Genesis

By Jack McKinney 1987

To Carl Macek, who pulled it all together

PROLOGUE

I've brought death and suffering in such magnitude, Zor thought. It's only right that I spent the balance of my life bringing life.

He looked out from the observation bay of his temporary groundside headquarters upon a planetary surface that had been lifeless a mere four days before. He saw before him a plain teeming with thriving vegetation. Already the Flowers of Life were sprouting, reaching their eager, knob-tipped shoots into the sunshine.

Zor, supreme intellect of his race and Lord of the Protoculture, nodded approvingly. At times the memories of his own past deeds, much less those of his species, seemed enough to drive him mad. But when he looked down on a scene like this, he could forget the past and be proud of his handiwork.

And above him, blocking out the light of the nearby primary, his gargantuan starship and super dimensional fortress was escaping, as he had directed. The satisfaction he felt from that and from seeing the germinated Flowers made it much easier to accept the fact that he was about to die...

He was tall and slender, with a lean, ageless face and a thick shock of bright starlight hair. The clothes he wore were graceful, regal, cut tight to his form, covered by a short cloak that he now threw back over one shoulder.

Zor could hear the alarm signals ring behind him, and the booming voice of a Zentraedi announced, "Warning! Warning! Invid troop carriers are preparing to land! All warriors to their Battlepods!"

Zor gazed away from the beauty of the exterior scene, back to the harsh reality of the base, as towering Zentraedi dashed about, preparing for battle. Even though the appearance of the Invid had taken them by surprise, even though they were badly outnumbered and at a disadvantage since the enemy held the high ground, there was a certain eagerness to the Zentraedi; war was their life and their reason for being.

In that, they had met their match and more in the Invid. Zor found

bitter irony in how his own poor judgment and the cruelty of the Robotech Masters—his masters—had turned a race of peaceful creatures, once content with their single planet and their introspective existence, into the most ferocious species in the known universe.

While subordinates strapped armor and weapons on his great body, Dolza, supreme commander of the Zentraedi, glared down at Zor. His colossal head, with its shaven, heavy-browed skull, gave him the aspect of a stone icon. "We should have departed before the Flowers germinated! I warned you!"

Dolza raised a metal-plated fist big enough to squash Zor. Unafraid, Zor looked up at him, though his faithful aide, Vard, was holding a hand weapon uneasily. Around them the base shook as armored Zentraedi and their massive fighting pods raced to battle stations.

"What of the super dimensional fortress?" Dolza demanded. "What have you done with it?"

"I have sent it away," Zor answered calmly. "To a place far removed from this evil, senseless war. It is already nearing the edge of space, too fast and far too powerful for the Invid to stop."

That much, Dolza knew, was true. The dimensional fortress, Zor's crowning technological achievement, was the mightiest machine in existence. Nearly a mile long, it incorporated virtually everything Zor had discovered about the fantastic forces and powers springing from the Flowers of Life.

"Sent it where?" Dolza demanded. Zor was silent. "If I weren't sworn by my warrior oath to protect you"—Dolza's immense fist hovered close—"I would kill you!"

A few pods from the ready-reaction force were already on the scene: looming metal battle vehicles big enough to hold one or two Zentraedi, their form suggested that of a headless ostrich, with long, broad breastplates mounting batteries of primary and secondary cannon.

"I don't expect you to understand," Zor said in carefully measured tones, as explosions and shock waves shook the base. They could hear the

Zentraedi communication net crackling with reports of the Invid landing. "You were created to fight the Invid; that is what you must do," Zor

told the giant as the headquarters' outer wall heaved and began to crumble. "Go! Fulfill your Zentraedi imperative!"

As Zor spun and ducked for cover, Vard shielded him with his own body. Dolza turned to give battle as the wall shuddered and cracked wide. Through the showering rubble leapt Invid shock troopers, the enemy's heaviest class of mecha, advanced war machines. Forged from a superstrong alloy, bulky as walking battleships, the mecha resembled a maniac's vision of biped insect soldiers.

They were every bit as massive as the Zentraedi pods, and even more heavily armored. Concentrated fire from the few pods already on the scene—blue lances of blindingly bright energy—penetrated the armor of the first shock trooper to appear. Even as the Invid returned fire with streams of annihilation discs, the seams and joints of its armor expanded under the overwhelming pressure from the eruptions within. It exploded into bits of wreckage and white-hot shrapnel that bounced noisily off the pods' armor.

But a trio of shock troopers had crowded in behind the first, and a dozen more massed behind them. Annihilation discs and red plasma volleys quartered the air, destroying the headquarters command center and equipment, setting fires, and blasting pods to glowing scraps or driving them back.

Armored Zentraedi warriors, lacking the time to reach their pods, rushed in to fight a desperate holding action, spraying the Invids with hand-held weapons, dodging and ducking, advancing fearlessly and suffering heavy casualties.

A swift warrior ran in under an Invid shock trooper, holding his weapon against a vulnerable joint in its armor and then triggering the entire charge all at once, pointblank. The explosion blew the Invid's leg off, toppling it, but the Zentraedi was obliterated by the detonation.

Elsewhere, an Invid mecha seized a damaged pod that could no longer fire, ripped the pod apart with its superhard metal claws, then dismembered

the wounded Zentraedi within.

Scouts, smaller Invid machines, rushed in behind the shock troopers to scour the base.

It took only moments for one to find Zor; the Invid had been searching for him for a long time and were eager for revenge.

As the scout lumbered toward them, Vard tried to save his lord by absorbing the first blast himself, firing his little hand weapon uselessly at the Invid monster. He partially succeeded, but only at the cost of his own life—immolated in an instant by a disc. The force of the blast drove Zor back and scorched him.

The rest of the discs in the salvo were ignited by the explosion, but, having been flung aside, Zor was spared most of their fury. Still, he'd suffered terrible injuries—skin burned from his body until bone was exposed, lungs seared by fire, bones broken from the concussion and the fall, tremendous internal hemorrhaging. He knew he would die.

Before the Invid scout could finish the job, Dolza was there, firing at it with his disruptor rifle, ordering the remaining pods to concentrate their fire on it. "Zor is down! Save Zor!" he thundered. Switching to his helmet communicator, he tried to raise his most trusted subordinate.

"Breetai! Breetai! Where are you?"

The scout was blown to fiery bits in the withering fusillade, but its call had gone out; the other scouts and the shock troopers were homing in on their archenemy.

Dolza, with the remaining warriors and pods, formed a desperate defensive ring, unflinchingly ready to die according to their code.

Suddenly there was a massive volley from the right. Then an even more intense one from the left. To Dolza's astonishment, they were directed at the Invid.

Breetai had arrived at the head of reinforcements. Some of them were wearing only body armor like himself, but most were in tactical or heavily armed officers' Battlepods. The Invid line began to collapse before a storm of massed fire. More pods were arriving all the time. Dolza couldn't

understand how—an invasion force was descending by the thousands from a moon-size Invid hive ship, its troopers as uncountable as insects. Surely the base must be covered by a living, swarming layer of the enemy.

But the enemy was being driven back, and Breetai was leading a countercharge on foot, just as a small wedge of shock troopers threatened to make good on a suicide rush at Dolza and Zor. A disc struck a pod near Breetai even as he was firing left and right with his rifle; blast and shrapnel hit his head and the right side of his face.

Breetai dropped, skull aflame, but the Zentraedi countercharge went on—somehow—to drive the Invid back to the breach in the wall.

Finally Dolza wearily lowered his glowing rifle muzzle. Pursuit of the retreating Invid could be left to the field commanders. He began to take reports from the newcomers, thus learning the details of the unexpected Zentraedi victory.

Most of the Invid had been diverted in an attempt to stop or board the dimensional fortress and had been wiped out. Even now, word of the attack was going back to the Robotech Masters; a punitive raid would have to be mounted. Breetai was being attended to by the healers and would live, though he would be scarred for life.

But all of that was of little moment to Dolza. He looked down on the smoking, broken body of Zor. Healers crowded around the fallen genius with their apparatus and medicines, but Dolza had seen enough combat casualties to know that Zor was beyond help.

Zor knew it as well as Dolza. Drifting in a near delirium, feeling surprisingly little pain, he heard exchanges about the dimensional fortress. He smiled to himself, though it hurt his scorched face, thankful that the starship had escaped.

Once more, he had the Vision that had made him decide to dispatch the ship; as the master of the limitless power of Protoculture, with his matchless intellect, he had access to hidden worlds of perception and invisible paths of knowledge.

He saw again an infinitely beautiful, blue-white world floating in space, one blessed with the treasure that was life. He sensed that it was or would be the crux of transcendent events, the crossroads and deciding place of a conflict that raged across galaxies.

A column of pure mind-energy rose from the planet, a pillar of dazzling force a hundred miles in diameter, crackling and swaying, swirling like a whirlwind, throwing out shimmering sheets of brilliance, climbing higher and higher into space all in a matter of moments.

As he had before, Zor felt humbled before the mind-cyclone's force. Then its pinnacle unexpectedly gave shape to a great bird, a phoenix of mental essence. The firebird of transfiguration spread wings wider than the planet, soaring away to another plane of existence, with a cry so magnificent and sad that Zor forgot his impending death. He wept for the dreadful splendor of what was to come, two tears flowing down his burnt cheeks.

But he was buoyed by a renewed conviction that the dimensional fortress must go to that blue-white planet.

The sounds of the last skirmishes came from the distance as Zentraedi rooted out and executed the last of the Invid troops. Dolza stood looking down at Zor's blackened body as its life slipped away despite all that the healers could do. Dolza suspected that Zor did not wish—would not permit himself—to be saved.

Whatever Zor's plan, there was no changing it now. The ship itself, along with a handful of Zentraedi loyal to Zor alone, had jumped beyond the Robotech Masters' reach—at least for the time being.

It was of little comfort to Dolza that final transmissions from the dimensional fortress, in the moments before transition through a spacefold, indicated that the traitors aboard had been badly wounded during the battle to get past the Invid surprise attack.

"Zor, if you die, the mission is over and I must return in defeat and humiliation," Dolza said.

"I have thwarted the Robotech Masters' plan to control the universe." Zor had to pause to cough and regain his breath, with a rattle in it that

spoke of dying. "But a greater, finer mission is only beginning, Dolza..." Zor coughed again and was still, eyes closed forever.

Dolza stood before a screen that was large even for the Zentraedi. Before him was the image of a Robotech Master. Dolza spoke obsequiously.

"... and so we have no idea where the dimensional fortress is, at least for the moment."

The Master's ax-keen face, with its hawkish nose, flaring brows, and swirling, storm-whipped hair, showed utter fury. Dolza wasn't surprised; Zor, who'd given the Masters the key to their power, and the mighty dimensional fortress gone, at a stroke! Dolza wondered if the Invid realized just how much damage they'd inflicted in a raid that would otherwise have been an insignificant skirmish.

The Robotech Master's voice was eerily lifeless, like a single-sideband transmission. "The dimensional fortress must be recovered at all costs! Organize a search immediately; we shall commit the closest Zentraedi fleet to the mission at once, and all others will join in the effort if necessary."

Dolza bowed to the image. "And Zor, my lord? Shall I have his remains interred in his beloved garden?"

"No! Freeze them and bring them back to us personally. Guard them well! We may yet extract information from his cellular materials."

With that, the Master's image disappeared from the screen.

"Hail, Dolza! Breetai reporting as ordered."

Dolza looked him over. A day or two of Zentraedi healing had the senior commander looking fit for duty; though he was again the fierce gladiator he'd always been, he was far different.

The damage done by the annihilation discs of the Invid could not be completely reversed. The right half of Breetai's black-haired scalp and nearly half his face were covered by a gleaming alloy prosthesis, a kind of half cowl, his right eye replaced by a glittering crystal lens.

Breetai had always been given to dark moods, but his mutilation at the

hands of the enemy had made him distant, cold and wrathful. Dolza approved.

Dolza had summoned Breetai to a spot on the perimeter of the reinforced base where Flowers of Life were sprouting underfoot. The supreme commander quickly outlined the situation. The details of the long struggle between Zor and the Masters, and Zor's secret plan for the future of Protoculture, shocked Breetai, as did certain other information that was Dolza's alone to tell.

"You're my best field commander," Dolza finished. "You will lead the expedition to retake the dimensional fortress."

The sunlight glinted off Breetai's metal skullpiece. "But—it jumped!"

Sympathy was not part of the Zentraedi emotional spectrum. Dolza therefore showed none. "You must succeed. You must recover the fortress and its Protoculture factory before the Invid do, or we'll have lost everything we've worked for."

Breetai's features resolved in faux lines of determination. "The dimensional fortress will be ours, on my oath!"

CHAPTER ONE

I had misgivings like everybody else, but I thought [the appearance of SDF-1] just might be a good thing for the human race after all when I saw how it scared hell outta the politicians.

Remark attributed to Lt. (jg) Roy Fokker in

Prelude to Doomsday: A History of the Global Civil War,

by Malachi Cain

When the dimensional fortress landed in 1999 A.D., the word "miracle" had been so long overused that it took some time for the human race to realize that a real one had indeed come to pass.

In the late twentieth century, "miracle" had become the commonplace description for home appliances and food additives. Then came the Global Civil War, a rapid spiraling of diverse conflicts that, by 1994, was well on its way to becoming a full-scale worldwide struggle; in the very early days of the war, "miracle" was used by either side to represent any highly encouraging battle news.

The World Unification Alliance came into existence because it seemed the best hope for human survival. But its well-meaning reformers found that a hundred predators rose up to savage them: from supranational conglomerates, religious extremists, and followers of a hundred different ideologies to racists and bigots of every stripe.

The war bogged down, balkanized dragged on, igniting every corner of the planet. People forgot the word "miracle." The war escalated and escalated—gradually, it's true, but everyone knew what the final escalation would be—until hope began to die.

And in a way nobody seemed to be able to stop, the human race moved along the path to its own utter obliteration, using weapons of its own fashioning. The life of the planet was infinitely precious, but no one could formulate a plan to save it from the sacrificial thermonuclear fire.

Then, almost ten years into the Global Civil War, the thinking of Homo sapiens changed forever.

The dimensional fortress's arrival was a coincidence beyond coincidence and, in the beginning, a sobering catastrophe.

Its entry was that of a powered object, and it had appeared from nowhere, from some unfathomable rift in the timespace continuum. Its long descent spread destruction and death as its shock waves and the after-blast of its monumental drive leveled cities, deafened and blinded multitudes, made a furnace of the atmosphere, and somehow awakened tectonic forces. Cities burned and fell, and many, many died.

Its approach rattled the world. The mosques were crowded to capacity and beyond, as were the temples and the churches. Many people committed suicide, and, curiously enough, the three most notable high-casualty-rate categories were, in this order: fundamentalist clergy, certain elected politicians, and major figures in the entertainment world. Speculation about their motives—that the thing they had in common was that they felt diminished by the arrival of the alien spacecraft—remained just that: speculation.

At last the object slowed, obviously damaged but still capable of maneuvering. Its astonishing speed lessened to a mere glide—except that it had little in the way of lifting surfaces and was unthinkably heavy. It came to rest on a gently sloping plain on a small island in the South Pacific, once the site of French atomic tests, called Macross.

The plain was long and broad, especially for such a tiny island, but it was not a great deal longer than the ship itself. A few hundred yards behind its thrusters, waves crashed against the beach. A short distance ahead of its ruined bow were sheer cliffs.

Its outer sheath and first layers of armor, and a great portion of the superstructure, had been damaged in the course of its escape, or in the controlled crash of its landing. It groaned and creaked, cooling, as the combers foamed and bashed the sand on an otherwise idyllic day on

Macross Island.

The human race began assessing the damage in a dazed, uncoordinated way. But it didn't take long for opposing forces to convince themselves that the crash was no enemy trick.

For the first few hours, it was called "the Visitor." Leaders of the various factions of the civil war, their presumed importance reduced by the alien vessel's appearance, took hasty steps toward a truce of convenience. The various commanders had to move quickly and had to sacrifice much of their prestige to accommodate one another; all eyes were turned to the sky and to Macross Island. The Global Civil War looked like a minor, ludicrous squabble compared to the awesome power that had just made itself felt on Earth.

Within hours, preparations were being made for an expedition to explore the wreckage. Necessary alliances were struck, but safety factors were built into the expeditionary force. Enemies at the top had accomplished an uneasy peace.

Now, those who'd fought the war would have to do the same.

The flight deck of the Gibraltar-class aircraft carrier Kenosha retreated beneath the ascending helicopter, a comforting artificial island of nonskid landing surface. Lieutenant (jg) Roy Fokker watched it unhappily, resigning himself to the mission at hand.

He turned to the man piloting the helo, Colonel T.R. Edwards, who was flying the chopper with consummate skill. Roy Fokker was more used to those occasions when he and Edwards were doing turns-and-burns, trying to shoot each other out of the skies.

Roy Fokker was an Internationalist, right down to his soles. His uniform bore the colors of his carrier aviation unit, a fighter squadron: the Jolly Roger skull-and-crossbones insignia. The colors were from the old United States Navy, the renowned and justly feared VF-84 squadron off the USS Nimitz that had hunted the skies in F-14 Tomcats, then Z-6 Executioners, right up to Roy's own production-line-new Z-9A Peregrine.

Roy wished he was back there in his own jet, in his own cockpit.

For so important a takeoff, it would have been normal to see the Kenosha's skipper on the observation deck under phased-array radar antenna and other tower shrubbery—the deck the aviators called Vulture's Row. Admiral Hayes and the other heavy-hitters were all there, but Captain Henry Gloval wasn't. Today, Captain Henry Gloval was belted in the rear of the helo with a platoon of marines and some techs and more scientific equipment and weapons than Roy had seen packed into a bird before. That the Old Man should actually leave his command and go ashore showed how topsy-turvy this spaceship or whatever it was had turned matters on Earth.

It was as oddball a mission as Roy had ever seen; it made him uncharacteristically nervous, especially since the opposition junta had picked Edwards as its representative on the team.

The last time Edwards and Roy had crossed contrails, Edwards had been in the hire of something called the Northeast Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere. There was no telling who he was really working for now, except that he was always, without exception, out to benefit Colonel T.R. Edwards.

Roy told himself to stop thinking about it and do his job. He fidgeted in his seat a little, uncomfortable in web gear weighted with about a hundred rounds of weapons, ammo, and survival and exploration equipment.

He pushed his unruly mop of blond hair back out of his eyes. He wasn't sure why or when long hairstyles had become the norm among pilots, but now it was practically de rigueur. Some Samurai tradition?

He glanced over at Edwards. The mercenary was perhaps thirty, ten years older than Roy, with the same lean height. Edwards had tan good-looks and sun-bleached hair and a killer smile. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

Roy's youth didn't make him Edwards's inferior in combat experience or expertise. The practical philosophy of the old-time Swiss and Israelis and others like them was now the rule: Anyone who could fly well did, and they flew as leaders if they merited it, regardless of age or rank.

All the tea-party proprieties about a flyer needing a college education

and years of training had been thrown out as the attrition of the war made them untenable. Roy had heard that kids as young as fourteen were in the new classes at Aerial Combat School.

Edwards had caught the glance. "Want to take over, Fokker? Be my guest."

"No thanks, Colonel. I'm just here to make sure you don't mess up and spike us into the drink."

Edwards laughed. "Fokker, know what your problem is? You take this war stuff too personally."

"Tell me something: D'you like flying for a bunch of fascists?"

Edwards snorted derisively. "You think there's that much difference between sides, after ten years of war? Besides, the Neasians pay me more in a week than you make in a year."

Roy wanted to answer that, but his orders were to avoid friction with Edwards. As if to remind him of that, a sudden aroma wafted under his nose. It was pipe tobacco, but to Roy it always smelled like a soap factory on fire.

Gloval was at it again. But how do you tell your commanding officer that he's breaking regs, smoking aboard an aircraft? If you are a wise young lieutenant (jg), you do not.

Roy turned back to study Macross and forgot Gloval, Edwards, and everything else. There lay the blackened remains of a ship like nothing Earth had ever seen before.

"Great God!" Roy said slowly, and even Edwards had nothing to add.

The wreck was cool, and radiation readings were about normal. Previous fly-bys hadn't drawn fire or seen any activity. The helo set down a few dozen yards from the scorched, broken ruin. In another few moments the team was offloading itself and its equipment.

Gloval, a tall, rangy man with a soot-black, Stalinesque mustache, captain's hat tilted forward on his brow, was establishing security and getting ready for preliminary external examination of the wreckage. He was square-shouldered and vigorous, looking younger than his fifty-odd years

until one saw the lines around his eyes.

But while the preparations were going on, Lance Corporal Murphy, always itching to be on the move, couldn't resist doing a little snooping. "Hey, lookit! I think I found a hatch!"

Gloval's voice still retained its heavy Russian accent. "You jackass! Get away from there!"

Murphy was standing near a tall circular feature in the battered hull, waving them over. With his back to it, he didn't see the middle of the hatch open, the halves sliding apart. He couldn't hear his teammates' shouted warnings, as several long, segmented metal tentacles snaked out.

In another moment, the unlucky marine was caught and lifted off his feet. The service automatic in his hand went off, then fell from his grasp, as he was yanked within. None of the others dared to shoot for fear of hitting him.

The hatch snapped shut. Gloval spread his arms to hold back Roy and some of the others; they would have charged for the hatch. "Stand where you are and hold your fire! Nobody goes any closer until we know what we're dealing with!"

An hour later things had changed, although the explorers didn't know much more than they had at the beginning.

At Admiral Hayes's insistence, Doctor Emil Lang had been choppered ashore to supervise. Lang was Earth's premier mind, by decree of Hayes and Senator Russo and the others in the alliance leadership, the final authority on interplanetary etiquette.

Lang ordered everyone into anticontamination suits, then directed a human-size drone robot to make preliminary exploration of the ship. When the robot, essentially a bulbous detector/telemetry package on two legs, stopped dead in front of the hatch as the hatch reopened, Lang looked thoughtful.

The robot refused to respond to further commands, the hatch stayed open, and there was no sign of activity within. Lang's eyes narrowed behind

his suit's visor as he concentrated.

Lang was a man just under medium height, slight of build, but when it came to puzzling out the unknown, he had the courage of a lion. Disregarding his orders, he directed Gloval to select a party to explore the wreck. Gloval picked himself, Roy, Edwards, and eight of the grunts.

"Get those spotlights on," Lang instructed. "And you may chamber a round in your weapons, but leave the safeties on. If anyone fires without my direct order, I'll see that he's court-martialed and hung."

Unnoticed, T.R. Edwards made a wry face inside his suit helmet and flicked his submachine gun selector over to full auto.

The lights they'd brought—spotlights mounted on the shoulders of their web gear—were powerful but not powerful enough to reach the farthest limits of the compartment in which they found themselves. Lang and Gloval only studied what was before them, but from the others were soft exclamations, curses, obscenities.

It resembled a complex cityscape. The alien equipment and machinery was made of glassy alloys and translucent materials, with conduitlike structures crisscrossing in midair and oddly shaped contrivances in every direction. The spacecraft was built to a monumental scale.

Readings still indicated no danger from radiation, atmospheric, or biological contamination; they removed the suits.

"We will divide into two groups," Gloval decided, still in charge of the tactical decisions. "Roy, you'll take four marines. Dr. Lang, Edwards—you'll be in my group."

They were to work their way forward, following opposite sides of the wreck's inner hull, in an attempt to link up in the bow. Failing that, they would observe as much as possible and fall back to their original point of entry in one hour.

They started off. No one heard the inert probe robot suddenly reactivate and step through the open hatch in their wake, moving more nimbly than it had a few minutes before.

Fifteen minutes later, in a passageway as high and wide as a stadium, Roy paused to shine his shoulder-mounted lights around him. "This place must be playing tricks on my eyes. Does it look to you like the walls're moving?" he asked the gunnery sergeant behind him.

The gunny said slowly, "Yeah, kinda. Like there's a fog or somethin' flowin' through all the nooks and crannies."

Roy was about to get them moving again when he heard someone calling softly, "Caruthers. Hey, man, where y' at?"

Caruthers was the man walking drag at the rear of the file; they all turned back to see what was going on. Caruthers had fallen far behind for some reason; but he was rejoining them, his spots getting nearer. But something about the man's movement wasn't normal. Moreover, his head hung limply and he appeared to be moving considerably above them, as if on a catwalk.

They flashed their beams his way and stood rooted in astonishment and stark terror. Caruthers's body hung on a line, like a tiny puppet, held in the hand of a humanoid metal monster seventy feet tall.

The armored behemoth swung its free hand in their direction. They didn't have time for permission to react; they wouldn't have listened if Lang had denied it, anyway.

Roy and the gunny and the other marines opened fire, the chatter of their submachine guns loud in their ears.

Their tracers lit up the darkness, as the bullets bounced off the monster's armor as if they were paper clips.

Its right hand loosed a stream of reddish-orange fury. A marine disappeared like a zapped bug, turned to ash in an instant.

CHAPTER TWO

I suppose, in the back of my mind, I was aware that fate had sent my way a chance to be mentioned in the same breath with Einstein, Newton, and the rest. But to tell the truth, I thought little of that. Before the lure of so much new knowledge, any scientist would've made poor old Faust look like a saint.

Dr. Emil Lang, Technical Recordings and Notes

Roy and the others emptied their weapons to no avail. The looming weapon hand swung to a new target as they ducked, switching their turned-and-taped double magazines around to lock and load a fresh one.

A second stream of superheated brilliance blazed, and another marine was incinerated.

Roy realized the radio was useless; it was in Hersch's rucksack, and he'd just been fried. Roy turned, spotted the RPG rocket launcher dropped by the first victim, and made a dive for it.

The gunnery sergeant gave him a look of misgiving but kept his peace. Firing the weapon might be suicidal for a number of reasons, including secondary explosions from their attacker, but Roy saw no other options; their escape was cut off, and there was no cover worthy of the name.

The RPG was already loaded. Roy peered through the sights, centering the reticle, and fired at the thing's midsection, where two segments met. The resulting explosion split the metal monster in half; it toppled, venting raging energy. The secondary blast knocked Roy off his feet.

He lost consciousness for a second but came to, momentarily deafened, with the gunny shaking him. Roy managed to read his lips: "It's still alive!"

Blearily Roy followed the pointing finger. It was true: Segments of the shattered behemoth were rocking and jouncing; those that had some articulation were trying to drag themselves toward the intruders. Other pieces were firing occasional beams, most of which splashed off the faraway ceiling.

The gunny got Roy to his feet and began dragging him around the remains in what seemed like the direction from which they'd come. Even though he couldn't hear, Roy could feel heavy vibrations in the deck. He turned and found a second monster approaching. He couldn't figure out how the first one had come upon them so silently, and he didn't wait around to find out.

The thing halted by the smoldering debris of the first as Roy staggered off behind the gunny.

"... remember coming through here," Roy dimly heard the gunny say when they paused after what seemed like a year of tottering along the deck. Evidently, the gunny had covered his ears to avoid the rocket's impact; he was listening as well as looking for more enemies.

"Neither do I," Roy said wearily. "But all our other routes were blocked."

"They could've polished us all off, Lieutenant," the gunny said.

Roy shook his head, just as confused as the marine. "Maybe they're herding us along somewhere; I dunno."

They took up their way again. Roy's hearing was coming back, accompanied by a painful ringing. "Maybe they don't want to kill all of us because—"

The gunny screamed a curse. Roy looked down to see that the deck plates were rippling around their legs like a running stream, engulfing them.

Gloval gripped his automatic resolutely. "Are you getting all this on the video, Dr. Lang?"

Lang put his palm to his forehead. "Yes, but those shapes keep shifting... gets me dizzy just looking..."

"Kinda like... vertigo..." T.R. Edwards added.

Gloval was feeling a little queasy himself. He called a halt for a breather, sending Edwards to peer into the next compartment. Gloval watched Lang worriedly; with the arrival of the alien ship, Lang became the most

indispensable man on the planet. Lang must be kept safe at all costs, and the fact that Gloval couldn't raise Roy's party or the outside world on the radio had the captain skittish.

Edwards was back in moments, face as white as his teeth. "You'd better brace yourselves." Edwards swallowed with difficulty. "I found Murphy, but—it's a little hard to take." He swallowed again to keep from vomiting.

One by one they went to join him at the entrance to the next compartment, from which an intense fight shone. Lang caught the edge of the hatch to steady himself when he saw what was there.

In a large translucent tank wired with various life support systems floated the various pieces of Lance Corporal Murphy in a tiny sea of sluggish nutrient fluid.

They drifted lazily, here an arm, there the head—sightless eyes wide open—a severed hand bumping gently against the stripped torso. The fluid was filled with fine strands glowing in incandescent greens. Tiny amoebalike globules flocked to the body parts and away from them again, feeding and providing oxygen and removing wastes.

Gloval turned to the marine behind him. "Establish security! Whoever did this may still be around." The men shook off their paralysis and rushed to obey.

All, that is, but one, who was about to pluck out a leg by a white, wrinkled foot that had bobbed to the surface. "We can't leave 'im like this!" Through the grinding war, the marines had maintained their honor and their high traditions proudly; esprit de corps was like the air they breathed. To leave one of their own on the battlefield was to leave a part of themselves.

But Lang pulled the grunt back with surprising strength. "Don't touch him! Who knows what the solution is? You want to end up pickled in there too? No? Good! Then just draw a specimen with this device and be careful!"

Gloval, carefully gauging the alien topography to keep his mind-and eyes-off Murphy's parts, determined that his suspicions were true: The internal layout of the place was changing around them. There was no way

back.

He quickly formed up his little command and got them moving, grimly satisfied that Edwards wasn't so cocky anymore.

Moments later, as the party moved through a darkened area, he felt a marine tug at his shoulder. "Cap'n! There's a-"

And all hell broke loose as armored behemoths set upon Gloval's group from the rear, blasting and trying to stamp the puny humans into the deck.

One marine gave the beginning of a shriek and then blew into fragments, the moisture in his tissues instantaneously converted to steam, the scraps of flesh vaporized in the alien's beam.

The humans cut loose with all weapons, including a man-portable recoilless rifle and a light machine gun whose drum magazine was loaded with Teflon semi-armorpiercers. A second marine was cremated almost instantly.

They had better luck than Roy's team in that the machine gunner and the RR man both happened to aim for the lead monster's firing hand and were lucky enough to find a vulnerable point, blowing it off.

The fortress's guardian staggered and shook as the fire set off secondary explosions. "Gloval! In here!" screamed Edwards, standing at the human-size hatch to a side compartment. The survivors dashed to it, crowding in, two of the marines hauling Lang between them while the doctor continued recording the scene as the injured machine-thing shot flame and smoke and flying shrapnel through the air.

"We can hold 'em off from here-for now," Edwards said, throwing aside a spent pair of magazines and inserting a fresh one in his Ingrain MAC-35.

"Concentrate fire on anything that approaches that door," Gloval told the marines, and turned to survey the rest of the compartment. It was quite tiny by the standards of the wreck: Perhaps eight paces on a side, with no other exit.

Lang was shaken but in control, willing his hands to be steady as he took what videos he could of the scene in the outer compartment. Gloval was about to command him to get back out of the line of fire when the floor

began to move.

"Hey! Who pushed the up button?" Edwards shouted, pale again. "Security wheel!" Gloval bellowed. "Doctor Lang in the center!"

Lang was thrust into the middle of the rising elevator platform as the others put their backs against him, weapons pointed out before them. The ceiling was about to crush them, but suddenly it rippled like water, letting them pass through. They came up into a brighter place and heard a familiar voice.

"Well, well. 'Bout time you guys got here."

"Roy!" The lieutenant stood leaning against a stanchion in the most immense chamber they'd seen yet, lit as bright as day.

When stories were exchanged, Gloval said, "All right, then, we've been herded here. But why?"

Lang pointed to a bridgelike structure enclosed by a transparent bowl, high to the stern end of the compartment. It was big but seemingly built to human scale.

"I'm betting that is the ship's nerve center, skipper, and that is the captain's station."

"It's our best shot, so we shall try it," Gloval decided, "but you stay with the main body, my good doctor, and let Roy go first."

"What an honor." Edwards grinned at Roy.

Zor's quarters were as he had left them, so long ago and far away. The sleep module, the work station, and the rest were built to human scale and function. Lang stared around himself as if in a dream.

Despite the many objects and installations that were impossible to identify, there was a certain comprehensibility to the place: here, a desk unit, there, a screen of some kind.

Roy, Gloval, and the others were so fascinated that they didn't notice what Lang was doing until they heard the pop and crisp of static.

"Lang, you fool! Get away from there!"

But before Gloval could tear him away from the console, Lang had

somehow discovered how to activate it. Waves of distortion chased each other across the screen, then a face appeared among the wavering lines.

Gloval's grip on Lang's jacket became limp. "Good God... it's human!" "Not quite, perhaps, but close, I would say," Lang conceded calmly.

Zor's face stared out of the screen. The wide, almond eyes seemed to look at each man in the compartment, and the mouth spoke in a melodious, chiming language unlike anything the humans had ever heard before.

"It's a 'greetings' recording," Lang said matter-of-factly.

"Like those plates and records on the old Voyagers," Roy murmured.

The alien's voice took on a different tone, and another image flashed on the screen. The humans found themselves looking at an Invid shock trooper in action, firing and rending.

"Some kind of war machine. Nasty," Lang interpreted.

As the others watched the image, Roy touched Gloval's shoulder and said, "Captain, I think we'd better get out of here."

"But how? This blasted ship keeps rearranging itself."

"Look!" cried Edwards, pointing. The deck rippled as a newcomer rose up through it. All weapons came to bear on it except Lang's; the doctor was dividing his attention between what was going on and the continuing message on the screen.

A familiar form stood before them. "It's the drone robot, the one that broke down," the gunny said.

Edwards's eyes narrowed. "Yeah, but how could it have followed us?" "It appears to be functioning again," Gloval said. "Maybe we can use it

to contact the base."

Lang crossed to the robot, which waited patiently. He opened a rear access cowling and went to inspect the internal parts there, then snatched his hands back as if he'd been bitten.

They all crowded around warily, ready to blast the machine to bits. "This isn't the original circuitry," Lang said, sounding interested but not frightened. "The components are reshaping themselves."

As they stared, wires writhed and microchips changed like a

miniaturized urban renewal project seen from above by time-lapse photography. Things slid, folded, altered shape and position. It reminded Roy of an unlikely cross between a blossoming flower and those kids' games where the player slides alphanumeric tiles around into new sequences.

"Perhaps it's been sent here to lead us out," Gloval suggested. "But why'd the other gizmos attack?" Edwards objected.

Lang shrugged. "Who knows what damage the systems have suffered? Perhaps the attacks are a result of a malfunction. Certainly, the message we just saw was intended as a warning, which implies good intentions."

"But what's it all mean, Doc?" Roy burst out.

Lang looked to him. "It means Earth may be in for more visitors, I think. Lots more."

"All right, all of you: Get ready," Gloval said. "If we can get the drone to lead us, we'll take a chance on it. We've no alternative."

While the others readied themselves, dividing up the remaining ammunition, reloading the last two rocket launchers, and listening to Gloval direct their order of march, Lang went back to the screen console.

He had been right; this was the ship's nerve center, and the console and its peripherals were the nucleus of it all. Lang began form-function analysis, fearing that he would never get another chance to study it.

Certainly, the ship used no source of power that he could conceive of. Some uncanny alien force coursed through the fallen ship and through the console. Perhaps if he could get some data on it or get access to it...

At Lang's cry they all turned with guns raised, as strobing light threw their shadows tall against the bulkheads. The command center flashed and flowed with power like an unearthly network of electronic blood vessels.

The console was surrounded by a blinding aurora of harsh radiance that pulsed through the spectrum. Lang, body convulsed in agony, holding fast to the console, shone with those same colors as the enigmatic forces flooding into him.

"Don't touch him-!" Gloval barked at Roy, who'd been about to attempt a body check to knock Lang clear. Edwards moved to one side, well out of

range of the discharges, to get a line of fire on the console that wouldn't risk hitting Lang. Edwards made sure his selector was on full auto and prepared to empty the magazine into the console.

But before he could, the alien lightning died away. Lang slumped slowly to the deck.

"Captain, the robby's leaving!" The gunny pointed to where the deck was starting to ripple around the drone's feet.

There was no time for caution. Roy slung Lang over his shoulder, hoping the man wasn't radioactive or something else contagious. In another moment they were all ranged around the robot, sinking through the floor.

Air and matter and space seemed to shift around them. Lang was stirring on Roy's shoulder, and Roy was getting a better grip on him, distracted, when one of the marines hollered, "Tell me I'm not seein' this!"

The ship had changed again, or they were in a different place. And they were gazing at the remains of a giant.

It was something straight out of legend. The skeleton was still wearing a uniform that was obviously immune to decay. It also wore a belt and harness affair fitted with various devices and pouches. But for the fact that it would've stood some fifty feet tall, it could have been human.

The jaw was frozen open in an eternal rictus of agony and death; an area the size and shape of a poker table was burned through the back of its uniform, fringed by blackened fabric. Much of the skeletal structure in the wound's line of fire was gone.

"Musta been some scrap," a marine said quietly, knowingly.

Lang was struggling, so Roy let him down. "Are you all right, Doc-"

Roy gaped at him. Lang's eyes had changed, become all dark, deep pupil with no iris and no white at all. He had the look of a man in rapture, gazing around himself with measureless approval.

"Yes, yes," Lang said, nodding in comprehension. "I see!"

There was no time to find out just what it was he saw, because the robot was in motion again. Roy took Lang in tow, and they moved out, only to round a corner and come face to face with two more of the armored

guardians.

The gunny, walking point right behind the robby with one of the RPG launchers, let fly instantly, and the machine gunner and the other RPG man cut loose too as the red lines of tracers arced and rebounded of the bright armor.

INTERLUDE

Listen, take the Bill of Rights, the Boy Scout oath, and the Three Laws of Robotics and stick 'em where there's no direct dialing, jerk! "Good" is anything that helps me stay at the top; "bad" is whatever doesn't, got it?

Senator Russo to his reelection committee treasurer

"And, in brief," Admiral Hayes finished, "Captain Gloval's party made it back out of the ship with no further casualties, although they encountered extremely heavy resistance."

Senator Russo puffed on his cigar, considering the report. "And Doctor Lang?"

"Seems to be all right," Hayes said. "They wanted to keep him under observation for a while, but he's absolutely determined to resume research on the alien vessel. And you know Lang."

Indeed. Earth's foremost genius, the man to whom they would all have to look now for crucial answers, made his own rules.

"I should add one more part of the after-mission report that I still find it difficult to credit," Hayes grudged. "Captain Gloval estimates, and his and the others' watches corroborate this, that they were inside the ship for some six hours."

Russo blew a smoke ring. "So?"

Hayes scratched his cheek reflectively. "According to the guards posted outside the ship and their watches, Gloval and the others were only gone for approximately fifteen minutes." He sat down again at the conference table.

Russo, at the head of the table, thought that over. He knew Hayes was too methodical an officer to include a claim like that in his report without having checked it thoroughly.

Senator Russo was a florid-faced, obese little man with a gratingly false-hearty manner and a pencil mustache. He had fat jowls and soft white hands bearing pinkie rings. He also had a brilliant tailor, a marvelous

barber, and enough political clout to make him perhaps the most important figure in the emerging world government.

Now, he looked around the top-secret conference room aboard the Kenosha. "Whoever sent this vessel may come to retrieve it. Or someone else might."

He broke into an unctuous smile. "If something like this hadn't come along, we'd've had to invent it! It's perfect!"

The other power mongers gathered there nodded, sharing the sly smile, their eyes alight with ambition.

The timing of the crash was indeed astounding. Not a month before, these same men had been part of a group that had met to lay the groundwork for one of the most treacherous plots in history. It's true they were confronting the ultimate crisis-the likelihood that the human race would destroy itself. But their solution was not the most benign, just the one that would be most profitable for them.

They'd been intent on creating an artificial crisis, something that would stop the war and unite humanity under their leadership. A number of promising scenarios had been developed, including epidemics, worldwide crop failure, and a much less spectacular version of the very thing that had taken place in Earth's atmosphere and on Macross Island.

Russo's smile was close to a leer. "Gentlemen, I don't believe I'm being presumptuous when I say this is destiny at work! The blindest fool can see that mankind must band together."

Under our rule, was the unstated subtext. Russo saw that the true power brokers there understood, while Hayes and a few other idealistic dupes were almost teary-eyed with dedication and courage. Suckers...

It had never really mattered to the power brokers what side they served, of course; the ideologies and historical causes of the Global Civil War meant little or nothing to them. Russo and others like him had given those mere lip service.

The important thing was to use the opportunity, to gain prestige and power. Russo had joined the Internationalists-the world peace and

disarmament movement-because they offered personal opportunity. If they hadn't, he'd have thrown in with the factionalists without a qualm, so long as they promised him a route to power.

Hayes was saying, "We must act with all possible speed, throw every available resource into understanding the science behind that ship, into rebuilding it, and using this amazing 'Robotechnology,' as Doctor Lang insists on calling it."

Absolutely beautiful! Russo thought. An enormous tax-supported defense project, more expensive and more massive than anything in human history! The opportunities for profit would be incalculable. In the meantime, the military could be kept distracted and obedient, and all political power would be consolidated. More, this incredible Robotechnology business would ensure that the new world government would be absolutely unchallengeable.

Russo frowned for a moment, considering Hayes again: good soldier, obedient and conscientious, but a plodding sort of fellow (which was Russo's personal shorthand for someone prone to be honest).

Yes, Hayes might present a problem somewhere down the road-say, once Earth was rebuilt and unified and ready to be brought to heel, when it was time to make sure that those in power stayed there for good.

But there would be ways to deal with that. For example, didn't Hayes have a teenage daughter? Ah, yes. Russo recalled her now: a rather plain, withdrawn little thing, as the senator remembered. Lisa.

In any case, there'd be plenty of time to neutralize Hayes and those like him once they'd served their purpose. Have to keep an eye on that Lang, too.

But this Colonel Edwards, now; he seemed to be a bright young fellow-knew which side his bread was buttered on. He was already passing secret information to Russo and keeping tabs on Gloval and the others. Edwards would definitely have his uses.

"Let's have Doctor Lang, eh?" Senator Russo proposed.

Lang came in, lean and pale, emitting an almost tangible energy and

purpose. The strange, whiteless eyes were unsettling to look at.

"Well, Doctor," Russo said heartily. "We've had a miracle dropped from heaven, eh? But we want you to give us the straight gospel: Can that ship be rebuilt?"

Lang looked at him as if he were seeing Russo for the first time-as if Russo had interrupted Lang during some higher contemplation, as, of course, he had.

"Rebuild it? But of course we will; what else did you think we would do?" It sounded as though he had doubts about Russo's sanity, which was mutual.

Before Russo could say anything, Lang continued. "But you used the word 'miracle.' I suppose that may be true, but I want to tell all of you something that Captain Gloval said to me when we finally fought our way out of the ship."

He waited a dramatic moment, as his whiteless eyes seemed to take in the whole conference room and look beyond.

"Gloval said, 'This will save the human race from destroying itself, Doctor, and that makes it a kind of miracle. But history and legend tell us that miracles bear a heavy price."'

CHAPTER THREE

There's a movie my grandfather loved as a boy, and my father sat me on his knee and showed me when I was a little kid, The Shape of Things to Come.

The part that made the biggest impression, naturally, was when the scientist-aviator climbs out of his futuristic plane and looks the local fascist right in the eye and tells him there'll be no more war. Babe, how many times I've wished it was that easy!

Lt. Comdr. Roy Fokker, in a letter to Lt. Claudia Grant

"Fireworks," Lieutenant Commander Roy Fokker murmured to himself, neck arched back so that he could watch the bright flowers of light. The gigantic mass of Super Dimensional Fortress One blocked out much of the sky, but he could still see skyrockets burst into brilliant light above every corner of Macross City. There were banners and flags, band music, and the constant laughter and cheering of thousands upon thousands of people.

"Fireworks instead of bombs; celebrations instead of battles." Roy nodded. "I hope it's always like this: parades and picnics. We've seen enough war!"

Macross Island had changed a lot in ten years-all for the better, in Roy's opinion. After the World Government made rebuilding the alien wreck its first priority, a bright modern city had been erected around the crash site, along with landing strips used to airlift supplies and equipment, construction materials, technicians and workers and their families, and military personnel.

A busy deep-water harbor had been dredged, too. Two colossal aircraft carriers were anchored there, though they were dwarfed by the vessel in whose shadow Roy stood. Flights of helos and jetcraft made their passes overhead, rendering salute to the Earth's new defender, Super Dimensional Fortress One.

Roy glanced up at the SDF-1 again. Even after a decade, he was still

awed every time he gazed at it. Its hull and superstructures gleamed, sleek and bright now, painted in blue and white. The vast transparent bubble of the bridge bulged like a spacesuit facebowl, giving the eerie impression that the fortress was keeping watch over the city.

Roy still found himself wondering what the ship had originally looked like before its terrible crash. How close had Lang and his team come to restoring it to its original state?

One thing was certain: Lang and the others had performed the most amazing technical feat in Earth's history. Not all the battle fortress's secrets were theirs, not yet; but that seemed only a matter of time. In the meantime they'd gotten the SDF-1 fully operational, and given the Earth the means to build its Robotech Defense Force-the RDF.

And today, for the first time, the general populace was going to see things that had been classified top-secret.

A flight of Veritech fighters, wings swept back for high speeds, performed a fly-by. They were from Skull Team, Roy's command. "Wait'll we show 'em what we can do," he said, smiling.

Across town, a motorcade made its way with flashing lights and wailing sirens toward the SDF-1's platform, already late for the ship's scheduled launch on its maiden flight. Motorcycle outriders led the way, followed by a long stretch limousine. Bunting and pennons hung everywhere.

Not everyone in town was overjoyed with the day's festivities. Macross City's mayor, a small, stocky man who usually showed good humor, scowled in disapproval as the motorcade rolled in his direction. Vern Havers, who ran one of the town's more prosperous appliance stores, stood by his side, watching.

"Now what's wrong, Mr. Mayor? What's all that sighing about?"

Mayor Tommy Luan shrugged. "Aw, after all these years, it's hard to believe we may be looking at the old girl for the last time." Both men gazed at the colossal ship, which dominated the city and the island, its running lights blinking and flashing.

Of course, SDF-1 was only leaving for a test flight, to be followed by a short shakedown cruise if everything checked out well; but the mayor could be right-there was no telling when the fortress might return.

Certainly, Macross would never be the same place again.

"We'll all miss her," Vern conceded. "But aren't you proud to see her launched at last?"

"Of course. But if the test is successful, we'll all be unemployed!" the mayor burst out. Vern wasn't looking forward to closing down his business either, but he remembered the war very well. He had to admit he liked the idea of the battle fortress being out there in space, guarding the planet, a lot better than the mayor seemed to.

Vern sighed. A lot of people had forgotten just why Macross City existed. But Vern kept his opinion to himself.

The motorcycles and limousine roared by. "The big shots making their grand entrance!" The mayor sniffed. It was well known that the mayor hadn't been invited to any of the important ceremonies; the world leaders were keeping the prize honors for themselves.

"Captain Gloval doesn't seem too happy about it," Vern observed, hoping it would make Tommy Luan feel a little better.

Not happy, indeed. As the limo shot along, Russo, sharing the back seat with Gloval, waved tirelessly, flashing his smile to everyone with the bland relentlessness of a career politician.

Without turning from the crowds, he chided, "Don't look so sour, Gloval! It's our big day! Surely you realize all those loyal citizens out there consider you their hero! You could at least wave to them."

Gloval grunted, chin sunk on his chest, arms folded. He was wearing his dress uniform, and some pushy liaison officer had seen to it that every decoration Gloval was entitled to wear was in place. Gloval had certainly won more than his share of medals and "fruit salad" over the years, but he didn't much like being in the spotlight. He was grumpy.

Still, there was something to what Russo had said. The senator might

consider it his big day, but it was those people out there who'd worked like mad these last ten years, sacrificed and hoped, all in the name of peace and security for future generations.

"All right, I'll wave," said Gloval, hoping the speechmakers' foolishness and the political hacks' patting themselves on the back wouldn't last long. Gloval only wanted to be out in space with his new command.

At SDF-1, all was controlled commotion. The Veritech demonstration was due to begin at any moment, and final preparations to get the fortress under way were still not on schedule. Com circuits and the ship's intercoms rang with checklist items: engine room and astrogation systems, communications and life support, combat and support squadrons, and more. Literally millions of items had to be double-checked by the SDF-1's thousands of crew members during those final days of preparation.

Up on the bridge, Commander Lisa Hayes arrived to make sure everything would be squared away for launching. Admiral Hayes's daughter had always made it a point of honor to show more merit, more skill at her job, and more dedication to the service than anyone around her so that there could be no question of favoritism when the time came for promotion. She'd carved out an amazing career for herself. At twenty-four, she'd been made First Officer of SDF-1. A lot of that was due, no doubt, to her familiarity with the ship's systems: With the exception of Doctor Lang, no one had such a complete and comprehensive knowledge of the vessel's every

bolt and button.

But there were her endless commendations and top evaluations as well, and two decorations for courage under fire. Some people thought her too severe, too single-minded in her obsession with duty, but no one accused her of not earning her rank.

She paused to survey the bridge, a slim, tall, pale young woman with blond-brown hair that bobbed, confined in graceful locks, against her shoulders. Her subordinates were already at their duty stations.

Claudia Grant seemed to have things well in hand, speaking into an

intercom terminal from her position at the Bridge Officer's station. "Roger, engine room; that's affirmative."

Vanessa, Sammie, and Kim, three young female enlisted-rating techs, completed the bridge complement; Gloval liked running things with as little confusion and as few people as possible.

Vanessa was feeding computer projections of fuel consumption to the engine room while Kim finished up the astrogation checklist and Sammie saw to the manual systems. They were all young, like Lisa-like most of SDF-1's crew. Robotechnology and the weapons and machines it had spawned were a whole new game; taking people while they were young and instilling its strange disciplines in them had proved more workable, in most cases, than trying to get veterans to unlearn what they'd already taken to heart.

Lisa sighed, brushing her hair back with her hand, making her way to her station. "The ceremony starts in fifteen minutes. I hope the captain gets here in time. The scuttlebutt is that he didn't get much sleep last night."

Claudia gave a smile, her brown face creasing, eyes dancing. "Yeah; the flag-rank officers threw a farewell party for him. They probably sat up all night telling each other war stories. You know how they are."

Lisa hid a mischievous smile. "And where were you, Claudia? Hmm?" Claudia was taken off guard. "What're you talking about?"

"You didn't get back to your quarters until four in the morning, that's what! You must've been partying too."

Claudia stuck her nose in the air and struck a glamorous pose. She was taller than Lisa and several years older, with exotic good looks crowned by a cap of close, coffee-colored curls.

"You jealous? I had a late dinner with Commander Fokker."

Lisa had been joking, assuming Claudia had spent her last groundside leave visiting with her family, but suddenly the First Officer was angry.

"Claudia! You stayed out all night, knowing you and Roy both have flight duty today?" Duty was everything to Lisa; she had trouble understanding how anyone could be so casual about such an important

mission.

But there was also something else, something about Claudia's love affair with the handsome, heroic Roy Fokker-not jealousy, but rather a feeling of Lisa's own loneliness. It brought an uncharacteristic confusion to her, a sudden emptiness that made her doubt the principles by which she lived her life. She shied away from it, reasserting control over herself by acting every inch the First Officer.

But Lisa wasn't the only one who was angry. Claudia set her hands on her hips. "So? What's the big fuss about, Lisa? We won't let it affect our performance on duty. After all, we're not children-and you're not our mother!"

Lisa felt her cheeks growing red. "Your responsibilities to the ship come first, Claudia!"

Neither one was backing away from the confrontation, and Claudia looked like she was running out of patience. And given her size and temper and the fact that she was an accomplished hand-to-hand fighter, Claudia was nobody to antagonize unnecessarily.

"My private life is my own business! Nobody else's!" Claudia stopped herself just short of some cutting remark: Why don't you try loosening up for a change, Lisa?, for example.

But she got hold of herself instead. "Now then, let's get to work, all right?" She pointed toward Lisa's duty station. "Get outta here."

Lisa hesitated, unused to backing away from a fight, and still angry but feeling she'd overstepped her authority. Just then Vanessa said slyly, "Lisa doesn't understand about men, Claudia. She's in love with this spaceship."

Claudia couldn't resist a grin, and Kim threw in, "Yeah, you got that right!"

That stung Lisa terribly, though she'd have died before admitting it. She knew she had a reputation as a cold fish among most of the ship's complement; maybe that was why, against the rules of good discipline, she'd found herself becoming close with the other women with whom she spent so much time on the bridge. Besides, Captain Gloval's informal and even

indulgent way of running the bridge-rather fatherly, really-made it easy to make friends.

But now Lisa felt herself flush angrily. "That wasn't funny, Vanessa; we have an important job to do here-"

Claudia, still steaming, interrupted her: "You act like I don't care about our mission at all!"

Sammie, at twenty the youngest of the bridge crew, couldn't bear to hear her friends fight anymore. "Oh, don't argue!" she cried.

She was so plaintive that the danger level lowered a little. "I'm not the one who keeps butting into everybody's business," Claudia pointed out.

Not quite ready to retreat, Lisa let out a growl she'd somehow picked up during her time with Gloval. Even as she began, "I'm warning you-" she was aware of a new sound in the bridge, cutting through her anger.

Claudia wore a haughty look, nose in the air again. "I hate to interrupt, but hadn't you better check your monitor, Commander?"

Then Lisa realized that an insistent signal was sounding from her duty station. She crossed to it, trying to put the argument out of her mind as Kim called out, "It's an unidentified incoming aircraft, Lisa!"

Checking her monitors, Lisa saw it was on an approved approach path and signaling for landing instructions. Since none of the many military aircraft flying patrol around Macross Island had challenged or interfered with the new arrival, it could be nothing but a peaceful visitor.

Lisa opened a communication link, resolving to try to smooth things out with her friends. She'd so much wanted the day to be right, to be marked by excellence and top performance! Why couldn't anyone share her drive for perfection? Perhaps she was simply fated to be the outcast, the oddball-

"Attention, aircraft approaching on course one-zero-seven," she said coolly. "Please identify yourself."

A youngish male voice came in response. "This is Rick Hunter. I have an invitation for today's ceremonies, invitation number two-zero-three."

Lisa checked it against another computer display, although she found

herself irked by the job. The SDF-1 was set to launch, and she was expected to act as an air traffic tech!

But she responded, "That's confirmed as an invitation from Lieutenant Commander Fokker." Fokker! Lisa kept emotion out of her voice and avoided meeting Claudia's eye, finishing, "Follow course five-seven for landing."

"Roger," the voice said cheerfully, and signed off.

With all the important things I have to worry about, Lisa mumbled to herself, they also have to saddle me with babysitting the Rick Hunters of this world?

CHAPTER FOUR

All right, you win, "Big Brother." I'll come to your party. I'll even put up with all those military types you hang around with. But try not to make it too boring, okay?

Rick Hunter's RSVP to Roy Fokker's invitation to the SDF-1's launch ceremonies

High above Macross Island, an unusual aircraft began to descend into the complex flight patterns of Launching Day, following course five-seven for landing, just as Lisa Hayes had instructed.

Rick Hunter whistled as he got a better look at the SDF-1. The descriptions and the newscasts just didn't begin to do justice to the astonishing size of the thing! The two supercarriers anchored among the flotilla of ships in the harbor were of the new Thor class-each longer than a 150-story office building resting on its side-yet they were modest in comparison to the battle fortress.

And the sky was full of the sleekest, most advanced-looking fighters Rick had ever seen-Robotech fighters, the newscasts had called them. Whatever that meant. For a moment Rick couldn't blame Roy Fokker for dedicating himself to this Robotech stuff.

After a decade of secrecy, the United Earth Government promised the wonderful new breakthroughs made on Macross would be revealed. To Rick, it simply meant that Roy wouldn't have to be so hush-hush about what he was doing, and perhaps their friendship could get back on its old footing.

Rick maneuvered his ship smoothly through the traffic, relying not on his computers but on his own talent and training-a point of pride. He was the offspring of a proud, daring breed: last of the barnstormers, the stunt fliers and the seat-of-the-pants winged daredevils.

He was eighteen years old and hadn't been outflown since-well, long before his voice had changed from a kid's to a young man's.

His plane was a nimble little racer of his own design. A roomy one-seater, white with red trim, powered primarily by an oversize propfan engine but hiding a few surprises under its sleek fuselage. Rick had named it the Mockingbird, a fittingly arrogant name for the undisputed star of the last of the flying circuses.

He tossed a dark forelock of hair back and adjusted his tinted goggles, then went into a pushover and power dive for the SDF-1. This Robotech stuff looked impressive... but maybe it was time somebody showed these military flyboys that it was the pilot that mattered most, not some pile of mere metal.

Far out beyond the orbit of Earth's moon, a portentous tremble shook the spacetime continuum as if it were a spiderweb. It was only a preliminary disturbance, yet it was exacting and of great extent. A force beyond reckoning was making tentative contact on a day that marked a turning point in the history of the unsuspecting earth.

On Macross Island, in the shadow of the SDF-1, Roy didn't have time to notice the tiny racing plane making a pass over the ship's bow, thousands of feet above him. The public address system carried an announcement to the tens of thousands gathered there.

"And now we present an amazing display of aerial acrobatics, demonstrating the amazing advances we have made through Robotechnology. Lieutenant Commander Roy Fokker, leader of the Veritech fighters' Skull Team, will describe and explain the action for us."

Roy made his entrance to enthusiastic applause; he was known to and well liked by most people on Macross Island. Tall and handsome in his uniform, the blond hair still full and thick, he stopped before the microphone stand. He gave a snappy salute, then fell into parade rest and began his address.

"Today, ladies and gentlemen, you'll see how we've applied human

know-how to understanding and harnessing a complex alien technology."

Overhead, a half dozen swift, deadly Veritech fighters peeled off to begin their performance.

"Keep your eyes on planes two and four," Roy went on as two and four lined up for the first maneuver, engines blaring. "Flying at speeds of five hundred miles per hour, only fifty feet above the ground, they will pass within just a few yards of one another. Robotechnology makes such precision possible."

Roy looked out over the crowd with satisfaction. All eyes were gazing up in amazement at the onrushing fighters.

But the show would build from there. Precision flying was nothing compared to the other forms of control Robotechnology gave human beings over their new instruments. At long last average citizens would get to see Guardian and Battloid modes in action, Robotechnology applications that until now had been used only in restricted training areas or drills far out at sea, when the Veritechs were launching from the decks of the Daedalus and the Prometheus.

Those people in the throng, the ordinary citizens of Macross, were the ones who deserved the first live look at what the SDF-1 project had brought forth. They'd earned that right-much more than all the politicians, who had merely voted how much time and work and money would be spent-time and work and money that were invariably not the politicians'.

Today, all the rumors and speculations about Robotechnology would be put to rest, and the people of Earth would find out that the reality surpassed them all.

Roy was thinking about that happily as he spoke, waiting for the inevitable gasps from the crowd as the first high-speed pass was executed. It took him a few seconds to realize that the people below the speakers' platform weren't gasping.

They were laughing.

Roy whirled, craning his head to look up. Two and four had been forced to peel off from their pass by the sudden appearance of an interloper, a

gaudy little stunt plane, absurdly out of place among the modern miracle machines.

A circus plane! "Oh no-o-o!" Roy didn't have to guess who it was; he'd arranged for the invitation himself, and he was regretting it already. He grabbed the microphone out of its stand and flipped the switch that would patch him through to the aircom net.

"Rick! Is that you, Hunter?"

The little Mockingbird gave a jaunty waggle of its wings in salute as Rick banked slowly overhead. His reply came patched through the PA system.

"Roy! It's good to hear your voice, old buddy! They tell me you're a lieutenant commander now. The army must really be desperate!"

Furious, Roy yelled into the mike. "Are you crazy? Get that junk heap out of here!" He forgot that he was still patched through the PA, so that the whole crowd followed the exchange. Of course, as loud and angry as Roy was, the people up front would've had no trouble hearing him anyway.

The people below thought it was great, and the laughter started again, even louder. Roy was shaking one fist at the little stunt plane, holding the mike stand aloft with the other, like Jove brandishing a lightning bolt: "Hunter, when I get my hands on you, I'm gonna-"

Roy didn't get to elaborate on that; just then the bottom half of the telescoping mike stand dropped, nearly landing on his foot.

Roy caught it just in time-at thirty, he was one of the oldest of the Veritech fighter pilots, yet his reflexes hadn't slowed a bit-but couldn't quite get it to fit back together. Fumbling, forgetting what he'd been about to say, he was ready to explode with frustration.

He abruptly became aware of the laughter all around him. The crowd was roaring, some of them nearly in tears.

One young woman in front caught his eye, though. She looked to be in her mid teens, slender and long-legged, with a charming face and hair black as night. She was standing behind a kid, possibly her brother, who was laughing so hard, he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

At some other time, Roy might have tried to catch her eye and exchange a smile, but he just wasn't in the mood. His face reddened as the laughter washed over him, and he unknowingly echoed Lisa Hayes's sentiments of a few moments before: Why today, of all days?

Roy covered the mike with his gloved palm and stage-whispered to one of the techs. "Hey, Ed! Switch this circuit over to radio only, will you?" It was going to be awfully hard to chew out his men about com-procedure discipline after today.

It took only a second or two for Ed to make the change. "What're you trying to do, Rick, make a perfect fool of me?"

Roy could hear the laughter in his old friend's voice. "Aw, nobody's perfect, Commander!"

Roy was just about grinning in spite of himself. People who didn't watch their step every moment were liable to become Rick Hunter's straight men. Roy decided to give him back a bit of his own. "You haven't changed a bit, have you, kid? Well, this isn't an amateur flying circus; my men are real pilots!"

"Amateur, huh?" Rick drawled. He looked off in the distance and saw the Veritech fighters in a diamond formation for a power climb, preparing to do a "bomb-burst" maneuver. "I'm gonna have to make you eat those words, Commander. Comin' in."

"Stop clowning around, Rick-look out!"

Mockingbird swooped down in a hair-raising dive, barely missing the speaker's platform, so low that Roy had to duck to avoid getting his head taken off. A lot of people in the crowd hit the dirt too, and most of them cried out in shock. Roy caught another glimpse of the pretty young thing in the front row; she seemed thrilled and happy, not in the least frightened.

Roy spun as the Mockingbird zoomed off, building on the acceleration it had picked up in its dive. Suddenly, as the little aircraft was safely away from the crowd, covers blew free from six booster jet pods mounted around the turbofan cowling at the rear of the ship, and powerful gusts of flame lifted it into a vertical climb. The crowd went "Oh!"

Leaving streamers of rocket exhaust, the Mockingbird went ballistic, quickly overtaking the slower-moving formation of Veritechs.

"Get out of there!" Roy yelled up at him, not even bothering with the mike, knowing it was pointless. "Headstrong" was a word they'd invented with Rick Hunter in mind.

Rick cut in full power, came up into formation perfectly, becoming part of the display, as the Veritech fighters completed their climb and arced away in different directions, like a huge version of the afternoon's skyrockets.

The crowd was applauding wildly, cheering. Roy shook his fist again, furious-but a part of him was proud of his friend.

Out in space, vast forces were coalescing-nothing Earth's detectors could perceive yet, though that would happen soon. Soon, but too late for Earth.

Contact had been made; an inconceivable gap was about to be bridged, a marvel of science put to hellish use.

As Mockingbird floated in for a perfect landing, Roy leaped from the speaker's platform, so eager to get at Rick that he forgot to let go of the mike, yanking the stand over and nearly tripping on the microphone cord. The cord snaked along behind him as he ran.

Rick raised the clear bubble of the cockpit canopy as he taxied to a stop, his forelock of dark hair fluttering in the breeze. He pushed his tinted flying goggles high on his forehead. "Whew! Hi, Roy."

Roy was in no mood for hi's. "Who d' you think you are? What were you trying to do, get yourself killed?"

Rick was nonchalant, pulling off his headset and goggles and tossing them back into the cockpit as he hiked himself up. "Hey, calm down!"

Not a chance. Roy still had the mike in one hand, a few yards of cable attached to it. He flung it down angrily on the hardtop runway surface. "And while we're at it, where'd you learn to do that, anyway?"

Rick had his hands up to hold the much bigger Roy at bay. He gave a

quick smile. "It was just a simple booster climb. You taught it to me when I was just a kid!"

"Ahhh!" Roy reached out, grabbed Rick by the upper arm, and began dragging him off across the hardtop.

"Hey!" Rick objected, but he could see that he'd taken a lot of the voltage out of Roy's wrath with that reminder of old times.

"I have to admit, those guys up there were pretty good," Rick went on, jerking his arm free, straightening his dapper white silk scarf. "Not as good as me, of course."

Roy made a sour expression. "You don't have to brag to me, Rick. I know all about your winning the amateur flying competition last year."

"Not amateur; civilian!" Rick bristled. Then he went on with great self-pleasure. "And actually, I've won it eight years in a row. What've you been doing?"

"I was busy fighting a war! Combat flying and dogfighting kept me kind of occupied. Hundred 'n' eight enemy kills, so they tell me."

"You're proud of being a killer?"

They'd touched on an old, sore subject. Rick's late father had rejected military service in the Global Civil War, though he would have been the very best. Jack "Pop" Hunter had seen combat before and wanted no more part of that. He had instilled a strong sense of this conviction in his son.

Roy stopped, fists cocked, though Rick continued walking. "What?" With anyone else, a serious fistfight would have resulted from this exchange. But this was Rick, who'd been like family. More than family.

Roy swallowed his fury, hurrying after. "There was a war on, and I was a soldier! I just did my duty!"

They made a strange pair, crossing the hardtop side by side: Roy in his black and mauve Veritech uniform and Rick, a head shorter, in the white and blazing orange of his circus uniform.

They stopped by a vending machine unlike any Rick had seen before, which offered something called Petite Cola. Rick fed it some coins while the machine made strange internal noises. He took a can of ice-cold soda for

himself, giving Roy the other.

"You promised my dad that as soon as the war was over you'd come back to the air circus. Why'd you go back on that, Roy?"

Roy was suddenly distant. "I really felt guilty about letting your father down, only... this Robotech thing is so important, I just couldn't give it up."

He pulled the tab on his soda, torn by the need to explain to Rick and the knowledge that some parts of the original mission to Macross Island, and of Robotechnology, were still classified and might be for decades more. He felt a debt, too, to the late Pop Hunter.

Roy shrugged. "It gets into your blood or something; I don't know." Rick scowled, leaning back against the Petite Cola machine. "What is

Robotech, anyway? Just more modern war machinery!" Somewhere, he could hear a kid raising a ruckus. "And the aliens-huh?"

He couldn't figure out how he'd lost his balance, sliding along the vending machine. Then he realized it was moving out from behind him.

The Petite Cola machine was rolling eagerly toward the child, a boy of seven or so who was throwing a terrible tantrum.

"Cola! I wanna cola! You promised me you'd buy me a cola, Minmei, and I want one right now!" He was dressed in a junior version of a Veritech pilot's uniform, Rick saw disgustedly. Teach 'em while they're young!

Roy looked around to see the commotion. He was suddenly very attentive when he saw the person trying to reason with the kid-"Minmei"-was the young lady who'd been standing at the edge of the speaker's platform.

She was charming in a short red dress, pulling on the boy's arm, trying to keep him from the vending machine that was closing in for the sale. "Cousin Jason, behave yourself! I already bought you one cola; you can't have any more!"

Jason wasn't buying it, stamping his feet and screaming. "Why? I wanna cola-aaahh!"

To Rick's amazement, the scene turned into a combination wrestling match and game of keepaway: Minmei was trying to prevent Jason from

reaching the machine and was crying, "Cancel the order, please, machine!" while Jason struggled to get past her. In the meantime, the machine, circling and darting, made every effort to reach him short of rolling over Minmei. With its persistence and agility, the vending machine somehow gave the impression that it was alive.

"Never saw anything like that." Rick blinked.

Roy gave him an enigmatic smile. "Robotechnology has a way of affecting the things around it, sometimes even non-Robotech machines."

Rick groaned. "Robotech again?" "Jason, you'll make yourself sick!" "I don't care!" Jason wailed.

"Maybe you could tie a can of soda to a fishing pale and lure him home, miss?" Roy suggested.

Minmei turned to him, still deftly keeping the kid from scoring the Petite Cola. She broke into a winsome smile. She was of Chinese blood, Roy figured, though she had strange, blue eyes-not that he was interested! Claudia would probably take a swing at him (and connect) if she found out he was roving. Still, something about Minmei's smile made her irresistible.

"Oh! You're the officer from the stage! You were very, very funny!" Minmei giggled, then turned to the little boy sternly.

"That's it! We're going home! Come on, Jason; don't make me spank you!" She lugged the boy away as the Petite Cola machine made halfhearted attempts to clinch a sale against all hope.

"Well, Roy," Rick commented, elaborately droll, "I see you're still a big ladies' man."

In deep space, dimensions folded and transition began; death was about to come calling.

CHAPTER FIVE

From the first, there were anomalies about the situation on the target world, things that gave me pause. The second-guessers would have it that I was remiss in not advising caution more strongly. But one did not antagonize great Breetai with too much talk of circumspection, you see-not, at least, without great risk.

Exedore, as quoted in Lapstein's Interviews

The stars shimmered and wavered as if shivering with dread. And well they should.

The forces that bound the universe were briefly snarled by a tremendous application of energy. The dimensional warp and woof pulled apart for a moment.

In a precisely chosen zone of space beyond Luna's orbit, it was as if a piece of the primordial fireball that gave birth to the cosmos had been brought back into existence.

Motes bright and hot as novas, infinitesimal bits of the Cosmic String, were spewed out of the rift in spacetime like burning sparks of gunpowder from some unimaginable cannon shot; the burning detritus of nonspace moving at speeds approaching that of light itself, consumed almost as soon as they came in touch with three-dimensional reality.

Larger anomalies, like furious comets, flared here and there in the wash of light. Then there was another explosion beyond any description: the pure emission of unadulterated hell. It pushed outward from a rip in the fabric of the universe, taking on shape and shedding a raging wave of incandescence as if it were water. The shape became longer, more forceful, menacing.

The Zentraedi had come at last.

First was the great flagship, sheets and wind racks of ravenous light streaming away behind it to reveal its shape: nine miles long, an irregular

blunt-nosed cylinder.

A vessel many times the size of SDF-1, the flagship was a seemingly endless span of mighty weapons and invulnerable shields, of combat-ship bays and mountainous armor and incalculable firepower. The pride of the Zentraedi fleet, searching the solar system in an instant and knowing where its prey waited.

The flagship had been built with only military conquest, warfare, and destruction in mind. Manning it was a race of beings bred for that single purpose.

The ship was like a leviathan from the deepest oceans of human nightmares, with superstructure features that might be gills here or titanic eyes there, huge spines that were sensor spars, nubbles of the secondary and lesser weapons batteries, projections like questing fangs. Lighted observation ports, some of them a hundred yards across, suggested bulging, multiple eyes.

Behind it came a fleet surpassing any the Zentraedi had ever assembled before, cascading from the spacefold warp that had been their shortcut past the endless light-years. They were a school of gargantuan armored fish numerous enough to fill all the oceans, plated and scaled in sinister greens and browns and blacks, with pale underbellies in sickly grays and blues.

There were more of them than the visible stars. They were the mightiest Zentraedi armada ever seen, and yet they were cautious. They followed a flagship that knew no equal in any fleet they'd ever encountered, and yet they were wary.

If translated into human terms, their caution would mean something like: Even wolves can be prey to the tiger.

Having pursued the single wounded tiger across space and time, the fleet of so many hundred thousand ships formed up around the flagship.

In the transparent bowl of the Supreme Commander's flagship, Breetai, tall and stiff in his dress uniform, gazed down on his operations center. Even for a Zentraedi, he was a mighty tower of bone and muscle, as strong as any trooper under his command and as good a fighter. Like many of his

engineered race, his skin was a mauve shade suggestive of clay.

A projecbeam drew a two-dimensional image of the target planet in midair, a puny and an unremarkable blue-white sphere, nothing much to look at. Rather disappointing, really.

Breetai reached up one hand to touch the cold crystal-and-metal half cowl that covered much of his head, thinking back to the day so long ago when Zor had died, and the dimensional fortress had been lost. The failure still burned at him.

He'd accepted that with a warrior's fatalism, and with a warrior's lust for triumph he contemplated the final victory that would be his this day.

Breetai studied the Earth coldly. "The finder beam has locked on this planet. Are you sure this is the source of those emanations?" His voice was huge and deep, with a resonance that shook the bulkheads.

Off to one side, Exedore, Breetai's adviser, kowtowed slightly, showing deference from habit even though he wasn't in Breetai's line of vision. "Yes, sir, I'm positive."

Breetai pursed his lips in thought. "They could have executed a refold." The thought of losing his quarry again was almost unbearable, but Breetai avowed no emotion to show.

"It's doubtful, sir," Exedore said quickly. "There was no evidence of a second jump into hyperspace."

Savagely, Breetai thought again of those traitors to his race and their narrow escape. "Hmm. They couldn't have gone far in their condition. And they would have to land in order to repair the ship." He looked to Exedore. "That's a logical conclusion, I think."

Exedore inclined his head respectfully. "I agree. It would seem very likely, sir."

Breetai was used to acting on his own instincts and deductions; but it was reassuring that Exedore, the most brilliant intellect of the Zentraedi race, was in accord.

Breetai considered Exedore for a moment: small, almost a dwarf by the standards of their species, and frail into the bargain. Gaunt, with protruding,

seemingly lidless eyes and a wild thatch of odd, rust-red hair, Exedore was still the embodiment of Zentraedi law and tradition-and more valuable to the towering commander than any battlefleet. Yet with all that, he was loyal, almost selfless in his devotion to Breetai.

Breetai gave Exedore a curt nod. "Very well; dispatch a scout team for a preliminary reconnaissance."

In the Zentraedi warrior religion, efficiency was a virtue ranking only behind loyalty and courage in battle. The words were scarcely out of Breetai's mouth when two of the fleet's heavy cruisers detached themselves and advanced on the unwary planet.

At the festivities in the shadow of the SDF-1, Rick was getting his first close look at a Veritech fighter that had been put on display. Because he was accompanied by Roy, Rick was allowed into the roped-off area around the craft and permitted a hands-on examination of the ship.

"Whew, this fighter's a real beauty, all right." He looked at it enviously; he had no desire to fly combat, but that didn't stop him from longing to sit at the controls of the fantastic machine, high in the blue.

He ran his hand along the fuselage. "It looks great. How does it handle?"

Roy thought that one over. "Hmm. Well, why don't you climb aboard and see for yourself?"

"You really mean that?"

"Uh huh. I'll ride piggyback behind you." It was, perhaps, bending the rules a bit, though familiarization flights were scheduled for VIPs later in the day. Still, a little sample of what the Veritech could do might change Rick's attitude about military service, and the service could sure use a flier like Rick Hunter.

Rick was already scrambling up the boarding ladder, peering into the cockpit. "The controls look pretty complicated," Roy called up, "but I'll check you out on them."

Rick looked down and smirked. "I'm not worried. If you can learn to fly

one of these things, I sure can."

Roy snorted, "Don't be so modest!"

When Rick was in the pilot's seat and Roy was in the rear seat, Roy handed Rick a red-visored Robotech flight helmet.

Rick turned it over in his hands, examining the interior. "Whoa, what kind of helmet is this? What's all this stuff inside?"

"Receptors. They pick up electromagnetic activity in your brain. You might say the helmet's a mind reader, in some ways."

The receptors were just like part of the helmet's padding: soft, yielding-no safety hazard. But Rick wasn't so sure he liked the idea of having his head wired. "What're they for?"

"For flying a Veritech, buddy boy. You'll still handle a lot of manual controls, but there are things this baby does that it can only do through advanced control systems."

Rick hiked himself around in his seat and leaned out to look back at Roy. "Look, I saw your guys flying, remember? What's so special about these crates that you have to wear a thinking cap just to steer one?"

Roy told him, "The real secrets aren't supposed to go public until the politicians are through with all their blabbing, but I'll tell you this: The machine you're sitting in isn't like anything humans have ever built-it's as different from Mockingbird as Mockingbird is from a pair of shoes.

"Because you don't just pilot a Robotech ship, Rick; you live it."

On the main reviewing stand high above the crowd, Senator Russo stood at the speaker's rostrum, his voice echoing out over the throngs, amplified so that it reached to the farthest shores of the sea of people. Flags snapped in the wind, and the moment felt like a complete triumph.

"This is the day we've all been looking forward to for ten years! The Robotech project has been a tremendous asset to the economy of Macross City and to the welfare of our people!"

Captain Gloval, standing to one side with a few other dignitaries, tried to keep from yawning or simply throwing up his hands in disgust. So far, all

Russo and his cronies had done was take credit for themselves and do some not-too-subtle electioneering.

Gloval cast a critical eye at the weather and gave it his grudging approval. He was impatient to launch; various other Earth military forces were already deployed in space, patrolling and awaiting the start of the SDF-1's first space trials. But the politicos didn't care who they kept waiting or what careful timetables they spoiled when they had the spotlight.

A liaison officer came up the steps at the rear of the reviewing stand and approached Gloval as Russo went on. "More important, though, is the fact that the technology developed here will benefit all mankind, now and in the future. And I need not mention what it means to the defense of our great planet, Earth!"

The liaison cupped his hand to Gloval's ear and said, "Excuse me, sir: urgent message from the space monitoring station. A strange flash of light and an explosion, tremendous radiation readings, accompanied by irregularities in solar gravitational fields."

In spite of the warmth of the day, Gloval suddenly felt cold all over. "The same sort of event occurred ten years ago. You know what happened then, don't you?"

The aide was trying to conceal his fear, nodding. "That's when the alien ship arrived."

Gloval assumed the icy calm of a seasoned captain. "Better check it out.

Come with me."

Gloval was descending the platform steps as Russo announced what a great honor it was to introduce the commander of SDF-1, Henry Gloval.

For once, Russo didn't know what to say. "Come back here! You have to make a speech!" he shouted.

Gloval never even looked around. The time for speeches was over.

On the SDF-1 bridge, the women who were the battle fortress's heart worked furiously to make some sense of the sudden chaos around them.

"What's going on here, anyway?" Claudia demanded, trying everything she could think of to interpret her instruments and reassert some control over the ship's systems.

"Claudia, give me a readout!" Lisa called calmly. All around her, the bridge was a din of alarms, flashing indicators, malfunctioning controls, and overloaded computers.

Claudia looked up from her hopeless efforts. "Every system on the ship is starting up without being turned on!"

Unprecedented, impossible-to-interpret mechanisms had self-activated in the ship's power plant-the great, sealed engines that not even Lang had dared open. And the many different kinds of alien apparatus connected to it were doing bewildering things to the SDF-1's structure as well as its systems, making the humans helpless bystanders.

"The defense system is activating the main gun!" Claudia reported, horrified.

Far off at the great starship's bow, gargantuan servomotors hummed and groaned. The huge twin booms that made up the forward portion of the ship moved to either side on colossal camlike devices. The booms locked into place, looking like a fantastic tuning fork. The ship's reconstruction had the bow high up now, pointed out above the end of Macross Island's cliff line at the open sea.

Lisa's mind raced. The main gun had never been fired; no one was even sure how powerful it was. That test was to be reserved for empty space. But if it salvoed now, the ensuing death and destruction might well be greater than that created by the ship's original crash.

At the same time, everyone aboard could feel the supership shifting slightly on the massive keel blocks-the monolithic rests on which it lay. Warning klaxons and horns were deafening.

The SDF-1's aiming its gun, Lisa realized. But at what target? "Shut down all systems!" she ordered Claudia.

Claudia, trying the master cutoff switch several times to no effect, looked at Lisa helplessly. "It doesn't work!"

A sudden glare from the bow lit the bridge with red-orange brilliance, throwing their flickering shadows on the bulkhead behind them.

Around and between the forward booms, tongues of orange starflame were shooting and whirling and arcing back and forth. The fantastic energy cascade began sluicing up the booms toward their tips, sparks snapping, seemingly eager to be set free.

And still Lisa could think of nothing she could do.

Just then the hatch opened and Gloval hurried in so quickly that he bumped his head on the frame. He didn't spare time or his usual swearing at the people who'd refitted the largest machine ever known for not providing a little more headroom.

"Captain, the main guns are preparing to fire!"

Gloval assessed the situation in seconds, but Lisa could see from his expression that he was as much at a loss as she.

"I can't control them!" Claudia told Gloval. "What'll we do?"

Lisa absorbed a terrible lesson in that moment. Despite what they might teach in the Academy and the War College and Advanced Leadership School, sometimes there was nothing you could do.

The energy storm around the booms had built to an Earth-shaking pitch, a noise like a million shrieking demons. Then huge eruptions of destructive energy streaked off the booms.

The bolts streamed off into the distance, thickening into a howling torrent of annihilation, a river of starflame as high and wide as SDF-1 itself, shooting out across the city.

Lisa expected to see everything in the volley's path consumed, including the gathered populace.

But that didn't happen. The superbolt went straight out over the cliffs and over the ocean, turning water to vapor and roiling the swells, raising clouds of steam that wouldn't settle for hours. The shot was direct, the curve of the Earth falling away beneath it as it lanced out into space.

And just as Lisa Hayes was registering the fact that the city still remained, intact and unharmed-that her father was down there somewhere,

still alive-new information began pouring in on scopes and monitors.

The Zentraedi heavy cruisers, closing in on the unsuspecting Earth, barely had time to realize that they were about to die. By some unimaginable level of control, the blinding shaft of energy split in two.

The twinned beams holed each heavy cruiser through and through, along their long axes. Armor and weapons and hull, superstructure, and the rest were vaporized as the beams hit, skewering them. They expanded like overheated gas bags, skins peeling off, debris exploding outward, only to disappear, blown to nothingness, an instant later in globes of bright mass-energy conversions.

From his command station, Breetai watched impassively, arms folded across his great chest, as the projecbeam displayed the death of the two heavy cruisers.

"Now we know for sure: The ship is on that planet!" This time he didn't bother soliciting Exedore's advice. "All ships advance, but exercise extreme caution!"

The Zentraedi armada took up proper formation, ships-of-the-line moving to the fore, and closed on the target world.

Clouds of superheated air blew out across the ocean; gulls cried in the aftermath of the SDF-1's single volley.

Gloval was at the bridge's protective bowl-its "windshield"-his face all but pressed against it, scanning through the steam and fog. He breathed a prayer of thanks that the city was unharmed.

"Some sort of magnetic bottling," Sammie reported, focused on her work. "All the force was channeled directly out into space, except for some very marginal eddy currents."

"We have control over all systems again, sir," Claudia announced calmly. "What happened, sir?"

Gloval suddenly felt old-older than the ship, the island, the sea. He wasn't about to speculate aloud, not even to his trusted bridge gang, but he

was just about certain he knew. And if he was right, it put the weight of a planet on his shoulders.

CHAPTER SIX

While Captain Gloval gets admittedly deserved credit for his handling of the disaster that day, male historians frequently gloss over Gloval's straightforward statement that if it weren't for the women on SDF-1's bridge, their nerve and gallantry and professionalism, the Robotech War would have been over before it had fairly begun.

Betty Greer, Post-Feminism and the Global War

The ground had stopped shaking, and the sky was clearing. The Veritech fighter stopped its trembling dance, and Rick Hunter caught his breath. The air seemed a little hotter in his lungs, but not terribly so.

He called back to Roy in a subdued voice, "Wow. What were all those fireworks about?"

Fireworks! Roy thought. 'Fraid not! Aloud, he said, "I dunno. I better go check. Wait here; I'll see what's goin' on."

He put aside his flight helmet-the "thinking cap," as Rick had called it-and hiked himself up out of the fighter cockpit. If what Roy feared the most had come to pass, Rick would be as safe where he was as anywhere else. And he'd also understand why some people could spend their lives preparing for war.

"The space monitor report's coming in," Sammie sang out. "It shows what our gun was firing at."

"I have it here, Sammie," Lisa cut in, studying her monitors. "Two large objects, probably spacecraft, origin unknown, on Earth-approach vector, approx two hundred miles out."

Gloval was nodding to himself without realizing it. The ship could be raised or lowered, the booms traversed for-what, a few insignificant minutes of arc? And the SDF-1 hadn't been moved, except to lift it onto the keel blocks, since it crashed. The range was incredibly long, making for a

greater field of fire; but still, such a shot, such a series of events, could only come about with some forewarning, or intuition, or-we forgot that whoever built this vessel had to some extent mastered time; could, perhaps, see through it. Could see this very moment?

"Both objects were struck dead center by the beam and were destroyed-disintegrated," Claudia said. "Orbital combat task forces are deploying for defense, with Armor One and Armor Ten-sir? Captain Gloval?"

Sammie, Vanessa, Kim-they exchanged looks with one another as Lisa and Claudia traded facial signals. Gloval was laughing, a deep belly laugh, his shoulders shaking. Claudia and Lisa saw that they were both thinking the same thing: If Gloval, their source of strength and calm, had lost his grip, all was lost.

"Captain, what is it?" Lisa ventured. "What are you laughing about?"

Gloval stopped laughing, crashing his fist against the observation-bowl ledge. "It was so obvious! We should have known! A booby trap, of course!"

Claudia and Lisa said it at the same time, "Booby trap, sir?"

"Yes, it's one of the oldest tricks in military history! A retreating enemy leaves behind hidden explosives and such."

He clamped his cold pipe between his teeth. "The automatic firing of the main guns means that enemies have approached close enough to be a threat to us." He drew his tobacco bag out of the breast pocket of his uniform jacket.

"Captain Gloval!" Sammie was up out of her chair. Everyone turned to her, wondering what the new alarm was.

"No smoking on the bridge, sir!" Sammie said. "Strictly against regulations!"

Claudia groaned and clapped a hand to her forehead. Lisa reflected, Nothing throws Sammie.

"I was just holding it; I wasn't going to light it," Gloval said defensively. The unreality of the situation retreated with Sammie's interruption. There were both good things and bad things about having one's bridge crew be like

family.

But doubts were past now. Gloval barked, "Hot-scramble all fighters and sound general quarters! I'm declaring a red alert!"

Down below, the crowds milled uncertainly as helos and other aircraft veered away to report to battle stations. Suddenly, launch crews were scrambling to get Veritechs into the air. Out on the carriers, all catapults were busy, while the SDF-1's own warcraft rushed up from the ship's interior and groundside runways to establish a protective shield overhead.

Out in the void, armored spacecruisers, human-designed vehicles incorporating some of the principles learned from Robotechnology, moved their interceptors and attack craft out of the bays and into fighting position.

It wasn't long before the swarm of human defenders had sensor contact, then visual sighting, on the aliens; the Zentraedi wouldn't have had it any other way.

A Scorpion interceptor pilot reported back to Armor One over the tac net, "Enemy approaching on bearing niner-zero. We are engaging. Commence firing!"

Scorpions and Tigersharks and a dozen other types of Earthly combat spacecraft, ranging up to the mammoth Armors themselves, rushed to close with the aliens' first attack wave.

Missiles-Stilettos and Piledrivers and Mongooseswere launched at extreme range so that all but the glows of their drives were lost to sight until the blackness blossomed with the spherical explosions characteristic of zero-g, the bursts overlapping one another, thicker than a field of dandelions.

The Zentraedi ships-of-the-line forged through the intense fire with few losses, closing the gap in seconds. The formations broke up to lock in a fierce, pitched battle.

The Armors launched all their missiles. Lasers, kinetic energy weapons-rail-gun autocannon and such-were the other main Terran weapons. The Zentraedi's were far superior; their warcraft simply

outclassed the defenders', whose design involved fewer Robotech innovations.

Earth's forces fought with savage determination, but the unevenness in technologies was instantly apparent.

Aboard the alien command ship, Breetai studied the engagement solemnly in the projecbeam images and monitors, listening to his staff's relayed readouts with only a small part of his attention.

"Very heavy resistance, sir," Exedore observed.

"Yes," Breetai allowed. "But why are they using such primitive weapons? Our lead ships have broken through. It's unbelievable, this sacrifice they're making! Some sort of trick, no doubt."

Exedore considered that. "Yes, it is puzzling."

Breetai whirled on him. "It makes no sense, then? Even to you?"

"There has to be a reason, but it's beyond me. Surely, the Robotech Masters-"

He was interrupted by an urgent message from the tech at the threat-prioritization computers. "Commander Breetai! Two enemy cruiser-class vessels are approaching; they could be the ones who launched the missile bombardment."

Breetai smiled, but his single eye was chilly. "Destroy them!"

Specially designated main and secondary batteries opened fire: phased particle-beam arrays and molecular disruptors, long-range and fearsomely powerful.

Armor Two was hit on the first volley as hundreds of spears of high-resolution blue fury ranged in on it. It tried to evade the barrage; house-size pieces of armor and superstructure were blown from it. Many of the smaller defending craft were completely disintegrated.

Breetai, waiting for effective counterfire, lost patience. Perhaps the foes' hesitation to use reflex weaponry fit into some strange plan, but to forgo use of any advanced technology, to sacrifice troops to this kind of slaughter, was perverse.

Incredulous, Breetai wondered if somehow this victory was going to be

far easier than it had seemed when that first mighty bolt rose from Terra. "Those idiots behave as though they don't even know how to use their own weapons! Full barrage, all cannon!"

The Zentraedi command ship cut loose again with all forward gun turrets. Armor Two was instantly holed through in a hundred places, the enemy beams penetrating it like ice picks through a cigar box.

Hull integrity went at once, and internal gravity; hatches and seals blew, and space began sucking the atmosphere from the cruiser, tossing crew and contents around like toys. Still more hits made a sieve of the pride of the orbital defense command and destroyed its power plant. A moment later it disappeared in a horrendous outpouring of energy, while lesser ships all around it met a similar fate.

Lisa, more pallid than ever, kept her voice even as she reported to Gloval: "Armor Two is destroyed and Armor Ten is heavily damaged, sir. Other losses extremely heavy. The Orbital Defense Forces are no longer even marginally effective. Alien fleet is closing on Earth."

Gloval sat in his command chair, fingers steepled, chin resting on pressing thumbs. "I had hoped this moment wouldn't come in my lifetime. SDF-1 kept us from exterminating ourselves and let us achieve worldwide peace, but now it has brought a new danger down upon us. We face extinction at the hands of aliens whose power we can only guess at."

Henry Gloval's mind ranged back across a decade to that first investigation of the wrecked SDF-1. Miracles have a price. And this one, I think, will be very, very high.

Claudia and Lisa and the other members of the bridge crew swapped quick, worried looks.

"I had hoped that war was a thing of the past. We all had." Gloval looked up from his distraction like a knight at the end of his prayer vigil, ready to take up a shining sword, a gleaming shield.

"But here we go again, like it or not." He rose to his feet, shoulders back, and a vivid current of electricity that hadn't been there a moment before

hummed in the air. Gloval was suddenly strong as an old oak. "All right. Give the order to move out!"

"Yes, sir." Lisa relayed the command crisply. "All forces, deploy in accordance with Contingency Plan SURTUR."

More Veritechs launched all across the island as Lisa's words reverberated to every corner of it, like the gods' final war song. "We are under attack by alien invaders in sector four-one-two. This is not a drill, I say again: This is not a drill."

Roy Fokker, clambering into his fighter, pulling on his flight helmet, gasped, then hissed. He'd been so busy saddling up Skull Team when word came that there was trouble that he'd forgotten all about Rick!

Then he calmed. The fighter in which Rick was sitting had been seconded from active duty for the public relations events; it wasn't as if some angry pilot would be wrestling him out of the cockpit. So Rick was as safe there as anywhere else for the time being.

Lisa's voice rang across the airfield. Roy didn't mind it, but he couldn't help wishing it were Claudia's.

Then Roy got back to the job at hand, settling the all-important helmet on his head. He switched on the tactical net, trying to sound casual, just about bored. The fighter-pilot tradition; dying was something you sometimes couldn't help, but losing your cool was unforgivable.

"Well, boys, you heard her. This is the real thing." Roy practically yawned.

The sky was filled with climbing flights of fast-moving aircraft, vectoring off to their assigned coverages. Dozens, hundreds had arisen from the carriers and the island. The flattops were making ready to stand out to sea so that the foe couldn't concentrate his attacks; that would take some time. But at least with the combat squadrons aloft, Earth wasn't as vulnerable to a single, concentrated strike.

Lisa's voice came over Roy's flight helmet phones. "Wolf Team has cleared. Skull Team, prepare for takeoff."

"Skull Team ready." Roy knew the men in the other parked Veritechs

would be watching him as well as listening over the tac net. He gave a quick thumbs-up. "Awright, boys; this is it."

More fighters were streaking up from the flight decks of the carriers, launched out from the waist catapults or propelled out into the air over the Hurricane-style bows.

"Let's go," drawled Roy Fokker. Robotech engines shrilled.

"What a disorderly arrangement!" Breetai exclaimed, studying Macross City on long-rage scanners. The populace, the military forces-they were so unbelievably concentrated! "These people must be completely ignorant of spacewar tactics!"

The sensor image panned until an image-interpretation computer locked it in. Breetai leaned closer to the fishbowl surface that protected his command post.

"What's this? The battle fortress! But-what's happened to it?"

Exedore took that as leave to speak. "It appears to have been completely redesigned and rebuilt, perhaps by the inhabitants of that planet."

Breetai set his fists on his hips. "Mere primitives couldn't possibly have captured a Robotech ship."

Exedore fixed Breetai with his great, protruding eyes, their eerily pinpoint pupils hypnotic, mystical. "Perhaps it crashed on their planet and they managed to salvage it."

"But what about the crew? Zor's traitors wouldn't just let these creatures have the vessel!"

"Maybe they perished in the fighting with the Invid, or in the crash," Exedore suggested delicately. It was an answer of high probability; Breetai saw that at once, chose not to contest it, and congratulated himself on having a friend and adviser like Exedore.

"Even so..." The commander sidestepped the discomfitting idea that the primitives were antagonists to be feared. "The ship would have been terribly damaged. And these primitives wouldn't have the technology to

repair it."

This Zentraedi arrogance of ours gets worse with every generation, Exedore thought, even as he readied his answer. Someday we may all pay for it.

"I know, sir, but is there any other explanation? It is a Robotech vessel, and we know they have-"

"Reflex weaponry!"

"Precisely. And this makes them very dangerous. So we must exercise extreme caution."

Breetai turned back to the projecbeam displays, uttering a feral growl.

The instruments and transparent bowl rang with it.

A command center coordinator's voice came up over the intercom. "Target pinpointed, Commander. We're launching fighters!"

Breetai and Exedore contemplated the image of the dimensional fortress.

CHAPTER SEVEN

If there exists on record a stranger familiarization flight than Rick Hunter's VT shakedown, I have been unable to find it.

Zachary Foxx, Jr.,VT: the Men and the Mecha

Zentraedi combat ships of every kind cut down through Earth's atmosphere in tight, well-maintained formations, plunging at Macross Island and its surrounding waters. The alien pilots were confident, swelled with their swift and smashing victory against the target world's outer defenses.

The bright streaks of their plummeting drives seemed as numerous as raindrops. They were primed for easy kills and a swift capture of the battle fortress that had to be captured whole and undamaged, as Breetai had ordered. The invaders had had it pretty much their own way so far.

All at once that changed...and the rout suddenly became a battle again. Protective covers had been raised from the SDF-1's missile racks;

almost all incoming ordnance was intercepted and exploded in midair. Fighters of types the Zentraedi hadn't encountered before boiled up to lock in combat with them. And the elite warrior race found out, to their extreme unhappiness, that the primitives had indeed puzzled out quite a bit of Robotechnology.

In Earth's slaughterhouse skies, the dying began again.

Snoozing comfortably, Rick Hunter began to rouse a bit. If the weather had turned so bad-there was constant thunder-maybe he ought to make sure all the windows were shut. Only, he didn't seem to remember where he was. Besides, there was this bothersome voice in his ear; it had the ring of authority, and that was something that never failed to antagonize him.

"This is SDF-1 control calling VT one-zero-two. You down there, on the exhibition grounds! We're on combat alert! Why haven't you taken off?"

Lisa Hayes had a million other things to do; prodding slowpoke fighter jocks was the last problem she needed, and it made her mad to have to take time she couldn't spare to do it.

Rick sighed and stretched, then tilted the strange flight helmet back on his head, leaning forward and blinking groggily at one of the cockpit's tiny display screens. A young woman's face peered angrily out of it: pale and intense, impatient. Rick Hunter was used to being regarded as something pretty special, particularly by the opposite sex; he therefore decided at once that whoever she was, she had a pinched and grumpy look.

"You don't mean me, do you, lady?" But just then he became aware of distant explosions-not thunder but the reports of incoming fire. And there were blazes in the city, and smoke and damage. Crewpeople were rushing everywhere, fueling and arming and guiding planes, getting them airborne. Meanwhile, up in the air...

What were all those intertangled contrails and afterburner glows and explosions and tracers?

"Huh? What?" Rick Hunter asked himself weakly. People were scrambling around the plane in which he sat, readying it.

"Don't waste any more time!" the pale face in the screen scolded. "Take off immediately and join your wingman! The fighter squadron's outnumbered as it is!"

Rick gritted his teeth. "What d'you mean take off? The runway's demolished!"

And so it was, one of the primary Zentraedi targets, one of the few to be hit effectively. The young woman on the screen appeared to be counting to control her temper.

"Runway two is operable. You're fully armed, and your engines will overheat very quickly at high standby, so prepare for immediate takeoff!"

Now that she mentioned it, he could hear the highpitched whine of an engine, could feel it through his seat, but it was not like any he'd ever heard before-and Rick Hunter had heard 'em all.

Rick leaned out of the cockpit for a look. Sure enough, the Veritech was

armed to the teeth, external hardpoints and pylons loaded with ordnance, the jet also carrying odd pods that he couldn't quite figure out.

Then a ground crewman was next to him, standing on the boarding ladder. "All set, sir! Good hunting!" The man did something or other, and the cockpit canopy descended.

Rick was to admit later that that would have been a very good time to come clean and admit that he had no idea what was going on, that he was a noncombatant and needed to be shown to a shelter. But that would have entailed admitting that he didn't know how to fly the aircraft in which he was sitting, that he couldn't. That he was, in short, nothing but a bystander, a hick, just like the people who gawked up at him at the flying circus.

And when you regard yourself as the greatest pilot in the world, an admission like that is extremely difficult. Besides, there was that irritating female on the screen.

"Well, okay. If you insist."

Rick drew a deep breath, took the controls, and gave himself a quick run-through, remembering all the stuff Roy had told him. He waggled rudders and played around for a second, then increased throttle, taxied out, and stood the fighter nearly on its tail, like a meteor in reverse.

A late Zentraedi missile blew a hole the size of a city block where he'd been parked a few seconds before. He was hoping the ground crews had all gotten clear as the Veritech responded to his demands for speed.

Wow! The proverbial bat.

He adjusted wing sweep and camber and angle of attack, going ballistic, wingtips leaving wispy lines of contrail like spider's thread. And though he would never have admitted it, he was more than a little intimidated. He was riding a rocket.

He punched a hole in a cloud, then found himself in the middle of a vast, swirling gladiatoral combat, the biggest dogfight since the close of what they called WWII.

"Whoa-ooooooo!"

Robotech craft were everywhere, and planes of some design that made

no sense to Rick; not aerodynamic but devilishly fast and mounting unprecedented firepower. Explosions flowered all around him, rocking the ship, just as a lazy, familiar voice came over the tac net.

"Skull Leader to Veritech squadron. Intercept new invader flights at zone four-two-eight. Traffic's pretty heavy out here, boys, so break formation, but don't leave your wingman!"

"Roy!" He sounded short of breath. Rick looked up, open-mouthed, as a Veritech flying the Jolly Roger insignia bagged an alien recon craft shaped something like a flying bottle.

Debris was raining everywhere; pilots from both sides screamed in agony as they were blown to oblivion up where sky met space.

And, because dogfighting was so incredibly demanding physically, the tac net was loud with gasps and grunting. Dogfighters trained themselves to lock the muscles of their lower bodies-turn their legs to iron; suck their gut to their spine. Anything to keep the blood up high in the head. Up in the brain, where it was needed even more than in the heart.

The pressure on the pilots' diaphragms was fearsome; they could draw only short, hard-won breaths, if they were in high-g maneuvers.

The tac net sounded like eight or ten wrestling teams had been paired off for the championship.

And the trophy was Earth.

"Hey, Fokker! Wouldja mind telling me what's going on around here?"

Roy had just finished dusting a bogie off Skull Eight's tail. He switched a communications screen over to ship-to-ship and was, he admitted, not all that surprised to see Rick Hunter's face.

"How's it feel to be a fighter pilot?"

"What're you talkin' about, Big Brother? I'm not a fighter pilot; in fact, I-uhhhh!"

That last, as a wash of light came through Rick's canopy, and Roy's screen dissolved into a storm of distortion. There had been explosions just before the cutoff; in fighter jocks' lingo: he tuned out. Tuning out was

terminal.

But Roy cut in maximum thrust, checking his situation displays, heading for his friend's location. "Hold on, Rick; I'm coming."

The Veritech's thrust pushed him back, deep into his seat. Roy felt tremendous relief when he sighted VT one-two-zero flying level and unharmed.

Roy caught up and fell in on Rick's wingtip. "You weren't hit; it was just a close one. You all right?" The alien that had come so close to nailing Rick was coming around for another try.

"Whew! Yeah, I'm okay," Rick decided.

Roy moved into the lead just a bit. The enemy fighter was closing fast. "Combat flying's scary for everyone first time out," he said. "You'll get used to it, though; it's not that much different from the good old days at the flying circus."

So saying, Roy thumbed the trigger on his control stick and sent two air-to-air Stilettos zooming to score direct hits on the invader and blow it to flaming bits.

"Yeah, but I never got shot at in the circus, Roy." Funny, but now the flying circus seemed like another life, a million years ago.

"You'll get used to it. Just tag along with me and we'll start your on-the-job training-if you can keep up with me."

The old smirk was back on Rick's face. "If? I'll do my best not to leave you in my backwash!"

"Let's go get 'em, Little Brother." Roy increased airspeed, beginning a climb, wings folding back for high-speed dogfighting. Out of nowhere, an enemy fighter came in at Rick from six o'clock high, chopping at him with energy bolts.

He let out a cry as he began to lose control, the fighter E shaken and bounced by the near misses.

"Climb and bank!" Roy called out, trying desperately to bring his ship around. "Rick!" He himself was dodging Zentraedi cannon fire a moment later. With Rick's ship out of control and nosediving in a spin, the Zentraedi

had broken off his attack and turned on the Skull Team leader. The two fighters joined in a vicious duel.

Rick tried everything he'd ever learned but couldn't regain control of the Veritech. "I think I've had it, Roy. I'm getting no response from the controls at all!" Macross Island pinwheeled up at him.

Just then a voice he recognized came up over the net. "This is SDF-1 control calling VT one-two-zero. Pull out! You're diving straight at us!"

"Lady, don't you think I'd like to? But all the controls have lost power." "Have you tried switching to configuration B?" Lisa Hayes demanded. "Huh? B? What're you talking about?"

"You don't know?" This one must've really lost it-complete panic! "Listen, pulled down the control marked B on the left side of your instrument panel."

The ground was very near. Rick, dizzy and almost unconscious from the g forces, somehow guided his hand to the knob in question, having a little trouble sorting it out from an identical one next to it marked G, moving it down in its slot.

The Veritech abruptly slowed in its tailspin, stabilizing, beginning to level off. At the same time, Rick could feel the entire ship start to shudder and shift, its aerodynamics changing in some way that he couldn't comprehend. He could feel vibrations, as if the fighter was-changing.

"What's it doing?" The fighter was still descending, the streets of Macross City looming up before the canopy. Rick had been a pilot long enough to know that since its flight characteristics had changed so dramatically, there was no other answer except that the shape of the Veritech had somehow altered.

What he didn't realize, and couldn't see from the cockpit, was that the ship had begun undergoing a process Doctor Lang had dubbed mechamorphosis. It was no longer configured like a conventional fighter but had, instead, gone to Guardian-G-mode, on its way to B.

In this transitional state it resembled a great metal bird of prey, an eagle, with sturdy metal legs stretched to set down and wings deployed,

humanlike arms and hands outstretched.

But before Rick could figure out what had happened or the fighter could complete the shift to B, the Veritech crashed into the upper floors of an office building at an intersection in Macross City.

Fortunately, the alert had the population indoors or underground in the sprawling shelter system, and so no one was killed. The Guardian carved a path of devastation through the upper stories of an entire block, its fantastically strong armor and construction resisting damage.

Bricks, concrete, and girders flew in all directions; clouds of plaster went up like a dust storm. Signs crashed down, and broken plumbing gushed; severed power lines spat and snapped. The Guardian's engines cut out as the machine became aware of its situation and reacted to emergency programming.

Rick Hunter could still feel the plane shifting, changing, all around him. In fact, in some way he couldn't figure out, he could sense it-could actually feel it.

Rick sat where he was, realizing that he didn't know how to eject, even if the system was a "zero-zero" type that would let him survive a standstill ground-level ejection, which was far from the case.

It felt as if the crazy Robotech fighter was coming to a stop; he readied himself for a quick escape, not wishing to be in the neighborhood if a few tons of highly volatile jet fuel suddenly took a notion to catch fire. But the Robotech ship had one last surprise for him; the relatively smooth slide became a lurch as the plane snagged on some final obstruction. The fighter heaved, and Rick's helmeted head slammed into the instrument panel.

If he hadn't been wearing the flight helmet, it would have been the end.

As it was, he saw stars and nearly lost consciousness.

But the Veritech was unhurt. With a creaking of girders and the racket of tons of rubble being moved, the machine began to extricate itself. The mechamorphosis to B mode was complete, and the fighter was now a Battloid.

It looked for all the world like a man in armor, a supertechnological

knight sixty feet tall. The electric gatling gun that had been pod-mounted under the Veritech's belly was now aligned along its right arm, the giant right hand gripping it like an outlandish rifle.

The cockpit section was unrecognizable, now incorporated in the turretlike "helmet," the Battloid's head. Its visor swung this way and that, taking in the situation, seeing the explosions of the dogfight continuing high above.

The Battloid knew the enemy was there; it was ready to do what it had been designed to do. It awaited orders.

Rick shook his head groggily. "What d'ya know? I'm alive!" Then he saw that something was wrong with his perspective-that he was high above the street, that there were things about Robotech too astounding to believe. He saw the distant air engagement too.

Somehow Rick knew, deep down, that life was never going to be the way it had been fifteen minutes ago. Things had changed forever.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Dear Diary,

Launch day's really been fun, even though Jason's making himself a bit of a pest. I met a couple of really dreamy guys, pilots, I guess-a very tall blond one and a cute little darkhaired one.

I'm going back out this evening to sing at the municipal center picnic. Maybe they'll be there! I might-hey! I think something's going on outside. More later.

From the diary of Lynn-Minmei

In SDF-1's bridge, Vanessa studied her screens and gave Gloval a concise report. "Twenty-four unidentfied objects are descending from space, projected landing point twenty to thirty miles west of Macross Island, sir. They're definitely not ours."

"Why didn't we detect them before?"

Vanessa looked to the captain, adjusting her big aviator style glasses. "When the main guns fired, they sapped so much power, our radars malfunctioned."

Gloval reflected on that. "That first wave of attack ships-it was just a decoy. Very clever strategy. Lisa! Recall Lieutenant Commander Fokker's team immediately!"

Lisa, studying her data displays, said, "They're still engaged in combat with the first attack wave, sir. I doubt they can break away without suffering heavy losses."

Gloval nodded stiffly. "I understand. Thank you."

Vanessa updated, "The unidentified crafts have landed in the ocean twenty-five miles west of us. They seem to have submerged, sir."

Gloval could no longer put off giving Lisa the unpleasant command. "Call Prometheus and order them to send out reconnaissance choppers."

"I already have them awaiting your go-ahead, sir. They'll be on station

in five minutes."

"Mind reader," Gloval growled, though there was real fondness in his voice.

"Yes, sir," Lisa said, cheeks coloring a bit.

There was only a moment in which to be relieved that Gloval wasn't rankled at her for anticipating him; those recon helicopters racing to confront the new alien arrivals were quite capable in their own way, but they weren't Robotech ships. And that could be very bad for the helo crews.

People had crept forth, very hesitantly, to gawk up at the towering knightlike figure that had been VT one-two-zero. The Battloid stood straddle-legged in the middle of the street. As pieces of sheetrock fell from its shoulders and bits of rubble rained around it, it appeared as if it were waiting for a trumpet to sound the call to arms. It took a few faltering steps, nearly toppling over.

"What is that?" one man breathed.

"A giant robot!" a second misguessed.

"Could be an alien invader!" a third ventured. There were already a thousand rumors abroad as to exactly what had happened to Macross Island and to the human race in general.

A few yards away, Lynn-Minmei crouched with her uncle and aunt in the doorway of their restaurant, the White Dragon, unsure what to do. Jason had been outside playing somewhere when the chaos began, and there was no sign of him.

"It's stopped moving; it's just standing there now," Minmei said, looking up at it. She got ready to make a dash, to go look for her cousin.

Suddenly a small figure in bib overalls and yellow sweatshirt dashed out from behind a crumpled trailer, passing by the metal fighting machine's feet, close enough to touch them.

"Wow! Hey, Minmei! Come lookit what's out here! An honest-to-goodness giant robot!"

She caught him up in a hug, as relieved as her Uncle Max and Aunt

Lena were. "Oh, Jason! What if that thing had stepped on you?"

Jason pushed her away with the unconcern of the very young. "Aw, I can take care of myself." Then he broke loose, heading for the stairs, a compact little whirlwind.

"I want to get a good look at that thing! C'mon; we'll go upstairs and look out the window!"

Minmei hurried after. She yelled, "Jason, wait for me!" as her Aunt Lena called, "Don't let him fall out the window!" then went back to trying to figure out what to do with the shambles that had been a thriving business only minutes before.

The two Barracuda naval attack helicopters from Prometheus approached watchfully, encountering only calm sea.

"This is PHP two-zero-two," the flight leader radioed. "We're approaching target area. Negative sightings of alien craft so far."

Lisa's reply came after a burst of static. "Roger that, PHP two-zero-two. Maintain maximum surveillance; bogies are suspected to be submerged. Prepare to deploy sonobuoys."

Her transmission was just ending as the blue water broke for one, then another, then half a dozen rounded shapes. They bobbed up, shedding water, bulbous and gleaming metallically, with odd projections-tubes-suggesting old-fashioned magnetic mines.

The floating objects turned, the tubes aligning and sighting. All at once they spat lines of dazzling brilliance up at the Barracudas. More and more of the rounded shapes bobbed to the surface, joining in the barrage.

The flight leader barely blurted out, "We're being fired upon!" when the crisscrossing beams found the second chopper and blew it to pieces in midair.

"Let's get out of here!" the leader screamed, firing a missile and preparing to run even as the beams converged on his ship. The chopper became a fireball. The pilot's scream was cut off in midtransmission.

Back on the bridge, Lisa reported woodenly, "They're gone, sir."

Gloval glared out the forward viewport. "And here I am with an untested ship, an inexperienced crew-" And very little time to make my decisions.

The hatch slid open, and Russo strode onto the bridge, puffing on his cigar and clutching his expensive lapel, seemingly in control. But he was pale and sweating; Lisa could see that and smell it. Under the hail-fellow-well-met exterior, the senator was so frightened that he was in danger of passing out.

"Well, Captain, it's lucky for us we got this ship finished in time to fight off the invaders. When d' you take off?"

The curious timing had occurred to Gloval, too-that the aliens should arrive at this very moment. His own conclusion was that the final activation of the SDF-1's huge, mysterious sealed power plant had somehow drawn the invaders. But he had no time to think about that now.

In answer to Russo's question, he simply hmphhed.

Russo's eyebrows beetled. "You are ready, aren't you? Why haven't you taken off? What are you waiting for?" He glared up at the captain.

Gloval's upper lip curled. "You must think I'm out of my mind. I can't take this ship into combat with a crew of raw recruits who've never been in space before! What's more, this ship hasn't even been tested yet; we don't even know if it'll fly."

His commitment to his oath of service made him add, "If you order me to take SDF-1 up, I'll obey. But it'll be against my better judgment."

Claudia and Lisa were standing rigidly at their stations, pretending to take no notice. But Sammie turned to Kim and whispered, "D'you think he's serious?"

"I think he means it." Kim nodded after a moment's thought.

Sammie gave a toss of her long mane of wheat-colored hair. "Wow," she whispered with a tremble.

"I am ordering you to take off, Captain. Understand?" Russo was saying.

Kim frowned, "What's the matter, Sammie? I thought you wanted to go

into space."

Sammie's eyes were big, frightened. "I do... I think." But all of a sudden, it's real!

"Let it be your responsibility, then," Gloval came back to Russo, "because I'm telling you, it could be suicide. We don't understand half of SDF-1's systemry yet!"

Russo's lip was quivering, but he bristled, "It sounds to me like you're saying you've no confidence in your crew. Is that what you're telling me, Gloval?"

Gloval looked quickly to Lisa and Claudia, who turned back to their duties to avoid being caught watching the confrontation. "I didn't say that."

"Then what are you saying? Earth has spent untold resources on this Robotech ship, and I don't want to see it destroyed on the ground."

"Senator-"

"No, Captain! No more excuses; take off!"

"Very well. As ranking official, you may take that seat over there. We'll be under way in a few moments."

Russo almost swallowed his cigar. Claudia had to stifle her snigger. "What?!" the senator exploded. "No! That is, I have too many other things to do on the ground. You're not to take off until I've left this ship, is that clear?" The terror in his voice was unmistakable.

"Whatever you say, Senator." Gloval showed a thin smile.

Pulling himself together, Russo beat a hasty retreat. To the bridge gang he said, "Well, girls, we're all depending on you. So don't let us down!" The hatch closed behind him.

Gloval stared at the hatch. We aren't ready for combat. We just aren't ready!

Minmei joined Jason at the top-story window. They were gazing up at the immobile war machine from about the height of its waist. The titanic chest had been holed by enemy fire.

"Wow, look how big it is!" the boy squealed with delight.

"Be careful, Jason," Minmei scolded, holding him back so he wouldn't climb out onto the ledge.

"I wonder where it came from?" Jason yelled happily.

As they watched, the cyclopean head tilted far forward as heavy servomechanisms hummed, leaving the torso uppermost.

Down in the street, people were exclaiming, "Look! It moved its head!" "It just fell out of the sky and wiped out those buildings!" "It's as big as a building itself!"

"See? Its back opened up!" Jason cried, pointing. Minmei gasped. A co-pilot's seat rose on a support pillar, lifted into sight by some inner mechanism. It was empty.

Jason's brows came together. "There's nobody running it!" Machinery whirred again, and the post moved higher, raising the first seat to reveal a second mounted below it. In that seat was Rick Hunter.

Getting out of his seat, looking down, Rick ignored the furor of the crowd below. "What's going on here? What's happened to me?"

"The pilot looks confused," Jason commented; he'd been hoping for someone a little more impressive.

"Maybe he was injured in the crash," Minmei suggested. But something about the young man was familiar.

"I must be seeing things," Rick muttered. "This used to be a fighter plane."

He spotted Minmei and Jason. He recalled the girl from somewhere but couldn't take time to try to place her just now.

"Excuse me, but, uh, what is this?" He indicated the Veritech. "I mean, what does it look like to you?"

Minmei took a moment to absorb the question. "Some kind of robot, I think."

"Oh, great," Rick sighed, relieved. "When I got into this thing, it was an aircraft. I thought I'd gone nuts."

"A convertible airplane?" Minmei and Jason both echoed. "You must be joking," Minmei added. She thought he wasn't bad-looking, however, and

wondered how old he was. Not much older than she was, she judged. "I'm as puzzled as anybody about it."

"You're kidding!" she said. "You're the pilot and you don't even know what it is?"

"No, I'm not a military pilot. I'm just-just an amateur!" Satisfied, Roy? "It's all, um, a big mistake. I'm not supposed to have it."

"An enemy spy!" Jason squawked.

Minmei gave him a little shake to quiet him. "Jason!"

"Spy?" Rick yelped. "Look, this was the army's idea, not mine!" He shook his head, looking down at the Battloid. "Look at all the damage!"

Helicopters were approaching from the distance, and traffic was venturing forth again. "Will you have to pay for it?" Minmei wondered.

Rick's stomach felt like it was doing somersaults. "Me? I hope not." A truck was insistently blowing its horn down by the Battloid's automobile-size feet. "What?" he yelled angrily.

The driver hollered up, "Get that thing off the road! I have a truckload of military supplies to deliver and I'm in a hurry, Mac! Now, move it!"

Rick stood up, surrendering to the inevitable. "I don't know how it works, but I'll try."

"Good luck!" Minmei called. She'd decided he was kind of cute. "Thanks." She has a real nice smile. He'd have to remember his way

back here.

"And please be careful."

He gave her a broad grin and a wave. "Sure. I will." He got back to his seat. As it lowered, he tried to think of something else to say but could only come up with, "So long!"

"I hope I see you again sometime!" Minmei called.

Back in the cockpit, Rick told himself, "Well, all I can do is throw a few switches and hope for the best, I guess." The giant head swung back into place.

Taking the control grips, he panned the screen before him. "At least I can see where I'm going. If I can just figure out how to get there."

But as the Battloid stirred, preparing to walk, he felt a distinct lack of confidence, something he was unused to. The machine seemed to want more of him than the mere pushing of buttons.

The Battloid lifted its foot to step, lost balance when it brought it too high, and swayed, about to topple over backward. The crowd that had gathered to stare at the Battloid panicked and began to bolt, yelling and milling. Rick howled in dismay.

Just as the war machine was about to crash into the buildings behind it, back thrusters flared for a quick, intense burn. The Battloid was pushed back to a precarious balance. Then it went off kilter in the opposite direction, staggering toward the little balcony over the White Dragon from which Minmei and Jason watched, open-mouthed.

The two saw that it wasn't going to stop; with wails of fright, they turned and fled just as the Battloid crashed through the wall where they'd been standing, collapsing that whole portion of the building. It came to rest like a drunk who'd passed out across a bar.

Minmei coughed and spat out plaster, checking Jason, whom she'd shielded under her as she went down. "Please tell me you're okay!"

"I am!" Jason said brightly.

Rick's voice came over the Battloid's PA system. "Are you two all right in there?"

"Yes!" Minmei yelled.

In the cockpit, Rick tilted his helmet back to wipe his brow. "Thank goodness!" He couldn't bear the thought of hurting an innocent bystander.

Besides, the girl was real cute.

CHAPTER NINE

Clearly, as Gloval said, SDF-1 was in part a booby trap. He was too busy to think of it, and I wasn't a trained military man, so it didn't occur to us until it was too late that that particular, sword might cut both ways.

Dr. Emil Lang, Notes on Launch Day

The moment came in a way no one had forseen even an hour before; SDF-1, all running lights flashing, prepared to launch for the first time.

"Gravity control systems through bulkhead forty-eight are green light," Sammie relayed to engineering. "Please confirm, over."

From all over the ship the reports came in; the messages went to every corner of it. It was no longer a question of waiting for a perfect checklist; the dimensional fortress was going-now.

"Priority one transmission from HQ, Captain Gloval," Vanessa announced. "Armor One has completed recovery procedures and is departing now to join Armor Ten at Rendezvous Point Charlie."

Gloval grunted acknowledgment and added, "Thank you, Vanessa. Claudia, check the reflex furnace and see if we've recovered full power yet."

Claudia studied her equipment, listened to a brief intercom message, and said, "Ready condition on furnace power, sir."

Once more, Gloval wondered about those enormous, enigmatic, and unprecedentedly powerful engines. "Reflex power" was a term Lang used; even his closest assistants scratched their heads when Lang scribbled equations and tried to explain why he called it that and what he thought was going on inside the power plant.

Not that it mattered; all Gloval wanted was for his ship to function, to be battleworthy, for however long it took. A few days-perhaps.

Or a day. Just give me one day! "Very good. Antigravity: full-thrust."

"Aye aye, sir," Kim sang out. "Full thrust." The mountainous bulk of the

SDF-1 trembled and was somehow alive under them. The bridge gang went through individual countdowns and checklists, their voices and those from the intercom overlapping.

Then Claudia's rang out clear as an angel's through the ship, and over Macross Island. "Ten... niner... eight..."

A hundred thousand thoughts and fears and prayers hovered over the island, almost a tangible force in themselves.

... two... one..."

"Full power," Gloval ordered. "Activate the antigravity control system."

The entire city vibrated slightly, as the hundreds of thousands of tons of SDF-1 rose from the ship's Gibraltarlike keel blocks; their unique absorption system adjusted to the sudden unburdening.

The ship rose smoothly, casting its stupendous shadow across the island. "The gyroscope is level, sir," Lisa reported tersely.

Gloval eased back in his chair, hoping it was a good omen. "Well done."

He'd barely said it when a tremor ran through the great ship. Below, he could see the upper-hull/flight deck actually quake.

SDF-1 lurched, then listed hard to port, throwing people from their feet.

There was a lot of yelling; the intercom was bedlam.

"What in blazes is going on?" Gloval thundered, grasping the arms of his chair to keep from being thrown across the compartment. "Trim the pitch attitude immediately!"

"It must be the gyroscope," Claudia said, struggling to stay at her station.

"No, look!" Lisa was pointing out at the upper-hull/flight deck.

Bulges had appeared, like volcanic domes being thrust up against the hardest armor ever developed; the tearing of metal sounded through the SDF-1 like the death throes of dinosaurs.

The convexities of armor broke open like overripe fruit, yielding complex cylinders of advanced-design systemry. The cylinders, each the size of a railroad tank car, rose majestically into the air, trailing power leads and torn support frameworks.

"The gravity pods are breaking away!"

Gloval rushed up behind Lisa to see for himself. "What is it? Oh, no!

They're tearing away from the ship instead of lifting it!"

Everywhere it was the same; the physics of the disaster was inflexible. Dozens of gravity pods tore lose, continuing their ascent as they'd been charged to do, breaking their way through any structure in their path (or, to put it another way, conventional gravity was dragging the SDF-1 down around them).

"This can't be happening!" Gloval breathed, not so much distraught by the probable outcome the disaster would mean for himself and his command as by the utter catastrophe it meant for Earth.

"The ship is losing altitude, Captain!" Lisa cried. Gloval groaned. "Please! Tell me I'm dreaming this!" "Pardon, sir?" Lisa said.

He hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud. "It's a nightmare."

SDF-1 fell faster, its few operating thrusters unequal to the task of easing it down. All through the ship, people knew that calamity had occurred and waited with varying attitudes to find out what their fate would be.

With alarms hooting and wailing, the ship crashed back onto its keel blocks. Under the velocity of even a cushioned fall, the titanic weight made the monolithic blocks crack, give way, and collapse or drive themselves down into the Earth.

But the impact-absorption systems built into them saved the ship from greater damage and spared lives, before the blocks were overloaded and defeated. SDF-1 settled down with its hull against the rubble and soil and hardtop, but the ship's back hadn't been broken or its hull breached.

The bridge wasn't so different from any other section: outcries and screams and incoherent yelling. In moments, the noise died away and military discipline reasserted itself. SDF-1 rested at a 15-degree list to port.

"Is anyone hurt?" Gloval's voice cut through the confusion. Everyone else chimed in that they were uninjured, then shut up; the captain's voice

must be heard, uninterrupted, at a time like this; and though the bridge gang was untried in space, they knew their duty and they knew their orders.

Gloval strode back toward his seat. "I want a full damage report. Give me a computer readout on every system onboard!" The SDF-1 was a fish in a barrel for the time being; he had only minutes in which to act.

"Yessir!" the five voices responded as one, giving the words a choral sound.

Gloval looked infinitely tired. "They'll never let me forget this." "You shouldn't blame yourself for this, sir," Lisa said softly.

Gloval lowered himself into his chair, shaking his head to contradict

Lisa.

"I am the captain," he said simply.

In the street outside the White Dragon, a very peculiar salvage operation was in progress.

The Battloid had been rigged with cables attached to two seafood delivery trucks. The civilian populace had always been sympathetic to the military's mission, and by now news broadcasts had made it apparent to most people that a new and awful war had begun and that, like it or not, everyone was a part of that war for the time being. So the truckers and other bystanders were doing their best to get the Battloid righted.

The big box jobs gunned their engines, tires spinning and squealing, laying down large black patches of rubber and raising reeking clouds of smoke. The trucks backfired, and their engines labored.

Slowly, the armored mechamorph came away from its resting place, toward a vertical position. Rick, sweating over his controls, sat with hands hovering over them, hesitant to court further misfortune by interfering.

The Battloid was standing again-for the moment. It reached the vertical and slowly began to tilt the other way. Volunteer helpers and onlookers let out a wide assortment of exclamations and yowls and scurried for safety; the drivers leapt from the cabs of their trucks and hotfooted it.

Minmei and Jason hugged each other and shouted, "Oh, no!" at the

same instant.

Rick grabbed for the controls desperately. At the very least, he had to try to keep this insane metal berserker from doing more damage to the restaurant.

The Battloid lurched, trying to find its balance. Rick tried his best but couldn't seem to do anything right. Again, it was as if the machine was waiting for him to do something more than merely manipulate controls.

The Battloid took a lurching step, and its legs became entangled in the cables; it twirled clumsily and fell backward toward the opposite side of the street, its back crashing against an empty building that had taken heavy damage from the enemy barrage.

It sank down, crunching the building, until it came to rest with its backside halfway to the street, heels dug into the pavement. When Rick was sure the machine was stable for the time being. He wiped his brow again. "Oh, why me? How come these things don't happen to other people?"

The triumphant Veritech squadron flew in tight formation, making its way back to the Prometheus and the dimensional fortress.

Roy was in the lead spot, of course. "This is Skull Leader, Veritech squadron, to SDF-1. Am returning to base. We have met the enemy and pretty much cleaned their clocks. They've withdrawn from Earth's atmosphere."

Lisa's face was on the display screen. "Commendable work, Commander Fokker, I'll-"

She was abruptly moved out of the way by Claudia, who said "Let me talk to him! Roy, how many of them did you shoot down?"

"Only ten this time," he said nonchalantly. But the dogfight would be a legend by that night, the hardest rat-racing he'd ever seen. Every millisecond was going to be analyzed and refought a hundred times among the flying officers.

"You're slipping, Roy," Claudia told him, but her tone wasn't critical at

all.

"Well, don't worry, Claudia; I'll make it up." Something tells me I'm going to get plenty of opportunities! "Do you have any word on the VT one-zero-two?"

Lisa crowded back onto the screen. "That section-eight case! He landed in Macross City in a Battloid, and he's doing more damage than the invaders."

Roy laughed. "Thanks, Lisa."

"Who is he? He's not registered as a fighter pilot." "Don't worry; I know him."

"Well, he sure needs help." Lisa scowled.

"I'd better go check on him." Roy switched to the tic net. "This is Skull Leader to group. You guys head on back to Prometheus. I've got some business to take care of in town. Captain Kramer, you take 'em home."

"Will do, boss."

Roy peeled off from the formation and, increasing his wings' sweep for higher speed, plummeted for Macross City. "I should've known better than to leave him alone," he muttered.

Even in a city that had known a peppering of energy bolts and alien rockets, it wasn't too hard to spot the mess made by an out-of-control Battloid. "Aha! That you, Rick, old son?"

The war machine was resting against a building. "Hi, Roy! It's me!" "Had a busy day down there, huh?"

Rick sighed. "You might say that, Big Brother."

People in the streets spotted the approaching aircraft. The skull insignia was well known; but things had a way of being unexpectedly dangerous today, and nobody was up for taking any more chances.

Everybody sprinted for cover again. Roy switched his ship to Guardian mode for the descent-the mechanoid/eagle configuration that allowed more control in the tight quarters of a city street. It settled in on the bright blue flare of its foot thrusters, chain-gun cradled in its right arm.

In another moment Roy's ship had mechamorphosed to Battloid. Its shoulder structure gave it a look of immense brute power, like a football

player. Rick felt like rubbing his eyes. "I must be dreaming this; I don't believe it!"

Jason, crouched with Minmei behind a fallen cornice, yelped, "That airplane became a robot too!"

"Amazing!" Minmei murmured. It was all so strange and almost magical-it made her wonder what the young pilot's name was.

"A few small repairs and you can take that Battloid back into action," Roy said blithely.

"What're you talking about?" Rick yelled over the net. "I don't even know what this thing is, and if you think I'm qualified to operate it, just take a good look around the neighborhood!"

But he watched his screen in utter fascination as Roy's war machine shifted its weapon from its right arm, drew out a long, thick band as sturdy as a heavy-cargo sling, and settled the weapon over its left shoulder, all as casually as an infantryman going to sling-arms.

Rick gaped. No control system in the world could do that. Maybe a battery of computers, if the sequence was worked out precisely in advance. But what Roy had done had more of an on-the-spot look to it.

It brought to mind what Roy had told Rick about the Robotech flight helmet-the thinking cap: "You don't just pilot a Robotech ship; you live it."

"If you can fly a jet, you can operate a Battloid," Roy began. "I'll tell you what to do. Gross movements are initiated by manuals-the legs are guided by your foot pedals, for instance."

"Which foot pedals, Roy? I've got about fifty controls in here!"

"Fifty-seven, if you want to get technical. But that's not the important part. Just button up and listen; I'll explain while I'm making repairs."

The skull-insignia Battloid extruded metal tentacles, tool-servos, waldos, and a host of other advanced repair apparatus. In moments the one Robotech war machine was repairing the other. Welding sparks jumped, and damaged components were replaced.

"The secret's that helmet," Roy said. "You generate general movements or sequences with your controls, but the Robotechnology takes its real

guidance straight from your thoughts. You've got to think your ship through the things you want it to do."

Rick couldn't help being skeptical in spite of everything he'd seen. "Now you're gonna tell me these junk heaps are alive?"

"Close enough for me," Roy said noncommittally, "although you're going to have to make up your own mind about that. We still don't understand the power source-the same power source that runs SDF-1 but we know that, somehow, it's not just a-a blind physical process. It's involved with life forces somehow; with awareness-with mind, if I'm not getting too fancy for you."

"I think you're bucking for a medical discharge, mental category."

Roy chuckled. "See for yourself. Just pay attention and I'll tell you how it's done."

CHAPTER TEN

When it comes to testing new aircraft or determining maximum performance, pilots like to talk about "pushing the envelope."

They're talking about a two-dimensional model: the bottom is zero altitude, the ground; the left is zero speed; the top is max altitude; and the right, maximum velocity, of course. So, the pilots are pushing that upper-right-hand corner of the envelope.

What everybody tries not to dwell on is that that's where the postage gets canceled, too.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

For the next few minutes Roy repaired Rick's downed machine while he briefed his friend on the secrets of operating Robotechnology.

"These Battloids are classified top secret," he finished, as he made the last reconnection. "And you've gotta trust me on this one: There is a reason for it." All the repair tackle had neatly withdrawn itself into the skull Battloid's huge body.

"There, that oughta do it," Roy said. "Now switch on energy and depress those foot pedals slowly, like I told you."

Rick did, and thought his way through the maneuver as Roy had instructed. He focused his mind's eye on the act of getting back to his feet; something at the other end of the helmet's pickups sensed and understood.

Carefully, Rick Hunter's red-trimmed Battloid levered itself up, gaining its feet to stand shoulder to shoulder with Roy's.

"That's it," Roy said. "See how easy it is?"

More than easy; it was exaltation. It felt as if there was a feedback or reciprocation mechanism in the control system; Rick felt as if he were the Battloid.

Several stories tall. Indestructible. Armed with the most advanced weapons the human race had developed. With the power of flight in a way

that did indeed make the Mockingbird seem primitive, and metalshod fists capable of punching their way through a small mountain.

Rick drew a deep breath, dizzy with the feeling. "That's it!" Roy encouraged. "See how easy it is?"

"Wow, you learn fast, don't you?" said a voice from street level over the battloid's external pickups.

Rick looked down at Minmei and Jason. He automatically guided the Robotech machine so that it leaned down toward the girl. "Thanks."

A voice from the distance-Minmei's Aunt Lena-called, "Minmei! Jason!

Come on!"

Minmei waved up at Rick. "See you later! We're being evacuated!" She trotted off with Jason in tow, long, slim legs moving with unconscious grace.

Off the shore of Macross Island the breakers came in, crashed, and sent up high fountains of foam, and the waters pulled back to regroup yet again for their eternal assault on the beach.

But the next breaker brought a different kind of assault.

Zentraedi Battlepods launched straight up out of the water on their thrusters: scout versions, officer versions, and the standard models configured to carry a variety of heavy weapons and equipment.

Their biped design, the legs articulated backward, resembled that of an ostrich. They landed on the shore and began advancing in long leaps like monstrous kangaroos, sensors swinging for information, weapons ready for the kill. They arranged themselves in skirmish formation and covered miles in seconds.

Soon they loomed across a ridgeline, looking down on Macross City.

At Breetai's command post, the report was patched through. "The recon and Battlepods have landed, Commander. We're ready to attack."

Exedore's protruding, pinpoint-pupiled eyes swung to regard his lord.

Breetai leaned to a communications pickup.

"Attention all gunnery crews! Prepare to give covering fire to the recon assault group."

The command "Ready All Guns" and subsidiary orders rang through the armada. The long muzzles were run out and ranged in. In their sights was Macross City.

"We better get moving, Rick," Roy told his friend. "We still have a war to fight."

"I'm still pretty unsure of myself with all these robot controls! I'm not ready for combat."

"Not robot; Robotech!" Roy corrected automatically. "Look, pull the control marked G, and we'll switch to Guardian configuration."

Rick complied, muttering, "What the heck is a Guardian? Here goes!"

As the Veritech shifted and mechamorphosed, converting to a bird of prey/war machine, Roy explained. "The Guardian controls operate almost exactly like those of the fighter plane. You can fly it without any problems."

"I've heard that before," Rick reminded him.

On a hill overlooking the city, the crowds waited to be admitted to the underground shelter system. Because of the dangerous nature of research and experimentation going on in the city and the fact that Macross would be a primary military target for any aggressor, the shelters had always had a high priority in the island's construction projects.

Minmei and her relatives were waiting fretfully with the thousands upon thousands of others. The emergency personnel were working as fast as they could, but moving the huge population underground was time-consuming at best.

The job facing the civil defense crews was overwhelming, and to top it off, many people had stopped in the foothills to try to find friends or relatives before moving below.

But that wasn't what made Minmei halt in midstep.

"My diary!" She had been keeping it since she was old enough to hold a

pen, xeroreducing her writing so that each page held weeks of entries in a single, thick little volume. In it were all her thoughts, ideas, memories, stories, the lyrics for her songs, her poetry and secret longings, and the most important letter she'd ever received in her life-Minmei's diary was her life.

"I have to go back for it!"

"Don't be foolish, child!" Lena cried. "There is no going back." Jason watched wide-eyed; he was too young to have known Minmei before she'd come to live on Macross Island, but he already adored her.

Minmei ducked away from her aunt's restraining hands and avoided Uncle Max's effort to stop her. Older people just didn't understand!

"It won't take me a minute to get it, don't worry!" Then Minmei was off, gamine legs flying.

"Come back!" Aunt Lena moved to follow, but two CD workers, too late to restrain Minmei, blocked her way. Uncle Max and Jason and the others stood watching as Minmei's fleet figure disappeared down into the city. Over all loomed the fallen SDF-1, blocking the sun.

Breetai studied the fire-mission computer models. He gave a grudging nod of satisfaction.

"All guns standing by for bombardment, Commander Breetai," a tech reported.

"Good. Level everything in the path of the assault forces but be careful not to damage that battle fortress. I want to take it intact!" Once the Battlepods had established a beachhead, his plan could be implemented, and Zor's masterpiece would belong to the Zentraedi.

Then let the Robotech Masters beware! Breetai thought.

Lead elements of the armada opened fire; those farther back in the dense cloud of warships couldn't fire without the risk of hitting another Zentraedi vessel.

A torrent of alien bolts rained down like a hellish spring storm, in a kill-zone that encircled the dimensional fortress. Buildings seemed to melt like candles in a blast furnace, riddled by thousands of narrow,

high-intensity beams, collapsing in clouds of plaster and concrete dust.

Death was everywhere among the CD teams, emergency personnel, antilooting squads, and others who'd bravely remained behind. Dying screams and the shrieks of the wounded rose on the bolt-splashed heat waves. Zentraedi Battlepods watched it all impassively from their vantage point: wingless, headless armored ostriches bristling with sensors and heavy weapons. The shelters and the masses waiting to enter them were noted, but those were of no importance; Breetai was only interested in the SDF-1.

"They're invading the city!" Rick yelled from his Guardian's cockpit. It was only by accident, he realized, that he'd crash-landed outside the kill-zone.

"Yeah; it looks like it was evacuated just in time," Roy said, surveying the blasted landscape from his higher vantage point in the Battloid.

He also had updates on the refugee situation and the various assembly points. "If you're worried about your girlfriend, we could go check on her."

Roy shifted to Guardian mode and showed Rick how it was done; the two Guardians skimmed away like jet-powered skaters, foot thrusters riding them on a blasting carpet mere inches off the ground, safe from most of the enemy fire.

"Do we have a fix on where that bombardment is coming from?" Gloval snapped.

"A fleet of spaceships, numbers uncertain but very, very high. In lunar orbit," Vanessa told him promptly.

Gloval rubbed his jaw. "Beyond the range of our missiles."

Lisa looked up from her monitors. "Captain, an alien assault force is approaching from the east, range eight miles."

It was her job and her prerogative, so she added, "We need air support,

sir."

Gloval gave a quick nod that shook his cap a little. "Call for it."

The Zentraedi Battlepods leapt from the cliffs around the city and began their fast assault. They moved with the high speed and precision of advanced Robotechnology, hopping nimbly or skating quickly at ground level on their foot thrusters.

At the outskirts of the city they opened weapons ports and missile rack cover plates, then opened fire. Missiles left scorching, corkscrewing trails in the air, converging on SDF-1. Pulsed laser beams strobed and flicked at targets of opportunity.

The initial barrage met with strong defenses. Most of the missiles were jammed by ECM techs or intercepted by countermissiles; the beams were either repulsed by SDF-1's highly reflective surface or failed to do more than warm the great ship's armor at that range and in those atmospheric conditions. Still, the situation was about to get grim if Gloval couldn't change the tactical equations.

"This is SDF-1," Lisa transmitted calmly. "Attention all strike elements: We are under attack and need immediate assistance. Incoming Veritechs, switch to Battloid mode." The tac nets were silent; the situation seemed hopeless. Lisa considered the fact that, in spite of all the beliefs she'd embraced, perhaps humans weren't destined to rule Earth. Just then, Gloval played his hole card.

Through a sky crowded with spherical missile explosions, the Veritechs swooped with supreme confidence, dodging the intense ordnance eruptions all around them.

More VTs formed up on the lead formation. In seconds it was a gathering of vengeful eagles. "Roger, SDF-1," Captain Kramer drawled. "We're comin' in. All Veritechs switch to Guardian mode."

Below, the round-bodied, hopping Zentraedi war machines were laying waste Macross City, shooting indiscriminately and ravaging for the love of it. Kramer disliked net discipline as much as Roy did. So he said:

"Skull Team, area four-one. Vermilion Team, area four-four." Kramer gave the other ground-strike assignments, just as Roy would have done. The

two had been wingmates long enough for Kramer to know it by heart.

And long enough for Kramer to know how to send the Veritechs on their way: "Awright, boys; let's get on down there an' wrassle 'em around some."

The ships dived in tight formations; the pilots only talked imprecisely.

So used to having their own way, the Zentraedi Battlepods, didn't seem to understand that with the arrival of the Veritechs, the odds had changed.

In moments, the Veritechs found, fixed, and fought the enemy, and the aliens began to get an unwelcome message.

Zentraedi Battlepods, headless and ominous, were being blown away right and left by Robotech ships in Battloid mode. The giant mechanical infantrymen had all the skill their human pilots had absorbed; if their close-in weapons were somewhat inferior to the Zentraedi's, it mattered very little in the street-to-street, house-to-house, often eye-to-eye close quarters of urban combat.

Alien Battlepods stalked and stomped through Macross city, cannon muzzles angling and firing at will, rockets twist-trailing everywhere, leaving an inferno behind them.

An elite Zentraedi strike squad had encountered nothing that could impede it. Its members didn't know that a computer-assisted gunsight was zeroing in on the squad leader-until it was too late.

A powered Gatling gun opened up, a thousand times louder than a buzz saw, shell casings flying up in a steady stream. The high-density depleted transuranic slugs used in Terran Robotech bullets were very heavy and delivered devastating amounts of kinetic energy on impact. A generation before, 30-mm autocannon had been capable of blowing tanks apart. A lot of improvements had been made since then.

The Battlepods found that they'd dropped into a very angry wasps' nest and that the stings were deadly. Then the squad leader disappeared in a high-density barrage.

A pod swung its upper and lower plastron cannon muzzles, its operator deciding where to direct his fire next. All at once a Battloid broke through the building next to it, bringing up the muzzle of its Gatling to knock the pod back off balance. The pod was twice the defender's size, three times its mass. But the stroke sent the offworld vehicle reeling back.

The pod staggered, legs flailing, ending up against a metal utility pole, bending it. The Battloid leveled its Gatling and opened fire with a sound like ripping cloth amplified to the point where it was deafening.

The Zentraedi pod abruptly became an expanding sphere of flame, gas, and debris. The Battloid whirled, gun held at high port, looking for more enemies.

All across the city it was the same; as wave after wave of pods descended or leaped ashore, the Battloids engaged and overcame them using tactics distilled from SWAT teams and infantry rifle outfits. The battloids handled themselves like grunt fireteams in fantastic enlargement.

And the Zentraedi learned that the price of Earth, foot for square foot, promised to be very high indeed.

Rick skimmed along behind Roy, twisting and dodging through the war-torn maze that was Macross City. SDF-1's bow was hanging like a threatening hammer above them as tracers drew lines of light through the air, missiles exploded, and alien blasterbolts hyphened all through the combat zone around the dimensional fortress.

The side of an apartment building was blown loose and collapsed in pieces. Rick zigzagged around it, his Veritech still skating along in Guardian mode as he tried to put together in his mind why that girl Minmei was suddenly so important to him that he'd go through this for her.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

In a Veritech y'got every kinda way a pilot can die and just about every kinda hurt-alert a leg infantry might run into, see: Exceptin' possibly trench foot, though I wouldn't bet on it.

Anonymous Wolf Team pilot, quoted by Zachary Foxx, Jr., VT: The Men and the Mecha

More pods grasshoppered into Macross City, all plastron cannon firing. A damaged pod, hit on descent by SDF-1 missile crews, blazed like a fiery comet, punching through one building and laying a track of devastation across the roofs of three more before colliding with a last in an

inferno that sent rubble in thousand-foot arcs.

Nearby, Battloid gunners swung their muzzles from target to target. The pods were falling back on every front. There was word over the net that some guy in Vermilion, out of ammo, had actually downed one with a Battloid roundhouse, and worked it good with the Battloid's feet.

Elsewhere, Minmei ran for her life.

It seemed so easy at first: the diary in her hand, the way back to the shelters unobstructed... until the pods had dropped into the neighborhood on every side.

Minmei didn't know where she'd lost the diary; she'd only thought to save her all-important letter. Now she thought only about living. She raced through the streets, the long legs flying, midnight sheets of hair flying, as the pods closed in. Blasts and rockets demolished the buildings around her, and burning wreckage nearly smashed her flat a dozen times.

But bless them, there were also those fantastic robotlike defenders, like the one who'd nearly caved in her aunt's restaurant. They were everywhere, leaping and charging and firing, giving even better than they got. They were like armored giants, but none of them were around now. And now was when

Minmei needed one.

A Battlepod stomped after her, hooflike feet sinking deep into the pavement with every step. Minmei understood then that hers was only a little life, of no significance on the grand scale of things. There were so many things she'd never done and so little time to reflect on the things she had-the harshness of it hit her in an instant: the miracle that was life, the irreplaceability of each moment.

The Battlepod was almost upon her, armorshod hooves pounding the street. The very vibrations of it threw Minmei headlong, scraping her elbows and hands and knees, as explosions crashed all around. She was not quite sixteen years old, but she understood in that moment that war had no eligibility requirements.

Gigantic pod feet crashed behind her. Minmei cringed, hands over head, waiting for death to take her. An enormous hoof descended.

Just then an amplified voice said, "Oh, no, you don't!"

She heard an explosion and a tearing of metal and felt waves of heat scorching her back. There was a rending of armor and a ground-shaking crash. Somehow, none of it hurt her.

Minmei gathered her nerve and opened her eyes. The pod had been knocked back through the air, one leg dangling loose, in flames. She'd been protected by great metal wings.

It was another example of those things people were calling Robotech, this time in the metal eagle form they seemed to take on at will. There was something familiar about this one's voice.

"Take it easy, honey; you're okay," Roy said over external speakers. "We'll protect you."

Roy turned to Rick. "Take care of the girl! I'll keep the pods off our backs!"

Minmei struggled to her feet while the skull-and-crossbones machine reared, mechamorphosing and growing taller and manlike in a way that put her in mind of some miraculous origami. The second, the red one she recognized from her aunt's restaurant, stayed in the man-bird mode,

objecting, "You can't handle them alone!" in another voice she remembered. Roy brought his Gatling up, covering the area. "Don't argue with me!

I'll draw their fire while you get her out of here."

Rick, using controls and mind-imagery, eased the Guardian over, extending its left hand, until fingers the diameter of telephone poles were ready to grasp her. He raised the cockpit canopy to call down, "Don't move! I'm going to pick you up!"

For a damsel in distress, Minmei showed a certain skepticism. "I thought you were an amateur."

The anthropomorphic hand gently enfolded her; Rick sweated bullets, concentrating, and knew that he would never try anything like this with a mere physical-control system. Only Robotechnology allowed such fine discretion.

Minmei had a fleeting feeling that she ought to be wearing a white gown and wondered if she was to be carried to the top of a skyscraper or dragged into the middle of a fight with dinosaurs.

In a way, of course, that had already happened. "Huh? Oh, no!" she cried as the fingers closed around her.

"Trust me; I can do it!" Rick called down to her. "Do I have to? Ohhhh!"

But the grip, though firm and secure, didn't mangle her or crush her into jelly or even hurt-at least, not much. Which was just as well, since there were alien pods releasing flights of missiles high overhead.

"Get outta here, Rick! Fire your jets!" Roy hollered, bringing up his Gatling and sweeping it back and forth at the incoming missiles, hoping to cut into the odds a little.

The Guardian's foot thrusters blared; Minmei howled, and they were airborne, zooming away from the attack.

Roy got a number of the missiles, detonating them, which in turn knocked out quite a few others- "fratricide," as the ordnance people called it-as they either veered into one another or detonated from the force of the first explosions. But survivors got through, beating down on Rick, who

didn't dare go faster with Minmei in hand for fear that the air blast and maneuver forces would injure or kill her.

He could only duck and dodge, engaging his jamming and countermeasures gear as Roy had taught him, and hope for the best. Missiles sizzled by all around to impact far down the street.

Minmei hid her head in her hands, then looked up to see that Rick was yelling something at her, too distracted to remember the external speakers. "What're you saying? I can't hear you!"

Roy spotted a pod just as his radars and other instruments picked it up; it was making a stand on a ridgeline above the housing project which had been gouged into the side of a hill. The Zentraedi pod launched itself off the ridge at him; Roy brought his muzzle around and trap-shot it in midair. It rained down in fire and broken fragments.

His fields of fire were clear for the moment. He raised Rick on the tac net. "How's it goin'? Everything okay?"

"I'm all right now, Roy-"

"I don't care how you are; how's the girl?"

"Huh? Um, okay. So far." Rick began a steady, smooth ascent to get above the battle and out of the range of the pods in Macross City.

"She's a taxpayer. If anything happens to her, you answer to me."

Rick grinned at Roy's screen image. "Don't forget, Big Brother: I saw her first."

"That's how it is, huh? We'll discuss this later!"

Roy got back to business at hand, leaving Rick to ponder Minmei, whose hair was being whiplashed in her face by the ship's airspeed. They'd already gained enough altitude for it to be pretty cold out there; she couldn't take much of it, in addition to the strain it would put on her simply to breathe.

"Boy, I've gotta figure a way to get her into the cockpit," he whispered.

It was exactly then that his instruments beeped an urgent warning. "Uh oh..."

In Macross City, an alien pod fitted for heavy weapons stood up from

its concealment behind a demolished mall. It was mounted with two large racks of rockets, like firebreathing Siamese twins. Missiles came spiking at him, superheating the air with their trails.

He cut in all countermeasures, going into a booster climb, going ballistic. He rammed the stick up for a pushover, losing a few of the seekers, unable to tell if the maneuver forces had simply knocked Minmei out or killed her.

Wishing he had Roy's skill at this sort of thing, Rick dodged, white-faced with the thought that he would fail, would let Minmei down and lose both their lives.

Miraculously, he avoided them all-almost.

A hit at the elbow joint of the arm holding Minmei blew the joint in half. Minmei fell away, screaming, as if in slow motion. It seemed to Rick that he could hear the scream echoing away.

He banked, diving after her, though all the books and experts would have said that there wasn't a thing in the world he could do to save her. He concentrated on those fingers-thought and thought hard.

The telephone pole fingers of the Robotech hand slowly opened in answer to his thinking-cap command, and Minmei found herself floating in midair. The ground, the sky, the wind-nothing seemed to be moving but she and the giant hand.

She realized she was still screaming, and stopped, pushing herself free for whatever good it would do. Then there was something next to her, matching speeds and distances. She seemed to be floating-swimming outside the canopy, some dream mermaid, kicking and struggling toward him, her eyes so big and terrified and pleading that the sight of them almost paralyzed him.

Earlier that same day, Rick would have said that no aircraft in existence could do what the Veritech was doing now. It drew close to Minmei, canopy easing open (he would have said that an aircraft canopy would be torn away like a piece of tinfoil if subjected to aerodynamic stresses like those), in close obedience to his commands and images.

Her black hair stood back, stark, around her face; the white legs kicked like a swimmer's. She glided toward him, arms outstretched. In that moment he knew that if he didn't save her, life would cease to have any meaning.

Still there was the buffeting of the air and the slipstreams created by the fighter itself; they tore at him as Rick rose up, safety harness released, to draw her into the fighter. No ship, not even a Robotech ship, had ever been subjected to such exacting demands.

Gripping the windshield frame, he grabbed for her hand, missed, grabbed, and missed again, the whole time imaging the Veritech's precise positioning at speeds approaching the blackout point. One-armed, its aerodynamics radically changed, the fighter struggled to comply.

They drifted like zero-gravity dancers; it seemed so silent and slow and yet so high-speed, with the air shrieking past them and death only an instant away.

Then, somehow, their fingers were together. Later, Rick never remembered shaping the image, but the Veritech altered its death dive to come around and catch them, Minmei drifting into the rear seat, Rick into the front.

A last ripping air current almost carried him away, but the descending canopy pressed him back in to safety, although he didn't recall giving the command for it to close.

Maybe if the pilot lives the ship, the ship lives the pilot? he speculated. He grabbed the manual controls and got the Guardian stabilized again.

Behind, there was a last grand explosion of several alien missiles committing fratricide. The Guardian's foot thrusters blowtorched; Rick trimmed his craft. He descended through debris and smoke for a shaky landing, trembling and wiping his brow while Minmei at last gave in to sobs in the rear seat.

"We're safe now. Please don't cry." Rick turned toward her.

The Guardian was in a slow, easing descent, its feet only inches above the streets of Macross City. Minmei wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

"I'm all right now. Oh, no!"

Her eyes were wide as saucers-such a strange blue, he thought again-focused over his shoulder.

Even as he whirled, an image of what the Guardian should do sprang to mind; its heels caught the pavement, digging in as the thrusters retrofired.

A Battlepod had backed around the comer of a building at an intersection dead ahead-damaged and covering its own retreat, later reports indicated. The Guardian took it from behind, wings hitting the backs of its knees, neatly upending it.

The Guardian slid for nearly a hundred yards, upside down, Rick and Minmei howling as the pavement tore at the canopy, until it came to a rest.

The Guardian got to its feet; so did the pod, which seemed rather unsteady and showed heavy damage.

"You okay? Oh, no! Minmei!" She was pale and unmoving, slumped in the rear seat.

And why? Because these creatures, or whatever they are, came across a billion light-years to invade us? For more war? FOR MORE WAR?

"Yahhhhhh!" Furiously Rick gripped the trigger on his control stick, the chain-gun pelting the pod with a hail of high-caliber, high-density slugs. The invader's armored front disappeared in a welter of explosions, shrapnel, and smoke. There were secondary explosions, and the machine fell to the ground like a dying ostrich, strangely articulated legs rising up

behind as the rest of it crashed down.

Rick found that he was still thumbing the trigger on his control stick-to no avail; the Gatling's magazine was empty. He took his hand away, breathing a sigh of relief or despair-he wasn't sure which.

And then he heard a sound of metal creaking and shifting.

In the back of the downed pod, a hatch was thrown open. A hatch three yards across.

A figure emerged, helmeted and armored. It was on the scale of the pods-taller than most of the buildings around it. Its helmet's faceplate was a cold and untelling fish eye of green.

It was human-shaped, and it came Rick's way. And for the first time in his life, he froze. Couldn't leave Minmei, had no ammo left, and besides-the sight of the thing had him completely rattled. It was as big as a Battloid.

The ground reverberated under its feet; just as Rick thought things couldn't get any worse, its arms reached up and wrenched off a helmet the size of the Veritech's cockpit, dropping it tiredly.

The face might have been the face of anybody on the streets of Macross City. The monster made bass-register rumbling noises, unintelligible-not surprising in view of how long and muscled its vocal cords must have been if they followed human form.

It staggered and teetered toward the grounded Veritech. Rick froze in his seat-nothing to fire and unwilling to eject or otherwise abandon Minmei. A terrible basso growling shook the air; one metalshod foot of the giant alien warrior squashed a car.

The titan reached toward the Veritech; he quite clearly knew who his enemy was and what Rick had done to him. Dying, he would still have his revenge. Rick sat frozen.

There was a burst of high-decibel, buzz saw sound from somewhere. The alien, fingers not far from Rick's canopy, suddenly looked blank and vulnerable. He toppled to the ground and didn't move again, his weight bending and collapsing his body armor.

The alien pitched onto his face, his back showing the deep penetrations of Veritech Gatling rounds. He'd nearly made it to his objective; his right hand clutched the Guardian's immobilized left foot. The ground shook at Roy Fokker's approach, his Battloid shouldering its weapon.

Rick couldn't shake off his terror. "What was it? What was that thing, Roy?"

Roy's reply sounded flat, tight. "That's the enemy. Now you know why we built the Battloids, Rick. To fight these giant aliens." Roy's Battloid toed the corpse with an armored foot.

Rick felt like he was losing his grip. Maybe it was a good time to, but he didn't have much experience in the practice. "But-that guy looks just like a

human being!"

Roy snorted, "Yeah. If you ever saw a human fifty feet tall.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Lisa turned to me and yelled, "I am getting sick of that name!"

And I thought, Mr. Rick Hunter, whoever you are, if you know what's good for you, you'll start thinking along the lines of an alias.

She had no idea what you'd brought us, Roy! None of us did.

Lt. Claudia Grant, in a note to Lt. Commdr. Roy Fokker

Roy and Rick looked down at the dead goliath who still had one hand clasped around the Guardian's ankle in final rigor. Rick was just starting to get over the shakes but was still numb with the idea that beautiful, innocent Minmei, so full of life, had had that life taken from her in such a meaningless and appalling way.

His panic reassailed him as he realized that there were more aliens like this one-that the pods and the ships beyond the atmosphere were crowded with them-that a plague of them had come to obliterate the Earth.

"I guess you understand now why we kept this secret," Roy said.

"Engineering reports backup rockets are fueled and ready for firing," Claudia said. "How's the evacuation progressing, Lisa?"

Lisa was still watching Gloval worriedly. "All civilians have been safely transported to shelters. Macross City is deserted except for combat units."

Gloval squared his shoulders. "Very well. Bring up the booster rockets.

We'll be blasting off immediately."

Lisa blurted, "I hope the standby boosters work," before she could think better of it.

Gloval gripped her shoulder, calm in the eye of the storm, hiding the fact that he harbored the same misgivings. "They'll work, Lisa; they were designed and built on Earth."

But they'd never been tested under full power.

Gloval glanced around. "All right? Blast off!"

Tight-lipped, Lisa responded by manning her station; the rest of the bridge crew chimed in, "Yes, sir!"

The boosters rained blue-white fire, then flared to full life like chained supernovas, their fury backwashing against the hardtop, raising mist and debris, setting blazes, raising steam clouds from the leaking water that flowed through the streets, melting nearby metal. SDF-1 rose slowly, for the first time in a decade, sustained on fusion-flame.

"Attention Skull Leader." Lisa's voice came over the tac net. "SDF-1 is taking off. Request air cover."

Roy's Veritech mechamorphosed from Battloid to Guardian mode. "We're on our way. Over."

Roy's ship rose on its foot thrusters, hovering when Roy realized that there was no sign of life in Rick's fighter.

"C'mon, Rick; let's go! Get the lead out! What's the matter with you?" He went ballistic, climbing.

Rick reached out and shut off his commo, blanking Roy's image. He hadn't led a sheltered life, but nothing had prepared him for the kind of carnage he'd seen in the last half hour or the fear and hatred he'd known. Or for the dismay and grief he felt over the lifelessness of the beautiful young girl slumped in the seat behind him.

SDF-1 rose on its thrusters. Rick sat, prepared to see it go without him, unable to touch the controls of an aircraft.

He leaned back, lowering his head, catatonic and lost.

Roy, off to rejoin the other Veritechs and provide cover for the dimensional fortress's withdrawal, suddenly realized that Rick hadn't followed along behind.

"Rick! Come in, Rick!" No use; he couldn't raise his young friend.

Poor kid's had to take on more than he could manage, Roy decided.

Well, I can't just leave him back there.

He got back on the radio. "Skull Leader to Control. Lisa, I'm going back to pick up something I left down in Macross City. Captain Kramer can run

the fighter group till I get back, over."

Lisa frowned out at him from a display screen. "Why are you turning back? Over."

"Rick Hunter in fighter VT one-zero-two is still back on the ground, and I have to get him out of there."

Lisa's expression showed her sense of outrage. "That pilot's an imposter! I've gone through all the rosters and I find no record of such a person."

Roy was bringing his ship through a wide bank. "Easy enough to explain. He's a civilian, so he isn't listed in the military registries."

Lisa's hand flew to her face. "A civilian? But I thought-ohhh... !" And I ordered him to get his fighter into the air! She could hear Sammie and the others whispering among themselves: "What?" "Did he say civilian?" "Who is he?"

Back in Macross, the firefights flared with even greater fury as more pods entered the battle in long, two-footed hops.

Two pods and a pair of Battloids were squared off at a range of one hundred yards-practically close quarters-the red tracer streams and the blue energy bolts crisscrossing over the devastated cityscape.

Rubble was tossed into the air and whole walls were blasted to bits as large chunks were gouged or vaporized from the pavement.

It was a nearly even match, but another pod arrived and opened up just as one of the first two went down in a hail of armor-piercing autocannon fire. Still another Zentraedi showed up, to concentrate its chest cannonfire along with the others'. A Battloid, blown in half at the waist and leaking fire and explosions, crumbled and disappeared in a detonation.

The second Battloid shifted to Guardian mode, skimming away at ground altitude, trying to get clear. The pods leapt after, closing in for the kill. All at once the two pods were split open like bursting fruit by direct hits from a pair of Stiletto missiles launched by a diving Veritech.

Roy did a tight bank and came in again. Another Stiletto tore the lead

pod's leg in half, toppling it, and the pod blew open like an overtaxed boiler:

Seeing the Guardian was safely on its way home, Roy did a wingover and went down lower, searching through the drifting smoke, steam, and dust.

Rick was brought out of his shock and torpor by a sound. He discovered that he'd been slumped against the instrument panel, head resting on his arms.

He moaned a little, then realized what had snapped him out of it: The girl was coming around, making little groaning noises.

"Thank heaven she's alive," he said aloud to himself. Those endless moments of the midair rescue came back to him again-the look in her eyes and the thought of how important she'd become to him.

He shook off his grogginess and glanced around to take in his situation.

The enormous corpse was the first thing he spotted.

"I've gotta get us away from here. She might panic if she sees that."

He reached for the instrument panel, trying to clear his head and recall how things worked. He punched up a takeoff sequence, muttering, "I hope this thing'll fly."

But instead of taking to the air, the Guardian lurched and slammed into the pavement, held down by the corpse's death grip, the ship's nose hitting the ground so hard that Rick was nearly jolted into unconsciousness. He lay, pale and panting, feeling cold even though sweat poured from him. His eyes were glassy; he couldn't take them off the terrible sight of the

dead alien.

"What happened?" Minmei asked, just having come to. "What's wrong?

Why're you trembling like that?"

When Rick didn't answer, she leaned forward. "What are you looking at out there? What's there-"

The thought of how the sight might subject her to more pain brought him out of his paralysis. "No! You mustn't look out there!"

She resisted the temptation to do just that; she'd come to trust him.

"Why, what's wrong?"

As she was saying it, the ground began to vibrate to colossal footsteps, the approach of another war machine. Rick, remembering his Veritech was immobilized and out of ammunition, gazed up in dread.

But the swirling clouds of the battle parted to reveal Roy's ship in Battloid mode, shouldering its autocannon. "I hate to interrupt you two, but you can't sit around here forever. C'mon; let's go!"

But he could see there was no question of repairing Rick's battered ship this time and saw that the dead alien's grip wouldn't be easy to release, short of blasting the hand of at the wrist. "That big palooka seems to have formed a permanent attachment to you guys."

Fortunately, there was a quicker and less messy way to handle things. Roy's Battloid extruded a long metal tentacle ending in a special waldo. With it, he opened a small access plate in one of the downed Guardian's nacelles, cutting in the rescue overrides manually.

In another moment Rick and Minmei felt themselves jostled around as the cockpit and nose separated entirely from the rest of the machine. Roy caught it up neatly and tucked it into a special fitting on the underside of his Battloid's right forearm.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Rick got out.

"It's-realy incredible" was all Minmei could manage to say.

"How's that for convenience?" Roy asked. He never got their answer, because at that moment another alien war machine-a pod armed with heavy missiles-sprang from behind a gutted building and zeroed in on the Battloid.

"Hang on, you two!" Roy leapt his Battloid clear just as the pod fired a volley of energy shots. Bringing up his autocannon, the skull leader peppered the pod and sent it crashing backward, riddled and burning.

But more pods were rising from concealment or springing down from the roofs of adjacent buildings. Roy was already shifting to Guardian configuration and jetting away, the aliens galloping in pursuit, firing and firing.

One pod nearly caught him, the vast torso of it filling the sky to starboard. But Roy completed the mechamorphosis to fighter mode and shot away into the sky while salvos ranged around him, thrusters going full-bore.

Two pods stationed on the cliffs at the edge of town poured intense fire at the Veritech as it climbed directly at them. Rick heard Minmei echo his own moan of fear.

Roy stayed dead on course, releasing more missiles when the time was exactly right. The pods went up like a pair of Roman candles, and Roy zoomed into the clear, headed for SDF-1.

The dimensional fortress, its protecting fighters deployed all around it, had achieved a low orbit.

"Shifting to horizontal propulsion," Lisa's voice rang through the fleet, and the enigmatic main engines sent a river of force through the primary thrusters at the ship's stern. Blue infernos raved, and the SDF-1 gathered speed, moving for a higher orbit.

"Stand by for fighter retrieval," Lisa went on. "All planes return to carrier bays. Over."

"This is Sepia Three. Roger, Control, returning for retrieval."

On the flight decks, the crews prepared for the feverish, dangerous work ahead. The fleet was still on combat alert, subject to attack at any time. Every attempted landing must be a "trap"-successful-because there was no time to waste on "bolters" that would have to be repeated.

The teams swarmed to their mother ship; everyone from Gloval on down sweated each second of the retrieval. "Lisa, please report whether we have all fighters safely aboard," Gloval said after an eternity.

"Yes, sir." The answer came quickly. "Those were the last two, sir. All others are accounted for except for Commander Fokker and VT one-zero-two."

"Good. I don't think we have to worry about Commander Fokker." Gloval rose. "Vanessa, show me the current orbital data for Armor One and

Armor Ten."

Vanessa punched up the information. "Yes, sir. They're both approaching Rendezvous Point Charlie right on schedule. We should be making contact with them in about two-niner minutes."

"Very good. Claudia, any sign of enemy craft?" "No, Captain. It's all clear."

"Excuse me, Captain, but isn't that strange?" Lisa asked. "After launching a massive attack from orbit, why isn't the enemy continuing their attack? It doesn't make sense, does it?"

Gloval usually kept his own counsel but admitted now, "That's bothering me too. There has to be a reason they're just playing with us. They have the advantage, but they don't attack. But why?"

The bridge crew exchanged troubled looks with one another.

Roy's fighter climbed smoothly out of the atmosphere, making for the dimensional fortress. Inside, though, things were a little stormier.

"She doesn't want to go to the ship, Roy!" Rick insisted. "She wants to go back to Macross Island!"

Roy, lips pulled back in anger, snarled at Rick's image on his screen. "Are you crazy? Macross is crawling with aliens! It'd be suicide for her to go back there! Did she give you any reason?"

Minmei butted in, "I'm worried about my aunt and uncle back in the shelter, with all those invaders around them!"

"They're perfectly safe there," Roy insisted. "The shelters are impregnable; this is what they were built for."

Minmei looked winsome even when she was being stubborn. "But I still want to go back to Macross. It's my home!"

Roy shook his head slowly. "I promise, as soon as this trouble's over, I'll take you back there personally."

"What d'you mean you'll take her?" Rick blurted. "I will!" He heard Minmei make a little shocked sound and realized how possessive he'd sounded. "Uh, that is..."

"Hold on a second, Rick," Roy said, and switched his attention to the mammoth ship looming before him. "This is Skull Leader to SDF-1, over."

Lisa's tone was vexed. "Did you find him?"

Roy answered wryly, "He was annoying a young lady. I had to rescue her as well."

"You rat!" Rick snapped.

Lisa had both screens up on her board, looking Rick Hunter over and not missing Minmei, who was leaning in over his shoulder. Hunter was obviously a wet-behind-the-ears kid and a discipline problem to boot, she saw. As for the girl-well, she was pretty in a way, Lisa supposed, if you liked that type.

"So that's our civilian pilot," Lisa said. "I wondered why he didn't know how to fly his aircraft."

Rick recognized those as fighting words. "Who's that old sourpuss, Roy?"

Lisa drew back as if he'd thrown ice water in her face. Old sourpuss? The rest of the bridge gang was very discreet about swapping startled but amused looks.

Roy couldn't help laughing out loud. "That old sourpuss is our Control and the ship's First Officer, Lisa Hayes. And if she looks old to you, you're not as grown up as I thought, kid."

Lisa grimaced and cut in, "Now, listen up, Commander Fokker! You'd better have a good explanation for turning a Veritech fighter over to an amateur civilian pilot! You could face a court-martial for this, or hadn't you thought about that?"

Luckily for all concerned, she didn't notice that Gloval was stifling his laughter off to one side. He hastily resumed a straight face.

"Ooo, she's mad," Roy said blithely.

"As for you, Rick Hunter," Lisa bore on, "you're in a lot of trouble, whether you know it or not!"

Somehow, gallantry seemed to melt away now that there was no danger and people were talking about legal proceedings. He gestured to Minmei

helplessly. "This whole thing's because of her, you see..."

Minmei didn't seem offended, but she confided, "I think you'd better apologize, Rick. Women her age can get awful mean, you know."

Lisa Hayes silently counted to ten, trying to keep from putting her fist through the screen.

"Bridge Control, this is Skull Leader requesting landing instructions," Roy reminded her. "Give us a bay number you old sourpuss."

This time there was no controlling it, and the rest of Lisa's bridge gang broke up in giggles. She clenched her fists but somehow kept her rage contained.

"Roger. Bring your plane into bay zero-niner." And I hope it's the last I see of you, Rick Hunter!

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It is no exaggeration to say that we found the inhabitants of the planet surprising. Quite tenacious and determined in battle, and yet not as suicidal-not as mindlessly ferocious-as, for example, the Invid.

But if they surprised me, surely, I thought, we would awe them by an overwhelming application of force. The thing upon which I did not count was how very much like us they were.

Exedore, from his Military Intelligence Analysis Report

The beaches of Macross Island were now a staging area for the Zentraedi withdrawal. Immense saucershaped landing craft pulled themselves along the shoreline, their huge access hatches lowered over the breaking waves.

With the SDF-1 gone, the pods had no further reason to be on the island; the shelters were of no interest to them, and no serious effort had been made to breach the human fortifications. Ironically, the Zentraedi's iron warrior code kept them from realizing the value of hostages; hostages were of no significance at all to them, and it never occurred to them that humans might be different.

Wave after wave of pods bounded into the ships, some trailing damaged parts or showing the effects of Veritech hits. There was plenty of room in the landing ships that would bear them back aloft; the pods' ranks had thinned considerably. The saucers lifted away, shedding seawater.

Breetai received the report in his command post. "Recon force now returning to group orbit."

"It appears only half of them survived," Exedore observed.

"Where is the battle fortress now?" Breetai demanded of his techs. Though the missing pods represented a negligible loss, he seethed over it. That Zentraedi warriors should be thus resisted by mere primitives!

"It has passed through the uppermost atmospheric ranges and

achieved orbit," a voice reported. "It is apparently on its way to rendezvous with the other orbital units."

"What is your plan, Breetai?" Exedore asked.

Breetai considered. "It would be a simple matter to shoot them down, but I don't want that ship damaged."

Wisely, Exedore didn't point out that notwithstanding Breetai's preferences, that was the specific order that bound him: To capture the dimensional fortress intact. "Once they're out of Earth's gravitational field, they can execute a hyperspace fold, taking them beyond the range of our weapons-perhaps to escape us completely across spacetime once again."

Breetai nodded. "You have a point there. Perhaps I'd better apply a little restraining force to slow them down a bit."

He turned to give the order in his rumbling basso, his gleaming skullpiece and glittering artificial eye catching the light. "Prepare a laser bombardment!"

The order was repeated all through the fleet, as guns were run out in their turrets and casemates-slender, tapering Zentraedi-style barrels like gargantuan steel icicles.

The order resounded through the fleet, "All gun crews stand by for total bombardment of target area. Stand by for order to fire."

Rick and Minmei were speechless at their first view of the SDF-1's interior.

They raced along in a four-seater troop vehicle driven by Roy, who showed his fondness for high speed and squealing tires. They barreled through holds and compartments so vast that there was no feeling of being inside.

Instead it was like driving through an immense metal metropolis studded with lights of all descriptions, reaching up and up, the levels disappearing into a dim ceiling/sky. Rick couldn't imagine what such stupendous amounts of unoccupied space were for.

"I've got a little surprise for you, Rick." Roy smiled. "Wait'll you see it."

He made another turn with two wheels off the deck.

At last he brought the jeep to a virtual panic stop, tires screeching, so that Rick and Minmei were thrown off balance. "Well, here we are." He hopped out jauntily. "Come on!"

Rick glared, helping Minmei up. "Was that really necessary? She could've been hurt!"

Roy ignored the comment because, of course, he was confident that he'd never let that happen. He flicked on a bank of overhead spotlights. Sitting in a small hangar bay was the Mockingbird.

"Golly, Rick! Look at that!" Minmei exclaimed.

"Somebody left this thing behind," Roy said casually, "so I had it stashed here and serviced."

The little plane's booster rocket covers had been replaced, and the way the ship sat on its landing gear let Rick know that it had been completely refueled.

"My racer!" He jumped out of the carrier, dashing to his beloved Mockingbird, all but dancing around it. "I thought I'd never see it again! You saved it!"

He had Roy's hand in his, pumping it, ready to give his friend an exuberant hug. "Oh, thank you, Roy, thank you-"

Roy disengaged himself. "Hey, cut it out, Rick! Take it easy! I just thought you'd be more comfortable flying in this thing than in one of our Veritechs. Mockingbird doesn't turn into a Battloid."

"I don't know what to say, Roy!"

"I've seen that plane before," Minmei said, joining them. "It was in the air show this morning, wasn't it?"

Yeah, about a million years ago, Rick thought. But as he was about to explain, Claudia's voice came over the PA. "Attention all hands. We are approaching rendezvous with Armor One and Armor Ten. Report to your docking stations immediately! All hands report to stations!"

Roy was already leaping back behind the wheel of the carrier. "I have to get going now. You two stay here and don't wander around. If you start

exploring, you'll get lost."

The tires chirped as he broke traction briefly. "You can't imagine how huge this ship is, so stay put!" Then he was gone.

The Armors and their tenders and destroyer escorts were coming up quickly, strung out in a line so that they could be mated to the SDF-1 in order.

"We have perfect docking alignment," Vanessa announced.

"The enemy ships are preparing to dock, sir," a Zentraedi tech reported.

"All right," Breetai replied. "Tell our gunners to fire their beams between the fortress and the other vessels and at the target ships themselves. I don't care how many of the smaller ones are destroyed, but the large one must not be damaged!"

The command was relayed as the long, slender Zentraedi cannon swiveled and came to bear. Then the order was gassed: "Gun commanders may fire when ready!"

The Zentraedi beams seemed to light up the universe.

A quick, orderly docking sequence became a bloodbath as alien beams zeroed in from far away, without warning, punching through hulls and turning ships into flowering explosions.

Destroyers, tenders, and escort ships were hit, and Armor Three went up in a ball of fury that lit the SDF-1's bridge in a harsh glare. Wreckage and debris rode the winds of the explosions as though tornado-driven.

Gloval, knocked from his feet, drew himself back up. "Vanessa, what's the enemy's position?"

The bridge crew calmly went back to work. "The current attack is from the exact same location as the first one: They're about ten thousand miles from here in a higher orbit."

Lisa said, "Reporting: Miranda, Circe, and Armor Three completely

destroyed, as well as numerous smaller vessels and heavy damage throughout the Orbital Force."

"They're tearing our fleet to shreds!" Gloval snarled. "And what about our damages?"

"We've taken no direct hits, Captain," Sammie declared, and Kim confirmed, "No damage anywhere, sir."

"What's our position?" Gloval snapped, squaring away his cap.

"We're just closing our initial orbit," Vanessa told him. "Approaching our original position over Macross Island, distance approximately one hundred miles."

Gloval made up his mind. "Claudia, take us down over Macross Island. At two thousand feet altitude activate the fold system for a position jump."

Claudia debated whether she should question the order; this was a wartime situation. But at certain critical times allegiance to duty could demand something more than mere obedience. "Are you sure you want to do that, Captain? The fold system hasn't even been tested yet!"

"I am well aware of how risky it is, Claudia, but you can read the situation displays and tactical projections as well as I."

She could, and had, as they all had. The alien fleet had already been deployed in an inescapable net and was drawing the net tighter around SDF-1. "If we stay in this position, we'll be totally defenseless," Gloval added.

"But we're not even sure how the system works!" Lisa reminded him. "That's why I'm bringing us as close to Macross as I dare," Gloval said

calmly. "All Doctor Lang's calculations and preliminary findings are based on experiments conducted at that location."

He looked around at his bridge gang. He wasn't used to explaining orders, but it was important that his reasoning go on the record so that if he didn't survive the engagement, what he'd done might be of use in later decisions.

"We can't just surrender?" he said hotly. "We have to try everything we can first! So ready fold system for a position jump, targeting the area on the

far side of the moon, within one lunar diameter of the surface. Get your radar ready for an access check, Lisa."

The bridge gang got to work, speaking into comcircuits, operating their consoles, while Gloval gave orders in a steady voice. "We'll make the jump from precisely two thousand feet above the island."

"Don't we need permission from headquarters?" Claudia asked. He shook his head. "We don't have time for that."

"But Captain, you know the regulations specifically-" His gaze was white-hot now, making her falter. "Sorry, sir..."

Gloval took in a breath. "I know what the regs say, but I appreciate your bringing it to my attention."

"I just wanted to-"

"Claudia! You've got your orders!" He turned away, hands clasped behind his back once more.

"Yes sir, Captain," she said through locked teeth, and turned to do as she'd been commanded. "Attention all hands. Priority! Fold system standby! Readying energy at maximum-green at all power sources."

The giant untried fold devices came alight like castles of energy. The crews raced to prepare and make secure for the jump, although there wasn't nearly enough time. The chaos was especially acute in the hangar bays.

Nevertheless, throughout the ship, men and women did their best.

"All hands to emergency stations. All hands, emergency stations. This is not a drill, I say again: This is not a drill! Prepare for fold operation in T minus five minutes and counting-mark!"

In the labyrinth shelter system under the smoking ruins of Macross Island, Jason shifted uncomfortably. It wasn't that he felt crowded; the shelters had been built with a far larger population and supply requirement in mind-against the day when Macross might be the last human refuge.

But Jason missed his cousin. "I'm getting worried about Minmei, aren't you? I wonder where she went."

"Don't worry about Minmei. She'll be fine," his mother reassured him. "She just went to another shelter, that's all."

His father was quick to add, "Sure! Nothing's going to happen to anyone as smart as Minmei! Isn't that right?"

But among the grown-ups there passed looks hidden from the boy. They'd felt the distant concussions of the terrible battle, and now, for a long time, there had been an ominous silence with no all-clear signal from the military.

"Yeah..." Jason conceded, and settled himself down to wait some more, gathering his blanket around him.

"Are you planning on going somewhere?" Minmei asked as Rick ran a final preflight check on Mockingbird and made a few last adjustments.

He closed an access panel and turned to her. "I'm gonna take you back to the island like I promised." He knelt to replace his tools in the box and return it to its stowage niche. "You still wanna go back, don't you? Because I'm not gonna hang around here one way or the other."

He couldn't bring himself to admit how important it was that she come with him; that wasn't the sort of thing one learned to do working in a flying circus.

The SDF-1 resounded with Sammie's latest announcement: "Attention, all hands. Fold in T minus three minutes and counting."

Minmei offered him part of a chocolate bar that had somehow stayed in her pocket against every conceivable adversity. "Candy?"

"...Thanks,"

"Rick, what's a fold?"

"Aw, nothing to do with us." He offered her his hand to help her into the cockpit. "Come on; let's go."

She looked into the tiny plane's only passenger space dubiously. "It's so small. Will it hold two people?"

"If they're very friendly, it will." And so, she didn't object when he put his hands on her waist and helped her up into the Mockingbird.

Rick handed her his Veritech helmet. "Here; put this on."

She gave the helmet that wide-eyed look he'd come to care so much about. "Ohh!" Then she had it on.

"It's so cute on you, Minmei. You could start a whole new fad." She snorted in exasperation. "Oh, you!"

He chuckled foolishly and turned to work the bay door. The indicators had already let him know that the SDF-1 was descending, quickly; it was low enough for his plane's turbofan to function.

The first thing he saw as the doors parted was Macross Island, far below. It occurred to him that that was the ship's most likely landing spot, but be that as it might, he had no intention of remaining aboard. These military types had gotten him-and Minmei-into enough trouble.

Minmei saw Macross, too. She was still staring at it longingly as Rick crowded into the single pilot's seat next to her and got her into his lap.

The propfan was turning slowly; he brought it up while he lowered the canopy and began to turn Mockingbird's nose. It would be the trickiest takeoff of his career; the slipstream caused by SDF-1's descent could break the tiny stunt plane in half if Rick didn't do things just right.

"Hang on to me, Minmei."

"It's awful close in here." She squirmed forward, trying to rest against the instrument panel.

"Hey! I can't see to fly if you sit there!"

She leaned back, and he decided that he had to take his shot now, before the SDF-1 got into the heavy air currents lower down. He gunned the turbofan, launched. Counterrotating blades spun.

"I'm sorry, Rick," Minmei was apologizing, "But it's so tiii-yiiite!" as the Mockingbird was seized and twirled.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Who Dares, Wins."

This motto of the Special Air Service commandos of the Royal Air Force of the United Kingdom (latter twentieth century) was known to have been quoted by Gloval, even though his behavior and accomplishments make it clear that he was far from rash.

Certainly, he proved that he knew what the saying meant that day high above Macross Island.

"Starleap," History of the First Robotech War, Vol. VIII

Rick somehow succeeded in keeping them from being smashed into a large gun turret as the Mockingbird nosedived, spinning round and round.

"There's nothing to worry about, Minmei; I'm an expert pilot," Rick insisted in what he hoped was a composed voice, fighting his controls and expecting to be slammed back against the SDF-1's superstrong hull. Minmei meanwhile sat with her head buried against his chest, moaning and wishing life would slow down again, even for a moment, so she could catch her breath.

But somewhat to his own surprise, Rick did manage to pull the ship out of its spin, level off, and gain proper flight altitude. "There, okay?"

She got up the nerve to look, saw that things were under control, and couldn't help laughing for joy, hugging him.

Rick Hunter felt very, very pleased with himself and began to wish that the flight could go on forever.

Macross Island was clearly defined beneath the dimensional fortress, seeming to draw nearer as SDF-1 descended. "We will enter fold in ten seconds," Claudia intoned over the PA. "Nine..."

Gloval watched the dozens of displays and screens with no outward

show of the misgivings he felt. The enigmatic sealed engines made the huge vessel tremble, and the high vibrations of the fold generators seemed to cut through everyone aboard.

The seconds seemed to stretch on endlessly, then he became aware of Claudia saying, "... two... one... zero!"

"Execute hyperspace fold jump!" Gloval ordered. The bridge gang bent to their duty stations to carry out the command.

It seemed to Gloval that he was seeing the view from the bridge in an altered way, that he was perhaps seeing higher into the ultraviolet or lower into infrared. In any case, the superstructure was outlined with strange hot reds, yellows, and oranges that hadn't been there moments before.

Am I seeing into the thermal part of the spectrum, perhaps?

But even that didn't explain the strange, almost ghostly images, not quite indentifiable, that suddenly loomed in the air or the way in which vision suddenly altered so that the world looked like a shifting double exposure.

The SDF-1 appeared to be in the center of a hot gas cloud. From it expanded a white-hot globe of light, the same sort that the Zentraedi armada had produced earlier that day. Sounds like nothing humans had ever heard before toned and swirled in the crew's ears, with no apparent source.

The fold jump globe expanded, defying Lang's theories and calculations, enveloping Macross and its harbor, making even the supercarriers Daedalus and Prometheus shift in focus and seem to blur into double exposure as the waters crashed as if storm-tossed.

A vibration like an earthquake, far greater than any the Zentraedi attack had produced, shook the shelters, and the refugees thought the worst had come-the worst as they could conceive of it: the end of their world.

In Macross City sudden eddy currents from the fold swept through the streets, destroying buildings and the remains of downed war machines of both armies. The violent side effects of the space jump maneuver caught the tiny Mockingbird too, whirling it like a leaf.

Incandescent motes appeared, growing brighter and brighter, circling like lazy insects or sentient miniature stars. On the bridge, it was impossible to focus on instruments or screens. Lisa sobbed, feeling sick and wrenched from herself, as if she were being torn from life itself.

A globe with the SDF-1 at its center now encompassed the island, the waters around it, and a considerable bubble of sky. The ocean crashed against the force field, without effect.

SDF-1 shifted through the double-exposure changes again, stabilizing at last, then began to fade. In one moment, the spherical force field was immovable in the midst of the furious sea-and in the next, it was gone.

Billions of gallons of water poured in to fill the gap, colliding to send up tidal waves that would race around the planet for days. Air rushed in to take the place of the sudden vacuum, creating a thunderclap like the detonation of a nuclear weapon, only sharper.

Over the rim of the world, where the main Zentraedi elements were forming up for a final attack, the event registered only picoseconds before the glow erupted. It lit the horizon like a "diamond necklace" eclipse. Breetai needed no instruments or tech reports to know what had happened.

"A fold! I don't believe it!"

"Impossible that close to planetary gravity!" Exedore burst out in a rare display of emotion. These primitives somehow rebuilt the SDF-1 and, with whatever modifications or improvising they did, somehow came up with a superior spacefold process! Or perhaps it's something of Zor's; it doesn't matter. If it still exists, we must have that ship!

Breetai was uttering his terrible animal growl, fists clenched so tightly that Exedore could hear the squeaking of bones and cartilage under the exertion of those corded muscles.

"I want to know their exact position immediately!"

Out in the farthest reaches of the solar domain it had been cold and dark since the birth pains of the solar system, almost twenty million years before. Here the great furnace of the sun was only a tiny, cold droplet in the

night, and Pluto, the only planetary body, nearly forty times as far from the life-giving primary as Earth, maintained a temperature near absolute zero.

But in an incomparable moment, Pluto and its single loyal satellite, Charon, were joined in their lonely, eccentric orbit.

The fold force field appeared, a stupendous orb in space, holding the SDF-1 suspended over an island with a fishbowl-bottom of ocean underneath it, the smoke of battle still rising from Macross City.

The sphere winked out of existence. By all rights, the waters should have boiled away in the vacuum, all atmosphere not pent up in the battle fortress or the shelters dissipated; and the fragment of Earth that was Macross Island itself should have begun coming apart.

That none of these things happened was proof-reinforcing later evidence-that certain other forces were still at work. The Protoculture-powered globe couldn't be maintained for very long, not even by the dimensional fortress's mighty engines, but secondary effects could; Protoculture-powered phenomena were very different from the rawpower manipulations of the universe that humans had been used to until now.

The ocean waters froze, still adhering to the island fragment, expanding and cracking. Most of the atmosphere began to fall toward the island, frozen air snowing down on it, coating it in seconds with a thickening glacial coat-despite the fact that instruments indicated no gravity whatsoever beyond the negligible amount such a mass would generate. Be that as it might, the harbor became a solid mass and the aircraft carriers were rimed with permafrost in moments.

These anomalies have always constituted one of the great mysteries of the Robotech Wars, though subsequent events and discoveries gave the human race some tantalizing hints as to what may have happened that chilly afternoon some three and a half billion miles and more beyond Terra's orbit.

Already disoriented and dismayed, with Minmei clinging to him, and concealing the terror he wanted to show, Rick realized two new and

frightening things: His propfan engine was no longer having any effect, and the entire canopy was frosting over-fast.

It wasn't as if he needed that; he'd already watched with horror as Macross turned to a polarscape. It was clear that there wasn't much gravity in the dark, empty neighborhood, whatever it was. He'd heard Mockingbird's seals close against low pressure-no pressure, he was certain-and that spelled very bad luck.

Rick watched the blanket of white cover the canopy and wondered what he could possibly do next, aside from dying.

"Let's have some light in here!" Gloval ordered; the fold jump had drained all systems. The emergencies cast a weird red glow over everything. Heating units shouldn't have been needed in the vacuum of space; Gloval wondered what was wrong.

"Switching to backups, Captain," Claudia said crisply, and brought lighting back to normal. The bridge gang blinked a bit but kept to their jobs. Powerful running lights showed a dust storm of wreckage blowing past the ship, pieces impacting constantly.

"Radar shows an extremely large object just-beneath us, sir," Vanessa said. At least, it was "beneath" relative to the battle fortress; but the readings looked very peculiar, even though the ship's artificial gravity had cut in automatically during the jump.

"Our jump target was the moon; that's what your large object is," Gloval said.

"No; it's too small to be the moon, sir," she countered. "I'll put it on one of the main screens for you."

Everybody there looked, and everybody drew breath in brief astonishment and fright.

"It's coming straight at us, sir!" Vanessa said.

Gloval took a quick look at the readouts and contradicted, "No! We're moving toward it!"

"It's Macross Island, Captain Gloval!" Vanessa yelled, but Gloval had

already seen that and reached his own conclusions as to the magnitude of the disaster. But there were other things that had to be dealt with instantly; reflection must wait for a later time.

"Retro rockets, Claudia! Maximum thrust!"

Claudia worked, tight-lipped, at her station and spared only a moment to say, "It's no-go; I'm getting no response whatsoever from the computer!"

Damn energy drain! Lisa thought, even as she sounded "collision" over the PA. "Emergency! Emergency! Prepare for impact! Prepare for impact!"

Helpless, the SDF-1 floated kneel-on toward Macross Island. "It's covered with ice," Sammie reported, looking into her scope while everyone else could see that on the screen. Claudia yanked her away from the scope so she wouldn't get her nose broken.

SDF-1 hit the tilted surface and crunched through the buildings as if they were a bunch of potato chips dipped in liquid nitrogen, sliding side-on across the surface of the worldlet that had been a thriving, jubilant city only hours ago.

Down in the shelters, people already dealing with the difficulties of mass null-g sickness and panic had their problems complicated by an impact that sent many of them flying once again across the shelters-toward walls and ceilings and floors that weren't padded and wouldn't make kind landing places.

Jason wailed and grabbed for his mother's hand; Lena pulled him back from an impact with the wall, and together they spun helplessly in midair, wondering if this was the end.

The rime frost on the outside of Mockingbird's canopy was gone in that uncanny pulling-together force exerted in the wake of the fold-a force that wasn't gravity but had many of its attributes. A force that seemed to make conscious distinctions.

But the cold of the outer rime had transferred through the canopy to the atmosphere in the cockpit, forming a thick glaze. Now Rick wiped away

a large patch to get a look at what was going on.

"Ooo! Look how beautiful it is!" Minmei gasped, her long dark hair floating weightless. Rick was struck again by her innocence, the purity of spirit that saw beauty everywhere and gave so little attention to danger and evil.

A starfield shone against the blackness of space. Chunks of rock and debris floated by. Rick tried his controls, without effect.

I'm getting no response at all from the propfan. As crazy as it seems, there's no other answer: We're out in deep space. And that means we're in deep trouble!

"Oh, my, isn't it romantic?" Minmei sighed. Rick forced himself to smile. "Yes, it is."

There was an abrupt metal-to-metal collision that jarred the little plane brutally, sending it spinning away. Rick had a split-second glimpse of some kind of large machine casing veering off from its impact with Mockingbird.

The two cried out in shock as the plane was spun through the vacuum, to collide with another piece of flotsam. The second hit jolted Rick's nose into the back of Minmei's head, but it also absorbed much of the spinning and brought the ship virtually to rest relative to the junk floating around it.

Rick sneezed mightily from the bump on the nose. Minmei looked startled, then laughed, and Rick joined her.

But she stopped in alarm a moment later. "What's that hissing sound?"

Rick was quick to cover his panic. "Oh, it's perfectly all right. Don't get upset about it."

But the hissing was coming from a hairline crack just under the windshield frame. "You hear all kinds of weird noises in these things." He forced himself to laugh lightly.

I don't dare tell her our air's leaking out into space! The flow wafted the ends of stray strands of Minmei's hair toward the crack.

Rick wadded a handkerchief and tried to push it into the crack. Maybe this'll hold it temporarily. It didn't seem to do much good.

Minmei's eyes were enormous with fright. "Let's get out of here, okay?"

"Hey, relax; what's your hurry?" Rick could think of only one slim hope of survival. He put the helmet back on her head, and she snuggled into his lap again as he thought, If the boosters don't work, we're sunk! "Comfy?"

"Uh huh," Minmei answered. Rick hit his boosters very gently, bringing them up.

He had a certain amount of independent control over each, but that still made steering a very ticklish problem. Attitude thrusters would have been a tremendous help, but there just hadn't been much need for deep-space maneuvering capability in the air circus.

A tiny burn-a mere cough-got the Mockingbird under way, infinitesimal spurts from selected boosters were the only way he had to steer. And there wasn't very much fuel in the little rockets.

He was beginning to see where there were some advantages to those nutty Veritechs after all.

"I guess we'll go find the SDF-1," he said. "Something funny's been goin' on around here." The air leak hissed on. At least the frost was melting off the canopy; he gave up wondering how much time they had and concentrated on piloting and spotting the battle fortress.

"There it is!" Minmei said very shortly. SDF-1 was hard to miss: still lodged in the remains of Macross Island, with explosions, tracers, and energy blasts flashing all around it.

The war had resumed,

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Well, you're newer gonna believe this!

From the diary of Lynn-Minmei

"It looks like they're fighting down there!" Minmei said.

It doesn't matter; we've got nowhere else to go. "Don't worry." He cut in the boosters, nursing them along exactingly to line up his vector, praying no debris got in his way because there was no hope of dodging anything.

In the fury of the battle back on Earth, human defenders had overlooked the fact that one of the first Zentraedi landing ships, loaded with Battlepods, had been heavily damaged and forced to set down on Macross once again, unable to fly. And so it, too, had been transported into deep space by the fold maneuver.

While the landing ship was no longer operable, the pods were. They'd immediately resumed their attack on the ship, no doubt in response to their assigned mission but moved, too, by the awareness that they were somewhere far from their fleet and that if they couldn't take the fortress, they wouldn't survive for long out by Pluto's orbit.

The island in space was now complete bedlam, with alien mecha massed in suicidal assault waves, while the ship's guns blazed away. Rick Hunter rocketed into the midst of this with a ship he could barely control.

Still, he did the best he could, gradually bringing the little racer in end for end through judicious use of the boosters, his only method of halting being a retrofire. He made microburns, slowing, trying to line up his approach. It seemed hopeless.

Then a bad situation became even worse. All the landing bays were closed, sealed tight. "I forgot, they shut them during combat," Rick said, tight-upped. Minmei blinked, looking at him as if he'd said it in another language.

A mortally damaged pod went tumbling past them, trailing fire like an

erratic meteor, victim of an armor-piercing, discarding-sabot round from SDF-1-so close that it all but singed Mockingbird's wingtip. Rick and Minmei shrank from it in reflex, but it was already impacting the SDF-1.

Rick had to crane around, glancing over the back of the plane, to see what happened. The pod gave up all its destructive power in one great explosion, hitting at the confined area of a recessed maintenance causeway.

It was a million-to-one shot, but the explosion acted as a shaped charge, blowing a gaping hole in the dimensional fortress's armored hide. And it was toward that hole that the plane was going.

Until the explosion's shock wave hit it.

Mockingbird was jarred, stopped in midflight, spun. It ended up with its nose more or less pointed at the SDF-1 but moving away from it.

Rick was already feeling a little light-headed, and breathing was an effort. Moreover, the boosters didn't have very much left to give. "Maybe we can get through the hole the invader made!"

Minmei nodded, too short-winded to answer. Rick cut in the boosters, steering as best he could.

Another pilot would have died then. But Rick knew Mockingbird well, even under circumstances as bizarre as these. He nursed the racer along with minute bursts of thrust, knowing there'd be no time to flip and retro, hoping he and Minmei could survive a crash.

But they would have to endure one more bad break to even the balance of the sudden luck that had come their way: A thick curtain of armor was descending over the hole, the reaction of an automatic damage-control system.

Rick cut in all boosters full throttle, seeing his only chance of survival disappearing. He cranked up the propfan in full reverse, hoping that it might stop the ship once it hit atmosphere.

He'd calculated that most of the outsurge of air from the breached compartment would have spent itself by the time he got there. There was no point in thinking-otherwise; neither boosters nor propfan could take Mockingbird "upstream" against the terrific pressure of such a monster air

leak.

He wasn't too far off. In fact, he did a piloting job worthy of a place in

the record books until the descending armor curtain sheared the racer's uppermost wing off.

Still, the little plane shot into the vast compartment, more or less intact, aimed at a far area of the ceiling. The propfan howled as the blades got some bite in a very thin atmosphere. The armor patch clanged into place.

And there was gravity. Mockingbird's upward climb topped out and became a crash dive. We almost made it, Rick realized. The deck whirled at the canopy.

But they'd happened into an area still strung with hoisting cables, rigging slings, and tackle-a jungle of them. Mockingbird was successively snagged, whirled, flipped, and caught in a matter of seconds, with more pieces broken from it.

Rick and Minmei felt themselves blacking out but shook it off a few seconds later to discover themselves hanging upside down, the deck only a yard or, two below the cockpit dome. The rumble of life-support equipment pumping air back into the chamber was already loud.

Mockingbird hung ensnared in the lines and cables, upside down but stable for the time being. A last piece of good fortune: None of the lines had caught across the canopy to hold the cockpit shut and imprison them.

Rick had no reserves left to think of elegant solutions. He hit the release, and the canopy swung down. He lowered Minmei with the last of his strength and, resigning himself to a fall, released his safety harness. He landed on the deck at her feet, saying only, "Oof!"

She knelt next to him. They looked themselves over with wonder, having resigned themselves to being dead. Then they looked at each other and burst out laughing at the same moment.

It was the best, loudest laugh either of them had ever had. Somehow, it was immeasurably important to Rick that he share it with Minmei.

"We just shot down the last enemy Battlepod, sir," Sammie relayed the

information.

"Very good." Gloval nodded. "Any contact with headquarters yet?"

That was Claudia's hot potato. "No, Captain. I've tried, sir, but nothing works. We can't raise them."

Sammie broke in, "Are you sure there's no system malfunction?" "Negative," Claudia shot back tersely.

"None at all," Vanessa said, backing her. "It's operating perfectly."

Gloval didn't want to indulge his fears; he had a pretty good idea what had happened, but if it were to prove true, the consequences would be dire indeed. Still, there was no avoiding the inevitable. "Give me the reading on our position."

Vanessa was prompt and precise in answering. "The planet Pluto's orbit, according to the computer plot."

"The planet Pluto?" So much worse than even he had suspected. Gloval dipped deep into the fortitude that develops when death has been cheated a hundred times and comes back for a rematch. Relentlessly.

The bridge gang was gathering around Vanessa, even rocklike Lisa. "Pluto?" "Impossible!"

"It can't be!" Claudia was proclaiming, knowing very well that it was. "I was against this fold jump business all along!"

More than just about anyone else alive, Gloval knew when it was time to play martinet (rarely) and when it was time to play patriarch (the manner in which he had won every important citation there was, some several times over).

"Now, now, now. Settle down; don't panic." His voice was calm and sure. It brought order and discipline back to the bridge by its very measured resonance. "All we have to do is refold to get back to where we started."

That made them all exchange looks and get a grip on themselves. Gloval was four steps ahead of everyone, as usual; everything was all right.

Far aft, in the engineering section, Lang stared up and laughed, then doubled over, slapping his knees-a laugh that seesawed between the

hysterical and the Olympian. The techs and scientists and crewpeople around him looked at him dubiously.

It had been going on for a half minute or so, and each time he took a fresh look, Lang laughed again. Tears had begun squeezing out of the corners of his strange eyes for what he perceived as a monumental joke.

Before anybody around him could act, Lang forced himself to stop. Cosmic jokes weren't something you could share with everybody; the gift of humor didn't run that deep in some people.

Lang straightened and caught his breath, gathering himself, shaking his head.

"Somebody get me Gloval."

"There's absolutely nothing to worry about," Gloval was saying.

"I hope not, Captain," Lisa muttered, back at her duty station. And that was when the hot line rang.

"Now what?" Gloval got it, growling like a bear. "Yes? What? Are you absolutely sure? Stand fast; I'll be right there."

Gloval slammed the handset down. He ignored the questioning faces around him and headed for the hatch. Lisa stood rooted, stunned by the idea that the captain would even think about leaving the bridge at a time like this. "Captain? What happened?"

Gloval paused at the hatch. "Doctor Lang informs me that the fold system has vanished into thin air."

The bridge gang let out stifled cries and moans; Sammie and Kim hugged each other, fighting back tears. Everyone there knew just as well as Gloval what that meant.

"We'll never get back," Claudia whispered.

Outside the hatch, Gloval stopped to fire up his evil-smelling old briar. There was no point in doubting Lang's news; the man was obsessed with Robotechnology but otherwise quite rational. That left Henry Gloval to calculate matters of current orbital positions, distance, life support, and engine performance profiles.

He blew out a cloud of smoke, considering the tobacco in the pipe's bowl. I'd better cut down; what I have is going to have to last me quite a while.

"Hmm. Well now," he said aloud. "Gonna be a long trip."

Fantastic as it seemed, Lang was right: The fold engines were gone.

Gloval returned to the bridge to try to salvage this seemingly hopeless situation as best he could.

"I don't know what happened exactly," Gloval shouted into a handset. "But our first priority is to get the civilians onboard this ship as soon as we can!"

He slammed down the handset and turned to his bridge gang. "Well?" "Captain, we can't raise the Daedalus or Prometheus," Lisa told him.

His gaze went to the forward viewport. At a distance of a few hundred yards, the titantic shapes of the two supercarriers could be seen clearly amid the cloud of debris and wreckage, the drifting automobiles and furniture, and the more ghastly remains of human victims of the tragedy.

"They're aircraft carriers; all atmosphere would have bled away at once, as soon as the fold force field disappeared." No one needed to be told what that meant; all hands lost in the wake of the jump, like every other unprotected human being. "What a catastrophe!"

But other matters were too urgent for him to dwell on the horror of what those last few seconds must have been like in the supercarriers. Chances of survival and a safe return to Earth were slim, but it was up to him to make the most of them.

Like a handful of others throughout history, Henry Gloval was uniquely suited for this particular moment and situation. History was to record it as a singular stroke of good fortune for the human race.

"Commander Hayes, order a squadron of rescue vehicles to maneuver the carriers alongside the SDF-1. We will make fast to them and get crews working round the clock to make them airtight and operational once again." He shunted aside the thought of what a grisly job the clean-up would be.

Lisa looked surprised. "Captain, is it more important that we link up with them than with Armor One or Ten?"

"Yes. I believe their onboard weapons will still be functioning, and there are Veritechs onboard both of them."

"I hope it works, Captain," Lisa said.

"It must be done quickly," Gloval added. Claudia muttered, "That's for sure."

Gloval went to stand by the viewport. All those lives lost! How could I have been so stupid? But he knew, deep down, that he was being unfair to himself. He'd taken the only option open to him. If he'd chosen another course of action, the SDF-1 would now be in the hands of the alien invaders, and all would have been lost.

"We will also deploy boarding tubes to the shelters and begin transferring all occupants to the SDF-1," he gave the order over his shoulder. "Instruct Colonel Fielding and his staff to drop everything else and begin making temporary living arrangements for them at once. Detail EVE groups five and six to start salvage operations; tell them to bring in all usable materials, with special emphasis on foodstuffs and any water ice they may be able to find."

The bridge gang hopped to it, taking notes, as the orders went on. Inventories of all resources; requirement and capability projections from all division chiefs; long-range scans for any signs of enemy presence or activity. There was particular attention to that last item. They found us once,

Gloval thought. Heaven help us if they do again.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

. . . ——— . . .

"SOS" signal attempted by various means by Rick Hunter

Far below the bridge and slightly aft, Rick Hunter strained against a hoisting line. Grease-stained and exhausted, he persisted, even though it seemed hopeless. Getting the wing patched back onto Mockingbird hadn't proved impossible-though he wasn't sure how long the patch would hold-but straightening the frame and repairing the fuselage had him near the limits of his endurance.

The racer still hung upside down, cables and lines looped under its wings, nose canards, and tail. He loved the ship, had built it by hand virtually from scratch; the idea of not saving it was hard to accept, and more important, he had reached the conclusion that it was the key to his and Minmei's survival.

They'd ended up in a portion of the ship that was completely deserted, unequipped with intercom or other communications gear or any indication as to how to get out. Rick had quickly decided that if he could just get his plane working, he could somehow get the armor patch to move, get back out into space, and reach a landing bay.

Minmei had less faith in the plan, but she'd been silent. Up to now. But she touched his shoulder as he strained against the line.

"Rick, you'll never get it to fly. Why don't we see if we can get some help by using the radio in your plane? It seems like it would be the easiest thing."

He let go of the line tiredly. "The radio got busted up when we landed.

There are pieces of it all over the compartment: it'll never work." "Oh," Minmei said in a small voice.

Rick reconsidered something that had been in the back of his mind. He held up his Heiko aviator's-model watch, switching modes. "But maybe

this'll help us get out of here."

She came closer, watching. "What've you got there?" "An inertial tracker-a kind of a compass."

Minmei looked puzzled. "But I thought a compass had two arms that go back and forth?" She held her forefingers together to show what she meant.

"Huh? Oh!" Rick laughed.

Minmei looked hurt. "Well, the only compass I ever saw was for drawing circles."

They set out at once, Rick showing the way with a flashlight from his emergency equipment. "With this kind of compass we'll be able to make our way back to Mockingbird if we get lost inside this big old tub and can't find a way out."

They quickly found out that they were in a maze, a limitless world of conduits, cables, hull, passageways, ducts, and bulkheads. Their footsteps echoed eerily.

"I wonder what all these pipes are for?" Minmei said, reaching out to touch one.

"Maybe to cool some kind of energy unit." Rick shrugged.

"Oh." Then, "Yow!" yelped Minmei, snatching her hand back, fingertips scalded.

"You okay?"

"Oh, I'm all right. It was just a little hot."

Rick's eyebrows went up. "Well, now, that was pretty dumb."

"Sorry." But as he started off again, Rick put his foot right in a puddle of oil and nearly landed flat on his face, flailing and slipping.

"Um, what was that again?" Minmei asked sweetly. Rick grunted and strode off again.

But they came at last to a big compartment filled with scrap, discarded machine parts. "I think it's a dead end," Rick judged.

"You mean," Minmei said with a tremor in her voice, "we can't get back?"

"You can't go searching for your friend now, Roy!" Claudia shouted at the screen.

"But I know Rick's out there somewhere," the Skull Leader insisted. "I can't just abandon him."

As much as Roy meant to her, Claudia couldn't help wishing she could reach through the screen into his cockpit and throttle him. "Listen, you can't just leave your post any time you feel like it! What if-"

Gloval was clearing his throat meaningfully. "Lieutenant Grant, let me talk to him."

She bit her lower lip but answered, "I'll patch you through on channel eight, sir."

Gloval took up his handset. "Commander Fokker, your request is denied. I'm sorry to hear about your friend, but we have over seventy thousand civilian survivors aboard this ship, and we'll need every hand working full-time to ensure their safety."

Roy's eyes narrowed. "Aye-aye, Captain. I guess friendship's a little more important to some of us than it is to others. Sorry to bother you, sir."

Roy signed off, and Gloval slammed down the handset. "Insolent pup!" "Hothead," Claudia said under her breath, while Lisa tried to get her mind back on what she was doing, bleary-eyed from lack of sleep. She

hoped she never heard Rick Hunter's name again in her life.

"Where are we? What is this place?" Minmei wanted to know.

"I dunno; it's huge," Rick exclaimed. Not that she couldn't see that for herself; the compartment was the size of a hangar, with piles of crates and equipment. But the astonishing thing about it was the cyclopean hatch at the far end.

"Why don't we climb up and get a closer look at it?" Minmei proposed, heading for a nearby hill of boxes. As he helped her make the ascent, she bubbled, "Maybe there's a doorway at the top that's open and leads to a hallway that leads to the outside! Why, I could be home in time for dinner!"

But while she rushed off in one direction, he spotted markings in

another. "Hey, that thing is a giant air lock! Built to scale for those giant aliens!" He suddenly felt mouse-size and very vulnerable out there in the open. "I hope they don't come back... Minmei? Minmei! Where are you?"

He dashed off to find her at a viewport, staring out as if hypnotized, into space. The debris and wreckage were much thicker, drifting past the ship.

"Look at that," she said sadly. "What do you think happened?"

"I don't know where all that stuff came from. It looks like a whole city blew up."

Minmei seemed about to burst into tears. "Could... could all that be from home? From Macross?"

The bridge crew was taking its first break in what seemed like years, sipping coffee, while Gloval was off on a personal inspection of the ship's situation.

Lisa was shaking her head. "If the aliens attack us again, we won't have a chance."

Vanessa said, "We should have standard communications working very shortly! Maybe Earth can tell us what's going on."

Lisa was skeptical. "If we use conventional transmissions, we'll be taking a big chance. The aliens might get a fix on us; we could give away our location."

"Commander Hayes," Sammie piped up from her duty station, "resettlement team five leader wishes to speak to you. He says it's urgent."

Lisa put aside the coffee, knowing she wouldn't be finishing it any time soon.

"Well, this one doesn't go anywhere either." Rick frowned, shining his light on the blank bulkhead before him. "How does your leg feel? Any better?"

Minmei rubbed her ankle. "My leg's a lot better; I just twisted it, I guess. But I'm getting kind of thirsty."

Rick considered that. "I've got some emergency rations in my plane, but I haven't got any water."

But suddenly inspiration struck. "There's water all around us! Just wait right here!"

He sprinted away while Minmei murmured. "I wonder what in the world he's talking about?"

He was back in moments with a length of steel bar he'd spotted. "Ta-dum! I believe madam requested some water? Refreshments coming right up!"

He wedged it into the junction of two pipes and began pulling at it to break them apart. "Careful! Don't hurt yourself!" Minmei warned.

"Harder... than I thought," he said through gritted teeth.

Minmei kicked off her shoes. "Let me help you!" Together they threw all their strength into the effort, the pipes creaking. It took everything they had, but at length there was a snapping of metal and the gushing of water.

Luckily, it was tepid rather than superheated. Rick and Minmei fell backward to the deck as it fountained high to fall back on them like a downpour. "We got it! It's a geyser!" Rick shouted jubilantly. Minmei laughed, and he joined in.

After a few moments of it she got up, sopping wet, and went to catch the streaming water in her hands. "Wow, this is wonderful! Well, I think I'll take a shower."

"Huh?" was all Rick could think of to say.

"Well, I might as well take advantage of this while it lasts." She began unfastening the back of her dress, then stopped to glance at Rick, whose mouth was a big O. "Ahh, Rick..."

"Oh! Um. I, uh, guess I better go scout around a little, hmm?"

She grinned, nodding. "And don't peek. Would you push that over here so I can use it as a shower curtain?" He lugged a big hunk of sheet metal into place across the open passageway hatch as he retreated.

"Thank you!" she called over the splashing water. He noticed a small hole in the sheet metal and bent to inspect it, just checking of course,

putting his eye to it.

Minmei shrieked. Rick was back on the other side of the partition in a split second, visions of menacing alien giants daunting him. "Minmei, what's wrong? I'm coming-"

He slid to a halt. She was gazing at him with a mischievous glint in her eyes, long dark hair plastered flat against her by the falling water, arms folded, still wearing her dress. "I thought I saw something, there by the shower curtain."

"Your imagination, maybe?" he said weakly. "Su-uure." She nodded sarcastically.

"Yeah." He coughed. "Well. Excuse me, I-" He turned and hurried off.

Minmei lost track of time, singing and humming, luxuriating in the feel and taste of the water. Then she heard a sound, too faint to identify.

She, too, thought of alien giants. "Rick? If that's you, stop playing tricks!" She felt a wave of panic. "Rick, you answer me right now."

A small roll of cloth was tossed through the gap in the makeshift partition. "Brought you some fresh clothes," he called. "It's an extra work shirt I had in the Mockingbird."

After Rick grabbed a quick shower, they started back for the plane, guided by his inertial tracker and the markings he'd made at various passageway junctions in the course of their explorations.

Rick tried not to be too obvious about ogling Minmei. The shirt was baggy on her but barely covered the tops of her thighs. Her lovely, coltish legs seemed to go on forever.

She was in high spirits-it seemed to be her natural state. "That was just what I needed! I feel a whole lot better now. And thanks for the shirt, Rick."

"You're welcome-"

"Even if it is a bit big." She flopped the empty cuffs around to demonstrate, giggling.

Minmei capered over to a highly polished metal panel, which reflected her image like a dark mirror. She made a comical face, sticking her tongue out and crossing her eyes, waggling the overlong sleeves. " 'The Creature

with No Hands!' Nyyah!" She laughed.

They'd come back to the compartment where the Mockingbird hung suspended. Rick went over and sat beneath it, on a pallet improvised from shipping crate padding he'd scavenged. He picked up a couple of flat cans.

"I dug out my emergency rations. Here: This one's for you." He tossed it to her.

"Oh! Thank you!" She looked delighted, as she so often did. Minmei found more delight in life than anyone Rick had ever met.

She watched him detach the fork that came with the can, trigger the lid release, and peel it back. "Let's see if this stuff's any good." He dug into the brownish concentrate paste, making approving sounds.

Minmei didn't follow suit, suddenly looking troubled. "Shouldn't we be conserving these in case we have to make it last?"

"I'm not worried." He shoveled in some more. "We'll be out of here soon."

"Yeah, but what if we're not?"

He tried to sound confident. "I used to be a Junior Nature Scout; I'll get us out of here."

She looked at him archly. "Well, I'll bet you didn't get any merit badges for pathfinding, did you?"

"Now, stop worrying," he told her, around a mouthful of food. He swallowed. "I promise you I'll find a way out of here." He suddenly lowered his fork, looking down despondently at the deck. "But that was one badge I didn't get," he confessed.

She made him jump by giggling into his ear. "I knew it!" "Hey, what's so funny?"

She was laughing into her hands, unconcerned with their plight for the moment, making him smile involuntarily.

"I was sick the day they gave the test! At least I know what a compass looks like!"

Minmei laughed harder and harder. Rick couldn't resist and joined in.

Later they sat on the padding, backs resting against a crate, under Mockingbird. "I'm real worried about my family," she confessed.

"Don't be. I'm sure they're safe in the shelters," he insisted, making it sound as positive as he could.

She was blinking sleepily. "Oh, I hope so. Y'know, there was a shelter right next door to our house."

"Well, there you go; they're all fine."

She yawned against the sleeve-covered back of her hand. "I suppose." Her head settled against his shoulder.

Rick was so surprised that he didn't move or speak for some time. "Um. Are you going to sleep?" She was breathing evenly, eyes closed. She looked more enchanting than ever.

"Wake up. You can't go to sleep like this; you'll get a stiff neck."

He reached around her shoulders from either side, about to ease her down into a more comfortable position. His elbow brushed against something alive that was poised behind him on the crate.

With a shrill chitter, a fat gray mouse bounded across Minmei's shoulder, scampered along her arm, and ran down the length of her bare leg, springing away into the dimness. Minmei awoke with a scream, to find Rick's hands on her shoulders.

"Ah. Um."

She gave him an appraising look. "Hmm. Maybe I'd better move. You stay here, and I'll sleep over there." She rose lithley and went to another pile of padding a few yards away.

"Hey, it was a mouse," Rick protested.

"Mm-hmm." Minmei ignored him. She was young and very, very attractive; she'd learned that she had to be careful. She kneeled to pull aside a fold of the padding and rearrange it more to her liking. As she did, a fat, furry gray form bounded out of hiding and went racing off into the darkness.

"There's a mouse!" Minmei covered the distance back to Rick in a single hysterical leap.

He sniffed. "You don't say. I seem to recall mentioning something about that, but you didn't believe me."

She hung her head, then looked at him again. "I'm really sorry, Rick.

From now on, I promise I'll believe you."

He struck a noble pose. "In that case, fair lady, I shall defend you from these fearsome creatures!"

"Oh, thank you." Minmei stifled another yawn.

"I think we'll be all right for tonight," he added, looking around the compartment as she rested her head on his shoulder once more. Her eyelids were fluttering tiredly. "They're more scared of us than we are of them."

What's more important, he didn't say out loud, so as not to discourage her hopes of escape or rescue, if they can survive here, we can. He tried to fight down the feeling that their situation wasn't very promising.

"So if you want to sleep-" he started to say, then realized she was dozing, snuggled against him.

"I'll be darned. Wish I could fall asleep like that." He made himself comfortable as best he could, leaning back against the crate, concentrating. He considered every option and plan he could think of, certain of only one thing.

He wouldn't let Minmei down.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

If Breetai and company were confused by human behavior as applied to war, one cannot help but wonder, in light of subsequent events and Zentraedi responses, what they would have thought if they could have looked into the remotest corner of SDF-1 and observed the behavior of two castaways.

Zeitgeist, Alien Psychology

Rick was brought out of his musings by a scrape of metal-a screech, really-that set his teeth on edge and had him alert for danger.

He'd grown used to the endless dripping of water condensed on or leaking from pipes, not even registering it anymore, and could identify most of the ship's sounds-giant circulation systems and the vibrations of far-off machinery. But this one was something new.

It was Minmei. "Let's see: Yesterday was Thursday. Now Friday..." She held a triangular piece of scrap metal in her hand, one edge sharpened against the deck, finishing the line she was gouging in Mockingbird's upside-down fuselage, under the starboard nose canard.

There were two of them, irregular verticals cut deep into the racer's vulnerable skin. She'd picked a spot where there was room for quite a few marks, he saw.

"Hey! What're you doing?"

She turned to him with a smile, happy to be doing something that yielded tangible results, however slight. "I'm keeping a record of how many days we've been stranded here." She offered him the improvised cutter. "Would you like to help?"

It had obviously never occurred to her that his Heiko had a day/date function. Rick kept the fact to himself; her personal calendar seemed to lift her morale. "No thanks. You're doing fine. I'm gonna get back to work."

"See ya." Minmei grinned and watched him walk off, slinging his clipboard around his neck for another exploration-survey mission.

That was a brand-new paint job! He blew his breath out. It didn't matter anyway; Mockingbird would never fly again. Some help she is! Well, I don't suppose too much else can go wrong today.

Which was just when he clunked his forehead against a low-hanging pipe. Recoiling back in pain, he hit another with the back of his skull. Hissing in anger and pent-up frustration, he berated himself for not wearing the Veritech helmet as a hardhat.

But he refused to turn back. Marking off the different routes and possible escape paths available to them had seemed easy at first, until he'd come to realize what a tremendously complicated and far-reaching maze they were trapped in. He'd come to so many dead ends that he constantly saw them in his dreams.

Banging on pipes and bulkheads with the metal bar had produced no results, and even sending shorts and longs over a severed power cable was a failure. Depression was hard to fight off, and he couldn't bear the thought of what would happen if he didn't come up with a solution soon.

There was one long shot he hadn't mentioned to Minmei yet, not so much because it was a life-or-death risk for him but rather because, if he tried it and failed, she would be alone. Still, his alternatives were fewer and fewer with every passing hour.

When he finally dragged himself back to the plane after more fruitless searching, he was pleasantly surprised to see that he hadn't been the only one hard at work.

"Well, Rick, how do you like our new home?" Minmei asked him, eyes shining.

Rick broke into a smile for the first time he could recall. "It's great!" was all he could say.

Minmei had somehow figured out how to get the parachute out of the back of the pilot's seat-maybe after reading the ejection instruction plate, it occurred to him. It couldn't have been easy with Mockingbird hung upside down eight or nine feet off the deck.

More than that, she'd draped it over the ship to make a roomy red and

white striped tent. And best of all, she'd located the survival gear, set up the tiny camp stove, and put together a meal whose smell had his mouth watering until his jaws hurt.

The compartment lights were going dim according to SDF-1's twenty-four-hour day/night schedule. The two moved in under the tent, Rick sitting tailor-fashion while Minmei knelt by the stove, stirring with a plastic spoon.

"By making stew we can make our supplies last longer," she explained. Rick repented of his earlier thought-that she couldn't pull her own weight.

"That's right; I forgot," he said, determined to make it up to her. "You're in the restaurant business."

She was sprinkling bits of what seemed to be seasoning into the stew, only he couldn't remember spices being listed on the rations contents listings. Whatever she'd done, she'd come up with something that smelled heavenly.

"No, the White Dragon was my Aunt Lena's restaurant," Minmei responded, shrugging. She thought a moment, then added, "Actually, I want to be an entertainer."

Rick cocked his head in surprise. "You're planning on being an actress?"

"Well, I studied acting, singing, and dancing." She'd been dishing up his portion. "Here."

"Thanks." He was silent for a while, taken by the image of Minmei dancing. Then, "That doesn't exactly prepare you for something like this, huh." Ruefully, he looked down at his clipboard and the growing map of dead ends.

Five days went by.

"Can you believe they're rebuilding the city inside the ship?" someone was saying as Lisa Hayes entered the officers' wardroom. "It's amazing."

She saw by his insignia that he was a Veritech pilot off the Daedalus, one of the few who'd been in the air during the spacefold jump and had thus

been spared. He and his kind were like specters these days, watching whole new groups of pilots being crash-trained to fly the fighters that the carriers' dead could no longer man.

His comment about the refugees and their rebuilding was grudging. Open area of any kind in a naval or space vessel was always held dear, and now...

"You can leave the trays, steward," Claudia was saying at the table where she waited for Lisa. "Thank you very much. It smells wonderful."

"Yes, ma'am." The steward served awkwardly, a new recruit; everybody with military training had been tapped for higher-priority work these days, and it was most often serve yourself. But things were tough all over, and complaints were very few. This particular steward, Claudia had found out, was to be posted to a gunnery class next shift.

"So he expects me to volunteer and go out and get this castaway shelter module all alone, and I sez, 'Sir, I'm brave but I ain't crazy!"' the VT pilot continued.

"So you didn't volunteer," his tablemate said. "But did you go?"

The first pilot shrugged unhappily and made a zipping motion with his hand, thumb and pinkie spread to indicate a Veritech's wings. They both laughed tiredly.

Some things never change, Lisa thought. Contrary to what most civilians thought, real combat veterans seldom bragged among themselves of their heroism; it was a mark of high prestige to go on about how scared you were, how fouled up things were, how hairy the situation had gotten, how dumb the brass were. Because among them, everyone knew; boasts were for outsiders.

"Oh, there you are," Lisa said, collapsing into a chair across from Claudia.

Claudia lowered her coffee cup. "What's the latest on the refugees?"

Lisa pursed her lips, weighing the answer. "We finally have them divided by city blocks and the construction's going on twenty-four hours a day."

Claudia's dark eyes were unfocused with fatigue and with the strangeness of what had happened and what was going on.

She could only manage an understatement. "Really? That's incredible."

Gloval had known at once what must be done. His relentless effort to get the Macross survivors and as much salvageable and recyclable material aboard as was possible had yielded amazing results. It was the only way the humans could make the long voyage home.

Miles-square purse-seine nets had been devised overnight by the engineers to collect what could be collected of the wreckage. There'd been too many acts of individual valor to count or keep track of. Not the least of them was the work of the disposal teams, whose grim job was to remove the dead from the supercarriers and other areas where they were encountered.

Hold after hold in SDF-1 that had been reserved for future missions and future purposes that would never come to be were now filled with wreckage, and there were material stores that could be used as well. Robotech fabrication machines aboard the SDF-1 were the most advanced devices of their kind ever developed-the equivalent of an industrial city packed into a few compartments, minifactories that could replicate a staggering assortment of manufactured goods and materials.

As for blueprints and plans, they would be child's play for the SDF-1's computers, since all records of the city's construction, from the first permanent building constructed ten years earlier to the last, were in the ship's data banks.

More importantly, Gloval understood before anyone else aboard just what the long trip to Earth would entail. The civilians couldn't be expected to simply sit in packed emergency billets and twiddle their thumbs; that invited complete social breakdown, and disaster for the SDF-1.

The secret was well kept in subsequent mission reports and in announcements to the refugees, but it was Gloval's liaison officers who planted the seed of the idea: Why not rebuild Macross City?

The gouges of Minmei's calendar had multiplied: four verticals with a

crosshatch now, and two more besides.

Now Rick dreaded returning to the small light cast by the miniature camp stove, dreaded having Minmei pretend she wasn't disappointed by another day of bad news.

She'd begun explorations too, to double their chances, over his strenuous objection at first-but with his unspoken acceptance as things became more and more desperate.

Now he sank wearily onto his pallet, while she stirred the thin soup that was the very last stretching of their rations. He hadn't been able to find out how the mice were subsisting, but it wouldn't be very long before he and Minmei would be forced to start trying to catch them. He doubted that even she could make mouse stew taste very good.

He sat, trying to figure out how to phase his difficult decision. "No luck, huh?" Minmei said. "Why don't you rest?"

"Minmei," he began, head lowered on his knees, "I don't know what else to do. This ship is like a big prison maze."

"Yeah," she said without looking up, "a big prison floating somewhere in space."

It was an opening he hadn't expected, a chance to make his plan look hopeful, to make her optimistic. "That's it, of course! We're in space!" He tried to sound as though he'd just realized the implications of that.

She looked startled. "What about it?"

"That's our way out of here! Out that air lock we found and into another, somewhere farther above!"

She didn't understand. "We can't do that; we don't have any spacesuits."

He was already on his feet, the Veritech helmet taken down from its resting place. "My flight helmet will protect me. I'll float out, get help, and come back down here for you. It's simple! It'll work!"

He flipped up his flightsuit collar and ran his fingers along the automatic closure to show her how it formed a pressure seal and a collar ring that could be fitted to the helmet's.

She looked terribly confused. "Yes, but-"

"Now, I'm going to need your help," Rick said as he led the way with the flashlight. "So I'll show you how to use the air lock controls, okay?"

She trailed behind unwillingly, hands clasped behind her, silently accepting his help as they began ascending the mountain of packing crates and boxes again.

They reached the Zentraedi-scaled utility shelf near the power panel; it was the width of a country lane. The control dials were the size of wagon wheels, the buttons as big as her bedroom window. "You sure you understand everything?" he checked again.

"Mm-hmm." Then she said in a rush, "Without oxygen tanks, though, Rick? How're you going to breathe?"

"There's air in the helmet and some in the suit. I won't need much time." But he hurried along before she could pinpoint the problem that he'd already spotted: They'd explored the ship in every direction and found no nearby air locks. From this one, it would strain his scant supply of air to the very limits to reach another, even if one lay just beyond their prison.

He turned and started off before she could say anything more. "Wait!" cried Minmei, running after him. "I'm having second thoughts about all this! Rick?"

She ran after him, back around the turn in the shelf. "Where're we going?"

"I want to show you: You can stand by this big viewport here so we can communicate if we have to." The viewport was bigger than a movie screen.

She gasped and threw both hands up to her mouth, feet going pigeon-toed, eyes enormous.

He prepared his most matter-of-fact voice. "Minmei, what is it now?

You've gotta stop this constant worrying-huh?"

She wasn't looking at him. She was gaping over his shoulder at the viewport. He whirled. "Look... at... that!"

"I've never seen anything like it!" Minmei breathed. "What kind is it?"

At first he thought it was some kind of new prototype spacecraft, silvery and sleek, and he was already trying to figure a way to signal it. Then he was afraid it might be an alien ship, although it didn't look anything like a pod. But a second later he calmed down and saw what it really was, which was only slightly more fantastic than possibilities one and two.

"Offhand, I'd say it's a tuna," Rick ventured. "I didn't know they grew that big."

This one was as long as Mockingbird and appeared to be intact and whole. Why the forces of explosive decompression and vacuum hadn't turned it into something more like a radar-waved football, he couldn't imagine; he was unacquainted as yet with the very singular peculiarities of a Protoculture-generated force field.

It floated along like a schooner, as if it was keeping pace with them. "That sure is a big tuna fish," Minmei observed, licking her lips.

"Real big," Rick conceded. He turned to her, and they both yelled "Yay-yyy!" at the same instant, pressing their noses and palms up against the viewport. "I wonder if there's a way I could snag it out there," he said longingly.

They turned to each other, chorusing, "Tuna fish!"

Rick made sure the ring seal was as tight as he could make it. Seals at his wrists and ankles were reinforced with all the tape he'd been able to find and some turns of twine. The collar closure was wound tight with layer upon layer of cloth strips.

He realized he couldn't hear anything and opened the faceplate again. Minmei was yelling down to him, "Be careful out there! Wave when you're ready!"

He gave her the wave and closed the faceplate again, carrying his looped line back into the oversize air lock. Minmei said, "Here we go!" to herself and strained against a wagon wheel dial.

Rick did his best to keep calm as the inner hatch came down with a finality that made the deck jump and the air bled away. Next to him were a

pair of heavy tanks of some kind; he clutched them close. He felt the ship's artificial gravity easing off him.

When the air was gone and the outer hatch was open, he took careful bearing and pushed himself off, trailing the long rope behind. His suit was already becoming a steambath.

The tuna was obliging in that it didn't move much, but his aim was off. He threw one of the tanks from him in one direction, Newton's third law driving him off in the other.

There'd be no time for fumbling; if he missed, he'd have to go back in and refill his suit with air, get more ballast, and try again. Exhausted and depleted, he didn't know if he had the strength for that and didn't want to find out. He tucked the second tank into the looser cloth windings.

He pinwheeled, unused to zero gravity, forcing down the appalling thought of how he'd die if he lost control of his stomach now and gave in to zero-g nausea.

Then he was drifting toward a lifeless eye the diameter of a dinner platter. He spread his arms and bulldogged the tuna. The big fish spun slowly as Rick clung to the left side of its head. He belayed a loop around a pectoral fin as insurance.

He tried heaving the second tank to get the tuna moving toward the lock, but without much luck; the thing was weightless, but its mass hadn't changed, and its mass seemed immovable.

The line he'd played out behind him reached its end, stretching just a bit, an expensive composite made for deep-space work, stronger than steel. Rick was jolted, realizing that if he hadn't looped the fin, he'd have been snapped loose from the fish like a paddleball.

The line's elasticity absorbed the fish's movement and contracted, starting the tuna moving back for the lock. Rick felt his air getting short and fought the urge to use the fish as a launching platform-to kick off for the air lock and hope he could recover it later. He and Minmei could survive for a while longer without food, but not forever, and the fish would probably be the difference between life and death for them both.

He held on, straining at the line to speed things up. The air lock seemed a long way away, and his air very, very thin, making him groggy, while the fish moved as slowly as a glacier.

He shook his head to clear it, concentrating. Everything was blurry. Wasn't there some book about an old fisherman who hung on somehow? Rick was pretty sure his father had made him read it, but he couldn't recall it.

The hatch was before him. Had he been napping? He didn't have time to get out of the way, and the tuna trapped him against the deck, plowing him along. He felt some tiny seam give, and the air pressure in his suit began dropping.

He shoved hysterically, fighting his way out against the impossible mass, kicking off and fetching up against the miles-high inner hatch. He slammed it with his fists, breath and consciousness slipping away-forever, he knew, if he didn't get air soon.

The hiss got louder, and he located the stressed spot just as it began to go, holding it together with his hand, hooking one foot on some kind of cross member, hammering and hammering with his free fist. He didn't notice the jarring of the outer hatch.

Nor did he notice the return of gravity until it flipped him off the inner hatch. He sagged against the armored door, now only able to thump it feebly, the world going red in his vision, then increasingly dark.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

That suppressed longing of the Flower of Life, which desire generates the incalculable power of Protoculture, has its human equivalent. The interlude of the castaways is rich in insights as to those Greater Forces, so much more powerful than mere guns or missiles, that manifested themselves in the Robotech War.

Jan Morris, Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians

Rick almost fell to the deck on his face. The inner hatch had risen without his noticing it, and there was air all around him. Unfortunately, his helmet was still sealed.

Minmei raced for him, screaming something he couldn't hear. He reeled and staggered. At last, between them, they got the helmet off; he devoured air, his chest straining against the flight suit, sobbing on the exhale, but alive.

Minmei got a shoulder under his arm, steadying him as he sank to all fours. "I was so worried! I thought-" She didn't finish it.

"At least... I got the tuna back in," he labored. Catching his breath a bit, he straightened up and looked back over his shoulder into the lock, at his catch.

The fish had been thrust back when he kicked off from it and had been completely severed by the outer hatch; only the glassy-eyed head remained in the lock, and everything behind the gills was out drifting once more on some new vector.

"Or some of it, anyway," he amended. He wondered whether Minmei's aunt had taught her any recipes appropriate to the occasion.

"Hu-uuuh!" Rick observed, and sank to the cold deck.

Ushio jiru, a great delicacy, was more suited to the preparation of the porgy, exploiting the flavor and use of piscine parts Westerners usually

discarded. The version Aunt Lena had taught Minmei, however, did not start "Take one fish head one and one-half yards long."

That didn't make Rick's mouth water any less as the hapless fish sat staring at them out of a big vat; Mockingbird's jet fuel flamed through jury-rigged burners, and a delicious smell wafted out through the compartment.

"Why are you sitting there with such a sad look on your face?" Minmei prodded Rick. "You caught a fish in outer space! You were wonderful out there!"

Glumly, he sat with face cupped in hands. He'd underestimated her and had made a pact with himself to be honest with her from now on. "Thanks, but that little fishing trip ruined our chances of going out along the ship's hull." He showed her the rent that had appeared in his suit in the last instants before she had opened the inner hatch and saved him.

"We have no way to fix it. I don't know what we're gonna do." He hugged his knees, forehead sinking down against them.

"Maybe we could cut a hole in the roof and then climb right up," she proposed-anything to keep him from losing hope.

His head came up again. "I've already thought about that. I took some tools and climbed up to the ceiling yesterday. But it's like armor; I couldn't even make a dent in it."

Minmei gave the mountainous fish head a poke with her long sheet-metal fork. "What about an explosion?"

"What would we explode? The last of our fuel will run the camp stove a while longer, but it wouldn't even warm up this armor all around us."

Minmei prodded the fish head a little, trying to set it so it wouldn't topple. They'd lashed together some pitchforklike cooking tools, but those were pretty clumsy. They couldn't afford to spill the ushio jiru or waste any of the fish head; they might not have any other source of food for a long time.

She looked at the flame beneath the vat and wondered what would happen to them when the food, the fuel-perhaps even the air and

water-finally gave out.

Minmei's tally of the days had grown: four verticals crosshatched with a fifth, and another group of five, and two more besides, for a total of twelve. Neither of them mentioned the count anymore.

They would leave the stove on, a tiny orange-yellow flame, for just a little while after the compartment lights went out each night. It was unwise from the standpoint of conservation, of course, but it helped their morale a lot, talking for a while in the peaceful quiet of their tent before going to sleep. Rick found himself looking forward to those moments all day as he dragged himself around the maze, his hopes dashed over and over by dead ends.

But he was already thinking about the moment when the stove would flicker out for the last time. There was always the wood from the many packing crates, of course, but Rick wasn't sure what danger an open fire might constitute to the air supply. He was already mapping steam and hot water lines, looking for the best and nearest place to do their cooking, and trying to interpret the utility markings in order to improvise a little light during the night cycles and recharge his flashlight once Mockingbird's batteries were completely dead.

"And so I practiced as hard as I could-I didn't do much of anything else, I guess," he told Minmei. He was lying with his head pillowed on his arms, staring up at Mockingbird. Minmei lay across from him on her pallet, resting on one elbow. The soft light made her skin glow and her eyes liquid and deep.

"My dad grumbled a bit," he went on, "but he taught me everything he knew, and I came back to win that competition the next year. And I won it eight times in a row, even though I was only flying an old junker plane."

He stopped, wondering if it sounded like he was bragging. Then he dismissed the thought; Minmei knew him better than that. And he felt like he'd known her all his life-no, like he'd known her always.

She sighed, laying her head on her hands, watching him. "Rick?" she

said softly. "Do you think I'll ever get to fly with you again?"

He put all the conviction he could into his answer, trying to sound matter-of-fact. "Why, sure! Once we get rescued, I'll take you up whenever you want. That is, if you'll sing for me now and then."

She lay back, gazing up at the play of firelight on the inverted cockpit canopy. Their isolation had become their world, filling dreams as well as days.

Sometimes I dream of falling in love. She'd never dared mention it to

him.

Minmei began singing, a song she'd written and never shared with

anybody before. It took him a second to realize that he didn't recognize it.

"To be in love

My hero he must take me where no other can Where silver suns have golden moons,

Each year has thirteen Junes, That's what must be for me To be

In love."

"You've got a beautiful voice." He'd said it before; though he tried to think of some flowery new way to tell her, it always came out the same way.

She looked over at him again; he couldn't tell if she was blushing or not. "Thank you, Rick." She averted her eyes for a second, then looked to him again. "If I could do one thing with my life, it would be to sing. I couldn't live without singing."

"It's always been planes for me," he answered, even though she already knew that. "All I ever wanted to do was fly." Then he felt awkward for repeating what he must have told her a hundred times already.

But Minmei sat up, embracing her knees, nodding gravely. "I know how you feel, Rick. Sometimes you can't be happy unless you do what you dream about."

"So you're sure that being an entertainer is what you want from life?" "Yes, I guess." She added in a rush, "But what I really want is to be a

bride."

He was suddenly alert and wary. "Ah. You mean, married?"

She nodded, the long hair shimmering in the stove's light. "In my family, there's so much love-well, I've told you that already, haven't I? You'll simply have to meet them! They're wonderful and-that's the kind of joy I want in my life."

"I guess you'll probably make somebody a terrific wife," he said noncommittally.

She was suddenly sad again. "Thanks, but now I'll never have the chance."

"Don't you even think that, Minmei! I know we're gonna get out of here somehow!"

"It's been twelve days. And I'm sure they must have given up searching for us by now." Her voice had shrunk to a whisper. "We'll never get out of here."

He didn't know what to say. Before he could decide, there were squeaks and chitters and a faint rattling.

"It's those mice again! I'll get them this time!" Relieved at a chance to work off his frustration, he grabbed an empty can and sprang to the opening of the tent.

He hurled the can, and it clanked and bounced in the darkness, scattering the mice.

She was standing next to him. "We're never going to make it out of here alive. We're going to be here forever."

Her hands were clasped, and she was gazing sadly into the darkness. She suddenly sounded bitter. "We've been here too long. They've all forgotten about us by now."

"Minmei, I don't want to hear that kind of talk!"

"It's true! We've just got to face it." She stood with her back to him, looking out into a void darker than deep space. "We'll live our entire lives

right here in this ship. I'll never know what it's like to be a bride and start a whole new life."

She was weeping, unable to go on, her shoulders shaking. "Minmei," he said gently, "you will. I'll show you."

She sniffed. "How can you do that?"

"Um, we can have a ceremony right here. We can pretend."

She turned and came back to him, cheeks wet. "Oh, Rick, do you mean it?" He nodded slowly; Minmei wiped away her tears. "Then let me borrow your scarf?"

She unknotted it and drew it from around his neck, a long, white flier's scarf of fine silk, spreading it and carefully arranging it as a bridal veil.

"Minmei, you look beautiful. I-I guess I should be the groom, huh?" he said haltingly, then rolled his eyes at his own stupidity.

Minmei said nothing, holding her hand out. He took it. "Is this what we do next?"

She started to nod, then broke from her role, close to tears again. "Oh, Rick, why doesn't someone come and find us? I want to go home!"

"But you will, I promise you."

She squeezed his hand hard. "I'm just so scared." It sounded so small and forlorn in the huge, empty compartment.

"I know; so am I." He took her shoulders in his hands. "Come on, I'm telling you: We're gonna get out of here! There's got to be a way! We can't give up! I've never been a quitter, and you shouldn't be either!"

She pulled back out of his reach. "Stop it. That's all just silly talk! You know what's going to happen! We're going to die here!" She turned away, sobbing.

Rick stared at her, not knowing what to say. She was not quite sixteen, very much in love with life. "Minmei, it's not silly talk. I really believe it. You mustn't give up. I'm doing my best." He gestured vaguely. "I'm sorry."

She turned back to him. "No, Rick; I'm the one who should apologize.

It's just that-" She threw herself into his arms. "I'm being so stupid-" He held her close. "That's not true."

She turned her face up to his. "Kiss me, Rick." "If you're sure..."

She closed her eyes, and they kissed.

It seemed to them that their lips had barely touched when there was a concussion that shook the deck, shook that whole part of the ship, like the crack of doomsday, nearly sending them sprawling. The Mockingbird and their camp disappeared under tons of metal alloy. They barely kept their feet, holding each other in their arms.

Suddenly there was something-the Leaning Tower of Robotech! Rick thought wildly-canted to one side in its lodging place, having penetrated the deck above, the one totally immune to Rick's tools. Light shone down into the compartment.

Not just light; it looks like SUNLIGHT! Minmei thought, though she didn't understand how that could possibly be. Wasn't it night all over the ship?

Long shafts of artificial light-flashlights-probed down into the dust and smoke of the sealed-off compartment. There were voices.

"What was that? An enemy missile?"

"Looked to me like a bomb!" Human figures were gathering around the jagged entrance hole of the metal juggernaut that had struck daylight into Rick and Minmei's prison.

"Naw," somebody drawled. "New converter subunit from the ceiling level, according to Control. Mounting gave way."

The beams played this way and that while the castaways watched, too astounded to speak. Then one light found them, and another, and in a second four or five converged on them.

"Hey! There's somebody down there!" "It looks like a coupla kids!"

They held each other close, not sure what might have happened to the rest of the universe in twelve song days and nights. The harsh flashlight beams sent shadows away from them in different directions.

Then a familiar voice said, "Why, that looks like Minmei down there!"

It came from a squat, broad figure gazing down at the very edge of the abyss.

Minmei's grip on Rick tightened. "It's the mayor! Rick, Rick, we're saved!" She hugged him but then let go, moving into the center spotlight to wave.

Rick dropped his arms to his side and wondered why he wasn't as ecstatic as he thought he'd be.

It took only a few minutes to get a crane rigged with a bucket to lift them out; there was construction equipment all over that part of SDF-1. They were lifted up into more intense light than they'd seen in nearly two weeks. But that was hardly noticeable, insignificant against the shock of the new world in which they found themselves.

"Are we dreaming or something?" Minmei clung to the bucket's rail. "What in the world is going on here?"

They were looking around them at broad streets and tall buildings, signs, lamp posts, marquees, and throngs of people. They were looking at Macross City, except that far overhead was the expanse of a spacecraft's metal "ceiling." A far-reaching lighting system had already been set up to give Earth-normal illumination. The crowds were pointing at them and gabbling and yelling.

"I can't believe it," he muttered. "The whole city's here."

The bucket set them down to one side of the hole in the deck. Minmei was about to climb out when she gasped and pointed. "Oh, Rick, look!"

He remembered the corner well; he'd done enough crashing around on it in a Battloid he couldn't steer. Except these buildings all looked new, bright with fresh paint.

"The White Dragon and Aunt Lena's house are right here!" She was already clambering out of the bucket.

There's no place like home, Rick thought sourly, not remembering whether or not he'd clicked the heels of his ruby slippers.

He felt a little woozy, and there were a lot of confusing images, one on top of another, after that. A tiny dynamo came dodging out of the crowd.

Jason threw himself into Minmei's arms, and the cousins hugged each other and cried.

Mayor Tommy Luan was slapping Rick on the back and saying things like "As you can see, m'boy, the entire city's been rebuilt! Now, we've got to get you rested up and hear what happened to you; you've been gone for almost two weeks!"

Minmei's Uncle Max had more to add, pumping Rick's hand with the powerful grip of a lifelong worker. "I appreciate the protection you provided our baby girl!"

"Uh, don't mention it," Rick said vaguely. He suddenly wanted very much to sit down. Then he caught other nearby voices.

People were gathered around Minmei, Macross City people who knew her and regarded her as part of their extended family, not a castaway and a stranger-not as they would regard Rick.

"Oh, it was so frightening down there," she was telling her audience, wide-eyed. "You have no idea!"

"Oh, I can imagine," a woman said, while people nodded and murmured in agreement.

A godlike voice echoed through the strange, metal-boundaried world of the new Macross City, startling Rick. "Attention! Message from the bridge!"

He thought it was a voice he'd heard before somewhere, but he was too disoriented to place it. "The disturbance in Sector Seven-X was caused by a construction accident. There were no injuries. The damage will be cleared up very shortly. All divisions revert to normal status."

Where'd I hear that voice before? he wondered.

Minmei was regaling people now; she had the crowd in the palm of her hand. "Oh! And the mice!"

The onlookers laughed in anticipation, though they had no idea what the mice story was all about. Rick waited for her to catch his eye and draw him into the center of attention, but she was focused on her performance now.

A bad dream, he told himself, not sure if he meant the long wait below

or coming back to a too-bright, too-loud, too-strange world.

"Well, m'boy, you must be one happy fella right now, by golly, huh?" Tommy Luan said, and slapped him on the back again in a man-to-man fashion. The mayor was built like a barrel weighted with cannonballs; the slap sent Rick teetering over to the deck.

It felt nice and comfortable there. He didn't have the strength to get up anyway and didn't think anybody would miss him if he just napped for a little while.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Heroism? Perseverance? When it comes to the story of Macross City and its citizens, we're talking about a whole lot of new superlatives for those concepts.

Mayor Tommy Luan, The High Office

It feels so much like home, Minmei thought, wiping down the table, even though it's not.

There were little differences that let her know she wasn't really in the original White Dragon, but she could ignore them-ignore them happily-after her imprisonment in the deserted portion of SDF-1.

So, waiting for her uncle and aunt to return, she cleaned the place up the way she'd done back in Macross City. The furniture felt a little strange, lighter and far stronger than the wooden stuff she was used to, fabricated by Robotech equipment out of reprocessed wreckage; but it looked close enough to the original tables and chairs to make her feel like she was home again. She worked happily, humming, not realizing that the tune was the "Wedding March."

The front doors swept apart, just like the ones back on Macross Island, and her uncle and aunt came in. "We wasted half the day standing on line for this," Uncle Max was grousing, shaking a food ration package no bigger than a good-size book.

She thought again what a strange pair they made, her uncle broad and substantial as a boulder, barely coming shoulder-high to his willowy, serene wife. And yet when Minmei thought about what it meant to be completely in love, she often thought about these two.

"We're lucky to have anything," Lena reminded him gently.

The SDF-1 had been equipped and supplied for a variety of missions, but not for feeding tens of thousands of refugees. Aeroponic and hydroponic farms and protein-growth vats were already in operation, but for the time

being the dimensional fortress's stores, and the supplies salvaged from the shelters, were the extent of the food supply. Those were quite considerable, rumor had it, but rumor also had it that SDF-1 faced a very long trip back to Earth, and Captain Gloval was being careful.

"Hi, you two!" Minmei said brightly. "Welcome home! How'd it go?"

Aunt Lena tried to put on a cheerful expression. "About as well as could be expected, I guess."

"I'm feeling much better now," Minmei said, gesturing around to show them the progress she'd made toward putting the place in order. Uncle Max looked around despondently; it was so much like the White Dragon that was gone forever.

"I'm glad to hear that," Aunt Lena said. "And how's Rick? Is he up yet?"

When the medics released him, Aunt Lena and Uncle Max had insisted that Rick stay in a spare bedroom in the rebuilt restaurant until he was fully recovered. "I suppose he's still in bed," Minmei said. "I haven't heard him moving around up there."

"I'm not surprised." Lena smiled. "After watching over you for two weeks, he probably deserves a rest."

Minmei grinned. "I guess you're right about that. Oh, by the way, are you going to leave everything like this or will you reopen the restaurant?"

"What d'you mean reopen the restaurant?" Uncle Max exploded, though she could hear the sudden hope in his voice.

Minmei gestured around at the stacked chairs and boxed flatware and bundles of table linen. The White Dragon, which originally stood at the virtual center of Macross City, had served as a kind of field test for the engineers seeking to help the Macross City survivors rebuild their lives, an experiment to see if a piece of the city could be reproduced down to the last detail. There were working dishwashers and ovens and sinks and rest rooms, freezers and refrigerators, lighting and a sound system.

The only thing that was different was that there were no garbage pails or dumpsters. A system of oubliettes was being built into the new Macross City because everything-everything-would have to be recycled and reused. It

made perfect sense to Minmei, who'd known thirst and hunger and other privations well in the past two weeks; anyone who couldn't see that was just being stupid.

"We have everything we need," she pointed out. "It'll be fun!"

She saw a rekindling in Uncle Max's eyes, but he said slowly, "Maybe so, but it'd be awfully difficult to run a restaurant when these are all the rations they give at one time." He shook the book-size box. "For four of us, for today."

"But you kept your place open all through the war!" Minmei cried. Uncle Max ran his hand through the tight black curls on his head. Aunt

Lena looked shocked, but happy. "Whff! That was much different," Max said. Then he reconsidered.

"Well, the army had imposed rationing then too..."

"But-we're living inside a spaceship, Minmei," Lena said.

"But the main problem right now isn't shortages, right?" Minmei reminded her. "It's distribution and control. We've got thousands of people spending half the day on line! How's anybody gonna get anything done? That's the ultimate in stupidity!"

She saw that they were getting the point. "Aunt Lena, once the authorities know you're reopening the White Dragon, they'll give you all the supplies you want! And it wouldn't surprise me if they put us all on salary as food distribution specialists!"

"And people can pay us with their ration cards; the army pays at least part of the overhead; there's room for a little markup, I would think; the tips are pure profit, whether they're in military script or in goods or service IOUs; and we'll get that new bookkeeping computer they're setting up to keep track of cost/profit margin!"

She was out of breath but triumphant. And she could see from their faces that she'd sold her aunt and uncle. "What d'you think?"

Uncle Max rubbed the back of his neck, wanting very badly to believe it. "I suppose it doesn't sound like a bad idea, after all."

"I guess so," Aunt Lena allowed. She drew in a great breath, looking at

Minmei. "Doing business as usual is the answer to a lot of problems, right?" Minmei nodded until her hair was rippling around her.

"Right!" barked Uncle Max. "Let's get cracking! Full steam ahead!" He laughed, full-throated, at the dark starburst of happiness in his wife's eyes and at Minmei's gasp.

"Wait just a second!" Minmei dashed off, hair whipping behind her. "I'll be right back! I'm just gonna change my clothes!" Mandarin dresses were no problem at all for computer-directed fabrication units that had reproduced alien technologies.

Uncle Max expanded his chest in pride. Aunt Lena put her arm around his broad shoulders and said, "I'm glad she's excited."

He nodded. "I only hope we're not making a mistake about this." Lena kissed him tenderly. "We're not."

"Careful, that's it," Uncle Max instructed anxiously as he and Minmei carried the little stand out onto the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. "Now turn it around. Good!"

"Everybody'll see this!" Minmei said excitedly. The stand was covered with a bright red and yellow silk cloth announcing the restaurant's name in Chinese characters. Minmei's elegant mandarin dress was made of the same stuff. She'd arranged her hair in large buns with a braid to one side, weaving a rope of pearls into the coiffure.

She was so intent on her work that she almost collided with the mayor and his wife, who stared in surprise. "Well, well, what's all this about?"

Minmei replied, "A little surprise, Mr. Mayor. We're reopening our restaurant!"

Tommy Luan's eyebrows shot up. "Have you all gone completely crazy? Has it ever occurred to you that we're at the edge of the universe in the belly of a spaceship?"

"Why, no, we never thought of that," she said tartly. But then she gave him her sunniest smile. "But honestly, that doesn't mean we shouldn't make the best of things, does it? I think we can still have normal lives. After all,

this is still our good old hometown, isn't it?"

She indicated the town. It was already an everyday thing for traffic to be moving around the streets-not just military vehicles but cars and trucks that had been salvaged after the spacefold jump as well.

One thing was for sure, the mayor knew: When the diversion of rebuilding the city was over, and that would be soon, the refugees would need something else to occupy them. And as she so often did, Minmei had seen to the heart of things.

"By gosh, you're right!" the mayor said excitedly. To get back to life as usual-how grand that would be! His head was suddenly swimming with ideas for restoring normality to refugee life, but he was distracted as a four-seater troop carrier pulled to the curb with a squeal of tires and a beep of its horn.

Three Veritech pilots sat there, gazing at the restaurant as if it were a three-headed dinosaur. "We saw it but we couldn't believe it!" the jeep's driver said. "Are you really open?"

"We certainly are!" Minmei said proudly.

They looked a little dazed as she led them inside, seated them, and brought glasses of ice water. "Welcome to the first Chinese restaurant in outer space," she beamed, distributing menus.

"Thanks; it's an honor to be here," the driver said. "Hey, you're that girl Minmei everybody's been talking about, huh? I'll bet you had some incredible adventures."

"Sometimes it was pretty scary," she admitted.

The biggest of the three, the one who'd been sitting in the back of the carrier, said in a sly tone, "I heard it was just you and whatshisname, that kid, alone for two weeks. What'd you do all that time?"

She blinked. "What do you mean?"

"Oh, I think you know," the big guy said. "C'mon, it's obvious," the third one said.

"You make me sick!" she fumed, turning her back on them.

"You mean nothing happened?" the big one persisted. "Nothing at all?"

She whirled. "Yes, that's exactly right!"

"Speaking of whatshisname," the driver said, "is he still around? I mean, I heard he was living here or something."

Minmei answered carefully. "Yes, he's renting a room upstairs from my aunt and uncle. Why?"

The driver shrugged. "You're saying that with all you two went through together, nothing happened? You didn't fall in love or anything?"

"Don't be ridiculous! Rick is just a friend! Now, are you three gonna order or are you gonna leave?"

Rick, poised on the stairs, had heard enough. As the pilots hastened to order chow mein, he turned and went back up to his room.

He sat on his bed and stared glumly at the wall. So, we're just friends, huh? He remembered the feel of her in his arms, the electric thrill as they kissed.

After everything that happened, the next day we're just friends. He knew Minmei could be stubborn, but on this subject she was just going to have to change her mind.

The engineering section was a hive of activity where every tech, scientist, and specialist available was working twelve-, eighteen-, sometimes twenty-hour days.

Gloval, by his own order, was ignored as he entered, not wishing to break anyone's concentration even for a moment. "Doctor Lang, what do you think? Is the main gun usable or not?"

Lang gave Gloval a brisk salute from habit. The strange whiteless eyes were still mystical, dark. "Look at this schematic, sir."

Lang projected a diagram of SDF-1 on a big wall screen. "This is a first-level depiction of the primary reflex furnace, our power plant. And there you see the energy conversion unit for the main gun. Between the two is the energy conduit for the fold system."

He gave a bitter smile. "Was, I should say."

"Which means that after the fold system disappeared, the gun's power source was separated from it, correct?" Gloval asked. "What are you planning to do, since we haven't much spare conduit left?"

And, ironically, conduit was one of the very few things the fabricators couldn't reproduce with materials at hand. But the main gun was SDF-1's hope of survival; Gloval studied Lang, hoping the man had an answer.

Lang assumed the tone he'd used in his lectures back on Earth. "The SDF-1's construction is Robotech construction, sir. That is, the ship is modular, as our Veritech fighters are modular. Variable geometry, you see."

Lang ran a series of illustrations to show what he meant. "So, simplistically speaking, we should by all rights be able to reconfigure the ship, altering its structure in such a way as to bridge the gap that now exists between the main gun and its power source."

It was all a little breathtaking and bold; the proposed reconfiguration, with modules realigned in new shapes, was radically different from the SDF-1 as she now existed.

Gloval felt very uneasy. Lang went on, "The problem, very simply, is that until this modular transformation is completed, the main gun cannot be fired."

Lang gestured to the diagrams. "There are going to be major changes, both internally and externally. Of course, the rebuilding of the city and the other modifications made by and for the refugees were never planned for in the ship's construction. I anticipate considerable damage. It's going to be quite a mess for a while."

Gloval was staring at the diagrams, haunted by the awful scenes he'd been forced to witness out the SDF-1 bridge viewport after the spacefold. Mention of structural conversions and damage automatically made alarm bells go off in any seasoned spacer's head; despite Lang's cool calculations, the risk wasn't just of damage-it was of utter disaster.

"Don't we have any other way to fire the main gun, Doctor?"

"You mean besides a modular transformation, sir? No other way that I know of."

Gloval turned away from the screen angrily. "We just can't! The people are only now getting used to being here, trying to patch their lives back together. To subject them to such chaos and perhaps lose more lives-no, it would be just too much."

But a small part of him feared that the decision wasn't that simple; events could force his hand.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Rick Hunter who crashed in that hold would never have listened to Roy Fokker. The one who came out...

Well, it's just funny how things happen sometimes, isn't it?

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

Can I have two more orders of egg foo yong and a milk shake, please?" the air crewman yelled over the din in the White Dragon.

"Milk shake?" Minmei shivered at the thought, but she put the order in anyway. Uncle Max didn't seem to mind in the least; he was happier than she'd ever seen him, doing the work of three men back in the kitchen, performing miracles with stove and wok.

And the place was packed; word had gotten around even faster than Minmei had hoped. The SDF-1 liaison officers were overjoyed at this solution to their food distribution headaches and provided incentive packages to get the whole population to resume as normal a life as was possible under the circumstances.

Minmei turned, then burst into a smile. "Oh, hi, Rick!"

But he gave no sign of having heard her, slouching toward the door with hands in pockets. Minmei watched him go, her brows knit, suddenly worried and confused.

The hangar bay was dark, quiet as a tomb. Very appropriate, Rick thought.

He pulled the bright red-and-white striped chute off the dashed remains of Mockingbird just enough to be able to gaze down at a flattened section of engine. The racer was wreckage and would never be anything else again. He still couldn't bring himself to accept that, and so he forced himself to stare, to acknowledge.

He shook his head. "Boy, what a mess."

"Hey, Rick!" It was Roy, stepping into the little circle of light. "Now, show me this junk pile."

Rick came to his feet, fists balled. "Listen, buddy, this is the racer I won eight international championships in. You call it junk? I oughta knock your block off, Roy!"

Roy kneeled to take a better look at Mockingbird's remains. "Actually, it's very nice junk. But-them's the breaks, kiddo."

Rick seemed about to explode.

"Hey, I've got an idea." Roy grinned. "Let's take a walk, okay?"

Rick looked startled. "I've never seen you so depressed in my life," Roy went on. "What you need is exercise!" He came over to put an arm around his friend's shoulders. "Try it! You'll like it!"

Roy's walk took them to the uppermost part of SDF-1 for an astonishing view.

From the lounge of the officers' club, Rick found himself looking down on the Daedalus. "Wow! An aircraft carrier connected to the Robotech ship?"

There was a long elbowlike housing holding the carrier fast. Rick could see that the ship had been patched and made airtight and was in service. All six bow and waist cats appeared to be in operation. As he watched, an elevator brought up two Veritechs for launch.

The Thor-class supercarrier, almost fifteen hundred feet long, had undergone a lot of other modifications. Most conspicuously, its "island"-the towerlike superstructure that had once dominated the flight deck and been the Daedalus's bridge-had been removed to leave the deck perfectly flat. All flight operations had been combined in the SDF-1's command center, and the salvaged materials and equipment had been used in the design changes.

The Veritechs spread their wings, not for the sake of aerodynamics but rather because the wider placement of thrusters gave them better control. The hookup men and cat crews, now spacesuited and still color-coded according to their jobs, went through the time-honored routine.

As Rick watched, a bow cat officer pointed to his "shooter," the man who actually gave the order to launch. The cat officer signalled the Veritech pilot with a wave of a flashlight, pointing toward the bow, dropping to one knee to avoid being accidentally hit by a wing.

The fighter was accelerated off the flatdeck's hurricane bow at almost 200 knots-not because airspeed was necessary in the airlessness of space but to get the Veritech launched and clear of the ship in a hurry, as it would have to be in combat, so as not to be a sitting duck for alien pilots.

The Veritech banked and soared away. Rick had to remind himself that it was flying in total vacuum; Robotech control systems made the operation of a fighter very much a matter of thought, and the Veritech pilots were used to thinking in terms of atmospheric flying. And so the Veritechs flew that way; it was wasteful of power, but power was something Robotech ships, with their reactor drives, had in great supply.

Rick watched longingly. "Terrific."

"How'd you like to fly one again?" Roy clapped Rick on the shoulder. Rick spun on him. "What are you saying?"

"Join us, Rick. Become a Veritech pilot and stop all this moping around."

Rick's expression hardened. "I don't want to be a fighter pilot."

"Oh? You'd rather drag yourself around the SDF-1 like a lovesick idiot?

Well?"

Rick broke loose of Roy's hand, turning away. "Roy?" he said over his shoulder.

"Yeah?"

"Roy, I think I'm-I mean, do you think it's possible for girls to change overnight? Completely?"

"How's that again?"

"Can a girl simply change from what she was the day before?"

"I don't think you have to worry about that. Minmei thought you were depressed, and it was her idea for me to bring you up here and have a tittle chat."

Roy slapped him on the back, knocking a little of the breath from him. "So just cheer up and go back to Minmei, kid; she's waiting for you."

He walked off, chuckling to himself, but paused to call back, "Oh, one more thing: Girls like her can be sort of flighty sometimes, know what I mean? You better be careful some guy in uniform doesn't catch her eye. See ya."

Across the solar system, maintaining position relative to Earth's nearby moon, the Zentraedi armada hung like a seaful of bloodthirsty fish.

Breetai returned to his command post in response to Exedore's request. "Traps-vid records of the aliens, you say?"

Exedore kowtowed to his lord. "Yes, they were just recovered from a disabled scout pod. And they confirm absolutely the eyewitness accounts of our warriors. If you would care to study them, Commander..."

A projecbeam drew an image in midair. The recorder's point of view was a fast-moving, almost bewildering sweep through the carnage and fury of the battle in the streets of Macross City. Explosions and fire were everywhere, but now and again there were split-second glimpses of the aliens, mostly fleeing or falling.

"I believe you'll find this intriguing," Exedore said. Then suddenly a pod loomed close by one of the inhabitants of the planet, and for the first time Breetai got a feeling of scale.

His voice reverberated in shock and anger, a guttural to shake the bulkheads. "So! It's true! Micronians!"

The traps-vid record cut to another shot that left no doubt: a human figure falling to its death from a high building, knocked off along with debris by the enormous foot of a pod.

"Precisely," Exedore said delicately.

"So the inhabitants here are Micronians, eh?" Breetai scowled. The conflicting emotions held by the Zentraedi toward normal-size humanoids-'Micronians,' as the giant warriors contemptuously referred to them-welled up in him. There was disdain and hatred but also something

strangely close to fear.

"I brought the traps-vids to you as soon as I saw them," Exedore said. "They present us with a very unpleasant new situation. During my researches into the origins of the Micronians in our most ancient records, I encountered a decree from our dimmest histories.

"It directs us to shun contact with any unknown Micronian planet-and threatens disaster if we do not heed it."

Breetai's face looked like a graven image. "So I'm to keep my hands off this Earth, eh? Bah!"

"It is my considered opinion, m'lord," Exedore insisted, "that we must cease hostilities with this planet immediately. We now have a fix on the battle fortress; I consider it prudent counsel that we make its capture our priority." The pinpoint pupils bored into Breetai, unblinking.

Breetai knew that Exedore would drop his usual deference only for a matter of vital importance. Breetai, like all Zentraedi, had absorbed his race's legends and superstitions along with its lore and warrior code. Like them all, he felt a twinge of apprehension at the thought of defying his heritage.

It was in his mind to object-to say that Exedore's stricture came from the days when the Zentraedi's numbers were fewer, their ships less mighty, their weapons not as powerful. But he considered Exedore: the repository of most of the lore and learning of the Zentraedi race. In a way, the diminutive, physically weak Exedore embodied his people. And Exedore seemed to have no doubts about the correct course in this instance.

"Very well, then. We will execute a spacefold, immediately and pursue the dimensional fortress."

Exedore bowed. "It shall be done."

"And see to it that an appropriate reconnaissance vessel is sent out at once upon completion of the fold maneuver."

Exedore knew what "appropriate" meant; they had discussed Breetai's strategy for dealing with the SDF-1. Exedore bowed again. "Yes, m'lord."

"Oh, you're back, Rick! Anything special on your mind?"

Rick paused with his knuckles poised to rap on Minmei's door. It was a red door she'd chosen to decorate with a whimsical pink rabbit's head bearing her name. He'd wavered quite a bit before finally drawing a deep breath and preparing to knock on it.

Only to find her standing in the hall behind him. "Uh, nothing, Minmei-really..."

She burst into one of those captivating laughs, eyes crinkling. "I'm sure! C'mon in, Rick." She opened the door and led the way. "Make yourself at home."

It was a bright little room, painted in shades of blue and yellow, easy on the eyes and not overfurnished. Bed, lamps, bookshelf, and a handmade throw rug; a few flowers very beautifully arranged-thoughtfully arranged-in a small antique vase. There were stuffed toys, too, and a favorite purse. It was a room of seeming clashes that somehow gave the impression of oneness-like its occupant.

Minmei sat on the bed. "Oh, could you open the window?" "Right; glad to."

He slid the window aside, not that the air in the rest of the ship was very much different from that in Minmei's room. But here over the restaurant it was a little warmer than outside, and with the window opened more of the slight, never-ending breeze from the SDF-1's circulation system could be felt. It was as much like getting "fresh air" as people in the dimensional fortress could expect.

Minmei folded one leg under her. "So, what happened?"

"Not much. But it's nice to be back here." He looked around her place to avoid meeting her gaze and to give himself time to build up courage to say what he had to say.

His eyes lit on an envelope lying on her dresser. "Hey, don't tell me you got mail!" He picked it up and looked it over.

"That's what I went back for," she said, watching him. "That and my diary-when you rescued me." She shivered, remembering the concussions of

the pod's titanic feet crashing down, nearer and nearer, behind her.

It had plainly been reread over and over. "A love letter, hmm?" The thought made him so depressed that he ignored the warmth in what she'd just said.

"Don't be silly! You can take a look at it if you like."

He did. It took him a minute to figure out what he was looking at. "What's this all ab- A singing audition? It says you, um, got to the preliminaries."

Her eyes were dancing. "That's right! I can hardly believe it!"

He read on. "This says you were accepted for the Miss Macross competition. Miss Macross?"

He wondered for a moment why she'd never told him about that in the long imprisonment they'd shared down in SDF-1's sealed nether regions. But then, he realized there were things he'd never shared with her, either.

"Uh huh!" Minmei was giggling.

Rick put the letter down slowly. "Well, I guess it's no surprise. Minmei, you really sing well."

"Thank you, Rick." But the joy abruptly changed to a faraway look, a sadness. She rose from the bed and went to the window to look out on Macross and the bulkheads and overheads that hung in the distance like the end of the world.

"But this isn't the Earth, and people there have forgotten about this contest, so it's all kind of pointless, isn't it? Who cares if I'm a star here?"

It was the first time he'd seen her great thirst to be famous and successful; in their imprisonment it had seemed such a distant, implausible thing. But now it was clear that it was what she lived for.

He looked at the letter again. "Minmei, don't be sad. You can always audition again when we get back to Earth."

"If we get back to Earth."

He had no ready comeback for that. They both knew how desperate the situation was, how terrible the enemy. As they gazed at each other a skycrane went by the window, floating a prefab condo module toward its

destination. The illusion of home all around them only made them that much more homesick.

"Rick? Do you ever dream?"

He was surprised, answering hesitantly. "I used to have a dream. Now it's a pile of junk in a hangar bay up on the flight deck levels."

"Mockingbird."

"Yeah." And I won't let my father down! I'm not going to be part of this war or any war! So-I guess I might as well get used to being a passenger.

"I'm never gonna have another dream again, Minmei. They hurt too much when they die."

She hung her head. "Oh, Rick."

He wondered if it had occurred to her that he wasn't just talking about Mockingbird, wondered if she ever remembered that one kiss...

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

They still thought of mechamorphosis, of transformation and in fact transfiguration, as an unlooked-for last resort and a sort of desperate aberration. There was no point in my telling them that it was all in the nature of Robotechnology; they would come to understand that for themselves.

Dr. Emil Lang, Technical Recordings and Notes

"We register a defold reaction," reported a voice from the monitor-lit cavern of the sensor operations center, "at the following coordinates."

Up on the bridge, Vanessa forced down her dismay as she relayed the information to Captain Gloval. "Radar reports unidentified object, bearing six-two-seven-seven, possibly of alien origin."

The information was pouring in quickly; Lisa correlated it at her duty station. "Enemy starships," she confirmed.

Gloval rose slowly and crossed to peer over her shoulder. "So, they've come at last." He stood looking down at the huge "paint," the wide splotch on the radar screen that indicated the enemy.

Claudia and the rest of the bridge gang took a moment to gaze too.

"All right, then," Gloval said. "Prepare to repel attack and launch an immediate counterattack."

"Aye-aye, Captain." Lisa moved with precision, sounding the alarms that were her province, speaking into a handset.

"Enemy attack. I say again, enemy attack. This is not a drill. Scramble all Veritechs. Scramble all Veritechs."

As general quarters sounded, the SDF-1 and its attached supercarriers became scenes of frantic activity. Men charged to their planes, some of them to fly combat for the first time, as plane crews and launch crews, flight controllers and cat crews, all braced for the manic haste.

The hangar decks and flight decks were in a well-ordered turmoil. Elevators raised flight after flight of fighters to the flatdecks' waist and bow

cats, and even more Veritechs blazed angrily from SDF-1's bays.

Roy Fokker pulled on his helmet, checking out his own ship's status and the rest of Skull Team's as well. It so happened that they were taking off from Daedalus after a familiarization mission; Skull's usual berth was in a bay on the dimensional fortress.

But they were all experienced naval aviators. The hookup man had made the connections to the bow cat, and the blast deflector had been raised from the deck behind Roy's Veritech. The cat officer had her right hand up high, two fingers extended, waving it with a rapid motion.

This particular catapult officer, Roy knew, was a good one: Moira Flynn, who'd been reassigned to SDF-1 from the Daedalus and had thus been spared the horrible fate so many of her shipmates had suffered in the wake of the miscalculated spacefold. Moira and the other old hands had worked like coolies in the reorganization, training new crews for the fearsomely dangerous job of working a flight deck.

Troubleshooters made a last quick eyeball inspection of the fighter in a fast walkdown along either side and found no reason to abort launch. The cat officer registered their thumbs-up reports; some things hadn't changed much since the early days of carrier flying and visual signals were the communication of choice, even though the suit helmets had radios. Verbal communication among so many people would have made any communications net chaos.

The hookup man was clear, and Moira Flynn pointed to Roy. Fokker replied with a sharp salute to signal his readiness, cutting his hand away from the brow of his helmet smartly.

The cat officer turned to point at her shooter to alert the man for a launch, then turned as in some punctilious dance to make a last check that the deck was clear for launch. Roy felt his stomach get tight, as it always did. The cat officer turned back to the fighter, kneeling in what looked like a genuflection so as to be clear of the launch in case of catapult or Veritech malfunction. Lieutenant Flynn gave final, ritual clearance, pointing along the track of the cat, with her flashlight, into the void, in a pose like a javelin

thrower who'd just released.

Her shooter hit the button, brought both hands together in signal, and ducked, as per procedure.

Roy felt himself shoved at 200 knots along Daedalus's deck. All the catapults had had to be recalibrated because, while there was gravity on the flight decks now thanks to equipment from SDF-1, there was no air resistance.

Skull Leader's fighter shot forth over the ship's hurricane bow, going out straight as an arrow to avoid a collision with ships being launched from the waist cats. Another Veritech was about to be launched from the center bow cat, and it would bank starboard. A third was about to be guided into the slot of the third bow cat; a fourth was about to be guided into the slot Roy had just abandoned.

The Veritechs launched, one after another, all over the reconfigured SDF-1. The blue novas of their drives lit the darkness of the solar system's edge as they formed up and went to meet their enemies once again.

It promised to be a proper park someday, but now it wasn't much more than a patch of unproductive soil atop a castlelike upthrust of interior equipment overlooking Macross City. But somebody had planted trees and shrubbery, and somehow they were being kept alive. Rick suspected that it was the work of homesick Macross refugees rather than any official project. Up here, the gigantic citycompartment's overhead lights were close.

Minmei led the way to the low railing. "What a view!"

Rick grunted, shuffling along behind her with his hands in his pockets. He supposed that she was right; the city lay at their feet, and there probably wasn't a better vista of human-type scenery within a billion miles. He sank down on the wide railing, looking at the ground rather than at the city.

Minmei didn't notice his depression, too taken with the scene. "It's so-" she started to say, just as the general quarters alarms cut loose and Lisa Hayes started making her announcements. Rick recognized the voice and decided he disliked it more than he'd thought possible.

"Will we be all right?" Minmei asked him as another voice started to yammer about air raid warnings.

He kicked a bit of dirt. "Don't worry. Roy'll take care of it. As usual." She put her hands on hips. "How come you're always talking about

Roy's flying? You're just as good a pilot as he is, any day!"

He looked away at that, up to the ceiling lights. Alarms wailed, and he wondered what Big Brother was doing.

Just then, Roy was leading Skull Team in the most furious dogfight he'd ever seen, as wave after wave of pods came in at the SDF-1. Zentraedi energy blasts and missiles flashed in all directions as the dimensional fortress's defensive batteries blazed away. The special Veritech autocannon ammo, designed to fire in airless space, was even more powerful and accurate there than in atmosphere.

There were explosions and more explosions, all in the eerie quiet of vacuum. Except the tac nets weren't quiet; if the explosions emitted no sound, the screams of dying men made up for that.

Every Veritech squadron rehearsal and drill went out the window; in the utter madness that swirled around the SDF-1, the pilots found that they could keep tight with their wingmen and engage the enemy only as the opportunity arose. It was a cloud of dogfighting like nothing that had ever gone before it in human history-fireballs created by exploding spacecraft, perhaps a half dozen of them at a time, and the relentless lancing of beam weapons and autocannon tracers.

"These aliens area lot better up here than they were back on Earth," Roy told Skull Team, although they were all painfully aware of that already. "Looks like a real rat race this time."

He led his wingman onto a new vector and headed for a cluster of pods that threatened to break through SDF-1's defenses at a spot where two gun turrets had been knocked out.

Pods began erupting in flames as the VTs' shots rained on them; the sally was turned back, but in the meantime three more cries for help came

in. Roy told himself to ignore the big picture and just tend to his flying.

"Our special decoy vessel is now within their firing range," the report came to Breetai.

Exedore stood next to him, watching the same tactical display monitors. "I find it strange they haven't fired their main gun yet."

Breetai, arms folded across his immense chest, contemplated the screens. After a lifetime of soldiering, after uncountable contests in battle, he'd come to appreciate a shrewd enemy, and he'd begun to conclude that this enemy commander was either quite shrewd-or insane.

Still, a warrior fought to win. To meet a foe worthy of respect was a thing to be wished for but also a thing to ignite caution in any wise commander.

The metal and crystal of his headpiece caught the light. "What are you planning, my dear Micronian friend?" Breetai murmured.

"Perhaps we should offer them another enticement and see what they do," Exedore suggested.

"Mmmm." Breetai's metal-sheathed head inclined.

"Very good idea. Tell the recon ship to open fire, but it is not to do serious damage to the battle fortress. Is that clear?"

Exedore bowed and hastened to obey.

Out in the lead of the armada's main body, the recon ship opened up with all batteries. At that distance, it was impossible to be sure an energy bolt wouldn't hit a dogfighting pod; the battling Robotech machines were in constant motion.

But the Zentraedi overlords cared little about that; their warrior code held that lives were expendable. Without warning, a terrible volley hit friend and foe alike and holed the battle fortress.

A pod was blown apart just before two converging VTs could make the kill themselves; another Veritech was singed along a wing surface by the barrage. Attempting to switch to Guardian mode so it could cope better with

damage to itself, it was hit by another blast, flying to pieces in a bright globe. Secondary explosions blistered from the SDF-1's hull. Wreckage flew, and precious atmosphere puffed into space.

Lisa was thrown against her console by a direct hit to a reactor subcontrol unit several decks below the bridge. Gloval rose halfway from his chair. "Are you all right?"

She righted herself, nodding. "I'm okay, but what about the hull?"

He came to his feet, studying the damage reports pouring in all around him, gazing out the forward viewport at the eruptions of destroyed pods and VTs, and the blue hail of incoming cannon bolts.

"Just pray," Gloval said tightly.

A call came in from the engineering officer, the shouts of his men and the crackle of fire mixed with the hiss of firefighting foam in the background. "There's been some damage to the reactor subcontrol, Captain, but we'll manage."

"I'm counting on you," Gloval told him, wondering how long the ship could withstand the barrage.

Out in the savage killing ground of the dogfight, pod preyed on Veritech and Veritech upon pod. All was swirling combat, blazing weaponry, max thrust, and desperate maneuvers. The pods, like the VTs, often moved in a way that suggested atmospheric constraints, despite the fact that they were in deep space.

The Zentraedi recon ship continued to pour heavy fire into the SDF-1's general vicinity, though the dimensional fortress sustained less damage than it might have. The alien gunners weren't making it obvious, but Breetai's orders regarding the battle fortress's survival were being followed to the letter. Still, carefully placed rounds seared through the ship's shields and armor, blowing apart a turret here, a radome there. A nearby hit shook the bridge gang around like dice in a cup and threw Gloval headlong out of his chair, his hat skittering across the deck.

"Thundering asteroids!"

Vanessa was back to her station before he got to his feet.

"Captain, damage control reports that the second and fifth laser turrets have sustained heavy damage. They'll be out of action for seven hours minimum."

"Number four thruster is almost completely destroyed," Claudia declared grimly.

"Subcontrol systems report heavy damage and heavy casualties," Lisa added.

Another close hit jarred the ship, lifting a missile-launching tube away from it and scattering wreckage and pieces of human bodies.

Gloval reared up angrily. "That's the last straw! We're firing the main

gun!

Lisa heard herself gasp along with the rest of the bridge gang.

Gloval was stone-faced. "Stand by; upon my command, we will execute

Dr. Lang's designated modular transformation!"

Kim couldn't keep herself from protesting. "But if we do that, it means the whole town might-"

"Yes, that's right, the damage-" Sammie agreed, breathless.

Gloval glared at them. "I either take this risk or see the SDF-1 completely destroyed. I have no choice! I have to do it.

Outside, the sinister festival of lights grew more intense. Another nearby hit shook the bridge again. Lisa whirled back to her duty station. "All systems attention, all systems attention! Begin preparations for firing the main gun!"

Her voice rang through the rest of the ship, through engineering compartments and fire control centers and living quarters alike. "Modular transformation will be initiated in three minutes, mark!"

An engine room tech looked to his squadmate. "They can't be doing that crazy transformation now."

"They're outta their minds," the other agreed.

"Two minutes, fifty seconds and counting," Lisa's steady voice echoed.

The two looked at each other for a moment, then dove for their emergency suits.

The traffic had halted in the city streets below, but otherwise Macross looked the same. Rick and Minmei glanced up at the nearest PA speakers as the voice he'd come to so dislike said, "Attention, all citizens! This ship will be undergoing modular transformation in two minutes. This operation is dangerous; please take all safety precautions.

"Move outdoors at once. Beware of possible quake damage. If possible, evacuate to a designated safety area." There was a slight pause before the echoing voice added, in a softer tone, "And-good luck."

"Transformation? What's that?" Minmei wondered. She and Rick had stayed where they were once the fighting started because it seemed as safe a place as any.

"I dunno; maybe something they came up with while we were-while we were stranded."

"I guess that Roy must be out there in the middle of the fighting," she said sadly, looking out at the city.

"You mean-you think I should join the defense force?"

"No, I didn't mean that at all. It's just that airplanes are your dream, aren't they?"

He could see that the war didn't matter very much to her; that wasn't the way her mind worked. But she'd seen that he was sad and saw what she thought to be a remedy to that sadness.

"I guess so. But if I go and join the defense forces, Minmei, I won't be able to see very much of you anymore." Painful as seeing her under present circumstances was, he wasn't willing to give it up.

She was suddenly smiling. "Rick, we're on the same ship! On your days off or furlough or whatever it is, we can see each other whenever we want to."

"If I survive."

"Oh, how can you talk that way? All the soldiers who come to the

restaurant are in exactly the same position!"

"The same position?" He smiled bitterly. "You'd be the one to know, now, wouldn't you?"

She started as if she'd been slapped. "What?"

Up on the bridge, Claudia watched her monitors. "Ten seconds to transformation."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

And so, my preliminary conclusions lead me to believe these creatures harbor certain unpredictable impulses of a nature as yet unknown to us. It seems obvious that this irrational side to their nature will impede their war-making ability and work in our favor, assuring us the ultimate victory.

Preliminary findings summary transmitted by Breetai to Dolza

out.

"All sections on execution standby?" Gloval demanded.

"D and G blocks are running a bit late but they'll manage," Kim sang

"Good; continue," the captain said.

"Counting four seconds," Claudia resumed. "Three... two..." "Commence full-ship transformation," Gloval ordered.

The bridge crew took up the quiet, critical exchanges of the

transformation, listening to their headset earphones and speaking into their mikes. What would have been soft-spoken bedlam to an outsider was instantly intelligible to Gloval.

Sammie: "Commence full-ship tranformation. J, K, and L blocks, stand

to."

Kim:"Number seven reflex furnace, power up. Seven-eight section start

engines. Not enough power, J block!"

Vanessa: "Activate main torque-sender units."

And the ghostly voices came back, complaining of trouble with substrata plasma warps, of injuries in a hundred different locations, of machinery that was being asked to do too much, of overtaxed components that simply could not do their jobs, and of civilians who, confused and disoriented, were not prepared for the upheaval that was about to take place. Through it all, the bridge gang worked selflessly, concentrating on their jobs and their responsibilities.

Gloval knew that no matter what was about to happen, he was proud of them, proud to serve with them.

"Full-ship transformation under way, sir," Claudia relayed.

With the ship trembling and vibrating all around him, Gloval drew on his reserves of inner calm, clasping his hands behind his back. Now, what would happen would happen; he'd done all he could, and the odds of numbers or the vagaries of engineering or happenstance or some higher power-or all of the above-would make the final judgment.

"Very good," he told Claudia.

Rick looked down at the city. People had streamed from the buildings, racing this way and that, with no clear destination or purpose. Some seemed to be headed for designated shelter areas, but others darted aimlessly, unable to bear another catastrophe so soon after the last.

Rick didn't particularly care, didn't feel any urge to find refuge. "Y'know, Minmei, sometimes I wish they'd never found us."

"I can't believe I'm hearing that from you! How can you be so spiteful?

Oh, l hate you!"

He looked back at her. "The same goes for me. If it doesn't mean anything to you that you and I were-"

The vibration had reached a level that nearly knocked him off his feet as enormous pylons, each as wide as a city block, began descending from the gigantic compartment's ceiling. The grinding of the monster servomotors that moved them became deafening.

Rick and Minmei barely had time to get an inkling of what was going on, barely had time to begin to cry out, when the ground at their feet split apart, he on one side and she on the other.

The tower on which humans had so tentatively begun a garden had functions none of them had foreseen. In answer to the reconfiguration order, the tower halves swung away from each other.

Minmei lost her balance and fell, barely catching the brink of a metal ledge that jutted out a few inches below the soil level. The tower part to

which she clung pivoted on its supports out over the roofs of the city; screaming, she kicked and scrabbled for purchase against a sheer cliff face of technical components, systemry, and equipment modules.

"Minmei!" Rick fought for balance as the tower segment on which he was standing shook, moving into place with a grinding of massive gears. The gap between the halves was growing wider. He took a running start and hurtled out over empty air, barely making the other side.

Rick knelt to where Minmei hung, legs kicking, hundreds of feet above the roofs of Macross. She'd lost one hand grip, and her fingers were slipping form the other.

He threw himself prone at the brink of the abyss and grabbed her wrist with both hands just as she let go. He gritted his teeth and pulled, but the leverage was difficult, and he hadn't had time to get a firm hold.

Minmei's wrist slipped through his grasp a fraction of an inch. She stared up into his eyes, terror consuming her. "Rick, help me!"

Again the monster cam devices rotated SDF-1's forward booms apart in preparation for the firing of the main gun. But other alterations were taking place, too; and the ship, particularly the stupendous hold where the refugees had rebuilt their city, was filled with devastation, injury, and death. A hull structure the size of a billboard moved to one side like a sliding door to reinforce the new configuration; out through the gap in the ship's side poured a tidal wave of air, ripping up everything in its way, hurling cars and people and trees into space. An inner curtain of armor dropped to close the gap in moments, but not before part of the city had been sucked away to

utter destruction.

Elsewhere, more pylons were in motion, this time rising from the floor, climbing up and up, crushing the buildings atop them flat against the hold's ceiling. Debris rained everywhere; the thousands who hadn't sought shelter or hadn't been able to find it were crushed or injured. Falling signs, toppling light poles, vehicles careening out of control, ruptured power lines, and tons of plummeting concrete and steel claimed as many lives as the Zentraedi

had.

Roy bagged another kill, a pod that had very nearly bagged him, and brought his fighter around to locate Captain Kramer, his wingman, and get his bearings. Then he saw the SDF-1. "What in the..."

The Daedalus and the Prometheus were in motion, swinging on the giant elbow moorings that joined them to the dimensional fortress. In the blizzard of explosions and ordnance and fighter drives, the supercarriers swung from positions more or less alongside the SDF-1's stern, port and starboard, to a deployment that left them angled out from the hull.

Roy got a confused impression of movement along the hull, of realignment, of major structural features disengaging and then reshaping themselves. The entire midships area was turning. The great forward booms that constituted the main gun were on the move, and the bridge itself was shifting position. And the overall effect was-Roy stared, trying to believe it-the overall effect was of a human figure, a giant armored warrior something like a stylized Battloid.

The flattops resembled pincer-equipped arms, the tremendous aft thrusters were like legs and feet, and the bridge and the structures around it were a blank-visored helmet. And standing high above either shoulder, like uplifted wings, were the booms; with the shifting of the entire midships section, they were now in position to receive energy.

Somehow, Roy found himself accepting the strange apparition as a logical thing; Robotechnology seemed to have, as a primal component, a quality involving shape shifting, and anthropomorphic structures.

"So, that's the transformation," he breathed. Now, if it only works!

"Right wing section, modification percentage seventyfive," Kim relayed to Gloval.

"Left wing section, modification percentage at eightythree. Main gun up," Sammie added. There was more booming and reverberating as the last components were mated and the final connections made.

"Modular transformation completed, sir," Lisa announced. "SDF-1 is now in Attack mode."

"Captain, another enemy assault wave is approaching from one-zero-niner-three."

"Disregard," Gloval ordered. "Fire main gun at designated targets." "Yes, sir." Claudia thumbed the safety cover off a red trigger button and

pressed it with her forefinger. There was a fateful little acknowledging click. Out between and around the forward booms, the red flash flood of energy began building again, just as it had that day on Macross Island. A wash of energy a quarter mile in diameter sprang across space, instantly destroying all the alien pods in its path as well as pods on the periphery of the beam, out to a radius of a mile and more. They lit up, superheated by the eddy currents, their shields overpowered in seconds, armor heated to cherry-red and then white-hot before the occupants could take any evasive

action or retreat.

They simply blazed in the stream of the main gun's volley for an instant, giving off trails like meteors, then disappeared.

The beam hit the decoy reconnaissance vessel and its escort ships, making them pop open like chestnuts in an arc furnace, then run like quicksilver and vaporize.

The glare of it lit Breetai's command post. "What's happening?" Exedore looked out on the carnage, thinking of the strictures from the

Zentraedi ancients. Try as he might, he couldn't fathom the workings or the strategies of these Micronians. He was intrigued, as he always was when he found something new to study, but he was also beset by doubts and misgivings.

Somewhere, somehow, Micronians had evidently given the Zentraedi good reason to shun them. But why?

"I wonder..." he said aloud, only partly in reply to Breetai's question.

"Enemy ships disintegrated!" Vanessa cried. The bridge was in a joyous uproar.

What those people at NASA used to call a "whoopee," Gloval reflected, recovering his hat from where it lay on the deck.

He cleared his throat, and the "whoopee" was over. "Get me a full damage report on all sections immediately," he said. As after-action reports started coming in, the thought of the losses the people in the Macross hold had suffered seriously dampened the festive mood.

In the shattered ruins of Macross, people were moving around again. Ambulances and stretchers and rescue teams swarmed through the aftermath of the latest disaster.

A voice on the PA was saying, "We have suffered grave losses both in the military combat squadrons and within SDF-1. However, we fired our main gun and completely destroyed the enemy attack force that was attempting to obliterate us. We thank and salute the residents of Macross City for their gallantry and courage."

There was more, about where to bring casualties and how the clean-up would proceed. And the rebuilding, of course. Rick Hunter, looking down from the tower, knew that rebuilding had become a part of the people of Macross. Whatever didn't kill them made them stronger and more determined to overcome any adversity.

Minmei stood beside him. Her brush with death had left her in a strange state-flushed with life and yet remote somehow. Rick knew the feeling, knew that all he could do was wait for her to come out of it before they started the long descent to Macross.

"Well, Rick," she said softly. "You said once that you wouldn't mind if the whole town were wiped out of existence, remember? How d'you like it?"

He stared down at the ocean of human suffering before him. "I didn't actually want anything to happen! I never wanted this."

She tried to identify city blocks from the fallen remains of buildings. "I wonder if the White Dragon is still there."

He turned to her. "Minmei, I'm gonna do it." He drew a deep breath. "I'm gonna join the defense forces."

"What?"

"You're right. It's no good, my moping around, especially when we're in the middle of a thing like this. I don't know if my father would understand; I think he would, though. I'm gonna enlist."

They turned to take a last look at the shattered city before going down to be of what help they could. Minmei took Rick's hand.

Roy had Skull Team back in some order, and the other surviving VT teams were forming up too. Instruments indicated that the aliens were withdrawing. Roy didn't blame them a bit, after that shot from the main gun.

Human losses had been considerable, though, and that was from an attack that could have involved no more than a tiny fraction of a percentage of the enemy forces. It was a sobering thought, and he tried not to think too hard about what the next set-to would be like.

No time to sound doubtful now, though. "Awright, boys," he drawled over the tac net, "let's head for home."

Yessir, mosey along. But as the other Veritechs formed up on his ship and their drives lit the eternal night on the solar system's edge-as they returned triumphantly to a ship that was now an armored techno-knight dominating its part of space-Roy couldn't help wondering how many more miracles were left in the magic hat.

Luck doesn't hold out forever; it never does. There were too many gaps now in the elite ranks of the Veritechs. Too many; filling them must be top priority, starting today. The very best of the best had to be in those seats.

Roy knew who it was that must be persuaded to join the Robotech warriors. Even if I have to ram his head against a wall!

The surviving VTs sped home; the Zentraedi paused for cold calculation. Decisions were made, and all eyes looked to the overwhelming distance SDF-1 would have to cross in its journey back to Earth.

Unknowns... the situation was filled with unknowns. And the only good

thing about unknowns was that they allowed marginal room for hope.

End RTUCN.COM

Battle Cry

By Jack McKinney

1987

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For Carmen, Carlos, and Dimitry Mamaroneck’s Robotech

Defense Force

3

4

CHAPTER ONE

If there was any one thing that typified the initial stages of the First

Robotech War, it was the unspoken interplay that developed between Captain

Henry Gloval and the Zentraedi commander, Breetai. In effect, both men had

been created for warfare-Gloval by the Soviet GRU, and Breetai, of course, by

the Robotech Masters. When one examines the early ship's log entries of the

two commanders, it is evident that each man spent a good deal of time trying

to analyze the personality of his opponent by way of the strategies each

employed. Breetai was perhaps at an advantage here, having at his disposal

volumes of Zentraedi documents devoted to legends regarding the origin of

Micronian societies. But it must be pointed out that Breetai was severely

limited by his prior conditioning in his attempts to interpret these: even

Exedore, who had been bred to serve as transcultural adviser, would fail him

on this front. Gloval, on the other hand, with little knowledge of his ship and

even less of his opponent, had the combined strengths of a loyal and

intelligent crew to draw upon and the instincts of one who had learned to

function best in situations where disinformation and speculation were the

norm. One could point to many examples of this, but perhaps none is so

representative of the group mind at work inboard the SDF-1 than the Battle at

Saturn's Rings.

"Genesis," History of the First Robotech War, Vol. XVII

Zor's ship, the SDF-1, moved through deep space like some creature

loosed from an ancient sea fable. The structural transformation the fortress

had undergone at the hands of its new commanders had rendered it

monsterlike-an appearance reinforced by those oceangoing vessels grafted

on to it like arms and the main gun towers that rose now from the body like

twin heads, horned and threatening.

What would the Robotech Masters make of this new design? Breetai

asked himself. Even prior to the transformation, Zor's ship was vastly

5

different from his own-indeed, different from any vessel of the Zentraedi

fleet. Protoculture factory that it was, it had always lacked the amorphous

organic feel Breetai preferred. But then, it had not been designed as a

warship. Until now.

The Zentraedi commander was on the bridge of his vessel, where an

image of the SDF-1 played across the silent field of a projecbeam. Breetai's

massive arms were folded across the brown tunic of his uniform, and the

monocular enhancer set in the plate that covered half his face was trained

on the free-floating screen.

Long-range scopes had captured this image of the ship for his

inspection and analysis. But what those same scopes and scanners failed to

reveal was the makeup of the creatures who possessed it.

The bridge was an observation bubble overlooking the astrogational

center of the flagship, a vast gallery of screens, projecbeam fields, and

holo-schematics that gave Breetai access to information gathered by any

cruiser or destroyer in his command. He could communicate with any of his

many officers or any of the numerous Cyclops recon ships. But none of

these could furnish him with the data he now desired-some explanation of

Micronian behavior. For that, Breetai counted on Exedore, his dwarfish

adviser, who at the moment seemed equally at a loss.

"Commander," the misshapen man was saying, "I have analysed this

most recent strategy from every possible angle, and I still cannot

understand why they found it necessary to change to this format. A

structural modification of this nature will most assuredly diminish, possibly

even negate, the effectiveness of the ship's gravity control centers."

"And their weapons?"

"Fully operational. Unless they are diverting energy to one of the shield

systems."

Breetai wondered whether he was being overly cautious. It was true

that he had been caught off guard by the Micronians' unpredictable tactics

but unlikely that he had underestimated their capabilities. That they had

6

chosen to execute an intraatmospheric spacefold, heedless of the effects of

their island population center, was somewhat disturbing, as was their most

recent use of the powerful main gun of the SDF-1. But these were surely acts

of desperation, those of an enemy running scared, not one in full possession

of the situation.

In any straightforward military exercise, this unpredictability would

have posed no threat. It had been Breetai's experience that superior

firepower invariably won out over desperate acts or clever tactics. And there

were few in the known universe who could rival the Zentraedi in firepower.

But this operation called for a certain finesse. The Micronians would

ultimately be defeated; of this he was certain. Defeat, however, was of

secondary importance. His prime directive was to recapture Zor's ship

undamaged, and given the Micronian penchant for self-destruction, a

successful outcome could not be guaranteed.

With this in mind Breetai had adopted a policy of watchful waiting. For

more than two months by Micronian reckoning, the Zentraedi fleet had

followed the SDF-1 without launching an attack. During that time, he and

Exedore had monitored the ship's movements and audiovisual

transmissions; they had analyzed the changes and modifications Zor's ship

had undergone; they had screened trans-vids of their initial confrontations

with the enemy. And most important, they had studied the Zentraedi

legends regarding Micronian societies. There were warnings in those

legends-warnings Breetai had chosen to ignore.

The SDF-1 was approaching an outer planet of this yellow-star system,

a ringed world, large and gaseous, with numerous small moons. A

secondary screen on the flagship bridge showed it to be the system's sixth

planet. Exedore, who had already made great progress in deciphering the

Micronian language, had its name: Saturn.

"My lord, I suspect that the spacefold generators aboard Zor's ship may

have been damaged during the hyperspace jump from Earth to the outer

planets. My belief is that the Micronians will attempt to use the gravity of

this planet to sling themselves toward their homeworld."

7

"Interesting," Breetai replied.

"Furthermore, they will probably activate ECM as they near the

planetary rings. It may become difficult for us to lock in on their course."

"It is certainly the logical choice, Exedore. And that is precisely what

concerns me. They have yet to demonstrate any knowledge of logic."

"Your decision, my lord?"

"They have more than an escape plan in mind. The firepower of the

main gun has given them confidence in their ability to engage us." Breetai

stroked his chin as he watched the screen. "I'll let them attempt their clever

little plan, if only to gain a clearer understanding of their tactics. I'm curious

to see if they are in full possession of the power that ship holds."

Henry Gloval, formerly of the supercarriers Kenosha and Prometheus

and now captain of the super dimensional fortress, the SDF-1, was a

practical man of few words and even fewer expectations. When it came to

asking himself how he had ended up in command of an alien spaceship,

1,500,000,000 kilometers from home base and carrying almost 60,000

civilians in its belly, he refused to let the question surface more than twice a

day.

And yet here was the planet Saturn filling the forward bays of the

SDF-1's bridge, and here was Henry Gloval in the command chair treating it

like just one more Pacific current he'd have to navigate. Well, not quite: No

one he'd encountered during his long career as a naval officer had ever used

an ocean current the way he planned to use Saturn's gravitational fields.

The SDF-1; spacefold generators, which two months ago had allowed

the ship to travel through hyperspace from Earth to Pluto in a matter of

minutes, had vanished. Perhaps "allowed" was the wrong word, since Gloval

had had his sights on the moon at the time. But no matter-the

disappearance remained a mystery for Dr. Lang and his Robotechs to

unravel; it had fallen on Gloval's shoulders to figure a way back home

without the generators.

Even by the year 2010 the book on interplanetary travel was far from

8

complete; in fact, Lang, Gloval, and a few others were still writing it. Each

situation faced was a new one, each new maneuver potentially the last.

There had been any number of unmanned outer-planet probes, and of

course the Armor Series orbital stations and the lunar and Martian bases,

but travel beyond the asteroid belt had never been undertaken by a human

crew. Who was to say how it might have been if the Global Civil War hadn't

put an end to the human experiment in space? But that was the way the

cards had been dealt, and in truth, humankind had the SDF-1 to thank for

getting things started again, even if the ship was now more weapon than

spacecraft. All this, however, would be for the historians to figure out.

Gloval had more pressing concerns.

Relatively speaking, the Earth was on the far side of the sun. The

fortress's reflex engines would get them home, but not quickly, and even

then they were going to need a healthy send-off from Saturn. Engineering's

plan was for the ship to orbit the planet and make use of centrifugal force to

sling her on her way. It was not an entirely untested plan but a dangerous

one nonetheless. And there was one more factor Gloval had to figure into

the calculations: the enemy.

Unseen in full force, unnamed, unknown. Save that they were thought

to be sixty-foot-tall humanoids of seemingly limitless supply. They had

appeared in Earthspace a little more than two months ago and declared war

on the planet. There was no way of knowing what fate had befallen Earth

after the SDF-1's hyperspace jump, but some of the enemy fleet-or, for all

Gloval knew, a splinter group-had pursued the ship clear across the solar

system to press the attack. The SDF-1's main gun had saved them once, but

firing it had required a modular transformation which had not only wreaked

havoc with many of the ship's secondary systems but had nearly destroyed

the city that had grown up within it.

For two months now the enemy had left the ship alone. They allowed

themselves to be picked up by radar and scanners but were careful not to

reveal the size of their fleet. Sometimes it appeared that Battlepods made up

the bulk of their offensive strength-those oddly shaped, one-pilot mecha the

9

VT teams called "headless ostriches." At other times there was evidence of

scout ships and recon vessels, cruisers and destroyers. But if the enemy's

numbers were a source for speculation, their motives seemed to be clear:

They had come for their ship, the SDF-1.

Gloval was not about to let them have it without a fight. Perhaps if

they'd come calling and asked for the ship, something could have been

arranged. But that, too, was history.

There was only one way to guarantee a safe return to Earth: They had

to either shake the enemy from their tail or destroy them. Gloval had been

leaning toward the former approach until Dr. Lang had surprised him with

the latest of his daily discoveries.

Lang was Gloval's interface with the SDF-1; more than anyone else

onboard, the German scientist had retuned his thinking to that of the

technicians who had originally built the ship. He had accomplished on a

grand scale what the Veritech fighter pilots were expected to do on each

mission: meld their minds to the mecha controls. There was suspicion

among the crew that Lang had plugged himself into one of the SDF-1's stock

computers and taken some sort of mind boost which had put him in touch

with the ship's builders, leaving him a stranger to those who hadn't. Gloval

often felt like he was dealing with an alien entity when speaking to Lang-he

couldn't bring himself to make contact with those marblelike eyes. It was as

if the passionate side of the man's nature had been drained away and

replaced with some of the strange fluids that coursed through many of the

ship's living systems. You didn't exchange pleasantries with a man like Lang;

you went directly to the point and linked memory banks with him. So when

Lang told him that it might be possible to create a protective envelope for

the SDF-1, Gloval merely asked how long it would take to develop.

The two men met in the chamber that until recently had housed the

spacefold generators. Lang wanted Gloval to see for himself the free-floating

mesmerizing energy that had spontaneously appeared there with the

disappearance of the generators. Later they moved to Lang's quarters, the

only section of the unreconstructed fortress sized to human proportions.

10

There the scientist explained that the energy had something to do with a

local distortion in the spacetime continuum. Gloval couldn't follow all the

details of the theories involved, but he stayed with it long enough to

understand that this same energy could be utilized in the fabrication of a

shield system for the SDF-1.

Since his conversation with Dr. Lang, Gloval had become preoccupied

with the idea of taking the enemy by surprise with an offensive maneuver.

With the main guns now operational and the potential of a protective

barrier, Gloval and the SDF-1 would be able to secure an unobstructed route

back to Earth. And Saturn, with its many moons and rings, was ideally

suited to such a purpose.

Rick Hunter, Veritech cadet, admired his reflection in the shop

windows along Macross City's main street. He stopped once or twice to

straighten the pleats in his trousers, adjust the belt that cinched his colorful

jacket, or give his long black hair just the right look of stylish disarray. It

was his first day of leave after eight weeks of rigorous training, and he had

never felt better. Or looked better, to judge from the attention he was

getting from passersby, especially the young women of the transplanted

city.

Rick was always reasonably fit-years of stunt flying had necessitated

that-but the drill sergeants had turned his thin frame wiry and tough.

"Nothing extraneous, in mind or body." Rick had adopted their motto as his

own. He had even learned a few new flying tricks (and taught the

instructors a few himself). Planes had been his life for nineteen years, and

even the weightlessness of deep space felt like his element. He wasn't as

comfortable with weapons, though, and the idea of killing a living creature

was still as alien to him as it had been two months ago. But Roy Fokker,

Rick's "older brother," was helping him through this rough period. Roy had

talked about his own early misgivings, about how you had to think of the

Battlepods as mecha, about how real the enemy threat was to all of them

inboard the SDF-1. " 'The price of liberty is eternal vigilance'," Roy said,

11

quoting an American president. "There's no more flying for fun. This time

you'll be flying for your home and the safety of your loved ones." Of course

Roy had been through the Global Civil War; he had experience in death and

destruction. He'd even come through it a decorated soldier. Although why

anyone would have sought that out remained a mystery to Rick. Roy had left

Pop Hunter's flying circus for that circus of global madness, and it wasn't

something Rick liked to think about. Besides, as true as it might be that the

war was right outside any hatch of the ship, it was surely a long way off for a

cadet whose battle experience thus far had been purely accidental.

Rick was strolling down Macross Boulevard at a leisurely pace; he still

had a few minutes to kill before meeting Minmei at the market. The city had

managed to completely rebuild what the modular transformation had left in

ruins. Taking into account the SDF-1's ability to mechamorphose, the

revised city plan relied on a vertical axis of orientation. The attempt to

recreate the horizontal openness of Macross Island was abandoned. The

new city rose in three tiers toward the ceiling of the massive hold. Ornate

bridges spanned structural troughs; environmental control units and the

vast recycling system had been integrated into the high-tech design of the

buildings; EVE engineers-specialists in enhanced video emulation-were

experimenting with sky and horizon effects; hydroponics had supplied trees

and shrubs; and a monorail was under construction. The city planners had

also worked out many of the problems that had plagued the city early on.

Shelters and yellow and black safety areas were well marked in the event of

modular transformation. Each resident now had a bed to sleep in, a job to

perform. Food and water rationing was accepted as part of the routine. The

system of waivers, ration coupons, and military scrip had proved

manageable. Most people had navigated the psychological crossings

successfully. There would soon be a television station, and a lottery was in

the works. In general the city was not unlike a turn-of-the-century shopping

mall, except in size and population. Remarkably, the residents of Macross

had made the adjustment-they were a special lot from the start-and the

general feeling there was a cross between that found in an experimental

12

prototype community and that found in any of the wartime cities of the last

era.

Nearing the market now, Rick began to focus his thoughts on Minmei

and how the day as he imagined it would unfold. She would be knocked out

by the sight of him in uniform; she wouldn't be able to keep her hands off

him; he would suggest the park, and she would eagerly agree-

"Rick!"

Minmei was running toward him, a full shopping bag cradled in one

arm, her free hand waving like mad. She was wearing a tight sleeveless

sweater over a white blouse, and a skirt that revealed too much. Her hair

was down, lustrous even in the city's artificial light; her blue eyes were

bright, fixed on his as she kissed him once and stepped back to give him the

once-over.

Inside the cool and crisp cadet Rick was projecting, his heart was

running wild. She was already talking a blue streak, filling him in on her

eight weeks, asking questions about "spacic training," complimenting him,

the uniform, the Defense Force, the mayor, and everyone else connected

with the war effort. Rick, however, was so drawn to her beauty that he

scarcely heard the news or compliments; he was suddenly quiet and worried.

Minmei drew stares from everyone they passed, and she appeared to know

half of Macross personally. What had she been doing these past eight

weeks-introducing herself on street corners? And what was all this about

singing lessons, dance lessons, and an upcoming beauty pageant? Rick

wanted to tell her about the hardships of training, the new friends he'd

made, his unvoiced fears; he wanted to hold her and tell her how much he

had missed her, tell her how their two-week ordeal together had been one of

the most precious times in his life. But she wasn't letting him get a word in.

A short distance down the block, Minmei stopped in midsentence and

dragged Rick over to one of the storefronts. In the window was a

salmon-colored belted dress that had suddenly become the most important

thing in the world to her.

"Come on, Rick, just for a minute, okay?"

13

"Minmei," he resisted, "I'm not going to spend my leave shopping."

"I promise I'll only be a second."

"It always starts out that way and, and..."

Minmei already had her hand on the doorknob. "Just what else did you

have in mind for today, Rick?"

She disappeared into the woman's shop, leaving him standing on the

sidewalk, feeling somehow guilty for even thinking about going to the park.

By the time he entered, Minmei had the hangered dress draped over

one arm and was going through the racks, pulling out belts, blouses,

patterned stockings, skirts, sweaters, and lingerie. Rick checked his watch

and calculated that he'd be AWOL long before she finished trying everything

on. She had entered the dressing room and was throwing the curtain closed.

"And no peeking, Rick," she called out.

Fortunately there were no other customers in the store at the time, but

the saleswoman standing silently behind Rick had found Minmei's warning

just about the funniest thing she had heard all week. Her squeal of delight

took Rick completely by surprise. He thought an early-warning signal had

just gone off-and in the middle of squatting down for cover, he managed to

lose some of the items from the top of the shopping bag. In stooping over to

recover these, he tipped the bag, spilling half the contents across the floor.

The woman was laughing like a maniac now, the door buzzer was

signaling the entry of three additional shoppers, and Minmei was peeking

over the top of the dressing room curtain asking what had happened. Rick,

meanwhile, was down on his hands and knees crawling under tables in

search of the goods-bottles of shampoo, creme rinse, body lotion, baby oil,

lipsticks, and sundry makeup containers-all of which had become covered

in some sort of slippery wash from a container of liquid face soap that had

partially opened. Each time Rick grabbed hold of one of the items, it would

jump from his hand like a wet fish. But he soon got the hang of it and had

almost everything rebagged in a short time. Only one thing left to retrieve: a

tube of tricolored toothpaste just out of reach, bathing in a puddle of the

face soap. Rick gave it a shot, stretching out and making a grab for it. Sure

14

enough, the tube propelled itself and ended up under another table.

It was time to get serious. Rick set the bag aside and crawled off

stealthily after his prey, as though the tube had taken on a will of its own

and was on the verge of scurrying off, like some of Macross City's

robo-dispenser units. He squinted, held the tube in his gaze, and when he

was near enough, pounced.

The tube seemed to scream in his hands and immediately worked itself

into a vertical launch. But Rick had prepared himself for this; he lifted his

head, eyes fixed on the tube's ascent.

The one thing he hadn't taken into account was the height of the table.

His head connected hard with the underside, the tube made its escape, and

Rick collapsed back to the floor, rolling over onto his back and holding his

head.

When he opened his eyes, he was staring up at a rain of brassieres and

three pairs of silken female legs. The women owners of these were backing

away from the table, high heels clicking against the floor, hands tugging at

the hems of their skirts as though they'd just seen a rodent on the loose.

Rick pushed himself out and got to his feet, facing the three women

from across the table. They were still backing away from the tabletop

lingerie display with looks of indignation on their faces. Rick was

stammering apologies to them as they exited the shop, the saleswoman was

once again laughing hysterically, and Minmei was suddenly behind him,

tapping him on the shoulder, soliciting his opinion of the dress she was

trying on. He stood shell-shocked for a minute, laughter in one ear,

Minmei's questions in the other, and left the store without a word.

Minmei remained inside for well over an hour. She had two additional

shopping bags with her when she came out. Undaunted, Rick once again

tried to suggest a walk in the park, but she had already made other plans for

the two of them. Her surrogate family, who ran Macross City's most popular

Chinese restaurant, the White Dragon, had been asking for Rick, and this

would be a perfect time to visit-he looked so "gallant and dashing" in his

uniform.

15

Rich could hardly refuse. Minmei's aunt and uncle were almost like

family to him; in fact, he had lived with them above the restaurant before

joining the Defense Forces.

They were an odd couple-Max, short and portly, and Lena, Minmei's

tall and gracious inspiration. They had a son back on Earth, Lynn-Kyle,

whom Lena missed and Max preferred not to think about, for reasons Rick

hadn't learned. Although there was little else that either kept from him. As

Rick entered the restaurant they pretended surprise, but within minutes

they had his favorite meal spread out before him. While wolfing down the

stir-fried shrimp, he regaled them with the barracks stories he had been

saving for Minmei. They wanted to know all about the Veritech fighters-how

they handled in deep space, how they were able to switch from Fighter to

Guardian or Battloid mode. And they asked about the war: Had Gloval

managed to contact Earth headquarters? Did his commanders believe that

the enemy would continue their attacks? Was Rick worried about his first

mission? How long it would be before the SDF-1 returned to Earth?

Rick did his best to answer them, sidestepping issues he was not

permitted to discuss and at other times exaggerating his importance to the

Defense Forces. It concerned him that the residents of Macross City were

not being given the same reports issued to the Veritech squadrons. After all,

Macross was as much a part of the ship and the war as the rest of those

onboard.

He was about to allay their fears for his safety by telling them that a

combat assignment was far off, when he saw Roy Fokker enter the

restaurant. The lieutenant's six-six frame looked gargantuan in the

low-ceilinged room, but there was something about Roy's unruly blond hair

and innocent grin that put people at ease immediately. He greeted everyone

individually, made a show of kissing Minmei's hand, and took a seat next to

Rick, snatching up the last of the shrimp as he did so.

"Figured I'd find you here," Roy said with his mouth full. "Gotta get you

back to the base on the double, Little Brother."

"Why, what's up?" Rick asked.

16

"We're on alert."

Rick was suddenly concerned. "Yeah, but what's that have to do with

me?"

Roy licked his fingers. "Guess who's been assigned to my squadron?"

Rick was speechless.

Aunt Lena and Uncle Max stood together, worried looks behind the

faint smiles. Minmei, however, was ecstatic.

"Oh, Rick, thats wonderful!"

Like he'd just been awarded a prize.

Roy stood up and smiled. "Up and at 'em, partner."

Rick tried valiantly to return a smile that wasn't there.

The war had caught up with him again.

17

CHAPTER TWO

From the start it was inevitable that a cult should develop around the

Veritech fighters. Like the World War I aces, jet fighter jocks, astronauts, and

computer linguists before them, the men who were chosen to interact with the

first by-product of Robotechnology considered themselves to be at the cutting

edge of human progress. And in a sense they were. For who before them had

interfaced with machines on such an intimate level? It was only fitting that

they should form their own club and speak their own language-call

themselves "mechamorphs." They were continually borrowing and applying

mystic phrases from their Zen masters-those actually responsible for teaching

the pilots the essentials of meditative technique...You'd be walking around

Macross in those days and hear phrases like "dropping trou" and "standing

upright" being tossed about-referring to reconfiguration to Guardian mode

and battloid mode, respectively. Pilots would talk to you about your "thinking

caps," the sensor-studded helmets worn, or about the thrill of "haloing"

(fixing an enemy on target in the mind's eye) or "alpha-bets" (gambling with

yourself that you were deep enough in trance for the mecha to understand

you) or "facing mecha" (going into battle) or "azending...

Zachary Fox, Jr.,

VT: the Men and the Mecha

Gloval met frequently with Dr. Lang during the development phase of

what was being called the pinpoint barrier system. The lambent energy that

once filled the spacefold generators' chamber had been harnessed and

redirected. Such was the nature of this antielectron energy, however, that a

photon shield for the entire fortress would have further destabilized an

already weakened gravity control system. The best that Lang and his

Robotechnicians had been able to come up with was a cluster of movable

barriers capable of deflecting incoming bolts. An area aft of the ship's bridge

had been retrofitted with three manually operated universal gyros, each tied

to one of the cluster's photon discs.

18

With the barrier system now operational, Captain Gloval was confident

that his "Blitzkrieg" attack plan would prove viable. The strategy was simple

enough: When the SDF-1 was in close proximity to Saturn's rings, electronic

countermeasures would be activated to jam the enemy's radar scanners. The

fortress would hide within the rings to take full advantage of their intrinsic

radio "noise," while at the same time, squadrons of Veritech fighters would

be deployed in a simulated attack mission to act as decoys. When the enemy

moved in to engage the VTs, the SDF-1's main gun would take them out.

Orbital dynamics would make the timing critical: If the fortress reentered

orbit too early, it would be catapulted back toward the outer planets; too

late, and the launch window to Mars and the inner planets would be closed.

The VT fighter pilots would receive most of this information at the

scheduled briefing, and it was to this briefing that Rick and Roy were

headed after they left the restaurant.

Roy had been doing his best to cheer up the newly graduated cadet.

Rick was one of five cadets chosen; it was really an honor, an endorsement

of his flying skills. He would be able to move out of the dormitory barracks

into his own room. There would be more free time, special privileges.

They were walking along the tall chain-link fence that surrounded the

barracks compound now. Fifty-foot-tall Battloid sentries patrolled the

perimeter, their gatlings shouldered like proper soldiers. Defense Force

personnel were moving quickly in response to new orders which had been

delivered to each unit.

But Rick's morale was low; his hands were in his pockets, and his

shoulders drooped. Roy, however, succeeded in bringing him around with a

sharp, "Ten-shun!"

Rick responded expertly to his conditioning: His head came up, he

squared his shoulders, brought his back straight, hand at his forehead. His

eyes searched for a superior's uniform, but the only people in his field of

vision were four young women in civilian dress. The oldest among them, not

more than twenty-three or twenty-four herself, was the one who returned

his salute. She had thick brown hair coiled at her shoulders, small,

19

attractive features, and an athletic body even her conservative outfit

couldn't conceal. There was an air of cool command about her.

The other three were suddenly laughing and pointing at him; the tall,

dark-haired one-Kim, Rick understood-was whispering something to the

one with glasses-Vanessa. Rick was resisting an urge to check his fly buttons,

when the short blonde among them yelled, "Mr. Lingerie!"

He decided to risk a full look and recognized three of the women from

this morning's incident in the dress shop. One of them was saying, "Hold

your skirts down, ladies," and Roy was elbowing him in the ribs.

"What gives, Little Brother?"

"Don't ask," Rick said out of the corner of his mouth.

The oldest had stepped forward; she gave Rick a look and turned to

Roy.

"Commander Fokker, don't tell me this is the brilliant new pilot you

were raving about?"

"One and the same. Corporal Rick Hunter, this is the Flight Officer Lisa

Hayes. You'll be hearing a lot from her from now on."

Rick saluted again. The women were still needling him with comments.

"Rick Hunter..." Lisa Hayes was repeating. "Why does that name sound

familiar? Have we met-uh, before this morning, I mean?"

"No, sir, I don't think so, sir."

Lisa tapped her lower lip with her forefinger. She knew that name from

somewhere...and all at once she had it: Hunter was the civilian pilot who

had shown up at Macross on Launching Day. The same one who had made

unauthorized use of a Veritech, the same one who had rescued that Chinese

girl, the same one who had called her-

"You're that loudmouthed pilot, aren't you?"

Rick stared at her. Yes, unbelievable as it was, she was the one he had

seen on the Veritech commo screen months ago.

"Then you must be-"

"Go ahead, Corporal Hunter, say it: I must be..."

"Y-you must be...my superior officer, sir!"

20

Lisa smirked and nodded her head knowingly. She motioned to her

group, and they started off down the sidewalk. But Lisa turned to Rick as

she passed him and added, "By the way, I don't know what your particular

problem is, but it's hardly appropriate behavior for a VT pilot to be hanging

around lingerie shops looking for a cheap thrill."

Rick groaned. Roy scratched his head. The blonde said: "Creep."

Later, at the briefing, Rick was still replaying the incident; but in light

of what was being said, embarrassment placed last on his list of concerns. A

decoy mission-the VTs were actually going to pretend to launch a

counteroffensive against the aliens! Judging by the murmurs in the crowd,

Rick was not the only pilot to be floored by this directive. But like it or not,

they had their orders.

"I want you to be thinking of one thing and one thing only," the general

was saying. "Robotech! And I want you to know that we're all counting on

you."

If the general had let it go at that, Rick would have been all right-afraid

but not desperate. The general, however, had then added: "If there's anyone

you want to see, you'd better do it tonight."

Rick was in a panic. What did he mean by that-that they were being

sent out on some kind of suicide mission? And do what tonight-say

good-bye, say wish me well, say please remember me always?

He stood on line to use the phone and managed to reach Minmei's aunt

Lena. Minmei was at ballet school, but yes, Lena would relay Rick's message:

Macross Central Park, their bench at nine P.m.

Rick rode back into the city with a few of the other pilots. He kicked

around the market area for a while and was in the park by eight o'clock

keeping their bench warm. Starlight poured in from the huge bay in the hull;

lovers held one another; life went on as though filled with limitless

tomorrows. But Rick couldn't see past the mission, and he was frightened.

By ten o'clock she still hadn't showed; the park was quiet, and he was

about to move on. But just then she came running in, face flushed and out

of breath.

21

"Rick, I'm sorry I'm so late."

He smiled at her. "At least you made it."

She pushed her bangs back. Her forehead was beaded with sweat.

"What's the big emergency, anyway?"

"They're sending us out on a mission tomorrow."

He didn't need to add any dramatic accents to it; the words just fell out

that way. But her reaction was unexpected. She was practically clapping for

him.

"Oh, Rick, that's great! Really, I'm so happy for you!"

And for a moment her enthusiasm almost won him over. Hey, Rick told

himself, maybe this is how I'm supposed to feel, like I'm lucky or something.

The park fountain was even gushing in his honor! It didn't last, though,

despite her continued exclamations.

"Your first mission! I can't believe it! I'm so proud of you!"

Obviously this was what supporting the war effort was all about, he

decided. And she was very good at it.

Then Minmei was suddenly on her toes, twirling around in front of him.

"Do you like it? Don't you just love it?" she kept asking. He was puzzled but

caught on fast. The dress! The salmon-colored dress she'd picked up that

afternoon.

"You look beautiful, Minmei."

She moved in close and made him repeat it.

"Do you mean it, Rick? Am I really beautiful?"

An idea came to him and he signaled to a robo-camera that was making

rounds through the park. The stupid thing kept moving in circles, trying to

home in on Rick's call, and he finally had to throw a stone at it to get its

attention. The cam approached them, asking for money.

"We'll have a picture taken. You'll see how beautiful you are."

Minmei protested some, and the cam uttered some stock phrases to get

them in the proper mood, but eventually they had the print and Minmei was

pleased. A smile and a look of concern; Minmei clinging to his arm; the

22

fountain behind them.

Afterward, she talked dance for half an hour; she read him the lyrics of

a song she'd composed. Then she had to be going.

"Uncle Max gets mad when I stay out too late. But I'll see you when you

get back, Rick. Have a good mission, and remember, I'm very proud of you."

And with that she was gone, leaving him wondering about tomorrow all

over again.

He power-walked and jogged for an hour hoping he would exhaust

himself and fall into a deep sleep back in the barracks. But sleep didn't seem

to be on tonight's agenda; in fact, he couldn't even keep his eyes closed. It

was too hot in his bunk, then too cold, there were too many noises in the

room, the pillow just wasn't right...Finally he sat up and switched on the

reading light. He took the park photo and brought it close to his face.

Perhaps he could reach her by concentrating on her image; spoken words

weren't doing much good.

Minmei was proud of him; earlier that day she'd been upset with him

for carrying her shopping bag because the package hid too much of the

uniform. Besides, it was wrong for a Veritech fighter pilot to involve himself

in such mundane activities. Well, that much was encouraging to Rick

because she had really been his motivation for joining up. During the weeks

that followed their shared ordeal in that remote part of the ship, he realized

that Minmei could never accept an ordinary man as her lover; he would

have to be someone who participated in life to the fullest. Someone

romantic, adventurous, full of grand dreams and positive hopes for the

future-an all-day-long hero who would never fear, never say die. A special

man, a dearest man, someone to share his life with you alone, as Minmei

had herself written it...She was like someone who had gone from childhood

to maturity without any of the intervening periods of longing or confusion.

And even though Rick had saved her life on two occasions and spent two

long lost weeks with her, he had yet to prove himself in her eyes. Without

joining up there would have been no way for him to display the heroics she

craved, no way to individualize himself, no way to accept himself as her

23

equal.

And yet, even having taken those steps, he felt no closer to her than

before. Her love had no fixed center; it was spread across the board and

parceled out in equal packets for one and all to enjoy. A hero wouldn't even

be enough for her because she belonged to everyone. She was more spirit

than woman, more dream than reality.

Rick slipped into fitful sleep for a short while, only to have Roy wake

him out of it. Fokker was just checking in, reminding him that they had to

be up early tomorrow.

"Your first combat mission is always the worst, kid. I sympathize with

you. Now, get some sleep-count fanjets or something."

Everyone had such encouraging words: At the briefing they'd been told

to wrap up their personal business, and now Roy tells him that tomorrow is

going to be the worst. Minmei had behaved like a cheerleader, his

commanding officer thought him a lecher...It had been quite a day.

So Rick actually took Roy's suggestion-he began counting

fanjets-although it wasn't sleep he found in the high numbers but an

uncomfortable half state where Commander Hayes and the three bridge

bunnies mocked him, and the giant enemy soldier he had confronted on

Macross Island was reborn to stalk him.

The reveille call came too quickly. Rick felt like one of the walking dead

as he gathered up his gear and zombied his way through morning rituals

with the other VT pilots. There was a second preflight briefing, more

detailed than the first. Then the men were loaded into personnel carriers

and conveyed to the Prometheus. Roy and Rick's group drove through

Macross City, past the park where he and Minmei had been together only

hours before. The city was asleep, peacefully, blessedly unaware.

Even before the transport vehicle had come to a halt in the hangar of

the supercarrier, pilots were hopping out and rushing toward their propped

Veritechs. The Thor-class Prometheus-one of two ships that had been

caught up in the spacefold and had since been grafted on to the main body

of the SDF-1 was like an active hive, and every drone aboard save Rick

24

seemed certain of his or her duty. He lost Roy in the crowds and stood by

the transport scanning for a familiar face among those now rushing by him.

He recognized Commander Hayes's voice coming through the PA system.

"All Veritechs report for roll call at Prometheus...All Veritechs report

immediately for roll call at Prometheus...Orange, Blue, and Red squadrons

will commence flight preparations on second-level afterdeck...All remaining

squadrons prepare for takeoff from preassigned locations...Reactor control,

bridge requests status report on first and third plasma shields..."

Suddenly Fokker had him by the arm and was propelling him through

the hangar, filling his ears with last-minute instructions and words of advice.

He gave Rick a quick embrace when they were alongside Skull Team's

twenty-three and was soon swallowed up in the crowds again.

Rick was assisted into the pilot's crane sling by two techs, who also

issued him boots, gloves, and a "thinking cap"-a sensor-studded helmet that

was in some ways an outgrowth of the Global Civil War "virtual cockpits"

and essential for rapport with the mecha.

Rick regarded the plane as he was being lowered into the cockpit

module. In Fighter mode, the mecha was similar in appearance to the

supersonic jets of the late twentieth century. But in actuality, the Veritechs

were as different from those as cars were to horse-drawn wagons. The aliens

who had engineered the super dimensional fortress had found a way to

animate technological creations, and working from examples found

onboard the SDF-1, Dr. Lang and his Robotechnicians had been able to

fabricate the Veritechs in much the same way-"chips off the old block," as

the scientist called the VTs.

Once inside the cockpit, Rick strapped in and donned the helmet; from

this point on he was mind-linked to the fighter. There were still plenty of

manual tasks to perform, but the central defense capabilities that set the

planes apart from their predecessors were directly tied in to the pilots'

mecha-will.

The Veritech was fired up now, reflex engines humming, and cat

officers were motioning Rick forward. He adjusted the helmet and seat

25

straps and goosed the throttle to position the fighter onto one of the carrier

elevators. A second Skull Team VT joined him there.

As the two crafts were lifted to the flight deck, Rick could see the disc of

the sun far off to his left. At the end of the hurricane bow was Saturn,

impossibly huge. Commander Hayes was once again on the PA and tac net.

"This operation will be directed toward the Cassini Quadrant. All

squadrons will wait in the ice fields of the rings for further instructions."

The ice fields of Saturn's rings, Rick repeated to himself.

And he had thought yesterday was bad.

26

CHAPTER THREE

The so-called Daedalus Maneuver was the first demonstration of what I

have termed "mecha-consciousness"-levels beyond the somewhat primitive,

almost instinctual modular transformation. The officers of the bridge, along

with the engineering section, did little more than offer a prompt to the SDF-1:

The dynamics of the maneuver were carried out by the fortress herself,

despite claims to the contrary. I, alone, recognized this for what it was-an

attempt on the part of the ship to interface with the living units she carried

within her...Later I would overhear someone in the corridor say that "the

Daedalus Maneuver (would) go down in the annals of space warfare as a

lucky break for an incompetent crew." In point of fact, however, the SDF-1

was able to repeat this "accident" on four separate occasions.

Dr. Emil Lang,

Technical Recordings and Notes

"It is as you predicted, commander," Exedore said as he entered the

flagship's command center.

Without a word, Breetai rose from his seat; a wave of his hand and the

projecbeam field began to assemble itself. Here was Zor's ship, still in that

bizarre configuration, a speck of gleaming metals caught in starlight and

silhouetted against the milky white bands and icy rings of the system's sixth

planet. Breetai called for full magnification.

"The Micronians have activated electronic countermeasures and are

about to enter the rings," Exedore continued. "They are endangering the

ship."

"We cannot permit that."

"I have taken the liberty of contacting Commander Zeril."

"Excellent."

A second wave brought Zeril to the screen. He offered a salute.

"My Lord Breetai, we await your instructions."

"The Micronians are laying a trap for us, Commander Zeril. It would

27

suit me to humor them a bit, but I'm concerned about the security of the

dimensional fortress. As your scanners will indicate, the enemy has

deployed several squadrons of mecha in the hope of luring you to your

doom. Send out enough Battlepods to deal with them.

"The Micronian commander will bring his ship from the rings when

you are within range of the main gun. I expect you to cripple the fortress

before the gun is armed."

"Sir!" said Zeril.

"You understand that the ship is to be disabled, not destroyed. As we

speak, relevant data concerning the ship's vulnerable points is being

transmitted to your inboard targeting computers. Success, Commander."

"May you win all your battles, sir!"

Zeril's face faded from the field, replaced now by a wide-angle view of

the SDF-1 at the perimeter of the ring system. Breetai and his adviser

turned their attention to a second monitor where radar scanners depicted

the exiting mecha as flashing color-enhanced motes.

"Attacking with such a weak force is completely illogical," Exedore

commented. "They seem to have little knowledge of space warfare."

"They have been a planetbound race for too long, Exedore. Caught up

in their own petty squabbles with one another."

"Absolutely and totally illogical."

Breetai moved in close to the scanner screen, as if there were some

secret message that could be discerned in those flashing lights.

"I don't believe they realize that we are holding back nearly all our

forces...But this is an excellent opportunity for us to demonstrate just what

they're up against."

No sooner had Rick Hunter executed a full roll to avoid colliding with a

chunk of ring ice than Commander Lisa Hayes opened the net, her angry

face on the commo screen lighting up the Veritech cockpit.

"Skull twenty-three! What in blazes are you doing? Just where were

you at the briefing-asleep? I'm getting sick and tired of repeating myself:

28

That kind of stunt flying will give away your position to the enemy! This

isn't the time or place for aerobatics, do you copy?!"

"It was just a roll," Rick said in defense of his actions. "I'm not the only

one-"

"That'll be enough, Corporal. Follow Skull Leader's instructions, do you

copy?"

"All right," he answered sullenly. "I gotcha."

But Hayes wasn't finished, not by a long shot.

"Is that the way you address superiors, Hunter? Look around you,

bright boy. Everyone else here flies by the rules."

"Roger, roger, Commander, I copy."

"And get your RAS back where it belongs-why are you dropping

behind?"

"Hey, you're not flying around up here-" He caught himself and made a

new start. "Uh, Skull twenty-three increasing relative airspeed,

Commander."

Hayes signed off, and Rick breathed a sigh of relief. This was going to

be even more difficult than he had imagined. His first mission, and already

he was being razzed by some know-it-all bridge bunny. Just his luck! What

did she think, it was easy out here? Oh, to be back in the Mockingbird, Rick

thought.

They were flying blind in Saturn's shadow, far from the surface of the

rapidly spinning planet and deep in the ice fields of its outermost rings.

Rick's eyes were glued to the cockpit screens and displays, and yet even with

all this sophisticated instrumentation he had already had several close calls

with debris too insignificant to register on the short-range scanners but

large enough to inflict damage. He knew that the rest of Skull Team was out

there somewhere, but visual contact would have been reassuring right about

now-a glimpse of thruster fire, a glint of sunlight on a wingtip, anything at

all. Soon enough there would be an added element of danger-the arrival of

the enemy Battlepods.

Just then, Roy Fokker appeared on the port commo screen.

29

"Get ready, fellas, here they come."

There's no more flying for fun.

Claudia Grant, the black Flight Officer on the SDF-1's bridge, was

monitoring Lisa Hayes's conversation with the young VT pilot when radar

informed her of the enemy's counterattack.

Claudia and Lisa had adjacent stations along the curved forward hull of

the bridge, beneath the main wraparound bays which now afforded views of

the rocks and ice chunks that made up Saturn's rings. Each woman had two

overhead monitors and a console screen at her disposal. Elevated behind

Lisa's post was the command chair, and behind the captain along the rear

bulkheads on either side of the hatch sat Sammie and Kim, each duty

station equipped with nine individual screens that formed a grand square.

Vanessa was off to starboard, positioned in front of the ten-foot-high threat

board.

Claudia's station was linked to those of the three junior officers by

radio, but such was her proximity to Lisa's that scarcely a word the

commander uttered escaped her hearing. Not that there would have been

anything left unshared between them in any case. They had forged a close

friendship; Claudia, four years Lisa's senior, often playing the role of older

sister, especially in matters of the heart. But for of all her desirable traits,

her natural attractiveness and keen intelligence, Lisa was emotionally

inexperienced. She projected an image of cool and capable efficiency,

rationalizing her detached stance in the name of "commitment to duty." But

buried in her past was an emotional wound that had not yet healed. Claudia

knew this much, and she hoped to help Lisa exorcise that demon some day.

This new VT pilot, Hunter, had touched something deep inside Lisa by

calling her just as he had seen her- 'that old sourpuss' and Claudia wanted

to press her friend for details. But this was hardly the time or the place.

"Enemy Battlepods now engaging our Veritechs in the Cassini

Quadrant, Captain," Claudia relayed.

"Enemy destroyer approaching the target zone," Vanessa added.

30

Gloval rubbed his hands together and rose from his chair.

"Excellent. If we can get a visual on the destroyer, I want it on the

forward screen. Let's see what these ships look like."

Sammie punched it up, and soon the entire bridge crew was staring at

the enemy vessel. It was surely as large as if not larger than the SDF-1,

perhaps two and a half kilometers in length, but in no other way similar to it.

Broad and somewhat flat, the warship had a vaguely organic look, enhanced

by the dark green color of its dorsal armored shells and the light gray of its

seemingly more vulnerable underbelly. Oddly enough, it also appeared to be

quilled; but there was good reason to suspect that many of those spines

were weapons.

"Not a pretty sight, is she?" said Gloval.

"Sir," said Vanessa, "the destroyer is within range."

"All right. Bring the ship around to the predesignated coordinates.

Make certain there are no fluctuations in the barrier system readings and

prepare to fire the main gun on my command."

Claudia tapped in the coordinates. She could feel the huge

reflex-powered thrusters kick in to propel the ship away from Saturn's

gravitational grasp. The pinpoint barrier system checked out, and the main

gun was charging.

Free of the rings now, the SDF-1 was repositioning itself. The twin

main gun towers were leveling out from the shoulders of the ship, taking

aim at a target hundreds of kilometers away.

"Main gun locked on target, sir."

Gloval's fist slammed into his open hand. "Fire!"

Claudia pushed down a series of crossbar switches, threw open a red

safety cover, and pressed home the firing device.

Illumination on the bridge failed momentarily.

The gun did not fire.

Again Claudia tapped in a series of commands; there was no response.

"Quickly!" Gloval shouted. "Get me Lang."

"On the line," Kim said.

31

Lang's thickly accented voice resounded through the bridge comlink

speakers.

"Captain, the pin-point barrier is apparently interfering with the main

gun energy transformers. We're doing a vibrational analysis now, but I don't

think we'll have use of the gun unless we scrap the shield power."

"Bozhe moy!" said Gloval in his best Russian.

Sammie swiveled from her console to face the captain, "Sir,

particle-beam trackers are locked on our ship. The enemy is preparing to

fire!"

Eight weeks of special training had failed to prepare him for the silent

insanity of space warfare. Disintegration and silent death, the pinpoints of

distant light that were laser beams locked on to his ship, the stormy

marriage of antiparticles, the grotesque beauty of short-lived spherical

explosions-bolts of launched lightning, blue and white, igniting the proper

combination of gases...

Rick Hunter fired the VT's thrusters as two Battlepods closed in on him

from above-the relative "above" at any rate, for there was no actual up or

down out here, no real way to gauge acceleration except by the constant

force that kept him pinned to the back of his seat, or pushed him forward

when the retros were kicked in, no way to judge velocity except in relation to

other Veritech fighters or the SDF-1 herself. Just that unvarying starfield,

those cool and remote fires that were the backdrop of war.

It was said that the best VT pilots were those who simply allowed

themselves to forget: about yesterday, today, or tomorrow. "Nothing

extraneous, in mind or body." Warfare in deep space was a silent Zen

videogame where victory was not the immediate goal; success to any degree

depended on a clear mind, free of expectations, and a body conditioned for

thoughtless reaction. Stop to think about where to place your shot, how to

move or mode your mecha, and you were space debris. Fight the fear and

you'd soon be sucking vacuum. Rather, you had to embrace the terror, pull

it down into your guts and let it free your spirit. It was like forcing yourself

32

through the climax of a nightmare, confronting there all the worst things

that could happen, then piercing through the envelope into undreamed-of

worlds. And the dreamstate was the key, because you had to believe you had

complete control of each detail, every element. The silence of space was the

perfect medium for this manipulated madness. Out here, content was more

important than form; wings were superfluous, banking and breaks

unnecessary, thoughts dangerous.

Rick knew when he was trying too hard: He would feel the alpha vibe

abandon him and the mecha follow suit. You are the mecha, the mecha is

you. Left empty, the fear would rush in to fill him up, like air rushing into a

vacuum; and the fear would trigger a further retreat from the vibe. It was a

vicious circle. But he was beginning to recognize the early stages of it, the

waverings and oscillations, and that in itself represented an all-important

first step.

He stayed at Fokker's wing, learning from him. The pods were not as

maneuverable as the Veritechs and nowhere near as complex. They also had

far more vulnerable points. It was just that there were so damned many of

them. One Battlepod, one enemy pilot. How strong was their number? How

long could they keep this up?

Rick came to Roy's aid whenever he could, using heat-seekers and

gatling, saving the undercarriage lasers for close-in fighting.

The assault group had fought its way out of the rings and shadow zone,

but not without devastating losses to the Red and Green teams. And the

SDF-1 had still not fired the main gun.

It was difficult to tell just what was going on back at the fortress. Rick

could see that it was taking heavy fire from the enemy destroyer, a

bizarre-looking ship if ever he'd seen one: a cross between a manta ray and

a mutant cucumber. But for some reason the enemy was using rather

conventional ordnance, easily thwarted by the fortress's movable shields. It

would only be a matter of time before the destroyer upped the ante.

Rick guessed Command's new orders for Skull Team long before Roy

appeared on the screen with them: The VTs were to attack the destroyer.

33

Fokker led them in, searching for soft spots in the forest-green hull.

Battlepods continued to exit the ship through semicircular topside portals,

so the Skull Leader directed the attack along the underside of the destroyer,

using everything his fighter was prepared to deliver.

Rick had completed one pass, discharging half his remaining Stilettos.

He was preparing for a second run now, coming in across the nose of the

destroyer this time, zeroing in on two massive cannons set close to the

central ridge. Suddenly a Battlepod streaked in front of him with a VT in

close pursuit; the mecha let loose a flock of heat-seekers which caught up

with the pod directly over Rick's fighter. He dropped the VT into a nose dive,

expecting concussion where there was none, then executed two rollovers but

still couldn't manage to pull the mecha out of its collision course with the

destroyer. Desperately, he reached out for the mode levers and reconfigured

to Guardian. This would at least enable him to extend the "legs" of the

mecha and utilize the foot thrusters to brake his speed. But the angle of his

approach was too critical. With the nose beginning to dip and the energized

foot thrusters threatening to throw him into a roll, Rick again switched

modes, this time to Battloid configuration. Regardless, he was committed to

completing the front flip, and the Battloid came down with a silent crash,

face first on the armored hull.

As on the SDF-1's shell, there was artificial gravity here, but Rick had

no time to be impressed: two Battlepods were on him, coming in fast now

for strafing runs. He thought the mecha to a kneeling position and brought

the gatling cannon out front. Blue bolts from the pods were striking the hull

around him, fusing metals and blowing slag into the void. It didn't seem to

bother the enemy pilots any that they were firing on their own ship; they

were intent on finishing him off, homing in now, bipedal legs dangling and

plastron cannons firing like spheroid kamikazes.

Rick was backing away from blue lightning, returning continuous fire.

The big gun was dangerously close to overheating in the Battloid's hands.

Then, suddenly, the hull seemed to give way under him. Instantly Rick

realized that he had stumbled the Battloid through one of the topside

34

semicircular ports.

The mecha landed on its butt, twenty-five meters below the action on

the floor of a loading bay. Rick worked the foot pedals frantically, raising

the Battloid to its feet in time to see the overhead hatch close-a shot from

one of the pods had probably activated the external control circuitry. There

was a second hatch in the bay which undoubtedly led to the innards of the

destroyer.

Rick began to approach this second hatch cautiously, studying the air

lock entry controls and feeling strangely secure in the sealed chamber. Just

then the air lock door slid open. On the other side of the threshold stood an

enemy soldier who had apparently heard Rick's fall to the floor. He was

easily as tall as the Battloid and massively built; but although he was

armored, his head was bare and he was weaponless.

The alien goliath and the small human in the cockpit of the mecha had

taken each other by surprise. As dissimilar as these potential combatants

were, their frightened reactions were the same. The defenseless soldier's

eyes darted left and right, desperately seeking an escape route as Rick's did

the same. The alien warrior then stepped back, body language betraying his

thoughts.

It was all that was needed to break the stalemate: Rick raised the

muzzle of the Battloid's gatling, metalshod fingers poised on the trigger.

The enemy destroyer was bearing down on the SDF-1, peppering her

with hundreds of missiles. Radar scanners located throughout the body of

the fortress relayed course headings of the incoming projectiles to inboard

computers, which in turn translated the data into colored graphics. These

displays were flashed to monitors in the barrier control room, where three

young female techs worked feverishly to bring photon disc cover to

projected impact points, the spherical gyros of the pin-point barrier system

spinning wildly under the palms of their hands.

On the bridge Captain Gloval feared the worst. The main gun was still

inoperable, and despite the effectiveness of the shields, the ship was

35

sustaining damage on all sides. Skull Team was counterattacking the

destroyer, but it was unlikely they'd be able to inflict enough damage to

incapacitate it. Was there ever in Earth's history a commander who had

more than 50,000 civilian lives at stake in one battle? For all these long

months Gloval had never once contemplated surrender. Now, however, he

found that possibility edging into his thoughts, draining him of strength and

will.

As if reading Gloval's thoughts, Lisa suddenly came up with an inspired

plan. But first she needed to know if it was possible to concentrate and

direct the pin-point barrier energy to the front of the Daedalus-the

supercarrier that formed the right arm of the SDF-1.

Gloval immediately contacted Dr. Lang, and the reply came swiftly: Yes,

it could be done.

Gloval ordered him to begin the energy transfer at once and quickly set

in motion phase two of the plan. This required that all available Destroids,

Spartans, and Gladiators-the "ground" support weapons mecha-be gathered

together at the bow of the Daedalus. The final phase would be handled by

the Captain himself; he reassumed the command chair, his strength and

confidence renewed.

"Ramming speed," he ordered. "We're going to push the Daedalus right

down their throat!"

Members of the Skull Team who took part in Operation Blitzkrieg

would later report on the spectacle they witnessed that day in Saturn space.

How the SDF-1, gleaming blue, red, and white, engulfed in explosions and

locked on a collision course with the enemy, had executed a backward body

twist, followed by a full-forward thrust of its right arm that brought the bow

of the Daedalus like a battering ram squarely into the forward section of the

destroyer.

One can only imagine the scene from Commander Zeril's point of view:

the impact; the sight of the front of his ship being splintered apart, cables

and conduits rupturing as the destroyer impaled itself on the arm of the

fortress; stressed metal groaning and giving way, crossties and girders

36

ripped from their lodgings; the mad rush of precious air being sucked from

the ship.

Perhaps Zeril and his second were alive long enough to see the forward

ramp of the Daedalus drop open, revealing row after row of deadly

Destroids, thick with guns, missile tubes, and cannons. Perhaps the two

Zentraedi even saw the initial launch of the five thousand projectiles fired

into the heart of the destroyer, the first series of explosions against the hull

and bulkheads of the bridge.

Rick couldn't bring himself to waste the enemy soldier. His mind and

trigger finger were paralyzed, not out of fear but forgiveness. This was no

Battlepod he was face to face with in the airlock but a living, breathing

creature, caught up just as Rick in the madness of war. Remember what

they did to us at Macross Island, Roy had drilled into him. Remember!

Remember!...humankind's war cry for how many millenia now? And when

would it end-with this war? the next? the one after that?

Suddenly the soldier turned his head sharply to the right, as though he

had heard something unreported by the Battloid's sensors. Rick saw the

soldier's face drain of color, his eyes go wide with even greater fear.

In the next instant a conflagration swept through the corridor. The

soldier was vaporized before Rick's eyes, and the Battloid was thrown back

into the loading bay by the explosive force of the firestorm. The air lock was

sealed, but the chamber walls were already beginning to melt.

Rick brought the Battloid's top-mounted lasers into action to melt

through the overhead latch controls, and soon enough the semicircular

hatch slid open. Foot thrusters blazing, the mecha rose from the floor and

clambered out onto the destroyer's outer skin.

The ship was convulsing beneath Rick, disgorging a death rattle roar

from its holds. Forward, he could see the SDF-1 propelling itself away from

the crippled enemy, its pectoral boosters blowtorching and its Daedalus

right arm flayed of metal and superstructure.

Rick returned the mecha to Guardian for his takeoff, then well into the

37

launch he reconfigured to Fighter mode, kicking in the afterburners to carry

him away from the destroyer.

A series of enormous blisters was forming along the outer shell of the

ship as explosive fire launched by the Destroids was funneled front to stern.

But the hull could contain it for only so long; the pustules began to burst,

loosing coronas and prominences of radiant energy into the void. A violent

interior explosion then blasted the destroyer's skin from its framework. At

last there was nothing left but a self-consuming glowing cloud, a war of

gases bent on mutual annihilation. The energy flourished wildly and

dispersed, leaving in the end no trace of itself nor its brief struggle.

38

CHAPTER FOUR

Several historians of the Robotech Wars-Rawlins, Daily, Gordon, and

Turno, to name but a few-have advanced the claim that it was Breetai's

decision [to call up Khyron's troops as reinforcements] that placed the

Zentraedi squarely on the road to defeat. Rawlins, in his two volume study,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron, states: "It was more than a

tactical blunder...Khyron's use of the dried leaves of the Invid Flower of Life

had drastically affected his Zentraedi conditioning. Subsequent research

clearly demonstrated that alkaloids present in the leaves had a direct effect on

the limbic system of the brain. The Flower had the power to stimulate a

resurgence of archaic patterns of behavior. In the case of the Zentraedi,

ironically enough, those behavior patterns were the ones which most clearly

defined the human condition...So in this sense it may be said that Khyron was

the most human of them all."

History of the First Robotech War, Vol. XXXIV

Breetai was now beginning to enjoy this micronian battle game.

"'Cat and mouse' did you call it?"

"Yes, my lord. Apparently it refers to a game the stronger animal plays

with the weaker before the final kill."

"Excellent. You must teach me their language, Exedore."

"Of course, sir. It is most primitive, easy to absorb.

Our three operatives from surveillance are making rapid progress."

"Yes...I may want to talk to these Micronians soon."

The flagship and several of the fleet's scout and recon ships had made a

hyperspace jump along the projected course of the SDF-1. Breetai had left

behind several cruisers and destroyers, along with plenty of Battlepods, to

keep the Micronians busy while he plotted his next move in the game.

The Zentraedi commander smiled wryly as he viewed the traps-vids of

Zeril's destruction. Enhanced-motion playback had captured the giant

39

ship's final few moments splendidly. He had to credit the Micronians for the

unorthodox nature of their counterattack. Instead of further depleting their

power by firing the main gun, they had used one of their oceangoing vessels

to ram Zeril's destroyer headlong. Once inside, a sufficient amount of

firepower must have been unleashed to destroy it. The ship blistered,

glowed, became a veritable tunnel of trapped photon energy, and exploded.

Yes, Breetai was amused by the challenge of illogical behavior; it forced

him to step outside his own conditioning and search for novel approaches to

destruction.

His thoughts were now interrupted by a communiqu?from astrogation.

Exedore relayed the message.

"Sir, emerging from hyperspace-fold."

The composite projecbeam disassembled itself. Exedore called for an

exterior view of local space. Cameras panned across the unbroken blackness

and locked on a small red planet, arid and angry-looking. For Breetai it

brought to mind memories of Fantoma, and the mining worlds he had

worked and patrolled long ago. A schematic appeared on one of the side

screens of the command bowl showing the planetary system of this yellow

star the Micronians referred to as their "sun."

"Mars," said Exedore, "the fourth planet."

Breetai turned to his adviser.

"Has the recon vessel been deployed?"

"As you ordered, sir. The Cyclops transmissions are coming in now."

The projecbeam revealed an abandoned Micronian base that showed

signs of an earlier battle: craters from explosions covered with the fine red

swirling dust of the planet's deserts, a shuttlecraft disabled and still in its

launch bay, the shells of buildings and fractured domes.

"Our scanners reveal no life readings, no energy levels of any form save

minimal low-level background radiation, Commander."

Breetai put his massive hand to his head and unconsciously stroked the

metal plate there. The plate concealed scar tissue that had overgrown the

wounds received while protecting Zor from the Invid; now, it seemed, each

40

time he came close to fulfilling his imperative-to capture the fortress-the

original pain returned.

"It would appear that the Earth people abandoned this installation."

Exedore studied the data screen. "Long-range surface scanners indicate

that a military conflict took place here and at a neighboring installation.

Nevertheless, the Micronians' reflex power furnaces are still operative, and

we've managed to tap into their computer banks and access some of the

information. It seems that most of the inhabitants, sir, were destroyed in a

battle with their allied forces, and the few that survived were unable to

escape the harshness of the planet itself."

Breetai continued to stroke his faceplate. "Hmmm...see to it that one of

the computers is activated and the contents of its memory transmitted on a

hailing frequency."

One of Exedore's eyebrow's arched. "Certainly, my lord, but why?"

"Because this abandoned post will make a perfect trap. I have ordered

the Seventh Mechanized Division of the Botoru Battalion to assemble here

immediately."

The Seventh had a reputation for ground-based savagery and more.

"Impossible," said Exedore with alarm. "Surely, sir, this cannot be; you

haven't ordered up Khyron's division?"

Breetai smiled bemusedly at his companion. "Indeed I have, and why

not?"

"You're familiar with his battle record, his reputation."

"What of it?"

"During the Mona Operation, he was intoxicated and ended up killing

some of his own men." Exedore pressed his point. "And in the Isyris battle

zone he almost wiped out two divisions of friendly forces-"

"While successfully destroying the enemy."

"True, sir, but because of that his own troops have named him the

'Backstabber.'"

Breetai was about to respond, when without warning the bridge went

on alert. Lights began to flash, and warning klaxons were sounding general

41

quarters. Exedore had already positioned himself at the control pads of one

of the monitors, trying to ascertain the cause. Breetai stood over him now as

data began to flash across the screens.

"What is it?" the commander demanded.

"Armed ships emerging from hyperspace in the midst of our battle

group. A collision appears imminent!"

Breetai turned to the forward projecbeam. "Some of the Micronians'

unorthodoxy!"

A card player at a show of hands, Breetai readied himself, fully

expecting the materialization of a squadron of Micronian mecha. But what

appeared instead were the ragtag ships of the Botoru Battalion.

Visual distortions in local space preceded their crazed arrival,

shimmerings and oscillations in the fabric of real time. Several vessels of

Khyron's battle group collided with ships of the main fleet, spreading shock

waves throughout the field. Even the flagship itself was rocked by debris,

the force of the impact strong enough to knock Exedore off his feet. Damage

reports were pouring in to the bridge; debris appeared in the projecbeam

field.

Exedore picked himself up; his voice was full of anger when he spoke.

"This is happening just as I expected! Khyron, sir, is totally without

discipline!"

Was this an oversight, Breetai asked himself, or just a demonstration of

Khyron's recklessness?

The Backstabber's face suddenly appeared on the forward screen.

Khyron, long steel-blue hair falling over the collar of a uniform of his own

design, saluted. His face was a curious mixture of boyish innocence and

brooding anger, Prince Valiant's devilish shadow with a fire in his eyes that

was not quite Zentraedi.

"Commander of the Seventh Mechanized Space Division reporting as

ordered." His lowered salute turned into a mock wave. "Good to see you

again, Commander Breetai." He finished off with a laugh.

"The sheer audacity-" Exedore started to say.

42

A square jawed battle-scarred warrior had appeared by Khyron's side

in the projecbeam field, sharing some sort of joke with him. "Ha! Just as I

thought, Khyron. We crashed into four ships total."

Khyron tried to silence him, but it was too late.

"You thought it would be three at best. I win the bet."

"Be quiet, you fool," ordered Khyron finally. "Our conversation is being

broadcast."

Breetai fixed him with his one eye. "Khyron, don't trifle with me if you

value your command. I'm willing to give you a chance to make up for your

past mistakes, but I have no time for your games. Is that understood?"

Khyron straightened his smile, but the laughter remained in his eyes.

"Yes, Commander, what is it you want me to do?"

"There's an abandoned base on the fourth planet of this star system.

We intend to lure Zor's ship there, and I want you to see to it that it doesn't

leave. Trap it with gravity mines if you have to, but understand this: Your

Seventh will blockade the ship without damaging it unduly. You will then

await my further instructions. Is that clear? You are to await my

instructions before engaging the enemy."

"Perfectly clear, Breetai. I would naturally prefer you to have the honor

and glory of the capture. Commander-in-Chief Dolza expects nothing less of

you, I'm sure."

"That will be enough, Khyron," said Exedore.

Breetai gestured to his adviser. "Send out a recall order to our

Battlepods. Let's give the Micronians enough breathing room to take the

bait we're going to lay out for them."

Khyron signed off. Exedore continued to plead the case against using

him, but Breetai was already looking forward to the plan. The prospect of a

trap excited him. Furthermore, real sport required the unexpected, and in

this contest for Zor's ship and the precious cargo it held, Khyron would play

the Zentraedi's wild card.

Two Battlepods were right on his tail, pouring fire into the mecha. Rick

43

didn't need gauges to feel the lock of those lasers; they might as well have

been burning into his skull. He opened up the gap somewhat by hitting his

afterburners, then tacked toward relative-twelve and waited for the pods to

split up. He knew they'd attempt to pinch him, but he had plans of his own.

Rick took his mind off the pod below him. He had number one haloed

in his rear sights. Firing the forward retros to cut his velocity, he loosed a

cluster of heatseekers. The missiles tore from beneath the right wing of the

mecha and accelerated into a vertical climb, homing in on the enemy ship.

Rick used the port thrusters to angle himself free of the debris and risked a

brief look up and over his shoulder. The rockets caught the Battlepod in the

belly, blowing off both legs and cracking the spherical hull.

Scratch one.

Number two was still below him, trying to roast the underside of Rick's

mecha with continuous heat. A little more of this and he'd be cooked.

Lateral swings were getting him nowhere, so he thought the fighter into a

rapid dive, rolling over-as he fell. The enemy lasers were now tickling the

back of the Veritech, and Rick had to act fast: He returned fire with is own

top-mounted guns, training them on the hinge straps of the pod's

chestplate.

The enemy pilot understood Rick's move and arced his guns toward the

more vulnerable cockpit of the mecha. But he was too late; the hinges of the

chestplate slagged out, and the pod opened up like a newly hatched egg.

Rick caught a glimpse of the giant flailing around in his cockpit before he

completed his roll and engaged the boosters.

Scratch two.

He was headed away from the fortress now. The scene before him had

to have been lifted from some nightmare: Space was alive with swarms of

Battlepods...photon beams laced through the blackness, and silent

explosions brought the colors of death and destruction to an indifferent

universe.

For three days now the pods had pressed their attack. There had been

little sleep for the Robotech forces, even less for the SDF-1 flight crews.

44

After the Daedalus Maneuver and their success in the rings of Saturn, there

was some hope that the enemy had for once suffered a setback. And for

almost a month, while the fortress crossed the Jovian orbit and the asteroid

belt, there were no attacks. But that period of calm was behind them.

Captain Gloval and Dr. Lang had reversed the modular transformation

and disassembled the pin-point barrier system in an attempt to arm the

main gun once again, but their efforts had proved futile. For the rest, the

still slightly shell-shocked masses of displaced persons of Macross city,

catapulted like himself from the southern Pacific to the icy regions of deep

space, there was nothing to do but adjust to the reality of the situation,

continue to rebuild lives and the city itself. Every now and again, they could

marvel at the wonders of space travel, the stark and silent beauty of it, and

forget for a moment that they were not tourists out here but unwilling

players in a nonstop game of death, pursued by the seemingly limitless

forces of a race of giant warrior beings who had dropped out of the skies and

turned the world upside down.

Only a month before, Rick had been face to face with one of those

titans in an air lock on one of the alien ships. He recalled staring out of the

cockpit of the transformed Veritech at the giant, who at first had openly

feared him, then cursed and ridiculed him for not having the will to blast

him away. The laughter of that alien still rang in his ears, followed by his

guilt and confusion.

But most of all the memory of the giant's fiery death.

How could one ever forget?

Two Battlepods were suddenly behind him, looking for laser lock. Rick

executed a double rollover and dive to lose them. Peripherally, he saw the

Blue Team leader swoop in and take them out.

"Way to go Blue Leader!" Rick shouted into the tac net.

"Just do the same for me sometime, buddy," came the reply.

"You got it."

Rick and the Blue Leader, wing to wing, led a frontal assault on yet

another enemy wave. They launched themselves into the thick of it,

45

dispatching several of the enemy. Lateral thrusters took them out of the

arena momentarily, and the SDF-1 came into view, her main batteries,

Phalanx guns, and Gladiator mecha issuing steady fire. The fortress,

enveloped by a swarm of pods, looked as though it had somehow wandered

into a fireworks display.

Commander Hayes was calling for an assist in Fifth Quadrant, and

Skull and Blue Teams were ordered to respond. Rick and Blue Leader were

initiating course corrections when five pods appeared on Rick's radar screen.

Three of them were quickly dispatched by Roy Fokker in Skull One, but the

remaining two were hounding Blue Leader's VT with a vengeance. The

enemy unleashed a massive volley of rockets that caught the mecha

broadside. For a moment Blue Leader seemed to hang in space; then the

fighter exploded and disintegrated, its parts scattered, its pilot a memory.

Rick turned his face away from the wreckage. I could be next, he

thought.

How could one ever forget?

The pods continued to press their attack.

Death had a free hand.

Then, as suddenly as they had appeared they were gone. The fighting

was over and recall orders came in from the bridge.

Rick followed Roy Fokker's lead into the docking bays of the

Prometheus.

Roy caught up with him in the hangar and slapped him on the

shoulder.

"You looked good up there, Rick. Keep it up."

Rick grunted, removed his helmet, and kept walking, increasing his

pace.

Roy caught up with him again. "You can't let it get you down, kid. We

sent them home, didn't we?"

Rick turned and confronted his friend. "If you believe that, you're a

bigger idiot than I am, Roy."

Roy draped his arm around Rick's shoulders and leaned in. "Listen to

46

me. You're beat. We all are. Get yourself into town after the debriefing. I'm

sure Minmei would like to see you."

"That would be a surprise," Rick said, and stormed off.

Monorail lines now ran from the Prometheus and Daedalus arms into

Macross. A central monorail line ran through the body of the fortress,

through enormous interior holds originally meant for creatures ten times

human scale-a vast forbidden zone only a portion of which was understood

by Dr. Lang's teams of scientists-and through that area where Rick and

Minmei had passed two weeks together deep beneath the present streets of

the city.

Each passing day brought changes here. There was even talk of using

EVE, enhanced video emulation, to bring sunrise and sunset, blue skies and

clouds, to the place. Already there was a grid of streets, carefully arranged

according to the dictates of the modular transformation schematic,

multiple-storied dwellings, shops and restaurants, a central marketplace,

even a few banks and a post office.

The city went on living through the war, almost oblivious to it except

when energy drains through diversion led to power shortages or when the

enemy fighters and Battlepods scored direct hits. Even the ubiquitous

uniforms didn't signal war-uniforms were worn by everyone to denote job

and detail, a carryover from the island where most of these same people had

been connected in one way or another to the reconstruction of the SDF-1. A

public address system kept the residents of the city informed about the

ship's course through the solar system but was seldom used to report

accurate battle results. In fact, it was speaking to the population now, as

Rick meandered in vague fashion toward the Chinese restaurant, hoping for

an accidental encounter with Minmei. Passersby paid the message little

mind, but it caught him off guard.

"News from the bridge: We have been attacked by one hundred twenty

enemy pods, but our first, fourth, and seventh fighter squadrons have

succeeded in completely destroying them. Our casualties have been light,

47

and our astrogational system has not been affected. That is all."

Incredible! Rick thought. He was looking around for someone to talk to,

someone he could grab by the lapels and awaken with the truth, when an

arm caught hold of his. He turned and found himself looking into Minmei's

blue eyes.

"Hello, stranger," she said. "I've been worried about you."

She embraced him like a brother.

He had rehearsed how he was going to play this, but standing here with

her now, the half-truths from the bridge echoing inside him, he just wanted

to hold and protect her. But he managed to keep some distance, and she

caught his mood.

He explained about the announcement. "It wasn't true, Minmei.

They're misleading everyone. We didn't hit half of them, and our losses

were-"

She put a finger to his lips and looked around. "I don't think it's a good

idea to talk about this here, Rick."

He broke from her hold. "Listen, Minmei-"

"Besides, everyone's doing all they can for the war effort, and I don't

think you'll accomplish anything by getting them-or me-depressed.

Especially with my birthday right around the corner."

He could only stare at her and wonder where her mind was, but she

was way ahead of him already. She smiled and took hold of his arm.

"Come on, Rick. Let's get something to eat. Please?"

He gave in. How could he make her understand how it was out there?

In here she was doing what they all were: going on with life as if nothing

had happened, as if this were home, as if there were a wonderfully blue

ocean just over that rise. As if there were no war out there.

On the bridge of the SDF-1 there was little else but war to talk or think

about.

Captain Gloval removed his cap and ran a hand through his

salt-and-pepper hair. What were the aliens planning now? Obviously their

48

constant attacks were not meant to turn the tide but to wear him down,

perhaps in the hope that the SDF-1 would be surrendered. The attacks were

like sparring matches; it was as if the enemy was feeling him out, trying to

gain some insight into his tactics. Psychological warfare conducted with an

inexhaustible supply of ships and no regard for the pilots who flew them.

Gloval wondered what his counterpart might look like, what kind of being

he was. He recalled the video warning the fortress had broadcast to his

small band of explorers some ten years ago...One thing was becoming clear:

The aliens did not want to damage the SDF-1. They hoped to recapture it

intact.

The attacks had thrown them drastically off course, and although

closing in on Earth's orbit, they had months of travel ahead of them.

Gloval asked for information about the aliens' retreat. The only thing

Claudia and Lisa could be certain of was that there were no longer any

traces of enemy pods on the radar screens. Gloval was pondering this when

Kim Young announced that incoming data was being received on one of the

open frequencies.

Gloval stepped down from his chair and walked over to take a look at

the transmissions.

"...'If mice could swim,"' he read, " 'they would float with the tide and

play with the fish. Down by the seaside, the cats on the shore would quickly

agree...' What is this nonsense? Where is it coming from?"

Vanessa Leeds tapped in a set of requests and swiveled in her seat to

study a secondary monitor. In a moment she had the answer. "A transmitter

located sixteen degrees off our current course."

"That would put it at Sara Base on Mars!" said Claudia.

Lisa Hayes turned from her post in a start. "What?! That's impossible!

Are you certain of those readings?"

"Sara Base is deserted," said Gloval. "All life there was wiped out

during the war. It just can't be."

Lisa and Claudia exchanged a conspiratorial look.

"No, Lisa," said Claudia. "Don't get your hopes up."

49

"Why couldn't there be survivors?" Lisa said excitedly. She turned to

Gloval. "Isn't it possible, sir?"

Gloval crossed his arms, "I don't see how, but it was a pretty big base,

and I suppose anything is possible. We've all seen enough lately to convince

me of that."

"We have secondary confirmation on the origin of the transmissions,

sir. The origin is definitely Sara."

Claudia said, "Perhaps we should check it out, Captain. It would only

mean a minor deviation in our course." Again she and Lisa exchanged looks.

Gloval returned to his chair. He thought it unlikely that there were

survivors on the base. And the possibility of an enemy trap had to be

considered. But there were no radar indications of activity in the area, and

the risk presented by a landing would certainly be justified if they could

manage to replenish their rapidly diminishing supplies. It would be the last

chance until Earthspace, and who knew when that might be. If that would

be...

Gloval turned to his crew.

"How badly hurt are we?"

Vanessa responded, "Astrogation and engineering sections report

limited damage only, sir."

"All right," said Gloval. "Change course and head for Mars."

50

CHAPTER FIVE

The destruction of Sara Base on Mars was in some ways typical of the

setbacks experienced by the newly formed World Unification Alliance, the

unfortunate result of suspicion, misinformation, and manipulation by an

unnamed collective of separatist factions. That the Northeast Asian

Co-Prosperity Sphere could be so easily duped into believing the base a

military installation was all the more cause for concern. But more than that,

the attack upon the base marked the first instance that humankind had taken

warfare off the planet and brought it to the stars.

Malachi Cain,

Prelude to Doomsday: A History of the Global Civil War

Mars!

Lisa stared at the barren world as it came into view through the

forward bays. Arid, lifeless, named for the ancient god of war, it was like an

angry red wound in her heart. Eight years earlier her love had died here, on

this world that she was destined to visit, one that had visited her so often in

tear-filled dreams. But even so she couldn't suppress the belief, the hope,

that one of the many survival scenarios she had played endlessly through

these lost years would run to completion. The last time she had seen and

held Karl Riber was the evening he had told her of his assignment to Mars

Base Sara.

"The Visitor" had crash-landed on Macross Island three years earlier,

and the Internationalists-men like her father, Admiral Hayes, Senator

Russo, Gloval, and the rest-were doing their best to bring about world unity,

centered on the restoration of the SDF-1 and the potential threat to Earth

posed by the arrival of that ship built by an advanced race of intellectual and

physical giants. But peace and unity were not so easily secured.

Factionalism was rampant and borders changed overnight, sides were

drawn and redrawn, bombs were dropped, and the killing continued

51

unabated.

She had known Karl only a short time but had loved him from the start.

He had been assigned to her father as an aide and was doing his best to be

the soldier Admiral Hayes expected at his side. But through and through

Karl was a peace-loving man, a sensitive scholar who, like others of his type,

was looking forward to a day when the bloodshed would end and

humankind would begin to focus itself on its destiny, its true place among

the stars. The arrival of the SDF-1 had further inflamed his passion for

peace; but when even that event failed to put an end to the reigning

madness, there was nothing left for him but cynicism and the need to

escape.

That farewell night found Karl and Lisa together at the Hayes estate in

upstate New York. They sat together under a grand old tree under star-filled

skies, and Karl told her that he had been reassigned to Base Sara, a

scientific observation post on Mars. He had pointed out the planet and

confessed how torn he was to be leaving her. But there was no place on

Earth for him any longer; even the Robotech project had been co-opted by

the militaristic power wing of the Alliance. Instead of profiting from the

miraculous find, they were merely gearing up for an anticipated war, a

projected war.

She knew it was the right move for him, even if it was the wrong move

for there. But that night her young mind had seized on a plan she hoped

would keep them together: She would enlist in the Defense Force and would

apply for an assignment to Sara Base.

She had confessed her love for Karl.

And lost him to the stars.

But she made good her promise, and with her father's assistance had

received a security clearance and an assignment to Macross Island to work

under Dr. Lang aboard the SDF-1.

She and Karl never saw each other again. But there were letters and

tapes and the occasional transworld calls. Karl was in his element there, and

all signs had pointed to her being able to join him soon. Until war had

52

reached out its long arm and seized on the one place humankind had yet to

spill blood. Sara Base became a graveyard overnight, almost a symbol of

humankind's need to take war with it wherever it set foot in the universe.

The SDF-1 became her future from that moment on. She had thrown

herself into the project with a fever born of forgetting that meant for rapid

advancement but left little time for personal growth. Vanessa and Claudia

chided her for her attachment to the ship, and sometimes she knew that she

did come across as cold and distant.

The old sourpuss!

It was left unfinished between her and Karl, as if emotional time had

been frozen on the night she learned about Base Sara's destruction.

This planetary touchdown then was more than a mere landing to her; it

was an emotional pilgrimage. Karl Riber was alive in her heart, moment to

moment; to her it meant that he could really be alive, one of a group of

survivors here. He had said to her, We'll be together again someday, when

the Earth is at peace. Love was simply not meant to perish in angry flames;

love couldn't be extinguished by war!

Gloval was shouting her name; she turned a confused face toward him,

caught between past and future in a present that was of her own making.

"Lisa, what's wrong? Are you sure you're feeling all right?"

She composed herself and awaited his command.

"Send out a Cat's-Eye recon unit. Order them to report any anomalies

in their findings-any at all."

Lisa turned to her task. Let him be alive, she prayed to herself.

The Cat's-Eye recon scanned the deserted base and radioed its findings

to the bridge of the SDF-1: no sign of the enemy, no sign of life of any kind.

And yet, inexplicably, data continued to pour into the onboard computers.

Somehow one of the Sara Base computers had gone online. Captain Gloval

was convinced of this much. Still, wary of a possible enemy trap, he

convened a special meeting with colonels Maistroff and Caruthers and

high-ranking officials of Macross City to discuss the prospect of setting the

53

giant space fortress down on the surface of Mars.

There were two reasons for attempting such a landing, as opposed to

holding the fortress in low orbit and using cargo ships and drones to ferry

up the much needed supplies. The primary reason was that a setdown

would enable ground crews to repair damage sustained during four months

of space warfare. Most of these repairs could not be effected in deep space

or even in low orbit without the constant threat of enemy sneak attacks and

the overwhelming logistical problems that extended extravehicular activity

would entail. The second advantage, although less clear-cut, was of greater

concern to Gloval and Lang than to the Macross City leaders, for whom

replenished supplies was reason enough. The fact was that the SDF-1 had

never been landed; the closest it had come was more a controlled drop than

an actual landing, months ago when the antigravity devices had torn

through the hull of the ship and it had fallen back to its docking bay

supports on Macross Island. The lower gravity on Mars would allow

engineering to stage a dress rehearsal of the landing they would have to

perform once the fortress reached Earth.

Recalling that first day of attack, Gloval resisted an urge to dwell on

how defenseless he had felt with the ship grounded. There was no assurance

that this wouldn't be the case again, but he had to convince himself that the

advantages outweighed the risks.

It took two days to bring the SDF-1 down.

Astrogation held her in stationary orbit for what seemed an eternity,

and then the fortress was allowed to begin its slow nerve-racking descent to

the surface of Mars. Gloval sat at the helm wondering what surprise Lang's

half grasp on Robotechnology might result in this time, but to his relief and

to the delight of everyone onboard, the SDF-1 was set down without

incident. After months in space it was difficult to believe they were down on

solid ground once again. It made no difference that this wasn't their

homeworld; after all, humankind had once occupied this planet, and that

was reason enough to call it home for the moment.

Half of Macross City jammed itself onto the observation deck after the

54

all-clear was sounded and the ship had docked. At least half that number

would have gladly disembarked then and there to begin new lives for

themselves; but there would be no liberty for civilians at this port.

Gloval continued to have misgivings-he felt as if he was standing on

solid ground with nothing beneath his feet. For this reason he ordered the

ship down at a point several kilometers from Sara Base. Destroids were then

deployed to secure a supply route, with squadrons of Veritech fighters

launched to provide cover. The Cat's-Eye recon plane continued its sweeps

over the area, and long-range radar watched the skies. When Gloval was

convinced that there was no threat to their position or operation, he ordered

that the ship be moved closer to the base, employing the auxiliary lifters and

gravity control system, something they wouldn't have been able to do on

Earth.

Now the base complex, what remained of it, lay spread out below the

ship. From the bridge, the crew could observe the destruction that had been

visited upon it, a grim reminder of the days when humankind was at war

with itself. It was a forlorn-looking place covered with debris swept in by the

continuous Martian winds.

The supply routes secure, Battloids began their patrol, gatling weapons

ready. A long line of wheeled and treaded transport vehicles now stretched

from the loading bays of the Daedalus and the Prometheus to the heart of

Sara.

Lisa was waiting for the right moment; if she didn't act quickly, though,

there wouldn't be another chance. Data from the base was still coming in,

and Gloval had yet to organize a recon team to investigate the source of the

transmissions. Finally she gathered up enough nerve and turned to the

captain.

"Requesting your permission to leave the ship, sir, and recon the

interior of the base."

The captain regarded her with concern. "But Lisa-"

She interrupted him. "I'd like to check out the source of those signals,

sir. There could be survivors here!" Only when she caught the look of

55

protective paternalism in his eyes did she break down. "Please, sir. It's

important to me." She had no idea whether Gloval knew anything about her

past; but he knew her as a crewmember, knew when she needed his

attention.

Claudia offered an unsolicited assist. "I'll cover her duties here," she

told the captain.

Gloval thought it over. Anyone who was within 500 kilometers of the

base would have already come running. But there was something so

personal in her insistence that he decided to allow her to go.

"But I want you to take two security personnel with you!" he called out

as she hurried from the bridge.

Lisa ignored the captain's command; after all, it hadn't been issued as a

direct order. She outfitted herself with helmet and environment suit, radio,

and laser sidearm and took charge of a small personnel carrier from supply.

Had she been thinking about it, she might have compared her short

ride across the Martian wastes to the driving training she'd undergone on

the moon years ago, but her thoughts were elsewhere. She had to find Karl

and renew their life together or discover for herself that he was dead.

The base had the familiar look and feel of the countless war-torn cities

she'd experienced on Earth-not voluntarily abandoned but simply cut down

in its prime. All life had been sucked from the place in an instant, and that

sort of ending always left ghosts lingering about. She could sense their

presence all around her, almost as if they were still confused by what had

occurred here and were now demanding an explanation from this stranger

who was visiting their resting place. Yes, it was like those ravaged cities but

more so: The howling of the winds was louder and angrier, the soil

appeared more blood-stained, and there was never a blue sky here.

She used the homing device to direct her to the source of the

transmissions received by the SDF-1. They emanated from a large building,

central to the complex, that had served as the communications center. She

entered this through the blown front hatchway and made her way through

56

deserted halls to the computer room, the sound of her own breathing heavy

in her ears. Everywhere she looked there was evidence of the disaster. The

scientists who were stationed here must have had some sort of warning,

though, because there were no bodies lying about-how she had feared

that!-just general disarray, as if there had been a last-minute effort to collect

what they could and leave this place before the sky fell.

At last she reached computer control. She stood motionless in the

doorway and peered into the deserted room: chairs tipped over, papers

strewn about, a carpet of glass shards from blown monitor screens

wall-to-wall. But at the far end of the room there were flashing console

lights, greens and reds, and an on-line computer frantically emptying its

memory banks across a monitor screen no eyes were meant to read, like an

infant left crying in a crib. Lisa walked over to the machine and shut it down.

She turned and took another look around the room, puzzling over its

emptiness.

So there was no half-starved band of survivors huddled in one sealed

room using the computer as shipwrecked sailors would a signal fire. Just a

machine that had somehow activated itself.

The way memories did.

Hidden in a deep chasm fifteen kilometers from Sara Base, Khyron and

his attack force of 200 Battlepods waited. The Backstabber himself occupied

his Officer's Pod, a mecha different from the rest, with lasers protruding like

whiskers from its elongated snout and two arms that were deadly cannons.

He ingested the dried and intoxicating leaves of the Invid Flower while

monitoring reports from his squad leaders who were holding at other points

along the perimeter.

A Micronian recon ship had already overflown the canyon and failed to

detect the presence of his troops. The abandoned base was surrounded, the

gravity mines were in place, and the fortress had set down just where he had

predicted it would. The foolish Micronians had taken the bait-an on-line

computer-and the trap was almost ready to be sprung. Soon he would

57

capture Zor's ship, for the glory of the Zentraedi! And for the honor of

Khyron. It would be a shame if he was forced to take on the fortress himself.

He did so want the credit to go to Breetai. If only things weren't going so

slowly. The leaves always made him somewhat impatient.

"Gerao, aren't those gravity mines ready yet?" he shouted into his

comlink mike.

The Battlepod speaker crackled with static and the monitor erupted

into patternless noise bars before Gerao's face appeared on the screen. His

droid team was operating at almost three kilometers below the surface.

Gerao may have won the collision bet, but it didn't pay to best one's

commander. Khyron laughed to himself.

"The energy accumulation is up to seventy percent, my lord. Not much

longer."

"Blast it, this waiting is irritating me! Drive those droids harder, Gerao,

or I'll leave you buried on this godforsaken world. You have my word on it!"

Gerao's emphatic salute signaled that he understood Khyron's threat

completely. He signed off. Khyron began to drum his fingers on the console.

Zor's ship, he thought to himself. Why was Commander in Chief Dolza

wasting his time with this one when there were countless worlds left to

conquer? Since when were the Zentraedi errand boys? If the Robotech

Masters were so desperate about getting Zor's Protoculture matrix back,

they could go retrieve it themselves. What did Khyron care about

Protoculture? It was the Invid Flowers that were important to him...He

picked up one of the dried petals and regarded it lovingly: Here was the true

power.

As Khyron was placing the petal in his mouth, the face of one of his

troops surfaced on the Officer's Pod commo screen.

"We've waited long enough, Commander," the soldier said. "I'm going

in now. Any longer and we will jeopardize our mission."

To Khyron's amazement, the soldier's Battlepod fired its thrusters and

began to lift off from the chasm floor. Was he seeing things or had this fool

actually decided to use his own initiative? Khyron was as fond of insolence

58

as anyone, but this was pushing things too far. He allowed the pod to climb

almost to the rim of the chasm before bringing up one of the cannon arms of

his mecha and firing. The Battlepod took a direct hit, turned end over end,

and plummeted and crashed on the chasm floor.

The pilots of two other pods hopped their crafts over to their fallen

comrade and checked his status.

"He's still alive, my lord."

"So much the worse for him, then," yelled Khyron. "If I can wait here

patiently, so can the rest of you. The next one who disobeys my orders will

meet a worse fate. I promise you that!"

Khyron was imagining his underlings stiffening into postures of salute

inside the pods when the voice of Gerao entered the headset.

"My lord, I fear that use of the cannon may have compromised our

position. The Micronian recon plane is circling back in this direction."

"The recon plane! Gerao, are you ready with the mines?"

"Just ten percent more to go."

Khyron slapped his hands down on the pod console. "Ninety percent

will have to be good enough. You have my permission to attack!"

Claudia was worried: There had been no word from Lisa for almost an

hour now. The incoming data from the base had terminated, but the seismic

sensors were picking up something new. Captain Gloval and Vanessa were

trying to make sense of the readings.

"Nearby in the mountains, I think-a disturbance or explosion," said

Vanessa.

"A landslide, perhaps."

"No, there's too much sonic attached to it. It must have been an

explosion."

Gloval turned to Claudia. "Instruct the Cat's-Eye to make another pass

over the eleven o'clock zone at the fifteen-kilometer perimeter. And see to it

that recon readings are patched into the main screen here."

Claudia contacted the Cat's-Eye, and within minutes new data was

59

filling the screen: The sensors indicated hundreds of individual mecha units

moving in from the cavernous mountains that surrounded Sara Base.

"Battlepods!" said Gloval. He ordered Claudia to sound general

quarters. "Recall all transport vehicles immediately and scramble the

Veritech fighters! They won't catch us napping this time!" Gloval paced the

bridge, then threw himself into the command chair. "Activate the gravity

control system and prepare the ship for takeoff."

Claudia swung around from her terminal. "But Captain, Lisa's still out

there. She'll never make it back in time."

Gloval waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal. "I told her I didn't

want her to enter that base. Now she'll have to come up in one of the VTs."

Claudia hid a look of concern from Gloval and carried out her orders.

But something was wrong: The ship wasn't lifting off. The gravity control

system wasn't damaged, there were correct readings on all the sensors, but

the SDF-1 would not rise. It bellowed and shuddered like some captured

beast.

"Captain," Vanessa managed to shout above the noise, "the seismic

sensor indicates an intense gravity field underlying the base!"

Gloval leaped from his seat to study the threat board.

"Gravity mines! So this is what the enemy has in mind-they mean to

pin us down like a trapped insect. Shut down all engines before she comes

apart at the seams!"

"Battlepods!" said Claudia.

Gloval and the bridge crew turned to face the front bays: The Martian

sky was filled with enemy mecha.

60

CHAPTER SIX

It's become my routine these past two months to wander over to the

observation dome and spend hours at the scope watching our beautiful blue

and white world transit the Martian night. How bright, how incredibly alive

and tranquil, Earth appears from afar! And how misleading that impression

is...I often think about our last night together. It was more difficult for me to

leave you than to leave our planet, the global madness, the small minds at

work who have robbed us of our dreams. But I don't want to get started on all

this again; I want to talk about this place, and how happy I know you will be

here. The stars seem close enough to touch, our distant sun no less warm, and

even these incessant winds do not disturb...Base Sara is a new experiment in

peace, a new experiment in the future...

Karl Riber,

Collected Letters

The battlepods and carapace fighters of the Botoru Seventh left the

cover of the mountain chasms and descended on Sara Base. Khyron led the

assault, screaming into his communicator, "Kill them, kill them all!"

The Robotech forces threw everything they had into the Martian sky.

Battloids and Spartan defenders took up positions on the base, while

squadrons of Veritechs went up to meet the enemy one on one. The main

batteries and CIWS Phalanx guns of the grounded space fortress rotated

into position and filled the thin air with orange tracers, armor-piercing

discarding sabot rounds, and deadly thunder.

In an attempt to cut off the supply line to the SDF-1, Khyron and his

forces went after the transports first. The pods fell from the Martian sky

unleashing a torrent of energy bolts and missiles. The all-terrain trucks

bounded off the gravel highway to evade fire, but scarcely a dozen made it to

the fortress intact. Explosions tossed the vehicles off the ground like toys,

and soon there was only a pathway of fire where the vehicles had once

traveled.

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The Destroids were next on Khyron's list; then he turned his attention

to the Battleloids and Guardians.

The Battloids of the Skull Team were positioned along the SDF-1's

defensive perimeter when they received launch orders. Roy and Rick

transformed their mecha to Guardian mode and lifted off from blasting

carpets to engage the enemy.

Rick retracted the legs and threw the fighter into a long vertical climb,

exchanging fire with three pods on the way up. The three gave chase while

he banked at the crest of his ascent and dropped off into a fusillade fall,

weapons blazing as he came back down on them. Heatseekers ripped from

his mecha, scoring hits against two pods.

Rick and the remaining enemy raced above the rough terrain, trading

shots. At the foot of the mountains they split apart, only to encounter each

other at the craggy summits. It was a game of aerial chicken, pod and fighter

on a collision course, Zentraedi and Terran pilots emptying their guns.

Rick yo-yoed and took the fight deeper into the mountains. The enemy

pursued him, launching rockets which Rick's mecha successfully evaded

with breaks and jinks and high barrel rolls.

Skull twenty-three banked sharply now and fell away into a narrow

valley, luring its opponent toward a forest of wind-eroded rock spires. Rick

used two of his rockets to blast an opening for himself and dove in. The pod

stayed with him but was having trouble negotiating the forest's tight

groupings of columns. Too late, the enemy pilot attempted to pull out; one

of the pod's clawlike legs snagged on a spire, and the pod suddenly became

a highspeed pinball, careening from tower to tower. Flames and debris from

the resounding explosion tore past Rick's mecha as he climbed from the

canyon.

This was more like it, he told himself, rejoining his battle group on the

Martian plain. Sky above, ground below. Sound and light, explosions of

finality. No clouds for cover, but it seemed as though you could see forever

through the thin air.

Just then Roy's face appeared on the left screen of his cockpit.

62

"What d' ya think, Little Brother? It's a little like the old days, isn't it?"

"The 'old' days, yeah, four months ago!"

Roy laughed. "Let's get 'em, tiger!"

Rick watched his friend's fighter face down two of the pods and

dispatch both of them. He quickly scanned the busy sky: If each Veritech

could take out two pods, the enemy would only have them outnumbered

four to one.

From the bridge of the SDF-1, Gloval and his crew had a clear view of

the ongoing massacre. Brilliant strobelike flashes of explosive light spilled

in through the forward and side bays as the enemy continued to pour fire at

the ship. The fortress rocked and vibrated to the staccato beat of battle. The

Martian landscape had become an inferno.

"The sixth and eighth Spartan divisions have been wiped out, Captain,"

Claudia reported. "Veritech squadrons are sustaining heavy casualties."

Gloval paced the deck, fingers of one hand tugging at his thick

mustache. "There must be a way out of this..." He turned to Vanessa. "Put

the seismic schematic on the screen again."

Gloval studied the computer graphic display as it came up. The source

of the induced gravitation that held the ship captive was located some three

kilometers beneath the surface. Gloval now had Kim project a schematic of

the underground power center that fueled Sara Base. He stepped back to

take in both screens, folded his arms across his chest, and nodded.

"It's just as I thought. There is a reflex furnace beneath Sara." Reflex

power was one of Robotechnology's first by-products-back in more peaceful

times. "If we were to overload it, the explosion that would result might take

out the enemy's gravity mines as well."

Gloval instructed Vanessa to run a computer simulation based on the

available data. Then he turned to Claudia: "Contact Lisa, immediately."

Lisa was trying to figure a way out of Sara Base when Gloval's call came

through. With what she recalled from her engineering courses and the

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technical assists the SDF-1 onboard computers would provide, there was a

good chance that she'd be able to shut down the reflex furnace as Gloval

requested. He instructed her to keep her radio tuned in to the bridge

frequency so that they could monitor her location and position.

The first step would be to get herself safely from the communications

center to the main power station, which meant an unescorted trip through

the thick of the fighting. There was one other option, though, and it would

require her to be out in the open only for a short time. The power center was

linked to the barracks building through a system of underground tunnels

and access corridors. And the barracks was just a short hop through hell.

Lisa poised herself on the threshold of the communication building's

blown hatch. Ground-shaking explosions were going off all around her.

Alien pods, hopping nimbly through the devastation, were leveling

everything in sight. Hundreds of missiles Corkscrewed overhead,

converging on what was left of the supply line and the fortress itself. Lisa's

dream was finished, and Sara Base was finished with it. She pushed herself

from the front entry like a parachutist leaving an old-style aircraft and flung

herself into the firestorm. She ran a slalom course, jagging left and right

through fields of fire, and made it to the safety of the barracks just short of a

violent blast that took out the area she'd left behind. The concussion threw

her off her feet, but she was unhurt.

Inside, she accessed information from the SDF-1 to locate the main

shaft elevators. There was auxiliary power here, so she would be able to ride

down to the underground room.

The descent was a long one. It felt as though she were traveling into the

very bowels of the fiery planet. Each level lessened the effects of the

overhead bombardment until the world seemed silent once again.

Stepping out at Sublevel Fifteen, she made her way to the control room.

There was an uncommon, low-level vibration down here, and she was

forced to move with more exertion, almost as though she'd been returned to

Earth gravity. She reasoned that the enemy gravity mines were responsible

for this.

64

It took Lisa several minutes to locate the furnace controls, a confusing

array of switches, dials, and meters, antiquated and needlessly complex.

There were redundant systems and far too many command switches and

manually operated crossovers. But instructions from the onboard computer

simplified her task. Finally she had the reflex computers programmed for

overload. The control systems that allowed excess charge buildup to be

safely shunted into runoffs were now damped down, and all backup outlets

were similarly closed. Next she instructed the CPUs that operated the

furnace to bring the power up to maximum, canceling out the safety

programs with override commands.

Warning lights were starting to flash on the console, and she thought

she could detect the sound of warning sirens and klaxons going off

somewhere. The sequence, however, had kicked in several other built-in

safety systems that were unanticipated: Hatchways were beginning to lower

throughout the room. According to an overhead digital clock, she had less

than fifteen minutes to get off the base.

Lisa returned to the main elevator and rode the car back to ground

level. The sounds of battle had increased. She tried to retrace her path to the

entrance, but the barracks had taken several hits, and debris now blocked

the corridor. There was an unobstructed second corridor that led to the

officers' quarters; a hatchway there would allow her to exit on the other side

of the building. She entered this and was making for the hatch, when the

corridor suddenly sealed itself off. Iron doors dropped from overhead vaults

at both ends, trapping her inside.

Hatchways to individual quarters lined both sides of the corridor, and

while she was opening each of these looking for some way out, a terrible

thought occurred to her: What if one of these rooms had belonged to Karl?

In the dim light, Lisa's fingers traced the letters of raised name tags on

the doors, and it wasn't long before she found RIBER, KARL.

Slowly the will to survive began to abandon her. All she could feel now

was a terrible sadness and a pain from long ago, as though her body was

recalling the hurt and bringing it up to the surface.

65

She hit the button that opened the hatchway to Karl's quarters and

stood at the threshold, afraid to enter, supporting herself against the

doorjamb. "Oh, Karl," she said to whatever ghosts were lurking there.

Lisa entered, mindless of the countdown to self-destruction.

"The destruct sequence has been initiated, Captain," Claudia said. "T

minus ten minutes and counting."

Gloval nodded his head in approval. "Good. I knew Lisa could do it.

Now, issue a recall order to our remaining Destroids and Valkyries. But I

want them to pull back slowly: With a little luck we'll catch the enemy in our

trap this time."

"Nine minutes and counting, Captain."

"Contact Lisa; let's see how she's making out."

Claudia tried, but there was no response. The radio transmitter was

still on, but Lisa wasn't answering the call.

"Lisa, come in, please," Claudia said. "She's not responding, Captain."

Gloval rose from his chair. "If she's still on-line, we should be able to

get a fix on her position."

Kim already had it up on the screen.

"She's in Barracks C. But she's not moving."

"She could be hurt, or trapped," said Gloval. "Claudia, quickly, contact

the Skull Leader."

Rick released two rockets and dove under the Battlepods. White-hot

shrapnel impacted against his fighter, and the shock wave threw him into an

involuntary sink.

He narrowly missed buying it at the hands of an enemy Officer's Pod

that leaped into view out of nowhere. It was the same one he had seen on

and off throughout the battle. And whoever piloted it was someone to fear.

Rick had seen the pod take out three Veritechs in one pass, and later he had

seen that same pilot blow away two of his own men to get to one of the

Robotech Valkyries.

66

Roy pulled alongside Rick, gesturing to the enemy mecha. His face was

on twenty-three's left screen.

"You wanna watch that one, Rick. He means business."

"Let's gang up on him, buddy."

"Negative, Rick. We've got new orders. Seems that Commander Hayes

has gotten herself stranded on the base and it's up to us to rescue her."

"Hey, like we don't have more pressing matters at hand?"

"Come on, I thought that damsels in distress were your stock 'n' trade,

Little Brother."

"One damsel at a time, Roy. One at a time."

Roy's face became serious. "Patch your system into the SDF-1

mainboard and home in on the signal they transmit. I'll be covering you."

"Roger," Rick said. "One rescue coming up."

He pushed the fighter into a shallow dive that brought him into and

through a group of alien pods. Those that didn't take each other out in an

effort to bring him down, Rick dispatched with close-in laser fire directed at

the pods' fuel lines. Roy was running interference up ahead, diverting some

of the pods positioned between Rick and the base.

Rick dropped the fighter to ground level, relaxed back into his seat,

lowering his mind into transitional alpha and directing the Veritech's

transformation to Guardian mode. The fighter was soon tearing along the

ground in a sort of combat crouch, gatling cannon held out front by the

huge grappling hands of the mecha. Rick rode out a cluster of explosions in

this form, then hit his thrusters and brought the mecha into full Battloid

mode to deal with several pods along his projected course.

Upright, the Battloid swung the cannon in an arc and trap-shot two of

the pods. A half twist and Rick beat another to the draw.

Rick let Roy deal out justice to the rest and shifted his attention to the

homing signal. Info from the SDF-1 bridge told him precisely where the

commander was located: inside the barracks building, just on the other side

of the wall in front of him.

In four minutes the entire base was going to be a memory. And that

67

didn't leave him enough time to use the doorway. He retransformed to

Guardian mode and readied the massive metalshod fists of the mecha.

Now it was Lisa's turn to play the ghost.

She had walked through Riber's quarters, insulated from the harsh

atmosphere by her suit, arms extended, gloved fingers reaching out and

touching everything in the small room, expectant, in search of something

she couldn't identify or name. What was it she hoped to find here? she

asked herself. It was as if Karl's clothes, still in the wardrobe closet, his bed,

reading light, and phone held clues to some mystery she hoped to unravel.

And now as she sat at his desk, paging through his notebooks and

reading the titles of the books stacked there-The Martian Cronicles,

Mankind Evolving, Gandhi's Truth-Lisa realized that she would never get

over his loss; she would never be able to leave this place. Her life, along with

Riber's, had ended here six years ago.

She fell forward onto the open notebooks and began to weep. Claudia

was desperately calling to her through the headset, but Lisa already felt

disconnected from that present. She switched off the radio transmitter. She

was about to raise the faceshield of her helmet when she heard her name

called out through a speaker phone of some sort.

On the other side of the room's thick translucent window. she could

discern the shape of a Veritech fighter-a veiled Guardian behind a

Permaglass gate.

"Commander Hayes," the voice called out. "Please stand back. I'm

going to crash my way in."

Quickly, she switched her radio back on.

"Whoever you are, stay away from here. Return to the ship. That's an

order."

The fighter pilot paid her no mind.

"Stand back. My orders are to get you out of here."

Before she could speak again, the Guardian's huge hand had smashed

through the window and the pilot-Rick Hunter!-was staring at her from the

68

cockpit.

"Climb aboard-quickly! We don't have much time left!"

"I'm not leaving this room!"

"One minute and counting, Commander."

"I don't care! Go on, do you hear me, save yourself!"

She saw him shake his head.

"I don't know what's going on here, but you're coming with me."

And in an instant Lisa was held fast in the grip of the Guardian's hand.

It was useless to struggle; the Veritech was already backing away from the

barracks building and preparing for takeoff.

She found herself reaching out toward Riber's room nevertheless,

clinging to it with all the strength she could summon, screaming out his

name as the fighter launched itself and sped from the burning base.

Khyron pressed the attack, urging his forces onward with calls to glory

and promises of promotion; when those failed, he resorted to simple threats

and imprecations. Several times during the exercise he had decided to deal

out punishments on the spot, and occasionally he had been forced to

sacrifice the innocent. But this was all part of the warrior's life, not

regrettable but expected behavior.

It had been a glorious battle-up until now.

The Micronians had begun to retreat toward Zor's ship, a retreat with

at least three-quarters of their original forces still occupying the arena. He

was confused and angered. Were the Micronians such spineless creatures

that they would choose surrender over death in battle? Zor's ship, held fast

by the gravity mines, wasn't going anywhere, so what did these fools expect

to gain by a retreat? It would only mean a nastier mop-up operation for

Khyron's troops. The space fortress would have to be stormed, or perhaps

he would decide to starve them out; but in either case the end result would

be death, so why not go out fighting?

Gerao was reporting certain anomalies in the gravity mine field-some

sort of pressure buildup the sensors had yet to identify-but with the

69

Micronians on the run, this was hardly the moment for caution or

indecisiveness. Khyron would have the enemy captain's head before

nightfall!

The Zentraedi forces had routed the enemy from the base, and their

commander was about to join them there, when the surface of the planet

began to quake with unnatural force. Some massive explosion deep below

ground level was working its way upward. And when it broke the planet's

skin, it was greater than anyone-Zentraedi or Earthling-might have

expected.

In an instant, the base and most of Khyron's occupying army were

obliterated as a tower of raw unleashed energy shot from within the planet.

Through the blinding glow of the initial explosion, Khyron could see Zor's

ship lifting off, just moments before a second explosion of equivalent force

atomized what was left of the area.

Khyron's Officer's Pod was far enough away to withstand the blast, heat,

and follow-up shock waves and firestorms.

Madness, Khyron thought. Madness!

He raised the cockpit shield of the Battlepod and sat for a moment in

stunned silence. Thick clouds of rust-colored dust were being sucked into

the area. Zor's ship was just a preternatural shimmer in the Martian sky.

The Micronians had surprised him.

Unpredictability was something to fear and respect in an opponent.

But failure in battle was something that could not be tolerated.

He vented his anger by smashing his fists into the console of the

Battlepod, then collapsed back into the seat, spent. He reached out for the

dried leaves of the Flower of Life, ingesting several of these and urging their

narcotic effect to wash over him. Ultimately Khyron smiled maliciously. He

gazed up at the dwindling space fortress and said aloud:

"We'll meet again, Micronians. And next time I will give you no

quarter."

70

CHAPTER SEVEN

I admit it: In those early days I had trouble playing by the rules. Of

course, ultimately I learned to return salutes, use the proper phrases,

demonstrate respect for my superior officers, and generally behave like a

model Robotech soldier. But I continued to have real problems with the

system of promotion. If it had been up to me, medals would have been handed

out to everyone who went out there. There wasn't one among us who wasn't

deserving; not one among us who wasn't qualified to lead.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

There was a special data chamber in Breetai's flagship that was off

limits to all but the highest-ranking officers of the Zentraedi elite. In here

were stored the historical records of the Zentraedi race: documentation of

past victories, military campaigns, great moments in the lives of great

warrior leaders. In addition to these were banks of information relating to

the Invid and several dozen other sentient life forms that inhabited the

Fourth Quadrant of the galactic local group. As chief science officer and

transcultural adviser on all issues dealing with interracial contact (more

frequently, conquest), it was Exedore's duty to commit to memory a vast

amount of this accumulated lore and knowledge. Indeed, this room

belonged more to the misshapen Zentraedi than to any other. And the more

he delved into data pertaining to the Micronians, the more apprehensive he

became. The pursuit of Zor's ship, and this continued contact with the ship's

Micronian warriors, was destined to end in unprecedented failure-an

undoing of all that had been carefully laid down and preserved for millennia.

Try as he might, Exedore could not put this thought from his mind. If the

Zentraedi were defeated, what then could stand in the way of the dreaded

Invid?

He had mentioned these misgivings to Breetai, careful to couch his

phrases in such a way that no fear or cowardice could be inferred; he had

71

even gone so far as to quote some of the documents to the commander,

pointing out the specific warnings about contact with the Micronians.

Legends which spoke of a Micronian secret weapon that would be used

against any invading race. But his words fell on deaf ears. Breetai was, after

all, a military tactician; like most of his race he lived and breathed for battle

and warfare-the Zentraedi were born to this. Moreover there was some

unspoken fascination at work here, as if in some half-understood way

Breetai too was aware of Exedore's thoughts about destiny and undoing.

Just now the two Zentraedi were standing together in the observation

bubble of the bridge. The SDF-1, in high relief against a starlit crescent of

this system's fourth planet, filled the forward screen. Khyron's forces,

though unsuccessful in capturing the ship when it had been lured into

Breetai's trap, had nonetheless prevented the Micronians from gaining any

distance to their homeworld.

"It amazes me that they have managed to come this far," said Breetai.

"Yes, Commander, and they will fight more fiercely as they near their

planet. I fear that the ship itself may be destroyed long before we can

enforce a surrender."

Breetai became agitated. "That must not be allowed to happen,

Exedore. My orders have been most specific: I want the fortress captured

intact and undamaged. The ship is our primary concern, not the people in

it."

"Sir, I fear that Khyron understands destruction only. 'Capture' is too

subtle a strategy for him to comprehend."

Breetai shot his adviser a look. "Khyron is a Zentraedi. He'll do as he's

ordered or face the consequences."

Exedore bowed slightly. "Certainly, my lord."

Would that it were so, he thought. And did the Micronian commander

in charge of Zor's ship have similar issues to deal with, or were orders

carried out without question at all times? Like the Zentraedi, the

Micronians were a warlike race; but had they too arrived at that

evolutionary point where individual initiative was willingly relinquished for

72

the greater glory of the whole? The data documents were not clear on this

point.

Exedore stared at the fortress, as if attempting to project himself

onboard. What were the Micronians planning? he wondered. What would

any one member of that race be thinking at this very moment?

She loves clothes. Her favorite colors are shades of pink and purple.

She lacquers each fingernail with a different color polish. She likes to wear

dangling, outrageous earrings, shoes that give her more height and match

her mood, bright belts with large buckles..."It's no use!" Rick said out loud.

He got up off the bed and began to pace the scant distance it took to cover

his new quarters wall to wall.

The invitation to Minmei's birthday party lay unopened on his bed, the

envelope sealed with a paste-on red velvet heart. Cute. There was no need to

read it-half of his division had received invitations, and everyone was

flashing them in front of his face with knowing smiles. He wasn't sure that

he was even interested in going to the party under the circumstances. When

it was just the two of them, everything was fine. But in a large group,

Minmei wanted center stage and Rick often felt like just another nobody in

the audience. Just another faceless member of Minmei's adoring public.

Neglected. Yeah, that was how he felt. And jealous, he had to admit it. Angry,

confused, depressed...the list went on and on. It was almost as long as the

list of possible gifts he'd formulated. But none of the items seemed quite

right, not one of them was perfect, and that was what he was shooting for.

Something that would say what he couldn't confess.

And just what was that? he asked himself. He wanted to tell her how

special she was-how beautiful, and sexy, and charming. How flirtatious and

conceited and spoiled and-

All this was getting him nowhere-fast. He collapsed onto the bed, put

his hands under his head, and stared at the ceiling. When he closed his eyes

and tried to think things through once more, something unexpected

happened: The face of Lisa Hayes filled his mind. This wasn't something

73

new, but it continued to take him by surprise. The truth was, it had been

happening a lot since Sara Base.

Was he really such an idiot that he was going to invite yet another

woman to run roughshod over him? An older woman at that, a superior

officer who gave every indication of despising him in spite of his rescue

efforts on her behalf? A cold and distant plain-looking woman who seemed

more a part of the SDF-1 than a part of the crew? So why was he suddenly

feeling that she too needed protection and affection?-his protection, his

affection. But Lisa occupied a different place in his heart than Minmei,

someplace he couldn't reach with thoughts alone.

Rick was rescued from this by a call announced through the

intrabarracks comm system.

"Attention the following personnel: report to headquarters: third

lieutenants Justin Black and James Ralton; second lieutenants Xian Lu,

Carroll James, and Marcus Miller; first lieutenants Thomas Lawson and

Adam Olsen..."

Rick listened for a moment, lost interest, and was about to rehash his

dilemma, when he heard his own name called.

He made himself presentable and left the barracks, walking listlessly

toward headquarters and wondering just what he might have done to get

himself called on the carpet this time. He ran through a mental list of the

possibilities as he rode the elevator to the command level of the ship.

It was a day for lists, that was for sure.

A female lieutenant led him into a briefing room where the others

whose names had been called were already gathered. Rick fell into an end

position and looked down the line: Black, Ralton, Olsen...these guys were all

square shooters. No one needed to read them the riot act, and not one of

them seemed the slightest bit concerned; just the opposite, in fact:

confidence and pride radiated from each face.

When a captain called attention, Rick squared his shoulders and

feigned unconcern. Colonel Maistroff and some of the top brass entered the

room. The colonel seated himself at a long table and glanced through the

74

files piled in front of him; then he cleared his throat and addressed the line.

"Since the battle for Sara Base on Mars, the men assembled here have

established for themselves records of bravery under fire. Therefore, I am

pleased to award them the titanium Medal of Valor for their distinguished

service. Gentlemen: We proudly acknowledge your achievements!"

The female lieutenant had carried over a flat unlidded box, and from

this Maistroff lifted out the medals, pinning one to each breast in the line

and offering his hand in congratulations. Rick wanted to pinch himself to

make certain he wasn't dreaming. He craned his neck to try to get a good

look at the medal after Maistroff had decorated him.

When the brief ceremony ended, Rick left the room. He found Roy

Fokker waiting for him, all smiles and beaming like a proud older brother.

"Nice going, Rick."

They shook hands and embraced. Rick said, "I still can't believe it."

"Amateur civilian ace for eight years running and you're not used to

awards by now?" Roy laughed. "Come on down to my office for a minute."

They caught up on the events of the past few days as they walked. At

the office, Roy motioned Rick to a chair and positioned himself behind the

desk opposite him. He opened a drawer, retrieved something, and tossed it

to Rick.

It was a small, flat leather case. Rick hefted it and asked, "What is it?"

Roy's smile was enigmatic. "Go on, open it."

Rick snapped open the lid: Lieutenant's bars rested on green velvet

beds.

"You've been promoted, Rick."

Lieutenant Rick Hunter.

Rick asked Roy to say it so he could get used to the sound of it.

"Lieutenant Rick Hunter."

Rick signaled his approval with a nod. It sounded fine. Next he turned

his attention to the information contained in the dossiers Roy had given

him.

I'm assigning two subordinates to your command.

75

Some of the dossier material flashed across the monitor screen on

Roy's desk: CORPORAL BEN DIXON; 378 HOURS IN FLIGHT

SIMULATION AND 66 ACTUAL HOURS. CLASS A. MAXIMILLIAN

STERLING; 320 HOURS IN FLIGHT SIMULATION AND SO ACTUAL

HOURS. CLASS A.

While he listened, Rick absently fingered the medal of valor pinned to

his jacket.

"These guys are novices, Roy."

Roy stuck out his jaw. "You're the old veteran now?"

"Well, I've flown more missions than these two."

"To me you're not a lot different from them, Little Brother. You've

flown more than some but a lot less than most of us. It's too early for you to

get cocky."

Rick considered this sullenly. He removed the medal and regarded it.

What is it really? Just something to make me feel better about going out as

cannon fodder again.

Roy had gotten up to answer a knock at the door, and when Rick

looked up, he found his two new subordinates stepping forward in formal

salute to introduce themselves.

Dixon, the larger of the two by almost a foot, was muscular and

aggressive. He had a crop of undisciplined brown hair that rose from his

head like flames caught in freeze frame. There was a note of arrogance

about him, but this was softened somewhat by his husky self-mocking

laughter. Sterling, in contrast, was mild-mannered and soft of voice. And

yet there was something almost false about his humility. He wore his hair

long, with uneven bangs that kept falling in front of his aviator glasses. It

was unusual to meet a pilot with impaired vision, and Rick reasoned that

Sterling's talents had to outweigh the disadvantages presented by

less-than-perfect eyesight.

Rick acknowledged their salutes, and Roy made the informal

introductions. But after a few minutes of pleasantries, Rick was beginning

to feel uncomfortable with his two new dependents and took advantage of a

76

lapse in the conversation to excuse himself. Minmei's party would be

kicking off soon, and he wanted to catch her alone for at least a few minutes.

However, when Ben and Max suddenly expressed an interest in

accompanying him, Rick reconsidered his options: Showing up at Minmei's

with new lieutenant's bars and two subordinates in tow would surely gain

him some points. At least it would show her that his superiors viewed him

as responsible and serious, even if she chose not to.

So the three of them left Fokker's together, already exchanging- stories

and searching out common ground. They tubed into Macross City, hitting a

few spots on the way, and it wasn't long before they were fast friends.

Macross was a different experience each time Rick visited it. Resident

old-timers-people born back in the 'forties and 'fifties-claimed that it would

have taken generations to construct what Robotech engineers and crews

managed in a week. All of this was due to technological advances brought

about with the arrival of the SDF-1. Some of the city had been "created"

through the use of Enhanced Video Emulation-the people were fed illusions

as in some turn-of-the century film-but most of it was a real, pulsing

metropolis now. Certainly no city on Earth could boast of a park with views

to match those from Macross Central. You were not just staring up at the

stars from the benches there; you were among them.

The three VT pilots were a few blocks from the White Dragon, when

several "death-beds" rumbled by-huge flatbed vehicles carting off the

battle-damaged remains of Veritech fighters to recycling. Without raw

material, the SDF-1 techs had to reuse everything.

Rick looked over at his new comrades and studied their reaction to the

passing wrecks. His jubilant mood had vanished. Fighter pilots were

similarly recycled, he told himself.

"There's the whole truth about war," Rick said, gesturing to the

death-beds.

"I don't want to end up like that," said Max.

Ben bellowed his laugh. "While I'm around you've got nothing to worry

about."

77

Lieutenant Rick had an impromptu speech on the tip of his tongue, but

he decided to let Dixon's remark slide. Ben would find out for himself soon

enough.

The war machine would chew them up and spit them out. You could

only give it your best shot and hope the odds were in your favor.

"Luck" was a term the Zentraedi were unfamiliar with; their language

contained no words for it, and their psychological makeup embraced no

such concept.

Khyron had suffered a setback. It had nothing to do with chance or

odds. He had failed because he had listened to Breetai and disregarded his

own instincts. This would not happen again. This enemy was unpredictable.

Where it would be advantageous to press an attack, they would retreat;

where it would have been wise to use the massive firepower of Zor's ship,

they instead relied on small fighters. And the worst of it was that they

seemed to value life above all else. Sooner or later Khyron would have to

play on that fear of death they carried around.

He had appointed a new second-in-command to replace Gerao, who

was now in solitary confinement for having failed to detect the Micronians'

countermeasures at the abandoned base. The blank faceplated visage of this

second was currently on the monitor screen in Kyron's quarters.

"But, my lord," the second was saying, "what about Commander

Breetai's reaction to our continued attacks? He has made it clear-"

"Forget about him! Do you dare question my authority?"

"My lord!" The second saluted.

"We'll deal with that ship in our own way. Now pay close attention:

Breetai has prescribed war games for us. This is his way of humiliating me

for our failures. But we're going to turn this opportunity to our advantage.

We're going to take that ship, if it takes every last piece of mecha in the

Zentraedi armada!"

Things were quiet on the bridge of the SDF-1, a little too quiet to suit

78

Claudia Grant. The ship had been in a deep-space orbit around Mars for

scarcely a week, but that week felt like an eternity. And it had been that long

since Lisa had exchanged more than three words with Claudia or any of the

others on the bridge. Something had happened to Lisa down there, but even

Claudia couldn't pry any of the details from her. To be sure, it had

something to do with Karl Riber. Claudia figured that he must have been

quite a man to keep Lisa in limbo for eight years. For most of the ship's crew

and the population of Macross City the red planet afforded some sense of

stability and center, but for Lisa it was a constant reminder of loss, an orbit

of pain.

The enemy had been hammering away at them for the past week,

determined to keep them from making any progress toward Earth. But the

launch window for a return to Earth was still two weeks away, so they would

have remained here regardless. Conserving fuel, making repairs, and using

Mars's gravity to throw them toward Earth when the right moment came.

Nevertheless, they had attempted to keep the planet between themselves

and the enemy; until yesterday, when long-range recon units had reported

that a sizable contingent of enemy ships had dropped to an inner orbit near

the Martian moon Phobos. The enemy was sandwiching the fortress

between their forces. Claudia was worried, and Lisa's continued silence and

sulking were not helping at all.

Claudia held something in her hand she thought might break her

friend's distracted mood: It was a dispatch from Maistroff's office listing the

new field promotions. Rick Hunter's name was on the list. Claudia tapped

the dispatch against the palm of her left hand. Maybe anger was just what

the doctor ordered.

She sidled over to Lisa, suppressing a grin as she handed over the

dispatch.

Lisa accepted it disinterestedly and scanned the short column. Claudia

watched her expression change as the name registered. Lisa crumpled up

the paper and slammed both her palms down on the radar indicator board.

"I can't believe it! I just...I can't believe this! It's unbelievable!"

79

"What is it, Lisa?" Claudia was still playing dumb, and not very

effectively.

"Don't be coy with me, Claudia. You've seen this list. How does Hunter

rate a promotion to group leader?"

Claudia stroked her chin. "Uh, let's see, I think he was involved in some

sort of rescue operation-"

"That's a matter of opinion, Claudia. Oh oh..."

Lisa was staring at the radar screen and fiddling with the control knobs.

Claudia went over to her.

"What's up?"

She was working the dials, trying to tune something in. "I guess I

shouldn't have slapped this thing so hard-it's all static."

"Try switching over to the backup overrides," Claudia suggested.

She did, but the static remained.

"I'm going to run this through computer analysis," said Lisa.

The two women waited for the system to display its diagnosis. They

sucked in their breath when it appeared: It was a jamming pattern.

"Put us on yellow alert," Lisa said with newfound enthusiasm. "Notify

all VT teams to report to their fighters and stand by."

Things at Minmei's party had gone from bad to worse, and for Rick, the

yellow alert siren blaring in the streets of Macross City felt like a reprieve.

By the time he and his new cohorts had arrived at the party, the

restaurant was already packed. In addition to scores of Veritech defenders

and a few of Minmei's show business friends, the mayor and his cronies

were circulating around, pressing the flesh. At times it seemed to Rick that

Mayor Luan harbored some secret plan for Minmei, as if she was some pet

project or secret weapon he was going to unleash on the world. Minmei,

dressed to kill in her purple mandarin tunic was at her butterfly best flitting

from table to table, center stage no matter where she was in the room. She

was hard on Rick for arriving late. Moreover, he had forgotten to pick up a

present. She was duly impressed with the new lieutenant's bars but an

80

instant later had taken an immediate shine to shy Max and was at that very

moment singing harmony with him to guitar accompaniment. And the

mayor hadn't helped matters any when he came over to Rick and in a

conspiratorial whisper warned him about letting Minmei get too far out of

sight-"She seems quite taken with your new corporal, Rick"-as if Rick could

influence what she did and where she went.

Rick had quickly become withdrawn and moody, non-communicative

even when Minmei's orbit took her past his table or her wink from across

the room was meant to single him out as some sort of accomplice in her

performance. Rick stayed close to the mildly intoxicating punch and kept

his eyes down for most of the afternoon.

But then the alert had been sounded.

And now all the flyboys were gulping down their drinks and racing for

the door, leaving Minmei standing alone, her song left unfinished, center

stage stolen from her by the war. And even though Rick couldn't approve of

her petulance and spoiled behavior, he couldn't help being moved by her

innocence and naivet? He wanted to run to her and promise her that this

war would go away soon and that all her dreams would come true. But the

best he could promise was his return later with the gift he had for her. He

gave her his kerchief to wipe the tears from her face, and she put her arms

around his neck and thanked him with a hug.

"What would I do without you, Rick?"

He pulled away from her embrace; Max and Ben were calling to him

from the hexagonal doorway, motioning for him to get himself in gear-after

all, there was a battle to be fought, a war to be waged!

"Come on, Lieutenant, we don't want to keep the enemy waiting, do

we?"

Rick looked at Ben and felt a sudden urge to strangle him. No, he

thought, we mustn't keep them waiting.

81

CHAPTER EIGHT

One must now address the reasons for Khyron's failures. Was he

defeated on each occasion by the Earth forces, or was he in fact defeated by

his own commanders? So often recalled from the very brink of success; so

often within reach of victory. Why wasn't he allowed full rein? Again, there is

wide disagreement among the commentators we have been discussing

throughout. Gordon (along with several of his psychohistorian disciples)

wants to convince us that Dolza and Breetai had so misread Gloval's tactics

as to believe that he would have destroyed the ship rather than allow it to fall

into Zentraedi hands. And yet, Exedore himself has stated that: "...rivalry had

completely splintered the Zentraedi high command. Continued contact with

Human self-initiative had by this time fostered unrecognized and certainly

incomprehensible competitive drives in the commanders themselves. Dolza,

Breetai, and even Azonia (who had reasons of her own to behave otherwise)

were unconsciously mimicking an emotion they had never experienced. 'For

the greater glory of the Zentraedi' had already become an archaic phrase."

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

Rick, Ben, and Max-the newly formed Black Team-were ordered to

defensive positions in the Fourth Quadrant, close to the fortress and too far

from the main fighting to suit Dixon. He was anxious to get into the thick of

it.

Below them, between the SDF-1 and Mars, Skull, Red, and the other

squadrons were engaging enemy pods. From his vantage point, Rick could

make out a cat's cradle of interlacing laser light punctuated by brief

spherical flashes of death, but most of the battle information came to him

via the aircom net. It was beginning to sound like the boys had the enemy

on the run; indeed, the explosive bursts seemed to indicate that the pods

had fallen back to positions closer to the planetary rim.

As the exchanges continued to diminish in size and frequency, Rick

82

began to worry that Gloval was permitting the VTs to fly right into a trap, or

worse, that he had ordered offensive action against one of the mother ships.

Dixon was ready to join them nevertheless.

"Can't we get into some of that?" he wanted to know.

"We have our orders," Rick told him sharply. "Now, stick close to me

and stay alert."

On the bridge of the SDF-1, Gloval was studying the deployment of

pods and Veritechs on the threat board. The enemy was trying something

new. Instead of assaulting the fortress, as was their usual routine, they were

keeping their distance, perhaps fearful that the main gun had been repaired.

Would that that were the case, thought Gloval. But the more he studied the

screen, the more suspicious he grew. The enemy wasn't turning tail to avoid

battle. Gloval shook his head in amusement. Did they really think him such

a fool? It was obvious that they were hoping to lure the VTs away from the

fortress in order to open up a second front.

He was ready to issue a recall order when new data verified his hunch.

Vanessa announced, "We have an attack force of enemy pods at our

stern."

Gloval ordered that the Gladiator force be called up, and Dr. Lang was

requested to shunt sufficient energy from the shields to arm the main

batteries aft. The second enemy wave was coming in from the relatively

unguarded Fourth Quadrant, where Hunter's Black Team was on defensive

patrol. As this sector was put up on the screen, the bridge crew readied

themselves to render assistance.

Rick received the communiqu?from the bridge and moments later had

the enemy assault team on his cockpit radar display.

"Company's coming," he told Max and Ben. "Let's show them how we

treat party crashers."

Locked into the bridge command center, the three Veritech pilots

swung their fighters toward the advancing pods. They were still too distant

for visuals, but Rick was soon facing those characteristic pinpoints of

explosive light that signaled laser bombardment.

83

A nanosecond later the bolts reached them. Rick ordered his men to

begin evasive maneuvers to lessen the staying power of the charge. Some of

his own circuits were already fried, but it was nothing he needed to worry

about.

And then they had a visual on the pods: There were only a dozen of

them, including an Officer's Pod. They came into the quadrant, weapons

blazing, the Black Team ready for them.

"I'm gonna fly rings around these guys, Lieutenant. Just watch me go,"

Rick heard Ben say.

Dixon fired off a cluster of heat-seekers and attempted to roll out. But

the enemy had outguessed him, and two of the pods were following him

through, positioning themselves on either side of his mecha well inside the

lethal cone.

"Break across that seven o'clock bandit, Ben," Rick shouted into the net.

"Don't get cute, they're going to catch you in their cross fire!"

Dixon realized he was in trouble and called for an assist. The two pods

were practically on top of him, pouring particle-beam energy at his booster

pack. A Veritech could stand only a few seconds of this; ultimately,

structural molecules would be altered and the ship would come apart. Ben

would be fried alive.

Rick kicked in his aft boosters, found one of the pods in his reticle, and

loosed two missiles. They caught the pod at its weakest spot, just where the

cockpit cover was hinged to the main body of the sphere. The hatch blew

open, precious atmosphere was released and the pilot inside clawed

frantically at his controls. Soon the lifeless thing was drifting aimlessly out

of the arena.

The second pod was still throwing heat into Dixon's fighter, but the

pilot, realizing that he was now outnumbered, began to drop away.

"I'm going to save your skin, Ben. Just retro when I give the word."

Rick haloed the ostrich and shouted, "Now!"

His thumb came down hard on the Hotas trigger. Two missiles

dropped from their pylons and connected with the pod, blowing it to pieces.

84

While Ben was thanking him, Rick looked around for Max. There was a

lot of activity going on off to his right; as Rick was soon to realize, Max was

at the center of it.

The corporal had shifted to Battloid mode and was using the gatling

cannon to take out pod after pod, executing evasive maneuvers the likes of

which Rick had never seen. Max was pushing the Veritech into reverses Rick

wouldn't have believed possible. He had heard about pilots who could

totally surrender themselves to the alpha state, but he had never seen

anything like this with his own eyes.

"Look at him go!" Dixon was yelling on the tac net.

Max had second sight, eyes behind his head, a sixth sense...the enemy

mecha couldn't get near him. He was polishing off the last of the assault

group, and Rick was on the horn congratulating him.

"I'm happy I was able to help out," came the humble reply. "Now I'll

show you something I learned in flight school."

Rick was amazed: Max was literally about to talk Ben and him through

a maneuver; it was difficult enough to control the complexities of the

Veritech weapons system and answer to the demands of the mecha, but to

have anything left over for movement, let alone human speech!...But here

was Max, explaining every move as he went after two new entries. He drew

the enemy in, then suddenly inverted himself, firing his thrusters so that he

was coming right down their throats with his weapons blasting. The two

pods were taken out, along with a third that had appeared at Rick's port side

unannounced.

Rick's jaw went slack.

"It's called Fokker's Feint," said Max. "You have to confuse them. And

while they're looking for you, you come up behind them and tap them on

the back!"

Lisa Hayes was suddenly on the net at the same time, berating Rick for

his poor response time. He offered as an excuse the two inexperienced

pilots he had with him, listening to himself while watching Max execute a

flourish of moves.

85

Maybe this was one of the advantages to being a superior officer, he

thought. Foul up and you could lay the blame on your men; succeed, and

their victories were your own.

Khyron was observing the progress of the battle from his Officer's Pod.

The diversionary strategy wasn't working out exactly as he had hoped, but it

had opened up a few holes in the fortress's defensive perimeter. Most of the

Micronian mecha had been successfully lured far from Zor's ship, and those

few remaining fighters were rapidly being eliminated. The second assault

team had taken the sting out of the main batteries of the SDF-1, and the

mecha dispatched to slow their attack had been eliminated. Now it was time

for the coup de grace: Khyron's special elite assault team would storm the

fortress and put an end to this game.

It was almost too easy...

Through his headset, Rick heard the voice of Lisa Hayes:

"Enemy forces have broken through our defenses in the Third

Quadrant. You're our only hope, Black Leader."

"We're on our way," Rick told her.

Ben was out front, making up for lost time with continuous fire, little of

it effective. Rick warned him not to waste his ammo. Max, meanwhile, took

two pods off Rick's tail and asked Rick if it was all right to fire when it

wasn't a waste. Rick ignored the joke and ordered Max and Ben to split up,

hoping they could drive a wedge into the attacking enemy units.

Only a few of the Phalanx and close-in guns on the SDF-1 were capable

of giving them cover fire, and most of those had sustained some damage.

Destroids and Gladiators floated above the ship, pieces of debris, sparking

out as they drifted toward oblivion.

Rick, already reaching out for the B mode lever, ordered his team to

switch over to Battloid. He watched as the tailerons of Max's fighter folded

down and the wings swept fully back to lock into place. Next, the entire

86

undercarriage, including the twin aft thrusters, swung down and forward,

riding on massive pins located beneath the cockpit module. As rear thruster

sheaths chevroned to become the Battloid's feet, the ventral fuselage halves

split away from each other and spread outward to form the arms. Hands

slid out from armored compartments. Inside the mecha Max's seat would

now be riding upward along a shaft that would reposition the pilot inside

the head-a minute ago the undercarriage laser-gun bubble. Rick's own

fighter was going through the same changes. He could sometimes feel his

own body react, as though unseen hands were at work on him.

Thus reconfigured, the three members of the Black Team touched

down on the SDF-1's hull and brought their gatlings to bear on incoming

enemy pods. Ben stood his ground, screaming curses at the ostriches as they

made their approach. Initially he was positioned near one of the damaged

phalanx guns, his cannon at high port, but he stepped out into the open. to

trap-shoot an incoming bandit just as a second flew in from behind and

dropped him with a blast that caught the Battloid full in the back. Rick

winced and tried to raise him on the net.

"Ben, are you alive in there?"

Dixon answered weakly; he was hurt but had somehow managed to

survive the hit.

Rick was moving in to lend a hand, when several pods appeared over

the horizon of the ship. High-density transuranic slugs from the gatling

brought two down. Two others loosed their rockets ineffectively and

streaked overhead, but the Officer's Pod that led them seemed determined

to go one on one with him. It was the second time that day that Rick was to

witness incredible maneuvering.

The Officer's Pod-not spherical like the others but somewhat elongated

and fishlike above its legs, with twin "hand-gun" arms and a top-mounted

long-muzzled plastron cannon-toyed with him, dodging each of his shots as

though the pilot inside could read Rick's mind. The pod leaped over a

conning tower and came down behind him; Rick turned and fired, but the

enemy was already spaceborne again and swooping in, clawed legs swinging

87

back and forth, discharging rounds from its hand-guns.

Rick's mecha took several hits through the torso; then the glancing

blow of a projectile sheared off the Battloid's left arm. Rick thought the

damaged vehicle down to one knee as the enemy pod came in to finish him.

When it was within reach; he brought the Battloid to its feet and used the

useless cannon to bat at the thing. He connected, driving the ostrich into a

spin that brought it crashing down to the surface of the ship, minus one of

its own cannon appendages.

The two mecha faced each other across a distance of about 200

meters-a showdown on a western street. Rick worked frantically at the

controls, trying to divert power from the main mechamorphosis systems

into the main gun, but all his efforts proved futile. He stared out of the

cockpit faceplate of the Battloid as the enemy manning the Officer's Pod

raised the muzzle of the one good arm and prepared to fire...

Onboard the Zentraedi flagship Breetai was informed of the battle

being waged against the SDF-1, in direct violation of his orders. He rushed

from his quarters to the command bubble, where Exedore was waiting for

him, watching images play across the projecbeam field with growing

disgust.

"It is as I feared, Commander. Khyron has taken matters into his own

hands once again."

Breetai stood, arms akimbo, regarding the action as explosive flashes of

light reflected in his faceplate.

"So this is Khyron's idea of war games?" Breetai snorted. "Again he has

the temerity to disobey my orders!"

"I suggest that we recall him...before he succeeds in destroying the

ship."

"The fool, I warned him." Breetai turned away. "Use the nebulizer to

override the astrogational systems of his attack force. We'll pull this

offensive out from under him."

Exedore moved to the nebulizer controls. "Ready to initiate on your

88

command."

"Mark!" Breetai shouted to the screen.

Warning lights were flashing on the bridge of the SDF-1. Sensors were

picking up energy readings of an extraordinary type. Astrogational and

engineering were reporting dangerous fluctuations in the drive systems; it

was as if all control had been lost.

Meanwhile, on the skin of the ship, Khyron was taking aim at Rick's

Battloid.

The Zentraedi commander felt the pod suddenly surrender itself to a

higher power and knew at once what had happened: Breetai was recalling

them. On the very brink of victory, and the fool was recalling them! He

could do nothing; the nebulizer had even neutralized the weapon system of

the pod. This fortunate Micronian pilot would live to fight another day,

Khyron said to himself as the Officer's Pod rose involuntarily from the skin

of Zor's ship. He could see the Battloid lift its head in some gesture of

wonder or amazement and could only guess how the pilot inside was

reacting

Rick would recall his feelings later, too stunned at the moment to

analyze his reactions.

In the aftermission debriefing room they would all report the same

thing: that the pods had suddenly abandoned their attack and lifted off, as

though they had been given some sort of recall signal.

While Dr. Lang tried to postulate the cause of the strange readings he

had received and Gloval asked himself why the enemy had called off its

attack, Lieutenant Hunter had a private session with his two new charges in

the mess hall of the Prometheus.

Ben's head was bandaged. On the positive side, it seemed that one of

those blasts had finally gotten it through the corporal's thick skull that

discretion was the better part of valor. Max, on the other hand, credited

with at least nine kills, was basking in self-adulation, wondering only half in

jest whether the brass might not end up promoting him from corporal to

89

general overnight.

Still amazed by what he had seen Max accomplish during the battle,

Rick found that his respect for his fellow pilot was marred by feelings of

jealousy. But he was too exhausted to dwell on it; he had just enough

residual energy to carry him to his quarters. He was already thinking about

crawling into his bunk and courting sleep.

An hour later he was standing in the doorway to his room, reaching in

to hit the light switch. One step inside and his eyes fixed on the bed and the

invitation laying there, paste-on red heart seal still unbroken. He groaned:

Minmei's birthday present! It was like a bad dream, like being up in your

Veritech and suddenly realizing you'd forgotten to ammo up.

Rick started pacing the room, trying to recall the mental list of gift

possibilities he'd composed earlier. What was it-shoes, jewelry, clothes? He

checked his watch: twenty-two thirty. He knew he didn't stand a chance, but

he had to give it a go.

He rode an empty tube into Macross City and ran up and down the

streets searching for an open store, cursing EVE with every step, because

before these artificial sunrises and sunsets the city had rocked twenty-four

hours a day. Now you were lucky if you stumbled on a place that served

hamburgers past midnight. Then he spied a robo-vending machine on one

corner and called to it; he would swear that the thing turned and looked at

him before streaking away. Why did they do this? Rick asked himself as he

gave chase. Human and animated robo-vendor ran for several blocks

through the late-night deserted streets of Macross, Rick calling out to it,

pleading with it, and ultimately cursing it. But the device managed to

outrun him.

He caught his breath and began heading in the general direction of

Minmei's apartment above the White Dragon. He was going to have to tell

her something-anything but the truth: that he'd been too busy doing battle

with the enemy to get her a gift. Of course, there was a chance that she was

already asleep. Maybe he would just sort of lurk around underneath the

balcony of her apartment, see if there were any lights on up there...

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As if on cue, though, she came to the window, saw him out there under

the streetlight, and threw open the balcony doors, calling to him.

"Rick, I knew you wouldn't forget." She was checking her wristwatch.

"Five minutes to go. What did you bring me?"

He started to trip over his words. "Well, look, Minmei, about your

present, you see, I was planning...er, that is, what I meant to tell you

before..."

She laughed. "Come on, Rick, don't be a jerk. I don't care what you

brought me. It's the thought that counts. Now, throw it up here. Come on."

Rick's arms fell to his sides in a gesture of complete helplessness. But

his right hand had found the boxed Medal of Valor in his trousers pocket.

He pulled it out and regarded it in the streetlight. The brass had given him

this to single him out; it said: Listen, you are something special, you've been

of extraordinary service to all of us in this war we're waging, wear this and

be proud, wear this and be recognized by your fellow comrades.

So why couldn't it say the same thing to her: By giving it to her he was

saying that she was really the special one, that his bravery and valor were in

her honor, that she was his inspiration, the person he returned to-the

reason he returned.

He snapped the lid closed and gave the box an underhand toss toward

her outstretched hands. He couldn't see her face well enough to judge her

reaction, and for a moment the silence unnerved him. But when she spoke,

he was certain there was no insincerity in her voice.

"Rick, I don't know if I can accept this. Really..."

"I want you to have it, Minmei. It-it says what I can't say to you. Please,

keep it."

She held the box to her cheek. "It's beautiful, and I love it."

Rick smiled. "Happy birthday."

She blew him a kiss and waved good night.

Rick waited until the lights went out, then walked the quiet streets of

Macross City. It was peaceful and pleasant. Dogs barked in the distance and

laughter filtered out of open doorways. It was almost like real life.

91

CHAPTER NINE

There are so many wonderful things going on in my life, it's sometimes

hard to believe it can continue like this. But what would the people of Macross

City think of me if I announced to them that getting stuck in the fold and

landing out here in deep space was one of the greatest things that ever

happened to me? Aunt Lena and Uncle Max's restaurant is really happening;

even the mayor comes to eat there. I have three complete songs written: "My

Boyfriend's a Pilot," "Stagefright," and "To Love." My dance instructor and

my voice coach tell me that I'm making excellent progress, and I'm actually

even thinking of sending in an application for the Miss Macross pageant. But

I know that I could never be accepted! That is just too wild a dream to come

true-even for me!...The only rough spot in my life right now is Rick, and I

can't figure out what to do about him. I owe him my life, for real; but he

wants me to be something I can never be: a loyal girlfriend, maybe someone

who would be content to live in his shadow. But I have shadows of my own to

cast!

From the diary of Lynn-Minmei

As the mayor of Macross City, Tommy Luan had a lot to deal with. For

a long time after the spacefold he harbored a fear that the population was

one day going to wake from the collective shock of the experience and he'd

have a mass riot on his hands. But that never came about. It was probably

an indication of how inured the human race had become to tragedy; ten

years of global war had started it, and the arrival of the SDF-1 from deep

space, carrying with it evidence of extraterrestrial life forms, had sealed it.

But in any case the residents of Macross City were a breed apart from the

start.

Tommy Luan had been part of the second wave of newcomers to arrive

on Macross Island. The first consisted mainly of scientific and military

representatives from the newly formed World Unification Alliance, Dr. Lang

92

and his group, Gloval, Fokker, Colonel Edwards, and others from the

supercarrier Kenosha. Then there followed the decision to attempt a

construction of the ship- "the Visitor," as it was called-and this brought in

the numerous tech teams who were really Macross City's founding fathers.

Luan was one of these. His background was construction-immense projects:

bridges, skyscrapers, hospitals-no job was too large. But the Global Civil

War had put an end to an unprecedented period of growth in the building

trades, and like far too many others Luan was on the skids and looking for a

job. He applied for a position on the Macross project and was accepted. He

received a security clearance and once on the island found himself placed in

charge of housing construction for the tech and support groups.

As the SDF-1 began to take shape, so did Macross City. The ongoing

project to decipher and apply the principles of Robotechnology became the

one to try for; Macross Island became a haven for scientists from every

discipline, pacifists and idealists disheartened by continued war fare,

Senator Russo's military teams, and the support network that grew up to

house, feed, and entertain these various groups.

Tommy Luan built Macross City, no one would have taken issue with

that; so when it came time to call Macross City what it was and elect officials,

Tommy Luan won hands down. And four years later, when the city had

grown to a population of over 100,000, Tommy Luan would still be on top.

And now, months after the fold, here was Tommy Luan still in charge.

The fact that the city and, most of its inhabitants had been rescued was

miraculous; what had been done to the city since was equally so. For a time

it had been like living in a giant's cellar; enormous conduits and pipes

overhead, bulkheads for horizons, the eerie sounds of the ship permeating

the city. There was room enough for the 50,000 survivors, but a kind of

collective claustrophobia prevailed.

Then there was the disaster that befell them during the first modular

transformation and the continued attacks on the SDF-1 by their unseen

enemy. But Macross City had weathered it all, and the new city was a marvel

to behold. Constructed on three levels that ascended to the massive starport

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dome, the city had everything it had had on Earth-and then some. There

were streets (even hills), shopping malls, electric cars and trucks, a

monorail, tube and lift systems, several movie theaters, arcades, an

amphitheater, even a radio station. The engineers who had come up with

Eve-Enhanced Video Emulation-were experimenting with the blue skies,

sunrises, and sunsets. And soon the Macross Broadcasting System would be

inaugurated.

But there was an important something missing: There was no news.

Except, of course, what they were permitted to broadcast to the

population concerning the war. Births and deaths; no crime to speak of; no

traffic accidents; no corruption. There was no real life sense to the place;

some fear and paranoia, but no real fun or excitement.

Which is precisely why Mayor Tommy Luan had jumped at the idea of

running a Miss Macross pageant when Jan Morris's people had approached

him.

Jan Morris's people-her agent, her manager, her publicity agent, the

whole lot of them along with the noted Hollywood star-had become

overnight residents of Macross City since the spacefold. She had been part

of a variety show organized in the States and newly arrived on Macross

Island to take part in the Launching Day celebration. Now Macross City had

the whole show on a permanent basis; in addition to Jan Morris, there was

an entire show band, two rock groups, two stand-up comics, and three

singers. The Morris group presented the idea of the beauty pageant with

real humanitarian zeal: Macross City needed a little excitement, and what

better way to inaugurate the new television station than with a

knock-'em-dead show with plenty of beautiful women and production

numbers. Macross Island had been gearing up for just such an event, but

what Morris's people were proposing was not a beauty pageant in the

traditional sense of the term-Jan's people knew better than to put their star

up against seventeen-year-olds in a swimsuit competition-but more of a

Miss Popularity contest based on each individual's contributions to the

spirit and growth of the transplanted city. The way they had it figured, Jan

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would be crowned with the title at the end of the show and everyone would

walk away happy.

The mayor had listened patiently to their plan, all the while

formulating some thoughts of his own. It was a terrific idea-Macross City

could use the boost, any excuse to gather behind an issue that wasn't

war-related-but he saw through their motives: It was true that Jan, like so

many others, had done her share to keep up the morale in the city, but as an

actress (and only a fair one at that) in a world without movies, what else

could she do but play on her past? But now with the SDF-1 through the

launch window and the actual final leg of the ship's homeward journey a

real possibility, it was time to think about the future of Jan Morris as a

marketable property. After all, her audiences on Earth had surely regretted

her loss, and just as surely they had moved on by now. So unless Jan Morris

could return to Earth singled out by a title like Miss Macross from the other

50,000 returnees, her future as a star would be bleak. She would have

missed her personal launch window.

With the right publicity, Jan Morris would certainly be a shoe-in for

the title. But Mayor Tommy Luan didn't want to see that happen. Jan

Morris was deserving enough, but her image was all wrong; she represented

the past, and moreover, she was not really a voluntary resident of the city.

No, what Macross City needed was someone whom they could call their own;

not just a figurehead but some young woman who would embody the spirit

of adventure and survival, of victory and hope.

The Morris group continued to lay out their plans, but unknown to

them, the mayor had already chosen the winner. She would be perfect! he

told himself. Not only was she of mixed background and ancestry, lovely to

look at, personable, and talented, but she was already a minor celebrity in

her own right. For two weeks she and her young lieutenant friend had faced

an ordeal in the bowels of the ship; it was her family that had reopened the

first restaurant in the resurrected city, the White Dragon; and the flyboys all

adored her. Yes, she would be perfect, the mayor decided:

Lynn-Minmei, Miss Macross!

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Rick was having lunch with Minmei at Variations, a popular eatery on

the upper tier of Macross City, when she told him about her entry in the

Miss Macross pageant. They had been seeing each other frequently during

the past two months. The enemy had pulled back for some reason, and the

ship was on a course that would return them to Earth in six months or so. In

general, things had been going well, but this was the first definite news Rick

heard of the resuscitated contest, and he was speechless; it was hard enough

sharing her with half the Robotech Defense Force, and now she was on the

brink of becoming the communal property of the entire SDF-1!

"Rick, please don't get like that," she responded to his silence. "The

mayor went ahead and entered me without even asking. And besides, you

know how much this means to me."

"What are you, his secret weapon or something? I mean, what about us,

Minmei? I mean...oh, forget it, I don't know what I mean."

She reached across the table for his hand. "Listen, Rick, will you be

there for me-you and Roy and the guys? I'm going to need all the help I can

get."

He looked into her blue eyes and began to feel the anger leaving him.

His smile brought one to her face.

"Of course we'll be there. We're on standby patrol that night, but Roy

will able to pull some strings. Anyway, you're going to win that contest

hands down."

"You really think I have a chance?"

"You're a sure thing," he told her. "You are our secret weapon, don't

you know that?"

After Rick left the restaurant, Minmei ordered more tea for herself and

stared out at Macross City's experimental blue skies. A sure thing, she

mused. If only that were true, if only she could have the confidence that

others had in her. The mayor, for one; he was treating her like she'd already

won the contest, building up her chances, seeing to it that she had enough

money for a new outfit. But what chance did she stand against girls like

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Hilary Rockwell and Shawn Blackstone? Let alone Jan Morris! Hey, Jan

Morris was her idol!

Minmei's hands fell to her lap. She looked down at her plaid school

skirt, the blazer and tie. She thought she saw herself as she really was: just a

kid with big dreams. A kid who needed constant attention and

encouragement, even when she hated herself for bringing that about. At war

with herself: one half weak and scared and full of self-doubts, against a

constantly charming, vivacious, confident other half. The former could not

for an instant sustain the dream that she would win, while the latter self

seemed to embrace that dream as if it was something meant to lie-destined.

Well, wasn't it enough, she asked herself, just to be a part of the

pageant, among those others she looked up to?

The answer was a resounding no!

The Macross amphitheater (the Star Bowl, as it was affectionately

known) was located at the extreme edge of the enormous hold that housed

the city. When planning the amphitheater, Robotech architects and

engineers had taken full advantage of a preexisting bowl-shaped depression

in the ship's floor and a large spacelight in the ceiling above the building site.

The result was about as close to an open-air theater as one could hope for

aboard a spaceship. The Star Bowl could seat 30,000, and there wasn't an

empty place to be found on the night of the pageant.

The Macross Broadcasting System had labored long and hard to

position their cameras for maximum coverage of the event. If all went as

planned, the other 20,000 residents would be able to view the pageant from

their shops, homes, or any of the curbside monitors that had recently been

installed throughout the city.

The host for the show was Ron Trance, a veteran of countless benefit

and rear-line shows for the troops during the Global Civil War. Trance had

been slated to run the SDF-1 launch celebration and had been caught up in

the fold. The seven judges included Colonel Maistroff and Captain Gloval,

the editor of the newspaper, a former advertising executive, and three

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officials from the mayor's office; but these seven were a mere formality-they

would handle the contestants' questions and choose the semifinalists but

would cast no final votes. That voting would be left to the people of Macross

City. Each seat in the arena had been equipped with a sensor that would

transmit a vote during balloting, and those in the city could cast their votes

by phone or at any of several dozen voting booths.

Minmei's cheering section was seated to the left of the central runway,

along the midsection of the amphitheater. Roy and his Skull Team were

there, along with the members of Rick's newly formed Vermilion. Other

squads were scattered throughout the area. The young lieutenant himself

had yet to arrive.

The mayor opened the show, and after a few technical glitches the

pageant got under way. The orchestra performed a piece written especially

for the pageant, lasers crisscrossed overhead through colored smoke,

spotlights played across the stage, and a series of holoprojected letters

assembled themselves above to spell out "Miss Macross!" To thunderous

applause Ron Trance made his entry, hoofing and singing. The curtains

parted, and the twenty-eight contestants strutted on stage in a simple

choreographed parade. The grand prizes were announced: a recording

contract, a screen test, and a new fanliner, "the latest thing in sports

mecha...featuring the powerful new VA hydro-turbine engine, designed by

Ikkii Takemi himself..."

Minmei was comfortable with this part of the show. She hadn't realized

that the bright lights at the front of the stage would make it impossible for

her to see the audience, but it was probably just as well: It was more

dreamlike this way, and she felt that she possessed more control over

fantasy than real life. But backstage later on, the frights began to take hold

of her. All week long she had been coached by her chaperons and support

group on how to act during the next portions of the event, but just now she

couldn't recall one bit of their advice. So she relied instead on Uncle Max's

words: "Just be yourself."

It was while everyone was running around making costume changes for

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the upcoming poise and question portions of the show that she spotted Jan

Morris.

Minmei had been trying to meet her all week long, but Jan's agents had

kept her inaccessible. She was the real star of the show, Minmei supposed,

and here she was, just one of the contestants, a few seats away talking to her

manager. She certainly was pretty, though-blond curls piled by a black and

white striped headband, long legs, gorgeous blue dress with red horizontal

bands, and that million-dollar smile. But as Minmei overcame her shyness

and drew nearer, pen and memo book in hand, to ask for an autograph, she

couldn't help but notice that Jan was a lot older than most of the girls and a

lot shorter than she appeared to be in her films.

She was also upset about something.

Jan's manager was saying, "I guess they put you at the head of the list

because you're the only star. But I've talked them into calling you last."

"Oh, thanks a bunch, Mary." Jan's voice dripped sarcasm.

"Listen, Jan, it's only right that you-"

"Will you stop it, please!" the actress snapped. "This isn't Hollywood. I

didn't ask to go to the...planets! Or get stuck in this oversized sardine can."

"So why are we doing this? We don't have to participate in this thing,

Jan."

Jan just stared at her. "It goes with the territory, sweetheart. You

should know that. I mean, someday we're going to get back home, and I'm

not about to play the forgotten star-"

She glanced up at that moment and saw Minmei standing there.

"Now what?" Jan muttered.

"Excuse me, Miss Morris, I'm really one of your biggest fans, and so I

was wondering if you'd be kind enough to give me your autograph." Minmei

pushed the memo book forward. "I'm afraid this is all I have to write on,

though. Would it be all right?"

Jan Morris gave her a cold once-over and, suddenly on the verge of

tears, declined. Mary interceded before Minmei could apologize. "If you

want an autograph from a real star, get yourself a real autograph book." Jan

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Morns stood up, and the two of them walked away.

Minmei was stunned by the encounter, but she didn't have a moment

to think about it: Center stage was calling.

Rick arrived at the amphitheater just in time to catch Minmei's grand

entrance. Macross City's mass transit system was so jammed, he'd had to

bicycle over from his quarters. He took a seat in the balcony, his binoculars

zeroed in on the runway.

Minmei wore a hand-woven lavender mandarin gown of clinging silk, a

dress that had belonged to her grandmother and had been altered to suit

the girl's slim figure and long legs. The tunic had a simple round collar,

flawless embroidery over the left shoulder, and revealing slits. She wore

matching pumps and had strands of pink cultured pearls in her braided and

bunned hair. Rick thought she looked fantastic as she stepped forward into

the bright spot to wait for the judges' questions.

"Could we have your thoughts about the war and the needs of Macross

City, your hopes for the future, your ambitions..."

Rick was simply too taken with the sight of her to pay much attention

to Minmei's responses, but just then Captain Gloval asked a relevant

question: "Do you have a steady boyfriend among all the fighter pilots you

count as your friends?"

Rick hung on her every word.

"I don't believe I'm ready for that at this point. I mean, I think it's best

to have a lot of different friends."

Colonel Maistroff followed up: "Do you find it difficult having male

friends?"

Minmei laughed. "Not at all! In fact, I have one really good friend who's

just like a brother to me."

Rick slapped himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. A

brother?! A BROTHER?!! And just then, while Minmei was taking in the

applause, his pager went off. He raised his eyes to the starlight, wondering

who was calling him out this time.

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CHAPTER TEN

"Rome wasn't built in a day-Macross City was!"

Mayor Tommy Luan

Had it not been for the Miss Macross pageant, I might never have

undertaken the journey which led me to enlightenment-a journey I hope to

guide you through in the pages that follow. It was only after I had opened my

heart to the First Truth-that beauty and fame were not only transitory but

illusory-that my soul was sufficiently prepared to accept the profound

wisdom of the heavens: the knowledge that we are but seeds in the cosmic

garden, potential given form and the will to evolve, true children of the

starsbeings of noble light!

Jan Morris,

Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians

When accounts of The First Robotech War were finally written, not one

of that war's many chroniclers failed to point out the curious turn of events

precipitated by the Miss Macross pageant. The word "irony" appears often

in those accounts, but irony is a judgment rendered after the fact and, in the

case of Lynn-Minmei and the part she would come to play in the hostilities,

much too simple and soft a term.

Exedore could no longer allow his growing concerns about the

Micronians to go unspoken. The Tritani pattern was being woven again, and

although it was not the Zentraedi way to look back, the application of

lessons from the past was now essential. Otherwise the quadrant would

surely fall to the vengeful Invid!

Just when events had calmed somewhat-Khyron was temporarily

reined in and Dolza had issued an order allowing the SDF-1 a brief stay of

execution-the Earthlings had once again demonstrated their penchant for

the unpredictable.

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Strange, incomprehensible telecommunications were being broadcast

from the dimensional fortress. Exedore had requested that Commander

Breetai meet with him on the bridge.

The audio and visual signals were being broadcast on a relatively

low-frequency wavelength; reception was intermittent at best. But even

strong and continuous, they would have remained equally baffling to the

Zentraedi commander and his adviser. What they saw were images of

female Micronians undergoing what appeared to be an unusual

metamorphosis, complete with bizarre changes in chroma and an alarming

lack of any cause-and-effect sequencing. Breetai and Exedore stared at the

screen and turned to each other with confused looks.

" 'Miss...Macross...pageant'...What does it mean, Exedore?"

"I understand the individual words, Commander, but the meaning of it

escapes me."

"A call for reinforcements, perhaps."

"No, Commander. The signal is far too weak for that."

Breetai experienced a moment of disquiet. Had he overlooked

something important in the legends-something about a secret weapon the

Micronians possessed, an innate ability to conquer all who threatened

them?

"We must decipher this code, whatever it is. Have you been successful

in your efforts to teach our agents the Micronian tongue?"

"As successful as can be expected, Commander. They aren't-"

"Ready one of the Cyclops recon ships. Tell your operatives to stand

by."

"M'lord," said Exedore, and backed away.

While his adviser was left to carry out the orders, Breetai studied the

screen; there was something disturbing about those partially clothed and

strangely colored females, a power about them that pierced him like an

ancient arrow.

As regimented as the Zentraedi were, there were still individual

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personality types, and the three agents chosen to man the Cyclops recon

were to prove as pivotal in the unfolding of events as the Miss Macross

pageant itself. At the helm of the arachnidlike vessel was Rico, a wiry,

effectively one-eyed warrior with a thin, sunken face, prominent

cheekbones, and chiseled features. Bron, a beefy, powerful man with greasy

red hair, was the navigator, and in charge of communications was Konda, a

nondescript second lieutenant with shaggy, lavender hair well suited to

current Earth fashions.

They'd been given a dangerous assignment: The Cyclops had to be

brought in close enough to Zor's ship to monitor and record the curious

Micronian broadcasts while at the same time evading detection. But Rico

was an experienced surveillance pilot, and he soon had the Cyclops well

situated for reception. He was not, however, prepared for what greeted his

eyes (nor would he be for quite some time to come): Here was a Micronian

male wearing some sort of strange devices in front of his eyes, holding in his

hand an equally unusual device which he seemed to be directing toward...a

female! An unclothed female at that! A-and the two of them were actually

together-in the same space!

"This is unthinkable!" he cried.

Bron and Konda were similarly appalled.

Rico adjusted the recording controls to enhance the monitor image.

"She must be wearing some new type of armor."

Bron disagreed: The armor covered the female's hips and breasts only;

it didn't make sense.

"Perhaps those are the only vulnerable parts of a Micronian female,"

Rico offered.

"It's not armor at all," said Konda. "It's a formal uniform."

Bron shook his head. "You're both wrong. It's not even a female. It

must be a secret weapon designed to look like one!"

Rick Hunter was missing the swimsuit competition.

He cursed his luck and muttered to himself while he strapped into the

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cockpit module of the armored Battloid. Why did Henricks have to pick

tonight to get sick, and why did Rick's name have to appear at the top of the

patrol list?

He had already gotten into an argument with Commander Hayes- "As

primary patrol backup, you should have remained on the base, Lieutenant

Hunter, not run off to some foolish beauty pageant!"-and now Minmei was

going to be disappointed that he'd missed her big moment. "This sucks!" he

yelled to the techs who were operating the module cranes and servos. They

had one eye fixed on getting Rick's module into position and the other glued

to monitors tuned in to the Miss Macross broadcast: No doubt Lisa Hayes

and the SDF-1 bridge crew were doing the same. Meanwhile, Rick Hunter

gets to go out into space and search for some enemy ship picked up on the

long-range scanners.

Alone!

But if that was the way it had to be, he was going to recon in style, and

the armored Battloid was just the ticket.

Still classified as experimental, it was the latest innovation from the

Robotech Weapons Division. In addition to the standard armaments and

defensive systems of the phase one design, the Battloid was equipped with

new generation boosters and retros-the so-called deep-space augmentation

pack-multiple-warhead "pectoral" launchers, and ejectable Bohrium-plated

armor on those areas previously considered to be "vulnerable to

penetration" by the boys in the RWD.

Rick spent a few moments familiarizing himself with the new controls.

Fewer foot pedals, that was a plus. A new Hotas design-the hands on

throttle and stick-improved ADF and ADI, totally useless before in deep

space; a horizontal situation indicator-ha!; and a triple-screened TED,

stocked with an up-to-date library of alien craft signatures. Rick donned the

"thinking cap" and thought the mecha through some simple maneuvers. He

then walked it cautiously to the Prometheus bay and launched himself from

the fortress.

This was deep-space patrol once again, Mars just a memory. But there

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was some security to be gained from the sight of Sol, blazing bright in the

heavens. It was almost beginning to feel like home turf out here.

Rick engaged the power pack boosters and relaxed back into the

padded seat, locking onto the coordinates furnished him by the bridge. The

enemy ship was thought to be a recon ship patrolling the outer limits of the

SDF-1's sensor range.

The comtone sounded through his headset, and the face of Lisa Hayes

appeared on the left commo screen. By the look of her, she was disturbed

about something. In fact, she was livid.

"Lieutenant Hunter, who issued you permission to take out the

armored Battloid? You are supposed to be flying ghost support, not

confrontational."

Rick winced as the commander's words rushed out. "Excuse me, sir,

but I'm out here on my lonesome, up against some-"

"We'll discuss this later, Lieutenant! Prepare to receive new

coordinates."

Rick switched the ADF from lock to standby, but the data transfer was

incomplete. The displays shut down, and the monitor was suddenly nothing

but static lines and snow. Even audio was getting shaky. Rick heard

something about "Zenny's fast food." He flipped the toggle to automatic

fine-tuning.

"Some sort...-ust interference," Lisa was saying. "I'm...-witch...laser

induction. Stand by."

Lisa's face faded and disappeared, replaced by the curvaceous form of

Sally Forester walking the Star Bowl runway in a yellow two-piece.

Well, well, thought Rick, relaxing again, the latest in diversion

technique for the battle-weary fighter pilot. Then Lisa was back on-line for

an instant, instructing him to switch over to channel D-3. He tried that, but

video reception seemed to be locked on the MBS transmissions. Tough luck,

Rick said to himself, rubbing his hands together and grinning. It was Hilary

Rockwell now, looking choice in her blue suit. Rough decision ahead;

almost easier to be up here, Rick thought.

105

And then Minmei was on stage.

It was certainly one of the oddest feelings Rick had experienced in a

while: Here he was in deep space, and there was Minmei in her teal bathing

suit. As his spirits began to improve, the mecha responded; the Battloid was

practically doing pirouettes in space! But the mood was to be short-lived:

The console displays were flashing wildly, not out of contagious joy but

because heat-seeking missiles had locked onto his tail!

Quickly, Rick commenced evasive action and instructed the stealth

systems to launch ghosts. The rear cameras gave him a glimpse of his deadly

pursuers-a flock of A/As-and sure enough, the scanners had picked up,

registered, and catalogued the enemy vessel. A schematic formed on the

port commo screen, profiles, front and rear views, weapons systems,

vulnerable spots, suggested response. RECON VESSEL: CYCLOPS TYPE.

Rick fired the boosters and put the Battloid through its paces, pushing

it for all it was worth while the heatseekers continued to narrow the gap. So

much for the ghosts. Concerned about their own survival, the warning

systems were shouting out instructions, breaking his concentration. He shut

down the interior audio supply and looked inside himself for the tone. A

cold sweat broke out all over him. He thought the mecha left, right, up,

down, and every which way but loose. The missiles were still with him.

And all the while, Minmei was parading across his three screens. They

were flashing her measurements, for. Pete's sake!

Rick was leading the missiles on a merry chase, but one that was going

to have a most unfortunate ending unless he pulled something out of the

hat-fast! Fratricide was his only hope. Desperately, he willed the Battloid to

turn itself face to face with the heat-seekers and raised the gatling cannon;

locking the targeting coordinator onto the leader of the pack, he fired!

Minmei stood in the wings, trembling. But when her name and

contestant number were announced, all the anxiety seemed to leave her; she

threw her shoulders back, stood straight and tall, and strutted on stage. She

knew she looked good-the teal-colored stretch suit fit her perfectly-and

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given the audience reaction to her previous appearances, she figured she at

least had a shot at one of the runner-up positions. If she could only keep it

together for the next few minutes...

Her legs were shaking. She felt very unsteady on the high heels; she

understood the need for them-added height and their pleasing effect on

body posture-but she was unaccustomed to them. Nevertheless, she made it

down to the end of the runway without incident. She had made her turn and

was starting back, when it happened.

In thinking about it later, she would recall that the heel of her left shoe

didn't so much let go as completely disappear as if it had been blown out

from under her. But at the moment all she could think about was the

embarrassment and the agony of defeat. Two pageant officials came to her

aid and helped her up. There was some laughter from the audience, but

mostly concern. And she did her best to alleviate that by demonstrating she

was a trooper: She put on her best smile and hobbled her way back to center

stage. The applause didn't end until long after she reached the wings.

Shawn Blackstone, who had become her close friend during the

pageant, was at her side in a flash. She made light of the incident and said

that it would have no effect on the judging.

"It shows them you're human, Minmei. Not like you-know-who."

You-know-who was Jan Morris, now making her walk down the

runway to cheers and applause as Minmei watched from the wings. Jan was

completely self-possessed; she'd been there a hundred times already. She

wore a bold, striped suit with a halter top, more daring and revealing than

the suits worn by the rest of the contestants-revealing enough to show some

stretch marks, Minmei noticed.

Jan stood at the end of the runway taking it in; she had them eating out

of her hand. Minmei couldn't watch. She turned aside, the contest over.

Time to wake up.

"You haven't beaten me yet, chumps!" Rick shouted to the stars.

The detonation of the heat-seekers had shaken him up and fried some

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of the Battloid's circuitry, but he was intact. Fortunately (and puzzlingly),

the enemy had not followed up their initial attack. And now it was Rick's

turn. He had a fix on the ship and launched enough missiles to wipe out a

fleet.

Inside the Cyclops recon ship, the three Zentraedi operatives were so

transfixed by the swimsuit competition that they almost failed to react to

the counterattack. On the monitors were all those Micronian females,

scantily clad (in armor or uniform, depending on whom you listened to),

parading themselves in front of an enormous audience. It just had to be a

weapons demonstration; why else would so many people gather in one

place?

And one of the females had fallen. Uncertain if this was part of the

ceremony or not, the three began to focus on the fallen one to the exclusion

of all else. Something was stirring in each of them-a novel feeling, confused

as though half remembered from a previous life, disturbing but strangely

appealing.

In fact, it took Rick's missiles to bring them to their senses. The

Cyclops took the full force of the explosions and sustained heavy damage,

but the weapons system had not been affected. Rico ordered visuals on the

source of the missiles and returned fire. He watched the Micronian pilot

throw the Battloid into a series of successful evasive maneuvers. Then,

without warning, the pilot blew the armor from the ship and swung the

Battloid toward them, gatling cannon blasting away.

Rico recognized a no-win situation when he saw one; sacrificing the

ship for the crew was not something normally allowed by the Zentraedi

command, but this was an important mission, and Rico thought it prudent

to do so. With the Battloid still on the approach, he initiated the

self-destruct sequence, then ordered his men to the escape pod.

Inside the Battloid cockpit, Rick engaged the foot thrusters and willed

the mecha's legs forward; he was hurtling toward the enemy ship now, bent

at the waist, feet stretched out in front of him.

Upon contact with the recon ship, he grappled on and used the feet to

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batter his way through the forward bays and into the ship's control station.

He was actually seated on the instrument console when he brought up the

cannon once again, but by then the crew had already abandoned ship. He

raised the Battloid and walked it forward cautiously. A hatchway slammed

shut somewhere, and all at once, off to his right, a bank of porthole

monitors lit up, Minmei's face on each of the dozen screens.

She was the last image in Rick's mind when the ship exploded.

From the twenty-eight contestants the judges chose five finalists;

Minmei was among them. They were seated in the center of the stage now,

Shawn and Hilary on Minmei's right, Sally and Jan Morris on her left.

Vertical light bars computer-linked to the voting processor rose behind each

of them. Ron Trance was speaking. The big moment had arrived.

"And now, ladies and gentleman..." Ron milked it a bit, playing on the

suspense, walking to and fro, cordless mike in hand. "It is time for you to

decide who will be crowned Miss Macross! So get ready to cast your vote."

There was a moment of undiluted silence before Trance gave the word.

Then the orchestra began a soft and slow build that quieted the murmurings

from the audience and kept time with the ascending columns of light.

Minmei wanted desperately to turn around, but she felt glued to her chair.

The orchestra continued to pour out an atonal modulation which strained

for a crescendo, the audience began to cheer and scream, the light rose

higher and higher...

Some of those who were fortunate enough to have been there recall

that Jan Morris was rising from her chair when Ron Trance made the final

announcement. But it was Lynn-Minmei's chair that he approached, her

hand that he took, her song he sang.

Minmei's recollection of the events was poorer than most; try as she

might when viewing the tapes afterward, she could not recall her thoughts.

All she remembered was the cape that had been draped over her shoulders,

the crown placed upon her head, and the fact that when she looked up

toward the starlight, it had seemed to her that unseen eyes were upon her,

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as though the stars themselves had ceased their motion to pay tribute to her

moment.

Rick was semiconscious in the cockpit of the drifting disabled Battloid.

The damaged instrument panels were flashing out, filling the small space

with stroboscopic light. Shafts of pain radiated through him as he fought to

reach the surface. Once there, a beatific creature appeared to him, and he

felt a glimmer of hope. It wore a beautiful smile, a crown, and resplendent

robe of many colors; it carried a scepter and stood proud and tall...

Rick Hunter, however, had strong survival instincts. He managed to

reach forward through his stupor and activate the mecha's distress and

self-guidance systems. Performing that act brought him around to full

consciousness, and at once he realized the Battloid was still receiving

transmissions from the SDF-1. The angel who had visited his vision was

none other than Minmei.

Lynn-Minmei, now Queen of Macross.

Rick watched as she surrendered herself to the audience. He reached

toward the monitor as though he might touch her one last time before she

passed beyond him forever, a part of something that would always be bigger

than both of them.

Rick let his head loll forward.

What good was it to wake up to a world he could never enter?

110

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"You have to look at things from our perspective: An alien armada

appears in lunar orbit and launches an attack on Macross Island, the site of

the SDF-1 reconstruction project; Captain Gloval, the fortress, and the entire

island disappear. The aliens give chase to the ship and leave us alone. Then a

year goes by and Gloval makes contact, informing us all of a sudden that he's

returning the fortress to Earth, along with 50,000 people who were supposed

to have perished during a volcanic eruption. What else were we supposed to

tell the planet-that giant aliens had attacked and might or might not be hack?

And in addition to this, Gloval still had the armada on his tail, and he's

leading the enemy back to Earth! I put it to you, who in their right mind

would grant him permission to land? You might just as well invite

catastrophe..."

Admiral Hayes, as quoted in Lapstein's

Interviews

Rico, Bron, and Konda were brought before Breetai and Exedore for

debriefing. They had escaped death at the hands of the Micronian ace but

had failed to return to the Zentraedi mother ship with any substantial

information regarding the unusual transmissions from the SDF-1. As a

consequence, their lives were once again in jeopardy.

Breetai regarded the three operatives from his lofty position above the

floor of the interrogation chamber. The debriefing was going nowhere fast,

and he was tempted to put an end to it, but he decided to give it one last

chance.

"We will review this again. What did you see?"

Once more the three commenced their explanations simultaneously.

"They were wearing military costumes-"

"It was armor-"

"Just looking at them gave me the strangest feeling-"

"Silence!" yelled Breetai. "It's apparent that none of you know what you

111

saw."

In response to their salute, Breetai folded his arms across his chest and

turned to his adviser. Exedore concurred with his plan to send out a second

recon unit but went further in suggesting that it might be advantageous at

this point to capture one or two of the Micronians alive.

"To what end?" Breetai wanted to know.

"To examine them, my lord. To determine for ourselves if they possess

any knowledge of Protoculture."

Exedore whispered the word.

Breetai considered it. He was directing his thoughts toward

Commander-in-Chief Dolza's possible reactions, when another argument

broke out below him. Each of the pilots was certain of what he had seen. It

was most curious: armor, military costume, a secret weapon disguised as a

partially clad Micronian female...

Breetai allowed the bickering to escalate somewhat, but put a stop to it

when physical blows were exchanged. Then he brought his massive fist

down on the curved railing of the balcony.

"Enough of this! You were given an assignment, and you bungled it."

He made a dismissive gesture. "Return to your quarters and await my

judgment."

The pilots bowed and exited, leaving Breetai and his adviser alone in

the chamber. Exedore had adopted a pensive pose.

"Of late I have witnessed this same scene all too frequently,

Commander. Continued contact with these Micronians has threatened the

integrity of your command. Our forces are confused and demoralized."

"Your point is well taken, Exedore. They are accustomed to decisive

victories."

"I fear that this game of 'cat-and-mouse' will undermine us, my lord."

"Then perhaps the time has come to talk to them."

"I agree, Commander."

"All right then, consider it done." Breetai grinned. "But we must be

persuasive. I doubt they will surrender one of their kind just for our asking."

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A planet was centered in the main extravehicular monitor screen of the

SDF-1. Even under full magnification it was impossible to discern any

surface details; but that made no difference to the men and women on the

bridge, who had long ago committed to memory those oceans and

continents and distinctive cloud patterns. Earth! Darker than they knew it

was due to the filters used on the giant reflector scopes, but their

homeworld nonetheless. From their vantage, the planet was scarcely ten

degrees from the solar disc itself, still on the far side of the sun, but there it

was: visible, almost palpable.

Save for the ever-present whirls, hums, and beeps Robotechnology

contributed to life on the bridge, you could have heard the proverbial pin

drop. Lisa Hayes, Claudia Grant, Sammie, Vanessa, Kim, and Captain

Gloval-all of them were transfixed by the sight. But their silence was

purposeful as well as ceremonious. They had just directed a radio beam

transmission to the United Earth Defense Council headquarters and were

now awaiting the response.

All at once static crackled through the overhead speakers; all eyes fixed

on these now, the forward screen forgotten.

"Captain Gloval," the voice began, "due to the possibility that our

security may be breached and this transmission intercepted by the enemy,

we cannot give you the information you requested about our present

support systems...Fortunately for us, the enemy forces were more interested

in following the SDF-1, and consequently, you are requested to continue to

keep them at bay and not return to Earth. Repeat: Do not attempt a return

at this time. That is all."

This time the bridge crew was just too stunned to speak.

Finally, Vanessa deadpanned, "Welcome home."

"I can't believe this," said Claudia. "We're expected to stay out here and

be sitting ducks while they, they-Oh, forgive me, sir, I've spoken out of

turn."

113

Captain Gloval said nothing. Was it possible, he was wondering, that

after more than a year in space the SDF-1 could simply be turned away, that

the council had decided to offer them up as sacrifices? Gloval pressed the

palms of his hands to his face as if to wipe away what his expression might

betray. It was more than possible, it was probable.

Eleven years ago, when initial exploration of the recently arrived SDF-1

had revealed the remains of alien giants, the World Unification Alliance had

decided to reconstruct the ship and to develop new weaponry designed for

defense against this potential enemy. It was a ruse, but it had succeeded to

some degree in reuniting the planet. Confrontations during the past year

had made it plain to Gloval that the enemy had traveled to Earth to reclaim

their ship. Just what was so important about this particular vessel remained

a mystery, but it was obvious that the aliens wanted it back undamaged. The

spacefold undertaken on that fateful day had inadvertently rescued Earth

from any further devastation. In this way, the Robotechnicians had done

their job: An alien attack had been averted.

Gloval was now forced to take a long hard look at the present situation

through the eyes of the Earth leaders. And through the eyes of the enemy.

Several possibilities presented themselves. The fate of the Earth might still

hang in the balance regardless of whether or not the SDF-1 was captured,

destroyed, or surrendered. If the Council was thinking along those lines,

then perhaps work was under way on some unimaginable weapons defense

system, and time was what they needed most-time that the SDF-1 could buy

for them. But if the ship was the enemy's central concern, it would occur to

the aliens sooner or later to use their superior firepower to hold the Earth

hostage. And how could one compare the loss of 50,000 lives to the

annihilation of an entire planet?

Sadly, there was something about the short message that led Gloval to

believe that Earth had already written them off.

When the Captain looked up, he realized that Lisa, Claudia, and the

others were staring at him, waiting for his reaction.

Full of false confidence, he stood up and said:

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"We're changing course."

The Zentraedi had grown so accustomed to the Micronians' erratic

behavior and unpredictability that it hardly surprised them when the SDF-1

repositioned itself. Where at one time they would have puzzled over the

situation and analyzed its strategic implications, they now simply altered

their plans accordingly. And it just so happened in this instance that the

course change was easy to accommodate.

Breetai and Exedore communicated their attack plan to Grel, acting

liaison officer for the Botoru's Seventh Division-Breetai refused to have any

further direct dealings with Khyron. Grel relayed the information to his

commander.

Khyron received him in his quarters onboard the battle cruiser. He had

been using the dried leaves again, a habit he turned to in tranquil times, and

ingested one as Grel spoke.

"They've changed course?"

"Yes, my lord. Already they have recrossed the orbit of the fourth

planet, and our course projections show them closing on the system's

planetoid belt."

"Hmm, yes, they seem to fear deep space. Go on."

"While the Noshiran and Harmesta assault groups are engaging the

enemy, we are to choose a planetoid of suitable makeup and sufficient size

and destroy it. It is Commander Breetai's belief that the Micronians will

raise their shields against the resultant debris-"

"Shunting power for the shields from their main battery weapons

system."

"Such is Breetai's belief. With their main gun inoperable and their

Battloids engaged, Zor's ship will be rendered helpless."

Khyron slapped the table. "Then we move in for the kill!"

"No, Commander."

"What then?"

"Warning shots across the bow of the ship."

115

"What!-without hitting them?"

"Commander Breetai will then demand a surrender."

A look of disbelief flashed across the Khyron's face. He threw back his

head and laughed. "This reeks of Exedore's hand. What can he be thinking

of? We've chased these Micronians through this entire star system. They

know we won't destroy the ship, so why expect a surrender now?" Khyron's

gestures punctuated his words. "A demand must be backed up with the

threat of annihilation."

"I agree, Commander. The Micronians have demonstrated a

remarkable tenacity. They will continue to fight."

Khyron thought for a moment. "Suppose they had to fight blindfolded,

Grel. Say, without their radar..."

"But Commander, our orders-"

"To hell with our orders! I'm not afraid of Breetai."

Khyron stood up and approached his underling conspiratorily.

"What we need now is someone to toss to Central Command. Someone

willing to admit to a tactical blunder-a misdirected laser bolt."

"I understand, my lord."

"Good. If no one volunteers, then use your discretion and choose

one...We must take care to cover our tracks, my dear Grel."

Had Lieutenant Rick Hunter been privy to Captain Gloval's decision to

alter the SDF-1's course (or had he been able to read the stars), he might not

have been feeling so desperate, sitting there on a bench in Macross Central

Park waiting for Minmei to show. But the way Rick had figured it, Earth was

only a few months away, and he had to win Minmei before they arrived. For

all its 50,000 inhabitants, Macross still felt like a small town; he stood a

chance here. Once they were home it would be a different story.

Rick was not in the best of moods in any case. He was still burning

from his most recent confrontation with Flight Officer Lisa Hayes, and now

Minmei had kept him waiting for over an hour. He checked his wristwatch

against Macross City's new midday sun. A little more magic from the EVE

116

engineers and no one was going to care about returning to Earth, he said to

himself.

Since the Miss Macross pageant, Minmei had been all but inaccessible;

seeing her practically required a formal appointment, and on those rare

occasions when Rick managed to cut through the red tape, their time

together had been brief and awkward. She hadn't even bothered to visit him

in sick bay after the recon encounter. Still, the field was clear; she wasn't

dating anyone. Her picture adorned the radomes of many of the Veritechs,

but only Rick Hunter had access to the real thing.

He checked his watch again and looked around the park. The three

bridge bunnies were approaching him. Kim, Vanessa, and...he couldn't

remember the young one's name. He didn't feel up to making small talk

with them, but there was nowhere to hide.

They started right in on him:

"Well, hello there, Lieutenant Hunter."

"Who are you waiting for?"

"Do you have a date?"

"Been waiting long?"

"Is she really beautiful?"

"Prettier than we are?" the young one asked.

Rick took a good look at them as they struck mock poses for his benefit.

They were all attractive, especially the brunette in shorts. But in his eyes

Minmei had them beat. He gracefully sidestepped their further questions

and a moment later was rescued by a robo-phone that was cruising around

the park paging him. The persistent machine was arguing with someone on

a neighboring bench when Rick called out to it. Once, then again and again,

adding volume to each shout.

Finally the phone homed in on him, insulting some innocent as it left

the nearby bench. Rick deposited a coin; Minmei's face appeared in the

viewscreen. The three women moved behind him to get a better look. Rick

didn't hear their surprised reactions at seeing Miss Macross on the screen

and barely acknowledged their good-byes when they wandered off.

117

Minmei was apologizing. "...It's just that my singing lesson was set

back an hour and I'm afraid I'm not going to make it now."

"That's great, Minmei. The one afternoon I'm not on flight duty and

you've got singing lessons."

"Listen, Rick, they've decided to do a recording session-"

"Another new career for the 'Queen'?"

Minmei's response was interrupted. She turned away from the camera

to respond to someone seated at a piano. The guy was summoning her back

to practice.

Minmei said, "Rick, I've got to go," and broke the line.

The robophone moved off. Rick took a walk through the park, not sure

if he was feeling anger or self-pity. He was standing by the central fountain

when the city's warning sirens sounded. A general alert, but conditional, not

confrontational-an environmental threat as opposed to an enemy attack.

People were heading toward shelters, but with such unconcern that Rick

was tempted to ride it out where he stood.

But just then the fortress was struck.

Rick was knocked off his feet and thrown into the fountain-that

fountain that figured all too frequently in his thoughts of fond moments and

better times. But he had no time to bathe in waves of memory or irony. The

ship was sustaining impact after impact, shaking Macross City to its

foundations, and the mood was now one of panic. The "sun" disappeared,

and through the overhead starlight, Rick could see an enormous hunk of

planetary debris on a collision course with the ship.

"Sound general quarters!" ordered Gloval as he stooped to retrieve his

cap. "Give me course correction options based on the current data, and

alert-"

The bridge quaked with such force that Gloval was thrown from his

chair. Fragments of the exploded asteroid Pamir continued their rain of

death against the ship. Klaxons blared, and damage reports poured in.

"Our port side is taking the brunt of it, sir," said Lisa. "Macross is being

118

badly shaken."

"All right," Gloval said, picking himself up. "Concentrate the shield

energy there. Divert weapons power to the pin-point barrier system. And

get me the air wing commander."

"I have Skull Leader on the horn," said Claudia. "He reports heavy

fighting in the Third Quadrant. He's requesting backup, Commander."

"Negative. Give him the situation here. Tell him to stand by for recall.

In a minute we're going to be defenseless."

Vanessa, Sammie, and Kim stumbled onto the bridge as Gloval was

issuing course correction coordinates. The three women strapped in and

began to monitor ship systems status.

It was Vanessa's threat board that revealed the enemy ships.

"Enemy destroyers! They're moving into firing position."

"Those bastards!" yelled Gloval. "Reroute power to the main gun."

"Sir, Macross City will be destroyed if we lower the shields," said

Sammie.

"You have your orders," Claudia reminded the young tech. "Without

defenses there won't be any Macross City!"

"Confirm enemy fire-laser-bolt signatures!"

"Brace yourselves!" said Gloval.

But no shock came. The SDF-1 was fenced in by blue lightning but left

unstruck. And Gloval didn't know what to make of it. All at once, however, it

became a moot point: The ship sustained a terrible direct hit. All systems

failed on the bride. Presently auxiliary power brought some of them back to

life. Gloval requested damage assessment from all stations.

Lisa reported the worst news: The conning tower had been hit. The

entire radar control crew had been wiped out.

Gloval ordered all engines stopped.

The dimensional fortress shut down. The enemy had ceased their fire,

but chunks of rock continued to impact against it. Debris from the conning

tower drifted by the front and side bays. Lisa averted her gaze from the sight

of a human body hanging lifeless in the void, a redtrimmed Battloid...

119

"Can we raise Skull Leader?"

"Negative, sir," said Claudia.

"Do we have any radar functioning-wide-range, perhaps?"

"The report from the technical repair unit is coming in now," said Lisa.

She listened a moment. "Estimates of ten hours to effect minimal repairs."

Gloval said nothing; his silence was unnerving to the rest of them.

Incoming data to Sammie's station broke the stalemate. It registered as

code, but unlike any encrypted transmissions they were familiar with.

Gloval ordered her to patch it through the speakers. The ever-present static

of deep space infiltrated the bridge; then, a voice: deep, resonant, menacing.

"In the name of the Zentraedi forces, I order you to surrender. The last

attack on your ship was a warning of what we will do. You cannot escape. If

you wish to save the lives of your crew, you must surrender at once."

"My God," said Claudia. "It's the aliens!"

"We repeat," the voice continued, "in the name of the Zentraedi forces,

I order you to surrender. The last attack on your ship..."

Gloval listened carefully to the message. The Zentraedi, he said to

himself.

Now at least he knew what to call them.

120

CHAPTER TWELVE

It was only during the final stages of the [Global] War that women were

assigned to active military operations. Up until that time most women held

rear-echelon positions; but as casualties increased among the men

unilaterally, these positions came to be of paramount importance. Indeed, by

the time of the First Robotech War those positions could only be filled by

women. True, there were no women on the United Earth Council, but the

entire bridge crew of the super dimensional fortress, the SDF-1, was female.

One recalls the postfeminist claims that women were now not only victimized

by male aggressive instincts but instrumental in carrying them out, that

women (especially in the case of the SDF-1) had exchanged the traditional

pots and pans for the keyboards and consoles of the bridge. But those claims

not only simplify the issue but malign those women who contributed their

unique skills to the war effort. What is most disconcerting is the fact that

although women had finally achieved their long-sought-after goal of equality,

the Global War had introduced a new set of polarizing issues which now had

to be taken into account-there was mutual respect between the sexes but a

continued sense of the same old bugaboo about knowing and adhering to

"one's place in the world." In terms of male female relationships, the attitudes

of twenty-first-century society suggested those prevalent in the middle of the

previous century.

Betty Greer,

Post-Feminism and the Global War

The Cat's-Eye recon unit, escorted by Rick Hunter's Vermilion Team,

was launched from the flight deck of the Prometheus. Fragments of the

exploded planetoid littered local space.

Where only hours before they had been ordered to buy time for the

United Earth Defense Council, Captain Gloval was now buying time for the

SDF-1. The enemy's offensive strength had to be ascertained-the Zentraedi's

strength-and with the ship's radar down this could be achieved only by

121

deploying the recon vessel.

Lisa Hayes had the stick-the unit's former pilot had been a casualty in

the latest Zentraedi offensive. Her copilot was an inexperienced second

lieutenant on loan from the Gladiator Defense Force. Most of the air wing

strike teams had been deployed to guard the badly damaged SDF-1, looking

crippled and deathly still now on the Cat's-Eye's rear commo screen.

Lieutenant Hunter was on the forward screen.

"Ironic, isn't it, Commander," he was saying, "that I should end up your

wingman?"

Lisa knew what he was referring to; less than twenty-four hours ago

they had gotten into yet another tiff.

One of Vermilion squadron's VTs had taken a hit, and Hunter had

informed the bridge that he was taking his group home. The pilot of the

stricken VT maintained that the damage was only slight, and scanners

showed continued fighting in Hunter's quadrant, with only the Skull Team

left to take up the slack; so Lisa had denied him permission to come in.

"I'll be the judge of that," Hunter had said. "I'm group leader, and I'm

responsible for the safety of my men!" Then he went on to lecture her about

the dynamics of space dogfighting, how seemingly insignificant damage

could quickly prove fatal, how she was safe and sound on the bridge while

the big brave men of the VT strike force were constantly in jeopardy...On

and on.

She dismissed it as battle fatigue. But instead of letting it go, she had

vented her own anger and frustration. After all, she was his superior.

Then Roy Fokker, guitar-strumming darling of the Defense Force, had

stepped in on Hunter's side. They went right into their big brother-little

brother act, and the next thing Lisa knew, Fokker was ordering the

Vermilion Team home. He did, however, scold Hunter for talking too much.

If the incident had ended there, she would have forgotten it by now.

But among the space debris that had floated past the bridge bays following

the Zentraedi attack there was a disabled Battloid she had been certain was

Hunter's red-trimmed own. She had even imagined (or, more likely,

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hallucinated) that she saw Rick's lifeless form drift from the shattered

cockpit module...

Even now the image was too painful to recall.

Hunter had rescued her on Mars. But so what? He'd been ordered to do

it. Any of the VT pilots would have done so; it certainly didn't mean that she

had to feel anything special for the guy. Of course, it might have been

different if she felt something coming from him, but-

"I show four bogies at four o'clock relative," her copilot informed her.

"I see them," Lisa heard Rick say.

"There going to try a surprise attack," said Ben Dixon. "Let me at 'em."

"Negative, Ben," Hunter countered. "Do not give pursuit. We're going

to stick to the Eye."

Here he goes, thought Lisa. He was doing it again, making her feel like

she couldn't take care of herself. He infuriated her with his unsolicited

protection. She went on the tac net.

"I can protect myself, Lieutenant Hunter. Give pursuit. That's a direct

order, do you copy?"

Hunter was silent for a moment, then said, "All right, boys, you heard

the little woman. Let's go get 'em."

The three VTs of Vermilion Team broke formation and went after the

Battlepods. The Cat's-Eye was relaying positional data to them, but the

enemy bandits were still too far off for visual contact. Rick called up full

magnification on his port and starboard screens, and suddenly there they

were: guns bristling, extended claw thrusters radiant in the perpetual night.

"I see them," said Max Sterling. "Going in..."

Max and Ben, both of them anxious to post a few more pod decals on

their fighters, hit their afterburners and passed Rick. by. Rick found himself

holding back, thinking about Lisa's safety. Damn her, he thought. Let her go

ahead and get herself atomized. What did he care? He shook his head as if

to clear it and threw his VT into the fight.

A Battlepod had swooped in and fixed him in its lasers. Rick in turn

engaged his starboard thrusters, then cut his forward speed and fell away

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from the laser lock. At the same time, he loosed aft heat-seekers, which

caught the pod where the legs met the spherical body. The pods were highly

vulnerable there, and this one went into an uncontrolled accelerated spin as

the legs blew away. Rick saw two quick flashes ahead of him, and soon his

fighter was sailing through more pod debris.

It was easy if you let yourself think of the pods themselves as the

enemy. Remind yourself that there was a fifty-foot humanoid giant in each

of them though, and your brain began to short-circuit. In Battloid mode,

Rick had been face to face with Zentraedi warriors on two occasions. And

each time he had been paralyzed with fear. The Robotech Defenders who

had trained on Earth before the invasion had been shown the skeletons and

had been conditioned to accept the reality, but Rick had to learn it the hard

way. Rick, however, was one of the few men who had actually met a live

Zentraedi and lived to tell about it.

Battloids were the perfect mating of mind and mecha and were ideally

suited to a war with giants. But what would it be like to confront a Zentraedi

without the mecha? What could you do against something ten times your

size? There was a seventy-year-old film on videotape in the ship's library

about a giant ape who had been found on a remote Pacific island. The ape

had terrorized New York City the way later mutants and giants would wreak

havoc on Tokyo. But there was something about that old film...it had

somehow managed to communicate the mixture of awe and terror Rick felt

when he faced the giants. There had been a woman in that film, he

recalled...

The Battlepods destroyed, he switched on the tac net and tried to raise

the Cat's-Eye. But there was no response.

The recon ship was in trouble.

In pursuit of their surveillance mission, Lisa and her copilot had

entered into an area filled with massive chunks of what had once been the

planetoid Pamir. They had their hands full dodging these while at the same

time reporting on enemy locations.

"We have multiple radar contacts, picking up four, five, six, eight, and

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twelve heavy," the copilot said.

Lisa watched the radar hand sweep across the color-enhanced screen.

There was something enormous ahead of them. It would have to measure

more than fifteen kilometers in length. Possibly a piece of Pamir, but the

shape was all wrong. This thing was like an elongated ellipse, a zero

stretched at its poles. It had to be an enemy ship!

She began maneuvering the Cat's-Eye in for a closer look, her attention

fixed on the radar screen.

She didn't see the island of space rock they collided with.

The radar disc was torn from the ship, and one by one the life support

systems began to fail. The forward portion of the canopy was damaged but

intact. But the copilot had not been as fortunate; his limp form hung in

space, still tethered to the ship by an untorn length of seat strap. There's no

atmosphere in space, Hunter's words came back to her before she slipped

from consciousness.

The smallest damage could prove fatal.

Exedore watched his commander pace the bridge.

Continuous setbacks and defeats at the hands of the Micronians were

beginning to take their toll.

When the projecbeam field formed itself for viewing, the now crippled

SDF-1 could be discerned amid the asteroid field. Scanners indicated that

Micronian fighters had taken up defensive positions in all quadrants in

anticipation of a second offensive.

"Look at that ship," said Breetai. "We're fortunate that it survived the

attack."

"No thanks to Khyron. This time he has gone too far.

"Too far, indeed. And do you see how the Micronians react to our

demands for surrender, Exedore? They ignore us."

"Yes, Commander. I fear that they have seen through our strategy.

There is in fact a word for it in their language-bluff. It means to mislead or

intimidate through pretense."

125

The comlink tone sounded on the bridge, followed by the voice of the

duty officer.

"Commander Breetai, we have Commander Khyron standing by."

Breetai dissolved the projecbeam and hit the communicator switch.

"Patch him through-immediately!"

Khyron wore his familiar expression of slight bemusement. Exedore

had heard rumors to the effect that he was addicted to the Invid Flower; if

this was true, Khyron was even more dangerous than Breetai realized.

"You will be pleased to learn that the matter has already been settled,"

the Backstabber was saying.

A frightened junior officer was then shoved forward into the screen's

field of view. His shackled hands managed a two-handed breast salute as

Khyron ordered him to speak.

"Commander Breetai, I take full responsibility for the misplaced laser

bolt which destroyed the radar tower of Zor's ship. My aim was untrue, and

I humbly await your judgment."

The officer hung his head in shame.

Breetai stared at the screen with a look of disbelief that quickly

refocused as anger.

"Khyron, do you take me for a complete fool?!"

Khyron smirked, "Not complete, Breetai."

Exedore's commander was enraged; he shouted, "You have not heard

the end of this!" and shut down the comlink. He resumed his pacing as a

second message was fed to the bridge: An enemy recon vessel disabled by a

collision with an asteroid had been captured and was being brought to the

flagship.

So something had been salvaged from this operation, after all, Breetai

told himself. He heard Exedore give the order that all survivors were to be

left unharmed.

"Well, Exedore, it looks like you'll have the specimens you wanted."

"So it would appear, Commander," Exedore replied guardedly. These

would-be minor triumphs had a vexing way of reversing themselves.

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Nevertheless, Exedore and Breetai rushed from the bridge and made

for the docking bays. They were halfway along the main corridor to the

elevators when an announcement from ship security brought them to a halt.

"Three Micronian ships in pursuit of the captured recon craft have

broken into the lower deck holding area. Commander Breetai, contact the

bridge."

Breetai growled, "They dare to enter my ship?! Now I will deal with

them personally!"

The Zentraedi commander broke into a run; Exedore was behind him,

throwing caution to the wind.

The Vermilion Team had pursued the captured Cat'sEye into the lower

hold of the huge ship, reconfiguring to Guardian mode when they cleared

the hatchway. Afterburners were now accelerating them along the

kilometers of floor in the enormous chamber.

Rick took out the enemy tow which had ensnared Lisa's craft and

ordered the team into Battloid configuration. The two Zentraedi pilots who

jumped from the flaming wreck were easily chased off by gatling fire loosed

by Max and Ben.

The two corporals were speechless. Those were living, breathing giants

who had clambered out of the tow. All that training-the photos, the videos,

the skeletal remains-hadn't prepared them for this moment of actual

confrontation. They couldn't help but notice, however, that the place was a

wreck all on its own: Spare parts from Battlepods and other mecha littered

the area, overhead gantries and hull hatchways were in desperate need of

attention, and an atmosphere of ultimate neglect and disrepair hung over

the area like the stench of decay.

Rick, meanwhile, was bringing the Battloid down on one knee to

inspect the Cat's-Eye. He could see Lisa begin to stir inside the smashed

cockpit. Seeing the Battloid, she switched on the external speakers.

"Lieutenant Hunter, take your men and get out of here. You've got no

time to spare."

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Her voice was weak.

"Time enough to bring you with us."

Max came on the line: "Lieutenant, the Zentraedi are taking up

positions at the end of the corridor. We better blow this place."

"Just give me a few minutes of cover fire, Max. Then we're outta here."

"That'll just about deplete my cannon charge."

"Mine, too," Ben added.

"Cut the chatter. Open fire."

Rick returned his attention to the Cat's-Eye while his teammates laid

down a deafening barrage of fire.

"Can you operate the manual eject mechanism, Commander?"

"Negative," Lisa answered him. "The controls are jammed. Move out,

Lieutenant. I'm giving you an order."

"This is no time to stand on protocol, Commander. Cover yourself; I'm

going to break into the cockpit."

Lisa saw the Battloid's enormous hand come down on the shield and

screamed, "Keep your hand off me, Hunter! I'm not kidding, don't touch me

with that thing!"

The Battloid's fingers pinched the shield, shattering it. Cursing Rick the

entire while, Lisa pulled herself up and free of the wreckage.

"I'll have your stripes for this, Hunter. I swear it."

Rick heard Ben's gatling sputter out; Max flashed him a signal that he,

too, was out of ammo. Lisa had moved away from the Cat's-Eye. Rick was

offering her the outstretched open hand of the Battloid when he caught her

startled reaction to something that had appeared on the overhead catwalk.

Halfway to standing, that something landed hard on the Battloid's back,

driving the mecha to the floor of the hold with a force not to be believed.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Few of us were fortunate enough to have seen the interior of the SDF-1

before Dr. Lang's teams of Robotechnicians had retrofit the fortress with

bulkheads, partitions, lowered ceilings, and doorways and hatches

proportioned to human scale; so our entry into the enormous lower hold of

[Breetai's] flagship proved to be a veritable assault on the senses. Although I

learned much later that human-size enclosures did in fact exist aboard the

SDF-1 prior to reconstruction, here were all the things Sterling, Dixon, and I

had been hearing about from members of the early exploratory teams: the

three-hundred-foot-high ceilings, thirty foot-wide hatchways, miles of

corridors...It was not surprising, then, that our minds refused to grapple with

these new dimensions. We didn't experience the hold as human beings

entering giant-sized spaces; it was instead as if we had been reduced in size!

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

Even by Zentraedi standards, the soldier who leapt from the hold

gantry and decked Rick Hunter's Battloid was enormous.

Max calculated the giant's height at sixty-plus feet. He wore knee-high

utility boots and a blue uniform trimmed in yellow at the collar and sleeves;

over this was a long, sleeveless brown tunic adorned with one bold vertical

blue band. At breast level was some sort of insignia or badge of rank-almost

a black musical note in a yellow field. But the most memorable thing about

him was the gleaming plate that covered one side of his head, inset with

what appeared to be a lusterless cabochon. He had jumped more than 200

feet from the catwalk, yet here he stood glaring at them, ready to take on the

entire Robotech Defense Force single-handed.

Max didn't have to be told that he'd met one of the Zentraedi elite.

Sterling allowed these diverse emotional reactions to wash through

him; he then relaxed and began to attune his thoughts to the Battloid's

capabilities. Quickly positioning his mecha behind the giant, he swung the

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depleted gatling cannon across the warrior's chest and held it fast with both

hands, pinioning the giant's arms at his sides. Displays in the Battloid

cockpit module ran wild as the Zentraedi struggled to free himself. Max

could sense the extent of the enemy's will reaching into his own mind and

grappling with it on some newly opened front in this war, a

psycho-battleground.

The Battloid's arms were stressed to the limit, threatening to dislocate

with each of the giant's chest expansions. The Zentraedi was growling like a

trapped animal, twisting his head around, each deliberate move calculated

to bring that gleaming faceplate into violent contact with the canopy of the

mecha. Max knew that something was going to give out soon unless he

changed tactics.

The Battloid's environmental sensors indicated that the hold was

indeed an air lock; it could therefore be depressurized. Max wasn't certain

what size hole would be necessary to achieve the effect he was after, but he

had to take a chance. He raised Ben on the tac net, all the while struggling

with foot pedals and random thoughts, and ordered him to fire his

warheads at the ship's hull directly overhead.

Ben triggered release of the missiles; the explosion tore a gaping hole

in the ship. But something unexpected was happening even before the

smoke was sucked clear: The hull was actually repairing itself! Max couldn't

believe his sensors; the process was almost organic, as though the ship

was...alive.

But he lost no time thinking about it. He fired the mecha's foot

thrusters, launching himself, along with the Zentraedi, toward the ceiling.

Just short of the healing rend, he released his grip on the cannon.

Momentum carried the giant out into space seconds before the hull patch

completed itself.

Back on the floor of the hold, Rick had picked himself up. He had

snatched Lisa from midair during the depressurization and was holding her

in the Battloid's metalshod hand now, ignoring her protestations. Max

brought his Battloid down beside him.

130

"Nice work, Max. Guess we won't be seeing that character again."

"Not unless he can survive deep space without an extravehicular suit."

"Now what do we do?" Ben asked.

The three men panned their Battloid video cameras across the hold,

searching for a way out.

Breetai, meanwhile, who was made of much sterner stuff than any of

the Earthlings realized, was not only alive but was at that moment pulling

his way along the outer skin of the flagship, using as handholds the,

numerous sensor bristles and antennae that covered the ship. The gaping

hole had of course closed itself too quickly to permit reentry into the hold,

but he had managed to recollect his strength by latching on to a jagged piece

of the ruptured hull before beginning his trek across the exterior armor

plating.

His genetic makeup allowed him to withstand the vacuum of deep

space for a limited period only, but he had nothing less than complete

confidence in his ability to survive. Thoughts of vengeance drove him on:

That Micronian was going to pay dearly for this.

Inside the ship, the diminutive Lisa Hayes had resumed command of

the three pilots in their Battloids. She spoke into her helmet communicator

from the open hand of Rick Hunter's mecha, instructing Max and Ben to use

their top-mounted lasers to burn through the port hatch.

"You'll have to do it quickly," she advised them. "They're going to be on

us any second now." She then swung herself around to face Rick. "And

Lieutenant, would you mind putting me down now? I know how you enjoy

holding me, but you'll have to learn to admire me from a distance."

Rick mumbled something into his headset and set his commander back

on the floor of the hold. Max and Ben were taking alternate turns on the air

lock to keep their lasers from overheating.

Rick stepped forward to join them. He was motioning Ben's Battloid

aside when he heard what sounded like a war cry-not through his headset

but shattering the air of the hold itself. He spun the Battloid around in time

to see the returned Zentraedi leap from an open hatchway overhead. The

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giant attacked like a samurai warrior; he held aloft a thick, pipelike tool that

he brought down with gargantuan strength on the head of Ben's Battloid,

dropping the mecha to the floor with a resounding crash.

The Zentraedi stood victorious over his fallen enemy, then turned his

attention to Max and Rick. Issuing a guttural sound; he gripped the tool

with both hands and thrust it in front of him.

Max and Rick separated some and raised their useless cannons,

gripping them palms down like battle staffs. The Zentraedi was moving in

slowly, each step calculated and deliberate.

"He's getting ready to charge," said Max.

Rick risked a step forward, motioning Max to fall in behind him. He

brought the cannon up over his head and stood his ground, waiting for the

charge.

The Zentraedi launched himself with a basso yell. Rick planted himself

and brought the cannon down like a sledge, putting every ounce of strength

he could summon into the blow. Metal met metal with fusion force.

Breetai swung his weapon like a bat, sending the gatling flying from the

Battloid's hands. It hit the floor nose first, almost flattening Lisa Hayes.

Now six more Zentraedi soldiers in helmets and fullbody armor arrived

on the scene. One of them rushed forward with some sort of satchel and

sacked the dazed Micronian pilot.

Max witnessed it, but three soldiers now stood between him and the

commander. Regardless, he moved in to engage one of them. The Zentraedi

tried to wrestle the gatling from his grip, so Max turned the sallow-faced

man's strength to his own advantage, relaxing his own hold on the cannon

for a moment, then using the soldier's uncontrolled momentum to heave

him to the floor. But he was hardly in the clear: A cluster of five more were

opening fire on him with shock guns. Max tossed aside the cannon and

leaped up, firing the Battloid foot thrusters as he did so. Halfway to the

ceiling of the hold he reached for the mode levers, reconfigured the

Guardian, and began returning fire, dodging blue bolts of energy that shot

past him and impacted on the inner skin of the ship.

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Rick had been knocked flat on his back by the Zentraedi commander.

The giant stood over him now, preparing to pile-drive the tool through the

Battloid's abdomen. Rick brought the mecha's right leg up, bent at the knee,

and fired the foot thruster full into the face of his assailant. As the Zentraedi

went back, clutching his face and losing his grip on the weapon, Rick pulled

his thruster lever home and went in for the kill, catching the giant's

midsection and somersaulting him into a midair front flip. But the giant

somehow managed to reverse the throw. Although Rick landed on top of

him, he found himself facing the Zentraedi's feet. And the next thing he

knew, he was being pressed into the air by the standing Zentraedi and

launched across the hold.

Rick engaged the shoulder retros to cut his airspeed. He executed a

neat front flip with a half twist that left him standing face to face with the

Zentraedi, but he was unfortunately off balance and stunned. A right cross

followed by a front kick sent him down to the floor again. This time his

opponent was playing for keeps.

Breetai grabbed the mecha by its right arm, spun it into a three-sixty,

and hurled it against a set of bulkhead cargo spikes; these perforated the

Battloid's arms, chest, and shoulders and left it hanging there, pinned to the

wall.

Identifying with the mecha, Rick felt like the victim of a careless circus

knife thrower. The Battloid was immobilized, half its systems disabled, and

now this giant with the faceplate was coming in to finish him off. Valiantly,

Rick fired the top-mounted lasers, but the Zentraedi dropped himself out of

range in the nick of time.

Rick was suddenly looking at foot-long life and love lines-the giant had

brought his hand up over the canopy and was beginning to crush it. One by

one the life support systems began to fail. And now the giant was working

on the chestplates, literally tearing the Battloid apart! He ripped the armor

from the mecha and tossed it aside as though it weighed nothing.

Grinning, the Zentraedi peered in at him now through the torn cockpit

module, taking obvious delight in Rick's fearful situation. Rick, armed the

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mecha's still-functioning self-destruct warhead and in desperation, reached

down under the seat for the manual-eject ring and gave it a wholehearted

tug. The head of the Battloid lolled forward, its explosive charges crippled,

but the cockpit seat managed to launch itself.

The Zentraedi, too, launched himself with a powerful jump. He

snatched Rick from the air, crushing him in his fist, bringing on blessed

relief from further fear...

Witnessing the giant's catch, Max, his Guardian still moving through

the hold dodging laser bolts, was certain that the lieutenant had been killed.

Hunter's murderer was going to pay in kind, Max decided. He nose-dived

the VT, preparing to loose all the firepower he had left.

But all at once the remains of Rick's Battloid exploded. The Zentraedi

was thrown off his feet, a breach was blown in the hull, and Max's Veritech

was sucked from the air lock.

The hull quickly sealed itself, and the Zentraedi soldiers gathered

around their fallen commander. Breetai was flat out on his back, his tunic

and uniform torn and tattered. But he was made of sterner stuff than even

they realized. He said as much as he got up.

His right hand was still clenched. Carefully he relaxed his grip to

regard the small creature held there, strapped to its ejection seat, unmoving

and as quiet as death.

134

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

As I have elsewhere stated, preliminary tests on the three Micronian

subjects indicate that their anatomical makeup and physiological systems are

very similar to those of the Zentraedi; I hasten to add, however, that I am

here referring to "wet-state" subjects rather than mature and viable ones.

[Editor's note: There is as yet no adequate Panglish equivalent of the

Zentraedi term. Some linguistic camps favor "pretransformized," while others

have pushed for "neocast" or "neocloned." See Kazinsky, Chapters Seven and

Eight, for a lively overview of the continuing controversy.] Subsequent

psychoscanning, in any case, brought to light the dissimilarities which are the

focus of this report. These include: (1) significant anomalies throughout the

neocortical regions and topical convolutionary conduits, (2) structural

anomalies in the vascular and neural networks of the infundibulum, the

pyramidal tracts, and the hippocampus, (3) pineal insufficiency, and (4)

reticular imbalance of the pons and attendant cerebellar pathways.

Exedore, from his

Military Intelligence Analysis Reports

to the Zentraedi High Command

Micronians think too much!

Khyron

Previous dealings with Micronians had largely been a matter of

eradication. But now Exedore actually had three live specimens to analyze

and examine. And the results of tests thus far conducted were as surprising

as they were baffling and discomforting. Genetically, anatomically, and

physiologically, the Micronians appeared to be almost identical to the

Zentraedi. They were of course culturally and behavioristically worlds apart,

but the physical similarities suggested a point of common origin lost to time

and history.

Exedore studied the prisoners from his sealed-off operating station

135

inside the ship's laboratory-who knew what contagious diseases these

beings harbored? The scanner umbrella which in effect kept them isolated

and confined to the specimen table was probably sufficient in itself for this,

but Exedore was taking no chances.

Breetai, however, wanted no part of the laboratory or the operating

station. Exedore brought him up to date on the findings in the command

center, illustrating facts and speculations with data readouts, x-rays, scans

of various sorts, and relevant historical documents, all of which flowed

freely across the center's many monitor screens.

Breetai took particular interest in the female of the group. He shifted

his attention from one screen's anatomical depictions and turned to the

specimen table monitor. The Micronian female appeared to be unconscious

or asleep, the other two as well.

"Is it wise to keep the female and males together?"

Exedore had the camera close on the table. "It is apparently their

practice, Commander. It will certainly benefit us to observe their

interactions."

A look of surprise came over Breetai's face, and Exedore now turned

his attention to the monitor. The Micronians were beginning to stir.

The two Zentraedi watched intently.

The black-haired one was first to rise-the tough little pilot who had

manned the mecha Breetai had destroyed. The female recon pilot was next,

but together they couldn't seem to rouse the third and largest member of

their party.

"This one has a very slow metabolic rate and is less intelligent than the

others," Exedore said by way of explanation.

Something curious began to happen just then: The female and the male

were arguing. Breetai signaled his adviser to activate the audio monitors.

The words came fast and furious and were for the most part unfamiliar to

Breetai, but he understood enough to get the gist: They were blaming each

other for the failure of their mission and their eventual capture.

Breetai was amused.

136

"They fight with words as aggressively as they fight with mecha."

"A result of the commingling of males and females, sir-an ancient

practice long ago abandoned by the Zentraedi."

"I see...anger without discipline."

"Precisely that, Commander."

As Breetai continued to observe the argument, however, he was

overcome by a feeling of sickness; he felt debilitated and phobic. He ordered

Exedore to deactivate the monitor and collapsed down into his chair.

"My head is spinning. I can no longer stand to watch them."

"I feel the same," said Exedore. "However, we must not allow any of

our personal reactions to interfere with the mission at hand."

Breetai lifted up his head. "Well, suppose you tell me how I should

proceed with these creatures."

"The Micronians should be brought to Dolza himself. There they

should be subjected to the most rigorous interrogation possible."

"That will require a fold operation and the expenditure of substantial

quantities of energy."

"It will be justified, Commander. The Micronians' own words will

doom them to defeat."

Lisa couldn't believe her ears: Who in the known universe did Hunter

think he was talking to?

She and Hunter and dead-to-the-world Dixon were on some sort of

alien grid platform, curtained and contained by a nebulous rain of electrical

energy directed from an overhead generator. But through this translucent

umbrella could be glimpsed the enormous machines, scopes, scanners, and

data analyzers that constituted the laboratory beyond. One portion of the

energy canopy afforded them visual access to an exterior bay of the ship.

And somewhere out among that starfield was the SDF-1 and a world the

three of them might never see again.

Hunter, nevertheless, seemed less interested in establishing where they

were than in establishing who was to blame for their being there.

137

"Are you telling me that you wouldn't have been captured if a man had

been piloting the Cat's-Eye? Because if you are-"

"I'm not saying that. I'm just saying there are some jobs that are better

left to experienced pilots. You don't find VT pilots muscling onto the bridge,

do you?"

Lisa glared at him. "I'm your superior, Lieutenant Hunter!"

"Only in rank, Commander Hayes."

"In rank and military experience!"

Rick made a dismissive gesture. "Don't give me that Robotech

Academy superiority. I'm talking about combat experience."

Lisa crossed her arms to keep him from noticing that she was shaking

with anger. Her foot tapped reflexively.

"Do you need to be reminded of the conversation we had yesterday-the

one where you complained about my always being 'safe and sound on the

bridge'? Now I'm out here with you, and I still can't do anything right in

your eyes. It's a no-win situation with you, mister."

Rick softened somewhat. "Look, it's just that I feel more...I don't know,

vulnerable, with you around. You're always getting yourself in a fix, just like

on Sara Base-"

"Hunter!" she screamed. "You're an idiot! Just who appointed you my

personal guardian?"

"Someone's gotta protect you from yourself."

She looked around for something to throw at him, but Dixon would be

too heavy and there was nothing else on the grid.

"Who had to be towed in after completely destroying the armored

Battloid, Lieutenant?"

Rick's face went red with rage and embarrassment.

"You think fighting these Zentraedi is some kind of cakewalk? Maybe

you didn't see that guy tear my mecha apart with his bare hands, huh?"

"No, I didn't see it. I was in the sack, remember?"

"Yeah, well..."

"Yeah, well," she mimicked him, and turned away.

138

Ben Dixon was coming to, stretching and yawning as though he'd just

taken a terrific nap.

He looked around and asked if he had missed anything.

Rick shot Lisa a cruel look and stepped over to his corporal. "Uh,

nothing much, Ben. The Commander and I were just discussing an escape

plan."

Lisa smirked and looked out the bay.

"Great," Ben said. "When do we get started?"

Rick said something Lisa didn't catch; she was too mesmerized by what

was occurring outside the ship: The stars were becoming tentative, strung

out, as if trailing threads of light behind them.

My God. She realized what she was seeing. The Zentraedi were

beginning a fold operation!

Back onboard the SDF-1 the period of anxious waiting had ended an

hour ago with the restoration of widerange radar. But a new period of

apprehension had just begun. The bridge had lost communication with the

Cat's-Eye recon and the VTs of the Vermilion Team, and now there was

evidence of fluctuations in the timespace continuum of that area. Most of

the massive enemy ships had disappeared from the scanner screen, but

numerous small ships and battle mecha were still swirling around the

fortress. Gloval was certain that half the fleet had executed a spacefold.

In all his long years of military command, Gloval had never faced a

more unpredictable foe. They had crippled his ship, threatened him with

extinction, demanded surrender, and suddenly disappeared off the scopes.

Gloval was perplexed.

He instructed Sammie to try to raise Commander Hayes again.

"Negative response, sir. I can't raise anyone at all in that Veritech

group."

Have we lost them? Gloval wondered. Please, not Lisa!

"Sir, we can't just give up on them," said Sammie.

"It could be radio trouble," Claudia added.

139

"I'm not about to give up on them," Gloval said at last. "But we can't

afford to sit here and wait for the enemy to return and make good their

threats." He hung his head. "We'll give them twelve hours. Claudia, if we've

had no contact with them by then, I want the ship out of this quadrant by

oh-six-hundred hours. Is that clear?"

"Yes, Captain. And about Commander Hayes...and Lieutenant Hunter

and his men?"

"Enter their names on the list," Gloval responded flatly. "Missing in

action and presumed dead."

Roy Fokker seldom visited Macross City, and when he did it was

usually at Claudia's insistence-dinner somewhere, a movie, or the Miss

Macross pageant a while back. It wasn't that he didn't like the place, just

that he had little use for it. Its presence onboard the SDF-1 had all but

undermined the ship's original purpose. The SDF-1 was to be Earth's

guardian and defender, not surrogate or microcosm, and certainly not decoy.

As one of the men (along with Dr. Lang and Colonel Edwards) who had first

explored the ship shortly after its arrival on Earth, Fokker had a profound

attachment to her. But the spacefold accident and this resulting city had

devitalized that attachment, and for the past year Fokker had come to feel

more the hopeless prisoner than anything else.

His motivations for visiting the city today, however, had nothing to do

with entertainment or a lover's obligation; he was here because duty

demanded it of him. Rick had been MIA for almost two weeks now, and

there were people who had to be told.

Two weeks missing in action, Roy told himself. Was it still too early to

grieve, or was it too late? Wouldn't he be able to feel the truth one way or

another in his heart? Their friendship went so far back...Pop Hunter's flying

circus, the fateful day Rick had turned up on Macross Island, their first

mission together

What was the use of tormenting himself? When he did search his heart

for feelings, he found his "Little Brother" alive-this was a certainty. And yet,

140

his mind would ask, what were the odds they would ever see each other

again? The SDF-1 was a million miles from that area in space where Rick

and the others had last been heard from, way beyond the range of any VT.

And did it ease the pain any to think of him as a prisoner? The Zentraedi

weren't likely to hold him hostage, not when they had an entire planet at

their disposal. So maybe it was better to believe the worst, accept his death

and get the grief behind him. Then he could at least remove himself from

this timeless agony and begin to court the future once again.

It might have been the need for partnership in grief that led Roy to

seek out Minmei. He, too, had been attracted to the blue-eyed Chinese girl

from the start, and he liked to think that there was some special bond there,

even though Minmei rarely acknowledged it by words or actions. But that

wasn't her style, anyway. Especially now that she was on the brink of

stardom. In fact, the "Queen of Macross" was going to be headlining a

concert at the Star Bowl on Monday night.

Soon she was coming down the sidewalk toward him, flanked by two of

her woman friends and looking the starlet part in some sort of green

military-chic shorts outfit, complete with epaulets and rank stripes. Roy

recognized it as the piece she'd worn for the Defense Force enlistment

posters that had begun to show up all over the city.

Roy had been waiting for her outside the White Dragon. As she

approached, he straightened up to his full height, tugged down on his belted

jacket, and waved to her.

She came at him with a big smile, increasing her pace and excusing

herself from her friends. Right off, she wanted to know if Rick was with him.

He returned the smile, strained though it was, and suggested they take

a walk together. She looked at him questioningly.

"Why, Roy? What's happened?"

"Come on, walk with me a minute."

She pulled back when he tried to take her arm.

"I don't want to take a walk, Roy! What's happened? Where's Rick? Has

something happened to Rick?"

141

Roy faced her, placing both hands on her shoulders, towering over her.

He met her eyes and held them as he explained.

Halfway through his explanation she was shaking her head, refusing to

believe him. "He's dead!"

"Minmei, listen, please don't think he's dead-we don't know that for

sure."

Roy was doing just what he had promised himself he wouldn't do. And

she was inconsolable. She twisted free of his hold.

"I don't want to hear anymore! You're a liar, and I hate you!"

She glared at him, turned, and ran off.

Her friends offered him sympathetic smiles. Roy stood with them,

feeling utterly helpless. He sucked in breath and tears and clenched his

teeth.

Minmei ran to their bench in the park.

It was a special bench, set apart from the others in Macross Central,

tucked away on a small subtier of its own overhung by the full branches of

an oak tree and surrounded by flowering plants and thick buses. It was

almost a secret place, curiously unfrequented by park users, with an

incredible view of the city spread out below and the closest view possible

through the enormous starlight in the ship's hull. Rick used to say that it

was their balcony "with a view of forever."

They spent many long hours here-after their two week ordeal together,

before Rick had joined the Defense Force, and before Minmei had been

crowned "Queen"...She had listened to Rick talk about the horrors of space

battle, his victories and defeats, his fears and dreams. And he had listened

to her fears, her plans for the future, her song lyrics, her dreams.

And now...

Why did this have to happen? Why, when everything in her life was so

wonderful, did tragedy have to visit? Why did this collision of dream and

reality always have to occur?-as if no good fortune was possible without a

balancing amount of evil. What sort of god would have set such a

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mechanism in motion?

Face to face with that portion of the universe revealed by the starlight,

Minmei began to cry. Later she would bang her fists against the rail of the

balcony and curse those stars, then sink back against the wooden slats of

the bench and surrender to her sorrow. And ultimately she would retrieve

from her handbag a penlight she carried there, and, aiming it toward the

ship's bay, she would click it on and off, again and again, a light signal into

"forever" of her undying affection for him.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Spirit does not willingly abdicate its throne. The Big Bang was Spirit's

first rebellion against form-its imprisonment in matter. Subsequently it

fought humankind's acceptance of fire; it battled against steam; it contested

electricity and nuclear power; it raged against Protoculture...War is Spirit's

attempt to attain freedom from matter, its effort to remain autonomous.

Wars are waged to prevent matter from becoming too comfortable or

complacent. For it is Spirit's divine purpose to someday abandon its vehicle

and transcend, to reunite with the Godhead and suck the universe back into

itself.

Reverend Houston, from the foreword to Jan Morris's

Solar Seeds. Galactic Guardians

Protoculture is technology's royal jelly.

Dr. Emil Lang

Unknown to Breetai or his crew, there was a stowaway aboard the

Zentraedi flagship-a Micronian Veritech ace named Max Sterling.

Sucked into space through the hole in the hull created by Rick Hunter's

self-destructed Battloid, Max had unknowingly duplicated the walk Breetai

had undertaken along the outer surface of the ship sometime earlier. Breetai,

however, was familiar with the manual air lock mechanisms, so he merely

had to let himself in; Max had to discover a way in. Fortunately he had

stumbled upon an unclosed breach in the hull-the fried bristle sensors

surrounding the hole gave evidence of a previous explosion-flown himself

into an empty bay, and, returned to Battloid mode, made his way into the

ship through an unlocked hatchway. His gatling cannon had been left in the

hold, his lasers were burned out, and he had scarcely half a dozen rockets

left. Max was operating on willpower, driven by the hope of rescuing his

friends.

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The interior of the flagship was a labyrinth of corridors and

serviceways, some well lighted and maintained, others dark, damp, and in

varying states of disrepair. But luckily, all of them had been deserted.

Until now.

Max was at the intersection of two corridors-curved ceilings, large

overhead light banks-peering around the corner when he saw the alien enter.

A private, Max guessed: standard-issue drab highrise-collared uniform, a

round cap with an insignia. He moved the Battloid back a step and scanned

the area. A short distance down the corridor behind him was what appeared

to be a utility closet with a curved-top hatch. He made his way to this as

quickly and quietly as he could manage, threw the bolt, and secreted the

mecha inside. Shut off from the corridor, Max had no way of knowing which

route the Zentraedi had taken, so the look of surprise on the alien's face

upon discovering a Battloid in the utility closet was no greater than the

startled look on Max's own.

For what seemed like an eternity they both stood there marveling at

each other, until Max's training brought a decisive end to it. He executed a

sidekick with the Battloid's right foot that caught the Zentraedi's midsection,

instantly doubling him over. Gathering up the unconscious private in the

Battloid's right arm, Max stretched out the left, grabbed the door bolt, and

slammed the hatch shut.

He was puzzling over what to do with the guy, when all at once the

cockpit indicators began crying out for attention. He checked the readouts

but still couldn't make sense of anything: All systems were functioning, and

there didn't seem to be any immediate threats to the mecha,

environmentally or otherwise. So what was going on?

Then Max glanced at the astrogation displays. The temporal sensors

were spinning wildly-the flagship was folding!

Max watched as hours and days began to accrue on the gauge. He

slumped into his seat and waited...

The emergency spacefold which had catapulted the SDF-1 and Macross

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City clear across the solar system had been Lisa's first; and, as such, there

hadn't been time to...well, look around. It had also been a relatively short

jump through space and therefore a brief one through time. But for this, her

second trip through the continuum, the temporal indicator built into her

suit registered the equivalent of fourteen Earth-days. Wherever the

Zentraedi were going, it was a long way from home.

Lisa had plenty of time to look around.

It was nothing like she had expected, nothing, in fact, like she had been

trained to expect. The stars did not so much disappear as come and go. She

couldn't be certain, however, that it was the same stars that were

rematerializing each time. The heavens seemed altered with each fade, as

though someone had snipped frames from a strip of film, editing out the

transitions from event to event. The energy umbrella that kept her and the

others confined to the grid prevented her from observing flux details in the

laboratory, but when she looked at Rick or Ben, she noticed a slight

shimmering effect that blurred the boundaries of objects; occasionally, this

effect intensified so that there was a sense of double focus to everything: the

form of the past, the form of the future, distinct, discrete, unable to unite.

In real time, one Earth-day elapsed; and as the flagship began to

decelerate from hyperspace, the past twenty-four hours took on a dreamlike

quality. Had she slept through most of it, dreamed a good part of it? Or was

this some new condition of consciousness yet to be named?

Lisa, Rick, and Ben stood at the edge of their small world, watching the

stars assume lasting form once again. These were alien configurations to

their eyes: brilliant constellations of suns, dwarfs and giants, three planets

or moons of some unknown system, all against the backdrop of a gauzy

multihued nebulosity. And something else-something their unadjusted

vision labeled an asteroid field, so numerous were the dark objects in that

corner of space.

"What are those things?" asked Ben.

"Space debris," Rick suggested. "We might be near their home base."

Lisa squinted; then her eyes opened wide in amazement.

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Not asteroids, not space debris, but ships: amorphous ships as far as

the eye could see, ships bristling with guns, too numerous to count, too

numerous to catalogue-scouts, recons, destroyers, cruisers, battle wagons,

flagships. Thousands of ships, millions of them!

"The enemy fleet!"

It was too much to take in, but Lisa used the microvideo recorder the

aliens had overlooked to capture what she could.

More than a year would pass before they learned the exact count; a day

of reckoning...

The flagship was now closing on a dazzling cluster of lights, a kind of

force field that housed an immeasurable asymmetrical fortress their senses

refused to comprehend.

But they soon had other issues to confront. Without warning, the

energy umbrella had been deactivated and the circumstances of their world

redefined. They had wondered how their captors had been able to provide

them with food and drink served on human-size plates, with cups and

utensils in proper proportion. But there would be no such comfort for them

from this moment on.

Two giants now stood on either side of the grid, which turned out to be

some sort of specimen table. Could anything have prepared them for the

assault of sensations that followed-the deafening basso rumble of the giants'

voices, the sonorous roar of their mecha and machines, the intensity of the

corridor lights, the overpowering smells of hyperoxygenated air, stale

breath, sweat, and decay?

They were transferred to a second platform-a hovertable directed

through the corridors by their jailers-and ultimately to a gleaming

conference table as large as a football field. There were banks of overhead

lights and several chairs positioned around the table. Lisa noticed that

amplifiers had been strategically positioned here and there-the better to

hear you with, my dear! And one by one their interrogators entered the

room and sat down.

The first to arrive was a male scarcely half the size of those Zentraedi

147

they'd seen. A slightly hunched back was evident beneath his blue cowl;

swollen joints and outsize hands and feet suggested some sort of birth

defect. He had an inverted bowl of henna hair thick as straw concealing a

deformed cranium, uneven bangs bisecting a high forehead above a drawn

face, and bulging, seemingly lidless eyes with pinpoint pupils. He was

carrying notebooks, which he placed on the table next to a light-board

device; this he activated as he sat down, bending forward to regard his three

prisoners analytically.

Next to enter the chamber was the immense soldier Rick had battled in

the hold; there was no forgetting that faceplate, no forgetting, that

malicious grin. Trailing behind him were three more males of differing

heights, wearing identical red uniforms, not one of them as short as the

disabled Zentraedi or as tall as their commander. They took seats at the far

end of the table.

Lisa was wondering who or what was going to fill the empty seat

between the commander and his adviser; when the answer to her whispered

question arrived, she was at once sorry she had asked.

"How many sizes do these guys come in?" said Ben in amazement.

The grand inquisitor stood well over eighty feet tall and wore a solemn

gray robe with a high upturned collar that all but enclosed his massive,

hairless head. The heavy brow ridge, pockmarked sullen face, and wide

mouth gave him a fearful aspect, and when he spoke there was no mistaking

his meaning.

"I am Dolza," he began. "Commander-in-Chief of the Zentraedi. You

will submit to my interrogation. Should you choose not to, you will die. Do

you understand me?"

Rick, Ben, and Lisa looked at one another, realizing suddenly that they

had failed to elect a spokesperson-for the simple reason that they hadn't

expected an actual session with the enemy. The fact that they would be able

to communicate with the Zentraedi gave them new hope.

Lisa secretly activated the audio receiver of the microrecorder, while

Rick stepped forward to speak for his group.

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"We understand you. What do you want from us?"

Dolza turned to the dwarf. "Congratulations, Exedore, you have done

well in teaching me their primitive language."

Exedore inclined his head slightly.

"Why do you continue to resist us, Micronians?" Dolza gestured to the

male on his right. "Surely Breetai has already demonstrated our

superiority."

Rick pointed his finger at the one called Breetai. "You launched the

attack on us! We've only been trying to defend ourselves for the past year-"

"Immaterial," Breetai interrupted. "Return to us what is rightfully

ours-Zor's ship."

"'Zor's ship'? If you mean the SDF-1, that's our property. It crashed on

our planet, and we rebuilt it. You-"

Dolza cut Rick off. "It is as I feared," he said to Exedore.

"Tell us what you know of Protoculture. You-the fat one."

Ben gestured to himself questioningly. "Me? Forget it, high rise. I don't

know anything about it."

"Tell us what you know of Protoculture!" Dolza demanded.

"You deny that you've developed a new weapons system utilizing

Protoculture?" Exedore wanted to know.

Rick turned to his companions and shrugged. The questions kept up,

increasing in volume, until Lisa decided she'd had enough. She stepped

forward boldly and held up her hand.

"That's enough! I will no longer submit my men to your questioning!"

Dolza raised what he had of eyebrows. "So the female is in charge

here." He sat back in his chair, steepling his fingers as he did so. "You

underestimate the seriousness of your predicament, Micronian."

And with a wave of his hand the room was transformed.

Lisa, Rick, and Ben were suddenly in deep...space! At least it appeared

that way: Here were the stars, planets, and tens of thousands of ships they

had seen upon defold into Zentraedi territory. And yet they had not moved

from the table, and Dolza's voice could still be heard narrating the

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phenomenal events occurring in that unreal space.

Photon charges were beginning to build up in several of the fleet ships;

they were taking aim at a planet not unlike Earth in appearance...

"We are in possession of sufficient power to destroy your world in the

blink of an eye," Dolza was saying. "And if you need proof of that, behold..."

As lethal rays from the battle wagons and cruisers converged on the

living surface of the planet, a glow of death began to spread and encompass

it; and when that fatal light faded, a lifeless, cratered sphere was all that

remained.

Lisa hung her head; the Zentraedi had just destroyed a planet merely to

make a point. Is this what they had planned for Earth? But then, why were

they holding back? What had Exedore said about "a new weapons system

utilizing Protoculture"? She made up her mind to try a bluff.

"You don't have enough power to destroy the SDF-1, Dolza."

"Impertinence!" their interrogator yelled.

Ignoring Rick's plea for caution, she continued: "The SDF-1 has powers

you've never dreamed of."

Dolza brought his fists down on the table, throwing the Terrans off

their feet. He then reached out and grabbed Lisa in his right hand. He

brought her close to his face, warning Rick and Ben to stay put.

"Now, my feisty female, I want to know by what process you become

Micronians." He tightened his grip around Lisa, demanding an immediate

answer.

"Stop squeezing her!" said Rick. "We're born this way. We're

born...Micronian!"

"Born from what is the question," said Exedore.

"Huh? Well...from our mothers. What else?"

"What is this thing you call 'mother'?" one of the Zentraedi behind Rick

asked.

Ben swung around to face the red-uniformed trio.

"Mother. You know, like the parent that's female." Ben turned to Rick,

twirling his forefinger against his temple.

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Exedore was startled. "You mean that you are actually born from the

females of your kind?"

Breetai was incredulous.

"Hey," Ben continued. "It happens, you know. You put a man and a

woman together and...well, it just happens." He laughed. "It's love."

Breetai looked over at Dolza, then fixed his gaze on Ben. " 'Love,' yes, I

have heard that word mentioned in some of your transmissions. But what is

it? How do you express it?"

"Oh, brother," Ben said under his breath. "You field this one,

Commander."

Rick shot him a look and chuckled, in spite of himself, in spite of the

gravity of the situation. "It can start with a kiss, I guess."

Dolza wasn't buying it: If Micronians could be produced by kissing,

then he wanted living proof of it. He ordered Rick and Ben to demonstrate.

"Demonstrate this kissing or I will crush all of you!"

Rick was stammering an explanation of the facts, when he heard Lisa

agree to volunteer. Released from Dolza's grip, she staggered weakly over to

Rick, leaning against him as though regaining her strength and taking

advantage of their proximity to explain her plan: She wanted Rick to kiss

her...so she could record the aliens' reaction on her microcamera.

Rick stepped away from her. "Do it with Ben, Commander."

She turned and looked over at the corporal briefly. "Listen, Rick, I'd

rather do it with you, all right?"

"You'll have to make it a command, sir."

"Proceed at once!" said Dolza.

Lisa held Rick's gaze, softening his anger somewhat by the hurt look he

thought he saw in her eyes.

"I'm giving you a direct order, Lieutenant Hunter: Kiss me."

Rick made a silent appeal for Minmei's forgiveness and stepped into

Lisa's arms. They kissed each other full on the mouth, and for several

seconds the two of them were far away from it all. It was, however, difficult

to sustain that romantic mood while six giants were making sick sounds

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behind their backs. They broke their embrace and stepped apart.

"What is happening to us?" said Dolza. "This results from

Protoculture?"

"It is their weapons system at work," said Exedore.

Dolza was on his feet, glaring at the Terrans. "Take them out of here at

once! Get these Micronians out of my sight!"

Rick turned to Lisa as the three of them were being herded onto the

hover-table once again. "Are we that bad at it?"

She looked at him and said, "I guess we are."

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"Ya gotta picture it, gang: I mean, here's Rick, Lisa, and Ben,

surrounded by these six giants, Hunter and Hayes step into each other's arms,

liplock, and these big, bad hombres begin to freak! I mean...[laughs shortly],

'magine if Lisa's microcamera had been set up to show X-rated movies? The

war woulda been over on the spot!"

Unnamed VT pilot, as quoted by Rick Hunter

"What's love got to do with it?"

Late twentieth-century song lyric

Dolza and his advisory group remained in the interrogation room after

the Micronian prisoners had been taken away. The Zentraedi commander in

chief was disturbed by the reactions he had experienced when the female

and male had kissed each other. Breetai stated that he had felt weakened

after witnessing a verbal argument between these same two Micronians;

and apparently, similar feelings had plagued the three operatives of the

surveillance team that had been dispatched to monitor transmissions from

Zor's ship. Now, as Dolza listened to the recon team's report, he asked

himself whether Exedore's suspicions about the Micronian use of

Protoculture might not be justified, after all. Perhaps he should have killed

Zor when he had had the chance, or simply destroyed the dimensional

fortress, instead of seeing in it a road to freedom for himself and the rest of

his warrior race.

"...and Konda here had the same reaction when he saw the unclothed

female," Rico, the commander of the team, was saying.

"It's true, sir," Konda affirmed. "Although I didn't agree at the time."

"This could only be done with Protoculture," said Dolza. He folded his

arms and addressed the group. "What I'm about to tell you must never leave

this room. Is that understood?"

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Breetai and Exedore nodded their assent. In unison, Rico, Konda, and

Bron said, "Yes, sir!"

"Protoculture, as Breetai and Exedore are aware, is the essence of

Robotechnology developed by our ancestors. Yes, ancestors," he

emphasized for the sake of the recon team. "In the beginning, members of

the Zentraedi race were the same size as these Micronians. And at one time

we, too, lived together, male and female, in something that was called a

'society.' But through the use of Protoculture we were able to evolve to our

present size, strength, and superiority. However, a series of events that

must even now be kept secret from you led to a loss of our understanding of

Protoculture."

Dolza put his open hands on the table and leaned forward.

"I have every reason to believe that those lost secrets are to be found

aboard Zor's ship." He allowed this to sink in for a moment. "This is why the

Micronians present such a potential threat. And this is precisely why we

must take that ship back undamaged."

"We have not been able to determine to what extent the Micronians

have applied their understanding of Protoculture," Breetai added. "But it is

obvious to me that they know enough to effect repairs on Robotech

equipment and perhaps enough to be experimenting with a new weapons

system."

"Sir," said Rico. "We have demonstrated our power to them. Why not

hold their planet hostage for the return of the ship?"

It was a generally unheard of notion, but Dolza was willing to entertain

it. He stroked his chin and turned to Exedore.

"You have made a thorough study of this race. You appear to have an

understanding of their language and culture. Would such a threat be

effective?"

Exedore weighed his words carefully. "Sir, it is not the Zentraedi way to

speak of past defeats, but may I be permitted to remind this table that these

Micronians have already demonstrated an uncommon determination to

survive. In response to our initial attacks on their homeworld, the

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commander of the ship, with no regard for the lives of tens of thousands of

his fellow creatures, executed an intraatmospheric spacefold to escape us.

This same commander detonated a reflex furnace on the fourth planet in

their system, endangering the ship and the lives of all aboard rather than

surrender to Commander Khyron's mechanized division. Even though

crippled in space and without radar, they simply ignored our most recent

demands for surrender...In response then to your query, my lord: No, I do

not think that such a plan would work."

"We cannot risk losing those secrets," said Dolza. "We must infiltrate

the ship and determine what the Micronians know about Protoculture."

Breetai, who knew Zor's ship inside and out, had a plan he began to

relate to Dolza. Rico, Konda, and Bron, meanwhile, hatched a plan of their

own: They made a joint decision to volunteer to go through the cellular

transformation process which enabled a Zentraedi to assume Micronian

dimensions.

Dolza and Breetai would find the trio's proposal acceptable, and later,

even commendable. And fortunately for Rico and the others, they were

never called upon to give reasons for their sudden dedication to the cause.

Because if the truth were known, all this talk about Robotechnology and

Protoculture was way beyond them. They were simply anxious to have

another look at those partially clothed Micronian females and experience

again those curious feelings that were the result.

In a holding cell elsewhere on Breetai's ship, Lisa, Rick, and Ben,

sitting in a patch of corridor light which poured through cellular windows in

the chamber's double doors, were comparing their own reactions to the

Zentraedi interrogation. It was a little like being locked in an empty airliner

hangar, but at least there were no giants on the scene.

"It was the weirdest thing I've seen in a while," Ben was saying. "You

two kiss, and the big guys go nuts. I don't get it."

"They have enough power to atomize the Earth, but simple contact is

too much for them to handle," said Rick.

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Lisa was deep in thought.

"And what about this 'Protoculture' business? What do you think,

Commander?"

Lisa looked at Ben. "Do you realize that we haven't seen any female

Zentraedi? No children, no civilians, not even any techs or maintenance

crews. Only soldiers."

"We haven't exactly been given the grand tour," Rick reminded her.

"I realize that, Lieutenant. But it could be that there are no females of

their kind."

"No, that can't be. They know you're female. They had some kind of

knowledge about mothers and birth."

"Lieutenant, we gotta get outta here," Ben said, looking around.

"I know. I've been giving it some thought. We might be able to use our

new weapon on them."

"What new weapon? What are you talking about?"

Rick smacked his lips. "The kiss. Don't you get it? We wait till the guard

comes with our food, we confuse him with our, uh, weapon, and we make a

break for it."

Ben was already on his feet. "Great! Any place'll be better than this."

Lisa looked at the two of them. "Are you joking? You mean that every

time a Zentraedi shows his face we're going to put on a show for him?

Forget it, Lieutenant. I've heard some lines in my day, but that one beats

them all."

Rick's mouth dropped open. "Just hold it a minute, Commander.

Whose idea was it in the first place? Besides, if you think I'm doing this

because I want to, you've got another-"

"That'll be enough, mister! I only kissed you to get their reaction on

tape." She patted the camera. "We've got it now; we don't need to do

another take."

Ben stepped forward, "Hey, listen, I'm perfectly willing to volunteer to

be your partner, Commander Hayes."

"At ease, Corporal," Lisa told him.

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She turned her back on the two of them, angry but wondering: Was

there anything about strategic osculation in the officers' manual?

Help was on the way.

In what was certainly the most complicated set of mecha-motions

executed to date, Max Sterling had managed to clothe his Battloid in the

uniform he had taken from the Zentraedi private. That he had succeeded so

completely in wedding his mind to the mecha controls was justification

enough for the many articles later devoted to the feat, but the fact that he

had accomplished this within the confines of the utility closet was what

ultimately led to his legendary status as a VT hero.

Making certain the Zentraedi was neatly tied up and stowed away, Max

checked the corridor, eased out of the closet, and began to follow his

instincts. The Zentraedi uniform was well suited to the Battloid's purpose,

the high-collared jacket especially so. And even with the round cap pulled

low, the cockpit wide-angle and longrange cameras and scanners had

enough clearance for operation.

Not ten paces down the hallway, Max encountered one of the massively

built, armored shock troopers, who luckily paid him little notice. Now

having passed the test, he began to move with increased confidence, and not

long after he spotted two of the enemy guiding a hover-table through the

ship. Max upped the magnification on his cameras, locked in on the table,

and found Lisa, Ben, and Rick, looking none the worse for wear but in no

condition to do battle with their giant captors.

Max trailed the guards at a discreet distance and watched as

Lieutenant Hunter and the others were deposited in some sort of

double-doored holding cell. A single sentry was posted outside.

Max was not inclined to wait much longer; besides, the sentry was

already betraying his boredom with yawns and general inattentiveness. Max

primed the Battloid for action and moved in.

When Lisa heard the commotion in the corridor outside the cell, she

had a change in heart: Maybe Hunter's plan would work. There wasn't

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much to lose at this point, so she convinced herself that kissing him was just

part of the mission. She told him so, and the two of them readied their

"secret weapon" while Ben waited by the door.

Though Max's reaction to throwing open the cell door and finding his

commanders locked in a loving embrace was more pure surprise than

anything else, his temporary paralysis convinced the prisoners that they had

made the right move. The three were ready to bolt for the corridor when

Max opened the external com net and called out to them.

"It's me-Max!"

They stopped in midstride and stared up at him.

"M-Max?" Rick said tentatively.

"Yeah, I'm in here all right."

"God, Max, we thought you were dead," said Lisa.

"Yeah, well, long story."

Ben wanted to know where the uniform had come from.

"Later. We better get a move on." He lowered the Battloid's gloved left

hand. Rick and Lisa climbed in, and Max raised it up, leaving Ben on the

floor.

"Hey, man!"

"Hang on, Ben, I want you in the other hand."

Ben climbed into the lowered right. Now Max brought both the

Battloid's hands level with the uniform's breast pockets. Lisa and Rick

grabbed hold of the insignia-pocket and pulled themselves in; Ben did

likewise on the other side of the jacket.

"I don't want you to interrupt the lovebirds, Ben."

"Now wait a minute, Corporal," Lisa protested. "We only did that to

escape."

"Kissing each other to escape, huh? I understand."

"Listen up, Max-"

"Save it, Lieutenant. You've got my word that I won't spread this

around Macross City. Although I must say you had me fooled. I thought you

preferred younger women."

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"Max!"

"Get yourselves down in there. We're moving out."

Rick held in his anger and slid down into the pocket alongside Lisa.

The Battloid parted the double hatches of the holding cell and began to take

long, stiff strides down the corridor.

It wasn't long before they heard Max utter a sound of alert. A Zentraedi

soldier, armored and armed with a hip blaster, was approaching them.

Soldier and disguised Battloid passed each other seemingly without incident,

and inside the pocket Rick and Lisa breathed a premature sigh of relief.

But the soldier had stopped and was calling for Max to halt.

Max was in no position to defend himself or his passengers; launching

his few remaining rockets would have fried Rick and Lisa. So he took the

only course available: He ran-straight into two more shock troopers who

were coming down the corridor. Max tackled one of them, lifting him and

swinging him into the other as he continued on his way, but by now the first

soldier was chasing him and opening fire. He was quickly joined by his

comrades.

The Battloid sustained blasterbolt after blasterbolt to the back as it flew

through the ship, pieces of burned and tattered cloth flying in its wake. At

Rick's urging, Max reconfigured the VT to Guardian mode, ripping open the

uniform jacket as he hit the aft thrusters. In that hail of lethal fire, the

Guardian looked like some sort of caped bird of prey fighting its way to

freedom.

Corridor length, however, was suddenly in short supply, and Max knew

the VT wouldn't be able to pull off a ninety-degree turn in such limited

space. Set in the bulkhead at the top of the corridor T, however, was a

control panel which could probably be pierced without undue damage to the

fighter. Max opted for it and pulled the thruster lever home.

The bulkhead surrendered too easily, and by the time Max realized that

the VT had broken through a large circular viewing screen in a control room,

the Guardian was way beyond it, tearing through a series of projecbeam

astrogational charts free-floating in an immense central chamber of the ship.

159

An open rectangular port at the far end of the room delivered them into

another serviceway, at the end of which was a sealed elevator. They were

still taking rear fire when the elevator doors parted. A surprised Zentraedi

soldier saw them coming and leaped out into the corridor, narrowly

escaping impalement on the radome of the VT.

Once inside the cubicle, Max blew the canopy and clambered out onto

the arm of the craft, clutching his laser rifle.

"The circuits are fried! This thing's gonna blow!"

Rick left the pocket and catwalked the extended arm of the Guardian to

the elevator closure lever. He jumped up and grabbed hold of it, riding it

down as the doors closed. The fighter was temporarily sealed off from

enemy fire, and the elevator began to descend.

One, two, three, four, five levels and they were still going down, the

Guardian giving off predestruct noises and smoke now, Max and the others

offering up silent prayers for the doors to open.

At level six the elevator stopped. The doors parted, and the four

defenders were off and running. But out of nowhere a Zentraedi shock

trooper made an airborne grab for them, landing facedown and

miraculously empty-handed in front of the elevator. The soldier got to his

feet, his quarry long gone, and stared at the smoldering uniformed thing

inside.

He had perhaps a second to contemplate its crouched birdlike form

before the ensuing explosion blew him away.

If the soldier's last grasp failed to capture the four, it had at least

succeeded in dividing them.

Rick and Lisa ran for quite a while before realizing that Ben and Max

were no longer with them. They searched for a while, but the explosion of

the VT had drawn more Zentraedi to the scene, and it seemed a wiser move

to push on.

They entered an area where several corridors converged. It was a vast,

domed chamber crowded with generators, computer terminals, conduits,

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and ductwork. There was an overpowering smell to the place, as alien as

anything their senses had yet encountered, and a sonic roar that reminded

them of pressure-cooker sounds, amplified and low-frequency-enhanced.

They secreted themselves behind a long console covered with switches and

control knobs. Then, cautiously, they peered over the top.

What they saw was a cluster of thirty-meter-high vessels, like medicinal

capsules stood on end, transparent and filled with a purple viscous,

churning fluid. In at least six of these vessels were half-formed, featureless

Zentraedi. Rick was totally bewildered and vaguely upset by the sight, but

Lisa's sharp intake of breath told him that she recognized something here.

"So that's why so many of the Zentraedi soldiers look alike-they're all

clones!"

Lisa risked a better view: Now she could see a second cluster of

human-size capsules positioned in front of the larger ones, also churning,

also containing some half-formed shape. It took her a moment to make

sense of this, and when she turned to Rick with an explanation, she scarcely

believed her own words: The Zentraedi were reducing their soldiers to

human size.

Rick looked at her like she was crazy, and she didn't blame him. But

there it was, happening right before their eyes, and no other explanation

was forthcoming.

They pulled back as more soldiers entered the chamber searching for

them and resumed their conversation some distance away in a dimly lit

weapons room.

"You remember how Dolza kept asking us how we became

Micronians?"

"Yeah, so?"

"They're wondering if we have similar clone chambers and reduction

devices. That's why they can't understand any closeness between the sexes,

because, well, love and sex wouldn't be necessary in a society of clones."

"Incredible."

"You're not kidding, incredible. And it wouldn't surprise me to learn

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that Zentraedi and humans are genetically related. In the beginning they

were probably the same size as us!"

"So what are they, human giants or giant humans?"

She looked at him blankly. "I guess it's too early to say. Maybe after we

analyze the videos we'll know. But right now, I'd say they can go either way.

They've found some way of rearranging their molecular structure-big for

hostile environments, small for..." Lisa shrugged.

"Yeah," said Rick. "Small for what? Why are they reducing some of

their troops? And how are they doing it?"

"Protoculture," Lisa said evenly.

The word had scarcely left her lips when Rick heard the growl.

Suddenly a giant hand reached into the room and took hold of Lisa. She

screamed. Rick yelled and gave chase, mindless of the consequences.

The giant had straightened from his crouch by the time Rick hit the

corridor; he was holding Lisa near his face, growling at her. As Rick ran into

view, the Zentraedi soldier simply extended his foot-not a kick, really, but

more than enough to lift Rick off the floor and send him careening into a

rack of upright laser rifles. Why every bone in his body wasn't broken, he

had no idea (adrenaline, he'd tell himself later), but at the moment all he

knew was that he was buried under the weapons, stunned and crushed but

alive and angrier than ever.

Rick allowed the fear and anger to get hold of him; he positioned

himself on one knee and heaved one of the rifles over his shoulder like a

bazooka-a five-meter-long bazooka. Putting all his meager weight to the

trigger, he managed to yank off three rapid blasts. The Zentraedi caught all

of them-one through the fish eye faceshield and two through the pectoral

armor-and went down like an oak. Rick dropped the weapon and rushed in

to find Lisa still in the soldier's hand, crying.

He stopped in his tracks, then moved in slowly, afraid to touch or move

her.

"Jeez, Lisa...how bad are you hurt?"

"I dropped the camera, I-I...it shattered."

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"Forget the camera! You mean you're not hurt?"

"No, I don't think so. But the mission..."

"Unbelievable," Rick muttered as he helped her from the slack hand.

"Sometimes women just don't make any sense, even when they're officers."

It wasn't in any way meant to bring her around, but it surely did: She

threw him off and ran a hand over her wet eyes. "Don't start with me,

Hunter."

Rick felt the footsteps coming. He grabbed her hand, and the chase was

on again. This has got to be the way mice feel, he told himself while they

were running.

The Zentraedi soldiers were right on top of them, forcing them into left

and right turns indiscriminately. Ultimately they found themselves in a dark

and deteriorated corridor, with stress fissures in the walls and great gaping

holes in the floor. Explosive bolts of energy threw light and short-lived

shadows all around them as they ran. And suddenly the world dropped out

from under them, light and sound beginning to fade as they plunged toward

emptiness together...

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The list of players was still incomplete when Miriya took to the stage;

but was there ever a harder act to follow?

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

The best they could do was clean up the mess.

Breetai looked on as two lower-echelon soldiers carted fragments of the

broken viewscreen from the bridge. The front shield of the observation

bubble was also in ruin. Much as Breetai's career.

Dolza, Breetai, and Exedore had been on the bridge when the

Micronians' mecha had punched through the wall. Only seconds before,

they had been informed of the prisoners' escape, and Breetai was promising

their speedy recapture. Then, suddenly, the transformed Battloid had

exploded into their midst and soared belligerently out across the

astrogation hold. Breetai had glimpsed the look on Dolza's face then, and

now that look was being leveled against him.

"So, Breetai, have the Micronians been recaptured?"

"I'm sorry to report that they haven't. Their size presents difficulties."

The Zentraedi commander-in-chief cocked his head to one side.

"Indeed. And further difficulties are the last thing we need at the moment.

Do you understand?"

"M'lord."

"The responsibility was yours, and this failure will have to be entered

into the record." Dolza turned his back to Breetai. "I am relieving you of

active duty for the time being, Commander."

He turned around and motioned to the shattered observation bubble.

"You can hardly continue to operate in this...condition, in any case."

It was even worse than Breetai had expected. But he thought there

might still be a way out. Exedore stepped forward to speak for him.

"But sir, the infiltration-who will assume responsibility for the

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operation?"

Dolza considered this. "Breetai's knowledge of Zor's ship has been an

invaluable aid to us in this matter. It will be duly noted. However, Azonia

will now be in charge of our three agents."

"Azonia?!" Breetai and Exedore exclaimed.

"But Azonia isn't briefed-"

Dolza held up his hand to silence Exedore. "Commander Azonia is a

loyal subject who has never failed me. Once more, I am assigning our finest

pilot to her charge."

Just then two soldiers requested entry and conveyed the hover-table

onto the bridge. Grouped together on the tabletop and clothed in the only

suitable garments available-sleeveless sackcloths cinched at the waist by

rough cords-were the three now "micronized" operatives, Rico, Konda, and

Bron.

Dolza looked down on them soberly.

"You understand the gravity of your mission?"

"Sir!" three small voices shouted in unison.

"Miriya will oversee your insertion into the dimensional fortress."

The agents exchanged looks and expressions of excitement.

"Succeed and you will each have a cruiser to command upon your

return."

Three arms were raised in salute: "For the glory of the Zentraedi!"

Dolza returned the salute and turned to Breetai as the hover-table was

taken from the bridge.

"This time we will not fail."

Ben remembered having hurdled the giant alien's spread fingers, but

Max assured him that he'd done nothing of the sort. They'd both taken a

dive off to one side of the corridor when the Zentraedi pounced and found

cover behind an open hatch just as the VT exploded. They saw Rick and the

Commander make their escape, but neither Max nor Ben was able to pick

up the trail. While enemy soldiers poured into the area, the two corporals

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had moved swiftly through a serviceway that ran parallel to the ship's

central corridor. They had made good progress for several hours, until Max

had inadvertently tripped a scanner alarm reset to detect movement along

the floor of the passageway.

They had three shock troopers on their tail now and a deadly flock of

projectiles overhead. The soldiers were herding them toward a waiting

elevator, hoping to corner them inside. But perhaps the enemy hadn't

identified the weapon one of the Micronians carried, or perhaps they hadn't

even seen it? In any case, no sooner did the two enter the car than Max

swung himself about face, trained his laser rifle on the elevator controls,

and fired. The intense beam soldered the proper circuits; the doors slid

closed, and the car began to descend...

In that liquid dream, Minmei was leaving him and Rick was calling out

to her, over and over again...

Then Lisa's face floated into focus, and the dream faded. She helped

him sit up and asked if he was all right.

He began to take stock of himself and these new dark and wet

surroundings. They were in an area of huge pipes, containment chambers,

baffles, valves, and regulating devices, seated near the edge of a system of

channels and reservoirs that stretched out into the darkness. Shafts of light

filtered down from far above them, and the thick air was filled with the

sounds of mechanized pumps and filtration units, running water, and the

clank and hiss of fluid control conduits.

They were both soaked to the skin; Lisa's uncoiled long brown hair

hung in wet waves halfway down her back.

She said, "We must be in the water-recycling chamber. It's in terrible

disrepair." She laughed at her words. "Great time to be judgmental, huh?

This pool saved our lives. We must have fallen a hundred feet."

With effort, Rick got to his feet. "Maybe the water broke our fall, but

something else saved me from drowning."

Lisa averted his gaze. "I wasn't about to have you die on me, Hunter."

166

Then she looked directly at him. "Let's just call it even."

Rick's vision was adapting itself to the dark; he began to take notice of

the refuse and debris all around them.

Nearby there were hatchways and elevator platforms, and somewhere

in the distance, faint light.

"They do let things get run-down, don't they?"

"I've been thinking about it, Lieutenant. Even with all their technical

knowledge, maybe they only know how to use the equipment but not how to

repair it. No techs, no maintenance personnel. Just soldier clones, every last

one of them."

"All this destructive power...I wonder how many worlds they've ended,

how many lives they've taken. It's sickening to think about: an entire

civilization dedicated to war."

"I guess I should feel right at home."

"What d' ya mean?"

"My father had a favorite saying: 'Only where there is battle being

waged is there life being lived."' She sighed. "My family has been connected

with the military for the past century...The only life I've ever known is the

Defense Forces. 'The mission,' that's all I can think about." She gestured.

"You heard me up there."

"Yeah, but, that's why you're an officer. You're a leader. Head of the

class and all that."

Lisa's eyebrows knitted. "How did you find that out?"

"It's common knowledge." Rick laughed. "Some of the VT pilots call

you Supergirl."

"Wonderful..." She looked hard at Rick. "You know, I don't mean to

intimidate anyone. It's just that..." A sly smile replaced her grim expression.

"Forget it. But I'll bet Miss Macross isn't a bit intimidating, is she?"

Rick was taken off guard. "Minmei? What makes you think-"

"You were calling her name: 'Minmei! Minmei!"' Lisa playfully mocked

him.

"All right, all right. What of it?"

167

"You tell me."

"Nothing to tell. We're friends, that's all. You know how it is. She's a

celebrity. Public property. We don't have time for each other anymore."

"A major talent, I'm sure."

Rick gave her a look that signaled she'd gone too far.

"Listen, Lieutenant, I'm only kidding. At least you have someone to

return to. All I have is another mission to look forward to."

"There's no one in your life?"

"Just call me Miss SDF-1."

"That's just a matter of time. You're a beautiful woman. Most guys

would give..."

"Yeah?"

"What I mean is, you're a brilliant officer, and..."

Lisa didn't say anything for a minute; then she cleared her throat and

stood up. "Well, I'm not going to meet anyone sitting around here, am I?"

She took hold of Rick's hand. "Let's get out of here, Lieutenant."

They walked toward the light.

Engine rooms, storage rooms, empty holds, a second recycling plant,

more storage areas-all in the same shabby, unwashed, and unmaintained

state. But something had changed: The air had begun to lose that

overpoweringly dank smell and thickness. A slight breeze played through

Lisa's long hair.

They moved toward the source of the wind.

At the far end of a supply room filled with Battlepods and ordnance of

every conceivable type, they found their exit: a rectangular port in the hull

of the ship. They ran toward this, the wind no longer gentle but chilled and

full of sound, and stopped short of the edge, awestruck.

So wrapped up in finding a way out, they had forgotten that they were

actually onboard a ship within a ship!

If you could call it a ship.

Beyond the portal was a sight their senses were unprepared for:

hundreds of Zentraedi ships anchored weightless in the seemingly sky-blue

168

docking chamber of the command center. Overcome by a sudden wave of

vertigo, Lisa took a step back. Was it possible? Dolza's ship would have to be

the best kept secret in the universe-a thousand miles long-to accommodate

all these vessels! Her mind wrestled with it, her thoughts spinning out of

control.

Rick had taken hold of her arm. "Someone's coming!" he told her.

They concealed themselves behind some crates near the portal. Rick

tuned in to the sounds he had heard and realized at once that no Zentraedi

was capable of making so little noise. It had to be...

"Ben! Max!" Lisa yelled.

The four of them reunited in a group embrace, and capsule summaries

of their respective adventures and ordeals were rapidly exchanged. Max

complimented Lisa on how lovely she looked with her hair down, and she

congratulated him on having been able to hang on to his "thinking cap" all

this time. Ben was in his usual good humor.

"So what's next on the agenda, friends?"

The intrusion of reality cooled their warm reunion somewhat; what

was next, indeed? From the edge of the portal they could see a cruiser

taking on supplies through a transfer tube at a neighboring port in the

flagship.

"We could get aboard easy enough," said Max, "but where do you think

she's bound?"

"Does it matter?" Ben asked. "Let's go."

"Hold on a minute, Ben," said Lisa. "We were brought here on this ship.

I think we'd stand a better chance of getting back to the SDF-1 by remaining

aboard."

Max didn't like the idea. "Not if the Zentraedi capture us. We've seen

too much by now. They won't take any chances with us."

"He's right," Rick agreed. "You're in charge, Lisa, but I vote for the

cruiser."

Lisa crossed her arms, then relaxed and smiled at them.

"All right, let's do it."

169

They set off at once.

Finding their way to the adjacent port was more difficult than they'd

imagined, but once there it was a simple matter to conceal themselves from

the guards and at the right moment jump aboard the cargo conveyer. Rick

thought about mice and rats again as the team was carried out of Breetai's

flagship and into the purple-armored cruiser.

Azonia was the commander of the cruiser and her all-female crew.

Highly skilled, respected, and powerful, she had earned a reputation for

succeeding where others had failed. Her attractiveness and magnetism had

helped secure a brilliant career, but her soft eyes and small features belied

the arrogant, self-absorbed megalomaniac many knew her to be. Here was

one who would sacrifice half her fleet to fulfill that all-consuming passion

for victory-a fact that had endeared her to the Zentraedi Command but one

that instilled fear in the hearts of anyone of lesser station. In fact, among all

the Zentraedi there was only one who would have defended her to the finish

and whose respect for her some said was tainted by an atavistic lust for

sensual experience. That one was Khyron, the so-called Backstabber.

Azonia was joined on the bridge of the cruiser by the ace pilot Dolza

had promised her to carry out the infiltration-Miriya Parino of the

Quadrono Battalion.

If Miriya was not as ambitious as her superior, she was certainly as

respected. Where Azonia lived for self-glorification, Miriya fought for

personal perfection: to rank first in this game called war the Zentraedi had

been born into. Ever on the alert for new challenges, new tasks to master,

new worlds to conquer, she was possessed of an intensely curious nature

well suited to the extraordinary level of her talents, a trait that set her apart

from the other pilots. But she was loyal to a fault and never failed to carry

out her orders to the fullest. In this way she was much like her commander,

but where Azonia would seek out ways to promote herself, only Miriya could

rightfully judge Miriya. She had earned her own command a dozen times

over but had rejected it on each occasion. Promotion would have placed her

170

too far from the action, and it was hands-on action that she craved-contest,

confrontation, challenge. She had little patience for the relative ease of a

commander's life, having always to be ready to accept blame or praise based

on how well the troops had carried out their mission. No, it was far easier to

accept the orders of those unskilled superiors and bask in the freedom that

a secondary position allowed.

She was eager to mix it up with these Micronians. They were making

fools of the pilots under Breetai's command. And even the great Khyron had

not fared well with this new enemy.

It was time to let the female Zentraedi take over.

Anyone unaware of the motivational differences between Azonia and

Miriya might have been inclined to read rivalry into their relationship, and

in fact many of the female soldiers on the bridge did just that, even though

no such condition existed.

Azonia swirled the gray commander's cloak over her crimson uniform

as she turned to face the female ace. Her close-cropped bluestone-colored

hair gave her an air of efficiency. Unlike Miriya's long thick fall of forest

green and large emerald eyes that radiated sensual fire.

"I take it you have already been briefed on your mission."

"I have, Commander Azonia. But may I speak freely?"

"Say what's on your mind."

"Delivering spies into the SDF-1 hardly seems a mission worthy of my

talents."

"Yes, I thought it might be something like that."

"After all, I'm a combat pilot, not some delivery drone."

"This mission happens to be of utmost importance. It has been

authorized by Commander-in-Chief Dolza himself."

"Of course, sir, but still-"

"Have you considered that these Micronians might prove to be more

dangerous than you have been led to believe?"

"That is something to be hoped for, Commander."

"Need I remind you that my reputation rides on this mission?"

171

Miriya bowed and saluted. "I will not fail you, my lord."

Azonia narrowed her yes.

"The three micronized operatives are presently aboard our sister ship.

They have been placed inside a capsule-craft that you will retrieve once we

are within range of the dimensional fortress. Now, how will you get the

spies aboard?"

"I am not at liberty to discuss that aspect of the operation with

anyone."

The commander stiffened somewhat. "I see."

"Commander, it will be good to best Breetai in this matter. And Khyron,

of course."

"Commander Khyron to you, Miriya-now and always. Is that clear?"

"My apologies, sir."

"You are dismissed. Return to your quarters and prepare for

hyperspace-fold."

The fold operation was the first note of encouragement struck for the

four Micronian escapees who had sequestered themselves in a supply

hangar elsewhere in Azonia's cruiser. The Zentraedi guards had left the hold

when the spacefold began, leaving them alone in a room full of armaments

and Battlepods. But they remained cautiously optimistic. Especially Ben.

"I know a way we can pass the time-we can count the number of

different places we might end up after this fold."

Lisa's attention had been riveted on the real-time indicator, but Ben's

comment intruded on her concentration.

"Lieutenant Hunter, you didn't tell me you had such a comedian on

your team." Lisa gestured to Ben. "We've gone from the frying pan to the

fire, and all he can do is make jokes."

"All right Ben, can it," said Rick.

"How are we going to get outta here, anyway?" said Max. "Even if we

do defold back in Earthspace?"

"We're going to commandeer one of these Battlepods."

172

Lisa said it so matter-of-factly that the three then did delayed double

takes.

"Just climb into the Battlepod and fly it out of here, huh? Who's going

to teach us how to operate it? You think they left an operating manual

inside, in the glove compartment maybe?"

Lisa put her hands on her hips. "Have you been playing hooky,

Lieutenant?"

"Wait a minute!" Rick said defensively. "Sure, I've studied the insides

of these things just like everybody else. But those were wrecks. Nobody's

actually piloted one of them."

"Listen, Rick, you said yourself that their systems are complex but not

impossible to understand. It shouldn't be a problem for three ace pilots like

you boys."

"Come on, Commander..."

Lisa checked her watch. "It took us twenty-four real hours to make the

hyperspace jump from Earthspace to Dolza's command center. Assuming

we're headed back to the SDF-1, we've got twenty hours left to learn."

"And suppose we're not headed back to Earthspace? Suppose we defold

at some other Zentraedi front or base or I don't know what?"

"Then it won't matter whether we learn how to operate it or not."

Rick stood up and cracked his knuckles. "All right, gang, let's get

crackin'."

Aft in the special weapons hold, Miriya strapped herself into the

Quadrono scout ship-a combination thruster unit and multiple-missile

launcher developed by the Invid, and designed for infiltration or solo

penetration operations. Defold was complete, and the time had come to

retrieve the three micronized agents from the cruiser's sister ship.

Miriya lowered the canopy of the extravehicular pack and stepped

forward to the edge of the port. In the distance she could see the object of

her mission: the SDF-1. It was under attack by the remnants of Breetai's

tattered fleet.

173

Azonia came on-screen in the mecha's cockpit:

"We'll draw the enemy's attention away from you. May you win all your

battles!"

"As always!"

Miriya launched herself into space, a darting dragonfly among the

stars...

Max had his arms stretched out deep into the pod's waldolike gun

controls. Ben was scratching his head, puzzling over the firing mechanism

for the missiles. Lisa wondered how she was going to be able to activate

those huge radio toggles. And Rick tried to figure out how he was going to

fly the thing.

The interior of the Battlepod was not entirely dissimilar to

human-made Robotech mecha. In fact, the design of the cockpit went a long

way toward verifying Lisa's theory about a point of common origin; the

layout and placement of the controls had the logic of human construction,

albeit on a grand scale.

Lisa, her arms overhead hugging a toggle switch, glanced at her watch

and dropped to the sphere's seat. She looked hard at her companions,

calculating the present level of visual distortion against the indicator's

display. Satisfied with the results of her scan, she announced:

"We're coming out of defold right on schedule. It's got to be Earthspace

or an incredible coincidence."

The four regarded one another and took a collective breath; they all

knew what had to be done next.

Rick readied himself at the controls. "Let's see if we can start this thing

up."

He engaged the drive lever and activated the sensor and scanner

systems. The mecha began to hum and come to life, and the first thing that

greeted their eyes on the forward screen was the sight of two Zentraedi

soldiers just returned to the hanger.

The soldiers spun around at the sound of the activated pod.

174

"They're on to us!" yelled Rick.

"Blast 'em!"

Max shouted, "Here goes nothing!" as laser bolts shot from the arm

cannons and dropped the guards to the deck.

Lisa and Ben cheered. Rick told Max to keep firing.

"Keep it up; let's open up this can of worms and get out of here."

Meanwhile, he nudged the stick forward and the Battlepod lifted away from

its still silent companions.

Max continued to pour particle heat into the hull, until all at once the

lasers burned through, and air and mecha were being sucked in a rush

toward the breach.

"We're gonna have to be fast," Max warned them. "These things heal

themselves."

Ben said, "Not while I'm around!" and loosed two rockets at the hull.

Rick let out a rousing yell. Simultaneously with the explosions, he sent

the thruster stick home; the pod soared across the hangar and through the

breach.

Miriya had retrieved the ejected canister which contained the

micronized agents. Battlepods were swarming around Zor's ship like angry

insects and engaging enemy mecha throughout the field. It would have been

a simple matter to insert the cannister and be done with it, but she couldn't

resist testing these waters.

She flew straight into their midst, executing a series of teasing

maneuvers meant to draw the enemy out; but not one of them succeeded in

getting a fix on her. She made up her mind that these Micronians were

nothing to worry about and grew even more daring, positioning herself in

the center of an entire squadron of enemy fighters. And again their

heat-seekers could not find the mark. She laughed aloud and stung back.

Roy Fokker, Skull Team leader, would later recall the strange sight he

witnessed that day: how a Zentraedi mecha, not much larger than a giant

with a jet pack, had taken out five VTs at once.

Through the breach, the commandeered Battlepod rolled into a near

175

front gainer and was almost taken out by Zentraedi crossfire. But the

occupants of that pod were filled with such vigor and than that they scarcely

took notice of their predicament. Ahead of them, enveloped in a cloud of

metal anger, was their ship. And beyond that, their planet and its silver

satellite.

"Can you raise anything on the radio?"

"I'm trying," said Lisa. Ben came to her aid; together they put their

strength to the knob and managed to give it a fraction of a turn.

Rick heard singing: a familiar voice, a familiar song.

"That's Minmei! That's her song-My Boyfriend's a Pilot'!"

"As long as it's not was a pilot," said Ben.

Miriya easily avoided the Phalanx and Valkyrie fire from the SDF-1 and

came alongside the fortress at a point where Breetai claimed the hull could

be easily breached. She summoned Protoculture strength to the outsize

grappler hands of the mecha and tore away some new hatchway the

Micronians had installed. She deposited the cylinder inside an air lock in

the mecha, then opened and resealed.

"Insertion successful," Miriya said aloud. "Returning to base."

Status reports, enemy trajectories, battle coordinates...

"We've got the military frequency," said Rick excitedly.

Lisa leaned into the mike. "Please respond, SDF-1, we are in your air

space. This is Commander Hayes and the Vermilion Team attempting to

make contact with our home base. Do you read me? Over. Rick, do you

think they heard us?"

"I hope so, Lisa. I'd hate to be taken out by one of our own VTs."

Three Battloids were closing on the pod in attack formation, gatling

cannons in hand. Rick and Lisa, Ben and Max, turned to each other with

undisguised looks of concern.

"Did they hear us, Rick? Did they hear us?!"

Rick closed his eyes as the Battloids moved in for the kill.

With home so close you could almost touch it...

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End

RTUCN.COM

177

Document Outline

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Homecoming

By Jack McKinney

1987

2

For Risa Kessler, with thanks and high regard

3

4

CHAPTER ONE

The enemy armada, so vastly superior to us in numbers of fighting

mecha and aggregate firepower, continues to harry and harass us. But time

and again the Zentraedi stop short of all-out attack. They impede our long

voyage back to Earth, but they cannot stop us. I am still uncertain as to what

good fortune is working in the SDF-1's favor.

I do not point out any of this to the crew or refugees, however. It does no

good to tell grieving friends and loved ones that casualties could have been

far worse.

From the log of Captain Henry Gloval

Blue lines of enemy cannon fire streaked by Roy Fokker's cockpit,

scorching one of his Veritech fighter's tail stabilizers, ranging in for a final

volley.

"Flying sense" the aviators called it, jargon that came from the

twentieth-century term "air sense": honed and superior high-speed piloting

instincts. It was something a raw beginner took a while to develop,

something that separated the novices from the vets.

And it was something Lieutenant Commander Roy Fokker, Skull Team

leader and Veritech squadron commander, had in abundance, even in the

airlessness of a deep-space dogfight.

Responding to his deft touch at the controls and his very will-passed

along to it by Robotech sensors in his flight helmet-Roy's Veritech fighter

did a wingover and veered onto a new vector with tooth-snapping force.

Thrusters blaring full-bore, the maneuver forces pressed him into his

seat, just as the enemy was concentrating more on his aim than on his

flying.

The Zentraedi in the Battlepod on Roy's tail, trying so diligently to kill

him and destroy his Robotech fighter, was a good pilot, steady and cool like

all of them, but he lacked Roy's flying abilities.

5

While the giant alien gaped, astounded, at his suddenly empty gunsight

reticle, the Skull Team leader was already coming around behind the pod

into the kill position.

Around that fragment of the battle, an enormous dogfight raged as

Zentraedi pods and their Cyclops recon ships mixed it up ferociously with

the grimly determined human defenders in their Veritechs. The bright

spherical explosions characteristic of zero-g battle blossomed all around,

dozens at a time. Blue Zentraedi radiation blasts were matched by the

Veritechs' autocannons, which flung torrents of high-density armor-piercers

at the enemy.

Roy was relieved to see that the SDF-1 was unharmed. Most of the

fighting seemed to be going on at some distance from it, although it was

clear that the enemy fleet had all the odds on its side. The Zentraedi armada

easily numbered over a million warships.

Roy located his wingman, Captain Kramer, in the furious engagement;

forming up for mutual security, he looked around again for the fantastic

Zentraedi mecha that had done so much damage a few minutes before. It

had flown rings around the Veritechs that had gone after it, taking Roy and

the Skulls by surprise and smashing their formation after cutting a swath

through Vermilion Team.

Whatever it was, it was unlike any Zentraedi weapon the humans had

seen so far. Unlike the pods, which resembled towering metal ostriches

bristling with guns, the newcomer was more human-shaped-a bigger, more

hulking, and heavily armed and armored version of the Veritechs' own

Battloid mode. And fast-frightfully fast and impossible to stop, eluding even

the SDF-1's massive defensive barrages.

Roy had expected to see the battle fortress under intense attack;

instead, the super dimensional fortress was cruising along unbothered and

alone. Moreover, transmissions over the tac net indicated that the Zentraedi

pods and Cyclopses were withdrawing. Roy couldn't figure that out.

He switched from the tac net to SDF-1's command net. There was word

of the new Zentraedi mecha. The thing had made it as far as SDF-1-getting

6

in beneath the fields of fire of most of the ship's batteries-then had suddenly

withdrawn at blinding speed, outmaneuvering gunfire and outracing

pursuit. The ship had suffered only minor damage, and the operations and

intelligence people had concluded that the whole thing had been a probing

attack of some kind, a test of a new machine and new tactics.

Roy didn't care as long as the battle fortress was still safe. He gathered

the Veritechs, ready to head home.

"Enemy pod," Skull Five called over the tac net. "Bearing

one-niner-four-seven."

Roy already had the computer reference on one of his situation screens.

A pod, all right, but evidently damaged and drifting, none of its weapons

firing; it was leaking atmosphere.

"Could be a trick," Skull Seven said. "What d' ya think, skipper? Do we

blast it out of the sky?"

"Negative; somebody may still be alive in there, and a live captive is

what the intelligence staff's been praying for." The incredible savagery of

this deep-space war was such that few survived as casualties. Alien or

human, a fighter almost always either triumphed or died, a simple formula.

The humans had never recovered a living enemy.

Besides, for very personal reasons, Roy was especially eager to see a

Zentraedi undergo interrogation.

"We're getting signals from it, nothing we can unscramble," a

communications officer reported over the command net.

Whatever was going on, none of the Zentraedi forces seemed to be

turning back for a rescue. Veritech fly-bys drew no fire; eyeball inspection

and instruments indicated that the damaged pod's main power source had

been knocked out but that some of its weapons were still functioning.

Nevertheless, it passed up several opportunities to blast away at nearby

VTs.

"This is too good an opportunity to pass up," Gloval finally announced

over the main command net. "If there is a survivor aboard, we must get him

into the SDF-1 immediately."

7

"That thing could be booby-trapped-or its occupant could be!" a

security staff officer protested from one of Roy's display screens.

Gloval replied, "That is why we will push the pod closer to SDF-1-but

not too close-and connect a boarding tube to it. An EVA team will make a

thorough examination before we permit it any closer."

"But-" the officer began.

Roy cut in over the command net, "You heard the captain, so put a sock

in it, mac!" Roy was elated with Gloval's decision; it was only a slim hope,

but now there was hope of finding out what had happened to Roy's closest

friend in the world, Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes and the others who'd

disappeared on their desperate mission to guide the SDF-1 through danger.

Roy began swinging into place, shifting his ship to Battloid mode.

"Okay, Skull Team; time to play a little bumper cars."

Two more Skulls went to Battloid, their Robotech ships transforming

and reconfiguring. When the shift was complete, the war machines looked

like enormous armored ultramech knights.

They joined Roy in pushing the inert pod back toward the battle

fortress.

The men and women of the EVA-Extra Vehicular Activity-crews were

efficient and careful. They're also gutsy as hell, Roy reflected, his Battloid

towering over them in the boarding tube lock. But of course, everybody

knew and honored the legendary dedication and tenacity of the EVA crews.

Crowded into the boarding tube lock with two other Battloids behind

him, Roy watched expectantly. The huge lock, extending from the SDF-1 at

the end of nearly a mile of large-diameter tube, was a yawning dome on a

heavy base, equipped with every sort of contingency gear imaginable. The

captured pod and EVA crew and Roy's security detail took up only a small

part of its floor space.

"Not beat up too bad," the EVA crew chief observed over the com net.

"But I dunno how much air it lost. What d' ya say, Fokker? Do we open 'er

up?" She was holding a thermotorch ready. She'd turned to gaze up at Roy's

8

cockpit.

As ranking officer on the scene, Lt. Comdr. Roy Fokker had the

responsibility of advising Gloval. Tampering with the pod was very risky;

they could trigger some kind of booby trap humans couldn't even imagine,

destroying everyone there and perhaps even damaging the SDF-1.

But we can't go on fighting war this way! Roy thought. Knowing next to

nothing about these creatures we're up against or even why we're

fighting-we can't go on like this much longer!

"Cap'n Gloval, sir, I say we take a shot."

"Very well. Good luck to you," Gloval answered. "Proceed."

Roy reached down and put a giant hand in front of the EVA crew chief,

blocking her way as she approached the enemy mecha. "Sorry, Pietra; this is

my party."

His Battloid stood upright again and walked to the pod, shouldering its

autocannon, its footsteps shaking the deck. "Cover me," he told his

teammates, and they fanned out, muzzles leveled, for clear fields of fire. The

Battloid's forearms extruded metal tentacles, complicated waldos and

manipulators, and thermotorches.

"Just try not to break anything unnecessarily," Pietra warned, and led

her crew to the shelter of a blast shield.

Roy looked the pod over, trying a few external controls tentatively.

Nothing happened. He moved closer still, examining the pressure seals that

ran around the great hatch at the rear top of the pod's bulbous torso. Being

this close to a pod's guns had him sweating under his VT helmet.

"Careful, Roy," Kramer said quietly.

He didn't want to use the torch for fear of fire or explosion. He decided

to try simply pulling the pod's hatch open with the Battloid's huge, strong

hands. He ran his ship's fingers along the seams, feeling for a place to grab

hold...

The pod shook, rattled, and began to open.

Roy's Battloid leapt back, weapon aimed, as the hatch lifted up.

Battloid forefingers tightened on triggers, but there was no occupant

9

immediately to be seen.

However, the Battloids' external sound sensors relayed a remarkable

exchange, muffled and a little resonant, coming from the pod.

"Well, finally! Thank goodness! When you start bragging to your

fighter pilot buddies about this mission, boys, don't forget it took you just

about forever to get a simple hatch open!"

That voice was womanly and very pleasant, if a little arch and teasing.

Another, a young male's, sounding highly insulted, answered, "You weren't

so hot at getting in touch with your precious bridge, I noticed!"

If this is some kind of trick, we're up against the zaniest enemies in the

universe, Roy thought.

"I thought you both did very well," another male voice said calmly,

humbly placatingly.

"Ah, look out, Max," the first male voice said. "And let's get outta here."

There was a certain amount of grunting and straining then, and at one

point the female voice yelled, "Ben, if you don't get your big foot out of my

face, I'm going to break it off!" A vociferous argument broke out.

"Everybody shut up!" the first male voice screamed. "Ben, Max: Gimme

a boost up, here."

Moments later, two flight-gloved, human-size hands gripped the edge

of the hatch. A dark mop of black hair rose into view.

Rick Hunter, standing on the head of the husky Ben Dixon, hauled

himself up triumphantly.

"Hold your fire! We're back! Roy, we escaped from the Zentraedi-um..."

Three Battloids stood there looking at him, hands resting casually on

the upturned muzzles of their grounded autocannon, heads cocked to one

side or the other. Their attitude seemed to be one of resigned disgust.

"We escaped!" Rick repeated, thinking perhaps they hadn't heard him.

"Man, have we got stories to tell! We were in an enemy ship! We met their

leaders! We shot our way out in this pod! We...we...What's wrong?"

Roy couldn't tell Rick how overjoyed and relieved he was; it would have

spoiled their friendship.

10

"We were hoping for a POW," he said. "Boy, is Captain Gloval gonna be

sore at you for not being a Zentraedi."

11

CHAPTER TWO

The Zentraedi version of psychology could only be termed primitive, of

course, except as it applied to such things as maintaining military discipline

and motivating warriors. And even there, it was brutal and straightforward.

No surprise, then, that when those particular three Zentraedi were quick

to accept their spying mission, Breetai scarcely thought twice about it.

But of course, he hadn't spent as much time watching transmissions of

the swimsuit portion of the Miss Macross contest.

Zeitgeist,

Alien Psychology

The SDF-1'S survival of the latest Zentraedi attack had buoyed morale

all through the ship-at least in most cases; there were those whom the

lessons of war had made too wary to quickly believe in good fortune. Even

with Earth looming large before it and the long, dark billions of miles safely

crossed, the battle fortress was dogged by the enemy-now more than ever.

Continued vigilance was imperative.

One of those acutely aware of the continuing danger was Claudia Grant,

who was acting as the vessel's First Officer in Lisa Hayes's absence. Though

Claudia and Lisa were friends, Claudia had always felt a little put off by

Lisa's single-minded devotion to duty, her severity. But now, elevated to the

responsibilities of her new position-especially at this moment, with Gloval

off the bridge-Claudia was seeing things in a different light.

The members of her usual watch, the female enlisted-rating techs,

Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa, were off duty for a long-postponed pass into

Macross City. Lisa, Claudia, and the other three had formed something very

much like a family, with Gloval as patriarch; they had become a highly

efficient team both under everyday stresses and demands and under fire.

The turmoil of the war had brought an assortment of other techs to the

bridge on relief watches, and Claudia didn't trust any of them to really know

what they were doing, just as Lisa hadn't. So even though she was almost

12

out on her feet with fatigue, Claudia had refused to be relieved of her duties

as long as Gloval was away.

There was no telling how long that would be. The glorious news of the

rescue of Lisa and the others was tarnished by the fact that the SDF-1 was

still surrounded by the enemy armada. Debriefings and command

conferences might go on for a very long while.

Claudia looked up wearily from her instruments as she heard one of the

relief-watch techs say wistfully, "Boy, is that beautiful! D' you think we'll

ever set foot on Earth again?"

The tech had brought up a long-range image of their blue-white

homeworld on the screen before her.

Claudia was a tall woman in her late twenties, with exotic good looks

and glowing honey-brown skin. Her dark eyes twinkled and shone when she

was happy, and flashed when she was angry. Right now, they were flashing

like warning beacons.

"Why don't you go ask the commander of that Zentraedi fleet? Go

ahead, take a look at them! Maybe they've gone away!"

The tech, a teenage girl who wore her auburn hair in a pageboy and still

didn't look quite comfortable in uniform, swallowed and went a little pale.

Claudia Grant's temper was well known, and she had the size and speed to

back it up when she needed to.

The tech worked her controls obediently, bringing up a visual of the

Zentraedi fleet. They were all around the battle fortress, standing out of

range of the ship's secondary batteries and lesser weapons. They were like a

seaful of predatory fish-cruisers and destroyers and smaller craft in swarms,

blocking out the stars. And farther away, the instruments registered their

flagship: nine miles of armor and heavy weapons.

The tech gasped, eyes big and round.

"Still there, huh?" Claudia nodded, knowing full well they were. "All

right, then, let's not hear any more about wanting to go home; not until our

job's done. Understood?"

The tech hastened to say, "Aye aye!" as did the rest of the watch.

13

Claudia eased off a bit, looking around at the watch members. "There

are a lot of folks depending on us. And I guarantee you, you don't want to

know what it feels like to let people down in a situation like this."

In a far-off compartment of the SDF-1, three strange beings skulked

and crept around. They were not Zentraedi, at least not any longer; they

were of human scale. But neither could they fairly be called human, though

that was the appearance they gave; until a few hours before they had been

members of the giant warrior race.

The devastatingly fast and ferocious enemy mecha that had wreaked

such havoc among the VTs-the one the humans hadn't seen before-had put

this threesome aboard. The one thing they could accurately be called was

"spies."

They had hastily retreated from the metal canister in which they'd

arrived. The mighty Quadrono Battalion mecha that had, in its lightning

raid, torn open a section of the SDF-1's hull to toss them inside had also

(understandably enough) attracted a certain amount of attention. If the

canister was found before it quietly dissolved, it might set off a massive

search.

The smallest of the three, Rico, said, "Okay, let's start spying!" He was

dark-haired and wiry.

The sturdy Bron, a head taller, said sourly, "But we can't spy in these

clothes; they'll know who we are!"

Even though the Zentraedi military had little experience in

espionage-out-and-out battle was what the warrior race preferred-it was

obvious that Bron was right. The Zentraedi fleet carried no wardrobe in

human size, of course, and so the three wore improvised, shapeless

knee-length robes of coarsely woven blue sackcloth. The sleeveless robes

were gathered at the waist with a turn or two of Zentraedi string, more or

less the thickness of clothesline. Not surprisingly, the spies were barefoot.

It all had them a bit shaken, this matter of dress. The Zentraedi drew

much of their sense of self from their uniforms. The best the trio had been

14

able to do was agree to maintain the attitude that they were wearing the

special attire of an elite unit. A very small elite unit.

Konda, nearly Bron's height but lean and angular, shook his hair back

out of his eyes. His hair was purple, but intelligence reported that the color

wouldn't stand out much in light of current human fads. "Then, let's find

some other clothes," Konda proposed.

They'd been given some briefings and rather broad guidelines by

Zentraedi intelligence officers, but to a great extent they were improvising

as they went along. Still, Konda's idea made a lot of sense. The spies leapt

from hiding and set off down a passageway, slipping among the shadows

and peering around corners, much more conspicuous than if they'd simply

strolled along chatting.

Naturally, SDF-1 had no internal security measures against Zentraedi

spies, since it was generally assumed that a fifty-foot-high armored warrior

wouldn't be difficult to spot in the average crowd.

There followed a period of ducking and darting, of peeping into various

compartments and avoiding any contact with the occasional passerby. The

spies knew the general location of the battle fortress's bridge and worked

their way in that direction, since the ship's nerve center was something the

Zentraedi wanted very much to know about.

As the motley trio peeked out from concealment, they heard a very

strange and appealing sound, something none of them had ever heard

before. It was human; Konda wondered if it was some alien form of singing,

even if it didn't sound very military.

The sound was coming in their direction. They yanked themselves back

out of sight. The oddly interesting sound stopped, and the spies heard

human female voices.

"Where d' you want to go tonight, Sammie?"

There was the sound of slender shoe heels clicking along the deck. The

human females were coming their way, so the spies drew back even deeper

into darkness.

"Oh, I don't really care, as long as I can get out of this uniform,"

15

Sammie answered.

"Mine feels like it'll be glad to get off me!" Vanessa said.

The Terrible Trio giggled together again; they'd been laughing with

delight ever since the relief watch had shown up on the bridge to give them

a brief taste of freedom. The hatch to a complex of enlisted ratings' quarters

compartments slid open for them and they entered. The hatch closed,

shutting off the giggles.

The accelerated course in human language the three spies had been

given let them understand the words perfectly, but the content was another

question entirely. "What did all that mean?" Konda wondered, rubbing feet

that had been made very, very cold by the deck plates.

Little Rico was thinking of a uniform wanting to get off somebody. Can

these creatures have sentient clothing? Perhaps with artificial

enhancements? That would indicate a supreme control of Protoculture! "It

seems these Micronians have some great powers."

"Micronians" had always been a derogatory Zentraedi term for small

humanoid beings such as Homo sapiens. Now, the spies weren't so sure that

the condescension was justified.

Bron nodded. "Well, let's keep watch and see what else we can find

out."

It seemed like a very long time before the hatch reopened. The Terrible

Trio emerged, each dressed for a night on the town in a different, fetching

outfit. They laughed and joked, going off in the opposite direction, leaving

the very faint but heady fragrance of three perfumes in the passageway.

"Different clothes!" Rico exclaimed softly. With different powers,

perhaps, specialized for a particular mission?

"I know!" Bron said with a certain surprising emphasis.

"Do these people change uniforms every time they do something?"

Konda posed a tactical question:

But why, then, did the clothes all look different? The spies somehow

knew what they'd just seen weren't uniforms. But how could the Micronians

bear to lose their identity by not wearing their uniforms? It was all too

16

unsettling for words.

Not to mention the fact that the three Micronian females looked and

sounded, well, somehow delightful. Beguiling. It was very puzzling. The

three looked at one another.

"Incredible," Bron summarized.

"Uh, but what does it all mean?" Rico said with troubled brow.

Konda rubbed his jaw in thought. "They changed their clothes in that

compartment down there. So that means...we can get disguises!"

"Good thinking!" Bron cried.

"Let's go!" Rico exploded.

They dashed down the passageway, bare feet slapping the deck. After

first making sure nobody was still inside, they piled through the hatch

together, anxious to blend in with the Micronians. And though none of them

admitted it to the others, they were all thinking of those three intriguing

Micronian females but trying not to.

They'd had a previous close encounter with the human enemy,

monitoring SDF-1 transmissions that were confusing and puzzling but ever

so fascinating. What they'd seen was the swimsuit competition of the ship's

Miss Macross pageant. Though they hadn't been able to make head or tail of

it, and neither had Zentraedi intelligence analysts, the experience had made

Rico, Bron, and Konda eager to sign up for the spying mission.

Inside, various small subcompartments opened off a narrow central

passageway. The spies began searching through them, looking for garments

that might fit.

They approached the clothes tentatively, timidly. The human fabric

constructions seemed unthreatening enough, hanging there docilely; but if

they somehow incorporated Protoculture forces, there might be no limit to

what they could do. The threesome moved as carefully as if they were in the

midst of a pack of sleeping Dobermans.

When at last they worked up the nerve to actually touch a dangling cuff

and nothing catastrophic happened, the Zentraedi proceeded with more

confidence.

17

A pattern emerged: The lockers in those quarters on the forward side of

the passageway tended to have rather recognizable clothing suited to

normal activities, even if the cut was a little strange. The ones on the aft side,

however, had frilly things, as well as trousers and the skirt-type uniforms

the females had worn, as well as more elaborate designs of the same

undivided lower garments.

After a lot of rummaging and trying on, Konda and Rico, now in human

attire, stepped back into the main passageway. Konda wore dark slacks and

a yellow turtleneck, settling the collar uncomfortably. Rico had found blue

trousers and a red pullover.

"Hey, Bron, let's get moving!" Rico called.

"This uniform is very unusual," Bron said, lumbering to catch up. "But

it's all I can find that fits me. I dressed to conform with a two-dimensional

image I saw in that compartment. What d' you think?"

Bron held out the hem of his pleated skirt, standing awkwardly in the

large pumps he'd found. His white silk blouse was arranged correctly, its

fluffy bow tie and the tasteful string of pearls exactly corresponding to the

fashion photo he'd seen.

"Y' look fine, Bron! Now, let's get started," Rico snapped. Bron looked

wounded.

Rico was edgy; he and the others had come aboard unarmed, since all

Zentraedi weapons were now far too big for them to handle or hide. They'd

found no Micronian weapons at all in the humans' personal quarters except

those of a makeshift and unsuitable sort. How could these creatures feel any

peace of mind without at least a few small arms close at hand? It all made

less and less sense.

Bron glowered, and Rico subsided; it was unwise to get the big fellow

irritated. Bron gave his skirt a final hitch and said, "Ready."

They fell in together and trooped off in the direction the Terrible Trio

had gone, ready to bring triumph and glory to the mighty Zentraedi race.

18

CHAPTER THREE

We had met the enemy, and he wasn't us. Then we wound up in front of

some of "us," and they were the enemy.

Lisa Hayes,

Recollections

"Please continue your report, commander Hayes," the captain bade

her.

They sat in high-back chairs along the gleaming conference room table,

all in a row. A short time ago they'd been greeted as heroes, but now-despite

Captain Gloval's comforting presence-Lisa felt very much as if she were

sitting before a board of inquiry.

Lisa, Rick, Ben, and Max looked across the long, wide table at the row

of four member officers of the evaluation team. Only one of them held rank

in one of the combat arms, Colonel Maistroff, an Air Group officer with a

reputation as a martinet and stuffed shirt.

The others were intelligence and operations staffers, though the

bearded and balding Major Aldershot was supposed to be something of a

mainstay over at G3 Operations and had earned a Combat Infantry Star in

his youth. The team studied the escapees as if they were something on a

microscope slide.

Gloval, presiding at the head of the table, was encouraging Lisa. "You

are certain that what you've made is a fair estimate? At this Zentraedi

central base there are really that many more ships than we've already seen?"

The comlink handset next to him began beeping softly; he ignored it.

Lisa thought carefully. So many things about their captivity in the

planetoid-size enemy base, a spacefold jump away-somewhere else in the

universe-were astounding and unnerving that she rechecked her

recollections again, minutely.

Rick looked over to her, and their eyes met. He didn't nod; that might

have tainted her testimony. But she saw that he was ready to back her up.

19

"Yes, sir, at least that many. And quite possibly millions more. I made a

conservative estimate."

Gloval, hand on the phone, looked to Rick. "Truly?"

Rick nodded. "Yes, sir. That many."

Gloval listened to the handset for a moment, then replaced it in its

cradle without responding. "Based on all combined reports," he resumed,

"our computers place the total enemy resources at somewhere between four

and five million ships."

"Sir, forgive me, but that's ridiculous," one team member said. From

the security branch, he was the officer who'd been all for destroying the

escapees' pod. "Our projections are based on the most accurate data and

statistical techniques known.

"No species could accumulate that sort of power! And even if they

could, they couldn't possibly remain at the primitive social and

psychological level of these aliens!"

"Now, granted, we're seeing a great deal of military display here," the

Intel man, a portly fellow in his early thirties, added. "But how many of

those ships have actually proved themselves to be combat-ready? A

comparative handful! No, Captain; I think what we're seeing is just a bluff.

And I think your people here have been taken in by it. My analysis is that

Commander Hayes and her party were permitted to escape so that they

could bring us this...hysterical report and demoralize us."

"Permitted?" Ben Dixon was halfway out of his chair, the big hands

clenched into fists, about to leap across the table and pummel the intel

officer. "D' you know how many times we almost got killed? How close we

came to not making it? When was the last time you saw any action, you-"

"Captain!" the intelligence officer burst out to Gloval by way of

complaint.

"That will do!" Gloval thundered, and there was sudden silence as Max

Sterling and Rick Hunter pulled Ben back.

Having shown his Jovian side for an instant, Gloval lapsed back into a

reasonable voice. "Gentlemen, let's hear the entire report before discussing

20

it." It wasn't a suggestion, and everybody understood that. The debriefing

team subsided.

Lisa had thought her words out carefully. "In the course of our captivity,

we observed that the aliens have absolutely no concept of human emotions.

They've been groomed entirely for war. And their society is organized along

purely military lines.

"It appears that they've increased their physical size and strength

artificially through genetic manipulation and that they also have the ability

to reverse the process."

The others present were studying the few video records she'd managed

to make surreptitiously during captivity, but Lisa's memory, with Rick's,

Ben's, and Max's, provided vivid and chilling recollections. They'd

witnessed Zentraedi trans-vid records of the destruction of an entire planet,

seen the gigantic protoculture sizing chambers the aliens used to

manipulate their size and structure, felt the deathly squeeze of Commander

in Chief Dolza's fist around them.

And something else had happened, something Lisa could only bring

herself to refer to obliquely. The enemy leaders had been repulsed, but

fascinated, by the human custom of kissing. At their demand, and to

ascertain what effect it would have on them, Lisa and Rick had kissed, long

and deeply, on an enemy conference table as big as a playing field.

None of the four escapees had mentioned the kiss. Lisa still wasn't sure

exactly what it was she'd felt afterward. She suspected that Rick was also a

little confused, in spite of his love affair with the girl called Minmei. Max

and Ben had kept silent, Rick's friends as well as his wingmates.

Lisa finished, "And I think this last part is very important: While they

examined and interrogated us, they constantly made reference to something

they called -'Protoculture.'"

The intel officer who had almost been attacked by Ben Dixon tilted his

chair back arrogantly. "That's pure fantasy."

His security buddy added, "And were there any little green men?"

Major Aldershot glanced around at him stiffly, the ends of his waxed

21

mustache seeming to bristle. "I will point out that the commander is a

much-decorated soldier. This insulting levity is unbecoming from someone

who has yet to prove himself under fire." It was the most he'd said all

morning.

"What is this 'Protoculture'?" Gloval put things back on track.

Lisa hesitated before answering. "It's apparently something that relates

to their use of Robotech. I'm not sure, but they think that Protoculture is the

highest science in the universe and that somehow we possess some of its

deepest secrets."

Colonel Maistroff said with a sly grin to the other evaluation team

officers, "Too deep for me!" and guffawed at his own joke.

The intel and security officers roared spitefully along with him as Lisa's

cheeks colored and Rick felt himself flush in anger.

"Silence!" Gloval barked. It was instantly quiet. "This is a very grave

moment. This alien armada has pursued and harried us across the solar

system for almost a year and yet has never made an all-out attempt to

destroy us; perhaps we do possess a power in the SDF-1 that we don't fully

understand."

That was a good bet, the way Rick saw it. Even the brilliant Dr. Lang

understood only a fraction of the alien ship's secrets, and he was the one

who had masterminded its reconstruction from a burned and battered

wreck.

Maistroff fixed Lisa with a gimlet stare, red-faced at being rebuked in

front of junior officers. "Commander Hayes, is that all?"

Lisa met his glare. "Yes, sir, that's all."

Ben whispered to Rick, "I don't think they believe us." Ben wasn't

exactly point man on the genius roster, and the idea that such a thing could

happen had never occurred to him until the debriefing was well along.

"It's probably the dishonest expression on your face," Rick whispered

back absently.

Maistroff placed both hands flat on the table and turned to Gloval. "Do

you really believe this wild tale? It's enemy trickery! Hallucinations!"

22

Gloval began stoking up his evil-smelling briar, tamping the tobacco

slowly with his thumb, pondering. "This information must be correlated and

reported to Earth immediately, whether I believe it or not-"

Maistroff interrupted him, saying tightly and too quickly, "I'll send a

coded message right away-"

"Colonel Maistroff." It was Gloval's turn to interrupt. "No, you won't."

He lit his briar while they all gaped at him.

Gloval said, "We've got to break through the enemy elements that

stand between the SDF-1 and our homeworld."

The evaluation team was aghast, Maistroff shouting, "We can't make

it!"

Rick looked around and saw that everybody on his side of the table

thought it was a magnificent idea. Gloval rose. "At our current speed, we are

only two days from Earth, and they must have this information." He started

for the hatch.

Maistroff scowled at Gloval's back. "And then what?"

The captain answered over his shoulder. "And then nothing. We just

await orders while we relax, Colonel Maistroff."

He cut through all their protests. "That will be all, gentlemen."

Gloval turned to the escapees. "And as for you four..." They all shot to

their feet at rigid attention.

"At least for the time being, you'll be relieved of duty. You've earned a

little R and R. You're dismissed."

The four saluted him happily. "Enjoy yourselves," Gloval said gruffly;

puffing his pipe. They did a precise right-face and marched out of the

conference room in style. But at the last moment, Gloval removed his pipe

from his mouth and called, "One moment, Lisa."

The others continued on. Lisa paused at the hatch and turned back to

him. "Yes, Captain?"

"Personally, I am inclined to believe that your report is accurate.

However..."

"Certainly," she said. "Thank you, Captain. I know you believe in us,

23

and I appreciate that."

"I'm glad you understand."

The door slid open again, and she turned and left. Gloval, looking back

to the debriefing team, saw that the fact that he'd chosen to tell Lisa what he

did, where he did, wasn't lost on them.

"I'd rather face the aliens again than that bunch of brass," Max Sterling

told Rick as they walked down the passageway. They were walking side by

side, with Ben behind. They could hear Lisa's quick footsteps as she fell in at

the rear.

"Gloval wasn't so bad, and that Major Aldershot," Ben said.

"They're only doing their job," Rick maintained. "I'd feel the same way

in their place."

"Sure you would," Lisa put it, a little surprised that Rick Hunter had

been so transformed from a headstrong discipline problem to a trained

military man who understood why and how the service functioned. "And

they'd feel exactly the same way we do in ours."

"That's right; why not look on the bright side," Ben said. Rick looked

back to Ben but found himself making eye contact with Lisa. He looked

ahead again quickly, in turmoil, not sure what he felt.

"After all, all of us were promoted, weren't we?" Ben went on, noticing

nothing, very jolly. "And we're going home to a big hero's welcome! So why

not relax and enjoy the rest and recreation Captain Gloval gave us?" He

clapped Rick on the shoulder, staggering him.

Rick looked back at him sourly. "You could probably relax in the

dentist's chair, Ben."

"Are you sure this is the right way?" Konda asked nervously, watching

the elevator's floor-indicator lights count down toward One.

"We're headed for the area of greatest activity in this battle fortress,"

Rico said confidently. "Surely the most important concentration of military

secrets will be there."

24

"I still think we should be trying to reach the bridge," Bron grumbled.

The elevator stopped, and the doors parted. A brilliant ray of light

broke on them. The three spies stood rooted, making astounded, strangled

sounds.

Before them was Macross City in all its glory. The streets were jammed

with traffic; the sidewalks were crowded with busy, hurrying people.

Streetlights and signs and headlights shone, as did the starlight projected by

the Enhanced Video Emulation system. Display windows were filled with

clothing and appliances, books, furniture, and an astonishing variety of

other goods.

Rico gulped and found his voice. "There's so much to spy on! Where

should we start?"

Konda drew a deep breath. "Perhaps we should just mingle with the

Micronians and observe their habits."

They gathered their courage and stepped out. Humans were

everywhere, alone and in pairs and bigger groups, all going every which way.

Some were in military uniforms, but in general everybody was dressed

differently. Reassured that he and his companions wouldn't be noticed,

Bron pulled up his knee socks and smoothed the pleats in his skirt.

It took all their self-control not to shout upon seeing male and female

Micronians mingling freely. No officers or overseers were in immediate

evidence, although it was just as plain as could be to the Zentraedi that such

hivelike activity would be totally impossible without some strong central

control. Still, there were humans who strode along purposefully while

others stood idly conversing and still others browsed along, glancing

through the gleaming store windows.

And nobody, nobody, was in step with anybody else.

They started off, observing carefully. Bron said, "Well, I think there's a

good chance we're going to be observing them for a very long time before we

figure them out."

They came to a window-shopper, a young man staring longingly at a

display in a music store, eyes fixed on a red crystal electric guitar that had

25

three necks and a set of speakers bigger than public comcircuit booths.

"What d' you suppose he's doing?" Bron whispered.

Rico considered, then smiled in sudden realization. "Taking

inventory!"

Bron and Konda murmured, "Ahh!" and nodded knowingly.

26

CHAPTER FOUR

Due to an OVERWHELMING NUMBER OF APPLICATIONS, processing

and mailing of membership packets for the MINMEI FAN CLUB is running

several weeks behind.

MINMEI hopes that all her LOYAL FANS will understand this and wants

you to know that she LOVES EACH AND EVERY ONE OF YOU!!!

Macross City newspaper, magazine, and broadcast ad

The trio of micronized zentraedi came to an intersection. Before them,

crosswalk signals blazed and traffic lights changed colors. The movement of

vehicles and people was orchestrated somehow, but the logic behind it was

difficult to grasp. Everything was so disorderly, so unmilitary.

And all around them was the barrage of lighted signs and flashing neon

of Macross City's "downtown." They could read the signs-at least when the

logos and print styles weren't too fanciful-but couldn't make any sense of

them. And there was so little uniformity! Surely, they thought, these

Micronians must be mad.

And none of the three dared admit to the others how oddly appealing

he found it all.

Rico threw his hands in the air. "What military purpose could all those

indicators possibly serve?"

Konda glanced around at lovers strolling with arms about each other's

waists, at parents leading their children by the hand, at old people enjoying

coffee at an outdoor cafe. It was just as horrible as the intelligence reports

had indicated. "You can be sure some kind of sinister force is at work here."

He started off, the other two falling in with him. "There's something

strange at the root of all this, something that makes these creatures so

completely unlike us. But I haven't been able to put my finger on it."

"I noticed it, too!" Rico said excitedly. "Like something's out of

balance-something weird that affects all of them."

27

They heard laughter and shouting coming their way, and the hiss of

small wheels against the sidewalk. Bron pointed. " Warriors!"

A young male and a young female sped with easy, athletic grace along

the sidewalk on small wheeled contrivances barely big enough to stand on.

Their hair streamed behind them, and they whooped and laughed,

tilting and swaying to steer. From their merry demeanor, the spies could see

that the young Micronians enjoyed their drill and the prospect of combat.

"Gangwaaaay!" called the boy.

"Yahooooo!" sang the girl.

Trying to hide his dismay at their bloodthirsty war cries, Bron dodged,

then faked the other way. The skateboarders, unaware that they were part of

an interspecies skirmish, effortlessly avoided him. Bron mistook their

evasive maneuvers for an attack, reversed field too quickly in the unfamiliar

low-heeled pumps, and ended up on his backside.

Konda and Rico hurried to kneel at either side. "Bron, are you

wounded?"

"No, Konda, but I think they suspect something."

The spies looked around apprehensively. Passersby were gazing at

them curiously, sometimes murmuring to one another but not stopping or

making agressive moves.

"Perhaps that was only a probing attack," Rico speculated. His voice

betrayed an unusual lack of self-confidence. If the Micronians were playing

such a sadistic cat-and-mouse game, they must be masters of psychological

warfare.

More and more people were noticing them now, laughing outright

before moving along, passing comments among themselves. Their attention

seemed to be focused on Bron and his attire.

"It could be that there's something wrong with our uniforms," Rico

hissed.

"I don't see any difference between our uniforms and theirs, do you?"

Konda demanded as he and Rico each took one of Bron's arms and hauled

the bulky warrior to his feet.

28

Bron pulled up his white knee socks and rearranged his string of pearls.

"I don't see any difference, either. But just the same, I wish I'd chosen

something a little less breezy down around my legs." He flapped the hem of

his skirt in the air.

People were stopping now, staring at them, laughing and slapping each

other on the arm. The female Micronians seemed inclined to look, avert

their eyes, then look again, blushing and shaking with laughter.

Rico caught a few words here and there-"women's clothes," for

example-and made a brief, horrified comparison study of the garments he

saw all around him, and their wearers.

"That's it! It's a female's uniform you're wearing!"

So, they hadn't been spotted by the Micronians' secret police. Bron had

his eyes closed, almost collapsing back into Konda's arms with the

mortification of it.

Konda shoved him upright. "Come on! Let's get out of here now!"

Nobody appeared inclined to stop them, and most were laughing too

hard, anyway. They dashed off in a line, Konda leading, around a corner and

down a street, around another corner and across to a park, making sure not

to bump into anybody.

"Frat initiation," someone said sagely.

"Another bunch of drunken performance artists!" an old man yelled,

waving his cane at them vengefully.

But other than that, they drew a few puzzled glances and nothing more.

Konda had spotted an illuminated symbol whose meaning they'd learned on

their earliest explorations, the little stick-figure Micronian near the lighted

sign, MEN.

The attendant was standing outside, whiling away the time and

watching the people go by. He watched as Konda and Rico dashed into the

men's room, not terribly interested; he'd seen guys in a bigger hurry in his

time. Then he heard the pounding of heavy footsteps and did a classic

double take as Bron brought up the rear.

The picture of offended righteousness, the attendant held up his hand.

29

"Just a second, madam! Nothin' doin'! Ladies' room to th' left!"

"Okayokayokay!" Bron veered off and ran into the ladies' room.

There were a few relatively quiet moments, during which the attendant

looked up at the evening sky synthesized by the EVE system-tonight they

were recreating a northern hemisphere summer sky-and reflected on the

sorry state of the human race. Women in the mens' room! Boy, if you

weren't on your toes every minute...

Distracted, wandering to the corner of the little building to look up and

philosophize, he failed to notice the dim cries of "A man!" "Get out!" and

"Pervert!" that came from the ladies' room along with shrieks and howls of

outrage.

Bron emerged from the ladies' room a moment later in a low crawl, the

shoulder of his blouse ripped, hair askew, and face scratched in parallel

furrows, several spots on his shins promising remarkable bruises.

Panting, he took a moment to catch his breath, slumped against a

partition, preparing to move on quickly before he was attacked again.

"These...Micronians certainly have a warlike culture!"

Elsewhere in the park, in the Star Bowl-the open-air amphitheater

where Minmei had been crowned Miss Macross-a different sort of ceremony

was about to take place.

None of it fazed Max Sterling very much-few things seemed to-but Ben

wasn't happy. "Hey, Max, I thought we were supposed to be resting and

relaxing."

Max adjusted his large aviator-style eyeglasses, smiling his serene,

mischievous smile. "Aw, what's the matter? Don't you want to be a hero?

Didn't you say you were looking forward to it?"

Ben considered Max sourly. Now, here was this little guy-not even

twenty yet-who wouldn't even be flying in one of the old-time wars. In

prewar days, pilot candidates who needed corrective lenses were as sought

after as those with untreatable airsickness.

And then there was Max's self-effacing style, his quiet, somehow Zen

30

humility, which wouldn't have been noticeable except that he was the

hottest pilot who'd ever climbed into a Veritech, and everybody knew it. Not

Rick Hunter, not even Roy Fokker himself, was Max's equal, but Max just

went along like a goodnatured kid who was rather surprised at where fate

had brought him, bashful and loyal and given to blushing. Even if he did

follow the fad of dying his hair-blue, in this case.

"Aw, pipe down," Ben growled at him, but in fact Ben wasn't that

unhappy. Who gets tired of being cheered? Pity them, whoever they are.

Banks of lights came up all around them, until they were standing in a

lighted area brighter than brightest day. Triumphant music soared from the

sound system as curtains swept aside, and the applause and cheering and

whistling began, like waves hitting a shore.

Rick and Lisa, who'd been conversing haltingly and enjoying a kind of

mutual attraction they couldn't seem to resist, looked relieved that the

extravaganza had started. The four escapees, in full-dress uniform, stood in

a line on the stage; from all around the packed Star Bowl the outpouring of

joy and admiration came.

There'd been good war news and bad, and virtually everyone in the

amphitheater had lost friends and relatives; besides, many in the audience

were military. But these were four who'd gone into the very heart of the

enemy stronghold and come back, and returning-coming back home-was

something very much in the minds of the people of Macross City these days.

The master of ceremonies, a man in a loud suit with an oily voice, held

the microphone right up against his capped teeth.

Rick sighed and made up his mind to put up with the show as best he

could. The music was still all trumpets and drums, and the ovation was

growing louder and louder. A tech somewhere turned up the gain on the

mike so that the emcee could be heard.

"And here are the four young champions who have miraculously

escaped the clutches of our enemy: Commander Lisa Hayes, our number

one space heroine-"

Lisa was breathing quickly, eyes on the floor, Rick saw; by an iron

31

application of will, she forced herself not to bolt from the stage; there was

bravery and there was bravery, and facing a crowd took a great deal of hers.

"And Lieutenant Rick Hunter, whose flying exploits are already

legendary!"

Rick was used to crowds, was used to taking bows and waving and

soaking up the glory, from his days in his father's air circus. He could easily

have played to the crowd, knew just what it was they wanted and just how to

make them like him even more: the little tricks of eye contact, of perhaps

singling out a child to kiss or an elderly sort to shake hands with or a

good-looking woman to hug.

But he did none of that. The mission that had landed him in the

Zentraedi ship and in the heart of the mad Zentraedi empire hadn't been

undertaken to win cheers. Playing to the crowd was a thing that was behind

him now, something out of a different life. Rick Hunter acknowledged the

ovation with a bow of his head and remained more or less at attention.

He looked aside only once, to see what Lisa was doing. She was

watching him.

"And here are their intrepid companions," the emcee went on in a voice

so ebullient that the listeners might have thought he'd been along on the

mission. "Max Sterling and Ben Dixon! To these four, we express our

deepest gratitude."

The crowd did. Earth was so close now, and there was a holiday spirit

in the air. A homecoming; a victory; the sight of four humans who'd gone up

against the relentless enemy and come back covered with glory-these things

all had the Macross City inhabitants at a fever pitch.

The emcee was holding his hands up. The uproar died a little. "There's

more to come! To properly demonstrate our high regard for these young

heroes, we present that singing sensation, Miss Macross herself,

Lynn-Minmei!"

"Miss Macross? Minmei!" Rick had almost forgotten about the Miss

Macross contest Minmei had so recently won when he'd gone out on this

last mission. It felt like a century before, but it was really only a few days.

32

She emerged from the wings, most of the spotlights going to

her-followed by an escort, a fellow in white tie and tails who carried

bouquets of red roses, as if she were royalty. And she was, of a sort; the

audience went wild, shouting her name and whistling, clapping.

Rick could see a cluster of people waiting in the wings-Minmei's

entourage, apparently-men in expensive suits who wore sunglasses at night

and stylish women with calculating looks in their eyes.

But Minmei...She was gorgeous in a frilly dress whose hem was

gathered up high on one side to show off long, graceful legs. Her jet-black

hair swayed behind her, and her eyes were alight. She seemed used to the

spotlight, used to the devotion of the crowd. She was the same young

woman who had shared so many adventures and so much privation with

Rick and-at the same time-a new persona, a darling of the mass media.

She blew kisses to the crowd, and it went even wilder; guards at the

edge of the stage, who hadn't been too hard-pressed to keep people away

from the military heroes, had all they could do to keep-rabid fans from

getting out of control. Young girls especially were reaching out in a hopeless

effort to touch Minmei, many of them crying.

"I don't know about you," Ben's voice grated. "But I'm embarrassed;

being put on display like this. And just look, will you?" He held up a limp

lapel that had been stiffly starched at the beginning of the evening. "My

uniform's starting to wilt."

Lisa was watching Rick watching Minmei. Lisa didn't feel very much

like a heroine, didn't feel strong or brave. Instead, she found herself

resenting the sideshow atmosphere. What did civilians know about military

achievements, anyway? Show them some beauty contest winner and they

forgot all about the people who put their lives on the line to safeguard the

SDF-1.

"I think I'd rather be trapped back in that Zentraedi headquarters

station," she blurted before she herself could quite analyze what she meant

by it. Rick gave her a quick, troubled glance, then looked back at Minmei.

It was Max Sterling, calm and unflappable, who answered

33

good-naturedly. "Well, it might never happen again, so let's just sit back and

enjoy this, huh?"

Minmei held up her hands for silence, and the ovation became relative

silence. She took the first of the bouquets of red roses from the man in the

tuxedo and gave it to Lisa.

"Congratulations on your safe return!" Minmei's winsome smile and

enthusiastic manner were difficult to resist. She had a way of putting

something extra into the words, of breaking through resistance, so that

whomever she was talking to virtually had to respond in kind.

Lisa simply couldn't think badly of Minmei-found herself saying,

"Thank you very much," and meaning it, and even returning the bright

smile. Minmei surprised her by shaking her hand warmly, then went on to

Rick, taking another bouquet.

Lisa closed the hand into a tight fist. In those seconds Minmei had

made her feel like a friend, as if she was all-important to Minmei. Lisa had

to admit that that would be a very hard thing for anybody to

resist-especially a man.

34

CHAPTER FIVE

As veteran Zentraedi warriors, you will, of course, even in your

micronized state, find it necessary to hide your natural superiority. Be sure to

conceal your immunity to the degenerate behavioral impulses of the humans.

Breetai, from his instructions to the spies

Rico, Bron, and Konda

Minmei had gone on to Rick, taking another bouquet and presenting it

to him. "And congratulations on your safe return, you handsome devil!"

She handed him the flowers with a wink and a laugh. He stood for a

second looking as though he'd just touched a live wire. Then he blurted out,

"Well! Um, thank you!"

Minmei put one slender hand to his right cheek and held him steady

while she kissed his left. Fire and ice coursed through him; he remembered

the moment, months before, when, trapped together in a distant

compartment of the SDF-1, they'd shared a deeper, more lasting kiss.

The crowd had suddenly gone ugly. Minmei was everybody's favorite,

and there was a strange current of jealousy at seeing her single out a nobody

lieutenant, hero that he might be, for special treatment. She was the dream

girl, the idol, the fantasy figure; an undertone of hostility ran through the

crowd.

She turned to the audience without losing her merry persona. "Now,

now!" she chided, shaking a finger at them in mock chastisement.

Amazingly, the sounds of resentment died away as quickly as that, and

people were applauding her again. To make her point, Minmei kissed Max's

cheek,

and

Ben's,

as

she

gave

them

their

roses.

"Congratulations...congratulations..."

The crowd loved it; the crowd loved her.

Down among the people near the stage were the three spies. At first

they'd merely drifted along with the people assembling in the amphitheater,

35

to make sure they'd eluded any Micronian pursuit. Then it had become

apparent that a major gathering was taking place, and they'd set out to

infiltrate it. That had proved amazingly easy.

Bron had gotten rid of his pleated skirt and knee socks and white silk

blouse and even the tasteful string of pearls. He was wearing a blue

turtleneck and dark slacks, although it had taken a little doing to get new

clothes.

On a quiet side street, they had stumbled across a metal bin stenciled

CONTRIBUTIONS FOR THE NEEDY. With some effort, the portly warrior

had hauled himself into it and found Micronian male garments that fit.

The three spies concluded that keeping contributions for the needy in

the difficult-to-enter metal housing served as a kind of minimum

qualification test in the savage Micronian culture; any needy individual who

wasn't fairly spry would be out of luck. It was a stern way to run things, the

trio agreed, but no doubt very efficient.

Now, though, they looked around themselves worriedly. These

Micronians were obsessed with the creature Minmei. At first the spies had

thought that they'd stumbled onto a simple propaganda rally and that

they'd get insights on the humans' attitudes toward the Zentraedi, but the

Zentraedi had hardly been mentioned.

Instead, there was a lot of strange business with passing plants

around-flowers, to be precise-and a very confusing level of noise and

emotion, virtually all of the outpouring directed at Minmei.

Konda in particular felt that they were close to uncovering some

important military secret. There was no question but that the enemy was

highly motivated; perhaps some new sort of mind control technique would

be revealed.

They recognized Minmei from transmissions of her that they'd

intercepted on their original signal-intelligence mission, of course. She'd

abandoned the bizarre armor the Micronians called a bathing suit, and wore

a slightly less revealing but even flimsier cover. The trio had as yet seen no

demonstration of Protoculture powers from the humans' garments, but they

36

were still very edgy.

The crowd was still carrying on over Minmei. "Hey, what's going on? A

riot?" Bron yelled over the uproar.

They were packed in together tightly by the massed crowd, but Konda

got his hands onto Bron's shoulders. "Don't panic! I don't think it's a riot; it

seems to be something else..."

Rico was nearly at the end of his rope, sweating and shuddering a bit; a

good old fashioned anti-enemy hate rally was something anybody could

understand, but this was utter chaos! He covered his ears with his hands,

squeezing his eyes shut. "Oh, my head!"

He began to slump in a near faint. His companions managed to catch

him somehow in the press of the crowd. Just then, Minmei came to the edge

of the stage in a convergence of spotlights and the gathered residents of

Macross began applauding and cheering all over again.

"Now what's the matter?" Bron asked, refering to Rico as well as the

Minmei situation.

Chairs had appeared from somewhere, and Rick, Lisa, Max, and Ben

were sitting uncomfortably. Minmei, angelic in the spotlights, indicated

them with a sweeping gesture. "To celebrate their return, my first song this

evening is dedicated to these four heroes and all the others who guard and

defend us!"

She threw kisses to the crowd as the band came up, uptempo.

Streamers and confetti rained down, and light effects blazed. As she threw

her arms wide, she seemed to be a creature of pure light, of spirit, of magic.

The streamers and confetti rained down on the crowd, too, and many joined

in, joyously, knowing the words, arms around each others' shoulders.

"Stage lights flashing,

The feeling's smashing,

My heart and soul belong to you

And I'm here now, singing,

All bells are ringing,

37

My dream has finally come true!"

In a time when the most adored performers were unapproachable and

inaccessible, she was somehow the exact opposite of the media sirens who

reigned elsewhere. She was, after all, one of the citizenry, another Macross

Island refugee like virtually everybody else aboard. Her success and

stardom could as easily have been theirs-was theirs in a way.

She was one of them, and she gave herself to them totally, letting them

share the moment. Her silver-bright voice soared, taking the high notes

with complete confidence. Her slim, straight figure reflected the light back

into their eyes, the joy back into their hearts.

They were a battered, war-weary community, and in a way nobody

quite understood, she made them feel hope and experience a soaring elation.

It had been said-and not discounted by Minmei herself-that she was a

reflection of them, the military and civilian occupants of SDF-1.

Certainly there were precedents in history. Times of greatest danger

and tribulation inevitably bring forth symbols.

In human societies...

The three spies couldn't quite understand it but couldn't resist it either.

It had to be admitted, the gathering of humans might as easily be an

assembly of Zentraedi in some ways-except that this spirit of undisguised

joy was utterly weird. People swayed and laughed and forgot their problems,

thinking about home, and there wasn't a single pro-war propaganda

message to be seen anywhere.

Somebody threw an arm around Rico's shoulder from one side,

somebody else hanging one around Bron's from the other, and they were

caught up in the swaying of the throng. It so happened that the groups on

either side were keeping separate time, one going one way while the other

went counter.

"This must be some kind of tribal ceremony," Konda speculated, but he

found himself enjoying it.

Still, somehow, as easily as if they'd been doing it all their lives, the

38

Zentraedi sorted out the conflicts and in a moment were swaying along with

the thousands upon thousands of others. It began to dawn on them what

they were seeing.

As had happened before, a symbol had arisen, and Minmei was it,

uniquely suited to the role. One tiny Micronian female, hoping to get home,

possessed of a kind of deathless optimism; and all that was set off by

remarkable singing skills and a personality that won over whomever she

encountered. And none of it was calculated; people sensed that. She was

wonderful and straightforward, and Macross City threw itself at her feet.

She's incredibly dangerous to the Zentraedi cause, Rico mused. Why do

I like her so much?

"I feel incredibly primitive," Bron reported dubiously.

"But it has a pleasing effect on the senses," Rico was honest enough to

admit.

"It's-mass hypnosis!" Bron burst out, even though he'd been trained to

recognize mass hypnosis and knew this wasn't it.

"Yeah, but I kinda like it," Konda confessed. They swayed along with

the music and laughed at the people who swayed and laughed with them...

"Stage fright, go 'way-

This is my big day,

This is my time to be a star!

And the thrill that I feel

Is really unreal:

I can't believe I've come this far..."

In the midst of the performance, people had forgotten about the four

forlorn figures sitting on their chairs, very much in the background now but

unable to make an escape. Only Max Sterling seemed unbothered and

happy.

Rick shifted the bouquet on his lap despondently. He saw it all now:

Minmei had been elevated to a different level of existence. What they had

39

gone through together and felt for each other didn't matter anymore. He

had lost her.

Lisa leaned toward him to ask, "What's the matter, Rick?"

He shook himself, drawing a deep breath. "Nothing. The light bothers

my eyes, is all."

Lisa saw it wasn't true. She hadn't gotten to be a commander and the

SDF-1's First Officer by being unobservant or slow to understand what was

going on. But that didn't help her figure out what she was feeling as she

looked at Rick and the now-unreachable Minmei: some complicated

mixture of relief and foreboding.

Minmei's hands were high, and she had moved the crowd into a

veritable transport of joy. White light blazed all around her, and it seemed

that every hope and aspiration was embodied in her.

"I can't believe I've come this far,

This is my time to be a star!"

The hatch to the battle fortress's bridge slid aside; all heads turned.

Gasps and yells sounded from all sides.

Lisa felt better already, there in the place that was most important to

her. "Hi," she said shyly, not recognizing many of the faces and wishing only

to get back to her station, get back to her work. She would have died before

admitting that she wanted to drive all other thoughts out of her mind-to

forget.

Claudia placed one hand to her chest in a "mercy me" sort of pose. "The

prodigal returns!" The dark face creased in lines of real welcome, and Lisa

began to feel better.

Gloval was absent from the bridge. The relief watch tech at Lisa's usual

station stepped away from it, glad to see Lisa but a little intimidated before

the omnipotent superwoman. "Nice to see you again," the enlisted rating

squeaked.

Lisa, nervous as a cat, managed to meet her eye for a moment. "Thank

40

you very much," Lisa got out, essaying a smile and then hiding behind her

thick curtian of brown hair again. "It's nice to be back."

She ran her fingertips across the console's controls, lost in thought.

There had been so many times when she'd never expected to stand there

again.

The women on the bridge were paying her a kind of attention that

didn't really conform to any conventional military courtesy-happy for her

and taking liberties with standard procedure.

"Congratulations on your promotion!"

"And you're a real hero!"

"We're all so proud of you, Lisa!" The tech who'd been watching over

Lisa's station had her hands clasped, smiling beatifically.

These were all women who had served their time under fire, who had

come to know what it was Lisa Hayes did so well and how much of a

difference her actions had made in the fate of SDF-1. Their few words meant

so much more to her than the spotlights and crowds-she felt her tension

ease; she was home again.

Now that she was back in familiar surroundings, everything that had

happened came back to her. A small part of her was preoccupied, sifting

through her emotions, but Lisa just savored the contentment of being back

where she belonged.

The things that had brought conflict to her-the kiss in the enemy

stronghold, the sight of Rick and Minmei-were, perhaps, aberrations.

Maybe it was just her destiny to be what those in her family had always

been-members of a military dynasty, her destiny tied to that of the SDF-1.

Certainly, all things seemed clear there on the battle fortress's bridge.

Doubts, misgivings-they fell away like dead flower petals.

Then Claudia was leaning an elbow on the console, too good a friend

not to understand exactly how Lisa felt, too good a friend not to kid her out

of it. "Well, how does it feel to be a heroine?" she purred.

Lisa's pale cheeks colored. "Oh, you!"

"Come on! Tell Aunt Claudia!" The dark eyes narrowed mischievously.

41

"Or did this promotion give you a sudden sense of modesty?"

Lisa lowered her gaze to the deck, avoiding eye contact as she often did

when she wasn't on duty. But she grinned at Claudia's jibe, the first time

she'd grinned in a while. She gave her friend a bemused smile.

"That's it! My secret's compromised!" Lisa crossed her arms on her

chest and made a severe face, imitating Captain Gloval at his sternest. She

rolled her r's, so there'd be no mistake. "So let's have a little respect here!"

Somebody Lisa didn't recognize returned from a coffee run, and they

all had some. "It's good to be here," Lisa said meditatively, letting the cup

warm her palms. Then she made a puckish expression. "And lemme tell ya,

the Zentraedi make lousy coffee."

Claudia realized something and set her cup down. "Hold on! Lisa, I

thought you were supposed to be on special furlough."

Lisa lowered her cup, not wanting to think too hard about the

ceremonies and the tangled feelings that had driven her back to the bridge.

She bit her lower lip for a moment and said, "I wanted to come home."

Claudia was about to say something to that; Lisa was both shielding

something and waiting for someone to draw her out about it. It seemed to

Claudia Grant a good time to order the enlisted crew off the bridge for chow

or whatever and get down to business.

But just then the hatch slid back again, and the Terrible Trio stood

there. Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa spied Lisa and charged in, the dignity of

rank forgotten. Lisa forgot it, too, swapping hugs with them and loving the

calm and strength and serenity of the SDF-1's armored bridge.

Claudia filed the subject of Lisa's furlough and her strange new

introspection away for discussion in the near future. She'd been protective

of Lisa ever since they'd met and tried not to let that spill over into nosiness,

but...

This girl needs a talking to, Claudia decided. And I'm not even sure

about what!

42

CHAPTER SIX

As an insect seen through an enlarging imager may appear a monster,

so these Micronians, magnified by a few minor successes and by an

unforgivable timidity among certain Zentraedi leaders, are permitted to

resist us. This has led to a stalemate; what Zentraedi worthy of the name

would permit this?

Khyron the Backstabber

The jeep roared down the empty SDF-1 passageway, rounding corners

on two wheels, tires shrieking. Ben Dixon enjoyed this kind of outing; he

usually took a slightly longer route to the fighter bays than he had to

because he so missed the open road.

Ben's dragster had been parked in an alley on Macross Island on the

day of the fatal spacefold maneuver. So now it was either a floating relic in

space back near Pluto's orbit or had been completely dismantled by the

salvage and reclamation people. Either way, he didn't like to think about it.

But barreling around the roomier parts of the dimensional fortress

helped ease his loss. The civilians had crowded-but-very-livable Macross

City, but once in a while some people needed to hit the road, floor the

accelerator, and let off a little steam. It was an open secret that some of the

less traveled regions of the SDF-1 had become virtual racetracks.

Ben took a corner even more sharply than usual and waited for Rick,

who was sitting in the seat next to him, to make a perfunctory objection. But,

lost in thought, the Vermilion Team leader didn't say anything. Sprawled in

the back, Max Sterling looked supremely unworried. Ben was a little bit

offended by that; Max was a good friend, but Ben expected passengers to be

a little intimidated when he drove. Yet nothing seemed to ruffle Max or dim

the boyish cheerfulness for which he'd become famous.

In fact, a few guys had decided that Max's goodnaturedness meant that

he was a wimp despite his ferocious flying skills. There'd been a few fights,

43

and Max had insisted that Rick keep Ben from interfering on his friend's

behalf.

Help wasn't necessary, anyway; Max's astonishing reflexes and

hand-eye coordination more than sufficed. Max always helped his

opponents to their feet afterward, still with that boyish smile; he even

performed first aid in one extreme case. After a while, interest in bothering

Max Sterling waned.

Max gave his blue hair a toss and resettled his glasses, turning at the

sound of another jeep engine. He leaned forward to tap Rick and point; at

the wheel, Roy Fokker was catching up to them, accompanied by three of

his Skull Team fliers.

"Hey, Rick!"

"Hi, Roy."

"Uh oh." Roy came up very close alongside, and Ben had to cut the

wheel to avoid an accident.

"Where d' you three think you're going?" Roy demanded.

They were on one of the longest straightaways in the ship, but they

were moving fast. Ben knew he was being tested; he sweated a bit but kept

on a steady course. But they were approaching the far bulkhead at an

alarmingly rapid speed, and there was room for only one jeep in its

hatchway.

The Skulls in Roy's jeep didn't seemed very thrilled about the

encounter either, but they knew better than to say anything to their

hotheaded leader.

"What'd you say?" Rick asked mildly.

Roy hollered, "I said, where d' you think you're going?"

Max leaned forward. "The PA system said for all military personnel to

report for duty!" he said. Ben Dixon began sweating bullets as the far

bulkhead got closer and closer.

"You had orders to stay behind, you nitwit! That announcement doesn't

apply to you guys!" Roy was shaking his fists in the air; the guy riding

shotgun grabbed the wheel while one of the others in the back seat began

44

crossing himself and the other spun a tiny prayer wheel. Roy ignored them,

keeping the accelerator floored.

"But that wasn't an order...specifically," Rick pointed out.

Roy had his hands back on the wheel. "Well, I'm making it an order!

Specifically! Return to quarters, and make it fast!"

Ben eased back, breathing a sigh of relief. Roy's jeep took the lead as

Rick yelled, "Gonna take on the enemy alone, huh?"

Roy turned and rose, his front seat passenger diving for the wheel

again. Roy shook his fists at the heroic escapees. "Maybe you'd rather report

to the brig for insubordination?"

Ben began braking. He and his friends chanted in perfect unison, "Not

really, sir! No thank you, sir!" a bootcamp response used here to mock Roy

by implying that he was as dumb as a drill sergeant.

Roy cracked an unwilling smile, then turned to take the wheel back

from his ashen-faced front seat passenger. "I'm glad you understand," he

called back, voice growing fainter. "Nobody likes a smart aleck!"

Ben stopped just short of the bulkhead, and Roy's jeep shot through the

hatch, speeding toward the fighter bays.

"There goes a wonderful guy," Ben said, letting out his breath.

The Zentraedi had a saying that in Earthly terms would translate to:

"Even wolves may be prey to the tiger."

So the huge armada kept its distance from SDF-1, pacing it on its

homing journey. Ironclad orders stated clearly that Zor's fortress was to be

captured with all its Protoculture secrets intact. From the perspective of the

fleet's commanders, the more important point at the moment was that the

SDF-1's main gun had proved itself operational, even though the Micronians

had used it very sparingly.

The Zentraedi couldn't figure out why-one of the mysteries that

prompted the placement of Bron, Rico, and Konda aboard SDF-1. What the

Zentraedi didn't know was how little the human race understood about the

giant ship and how vulnerable the SDF-1 really was.

45

All the Zentraedi knew for certain was that the ship contained enough

power to destroy whole star systems and rip the very fabric of space and

time. So the armada paced the battle fortress, watching and waiting.

A report was being delivered by a technician in a fleet command vessel.

"Commander Azonia, the super dimensional fortress had started to increase

its velocity."

Azonia looked up sharply at her intelligence analyst. Azonia sat in the

control seat amid a vast array of machinery and consoles and holographic

data displays that stretched away in every direction.

"What are your orders?" the analyst asked. Azonia glanced at the

various maps, readouts, and tactical projections.

"Dolza has given me no authority to destroy it," the armada's

commander replied, running a hand through her close-cropped blue-black

hair. "So we'll just follow it and see what happens." Azonia had replaced the

legendary Breetai as commander when he'd made one mistake too many,

and she had no intention of suffering similar humiliation.

The analyst bowed obediently, and withdrew from the command center.

Azonia pulled her campaign cloak tighter around her and adjusted the high

collar; she was having doubts she would never betray to a subordinate.

The Micronians' homeworld was close; what would happen there? The

original Zentraedi invasion force had smashed all Terran opposition until it

encountered those thrice-damned Robotech mecha-the Veritechs. And after

ail these months, who knew what new defenses the perversely ingenious

humans might have developed?

Allowing the super dimensional fortress to reach its destination was a

risky game at best; a disastrous one, perhaps. Yet Azonia couldn't see any

new orders coming from her superiors, nor could she come up with an

alternative course of action to offer them that didn't risk the loss of the

all-important secrets of Protoculture.

Azonia forced down those thoughts. There was still time to win, and

victory in this campaign would bring the most precious prize in all the

universe.

46

The SDF-1 was in its cruiser mode, which meant that the great main

gun couldn't be fired. This was unavoidable, however, since the giant

weapon would function only in Attack mode-a formation that rendered

Macross City virtually uninhabitable.

In its present configuration it looked like a conventional spacecraft or

even a naval vessel. The Thor-class suppercarriers Daedalus and Promethus

were swung back flush against it, and the two great booms of the main gun

were mated together to form a prow. The bridge and its attendant structures

rose above the main deck but still sat rather low.

As its gargantuan thrusters flared blue fire, the ultimate warcraft

approached the orbit of pockmarked Luna.

Claudia studied Earth's moon in her displays. "We are proceeding at

maximum speed, Captain," she reported. "Beginning Earth-approach

maneuver...now!"

Gloval appeared to be asleep: The polished visor of his cap was pulled

low down on the bridge of his nose, and his arms were folded across his

chest. But he said quite clearly, "Vanessa, how has the enemy fleet reacted?"

Vanessa pushed her glasses up, made a final sweep of her instruments

to be sure, and then turned to Gloval "They're still all around us, Captain,

but they're maintaining distance. It's strange-they're still matching our

speed exactly."

Gloval rubbed his cheek and realized he needed a shave. He didn't even

want to think about how tired he was. "It would appear they still don't want

to risk firing on the SDF-1. This would seem to bear out your theory, Lisa."

Lisa broke her intense concentration on her instruments to say, "I

certainly hope so, sir." If she was wrong, the battle fortress wouldn't last

another hour.

"We are approaching the orbit of Luna, Captain," Vanessa said tensely.

"Keep monitoring the enemy closely."

"Yes, sir."

Lisa chimed in, "Fighter ops reports Vermilion and Ghost teams ready

47

for takeoff, Captain." She did her best to sound businesslike and not think

about one of those Vermilion Team Veritechs. Especially its pilot...

Gloval nodded and hoped he wouldn't be forced to use them. They were

some of his very best pilots, but they'd been chewed up badly in the latest

installment of the running battle the SDF-1 had been fighting for months in

the remote, dark places of the solar system.

Earth was so close. Gloval would have given his own life without an

instant's hesitation if it would have meant repatriating all the refugees

who'd survived the brutal voyage. But that wasn't how things worked.

In a Zentraedi command center, a finger the size of a log stabbed at a

tactical display screen representation of the SDF-1 and the armada around

it.

Khyron could barely keep his voice from breaking in rage. "The

Micronian ship is here, and the ships under my command are here, behind

it. Now, at maximum speed, their vessel stands a good chance of

penetrating the net around it and escaping!"

He stared angrily at his second in command, Grel, and his trusted

subordinate, Gerao. "Are we to sit here with our arms folded while these

creatures get away and not raise a finger to stop it?"

"But Azonia has forbidden us to act," Grel pointed out. "What can we

do?"

Khyron slammed his palms down on the display console. "We will

crush them!"

Khyron, handsome and fiendish commander of the Zentraedi Seventh

Fleet and its mecha strike arm, the Botoru Battalion, had a reputation that

gave even the giant warriors pause. He had earned the nickname

"Backstabber": He had a reputation for savage ferocity, a total lack of feeling

for his own men, and an unquenchable thirst for bloodshed and triumph.

Grel knew better than to contradict his superior when the killing rage

was upon him. There was a persistent rumor that Khyron's secret vice was

the essence of the Flower of Life, a forbidden addiction; if that were so, he

48

used it in some form that made it a flower of death. In this mood, he was

capable of anything.

"Order the lead ships in the squadron to increase speed and attack!" he

roared, holding his hand high in a salute and gesture of command. "For the

glory of the Zentraedi...and of Khyron!"

Vanessa stared intently at her screens, calling out, "A squadron of

enemy battle cruisers has broken away from the rest of the fleet and is

moving in on us, Captain. Approximately ten of them."

Gloval stared out the forward viewport morosely. "Scramble fighters."

"Yes, sir." Lisa drew a deep breath, opening the PA mike. "Vermilion

and Ghost Teams, scramble, scramble!

Down in the hangar decks of the supercarrier Daedalus, there was the

controlled chaos of a "hot" scramble, one that everybody knew was no drill.

The huge elevators began raising the Veritechs to the flight deck port and

starboard, two to a lift.

Roy Fokker pulled on his flight helmet and checked his controls as his

ship was moved out for lift by a tow driver. Roy was Skull Leader, but

experienced pilots were in such terribly short supply and Rick and the

others were on enforced R&R, so he had to help fill the ranks of the depleted

Vermilions, especially at a critical time like this.

The Veritechs' stabilizers and wings began sliding into flight position.

Cat crews rushed to hook up and launch the fighters; The Veritechs went

into a vigilant holding pattern, ready to fend off any attack against the VTs

that were still vulnerable, awaiting launch.

The cats slung the fighters out into space; the blue Robotech drives

flared, and the Vermilions and Ghosts formed up to do battle yet again.

Gloval had hoped to avoid it, but he gave the order nevertheless.

"Engage SDF-1 transformation and activate pin-point defensive barrier. We

are breaking through the alien fleet!"

49

"Macross City evacuation is nearly complete, Captain," Sammie told

him.

The voices of the others kept up a constant, quiet flow of orders and

report. "All sectors begin transformation." "All section chiefs please report

to the bridge." "Damage crews stand by." "Emergency medical and rescue

personnel ready, Captain."

Banks of screens showed interior and exterior scenes, the frantic haste

to brace for attack and reconfiguration.

Once again the awesome, incredible, and perilous Robotech

transformation of SDF-1 was about to take place.

It had been hard to get used to the bustle and activity of Macross City,

but this sudden abandonment of it was even stranger.

The three Zentraedi spies still had no idea what was happening. The PA

announcements were bewildering, impossible to understand. The trio was

hesitant to show ignorance at first, but by the time they'd worked up the

nerve to start asking questions, everybody was scurrying in a different

direction and answers were impossible to get.

Now they found themselves standing at the center of a deserted

intersection as traffic lights and crosswalk signals blinked through their

accustomed sequences. The EVE system was shut down, the artificial sky

gone, leaving only cold, distant metal high overhead.

"Everyone's vanished," Rico said slowly, pivoting through a 360-degree

turn. It felt very spooky to be standing in the middle of an empty city.

"What d' you think that announcement was?" Konda asked. "What

could it be-this 'transformation' they're talking about?"

Bron was about to add something when the street began to quake

beneath them, tossing them around like water droplets on a griddle. As

deep grinding noises began, they were thrown to the surface, so they tried to

cling to the pavement. They could feel the vibrations through the ground.

Then the street parted beneath them and an enormous sawtooth

opening widened rapidly. Despite his hysterical scrambling, Rico

50

disappeared into it.

51

CHAPTER SEVEN

What they never asked themselves was whether Khyron would have

behaved as he did if it hadn't been for the accursed Micronians! I hated

Micronians, too; we all did. It was just that Khyron was better at it.

Grey aide to Khyron

Reacting faster than Bron, Konda just managed to grab Rico's sleeve

and keep him from falling beyond reach. Then Bron was there to help pull

his companion back out of the abyss.

It was a long drop, into a type of machinery they hadn't seen in the

battle fortress before. Rico lay puffing and gasping, white-faced. "What kind

of insane place is this?"

Elsewhere, the titanic booms that were the battle fortress's bow were

rotated to either side by monster camlike devices. Whole sections of hull

moved and slid, opening the ship's interior to the vacuum of space as

precious atmosphere escaped. Giant armor curtains slid into place to seal

the gaps, but not before there was grievous loss of the very breath of life.

The SDF-1's life support systems would eventually replace it, but the

inhabitants of Macross would be living under the same atmospheric

conditions as Andean Indians for a while-if they survived.

Enormous pylons the dimensions of a city block rose from the floor and

descended from the ceiling, crushing the buildings in their way. The

grinding of servomotors shook every bolt and rivet in the ship.

Scraps of buildings, torn loose by the outpouring of air, were whirled

around like leaves in a cyclone. Macross City was being leveled.

The three spies went dashing down the middle of a broad, empty street,

dodging a falling sign here, a broken cornice there. Utility poles toppled,

whipping live power lines around like snapping, spitting snakes. Konda

puffed, "I think it would be advisable for us to take cover as soon as-"

52

He never got to finish. Just then, the ship's internal gravity fields

shifted from the effect of the massive power drains of the transformation.

The three went floating into the air among drifting automobiles, scraps

of roofing material, uprooted trees, and spinning trash barrels.

All through the great fortress, modules shifted, and billboard-size

hatches closed here, opened there.

The full-ship transformation had the two Thor-class flattops, Daedalus

and Prometheus, swinging out from the SDF-1's sides by the elbowlike

housings that joined them to the ship. The midships structure that housed

the bridge and so many other critical areas rotated, coming end for end into

the center like a spinning torso.

Inside, cyclopean power columns met and latched as cables snaked out

to connect with them and complete the new configuration.

Gloval fought to stifle his impatience; the ship was nearly helpless

while undergoing transformation, but there was absolutely no way of

hurrying it. And there was no alternative: The SDF-1's main gun couldn't be

fired in any other configuration because the ship spacefold apparatus had

simply vanished after that first disastrous jump from Earth to Pluto. The

transformation was a kind of glorified hot-wiring, bringing together

components that would otherwise be out of each other's reach.

"Starboard wing section transformation seventy-five percent

complete," Vanessa said.

"Port wing section transformation complete," Kim added. "Now

connecting to defensive power system."

"Enemy vessels approaching in attack formation," Lisa said, her face lit

by her screens. "Estimated intercept in fifty-three seconds. Ghost and

Vermilion teams on station to engage."

The battle fortress had become a tremendous armored ultratech

warrior standing, straddle-legged, in space, awaiting its enemies. They

swooped at it eagerly.

"The enemy's within range of our main gun, sir," Kim said.

53

From Vanessa: "Fighter ops reports all Veritechs clear of the line of

fire."

"Transformation complete, Captain," Sammie told Gloval.

"Fire!" Gloval growled.

The safety shield had been retracted from the main gun's trigger. Lisa

pressed the red button hard.

Tongues of starflame began shooting back and forth between the

booms that constituted the gargantuan main gun, whirling and crackling

like living serpents of energy.

The blizzard of energy grew thicker, more intense. Then it leapt away,

straight out from the booms, merging and growing brighter until suddenly

there was a virtual river of orange-white annihilation, as broad and high as

the ship itself.

The hell-beam tore through space. The first ten heavyweight warships

from Khyron's contingent flared briefly, like matches in the middle of a

Veritech's after blast. In a split second their shields failed, their armor

vaporized, and they were gone.

Khyron's handsome face was distorted like a maniac's. "We must press

the attack! Move the next wave in!" The Zentraedi warrior's code could

forgive audacity-even direct disobedience-from an officer who won. But

defeat might very well be unforgivable and earn him the death penalty.

More heavy ships-of-the-line moved up, firing plasma cannon and

annihilation discs. The SDF-1 shook and resounded from the first hits.

There were a few gasps on the bridge, but Gloval and the bridge crew

concentrated on their jobs.

The enemy dreadnoughts' blue-fire cannon volleys rained on the SDF-1

as Khyron's second attack wave bored in.

The three green-white discs of the dimensional fortress's pin-point

barrier system, each bigger than a baseball infield, slid along the ship's

surface like spotlight circles. The disaster of the spacefold equipment's

disappearance had left the vessel unable to protect itself completely; the

54

pin-point system was the stopgap defense developed by the resident

Robotech genius, Dr. Lang.

Now, the female enlisted-rating techs who operated the pinpoints

sweated and flickered their eyes from ship's schematics to threat-display

screens to readouts from the. prioritization computers. In a frantic effort to

block enemy beams they spun and twirled the spherical controls that moved

the pin-point barrier shield loci across the ship's hull.

The circles of light slid and flashed across the battle fortress's

superalloy skin. Enemy beams that hit them simply dissipated, changing the

locicircles into a series of concentric, rippling rings for a split second. Then

the circles came back to full strength, racing off to intercept another shot.

No one had ever done that kind for work before, and the three young

women were good at what they did-experts by necessity. But sometimes,

unavoidably, they missed...

The SDF-1 shuddered at another impact. "Starboard engine has been

hit," Claudia informed Gloval without looking up from her console.

Gloval said nothing but worried much. Even now, a decade and more

after the SDF-1's original appearance and crash landing on Earth, nobody

understood very much about its enigmatic, sealed power plants-not even

the brilliant Lang. What would happen if an engine were broached? Gloval

didn't spare time to worry about it.

The bad news was coming fast. "Industrial section hit." "Sector

twenty-seven completely nonfunctioning."

Claudia looked to Gloval. "The pin-point barrier is losing power."

Gloval didn't permit himself to show his dismay. Now what? he

thought. We've fought so hard, endured so much, come so close. "Keep

firing the main battery!" he said, aloud.

Lisa knew how to read him so well after all these years. Look at him,

she thought. It's hopeless! I know it!

"Lisa, didn't you hear the order?" Claudia was yelling, a little

desperately.

55

"Yes," Lisa said resolutely. She pressed the trigger again.

Another unimaginable flood of utter destruction leapt out to devour the

second Zentraedi wave.

In her command center, Azonia watched a dozen proud Zentraedi

warships vanish from the tactical display screens.

"That imbecile Khyron! What does he think he's doing? He has no

authority whatsoever for this attack!"

Yaita, her aide, said laconically, "No, Commander." Then, "Therefore,

what are your orders?"

In an event of this magnitude there was opportunity for the right junior

officer to get herself noticed, perhaps even mentioned in dispatches to

Dolza's headquarters. Interfering with the unstable battle lord risked a

confrontation, perhaps even combat, but by nature Yaita was a risk taker.

Azonia, even more so. "I shall have to force Khyron to break off his

attack myself."

Yaita said, "You mean to divert part of the fleet blockade? But the

enemy vessel might find a way to break through!"

"It can't be avoided," Azonia said coldly. "That ship must not be

destroyed. Its Protoculture secrets are the key to the Zentraedi's ultimate

victory."

Vanessa relayed the information, "The aliens are bringing up

reinforcements, Captain; nearly two hundred heavy warships." She looked

up from her console. "Analysis indicates that's too many for us to handle."

"The barrier's weakening rapidly," Sammie said.

"We're losing power," Kim added.

Vanessa watched her tactical screens, ready to give the grim details as

the enemy closed in for the kill. But she suddenly had trouble believing

what she was seeing. "What's going on? The reinforcements are breaking

formation-spreading out and closing in on the other enemy ships!"

56

Khyron watched his trans-vid displays furiously as Azonia's fleet swept

in to close with his own reduced forces. "What is that woman up to now?"

The Micronian vessel was nearly his; he could feel it.

I will not be thwarted again!

A projecbeam created an image of Azonia in midair over his head.

"Khyron, you fool! Dolza has given you no authority whatsoever to destroy

the Earth ship!"

Khyron felt that insane wrath welling up in him once again, a fury so

boundless that his vision began to blur. He growled like an animal through

locked teeth.

Azonia was saying, "As commander of this force, I am ordering you to

cease this attack at once and withdraw to your assigned position-or you will

find yourself facing Zentraedi guns!"

Studying the tactical readouts, Grel said, "Captain, her entire arsenal is

already being aimed at us."

Khyron crashed his first on the map console. "That blasted meddling

idiot of a woman!"

He may have been called Khyron the Backstabber by some, but he'd

never been called Khyron the Suicide or Khyron the Fool. Azonia had the

rest of the armada to back her in this confrontation.

Khyron had no choice. With Azonia's ships blocking their way, his

vessels reduced speed, and the SDF-1 began to put distance between itself

and its enemies.

"They're escaping!" Khyron's voice was a harsh croak. "And so Azonia

robs me of my triumph. But I swear: I shall not forget this!"

Grel had heard that tone in his commander's voice before. He smiled

humorlessly.

If Azonia was wise, she would begin guarding her back at all times.

The immense Robotech knight that was the SDF-1 descended to Earth's

atmosphere, toward the swirling white clouds and the blue ocean.

"I don't understand it," Claudia said. "They screened us from their own

57

attack."

"I know, but we'll worry about that after we get back to Earth, Claudia,"

Gloval answered.

"Reentry in ten seconds," she told him.

"Steady as she goes, Lisa," Gloval ordered calmly. All the equations and

theories about how the reconfigured SDF-1 would take its first grounding in

Earthnormal gravity were just that: theories. Any one of an almost infinite

number of things might go wrong, but there was no alternative. Soon the

ship's crew and inhabitants would find out the truth.

"Atmospheric contact," Claudia reported.

The giant warrior ship descended on long pillars of blue-white fire that

gushed from its thruster legs and from the thrusters built into the bows of

Daedalus and Prometheus. "Order all hands to secure for landing," Gloval

directed.

Elsewhere, the strain was beginning to tell. Power surges and outages,

overloads and explosions, were lighting up warning indicators all over the

bridge.

"Starboard engines have suffered major damage from the reentry, sir,"

Claudia said. "And gravity control's becoming erratic."

"The explosions have caused some hull breaches, Captain, and we're

losing power quickly," Lisa put in.

"This is going to be some splashdown," Gloval muttered to himself. At

least the loss of atmosphere didn't matter anymore; in moments they'd

either have all the sweet atmosphere of Earth to breathe or they wouldn't

need air ever again.

Claudia counted off the last few yards of descent. Vast clouds of steam

rose from the ocean as the waters boiled from the heat of the drive thrusters.

Then the ship hit the water.

At first, the ocean parted around it, bubbling and vaporizing. Then it

came rushing back in again, overwhelming even that tremendous heat and

blast. SDF-1 sank, sank, the waves crashing against its armor, then racing

away from it, until at last it disappeared from sight beneath the churning

58

water.

Moments passed, and the sea began to calm itself again. Suddenly, a

spear of metal broke the surface; then three more: the long tines at the tips

of the booms of the ship's main gun. The booms rose, shedding water, and

then the bridge. The SDF-1's shoulder structures came up, and then the

elbow housings, until at last Daedalus and Prometheus were up, their flight

decks shedding millions of gallons of water.

The calculations were right; SDF-1 was an immense machine, but it

was quite buoyant and seaworthy. It gleamed brightly as the seawater

streamed down its hull.

59

CHAPTER EIGHT

"There's no excuse for sloppy discipline-not even victory," Colonel

Maistroff was fond of lecturing us. Maybe so, but I never saw a haircut win a

battle.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

Gloval and his bridge crew gazed out at the serene ocean. The Terrible

Trio was intoxicated with joy.

"Home again-after so long!"

"It's just beautiful!"

"Home-"

Sammie, Vanessa, and Kim, arms around one another, turned to the

others. "Welcome back!"

Claudia was brushing tears away, and Lisa just stared at the sea, not

knowing exactly what she felt.

Gloval lit his pipe; regulations be hanged. "Now, how about a little

fresh air?"

Major access hatches began cranking open all around the Macross City

area; light and wonderful sea breezes flooded in. Blinking and gaping, the

inhabitants of the city began to congregate in the air locks and on the outer

decks.

When they finally believed what their senses were telling them, the

cheering began-the backslapping and hugging and kissing and laughter.

People stood in the sunlight and cried or prayed, shook hands solemnly or

jumped up and down, sank to their knees or just stood, staring.

Kim's voice came over the PA. "We've touched down in the Pacific

Ocean. The captain and crew extend their gratitude to the citizens of

Macross for your splendid cooperation during a difficult and dangerous

voyage. It's good to be home."

A big hatch dropped open just below the bridge. Ben Dixon was the

60

first one out onto the open deck, laughing and turning somersaults, leaping

into the air ecstatically.

More Veritech pilots and crew people rushed after him. Rick and Max

stood watching Ben carrying on. "He'd make a pretty good acrobat, wouldn't

he?" Max commented.

Rick smiled. "Probably, but-look at that blue sky. That's no EVE

projection! I can't say I blame Ben a bit."

Ben was pointing into the sky. "Look! They're giving us a fighter fly-by

to welcome us!"

So it seemed; twenty or more ships that resembled VTs, bearing the

familiar delta markings of Earth's Robotech Defense Forces, came zooming

in in tight formation to pass over the SDF-1.

But the three pilots felt their joy ebb as they were struck by the same

thought: The Zentraedi were still out there, millions of ships strong.

An endless series of details kept Gloval busy for the next few hours,

including the recovery of the Vermilion and Ghost fighters who'd flown

escort during the SDF-1's final bolt to safety.

But at last he put aside other duties, satisfied that subordinates could

take care of the remaining details, and repaired to his cabin to complete his

compilation of log excerpts.

The Earth authorities would soon have all the facts as he knew them.

Gloval wondered if the leaders. of the United Earth Government would

believe all that had happened to the SDF-1 in the months since it had

disappeared. Sometimes Gloval himself had trouble.

He reviewed the long tape he'd compiled to amplify the other materials.

Starting with the initial Zentraedi attack, when so much of Earth's military

force had been obliterated and the dimensional fortress had activated itself,

the log covered all the important incidents of the running battle with the

aliens.

There'd been the ghastly aftermath of the spacefold jump and the

almost insurmountable problems of getting tens of thousands of Macross

61

refugees settled in the ship. The Daedalus Maneuver, Lisa Hayes's

inspiration, had allowed the humans to win their first resounding victory

amid the icy rings of Saturn.

Lisa saved the day again, this time on Mars, by destroying the alien

gravity mines that had been holding SDF-1 on the Red Planet's surface. The

ship's most recent crisis began when radar was disabled by enemy fire,

leading to a foray by a Cat's-Eye recon ship-piloted by Lisa Hayes, of course.

Gloval didn't like to think too hard about the fate his command would

have suffered if he hadn't been lucky enough to have had Lisa with him.

Certainly there were skilled and courageous men and woman throughout

the SDF-1; examples of extreme bravery and ingenuity were too many to

mention. But it seemed that Lisa's devotion, valor, and special loyalty to the

SDF-1 and to Gloval made her the pivotal figure in almost every action the

ship fought. It made it that much more difficult for Gloval to see how few

real friends Lisa had, how empty her life was of anything but service and

duty. Of course, he had no right to interfere with her personal life, but he

couldn't help being worried about her.

The most important thing Gloval had to present to the United Earth

Government was an enigma: The molecular and genetic structure of the

Zentraedi was so formidable that some of them could even survive

unprotected in the vacuum of space for short periods of time; their sheer

physical strength was a match for that of Battloids and other human

Robotech mecha-yet they had nearly collapsed at the sight of two relatively

tiny humans sharing a kiss.

Moreover, the Zentraedi didn't seem to know anything about repairing

their equipment. It was as though they were a servant race using the

machinery given them by some higher power, yet they boasted of being the

mightiest warriors in the known universe.

Gloval shook his head, hoping the Earth authorities would have

additional information or analyses that would shed some light on the

mysteries surrounding the war.

He worked for hours, inserting updates and clarifying things that

62

warranted it, condensing wherever he could. Twice he dozed briefly, then

got back to work, making an occasional status-check call to the bridge. The

relief officer on duty, Lieutenant Claudia Grant, assured him all was well.

A quarantine area had been established around the battle fortress-not

surprising, Gloval supposed-and a communication blackout had been

imposed for the time being. The crewpeople took that fairly well-they were

used to military discipline-and even the civilians had been too delirious with

joy to be very upset by it so far. Gloval could see why his superiors might

want to maintain radio silence until he'd appeared to give his full report, but

he hoped the need for it wouldn't last much longer.

The civilians were still celebrating, but they wouldn't be satisfied with

that indefinitely.

He brought the tape to a close, puffing on his briar as he dictated. "I am

convinced the Zentraedi have more firepower than we can even imagine.

The situation is extremely critical, and I believe that a central issue in this

war they've forced on us is this mysterious 'Protoculture' they keep

mentioning. I therefore suggest that-what? Come in!"

The rapping had been gentle. Lisa entered with a pot of fresh coffee. "I

thought you could use some about now, sir."

"Thank you; it smells wonderful." She came in, and the coffee's aroma

filled the cabin, cutting the aroma of the pipe tobacco.

She poured while he glanced up at an ancient brass ship's clock on his

wall. "I did not realize what time it was."

He put the pipe aside. The ashtray lay next to a detailed analysis and

history of living arrangements and social organization in Macross City and

the SDF-1 during the voyage. The SDF-1 held far and away the largest

human population ever to travel in space, and that on a voyage of very long

duration. The data on how people had coped with their living conditions

and somehow managed to make things work would be very important,

Gloval suspected. There would have to be a lot more humans in space for

long periods of time, sooner than anyone expected.

Gloval threw back the curtains, looking out the high, wide curve of

63

viewport at a Pacific dawn. He'd forgotten how many seemingly impossible

colors there could be in such a sunrise-the purples and reds and pinks. He'd

forgotten how the water broke the light into a million pieces and the sky

ignited.

"Here you are, sir," Lisa said, handing him his cup, prepared just the

way he liked it. They gazed out at the peace and powerful beauty of the

dawn,

"I never thought I'd see anything as beautiful as this ever again," Lisa

said. It was a moment of such tranquillity, such oneness with the planet that

had been their goal for so long, such satisfaction with a protracted,

seemingly hopeless mission accomplished at last, that she did her best to

lock it in her heart and senses and memory-a treasure that she could relive

occasionally. Sparingly.

"You're right," Gloval said at length. "I feel the same way. You know, I

have a confession to make."

Lisa sipped her coffee, watching the sea, saying nothing. Gloval went

on. "I had a premonition when I took command of this ship, the feeling that

something terrible would happen. It's difficult to explain, but it was a

conviction that something would happen to us that would change us

forever."

She studied his face. "And it seems that you were right.".

He was staring at the sea and the rising sun, though she doubted he

was really seeing them. "This ship still has its secrets, Lisa, but what are

they? We must find out; I can't escape the feeling that everything depends

on it.

It was strange to see the flight deck crews working in conventional

coveralls and safety helmets again after months in vacuum suits, strange to

think that most planes would need a catapult launch from the SDF-1 and

the flatdecks now in order to get up airspeed.

Theoretically, the transport that was waiting for Gloval and Lisa didn't

need a launch; it was a VTOL job, capable of lifting off like a helo. Still, it

64

had the reinforced nose and landing gear of a naval aircraft, and SOP

recommended that fixed-wing aircraft receive cat launch.

Gloval walked toward it with Lisa at his side, his attached case

weighted with documents, tapes, photographs, reports, and evaluation

reports on those reports. His feet scuffed against areas of missing nonskid

surface on the flight deck, flaps of it having been peeled loose by the

violence of SDF-1's homecoming.

Scores of crewmen were just completing an FOD walkdown of the flight

deck, pacing its length in a line abreast running from port to starboard.

Foreign Object Damage was a thing much to be feared on a carrier; no scrap

of debris could be left to be sucked into a jetcraft's air intake.

The weather remained fair, but now a thick odor rose from the sea. The

superheated steam and hard radiation produced by the dimensional

fortress's touchdown had resulted in a considerable fish kill, even so far out

at sea; the sun was warming the foul-smelling soup that lapped around the

hulls of the carriers and the approximate hip level of the SDF-1's "torso."

Still, the stench came from far below and was easy to endure, mixed as it

was with the trade winds that carried Earth's inimitable air to people who

had been breathing reprocessed gases for months now.

Gloval was tight-tipped and silent, feeling strange premonitions like

the one he'd mentioned to Lisa. The United Earth Government's replies to

his messages had been terse, noncommittal. It seemed he had another

desperate job of convincing to do.

Lisa emulated her captain, saying nothing and betraying nothing by

her expression as she followed him up the boarding ladder into the

transport. A crew member closed the hatch, and the transport's turbines

increased their howl.

The plane had already been boxed-aligned on the catapult and fitted

with an appropriate breakaway holdback link that was color-coded for its

particular job. The transport's downswept wings bobbed minutely as the

catapult crew got ready to launch.

When the cat crew had gone through their ritual, the transport shot

65

away, taking lift from the sudden flare at the bow, off the angled flight deck,

in a cloud of catapult steam.

Kim stretched, arms behind her head, gazing down at the carrier deck

from the SDF-1's bridge. She sighed. "Well, there they go; at least they got a

clean launch."

She was standing at the vast sweep of the bridge's forward viewport

with Sammie, Vanessa, and Claudia, following the transport's climb.

Little Sammie shook her long, straight locks of blond hair back from

her face. "I wish I were going, too," she said forlornly, resting her chin on

the viewport ledge.

Claudia unwillingly told herself that it was time to scold a little, not

sympathize; these last few hours or days before the SDF-1 crew was relieved

might be the most demanding of all where discipline was concerned.

So she chided, "What're you talking about, Sammie? D' you know how

cold Alaska is this time of year? Or any time of year? You should be glad

you're staying where it's warm."

"Well, I'm not," Sammie said bravely.

"At least we'd be off the ship," Vanessa pointed out, adjusting her

glasses self-consciously. She and Kim nodded supportively and made low

"uh huh!" sounds.

Claudia was suddenly stern. "All right, that's enough of that! First off,

the captain and Lisa are on a classified mission, which means we don't talk

about it any more than we have to for duty purposes. And we don't mention

it at all outside this bridge, do you roger that transmission?"

The Terrible Trio nodded quickly, gulping, in unison.

The hatch slid aside as a voice startled them. "Good morning, ladies!

I'd like-"

The greeting was cut off by a sharp whap! of impact. The bridge crew

turned in surprise, Sammie letting out a small cry. Claudia maintained her

composure, but it wasn't easy.

"Oh! Ouch! Uhhhh!" Colonel Maistroff was in the hatchway, rubbing

his forehead, his cap knocked back cockeyed on his head by the impact,

66

holding himself up with one hand against the frame.

Everyone there knew Maistroff, and not for any cordial reason; one

didn't make allies of the bridge crew by crossing Captain Gloval.

Claudia fluttered her eyelashes and said disingenuously, "Colonel, are

you all right? That hatchway's terribly low! I recommend you duck down

when coming onto the bridge, sir. Captain Gloval always does."

There was something in the expressions of the bridge crew that said

that they resented Maistroff's taking this liberty; it was his right to act as if

he were Gloval, but they were not required to play along with the pretense.

Maistroff rubbed a growing knot over one eye, making a low grating

sound so that subordinates wouldn't hear him groan in pain. "Thank you for

that warning, Lieutenant Grant; you're only about ten seconds too late."

He stopped rubbing his forehead and squared his cap's visor away. The

Terrible Trio trooped past him, in step, on their way to their duty stations.

"I just came up to officially take over command of this vessel in Captain

Gloval's absence."

Claudia held all her personal feelings in check; she'd had a taste of

what command was now and was willing to give even Maistroff the benefit

of the doubt. "Yes, sir; I'd heard that you would. I'm sure you'll enjoy the

experience."

He glowered at her. "Mmm. I don't think that 'enjoy' is quite the

appropriate word, miss. But I do expect to run a tight ship." He moved past

her, going to the forward viewport.

Claudia tried to get a grip on herself. Tight ship! She'd had the feeling

he'd say that. As though Captain Gloval runs a loose ship! As if Captain

Gloval isn't the best skipper in-

"No more slipping around the rules;" Maistroff was saying. "What this

bridge needs is a good dose of discipline." Gazing grandly out the forward

viewport, he drew a long cigar from the breast pocket of his uniform jacket.

It was plain that he was savoring the moment. Perhaps he had saved

the stogie all this time since the SDF-1's accidental departure so that he

could smoke it on the bridge as master. Maistroff made a production of

67

biting off the end, rolling the cigar between his fingers, and moistening it

front and back between his lips.

His indescribable pleasure in the moment was broken by a

high-pitched voice. "There's no smoking on the bridge, sir!"

"What?" Maistroff whirled on Sammie, who was out of her chair and

didn't look in the least daunted by his scowl.

"It's on page two of the ship's SOP rule book-standard operating

procedure, isn't it, sir?"

Claudia couldn't for the life of her figure out whether Sammie was

serious or was having her little snipe at the colonel. Apparently, neither

could Maistroff.

He turned back to the viewport, holding the cigar as if somebody else

had put it in his fingers, not willing to throw it away but unable to do much

of anything else with it. His back was ramrod straight, and his cheeks

flushed a bright red.

"Ah, of course. I was only holding it. I had no intention of lighting it."

He gritted his teeth but refused to take official recognition when he heard

female giggling and tittering behind him.

"Excuse me, Colonel," Claudia said. "Will there be anything else, sir?"

He turned to her, trying to put down his anger, cold cigar clenched in

his teeth, hands clasped behind him. "What? What?"

She said gently, "I was officer on the last watch, sir. Am I relieved?" She

saluted.

He was doubly red-faced to have forgotten so simple a thing as

relieving her of the command. "Oh!" He answered her salute. "Sure, you go

right along, Lieutenant Grant. I'm sure we'll be able to operate just fine until

you get back." He smiled indulgently.

As Claudia gathered her things, Maistroff went to inspect the rest of the

bridge and incidentally try Gloval's chair to see how it felt. Making sure that

he wouldn't hear, Vanessa whispered to Claudia, "Y' better check in later to

make sure the bridge is still here!"

The Terrible Trio stifled their laughter. Claudia smiled. "You hang in

68

there, girls."

Reflecting that Maistroff didn't know what real opposition was like but

would find out if he crossed the Terribles, Claudia left the bridge.

69

CHAPTER NINE

Hey, I was managin' a couple of other class acts when I signed Minmei,

y' know? I mean, I wasn't just chopped liver, kapish? I mean, I had the Acnes,

who had a big, fat bullet: "I'll Be a Goo-goo for You."

Anyway, Minmei-doll hits the scene, and I can't even get my other acts

arrested! "Minmei! Minmei!" People don't wanna hear anything else.

The public-go figure.

Vance Hasslewood, Minmei's personal manager,

interviewed on Jan Morris's on-ship TV show,

"Good Morning, SDF!"

The city of Macross hadn't seen fireworks since that fateful day when

the Zentraedi first appeared in the solar system. There had been plenty of

explosions, all right, but not simple skyrockets and colored bursts.

Now, fireworks flashed high over Prometheus's flight deck. Canopies

and marquees were set up, and an old-fashioned town festival was in

progress.

Strings of firecrackers banged and snapped on the nonskid, and

streamers and confetti flew in squalls, carried by the sea breezes. Many had

chosen to wear costumes, and some wore fantastic, gruesome giant masks

that covered them from head to foot. There was dancing and laughter; a sort

of communal drunkenness with joy.

On an improvised speaker's platform, Mayor Tommy Luan held his

hands high. "Our troubles are finally over! Let's make this party last all

week!"

The stocky little mayor's good friend, Vern Havers, a lean,

mournful-looking man with a receding hairline, clung to the side of the

platform to call up anxiously, "But what about packing? Shouldn't we be

getting ready to leave?"

"Vern, this isn't a day for packing! We have plenty of time for that!

70

Don't you think that the Macross survivors deserve a celebration after all

we've been through?"

The mayor looked up at the looming SDF-1, its silent guns throwing

long shadows across the deck. "Besides, once we leave this ship, we'll

probably never see it again."

Vern hadn't even thought about that, but it made sense; SDF-1 would

have to take up its job of guarding Earth; the rebuilt Macross City would of

course be dismantled.

Like many others, Vern had dreamed of returning to Earth, had lived

for it, all these months; but now, like many others, he felt strangely sad that

a unique time in his life was ending. He hoped there could be some kind of

open house or something so people could see what the citizens of Macross

had accomplished before all their handiwork was swept away.

"Well," he said, "if you put it that way, I suppose you may be right."

The mayor was literally hopping up and down, from his own swelling

emotions. "Of course I'm right! Now, let's party!"

Vern resigned himself to the inevitable. It was good to be back on Earth,

but he was beginning to realize how difficult it would be to get used to

uneventful peacetime life.

Elsewhere in the milling, boisterous crowd, the three Zentraedi spies

were trying to absorb what they were seeing around them.

Gaiety like this was unknown among their people; certainly the

frivolous consumption of food and drink, scandalous mingling of males and

females, and pointless merrymaking would be a court-martial offense

among the warrior race.

Konda was absorbing something else-his third cup of an intriguing

purple liquid with ice cubes floating in it-when Bron, gawking at all the

goings-on, jostled his elbow.

Konda, vexed when some of his drink spilled, gave the bigger spy a

shove. "Clumsy! Can't you be more careful?"

Bron looked hurt. Konda said, "I'm sampling something called 'punch,'

and you interrupted my experimentation."

71

Bron looked at the beverage dubiously. "It seems to me you've imbibed

more than is necessary for a mere effects test, Konda."

Konda pushed the cup into Bron's hands. "Here! You try it! I know

where to get more, and the requisitioning procedure is puzzlingly informal."

He hiccuped.

Bron sniffed the stuff suspiciously; then, after a final glance at Konda

to make sure he showed no sign of toxic reaction, he downed the punch in

two big swallows. It was cold but somehow had a warming effect. He gagged

a little but felt a pleasant sensation course through him.

"I don't know what's in this stuff," Konda said with a foolish grin, "but

it sure is getting me charged up!"

Oh my goodness! thought Bron. "You...you mean it's got some kind of

Protoculture in it?"

Exasperated, Konda was considering clouting Bron in the head for

being such a dummy, when Rico rushed up to them angrily. "Why aren't you

two making noise like the rest of these people? You want them to notice us?

Well then, pretend you're having fun!"

Rico, too, held a cup of the punch; it was all but empty, and he looked a

little bleary-eyed. He threw one fist up and yelled, "Yay-yyy!" so loudly that

he quite startled his companions. "We finally made it back! We're home

again!"

"Hurrah! We beat the enemy!" Konda added helpfully. "Hurrah for us!

Hurrah for Earth!"

"Down with the Zentraedi!" Bron burst out, doing a little jigging dance

step. That punch beverage, whatever it was, had him feeling rather, well,

happy. "Up with the Micronians! Down..."

He realized the other two were staring at him. Bron covered his mouth

with his hand in anguish. "Oh, my! I didn't know what I was saying! Konda,

Rico-please don't report me!"

Just then a young woman dressed as a medieval princess and carrying

two cups of punch swept by. She saw the three standing together, one

without a cup. She put her extra one into Konda's hand and clinked glasses

72

with them, grinning behind her silvery domino mask. "To home and

friendship!" Then she was gone in the crowd.

The three spies looked at one another for a moment, then echoed, "To

home and friendship," and clinked cups as the celebration swirled around

them.

With most of the off-duty crew and virtually all the civilians up at the

party, SDF-1's passageways were empty, giving the ship a haunted feel.

Making her way toward the VT pilots' living quarters section, Claudia Grant

tried to put that fool Maistroff out of her mind and concentrate on enjoying

her brief time off watch.

For the first time in months, the Veritech pilots weren't flying constant

patrols or combat missions, and SDF-1 was being manned by a virtual

skeleton crew. So her free time meshed with Roy's for the first time in a long

time.

The love affair between Claudia Grant and Lieutenant Commander Roy

Fokker, as passionate as it was romantic, had been terribly strained by the

demands of the SDF-1's desperate voyage. But now there would be time to

be together-the very best thing about the dimensional fortress's return, as

far as Claudia was concerned.

She signaled at the hatch to his quarters but got no response. Rapping

on it with her knuckles was no more effective.

Claudia wasn't about to miss her chance to see him. Perhaps he'd left

her a note. She tapped the hatch release and entered as the hatch slid aside.

Roy Fokker-leader of the Veritech Skull Team, heroic ace of the

Robotech War-lay snoring softly, dead to the world, his long blond hair

fanned out on the pillow. At six foot six, he hadn't yet found a military-issue

bunk that fit him; his feet and the covers stuck off the end of the bed.

It had been said of Roy that "he doesn't fly a jet; he wears it." But right

now Roy looked like nothing so much as a sleepy kid.

For months we never have the chance to be alone, and when the

opportunity finally arrives, he sleeps through it! But she couldn't be mad at

73

him. He'd been on duty, usually in the cockpit of a fighter, just about every

waking hour since the spacefold jump.

Poor dear; he must be exhausted. "Oh, well..." She pulled the covers up

over his shoulders, then turned to go.

"Hey, hold up!" She turned to see Roy sitting up in bed, blinking the

sleep away, smiling. "You just gonna run off?"

She grinned at him. "I figured the Skull Leader needs all the beauty

sleep he can get."

"You were wrong. C'mere."

He grabbed her wrists, his big hands engulfing hers, and pulled.

Claudia gave a laughing yelp as he dragged her down next to him, then

relaxed against him in a kiss that took away all the pain and sorrow and

weariness of the long voyage home.

Back in the midst of the festivities on Prometheus's flight deck, Rick

Hunter stood waiting next to an aircraft. He was wearing his old flying

circus outfit of orange and white trimmed with black, and his silken scarf.

The plane was the fanliner sport ship won by Lynn-Minmei when she'd

taken the Miss Macross title. This was to be its maiden voyage in the

atmosphere of Earth.

It was a sleek, beautiful propfan design by the illustrious Ikkii Takemi

himself, with powerful, pinwheel-like propellers in a big cowling behind the

cockpit. It reminded Rick very much of his own Mockingbird, which

depressed him because that in turn reminded him of the time he'd spent

with Minmei, stranded together in a remote part of the SDF-1. During that

time she'd come to mean so much to him, but now...

"You're a lucky guy, Rick, to be flying Minmei home," a ground

crewman was saying. "You not only get to leave the ship, but you spend time

with a beautiful-huh?"

Rick heard it, too, and looked around. The roar of the crowd had

increased, and there was cheering and applause.

"Like I said," the ground crewman went on, "you get to spend time with

74

a beautiful celebrity."

Minmei's entrance was worthy of her star status-her superstar status,

as far as the crew and passengers of the SDF-1 were concerned. She was

being chauffeured across the flight deck in a glittering new Macross

City-manufactured limo, the crowd parting before her. They held up signs

with hearts and fond sentiments on them or waved autograph books

somewhat hopelessly.

Flower petals and confetti and streamers rained down on her car;

people pressed up against the glass to smile, wave, and call out her name-to

feel close to her, if only for a moment.

"Y' know, she's the only one who's been given permission to leave the

ship so far, even for a short time," the crewman continued. "Hope you enjoy

the ride."

Minmei sat quietly in the exact middle of the limo's rear seat, hands

folded in her lap, watching the people throng around her car and pay

homage. She wore her old school uniform: white blouse and necktie, brown

plaid blazer, plaid skirt. Audience research indicated that her public liked to

see her in attire that emphasized her youth.

Her manager, Vance Hasslewood, sat next to the chauffeur, happily

surveying the crowd. "Well, this is quite a turnout for you, Minmei."

Minmei gave a little sigh. "Yes, I suppose these mobs are the price one

must pay for fame."

Hasslewood and the uniformed chauffeur exchanged a wry, secret look.

"Could we go a little faster? I'm late as it is," Minmei added. The driver

sped up a bit, honking his horn, and Minmei's adoring public had to move

out of the way quickly.

I wonder if she's changed much, Rick thought as the limo screeched up

beside the little sport plane. Minmei had promised that she and Rick could

still see a lot of each other once he joined the Robotech Defense Forces, but

between his duties and her skyrocketing career as the SDF-1's homegrown

media idol, that promise had been forgotten.

The chauffeur held the rear door open for Minmei while Vance

75

Hasslewood went to confer with a liaison officer from the SDF-1 Air Group.

"Hello, Minmei." Rick smiled. "It looked like you had a lot of trouble

getting through that crowd back there."

She giggled, her eyes shining in the way he remembered. "Those are my

loyal fans. They follow me everywhere. I just love them!"

She turned to wave to the people being held back by a cordon of

security guards. "Hello, hello! Thank you for coming down to see me off! I

love you all very much!"

Apparently she was unaware that a lot of the people, the majority of

them perhaps, were simply there for the party; maybe she didn't even

realize that there was a celebration going on. Rick shook his head, laughing;

Minmei was sweet and charming, but she still lived very much in a world of

her own.

The fans were clapping, stamping, and whistling for her, waving their

signs and banners. Vance Hasslewood looked on approvingly, eyes hidden

behind tinted glasses.

"Thank you!" she called, throwing kisses.

"Boy, they really like you," Rick remarked.

"I know," she said matter-of-factly. "Rick, when can we take off? I'm

really anxious to see my parents."

"Well, I guess we can take off any time; the engines are all warmed up."

He led her to the boarding ladder. "Just climb into the rear seat-careful,

now-and sit down, strap yourself in."

She got into the fanliner and settled her shoulder purse next to her,

taking up the safety harness. "Thanks, Rick. It seems like you've become a

lot nicer now than when we first met."

Huh? Minmei was still living in her own world, he saw-revising her

memories of the past according to her preferences, forgetting whatever was

inconvenient or troubling or replacing it with something that freed her from

introspection.

So now she'd decided that Rick had been unkind to her. Perhaps she'd

forgotten that he'd saved her life several times...forgotten that they'd held a

76

mock wedding ceremony and she'd worn the very white silk scarf that he

now had around his neck as a bridal veil.

Perhaps she'd forgotten their kiss, there in the remotest part of the ship.

Certainly she was now surrounded by people who would go along with

almost anything she said or chose to think, people not eager to remind her

of her past life and ties. She was free to be completely self-absorbed.

As he stood on the boarding ladder looking down into the cockpit at

her, he saw her in a new light. "Maybe I've grown up, Minmei."

Her brows met, and she was about to ask what he meant; but just then

Vance Hasslewood, standing at the foot of the boarding ladder, thrust his

face up into Rick's. "Young man! Your name; what is it, hah?

Rick threw him a sarcastic salute. "Lieutenant Rick Hunter, sir."

"Well, Lieutenant Rick Hunter, I expect you to take good care of

Minmei! She's a very busy person, and she must get back to the ship on

time."

Minmei surprised both men by jumping in on Rick's side. "Don't worry,

Vance! I feet perfectly safe! Rick's a very good pilot!"

Hasslewood backed off a bit. "Er, yes, I'm sure he is, but he's so young,

I, uh-"

Rick wondered just who and what Hasslewood really was. Certainly,

Minmei's astounding popularity had been very lucrative for the man, and he

was very proprietary about her. But what else was there to the

manager-client relationship?

Nothing romantic, Rick was pretty sure of that; even at her most

career-hungry, Minmei wouldn't have fallen for an abrasive hustler like

Hasslewood. But how had Minmei gotten permission for even a brief visit to

her parents when the SDF-1 was virtually quarantined?

To be sure, Rick's confidential orders were specific enough: Make sure

that Minmei had no access to outside media interviews. Just the family visit,

and then right back to the SDF-1, whatever that took.

Rick had thought about Minmei's brief liberty privilege and could only

come up with one explanation: Her talents and appeal had been a major

77

factor in keeping up morale and fighting spirit during the long return

voyage to Earth. And no matter what the public information people were

saying, the war wasn't over and there was still a threat of invasion. If

Minmei could do for the general population of Earth what she'd done for

the people on SDF-1, she would be a tremendously important resource. That

gave her and, in turn, Hasslewood, an awful lot of leverage.

Right now, though, Rick wasn't worrying about infiuence or power. He

stuck his face into Hasslewood's, cutting him off. "How about standing back?

We're taking off now."

Hasslewood just about fell over his own feet, retreating. "Sure, kid;

don't get touchy! Have a good trip, Minmei! Hurry back!"

Rick pulled on his goggles and headset, lowering the cockpit's front and

rear canopies.

Vance Hasslewood mopped his forehead with his handkerchief,

watching as Rick increased the propfan RPMs. The manager prayed silently

for a quick, uneventful flight; all his personal marbles were riding in that

rear seat.

Rick turned the fanliner's nose and taxied. The sport plane wasn't

equipped for cat launch, but it was so little and light that there was more

than enough runway for a takeoff. With Daedalus's bow turned into the

wind, the little ship fairly leapt up off the deck.

Minmei sighed happily, looking down at the SDF-1, savoring the

freedom of the flight. "Ahhh! It's been a long time!"

"It sure has," Rick murmured, bringing the plane onto its course for

Japan. A vivid, seductive fantasy had begun running in the back of his mind,

of being forced to land with Minmei-marooned on some idyllic desert island,

perhaps; of things being the way they once were.

"I forgot how I felt about her."

"What?" Minmei asked, leaning forward to peer around his seat.

He hadn't meant to say it aloud. Flustered, he hastened, "Oh, nothing,

nothing!" But his face was reddening, and she looked at him oddly.

He tried to concentrate on his flying as she settled back in her seat. But

78

that little fantasy just wouldn't let him alone.

79

CHAPTER TEN

We weren't deaf to the innuendo, of course. Claudia and the Terrible

Trio and I heard all the sniping about "Gloval's Harem," though people were

very careful not to say anything around Claudia after she decked a cat

crewman.

There is a loneliness to command, it's no myth. But there's also an area

around the commander-where you're not in charge but not part of the rest of

the ship's complement, either-that's often a difficult place to be, too.

Lisa Hayes,

Recollections

The United Earth Government's command complex was like a

landlocked iceberg-only a fraction of it was visible aboveground. In fact, the

communications towers, observation and surveillance structures, defensive

emplacements, landing pads, and aircraft-handling facilities constituted

less than half a percent of the cubic area of the enormous base.

It was still a highly classified installation. The fighters escorting the

transport plane bearing Gloval and Lisa wouldn't have hesitated for a

moment to open fire on any unauthorized aircraft that entered its restricted

airspace and failed to respond to their challenges.

Changing the angle of its engine blast, the transport eased in for a

vertical landing. Lisa, glancing out her viewport, saw Battloids pacing on

guard duty.

Once the plane's authenticity and clearance were verified, its landing

pad became an elevator, lowering it deep beneath the bleak, subarctic

landscape.

Lisa and Gloval released their seat belts and gathered their things.

"I hope they're prepared to listen," Lisa said. "Captain, we've got to

convince them! Surely they'll listen to reason!"

"That would be nice for a change," Gloval growled.

80

The Ikkii Takemi-designed fanliner rolled and soared, glinting in the

sun.

"Woo-hoo-ooo!" Rick exulted. Piloting a Veritech through deepspace

had its appeal, but there was nothing like feeling control surfaces bite the

air and making a light stunt plane do exactly what you wanted it to.

"Having fun, Minmei?" He laughed again, and she joined in. He adored

the sound of her laugh.

Maybe, he thought, he could just set down on some little island and say

he wanted to check out the engine. Then he'd have a chance to talk to her,

would have her full attention for a while.

While he was turning the idea over in his mind, a familiar voice came

over his headset. "Veritech patrol to Minmei Special. Hey, Lieutenant! It's

Ben and Max!"

"Huh?" Rick saw them now, back at five o'clock. The fighters had their

variable-sweep wings extended all the way for the extremely low speed

needed to keep pace with the sport plane. He was a little embarrassed that

they'd managed to sneak up on him.

"We understand you have a VIP aboard," Ben went on.

"Some guys have all the luck," Max added suggestively.

"We're returning to base; have a nice date," Ben finished, laughing. The

Veritechs waggled their wings in salute, then peeled off onto a new course.

Their wings swept back to an extreme angle as they picked up speed,

punching through the sound barrier.

They were doing better than Mach 2 and still accelerating when Rick

lost sight of them. "So long, wise guys," he called over their tac net. "See you

later."

"Ben and Max are silly, but it does sort of feel like a date."

He felt his pulse race. "Yep."

She inhaled the cold, clear air, watching the glitter of the sun on the

canopy. "It's great to get away for a while, but when I get back, I have a

whole lot of work to make up. You should see all the things they want me to

do!"

81

Show biz again! "I suppose it fills your time," Rick snapped, vexed.

She hadn't noticed his tone, ticking off her projects on her fingers. "Oh,

yes! I've got to do a television show, and then I'm cast in a play. Why, I'm

even supposed to do a movie!"

"Mmm," Rick tried to sound elaborately bored. She still didn't notice.

"That's going to be really great," Minmei gushed. "I expect to work

really hard. This is my first movie, y' know. Say! If I speak to the director, I

might be able to get you a small part, hmm?"

That made him smile. Maybe she did think about others after all,

notwithstanding the fact that he thought movies were a rather brainless

occupation and definitely inferior to flying a fighter.

"Maybe some other time, Minmei. But, hey, where d' you get all your

energy? Flying heel-and-toe patrols is one thing, but I'd be exhausted trying

to keep up with a schedule like that one. Minmei?"

He hiked himself around to look over his seat at her. "Minmei, are you

all right? Speak to me!"

For a moment he was afraid the cockpit had lost pressure and looked to

his instruments frantically. Then he saw what had happened. "Well how

d'you like that? She's asleep."

Her chin was resting on her chest, and she was breathing softly. Again,

Rick felt a wave of that fierce protectiveness he'd felt toward her when they

were stranded. And tremendous affection rose up in him as well.

He turned back to his piloting with a fond smirk. I hope she wakes up

long enough to say hello to her parents.

The streamlined tramcar, mounted on twin magnetic-lift rails, plunged

deeper and deeper into the gigantic headquarters installation.

Aboard, Captain Gloval sat with arms folded across his chest and cap

visor pulled down over his eyes, as if asleep. He would have loved a

meditative pipe but knew how unpleasant that would have been for Lisa.

Lisa shifted nervously on the padded passenger bench. "Will it take

long to reach the Council chambers?"

82

Gloval lifted his visor. "Just a little longer. The shaft goes down almost

six miles." He didn't remark on his disdain for all this burrowing and

hiding-Earth's governing body skulking at the bottom of a hole in the

ground like frightened rabbits! When the Zentraedi were capable of blowing

an entire planet to particles!

"By the way, that reminds me," he went on. "Have you heard anything

about this Grand Cannon?"

Lisa's face clouded; the words sounded so ominous. "No, what is it?"

"It is a huge Robotech weapon that's been under construction here for

almost a decade now."

Gloval gestured to the illuminated schematic of the base that was

displayed by the tramcar's access doors. The elaborate details of the

sprawling underground complex were mostly represented in coded symbols

for security's sake; but the essential layout was in the shape of a gargantuan

Y The blinking light representing the tramcar was moving down one arm of

the Y, heading for the vertical shaft.

"The Grand Cannon uses Earth's gravitational field as its main energy

source," he told her. "In fact, the shaft we're traveling in at this moment is

the barrel of the weapon."

Lisa looked around uncomfortably. "You mean, if this base were

attacked right now and Command decided to fire the cannon, we'd be blown

away?"

Gloval chortled. "Well, I'd like to think they'd clear the barrel first."

He knew she was astute enough to see the major disadvantage of the

great gun: Even with the Y arrangement and the titanic rotating gear, the

Grand Cannon's field of fire was very limited-and even United Earth

Command hadn't come up with a way to tilt and traverse the planet Earth to

bring the weapon to bear on inconvenient targets. Arrangements to

overcome the problem were part of the plan, of course, but...

Gloval had been one of the loudest voices against the project; wars, he

maintained (with history on his side), aren't won by defense but rather by

offense-by an SDF-1 that could go out and confront the enemy, not by a

83

Grand Cannon in a hole in the ground.

He had gone head to head with Lisa's own father during that argument,

taking the opposite side from a man who had been a valued friend and a

comrade in arms until then. It had been the beginning of a rift that had only

widened and deepened in the years since.

It made him sad to reflect on those days gone by-they had saved each

others' lives...they were bonded by more than mere blood. Yet Admiral

Hayes had become an opponent, almost an enemy.

Henry Gloval knew the way of the world and of highest-echelon politics;

he was as shrewd as anyone who played the game. But there was still

something in him, something bred in the bone, that found it bewildering

and saddening that there could be such a falling out between men who'd

served together in war.

I suppose it's just as they say, he thought. I'm a peasant at heart, and

there's no changing that.

He shook off his brief distraction. There was an Isaac Singer story he'd

taken to heart-"The Spinoza of Market Street"? Perhaps; in any case, the

point was that the virtue lay in behaving in accordance with one's ideal, not

necessarily in being it.

And one of Henry Gloval's ideals was a steadfastness in friendship. So

he asked Lisa pleasantly, "Your father never brought you down here

before?"

"A few times," Lisa answered, "but I was never allowed to come down

the main shaft. Now I understand why."

"Yes, this Robotech project was top secret. Only a few outside officers

had access. It made the old-time Los Alamos reservation look like open

house!" He chuckled; there were fond memories of those days among the

bitter.

"And no civilian visitors," he finished, "not even an admiral's

daughter."

Lisa wore a puzzled look. "But then, why did they let Father in?"

Gloval said staunchly, "Who else was there? He was the visionary. He

84

pushed for the creation of this complex when no one else thought it was

necessary."

She looked around again, looked to the vast schematic on the wall. "My

father was responsible for all this? I didn't know that!"

Gloval drew a deep breath. "Your father was always decisive." How

could he talk to her of friction and resentment? He couldn't.

"When I was serving under him in the Global Civil War, a problem

came up about inadequate rations for the troops. When Admiral Hayes

didn't get satisfactory action from headquarters, he led our entire Combined

Action Group in a raid on the logistical depot. Camo face paint; real

guerrilla stuff!

"He personally sat on the log-command three-star general while we got

something to eat. There were a lot of brave and deserving men and women

who had their first real meal in a long time that night."

Lisa was laughing heartily, one hand at the base of her throat. "My

father got away with that?"

Gloval was laughing again. "It's true. The general thought sappers had

infiltrated the base, kept sending down orders for us to find them. There

wasn't a woman or a man in that entire unit who wouldn't have done

anything, anything, for your father, Lisa. Would've followed him to hell if

he'd given us the word."

Lisa was still laughing, shoulders shaking. But her laughter no longer

had anything to do with the story about her father. The sudden freedom

from the SDF-1, the astonishing size of headquarters base, the very

emphatic and yet somehow empty joy of being home again had cast a

certain familiar pall over her. It was strangely overwhelming; there was

nothing she could do but laugh.

Lisa Hayes had realized a long time before that a life in the military

didn't exactly make for happily-ever-after, particularly for a woman.

Nevertheless, there was a warmth of that moment, something between

people who'd served together, something no outsider could have ever

shared.

85

"It's good to hear you laugh again, Commander." Gloval smiled slowly.

"I think this is the first time I have heard you laugh since you escaped from

the enemy, no?"

Lisa said, "Ahh," and "Umm," trying not to think of a particular VT

pilot, trying to keep the warmth and the laughter alive, doing her best not to

be vulnerable to desires and attractions and yet be open to Gloval's

confessions. A small part of her wondered if male subordinates of female

flag-rank officers went through this.

"But I wonder if we'll feel much like laughing after this meeting with

the governing council," Gloval went on. "It's crucial that they be made to

understand that the aliens are only interested in the battle fortress and its

secrets, not in our world."

Gloval tilted his cap forward on his brow again. "I hope you've

thoroughly prepared your arguments, Commander Hayes."

Her chin came up; her eyes shone. "Ready to go, Captain," Lisa said,

managing a smile as she was reminded of the loneliness she felt.

All her life, it had been so difficult for her to establish a relationship

with men her own age, even men in the military. But it was not surprising,

really; she had been surrounded by men like Gloval, men like her father.

How many men like that could there possibly be? One in a hundred

thousand? In a million?

Hard to match, in any case.

Gloval was saying, "Mm-hmm, that's good."

Lisa replied, "I'm sure we'll be able to convince them. After all, we're

the only ones who've had close contact with the aliens!"

Yes, Gloval reflected, it would seem so cut and dried to her; Lisa's

father was one of the most powerful people on Earth, but despite

that-perhaps because of that-Lisa herself was completely naive about

political machinations.

He knocked a bit of ash out of the bowl of his pipe and tamped down

some new tobacco, as was his habit when he was thinking. Just as he struck

one of the old-fashioned kitchen matches he so loved, a surveillance eye in

86

the wall lit up anti a feminine computer voice said, "ATTENTION!

SMOKING IN THIS CAPSULE IS FORBIDDEN! PLEASE EXTINGUISH

ALL SMOKING MATERIALS IMMEDIATELY!"

Gloval yanked his briar from his mouth guiltily. "Ah? Can't I smoke

anywhere? If it's not my bridge crew warning me, it's these machines!"

Lisa was clearing her throat meaningfully. "Captain, are you worried

about the SDF-1? Sir, is something going to happen to us?"

Gloval's aching conscience made him leap on the question, "Why do

you ask?"

Lisa only smiled and said, "When something's bothering you, I've

noticed, you always pull out your pipe and make a big production about

lighting it."

Gloval lowered the pipe slowly and, not caring who might be listening

on some bugging device, said, "Hmmph! I must confess I'm very worried

about this meeting. I'm not sure these-" he made a gesture with his head to

indicate his disdain for anyone who would protect themselves underground

while ordering brave men and women to die "-not sure these men will listen

to us with open minds. And Lisa, it's vital to our future that they do so, do

you understand?" Gloval spread his broad, brown peasant's hands on his

knees and looked down at them.

Lisa nodded slowly. She was Admiral Hayes's daughter, used to having

people view her as an access road to the highest levels of decision; that was

one of the things that set Lisa Hayes so far apart from her contemporaries.

She'd seen power politics in excelsis all her life, had sickened of them

and the unspeakable people drawn to them.

After Karl Riber had died she felt she would never heal from that hurt.

But surely there were others out there, people who were kind and patient

and true? The image of Rick Hunter suddenly came to her. Though she

refused to admit it to herself, Rick Hunter had come to mean very much to

her.

"What will happen if we can't convince the Council?" she asked Gloval.

He answered in a grim, level voice. "Then the Earth will go to war

87

against the aliens."

Before, he had always spoken of triumph and the need to win; this time,

with only Lisa to hear his confession, Gloval mentioned nothing about that.

Lisa knew him well enough to know what that meant: Captain Gloval's

estimation of the human race's chances against the Zentraedi were very

bleak indeed.

The tramcar came to the bottom of the Y's arm and began the vertical

descent to the innermost chambers of the United Earth Defense Council.

88

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?

Early twentieth-century song title

"Minmei? Minmei, wake up; you're almost home."

She stirred a little; it was a voice she liked, she knew, and it was a

message that was wonderful beyond compare. Minmei yawned charmingly

against the back of one hand, trying to stretch but restrained by something.

Her head was filled with the marvelous images and memories that the word

"home" conjured up.

Minmei opened her eyes, recalling that the restraint was the fanliner's

seat belt. Behind her, the steady vibration of the propfan engine drove them

along. "Look!" Rick said, pointing.

"Mount Fuji!" she shrilled, happy beyond words. The mountain wore a

crown of snow despite the fact that it was midsummer-something that

happened very rarely. Minmei took it as a good omen and a welcome home.

Rick cruised slowly past Fuji, giving Minmei a chance to look. Air

traffic was being rerouted to give him an unobstructed course; he wondered

again what secret deals had been struck just so Minmei could see her

relatives and wondered too how soon the Macross City survivors would lose

patience with their confinement.

He banked the little aircraft, heading for Yokohama. Though he was

happy that Minmei would soon have the joy of reunion, he was despondent

that their time alone together was nearly half over. He tried to picture her

family and how they would react to their daughter's status as SDF-1

superstar.

He trimmed the ship and shook his head. There are billions of people

on this planet. Why did I have to fall in love with public property?

He took on a bit of altitude; the island chain lay beneath them like so

many gemstones.

89

In the deepest vaults of the Alaskan base, Lisa Hayes and Henry Gloval

sat at a simple, unadorned desk in the middle of a vast hearing chamber.

The walls of the chamber were several dozen yards thick; though the

pressures of the Earth itself were enormous down there, the room itself was

as comfortable, in terms of temperature and air pressure, as any surface

garden.

There was a multimedia console, perhaps ten yards away, at the base of

the wall before them, and all around were display screens as big as

billboards. Lisa and Gloval were still arranging documents and papers on

the table, preparing to give their testimony.

Though he said nothing about it and gave no outward sign, Lisa knew

that Captain Gloval was absolutely furious. He and his First Officer had

been denied the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting with Earth's governing

body and had been shown, instead, to this interrogation chamber.

Lisa knew he didn't blame her, but she couldn't meet his eye. She knew

that her own father was one of those responsible for this shameful, cowardly

treatment.

Suddenly all the screens came to life. There were a half dozen

extremely magnified faces glaring down Lisa and her captain. All the faces

were male, middle-aged to elderly, and all but two were in military uniform.

It confirmed Gloval's worst misgivings. Lisa had to remind herself to

breathe. Military running the government? This wasn't what we were

fighting for!

Before her, on the center screen, was the towering face of her father.

"Welcome home, Captain Gloval," said Admiral Hayes. "It's been a long

time since you reported in person."

Gloval snapped his hand to his forehead in salute, and Lisa followed

suit. Others might forget their vows, their obligations; but the one thing that

sustained Gloval was the certainty that while he still lived he would never

renege on his sworn word. Even if it meant rendering military courtesies to

men he no longer respected.

90

It was a code of conduct few outsiders could have understood; a

samurai maybe. Gloval had understood and willingly accepted his oath of

allegiance to the new United Earth Government, back when the alternative

was racial annihilation. He meant to live up to that oath just as long as he

was able.

So he rendered military courtesy crisply.

"Yes, sir," replied Henry Gloval.

The huge eyes of the projected image, as blue as Lisa's, turned to her.

"You too, Commander."

"Yes, Admiral," she said quietly. She gave no outward sign that her

heart was breaking.

After her mother's death, her father had been her only emotional

mainstay, until Karl Riber and, later, Claudia, Captain Gloval, and a very

few others. And now, Admiral Hayes didn't even deign to break formality.

An embrace and a few tears weren't military, perhaps, but she'd hoped for

them; and, to be sure, she'd come prepared with some of her own.

But instead, the screen face said, "Good. Now, why don't you both have

a seat and we'll hear your report?"

"Yes, sir." Lisa and Gloval cut their salutes away smartly, precise and

correct. They both sat while Lisa gathered her briefing data, then she stood

again. Gloval felt a sudden burn, since she would have to bear the brunt of

their inquiry. But the structure of the meeting was traditional and dictated

by custom: The First Officer made the presentation because the Captain was

sacrosanct and not subject to cross-examination outside of a court-martial.

"We must know everything from the beginning," said a white-haired

man with a snowy handlebar moustache. He was a former political hack

who had oiled his way into a direct commission in the Judge Advocate

General's office and made his rise from there. Lisa took one look at the

ribbons on his tunic and knew he had never seen a single moment of

combat.

She had two decorations for courage under fire as well as numerous

other campaign ribbons and medals, but she bit her lip and said, "Of course,

91

sir."

Lisa arranged the papers in her hands and looked straight into the

image of her father's face. He didn't look away. All around her were august

visages; it was like being in an observatory with televisor screens running

from floor to ceiling apex.

Lisa gazed at her father coldly.

"This report presumes that everyone present is familiar with the details

of the situation up to the time of the Zentraedi's appearance in the solar

system. Supplementary reports will be made available to you."

She glared at her father for a second, then went back to her report,

happy that Gloval was at her side but ashamed of her own family. She

turned instead to a commissioner whose face was displayed to her right, a

man who looked like Clark Kent in those ancient Superman comics.

She cleared her throat, looked at the overbearing faces around her, and

suddenly felt strong; strong as only people with simple truth and dedication

to duty on their side can feel. She could stand up to any of them.

"The following are the abbreviated details of the miscalculated

spacefold jump undertaken by the Super Dimensional Fortress One while

under unprecedentedly intense attack from hostile alien forces and its

consequent actions in returning to Terra."

That was quite a mouthful, but Lisa took pride in how fascinated and

intimidated those enormous, concave faces looked.

These were men who had used the emergency of the Zentraedi's

appearance to take control of Earth. Along the way they had evidently

forgotten how terrible and overwhelming the enemy was that currently

prowled the dark beyond their tiny planet.

Lisa let herself feel a little vindictive; she figured they had it coming.

"At that time, the strength of the alien fleet was estimated at nearly one

million ships of a size three or more times larger than our Terran Armor

class," she said with a certain relish.

And before anybody could say anything, Lisa Hayes added, as she

stared her father in the eye, "That number has since increased and our best

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intelligence evaluations indicate the Zentraedi committment to this war to

be in excess of two and a half million ships-of-the-line."

Nobody said anything, but there was clearly a mental echo running

round the sad little rabbit hole of the United Earth rulers: TWO AND A

HALF MILLION SHIPS???!

Chew on that! Lisa thought to herself as she went on to the next page,

watching out of one eye as the great and the mighty of Earth squirmed in

their seats.

Yokohama was picture-postcard perfect under a blue sky dotted by

slender wisps of white cloud.

Minmei tugged Rick along by the hand as they headed for her parents'

restaurant. She stopped in the middle of the esplanade, looking out at the

glittering ocean.

"Just smell that beautiful sea air!" She drew in a great breath of it.

"Nothing smells as good as Yokohama!"

She took her hands from the guardrail, went on full point, pirouetted,

and then did a few jets. "It makes me want to sing, and dance, and carry

on!"

Rick, trying not to feel like a secret agent but aware of his responsibility,

caught her by the upper arm. "Minmei, would you please stop acting like

this? Everybody's looking at you."

Shaking off his grip, she spun on him, putting her face up to his

furiously. "Listen, I'm happy to be home, and if I feel like singing and

dancing, I will! Hmmph !"

Rick was about to mention their obligation to the SDF-1 and the

secrecy to which they'd both been sworn for this mission, when Minmei

spied a tall, slender structure nearby.

"Look! There's the New Yokohama Marine Tower!" she squealed,

pointing down the esplanade. She took on the reserved voice of the tour

guides she'd heard so often while she was growing up.

"'When it was built, the New Marine Tower, which replaced the first,

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was the tallest structure in the world; over twenty-eight hundred feet high!

It's an engineering masterpiece."'

She did another jet. "It's the same age as me!"

Rick's patience was fading. He doubted that the tower had very much

longer to live if its life expectancy was tied in to Minmei's.

"It looks it," he commented.

She thumped him hard on the chest with her fist. "Doesn't anything

impress you, Rick Hunter? I want you to like my city!"

It was another one of Minmei's masterful emotional flip-flops: She won

him over again in a single moment, as he stared into those enormous blue

eyes while she tossed her head, sending ripples of light through her jet-dark

hair.

Does she know she has this effect, or is it all unconscious? he wondered.

He'd never dared ask the question.

She had her hand in his. "I just know you're going to like my mother!

She's the nicest, friendliest woman in the whole world! Rick, I'm not

kidding!"

She tugged him along. "Come on!"

Who am I to resist? he thought, yielding to the inevitable.

A few minutes later, they came to a torii that spanned the street,

inscribed with ideographs. "Hey, this is the local Chinatown!" Rick

remarked.

Minmei shook her head in dismay; how could such a brilliant pilot be

so dumb about other things? "I know, silly. I'm Chinese; this is where I live.

Come on; let's go!"

She grabbed his hand again and dragged him along, under the torii and

into Chinatown.

People stared at them a bit, curious about the trim young man in the

circus flier's outfit and the enchanting young woman who seemed to radiate

life and exuberance. "Now, the grocery store is right over there," Minmei

was saying, "right next to the gift shop. And the bakery is still-Rick, have

you ever tasted mandarin root? Oh, and I'm so glad they haven't changed

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the street signs!"

The signs were in the shape of smaller torii. "You haven't been gone

that long," he reminded her. What did she expect? Funeral bunting on every

corner?

"Right," she said, barely having heard him. "I hope my house is still the

same. Just a minute now..."

He'd stopped as she slowed to a halt.

"Look!" She was pointing to a building facade covered with ideographs

and intertwined symbols, gold on scarlet, with a very conspicuous dragon in

the midst of it. "We're here!"

She turned to Rick excitedly, and he found himself returning her smile

in spite of himself. "It's the Golden Dragon, our restaurant, see? Just like

the White Dragon is Aunt Lena's in Macross!"

"It's very nice," was all Rick could find to say.

Minmei was close to tears of joy. "I hope everybody remembers my

face."

Rick sighed. "I keep trying to tell you, you haven't been gone that long!"

"So? Maybe I've changed a lot." She struck a pose; he recognized it

from her glamour photos and feared the worst.

Minmei gave a carefree laugh and went dashing into the Golden

Dragon. With no alternative, Rick followed after.

"Chang! Chang!" she was shouting into the face of a startled and rather

nervous-looking Chinese gentleman dressed in a white waiter's tunic and

matching Nehru hat. "D' you recognize me? Look! Who am I?" She twirled

before him.

Chang, his eyes the size of poker chips, said something in a language

Rick didn't recognize and charged off into the kitchen, crying, "Look! Come

look, come look!"

He was back in a moment, dragging a brown-haired, kind-faced

woman whose features bore a resemblance to Minmei's. "Chang, why are

you shoving me? What in the world-stop pushing-oh!"

"Don't you recognize me, Mother?"

95

She had spied Minmei and stopped, wordless-perhaps close to cardiac

arrest.

"Does that mean you do?" Minmei smiled.

"Minmei...we were sure you'd been killed!"

"No; I'm home," she said brightly.

Minmei's mother rushed over to throw her arms around her daughter,

nearly knocking her down. "I can't believe it! My darling little girl is home!

She wasn't taken from us!" She was racked with sobs.

"Well, I was, really," Minmei said, pulled a little off balance by her

mother's tight embrace around her neck. "But they brought me back."

Her mother suddenly had her at arm's length again. "Back from where?

And who's this?"

"This is Rick Hunter, Mother. He's the boy who saved my life."

Minmei's mother suddenly clasped Rick's hand, bowing over it

solemnly, again and again. "Thank you; thank you, son!"

Rick scratched his head with his free hand, not knowing what to say.

Among other things, he wasn't at all sure he liked being referred to as a

"boy"-especially by the young woman he cared for so much.

"Minmei! We thought you were dead!" A thick-bodied, angry-looking

man had appeared from the kitchen. He had dark eyes and hair as black as

his daughter's.

"How could you not contact us and let us know you were alive?" But

even though he was scowling, her father touched her face tenderly.

Meanwhile, Rick was having some very troubling thoughts of his own.

The G2 Security officers who had briefed him for this oddball mission had

been very emphatic that he not discuss any details of the situation on the

SDF-1; even Minmei had agreed to be circumspect about revealing any

information about the vessel or its mission.

But these people behaved as if the ship had been lost with all hands

even though it had been back for over twenty-four hours now.

Rick took the briefing officers' instructions to heart, deciding to say as

little as possible-and to see that Minmei did the same, though that promised

96

to be a chore-until he had a clearer idea of just what was going on here on

Earth.

97

CHAPTER TWELVE

Gloval's ship and crew had been tested in the flame and come through.

The Robotechnology and the civilian refugees, likewise, had undergone a

make-or-break trial.

No one had foreseen that an even more severe strain was to be put on

Gloval's own oath of allegiance.

"The Second Front,"

History of the First Robotech War, Vol. LXVI.

The giant face of a council member looked down at Lisa as she set

down her briefing book, her summary complete.

"That was a very comprehensive report, Commander Hayes," the

Council member, General Herbert, said. "But come now, don't you think

you've overestimated the enemy's strength by quite a lot?"

Herbert disappeared, and the image of Marshal Zukav, silver-haired

and silver-mustached, took its place. "Yes, I can't help but wonder why

these aliens didn't destroy the battle fortress if they had such

overwhelmingly superior numbers."

Lisa, who'd seated herself, came to her feet again. Gloval said nothing,

glaring up at the magnified faces around him, content to let his First Officer

draw out the Council's attitudes and arguments before he made his stand.

"I've already stated what we believe to be their motives in my report."

Herbert was back. "You expect us to accept that report as the truth?"

Lisa growled, gritting her teeth, her hands bunching into fists, trying to

keep her temper.

Then her father, Admiral Hayes, was staring down at her. "That will be

all, Commander; we've heard quite enough. You may resume your seat."

"Admiral, I-"

But Gloval was on his feet now, with a calming hand on her shoulder.

She held her peace.

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"Gentlemen," he addressed the Council, "what about the authorization

for the requests that were attached to that report?"

Now Zukav glared down at him again. "The proposal to negotiate with

the enemy and the plans to relocate the Macross City survivors?"

Herbert broke in, "We will discuss your requests in private session. You

and your First will stand by!" There was a loud comtone, and all screens

went blank, leaving Lisa and Gloval in a sudden silence in the dim, domed

chamber.

Lisa's fists were trembling. "Ohhhh! I can't believe they treated us like

this!"

Gloval lowered himself into his chair, head thrown back, eyes closed. "I

do. I think we've lost the fight."

"But-how can you know that already?"

"There's something going on here that we don't know about, Lisa. Their

minds are made up."

She gazed around at the darkened screens. "I wonder what they're

planning to do with us?"

Minmei's father slammed his fist on the table, making the teacups

jump. "No! You're not going!"

"That's right!" her mother added. "After more than a year we finally

discover that you're not dead; how can you think we'd let you leave?"

"To go entertain troops on some warship." Her father sneered.

Minmei was on her feet, hands on hips. "Hah! Is that what you think

I'm doing?" She stamped one little foot. "I'm not just some run-of-the-mill

USO singer, you know! I'm an important person back there!"

Her father shouted, "Well, you're not back there! You're here, and I'm

not letting you return, and that's that!"

She threw her head back, eyes squeezed shut, shaking her fists.

"No-o-o-o!" Then she went on. "I've got to go back! I'm doing a TV show,

I've got a record coming out, and I'm going to be starring in a film! Isn't that

right, Rick?"

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Rick was completely taken by surprise at the sudden shift of focus to

him. "Uh, um-"

"Ridiculous! Your family comes first!" her father barked.

Rick was wondering about that, too. When he and Minmei were

stranded, she had talked at length about all the love and mutual support

there was in her family. It looked like a little celebrity could change a for of

things.

"I want to be a movie star!" she pouted, stamping both feet this time,

just as her cousin Jason did when he threw a tantrum.

Her mother was weeping into a snow-white napkin. "How could you

hurt us like this? You know we've always counted on you to get married and

take over the Golden Dragon and run it with your husband."

Married? Run the restaurant? Those were new wrinkles! Rick suddenly

felt a little queasy at the very thought of giving up flying, even for Minmei.

Maybe they weren't destined for each other, after all.

"What about you, young man?" her father snapped. "What d' you think

about all this hogwash, eh?"

"Huh? That is-well-"

Minmei was furious. "I don't see why you're asking him! His opinion

doesn't count here! I'm the one making the decision! It's my life, and I'm

going back to the ship; I can't turn my back on thousands of loyal fans and

all the people I work with!"

Her mother sniffed and said, "But you're turning your back on us."

Score one for Mom, Rick thought; that shot had hit home, stopping

Minmei in her tracks, at least for the moment.

But just when she might have yielded, a new voice interrupted. "Hey,

what's all the screaming about down here? I can't even concentrate on my

studies-hey! Minmei!"

He was about Rick's age or a little older, tall, with straight hair as black

as Minmei's that fell past his shoulders. He'd stepped down out of the

stairway-a slim, athletic-looking fellow, handsome but somehow sullen. Still,

his face lit up when he saw her.

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She flew to him, hugging herself to him. "Kyle! Oh, I can't believe it!

You're here! I thought I'd never see you again!"

He laughed and held her close.

She spoke in a flurry. "We thought you died on Macross! We never

found you in the shelters, or later on the SDF-1, so your parents and I

assumed-"

He shrugged. "After my father kicked me out of the house for being in

the peace movement, I figured it wasn't such a good idea to stick around a

military town. So I left the day before Launching Day."

Rick was looking at him jealously. Kyle had a sort of inner balance, a

calmness-unflappable and very self-possessed.

"When I tried to get in touch with you," he was telling Minmei, "they

told me that everything on the island had been destroyed and that it was off

limits for good. Radioactive or something." His face clouded with the

memory, a sensitive and strong face.

"It was terrible." She nodded sadly.

He took her shoulders. "Well, I'm glad you're here; I'm glad somebody

survived."

"Oh, but your mom and dad are doing just fine, running the White

Dragon!"

"What?" His grip tightened on her shoulders for a moment, powerful

fingers digging in until he realized what he was doing and eased off.

"They're alive?"

She gave him a smile warm as a hearth fire. "Sure, silly; they're on the

ship."

"Ship? What're you taking about?"

She tched and explained, "The spaceship."

"You mean you didn't know?" Rick asked, wondering just how much

covering up he was going to have to do.

Kyle was shaking his head happily, baffled but laughing. "No."

"Most of us survived, even though we lost a lot of people," Minmei told

him. "This is Lieutenant Rick Hunter; he's one of the fighter pilots from the

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ship."

Kyle said, "Oh. Hello." It sounded like he was greeting the lowest

known life form.

Rick rose anyway, trying to be polite. "Hi."

"Rick," Minmei gushed, "this is my cousin Lynn-Kyle; he's been like a

brother to me. Kyle, Rick is the one who saved my life."

"It was a privilege." Rick shrugged.

Kyle's expression was full of anger and resentment. "I thought soldiers

were expected to aid civilians in times of emergency."

Rick cocked his head to one side, trying to figure out what Kyle's beef

was. "Hmmm."

"But we appreciate your efforts, anyway," Kyle told him with a frown.

Minmei slipped an arm through Kyle's elbow. "No, no: When Rick

saved my life, he hadn't become a soldier yet."

Kyle was looking him up and down with narrowed eyes. "So you

decided to join up later, eh?"

Minmei's mother and father were watching the whole exchange

without interfering; Rick wondered just what he'd gotten into the middle of.

"That's right."

Kyle held his chin high, gazing down his nose at Rick. "What d' you

think's so good about the military?"

Rick showed his teeth in a snarling smile. "Free bullets, free food...and

it sure beats working for a living."

"It's getting late," Gloval said grimly just as a comtone sounded.

Hours had gone by. In the interview chamber at the bottom of the

Alaskan base, the screens flashed to life again. Gloval and Lisa looked up

expectantly, wondering what the result of the deliberation was. The wall

clock read nearly midnight.

General Herbert gazed down at them. "Captain, Commander-sorry to

keep you waiting." He didn't sound sorry at all. "The Council has been going

over your report, and we have found most of it to be accurate."

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"And what about my requests?"

"Captain Gloval, all negotiations with the aliens for an end to hostilities

are flatly rejected."

Gloval spat, "You think we can win against a force like that?"

"We don't know whether we can win or not. The point is, we don't

understand the invaders' thinking. We scarcely understand their

Robotechnology. How can we begin peace talks with them?"

Gloval was about to interrupt, but Herbert pushed on. "We have no

way of knowing if they would participate in good faith or simply ignore any

treaty commitments and attack again when it suited them."

"But-you must realize-" Gloval began.

Then Admiral Hayes's image was front and center. "Captain, we think

our Grand Cannon will protect us as long as we stay prepared and alert. We

will not negotiate away that advantage."

"Very well," Gloval snapped. "I understand, sir. But what about

resettling the fifty thousand or so Macross survivors?"

Herbert fielded that one, seeming irked that he would even ask the

question. "They've all been declared dead, so having them leave the SDF-1 is

out of the question, Gloval."

Gloval shook his head slowly. "I don't understand."

Lisa shot to her feet. "Just what is it you're saying?"

Herbert's answer was acid. "Do you think we made an official

announcement that we're at war with aliens? Why, there would have been

worldwide panic and probable insurrection by the peace factions!"

"They'd have been screaming for immediate unconditional surrender,"

another Council member, Commissioner Blaine of US-Western, added.

Admiral Hayes's image held the center spot again. "We invoked a strict

media blackout from the day the SDF-1 disappeared, using the excuse that a

guerrilla force of anti-unification terrorists had attacked Macross Island and

destroyed it after the ship left on its maiden test flight. Now, how could we

let the tens of thousands of Macross inhabitants who know what a

tremendous threat we face return to Earth?"

103

"It's impossible!" Zukav threw in. "The government would be

overthrown!"

Are they crazy or am I? Gloval asked himself.

For ten years, throughout the rebuilding of SDF-1, the world

government had used the threat of alien invasion to justify their staggering

defense budgets and its own ever-expanding influence.

But when the Zentraedi finally appeared with power so far beyond

anything humans had envisioned (except for a few hardheaded realists like

Gloval), the Council had, in effect, become completely paranoid: They lied

to the populace, hid in a hole in the ground, and simply prayed the menace

would go away.

All for the sake of their political power base, all so that they could rule a

little longer.

Gloval's voice rose a few decibels. "We're going to have a riot on our

hands if we don't allow those people to get off the ship! They've been

through a lot and endured it gallantly, but now they're safely back home and

their patience is wearing thin!"

Herbert answered that. "Keeping them under control is your

responsibility. And anyway, if, as you stated in your report, the aliens are so

curious about our customs, then carrying an entire city within the SDF-1

should ensure that their attention is focused on it, don't you think?"

"It's crucial that you draw the enemy forces away from this planet!"

Kinsolving, a bloodless-looking man with eyes like glass pellets, said from

one side.

"At what price?" Gloval roared.

He felt very close to surrendering to his rage-perhaps going back to the

SDF-1 and launching a little revolution of his own.

But he knew he wouldn't, knew he couldn't fire on innocent men and

women who believed the Council's lies and who would rise to oppose

him-knew he couldn't break the oath of allegiance he'd sworn.

He'd seen enough civil war; he knew he couldn't start another.

Admiral Hayes was saying, "Captain, we're not insensitive to your

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situation, but we must have time to strengthen our defenses and increase

our knowledge of Robotechnology. And you're the only one who can give it

to us."

Lisa cried, "Father, this is too much to ask of all those civilians!"

Hayes's huge projected face glared down at her icily. "Commander

Hayes, we may be father and daughter, but during these proceedings I

expect to be addressed by my rank, is that understood?"

"Yes, sir," she spit out the words.

"And what if the aliens decide not to follow the battle fortress?" Gloval

posed the question. "What if they at tack the Earth instead? You can fire

your Grand Cannon until you broil away the planet's atmosphere and make

the surrounding land mass run molten, but you still won't be able to destroy

all those ships!"

Hayes answered, "Your own analysis indicates that that's highly

unlikely; the invaders are interested in your ship. You will receive your

sailing orders in the morning. That is all."

Again the screens went blank.

Gloval picked up his hat tiredly. I guess that's the end of that.

"Captain, how are we ever going to be able to explain this to the people

on the ship? Not just the survivors; the crew-they've been in constant

combat for more than a year!"

Gloval had no answer. In the corridor outside, he asked, "Lisa, wouldn't

you like to spend some time with your father while you're here? As family, I

mean? I can authorize a brief leave..."

They came to an elevator to begin the long trip back to the surface. Lisa

kept her eyes lowered to the floor. "No, sir. I have no particular interest in

seeing him right now."

"I understand, my dear," said Gloval as the elevator doors closed.

105

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The patterns of behavior observed so far indicate that either all these

humans are demented or else the three of us suffered head injuries upon first

landing here.

Preliminary observation of the Zentraedi spies

Rico, Bron, and Konda

"I really don't think this is getting us anywhere," Lynn-Kyle said in his

soft, reasonable voice.

Hours of argument had gone by, but the five-Minmei and her parents,

Rick, and Lynn-Kyle-were still gathered around the table. "Minmei's made

her decision," Kyle went on, "so why don't you let her go?"

Minmei clapped her hands, eyes dancing. "Oh, Kyle, you're wonderful!

I knew you'd say that!"

"Just a minute!" Minmei's father said angrily.

His wife was quick to head off the brewing confrontation with Kyle and

keep the debate on track. "You're the last one we'd expect to send Minmei

away from her home, Kyle."

"Especially with no one to watch over her," the father added. Rick

almost said something about that: Listen, I saved her from fifty-foot-tall

aliens and death by starvation and thirst! What d' ya call that, a passing

interest?

But it didn't seem like the time.

"I thought I would go with her," Kyle said casually, "and live with my

folks."

Minmei was ecstatic. "Hurray, Lynn-Kyle! I knew you'd find some way

to come to my rescue!"

Rick made a bored sound.

"Well, I guess that's all right," Lynn-Jan said slowly, deciding it might

be for the best to let his daughter get this foolishness out of her system. His

106

wife, Lynn-Xian, looked relieved, saying, "It would make me feel a lot

better."

"No problem," Kyle said with a charming smile. "It's just temporary,

anyway."

The transport hurtled through the frigid night air, bound for the SDF-1.

A full squadron of fighters was flying escort around it.

Gloval knew now that it was no longer a matter of honor; he wouldn't

be given the chance to divert or disobey orders now that the Council had

made its decision.

Lisa, sitting. in the window seat, opened an envelope that one of her

father's aides had given to her. She read:

My dearest Lisa,

I know that you're angry about my decision regarding the SDF-1, but it

was unavoidable under

the circumstances. I want you to try to understand and realize I'm

concerned about your welfare. The battle fortress is a very dangerous place,

and I'm working on getting you reassigned to another ship, or possibly here

to headquarters, before it's ordered to move out into space once more-

Without finishing the note, she tore it into tiny tittle pieces.

From another direction, the speedy little fanliner cut the sky, bound for

the ship. It was handling a little less nimbly than before; Lynn-Kyle was

seated in the back with Minmei in his lap.

"You mean to say you don't have any girlfriends?" she was asking him

coquettishly, batting those big blue eyes.

He looked at her fondly, but he seemed to be one of the few people

immune to her manipulation. "Well, I've been traveling around so much, I

haven't had time."

"If you did have a girlfriend, I'd probably be jealous."

107

He chuckled. "What d' you have in mind? You want me to stay single

forever?"

"Well, not exactly," she said slyly.

It sounded like a game they'd played often, Rick thought. "Then what

do you want?" Kyle coaxed.

She knuckled his shoulders, giggling. "Oh, nothing; I'm just teasing."

Rick lost patience with all the cuteness; he couldn't take any more of it.

"Hey! It's hard enough to fly this crate, overloaded like this, without all that

jabbering back there! How about buttoning up until we land?"

He was also bothered by the idea that he might have exceeded orders.

There were no provisions for him to bring an outsider aboard the SDF-1; but,

on the other hand, the briefing officers were very emphatic that Minmei was

important to the war effort and must be returned, and Minmei couldn't

come back without Kyle, so...

Minmei was giggling again. "That boy's always kidding," she confided

to Kyle.

That tears it! "Guess again," he told her. "It's no joke!"

He banked sharply; Minmei let out a squeal and clung closer to Kyle.

Rick poured on the speed, impatient to be rid of the two of them.

Lynn-Kyle held his cousin close and smiled triumphantly.

"That's not fair!" Kim Young cried, hearing Gloval's heartbreaking

news.

"It's like we're prisoners here!" Sammie added.

Gloval stood his ground, unmoving, betraying no emotion. He'd

thought it best to let his trusted bridge crew in on the news first, in the

privacy of the bridge; they were the ones who would form the core of what

he was coming to think of as his crisis-management team, helping him

ensure that things didn't fall apart aboard SDF-1. They had to be given time

to get over the shock before they could help the entire ship's population

cope with it.

Claudia was the first one to get things in perspective. "Orders are

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orders, even if there are a lot of idiots at central headquarters who have no

idea what they're doing!"

Lisa nodded to herself; she knew that was the kind of woman and

officer Claudia was.

Still, Sammie insisted, "But there must be something you can do,

Captain. Please tell us you're not going to accept this quietly. You will

change their minds, won't you?"

"Won't you, Captain?" Kim added pleadingly.

Gloval cleared his throat in the way he did when he'd heard enough and

expected to be obeyed. "Your lack of discipline is only compounding the

problem, so get back to your duty stations immediately. I appreciate your

concern, but right now I have to begin deciding how to break the news to

the Macross survivors and the rest of the crew."

He stood up from his chair, brushing past them. "You will excuse me."

Shifting her glasses nervously, Vanessa couldn't help calling a last

desperate objection after him. "Captain, can't you-"

Gloval cut her off stiffly. "That will be all, Vanessa."

"Yes, sir," she said contritely.

"Try to understand," Gloval said softly over his shoulder to them just

before the hatch closed.

Vanessa removed her glasses to wipe away a tear of anger. "But-it's not

fair!"

"That's absolutely true," Lisa said, speaking up for the first time. "But

you can't blame the captain for something headquarters did. Everybody has

a right to gripe, but you should at least be mad at the right people."

"Okay, okay-the captain needs our support, right?" Claudia said

soberly.

"Yes. He knows he can't possibly succeed without it," Lisa answered.

The bridge hatch opened, and the relief watch started filing in. Kim let

her breath go with a rasp. "All this talk isn't going to change anything, and

I'm hungry," she declared, careful to mention nothing specific in the

outsiders' presence.

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Sammie took the cue. "Let's go into town and eat lunch!"

Vanessa nodded energetically. "Yeah, let's go down to the White

Dragon; I'm starving."

At the White Dragon, the front doors slid aside. Minmei's aunt Lena

quickly went to greet the first customers of the lunch rush, bowing

hospitably. The restaurant was braced for a busy day; people were

boisterous, in a mood to continue their celebrating even though a lot of

them were getting restless and edgy with the delay in disembarkation.

It didn't disturb her husband Max very much; "People will always have

to eat," was his motto. But Lena knew a certain sadness. In spite of the

dreadful things the SDF-1 and Macross had gone through, the rebuilt

restaurant held a wealth of happy memories.

"Welcome," she said, "welc-oh !"

A ghost had come through the door, surrounded by a cloud of brilliance

from the brighter EVE "sunlight."

Her hands flew to her mouth. "Oh, Kyle, is it really you?"

He took a step closer. In the well-remembered, soft, clear voice, he said

gently, "Yes, Mother; I'm home. And I've missed you very much."

Dimly, she was aware of the traffic passing by on the street outside and

of Minmei and Rick Hunter waiting a few paces back. Minmei was barely

keeping herself from weeping. Rick was straightfaced, showing no emotion;

but he envied the Lynn family their connectedness and their warmth,

Minmei's tantrums notwithstanding.

When he thought about it, Rick realized that the closest thing he had to

family was Roy Fokker and-to a slightly lesser extent-his wingmen, Max and

Ben. So Rick endeavored not to think of it.

Lena walked haltingly to her son. "Kyle, is this a dream? I can hardly

believe my eyes! Oh, my baby!" She cupped his face in her hands.

"No, it's not a dream, Mother; it's me."

Tears rolled down her cheeks. "I've missed you so." Lena threw herself

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into his arms.

"Gee," Minmei said, wiping away moisture from her eyes. "I'm so

happy, I'm gonna cry."

Lena truly noticed Rick and her niece for the first time. "Oh, dear! This

is no way to welcome you two home!"

Minmei was snuffling and sobbing openly now. "Aw, don't worry about

us," Rick said.

Lena said, "Now, now; come in!" She kept her hold on her son's

shoulders as he took another step into the White Dragon. Minmei had

assured him that in virtually every detail it was an exact duplicate of the old

place, the one that had been destroyed on Macross Island. But this was

astounding!

There was a clatter of bowls and a rattle of chopsticks over by the

pickup counter. Lynn-Kyle essayed another of his gentle smiles. "Father.

I've missed you, too. You're looking well."

Max snorted gruffly, looking the boy over. Gathering the last of the

bowls with an irritated grunt, he vanished back into the kitchen.

Lena went to plead with him. "Now, dear! Please don't be so-"

But Kyle had caught her wrist, pulling her back. "Mother, don't get

upset, I beg you. Father's always been that way around me, you know that."

Washing up the last of the dishes, Max scarcely knew what he was

doing; his mind was far away, on the years and the rift between himself and

his son. "I always knew he'd come back," he muttered to himself, words

drowned out by the jetting water and the other sounds of the kitchen. "No

alien sneak attack could've killed him."

He had to stop, to dry his eyes and blow his nose. "What else could I

think? He is my son."

And he couldn't help but surrender to the proud smile he'd kept

hidden.

The three Zentraedi spies crouched before the display window of a

sushi and tempura shop not far away, gazing hungrily at the appetizing

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dishes there. Their mouths watered, and their jaws ached with hunger.

Rico's face and hands were pressed flat against the glass.

"So d' you suppose that stuff is food?" Konda asked aloud.

Bron had a hypnotized grin on his face, eyes never leaving the display.

"Mmm, well, something sure smells good here, and I'm getting pretty

hungry."

The tiny supply of concentrate capsules they'd brought with them was

long gone, and they hadn't eaten since the free food at the party on

Daedalus's flight deck the day before.

The other two made ravenous sounds of agreement. Thus far, they

hadn't been able to figure out how to requisition food on the SDF-1;

Macross City was filled with an astounding variety of things, all of which

seemed to change hands through a system based on pieces of paper.

But how to get the paper? The humans' system of distribution and

ration allocation seemed the maddest thing of all about their society.

The three took a few steps back to stare in fascination at the window

and consider their problem. "So who's goin' in to get our rations?" Konda

posed the question.

"That's easy," replied Bron, hitching his belt up. "I'll go."

"No, I'll go!" Rico insisted. Before the other two could raise the

question of tactics, the smallest spy backed up a few steps and, with a

running start, slammed his shoulder into the plate glass.

The glass heaved and shattered, pieces of it raining down inside the

display case and out on the sidewalk. By some chance, Rico wasn't hurt at

all.

The owner, a sturdy-looking woman in her forties wearing flat slippers

and an apron over her working clothes, came charging out onto the

sidewalk. She held a heavy, long-handled ladle in one formidable-looking

fist.

"Hey, what's going on out here-Oh!" She watched dumbfounded as

Rico, squatting on his haunches, claimed his right as winner of the food and

had the first portion. Konda and Bron were looking on avidly.

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But Rico spit out the stuff that was in his mouth and spit again, making

horrible faces. "Inedible! Plaugh!"

She shook her ladle at him. "What's wrong with you? Of course it's not

food. Don't you know the difference between real food and a plastic window

display?"

She took a step toward him, and Rico fell over backward on the seat of

his pants, intimidated by the implement she held-from the confidence she

showed, it was obviously a lethal weapon, perhaps a Robotech device.

Konda and Bron skipped back, ready to do battle but more inclined to run

from such a fearsome opponent.

She set her hands on her hips, looking down at Rico, who waited

miserably to be set upon and wounded or killed. But she said, "If you're

trying to eat that, I guess you really must be hungry."

She'd thought that arrangements for feeding everyone in the SDF-1 had

missed nothing, but perhaps these three loonies were a special

case-incapable of coping with even the least contact with bureaucracy.

There were always going to be those who fell through the social safety net,

she decided, even on the SDF-1.

She wasn't the kind to let people go hungry, and what's more, she was

filled with the joy of the return to Earth and the promised end to her

hardships. She pointed to the door of her restaurant.

"C'mon inside, you three, and I'll fix you something to eat. And I mean

real food!"

She went inside, and the three spies looked at one another.

"She's going to give us food? Just like that?" Bron said blankly. "Just

because she sees we're hungry?"

"How can a chaotic system like this possibly function?" Konda

wondered, rubbing his jaw.

"I don't care, just as long as it functions for another half hour or so!"

proclaimed Rico, scrambling to his feet.

It was insane, against all logic. And yet, knowing how it felt to be very,

very hungry and have someone act toward them in this absurd but very

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welcome manner, they had to admit that there was something about

it-something admirable. Something that struck a chord deep within them.

It was completely unlike the Zentraedi; it even smacked of a kind of

weakness. But it stirred up new and confusing response patterns.

"Hey, wait for us!" Rico yelped, scuttling along after her. Konda and

Bron crowded each other for second place.

114

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

In recent years, Karl Riber hadn't come so often to mind-not more than

once or twice a day, sometimes.

Occasionally, I wonder why I stayed in the service, since it was war that

took us apart, war that had made peace-loving Karl volunteer for duty on the

Mars Sara Base, that got him killed in that raid.

I was only a teenager, and a rather young one, when he left. When he

died, I thought someday the pain would go away, the years would wear it out.

I know better now.

Lisa Hayes,

Recollections

Lisa and her watchmates showed up at the White Dragon with Max

Sterling bringing up the rear. Max knew that Rick claimed to dislike them,

especially Commander Hayes; but Max didn't share his feelings.

He even suspected that Rick protested too much, was too loud in his

denunciation of Lisa; Max had seen them together and knew there was

more there than met the eye, more than either of them was willing to admit.

But far be it from the self-effacing Max Sterling to make any comment.

As for Kim, Sammie, and Vanessa-the ones Rick had dubbed the

"bridge bunnies"-Max was delighted to have their company. He thought it

good luck to have run into them and been invited along and figured any VT

jock who wouldn't jump at the chance to have four good-looking women for

company ought to report immediately for a long talk with the flight surgeon.

"Looks kind of crowded, doesn't it?" Kim was saying, just as they

realized someone was signaling them. He had a big roundtop all to himself,

the only unoccupied table in the place. The bridge bunnies thought it was a

sign from providence, and Lisa made no objection to joining him.

"Talk about a case of perfect timing," Rick said as Max ran around

trying to hold all the women's chairs at once. "Minmei's long-lost cousin

Kyle was in Yokohama. And she wouldn't come back without him."

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Lisa's face clouded with disapproval. She knew Rick's orders, and

bringing an outsider was tantamount to disobedience. Still, if that was the

only way Miss Macross would rejoin the ship, Rick had probably done the

right thing, she admitted, even though she couldn't see why the staff

people-especially the civilian affairs and morale officers-were so determined

that the girl be catered to.

Besides, she knew from her visit to the Alaskan base that there would

be no leak of information about the SDF-1's return or Minmei's visit, not

even from Minmei's parents. The damned Council gestapo would apply

pressure to make sure of that.

"So it's a big reunion," Rick was grousing. "Everybody in the

neighborhood came in to see him."

"Gee! What a hunk!" Sammie gushed.

Her two cohorts were quick to agree, sounding as if they were about to

swoon. Lisa looked over to where Kyle stood with Minmei and his mother,

greeting people and exchanging pleasantries with that gentle reserve of his.

Lisa gasped. He-he reminds me so of Karl!

Gentle, peace-loving Karl, her one and only love, gone forever.

The Terrible Trio were into their act. "Kim, you shouldn't stare; not so

hard!" Sammie giggled.

Kim sniggered back, "Oh, sure! And I suppose you saw him first?"

Sammie dissolved in laughter.

Max seated himself, tossing a forelock of long blue hair out of his eyes,

and polished his glasses on his napkin. Vanessa asked Rick, "What did you

say her cousin's name was again?"

"I think I said Kyle," Rick grunted.

The Terrible Trio had practiced enough to say it as one, so that

everybody in the place could hear: "OH! WELL, HE'S SURE

GOOD-LOOKING, ISN'T HE?"

Maybe "bridge bunnies" isn't such a bad name for them, after all, Max

mused, putting his glasses back on and taking another look at this

Lynn-Kyle.

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"Gee, Minmei looks so happy," Kim sighed.

Rick had something sour to say on the subject, but at that moment

Mayor Tommy Luan sauntered up to the table, his usual effervescent self.

"Well, well, well, Rick, m' boy! So these are some of your friends, eh?

Why don't you introduce me to the ladies, hmm?"

Rick wondered if there was ever a time when Tommy Luan wasn't

campaigning. But before he could comply, Minmei's cousin was there, with

Minmei trailing behind like a faithful pet.

"Hello, Mr. Mayor; glad to have you back on Earth. I'd like to introduce

myself: My name is Lynn-Kyle. Welcome to my family's restaurant."

Minmei, clinging to his arm, added, "Hi!"

Rick heard a little sound escape Lisa and saw that something about

Kyle made her very distraught. The Terrible Trio fell all over one another

greeting Kyle, and Max mumbled some adequate response.

The mayor said heartily, "Well, Kyle, even if you don't like the army,

you'll have to admit there are some lovely ladies in the military!"

Lisa gasped. He even had the same convictions as Karl!

"Oh, uh, did I say something perhaps I shouldn't have?" Tommy Luan

asked with elaborate innocence. "Well, young people should get to know one

another." He sauntered off. "'Scuse me."

Max had the distinct impression that the mayor was wearing a satisfied

smirk-as though he'd succeeded at something. But what?

"Was the mayor implying you have something against the service?"

Sammie piped up.

Kyle shook his head, the long, straight midnight hair shimmering. "It's

not just the military. I don't like fighting of any kind."

Sammie rested her chin on her hands and batted her eyelashes at him.

"Oh, really?" For a guy this dreamy, she'd have sat happily listening to him

do Zentraedi halftime cheers. Minmei gave Sammie a suspicious scowl.

"Fighting produces nothing!" Kyle declared. "It only results in

devastation and destruction!"

Max was studying Kyle with an unusual directness. "Are you saying

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that everyone in the service enjoys destroying things?"

Rick couldn't help jumping in, even if it offended Minmei. Maybe even

because it would. "Well, I didn't join the Robotech Defense Forces because I

like devastation and destruction."

Divine as Lynn-Kyle might be, even the Terrible Trio had to nod and

murmur their agreement with that. Minmei intervened, afraid that things

were about to get out of control.

"Hey, relax, everybody! We're celebrating Kyle's return, after all. I've

got it: They're broadcasting that show I taped yesterday. What about

turning on the television?"

That met with general acclaim; if Minmei was the darling and idol of

the SDF-1, she was an empress among her friends and neighbors. In

another moment the sixfoot screen showed her in the center of the

spotlights, microphone in hand-not that the sound crew couldn't have used

directionals, but she preferred it as a prop. She wore a stunning new Kirstin

Hammersjald creation.

The crowd in the White Dragon was cheering and stomping and

whistling, as was the crowd in the taping studio. Rick strained to catch a

little of the song:

I spend the days alone,

Chasing a dream-

All at once the entertainment special disappeared in an avalanche of

zigzag static, to be replaced by Colton Van Fortespiel.

Everyone in the SDF-1 knew Van Fortespiel, the SDF Broadcasting

System's supervising announcer and the only TV anchorman on record to

wear dark wraparound sunglasses on camera. His appearance sent a signal

of fear through the room; unscheduled announcements of this sort usually

spelled trouble for the dimensional fortress.

For this reason, and the sunglasses, Van Fortespiel was sometimes

called the Boogieman. The Boogieman was wearing earphones today, too,

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and speaking into a jumble of mikes that took his voice over the various

sound-only circuits, intership comlines, and alternative TV channels.

"We interrupt our regular programming for this very important news

bulletin."

The White Dragon resounded with angry resentment. The crowd had

felt at home, safe, and had been eagerly watching Minmei; the people

wanted no part of any more disaster reports. They were yelling for Minmei's

show to be resumed.

"At a news conference moments ago," the Boogieman continued,

"Captain Henry Gloval disclosed to the press that permission for any

survivors to leave Macross has been denied."

There was a moment of stunned silence as Van Fortespiel shifted his

sheets of copy, until a grandmotherly woman howled, "What does he mean,"

'denied'? Does that mean we're stuck here? For how long?"

Others were raising objections, too, but most were shushing them to

hear what else the Boogieman had to say.

"Rumors circulating throughout the ship's upper echelons today

indicate that this prohibition may only be temporary."

A man in a brown sport coat shook his fist at the screen and hollered,

"We finally make it back to Earth and now they're telling us we have to stay

aboard this junk heap?"

A redhaired woman, holding a frightened little girl who wore an RDF

insignia on her rompers, wailed, "How much more do they think we can

endure? When will all this ever come to an end?"

There were plenty of angry voices to second that. "Yeah; we demand an

explanation!" bellowed a guy in a black T-shirt.

But the Boogieman was already returning them to their normally

scheduled programming. In another second, Minmei, smiling winsomely in

the spotlights, was finishing.

-here by my side!

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...and taking a bow. The crowd in the restaurant didn't spare her a clap or a

whistle.

Kim murmured, "They spent all that time and this was the best

announcement they could come up with to break the news?"

Max and Rick traded puzzled, worried looks: What's she talking about?

Sammie gulped. "Look, they're not taking it very well. I sure hope this

doesn't turn into an all-out rebellion!"

The man in the brown coat said, "Hey, look; we've got those military

officers right over there! I say let's get some kind of explanation out of 'em!"

A number of the men there went along with the idea, and in a moment

the five RDF members seated at the table found themselves surrounded.

The brown sport coat shook a fist in Rick's face. "C'mon, Lieutenant!

Tell us what's goin' on!"

Rick sputtered and stammered, as surprised as anyone. "Well, uh, I

guess I don't really know..."

"Stop this!" Lisa snapped. "Stop it right now! How dare you treat us

this way? We risked our lives-and plenty of us died!-to get you back here

safely!"

Some of the crowd paused at that, but the man in the brown sport coat

and a number of others weren't buying it.

"What d' ya want, gratitude?" He sneered. "When we lost everything we

had because of your SDF-1? And now you're making us prisoners here?"

He slammed his fist on the table; the Terrible Trio jumped, startled and

frightened. "Well? I want a straight answer!"

Lisa tried again, more calmly. "Please, it's just a temporary measure.

Just give us-"

He cut her off. "For what, more of the same old promises? We're tired

of lies! We're tired of being held here like convicts! Now we take matters

into our own hands!"

Whoever the brown sport coat was, he was a rabblerouser of

considerable talent. He had almost all the men and quite a few of the

women with him, talking about justice and fighting for their rights. And for

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Lisa the agonizing thing was that she knew that there was a lot to justify

their reaction and that her father had been one of those chiefly responsible

for doing this to the Macross survivors.

Some loudmouth was yelling, "Why don't we show 'em we mean

business? Let's take these punks and force 'em to get us off this ship!"

Lisa stood, gathering the others in by eye. "Let's go."

A broken-toothed man clapped a big paw on her shoulder. "Hold it!"

She tried to stare him down. "You'd better let me go." He shook her.

"Siddown!"

But a hand closed on his shoulder. "Okay, that's enough."

It was Max Sterling. Rick, halfway out of his chair to help Lisa, did a bit

of a double take. Max had been sitting beside him a moment before. What'd

he do, teleport over there?

Max's voice was still mild, but his face showed a certain intensity Rick

had seen only during combat. Look out, tough guy! Rick thought to the

broken-toothed man.

"Take your hand off her. Now."

Max had barely gotten it out when the man threw a punch, screaming,

"Shut up!"

Max ducked, but not far. Rick had seen him do this before; Max's

incredible reflex time and psychomotor responses let him deal with such

things by split seconds and fractions of an inch.

Max avoided the clumsy haymaker and delivered a jolting left,

snapping the other's head around, stepping back neatly as he began to

collapse.

Other members of what had now become a mob saw what had

happened and began to converge on Max, snarling and getting ready to

fight.

Max glared at them, unruffled. "You'd better get back."

Somebody shrieked, "Let's get 'em!" and Rick found that he couldn't

get to Max because the mob was closing in on him, too. A man in a green

turtleneck threw a wild left. Rick bobbed under, came up, and planted a

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solid uppercut, sending him staggering back. Two more men closed in,

swinging hastily and inaccurately. He avoided them, backpedaling.

Max was taking on a very muscular young man who had plenty of

power but not much style. Max warded off a roundhouse with an inside

block, getting a quick hold on that arm. Max's fist went ballistic under the

guy's chin, lifting him right off his feet. It was the brawler's good fortune

that his tongue was well back in his mouth, or his teeth would have snipped

it off.

The muscular one landed sprawling across a table; it crashed down,

slamming him on the back of the head as he landed on his butt on the floor.

Lynn-Kyle had neither advanced to help his cousin's friends nor

withdrawn from the scene. Rick got one brief look at him: Kyle was standing

as rigid and indifferent as a stone idol.

Rick stopped another vigilante with a short, hard shot to the sternum,

then rocked him back with a left cross.

Things had gone very well for the two VT pilots up to now, but more

and more men were getting ready to wade into the melee as soon as an

opening occurred. On the outskirts of things, Lisa and the Terrible Trio

were doing what they could. Quite a number of self-appointed public

prosecutors never got to mix it up with the pilots because a chop across the

neck or a kick to the kneecap put them out of the fight for good.

But the odds against them kept growing. With no chance for a breather

and no escape route, Rick and Max knew things would probably swing the

other way shortly. There was no helping that, and the brawl had gone too

far to be stopped now; they fought on. Rick was accomplished in hand to

hand, quick, well trained, and in good shape, but Max Sterling was simply

unleashed lightning.

It was then that Max, blocking a punch so that he had his foe's arm in a

firm lock, threw the man through the air. Only this fellow, thrashing and

kicking madly, was lofted straight at Lynn-Kyle, who had been watching the

fight impassively. Behind Kyle, Minmei let out a kind of squeak and ducked

for cover.

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Kyle never even moved his feet; he simply bent aside and struck,

sending the unfortunate man flying through the air again, away from his

cousin and himself.

The vigilante crashed into the table the muscular fellow had overturned,

shattering it on impact as a result of the amazing force Lynn-Kyle's move

had imparted to him and somehow contriving to land on his face.

Two of the brawler's friends were at his side instantly. "You all right?"

one of them asked idiotically when it was obvious the man was not all right.

The brawler looked up woozily. "Who is that guy? He's an incredible

fighter!"

"His name's Kyle," said the other buddy, "and that was nothin' but

luck!" He straightened. "But I'm gonna fix him."

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

"I'll tell ya somethin' about your Lynn-Kyle," Max said. "He might be

anti-military, but he's no pacifist. What'd ya think, Gandhi could do spin

kicks?"

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

Kyle waited, serene and unmoving.

"No! No!" Lisa breathed, seeing them close in on him. It would be too

much like having gentle Karl Riber beaten up. But there was nothing she

could do; it was all she and the Terrible Trio could do to hold their own

against the peripheral crowd members.

Rick wondered later if Max Sterling knew all along-or had at least

guessed-what was to happen next and had deliberately thrown that first

opponent Kyle's way. Max, in his supremely humble way, assured Rick that

such a thing was preposterous. Rick might have believed him more if he

hadn't seen the things Max could do in combat.

The first two were a pair of stumblebums; barely moving at all, Kyle

disposed of them contemptuously with foot sweeps, evasions, leg trips, and

beginner's class shoulder throws.

That drew the attention of the men waiting for another crack at Max

and Rick; more and more of them came at Kyle.

Minmei's cousin seemed to have chosen a particular spot on the floor

and decided to defend it-not from preference but rather as an exercise of

will and proficiency. Certainly, the fight didn't seem like much of a

challenge-at least at first.

There was a lot of aikido in his style, plus bando, some judo, uichi-ryu,

and a lot of stuff Rick couldn't identify. It wasn't until he was pressed very

hard that Kyle used his feet, and after that there were teeth and blood on his

area of the White Dragon's floor.

Defending himself on several fronts, Kyle didn't seem to notice the

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roughhouser closing in behind him. Lisa happened to see it, and she had the

weird impression that he knew what was coming and chose to undergo it as

a sort of test, as if he wanted to be hurt.

Be that as it may, the big bruiser got Kyle in a full nelson, and

somebody else tagged him good and hard on the mouth. Kyle didn't seem to

feel it much; he shrugged down out of the hold with some fluid move,

sidekicking the man who'd done the punching so that he went down and

stayed down.

Then Kyle whirled and brought the flat of his hand in an unsweeping

blow along the face of the one who'd held him. The man reeled back, face

leaking crimson but not as badly hurt as he would have been if Lynn-Kyle

had been truly angry.

Kyle had taken just enough of the pressure off Rick and Max so that

they were doing okay again. They'd both taken more than a few shots and at

one time or another had, between them, squared off with just about

everybody on the other side of what had become a minor war. The

opponents were bouncing back more slowly now, and many of them were

out of it for good.

As for Lynn-Kyle, he was a whirlwind, leaping over and ducking under,

spin kicking but never surrendering the spot he'd chosen to defend in the

middle of the White Dragon. He jumped impossibly high, out of the way of a

powerful kick, got his opponent in a wristlock, and rammed him headfirst

into a man who was attacking from the opposite side.

It was an amazing demonstration, like some martial-arts fantasy,

marking the beginning of Lynn-Kyle's legend on the SDF-1. But it should be

remembered that for the most part he was facing antagonists who'd already

been around the dance floor once or even twice-and in some more insistent

cases three times-with Rick and Max.

At one point, Rick put away a shaven-headed tough who'd been trying

to gouge his eyes, working fast, jabbing combinations with knuckles that

were long since lacerated and bleeding. He turned and saw Kyle, leaping

high, lash out with the sword edge of his left foot and down another

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opponent.

Rick wiped blood from his face. "Hey, Kyle! Why don'tcha hand him a

pamphlet?"

Rick went back to his own fight. Kyle made no response but wondered

if the VT pilot knew how deeply that jape-and the dissonance of this

violence-upset Kyle's inner harmonies.

The fight didn't so much end as slow to a halt; at last there was no one

to come at them again. Rick was left sitting on the floor, huffing and puffing,

bone-weary and sore all over. Max was panting, too, leaning against a wall,

blood seeping from a swollen, split lip, his ribs starting to ache where

somebody's knee had gotten a piece of him.

Lisa and the Terrible Trio were standing by the line of brawlers they'd

taken out of the action, having neatly composed some of them as if for sleep.

Lynn-Kyle stood squarely on the spot he'd chosen to defend in the middle of

his family's restaurant.

"You okay, Rick?" Max panted.

Rick was too tired to do anything but nod slowly, tonguing a tooth that

felt like it had been loosened. He felt a certain dread: There were some

inflexible laws aboard the SDF-1, mandated by the insanely unlikely

circumstances of so many civilians and service people thrown together in

such close quarters for such a long time.

Many of those laws had to do with "No Fighting with the Townies!"

Rick figured Gloval was going to be mildly crazy about all of this. Then it

occurred to Lieutenant Hunter to think about the bigger picture, about what

was happening all over the super dimensional fortress in the wake of the

Boogieman's announcement.

We'll be lucky if there is an SDF-1 by tonight! he realized.

Lisa and the Terrible Trio were dusting their hands off, making a few

first-aid suggestions to the people they'd taken out of the action. It occurred

to Rick that without them, he and Max and even Kyle would have gone

down, martial arts notwithstanding. Minmei was gazing at Kyle with stars

and hearts and flowers in her eyes.

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"Oh, Kyle, I'm so proud of you! Are you okay?" She threw her arms

around his neck.

Lynn-Kyle only nodded and made a soft, "Mm hmm."

"'Okay'?" Rick sniggered tiredly, and spit out a gobbet of blood.

Max had come upright, staring at Kyle strangely. "They barely laid a

hand on you." Kyle only looked down at the floor like some demure maiden.

Men who had been in the fight were helping each other to their feet,

staunching blood flows, helping hobbling friends. One tucked an injured

hand into his shirtfront with much pain, wiped the blood from his broken

nose, and said grudgingly, "He's the best I've seen or fought against. That's

the truth."

"Yeah," said Max Sterling reflectively. "He's got moves I never saw

before. Doesn't make sense." He went over toward Kyle, and Rick hauled his

aching body to its feet, prepared to back up his friend if the ultimate slugfest

were to begin.

There was a sudden, particular something in Max's manner now: an

acuity, an unveiled dangerousness, that the aw-shucks everyday Sterling

demeanor usually shrouded.

But Max only stood looking at Kyle, and Kyle back at Max. Max said

after a moment, "You're a pretty well-trained fighter for someone who

doesn't like to fight."

They stood measuring each other. On the one hand was quiet,

bespectacled Max, with his natural gifts, miraculous coordination, and

speed so superior that he could afford to be humble in all things-already a

Robotech legend. Unassuming and kind unless some evil threatened. Max

the placid and benign, truer to what Kyle aspired to be, in a way, than Kyle

himself.

On the other hand was Kyle, seemingly apart from any worldly

consideration or motivation, his incredible martial-arts skills just a

reflection of things that relentlessly drove him for spiritual transcendence.

People sought him, virtually courted him, sensing that he'd passed beyond

everything that was superficial, and wanting-what? His attention and

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approval? His friendship? He didn't have them to give.

But people wanted it more than anything. Kyle's gift was a kind of cold

invulnerability that brought him close to being superhuman for the most

dire and yet formidable reasons, reasons that combined the very best and

the very worst in him.

Those who knew certain spiritual and fighting systems could see the

symptoms in him: all things lay within his grasp, excepting only that which

he wanted most. So his innermost passions had been brought under control

by an act of will, the dark side of his nature subdued in a battle that made

lesser contests, mere physical duels, seem childishly easy.

And that made for a powerful fighter who was without fear and who

would give obeisance to the very best conventional values-while his inner

being fought an endless war.

Some of the people who were in the White Dragon that day later swore

that the very air between Max and Kyle crackled like a kind of summer

lightning or perhaps the terrifying glow between two segments of a critical

mass being brought too close together.

But Kyle lowered his eyes to the floor and said softly, "It was just

something that had to be done, I guess." His head came up, and he looked

about at the men he'd bested. "I'm sorry." A trickle of blood ran from the

corner of his mouth down to his chin.

Minmei was deciding how best to show her concern for Kyle, when Lisa

stepped up to him, holding a scented, daintily folded little handkerchief in

her hand. This was the woman who'd kept a rioter from pouncing on Kyle

two minutes earlier by bringing down a chair on his head.

"You're bleeding! Maybe this'll help."

He drew away from it as if it carried plague, but his voice was still soft

and measured. "Please don't bother. I'd rather not have help from any of

you people. But thank you, anyway."

She was shattered. "I see."

Minmei was quick to see her opening and use it, snatching the

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handkerchief from Lisa's upturned palm. "That's right; Kyle dislikes

servicemen."

Lisa stared at the floor and hoped the hot red flush of anger in her

cheeks didn't show too much. Servicemen?

"Let me help," Minmei said, dabbing at the wound on his cheek.

Kyle hissed in pain. "It hurts if you press too-hard."

She drew a quick breath. "Oh, Kyle, please forgive me!"

Punches and kicks hadn't seemed to bother him that much. "Is he for

real or am I crazy?" Max muttered.

Rick shrugged; if he hadn't just seen Kyle take care of some of the more

hard-core rowdies aboard the SDF-1, he would have said Minmei's cousin

was a complete wimp.

If it was an act, it was brilliant. The bridge bunnies were oozing

sympathy for Kyle, and somebody was going to have to stick a stretcher

under Commander Hayes if she got any more emotional over his well-being,

while Minmei glared at ail the other women jealously and shielded Kyle

from them as much as she could. Miss Macross stroked her cousin's arm

with a proprietary air.

Rick turned to Max, feeling the swelling on his own forehead and the

throbbing of assorted contusions suffered in the riot. "Max, if you're asking

me, the answer is yes!" Rick told him.

Azonia, mistress and overlord of the Zentraedi, surveyed the strategic

situation from the command post of her nine-mile-long flagship.

Matters were coming to a head. She was determined that this would be

the proof of her abilities. A stellar chance! Once she defeated these

Micronian upstarts, the universe would be hers. Supreme commander? That

would lie well within her grasp, and farewell, Dolza!

Or perhaps she would become the new Robotech Mistress. Others had

played that dangerous game, only to lose. But none played it as well as she,

Azonia was confident.

She was less than happy at the moment, however, having just been

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informed that Khyron, the mad genius of war, had again disobeyed her

orders.

Azonia rose to her feet from the thronelike command chair on the

bridge of her own vaunted, combat-tested battleship, fury striking from her

like lightning as though she were a goddess who could smash worlds.

And, in fact, Azonia was.

"What? Are you saying Khyron left the fleet's holding formation in

violation of my orders?"

The communications officer knew that tone of voice and was quick to

genuflect before her, then touch her forehead in abasement. "Yes,

Commander."

She was tall even for a Zentraedi woman, some fifty-five feet and more.

Her mannishly short hair had been dyed blue, not because she cared for

meaningless fads but rather so she would not be thought unaware.

She had exotic, oblique eyes that were piercing beam weapons of

intellect that had served Azonia's rise beyond her contemporaries to the

very pinnacle of Zentraedi command. "That is all," she said coldly.

"Yes, Commander." The messenger withdrew quickly and very

gratefully; beheading the bearer of bad news was a not-uncommon

Zentraedi custom, which among other things served to keep the lower

orders in their place. She was glad-and lucky-to have her life.

But Azonia had dismissed the messenger from her mind completely;

her concentration was all for the problem at hand. Technical readouts and

displays told her all the details she needed to know: The Backstabber, with a

strike force from his infamous Seventh Mechanized Division had, by

Robotech fission, detached a major vessel-form from his own flagship and

was proceeding at flank speed toward the spot where the Micronians had

landed their stolen starship.

Azonia touched a control almost languidly. Close-up details showed

streamers of fire and ionization trailing from Khyron's craft, its outermost

skin glowing red-hot; he was making his entry into the Earth's atmosphere

at a madly acute angle, risking severe friction damage.

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Azonia had sufficient experience to know that Khyron and his attack

troops were sitting out a roller coaster ride in an oven, all in the name of a

possible extra few minutes of surprise.

It was so audacious. It was so willful, so disdainful of anyone's criticism

or interference. So Zentraedi. Azonia resumed her throne, chin on fist.

"Khyron, what have you come up with this time, eh?"

She was in some small part envious, sorry that she wouldn't be there

for the fight. With Khyron in charge, there was sure to be a splendid battle,

bloodshed-that highest glory that was conquest.

On a previous venture, Khyron had been yanked from his objective at

the last moment by Breetai's manual override return command, which had

caused the Backstabber's war machines to return to the fleet despite his

countermanding orders. Khyron had apparently taken steps to ensure that

it couldn't happen to him again.

By now the Earthlings would be hearing the peal of Khyron's thunder.

Azonia, eyes slitted like a cat's, savored the moment, knowing she couldn't

lose either way. If the Backstabber won, the credit would go to her as

armada commander, she would make sure of that; if he lost and was

unfortunate or unwise enough to return to the fleet, she would have the

pleasure of executing him herself.

Azonia savored the thought. Violence and death and a certain sensual

cruelty were things to command any Zentraedi's emotions. Khyron was

becoming quite intriguing.

Azonia watched the displays with feline glee. Decorate him, kill him;

she was equally eager to do either one.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

There before him were the Micronians, doing everything that was

anathema to the Zentraedi. But the lure of the forbidden was always strong in

Khyron, and so there were certain things about Micronian behavior that, I

think, he found tremendously seductive-not the weakling things, of course, but

rather the sensual.

Is it any wonder he loathed and hated them, could not bear to have them

even exist?

Grel, aide to Khyron

She'd been through this drill before, but it didn't make it any easier.

Donna Wilhelm, an enlisted-rating tech who was relief-watch fill-in for

Sammie, tried not to lose her composure and let her voice quaver.

Her fingers clenched at the edges of the console, so hard that it felt like

she might crease it. "Captain Gloval, unidentified cruiser-class spacecraft

closing on our position at Mach seven."

She was the one Claudia had chewed out for daydreaming; Donna was

exacting now, more practiced. She'd learned the lessons anybody under

Gloval learned, and as a result she was capable of manning her station

through hell's own flames. Which looked like it was about to become a job

requirement.

Donna hadn't heard footsteps, but Gloval was suddenly at her shoulder,

massive and calm, whacking his briar pipe against the heel of his shoe to

knock out a bit of dottle. "Punch it up, please."

"Yes, sir. Altitude twelve thousand." Donna lit up her part of the bridge

with tactical displays. It was a given that this could be the minute in which

every soul aboard died.

But that couldn't excuse sloppiness in the discharge of one's obligations.

There was a pure, white-hot kind of bushido, an ultimate calmness in

matters of overwhelming importance, a very privileged eye-of-the-storm

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serenity, that the people on the bridge of SDF-1 were expected to have.

Once you'd been a part of it, it was just impossible to settle for anything

less. Donna had learned it in a school that permitted very few errors and no

inattention, under Gloval, Lisa Hayes, Claudia Grant, and the others.

So now Donna did her duty, up to SDF-1 standards, which is to say

without flaw and with the guts of a cat burglar. "Eleven thousand," she

updated. "If it maintains present course, it'll touch down approx ten miles

from the SDF-1 magnetic bearing three-two-five."

It couldn't be anything but trouble; the war was on again, and if peace

had seemed too good to be true, that was because it was. But Gloval's broad

hand patted Donna's shoulder for a moment, transferring what felt like an

infinite calm even while he was calling orders to other bridge personnel.

"Order up a B status encrypted comline to headquarters immediately!

And one of you find Commander Hayes and get her up here on the double!

Somebody else tell Ghost and Skull teams to get ready for a hot scramble!"

People were doing all of that, and still the bridge was as quiet as a

well-run switchboard. Gloval told Donna Wilhelm, "Well done. Give me

updates every fifteen seconds, understood? And if you see I'm not listening,

come stand on my foot."

Then he was gone, and the SDF-1 bridge was quietly chaotic with a

general-quarters combat alert. Arm Hammerhead missiles and Deca

missiles and Scorpion missiles; power up to main gun batteries; secondaries;

to all firing positions. Hot scrambles, ready on go, aye.

Donna looked at her screens and got ready to relay the first update to

Gloval. Over a year ago, her family had been one of those that were simply

vacuumed up in the catastrophic first encounter between Zentraedi and

human. Now her father was an emergency team specialist, her mother

supervised an elite EVA squad, and her younger brother was dead, one of

Ghost Team's KIAs back in that big blitzkrieg in Saturn's rings.

So Donna did her duty. The aliens had followed SDF-1 to Earth; the

aliens would follow the SDF-1 everywhere, hound the ship and hound those

within it until this fight was settled one way or the other. Only, there was

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one thing that the aliens didn't seem to understand: The SDF-1's crew

would never surrender now.

No matter; it was war again. And the Zentraedi didn't know that they

themselves were refining, like precious metals in some torturous crucible, a

counterforce within the human race that was their match-in willpower if not

in firepower-and more.

Much more.

In the vast command center under the Alaskan wilderness, an operator

called out over his headset, "Confirmed enemy craft continues descent, sir.

Will touch down at point K-32, R-56 Bravo."

The duty officer, Brigadier General Theroux, leaned forward, staring up

at the immense display screen. "Are you certain? Are you positive that that

craft is confirmed as the enemy?"

"That's affirmative, sir."

Theroux got to his feet, squaring away his cap. This was Command's

worst fear made real. The Grand Cannon wasn't yet ready to fire, and even if

it had been, the approaching alien warship wasn't in its range. Until the

planned network of unique dish satellites was in place to redirect the Grand

Cannon's superbolts as needed, it was virtually useless.

Theroux opened an emergency com channel, sure that the ruling

council would want to reconsider standing instructions under the

circumstances. But he could reach only General Herbert and Marshal

Zukav.

"And the enemy is headed straight for the SDF-1," Theroux finished his

brief situation report.

General Herbert's face blinked at him out of the screen. "And? You

mean you haven't carried out Special Order Seventy-three yet?"

Theroux said desperately, "But sir, that will only-"

"Carry out your duty!" Zukav screamed, florid-faced, from another

screen. "Do it this instant or I'll personally see you hanged for mutiny!" The

screens blanked.

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That will only goad them into attacking the SDF-1, and the SDF-1 is a

sitting duck, Theroux had been about to say. But Herbert and Zukav knew

that as well as he. It was as if they wanted the battle fortress obliterated.

Brigadier General Theroux forced his thoughts away from that line of

contemplation. He had his orders.

He addressed his launch control officer. "Very well, then: execute

Special Order Seventy-three. Launch missiles immediately."

And as techs were acknowledging and carrying out the command, he

murmured, "And heaven help us."

"We are now monitoring all base com signals and telemetry," Claudia

reported.

"Very good," Gloval said. While he had no direct orders not to

eavesdrop on his superiors, it went against all operating procedure. But he

had so few things working to his advantage in this crisis; if a man with

cloven hooves, smelling of brimstone, had appeared on the bridge at that

moment, it's very likely that the captain would have struck a bargain with

him.

Claudia looked over to Lisa, who seemed lost in thought even though

her boards appeared to be registering a lot of activity. "Lisa?" Claudia called

softly. "Lisa! Girl, what seems to be the problem? You've been in some kind

of daydream ever since you got back. Tell me, is it Kyle?"

For a moment Lisa looked like a startled deer. Then she became very

defensive, even though she should have been used to her best friend's

teasing by then. "Claudia, you know that's just not true!"

"Ahem," Gloval said softly, materializing behind them. "Ladies..."

They both got back to work, but Claudia was chuckling and an angry

red spot appeared on each of Lisa's cheeks.

Kim shattered the gentle, joking atmosphere for good. "Captain,

headquarters had just launched defense missiles. Our instruments show

approximately fifteen seconds to impact."

Gloval settled into his chair. "Fifteen seconds, understood." What in

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blazes can those fools be hoping to accomplish? Conventional weapons are

totally useless against the Zentraedi.

"Prepare to send in the Veritechs," he said.

With the disappearance of Dr. Lang and the SDF-1 and the destruction

of its orbital force in the wake of the initial Zentraedi attack, Earth's defense

command had been forced to fall back on older technologies, at least until

their Grand Cannon was completed.

Even the production of VTs was impossible, since most of the necessary

fabricating and power-plant replicating devices were on the battle fortress;

the earthly RDF fighters who'd greeted the ship on its return were just that,

ordinary fighters, even though they looked like VTs. The only real Robotech

weapons now in the Council's possession were the handful of Battloids that

had, predictably, been preempted to guard the Council's own Alaskan

warren.

The huge, silvery missiles that rose up from the planet's surface now,

recently manufactured and bearing the kite-like delta insignia of the

Robotech Defense Forces, were nevertheless primitive in comparison with

Robotechnology. But the order to fire was in place, and the workings of

command structure spun and reacted automatically.

Khyron's great cruiser moved more slowly in the thick lower

atmosphere. He didn't even bother trying to evade the missiles or shoot

them down; he relished the shudder and thunder of their harmless

detonations against his vessel's massive armor. He loved toying with his

prey, loved to pretend that slaughter was battle.

Hellish fire washed across the ship's armor and swirled away behind it,

like foam off a killer whale, having no effect.

Behind the big transparent bubble of his command post, Khyron

looked down contentedly at the activity on his warship's bridge. Grel, his

second in command, growled in a fierce, deep Zentraedi guttural, "Khyron,

what about a counterattack?"

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It was Khyron's pleasure to speak differently from his fellows, to be

unique in all things. His accent was overrefined, almost foppish, though the

Zentraedi lacked such a concept except in his case. But few people had ever

dared call the Backstabber on it, and all of those had met with grief.

"A brilliant idea, Grel! But just what are we counterattacking?"

Greys thick brows met as he pondered the question. "You mean," he

said slowly, "that this planet is not the actual main objective."

Khyron's handsome, sinister face lit with a predatory smile. "You're

beginning to see the light." Another glorious victory for Khyron! And

oblivion for the hated SDF-1; things were going perfectly.

"Veritechs, you have permission to engage the enemy," Lisa said. "Fire

at will."

A swarm of angry VTs swooped in on the descending alien, lances of

bright blue energy stabbing from their pulsed laser-array cannon, another

of Lang's developments.

"SDF-1 to United Earth Command," Lisa transmitted. "Our fighter

squadron has initiated contact." Chew on that, you burrowing moles!

The VTs were in close, flown by veterans who knew where to aim and

how to avoid the bigger ship's clumsy cannon volleys. They did only minor

damage on the first few passes; but there were dozens of them, so more

serious damage would be inflicted if they were allowed to have their way.

Gloval was counting on something he'd noticed before: There were

definitely differing factions among the enemy, sometimes working at

cross-purposes. One faction seemed to be commanded by an injudicious

hothead, and this attack smacked of him-or her.

Gloval was right. Even as the enemy cruiser closed on the dimensional

fortress, fighter bays opened and alien mecha poured forth to battle for the

skies. For this engagement, Khyron had elected to use a mix of his best

fighting machines; the VTs swooped in to find themselves facing stubby

triple-engine fighters with fuselages like narrow eggs: tri-thrusters-Botoru

pursuit ships, agile and spoiling for a fight.

137

But no more so than the RDF fliers, who were now on their home

planet, their backs literally to the sea. There was nowhere to run, no thought

of surrender, and no battle plan needed except to make the aliens pay very,

very dearly for each moment they spent in Earth's atmosphere.

"I'm getting heavy contact reports and increased readings of enemy

activity, sir," Claudia relayed.

Out where war mecha jousted with spears of pure ruin for the fate of

the SDF-1 and the human race, lines of fire and counterfire crisscrossed

ferociously, taking a heavy toll on both sides.

Despite a steady rain of blasts from the SDF-1's primary and secondary

batteries, Khyron's cruiser swung in a low pass toward the battle fortress.

Gloval wasted no time wishing that the all-powerful main gun could be fired.

That wasn't possible; damage to the main gun mechanism suffered on

reentry hadn't been repaired yet. So the battle would have to be won

another way.

More VTs were ordered to the flight decks, Rick's Vermilions among

them, and every weapon on the ship concentrated fire on the invader.

Gloval spoke quickly to engineering, preparing for other, desperate

measures.

The SDF-1's fire was punishing Khyron's ship as even the VTs couldn't,

but that didn't matter to the Backstabber; he needed only a little longer. His

cruiser passed overhead, all batteries firing, the two heavyweight ships

hammering away at each other with all they had, inflicting appalling

damage.

At the same time the cruiser released more mecha, a virtual hail of

Battlepods that dropped down toward the SDF-1. The pods and the

tri-thruster pursuit ships kept up a heavy fusillade. The VTs did their best to

turn back the assault drop, but they were simply outnumbered; there would

be many empty bunks down in the squadron quarters that night, if indeed

the SDF-1 lasted at all.

Leading his troops in his own tremendously powerful officer's

Battlepod, Khyron saw the carnage and grinned like a lunatic.

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"Keep firing and don't stop until we've destroyed every last one of the

miserable Micronian vermin!"

139

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

And so the stage was set by the eternal mandala, the yin and the

yang-the good that is in evil, and the evil that is in good. Human betrayal,

Zentraedi disobedience of several trends, and yes, that fanatic courage of the

aliens-these al! played their part that day.

Jan Morris,

Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians

Claudia turned to call to Gloval. "A mixed group of fighting vehicles is

approaching our decks, sir. The Veritechs couldn't hold them."

"I want Vermilion ready for immediate launch," Gloval snapped.

Lisa found herself seeing Rick's face and shook her head to regain her

concentration. "Yes, sir."

As his ship and Max Sterling's were raised to the flight deck, Rick

thought, Well, here we go again. And haw many will die this time? Damn all

Zentraedi! You want death?

Come on, then; we'll give you death!

Claudia updated, "Enemy breakthrough heaviest now at blocks three,

seven, niner, and sixteen."

Gloval turned and called, "Get the tactical corps mecha out on deck.

Double-check to make sure all civil defense mecha are in position and have

them stand by for possible redeployment!"

Everybody knew what that meant: Gloval was practically admitting

that the aliens might penetrate to the very interior of the ship itself-perhaps

to Macross City.

Lisa shuddered, but she kept on at her work, seemingly calm and

self-possessed. "Vermilion Team, stand by at block number three for

protection and await further orders." From that position a number of the

dimensional fortress's functioning gun turrets and missile tubes could

provide some cover for them until Gloval decided where to commit them.

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"Roger," Rick acknowledged.

Almost all the other VT teams were either in the air or waiting to be

lifted to the flight deck, but that didn't seem to be daunting the enemy.

More and more alien mecha were dropping, an unbelievable assault force.

That cruiser must have been packed cheek by jowl with them! Lisa thought.

She saw Vermilion forming up on an outboard pickup. Enemy fire was

sizzling down all around them, bluewhite beams that vaporized the nonskid

and scored the armor deeply.

Rick's voice came on again. "Hey there, Commander Hayes! How many

of these things do we have to shoot down before they stop coming at us?

Ten thousand or twenty thousand? Or two million, or what? Just checking,

you understand."

A sudden volley hit right near his VT and almost got it; she could hear

the shock and adrenaline in his voice as he cried out, "God damn you!" at

the aliens.

Lisa looked stunned. "Hold position," she said slowly, feeling her skin

go cold and her heart pounding so hard she could feel it all through her. She

watched her screen, hypnotized, waiting for the next salvo to claim him.

"Await...further orders..." she managed. She saw Rick's face before her,

in a cockpit, but then suddenly Karl Riber's-or no, it was Lynn-Kyle's,

wasn't it? What was happening to her?

There was such a thing as personal initiative, and junior

officers-especially team leaders-were expected to recognize a time when it

was their duty to exercise it.

"Well, I'm getting these fighters out of here before it's too late!" Rick

snapped, as much to himself as to Commander Hayes. "All right, Vermilion;

follow me!"

There was no time for a catapult launch, even if the cat crews had been

able to function in that firestorm. None could, and many of the brave crews

were down for good.

The VTs rolled behind Rick, engines shrilling; only Robotechnology

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gave them power to reach sufficient airspeed in the short space available.

Rick's VT howled out into the air, followed by Max, Ben, and the rest.

Even so, they hadn't gotten away fast enough. The fifth VT took a direct

hit while lifting, crashed to the deck again, burning out of control because

overworked damage and firefighting crews were fully occupied elsewhere.

From the explosion, it was clear that the pilot had died instantly.

But the deck would have to be cleared for more launches and for

eventual landings, assuming any Veritechs came back this day. A

courageous cat crew officer named Moira Flynn climbed into a cargo mover.

Braving the flames, the exploding VT ordnance, and the withering enemy

fire, she began bulldozing the wreckage to the edge of the deck, to dump it

into the sea.

Lisa could barely spare an instant in which to watch the launch of

Vermilion; there were a thousand other things that demanded her attention.

But she shut her eyes for an instant. Please let him be all right! But Rick's

face was superimposed in her mind with Karl's, with Kyle's...

Out on the flight deck, a bulky Gladiator attack mecha from the tactical

corps-a smaller, cruder version of the Battloids-fired its chest cannon,

missile racks, and straight-lasers. It suddenly found itself confronted by a

quintet of Battlepods that dropped to the deck almost simultaneously,

blowing the Gladiator away; both human crewmembers were dead

practically before they knew what was happening.

More pods landed, firing the heavy guns mounted on their plastrons

and, in some special cases, missile launchers, particle cannon, and other

offensive armaments.

Two more Gladiators came forward to seal the hole in the defensive

lines, braving the enemy rounds to throw out a wall of fire of their own. The

crewmembers loved life as much as anybody, but they were unswerving in

the defense of their ship and their planet. They opened up with gatlings and

missiles and lasers. The Battlepods kept coming until the mecha were at

point-blank range.

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Another Gladiator went down. Amid the smoke and confusion, the

third found itself out of ammunition and standing toe to toe with a pod.

The Gladiator crew reacted at once; as the pod sprang at it, their war

machine swung an armored fist, caving in the lower half of the Zentraedi's

plastron. The Gladiator ducked, and the pod crashed to the deck a little

beyond.

Unarmed, the RDF mecha turned to grapple with the next pod, but it

leapt high in the air like an immense grasshopper, all guns firing. The

Gladiator collapsed in on itself, becoming a fireball.

Rick lined up another bogey, one of the small, fiendishly fast Botoru

pursuit ships. The enemy fired a poorly aimed stream of the annihilating

energy discs that were one of its armaments, then flared like a meteor

before the Vermilion Leader's volley.

The battle was the biggest fighter ratrace yet, all the more frantic and

hysterical because it swirled through the relatively small area around the

battle fortress. Speeds were therefore much lower than usual, but distances

were so short and maneuvering room so limited that everything happened

in split seconds.

One dogfight got mixed up with another. Pilots from both sides

collided, shot friend instead of foe, lost sight of their prey only to find a

bandit on their tail.

Lisa's voice sounded in Rick's headphones. "Proceed to enemy

penetration at block number seven."

Only Max and Ben were left now. They managed to make it over to the

designated defensive block, where they were witnesses to something out of

an old-time Western movie.

Civil Defense mecha had been rushed up to serve as reinforcements for

the tacticals. The thickset war machines, like walking dreadnoughts, stood

straddle-legged on the deck, blasting away at the massed enemy.

Excalibur Mark VIs and Gladiators, drum-armed Spartans with their

huge circular canisters of missile launchers, and multi-barreled Raider Xs

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swinging their beam cannon this way and that-they all stood shoulder to

shoulder against the main Zentraedi onslaught as enemy fire took them out

of the line one by one.

The pods were closing in fast; the enormous losses they'd suffered

seemed to have no effect on the size of the fleet. They had advanced to a

point where none of the SDF-1's primary batteries-and only a few of the

remaining secondaries-had a line of fire on them; the batteries were

primarily for air defense.

The RDF mecha were standing their ground, laying down fire with

everything they had. They knew that if their line collapsed, there would be

nothing to stop the aliens from getting into the ship-and winning the war.

It was truly the hour of the attack mecha, with even the VTs taking a

back seat. They made their stand as the Zentraedi closed the distance by

leaps and bounds. The killing in the skies had numbed him, yet Rick

thought this was one of the most savage scenes ever seen during the war.

As Vermilion came in to see what they could do to help, two foremost

Raider Xs went up like cans of firecrackers. The pods bounded past the

wreckage to close in on the last of the defenders.

Khyron was gleeful, nearly mad with the joy of war, as he led the final

charge, addressing the cannon of his Officer's Pod to a new target. In

minutes, the ship would be his; and with it, the universe.

In the meantime, three of the accursed VTs made a close strafing run,

destroying the leading line of pods. But other pods would soon be there to

deal with them; even Veritechs couldn't keep Zor's ultimate creation away

from Khyron now!

Khyron was distracted by two lumbering Excaliburs that were closing

in on him, their power low, missile racks exhausted. He blew them both

away in the same moment with the tremendous derringerlike cannon that

were arms of the Officer's Pod.

The VTs were making another pass, and the enemy mecha were being

outrageously stubborn-but the final conclusion should only take another

minute or so.

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But just then Khyron heard an alarm signal on his instrument panel.

He read his indicators, turned, and craned to look up into the distant sky.

"What's this? No! Impossible!"

Grimly, without looking up from her data displays, Claudia said,

"Captain, a second enemy attack force is on the way down now, from

another ship. They appear to be a new type of mecha."

Leading her combat drop, Miriya looked approvingly at the bitter

struggle raging all around the dimensional fortress. Behind her came a full

battalion of her Quadrono Battalion's powered armor mecha.

Azonia was still reiterating instructions over the com net, a rather

offensive bit of interference, Miriya thought. "Miriya, the purpose of your

operation is to thwart Khyron's plan. Therefore, do not fire at the enemy or

damage the dimensional fortress."

Azonia had done some thinking in the interim and had consulted

several of her personal informants. It seemed Khyron was playing a game

truly his own; everything pointed to his intention to take the SDF-1 for

himself.

And Azonia would win no approval from her superiors or the Robotech

Masters if that were to happen; quite the opposite, in fact. Thus: Miriya and

her Quadrono Battalion were launched to stop him.

So a Zentraedi warrior is expected not to fire at the enemy, eh? Miriya

smiled to herself maliciously. "Well now, it's too bad I never heard that

order because my communications gear is malfunctioning, Azonia!"

Her own personal mecha-suit was the one that had so dazzled the RDF

during her insertion of the three spies. It was supercharged, more

maneuverable and powerful than any other in the Zentraedi fleet. Now she

zoomed down like a lightning bolt, blowing an unsuspecting VT out of the

air with a double stream of the annhilation discs, destroying another a split

second later.

"I love it when a good plan works out well," she said languidly. And the

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good plan in this case was her own-the one that had gotten her another

crack at the enemy and, if she was lucky, a little scuffle with Khyron's

incompetents as well.

The Quadrono armor hit thrusters, rocketing for the deck.

Azonia ranted at the com pickup in her flagship bridge command

center. "Khyron, come in immediately! Can you hear me? You are in

violation of your orders! Therefore, stop this attack at once!"

Perhaps he would claim that his equipment wasn't working properly.

That was the damnable thing about the Zentraedi armada, and for that

matter their whole instrumentality. With a few exceptions like that bitch

Miriya's, Zentraedi war machinery had a far from flawless operational

record.

It was only right that warriors care only for war; maintenance and

mechanics were work for slaves. But there never seemed to be nearly

enough of those, at least ones of any use.

Azonia swore under her breath and waited to see what would happen.

But Khyron wasn't opposed to answering her. He was merely

completing his latest maneuver, having leapt his pod high to come down

directly over two of the last enemy attack mecha, a pair of Raider Xs,

blowing them to bits with the derringer cannon.

"Violation of my orders?" he mocked her. "But I haven't done anything

to these despicable Micronians, at least not yet!" He was firing to all sides.

"But in the centuries to come, if any of them are left alive, they will speak

the name of Khyron with terror!"

"Don't play games with me!" Azonia shouted. "Turn back at once or I'll

have you shot!"

The last of the enemy mecha were down, and Khyron was about to lead

his forces to the ultimate plunder, when the odds suddenly changed.

Aircraft elevator platforms ground up into view to either side despite the

fact that the last of the SDF-1 combat aircraft had long since taken off.

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They were loaded, instead, with every MAC II Destroid cannon the

desperate defenders had managed to get to the trouble spot, arriving in time

only because of the attack mecha's courageous last stand and Vermilion's

skillful flying. Six of the stumpy, waddling gun turrets were on either

elevator, port and starboard.

Mounting six pulsed laser-array cannon and four supervelocity

electromagnetic rail-guns apiece, the MACS had the pods in a perfect cross

fire-and opened up.

What had been imminent victory for the pods became instead a

disastrous firestorm.

The rail-guns fired solid slugs at a velocity that delivered incredible

kinetic energy on impact, velocities so high that making the slugs explosive

would have been redundant. Zentraedi combat armor was no protection,

and Battlepods collapsed in on themselves like crushed eggs or came apart

in fragments, only to explode instants later.

The MACS' pulsed lasers swept back and forth at the massed alien war

mecha, quartering the sky with grazing fire that raked the flight deck, and

caught them as they leapt or while still on their feet. Pods went up like

exploding oil-well rigs or expanding spheres of shrapnel and flame.

Khyron had instantly leapt his pod away to comparative safety upon

seeing the MACs appear. He would have gone truly berserk with frustration

and wrath at that point, but his own life was now at stake.

There would be no quick taking of the objective, and SDF-1's deck was

being swept clear of his troops. More, Miriya's hated Quadronos were

hovering above, out of range but capable of intervening at any moment. But

on whose side? In some ways she was as capable of duplicity as Khyron

himself.

And then, of course, there was Azonia's promise to have him shot.

He gave a low, bestial growl as he landed his Battlepod on a safer area

of the deck, opening his command channel. "All right, men! Cease firing!

We're returning to the fleet!"

His mission exec, Gerao, came up over the net, sounding shocked.

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"Ex-excuse me, mighty Khyron; would you please repeat that? We're going

back now?"

Khyron could see from his instruments that Gerao was fairly well in the

clear and could reach the cruiser quickly. The cruiser was exactly where he'd

directed that it be: submerged in the ocean not far from SDF-1.

"Yes." Khyron sneered. "I have just received a direct order from

Commander Azonia. "But don't forget to get your souvenir, my friend."

"My souvenir?" Gerao's tone said he'd understood Khyron's hidden

meaning. "Why, no, sir. I certainly won't forget that!"

Khyron began regrouping his forces for the shameful withdrawal. But

part of him burned fusion-bright.

If Khyron couldn't have his victory, he would at least have his revenge!

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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

No one, gunner or VT jock or attack-mecha crewmember, could recall a

more intense fight. Certainly they all earned their pay that day, and a lot

more than money besides. Many paid the final price of freedom.

It is interesting to note, however, that although everyone on the VT

teams had seen intense combat, it was the men and woman of the air-sea

rescue teams [whose units had also suffered heavy casualties] who, upon

entering the various pilots' hangouts, found that they would not be allowed to

pay for their own drinks, period.

Zachary Fox, Jr.,

VT: the Men and the Mecha

The giant saucer shapes that were Zentraedi amphibious-assault ships

dropped from Miriya's cruiser to retrieve Khyron's surviving Battlepods.

At Khyron's order, the first of his retreating units kangaroo-hopped

from the SDF-1's deck into the sea to get well clear of the fortress's guns and

fighters before making their rendezvous. He'd lost enough of his vaunted

strike force without having them and their pickup ships shot out of the sky.

Now it was Zentraedi mecha that fought the holding action as RDF

attack machines and VTs pressed them ever harder and turned the kill

ratios around. Battlepods bobbed and churned through the waves as the

great saucers descended for the rendezvous point.

Overhead, the fighters were still going at it with the Botoru tri-thruster

pursuit ships while the SDF-1's gun batteries took more and more enemy

ships out of the fight as the tactical and civil defense attack mecha took over

mop-up operations on deck.

Elsewhere, Gerao reached Khyron's cruiser as it rose from its

submerged position. He gave quick orders as his pod was being brought

aboard, preparing to take command and wreak Khyron's vengeance on the

Micronians.

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Vanessa called out, "Captain, that first enemy cruiser has reappeared!

It's on a collision course with us!"

Gloval thumbed the bowl of his empty pipe absentmindedly. "It looks

like a suicide maneuver. Lisa, Claudia! Prepare the Daedalus for its Attack

mode, immediately!'.'

Up on deck, Vermilion Team had its Veritechs in Battloid mode.

Rick concentrated on control, letting his helmet's receptors pick up his

thought-commands and translate them into the Battloid's instant, fluid

movements. The Battloid traversed its autocannon from one target to the

next, firing depleted transuranic slugs that had awesome, armor-piercing

capabilities. The powered gatling consumed ammunition at an amazing rate,

and the Battloid had to transfer fresh boxed belts of rounds to it frequently

from integral reserve modules built into various parts of its body.

The reloading took only moments, but in the middle of a firelight that

could be a long time. Rick found himself on empty as a pod dashed at him.

He hit the thrusters built into the Battloid's feet and launched himself at it,

just as its cannonade blew up the deck where he'd been standing.

He had no choice but to attack it hand to hand before it could get a

bead on him. All around him, Battloids were locked in similar

close-quarters fighting against the pods, up and down the SDF-1's decks.

But the alien Battlepod crewman was shrewd and quick. The pod

lashed out with one foot and sent Rick's Battloid flying backward with a

tooth-rattling jolt. The Battloid crashed to the deck, its pilot dazed.

He shook his head clear just in time to send the Battloid rolling to the

side. He avoided the pod's next fusillade, rolled again, and brought the

Battloid to its feet dexterously. And now, the chain-gun was reloaded.

Rick fired a long burst, taking the pod dead center; he watched it

dissolve and fly into pieces, an expanding, blazing sphere. But out of the

ballooning explosion zoomed a new enemy, one of those strange alien

mecha that had been mostly staying out of the fight up until now.

Whoever was flying it was either a masterful pilot or crazy or both. The

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battle-armored figure came through the fireball in one piece, though, and

nearly bowled Rick over. Its weapons came close to downing Max on one

side and Ben on the other as the two Vermilion wingmen dove for cover.

The lightning-fast attacker was gone before they could fire at it, since

the SDF-1's surviving batteries were hopelessly slow in tracking it. The three

Vermilion fliers got their Battloids to their feet, shaken but unharmed.

"Let's finish this thing!" Rick said in clipped tones. At his command,

Vermilion went into Veritech mode, skimming the deck, turning pods into

expanding balls of incandescent gas with intense autocannon fire.

The last few pods leapt high, thrusters cutting in, trying for a

slim-chance vertical escape while the remaining Botoru pursuit ships dove

to try to cover them. The lower battle and the upper became one as the

mecha swirled and fought. Rick peeled off to go after two escaping pods.

"So they think they have won, eh?" Khyron mused, his pod standing in

the shelter of a superstructural feature of the dimensional fortress's flight

deck, hidden and waiting.

Rick bagged the pods, and Ben and Max went back down to take care of

an insistent pursuit ship that was still strafing the SDF-1. They returned to

Battloid mode, blasting it into ten thousand pieces.

Meanwhile, Rick had picked up two more tri-thrusters on his tail. He

led them down to deck level, and Max and Ben bagged them from behind

with streams of high-density slugs.

"Nice shooting!" Rick said, relieved. Then he saw what was coming up

fast behind him. "No!"

It was the strange alien attack mecha, the one that had nearly nailed

him moments before. He braced himself to be hit, perhaps killed, then and

there. But it zoomed past, gaining altitude rapidly, pulling away as if the VT

were standing still.

Rick realized that it matched the description of that souped-up

Zentraedi who had done so much damage to Roy Fokker's Skull Team just

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before the Skulls recovered the stolen pod in which Lisa, Rick, Ben, and

Max had made their escape from the aliens.

Rick cut in auxiliary power, going ballistic, determined to end the

warped cat-and-mouse game.

In her special suit of Quadrono powered armor, Miriya laughed

scornfully.

Khyron's cruiser was close enough to the SDF-1 that the ship's turret

guns were making serious hits on it now. The remaining Battloids on the

deck were also keeping up a steady volume of fire at the suicide ship. But

that was of no matter; in moments, the battle would be over.

In his massively reinforced command center, Gerao braced for

collision.

"Veritechs, be ready to get clear on my command," Claudia said, having

taken over some direction of fighter ops while Lisa readied the Daedalus

Maneuver.

Miriya swept by, only a few feet off the deck. Rick was right on her tail,

chasing her high and low, around and around.

She went into another climb, but the irritating Micronian stayed with

her in the six o'clock position, chopping away at her with autocannon fire.

Not that it concerned her very much; Miriya was sure she could turn on

him and kill hilm whenever she chose. But she monitored the coming

impact of the enormous ships closely. "Khyron, do not fail!"

"Daedalus attack in five seconds," Claudia marked. "Four..."

The Terrible Trio braced for collision; the enemy cruiser blocked the

sky, growing larger every instant.

In one horrifying moment, Claudia realized that Lisa was paralyzed.

Lisa saw Rick's face, saw poor dead Karl's, saw Kyle's. Over and over,

so obsessively that she failed to see the cruiser's bow filling the bridge's

forward viewbowl.

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"LISA!"

Claudia's shout brought her back at the very last moment. Her hands

were reacting even before she could order her thoughts, flying across the

controls. She heard herself responding calmly, "Executing Daedalus attack

now." It was as if someone else were speaking.

They felt the SDF-1 shift, its bouyancy radically altered, as the

supercarrier Daedalus was lifted clear of the water-a battering ram the size

of a hundred-fifty story building. There was the rumble of the dimensional

fortress's foot thrusters firing to keep balance. The sea boiled all around

them.

The astoundingly powerful Robotech servos lifted the huge flatdeck

clear of the sea, thrusting it at the incoming enemy like a titanic warrior

throwing a slow-motion punch.

Gerao saw the carrier's prow coming; it was far too late to do anything

about it. He triggered his personal ejection mechanism, to flee the ship

while he still could, leaving the rest of his crew to perish.

The Daedalus's hurricane bow and can-opener prow had been

reinforced by Lang and his technicians to the point where they were all but

invulnerable, even against Zentraedi armor. Daedalus punched through the

cruiser's hull, keelside and forward, as if skewering it. The carrier burst

through armor, structural members, bulkheads, and systemry, smashing

everything that was in its path as if it were passing through rotted wood and

plasterboard.

The cruiser's velocity carried it into the blow, and the SDF-1's

incomparable power lifted Daedalus and the enemy vessel high. The

supercarrier's prow emerged from the cruiser's upper side, protruding more

than fifty yards beyond.

Lisa, still monitoring the attack and shaken by her near failure, hadn't

noticed that protrusion. She was alarmed that the cruiser's residual

momentum was grinding it forward toward the SDF-1 like a wild boar

coming up a hunter's spear to deal death before it died.

"Emergency missiles: Fire!" she said, hitting the switch.

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High above, the carrier's bow swung open and a thousand missiles

screamed out of their launchers. But instead of seeking targets within the

enemy vessel, as they were programmed to do and as they had done in the

Battle at Saturn's Rings, they boiled out into the open sky.

Here and there they found a damaged, limping Battlepod or a disabled

Botoru tri-thruster, obliterating them; but the majority climbed, searching

for targets and rose up at-a Veritech.

He juked and hit his countermeasures and jamming gear, giving his

ship everything he had while simultaneously screaming over the command

net.

"Lisa, this is Rick! I'm in direct line of our missiles! Abort firing!

Destruct! Destroy them!"

She'd barely begun when he was yelling, "Mayday! Mayday, I'm hit!"

The jolt to his wing and another to the rear stabilizers, as well as the

sudden, uncontrollable spin, let him know that there was no hope of

keeping his VT in the air. He was preparing to eject when another missile

hit the fuselage forward of the wing-just below the cockpit.

Above the VT that pursued her and slightly farther away from the

missile barrage, Azonia gave her powered armor suit maximum emergency

power, dodging and diving. The explosions of the missiles that had hit

Rick's ship had set off fratricide explosions in other missiles, causing them

to destroy one another and upsetting the guidance systems of many more.

She turned, dove, shook off the last of the missiles chasing her, and

came back past the SDF-1 in a low pass that clipped the tops off the ocean

swells heated by the dimensional fortress's thrusters. Her jamming

equipment, the surface clutter, and her own speed and maneuverability had

somehow saved her. Unscathed, she flashed into the sky once more as the

missile barrage died away.

Khyron's cruiser was beginning to glow and tremble from massive

interior damage and ruptured power systems. Claudia and the others moved

fast to pull the Daedalus free and back away. They were barely clear when

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the cruiser's engines overloaded and it became a globe of blinding light,

rocking the SDF-1 in the water.

"The follow-up missile attack on the enemy was a complete success!"

Claudia crowed. "Captain, the enemy ship has been totally destroyed!"

Looking down from his hovering Battlepod, far out of the radius of

battle, missile attack, and explosion, Khyron pounded his metalshod fist

against the arm of his seat over and over.

"No! My plans can't have failed! Not again! I won't have it!"

Azonia's image appeared on one of his screens. "Well, Khyron, it looks

as though your perfect plan was slightly less than perfect. In fact, if it had

been any less perfect, you'd be dead too!" Her jeering laugh let him know

that such an event wouldn't have been so imperfect to her.

The remaining enemy forces withdrew in their big saucer-like

amphibious ships. Gloval vetoed any idea of pursuit. "Let's not push our

luck or theirs, eh? The battle is over." He rose to go. "Just maintain present

position."

"Yes, Captain," Claudia responded, when Lisa didn't.

He paused to look back at Lisa. "Oh, and Commander Hayes: I want to

commend you on the excellent job you did this afternoon."

They all saw her shoulders shaking as she bent over her console, heard

the sobs in her voice as she replied, "Thank you, sir."

Later, as she sat in her cabin, her head whirled with bits and pieces of

the things that were tearing at her: Rick. Karl. Kyle. Her father. Gloval. And

the fate of all the innocent people on the SDF-1...The cruel faces of the

UEDC councilors.

And, more than anything, what she should do about it all, because Lisa

Hayes wasn't anybody's crybaby.

But she spent most of the time thinking about Rick's frightened voice

as the missiles closed in. There's been no word yet of any sightings by the

air-sea rescue teams.

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In the end it was Rick's voice she heard over and over, Rick's face she

saw. Then for a while she did cry, wondering if she would go insane.

"I didn't know! I just didn't know," she wept. Didn't know she would be

putting him in danger with the missiles, didn't know how deeply it would

affect her and how much she felt for him.

Didn't know if she could go on, if he were dead.

She gazed up to where the bulkhead met the overhead. "Please, please

don't let him die!"

The Barracuda helo swept in low. The pilot radioed back to the search

plane, "Uh, roger, two-niner-niner. I have the dye marker in sight and now

have the chute in sight. But I have no movement, I say again, no

movement."

The helo descended, churning up the water with the backwash of the

rotors. The buoyant VT parachute was below it, lying like a dead sea nettle

amid the yellow stain of the dye marker that had automatically been

released by the wearer's safety harness on impact with the water.

There was a figure in a flight suit, buoyed by automatic floatation

pockets that had expanded when he'd hit, his helmet having sealed itself to

keep him from drowning. But all the automatic gear was worthless if he'd

been shot while in his ship or coming down.

Big, sinuous shapes were circling; large dorsal fins cut the water. The

rescue teams got ready for a pickup while the door gunners did a bit of

shark hunting.

Back at the hospital in Macross City, Rick was taken into the ER,

priority. The medical personnel continued fighting their own battle long

after the killing had stopped.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

It was very strange. It took such an awful mishap to crystallize

something that had been so murky up until then. I'm not much for romantic

fiction or tell-all autobiographies, but from what I'd read, it's usually

something grand and poetic that brings on a realization like this, not just

almost causing somebody's death.

Lisa Hayes,

Recollections

He lay covered by a protective med-bubble, attached to banks of

intensive care machinery.

The monitor-robot overseeing his millisecond-to-millisecond care

recorded:

"Lt. Rick Hunter. Multiple lacerations, concussion and minor skull

fractures causing temporary encephalographic irregularities. No internal

damage. This unit will continue to monitor. Probable symptoms of

delirium."

Somewhere deep in his thoughts the word registered, echoing.

Delirium...delirium...

He was off on a midnight roller coaster ride, composed of the various

wonderful and dreadful experiences he had had in wild juxtaposition

throughout the Robotech War.

He was watching Minmei sing at the Star Bowl, staring at her wistfully.

Then an enormous blue-gray hand reached out of infinite distance and

grabbed her away. Breetai laughed against afield of stars. "You'll never get

away!"

Rick went after them in his VT, through battle and dogfight, only to be

chided by Lisa Hayes, only to crash in Macross again. He relived episodes of

his time aboard the SDF-1, while Minmei cried out for rescue. Basic training,

friction with Lisa, rat-racing against pods and a maelstrom of emotions.

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He and Max and Lisa and Ben were on Breetai's ship again. And at last

he flew his VT to where Breetai sat in the rubble of Macross City, holding

Minmei in the palm of his hand like a trained nightingale.

But she spurned Rick's rescue, because, "Lynn-Kyle told me I can't go

out with soldiers." And then it wasn't Breetai holding her but a Lynn-Kyle

big as Breetai and wearing the Zentraedi's uniform and metal skullplate and

crystal eyepiece.

But Kyle self-destructed, and Rick was saving Minmei again in the fist

of his Guardian, as he had the first day they'd met.

"Observation hour ten," the monitoring robby recorded. "Lt. Hunter

still unconscious. Low-grade fever. Encephalogram remains disturbed."

Rick and Minmei were stranded inside the SDF-1 once more. They

stood looking out at the endless Zentraedifleet, and suddenly it was Lisa

standing next to him, then Minmei again. The time stretched out to years.

The Miss Macross pageant and photographers were all mixed into their

solitary time together somehow.

"Patient progressing steadily," the robby told itself. "Prognosis good.

Anticipated return to consciousness in approximately one hour."

Rick and Minmei went through their pretend wedding once more. But

as he kissed her, Dolza came crashing through the bulkhead, and suddenly

Rick was standing beside Lisa on the football field-size table in Zentraedi

HQ.

"You shall never have Minmei!" Dolza promised.

"You belong to my world now, Rick; you belong to the service," Lisa

told him gently, with love in her eyes.

Then it all dissolved into white light for what seemed like a half second.

But when he opened his eyes, he was lying in a hospital bed.

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Rick sat up, groaning and dizzy. "What a terrible dream that was," he

slurred.

Terrible, yes, in parts, it occurred to him, as the dream fragments

blurred even as he sat trying to gather them into memory. But some were

wonderful, sending emotional surges through him.

And some had just plain shocked him.

The nurse was taking his pulse to verify what the instruments had told

her, which made Rick wonder why they bothered with the instruments.

He groaned, bored stiff, and wondered when they would let him get

back on active duty; he had the flight surgeons to worry about in addition to

the attending physicians.

That was assuming, of course, that fighter ops and Gloval would

entrust another VT to a pilot who'd managed to stumble into a barrage of

his own side's missiles and get shot down by them.

"Oh, brother; what an ace," he muttered, thinking that a slightly

different pronunciation of the word might be more appropriate.

"Hmm?" asked the nurse. She was young and attractive, with nice legs

displayed by the daring hemline of her uniform.

But somehow he wasn't interested. "Nothing. Will I live?"

She dropped his hand and checked his chart. "Basically, you've got a

bad bump on the canopy, flyboy. I think you'd better plan on being our

guest for a while, Lieutenant, at least until we get the results of your tests

back from the lab."

"How come?"

She made a wry face. "So the doctors can find out if it's really true that

pilots' heads are made out of granite."

"Why aren't you telling jokes for the USO?"

She patted his shoulder. "Cheer up, Lieutenant. You'll be out of here

before you know it."

She turned to go, and he looked out the window at Macross's beautiful

EVE sky. "I've got rounds to do," she said. She opened the door. "See you

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later."

He didn't hear the door close. It took him a moment to realize that he

wasn't alone. "Well, look who's here."

Lisa stood in the open door, looking down at her feet. Then she looked

up at him miserably.

"Hey, why the long face? Didja come to bury Caesar?"

"Hello, Rick." She walked to his bedside, a small bouquet dangling

from her hand. He had a flashback of her face from his delirium but pushed

it out of his mind. "I came to apolo-to say I'm sorry," she confessed.

"Apologize? Apologize for what, for Pete's sake?"

She turned to put the flowers in a little vase, arranging them so that she

wouldn't have to meet his stare. "For your being here. We both know it's my

fault that your VT was downed and you were injured."

He couldn't believe what he'd just heard from the ever-in-control

Commander Hayes. "Lisa, I have nobody to blame but myself. I made a

mistake in judgment and that's it, see?"

She brought the flowers to his nightstand. "Thanks for your

generosity."

He snorted, "What's happened to that old command confidence? This

isn't like you at all."

He still sees me as just a martinet, an old lifer! She went to crumple up

the wrapping paper angrily and toss it out. "No, Lieutenant, I don't suppose

it is, at that! Anyway-I've said what I came to say, and now I have to get

back to my duties on the bridge. Get well."

"Thanks, Lisa. Drop by again?"

As she closed the door: "I don't think so, Lieutenant. I'll be too busy."

On the bridge, Claudia stopped trying to pretend she was taking care of

minor duties and turned to where Lisa stood with head bowed over her

console, lost in thought.

"How is Lieutenant Hunter, Lisa?" Lisa turned around, startled and

downcast. Claudia sympathized. "Come on, baby; it can't be as bad as all

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that."

"You're wrong."

Claudia held folded hands to her bosom. " 'And now the sting of

Cupid's arrow strikes home!"'

Lisa's mouth dropped open. "What?"

"You needn't be ashamed to talk about it, Lisa. I know what it's like to

be in love, y' know. Roy and I started out the same way."

"But you two love each other!"

Claudia put her hands on hips. "Of course, silly. So what's the

difference?"

Lisa was practically gnawing her fingertips. "I don't think Rick cares."

Claudia leaned close, towering over her. "It's very simple, Lisa. If you're

in love with him, go after him! You're in love with Rick Hunter, isn't that

true?"

She sighed, nodding slightly. "What should I do, Claudia?"

"Be a woman! Stop moping and-" She gave Lisa a light cuff on the

shoulder. "Smile more often!"

The hatch had slid open, and Gloval was on the bridge. "Let me know

as soon as logisitics has loaded all supplies."

The two women saluted. "It's already been ordered, Captain," Claudia

replied.

He studied the two women, so vital to the survival of the SDF-1. "Is

there anything else I should know?"

"No, sir," Claudia said blithely. "I was updating Commander Hayes on

other military procedures just now."

"Umm." Gloval stroked his dark mustache. "Well, it's unlikely we'll

need much hand-to-hand combat expertise up here on the bridge, but carry

on."

He turned to go, and Claudia slipped Lisa a wink.

Rick was listening to Minmei singing on the radio, alternatively

recalling shards of his dreams and putting them out of his mind, when the

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door opened and uniforms started pouring through.

"Hi there, buddy. How goes it?"

Roy Fokker grinned, Max and Ben bringing up the rear. "Big Brother!"

Rick said happily, sitting up in bed.

"Y' just can't keep outta trouble, can you? Here." He tossed Rick a

gift-wrapped package that was just about the right size for a new robe he

had no use for.

Ben cocked an ear to the little radio. "Hey, it's Minmei! That's great!"

He fiddled with the volume control.

"Aw, can it, Dixon." Rick slapped the thing off.

Ben stood looking bewildered and hurt. "Whatsa matter?"

"I just like it quiet, all right?"

Ben wore his bemused, goodnatured look, scratching a hairstyle that

resemble a fuzzy brown turnip. "Absolutely! Anything you say, skipper!

You're the boss!"

"So tell me something, y' big loafer," Roy intervened. "When're you

gonna quit playing invalid?"

"'Playing' isn't the right word, Roy."

Max grinned. "What you need is a visit from someone like Minmei, to

come over and give you a command performance right here."

Rick turned on him so angrily that Max clapped a hand over his own

mouth. Then Rick leaned back on his mound of pillows, head resting on

hands. "I don't imagine Minmei's very interested in a washout like me."

Ben sounded his heartiest. "Well, then maybe you oughta introduce her

to a certified flying ace like myself, Lieutenant." He laughed loudly.

Rick sat up again, fist clenched. "How about a punch in the nose?"

Roy was on his feet, one hand on Ben's shoulder. To Rick, he said,

"Easy, tiger; Ben didn't mean anything."

Big as Ben was, Roy lifted him onto tiptoes without much trouble.

"Let's go, ace, before you make his condition any worse."

As he dragged Ben off, Roy threw back, "Glad to see you're okay, kid!"

Max asked Rick, "Has Minmei been here? I thought the flowers-"

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"No; they're from Commander Hayes."

As Roy paused to open the door, Ben got out, "So what's wrong with

that?"

Roy caught his arm. "I said c'mon!"

Ben got off a salute and a "See ya later!" before Roy yanked him out of

sight.

"Well, it was nice of her to bring flowers, wasn't it?" Max persisted. "Uh,

skipper?" Rick wasn't listening, arms folded and chin sunk on chest.

Max saluted uncertainly. "Well, get well soon, sir. Be seein' ya."

Out in the street, Roy told Ben and Max, "At this rate he'll be laid up for

months. Guess I'll have to do something to get Little Brother out of this

depression."

Ben wore an even more baffled look than usual. "But how,

Commander?"

Roy wore a rakish smile. "There's only one kind of medicine that I can

think of that'll cheer him up."

Variations, his favorite coffee shop, was fairly busy for that time of day,

and so Claudia had a little trouble finding him.

She gave him her bright, winsome smile as she joined him at a window

table for two. "Hi, hon; what's the urgent summons all about?" She leaned

closer to breathe, "Official business or personal?"

He showed a roguish smile. "A little of both."

She looked him over. "This Minmei business you mentioned better be

the official part."

"Yep. I have a friend who could use some cheering up; I need to talk to

her."

She considered that. "Easy enough; she's making a motion picture.

You'll find her on the set every day. Now, could we get to the personal part,

Commander Fokker?"

He leered at her fondly. "How personal d' you wanna get?"

"Dinner tonight?"

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He was coming to his feet. "You got it, kid, but only if you make your

famous pineapple salad. But I've gotta get going. See you about seven,

okay?"

She watched him rush off again. The SDF-1's new predicament-the

work to reequip and rearm combat units, train replacements, restock all

supplies, do all maintenance and repair work possible-still left them little

time together.

Sure, Commander Fokker, she thought calculatingly. Dinner tonight

and, although you may not know it yet, breakfast tomorrow.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

So Sammie gave me this puzzled look and said, "But we know perfectly

well how bad things look, Claudia. But that's exactly the time when we should

go into town and have fun! Didn't you know that?"

All I could do was explain that us old folks are often forgetful and send

the Terrible Trio on their way. Whatever they have, there're times when I

could sure use some.

Lt. Claudia Grant, in a letter to Lt. Commdr. Roy Fokker

Bron, Konda, and Rico looked down at the street-corner huckster's

portable table, transfixed by fear, awe, and the deeper impulses that their

sojourns among the Micronians had awakened.

"Not available in any store!" the huckster ran through his spiel.

"Dancing and singing just like the real thing! Batteries not included.

Wouldn't you love to have a Minmei doll of your very own?"

Bron, hands clasped reverently, nodded furiously, proclaiming, "I'd

love to have one of my very own!"

He was squatting now, eyes level with the table, as were his

companions. The little mechanical dolls in their bright crimson and gold

mandarin robes, black hair bunned and braided like Miss Macross's, didn't

actually dance; their movements were more like penguins'. But that didn't

stop the gathered children and adolescents from scooping them up.

The huckster, a black-bearded, bald-headed, burly fellow, was doing a

land-office business. Nobody even wanted to look at bare-chested

swordsman dolls or lovable stuffed cutsies anymore. The girls wanted

Minmei, the boys wanted mecha-although sometimes it was just the

opposite.

"It must be Robotechnology!" Rico muttered to his companions. And a

secret weapon, too, he suspected, from its hypnotic effect on him.

The spies had a hopeless long-distance crush on Minmei and an

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all-consuming yearning to have one of the dolls. But money was still a

problem, as it had been since the beginning of their mission.

"We must seize one of them," Konda decided. "On my signal-now!"

They came surging up, upsetting the table and knocking the huckster

back off balance as he squawked, "Hey, watch it! Ahh!"

The crowd milled, and shoved; Minmei dolls slid or were lofted all over

the place as the huckster landed on his rear.

"Grab it!" Konda yelled, and Rico got his hands on one, taking it

quickly but lovingly. The fearless espionage agents made their escape in the

confusion, clutching their critical item of enemy technology. They could

hear the huckster swearing that somebody would be made to pay.

They didn't return directly to the hideout they'd established, of course;

that would have been poor tactics. They had to make sure they weren't

being pursued.

They couldn't risk having their refuge compromised; it was filled with

critical pieces of human instrumentation, things that would give

Commander in Chief Dolza and the other Zentraedi lords vital intelligence

data and perhaps the key to overcoming the Micronians. There was a piano,

an assortment of movie posters, a box of kitchen utensils, radios, TVs and

personal computers, a food processor, a bicycle wheel, several street signs, a

Miss Macross jigsaw puzzle, and a jumble of broken toys from the city's

charity discard bins that the spies so loved.

Every time they thought about their plunder, the spies' chests swelled

with pride. But this! A Minmei doll! A crowning achievement!

The Terrible Trio paced through the streets of Macross City in the

throes of a real crisis.

Kim groused, "will you look at us? Walking around town with a day off

and nothing to do? No place to go? Ugh, how boring!"

"Ew," Vannessa agreed.

"Yuck," Sammie concurred.

To top it all off, they were dressed for a real good time: Vanessa wore

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white slacks and a Gigiwear sport coat with the sleeves shot back, Sammie

was in a prim but cute outfit that looked like she belonged in the Easter

parade, and Kim wore a revealing citypants outfit set off by saddle shoes

and knee socks.

"And not a man in sight!" Sammie piped up. "It's a lot worse than just

boring!"

An abrupt commotion off to one side drew their attention. With

pounding feet, three figures came dashing, just about tumbling, around the

corner. There were three guys, a big husky one and a tall lean one and a

small, wiry one, panting and frantic. They crowded on top of one another as

they hid around the corner, looking back the way they'd come.

The three spies had recently plugged the special Protoculture chip

given them by Breetai into an unguarded portion of the SDF-1's systemry.

The towering commander had made it clear that the chip was valuable,

irreplaceable, one of a very limited number remaining from the research of

Zor himself. The chip would slowly draw on surrounding components and

the ship's power to create a pod for their escape. Exedore had been loath to

spend the irreplaceable chip even on so important a mission, but Breetai

had decided that the spies' return must be assured. And so, they must be

sure they weren't pursued.

"Anyone following us, Bron?" the little one said between gulps of air.

"What's the merchant doing?" the tall, lean one panted.

Gasping for breath, the husky one said, "He seems to be sitting there,

trying to get the other dolls back."

Rico turned, gloating over their prize, holding the little toy up to

inspect it gleefully. "Look: Minmei!" The other two bent near, feasting their

eyes on it. "Ah!" exclaimed Rico. "Robotech-Robo-uhhh."

He'd noticed something; when Bron and Konda looked up, they too

saw three young Micronian females standing nearby, studying them

strangely.

Rico was the one among them with a certain presence of mind. He

stood up at once, whisking the doll behind his back, sweating profusely.

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"Um, hello! W-w-we're strolling!" The other two nodded diligently in

agreement, showing their teeth in unconvincing smiles.

Sammie pointed at them and declared. "Yeah? It looks to me like you're

playing with a Minmei doll!"

"D-d-dunno what you mean!" Rico insisted. But the three spies were

terrified that their valiant mission had run its course, defeated by the

malevolent Micronian genius for war and intrigue.

Sammie shrugged. "It's just that I've never seen a grown man playing

with a doll before."

"Adults don't do it?" Bron burst out, trading astounded looks with his

cohorts.

Sammie sniggered. "Silly man! Only kids play with dolls."

The spies reflected on the perversely complicated, often contradictory

behavioral code the Micronians maintained-no doubt as a safeguard against

infiltration by outsiders. A matter of warped genius, and now it had worked;

they had blundered and come to the attention of what appeared to be three

patrolling secret police.

Vanessa resettled her glasses and took a closer look at the three nerds

she and her friends had stumbled across. "What planet d' you come from,

anyway?"

Bron went, "Duly" and almost fainted. Konda blurted, "We come from

right around here!" and Rico did the best he could, although he was sure

they were about to be apprehended and tortured. "Yeah, we work right

across the street." He'd heard somebody say it a day or two before, and it

seemed to be some kind of verification or identity-establishing phrase.

The spies had learned about "work," a noncombat function considered

demeaning and suitable only for slaves among the Zentraedi yet somehow

desirable and even admirable among the deviate Micronians.

The Terrible Trio looked where he was pointing. It was one of the

loudest, most garish spots in Macross City, ablaze with lights and raucous

music. The sign over it said, Disco BAMBOO HOUSE.

Kim clapped her hands. "You mean you work at the disco? We go to the

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Bamboo House all the time!"

Sammie gave them an even closer look. "I wonder why we've never

seen any of you there?"

Bron began, "Uh, what is a dis-" before Rico got an elbow into his

middle and he subsided.

Sammie grabbed Rico's wrist. These three guys might be slightly

strange, but what the heck? Weird as they were, they worked at the disco,

and that would at least mean that they could dance.

"I've got an idea," she said, batting her eyelashes. "Why don't we all

check it out together?"

"What a wonderful idea!" Kim threw a fist in the air in elation.

Vanessa figured it was better than another few hours of trudging

around town. "I want the big, handsome one," she said, winking at Bron. All

the color left his face, and his knees knocked.

Sammie was towing Rico into the street; he didn't dare to resist too

much or put up a fight.

"Come with me," she pouted.

"Can't we talk this over?" Rico bleated.

Was this as innocent as the females were making it out to be, or were

they superlatively well trained counterespionage agents with a clever plan to

drive the Zentraedi spies into paranoid madness and thus make them easier

to interrogate?

Bron whispered to Konda, "D' you suppose this disco thing is some

Micronian method of torture?"

Kim and Vanessa were looking at them expectantly. Konda hissed, "We

must perform our duty as Zentraedi!"

Their chins came up, and their mouths became ruled lines; they

advanced bravely to endure whatever sadistic, ultimate torment the

experience called "disco" might hold in store.

The cruiser that had been completely destroyed was only a minor part

of Khyron's titanic flagship, a part that was now slowly being replaced by

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the organic growth characteristics of Protoculture.

In the command post bubble overlooking the flagship's bridge, Khyron

stood alone, raging at the figure on the projecbeam screen. He'd driven out

all his subordinates, even the faithful Grel, determined that they would not

witness his helpless fury before the mockery of the woman warrior Miriya.

"How dare you question my leadership abilities?" he railed at her. "Just

who do you think you are?"

She stood projected before him, erect and lithe, a tall woman with a

flowing mane of green-black hair. She drew herself up even taller. "I am the

backbone of the Quadrono Battalion, and the finest combat pilot in all the

Zentraedi forces."

Khryon snarled, "Your ego will one day cause your destruction,

Miriya."

One corner of her mouth tugged upward. "Just as yours caused you to

be defeated by the Micronians yet again and made you an object of ridicule

to all those whom you command, Backstabber?"

He pointed a finger at her. "Because you have never faced a capable

opponent, you believe you're something special. But take care, little Miriya!

For there is one aboard the alien ship whom you cannot best!"

She heard the would-be taunt with calm interest. "So! A superior pilot,

a super-ace, aboard the SDF-1? Interesting!"

She smiled just the slightest bit, dimples appearing at the sides of her

mouth, giving her a beautifully hungry, dangerously feline look. "I'd like to

meet him!"

Huh! Everything's phony! Roy thought, looking around the movie set.

Somehow he'd never believed it even though that was what people had

always said. But the little Shao-lin temple and its shrine and the trees,

plants, and grass were all a variety of cunningly fabricated plastic and other

synthetics from the ship's protean Robotech minifactories.

People were running around yelling, mostly being rude to one another.

You could tell who was more important, because the other person would

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just have to stand there and take it. Roy heard things that would have

started major fistfights in a barracks, differences in rank notwithstanding.

A man he recognized as Vance Hasslewood, Minmei's personal

manager and now codirector of her movie, was running around being

important. "Let's set up for the next shot!" "Minmei, Kyle: Relax for a few

minutes!" "Wardrobe? Listen, sweetie, those blouses are awful!"

Roy tuned him out, strolling around a phony corner and glancing up a

phony staircase. "Well, hey!"

Minmei squealed. "Commander Fokker!" and came racing down the

steps to him. She wore a Chinese peasant-style tunic and trousers

combination, her hair gathered tightly and done up in a long braid in back.

He looked down on her fondly from his rangy height. "How's

everybody's favorite recording star?"

She gestured around at the lights and all the other equipment. "Trying

to be an actress. I get to play the cute little heroine."

"Sounds like fun," Roy lied; it looked like appalling drudgery, but then,

it was probably tolerable to people who couldn't fly.

"Oh, it is!" she enthused. "But-where's Rick? Is he hiding?" She glanced

around.

"'Fraid Rick couldn't make it this time."

Her hand flew to her mouth. "He's not hurt, is he?"

"Not seriously, but he's gonna have to spend some time in the hospital,

and I thought you might like to stop in and see him."

Roy's voice took on a slightly harder edge. "That is, if you can spare

time from all this." He indicated the overturned anthill confusion of the

movie set with a disdainful toss of his shaggy blond head. "I'm convinced a

visit from you would be worth more than all the medicine in the world."

Minmei had discovered that life on a movie set was a lot less exciting

than she'd pictured it-tedious and time-consuming and endlessly repetitive,

just the opposite of what she'd envisioned. She still aspired to superstardom,

but the movies' hold over her was less now.

Besides, even though she was flighty, she wasn't blind to the things she

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owed Rick Hunter. The news that he had been wounded brought out the

very best in her-so winning that few people could resist it-and perhaps a

sense of real drama.

"Of course I will! If it weren't for Rick Hunter, I wouldn't even be

alive!"

Roy gave her a broad conspiratorial smile. "Atta girl!"

"Commander!"

Roy and Minmei turned together to see Lynn-Kyle striding their way.

He glowered at them, an angry young man in a black, white-trimmed jacket

and trouser costume. "If you're through wasting Minmei's time, I wonder if

we could get back to work?"

Roy took his time staring down his nose at Kyle. He'd heard all the

stories about the fight at the White Dragon, He wondered if Kyle had heard

the adage that a good big man will beat a good little man every time...

But Roy knew even more about women than he knew about martial

arts and, it is a verifiable fact, preferred the former. Kyle was playing the

heavy without even being coaxed; let it be so.

"Of course." He smiled blandly at Lynn-Kyle.

A little frown had crossed Minmei's face at her cousin's boorishness.

Then Vance Hasslewood was yelling for his stars-the first team, as he called

them.

Minmei's mood appeared to brighten; but Roy wasn't sure, and neither

was Kyle. She went running toward the set; Kyle spared Roy a steely look

and turned to follow.

Roy left the sound stage whistling happily. He was still feeling pretty

smug when the com unit in his jeep toned for his attention. "What is it?"

It was Lisa's voice. "Commander Fokker, one enemy ship has broken

out of the fleet and is heading this way, closing fast. Two Vermilion

Veritechs are on scramble, and Captain Gloval directs you to take command

of the flight and intercept."

"Who's on?"

"Sterling and Dixon," Lisa answered. "Captain Kramer will have your

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Skull Team standing by for backup as needed."

"Good," Roy told her. "If things begin to boil, I always like those Jolly

Rogers around."

The EVE system was off, and the distant reaches of the stupendous

hold were above him. Roy Fokker roared his jeep down through a quiet

Macross, wondering what the fight was going to be like this time.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

There are few more indicative incidents in the Robotech War, from my

viewpoint, than this sudden transference of impulse and disobedience from

Khyron to Miriya. The evidence of what was happening was all around them,

but still the Zentraedi High Command was, in any meaningful sense, blind to

it.

Zeitgeist,

Alien Psychology

"Sound general quarters," Gloval said, his calm, level voice enveloping

the bridge. "Prepare pin-point defense shields. Tell fighter ops to scramble

Vermilions."

The new attack had come, as Gloval had feared, right in the middle of

his own political offensive-his effort to make an end run around the Council.

If anybody aboard the dimensional fortress was curious about his

encrypted "back-channel" calls to unnamed addressees since his return

from the Alaskan fiasco and his silence on the issue of the Council's insane

mandates, they'd kept it to themselves. Good crew! No one could ask for

better.

The single enemy ship was drawing nearer. The exhausted and heroic

logistics people, straining to do an impossible job of taking on the endless

rations, ordnance, equipment, life support consumables, and the rest, had

secured themselves; the ship was battening down.

The turnaround time for a supercarrier in pre-Global Civil War days,

included shipyard overhaul and the rest, ran as much as six months; the

United States Navy was doing well if it had half its carrier groups at sea at

any one time. The SDF-1 had had less than a week to lick its wounds, and

unless Gloval's plan worked, it would get no more, but be driven out into

space once again.

In the Disco Bamboo House, the three spies, sweating and exhausted

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from a brave effort to keep up with the torturous convolutions the

Micronian females called "dancing," were shocked and worried by the

sudden alarms but also relieved. The Terrible Trio's endurance on the dance

floor was simply not to be believed.

The women dove for their things, about to head for the door. Sammie

stopped to pat Rico's cheek. "You have the strangest style I ever saw, but it

was fun!"

Vanessa gave Bron a quick hug. "Let's do it again soon, boys!"

And Kim, blowing a kiss to Konda as she and the others hurried to go,

yelled, "We really had a good time!"

Standing there and watching them go, Konda said wonderingly, "You

know-I did, too."

The other two looked at him for a moment but then nodded in

agreement.

Khyron's words had not seared long at Miriya's pride before she'd

taken action.

Now, her own attack cruiser threw off the heat of atmospheric entry

unfeelingly, and she and her Quadrono stalwarts poised for the moment

when they could go hunting.

Indicators signaled GO. Encased in their top-heavy looking powered

armor, the Quadronos stepped one after another into the drop bays.

They were released seemingly at random but all in a plan to assume a

combat-drop formation, backpack thrusters blaring, forming up for the

assault on the SDF-1.

Inside the green-tinted face bowl of her interior suit, the light gave

Miriya's complexion a verdant tinge. "I am looking for one particular enemy

fighter," she told the massed assault mecha behind her. "He will show

himself by superior performance. When he has been identified, you will

maintain distance and leave his execution to me, personally! Am I

understood?"

That was confirmed all through her mingled force of Quadrono mecha

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and tri-thrusters. Miriya monitored her powered armor and contemplated

her kill.

There were so many things that made this violation of standing orders

so irresistible! There was the chance to show up that posturing fool Khyron;

the opportunity to meet an enemy worthy of her mettle (for in his taunt, the

Backstabber had been right on target-she'd never met an antagonist she

regarded as her equal); a way to defy Azonia; a chance to have the Robotech

Masters sing the name of Miriya; a crack at ending this war once and for all,

to her own personal glory; and of course that ultimate thrill, flirting with

complete disaster.

Because if she failed-and Miriya never had-then all would probably be

taken from her, her life included. But what was any of it for, if not for the

risking? She lived for combat and victory. It was as easy to keep bleeding

prey from the jaws of a lioness, as it was to protect the foe from Miriya's

attack.

This time, the SDF-1 was ready.

Cat crews nosed up VTs in the launch boxes; the flight decks of the

dimensional fortress and Daedalus and Prometheus were cluttered with

combat aircraft, looking like toys under a Christmas tree from the lofty

height of the bridge. The VTs' wings were at minimum sweep, ready for

launch.

Lisa Hayes had already given Ben and Max the go. Lt. Moira Flynn, cat

crew officer, pointed to her shooter. A moment later, Max Sterling rode a

rocket off a bow catapult at 200 knots, while Ben Dixon "Yahoooed" off a

waist cat a moment later.

Lisa asked over the intercom, "Is Commander Fokker's ship ready for

takeoff?"

Claudia left her station-left it entirely!-and strode over to Lisa. "Is Roy

leading that intercept flight?"

Lisa bit back what she'd been about to say: You mean he didn't tell you?

"Yes, Claudia."

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Roy pulled on his VT helmet-the "thinking cap," as some liked to call

it-as his own trusty Skull fighter's forward landing gear was boxed up by the

cat crew.

"Good hunting, Commander," Lisa said, her face on his display screen

looking as worried and self-contained as ever.

"I'm more interested in hunting for a pineapple salad," he radioed

back.

Lisa couldn't quite believe her ears. She tried to get a confirmation on

the pineapple salad transmission as Claudia laughed behind her hand and

Gloval marveled at the resilience of young people.

Roy, Max, and Ben joined another flight of VTs off Prometheus. In

command, Roy took them up and up, going ballistic, all of them eager for

the dogfight that had been forced upon them.

Roy looked at them, a bit dismayed. None of the VTs had fought with

Quadronos on an even footing yet, except for Rick, who hadn't come out of

it so well.

But Roy remembered the souped-up Zentraedi better than anyone, and

if the SDF-1 was facing a division of them, that was all she wrote. Endgame.

"Dogfight?" muttered Ben. "You Zentraedi ain't hardly been bit yet!

Now, it's lockjaw time!"

Now. Where is this great enemy ace that Khyron fears so? mused

Miriya as she and the first few of her armored Quadrono deployed under

power to engage a slightly lesser number of enemy aircraft.

She howled a Zentraedi word, a Quadrono battle cry that translated as

"Smite them from the sky!"

Immediately the Quadrono battle suits began pouring forth a cascade

of fire. The Veritechs dove up into it eagerly, dodging and jamming missiles,

betting their reflexes against the enemy's.

Roy did a wingover and banked as a Quadrono's redhot beams ranged

past him. Skull leader did a loop that would have torn the wings off any

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other fighter ever built, then centered the bulky, top-heavy-looking

Quadrono in his gunsight reticle, and thumbed the trigger.

He had a lot of bad-tasting memories in his mouth of how an armored

bogey just like this one had rousted him and cost him men in the attack

near Luna's orbit. A lot of that pain went away as he watched the

Quadrono's head module cave in, then be plowed to nothingness by

high-density rounds.

The alien mecha fell, leaving a long, curlicuing trail of oily, red-black

smoke.

"Scratch one," whispered Roy Fokker to himself, and went looking for

scratch two.

They fought their way up above the cloud cover. One Quadrono burst

through, pursuing Ben's banking VT; a second followed, folding into some

sort of bizarre fetal configuration, only to bring forth a hornet's nest of

missiles.

The missiles moved faster than the eye could follow, detectable only by

their flaming wakes and corkscrewing trails of smoke. Somehow, though,

they weren't fast enough to get Max Sterling; he twisted and rolled his VT

through seemingly impossible maneuvers, jamming some of the missiles'

guidance systems, getting others to commit fratricide, and just plain

outflying the rest.

He was putting his Veritech through mechamorphosis even before the

last of them had gone by. Changing to Battloid mode, he leapt down at his

attacker like a cross between a sleek, superswift gunship and Sir Lancelot.

Max fired his autocannon, riddling the Quadrono and blowing it to

burning shreds that fell almost lazily. He turned just in time to catch a

Quadrono that was trying to sneak up on him. The Robotech chain-gun

made its howling, buzzsaw sound again, and the alien became nosediving

wreckage.

Miriya had seen it all, the blue-trimmed VT's latest victory in its

rampage across the sky. No Zentraedi had been able to stand against it; who

else could this be but Khyron's vaunted Micronian champion?

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She cut in full power, diving at him like a rocket-powered hawk. "Now

you die!"

Except dying wasn't on Max Sterling's agenda today. He dodged her

first volley and got a few rounds into her armor as she zigzagged past.

Miriya turned and loosed a flight of missiles that arced and looped at

the Battloid, leaving ribbons of trail as graceful as the streamers on a

maypole. He dodged those, too, while he charged straight at her, firing all

the time. An unbelievable piece of flying.

"You devil!" Miriya grated softly, almost fondly, knowing now what a

pleasure it was going to be to kill him. The powered armor and the Battloid

whirled and pounced, the upper hand changing sides a dozen times in a few

seconds. Miriya was astounded; could this Micronian have artificially

enhanced reflexes and telepathic powers? That was certainly the way he

flew his aircraft.

She went into a ballistic climb, and Max got a sustained burst into the

Quadrono's backpack thrusterpower unit. Miriya's mecha trailed sparks and

flame as it tumbled back down but suddenly straightened out again; she

played hurt and turned the tables once more.

Her particle cannon pounded away at the Battloid, knocking it back as

several rounds hit home. Max regained stability by shifting back to Veritech

mode and taking evasive action to get a little elbow room before going at it

again.

Miriya laughed like some wild huntress and pursued him down

through the clouds, crying, "You can't dodge forever!"

"That's very odd," Lisa murmured. "Those alien mecha aren't attacking

us. In fact, they seem to be holding off, covering the one that engaged Max

Sterling."

Claudia nodded. "It seems like the leader, or whoever it is, has a

personal vendetta against Max."

"Who can understand the mind of a combat pilot?" Gloval shrugged.

"Especially an alien one?"

179

"There must be some reason Max has been singled out."

She was right. "Order the lieutenant to retreat. If they continue to

pursue him, it will mean that the target isn't SDF-1."

Max received Roy's order with a good deal of bewilderment. "Retreat?

Wa-wait, I don't get it!"

It would not be exactly true to say that he was having a good time, but

he was doing what he did best-did better than anyone else alive. Bashful,

unassuming Max Sterling could afford to be deferential and mild-mannered

on the ground. It was a kind of wide-eyed but honest noblesse oblige,

because in aerial combat he lived life at lightspeed and ruled the sky.

"That bandit on your tail is trying too hard," Roy explained. "They want

to find out what his game is."

"You got it," Max said amicably. He thought there was something

different about this one. At any rate, whoever this alien was, he was one hot

pilot.

Max shoved his stick into the corner for a pushover and dove for the

surface of the ocean. The Quadrono powered armor streaked after.

Watching the instruments on the dimensional fortress's bridge, Gloval

came to his feet. "So, now we know."

Roy's gift box hadn't contained a bathrobe at all but rather his

treasured and superb collection of miniature aircraft.

Rick's favorite was also Roy's: a fragile yellow World War I fighter, a

German Fokker triplane with black Iron Cross markings, made at the time

of that conflict and nearly a century old. "Fokker, Little Brother, that's me!"

as Roy liked to say.

The door opened, and Rick looked to it uninterestedly. Then, abruptly,

he was sitting bolt upright in bed. "Minmei!"

She was looking very stylish in a long, red suede coat with white fur

collar and cuffs and a pair of yellow tinted aviator glasses. "I hope you don't

180

mind; you didn't look like you were sleeping, so..."

He hastily put the toys aside as she came over to him. Whatever subtle

things the movie makeup and hairstyle people were doing to her looked

great. "Nice big room," she said brightly, glancing around. Her eyes fell on

the flowers for a moment.

"It's wonderful to see you."

"I must look an absolute mess," she fished a little, "but I came right

over from the studio when I heard you were hurt."

"How'd you find out? Not many people know." Casualty figures and

many details of the war were still classified.

"Commander Fokker told me. He came by the set this afternoon to visit

me." She patted the bed. "D' you mind if I sit down?"

That's another one I owe you, Big Brother! thought Rick.

"Mm, this is nice," Minmei said, stretching out at the foot of the bed.

Her eyes fluttered, and she yawned charmingly, then laid her head on her

arm.

"You look tired."

"I'm exhausted, Rick. There just doesn't seem to be enough time in the

day to do the things I'm supposed to do now."

"Would you like to just lie there and get some sleep for a little while,

Minmei?"

Her eyes were already closed. "That would be wonderful! If I could just

stay here...for a little while..."

She was asleep in seconds. Watching her, he mused, I don't understand

what's happening to our world, Minmei, or what's going to become of us.

But your safety and well-being makes everything worthwhile to me.

He sat with his knees drawn up under the sheet, arms folded across

them and chin resting on his arms, watching her sleep. He couldn't

remember the last time he'd felt so happy.

"Let's get on with it!" howled Roy Fokker, putting a final burst into a

damaged Quadrono mecha and sending another Zentraedi flier to the great

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beyond. The skull-and-crossbones VT banked and dove, looking for new

quarry in a sky crowded with missile tracks, alien beams and annihilation

discs, gatling tracers and explosions.

The enemy leader and Max were still battling it out for the

championship, but Roy and the other VT pilots weren't about to let the rest

of the invaders hang around like wallflowers. The RDF fliers were ready and

willing to fill their dance card.

The Quadronos didn't hesitate, either. And so: the dance of death.

Captain Kramer, Roy's Skull Team second in command, had shown up

with reinforcements when it became clear that the single combat between

Max and the enemy leader wasn't simply a diversionary tactic.

Now, Roy pulled out of an Immelmann, split S and zapped another

Quadrono just as he saw Kramer zoom past with a Zentraedi on his tail. Roy

went after to help, but he was too late; the captain's ship was already in

flames.

"Kramer, punch out, damn it!" Roy yelled, waxing the one who'd hit

Kramer. "You're clear, boy! Punch out!"

Kramer ejected as another Skull pilot called the SDF-1 air-sea rescue.

The captain should have left his chute undeployed until he had fallen well

out of the dogfight, but it opened for some reason. Roy figured that meant

that Kramer had been hit and his ejection seat's automatic systems had

taken over.

Roy circled anxiously, determined to make sure none of the invaders

took advantage of Kramer's vulnerability. The grizzled captain had been

with Skull Team for years, had flown off the old flatdeck Kenosha with him

in the Global Civil War. Kramer was the oldest VT Pilot on the roster, and

Roy meant to see that he got older.

The Skull Leader was so intent on watching over his friend that for

once he was careless. He didn't realize it until bolts from a Quadrono

chest-cannon blew pieces from his plane.

"Ahh," he groaned, with pain like white hot pokers being thrust

through him. Ben Dixon came to his rescue and engaged the Zentraedi

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before it could make another pass, but Roy's VT began losing altitude,

trailing smoke.

The dogfight raged away from him like a tornado of combat ships and

weapons fire as Kramer's limp form glided peacefully toward the sea.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

There quite simply had never been anything like it, and veteran fighter

pilots who witnessed it shook their heads and did quite a bit less boasting for

a while.

Zachary Fox, Jr.

VT: the Men and the Mecha

Max and Miriya still fought their incredible duel across the sky.

Max had gone back to Battloid mode, and the two darted and zigzagged

like maddened dragonflies. Max released another flight of missiles that she

avoided, then nearly clipped her with a tracer-bright stream of gatling

rounds.

But she evaded him again. It was the most difficult, dangerous,

exhilarating contest Max had ever been in; his sense of time had slipped

away, and he didn't think of victory so much as excelling, of outperforming

his foe.

For Miriya it was different. Not only had she not destroyed the

Micronian, she'd come very close to being killed herself. He was as good as

Khyron had said and better. For the first time, she was beginning to know

what her own opponents, her long list of kills, had felt.

Perhaps, as the ancient wisdom goes, there is always someone better

than oneself. The thought repelled her and filled her with an angry dread.

She came tearing through a small white puff of cloud to see that the

SDF-1 was close by. "His ship!'

She made straight for it at maximum speed. Perhaps in tight quarters

with his own unprotected fellow beings all around, he would know a

hesitation to shoot, would lose concentration.

It was a deliciously audacious, risky plan; she adored it.

"I won't be able to catch him in time!" Max hollered over the command

net, seeing what this brilliant, devious enemy had in mind.

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"They're heading this way, Captain-straight for us!" Lisa reported.

"Tell the AA batteries not to fire!" Gloval barked. "Sterling is too close

to the enemy! Make sure all hatches are sealed! Double-check that all

civilians are in shelters!"

The banshee song of sirens echoed through the stupendous hold that

housed Macross City.

Rick looked up from his peaceful contemplation of the sleeping Minmei.

He got to his feet, then staggered for a moment as his bandaged head

pounded like a bass drum. He had no idea what the procedure was for

patients and visitors during an alert.

Minmei hadn't even stirred. Rick found the corridor empty; he didn't

know it, but doctors, nurses, and other staff members were busy helping

priority patients-newborns, intensive care, and other nonambulatories. He

could hear internal hatches booming shut.

Rick looked at Minmei; for the moment she was as safe where she was

as anywhere he could think of. He had to find out what was going on. Rick

trotted off to find someone, his head punishing him with every step.

Most of the exterior hatches on the SDF-1 were sealed, of course, the

ship being at general quarters. But one wasn't: the one through which the

air-sea rescue helo had just left to make the pickup on Captain Kramer.

The enormous hatch couldn't be closed quickly, but it was more than

half closed already. Miriya saw it and dove through it, into the dimensional

fortress.

"This is it!" Max steeled himself and followed grimly, his ship in

Fighter mode. His rear stabilizers barely cleared the descending upper half

of the hatch; the VT's gleaming belly nearly scraped the lower.

He chased the giant powered armor suit through a long curve of

enormous passageway usually used to shuttle large machinery, components,

and vehicles to and from the fabrication complex situated near Macross

City.

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"Run, little man, run," Miriya beckoned, watching him approaching in

her rearview screen while simultaneously flying at hair-raising speed

through the relatively tight passageway. "And when you catch me, you die."

Rick was gazing out through a permaglass window in the solarium,

watching the last few civilians scuttle into shelters, when outside debris

began falling from overhead.

An enormous figure dropped to the streets of Macross, making the ship

tremble. Rick found himself staring at the back of the Quadrono's head.

They're inside the ship! We're finished! The Quadrono's back thrusters

flared, and it went racing down the street, taller than some of the buildings,

its backwash nearly knocking out the solarium windows.

Rick had barely regained his balance when another cyclopean form

dropped from above. Rick recognized the Battloid's markings as Max

Sterling's.

Maybe we're not finished, after all! "Go get 'im Max! Yeah!"

Standing erect like the Quadrono, the Battloid flashed off into the

streets of Macross in search of its antagonist.

Miriya wasn't used to such close quarters; though she handled her

Quadrono mecha well, she bashed through walls and ripped out overhead

signs and fixtures. None of that mattered to her, and it didn't affect the

mecha at all.

But Max had the advantage of knowing the streets of the city. Miriya

came around a turn to see the Battloid, feet gushing thruster fire, skid to a

halt before her.

Several blocks separated them. Max whipped up the long, cigar-shaped

gray chain-gun and opened fire from the hip. The hail of massive bullets

spattered the Quadrono, holing it in places where its armor was thinnest,

driving it back off balance. Do what she might, Miriya couldn't prevent her

mecha from being knocked over backward.

The Quadrono heaved itself to its feet again, Miriya caught in a red

haze of rage. "You think to do combat with me?" she screamed, though he

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couldn't hear her. "You impudent fool!"

No radio reply or translation from Max was needed. The Battloid said it

all as it stood waiting, poised, with autocannon ready, allowing her the

option. The clearest challenge imaginable.

Her words couldn't dispel the thought that assailed Miriya. Khyron was

right! This Micronian is a demon of war!

"Open the overhead hatch that's nearest to them!" Gloval snapped. "We

have to force the alien out of the ship!"

The Quadrono's exterior pickups caught the sound of grinding brute

servomotors, and Miriya detected the opening of the hatch above her as she

shouldered aside a building, crumbling it to pieces like a plaster model, to

get some fighting room.

Her Quadrono fired with the energy weapons built into its giant

hands-particle beams and annihilation discs. The Battloid ducked one

volley, leapt high on thrusters to elude another.

Then Max started slowly walking his Battloid toward the enemy, still

holding his fire until he had a perfect shot, determined that his next burst

would end the duel. He was sure the other was enough of a warrior to know

just what was happening, a test of nerve and backbone.

How close do we come before we open fire? Who gets rattled and

shoots first, afraid to go toe to toe? Afraid to shoot it out point-blank?

It was all so bizarre, so impossibly unlikely, a unique moment in the

Robotech War. Max couldn't help feeling like one of the good guys in the

Westerns he'd loved so much as a kid. If the Duke could only see this!

The Battloid's footsteps resounded, the autocannon cradled at its side

like the Ringo Kid's Winchester. Max was a little too busy to whistle "Do Not

Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin'," but he heard it in his head.

Miriya almost fired a dozen times in those moments, but pride kept her

from it. If the Micronian had the nerve to close the distance to

point-blank-to a distance where they'd almost certainly both be killed when

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the shooting started-then so did Miriya, leader of the Quadrono.

On this, our weddin' day-ayy, went the tune in Max's head.

The Battloid's feet measured off ten yards at a stride; the city blocks

between the huge mecha disappeared quickly.

It's not good enough simply to die killing him! Miriya's mind

yammered. He must die knowing that I live!

Before she could reconsider, the Quadrono's thrusters novaed, and the

powered armor rocketed up, through the open hatch. She loosed a flock of

sizzling missiles, but the pursuing Battloid avoided them and kept coming.

Max mechamorphosed to Veritech mode, chasing her in a ballistic

climb. "Turnip' tail, are yuh, pilgrim?"

Then Lisa was saying in his ear, "Return to base, Vermilion Three.

You've beaten him."

Not decisively, Max told himself, turning for home. He knew that, and

the Zentraedi surely did, too.

Seething, Miriya guided her Quadrono back into the stratosphere.

"Miriya, will not forget this day, Micronian-and you will pay for it. So I

vow!"

Elsewhere, the rest of the VTs were chasing the last of the surviving

pursuit ships and Quadronos. Roy, fighting down the pain in his chest,

managed to drawl, "Awright, Looks like they've had enough."

"Commander Fokker," Lisa said, "you're losing attitude. Are you all

right?"

He smiled into the visual pickup and did his best to sound amused.

"Yeah, I'm great. But how 'bout Max?"

"He's fine, Commander."

"And my old buddy Kramer? Any word?"

Lisa's face on the display screen was sphinxlike, unrevealing. "He's in

intensive care now, Roy. Come on home."

"Roger, SDF-1; we're comin' in."

"Godspeed."

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The dreams had been lovely, but the waking was not.

"Ah, so here you are! I been lookin' all over for ya! C'mon, Minmei!

Wake up! Wake up!"

She didn't want to; she'd always loved to sleep. It was so wonderful and

cozy, and her dreams were her very best friends.

Now, though, waking up was easier than being shaken so rudely-almost

roughly.

She rubbed her eyes, blinking, and looked up at Vance Hasslewood.

"What's the matter?"

He made a big production of his exasperation. "Sweetie, honey, you're

holding up production, that's what's the matter! You're the star! Without

you, they can't finish the picture!"

She yawned, looking around, then stopped suddenly. "Wasn't there a

young man in here when you came in the room?"

"Hey! Toots! Are you nuts?" He was yelling now; time was money, and

when it came to money, Vance Hasslewood could be very unpleasant. His

contract said that he got a percentage of every dollar saved if the picture

came in under budget.

"You got a career to think about, sweetie! Ya don't have time for this

kid stuff anymore, comprende?" He looked at the bed. It wasn't at all

messed up, barely looked slept in. He breathed a sigh of relief; it looked like

there'd be nothing to hush up, nobody to bribe, no favors to call in or

promise.

"We have five more setups today!" he snapped. "C'mon, babe; let's go."

He grabbed her wrist and dragged her off the bed.

Minmei surrendered and trotted along dutifully. She'd discovered that

being a star meant that she had to put up with being herded around. She

loved the glamour, but she had never counted on having to be so passive.

Still, it was worth it, she guessed-wasn't it?

"My dad was right," Vance Hasslewood steamed. "I shoulda been a

CPA!"

189

In the Veritech hangar bays, the maintenance crews were getting to

work on the parked aircraft. There had been plenty of damage in the dustup

with the Quadronos; nobody on the crews was going to be sleeping very

much for the next few days.

Two enlisted ratings had deployed the boarding ladder of Skull

Leader's ship, ready to climb up to the cockpit. "Whew! This time he really

got himself clobbered," one said. "I don't believe he could taxi this thing, let

alone fly it."

He followed his sectionmate up the ladder, bumping into him when the

other stopped short. "Hey, what-"

He swung around and came up the side of the ladder with angled feet, a

common practice. And he, too, stopped short when he got a look at the

cockpit.

There were bulges in the pilot seat's chickenplate armor and several

holes in the back of it. And the seat was red with blood that was now

seeping through, running to the floor.

Roy Fokker sat in triage with the others who had been injured. The

boys who were really bad had been taken to the ERs first.

Roy had lost a lot of blood, making him light-headed; but the wounds

had been closed easily enough, and he was hooked up to a plasma bottle.

"Hey," he asked a passing nurse, "is all this really necessary?" He held

up his shunted arm, the plasma tube dangling from it.

"Just shut up and sit there or I'll get Big Bruno the odorly orderly to

come sit on that pretty blond head," she said sweetly. She was the same

nurse who had looked after Rick, having been mobilized as soon as the alert

sounded as part of the special shock-trauma-burn military medical team.

"Doctor Hassan wants a few pictures of your gorgeous insides,

dreamboat, to make sure there's no internal hemorrhaging."

Beside being a top-notch RN, she was handsome and leggy and had a

way of getting men, even headstrong fighter jocks, to do what she told them.

190

She was an esteemed member of the MM team.

Roy smiled and relaxed, leaning back. She blew him a kiss and went on

her way. He felt a little floaty from blood loss, but he'd refused a shot for the

pain, so he was lucid.

Then he remembered Kramer. He reached out almost blindly for the

nearest institutional-green uniform. "Hey, nurse-"

But he'd grabbed the trouser leg of Dr. Hassan, the stocky heart and

soul of the MM unit. Hassan, a surgical mask around his neck, stopped and

looked Roy over.

The doctor and the Skull Team leader knew each other somewhat; Roy

had had plenty of his men racked up, had been in that same room quite a

few times before.

"Kramer?" Roy asked hopefully.

Hassan had almost been out of the medical profession, maintaining a

limited practice, doing some consulting and a bit of teaching, for years up

until the SDF-1 spacefolded. Time and events had thrust him back into the

center of things, and there was no more dedicated individual on the ship.

He had originally started easing out of medicine because of moments like

this, and these days such moments were all too common.

"I'm sorry, Roy. He was dead before the rescue people even got to him."

Roy squeezed his eyes shut tightly, tears finding their way out the sides,

nodding. He forced his fingers to open, to release the leg of the doctor's

trousers. But how do you let go of the pain of a close friend's death?

Hassan patted his shoulder. "Take it easy; I want to take a better look

at you. Be back in a minute."

Hassan hadn't gone ten feet when an orderly came rushing up to drag

him away for an emergency. The nurse was busy with a stat case that had

just come in, another downed flier, this one brought in alive by air-sea

rescue.

Unnoticed, Roy disconnected the plasma tube, closing the shunt. His

flying suit had been mostly cut off him by the medics, but his robe would do

until he could get a uniform. All he wanted now was to be with Claudia-to

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hold her and tell her he loved her and hear that she loved him.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

These mecha that they're always talking about-those are a perfect

symbol of the warmakers. Our lives and the life of our planet are too precious

to be entrusted to the military machines!

All they care about are their battles, their glory, their victories. The only

thing they love is their endless killing. They want to control us all to make

sure that their war goes on and on until they've destroyed the universe.

And I say, we're not going to let them run our lives anymore. Peace, no

matter what the price! Peace now!

From Lynn-Kyle's pamphlet,

Let the People Make the Peace!

Claudia adored Roy with all her heart, but honestly, sometimes she had

difficulty dealing with their love affair-dealing with him.

Like now. There he sat on her couch, silent and lost in thought,

strumming her guitar softly, his long fingers sure and gentle on the strings,

As if he were mute. She made final preparations, the pineapple salad

looking magazine-cover perfect.

"All right," she said. "I blew up at Lisa for not telling me you were

leading the Vermilions today, but that's squared away between her and me.

But what about you and me, Roy? It's just not fair to blame me for worrying

about you!"

Roy didn't say anything, sitting and strumming. He looked pale and a

bit dazed. She made up her mind that he was having breakfast with her, and

dinner again tomorrow night. She was going to get him to rest even if she

had to strong-arm the flight surgeons into taking him off the duty roster!

She turned to look at him from the tiny kitchenette. "I don't think you

realize how terrified I get every time you fly off on a combat mission. It's

almost as if you pilots think it's all some kind of wonderful game that you're

playing when you go up in those Veritechs!"

193

The music stopped. "It has never been a game, Claudia," he said quietly.

"You know that." He wanted to resume his song, to feel connected to the

music and to feel connected to Claudia and to feel connected to life.

But his vision was going dim, and he couldn't recall what he'd been

playing. He felt cold, unutterably cold.

"Anyway, I said what I had on my mind, and I promise that I'll keep my

mouth shut about it in the future," she said, putting a few final flourishes on

the halved pineapple.

Claudia told herself to let it drop. They were together, and they would

be together that night. She thought of his touch, how tender and caring he

could be, how he had always been there whenever she really needed him.

And all the other problems vanished; their love had a way of making that

happen.

Claudia turned, holding up the salad plate triumphantly. "Well! Don't

tell me I put you to sleep!"

His head lay bent back at an awkward angle, the blond hair hanging

from it. His hands had fallen from the guitar, and his eyes were closed. He

moaned very faintly.

Something about it filled her with a fear worse than anything she'd ever

felt on the SDF-1's bridge. "Roy?"

He moaned again, louder, tried to stand up but instead fell, to stretch

out facedown on her carpet. The back of his uniform jacket was sodden with

blood.

Roy heard Claudia, far away, and wanted to answer but couldn't. He

didn't know how he'd forgotten, but there was a mission he had to fly.

There was Kramer now, with the ships waiting to go. Strangest

fightercraft Roy had ever seen: far sleeker and more dazzling than Veritechs,

and they seemed to shine with an inner light.

But-how had Pop Hunter, Rick's dad and Roy's old mentor, gotten

tapped for this mission?

It didn't matter. There were plenty of good men on this one, many of

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the best Roy had ever flown with. Why hadn't he seen them lately? Not

important. Pop Hunter handed Roy his helmet, and Kramer slapped his

back in welcome.

Then they were airborne, going ballistic into the blue, free and proud as

eagles. What was the mission, again? Oh, yeah; the big one! How could that

have slipped his mind?

They were going to ride forth and rid the universe of war itself, so that

there would be peace, nothing but peace, forever. Then, after this last

mission, he could go home and turn in his helmet and never fly another.

He could hold Claudia to him and never let her go.

The fighters climbed, and the sky became lighter instead of darker, and

then impossibly bright. With his squadron arrayed behind him, Roy Fokker

zoomed straight into the center of the white light.

"I'm terribly sorry, Lieutenant Grant," Doctor Hassan was saying. "We

did everything we could for him. But there was massive internal

hemorrhaging, and he had just lost too much blood."

Claudia was shaking her head slowly; she heard the words, understood

what they meant, but they made no sense to her. She was looking down at

Roy's unmoving body, not believing he was dead.

Hassan and the nurse looked at each other. The doctor had seen this

before; he tried to get through to Claudia again.

"It's a terrible tragedy." He gave the nurse a look; she understood the

signal, and they turned to leave Claudia for a while so that she could begin

the long, painful healing.

"Commander Fokker will be sorely missed," Hassan said, closing the

door gently behind him.

Claudia stared down at Roy's face until the tears blinded her, then

threw herself to her knees, burying her face in the sheet that covered his

chest.

She wept until she thought her heart would burst, unable to believe he

was gone. It seemed that the entire world had simply vanished, leaving

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nothing but a cold, silent void.

Rick was sitting up in bed, playing with the triplane again, fairly happy,

although he didn't realize it. Even worry, lovesickness, and depression

couldn't be on the job all day and all night, so his natural resilience had

surfaced. He looked up as the door opened.

"Well, hi, Lisa! What's got you out around town on this fine morning?"

Then he saw something in her expression, and all the ebullience went

out of him.

Lisa had never been good at this sort of thing; she still didn't

understand why she had agreed to be the one to tell Rick.

"Commander Fokker's dead. From wounds suffered during the air

battle yesterday."

The little yellow airplane with the Iron Cross markings fell from his

limp grasp. "Fokker, Little Brother, that's me!" It hit the floor and broke

into a dozen pieces.

"My Big Brother's dead?" He whispered it without tone, with barely the

inflection to make it a question, staring at the wall.

When he began weeping into the bunched sheet that he gripped in his

fists, racked by sobs that it seemed would tear him apart, Lisa turned to go.

But she reconsidered, her guardedness and reserve and the hurt of what

she'd taken earlier as his rebuff dropping from her. She went to sit by his

side, her arm around him, as he cried inconsolably.

Gloval showed no emotion when he read the casualty report. But he

was distant and distracted, remembering the gangling, blond-haired

teenager who had flown for him off the Kenosha, who had helped him

explore the just-crashed SDF-1 when it first came to Earth...who had

believed so much that war must end that he was willing to fight for it.

Let him be the last! Gloval thought wrathfully. They're not sending us

out for more killing and dying! If I have to end the Robotech War here on

Earth, then I will!

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End

RTUCN.COM

197

Document Outline

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Battlehymn

By Jack McKinney

1987

2

For Gabriela “Gabby” Aranda

3

4

CHAPTER ONE

As far as I'm concerned [Gloval] has already disobeyed his orders; I'd

urge the council to proceed with a courtmartial if I could only come up with

someone to replace him. What do you think, [name withheld], perhaps I could

talk [Admiral] Hayes into accepting the position and kill two birds with one

stone?...This issue of the civilians aboard the SDF-1 has turned into a real

mess. Personally, I consider them expendable-along with Gloval, along with

the whole ship, if you want to know the truth. Let's face facts: The thing has

already outlived its purpose. You and I are where we wanted to be. Why not

give the aliens their damn ship and send them back where they belong?

Senator Russo,

personal correspondence (source withheld)

There was something new in the cool summer night skies of 2012...You

remember sitting on the backyard swing, hands tightly gripping the

galvanized chains, slender arms extended and head tossed all the way back,

gazing up into the immeasurable depths of that black magic, teasing your

young mind with half-understood riddles of space and time. All of a sudden,

your gaze found movement there where none should have existed, as if an

entire constellation had uprooted and launched itself on an impromptu

journey across the cosmos. Your heart was beating fast, but your eyes

continued to track that mystery's swift passage toward the distant horizon,

even though you were watching it upside down now and in danger of

toppling backward off the swing. A screen door slammed, its report a signal

that your cries had been heard, your father and his friends beside you trying

to follow the rapid flow of your words, your shaking forefinger, pointing to

unmoving starfields. "Past your bedtime," your father said, and off you went.

But you crept down the wide carpeted staircase later on, silently, invisibly,

and heard them in the library talking in low tones, using words you couldn't

fully comprehend but in a way that proved you weren't imagining things.

5

You'd glimpsed the fortress, a heavenly city returned from the past, massive

enough to occultate the stars...savior or harbinger of dark prophecies, your

father's friends couldn't decide which, but "a sign of the times" in either

case. Like blue moons, unexplained disappearances, rumors of giants that

were on their way to get you...And on the front page of the following day's

newspaper you saw what the night had kept from you: a mile-high roboid

figure, propelled by unknown devices twice its own height above a stunned

city, erect, legs straight, arms bent at the elbow, held out like those of a holy

man or magician in a calming gesture of peace or surrender. It reminded

you of something at the edge of memory, an image you wouldn't summon

forth until much later, when fire rained from the sky, your night world

annihilated by light...

In direct violation of United Earth Defense Council dictates, Captain

Gloval had ordered the SDF-1 airborne. It was not the first time he had

challenged the wisdom of the Council, nor would it be the last.

The dimensional fortress had remained at its landing site in the Pacific

for two long months like an infant in a wading pool, the supercarriers

Daedalus and Prometheus that were her arms positioned out front like toys

in the ocean waves. And indeed, Gloval often felt as though his superiors on

the Council had been treating him like a child since the fortress's return to

Earth. Two years of being chased through the solar system by a race of alien

giants, only to be made to feel like unwanted relatives who had simply

dropped in for a visit. Gloval had a full understanding of the Council's

decisions from a military point of view, but those men who sat in judgment

were overlooking one important element-or, as Gloval had put it to them,

56,000 important elements: the one-time residents of Macross Island who

were onboard his ship. Circumstance had forced them to actively participate

in this running space battle with the Zentraedi, but there was no reason now

for their continued presence; they had become unwilling players in a game

of global politics that was likely to have a tragic end.

There had already been more than 20,000 deaths; how many more

6

were required to convince the Council to accede to his demands that the

civilians be allowed to disembark?

The Council's reasoning was far from specious, it was crazed, rooted in

events that had transpired years before, but worse still, rooted in a

mentality Gloval had hoped he had seen the last of. Even now the

commander found that he could still embrace some of the arguments put

forth in those earlier times-the belief that it was prudent to keep secret from

the masses any knowledge of an impending alien attack. Secrecy had

surrounded reconstruction of the dimensional fortress and the development

of Robotech weaponry, the transfigurable Veritech fighters and the Spartans

and Gladiators. This was the "logic of disinformation": There was a guiding

purpose behind it. But the Council's current stance betrayed an inhumanity

Gloval hadn't believed possible. To explain away the disappearance of the

75,000 people of Macross, the military had announced that shortly after the

initial lift-off of the SDF-1, a volcanic eruption on the order of Krakatoa had

completely destroyed the island. To further complicate matters, GIN, the

Global Intelligence Network, spread rumors to the effect that in reality a

guerrilla force had invaded the island and detonated a thermonuclear

device. Global Times Magazine was then coerced into publishing equally

unreal investigative coverage of a supposed cover-up by GIN, according to

which the actual cause of the deaths on Macross was disease.

Just how any of these stories could have functioned to alleviate

worldwide panic was beyond Gloval; the Council might just as easily have

released the truth: that an experiment in hyperspace relocation had

inadvertently ended with the dematerialization of the island. As it stood,

however, the Council was locked into its own lies: 75,000 killed by a

volcanic explosion/guerrilla invasion/virus. Therefore, these thousands

could not be allowed to "reappear"-return from the dead was an issue the

Council was not ready to deal with.

The 56,000 survivors had to remain virtual prisoners aboard the

SDF-1.

And if the Robotech Defense Force should win this war against the

7

Zentraedi? Gloval had asked the Council. What then? How was the Council

going to deal with the victorious return of the SDF-1 and the return of the

dead? Couldn't they see how misguided they were?

Of course, it was a rhetorical question.

Gloval's real concern was that the Council didn't consider victory an

acceptable scenario.

Which is why he had taken it upon himself to launch the SDF-1. He was

going to focus attention on the civilians one way or another...

There was panic on the ground and panic in the voice of the

Aeronautics Command controller.

"NAC. ground control to SDF-1 bridge: Come in immediately...NAC.

ground control to SDF-1 bridge: Come in immediately, over!"

On the bridge of the dimensional fortress there were suppressed grins

of satisfaction. Captain Gloval put a match to his pipe, disregarding

Sammie's reminders. He let a minute pass, then signaled Claudia from the

command chair to respond to the incoming transmission.

"SDF-1 bridge to NAC. ground control, I have Captain Gloval. Go ahead,

over."

Gloval drew at his pipe and blew a cloud toward the overhead monitors.

He could just imagine the scene below: the eyes of Los Angeles riveted on

his sky spectacle. He had ordered Lang and astrogation to utilize the newly

revamped antigrav generators to secure and maintain a low-level fly-by, and

so the enormous triple ports of the foot thrusters were scarcely a mile above

the streets. There would be no mistaking this for some Hollywood stunt.

And not only were people getting their first look at the airborne SDF-1, but

also of the formerly top-secret mecha that flew along with her-fighters,

Guardians, and Battloids hovering and circling a milehigh bipedal

Robotechnological marvel. Forget the majestic colors of those sunset clouds,

Gloval wanted to tell them. Here was something really worth

photographing!

"Captain Gloval, low flights over population centers have been strictly

8

prohibited except in extreme emergencies."

Gloval reached forward and picked up the handset. "This is an

emergency. We must maintain a low-altitude holding pattern. Our gravity

control system is not perfected, and the lives of our 56,000 civilian

detainees are in jeopardy."

Lisa Hayes turned from her station to throw him a conspiratorial wink.

"But sir, you're causing a panic down here. Increase your altitude and

fly out over the ocean immediately. It's imperative."

I have them where I want them! Gloval said to himself.

"I will comply with your order if you can give me permission to

disembark these civilians."

The speakers went silent; when the controller returned, there was

incredulity and urgency in his voice.

"Sir, that's impossible. Orders from UEDC headquarters state that no

one is to leave your ship. We have no authority to countermand those orders.

You must leave this area at once."

It was time to let some of the anger show. Gloval shouted, "I will not

rest until those orders are changed!"

He slammed the handset back into its cradle and leaned back into the

chair. Vanessa had swiveled from her screen to study him; he knew what

was on her mind and granted her the liberty to speak freely.

"Sir, isn't it dangerous to be making threats while we're on the aircom

net?"

Claudia exchanged looks with Gloval and spoke for him.

"This fortress is a symbol of the Council's strength," she told Vanessa.

"If it gets out that the captain is resisting orders, the Council would lose

face-"

"And there's a chance," Lisa added, "that our communication was being

monitored." She turned to Gloval. "Isn't that true, Captain?"

Gloval left the chair and walked forward to the curved bay. The

cityscape was spread out beneath the ship; Veritechs flew in formation, and

great swirls and billows of lavender and orange sunset clouds filled the sky.

9

"I'm prepared to keep the SDF-1 here until we are monitored, Lisa." He

turned to face Claudia and the others. "I don't think there's much chance

that the Council will reverse its decision. But politicians can sometimes be

helpful, and it's possible that someone in the government will get wind of

this, see an opportunity, and step in."

"But the Council isn't going to like your tactics, sir," said Vanessa.

Gloval turned back to the bay.

"Even if I face prosecution, this is something I must do. Civilians have

no place onboard this ship. No place in this war."

But for the time being the SDF-1 was stuck with its civilians. However,

it had been outfitted with a reworked shield system. Dr. Lang had

dismantled the pin-point barrier and liberated the lambent energy which

animated it-the same energy which had materialized with the

disappearance of the spacefold generators some time ago. His team of

Robotechnicians had then reanalyzed that alien fire, careful to avoid past

mistakes, tamed and cajoled it, and fashioned a newly designed harness for

it. Where the former system relied on manually operated maneuverable

photon discs that were capable of covering only specific portions of the

fortress (hence the name "pin-point" system), the reworked design was

omnidirectional, allowing for full coverage. It did share some of the

weaknesses of its prototype, though, in that activation of the system drained

energy from the weapons systems, and full coverage was severely

time-limited.

If only the personnel of the fortress could have been similarly

outfitted...but who has yet designed a shield system for the heart, a

protective barrier, pin-point or otherwise, for the human soul?

Roy Fokker was dead.

The VT pilots of Skull Team had their own way of dealing with combat

deaths: The slain pilot simply never was. Men from Vermilion or Indigo

might approach them in Barracks C or belowdecks in the Prometheus and

say: "Sorry to hear about Roy," or "Heard that Roy tuned out." And they

10

would look them square in the eye or turn to one of their Skull teammates

and ask flatly, "Roy who?" some might think the skull were kidding with

them and press the question, but the response remained the same: "Roy

who?" Nobody broke the pact, nobody spoke of Roy, then or now. Roy

simply never was.

Except in the privacy of their quarters or the no-man's-land of their

tortured memories and dreams. Then a man could let loose and wail or rage

or throw out the wane questions humankind has been asking since that first

murder, the first death at the hands of another, the one that set the pattern

for all that followed.

Perhaps that shell game the Skull Team played with death had found

its way to the bridge, or maybe it was just that Fokker's death was too

painful to discuss-the first one that hit home-but in any case no one brought

it up. Claudia and Rick were each separately cocooned in sorrow no one saw

fit to disturb. Kim and Sammie talked about how sorry they felt for Claudia,

knowing how much she missed Fokker, knowing that underneath that brave

front she was torn up. But neither woman ever approached her with those

feelings. Even Lisa seemed at a loss. That afternoon she had followed

Claudia to the mess hall, hesitant at the door, as if afraid to intrude on her

friend's grief...Did it occur to her that Claudia and Rick-the lieutenant at the

observation deck rail and Claudia seated not fifteen feet away-might have

been able to help each other through it, or was Lisa also one of the

speechless walking wounded, wounds in her own heart reopened, wounds

that had been on the mend until Fokker's death?

It was Rick she approached that afternoon, the City of Angels spread

out below the observation deck like some Robotech circuit board. Rick

looked drawn and pale, recuperating but still weak from his own brush with

death from wounds he had suffered indirectly at her own hand. But there

was no mention of Roy, although it was plain enough to read in his dark

eyes the devastation he felt. And the more she listened to him, the deeper

she looked into those eyes, the more fearful she became; it was as though all

light had left him, as though his words rose from a hollow center, somber

11

and distanced. She wanted to reach out and rescue him from the edge.

There was music coming through the PA, a song that had once welcomed

both of them back from a shared trip to that edge.

"That's Minmei, isn't it, Rick? Have you two been seeing each other?"

"Sure," he answered flatly. "I watch her on the wall screen, and she sees

me in her dreams."

No help in this direction; Lisa apologized.

Rick turned from her and leaned out over the rail.

"She's been spending a lot of time with her cousin Kyle. You know,

family comes first."

"Well I'm glad you're all right, Rick. I was worried about you."

That at least brought him around, but there was no change in tone.

"Yeah, I'm feeling great, Lisa. Just great."

She wanted to start from scratch: Listen, Rick, I'm sorry about Roy, if I

can be any help to you-

"So I hear we've got a new barrier system," he was saying. "And I guess

we need it more than ever, right, I mean, since the Council is refusing to

allow the civilians to leave-"

"Rick-"

"-and it isn't likely that the Zentraedi are going to call off their attacks."

She let him get it all out and let silence act as a buffer.

"The Council will rescind their order, Rick. The captain says he'll keep

the ship right there until they do."

Rick sneered. "Good. And the sooner it happens, the better. I know

we're all anxious to get back into battle."

Rick's eyes burned into hers until she could no longer stand it and

looked away. Was he blaming her somehow for Roy's death? Had she

suddenly been reduced to some malevolent symbol in his eyes? First

Lynn-Kyle and his remarks about the military, and now this...Below she

watched the traffic move along the grid of city streets; she looked long and

hard at the Sierra foothills, as if to remind herself that she was indeed back

on

12

Earth, back among the living. But even if the Council had a change of heart,

even if her father came to his senses and allowed the civilian detainees to

disembark, what would become of the SDF-1 and her crew?

Where and when would they find safe haven?

13

CHAPTER TWO

LAPSTEIN: In light of the, well, "psychological" problems which beset the

Zentraedi after the SDF-1's successful return to Earth, isn't there some

justification for suggesting that Khyron should have taken over command of

the Imperial Fleet?

EXEDORE (Laughs shortly): We would not be having this interview, of this I

can assure you.

LAPSTEIN: Of course...But in terms of strategic impact?

EXEDORE: (After a moment) It could be said that Khyron was more aware of

the dangers of cultural contagion than many of us, but he was no longer

thinking as a strategist. The SDF-1 was not his main concern; that the ship

contained a Protoculture matrix was of little importance. He had by now

come to believe that by destroying it he would put an end to what he regarded

as a psychic threat to his race. I will leave it to your "psychologists" to

examine his underlying motives. But I will add this: He was responding in

pure Zentraedi fashion-he recognized potential danger and moved to

eliminate it. My hope is that this will rescue his image from what many of

your writers have termed "humanness. "

Lapstein,

Interviews

Khyron was possessed by the Invid Flower of Life; without being

aware of it, he was by now working against the Zentraedi imperative.

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza,

Breetai, Khyron

Well within striking distance of Earth, two Zentraedi cruisers moved

through space, silently, side by side, Gargantuas from an unholy realm. A

day would come when the commanders of these ships would stand together

at the gates of an even blacker void, released from an artificial past and

feverish with exhilaration for a present in the making, hands and hearts

14

linked, an evil pact made good, laughing into the face of death...But today

there were harsh words and recriminations, a taste of what was to come for

the rest.

Khyron slammed his fist down on the command post console, his right

hand pointed accusingly at the projecbeam image of Azonia, her arms

folded across her chest, as much in defiance as in defense.

"It can't be!" the so-called Backstabber shouted. "Why are they

ordering us to fall back?"

His lowered head and narrowed eyes peering from beneath bangs of

sky blue gave him a demonic look.

Azonia now addressed the projecbeam image on the bridge of her

cruiser.

"I'm not at liberty to explain, but our orders are clear, Khyron: Until

this new operation is terminated, you will do nothing but stand by and wait.

Is that clear?"

She tried to sound calm but knew that he would see through it. Khyron

glared at her.

"Don't play games with me, Azonia. That ship grows stronger day by

day, while we sit and do nothing."

"Khyron-"

"Your meddling in my plans allowed the Micronians to reach their

homeworld. But it is not too late to undo the damage you've done. Destroy

them now!"

"Enough!" she screamed at the screen. But he paid her little heed. An

angry sweep of dismissal with his arm, bared teeth, and he was gone. The

projecbeam compressed to a single horizontal line and vanished, but Azonia

tried to raise him nevertheless.

"Khyron, come in, Khyron! Come in at once!"

Too late. She leaned forward to steady herself on stiffened arms, palms

still flattened against the com buttons. She knew him well enough to fear

him, but it wasn't fear that was threatening to overcome her. These were

darker feelings, utterly devoid of light, far worse than fear. And suddenly

15

she recognized what it must be: Commander in Chief Dolza had relieved

Breetai of his command, had entrusted her with the mission to retrieve

Zor's ship, and she had failed him.

Failed him!

Just then Miriya was admitted to the bridge, and Azonia felt a glimmer

of hope. If anyone could help her deal with Khyron, it would be Miriya, the

Zentraedi's most skilled pilot. But Azonia was soon to learn that Khyron had

already undermined these plans also.

"I'm glad that you're here," Azonia said to welcome the female ace.

"Commander Khyron is jeopardizing our mission. I'm going to need your

help to keep him in line."

Miriya lowered her gaze. "Commander, I..."

Azonia approached her with concern. "Miriya, what's wrong? Out with

it."

"I have come to request your permission to enter the dimensional

fortress...as a spy."

Azonia was shocked. "Micronized?!"

"Yes. I have been studying the enemy's language, and I am confident

that my presence will profit our cause."

"But why? Why would our finest pilot want to become a Micronian?

You're not making sense!"

"Please, Commander, I have no choice."

"Nonsense! Tell me. I order you."

Miriya's deep green eyes flashed; she tossed back her mane of thick

hair and glared at Azonia.

"I have been defeated in battle...bested by a Micronian, an insignificant

bug! I must find and destroy that pilot. Until then I'm of use to no one. You

must permit me, Commander, for the glory of the Zentraedi."

Defeat! thought Azonia. Failure! What was to become of their once

glorious race?

Khyron wasted no time putting his attack plan into effect. Moments

16

after breaking contact with Azonia he was on his way to the cruiser's

Battlepod hangar, where his lieutenants and squadron leaders would

receive their briefing. Every minute lost brought the Zentraedi that much

closer to defeat; of this he was certain. The Micronians were making repairs,

taking on stores, readying themselves for another round...

Defeat...There was a time not long ago when the very word found no

place in his thinking, let alone the idea. But recent events had reshaped his

world view; dangerous possibilities were now entertained where none had

existed before. This operation directed against the Micronians of "Earth"

was beginning to assume portentous dimensions. Left in the dark to puzzle

out the intricacies of this war that was not a war, Khyron had been forced to

rely on instinct and rumor; he had implicit faith in the former but little use

for the latter unless, as in the present case, he found corroborating evidence

of his own. And at the center of the complexities was Zor's ship, the Super

Dimensional Fortress. That the fortress, with its Protoculture matrix, was a

trophy worthy enough to justify the expenditures of this operation was

beyond dispute. And that it had to be kept from the Invid, equally so. But

surely the Robotech Masters would concede that at this point the fortress

was expendable; the Micronians, having already unlocked some of its

secrets, posed a threat greater than loss of the ship itself. And threats were

best dealt with directly. But what should have been a straightforward

eradication and mop-up exercise, no different from scores of similar

operations effected throughout the quadrant, had become a hazardous

hunt-an attempt to recapture the fortress intact at any cost. Had the

Commander in Chief forgotten the imperative?

The Zentraedi were a race of warriors, not gamesters.

Just what were Dolza and Breetai up to? Over and over again he put

the question to himself. Were they serving the Robotech Masters or some

rebellious design of their own? Khyron's suspicions had been temporarily

put to rest when Breetai had been relieved of his command, but now he was

beginning to consider that this, too, was part of their plan. That Azonia had

been chosen to head up the operation was disturbing-maybe a sign that the

17

Old One was in fact losing his grip-but beside the point in any case. Azonia's

time had run out; once under way, the present attack plan would

accomplish a secondary purpose in seeing to that. But Dolza's next move

remained to be seen; should Breetai be returned to command, Khyron

would have no choice but to accept his rebellion theory as truth. But he also

understood that a schism now would only add to an already perilous course.

That was why the present situation had to be defused.

In the cavernous lower chambers of the Zentraedi cruiser, the assault

group was assembled. In addition to the usual complement of Botoru

tri-thruster assault ships, carapace fighters, and scout recons, there were

scores of specialized mecha outfitted with ECM and radar jamming devices.

Khyron laid out his simple plan: The dimensional fortress was to be

destroyed.

As Khyron prepared to strap into his Officer's Pod assault ship, he

exchanged some final words with Grel, who would man the helm in

Khyron's absence. The square jawed face of the First Officer was on the

overhead screen in the central hold.

"Wait until I approach the fortress and activate ECM before you follow

and land your fleet, Grel."

"Although Earth's atmosphere makes it difficult to maneuver, we will

obey."

"See that you do. Intelligence reports indicate that the Micronians care

a great deal about their miserable world, so if we bring the fight there, the

fortress and the planet will be ours for the taking." Khyron noticed Grel's

eyes shift back and forth. "Questions, Grel?"

"No, sir...But we are going against Azonia's orders again, aren't we?"

Khyron laughed maliciously. "Just carry out your orders. I'll take care

of her after we return."

Khyron lowered the canopy of the Battlepod. He ingested two dried

leaves from the Flower of Life and brought his mecha to the edge of the

cruiser port.

18

The first controlled firing of the main gun, the Daedalus Maneuver, the

return to Earth: three "whoopees" in two long years of warfare...

But now there was cause for genuine celebration on the bridge of the

dimensional fortress: Gloval's ploy had worked. The North American

Ontario Quadrant, one of a growing number of separatist states seeking

autonomy from the Council's stranglehold, had agreed to accept the

civilians. Ontario had its own reasons for doing so, but the captain wasn't

about to ask questions. It felt as though an enormous weight was about to

be lifted from his shoulders-he could practically feel the worry lines on his

face beginning to fade. Now, if Dr. Lang could only figure some way to

transfer Macross City as well, lock, stock, and barrel.

News of the recently received crypto-communication spread like

wildfire through the ship. Spontaneous parties were already under way in

the streets of the city, and Gloval would have been given a ticker-tape

parade if there had been any ticker tape available. Residents were hastily

packing and making preparations to leave, embracing one another, sobbing

good-byes, taking last looks around. As expected, there were more than a

few who wished to remain onboard, but there were to be no exceptions to

the captain's orders: All civilians had to go. Perhaps when the war was over,

like some "city in flight" the SDF-1 would be taking Earth's children to their

destiny...

But most of that was for starry-eyed dreamers and science-fantasy

buffs; most of Macross wanted out. The tour was finished; it was time to get

back into the real world, reconnect with family left behind, tear up the

premature obituaries, and start living again. No more alert sirens waking

you up in the middle of a false night, no more military scrip or play money,

no asteroid showers, no more-thank heavens!-modular transformations.

Many of the residents forgot that these same hopes had been dashed only

short weeks before.

The Defense Force was never polled as to its feelings, though the

results undoubtedly would have proved interesting. To some Macross was

the ship's heart, and they had fought hard on Earth and in deep space to

19

protect that transplanted center. To be appointed guardian of their

homeworld would have been a fair enough tradeoff, but, that was not to be

the case. The Council had already made this clear: Their orders were to lead

the aliens away from Earth, to bring the war back into deep space where it

belonged, to act as a decoy until such time as the Earth was suitably

prepared to deal with invasion. In other words, they had been singled out

for sacrifice. If there was supposed to be some sort of grandiose nobility

attached to this, it was not readily apparent. But fortunately for the Council,

the Earth, and the dimensional fortress commanders themselves, there

were few members of the Defense Force in possession of all the facts.

Rick was belowdecks in the Prometheus when Max and Ben brought

him the news from the bridge. He was in uniform, number-two torx driver

in hand, standing alongside Skull One-Roy Fokker's Veritech. An opened

access panel in the nacelle below the cockpit broke the unity of the circular

fuselage insignia, but Rick missed the symbolism. Nevertheless, he stared

into the exposed circuitry, even tinkered a bit, as if searching for memories

of his lost friend. The fighter had been fully repaired and serviced; there

were no signs of damage, no evidence of the fatal rounds sustained, but that

didn't mean the exorcism had been complete. Roy's presence fingered

palpably.

Rick closed the panel as the two corporals approached.

"Just doing some maintenance," Rick said by way of explanation. Yeah,

self-maintenance.

"I'm not surprised," said Max. "Lisa Hayes told us you were down

here."

Ben eyed the fuselage numerals. "Hey, this is Commander Fokker's

Skull One, isn't it? I didn't know you were going to be flying it."

"Uh, yeah," Rick answered distantly. "Guess I was lucky to get it as my

aircraft assignment."

He turned away from them and put his right hand against the mecha

almost reverently. "Nice touch of irony, don't you think? Commander

Fokker was always so proud of the fact that he'd never gone down. Now

20

he's...gone, and I get his plane. Me...the guy who's always being shot

down-even by our own ordnance. Just kind of ironic, that's all."

Rick's friends exchanged concerned looks, but Max broke out of it and

into a smile. He told Rick about the civilians, and the lieutenant said,

"Terrific." Undaunted, Max continued.

"Apparently the North American Ontario Quadrant will be accepting

them, and the official announcement will be given tomorrow by Captain

Gloval."

"So how's about we get a jump on the celebration?" Ben said, full of

good humor. "We could hit Macross for some food, drink, whatever else

comes along."

"You could use the recreation, Lieutenant," Max hastened to add.

Rick's slow smile was a signal that he'd already made up his mind. He

had to get himself out of this funk some how, and he didn't see how low

spirits could stand a chance in Macross just now.

"It sounds good, guys. In fact, it'll be my treat."

Ben beamed. "Well how about that, Max?" He moved between his

friends, a head taller than both, draping his arms over their shoulders and

leading them away from the Veritech. "Doesn't that sound like something

the new pilot of the Skull One would do? C'mon, let's get going before he

changes his mind."

Rick glanced over his shoulder at the silent mecha; then he turned his

back on it and followed Ben's lead.

Khyron's assault unit launched from the cruiser and plunged into

Earth's atmosphere, triple-thrusters brilliant orange against a peaceful field

of cloud-studded blue.

The dimensional fortress, still configured like an upright winged

techno-knight, was over the city of Toronto when radar alerted the bridge of

the impending attack.

Vanessa leaned over her console and tapped in a series of commands.

She leaned back in her chair as "paint" and directional symbols began to fill

21

the large screen.

"Multiple radar contacts in five, six, and seven. A fleet of alien

spacecraft," she informed the captain. Her words came in a rush. "Pods,

recons. Small ships, mostly. Coming in from an altitude of twenty miles,

north-northwest."

Gloval didn't want to believe it. "Are you sure?"

"Yes, sir," she answered emphatically.

Sammie moaned, "Oh, no!" as both Lisa and Claudia turned from their

forward stations to regard the threat board.

"Just as we were entering the Ontario Quadrant."

"Exactly," said Claudia in a way that meant: typical!

Gloval had not moved from the command chair; his hands were

tightened on the arms, as much to prevent himself from rising as to get a

grip on the situation.

"We cannot afford to come under attack here," he said to the bridge.

"Commander Hayes, order all pilots to red alert immediately!"

"Here you are, mister, one giant top sirloin, medium rare," the chef

said as he placed cutting board and cut in front of Ben.

He, Max, and Rick were in the Kindest Cut, one of Macross City's finest

steak houses. They had elected to sit along the circular counter which ringed

the central grills-"close to the action," as Ben put it. Exhaust fans and an

enormous copper hood overhead took care of most of the smoke, but you

had to be a real red-meat lover to deal with the odors, the sizzle and pop

that were inescapable up front.

"Thanks a lot, pal," Ben said, pulling the platter shaped cutting board

toward him.

His friends were staring at the steak in disbelief.

"Does this smell great or what?!" He had knife and fork poised, ready

to dig in.

"It sure looks like a lot to eat," Max said tentatively.

A massive hunk of meat was impaled on Ben's fork. "I'm so hungry, I

22

might order another one!" He laughed loudly, then opened his mouth

widely, the forkful a scant inch from his mouth, when an announcement

blared out over the citywide PA.

"Attention, all fighter pilots: red alert, red alert. This is not a drill..."

Max and Rick were already on their feet and heading for the door by

the time the message was repeated. Ben, however, was still anchored to his

seat, wondering if he had time for just one more bite.

"Hey, Ben, move out!" he heard the lieutenant say.

Ben stood up and contemplated the top sirloin, the small, round

potatoes, the heavenly garnish of mushrooms and onions...

"Don't move," he told the meal. "I'll be back."

23

CHAPTER THREE

And, lo, I saw a winged giant walking among the clouds in the western

sky, haloed within a globe of radiant glory, and his body set to gleaming

silver in the sun. And tho his hands might be raised in supplication, his heart

burned with all the fury of holy fires. And I say unto you that this is the

Temple of Mankind, risen and returned to do battle with the forces of evil!

Apocrypha, The Book of James

Veritechs were already being moved to the flight elevators by the time

Rick, Ben, and Max reached the hangar of the Prometheus. They had their

"thinking caps" and harness packs on, likewise their respective red, gold,

and blue flight suits. Cat crews and controllers were keeping things orderly;

after two years of almost constant fighting, they had the routine down to a T.

Lisa's voice was loud and clear through the speakers:

"All fighter squadrons: red alert, red alert. This is not a drill, this is not

a drill..."

They wished each other luck, separated, and ran for their individual

fighters. Skull One was waiting patiently for Rick, wings back and

emblem-emblazoned tailerons folded down. He clambered up into the

cockpit and strapped in as he ran a quick status check. He thought of Roy as

the canopy descended.

Well, Big Brother, looks like I've been elected to fill your shoes. I'm not

looking forward to it. Now, don't get me wrong...But piloting your fighter in

combat is going to take some getting used to.

Rick was waved forward to the elevator. Once on the flight deck, he

spread the mecha's wings and raised the Jolly Roger tailerons while

coveralled hookup crews readied the ship for launch. Finally the go signal

was given. Rick flashed thumbs up and dropped back against the seat. A

fleeting image of Roy Fokker appeared on one of the commo screens.

"Well, ole buddy, this one's for you," Rick said aloud. Then, flipping

24

toggles, he contacted the bridge and added, "This is Skull Leader, and we're

movin' out."

The engines were activated, power and sound building. The cat officer

dropped, the shooter ducked, and seconds later Skull One was accelerated

off the flatdeck's hurricane bow and airborne.

On the bridge of the SDF-1, Claudia turned to Lisa.

"Did he say, 'Skull Leader'?"

"That's right, Claudia." There was almost a note of pride in her voice.

"Lieutenant Hunter's taking over Commander Fokker's Skull One as of

today."

It took Claudia by surprise, but she smiled and turned to the bay,

hoping to catch a glimpse of the takeoff.

"Roy would have liked that."

"Skull Leader to Skull wing: I've got bogies on my screen. Estimate

fifteen seconds until first contact."

Rick and his men were in a delta formation; below them, also in

triplicate, were Indigo and Vermilion, along with several other VT teams.

Max and Ben were on the lateral commo screens in Skull One's cockpit.

"Are both of you ready to get the job done?"

"You bet we are, Lieutenant," Ben said.

Max added, "Ready for combat."

Rick felt a reawakened sense of purpose that bordered on sheer

exhilaration. It was not the usual prebattle adrenaline rush or any other

endorphin high but a settling of the storm that had raged inside him since

the ship's return to Earth and had peaked with Roy's death-a storm that had

whipped him into a frenzy and left him depleted of spirit, faith, the very will

to goon. But now, out in this wild blue yonder, those storm clouds were

breaking up, and with them that ominous sense of doom and impenetrable

darkness. Skull One was airborne again; Rick Hunter was airborne again.

Where before he had seen irony, he now felt a curious but calming harmony.

He would prevail!

25

In the lead ship of the alien assault group, Khyron was thinking the

same thing. But where Rick's thoughts were tuned to life, Khyron's were

attuned to death-as clear an example as any of the differences that

separated Human from Zentraedi.

"They're dead ahead," Khyron said to his pilots. "Keep your shields up

and fire when ready. Let's get them now!"

So saying, he engaged the ship's boosters, signaling his wingmen to

follow suit, and threw his forces against Hunter's.

The two groups met head-on, filling the skies with thunder. Explosions

bloomed and erupted like some hellish aeroponic garden. Brilliant blue and

yellow tracers crisscrossed with contrails and the smoke and fire falls of

destroyed ships. Wingmen broke away from their leaders to engage the

enemy mecha one on one in an aerial free-for-all. VT pilots sometimes used

the analogy of boxing versus street fighting: There were no rules; your

opponent was unskilled but mean-spirited and more than likely

unstoppable.

Zentraedi snub-nosed tri-thrusters, triple-finned and resembling

stylized faucet controls, tore through the Veritech formations, plastron

cannons blazing, blue fire holing craft and pilots alike. Twin top-mounted

rockets were elevated to firing positions, launched, and more often than not

found their mark, throwing fiery debris into the arena; balls of flame that

were once Veritechs plunged from the sky.

But the Robotech forces hit back.

Skull One banked sharply to avoid the debris of an exploded craft,

angry blue fire deep within its aft thrusters, red-tipped pyloned heat-seekers

eager for release. Rick trimmed his ship only to find that he had four more

bandits on his tail. He led them on a merry chase, up into a booster climb to

the edge of night, then down in a power dive they hadn't anticipated.

Rick threw down the G lever and thought the mecha through to

Guardian configuration. He flew into the face of his pursuers like a bird of

prey, taloned legs engaged and rear undercarriage guns erupting when he'd

cleared their formation. Orange fire blazed from beneath the wings.

26

A Zentraedi ship exploded, then a second, as it kamikazeed in on Skull

One, an expanding cloud of orange death. Divine wind, indeed, thought

Rick.

The Guardian was hovering now, utilizing the downward-pointing foot

thrusters for loft and stability and pouring out fire against the two

remaining ships. And once again, Rick's thoughts and shots found their

mark.

He heard Ben's voice above the racket on the tac net.

"Hey, Skull Leader, that was mighty fine flying, but you've got to be

more careful!"

But it was Ben who wasn't being careful: An enemy mecha had him

locked on target and was about to open up. Fortunately, Max Sterling had

been monitoring the approach; he had the craft lined up in his reticle, and

he loosed two rockets to take it out.

Rick heard Ben's cry of surprise, then delight, as Max brought his

blue-trimmed ship alongside Dixon's port wingtip.

"You okay, Ben?" Max asked, a lilt to his voice.

"Yeah, sure, now I am, thanks."

"Well, stay alert, big guy."

"Better believe it. Nobody tunes out Ben Dixon!"

Rick was too involved in the battle to notice that several alien ships had

peeled away from the attack group and established a holding pattern not far

from the SDF-1. This did not go unnoticed on the bridge of the fortress itself,

however, or onboard the cruiser commanded by Khyron's second, Grel.

Grel, arms folded across his chest, studied the blue projecbeam field.

Deep within a schematic representation of the planetary rim, a bright red

light bar flashed once, then twice more. And over the com came the voice of

one of the fleet commanders.

"Sir, the radar jamming tactic appears to be working. Shall we now

proceed?"

Grel leaned forward over the console. "Yes, proceed as planned."

27

As he gave the word, five enormous warships began a slow descent

toward Earth.

Gloval stood at the forward bay of the bridge, white cap pulled low on

his head, eyes heavy with concern. In the western sky flashes of devilish fire

marked the battle zone, discs and crescents in the dusk. South, a cluster of

enemy craft in a curious holding pattern, and below the fortress, a city in

chaos-a city in peril. What were the residents to make of these

unannounced fireworks? Gloves wondered. The SDF-1 was headed north at

a good clip, but would it clear these population centers before the battle

escalated? He knew it would. He closed his eyes to shut out the scene. He

had brought the fortress here to disembark the civilians, and in so doing he

had endangered yet another group. Was there no winning this thing-on any

front?

"Sir, radar is destabilizing."

Gloval didn't bother to turn and face Vanessa; wearily, he said, "The

Zentraedi are jamming our signal...One thing after another...Alert Skull

Team to begin a recon sweep of the area." Then he swung around. "Put the

new barrier system on standby and be prepared for new enemy activity."

Claudia exercised her prerogative by pointing out that activating the

shields would draw power from the weaponry systems, but the captain was

way ahead of her; he had little patience left for ground already covered. "I

understand the problem, but I must consider the safety of all personnel

aboard. Now, put the new system on standby immediately!"

"Yes, sir," Claudia deferred. "Stand by to engage..."

Meanwhile, a solitary ship of bizarre design was on a low, silent

approach to the dimensional fortress, taking advantage of a ridge of low

hills to conceal itself from detection and involvement in the raging battle.

The mecha was insectlike in appearance, with a globular twin-hemisphered

body, pincer arms, two cloven legs, and a pointed proboscis cockpit module.

It was not a Botoru ship-one of Khyron's Seventh Mechanical Division-but a

28

Quadrono. And held in the grip of the armored right hand, contained in a

transparent chamber similar to, that which had delivered three micronized

spies into the SDF-1, was the female ace of that fleet, Miriya Parino. She

wore a sleeveless blue-gray sackcloth of a dress, belted with rough cord, and

carried no weapons.

It was this last that worried the female pilot of the mecha. She had

visual contact with Miriya via the curved screen in the cockpit, audio

through the helmet communicator.

"Miriya, this is dangerous! Are you certain you want to board the

Micronian ship with no weapons?"

"I won't need weapons."

"But Commander Azonia is already upset about the failure of this

operation..."

"Upset, but not with me. It's Khyron who has made a mess of things."

And some of us are aware of the special rivalries that exist between Azonia

and Khyron, she wanted to add. But Miriya had no quarrel with the

Backstabber. He was now doubly responsible for her mission and her

present micronized size: first by alerting her to the Micronian ace who had

bested her in battle, and second by launching yet another unauthorized

attack against the SDF-1. The battle had simplified the infiltration

considerably. But these facts were of no use to the pilot.

"Just deliver me to the Micronian ship," Miriya said sternly.

Khyron had removed himself from the aerial arena; his command

mecha was positioned at the southern perimeter of the skirmish, and he had

managed to raise Grel on the com. The lieutenant's face appeared on a

secondary commo screen in the cockpit while explosive flashes of battle

light strobed against the outer hull of the ship.

"We're hovering above the surface, awaiting your further orders, my

lord."

Khyron was pleased enough to compliment his second.

"Excellent, Grel, you've done a superb job. Now, prepare your attack,

29

but don't open fire until I join you."

"My lord!" Grel saluted.

Following Gloval's orders, Skull Team had also temporarily absented

themselves from the battle to recon south of the fortress. Rick had patched

the infrared scanners, wide and long-range, into the commo system; center

and lateral screens now afforded him an imageenhanced sweep of the

horizon. In a moment he had radar contact and upped the magnification on

the screens. Gloval was right: Zentraedi cruisers!

Rick activated the scrambler and went on the tac net.

"Lisa, are you monitoring?"

She answered, "Affirmative," from the bridge and notified the captain:

"Skull has visuals on five alien cruisers; range, seventy miles,

south-southeast, vector headings coming in now..."

"All right," said Gloval, hands behind his back at the forward bay.

"Claudia, activate the omnidirectional barrier at once!"

In the new shield system control room, more than a dozen techs and

specialists readied themselves. Situated aft and well below the bridge in a

huge hold, the room itself was little more than a flyout platform equipped

with a central readout table and numerous manned consoles and

viewscreens. But the device responsible for the energy barrier was

something else again. Blue rings of pulsed energy filled the hold as Gloval

gave word to engage the system. Power began to build in the field

generator-an enormous gearlike dish with eight hydraulic closure

teeth-while its mate telescoped down on a thick shaft from the hold

overhead. Short of meshing, the generators exchanged phrases of fire,

forming and containing a sphere of effulgent energy.

On the bridge the energy sphere registered schematically on Claudia's

console monitor as a globe-shaped grid fully encompassing the upright

SDF-1.

Externalized, the sphere was a yellow-green cloud that grew and

expanded from the ship's center, gaseous and slightly luminescent, haloing

30

the fortress in the night sky.

Grel was viewing its formation on the command center screen as

Khyron entered, his harness pack and hip blasters still in place.

"What's going on?" he demanded.

Grel didn't bother to salute. "There's a large energy shield surrounding

the Micronian ship."

Khyron snorted. "I don't care. Open fire, now!"

It was as if someone had scribbled across the sky with a light

crayon...that many rockets were launched from the Zentraedi warships.

Ninety-eight percent of them found their mark, enveloping and obscuring

the dimensional fortress in a minute-long symphony of explosions. But to

the amazement of human and Zentraedi alike the shield absorbed the

deadly storm, and the fortress was left unscathed.

"It's unlike anything we've encountered," said Grel, commenting on a

profile schematic of the Micronian shield. "And it seems to be fully

protecting the ship from our attack. So what now?"

"Yes..." Khyron answered slowly. "Advance the group and continue

firing until I order you to cease."

And continue they did, employing pulsed lasers and cannon fire.

Streaks of horizonal lightning converged on the SDF-1, but to no avail. What

the shield didn't absorb, it simply deflected.

Captain Gloval was cautiously optimistic; the barrier system was

holding, but Vanessa's threat board showed that the enemy had advanced

well into the yellow zone.

"The enemy is continuing their attack," she warned him.

His hopes dashed, the captain gave voice to his fears.

"This time they won't stop coming until they've destroyed us."

Sammie turned her frightened eyes to him. "Sir, couldn't we radio

headquarters and ask for some support or something?"

"That won't work," Lisa chided her. "The captain knows a request like

that would just be ignored."

31

"Because we've been making so many demands about the civilians?"

Kim asked.

It was the wrong time for foolish questions, but Gloval fielded them

patiently. "It has more to do with our proximity to the ground," he told her.

He'd placed his own head on the chopping block; it was unlikely that anyone

in the Council would come to his rescue.

"Message, sir."

Gloval turned his attention to Claudia's overhead monitor. It was one

of Lang's Robotechnicians.

"We've got a serious problem, Captain. The barrier system is beginning

to overload!"

Rick and the members of Skull Team had been watching the

bombardment in awe, but Lisa was now ordering them to counterattack the

warships.

"You've got to draw their fire, Lieutenant Hunter. The shields can't

take- any more. If you fail...

"There isn't going to be any ship to return to."

Her eyes shifted on the screen, as if trying to find his across miles of

sky. "It looks bad, Rick. Captain Gloval wants you to know that as of this

moment, the safety of every single person on this ship rests in your hands."

The safety of every single person on this ship rests in your

hands...Bottom of the ninth: bases loaded, two outs, Hunter on deck...

Skull Team descended on the cruisers like vengeful eagles. They had

reconfigured to Guardian mode for the drop and to Battloid now as they

touched down on the first warship, skimming over its armored green hull,

blue foot thrusters blazing like power skaters. Gatlings resounding, they

moved toward the stern, taking out turret guns and sealing weapons ports.

But that still left four ships emitting unbroken lines of blue death.

The once clearly defined schematic sphere was now a vaguely circular

blotch bleeding sickly colors across the Zentraedi projecbeam field.

32

"You see," Grel said knowingly, "their energy readings are dropping

quickly. The shield is at its limit."

Khyron laughed through his teeth. "Now these Micronians will be mine.

Mine!"

Inside the SDF-1 the barrier system generators lost their grip on that

shared and maintained globe of energy; the ball flattened, grew savagely

oblate, then lost its circumference entirely and began to arc untamed

throughout the hold.

The bridge was in chaos.

"Barrier generators four and seven are losing power due to intense core

overheating," Claudia reported to Gloval. Her monitor schematic revealed

weakened coordinates along the shield grid.

The captain quickly ordered her to switch to subsystem power.

Meanwhile three of the nine screens at Kim's station and two at

Sammie's had blacked out; two others were flashing a field of orange static.

"We have an overload situation in the outer field circuits..."

"Number seven converter has exceeded its limit..."

"Emergency backup crew, report to your service areas."

Lisa brought her hands to her ears and went on the aircom net. "Skull

Leader, keep your comline open for emergency orders."

The threat board showed the Zentraedi warships continuing their

advance. "They've just entered the red zone, Captain!" Vanessa shouted.

Then, suddenly, there was a blood-curdling scream through the patch

lines from the shield control room and primary lighting failed. The bridge

crew looked like the living dead under the eerie glow of console lights.

Klaxons and warning sirens were blaring from remote areas of the fortress.

Sammie's station screen had gone fully to orange.

"It's reaching critical mass," she yelled. "It's going to explode!"

Rick heard the panic in Lisa's voice. "Skull Leader, evacuate your team

at once-the barrier system is about to chain-react. Evacuate-"

33

Rick, Max, and Ben thought their Battloids through an about-face.

Beyond the rim of the Zentraedi warship they could see the barrier

transubstantiate: What appeared as the selfsame shield was in fact shot

through and through with submolecular death.

Rick watched as radiation detector gauges came to life in the cockpit.

He raised his teammates on the tac net and told them to clear out on the

double.

Behind them the shield expanded, its internal colors shifting from

green through yellow and orange to deadly red; then, after a blinding flash

of silent white light, the shield was gone. In its place a hot pink hemisphere

began to form, an umbrella of horror fifty miles wide.

The three pilots ran their Battloids along the armored hull, past turrets

and singed bristle sensors already slagging in the infernal heat; they

reconfigured to Guardian mode and launched themselves, the spreading

shock wave threatening to overtake them.

Rick glimpsed one of the warships rise from the pack and accelerate

itself to safety. But the rest were annihilated, atomized along with every

standing structure and living thing on the ground.

Skull One was tearing through fuchsia skies, fire nipping at the fighter's

tail. Inside, Rick searched desperately right and left for a sign of his

wingmen. Max's ship came into view to port, but Ben was nowhere in sight.

"Ben, Ben!" Rick cried.

"Behind you, Lieutenant!"

Rick found Dixon's radar blip on the screen; Ben was converting to

Guardian for added thrust.

"Hit your afterburner-now! Do you copy?"

Ben's voice was terror-filled: "It's too late, Rick! I can't

make...Aaarrrggghhh!..."

Rick shook his head wildly, as much to deny the truth as to keep the

sound of death from his ears.

He crossed himself as Ben's radar image began to fade.

34

A second friend lost...color gone out of the world...

35

CHAPTER FOUR

All of a sudden it seemed everything was out of control. Here we were

back on Earth, feeling more displaced than we'd felt in deep space. The

Council refused to hear us out. The Zentraedi attacks continued unabated,

we'd lost Roy Fokker and Ben Dixon, and thousands of innocents had been

killed. I wasn't alone in feeling this sense of hopelessness. But it was

something we weren't supposed to discuss, as though we had all agreed to

some unspoken rule: By not talking about it we could make it go away...Day

by day it was becoming more difficult for us to find any sense of comfort or

acceptance in Macross, and here was Lynn-Kyle adding fuel to the fire,

spearheading a peace movement which could only further undermine our

attempts to defeat the aliens. Not that there wasn't ample justification for civil

unrest. But we were one ship, one cause-no thanks to Russo's Council-an

independent nation at war with the Zentraedi! I had personal reasons for

disliking [Kyle], but 1 now found reasons to distrust him as well. That he had

turned Minmei against me, I accepted as given. But I couldn't stand still and

allow him to threaten the ship, that military/civilian integrity essential for

our survival.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

The enemy energy poured into and absorbed by the barrier cloud had

chain-reacted; at the center of the ensuing explosion the SDF-1 was left

relatively untouched, but on the ground countless thousands were dead.

Within a twenty-five-mile radius from the fortress the Earth's surface was

scorched and flayed beyond recognition.

As a consequence, the Ontario Quadrant subcommand had refused to

allow the SDF-1 civilians to disembark; those onboard who had heard the

rumors early on ceased their premature celebrations and faced the

heartbreak.

Eight of the twenty-one techs who manned the barrier system controls

36

had been killed, and the rest were listed in critical condition. The air corps

had suffered heavy casualties.

Ben Dixon had tuned out...

But the really big news in Macross City focused on Lynn-Minmei: She

had been hospitalized for exhaustion.

Reporters caught up with Lynn-Kyle on the steps of Macross General.

The long-haired star was angry enough to create a scene, but he thought

better of it and decided to use the news coverage to his advantage. He left

their rapid questions unanswered until they got the hint and backed off to

let him speak.

"What does Minmei's doctor say?"

"What is the prognosis?"

"Kyle, how long will she be hospitalized?"

"Come on, give us something-you're her closest friend."

"How is this going to affect the shooting schedule for the movie the two

of you are doing?"

"All right, listen up," Kyle said at last. "I want to make a statement

concerning the war. In the midst of all that's going on, all this continual

destruction and loss of life, you people want to ask me about Minmei's

health. Are you all blind to the realities of this situation or what?"

One of the reporters smirked. "I get it, we should be focusing on your

needs, huh?"

Kyle shot him an angry look. "Have you ever stopped to consider the

priorities? You're prisoners aboard this ship, we're still under attack, the

Council has written you all off, you're being lied to left and right, and you

spend your time chasing after a celebrity who's fainted from overwork!

Forget this nonsense. We've got to find a way to put an end to this war."

"What would you have everyone do, Kyle?"

"Are you planning to head up a new peace movement?"

"Open rebellion, passive resistance, letters to Command-what are you

advocating?"

Kyle held up his hands, then pointed toward one of the group as he

37

responded. "It's your responsibility to expose these cover-ups. Point out the

lies and contradictions. Show the people of this city the military leaders as

they really are. We've got to begin pressuring them. We're fifty thousand

strong, and we can put a stop to this.

"Right now all we've got is devastation and destruction-no winners,

only losers. This is an inhumane, nowin situation. The only conquest that

should concern us is the conquest of our warring nature."

Kyle V-ed the fingers of his right hand and held it aloft.

"Peace must conquer all!"

While Lynn-Kyle was urging the press to smoke out enemies of peace

from Senator Russo's Council and the SDF-1's leadership command, Earth's

fate was under discussion several billion miles away. Khyron's cruiser, the

lone survivor of the barrier shield chain-reaction explosion, had refolded to

Dolza's command fortress with trans-vids of the catastrophic event. The

Zentraedi Commander in Chief was viewing these now, shock and deep

concern on his ancient stone face. Breetai, on the other hand, wore a

self-satisfied, knowing grin.

Wide-eyed, Dolza ordered a replay of the video-a second look at that

enormous canopy of destruction, that hemispheric rain of death, a hapless

Micronian city atomized, a verdant land utterly denuded.

"These Micronians are more ruthless than I first believed," the Old One

was willing to admit. "They were prepared to sacrifice an entire population

center simply to defeat four small divisions of attacking mecha!" Without

turning to Breetai, he added, "I suppose their determination comes as no

surprise to you, Commander."

Breetai swung around to face Dolza, his grin of self-vindication still in

place. He placed one arm on the table and said simply, "No, sir."

"Commander Azonia's inexperience with these beings has proved to be

an obvious liability. I am therefore sending you back to take charge of our

forces."

Breetai narrowed his eyes at the pronouncement; he'd anticipated this

38

moment for some time. "On one condition," he told Dolza, taking delight in

the Old One's disgruntled reaction. "I must request that the Imperial Fleet

be redeployed and placed under my command."

"Why such a large force?" Dolza demanded.

Breetai gestured to the wall screen. "You have seen what the

Micronians are capable of. They are unpredictable and dangerous. I'm going

to need the extra resources."

"Very well, then. You have them," Dolza said stiffly.

Breetai rose and brought his right fist to his left breast in salute. "Your

lordship."

Dismissed, he started for the door, but Dolza called out to him, "One

more thing, Commander."

Neither one of them turned around: Dolza sat stonefaced in his chair;

Breetai stood straight and unmoving, right hand clenched at his side. He

glanced back over his shoulder.

"I expect you to give me better results this time."

The words dripped with menace, the implication clear.

"You'll not be disappointed with my performance, m'lord."

When Breetai reached the sliding door, Dolza added, "For your sake, I

hope not."

Exedore was waiting for him in the corridor, eager to learn the results

of the brief meeting. Breetai brought his adviser up to date as they returned

to the flagship. The first stage of the journey-one that suitably suggested the

enormous size of the command center-was on foot. The two Zentraedi

walked for several minutes until they reached an egress port, where a

curved platform jutted out into the command center's central chamber. This

was a vast low-g space of water-vapor clouds and what might have appeared

to human eyes as blue skies. An open-aired hover-dish met them at the edge

of the railed flyout and transferred them to a waiting shuttle, one of several

"anchored" in antigrav stasis. In true Zentraedi fashion, these shuttlecraft

resembled nothing more than oddly shaped fish, with two small circular

"mouths," one above the other at the ship's snout, and ventral forehead slits

39

and bilateral gill membranes aft, which were actually the exterior drive

housings. The shuttlecraft conveyed them through the heart of the

chamber-over a veritable city given over to the Robotechnological devices

which maintained the command center-to the main docking area where

ships-of-the-line, cruisers, destroyers, and battlewagons were anchored.

Ultimately they were delivered into the flagship itself. Breetai insisted that

they go directly to the bridge.

The observation bubble which overlooked astrogation and the

command post's circular viewscreen were in ruins, unchanged since Max

Sterling had piloted a VT through them over two months before. But at least

the debris had been carted away and the commander's chair and twin

microphonelike communicators were intact.

"I'll be most eager to hear what our spies have to report when they

return from their mission," Breetai was saying.

"Yes, our emergence from hyperspace will be the signal they've been

waiting for." Exedore continued; "Their observations should prove most

enlightening, my lord. Surely we'll learn to what extent the Micronians have

applied their knowledge of Protoculture. From there it should prove a

simple step to redesign our offensive campaign."

"Let us hope so, Exedore," Breetai said noncommittally. "Now, give the

order to all vessels of the Imperial Fleet to prepare for an immediate fold

operation."

Exedore turned to his task. Klaxons were soon sounding, and

announcements were issued from the PA.

"All vessels move to fold position...Axis pattern adjust to flagship's

attitude...countdown has begun...Hyperspace-fold to commence in exactly

one minute..."

Exedore surveyed the vessels of the Imperial Fleet as the countdown

sounded. He was pleased with Breetai's reawakened confidence. But there

was something...some nagging doubt remained at the edge of his thoughts.

Words of warning from the ancient texts continued to erode his strength. A

secret weapon, a secret weapon...

40

One million warships readied themselves for the fold.

And Exedore wondered: Will they be enough?

On the way to his quarters in Barracks C, Rick heard his name being

paged and walked over to one of the yellow courtesy phones.

Minmei.

"Rick, I'm so glad I got you. I guess you've heard the news that I passed

out. Well, it's true. I'm in the hospital now, but I don't want you to worry

about me. It was just overwork, and now I'm catching up on some

much-needed rest...Oh, Rick, why don't you come over and visit me. It

would be great; I could really use the company. You don't have to bring me

anything-"

He replaced the handset in its cradle, stood there staring at it for a

moment, uncertain, then walked off. Again he heard his name paged, but

this time he ignored it.

He went straight to the computer keyboard in his quarters, sat down, and

began to hammer away at the keys methodically and without pause. He

commanded the printer on-line and tore free the single sheet he'd

completed.

"Dear Mr. and Mrs. Dixon," he read aloud. "As your son's commanding

officer, it is my sad duty to inform you that-"

Ben, hit your afterburners-now!

Rick crumpled the paper in his hands and threw it aside in anger. "I

just can't do it!" he shouted to the monitor.

Beside him on the desk was a photo of Ben and his parents taken years

ago, along with a letter from them that had arrived too late. Rick took hold

of them and stood up.

They were both so proud of him! There's nothing I can say to make this

any easier. It seems like such a waste!

There was a knock at the door; he replaced the items and went to

answer it, a weary stranger in his own room.

At the door it all caught up with him. Palms pressed against the cool

metal for support, he stood there and sobbed, letting his pain wash out

41

uncontrolled. Then suddenly he spun round at the sound of a familiar voice,

a ghostly hallucination his mind wanted desperately to embrace.

Ben was leaning over the computer, as though reading what Rick had

written, one foot crossed in front of the other, his characteristic grin in

place.

Lieutenant, old buddy-hi!...Hey, I know you're feelin' bad, but it

couldn't be helped. It was just my time to go.

Rick turned away from the apparition, complimenting one part of

himself for a nice try. But he wasn't about to let himself off the hook that

easily.

He hid his face and tears from Max as the door slid open. Sterling spied

the photo and letter but said nothing. He reminded Rick that the two of

them were due on deck shortly, and they left the room together a minute

later.

Why wasn't Max equally broken up about Ben's death? Rick asked

himself. What was it his mind had materialized only moments before to

bring him peace or resignation: It couldn't be helped, it was just my time to

go...Was there something to that?

In the elevator Max seemed to read his thoughts.

"I guess it's tough being in command," he told Rick. "I mean, after a

while you start feeling responsible for everybody who's serving under you,

right?"

Rick turned on him. "You don't know how helpless I feel each time we

go into battle. Each time we...lose someone. It's like letting someone slip

from your grasp and fall. You're always wondering if there wasn't something

more you could have done, something you overlooked."

"I wonder if I'll feel that way when I get my first command."

Max's response surprised him; he wasn't going to get the sympathy

he'd expected.

"It's probably coming soon," Max continued. "Command just promoted

me to second lieutenant, and it's barely a month since I was promoted to

third lieutenant."

42

They were ascending the wide staircase that led to the starboard

observation deck overlooking the Daedalus. Rick stopped to look at Max.

"I'm sure you'll make a good commander."

Rick's tone was flat, but he meant it; Max not only had the required

skills, he had the faith and will to carry on-he knew how to stow away the

horrors. Rick thought he'd achieved that after Roy's death. Before the battle

he had felt renewed, but with Ben's death that feeling had faded. In its place

was a hopelessness he could barely bring himself to confront.

A female tower controller's voice rang out over the ob deck speakers:

"Unloading will commence in exactly one minute. Please be sure all cargo

bay doors are open to receive supply consignments from helicopter shuttle

groups. Under flight decks should now be clear and convoy vehicles in place

to continue transfer to warehouse distribution centers..."

The SDF-1 was back at its original landing site in the Pacific, floating

now in Cruiser mode like some technoisland. For days, huge cargo carriers

and choppers had been flying in all make and manner of supplies and

provisions. Trucks and transports lumbered through the streets of Macross

city day and night, confirming the worst fears of the civilians aboard: The

battle fortress was no longer welcome on Earth.

Max pointed out a fancy-looking double-bubbled jet chopper coming

out of pink and lavender sunset clouds to set down on the carrier deck. In

addition to the Robotech insignia, it bore black and gold Earth Council

markings.

"Gotta be somebody important," Max guessed.

"It's from Alaska HQ. I'll bet they brought lift-off orders. We're the only

thing standing between Earth and the Zentraedi, but they're ready to toss us

to the sharks, anyway."

Following Rick's lead, Max put his elbows on the rail and leaned over

for a better look at the chopper.

"You think it's true about us being banished from Earth?"

Rick nodded and straightened up. "They've pulled in the welcome mat.

This ship is going to be our home for a long time to come."

43

"Then this might be the last time we get to see the Earth from the

surface," Max mused. "Guess we'd better enjoy the view."

The sun was setting over planet Earth. Rick stared into the orb's orange

glow; there was a finality to the moment too frightening to contemplate.

She was an attractive woman with pleasant features and a crop of long

brown hair, but she carried herself stiffly and kept her officer's cap pulled

too low on her forehead. Besides, she had brought bad news.

She turned around in the doorway to Gloval's quarters and saluted. "I'll

let headquarters know the orders were received." Two white jacketed,

blue-capped aides, brass buckles of their belts gleaming, registered looks of

distaste and followed her down the corridor.

The captain remained seated at the desk in his spacious quarters. A

Defense Forces flag stood to one side of the desk in an area partitioned off

by a tall bookcase and dominated by a large wall screen. Insignia carpets,

bright throw rugs, and potted plants warmed the room; the leatherbound

volumes and computer consoles lent just the right air of officiality.

Gloval had the orders in hand. He lighted his pipe and leaned in to read

through them. Yes, he said to himself, thinking about the female officer, the

orders have been received. And she could tell those idiot generals back at

headquarters that they were received in silence, completely under protest.

It was unthinkable-expected but unbelievable nonetheless. The Council

didn't have an ounce of pity in their hearts.

Gloval got up and paced, then returned to the desk.

What was he supposed to say to the people of the ship?

Silently, he read: The United Earth Council hereby orders that you

remove the dimensional fortress from any close proximity to the Earth. You

are also ordered to detain until such time as this governing Council sees fit

all civilian refugees onboard. Should you fail to carry out these orders to the

letter, this Council will recommend to the Joint Chiefs of Staff-

Gloval threw the papers aside in disgust. He responded to a knock on

the door and bade Lisa enter. She picked up the note of anger and

44

frustration in his voice and asked if there was anything wrong.

Gloval had his back to her, smoke rising from his pipe like steam from

an ancient locomotive. "Yes, there's something wrong-as wrong as can be."

He gave her a sidelong glance. "But it's just as we feared: We've been

ordered to leave Earth immediately."

Gloval heard her sharp intake of breath, but she rallied quickly and

offered to fix him a drink. She was a trooper all right.

"After the explosion I expected the ship to be exiled. But to force fifty

thousand innocent civilians to become refugees from their own planet

Lisa handed him a Scotch on the rocks; she had fixed herself one as

well.

"I guess we should drink a toast to our last moments on Earth, Lisa."

"Perhaps we should drink a toast to the civilians instead."

It seemed an appropriate gesture; they raised their glasses and took

long pulls of the expensive stuff.

"These orders go into effect as soon as we've finished taking on

supplies. That means we'll be forced to break the news of our banishment to

everyone just moments before we take off."

"Do you want me to announce it?" Lisa volunteered.

"No, I'd better make the broadcast myself."

Lisa left to make the necessary arrangements. Gloval dropped down

into his chair, took a deep breath, and punched in the bridge on his phone.

Claudia informed him that loading was almost complete.

"Now, listen to me carefully, Claudia," he began. Sweat was even now

beading up on his forehead; how would it be when he went out in front of

the entire ship? "I want you to quietly begin preparations to move out."

"To where, Captain?"

"I'll have astrogation furnish you with the coordinates immediately.

You see, we're leaving Earth."

45

CHAPTER FIVE

It is no secret (nor should it come as any surprise) that humankind's

most noble impulses often surface during the most trying of times, that

human spirit rises to the challenge when faced with adversity, that human

strength is born from human failings...Is it any wonder, then, that the SDF-1

crew became a tighter family after the fortress had been exiled than it had

been before?

From the log of Captain (later Admiral) Henry Gloval

In their dark and dank hideout deep within the bowels of the

dimensional fortress, the three Zentraedi spies sat down to their last

Micronian meal; soon they would attempt an escape that would end either

in their deaths or in a successful rendezvous with the ships of the main fleet.

The three-Rico, Konda, and Bron-agreed that their mission would have

been judged superlative had they only been able to leave the fortress to

reconnoiter the Micronian homeworld; but oddly enough, few of the

Micronians had been allowed to disembark. Nevertheless they were pleased

with what they had managed to amass over the course of the past three

months by Micronian reckoning. The operational Battlepod which they had

been lucky enough to obtain was ready for flight, crowded now with the

results of their many forays into Macross City in search of espionage booty,

Micronian artifacts, and, well, souvenirs-two video monitors, a few tables, a

refrigerator, a grand piano they had smuggled home in pieces, disc players

and discs, candy and foodstuffs, and, of course, a wide assortment of

Minmei dolls and paraphernalia.

Bron, as always, had prepared the meal.

"Something called beef stew," he explained.

"Smells terrific;" said Konda, purple hair now below his shoulders.

Metal plates and bent silverware in hand, the three agents, looking

unwashed and shaggy, their clothing soiled and threadbare, were seated on

46

short lengths of cowling and empty cans around a blazing liquid-fueled

camping stove, currently crowned by a large, lidded stew pot. Rico had

switched on the portable CD player; Minmei's "Stagefright" was filling the

little-used storage room with pleasing sounds.

Rico put aside the device that would alert them to the rearrival of the

Zentraedi fleet and said, "Listening to Minmei helps my food go down

better."

"She makes everything better," Konda seconded.

Their spirits were high, ebullient; even Bron, who managed to burn his

hands while removing the stew pot from the flame. As always. He placed a

coffeepot on the stove and sampled a bit of the day's fare.

"What about my cooking, boys-do you think it's improved some?"

"Yeah," said Konda, straight-faced, "it takes me over an hour to get

indigestion now."

Bron's response was equally low-key. "That is better. It used to take

you fifteen minutes."

"When he first started cooking, I used to get sick just thinking about

it!"

Rico broke up, and his comrades joined in. The coffee, meanwhile, was

boiling away, running down the sides of the pot and adding sizzle to the fire.

But Bron grew serious all of a sudden. "To be honest, I'm going to miss

this Micronian food."

The subject broached, other disclosures followed.

"Well, I hate to admit it, but you're right-me, too."

"And that's not all. I've been thinking, I'm gonna miss a whole lotta

things-like happy people, music-"

"Yeah, the music. The thing I'll miss most is hearing Minmei sing every

day."

The corners of Bron's mouth turned down. "I don't even want to think

about that."

"And you remember those females we met that one time?" Konda

poured himself a cup of coffee. "Dancing was fun."

47

"Yeah, that Kim was really something else," said Bron, the enthusiasm

returned. "She had me laughing almost all day!"

"And that girl Sammie," Rico was quick to add, hand to his face

demonstrating a Micronian gesture he'd observed. "When she spotted us

with the Minmei doll...'My heavens!'" He mimicked Sammie's voice.

They shared a good laugh, but again the mood deteriorated.

"Yeah...And you remember what we heard, that Micronian talking

about-about trying to put an end to the war?"

"That frightened me," said Rico. "Without war we'd have no reason to

live!"

"Maybe," Konda answered him. "But I kinda feel like I understand

what the Micronian was talkin' about."

Rico reached out and touched the gravity-wave indicator beside him on

the floor. "It's hard to believe that by tomorrow morning we'll all probably

be back in uniform."

"Yeah..."

"I can hardly wait..."

Claudia Grant also found herself breaking out in a cold sweat as she

relayed the captain's orders to the bridge crew.

"Takeoff?" said Vanessa. "You mean to say all those rumors about

leaving are true?"

"Let's be realistic. We caused an entire city to be wiped out." Kim's

hand was at her mouth, as though trying to stifle the truth.

Sammie looked over from her station innocently. "We weren't

responsible-it was the barrier overload. Blame it on the Zentraedi."

"But we shouldn't have been there," Kim argued.

"The captain was thinking of the civilians, Kim-"

"What's going to happen to them?" Vanessa broke in.

Claudia was on tiptoes, throwing switches to activate the overhead

monitors at her and Lisa's stations. She turned around, a hint of impatience

in her voice. "Since they've already been declared dead and nobody on Earth

48

wants to accept them, I guess they'll stay with us. Now, hurry up with those

final checks; we're running out of time."

Sammie struck a daydreamer's pose at her console. "Lisa's father is a

bigshot in the United Earth Council. Maybe if she sent him a message, he'd

hold up our orders until we figured out-Oh-"

Claudia, hands on hips, was standing over her.

"Don't you think about suggesting that to Lisa, do you understand? As

an officer aboard this ship, she knows her duties. Now, see to it that you

carry out yours!"

Lovers watching the skies that night thought they were viewing an

unannounced solar eclipse. The full moon wore a diamond ring of brilliant

light. But wait...an unannounced solar eclipse? The sun had set over four

hours ago!

Amateur astronomers were similarly puzzled, as were seismologists

and sailors; graphs and gauges were going wild, and Earth's oceans were

rising to dangerous heights...But there were a few scientists scattered across

the planet who recognized the phenomenon; they'd witnessed these

gravity-wave disturbances once before, a little over two years ago. But

where that initial event had brought awe, the present event brought terror.

To three beings on the planet, however, the event was little more than a

signal.

"That's it!" said Bron, deactivating the transceiver. "Let's move out!"

The agents were already inside the Battlepod, strapped in and alert.

They ran the pod ostrichlike across the hold, metal hooves loud against the

floorplates, echoes granting them an illusory sense of company, stopping a

few feet short of the exterior hull. Bursts from the mecha's twin lasers

concentrated blue-white energy on the hull. The steel glowed red, then

white, slagged, and began to fall away; flames leapt forth, and the small hole

enlarged. Within minutes there was an enormous breach, large enough to

accommodate the pod's passage into the cool Pacific night.

Foot-retros eased the pod into a controlled descent; it plunged several

49

hundred feet into the ocean, the thrusters carrying it scarcely half a mile

from the fortress to a coral outcropping.

Rico raised the mecha to its feet and initiated a series of booster

commands. Thruster flame shot forth from the cockpit sphere as it

disengaged from its bipedally designed undercarriage. The three micronized

agents were airborne and on their way home.

Had there been a little less preflight commotion aboard the

dimensional fortress, perhaps some tech or sentry would have noticed the

hole that the agents burned in the hull; but as it was, ship personnel had

just enough time to complete their assigned duties let alone check up on

someone else's station. And the bridge was by no means exempt from this

frantic pace, especially when radar informed them of interspacial

disturbances emanating from a region beyond the dark side of the moon.

Lisa was already on the bridge and the captain was just making his

crouched entry when the reports began to pour in.

"...We're not sure, but it appears to be the fallout from a massive

number of hyperspace-fold operations," Gloval heard someone from radar

report.

"Gravity-wave disturbance from the moon," said Vanessa, slender

fingers flying over the keyboard to bring schematics to the threat board.

Gloval was standing over her, anxious. "Are they certain it is a fold?"

"It's more severe than that, sir," she told him. "It appears to be multiple

folds!"

"Can you estimate the number?"

"Trying..."

"Wait!" said Sammie, and all eyes turned to her. "Maybe they've come

in peace this time." Blank stares of disbelief grounded her hopes. "Right,"

she said, swinging around to her console, "probably not."

That same male voice from radar announced an unidentified object

flying directly over the ship.

Gloval turned to Lisa. "Do we have any fighters on patrol?"

"Negative, sir."

50

"Radar again, Captain. Our monitors show a large alien vessel moving

toward Earth from lunar space. It appears to be on a collision or rendezvous

course with the object we've been tracking."

Gloval studied the schematic and ordered Lisa to move all Veritech

groups to condition yellow at once.

"Picking up a second wave of gravity disturbance," said Vanessa. She

gasped as new readouts filled the screen. "I calculate the number of enemy

ships to be in excess of...one million!"

Gloval narrowed his eyes and looked over at Lisa, as if to say: Yes, your

reports to the Council are now verified. Gloval wanted to see those generals

live to eat their words.

"I don't think it matters how many ships the enemy brings in," said

Claudia confidently.

"But a million of them..." said Sammie.

"We'll never be able to outmaneuver them," added Kim.

But Claudia remained undaunted. "We beat them before, and we'll beat

them again."

Gloval's thoughts were still focused on the Council. He was certain they

were monitoring this latest move by the Zentraedi, and yet there was no

word from them.

"Then we're completely isolated," he told the crew.

"Why?" Sammie wanted to know.

The time had come to let them know the truth. Gloval realized that his

life for the next twenty-four hours would be filled with many such moments.

And yet he couldn't help but ask himself what would happen if he did

nothing to counteract the present threat. Had the Zentraedi been pushed

beyond their limit? Were they ready to hold the Earth hostage? What did

they want, and what would the fools who governed the Council do if Gloval

refused to acquiesce to either group's demands?

But Henry Gloval was simply not built that way.

"I guess you might as well know," he began. "The Council has decided

that the best way to protect the planet is to use the dimensional fortress as a

51

decoy. We have been ordered to draw the aliens away." He let that much

sink in while he moved to the command chair and sat down; then he added:

"This ship and its passengers are considered expendable."

Although Mayor Tommy Luan had at one time expressed concern that

Macross had little in the way of newsworthy stories, there was now enough

daily news to run morning and evening editions. There wasn't a man,

woman, or child in the city who hadn't heard rumors to the effect that the

Ontario Quadrant subcommand had withdrawn its offer. Then there were

the further exploits of Minmei-whew! had that idea ever exploded far

beyond his plans!-and, lately, those of her cousin and costar, Lynn-Kyle-one

to keep a close eye on for several reasons. And of course the disagreements,

quarrels, and fights two months of imposed confinement and stress had

unleashed. And tonight Captain Gloval himself was planning to address the

entire ship, as rare an event as had occurred thus far.

Gloval and Lisa had left the remaining preflight preparations to

Claudia and the crew, exiting the bridge only minutes after the Zentraedi

had made their reappearance on the dark side of the moon. Gloval could

simply have raised the ship and put off the address until they were in deep

space, but he wanted it behind him. He had no idea what the enemy's next

move was going to be, and he planned to ask the residents of Macross for

their cooperation and support no matter what course of action he might be

forced to take.

They had arrived at the Macross Broadcasting System studios only

moments ago, interrupting a live special starring Minmei and Lynn-Kyle.

The two cousins, along with Lisa Hayes, stood off to one side of the

center-stage podium just now. There were three cameras trained on Gloval;

the lights were too bright and way too hot. He was already perspiring under

his blue jacket and white cap. He had opted against using the prompter or

cue cards, for effect as well as because of failing eyesight. One of the

engineers leading the quietly mouthed countdown threw him a ready sign,

and he began:

52

"This is Captain Gloval speaking, with a very important announcement

that will affect the lives of everyone aboard this ship. Since our return to

Earth, as some of you may already know, I have made numerous appeals to

both the United Earth Defense Council and the governing bodies of several

separatist states for permission to allow you to disembark and resettle

wherever you might choose. I'm certain that you are all aware by now of my

feelings regarding your continued presence aboard the fortress. Be that as it

may, time and again my appeals have been turned down, for reasons that

must remain undisclosed for the present. However, I always felt that

progress was being made on those requests, until in light of recent events I

have been forced to entertain second thoughts about the Council's position."

Gloval was silent a moment; his throat felt parched, and he began to

wonder whether the in-close cameras were picking up the slight tremor of

his hands. But he dared not risk looking at himself in the monitors. Rather,

he cleared the quaver in his voice and continued.

"My friends and fellow shipmates, I have some very bad news to report

to you. I received word just a while ago that this ship and all its passengers

have been ordered to leave the Earth immediately."

Gloval heard the cameramen and grips gasp; he imagined a collective

gasp rising up from the entire city, strong enough to register on the air

supply systems in engineering.

Now for the most difficult stretch...

"If we do not evacuate the Earth, we've been warned that we risk attack

by elements of our own Defense Forces. I know that you must find this

unthinkable, but it is most unfortunately true. You cannot have failed to

notice that for the past few days we have been taking on a wide assortment

of supplies and provisions. I know it is of minor consolation, but I anticipate

that we have enough in stores to undertake the journey ahead. And just

where is that? You must be asking yourselves. Well, I will tell you: That

journey will be to victory!"

Without an audience, Gloval had no idea how it went over, so he risked

a quick look at Lisa, who flashed a smile and thumbs up. But were the

53

civilians buying it? Did they still have confidence in his ability to lead them

to victory?

Those lights seemed even hotter now; he felt dizzy from strain but

pressed on.

"I desperately need all of your cooperation in this moment of terrible

responsibility. We must all work for the day when Earth will accept us back.

Until then, we will survive as best we can...I give you my most humble

apologies..."

No, this can't be happening! he shouted to himself.

But it was: He was sobbing, still on camera and sobbing.

And suddenly Minmei was beside him, her hand on his shoulder. She

picked up the mike from the podium and began to speak, the cameras

tracking mercifully away from Gloval to close on her.

"Listen, everyone, the captain really needs our support right now. Look,

I don't understand politics-after what Captain Gloval has told us, I'm not

sure I want to-but I do know that the only way we'll survive this is to pull

together.

"We've been on this ship for a long time, and I don't know about you,

but I think of the SDF-1 as my home now. Don't forget, we have almost

everything here that we could ever have on Earth-our own city and all the

things that go along with it. We've all been through quite a bit, but look at

how strong we've become because of it. I have more friends here than I ever

did on Earth. You've been like a big family to me.

"Someday we'll return to our real home-we'll never give up hope. But

for now, I'm proud to be a citizen of Macross City and this ship!

"No matter where we go in space or how long it takes, our hearts will

always be tied to the Earth. So to help all of us express our feelings at this

moment, I'd like to perform a song for you and dedicate it to the Earth we

love so dearly..."

And Minmei actually broke into song; white dress swirling, blue eyes

flashing, she broke into song. And more than half of Macross joined her.

She had touched something. Her words had given voice to some

54

unarticulated feeling the residents of Macross shared. Throughout the city,

people shook hands and began to view themselves as a new nation, a new

experiment in human social evolution. It was true that many of them had

family out there on Earth, but hadn't most of them come to Macross Island

in the first place to escape most of what passed for world events? Did

anyone really want to be governed by such a heartless group of puppet

masters as the United Earth Defense Council?

So they celebrated a bittersweet victory. They shelved their dreams for

the last time, and they took a long look around their city, as if for the first

time. And many of them crowded to the ports and lights in the hull as the

fortress lifted off, Earth already a memory, the unknown ahead.

55

CHAPTER SIX

They [the Zentraedi troops] reacted like adolescents released from the

behavioral constraints of their guardians. Suddenly there were worlds of

pleasure and pure potential awaiting them-worlds that they'd been denied

access to but that were now theirs for the asking, if not the taking...One

doesn't have to look far into the history of our own race to find examples of

the same impulses at work. The so-called counterculture of late-1960s

America comes immediately to mind, especially with regard to the central

place given music and pleasure, and arising as it did from a decidedly

antiwar movement.

Zeitgeist,

Alien Psychology

"Talk about your 'charms to soothe the savage beast' [sic]...She

had enough talent-enough magic-to bowl over an entire empire! So

why not call it as it was?-a Minmei cult!"

Remarks attributed to Vance Hasslewood,

Lynn-Minmei's agent

The million vessels of the Imperial Fleet formed up on Commander

Breetai's flagship, positioning themselves by rank in the staging area-a

multi-rowed column of Zentraedi firepower that stretched for thousands of

miles into Luna's dark-side space.

In what was left of the command post bowl, Breetai stood tall and

proud, his dwarfish adviser by his side, equally confident for the first time

in months. The three returned agents were being regenerated in the sizing

chamber, and here was Commander Azonia's troubled face in the

projecbeam field. Breetai had already informed her of his reinstatement.

Exedore moved to the communicator to check on regeneration status while

Azonia offered her reply.

"So I hear," she began. "You've assembled quite a fleet to deal with one

56

small Robotech ship."

Breetai laughed at her sarcasm, gleaming faceplate riding the wrinkles

of his grin. "You noticed...that 'small Robotech ship,' as you call it, has

caused quite a bit of trouble. Even you, Commander, were beaten and

humiliated."

"My defeat was humiliating only in that Khyron was responsible for it."

"A good commander keeps his troops in line," Breetai started to say.

But Exedore interrupted him deferentially.

"Uh, sir, the sizing chamber...Our agents are ready to deliver their

report."

Breetai regarded him briefly, then turned back to Azonia's projecbeam

image. "I'll give you your assignment later," he said dismissively.

"But wait, I haven't given you my report yet! Miriya Parino has-"

"That will be all," he told her, arms folded across his chest. "More

pressing matters require my attention."

"Breetai-" she yelled as the image faded.

"Ah, well done, my lord!" Exedore congratulated him. He then

motioned to the corridor. "I believe they're waiting for us."

"This report may turn the tide in our favor," said Breetai as they left the

command post.

Breetai had no reason to doubt that this would be the case. He had no

inkling then of the bizarre reversals that were to come not only from his

own agents but from another whose micronized presence onboard the

SDF-1 was to come as a complete surprise.

Rico, Konda, and Bron, clothed once again in the red uniforms of their

rank, were brought to Breetai's personal conference chamber, a sparsely

furnished circular room dominated by an enormous exterior bay, currently

filled with a view of the Earth and its cratered moon. Central to it was a

round table surrounded with comfortable high-backed lounging chairs. The

piled artifacts the agents had brought back with them made for a most

curious centerpiece.

Breetai reached out and pulled an item loose from the jumble. He

57

regarded it quizzically, its three-legged form misleadingly heavy in his open

hand.

"The Micronians call that a 'piano,' m'lord," Rico explained.

"'Piano,"' Breetai repeated. "What function does it serve?"

Rico instructed him to press down on the keyboard of small white teeth.

Breetai did so, displeased and strangely disturbed with the noise it emitted.

He placed the thing out of reach on the table. Exedore studied it while

Breetai hastily examined several other objects.

"Is it alive? Some sort of Protoculture-animated Robotech device?"

Exedore wondered aloud.

"No," Rico continued. "It makes music. Music is when different sounds

are put together for entertainment. It's really quite interesting when you get

used to it. We came to enjoy it very-"

"Explain 'entertainment,'" Breetai demanded.

Rico thought for a moment. "Uhh...diversion, m'lord. This, for

example." He selected a small, monitorlike device from the pile and held it

up for Breetai's scrutiny. "These seem to provide electronic images in much

the same fashion as our own vid-scanners. But several of these can be found

in each Micronian quarters for the purpose of observing and listening to

'entertainment.'"

Exedore made a thoughtful sound. "Undoubtedly the means by which

they familiarize themselves with battle plans and such. Continue," he told

Rico.

But all three agents started to talk at once, excitedly, eager to report

their findings. A little too eager; Exedore began to worry.

"One at a time!" Breetai said, silencing them. "Don't force me to repeat

the threats of our last debriefing."

Rico stood up. "What we brought back represents only a small part of

the Micronian society and its customs," he calmly began. "You see, they live

a much different life than we do-"

"They're proficient at making repairs within their ship," Konda

interrupted, on his feet now and gesturing nonstop. "Indeed, they rebuilt an

58

entire population center on board using only salvaged materials. They adapt

quickly to unfamiliar environments-"

"And," Bron blurted out, unable to contain his enthusiasm, "there are

many Micronians besides soldiers on board the ship. In fact, they join

together many times during the day and move about freely-"

"Males and females are together!" Rico shouted.

Breetai and Exedore, who had been trying to follow these rapid

deliveries like spectators at a high-speed tennis match, suddenly turned to

each other in near panic.

"Males and females together," Rico was repeating to utterances of

affirmation from the others.

"As a matter of fact, it doesn't seem to be as bad as we thought," Konda

started.

"We forced ourselves to adapt to the presence of females all around us

and were unable to discover any negative side effects," Bron finished.

Already Breetai had heard more than enough, but it went on like this

for several more hours before he silenced them again, as confused as he was

nauseated by their reports. If the results of the penetration operation had

demonstrated anything, it was that further contact with the Micronians

could not be permitted. It was obvious that his three agents had been

brainwashed by some Micronian secret weapon, and to make matters worse,

Exedore was now suggesting that he be allowed to investigate Micronian

society firsthand!

Dismissed, the three agents later regrouped in secret at Konda's

insistence.

"I kept some Micronian artifacts in my pocket," Konda was confessing

to his comrades now. "Did you show them everything you had?"

"No, I held out," Bron admitted. Ditto for Rico.

"Let's see what we've got," Konda said, pulling things from the deep

pockets of his red jacket.

Six hands began piling souvenirs on the table, a veritable dollhouse

59

garage-sale assortment of miniatures: a double-burner stove, a small

refrigerator, a circular end table, several video monitors, a chest of drawers,

a space heater, a commode, a/v discs, CD players, a teddy bear, a set of golf

clubs, a guitar.

Konda said, "I'd rather have these than the cruiser commands we were

promised."

"I brought along two of Minmei's voice reproductions," said Rico,

Minmei's first album edged between his thumb and forefinger.

Bron leaned in to take a look. "How about trading me one of those for

something, eh?"

"What piece do you plan to trade?" said Rico, a profiteer's glint in his

one good eye.

"I've got a Minmei doll..."

"Deal!" Rico answered.

Bron squinted at the album photo of a veiled Minmei.

"You know, the other guys would sure be impressed if they could see

this stuff."

Konda was nodding his head. "Yeah, we could get away with showing

just a select few, don't you think?"

Within an hour there were eleven soldiers gathered around the table in

what had become the agent's clubhouse. Word had spread quickly through

the flagship. There wasn't a soldier aboard who hadn't expressed some

interest in hearing about the peculiarities of Micronian life, and now that

there were, well, artifacts-actual objects to handle, look at, and listen

to-Rico, Bron, and Konda couldn't have kept them away if they tried. Of the

eleven uniformed troops, three were already in dereliction of duty.

The agents passed the artifacts around, pleased to be at center stage to

be sure but sincere in their desire to share their experience and adventures

aboard the Robotech ship with their comrades. Candies were sampled,

objects examined, nuances of Micronian culture explained. But it was soon

obvious which artifact among the lot was the hottest property.

"'To be in love,'" sang the doll as it took tiny steps along the tabletop,

60

electronically synthesized voice full of pleasant vibrato, arms in motion,

black hair buns like mouse ears.

The soldiers were disturbed, then astounded, but ultimately captivated.

"It looks like a Micronian, but what are those noises?"

One of them, a massive, mop-topped, sanguine-faced brute betraying

an uncharacteristic concern, squatted down, crossed eyes level with the

tabletop, when the doll tipped over and ceased its song.

"Uh, did I hurt it?"

Konda set the doll back on its feet. "No, dummy. You can't hurt it. It's

called a Minmei doll, and that 'noise' is called singing."

"You call that a 'Minmei'?" someone said. "It's incredible-I've never

heard anything like it."

"Amazing," said another.

"We should let some of the others hear this."

"Quiet! I can't hear the Minmei when you're talking."

For the remainder of the Zentraedi day, the doll repeated its two-song

repertoire over and over again. More and more soldiers stopped by the

clubhouse; rap codes and secret handshakes were exchanged, and Minmei's

name was being whispered like some password throughout the ships of the

Imperial Fleet.

While the "Minmei" continued to gather a secret following among the

troops of Breetai's armada, the inspiration for that doll was attending a

party at the plush Hotel Centinel, Macross City's best, only a stone's throw

from the new skyway overpass. The dimensional fortress had left the Earth,

and while most of the city's residents were making the painfully difficult

readjustment to life in space, Macross's who's-who were drowning their

sorrows in tabletop fountains of recently acquired sparkling spring water

and vintage champagne. But this was no sour-grapes affair; it was an all-out

bash held in celebration of the premiere of SDF Pictures' first release, Little

White Dragon, starring Lynn-Minmei an c Lynn-Kyle.

The film's financial backers were there, some of the crew, engineers

61

from EVE, the mayor and his crowd selected extras, and assorted

hangers-on. Kyle, too, little surly tonight but looking dashing in a lavender

suit crimson shirt, and bow tie. But the female lead was conspicuously

absent from the indoor merriment, the table; laden with gourmet foodstuffs,

the wine and spirits. She had absented herself to the balcony for a breather;

showbiz was getting to her.

There was a down side to it, she decided. The real thrill was in the

performing, the real reward in the applause. But these parties weren't fun at

all; they were business, a place for the sycophants and profiteers to gather.

This was where they performed, and money was their applause.

Minmei wasn't feeling jaded; it was too soon for that. But she couldn't

help but question some of the new directions she was taking, the new

directions Macross seemed to be taking. She thought back to the early days,

the communal spirit that had rebuilt the city, the family ties that had

developed, the sense of equality that had reigned. But things were changing

all of a sudden, not only physically-what with skyway ramps, exclusive

hotels, and gourmet foods-but spiritually. It seemed as though more than a

few people had merely given lip service to the idea of SDF-1 "citizenry"; now

that existence aboard the fortress was an open-ended reality, those same

hypocrites were seeking to claim for themselves the best this place had to

offer. A new class system was beginning to form itself, and the last place

Minmei wanted to find herself was among a reborn aristocracy. It was so

important to stay in touch with one's past, to remember the people, who

helped you find your place-

"Hey, doll, what's going on?"

Minmei turned from the view to face the sender of that slurred

intrusion. It was Vance Hasslewood, her business manager, at least two

drinks past his limit.

"You're the star of this party," he said, toasting her with the drink he

carried. "You should be inside having fun. What's the problem?"

"Looks to me like you've been celebrating enough for both of us." She

didn't bother to conceal her disapproval, but Vance was too caught up in

62

party momentum to catch it. He loosened his tie coyly, eyes closed behind

the aviator specs.

"Well, I'll admit that I'm enjoying myself a bit...but I've got one heck of

a reason. After the movie premieres you'll be a star. We're talking major

talent, big, big bucks. You'll need two more hands just to haul the money

home."

He couldn't have been happier.

"I'm already a star, Vance," Minmei reminded him. "What else can you

offer me?"

Vance laughed and put his arm around her. "Hey, it's payday, kid. You

want something, I'll get it for you."

"I need a front-row seat for the premiere; it's for someone I want to

invite."

Vance made a troubled gesture. "Front-row seat? Now? Those seats

were filled weeks ago...I don't know Minmei."

She looked directly at him. "Vance. Just do it, okay?"

"All right," he said at last. "I'll see what I can do."

Minmei thanked him, and he wandered off, glass in hand. Smiling

suddenly, she leaned her elbows on the balcony rail.

"I wish I could be there to see the expression on Rick's face when I tell

him."

Jan Morris was no stranger to people who talked to themselves-she'd

talked to herself for years now-but given her present condition it was

unlikely that she even heard Minmei's solitary remark. Cocktail glass

precariously pinched between her fingers, the former star (and someday

mystic) was winding her way toward the railing. Two years in space,

self-pity, and drink had taken their toll; she was aged beyond her years, a

bleached-blond caricature in long white gloves and strapless gown.

"Minmei, I've been looking all over for you. How are you, dahling?

Wonderful party! Having a good-oops!"

Minmei deftly avoided the launched cordial; thick liqueur red as Jan's

gown splashed against the retaining wall beside her.

63

"Excuse me. How clumsy, I could just die!" Jan was all false apologies.

"Lucky I didn't get any on your dress, dahling. And it's such a quaint little

dress, isn't it? So full of charm; it's really lovely, dear. Did you make it

yourself ?"

I'll have you know that this lime-green silk cape alone costs more

than-Minmei wanted to say. Fortunately, though, she didn't have to say

anything, because Jan was already slaloming her way back inside. An older

man had appeared and expressed an interest in meeting "the young star of

the film," and Jan was now tugging him away from the balcony doors.

"She's not so terribly interesting," Minmei heard her tell him. "Just a

child, really. Now, why don't we go sit down somewhere and I'll read your

palm."

Minmei was thinking about hiring a bodyguard when Kyle called to

her.

"Your manager told me to tell you it's seat A-5. They'll hold the ticket at

the box office."

Minmei clasped her hands together under, her chin. "Great, Kyle!

Thanks."

"Thank Vance," he told her, and led her inside. He had that protective

look on his face she'd come to recognize. He placed his hands on her

shoulders.

"You've got a big day tomorrow. Why don't you call it a night and I'll

walk you back to your room."

"Deal," she answered. "I need to make a call, anyway."

Big day or no big day, there was to be no sleep for her that night. She

left a message for Rick at the officers' barracks, but he never called back.

The large suite SDF Pictures had supplied only served to return her to that

evening's earlier train of thought. At Vance's insistence she joined him in

the rooftop lounge for a nightcap, but even that didn't help. She yearned for

her blue and yellow room above the White Dragon, her few possessions, her

treasured memories.

64

CHAPTER SEVEN

Eventually,

Little White Dragon

would find a larger audience, a less

involved one to be sure, and critical reaction was mixed, to say the least.

More than one reviewer dismissed it as "home movies for the space set";

another called it "low-art therapy...propagandist fantasy...a misdirected

death-wish fable." But several praised it unconditionally as "a prescient

warning from the collective unconscious."

History of the First Robotech War, vol. LXXXII

Miriya Parino, late of the Quadrono Battalion and now an

unauthorized micronized operative inside the dimensional fortress,

marched briskly down Macross Boulevard. The somewhat Teutonic outfit

she had pilfered to replace the sackcloth garment she'd arrived in was well

suited to her traffic-stopping martial stride, although she didn't understand

what all the stares were about. Perhaps, she wondered, the uniform was

inappropriate. If she could have seen herself as passersby saw her-radiant

green hair, tight-fitting lavender vest, knickers, white stockings, and

high-heeled "Mary Janes" she would have understood at once.

It had not been an easy week. She had been forced to steal food and

moments of rest when opportunities presented themselves. Once or twice

she was tempted to accept assistance offered at least a dozen times daily by

Micronian males-but thought better of it. Early on she had spotted Breetai's

three agents among a crowd gathered in front of a vid-scanner listening to

some long haired male talk of peace and ending the war! But she saw no

reason to make contact with the three and hadn't seen them since.

Peace...Micronian ways were baffling, unthinkable. But she was

enjoying the challenge. Unfortunately though, she had yet to find the pilot

who had bested her in battle, despite the many soldiers she passed in the

streets.

Ahead of her now was yet another gathering of Micronians, the largest

65

she'd encountered thus far, and certainly the loudest. Cheering groups of

males and female: were standing twenty deep in front of a strange-looking

building, a backlit message display of some sort jutting out above the entry.

"Little...White...Dragon," Miriya read aloud, trying out the feel of the

words. She knew that the first meant "small" and that the second referred to

the absence of color, but she was unfamiliar with the final word.

There was a line of long vehicles with tinted observation ports

discharging strangely uniformed males and females in front of the building.

The people in the crowd were craning their necks and rising on their toes to

catch a brief glimpse of these heroes as they ascended the entry steps,

waving and smiling. Adulation was heaped on two in particular: a small

dark-haired female someone in the crowd called "Min-mei" and an equally

dark-haired male-the same who had been spouting peace from the

vid-scanner! They were ceremoniously ushered into the building without

having to show the passes required by the ordinary citizenry of the

population center.

Miriya had little doubt that her quarry was inside, about to be honored

for defeating her in battle. It might have even been that long-haired male.

Why else would so many attend? She had no pass, but she did have a trick

up the sleeve of that white blouse with the ruffled collar. She had noticed

that certain facial contortions from a Micronian female could open many a

locked door. So giving her thong-laced vest a downward tug, she

approached the guard at the gate who was accepting the passes and flashed

him her most brilliant smile...

Spotlighted center stage inside the Fortress Theater, where an SRO

crowd filled the lobby and upper gallery tiers, stood the president of SDF

Pictures, Alberto Salazar (chairman of the board of Macross Insurance

Company in his spare time), tall and well built, with a thick walrus

mustache and blue-tinted triangular shades.

...Once again I want to thank you all for your support in the making of

this film-the first but certainly not the last filmed entirely onboard the ship.

66

And now, with out further ado, I'd like to introduce the stars of the film,

Minmei and Lynn-Kyle!"

Salazar made an expansive gesture to the wings, where a second

spotlight found the leading couple. They walked arm in arm, acknowledging

the applause with a wave or two. Salazar led Minmei to the microphone

stand.

"Tell us what it was like to star in your first movie."

"It was thrilling, Mr. Salazar. I just hope the audience enjoys my

performance."

The crowd went wild, and Salazar grinned.

"I'd say you already have your answer. Sounds to me like the people of

Macross love everything you do. And how about you, Kyle? Have you got

something to say to all your fans?"

"I just want to thank everyone involved in the production," he began

rather shyly. "Especially Minmei, for all the support she's given me. I'm a

newcomer to this ship, but I'm pleased to discover how easy it is to make

friends here. I'm hoping we can continue to turn out movies to entertain

you during our time together. This was a great experience, and I thank you

for it."

While Kyle was speaking, Minmei stole a glance at the front row,

searching for Rick. She found the mayor, Aunt Lena, and Uncle Max, but

A-5 was vacant. He didn't even call for his ticket, she said to herself.

But Rick was there all right, pressed shoulder to shoulder with the rest

of the standing-room-only crowd in the rear of the theater. He had received

the message that Minmei had called but not the part about the ticket

reserved for him. There had been no response when he phoned her at the

Centinel; she was in fact with Vance Hasslewood at the time, sipping at a

kahlua and cream on the hotel roof, thinking about Rick. He was in good

spirits nevertheless, happy to be there even when he heard someone nearby

say, "I hear that Lynn and Minmei are dating. It wouldn't surprise me if

they get married!"

Minmei was singing now, the crowd swaying to her song, and Rick

67

began to move with them, caught up in the moment. What is this power she

has? he asked himself.

Standing stiffly and in obvious discomfort a few feet away, Miriya

Parino asked herself the same thing.

In a review written by two science fiction writers who had been

covering the SDF- 1 launch for Rolling Stone on the day of the spacefold,

Little White Dragon was billed as "a kung fu fable"; it was to previous

martial arts flicks what Apocalypse Now was to war pictures. No one would

deny that it was an ambitious undertaking from the start, especially for a

fledgling company in a three-cinema, fifty-thousand-plus market with little

hope for a general release. But it more than fulfilled the expectations of its

creators, in much the same way that the Miss Macross pageant had.

Financial rewards aside, the film was conceived of as an effort to keep

morale high onboard the ship; shot entirely inside the SDF-1 (thanks to the

EVE engineers), it created jobs and indirectly helped to perfect some of the

"normalizing" techniques used in Macross City.

Set in some undisclosed era of Asian prehistory, the film opens on the

barren, evil-looking island of Natoma, where a wizard named Kirc is briefly

introduced. The young magician is in possession of a strangely configured

seagoing vessel, the bow of which has been fashioned to resemble a dragon's

head and neck, the sterna barbed tail. Folded wings form the ship's bulwark

and gunwales. It is soon apparent that Kirc is not the rightful owner; and

while an army of blood-crazed giants-massive sanguine-fleshed hairless

mutants dressed in harem pants, cummerbunds, and vests-move in to

repossess the ship, he utters a spell which results in its dematerialization.

Cut to a second island in more familiar waters, tropical and peaceful.

Some of the inhabitants become familiar, including the island's resident Zen

master and a beautiful girl named Zu-li (played by Minmei, her long hair

lightened and braided). Zu-li is a visitor to the island, but after scarcely a

month there she is known by one and all. Her quiet songs fill the night air,

lulling the inhabitants to sleep and bringing a sense of peace and harmony

68

to everything they touch. Her eventual leave-taking, however, is delayed

when a mysterious mist blows in and envelopes the island. Out of this

enters the dragon ship.

Most of the islanders are frightened by its appearance, but a band of

adventurous men and women led by the Zen master board the ship and

bring it in. Zu-li and a handsome kung fu student named

Taiki-Lynn-Kyle-(a peaceful young man forced by circumstance to fight to

save the people he loves) are among the master's following. On closer

inspection the vessel is even more marvelous than its stylized exterior

suggests, almost uncannily lifelike and filled with curious devices the

islanders strive to comprehend.

Time goes by, and on the trail of the ship come the evil giants seen

earlier. Seemingly recognizing the enemy at hand, the ship defends itself

with an outpouring of fiery dragon's breath that destroys most of the

attackers. Terrified by these developments, the chief orders the Zen master

and his followers from the island. They set sail aboard the ship and are

chased around the world by the giants in a series of perilous and exciting

episodes, culminating in their attempt to return to their homeland. Zu-li,

meanwhile, has discovered the true power of her voice: She learns to

produce a tone that weakens the giants while at the same time

strengthening Taiki's martial arts skills. He vanquishes enemies the dragon

ship encounters during its long journey home-blue-uniformed,

scimitar-wielding assailants and armored warriors with bows and

arrows-and lays waste to the giants with kung fu energy bolts and soaring

leaps.

In the thrilling climax Zu-li is captured by the enemy and rescued by

Taiki, and the island, which has refused to allow the journeyers home, is

devastated by the giants.

Well before the credits ran, Lisa Hayes left her seat and exited the

theater. That last Technicolor kiss had been too much for her to take. When

she looked at Lynn-Kyle, she saw Karl Riber; it was Karl's voice she heard

when Kyle spoke, Karl's sentiments about war and death...Since that first

69

day in the White Dragon she had been drawn to him, moth to flame. He was

antiestablishment, antimilitary, antieverything her life had become, and yet

she couldn't put him from her mind. She could close her eyes and remember

every detail of his face, every word she had heard him tell the reporters

about his hopes for peace when all they were interested in was Minmei's

health; she could vividly recall standing next to him at the MBS studio the

night Captain Gloval addressed the ship; and now there he was, ten times

larger than life on the silver screen. Another giant in her life. And seemingly

in love with Minmei. Minmei again. What magic did she possess? First Rick,

now Kyle. It sometimes felt as if the entire ship was haunted by her

presence, much as it was haunted by her songs.

Lisa could hear applause coming from inside the theater. Soon the

lobby was going to be jammed, and she didn't want to hear everyone talking

about how wonderful she was, how beautiful. She stopped for a moment to

glance at the film's colorful glass-encased poster and was about to move off,

when all at once someone grabbed her behind! Not a grab, actually, more

like a shove! She'd had enough of that waiting on line to get in and was

certainly in no mood for it now. Enraged, she spun around, white

trenchcoat flying, high red boots and fists ready, just like in the movies...

And found Rick Hunter groveling on the lobby floor in front of her,

apologizing for his clumsiness.

"Commander!" he said, full of surprise. "I am sorry. I must have

tripped or something...

Lisa folded her arms across her chest. "And I just happened to be

within reach, is that it?"

Rick's eyes widened. "Well, what do you think? I can't imagine another

reason why anyone would want to, er, grab you."

"That's tellin' her, pal," said someone in the crowd that was gathering

around them.

"I don't know, Hunter, first I find you prowling around in a lingerie

shop and now you're molesting women on the street..."

"Let him have it, sister," someone else added.

70

"Shove her again, pal!"

Lisa turned an angry face to their audience and grabbed Rick by the

arm. "Come on, Lieutenant, we'd better continue this discussion elsewhere."

That brought out even more comments and a few catcalls, but Lisa

ignored them. She practically dragged Rick down the wide staircase,

complaining all the while. "Of all the nerve, intruding on a private

conversation like that, how embarrassing, those imbeciles." Appropriately

enough, Lisa didn't come to a halt until she had both of them positioned

inside one of the black and yellow diagonally striped danger zones. Then she

turned on him again. "Now, what in the world were you up to back there?

"I was just coming out of the movie," Rick said innocently.

"Why didn't you stay to see the ending?"

The blare of warning sirens silenced Rick's reply; he and Lisa looked

around. People were already running for shelter, and Sammie's voice was on

the PA:

"Attention: Prepare for modular transformation. Please move to the

nearest shelter immediately. Avoid the marked danger zones and move to

the nearest shelter immediately!"

"A modular transformation?!" Rick said in disbelief.

"Something's wrong. We're supposed to be having a drill. That's why

Sammie's on the com."

"A sneak attack?"

Lisa shook her head. "Impossible. Even so, we'd have more advance

warning than this."

"We better get to a shelter, anyway." Rick took her arm, but she shook

him off.

"Shelter? What's the matter with you? We've got to get back to the base

as soon as-"

The street had begun to vibrate and shake. Lisa and Rick exchanged

worried glances and hesitantly looked down. Their colorfully striped section

of sidewalk was elevating rapidly. They held on to each other as they were

carried high above the city streets. Down below people raced for cover. Cars

71

pulled over, drivers and passengers leapt out. The scene in front of the

Fortress Theater bordered on pandemonium. Sirens continued to blare and

shriek.

The telescoping shaft came to an abrupt stop; then it lurched into

upward motion again, but not before Rick and Lisa had managed to leap off.

They were far above the third tier of Macross now, beyond EVE's blue sky

illusion in the uppermost regions of the dimensional fortress-an area of

massive cooling ducts, recyling conduits, transformational servogenerators,

and miles of thick cabling. But Rick thought he knew a way out. He led a

skeptical Lisa through a maze of human-size corridors; "portholes" every

few feet afforded glimpses of junction boxes and circuit boards inside the

walls.

"I think we're near the end," Rick said confidently. "All we do is bear

right here."

"You don't say."

"Just follow me. I'll get you out of here. Nothing to it."

A minute later, they were in a cul-de-sac and Rick was scratching his

head.

"Nothing to it," Lisa mocked him.

"Must've taken a wrong turn back there."

From somewhere close by came the click! click! and hum of activating

machinery. There was something about that wall in front of them...that

seemed to be moving forward! They turned and started to run, only to find

their exit blocked by a descending hatch. They stood rooted to the floor

while one section of wall continued to advance; then, blessedly, it

shuddered to a stop.

Lisa breathed a sigh of relief and regarded the thirty-foot-high metal

walls of their prison. She dropped her shoulder bag and turned to Rick,

exasperated.

"Hunter, aren't you the one who was lost somewhere in this ship for

two weeks?"

"Look, how was I supposed to know? We had no choice! Anyway, none

72

of this would have happened if you had gone with me to a shelter like I told

you in the first place!"

"That's no way to be talking to a superior officer!"

"What, now you're going to pull rank on me?"

Rick made a dismissive gesture and slumped down sullenly against the

bulkhead, knees up, hands behind his head. Lisa followed suit in the

opposite corner of the box, too frustrated to hold on to her anger. Distant

rumblings filtered in.

"Maybe we were attacked," Lisa posited. "Of course, it could be target

practice, Phalanx fire or the Spartans...I wonder how Sammie is doing?

She's new at this. But someone has to act as my backup. Claudia has her

hands full, and of course Vanessa and Kim..." She looked over at Rick.

"You're not listening to a word I'm saying, are you?" No response; Lisa

smirked. "Are you planning to sulk for the rest of our time together? You

know, you're acting pretty childish, Rick. Come on, damn you, I'm going to

go mad in here if you don't talk to me!"

"Well now, there's a surprise," Rick said suddenly. "Lisa Hayes actually

needs somebody."

"Just what's that supposed to mean?"

"I figured you were too tough to need anybody."

She glared at him, then softened. "All right, Rick, I'm sorry I exploded

back there."

Rick smiled. "Me, too." After a minute he added, "Reminds me of when

we were stuck in that holding cell on Breetai's ship."

"Don't remind me. This place looks too much like it."

Rick looked around. "True enough. But even if this ship was designed

by aliens, it's our ship now-our home. We'll just have to wait until she

reconfigures."

"If it is a drill, that won't be much longer."

They both grew quiet and introspective; but when an other twenty

minutes had passed, Rick broke the silence.

"I still can't figure out the Zentraedi's tactics. We haven't scored a

73

decisive victory once. They're always saving us from their own attacks."

"The captain thinks their command is divided. One side is convinced

that we're derived from Protoculture the other disagrees."

"The magic word...if we only had some idea what it was."

All at once there was a third voice in the room; Rick and Lisa glanced

up and saw a Petite Cola robo-vendor coursing around the upper landing of

their enclosure.

"What soft drink would you like?" the machine was saying.

"Hey!" yelled Rick, on his feet in a flash.

Lisa got up and moved to his side. The machine peered over the edge.

"We're out of that brand. Please choose again."

Rick shook his fist in the air. "You empty-headed tin can, bring some

help! Help!"

"We have ginger ale, Petite Cola, and root beer. Make your selection

and deposit appropriate amount." The vendor was circling around making

whirring sounds.

"You piece of junk, you no-good-"

"Stop it," Lisa said, tugging at his jacket. "It's not doing any good to yell

at it. It's just a machine."

Resignedly, Rick said, "Yeah, I know." He joined Lisa on the floor.

"That is what Protoculture is all about. Whatever it is that makes those

machines behave like idiots."

Lisa laughed. "I don't think so, but we'd have to consult Dr. Lang to be

sure."

"No thanks."

Again they both retreated to inner thoughts and fantasies, punctuated

by muffled explosions from overhead.

"I think Protoculture is more like the kung fu force in the movie," Lisa

said at last.

Rick's eyebrows went up. "Oh, so you were in the theater."

"Yes, I was there. I know the manager. I had a seat in the back. Why are

you so surprised?"

74

Rick shrugged. "Just hard for me to imagine you at a movie."

"I do get out, you know." She felt her anger building again.

"Guess I always pictured you as a shut-in."

"And I picture you as a jerk, Hunter!"

Rick made a show of acting miffed. "But sometimes I can read minds..."

He put his forefinger to his lower lip in mock concentration. "Let's see, you

wanted to see this movie-even though it was a chop flick-because you've got

a crush on one of the stars."

"Forget it, Hunter," she said, turning away from him.

"Right. You went to the trouble of reserving a ticket and dealing with

those crowds just to see a film starring Minmei. No way. It has to be Kyle.

Am I right?"

"Back off, Rick. Besides, how do you feel about Minmei now-Minmei

and Kyle, I mean? You're still in love with her, aren't you? Aren't you?" Rick

had lowered his head and grown silent. Lisa apologized. "I was just trying to

get you to stop making fun of me. I didn't mean to bring up any bad

memories. Believe me, I know what that can be like."

"Then tell me the truth," he said without facing her. "You left the

theater for the same reason I did. You couldn't stand to see the person

you're in love with kissing someone else?"

Lisa nodded, tight-lipped.

"What a joke," Rick continued. "Both of us running out of the theater at

the same time. But how could you fall in love with that guy? He's against

everything you stand for."

"He looks exactly exactly like a man I was in love with. He had to go

away, and then he died before we had a chance..." She began to cry in spite

of all her efforts to be strong. "Sometimes when I see Kyle, Karl's face comes

back to haunt me and I just can't bear it..."

Rick passed her his kerchief.

"But where would we be without love?" Rick mused. "Minmei's the only

meaning I have in my life."

75

"You're right, Rick," she sobbed. "But I just don't want to feel this way.

I just don't want it."

They held on to each other for several minutes, neither of them

speaking.

"I'm glad I'm here with you," Rick told her.

"You're not so bad yourself, Hunter."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. In fact, I think I could even get to like you-if you could stop

being such a chauvinist sometimes."

Rick smiled at her, discovering her eyes as if for the first time. "That's

funny, 'cause I was thinking the same about you."

Perhaps they would have kissed each other then-no alien pressure this

time, no hastily hatched escape plan in mind-but all-clear sirens and

Sammie's muffled voice on the city PA broke the spell.

"Attention, please: The drill has ended. The ship will now be returning

to its normal mode of operation."

"Time to return to reality," Rick said as bulkheads retracted and

hatchways lifted.

Lisa stood up and brushed herself off. "Guess I should get back to the

bridge."

Rick got to his feet. "I suppose so. But let's not rush, okay?"

Lisa grinned. "With you leading us, I don't see that we have any

choice."

Rick reached out and took her hand. They began to retrace their steps.

There were numerous wrong turns, reversals, and dead ends, even a

few hairy moments and tricky descents; but mostly there was a feeling of

togetherness and a fresh spirit of adventure. Ill prepared for the modular

transformation and coming as it did with so many people in the streets for

Little White Dragon's premiere, Macross City suffered more than its usual

share of damage. Rick and Lisa passed overturned vehicles, debris, from

traffic accidents, and fallen girders and piers in new construction zones.

76

Ambulances and fire crews tore through streets all but deserted now and

unnaturally quiet. They would learn later that a mistake had, in fact, been

made; what was supposed to have been a simple drill had escalated into a

small catastrophe. Sammie still had a lot to learn. Max Sterling, whom the

bridge bunnies had spent so much time talking and worrying about, had

never even left Macross, let alone the fortress. According to the latest

reports, Max was off in hot pursuit of some green-haired beauty in knickers

who had caught his eye at the premiere. Minmei and Kyle had left the

theater together and hadn't been heard from since.

No sooner did Rick and Lisa arrive on level one near the skyway, when

a Petite Cola machine sidled up to them, begging a handout.

"My drinks are undamaged. May I serve you, may I serve you?"

Rick was ready to deliver a few well-deserved kung fu kicks, but Lisa

stopped him. She also insisted on paying for the drinks.

"All right," Rick allowed. "But only because I'd like to take you out to

dinner next week."

Rick was just removing the cans of soda when he saw Kyle and Minmei

walking toward the Hotel Centinel. He pulled himself and Lisa into hiding

behind the machine.

"You better stay here," he told her without explanation. Later on he'd

feel foolish, but right now he was feeling protective.

"What's going on?" she wanted to know.

Rick was peering toward the hotel. "I didn't want you to get upset."

Lisa gave a look: Arms linked, the leading man and leading lady were

entering the lobby.

"Like I said before, welcome back to reality. Guess we'll just have to live

with it."

"Look, Rick, let's not worry about them. It's not unusual for cousins to

show affection and be close to each other."

Rick snorted.

"Let's get out of here," said Lisa.

"Barracks time, huh?"

77

She shook her head.

"Let's walk. I don't have to report in until oh-eight-hundred."

"Just you and me?" he gestured.

"Yeah," she said, taking his arm. "Just you and me."

78

CHAPTER EIGHT

Say what you will about the retrospective critiques of Little White

Dragon, it was Breetai's review that mattered most!

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

A world of things we've never seen before

Where silver suns have golden moons,

Each year has thirteen Junes...

Lynn-Minmei, "To Love"

(the rallying cry of Rico's Minmei cult)

"It appears to be some sort of battle record," Exedore was saying.

Breetai agreed. "A primitive fighting style at best. I don't understand

their interest in viewing such a record."

The Zentraedi commander and his adviser were side by side in the

flagship command post. In the astrogational section of the bridge the

rectangular field of the projecbeam glowed, outlined by the jagged, fanglike

remains of the observation bubble. Lynn-Kyle, Little White Dragon's male

lead, was up a tree dodging arrows loosed by a small army of bowmen led by

a crazed bearded commander with a black eyepatch and a plumed helmet.

"Possibly an instructional requirement for their soldiers," Breetai

continued as Kyle's leap carried him out of frame.

Still anchored in space on the far side of the moon, the mother ship of

the Imperial Fleet had locked into low-band transmissions emanating from

the dimensional fortress. The two Zentraedi had been viewing these for

some time, first with puzzled interest and now with growing concern. This

long-haired Micronian in the black slippers and belted robe had executed

some truly amazing maneuvers, albeit primitive, and now here he was

soaring through space unleashing bolts of brilliant orange lightning from

his fingertips. The recipient of these, a curiously uniformed hairless mutant

79

wearing some sort of power-collar, was paralyzed and felled a moment later

by the Micronian's follow-up leap and kick.

"Did you see what he just did? What was that?!" Breetai was aghast;

reflexively he had unfolded his arms and adopted a defensive stance.

Exedore's pinpoint-pupiled eyes were wide.

"Perhaps it is that legendary force the Micronians are said to possess."

"It's a death ray! Our soldiers cannot win against such an incredible

force!"

"It seems beyond the power of Protoculture or Robotechnology."

Breetai straightened up decisively. "We must report this information

immediately to Commander in Chief Dolza."

Elsewhere in the flagship Little White Dragon had a second audience,

the dozen or so members of the growing Minmei cult. They were gathered

around a monitor screen, jaws slack in amazement. Rico, Bron, and Konda

had recognized Minmei in spite of the Zu-li over-the-shoulder braid.

"She doesn't look the way I thought she would," said one of the group.

"Yeah, what happened to your beautiful female?"

"Bubbleheads," Bron said calmly. "This is just a monitor. She's much

better looking in person."

"That's right," Rico added knowingly. "You have to see her in real life.

We were hanging out with the girl all the time."

This drew astonished looks from the cultists; they turned now to Konda,

who added nonchalantly:

"In fact, the three of us all became her close personal friends for a

while."

On the screen, Kyle was going through his F/X routines, dispatching

giants left and right and hurling lightning bolts.

Rico recognized him. "These recordings must have been made before

the Micronian began to think about putting an end to warfare."

"An end to warfare?" said one of the confused cultists.

"'Peace' is the Micronian word for it," Bron explained.

But what grabbed the attention of this captive audience was the kiss

80

Lynn-Kyle planted on Minmei's lips after effecting her rescue. Cooing

sounds surfaced through the speakers.

"How strange," said someone in the audience. "I've never seen

anything like that before."

"It's weird...Why do they do that?"

"They seem to be enjoying it."

"Yeah," Bron explained. "Something makes them do that all the time.

It's required."

"They make their people press their lips together?"

"Yeah, it happened every day," Rico answered, ringleader and gifted

liar. He had his chair tipped way back, hands behind his head.

One of the heavy-banged clones took his nose from the screen. "That's

fantastic! I wouldn't have thought you could stand it. Did they force you to

do such a thing with this girl?"

"Yep, they sure did," said Rico.

"Often," from Konda.

Shocked faces, some gray, some yellow, some pure white, swung to

catch each spoken word, each nuance.

Then Bron picked up and carried for a while: "My lips got sore from

always being pressed."

It has been said that there comes a point in the growth of every

powerful cult or movement when something is needed to carry it over the

top, to open it up to those who are aware and prepared but who have been

afraid to act alone. Little White Dragon served this purpose for the Minmei

cult. But it had less to do with the "death ray" Breetai saw than with the

need to protect the film's leading lady. Singing had reawakened long-lost

emotions and impulses; music had reopened a long-locked pathway to the

heart.

There was scarcely a soldier in the Imperial Fleet who hadn't heard of

the singing doll by now. The film had instilled the rumors with a new

momentum; sensational tales of the wonders onboard the SDF-1 were

81

talked about in every corridor and discussed at every watch. The password

spread. Micronian words were spoken and memorized. Posts were

abandoned, duties left undone. Fights broke out over whose turn it was to

carry around the life-size color poster of Minmei. Shock troopers and

sentries began to rap on the clubhouse door and beg admittance, their

armed and armored presence lending a new element to the gathering of

green-uniformed cultists-an element that would soon spell peril for the

Zentraedi high command...

The little two-song dot-eyed doll continued to work its tabletop magic,

melting hearts hardened by conditioning and countless military campaigns

and conquests. Rico's roomful of former galactic warriors came to sound

more like a maternity ward visited by a host of proud fathers.

"So this is what they call 'singing,' huh?" said one soldier as he watched

the doll go through its motions. "I think I like it."

"Singing is a way the Micronians make each other feel good," Konda

explained.

"Makes me feel kinda funny..."

"Makes me feel great!"

"Is it true," asked another, "that we could hear the real singer if we

became spies and lived among the Micronians?"

"It's the truth," said Bron.

Rico folded his arms across his chest. "You'd like the real thing a lot

more than you like this doll."

"Yes, but it's unlikely that we'll ever get the chance to see for ourselves,

Rico. You three are surveillance operatives; we are soldiers."

A grin spread across Rico's face, and he leaned forward conspiratorially,

arms on the table. "This is something we should discuss..." he told them.

It is also said that "loose lips sink ships."

Khyron's second in command, Grel, reported to his commander that

there was trouble afoot. Khyron had been brooding about his defeat and

near death at the hands of the Micronians during the shield explosion and

82

as a consequence ingesting powerful amounts of the dried Flower of Life

leaves, so Grel braced himself for the worst.

"You say there's chaos aboard Breetai's flagship?" said the Backstabber

disinterestedly.

"That's right, m'lord. Exedore's spies-Konda, Rico, and Bron-returned

from their infiltration mission aboard the Robotech ship with a singing doll

that is wreaking havoc."

"A 'singing doll'? What are you talking about, Grel?"

"A...device, Lord Khyron. It emits sounds that have affected the

thoughts of the crew. Discipline has become a problem."

Khyron wore a look of distaste. "And you have seen this...device?"

"No, m'lord, but-"

Khyron turned his back to Grel. "I don't think we need to concern

ourselves with rumors."

But Grel persisted. "It's a lot worse than that, sir. There is talk among

many of our own soldiers about defecting to the Robotech ship to lead the

Micronian way of life!"

Khyron spun around, fists clenched. "Defecting?!"

"M'lord!" snapped Grel. "That what I heard. And not just a few-"

"Enough!" shouted Khyron. "Is anyone in the higher command aware

of this?"

"No, m'lord."

"As I thought." Khyron sneered. "Everyone is losing their minds over

what's happening on the battle fortress..." He raised his fist. "Well, let them!

Let them perish through their own stupidity! Khyron will survive and

prevail! Khyron will live to see that ship destroyed! Khyron alone will rule

the Fourth Quadrant of the universe! And woe to anyone who stands in his

way!"

It was true that neither Breetai nor Dolza had received word of the

incipient desertions, but the commander in chief had reasons of his own for

wanting the Micronians annihilated. Breetai had dispatched a ship to the

83

command center with trans-vids of the "death-ray" sequences he and

Exedore had viewed. There, Dolza had come as close to fear as his Zentraedi

conditioning allowed.

A trans-vid of his response was quickly returned to Breetai. The fleet

commander and his adviser screened this on a rectangular monitor that had

been installed behind the remains of the spherical one Max Sterling's VT

had finished off some months ago. The brief message did not take either of

them by surprise.

"I am now convinced that the Micronians have discovered the secrets

of Protoculture," Dolza stated flatly. "And as a result they are extremely

dangerous to us. Any prolonged contact with them can only have a

disastrous effect on our troops. I am therefore ordering you, Commander, to

begin preparations for a final assault on the Robotech ship. You are to

infiltrate the fortress and secure the Protoculture matrix. Failing that, you

are to destroy the ship. And understand me, Breetai: This time I expect

results. Succeed or find yourself facing the fury of my fleet."

Word of the impending assault threw the Minmei followers into a state

of dismay.

"What do we do now?" asked one of the cultists, Minmei poster in hand.

"When we attack the fortress, we'll probably kill this girl. We'll never get to

hear her sing!"

"We want to hear her sing!" yelled another.

There were at least twenty of them in concealment behind a row of

Battlepods in one of the flagship docking bays. All eyes were on Rico now.

"It's not just singing. In the fortress population center they have loads

of things we don't have. All that will be lost if we attack them!" He struck a

determined stance. "Why don't we save them, and save ourselves as well?"

"How?" several voices said.

"We can't do anything by just thinking about our future. I say we look

for a way to remain aboard the enemy ship when the attack begins."

There was a moment of stunned silence. Even in their weakened state,

84

enough residual conditioning remained to leave them fearful in the face of

Rico's suggestion, and more than one forehead was beaded in sweat. But

Rico had given voice to their wishes, and soon Bron and Konda were

slapping him on the back, full of encouragement and congratulations.

"If they catch us, we'll be executed," said one of the few holdouts.

But Rico was on a roll. "That's the chance we'll have to take," he said,

scanning each face.

"Then count me in. I want all those things I've never had before."

"Me, too," said another, and another. Shock trooper and duty officer

alike continued to cast yea votes until it was unanimous.

"Okay. We're in it together," Bron said finally. "But before we can enter

the enemy ship we've got to become Micronians."

Again there was a moment's hesitation as the irreversibility of their

decision set in. Then someone asked, "Do you know how to work the sizing

chamber well enough, Bron?"

"No," he confessed. "It takes a specialist to operate it, right, Karita?"

All eyes focused on a meek, docile-looking blond soldier at the outer

perimeter of the group. Nervously, Karita clasped his hands together as

Bron put the question to him. It was true. He knew the secrets of control

levers eight and nine.

"Without permission?" he seemed to whimper.

"Of course, you fool. If the plan is discovered, we're all dead!"

"You want to hear real singing, don't you?" said Rico, trying a gentler

approach.

Karita turned his back to them and stammered, "Sure I do, but, well,

uh..."

Bron took the Minmei poster from someone's hand. "If you help us,

this picture and the singing doll are yours. What do you say to that deal,

Karita?"

"Well...I don't know..."

"We've got to work like a team," said Konda. "If we stick together now,

we'll all be able to enjoy a new life with the Micronians."

85

Karita turned to face them. "All right. I'll do it. But you'll have to

promise to take me with you."

Bron went over to Karita with a big grin and put an arm around him.

"You just operate the converter. We'll see to it that you get into the ship."

Meanwhile, aboard the dimensional fortress life was busy imitating art.

Little White Dragon, finally shown in its entirety, had received ecstatic

praise from one and all, and more than ever Lynn-Minmei's voice seemed to

weave a magic spell over the ship. During a follow-up concert carried live by

MBS, there wasn't a man or woman who didn't feel somehow transported

by the star's songs and gentle lyrics. On the bridge Captain Gloval grew

introspective, remembering better if not quieter days. Vanessa, Sammie,

and Kim, ever-present cups of coffee in their hands, slipped into a sort of

collective daydream fantasy where those "silver suns" and "golden moons"

were almost tangible and love was something no longer sought but found

and embraced. Claudia Grant walked through London snow she hadn't

thought about in years, arm in arm with Roy Fokker, her lover still in that

interior realm unlocked by Minmei's magic. Even Lisa, who only the day

before had walked out on the film, succumbed; but it wasn't Karl Riber she

thought of but Kyle, who brought into question all that she had lived and

worked for, all that she was.

And from the stage wings of the Star Bowl Kyle watched his cousin

perform as though for the first time, feeling at once threatened and

comforted, concerned about how much attention was lavished on her and

how little was focused on ending the war but at the same time recognizing

how all-important Minmei had become to morale and the personal strivings

of all those onboard the fortress.

Not for a moment, though, did the singer herself question her gifts or

her purpose. Tearfully she accepted the applause, the flowers and love, but

in a strangely distanced state of being, as though outside herself, her songs

on the side of love in the eternal struggle of good against evil.

And was there anyone more aware of Minmei's cause than Rick Hunter,

86

standing now outside the Star Bowl as she finished one of her tunes, his ear

pressed up against one of the posters that adorned the amphitheater wall?

She was his cause from the beginning, and it seemed certain now that she

would be his cause at the end.

87

CHAPTER NINE

Although films like King Kong, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, and

Devil Doll had understandably enough become popular onboard the SDF-1,

perhaps we should have been paying more attention to a little-known classic

called One Touch of Venus, wherein a statue of the goddess comes to life and

sings a song that weaves a spell of love over everyone.

Lisa Hayes,

Recollections

The right arm of Zor's ship drew back and hurled itself forward as if it

were part of a living being, its steel-hulled supercarrier fist punching

through the armor plating of the Zentraedi cruiser and crippling it; only

then, with the ship so impaled, was the forward ramp of the carrier lowered

and the full firepower of the Micronian Destroids unleashed.

"The 'Daedalus Maneuver,' as it is called," said Exedore. "Apparently

named after the oceangoing vessel itself."

Breetai ordered a replay of those trans-vids which had captured the

Micronian battle maneuvers for study: the deep-space destruction of Zeril's

cruiser and the fiery death of a destroyer under Khyron's command when

the SDF-1 had been temporarily redocked on Earth. Exedore was arguing

that it might be possible to force the Micronians into employing the

maneuver once again, but in such a way as to prove advantageous to the

Zentraedi. Breetai was trying to keep an open mind, despite the fact that

there was precious little in the way of reinforcing evidence to warrant

optimism at this point. If two years of fighting (by Micronian reckoning)

had established anything, it was that one could only expect the

unpredictable from these Micronians. Still, there was too much at stake to

completely rule out Exedore's plan. He had been as shocked by Dolza's

threats as Exedore had been. That the Micronians presented an

unprecedented danger was not to be argued; but to destroy Zor's

dimensional fortress in lieu of capturing it was madness. Without the

88

knowledge contained aboard that ship the Zentraedi would never be able to

break free from the yoke of the Robotech Masters. Dolza knew that better

than anyone.

Breetai stroked his chin as the trans-vids ran to completion. "We would

be taking a great risk," he said to his adviser.

"True, m'lord. But even so, we stand to gain everything if we succeed. If

we can force them into executing a Daedalus attack, we might be able to

insert a Regault squadron into the fortress without detection. Then we

would be in a position to capture the ship intact."

Breetai uttered a sound of approval. "That has been my design all along.

But how can we make certain the Micronians fulfill their part in this?"

"First, we must rely on the fact that they judge our actions to be as

predictable as we judge theirs unpredictable. Then we must take care to so

maneuver the flagship that they launch their attack at the bow of our ship.

We are strongest there, and with our troops suitably forewarned, it would

prove a simple matter to get our infiltrators aboard."

"Hmm...you've thought this out carefully, Exedore."

The misshapen Zentraedi bowed slightly. "May I be permitted to speak

freely, m'lord?"

Breetai gestured his assent.

"With the one million ships of the Imperial Fleet at our disposal and

Zor's Protoculture matrix in our possession, we would be a force to be

reckoned with. Both Dolza and the Robotech Masters would have to deal

with us."

Breetai grinned. "And what of the Invid? Have you given this thought,

too?"

Exedore's pinpoint-pupiled eyes widened at the mention of the name,

but he regained his confidence soon enough.

"Those enemies of life as we know it will surely search us out," he told

Breetai coldly. "But they will be made to suffer the same fate as the

Micronians, and anyone else who presumes to tamper with Protoculture!"

89

The flagship sizing-chamber had been the scene of frantic activity since

Breetai's sounding of general quarters. True to his word, Karita had

operated the reduction converters, secretly "micronizing" some twenty

Zentraedi soldiers; and Rico, as promised, saw to it that Karita along with

three other Minmei cultists found a place in one of the Battlepods.

Sometime later the Zentraedi commanders would learn that fewer

Battlepods went out than pilots, but it was not something they needed to

concern themselves with at the moment; the Zentraedi were not as fussy

about this sort of thing as the Micronians were.

Several conversion kits for the pods had been secured, but not enough

to go around. Bron and Konda therefore offered last-minute advice and

instructions to the micronized pilots who would be manning the standard

pods. Then, in sleeveless sackcloths once again, the three infamous

operatives regrouped and climbed aboard the mecha that would deliver

them back to the SDF-1 and its world of delights.

Hundreds of Battlepods pressed plastron to plastron filled the launch

bay of the flagship. Pilots ran their craft through systems checks and

prepared themselves for battle. Rico, Konda, and Bron were at their stations

inside the pod when a change in the attack plan was announced from the

bridge: All Regault squadrons were being ordered to move to the bow of the

ship and await further instructions.

"Now what?" asked Konda in a sudden panic.

"Just calm down," Bron told him, already beginning to move their

Battlepod forward with the rest. "The plan is still to attack the battle fortress,

isn't it? We'll get our chance, so stop worrying about it."

Aboard Khyron's cruiser, meanwhile, the attack mecha of the Botoru

Battalion were readying themselves. The Backstabber's Officer's Pod headed

up four shipshape columns of the Seventh's finest fighters. Khyron was

addressing them over the net:

"The Micronian ship is almost within range. As soon as their fighters

are launched, we will take to space and engage them. Do not concern

yourselves with losses; think only of victory!"

90

Khyron lowered the visor of his helmet. The stage is set, he said to

himself. Nothing can save the Micronians now!

From inside the flagship command bubble Breetai ordered his attack

force into motion-a relatively insignificant number of ships but appropriate

for the occasion. He wanted the Micronian commander to feel confident,

not unduly threatened.

"Follow my lead toward the enemy fortress," he spoke into the

communicator. And he thought to himself: Let the games begin!

Sammie's scream broke them out of the trance Minmei's songs had

sired.

Lisa and Claudia furiously began to tap commands into their console

keyboards, while Kim let out a call that brought Captain Gloval running.

Vanessa sat hunched over the threat board controls like some maniacal

organist.

"Thirty ships," Lisa said, as Gloval tried to make sense of the overhead

monitor readout. A schematic showing the fortress's position relative to

Earth revealed that a triangular formation of enemy paint had emerged

from behind Luna and was presently on an intercept heading with the

SDF-1.

"Thirty," Gloval said, puzzled. "Why, when they have so many at their

command? What can they be planning?"

"Estimates of TOA and DOA coming in, sir," said Vanessa.

Gloval turned to the threat board and back to Lisa.

"Sound general quarters. Scramble the Veritechs." Gloval took to the

command chair and exhaled wearily as alert Klaxons blared throughout the

fortress.

Thirty ships, he kept repeating to himself. Not an arbitrary number,

but somehow calculated. The enemy was actually communicating with him,

offering up just this number of ships as a tease. Not enough to overwhelm

the fortress, though just enough for a tight fight. So why was he

experiencing such an unusual sense of dread? He couldn't put his finger on

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the cause, but he likened the feeling to those small warnings your mind

transmits just as you're stepping into an accident. Something says "oops!" to

you even before you've committed yourself to an action, but your body

refuses to listen: It moves forward into catastrophe in some irrevocable

fashion, obeying laws of causality as yet unknown.

Gloval stared at the monitor screen, watching the radar blips move

closer and closer to the fortress. Well, here was all the advance warning

anyone needed, and still he could not bring himself to turn tail. How that

would surprise those Zentraedi bastards! he said to himself. If he just

refused to engage them, if he just set the ship on a course of retreat...What

response did they expect from him this time? he wondered. Once again he

would be forced to choose between shield and main gun. Or he could simply

wait it out until the enemy began to turn on itself, as had so often been the

case. But no, that would go against his training.

Gloval made up his mind that he would simply meet the ships head-on,

no second thoughts about it. Brute force against brute force, one on one.

He'd bring the Daedalus into play if he had to. Just punch those ships from

space, one after another. Starting with that lead monster up in lights on the

radar screen. Yes, the SDF-1 would start with her: an all-out strike to the

front of the formation!

Rick was still leaning against the curved wall of the Star Bowl when the

sirens went off. He joined a group of VT pilots who had raced from the

amphitheater and flagged down a taxi. Together they piled inside and

ordered the driver to put the pedal to the metal and get them to the

Prometheus.

The hangar area was a study in controlled chaos. Pilots ran to their

ships, pulling on helmets and cinching harness straps. Flight controllers

directed prepped Veritechs toward runways and launch bays, while groups

of techs unloaded heat-seekers from antigrav pallets and locked them into

undercarriage pylons. Supply trucks and personnel carriers screeched

across the floor ferrying ammo canisters and cat officers through the

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madness, often narrowly missing one another. Shouts and elevator and

engine noise erased the gentler sounds of radio communiqu 閟, canopy

descent, and rapid heartbeat.

Rick threw himself into Skull One, throwing levers and toggles as he

fastened straps and adjusted the seat. The alphanumeric displays of the

HUDs and HDDs came to life, glowing brightly as systems ran themselves

to self-check status. Rick ran through a self-check himself, then worked the

foot pedals and interfaced with the HOL microprocessor, ordering the

Veritech forward to the elevator. He had his hands on the Hotas-the

so-called hands on throttle and stick-when Lisa appeared on the central

commo screen.

"Thirty alien craft approaching from section twenty-four, Skull Leader,

do you copy?"

"Affirmative, Commander."

"These aren't ostriches, Rick. Radar shows cruisers and battlewagons.

No mecha as yet. Your threat evaluation displays should be registering their

signatures now, do you copy?"

Rick turned to a side screen: Thirty bandits in a flying wedge formation

were revealed.

"I copy, Commander," he told Lisa. "Locked and loaded; I'm outta

here."

"Rick, this looks like a big one, so be careful, okay?"

He pulled his visor down. "You don't have to tell me."

Rick goosed the VT forward at the urgings of a flight controller and

positioned it on one of the elevators. He completed his checks as the fighter

was raised to the flight deck and stabilized for hookup. As the cat officer and

his shooter went through their well-oiled routine, he ran through one of his

own.

He summoned up an image of Roy Fokker in his mind's eye, then Ben

Dixon. He held on to those for a moment and allowed them to fade in the

presence of another. Minmei filled up his thoughts as the VT was catapulted

off the hurricane bow of the supercarrier and launched into space.

93

"Six bandits within range," Rick shouted into the tac net. "Switch over

to your targeting computers and fire on my command."

Local space was reduced to a grid on his forward screen, with clusters

of Veritechs assigned to each section. Skull One led a formation of five VTs

into one of these.

Death, parcelled out.

The enemy pods opened up, disgorging pulses of blue fire into the

night. An Officer's Pod was out front-its flashing signature plain as day on

Rick's threat evaluation screen-"hand-guns" and top-mounted cannon

spewing flame. The Veritechs danced between the deadly lines, thrusters

carrying them out of harm's way as nose gatlings blazed a reply.

"Send 'em home, boys!" Rick shouted.

He engaged the VT's afterburners, propelling it farther out in front of

the pack. Behind him, one of the newcomers sustained a direct hit and

disintegrated in a silent sphere of blinding fire. Two other fighters broke

across each other's courses and accelerated into flanking maneuvers on

either side of the enemy contingent. Pod gun turrets swiveled to find them

without effect, bolts of uncreased lightning telescoping into the void. They

broke their formation and scattered in pairs, dangling bipedal legs behind

themselves now, boosters blazing pink and white, blue fire erupting from

their plastron cannons.

Skull One loosed six red-tipped missiles into their midst, orange

crescents and small suns filling the skies as they found their mark. Pods

exploded, Human and Zentraedi pilots died, and Death clapped joyfully

from the sidelines.

It was a free-for-all, rockets and pulsed beams crosshatching space

haphazardly. No one was safe, no one immune.

Inside the flagship Breetai watched the battle from his command chair,

Exedore stone-faced beside him. The fleet commander was pleased.

"So far they are following their usual attack pattern."

Off to the right of the observation bubble, two indicator lights flashed

94

on. Breetai and Exedore turned to these.

"This is operations," said someone from the launch bays. "All our

Battlepods and mecha have been deployed."

"Good," Breetai responded, directing his words to the communicator.

"Inform all the cruiser commanders that I want them to continue on course.

But make certain they allow the flagship to maintain the lead."

"At once, my lord," came the reply.

Breetai rose from the chair. "Prepare to fire main batteries."

Pinpoints of blue light flashed into life across the front of the cruisers;

bursts of pulsed energy rained from the front of each of these, regular as

clockwork.

Meanwhile, pods and VTs continued to slug it out. Rick found himself

up against that Officer's Pod again; the enemy mecha was in ascent, thruster

glowing between its legs while it exchanged fire with Skull One and its

wingships. Aft and slightly port, a VT exploded-one of the less-armored tan

and white ships piloted by yet another newcomer. Engaging the

undercarriage and lateral thrusters, Rick piloted the VT up and over the

enemy fusillade; one of his wingmen followed but was tagged and blown to

debris. As enemy fire mysteriously ceased, he cut away from the silent

Officer's Pod and went after one of the regulars, executing a Fokker Feint,

then rolling over and taking it out with gatling blasts while it floated

stationery in space. The Officer's Pod tracked Rick as he completed the

move, encasing Skull One in streaks of fire from which it emerged

miraculously unscathed.

The SDF-1, however, was not faring as well. While the VT teams were

successfully shielding it from the stings of enemy mecha, the fortress was

sustaining salvo after salvo from the rapidly approaching whalelike ships of

the attack group. Bristling guns discharging unbroken lines of lethal energy,

the warships closed on the SDF-1 like deep-sea monsters in a feeding frenzy.

The massive ship was shaking violently. On the bridge Captain Gloval

gripped the arms of the command chair for all it was worth. The women

worked feverishly at their stations, tireless and unfailing in their duties, the

95

occasional scream notwithstanding.

"Damage reports coming in, Captain," said Kim.

"Later!" he answered.

Claudia reported that the Veritech teams were taking heavy losses.

"Keep them deployed as long as we can!" Gloval shouted to her as an

explosion rocked the bridge. "Lisa, we're going to have to use the Daedalus

to take out those cruisers one by one!"

Lisa turned from her console to signal her understanding, then reached

up for the remote mike cradled alongside the overhead monitor.

"Stand by to launch Daedalus when you receive my command," she

said.

Full of sinister intent, streaks of light radiating from what looked like

eye pods and the suggestion of a mouth turned up in a crooked smile, the

Zentraedi flagship continued to bear down on the fortress. Concealed

behind bulkheads and hastily erected reinforcing partitions in her bow

waited scores of Battlepods, erect on their hooved feet, turret guns aimed

and ready.

Inside one of the pods the three operatives received word of the

imminent Micronian counterattack. Rico and Bron were standing on the

seat, each positioned at one of the projecting levers that controlled the

mecha. Konda was down below near the foot pedals. Bron held a

communicator in his hand; through this he was in touch with the rest of

Rico's band of micronized would-be deserters.

"Are you ready?" he said into the mike. "Our moment has arrived."

"To our deaths, or our rebirth!" said Rico in a rallying cry.

The three raised their hands in salute to one another.

Rico grew serious. "Once inside the fortress, we'll have to take care."

"The wrong place at the wrong time and we could be killed-by

Micronians or Zentraedi," cautioned Konda. "We'll have to stay out of sight

until the proper time. Then we'll abandon the pod and lose ourselves among

the people of the population center."

96

"He's right," said Bron getting back on the mike. "I'll pass the word."

The Macross Amphitheater was shaking and quaking-not to

thunderous applause or the rhythm of the band but to the frenzied beat of

war. Half of the Star Bowl's 30,000 had fled for shelter at the first warning

sirens, and many more began to filter out as the sounds of battle invaded

the ship, but a surprisingly large number remained-mainly those who were

guided by the past, the unfortunate ones who continued to believe that

Macross would always be immune to attack.

Minmei was introducing a song when the first major jolt was felt. She

cried out as she almost lost her balance, and this started a wave of panic in

the audience. Suddenly the diehards and risktakers were having second

thoughts. People were screaming and rising halfway out of their seats in

dismay, as if to get a general fearlevel reading before making up their minds

to exit or stick it out.

Kyle could almost smell the panic brewing. He took to the stage in a

leap and ran to Minmei's side.

"Minmei, you've got to keep singing," Kyle told her.

Only moments before he had been watching Minmei's performance

from the wings, fascinated by how her mere presence could overshadow the

war. And now he glimpsed a way that her power might be put to good use in

lulling the audience back into a state of calm.

She turned to him, panic in her eyes, smudges of run mascara beneath

them. "What?" she said, not comprehending.

"Gimme that," he said, taking the mike from her hands. "Hey,

everybody, we're going to continue the concert, so please take your seats.

There's no reason for panic. We've all been through this before. So please

calm down and return to your seats. Minmei's going to go on with the

show."

Another jolt rocked the ship, and the screaming escalated. Minmei had

her hands over her ears, but Kyle was shaking her by the shoulders and

telling her to sing.

"In your strongest voice!" he told her.

97

She looked up at him, wide-eyed and childlike, but nodded her head.

"Be courageous and sing," Kyle said calmly. "You can do it."

Reluctantly she took the mike and stepped forward on trembling legs.

She walked out of the stage's inlaid five-pointed star and perched herself on

the edge. The band, taking this as a cue, gave her an intro. She motioned

them to pick up the tempo and began to belt out "Stagefright." People

returned to their seats. Minmei turned and winked at Kyle. He smiled at her

and mouthed: "You're great!"

On the bridge, Lisa Hayes gave the word. With a little luck the

destruction of the lead ship would result in an explosion that would take out

the others as well.

In space the right arm of the SDF-1 drew back and hurled itself forward,

as if it were alive...

98

CHAPTER TEN

"What you fail to grasp is that Commander Breetai's decision to allow

the SDF-1 to retreat was entirely in keeping with the Zentraedi tradition of

open warfare, that is, move and countermove. It was most certainly not a

tactical blunder...Moreover, it is for precisely this same reason that it never

even occurred to Commander in Chief Dolza to hold the planet Earth hostage

for the return of Zor's ship. Through no fault of your own you imagine this to

be unthinkable. Which, then, is the more barbaric of the two races-yours or

mine?"

Exedore, as quoted in Lapstein's

Interviews

The steel-plated bow of the supercarrier Daedalus punched through the

nose of the Zentraedi flagship.

It was an encounter of mythic proportion, worthy of inclusion in that

short list of eternal struggles-angel and demon, eagle and snake, snake and

dragon: a giant techno-knight in gleaming armor, its fist locked in the jaws

of a deep-space armored leviathan...

The two-foot-thick bow plate of the Daedalus swung up and away from

the body of the ship, its massive top-mounted hinges groaning in protest.

Unseen servodevices locked while others disengaged, motors whined, and

hydraulic couplers hissed in a symphony of mechanization. A triple-hinged

forward rampart unfolded itself into the hold of the Zentraedi, ship while a

fan of brilliant energy was loosed from Destroids in the carrier belly.

Structural piers and pylons were blown away; girders and tie beams slagged

in the infernal heat. Supply crates and storage tanks exploded, filling the air

lock with concussive sound and deadly fumes. A bulkhead just inside the

breach was holed by concentrated firepower.

Golden alloy-armored Destroids now began to descend the ramp, their

lasers at rest. They were early products of Robotechnology, bipedal and

nearly as tall as Battloids but somewhat cumbersome-looking, with large

99

square feet and skeletal laser-gun arms. Following their programmed

directives, the three-man units moved into the hold and took up positions

for a second and more lethal assault. But they were not quick enough.

Battlepods suddenly leaped from places of concealment and opened

fire. Pulsed beams tore through the thin skins of the mecha, dropping them

in their tracks. There were attempts to return fire, but the situation was

instantly beyond hopeless. The Destroids were vastly outnumbered and

easily overrun; minutes after the skirmish erupted, their silent forms were

heaped at the base of the ramp.

Then the Battlepods reversed the order, taking to the ramp and making

for the Daedalus. By this time, however, word of the defeat had reached the

carrier command center, and the arm of the SDF-1 was already retreating,

ripping out the steel tendrils the flagship defense systems had attached to it

in an attempt to seal the breach. There was barely time enough to insert a

quarter of the battle-ready pods. As the final few hopped gracelessly into the

carrier hold, the ramp folded, retracted, and slammed shut.

The Zentraedi had been given no clear-cut orders, save to enter the

Micronian ship and inflict as much damage as they could without

destroying it. Breetai's hope was that at least some of the pods would make

it to the bridge of the fortress and effect a capture of the commanders. Short

of that, the pods could attempt to incapacitate the ship's reflex drives.

Some of the Zentraedi soldiers, however, had their own ideas.

Once inside the Daedalus, in an orgy of indiscriminate destruction,

they began to fire at everything in sight. Provisions, mecha, vehicles, and

Gladiator teams were wiped out. Techs left their stations and picked up

weapons to combat the intruders, but not one lived to give details of the

battle. The Zentraedi hurled fire against the control towers and

communications stations, incinerating systems and personnel with equal

abandon. The hangar areas of the carrier were fully aflame by the time the

pods took to the main corridors of the SDF-1.

They still had no idea where they were going, but it was easy enough

for anyone to tell where they had been. A path of utter destruction led from

100

the supercarrier, up through the right arm of the fortress and into its

heart-Macross City itself. The pods moved wantonly through service

corridors, extending their reign of death. Coveralled techs were fried by

bolts of unleashed fury; shaking hands reached out weakly for comlink

phones and panic buttons but seldom found them. Meanwhile the pods

continued their sweep. The Zentraedi were finally repaying the Micronians

for two years of frustrating defeats. The mecha soldiers were so caught up in

vengeance that not one of them noticed the disappearance of several of their

number-a group of awkwardly piloted pods that seemed curiously loath to

engage in battle.

Captain Gloval's leg shook uncontrollably while he awaited Lisa's reply.

"Come on, Lisa, come on," he said, hoping to hurry along the flow of data.

She was bent over her console, fingers flying over the keyboard. "I have

no contact at all with the Daedalus, sir. It's as if it doesn't exist!"

Something was very wrong. The oblate bow of the Zentraedi warship

filled the bay of the bridge, dark green in color, menacing, enormous. It

looked to Gloval as if a whale had mistaken the arm of his ship for a giant

fishhook. But the calculated collision had not worked out as planned.

Whatever the firepower unleashed by the Destroids, it had not been

sufficient to affect the cruiser. In fact, the ship was still hurtling forward,

now pushing the fortress along in front of it. And the bridge had lost contact

not only with the Destroid squad but with the entire supercarrier garrison

as well.

"Pull the fortress back!" Gloval shouted suddenly. "All power astern

and redeploy the shield energy!"

As Kim and Sammie relayed continued commands to engineering and

astrogation, the fortress began to vibrate to a steady bass drone. The

engines were powered up and engaged; then the contained explosive fire of

the reflex core erupted from the ports of the pectoral thrusters, carrying the

ship away from its aggressor, pulling the Daedalus arm free of the flagship's

hold.

101

Gloval breathed a sigh of relief.

The fortress responded with an unprecedented sounding of Klaxons

and alert sirens.

Claudia was on the comlink; she lowered the handset and turned to

face the command chair, a look of unmitigated terror contorting her face.

"Enemy Battlepods have entered the ship through the ramming arm!"

Gloval's eyes opened wide. "The enemy's on board?"

This had happened only once before, when an overeager Zentraedi

pilot had given chase to Max Sterling's Veritech and battled it briefly in the

streets near Macross General Hospital.

"The Daedalus is on fire," Claudia continued. "The pods are attacking

Macross!"

"Quickly! Patch us into the civil defense network!"

The captain and his crew turned their attention to the speaker system,

hoping against hope.

"Ten enemy pods on Lilac Street," said a horrorstricken voice. "We're

trying to hold...Aargh!"

"This is area B control-we can't seem to hold them back, we need help-"

"...retreating from the Tenth Avenue gate. We're getting our-"

"Switch it off!" Gloval shouted from the chair. He dropped his head and

said weakly, "God help us all."

Destroids, Spartans, and Gladiators were waiting for the Battlepods

when they reached the outskirts of Macross City. For those battle-weary

residents who had yet to reach shelter, the attack would recall a similar one

two years earlier. But this time they knew their enemy. This time they knew

how much they had to fear.

Bent on nothing less than complete destruction, the pods advanced

through the street, blue fire spewing from their upper and lower guns,

panicked pedestrians scattering beneath their hooved feet. Explosions

launched fragments of glass and steel into the artificial air and tore gaping

holes in the streets, exposing raw power lines and rupturing water conduits.

102

Raining showers of electrical sparks, store signs dangled dangerously from

fractured rooftops. The facades of buildings fell and burned, sending up

clouds of dust and thick smoke.

A pod, its twin guns blazing, stepped out from behind the remains of a

clothing store to face off against a Gladiator positioned at the end of the

block. Bursts of blinding fire were exchanged again and again until both pod

and mecha exploded, while elsewhere rockets fell and flames spread. A

massive multibarreled autocannon swept along Macross Boulevard, sending

ground-to-air heat-seekers against airborne mecha. EVE's star-studded sky

veneer was stripped away, revealing in stark detail the naked terrors of war.

Not all the pods were blasting away, however. Some were actually

looting the shops for souvenirs, raking in whatever appeared intact with the

mecha's grappling hooks and waldo gloves. Two of the pilots got a fix on an

external sound source that was similar to Minmei's "singing"; and the pair

moved off together, homing in on the Macross Star Bowl.

Inside, Minmei was still on stage, wedded to her audience in some sort

of unrehearsed litany of song.

Without accompaniment, she sang, "To be in love..."

And they chanted: "Stagefright, go'way, this is my big day."

She was grasping the mike tightly in both hands, though she was

certain that the power had gone off. But her face betrayed no fear. Kyle was

standing stiffly by her side, his fists clenched, urging her to go on. From

what she could tell, the city beyond the amphitheater rim was engulfed in

apocalyptical flames; thick black smoke was billowing toward the ceiling of

the hold, and a light rain seemed to be falling from the overhead

water-retrieval system. Electrical power had shorted out in most areas of

the stadium. The spots were off. The band had fled. And those in the

audience who weren't singing were crying. It felt like the end of the world.

Then, all at once, two Battlepods appeared on the upper tier of the

amphitheater, their cannons aimed ultimately at the stage, and she dropped

the mike.

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Kyle stepped forward and raised it again to her mouth.

"You've got to continue singing, Minmei. Give it all you've got!"

He put his arm around her, and she found the courage to pick up where

she'd left off. The audience followed her; she believed they would have

followed her anywhere.

"Now, don't be afraid," Kyle was saying into her ear. "They're not going

to hurt us."

And it truly seemed that way for an instant-as if the pods were just part

of the audience-until a bolt of blue energy flashed overhead and struck the

upper reaches of the stage canopy. It had not been launched by either of the

pods and was in fact a stray shot from outside the amphitheater. But that

made little difference. The crowd panicked. And worse still, the blast had

loosened one of the large overhead spotlights. For a second it looked like it

wouldn't fall. Then something snapped and gave way, and down it came.

Kyle spied it in the nick of time and moved in to cover Minmei. He

succeeded perfectly, taking the full force of the impact on his back, the

spotlight driving both of them violently to the floor.

Outside the fortress, things were not much better. The SDF-1 had

managed to put some distance between herself and the Zentraedi warships,

but furious space dogfights were continuing. Rick was locked into the

vacuum equivalent of a scissors finesse with the Officer's Pod that had been

hounding him since the word go. Each time he tried to break or jink, the

pod stuck to his tail, loosing cannon fire, and now here was Lisa on the right

commo screen vying for his attention. Fortunately, Max had been

monitoring the aircom net and was coming in to give Rick some relief.

Sterling came in low under the Officer's Pod and chased it off with Stilettos;

Rick angled himself out of the immediate battle arena and went on the net

to the fortress bridge.

"In the ship?" Rick repeated in disbelief.

Lisa reaffirmed it. "They're destroying everything, Rick. Return to base

immediately!"

104

Minmei! Rick screamed internally. "Lisa, have they hit the

amphitheater? You've got to tell me!"

"I don't have a status report, Rick. Just get back here on the double."

As she signed off, Max appeared on the left screen.

"I'm with you, Commander," said Sterling. "I'll follow you home."

Which was easier said than done.

First the two Veritechs had to navigate a web of pulsed fire laid out by

the Officer's Pod and its three cohort ships, then direct themselves through

the continuous bombardment the fortress was receiving from the enemy

warships. Rick raised the bridge and asked Lisa to see to it that one of the

SDF-1's ventral docking ports was opened for their entry; it would have

been not only a longer route to Macross via the Daedalus or Prometheus but

a more dangerous one as well. No one in fact had ever piloted a VT through

the arms of the fortress.

Rick rehearsed his moves as he closed on the air lock; he visualized a

map of the city streets and began to plot a course, almost as if allowing the

mecha to familiarize itself with the plan.

Skull One and Skull Two zoomed into the fortress, unaware that four

Battlepods had followed them in, Khyron's Officer's Pod in the lead.

Miriya was as surprised as anyone to see Zentraedi mecha in the streets

of Macross City, and just now she was possibly the only person alive in

those streets. Most of the Micronians had taken to the shelters long ago, but

many had remained in the amphitheater to witness the workings of some

sort of psychological weapons system. For some unknown reason the

Battlepods had also chosen to concentrate their might there, and as a result

the Micronians had sustained heavy personnel losses. In addition the pods

had laid waste to much of the surrounding city. Fires continued to burn,

explosions could be heard and felt from all quarters, and a steady rain of

embers, soot, and debris fell from the ceiling of the enormous hold.

Miriya had been one of those who remained unsheltered in the

amphitheater. She had been trailing the longhaired Micronian warrior ever

105

since the populace had turned out in such force to honor him at the

trans-vid screening of his battle records. It seemed likely that the female

warrior shown in those trans-vids was the same one who had drawn such a

fanatical following to the amphitheater. The vocal noises she emitted had

been discomfiting; they had left Miriya feeling debilitated and ill at ease,

much as she had felt upon recognizing that the female warrior was in some

way the consort of the longhaired male!

Until moments ago Miriya had been convinced that the male warrior

was the one who had defeated her in battle, but something had happened to

alter her thinking. She had seen him crushed by the falling illumination

device and, while working her way down the aisles toward the stage, had

spied a blue-trimmed Micronian fighter streak overhead. Certain that she

recognized the mecha, she had taken to the devastated streets to watch the

pilot of that ship in action against her allies.

The fighter was reconfiguring to bipedal mode now as she watched,

fascinated, from her place of concealment. The pilot was about to bring the

gatling into play. Surrounded by pods, he twisted and trap-shot one from

the air, then spun around and took out a second that had landed behind him.

Agilely sidestepping the blast of the exploding pod's foot thruster, he

utilized the earned momentum to position himself for a bead on a

well-situated third. Yet another pod mistakenly thought that height would

be advantageous and lifted off, foot thrusters blaring and top guns blazing

away. But the Micronian merely sent his mecha into a beautifully executed

tuck and roll and came up shooting as the pod came down beside him.

Again the foolish Zentraedi pilot tried to leap and fire, but the blue ace had

already decreed his fate. Bolts of lightning striking around him, he raised

the muzzle of the cannon, fired, and holed the pod with a shot right through

the front viewscreen. While the mecha blew to pieces in midair, the

Micronian set off in search of greater challenges.

Miriya was depressed by the Zentraedi pilots' poor showing-it was no

wonder Breetai's troops were losing!-but elated at having at last discovered

the object of her long search. Now she simply had to hunt him down and

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confront him.

Elsewhere in Macross Rick had also set Skull One down in Guardian

mode and reconfigured to Battloid, shooting his way to the Star Bowl area

of Macross, where the fighting was thickest, charging down city streets he

knew so well and closing on the amphitheater. He had literally just bowled

over two stationary Battlepods when Max raised him on the tac net.

"How bad is it where you are?" Sterling wanted to know.

Rick panned his external cameras across the burning cityscape to take

stock of the scene: There wasn't a storefront left undamaged-it looked as if

some of them had been looted! The streets were torn up from explosions

and the hooflike feet of who knew how many enemy mecha. EVE's "sky" had

taken a beating-most of it had in fact fallen-and few of the deadly fires had

been brought under control.

Rick went on the net: "It's worse than I even thought, Max."

"Any civilians about?"

"None that I can see," Rick answered, calling for zoom on the scanners.

"Looks like most of them made it into the shelters."

Static crackled through Skull One's speakers.

"Same out here. What's your next move?"

"I'm going to check the Star Bowl. See that everybody got out of there

all right."

"Minmei..."

"Right, Max."

"All right, Skull Leader, I'm signing off. Rendezvous with you at the

Star Bowl. Over and out."

Rick took a deep breath and relaxed back into alpha. He hit the foot

pedals hard and began to think the mecha back into a jog. Enormous

explosions erupted behind him as he started out, the gatling in the

Battloid's right hand, metalshod left clamped on the cannon for added

stability.

Rounding a corner at a good clip, he ran smack into heavy fire. Several

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pods had taken to the rooftops here and were throwing blue bolts at

anything that moved. Up ahead a grounded pod sustained a hit in the back

and keeled over as Rick approached. Rooftop rounds were impacting all

around him, and he was forced to dive Skull One sideways to the street, left

arm straight out for counterbalance as he went into a double roll. The

muzzle of the gatling was up before he completed the move, just in time to

sear off the right leg of a pod that had leapt from an upper-story support.

The enemy mecha rolled over on its back, flame blazing from what was left

of its leg, and exploded.

Meanwhile Rick was back on his feet again and already resuming his

pace. But not fifty meters down the street a pod stepped from the shadows

of a department store doorway and almost succeeded in nailing him. At the

last minute, Rick saw it and launched the Battloid like a high jumper over

blinding flashes of cannon fire. As he rolled into a front flip, he opened up

with the cannon and caught the pod between the legs, transuranic slugs

lifting it. off the street before it burst to pieces in a ball of orange and purple

flame.

Skull One landed hard on its back, smoking gun still clutched tightly in

its right hand.

Inside the cockpit Rick shook his head clear and found himself staring

straight up at a gaping hole in the hold overhead and two more rooftop pods

that were now pouring rounds at him. He thought his mecha into a roll and

twist to the right, which ultimately brought it to a kneeling position, the

muzzle elevated and armed. Trigger finger on the Hotas, he squeezed,

bringing the mecha's left hand up and around to fasten on the forward

section of the gatling. The street quaked as explosivetipped projectiles

spiked into the area around him.

Rick sprayed the pods right to left seemingly without effect, the gun

sputtering and overheating in the Battloid's grip. Then it gave out

completely. But after a moment of dramatic stillness, the pods fell headfirst

from their ballet poses on the building ledge. Trailing fire, they crashed on

either side of Skull One, fulminating.

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Thinking the Battloid erect, Rick shouted, "Minmei!" and continued his

charge on the amphitheater.

109

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I can't imagine what he was thinking when he grabbed me like that,

pinning my arms and forcing himself on me. Why do they all have to fall in

love with me? Why do they all need to possess and control me?...All I could

think about was what happened on Thursday, when Kyle saved me from

falling into one of the modular transformation troughs and I looked up and

saw Rick's face in place of his.

From the diary of Lynn-Minmei

A kiss is just a kiss.

Mid-twentieth-century song lyric

Khyron and six of his finest swaggered their pods down Main Street,

mopping up what was left of the civil defense patrol Battloids and

Gladiators. The Backstabber couldn't have been happier. The fortress's

population center was in flames, Zentraedi mecha were overrunning the last

few remaining pockets of resistance, and soon the heart of the ship would be

secured. It would only be a matter of time before they moved against the

ship's command centers.

"Victory will be mine!" he shouted from within his Officer's Pod.

But something was about to occur that would rob Khyron of this false

apotheosis, something that would give new meaning to his nickname...

"Destroy everything in sight!" he commanded his troops. "We can do

anything we want this time!"

Two Battloids suddenly appeared in the distance; they had taken up

positions on either side of the street a few blocks ahead and were now

leaning out from behind buildings, directing pulsed cannon fire against

Khyron's methodical advance. But the Zentraedi commander never even

broke stride; he casually took out both of them with hand-gun hip shots.

He was beginning to increase the pace somewhat when three

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Battlepods darted out across his path from a perpendicular side street with

an obvious purpose in mind. Khyron signaled his own. troops to halt and

opened his comlink to these preoccupied pods.

"Just a moment," he said, stepping forward, his voice full of suspicion.

"Where in the name of Dolza are you three going? Answer me at once!"

The three pods stopped and turned to him. Vocal salutes and sounds of

surprise came across the net.

"Respond!" Khyron repeated.

After a moment one of them said, "We are hoping to find Minmei,

Commander."

"Minmei?" Khyron said uncertainly. "I've never heard of a Minmei.

What are its ballistic capabilities?"

"She's not a missile, sir," said another. "She's a Micronian female!"

All at once the three of them were laughing with delight. Several other

pods had skulked out of the side street to watch the exchange.

"The most incredible creature in the universe!"

"We've got to meet her in person: Hear her sing-"

"Silence!" Khyron cut them off.

The pods snapped to, but muffled laughter continued. Khyron

narrowed his eyes. So the rumors Grel had reported were true, he said to

himself. Defection: It was unheard of.

Khyron's voice dripped menace when he spoke again.

"I presume you plan to tell me what you're laughing about."

"I'm sorry, m'lord," one responded, attempting to stifle his laughter,

seemingly unaware that Khyron was bringing one of his hand-guns to bear

on him. "It's just that I'm so overcome with joy at the possibility of finding

Minmei-"

Khyron fired once, his round entering the pilot chamber through the

central viewscreen and exploding.

"He's out of his mind!" Khyron heard over the comlink as the pods ran

for cover. "Run, run!"

"Stop!" he commanded them, looking around and realizing that even

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members of his own crack unit were abandoning him. "All of you, come

back!"

Khyron threw his pod into Pursuit mode, hooved feet pounding along

the city streets. Not one of them would live to see the end of this day, he

promised himself. Already he had one of the deserters centered in his

topcannon reticle.

"Come back here, soldier, and face me like a Zentraedi! You can't run

from me forever!"

"I'm sorry, my lord," came the meek reply over the net, "but I-I can't

explain what joy it is to be among the Micronians."

"What?" Khyron shouted. "I've never heard anything so crazy in my life!

You're completely mad, do you hear me? You're telling me that you'd prefer

to be with them?!"

Khyron heard an exclamation of fear but no explanation. He shook his

head knowingly and pronounced sentence as the chase continued: "Well

now, my little friend, I'm afraid I must deal with you in the same way I dealt

with your companion."

The Officer's Pod right hand-gun fired once. The pod took the hit in the

rear end, was lifted up as though goosed by fire, and was blown clear from

the street.

Khyron fired again and again, pursuing the Battlepods through the

ruined streets into the city's night.

Minmei summoned her strength, heaved once, and managed to drag

herself out from under Kyle's dead weight. She felt bruised and mangled,

and her red gown was in a sorry state. The large canister spotlight that had

beaned her cousin was several feet away, tipped over on its side amid

plaster chips, shards of plastic, and other bits of fallen debris. The

amphitheater appeared to be deserted, but there were flames and thick

smoke in the distance and the sounds of sirens and explosions.

Wondering just how long she'd been out, she began to tuck stray hairs

back into their bunlike arrangement. Kyle made a groaning sound, and she

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went over to him, helping him to his feet and walking him to the wings,

where they both sat down. He was breathing hard, and his forehead was cut.

Minmei took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the blood. As he

came around, she said, "I'll make it better," and started to make funny faces

for his benefit. She crossed her eyes, stuck out her tongue, puffed out her

cheeks, uttered some strange sounds, and in a minute had him laughing.

"There. All better," she announced in a motherly tone, stroking his face

with the kerchief.

Had she been less concerned about what was to prove to be a very

minor injury, perhaps she would have noticed the look that began to surface

in his dark eyes and would have been able to avoid the awkward scene that

followed.

Kyle was so used to taking care of himself that Minmei's attentiveness

overwhelmed him. In his still weakened state he found his feelings for her

confused but undeniably powerful. She was so much stronger than he had

ever thought possible, so talented, such an amazing presence in the lopsided

world they inhabited together...

So he expressed these thoughts and feelings the only way he knew how:

He reached out for her and kissed her full on the mouth.

They were kneeling face to face on the stage; it was dark, and maybe he

didn't see her eyes go wide with bewilderment and fear-or maybe he just

didn't care. Perhaps he somehow misread her attempts to push him away.

But it is more likely that he pinned her arms in the hope that his love for her

could silence her fears, much as his mouth was stifling her protests. He

needed to make her understand how he felt. Once she was made to

understand his needs, she would surely give herself freely to him...

But ultimately Minmei pushed him away and told him in no uncertain

terms that he was never to do that again.

Kyle did not understand.

And neither did Rick, who had arrived at the amphitheater in time to

witness the kiss but who turned his Battloid around too soon to see the

rebuff.

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The computer-generated graphics from civil defense command had

been patched through to the fortress bridge. A schematic bird's-eye view of

the city streets showing the deployment of CD and enemy troops filled the

screen of the threat board. Gloval and his crew had been spared actual video

footage of the devastating attack, but it didn't take much imagination to

visualize the horrors that were befalling the place. These were the streets

and landmarks of their world, just as surely as the bridge and base were.

Each and every injury inflicted there affected the entire fortress. What

happened to one happened to them all.

Gloval was not really a religious man, despite what his verbal

expressions may have suggested. But more than once during the past two

years of warfare he'd come close to finding some sort of divine, intervening,

benevolent intelligence at work in the cosmos. And most often it had been

the Zentraedi's sudden and inexplicable strategic reversals which had given

rise to those theological revelations. The captain was in the middle of one of

these at the moment; standing stock-still behind Vanessa's chair and staring

uncomprehendingly at the novel troop movements on the screen.

"The enemy's actions have become totally chaotic," Vanessa said,

stating the obvious.

Gloval nodded his head slowly. "I see it...I see it...I don't believe it, but I

see it."

Initially it had appeared that the Zentraedi command was merely

relaxing its methodical march and allowing its forces to scatter-to loot or

pillage or engage in whatever it was that giants did in Micronian cities. But

on closer examination the board revealed that certain pods were chasing,

routing others. One pod in particular-an Officer's Pod according to its

schematic signature-was actually destroying them. Gloval let his mind rake

quickly over the possibilities: There was Lisa's two-faction theory, a schism

in the Zentraedi high command; the chance that some of the VT pilots had

for some reason commandeered several pods; and then there was...God.

And perhaps any or all of them spelled God in the end, Gloval decided, as he

114

turned forward to face Lisa and Claudia.

"Alert all auxiliary groups to assemble and lock in on sectors seven,

nine, ten, and eleven. We should be able to box the pods in near the

Macross amphitheater." Gloval regarded the board briefly and added, "See

if you can raise the Skull team and ascertain their position."

Lisa went to work carrying out the captain's orders. Brown, Indigo, and

Green squads were taking up positions near the amphitheater when she

finally succeeded in contacting Skull Leader. It had been a long while since

Rick had radioed in, and she found herself as relieved as she was angry

when he came on-line.

"Uhh, sorry, Commander." He sounded distracted and distant.

"You haven't been reporting in, Rick. Where are you? What's going

on?"

"They're here," he answered sadly, turning his head from the cockpit

camera. "Kyle and Minmei. Send a rescue group to the amphitheater."

"The amphitheater?" she said in alarm. "Rick, you've got to get them

out of there!"

Rick said nothing.

"Have they been hurt, Rick? Answer me. Has something happened to

Kyle?"

Lisa saw him reach out for the kill switch, and a second later the

monitor screen signals on the bridge went diagonal in static.

Skull One turned its back on the lovers' kiss; dejectedly, the Battloid

walked from the amphitheater's tier, head down, arms hanging loosely at its

side, interfacing with and mirroring the emotions of its pilot.

Rick felt as devastated as the city itself, at once angry at himself for

spying and heartbroken by the result. It had been far worse than that tender

cinematic kiss that had riled him so.

How could she have done it? How could she have been so blatantly

unfaithful to him?

There wasn't a trace of irony in his inner voice. He desperately wanted

115

to feel betrayed, and he meant to put the anger that welled up from the

wound to good use.

Max Sterling was waiting for him at the exit gate.

"Did you find her?" Max asked over the net.

"Find who?" Rick spat back.

"Minmei, buddy. Is she in the shelter already?"

Rick almost raised the muzzle of the cannon on his friend.

"She's only one person aboard this ship, Max, you got that? My job is to

defend the SDF-1, nothing else."

"Sure," Max said, backing his Battloid away a bit. "Then you'll be happy

to learn that you've got your job cut out for you. CD has herded the enemy

right into our lap."

Inside the cockpit module Rick stomped on the foot pedals and primed

the gatling cannon.

"Then let's go get 'em," he said to Max.

There were eight Battlepods waiting for him on the shattered street and

burning rooftops. He acknowledged them with a nod, raised the cannon,

screamed a throat-tearing war cry, and launched himself into their midst,

skull and crossbones prominently displayed.

The pods poured fire into the street and descended on him like rabid

birds of prey. Running headlong into a horizontal rain of blue death, Rick

kept the gatling at waist level, discharging searing fusillades against his

ship's enemies. He sustained hits his mind refused to feel and blew away

one after another of the galloping pods. Explosions relit the artificial night.

He jagged to the right as one pod took to the air and trap-shot it, two

hands on the cannon now and screaming his war cry all the while. He

twisted left and blew the legs out from under a second, screen-shot a third.

Even when the gatling had expended itself, his blood lust was far from

diminished. He went close in, using the cannon as a club; when he lost that,

he continued to fight, metalshod hand to hand.

On the other side of town six pods played dead.

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The double-pulled hinged hatch of one these opened, and three small

faces peered out. Explosions could still be heard off in the distance, but

from the sound of it the fighting was sporadic and winding down. Thanks to

Khyron, the Micronians had been able to snatch victory from the very jaws

of defeat; their troops were mopping up what the Backstabber's timely

escape from the fortress had left unfinished. But the micronized Zentraedi

soldiers inside these undamaged spheres had no bones to pick with him.

Quite the contrary: Thanks to Khyron! indeed.

Rico, Bron, and Konda rappeled to the street on ropes thrown from the

cockpit, had they been aware of the Micronian custom, they would surely

have kneeled down and offered a kiss. Other Zentraedi began to follow their

lead, and soon the entire cult was reunited.

These six pods had managed to keep together since the assault; they

had peeled away from the main strike force just before the destruction of

the population center had begun. Consequently they had come through the

battle relatively unscathed, but most of their fellow deserters had not been

as fortunate. Several pods, only a few of them containing micronized

Zentraedi, had been unlucky enough to cross paths with Commander

Khyron. The diabolical lord of the Botoru Battalion had meted out

punishment on the spot. There was no way of guessing just how many

soldiers he had put to death; but as word had spread through the ranks,

many had given up their hopes for resettlement among the Micronians and

fled into space.

As the lucky ones now began to take a look around their dreamland

there were mutterings of disappointment and regret. One of their number

had found a foot-high Minmei doll on the sidewalk, its embroidered red

robe stained and tattered. He was holding it in both hands cheerlessly.

"What's wrong with it?" one of his companions asked. "Why isn't it

singing?"

"It seems we've damaged it."

"That doll's not the only thing we've damaged," said Karita, gesturing

in general to their surroundings.

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"You mean it's not supposed to look like this?"

Bron stepped in and took the doll. "Karita's right. This population

center was once beautiful and peaceful."

"The Micronians know how to repair things," Konda added.

"Then they'll rebuild all this?" Karita asked hopefully.

Rico nodded. "They know the secrets of Protoculture."

This brought surprised gasps all around, even from those micronized

Zentraedi who had no understanding of the word but knew enough to

recognize it as the shibboleth of the command elite.

"But what do we do now, Rico? If we're discovered by the Micronians,

we'll be executed for our actions against the fortress."

"Yeah, now what?" others chimed in.

Rico thought for a moment. "There's a Micronian who was trying to

convince everyone that the war had to be stopped-the one I pointed out to

you during the battle record trans-vids we watched. He was talking about

peace all the time."

"What's 'peace'?" asked one of the clones, but the others shushed him.

"Go on, Rico."

"Well, I think we should turn ourselves over to the Micronian high

command. We'll tell them that we've come in the name of peace."

118

CHAPTER TWELVE

I remember my parents telling me about a popular amusement center

that existed before the [Global] War. The place was called EPCOT and it was

located in the southeastern Panam, in what was then called the state of

Florida. There you could walk or ride through any number of pavilions, each

representative, architecturally and culturally, of its nation of origin. Pop was

fascinated by the Mexican exhibit. Apparently, once inside the building, you

felt as though you were really in Old Mexico-assuming of course that you

were willing to surrender yourself to the imagineers' illusions. A marketplace,

an ancient pryamid, even a smoldering volcano-all under a twilight dome full

of redolent aromas. Pop was so taken with the pavilion that he went back to it

over and over again, and one day he was allowed in before those illusions

were in full swing. Much to his later disappointment. Because without that

starry sky and that cool and gentle breeze, he was well aware of where he

was: inside a human-made environment. The pavilion would never be the

same for him again. And this is how the dimensional fortress civilians felt

when they left the shelters after the Zentraedi attack. It was all too plain that

they were inside an alien spaceship; Macross was changed forever.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

Mayor Tommy Luan was one of the first to leave the shelters. He had

set out immediately on an inspection tour of Macross that by day's end had

left no proverbial stone unturned. But every step along the way proved to be

an ordeal.

The fires had been extinguished and the thick smoke exhausted

through the enormous exterior ports, but the air still reeked of molten

metals and plastics. The hold windows and bays, the so-called starlights,

were encrusted with the same resinous grime that seemed to have settled on

every horizontal surface in the city. The streets were potholed, cratered, and

torn up, running with water loosed from subsurface and overhead conduits.

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Recyclable sewage from the devastated oubliette system had been heaped

up here and there or blown into the air to adhere to street signs and

buildings. There didn't appear to be an intact piece of glass anywhere;

shards littered the sidewalks, the lobbies, the interiors of offices and homes.

In the most unlikely places one was able to stumble upon pieces of

mechanical debris, a car part here, the leg of a Destroid over there, a

Battloid finger buried in a wall. Perhaps worst of all, there were those holes

in the sky.

Residents were sorting through the mess like zombies, trying to locate

fragments of their past lives, staring shell-shocked at standing walls that no

longer embraced a home, walking eerily to and fro calling out names of the

displaced, the lost, and the dead-of which there were miraculously few.

For the most part casualties had been confined to the area around the

amphitheater, which had seen the worst fighting by far. The Star Bowl itself

would not house a concert for a long while, and the surrounding buildings

were damaged beyond repair. Here there was hard evidence of the battle:

the silent husks of pods and Gladiators still locked together in

war-memorial poses, undetonated missiles projecting from storefronts,

craters that were in effect immeasurable.

The Macross amphitheater, however, wasn't the only landmark to have

been hit. The Hotel Centinel had collapsed like a layer cake, and the

neighboring skyway was in shambles. Numerous monorail line pylons had

been felled; street and store signs were down. Much of Macross Central

Park had burned-the only "living fire" the SDF-1 would ever witness.

Electrical power was out in many sections.

Macross was a disaster area.

But Tommy Luan was already rolling up his shirtsleeves and putting

things back in order. On the one hand there were several things to be

thankful for, he told the populace from a makeshift podium set up on the

boulevard not far from the Fortress Theater. The aliens had been beaten

back. True, they had leveled quite a bit of the city, but they had not

penetrated any of the command areas of the ship-astrogation, engineering,

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or even the Robotech Defense Forces base. There was certainly an

enormous amount of work ahead of them, but they had already rebuilt once

before and they would be able to do it again. Luan called on them to think

back to a time even earlier than the spacefold accident and recall their

experiences during the Global Civil War, when scarcely a city on the planet

had escaped devastation in one form or another. Robotechnicians would

come to their aid and provide the know-how once again, Luan promised,

and Macross would meet those technicians halfway supplying the strength

and spirit required to implement their designs. "Rome wasn't built in a

day," he reminded them. "Macross City was!"

It was a rousing address, and the city applauded its mayor and

spokesperson as much for his determination as for his optimism. There

were few among the resident population who doubted that renewal was

possible, but an alternative to rebuilding had presented itself to some: Just

open the air locks, they publicly maintained. Let space suck out the debris

and the memories, and then simply start again from scratch.

For a small and select group of victims the disaster actually facilitated

the procurement of much-needed supplies-a different sort of uniform for

starters.

"Clothes!" Bron reiterated. "How many times do I have to tell you:

Some of the Micronians are soldiers, and some are civilians. The soldiers

wear uniforms; the civilians wear clothes. Now repeat it-clothes."

"Clothes," said the club members, hangdog expressions on their faces.

"I don't know..." Rico said uncertainly. He turned to Konda and Bron

for reinforcement. "Can we get away with this?"

The Minmei cultists had abandoned their Battlepods and hiked

crosstown-a troop of curious-looking scouts in sackcloth dresses. It had

been decided that Rico, Bron, and Konda would surrender themselves to the

SDF-1 high command and explain the reasons for their desertion from the

Zentraedi forces. Since the others had little command of the Micronian

language, Rico thought it best that they go into hiding for a while. He was

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actually more concerned about their over-eagerness to partake in the

Micronian way of life, although he didn't tell them this. All along he'd been

proclaiming to have sampled widely of the population center's offerings,

and now his followers were beginning to press him for answers he simply

didn't have. "When we do get to meet Minmei?" "Can we begin to kiss her

immediately?" "How long are we supposed to keep our lips pressed

together?" Rico felt like he needed to run off somewhere and hide, but it

would probably work out better for everyone if he hid them instead.

A hideout would be easy enough to come by, but at some point the

micronized soldiers were going to need food. Which meant that one of them

was going to have to go out unescorted into the streets. Which meant that

clothes were essential. Rico shuddered when he recalled how the

Micronians had laughed at Bron when he stepped out in female clothing.

Rico shuddered again at the thought of Karita or one of the others stepping

out into Micronian society. But something had to be done-and fast!

Konda, who had the best sense of direction among them, led them

through a maze of ruined streets and ultimately into a relatively undamaged

department store he remembered from the surveillance visit. The

Micronians were just beginning to emerge from their battle shelters as they

entered the well-stocked store. Rico turned the group loose and regretted it

almost immediately. Karita and the rest scattered and started stuffing all

sorts of objects into their sackcloth gowns-toys, small appliances,

hairbrushes,

entertainment

discs,

time

devices,

earlobe

ornaments...whatever they could lay their hands on. It took well over an

hour for Rico, Konda, and Bron to round them up; Karita and a second

cultist had to be forcibly restrained from lip-pressing every fabricated

female form they passed.

"Clothes!" Bron shouted angrily when they were all regrouped. "We're

here for clothes and nothing else. Is that understood?"

Sheepishly they promised to behave and followed Konda up a stairway

(which under normal circumstances would have been mechanized) and into

an area of the store set apart exclusively for apparel.

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"Now, pick what you want and be quick about it!" Rico yelled as they

ran off, their eyes lit up by the display.

Konda was the first to see them return from their foray: Rico and Bron

caught his slack jawed look and followed his gaze. Down to the last, they

had picked out female attire-long thin-strapped gowns cut low in front and

back; A-lines and pleated skirts; high-waisted sleeveless frocks; sweater and

skirt ensembles; ruffled blouses; lingerie, hosiery, and high-heeled shoes.

It took another hour to get everyone properly outfitted, but by the time

they left the store there was no reason to doubt they could pass for

Micronians. Except, that is, for the three leaders. Their next move was to get

themselves identified as Zentraedi, and they reasoned that the original

sackcloth uniforms might help that along.

The sidewalks and streets were filled with Micronians now, most of

whom were busy clearing rubble or sorting through debris. Food and drink

booths had been opened for the needy. Armed soldiers and battle mecha

patrolled while huge Robotech vehicles hauled away the remains of pods

and multigunned civil defense units. The population center was already

mobilizing, breaking up into teams and relief groups to deal with the

damage. Not fifty paces out of the department store, Rico and the others

were assigned to one of these work crews.

At first it looked as though involvement in the detail was going to spell

disaster, but Rico's concerns were shortly laid to rest. To the Zentraedi,

"repair" was not only a foreign notion but a magical process. Karita and the

others had been handed digging devices called shovels and pickaxes and

after a few moments of familiarization were completely absorbed in their

tasks. They were joyfully swinging and shoveling, shoulder to shoulder with

Micronians, even joining them in song! It was too perfect, Rico told himself:

They would be fed and cared for and looked after. Now, as long as none of

them had to speak...

With Konda and Bron in tow, Rico managed to weasel out of the area.

The three former operatives had far more important things to concern

themselves with than clearing debris from the walkways. It was time to turn

123

themselves in.

Expecting nothing less than complete acceptance and full cooperation,

Rico and his cohorts brazenly approached one of the nearby patrol posts

and confessed to being Zentraedi agents. But something was wrong; Rico

wasn't being taken at his word. The soldier was actually laughing at them.

So he grew more insistent.

"I'm telling you, we're Zentraedi. We came into the fortress inside one

of our battle mecha-"

"You're a little short to be a Zentraedi, aren't you, buddy?" the soldier

interrupted.

"We've been through the reduction converter," Bron attempted to

explain. "We're micronized."

The soldier exchanged winks with one of his companions.

"'Micronized,' huh? Well, why didn't you say so in the first place?" He

put his hand on Rico's shoulder and spun him gently left. "You want that

place, right over there. You see, where it says 'medical assistance."'

"'Medical assistance,"' Rico repeated. "All right, thanks." He turned to

Bron and Konda and said, "Come on."

"Shell shock," the lieutenant said to his corporal as the three

sackclothed men walked away. "Some kind of martyr thing by the look of it."

At the first-aid station they went through an almost word-for-word

repeat performance. But eventually a female wearing a white uniform with a

red-cross emblem escorted them into the office of a man who introduced

himself as Dr. Zeitgeist.

The room was large and spacious and lined floor to ceiling with archaic

document displays. The "doctor" himself was a portly Micronian with an

abundance of facial hair but very little on his cranium. He spoke with an

accent that made his curious utterances and phrases even more difficult to

comprehend. But undaunted, Rico proceeded to recount the details of their

desertion from the Zentraedi.

Zeitgeist gave a long "I seeeee..." when Rico finished, and leaned back

in his swivel chair. He regarded the three couched men in sackcloths for a

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moment, then began to review what they'd told him.

"So you three think you're Zentraedi soldiers," said Zeitgeist. (What he

actually said was closer to: "Zo you zree zink you're Zentraedi zoldiers."

"You were first sent here as spies, but you grew to so love our..." he

consulted his notes, " 'Micronian' society that you decided to desert your

armed forces and live with us."

"Yes, that's it," the three said in unison.

"I seeeee..." said Zeitgeist.

It was the most richly detailed case of guilt-induced Type-Seven

behavior that it had been his pleasure to come across in many a day.

Certainly a step up from the space phobias, null-g sickness, and separation

anxieties he'd been nursing along for the past two years. And so thorough

and laden with symbolism-from the flagellants' robes to the talk of

espionage and "micronization"-that wonderful word which really captured

the human sense of displacement one felt inside the alien dimensional

fortress. Why he could almost see the journal paper writing itself:

"Micronization: The Phobia of Containment."

"And you would ez-timate your actual height," the doctor continued,

"to be approx-zimately fifty 'Micronian' feet?"

Rico turned a sober face to Bron and Konda.

"He doesn't believe us."

Bron got to his feet. "We can prove it," he told Zeitgeist. "Bring us to

one of your commanders. We'll tell him things about our battle mecha that

will convince him.

Over the course of the next few hours the good doctor saw his hopes for

a journal paper dashed, but he did begin to think about opening up a

counseling clinic for disaffected extraterrestrials. Meanwhile the three

Zentraedi were prodded, poked, searched, examined, analyzed, interviewed,

tested, scoped, scanned, evaluated, appraised, and assessed. They were

moved from office to office, city to cell, and barracks to base. They saw more

different types of uniforms than they would have believed existed in the

Fourth Quadrant of the known universe. And finally, they were brought

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before the fortress's commander in chief, Captain Henry Gloval.

Gloval had done little more than browse through the foot-high stack of

reports on the debriefing room desk-psychiatric evaluations, intelligence

test reports, military and medical examinations, interview transcripts-but

he had seen enough to convince him that the aliens' claims were true. What

they knew about the workings of the Battlepods alone would have been

sufficient evidence. And their very existence in "micronized" size had fully

substantiated Lisa's aftermission reports regarding some sort of reduction

device aboard the enemy flagship. The clone issue would have to await the

results of the medical tests. That these three had actually been in the

fortress previously was as amazing as it was discomforting; it was no

wonder that Dr. Lang was dying to get his hands on them. First, however, it

was up to Gloval and the high command to decide exactly what to do with

them. What, in fact, did they want? And how many others like them might

be aboard the SDF-1 at this very moment?

These were questions he hoped to have answered before the special

session with colonels Maistroff and Caruthers convened.

Lisa Hayes and Max Sterling were now admitted to the room, and

shortly thereafter the three aliens were escorted in.

Lisa's first impression erased all doubts that she might have had; in

fact, there was almost something familiar about these three. Rico put a

quick end to her puzzlement.

"We were present at your interrogation," he explained. "Remember

when you kissed one of the male members of your group?"

Even though that tidbit had been included in her report, she blushed at

hearing about it-from a Zentraedi, no less. Rico went on to give details of

that meeting with Dolza that were more complete than Rick, Lisa, and Ben's

collective recollection. Then he went on to talk about Breetai and Exedore

and someone named Khyron, who had been responsible for turning the tide

during the attack on Macross City. The alien also mentioned Protoculture

and Zentraedi fears concerning a Micronian secret weapon. They wanted to

stay aboard the fortress-this much was clear-and more than anything they

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wanted to see Minmei!

By this time Gloval looked like someone on the verge of sensory

overload. His eyes were wide, and his mustache was twitching. "That's

enough for now," he said, holding up his hands. "We'll carry on with this

session in the presence of colonels Maistroff and Caruthers. And Lisa," he

added as an aside, "I want you to request that Lieutenant Hunter join us

immediately."

127

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When one sits down to a serious side-by-side study of the log entries of

the two commanders [Gloval and Breetai], a curious pattern begins to emerge

which I believe has been overlooked by many of (the Robotech Warsl

commentators and historians...And by the time we've reached those entries

written just prior to Dolza's direct involvement in the war, this parallel

pattern has become self-evident, especially with regard to Lynn-Minmei's

importance, the growing disaffection among the ranks, and the defiant stance

adopted by both Gloval and Breetai toward their respective high commands

(the UEDC and Dolza). It is almost as if two years of space warfare had

created what two centuries ago was called a folie. A deux.

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

"Lieutenant Hunter's presence is requested in HQ Special Sessions

chamber immediately." No explanation, no afterword, Rick told himself.

What, he wondered, had he done now?

There had been no sleep following the battle; the fortress was still on

red alert, and all available men and women in the Defense Force were on

duty. Most of the tech, engineering, and construction crew had been

assigned to Macross, where the civilians had organized work details and

clean-up was already under way. Indigo and Brown VT teams patrolled the

city streets in Battloid mode, wary that some Zentraedi might have survived.

The SDF-1 was swept stem to stern for infiltration units, but save for the

Daedalus arm and the city itself, there were no signs of enemy penetration.

Although casualty counts were not yet complete, there was little doubt that

the losses sustained would number well into the hundreds, and this didn't

take into account a civilian body count. It would take days to sort through

the rubble surrounding the amphitheater alone-a good deal of which Rick

and Max had been responsible for after the CD squads had successfully

stampeded a horde of Battlepods right into their laps.

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His blood lust quenched, Rick felt like some sort of overstimulated

incandescent bulb; sleep, even if it was granted by his superiors, would

probably elude him for weeks. And when that burnout point was finally

reached, it was going to be one heck of a downhill run to hell...He had been

ordered to the Prometheus, where he was supervising mecha triage when

the request from Lisa Hayes reached him.

Standing outside the Special Sessions chamber now, he returned a

sentry's salute, tugged at the hem of his jacket, tried in vain to dewire

himself somewhat, and rapped decisively on the door.

The large room was familiar to him from two other occasions-when he

had been awarded the titanium Medal of Valor and during his debriefing

after imprisonment aboard the Zentraedi flagship. Command would be

seated behind a three-sided continuous desk, somewhat U-shaped, above

which was the winglike Robotech emblem centered in an embossed Defense

Forces silver shield. There were bound to be one or two armed sentries

positioned on either side of the door, a session transcriber, and of course

some hot seat in front of the desk, which Rick hoped had not been reserved

for him.

"Lieutenant Hunter reporting as ordered." Rick saluted.

"At ease, Mister Hunter. That was a request, not an order."

Rick wasn't about to relax; he quickly scanned the room. Gloval was

seated casually below the shield, elbows on the desk; to his right were Max

Sterling and Lisa. On the captain's left, as stiff as ever, were colonels

Maistroff and Caruthers, burly veteran commanders both, thick fowled,

tight lipped clones in different color uniforms.

Three men were in the hot seat.

As Rick moved closer, he could see that they were similarly dressed in

coarsely woven dark-colored robes. Their strangely unnatural skin tones

and hair color varied greatly. And yet there was something familiar about

them, something that caught Rick in the pit of his stomach when the three

turned around to regard him, something his thoughts and voice refused to

make clear but his face betrayed.

129

"Yes," Captain Gloval said. "These...men are aliens."

Rick shook his head. Had Gloval taken leave of his senses? The

Zentraedi were giant warriors, killers! Their huge body parts and remains

were scattered all over Macross City for one and all to see. Rick had seen to

that! But even as his mind was shouting all this to his inner ear, an

irrefutable realization was fighting its way to the surface.

"B-but how?" Rick stammered.

"Apparently those were reduction chambers that we saw, Lieutenant

Hunter," said Lisa, picking up on his confusion and distress.

"It's pleasant to see you again, Lieutenant," said the gray-faced

Zentraedi

"Yes, not long ago you were in a similar position," added the heavy one.

A similar position? Rick asked himself. Then recognition joined

realization: These three had been present during the interrogation!

"But what are they doing here, Commander?" Rick held his hands out

in a gesture of uncertainty. "Were they captured, or, uh..."

"They have come in peace, Hunter."

"Voluntarily and at great personal risk," said Lisa. "They're asking for

our protection."

Rick was stunned. "Protection? Are we supposed to say, 'All is forgiven,

be my guest,' or what?" He turned to Gloval. "Have you seen Macross,

Captain?"

"Relax, Lieutenant."

"Then what do you want from me-my tacit approval?"

"You're here for the same reason that I asked Commander Hayes and

Lieutenant Sterling to join us: because you've had prior contact with the

aliens."

Rick turned to the aliens. They were pressed together on the hot seat

couch, expectant, almost jubilant looks on their faces.

"Why? What are your reasons for deserting, for wanting to join us? You

don't know anything about us."

"We want to live the Micronian life," said Bron.

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"There is happiness aboard this ship," said Konda.

"Minmei is here," said Rico.

Rick was speechless. Did the alien really say "Minmei" or had he just

imagined it? All of a sudden he felt nauseous. His voice sounded thin and

strained as he asked them how they knew about Micronian ways

and...Minmei. And their answer was even more surprising than he had

feared.

"We have already lived among you as spies."

For Rick's benefit the captain recapped what had been learned in

previous debriefing sessions with the aliens. How they had been inserted

into the SDF-1 at the same time Lisa and Rick's Vermilion Team had made

their great escape; how the three agents had walked unnoticed for weeks

through Macross City; how they had made their own great escape from Bird

Island; how tales of their exploits and disaffection with war had spread

through the Zentraedi fleet; how there were more than a dozen others like

them aboard the fortress even now; and how Minmei was at the center of it

all.

"...And the most beautiful things of all were Minmei's singing and the

fact that males and females, er, stayed together."

"Some people even spoke out against fighting," Rico added.

Kyle! Rick said to himself.

"Once we became used to it," Konda was saying, "we started to like

living here."

"We can't go back," Bron reminded them.

"And what would be the sense, since it is known that you control the

Protoculture."

All heads turned to purple-haired Konda.

"Exactly what is this 'Protoculture'?" asked Caruthers, speaking for the

first time since Rick's entrance.

"You know exactly what it is," Bron said flatly.

"It's not nice to make fun of us."

Rico seemed to be sincere about it, but Gloval wanted to avoid the issue

131

of Protoculture during this first session. He cleared his throat and asked

Rick how he would feel about granting the aliens political asylum.

Rick had sensed it coming for a while and had been slowly formulating

his thoughts. "I would be in favor of it," he told the panel. "If only as a first

step toward a possible truce or peace." There was no need to mention the

obvious military advantages to be gained once the aliens had been fully

debriefed.

"I can't believe what I'm hearing," said Caruthers. "Just a moment ago

you were reminding us of the atrocities that these...creatures had

perpetrated on Macross, and now you're willing to grant them asylum."

"Really, Captain Gloval," Maistroff added, picking up the ball. "Don't

you think we should be consulting with someone who has a clearer

understanding of this entire matter? I, for one, am not convinced of their

claims. This is a ruse."

"Hmmm," Gloval mused. "Anything you want to add, Hunter?"

Rick faced the colonels. "The aliens are bred for war and conquest. It's

the only life they've known. But contact with our ways has erased who

knows how many generations of aggressive conditioning almost overnight.

Singing, marriage, love. Even a kiss can set them off-Commander Hayes

and I indicated that much in our report.

"There has to be some attempt made at peace."

"Good lord, man!" said Caruthers, his fist striking the desktop. "You're

talking about living with aliens!"

Maistroff mirrored the gesture. "They may look like us, Lieutenant

Hunter, but don't be fooled: I'm certain that this is some sort of Zentraedi

trap."

"You weren't aboard that Zentraedi cruiser, Colonel. I'm telling you,

these three had their first taste of freedom aboard the SDF-1, and the word

has already started to spread. By granting them asylum we're

demonstrating that ours is the better life. We can create a mutiny in that

fleet."

"If three are willing to desert," said Lisa, "three hundred will, then

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three thousand."

Caruthers laughed shortly. "Now, there's some nice emotional logic."

"We must make them understand that there are alternatives to war,"

Lisa continued. "If we can get them to understand another way of life, one

that's not a matter of win or die, maybe we can change the focus of their

lives and live with them in peace."

"Very eloquent," said Maistroff, applauding, his voice dripping sarcasm.

"A truly excellent speech, Commander Hayes. But these are aliens we're

dealing with. You can't possibly expect them to adapt to our way of life."

The three still-couched Zentraedi were turning their heads from

speaker to speaker, trying to follow the conversation. Frowns of concern

had replaced their initially confident expressions. Rico was about to say

something, but just then someone knocked at the doorway and entered the

Special Sessions room unannounced. It was one of Lang's white-frocked,

glassy-eyed Robotechnicians.

"What is the meaning of this?" demanded Caruthers. "How dare you

barge in like this?"

The man was carrying a file which he presented straightaway to Gloval,

undaunted by Caruthers's reprimand. The captain returned a salute and

aimed a dismissive gesture toward the colonel. "I asked Lang to have this

sent to me as quickly as possible."

Gloval began to run through the file, uttering sounds of interest and

surprise.

Max, Lisa, and Rick exchanged glances.

"What's he got there?" Sterling whispered.

"Lang's medical profiles on the aliens," Lisa returned.

The colonels were halfway out of their chairs peering at the file. "Well,

what is it, Captain?" Maistroff asked at last.

Gloval passed him the file. "I had the laboratory analyze the aliens' cell

structure. You may find this intriguing. As a matter of fact, I'm certain you

will."

Save for the sound of pages being turned, the room was silent while

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Maistroff and Caruthers read. Ultimately the file began to shake in the

colonel's hands.

"It's incredible! Why, their blood types and genetic structures are

virtually identical to ours! We're effectively the same beings!"

This seemed to shock the three Zentraedi as much as anyone else in the

room.

"I expected something like this," Lisa remarked.

"You could be right, Commander," said Max. "We might have a

common ancestor race, after all."

"Well now, it seems to me that we can no longer treat these, ah, people

as aliens. I believe we're safe in proceeding with this case as we would with

any other request for political asylum."

"Hold on a minute, Gloval," Maistroff protested. "First of all, I don't

think that the results of one lab test should influence the decisions of this

council. As far as I'm concerned, Lang's evidence is inconclusive. Lord

knows the man has reason enough to want to keep these three aboard. But

that's beside the point. And so what if we are of similar genetic background?

These men-and I use the term advisedly-are the enemies of this ship and all

aboard her. I move for imprisonment until such time as their true purpose

for being here can be ascertained."

Gloval listened closely, nodding his head, then said, "And as captain of

this vessel, I say we grant these gentlemen political asylum."

The three Zentraedi were on their feet hugging each other even before

the last word left the captain's mouth. Rick, Lisa, and Max risked guarded

smiles. But Maistroff was enraged, standing at his chair and pounding the

desk with his fist.

"We can't make a decision as important as this without first consulting

the United Earth Defense Council!"

"You better hear him, Captain," Caruthers was saying.

"I accept the responsibility," Gloval answered them firmly.

Red-faced, Maistroff swallowed whatever it was he was going to say.

He motioned to Caruthers that they should leave, but at the door he turned

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and promised: "You haven't heard the end of this, Gloval."

"Captain," Lisa said after a moment.

Gloval acknowledged her.

"We're going to have trouble with them. They won't let it go at this.

They'll make contact with Earth HQ and try to get your decision

overturned."

Gloval turned a weary face to all of them. "We are forced to take

extraordinary measures. If the Earth Council wishes to continue denying

the facts, then so be it. But aboard this ship I will decide. Let them doom

themselves if they wish, but they will no longer sit in judgment of our fate."

135

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"Rick, I'm going out of my head," [Max Sterling] would say to me. "I've

been searching the city since I saw her at the premiere, and no one seems to

know her or know where she lives. I mean, how can that be? I thought

everybody knew everybody in Macross! I swear I'm in love with her; I'm

going to ask her to marry me if I ever see her again!"

"...And I remember saying to him, "Sterling, you're going to marry a girl

with green hair?" It was a foolish enough remark given the fact that Max had

worn a blue tint in his hair ever since I'd known him, but an absolute riot

considering who Miriya turned out to be!

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

Quadrono ace Miriya Parino did a double take as the Micronian work

crew passed her on Macross Boulevard. It wasn't the big smile on the

foreman's face that caught her attention-she was used to those appraising

looks by now-but the equally silly faces of a group of stragglers who seemed

to have attached themselves to this particular crew. This whistling

happy-go-lucky subgroup of males-there must have been ten of

them-carried their shovels and crude digging implements as if they were

sacred relics, and the ear-to-ear grins they wore (not directed toward Miriya,

in any case) appeared to radiate from some newfound inner sense of

wonder and exuberance. This in itself was not uncommon among the

Micronians, even in the midst of all the present devastation, but there was

something about the posturing and enthusiasm that led Miriya to believe

things were not entirely as they seemed.

She began to follow them along a course that wound its way through

the devastated city streets, across planks that spanned battle-created craters,

through the burned-out hulks of houses and buildings, around carefully

organized and sorted piles of debris and the slag-heap remains of ruined

mecha, and finally into the heavily damaged amphitheater, where the

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workers began an assault on the rubble. Assisted by massive Robotech

droids and processors, the men and women threw themselves into the task

with an unmatched display of discipline and commitment. The stragglers

were no exception to this. But as Miriya moved in for a closer look, she

recognized one of them: It was Karita-the Zentraedi officer assigned to the

sizing chambers aboard Commander Breetai's flagship! Even those finely

tailored Micronian trousers and that cardigan sweater could not disguise

him.

As Miriya began to look around, she recognized several others from

Breetai's ship and instantly realized what was going on. She had to

congratulate the Commander on a brilliant plan. Obviously the Zentraedi

attack against the population center was more in the way of a diversionary

action. The actual purpose of the raid was to see to it that a sizable

contingent of micronized agents would be inserted into the dimensional

fortress. Their mission was to infiltrate the work crews and attain firsthand

knowledge of the Protocultural process that enabled the Micronians to

effect repairs to their damaged Robotechnological devices-information long

withheld from the Zentraedi by their Robotech Masters but something Zor

would have wanted them to possess.

Miriya was content, she would be able to return to her own mission

without having to concern herself with the progress of the war. Breetai was

doing his part, Miriya, hers.

She left the amphitheater, pushing her way through throngs of busy

Micronians, deliberately stepping between male-female couples whenever

she had the opportunity.

Miriya was on her way to one of the fighter pilots' training centers-at

least that was what she reasoned it to be. VIDEO ARCADE, she read above

the doorway. Whatever that meant. Inside were two floors of electronic

fighter-training devices for young Micronians. It was no wonder the

so-called VT pilots were so adept at handling their mecha; they were trained

from infancy to fly and fight. Several of the training devices were even

designed to perpetuate archaic hand-to-hand combat techniques. Miriya

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had become fascinated by one of these in particular, a device called

"Knife-Fight." It was possible that when the time came for Miriya to face off

with her Micronian archenemy, there would be no battle mecha available.

She therefore planned to prepare herself for any and all eventualities.

"What are you looking at, Rick?"

"That girl," he started to say.

"She was pretty rude if you ask me, pushing between us like that when

she could just as easily have stepped to the side."

"Yeah, but that green hair..."

"You find that attractive?"

"No...no, of course not, Lisa. It's just that Max has been looking all over

for some green-haired girl, and that might be her."

"Tell Max she's rude."

"Yeah, sure, but did you see where she went?"

"I really wasn't looking, Rick."

"Must've turned off into one of those stores, maybe the arcade."

"Do you want to stop and look for her or what?"

"Huh? No, no way. I'll just let Max know that I saw her."

"You do that."

They were on a walking tour of the damage; no particular place to go.

People were scrambling around getting things done, taking care of business,

fixing this and that. "Public works," one of Rick's more cynical VT friends

had said, "keeps their minds off the war."

"Is it like this all over?" Lisa asked, wanting to change the subject.

Rick nodded. "Nearly every part of the city was damaged in the attack."

"I wonder what the casualty figures will be like."

"I don't know," said Rick. And he didn't want to know.

Eventually their wanderings brought them around to the White Dragon.

(Let Rick have the lead and you always seem to end up here, Lisa told

herself.) The building itself looked untouched, but an overturned delivery

van was still smoldering in the street. There were enormous breaches in the

138

overhead tier in this section-jagged holes and lightning fissures. Uncle Max

and his wife Lena, Macross City's oddest couple, were just exiting from the

hexagonally shaped doorway. Rick called out to them and broke into a run.

"Rick!" said Max. "What in the world are you doing here? Are you all

right?"

"I'm fine, but what about you? Where are you two off to?"

"We've been worried sick about Kyle and Minmei," said Aunt Lena.

"We heard that the Star Bowl was practically destroyed, and I just can't

stand waiting around here any longer, praying they'll show up."

Max took his wife's hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze.

"They're at the hospital," Rick told them. "But there's no need to worry;

they're both fine."

"Oh, thank God!" said Lena.

"Kyle is bruised up, and Minmei just went along to hold, ah, look after

him, see that he was all right."

"Do you think we'd be allowed to see them, Rick?"

"It's a bit of a mess over there right now," said Lisa. "But they'll let you

through, I'm certain of it."

Rick suggested that they give it a try and spontaneously volunteered to

keep an eye on the restaurant during their absence. Lisa agreed, and Rick's

surrogate family hurried off.

Inside, they had their work cut out for them. Large portions of

water-damaged gypsum board had collapsed from the ceiling; water

dripped from a broken overhead pipe. Tables and chairs were overturned;

pictures had fallen from the walls; the remains of dishes and glassware

shaken from cabinets littered the floor. On every horizontal surface from the

smallest ledge to the only still-standing table was a gritty black coating of

resinous ash. Ultimately the entire place was going to need a couple of coats

of paint, but until then they could at least take care of the custodial

chores-cleaning, sweeping, scrubbing.

Rick opted for the shovel and broom detail while Lisa attacked the

tables and chairs with a detergent fluid. Rick noticed that she hummed to

139

herself while she worked. It brought a smile to his face each time she

stepped from behind that commander's mask. Here she was being

domestic...Here he was being domestic! And he actually felt good, just

losing himself in the mindlessness of it and seeing immediate results for a

change. There was a beginning and an end to this task.

Two hours later the mess had been cleared, the tables and chairs

uprighted.

"You know what would be good right now, Rick? A cup of fresh tea. I'll

do the honors."

Rick said, "Be my guest," and walked over to straighten one last picture.

It was a framed photo of Minmei taken over a year ago, sometime after the

Miss Macross pageant. He reached out a gloved hand and tipped it back to

vertical, the harsh memory of that stage kiss replaying itself as he did so, a

continuous loop that time and endless viewing had yet to erase. It's over

now, he was saying to himself when Lisa entered from the kitchen with two

cups.

I've lost her to stage, screen, Kyle, and now to the enemy!

"Don't burn yourself," she warned him.

They sat at one of the tables overlooking the street. Work crews had

moved into the area to cart off debris and undertake floor-by-floor searches

of each building. Lisa watched a group of strange-looking men busy

themselves clearing rubble as she sipped her tea. They seemed downright

enthusiastic, and it got her to thinking.

"You know, Rick, these simple activities don't mean much to us, but to

the Zentraedi our everyday, humdrum world must seem wonderful by

comparison. It doesn't surprise me at all that Rico and those other two

decided to defect. Sometimes I think I'd like to desert. Just forget about the

military and get myself back to basics." She laughed to herself. "Get myself

back. Listen to me. I've never even been there."

"Are you thinking about the Zentraedi or Kyle?" Rick asked smugly.

She grinned wryly. "It's a pipe dream, and I know it. I'm Ms. Military,

and he hates the military. Great way to begin a relationship, right? But it's

140

true that I've been nursing some doubts since I met him. He's a ghost who's

come back to haunt me. Everything about him: his looks, all his antiwar

speeches. I keep seeing Karl. And it doesn't help any when we've got to hear

Maistroff and Caruthers expressing the same old...you know what I'm

talking about."

"So much for playing it by the book, huh?"

"Who knows? And as for Lynn-Kyle, he doesn't know I exist. I've got

two strikes against me: this uniform and Minmei." She saw Rick's face grow

long and apologized.

"If you don't want to talk about it..."

"There's nothing to talk about." Rick turned his face away. "I'm angrier

at myself than I am with her. I mean, how could I have been so sure that we

had something together when as far as she was concerned we were just

friends? Someday you'll have to get me drunk and I'll tell you all about our

wonderful two weeks together in the basement of this ship."

"I'm a good listener, Rick. I'm not going to judge you or anything."

He shook his head. "Maybe some other time. I'm just sick of getting all

twisted up by the whole thing. Let her stay with her cousin. Let her marry

him for all I care. I just wanna have all this behind me for a change. It's

really bizarre, and that's the long and short of it. Back on Earth I could at

least move to another town or another country. But we're all stuck on the

ship for the duration, the whole nine yards. Just one big happy family of

space wanderers."

He had tears in his eyes when he looked at Lisa again, but his voice was

self-mocking. "This was probably how it was at the beginning, a few

thousand hominids running around the Serengeti and every one of them in

love with the wrong person."

Lisa laughed and covered her mouth with her hand.

"I think you're writing yourself off too soon, Rick. Maybe it'll just take

time. Have you ever actually told her how you feel?"

Rick shrugged. "My actions speak for me."

"Not enough. Sometimes it's just not enough. You have to tell her.

141

Otherwise, she's in the dark and Kyle will take her away. Of course, you'll

get to hold on to your regrets and your self-pity...

Lisa recalled Claudia telling her as much.

"Is that what I'm doing? Is that how you really see it?" His watery eyes

were locked on hers, searching.

She exhaled slowly.

And a warning siren went off outside.

"Another attack!" said Lisa, jumping up from the table. "You better get

back to the base! I'll lock up in here and meet you at the rail line!"

"Don't take too long," he told her from the doorway. "Sammie can't

handle your station!"

"Be careful!" she called after him, but he was already gone.

"Enemy battle mecha," said Claudia Grant. "Course heading

zero-zero-niner, Third Quadrant. Looks like the same group to me,

Captain."

Gloval agreed with her assessment after studying the readout. The

same two dozen Zentraedi pods and fighters had appeared on the threat

board after the attack on Macross, moving erratically from quadrant to

quadrant, half the time in pursuit of the fortress and at other times speeding

from it. There was reason to believe that these were the very ships that had

escaped from the fortress after the CD forces had gained the upper hand.

Perhaps, Gloval now speculated, under the command of this apparently

crazed Zentraedi officer named Khyron, whom the three defectors had

mentioned over and over, sometimes referring to him as "the Backstabber."

Rico had actually credited him with more Battlepod kills than the combined

total of the Defense Forces.

"Skull Team is up and away, Captain," Gloval heard Sammie report

from Lisa's station. He noticed that her foot was tapping nervously.

"Kirkland," she continued, "prepare to supply cover. They'll be coming

about on your right flank."

"Left flank," Claudia corrected her. "Their cat's away from

142

Prometheus."

"Uh, scratch that, Kirkland. Look for Delta on your left flank. Indigo,

your signal is 'buster.' Return to base immediately. Uh, uh...Damn it! Where

is Commander Hayes? I'm going crazy-"

"Right behind you, Sammie," Lisa said breathlessly. She turned a quick

salute to the captain: "Sorry I was delayed, sir."

"It's all yours," Sammie said, stepping aside.

"Estimate five minutes to contact," said Vanessa.

Gloval glanced over at the board. The Zentraedi warships were still

holding at their post-attack coordinates. What could this small contingent

of pods have in mind?

"Looks like a kamikaze run," said Claudia. "They should know better

than that by now."

Lisa turned to her. "Judging from what the defectors had to say, I

wouldn't put it past them to try anything from now on." She raised Skull

Leader on the net. "Bandits will be in your lap in three minutes,

Lieutenant."

"Roger," Rick answered her. "I show them on wide beam."

"Try telling them to go home, Lieutenant Hunter."

Rick's laugh came through the speaker, followed by a loud and

seemingly sincere, "Go home!"

Still unwilling to rule out miracles, Lisa checked the displays.

"Uh, sorry, Skull Leader. Nice try, but it didn't work."

"I copy that, Commander. Guess we've gotta speak to them in the only

language they understand."

Lisa's screen began to light up; the enemy mecha had opened fire. Skull

and the other teams were engaging them. Radar blips began to disappear

from the board, VTs and enemy paint.

"Never say die, Rick," she said softly into her mike.

143

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

...But if such a contest existed, I would cast my vote without hesitation

for Khyron-history's principal man in the middle. Distrusted by Dolza,

dismissed by Breetai, feared by his own troops, and now fixed upon by the

"Micronians," Khyron had moved into what might be called transparanoia

(or better still, metanoia). He simply was all those things normal paranoid

personality types delude themselves into believing: persecuted, grandiose,

and essentially pivotal in the great scheme of things.

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

The Zentraedi flagship had self-sealed itself; an undetectable patch of

green armor covered the damage done to its blunt nose by the ramming arm

of the fortress-a design feature the Robotech Masters had engineered into

the ships of the fleet. Would that breaches in command were so easily

sealed, thought Breetai, and breaches in discipline.

Just now he was pacing the floor of the observation booth, as always,

under the analytical gaze of his misshapen adviser.

Though limited in emotional range, the Zentraedi commander had run

the gamut of available responses since the inception of Exedore's plan to

assault the SDF-1 right through to Khyron's news of mass desertion among

the ranks. Things had looked good early on: He had forced the Micronians

to launch their so-called Daedalus Maneuver, their Destroids had been

destroyed, and Regault squads of Battlepods had been successfully inserted

into the fortress. There were indications of a massive battle having taken

place in the population center inside the Robotech ship; the Micronians had

recalled most of their fighters to deal with, the threat, and follow-up

transmissions on the tac net suggested that the Zentraedi had scored a

decisive victory. Much to Breetai and Exedore's surprise, Khyron's Botoru

teams had also infiltrated the enemy's defense. Breetai had grown confident

of a sure Micronian surrender. Zor's Protoculture matrix would soon be his,

144

and with it would come greater glory than any had hitherto known.

But then word had been received from Khyron about the desertions.

Breetai refused to believe it.

"This must be the tremendous force the Robotech Masters have been

speaking of," Exedore said. "The legends have been most specific:

Continued contact with Micronians is to be avoided at all costs. They are

said to be in possession of a secret weapon which could ultimately destroy

us, leaving this quadrant wide open for an attack by the Invid. I have long

dreaded this day, m'lord."

Breetai expected no less; his advisor had been quoting the legends to

him since that first day when the fleet defolded from hyperspace near the

Micronians' homeworld.

"So you think I should have paid attention to those ancient warnings,

do you?"

"Perhaps, m'lord."

"And what of Commander in Chief Dolza, Exedore? What would we do

about him?"

"The question remains not what we would have done, Commander,"

Exedore countered, "but what we will do about him."

Desertion had turned the battle around. Although Breetai had yet to

formulate a clear picture of the events, Commander Khyron reported that

he had been forced to take punitive measures against some of the Zentraedi

troops. Soldiers had been abandoning their mecha and expressing a wish to

live among the Micronians. Some sort of psychological assault had been

launched against them-Khyron said that the deserters had referred to it as a

"Minmei." Obviously the perfected form of the weapon the Micronians had

been experimenting with for at least a year by their own reckoning. Breetai

recalled those early days: the low-frequency transmissions from the fortress

which had so confused Exedore's three Cyclops operatives, and later, the

disturbing effects produced by the male and female captives. Subsequently

there was the strange behavior of the returned spies and the trans-vids of

that Micronian battle record and death ray demonstration.

145

The secrets of Protoculture were theirs!

Driven from the dimensional fortress, Khyron had since been pursuing

a group of potential deserters, dispatching them one by one. He now had

them regrouped and headed again toward the SDF-1 on a suicide run.

Breetai, however, was having second thoughts: It was too late to undo any

of his past mistakes, but he might yet be able to profit from this latest upset.

Commander Azonia had informed him that Quadrono leader Miriya was

still aboard the fortress. Surely she'd see to it that the deserters wouldn't

live long enough to do the Zentraedi any harm. And as for these few

stragglers...

"Tell Khyron to call off his attack," Breetai now told his advisor. "We

will remove all our troops from Micronian influence immediately."

Exedore bowed slightly. "And then, m'lord?"

"Interrogate the deserters. You must see if you can determine the

nature of this power the Micronians have exerted. We may yet find a way to

resist their control."

"It shall be done."

Khyron had centered one of the Battlepods in his targeting screen. It

would require only a glancing blow to the upper right of the sphere to bring

the thing back into line. Mustn't let them stray too far from the fold, he said

to himself. All Micronian sympathizers have to stick together. He was just

elevating one of the mecha's handguns and bringing it to bear on the pod

when Exedore raised him on the comlink.

Breetai's orders were relayed.

"Isolate the deserters and lock them up?!" Khyron shouted into his

communicator. "Exedore, are you mad? What next, if we let them get away

with this?"

"You have your orders, Commander."

Khyron slammed his fist down on the control console of the Officer's

Pod. "We might just as well surrender to the Micronians!"

"Order your troops about, Commander. Commander Breetai has

146

ordered me to employ the nebulizer if you fail to comply."

"And what about the deserters aboard that ship?" Khyron demanded.

"Do you realize what damage they can do?"

"Miriya will see to them, Commander."

Khyron was stunned. "Miriya? Miriya Parino is aboard micronized?!

Why wasn't I informed of this?"

"That is Commander Breetai's prerogative," Exedore said plainly.

"Bah!"

Khyron shut down the comlink. So this was how it was going to be, he

said to himself. New lines were being drawn. And sooner or later he and

Breetai were going to find themselves on opposite sides. A sinister smile

began to surface. Let Breetai have his deserters, the infected ones. The

illness would spread through his fleet like an epidemic, and Dolza would

hear about it. With both Azonia and Breetai out of the way, Khyron would

be put in command. Then the real purge would commence; and not just

against the Micronians but against all those who defied the Zentraedi

imperative!

Human and Zentraedi mecha met head-on, crisscrossing silently in

space at skirmish speed. The Veritechs held back their fire until the last

possible moment, then unleashed a storm of missiles and gatling rounds at

the Battlepods and triple-fins. Spherical explosions threw short-lived light

against the night. Below them was the dark face of the Earth, undisturbed

and unconcerned.

Skull One's retros flared briefly to bleed the fighter of velocity as

ventral thrusters provided its lift, tipping the ship over so that Earth was

now above Rick for a moment. Most of the pods had also doubled back but

had yet to return fire. VTs from Vermilion and Blue teams were blowing

them out of space like sitting ducks. And where Lisa had been expecting a

kamikazelike attack, there was only a full-scale retreat. Rick moved to

within striking distance of two ostriches, his front fuselage guns blazing, but

the enemy refused to engage him; they simply rolled and showed him the

147

red glow of their foot thrusters.

"Certain reluctance out here or am I imagining things?" said Vermilion

Leader over the tac net.

"I copy that, V Leader," someone added.

"Skull One, do we pursue?"

"Uh, affirmative, V Leader," said Rick. "Let's go see what they're up to."

The Veritechs regrouped and boostered off after the fleeing Battlepods.

Rick was the first to spot the Officer's Pod; it seemed to be taking aim at one

of its own, herding the mecha back into formation with the rest. Rick hit his

afterburners and homed in on it.

He couldn't hold the enemy officer in the reticle but had a good view of

the ship on his forward scopes. It had to be the same one! Rick convinced

himself: There were no telltale markings of any kind-it was easily as worn,

scorched, and scratched as the rest of them-but that pilot seemed to have

his own signature. And from what the defectors had divulged, the name

attached to that craft would be "Khyron"-someone they seemed to fear

above all else.

Rick noticed two VTs from Blue making their approach against the

Officer's Pod. But Khyron was alert to their scheme and went after them in a

frenzy, handguns blasting away, top-mounted cannon erupting in salvos of

death. Both Veritechs sustained hits and disintegrated in the ensuing

explosions.

Meanwhile Rick was certain he had the drop on the pod. Distracted by

the two fighters, his quarry had turned his back to him, all guns forward.

But as Skull One sped in for the shot, the pod swiveled and caught sight of

him. Rick launched three missiles regardless, but pulsed bombardment

detonated the first, and the second and third fell to fratricide.

The tables were turned all of a sudden. The pod had a good opportunity

to tail Rick and slide easily into position for that lethal cone release, but in

the interim, Khyron's charges had escaped his control. So instead of

jumping on Rick, the pod turned around to reshepherd its widespread flock.

"They seem to be breaking off for good, Lieutenant," said the Vermilion

148

Leader.

Rick breathed a sigh of relief before he went on the net. "Have your

teams pull back to the fortress." He then raised Max on the commo screen.

"Scanners show warships along our heading, Skull One."

"All right, Max. Looks like they decided to go home, after all. Let's do

the same."

One by one the Veritechs retroed and began to reverse their headings.

The SDF-1, reconfigured to Cruiser mode now, was waiting for them in the

space above Earth's sunny side.

Later, Lisa met with Captain Gloval in his quarters. Ever since colonels

Maistroff and Caruthers had walked out on the asylum session, she had

been searching for some way to counteract their influence with the United

Earth Defense Council. Should the UEDC leaders overturn Gloval's ruling,

there was no telling what might become of the defectors. For all anyone

aboard the SDF-1 knew, Rico and his companions could possess some

means of spreading the word, good or bad, back to the Zentraedi fleet. They

had stated that there were ten other micronized soldiers in hiding. And

perhaps those ten were prepared to engage in acts of sabotage if asylum was

refused. Things hadn't gone very well with her father the last time they met,

but surely he would have to be open-minded now, in light of these recent

developments and this new physical evidence of a possible link between

Humans and Zentraedi. She told Gloval as much.

"You know I'm right, sir. When we granted asylum to those defectors,

we changed this whole conflict. We're defending their desire to adopt our

values. If I don't go to Earth and line up some support, we might very well

be ordered to send them back."

Gloval had his back to her while he listened. But now he swung away

from the starfield view out the portside bay and faced her. He was skeptical.

"Our dealings with the Council have proved less than satisfying so far.

What makes you think you'll be able to convince them now?"

"I'm not promising anything, Captain. But we do have new evidence on

149

our side. If I can just get my father behind us."

"That's a very large if, Lisa."

"The results of Dr. Lang's lab tests should be enough to reopen a

dialogue with the Council if nothing else. The Zentraedi race and the

Human race are essentially the same. They could be our long-lost brothers

and sisters. If that isn't compelling enough, I don't know what is."

"You're determined to make this work."

"Yes, sir. I'm aware of what you said after the session-that you're no

longer going to let the council dictate to this ship-but I would hate to see

things go in that direction. No matter how disaffected the civilians are,

Macross will never be the same after that attack. They have to be

disembarked and resettled on Earth. What can we do otherwise? Search the

galaxy for some hospitable world? If we still had our fold generators that

might be possible, but given the speeds we can attain...I don't have to tell

you this, Captain."

Gloval waved his hand dismissively. "You're right to say it. I need to

hear it sometimes."

Lisa perched herself on the corner of his desk. "We've been lucky. But

how much longer can this go on? Even if the Zentraedi never achieve a

decisive victory, they're going to succeed in whittling us down to nothing.

Our stores are not inexhaustible. And God knows, our Defense Force isn't

inexhaustible. And no matter what the Council proclaims-no matter what

they threaten us with-this ship is not expendable. We are the only thing that

stands between the Zentraedi armada and the Earth itself." Lisa motioned

out the bay to the stars. "They have over one million warships out there!

We're losing sight of that because we've been lucky and they've been foolish.

But even in the best of winning streaks luck has an uncanny way of

reversing itself. We have to come to terms with the Council and the

Zentraedi. I think the appearance of the defectors is the first step in that

process, and they took it. Maybe we've already done our part by offering

asylum, but I'm convinced we have to go further. I've got to get to my father

before Maistroff and Caruthers get to him."

150

Gloval tugged at his mustache. "It could be risky, Lisa."

"How, sir?"

"Because your father wants you off this ship. And if we lose you now..."

She smiled at him. "You have Sammie, Captain. She'll get the hang of

it."

Gloval snorted. "Sammie will someday make a proper First Officer, but

she lacks your overall knowledge of this fortress. You are needed here, Lisa."

"Thank you, sir," she said, lowering her gaze. "But this war must be

stopped. Let me try this approach, Captain. I promise you I won't let my

father prevent my return."

Gloval nodded and exhaled loudly. "All right, you have my permission.

But think carefully before you decide to disobey any orders from the Council.

Remember who and what you are, Lisa."

She stood up sharply and saluted him. "I'll begin working on a joint

report tonight and have a draft for you in the morning."

Gloval stood up and extended his hand to her. "You'll leave as soon as

possible."

Lisa was already formulating her report when she left the captain's

quarters, experimenting with wording and editing, choosing the phrases

and approach that would work best with her father. She was so wrapped up

in this process that she got halfway to the bridge before realizing that she

was supposed to be headed to her barracks. Turning around, she became

preoccupied with a different train of thought: It was possible that she might

never set foot on the bridge again. Captain Gloval was right; her father

wanted her off the SDF-1, and he would try to make good his demands this

time-especially after hearing the news she was bringing. She could hear him

now: What?! Aliens aboard the fortress?! A-and Gloval's granted them

political asylum? A-and you expect me to allow you to return to that ship of

fools?!

This started her thinking along a line of "last thoughts": This might be

the last time she walked this corridor, the last time she slept in her quarters,

151

the last time she saw her crewmates-Claudia, Sammie, Kim, Vanessa...and

Rick. What would Rick say if he knew she was leaving?

Had Lisa walked directly to the elevator, she would have had an

opportunity to ask him in person, because the lieutenant had stepped off a

moment before she arrived. And it would have been doubly interesting

considering that he had been wondering how she might react to his asking

her out to dinner.

But fate operated along the same lines then as it does today, and her

autopilot wrong turn along the corridor had erased all chance of a meeting.

Dinner would have to wait-for quite awhile if the truth be permitted at this

stage of the narrative. And not onboard the SDF-1, either. Events were

about to take a twist everyone had feared but no one had dared anticipate.

The war was about to escalate. Death was about to gain the upper hand.

Rick and Lisa would meet again, but against a landscape that would

overshadow any joy such a reunion might ordinarily bring.

End

RTUCN.COM

152

Document Outline

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Force of Arms

By Jack McKinney

1987

2

For Bonnie Bader, and her work on this project

3

4

Part I:

Showdown

5

6

PROLOGUE

In the 1990s, a global civil war swept across the planet Earth; few

wanted this war, but no one seemed to be able to avert it. It absorbed all the

smaller disparate wars, rebellions, and terrorist struggles in the same way a

huge storm vacuums up all the lesser weather systems around it.

The War was fought with conventional weapons for the most part, but

by 1999 it was clear that its escalation pointed directly to an all-out nuclear

exchange—planetary obliteration. There seemed to be nothing any sane

person could do about it. By then, the War had a life of its own.

As the human race prepared to die—for everyone knew that the final

phase of the War would surely exterminate all life on Earth, the fragile lunar

and

Martian

research

colonies,

and

the

various

orbital

constructs—something like a malign miracle happened.

A damaged starship—a super dimensional fortress created by the dying

alien mastermind, Zor—appeared in Earth's skies. It crashed on a tiny

Pacific island called Macross. Its descent wreaked more havoc than any war:

there was tremendous damage and loss of life and numerous natural

disasters. The human race was compelled to pause and take stock of itself.

Zor had served the evil Robotech Masters, but he had resolved to serve

them no more and had hidden his ultimate secrets concerning

Protoculture—the most powerful force in the universe—in the fortress. The

Robotech Masters needed those secrets not only to conquer the universe but

to protect themselves from the vengeful attacks of the savage Invid, a race of

creatures sworn to destroy them.

Thus, the focus of an intergalactic conflict came to bear on the formerly

insignificant Earth.

The super dimensional fortress was Earth's first inkling of the greater

events taking place outside the bounds of human knowledge. Earth's leaders

saw at once that the wrecked SDF-1 could be rebuilt and become a rallying

point that would unite a divided human race.

7

A ten-year project began, incorporating the brains and energies of the

entire planet. But on the day the SDF-1 was to be relaunched to guard

humanity from alien attack, disaster struck again. The Zentraedi—the

Robotech Masters' giant race of ferocious warrior clones—struck, bringing

devastation to the Earth in an effort to recapture the SDF-1.

The desperate crew of the SDF-1 attempted a spacefold jump to get

clear of the attack. Yet a miscalculation resulted in the ship's reappearance

far from its intended destination: The SDF-1 and most of the civilian

population of Macross Island were suddenly, transported out to the orbit of

the planet Pluto.

And so the long, perilous voyage back to Earth began. The SDF-1

battled for its life, hounded by the Zentraedi armada at every turn.

Returning after more than a year, the crew found that it was no longer

welcome on the homeworld—in the view of the ruling powers, they

constituted too much of a danger to Earth's safety as well as the rulers' own

authority.

A renewed Zentraedi offensive resulted in horrendous casualties on

Earth and reinforced the Earth leaders' determination to refuse haven to the

SDF-1—even though it had waged the only meaningful resistance to alien

invasion.

So the great star battleship was forced to ride an orbit to nowhere, its

crew and civilian refugees struggling desperately to stay alive. The Zentraedi

continued to plot new war plans, determined to have the ship and the

secrets of Protoculture.

Alien agents were planted within the ship, reduced from their fifty and

sixty-foot heights to human size. These spies found themselves strangely

affected by the experience of human life as their long-dormant emotions

were awakened by the sight of humans mingling and showing affection and

in particular by the singing of Minmei—the ship's superstar and media idol

and the mainstay of its morale.

Upon their return to the invasion fleet, the spies' stories and souvenirs

of their experiences among the humans led to the defection of a dozen and

8

more of the Zentraedi and disobedience in the ranks of those who remained

behind.

Aboard the SDF-1, human life fell into patterns of conflict and emotion.

Lieutenant Rick Hunter, fighter pilot in the Robotech Defense Forces,

experienced constant confusion and turmoil over his love for Minmei and

simultaneous attraction to Commander Lisa Hayes, the SDF-1's First

Officer.

This triangle formed the core of a larger web of loves and hates, the

sort of human emotional blaze that the colossal Zentraedi found so bathing

and

debilitating

.

Nevertheless, the Zentraedi imperative was battle, and battle it would

be. The aliens deployed a million-plus ships in their armada, restrained

from all-out attack only by their need to capture the SDF1's Protoculture

secrets intact.

Breetai, commander of the invasion force, moved in his own intrigues

against two of his rebellious subordinates: Azonia, the female warlord, and

Khyron the Backstabber, psychotic demon of battle.

But the Robotech War proved to be far more complex than any of

them—Zentraedi or human—could have ever imagined.

Dr. Lazlo Zand,

On Earth As It Is in Hell:

Recollections of the Robotech War

9

CHAPTER ONE

I guess Max was the most conspicuous example of the growing war

weariness and hunger for peace. As the top VT pilot, he was revered by all the

aspiring hot-doggers and would-be aces.

When he came back from a mission, his aircraft maintenance people

would always stencil the symbols for his latest kills on the side of his ship;

that was their right. But like a lot of us who had been in the eye of the storm

for too long, he began avoiding the jokes and high-fives and swaggering in

the ready rooms, barracks, and officers' club. He was still top man on the

roster, but it was plain that his attitude was changing.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

"Ya ain't so big now, are ya, ya freakin' alien?" the big bruiser said,

shaking a scarred fist the size of a roast in his face.

Well, no, he wasn't. Karita had been a Zentraedi soldier some forty feet

tall. But now, having been reduced to the size of a human and defecting to

their side in the Robotech War, he was only a medium-build, slightly

less-than-average-height fellow facing three hulking brawlers eager to split

his head wide open in a Macross alley.

Even as a Zentraedi, Karita hadn't excelled at combat; his main duty

had been tending the Protoculture sizing chambers, the very same ones in

which he had been micronized. The situation looked hopeless; the three

ringed him in, fists cocked, light from the distant streetlamps illuminating

the hatred in their faces.

He tried to dodge past them, but they were too fast. The biggest

grabbed him and hurled him against the wall. Karita dropped, half-stunned,

the back of his scalp bleeding.

He cursed himself for his carelessness; a slip of the tongue in the

restaurant had given him away. Otherwise, no one could have told him

apart from any other occupant of the SDF-1.

10

But he could scarcely be blamed. The wonders of life aboard the super

dimensional fortress were enough to make any Zentraedi careless. The

humans had rebuilt their city; they mingled, both sexes, all ages. They lived

lives in which emotions were given free expression, and there was an

astonishing force called "love."

It was enough to make any Zentraedi, born into a Spartan, merciless

warrior culture with strict segregation of the sexes, forget himself. And so

Karita had made his error; he had gone into the White Dragon in the hopes

of getting a glimpse of Minmei. He didn't realize what he was saying when

he let slip the fact that he had adored her since he had first seen her image

on a Zentraedi battlecruiser. Then he saw the hard looks the trio gave him.

He left quickly, but they followed.

During the course of the war, everybody aboard had lost at least one

friend or loved one. The Zentraedi, too, had suffered losses-many more than

the SDF-1, in fact. That didn't stop Karita and the other defectors from

hoping for a new life among their former enemies. Most humans were at

least tolerant of the Zentraedi who'd deserted from their invading armada.

Some humans even liked the aliens; three of them, former spies, had human

girlfriends. But he should have known there would be humans who wouldn't

see things that way.

The three closed in on him.

One of the men launched a kick Karita was too dazed to avoid. It was

not so much a sharp pain he felt as a tremendous, panic-making numbness.

He wondered woozily if his ribs were broken. Not that it mattered; it didn't

look like his attackers were going to stop short of killing him. They didn't

realize that they had picked on one of the most unmilitary of Zentraedi;

given a different one, they would have had more of a fight on their hands.

One of them drew back his heavy work boot to kick Karita again; Karita

closed his eyes, waiting for the blow. But the sudden sound of shoe leather

sliding on pavement and the thud of a falling body made him reopen them.

He looked up to see one of the assailants down and the other two

turning to face an interloper.

11

Max Sterling didn't look like the conventional image of a Veritech ace.

The brilliant Robotech Defense Force flier was slender, wore blue-tinted

aviator glasses-with corrective lenses-and dyed his hair blue in keeping with

the current fad for wild colors.

This young RDF legend looked mild, even vulnerable. In a time of crisis,

Max Sterling had risen from obscurity to dazzle humanity and the Zentraedi

with his matchless combat flying. But that hadn't changed his basic humility

and self-effacing good-naturedness.

"No more," Max told the assailants quietly. The bully on the ground

shook his head angrily. Max stepped between the other two, went to Karita's

side, and knelt, offering his hand.

Minmei's Aunt Lena had watched the ominous trio follow Karita when

he left the White Dragon; it took her a few minutes to find Sterling, so Max

said, "Sorry I'm a little late."

This bookish-looking young man who held the highest kill score of any

combat pilot in the ship offered the Zentraedi his hand. "D' you think you

can stand?"

The attacker Max had floored was back on his feet, eyeing Max's RDF

uniform. "You have two seconds to butt out of this, kid."

Max rose and turned, leaving Karita sitting against the wall. He took off

his glasses and dropped them into Karita's limp hand.

"I guess there's gonna be a fight here, so let's get one thing straight: In

case you missed the news, this man isn't our enemy. Now, are you going to

let us by or what?"

Of course not. They had looked at Karita and automatically thought,

We can take him! And that had decided the matter. Now here was the pale,

unimposing Max, and their assessment was the same: We can take him, too.

No sweat.

So the one Max had knocked down came at him first, while the others

fanned out on either side.

Max didn't wait. He ducked under a powerful, slow haymaker and

struck with the heel of his hand, breaking the first one's nose. A second

12

attacker, a thick-bodied man in coveralls, hooked his fist around with all his

might, but Max simply wasn't there. Dodging like a ghost, he landed a solid

jab to the man's nose, bloodying it, and stepped out of the way as he

staggered.

There wasn't much fighting room, and Max's usual style involved

plenty of movement. But it didn't matter very much this time; he didn't

want to leave Karita unprotected.

The third vigilante, younger, leaner, and faster than the other two,

swung doubled fists at him from behind. Max avoided the blow, adding

momentum with a quick, hard tug so that the man went toppling to his

knees. Then Max spun precisely so that he had his back nearly up against

the first attacker and rammed his elbow back.

The man's breath rushed out of him as he clutched his midsection. Max

snapped a fist back into his face, then turned to plant a sidelong kick to the

gut of the one in the coveralls. The incredible reflexes and speed that served

him so well in dogfights were plain; he was difficult to see much less hit or

avoid.

Karita had struggled to his feet. "Stop!"

The three attackers were battered up a bit, but the fight had barely

started. Max Sterling wasn't even breathing hard.

"No more fighting," Karita labored, clutching his side. "Hasn't there

been enough?"

The first man wiped blood from a swelling lip, studying Max.

Indicating Karita with a toss of his head, he said, "Him and his kind killed

my son. I don't care what you-"

"Look at this," Max said quietly. He displayed the RDF patch on his

uniform, a diamond with curved sides, like a fighting kite. "You think I don't

understand? But listen t' me: He's out of the war. Just like I want to be and

you want to be."

"But we're never going to have peace unless we put the damn war

behind us! So drop it, all right? Or else, c'mon: Let's finish this thing."

The first man was going to come at him again, but the other two

13

grabbed his shoulders from either side. The young one said, "All right-for

now."

Max supported Karita with his shoulder, and the three stepped aside to

let them pass. There was a tense moment as the pilot and the injured alien

walked between the attackers; one of them shifted his weight, as if

reconsidering his decision.

But he thought better of it and held his place, saying, "What about you,

flyboy? You're goin' out there again to fight 'em, aren't ya? To kill 'em if ya

can?"

Max knew that Karita was staring at him, but he answered. "Yeah.

Maybe I'll wind up killing somebody a lot like your son tonight. Or he'll

wind up killing me. Who knows?"

Max put Karita into a cab and sent him to the temporary quarters

where the defectors were housed. He didn't have time to go along; he was

late for duty as it was.

Waiting for another cab, Max gazed around at the rebuilt city of

Macross. Overhead, the Enhanced Video Emulation system had created the

illusion of a Terran night sky, blocking out the view of a distant alloy ceiling.

It had been a long time since Max or any of the SDF-1's other

inhabitants had seen the real thing. He was already defying the odds, having

survived so many combats. The EVE illusion was nice, but he hoped he'd get

to see the true sky and hills and oceans of Earth again before his number

came up.

Elsewhere on the SDF-1, two women rode in an uncomfortable silence

on an elevator descending to a hangar deck, watching the level indicators

flash.

Commander Lisa Hayes, the ship's First Officer, wasn't at ease with

many people. But Lieutenant Claudia Grant, standing now with arms folded

and avoiding Lisa's gaze as Lisa avoided hers, had been a close

friend-perhaps Lisa's only true friend-for years.

14

Lisa tried to lighten the gloom. "Well, here I go again. Off for another

skirmish with the brass."

That was certainly putting the best face on it. No previous effort had

convinced the United Earth Defense Council to either begin peace

negotiations with the Zentraedi invaders or allow the SDF-1 and its civilian

refugees to return home. Lisa had volunteered to try again, to present

shocking new evidence that had just emerged and exert all the pressure she

could on her father, Admiral Hayes, to get him to see reason and then

persuade the rest of the UEDC.

Claudia looked up. They were an odd pair: Claudia, tall and

exotic-looking, several years older than Lisa, with skin the color of dark

honey; and Lisa, pallid and slender, rather plain-looking until one looked a

little closer.

Claudia tried to smile, running a hand through her tight brown curls. "I

don't know whether it'll help or not to say this, but stop looking so grim.

Girl, you remind me of the captain of a sinking ship when he finds out they

substituted deck chairs for the lifeboats. It's gonna be hard to change

people's minds like that. Besides, all they can do is say no again."

There was a lot more to it than that, of course. Admiral Hayes was not

likely to let his only child leave Earth-to return to the SDF-1 and the endless

Zentraedi attacks-once she was in the vast UEDC headquarters. Neither

Claudia nor Lisa had mentioned that they would probably never see each

another again.

"Yeah, I guess," Lisa said, as the doors opened and the noise and heat

of the hangar deck flooded in.

The two women stepped out into a world of harsh worklights. Combat

and other craft were parked everywhere, crammed in tightly with wings and

ailerons folded for more efficient storage.

Maintenance crews were swarming over Veritechs damaged in the

most recent fighting, while ordnance people readied ships slated for the

next round of patrols and surveillance flights. The SDF-1's survival

depended in large part on the Veritechs; but they would have been useless if

15

not for the unflagging, often round-the-clock work of the men and women

who repaired and serviced and rearmed them and the others who risked

their lives as part of the flight deck catapult crews.

Welding sparks flew; ordnance loader servos whined, lifting missiles

and ammunition into place. Claudia had to raise her voice to be heard.

"Have you told Rick about the trip, or have you been too busy to see him?"

Busy had nothing to do with it, and they both knew that. Lisa had

concluded that her love for Rick Hunter, leader of the Veritech Skull Team,

was one-sided. By leaving the SDF-1 on a vital mission, she was also almost

certainly giving up any chance of ever changing that.

"I thought I'd call him from the shuttle," she said.

Claudia exercised admirable restraint and did not blurt out, Lisa, stop

being such a coward! Because Lisa wasn't-she had the combat decorations

to prove it, medals and fruit cocktail that any line officer would respect. But

where emotions were concerned, the SDF-1's competent and capable First

always seemed to prefer hiding under a rock someplace.

The shuttle was near the aircraft elevator-air lock that would lift it to

the flight deck. Lisa's gear and the evidence she hoped would sway Admiral

Hayes and the others at the UEDC were already aboard. The crew chief was

running a final prelaunch check.

"The shuttle is nearly ready for launch, Captain," a female

enlisted-rating tech reported. "Launch in ten minutes."

Captain Henry Gloval crossed the bridge to glance at several other

displays, stroking his thick mustache. "Any signs of Zentraedi activity in our

area?" His voice still carried the burred r's and other giveaways of his

Russian mother tongue.

Vanessa answered promptly, "There's been absolutely no contact, no

activity at all."

The stupendous Zentraedi armada still shadowed and prowled around

the wandering battle fortress. Time and again the aliens had attacked, but in

16

comparatively insignificant numbers. The defectors' information was only

now beginning to shed light on the reasons behind that.

"There's been nothing at all?" Gloval asked again, eyes flicking across

the readouts and displays. "Mm. I hope this doesn't mean they're planning

an attack." He turned and paced back toward the command chair, a tall,

erect figure in the high-rolled collar of his uniform jacket, hat pulled low

over his eyes. He clenched his cold, empty briar in his teeth. "I don't like it,

not a bit..."

Lisa was his highly valued First Officer; but she was also much like a

daughter to him. It had taken every bit of his reason and sense of duty to

convince himself she was the logical one for this mission.

The first enlisted tech turned to Kim Young, who was manning a

position nearby. She knew Kim and the two other enlisted regulars on the

bridge watch, Sammie and Vanessa, were known as the Terrible Trio, part

of what amounted to a family with Gloval, Lisa Hayes, and Claudia Grant.

"Kim, does the skipper always get this...concerned?"

Elfin-faced Kim, a young woman who wore her black hair in a short cut,

showed a secret grin. She whispered, "Most of the time he's a rock. But he's

worried about Lisa, and, well, there's Sammie."

Sammie Porter, youngest of the Terrible Trio, was a high-energy

twenty-year-old with a thick mane of dark blond hair. She usually didn't

know the meaning of fear...but she usually didn't know the meaning of tact,

either. She was conscientious and bright but sometimes excitable.

Lisa's departure had meant a reshuffling of jobs on her watch, and

Sammie had ended up with a lot of the coordinating duties Claudia and Lisa

would have ordinarily handled.

"Yellow squad, please go to preassigned coordinates before requesting

computer readout," she ordered a unit of attack mecha over the comcircuit.

The mammoth Robotech war machines were part of the ship's defensive

force. Excaliburs and Spartans and Raidar Xs, they were like some hybrid of

armored knight and walking battleship. They were among the units that

guarded the ship itself, while the Veritechs sortied out into space.

17

Gloval bent close to check on what she was doing. "Everything all right?

No trouble, I hope."

Sammie whirled and snapped, "Captain, please! I have to concentrate

on these transmissions before they pile up!" Then she went back to ordering

the lumbering mecha around, making sure that the gun turrets and missile

batteries were alert and that all intel data and situation reports were up to

date.

Gloval straightened, clamping his pipe in his teeth again. "Sorry. I

didn't mean to interrupt." Kim and Vanessa gave him subtle looks, barely

perceptible nods, to let him know that Sammie was on top of things.

Gloval had come to accept Sammie's occasional lack of diplomacy as a

component of her fierce dedication to duty. Sometimes she reminded him of

a small, not-to-be-trifled-with sheep dog.

Gloval considered the Terrible Trio for a moment. Through some joke

of the gods, it had been these three whom the original Zentraedi spies-Bron,

Konda, and Rico-had met and, not to put too fine a point on it, begun dating

and formed attachments to.

The normally clear lines between personal life and matters of concern

to the service were becoming quite muddied. The Zentraedi seemed decent

enough, but there were already reports of ugly incidents between the

defectors and some of the SDF-1's inhabitants. Gloval worried about the

Terrible Trio, worried about the Zentraedi-was apprehensive that; after all,

the two races could never coexist.

On top of that, he couldn't shake the feeling that he ought to be setting

curfews, or providing chaperones, or doing something paternal. These

things troubled him in the brief moments when he wasn't doing his best to

see that his entire command wasn't obliterated.

"Shuttle escort flight, prepare for launch, five minutes," Sammie said,

bent over her console. She turned to Gloval.

"Shuttle's ready, sir. Lisa will be leaving in four minutes, fifty seconds."

18

CHAPTER TWO

Of course, idle hands are not the devil's workshop; that is a base canard.

Rather, it is the sort of hand that is always driven to be busy, turning

itself to new machinations, keeping the brew boiling, that causes the most

trouble. Those who wish to dispute this might do well to consider what

happened whenever Khyron grew restive.

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

Max Sterling, flight helmet cradled in his left arm, strode through the

frenetic activity of the hangar deck and heard Sammie's voice echo over the

PA. "Sammie's substituting for the commander," he said.

At his side was a Skull Team replacement, Corporal Elkins, who had

been transferred in from Wolf Team to help fill the gaps in Skull's ranks

after the last pitched battle with the Zentraedi. Elkins remarked, "I hope she

stays calm. Last time she had me flying figure eights around a radar mast."

Max chuckled, then forgot the joke, distracted. "Hey."

Elkins saw what Max meant. The techs had rolled out a prototype ship,

something everybody in the Veritech squadrons had heard about. It was like

the conventional VT, a sleek ultra-fighter, but two augmentation pods were

mounted above its wing pivots..

The conventional VTs were a kind of miracle in themselves, the most

advanced use of the Robotechnology that humans had learned from the

wreckage of the SDF-1 when the alien-built battle fortress had originally

crashed on Earth twelve years before. The SDF-1 had murderous teeth in

the form of its mecha, its primary and secondary batteries, and its

astoundingly powerful main gun, but the VTs were the ship's claws. And

this new, retrofitted model was the first of a more powerful generation, a

major advance in firepower and performance.

"Wouldn't that be something to fly?" Max murmured. He hoped it

checked out all right in test flights; the humans needed every edge they

19

could get.

"Whenever they're ready to give me one, I'll take it," Elkins said.

"Anyway, watch yourself up there, Max."

At the top of the shuttle boarding steps, Lisa said, "I've made notes on

everything that might be a problem."

"Don't worry about a thing," Claudia told her. Then she put her hands

on Lisa's shoulders. "I'll see you back here in a few days, okay?"

Lisa tried to smile. What do you say to someone dearer than a sister? "I

hope so. You look after things." One of the ground crew whistled, and Lisa

stepped back into the shuttle's entry hatch.

The mobile steps moved away from the tubby shuttle. Claudia threw

Lisa a salute for the first time in so long that neither of them could

remember the last. Lisa returned it smartly. The round hatch swung to,

emblazoned with the Robotech Defense Force insignia.

There were no other passengers, of course; contact with Earth had been

all but nonexistent since the UEDC rulers decided that the dimensional

fortress was to be a decoy, luring the enemy away from the planet. Other

than a few canisters of classified dispatches and so forth, she had the

passenger compartment to herself.

Lisa found a seat at the front of the compartment, near a com console,

and asked a passing crewman, "Is this a secure line?"

"Aye aye, ma'am. It's best to make any calls now; never can tell what

glitches we'll run into outside."

"I will."

He was wandering a quiet side street of Macross when the paging voice

said, "Repeating: Lieutenant Rick Hunter, you have a call."

For a moment he wasn't even sure where he was, shuffling along in

civvies that felt rather strange-the first time he'd worn anything but a

uniform or a flightsuit in weeks. He'd been brooding a lot longer, trying to

sort things out, to understand his own feelings and face up to certain truths.

20

He went to one of the ubiquitous yellow com phones and identified

himself. The incoming call carried a secure-line encryption signal, keying

the public phone with it. While the machines went through their coding,

Rick looked around to make sure no one was close enough to eavesdrop.

People were just passing by, not even sparing a glance for the compact

black-haired young man at the phone. He didn't mind that; he needed a few

hours respite from being the Skull Team's leader-some time away from, the

burden of command.

He had been a cocky civilian when he first came aboard the

dimensional fortress two years before. He had been drawn into military

service only grudgingly by Roy Fokker, his unofficial Big Brother-Claudia

Grant's lover. Rick Hunter had survived more dogfights than he could

remember, had written so many condolence letters to the families of dead

VT pilots that he forced himself not to think of them, had stood by at the

funeral of Roy Fokker and others beyond counting. He only wanted to shut

them out of his mind.

He was not yet twenty-one years old.

The comcircuit was established. "Rick? It's Lisa."

He felt as though he had been under observation as he walked the

streets aimlessly. Lisa and Minmei; Minmei and Lisa. His brain failed him

in that emotional cyclone where his feelings for the two women swirled and

defied all analysis, all decision.

"What can I do for you?" Ouch. Wrong. He knew that as soon as he said

it, but it was too late.

"I wanted to let you know, Rick. I'm leaving the SDF-1. I'm on my way

to Earth to try to get them to stop the fighting."

He looked around again quickly to make sure no civilians had any

chance of hearing. There was enough unrest in the dimensional fortress

without spreading new rumors and raising expectations that would in all

probability be dashed. At the same time, he felt an emptiness. She's leaving!

"Why wasn't I told ab-"

"It's all top secret. Rick, I might not be allowed to come back." Lisa

21

cupped the handset to her, staring at it sadly, as the shuttle was moved onto

the aircraft elevator for the trip to the flight deck. Max Sterling's VT was

next to it.

"So...I want to tell you something," she struggled. Oh, say it! Claudia's

voice seemed to holler at her. But she couldn't.

"I appreciate all you've done, and it's been an honor serving with you,"

Lisa said instead. "Your observations about our captivity in the alien

headquarters will be an important part of my report when-"

"What are you talking about, Lisa?" Something that had been murky to

him moments ago was crystal clear now. "I don't care about reports or

anything else if you can't come back here!"

Tell him! Say it! But she ignored the voice, couldn't face the rejection.

He loved the luminous superstar, Minmei, and Minmei cared for him. Who

could compete with that?

She found herself saying, "Please watch over the Zentraedi defectors,

Rick. A lot of our people haven't had time to reason things out yet, and the

aliens are in danger."

The stubby shuttle was on the flight deck, boxed up for launch by the

cat crew, the hookup people clear, the blast deflector raised up from the

deck behind the spacecraft. Off to one side, Max's VT swept its wings out

and raised its vertical stabilizers.

Lisa held the handset tenderly. "We're launching. Good-bye. And

thanks again."

"What? Wait!" But the circuit was dead.

He got up to an observation deck just in time to watch a tiny cluster of

distant lights, the drives of the formed-up flight, dwindle into the darkness.

"Shuttle craft and escorts proceeding according to flight plan," Vanessa

told Gloval quietly. Nobody had actually said that Lisa's flight was to be

monitored so closely; but no one had objected to the idea, either, and the

Terrible Trio were keeping close tabs.

22

Back at her duty station, Claudia was alert to every nuance of voice, like

everyone else there. When Vanessa said, "Captain!" in a clipped, alarmed

tone, Claudia's heart skipped a beat.

"Elements of the Zentraedi fleet are redeploying. They're on intercept

course, closing in on the shuttle."

Gloval looked over his situation displays, threat boards, computer

projections. Claudia kept one eye on the board, one on Gloval.

He sounded very calm. Now that battle had come, he was a well of

tranquility. "Order them to take evasive action as necessary or return to the

SDF-1 if possible."

Claudia almost blurted out a plea to send reinforcements, but she could

read the displays as well as anyone. More Zentraedi forces were moving into

place, apparently to cut the shuttle off from the dimensional fortress.

Pummeled and undermanned, the SDF-1 could ill afford to risk an entire VT

team to save one shuttle and its escorts.

No matter who might die.

Alarms and emergency Hashers brought Lisa out of a dim gray despair.

The shuttle pilot was announcing, "Enemy craft approaching. All hands,

general quarters. Secure for general quarters."

There was a heavy grinding sound as sections of padded armor

shielding slid up into place around Lisa's seat. She calmly pulled her

briefcase into the questionable safety of the metal cocoon with her, securing

her acceleration harness, and the ship's drive pressed her back into the

seat's cushioning.

Max Sterling accepted the news almost amicably. The heritage that was

the fighter pilot's proud tradition remained strong. Dying was sometimes

unavoidable, but losing one's cool was inexcusable.

"Enemy approaching on our six," he said, with less emotion than most

people used talking about the weather. "Form up in gamma deployment and

stick with your wingmen."

23

The other VTs rogered and moved to comply. Max was going to give

Lisa an encouraging wave, but the armored cocoon had already swallowed

her up.

He peeled off to take up his own position. The aerodynamic maneuvers

of the VTs looked strange in the airlessness and zero g of space, but the

pilots came from a naval aviation tradition. They thought a certain way

about flying, and thinking was half the key to Robotechnology. The

aerodynamic maneuvers wasted power, but Robotechnology had plenty of

that.

Max hoped this was another feint. Like Gloval and many others, he had

noticed that there seemed to be two distinct factions-almost a

schizophrenia-among the enemy. One side was playing a waiting game,

determined to capture the SDF-1 intact for reasons that the humans still

couldn't guess and that the low-ranking defectors, not privy to strategic

information, couldn't clarify.

The other element-rash, unpredictable, almost irrational-mounted

sudden, vicious attacks on the dimensional fortress, apparently intent on

destroying it with no thought to the consequences. It was becoming clear

that the enemy commander responsible for this had a name known to, and

even feared by, all Zentraedi.

Khryon the Backstabber.

"Commander, the target has changed course," a Zentraedi pod pilot

said, the facebowl of his combat armor lit by his instruments. "And the

Micronian fighters are redeploying for intercept."

The alien mecha, two dozen and more, were in attack formation-huge

ovoid bodies quilled with cannon muzzles, mounted on long

reverse-articulated legs so that they resembled headless ostriches. Most

would have been considered "armless," but the Officers' Pods mounted

heavy guns that suggested gargantuan derringers.

In the lead pod was Khyron the Backstabber.

He didn't fit most stereotypes of the brutal warlord. Quite contrary to

24

the Zentraedi conventionalities-their Spartan simplicity, their distaste for

mannerisms-Khyron would have been called a fop if such a word or concept

had existed among his race.

Youthful-looking and sinisterly handsome, he gazed into the screens of

his pod's cockpit, contemplating the kill. He had been forbidden to attack

the SDF-1 again on pain of immediate execution, but no one had issued any

orders with regard to a juicy little convoy.

Four times now, the Micronian vermin had humiliated him. With each

defeat, his hatred had grown geometrically. It went incandescent when he

saw the sorts of perversions the humans practiced: males mingling with

females, the sexes somehow coming into contact and expressing

weak-willed affection for each other. They behaved seductively, something

unknown to the Zentraedi. The Micronians paired off, sometimes forming

lifelong bonds, driven by impulses and stimuli Khyron was only beginning

to perceive.

It repelled and fascinated him; it obsessed and possessed him. So he

knew he had no other choice but to destroy the Micronians utterly or go

completely insane.

"Nothing can save them," he gloated. "All units: Attack immediately!"

The pods closed in, riding the bright flames of their drives, guns

angling, answering their targetting servos. The VTs swept out to meet them.

"Captain, the shuttle has reached coordinates Lambda thirty-four,"

Sammie called out. "Should we send reinforcements?"

The bridge crew watched Gloval, hoping he would say yes as much as

he himself wanted to. But that would have left the SDF-1 underprotected;

the Zentraedi had already tried similar diversionary maneuvers to set up a

major attack.

With the number of spaceworthy VTs critically low until the Robotech

fabrication machinery could produce replacements, he simply couldn't risk

sending out another team of fighters or risk the pilots who were so crucial to

the ship's survival.

25

"Not unless we absolutely have to," he said stonily. The women turned

back to their jobs in silence. Gloval did not elaborate on the question of

reinforcements, but he had already decided: He couldn't risk a flight of VTs,

but there was one desperate gamble he could take if the shuttle's situation

got worse.

In the volume of empty space designated Lambda thirty-four, Max

Sterling's Veritech went through a lightning change. It was what Dr. Lang,

the eerie Robotech genius, termed "mechamorphosis," the alteration of the

fighter's very structure.

Max had pulled the lever that sent the ship into Battloid mode,

thinking the mecha through its change. The VT shifted to Battloid, looking

like a futuristic gladiator in bulky, ultratech armor, bristling with weapons.

Two pods drove in at him, cannon blazing.

26

CHAPTER THREE

That undisciplined showoff? That wet-nosed civilian joystick pilot? What

a waste of time and effort!

Remark attributed to Lisa Hayes upon being informed

that trainee Rick Hunter had qualified as a VT pilot 2009 A.D.

The pods fired away with the primary and secondary guns that

protruded from their armored plastrons, but the blue bolts converged on

utter vacuum. Max's Battloid wasn't where it had been a split second before.

The Battloid had its autocannon in its metal fists, riding its backpack

thrusters with the agility of a gymnast, darting like a dragonfly. It whirled

on one pod, opening up.

The chain-gun was loaded with depleted transuranic rounds, big as

candlepins and much heavier-high-powered, extremely dense projectiles

that delivered terrific amounts of kinetic energy. The pod's armor flew like

shredded paper; it exploded in an outlashing of energy and debris.

Max was still dodging with blinding speed, turning his sights on the

second pod. He riddled it before the enemy pilot could draw a bead on him,

putting a tight shot group of holes in the center of the egglike alien mecha.

The pod became a brief fireball.

No system of manual or computer controls could have come up with

such astounding maneuverability, such instantaneous responses and deadly

shooting. Only the "thinking cap," the interface of mind and mecha, could

work the seeming magic of the RDF.

Other VTs had already paired off against the foe. The mecha swirled

and pounced; their missiles corkscrewed and sizzled while energy bolts and

powered gatling rounds lit the darkness. But the pods had the advantage of

numbers by more than two to one, enough to occupy every Veritech and

leave more pods to go after the shuttle.

27

The shuttle pilot was taking evasive action and running for safety at full

emergency power. But there was no safety; the shuttle was no match for the

pods' speed, and the Zentraedi closed in, firing. The shuttle's light

armaments and lack of maneuvering ability made it easy prey, but the

shuttle skipper did his best, trying to evade. He was hoping he could

eventually make a dash for the tantalizingly nearby Earth, knowing that the

UEDC would never allow any of its forces to intervene or otherwise risk

turning the Zentraedi wrath on Earth itself. He could hope for no help from

that quarter.

A Zentraedi cannon burst stitched holes in the shuttle's port wing in a

line of three, ringed by molten metal. Lisa felt the ship rock in her armored

cocoon, and gripped the padded armrests, waiting to see what the outcome

of the battle would be.

The attacking pod was a modified standard type, carrying

augmentative particle-beam cannon for added firepower. It turned to come

back for the kill, but just then Max arrived, his Battloid diving headlong into

the fight. The Battloid knocked the pod aside like a football player, driving a

huge, armored shoulder into it.

Then the Battloid that was Max Sterling flipped neatly on foot thrusters

and fired. The rain of armor-piercing slugs punched a dozen holes in the

enemy, and it was driven back like some wounded living thing. There was

no secondary explosion-very unusual, since the enemy mecha's power

systems usually turned them into firecrackers once their armor had been

pierced.

Two more pods came in at him, one with extra missile racks and

another with the strange rabbit ears of a Zentraedi signal-warfare ship. Max

went at them, juking and evading to stay out of their cross hairs, his Battloid

firing short bursts from the autocannon.

One of the escort VTs had been lost, another damaged by the first

onslaught. Several more were still engaged in combat, but the rest, like Max,

had come through their first duel and were taking on new opponents. Some

help arrived, and Max began to feel confident that he could keep the pods

28

away from the damaged shuttle.

But just then, Elkins yelled over the tac net, "More pods! We've got

more pods coming at us-half a dozen!"

Max's mouth became a thin line as he drove in to deal with his current

opponents as quickly as he could. He thought back with a certain pilot's

superstition on what he had said to the men in the alley. Perhaps the taboos

were right and it was lethal bad luck to talk about not coming back.

"The escorts are outnumbered," Kim called over her shoulder without

taking her eyes from her instruments.

"More pods closing in on them!" Vanessa added. "Cutting off the

shuttle's escape."

Gloval sat slumped in his command chair with his cap visor pulled

down low over his eyes. A Veritech flight couldn't possibly get there in time,

and he didn't have them to spare. But...

"How long would it take the armored Veritech prototype to make it

there?"

Sammie already had the figures. "Approximately four minutes from

launch at max boost."

Claudia bit her lower lip, watching Gloval. The captain's head came up.

"Prepare it for launch!"

Claudia relayed the order, sending up a silent prayer, while Sammie

asked, "Who'll be flying it, sir?"

"Get Lieutenant Hunter to the hangar deck at once. Tell him we don't

know how much longer Sterling can hold out."

The ship's PA and a few seconds on a comcircuit had Rick on his way,

anxious and very intense, in a commandeered jeep he flagged down in the

middle of a Macross boulevard. The enlisted driver was a capable man who

liked having an excuse to break all traffic laws.

Rick suited up virtually on the run, and minutes later the aircraft

elevator was lifting the humpbacked-looking armored VT to the flight deck.

29

"Lieutenant, your destination is Lambda thirty-four," Sammie told him

over the command net.

"Lambda thirty-four? What're you talking about?"

On the bridge, Claudia turned to Sammie. "Didn't you see to it that all

pilots had the new map-reference codes?"

Sammie looked devastated. "I was so swamped-I didn't think he'd need

one until he went on duty later."

Aircraft status was relayed; the armored VT was boxed and ready for

launch. Sammie gritted her teeth, ignoring the silent stares of the rest of the

bridge watch, especially the ominous quiet from Gloval. She couldn't let her

mistake spell Lisa's death!

Sammie opened the mike again, concentrating, eyes shut, matching

coordinates and codes by memory. "Coordinates in superseded code are at

Weasel twenty-one!"

Rick launched without taking time to acknowledge. The armored VT

poured on speed like nothing any other human-produced mecha had ever

demonstrated. A single man in an untested ship, flying out against terrible

odds-and if he lost, the woman who was humanity's best hope for peace

would die too.

From the first, Max had known that the chances of help arriving from

the SDF-1 were slim. Now he was resigned to the fact that there would be no

help, though he didn't let on to the dwindling survivors of the escort flight.

The other VT pilots had flown well and bravely; their kill ratio was high,

but still they went down to oblivion, one by one, in the silent globular

explosions of a space rat race-a mass dogfight. Max Sterling flew like no

pilot before him, a grim reaper, a deadly wraith, an undefeatable mecha

demon in the form of a Battloid.

The Battloid changed vectors and zoomed out of a pod's salvo,

jamming some of its missiles with ECM equipment and dodging the rest, a

masterful performance. Max turned the gatling on it and hosed it with a

tracer-bright stream of heavyweight rounds, blowing it away.

30

But still the enemy came, and more were arriving. It looked like a day

for dying.

He turned to get back with Elkins, to stick together and protect the

shuttle to the last. But Elkins's ship vanished in an ugly blossom of fire and

shrapnel. The escort had been whittled down to five. Four times that

number came in at them now.

Hanging back from the action in his Officer's Pod, Khyron watched

gleefully. He suspected that the enemy leader, the amazingly fast and deadly

blue-trimmed Veritech, was the same one who had sent so many Zentraedi

to defeat and death-had even humbled the vaunted Miriya, female ace of

aces of the Quadronos.

Khyron was in no hurry to lead the attack and tangle with the

Micronian devil in person; it would be enough to dispose of the rest of his

command by attrition and pull the Veritech wizard to bits by sheer weight of

numbers. Then, Khyron would have a boast to fling in Miriya's face and the

faces of all the others who secretly laughed at him!

More pods converged. But at that moment a newcomer arrived.

"Only one," a pod pilot reported, and Khyron dismissed the matter

coldly. One more Veritech wouldn't matter now.

His opinion changed a moment later. The fighter accelerated to

unprecedented speeds, maneuvering more nimbly than any Micronian

mecha ever had. Its humpbacked profile didn't match any computer ID.

Then the strange new machine let forth a storm of fire: murderously

fast and accurate missiles of some new type; autocannon rounds with even

greater velocity, delivering far more kinetic energy on impact; phased-array

laser blasts as powerful, at close range, as any plasma bolt.

The new arrival, faster than the escort leader, was in and out among

the pods, striking and vanishing, blowing two Zentraedi mecha to

smithereens and going on to take out another while the first two explosions

were still ballooning.

Suddenly, the pods were like so many fat pigeons before the attack of a

31

rocket-driven hawk.

Rick's initial success was so overwhelming, so pronounced and

irresistible, that he got careless.

After seeing a dozen and more of the ambushers go up in flames, he

began the switch to Guardian mode. But he'd forgotten what a hot ride he

had, and the ship's sudden retro thrust almost put his head through the

instrument panel and split his thinking cap down the middle.

He barely recovered, shaking his head, the breath knocked from him by

the strain of the safety harness across his torso. Trembling, he got control of

himself and his ship and pressed the fight again.

And once more the Zentraedi pods were fat targets at his mercy. He

went swooping in at them, the VT laying out a staggering volume of fire,

skeeting pods as if they were clay targets.

Khyron had seen enough; he had no desire to go up against this

bewilderingly fast, fearsomely armed intruder. He made sure his own

withdrawal was well under way before he ordered his troops back.

It didn't mean his thirst for revenge was slaked, of course; if anything,

it was worse. It was a constant torment now; it would be until he destroyed

the enemy insects once and for all.

Max's report came over the bridge speakers. "The enemy has broken

contact and withdrawn. The shuttle has sustained minimal damage and is

continuing on.

"With your permission, I am returning to the SDF-1 with the remaining

escort ships, due to damage suffered during the attack. Lieutenant Hunter

will escort the shuttle to Earth."

Gloval granted permission. To Claudia's doubtful look, he responded,

"That armored Veritech has so much speed and firepower, it's the equal of

ten regular fighters."

32

And a thousand more like it wouldn't put us on an equal footing with

our foe, he thought to himself. Still, we must have as many as we can, as fast

as we can!

Sammie stretched and yawned. "I'm exhausted! I wish Commander

Hayes was back."

Claudia glared at her. "We almost lost her permanently with that code

snafu of yours!"

Sammie looked dismayed, young and tearful; she was even more upset

by the danger to Lisa than by Claudia's temper, which could lead to very

serious problems for anyone who angered the bridge officer.

But Claudia softened after a moment. After all, Sammie had pulled

things out of the fire.

"That's okay, kiddo," Claudia said, turning back to her console.

"Everybody learns from mistakes."

Gloval thought about that, silently gazing through the forward viewport.

Did that apply to the Zentraedi, too? And the UEDC rulers?

Could they all be convinced the war was a catastrophic mistake?

The protective shielding swung back to show Lisa a passenger

compartment that seemed unaffected by the battle. She was still a little

winded and bruised from the tossing around she had taken in the padded,

armored cocoon.

The shuttle pilot had kept her abreast of the battle and she felt a bit

limp with relief. It was so vital that she get to Earth, that she speak for

peace-long ago she had resigned herself to the likelihood that she would die

in war, but to have died at that moment was a tragedy too vast to

contemplate.

"Commander Hayes," the pilot's voice came over the intercom. "We

have a commo call for you from Lieutenant Hunter, who's now flying escort

for us. I've patched it through."

So Rick was the one who had ridden to the rescue in the armored VT;

33

she had hoped it was and yet had feared for his life all through the fight. She

picked up the handset.

Armored panels were sliding back from all the viewports. She was

looking out at the humpbacked new-generation Veritech. "Lisa, are you all

right?" she heard him say.

"Yes. Because you came to help." She saw him through the VT's canopy,

looking at her worriedly.

I was never cut out for emotional drama, she thought. I should have

known I couldn't get away with a rehearsed exit speech.

"No problem," he was saying. "Now, what's all this about you not

coming back?"

"There are reasons, Rick."

"Even though your father's on the UEDC?"

"Especially because of that. Besides, they aren't going to like what I'm

going to tell them."

There was a choppy sensation as the shuttle entered the Earth's

atmosphere. He fumbled for something appropriate to say, knowing he had

to turn back in seconds. "I hope you'll be safe" was all he could come up

with.

"Thanks. I'm sure I'll be fine."

"Um." He knew the call was patched through the shuttle's com system,

accessible to the pilots-presuming they weren't busy with their atmospheric

entry maneuver. There's something else-sorta private. Here; look."

He had fallen back, out of the pilots' line of vision, up close to the

shuttle. She could see him clearly, watching her. She was confused. "What is

it?"

"Prosigns." He began flashing his VT's running lights in prosigns-brief

dot-dash combinations that represented whole words, for quick manual

Morse code communications. Lisa was a little rusty but found that she could

read it.

LIKE YOU MUCH. COMPLAIN SOMETIMES BUT BELIEVE IN YOU.

MISS YOU MUCH IF YOU DON'T RETURN. PLEASE RETURN SOONEST.

34

He could read her lips, so close were VT and shuttle.

I'll try. So long, Rick.

He threw her a salute-a joke between them, given his lack of military

discipline when they had first met and clashed.

The armored VT peeled off and vectored for the SDF-1, the blue

vortices of its thrusters shrinking to match flames, then disappearing. The

shuttle jostled more as it hit the denser atmosphere.

35

CHAPTER FOUR

I have familiarized myself with the enemy's culture, to better carry out

my espionage mission. What a repulsive, contemptible thing it is!

All seems to revolve around their grueseome, sadistic method of

reproduction, and it obsesses them constantly. The humans—Micronians—

even make up false legends about it! They immerse themselves in stories

where males and females poison one another or stab themselves or simply

expire from some unexplained thing called "pining away." Or else the

imaginary couples go off together and spend all their time in revolting,

pointless intimacies.

Our enemies languish in these falsehoods the way we might enjoy a hot

soak at the end of a long campaign.

What perversion! Truly, this is a species that must be exterminated!

Miriya Parino, from her interim notes for an intel report

to the Zentraedi High Command

She was striking enough to draw stares even in the crowded Macross

plaza, where people were usually in a hurry and some of the more attractive

women in the dimensional fortress were to be seen.

Boots clicking on the swirling mosaics of the plaza, the green-dyed hair

flowing with the speed of her walk and the light air currents of the ship's

circulation blowers, she looked neither right nor left. People made way for

her; she was barely aware of their existence, even that of the men who

looked at her so admiringly.

Miriya, greatest combat pilot of her race, exulted a bit. I've finally

discovered one of the reasons these Micronians have developed such

amazing skill in handling their mecha! It wasn't the reason she had come to

the SDF-1 as a spy, but it was a step in understanding her quarry, and that

was elating. The intelligence data would also be of interest to the Zentraedi

High Command, another coup to her credit.

36

Not that Miriya needed one. As a demigoddess of battle, she was

without equal, her kills and victories far outnumbering her nearest rival's.

She had lost only once in her life, and had submitted to micronization and

come to the SDF-1 to make amends for that.

Miriya left the street and its EVE noonday, entering the dark and

blinking world she had only recently discovered. All through the

media-game arcade, people stood or sat hunched toward the glowing

screens, playing against the machines.

The screen-lit faces of the players were so intent, their movements so

deft and quick-what could account for it other than military indoctrination

and the hunger for combat? What other motive could there be for the

Micronians' relentless practice? They were so highly motivated that they

even subsidized their own training, feeding money into the machines.

The young ones were the best and most diligent, of course. By the time

they reach maturity, they wild be superb warriors! she thought. This, even

though the very concept of human reproduction, the parents-child-adult

cycle, made her feel queasy and dizzy. The discovery of that vileness, as she

thought of it, had rendered her inert and dazed when she first stumbled on

the truth of it. But in time, bravely, she had shaken off the horror of human

reproduction and resumed her search.

Miriya came to the most significant machine, though they were all

cunning and instructive. She vaulted into the little cockpit, inserting a coin

in the slot. One hand went to the stick, the other to the throttle, as she

watched the screen. Her feet settled on the foot pedals.

Her finger hovered near the weapons trigger as she waited for the game

to begin. Miriya looked around quickly to see if her nemesis was there.

She couldn't spy anyone who might be that greatest of Micronian pilots

and therefore assumed he wasn't present. Surely a pilot who was good

enough to have defeated Miriya Parino, the indisputable champion of the

Zentraedi, would draw great attention and recognition.

She would know him when he came or when someone mentioned him.

She would find him eventually.

37

And then she would kill him.

The face in the family portrait was pale, thin-but open and kind, the

mother's features very much like the daughter's. Admiral Hayes glanced

down at the framed photo, not realizing that many minutes had gone by

while he sat, thinking and remembering.

He was looking at himself, years ago, only a lieutenant commander

then. Next to him in the photo was his wife, and in front of them a

shy-looking little girl wearing a sun hat and sun dress with a Band-Aid on

one knee.

Whenever I look at this picture, I wish Andrea were still here to see

how her little girl turned out-to see what an extraordinary soldier Lisa's

made of herself.

A comtone from his desk terminal broke his contemplation. "Pardon

me for interrupting, sir," an aide said. "But you left word that you be

informed when the shuttle made final approach."

Hayes shook himself; there had been that last, terrible fear when the

shuttle was attacked and not even he could countermand UEDC orders and

send help. More to the point, there was no help that Earth could send that

would be of any use; the SDF-1 and its Veritechs, were the only effective

weapons against Zentraedi pods. Hayes could only wait and hope.

When the shuttle survived its gauntlet, he had nearly collapsed into his

chair, staring at the photograph of the past. There was so much to heal

between himself and his daughter, so much to put behind them.

Now, he looked to the aide's image on his display screen. "Thank you."

"The craft should be landing very shortly. Shall I meet you at the

elevators, sir?"

Hayes pressed against his big, solid oak desk with both hands, pushing

himself to his feet. "Yes, that would be fine."

The headquarters of the United Earth Defense Council was a vast base

beneath

the

Alaskan

wilderness.

Very

little

of

it

was

aboveground-surveillance and communications equipment, aircraft control

38

tower-but the surface was guarded by the few remaining Battloids on Earth.

Years before, when the SDF-1 made its miscalculated spacefold jump

out to the rim of the solar system, it took with it most of its Robotech secrets

and all the fabricating equipment humanity had discovered in the huge

vessel when it originally crash-landed on Earth. Earth had turned back to

largely conventional weapons for its defense with the exception of one

gargantuan project that was already under way: the Grand Cannon.

The Grand Cannon took up most of the sprawling, miles-deep base, a

doomsday weapon that let the UEDC live the fantasy that it could defend

itself against an all-out Zentraedi onslaught. Admiral Hayes had been

largely responsible for the Grand Cannon's construction; Gloval's simple

disdain for such a massive, immobile weapon system was one of the major

stresses that had ended their friendship.

Waiting by the landing strip, the brutally cold arctic wind whipping at

his greatcoat, Hayes recalled those days, recalled the bitter words. His

once-warm bond with Gloval, solidified during their service together in the

Global Civil War, had shattered as Hayes accused the Russian of timid

thinking and Gloval sneered at the "hidebound, Maginot-Line mindset" of

the Cannon's proponents.

Hayes's thoughts were interrupted by the aide. "Admiral, we've just

received word that the shuttle's ETA has been moved back by twenty

minutes. Nothing serious; they're just coming around for a better approach

window. If you like, I'll drive you back to the control tower; it's warmer

there."

The admiral said distractedly, "No, I'll wait here. It's not that cold,

anyway." Then he turned back to watch the sky, barely aware of the biting

wind.

The aide sat back down in the open jeep, shivering and buttoning up

his collar all the way, burrowing his chin down and tucking gloved hands

under armpits. He always thought of his commander as rather a

comfort-loving man; certainly, Hayes's living quarters and offices gave that

impression.

39

But here was the Old Man, indifferent to an arctic blast that would

send an unprotected man into hypothermia in seconds. None of the base

personnel knew much about this daughter; her last visit to the base had

been rushed and very hush-hush. Hayes rarely mentioned her, but he had

been remote most of the time since he had received word she was coming.

The aide shrugged to himself, swearing at the shuttle, wishing it would

hurry up.

In an officers' mess onboard the SDF-1, Max sat toying with his coffee

cup, glancing over at the table a few yards away where Rick Hunter sat

immersed in thought, an almost palpable cloud of gloom surrounding him.

He's been sitting there by himself for half an hour twiddling his spoon,

and it's like his food isn't even there, Max reflected. He made a quick

decision, rose, and went to approach his team leader.

"Lieutenant, it's too early to be depressed about this," Max jumped

right in. "I'm sure Commander Hayes will get back here somehow."

Rick turned away from him, chin still resting on his hand. "First of all,

I'm not thinking about her, and secondly, what makes you think I'm

depressed?"

Rick decided it was all, far too complicated to explain to Max Sterling,

the bright-eyed boy wonder of the VTs, the cheerful, unassuming ace of aces.

A man who never seemed unhappy, at a loss, or in doubt of what he was

doing. Eager beaver! Rick thought huffily.

"Maybe you need a little excitement-some distraction," Max persisted.

"How about a game? I know just the place! Let's go!"

Before Rick could object or even consider pulling rank, Max had him by

the arm and yanked him to his feet, tugging him toward the door. It seemed

easier to give in than to start a tug-of-war in the middle of the officers' mess;

Rick went along compliantly.

It didn't take long to get there; Max even paid for the cab. The Close

Encounters game arcade was alive with noise and lights, like some

Robotech fun house.

40

Max's eyes were shining. "Great place, huh? You're gonna love it!"

More war games? Rick groaned to himself. "I don't know. Maybe I'll

just head home-"

But Max had him by the elbow again. "A coupla games'll make you feel

like a new man, boss."

"Max, I don't think-"

"Look, I've been here before; I know what I'm talking about!" He

dragged Rick through the entrance.

As they moved deeper into the arcade, Rick recognized a face. Jason,

Lynn-Minmei's little cousin, had stopped to watch a young woman playing a

game. Rick went past without saying anything to attract the child's attention;

talking to Jason would only remind him of his feelings for Minmei and

compound his doubts and gloom.

In passing, he did notice the young woman: a very intense player with

green-dyed hair and an expression like some beautiful lioness ready for the

kill.

The shuttle had barely rolled to a stop when Hayes reached it, running.

His aide watched him in astonishment.

By the time the ground crew got the mobile stairs in position, Lisa was

waiting in the open hatch. The wind tugged at her long, heavy locks of

brown-blond hair and her too-light trench coat. She was wearing

fur-trimmed boots she had borrowed, but the cold sent ice picks through

her and numbed her skin instantly.

She halted, shocked to see her father waiting for her. Their previous

meeting and parting had been anything but cordial, with the admiral

doggedly taking the UEDC line against Gloval's common sense and

compassion. Coldly formal to her in the meetings, her father had later

sought to get her reassigned to headquarters base, to get her out of the

danger of her SDF-1 assignment. Lisa had torn up the conciliatory note he

had sent her and returned to the dimensional fortress with Gloval. She was

unaware of how that tormented her father.

41

Now, looking up at her, he said, "Lisa! Thank goodness you're here at

last!" She came down the stairs carefully, holding the railing with one hand

as the wind buffetted her, clutching a dispatch case.

"You're finally off that cursed alien Flying Dutchman." He was smiling,

tears forming. "We've got a lot of talking to do!"

But when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she came to attention

and snapped him an exacting salute. "Admiral, Commander Lisa Hayes

reporting, sir. I'm carrying a special dispatch from the captain of the SDF-1

to the United Earth Defense Council."

He was taken aback, the smile wiped from his face. It was her turn to

be formal and distant now, her right, as it had been his the last time.

If she was giving him back his own, he was willing to accept it. Nothing

was as important to him as the fact that his daughter, his only family, was

with him again. He returned her salute crisply, straight-faced.

"Welcome home."

Dante's Inferno was one of the more popular games there, but Rick just

didn't feel like following old Virgil down through the nine circles to the

demanding Ultimate Player level. Dragonbane, with its swirling nightmare

reptile attackers and Nordic swordsman, seemed a little too much like his

own duel with inner demons.

Nor was he inclined toward Psycho Highway Chainsaw Bloodbath.

Eventually, though, Max convinced him to take on a pair of side-by-side

Aesop's Gauntlet machines, mostly because the easy chairs before them

were thickly upholstered and comfortable.

Down below, on the main level, Miriya sharpened her skills at the

Veritechs! game: She found grim amusement in being a simulated

Micronian pilot, blowing Zentraedi Battlepods to whirling fragments. She

was disappointed that there were no Quadrono powered-armor opponents

in the game; her own unit was by far the elite of the alien armada.

She also approved of the training machine-as she thought of it-for not

introducing trainees to the realities of warfare at this early phase of their

42

instruction. It was clear that the gamesters would need a little hardening

and proper military discipline before they could deal with the horror and

bloodshed of real warfare. This clean, neat gaming gave them appropriate

affection for combat without any confusing exposure to certain unpleasant

aspects of a real warrior's life. Clever.

She sent another pod to computer-modeled oblivion, pretending it was

that of Khyron, whom she had come to despise. The score credit flashed,

and little Jason, still watching, piped up, "Wow! Look at that!"

She tried to ignore him as tokens stamped with a big M poured into the

payoff tray. The little Micronians were intriguing to her, but disquieting.

And the small ones were always so boisterous or emotional-certainly

impulsive and rather simpleminded. At first she thought that they were a

slave underclass, but that didn't square with the indulgent treatment they

got from the bigger Micronians. She forcefully shut from her mind the truth

about human childbearing; compared to it, the war and slaughter were

simple, comprehensible, painless things.

And such thoughts were not in keeping with her true mission aboard

the SDF-1. She looked around, wondering when she would find her quarry.

The memory still burned in her: of how the Micronian ace had outflown her

and then, in the very streets of Macross itself, she in her Quadrono

superarmor and he in his Battloid, faced her down, made her flee.

Her face burned again at the thought of it. She had difficulty eating or

resting and would until she regained her honor.

The dimensional fortress was big, but not big enough that her enemy

could hide forever.

43

CHAPTER FIVE

Considering the staggering expense involved in any Robotech operation,

the match that took place in the arcade that day certainly ranks as the most

cost-effective VT mission of the war-and perhaps the most fateful.

Zachary Fox Jr.,

VT: the Men and the Mecha

Every animal in Aesop's Bestiary seemed to have it in for Rick, while

Max progressed through the ascending levels with ease.

"The points're piling up, Lieutenant," Max said, referring to his score.

Rick, teeth gritted, was trying to wax the fox that was leaping for the grapes.

Damn thing moved faster than a Zentraedi tri-thruster.

After a lot of bleeping, ringing, and flashing from Max's machine, a

flood of tokens, glittering like gold, slid into the payoff tray. The tokens

could be used for more games, of course, or redeemed for prizes, vouchers

of various kinds, or-if one really pressed the issue-cash.

"That's great! I always make more than I can cart off."

"Well, you left me behind," Rick admitted. Wasn't this supposed to

make me feel better?

Actually, it did. "Max, look at that!" More and more tokens slid down

into the tray until they were spilling all over the place.

Close Encounters's assistant manager, Frankie Zotz, a nervous young

man in white pancake makeup and black, owllike hairdo, rushed into the

manager's booth. "Hey, boss! We're gettin' wiped out at some of our most

difficult machines!"

Blinko Imperiale, the manager-he of the goggle shades and two-tone

Mohawk and vaguely intimidating lab coat-sat with chin on fist.

"Dincha hear me?" Frankie Zotz yelped. "That pilot's upstairs again,

and the green-haired dame's inside turnin' a VT game every which way but

profitable!"

Blinko didn't even move, sadly staring off at nothing. "Oh, boy. I knew I

44

never shoulda opened this place near where those RDF maniacs hang out!"

The split-screen comparisons were obvious even to nontechnical

personnel. The DNA strands and analysis workups spoke for themselves.

The presentation flashed along as Admiral Hayes muttered,

"Interesting...hmmm..."

It was much more than that; it was astounding. It shook the very

foundations of human knowledge.

It had long been thought that wherever the basic chemical building

blocks of life coexisted in the universe, they would preferentially link to

form the same subunits that defined the essential biogenetic structures

found on Earth. In other words, the ordering of the DNA code wasn't a

quirk of nature. Tentative evidence dated back to long before the SDF-1's

crash landing on Earth, both from meteoric remains and from

spark-discharge experiments.

The new data pointed up a universal chemistry-that the formation and

linking of amino acids and nucleotides was all but inevitable. The

messenger RNA codonanticodon linkages that blueprinted the production

of amino acids seemed to operate on a coding intrinsic to the molecules

themselves. This meant that life throughout the universe would be very

similar and that some force dictated that it be so.

Admiral Hayes skimmed over all that; it had little to do with the war.

He skimmed some of Dr. Lang's hypotheses and preliminary findings, too:

that somehow the very energies that drove Robotechnology were identical

to the shadowy forces governing molecular behavior. There was also

mention of this irritatingly mystical Protoculture, something none of the

alien defectors had had sufficiently high clearance to have learned much

about.

Lang, it appeared, was monumentally frustrated that the hints and

suspicions couldn't be verified. But he was vocal about his suspicion that

this Protoculture the Zentraedi were so obsessed with was the key to it

all-molecular behavior, the war, the origins of life, ultimate power.

45

The point of the presentation was obvious even to an aging flag-rank

officer whose Academy biochemistry classes were far behind him. "Let me

see if I'm completely clear about what you're telling me."

"You believe our genetic backgrounds, the Zentraedi's and that of the

human race, are similar. And because of the possibility that we might all be

part of the same species, you hope to promote peace talks."

Lisa was nodding, wide-eyed as the little girl he remembered. "But will

all this convince the UEDC to open negotiations, sir?"

He sighed, the heavy brows lowering, staring down at the briefing file

before him on the coffee table. Lisa held her breath.

"I'm not sure," her father said at last. He looked up at her again. "But

I'll present it to them and make sure they listen, then we'll see what they

say."

For the first time since she left the SDF-1, Lisa smiled.

Miriya bent over the VT machine, refining her game. Next to her, on

the floor, were two plastic pans filled with playing tokens. Frankie Zotz had

had to refill the game's reservoir twice to pay off all her winnings. She

ignored his sweaty invitations to go play some other game-or, better yet,

take a rain check and just go-with a slit-eyed amusement and a dangerous

air that kept him from pressing her too hard about it.

Max came downstairs with Rick, holding his own tray of tokens.

Suddenly, he stopped yammering his overcheerful encouragements about

how Rick would eventually get the hang of the computer games. That was

fine with Rick; he had had just about enough light banter.

Max paused on the stairs. "Oh! That girl! Sitting at that game!"

Rick looked at the green hair. She wore a tight brown body suit that

showed off a lithe figure, and a flamboyant yellow scarf knotted at her

throat. "So? What about her?"

"Isn't she incredible?" Max said, more excitedly than Rick had ever

heard Max talk about anything. "I've been seeing her everywhere."

"Well, she is sort of attractive," Rick had to admit, his mind too full of

46

Lisa Hayes and Minmei for him to go on at any greater length.

Max, the renowned VT wizard, wasn't much when it came to the

pursuit of females; his few fumbling attempts with one or another of the

Terrible Trio had failed, and he retreated completely when Sammie,

Vanessa, and Kim became involved with the three Zentraedi ex-spies,

Konda, Bron, and Rico.

Max's modest, self-effacing shipside persona made him a sort of

uninteresting doormat for women. Perhaps he wasn't suave or seductively

menacing enough. So when he wasn't out in a Veritech, he kept to himself

for the most part.

But this was different; the Close Encounters arcade was his turf.

"Maybe I can get her in a game with me!" Max said, as he went racing down

the stairs.

There was quite a crowd around Miriya; she had rolled up one of the

largest scores ever on the Veritechs game. She felt a little irritated, even a

bit strange, with all these Micronians gathered around. Yet she endured

their gaze, proud and pleased to show off her prowess.

She briefly considered the idea that her strange sensations had

something to do with the damned Micronian food. It was nothing like the

cold, processed, sanitized rations of the Zentraedi; human food had strange

textures and flavors, odd biological constituents. It was all animal tissue and

plant substances, and she suspected it was affecting her system.

She shook off the feeling and kept playing, rolling her score higher and

higher, until she went over the top, beating the game, and more tokens

poured into her tray. Getting enough money to survive in Macross had been

no problem for Miriya since she had discovered the arcades.

Now someone pressed through the crowd: an unremarkable-looking

VT pilot with a tray of token winnings in his hands. She was inclined to

dismiss him; dozens of men had made overtures to her since she first came

to the SDF-1.

But there was something different about this one, she thought.

Max worked up the nerve to say, "'Scuse me; would you be interested in

47

playing a game with me? From what I've seen, I think we'd be equally

matched. Don't you?"

He looked so young and eager that she almost laughed in his face and

ignored him. Then she considered the tray of tokens in his hands. Miriya

knew enough about the arcades to appreciate how good he must have been

to have accumulated so many of the glittering pieces.

Of course it was beyond the realm of possibility that this slim youngster

could be the premier enemy killer, but if he provided some competition, it

might make for useful practice.

She looked at him languidly beneath long black lashes. Max felt his

heart pounding. "Are you willing to bet all that?" Miriya asked.

He gasped happily. "Yes, I am!" He set his tray down next to hers, then

scooted around into the seat opposite her. He babbled, "This is absolutely

terrific! I know we're gonna have a great game!"

Watching frorn the sidelines, Rick wondered if there wasn't something

else Max could do to screw up his chances of impressing her. Trip over her,

maybe; or throw up.

But once in his seat, Max took on the air of confidence and aplomb that

was his in matters regarding the VTs. "How about starting with level B? All

right with you?"

She shrugged, somehow making it seem alluring and yet indifferent.

"Fine."

"All right. Here we go."

He deposited the tokens, and the screen lit. Miriya had picked red for

the color of her VT; Max selected blue, for the trim on his own ship. He

didn't notice that Miriya's eyes suddenly narrowed at that choice.

Little animated Minmei figures walked out from either side of the

screen to strike a gong in the center, and the action began. They guided

their VTs through the twisting, changing computer-modeled landscape,

using control sticks and foot pedals, maneuvering at each other and firing.

It didn't take long for Miriya to lose her nonchalance. Try as she might,

she couldn't gain the advantage on him, couldn't shake him once he'd

48

gained on her. A frown crossed her face, then a sudden flare of rage, when

his fighter destroyed hers. She hid the expression in an instant, looking at

him more closely.

The video warriors gathered around them were aghast. It had been a

master-level fight. Max grinned at her. "Whoops! Looks like I won, huh?

Wanna go on to level A?" He winked at her.

Rick groaned to himself. Somewhere along the line, Max had learned

exactly how to antagonize beautiful young women.

She regarded him coldly. "Yes. Let's go on to level A. That should prove

quite interesting." This time she would give the fight serious attention.

Max fed in more tokens; this time a blue hemisphere sprang from the

game, a holoprojection. The muttering of the growing crowd became louder,

until the real purists silenced everybody.

The miniature Veritechs flew over the flat surface of the gaming table

now, going to Battloid mode and taking their autocannon in hand at high

port. There was a moment in which Miriya gazed through Max's

bluetrimmed, ghostly mecha, through his blue aviator glasses, into his eyes.

Somehow, she knew in that moment; all the rest of the game would

only be proof of what her instincts were telling her.

The little Battloid computer images looped and fired, maneuvering on

each other, going to Guardian or Veritech as their players decreed. There

were outbursts and yells from the onlookers as the game moved. It was the

fastest, most canny maneuvering anyone had ever seen; even though side

bets were strictly illegal, everybody was making them.

Frankie Zotz projected it onto the arcade's main screen. Veteran

players looked on in awe at the amazing dogfight. Tiny missiles and tracers

spat; the computers could barely keep up with the instructions coming from

the control sticks. The minuscule mecha circled and attacked.

Miriya used the same tactics she had used that day in her Quadrono

armor; his responses were the same. For a moment, it seemed to her that

her simulacrum Battloid had become a miniature Quadrono. Any doubts

she had were swept away.

49

Max was thinking, Boy, is she beautiful! as he played his best at the

machine. Another VT pilot, a lady's man, might have lost to Miriya on

purpose. But then, another VT pilot probably couldn't have won.

People were whooping and cheering on the sidelines. In her mind's eye,

Miriya saw the apocalyptic combat in the streets of Macross, as her own

powered armor smashed through buildings and wreaked havoc, backpack

thrusters blaring. She also saw that one-on-one final confrontation, when

she had bolted rather than die in a point-blank shootout.

And just as his autocannon rounds had defeated her that day, Max's VT

image destroyed hers. The red VT fragmented and flew into modeled,

spinning bits, then de-rezzed to nothingness.

The blue hemisphere faded away, leaving her openmouthed and

blinking. I lost! This cannot be! I will not be humiliated again!

The victorious Battloid image's head turret swung back, and a little

figure that looked suspiciously like Rick Hunter appeared, crying the word

"STRONG!!" as a tiny Minmei raced up to throw her arms around his neck,

kissing him and kicking her feet. The real Rick Hunter, still standing on the

staircase, edged back in order to be more inconspicuous and thought dark

thoughts about the sense of humor of video game designers.

An onlooker was saying to Max, "I dunno how you pulled that off,

buddy."

"Aw, there were a couple of tight spots in the middle and near the end,

but all in all, it wasn't too tough."

"Oh!" Miriya breathed. The insult of it. So she'd presented him with

little challenge, eh? She rose, turning on one booted heel.

Max forgot his warm victory feelings and plunged after her. He caught

her wrist, not knowing how close he was to getting a fist in the throat. "Wait,

I've been wanting to speak to you for a long time. I think you're wonderful,

and I want to get to know you better. This is my only chance to get your

name and phone number."

His grip was very strong but not painful; his palm very warm. For a

moment Miriya felt as though her wrist were burning.

50

"My name is Miriya," she said coldly. "And I don't currently have a

phone number." She turned to go, tugging at his grip. The feel of his skin

against hers made her feel a typical Zentraedi loathing of contact between

the sexes but stirred something else, something she couldn't put a name to.

Now that she had met her archenemy, Miriya was confused. Killing

him on the spot was out of the question; she suddenly didn't know how to

cope with her mission. What he said about her brought back the strange,

blurry feelings that the Micronian food gave her.

Max kept hold of her wrist. "Then, would you meet me in the park this

evening? By the Peace Fountain, at nine o'clock?"

Fool! You've sealed your fate! she thought. Somehow the thought of

slaying him made her angry rather than exultant. "Oh, whatever you want!

Just let me go!"

His fingers loosened, and she snatched her wrist away, saying an icy,

"Thank you." Then she whirled and ran, fleet as a deer, driven by a storm of

conflicting emotions.

Max watched admiringly, breathing, "Isn't she something? Whew!"

Looking down from the staircase, Rick silently wished Max better luck

than he was having.

51

CHAPTER SIX

When you're caught up in a war and thinking mostly about the enemy,

it's easy to forget that there are other fronts on which you should at least

attempt to strike a truce.

Lisa Hays,

Recollections

In a corridor deep in UEDC Headquarters, Lisa Hayes sat fretfully,

shifting and fidgeting. She heard footsteps approaching and looked up to

see her father. "Well, I talked to them," he said.

Tension twisted her middle. "Did they make any decisions?"

"You can never be certain about these things, but I think they're ready

to accept the idea of peace talks."

She drew an excited breath, then smiled at him fondly. "I'm so proud of

you for having the courage to take on this fight!" She stood on tiptoe to kiss

his cheek.

Later, as they sat on an upholstered bench in a lift car, she asked him,

"Is anything wrong, Father?" He had been staring at her strangely for

minutes.

"I've been thinking of how you remind me of your mother. And how

proud she'd be."

Shy blushed, very pleased. "Thank you, Father."

He shocked her by saying, "So, tell me how your love life's going these

days. Are you going out with anyone special? Anybody I should know

about?"

It took her so off guard that she found herself admitting, "Well, there is

a young man..."

"He's military, of course?" her father said.

"Yes, he is. In fact, he's the one who rescued me from the alien ship."

Admiral Hayes nodded slowly. "Ah yes. Sounds like a good man."

They walked and chatted as they hadn't done in more than three years.

52

The admiral led Lisa through the enormous base, coming at last to a vertical

shaft nearly a mile across. It was lined with operations ports, energy

systems, and power routing. High above, at ground level, a faceted dome

like a cyclopean lens covered the shaft.

"Was there something in particular you wanted to show me out here?"

After the relative confinement of the base passageways, it did feel like being

outside.

Her father led her out to the end of a gantry overlooking the cavernous

shaft. They could see down for miles, see up almost as far.

He waved a hand at it. "I wanted you to see the Grand Cannon, Lisa.

Before we enter into any peace negotiations with the aliens, we're going to

fire it at them."

She couldn't believe her ears. "What?" The cry seemed lost in the abyss

that was the cannon's barrel.

Admiral Hayes wore a grim look, his strong jaw set. "Even though the

satellite reflector system isn't in place yet, we expect to wipe out a large

segment of the enemy fleet by pulling off a surprise attack spearheaded by a

volley from the Grand Cannon. Once they've seen its power, we think they'll

enter the negotiations in good faith."

The original plan had been to put huge orbiting mirrors in place to

direct the cannon's bolts as needed; otherwise, its field of fire was very

narrow indeed. But with the alien warships so numerous and so close to

Earth, it was really only a matter of time before part of their fleet drifted

into range.

Lisa spat, "This Grand Cannon probably couldn't wipe out a small

division of Battlepods, much less one of their nine-mile-long mother ships!

Don't you understand? We have to approach them without trying to escalate

the war!"

"Some of them have defected to us already! I'm sure the Zentraedi will

listen to our peace proposals without the use of weapons."

The admiral looked out at the barrel of the gun. "Lisa, how can you be

so naive?" He turned to her. "The only thing a warlike power understands is

53

a demonstration of greater power! We can't let the Zentraedi mistake our

peace overtures for a sign of weakness. We must deal from strength!"

He paced to the observation platform at the very end of the gantry,

hands clasped behind him. "How can you expect peaceful intentions from a

race bred and trained for nothing but war? Even if their genetic structure is

identical to ours, we have no real knowledge of what factors in their

background motivate them, or how strongly."

"But Father," she began hopelessly.

He forged on. "No, Lisa! If history tells us anything, it's that caution

and strength are needed when dealing with an unpredictable foe. We've

already set a date for the firing of the cannon; we'll see about the peace talks

after that."

She stood mutely, hair stirred by air currents in the yawning shaft. "I'm

sorry, dear," he told her. "But there's nothing more to discuss."

"Yes. So I see."

Even with strange rumblings of unseen events on the war front, the

public demanded that its hunger for other news be fed. The interest in

celebrities and media idols was never satisfied for long.

A press conference had been called in the lobby of Macross General

Hospital. It was crowded with print and broadcast journalists, shoving and

elbowing, aiming lights and lenses and microphones. In the middle of it all

was Lynn-Minmei, the reigning queen of Macross and the SDF-1.

Not even nineteen yet, she was used to the lights and attention, a

gamine, black-haired lovely. Her tremendous charm and vivacity had

bolstered the ship's morale through its darkest moments and won the heart

of almost everyone on board.

Next to her sat her costar and third cousin, Lynn-Kyle, a saturnine,

sullen young man with flowing black hair that reached down past his

shoulder blades. Kyle, the pacifist who was nonetheless an unbeatable

martial-arts expert, wore a bandage around his head. He was completing his

convalescence after having saved Minmei from a falling spotlight during a

54

Zentraedi attack on the battle fortress.

Lynn-Kyle glared at the reporters and the camera and sound people.

He always held the public in some contempt, scorning them for their

willingness to let the military prosecute the war.

"Minmei," one man was saying, waving a mike at her, "is it true you've

been helping Kyle recover, remaining right beside his bed for the whole

week?"

Minmei frowned at him, and Kyle glowered, but they were used to that

kind of innuendo by now. "I don't think I'd put it quite that way," she

replied.

A woman persisted. "Rumor has it both of you are about to get married.

Got anything to say about that?"

"Absolutely untrue!" she fired back.

That didn't keep another guy from asking, "Can you tell us how your

ex-boyfriend reacted when you told him about these marriage plans?"

She felt like blowing her stack, then saw that this might be a chance to

divert the focus of the interview. "Oh, you must mean Rick Hunter." She

gave a silvery, laugh. "He was just a friend."

Sitting up on his bunk, knees clasped to himself, watching the live

coverage, Rick made a sour face, shaking his head. "Yeah. I guess that's all I

was."

He felt like an idiot, a complete sucker. Time and again he had

convinced himself that Minmei cared for him.

There was something about her, something flirtatious and impulsive. It

was something that didn't want to release anyone who had fallen under her

spell because, he supposed, that would be too much like rejection. So every

time he had come close to getting over her, she had shown up to raise his

hopes all over again.

Well, it looked like that wouldn't be a problem anymore. A little trip

down the aisle for the two darlings of stage and screen would at least cut

Rick free once and for all.

55

But the reporters weren't having any of Minmei's evasion. "Oh, come

on, now! That's not what we heard!" "You used to be pretty close to him,

right?" "You mean to tell us you and Hunter never discussed marriage at all.

Minmei looked vexed but didn't answer. Rick thought back once again

to those long days they had spent together, stranded and lost in a remote

part of the SDF-1, when they first met. When it looked like they weren't

going to make it, she had admitted to Rick her lifelong desire to be a bride.

They held a mock ceremony, marked by a very real kiss, only to be

interrupted by rescuers before they could say their vows. Rick wondered if

any of that was passing through Minmei's beautiful head or if she had

dismissed it from her mind as she seemed to dismiss anything that didn't fit

with her desires and attitudes of the moment.

He told himself that he would probably never get a clearer sign. It was

finally time to put her out of his thoughts and try to get back to living his

life.

In other quarters, the micronized Zentraedi defectors were gathered

around a screen, utterly enthralled as they gazed at Minmei.

They were dressed in ordinary work clothes and came in the

assortment of sizes and shapes that any random group of human males

might include. Except for a few skin tones that seemed a little odd-mauve,

albino-white, a pale, pale green-there was nothing to mark them as alien.

Since the incident with Karita and the muggers, they all took great pains to

avoid trouble. The military's decision to keep them all confined to their

quarters chafed but was accepted.

The SDF-1 authorities had provided them with quarters and rations

and so forth and were spending long hours debriefing them, though as

low-ranking warriors there was little of strategic value the defectors could

tell. No one had yet begun a systematic orientation program to familiarize

them with human life; since the military believed there was always the

chance they might return to the Zentraedi fold, the less they knew, for now

at least, the better.

56

But they could watch Minmei and listen to her voice-the voice that had

enticed them away from war making.

Now, one of them said, "Rico, what do they mean by 'marriage'? Why

do they keep talking about it?"

There was some grumbling, as others were troubled by the enigma, too.

Rico considered his answer. He understood only a little more about human

existence than the others, but they looked to him for answers, and he didn't

want to seem at a loss.

"Um, because marriage is something important. When two people get

married, they go off someplace private and spend their time pressing their

lips together."

This business of pressing lips had been mentioned before among the

Zentraedi, had been one of the prime matters of fascination that had led to

the defections. But still, the thought of such unbridled contact between the

sexes sent the erstwhile warriors into a tizzy.

"Maybe they won't make us do it?" "My lips aren't ready for that sort of

thing!" "I dunno; something tells me it might feel good." "Lemma at 'er!"

Some babbled and exclaimed to one another; others started shaking

visibly or gnawing their fingernails. A few tried rubbing their top and

bottom lips together and concluded that they were doing it wrong somehow.

At least one swooned.

At the interview, Kyle found another microphone shoved into his face.

"Tell the truth: have you proposed marriage to Minmei?"

He was calm, unflappable, on the outside. "No, I haven't."

He and Minmei were not close by blood, although their families had

kept close bonds due to friendships and shared business investments in the

White Dragon and Golden Dragon restaurants. He had grown up with

Minmei very much like an adoring little sister to him.

But that had changed over time, as much as he'd fought it. It was the

tremendous battle inside him compared to which mere physical fights were

children's antics. Everyone thought the self-discipline he brought to the

57

martial arts was a reflection of his inner calm; in fact, it was a reflection of

the iron will that barely kept him from yielding to temptation. He'd spent all

his young adulthood locked in fierce battle against his own impulses.

And most difficult of all were the movies they made together, the

shared work and intensity of their scenes, especially the love scenes. It was

so easy for acting to slide over into the real thing. The impulses were very

patient and unrelenting. He drove them off each day, only to have them

return fresher and stronger than ever the next.

But no more. Being with Minmei aboard the SDF-1, seeing the others

who coveted her, had decided Kyle. No one else could have her.

"Sounds like a pretty weak denial." The interviewer grinned at him.

"Maybe you just haven't had the chance, right?"

Kyle said in his calm, measured tones, "No, I've been thinking about,

um..."

The newsman was watching him like a ferret. "Yes?"

"Thinking about how I'd actually say it to her. Because I don't mind

telling you, it's something I've considered."

He heard Minmei's gasp next to him, and the mass intake of breath by

the reporters. Flashbulbs began popping, and everyone began talking at

once.

"Minmei, what d' you have to say?" "Have you set the date?" "Tell our

viewers: Would you accept if he proposes?" "Give us a shot of you two

holding hands!" "Kiss 'er, Kyle!" "Where d' you two plan to honeymoon?"

But they paid the reporters no attention. "Kyle, are you serious?" Her

eyes looked enormous. They sat there, gazing at each other, while the furor

boiled around them.

His screen switched off, Rick lay with head pillowed on elbows, feeling

utterly wretched. I can't believe it. All this time she's been waiting for Kyle

to propose to her.

There was a knock at the door, and Max showed up, dressed in civvies:

sports jacket, slacks, sweater, and tie. He wore a cheerful, eager look that

58

made him seem sixteen or so.

"Sorry to bother you, boss. But I'm thinking of wearing this tie to meet

Miriya. And I wondered if it made me look too sophisticated, you know? Or

maybe I should go the other way, wear a gold chain..."

After Rick got rid of Max, he decided to get some fresh air. He

wandered up to a parklike area on one of the observation decks and stared

out a viewport as high as a billboard and longer than two.

Earth swung by above him, a crescent of swirling blue and white in the

darkness. He sat and tried to spot Alaska.

After a while a familiar voice, holding a trace of mischief, said, "Well, if

it isn't Lieutenant Hunter, as I live and breathe!"

He looked up to see Claudia standing nearby. "Oh. Hi, how're you?"

They hadn't seen each other a great deal lately, partly because they had

been so busy and partly because they both still ached with the grief of Roy

Fokker's death, and seeing each other brought it up all over again.

But now she came over to sit next to him. "Not bad. But what're you

doing up here at this hour?"

"Couldn't stand my quarters anymore."

"Ah. You saw the press conference."

"Mm-hm."

She sat down, crossing her knees, resting her chin on her hand, helping

him watch Earth. "You could get along without her. She isn't that terrific."

"She is to me!" Rick wouldn't have taken that from anyone else now

that Roy was gone. But Claudia had an honesty that was hard not to respect

and give its due. And she was quite capable of getting mad right back at you

if she felt it was warranted. Claudia was not someone you wanted to be mad

at you if you could avoid it.

"You're bright; you should be with somebody else," she said after a bit.

"I don't know that I want to be. I'm stuck on her."

"Why, Rick?"

"I don't know why! Maybe she's just my type."

Claudia put one finger to her chin, eyeing him sidelong. "I don't know.

59

I sorta picture you being with somebody more mature. You know: someone

more experienced? Who's been through a big romance and a broken heart?"

Oh, great, just what I need! Rick thought. Some other walking

wounded to hang around with! But he couldn't help listening very closely.

"It'd be good for you to be with someone who can appreciate a

relationship. Those people're around, y' know. Sometimes they turn out to

be your next door neighbor. Or even...your superior officer."

"Huh?"

She rose. "Gotta go."

"Claudia, you mean Lisa, don't you?"

She glanced back over her shoulder at him. "Did you hear me mention

anybody by name? I only said people like that are around. Sometimes

they've been known to pass by so close, you can't even see them."

She started off once more, throwing back over her shoulder, "Now,

don't stay up too late. Things will look a lot better in the morning."

He watched her go and said very softly to himself, "Wow."

Rick sat, watching Earth again. The way he had it figured, the SDF-1's

orbit would bring Alaska into view in a little while. He went over the

message he had flashed to Lisa by prosign dots and dashes.

He wished he had said more.

60

CHAPTER SEVEN

The myths of selfless humility and humble allegiance to ideals aside,

there is no warrior culture, not that of Japanese samurai, medieval knight, or

any other, that does not, upon close scrutiny, have a ruthless, entirely

practical side to it. Also universal are egotism and a hypocritical willingness

to dispense with all the high-flown language and poetic vows when the grim

business of life and death is at hand.

How much more so, then, among the cloned, bred-for-battle Zentraedi?

In the case of Miriya Parino, female warlord of the Quadronos and arguably

the greatest fighter of her race, the matter is certain: Her soaring pride and

utter self-confidence had been her hallmark until she was bested both in the

air and on the ground by Max Sterling. Her emotional ferment was such that

the law of her kind, the vendetta, was the only road open to her-vengeance,

by any means possible.

Is it any wonder, then, that what happened next has provided fuel for

songs, arguments, dissertations, and grand opera for generations since?

Altaira Heimel,

Butterflies in Winter: Human Relations and the Robotech War

The super dimensional fortress prowled cautiously through the void,

vigilant against attack and yet resigned to battle as only a seasoned veteran

can be.

The Zentraedi had come pressing battle upon the ship many times

before, would come again. Life in between clashes was, therefore, to be lived

that much more fully. Death was all around-the war had gone on for years;

nobody aboard thought, any longer, that it couldn't as easily be their

number that would come up the next time around.

In the center of Macross was a park, lovingly and carefully put together

by the inhabitants almost blade of grass by blade of grass. Overhead was an

Earthly summertime evening, courtesy of the EVE system. There was even

61

the sound of crickets-descendants of good-luck pets who had somehow

survived the war.

Max Sterling paced fitfully under a streetlamp near the Peace Fountain

that trickled and gurgled a few yards away. He checked his watch for the

seventh time in two minutes.

"Jeez; it's almost nine. I hope she's all right."

He was worried that Miriya wouldn't show up-worried even more,

really, that she would. Just an average-looking young man straightening his

necktie and hoping his only sports jacket didn't look too shabby, and

recalling with a sudden sinking feeling that he had forgotten to pick up the

flowers he had ordered.

He didn't know that death hunted afoot and that the pounce was near;

he wouldn't know for several seconds yet that cruel eyes were watching him

from the shadows.

"I can't believe I asked her to meet me in the park-a girl, at night!" he

muttered. "She could get mugged or something."

In fact, street crime in Macross was all but nonexistent. And

punishments were such that recidivism was just about nil; but that sort of

reasoning meant nothing to a young man waiting for a woman who had him

mesmerized, entranced, enraptured. A woman he had met only a few hours

before.

A woman who stood in the dark poised, to kill him.

Then he heard running footsteps behind him, and her voice.

"Maximillian, prepare for your doom!" It was a literal translation of a

Quadrono war cry.

Miriya had gotten to the spot well in advance, seen him arrive, watched

him. She had been set to kill him precisely at their appointed meeting time,

a quarter hour before. But she had only watched him, hating him all the

more but feeling strange-feeling drawn to him in some mysterious way she

couldn't fathom.

She told herself she was merely studying her enemy's movements and

possible vulnerabilities and fought down the liking she had for seeing him

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in motion. She told herself that she was merely waiting for the most

opportune moment; yet though that part of the park was absolutely

deserted, she let the minutes slide by.

Miriya observed his eyes, his lips, the way he moved. She felt a

trembling in herself that no military mind /body discipline known to her

could quiet. But at last, by a tremendous application of will, she hurled

herself into battle.

Max was unaware of all of that, of course. At first he thought it was

some kind of joke.

He saw her charging at him with the quick grace of a panther, a

gleaming knife held high. Miriya's heavy waves of green-dyed hair snapped

and flew behind her like a flag. She still wore the brown body suit, the

kneehigh boots of blue-dyed leather, and the yellow scarf at her throat.

Her eyes started madly. She was Quadrono, a Zentraedi warrior, and

yet this miserable human had somehow made her vacillate-made her feel

weakness where once there had been only strength! But that would end;

Sterling would die, to expiate his sin of defeating her, and she would once

more be Miriya the unconquerable.

Max was fumbling through a little greeting he had been rehearsing, his

habitual whimsical half smile appearing on his face. "Miriya, it's nice to see

you...glad you could...uh..."

This, while she bore down on him, the blade gleaming. The knife was a

kind of hybrid cross between a Japanese-style tanto and one of the

midlength Randall hunting models, with a circular guard. She saw that she

had a lot of ground yet to cover and, afraid that he might elude her, hurled it

at him, clawing in the meantime for her second blade.

The knives weren't quite like the Zentraedi weapons she was used to,

but the balance and heft weren't too different. Although a firearm would

have been faster, her incandescent need for revenge had made Miriya

choose a more traditional weapon. It had to be reflexes, muscle, eye-to-eye

confrontation, and cold steel that settled her score with the hated human.

And in that moment Max Sterling proved that all those dogfight kills

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weren't some kind of fluke. His psychomotor responses were the fastest the

SDF-1 meds had ever measured-his coordination and reflexes were

unprecedented.

Max was still trying to figure out what she was talking about when his

body saw the flash of steel, understood, and ducked; he was doing his best

to recall the awkward, rather romantic little speech he had meant to make

to her when those supreme and somehow strangely given combat reflexes

cut in.

His evasion was barely a flicker of movement; the knife flashed past

him to land solidly in a tree trunk.

This was the first time she had ever missed. But she kept coming at

him.

Stunned, Max watched her charge headlong toward him. She threw the

sheath of the first knife far from her; it made no sound, landing in the grass.

"Hey, are you crazy?" Everything had suddenly slid into place within

him; he already loved her so, but the physical Sterling, the part that made

him unbeatable, was broadcasting warnings and threat updates, putting his

body in motion.

She drew a second, sheathed blade from the open front seam of her

body suit. "I am Quadrono Leader Miriya Parino: Zentraedi warrior!"

Max gulped. "There goes our first date."

But something in him had already changed; his balance was forward,

on the balls of his feet-he felt nearly weightless-and his hands were curled

into the fastest fists on the SDF-1.

However, he was still infatuated with her; he held himself in check

when all his impulses were to counterattack. A little thing like attempted

murder couldn't alter the fact that he was hopelessly in love with her.

She had seen him pacing, heard his concern for her. The weakling

human fears-for the safety of an imagined loved one, of all things!-were so

contemptible and misplaced, and yet...

Somewhere deep inside of her she knew; with a clear and pure

knowledge, that Max's worry was a reflection of his regard for her. Who else,

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in the course of her matchless military career, had ever shown such simple,

loving concern for Miriya Parino's well-being?

No one. Not ever. The very thought galvanized her, launched her

forward to murder.

The sheath hissed briefly with a metallic rasp as the blade glimmered

wickedly under the soft park streetlights. "You're such a fool! Fight for your

life!"

There was something nauseatingly vulnerable and adoring in his eyes;

the expression with which he regarded her was unworthy of any true

warrior-but it sapped her determination so.

Yet inside her, a furnace as hot and powerful as any Protoculture

engine burned. Kill him! Kill him now, at once! Before...before he can...

"My life? But why attack me?" Max asked bewildered; but his body was

already set-they were both so locked into the physical language of

hand-to-hand that a fight was inevitable.

She brought the glitter of the blade up into their line of sight like a

fencer so that they could both consider its cold blaze. "I will have my

revenge!"

His hand went to the hilt of the knife embedded in the tree trunk, and

she made new calculations based on his being armed. Sterling's having a

knife was so much the better as far as Miriya was concerned; she wanted to

kill him in a fight on equal terms, wanted to humble him as he had humbled

her-before...before he could...

His hand came away from the haft of the knife-very reluctantly, very

slowly, very deliberately. He turned back to her. "I'm afraid I don't know

what this is all about."

He left the weapon aside when he might have taken it. His life was in

danger, but in another way his life was there, staring at him, a knife in her

hand-the person, he was sure, he couldn't live without.

I wonder what the court-martial punishment is for falling in love with

the enemy?

"What d' you mean, revenge? If you're a Zentraedi, I understand why

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we have to-to fight." He barely got the word out. "But why d' you want

revenge?"

She held the short, tanto-style knife high, a miniature samurai blade,

burnished and keen, that threw the light back like a mirror.

"I...have...reasons!"

With that she sprang at him, fast as any jungle cat.

But Max Sterling's emotions and misgivings were subject to a sudden

override; body and reflexes took over.

An edge so fine that it would have cut a hair floating in the air sliced

through the spot where he had been standing, with a curt, sinister sibilance.

Max was already aloft.

She spat a Zentraedi oath in frustration, watching him dive and flip to

momentary safety. He whirled on her when he might as easily-and more

sanely-have run for it. "Miriya, what'd I ever do to you?"

She wasn't blind to his decision to stand when it would be more

advisable to run. Like a Valkyrie, she lifted the knife blade again, so that it

threw back shards of light.

"You defeated me. And you don't even know who I am, do you?"

She swirled the blade around, en garde, so that there was a contoured

trail of light between them. "I am the Zentraedi's greatest pilot! And I will

not be humiliated by a human insect!"

She plunged at him, the razor-sharp edge slitting the air. In less than a

second she executed two masterful infighting moves that would have

disembowled a lesser opponent.

But Max Sterling simply wasn't there. He made no countermoves, but

he avoided the cuts and thrusts like a shadow. Miriya was even more

enraged to see that he wasn't terrified, but rather mystified. That he still felt

weakling human emotions for her.

She fought down the chaotic impulses that flared up within her. She

slashed again, but the knife hissed through empty space once more.

And she began to know a certain fear. By the Protoculture! He's so fast!

Her fear had nothing to do with dying; she was Zentraedi. In this strangest

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battle of her life, she wasn't quite sure what that ultimate and most dire of

terrors was, the dread that was somehow bound up in Max Sterling. She had

had many mental images, wondering about what this utter demon of war

would be like; none of them were anything like the truth.

"The first time you were lucky! The second time was your final victory!"

She cut at him, barely missing, Max dodging with that same uncanny

speed. "Nothing can save you now!" Miriya hissed. "I will defeat you!"

She hurled herself at him, the blood thirsty edge coming around in an

eviscerating arc.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

There are old soreheads and young soreheads in our ranks who still

denounce the events that occurred near the Peace Fountain that night.

Chances are, they won't get the point of this book, either.

To paraphrase Robert Heilbroner, "These people bring lots of rigor to

our cause, but alas, also mortis."

Betty Greer,

Post-Feminism and the Robotech War

Miriya was quick, too, nearly as quick as Max, and a clever knife fighter.

She maneuvered the next sequence of cuts so that his route of evasion

would be past the tree's great roots, and sure enough, he stumbled and went

down.

She dove at him gleefully, the white throat open for her death cut. By

all rights the duel was hers; it needed only the flick of a wrist to end

Sterling's life and expunge her shame. Nothing could explain her slight

hesitation, she who had never hesitated before and had lost to no other foe.

Nothing could explain it except the sudden, vivid image of what he would

look like when she killed him.

Flat on his back, Max looked up at her. This was the powered-armor

pilot he had fought to a standstill days before, first in a furious dogfight over

the SDF-1, then in a toe-to-toe confrontation in the streets of Macross itself.

He should have been afraid for his life. But all he could think of was the

fact that, squaring off with Miriya's mecha, he'd kept hearing Tex Ritter's

old song from High Noon, "Do Not Forsake Me, O My Darlin'," echoing

through his head. And now he just couldn't help hearing that haunting line

on this, our weddin' day-ayy...

Miriya sprang at him; the blade cleaved the air, aimed at his heart. His

body responded before he had time for coherent thought; he held up a flat

disk of rock, and the knife point skidded from it, striking sparks, nearly

taking two of his fingers off but missing but a hair's breadth.

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The miss put her off balance; he worked a leg trip. As she rolled to get

free and try for his life again, he catapulted toward the first knife, which was

still buried in the tree.

She was after him at once. To kill him before...before he could...

"It's no use!" she cried triumphantly, slashing at him. They

maneuvered and feinted, the other knife's haft only inches beyond Max's

reach. "You're no match for me! Oh, you may be a great man, but what's a

man compared to a Zentraedi?"

He faked her away from the tree, turned, and had the knife in his hand

like magic, her belated cut only chipping bark.

"Now, we'll see." He held the knife in a fencing grip, almost hesitantly.

She went at him.

Impossibly, they set aside any sane knife-fighting style to fence as if

they held sabers. The knives struck scintillas of light from each other. Max

had learned to fence in school and had sharpened his combat skills in the

Robotech Defense Force; Miriya was a Zentraedi-she lived and breathed

warfare.

Amazingly, Max engaged her blade in a bind, whirling it around and

around, whisking it from her grip. It flew high, landing yards away. The

point buried itself in the ground, tantalizingly close and yet so far, too far.

Max held the point of his knife close to her throat. She raised her chin

proudly. "I guess I win again," he said, yet there was something in his tone

that made him sound unsure.

It was the moment Miriya Parino, warlord of the Quadrono, had never

thought she would face. And yet there was such a thing as dignity in defeat,

such a thing as her warrior code. "I've lost to you."

This is a shame I cannot endure. She sank to her knees, pulling the

scarf down and baring her throat. She waited for the cold kiss of the blade,

hoping it would come soon to end her suffering. She couldn't help it, but

tears welled up in her eyes-not from fear or even anger but from impulses to

which she could put no name.

He was hesitating for some reason; she thought that perhaps he was

69

going to show the cruelty a Zentraedi might in his position. She didn't

blame him and was bravely determined to endure whatever he might mete

out, but she thought that perhaps he simply needed a word from her to

acknowledge her defeat.

"End my life." She lowered her head; the long green tresses hung about

her face. "Please. Do it now."

But what she felt wasn't the final cold fire of the knife's edge. His

fingers were under her chin, lifting her face. "But I couldn't! You're so

beautiful..."

Suddenly everything was so unreal, so difficult for her to understand,

that it came as only a minor shock to see that he had let the knife fall.

Miriya looked up blissfully into a face that held confusion, wonder, and

a certain something else she was only beginning to comprehend.

She never felt herself come to her feet; perhaps she didn't, and the

zero-g, flying feeling was real. One final spasm of Zentraedi warrior training

made itself felt, telling her to stop him, to stop him before...before he

could...

But he already had, and they were kissing, embracing, Miriya in Max's

arms. For a while, in the little meadow in Macross's darkened park, there

was a place apart from all other worlds. No word was said for a long time,

until Max got up his nerve.

"Miriya, this is gonna sound crazy, but-will you marry me?"

"Yes, if you wish. Maximillian, what's 'marry'?"

The three former Zentraedi spies, Rico, Bron, and Konda, were sitting

in the RDF crew lounge not far from the bridge, doing their best to show the

Terrible Trio a good time.

Sammie, Vanessa, and Kim were feeling down-hearted. It seemed that

the SDF-1's voyage would never end, that there was no refuge for the

starship anywhere.

No one wanted to guess how much longer the dimensional fortress

could last against the Zentraedi armada that hounded them, but the

70

unspoken consensus was that it had pushed its luck to the limit and that

they were all living on borrowed time.

"D'you think the Canadians will offer sanctuary to the SDF-1, Konda?"

asked the burly Bron.

If the Canadians could be persuaded to defy the united Earth Defense

Council and let the ship land, offer her crew and refugees asylum, there

might be hope. It would be the most strenuous test yet of the UEDC's

authority as opposed to the autonomous rights of its member states, could

perhaps lead to a new civil war, but it was the SDF-1's only hope.

Bron's friend and fellow warrior chewed a bit of food. "I'll tell you one

thing: If our request is denied, it means we'll be stranded out here in space

forever."

The three young women exchanged agonized looks. Little Sammie

shook her head, intense and frightened. "Konda, please don't say anything

like that!"

Kim, her coffee cup forgotten in her hands, suddenly looked lost and

vulnerable. "Surely...someone will help us!"

Konda didn't contradict her, but neither did he agree. The six usually

had fun when they were together, but now they just stared gloomily into

their coffee.

"We must have faith," Rico said-an odd thing coming from one whose

only belief had, until some months ago, been the Zentraedi warrior code.

None of them noticed Max Sterling pass by, looking every which way

for his commanding officer. "Ah! Just the man I want to see," he muttered,

spying Rick Hunter.

Rick sat alone at a table on an upper level of the place, lost in thought,

staring out the deck-to-overhead viewports that had space on three sides of

him. He was exhausted from the constant flight duty and the added burdens

of being a team leader. He was worried about the ship, about his men, and

about what he could possibly do to set his love life straight.

Rick looked surprised when Max broke in on his reverie, but he invited

him to sit. "It's about last night," Max began. "I think I'm gonna get

71

married."

Rick spat out his coffee and choked a bit until Max patted his back.

"That's the most ridiculous thing I ever heard!" he sputtered at last. "You

only went on one date! Man, you know she won't be leaving town, so why

don't you take some time?"

Max looked stubborn, struggling a bit before he said, "We're in love."

Rick plunged into a lecture that he never would have imagined giving

before he became Skull leader. But before he could get too far into why no

one should rush into matrimony and how that went triple for VT fighter

pilots, Max cut him off.

"Lieutenant, that's not the part that's bothering me." He mopped his

brow with his handkerchief. "Y' see, it's ah, I'm not sure how to say this.

She's the enemy. Miriya confessed to me that she's a Zentraedi."

Rick stared at him blankly for a long moment. If it had been practically

anyone else, he would have doubted his sanity; but he was Max's friend, and

besides, he had seen his latest psych evaluation. "How could you let this

happen?"

"I love her," Max said, a bit more forcefully than he usually said

anything.

"You're talking nonsense! What could you possibly have in common

with her?" This, even though the three former spies and the bridge bunnies

were keeping company on the other side of the lounge. Rick had been trying

to unsnarl his own stormy emotional life and couldn't see why other people

would want to complicate theirs.

"I'm telling you, I love her," Max insisted. He suddenly hit the table

with his fist, making cup and saucer dance. "And there's no problem love

won't solve!"

Oh yeah? Rick thought ironically; he wished that for just a moment he

could do something about his hopeless yearning for Minmei, could

understand his complex feelings toward Lisa Hayes. Max, you've got a lot to

learn!

"There's one problem it won't solve, pal, and that's your silly idealism.

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Love isn't gonna make you happy, take it from me."

Max was furious. "It doesn't matter what you say, Rick. I'm going to

marry this woman with or without your approval."

"Okay, look, so you're attracted to her. How many times does that

happen to a guy?"

"She's special!"

"Take it easy; I'm sorry. I can tell you like her very much."

Max calmed a bit. "I want you to meet her."

"This should be interesting," Rick said, realizing someone had come up

to the table.

Miriya Parino of the elite Quadrono battalion of the Zentraedi hordes

looked like the cover of a fashion magazine. Rick didn't know what he had

expected; he had never met a female Zentraedi and had seen few males who

didn't look ugly enough to stop a clock.

What he hadn't expected was a gorgeous young woman in a simple,

graceful pink summer frock set off by a blue sash about her slim waist. She

wore her dark green hair in a single lush tail drawn forward over one white

shoulder.

"We were just talking about you," Max told her with a sublime,

starry-eyed smile.

Rick blinked, flabbergasted, then got out haltingly, "You were right,

Max. She is beautiful. I-I think I understand now."

Miriya smiled serenely. "I'm so pleased to meet you. You look just the

way Maximillian described you."

She was terribly happy that she and Max were to marry, though this

odd, strangely thrilling human custom was more a mystery than anything

else. She suddenly looked and felt nothing at all like a Zentraedi

commander and warrior, but she didn't mind. Everything was so clear and

bright and wonderful...

Max's decision to buy her new clothes had plainly been a good one; the

looks she'd drawn from people, and from Rick in particular, were not the

kind one directed at an enemy.

73

It was difficult to believe that only hours before, she had been trying to

kill Max. He had spent much of the intervening time trying to clarify what

"love" meant. She decided she wanted more clarification-a lifetime's worth.

"You're a lucky man, Max," Rick told him, without taking his eyes off

Miriya. Then he grinned. "And forget all that nonsense I told you."

Max was all smiles again. Rick added, "And to guarantee you two have

a great wedding day, I plan to be there to kiss the bride!"

Max shrugged and nodded cheerfully, a little irony creeping into his

tone. "I knew I could count on you, boss. Only-"

He reached out to take Miriya's hand. "You'd better hold off on that

until I explain it all to the future Mrs. Sterling. The RDF forces are

shorthanded as it is, and I'd hate to see Skull Leader wind up in intensive

care."

The preparations for the wedding began that same day. Gloval was

strangely silent, except to give his permission and authorize the sort of

major bash the ship's media moguls hungered and cried out for. Rick knew

Gloval well enough to know that the captain had good reasons for a move

like this, and he wondered what those might be.

News of the coming nuptials had the entire dimensional fortress abuzz.

It galvanized crewpeople and refugees alike, a reason at last to celebrate and

forget the war for a while. Mayor Tommy Luan and the director of the

in-ship broadcasting system and a hundred others threw themselves into

the arrangements.

Somewhat to their surprise, they found that Gloval had ordered that no

effort be spared in making the occasion a major event. Miriya could have

had ten thousand bridesmaids if she wanted; the RDF people and the

Veritech pilots in particular kicked out the chocks to mount a pageant

worthy of a royal wedding.

The preparations went quickly; the marriage became the center of

existence for quite a few people. They were sewing, cooking, decorating; the

RDF personnel rehearsed their drills, and the engineers rigged the most

74

special of special effects.

All the activity didn't go unnoticed. In the alien armada, cold and

merciless eyes watched the peculiar goings-on. Fateful, dire decisions were

near.

75

CHAPTER NINE

These letters pile up, Vince dear, perhaps to be read by you someday or

perhaps not, but today especially I have to set down how full my heart

is-more so than at any time since Roy was killed.

I heard Gloval murmuring something astounding while he was sitting in

his command chair: "Capulets and Montagues." I thought he was going soft;

heaven knows the rest of us have. But when I looked at the clipboard he had

been studying, it was an intel rundown on books Miriya had screened from

the Central Data Bank while she was here-when she was hunting Max.

Shakespeare was there, of course.

I don't know what to think, except-damn it! We've got to change the

ending this time!

Lt. Claudia Grant, in a letter to her brother Vincent

The spectacular fireworks lit up the space all around the SDF-1. It was

only the beginning, but what a beginning. The whole area was illuminated

in bright colors; civilians and RDF people alike crowded every available

viewport, oohing and ahing.

Then the fighting mecha appeared, to execute their part in things.

From the flight decks of the fortress and the two immense supercarriers

that had been joined to it like stupendous metal forearms, Veritechs

swarmed out to take up their places.

A broad, flat roadway of light, radiant in all the colors of the spectrum,

sprang from the bow of the flattop Daedalus, like a shining runway. The

Veritechs zoomed out, retros flaring.

Excitement hit fever pitch all through the ship. It was more than just

the occasion of a wedding-even the first wedding that anyone could think of

that had taken place in outer space. There was something about the joining

of a human and a Zentraedi that spoke directly to the humans' longing for

peace and a return home. It was a ray of hope that the terrible Robotech

76

War might yet be ended short of catastrophe.

For Max and Miriya, it was simply the happiest day of their lives. They

came swooping out of the void in Max's VT fighter right on schedule, Max

wearing his tux and sitting in the forward seat, piloting. Miriya sat in the

rear, making constant corrections to the fall of her wedding veil, the

arrangement of her bridal bouquet. She had won so many decorations for

bravery and courage under fire, yet she found herself unable to stop

trembling.

The VTs had gone into Battloid mode, looking like giant ultratech

knights. They positioned themselves in pairs, facing one another across the

rainbow runway of light. They lifted weapons, the long gray autocannon

that had been used on other occasions to wage savage war on the Zentraedi.

Now, though, the weapons had been fitted to throw forth brilliant

beams of light into reflective aerosols that had been misted around SDF-1

for just that purpose. They shone like scores of crossed swords over the

gleaming approach path. Max flew his ship under the military salute at low

speed as Miriya looked around at it open-mouthed, delighted beyond

words.

The fighter set down on Daedalus's deck, and there were more

mecha-the attack machines of the tactical corps ground units. Monstrous

Destroid cannon, Excaliburs, Raidar Xs, and the rest sent harmless beams

to form a canopy overhead as Max taxied for the elevator that would lower

his ship to the hangar deck.

Cameras were already tracking the VT, and close, total coverage was

planned for every portion of the ceremonies. Max and Miriya didn't mind;

they wanted everybody to share in their total joy.

But not everyone did.

Breetai, the mountainous commander of the Zentraedi armada, gazed

into the projecbeam image from intercepted SDF-1 signals. "This is the

oddest Micronian custom we've observed yet, is it not, Exedore? Can you

explain to me what Miriya Parino is doing?"

77

What she was doing was evident: She was walking slowly next to a

blue-haired human, dressed in a rather elaborate and inconvenient-looking

outfit, clutching what appeared to be a handful of plants.

She was also clinging to the Micronian's arm, causing Exedore to

speculate that perhaps she had been wounded in the leg or fallen ill.

Although she didn't look ill; she looked-Exedore didn't know what that

expression on her face could mean.

Breetai gazed at the image. He was a creature who would have had no

trouble passing for a Micronian himself, except that he was some sixty feet

tall. Terrible wounds received in battle against the Invid species, implacable

enemies of the Zentraedi, had left him with a glittering metal half cowl

covering the right side of his skull, the eye replaced by a shining crystal.

Next to him was Exedore, a hunched and fragile-looking Zentraedi, far

smaller than Exedore-almost a dwarf by the standards of his race. But

within Exedore's big, misshapen skull was most of the accumulated lore and

knowledge of his kind and a mind that Breetai relied upon heavily.

Exedore's bulging, lidless, pinpoint-pupilled eyes were fixed on the

projecbeam image of the wedding, too. "Your Excellency, if I am not

mistaken, she is getting 'married.'"

They were standing in Breetai's command station, overlooking the vast

bridge of his colossal flagship. The flagship, nine solid miles of weapons,

shields, and armor, was in a state of disrepair after its furious engagements

with the SDF-1 and the RDF mecha. The transparent bubble surrounding

the command station had been shattered; only jagged pieces of it remained

around the frame.

Zentraedi were warriors, not slaves or drudges; they had little taste for

anything that smacked of common toil, and even less talent for it. Those

predjudices were approved of and reinforced by their Robotech Masters;

without the Masters, the Zentraedi would sooner or later find themselves

without functioning tools of war.

Exedore explained, "According to my research, it is a condition in

which male and female Micronians live together."

78

Breetai was stunned. His harsh, guttural bass voice filled the command

station. "Live together? Miriya Parino and this puny Micronian male?"

"Correct, m'lord."

But for what reason? The towering Zentraedi warlord, master of a

cloned race that didn't know love, family, or sex, tried to imagine what the

purpose could be, why male and female might conceivably desire such

intimacy. But when he tried, he was assailed by waves of distaste and

confusion, by nameless half-seen visions that made him physically ill. He

shunted the images aside.

Breetai lowered himself into his enormous command chair, still

considering the import of the wedding. "It seems she's taking this spying

mission of hers very seriously. Perhaps more seriously than she should."

His first conclusion was that Miriya the dedicated fighter was simply

undergoing the tremendous torment of such behavior to infiltrate the

enemy and learn the perverse secrets of their obscene social practices. But

Breetai saw something in Miriya's face, something that made the towering

commander doubt this analysis.

It was like the three spies, Konda, Rico, and Bron, all over again.

Breetai felt a certain dread. "Unless my senses deceive me, it would seem

she's enjoying herself in some peculiar fashion. Could it be that she too has

found the Micronian way of life too enjoyable to resist?"

Exedore answered, "It would appear, sir, that she cannot resist the

charm of that Micronian pilot."

Breetai had seen kissing demonstrated when he captured Rick Hunter

and Lisa Hayes. He shuddered, recalling the disgusting display, and

wondered how any intelligent creature could bring itself to indulge in such

baseness.

But the lure of the humans was undeniable; scores of Zentraedi

soldiers had secretly conspired to undergo micronization and had gone to

live among their former foes. It was the first such mutiny ever to have taken

place in the history of the warrior race. Part of the madness had to do with

the young human female Minmei and the oddly hypnotic power called

79

"singing" that she exercised.

"Our forces may be in more jeopardy than we believed," Exedore said.

"What if the traitors who went over to the human side were not merely

mental defectives, as we thought, but rather the first wave in a sea of such

deserters?"

Breetai rubbed his huge jaw, the one giant black eyebrow lowering. "It

appears this 'love' business is a very powerful thing."

Exedore replied, "I'm afraid I agree with you, sir. It's an emotional

factor against which we Zentraedi have no defense. This 'love' could be used

as a powerful weapon against us."

Breetai scowled at the image of laughing, joyous humans, of the

radiantly happy Miriya and proud, smiling Max. "Weapon, eh?"

"Yes. We must beware."

The intercepted coverage of the wedding showed them flashbulbs

popping and people applauding as Max and Miriya cut their cake. The

wedding cake was a tenfoot-high model of the SDF-1 in its knightlike Attack

mode.

Breetai, growling in his rumbling bass, watched the proceedings

angrily. What was there about the blissful looks of Miriya and the Micronian

that exerted such a fascination, such a deep pull, on him? He told himself

that it was only a commander's need to study a dangerous enemy, refusing

to believe that he could feel such a thing as envy for the puny foe.

At the reception, the master of ceremonies was calling for quiet.

"Ladies and gentlemen, today is a very special day. It's more than just a

wedding celebration; it's the bonding of two souls dedicated to the

protection of our Robotech colony. I'd like to introduce the man who's done

so much to make this a unique occasion, the commander of the SDF-1,

Captain Henry Gloval!"

There was plenty of applause even though people were still passing

around cake and freshening up their champagne after the several toasts that

had been drunk.

80

Gloval stood up, decked out in his dress uniform, laden with medals,

braid, and campaign ribbons galore. Rick, who knew the captain a little

better than most people there, got the impression that they were going to

find out why he had spared nothing to turn the wedding into a major

occasion.

Gloval spoke. "Well, to begin with, I extend heartfelt congratulations to

Max and Miriya. This wedding carries with it a great historical significance.

"As you all know, Miriya was a Zentraedi warrior who destroyed many

of our ships. She comes from a culture that we have grown to fear and hate."

Oh, no! Rick thought. What could Gloval be thinking of? Miriya sat

rigid as a statue, staring down at her plate. Max was white. The gathered

guests were listening in stunned silence.

"It is the Zentraedi who have caused our present situation," Gloval

pressed on. "They alone prevent our return to Earth-our homes and our

beloved families." One hand was balled into a fist now. "It is they who have

caused injury, destruction, and endless suffering!"

"Captain, please!" Max burst out, just at the same moment that Rick

yelled, "Captain!"

Gloval forged ahead. "Now, I know what you're thinking: 'Why is he

choosing this time to remind us of these terrible things?' I remind you of

them, ladies and gentlemen, because we must learn to forgive our enemies."

His image and his voice went out over screens throughout the

fortress-in the barracks, the lounges, the giant monitors in the public

squares of Macross City. "Not blindly, not out of ignorance, but because we

are a strong and willing nation. We cannot blame the Zentraedi for their

inexplicable lust for war. They have never known another way of life, and it

has been their only means of survival."

All through the battle fortress, people gazed up at the screens in

amazement-some with burgeoning hope, others with growing antagonism.

"Nor can we condemn individuals of that society for the mass insanity

of their leaders. Instead, we must look to their good nature. As you may

know, dozens of Zentraedi defectors are now aboard the SDF-1, having been

81

reduced to human size. They have made a request to stop the fighting, and I

believe it is a genuine request."

He turned to indicate the newlyweds. "The blood of these young people

was tested before the ceremony. Zentraedi blood was found to be the same

as human blood."

That started murmurs and whispers in the reception hall; in the ship

and the city at large, it ignited a thousand arguments and marked a turning

point in human thinking.

In the White Dragon, the Chinese restaurant belonging to Minmei's

uncle Max and aunt Lena, Mayor Tommy Luan and some others had come

over to watch the ceremonies on television. They heard Gloval say, "There is

no reason why we cannot coexist in peace. Let this occasion represent a

future where all people live in harmony."

Cheers and applause were rising, evidence of the general hunger for an

end to war. Gloval held his hands up to silence it. "Please, let me speak a

moment longer."

Voices in the background were heard, saluting Gloval for his leadership,

courage, and convictions. In the restaurant, Mayor Tommy Luan nodded his

head and wiped at a tear. "Captain Gloval is truly a man of peace. A great

man."

There were others in the ship who didn't feel the same way, others who

smashed bottles in the street or shook a fist at Gloval's image. There had

been so many losses, so many deaths, and so much suffering since the

aliens' first attack that the hunger for revenge would not die easily.

Gloval had anticipated that, of course. "All of us have lost loved ones,

and it will be difficult not to harbor ill feelings toward the Zentraedi. But

somehow we must overcome these feelings! We must stop this senseless

destruction."

Far beneath the surface of the bleak Alaskan tundra, in the lowest

levels of the United Earth Defense Council's headquarters base, Admiral

Hayes pointed a remote unit at the TV, and it went dark.

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He turned to his daughter and spat, "He's crazy! I don't understand

Gloval talking about peace at a time like this!"

Lisa was quick to spring to Gloval's defense, both because he was her

former commanding officer and because he was inarguably right. "Father,

it's the only way to avoid our own destruction! If we don't start talking peace,

it will mean the end of this planet, and not even you would want that!"

He suddenly looked pained. "Lisa!"

"I'm sorry," she told him, "but you must stop the Grand Cannon

operation immediately!"

Admiral Hayes stubbed out a cigarette and avoided his daughter's gaze.

"Plans for use of the Grand Cannon are already set. There's nothing to be

done about that now."

83

CHAPTER TEN

I heard someone next to me saying something about a marriage literally

made in the heavens. I held my tongue and was glad no one took the obvious

bait, to mention a honeymoon in hell. I silently said my chants for the

newlyweds and for us all.

Jan Morris,

Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians

Gloval still held his audience transfixed.

"Each and every citizen must develop a responsible attitude toward the

efforts for peace. We must learn greater tolerance and meet this challenge.

I'm not proposing we lay down our arms but rather that we extend the hand

of friendship.

"There is a chance for a peaceful solution, and we must make it come to

pass. As Max and Miriya, here, have done."

"The Zentraedi are a strong and intelligent people. Let this ceremony

stand as a symbol of our desire for peace. We must emulate Max and Miriya:

They are the heroes of today and our hope for tomorrow."

It took a moment to realize he was finished, as Gloval turned to let the

newlyweds retake the spotlight. Then all at once the cheers and applause

were deafening. Streamers and confetti showered around the SDF-1 cake,

and everybody was hailing Max and Miriya and blessing their union.

The crowd hailed Gloval as well, and friendship between human and

Zentraedi. The Terrible Trio threw themselves into the arms of the three

onetime Zentraedi spies-Vanessa to the husky Bron, little Sammie with Rico,

and Kim embraced by purple-haired Konda. The joyous crowd called out

toasts and salutes to peace.

Gloval hoped that it had been enough-hoped that the commitment and

the determination would still be there when the cheering had stopped.

The headquarters of the Zentraedi supreme commander, Dolza, hung

84

like some titanic hive in the blackness of space. It was the size of a planetoid,

an armored moonlet so immense that Breetai's flagship and hundreds of

thousands more like it could fit within. Around it, the Zentraedi Grand Fleet

was assembling, a force so incredibly vast as to dwarf even Breetai's

armada.

Dolza, the Old One, largest of his race, paced within his headquarters.

Standing at attention before him were his assembled subordinates. Dolza

stopped pacing and looked down at them.

"We can no longer permit this condition to exist. It's becoming a

significant threat to Zentraedi power. It seems that we have underestimated

the powers of these Micronian vermin."

In the end, it seemed Breetai's trusted adviser Exedore was right: The

ancient Zentraedi warnings against any contact with Micronians had been

handed down for good reasons, though the reasons had been unknown until

now.

A race that could subvert the Zentraedi, make them violate their

warrior code-a race that could weaken them so with talk of love and peace!

Dolza had seen that it was a threat infinitely more dangerous than the

ravaging Invid, that it was something that could end Zentraedi greatness

forever, at a single stroke, unless something was done immediately.

"The battle fortress has become too dangerous to continue to exist.

Even though it means destroying so many of Zor's secrets and losing

valuable knowledge, you are ordered to totally annihilate the SDF-1. The

Grand Fleet will soon be mustered and prepared to set forth."

The subordinates smote their chests with their right fasts, roaring in

unison. "Ho!"

Then, Dolza thought grimly, we shall incinerate the planet Earth and

end this threat once and for all.

At the reception, there was the roll of a snare drum, and the master of

ceremonies brought out Lynn-Minmei. Rick Hunter sat with his arms

folded across his chest and didn't know what to feel.

85

She was even more beautiful than the first time he had met her-a

black-haired, blue-eyed stunner with a naturally winning stage presence.

She wore a gold lamb gown cut high on her left hip.

She took the microphone; the crowd was eating out of her hand before

she even opened her mouth. Minmei paid lavish compliments to the

newlyweds, then broke into one of her biggest hits, "To Be in Love."

Rick recalled the first time he had heard it, marooned with Minmei in a

deserted portion of the SDF-1, lost and seemingly doomed. He had fallen in

love with her there and had thought she felt the same.

Her wonderful voice took the notes with a sure, sheer beauty, caressing

the words, taking the crowd under her spell.

Rick saw Miriya take Max's hand shyly. The three alien ex-spies were

hugging the bridge bunnies. Konda and Bron and Rico had initially been

won over to the human side by that same voice, that same face.

Claudia was trying not to cry; she had done a good job controlling it

since Roy was killed, but Minmei's voice had something mystical about it.

Rick saw moisture on Claudia's cheek.

Rick looked out the viewport to the emptiness of space. Roy, his best

friend, was gone-and Ben Dixon and how many hundreds, how many

thousands upon thousands of others? The losses had been terrible.

Deep under the frozen Alaskan ground, Lisa had turned the ceremonies

back on. She watched Minmei work her magic and despaired of ever being

able to compete, of ever being able to win Rick's love. How can I? She's so

beautiful; her singing-it's like a kind of miracle.

The broadcast was also intercepted by the armada as it swam like a

school of a million bloodthirsty deep-sea creatures in the depths of space.

The great warships, bristling with weapons, spiny with their detection and

communication gear, prowled hungrily.

In his command station, Breetai looked up at the image and heard the

music. "This woman has a voice that...can make a man feel sorrow," he said

slowly, heavily. Exedore looked at him worriedly.

86

Just as Minmei was about to start another song, a priority signal

replaced Minmei's image. One of Dolza's staff officers looked down at him.

"Commander Breetai, forgive this interruption, but I bring you

top-secret orders from Commander in Chief Dolza."

Breetai shot to his feet, hand outflung. "Hail, Dolza!" He shook off the

effects of Minmei's siren song.

"You are ordered to begin a full-scale assault on the SDF-1," the officer

informed him. "There are to be no survivors whatsoever, no matter what the

cost. That is all."

He disappeared, and Minmei was singing once more. "Well, Your

Excellency?" Exedore asked softly.

Breetai stared up sadly at Minmei's image. "It grieves me that the time

has finally come. I do not look forward to this task at all, Exedore. That may

sound strange, but it's true."

And the haunting beauty of Minmei's voice put that same heavy sorrow

in him once more, until he willed himself to reach out and shut it off.

Loyal, insightful Exedore looked at his lord with concern. Half a dozen

times he almost spoke of the fear and apprehension that those words,

coming from Breetai, put into him. But in the end the small, slight giant

held his peace.

But Breetai did not have the only receiving equipment in the fleet.

Everywhere in the teeming warships it was the same: Clusters of huge,

hulking warriors had gathered around to watch and listen to Minmei-and

had heard Gloval as well. The first sounding of the alert signals, the call to

arms and to glorious Zentraedi warfare, had touched off more dissent than

they had ever experienced before.

"I don't want to fight," growled a much-decorated pod commander. He

was staring at something tiny that lay in the palm of his hand as though

examining his own heart line. Another PC, standing near, tried to get a look

at whatever it was; but the first closed his fist.

He did it carefully; he didn't want to damage the tiny Minmei doll that

87

lay there. Bron had given it to him before he and the others defected,

seeking shelter and an uncertain future among the humans. The PC had

listened to the doll sing until the batteries were all but exhausted. He

couldn't explain its appeal...or the power of Minmei's music over him...or

why he was unwilling to go out and destroy the SDF-1 when his former

comrades in arms were aboard.

The harsh Zentraedi language had few or no words for these concepts,

but that didn't change the PC's feelings.

All around them, colossal warriors raced to don combat armor, seize

weapons from the racks, grab gear, and get ready for the great assault. The

decks thrummed under their massive iron-shod feet.

The second PC opened his palm to the first for an instant. They had

been thinking the same thing, for he held another of the tiny souvenir

Minmei dolls. He closed his fist again. Opposing the war felt much different,

sparked a higher flame of hope, when each realized that the man facing him

felt the same.

"It's as though I'm going to be fighting against my own people," the

second PC said, struggling to put his thoughts into the limited Zentraedi

battle tongue.

NCOs and officers were yelling at various scurrying units to move it,

move it, move it. Go! Go! The deckplates thundered.

But one body-armored NCO, having caught a bit of the exchange,

skidded to a halt, his disrupter rifle gripped in one hand.

"D' you realize what the penalty is for disobeying orders in combat?"

Others had been listening to the two pod commanders; half swayed by

what they were saying, recalling Gloval's words and Minmei's song. But all

of them knew the dreadful punishment the NCO was talking about. Death

would be preferable.

One of the bystanders declared, "He's right! We will have to fight!"

"Let's move!" someone else cried, and with that they were in motion,

scrambling to prepare and race to their battle stations. Everyone, that is,

but the first PC. He watched the others go as he reclined back on his bunk,

88

hands behind his head, brooding. At last he brought his hand forth and

spent a long time looking at the tiny Minmei doll.

The vast armada began shifting formation, spreading and realigning

for the attack.

At the wedding reception, alert sirens began sounding at just about the

same time Gloval took the call on a mobile com handset and got the crowd's

attention. With the banshee song of the sirens behind him, he announced,

"Ladies and gentlemen! It grieves me to say this, but we are now on red

alert."

He had to raise his voice to speak over the confusion and outcries of the

crowd. "All military personnel report to battle stations at once. Civilians

proceed to emergency duties or to designated shelters. The SDF-1 is about

to come under full-scale attack."

He swallowed once, with effort. It was the first time the enemy had

thrown its massed strength at the fortress, and there was little question as

to what the final outcome would be.

"God be with you all. Now, move quickly!"

Only a few actually lost their heads and bolted; everyone aboard had

been through the fire of battle, and most moved swiftly but with a deliberate

calm.

The Terrible Trio finished what they were eating and swapped hugs

with the Zentraedi spies before dashing off to the bridge. Striding for the

door, Rick Hunter exchanged a brief glance with Minmei but had no time to

stop and talk to her, though he wanted to do that more than anything in the

world.

A VT duty officer halted amid the flow of people and looked back to the

wedding party's table as Max came to his feet, unable to believe what was

happening.

"Max, you're excused from duty. Captain's orders! You sit this one out!"

Then he was on his way.

Max slowly tugged his bow tie, opening his collar. He sighed deeply,

89

feeling Miriya's eyes on him, and turned to her. "I can't let them down when

they need me the most, love."

She drew off her wedding veil. "Of course not, Max. I'll go with you."

He stared at her. "Huh?"

Miriya came to her feet. "I've seen your Veritechs, even flew yours for a

bit, remember? I can handle one was well as any of your pilots."

"No-"

"I promised in our vows that I would stay by your side, and I will. From

now on, we fight together."

And a brief fight it might be, he knew. The RDF needed every hand it

could get, and Miriya's battle skill might be a critical plus. He took her hand,

and they managed an even more loving look than they had exchanged

during their vows.

"Then I guess I have no choice," he said. "Even though we may die

together."

"Oh, but Maximillian! I would accept no other death!"

"Me, either." He kissed her quickly, then they raced off hand in hand.

"There goes the honeymoon," he said as they ran.

"I don't think you understand true Zentraedi determination." She

smiled.

Alone in the ballroom, the master of ceremonies had no more strength

to seek shelter or follow the war over the screens. The wedding had been the

best thing that had happened to him in two years aboard the SDF-1, the

thing he was suited to, that he did best.

Now he sank to his knees, head lowered to the forearm he rested on the

shambles of the wedding party's abandoned table. The fortress model,

symbol of Max and Miriya's wedding, looked down at him. He sobbed what

everyone in the ship was thinking, as the Zentraedi dreadnoughts moved in

in their hundreds of thousands. "Please, save us all."

90

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Dolza, my old friend, old watchdog; the naive straightforwardness of

the Zentraedi could be your downfall some day.

All things are so simple to you: The eye sees the target, the hands aim the

weapon, a finger pulls the trigger, an energy bolt slays the enemy. You

therefore conclude that if the eye sees clearly, the hand is steady, and the

weapon functions properly, all will be well.

You never see the subtlety of the myriad little events in that train of

action. What of the brain that directs the eye and the aim? What of the nerves

that steady the hand? Of the very decision to shoot? What of the motives that

make the Zentraedi obey their military Imperative?

Ah, you call all of this sophistry! But I tell you: There are vulnerabilities

to which you are blind.

Remark made by Zor to Dolza shortly before Zor's death—

known only to Dolza, Exedore, and Breetai

Again the bays opened, the elevators lifted the fighters to the flight

decks. The SDF-1 and the Daedalus and Prometheus catapult crews labored

frantically to launch the all-important fighters as fast as possible. On the

flatdecks, waist and bow cats were in constant operation, and the crews'

lives were in constant danger; it was very easy for something as small and

frail as a human being to meet death during launch ops, especially in the

airlessness of space.

The Veritechs rose to the flight decks, deploying ailerons and wings

that had been folded or swept back to save space on the hangar decks. Their

engines screamed like demons, and they hurtled into space in a

meticulously timed ballet, avoiding collisions with one another and forming

up for combat with the sureness of long experience.

Gloval watched from a tall viewport as Rick Hunter went out, leading

91

Skull Team. And the rest, scores of them, fell in behind to do battle against

the aliens' total attack.

"May every one of you make it home safely," Gloval murmured, the old

briar pipe gripped in his teeth. But he knew it was too much to hope for.

Rick was running the fighter wing now; even though there were those

who outranked him, there was no one with more expertise.

"Remain in Fighter mode until I give the word," he told them. "We are

now approaching intercept zone."

Flying at his wing was Max, with Miriya in the seat behind wearing an

RDF flight suit and "thinking cap."

The pods were coming in droves to soften up the target and eliminate

and suppress as much counterfire as they could before the Zentraedi

heavyweights came in for the kill.

Rick's autocannon sounded like a buzz saw multiplied a thousand

times; high-density slugs went out in a stream fit by tracers to pierce an oval

armored body through and through. The enemy disappeared in an

expanding sphere of red-hot gas and flying shrapnel an instant later.

The Veritechs peeled off, wingmen trying their best to stick together,

and threw themselves into swirling, pouncing dogfights against the enemy.

The pods advanced in an unstoppable cloud, as the desperate VTs twisted

and swooped.

Gloval agonized over the fact that ongoing repairs and retrofitting

made it impossible to fire the ship's main gun. But the ship's primary and

secondary batteries opened up, turrets swinging, barrels traversing,

hammering away.

A pod was hit dead center by an armor-piercing discarding-sabot

round and blew to incandescent bits. Another was riddled by kinetic-energy

rounds from an electromagnetic rail-gun, projectiles accelerated to

hundreds of thousands of g's, hitting at such high speed that explosives

would have been redundant. A VT in Guardian mode spun and tumbled,

chopped to fragments by the energy blasts of a pod's plastron cannon.

92

But more and more pods came at the humans in vast waves, pushing

them back. The SDF-1 was surrounded by the globular explosions of space

battle, hundreds of them every second.

Max had a pod square in his gunsight reticle, thumb on his stick's

trigger, when Miriya cried, "No! Wait! Don't shoot!"

"Huh? But they were right in my sights."

She took over, maneuvering until the computer-aided sights were

centered on a structure behind the articulation apparatus that joined the

pod's legs. Whatever it was, it wasn't on the VT pilots' menu of sure-kill

shots.

But Miriya told her husband, "Now!" Max zoomed in on a close pass,

letting a short burst fly. The target structure disappeared in a burst of flame.

The Zentraedi wobbled and careened out of control, its main thrusters

sputtering and coughing every which way, guns going silent after a moment.

Trailing fire, it drifted away, limping toward safety with feeble gusts from its

attitude thrusters.

VT pilots were taught to go for the sure-kill shots at areas of the enemy

mecha most likely to expose themselves to fire. He felt like he had just been

taught a secret Shao-lin pressure point.

"But we could've lost him while we were trying for that shot," he

pointed out, craning around to look over his seat at his bride of less than an

hour.

"I don't want anybody else to be hurt in this war," she told him.

"But Miriya, we don't want to jeopardize our own lives, right? Or the

ships?"

She looked him in the eye. "Remember what the captain said? Max, it's

time to do more than just talk. We must act. And now I've given you the

key."

"Oh, boy. You're right. We'll just have to give this a try."

"Thank you, Maximillian."

Max took out two more to make sure it really worked.

"What in heaven's name is going on in that plane?" Rick yelled over the

93

tac net.

He saw Max's face on one of his display screens. "Boss, I'm sorry those

last few weren't kills."

"Don't bull me, Max." Rick could see what was going on. "I think I

understand."

He dove at a pod, his forward lasers vaporizing the vulnerable

component that Miriya had revealed. "We'll stop this war without

bloodshed!"

Captain Gloval was right. "The time has come for peace," Rick

muttered.

The secret of popping the enemy pods without killing anyone within

was made easier to share because the small, vulnerable component was

located behind and slightly below the leg juncture. This made it easy and

even fun for the VT fighter jocks to tell each other where to shoot and to vie

with each other at making perfect shots.

The structures were also located in a spot difficult for the pods to

defend. The VTs had never concentrated on that place before because most

of that area was heavily armored and the target in question was so small.

But once they knew what they were after, the VT pilots began

enthusiastic, almost crazed disabling runs. Pods got their fundaments

blown out from under them by VTs on long passes, predatory banks, high

deflection shots. One guy on Ghost Team got three in one pass.

But the pods had closed in tightly around the SDF-1 as the alien

battlewagons came up behind. The dimensional fortress shook to a

ferocious blast of concentrated fire.

"Captain, our number two thruster's been damaged," Vanessa said.

Gloval gritted his teeth, saying nothing; he knew it was going to get

worse.

The Zentraedi officer dashed angrily into the ready-room hatchway,

furious when he saw that the crew there had not even so much as donned

their armor.

94

"Lord Breetai commands that you prepare to attack!" he roared.

One crewmember was standing by a viewport, looking out at the starlit

darkness, holding a tiny Minmei doll in his palm, small as a pea in his giant

hand.

"So beautiful yet so small," he whispered to himself in his rumbling

voice as the others looked over his shoulder. He thought of her songs again,

and the memory filled him with longings no Zentraedi career could ever

answer. He closed his enormous fingers gently around the doll.

The officer bawled, "You're all in direct violation of Lord Dolza's orders!

Report to battle stations at once, or I'll have you all court-martialed!"

They were Zentraedi beguiled by the songs and peace talk of humans;

but they were still Zentraedi, with the pent-up fury of their race. One

whirled on the officer, bringing up an assault rifle, clacking off its safety.

"What did you say?"

Others turned, weapons clacking, and the officer found himself staring

into a half dozen rifle muzzles and then a dozen. "Don't be insane!" he

screamed. "Think of what you're doing!"

"It doesn't matter what you say," one of them told him icily. "We aren't

fighting anymore. We have friends on that ship. We have vows we've sworn

with those friends, sacred warrior oaths. We won't attack them; that's where

we draw the line. Now, leave!"

He threw the rifle to his shoulder, bracketing the officer in his sights,

finger tightening on the trigger. The officer gave a yowl and disappeared

from the compartment hatchway, boots echoing on the deck.

The warriors stood listening, lowering their weapons. "Look at him run,

like a trog with his tail between his ears," one said, laughing.

Breetai spun on Exedore. "What? It's mutiny!"

"Your Excellency, a large number of our best pilots will not leave the

mother craft. They refuse to acknowledge that the order was given! Mutiny

in time of battle is a thing that has never happened before in Zentraedi

history."

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Although, he added to himself, those warnings from the ancients must

have had a basis. If they're right, we face disaster!

"But-with all respect-they have some justification," Exedore went on.

Breetai glowered down at him. "There is no rationale for mutiny!"

"But you know there are Zentraedi on the battle fortress. And now they

know, too. To attack their own is a direct violation of the laws that bind us

together as comrades in arms-"

"Enough!"

"And then there is this baffling new tactic of the enemy, disabling our

pods rather than destroying them, sparing our warriors when they could

more easily have killed them. Some pod commanders in the attack force are

preparing to turn on their fellows if the attack isn't broken off-"

Breetai turned and strode away. "Exedore-"

Exedore hurried his shorter strides to catch up. "And the transmissions

from the wedding-"

Breetai stopped and pivoted instantly. "I said enough!" His boulderlike

fist hung near Exedore's face, clenched so tight that the huge knuckles and

tendons creaked loudly, trembling with Breetai's anger. Exedore fell silent.

After several long seconds, Breetai retracted the fist almost unwillingly

but regained control of himself. He started walling again, the overhead

lights gleaming off his polished skullplate and crystal eye; Exedore followed

meekly.

"Stop your blathering," Breetai rumbled. "I'm aware of the situation.

Issue the order to withdraw immediately! Recall all Zentraedi mecha."

Exedore halted, mouth agape. "Yes, sir, but that is in direct

disobedience of the Zentraedi High Command-of Dolza's own orders!"

Breetai stormed on his way, neither looking back nor answering.

On the SDF-1's bridge, no one quite knew how to take it.

"It's a miracle," was all Sammie could say.

"Yes, we're very lucky," Gloval said softly, sitting in his command chair.

Could it have to do with the wedding? Did it work?

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Claudia began calling the Veritechs home.

The newlyweds had received generous offers of living quarters in

crowded Macross City, even from some who could ill afford the space. But

there was no question of staying so far from the fighter bays while the

current emergency remained.

Ship's engineers had hurriedly taken out the partition between two

adjoining compartments to give the Sterlings a small connubial bower: a

living room-kitchenette and a tiny bedroom. There hadn't, however, been

time to soundproof it; that would have to wait until the next work shift.

So Rick Hunter lay in his bunk, head pillowed on hands, listening to

the muffled turmoil in the kitchenette on the other side of the bulkhead.

"Max, why is it on fire?" came Miriya's voice. "Is this another weird

human recipe?"

"Uh, honey, get out of the way; I'll put it out," Max yelped, and there

was the gush of a small fire extinguisher. Rick didn't hear the ship's main

fire-fighting systems cut in and concluded that Max had gotten it.

"Strange, strange day," Rick sighed.

He caught snatches of their conversation without meaning to. What

had she done? Just used a dash of that liquid, the cooking oil. Nothing on

the bottle said it shouldn't be used in the coffeepot.

Max would be perfectly willing to do all the cooking for a while; Miriya

insisted that she wanted to do her share. That was what comrades in arms

and lifelong mates did, she insisted.

After a bit longer, they were both giggling and the hatch to the

bedroom closed. Rick slugged his pillow like he was in a title fight, then

threw his head against the mattress and pulled the pillow over it.

I hope they'll be happy, he forced himself to think. Then he found

himself thinking about Minmei, and of Lisa, and then of Claudia, grieving

for Roy Fokker-so brave; stronger than Rick would be in her place.

Roy had tried to tell him something once, something the original Skull

Leader had discovered during the course of his tempestuous love affair with

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Claudia Grant.

Before you can love someone, you have to like them.

The thought came into Rick's mind unbidden, along with the image of

long, light brown hair and a slender form-a quick, disciplined mind and a

commitment to a set of beliefs that Rick found mare worthy every day.

And-there was the remembrance of a kiss before alien captors, a kiss that

had been so much more than he had expected and had haunted him since.

I like Lisa; maybe I even-

He tossed on his bunk, head on top of his pillow now, staring out at

space through his cabin's viewports. Next door there was still silence.

In a few moments he was blinking tiredly before he could sort out just

what it was he felt.

I'm so beat. I feel like just-

He fell asleep with Lisa's face before him.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

Khyron was always different from the rest of us, and the ways of the

Micronians held some dark fascination for him, however much he fought it.

But the Micronians are mad! Is it any wonder this drove him over the

brink, so that as he perceived it his only relief was to liquidate them all?

Grel

"Alien vessel, battleship class, sir." Vanessa said tightly from her

monitoring station on the bridge.

This time Gloval was ready. "Prepare to fire main cannon! Lock all

tracking systems to target!"

In the respite that had followed the last attack, engineers had

completed retrofitting and new installation. At long last, the SDF-1 had

been brought into Attack mode without major damage to Macross City and

accompanying loss of life.

The ship could use its fearsome main gun in this configuration,

standing like a monumental armored gladiator in space with the two

tremendous supercarriers held out like menacing forearms.

"All systems go; booms now moving into position;" Claudia said in

clipped tones. The booms had stood like hours above the fortress; now,

brute servomotors swung them down so that they pointed out straight from

both of the ship's huge, bulky shoulder structures.

"Main gun standing by to fire on your command, Captain," the message

was patched in from engineering. Claudia couldn't help but wish Lisa were

back (on the bridge. The Terrible Trio and the other techs were good and

were doing the best they could, but nobody except perhaps Dr. Lang knew

as much about the ship as Lisa.

Sammie watched the preparations, wide-eyed. "I bet this is a trick or

something," she declared in her young, breathless voice. "A Trojan horse!"

Kim spared a moment from her own problems to gaze at Sammie

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dubiously. "Trojan horse? They know we'd never fall for that! Where on

Earth would you get an idea like that from?"

"The Trojan War! Besides, that's the way it always happens in the

movies."

For two years now, they've been trying to wipe us out, and she still

thinks about movies! Kim groaned to herself and went back to her job,

resolving to slug Sammie later.

Sammie said with high acrimony, "Okay, if you've got a better theory,

let's hear it!"

Vanessa cut through the squabble.

"Captain," Vanessa said, "I have a message coming in in cleartext from

the alien ship."

Gloval came halfway out of the command chair. "What?" He tried not

to let himself hope too much.

"They're asking permission to approach the SDF-1. Shall I put it up on

the monitor, Captain?"

Gloval grunted approval, and Vanessa complied. Suddenly, Sammie's

flight of fantasy didn't sound so zany.

"I say again: We are sending an unarmed ship to dock with your battle

fortress. We request a cessation of hostilities. Please hold your fire."

The enemy flagship drew near at dead-slow speed, straight into the line

of fire of the main gun. The battleship might be nine solid miles of

supertech mayhem, but surely by now the Zentraedi knew that it would be

as defenseless as a helium blimp before the holocaust blast those massive

booms could generate.

"Let them come," Gloval told Claudia. "But stand ready to fire."

Claudia flipped up the red safety cover with her thumb, exposing the

trigger of the main gun. Sweating, she watched the battlewagon close in,

ready to fire the instant Gloval gave the order but forcing herself to be calm.

She was unaware that everyone else there, captain and enlisted ratings alike,

was glad that Claudia-whom they saw as a tower of strength-was trigger

man that day.

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Gloval let the flagship come at him, come at him. Sammie's Trojan

horse remark was much in his mind. He wondered about this Breetai, whom

Lisa and Rick had described to him. The three Zentraedi spies and the

deserters who had come after them had contributed more, as had Miriya.

Gloval wondered and hoped the vagaries of war would let him meet Breetai

face to face; he suspected that the alien commander felt the same.

The flagship slowed to a stop, a sitting duck of a target, reassuring him.

But abruptly there were dozens of streamers of light swirling from behind it,

bearing in on the fortress at high speed. Gloval didn't have to look at the

computer displays; he had seen these performance profiles before.

Vanessa yelled, "Picking up large strike force of tri-thruster pursuit

ships, closing rapidly!"

The tri-thrusters were right in the line of fire; Claudia's forefinger

hovered by the trigger.

What are they up to now? Gloval thought with dismay. Peace had

seemed so suddenly, tantalizingly close. But what could this be except

betrayal?

The tri's were out in front of the flagship, closing in on the SDF-1, their

drives leaving bright swirling ribbons of light behind them. The command

to fire was on Gloval's lips.

But all at once a hundred batteries in the enemy flagship's forward

section opened up, and the tri-thrusters were blown into fragments, dozens

disappearing per second in ballooning clouds of total annihilation. The

bluewhite lines of energy from the enemy dreadnought, thread-fine against

its enormous bulk, redirected immediately upon destruction of a target, to

the next. In moments, the massive sortie fell apart and space was full of

briefly flaming junk.

Gloval swallowed. "Secure the trigger but stand by," he said.

Claudia closed her eyes for a moment, breathing a prayer, thumbing

the safety cover over the trigger. But as he had ordered, her thumb rested on

it still.

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Breetai stood at his command station, hands clasped at the small of his

back. As he expected, Khyron the Backstabber didn't take long to appear by

projecbeam image.

"Breetai, have you gone mad?"

Breetai studied him coldly. "Your ships were interfering with a

diplomatic mission, as you well know. And so I disposed of them.

Henceforth you will address me by my proper rank."

Khyron fought a fierce internal battle, then managed, "Commander,

what happens now? I refuse to spare the Micronians! We all know Dolza's

orders!"

"You know nothing, Khyron! And I will hear no further word from you

on the subject. Just consider yourself lucky you didn't choose to lead your

troops this day!"

"Ridiculous!"

Breetai swung his command chair away from the screen, cutting the

communications circuit, muttering, "Hardly."

Like some immense killer whale, the flagship came to a stop directly in

front of the SDF-1's most powerful weapon.

"They're just sitting out there, Captain; I guess they're waiting for us to

make a move." Claudia's thumbnail stood under the edge of the trigger's

cover.

If they don't want peace, why would they destroy their own fighters?

Why would they not overwhelm us, as they so easily could?

"They wish to send an emissary. Very well," he decided. "So be it."

The Veritechs flew forth accompanied by other mecha, like the

cat's-eye intel ships, detector-loaded and studying everything about the

emissary pod.

The pod was standard except that it mounted only auxiliary commo

gear: no weapons. The cat's-eyes and other emissions-intelligence detectors

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said that it wasn't the Trojan horse of Sammie's nightmares.

Rick Hunter quieted his Skull Team, telling them he knew it was weird

and getting weirder all the time but reminding them the team hadn't

suffered any casualties in a while.

That strangest of all convoys came to rest in an SDF-1 bay, the VTs now

in Battloid mode with their chain-guns leveled at the pod.

Things moved quickly to the hangar deck, while PA voices went on

about the normal checklist procedures and the extraordinary precautions

surrounding the emissary's arrival. No one wanted to take any chances on a

double-cross or, perhaps worse, on a vengeful human's violent act robbing

the SDF-1 of this chance for peace. Security was-in some ways

literally-airtight.

The enemy mecha knelt, its prow touching the deck as the

rear-articulated legs folded back. A rear hatch swung open; a

Brobdingnagian enemy trooper stomped forth to glare around.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" called a reedy, highly miffed voice

from within the pod.

The mountainous trooper was immediately contrite, almost afraid. "Oh,

please forgive me, your Eminence! My humblest apologies!"

The trooper reached carefully into the pod and came out with a small

figure, which he set down with exaggerated, painstaking care. It had been

explained exactly what would happen to him if he allowed his micronized

passenger to come to any harm.

Exedore, dressed in the blue sackcloth robe that was all the Zentraedi

had to give their micronized warriors, stepped off the warrior's armored

palm.

His toes clenched, and his arches arched a bit higher against the cold

deck. "Hmph! How do these Micronians survive with such frail little

bodies?"

He turned to regard the huge flight deck, but it made little impression

because its size would have been imposing for human or Zentraedi.

Exedore's pilot was another matter, staring eye to eye with a

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chain-gun-wielding Battloid. "Rather an imposing sight, aren't we, hah?" he

said, rubbing his jaw.

Still, he was one among the Zentraedi to know that size didn't count for

everything-counted for nothing, in some cases.

"Ten-HUT!" the PA said as a line of military vehicles came screeching

up. The Battloids snapped to presentarms, and to Exedore's great pride, the

Zentraedi pilot stood at perfect attention. Exedore abruptly noticed that

there were Micronian personnel, ground crew and whatnot, scattered

around the compartment as they, too, came to attention.

Men leapt from the cars to form ranks smartly, and a man in a uniform

not so different from the Zentraedi's own came toward Exedore, hand

extended.

"Colonel Maistroff, Robotech Defense Forces, sir. I bring you greetings

from the super dimensional fortress commander, Captain Gloval."

Exedore sighed a bit to see that Maistroff was taller than he, to see that

all of them were. Perhaps there was something in the micronization process

that dictated that, or perhaps it was just something about destiny.

Anyway, Maistroff's open hand was out to him. Exedore blinked at it in

bewilderment. "This is how we greet friends," the human said.

Ah, yes! The barbarian custom of showing that there was no weapon!

Exedore put his dark mauve hand into the other's pale pink one, trading the

grip of friendship.

"I am Exedore, Minister of Affairs."

Maistroff, a former martinet and xenophobe who had been salted and

wisened up a bit in the course of the Robotech War, looked him over. "That

sounds rather important, sir."

Exedore shrugged blithely. "Not really." He smiled, and Maistroff

found himself smiling back.

The colonel indicated his staff car. "If you're ready, we'll get you some

more comfortable clothes and then take you to the captain. Have you

eaten?"

Exedore sorted that out, recalling the wedding transmissions and

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dreading a lot of ceremonies stalling the beginning of the peace talks. "Ah,

yes; yes."

As they walked, ground-shaking impacts began on the deck behind

them, jostling them as they moved. They turned to see that the Zentraedi

pilot had naturally fallen in to follow his lord. The Battloids hadn't quite

brought their chain-gun muzzles back up.

Exedore was quick to see the problem and also to understand some of

the humans' apprehension.

Maistroff kept his composure. "Excuse me, Minister Exedore,

but-could you ask him to wait here on the hangar deck?"

"Oh!" It didn't take a genius of Exedore's caliber to see that those little

hatches wouldn't allow for much fullsize Zentraedi wandering. Clever!

He turned to look up at his pilot. "Stay here and guard the pod." It did

irritate him how much higher and less forceful the transformation had

made his voice.

The pilot pulled a brace, biting out, "Yes, sir!"

Maistroff turned and jerked a thumb at two aides. "You men find him

something to eat."

They saluted as one, "Yes, sir!" under the eyes of the Zentraedi warrior,

just as precise as he. Then they watched as Maistroff cordially aided

Exedore in boarding the staff car, just about as unlikely a sight as anything

yet in the war. Motorcycle outriders led the way, and the motorcade moved

off.

The two staff officers relaxed, looked up at the Zentraedi, then looked

back at each other. "Something to eat?" the first one exclaimed. "He's got to

be kidding!"

"Maistroff never kids," his companion answered. They both had

comrigs in their jeeps, and the second staff officer reached over now to get a

handset, telling his friend, "You call ration distribution and break the bad

news."

Then he turned to his own mission. "Hello, transportation control?

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Listen, I'm gonna need a coupla flatbeds..."

The thoroughfares of Macross City were as confusing to Exedore as

they had been to the spies. So much undisiplined, disorganized activity! So

much aimless milling about! There seemed to be no point to a lot of it-all

this gaping through display windows and strolling haphazardly. He

wondered if it was some deceptive show that had been mounted for his visit.

And, of course, he averted his eyes from the males and females

wandering the city holding hands or with arms around each other's waists.

Of the tiny-model Micronians, the noisy, poorly regimented smallscales that

the human called "children," Exedore could make neither head nor tail. Just

seeing them gave him a shuddery feeling.

But he had to admit the ship was in a good state of repair, especially

after two years of running battles with the warrior race. There would have

been no hiding the damage in a Zentraedi ship, no fixing it. Intelligence

reports had already indicated what Exedore saw evidence of all around him:

The Micronians knew how to rebuild-perhaps how to create. It was an

awesome advantage, a critical part of the war's equation.

Very few Micronians were in uniform; none of them appeared to be

under close supervision.

"Why, this is our shopping district," Maistroff explained when Exedore

asked.

"Ah, yes! I believe this is where you use something called money to

requisition goods."

Maistroff scratched his neck a bit. "Um. That's not too far off,

Minister."

They cruised along a broad boulevard, and Exedore suddenly broke out

into a cold sweat and began to shudder. Maistroff sat up straight, wondering

if something about the ship's life support was incompatible, but that was

impossible.

Then he saw that Exedore, teeth clenched, was staring up at a billboard.

The billboard advertised the Velvet Suntan Clinics, with a photo of the

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languorous Miss Velvet, a voluptuous, browned, barely clad, supremely

athletic looking young woman whose poster popularity in Macross City was

second only to Minmei's.

"Ee, er, oh, th-that picture on the building over there," Exedore got out

at last, looking like he was having a malaria attack. "Would you mind

explaining it?" He forced his gaze to the floor of the staff car.

Maistroff reached up to the back of his cap and tilted the visor down

over his eyes to keep good form with the minister, coughing into his other

hand. "Well, actually, it's a little hard to explain."

Exedore crossed his skinny arms on his narrow chest and nodded

wisely. "Aha! A military secret, no doubt! Very clever! Indeed!"

Maistroff didn't even want to think about what damage he might have

done to interspecies relations-didn't want to complicate things.

He tilted his visor farther down. "Right, that's it. Classified."

The motorcade raced for the conference room.

107

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

RUSSO: What are they doing up there, Alexei? Don't those RDF pantywaists

of yours even know how to fight?

ZUKAV: I believe that what we should worry about, Senator, is that they and

the aliens are teaching each other how not to.

Exchange believed to have taken place

between Senator Russo and Marshal Zukav of the UEDC

The SDF-1 and the flagship faced each other, unmoving across a

narrow gap of space, almost eyeball to eyeball.

Gloval left instructions with Claudia that she open fire with the main

gun if there was any hostile action at all. A few minutes later he sat at a

judicial bench in the ship's biggest hearing chamber with Colonel Maistroff

on his right, an intelligence major to the left, zing down at Exedore. Except

for a few functionaries, the place was empty.

The misshapen little fellow fell far short of Gloval's mental image of a

ravaging alien warmonger, the captain had to admit to himself. If anything,

he seemed rather...prissy.

"At last we meet face to face, Captain," the alien said in a not-uncordial

voice, glancing at him from the distant witness stand.

"Yes," Gloval allowed.

An attractive young female ensign brought a tray and put a glass of

orange juice where Exedore could reach it. Gloval and the others watched

Exedore's reaction to the woman closely, but apparently he had gotten his

responses under control as he merely nodded his head in gratitude.

Exedore raised the glass and took a cautious sip. The flavor was

delightful, but the beverage had a certain savor, something he couldn't

define. It was something dizzying, almost electric.

"Mmm. This is very refreshing." He looked up at her. "What is it?"

She checked with Gloval by eye to make sure that it was all right to

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answer. Gloval gave the barest nod, which Exedore in turn caught. "It's

orange juice, sir. From our own hydroponics orchards."

Exedore didn't quite understand for a moment. When he spoke, he

tried to keep the tremor from his voice. "You mean, you grow it?"

She looked a little confused. "We grow the fruit the juice comes from."

"Ah, yes; just so. That is what I meant." He downed the rest of the

orange juice to hide his amazement.

These creatures consumed food that had been alive! Who knew;

perhaps they consumed things that still were alive! He shuddered and

reminded himself that this was only the juice of a plant, but his self-control

was tested thoroughly.

Here was something those three imbecile spies hadn't mentioned, or

had perhaps omitted from their reports on purpose, or had even failed to

realize. Zentraedi food, of course, was synthesized from its chemical

constituents; that was as it had always been, by the decree of the Robotech

Masters. To eat living or once-living food was to risk the consumption of

rudimentary energies somewhat related to Protoculture.

Exedore finished the glass so as to give no hint of what he was

thinking-fearing. It crossed his mind that perhaps these men were testing

him. If so, he would reveal nothing.

"That was very refreshing," he enthused.

The ensign gave him a bright smile. "Here, have another." She picked

up the empty and gave him a full one from her tray.

"If you insist," he said lightly.

Gloval was rubbing his dark mustache. To Maistroff, he said, "I think

we're missing some people, aren't we?"

"Some." The colonel nodded. "But they should be arriving any minute

now. In fact, this may be them."

He was indicating the door signal. Max and Miriya entered, both in

RDF uniform. Max snapped off a sharp salute. "Sir. Reporting as ordered."

Exedore was on his feet, the drink put aside. "Ah! Hello, Quadrono

Leader!"

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She gasped as she turned to him and saluted by reflex. "I'm sorry, sir; I

didn't realize you were the emissary."

He shrugged to say it was unimportant. "I found your pairing

ritual-marriage?-quite...provocative."

She didn't know what to say. "You are probably wondering why we did

it."

"Yes, just as you're no doubt wondering what 1 am doing here. And this

must be the male half of your pair."

Suddenly Miriya looked young and a little forlorn, standing before the

great genius of her race, the Eldest, the repository of all Zentraedi lore. "Ah,

that's right, sir."

"Gee, y' don't sound too thrilled about it," Max murmured. He almost

gave in to his impulse to take her in his arms and kiss her, top brass or no,

and remind her emphatically of what their pairing really meant.

But just then Rick Hunter reported as ordered, saluting. Then he spied

Max, who was in a bit of a snit. "Hey, you don't look so good," Rick

confided.

Exedore was still on his feet. Now, he pointed at Rick and Max, yelling,

"That's it!" He clucked to himself. "The micronization process must have

affected my memory! You're two of the hostages from Dolza's flagship,

aren't you?"

"Does somebody want to tell me what's going on here?" Rick asked

slowly.

"This time the circumstances are a bit different," Exedore rattled on

excitedly. "But tell me: How did you and the others manage to escape? Was

it some hidden Micronian power?"

What had really happened was that Max had come aboard in a Battloid

disguised in a Zentraedi uniform, but Rick wasn't sure he should let that

particular cat out of the bag. He didn't see Gloval or the others giving him

any help, so he improvised, "Uh, I guess you could say that."

The frail little emissary sat, fingering his jaw. "Hm, another one of your

military secrets." It was all so confusing and illogical, even to him. Who

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knew what eons of eating live food had done to these creatures?

The door signaled again, and Gloval said, "Here are the others now."

Rico, Bron, and Konda filed into the hearing chamber. They caught sight of

him and cringed as he gave them a death's-head smile.

"It's Minister Exedore!" they all yelped at once, looking like mice facing

a hungry lynx.

"I did not expect to see the instigators of our mass defection show up

here today," he remarked.

Trembling, Rico drew himself up. "Your Excellency, it wasn't our fault!"

"That's right! It was just something that we couldn't help!" Konda put

in. And the stout Bron maintained, "We had no control, sir!"

Exedore brushed that aside with a prim flick of his fingers. "You may

relax. I have no intention of harming you."

The breath they let out was audible as they wilted with relief. When

everyone was seated, Colonel Maistroff said, "Captain Gloval, the ship's

computer will record the proceedings."

Gloval squared his cap away. "Very good; let us begin." To Exedore he

said, "Minister, we are unclear as to the exact purpose of your mission here.

You've told us very little so far. Won't you please enlighten us?"

Exedore's eyes swept across them. "Your curiosity is understandable,

but-not everyone is present yet, Captain."

"What?" Maistroff growled under his breath.

"We would like to know more about two of your kind, gentlemen. The

first possesses powers and fighting skills that are truly extraordinary, and

there is a female who is the core of your psychological assault."

"Incredible," mumbled Gloval, watching Exedore.

Colonel Maistroff had read some of the defector debriefing reports. In

an aside to Gloval he said, "I think he means that movie, Little White

Dragon. They must've seen it too, and think Lynn-Kyle's movie stunts were

for real."

Little White Dragon was the first feature film produced on the SDF-1. It

featured Lynn-Kyle in some spectacular stunts and fights, downing

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ferocious giants with his fighting arts and using a death beam that he could

shoot from his hand thanks to an enchanted medallion.

"There is clearly a misunderstanding here," Gloval told Maistroff. To

Exedore he declared, "I can't think of anyone who would be at the core of a

psychological assault. It would be helpful if you could be more specific

about this female."

Exedore blinked at him with bulging, pinpoint-pupiled eyes. "She

appears to be performing some kind of ritual. A strange little chant."

Bron leaned over to his fellow ex-spies. "Do you think he means-"

"No! He couldn't!" Konda whispered.

"Sure he could!" snarled Rico.

"You know," Exedore said impatiently. And he rose to stand next to the

witness chair, strike a coquettish pose, and sing:

Stage fright, go 'way,

This is my big day!

Rick groaned, not wanting to be the first to say anything. If he wasn't

seeing what he thought he was seeing, Colonel Maistroff would probably

report him to the flight surgeon and get him grounded on a mental.

But the three spies burst out, "He is talking about Minmei!"

Exedore went on singing "Stage Fright" with a terrible, cracking

falsetto that was seriously off key. He struck poses and postures that looked

like he was auditioning for Yum-Yum in an amateur production of The

Mikado.

Gloval drew his head down into his high, rolled jacket collar like a

turtle, making a low sound. "I do not believe this."

"They must think Minmei's singing is a weapon of some kind,"

Maistroff observed.

"Have the girl brought here," Gloval ordered. "And her cousin as well."

Then he tried to figure out what the most direct and yet diplomatic method

would be for asking the emissary to please stop singing.

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As soon as Minmei appeared in the doorway, Exedore cried, "That's her!

Yes!"

She stood looking around like a startled deer. A moment later, Kyle

slouched into the room, sulking and hostile, saying, "I'm getting tired of

being pushed around by the military."

"Now," Minmei said in a tired voice, "would someone mind explaining

why it was so important for us to come here?"

She was as beautiful as ever, delicate and haunting as a princess from a

fairy tale; try as he would, Rick couldn't keep the familiar longing from

welling up in him.

Kyle stepped before her as if to shield her from harm, glaring all

around. "Don't expect any answers from them. They only care about their

fascist war schemes; they don't care about people, and they-"

"Enough of this nonsense!" Gloval thundered, and even the truculent

Lynn-Kyle was a bit intimidated. Exedore thought how like the great Breetai

this Micronian commander was.

"You will answer our questions," Gloval said to the two of them. "These

proceedings are strictly classified, and if you mention them to anyone, I will

personally see that you rue this day. You will give us your total cooperation.

Do you both understand?"

"Yes." Minmei nodded. When Kyle stood unspeaking, unresponsive,

she put a hand to his shoulder. "They need our cooperation. Hostility won't

do us any good, don't you see?"

Gloval had turned to Exedore; he let his irritation show in his voice.

"Now, Mr. Minister, if you would kindly tell us what your mission here is all

about?" He began stoking up a favorite meerschaum.

"All in its proper sequence," Exedore said earnestly. "But I assure you:

My reason for being here is of crucial importance for you as well as for the

Zentraedi."

Gloval puffed out a blue cloud that his officers tried to ignore. Reading

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this alien's mind is impossible, he reflected. The song and dance had

convinced him of that. I'll just have to wait and hear him out.

In the UEDC's subterranean complex, Lisa Hayes sat at the end of long

rows of techs who were manning monitor screens. All attention was focused

on the SDF-1; Lisa had gotten the impression, in subtle ways, that the world

rulers were chewing their nails, waiting to see what would happen.

She had stopped wishing that she was back onboard to help in what

was going on; it hurt too much. The emergency, the shortage of good

officers, the dangers of space travel during the current hostilities, the fact

that she had had access to classified UEDC information, her value as an

intelligence source-her father had a dozen justifications for keeping her

right where she was, and there was little she could do about it.

Now, she stared up at her own master console. The more she learned

about the Grand Cannon, the more convinced she was that it would serve

little purpose except to get the Zentraedi angrier.

She started, realizing that her father had come in to bend down near

her. The other technical officers and enlisted ratings kept diligently at their

work; it was unwise to be seen letting one's attention stray when Admiral

Hayes was around.

She was beginning to understand that her father wasn't a popular

officer. She had never found it easy to make friends, and now that she was

known as the admiral's daughter, she was effectively frozen out.

She removed her headset in time to hear him say, "How do you like

your new job? Everything okay?"

"Fine, fine," she lied, and attempted to smile. "I understand that the

SDF-1 and the Zentraedi fleet have reached a cease-fire agreement."

"That's what I hear," her father said noncommittally.

She tried to sound as upbeat as she could. "Well, if things keep going

this way, maybe we won't have to use the Grand Cannon, after all.

"It's possible, but I doubt it."

She turned away, dropping her eyes in discouragement. They were all

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so blind down here in their little rabbit warren! Then she felt his hand on

her shoulder.

"Listen, Lisa. We can't trust the Zentraedi; we have to prove what we

can do."

It would do no good to tell him again that the SDF-1's main gun was

easily a match for the Grand Cannon, and it hadn't kept the Zentraedi from

waging their war. The UEDC planners, engineers, and rulers had too much

at stake and only scoffed when she tried to make the point.

He saw she wasn't going to yield the point; she simply gave up arguing

it for the time being. He turned to go, saying, "I have work to do. If anything

comes up, I'll be in the central core."

"Yes, sir," Lisa said wearily.

115

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I was close enough to Lang in those days to be certain that he had no

confidential knowledge of the hidden Protoculture source to which Exedore

was referring. Had he but known the secret of those great, sealed reflex

furnaces, he might have formulated an immortal update to Einstein's remark:

Protoculture doesn't play dice with the universe, but It certainly knows how

to palm an ace at the crucial moment!

Dr. Lazlo Zand,

On Earth As It Is in Hell: Recollections of the Robotech War

"Officer Lynn-Kyle, what is your military rank?" Exedore asked in the

vaulted hearing chamber.

Kyle gave him a surly look. "I'm a civilian."

Exedore made a brief, mocking chuckle. "With your superpowers? I

doubt it."

Kyle bared his teeth at the alien. "I have no idea what you're talking

about!"

Exedore looked around, confused. He was satisfied that these

Micronians were doing their best to, to "level with" him, as Colonel

Maistroff had put it on the way over.

Gloval intervened. "Mr. Minister, he's telling the truth. This man

possesses no superpowers. For that matter, none of us in this room possess

the powers you're referring to."

Gloval was taking a gamble. The bluff of human superpowers hadn't

made the enemy go away and couldn't be sustained for very long. But there

was something murky about the whole war, something that made him

suspect that a basic breakdown in communication was responsible for the

whole thing. It was time for someone to try to get to the bottom of it.

"But-we saw him on our monitors," Exedore protested.

"Oh, that was a movie, merely a form of entertainment," Gloval replied,

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scratching his head to try to think how to explain better. "It's not true;

it's...simply for enjoyment."

Exedore decided to table that for now; he knew the enjoyment he found

in the ancient lore and history of the Zentraedi, but those were factual.

"Then what about your energy barrier and destruction waves?"

"These are merely defensive and offensive weapons based on

technology discovered in this ship when it originally crashed on Earth."

"Ah, but you've forgotten the Protoculture!" Exedore said slyly. "The

great genius of the Robotech Masters' race, Zor, hid the secrets of

Protoculture and its last great manufacturing source in this vessel before he

dispatched it here."

Now, at last, Gloval was seeing some of the aliens' cards, and he was

sure the talks were worth it. All the questions of who the Robotech Masters

were, who Zor was and why he had picked Earth, had to be set aside,

intriguing as they were. The life of the human race might be measurable in

hours, even minutes.

Gloval opened a comfne. "I think we're ready for Dr. Lang now."

Lang entered, the greatest mind of his time, an intellect worthy to sit

with Newton and Einstein and yet a man frustrated by the many mysteries

of Robotechnology. He had been monitoring the exchanges in a waiting

room and was eager to talk to Exedore.

The Zentraedi, Minmei and Kyle, and the others there who had never

seen Lang before got a bit of a shock and understood why he shunned the

limelight. Normal-looking in every other way, the man had eyes that

seemed to be all dark, liquid iris-no pupil or white.

Gloval remembered that day well, hours after the SDF-1's crash in 1999,

when he, Lang, and a few others had first boarded the smoking wreck. They

had discovered an astounding technology, fearsome mecha guardians, and

bewildering time paradoxes.

They had also discovered a recorded warning that they couldn't fathom.

And Lang, yielding to an unquenchable thirst for more knowledge, more

interface, had somehow subjected himself to direct contact with whatever it

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was that animated the ship. That was when his eyes changed, when he

himself became different, as if he were hearing celestial music. Nevertheless,

it was his genius that had allowed the rebuilding of the SDF-1 and the

construction of the Robotech Defense Force.

Now, Lang said to Exedore, "We've heard Protoculture mentioned

many times, Emissary. Will you tell me now what it is?"

Exedore's brows shot up. "You mean you still insist that you

Micronians don't know? Protoculture is the most powerful energy source in

the universe."

Lang's deep, dark eyes bored into him. "I have been able to find

nothing of that nature in this vessel, and I've been searching since your fleet

first arrived in the solar system. But I believe I know what has happened.

Will you come with me, please?"

Gloval rose but told the others, "You will all kindly remain here,

please."

The jeep was waiting, and the trip through the huge passages and

byways of the battle fortress took only a few minutes. Very shortly they were

in the engineering section, just forward of the huge reflex engines that were

the ship's power plant.

They were in a large compartment that had once held the ship's

spacefold apparatus. Now there was some leftover machinery from the

pin-point barrier system that had been the ship's main defensive weapon on

its precarious trip across the solar system. As there had been for years, there

were also the lights.

"When the Zentraedi first attacked Earth, we made our spacefold jump

to get to safety," Lang was explaining. "We had no time to experiment, no

time to test. A jump that was meant to take us beyond our moon's orbit took

us instead to the orbit of Pluto."

"I remember well," Exedore said, scratching his cheek, staring at the

giant, almost-empty compartment.

"You made the jump too close to the planetary surface; we were

convinced that you were suicidal."

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"You gave us no choice," Gloval said in a low voice, thinking back to the

appalling devastation and loss of life that day. He did his best to put it from

his mind.

"But in the wake of the jump," Lang went on, "the spacefold apparatus

just...disappeared. Utterly! Simply faded from view and was never seen

again. And in its place were those."

Lang meant the lights: darting, glowing sparks, fireflies and tiny

comets that swarmed and drifted through the space where the spacefold

apparatus had once been. Exedore turned to him. "May I borrow some of

those instruments you've brought, Doctor?"

It took only a little time to prove his suspicions. "Ah, yes: definite

residual Protoculture signature here, but the Matrix is gone. And I detect no

other great manufacturing mass, only the lesser animating charges of your

weapons and the reflex furnaces."

Exedore lowered the detector numbly. "The secrets of Zor, gone! This

long war fought for nothing!"

Lang patted Exedore's shoulder commiseratingly. "Perhaps someday

we will find it again; who can say?"

Gloval was shocked to see how quickly the two had become easy in

each other's company. "I think we'd better get back to the hearing room,"

the captain said. "We still have a great deal to talk about."

Deep within the sealed fastness of the mighty reflex engines, something

stirred and then was quiet again. It could not be detected by Lang's

relatively primitive instruments, was capable of hiding itself even from the

Zentraedi's scanners at this range.

As Zor had provided, the last Protoculture Matrix was safe, biding its

time, waiting until his great Vision should come to pass.

"It does appear we've made a great mistake," Exedore confessed when

they were all back in their places. "But! You cannot possibly deny the power

of the female's singing!"

119

"I wouldn't dream of it," Gloval responded simply, drawing a doubtful

look from Colonel Maistroff.

But Bron was on his feet. "He won't deny it because it's true!"

"Minmei's song has incredible power!" Rico added, jumping up too.

Minmei, for her part, gave a shy smile that seemed to have some secret

wisdom behind it.

"This is not the first time the Zentraedi have encountered something

like this," Exedore told them all. "A very long time ago we were exposed to a

culture like yours, and it nearly destroyed us."

"How do you mean that?" Gloval was quick to ask.

Exedore's protruding, pinpoint eyes roamed the room. "To a Zentraedi,

fighting is a way of life. Our entire history is made up of nothing but battle

after glorious battle. However, exposure to an emotionally open society like

yours made our soldiers refuse to fight.

"This, of course, could not be tolerated, and the infection had to be

cleansed. Loyal soldiers and the Robotech Masters themselves came in to

exterminate all those who had been exposed to the source of the contagion."

The three spies in particular were pale and silent. The rest looked at

one another. Exedore went on. "Dolza, our supreme commander, will do

everything in his power to avoid making the mistake our ancestors did.

When and if he reads my report, he will certainly launch an all-out attack on

Earth, especially in light of the fact that the Protoculture Matrix is no longer

on the SDF-1."

Gloval's eyes shifted to Rick. "That's the same one mentioned in your

report?"

Rick licked his lips. "Yes, sir." Almost five million warships!

Exedore nodded. "I know what you're thinking. But you see, these new

developments-the defections, the Minmei cult, the mating of our greatest

warrior with one of your pilots-change the entire picture."

He looked around at them, the center of their riveted attention. "For,

you see," Exedore said, "unless some solution can be found, we-Breetai's

forces-are in as great a danger from Dolza and the Grand Fleet as you."

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Breetai sat in his chair in the command station overlooking his

flagship's bridge.

A projecbeam drew a two-dimensional image of Azonia in the air, the

woman who had replaced him in the war against the humans, failed to bring

it to a successful conclusion, and been replaced in turn by Breetai.

"Commander!" she began. "How long do you intend to allow this

situation to continue?" She was a mediumsize, intense Zentraedi female

with a quick mind and high aspirations. Her short, frizzy hairstyle puffed

within the confinement of her high, rolled collar.

Breetai, arms folded on his great chest, answered in his rumbling,

echoing bass, "Any continuation of hostilities would be unwise in light of

recent events."

She sneered at him. "Well, I expect a different solution when the Grand

Fleet arrives!"

He leapt to his feet. "Grand Fleet? What have you done?"

She gave him a smug smile. "I've reported my findings to the supreme

commander. And his Excellency Dolza has decided to set the fleet into

motion."

"So Dolza has decided the Micronians are a threat, has he?"

"He has," she said triumphantly.

Breetai's anger welled up like a volcano, but suddenly he found himself

laughing like a grim god at the end of all worlds. It was the last thing Azonia

expected; she watched him, his head thrown back, roaring, light flashing off

his metallic skullpiece and the crystal eye, and she felt a sudden sinking

sensation in the pit of her stomach.

"You imbecile!" he managed when he could talk again. "You know

nothing of history, do you? No, no self-respecting Zentraedi cares! Well,

know this, my scheming friend: We're doomed along with the humans! We

have been infected, and all of us-all-are now considered plague carriers."

"You're certain of this?" Exedore asked quietly, holding the handset

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tightly in trembling fist.

The communications patch had been set up hastily, with no chance for

the aliens to encrypt their exchange. Exedore would certainly know that

human techs had monitored whatever Breetai had said. Therefore, the

captain bent forward, certain that he would hear whatever it was at once.

"You know what this means, then," Exedore said. "I understand." He

returned the handset to its cradle and looked at Gloval.

"Captain, you must prepare yourselves to escape this star system. We

will help you."

Gloval's face hardened. "And leave the Earth defenseless?"

"Yes."

Gloval squared his shoulders. "Out of the question! We are sworn to

defend our planet."

Exedore was nodding wearily. "Yes, I understand. We Zentraedi would

not act any differently. What's more, without your help, escape for us would

be all but hopeless. The Protoculture Matrix was our great hope for success;

the armada's supplies are all but exhausted."

He sighed. "It seems we shall soon be fighting a common enemy."

Maistroff exploded. "What did you say?"

Exedore looked to him. "My Lord Breetai has just informed me that the

Grand Fleet is headed for this star system. That means four million eight

hundred thousand ships with the destructive force of a supernova."

"All right, then," Gloval said matter-of-factly. "A fight it shall be."

"You're crazy!" Lynn-Kyle was on his feet. "There's no way you can beat

a fleet like that! We're finished!"

Max had taken Miriya's hand in his. He told her gently, "I'm so afraid

that this might be the end for us. Just when we've found each other."

She squeezed his hand. "I don't care, my love, as long as I'm at your

side in battle."

Rick, on the opposite side of the U-shaped table, looked across at them

with envy. "Together," he said under his breath.

Exedore had been watching the various reactions carefully and was

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satisfied. He could tell mighty Breetai that among the military, at least,

there were worthy allies.

Now he raised his voice to say, "It's not over yet! There might still be a

way!"

"Explain," Gloval bade him, stone-faced.

"Thus far, this vessel has proved itself unbeatable. I will need more

information before I can be sure, but I believe there is a way that we can

win."

123

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I have therefore concluded that Breetai and his subordinates and all

those under their command now entertain such primitive behavioral quirks

and abstruse thought processes as to set them completely outside the

Zentraedi species and make them a threat to us all.

Every available unit will therefore be mustered in the Grand Fleet to

take the action dictated by our ancient lore.

From Dolza's personal log

"Repeating this announcement, all military personnel are to report for

duty at once. All leaves are canceled. All reservists are to contact their units

for immediate mobilization. Civilians are directed to stand by for further

directives; we will be making announcements as soon as further

information is available."

Lisa wheeled her jeep into the headquarters cavernous parking lot on

two wheels, snapping off the radio. She hadn't been able to get anything on

the military freqs, and the civvie bands just kept repeating the same thing.

She dashed into the HQ, flashing her security badge, and, in the

situation room, heard the classified announcements.

"Sensors are still picking up extremely high energy levels from lunar

and near-Earth regions. This activity is characteristic of enemy spacefold

operations. However, they are of a magnitude never before encountered."

She spotted her father and ran toward him. In her mind's eye was the

Grand Fleet as she had last seen it, or at least part of it, in and around the

moonlet-size hive that was Dolza's headquarters base.

"It doesn't look good," Admiral Hayes was saying to a G3 staff

commodore.

"Admiral!"

Her father looked at her, traded salutes with the staffer, and came over

to her. He took her by the arm, leading her to a conference room. He

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sounded brusque as the door slid shut. "Well? What is it?"

She drew a deep breath. "Father, what's going to happen to the SDF-1?"

He didn't reprimand her for the lapse in formality, as he once would

have. But there was no sympathy in his voice. "It will be destroyed. We're

committing it to drawing the enemy fire away from Earth and the rest of our

forces."

"You can't!"

"I'm sorry, Lisa." He didn't sound sorry at all. "There's no other

choice."

She accepted that; she'd been around headquarters long enough now to

realize that her father was no longer a leader. He was an apologist, an

errand boy, for the real rulers of the planet.

She gathered her self-control. "Father, I want to ask you a personal

favor. I want you to send me back to the battle fortress."

"No! That's completely out of the question!"

Now it was her turn to flare. "My place is with my crew, my captain!"

She waved her hand around to indicate the scurrying futility of the UEDC

base. "It's not here, in a hole in the ground, when the people I fought beside

need me."

He knew then that he'd lost her. For a moment, he saw the place

through her eyes and wondered how he could ever have been so deluded.

The Grand Cannon was a sham, and the UEDC were frightened men who

had brought the world down around them rather than admit that they were

wrong.

He shook it off, his oath to his duty coming to the fore again. But there

was real pain in his voice as he told her, "I'm sorry, but-"

"But you won't."

"I can't allow you to throw your life away up there. Lisa, Lisa...you're

my daughter."

"I'm an officer in the RDF!"

He said it very quietly, "I know that."

"Then reassign me!"

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He looked at her angrily now. "Father or no, I promise you this: If you

try to leave, I'll have you thrown in the brig."

She was only partly successful at keeping the tears out of her eyes, but

her voice was steady. "Yes, sir."

Admiral Hayes despaired of ever winning the battle; he saw that he had

lost the last of his family.

Breetai looked up at the projecbeam image. "What now, Azonia?"

She didn't mince words; he had expected no less. "There are no options,

great Breetai. Dolza will try to exterminate us now that we have been

exposed to the Micronians. I will stay and face the Grand Fleet. It will be an

honor to go into battle with you, my lord!"

Some part of him knew what she meant. Wasn't this the battle any

Zentraedi dreamed of, a hopeless fight against overwhelming odds in the

clash of dreadnoughts as numerous as the stars? Wasn't this the apocalypse

to which the Zentraedi looked for their version of immortality?

"Commendable," he said. "May you win every fight."

She drew a breath at the high compliment he had paid her. "And you

too, Breetai!"

Her face dissolved as the projecbeam image did, and he turned to

another. "Khyron? Your intentions?"

Khyron, languid and condescending, smoothed his beautiful blue hair.

"You know my answer. The odds are too great. Why fight if you can't win,

Breetai?"

"Why be Zentraedi if you don't know the answer to that, Khyron? But

this is as I expected; I wasn't depending on you, anyway."

And so it was all out in the light at this eleventh hour. Khyron had

substituted the ruthlessness and savagery that were all he had for courage.

The difference came forth only in moments like these, but it was plain.

Now Khyron's facade broke, and he screamed at Breetai, froth leaping

from his lips. "You will be destroyed!" The projecbeam image vanished.

126

On his own flagship, Khyron sat slouched in his command chair like a

wounded toad. "All right, let's go." He threw the command over his shoulder

to his subordinate, Grel.

"What coordinates?" Grel asked carefully. In such a rage, Khyron was

easily capable of lashing out and killing any around him.

"Anyplace else in the universe but here," Khyron brooded, staring off

angrily at nothing. There was no response from Grel, and Khyron snarled,

"Didn't you hear me?"

Grel calculated his next words carefully. "But sir, we can't run."

Khyron barked a galling laugh. "You think not? Watch, then!" He

signaled, and the engines of his flagship came up to power, as did those of

all the Botoru ships under his command.

Grel licked his lips, wondering how best to tell Khyron that he hadn't

been speaking figuratively. Khyron cherished the practice of beheading the

messenger who bore bad tidings.

Breetai paid little attention to the maneuvers of the Botorus. He

considered the nearby fabric of space, where the first perturbations of the

Cosmic String heralded the Grand Fleet.

Once he had been Dolza's most valued subordinate-had saved Dolza's

life from the very Invid attack that had killed Zor. Now he contemplated the

stirrings of the universe in advance of the attack and reflected on the

incredible way things had turned out there in the Micronian star system.

Hear my thoughts, Lord Dolza! To go down in battle is all we seek,

from the highest to the lowest. Mark me well, for this is the final battle of

Breetai!

In the hearing chamber, people were exhausted, but the marathon

went on. Computers and analysts were hooked in; G-staff members and

evaluation teams were ready.

"Dolza will assume you're too weak to fight," Exedore was saying, still

animated and prim in the midst of the most tiring activity. "He will divide

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his fleet and attack from every side, sealing off any avenue of escape. But

this maneuvering will give you your only chance."

"Enough background; kindly be specific," Gloval snapped.

Exedore turned to a luminous tactical projection he had constructed

with the help of the SDF-1 computers.

"Their flagships will be here, here, here, and here, and Dolza's mobile

base will appear here; these are my best projections.

"If you can destroy these vessels, it will throw the entire Grand Fleet

into chaos."

"Simple military strategy," someone muttered.

"No; simple military strategy-of all-out, straightforward attack and

overwhelming numbers-is what has allowed our tactics to remain the same

for so long," Exedore countered. "That and the fact that the Zentraedi have

never lost a war."

Colonel Maistroff rubbed his face with his hand, as if he were washing.

"So, in short, we crush the head of the snake!"

Exedore nodded. He stepped away from the tactical display, pacing

toward the place where Gloval sat.

"With their attack forces in disarray, our only chance for survival is to

utilize the combined forces of the SDF-1 and our battlefleet. We are already

aware of the crude Robotech cannon in your planet's northern hemisphere

but consider it a minor element at best."

Gloval came to his feet. "I'm glad that we're now fighting on the same

side." He clasped hands with the gnomish little man.

"Yes, so am I." Exedore turned to Minmei, who was watching it all

unbelievingly. "And without your singing, this alliance between our peoples

would not have been possible."

Kyle had assumed a hard expression, eyes closed, chin sunk on chest,

lip curled. But Minmei was in a sort of dream state. "Who, me? Really?"

Exedore nodded his head slowly. "While I don't profess to understand

Micronians, I now realize the importance of your singing. It touches

emotional resources to which we Zentraedi did not have access before-a

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courage that is beyond mere courage in battle."

He seemed to blush a little; nothing could have surprised them more.

Even Kyle was shocked.

"Will...will you sing for us?" Exedore got out, face coloring furiously.

"So that we may hope for victory? Please, Miss Minmei."

"Of course."

She stood up, in that room where the plans were coming together that

would spell the death or life of worlds, the survival or slaughter of billions.

She drew a breath and sang in a voice as clear as polished diamond.

She sang "To Be in Love," one of her first compositions, still one of her

favorites. It was a simple song, and there was nothing in it of armies or

battles. It was about a closeness between two lovers.

Exedore and the three former spies were mesmerized. Kyle, eyes closed,

was cold and indifferent. Gloval, Max and Miriya, and the rest watched and

listened, immersed. Her voice soared to rebound from the domed ceiling.

Rick was transfixed, too, at first. The fact that he'd lost her didn't make

her any less desirable, especially now.

But then a new sound came to him, a sound he recognized even

through the intervening decks and bulkheads.

On the hangar decks, the elevators were at work, lifting Veritechs for

cat launch. For the final battle.

The finder beams had done their work. Now there was a brutal

application of force, and the warp and woof of the universe were ripped

apart.

The Zentraedi had refined their targeting. This time, there was no

cosmic bow wave of incandescent fire. Instead, a green cloud of some kind

seemed to appear-until it became clear that every last mote in the cloud was

a warship.

Another cloud appeared nearby, and another. Then two at once, then

three. And soon the stars were blotted out. It was as if handfuls of sand had

suddenly become ugly battlecraft. More appeared, and more, in dense,

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well-ordered formations, thicker than any hive swarm.

"There are too many for sensors to count," Vanessa said, sweating,

blinking behind her glasses. "Too many..."

"I have to go," Admiral Hayes told his daughter gruffly. "We'll talk

about this later-"

The PA interrupted. "Sensors register immeasurable defold activity.

Estimated enemy strength one million, three hundred-correction, two

million, one hundred thousand-stand by! Stand by! More enemy units

arriving!"

Some other, less hysterical voice cut in. "Battle stations. Repeat, battle

stations." Alarms and sirens sounded, and nobody had to say that it wasn't a

drill this time.

Admiral Hayes swallowed, going pale.

Earth was engulfed in a net of enemy warships. They blotted out the

sun's light, appearing in their hundreds of thousands, taking up position for

the ultimate confrontation.

Claudia's face appeared in the hearing chamber on a display the size of

a movie screen. "Captain Gloval, monitor three shows enemy positions over

the western hemisphere."

The view came up. Still the sinister warcraft poured into Earth orbit

from nothingness. The drifting clouds of them stretched, established

intervals, deployed for total coverage. Great blotches of green, whole

clustered space navies, were painted into the picture.

"Well, I'm afraid this is it," Exedore said. It looked, like the planet was

falling, in time-lapse photography, under a leprous infection of Zentraedi

combat green.

Minmei could only stare, her song forgotten. Max and Miriya took each

other's hands, and he was grateful that he had been granted the time they

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had had together.

Even Kyle was aghast. If there was one there who was in the mood for

the scene, it was Rick Hunter. He watched the Grand Fleet spread and grow.

Nothing left to lose. Okay: A fight it would be.

Breetai, staring up at the displays that were still functioning on his

bridge, watched in awe. It was. the greatest single combat fold jump

operation in history, and it came off meticulously. Dolza was doing

everything right so far.

Breetai's clifflike jaw set. Opening moves and endgame were two

different things.

The night sky over the Alaska Base was lighter, with the reflections of

sunlight from the light underbellies of the warships taking up orbit. The

stars were obscured, hundreds at a time.

Watching the screens, Lisa heard her father moan. She turned and saw

by his expression that he realized, far too late, that the reports of the aliens'

strength were accurate and that five million ships were so many more than

he had ever envisioned.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

And so the Great Mandala spun,

Two halves had learned They both were one

Mingtao,

Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

Among all the announcements of the loading of Decamissiles, the

manning of gun turrets, the frantic coordinating of target-acquisition and

threat-priority computers, there came word that Skull Team was to report

to its fighters.

"Well. That's us," Max said, looking at the deck and then up at his wife.

He was really at a loss. Some traditionalism said that he should shield her

from harm; but Miriya was a better flier than anyone else aboard except

relax, and there was no safety, anywhere.

More to the point, she would never have allowed him to leave her

behind.

"Yes, Maxmillian," she said, watching him. Rick noticed that in an

amazingly short time, they had both learned to smile exactly the same slow

smile at each other at exactly the same moment. He did his best to suppress

his envy.

Max put his arm around his wife's slim waist and gave Rick a wave.

"See you out there, boss."

"Count on it." Rick waved at them with phony cheer, watching them go

off to suit up.

Others were finding their way out of the hearing chamber; Gloval and

Exedore and the other heavy-hitters were already gone. The recording techs

were wrapping things up quickly, preparing to double in brass on combat

assignments.

Only Kyle and Minmei were left, uncertain, with no place to go. Rick

looked up at them and thought about what was happening out there where

the void met Earth's atmosphere. Millions of ships were forming up for a

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greater battle than even the Zentraedi had ever seen before.

Which meant the future looked very dim for one little VT leader who

had come late into the business of war. Rick decided in an instant and

sprinted off to where Minmei stood.

She was at the top of the steps leading to the table podium; he stopped

a few steps below. "Minmei!"

She looked at him oddly. "Yes, Rick?" He couldn't read her, couldn't

understand what was going on behind the startling blue eyes. Kyle was at

her shoulder, cold and angry, glaring down at him.

Not that Kyle mattered anymore; very little did.

Rick fumbled for words, not coming up with any that would express

what he wanted to say, not even managing to get started. At last he got out,

"You know I'm not good at this sort of thing."

She did; knew it from the long days and nights they had spent stranded

together, knew it from more recent times, when he had been all but

inarticulate.

"But I might not see you again," he went ahead. "I want to say that-that

I love you."

Her hands flew to her mouth like frightened birds. She mouthed words

that made no sound.

"Had to tell you." He smiled bitter-sweetly. "Take care."

Then he left to suit up, already late in the massive launch schedule of

the apocalypse, heels clicking emptily on the deck.

She was frozen by his words; she could move again only when he was

out of the hatch, out of sight. Minmei hurried down the steps to catch up.

Kyle was next to her in an instant, catching her arm, bringing her up

short. "Don't try to stop him!" The doings of the warmakers were their own

concern; Kyle had loved Minmei too long to lose her to them now.

She struggled hopelessly to free her arm, the black hair whipping. "Let

go! I' have to tell him! Kyle, let me go or I'll hate you forever!"

Fingers that could have tightened like a vise released instead. He knew

a hundred ways to force her to stay there but not a single one to take away

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her feelings for Hunter or to keep her from the pilot without making her

hate him.

The grip, strong as steel, went limp, letting her go. Minmei wrenched

her arm free and raced off after Rick. Kyle stood alone for a long time in the

deserted hearing chamber, listening to the emergency directives, the RDF

announcements, the preparations for battle.

Battle, death, oblivion-those were so easy to face, didn't the military

war lovers understand? Living without the one who meant everything in life

to you, that was the fear that couldn't be overcome, the abyss no courage

could see you across.

In the hangars and bays and ready rooms of the combat mecha,

thoughts of love and grief had been left behind. Now it was only kill or be

killed. Men and women emptied their minds of everything else in a way no

outsider would ever understand.

"Arm all reflex warheads," the command came over the PA from Kim

Young.

The

missiles-Hammerheads,

Decas,

Piledrivers

and

Stilettos-became alive in their pods and racks.

The attack mecha stood to readiness: lumbering giants heavy with

laser-array and x-ray laser cannon, missiles, chain-guns, and rapid-fire

tubes loaded with discarding-sabot armor-piercing rounds.

The Destroids stumped out first: waddling two-legged gun turrets the

size of houses, running their clustered barrels back and forth in test

traverses, ready to bunch up shoulder by shoulder and concentrate fire.

Forming up behind them were the Gladiators, Excaliburs, the Spartans and

Raidars, all making the reinforced decks resound to their tread, weighted

with every weapon Robotechnology could give them.

The March of the Robotech Soldiers.

The SDF-1 gun turret and casemate barrels swung and readied, men

and women sweating as they settled into the gunners' and gunners' mates'

saddles. Targeting reticles were checked for accuracy; triggers were

dryfired.

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The stupendous warrior that was the SDF-1 itself stood ready, covers

lifted from its many weapon ports. The two suppercarriers that were the

ship's arms, Daedalus and Prometheus, set for battle and for the harrowing,

fiercely dangerous business of combat launches and retrievals.

On the hangar deck, Skull Team warmed up. They would be one of the

few teams flying the new armored Veritechs. Max, running things until Rick

could get there, threw his wife a quick smile. Miriya blew him a kiss, as she

often did when no one else was looking. Kissing was still an amazing thing

to her; lovemaking left her at a complete loss for words. But then, it did the

same to Max.

She turned back to a final check of her VT. Combat was something she

knew intimately, too. Max got the rest of Skull saddled up, resisting the urge

to be bitter and preoccupied with regret that he had had so little time with

her.

Those were the distractions that got fighter pilots killed.

On the bridge, Gloval arrived with Exedore at his side, and no one

thought to say it should be otherwise.

The reports of the ship's fighting status came to him from the Terrible

Trio and from Claudia.

Gloval led Exedore to the great bubble of the forward viewport,

thinking, Who would have dreamed we'd be fighting side by side?

But there was an answer to that. It was Gloval, always Gloval-and

sometimes only Gloval-who had anticipated this day from the moment he

had heard of the enemy defections.

Over the UEDC Alaskan headquarters, fighters looking a lot like VTs

but lacking their superlative Robotechnology screamed into the air on alert.

It was a brave show that everyone knew to be hollow; Earth's only real hope

lay with the dimensional fortress.

Admiral Hayes and several other senior officers stood on a balcony

overlooking the vast situation room. They heard echoing updates on the

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Grand Cannon's firing status, the enemy fleet that was still pouring out of

spacefold, the composite picture that made it unlikely that a single member

of species Homo sapiens would live through the day.

"The projections turned out to be in error," an intel-analysis officer

confessed, zombielike. "Against a force that big, we can't hope to win. We

couldn't do it even if the Grand Cannon satellites were in place." He was

shaking his head slowly. "No way, sir."

Hayes was used to hiding his dismay. He called down to a

communication officer, "Lieutenant! Have we been able to establish contact

with the aliens?"

Hayes burned at the thought of why his superiors were suddenly so

eager to talk to the Zentraedi. He avoided any contemplation of how Earth's

rulers sounded now that reality had at last been forced upon them. The

brave words and the bold posturing had been blown away like smoke in the

wind, and UEDC was eager, cringingly eager, to make any deal it could,

starting with an offer to make itself an overseer government under alien

rule.

Except the Zentraedi weren't making deals today, and Armageddon

was apparently the only item on the agenda.

"We're trying, Admiral, but so far it's a no-go," a com officer called up

to him.

Hayes himself felt betrayed and a fool. His daughter and Gloval had

been correct all along, right down the line. The prestige and honor of his

rank had fallen away to nothing, and he saw that he had, very simply,

wound up an otherwise honorable career by being the instrument of craven

and greedy men.

"Then there's nothing left to do but fight," Hayes said.

Under other circumstances it might have been one of those lines

flag-rank officers could hope to have show up in history books. The fact was

that Hayes knew he been duped again and again by the politicians. Besides,

it was unlikely that there would ever be any more history books.

And the only reason to fight was that the enemy offered no

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alternative-it meant to wipe the human race out of existence.

The Grand Cannon prepared to fire, and the futile squadrons of Earth

fighters went out to do their jobs as best they could. Lisa Hayes stared down

at her screens and instruments and fought off the urge to weep for the men

and women who were doing their jobs in all good faith and were kept, by the

omnipresent UEDC propaganda and disinformation, from knowing that

they were doomed.

During a few moments lag time, she paused to regard a close pickup

shot of the SDF-1 and to think of Claudia, of Gloval, and of Rick. She found,

as her father had told her when she was a little girl, that there were only a

few really important questions in life and that combat would make anybody

ask them.

Why are we here? Where do we come from? What happens to us when

we die? And when I do, will I be with Rick, at last, or will I be alone forever?

An update on the cannon's targeting status came in just then, and Lisa

had to let those thoughts go.

Rick Hunter sealed up his flightsuit and made sure his gloves were

firmly connected to his instrumented cuff rings. They fit smoothly, allowing

him maximum dexterity.

The hatch to his quarters signaled, and he thought it was just another

messenger with a mission update, all com channels being overloaded. Until

the hatch slid back.

"Rick?"

He pivoted and saw her standing in the hatch, outlined against the

harsh glare of the passageway lights. She came a step into his quarters

demurely but looking him in the eye.

The hatch rolled shut behind Minmei.

They were there in every size and shape, those wargreen vessels of the

Zentraedi Grand Fleet. Never in their entire history had they been

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assembled for combat in such a formation.

From his command station, Dolza, supreme commander of the

Zentraedi race, considered his target, Earth.

Space was filled with his ships; there had never been a marshaling like

this in the infamous annals of the Zentraedi.

And yet he felt misgivings. Dolza knew the ancient lore of his race from

Exedore's endless teachings. Against the forces that those records

mentioned, the Grand Fleet itself might not be enough.

Perhaps nothing would.

Inside the boulderlike base that was Dolza's headquarters, a thousand

miles through its long axis, the supreme commander received word that the

fleet was at last all present.

He was enormous, the largest and, but for Exedore, the oldest of his

race. Dolza's shaven skull and heavy brow made him look like a granite

sculpture.

"My first attack shall be the Micronians' mother planet," he said. "Let

all ships stand prepared."

All through the fleet, final preparations for battle were carried out. On

the colossal bombardment vessels, the bows opened like giant crocodile

jaws, exposing the heavy guns.

Targeting computers accepted their assignments from Dolza's base,

ranging their sights across the surface of the world, fixing their aim. The

Grand Fleet's engines howled like demons, supercharging the weapons

pointed at the helpless Earth.

"I want to apologize to you, Rick," she said. "I mean, about Kyle."

"It's not really your fault," he told her. "I should have let you know

what my feelings were. I should have tried harder, I guess."

"But, I-"

"Oh, Minmei, it's all right!" he yelled, frightening her a little. He got

control of himself and went to get his flying helmet. How do I tell her?

He went to pick up the helmet but saw her reflection in the visor. She

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was standing silently, watching him.

"I'm a pilot, and you're a superstar now," he said tiredly. "You know it

wouldn't have worked for us, anyway. Too much has changed, Minmei."

He went to the viewport, looking down at Earth. "It's strange to think

how small our world is," he said, almost distractedly. "It's a pity how much

time we wasted, isn't it?"

She flinched as if he had hit her. She could see that he was being cruel

on purpose, hurting himself and her, to make the love stop. She opened her

mouth to say something that would make him honest again, would clear the

air between them.

But at that exact moment the universe lit up. The Zentraedi attack had

begun.

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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Once I wrote here-a younger Minmei did-that I needed to be my own

person, that I had my own shadows to cast.

But, oh...I didn't realize how terrible that darkness would be.

From the diary of Lynn-Minmei

Millions of blindingly bright beams of pure energy rained down on the

blue-white world.

First to go were the orbital defenses, the surveillance satellites and the

"armors"-the big conventional-technology space cruisers. They were

obliterated instantly, vanishing in clouds of expanding gas.

The incredible volley pierced the atmosphere, boiling away clouds and

moisture, striking through to the surface. Buildings and trees and people

were vaporized; everything flammable exploded. The hellish rays set off

tremendous detonations and superheated the air like thermonuclear

weapons.

Everywhere it was the same. Soldiers and civilians, adults and children,

and the unborn as well-the Grand Fleet favored none and spared none. In

the middle of a humdrum day marked only by some sort of alert the UEDC

wasn't explaining, nearly the entire population of the planet was put to the

sword.

For most, there wasn't even time to scream, only a hideous moment

when light and heat beyond any description engulfed them, making their

bodies as transparent as x-ray images, then consuming them.

Cities toppled, and blowtorch winds scoured the world. Seas were given

no mercy, either; Dolza had decreed a carpet-volley pattern to get ships and

aquafarming and aquamining installations and the like. Untold cubic miles

of water turned into steam.

The beams came like a fusion-hot monsoon all across the defenseless

world.

140

In UEDC headquarters, the ground rumbled but miles of earth and

rock saved the occupants from immediate death.

Lisa gaped at an illuminated situation map. The strikes were so

numerous that the display computers couldn't discriminate anymore. The

face of the world glowed.

"They can't be doing this!" she screamed. "They can't!"

But she knew she was wrong. They were.

"Annihilation."

Gloval stood helplessly, shoulders bowed, looking out the forward

viewport. Exedore stood mute at his shoulder. The alien decided that he

must, in fact, have fallen victim to the contagious human emotions, because

he felt them very strongly at that moment: rage that this should happen, a

soul-wrenching sorrow, and an utter, utter shame.

Reading her instruments, a female enlisted-rating tech said in

monotone, "They're gone. They're all gone."

In his headquarters base, the immense Dolza looked upon his

handiwork and found it good. His guttural laugh echoed in the deep, eerily

resonant tones of the Zentraedi.

The Micronian interlude would be expunged from history, he had

decided. And any similar race encountered by the Zentraedi would be

subject to instant and total termination.

Then, events could be put back on their proper track.

Dolza had to admit that even he, the supreme commander, hadn't had

a true idea of Zentraedi power until the moment the Grand Fleet opened fire.

The irresistible might of it! It filled him with new aspirations, new resolve.

When the humans were finished and the rebellious Breetai and his

followers destroyed completely, it would be time to deal with the Robotech

Masters.

For too long now, the Masters had treated their warrior servants, the

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Zentraedi, with the contempt one showed a slave. For too long, that had

seared the Zentraedi pride. Moreover, it had come to light that the Masters

had told the Zentraedi a colossal lie all along-they had deceived them about

the giants' very origins.

The Protoculture secrets hidden in Zor's ship had been an important

part of Dolza's master plan to overthrow the Robotech Masters and let the

Zentraedi take their rightful place at the pinnacle of the universe.

The accursed Zor had been aware of that and had dispatched his ship

to keep it from Masters and Zentraedi alike. The plan had ultimately worked,

but in so doing it had brought this day. As Dolza looked out at nearly five

million warships, all raining down destruction on Earth, he realized that he

didn't need Zor's secrets, didn't need the SDF-1. All he needed was the

might of the Zentraedi hordes.

He laughed again, a bass rumble that made the bulkheads ring. Today

humanity died. Tomorrow the war against the Robotech Masters would

begin.

Rick Hunter clutched the ledge of his viewport. As he watched, the

night side of Earth, partly obscured by the enemy fleet, lit up with a myriad

of red-hot specks, the work of that first terrible salvo.

"The whole planet," he said numbly.

Minmei came up behind him, walking like a robot, in deep shock. "Are

they all...are they all dead, Rick?"

He watched the night turn red. "Yes, Minmei."

She tore her eyes away from the sight. "Mother. Father."

"Lisa," he said very softly. His cheeks were suddenly slick with tears.

She started to sing in a lullably voice, crooning a little love song to life

and to the planet that was dying. But it didn't last long, and soon her head

was buried in her hands.

"So this is how we end," she sobbed. "First the Earth and then the rest

of us."

He put a hand on her shoulder. "No, Minmei. This is not the end, do

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you hear me?"

He wished he could sound more convincing. But she wasn't blind; she

could see the overwhelming might preparing to turn its guns on the SDF-1

and its Zentraedi allies.

"We still have our lives," he said, shaking her shoulder a bit roughly to

make her listen to him.

It was all so unfair, so hopeless. He hadn't felt so angry and powerless

since that day in Dolza's base when he and Lisa and Ben were helpless

prisoners-

THAT'S IT!!!

He shook her shoulder again with a sudden new conviction. "It's not

over yet! Listen, Minmei, I want you to go now and sing for everyone!"

She wiped tears from her lashes. "Sing?"

"Yes. I've got an idea."

The smoke clouds were already rising from the Earth, rolling to

envelop it and bring on a winter that even the computers couldn't analyze

reliably.

In the UEDC base's main control room, Admiral Hayes heard the

report.

"There's been no word from any other Council member, sir. Marshal

Zukav is still unconscious, and the doctors think they'll probably have to

operate. What are your orders?"

In this election year, most of the UEDC members had been caught by

surprise by the alien attack, out mending fences and fixing political support.

Of them all, only Hayes and Zukav had been present at the base when the

attack came, and Zukav had suffered a coronary on the spot.

Now the reins were in Hayes's hands, but they were the reins to a

planet that was more cinder than soil.

"Damage estimate to all sectors exceeds any known scale," a voice was

saying quietly to one side. "We have indications that a few scattered groups

survived the first attack."

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The first attack, yes. But now the enemy was no doubt preparing a

second and a third-as many volleys as it took to turn Earth into a molten

ball.

And so the world would end.

"Did the Grand Cannon survive the attack?" he asked.

An aide was quick to answer. "Yes, sir. It will still function."

Hayes turned to him. "Very good. Then we'll begin the countdown at

once, Lieutenant."

The aide hurried off to relay the order. In moments, the vast base

thrummed with power.

Gloval looked into the face of his onetime enemy. Breetai stared back,

and it would have been a historic moment if everyone had not been in such

a hurry.

Breetai gazed down at the mustached, almost disheveled-looking little

creature who had outfought and outthought the best warriors in the galaxy;

Gloval looked up at a frighteningly massive fellow with a chest as thick as an

ancient oak and a metal and crystal cowl covering half his skull.

They spoke with virtually no preamble; they felt they knew each other

well.

"Commander Breetai, I want you to please broadcast a simultaneous

transmission of Minmei's song on all of your military frequencies."

Breetai's single eye fixed on Gloval intently. "I have no objection, but

what is your plan?"

Exedore stepped into the picture to explain. "As yet, the soldiers in

Dolza's fleet have had no contact with Micronian culture, m'lord! When

exposed to the song, they will be thrown into confusion. And it will also

boost the Micronians' morale."

Breetai rubbed his massive jaw. Gloval stared in fascination at the giant

mauve hand, the dense black hairs on its back thick as wires. "That could

provide us with the chance we need to catch them off guard."

Gloval was a bit-breathless with this alien's audacity. He himself had

144

been thinking more along the lines of a selective strike. "But-the Grand

Fleet is not a force we can attack head-on, Commander!"

Breetai gave him a surprisingly winning smile, coming as it did from a

cloned XT soldier whose head was half hidden by a metal and crystal sheath.

Breetai plainly savored every word. "Precisely, Captain Gloval. They would

never expect us to mount a surprise attack against them."

The main bridge hatchway slid open, and a slender figure stepped in.

Minmei looked around nervously at the mysterious landscape of dials, lights,

screens, and controls.

"Um, you wanted to see me; Captain?"

He went to her, Exedore trotting alongside. "Yes, Miss Minmei.

Lieutenant Hunter has told me his plan. We're going to use it for our

counterattack."

Minmei glanced nervously at the communications screen; then quickly

averted her eyes from the metalskulled alien who was staring at her with

frank interest.

"You will be able to sing a song for us, won't you, Minmei?" Exedore

said anxiously.

She forced a smile. How could you go on with life when the world had

just died? Simple: You used your acting instincts, keeping introspection and

sorrow damped well down.

"Yes, of course. Anything to help out."

Gloval nodded in approval. She had barely exchanged two words with

him at the wedding, but there was something about his old-world formality,

a kind of lovable stuffiness, that put her at ease somehow.

"I have one special request, Minmei," Exedore put in. "Could you do

that, er, that is, that thing that you do in all your movies? I believe it is

referred to as a kiss."

He couldn't have surprised her much more if he had done his Minmei

imitation for her. "I-I suppose I could. But why do you need that?"

Exedore dropped into the pedantic, almost effete tones he used when

trying to get his point across to stubborn Zentraedi. "I believe it would act as

145

a kind of psychological shock to all the Grand Fleet attack forces, rendering

them less able to fight."

She felt like laughing hysterically; there were some critics who would

have agreed with Exedore's evaluation of her acting ability.

But outside the viewport, Earth smoldered. "Well, if it will help."

The clouds were already thick in the night sky over Alaska, lit from

below by an infernal glow.

The base throbbed around her, preparing for the monumental cannon

shot. Lisa stared at her screens and waited to die.

At the cannon's base, a small city of Robotechnology, subatomic fires

whirled; energy crackled and struggled to get free.

Admiral Hayes heard the reports in stony silence. This would probably

be the last, possibly the only human shot in the battle, on the last day of the

human race; but somebody was going to be very sorry they had ever come

seeking battle. To go down fighting was much better than simply dying.

The cannon's huge lens, lit with targeting beams, made the undersides

of the black clouds closing in on the world red.

Dolza looked around suddenly at an emergency communication tone.

"Your Excellency! We've detected a high-energy reaction coming from the

third planet!"

But before Dolza could ask for more data or give a single order, hell

spewed forth.

It had been apparent from the start that an energy gun buried vertically

in a planetary surface would have a very limited field of fire. The planned

system of satellite reflectors was supposed to have solved that, but interim

measures had been put in place. They showed their worth now.

A beam as hot as the heart of a star sprang up from the devastated

Earth. Widened by the lens, it lanced up into the Grand Fleet. A hundred

thousand ships disappeared in an instant, burned out of existence like

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insects in a flamethrower's blast.

Brute servos tilted the lens, angling the beam. No one had been sure

whether or not a shot like that would violate all the mathematics of the

Grand Cannon and blow the installation to kingdom come, but it turned out

that somehow everything held.

Like a flashlight of complete and all-encompassing destruction, the

Grand Cannon's volley swiveled through the blockading fleet.

Ships were simply there and then not. Left behind were only

component particles and the furious forces of destruction. In that single

attack, the human race destroyed more warcraft than the Zentraedi had lost

in any war in their entire history.

"The enemy ships are just disappearing, sir," Vanessa said.

Gloval and Exedore stared at the screen, watching the angling and

swinging of the Grand Cannon. "Alaska Base survived!" Gloval exulted. The

Terrible Trio let out whoops and laughter.

"Lisa," Claudia whispered.

147

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Well, that was when I decided that ol' Vance needed to ease out of being

Minmei's manager and into a new setup. I mean, hey: what does twenty-five

percent of Armageddon amount to in real money?

Vance Hasslewood,

Those Were the Days

Minmei's backup band and roadies (if that was the proper name for

them; they played only one town, but they clocked more miles than any

other act in history) were used to taking their time setting up, running

sound checks, getting mentally prepared for a concert or recording session.

None of that today, though.

RDF techs and other personnel threw the setup together in a few

minutes flat, a briefing officer making it clear to the musicians just how

important this concert would be. The only one to object, a keyboard man

who wasn't happy with the way his stacks had been arranged, was menaced

into silence not by the military people but by the other band members.

Everyone knew what would happen if the Grand Fleet carried the day.

In her dressing room, Minmei tried to keep her mind off the greater

issues and simply concentrate on her performance. Humming, she leaned

toward her brightly lit makeup mirror, examining one eyelash critically. It

wasn't that she was unaware of the horrifying events taking place all around

the SDF-1; it was just that she could do nothing about them except clear her

mind and sing her very best.

There was a timid knock at her door, and three visitors entered. "Hi,

Minmei," said a rough but friendly voice.

Minmei smiled into her mirror at the reflection of Bron and the other

two Zentraedi spies.

"We understand the pressure you're under, Minmei," Rico began.

"Going into battle can be very, um, taxing," Konda added helpfully.

"We just wanted you to know we're with you 100 percent and we know

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you can do it," Bron told her, blushing. The other two nodded energetically.

"Oh!" She turned to them and came to her feet. She had spoken to

them only a few times, even including the official hearings and meetings.

But she felt a kinship to them, a bond of empathy. Song had made

them leave behind everything they knew, made them risk the unknown and

commit themselves to a new life, even though that life held dangers and

frightening enigmas. In that, they were very much like Minmei herself.

She put her hands out to them, palm to palm. "Thank you, Konda-Bron,

Rico. You're very kind."

Konda cupped his hands around hers, and the other two stacked theirs

gently on top. "You three are such wonderful men."

"Minmei," came the stage manager's voice. "Two minutes."

She kissed each of them on the cheek, then she was gone in a swirl of

long, raven hair.

Instead of the seats of the Star Bowl amphitheater or a glass wall that

looked on a recording studio's engineering booth, Minmei and her band

gazed at a great, concave sweep of viewport. The enemy warfleet was

deployed before them. Below were the battle fortress's upper works, and

beyond the bow, the curve of the blasted Earth.

Combat craft were swarming from the super dimensional fortress; the

warships of Breetai's armada were forming up around and behind it,

battlewagons and flagships at the lead for a do-or-die first impact.

The cameras and pickups focused on Minmei as she found her mark on

the stage. She had decided to wear a simple full skirt and blouse, with a

golden ribbon bowed at her throat.

"Wh...what's your opener gonna be?" laughed her manager, Vance

Hasslewood, nervously, mopping his brow with his handkerchief.

"How 'bout 'My Boyfriend's a Pilot'?" the bass man joked weakly.

"No," she said firmly. "We'll do the new one."

They had barely rehearsed it; she had completed it only two days

before. There was a chorus of objections from just about everyone, but she

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held up her mike and spoke into it firmly.

"This is the time for it."

Now or never.

Tactical corps and civil defense mecha had been brought out on the

decks of the battle fortress and the suppercarriers. With their massed

weapons added to the turrets and tubes of the SDF-1, short-range defensive

firepower was more than tripled.

Out where the VTs were forming, as the cats slung more and more of

them into space, the RDF fliers listened over the command net as Gloval's

voice came up.

"Attention, all fighter pilots. Once we enter the zone of engagement,

there will be complete radio silence under all circumstances. Miss Minmei's

song, and only that, will be broadcast on all frequencies. As you have been

briefed, we hope that will distract the enemy and give us the advantage.

"We must make maximum use of this element of surprise. Good luck to

you all."

Rick heard Gloval out, lowering his helmet visor. Skull Team was flying

the few armored VTs the fabrication and tech people had managed to get

operational. That meant that Rick, Max, Miriya, and the rest would be out at

the very spearhead of the attack. Not something to dwell on.

In his heart, he wished Minmei well, and then he led Skull Team out.

She looked up to the camera and raised her mike on cue as the cone of

spotlight shone down on her. In the control room, her image was on all the

screens from many angles.

Life is only what we choose to make it,

Let us take it,

Let us be free

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Rick hit his ship's boosters. The blue vortices of its drives burned and

shrieked. The armored VTs left trails of light, leaping into the dark.

Conventional VT teams came after.

Breetai's tri-thrusters, pods, and other mecha prepared to follow.

Gloval and the Zentraedi had wisely agreed not to mingle their forces; in the

heat of battle, human pilots would have a difficult time reading alien unit

markings and telling friend from foe. Even the hastily added RDF insignia

on the tri's and pods might not be spotted in time.

In the command station of his flagship, Breetai stood with arms folded

across his broad chest, a characteristic pose, staring up at a projecbeam. As

he had admitted so long ago, hers was a voice to wring emotion from any

heart. Perhaps the course to this moment had been set when he first heard

it.

A tech relayed word. "My lord, this transmission is being picked up by

Dolza's ships."

He nodded, watching and listening to Minmei.

We can find the glory we all dream of,

and with our love,

We can win!

His flagship trembled as its engines came up to full power. The front

ranks of the armada moved forward at half speed, picking up velocity slowly.

The SDF-1, in Attack mode, was accelerating along in the thick of them, its

back thrusters blazing, a fantastic armored marionette of war.

Still engulfing Earth, below them, the Grand Fleet lay in orbit,

seemingly paralyzed.

The human-Zentraedi alliance swooped down at it.

"What's that on our monitors?" growled one of Dolza's

communications officers, his voice harsh and guttural.

His subordinate could barely tear his attention away from the song to

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answer. Such distraction when a superior was asking questions would have

drawn quick, terrible punishment at any other time, but they were both

hypnotized by Minmei.

If we must fight or face defeat,

We must stand tall and not retreat.

The subordinate shook himself a little and answered. "I don't know, sir,

but we're receiving it on all frequencies."

Then they both watched in fascination, ignoring the flashing of

indicators and the beeps of comtones.

"We're within firing range," Vanessa said tightly. "No counterattack

detected."

"It's working!" Exedore cried, watching the battle at Gloval's side.

"This is it," Gloval said calmly. "All ships, open fire."

In that first gargantuan volley, the attacking force's main problem was

not to hit its own fightercraft or have its cannon salvos destroy its own

missiles in flight. But the Zentraedi were used to that sort of problem, and

fire control had been carefully integrated with the SDF-1's systems.

It was an impact almost as damaging as the Grand Cannon's; millions

of Zentraedi, gaping at Minmei's performance, died in moments.

Alarms were going off. The few Grand Fleet officers who could force

their attention away from the screens could get no response from their

troops short of physically attacking them.

As many of the Grand Fleet crews were beginning to notice the alarms,

though, Minmei paused in her song; the band vamped in the background. A

tall, dark figure stepped out into the spotlight with her.

Lynn-Kyle wore a look of burning intensity, his long, straight black hair

swirling around him, taking her hand. "Minmei-"

"Yes, Kyle; I know," she recited her line. "You've come to say

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good-bye."

"Yes."

Minmei wasn't exactly sure where the lines had come from; everything

was so hurried, so improvised. Weren't they from one of the movies the two

had done together? But Kyle was putting more into them than he had ever

managed on screen. He had seen her run off after Rick. What was going

through his mind?

No matter. He took her into his arms. She turned her face up to his.

The camera cut from a two-shot of their bodies pressed against each other

to a close-up of along, passionate kiss, Kyle no longer acting.

In the Grand Fleet, alien warriors groaned and made nauseated

sounds.

"How can they do that?" "Most disgusting thing I ever-"

And yet there was something about it that kept them from looking

away, an appalled captivation. It should be added that among the female

units like the Quadronos, there was more absorption and less repulsion

than among the males.

But all through the orbiting fleet, moans and growls and other

reactions to the kiss turned into shrieks of dismay and pain as the alliance's

volley cut through the enemy ships, holing them, blowing them to

nothingness.

Rick watched the kiss on a display screen and thought, not unkindly,

Farewell Minmei.

Then, "Let's get 'em!" he snarled over the tac net.

Someone must have managed to cut off the Minmei transmission from

at least some of the Grand Fleet's mecha. There were plenty of effective

ships, more than plenty.

The Skull Team's armored VTs bore in at the enemy, releasing barrages

of missiles, fighting their way through Grand Fleet pod and tri-thruster

defensive screens. Quadrono powered armor came at the VTs, too, less

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effective now that Miriya no longer led them. Miriya avoided engaging

those.

VTs shifted configuration according to the needs of the moment;

Battloid and Guardian and Veritech modes were intermingled. Pods and

tri-thrusters mixed it up with them and opened fire. Space was one big

killing ground.

The armored VTs were faster and more maneuverable than anything

else in the battle as well as being more heavily armed. They pierced the

enemy formations, ripping a hole for the rest of the attack force to exploit.

Skull Team seemed to be everywhere, unhittable and unavoidable.

Many, many Zentraedi saw their Jolly Roger insignia-the skull and

crossbones-and died instants later. The heavy autocannon buzz-sawed; the

missiles streamed, leaving boiling trails. But for every enemy downed, three

more dove in to try to seal the gap.

It's love's battle we must win.

We will win.

We can win!

The range was close now. Around the bowl in which Minmei performed,

the ship's mecha opened up. The Destroid cannon in particular put out

staggering volumes of fire. Every battery the ship mounted-except for the

monster main gun, whose energy demands might have damaged the

SDF-1-was working overtime.

The Grand Fleet's losses in the first moments of the battle were awful,

but its numbers still gave it a vast edge, and some of the enemy ships were

returning fire. The SDF-1 and the armada dreadnoughts forged on, blazing

away in all directions. Enemy mecha were starting to get through to the

alliance capital vessels now, despite the best efforts of the VTs and the

armada's pods, tri-thrusters, and powered armor.

But slowly, seemingly by inches, the allied force drew closer to Dolza's

headquarters.

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Max and Miriya were like avenging angels, beyond any mortal power to

resist or stop. Faced with the redtrimmed armored VT or the blue, all any

enemy pilot could do was resign himself to death.

Rick had part of his commo and guidance equipment tuned for signals

of life on Earth, especially from Alaska Base. If there was any sign of life...

A light cruiser was trying to break past the VTs for a go at the SDF-1.

He went in at it, letting go a torrent of mixed ordnance, aiming for the vital

spots the defectors had told the RDF about.

The cruiser fired back, and Rick decided this was one head-on he

wasn't going to survive. But all at once the cruiser expanded, armor flying

off it like rind off a bursting melon, and then the vessel and its crew were

scattered atoms and little more.

So violent was the explosion that Rick was distracted, avoiding being

damaged by it. When he looked around again, he saw that a trio of

Battlepods had loosed multiple spreads of missiles at him, and there was

absolutely no hope of dodging them all.

He eluded some, jammed some of the others' guidance systems, shot a

few right out of existence-and the special VT's armor protected him from

several hits.

But that left still more to go for his vitals. In Battloid mode, he

crouched, trying to shield himself. He nevertheless took several, right in the

breadbasket. VT armor was good but not that good.

The damaged Battloid, leaving a wake of flame behind it, spun and

tumbled for Earth, flopping lifelessly.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

When you're in the upper-right-hand corner, pushing that envelope, and

the "CANCEL" stamp comes your way, you do a lot of thinking.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

The crescent moon filing low on the horizon; the landscape of Earth

made the two bodies like twins now.

Compared to the barrage that had laid waste to the Earth, the stray

beams and rounds from the colossal battle above were barely distant sniper

shots. But they were enough to rattle an Alaska Base that was already

mortally wounded.

The shattered mouth of what had once been the Grand Cannon was

already ringed with bizarre energy phenomena. Crackling discharges,

wandering spheres of ball lightning, and fireflylike radiation nexuses had

sprung from the tremendous forces loosed by the Grand Cannon and their

interaction with both local fields and the fury of the enemy's rain of death.

"Earth Defense Sector four-alpha, come in please," Lisa called into her

headset mike as the room tossed. "This is Alaska Base!"

The base heaved again, shaking down dust and debris from the ceiling.

The tremors were caused by stray shots from the battle and by the rebellion

of the very planet against the obscene things that had been done to it. But

they came as well from the interior of the base itself. The installation was

dying; but from what Lisa could read from her instruments, it would not be

a slow, quiet death.

She had found no one else alive in the base. She had been ordered to

see about a glitch in a shielded commo relay substation, had been there just

as the cosmic fireworks went off. Being the last survivor in an underground

charnel house might be somebody else's idea of a stroke of fortune, but it

wasn't Lisa's.

She fought to keep her voice and her nerve from breaking as she tried

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another call. She kept herself narrowly fixed on the job at hand to shut out

the ghastly things she had seen and smelled and been forced to come in

contact with in making her way back to her post.

The place was nearly dark, lit only by dim red emergency lights. The

weak flow from the fallback power system was barely enough to keep her

console functioning. There was plenty of power in the base, power gathering

itself for a split-second rampage, but she couldn't tap any of it.

"It's no use. They're all gone," she said numbly. She wondered how

long she would last, the only living thing in the city of the dead, perhaps the

only human being alive.

Not long, she hoped.

Abruptly, multicolored lines of static zagged across her screen, and her

father's face appeared, broken by interference, only to reappear.

"Is that you, Lisa? I'm reading you, but the transmission is very weak."

She let out a long breath. "Thank God you're alive!"

She could see that he was still in the command station. A few figures

moved in the gloom behind him, lit by occasional flashes of static or

electrical shorts. So others had been spared by the concussion, the

explosions and air contamination, the fires and smoke and radiation.

"The Grand Cannon was severely damaged," he admitted. "I don't think

it will fire again, but we have to try."

"Oh, Father."

He smiled weakly. "It seems you were right all the time. The Zentraedi

forces are much too powerful for our weapons to handle. I should have

listened to you."

Another shock wave shook the base. Admiral Hayes said, "Lisa, you

have to get out of here now!"

Get out? What was he talking about? The surface was a radioactive

execution chamber carpeted with molten glass for miles all around. She was

about to tell him so, to make her way to him, to die with him because it was

a better place than the one she was in now, and she knew she would die this

day.

157

Before she could speak, there was some sort of eruption from the

Grand Cannon base equipment behind him, and the screen broke up into

rainbow distortion, then went dark.

"No!" She threw herself at the console, then sank to the floor, wracked

by sobs, as the wailing of the base's power plant built and built for a final,

terrible outpouring.

"Father...Father..."

As the battle draws on, we feel stronger,

How much longer must we go now?

Rick recognized the voice at once, even in the daze he was in from the

missiles' pounding. He blinked and saw the Earth whirling before him. His

flying sense told him his ship was spinning and sprawling toward the

ground, its thrusters only marginally effective in slowing it. He was inside a

big, loose-limbed fireball meteor.

Where am I? What happened? Then it came back to him in a rush. As

he gained a little control over himself, his VT, taking its impulses from the

receptors in his helmet, did the same.

Gotta go to F mode! The bucking and spinning of the dive made it

difficult reaching for the one close control. He knew that if the ship hadn't

made minimal attempts to control the crash, he would likely never have

woken up.

It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life, but he got his hand

to the F lever and yanked it. Damage control systems in his Robotech ship

made decisions and blew off the armor and pods with which it had been

retrofitted. Somehow, the burning components were jettisoned too.

The Battloid folded, elongated here, shortened there-mechamorphosed.

And in a moment, a sleek, conventional VT rode the thickening air down

toward Earth.

Seems to be handling all right, he thought. Maybe I wasn't hit as bad as

I thought.

158

The ship had automatically assumed a belly-flop attitude for

atmospheric reentry. The speed of its descent reddened its ablative

shielding a bit, torching the air around it.

Oops! Better activate heat shields! In another moment a protective

blister of heat-reflective armor, bearing the Skulls' Jolly Roger insignia, slid

into place over the canopy. Other vulnerable components were similarly

protected.

The heat in the cockpit began dropping at once, and Rick tried to assess

his situation. I'm still alive. That covered just about all the important stuff

as far as most pilots were concerned.

Minmei was still singing. He recalled those last words he had

exchanged with her in his quarters as the sirens shrilled for a VT hot

scramble.

You can do it, Minmei. Just remember: Today you sing for everyone.

But -I want you to understand, Rick. I'm really singing for you.

And then she had given him a kiss that he had felt to his toes, a kiss

that made him feel he didn't need a VT in order to fly.

I love you, he told her; l love you, she said.

But it was really good-bye, and they had both known it.

He shook off the recollection; that was the sort of stroll down memory

lane that got pilots killed. He was deep in the atmosphere now, his VT

trimmed, seeming to respond well. He slowed, bringing the wings out to

minimal sweep, rolling back the heat shields, for a look around. Night lay

over the wasteland, and clouds closed in above.

He tried to figure out why the VT was descending in the first place, why

it seemed to be homing in on something. Then he noticed that the commo

system had picked up a signal and remembered that he had given it a

certain task.

He swept in lower over the ravaged surface, trying to get a stronger

signal. The utter horror of what had been done to his planet made him lock

his mind to the job at hand and that alone. His commo equipment had

picked up emanations of some kind on the designated frequency.

159

He turned and banked, climbed through the smoky night. A minute of

maneuvering went by, then two, and as if by magic he was rewarded with a

signal that came in five by five-perfectly.

"I say again: This is Commander Hayes, Alaska Base. Anyone receiving

this transmission, please respond."

There was a note of fear in her voice that he had never heard before.

Something in it brought home to him forcefully how important she had

become to him.

Farewell, Minmei.

He was so eager to reply, to tell her he was there, that he fumbled in

opening his transmitter and ignored all proper procedure.

"Lisa! Lisa, it's me!"

"Rick?" She said it low, like a prayer. Then, wildly, "Rick, is it really

you?"

"Yes! Are you all right?"

She suddenly sounded downcast. "Yes, but I think I'm the only one."

"Lisa, give me your coordinates. Send me a homing signal."

She waited a beat before answering. "No, Rick; it's far too dangerous

here. But thanks."

"Damn your eyes! I've got a fix on your signal, and I'm coming! Now,

will you help me or not?" She didn't say no, but she didn't say yes.

"Besides," he said jauntily, "what's a little danger to us? I'll get you out

of there in no time." He wished he had his long white flying scarf so he

could fling it back over his shoulder rakishly.

Suddenly, there was a homing signal. "Rick, I'm so glad it's you," she

said in a voice as intimate as a quiet serenade. "Be careful, all right?"

Soon after, the VT dove straight down the shaft of the onetime Grand

Cannon. It went from Fighter to Guardian mode, battered by rising heat

waves and running a gauntlet of radiation that would have broiled an

unprotected human being instantly.

We shall live the day we dream of winning

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And beginning a new life

We will win!

We must win!

She had sung it through, taking longer because of the scene played with

Lynn-Kyle, and yet it hadn't been very many minutes since Minmei had

begun her song. Nevertheless, Khyron the Backstabber knew, the universe

and war in particular turned upon such minutes.

He stood in his flagship, well out of the battle but within striking

distance, watching the fight. Lack of sufficient Protoculture to make his

escape from the solar system had forced him to come up with a new plan,

and the plan seemed more promising every moment.

Grel, his second in command, watched Khyron worriedly. Khyron had

shown no aversion to the singing, the kissing. His handsome face shone, his

eyes alight with the gleam Grel had seen there when Khyron used the

forbidden leaves of the Flower of Life.

"What is your plan now, my lord?" Grel ventured.

Khyron was still watching Minmei. "Mm. Pretty little thing."

Grel couldn't help bursting out, "What?"

Khyron looked at him coldly. "Get me the position of Breetai's

flagship." Then he was smiling up dreamily at Minmei's projecbeam image

once more.

Grel didn't know what to say and, moreover, knew that saying the

wrong thing to the Backstabber had cut short quite a number of otherwise

promising careers. He couldn't help blurting, though, "But my lord! Breetai

is one of us! You cannot do th-"

Khyron whirled on him in a murderous rage. "How dare you? You will

follow my orders or else!"

Grel turned very pale and hurried to obey. Khyron turned back to his

enjoyment of the song.

But his enjoyment was sinister. He felt a physical, languorous pleasure

as he concluded that he was at last coming to a clear understanding of a

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pure true definition of conquest; something more pleasure-giving, if he was

right, than all the victories, booty, and worlds the Zentraedi had ever taken.

In seconds, Khyron's flagship was underway, followed by the tiny

flotilla of those still loyal to him.

People in the control booth and even members of the band had sent the

inquiry up the line: Shouldn't Minmei go to another song?

In the midst of the most important battle of his career, Gloval had

taken time to give the order personally: no! This song, this song was the

one!

Now, with Minmei's voice ringing through it everywhere that battle

damage hadn't silenced the PA system, the SDF-1 waded deeper and deeper

into the massed Grand Fleet. Out on the decks and outerworks, enemy fire

was taking a vicious toll of the exposed attack mecha, but the crews of the

war machines still kept up intense fire.

Breetai's armada had suffered badly, too, but hadn't slowed.

"Keep all power levels at maximum!" he bellowed as systemry and

power conduits blew all about him.

His flagship and its escort, the SDF-1 side by side with them, pressed

on, their volume of fire enormous, the rest of the armada striking after in a

wedge, probing their way through the disorganized foe.

Many of the smaller fightercraft and mecha on both sides had been

snuffed out of existence by the overwhelming volleys being traded; most of

the rest had quit the battle's fairway.

"Hell or glory!" cried Azonia, holding her fist aloft, coming in to shore

up the alliance's badly crumpling left flank. Her forces threw themselves

into the engagement with fanatic zeal.

Dolza's faithful leapt at them with an equal thirst for death and

triumph.

Inside the SDF-1, a direct hit pierced the hold in which Macross City

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lay. Atmosphere roared out at once like a great river, and more missiles

penetrated the hold to score direct hits on the streets of the city. Armored

curtains and sealing sections swung into place at once, but still there was

grievous damage to the city. Rebuilt a half dozen times, it was fast becoming

rubble again. Loss of life was relatively low because most of the inhabitants

were on emergency duty elsewhere and practically all the rest were in

shelters.

Just before the last curtain rolled into place to seal the compartment

and allow it to be repressurized, a last heavy enemy missile somehow sizzled

through the gap. By chance, it found a shelter in a direct hit, and the

carnage was nothing that belonged in a sane universe.

Repair and rescue crews and medical teams wanted the ship to drop

back to give them time to do their work. Gloval bit his lower lip but refused;

perhaps all that was left of humanity was aboard the SDF-1, and if Dolza

wasn't smashed now, in this moment, none of them would survive.

The request was denied. The battle raged on. It was not the first

agonizing time Gloval had felt himself something of a villain.

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CHAPTER TWENTY

Aside from Gloval, very few of our senior military people seem to be able

to grasp the simple truth: The Zentraedi do not truly understand

Robotechnology. They use it without comprehending how it works, as many

humans use television, laser devices, or aircraft without the slightest idea

what makes those technologies function. The Zentraedi were given their

weapons and equipment by the enigmatic Robotech Masters. Their control

over the Zentraedi is due, in part, to the giants' own ignorance.

This means that the Zentraedi are vulnerable in ways of which they are

unaware.

Dr. Emil Lang,

Technical Recordings and Notes

More disturbances shook the underground corridors of Alaska Base as

a terrier might shake a rat in its teeth. The titanic supports complained, and

the ceilings showered rock dust.

Through it flew the Skull Guardian, maneuvering in very confining

space to avoid exploding power ducts and ruptured energy mains. Rick

brought the ship to an abrupt halt, hitting the foot thrusters hard so as not

to collide with a thick shield door that dead-ended the cyclopean corridor.

But he was in no mood to be stopped. He lowered a phased-array laser

turret and aimed with his gunsight reticle. The fearsome power of the

quad-mount sent armor flowing in rivulets, but not as quickly as he hoped.

He cut back his ambitions and tried for a man-size opening instead of a

VT-size one.

In a few moments a circular plug of armor two feet thick fell back from

the shield door, leaving a makeshift hatch. Rick gave commands with his

controls and with mental images; the Guardian bowed, its nose touching the

corridor floor so that he could disembark.

He was barely at the smoking, red-hot opening when he heard her.

"Rick!" Lisa was waiting for him patiently at the far end of the short, small

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connecting passageway.

He felt like sinking to his knees with relief and-something else. But

there was no time for it, and so he tossed his thick, unruly black hair out of

his eyes and flickered his eyebrows at her.

"You the lady who called for the cab? I'm your man."

She laughed fondly, nodding. "It's about time." She ran to him,

laughing, and he caught her up in his arms, whirling her.

In another few seconds they were in the Guardian's cockpit, Lisa seated

across his lap, Rick trying to concentrate on his flying. Strange energy

phenomena coruscated and spat all around, a poltergeist zoo of deadly

short-term exotica. Purple lightning grasped for them, and green rays

ricocheted from surface to surface. Walls blew out into the corridor, sending

pieces of shredded armor plate whirling like leaf fragments.

"The reactor's overloading!" she yelled over the din.

Rick somehow ran the dimly lit obstacle course, Lisa's head buried

against his chest in case the canopy shattered. After several centuries' time

juking and sideslipping through the maze of Alaska Base, the Guardian was

back into the vertical shaft of what had been Earth's greatest weapon less

than an hour before.

The last layer of defensive ships was riven apart by the irresistible

wedge of the allied force. Before them hung Dolza's headquarters like some

lumpy, dangling overripe fruit.

But Dolza didn't run; that wasn't the way of the true Zentraedi warrior,

and Dolza embodied the Zentraedi warrior code. It was as Breetai had

known it would be. Instead, the moonlet-size headquarters came straight at

its enemies, surrounded by such escort vessels as it could gather around it.

"Objective now approaching," Vanessa reported.

"All units in position," Kim sang out.

"Target within range. Stand by, all batteries," Sammie said into her

mike.

"All escort fighters, break contact and attack objective immediately,"

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Claudia ordered. She paused for a quick glance at the headquarters. Its

shape and lines and apparent texture reminded her so much of a mountain

in space, falling straight at the SDF-1. Ready to crush them and the

Zentraedi who had become humanity's friends; ready to crush everything in

its path, as had always been the Zentraedi way.

Claudia's face hardened along grim, angry lines. Not this time. She

thought of her slain lover, Roy Fokker, and of all the others who had died in

the pointless war. But not this time!

Exedore, still at Gloval's shoulder, said softly, "Now, Captain."

It was as if someone had run a high current through Gloval. "Open

fire!" he barked.

The SDF-1 fired again, in every direction, her carefully hoarded power

being used at a fearsome rate now, at a moment that was late in the battle

even though only minutes had elapsed.

The armada ships of Breetai fell away to all sides to engage the enemy

or lend support as they could. The final mission was the dimensional

fortress's alone, and no other vessel in existence could perform it or

accompany the ship.

The giant warrior shape's thrusters blared, adjusting attitude, and now

the SDF-1 came at Dolza's stronghold headfirst.

"Brace for ramming!" Gloval bellowed, and the orders went forth. The

engines shook the great ship and drove it in a death dive.

The two great booms that reared above the ship's head like wings were

now aligned directly at the space mountain that was Dolza's headquarters,

the nerve center of the Grand Fleet. The booms were separate parts of the

main gun, reinforced structures that were, with the exception of the

mammoth engines, the strongest parts of the ship. And around their tips

glowed the green-white fields of a limited barrier defense, making them all

but indestructible.

The SDF-1 plunged at its objective; Dolza's technical operations people,

prepared for an exchange of close broadsides, realized only in a last,

horrified moment what the dimensional fortress's intention was. By then, it

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was too late.

The idea of being rammed hadn't occurred to them; no other vessel

could have done it. Even Breetai's flagship could have caused Dolza's base

little more damage that way than a child could inflict by crashing a kiddie

car into Gibraltar.

But this was Zor's final creation, a machine that incorporated most of

what he had learned about Protoculture and the secrets of Robotechnology.

The booms went through the thick armor of the headquarters moonlet as if

it were soft cheese. The SDF-1 was like some enormous stake being driven

into the heart of the Grand Fleet.

Once the dimensional fortress was inside the outermost layers of the

headquarters' armor plating, Dolza's stupendous ship was even more

vulnerable. Bulkheads were smashed out of the way like aluminum foil;

structural members snapped like toothpicks. The directed barrier shields

glowed brighter but held.

An ocean of air began leaking from the headquarters, and the dying

started at once. Power junctions and energy routing, severed or crushed,

sent serpents of writhing electrical and Protoculture lightning into the

thinning air and serpentining along the bulkheads and decks.

The SDF-1 brought its mighty forearms, the supercarriers Daedalus

and Prometheus, into play. Their bows, too, had been reinforced and

mantled with directed barrier shields. Like a giant punching his way

through an enemy castle, the ship drove on, destroying all that was in its

path, its thrusters making it an irresistible force.

Zentraedi were whirled through the air like dust motes in the

tremendous atmospheric currents being sucked toward the opening the

SDF-1 had made. They died in explosions and were torn apart, ground up,

squashed to jelly, or impaled by the flying, whirling wreckage.

Through it all, Minmei sang. She knew the song was no longer a part of

any surprise attack, but she felt-now that if she stopped, it might bring

about some disastrous halt in the desperate attack. It was as if her song was

what was making it all happen; it was a form of magic that she couldn't stop

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in midspell.

Then the dimensional fortress was opening up with conventional

weapons. X-ray lasers and missile tubes, cannon and pulsed beams

hammered away at everything before and around them. The ship's path was

often obscured by the demon's brew of flame and explosion all around.

Minmei watched, transfixed, at the huge sweep of viewport and sang,

wondering if the universe was about to end. Because that was how it looked

from where she stood.

But moments later, as suddenly as the drawing aside of a curtain, the

SDF-1 broke out into a vast, open place. Behind it was a tunnel with its

mouth edged by jagged, bent-out superalloy plate. The Zentraedi gaped as it

drifted across the vast space within the headquarters mountain.

Gloval knew the timing had to be split second and perfect, and he had

no leisure for preparation.

There were quite a few enemy vessels still inside the gargantuan base,

something Gloval had been hoping against. But they were all at rest, unable

to maneuver or open fire for seconds more at least, perhaps as much as a

half minute. In a battle like this, that was an eternity.

"Prepare to execute final barrage!" he snapped as his bridge crew bent

to their work. "Then full power to barrier shield!"

Missile ports opened to let loose the last volley the SDF-1 was capable

of firing, the do-or-die knockout punch Gloval had saved for this moment.

The fortress's heaviest projectiles-Deca missiles the size of old-fashioned

ICBMs, Piledrivers as big as sub-launched nukes-were readied for firing.

The bows of the flatdecks opened like sharks' mouths, revealing racks

of smaller Hammerhead and Bighorn missiles.

"Target acquisition on their main reflex furnace," Gloval ordered.

But Claudia was way ahead of him. "Target locked in, all missiles, sir,"

she said.

In his command post, the looming Dolza tried to believe what he saw

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before him. "What are they doing? They'll destroy us all!"

If the reflex furnace went, the resulting explosion would certainly

destroy the base and everything in it, and quite possibly all ships in both

fleets and even the planet nearby. But that didn't seem to be daunting the

Micronians.

This isn't war! Dolza screamed within himself. It's madness!

So the tiny creatures were willing to die in order to avoid the disgrace

of defeat.

They are more like us than I thought! Dolza realized. They have some

source of strength we must learn. What allies they would snake in a war

against the Robotech Masters!

"Wait!" he bellowed.

"Fire!" Gloval roared on SDF-1's bridge.

The missiles gushed from the battle fortress, the smaller, faster ones

getting a quick lead and leaving corkscrewing white trails. The heavier ones

took a bit longer to get up to speed, but they quickly overtook and passed

their little siblings. All angled in, on assorted vectors, for the base's reflex

furnaces.

But Gloval had dismissed them from his mind as soon as he had given

the order to let them fly. There was no time to spare.

"All power to barrier shields!" he snapped, but again his bridge crew

had anticipated.

The ship was standing stock still. Every erg of power in it was

channeled to the shields; producing first a cloud of scintillating lights

around the ship, then a green-white sphere like some exotic Christmas

ornament.

"Barrier shield coming to maximum," Kim said calmly. Then, a second

later, just as the first missiles began to detonate on target, "Barrier at max,

sir."

The enemy ships in the base were opening fire now, but their shots

glanced harmlessly off the barrier system. Gloval barely paid attention to

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confirmation of that; he had little doubt the Robotech shield created by Dr.

Lang could hold out against an enemy bombardment for a few seconds. The

real test was coming up.

Dolza watched the awesome barrage hit home on the reflex furnace

area of the ship's interior and knew he was going to die.

Even with the protection of its shielding, even with the defenses of

desperate, brave Zentraedi captains who purposely threw their ships in the

way of the all-out salvo, enough missiles got through to ensure that the base

would be destroyed. Many times enough.

The reflex furnaces churned, then spewed forth utter destruction.

Dolza, watching from his command post, had time only for one thought.

Years and years before, he had watched Zor die. Zor had spoken of

some overriding Vision that made the megagenius send the SDF-1 here, to

Earth.

Had Zor seen this moment, too? And things beyond it?

Then a terrible light seared him. Dolza howled a fierce Zentraedi war

cry as he was rent to particles.

The interior bulkhead of the base began to bulge with secondary

explosions, nodes of superhard armor being pushed out like putty by the

force of the blasts running through the place. The rift in the reflex furnaces

that had destroyed Dolza's command post was expanding, gushing forth

blinding-white obliteration.

Ships only beginning to maneuver for the run to safety were caught in

it, wiped out of existence like so many soap bubbles in a blast furnace.

The base swelled like an overfilled football, then split apart along

irregular seams that hadn't been there moments before. Ruinous light

spilled out of it, then it lit the sky over Earth like a star.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Francis Bacon said that "In peace the sons bury their fathers and in war

the fathers bury their sons." My father warned me when I joined up that this

didn't always apply to our family, because we were all military. He might

have had some premonition that I would outlive him, but what he didn't

foresee was that his daughter would hear taps played for an entire world.

Lisa Hayes,

Recollections

The thick clouds had darkened the Alaskan night to pitch-blackness,

but the fighter's night-sight capabilities gave Rick a clear view of what he

was doing. The lurching Guardian barely cleared the rim of the Grand

Cannon's shaft without snagging a wingtip.

It might be begging for a crash, but he kept going, nursing the fighter

along until he was beyond the blighted, red-hot area around what had been

Alaska Base.

He was barely clear of the blast radius when Alaska Base went up like a

pyromaniac's fantasy of Judgment Day.

He flew in Fighter mode for a long while, casting back and forth across

the charred Earth for safe landing, watching his radiation detectors and

terrain sensors.

He swooped in over what had been a major UEDC base, according to

the maps. But there was only a dry lake bed, its water vaporized by a direct

hit, and the remains of what had been a major city. The plane started

bucking hard, and he went back to Guardian. The place showed no signs of

radioactivity or fallout; he decided to set down.

It was a little before sunrise on a smoky, darkened world that, it

seemed, would never see the sun again.

Rick hit the foot thrusters and brought the VT to an erratic, slewing

landing. The canopy servos had gotten fried in one of those last blowups, so

he yanked the rescue handgrip and blew the canopy off.

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Rick and Lisa stood up in the cockpit and looked out at the mutilated

landscape of Earth. It was as pockmarked as the moon, with deep cracks

and crevasses. Smoke was rolling into the sky from dozens of impact points

and from fires that stretched along the horizon. The air was hot, thick with

soot and dust. There seemed to be volcanic activity along a chain of

mountains to the west. A scorching wind was rising.

The most frightening thing was that there was no water to be seen

anywhere.

There was a patch of open sky, but as they watched, the clouds rolled in,

blotting out the stars. He wondered how the battle had turned out. From the

looks of Earth, it probably didn't matter very much.

Lisa looked at him, pulling the windblown strands of long brown hair

away from her face. "Thank you for getting me out of there, Rick." She could

bear dying on the surface, in whatever form that death might take. But to

endure her last moments among the charred and smoking remains of the

base's dead-that would have been more than she could have borne. She

extended her hand.

Rick took it with a grin. "Oh, c'mon. It gave me a chance to disobey

your orders again, after all." They shook hands, and she let herself laugh

just a little.

Lisa sat on the edge of the cockpit. "I'll always be grateful. I admire you

a great deal, Rick."

That wasn't what she really wanted to tell him, but it was a start. It was

much further along than Rick had gotten in saying what he was feeling at

the moment. It occurred to him that a world that was a mass grave, very

likely smoldering ash from pole to pole, was a strange place to profess love

for somebody.

Or maybe not, he saw suddenly. Maybe it was the best epitaph anybody

could ever hope to leave behind.

He had already yielded to the hard lesson that life wasn't worth much

without it.

He almost said four or five different things, then shrugged, looking at

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his feet, and managed, "It was...it was a pleasure."

A ray of light made them turn. The rising sun had found a slit between

clouds, to send long, slanting rays on the two people and their grounded

machine. There was no sign of the stupendous battle.

"It looks like the fighting's stopped." She felt so peaceful, so tired of

war, that she didn't even want to know the outcome.

"Um, yeah."

"I wonder if there's anyone else around?"

"Huh?"

She looked around to him. "What if we're the last? The only ones left?"

He looked at her for long seconds. "That wouldn't be that bad, would

it?" he said softly. "At least neither of us will ever be alone."

"Rick..."

He had his mouth open to say something more, but there was a blast of

static from the commo equipment as the automatic search gear brought up

the sound on a signal it had located. There was a familiar voice singing a

lilting, haunting hymn to Earth.

We shall live the day we dream of winning,

And beginning a new life!

"Minmei!" Lisa cried. She didn't know whether she could ever change

her feelings toward the singer, but right now that voice was as welcome

as-well, almost as welcome as the company Lisa was keeping.

"Up there!" Rick shouted, pointing. Something was descending on blue

thruster flames hundreds of yards long, trailing sparkling particles behind it,

weird energy anomalies from the interaction of barrier shield and reflex

furnace obliteration.

Rick held Lisa to him. The dimensional fortress settled in toward the

lake bed, the two flattops held level, elbows against its own midsection like

Jimmy Cagney doing his patented move.

All it needs to do is throw a hitch in its shoulders and sing "Yankee

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Doodle Dandy"! Rick thought.

The enormous blasts of its engines kicked up dust, but the SDF-1 was

landing with the rising sun directly at its back. They watched it sink down,

silhouetted against the wavering fireball of the sun, until the land was waist

high all around it.

Sunrise was throwing brighter light across the flattened terrain. "What

a sight for sore eyes." Rick smiled, flicking switches on his instrument

panel.

Lisa laughed outright, surprising herself. Was it right to be happy again

so soon after so much carnage? But she couldn't help feeling joy, and she

laughed again. "Oh, yes, yes!"

"This thing's still got a few miles left in it," Rick decided, studying the

instruments. "Let's go."

"Okay!"

She settled back into his lap, and when he put his hand over the

throttle, she covered it gently with her own, averting her eyes but leaving

her hand there. He moved the throttle forward. Lisa's heart soared, feeling

his hand beneath hers.

The Guardian jetted across the devastated landscape, into the sunrise,

straight for the SDF-1 and the long shadow it threw. Lisa, her arms around

Rick's neck, laid her head on his chest and watched a new future loom up

before her.

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Part II:

Reconstruction Blues

175

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

Why were the higher-ups so surprised that we rebuilt right away, and so

quickly? Human feet can wear down a stone, human hands can grind down

iron, human perseverance can overcome any adversity.

Mayor Tommy Luan,

The High Office

Upon its initial arrival, Gloval had thought of the SDF-1 as a kind of

malign miracle, since it had kept humanity from destroying itself utterly in

the Global Civil War.

There was another miraculous purpose it was to serve, to divert war

away from Earth, fight off the Zentraedi, and ultimately break the invaders'

power.

But there was a third role in this sequence of events that even Gloval

hadn't guessed; indeed, he had unwittingly worked in opposition to it.

The SDF-1 was an ark, as well.

Even after the bombardments, the scorched-Earth attack that had very

nearly come to a no-Earth situation, the boiling away of much of the

planet's water-temporarily at least-into the atmosphere, pockets of

humanity had survived. But what chance would they have to resume an

advanced culture and technological base?

Very simply, none.

Take mining as an example. Most of the useful minerals that could be

mined by primitive means were long since exhausted. The huddled groups

of war-shocked people who survived the Zentraedi holocaust were unable to

mount even steam-age mining efforts, much less the sophisticated

operations it would take to get to the less accessible deposits still remaining

in the planet. An unbelievably complex and interdependent world had

simply passed away, and there was no means to rebuild it.

Terran technology had used up its one bolt, and there was no such

thing as starting over from scratch, because the resources that had let Homo

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sapiens start from scratch had been consumed long before.

The human race was on its way to becoming a permanent, dead-end

race of hunter-gatherers with no hope of ever being more again. History was

about to close the books on a vaguely interesting little upstart species;

events and the simple facts of life had gone against it.

Except there was the SDF-1, with Macross City inside.

There had been few hard words or unyielding attitudes once the great

starship set down in the dry lakebed. Who do you get mad at when the

world lies dying?

In their years of wandering and persevering, the residents of Macross

City had put most delusions and wishful thinking behind them. They saw

what had happened, and it came to them quickly that against any

expectation, they had been the lucky ones. The castoffs and pariahs were

actually the cargo of a new ark.

So in the end that was the fate of Macross City. What was left of it was

disembarked, person by person, piece by piece, around the lakebed, and the

rebuilding began.

The intellectuals and experts argued about the best ways to reestablish

ecological balances and manage moisture reclamation; the people of

Macross rebuilt their homes and businesses and lives as best they could,

trusting that such things were more important than all the computer

projections.

The ship's engines provided power. Its mecha and military people

enforced law and order in an ever-growing domain of security. The SDF-1's

fabricators and other technical equipment quickly provided a new industrial

base, and the population of Macross constituted an urban economic hub.

In the time after that last Armageddon, the SDF-1's name might better

have been that of one of its constituent flattops, Prometheus. It was

humanity's main source of medical care, technical resources, and most

importantly, the accumulated knowledge and wisdom of the species Homo

sapiens.

The nuclear winter scenario was much less severe than the computers

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had guessed. That was partly because the predictions had been based on

faulty models. It was also because the RDF and civilian corps worked

around the clock to make it so.

And they had allies. The explosion of Dolza's base had disabled or

taken with it his entire Grand Fleet, but a considerable part of Breetai's

armada had survived. Many Zentraedi had chosen to go to Earth and take

up a life there either in Micronian size or in their own original bodies.

Both races hoped for a new golden age or at least a lasting silver one.

It was a world seared and barren, pockmarked with craters and. split

with fissures made by war. Everywhere were the rusting mecha of the last

great battle. Most of the disabled Zentraedi ships had, for unknown reasons,

oriented on the nearest center of gravity-Earth-and driven toward it.

The result was that the planet's surface was an eerie Robotech Boot Hill

dotted with crumpled alien warships that had driven themselves partway

into the ground like spikes. The reminders of that last day were everywhere,

too many to ever dismantle or bury. Only time and the elements would

remove the grave markers, and they would not do so in the life span of

anyone then living.

But those who were left alive went on a new crusade, the one to heal

the planet and put things right again.

Two years passed.

Rick Hunter's VT, in Guardian mode, complained at the strain he put

on it in the tight bank. He gritted his teeth but held to it. The old ship,

battered as it was, had never failed him yet. With replacement parts and

maintenance time in such woefully short supply, the Skull Leader's craft

wasn't in the shape it had been in during the war, but he trusted it.

The Guardian jetted in low over the rust-red, pitted countryside and

foot-thrustered to a deft landing. It bowed, nose nearly touching the ground;

he jumped from the cockpit eagerly, hardly able to credit what was

happening to him.

"I don't believe it! It's impossible!"

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He ran across the gritty, fallow soil, back toward what he had spotted.

All around were gigantic, jagged shreds and peels of Zentraedi armorplate,

twisted and mangled, slowly turning to rust and dust. Off to one side was an

overturned Guardian wreck that looked like it had been put through a meat

grinder. Its rusting legs stuck straight up into the air like a dead hawk's.

Rick skidded to a halt, the wind moaning around him. He looked down

and was astounded.

At his feet, springing from a moist plot of earth somehow enriched

enough to sustain it, was a field of dandelions. The irregularly shaped,

few-square-yards patch of them was sheltered from the wind by the

wreckage and yet, by chance, had good exposure to sunlight.

For a moment he couldn't find words. "Absolutely incredible," he

murmured, but that was insufficient. Here, near yet another Zentraedi

wreck, the soil had been fortified with something that would support life.

He suspected that he knew what that something had been, and it suddenly

made him feel very mortal and humble.

"Real flowers!" He knelt, handling them as gently as a lover, inhaling.

Certainly there were flowers in the greenhouses and protected fields of

the reclamation projects, but this! It was a thing as wonderful as flight-no,

more wonderful! Life itself!

He couldn't recall how many times, as a child, he'd raced across a field

of these unglamorous flowers, eyes fixed on the blue sky, wishing only to fly.

And now things had come full circle; he flew the most advanced aircraft ever

known with his eyes trained on the ground, waiting and hoping for just such

a sight as...dandelions.

I hope this means the Earth is forgiving us, he meditated.

It was a good and precious thing to know that at least one positive sign,

however small, had shown itself. There were other omens that were not so

good. Rick was privy to a lot of high-level information thanks to his

experiences among the Zentraedi and his value as an intelligence source.

There were things he tried not to think about, and three of them had

disturbing names: Protoculture. Robotech Masters. Invid.

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Three VTs swooped in low over the desolate land, forming up again

after completing their aerial recons of assigned sectors. They were newer

ships than Rick's, but they looked somehow less sleek and finished. There

were those who said the true high-water mark of Robotech workmanship

had passed.

"Commander Hunter, come in, please," said Rick's new second in

command, Lieutenant Ransom. "This is Skull Four calling Skull Six."

No answer, after five minutes' trying. Ransom thought for a moment.

"Bobby?"

Sergeant Bobby Bell, youngest of the remanned Skull Team, appeared

on Ransom's display screen. "Yo?"

"I can't raise the boss, kid."

Bobby's round face looked pained. "What d' you think? Renegades?"

That was one of the big reasons for the patrols. Of the many Zentraedi

who had gone forth among the humans to try a more peaceful way of life

and a chance to open up the more feeling and compassionate side of their

nature, some had found that it simply wouldn't work.

The renegades had begun slipping away into the wastelands more than

a year before. There was an entire world of salvage for them out there:

mecha, weapons, rations, and anything else they might need, provided they

could find the right wreck. More importantly, there was the freedom to act

as Zentraedi warriors once again, to follow their own brutal, merciless code.

"I think his last transmission came from his search quadrant," Bobby

said worriedly.

"I know," Ransom said. "I got a DF fix on it. Let's go.

The VTs formed up, and their engines made the ground tremble. They

shot away to the northwest.

The SDF-1 stood like a knight in a bath up to his waist. The two

supercarriers floated at anchor, giving the corroding derelict added

buoyancy.

180

Refilling the lake had been a major priority, since not even the

fortress's colossal strength could support itself and the two giant warships

for long. At the same time that RDF fliers were seeding clouds and Dr.

Lang's mysterious machines were working day and night to head off the

nuclear winter, combat engineers and anybody else who could be found to

lend a hand worked feverishly to make sure the drainage would be ready.

And just over forty-eight hours after the ship's landing, the rains had

begun. They gave back some of the moisture boiled away by the Zentraedi

attack, but Lang's calculations, supported by subsequent data, showed that

much of it was gone forever. Short of importing many cubic miles of water

across space from some as yet unknown source, the Earth would never

again be the three-quarters-ocean world she had been when she brought

forth life.

In time, the rains stopped, and the generations-long job of replanting

and refoliating the planet began.

Around the lake the new Macross rose, the stubborn refugees

rebuilding their lives yet again. It was the only new population center on the

planet so far, the only place where the concrete was uncracked and the

buildings tall and straight. There was fresh paint, and there were trees

transplanted from the starship. There were lawns and flower beds seeded

from plants that had survived the billions of miles of the SDF-1's odyssey.

It was a city where energy and resources were used with utmost

efficiency, a town of solar heaters and photovoltaic panels, with a recycling

system tied to every phase of life. The Macross residents and SDF-1

personnel had learned the tough lessons of ecological necessity during years

in space, and nothing at all was wasted. That was the sort of world it was

going to have to be from now on.

In a neat, quiet suburb of the city served by an overhead rapid-transit

system sat a modest little prefab cottage, its solar panels, guided by

microprocessors, swinging slowly to follow the sun. As a senior flight officer,

Rick Hunter rated off base housing even though he was single, and liked the

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idea of getting away from the military when he could, even if his home

looked like modular luggage. As Skull Leader, he seldom got a chance to be

there.

So Lisa Hayes took it upon herself to tidy up the place when he was

away. Her own rather more spacious quarters were nearby.

Neither of them was quite sure what the bond between them meant or

where their companionship was going, but she had a key to his place, and he

to hers.

Now she hummed happily to herself as she put away the last of the

just-washed dishes. Maybe I ought to bill him for maid services, she thought

wryly.

But she knew better; she enjoyed being in his place, touching the things

he touched, seeing reminders of him all around. She hoped that the

extended patrol up north didn't last too much longer-that he would be home

soon so that they could be together again.

Lisa considered the sunlight streaming through the kitchen window.

Polarizing glass was all well and good, but curtains were what that window

needed.

Will you listen to me? Curtains! Miss Suzy Homemaker! She smirked

at the apron she was wearing. It was doubly funny because she was due back

at the base soon for more meetings and briefings on the final construction

details of the SDF-2, the new successor to the battle fortress.

And she meant to have a berth on that ship, to be the First Officer if she

could, and go to the stars. Ol' Suzy Homemaker herself.

She snorted a laugh as she moved into the bedroom. Seeing it, she

sighed. Why does this place always look like a bear's been wintering here?

She raised all the blinds, opened all the windows, and moved around

the room slowly, fondly. When she smoothed the sheets to make up the bed,

her hands lingered upon them, and she touched the pillows tenderly,

remembering his head on them, and her own.

Her wrist chrono toned, reminding her she had to go soon. When she

straightened, her eye fell on something she hadn't seen before.

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It lay on his desk, next to his spare flight helmet: a photo album bound

in creamy imitation leather. Lisa moved toward it unwillingly, knowing she

shouldn't do what she was about to do but unable to stop herself.

The album was well worn, had obviously been leafed through many

times. The first page made her heart sink, There was a snapshot of Minmei

seated on a park swing back in the Macross within the SDF-1, Rick standing

behind her. The other picture was a close-up taken of Minmei back at the

start of her career, a wide-eyed gamine with flowing black locks framing her

face.

Lisa sighed again. What does he see in her? What's she got except great

looks, the singing voice that won the war, and superstardom?

It was Minmei on every page, glamour poses and home snapshots,

portfolio glossies and PR photos. Lisa got angrier and angrier as she

thumbed through them.

Why do I have the impulse to strangle this girl?

Along with the anger came a pain so sharp and cold, it took her off

guard. Lisa had assumed she and Rick were solidifying something,

strengthening the ties between them. But the thought of his keeping this

album, taking it out when Lisa wasn't there and fantasizing over it-that was

too much to bear.

Having his companionship and friendship without his declared love

was something she had accepted, albeit always with a secret hope. But the

photo album made her feel she had been taken for granted, a kind of

emotional consolation prize. Her self-respect simply wouldn't allow that.

Lisa slammed the album shut, tore off the apron, and strode for the

front door. As the door rolled shut to lock, she tossed Rick's spare house key

onto the living-room rug, leaving it behind.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

We won? When you hear some military moron say that to you, spit on

him! Point out the graveyard that is Earth! When he tells you how the

military's going to make all that well again too, hold up the ash that used to

be your home.

They won, all right, and they'd just love to win again. And every time,

it's you and I who lose.

From Lynn-Kyle's tract,

Mark of Cain

Rick Hunter sat in the cockpit of the grounded Guardian and watched

white spores take to the wind like miniature parasols. Meanwhile, he

wrestled with his thoughts.

The truth was that Earth was a dead end for a pilot. Oh, there was the

problem of the rebellious Zentraedi, to be sure, and the various fractious

human communities. But the war was over, and there were no flying

circuses. Maybe it would be easier to put up with the growing boredom of

peacetime life if bigger things weren't brewing out beyond Earth's

atmosphere.

Breetai and Exedore seemed to be at the source of it, and Gloval, Dr.

Lang, and Dr. Zand. Only everything was so secret that a mere squadron

commander couldn't find out a thing. Even Lisa professed not to know

anything. But scuttlebutt and the few hints Rick could get from his intel

debriefings made him believe that the SDF-2 was slated for a big, big

mission.

He was pretty sure that the SDF-2, and such Zentraedi warships as

Breetai could get fully functional again, were going to carry the war to the

Robotech Masters. Humans and Zentraedi would go out and end the threat

forever or die trying.

How could he not go? Only...that was a voyage and a military operation

that might make their previous campaign look like a weekend vacation by

184

comparison. It would probably mean he would never see Earth and Minmei

again.

Not that he'd seen much of Minmei in the last two years, but signing on

for a trip to far-off star systems would strip away any hope.

But what else was there for him except flying? He wished and prayed

that there could be Minmei, but Minmei was so bound up in her glittering

career that he rarely saw or heard from her. On the SDF-2 mission, at least

he would be with Lisa, and he was becoming more and more convinced that

that was where he belonged.

Of course, the odds against surviving would be very high, but that was a

combat pilot's lot. And what better cause was there to serve, and die for, if it

came to that? He had a sudden vivid recollection of something Roy Fokker

had told him.

An American president once said that the price of liberty is eternal

vigilance, Rick.

It was on a "day" in SDF-1, out someplace by Pluto's orbit, when Rick

joined the RDF There's no more flying for fun, Roy told him, stern and

grave. From now on you fly for the sake of your home and loved ones, Rick.

"My home and loved ones, huh?" Rick muttered to himself. He flicked a

switch, and the canopy descended on whining servos.

"All right; time to go flying, then." He eased the throttle forward. The

Guardian's foot thrusters blew soil away and lifted it. Rick was careful to

skirt the patch of dandelions as he rose. But the backwash sent hundreds of

thousands of spores wafting into the air in hopes of finding some other kind

plot of ground.

Rick tucked a single dandelion blossom into a seam of his instrument

panel, mechamorphosed his ship to Fighter mode, and went ballistic,

climbing toward the sun. He set the commo rig to search for local traffic,

part of the recon mission. The equipment scanned the band and stopped at

a transmission that carried a female human voice.

-here by my side,

185

Here by my side.

He jolted against his safety harness, reaching to get a stronger signal.

"Minmei!"

There was applause in the background. Another voice he knew well

came up. "You're listening to the beautiful Lynn-Minmei, broadcasting live

and direct from Granite City! This area is slowly rebuilding through the

combined efforts of many wonderful people who are ceaselessly devoting

their time and labor to a project that many considered hopeless."

Lynn-Kyle. He sounded more like a pitchman than a costar now, but he

still had that same hostility in his tone.

Granite! Rick realized. Not far away! He was already checking his nav

computers.

"People Helping People is the theme of our tour," Kyle went on. "And

we don't consider the project hopeless at all! How do you people feel about

it?"

Clapclapclapclap, from the audience, and a few yays. Those shill

questions always worked. Rick's expression hardened, and he brought his

stick over for a bank.

Granite City lay in the shadow of a Zentraedi flagship rammed like a

Jovian bolt into the red dirt. The outskirts of the place were still haphazard

rubble from the war, but a few square blocks in the center had been made

livable.

There were weakened foundations and angled slabs of paving and

fractured concrete everywhere, but at least the streets were clear.

This most recent stop in what was to have been the triumphant Minmei

People Helping People tour had attracted something under three hundred

people in Granite, plus several Zentraedi who loomed over the crowd even

when sitting and squatting.

The crowd was composed of sad-eyed people doing their best to believe

they had a future. Most were ragged, all were thin, and there were signs of

186

deficiency diseases and other medical problems among them.

But at the urging of Lynn-Kyle and others in the loose-knit network of

antigovernmentalists, Granite persisted in refusing to drop its status as an

independent city-state or allow military relief teams in.

The Zentraedi were in better shape than the humans; the rations in the

spiked ship could sustain them, though for some reason those seemed to

have no nutritive value for Homo sapiens. There had been a fine cordiality

and hopefulness among the people of Granite at first, but now there was

growing despair in this dissident model program. Thus, this morale

appearance by Minmei.

"Yeah! Let's hear it!" Lynn-Kyle yelled, working the mike at center

stage, making beckoning motions with his free hand. The crowd clapped

again, a little tiredly.

"And Granite doesn't need any outside interference, either!" he yelled.

He had spent fewer than four hours there in his entire life.

"The good people here will take care of themselves and make Granite

the great metropolis she once was!"

The applause was even weaker this time around, and the more

theatrically knowledgeable in the front rows could detect beads of

flop-sweat on Kyle's brow.

"But let's forget, for now, what the military warmongers have brought

us to," he said, almost scowling, then catching himself and flashing a bright

smile. "As we listen to the song stylings of the marvelous, the incomparable

Lynn-Minmei!"

Recorded music came up, and Minmei hit her mark right on cue, mike

in hand. She sang her latest hit.

I've made the right move at the right time!

We're on our way to something new!

Just point the way and I will follow!

Love feels so beautiful with you!

187

Rick followed the song, entranced, until a transmission cut through

Minmei's singing. "Commander Hunter, come in, please."

It was Ransom. Rick switched to the tac net. "What is it?"

"You all right, skipper? I've been trying to reach you for some time;

thought you might've run into trouble."

Rick let a little impatience slip into his tone. "Is anything wrong?"

Ransom looked at him out of a display screen next to the yellow

dandelion, speaking precisely. "Nothing specific, boss. Just wish you'd take

your rover radio with you when you leave your ship to look around. I worry,

y' know?"

Rick bit back the rebuke he had been putting together. Of course he

knew; he would have chewed out a subordinate for doing the same.

He sounded contrite, and it was real. "Sorry, Lieutenant. But I came

across something miraculous today."

Ransom stared. "Trouble with renegade Zentraedi? Boss, what is it?"

Rick took the dandelion from its place and held it close to the optical

pickup. "Look what I found. An entire field of them."

Ransom considered the flower. "Wait a minute. Your zone wasn't

inside the natural recovery planning zone."

Rick was ecstatic. "That's right! But lemme tell ya, there are flowers in

the northwest quadrant!"

The usually morbid Ransom cracked a very slight smile. "I suppose we

should have known the Earth would be starting her own recovery program.

Great news, huh, skipper?"

"Roger that. Look, continue your patrol according to mission plan,

Ted."

"I copy, but aren't you coming with us?"

"Not right now," Rick answered. "I'm dropping over to Granite City. If

anything serious comes up, give me a yell."

Ransom nodded and hedged. "And, uh, boss..."

"Don't sweat it, Lieutenant! When I leave the ship, I'll take my rover!

Out!"

188

Rick did a barrel roll for the hell of it and opened his throttle wide for

Granite City.

If she wonders,

It's you who's on my mind.

It's you I cannot

Leave behind...

Rick followed Minmei's voice as someone else might have trod a yellow

brick road. From overhead the Zentraedi battlewagon dominated the

landscape, but a closer look at the ground showed that the rusting metal

peak was a monument to defeat and that the teeming victors were still in

turmoil.

Rick left his VT at the edge of town under the care of the local militia

CO, who was well disposed toward RDF fliers even if the populace wasn't.

Rick got to the concert and missed, by a fraction of a second, getting

flattened by the hand of a Zentraedi leviathan who was sitting at the edge of

the crowd, shifting his weight.

"I'm so sorry," the alien tried to whisper in his resounding bass.

Everybody around them went Shhhh! Rick gave the big fellow a nod to let

him know it was no offense taken.

It's me who's lost,

The me who lost your heart

The you who tore my heart

Apart...

She's come a long way, but it's the same girl I spent those awful,

wonderful two weeks with somewhere in the belly of the SDF-1. My Minmei.

When the song was over, the crowd applauded. Rick applauded loudest

of all.

189

Near a sidewalk cafe in Monument City, with the SDF-1's shadow

coming her way like a sundial, Lisa stared dully at people passing by and

ignored her cooling demitasse. The meetings had been delayed, giving her

some unexpected free time. Idle hours were more a curse than a blessing.

As she watched, two down-at-the-heels boulevardiers ogled a very pert

young blonde whose hemline came nearly to her waist. The two did not

quite slobber.

"My man, the women were dealt all the aces in this life. They can have

anything they want," opined one, a beefy kid who looked as if he stood a fair

chance of growing up to be normal. "They can have anybody they wanna

have."

Lisa considered that, her chin resting on her interlaced fingers. "That's

all you know about it, my fat friend," she murmured, watching the two

would-be rakes go on their way. "Here's one woman who'd trade every other

ace, knave, and king in the deck for one Rick Hunter."

She drew a sudden breath as she looked across Monument City's main

thoroughfare. Max Sterling strolled along there, looking as if he didn't have

a care in the world, pushing a baby carriage. Miriya held his arm.

They stopped, and Max hurried around the carriage to scoop up his

daughter and pat her back, burping her on his shoulder. Miriya looked on

serenely with a smile Lisa almost begrudged her.

The very most secret eyes-only reports boiled down to the fact that

nobody could quite figure out how Max and Miriya had had Dana, their

baby girl. But as proved by exhaustive tests, the child was indisputably

theirs.

No Zentraedi male-female reproduction had ever been recorded,

making the whole thing that much more extraordinary. The likelier

explanations had to do with Miriya's consumption of human-style food as

opposed to the antiseptic rations of the Zentraedi and her exposure to

emotions that had worked subtle biochemical changes on her. The word

"Protoculture" cropped up again and again in the reports, only nobody

seemed to understand quite what it was, at least nobody outside the

190

charmed, secretive circle of Lang, Exedore, and a few others.

Like a lot of women and quite a few men, Lisa sometimes thought all

that was a crock. Miriya and Max were in love, and so: little Dana.

She looked at the three of them, and for a moment Max wore Rick's

face, and Miriya wore Lisa's. The SDF-2 would soon be ready for space trials,

but that didn't mean the First Officer couldn't have a family. The starship

had been built for a long voyage, for children as well as men and women.

Max and Miriya and their baby resumed their way, and Lisa watched

them go. They look so happy. If only I could make Rick understand!

Just then, though, two RDF boot trainees wandered up to the caf?with

a street-blaster stereo. The well-remembered voice boomed,

And the thrill that I feel

Is really unreal.

"Hew! That little mama sure can sing," the first one said, whistling. "I'd

give a month's pay to meet her."

The other blew his breath out sarcastically as the pair sat down a few

tables away. "Sure, buddy. Then she takes you away and signs over the deed

to her diamond mine to you, right?"

The first one made a very sour face and signaled the waitress. On the

eardrum agitator, Minmei sang,

I can't believe I've come this far.

This is my chance to be a star!

There doesn't seem to be any way I can avoid you, Minmei!

Lisa collected her purse and left her money on the salver, then rose and

headed off down the boulevard.

She was so caught up in her own thoughts, regrets, and preoccupations

that she didn't realize-had never realized-how many admiring glances she

drew. She was a willowy, athletic young woman with brown hair billowing

191

behind her, a delicate complexion, and a distant look in her eyes. Her

insignia and decorations were enough to make any vet, male or female, take

notice of her.

If there were an artistic competition for the concept WINNER, a simple

photo of Lisa at that moment would have won it. Women in particular

looked at her, her sure stride and air of confidence, and made various

resolutions to be more like this self-confident superwoman, whoever she

was.

But that wasn't the way it felt to Lisa. She allowed herself a rueful half

smile. I guess when the aces were dealt out, it just wasn't in the cards for me

to get the one I want.

It was near enough to a joke to make her smile cheerlessly. She

quickened her pace, off to report to the SDF-2.

192

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I've seen people like Lynn-Kyle before. I'm prepared to believe that he

hates war; who among us does not?

But he has the attitude, set in concrete, that virtue is measured by one's

disaffection from the power structure under which one lives. Such a person

builds a fortress of self-serving piety, resisting authority of any kind at every

turn whether for good or ill.

The RDF will continue to defend to the death the freedoms that make this

possible.

From the log of Captain Henry Gloval

"What a crummy hole!"

Lynn-Kyle threw his arms wide to take in Granite City, off to one side,

and the wastelands all around it.

Minmei sat despondently on a piece of rotting Zentraedi alloy, hugging

her knees to her chest, a pink jacket draped over her shoulders against the

evening chill, watching him take another slug from the bottle of brandy that

seemed to be his constant companion these days.

Things had gone steadily downhill since Vance Hasslewood had moved

up in the world to become a booking agent and aspiring theater maven,

leaving Minmei's cousin, costar, and lover to take over the duties of

manager. Lynn-Kyle's interests went far beyond show business, and he had

come to realize that his own fame and popularity were only a pale reflection

of hers.

Now he paused. "Lousiest booking so far!" Then he threw back another

several ounces, making her wince.

Kyle wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, staining the purple cuff

of his suit. "Let's get out of this burg! It's disgusting!"

He was red-eyed and close to the edge, but she said what was on her

mind anyway; she had held it back long enough. "Do you have to drink so

193

much?"

"Listen, don't change the subject!" he slurred. "We didn't even get any

money! This is our whole paycheck!"

He toed over a wilted cardboard box; out spilled some canned goods,

bath soap and so forth, a few vegetables-the same dole everyone else in

Granite City was living on. Even though Granite refused to recognize the

new Earth government's authority, the government gave what help it could;

without it, the city couldn't have kept functioning.

"A stinkin' handout from our military overlords!"

"And what else do we need for survival?" she asked him, watching his

eyes. Two years with Kyle had made her older, much older.

"Have you given any thought to taking in a little cash for a change?" he

snarled.

She came to her feet, the jacket clutched to her. "No, I haven't!"

If it was going to be another argument, she decided, this time she was

going to get a few things off her mind. "This was supposed to be a benefit

concert for those poor people who're trying to make their lives work in

Granite, not some big-deal career move for Lynn-Minmei!"

She had him, and they both knew it. All at once his ranting sounded

like empty talk. He was suddenly contrite. "Aw, c'mon, Minmei. You know I

didn't mean anything like that." It was not quite a whine, but somehow it

only made her detest him more.

She knelt and began picking up the things he had spilled, brushing dirt

from them. "We're getting paid like everyone else is, in the things that keep

us alive. I think we should show a little appreciation."

That made him cough on the mouthful of brandy he was chugging. He

almost finished the bottle, and his mood swung end for end, as quick as his

martial-arts moves used to be.

"Appreciation? I should appreciate the great military mentality that

brought us to this?" He opened his arms as if to embrace the blighted world.

She straightened and met his stare. "Earth was attacked, and it fought

back. I don't want to hear anybody knocking the military. If it hadn't been

194

for them, I wouldn't be alive right now. And for that matter, neither would

you."

So, we come to the core of the matter, he thought blearily.

That moment on the SDF-1, with a planet dying at his feet and great

fleets slaying one another while he kissed her, was two years behind him.

And yet it played over and over in memory, as fresh as if it had happened

that afternoon.

The secret that glowed in him like a reflex furnace, the one Kyle would

never be able to bring himself to admit to her or even put into words to

himself, was that he had exulted in that moment even as he had been

repulsed by it.

He had loved it! He had been taken by the drama completely, swept up

in the battle. He had cast aside every conviction he ever had and gloried in

what was happening. He had hoped with all his soul for human victory.

His father had been a soldier; both family restaurants had catered to

the military trade. Lynn-Kyle scorned all of that, scorned military and

government and authority in every form. And yet when it had come down to

a question of seeing his planet and people die, he had been out there rooting

for the home team, as red of fang and claw, as contemptible, as any of them.

He had never lost a fight since his father had pummeled and shamed

him into learning the martial arts. Indeed, he'd become a very genius of

unarmed combat. But this contest with himself was one he felt fated to lose.

As he hated himself, so he had come to make Minmei hate him.

He had seen that the military, with the SDF-1 and Macross as a power

base and Breetai and his Zentraedi as allies, was destined to be the force

that reunited the planet. Nevertheless, he resisted it every inch of the way,

going deeper and deeper into despair as the vast egalitarian movement he

had envisioned dwindled away to a few pitiful holdouts.

So if this was going to be the argument that had been building between

Minmei and Kyle for so long, let it be so. He turned his face to an ugly mask

with an elaborate sneer. "You're breaking my heart." He swallowed the last

of the brandy.

195

You're breaking my heart.

Twenty yards away, behind a broken piece of cornice at the top of a rise,

Rick Hunter squatted with his back against cold stone and listened to

Minmei and Kyle.

He sat still as a rock or one of the pieces of dead mecha that now

littered the world.

"Must you keep drinking?" Minmei said. "It's getting out of hand!"

Kyle upended the bottle and let the last few droplets fall on soil that

hadn't tasted moisture in two years. Then he tossed it high, launched

himself through the air in a reverse spin kick, a ki-yi yell coming from deep

within him, turning twice, and popped the little brandy bottle out of

existence like a trap shooter.

Pieces of dark glass landed at Minmei's feet. She watched Kyle steadily.

"Did that make you feel any better about yourself?"

How can she wound me so easily with just a word or two? he wondered

in confusion.

His mood swung again, and there was an endless affection in him for

her. She was, after all, the sum of his life. All he had ever really

accomplished, Lynn-Kyle saw now, was getting Minmei to love him.

But Minmei's mood was riding a different swing. "Whatever you think

of the RDF, there are a lot of fine men and women in it," she said levelly.

"Much better people than you are right now."

A moment that might have been a reconciliation and a new start was

gone forever. Kyle ran the back of his hand across his mouth again. Al! right;

we might as well have it all out.

"What's that crack supposed to mean?"

Minmei was actually shaking a fist at him. "It means they're trying to

rebuild Earth, while all you can do is drink and feel sorry for yourself!"

"Is that so? Well, I've done a pretty good job of takin' care of your

career, little Miss Superstar!"

196

She had been loud a moment before; her voice was quiet now. "Maybe

we'd better split up then, Kyle. So you can look after your own career." She

gathered her pink jacket around her.

She had been hurt until her endurance was all gone, and now she only

wanted to hurt in retaliation. "I didn't realize I owed it all to you, Kyle."

He had his hands out in fending-off gestures. "Wait, wait. I didn't

mean-didn't mean I wanted to split up our partnership." "Partnership" was

a weak word for what they'd had, but somehow the vocabulary of love was

steamrollered by the vocabulary of argument. He felt something slipping

away even as he made the choice of words.

She drew a long, deep breath, looking him in the eye. "Maybe not, but

it's what I meant."

The compass of Lynn-Kyle's emotions swung a last time, and his mouth

resolved into a straight, thin line. "Okay, go! Who needs you?" He kicked

the empty carton high into the air.

Rick Hunter didn't know exactly what to feel. The fact that Kyle had

alienated Minmei might have been enjoyable from a distance, but it was

harrowing to see at close range.

And then there was the whole question of going out and intervening.

Rick had no illusions about being able to take the tall, cobra-fast

martial-arts expert hand to hand, and he had forgotten to bring along the

survival pistol from his VT's ejection pack.

Suddenly the rover radio buzzed in its thigh pouch. "Commander

Hunter, come in please!" It was Vanessa's voice, sending from the rusting,

soggy-footed SDF-1.

He had turned the volume down low when he came out to the edge of

the wastelands, following leads to find Minmei. Now he held the rover up to

his ear. Minmei and Kyle didn't seem to have heard a thing.

He thumbed the transmit switch. "I'm here."

"Sir, you're directed to lead your flight to New Portland. A residential

197

district is under attack by several Zentraedi malcontents."

"Malcontents." That was what the new world government was calling

them so far. But those who had sworn the Zentraedi warrior oath and

turned their back on human society were a lot more than malcontents. They

had only to walk out into the wasteland and keep going, find the right

wrecked ship. If they were lucky, they would find arms, mecha, rations,

water, and shelter.

Rick poised for a moment in a pain so precise that it defied any random

theory of the universe. Most of what he had come to believe in impelled him

to get to New Portland with all possible speed.

Everything else told him to stay there, because this was the moment he

could win Minmei back.

But he thumbed the rover's transmit button again. "What weapons?"

"Three battlesuits and four pods, a total of seven," Vanessa's voice

came back. That wasn't exactly several, the way Rick saw it, but he had to

admit that things probably looked a little different from a worldwide

coordinating nerve center like the SDF-1.

These were Zentraedi who had defected to the human side in the

Robotech War. They were onetime allies. He held the rover's voice pickup

close and said softly, "It'll be taken care of. What's the status on Skull flight?

Over."

"They are curtailing their current sweep and will rendezvous with you

in New Portland. Out."

He shut off the rover before the sound of static could betray him. He

raced off toward his ship. It was a kind of liberation to have some crisis so

pressing that he could forget about Minmei for a while. He left the two

Lynns to their own devices, and somehow he couldn't help wishing them the

worst.

As his VT took off in Guardian mode, Rick saw the tiny, distant figure

of Kyle go down on both knees before Minmei. She turned and opened her

arms, cradling his head to her breast. Rick hit the throttle, and his VT left a

trail of blue fire across the sky.

198

Lisa stared up through her window at the rotting hulk of the SDF-1.

Beneath it was a thriving, growing city, but its presence put everyone in

mind of the war.

"Hmmph! What a view!" As a morale builder, she was wearing a tight

blouse with a high, upturned collar. Every once in a while she permitted

herself to catch a glimpse of herself in a full-length mirror there in her

quarters and admit, not bad!

The SDF-1 wasn't bad to look at either, really. The more so because the

SDF-2 would be lowered into place, back to back with it, in another day or

so. Lang and his disciples had worked out some way to move the sealed

enigmatic engines from one to the other. Lisa had heard the briefings, could

sort of understand the mathematics Lang scrawled all over every flat surface

that came to hand, and had faith in him, but she still thought her new

assignment was an unknown quantity.

The comset birred for her attention. She picked up the handset. In

seconds she had word of the New Portland raid from Vanessa and was

hurrying for the door.

Sunset had come, and a freezing rain, as the Zentraedi ransacked New

Portland. They had cut a swath of destruction from the diminished Lake

Oswego to the once great Columbia River.

The pods fired and devastated without mercy. Local militia and police

were victims just like the civilians; in the first hours of their rampage, the

alien malcontents slew over four hundred men and women of assorted

constabularies, police departments, and guard units.

They set buildings afire with a mere brush of their plastron cannon;

they trod houses and people flat underneath their pods' huge, hooflike feet.

Now they loomed, three abreast, in the center of New Portland as black

smoke roiled around them and the screams of the dying echoed through the

rain-washed streets. Blood ran in the gutters.

Down from the night swooped the VTs of Skull Team under Ransom's

199

command. Robotechnology made them all-weather fighters, as dangerous

in blackness as they were in light.

"Nobody fires unless they have a confirmed target; there're civilians

down there," Ransom said.

Just then New Portland came into view, burning like a skillet of molten

metal, smoke funneling up from it to form thickening layers that threw back

red light.

Bobby Bell began, "My God! This is horrible-"

"Shut up, Sergeant," Ransom cut him off. "All VTs form up on me. Let's

get down there and stop this thing. And watch your fare!"

Jeanette LeClair and her best friend, Sonya Poulson, ran through the

rain-slick streets of New Portland hand in hand, shivering in the frigid rain,

crying for the loved ones who had died, pulses hammering because death

was at their heels. Jeanette's birthday a month before had made her eight

years old; Sonya's, four days later, had brought them even.

Behind them, a Zentraedi Battlepod stumped around the corner,

kicking a traffic light through a brick wall and snapping power lines, then

turned its guns on them.

Jeanette fell, and Sonya wanted to keep running but found that she

couldn't. She dashed back to her friend, trying to help her up, but she fell

instead, and the two of them sprawled on the rain-washed cobblestone

street as a huge round metal hoof came down at them. They wept, held each

other close, and waited to die.

The pod paused in the act of trampling yet more victims. The armored,

lightbulb-shaped torso turned, as if listening to something. Jeanette and

Sonya could hardly know that it was receiving an urgent message from one

of its fellows.

"Warning! Warning! Enemy fightercraft approaching! Form up to take

defensive action!"

The two little girls looked up at the ridges and features of the huge hoof

and realized it was pulling away. In moments, the pod had turned and

200

grasshoppered off for some destination they couldn't even guess at, riding

its foot thrusters.

Moments later, thunder came down through the sky as Skull Team VTs

arrived at full throttle. The two girls helped each other up. Buildings shook

and windows broke to the sonic boom as the RDF fighters swept in

vengefully.

The girls' voices were very small in the middle of all that, but they

cheered nonetheless.

The pods chose straightforward battle, charging out in a group, firing

the primary and secondary cannon mounted on their armored chest

plastrons.

That suited Skull Team just fine; they flew down through the intense

ground fire in Guardian mode, like eagles for the kill, gripping their

chain-guns.

"Let's hit 'em," Ransom said.

"Sure, but we've gotta lead 'em away from the city!" Bobby Bell yelled.

He was right, and the formation split even while it exchanged fire with

the rampaging pods. The Guardians turned back, and the pods, firing with

every gun, rocketed and kangaroo-hopped after.

201

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

For the Zentraedi, peaceful life and a disengagement from their warlike

culture was, after all, a profound struggle, a sort of sublimating battle into,

which they could hurl themselves. For a time they were content with it, as

they were content with any other conflict.

Is it any wonder, though, that with the battle won, so many of them

began to fall prey to a frustrated restlessness? The fight for peace can be a

noble one, but as history and legend tell us, the warrior-born should beware

the disaster of total victory.

And so should those about him.

Zeitgeist,

Alien Psychology

In the foothills at the outskirts of New Portland, the VTs stopped

running and the mecha clashed in earnest.

Almost by instinct, the pods came abreast to set up a firing line. The

Guardians dove at them, and the bluewhite lances of energy beams jousted

against streams of high-density slugs lit by tracers.

A concentrated salvo of alien cannon fire took off the left arm of

Ransom's Guardian. "These dudes really wanna fight," he said grimly. He

looped, trying to manage the damage, and unleashed a spread of Stilettos at

them.

No more tromping on little girls, bozos! Let's see you pick on somebody

your own size!

"This could be defined as dereliction of duty, Commander," Lisa's voice

said in Rick's ear.

"What're you talking about?"

"Where were you?" she said icily.

"Uh, on recon." Guilt made him snappish. "It's within mission

guidelines. Why, any objections?"

202

Back in the command center, she looked down at the latest satnet

locater profiles of military aircraft. He had been grounded at the edge of.

Granite City. No surprise.

"I object when you jeopardize the lives of the men under your

command, Hunter."

He couldn't help it; the accumulated experiences of the day just made

him lose control as no cool, competent combat flier is supposed to. "What's

your goddamn problem, Lisa?"

"Your men are in combat, and you're supposed to be leading them, you

unutterable moron!" she yelled into the mike, then snapped it off.

Well, there. They had had a grand argument over a command commo

net about everything except what was really driving them apart. What

satisfaction.

She stalked away from the commo console. "Oh, that man."

"Take cover, take cover," chanted Vanessa in a whisper to the rest of

the Terrible Trio.

"I wonder what Commander Hunter did to cause the blowup this time."

Sammie blinked.

"Whatever it was, it looks like he'll be on a steady diet of cold shoulder

when he gets back," Vanessa replied.

Kim took off her headset and turned to them. "I dunno; d'you think she

really loves him?"

"D'you mean to say you haven't heard the latest gossip?" Sammie

almost squirmed in her eagerness to tell it. "They say she cleans his quarters.

Yeah, yeah, cleans! While he's away on patrol. And he doesn't even take her

out or anything."

The Terrible Trio thought poisonous thoughts about the male gender.

Kim fanned herself gently with her hand. "It's hard to believe Lisa

would get herself roped into something like that. She's too smart!"

Sammie caught her arm. "But wait; that isn't all!"

"Ixnay," Kim murmured, turning a sidelong glance. "We're being

203

watched."

"Uh-oh." Sammie hastened to put her earphones back on.

Lisa looked at them resignedly. Go ahead, girls; I don't blame you. I

guess it is funny.

The pod's cannon hosed concentrated fire into the storm-wracked

night sky. The Guardian sideslipped and counterfired with its autocannon.

"Won't these characters ever give up?" Bobby Bell gritted.

But there was a certain fear to it. Zentraedi who had returned to their

warrior code, their death-before-defeat belief system, were enemies to be

reckoned with.

And then there was a familiar face on an instrument panel display

screen. "How you guys doin'?" Rick Hunter asked with elaborate casualness.

It was the heritage; he was flying into the middle of a red-hot firefight, and

he looked like it was all he could do to stay awake.

"Boss, look sharp," Bobby shot back. "These boys are murder."

Rick's VT dove down through the rain in Guardian configuration like a

rocket-powered falcon. "It's okay. I'll take over now. Ransom, Bobby; all of

you drop back and stay out of sight."

He went in at them as he had gone in at hundreds of

pods-thousands-since the day he first stepped into a VT cockpit. He wove

through their fire, rebounded from the ground, and sprang high overhead

on Robotech legs.

The energy blasts skewed all around him. "Last chance," he transmitted

over the Zentraedi tac frequency. "Cease fire and lay down your arms."

If they had, they would have been the first of the malcontents to do so.

But instead, like all the rest, they fired that much more furiously.

He wondered what he would have felt like if their positions had been

reversed. The human race was lost and struggling in its own ashes, but how

much more so the Zentraedi defectors?

He wondered only for an instant, though; lives were at stake.

Skull Leader came in behind a sustained burst from its autocannon, the

204

tracers lighting the night, blowing one pod leg to metallic splinters. As the

pod collapsed, Rick banked and came to ground behind an upcropping of

rock, going to Battloid mode.

He reared up from behind the rock, an armored ultratech warrior sixty

feet tall with a belt-fed autocannon gripped in his fist. "For the last time, I

order you to drop your weapons!"

He saw the plastron cannon muzzles swinging at him, and hit the dirt

behind the rock. Energy bolts blazed through the air where he had been

standing.

When the volley was over, he came up again shooting. The high-density

slugs blew another pod leg in half at its rear-articulated knee, toppling it.

The third one ran, zigzagging, evading his fire. Suddenly there was only the

drumming of the rain on the field of battle.

The Zentraedi malcontents emerged from their disabled mecha slowly.

He could see that they carried no personal weapons and knew that the New

Portland police and militia would be able to deal with them. The rest of

Skull Team went to mop up and make sure the armored Zentraedi on foot

were taken prisoner. The malcontents would pay with their lives for the

lives they'd taken.

Tonight we won. What about tomorrow?

He was the last one to deplane; Ransom, Bobby, and Greer were

already far from the hangars and revetments when Rick dragged himself

from his VT, feeling dogtired. How could peace be so terrible? Peace was all

he or Roy or any of the rest had ever wanted. He wondered if there would

ever be an end to the fighting.

Then he saw Lisa standing by the fighter ops door. No peace in my

lifetime, he decided. Look at that warcloud.

"Why do I feel like I should ask for a blindfold and a last cigarette,

Commander?"

"Not very funny, Rick."

"No, I suppose not." He groped for a way to tell her all the things he

205

had thought and been through in the last few days.

But she was saying, "You're ordered to report to Captain Gloval at

once."

He considered that, brows knit, turning toward the SDF-1. "Wonder

what he wants."

She couldn't hold back what she was thinking. "How was your visit

with Minmei?" she called after him.

He stopped. "I enjoyed her broadcast from Granite City yesterday," she

said softly.

He drew a breath, let it out, looked down at the hardtop beneath his

feet. "Well, I didn't actually visit with Minmei."

He started off again. She caught up, walking right behind. She made it

sound as spiteful as she could, hating herself for it the whole time. "Was

that because she was so surrounded by adoring fans that you couldn't get

close to her, Rick?"

"No."

"Anything happen?" Why am I putting us both through this? she

wondered, and the answer came back at once: Because I love him!

"What could happen?" he growled.

"I don't know!" She raced to catch up with him, taking a pale blue

envelope from her uniform pocket. She dashed around in front of him,

bringing him up short, pressing it into the palm of one flightsuit glove. She

turned and walked away from him.

"Lisa, what is this?"

"Just something to remember me by," she threw back over her

shoulder, not trusting herself to look at his face once more. Her heels

clicked away across the hardtop.

The envelope held photographs-Lisa with a niece, on a vacation; Lisa as

an adorable teenager with a kitten perched on her head; Lisa on the day of

her graduation from the Academy.

"What on Earth?" he mumbled, but he knew. The album, all the rest of

it: What had happened came to him in a flash. He had left New Portland

206

feeling like there was some good that he could do in the world, feeling that

no matter how bad things looked, there was always hope, and feeling that he

was on the side of the angels.

But now, holding the photographs at his side and watching her

disappear among the parked combat mecha, he tried to ride out a tide of

regret that threatened to wash him away, and he was suddenly sorry he had

ever been born.

"Commander Hunter reporting as ordered, sir."

Gloval sat looking out the sweeping forward viewport of the SDF-1, at a

blue sky flecked with white clouds. "Please come in, Rick," he said without

turning.

"Thank you, sir." Rick came in warily; Gloval did not often use his

subordinates' first names.

"I'll get right to the point." Gloval swung around to face him and came

to his feet. "The aliens among us are reverting to their former ways."

Rick considered that. He had friends among the Zentraedi-Rico, Bron,

and Konda; Karita and others. "The New Portland rebels won't give us any

more trouble, sir."

"That incident was only a symptom, Lieutenant Commander." There

was something about the way Gloval pronounced your rank that let you

know you were a part of a thing greater than yourself.

"We cannot afford to have this occur again," Gloval went on, "or we'll

be risking complete social breakdown. I've decided to have some of the

aliens reassigned to new locations where we can keep an eye on them."

None of the importance of that was lost on Rick. We promised them

freedom! It was all coming apart, everything that had seemed so bright two

years before.

The rest didn't really have to be said. Gloval was counting on Rick to

enforce his directives and letting him know what he would be in for.

Rick Hunter looked at the old man who'd been through so much for

Earth, and for the Zentraedi, too, in truth. The younger man snapped off a

207

brisk salute. "Whatever you decide, you have my support; you know that, sir.

And you have the support of everyone on the SDF-1."

"Thank you, Lieutenant." Gloval acknowledged the salute precisely but

rather tiredly. He didn't look like he had gotten any real sleep in a long time.

They met each other's gaze. "I understand," Rick said.

Minmei shivered under her jacket, leaning against a pylon of Zentraedi

wreckage and staring into the sky as night came on Granite City.

So much desolation. And so much bitterness, even between people who

should have learned to love one another a long time ago!

She looked to the few lights of the town. Kyle had gone off that way,

and she had no idea whether he intended to stop or keep on going, had no

idea whether she would ever see him again and no clear conviction as to

whether she wanted to or not.

She looked up as the stars appeared. Oh, Rick. Where are you?

End

RTUCN.COM

208

Document Outline

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Doomsday

By Jack McKinney

1987

2

For Shoji Kawamori and the '80s gang at Studio Nue; Haruhiko

Mikimoto; Ippei Kuri and Kenji Yoshida of Tatsunoko:

Robotech Masters the lot of them—although they didn’t realize

it at the time.

3

4

CHAPTER ONE

Had the Robotech Masters the power to travel as freely through time as

they did space, perhaps they would have understood the inevitabilities they

were up against: Zor's tampering with the Invid Flower was a crime akin to

Adam's acceptance of the apple. Once released, Protoculture had its own

destiny to fulfill. Protoculture was a different-and in some ways

antithetical-order of life.

Professor Lazlo Zand, as quoted in

History of the Second Robotech War, Vol. CXXII

The dimension of mind...the rapture to be found at that singular

interface between object and essence...the power to reshape and reconfigure:

to transform...

Six hands-the sensor extensions of slender atrophied arms-were

pressed reverently to the surface of the mushroomlike Protoculture cap, the

Masters' material interface. Long slender fingers with no nails to impede

receptivity. Three minds...joined as one.

Until the terminator's entry disturbed their conversation.

Offering salute to the Masters, it announced:

-Our routine scan of the Fourth Quadrant indicates a large discharge of

Protoculture mass in the region where Zor's dimensional fortress defolded.

The three Masters broke off their contact with the Elders and turned to

the source of the intrusion, liquid eyes peering out from ancient, ax-keen

faces. Continual contact with Protoculture had eliminated physical

differences, so all three appeared to have the same features: the same

hawkish nose, the flaring eyebrows, shoulder-length blue-gray hair, and

muttonchop sideburns.

-So!-responded the red-cowled Master, though his lips did not

move-Two possibilities present themselves: Either the Zentraedi have

5

liberated the hidden Protoculture matrix from Zor's disciples and

commenced a new offensive against the Invid, or these Earthlings have

beaten us to the prize and now control the production of the Protoculture.

There was something monkish about them, an image enhanced by

those long gray robes, the cowls of which resembled nothing so much as

outsize petals of the Invid Flower of Life. Each monkish head seemed to

have grown stamenlike from the Protoculture flower itself.

-I believe that is highly unlikely-the green-cowled Master countered

telepathically-All logic circuits based on available recon reports suggest that

the Invid have no knowledge of the whereabouts of Zor's dimensional

fortress.

-So! Then we must assume that the Zentraedi have indeed found the

Protoculture matrix, ensuring a future for our Robotechnology.

-But only if they were able to capture the ship intact...

The organic systems of the Masters' deep-space fortress began to

mirror their sudden concern; energy fluctuations commenced within the

Protoculture cap, throwing patterned colors against all but breathing

bulkheads and supports. What would have been the bridge of an ordinary

ship was here given over to the unharnessed urgings of Protoculture, so that

it approximated a living neural plexus of ganglia, axons, and dendrites.

Unlike the Zentraedi dreadnoughts, these spadelike Robotech

fortresses the size of planetoids were designed for a different campaign: the

conquest of inner space, which, it was revealed, had its own worlds and star

systems, black holes and white light, beauty and terrors. Protoculture had

secured an entry, but the Masters' map of that realm was far from complete.

-My only fear is that Zor's disciples may have mastered the inner

secrets of Robotechnology and were then able to defeat Dolza's vast armada.

-One ship against four million? Most unlikely-nearly impossible!

-Unless they managed to invert the Robotech defensive barrier system

and penetrate Dolza's command center...

-In order to accomplish that, Zor's disciples would have to know as

much about that Robotech ship as he himself knew!

6

-In any event, a display of such magnitude would certainly have

registered on our sensors. We must admit, the destruction of four million

Robotech vessels doesn't happen every day.

-Not without our knowing it.

The terminator, which had waited patiently to deliver the rest of its

message, now added:

-That is quite true, Master. Nevertheless, our sensors do indicate a

disturbance of that magnitude.

The interior of the Protoculture cap, the size of a small bush on its

three-legged pedestal base, took on an angry light, summoning back the

hands of the Masters.

-System alert: prepare at once for a hyperspace-fold!

-We acknowledge the Elders' request, but our supply of Protoculture is

extremely low. We may not be able to use the fold generators!

-The order has been given-obey without question. We will fold

immediately.

High in those cathedrals of arcing axon and dendritelike cables,

free-floating amorphous globules of Protoculture mass began to realign

themselves along the ship's neural highways, permitting synaptic action

where none had existed moments before. Energy rippled through the

fortress, focusing on the columnar drives of massive reflex engines.

The great Robotech vessel gave a shudder and jumped.

Their homeworld was called Tirol, the primary moon of the giant

planet Fantoma, itself one of seven lifeless wanderers in an otherwise

undistinguished yellow-star system of the Fourth Quadrant, some twenty

light-years out from the galactic core. Prior to the First Robotech War,

Terran astronomers would have located Tirol in that sector of space then

referred to as the Southern Cross. But they had learned since that that was

merely their way of looking at things. By the end of the second millennium

they had abandoned the last vestiges of geocentric thinking, and by A.D.

2012 had come to understand that their beloved planet was little more than

7

a minor player in constellations entirely unknown to them.

Little was known of the early history of Tirol, save that its inhabitants

were a humanoid species-bold, inquisitive, daring-and, in the final analysis,

aggressive, acquisitive, and self-destructive. Coincidental with the abolition

of warfare among their own kind and the redirecting of their goals toward

the exploration of local space, there was born into their midst a being who

would alter the destiny of that planet and to some extent affect the fate of

the galaxy itself.

His name was Zor.

And the planet that would become the coconspirator in that fateful

unfolding of events was known to the techno-voyagers of Tirol as Optera.

For it was there that Zor would witness the evolutionary rites of the planet's

indigenous life form, the Invid; there that the visionary scientist would

seduce the Invid Regis to learn the secrets of the strange tripetaled flower

that they ingested for physical as well as spiritual nourishment; there that

the galactic feud between Optera and Tirol would have its roots.

There that Protoculture and Robotechnology were born.

Through experimentation, Zor discovered that a curious form of

organic energy could be derived from the flower when its gestating seed was

contained in a matrix that prevented maturation. The bio-energy resulting

from this organic fusion was powerful enough to induce a semblance of

bio-will, or animation, in essentially inorganic systems. Machines could be

made to alter their very shape and structure in response to the prompting of

an artificial intelligence or a human operator-to transform and reconfigure

themselves. Applied to the areas of eugenics and cybernetics, the effects

were even more astounding: Zor found that the shape-changing properties

of Protoculture could act on organic life as well-living tissue and

physiological systems could be rendered malleable. Robotechnology, as he

came to call this science, could be used to fashion a race of humanoid clones,

massive enough to withstand Fantoma's enormous gravitational forces and

to mine the ores there. When these ores were converted to fuel and used in

conjunction with Protoculture drives (by then called reflex drives), Tirol's

8

techno-voyagers would be able to undertake hyperspace jumps to remote

areas of the galaxy. Protoculture effectively reshaped the very fabric of the

continuum!

Zor had begun to envision a new order, not only for his own race but

for all those sentient life forms centuries of voyaging had revealed. He

envisioned a true mating of mind and matter, an era of clean energy and

unprecedented peace, a reshaped universe of limitless possibilities.

But the instincts that govern aggression die a slow death, and those

same leaders who had brought peace to Tirol soon embarked on a course

that ultimately brought warfare to the stars. Co-opted, Robotechnology and

Protoculture fueled the megalomaniacal militaristic dreams of its new

masters, whose first act was to decree that all of Optera's fertile seedpods be

gathered and transported to Tirol.

The order was then issued that Optera be defoliated.

The bio-genetically created giants who mined Fantoma's wastes were

to become the most fearful race of warriors the quadrant had ever

known-the Zentraedi.

Engrammed with a false past (replete with artificial racial memories

and an equally counterfeit history), programmed to accept Tirol's word as

law, and equipped with an armada of gargantuan warships the likes of

which only Robotechnology could provide, they were set loose to conquer

and destroy, to fulfill their imperative: to forge and secure an intergalactic

empire ruled by a governing body of barbarians who were calling

themselves the Robotech Masters.

Zor, however, had commenced a subtle rebellion; though forced to do

the bidding of his misguided Masters, he had been careful to keep the

secrets of the Protoculture process to himself. He acted the part of the

servile deferential pawn the Masters perceived him to be, all the while

manipulating them into allowing him to fashion a starship of his own

design-for further galactic exploration, to be sure-a sleek transformable

craft, a super dimensional fortress that would embody the science of

Robotechnology much as the Zentraedi's organic battlewagons embodied

9

the lusts of war.

Unbeknown to the Masters, concealed among the reflex furnaces that

powered its hyperspace drives, the fortress would also contain the very

essence of Robotechnology-a veritable Protoculture factory, the only one of

its kind in the known universe, capable of seducing from the Invid Flower of

Life a harnessable bioenergy.

By galactic standards it wasn't long before some of the horrors the

Masters' greed had spawned came home to roost. War with the divested

Invid was soon a reality, and there were incidents of open rebellion among

the ranks of the Zentraedi, that pathetic race of beings deprived by the

Masters of the very essence of sentient life-the ability to feel, to grow, to

experience beauty and love.

Nevertheless, Zor ventured forth in the hopes of redressing some of the

injustices his own discoveries had fostered. Under the watchful gaze of

Dolza, commander in chief of the Zentraedi, the dimensional fortress

embarked on a mission to discover new worlds ripe for conquest.

So the Masters were led to believe.

What Zor actually had in mind was the seeding of planets with the

Invid flower. Dolza and his lieutenants, Breetai and the rest, easily duped

into believing that he was carrying out orders from the Masters themselves,

were along as much to secure Zor's safety as to ensure the Master's

investment. The inability to comprehend or effect repairs on any Robotech

device and to stand in awe of those who could was programmed into the

Zentraedi as a handicap to guard against a possible grand-scale warrior

rebellion. The Zentraedi had about as much understanding of the workings

of Robotechnology as they did of their humanoid hearts.

So, on Spheris, Garuda, Haydon IV, Peryton, and numerous other

planets, Zor worked with unprecedented urgency to fulfill his imperative.

The Invid were always one step behind him, their sensor nebulae alert to

even minute traces of Protoculture, their Inorganics left behind on those

very same worlds to conquer, occupy, and destroy. But no matter: In each

instance the seedlings failed to take root.

10

It was at some point during this voyage that Zor himself began to use

the Flowers of Life in a new way, ingesting them as he had seen the Invid do

so long ago on Optera. And it was during this time that he began to

experience the vision that was to direct him along a new course of action. It

seemed inevitable that the Invid would catch up with him long before

suitable planets could be sought out and seeded, but his visions had

revealed to him a world far removed from that warring sector of the

universe where Robotech Masters, Zentraedi, and Invid vied for control. A

world of beings intelligent enough to recognize the full potential of his

discovery-a blue-white world, infinitely beautiful, blessed with the treasure

that was life...at the crux of transcendent events, the crossroads and

deciding place of a conflict that would rage across the galaxies.

A world he was destined to visit.

Well aware of the danger the Invid presented, Zor programmed the

continuum coordinates of this planet into the astrogational computers of

the dimensional fortress. He likewise programmed some of the ship's

Robotech devices to play a part in leading the new trustees of his discovery

to a special warning message his own likeness would deliver to them.

Further, he enlisted the aid of several Zentraedi (whose heartless

conditioning he managed to override by exposing them to music) to carry

out the mission.

The Invid caught up with Zor.

But not before the dimensional fortress had been successfully launched

and sent on its way.

To Earth.

Subsequent events-notably the Zentraedi pursuit of the fortress-were

as much a part of Earth's history as they were of Tirol's, but there were

chapters yet to unfold, transformations and reconfigurations, repercussions

impossible to predict, events that would have surprised Zor himself...had he

lived.

"Farewell, Zor," Dolza had said when the lifeless body of the scientist

11

was sent on its way to Tirol. "May you serve the Masters better in death

than you did in life. "

And indeed, the Robotech Masters had labored to make that so, having

their way with Zor's remains, extracting from his still-functional neural

reservoir an image of the blue-white world he had selected to inherit

Robotechnology. But beyond that Zor's mind had proved as impenetrable in

death as it had been in life. So while Dolza's Zentraedi scoured the quadrant

in search of this "Earth," the Masters had little to do but hold fast to the

mushroom-shaped sensor units that had come to represent their link to the

real world. Desperately, they tried to knit together the unraveling threads of

their once-great empire.

For ten long years by Earth reckoning they waited for some

encouraging news from Dolza. It was the blink of an eye to the massive

Zentraedi, but for the Robotech Masters, who were essentially human in

spite of their psychically evolved state, time moved with sometimes

agonizing leadenness. Those ten years saw the further decline of their

civilization, weakened as it was by internal decadence, the continual attacks

by the Protoculture-hungry Invid, a growing rebellion at the fringes of their

empire, and heightened disaffection among the ranks of the Zentraedi, who

were beginning to recognize the Masters for the fallible beings they were.

Robotechnology's inheritors had been located-"Zor's descendants," as

they were being called-but two more years would pass before Dolza's

armada made a decisive move to recapture the dimensional fortress and its

much needed Protoculture matrix. There was growing concern, especially

among the Elder Masters, that Dolza could no longer be trusted. From the

start he seemed to harbor some plan of his own, reluctant to return Zor's

body twelve years ago and now incommunicado while he moved against the

possessors of Zor's fortress. With his armada of more than four million

Robotech ships, the Zentraedi commander in chief stood to gain the most by

securing the Protoculture matrix for himself.

There was added reason for concern when it was learned that "Zor's

descendants" were humanoid like the Masters themselves. The warrior race

12

literally looked down on anything smaller than itself and had come to think

of normally proportioned humanoids as "Micronians"-ironic, given the fact

that the Masters could have "sized" the Zentraedi to any dimension they

wished. Their present size was in fact an illusion of sorts: Beating inside

those goliath frames were hearts made from the same genetic stuff as the

so-called Micronians they so despised. Because of that basic genetic

similarity, the Robotech Masters had been careful to write warnings into the

Zentraedi's pseudo-historical records to avoid prolonged contact with any

Micronian societies. Rightly so: It was feared that such exposure to emotive

life might very well rekindle real memories of the Zentraedi's bio-genetic

past and the true stuff of their existence.

According to reports received from Commander Reno (who had

overseen the return of Zor's body to Tirol and whose fleet still patrolled the

central region of the empire), some of the elements under Breetai's

command had mutinied. Dolza, if Reno's report was to be believed, had

subsequently elected to fold the entire armada to Earthspace, with designs

to annihilate the planet before emotive contagion was spread to the

remainder of the fleet.

The Zentraedi might learn to emote, but were they capable of learning

to utilize the full powers of Robotechnology?

This was the question the Robotech Masters had put to themselves.

It was soon, however, to become a moot point.

Hyperspace sensor probes attached to a Robotech fortress some

seventy-five light-years away from Tirol had detected a massive release of

Protoculture matrix in the Fourth Quadrant-an amount capable of

empowering over four million ships.

13

CHAPTER TWO

Throughout the territories we traveled (the southwest portion of what

was once the United States of America) one would encounter the holed hulks

of Zentraedi warships, rising up like monolithic towers from the irradiated

and ravaged wastelands...At the base of one such apocalyptic reminder sits

the crosslegged skeleton of a Zentraedi shock trooper, almost in a pose of

tranquil meditation, still clad in his armor and bandoliers, a Minmei doll

insignificant in his huge metalshod hand.

Dr. Lazlo Zand,

On Earth As It Is In Hell: Recollections of the Robotech War

"Therefore, it is our conclusion, based upon the available information,

that human and Zentraedi are descended from very nearly the same

ancestors!"

Exedore leaned back in the chamber's straight-backed chair to cast a

look around the circular table as the weight of his pronouncement sank in.

Continued exposure to Earth's sun these past two years had brought out

strong mauve tones in his skin and turned his hair an ochre red.

To his immediate right was the somewhat dour-looking Professor Zand,

a shadowy figure who had emerged from Lang's Robotech elite; to Zand's

right were two Zentraedi, micronized like Exedore and sporting the same

blue and white Robotech Defense Forces uniforms. Clockwise around the

table to Exedore's left were Claudia Grant, the SDF-2s First Officer-a

handsome and intelligent representative of Earth's black race-Commanders

Lisa Hayes and Rick Hunter (Made for each other, Exedore often said to

himself), and Admiral Gloval, serious as ever.

The rich golden warmth of Earth's sun poured into the fortress through

two banks of skylights set opposite each other in the conference room's

cathedral ceiling.

Exedore had been working side by side with Dr. Emil Lang and several

14

other Earth scientists, deciphering some of the numerous documents Zor

had thought to place aboard the SDF-1 over a decade ago. But his

announcement of Terran and Zentraedi similarity came as the result of an

extensive series of medical tests and evaluations. The distinction Human or

Zentraedi no longer applied; indeed, it was beginning to look as though

there existed-lost somewhere in time-an ancestor race common to both.

Exedore had noticed that the Terrans accepted this with less

enthusiasm than might otherwise be expected. Perhaps, he speculated, it

was due to the fact that they continued to reproduce in the natural way,

whereas the Zentraedi had long ago abandoned that unsure method for the

certainty of genetic manipulation. In Earthspeak the word was "clone"; the

Zentraedi equivalent approximated the English term "being."

New discoveries awaited them in the documents, especially in the latest

batch of trans-vids uncovered. Exedore had yet to view these, but there were

indications that they would provide answers to questions concerning the

historical origins of the Zentraedi race, answers that might shed light on the

origins of the Terrans as well. All evidence pointed to an extraterrestrial

origin, an issue hotly debated by Earth scientists, most of whom believed

that the Human race evolved from a tree-dwelling primate species that had

roamed the planet millions of years ago.

But if all these protohistorical answers were coming fast, the

whereabouts of the Protoculture matrix Zor had built into the ship

remained a mystery. Hardly a place had been left uninvestigated by Exedore,

Breetai, Lang, and the others; and Zand had even suggested that the

Protoculture was in hiding!

Responses to Exedore's announcement proved varied: The misshapen,

gnomish Zentraedi heard Claudia's sharp intake of breath and Lisa Hayes's

"Ah-hah," voiced in a fashion that suggested she had expected no less.

Commander Hunter, on the other hand, sat with eyes wide in a kind of

fear-the personification of a certain xenophobic mentality that permeated

Terran Cultures.

Gloval was nodding his head, saying little. His white commander's cap

15

was pulled low on his forehead, so Exedore couldn't read his eyes.

"So, Admiral," Exedore continued, leaning into the table. "There is

little doubt-our genetic makeup points directly at a common point of

origin."

"That's incredible!" Gloval now exclaimed.

"Isn't it? While examining the data, we noticed many common traits,

including a penchant on the part of both races to indulge in warfare."

This brought startled reactions around the Terran side of the table.

"Yes," Exedore said flatly, as if to forestall any arguments before they

had a chance to flare up. "Both races seem to enjoy making war."

Rick Hunter held his breath, counting to ten. How could the Zentraedi

believe his own words, he asked himself, when it was love and not war that

had doomed the Zentraedi to defeat? The Zentraedi race had started the

entire conflict, and Rick nursed a suspicion that this pronouncement of

Exedore's was his way of letting himself off the hook.

Exedore seemed to be enjoying his so-called micronized state, and Rick

further suspected that this had more to do with a new sense of power the

small man had gained than it did with exploring the ship for this

Protoculture factory that had yet to turn up. Exedore couldn't bear to admit

to himself that his commanders had waged a war for something that didn't

even exist; they had nearly brought destruction to both races, chasing after

some goose that was supposed to lay golden eggs. Truly, this was the saga

that would go down in their history as legend: the pursuit of a ship that

supposedly held the secrets of eternal youth, the capture of one hollow to

the core.

Rick looked hard into Exedore's lidless pinpoint-pupiled eyes. He

didn't like the idea of Exedore poking into every nook and cranny in the

fortress, acting as if it was more his property than Earth's. Only a moment

ago the Zentraedi had seemed to be sizing him up, well aware of the effect of

his words. Rick wasn't about to disappoint him.

"Well, with all due respect," he began acidly, "I disagree. We don't fight

because we like to-we fight to defend ourselves from our enemies. So, under

16

the circumstances we have no choice in the matter. Do you understand?"

Rick's hand was balled up into a fist. Lisa and Claudia looked at him in

surprise.

"That's nonsense, Commander," said Professor Zand, who had Dr.

Lang's marblelike eyes. He stood up, palms flat on the table, to press his

point. "There have always been wars in progress somewhere on Earth, even

before the invasion from space. I think this clearly indicates the warlike

nature of Humans."

Another Zentraedi sympathizer, thought Rick. And talking like an alien

to boot. He began to stammer a response, always feeling outgunned when

up against academics, but Zand interrupted him.

"A perfect example: Look what happened on Earth when the

peacemakers tried their best to prevail. They formed the League of Nations

and the United Nations, both of which failed!"

Rick got to his feet confrontationally. What did all this have to do with

Humans enjoying war? The best he would allow was that some humans

enjoyed war but most didn't. Most enjoyed...love.

"I can't believe you'd simplify the facts like that," Rick shouted. "You're

practically rewriting history!"

"Facts, sir, do not lie," said Zand.

Rick was about to jump over the table and convince the man, but

Exedore beat him to the punch, fixing Zand with that unearthly gaze of his

and saying:

"We're merely telling you the results of our best data analysis. Please

don't interject your opinions."

So when we have something to say, it's an opinion, and when they have

something to say, it's a fact, Rick thought, restraining himself.

Gloval cleared his throat meaningfully.

"Fascinating...So we're all descended from the same race, are we? And

who can say in what direction all of us are headed. We may never know..."

Rick dropped back into his seat, staring off into space. Whatever

happens, he told himself, we mustn't ever allow ourselves to become like the

17

Zentraedi, devoid of emotions-no better than robots. Never!

The conference room, scene of Exedore's briefing, was located on level

34 of the new fortress, the so-called SDF-2, which had been under

construction for almost as long as the city of New Macross itself. The space

fortress was a virtual copy of the SDF-1 and currently sat back to back with

it, linked to its parent by hundreds of transfer and service corridors, in the

center of the circular human-made lake known now as Gloval, in honor of

the admiral. The arid, high plateaus of northwestern North America seemed

ideally suited to the reconstruction of the city that had once grown up inside

the original super dimensional fortress. The area was cool compared to the

background radiation of the devastated coastal corridors, untainted water

was plentiful enough, the climate was temperate, and there was no shortage

of space. As a result the city had risen swiftly, prospered, and spread out

from the lake, a burgeoning forest of skyscrapers, high rises, and prefab

suburban dwellings. In the two years since its founding, the population of

New Macross had increased tenfold, and its was considered (though not

officially recognized as) the Earth's capital city.

New Macross had its share of Zentraedis, though not nearly as many as

the cities that had grown up at alien crashpoints throughout the

continent-New Detroit and nearby Monument City chief among them. The

Zentraedi enjoyed less freedom than the Humans, but this was conceived of

as a temporary measure to allow for gradual readjustment and

acculturation. Most Zentraedi had opted for micronization, but many

retained their original size. However, control of the Protoculture sizing

chambers fell under the jurisdiction of the military government, the

Robotech Defense Force, alternatively known as the Earth Forces

Government. Micronization was encouraged, but the return to full size of a

previously micronized Zentraedi was rarely if ever permitted. This had

given rise to a separatist movement, spearheaded by Monument City, which

advocated the creation of autonomous Zentraedi free states. Critics of these

proposals pointed to increasing incidents of Zentraedi uprising as

18

justification for maintaining the status quo. The innate blood lust that had

earned the Zentraedi their reputation as fearsome warriors was not always

so easily overcome and controlled.

At factories in the industrial sector of New Macross City, humans and

aliens worked together toward the forging of a united future. The Zentraedi

were fond of work, having had no previous experience with it during their

long history of enslavement to war. Manual labor or assembly line, it made

no difference to them. Giants hauled enormous cargos of wood and raw

materials in from the wastelands, while their micronized brethren worked

at benches completing electronic components, adding Protoculture chips to

Robotech circuit panels-chips that had been salvaged from the ruined ships

that dotted the landscape.

But there was tension in the air on this particular day. Unused to a life

without war, some of the aliens were beginning to question the new life they

had chosen for themselves.

Utema was one of these. A massively built red-haired Goliath who had

served under Breetai, he had worked in New Macross for eighteen months,

first assembling steel towers in the Micronian population center, then here,

scouring the countryside for usable materials. But on one of these forays, he

had stumbled upon an encampment of former warriors who had abandoned

the Micronian ways, and ever since he had harbored an anger he could not

articulate. An urge to...destroy something-anything!

His eyes had seized on one of the factory trucks parked in the fenced-in

yard, a harmless tanker truck used for the transport of fuels. He approached

it now and booted it, experiencing a long-lost thrill as the toy vehicle

exploded and burst into flames.

Laborers at their work stations inside the factory heard Utema bellow:

"I quit! I can't stand it! I quit! This is stupid!"

The explosion had rekindled his rage. He stood with his fists clenched,

looking for something else to demolish, ignoring the protests of his giant

coworker. The two had faced off.

19

"It's worse than stupid-it's degrading!" Utema roared. "I've had

enough!"

Violently, he side-kicked a stack of dressed logs, a guttural cry

punctuating his swift move.

"Shut up and don't interfere," he warned his companion. "I'm leaving!"

The second giant made no move to stop Utema as he stepped over the

chain-link fence and headed off toward the wasteland. Two others had

arrived on the scene, but they too let him walk.

"But where are you going?" one of them called out. "Utema-come back!

You won't survive out there!"

"It's you that won't survive!" Utema shouted back, pointing his finger.

"War! War is the only thing that will save us!"

At a supper club in Monument City, Minmei, wearing a gauzy blue

dress that hung off one shoulder, stood in the spotlight, accepting the

applause. It was nowhere near a full house, and, disappointed by the

turnout, she hadn't put on her best show. Nevertheless, those few who had

been able to afford tickets applauded her wildly, out of respect or politeness,

she couldn't be sure. Perhaps because most of her fans rarely knew when

her performance was off-she was her own most demanding critic.

The light was a warm, comfortable curtain she was reluctant to leave.

Kyle was waiting for her backstage in the large and virtually

unfurnished dressing room, leaning against the wall, arms crossed, looking

sullen and angry. He was dressed in jeans and a narrow-waisted jacket with

tails. She could tell he'd been drinking and wondered when he would go into

his Jekyll and Hyde number again. No doubt he'd caught all her off notes,

tempo changes, and missed words.

"Hi," she greeted him apologetically.

"That was terrible," Kyle snapped at her, no beating around the bush

tonight. It was going to be a bad evening, perhaps as bad as the night he had

kicked a bottle at her.

"Sorry," she told him mechanically, heading straight for the dressing

20

table, seating herself on one of the velour stools, and wiping off makeup.

Kyle remained at the wall.

"I'm worried about that charity concert tomorrow-if it goes like this."

"I'll be okay," she promised him, looking over her shoulder. "There

were so few people tonight that I was really taken by surprise. Don't worry,

I'll be all right tomorrow."

"This is a high-class club," Kyle persisted. "We let our patrons down."

She sighed. He wasn't going to let go of it. She couldn't do anything

right anymore. He was constantly lecturing her and trying to change her

behavior.

"I know," she said meekly, sincerely depressed-not for disappointing

Kyle but for giving anything less than her all to the audience.

"Well, there's nothing we can do about it now-the damage is done."

She began applying cr 鑝 e to her face. "You could have reduced the

admission price a bit, right?"

"Y' get what you can," Kyle said defensively, shaking his fist at her or

the world, she didn't know which. He approached her. "And then, don't you

forget, my pet-we'll be sharing the dough we earn with all the poor people,

right?"

His scolding voice was full of sarcasm and anger, hinting that she was

somehow to blame for his actions: He had to charge a lot for the tickets

because she was the one who insisted on splitting all the profits with the

needy. Little did Kyle know that she would gladly have worked for no profit.

It just didn't seem right anymore to work for money with so much need, so

much sadness and misery, in what was left of everyone's world.

"Then why don't we give all the money to charity?" she asked, meeting

his glare. "We have enough."

Kyle was down on one knee beside her now, anger still in his eyes but a

new tone of conciliation and patience in his voice. He put his hands on her

shoulders and looked into her face.

"We have, but not enough to make our dreams come true. You certainly

ought to be able to understand that!"

21

"Yeah, but-"

"We promised ourselves we'd build a great concert hall some day and

do all our work there-right?"

She wanted to remind him that they had made that promise years ago,

when such things were possible. A great concert hall now-in the middle of

this wasteland, with things just beginning to rebuild and isolated groups of

people working the land who never strayed five miles from home? But she

just didn't have the energy to argue with him. She could imagine the

accusatory tone in his voice: You're the one who ought to understand about

dreams-you had so many...

"Now, get cleaned up," Kyle ordered her, getting to his feet. "After you

get dressed, I'll take you out for a good dinner, okay?"

"I'm not very hungry, Kyle," she told him.

He turned on her and exploded.

"We're going to eat anyway! I'll get the car."

The door slammed. She promised herself she wouldn't cry and went to

work removing the rest of her makeup, hoping he would mellow somewhat

by the time she met him at the stage door. But that didn't happen.

"Come on, get in," he ordered her, throwing open the sports car's

passenger door.

She frowned and slid into the leather seat. Kyle accelerated even before

she had the door closed, burning out as they left the club. He knew that she

hated that almost as much as she hated the car itself-a sleek, dual frontaxled

all-terrain sports car, always hungry for fuel and symbolizing all that she

detested in the old world as much as the new: the idea of privilege, status,

the haves and have-nots.

"Where would you like to eat?" Kyle said unpleasantly, throwing the

vehicle through the gears.

"Your dad's restaurant. We haven't been there in a long time."

"I don't want to go there."

"Then why do you bother asking me where I want to eat, Kyle? Just let

me off and I'll go there myself!"

22

"Oh?" Kyle started to say, but swallowed the rest when he realized that

Minmei had thrown open the door. An oncoming van veered off, narrowly

missing them, as Kyle threw the steering wheel hard to the left to fling her

back into the vehicle. But he overcorrected coming out of the resultant

fishtail and ended up in a swerve that brought him into oncoming traffic.

The car went through several more slides before he could safely brake and

bring them to a stop on the shoulder. Afterward he leaned onto the steering

wheel and exhaled loudly. When he spoke, all of the anger and sarcasm had

left him.

"Minmei...we could have been killed..."

Minmei was not nearly as shaken by the incident, having achieved

some purpose.

"I am sorry, Kyle. But I'm really going there, even if I have to walk."

She opened the door again and started to exit. "Good-bye."

"No, wait." he stopped her. "Get back in the car."

"Why should I?"

"I'll...I'll drive you as far as the city line."

She reseated herself and said, "Thank you so much, Kyle."

The doors of the rebuilt White Dragon slid open as Minmei approached

just short of closing time. Still the center of the city as it had been on

Macross Island and later in the SDF-1, the restaurant was packed even at

this late hour.

"Hi! I'm here," she called, cheerful again, the argument with Kyle long

behind her now.

Aunt Lena was cleaning up. Tommy Luan, the barrel-chested mayor of

Macross, and his fusty wife, Loretta, were having tea.

"Oooh, you're back!" said Lena, a warm smile spreading across her face,

the mother Minmei had lost.

"Heyyy!" called the mayor, equally happy to see his long-lost creation.

She greeted Lena with an embrace.

"Welcome back, darling! But shouldn't you be rehearsing for your

23

concert?" Minmei was the daughter Lena had never had as well as a

replacement for the son she seemed to have lost.

"Uh huh," Minmei told her and let it drop. "Mr. Mayor, how are you?"

"I'm just fine, Minmei."

"Good seeing you, dear," said his stiff wife. A head taller than her

husband, she had a long, almost emaciated face underscored by a

prominent chin. She wore her wavy auburn hair pulled back into an

unattractive bun and kept the collar of her blouse tightly fastened at the

neck by a large blue brooch.

Loretta and Tommy were almost as unlikely a couple as lithesome Lena

and squat Max, who was just stepping from the kitchen now, his cooking

whites and chef's hat still in place.

"Heyyy, Minmei," he drawled.

"Uncle!...Would it be okay with you if I stayed here tonight?"

"Of course it'd be okay! M' girl, you can even have your old room back

again."

"Oh, thanks, Uncle Max," Minmei said, suddenly overcome with a

feeling of love for all of them, happy to be back in the fold, away from the

lights, crowds, attention...Kyle.

"Isn't that great?" the mayor crowed. "She hasn't changed a bit, even

after becoming famous!"

Three male customers had left their table to surround her, wondering

what she was doing there, taking advantage of the casual nature of her visit

to ask for autographs.

"Success hasn't spoiled our Minmei."

"She's still our little girl," said Max.

Which is just what she wanted to feel like at the moment: to be the one

taken care of instead of the one who always had to keep things going. But

she said, laughing:

"Oh, no! That makes me sound like a little child who hasn't grown up at

all!"

"Oh, I didn't mean it that way!" Max recanted, joining the laughter.

24

After signing autographs and having something to eat-Lena refused to

take no for an answer-Minmei excused herself and went upstairs to her

room. There were no questions about Kyle; it was as if he were no longer

part of the family.

Lena and Max hadn't changed a thing even after the relocation of the

restaurant from the hold of the dimensional fortress; they must have put

everything back where it had been-even the whimsical pink rabit's head

bearing her name that she had tacked to the door.

Once inside, a flood of memories began to overwhelm her:

Her first night in this very room when she'd arrived on Macross Island

from Yokohama-the balcony view from these very windows of the

reconstructed SDF-1; the Launching Day celebration and the madness that

had ensued; the years in space, and the strange twists of fate that had

brought her fame...And through it all she saw Rick journeying along with

her, accompanying her, though not always by her side.

She looked up at the corner of the room damaged by Rick's Battloid on

the day fate had thrown him a curve. The cornice of the room had been

repaired, but the place never seemed to hold paint for very long, as though

the spot had decided to memorialize itself.

Minmei crossed over to her bureau, opened one of the drawers, and

retrieved the gift Rick had given her more than three years ago on her

sixteenth birthday. The titanium Medal of Honor he had received after the

battle of Mars. She recalled how he had appeared beneath her balcony only

minutes before midnight and tossed the gift to her. "It says what I can't say

to you," Rick had told her then.

The memory warmed her heart, thawing some of the sadness lodged

there. But suddenly she felt far away from the joy and love of those earlier

times; something inside her was in danger of dying. She sobbed, holding the

medal close to her breast:

"Oh, Rick, what have I done?"

25

CHAPTER THREE

What do I remember about those days in New Macross?...Anger,

strident conversations, despair-it almost seemed as if Protoculture's

shape-shifting capabilities had taken hold of fate itself, changing and

reworking individual destiny, transforming and reconfiguring lives...

Lisa Hayes,

Recollections

The sun rose into cirrus skies above New Macross City, autumn's first

crisp and clear day. The stratospheric dust and debris that for two years

now had led to blue moons, sullen sunsets, and perpetual winters was at last

dissipating, and there was every indication that Earth was truly on the

mend.

Minmei, dressed in a white summer-weight skirt and red sweater,

stepped out of the White Dragon and took a deep breath of the cool

morning air. She felt more rested than she had in months; the comfort of

her own room and the company of her family were warm in her memory. A

newsboy, brown baseball cap askew on his head, rushed by and dropped off

the morning edition; she greeted him cheerfully and started off down the

street, unaware that he had turned startled in his tracks, recognizing the

singing star instantly and somewhat disappointed when she hadn't stopped

to talk with him for a moment.

She had a lot on her mind, but for a change she felt that there was all

the time in the world to see to everything. The band would be expecting her

for rehearsal, but that was still hours off, and she wanted nothing more than

to walk the streets and say hello to the city in her own way. That's no EVE

projection up there, she had to remind herself, unaccustomed to sunny

skies. She had been a creature of the night for too long, victimized by her

own needs as much as she was by Kyle's grandiose plans for the future.

Last night's argument seemed far removed from this new optimism

coursing through her. If Kyle could only be made to understand, if he would

26

only stop drinking and return himself to the disciplines that made him

unique in her eyes...Sometimes he appeared to be as displaced as the

Zentraedi themselves, yearning for new battles to wage, new fronts to open.

He detested the presence of the military and continued to blame them for

the nearly total destruction of the planet. Minmei pitied him for that. The

military had at least managed to salvage a place for new growth. And as for

their presence, the threat of a follow-up attack was a real one-not

manufactured, as Kyle claimed, to keep the civilians in line. The Earth had

been ravaged once, and it could happen again.

But these were dark thoughts to have on such a glorious day, and she

decided to put them from her mind. There was beauty and renewed life

everywhere she looked. Skyscrapers rose like silver towers above the

rooftops, and Lake Gloval, looked as though it had been sprinkled with

gems....

In the outskirts of New Macross Rick had already commenced his

morning run, in full sweats today, a beige outfit Lisa had given him for his

birthday. The city was still asleep, taking advantage of the chill to spend a

few extra moments cuddled under blankets, and there was no traffic to fight;

so he jogged without any set course in mind, along the lakefront, then into

the grid of city streets. Flat-bottomed cargo crafts ferried supplies to and

from the supercarriers still attached to the SDF-1, while launches carried

night-shift work crews away from the SDF-2, back to back with its mother

ship and rapidly nearing completion.

Breathe in the good, breathe out the bad, he chanted to himself as he

ran-and there was a great deal of the latter he needed to get rid of. If asked

what he was so angry about, he probably wouldn't have been able to offer a

clear explanation. Only this: He was tense. Whether it had something to do

with his situation with Lisa, or Minmei's situation with Kyle, or Earth's with

the Zentraedi, he couldn't be sure. Probably it was a combination of

everything, coupled with an underlying sense of purposelessness that had

given rise to this unnatural cynicism and despair.

27

"Both races seem to enjoy fighting," Exedore had said. He regretted

now that he had turned the briefing into a debate-he would have felt

differently had he been able to make his point-but was still certain of his

feelings: that the Zentraedi, for all their genetic similarities to humans, were

no better than programmed androids. All one needed to do was look around

to see that he was right: The Zentraedi were hungry for war-biologically

hungry. They were deserting their positions, sometimes violently-the recent

incident in New Portland was a case in point-to take up with their fellow

malcontents in makeshift compounds in the wasteland, off limits to humans,

who would not be able to withstand the lingering radiation. Perhaps a

mistake had been made in attempting to band together despite the gains to

New Macross thanks to the literary larger labor force? But Rick was certain

it was only a matter of time before all the Zentraedi followed suit and

returned to war.

He exhaled harshly and increased his pace.

Just down the street from the White Dragon, only a few blocks from

Rick's present course, a delivery van pulled to a stop in front of a

two-storied building with a red and white striped awning and a

rainbow-shaped sign that read CLEANING. At the wheel was Konda, one of

the three former Zentraedi spies.

"Rico! Gimme a hand with this!" Bron called out from the sidewalk, a

full basket of laundry in his brawny arms.

The door to the shop opened, and the founder of the Minmei cult

stepped out, affecting oversized and unnecessary eyeglasses, convinced that

they enhanced his appearance. Rico had also let his hair grow and was

dressed in a short-waisted blue and white uniform that fit him like a leisure

suit.

The three former secret agents had secured jobs with the cleaning

service several months ago, their fascination for clothing as strong now as it

had been when they first experienced Micronian life in the holds of the

SDF-1.

"Hey, guess what happened?" Konda said, leaning out of the van.

28

Rico was quick to respond, leaving Bron (a good fifteen pounds lighter

than he'd been two years ago) to fend for himself. "What happened?" he

asked excitedly.

"Guess."

"What?" Rico repeated, enjoying the game but still vague about the

rules.

"Minmei's back in town-she stayed at the restaurant last night!"

"No kidding!"

"I got it straight from his honor the mayor himself."

Rico made a puzzled gesture. "But I saw in the paper that Minmei's got

a concert in Stone City today." He wanted to believe Konda, but still...

"Well; if she leaves early enough today, she can still make it," Konda

offered as an explanation.

Rico snapped his fingers. "Rats! If I had known, I would have gone to

the restaurant last night to eat." He dug into his pants pocket and produced

a small notebook, which he immediately began to leaf through. It was

possible he'd been mistaken about the Stone City concert. "Hmmm...let's

see...It looks like I've forgotten her concert schedule in my other notebook."

If Konda's information was correct, then perhaps Minmei would be

spending another night at the White Dragon.

Rico reveled in the idea of "having a mission." He and his sidekicks had

had their share of dull evenings lately. Things didn't seem to be working out

too well between the three of them and Kim, Vanessa, and Sammie. He was

at a loss to explain the reasons for this but reasoned that it had something

to do with procreation, that mystery of mysteries so important to Micronian

females. Not everyone could be as fortunate as Miriya Parino and her

mate...

Just then Bron appeared behind him, a neatly folded stack of sheets in

his arms.

"Hey! We're supposed to be dry cleaners, not gossipmongers." Bron

took his job very seriously, judging it to be one of the most important things

a Micronian could attend to-next to cooking, of course. The care and

29

maintenance of uniforms especially. "Now, either you ship up or shape out

or I'm gonna just have to-huh?"

Bron shouldered Rico aside and advanced a few steps along the

sidewalk, staring at a woman pedestrian headed their way.

"Hey...Am I dreaming?" he-said. Then: "It is!"

"Huh?" said Rico, tempted to remove his glasses.

Konda leaned from the van. "Is that..."

"Minmei!" the three of them said together, unable to believe their luck.

"Hi." She smiled, raising her hand. She hadn't seen any of them in

months-since her last open-air concert in New Macross, where they had had

front-row seats and carried artificial flowers.

Rico and Bron ran to her, Konda quick to bring up the rear.

"Minmei, would you...well, would you like to autograph this?" Bron

said, offering her his pile of pressed linen.

"Hey, Bron, that belongs to a customer," Rico pointed out, confident

that his knowledge of Micronian protocol would impress Minmei.

But Bron ignored him. "So what! I'll buy the customer a new one!"

This found favor with Rico and Konda, both of whom reached for the

sheets simultaneously, touching off an instant tug-of-war for what hadn't

already fallen to the sidewalk.

Minmei backed up, worried about how this battle might escalate; but

finally she laughed and dug into her purse for a pen.

Elsewhere in the city a more violent battle was under way.

Mayor Tommy Luan had been attending to his morning ritual (putting

on a tie, then taking it off ), when he saw something fly past his second-floor

bedroom window-something large and red that had about as much business

being in the air as a tie had around his neck. He moved to the window in

time to see a compact car crash to the street and explode. Pedestrians were

screaming and fleeing the scene. Some idiot's driven off the roof of the

parking garage, Luan told himself as he made for the stairway.

By the time he reached street level, flames and thick smoke had

30

engulfed what was left of the car. But he had scarcely stepped from the

building when a second explosion filled the air, more ground-shaking than

the first. Luan saw a second black cloud rise over the rooftops from

somewhere nearby and ran toward the direction of the smoke, revising his

earlier hypothesis. Was this a sneak attack or some new terrorist group at

work?

As he approached the intersection, an airborne girder took out a

streetlamp, sending up a fountain of sparks and stopping him in his tracks.

From around the corner came two Zentraedi giants, one brandishing a long

pipe and carrying a large sack stuffed with who knew what. Luan had begun

a slow retreat down his street, but the two saw him and began to pursue him.

Spent after a block, the mayor stopped, collapsing to his knees in front of

his home.

The Zentraedi stood over him, threatening him with the pipe.

"I beg you-h-have pity,"

"I'll spare you if you give me everything you've got!" growled the pipe

wielder instinctively, with no real purpose other than intimidation in mind.

"T-that's easier said than done," Luan answered him, trying to figure

out just what he might possess that would appeal to a sixty-foot warrior.

Inside the house, Luan's wife, Loretta, having glimpsed the terrifying

street scene from the living room window, had already raised the base on

the phone. The clenched fist of one of the aliens filled the plate window

behind her.

"Right...right," she was saying, growing panic in her voice. "They've

suddenly become very violent and extremely dangerous. They're trying to

take our food and our possessions and everything we-"

Something took hold of her, cutting off her breath.

Now she was being lifted off the floor and carried through the front

door, her narrow shoulders and fragile neck pinched in the grip of giant

fingers. The warrior, who had gone down on both knees to fish her from her

home, held her ten feet above the sidewalk, choking the life from her while

he roared into her face.

31

"Whaddaya think you're up to? Sit down!" he said gruffly, slamming

her to the concrete. This knocked the wind out of her and dislocated her

back. Through the pain she recognized that she was sitting in a most

unladylike position, her pleated blue skirt up around her thighs, but there

was nothing she could do about it. Then suddenly Tommy was beside her,

holding her and spitting at the aliens:

"You monster! You've hurt her." Luan wrapped his beefy arms around

his wife. "Be strong, darling. We're going to get you to a hospital as soon as

we-"

"You're not going anywhere!" the two Zentraedi bellowed, moving in to

cast a grim shadow over both of them....

Rick was breathing hard, pushing himself into a sprint, when he heard

his name called. He forced himself to stop, doubled over with hands on his

knees, panting for a moment, before he turned around. Lisa! He had

purposely avoided his usual route for fear of bumping into her, and now

here she was not ten feet away, shapely in her blue skirt and orange V-neck

sweater. There had been some awkward moments between them these past

few weeks. She had stopped coming by his quarters-even (in a roundabout

fashion) returned the key he had given her. She thought he was seeing

Minmei again, but he wasn't. Not really.

"What are you doing up so early?" he asked as she approached.

She stammered, "Um...well, I wasn't sleeping too well."

"Why not?" Rick said, feeling a sudden concern.

"Something's wrong."

"Wrong? Whaddaya mean?"

Lisa stared at him. Was he ever going to be able to talk to her? "I don't

know," she told him. "I'm not really sure..."

"Well, working on patrol has made me pretty sensitive to what's going

on-there's some tension, but we can handle it."

Was he talking about tension between the two of them, or did he mean

tension among the Zentraedi? Lisa asked herself. Patrol was making him

sensitive...to what? She wanted to believe that this was Rick's way of

32

apologizing.

"I'd better be reporting in," he said, motioning toward the SDF-1. "It's

breakfast time."

Lisa smiled to herself. It was like pulling teeth...but she wasn't going to

give up on him. Not yet.

"Mind if I walk with you? I don't feel like going back to the barracks by

myself, okay?"

"Come to think of it," Rick said as they started off, "you may be right

about there being trouble."

It was as prescient a comment as Rick had uttered in quite some

time-although subsequent events would erase it from his memory-because

Minmei happened to be walking up the very street Rick and Lisa had

entered when they rounded the corner scarcely ten-paces ahead of her.

Minmei froze, sucking in her breath, as those haunting memories she

had experienced in her room last evening returned. Seeing him now,

practically arm in arm with this other woman, only strengthened her earlier

longings and, worse still, reinforced her worse fears. What had she done?

"Oh, listen," she heard Rick tell Lisa. "I forgot to tell you-I put your

picture in my album."

"You did? That was sweet."

Rick turned to Lisa and started to say, "I hope you don't mind, but I-"

Then he saw her standing there.

The moment was full of real-life drama, but Minmei held the edge. She

stood still long enough for him to hear her sob and see the tears; then she

turned and ran.

Her performance wasn't lost on Lisa. But Rick was fully taken in,

already chasing after her, calling for her to wait.

Why? Lisa yelled at herself. Why does she have to manipulate him, and

why does he fall right into it, and why am I chasing him now when he's

chasing her?

Rick and Lisa were right behind Minmei when she turned the corner,

but all at once she was nowhere in sight.

33

"How could she have disappeared so quickly?" Rick said, looking

around.

Lisa was out of breath. She had figured-correctly, in fact-that Minmei

was hiding in one of the storefronts up ahead.

She was about to suggest they try a different direction, when a

thunderous bass voice suddenly yelled: "I said shut up!"

Rick and Lisa turned. Towering above the building situated diagonally

across the intersection from them, two Zentraedi workers were faced off in

an argument. The red-haired one stepped forward and threw a sucker

punch, catching the second across the jaw and dropping him to the street

with a ground-shaking crash.

"Come on!" Rick said, hurrying toward the fracas.

By the time Rick and Lisa arrived on the scene, the red-haired

Zentraedi was straddling his opponent, pummeling the other's face. A third

Zentraedi, obviously allied with the winner, stood smiling off to one side.

Tommy Luan was cowering on the sidewalk nearby.

Rick braced himself and stepped forward. "Stop that fighting right

now!" he yelled. "Stop it, I said!"

The mayor, supporting his injured wife, ran to Rick's side from across

the street.

"Commander! Thank goodness you're here!"

"What's this all about, sir?" Rick asked him.

"They were threatening to kill us! Then this one showed up, and they

started arguing-"

"I can't live here anymore!" bellowed the red-haired Zentraedi, pinning

his opponent to the street.

Luan, encouraged by Rick's presence, stepped forward to address the

giant. "I told you-I understand your problem, but you have to be reasonable

about-"

"Be quiet, fatso!" the former warrior said, getting to his feet. "I'll

squash you, got it?!"

Luan and his wife hid behind Rick.

34

"Tell him not to get angry about it, Commander."

Just then the streets began shaking with a recognizable thunder. Civil

defense sirens blared as four Excalibur MK VIs took up positions on either

side of the Zentraedi, their twin-cannon arms raised. Bipedally designed

relatives of the MAC II cannon, the mecha bristled with gatlings and were

capable of delivering devastating volleys of firepower.

Rick wasn't sure what he was going to say next, but the sudden arrival

of Robotech mecha on the scene was a booster shot to his confidence.

"The authorities are here. Now will you stop fighting?"

The upper gun turret of the lead Excalibur slid forward, and the

mecha's commander elevated himself into view.

"Zentraedi!" his small but amplified voice rang out. "Stop! We've got

you surrounded!'

The giant who moments before had been flat on his back got up and

stepped out of harm's way, leaving the red-haired one and his cohort center

stage. Rick, recognizing the voice of the mecha commander, cupped his

hands to his mouth and shouted: "Dan! Hold it!"

Dan looked down from his cockpit seat, surprised to find Rick in the

middle of this. "Commander! What happened here?"

"Let me handle this," Rick told him.

Dan gave a verbal aye-aye, and Rick moved in angrily to confront the

giants.

"Now, you listen to me, and listen good! I know life with us is hard for

you, but the authorities want to help you with your problems-if you'll give

them the chance."

The red-haired Zentraedi, clutching his sackful of valuables once again,

went down on one knee to answer Rick, equally confident and angered.

"Wait a minute!" he growled. "If your government is so worried about

us and so concerned about our welfare, why don't they let us go out and be

with our own people where we belong?"

"Uh, well, that's-"

"I am a warrior, understand?"

35

"Well, what about it?" asked the second Zentraedi threateningly.

"Bagzent wants to fight-can you help him?"

"I'm good with my fists, and I can handle practically any weapon,"

continued the one called Bagzent. "So what do you say? Can you help?

Speak up, I can't hear you...Well?...Are you gonna help me or not?"

The scene was turning ugly again. Mayor Luan, his wife, and Lisa

sensed it and began to back away. The CD mecha shifted slightly, their guns

traversing somewhat.

At the corner, unseen, Minmei gasped.

"Well," Rick began, "we have no firm guarantee you won't band

together and attack us again. If you want to-"

"Huh!" Bagzent grunted, tiring of the game. "If you can't help-me solve

my problem, then what's the point in saying that you or your government

will talk about it?" All at once his right hand had moved forward.

"Micronian!" he uttered in disgust, flicking his forefinger.

Rick took the full force of the movement. The Zentraedi's log-sized

forefinger caught him full body, from knees to chin, lifting him off his feet

and tossing him a good ten feet through the air. Dazed and bloodied, he

landed solidly on his rump at the clawlike foot of one of the Excaliburs.

Startled gasps went up from the humans pressed together on the street

corner, but those were not as bothersome to the Zentraedi as the sounds of

weapons being leveled against them.

"On my signal," said Dan. "Blast 'em!"

The two Zentraedi backed away, suddenly afraid. Gatlings were ranged

in.

"Wait," one of them pleaded. "Don't shoot."

Rick shook the pain from his body, struggled to his feet, and raced back

to the center of the arena. He raised up his arms and shouted to Dan again,

"Hold your fire!" Then he held his face up to to Bagzent, blood running from

the corner of his mouth.

Bagzent snarled. "Listen to me, Micronian," he started to say.

"No! You listen to me," Rick interrupted him. "We've given you

36

sanctuary and this is how you repay us?!"

The corners of Bagzent's mouth turned down. "I'm sorry," he

grumbled-not apologetically, but as if to say: I'm sorry it has to be this way.

Bagzent and his companion turned and began to walk off, but the third

Zentraedi stepped forward now, calling to them.

"Come back! You'll regret this! When we first came here, you thought

their culture was a great thing-you were so impressed by Minmei's songs."

The Zentraedis stopped for a moment as if considering this, then

continued their heavy-footed retreat.

"Stay and give it one more try!" the third was shouting. "It's worth the

effort, isn't it? We've come so far, we can't give up now!"

When he realized his words were having no effect, he added: "Stupid

cowards! Come back!"

Concealed from Lisa and the Luans, Minmei brought her hand to her

mouth to stifle her sadness and terror. When she could no longer contain

herself, she fled.

Lisa was at Rick's side now, watching the Zentraedis move stiffly away.

"They're getting more and more dissatisfied," said Rick, spitting blood.

"We're gonna have to do something."

"I wonder...what'll they do after they leave here?"

"I know one thing," the mayor interjected. "Whether they survive out in

that wasteland or not...we're responsible."

Rick spun around, angry and confused to find yet another sympathizer

in his midst. But the mayor stared him down.

"That's right, Rick," Luan said knowingly. "We haven't heard the last of

this."

37

CHAPTER FOUR

The mythologies of numerous Earth cultures identified north and the

arctic regions with evil and death. I don't believe it was convenience or

coincidence that led the militaristic heads of the Earth council to construct

their ill-fated Grand Cannon there; nor do I think that Khyron just happened

to land his ship there. As water seeks its own level, so does evil seek its own

place.

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

The mile-long alien cruiser lay buried under ice and snow, with only its

igloolike gun turrets visible above the frozen, howling surface. No squad of

Air Force personnel would come to investigate this one, nor would any

human-chain prophylactic magic circle be formed to contain its evil intent.

It was too late to watch the skies...

In the observation bubble inside the ship, Khyron, his burgundy

uniform and forest-green campaign cloak looking none the worse for wear

through two long years, leaped from the command chair as Gerao delivered

his latest report.

"Are you absolutely sure of this, Gerao?"

"I'm certain of it, m'lord," said Gerao, thrice lucky for having lived

through the explosion of the reflex furnaces on Mars, the holing of his ship

during a Daedalus Maneuver, and now the holocaust itself. He brought his

fist to his breast insignia in salute.

"Our spies have reported that thousands of dissatisfied Zentraedi are

leaving town after town. They are estimated to be around ten thousand, sir."

"Ah, splendid," said Khyron, clenching his right hand, the devilish eyes

of his handsome face peering from beneath blue bangs. "A most interesting

occurrence-well worth the two-year wait in this terrible place!"

Khyron, through either an act of prescient will or cowardice unheard of

among the Zentraedi, had absented his ship and crew from the battle that

38

had all but destroyed the last of his race. It certainly wasn't Khyron's plan to

bring Breetai and Dolza into confrontation, so why allow the Botoru

Battalion to get caught up in High Command's madness? All along Khyron

had maintained that the best way to handle Zor's ship was to destroy it.

Anyone should have been able to see that from the beginning. But instead

the fools had attempted to capture the fortress, unaware of the Micronian

malignancy spreading fast through the fleet. The existence of the

Protoculture matrix Zor's fortress was thought to contain was not, however,

so easily dismissed. Indeed, Khyron had saved himself for this greater

purpose; but the fact remained that his warship's precious fuel and weapons

supply were all but depleted.

He had hidden on the far side of the Earth during the catastrophic

explosion that had wiped out Dolza's four-million-ship armada-the armada

that had once made his race the most feared throughout the Fourth

Quadrant. Surely the Micronians had the traitors Breetai and Exedore to

thank for their success, although how those two had gained any knowledge

of the barrier shield's inversion capacity was beyond him. In all likelihood it

was a stroke of luck-and the judgment of fate for the Zentraedi.

Khyron had chosen to put down in the frozen wasteland of the

half-dead planet in the hopes of salvaging something from the Micronian's

reflex weapon, the so-called Grand Cannon. But nothing remained of it.

He was aware, however, that his elite group did not represent the last

of the Zentraedi; somewhere in the quadrant between Earth and Tirol, there

was Commandor Reno's ship, along with the automated Robotech factory,

still fabricating battle mecha for a handful of warriors. There were also the

contaminated Zentraedi from Breetai's fleet who had elected to stand

shoulder to shoulder with the Micronians. Khyron's own spies were at work

infiltrating this latter group, in addition to the renegade bands of Zentraedi

who had already abandoned the Earth population centers to inhabit the

wastes; and Khyron knew that someday soon they would prove to be his

allies. Then, Reno and Khyron would rebuild the Zentraedi war machine

with the help of the Masters themselves. And once the Earth was

39

incinerated, they would scour the quadrant for new worlds to conquer.

But first he needed to get his ship spaceworthy once again.

And now the word he'd been waiting for had finally come.

He turned to the one who had stood beside him through the long wait,

in defiance of the old ways, a symbol of the new order of things.

"Our faith is vindicated, my dear Azonia."

"Indeed," The former commander of the Quadrono Battalion smiled.

She was dressed like her lord, save that her cloak was blue. Her arms were

folded, and she wore an arrogant grin. When her own ship had been holed

by fire from Dolza's armada, it was Khyron who had come to her aid,

convincing her to abandon Breetai's forces and join him. "Let them battle it

out together," he had said. "We will live to see the rebirth of the Zentraedi!"

"Their taste for the Micronian life-style was only temporary," Khyron

was saying. "I knew that after a little while they'd grow tired of it. And you

see I was right!"

Two years under the ice and snow had brought a strange new closeness

between Azonia and her commander-a closeness that had more to do with

life than death: the stimulation of the senses, pleasure. Azonia believed it

had something to do with the planet itself-this Earth. But she kept these

thoughts to herself. If pleasure was the cause of the warriors' desertion, she

couldn't blame them-Miriya included, although it remained a puzzle why

she would bother to take a Micronian mate over a Zentraedi.

"Yes, Khyron," said the fourth Zentraedi in the command center-Grel,

who had been Khyron's trusted lieutenant through many long campaigns.

Azonia shook her fist, mimicking Khyron's gesture of determination.

"Now, look," she announced. "If things keep going as planned, we can put

together a battalion that I guarantee will take them!"

Khyron smiled to himself. It was only right that his underlings echo his

sentiments, but Azonia had a lot to learn. What could she guarantee, save

that Khyron would be victorious in the end? That Khyron would take them!

Nevertheless, he humored her without seeming patronizing.

"Yes, of course we shall."

40

The Backstabber moved to the comlink of the cruiser's command

bubble to address his troops, who had gathered in the astrogational hold

below.

"Now, listen, everyone," he began. "You needn't hide yourselves any

longer! You are Zentraedi warriors! I want you to see to it that our former

comrades are led here. Those who have established camps for themselves in

the wastelands and those who have yet to leave the Micronian population

centers. And I want you to tell all the micronized Zentraedi that if they join

us, I will return them to their original size so that they too may walk tall and

proud once again!"

The soldiers began to cheer their lord and savior with cries of "Long

live the Zentraedi, long live Khyron!"

Khyron's lips became a thin line as he took in the collective

outpourings of his troops.

Yes, he promised himself, he would return the Zentraedi to their

original size-their rightful place in the universe. And the destruction of this

planet would be his first step in that direction, including the destruction of

that secret weapon the Micronians had used so effectively against his race,

that weapon the deserters had learned to embrace: that Minmei!

Kyle gave another look at his wristwatch: seven forty-eight and she still

hadn't arrived.

He glanced out from the wings of the stage. It was a small crowd who

had gathered in Stone City's open-air amphitheater (half a dozen giant

Zentraedi in the far tiers, mesas and monoliths in the distance, a pink and

blue sunset sky) but a vocal one nonetheless, clapping and shouting now,

eager to bring Minmei on stage. The warm-up group was well into their

second set, but the audience had already tired of them halfway through the

first.

Kyle cursed himself for letting her out of his sight, especially after last

night's fight and that crazy stunt she had pulled on the Macross Highway.

"Hey, Kyle!" said someone behind him. There was an unconcealed note

41

of anger in the voice, and Kyle swung around ready for action, happy to vent

his own frustration and rage if the opportunity presented itself. Vance

Hasslewood, Minmei's booking agent, was striding down the corridor

toward him.

"What's the idea? Where the devil is Minmei?" Hasslewood demanded.

Hasslewood was wearing his customary aviator specs, a sweater-vested

white suit and tie, and a scowl on his clean-shaven face.

"Minmei'll be here," Kyle told him tiredly.

"But showtime's in just ten more minutes-you realize that?"

"She'll show," Kyle said more strongly. "Minmei is not the kind of

singer who ignores her obligations. You oughta know that by now,

Hasslewood."

"I do know that. But just the same, Kyle, I want her here at least half an

hour before showtime."

"She'll be here!" Kyle repeated, his patience' fading fast. He gestured to

the audience. "You know, you put on a pretty good act as a promoter,

Hasslewood-attracting an audience that size."

Hasslewood's nostrils flared. He was getting sick and tired of having to

answer to Kyle's demands and criticisms and was of half a mind to turn his

back on the whole deal. But he couldn't bear the thought of leaving Minmei

in the care of a hothead like Kyle. A drunk and degenerate-

"Hey, she's here!" a stagehand called out.

As Hasslewood turned. around, one of the band members ran up to

him.

"Minmei's here. She's in her dressing room," he told them, feeling it

necessary to point the way.

Kyle snorted and shouldered his way past Hasslewood. He didn't

bother to knock at the dressing room door, merely threw it open and

demanded:

"Where have you been?"

Minmei was putting on her face. She was wearing the same

off-the-shoulder ruffled blue dress she had worn at the supper club last

42

night.

"Sorry I'm late," she answered without turning around.

"I don't know why we're even bothering to do this gig-there's hardly

anyone out there. This is the pits."

"I don't care that much about the size of the audience," she said into

the mirror. "I'm through worrying about all this, Kyle. I'm just going to sing

for my fans, just the way I always have."

"What's with you?" he said, standing over her now.

Minmei shot to her feet and faced him. "You worry about our take, Kyle!

I'm just singing for myself, do you understand me? Just for myself!"

She pushed past him and left the room.

Her anger had taken him by surprise. Minmei just singing for herself?

he asked himself, then turned to the door with a sullen look.

He'd see about that.

Back in New Macross, Rick, Lisa, and Max and Miriya Sterling were

summoned to a briefing in Admiral Gloval's quarters aboard the SDF-1.

Hunter and Hayes had spent most of the day filling out reports concerning

that morning's incident with the Zentraedi malcontents. Rick was sore head

to foot from Bagzent's finger flick. Max and Miriya were sans Dana, their

child, for a change but joined at the hip nonetheless.

Gloval looked plain tired. Perhaps, as a former Earth hero had once

remarked, "it wasn't the years, it was the miles." He'd been spending more

and more of his time in the old ship, and on those rare occasions when he

did put in an appearance elsewhere, he seemed impatient and troubled.

Gone was the tolerant, accepting paternal figure who shared the sense of

fear and purpose that united the rest of them. In his place was a man of

secret purpose, bearing the weight of the world on his narrow shoulders.

Exedore, who in a sense had become his right-hand man, was also in

attendance.

"What I'm about to tell you is strictly confidential," Gloval told the four

RDF commanders. "Not a word of this is to leave this room. If it were to get

43

out, the damage would be catastrophic."

The old man was seated at his desk; behind him the clear starry night

poured in through the fortress's massive permaglass window.

The commanders responded with a crisp, "Yes, sir."

Exedore stepped forward to address them now, the whites of his eyes

practically glowing in the dim room.

"Yesterday, we finally spotted the Zentraedi automated Robotech

factory satellite. Space cruisers large enough to destroy the Earth with a

single blast are being constructed within the satellite." He caught their

gasps of surprise and hastened to add, "Yes, it is a terrible thing."

"Listen carefully," said Gloval, more harshly than was necessary. He

was standing now, palms flat against the desk. "I want you people to survey

that system and bring me additional data on the satellite."

The four commanders exchanged puzzled looks. There was something

the old man wasn't telling them-aside from answering how it was they were

supposed to get offworld-unless of course he was planning to recommission

the SDF-1 itself.

"Commander Breetai will fill you in on the details," Gloval explained

after a moment. "We have no way of knowing if and when the remaining

Zentraedi will attack us again, but for our own defense we have to have as

many space cruisers as we can lay our hands on." He turned to them now to

emphasize the point, "You understand that."

"Yes," Exedore said softly. His eyes were closed, his brow furrowed,

and one could almost believe that he felt a twinge of pain at the thought of

bringing warships to bear against his own kind once again.

Rick and the others voiced their assent: It not only meant that they

would be leaving the planet again, it meant that they would be relying on

the Zentraedi as well. And yet Gloval was right: It was for their own defense.

Minmei stepped onto the stage and grasped the microphone. Colored

spots played across the plank floor, until at last a single rose-toned beam of

light found and encompassed her in its warm glow. Her face was sad, blue

44

eyes wide and full of loss. The crowd was chanting, "We love Minmei, we

love Minmei," but all she could think about was Rick, Kyle, those giant

Zentraedi who had fought in the streets of New Macross only hours ago.

She felt as though she had failed everyone.

She had decided to scrap the first upbeat tune of the set and go

immediately into "Touch and Go," a laid-back number that started with a

simple piano and string riff and bass slide but grew somber and melancholy

at the F-sharp minor/C-sharp 7 bridge, with a sort of crying guitar

distortion punctuation backed by a stiff snare beat.

I always think of you,

Dream of you late at night.

What do you do,

When I turn out the light?

No matter who I touch,

It is you I still see.

I can't believe

What has happened to me.

Tears began to form in her eyes as she sang. The audience was

mesmerized by her performance. She sensed this and began to experience

an extraordinary sense of nostalgia and yearning, entering the tune's bridge

now:

It is you I miss.

It's you who's on my mind,

It's you I cannot leave behind.

If the connection could always be this strong, she said to herself. If only

she had the strength to will things right, and good, and peaceful. If only she

had the power to become that symbol once again, that perfect chord

everyone would vibrate to...

45

It's me who's lost-

The me who lost her heart-

To you who tore my heart

apart.

But loss was the world's new theme; loss and betrayal, anger and regret.

And what could she hope to achieve against such malignant power? She had

tried and failed, and the day would come soon when song itself was but a

memory.

If you still think of me

How did we come to this?

Wish that I knew

It is me that you miss

Wish that I knew

It is me that you miss...

46

CHAPTER FIVE

[The joint Terran/Zentraedi exploration of the SDF-1] was the only

occasion when Breetai allowed himself to undergo the micronization process

[prior to the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission to Tirol]. As soon as it became

obvious that Zor's prize [i.e., the Protoculture matrix] was likely to remain

hidden for some time longer, Breetai immediately had himself returned to full

stature. He had little of the curiosity for Micronian customs that Exedore had;

nor did he share the same fascination for Minmei that was responsible for so

many other deviations from the Zentraedi way. Breetai enjoyed being looked

up to...

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

Ground fog lay like spun sugar across Lake Gloval and swirled through

the early morning streets of New Macross like autumn ghosts. In the

shadow of the gargantuan dimensional fortress-like some techno-Neptune

protector-a three-stage rocket added its LOX exhaust to the mist. An RDF

shuttle (the same that had carried Lisa Hayes from the SDF-1 to Alaska Base

two years ago) was affixed. to the rocket's main booster pack.

In another part of the field, nine Veritechs were also holding in

preflight status. Each ship was outfitted with deep-space augmentation

pods and positioned atop individual blast shield transports.

The Shiva was fully primed for launch; gantries and attendance

vehicles had already been pulled back, and the sound of the countdown

Klaxons lent an eerie sound track to the scene.

In the control tower, techs ran last-minute crucial checks on the

shuttle's propulsion and guidance systems. Readouts flashed across myriad

monitor screens too quickly for the untrained eye to make sense of, and two

dozen voices talked at once but never at cross-purposes. Robotechnology

had simplified things substantially since the pioneering days of space travel,

but certain traditions and routines had been maintained.

47

"Calculations for orbital fluctuations have been received," one of the

shuttle crew said through the comlink "We have lock and signal, control."

"Shuttle escort," a male controller directed toward one of the Veritechs,

"we are at T minus fifty and counting. Your lift-off is at T three."

A second Veritech pilot was being questioned by a female tech: "Escort

V-oh-one-one-two, your gravitational tracking status is what? Please

clarify."

"Tower control," the pilot responded. "Uh, sorry about that. Little

snafu with the guidance switch, if you know what I mean..."

"Watch it next time, mister," the tech scolded him.

On the field Max and Miriya, strapped into their respective blue and

red Veritechs, went through final systems checks. Max flashed his wife a

thumbs-up from the cockpit as he lowered the tinted faceshield of his

helmet.

Evacuation warnings were being broadcast through the field PA: "All

ground support vehicles evacuate launch area immediately...All Veritechs

complete final systems check...We. are go for lift-off. Repeat-we are go for

lift-off...Countdown commencing-T minus thirty seconds..."

In Skull One, Rick surveyed the field as the transport's massive

hydraulic jacks lifted the Veritech to a seventy-two-degree launch angle.

Simultaneously a thick blast shield was elevated into position behind the

Veritech's aft rockets. Thinking about the importance of the mission, he was

overcome by a wave of nostalgia, a curious sense of homesickness for space.

He realized suddenly how disappointed he would have been had the admiral

left him out of this one...

"You are going to rendezvous with the Zentraedi flagship, " Gloval had

explained at the briefing. "Only at that time will you receive your final

instructions. I have put Commander Breetai in charge of this mission for

reasons that will become clear to you later."

Rick glanced over his shoulder at the Shiva, the shuttle piggyback on its

gleaming hull. It was amazing, he decided: going off to rendezvous with

Breetai, the Zentraedi who had once torn his Vermilion Veritech limb

48

from limb. He wondered if Lisa was remembering that time, that kiss...

"Shuttle to tower control...all systems on-line and awaiting green light."

"Roger, shuttle," the controller radioed to the crew. "Stand by..."

Inside the shuttle, Lisa leaned toward the permaglass porthole closest

to her seat. It was not an easy maneuver, but she hoped to catch a glimpse

of Rick's lift-off. One by one the Veritechs were being nosed up now...Max's,

Miriya's...Rick's...She pulled herself away from the view and sighed, loud

enough for Claudia and Exedore to hear her and inquire if she was all right.

It was a strange mixture of emotions that tugged at her thoughts: memories

of the time she'd spent in Breetai's ship and recent events that continued to

confuse her feelings. In some ways this return to the stars was less like a

mission than a vacation.

"Shuttle escort launch at signal zero-now!"

The Veritechs lifted off, the sound of their blasts like a volley of

thunderclaps echoing around the lake. Then, with a more continuous roar,

the Shiva rose from its pad, a fiery morning star in the scudded skies over

New Macross.

Breetai's ship, one-time nemesis and subsequent ally of the SDF-1, was

holding at a Lagrange point inside the lunar orbit. More than ten kilometers

in length, armored and bristling with guns like some nightmare leviathan,

the vessel had never put down on Earth. But teams of Lang's Robotechs,

working side by side with Zentraedi giants, had retrofitted the ship to

accommodate human crews. Elevators and air locks had been incorporated

into the hull; holds had been partitioned off into human-size work spaces

and quarters; automated walkways were installed; and the astrogation hold

now contained control consoles and the latest innovations from Lang's

projects-development labs. All this had been child's play for the Earth

techs-many of the same men and women who had overseen the original

conversion of the SDF-1, had later fabricated a city for 60,000 inside the

fortress itself, and were currently involved in the construction of the

SDF-2-but it had struck the Zentraedi (who had no understanding of the

49

Robotechnology bequeathed to them by the Masters) as near miraculous.

Now, while the shuttle craft carrying Exedore, Lisa, and Claudia

entered one of the flagship's docking bays, the nine Veritechs under Rick's

command were reconfiguring to Guardian mode and putting down in

formation on an external elevator. In the bay a human voice announced the

shuttle's arrival in English.

"All

personnel

in

docking

zones

D-twenty-four

and

D-twenty-five-attention: Micronian shuttlecraft now commencing final

docking procedures in upper landing bay."

The use of the term "Micronian" was no longer considered to be

pejorative, in spite of its derivation; it had simply come to mean

"human-size" as opposed to "microbelike." So Lisa and Claudia were not

fazed; nor was Rick, topside, when a shock trooper welcomed the Veritechs

aboard likewise.

The Zentraedi shock trooper stood a good sixty feet tall, but the fact

that he was wearing armor and a helmet suggested that he might be one of

the inferior class of warriors incapable of withstanding the vacuum perils of

deep space unless properly outfitted.

"Uh, thanks," Rick told him through the com net. "It's good to be here."

The trooper flashed him a grin and thumbs-up. "If you're ready, let's bring

her down," Rick added.

The giant proudly displayed a device in his gloved hand. He tapped in a

simple code, and the elevator began to drop into the ship.

Elsewhere, Lisa, Claudia, and Exedore exited the shuttle's circular

doorway and descended the stairway to the hold floor. Breetai was waiting

for them there, his blue uniform and brown tunic looking brand-new.

"My Micronian friends-welcome," his voice boomed.

Lisa looked up at him standing there with arms akimbo and found

herself smiling. These past two years had worked a subtle magic on the

commander. It was well known that he refused to micronize himself, but

merely working with humans had been enough to change him somehow,

soften him, Lisa thought. The gleaming plate that covered one side of his

50

face seemed more an adornment now than anything else.

Meanwhile Exedore had stepped forward and offered a stiff human

salute.

"Greetings and salutations, your Lordship. We are at your service."

Breetai bent down, a look of affection contorting his face. "It's good

seeing you, Exedore...It's nice to have you back on the ship."

Exedore must have noticed the change also, because he seemed

genuinely moved. "Why, uh, thank you, sir," he stammered.

Breetai turned to Claudia and Lisa, their upturned faces betraying

gentle amusement. "And I especially wish to extend a welcome to you," he

told them, making a gallant gesture with his hand. "I am deeply honored to

have you under my command."

Lisa, versed in Zentraedi protocol, returned: "It's a great honor, sir, to

have this opportunity."

Breetai came down on one knee to thank her. "As you know, my people

are unaccustomed to contact with beauty such as yours," he said flatteringly.

"So don't be offended by any strange reactions you may encounter."

Lisa and Claudia turned to each other and laughed openly as Breetai

drew himself up to full height again.

"Now then...if you'll permit, I'll show you to your quarters."

In the hangar space below the docking elevator, Max stood beneath

Miriya's scarlet Guardian. He called up to the open-canopied cockpit, "Okay,

that's it," signaling her with a wave of his hand. "Now bring the cradle pod

down."

Miriya activated the device only recently installed in her Veritech.

"Here it comes," she told him.

Servomotors whined, and a royal-blue cylindrical pod-which could

have passed for a turn-of-the-century bomb-began to drop from the rear

seat, riding a telescoping shaft down beneath the legs of the fighter.

A Robotech delivery, Max said to himself as he approached the pod. He

went to work disengaging fasteners, and in a minute the pod's blunt nose

51

swung open. Max peered inside the heavily padded interior, smiled, and

said, "There..."

He reached in and pulled Dana into his arms, a tiny wiggling astronaut

in a white helmet with tinted faceshield and a pink and white suit that fit

her like Dr. Dentons. Dana cooed, and Max hugged her to himself.

Miriya saw him step from beneath the Veritech with Dana cradled in

his arms. Max assisted Dana in a wave; Miriya smiled and felt her heart skip

a beat.

Breetai paced the observation bubble deck anxiously. Terran techs had

effected changes here as well. The bubble shield had been dismantled and

an openwork semicircular flattopped walkway installed in its place;

humansize consoles occupied a flyout platform at the center of the arc. In

addition, the circular monitor screen Max Sterling had once piloted a

Veritech through was back in one piece.

"Any fluctuations from the satellite factory?" Breetai inquired into one

of the binocularlike microphones.

"Negative," answered a synthesized voice. "Maintaining solar stasis."

"Notify me immediately of any change," he ordered.

"Yes, sir," the computer responded.

Breetai assumed the command chair and steepled his fingers. "Think,

Breetai-think of a plan," he said aloud, as demanding of himself as he was of

his troops. "If we are able to convince Reno that we have the Protoculture,

we

will

have

little

difficulty

in

securing

his

complete

cooperation...Otherwise, we will have quite a fight on our hands. Our forces

will be vastly outnumbered."

Claudia turned from her console and monitor station on the walkway.

"But we don't possess any Protoculture," she saw fit to remind him, her

console mike carrying her words to the commander. "How do we convince

him that we do...uuhh," clearing her throat here, her eyes going wide for an

instant, "assuming we're given the chance?"

Breetai grinned. "We'll have our chance," he said certainly. "But for

52

now, entering hyperspace is our immediate concern, wouldn't you say?"

Claudia traded looks with Lisa, seated at the adjacent station. It was

obvious now that Breetai's musings were not really meant for their ears at

all. Whatever the plan, it seemed likely they would be the last to know.

Max and Rick stood together on one of the moving walkways,

marveling at the changes the ship had undergone and reveling in memories

that time had rendered less severe.

"Hey, remember the last time we were on this ship?" asked Max.

"Heh! Being a prisoner wasn't much fun, was it?" said Rick, turning the

tables on his friend's obviously rhetorical query. "I'm sure glad things have

changed. I don't want to see Breetai on the other end of an autocannon ever

again!"

"Yeah, after serving under Admiral Gloval, it'll be interesting to see

what his ex-enemy's like."

"I just wish we knew more about this mission."

"Gloval asked me to bring my whole family along and left it at that."

Rick shook his head in puzzlement. "Why in space would the old man

want you to bring Dana along?"

Max shrugged. "I don't know, Rick, but I want you to understand

something: I won't put her in jeopardy, mission or no mission."

Rick looked at him squarely and said, "I won't let you."

"All polarities inside the reflex furnaces have become stabilized,

Commander," Claudia told Breetai from her station.

A confusing array of data scrolled across the monitor screens, a

mixture of English, Zentraedi glyphs, and the newly devised

equivalency-transcription characters-phonetic Zentraedi.

A Zentraedi tech reported to Claudia that fold computations were

complete, and she relayed to Breetai that all systems were go. "We can fold

any time you like, sir."

He thanked her, then raised his voice to a roar.

53

"Begin fold operation immediately!"

As the fold generators were engaged, Protoculture commenced its

magical workings on the fabric of the real world, calling forth from

unknown dimensions a radiant energy that began to form itself around the

ship like some shimmering amorphous aura, seemingly holing it through

and through. The massive vessel lurched forward into a widening pool of

white light; then it simply vanished from its Lagrange point, for one brief

instant leaving behind globular eddies and masses of lambent animated

light, lost moments in somewhere else's time.

54

CHAPTER SIX

Up until the end of the Second Robotech War (how Pyrrhic, how

bittersweet that victory!), Protoculture was literally in the employ of the

Robotech Masters; not only did it in effect keep tabs on itself for their benefit,

but alerted them to changes in the fabric of the continuum. Not a single

Zentraedi ship could fold without their being made aware of it.

Dr. Emil Lang, as quoted in

History of the Second Robotech War, Vol. CCCLVII

Yes...I feel it...

The three Masters linked minds and once more laid their bony hands

against the Protoculture cap. The mushroom-shaped device reacted to their

touch, radiating that same pure light which spilled into the known universe

when Breetai's ship had folded. The cap took them through the inverse

world, through white holes and rifts in time, allowing them to see with an

inner vision.

They were no longer in their space fortress now, but back on their

homeworld, back on Tirol.

-Our former charges have allied themselves with Zor's descendants;

our former charges would replace us as Masters.

-We must try again to resurrect a simulacrum of Zor.

Twenty clones had been created from Zor's body; they had been grown

to maturity in biovats and held weightless in a stasis sphere. All matched his

elfin likeness: handsome, dreamers all of them, youthful and graceful. But

none of them had the spark of life that would replicate his thoughts and

mind, that would allow the Masters to learn the whereabouts of the

Protoculture matrix and the secrets of that rare process.

The Masters left the cap and stood gazing up at the stasis sphere that

housed the remaining clones.

"I suggest we begin the prion synthesis immediately," said one of the

55

Masters.

Away from the Protoculture cap they were forced to rely on ordinary,

primitive speech to convey their thoughts.

"Yes, Master," a synthesized voice responded.

Three Masters positioned themselves around a saucerlike device fitted

with numerous color-coded sensor pads grouped circumferentially around a

central viewscreen, while a visible antigrav beam conveyed one of the

lifeless clones from the stasis hemisphere of a circular Notable. The clone

was placed flat on its back on it, as if it were resting on a sheet of pure light.

The three Masters placed their hands on the saucer's control pads.

Roller-coaster-like readouts, hypermed schematics and X-ray displays

began to flash across the circular viewscreen beneath them. Meanwhile the

unmoving clone was bathed in a fountain of high-energy particles that rose

from the Notable like an inverted spring rain.

"Altering positronic bombardment," said the gold-cowled Master,

frowning as he watched the disappointing displays take shape.

"There's some bilateral cellular inversion," observed a second, the same

one who had called for prison synthesis. "Commencing symphysis..." he

announced, the sensor pads flashing like a light box.

The Masters concentrated, focusing the powers of their telepathic will,

then broke off their attempts momentarily.

The clone showed no signs of cerebral activity.

"Cranial synapses are still not responding...There is the same

disintegration of molecular substructures as in previous attempts."

"Yes, it has happened again...This time I think we'vetaken the clone

from the suspension before complete maturation...We must stimulate its

life function regardless," the red-cowled Master said, leaving the saucer

pod.

"I suggest we alter the prionic bombardment of the upper strata," said

the third Master.

Master two nodded his head and moved his left hand to a new location

along the control rim. "We'll try...Augmenting prionic bombardment in

56

increments of four..."

"Positronic emission is at maximum capability!" observed the third, his

arms at his sides.

"Good-cellular agitation is critical..."

Still the clockwork schematics revealed no activity.

"It is useless...We are down to the minimum suspension material-we

cannot waste it like this."

"Life is such an elementary process," said the first, standing over the

now useless clone, its neural circuits fried. "Where have we gone wrong?"

Miriya relaxed back into the couch and sighed, her fingers playing

absently with Dana's curls. Would she keep her dark hair? Miriya wondered;

each day it seemed to be growing lighter and lighter...

The baby was peacefully asleep on her breast, and just looking at her, it

was all Miriya could do to keep from weeping for joy. A miracle, she told

herself ten times a day: that she and Max could produce such innocent

loveliness; that she, a former warrior, could feel this way about anyone or

anything. Such unknown contentment and pure rapture.

"Max." She smiled. "Look at our child. She's so peaceful."

Max glanced out from the kitchenette of their quarters aboard Breetai's

ship. He was carrying a trayful of tall cocktail glasses to the sink-the

aftermath of an afternoon's partying with Rick, Lisa, and Claudia-and

wearing a knee-length apron that read: MAX AND MIRIYA: LIVE!

Peaceful and beautiful, both of them, he said to himself. But while

Miriya seemed to be having all the fun, he was the one who was stuck with

all the dishes and the cooking and more than half the time the midnight

feedings.

So what he said to her in the end, without betraying any of these

thoughts and just grateful for a few minutes of blessed peace, was:

"Yeah...but we'd better keep our voices down or we'll wake her up."

Rick, Lisa, and Claudia were a somewhat unsteady trio returning to

57

their quarters after the afternoon drinks they'd shared with the happy

couple. Combined with the thrill of deep space (after so many planetbound

months) and the effects of hyperspace travel, the drinks had left them with

more than an ordinary buzz.

"...and I held little Dana the whole afternoon, and she didn't cry a bit

the entire time!" Lisa was saying.

"Yes, but I don't think Miriya should have thrown Dana to you. She has

to learn to be more careful!"

Lisa nodded, biting her lower lip. "Well, it's an adjustment for her.

After all, her role model was probably the neighboring test tube."

Claudia cracked a smile in spite of herself and looked over Lisa's head

at Rick, but he was too bleary-eyed to catch her gaze. "Sometimes I envy

Max and Miriya for just having such a beautiful little girl," she said loudly.

"Mm-hmmm," Lisa agreed.

They had reached Lisa's quarters now, and Rick was standing off to one

side vaguely thinking about how he was going to spend the rest of the day,

while Lisa and Claudia exchanged good-byes. Suddenly Lisa turned to him

and said: "Rick, I'm going to walk Claudia to her quarters, but if you have a

minute, I'd like you to wait in my room for me-there's something I want to

talk to you about."

Her request somehow managed to cut through all the cotton inside his

head, and he found himself stammering, "Uhh...but..." all the while knowing

that there was no way around it. It just didn't seem like she had official

business on her mind, and he wasn't at all sure he was up to a

heart-to-heart.

Claudia cleared her throat. "May I remind you, Mr. Hunter, that Lisa is

your superior."

"But I'm off duty," Rick protested, definitely not in top form today.

"So is she," Claudia laughed, throwing him an exaggerated wink.

The two of them left Rick standing there with some half-formed reply

caught in his throat while they continued on down the corridor sharing a

whispered exchange.

58

"Now then, Lisa, what can I do for you?" Claudia asked when they were

some steps away.

"I just wanted to thank you for being understanding these past few

weeks. It really helps to have someone to lean on."

"I know what you mean," Claudia said at the door to her quarters. "It

can be rough sometimes-when you find you're in love."

Lisa still grew a little wide-eyed at hearing it stated so matter-of-factly.

She blinked and swallowed hard, ready to defend herself, but Claudia cut

her off.

"Go get him, okay?" A wink for Lisa also, and she was through the door.

Inside, she dropped herself on the bed and kicked off her heels, sighing:

I hope those two get it together soon. Lisa had a habit of pushing

"understanding" to the limit. And Hunter...Hunter was starting to remind

her of Roy in his early days. And that wasn't necessarily a good sign.

Alone in Lisa's quarters Rick felt nervous and trapped. His superior,

huh? Just how long was he going to have to put up with that remark?

Almost three years ago-on this very ship! Lisa had used that remark, and he

had held it against her ever since.

Lisa had unpacked some of her things, and Rick was wandering around

inspecting this and that when he saw a framed photograph on the room's

desk. He picked it up and regarded it. By the look of it, it had to have been

taken ten years ago. But here was Lisa looking cute in short hair and chubby

face, standing alongside an older guy, taller than she was by a foot and

wearing what looked to be an Afghani woven cap. Nice-looking couple, he

decided. But there was something familiar about him...something that

reminded him of...Kyle! Then this had to be Riber, Rick realized. Karl Riber,

Lisa's onetime true love, who had bought it along with Mars Sara Base years

ago.

His attention was so fixed on the photo that he didn't hear Lisa enter

the room. She realized this and stood in the doorway a moment, not

wanting to startle him or make him uncomfortable. Finally she called his

59

name softly, and he reacted like a sneakthief caught in the act, dropping the

photo sideways to the desk and apologizing.

"Oh, I'm sorry, Lisa. I didn't mean to snoop."

This angered her: after all they had been through together, after all the

time they had spent together, sharing secret thoughts and feelings, after all

the time she had spent at his place in New Macross familiarizing herself

with his things...

"What do you mean 'snoop'? I have nothing to hide from you, Rick. Be

my guest, look around-not that there's much here..."

"Uh, sure," he said, at a loss. "So, uh, what did you and Claudia have to

say?"

Lisa dismissed her conversation with Claudia as nothing special and

asked him if he wanted some tea. "You know, just a little chat," she told him

from the kitchenette.

Rick righted the photo when she left the room. He joined Lisa on the

couch afterward.

"Didn't sound like just a little chat to me," he braved to say, tea cup in

hand.

"Well, as a matter of fact, we were talking about you."

Rick squirmed in his seat. "If it concerns me and Minmei, I don't want

to hear about it!"

"It wasn't at all about Minmei," she said cheerfully. "What would I

possibly want to talk about her for?"

Lisa was unpracticed at this sort of thing and wished for a second that

Claudia could stand over her shoulder during moments like these, feeding

her the right lines or something. But oddly enough, Rick was apologizing for

his tone.

"Minmei and I haven't seen much of each other in several months,

and..."

"Oh, Rick," she said, perhaps too tenderly. "I know how you feel about

her, so...well, there's nothing more to say about it."

Acceptance was the one tack she hadn't tried yet.

60

Rick breathed a sigh and was puzzling over how he could just politely

excuse himself, when Lisa added:

"I don't know why, but I get the feeling sometimes that you...well, that's

there's something you want..."

Who doesn't? Rick asked himself, wondering just what she was getting

at now.

"What are you talking about?"

She made an exasperated sound. "Rick, you know what I-"

The PA chose just that moment to intervene: A female voice was calling

Lisa to the bridge.

Frustrated, Lisa said, "The usual perfect timing," then laughed. "You've

managed to escape unscathed once again." She stood up and bade him a

resigned good-bye. "We'll try this again some other time."

Rick reacted as if a dentist had just told him to make another

appointment.

Claudia had also been summoned to the bridge. She stood stiffly with

Lisa now on the automated walkway that was actually the curved top rail of

the observation bubble, her back to the astrogation hold. The ship had

unexpectedly defolded from hyperspace, and they were once again feeling a

bit shaky.

Exedore was manning one of the human-size duty stations. Breetai was

seated in his command chair, a grim look on his face. When Lisa said,

"Reporting as ordered," he uttered a throaty growl and inclined his head a

fraction to the left, as if to indicate the object of his attention.

Claudia and Lisa about-faced and eyed an image now filling the

rectangular field of the projecbeam. It was like nothing either of them had

ever seen-a twisted convoluted dark mass of armor, tentacles, reflex

thruster ports, and sensor devices, smoothed and eroded-looking along its

dorsal side, like a monstrous hunk of extraterrestrial driftwood.

"What in space is that?" Claudia asked.

"That, my dear Commander Grant, is a ship from our reconnaissance

61

force-a fairly late model if I'm not mistaken."

"B-but I've never seen anything like it!" Lisa exclaimed.

"That is not unlikely," Breetai told her.

Lisa turned to Exedore and ordered a status report.

"I have made a positive identification, and it is in fact a late-model

reconnaissance vessel. It has been somewhat modified for hyperspace travel.

Moreover, our scanners indicate no biological activity whatsoever."

Lisa noticed the concerned look on his face as he studied the image and

attendant glyphic readouts. Sectional views and close-ups of salient features

of the thing flashed across his monitor screen to illustrate his report.

Lisa sucked in her breath and turned to Breetai once more.

"Commander, we have to investigate!"

"That is completely out of the question," he snapped.

"Sir," she tried, "isn't it possible your scanning systems may have

missed something? Perhaps there are Zentraedi aboard? Isn't there any

margin for error?"

She didn't believe a word of it, and judging from the look on Exedore's

face, neither did he. But it was possible there were weapons aboard-pods,

tri-thrusters something the Earth forces could use to beef up their arsenal.

"The information assimilated is in accordance with the galactic code,"

Exedore told her sternly. "'Errors' are not possible."

"We can't waste an opportunity like this-we must investigate!" she

answered him, filing away "galactic code" for some future discussion. "The

possibility of Zentraedi-"

"Your compassion is commendable," Exedore interrupted, still

unconvinced. "However, it looks to me as though the vessel could be a trap."

"A trap?!"

"Yes," he continued. "We Zentraedi are known for such 'Trojan horses,'

as you call them. It is not wise to take such a risk."

Claudia decided to step in. "He's right-we can't jeopardize the mission,

Lisa."

"I suppose..." she said uncertainly.

62

"It is worse then you realize," Breetai intoned behind her. "This vessel

belongs to the Robotech Masters. It is one of many which act as their eyes

and ears."

The Robotech Masters, Lisa exclaimed to herself.

"You're saying that they could monitor our presence."

Breetai grunted. "I fear they already have."

63

CHAPTER SEVEN

Your Earth scientists are a fanciful lot: all this talk about time travel,

relativity, looking through a telescope and being able to see the back of your

own head...I suppose it all looked good on paper.

Exedore, as quoted in Lapstein's

Interviews

Defolding from hyperspace once again, Breetai's flagship materialized

in real time hundreds of parsecs from Earth.

If the image of the Robotech surveillance vessel had awed Lisa, the

form and appearance of the automated factory satellite positively stunned

her. It had the same vegetal look as the smaller vessel, the same external

convolutions, cellular armor, and incomprehensible aspect, but all

similarities ended there. The satellite was enormous, almost organically

rose-colored in starlight, shaped in some ways like a primate brain, with at

least half a dozen replicas of itself attached to the factory's median section

by rigid stalklike transport tubes. In orbit around it were hundreds of

Zentraedi craft: dreadnoughts, battle mecha, and Cyclops recons.

"My dear colleagues," Breetai announced as a closeup of the factory

appeared in the projecbeam field, "we have arrived."

Lisa, Claudia, and Exedore looked up from their duty stations.

"It's incredible!" Claudia exclaimed breathlessly.

Lisa made a sound of amazement. "Whatever powers created that must

be light-years beyond us," she said softly, recalling her first glimpse of

Dolza's command center and the surveillance vessel they had left behind

only hours ago. "It's still hard to believe that such things exist in our

universe."

"Well, all I can say is you better believe it, Commander," Max Sterling

chimed in from Lisa's monitor, his helmeted image filling the screen. Max

and Miriya's Veritechs were in position on the docking bay elevator,

preparing for launch.

64

Lisa went on the com net. "Max, remember: You must convince Reno

that we possess the Protoculture."

"Right, Captain." He saluted and signed off.

"Exedore," Breetai said from behind Lisa. "Summon Commander

Hunter to the bridge immediately."

Lisa swiveled in her seat to face the commander while Exedore carried

out the order.

"What do you have in mind, Commander?" she asked him.

Breetai showed a roguish smile. "I must apologize for not having

informed you sooner, but you are of course aware that diversionary tactics

will be necessary if our plan is to be successful."

"I support the tactic," she said warily. "But I thought we had agreed to

broadcast Minmei's voice."

"Correct," he responded, suddenly turning to Exedore. "However, we

have devised a small modification."

Lisa didn't like the sound of it, especially when she saw Exedore return

the commander's grin and add, "Your Lordship, that was your plan from the

beginning, was it not?"

Breetai issued a short laugh. He was pleased to see that his adviser had

not been completely changed by the Micronian ways; Exedore still refused

to take credit for a plan, even when his inspirations had guided it.

"Your modesty equals your intelligence," Breetai told him. Then,

turning again to Lisa: "Captain, we have decided that the kiss would be a

more effective counterattack. Wouldn't you agree?"

Lisa's eyes went wide and unfocused; she began to slump down in her

chair, her stomach in knots. "Umm...I suppose..." she managed.

"I'm sure you recall the extraordinary effect produced when you and

Commander Hunter touched lips," Breetai was saying.

Claudia meanwhile had left her station and was coming Lisa's way, a

sly smile already in place. "Liisaaa..." she said playfully, putting her hand on

her friend's shoulder. "Come on, Captain, can't you see it's a brilliant plan!

Nothing to get upset about."

65

Lisa was staring blankly at the monitor. Plan? she asked herself. Yeah,

but what plan were they all talking about: the one to fool the Zentraedi Reno,

or were these galactic events suddenly taking second place to a universal

conspiracy meant to bring her and Rick together?

"Lord Breetai," a Zentraedi voice announced. "A transmission from

Commander Reno. Shall I put it through, sir?"

Breetai raised himself out of the command chair.

"Yes. And use the translator so that our friends can understand him."

Reno's face and shoulders took shape in the projecbeam field. A

swarthy male with large eyes, dark busy brows, and a square jaw, Reno wore

a blue uniform with red piping and a green command tunic. He opened with

formalities, although wariness was suggested by both his voice and his

stance.

"Welcome," he told Breetai, the English translation out of synch with

the movements of his full lips. "It has been a long time, Commander."

"Indeed," said Breetai flatly. They hadn't seen each other since that

fateful day long ago when Zor had been killed; when Dolza had ordered

Reno to return the scientist's body to the Masters; when Zentraedi and

Invid had fought to the death...Breetai unconsciously stoked the faceplate

that concealed scars from those less confused times...

"Do you come as friend or foe?"

"We have retrieved the Protoculture matrix from Zor's dimensional

fortress, Reno. Our powers are limitless. I have come to demand that you

surrender the satellite to me. Join me and my friendship is yours. Oppose

me and perish."

Reno snorted. "So you've stolen Zor's science, have you?...And of

course you and your new Micronian playmates plan to keep it from the

Masters...Any other amusing anecdotes you wish try relate, Breetai?"

The commander smiled knowingly. "Actually, I do have something else

you might enjoy-it should be arriving at any minute."

"I'll attempt to contain my boundless excitement," Reno responded

66

sarcastically.

Rick was at just that moment arriving on the bridge. He saluted Breetai

from the curved walkway.

"Right on time," said the pleased commander. He turned to Reno and

issued his ultimatum: "This is your last opportunity to comply."

"Ridiculous!" Reno started to say. "The very fact that you have rejected

the ways of the Robotech Masters indicates-" But his own projecbeam now

closed on Lisa and Rick standing together on the walkway. Reno's bushy

brows went up. "What?! A female talking to a male?!"

Breetai's one eye sparkled. "Yes, that's right, Commander. And

now..."-like a master of ceremonies-"if you watch closely, you will witness

the strange and glorious freedom that comes from Protoculture."

Rick meanwhile was baffled, casting confused looks to Breetai and the

projecbeam image of Reno. He turned hopelessly to Lisa and whispered,

"What the heck is going on?"

"It's all right," Lisa said soothingly.

Rick stiffened. If Lisa was telling him it was all right, he was really

worried!

"Max," Miriya said over the tac net after hearing him laugh, "is there

any chance Rick won't go along with the change in the diversionary tactics?"

Their Veritechs were wing to wing in deep space, closing fast on Reno's

command ship, thrusters blue in the eternal night. The drama on the bridge

was being carried over the com net.

"I don't think I'm going to like this one little bit," Rick was grumbling.

Max grinned. "Don't worry about him, Miriya. Remember: Rick Hunter

is a professional." The humor was of course lost on her.

Miriya recognized Lisa's voice now: "Yes, mister, I'm making it an

order!"

"It's his job to take orders," she heard Max comment. He's so serious,

she thought. Perhaps there was another side to kissing that she wasn't

aware of-some strategic method Max had yet to teach her. As a mother she

67

was somewhat alarmed; but the warrior and fighter ace was downright

angered. This was, after all, a dangerous mission they were flying. There

might not be another opportunity...

"Do you think we'll ever have a chance to touch lips again, Max?"

Max regarded her red-suited image on his commo screen and smiled.

"I promise we will," he assured her.

"The Veritechs are within range of the tracking systems now," Claudia

reported from her duty station.

"Commence broadcast," Breetai told Exedore, ignoring for a moment

the minor battle that was in progress on the walkway below him.

"No, Lisa!" Rick was shouting. "I'm not going to consent to the kiss,

orders or no orders! I'm sorry, but my mind is made up!"

Diversionary tactic, Rick said to himself with distaste. Of all the cheap

shots Lisa could have taken! Just something to divert him from thinking

about-

Minmei?!

Rick blinked: Minmei's "Stagefright" was booming over the bridge PA

system, and he seemed to be the only one surprised by it.

Although that wasn't quite true: Reno's crew wasn't prepared for this,

either. Nor had they the chance to become gradually accustomed to singing,

as Breetai's crew had. Consequently, they reacted as though a combination

of nerve gas, high-frequency sound, and unbridled electricity had suddenly

been leveled against the ship.

"Aaargh! Blast it!" screamed Reno, throwing his hands up to his ears.

"Can't stand it!" yelled his crew members, who were dropping like flies

at their duty stations.

"No more!" Reno pleaded. "Please turn it off!"

It never failed to amaze Rick that Minmei's voice could elicit such

contrary responses from beings who supposedly had common ancestors;

but he had scarcely a moment to dwell on it. Lisa had grabbed him by the

shoulders and was now putting all she had into offensive osculation. And

68

whew! this was a different Lisa from the one who'd kissed him

closed-mouthed in front of Breetai three years ago!

"Well, Reno," Breetai was saying at the same time, a self-satisfied smile

on his face, "perhaps this will please you."

Reno, who had averted his gaze from the projecbeam, turned back to it

now that Breetai had lowered that "sound weapon." But the image that

greeted his eyes was even more debilitating: Here were two Micronians...

"-touching lips??!!" Reno wailed. He stared at the field, nauseated by

confusion and some feeling even more alien to his system. From the ship's

astrogation hold came shrills of protest, pain, and caterwauling. Reno

covered his eyes with his hand: He had barely enough strength to deactivate

the projecbeam and felt close to fainting when he managed to do so. Below

him, several of his troops had collapsed. But he would never admit to

defeat.

"Breetai," he said into the mike, his voice a harsh croak. "That display

gained you nothing."

Breetai looked exulted nonetheless, ready to lay down his trump card

now.

"Reno has discontinued transmission," a tech informed him.

Then Claudia relayed that the Veritechs were approaching their

mission objective.

"Contact in three seconds..."

Reno was just regaining his composure when a fiery explosion

breached the starboard hull of the astrogation hold, the force of it throwing

several of his goliath crewmen clear across the vast chamber. He cursed and

at the same time complimented Breetai for the brilliant execution of his

plan; his diversionary tactics-those Micronian secret weapons-having

completely disarmed his crew. Regardless, he had the presence of mind to

bellow:

"Attack alert!"

On Breetai's ship, Claudia updated that the Veritechs had made a

69

successful entry.

"The baby is with Max and Miriya," Lisa said worriedly to a still dazed

and confused Rick.

"Huh?!" he stammered in response, promising this was the last time

he'd permit himself to be so far removed from mission planning.

When the smoke and fire had been sucked from the hold of Reno's ship,

the hull self-repaired, and two Micronian battle mecha, one red, one blue,

rested side by side on the deck, fully encircled by Zentraedi troops wielding

pulsed-laser rifles.

"All units prepare to destroy Micronian fighters on my command!"

Reno growled, his troops snapping to and arming their weapons. He asked

himself just what Breetai was hoping to gain by the insertion of such a small

strike force, then directed his orders to the pilots of the Veritechs, using

what little he knew of their language. "Micronians! You are completely

surrounded! Surrender immediately and you will be allowed to live!"

The augmentation packs of the fighters elevated.

"This is it, Max," Miriya said over the net. "Wish me luck."

"You've got it," Max returned. "Everything'll be fine-I'm right here."

From the observation bubble high above the deck, Reno watched as the

canopy of the red fighter went up. The Micronian pilot stood up and

removed its helmet, shaking its long green mane free. Reno's mouth fell

open when the Micronian spoke.

"I am not a Micronian," Miriya announced in Reno's own tongue, "but

a micronized Zentraedi warrior."

Reno didn't doubt it for a second; in fact, he recognized her. "You are

Miriya Parino!" he said in disbelief. "You were second in command under

Azonia!"

Miriya pointed to Max's Veritech. "Allow me to present Lieutenant

Maximillian Sterling, an officer with the Earth Forces...and my mate. "

Max removed his "thinking cap" and stood up in the cockpit.

"What is this thing, 'mate'?" Reno was asking. "He is merely a

Micronian."

70

Max said loud enough for Miriya to hear: "Show him the baby."

And Miriya did just that, lifting Dana from the cockpit and raising her

into view. The infant was cradled in her arms, wearing the same helmet and

Dr. Dentons EVA suit.

For a moment Reno didn't know what he was looking at, but there was

something about the thing that filled him with fear nonetheless. From his

vantage it appeared to be some sort of...micronized, Micronian!

"But this is impossible!"

His rough and ready troops were similarly nonplussed.

"What is that thing?" one asked.

"By the twelve moons-it's deformed."

"Look-it moves!"

"A mutant!" someone insisted.

In an effort to rub her eyes, Dana had brought her tiny gloved fists up

to the helmet faceshield.

Miriya resumed, "In the Micronian language, this is what's called an

'infant'-actually created inside my own body. By both of us," she hastened to

add, indicating Max.

Max nodded, humbly, and smiled.

"It is love that is the basis of Protoculture," Miriya continued. She lifted

Dana over her head, the baby smiling and cooing in response. "You cannot

conquer love!"

Reno's face began twitching uncontrollably at Miriya's mention of the

shibboleth-Protoculture!

Still holding Dana aloft, Miriya pivoted through a 360-degree turn,

preaching to the full circle. "Observe the power of Protoculture-the power of

love!"

"It's a mutation," one of the troops shouted, letting his weapon fall and

fleeing the hold.

"It's contagious!" said another, also fleeing.

More discarded weapons crashed to the deck.

Dana, innocent, continued to wave her arms and smile.

71

Overcome, the troops began to desert their posts.

Beads of sweat pouring from his face, Reno was ranting into the mike:

"Stay where you are, you cowards! Come back! It must be a trick!"

Ultimately he backed away, turned, and ran from the observation bubble.

72

CHAPTER EIGHT

Love, like size, had lost all meaning-love was a battle maneuver, kissing

a diversionary tactic. The only one among us who seemed to know anything

about that elusive emotion was Miriya, wedded to the infant she'd given birth

to as much as she was Max.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

Reports from Max and Miriya verified the success of the third stage of

the ruse.

Breetai reasoned (correctly, as it would unfold) that Reno would retreat

just far enough from the cruiser's command center to restabalize himself

and sound general quarters. It was possible that the three-act tactic had

convinced him to surrender-and indeed, Breetai was more than willing to

give him the benefit of the doubt before mounting a full-scale assault on the

heavily guarded satellite-but unlikely.

At her duty station well below Breetai's thoughtful look, Claudia Grant

laughed. "I can't imagine why Reno's crew reacted like that," she was telling

Lisa Hayes. "I think Max and Miriya's baby is pretty cute, don't you?"

"Oh, stop it, Claudia," said Lisa.

Breetai noticed that Commander Hunter appeared somewhat

debilitated by the kiss he performed with Lisa before he had rushed from

the bridge. It was no wonder that Hunter had expressed such initial

reluctance, Breetai thought. Obviously, kissing is something not to be taken

lightly.

"None of you should underestimate the opposition's capability,"

Breetai warned the humans now, putting a quick end to the jokes. "Inform

your mecha pilots to stand by."

Claudia followed through immediately, ordering Blue, Green, and

Brown teams to their launch platforms. And not a minute later Max

reported that Reno had called for a counterstrike; he and Miriya were going

73

to make a break for it.

Dana! Claudia recalled, suddenly full of concern.

"Launch all mecha!" Breetai bellowed.

Human and Zentraedi mecha launched themselves from the warship's

bays while the vessels of Reno's fleet massed for attack.

Rick led his small squad of seven Veritechs against them, side by side

with the Zentraedi's ostrich-like Battlepods, tri-thrusters, and pursuit ships.

Two years had passed since he had engaged any enemy in deep space, but it

suddenly felt like no time had elapsed. The silence, the zero-g spherical

explosions that bloomed in the night like flowers of death, the eerie glow of

thruster fire, the disinterested shimmer of starlight, the cacophony that

poured into his helmet through the tactical net-a hallucinatory symphony of

panicked commands, frenzied warnings, and final screams.

He knew that he would need to clear his mind of all thoughts, righteous

and otherwise, to come through this unscathed. Out here thoughts were a

pilot's number one enemy, because they invariably impeded productive

interface with the Veritech. So he let it all go-the questions still there after

four years of combat, the faces of those left behind-and the mecha picked up

that vibe transmitted through the sensor-studded gloves and "thinking cap"

to its Protoculture heart and led him once more through hell's gates.

"I don't want your excuses!" Reno screamed, slamming his fist down on

the substation console-an elaborate control center even by Zentraedi

standards, salmon-colored and organic in design with no less than a dozen

circular monitor screens. "Now order your troops to battle stations! Do you

understand?!"

The face of Reno's red-haired lieutenant seemed to blanch in the

projecbeam. He raised his shaking hands into view.

"But sir, our troops are terrified of Micronian contamination!"

"Nonsense!" howled Reno. "You have your orders: Destroy the infected

mecha at once! I have spoken!"

74

"We are within range, m'lord," Exedore reported calmly.

Breetai regarded the projecbeam. Reno's fleet had foolishly formed up

on the commander's own cruiser, now itself bracketed in Breetai's deadly

sights. So much the easier, then, he said to himself.

At one time the strength of Breetai's conditioning would have made

such a thing impossible, but the Zentraedi imperative had been altered

beyond recognition by the campaign directed against Zor's dimensional

fortress. To remain on the side of the Robotech Masters was to be Breetai's

enemy.

"On my command, Exedore..." said the commander.

Skull One's lateral thrusters edged the Veritech out of the

arena-momentarily. There were still half a dozen Battlepods on his tail

crosshatching space with angry bolts of cannon fire, and these guys were on

his side! The nonallied pods were of course a concern, but the crazed

random firing of Breetai's troops was life-threatening! From the sound of

the shrieks and comments coming through the net, Rick knew that he

wasn't alone in his fear.

Now, with no advance warning from the bridge, the warship's main

cannon had been armed. Pinpoints of dazzling light had erupted across the

blunt nose of the battlewagon; in a moment, Rick knew from previous

battles, a lethal slice of orange death would streak from each of these, holing

their targets with an immeasurable force.

Breetai's ship was within point-blank range of Reno's, taking aim at the

bow of the smaller ship where the bridge and astrogational section were

located. Rick went on the tac net, warning his fellow pilots to steer clear,

and voiced a prayer that Max and Miriya had escaped safely.

The Robotech factory satellite, its secondary modules like small moons,

spun slowly on its axis-a small world unto itself, barely visible now in the

blinding light of a thousand small novas.

Miriya held Dana in her lap, her right hand gripping the Veritech's

75

Hotas. Flashes of stroboscopic light threw flaming reds and blazing yellows

into the cockpit. In no other battle (and there had been many) had she been

possessed by such fury. Even that on-and-off dogfight she had waged

against Max couldn't measure up to the intensity and need she now felt. It

was as though her entire body was rallying to the cause; as though the small

life she held in her arms was a treasure more precious than any the universe

could offer, a life worth preserving at all costs...

She and Max had blasted free of Reno's ship, but they were far from

safe.

"Enemy projectiles bearing 977L!" Claudia told her through the com

net, the alarm in her voice unmasked. "Two triple-fins attempting

interception!"

"Watch it, Max!" said Miriya, as concerned for his safety as she was for

Dana's. "I've got them!"

She thumbed the trigger button on the Hotas, releasing four

white-tipped heat-seekers, which tore from the Veritech's missile tubes.

They found one of the trithrusters, blowing it to pieces, while the second

craft disappeared beneath Miriya's own. She engaged the underside lasers

as the enemy made its pass, the intensified light searing open the cockpit of

the triple-fin, decommissioning it.

Miriya heard Max breathe a sigh of relief and thank her.

She returned the sigh and clutched Dana more tightly to herself, the

infant waving her arms joyously at the fiery spectacle.

"Fire!" said Breetai.

A rain of supercharged energy ripped from the nose of the warship,

converging on Reno's ship, individual bolts tearing through it as if it wasn't

there. And in scarcely a second, it wasn't-its superstructure flayed and bow

blown open beyond self-repair.

Like a whale swallowing a stick of dynamite, Rick decided. He

imagined Reno's swift death: energy brilliant as blizzard snow wiping him

from life...

76

"Dead ahead!" one of his wingmen said through the net.

Rick looked forward into a swarm of Officer's Pods, triple-fins, and

tactical Battlepods.

"Fire all proton missiles on my command," he told his squad. "Now!"

Hundreds of missiles dropped from their pylons and fuselage tubes,

blowtorching into the midst of the enemy cloud, taking out fighter after

fighter.

Meanwhile, Breetai's dreadnought had loosed followup fusillades

against two more warships in what had once been Reno's fleet. Explosions

lit local space like a brief birth of suns, Robotech husks drifting derelict in

the perpetual darkness. On the observation balcony, Breetai stood rigid with

his hands behind his back, impassively watching projecbeam views of the

battle. Victory was assured: one more blow struck against the Masters. But

he was aware that this was a minor triumph in the war that would someday

rage at Earth's gateway; and as bright as this moment might seem, he would

be powerless when that day arrived-

"Squadron leader requesting assistance in the Third Quadrant," one of

his officers interrupted.

"Is the neutron cannon ready?" Breetai asked.

"Eighty percent," Claudia reported sharply.

"We have positive lock and focus on photon particle tracking beam,"

Lisa added, her monitor schematic resembling a star map overlaid with

doodles. "All Veritechs and pods have cleared the field of fire."

"Neutron exchange complete," Claudia updated.

Breetai's lips became a thin line.

"Sanitize the area," he ordered.

Rick led his squad-Max and Miriya among them now-to the safe

coordinates Lisa had supplied him. Hearing the go signal for the neutron

cannon given, he glanced back at Breetai's ship, expecting to witness an

outpouring of energy to make all previous discharges pale by comparison.

But he saw no sign of fire, only the invisible particle beam's awesome and

77

horrific effect: Nearly every mecha in the cannon's line of fire was

disintegrated. Some exploded, others came apart, while still others simply

vanished without a trace.

The number of dead was beyond his ability to calculate. And he found

himself thinking about the Zentraedi on Earth-the micronized ones who

were struggling to adapt to a new culture, the malcontents who wandered

the wastes in search of new wars. With Reno's defeat (according to Exedore),

the race would be close to extinction.

It was as if they knew somehow that their time had come. They had

honored their imperative; they had chased Zor's fortress for their Masters

and done their best to reclaim it. But in truth, they had traveled clear across

the galaxy to fulfill a greater imperative: They had come to Earth to die.

"Lord Breetai," said Exedore. "The remaining troops have agreed to

surrender." His voice gave no hint of sadness at the nearly total annihilation

of Reno's forces; if anything, it carried a suggestion of relief. His

commander's reign was now supreme-as it was always meant to be, with or

without the Protoculture matrix.

Breetai was seated in the command chair. Regally, he stated, "Let the

prisoners know that we will gladly accept all who wish to join us."

Exedore spoke into the mike at his duty station. "Lord Breetai extends

his greetings to all Zentraedi prisoners. Furthermore, it is his pleasure to

extend a full pardon to those who wish to join the United Forces under his

command."

Standing now, Breetai announced: "Our victory may very well mark the

dawn of a new era in galactic relations."

His ship was already closing on the Robotech factory satellite, a

biluminescent mollusk in the blackness of space, strings of lights girdling it

like some Christmas ornament. The prize had been won. And if those

defeated troops on bended knee weren't testament enough to the win, one

had simply to look out on that seemingly limitless field of mecha and cruiser

debris through which his ship moved, the remnants of the last remaining

78

Zentraedi fleet.

79

CHAPTER NINE

The transport of the Robotech factory satellite to Earlhspace was

another one of the malign miracles visited upon us. Certainly Gloval and

Breetai had only our best interests in mind, but shouldn't it have occurred to

them that if the Robotech Masters had been able to track Zor's dimensional

fortress here, they could surely do the same with the satellite? Like Zor before

him, Breetai thought he was doing Earth a favor...This renders his comment

(upon manifesting in Earthspace with the factory) doubly ironic: "We've

made it," he is quoted as saying. "It is good to be back home."

Dr. Lazlo Zand,

On Earth As It Is in Hell: Recollections of the Robotech War

Armageddon played in full color on an oval-shaped viewing screen in

Tirol's central ministry, an organic room like those in the Masters' space

fortresses, cathedraled by columns that might have been living ligaments

and sheathed neurons. Representatives from the Council of Elders, the

Robotech Masters, the Young Lords, and the Scientists were in

attendance-the Elders and the Masters in unvarying groups of three at their

Protoculture caps. The Young Lords, a bearded trio, balding in spite of their

relative youth, were intermediaries between the Masters themselves and the

Empire clones. Three was sacred, three was eternal, the irreligious trinity

ruling what remained of Tirol's social structure-what remained of a race

long past decadence. Such had been the influence of the tripartite Invid

flower, the Flower of Life...

One of the Masters had the floor now: With Reno's defeat at the hands

of the traitor, Breetai, their hopes for reclaiming Zor's fortress had been

dashed.

-I think that the best plan is to completely educate another deprivation

tank tissue, so that by the time we get to Earth, it will appear human.

One of the Scientists risked a question, approaching the Masters'

80

station arrogantly, leaving his partners in the Triumvirate to labor at the

spacetime calculations.

-What makes you think this clone will be different from the others that

have been generated and failed?

-Mmmm?!

A second Master took up the challenge, regarding the Scientist with

distaste. An exotic-looking, blue-lipped, and scarlet-haired androgynous

clone. What had they accomplished, the Master asked himself before

replying, in creating this young generation of long-haired, toga-clad beings

who walked a thin line between life and death?

-Such insolence! Have you forgotten that these previous efforts have

been undertaken without proper attention to the basic matrix generation

process? This clone will have ample time to mature, but we must begin

programming the tissue immediately. Of the fourteen remaining in the tank,

one will, surely take on the full psychic likeness of Zor.

-One more thing, Master: Why don't we check the matrix figures on the

remaining Protoculture? Perhaps such a journey is unnecessary.

The figures have been checked and rechecked. We don't even have

enough to make the hyperspace-fold to the Earth system.

The female member of the Triumvirate turned from her calculations.

-I understand, Master.

-So! We will begin the trip under reflex power and rely on the

remaining clone matrix cell tissue to complete our mission.

-Twenty long years by their reckoning....And how many of us will

survive such a journey?

-If only three of us survive, it will be enough. This is our only chance to

regain control of the Protoculture.

One of the Masters gestured to the oval screen-a view of deep space

captured by their surveillance vessel: the mecha debris and litter that was

once Reno's fleet.

-After all, look what is left of their culture; observe and survey the

remnants of their once-great armada. We must have that Protoculture

81

matrix! Even if it takes twenty years and the last developing clone from our

tank! We have no choice but to proceed. I can see no other solution. So! If

there is nothing further...

A member of the Elder Triumvirate spoke through lips as cracked as

baked clay, a face as wrinkled as history itself.

"Elder Council is with you."

The central speaker of the Masters inclined his head in a bow.

"We acknowledge your wisdom and appreciate the generosity of your

support, Elder. It is out of loyalty to you and our forefathers that we have

decided thus."

"We understand the importance of this mission, not only for our race

but for all intelligent life in the quadrant."

A second Elder bestowed his blessings on the voyage.

"Proceed with your plan, then; but know that there can be no margin

for error without grave consequences."

"The future of all cultures is in your hands."

A twenty-year journey through the universe, the Masters thought in

unison. Twenty years to regain a prize stolen from them by a renegade

scientist. Would they prevail? Was there not one loyal Zentraedi left?...Yes,

there was. But could even he succeed where so many had failed?

Khyron!

Khyron was their last hope!

Human and Zentraedi teams labored long and hard to ready the factory

for a hyperspace jump. In less than a week's time it defolded in lunar orbit,

winking into real time without incident, Breetai's dreadnought, his Human

and Zentraedi crew, and thousands of converted warriors inside the

satellite's womb. The commander's prime concern had been the removal of

the factory from the Robotech Masters' realm; their reach, however, was to

prove greater than even he had anticipated.

The Veritech Team, as well as Lisa and Claudia, returned to New

Macross, and in their place arrived scores of Lang's Robotechnicians, who

82

dispersed themselves through the factory like kids on a scavenger hunt.

Finally, Admiral Gloval himself was shuttled up to Earth's new satellite; well

aware that the factory was now Earth's only hope against a potential

follow-up attack by the Robotech Masters, he traveled with his fingers

crossed. Claudia Grant was his escort.

Dr. Lang and several of his techs were on hand to greet them.

Pleasantries were dispensed with, and Gloval was led immediately to one of

the factory's automated assembly lines, where alien devices, still only

half-understood by Lang, turned out Battlepod carapaces and ordnance

muzzles.

Gloval marveled at the sight of these machines at work: Pods were

being fabricated as though they were chocolate candy shells. From a basic

sludge vat of raw metals to finished product in minutes; servos, arc welders,

presses, and shapers doing the work of thousands of men. Unpiloted pods,

controlled by computers even Lang refused to tamper with, marched in

rows, one above the other, along powered transport belts, pausing at each

work station for yet another automated miracle. All the while a synthesized

Zentraedi voice actually spoke to the devices, directing them in their tasks.

Exedore had substituted a translation, which was playing as Gloval stood

transfixed.

"Make ready units one fifty-two to one fifty-eight for protobolt

adjustments and laser-bond processes. Units one fifty-nine to one sixty-five

are on-line for radiokrypto equipment encoding..."

"But what does it mean?" Gloval asked Lang.

The scientist shook his head, marblelike eyes penetrating Gloval's own.

"We don't know, Admiral. But do not be deceived by what you see. This

entire complex is but a ghost of its former self-nothing is running to

completion." Lang made a sweeping gesture. "Whatever fuels this place-and

I see no reason to suppose that it is any different than that which runs the

SDF-1-has lost its original potency."

"Protoculture," Gloval said flatly.

Lang gave a tight-lipped nod and pointed to the line of half-finished

83

pods along the conveyor belt. "Observe..."

Gloval narrowed his eyes, not sure what he was supposed to be looking

at. But shortly the Doctor's meaning became obvious.

"Warning! Shut down! Warning! Damage!..." the synthesized voice

began to repeat. Suddenly one of the pods on the belt was encased in a

spider web of angry electrical energy. Servowelders and grappling arms

flailed about in the fire, falling limp as the pod split apart and the great

machines ground to a halt.

"Status report on the way," one of Lang's techs said to Gloval.

The admiral rubbed his chin and hid a look of disappointment.

No one spoke for a moment, save for a human voice from the PA

calling maintenance personnel to the process center. Then Exedore arrived

on the scene. Gloval had not seen him since the evening the satellite mission

was first discussed.

"How are you, sir?" Exedore asked, concerned but having already

guessed Gloval's response.

"Not as well as I was hoping," Gloval confessed. "When can you start

operating again?"

"I'm afraid the situation is worse than first thought." Never one to

mince words, Exedore added: "We may be down permanently."

"Are you certain?"

The Zentraedi adviser nodded, grimly.

Claudia gasped. "But our defense depends on continued operation!"

Gloval clasped his hands behind his back, refusing to accept the

prognosis. "Carry on," he told-Exedore. "Do what you can to get things

running again. Do something-anything!"

"Veritech team leader," said the female voice over Rick's corn net. "We

have a disturbance in New Detroit City. Can you respond?"

Rick accessed the relevant chart as he went on the net. "Roger,

control." He glanced at the monitor: His team was over the southern tip of

Lake Michigan, close to what was once the city of Chicago. "We are

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approximately three minutes ETA of New Detroit City. What's up?"

"Zentraedi workers have broken into Fort Breetai. They've taken over

the sizing chamber and are attempting to transport it from the city."

Rick gritted his teeth and exhaled sharply. "Listen up," he told his

wingmen. "We're on alert. Hit your afterburners and follow my lead."

New Detroit had risen up around a Zentraedi warship that had crashed

there during Dolza's apocalyptic attack; its mile-high hulk still dominated

the city and the surrounding cratered wastes like some leaning tower of

malice. The population of the city was predominantly Zentraedi, many

micronized by order of the New Council and hundreds more who were

full-size workers in the nearby steel factories. In addition, though, there was

a sizable contingent of civil defense forces stationed there to guard a sizing

chamber that had been removed from the derelict ship but had yet to be

transported to New Macross, where similar ones were being stored.

Rick caught sight of the chamber on his first pass over the high-tech

fort. A convoy of vehicles was tearing along the rampart that led to the

underground storage facilities. Updated reports from control indicated that

at least twelve Humans and three Zentraedi giants lay dead inside.

The clear-blue nose-cone-like device had been placed on an enormous

flatbed, hauled by a powerful tug with tires like massive rollers; two

micronized aliens were in the drivers' seats, three more up top, along with

three blue-uniformed giants, two of whom were attempting to stabilize the

hastily guy-wired and turnbuckled chamber. Behind the flatbed were two

more enormous eightwheeled transports, each bearing malcontents armed

with autocannons. Rick saw them open fire on the laser-sentry posts. At

street level, they turned their cannons on everything that moved, scattering

workers and pedestrians alike.

"We're over the disturbance now," Rick reported in. "Left wing, wait

until they've reached the outskirts, then go in low and give them a warning."

The renegade Zentraedis spotted the Veritechs and opened up with

indiscriminate volleys as the fighters fell from the sky. Rick and his team

rolled out, dodging autocannon slugs and gatling spray as they broke

85

formation.

So much for scare tactics, Rick said to himself, Skull One flying

inverted and low over the tortuous landscape outside the city limits.

"Left wing, knock one of the giants off the lead unit immediately!"

Rick completed his roll as his wingman went out, reconfiguring the

Veritech to Guardian mode and swooping down on the convoy. The

Zentraedis were loosing continuous fire, but Rick could discern the early

stages of panic in their flight. The highway was full of twists and turns here,

and the converter had made the flatbed dangerously top-heavy.

The armed alien on the flatbed got off one last shot before Rick's

wingman, now in Battloid mode, blasted him from the vehicle. The road was

also proving too much for the drivers to handle; Rick watched the vehicle

screech through a tight S-turn, leave the road, clinging to a raised course of

shoulder, then bounce back to the tarmac, where the giant's micronized

accomplices decided to call it quits.

Meanwhile, the rest of the Veritech group had reconfigured to Battloid

mode and put down ahead of the halted convoy.

Rick completed his descent and advanced his mecha in a run,

chain-gun gripped in the metalshod right hand and leveled against the

giants on the flatbed. One Zentraedi was dead on the road. The others began

to throw down their weapons as Rick spoke.

"Don't move or you'll be destroyed!" he called out over the external

speakers. The Battloids came to a stop and spread out. "It's useless to

resist," Rick continued. "You are completely surrounded. You must

understand that what you have done is unacceptable behavior by Human

standards and that you will be punished." Rick stepped his mecha forward.

"Now, the Protoculture chamber will be returned to the fort."

Three hundred miles to the northeast of New Detroit a thick blanket of

newly fallen snow covered the war-ravaged terrain. Khyron's ship had

landed here, having used up almost all of the Protoculture reserves that

drove its reflex engines to free itself from Alaska's glacial hold.

86

Zentraedi Battlepods sat in the snowfields like unhatched eggs

abandoned by an uncaring mother. Deserters from the Micronian

population centers and factories continued to arrive in stolen transports

and tugs. The hulk of a Zentraedi warship overlooked the scene, its pointed

bow thrust deep into the frigid earth like a spear, alien tripetaled flowers

surrounding it, hearty enough to pierce the permafrost.

Khyron had followed a trail of such ships clear across the northern

wastes, salvaging what he could in the way of weapons and foodstuffs,

marveling at the resilience of the Invid Flower of Life, gone to seed and

flower as the Protoculture in the ship's drives had disintegrated.

Now in the command center of his ship, he received word that his plan

to steal the sizing converter had failed.

"Idiot!" Khyron said to his second, Grel, standing in stiff posture before

the Backstabber. Azonia was seated in the command chair, her legs crossed,

a mischievous look on her face. "Your feeble plan has failed us again!"

Grel frowned. "I'm sorry, sir, but our agents failed to eliminate the

communications center and the Veritechs-"

"Enough!" Khyron interrupted him, raising his fist. "Our soldiers

couldn't even defend themselves!"

"But sir, if you had only listened to..." Grel started to say, and regretted

it at once. The plan had been Azonia's, not his; but there was little chance

that Khyron would blame her-not now that a special relationship had been

forged...And especially since his commander had begun to use the dried

Invid leaves once again. As if that wasn't enough, the troops had all seen the

Robotech satellite appear in Earth's skies, and that meant only one thing:

The Micronians had somehow defeated Reno!

"Shut up, Grel!" Azonia barked at him. "Under your leadership they

couldn't possibly have succeeded!"

"Well, I wouldn't exactly say-"

"Do not interrupt," she continued, folding her arms and turning her

back to him.

Khyron too mocked him with a short laugh, and Grel felt the anger

87

rising within him despite his best efforts to keep his emotions in check. It

was bad enough that he and the troops had been forced to live these past

two years with a female in their midst, but now to be humiliated like this...

"You should have had no trouble capturing the sizing chamber," Azonia

was saying when he at last exploded, murder in his eyes as he leaned toward

her.

"It might appear that all of this is my fault, but the truth is that you-"

"Enough!" Azonia screamed, standing, nearly hysterical. "I don't want

to hear any excuses from you!"

Khyron stepped between them, angrier and louder than the two of

them combined. "Stop arguing, Azonia! And Grel, I want you to listen,

understand me?! I don't have to tell you what the appearance of that

satellite signals-the last hope for the Masters lies with us!"

"Sir, I'm listening," Grel said, spent and surrendering.

Khyron, spittle forming at the edges of his maniacal snarl, waved a fist

in Grel's face. "Excellent...because my reputation is on the line, and I need

that sizing chamber to save face, and if I don't get it...I shan't spare yours!

Now, get out of here!"

Grel stiffened, then began to slink away like a beaten dog.

When he had left the room, Azonia moved to Khyron's side, pressing

herself against him suggestively, her voice coy and teasing.

"Tell me confidentially, Khyron, do you really think he can handle it?"

"For his sake, I hope so," Khyron said through gritted teeth, seemingly

unaware of Azonia's closeness until she risked putting a hand on his

shoulder.

"You know how to handle your troops, Khyron," she purred in his ear.

He pushed her away with just enough force to convey his seriousness,

not wanting to confront the hurt look he was sure to find on her face. There

was no use denying the bewildering attraction he had come to feel for her in

their joint exile-these novel pleasures of the flesh they had discovered; but

she had to be made to understand that there was a time and place for such

things and that war and victory still came first-would always come first! No

88

other Zentraedi had more right to these sensual gifts than he, but his troops

deserved more than a commander who was less committed to them than

they were to him. He had promised to return the deserters to full size, and

he meant to do it-with or without Grel. And, should it come down to it, with

or without Azonia.

"Now, listen," he confided. "There is something I couldn't tell Grel but

I'm going to tell you...I'm going after than sizing chamber myself-I can't

count on him to do it. I want you to stay here and take command while I'm

gone."

He turned and walked away from her without another word, unaware

of the smile that had appeared on her face.

Azonia savored the thought of commanding Khyron's troops in his

absence. "This is starting to get good," she said aloud after a moment.

89

CHAPTER TEN

If we accept for a moment the view expressed by some of our

twentieth-century colleagues-that children live out the unconscious lives of

their parents-and apply that to the Robotech Masters and their "children," the

Zentraedi, we will arrive at a most revealing scenario. It is clear at this point

that the Masters were the ones devoid of emotions. War though the Zentraedi

did, their true imperative was centered on individuation and the search for

self...One has to wonder about Zor, however: He served the Masters yet did

not count himself among them. Who can say to what extent he himself was

affected by Protoculture?

Zeitgeist,

Alien Psychology

Returned to New Detroit, the sizing chamber was being hoisted back

into its cradle, a four-poled hangar similar to those used to support

freestanding tents. A large crowd had gathered, Humans and coveralled

Zentraedi giants as well as their micronized brethren. Rick was supervising

the crane operation, while the rest of his team, still in their Battloids,

patrolled a cordoned-off area in front of Fort Breetai. There was palpable

tension in the air.

"That's it...just a little more and we're there," Rick instructed the

operating engineer. "Fine, fine...just keep it coming..."

As the chamber's round base was sliding down into the cradle's cup, a

black sports car screeched to a halt nearby. Rick glanced over his shoulder

and spied Minmei in the passenger seat.

New Detroit's Mayor, Owen Harding, a well-built man with a full head

of thick white hair and a walrus mustache, was in the back seat. He

recognized Rick from the days he himself had served with the RDF aboard

the SDF-1. Harding stepped out and asked if everything was well in hand,

whether there was anything he could do. Minmei had been recognized by

the crowd, and two policemen moved in to keep them from gathering

90

around the car.

Rick saluted and gestured to the sizing chamber. "I need your people to

provide security for this device."

"I can't do that, Commander," the mayor said firmly. "Most of the

population here is Zentraedi-as you can see. Securing this 'device,' as you

call it, is a military matter. We've already had enough trouble, and I'm not

about to add to it by throwing my police force into the middle of it. Let's not

beat around the bush, Commander, we all know what this machine is for."

Rick shook his long hair back from his face and squared his shoulders,

trying not to think about the fact that Minmei was only fifteen feet away.

"That's exactly why I need your support, sir-just until my superiors dispatch

a proper unit to guard it. We can't afford to allow this chamber to fall into

the wrong hands."

The crowd didn't like what they heard. Even before Rick finished, they

were letting the mayor know where they stood.

"What're you saying, Commander-that we're all thieves?!" someone

shouted.

"Just who is the 'wrong hands,' flyboy?!" from another.

The mayor made a hopeless gesture. "You see what I'm up against."

"Look," Rick emphasized, "I know you don't want any more trouble

here, but I'm only asking for your cooperation for a matter of days-"

"I can't become involved in this."

"It's for their protection, too," Rick said, pointing to the crowd. "We all

agreed to honor the Council's-"

"Then tell all the facts," a familiar voice interrupted.

Rick turned and saw Kyle walking toward him from the car.

"Military business, Kyle-stay out of it!" Rick warned him sternly. Kyle

was the last thing this situation needed: Mr. Agitation.

"This isn't just military business," Kyle started in, addressing Rick and

the crowd. "It's everyone's, Commander, because you're talking about the

Zentraedi's right to return to their normal size whenever they want."

Rick was incredulous. Sure, why not let them all change back-especially

91

now that they are hungry for warfare again and the closest targets are

one-tenth their size.

"You're nuts, Kyle."

"If you think I'm kidding, you're even a bigger fool than I thought. And

I'm sure that most of the people in this city would agree with me...isn't that

right?"

Rick didn't bother to look around. Shouts of agreement rang out;

micronized Zentraedi raised their fists, and the giants growled. Kyle's

violent scene with Minmei in Granite City replayed itself in Rick's mind,

along with Max's remarks about Kyle's false pacifism. Minmei, he said to

himself, giving her a sidelong glance and reading some sort of warning in

those blue eyes. How could you be blood with this-

"Well, do you..." Kyle was demanding. Picking up on Rick's inattention,

he followed his gaze, reading his thoughts now.... So he's still in love with

her.

Rick heard Kyle snort, then say to the crowd:

"When they take away your right to use the Protoculture chamber, it's

the first step toward martial law! You lived under that for long enough

before you came to Earth! This chamber should be controlled by the people

of this city!"

One of the giants stomped his feet, rocking the area.

"You better listen to us right now!" he bellowed.

"This is our city," said a human female, much to Rick's amazement,

"not the military's!"

Was there some sort of reverse contagion at work here?

"Why don't you just climb into your little plane and get out of here

while you still can!" yelled a second giant.

"Listen to me!" Rick pleaded, actually managing to quiet them for a

moment. "Isn't it better to have this machine secure from people who would

use it against you than to endanger the whole city with it!"

"I'm getting sick of your lies, Hunter!" Kyle ranted at him, furious.

"Beat it!" the crowd shouted.

92

"We're not going to take this anymore!"

The mayor edged over to Rick, eyes on the alert for airborne bottles or

rocks. "They mean business," he said warily.

"I've heard enough!" Rick began to shout back at them. "This is

military property! I've been ordered to secure it, and I intend to carry out

those orders!"

"We'll see about that!" one of the giants threatened.

Rick signaled his squad lieutenant. Two of the Battloids raised their

gatlings and stepped forward.

The crowd took a collective intake of breath, but the comments

persisted, helped along by Kyle, who was now attempting to lead them in a

chant: "Leave here now! Leave here now!" punctuating his call with raised

arm gestures.

The crowd joined him, holding their ground.

"Please, Commander, " said the mayor. "You have to go."

Rick narrowed his eyes and shot Kyle a deadly look. He scanned the

crowd-angry faces and towering Zentraedi. If the Battloids opened fire,

there would be all hell to pay; and if they didn't...if they just let the chamber

sit...

No win! Rick screamed at himself, sending a tormented look Minmei's

way before he turned his back on all of them and walked off.

In the snowfields at civilization's edge, Khyron received word of the

turnabout in New Detroit. He couldn't have been more pleased.

He stood now at the head of a double-rowed column made up of twelve

of his finest troops, each, like himself, suited up in Zentraedi power armor.

"Listen to me," he instructed them. "We are the last true Zentraedi! We

must take that sizing chamber! No sacrifice is too great!"

With that, he fired the body suit's self-contained thrusters and lifted off,

his elite squad following him into the skies.

Having left two of his Veritech corporals to stand guard over the

93

chamber, Rick and his remaining team were on their way back to New

Macross. Bill "Willy" Mammoth, one of Skull One's wingmen, had raised

Rick on the tac net.

"Go ahead, Willy, I'm reading you," Rick told him.

"It's just that it's bothering, sir. All that power. Leaving it there'n...well,

forget it..."

"Say it, Willy. I told you, I'm reading you."

"Well...I just hate to see a bunch of innocent people get hurt because of

some hare-brained troublemaker."

An image of Kyle's angry eyes flashed in Rick's memory. That fight long

ago in the White Dragon, Kyle's pacifist speeches, his violent temper...

"Yeah, so do I," Rick said grimly.

Mayor Harding was having misgivings. Two of Hunter's Battloids along

with one of New Detroit's own civil defense Gladiators were supervising the

transfer of the sizing chamber from Fort Breetai to its new resting place

inside the city's exposition center, a sprawling complex of pavilions and

theaters constructed in the "Hollywood" style-a pagodalike multistoried

building here, a Mesoamerican temple there.

"But will it be safe?" the mayor wondered aloud.

Lynn-Kyle and Minmei were with him in the center's vast rotunda,

observing the transfer procedure.

"Something's bothering you, Mr. Mayor?" Minmei asked leadingly,

hoping Harding had had a change of mind and would recall Rick and his

squad.

The mayor bit at the ends of his mustache. "To be honest, I was just

thinking about the consequences of having the sizing chamber here should

we be attacked...I only hope I made the right decision."

"Attacked by whom?" Kyle said harshly. "The war's over. "

"Not to hear Commander Hunter tell it." Harding shrugged. "All these

disaffected Zentraedi who have been leaving the cities and setting up camps

out there..."

94

Kyle made a dismissive gesture. "Forget about it-all that's just

disinformation. They'll say anything to convince us that we still need their

protection. Besides, there are a lot of peaceful Zentraedi citizens here.

They'd help us if things got bad."

"I hope you're right."

"Don't worry. We did the right thing, and the people appreciate it. This

chamber rightfully belongs to the Zentraedi people, and that's all that really

matters."

The mayor cleared his throat.

Kyle said, "Trust me."

Harding, however, remained unconvinced. Kyle noticed that Minmei

seemed preoccupied and uneasy, her face inordinately pale. The mayor had

insisted on taking them on a tour of the center's new theater, and it was

here that Kyle decided to change strategies.

"I've got an idea," Kyle told both of them, a lighter tone in his voice

now. "How about a goodwill concert to promote brotherhood between the

Human and Zentraedi citizens of New Detroit?"

All at once Harding grew excited. "Why, that would be great! I mean, if

Minmei would consent...on such short notice and all..."

"Of course she'll do it," Kyle continued, although Minmei hadn't so

much as acknowledged the idea by word or movement.

"The whole city'll turn out," said Harding, the wheels turning. He

began to lead them down one of the theater aisles toward the large stage.

"We can seat almost three thousand in here, and wait till you see our

lighting system." Cupping his hands to his mouth, he called to the balcony:

"Pops! Open up the main curtain and hit the spots!"

An unseen old-timer answered, "Sure thing, Mr. Mayor," and the

curtain began to rise. Kyle took advantage of the moment to turn to Minmei

and whisper, "What's you problem today, Minmei? You're going to upset the

mayor."

"I just don't feel like singing," she said firmly.

Kyle raised his voice. "And just why not?"

95

"Because I don't think this place is safe with that Protoculture chamber

here and because of what you did to Commander Hunter," she answered,

not looking at him. "He is my close friend, you know. He saved my life."

Kyle smirked. "You make it sound like it's a lot more than friendship,

Minmei."

"You asked me, so I told you:"

"Take it easy," he said. "First of all, we're not in any danger. And

second, it didn't hurt your flyboy any to have his feathers ruffled. It keeps

him sharp."

Minmei gritted her teeth.

"Here they come, Mr. Mayor!" the veteran stagehand yelled.

Two intense spots converged center stage, and Mayor Harding turned

to Minmei proudly.

"How 'bout that?"

Kyle put on his best smile and stepped forward. "I think the whole

place looks great, sir."

The mayor beamed and started to say, "Thank you-" when a loud

concussion rocked the theater. A second and third explosion followed in

quick succession, violent enough to send them all reeling in the aisle.

"What the-"

"Quick! Outside!" Kyle ordered.

No doubt a Minmei concert would have worked wonders in New

Detroit, but how could Kyle have known that Khyron had made a previous

booking?

Immediately upon his return to New Macross, Rick was ordered to

report to Admiral Gloval in the briefing room of the SDF-1. There he found

the admiral, Exedore, Lisa, Claudia, Max, Miriya, and the infamous Terrible

Trio-Sammie, Vanessa, and Kim-seated at the room's circular table. Rick

made his report directly to Gloval, summarizing the events that had

transpired in New Detroit.

Gloval wore a look of despair. "I want to commend you for exercising

96

good judgment, Captain," he told Rick after a moment. Then he gestured to

the table. "I wanted you to be included in this. Exedore..." he said, sitting

back to listen.

The enigmatic Zentraedi inclined his head. "I have finished my

research on the relationship between Protoculture and the Zentraedi," he

began rather soberly. "My race..." Exedore's face appeared to blanch. "My

race was bio-genetically engineered by the Robotech Masters for the sole

purpose of fighting. Protoculture, the discovery of the Tirolian scientist Zor

was utilized in both the initial cloning process and the enlargement of our

physical being."

Miriya gasped. "You're saying that the Masters created us? It can't be

true, Exedore. I have memories of my youth, my upbringing, my training..."

Exedore shut his eyes and shook his head sadly. "Implants,

engrams...The Masters were clever to equip us with both racial and

individual memories. But they neglected what is more important..."

Gloval cleared his throat. "Exedore, if I may?..."

Exedore gestured his assent, and Gloval addressed the table.

"These people you call the Robotech Masters were extremely proud of

their advanced and powerful civilization. Hyperspace drives and advanced

weaponry were already a part of their culture. But soon after the discovery

of Protoculture and the science of Robotechnology, they dreamed of ruling a

galactic empire. And they decided to develop a police force to protect their

acquisitions-the Zentraedi."

The table went silent.

"For hundreds of years," the admiral continued, his eyes finding Miriya

and Exedore, "you secured worlds for them-these Masters you were

programmed to obey. But this scientist, Zor, the very genius who designed

and built this ship, was silently working at tearing down what his co-opted

discoveries had unleashed. It was believed that he hid his secrets

somewhere in this ship and tried to send it from the Masters' grasp.

"And you, Exedore, and Miriya, Breetai, the old one you called Dolza,

even Khyron, you were ordered to reclaim this ship at all costs-because

97

without Zor's secrets the Robotech Masters won't be able to fulfill their

dreams of empire. Without Protoculture, they will fall, as surely as their

race of giant warriors fell. Confronted with emotions and feelings for the

first time, the Zentraedi were powerless. For surely that race of perverted

geniuses had no love left in their hearts. And they will be defeated for the

very same reasons."

Exedore looked up now. "Do not underestimate them, Admiral," he

cautioned. He was impressed by Gloval's summary and evaluation, but the

admiral spoke as if all of this was behind them, when in fact it was just

beginning. "We Zentraedi no longer pose a threat to you, it is true. But

believe me when I say this: The Masters are out there waiting, and they will

not rest until that Protoculture matrix is theirs. Earth has been brought

once to the brink of extinction by their power. Do not mislead yourselves by

thinking that it can never happen again."

Gloval absorbed this silently. "Are there any questions?"

"Are the people of Earth...are they Protoculture?" Miriya asked, full of

concern as she looked at Max. There was Dana-how could they explain

Dana!

Gloval said, "I know what you're thinking, Miriya. But no. You see, we

go back millions of years. And the Zentraedi..."

"But how can you explain that our genetic structures are nearly

identical?" Max wanted to know.

Exedore spoke to that. "Nearly identical. Nearly identical. What is most

plausible is that our genetic...stuff was cloned from the Masters themselves.

They are, after all, er...Micronians like yourselves. Look for a similarity

there, Lieutenant Sterling, not among the Zentraedi."

Max shook his head in a confused manner. "But I don't see that it

matters any!"

"It doesn't," Miriya said, putting her hand over his.

"Then it must figure," Lisa pointed out, "that the people of Earth and

the people of Tirol did have a common ancestry."

"I no longer believe that to be so," said Exedore. "A coincidence, I'm

98

afraid."

Rick's eyebrows went up. "A coincidence!? But Exedore, the odds on

that have to be nothing less than...

"Astronomical," Lisa finished.

Gloval snorted. "And the odds against our coexisting together?...They

might be even greater."

"So the truth is," Exedore concluded, "that although our races are

similar, they are not identical. My race, the Zentraedi, were Protoculturally

devoid of everything save for the bio-genetically engineered desire to fight.

We were nothing but toys to our creators-toys of destruction. "

99

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I had wandered into an inviting, friendly-looking house that sat flush

with the street, thinking it would be a shortcut to Rick (who was speeding

away in his Veritech). The house was filled with antiques from the last

century, and I was running around touching everything. But then when I

remembered Rick and began to search for an exit, I couldn't find a way out! I

started opening doors only to find more doors behind them, and more doors

behind those, and more doors!...I woke up more frightened than I've ever been

in a long time. It was more frightening than real life.

From the diary of Lynn-Minmei

Kyle, Minmei, and Mayor Harding reached the theater's main entrance

in time to see the descent of Khyron's airborne assault team.

They fell upon the city like a storm loosed from hell itself, resembling

deep-sea divers and Roman gladiators in their powered armor. Civil defense

Destroids were already in the streets, pouring missiles and transuranic slugs

into the skies. An Excalibur MK VI, its slung cannons blazing, caught two

enemy projectiles, which blew it off its feet, continuous fire from one of the

cannons holing storefronts all along the avenue. Nearby, a Spartan was

faring better, having taken out two of the enemy raiders with Stilettos

launched from the mecha's drumlike missile tubes. But it too fell when one

of the Zentraedi, easily as tall as the Spartan and better equipped to

maneuver, barreled into it, sending the thing reeling back against the facade

of the exposition theater, sparking out as it collapsed to the street, missiles

dropping from one of its shattered drums.

Kyle and the others pressed themselves deeper into the theater's

doorway, shivering with fear, as cries for help rang out from the demolished

Spartan.

"Our worst fears are realized!" yelled Harding.

Minmei clutched Kyle's arm, eyes shut tight, mouth wide in a silent

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scream.

Khyron's troops were bent on nothing less than extermination; they

had had two years to work up to this, two unrelieved years, just waiting for

an opportunity to make the Micronians pay for all the hardships they had

been forced to endure. Now all the tension and hatred left them in a

frenzied rush, with New Detroit left to reap that violent harvest.

Everything was a target, and no one was spared-Human or citified

Zentraedi.

"Fight to the end!" the Backstabber yelled into his comlink. "Find that

chamber! No sacrifice is too great for a cause dearer than life itself!"

Still, the Earth forces would not surrender; courage and valor were the

words of the day, although few remained by battle's end to sing the praises

of those who died.

A Gladiator went hand to hand with one of the alien berserkers,

dropping the Zentraedi with a left uppercut when its own cannons were

depleted of charge, only to have the downed enemy blow it to smithereens

with a blast from its top-mounted gun.

Another of Khyron's elite paused before a parking lot simply to

incinerate the vehicles and huddled groups of Humans inside.

"I'm getting high reflex-activity readings," Khyron announced, his suit

displays flashing. Locaters were helping him zero-in on the exposition hall.

"All troops converge on my signal immediately!"

Minmei and Kyle, wrapped around each other in the theater's entrance

alcove, watched as enemy troops made for the hall, the streets vibrating to

the crash of their metalshod boots.

What have I done?! Kyle asked himself, close to panic.

Inside the hall, the RDF sentries received word that the first defenses

had been overrun; the enemy was headed their way. A battloid raised its

chain gun at the sound of pounding on the hall's foot-thick steel door. The

three-member crews of the Gladiators readied themselves.

Mayor Harding had left Kyle and Minmei and rushed to the basement

of the building. He and an unfortunate office worker were looking in on the

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hall and sizing chamber now, a Permaglass shield the only thing separating

them from fire, as the door was suddenly blown open and Khyron's troops

poured in.

One of the Gladiators stepped forward to engage a Zentraedi, spitting

harmless machine gun fire into the face of its enemy as the two of them

grappled. Khyron's soldier got hold of the mecha's face plates, swung it

clean off its feet, and sent the hapless thing crashing through the buildings

reinforced concrete wall.

The second Gladiator was similarly engaged, one-on-one and winning

his close-in fight...until a Zentraedi appeared without warning overhead,

blasting his way through the ceiling and descending on the mecha forcefully

enough to split it wide-open, crown to crotch.

All this time, the Battloid was emptying its gatling against a Zentraedi

wall of armor. When the pilot saw the Gladiator take that terrible overhead

blow, he ran his mecha forward, autocannon raised high like a

sledgehammer, only to receive a paralyzing spin kick to the abdomen by an

enemy with eyes behind its head.

"That finishes it!" exclaimed the mayor, turning away from the carnage.

"We've lost the sizing chamber!"

"Chances are, no matter how much they are exposed to Humans, the

Zentraedi are still a war-loving race," Exedore told the admiral after the

session. He, Gloval, and Claudia had walked together from the briefing

room to one of the fortress's enormous supply holds.

"But many of your people have discovered an entirely different kind of

life here on Earth, Exedore," Gloval argued. "You shouldn't be so...hard on

yourself."

"Admiral Gloval's right," Claudia added. "Many of your people

supported peace as soon as they were exposed to the possibility, and most

still do."

"I agree that many want it," Exedore countered, unmoved by their

obvious attempts to put him at ease. After all, it wasn't a question of feeling

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this way or that way about it; it was simply a fact: The Zentraedi were

warriors. Exedore wondered sometimes if Humans didn't carry the

emotional mode too far. "It's just that I now worry about those who still

want to fight. Surely you understand that, Admiral."

"Yes," Gloval admitted, lifting his pipe to his lips, uncertain where this

discussion was headed.

"Doesn't it seem strange, then, that no matter how far even superior

civilizations have progressed, there never seems to be a solution to the

problem of aggression and warfare?"

"How true, my friend."

"That applies to Humans, too," Exedore continued. "In fact, there is no

known species in the whole of the Fourth Quadrant that has ever turned its

back on war."

"Regrettably so," Gloval said.

A comtone sounded, and the admiral reached for a handset, grunting

yeses and nos into it, his nostrils flaring. He recradled it with a slam and

barked at Claudia:

"Find Hunter immediately!"

Claudia stepped back somewhat. "Sir?"

"Zentraedi have attacked New Detroit!"

"A toy of destruction," Rick was repeating to Lisa. "That's what he

called himself, right?"

The two of them were standing in one of the SDF-1s open bays, twenty

feet above the shimmering lake, staring into orange and pink sunset clouds.

"Genetically programmed for fighting...it's pretty sad. "

"If you ask me, it sounds a lot like us," said Lisa.

Rick frowned at her.

"Aren't we always fighting?" she asked him.

"That's not fair, Lisa."

"I wasn't trying to be...Just making a point."

"Oh, yeah?"

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"Rick! Lisa!"

They turned together to find Claudia striding toward them.

"I'm glad I found you two," she said, out of breath. "Zentraedi forces

have attacked New Detroit!"

Rick's eyes went wide. "Forces?! What d' ya mean? Who-malcontents?"

Claudia shook her head. "Not from the sound of it. Their

communication signal was lost about ten minutes ago, but one of our recon

ships spotted the fighting. It looks a coordinated attack. At least a dozen

Zentraedi in power armor. "

Lisa watched Rick go livid. He clenched his fists and cursed.

"Rick, it's not your fault!" she said quickly, reaching for him. But he

was already through the doorway in a run.

"Who?!" Lisa demanded of Claudia. "Who?!"

The reinforcements from New Macross arrived on the scene too late.

Rick, in Skull One, had a bird's-eye view of the battle's aftermath: fire,

smoke, and several square blocks of total devastation. New Detroit's central

avenues were torn up and cratered; civil defense mecha lay smoldering in

the streets, while rescue crews worked frantically to free trapped crew

members. The area around the exposition hall was unrecognizable. The

main buildings had been reduced to rubble.

Rick blamed himself.

It had been his assignment to secure the Protoculture chamber, he told

himself, but he had let Kyle and those easily influenced Zentraedi take

charge.

Below him now, cranes and bulldozers worked to haul a damaged

Excalibur MK VI to its feet; the mecha's twin cannons had been blown from

the body. Elsewhere, the hulk of a Gladiator was being towed from an

intersection; it looked as though it had been split down the middle by an ax.

Though Rick was shouldering the blame, he couldn't very well charge

himself with the attack, and this was what began to concern him. The only

incident that approached the level of destruction here was the raid on New

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Portland some weeks ago. There, renegade Zentraedi had broken into one of

the armories, commandeered three Battlepods, and indulged themselves in

a brief orgy of terror. But that was the isolated case; most often, the trouble

was confined to fighting-the recent fistfight in the streets of Macross was a

perfect example. But now, within twenty-four hours, there had been two

major raids.

The recon pilots who had witnessed the attack saw no battlepods;

Zentraedi power armor, they said. Rick thought about it: Many of the

warships that had crashed on Earth had been stripped of weapons during

Reconstruction two years ago. But of course it was possible that a band of

outlaw giants had chanced upon a ship and found the power suits...but what

would they want with the sizing chamber? A blow for independence?

Furthermore, the attack on New Detroit had been too well coordinated: It

was purposeful, nothing like the sprees of random violence Exedore was

worried about-the resurgence of the Zentraedi programming.

Rick found himself thinking about the Zentraedi's raid on Macross City,

when it was still located in the belly of the SDF-1. As he looked over New

Detroit, he began to feel that there was something familiar about this

patterned ruination, almost as if it bore the earmarks of someone thought to

be dead-someone whom the Zentraedi themselves had feared...

While Rick was dropping the Veritech in for a closer look, searching for

an uncluttered stretch of street to put down on, Kyle and Minmei were

preparing to flee the city. The black sports car, which had been parked near

the theater entrance, had miraculously survived the destruction, and Kyle

was behind the wheel now, twisting the ignition key and cursing the thing

for not turning over. Above the sleek vehicle towered the lifeless body of an

Excalibur, spread-eagle in a death pose against the theater facade.

"You crummy no-good pile of junk!" Kyle shouted at the car, pumping

the accelerator pedal for all it was worth.

"Hurry, Kyle!" Minmei yelled from the street. "They might be coming

back!"

"I'm doing the best I can!" he told her angrily.

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Minmei was wringing her hands and pacing, a victim of fear and

self-torment. Like Rick, she was blaming herself for the tragedy.

I could have stopped Kyle, and none of this would have happened! How

could I let him do that to Rick?! If I had just stepped in when Rick looked at

me like that...

The sports car's engine fired, and Kyle hurrahed.

"Minmei, get in! Let's go!" She was either in shock or lost in thought,

he decided, because he wasn't getting through to her. "Minmei!" he tried

again.

She turned to him as if they had all the time in the world, pure loathing

in her eyes. She reached for the handle of the back door and threw it open.

Rick spotted her.

He had the Veritech reconfigured to Guardian mode and was setting

down on the theater street several blocks behind Kyle's sports car. Kyle was

revving the engine, too preoccupied to take notice of the mecha's descent,

but Minmei caught sight of it in the rearview mirror and spun around in her

seat.

She sucked in her breath. "Kyle, please don't leave yet-it's Rick!"

Skull One had landed. The radome of the Veritech was on the ground,

tail up in the air like some mechanical bird searching the earth for worms:

Rick had sprung the canopy and was climbing out of the cockpit.

Kyle said, "We're late already!" and gunned it, patching out on the

pavement.

Rick was chasing them on foot, and Minmei could read his lips: He was

calling her name, asking them to stop.

"Turn around, Minmei!" Kyle yelled at her from the front seat. "It's too

late!"

Her eyes filled with tears.

"Good-bye," she said softly to the small figure in the distance. It's too

late!

106

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Zentraedi are not inferior beings, nor should they be treated like

second-class citizens. They should enjoy the same freedoms the rest of us

do-life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness! No one can say for sure that

some of them won't turn to crime or evil purpose, but at least we won't have

repressed their right to express themselves-we won't have acted like fascists!

From Lynn-Kyle's

Pamphlets on Pacificism

The line forms to the right!" One of Khyron's shock troopers bellowed,

gesturing with his massive hand.

Forty feet below the giant's angry face, a micronized Zentraedi, recently

returned to the fold, wondered whether he had made the right decision in

joining the Backstabber's battalion. It had been an arduous journey from

New Detroit to reach these snowbound wastes. And now there was a certain

hostility in the cold air...

But all at once the shock trooper was grinning, then laughing and

slapping his knee. Other soldiers were, too, and all along the line of

micronized Zentraedi the laughter was spreading.

"Well, that's what the Micronians are always saying, isn't it?" the shock

trooper asked his diminutive counterpart. " 'Line forms on the right,' 'no

parking,' 'no smoking'...I mean, we Zentraedi warriors have learned

something from the Micronians, haven't we? We want to do things orderly

from now on-peacefully!"

"Yeah, we're all for peace!" said a second trooper, brandishing his laser

rifle.

A third added: "We love their homeworld so much that we're just

gonna take it from them!"

And everyone laughed and threw in comments of their own, giants and

micronized Zentraedi alike.

The line led to the sizing chamber, back where it belonged in Khyron's

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command ship now, where one by one, Zentraedi were doffing their

Micronian outfits and being returned to full size in the conversion tank. It

was a slow and tedious process, but no one seemed to mind the wait.

Khyron least of all.

He and Azonia were sitting some distance from the tank, sipping at tall

glasses of an intoxicating drink one of the former micronized Zentraedi had

introduced to the growing outlaw battalion. Khyron had taken a fancy to

sipping straws, and his consort humored him by having one in her glass also.

Close by, Grel watched them nervously.

Word had spread quickly through the wastelands that Khyron had

captured the sizing chamber and was ready to make good his promise to

return to full size any who would join his army. Each day the lines of

micronized Zentraedi males and females grew longer, and Khyron was

reveling in his victory. He had instructed his spies in the population centers

to make it known just who had taken the chamber.

Let them know that Khyron had returned!

Laughing hysterically, the warlord lifted the glass in a toast to a soldier

who stepped from the chamber, naked and powerful once again.

"Now that Khyron is in possession of the chamber, he will rebuild his

army and crush the Micronians! This wretched world will have known

better days!"

With that, he heaved his glass at the line, shattering it against the

interior hull of the ship and showering those waiting with glass and liquid.

Azonia looked at her lord and grinned proudly. She was half in love

with his insanity, though "love" was hardly the word she would have used.

But suddenly Khyron wasn't smiling.

He made a guttural sound, stood up, and began to pace back and forth

in front of her, his clenched fists at his hips holding the campaign cloak

away from his scarlet uniform.

"Not enough," he said at last. "Not enough!" He whirled on her without

warning, devilish fire in his eyes. "We must have the Protoculture matrix

itself-Zor's factory. It's somewhere still in that rotting fortress, and we will

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have it!"

"But m'lord, surely the Micronians-" Azonia started to say.

"Bah!" he interrupted her. "Do you think they would even bother to

guard this chamber if they had the factory in their possession?! No, I don't

think they've found it yet.

"Yes, but-"

Khyron smashed a fist into his open palm. "We will do what we should

have done all along. We will take something from them-something they

deem precious. And we will hold it in exchange for the dimensional fortress.

There is a Micronian word for it..." He turned to Grel and said, "The word,

Grel-what is it?"

"'Ransom,' m'lord," came the speedy reply.

"Ransom, yes..." Khyron repeated softly. He gestured to the sizing

chamber and instructed Grel to speed things along. "We're going to be

leaving here shortly," he told him. "But we must not forget to leave a little

surprise for our Micronian friends..."

New Detroit had been placed under martial law. There was little reason

to expect a follow-up attack, but the theft of the chamber had the resident

Zentraedi up in arms. Some of them believed that the Earth Forces had

staged a Zentraedi raid in order to gain possession of the chamber.

Reconstruction crews and civil defense reinforcements had been flown in

from New Macross, and a field headquarters (with Lisa Hayes in command)

had been set up outside the city limits.

Whether a band of malcontents from the wastes were responsible for

the assault had yet to be confirmed, but reconnaissance flights north of the

city had revealed the existence of a base of some sort, hastily constructed

around the remains of a crashed warship whose towering presence

dominated that snowy region. A squadron of Veritechs under Rick Hunter's

command was on its way to the site now, Lisa Hayes monitoring their

progress from field HO.

Her screen had indicated no activity at the base, but when the

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Cat's-Eye recon dropped in for a closer pass, the displays had lit up: Enemy

missiles had been launched at the approaching fighter group. Lisa went on

the com net to warn them.

"Uh, we roger that, control," said one of Rick's wingmen. "Enemy

projectiles maintaining tracking status. Onboard computers calculate

impact in twenty-three seconds."

"Evasive!" Lisa heard Rick say over the net.

Lisa watched her screen: The missiles were altering course along with

the fighters.

"They're still on your tail, Captain Hunter."

An elisted rating at the adjacent duty station turned to her suddenly.

"Picking up a sudden heat emission."

Lisa was already back on the net. "The projectiles have activated

protoboosters."

"All units," said Rick. "Send out ghosts."

Lisa studied the screen once more. The missiles had gained on the

group, but the false radar images had confused them. Only momentarily,

however. "They've swung around, Commander."

"Roger, control," Rick answered her. "We've got them in our tracking

monitors. We're planning a surprise of our own."

Skull One led the group in a formation climb and rollout that brought

them nose to nose with the incoming projectiles. Though eyes saw nothing

but blue skies ahead, the Veritech screens read death.

"Impact in seven seconds," said Rick's wingman.

"Hammerheads on my mark-now!"

Missiles tore from launch tubes as the group loosed a bit of their own

death; projectiles met their match head-on, annihilating one another in a

series of explosions that fused into an expanding sphere of fire. The

Veritechs boostered through this, scorching themselves but holding their

own, the route to the enemy base clear as day.

They came in hugging the barren terrain, the tail section of the leaning

hulk looming into view over the horizon. Rick ordered reconfiguration to

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Guardian mode when they hit the edge of the target zone and released a

score of heat-seekers to announce his arrival.

The ground at the base of the Zentraedi warship was instantly torn up.

Snow and dirt were blown from the area, and when the smoke cleared, there

was a newly formed crater fully encircling the ruined warship. But no return

fire or signs of activity. Rick guessed what the Cat's-Eye indicators would

reveal.

"Scanners indicate no sign of life," the recon plane's pilot said after a

moment.

Rick ordered half the team to put down and reconfigure to Battloid

mode for entry into the warship itself.

The fact that the hulk might contain unknown traps was on everyone's

mind, so they were to proceed slowly and methodically, compartment by

compartment, checking for timing devices or infrared trips.

Three hours in, they reached a central cargo hold filled with Zentraedi

ordnance and supplies. Still there was no sign of occupation.

"Looks like the place was deserted when we hit it," Rick proposed. "The

missiles must've been controlled from a remote outpost."

Rick's wingman gestured the arm of his Battloid to the weapons cache.

"Take a look at all this stuff."

Rick did just that: If whoever had been here could afford to leave all

this behind, he didn't want to think about what they were packing when

they left.

He moved his mecha toward one of the supply crates, absently

brushing dirt from the lid. As he did so, the insignia of the Botoru Battalion

began to take shape.

Khyron's battalion!

One thousand miles west of New Detroit, through land that had once

been home to dinosaurs and buffalo, ran the strangest group of creatures to

appear in many a day: a small band of giant humanoids and ostrichlike

machines-in some cases a commingling of the two, with giants riding

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piggyback on the pods, hands clamped tightly on plastron guns, legs

wrapped around the pods' spherical bodies. Inside an Officer's Pod at the

head of the pack sat the Backstabber, a crazed smile on his face while he

addressed the images of Azonia and Grel on the mecha's circular screens.

"Everything is going just as I planned," he congratulated himself.

"These Micronians are so easily fooled."

"Battlepods are now approaching objective," his consort reported.

"No sign of any resistance," said Grel.

"They fell for it!" Khyron cackled.

As a cowboy would the rump of a horse, he slapped the console of the

pod to hurry it along. He could hear the mechaless giants give out a war cry

as they crowned a small rise in the terrain and moved on the city.

Denver, Colorado, as it was once known, had been rebuilt so often

since the Global Civil War and had undergone so many name changes that

people now referred to it simply as "the City." An enormous hangar used

decades before by America's NORAD had been converted to a concert hall

large enough to accommodate several thousand Humans and close to a

hundred giants. There was a small crowd tonight, but Minmei was singing

her heart out nonetheless, memories of the raid on New Detroit fresh in her

mind and the need to cement relations between Human and Zentraedi

foremost in her thoughts.

She had the crowd, small as it was; the band was tight, and there were

moments of perfection in her performance. For a while she could put Kyle

from her list of concerns; he hadn't said ten words to her on their

cross-country trip from New Detroit, and even now she was certain that he

was glaring at her from the stage wings.

Minmei, in that same ruffled dress she had sported in New Macross,

was two verses into "Touch and Go" when the real trouble began. The giant

Zentraedi seated in the upper tiers were the first to notice it: a rhythmical

undercurrent of mechanical articulation, the beat of metalshod hooves in

the streets, a sound like distant thunder.

112

The singer herself became aware of the noise a moment later and

stopped midsong. Most of the audience was on its feet, staring up at the

curved roof of the hangar: Something was moving up there...

When the building began to quake, everyone made a run for the exits,

but they were a bit late: The roof seemed to tear open, and all at once it was

raining Battlepods. Several more broke through the hangar walls, followed

by Zentraedi shock troopers armed with laser rifles and autocannons. The

hall was pandemonium, even though not a single shot had been fired.

Minmei stood paralyzed center stage, Battlepods close enough to be

reflected in her azure eyes. She was aware of Kyle's presence at her side but

incapable of moving of her own free will.

"Minmei," he was screaming, "they're heading right for us! You've got

to snap out of it!"

An unusual-looking pod had positioned itself in front of the stage; it

had a red snout, a top-mounted cannon, and two derringer-like

hand-guns-one of which it slammed against the stage as Kyle was leading

her away.

She felt herself thrown off her feet by the violence of the force, but even

that wasn't enough to restore her will.

So she surrendered herself to Kyle, allowing him to pull her up and

lead her to the stage steps, down into the orchestra pit, down into that

grouping of pods closing in on them...

"Well, look what we have here..." an affected voice boomed out far

above her.

Minmei looked up into a handsome, clean-shaven face framed by

attractive blue hair. The giant Zentraedi who had climbed from the

unusual-looking pod was wearing a scarlet-colored uniform trimmed in

yellow and an olivedrab campaign cloak that fastened on itself over one

shoulder. He reached his hand out and grabbed hold of her and Kyle,

crushing them together in his grip as he lifted them high above the stage.

"Let us go!" Kyle managed to yell. "You're going to kill us!"

The warrior titan held them up in front of his face; Minmei saw the

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devil in his steel-gray eyes.

"I wouldn't dream of it," he said, some unspoken purpose in mind.

"No harm must come to Minmei, Commander!" she heard one of the

other giants insist. She craned her neck to see past the warrior's thumb,

fighting for breath to get a look at the one who had spoken in her defense.

Khyron gestured to one of his Battlepods, and without warning the

mecha kicked the friendly Zentraedi, catching him in the groin and sending

him sprawling back against the wall of the hangar, where he rolled over in

agony.

"I will not tolerate disobedience!" Khyron bellowed, raising his other

fist.

He shot Minmei a look that chilled her heart; then he threw his head

back and roared with laughter.

Khyron's name was being shouted in the streets of New Portland, New

Detroit, and several other cities that had seen incidents of Zentraedi

uprising. Lisa Hayes had heard as much at field headquarters, and she was

the one who first reported the rumors to Admiral Gloval. But Gloval

remained skeptical: If history had taught him anything, it was that heroes,

regardless of their orientation toward good or evil, were often resurrected in

times of cultural stress. The Zentraedi were no exception, so it was natural

for them to suddenly believe that Khyron, their evil lord, had not perished

along with Dolza and the commanders of the armada but had somehow

escaped and had merely been lying in wait these two years, ready to strike

back at the Earth with an equally ghostlike battalion of warriors when the

time was right.

Of course, there was no actual proof that Khyron had met his end in

battle, and the most recent attack on New Detroit and the theft of the sizing

chamber were suggestive of his style. There was also Commander Hunter's

discovery of an arms cache bearing the Botoru Battalion insignia...

The admiral, ran through all of it once more as he paced in front of the

large wall screen in the SDF-2 situation room. He was about to put a match

114

to his favorite briar when Claudia called to him from her duty station.

"We're receiving a transmission from someone claiming to be Khyron,"

she told him. "Shall I put it on the screen?"

"Yes, by all means," he replied, stoking the pipe. "And be sure to get a

fix on the source of the transmission. "

Gloval fully expected to encounter the likeness of an imposter. After all,

no one in the Earth Forces had met the so-called Backstabber face to face

(although God knew how many had met him mecha to mecha and regretted

it). The admiral had, however, seen trans-vids of Khyron supplied by

Breetai and Exedore during the long debriefing sessions following the defeat

of the Zentraedi armada.

...Which explains Gloval's sudden start when Khyron's devilishly

handsome face appeared on the wall screen. A collective gasp went up from

the command center personnel; even those who hadn't been privy to the

trans-vids recognized the real item when they saw it.

Khyron sneered: "What a pleasure it is to interrupt you, Admiral

Gloval."

"He sounds like that sixties actor," someone in the control room

commented. "James Mason."

Gloval made up his mind that he was not going to allow himself to be

rattled. He cleared his throat and chomped down on the mouthpiece of the

pipe. "On the contrary," he said with appropriate sarcasm, "the disgust is all

mine, I assure you."

Khyron seemed to like that and said as much. He made a gesture with

his hand to indicate something off to his left, and the camera swung slightly

to find a second Zentraedi officer-a female, at that. She was not unattractive;

with close-cropped blue-gray hair, fine features, and a pointed chin, but she

wore the same malicious look on her pale face as that worn by her

commander. Gloval didn't have to guess: This had to be Azonia, also

believed to have been killed, the dreaded Quadrono leader who was Miriya

Parino's superior.

"I have some friends of yours here," Khyron was saying quite

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matter-of-factly.

Gloval didn't have time to wonder to whom or to what Khyron was

referring. Azonia had raised Lynn-Kyle into view, pinched by the scruff of

the neck between her thumb and first finger. Khyron, too, raised his fist,

shoving Minmei toward the remote camera. The singer looked pale and

frightened.

"Minmei!" Claudia said in surprise.

"This can't be happening!" seethed one of the techs.

Dropping his act of feigned indifference, Gloval pulled the pipe from

his mouth. "You filthy swine!" he said to the screen image.

"You're mad!" someone added.

Khyron reacted by tightening his fist around his helpless captive, his

face suddenly contorted in anger. "Don't try my patience, Micronian-I am

known to have a violent temper!"

The implication was obvious, and Gloval signaled everyone to remain

calm. "We're sorry," he told Khyron.

The Zentraedi laughed shortly. "Well, then, your apologies are humbly

accepted. But listen to me carefully: I want you to know I mean business,

Admiral."

"We understand. What do you want?"

"Don't hurt her-I beg you!" a tech shouted.

Khyron smirked. "Then deliver the dimensional fortress to me

tomorrow by twelve hundred hours."

No one had expected this, least of all the admiral.

"That's impossible! The fortress is no longer spaceworthy."

"Don't lie to me, Admiral. I'm warning you..."

"I'm not lying," Gloval told him firmly. "Listen to me for a

moment...The war is over, Khyron. Dolza and his armada-"

"The war is not over, Admiral!" Khyron threw at the screen. "Not until I

have that fortress in my possession!"

Gloval knew what was on his opponent's mind. "The Protoculture

matrix doesn't exist," he tried calmly. "Ask Exedore and Breetai if-"

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Khyron was livid. "Those traitors are alive?!" Suddenly he laughed

maniacally. "Just deliver the fortress to me, Admiral-if you value your

little...songbird."

"You are mad!" said Gloval.

"Ah, but there's method to my madness," Khyron returned with a grin.

"First, the fortress for Minmei. Then, the Robotech factory satellite for this

second hostage." He gestured to Kyle, who was dangling by his coattails

from Azonia's pinch.

"Don't do it!" Kyle exploded. "Don't listen to them, Admiral!"

"You mind your manners," Azonia said playfully, wiggling him about

roughly.

"It's too dangerous," Kyle managed, in obvious pain. "You can't...you

can't just give in to this guy...

"You're hurting him!" Minmei screamed.

Khyron gestured to his consort to take it easy. "I'd of course prefer to

avoid violence, Admiral. But believe me; I'm more than willing to carry out

my threats."

"I'm sure we can arrange something," Gloval answered him. In fact, he

wasn't at all sure what could be arranged, but it was essential to start by

buying time.

"That's better." Khyron sneered.

Just then a third officer entered the screen's field of view, a large,

square-jawed man who deferentially tapped his commander on the

shoulder.

"Uh...excuse me..." said Grel.

Khyron turned to him briefly, then back to Gloval. "I must take my

leave now, Admiral. But remember: tomorrow by twelve hundred hours."

He flashed a smile, V-ed his fingers, and cut off transmission.

Gloval bowed his head and chided himself silently for believing that

evil could so easily be laid to rest.

117

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

When I first heard Khyron announce his demands for the SDF-1 in

exchange for the hostages he'd taken, my fear was that his agents had

actually penetrated our most top-secret operations. Then, when I realized

that his request was more in the nature of a formality, I began to relax some.

But the knowledge that he did in fact present a continued threat to our

security made me reevaluate the plans I had so carefully formulated for the

coming months.

From the log of Admiral Henry Gloval

Someone had thought to call the Denver hangar/theater

"Zarkopolis"-as close a translation from the Zentraedi as the Micronian

language allowed. The structure bore no resemblance to the original

Zarkopolis-the Zentraedi mining base on Fantoma-but it was in keeping

with the rekindled spirit of conquest to rename it thus.

Cross-legged on a raised portion of the stage that had become their

command post sat Khyron, Azonia, Grel, and Gerao. In attendance were

several aides and shock troopers in full battle armor. Stationed in the vast

hall below were troops of Khyron's elite strike force and half a dozen

battlepods. Minmei stood bravely in the Backstabber's open palm; Khyron

regarded her as though she were some zoological specimen.

"It's hard to believe that this helpless little creature in my hand is the

key to our freedom," he mused aloud. "To think they'd give up the fortress

for you..." His closed his hand on Minmei. "This Micronian sentimentality-it

makes me quite ill just to think about it!"

Khyron got to his feet, striking an orator's pose.

"Oh, to be free of this miserable planet!...I can hardly wait, I assure

you..." He had turned his back on his audience and was once again eyeing

Minmei, now on her knees in his open hand. "Well...why doesn't Minmei

perform for us, eh?"

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He swung around again and extended his hand, a small stage for her

act, almost forty feet off the ground.

Minmei was quick to comply; in fact, she'd been waiting for just such

an opportunity. Hers was the voice that had toppled a mighty empire, so

surely a handful of disaffected warriors would present little problem. She

feared and hated Khyron, but somewhere in the back of her mind endured

the idea that she possessed the power to open his heart to love and peace.

"To be in love..." she began, standing up and looking him in the eye.

"...must be the sweetest feeling that a man can feel...To be in love, to live a

dream..."

Khyron's expression was softening. The giant hand that was sweeping

her in front of a shocked and dumbfounded audience of hardened soldiers

was shaking and sweating.

"...with somebody you care about like no one else."

Minmei was practically shouting out the lyrics now as choruses of

groans and words of disbelief rose from Azonia and the others.

Khyron's body was trembling; his eyes were rolled back in his head.

"A special woman, a dearest woman..."

And suddenly, his knees were buckling and he was down on the floor,

seemingly ready to release her from his hold. Minmei started to step from

his palm, singing: "...Who needs to share her life with you alone..." Without

warning, he grabbed her again, a sly grin splitting his face as he squeezed

the song and breath from her.

"Well, it was a brave attempt, Minmei. But unfortunately for you, as

you can see, I am immune to your witchcraft."

"You had me fooled!" Azonia laughed, her hand to her mouth.

But Khyron silenced her. "I am speaking to my little songbird." He

looked hard at Minmei. "And she's going to help us get what we want, isn't

that so, my little pet?"

Minmei flailed about in his hand, struggling to free herself. "I won't

help you-you big overgrown...clown!"

Khyron faked a look of hurt. "That was not very nice, Minmei...In fact,

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I'm rather surprised at you-losing your temper like that. Very unladylike."

Minmei folded her arms in defiance, fighting back tears.

"I may have to teach you some manners," her captor was threatening,

his anger building, his grip on her tightening. "You think that just because

you're the magnificent Minmei, you're better than we are...Well, I despise

your music! Despise it! Do you hear me?!"

She could no longer breathe. Khyron was ranting and raving, and she

was rapidly losing touch with the world. Blackness circled in on her from

the edges of her vision, silencing thoughts and fears alike.

Khyron felt her go limp in his hand. and realized he had gone too far.

Azonia was shouting at him to be careful, but he was certain he'd already

overstepped himself.

"Cosmos! What have I done?!"

Minmei was unmoving in his hand, deathly still. "She enraged me so, I

forgot how important she was to our plan..." Gently, he poked at her with

his finger, hoping she'd revive; and in a moment she did, dazed and possibly

hurt but certainly nowhere near dead. Khyron acknowledged his relief with

a smile.

"She's all right," he told Azonia. "They're well-built little things."

Azonia had picked up Kyle and was now holding him by one foot and

one arm, twisting him about as though he were made of pipe cleaners. Kyle

was far less important to the plan, so she wasn't concerned about breaking

him up a bit.

Kyle, on the other hand, felt differently about it, and it was only his

many years of martial-arts training that kept him from suffering major

dislocations. The blue-haired Amazon seemed hell-bent on reconfiguring

him like some sort of mannikin mecha.

She joked: "Surely this is as much fun for you as it is for me!"

And Kyle could only hope he would see the day when she micronized

herself; because if he lived through this, there was going to be a score to

settle.

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Admiral Gloval called an emergency session with his chiefs of staff

following Khyron's transmission, which had been traced to New Denver.

They had less than twelve hours to decide on a course of action. Claudia

Grant, General Motokoff from G3, and several officers from various

departments of the RDF were gathered around a long table in the SDF-2

briefing room. Exedore, still aboard the factory satellite, was in

communication with them via comlink; his image appeared on one of the

monitors.

"The situation is without precedent," Motokoff was saying. He was a

young man in spite of his rank, former head of the CD forces aboard the

SDF-1 during its two-year ordeal in space. "Since the Zentraedi have never

taken hostages before, we have no way of knowing if they'll make good their

promises."

Gloval drew at his pipe, nodding. "Or their threats," he told the table.

"May I respond to that, Admiral?" Exedore said from the screen.

"Go ahead, Exedore," said Gloval.

The Zentraedi looked squarely into the remote camera. "Khyron will

make good his threats, of this I can assure you. Lord Breetai concurs with

me that this hostage taking suggests he has gone beyond the bounds of his

Zentraedi conditioning, which would have rendered such an act unthinkable.

There is no telling how far he is willing to go now. But I must caution you

not to accede to his demands under any circumstances. Lord Breetai wishes

me to inform you that he is at your service should you require him in

settling this most unfortunate matter."

Gloval took the pipe from his mouth and inclined his head. "That will

not be necessary, Exedore, although you may convey my appreciation to the

commander. Your people have already spent far too many years acting as a

police force. We won't ask you to fight our battles for us."

"I understand, Admiral," Exedore said evenly.

One of the officers stood up to address Gloval. "I agree with Breetai,

Admiral. Putting the SDF-1 into Khyron's hands would be an act of suicide!"

The officer had gotten himself so worked up that the pencil he was holding

121

snapped in his hands.

"Calm down," Gloval told him gruffly. "I have no intention of giving in

to his demands."

"I hope you're not suggesting that we ignore Khyron's threats to Kyle

and Minmei," said Claudia.

"No," everyone was quick to say.

"We're all in agreement on that, sir," said another officer. "But this is a

blatant act of terrorism, and we must refuse to bargain with him."

Claudia nodded in agreement.

Gloval cleared his throat. "For two years now the Zentraedi have lived

with us as equals. And in that time we have all come to know many of them

as friends and allies. Khyron took advantage of this by infiltrating his spies

into our cities." We have no way of knowing who they are or where they

might be."

"I don't see what bearing this has on the problem, Admiral," Motokoff

interjected.

Gloval made a dismissive gesture. "I'm coming to that. We don't know

who our enemies are, but we do know our friends..." The chiefs of staff

waited for him to finish. "So, I suggest we use the Zentraedis to trick him, as

he used them to trick us."

"Commander Hunter, engage your scrambler," Lisa said over the net

from field headquarters.

The Skull had been ordered out of the deserted Zentraedi base where

the arms cache had been discovered. In minutes the place was going to be a

memory, thanks to the explosive charges they had set to self-destruct.

"Engaging voice scrambler for encoded transmission, control," Rick

radioed back after tapping in a series of commands on the Veritech's

console.

He had been expecting new orders since word had been received that

Khyron was responsible for the attack on New Detroit. Unlike Gloval, Rick

saw no reason to doubt that Khyron had survived the Zentraedi holocaust.

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Khyron had always been the most self-serving of the lot; he was a born

survivor, and it was not unlike him to go in hiding for two years-to stage his

own resurrection. Rick recalled the many times he had faced Khyron in

battle; without adequate proof, he blamed Khyron for Roy Fokker's death.

And as anxious as he felt about a renewed contest, one part of him was

actually looking forward to it.

Lisa wasn't sure she wanted to break the news to him about Minmei,

but orders were orders. "Operation Star-Saver," the High Command was

calling it.

"It looks like it's going to be a tough one, this time," Claudia had told

her. "But you, you lucky devil, you'll be coordinating for Commander

Hunter once again. "

Somehow Claudia had missed the point: Rick was being ordered to

save Minmei-again! How much longer was fate going to build these rescues

into their relationship? Lisa wondered. Just when the singer was no longer

a threat to what little happiness Lisa and Rick shared, another crisis would

present itself.

"And why was it that Rick is called to respond to every crisis?" she had

asked Claudia, not really expecting a response and certainly not having to

be reminded that Rick was the best there was.

That was why she wanted him.

"Good to hear your voice again, Lisa," Rick was saying.

Lisa sucked in her breath and decided to take the plunge.

"Rick," she began. "Your team is to report back to New Macross for

special orders. Khyron has kidnapped, ah, two...people. He's holding them

hostage in New Denver for the return of the SDF-1."

"That's insane! The fortress isn't even airworthy, is it?"

"Of course not. But-"

"Man, somebody really must have slipped some elephant juice into the

punch bowl when that guy was cloned...And since when do the Zentraedi

take hostages?"

"Since Khyron got back to town."

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"So who'd he grab? Lynn-Kyle, if it's my lucky day."

Lisa raised her eyes to the domed ceiling. "It's your lucky day," she told

him.

She heard his gasp, then: "Who's the second person, Lisa? Give it to me

straight."

Make it short and sweet, she told herself, and said: "Minmei. Khyron

attacked a club in-"

"Where are they?!"

Lisa stiffened at her station. He'd fly to the sun and back, she said to

herself. But to Rick, she cautioned: "There is no place for amateur heroics

on this mission, Commander."

Rick went silent, and it was too late for her to take it back.

"Uhh, really?" he said after a moment, cold as ice. "I wasn't aware that

amateur heroics were my stock in trade."

Lisa fumed, her face coloring. The woman tech at the adjacent station

was staring at her as if assessing her professionalism. "That is all! Out!" she

hollered, and slammed her palm down on the comlink button.

Four hours later, Skull Team was assembled on the flight deck of the

Prometheus; they had been briefed and were ready for action.

Lisa, also recalled to New Macross, was braving the cold evening winds

to wish Rick well. She couldn't bear the thought of his going off into combat

while that foolish argument remained unresolved. But he wasn't helping her

out at all, clinging to his anger.

"Please be careful, Rick," she called up to Skull One's cockpit. "Khyron

will stop at nothing, you know that."

Rick stopped on the top step of the Veritech's ladder and turned to her,

"thinking cap" in place. "Look, I appreciate your concern, but we've been

over the operation, and I know what I have to do."

"That's not what I'm talking about," she said as he climbed in. "I'm just

afraid you'll lose your objectivity and do something rash..."

Again her words brought him to a halt, but this time he leaped from the

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Veritech and strode toward her.

"Rick-"

"Yes. I love her very much-I won't lie to you, Lisa. I've never tried to

conceal that from you. But I settled my feelings about her a long time ago.

Minmei and I can never be together...I'm flying this mission as a pilot."

"And you're a fine pilot, Rick. Just don't lose your perspective, that's all.

If anything happened-"

"I'm, commanding an entire squadron, Lisa! Do you think I'd

jeopardize their safety just because of my feelings for Minmei?!"

"Emotions are so compelling..." she said, averting her eyes. "I just can't

be sure..."

Rick struck a challenge pose, gloved fists on his hips. "What? You can't

be sure of what?!"

She lowered her head. "It's nothing...Forget I said anything. "

Rick put his hands on her shoulders. "Look, I'll be back," he said,

hoping to put her at ease. He didn't even know why they were going at each

other like this. Two hostages: It didn't matter who they were...

"Good luck," Lisa said as he walked away.

In celebration of his imminent victory, Khyron had emptied the coffers

of the last remaining Zentraedi foodstuffs and provisions-bottles of

Garudan ale and sides of yptrax from Haydon VI, too long in the freeze-dry

bins. Most of the Zentraedi subsisted on chemical nutrients, but Khyron had

always strived to individualize himself. To be unique in all things. He

respected the Micronians' taste for organic food; it was only fitting that life

feed on death, as death fed on life...

Khyron toasted their success, took a long pull from the bottle of ale,

and refilled Azonia's glass. She was on the floor to the left of Khyron's

improvised throne-an enormous storage crate turned on its side-Grel, a

drumstick of meat in hand, to the right.

"There you are, my dear."

Khyron and Grel watched her empty the glass and laughed drunkenly.

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"She's amazing, my lord," Grel commented. His feelings toward Azonia

had changed somewhat, especially now that there were other Zentraedi

females in camp. And of course the ale helped considerably.

"I believe I'll have another," said Azonia. "Fill it up."

Khyron smiled and poured. "My dear Azonia, I believe you could

outdrink all of us."

"And I'm just starting." She beamed.

Khyron leered at her. "Excellent, Commander...excellent. "

Minmei and Kyle were imprisoned in an ingeniously designed cage

fashioned from a circular arrangement of giant-size forks-the

downward-pointing tines anchored by the inner lip of a shallow bowl-and a

similarly sized pan lid that enclosed and held fast the backward-bending

upper ends of the fork stems. To offset the fear, and really for lack of

anything better to do, the two captives pulled at their makeshift bars to no

avail.

Exhausted, Minmei fell to the bowl floor, Kyle beside her, breathless,

his body racked with pain from Azonia's manhandling.

"We'll have to try another way," she managed, gasping for air.

"There is no other way-we'll never get out of here!"

"No, Kyle, don't say that..."

"Whatever happens to us-no matter what he does to us-Gloval must

never give in to that barbarian's demands." Kyle wiped sweat from his brow.

"Imagine the SDF-1 in Khyron's hands!"

"Won't they try to rescue us?" she asked, suddenly even more

frightened.

"I wouldn't hold my breath, Minmei."

It was difficult to know just what Kyle wanted. He didn't want the

admiral to give in to Khyron's demands, but at the same time he was already

condemning him for not mounting a rescue. This was all too typical of his

recent behavior, and Minmei was further saddened.

"Then there isn't much to hope for," she sobbed. It didn't seem possible:

Hopes and dreams were so very real...

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Kyle was getting to his feet. "There's nothing to hope for."

"But we can't lose hope-that's all we've got," she told him, unsure

whom she was trying to convince.

But Kyle came back at her with his usual: "All the hope in the world is

useless in a situation like this."

Minmei felt sad for him. She didn't want to hurt him but nevertheless

found herself saying, "If only Rick was here-he'd save us."

Kyle didn't hear it or perhaps didn't want to hear it; in either case, he

had turned his attention to their captors and was now leaning between the

forks and shouting at them.

"Hey, you Zentraedi! Hey, you overgrown gorillas! What a bunch of

brainless baboons! All you can think about is your own bellies, huh?!"

Khyron and the others fell silent, listening to him.

"What about your own comrades? What do you think about that? Does

it make you happy knowing that you've slaughtered your own people?!"

Minmei noticed Khyron's eyes narrowing. She wanted to tell Kyle to

stop. What was he trying to gain by this, anyway? but he went right on

provoking them.

"Why can't you goons learn to live in peace for a change? I'll tell you

why-because that would take courage, and you're all a bunch of cowards,

that's why!"

Khyron had been getting a kick out of it-the spunk displayed by this

tiny creature-but accusations about cowardice were never amusing,

especially since the defeat of the armada and Khyron's decision then to

absent himself from the battle...

The Backstabber got to his feet in a rush, smashing a bottle of ale down

on the table that held the cage.

"Careful, Khyron," Azonia said as her commander stomped toward

Kyle and Minmei. "Remember the fortress..."

"You puny little things," Khyron sneered, towering over them. "If it

weren't for the fact that I need you, I'd...I'd crush you-just for pleasure!"

Minmei was shaking uncontrollably, ready to feel that hand come down

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on their cage. She stammered, "Be careful, Kyle, he's been drinking!"

The female, Azonia, was by his side now, and Khyron suddenly reached

out for her and pulled her to him, passionately.

"You see," he whispered to his captives, "I've learned something about

pleasure..."

And with that he embraced Azonia and kissed her full on the mouth,

savagely; she responded, groaning and holding him fast. Kyle and Minmei

were aghast-every bit as shocked as Dolza had been by Rick and Lisa's kiss

years before, the one that had started it all.

Kyle dropped to his knees as though defeated while the two Zentraedi

drank in each other's lust. And there was no telling just how far Khyron and

Azonia might have been prepared to go. But fate, as is its wont, chose that

particular moment to intervene: Grel, nervous at the prospect of disturbing

his lord, stepped forward with news to drain the life from the best of parties.

"I'm, er, sorry to have to interrupt your...demonstration, Lord Khyron,"

Grel faltered, "but I, uh, thought you might want to know that we seem to be,

uh, under attack."

128

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Hierarchy, hegemony...these words have no meaning to a Zentraedi.

They were a...compartmentalized military body. Dolza was created to

oversee them, Exedore to advise them; Breetai, Reno, Khyron, and

innumerable others to command; and the rest, to serve. But there was never

any male/female fraternization. And that very repression of natural drives

and instincts was in part responsible for the tremendous energy they

consequently gave over to warfare-displacement drive as it was once

called...How like the matrixed seeds of the Invid Flower itself, the basis of

Protoculture.

Dr. Emil Lang,

Ghost Machines: An Overview of Protoculture

Part of Azonia's intitation into sensual pleasure was to be pushed aside

and told that the time wasn't right.

Khyron had rushed to the nearest viewscreen, leaving Azonia where he

had pushed her to the floor, hungry for more of his attention. A red-haired

Zentraedi soldier stationed at a forward outpost saluted the Backstabber

from the screen.

"Greetings and salutations, Lord Khyron, master of the peoples of-"

Reflectively, Khyron leaned back from the monitor as a fiery blast

erased the soldier's words and carried him clear out of the remote camera's

field of view.

"What's happening there?!" Khyron shouted into the comlink, fooling

with the console control knobs. In a minute, the soldier rose into view once

again, hand to his head where he'd been wounded.

"Fighters are everywhere, sir! They've taken us completely by surprise!

We'll try to hold them off for as long as we can!" Earth mecha streaked

across the screen's starry background, leaving contrails in the night sky.

"Please, sir, you must send reinforcements-" And the monitor blanked out.

129

Khyron frowned. Behind him, one of his shock troopers suggested that

the Micronians might be mounting a diversionary raid, but Khyron didn't

think them foolish enough to risk such a thing.

"So this is how they answer my demands!" he said, suddenly getting to

his feet. "Well, it seems as though our little songbird has outlived her

usefulness-to them and to us!"

Khyron ordered his troops to their pods and began to suit himself up in

Zentraedi armor, bandoliers, and hip belt. Azonia approached him

cautiously.

"Khyron, may we please continue the...demonstration?"

"Just as soon as I return," he told her firmly. "But why don't you come

with us? The Micronians won't stand a chance with you by my side! We'll

enjoy a moment's pleasure with them."

Azonia hesitated; it was certainly an inviting notion, but she had been

trained to lead, not to follow. Besides, it would mean that one of the troops

would have to give up his mecha, and they were looking forward to battle to

the last man.

"And what about Minmei?"

Khyron glanced over at the cage he had fashioned and spat.

"We'll deal with her later." He put his arm around Azonia and offered

to find her a Battlepod, as if offering to take her on a vacation.

"That would be wonderful!" Azonia gushed.

"We'll share the experience our people love most!"

"Yes, we'll go into battle together!"

"Good." Khyron smiled. "I sense a great victory!"

Outside the hangar theater, the Zentraedi commander lowered himself

into a harness seat astride an Officer's Pod, which had been modified to

support four topmounted cannons. The mecha was piloted by a three-man

crew of micronized warriors. Somewhat below him, Azonia clambered into

one of the standard versions. "Show no mercy!" she shouted to the troops

lined up behind them.

Khyron kicked the side of Officer's Pod to signal the pilots to move out.

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Inside, one of the crewmen asked whether one kick meant "forward" or

"reverse."

"Neither, you fool!" said a second. "It means advance to the left."

"What does it matter?" asked the third. "We better do something or

he'll start screaming at us again."

Sure enough, Khyron opened the hatch to the control room and snarled:

"Get moving, you idiots!"

Zentraedi war cries filled the air as Khyron's alliance of troops and

mecha charged into the night.

Undiscovered by Khyron's sentries, two members of an RDF

long-range reconnaissance team witnessed the charge from their position

atop a granite outcropping not far from the hangar theater. They were

outfitted in sensor-reflective antirad suits, complete with jetpacks, full

helmets, and survival gear. The radio man had raised SDF-2 control.

"Pelican Mother," he whispered. "This is Eyes-Front. The Dark Star has

fallen; repeat: The Dark Star has fallen..."

"Roger, Eyes-Front, we copy you loud and clear," returned Lisa Hayes.

She then switched over to the com net.

"Skull Team, you now have green light, over."

Winging his way toward New Denver in Skull One, Rick copied the

message.

"Roger," he told Lisa flatly. "We're going in."

There, was so much more she wanted to say, so much more.

Khyron's forces crested a small rise and dropped into a barren hollow

in time to see three of their comrades locked in hand-to-hand combat with

three RDF Battloids.

"Micronians!" Khyron snarled from his seat. "Prepare to meet your

doom!"

Vastly outnumbered, the Battloids turned and fled as expected, but the

sight of the three Zentraedi giants fleeing along with them came as a

131

complete surprise. Khyron began to shout: "Where are you going?! We have

come to save you!" He didn't bother to repeat himself, though. His warrior

sense told him that he'd been led into a trap. Ordering his team to a halt,

Khyron spent a moment puzzling out Gloval's move.

Of course! he said to himself. Gloval had managed to infiltrate his unit

with Zentraedi traitors! Khyron turned in his seat and regarded his forces

warily. But there was no time to pick out the good from the bad: On the high

ground all around them, Micronian mecha were popping into view.

"Fire!" ordered Khyron, barely getting the command out before the

enemy guns opened up. Six of his Battlepods were taken out in an instant,

and an explosive close call almost toppled him from his seat.

"Fire!" he yelled again, hearing the immediate report of friendly

cannons. "Charge!"

"Skull Team, this is Pelican Mother: The trap is sprung! Over!"

"Roger, Pelican Mother," Rick's wingman radioed Lisa. "Approaching

assault objective."

"Commander Hunter," said Lisa. "That's your signal to begin."

"Roger."

The heck with rules, she told herself. "Be careful, Rick. Khyron left

several Battlepods behind to guard the hostages. "

"Going in low," he replied, Lisa's last words to him echoing in his mind.

Don't lose your perspective. But Minmei's voice was running at the same

time in wishful daydream thoughts.

It can't end this way, Rick, she was telling him lovingly. Soon we'll be

together.

Rick's face had a determined look as he nosed the Veritech still lower,

the target looming into sight.

Inside the hangar, three Zentraedi giants were playing cards, trying to

shake off the buzz from that premature celebration bash. The fork cage was

beside them on the table. Before they had time to know what hit them, a

Veritech had blown its way into the building, swept-back wings bringing

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down two soldiers in its flight path.

Three Battlepods guarding the entrance had already been blown to

smithereens.

The hangar was pure chaos; every soldier with an autocannon or

assault rifle was loosing fire and bolts of deadly energy against the fighter, a

bird of prey streaking overhead.

Rick circled the stage, looking for Minmei and Kyle while he dodged

steady bursts of ground fire, blinding searchlights in the dark building. In

Guardian mode now, he nosedived his mecha to within twenty feet of the

floor and made a pass between two Zentraedi, bowling them over with the

Veritech's wings. When he put down, a third giant wielding a depleted

autocannon rushed at him, connecting once with a blow that narrowly

missed the cockpit canopy before Rick dispatched him with a savage thrust

of the mecha's metalshod left fist. The warrior was propelled a good three

hundred feet to his final resting place.

Rick walked the mecha forward to the cage, pulling off the lid as he

dropped the Veritech's radome to the tabletop.

"Minmei, are you all right?!" he called anxiously through the external

speakers.

She was standing inside the fork enclosure, somehow tidy-looking and

effervescent despite the ordeal she'd suffered through.

"Yes, Rick! I knew you'd come for me!"

"Of course I would."

Looking up at him in the cockpit, she felt her heart suddenly swell with

love and longing. Rick was like some guardian angel in her life, always there

when she needed him-for support, protection, affection. And in that

moment, she vowed to act on the strength of these renewed feelings, to

demonstrate to him how much he meant to her.

"It's been a...long time," she said softly.

But it was doubtful that Rick heard her over Kyle's shouts.

"Will you get us outta here!" he was demanding.

Rick thought the mecha through a series of motions that allowed him

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to rip open the remainder of the cage, flattening the forks like a hurricane

wind. As Minmei and Kyle clambered up the mecha's left hand and arm,

Rick raised the base:

"This is Skull Leader, Operation Star-Saver...Mission accomplished!"

Lisa Hayes was already on her way to New Denver's theater when word

arrived that the two hostages were safe and sound. But no sooner had her

plane put down than she began to get an earful of complaints from an

infuriated Lynn-Kyle.

"I'm telling you," he was hollering in her ear, "he came blasting in

without any regard for our safety!"

Lisa could never figure Kyle out, but she had no patience with anyone

who criticized a successful mission-especially when that mission had saved

two lives.

Kyle thrust his forefinger at her like a weapon. "That maniac almost got

us killed!"

"We executed the mission to the best of our abilities," she countered,

angered beyond control. "If Commander Hunter's conduct was

unacceptable, then file a report."

"A report?!" Kyle screamed, flexing his hands. "Just lemme get my

hands on him!"

Suddenly Minmei was between them, holding her arms out like a

crossing guard-a living cross to Kyle's vampire. "Stop it!" she shrieked.

"Can't you see that all these people risked their lives for us, you ungrateful

oaf!"

Lisa waited for Kyle to deck his cousin, but Rick's equally sudden

appearance caught Kyle off guard. The Skull Leader came walking out of the

night shadows cast by his crouched Veritech, helmet cradled in his right

arm.

"I did it for you, Minmei," he said, approaching the three of them. "I

sure didn't do it for Kyle."

Kyle took a step forward, threateningly. "I'd expect that from you,

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Hunter." Now, Lisa said to herself. Now all hell is going to break loose.

Things had been building to this showdown for three years...

But thankfully, the argument didn't escalate to violence. Quite the

opposite: Minmei stepped out from between Kyle and Lisa with a warm

"Thank you" for Rick, and he smiled. "I was happy to do it."

She seemed to stand there staring at him for a moment, then broke out

into a run that led her straight into his arms.

Lisa heard Rick tell her: "You must know that I'd be willing to risk my

life for you again and again." And as Lisa's mouth dropped open, the two of

them began twirling around together, sobbing with joy like long-lost lovers.

Just that, in fact.

Elsewhere, Khyron's troops and the Earth Forces were annihilating

each other. The last thing the RDF commander had expected was a charge;

but then, he had never faced the Backstabber in battle.

Battlepods and Gladiators met head-on, going at it with a ferocity

neither side had experienced before. Here, a pod rammed itself into a MAC

II cannon, self-destructing on impact, while close by two pods down on

their backs and cracked open like eggs fought their assailants with blasts of

heat and fire sent blowtorching from their foot thrusters. Azonia, the

Protoculture charges of the Officer's Pod weapons system depleted,

windmilled the mecha's hand-guns against its Battloid opponent. Zentraedi

infantry troops armed with control rods torn from ruined Battlepods dueled

Excaliburs, swinging autocannons like baseball bats.

Khyron was still astride his undamaged cannon pod, directing rotating

fusillades of fire against ridge guns and attacking mecha. Battloids

challenged his position, charging in from all sides and scaling the

four-cannon machine to engage him one on one.

He wrestled a gatling away from one of these would-be heros and

turned the gun on it, blowing off the top of the pod. As the Battloid hit the

ground and exploded, Khyron emptied the gun on a new wave of Micronian

mecha, laughing maniacally, as was the Zentraedi way to welcome death.

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Khyron was cursing the depleted gatling when one of his micronized

crewmen appeared briefly in the cockpit hatchway to inform him that the

cannon's Protoculture charge was likewise used up. Distracted, the

commander didn't see a second Battloid that had reached the top of the

cannon until it was almost too late. He sidestepped the mecha's lunge and

knocked it off balance with a gatling blow to the abdomen. But now a third

had suddenly appeared behind him, and again he twisted and swung the

gun, nailing the mecha with a shot to its chest.

Grel had also survived the initial surprise attack and was contributing

his blood lust to the kill zone. Out of weapons charge, he ran his Battlepod

at full throttle into the swarm of Battloids attacking his commander's

position. But a miscalculation inadvertently brought him crashing against

one of the mecha's hand-guns, setting loose the cannon's final charge. The

force of the blast threw Grel's Battlepod into a back flip, while the slug itself

ripped from the muzzle and blew away the arm of Azonia's Officer's Pod.

Khyron saw her go down in a fiery fall and leaped from the cannon seat

to run to her aid. Bolts of energy crisscrossed overhead and explosions

erupted around him as he ran, a broken-field runner in hell. A Battloid

thought to stop him, but he felled it with a gatling blow to the thing's head.

He lifted the plastron hatch of Azonia's smoldering pod and called out

to her, the first time he had ever demonstrated such feeling for one of his

own kind. She was lying injured inside, on the brink of unconsciousness,

until she saw him and felt the light return to her.

Was she all right? he wanted to know.

She smiled slightly, even though there was nothing good to report; oh,

she was unhurt, but the pod's weapons were empty. And it didn't matter,

she wanted to tell him, because she had at least lived to experience the joy of

battle and the knowledge that he had cared enough to come to her side.

But Khyron surprised her by ordering a retreat.

She got the pod to its feet and scooped Khyron up in its one good arm,

running away with him into the dawn light, a badly beaten band of

Battlepods trailing behind.

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Lisa and Kyle stood silently side by side, identical scowls on their faces,

while the happy reunion continued. Lisa was thinking: We must look like

twins.

She wasn't aware of the female flight officer who approached her from

the shuttle plane until she felt the light tap on her shoulder.

"Khyron is in full retreat," the woman reported.

Lisa glanced back at the lovers. The sun was up, and it would have

made a pretty picture-the two of them embracing, the Guardian behind

them against a powder-blue sky-if only Rick hadn't been a featured subject.

But this sudden news had presented her with a way to break it up. After all,

it was Rick's duty to go after Khyron, wasn't it. He was the best there was...

If Lisa wrestled with the idea of using her rank to come between them,

she didn't show it. She turned to the woman officer and told her to notify

Admiral Gloval that she was sending Commander Hunter in to mop up.

With that, she walked over to them, tapping Rick roughly on the

shoulder to put a swift end to their lingering kiss. She demonstrated none of

the nervous reserve Grel had shown earlier with Khyron and Azonia.

"I hope I'm not interrupting anything important, Commander, but

Khyron is on the run, and Skull has been ordered to give pursuit."

"Huh?" Minmei said, as if waking from a dream.

Rick shot Lisa an angry look. "I almost didn't make it back the first

time-isn't that enough for you?!"

"Are you refusing orders, mister?!" she said, raising her voice.

Rick threw his helmet to the ground. "You're darn right I'm refusing!

You want Khyron so bad, you go out and get him!"

"Fine!" Lisa shot back, squatting down to retrieve the helmet. "I'll go

bring him in, and you can just go put yourself on report!"

Minmei made a startled sound, looking back and forth between them.

Rick snatched the helmet away from Lisa's grasp.

"Forget it! I've come this far-I might as well finish the job, Captain!"

Lisa berated herself silently. How could I allow myself to do this to him?

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She started to apologize, but he cut her off.

"It's my duty, right?!" He turned affectionately to Minmei and told her

that he'd be back soon.

"I know you will," she sighed.

Lisa stood with her arms folded, her foot tapping the tarmac fitfully.

She wanted to throw up, apologize again, scream, do something!

Rick donned the "thinking cap" and made an athletic jump to the

lowered nose of the Veritech. As he was snuggling down inside the cockpit,

Minmei saluted and said, "I'll be waiting for you."

He returned both her smile and her salute before bringing the canopy

down.

The Guardian righted itself as Rick fired up the rear thrusters, and

some sort of silent communication passed between Minmei and himself:

words and thoughts from the past, suddenly intertwined and confused with

these renewed trusts.

Minmei stood unmoving while the Veritech initiated its launch, riding

over the barren land on its own blasting carpet. But when it had reached the

end of the field, she began to chase after it, shouting out Rick's name, afraid

all at once that she would lose him forever.

Lisa took off after her, concerned for her safety. She saw Minmei

collapse a short distance off, burying her face in her hands.

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CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I don't know who I want to strangle more-Lisa or her idiot flyboy. I only

know that if something doesn't put a quick end to this little duet they're

dancing, I'm going to get myself transferred to the factory satellite, and I'm

going to see to it that Lisa Hayes comes with me.

The Collected Letters of Claudia Grant

The issue, Lisa decided afterward, was control. It had nothing to do

with Minmei, Kyle, or even Rick. She couldn't bring herself to blame him no

matter how much effort she put into it; she couldn't accuse him of deceit-he

had been honest about his feelings for Minmei all along-lack of

consideration, or outright selfishness. Nor was his behavior manipulative or

controlling in any way. Damn him. That left only herself to blame, unless

she could somehow pin the whole thing on Khyron!

This made her laugh: Here she was, sitting in the officer's mess feeling

like the world was about to end because she and Rick had had another tiff,

when Khyron was on the loose, kidnapping people, demanding the return of

the SDF-1, and threatening to wipe out what little remained of the human

race. But her preoccupation with the little things didn't surprise her. For

what could one person do up against the bag ones? She played her part,

Rick played his; all of them, Minmei included, had roles to enact.

Sometimes, though, it felt as if someone else had written the lines they all

delivered with such force and passion. But in the end it all came back to

control: how she was going to regain control of herself.

Lisa sat there sipping at lukewarm coffee, so wrapped up in replaying

dawn's events that she took no notice of Claudia's arrival.

"I thought I might find you in here," her friend said, slipping into the

seat opposite her. "Why so glum, chum?"

Lisa looked up, startled and in no mood for good cheer.

"Come on," Claudia pressed. "Tell me what Rick has done now, Lisa."

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"Please, Claudia..."

"Not in the mood for talk, huh? Well, honey, sometimes it clears the

air...just helps to get it in the open."

Lisa loved Claudia dearly, but ever since Roy's death she seemed to

have become the absolute font of optimism. Whether this was simply her

way of running from reality-her path of control-Lisa had no idea. Just now

she didn't feel like "clearing the air"; instead, she tossed her head back as if

to shrug off her dark mood and asked Claudia what made her think she was

upset.

Claudia almost smiled. "Uh, woman's intuition. And even if I'm wrong,

I want you to try my prescription for pain." She produced a box of blended

teas from her jacket pocket and slid it across the table. "Hot tea can do

wonders for open wounds."

Indefatigable optimism and a reliance on health potions and panaceas,

thought Lisa. But after a moment she surrendered.

"Is it really all that noticeable?"

"Only if someone happens to be glancing in your general direction,"

Claudia told her. "Or maybe to someone who's been there..."

Lisa could only shake her head.

Claudia reached out for Lisa's hand. "I know how it is...but you've got

to loosen up. Stop trying to control how you feel-just tell him."

Claudia stood up.

"What am I supposed to tell him?"

Now Claudia shook her head. "How you feel about him, silly."

Lisa thought about it as Claudia walked off. She picked up the package

of tea and began to fool-with it absently. Rick Hunter, she said to herself.

This is the way I feel about you: I-I love you. Suddenly she gave the box a

sort of hopeless toss. Even her inner voice was stammering! This was not

going to be easy.

Mirroring the emotional state of its pilot, Skull One came in fast and

furious, rocking side to side as it screeched along the Prometheus's flight

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deck.

Rick was like a raw nerve just waiting to be touched. Effectively he'd

been in high gear since leaving the abandoned Zentraedi base over

forty-eight hours ago. For the past eight, the squadron had been scouring

the countryside for signs of Khyron's forces. Beginning with the site of the

surprise attack (now a place of unspeakable carnage, littered with the

remains of scores of Battlepods and RDF mecha), Skull Team had traced

Khyron's retreat north to yet another hastily abandoned base. Sensor

readings indicated that a Zentraedi warship had been launched from the

base shortly before Skull's arrival, but there was no trace of its heading or

any way to determine the strength of Khyron's remaining army. Given the

number of Zentraedi who had deserted the cities, the size of the ship

(Zentraedi cruiser class), and the fact that Khyron was in possession of a

workable sizing chamber, troop estimates ranged anywhere from one to

three thousand.

Then there was Lisa to think about-the other front in this war without

end. Bad enough that most of his walking life was spent following orders,

but to have to take them from someone who expected to regiment his

personal life as well was more than he could stand. Even the memory of

Minmei's sweet embrace wasn't enough to wash away dawn's sour start.

"We'll put her away for you, Commander!" one of the ground crew said

as Rick was raising the canopy.

It took Rick a second to realize that the man was talking about Skull

One. He took a deep breath of fresh air and climbed from the cockpit, dead

on his feet.

The ground crew chief called out to him as he was leaving. "Excuse me,

sir, but Captain Hayes wants you to report to her as soon as possible."

"Did she say why?" Rick asked him.

"No, sir."

Rick turned and stormed off. It was time to have a showdown with

Captain Hayes.

Lisa, meanwhile, was at her station in the SDF-2 control room. She had

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made up her mind to apologize to Rick, perhaps go a step further if her

courage held up. Humming to herself now while she toyed with the tea

package, she didn't notice Rick's vexed entry. Vanessa, at the adjacent duty

station, tried to whisper a warning, but Lisa had turned and caught sight of

him, somehow misreading his mood.

"Oh, hello, Rick," she said cheerfully.

He answered her by practically throwing his written report at her.

"With my compliments, Captain."

Lisa's eyes went wide; she hadn't anticipated this.

"Will that be all?" he continued in the same sarcastic tone. "I don't

want to take up too much of your time."

"Rick, I-"

"I said, will that be all, Captain?"

"What's the matter with you?" She raised her voice, but it came out

confused-sounding.

"What's the matter with me?! I come in after chasing Khyron halfway

across the continent and the first thing I hear is that I'm supposed to report

to you-you think I don't understand military procedure by now, or what?!"

He was standing over her, red-faced and shaking.

"If you'll just give me a chance to explain..."

"And another thing." He made a fist. "My personal life is just

that-personal! D' ya understand, Captain?! I'll speak to whoever I want,

whenever and wherever I want!"

So that was it, Lisa thought. He believed that she had manipulated this

morning's situation for her own purposes. In other words, her motives had

been transparent.

"I understand," she told him meekly.

"Like Vanessa, here, for example," Rick added suddenly, walking over

to her station. "Am I right or not?"

Vanessa adjusted her glasses, glanced briefly at Lisa, and slid down in

her seat, wanting no part of this. "Uh, I don't really think I'm..."

But Rick was bending over her, his hand on the back of her chair, full of

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false charm. "Hey, why don't we grab a bite to eat?"

Vanessa blanched. "Please," she told him, not wanting to have to state

the obvious. "As you can see, I'm still on duty..."

"So what? You can still play hooky, can't you?" Rick stole a look at Lisa;

she was getting to her feet, her back to both of them.

"If you'll excuse me," Lisa said, "I think I've had enough of this." She

was hurt, but at the same time she felt sorry for Rick. That he would stoop

to such transparent gestures to get even with her; that he would drag her

friend into it; that he was a man...

When Lisa was out of earshot, Vanessa turned sharply to Rick and told

him off. "That was the worst, Hunter. I mean it."

He had an arrogant look on his face. "Oh yeah, why's that?"

Vanessa shook her head in disbelief. "You've been relying on

instruments too long, flyboy. Open your eyes: Did you stop to think about

how Lisa feels about you?" This was none of her business, and she knew she

had no right to be speaking for Lisa, but somebody had to get this guy to

wise up.

"Feels about me?" Rick was saying as if he couldn't believe what he was

hearing. "You gotta be kidding-the only thing Lisa cares about is her job."

Vanessa frowned, and Rick walked off. She gave herself a moment to

calm down, then went over to Kim's station to fill her in on this latest

chapter in the Hayes-Hunter miniseries.

"What's Lisa's problem?" said Kim after she'd been briefed.

"She doesn't have any problem," Sammie defended her commander. "It

was just a lovers' quarrel. It's none of our business."

Vanessa disagreed. "You weren't there. She loves him, but she doesn't

have the courage to tell him."

"That's absolutely ridiculous!" said Kim, suddenly angry. "Why doesn't

he just be a man about it and tell her how he feels?"

Vanessa gave her a quizzical look. "Has it ever occurred to you that he

doesn't share the same feelings? He asked me out, you know."

"Oh, come on," Kim said, dismissing it. "He knows how she feels about

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him, and he does feel the same. He's just being a stubborn idiot."

Vanessa restated her doubt. Sammie, though, had a dreamy look on her

face. "Well, if I felt that way about a man, I'd come right out and tell him."

Kim turned to her and laughed. "Yeah, but you do that with almost

every man you meet!" This cracked Vanessa up as well. But it didn't last

long.

Kim sighed. "The only reason we're laughing is because it isn't

happening to us."

Vanessa nodded. "The only other man Lisa ever loved was killed in

action."

"This makes me so sad..." Sammie said tearfully.

Yeah, Vanessa thought, putting her hand on Sammie's shoulder. But

what would we do for entertainment around here without Lisa and Rick?

What was there in her own life-or in Kim's or Sammie's-that even

approximated passion and the dream of a new start? Rico, Konda, and Bron?

That was a dead end on several counts. She grew tearful herself, for all of

them. For the emptiness at the center of this brave new world they had all

been thrown into.

In spite of the threatening skies, Lisa had decided to walk home from

the base. The clouds opened up before she had made it halfway to the New

Macross burbs, drenching her instantly and chilling her to the bone. A long

winter was on its way.

When the world is out of synch with your inner life, you come to think

of it as a heartless, godless realm; and yet when it mirrors those thoughts

and feelings, you dismiss it as pathetic fallacy.

She stood thinking this to herself in front of Rick's quarters. There

were lights on inside, and once she saw his silhouette pass briefly behind

the picture window permaglass. It wasn't aimless wandering that had

brought her here, but she couldn't summon up the nerve to go up to the

door. Rather, she had a peace offering in mind: She'd leave Claudia's tea in

Rick's mailbox, go home and phone him, and-

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"Planning to drink that tea in the rain?"

All at once there was an umbrella overhead and Claudia was beside her,

smiling. "Why don't you go up and knock?"

"He doesn't want to see me," Lisa told her, raising her voice above the

sound of the rain.

"You've made up his mind for him, huh? Well, listen, if you're not

ready to talk to him right now, why don't you come on over to my place?

We'll dry off and talk some-what do you say?"

Lisa hesitated, and Claudia put the umbrella in her hand.

"Well, while you're thinking about it..."

"Claudia, I..." Lisa began, but her friend was already trotting off. Lisa

gave another hopeless glance toward Rick's window and followed after her.

"I've made some nice hot tea," Claudia called out from the kitchen.

Lisa was on the living room sofa towel-drying her hair. Tea sounded all

right, but the chill she was feeling ran clear through to her heart. "At the

risk of sounding like a pushy guest," she said when Claudia entered with the

tea serving, "you wouldn't happen to have anything stronger lying around,

would you?"

Claudia's eyebrows went up. "Like what?"

"You hiding any wine around the house?"

A big grin appeared on her friend's handsome face.

"You got it."

"Well, go get it!" Lisa said playfully. She had a low tolerance for alcohol

and drugs of any sort, which was both a good and a bad thing: On the one

hand, her body simply rebelled at overindulgence, a fact that kept her from

turning to drugs for escape in times of stress; while on the other hand, she

could count on a little going a long way-one or two drinks and inhibition

was a thing of the past. A classic "cheap date," she reminded herself.

"Burgundy all right?"

"Right now I'd settle for Zentraedi zinfandel."

Claudia returned with two wine goblets and sat down facing Lisa on the

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matching recliner. A framed photo of Roy held center stage on the low table

between them. She pulled the cork from the bottle and poured two full

glasses. Lisa offered a silent toast and drained the entire glass, sensing an

almost instantaneous warmth suffuse her body. She settled back against the

couch and smiled at Claudia.

"So how long does it take for the hurting to stop?" she asked her.

"You sound like you're giving up."

"When he came in with his report this morning, I really wanted to

apologize, but then, before I could, he started chewing me out."

Claudia refilled Lisa's glass. "What did he say?"

"Only that his personal life was his own business and that I should stay

out of it." Again Lisa drained the glass.

"What did you expect?" Claudia was saying. "He doesn't know how you

feel about him. You've both shared some ordeals and some close

conversation, but as far as he knows, you're just his fellow officer and

sometime friend."

"I know...I've tried to be honest about it...but I don't think it would

matter anyway."

Claudia had never seen her friend quite so loosened up. Lisa was

holding her glass out for yet another refill, but she already looked pretty

low-lidded. Claudia didn't want her to get sick or pass out, but she poured a

little more burgundy, anyway.

"You don't know that it wouldn't matter to him. Stop trying to outguess

him all the time. Just do it, Lisa."

Lisa blinked and shook her head. "Okay, toss it up to the wine."

"Fine. But you weren't drinking out there in the rain twenty minutes

ago when you decided he wouldn't want to see you...The situation's not as

hopeless as you think-at least the man you love is still alive...Of course, I

know that you've had that experience also," Claudia was quick to add.

Both women turned to the photo of Roy.

Claudia continued. "When Roy passed away, this," she said, holding up

her wine, "became a very necessary crutch for me...Now, nothing seems to

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be important anymore."

Lisa was stunned, almost brought back to the edge of sobriety. But

what about all that optimism? she wanted to ask-all those teas? Instead, she

said: "There's a difference, anyway...You and Roy hit it off from the very

start...Rick and I were...emenies, I mean, enemies." Lisa stopped and took a

breath: "Enemies. "

Claudia chuckled, then grew somber. "It wasn't like that at all-Roy and

I were at each other's throats all the time. It nearly drove me crazy."

A second revelation! thought Lisa.

Claudia reached for Roy's photo. "Do you want to laugh? I'll tell ya

'bout him!"

Lisa laughed' up front. "Lemme tell ya something-right now I'll take all

the laughs I can get!"

Rick was too exhausted to sleep; it was as if he had somehow passed

beyond the need for rest. And that cold prewinter rain beating down on the

flat roof of his small modular barracks home seemed to be keeping time

with his racing heart.

He had tried to focus his thoughts on Khyron's whereabouts; the latest

intel reports pointed to a southern route of retreat. But where, Rick had

asked himself while pouring over the reports and reworked

maps-somewhere in what used to be Mexico, or the decimated Panamanian

land bridge, the Amazon jungles, such as they were? Where was he hiding,

and what was his next move likely to be? Even Breetai hadn't a clue.

He gave up on this after a while and collapsed on his back to the bed,

still in his uniform, hands locked underneath his head.

Why did I have to go and shoot off my big mouth like that? he asked

himself, getting at last to the center of his confusion. The least I could have

done was to listen to what she had to say!

That tall, blond, smooth-talking, and guitar-strumming Roy Fokker

had been a ladies' man came as no surprise to Lisa; but to hear Claudia tell

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it, he had also been something of a scoundrel and womanizer. Lisa had

always known Claudia and Roy as the happy couple-this went back to the

early days on Macross Island when the SDF-1 was first being rebuilt. But the

stories Claudia had regaled her with for the past two hours painted a much

different portrait than the one Lisa had imagined.

Claudia met Roy in 1996, during the initial stage of what would come to

be called the Global Civil War, when the two of them were stationed

together at a top-secret base in Wyoming; Roy the eager young fighter jock,

half in love with death and destruction, and Claudia the naive recruit, easily

impressed and often taken advantage of. Claudia described an arrogant Roy

to Lisa: a whacko flyboy who would be plying her with gifts one week, then

showing up for a date with three adoring women in tow the next. A Roy who

would down enemy fighters in her honor but who would rarely call in

advance to cancel an appointment.

"Talk about a complex personality," Claudia said. "At first I didn't want

anything to do with him, and I avoided him as much as possible. I even told

him so, point-blank. But...it didn't work-Roy Fokker was nothing if not

persistent.

"But what I'm trying to tell you is that our first impressions can be all

wrong. Roy and I never really talked to each other, or said how we actually

felt, until it was too late...And then he was gone."

Lisa was momentarily confused; then she realized that Claudia was

referring not to Roy's death but to his overseas transfer during the Global

Civil War.

For over a year Claudia didn't hear from Roy; but ultimately they both

wound up on Macross Island soon after the "Visitor" crash landed. Still, it

was rough going. Roy now had a new love: Robotechnology-specifically, the

Veritech fighters that Dr. Lang's teams of scientists were developing.

"He used to look at those experimental aircraft the way I wished he

would look at me," Claudia explained.

She had actually left unopened all the gifts Roy had given her in the old

days and returned them to him years later, hoping he would come clean

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with her about how he felt. But Roy had simply chalked it up to fate, telling

her with a shrug, that you couldn't win them all! And it was Claudia who

had ended up hurt. On another occasion she saw him dancing and carrying

on with three women in a way that suggested that they knew him much

more intimately than she did.

But finally-on a rainy night much like tonight, Claudia went on-Roy

confessed his love for her. As obsessed as he was with flying and combat, he

was equally obsessed with death; he was certain that he would die in a

fighter, and it was only Claudia he could talk to about his hidden fears.

"It was quite a revelation for me to realize that underneath all that

mechamorph bravado, there was a sensitive human being, full of real

dreams and real fears," said Claudia. "Deep down I knew it all along. But

look at all the happiness I lost with him just because I wasn't able to say

what was in my heart. I just hope that you won't let the same thing happen

to you, Lisa."

Lisa polished off the last sip of wine and set her glass on the table,

staring at it absently. Rick had never pulled half the stunts Roy had; she at

least had that to be thankful for. But in some ways her problems with Rick

ran even deeper than Claudia and Roy's: Their arguments centered on

issues like...competition and control...and Minmei! Roy had stepped out

from behind his mask, but Rick Hunter didn't wear a mask.

The ball remained in Lisa's court, and even now, after all these hours of

wine and honest conversation, she still didn't know how to play it.

While Lisa was visiting Claudia's past, Rick was running through his

own. He recalled his first exchange with Lisa, when he had called her "an

old sourpuss," and their first meeting after he had embarrassed himself in a

lingerie shop. Then there were the countless arguments, most of them over

the com net, related to procedure and such. Their capture and interrogation

on Breetai's flagship. That first kiss...The decoration that followed their

escape, the complex crosscurrents that developed after Lynn-Kyle entered

the scene. The time Lisa had visited him in the hospital-after inadvertently

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shooting him down. Roy's death, and how she had tried to comfort

him...Ben's death on that horrible afternoon over Ontario...The final battle

that brought them all together, the way they ran into each other's arms after

he had touched down near Alaska Base, thinking themselves the last

survivors of their race. And the two long years of Reconstruction following

that fateful day. He and Lisa as a team: planning, supervising, rebuilding.

She would come over to his quarters for a late-night snack or just hang out

and read while he was off somewhere on patrol-often clean up the mess he

invariably left behind. And that day not long ago when she had presented

him with a picture of her to add to his album...

For the first time he felt as though he were seeing the whole

progression of their friendship clearly. And isolated from its various

backdrops-Minmei, Kyle, the war without end, Reconstruction blues-their

relationship suddenly leapt out as the most significant one in his life. What

leapt out with equal clarity was that he had been an absolute fool!

How, he asked himself now, could he have run that lame number on

Vanessa-just to hurt Lisa?! He realized that his stubborn refusal to believe

that Lisa was in love with him was all wrapped up in the Minmei dreams he

himself perpetuated. Lisa represented a threat to those dreams, much as

Minmei was a threat to Lisa's dreams. Dawn's harsh words were crystal

clear, and so were Rick's thoughts: He jumped out of bed feeling as though

he had slept for a month, refreshed and revitalized, with one purpose in

mind-to find Lisa.

He grabbed an umbrella and ran through the rain to her place, but she

wasn't there. He tried a spot in town she frequented; no one had seen her.

He phoned headquarters, and the SDF-2 duty chief told him that Lisa had

signed out hours ago...That left only one more possibility.

He deposited another token in the pay phone and tapped in the

numbers as rapidly as he could.

"You're kidding," Lisa slurred when Claudia informed her that Rick

was on the phone.

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"He called from across the street." Claudia smiled, recradling the

handset.

"You're serious."

"You bet I am." Claudia picked up Fokker's picture and regarded it.

"Now I wanna have a drink with this fella," she said. "So don't plan on

hanging around here with your friend."

Lisa was suddenly flustered. "What'll I say?"

"What'll you say? If you don't know by now, then we've wasted the

whole evening."

In a moment Rick was pounding on the door, and Claudia was handing

Lisa yet another box of tea. "Your Prince Charming is here. Now, go on, and

take this with you-it's a great little icebreaker."

They walked silently, shoulder to shoulder beneath Rick's umbrella.

Lisa was carrying on a running dialogue with herself, and by the looks of it,

Rick was too. After all they had been through together, tonight had all the

uneasiness of a first date. Something as yet unspoken had altered the way

they reacted to each other.

"Uh, you aren't going to be too cold, are you?" Rick asked her.

"Oh, no...Are you?"

Rick suggested they call a cab, even though it was only a few blocks to

either of their quarters-and that was the general idea, wasn't it? She smiled

and said that she enjoyed walking.

Rick agreed: Yeah, it felt good to walk.

"I walk a lot at night," said Lisa.

"That's great-it's terrific exercise."

Finally, when she couldn't stand the small talk anymore, she said:

"Rick. We've got to talk."

They were at the corner nearest his place. Rick gestured. "We could go

to my quarters, but I don't have anything to offer you-er, wine or..."

She produced the package of tea. "I've got just the thing."

Rick smiled. "You're a lifesaver," he told her.

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

First and foremost we must accept who we are; only then can we gain a

clear view of our motives. How well I recall being one of the important people,

and how well I recall the effect that illusory self-image had on my decisions

and motivations. Fallen from grace, I was rescued from what might

otherwise have been a transparent existence. Unimportant, I learned to know

myself. This forms the basis for the following lesson.

Jan Morris,

Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians

November 2014 came and went, Thanksgiving for those who

remembered it-not in remembrance of the pilgrims, though, but in memory

of the feast held two years before, when the SDF-1 returned to its devastated

homeworld and founded New Macross. Wild flowers covered the western

slopes of the Rockies, and blue skies had become an everyday event. The

cities had been peaceful, and there was no further sign of Khyron. Minmei

was back on tour.

Rick and Lisa had been seeing a lot of each other. This morning she

was in the small kitchen of her quarters, humming to herself while

preparing sandwiches and snacks for the picnic she and Rick had planned.

On routine patrol only days ago, he had discovered an ideal spot in the

nearby forest. Lisa was in high spirits. She had a map of the area spread out

on the table. It seemed like months since she had taken personal leave and

years since she had done anything like this. And she owed at least some of

her happiness to Claudia for getting her to be more honest with Rick; she

had told him how special he was, and surprise of surprises, he had said he

felt the same way toward her.

In his own quarters a few blocks away, Rick was getting himself ready.

Lisa had said she wanted to take care of the food; all he had to do was show

up on time. He was certain he could handle that much. It was strange to be

out of uniform, almost frightening to contemplate a return to normalcy,

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days and days of uninterrupted peace. And that very sense of discomfort

made him ask himself how similar the Human and Zentraedi races had

become: in their own way grown dependent on war.

The phone rang while he was shaving. He turned off the razor and went

to answer it, figuring it was Lisa trying to hurry him along.

"I'm almost ready," he said into the handset, not bothering to ask who

was on the line. "I'll be there-"

"Hi there, it's me!"

Suddenly uncertain, Rick looked at the phone.

"It's Minmei!"

"Oh, Minmei!" he answered, perking up. "Where've you been?"

"All over the place," she said dismissively. "Where are you now?"

Rick looked at the phone again. "Home. "

Minmei laughed. "Oops, I completely forgot! I called to thank you...for

saving me and...Kyle. I mean it."

"You don't have to thank me, Minmei," Rick said plainly.

After a moment she asked him if he was free for the day. Rick hemmed

and hawed but didn't mention the picnic. She was hoping that he could

make it over to Monument City-she had a few hours free before tonight's

concert.

"I kinda made plans already."

"Oh, please, Rick," she purred. "I'm only here for today, and I'm sure

whoever you're going to meet won't mind."

Rick thought back to his conversation with Lisa, how he'd asked her to

cancel whatever plans she had made so they could get together for the

picnic. He looked at his watch and wondered what sort of last-minute

excuse he could come up with. Sickness? A new war?

"Pleease..." she repeated.

"Uh, I guess it's okay," he said, relenting. "It's not every day that I get

to spend time with you."

"It'll be fun," Minmei said excitedly. "You can see your friend any time,

right?"

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"Yeah..."

"Great! I'll be waiting for you at the airport. And dress up," she told

him.

An old school chum showed up, Rick thought, replacing the handset.

Somebody who just wandered in from the wastelands. Quickly he punched

up Lisa's number, but of course she had already left; more than likely she

was already at the Seciele coffee shop waiting for him. Better to say nothing,

he decided at last. Just not show up at all.

There are a hundred reasons why this is a good idea, Rick said to

himself as he dropped his fanjet in for a landing on Monument's new strip,

not the least of which was the chance to put his little craft through some

paces-it had been months since he'd taken it out. And of course it was good

for his relationship with Lisa: putting his feelings for Minmei to rest and

such. But "sudden business in Monument City" was what he planned to tell

Lisa; he promised himself that he would take her on two picnics to make up

for this.

He cut quite the dashing figure in his new gray jump suit as he jumped

from the cockpit. He had changed from denim and flannel to his one and

only suit and was wearing it underneath, a black scarf tied around his neck.

"I'm over here, Rick!" Minmei waved from behind the chain-link fence.

"How've you been, flyboy?"

He approached her, smiling. She was wearing a tightfitting sweater and

skirt, heels, a large red hat that matched her belt, and big round tinted

glasses.

"I don't think I would have recognized you," he confessed.

She laughed. "That's the point, silly."

Rick got out of the jump suit and stowed it in his carry case, while she

ran to the gate, coming around to his side of the fence.

In a moment they were walking arm in arm, not saying much to each

other. Rick felt uncomfortable in his button-down shirt and tie but tried not

to convey it.

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"Listen, Rick," Minmei said at last, biting her lower lip. "I'm sorry to

drag you away from your appointment. I hope he wasn't mad at you,

whoever he was."

Rick cleared his throat. "Uh, no, he wasn't mad...I rescheduled my

appointment with him..." Minmei pressed herself against him, her hand

caressing his arm. People were checking them out as they strolled by.

"Aren't you worried that someone might recognize you...and me, and, er..."

"I'm never worried with you," Minmei sighed. She turned him around

and reached for the knot in his tie, adjusting it. "I've never seen you in a suit

before. You're very handsome-you look important."

Important? he asked himself. He remembered how good it felt to be in

denim and flannel-strange but good. And here he was in a suit, wandering

around Monument City with a star on his arm, looking important, and

receiving compliments left and right. What did Minmei have in mind? he

wondered. Lisa had wanted to picnic and hike.

Minmei had rented a vehicle for them to use. Rick climbed behind the

wheel and followed her directions into the city. Monument was about the

closest thing Macross had to a sister city. It had been founded by Zentraedi

once under Breetai's command, who had rallied around the crashed warship

towering out of its lake the way Humans had around Lake Gloval's similarly

situated SDF-1. Monument had spearheaded the separatist movement and

had recently been the first to be granted autonomy from the Macross

Council.

She sensed that she might have done something wrong, but she had

only been trying to show him how she felt about him. If flattery wasn't going

to work, she had hopes that the restaurant she was leading them to would

do it: beautiful view, great food, soft music...It was probably more suited to

quiet dinners than early lunches, but it had been difficult enough to block

out even a few midmorning hours from her busy schedule. And there were

only so many excuses she could come up with to convince Kyle that she

needed private time.

Chez Mann was an anachronism, a sumptuously decorated theater

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restaurant with window walls, crystal chandeliers, and tuxedoed waiters,

which, for all its pretensions, ended up looking like an airport cafeteria. An

arrogant maitre d' showed them not to the secluded table Minmei requested

but to a deserted-looking one along the window wall, while a lifeless pianist

noodled his way soullessly through an old standard.

"Do you like it?" Minmei said when they were seated. "My producer has

a friend who's part owner. Movie stars come in here all the time," she

continued, pressing her point.

Rick regarded her quizzically. Minmei seemed incapable of accepting

the present state of the world. Movie stars: There weren't more than a

handful of entertainers left on the entire planet, let alone in Monument City!

In fact, if anything, the notion of entertainment was reverting back to much

earlier forms of story telling and what amounted to religious drama and

reenactments.

"Who cares about movie stars?" Rick said harshly.

Minmei smiled at him. "Well, I'm a movie star, and you like me."

"I liked you before you were a star, Minmei."

Her first reaction was to tell him: I've always been a star. Miffed, she

said: "You mean you don't like me just because I happen to be famous?"

"I like you," he reassured her, but she had already turned her attention

to something else. Rick glanced down at his watch and thought again about

Lisa. When he looked up, Minmei was sliding a present toward him.

"Just my way of saying thank you, Rick."

He didn't want to accept it. It wasn't, after all, like he'd done her some

sort of favor. But she insisted, claiming that she had looked all over for

something special. Finally, he shrugged and opened the wrapping; inside

was a winter scarf of hand-woven alpaca wool, as rare as hen's teeth these

days.

He put it around his neck and thanked her. "I'll think of you whenever I

wear it."

"It looks good with that suit," she commented, hoping the nervousness

she felt wasn't visible. It was so important to her that he understand how

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she felt.

"Makes me feel like Errol Flynn," Rick joked, striking a pose.

She laughed. "All you need is a sword."

Minmei wanted to reach out and take his hand, but just then the waiter

appeared with cocktails and set them on the table. The moment spoiled, she

looked across to Rick and said: "Why do waiters always seem to serve

people at precisely the wrong time?"

The waiter, a long-haired would-be actor with a pencil-thin mustache

who had had a bad morning, returned: "And why is it that movie stars

always seem to find something to complain about?"

Rick stifled a laugh, happy to see Minmei taken to task. But it hardly

fazed her. He joined her in a toast to "better times" and began to feel

suddenly at ease. They began to talk about the old times-for the two of them,

a period of scarcely four years. To Rick it felt like yesterday, but Minmei

seemed to think those times a million years ago.

"Some things time can't change," Rick said cryptically.

She nodded. "I know. Sometimes I think my feelings haven't changed

at all."

It was an equally vague sort of response, and Rick, recalling Minmei's

feelings, wasn't sure he wanted things to return to yesteryear. He decided to

be straightforward-the way Lisa had been with him recently-just to see

where it would lead.

"I still think about you, Minmei," he began. "Sometimes at night, I-"

There was some sort of commotion at the door; the maitre d' was

shouting, insisting that the man who had shoved his way past him was

required to wear a tie before entering. The long-haired man turned out to be

Lynn-Kyle.

Both Rick and Minmei had turned their attention to the scene; now

they were staring at each other blankly. Minmei took Rick's hand, squeezing

it, her eyes brimming with tears.

"Please Rick, you've got to promise me: Whatever he does, whatever he

says, you won't interfere."

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"But-" he started to protest.

"Promise me!"

Rick's lips became a thin line, and he nodded silently.

In a moment Kyle was standing over Minmei.

"I've been looking all over for you," he said, controlled but obviously

angered. "You knew I scheduled a press conference. Come on, we're

leaving."

He made a move toward her, but she refused to budge.

"Don't be obstinate, Minmei! Do you realize the strings I had to pull to

get those reporters out here today?!"

Rick held himself in check, the scarf still around his neck; Kyle hadn't

bothered to acknowledge him. Rick guessed he was still sore about having

had to be rescued. The dirt bag. Still, this was business, and maybe Kyle had

a right to be angry. He decided to help Minmei out by offering to leave. But

instead, she put him right in the middle of things.

"We don't have to leave-I'm not going!"

Now Kyle grabbed her by the wrist. "Oh yes you are!"

"Get your hands off!" she retaliated. "You're hurting me, you bully!

Who do you think you are, anyway?!"

Surprisingly enough, Kyle backed off, and Rick offered silent thanks to

the heavens, because if it had gone on another second, he would have been

all over Kyle, promise or no promise, martial arts or no. The piano player

had stopped his noodling, the restaurant patrons having found more

accessible entertainment.

Kyle grinned knowingly and turned to Rick. "This is how a professional

acts...Attractive, isn't it?" He swung back to Minmei, raising his voice

parentally. "That's enough of your whining! Why don't you try acting your

age for once? People are waiting for you!"

Minmei was standing at her place, her fists clenched. She grabbed her

cocktail and downed the thing defiantly, shivering and trying to brave it out.

Rick looked out the window.

"I'm tipsy..." he heard her say. "I couldn't possibly talk to any reporters

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now."

Kyle issued a low guttural growl, a dangerous signal that Minmei might

have overplayed her part. With lightning speed he scooped up the water

glass and threw it in her face.

"That oughta sober you up."

Rick was halfway out of his chair, his teeth bared, waiting for the next

move. Minmei had begun to sob, and once again Kyle had her by the wrist.

"Now, stop acting foolish and let's go."

Kyle tugged, she followed; then she suddenly turned and shouted for

Rick.

"Kyle!" he screamed, expecting him to let go of her and come after him.

Kyle, however, chose a subtler way to disarm him.

"Don't you understand, Hunter?" he said, reasonably and in full

possession of himself. "She's got too many things that have to be taken care

of. It comes with the territory." When he saw Rick relax, he added: "Oh, and

don't worry about lunch: We'll cover it-that's what expense accounts are for.

Maybe you should just report back to your base, huh? Get back into your

uniform or something. "

Rick saw Minmei nod to him, sobbing but gesturing that he should do

as Kyle said. Kyle tugged at her again, lecturing her about how he had given

up everything, how she didn't care about her career anymore. Most of the

patrons were bored by now; many had simply gotten up and left the

restaurant.

Rick avoided their stares and reached for his drink, fingering the new

scarf. Some swashbuckler, he said to himself.

It was almost noon, and the Seciele coffee shop was beginning to gear

up for lunch, although the majority of its outdoor tables remained empty.

The weather had taken a sudden turn, and most people were electing to take

indoor seats. Lisa, however, was still at the table she had occupied since

nine o'clock. She had already downed four cups of coffee and was sweating

despite the sudden chill in the air. There had been no word from Rick, but

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she had decided to remain in case he tried to get a message through.

Obviously he had been called in, but no one at the base knew anything

about it or knew where he might be. If there had been an alert, she would

also have been notified, but no such orders had been given. Still, Rick's

being called in was the only possible explanation.

The good mood she had enjoyed only hours before had long since

abandoned her along with the morning's unnatural warmth. Were these

quick turnabouts a sign of the times? she questioned-the mood swings, the

reversals, the confusion? Only moments ago she had witnessed a small

misunderstanding between a pedestrian and a motorist escalate into a

violent argument. It made her wonder if Rick had been involved in an

accident, perhaps run over!

Anxiously, she checked the time and hurried to the vid-phone. There

was no answer at Rick's quarters, so she toned in the base again,

contemplating a fall leaf that had blown her way-the closest she might come

to nature all day.

"Communications. This is Lieutenant Mitchell."

Lisa identified herself, but before she had an opportunity to inquire

about a possible alert, Nikki Mitchell said: "Captain Hayes, I thought you

were with Commander Hunter."

Lisa instantly regretted phoning them. Her life had practically become

an open book to the SDF-2 control room crew, Vanessa, Sammie, and the

rest. It was one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situations:

When she was cool, calm, and collected, Lisa Hayes "the old sourpuss," no

one bothered to interfere with her private life; but now that she had taken

some of Claudia's advice and was speaking her mind, everyone was tracking

her moves as if she was a regular entry in some sort of gossip column

contest.

"Aren't you supposed to be on a picnic?" Mitchell asked.

In the background, Lisa could hear Kim say: "I bet that creep stood her

up." Vanessa reinforced it: "See, I told you he wasn't interested in her."

"Shut up!" Nikki yelled, and Lisa held the phone away from her ear.

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"You two sound like a couple of old hens!"

"And what does that make you-the rooster?" Sammie countered.

Lisa was furious. Not only was her private life being discussed behind

her back, but it was being wagered upon and argued about!

"Oh, never mind!" Lisa yelled, and hung up. "Busybodies," she

muttered under her breath.

Cut off by the Chez Mann bartender after countless drinks, Rick had

drifted back to the right-hand-drive rented vehicle and started out for the

airport. The scene that had taken place between Minmei and Kyle now

seemed just that: an orchestrated act put on for the public, with a cameo by

Rick Hunter, occasional hero. In the end Minmei had chosen to run along

with Kyle, and that was all that really mattered: She hadn't changed, and

Rick had been a fool to think she could. Presents, wistful walks down

memory lane, postrescue embraces: it was all part of her repertoire. And

now he had lost her for the umpteenth time and stood up Lisa to boot.

Up ahead of him on the two-lane airport highway was a roadblock

manned by a CD corporal wearing a white beret. The road was closed, Rick

was informed.

"Is there an alternate route to the airport?" he asked, leaning out the

driver's window.

"Airport's closed," said the corporal. "We've got Zentraedi trouble."

"My plane's out there!" Rick shouted, not clearheaded enough to show

his ID.

The corporal's hand edged toward his sidearm. "I told you, buddy, the

road's closed."

Rick cursed him and stomped on the accelerator. The minivan shot

forward, swerving around the barricade, while the sentry drew his weapon.

In thinking about it later, Rick would ask himself why he had done this,

wondering whether to blame Minmei or the alcohol. In the final analysis,

however, he realized that he had done it for Lisa: He was going to have to

tell her something!

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"Damn fool!" the sentry yelled, thinking twice about firing a warning

shot and hurrying to his radio phone.

A Battlepod ambled along the runway, destroying grounded Veritechs

with blasts from its plastron cannon, while nearby a giant Zentraedi armed

with an autocannon picked off fire and rescue vehicles that were tearing

across the tarmac en route to crisis points.

"These Micronians are no challenge at all!" he yelled in his own tongue,

the lust for battle erasing all memories of his two peaceful years on Earth.

A second giant in Botoru powered armor lifted a fighter from the field,

pressed it over his head, and heaved it at a speeding transport truck several

hundred feet away. The Veritech fell squarely on the vehicle and exploded,

obliterating both.

Veritechs appeared in the skies now, just as Rick was arriving in the

minivan. Dodging gatling slugs, he made his way to the CD hangar, showed

his ID, suited up, and commandeered an Excalibur. He had counted five

giants-all armed with autocannons-a sixth in powered armor, and at least

two Battlepods. Whether these were malcontents or members of Khyron's

beaten band was immaterial: The CD unit was outpowered. And yet the base

commander was giving him a lot of flack about clearance and warning him

not to damage the mecha! Rick realized that Monument's recently gained

autonomy accounted for this, but without a little help, there wasn't going to

be much of a Monument left; so he humored the commander, shaking off

the last of his alcoholic stupor.

Meanwhile, a Battlepod was holing the passenger terminal with volleys

of fire. His ally with the cannon had tired of firing on the private craft and

now turned his attention to the terminal. Peering through a horizonal row

of permaglass windows, he spied several Micronians huddled together

behind the desks of a spacious office-the most laughable sight he had seen

all day. It was too easy to blow them away as a group, so he first drove the

muzzle of the autocannon through the plate glass to scatter everyone. Only

then did he train the weapon on them, bolts of white energy flinging bodies

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to gruesome deaths.

One of his less exacting comrades emptied his cannon against the

building in an effort to collapse the entire wall.

Rick stepped his mecha from the hangar in time to see a pod with its

left foot posed above his small fanjet, preparing to stomp it out of existence.

He got off a shot without thinking and managed to take the pod's leg off at

the knee, sending the mecha backward and down on its back to the field.

This captured the attention of the remaining Zentraedis, who swung around

to find themselves face to face with two Excaliburs and a Battloid.

"Zentraedi rebels!" Rick yelled through the external net. "Throw down

your weapons at once or we will be forced to take immediate action!" He

repeated it even as the soldiers and mecha were leveling their weapons

against him.

"Prove it!" said one of the giants, a purple faced, bluehaired clone with

gorilla features. He gestured to his fellow warrior and opened fire,

autocannon slugs raining ineffectively against the armored legs of Rick's

Excalibur.

"They're bluffing!" he shouted when his weapon had expended its

charge.

Rick smiled madly inside the cockpit. "Give them a demonstration," he

ordered.

Suddenly a drum-armed Spartan was looming into view on the other

side of the airport terminal. Rick gave the word, and scores of missiles

streaked heavenward from the mecha's launch tubes. The three Zentraedi

giants tracked their course with frightened eyes and screamed as the

missiles plunged homeward, exploding like strings of fireworks at the

giants' feet. The three were blown from the strike zone, one flung to his

death against a massive conduit, the others gasping for air as paralyzing

nerve gas released from the missiles began to sweep over them.

"Move in!" Rick said over the tac net.

Reconfiguring to Guardian mode, the Battleloid went after the

remaining Battlepod; but the Zentraedi mecha juked and sidestepped,

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facing off with Rick's Excalibur instead. Rick dropped his mecha to a crouch

and tackled the pod, shearing off one of its legs as it passed overhead. Out of

commission, the mecha hit the field with a ground-shaking crash, its

severed leg bouncing along with it.

The one giant who had survived the gas was easily dispatched by the

second Excalibur, while the Veritech just as easily dropped the alien in

powered armor.

Rick ordered the civil defense units to collect the bodies, separate the

living from the dead, and lock the former away for interrogation.

"And radio the SDF-2 for me," Rick added as an afterthought. "Make

sure you mention that I was here."

With a little luck, Lisa would receive word of the uprising even before

he made it back to New Macross.

Lisa had switched over to cocktails, and by the time the robo-waiter

cruised over to inform her that outdoor service was being discontinued, she

had had so many Bloody Marys that she was seeing red. The waiting game

had become some sort of crazed exercise in self-control. She had visions of

Rick finding her skeletal remains here, her withered hand permanently

affixed to the thermos or the picnic basket. The temperature had fallen a

further fifteen degrees since noon, and the wind had picked up, gusting in

autumn leaves that swirled around her feet. Once, a puppy had wandered by

and she had fed him snacks from the wicker basket. She had been eyed by

more than one Veritech jock and coffee shop poet. But now she was ready to

throw in the towel. That Rick Hunter had died was the only excuse she was

ready to accept.

But no sooner did she hear Rick's voice than she went back on her

word. He was running up the street toward her, dressed, oddly enough, in

his one and only suit and wearing a long scarf around his neck. Hardly the

picnic and hiking outfit she had expected, but she decided to at least give

him a chance to explain.

"Let's hear it, Rick," she said coolly from her chair.

164

Rick was panting. "I didn't think you'd still be here...I checked your

quarters first...You see, there was a Zentraedi uprising in Monument and-"

"An uprising?!" Lisa said, surprised. "Is everything all right?"

"Yeah, now it is. But there were a number of deaths and-"

"Wait a minute," she interrupted him. "We have no jurisdiction in

Monument. What were you doing there?"

"Well, I...had some official business-"

"Which is why you're wearing your suit, of course."

Rick looked himself over as if noticing the suit for the first time.

"This was for our date."

Lisa laughed. "It was supposed to be a picnic, remember-not a cocktail

party."

"Look..."

She made a dismissive gesture and stood up, taking hold of the basket

and thermos. "It's too late for a picnic now. And it's a shame, really, because

I spent all morning cooking. It's the first time I've had a chance to do that in

years."

Rick stammered an apology.

"You should have called me," she told him. "I've been waiting here all

day, worried that something had happened to you and figuring you would

try to get a message to me somehow. Now you give me this story about an

uprising and some mysterious business-"

"There was an uprising! Check with the base if you don't believe me.

Besides, I did try to call you..."

She threw him a suspicious look. "You're here now. We can at least take

a walk."

Lisa didn't hear Rick's sigh of relief. She was too busy concentrating on

the fact that he was cozying up to her, draping one end of that scarf around

her shoulders. The temperature was continuing to plunge, and there was a

winter dampness in the air. She reached up to feel the weave; it was so soft,

she touched the cloth to her cheek. And suddenly stopped dead in her

tracks.

165

She might have had a poor memory for faces and two left feet when it

came to dancing and a habit of picking derelicts for boyfriends, but one

thing she prided herself on was her talent for remembering aromas and

tastes. And she sure as heck recognized the perfume on that scarf:

Innocent-Lynn-Minmei's favorite!

"Take that thing off me, Hunter!" she exclaimed. "You seem to have

wrapped it around the wrong person!"

"Lisa, I can explain everything! It's not what you think!" Rick said, as

she threw one end of the scarf over his shoulder.

"I recognize the scent, you idiot! So that was your official business,

huh?" she began to walk away. "And don't bother calling me!"

She shouted it without turning around because she didn't want him to

see the tears in her eyes.

Snowflakes had begun to fall.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen of Monument City," Lynn-Kyle

announced from that city's bandshell by the lake. "Congratulations on your

autonomy from the central government. Tonight, in celebration of that

event, we have a special treat in store. Minmei has graciously agreed to

come and sing for you. Let's all hang our hopes for a bright future on her

songs...And

so,

let's

have

a

warm

welcome...for

a

great

talent-Lynn-Minmei!"

The audience of mostly Zentraedi giants applauded and cheered as the

orchestra commenced the opening bars of "Stagefright." The bandshell

blacked out, and Kyle moved off to the wings. On the stage's upper tier, a

wide spot found Minmei; she stood unmoving, arms at her sides, the mike

dangling from one hand.

Even after the song's intro.

Kyle looked up, full of concern. The band had broken into a

low-volume vamp, awaiting her entrance. "Minmei, that was your cue!" Kyle

whispered. When she didn't respond, he tried another tack. "Quit fooling

around! Are you all right?!"

166

"Yes," she said with a sad smile. The band had broken off altogether

now, and murmurs were running through the audience. Some thought it

part of the act-a new form of dramatic effect or something-and a rhythmical

clapping began, punctuated with shouts of "Minmei! Minmei! Minmei!"

"What's the problem?!" hissed Kyle. "Sing!"

She had one arm across her chest self-protectively and her eyes averted

from the audience. Kyle heard her sigh; then she suddenly turned to them.

"I'm sorry-I can't perform!"

The clapping died down.

"I won't sing," she continued, on the verge of tears. "I can't perform

when my heart is breaking!"

And with that she dropped the mike, turned, and fled. The audience

surged forward, refusing to believe this, and Kyle was all at once stunned

and worried about a riot. Quickly, he signaled the stage manager to lower

the bandshell's eyelidlike curtain.

The audience fell back to watch its descent. And the moment carried

with it a discomforting note of finality; the Zentraedi ship in the lake

loomed behind the closed bandshell like a spike driven into the all-seeing

eye.

Kyle found her on the littered beach behind the bandshell. She was

alone, hugging her knees, staring at the ruined Zentraedi ship. He wasn't

sure that anything he said would turn the trick. And for the first time he

didn't care. She had moved away from him, withdrawn from the high goals

they had both set themselves. Unreachable, she had ceased to interest him

any longer; she was beyond his control.

"This is all your fault," Minmei said, sensing somehow that he was

standing over her. "Since I've been with you, I've lost touch with the things

that are really important to me."

Kyle laughed shortly. "You haven't changed a bit, have you? Still the

selfish brat! You know, you only think about what you want, just like you've

done since you were a kid. Well, it's about time you grew up. Don't you have

167

any idea how those people felt when you refused to sing for them tonight?

You should've seen their faces...They're your fans, and they love you. And

what do you do? You go and let them down. That's just like you!"

Minmei struggled with his words, determined not to let Kyle get to her.

She knew what he was up to: pulling out all the stops now to convince her to

come around. And she knew it would get worse-uglier.

"I just can't do it anymore," she said firmly.

Kyle reconfigured his tone. "If you just opened your heart and let the

love flow through you, you could be the greatest talent ever. Through your

music, we could transcend all the evil in the universe and bring people

together...That's a precious gift, Minmei, but it has to be properly presented.

That's why I've worked so hard for three years...But now, this is the end. I'm

going to take a long trip, and I probably won't see you again-at least not for

some time..."

A ferry was crossing the lake, its mournful horn sounding. Minmei

clenched her teeth, hating Kyle for his hypocrisy, his years of abuse. He had

almost succeeded in dragging her down to that plane of misery and

cynicism he lived on-despite the noble sound of his words, the peaceful

thrust of his speeches. And now he was simply going to walk out on her-his

standard approach to interpersonal challenge when martial arts wouldn't do

it. So of course it was important for him to make her realize that she'd been

rotten all along, that he could do nothing with such flimsy stuff, that she

was no longer worth the effort. He had done the same thing to his parents.

He had draped his jacket over her shoulders in preparation for a

theatrical exit.

"I hope that someday," he was saying, "you can find happiness for

yourself. I'll always love you..."

Creep! she was shouting to herself. Rat! Fool! But at the same time she

seemed to have a vision of him, off somewhere in the wastelands, probably

living

among

the

Zentraedi

renegades

organizing

a

new

movement...perhaps seeing if he could get himself enlarged to their size-a

dream at last fulfilled.

168

A sudden breeze came up, sending watery crests of moonlit brilliance

across the waves. She felt a chill run through her, and when she turned, he

had disappeared into the night.

169

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The symbolism of the SDF-1 as New Age Ark wasn't lost on the residents

and crew of that fortress-Macross, thriceborn city of the stars. But unlike the

Old Testament Ark, which was really Noah's Ark, the dimensional fortress

was thought of by some as the savior itself: the reappearance of the culture

hero, the second coming, clothed in the guise of technology-Robotechnology-

befitting the times, much as the Nazarene was his own world. This, however,

remained the stuff of esoteric cults; underneath it all, the old religions

continued to thrive. A return to the basics was universally stressed: the

original untampered-with versions of creation and regeneration. And even

the Zentraedi found their way over to these.

History of the First Robotech War, Vol. CCXIII

Although Dolza had rained death on the east and west coasts of the

South American continent, the Amazon basin, with its complex river

systems and millions upon millions of acres of virgin forest, was left

relatively untouched by his deadly storm. Ironically, many of the indigenous

people who had once abandoned their dwellings on the jungled shores of

those many slowmoving tributaries for the coastal cities had found their

way back into that verdant wilderness after the devastating Zentraedi attack.

Green hell or green mansion, its untamed prehistoric disorder was currently

home to more survivors than ever before.

And among the most recent arrivals was Khyron.

So different from those bleak icebound reaches he had come to hate,

this landscape of perpetual murder-where one waged a daily battle for

survival, and where pain, misery, and death ruled supreme-it was hardly his

world, but it was most certainly his element.

Chased by unrelenting squadrons of Earth Forces mecha, Khyron had

been forced to put down here, his own troops reduced to a mere handful,

and his cruiser all but depleted of its Protoculture fuel supplies. The small

170

amounts of precious fuel that had spilled from ruptured Protoculture lines

had found sympathetic roots in the forest, working vegetal miracles in the

thin surface soil-Khyron's ship, wrapped in creepers, tendrils, orchids, and

vines, looked as if it had landed there eons ago. But there were things to be

thankful for: Some of his troops had served for many months in the

Micronian population center factories, learning about that strange custom

called "work" and that more important process known as "repair"; moreover,

his agents were still at work in the so-called cities of the north, reporting to

him on matters of mecha deployment, Protoculture storage, and the

growing separatist movement in the Zentraedi cities such as New Detroit

and Monument. Soon the time for his reappearance would be at hand...

In addition, Khyron learned that scores of Zentraedi ships had crashed

in the jungle, and already the survivors of those wrecked ships were finding

their way to his new stronghold.

For several weeks the tech crews had worked feverishly to effect repairs

on the cruiser's weapons and navigational systems, while squads of giants

had scoured the thick forests for food and supplies, often raiding the simple

Micronian settlements they stumbled upon. The hot, steamy jungle

succeeded in dragging them down to its own primitive levels, humanizing

them in ways even Khyron didn't notice. Discipline had loosened somewhat,

especially with regard to fraternization between males and females and the

wearing of uniforms. The men, sometimes stripped to the waist or in

tank-top undershirts, grew accustomed to sweating-something new to their

bodies, despite their having labored on infernal worlds like Fantoma. And

Khyron got used to his troops calling him by name.

"Commander," called one of the techs now. "I can give you auxiliary

power."

"Then do it," Khyron told him.

There were four of them in the control center of the cruiser, all in

sleeveless T's, enervated by the afternoon heat. The man who had addressed

Khyron was seated at one of the many duty station consoles; he engaged a

series of switches, and illumination was returned to the bridge.

171

"Good," Khyron complimented him. He reached for his communicator

and inquired after the reflex furnaces.

A tech wearing an earphone, a flex-mike communicator, and a

monocular enhancer responded from elsewhere in the ship. He was one of

those who had spent more than a year in the New Detroit mecha factories.

"Not yet, Khyron. And probably not at all unless we acquire some

Protoculture soon."

"What is the status of the main reactors?" Khyron asked.

"Barely functional. Takeoff is still impossible."

"Not good enough! Is there some way to shunt primary power to one of

the smaller ships?"

"Yes..." the engine room tech said hesitantly. "But its range would be

very limited."

"Enough to get us to New Macross and back?"

"Yes, but-"

"That's all," Khyron said, breaking transmission. He adopted a

thoughtful pose for a moment; then, wiping sweat from his brow, he turned

to Grel, who was tinkering with a monitor at the opposite end of the control

room.

"Grel, are your spies in the Micronian cities to be trusted?"

"I believe so, m'lord," Grel said over his shoulder.

Khyron walked over to him, bending down to repeat his question.

Again Grel stated that the agents could be trusted.

"I have a plan..." Khyron began. "This 'hollow day' that approaches-"

"'Holiday,' m'lord. A feast day of sorts."

"Holiday," Khyron repeated, trying the word out. "Yes...'Christmas,'

you called it. The Micronians will have their minds on celebration."

Grel smiled. "I understand, Commander. It would be an ideal occasion

to strike."

"And you're certain about the whereabouts of the Protoculture matrix,

Grel? Because I warn you-if you're not..."

Grel swallowed hard. "Certain, m'lord."

172

Khyron ordered him to open all communications channels within the

cruiser. When Grel nodded, Khyron picked up the comlink mike.

"Now hear this," he anounced. "We are mounting a raid on a Micronian

population center. Our objective: the Protoculture-matrix drive housed in

the storage facility at New Macross. I want all of you to go on standby alert."

Khyron signed off.

"What is this 'Christmas,' Grel?"

Grel raised his eyebrows. "A feast celebrating the creation of one of the

Micronian culture heroes, I believe."

"Culture hero?!" Khyron spat. "It is the name 'Khyron' they will speak

of after our raid! Khyron the destroyer of worlds!" He threw his head back,

laughing maniacally and crushing the communicator in his hand. "Khyron,

the Protoculture hero!"

"Sometimes I think life was easier when we were Zentraedi," Konda

said sadly.

Bron and Rico responded at the same time:

"You don't meant it!"

"We're still Zentraedi, Konda!"

Konda pushed his long lavender hair out of his face and looked at his

comrades. "I know that. But I mean when we were soldiers." He turned and

motioned to the shelves of Christmas toys that lined the back of their small

Park Street stall. "We wouldn't have to worry about selling all this stuff!"

Snow had begun falling on New Macross two hours ago, lending

further enchantment to an already cheery and magical Christmas Eve. It

was the first snowfall in several weeks, the first Christmas snow many of

Macross City's residents had seen in a decade. Shoppers and pedestrians

moved along the sidewalks in a kind of wonder, as if questioning their

surroundings: Was it possible after four long years of war and suffering that

joy was finally returning to their hearts? One could almost feel the radiant

warmth of their collective glow.

All except Rico, Konda, and Bron, that is.

173

Their jobs at the laundry had come to a sudden end months ago, when

they had returned from a routine pickup with a stack of expensive linen

sheets, each bearing Lynn-Minmei's indelible ink autograph. There had

followed a succession of menial jobs since, culminating with this Park Street

stallful of toys-transformable robots, lifelike dolls, and huggable stuffed

puppies, all of which had peaked three seasons before and were little more

than memorabilia now. They had managed to sell two items during the past

week-and that was only by reducing the prices to less than they had paid.

"We just have to learn to be more aggressive," Rico said knowingly.

"What d' ya mean?" said Konda.

Rico thought for a moment. "Uh, you know: forceful."

Bron looked confused. "Are you allowed to do that?"

"That's what someone told me." Rico shrugged.

"Well, okay," Bron echoed, beginning to roll up his sleeves to expose

his brawny arms. "But I don't see how we can do that from inside this stall."

"He's right," Konda suddenly agreed. "We should put all these toys in

sacks-"

"Like Santa Claus," Bron interjected proudly.

"Right. And take them over to the mall. We'll have more knee room

there."

Rico stared at the two of them. "Elbow room, you idiot."

Konda grinned sheepishly. "Whatever."

"I say we do it!" Bron said decisively, slapping his friends on the back.

"We'll be the most aggressive salesmen in town!"

In the deserted children's playground across from the mall where Park

Street emptied into Macross Boulevard, Minmei rocked herself side to side

on one of the swings. The newspaper gossip columns were filled with

rumors linked to her sudden disappearance from Monument City almost

three weeks ago, and this was the first time she had ventured out of the

White Dragon since returning to Macross. Even so, she wasn't disguised,

dressed in a plain burgundy-colored dress and black sweater barely heavy

174

enough to keep her warm. She reasoned-rightly so-that people wouldn't

recognize this new Lynn-Minmei, who was as far removed from that

eternally optimistic star of stage and screen as one could get.

Singing was a part of her past. So was Kyle and everyone else

connected with her career. She had spent a few days with her agent, Vance

Hasslewood, after the scene with Kyle, but he wanted to be more to her than

a sounding board. So she returned to Uncle Max and Aunt Lena; they took

her in with open arms and helped her secure a few moments of peace. But

she realized she wouldn't be able to remain with them: One day Kyle would

wander in, and she didn't want to be around when he did.

If only it weren't Christmas, she kept telling herself. If only it were

summer, if only everyone else didn't seem so happy and complacent, if

only...

She stretched her hand out to collect some snow, and as the flakes

melted against her warm skin, she thought about Rick. Where was he now?

Would he even be willing to talk to her after what had happened in the

restaurant? He was probably off having a wonderful Christmas Eve dinner

with someone-that girl Lisa, perhaps. Everyone had somebody they could

turn to.

Suddenly someone was calling her name. She looked up and saw three

men running toward her from the boulevard entrance to the park. One of

them, the shortest of the three, was pushing some sort of cart in front of

him; the other two were carrying enormous backpacks and bedrolls. All

three had on baseball caps and orange jackets, and there was something

familiar about them...

"Minmei!" one of them shouted again.

And then she knew. Disguise or no disguise, new Minmei or old, these

three would always recognize her!

She jumped up from the swing seat and began to run for the street.

Rico, Konda, and Bron gave chase, but encumbered by the toy sacks,

backpacks, and such, they couldn't keep up with her.

"Minmei!" Rico called again, out of breath.

175

Aggressive sales tactics had gotten them thrown out of the mall-they'd

actually been grabbing kids and forcing toys upon them-and so they had

wandered over to the park in search of fresh quarry.

"Maybe she didn't hear us," Konda suggested mildly.

"Maybe it wasn't her," said Bron.

Rico nodded. "Couldn't've been. We're her best fans."

Rick was in the kitchen of his quarters, waiting for water to boil, when

he heard the television announcement.

"Last night we reported that famed singer and movie star

Lynn-Minmei had been taken ill. But we have since learned that she is listed

as officially missing, following her hasty departure from Monument City

three weeks ago. Official sources believe that this has something to do with

the disappearance of Miss Minmei's longtime friend and manager,

Lynn-Kyle. There has, however, been no mention of foul play..."

Rick listened for a moment more. He was certain that the two of them

had wandered off somewhere together. After what he had witnessed in Chez

Mann, it was obvious that Minmei was completely under Kyle's spell. Rick

didn't dwell on it, though; people made their own choices in life. Besides, he

had problems of his own to dwell on: Lisa would talk to him only over the

com net, and even then her tone left no doubt about how she felt toward

him. She refused to talk about it, wouldn't so much as have a cup of coffee

with him.

The newscaster was saying something about a discovery in the Amazon

region when Rick heard the doorbell ring. He threw off his work apron and

went to answer it.

It was Minmei, although he almost didn't recognize her. She had a

forlorn and downcast look about her, snowflakes like a network of

disappearing stars in her dark hair. She asked to come in, not wanting to

impose, apologizing for not having called first.

"My friends don't have to call," Rick said, offsetting his initial

176

stammering.

She began to cry, and he held her.

Inside, he put his wool officer's jacket over her shoulders and made

some coffee. She sat on the edge of his bed and sipped at her cup, happier

by the moment.

"I feel so tired of everything," she told him after explaining her fight

with Kyle and her flight from Monument. "I'm sick of being fussed over all

the time...Now, when I think about my life, I remember the things that I've

lost instead of being grateful for what I have. I just don't have anyone to

turn to for support anymore."

She was standing by the window now, her back to him, staring out at

the snowfall. Rick, on the other hand, was staring at her long bare legs; even

while he tried to listen to her complaints, he wondered if she was going to

spend the night.

"You've still got your music," he said after a moment, not sure what he

meant.

"If that's all I've got, then I don't want to sing anymore."

"Your songs are your life, Minmei."

"My life is a song," she demanded, lower lip trembling.

Rick made a face. "You can't be serious."

"I can't perform anymore, Rick."

"It's Kyle, isn't it?"

She frowned at him. "That's not it! I don't care if I ever see him again!

We spent all our time together, whether we were working or not. He

smothered me with his stupid attempts at affection, then yelled at me when

he couldn't control me." Minmei looked hard at Rick. "I have nobody who

understands, nobody who'll take the time to listen to me."

Rick resisted a sudden impulse to run. He was aware of what she was

leading him into, and even though he'd played this scene through a hundred

times before, he didn't want to win her from weakness. As much as he

desired her, he didn't want to get her on the rebound from Kyle.

177

At about the same time Minmei showed up at Rick's door, Lisa was

enjoying a holiday eggnog with Claudia, Max, and Miriya at the Setup, a

health spa-pub on the boulevard. Later, she cabbed over to Rick's place, told

the driver not to wait, and headed for his quarters, leaving footprints in the

thin layer of snow.

She had a present for him-a shirt she had shopped long and hard for,

yet another peace offering in the seemingly constant war they waged with

each other. She had considered drenching it in her own favorite scent ("SDF

No. 5," Claudia called it) but thought Rick wouldn't appreciate the joke. He

had been calling her every other day with one suggestion or another-coffee,

a movie, a picnic!-and she had turned him down each time. But with some

distance from the battleground (her hours at the outdoor table forgotten),

and this being holiday time, she decided that the time was right for

forgiveness. Rick had been inconsiderate and all, but it probably wouldn't

be the last time; and if she was going to make this thing work, she would

have to learn not to hold on to her anger.

As she approached the house, she noticed that the front door was ajar.

She neared it just as Minmei was saying: "I have nobody who understands,

nobody who'll take the time to listen to me." The voice was as recognizable

as the perfume.

"None of my friends in the business really know who I am," Minmei

continued. "You see, Rick, you're the only one who cares. That's why I came:

I was wondering if I could stay here for a while."

Lisa sucked in her breath and almost shoved her fist into her mouth.

She knew she had no right to eavesdrop, but her legs refused to put her in

motion.

Minmei was pleading with Rick: "I don't have anyone else to turn to!"

Lisa's life seemed to be hanging in the balance. Then she heard Rick

give his okay and felt herself going over the edge. Silently she pulled the

door closed and began to run, crying harder with each step. A short distance

down the block a man stopped to inquire if she was all right. She turned on

him like a harridan, telling him to mind his own business.

178

Claudia, meanwhile, had been hopping from bar to bar, party to party.

Her brother, Vince, and his wife, Dr. Jean Grant, had invited her over for

Christmas drinks, but she had declined. Likewise, she had no desire to

return to her quarters and confront the intense loneliness that plagued her

on each holiday. For all his bravado Roy had had a traditional side that

revealed itself on holidays, and they had passed many wonderful moments

together: quiet dinners, walks through the snow on moonlit evenings,

midnight exchanges of gifts and affection. She saw this same shared magic

in the eyes of each couple that passed her on the street, and it wasn't long

before she found herself back at the Setup, hoping she would run into a

friendly face or two.

The last person she expected to find there was Lisa, but there she was,

draped over the bar, an almost empty wine bottle in front of her. She was

singing-trying at any rate-one of Minmei's songs, "Stagefright," by the

sound of it. Claudia's face dropped, then she gave a small shrug and took the

adjacent stool.

"Misery loves company," Lisa slurred, and smiled.

Several hours and countless drinks later, after toasting everyone they

knew or had known and solving all the world's problems, they kissed each

other good-bye just as the sun was coming up over Lake Gloval. Claudia had

the day off, but Lisa had put in for the morning shift. A young staff officer

who had been a frequent visitor to their private party ran Lisa over to the

SDF-2 in his open-air jeep.

Surprised at how sober she was-figuring she had somehow pierced the

hangover envelope-she tried to let herself enjoy the ride, the cold air

rushing at her face. But all that seemed to do was sober her to the point

where last night's problems had little trouble creeping into her

consciousness once again. It was time to give up, she told herself, give up

and let Minmei have Rick once and for all.

As Lisa was approaching the command center, she heard Kim and

Sammie discussing her-a common enough occurrence these days-so she

179

waited outside the door until they were finished, wondering how much

more of this she could stand.

Apparently, word of her all-nighter in the Setup had spread fast.

Sammie was saying:. "Well, you shouldn't believe everything you hear."

"You'd do the same thing if you wanted to forget him," said Kim,

making Lisa think back on the evening to ascertain if she had really done

something to be ashamed of. If only she had come into this a little sooner...

"Lisa's too nice a person to do something like that!"

"Of course-she's not as perfect as you," Kim teased.

That seemed to take the conversation in a different direction entirely,

and a minute or so later Lisa felt safe to enter. Kim, Sammie, and Vanessa

were, of course, all smiles by now, but Lisa didn't hold anything against

them. Vanessa mentioned a Christmas party, the first Lisa had heard about

it.

"You mean no one told you? It's for the bridge. Why don't you invite

Rick-I'm sure he'd love to come."

Was Vanessa goading her? Lisa asked herself. "Ah, I don't think he'd be

able to make it."

"But he's off today."

"Yeah, but he's at home with a miserable little..."

"Oh," said Vanessa. "Sick, huh? Too bad."

Just then the bridge PA came alive. A female voice said:

"This is ground base security! Zentraedi forces are attacking the

industrial section! Emergency communiqu?to all sectors!"

Khyron's Officer's Pod ran through the streets of New Macross, five

tactical pods alongside it. They had entered the city before dawn,

submerging themselves in the cold waters of the lake before the

early-morning surprise attack. Grel's Battlepod had taken the point, but

something was wrong: He had led them past the same storage tanks three

times now.

"What are you doing?!" Khyron screamed into his communicator.

180

"You're leading us around in circles!"

"The Protoculture has got to be here somewhere," Grel returned. "My

agents-"

"Your agents are idiots! Now listen to me: Your incompetence may end

up costing you your life! Now, find it!"

Jeeps and CD vehicles sped through the city announcing the attack and

instructing the early-morning crowds to seek shelter immediately. Thus far

the Zentraedi were restricting themselves to the storage facilities and

factories across the lake, but there was no telling where their blood lust and

thirst for destruction would lead.

Max and Miriya were opening presents for Dana when the alert

sounded. They left the baby with their neighbors, the Emersons, and headed

for the base, awaiting further instructions from Admiral Gloval's

headquarters. It was like old times, after all.

Gloval had been roused from sleep and was now putting in a rare

appearance on the SDF-2 bridge. Exedore, recently returned from the

Robotech satellite to continue his study of Micronian customs, was by the

admiral's side. Surveillance cameras located throughout the industrial

sector had captured the Zentraedis' curious movements. Both Gloval and

Exedore were in agreement that the Officer's Pod was manned by Khyron.

"They seem to be looking for something," Gloval commented. "There

has been very little destruction. Several sentries were killed when the pods

made their first appearance, but nothing since."

The micronized Zentraedi adviser nodded his head solemnly. "Correct,

Admiral. If this were an attack, he would be concentrating on military

targets. Or whatever suits his fancy, as you say. It would be my guess that he

is here to obtain the Protoculture be needs for his battlecruiser."

"We'll concentrate our defense in the industrial sector, then."

Exedore concurred. He then glanced about and added in a

conspiratorial tone: "May I be permitted to make a suggestion, Admiral?"

Gloval's brow furrowed. "Of course, Exedore."

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The Zentraedi said: "Let him find what he's looking for."

Frustrated by Grel's failure to zero in on the storage facility, Khyron left

his mecha behind and went into the streets on foot to reconnoiter. He was

armed with a single autocannon and his own brand of reckless abandon. He

held his ground calmly as Veritechs dove in for strafing runs, picking them

from the skies with hardly a lost step.

Across the lake Azonia headed up a diversionary force consisting of

powered armor units and Quadrono Battalion Invid scout ships. Someday

Earth would see many more of these in the skies...

She directed her squadrons against the city proper, successfully

drawing off the Veritech teams that were going in after Khyron, The

opposing forces met above the lake, filling the chilled air with furious

exchanges of heat, harnessed lightning, and swift death. Max was at the

center of the sudden hell storm, his blue Veritech reconfigured to Battloid

mode, juking and dodging volleys of enemy missiles while his gatling

cannon retaliated, spewing transuranic slugs against the invaders. Miriya

went wing to wing with him, dropping one, two, then three scout ships and

wondering which of the remaining mecha might hold her former

commander, Azonia, now Khyron's consort!

Rick, ever the gentleman, had taken the couch. He was aware that

Minmei had stood over him in the middle of the night while he pretended to

sleep; she had fixed his blankets and smiled at him in the dark. But he

hadn't slept well at all; his neck was cramped, his left arm was tingling, and

some sort of fireworks had roused him much earlier than he wanted to

rise-always the case on a day off.

He went to the window and saw thick columns of smoke in the clear

skies above the lake. Quickly he switched on the television, conscious of

Minmei's rustling around in the kitchen. Rick was already pulling on his

clothes when he heard the announcement from the MBS newscaster, Van

Fortespiel, "the Boogieman":

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"This special bulletin just in: The Zentaedi attack force is believed to be

concentrated in the industrial section of the city. Casualty reports are

expected in at any minute now..."

Rick was stunned. "Why wasn't I notified?!" he shouted to the screen,

pulling off his V-neck sweater and reaching for his uniform. "Lisa's on

command watch-she knew where to find me!"

Minmei waited nervously by the front door. Rick saw her troubled look

and tried to reassure her.

"Don't worry-this is routine."

Her eyes were wide with a sudden fear. "If something happened to you,

I don't know what I'd do!" She held him. "Please don't let me lose you now

that I've finally found you!"

Rick took her face between his hands and kissed her lightly.

"I'll be back soon," was all that he said.

Khyron's years-long familiarity with the Invid Flower of Life had

imbued him with senses above and beyond the ordinary, especially when it

came to homing in on the Flower itself, or in this case its repressed

matrix-Protoculture.

He ripped away the metal chamber's tarpaulin cover and smiled to

himself, his heart pounding and blood rushing through his system. "The

storage matrix," he murmured aloud.

The cylinder was easily half his height and perhaps twice his weight,

but he lifted it easily onto his back nevertheless. Returning to his mecha, he

attached servoclamps to the chamber and winched it tight against the

underside of the pod.

A savage battle was raging throughout the sector between Battloids and

giants, but he put an end to it now by issuing a recall order to his troops.

They regrouped and headed out in formation to the southwest.

Airborne in Skull One, Rick received an update from Max and signaled

his team of Veritechs to follow his lead.

"Prepare to block their escape route in sector November! We can't let

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them get away with that Protoculture!"

Max broke off to join Skull, leaving the rest of the scout ships to Miriya

and her fighter team.

"It's getting bad back there," he was telling her. But just then his eyes

fixed on the Veritech's topographic display. Something massive was putting

down in sector N..."A Zentraedi escort ship," he yelled.

Rick saw it land, the escort's four polelike legs spearing through the

roofs of buildings and settling deep into tarmac roads. A bizarre-looking

ship, shaped like the body of a bloated walrus, with legs that could have

been an architect's compass and an enormous rear thruster like some

outsize megaphone. Khyron's Battlepods and attack mecha were ascending

into its open steel-trap belly, while Battloids and Excaliburs poured

ineffectual fire against its armored hull.

"Attention, Micronians!" Khyron's voice suddenly blurted out as the

ship began to lift off. "Khyron the Destroyer wants to wish you a merry

Christmas, and I send you a special greeting from Santa Claus. May all your

foolish hollow-days be as bright as this one!..."

New Macross didn't know what had hit it, only that the entire city

seemed to go up in flames. Later, piecing together what passed for

facts-Khyron's cryptic remarks and the observations of people in the

street-evidence would point to a certain sidewalk Santa, an uncommon

Santa with empty eyes and skin like polluted clay, a Zentraedi who might

had been in radio contact with "the Destroyer" and set off the myriad bombs

his agents had planted throughout the city...

The Veritechs abandoned their pursuit of the escort ship and returned

to Macross to battle the blaze, diving into the citywide inferno again and

again with fire-retardant bombs.

By the end of the day, the fires were brought under control and the city

began to count its dead. The hospitals were filled to overcrowding, and

whatever Christmas spirit remained was more funereal than festive. Still, by

nightfall, most families had been reunited and a strange postholocaust calm

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prevailed. So often destroyed, so often reborn, the people of Macross were

hardened survivors, nothing if not adaptable, and well accustomed to death.

Church bells sang to one another from distant sectors, carolers took to the

streets, and the SDF-2 crew went ahead with its preplanned surprise,

lighting the ship with garlands of light, a sacred tree grown from the navel

of the world...

Rick met briefly with Lisa afterward. He was angry in spite of the

exhaustion he felt.

"I talked to Vanessa," he said sharply. "She told me you said I was sick

in bed! And you know that's a lie! I should have been notified at the very

first scramble alert!"

"I didn't say you were sick," she answered, averting his gaze for a

moment. "Anyway, I didn't think you'd want to be disturbed..." She waited

for his puzzled look, then added: "You should be more discreet when you

have people coming over-or at least learn to close your front door...I came

by last night to say merry Christmas. I know all about Minmei staying with

you."

He let it go at that and returned home, entering the house like he was

returning from a day at the office, with a cheery "Hi there!" for Minmei, who

was visibly overjoyed to see him.

"Thank goodness!" she gushed, wiping tears away.

"I told you I'd come back." He smiled.

She ran off to fix her face. Rick noticed that she had prepared an entire

dinner for the two of them-even a white-frosted cake with a candle and a

small Santa.

"I made it for you," she said softly, hugging him from behind. "My

sweet Rick...I was so worried."

Rick was speechless, feeling her pressed up against him like that, too

good to be true.

"Do you think you could ever give up your commission with the

Defense Force?" she asked him. "Please think about it because I never want

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to lose you, Rick-never again..."

She lit the candle after dinner and wished him a merry Christmas.

"May we have a million more like it," said Rick, the dog fights and

fireworks suddenly forgotten.

Minmei sighed and leaned forward, closing her eyes. Rick followed her

lead until their lips met...

186

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I believe Khyron suspected that Gloval's allowing him to leave Macross

with the Protoculture matrix was a form of peace offering. It was Gloval's

judgment for deportation as opposed to incarceration; Gloval's way of saying:

You have what you need to get home-now leave! But it remains unfathomable

to me that Gloval and Exedore could so misread Khyron at this late stage.

Home-with the imperative unfilled? Unthinkable. And yet, could the war have

ended in any other fashion?...I have asked myself over and over again how

events might have reshaped themselves had Khyron simply left.

Rawlins,

Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

Vengeance, snarled Khyron.

If there had been doubts regarding Khyron's leadership, the raid on

New Macross not only erased them but instilled within his rank and file a

sense of loyalty hitherto unknown, even among the Zentraedi. He was "the

Destroyer" now, no longer the Backstabber who had sacrificed thousands

along his own vainglorious campaign trail. By capturing the Protoculture

matrix, he had effected a rescue; he had provided them with the means to

take leave of the miserable world that had held them captive these two long

years-a way to return home. His troops would have followed him into hell

itself...And that was precisely where he meant to lead them...

"All energy inputs building to operative levels, sir," an engine room

tech reported to the observation bubble command center.

"Check the reflex furnaces," Grel shouted into the communicator. He

sat rigidly at his duty station, grateful to be alive after the way things had

turned out in Macross. Had Khyron failed to find the matrix, Grel wouldn't

have survived the day.

The Destroyer himself was pacing the deck, his hands clasped behind

his back, the olive-drab campaign cloak swirling as he turned.

"Stable," relayed the engine room tech.

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"We have full power," Azonia updated. Seated at the duty station

adjacent to Grel's, she too was in full-dress uniform.

Khyron clenched his fists and approached the curved console of the

command center. His eyes held a look that went beyond anger. "Excellent!"

he hissed. "We will leave immediately to rejoin the Robotech Masters!"

Grel and Azonia were raising their hands in salute when he suddenly

added: "But before I leave Earth, I want to destroy the SDF-1!"

His subordinates stared at him in disbelief, their protests ignored. The

Earth Forces weren't foolish enough to permit a second sneak attack; they

would be lying in wait, the guns of their newly constructed fortress primed

and aimed! Surely Khyron recognized this, surely he wouldn't allow

freedom to slip from their grasp now!

"I will have my final revenge on these Micronians," Grel and Azonia

heard him mutter under his breath. Then he turned on them and ordered

lift-off. They glanced at each other wordlessly and initiated the launch

sequence.

The cruiser shuddered; vibrating to a bone-shaking bass rumble that

was more feeling than sound. Protoculture surged through the ship's

atrophied systems, empowering the massive reflex furnaces in its holds.

Thrusters erupted with nearly volcanic force, inverted against the tangled

tenacious growth that was partly of the ship's own creating. The Earth itself

sensed the force of the cruiser's withdrawal, replying in kind with tectonic

movements created and relayed from deep within its core, the last gasp of

some opposing telluric intelligence bent on holding fast its dangerous

captive.

But ultimately the powers of evil proved superior and the Destroyer's

dreadnought tore loose, taking great hunks of earth and forest with it as it

climbed toward freedom and headed north for its rendezvous with

vengeance and death.

The end of the world, Lisa cried to herself.

Two weeks had passed since Khyron's Christmas morning attack, and

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Macross had yet to recover. Initially the residents of that often devastated

place had rallied, once again prepared to pick up the pieces of their lives and

rebuild the symbol of their dreams. But then a sort of delayed shock set in,

sapping even the strongest of the will to prevail. People remained in their

homes, leaving the streets deserted, the recent damage untouched; some

had even taken up what amounted to residency in the shelters themselves.

And yet others fled to other cities or wandered off into the wastes, a new

breed of pioneer, abandoning the one thing that had brought salvation and

devastation alike-the SDF-1.

Lisa Hayes was on the lookout bridge of the fortress now, her inner

world as overturned as that one she glimpsed along the curve of the lake.

Rick was lost to her, and his leave-taking had emptied her, much as the city

itself. She contemplated the single decision that would free her, sobbing for

all that might have been.

"Lisa!" Claudia yelled from behind her.

She wiped her eyes and turned around.

"Admiral Gloval sent me to look for you," her friend told her. "Why

aren't you on the bridge?"

"I needed to be alone," she answered, the cold wind mussing her hair.

"I'm thinking about resigning."

Claudia had sensed this coming for weeks now but found herself

surprised nonetheless. "You've got to be joking," she said plainly.

"No, I'm serious, Claudia." Lisa's voice cracked. "I just can't take it

anymore. The army...Rick...I'm giving up-I'm just not as tough as everybody

seems to think I am."

Claudia sized her up for a moment, deciding to get tough herself.

"Come off it, Lisa-you're not fooling anybody but yourself!"

So much for the sympathy, Lisa thought, startled by Claudia's reaction.

Maybe she just wasn't explaining all this properly-Claudia wasn't seeing it

through her eyes.

"You're talking like some silly, simpering, weak sister schoolgirl!"

Claudia stepped in to confront her further. "You're a military woman, born,

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bred, and trained, and you're too much of a scrapper to give in like this

without a fight!"

But Lisa held her ground. "There's no use fighting-it all comes down to

a battle with myself, Claudia. And I'm losing. If Rick prefers Minmei, that's

just the way it is, and there's nothing I can do about it.

"Except get over it and move on!" Claudia emphasized. "The military is

your life, girl. You give up and resign your commission, you might as well

throw everything else away."

Lisa's lips narrowed to a thin line. "I have to get away."

"You mean run away."

Lisa turned her back to Claudia. "Call it what you want. I can't work

with Rick and then watch him go home to her every day. If you can't

understand that..."

He shouldn't have the power over you, Claudia wanted to tell her. You

shouldn't permit him that power! But her heart understood only too clearly.

"I do understand," she said quietly.

The loneliness of command, Gloval said to himself for the third time

that morning. He wished Exedore hadn't chosen to return to the Robotech

factory satellite so soon; he missed him, finding in the gnomish Zentraedi a

keen mind unencumbered by emotional restraints. And yet far from being

pure intellect, cool and remote like Lang, the man-and Gloval would always

refer to him thus-the man had a loyal and unbiased nature, along with a

compassion rarely encountered among Humans or aliens alike. The two had

forged a unique friendship, built on shared interest, mutual trust, and

nothing less than awe for the events that had shaped their histories, both

racial and individual.

Gloval was in his favorite chair, the command seat on the SDF-1 bridge,

staring out at Macross through the wraparound permaglass bays. Everyone

knew to look for him here, more than anything his place of retirement. And

indeed, the issue of retirement weighed heavily on his mind; he wanted the

untaxed freedom to think back through the past two decades and make

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personal order out of the chaos he had so often seen there in moments of

reflection. He needed to take a hard look at his successes and failures and

evaluate his performance record, if for no other reason than to justify the

decisions that had affected so many lives...countless lives.

He recalled saying once that he was allowed to make more mistakes

than the rest of the crew, and indeed he had. He only prayed that his latest

decisions wouldn't fall into the same category.

When Lisa finally reported to him, he stood and walked to the forward

portion of the bridge, his hands behind his back.

"I have called you here to brief you on your new assignment, Captain."

"I'm...sorry, sir, but I can't take a new assignment," Lisa told him

directly.

Gloval pivoted through his rehearsed turn, raising his voice a notch.

"And why not?!"

Lisa's head was bowed. "Sir, I've decided to resign. In my state of mind

I'm no good to myself or the service."

"And what state of mind would that be?" Gloval wanted to know.

"I...I need to get away for a while, Admiral-for personal reasons."

Gloval beamed. "Well, that's perfect, then, because this assignment

calls for a certain amount of travel."

"No, sir." Lisa shook her head. "I'm sorry, sir."

Another tack, Gloval said to himself. "Nonsense. You can't disregard

your duty just because of some unrequited romance-you're just going to

have to get over it because I need you now more than ever before."

Lisa was staring at him wide-eyed. "You mean, y-you know?!"

The admiral made a dismissive gesture. "Good grief, I have eyes, don't

I?! I've probably known about you and Commander Hunter longer than you

have known!"

Lisa brightened somewhat and smiled. "I'll bet you have, sir...This new

assignment, then-is it in the way of a favor?"

"Nonsense," Gloval snorted. "You're the most capable and experienced

officer in the entire command. The choice was an obvious one."

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"Sir..."

Gloval cleared his throat. "As you know, construction of the new

fortress has just been completed. I want you to command it."

Lisa put her hands to her breast. That she was to command the SDF-2

had been hinted at but never actually stated. "What?! My own command?"

"It's a long-term commitment," he cautioned her.

"I accept-whatever it is."

"Good," he said, asking her to step over to the forward bay. She did so

and began to follow his gaze.

Stratified layers of blue sky and crystalline white arced across the

eastern horizon. Above this was a darker, more menacing ceiling of swiftly

moving storm clouds pierced by brilliant rays of winter sunlight. It was a

majestic morning sight, breathtaking.

"Yes," Gloval was saying, "our Earth is a beautiful planet. And we must

preserve its glories. That's why I must ask you to leave our world behind for

a time."

Lisa experienced a fleeting moment of fear.

"The time has come for humankind to grow up and leave its cradle

behind," the admiral explained. "To go forth and claim its place in the

universe...Your assignment is to lead a diplomatic mission to the

homeworld of the Robotech Masters."

"To Tirol, sir?!" Lisa said in disbelief. "But how?"

"That is the new purpose of the SDF-2. Commander Breetai and

Exedore will accompany you, although it might be easier to follow Khyron's

lead."

Lisa's brow furrowed.

"We let him have that Protoculture matrix for a reason, Captain. I'm

only sorry we hadn't anticipated the explosions."

"Khyron's ticket home," Lisa mused. "But why Tirol, Admiral?"

"Because the Human race couldn't possibly survive another holocaust

like the last one. Our defense system has been vastly improved, but even

that would prove useless against the sophisticated technology of the

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Masters or worse yet, to hear Exedore tell it, the Invid. It's essential that we

make peace with the Masters, perhaps for the sake of both our races."

"Peace," Lisa said, as though hearing the word for the first time. "And

we have to travel clear across the galaxy to secure it."

The downside of getting your wish, thought Rick.

From the picture window of his suburban quarters, he watched a

formation of Veritechs streak overhead. He hadn't been airborne in more

than a week, having taken the leave to spend time with his new

roommate/partner/significant other...and that didn't begin to tell the tale of

his confusion. As pleasant as it was with Minmei, Rick felt unfulfilled;

without flying, without a mission, without something to strive for, it was

just the two of them playing house. They would sleep late, cook together,

watch the screen, and suddenly there would be nothing to talk about. She

had stopped writing love songs, and he had stopped telling tales.

Minmei entered the room just then and seemed to pick up on his

distance. Was he tired of her already?

"Rick, why not just quit the service? We could move somewhere else if

you want. I mean, could you be happy if we settled down to a normal life?"

"Normal?!" he said, more harshly than he had to. "Take a look outside,

Minmei. There isn't any more normal!" He shook his head. "I don't think we

could even if there was."

"But why not? There's so much more to life than this, and we're

missing it."

Rick held his breath, then exhaled slowly through clenched jaws.

"People are depending on us. They look to people like me for protection,

and to you for inspiration. How can we just walk away from that?"

She put her hand on his shoulder. "Life is funny, isn't it? Nothing turns

out the way you think it will...When we first met, I was totally caught up in

romantic dreams, and some of those actually came true. But not the dream I

had for you and me, Rick."

"What dream?"

193

She tried to hold his eyes with hers. "Let's get married."

Rick reacted as if he'd been punched. Wasn't she listening to anything

he said?...But even as he thought this, he knew that it was more black and

white than he was making it out to be: Somehow the war and their separate

careers weren't the real issues at all. It was something else...

When the doorbell rang, both of them jumped up to answer it, thankful

for the intrusion. Lisa was standing there demurely, her uniform as bright

as the patches of snow on the front lawn.

"I came to say...good-bye, Rick. I've received new orders, and I'll be

going back into space soon." She pushed on through Rick's surprised

reaction, fighting to maintain her even tone. "It's true. I can't believe it, but

Admiral Gloval has given me command of the SDF-2." She grew almost

cheerful now. "It's like a dream come true. Aren't you happy for me, Rick?"

"When are you leaving?" he asked her anxiously.

"Transfer of the reflex engines from SDF-1 will begin tomorrow. But

we're bound for deep space soon afterward. To Tirol, the homeworld of the

Robotech Masters. It's going to be a diplomatic mission-a mission of peace."

That could take years! Rick thought.

"So I just wanted to say good-bye and...see you in a few years." Lisa

smiled at Minmei. "It's been a pleasure, Minmei. Your music has been a

great inspiration to all of us."

Minmei thanked her, warily at first but more sincerely when Lisa

wished Rick and her happiness in the future.

"I just have one more thing to say," Lisa stammered, her voice failing

her all of a sudden. "I love you, Rick! I always have! And I always will!"

Rick was speechless. Minmei had latched on to his arm with a

tourniquetlike grip. Lisa was apologizing, holding back tears.

"I may never see him again," she was explaining herself to Minmei.

"And I had to tell him...Take care of him for me."

She saluted Rick, turned, and began to run.

Rick stood in the doorway a moment, then shook himself out of his

stupor and called for her to wait. He took off down the walk, but Minmei

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was there in front of him, her arms stretched out to stop him.

"You can't go!" she said in a frightened rush. "What about me?! You've

already done more than your share! How could you even think of going back

into space again?!"

"Because...they need me," Rick lied.

And all at once the sky fell...

195

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Entropy-your belief that systems, biophysical and otherwise, are

predestined to move from a state of order to disorder-is the one concept that

continues to fascinate me; and I do believe that it has indeed shaped your

thinking as a race as powerfully as Protoculture has shaped mine. This

dissolution, this winding down...how typical of your thinkers to conjure up

such a poetic ending.

Exedore, as quoted in Dr. Laslo Zand,

On Earth as It Is in Hell: Recollections of the Robotech War

Good-bye, blue sky, good-bye...

Twentieth-century song lyric

A hail of missiles fell on unprepared Macross, turning the sky a radiant

yellow and leveling the heart of the city. Rick and Minmei were thrown to

the ground by the concussion of a thousand blasts that filled the air with

suffocating heat and fiery debris.

When Rick saw that Minmei was unhurt, he began a frantic search

along what was left of the street in the direction Lisa had run. The sky was

an orange fireball now, much of the city a memory. High-rise towers had

crumbled like sand castles; houses imploded. Park Street and Macross

Boulevard were buckled and heaved like rollercoaster courses.

Rick heard the high-pitched whine of secondary assaults above the

howling of an alien wind; then that deadly thunder returned as explosions

continued to punish the city and the surrounding hills.

He found Lisa lying in the street, miraculously alive though the

buildings on the block had been utterly destroyed.

"What happened?" she yelled above the firestorm.

"We're under attack!" he returned, helping her to her feet. "The

Zentraedi! One ship!"

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Khyron! she said to herself. "We've got to get back to the SDF-2!"

Lisa took a step forward and would have collapsed, but Rick held her,

his hands under her arms. "You're too weak," he spoke into her ear. "Let me

take care of you...I love you!"

She turned in his arms and took his face between her scorched hands.

"Am I dreaming this?" she said weakly.

Minmei was suddenly alongside them, urging them to get to the

shelters and pleading with Rick to stay with her.

Projectiles shrieked like banshees in that chrome sky.

"Get yourself to safety!" Lisa told her. "Rick and I have our duty to

perform!"

Minmei took a faltering step forward, confused.

"If you really love him," Lisa continued, "let go of him! He's a

pilot-that's his life!"

"Life?" Minmei screamed, hysterical, her arms flailing about. "You call

this a life?! War! Devastation! Battle after battle until everything is

destroyed!"

Rick took her by the arms and tried to calm her, urging her to leave.

"We're trying to put an end to all this. We hate it as much as you do, but the

future of our race has to be preserved!"

Missiles exploded nearby, raining vengeful lightning on them and

erasing words and thoughts. The three of them huddled together, showered

by cinders and unheavenly tongues of airborne fire.

Minmei looked at Lisa and Rick, angry now. "There is no future!"

Rick turned to leave, and she grabbed hold of him, begging him to

remain by her side. If he loved her, he would stay with her.

But he shook himself free.

"Someday you'll understand!" he shouted.

"I'll never understand!" she screamed to his back.

Lisa entered the bridge of the SDF-2 at a run, making straight for her

station. Vanessa was already at her console, the threat screen in front of her

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flashing with display information.

"Give me a status report!" Lisa ordered.

"A single battlecruiser-ten degrees southwest. Present position

twenty-seven miles but closing very fast."

"Right," said Lisa, and reached for the air com net switch...

The projecbeam field on the bridge of Khyron's cruiser showed the

Micronians' new battle fortress, sitting in its circular puddle back to back

with its crippled cousin, the SDF-1-Zor's ship, cause of so much undoing.

The Destroyer stood proudly in the observation bubble command

center, his facial features distorted by intense hatred.

"The dimensional fortress now coming into range, sir," Grel reported

from his station.

"Main gun at full power and standing by," said Azonia.

"My revenge was well worth waiting for! Admiral Gloval is going to

wish he'd never heard of me!"

Azonia straightened in her seat. "Awaiting your orders, m'lord."

"Take out the new ship first," he commanded. "Then we'll finish them

off. Zor's ship will soon be little more than a footnote in Zentraedi history!"

"Enemy ship still closing!" Sammie told Lisa from her station below the

balcony area of the SDF-2 bridge.

Kim suddenly swung from her console screen. "I'm getting high-level

radiation readings!"

"Vanessa?" Lisa said, asking for confirmation.

"They're firing on us, Captain!"

Glyphs of unharnessed lightning began to take shape along the blunt

bow of Khyron's leviathanlike cruiser, leaping pole to pole across what could

almost have been a full-lipped mouth, crowned and underscored with

twin-muzzled spiked cannons like tusks on its armored hull. The energy

danced and stretched, animated by the Protoculture charges enlivening the

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dreadnought's weapons systems.

Localized storms were unleashed as the ship tore through the winter

clouds above Macross, orange thrusters aft propelling it swiftly toward the

lake and the immobile fortresses.

The bolts crackled and hissed in the thin air as the bow began to open,

revealing a network of blazing vertical shafts of power, fangs and incisors

filed to gleaming points in the mouth of the beast. Ultimately, from

somewhere deep within its black heart a cone of blinding light burst forth,

spewing from the cruiser and fanning out to encompass the Earth itself,

then narrowing and collapsing upon itself as it found its focus. It surged

forward across the rooftops of the city, buildings collapsing in its wake, and

struck the heart of the fortress, rending the fabric of spacetime on impact

and opening gaps into antiworlds.

Colors reversed themselves; what had been light was now darkness,

and what had been blackness glowed with an infernal radiance. The heavens

rolled and gyrated as though the very stars had been thrown into chaos by

the force of the explosion.

"SDF-2 has taken a direct hit!" a hurried and frightened male voice

informed Rick over the tac net. "We've lost communications!"

Rick looked over his shoulder, dropping the Veritech's left wing as he

turned. Below him Lake Gloval was a caldron of fire and smoke, less a

reservoir of water than a volcanic cone. The new fortress was in ruins, holed

through and through by the annihilation ray.

"They're listing!" the voice updated. "They're sinking, Captain!"

"Come in, SDF-2," Rick shouted into his helmet mike. "Lisa, do you

read me?! Captain Hayes?!" His commo screen was a grid of black and

white static, then a vertical column of blue and white bands. "Answer me!"

he shouted once again.

Approaching Skull Team from twelve o'clock came an angry flock of

Zentraedi mecha, pursuit ships, tri-thrusters, and Battlepods.

Rick locked onto his targets and pulled home the Hotas.

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"You'll pay for this!" he snarled through bared teeth.

The rain was harsh but blessedly cool against her raw skin. Why hadn't

she thought to include sunscreen in the beach basket? And was Rick as

burned as she?...The wailing of tortured seabirds was taking her rapidly to

the surface of the world, the roughhouse voices of beachgoers at play...

Lisa opened her eyes to a close-up view of her console keyboard and

touch pads, water cascading between the tabs and puddling on the floor.

Her hands were under her face, and the screen in front of her was blank and

silent. She raised her head, pushed wet hair from her face, then struggled to

her feet to ascertain the extent of the damage to the bridge.

On the floor below the flyout balcony, Sammie and Kim lay sprawled

near their duty stations, seemingly dazed but uninjured. Klaxons were

sounding throughout the ship, and the overhead fire control system had

drenched everyone and everything in the hold. Lisa turned to check on

Vanessa before opening the comlink to request assistance.

"Fire control teams needed on levels four through twenty," she

managed.

Back at her station, Kim put in a call for medics.

"All section commanders file status reports as soon as possible," Lisa

heard Vanessa say.

"Tell 'em we need more help on the flight deck!" a paramedic shouted

from the floor.

Kim was working frantically at her controls. "Computer's dead!" she

told Lisa. "No manual override. We have no control whatsoever!"

"Losing power, Captain," Vanessa said behind her. "Recommend we

abandon ship!"

Lisa's mouth dropped open as she felt the impact of those words and

understood what it meant to lose a ship.

She swept her eyes across the bridge: The fortress had taken a direct hit

some floors below the control center, but secondary missiles had razed the

bridge as well. There were huge holes in the bulkheads behind her, acrid

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smoke was coiling from the ventilation systems, and for the first time Lisa

was aware that the ship was listing hard to starboard.

Think! she screamed to herself, as if to chase the demons of defeat

from her mind. What would Admiral Gloval do in a situation like this?

She pictured him sitting in the command chair on the SDF-1 bridge, his

white cap pulled low on his brow, the tobacco-stained fingers of his right

hand gently tugging at the ends of his thick mustache...She could almost

hear him:

"Lisa, you know that you'll always be able to find me right here. "

And suddenly she understood why he had told her this; she understood

why he had been absent so often these past months while the SDF-2 was

nearing completion, why he had given her command of the fortress...

"Of course!" she yelled. She beckoned her bridge crew to follow her and

hurried from the control room.

A winding service corridor still connected the two fortresses, a dark

and spooky place now, but the four of them barely took notice of its sinister

elements as they ran toward the mother ship, Lisa in the lead. Barely

breaking stride, she hit the control switch for the bridge hatch, and they

rushed in, surprised to find the overhead lights on and the display boards lit.

They were equally surprised to find Claudia standing at her forward station,

already initiating the lift-off sequence.

"Welcome aboard, ladies," she said calmly and with a hint of humor.

"What took you so long?"'

"Don't just stand there," Gloval barked from the command chair. "We

have a job to do. Battle stations everyone!"

Lisa smiled to herself while she and the others hastened to their

consoles and screens. So it was true: Gloval had half expected an attack of

some sort. He had sworn to Khyron (and the entire crew, for that matter)

that the SDF-1 was nonoperational, when in fact it was not only

spaceworthy but armed to the teeth. Robotech crews had to have carried out

the top-secret reconstruction months ago, purposely leaving the battered

exterior of the fortress untouched.

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"What about the main gun, sir?" she asked Gloval.

"Enough power for one firing. We'll have to make sure it's effective."

"Computer countdown is already programmed, sir," Claudia reported.

Gloval called for maximum power on all thrusters.

"Antigrav power levels at optimum capacity," Sammie updated.

"All systems go," said Kim. "Ready for immediate lift-off on

commander's mark!"

Claudia tapped commands into her overhead control board.

"Drive system is operational, and the chronometer is running. Four

seconds to ignition. Three! Two! One!..."

"Take her up!" shouted Gloval, almost rising from his chair...

Minmei, her aunt and uncle, Mayor Tommy Luan, and thousands of

others were pressed together in Macross's main shelter, an enormous

aboveground structure of steel and reinforced concrete that also housed the

city's communications system and data storage networks. Minmei had been

entertaining everyone with songs and stories. They were all maintaining,

despite the despair they felt when word of the destruction of the SDF-2 had

reached them. Recent arrivals to the shelter described how that Zentraedi

dragon had belched a flow of irresistible force and how the new fortress had

slipped like a corpse beneath the frothing surface of Lake Gloval. The

crowds in the shelter had keened and offered up their prayers.

But now incredible news had arrived: The SDF-1 was lifting out of the

lake! And people all over the city were beginning to leave their shelters,

heedless of the burning buildings and ravaged land, the death wind that

blew like a gust from hell through the deserted streets. Their guardian was

resurrected, and this was all that mattered. Even annihilation itself held no

sway.

Minmei, too, left the shelter in time to see the fortress liftoff, parting

the water as it rose from the lake, still a gleaming techno-knight despite its

sorry appearance. The supercarriers that were its arms were held out in that

characteristic gesture of supplication, and already the main guns were

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elevating into position above the knight's visored helmet...

Khyron's cruiser was continuing its deadly descent, disgorging blast

after blast of white light from its unholy gullet. Streaks of blue lightning

shot from pinpoint gun turrets, while power-armored Zentraedi troops

steadfast along the warship's rusted hull loosed cannon fire against the

Earth Forces mecha.

Rick skimmed Skull One along the cruiser's organiclooking surface,

offing missiles as he broke and climbed across its bow. When the recipients

of those Stilletos and Hammerheads exploded beneath him, he threw the

fighter into another dive, reconfiguring to Guardian mode as he dropped.

The skies were alive with tracer rounds, hell flowers, and annihilation disks.

Veritechs and Zentraedi pursuit ships were locked in crazed dogfights amid

it all, adding their own slugs and rounds to the chaos, their own deaths to

the escalating body count.

In Battloid mode now, legs splayed on the sickly-colored hull and the

autocannon at the ready, Rick's mecha emptied his rage at barbed turrets

and solitary troops alike. Explosions encircled him, filling the air with

whitehot shrapnel. But the great ship held to its course, hurtling toward the

lake undeterred.

All at once there was a voice on the com net.

"Rick! Rick Hunter-is that you?!"

"Lisa!" Rick cried. "I must be hearing things!"

"You're not," she told him. "I'm aboard the SDF-1, and we're preparing

to fire the main guns. So I strongly suggest you get yourself out of there!"

He was already reaching for his mode selector stick. "You don't have to

tell me twice!" he exclaimed, running his mecha along the deck and lifting

off.

Rick raised Max and Miriya on the tac net. Wing to wing the three

fighters peeled away from the targeted cruiser...

"Main gun is in ready position," Claudia announced. "Energy reading at

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present...niner-five-zero."

Lisa ran calculations at the adjacent station, reporting the results. "The

admiral was right-that's only enough energy for one shot, so make it a good

one!"

Vanessa gave the word: The cruiser was centered in the computer

reticle.

"Now, fire!" yelled Gloval...

The two columnar towers of the main gun were set in position side by

side, a continuous cat's cradle of scintillescent energy uniting them running

fore to aft. As Gloval issued the command to fire, the power web seemed to

solidify itself for an instant; then the twinboomed gun blowtorched.

A near hemisphere of incandescence erupted from the fortress,

dematerializing the winter clouds and igniting the sky like a second sun.

The collective force of an infinity of hyperexcited subatomic particles tore

through Khyron's approaching cruiser like a radiant stake driven into its icy

heart.

But the cruiser's forward motion was not yet arrested. Flayed of armor

and superstructure and trailing a dense pillar of swirling black smoke, it

continued to fall...

Khyron tasted blood in his mouth. In the dim illumination in the

observation bubble provided by the cruiser's auxiliary power system, he

traced the blood's course to a deep gash over his left eye. The eye itself was

closed, swollen and hemorrhaging in its fractured socket. Azonia was in the

command chair beside him, unscathed though the rest of the bridge was in

ruin.

"All right," he said, as though taken in by a minor trick, "they've had

their fun, and now it's our turn! I'll show them!"

Behind him, both Grel and Gerao had met their deaths. Weapons

systems and communications were out; likewise the computers and

projecbeam screens. But the ship's navigationals were alive-the ship itself

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could be used as a final weapon.

"Now what?" Azonia asked eagerly.

Khyron took the second chair. "They can't erect a defense barrier

without any power, correct?!"

"Right! They're helpless! Get them!"

He turned to her and smiled. "We both will," he rasped. "But it requires

a sacrifice...are you willing to face it with me, Azonia?"

She reached out for his hand. "It will be glorious."

"Yes...glorious. Locking on guidance systems, now."

Its power systems depleted, the SDF-1 had dropped back in the lake,

helpless.

Vanessa glanced up at the schematics on the threat board. The enemy

hadn't altered its course. "It looks like he plans to ram us, sir!"

Gloval turned to Sammie: "Do we have any power left?!"

"Not enough to activate the main gun again, sir."

"Kim?" said Gloval.

"Same story here...I have no helm control!"

Claudia turned from her station: "Reserves and backups are out."

Gloval stood up. "Ready the ejection modules," he started to say. But

Sammie was shaking her head, tears rolling down her freckled face.

"Only module C is operational. The rest are..."

Lisa felt her heart begin to race. Everyone looked at each other, saying

more with their eyes than would have been possible through words alone.

Sammie and Kim were crying, holding each other. Vanessa was tightlipped,

stoic, almost angry.

Lisa saw Claudia and the admiral exchange glances, then suddenly felt

her friend's graceful hand on her shoulder.

"Lisa..."

Lisa stepped aside and clutched at herself, feeling a wave of hysteria

mount inside her. "No!" she screamed.

"Lisa, yes!" someone said-it could have been Sammie, or Kim, or

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Vanessa.

Claudia and Gloval took a step toward her.

She began to shake her head wildly...

Max and Miriya, Rick and what remained of the Skull Team, had put

several miles between themselves and Khyron's warship. Circling out over

the lake, they regrouped and headed home, the SDF-1 at twelve o'clock, now

resettled in the choppy waters.

Rick had witnessed the counterstrike leveled against Khyron's vessel

and had naturally anticipated its complete destruction. But the cruiser had

survived and was locked on a collision course with the dimensional fortress.

The Veritechs began to pour everything they had toward it: missiles,

armor-piercing depleted transuranic rounds, heat-seekers, and the rest.

Phalanx guns of the SDF-1's close-in weapons system were similarly

engaged, challenging the gods with their volleys of thunder and blinding

light.

All at once Rick knew in his gut that all the firepower in the world

wasn't going to slow that skeletal ship's suicide descent...

The cruiser was a fiery javelin in a ballistic fall, called by the Earth's

own inherent powers to deadly rendezvous with its techno-savior.

On the bridge of the Zentraedi ship, Khyron and Azonia stood hand in

hand facing that divine wind in a way only warriors could, victorious in

their final moments as much for destroying the object of their years-long

pursuit as for the strength of their extraordinary bond, their marriage in

death.

Gloval, in his place, hugged his crew to him, stretching his long arms

around them all, courageous and loving father, while the Destoyer's warship

eclipsed the sky.

The mile-long cruiser rammed into the main guns of the fortress,

splintering the twin booms as it continued its dive. Metal shrieked against

metal, shafts, connectors, and joints snapping and roaring in protest.

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The bow of the leviathan ship forced the booms apart and impacted

against the main body of the SDF-1, shearing off the head and going on to

crash and explode once, twice, and again. The fortress took the full power of

these against its back and itself exploded, blowing the supercarriers from

their mountings and ripping away the battle-scarred armor that had seen so

much violence.

The lake boiled, releasing massive clouds of steam into the cold air, and

lightning storms appeared spontaneously in the skies overhead.

A fireball rose and mushroomed there, announcing the event to the

rest of the world...

When the smoke cleared, three ruins stood in the much shallower lake:

the burned-out hull of Khyron's cruiser, the remains of the ill-fated SDF-2,

and the blackened, headless torso of the original dimensional

fortress-monuments to madness.

Most of the city along the lakeshore had been obliterated.

Veritech teams swept the littered waters and frontage lands for

survivors but found none.

Rick made a pass over the leveled suburbs where his quarters had once

stood-where Lisa and Claudia, Sammie, Vanessa, and Kim had lived; then

he flew over the heart of downtown, where survivors were already leaving

the shelters.

But there would be no rebuilding this time-not here at any rate. Rick

guessed that the area would remain hot for decades to come. Evacuation

and relocation of the thousands who had lived through the day would have

to commence immediately. No simple task given the extent of the

destruction, but there were nearby cities that would lend a hand, and the

Earth would prevail, rid of its enemies at last.

He tried not to think about Gloval and the others; this was what waited

for all of them at the end of the rainbow.

He piloted his fighter past the lake hulks, circled, and put down in

Guardian mode at an intact landing zone not far from the shore. People

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were beginning to gather, many in shock, others staring at the fortress in

stunned silence. He raised the cockpit canopy and climbed out, only to hear

a ghost call him by name.

Lisa was walking toward his ship.

Rick approached her cautiously, more than willing to settle for

hallucination but worried that real emotion might frighten it off. But the

quaking shoulders he touched with his equally anxious hands were flesh

and blood, and the feel of her brought him close to fainting.

"At the last moment," Lisa was saying, "Admiral Gloval and...Claudia

forced me into the ejection module." She regarded the fortress for a moment,

silent while tears flowed freely down her cheeks. "They wanted me to live..."

She turned Rick and studied him intensely. "They said that I was the only

one who still had something to live for!"

Rick held her while she cried, her body convulsing in his arms.

"I thought I'd lost you," he whispered. "Just when I realized how much

you mean to me." He tightened his embrace. "You do have something to live

for-we both do now."

Neither of them heard Minmei approach. Reflexively, they separated

when she spoke; but Rick, in a rush, began to stammer an explanation.

Minmei spared him that.

"You're in love with Lisa," she said quietly. "I knew that."

"I would have told you sooner, but...I don't think I knew until today."

Rick reached for Lisa's hand. "Forgive me, Minmei."

Now Minmei faltered. "Well, uh, only if you can forgive me, Rick. For

trying to make you into something you're not. And, uh, for pretending to be

something I'm not." Rick and Lisa looked confused, so she continued. "You

see, I wasn't really that eager to get married. I realized that my music means

as much to me as the service does to you."

Lisa seemed to stiffen, somehow able to locate just a hint of anger

through her heavy sadness. "Oh, really?" she said flatly.

"My life is music," Minmei said innocently.

Lisa smiled to herself and gave Rick's hand a squeeze. Minmei couldn't

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bear to admit that she had lost Rick; and why bother to think that when it

was so much easier to rearrange the facts? Looking around, Lisa wondered

if she could do the same: just pretend all this hadn't happened, see blue

skies instead of storms ahead.

"Good luck on your mission, Lisa," Minmei said straight-faced.

As though all this hadn't happened!

"I know you'll be a bigger star than ever by the time we return," Lisa

told her, willing to give Minmei's blinder game a try.

Rick, too, wore a slightly puzzled look. But this began to fade when

Minmei turned to him, wishing him well and kissing him lightly on the

cheek.

"Don't forget me, Rick-you have to promise me you won't!"

"I'll never forget you," he said, meaning it.

She spun on her heel in an almost weightless turn and walked away,

stopping once to wave to him before rejoining the crowds of survivors,

already welcoming her with open arms.

Snow was beginning to fall. Lisa put her arm through Rick's elbow and

snuggled up against him.

"What about our mission, Rick? Is there a chance-even without the

SDF-1?"

Rick nodded slowly. He had already given it some thought.

"There's still the factory satellite and Breetai's ship. With his help, and

Lang's and Exedore's, we'll make good Admiral Gloval's assignment. We'll

reach the Robotech Masters' homeworld before it's too late. This time peace

comes first."

Mesmerized, Lisa watched the snow begin to blanket the devastated

city, the ruined warships that were to be its massive grave markers.

Perhaps Max and Miriya would sign on, she said to herself. Even

Minmei! What did she care now? It was going to be a diplomatic mission, a

proper meeting of two cultures bound to each other by a mysterious past

and separated by nearly the breadth of a galaxy.

She looked over at Rick and managed a smile, which he returned

209

though tears filled his eyes.

And if their plan failed for some reason, if it wasn't possible for

Breetai's ship to undertake the journey...then other solutions would present

themselves. Earth would rebuild itself and prevail. Perhaps, she speculated,

the Robotech Masters would come here instead...

And as it turned out, new solutions would present themselves. Earth

would rebuild and prevail. And as for the Robotech Masters...come they

would!

End

RTUCN.COM

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Document Outline

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Zentraedi Rebellion

By Jack McKinney

1994

For Michael Riccardelli—Zor Prime—faithful correspondent and provider of anime, comics, and rousing ideas for Robotech

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Since its inception, when Carl Macek restructured three Japanese animes to create the television series, Robotech has been an interactive enterprise. Comico Comics adapted the eighty-five original episodes, and Palladium Books provided additional details on characters, mecha, and chronology for the role-playing game. In adapting Robotech and the Sentinels for Del Rey Books, I incorporated material from the original scripts and the role-playing game; and in writing The End of the Circle, I tried to be faithful to Macek's vision. Eternity Comics has been doing the same in their adaptation of the Sentinels and in several spin-off series, incorporating material from the scripts, the role-playing game, and the novels.

For several years now I have wanted to chronicle the events that led to the launch of the SDF-3—to fill the gap between book six of the original series and book one of the Sentinels. However, some of that story has since been detailed by Bill Spangler in "The Malcontent Uprisings," a series he wrote for Eternity Comics. In the interest of consistency and continuity, I have included some of Bill's plot elements in the present work (chiefly, the events of 2018—with all apologies to Bill for the changes I made). Several key Zentraedi characters sprang from his imagination, as did many of the Zentraedi terms. I am also indebted once again to Kevin Siembieda for his detailed descriptions of mecha and of the factory satellite, and to everyone at Protoculture Addicts, not only for keeping Robotech vital, but for publishing a magazine line devoted to mecha.

Continuity is what distinguishes Robotech from similar (though admittedly more widespread) sagas like Star Wars and Star Trek. It was always my belief that only one version of the Robotech story exists, and what we writers are mere chroniclers of that tale.

2015

CHAPTER ONE

2015 began much as any other year in recent memory: a Zentraedi attack left yet a third version of Macross in ruins; friends died and were buried; and Rick Hunter found himself hopelessly conflicted, if not by love this time, then by rumors of promotion and his dark imaginings of things to come.

Altaira Heimel, Butterflies in Winter: Human Relations and the Robotech War

Spring's first sunrise brightened a bleak landscape, pockmarked with craters and crazed with fissures opened by weapons of destruction. In the Northwest Territory, where a rain of Zentraedi annihilation bolts had incinerated countless acres of fir forest and hardened vast expanses of sand to glass, stood thrice-born Macross City, Earth's burgeoning capital only three months earlier and now its most recent casualty of war. Hurricane-force winter storms had been no kinder to the place than Khyron had, and with the early thaw had come an understanding of just how much damage the city had sustained in the moments before its frigid burial.

From a rostrum that once had been a segment of elevated highway, a middle-aged man with a noticeable Germanic accent was addressing a sizable crowd of Robotech Defense Force personnel and civilians. The only way to tell one from the other was by the RDF unit patches adorning the sleeves of the soldiers' antihazard suits.

"The sudden deaths of friends and loved ones affect us more profoundly than the near death of an entire world," the speaker was saying. "And it is those loved ones—those teammates, techmates, and comrades—that we seek to honor today, on the occasion of this sad assembly."

His name was Emil Lang, and he was Earth's preeminent mathematician and physicist. Robotechnology's chief proponent for more than a decade, he was seldom at a loss for words, but much of his address that day had been written for him by Lisa Hayes. She was Admiral Hayes now, in the wake of the destruction of Macross City and the Superdimensional Fortresses 1 and 2, and the deaths of Admiral Henry Gloval and dozens of the RDF's highest-ranking officers.

Few among a crowd estimated to number ten thousand were aware that Lang's were borrowed words, though Rick Hunter knew as much, because he had been with Lisa when she composed them two months earlier.

"Lang wants to know what I would say if I'd been chosen to deliver the memorial," Lisa had explained at the time.

Rick understood how Lang might be nonplussed by the assignment: commo of the nontechnical sort didn't come easily to the Wizard of Robotechnology. And yet who better to memorialize Gloval, Claudia Grant, and the rest than the man most responsible for the reconstruction of the SDF-1? The Earthman most responsible, that was. To another went credit for the ship's original design and engineering: the Tiresian Zor, in whom Robotechnology itself had its beginnings.

Lisa's contribution notwithstanding, Lang's sentiment was genuine, and it spoke to everyone in the crowd. Several of Rick's closest friends had died in Earth's protracted war with the Zentraedi—some in deepspace, some in Earth's wild blue yonder—and each of those deaths had touched him more than the devastation visited on the planet as the culmination of that conflict. Rick was willing to accept that he, like so many of Earth's survivors, had been living in staunch denial of the cataclysm. But if that were true, then Khyron's surprise attack on the dimensional fortresses and the city that had grown up around them had constituted a long-overdue wake-up call.

Those sections of Macross that hadn't been atomized during the attack, had been rendered uninhabitable by radiation, thwarting early plans for salvage operations and memorial services. Readings hadn't subsided to safe levels until late February, and then there was the snow to contend with—snow that had commenced on the night of the attack and continued unabated for two months, almost as if nature had fashioned a microclimate to hasten the cooling. March's sudden melt loosed avalanches that had blocked the pass between Macross and Monument City and had turned the valley floors to sludge. Even now, Rick's Veritech—a VT-1S configured in Battloid mode—stood to its ankles in thick mud.

Rick thought the de rigueur antihazard suits a touch belated, given that one-quarter the city's population had been dosed with radiation on emerging from the shelters—Rick, Lisa, and Minmei more than most. In addition to the sixty-six hundred dead who had been aboard the fortresses or providing mecha support, over five thousand civilian residents had died, most within days, some as recently as that morning. Bodies had been retrieved by the planeload, but it had been decided that there would be no coffins. General staff's plan called for Lake Gloval to be filled in and made a common grave site—a shrine. Though a shrine none would dare visit for at least ten years to come.

Macrossers, however, were nothing if not war-hardened, and most would have braved the residual fallout suitless to honor those who had flown endless against-all-odds missions in their behalf. Rick would have numbered himself among that noble group, but as an RDF captain, commander of celebrated Skull Team, he was obliged to attend as both man and mecha—"crafted," as the Veritech pilots put it.

Skull—the lot them in Battloid mode—was deployed along what remained of the concourse linking the downtown mall to the flight deck of the SDF-1's Daedalus forearm. Ghost, Vermillion, and Indigo teams were similarly arrayed along the parallel concourse that fed the Prometheus. Both appendages were actually Thor-class supercarriers that had been grafted onto the fortress some five years earlier, at the start of the War against the race of giant warriors known as the Zentraedi. Rick, seated NBC-suited and neural-capped inside Skull One's ultratech cockpit was ten city blocks west of the slagged half-mile-high hulks of the SDFs 1 and 2; the former, dismembered and decapitated, was up to its chest in the mud-filled crater that had been the lake, the twin booms of its truncated main gun raised in an attitude of humble entreaty.

No more, it seemed to be saying to the early morning sky. Let it end here.

Looking west, Rick could see across the rooftops of block after block of burned-out buildings clear to the elevated roadway that was serving as a stage for the long-delayed ceremony. By telephotoing the VT's exterior-mount videocams, he could bring into sharp focus nearly every hooded face on the makeshift rostrum: Dr. Lang, Professors Lazlo Zand and Sheamus Bronson, Macross Council politicos Milburn and Stinson, Chief Justice Justine Huxley, and Mayor Tommy Luan. Elsewhere stood Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt, generals Maistroff and Motokoff, full-bird colonels Caruthers and Herzog, and Major Aldershot.

Rick spent a moment contemplating his pending promotion and shuddered at the thought of being lofted into the numbing company of all that assorted brass. He would just have to decline any advancement in rank, he told himself. Appeal to the aging flyboy in Reinhardt by saying that while he was flattered by Command's confidence in his leadership abilities, his place was and would always be with the Skull.

He reasoned he had a good chance of pulling it off. Providing that Admiral Lisa could keep from getting involved.

"In conclusion, let us at least try to embrace a constructive perspective," Lang was saying. "Let us try to view the coming years as a bridge to the future, however uncertain. We are a forward-looking race, and it is our faith in the future that will guide us . . ."

Lang was finally winding down—and just in time, Rick decided. For what had begun as a remembrance of the dead had deteriorated into a eulogy for Lang's precious dimensional fortresses and his plans for constructing an SDF-3.

And so when Vince Grant succeeded Lang at the podium—towering over it—he concentrated on remembering his sister, Claudia. And when Lieutenant Mitchell took the microphone she remembered enlisted-ratings techs Sammie Porter, Vanessa Leeds, and Kim Young, all of whom Mitchell had relieved at one time or another on the fortress's bridge. Cat crew officer

Moira Flynn read off the names of hundreds of pilots she had waved into battle, and Dr. Hassan, chief surgeon aboard the SDF-1, recalled acts of unsurpassed bravery.

And when Lisa Hayes spoke . . . Well, when Lisa spoke about what it meant to have served under Henry Gloval—the father she would have preferred—and about Claudia Grant, her closest friend and sister-in-arms, not even the MBS broadcasters could keep their deep voices from faltering.

"Skull," Rick barked into his helmet pickup, as sobs filtered through the tactical net. "Present arms!"

The crowds turned to the half-buried ships. The technoknights of Skull, Ghost, Vermilion and Indigo raised their autocannons in salute, Veritech teams screamed over the lake, disgorging payloads of hothouse flowers, and the massive guns of a dozen MAC II Destroids offered thunderous praise to the dead. A reclamation crew positioned on the rail-gunned shoulders of the SDF-1 unfurled a huge banner bearing the RDF insignia: an encircled, curved-sided diamond suggestive of a fighting kite.

Sunlight gleamed off the battered alloy surfaces of the SDF-1.

There had been talk of a closing address by Exedore, but the general staff had had a last-minute change of mind and the Zentraedi ambassador's shuttle flight from the factory satellite had been canceled. Khyron's raid—though in no way undertaken in the name of all the Zentraedi—had brought about a resurgence of hatred for the race with whom Humans were now forced to share the Earth. Bron, Rico, and Konda—the first of the aliens to defect during the War—had been ordered to remain in Monument City and satisfy their grief by watching live coverage of the funeral.

Their absence was nearly as conspicuous as that of Lynn Minmei.

Following the ceremony, Lisa came directly from Fokker Field, outside Monument City, to Rick's temporary quarters—even though her quarters were only a few blocks away in Monument's newest suburb, transported all but intact from Macross by a fleet of flatbed trucks.

"I don't want to be alone," she said when she arrived. "I can't be alone.

Not tonight."

Rick held her and stroked her long hair. They went over the day's events and she cried in his arms; then Rick led her to his bed and tucked her in. Gradually, her sobbing diminished and she fell asleep, and Rick returned to the living room, planting himself by a fixed-pane window that overlooked Monument's distant high-rise skyline. He felt strangely separated from the world, insulated by the window glass as he had been by the faceplate of the thinking cap and the permaplex of the VT cockpit.

The walls of the small house were hung with photos of Skull One and of assorted mecha, and dangling from the ceiling were plastic models of vintage prop planes of the sort his father and Leo Epstein had so loved, some of them purchased at Bron, Rico, and Konda's kiosk in the Macross mall. In Lisa's quarters were her stuffed toy ostrich and an oval vanity mirror decaled with stars that had somehow survived Khyron. Mass-produced modular rectangles of plastic and lightweight alloy, the two houses were mirror images of one another but identical to dozens of others in the transplanted neighborhood.

In the kitchenette was the round table at which Lisa had composed the introductory remarks to Lang's speech. By the time she had finished, the notepaper was so tearstained that Rick had had to have the few paragraphs transcribed. He marveled at how fluently she could cry, at how deeply she could grieve, especially when there didn't seem to be a tear left in him. With all that had happened in the past five years, it had gotten so that death was only unexpected when its cause was disease.

Fortunately for the Human race, Earth was proving itself immune to pessimism. In spite of what the War had wrought, the planet was healing itself. Angry sunsets and blood-red moons were things of the past, and songbirds had returned to a patch of forest in the hills surrounding Monument—Lisa's favorite spot for picnics. Conditions in the so-called Southlands were reported to be even better.

Monument City had been founded by a group of Zentraedi loyal to Breetai, the warrior giant without whose help the War would have been

lost—without whom, in fact, the Earth itself would have been lost, rid forever of "Micronians," as the aliens referred to any race that failed to measure up to their forty-foot stature. The city lay to the southwest of Macross, across a now-tortuous landscape of eroded hills and precipitous outcroppings, and was in many ways an imitation of Macross, right down to the milk-carton skyscrapers, Quickform buildings, pedestrian malls, and crater lake. Save that the rusting ship centered in Monument's lake was a Zentraedi dreadnought that had driven itself, like a spike, partway into the ground—one of tens of thousands of disabled and depleted warships that had oriented on Earth in the final moments of the War and plunged toward it. Much of the planet's ravaged surface was an eerie Robotech boot hill studded with crumpled ships, too numerous to either bury or dismantle. Only time and the elements might remove them, though not in the life span of anyone then living.

With the unequivocal destruction of Macross—it would never again rise from its ashes—facsimile Monument had been forced to accept Macross's 100,000 refugees, much as Earth had been forced to accept the defeated and marooned Zentraedi. Thus, in the three months since Khyron's assault, Monument had swollen to over ten times its original size. There was no SDF-1 to supply the fabricators that had enabled Macross Three to flower overnight, but Macross's city planners—out of foresight or perhaps paranoia—had seen fit to construct Macross as a veritable transportable city. Indeed, the construction designs and materials developed for Macross had already been exported around the world, to wherever people were struggling to rebuild: to Portland, Denver, Detroit, Albuquerque, and Mexico in North American Sector; to the Eastern European Commonwealth, Japan, India, Australia, and central Africa; and to relatively robust South America—the Southlands—whose cities housed the highest concentrations of Micronized Zentraedi—those of Human scale, whether by choice or design.

Monument had a mixed population of full-size and Micronized aliens, and despite the sudden growth and ethnic flip-flop, it remained essentially a

Zentraedi city, governed by a council made up of aliens and representatives of the small but vocal group of advocates who had spearheaded the movement for autonomy from Macross.

Watching the lights wink on in Monument's towers, Rick wondered how much longer the city's most recent immigrants would be willing to live under Zentraedi rule. The War, after all, had been fueled by fears of alien domination.

When he went to check on Lisa, he found her sound asleep, covers pulled tight around her head like a hood. Gazing at her from the bedroom door, she seemed the same, plainly pretty, twenty-nine-year-old military brat he'd once called an old sourpuss. Same heavy locks of brown-blond hair, same pale complexion and slender figure. Not that he was all that different from the long-haired Veritech jock Lisa was always accusing of indulging in amateur heroics. But Rick knew that deep down they both had changed. Or had been changed by events. Who knew any more?

Mostly, he was still trying to get used to the idea of the two of them as partners. They had only declared their love three months back, amid the searing flames of a city under siege—just when it had looked as if Rick and Minmei would be setting up house after five years of flirting with the arrangement. No matter that he had won Minmei by default; she had proposed to him, and no one could revoke that moment.

Minmei had moved into his Macross module, following her disastrous breakup with cousin, manager, and then love interest Lynn-Kyle. She was going to give up her career as a singer—as The Voice—and Rick, in turn, was expected to resign from the RDF. Minmei's formula for happily ever after: just the two of them, playing house, reminiscing about old times, going gray together. But all during that week they had spent together, in and out of each other's arms, Rick couldn't get Lisa out of his mind. He'd been between the two women for so long that the very idea of choosing one over the other . . . Well, maybe he needed confusion in his life, he'd told himself.

Unaware that Khyron was about to guarantee that.

Minutes before the Backstabber's assault, Lisa had stopped by the

house to inform Rick, very matter-of-factly, that she was being transferred to the factory satellite. Once there, she was to assume command of the near-completed SDF-2, and of the proposed Expeditionary mission to Tirol, homeworld of the Robotech Masters. Realizing that she would be out of his life for a long time to come had almost been enough to drag a confession from him. But it was Lisa's follow-up that finally did the trick: she loved him, she said. She had always loved him. And she was tasking Minmei—Miss Minmei, at that—with taking care of him.

A scary thought, even in the best of times.

Lisa hadn't gotten a block when Khyron's cruiser had fired the first of its annihilation bolts, and there she went, hurrying right into the thick of it. Giving chase, Rick's first obstacle was Minmei, who threw herself in front of him, shouting, "You can't leave me like this. How can you even think of going back into space?"

He had stepped around her and dashed after Lisa, Minmei hot on his heels, intent on playing out their final scene to a backdrop fashioned in hell.

"If you really love him, you'll let him go." Lisa had told Minmei. "He's a pilot. Flying is his life."

"You call that a life?" Minmei said back. "Battle after battle until everything is destroyed?"

Rick chimed in: "We're fighting to preserve a future. Someday you'll understand that." A somewhat ill-timed remark, what with fire falling from the sky and much of Macross already in flames.

The look Minmei returned was pitying. "There is no future. And you're wrong, Rick, I'll never understand—not war, not love, not any of it."

But hadn't that been Lynn-Minmei's problem all along? Rick asked himself now. Her celebrity had so isolated her that she had no comprehension of the real world. Lisa, on the other hand, understood all too well.

"It takes a soldier to understand the bitter truths," she had said earlier that same afternoon. "People think that because Khyron is dead and spring has arrived that the RDF's work is completed. They're wrong. But it's always easier to pretend. Everyone's become a Minmei."

No wonder that he and Lisa were inseparable, Rick thought. And that he hadn't so much as spoken to Minmei since the attack.

The bitter truths many of Macross's hagridden inhabitants were ignoring were two threats that still lurked in the stars: one posed by the race that had bioengineered the Zentraedi—the Robotech Masters—the other posed by an equally fiercesome race known as the Invid, one of a host of enemies the Zentraedi had made during their period of empire building for Tirol. The SDF-2, the gargantuan fortress Lisa was to have commanded, had been built to address the first threat. As envisioned by Admiral Gloval, the members of the Expeditionary mission would sue for peace with the Masters in their own space, thus removing the Earth from danger. Now, though, with the SDF-2 about to be interred, hope for the successful execution of the mission had centered on the sole remaining spacefold-capable battlewagon of the Zentraedi armada: Breetai's flagship. From the flagship would be fashioned a new dimensional fortress, Lang's SDF-3.

There was no denying the necessity of the mission. Rick, in fact, had probably been the first to suggest using Breetai's ship. But lately he'd been regretting having opened his mouth. Why couldn't he have said, We're just going to have to pray that the Masters and the Invid have better things to do than come looking for revenge. Didn't it make more sense to get on with healing and repopulating the Earth instead of wasting time worrying about things that might not even happen?

Even so, he knew it was too late for regrets. There was no dissuading Lisa, in any case. She saw it as a sacred obligation to carry out the assignment Gloval had given her on the morning of his death. Rick could understand that, too, though it sometimes felt that his and Lisa's newly affirmed love was little more than an extension of that obligation. Something he and Lisa owed to Gloval, Claudia, Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa, all of whom had foreseen a Hunter-Hayes union long before either of them had.

The hand of fate seemed to be steering him along with forceful claps on the back. He was grateful for the shove that had landed him in Lisa's life, but he wanted to evade any jostling that might mean added responsibilities. He was comfortable with his captain's rank, and he knew that he was an able team leader. No need to overextend himself or allow anyone else to. He simply didn't have what it took to command from a desk or from behind the shielded partition of some tech-heavy balcony in a war room.

CHAPTER TWO

Owing to certain remarks attributed to Admiral Gloval in the days preceding Khyron's raid [on Macross City], controversy has long surrounded the SDF-2. Gloval is claimed to have said that the fortress wasn't built as a vehicle for the Expeditionary mission [to Tirol]; instead, it was meant to serve as a decoy, to be used in the event that the Robotech Masters should come looking for Zor's original creation. Hence, the fact that while bearing a visual resemblance to its progenitor, the SDF-2 was incapable of reconfiguring from Attack mode, wanted a barrier system, and lacked any means of executing a fold. Drawing on [Lisa] Hayes's assertions [in her Recollections], several commentators have posited that Breetai's flagship was to have supplied the fold system for the SDF-2 once the two ships had rendezvoused at the factory satellite. While it is clear that Hayes accepted this as given, the evidence is inconclusive that such a transfer of technology was discussed, let alone planned. At the time, Lang was reluctant to tamper with the flagship's fold system or reflex engines, and the factory satellite itself was plagued with glitches. It is far more likely—and certainly more in keeping with the surreptitious methods of the REF—that the decoy SDF-2 was to have been dispatched from the Solar system by fusion drive, allowing the REF to focus on finding some means of refurbishing Zor's ship and employing that to reach Tirol before the Masters reached Earth.

Mizner, Rakes and Rogues: The True Story of the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission

Khyron's Christmas Eve raid on Macross, launched as a prelude to his decisive assault, had already reduced much of the eastern part of the city to charred rubble: the industrial sector, the fuel-storage depot, and a residential area squeezed between the lesser lakes, one of which hosted its own spikelike Zentraedi destroyer—a Thuveral Salan, Portions of the Downtown Mall had suffered as well.

RDF Command had purposely allowed the Backstabber to escape with a supply of Protoculture sufficient to revitalize his badly damaged cruiser, in the hope that he would quit Earth and fold for Tirol, presumably to inform the Robotech Masters of the defeat of the Zentraedi Grand Fleet. A costly miscalculation, to be sure, for just over a week later, Khyron returned to inflict his final vengeance on the Micronians who had won the War.

The cruiser had announced itself from twenty miles out, ten degrees southwest, with a plasmic eruption that obliterated the downtown center on its way to crippling the SDF-2. The unprotected ship immediately listed and toppled forward into the lake, incapacitated and aflame. Admiral Gloval countered with a surprise of his own by ordering the SDF-1 into the skies, reflex engines roaring, Hammerheads and Decas streaking from launch tubes, in-close weapons thundering away at the closing enemy ship. When brute servomotors had repositioned the titanic twin booms of the reflex cannon so that they were pointing straight out from the fortress's shoulders, Gloval issued the fire orders and the ship spewed a two-mile-wide beam of directed energy that flayed Khyron's cruiser and went on to bum a hole in Earth's magnetic envelope a quarter way to the moon. Gloval's was a brave though one-shot gamble, however, exhausting the fortress's energy stores; and, as devastating as it was, the blast failed to fully nullify the force field of the unstoppable battlewagon.

It will never be known who if any aboard remained alive. But someone or some mindless system steered the cruiser into a suicidal ballistic dive, even while the drained fortress was falling back into the lake, the booms of the main gun disintegrating on descent. The last words to reach the RDF's shielded command bunker in Macross City were Lisa Hayes's: "Brace for impact!" only moments before Henry Gloval and Claudia Grant forced Hayes into an emergency escape module and ejected her to safety.

Generals Reinhardt and Maistroff, eyes fixed on video screens in the bunker, had watched as the incendiary javelin that was Khyron's ship streaked between the main gun booms and sheared off the command tower before plunging into the lake. Knocked backward by the force of the impact, the SDF-1 seemed to go into spasms as it settled deeper into the now frothing water, liquid fire and massive steam clouds rising around it, throwing the winter sky into utter confusion. And soon the snow began to fall . . .

"I keep thinking back to my first experience of this ship," Emil Lang was telling Lazlo Zand in the midst of their final tour through the corpse of the SDF-1, two weeks after the funeral ceremony. Lang's tone of voice was nostalgic, even mournful. He aimed a meaningful look at Zand through the tinted faceplate of the antihazard suit. This ship changed my life, Lazlo."

Zand smirked and keyed the privacy communicator built into the suit's hood. "Safe to say it changed all our lives, Doctor."

Lang was chagrined, but only for a moment. A highly competitive colleague, Zand refused to grant that Lang might have been changed more than most—though Zand knew full well that it was true. "This was where Gloval ordered us to split into two teams," Lang went on, indicating a narrow corridor of glassy alloy. "Naturally, the ceiling was much higher then, and the ductwork is our own, retrofitted while we were returning from Plutospace."

Zand glanced around but said nothing. In the faint illumination provided by the bipedal drone-light that accompanied them, the corridor looked as if it had been finished in bold stripes, though in fact the stripes were scorch marks six feet wide.

Lang pointed starboard, to an enormous mass of slagged metal that had been a generator of some sort. "Gloval, Edwards, and I went this way. Roy Fokker led his group of marines along the port side."

Lang was a sturdy man of average height, normal looking except for his eyes, which seemed to be all dark, deep pupil, lacking iris or white. A souvenir from his initial penetration of the SDF-1 fifteen years earlier, when the ship was known as the Visitor.

The term visitor referred to the fact that the ship's seemingly calculated descent and controlled crash on Macross Island hinted at the potential for an equally calculated liftoff at some future date. At the time, Lang had proposed calling it the tease.

Zand was bonier and slightly taller, with an unruly forelock of dark hair streaked with strands of premature gray. He was attached to the Special Protoculture Observations and Operations Kommandatura, and he answered directly to Lang. Laboratory-bound in Macross City's Robotech Research Center for the past two years, Zand had only been aboard the SDF-1 on one other occasion, and he suspected that Lang had deliberately kept him away from the ship. That he had been invited on this, the last tour before the fortress was to be buried, had only added to an ever-increasing feeling of vexation.

They had just traveled downship from the hold in which Macross Two had been housed during the SDF-1's journey home from the outer reaches of the Solar system. Further downship were the engine rooms and the now cold and hollow bellies of the reflex furnaces. Elsewhere in the ship, Dr. Bronson, Ambassador Exedore, and Breetai were searching for any Protoculture-driven components that might be usable for mecha reconfiguration—mechamorphosis. Though Micronized for the tour, Breetai was still a giant of a man, eight feet tall from the soles of his jackboots to the crown of the hastily fashioned cowl that covered the ruined side of his face.

Previous surveys had established that there was little worth salvaging from the fortress, or, for that matter, from the submerged SDF-2, which had been explored by teams of underwater specialists. The ship's mother computer, known as EVE, had been moved to the Robotech Research Center in Tokyo shortly before Khyron's raid; and most of the remaining systems were so damaged that the process of dismantling and removing them would have proven more costly than fabricating them from scratch in the null-g heart of the factory satellite. As well, there were health and psychological reasons for laying the SDF-1 to rest as expeditiously as possible.

"It was somewhere near here that Fokker's team was attacked by the mecha that killed Cesar Hersch," Lang said, several minutes further along. "When I think of all the men who died on even that first recon . . . Jenkins,

Caruthers, Lance Corporal Murphy . . ." He stopped to look around and his words trailed off. "Colonel Edwards and I are the only ones left."

The story of that initial recon was well known among the elite science corp of the RDF: the reconfiguring ship, the encounters with forty-foot-tall mecha, the rewiring of Robbie the Robot, the attacks, the rotting carcasses of dead giants. However, the tale had been so exaggerated and flavored with anecdotes over the years that it had become difficult to separate what was true from what was legend. The story about Gloval's chronometer, for example. On emerging from the fortress, the team reckoned that they had been inside the ship for six hours, when in fact the recon had lasted only fifteen minutes. Then there was the oft-repeated tale of Lang's IQ-boosting encounter with a piece of alien technology.

Zand was obsessed with the story, and he made reference to it now, interrupting Lang's comments about Colonel Edwards. "I'd like to see where it happened, Doctor."

Lang's eyes narrowed perceptibly behind the suit's faceplate. "Where what happened, Lazlo?"

"The event that changed your life."

Lang nodded in revelation. "I'm afraid that's impossible."

"I thought as much," Zand said nastily. "I was simply wondering if it might not work a second time, on a second person. Or am I being impertinent by even asking?"

Lang planted his gloved hands on his hips. "First of all, to this day I don't know precisely which system I activated to generate the power surge. One minute I was listening to Zor's onscreen message of counsel, and the next thing I knew I was regaining consciousness atop Roy Fokker's shoulders."

He gestured broadly to an array of blackened modules and fused components. "I've spent fifteen years with this ship, Lazlo. I know it intimately, head to toe. But even at the end I could do little more than throw the proper switches—this one to fire the main gun, that one to effect a modular transformation, the other one to initiate a Daedalus maneuver. But ask me to explain how any of those systems worked, and all I can do is shrug.

"More importantly, Lazlo, when I say it's impossible for you to view the site of my encounter, I simply mean that nothing remains of the cabin where it occurred."

"Zor's quarters, I believe," Zand said. "The cabin you saw fit to make your own for all those fifteen years."

The helmet pickups amplified Lang's forced exhale. "I make no secret of feeling a sense of kinship with Zor—in attitude if not intellectual prowess. But I'm not being proprietary with the technology he bequeathed us, if that's what you're thinking. For God's sake, do you think I'm in favor of having this ship buried when we've barely scratched the surface in comprehending it?" Anger had crept into his voice. "My artificially boosted IQ is irrelevant. Besides, I have something of equal importance to show you."

Neither man spoke while Lang led the way through a labyrinth of corridors and down several stairways into an immense hold in the groin of the ship. The obedient drone-light trained its beam on a cluster of towering columnar containers, which Zand recognized as Protoculture conversion modules, supplying reserve power to the Reflex drives.

Protoculture was the essence of Robotechnology, its fundamental fuel, its life's blood. Believed to be derived from an alien plant known by the Zentraedi as the Flower of Life, Protoculture infused the inanimate with a kind of lifelike willfulness. It functioned as a mediator between animate minds and mechanical systems, imparting to the latter the faculty to shape-shift, to reconfigure. More, it had the power to perform that same magic on the fabric of space-time, enabling ships like those that had carried the Zentraedi to Earth to fold near-instantaneously across distances of millions of light-years.

"What exactly am I supposed to be looking at?" Zand asked impatiently.

Lang gestured to an empty area in the center of the hold. "That was where the fold generators stood before our inadvertent jump to Plutospace."

"The ones that got away," Zand said, chuckling.

"I've been asking myself ever since where they vanished to, and whether someday they might not rematerialize, unbidden." Lang took a few steps toward the empty area. "Another reason I'm against interring the ship. Think what we could do if we had those generators now. Think, so to speak, of the time we could save."

Zand regarded him dubiously. "Am I expected to help you look for them?"

"Of course not," Lang said, storming away, then whirling on Zand in obvious agitation. "I want you to know if you feel anything from this space, or perhaps from the Reflex drives. Something unseen. Some lingering . . . presence."

Zand saw immediately that Lang was dead serious, so he shut his mouth and tried to attune himself with whatever it was Lang was sensing. But it was hopeless. He would never be able to feel what Lang felt—not without first having his own mind enhanced.

Lang was gazing at the Reflex array. "If I had another week, Lazlo . . . If Milburn and the rest of those visionless politicians could only understand . . ." The helmet pickups betrayed his private laugh. "I'd begin by dismantling each of these drives."

"Then you do have some idea of what you're looking for."

Lang snorted a laugh. "Not really. Perhaps something Zor concealed here for reasons we may never grasp. Something I fear will remain alive in this ship despite our best efforts to bury it."

In the Macross Council's transitional headquarters in Monument City, Council President Braxton Milburn was hurrying through the promotions in an attempt to move on to matters of more pressing concern. The unmistakable urgency in Milburn's voice grated on Lisa Hayes. Important moments should never be rushed, she thought, and this moment had importance written all over it.

"Captain Hunter," Milburn said in his signature Deep South drawl, "will you rise and approach."

Lisa's heart pounded. She glanced down the length of the long table, watching Rick rise and give a smart tug to his uniform jacket before setting out.

Milburn, overweight and jowly, had the head of the table. On his right sat Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt, bald and bearded, and across from Reinhardt, the preternaturally tall Philipe Longchamps. Lisa was seated midway along, on Reinhardt's side of the table, in among other council members and RDF officers. Those officers receiving promotions—Rick, Vince Grant, Jim Forsythe, and a dozen others—were assembled at a second table. The room's window wall looked out on the copse of Quickform skyscrapers that was the city center.

Rick looked dashing. His thick black hair was neatly tucked behind his ears, and the high-necked blue yoke of the double-breasted jacket brought out the sea blue in his eyes. Lisa could barely keep from grinning, though when she swiveled to face Reinhardt once more, a shudder of misgiving passed through her. Would Rick fit in among the general staff? She pushed the thought aside as quickly as it had surfaced. Of course he would; he was made to lead.

"Captain Hunter," Milburn said, rising from his chair when Rick had stepped onto the low platform that had been erected for the ceremony. "In recognition of countless acts of bravery performed in the service of the Defense Force, and in heartfelt appreciation of your contributions to the civilian cause throughout this difficult period of reconstruction, and lastly in acknowledgment of your donations to the design of the Expeditionary mission—notably in the aftermath of the destruction of Macross—we, members of the council and the RDF, wish at this time to confer on you a much-deserved and perhaps long-overdue promotion in rank."

Lisa grinned despite herself. She'd fought hard to bring this about for Rick, insisting that he receive at least some of the credit for proposing to use Breetai's ship in the mission to Tirol, and for organizing the relocation of Macross's uprooted civilian population. No sooner did Rick begin to speak, however, than her smile faded.

"Sirs, Council Members," he said, "may I first say how honored I am. But I would be, uh, remiss if I didn't address some of my concerns about this promotion. I'm proud of what I've been able to contribute as a captain, leader of the Skull Veritechs, but I feel that a promotion to full-bird colonel—"

"Captain Hunter," Milburn said, "I'm sorry to interrupt, but you misunderstand."

Rick's left brow arched. "Huh? Well, of course I meant to say lieutenant colonel. But that doesn't change my feelings any. Sirs, I mean, it's—"

"Mr. Hunter." It was Reinhardt now, wearing a look of mild bemusement. "We're going to have to keep interrupting if you persist in making mistakes."

All along the table, secret looks of amusement were exchanged.

"Not lieutenant colonel?" Rick said. "Then, sirs, I'm afraid I'm at a loss . . ."

Milburn cleared his throat with meaning. "No reason to be, Vice Admiral Hunter."

Everyone in the room rose and saluted, then broke into applause while Rick stood staring at the white command cap Milburn was proffering. Clapping louder than any of them, Lisa fought back an impulse to run to Rick and fling her arms around him—if for no other reason than to shake him out of apparent shock.

"Begging your pardon, sir," Rick managed at last, his voice cracking, "but I'm only twenty-three years old!" Everyone but Lisa laughed.

"Age isn't a factor in these crucial times," Milburn said. "It's all about being able to lead, Admiral. To shoulder responsibility. To do the job that needs doing. And all of us in this room are confident you can do just that."

"But what job—exactly, I mean."

"Admiral Hayes," Reinhardt said, looking at her. Lisa turned to Rick, all traces of the smile gone. She was the career officer now, as she had to be.

"Admiral Hunter," she began. "It will be your responsibility to supervise and direct all strategic operations relevant to the Expeditionary mission, including but not restricted to the requisitioning of armaments and mecha, and the selection and tasking of all key mission personnel, who, from now on, will be known as the Robotech Expeditionary Force."

Rick was gaping at her. "But that's supposed to be your job, Lis—uh, Admiral Hayes."

Lisa squared her shoulders, faintly annoyed. "My job, as you refer to it, Admiral, will be overseeing the construction of those areas of the SDF-3 that will be allocated to the REF. Is that understood?"

Rick gulped and found his voice. "Understood, Admiral." He saluted, but refused to meet her eye while he was returning to his seat.

The promotions completed, Milburn directed everyone's attention to the next item on the agenda: plans for housing the Defense Force in what had been Monument's Excaliber base. Follow-up discussions centered on contingency plans for constructing an entirely new base should the Zentraedi-dominated Monument City Council object to the RDF's presence.

Lisa scarcely heard any of it, caught up as she was in mulling over new concerns about Rick. Had she made a mistake, not only in judging who he was but what he was capable of? Would the promotion become an issue in their private life as well?

It wasn't until Captain Rolf Emerson stood up to deliver his report that Lisa regained focus. Young, cleancut, and handsome, Emerson was in charge of liaison with RDF units in the Southlands. Lisa had met him through the Grants and liked him.

"I have troubling news," Emerson began, his fine features mirroring the gravity of his voice. "Khyron's death has had a significant effect on Zentraedi concentrations in the Southlands. Most refuse to believe that he's dead, and many of those that do, believe that the RDF purposely destroyed the cruiser to prevent him from leaving Earth.

"The point is that his death has given the so-called demobilized hostiles something new and powerful to rally around. Coupled with food shortages and a sharp increase in discrimination as a result of what happened in Macross, the situation has become volatile, and we're going to have to act fast if we want to diffuse it. I realize that food is in short supply here, but if the North doesn't at least share what it has with the South, we could be facing a full-scale uprising in a matter of months."

Emerson paused to catch his breath. "Khyron might be dead, sirs, but his spirit is very much alive."

"It's a piece of Khyron Kravshera's skull," Exedore said evenly. "From the right parietal region, I would venture."

Lang regarded their grisly find with a mix of awe and revulsion. Large as a dinosaur's bone, the blood-encrusted thing bore traces of long bluish hair. Lang was glad to be wearing the NBC suit, and doubly glad that nothing comparable—from Gloval, say, or Claudia Grant—had been discovered aboard the SDF-1.

Lang, Exedore, and Zand were in a previously unsearched compartment in the tail section of the Zentraedi cruiser. The ship's blunt bow was buried deep in the lake-bottom sludge, but its clefted stern had been raised from the water by giant cranes set atop the backward-leaning shoulders of the SDF-1.

Zand's gloved hand lifted a stiff strand of hair, eight feet long. "Are you certain?" he asked Exedore.

"Quite certain, Professor. I had many dealings with the leader of the Botoru Battalion previous to his enlistment in the campaign to reclaim Zor's dimensional fortress. However, as to how this piece of skull landed here, so far from the ship's bridge, one can only speculate."

Sealed inside an unnecessary antihazard suit, Exedore was simply a small man, though in fact he was hunchbacked, almost dwarfish, with mauve skin, a misshapen head, and pinpoint-pupiled eyes. He had barely escaped Khyron's raid on Macross, having returned to the factory satellite a day earlier.

Lang had no reason to argue with Exedore's assessment of the skull, though unlike Exedore, he had only seen Khyron once, and onscreen at that: the previous year, when the Backstabber had issued his ransom demands for hostages Lynn-Minmei and Lynn-Kyle. Even so, Lang recalled Khyron's slate-blue hair, the mannered voice, the condescending laugh.

The two Humans and the Zentraedi were still gawking at the bone fragment when Breetai and Bronson, a mecha-design specialist, appeared from an adjoining hold. Breetai was carrying what might have been the pincers of a gigantic lobster, save that they had been fashioned from some unidentifiable barn-red alloy and were studded with a trio of huge, glistening claws.

"Something that might interest you, Doctor Lang," Breetai announced in booming voice, carefully setting the pincers down on the deck. "Something from Khyron's collection of war trophies." He gestured to the adjacent hold. "The body these were attached to is in there."

Lang circled the pincers, studying them in silence. "They share some similarity to the arms of Male Power Armor."

"As well they might," Exedore said with transparent amusement, "since they were modeled after our battle suits."

"Interesting," Lang said. "I know I've seen them before, but if they're not part of the Zentraedi's arsenal . . ." He started to shake his head in defeat, and then it struck him: Zor had shown them to him in the warning message he had programmed into the SDF-1's mother computer. Lang was getting his first up-close look at pieces of an Invid weapon.

CHAPTER THREE

LAPSTEIN: Does the process (of Micronization) produce a change in consciousness as well as a change in size?

EXEDORE FORMO: Only that which might be expected from suddenly having to address the world as a five-footer after having known it as a forty-footer.

LAPSTEIN: Does one experience a sense of disempowerment? EXEDORE: Not in the way you mean it. Micronization was always purposeful, something undertaken in service to the Imperative. As a result, one feels "weaker" to some extent, but never disempowered. LAPSTEIN: What purpose did the Robotech Masters have in mind when they used Protoculture to encode Zentraedi DNA with the Capability to reconfigure?

EXEDORE: I should think the answer would be obvious: Micronized, the Zentraedi could be shipped by the tens of thousands to areas of contest, and once there, returned to full size to carry out the Imperative to kill and conquer.

Lapstein, Interviews

So extreme was the punishment visited on Earth during the conclusive battle between the RDF and the Zentraedi that vast stretches of continental coastline and shelf had been altered beyond recognition. From the command center of his boulderlike deepspace stronghold, Dolza, Commander-in-Chief of the Zentraedi, had ordered his battle-group captains to target only those areas found to be richest in Human life as revealed by the warships' bioscanners.

The South American littoral, no exception to Dolza's homicidal wrath, was in moments forever changed. Death dropped in oscillating cyan waves on Lima, Caracas, Bahia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Montevideo . . . In hellish quanta, death rained down the triple spines of the Andes Mountains, from Bogotá to Quito to Cuzco, then east in a sweeping curve across Lake

Titicaca to La Paz, Sucre, and Cochabamba, and south through Arequipa and Santiago to Bariloche. Once-grand capitals and high-valley colonial gems suffered more than they ever had from Earth's tectonic violence, crumbling into themselves like scraps of burning paper. Rivers and lakes surrendered to heat as searing as from an exploding star. Millions of lives were extinguished in the drawing of a breath, the blink of an eye.

But most of the continent's "Micronian" hot spots were oceanside, and much of the forested interior was spared, from Manaus on the Amazon River to as far south as the Chaco, in Argentina. And it was into this relatively cool and unscathed parcel of land, this enormous sunlit oval of uninhabited jungle, savannah, and turbulent rivers, that thousands of crippled Zentraedi ships nose-dived in the end moments of the War.

Most of the goliath alien clones who climbed from the wreckage of those ships soon died of blood loss, starvation, or illness. But some managed to find their way north across Central America into what had once been the United States. They traveled in groups a hundred strong on a pilgrimage of sorts, a journey meant to deliver them to the dainty feet of their idol: to Lynn-Minmei—Minmay—the woman/weapon who was largely responsible for their unprecedented defeat. In honor of her, many submitted to the process of Micronization, while others did so to renounce the counterfeit past that was their racial history. Those that chose to remain full-size were persuaded to lend their strength to the massive projects that typified the reconstruction, helping to reassemble factories, airports, and residential buildings—to put the planet back together. And indeed many, as a result, experienced a peace they had never known, a new security.

Others, however, within whom the Masters' embedded Imperative to kill and conquer burned strongest, left their jobs to wander the unpoliced, radioactive wastes, or to ally themselves with Khyron and eventually die with him in the skies over Macross.

By May of 2015, the only remaining full-size Zentraedi had been lofted to the factory satellite or were living in the north—in Monument, Denver, Portland, or on the Arkansas Protectorate. Their Micronized brethren, on

the other hand, were dispersed throughout the world; but nowhere were their numbers greater than in the city-states and polities of the Southlands, which had a long history of racial tolerance.

Karita was one of those who had come south in search of what he hadn't been able to find in two years of living in the north. Unfortunately, those who'd sung the praises of the promised land had neglected to mention anything about food shortages.

"I'm telling you people for the last time," a man was saying in a pidgin of Portuguese and English from the hood of an ancient gasoline-burning pickup truck, "let us pass—now."

The pickup was the first in a convoy of food trucks bound for the city of Cuiabá. But positioned between the convoy and Cuiabá just now was a crowd of some sixty hungry and disheveled-looking Zentraedi men and women.

"You have to learn to fend for yourselves," the man continued. "Our land is already overworked. The fields can only yield so much. And we're not about to supply you with food when there are children with empty bellies right here in Mato Grosso."

Cuiabá, in southwestern Amazonia, was where Karita had ultimately landed, dispirited and out of scrip after countless weeks of hard traveling on river barges and decrepit buses and trucks. Fragile, narrow-faced, and white-haired, he had been the tender of a sizing chamber aboard Breetai's flagship, and one of the first to join the Minmay Cult, founded by the defectors Rico, Konda, and Bron. On Earth, after the defeat, he had worked for a time in a factory, installing Protoculture chips in mecha neurocircuitry boards.

The man on the hood was thickly built and darkcomplected, the owner of a large ranch in the hills. "Clear the road and allow us to pass. We don't want to have to resort to force."

"And neither do we," a man answered from the Zentraedi side of the crude wooden barricades Karita and the rest had erected across the roadway. Tall and lean, with dark hair and a full beard, he was not Zentraedi but one

of those peculiar Humans who, for reasons seldom clear, had made a personal cause of the alien predicament. "We are assembled here in nonviolent protest of Cuiabá's discriminatory policies," he shouted in English, the second language of most of the Zentraedi present. "Ours is an act of civil disobedience. But yours is in violation of civil rights edicts issued by the Macross Council in 2013."

The rancher scowled in anger. "Macross is a memory, friend. And things have changed a lot since 2013. You want to champion their rights, that's okay with me. But do it someplace where there's food enough to go around."

Karita was sorry to see that the advocate didn't have a comeback line prepared. But what was there to say, really? Nothing had changed for Karita since the defeat. He'd known some wonderful moments in the north, especially the previous spring when he and thousands of like-minded Zentraedi had spent weeks following Minmei from arena to arena on her "People Helping People Tour"—Monument, Granite City, Portland, Detroit . . . But he had grown disenchanted with his life in Macross. Not that the work wasn't satisfying, but he was treated with such contempt by so many people. Once, the famous Veritech pilot, Max Sterling, had had to rescue him from a near beating by two racist RDFers.

But he and most of the others who had come south were not the disaffected—the malcontent—but merely the dispirited, shamed by defeat and now further shamed by having to subsist on the charity of Humans who were skilled in ways few Zentraedi could comprehend, much less imitate. Humans who understood the secrets of creating, manufacturing, and repairing; of working with domesticated animals and coaxing food from Earth's fecund mantle. So why was it so difficult for them in turn to understand what the Zentraedi were going through?

"You do have food enough to go around," the advocate responded at last. "It would just mean a little less for everyone at the distribution center. We're not asking for any more than an equal share, as is our right under the law."

"We?" the rancher said, switching to Portuguese. "Have you forgotten what planet you were born on?"

The advocate laughed in derision. "Planets, countries cities . . . Only a fool would make places more important than people. What matters is that all of us are Human!"

"I think I remember that one from Detroit," said the Zentraedi woman pressed against Karita's left arm, indicating the advocate with her chin while the crowds on both sides of the barricades exchanged threats. "He was always quick to step into our troubles."

Close fraternization between male and female Zentraedi was something Karita was still getting used to, but he had gotten to know this female along the route south. Her name was Marla Stenik, and during the war she had served Azonia, commander of the all-female Quadrono Battalion. Petite and blond, she had what Humans would consider boyish good looks.

Bagzent, the beefy, red-haired Zentraedi crushed against Karita's other arm, answered Marla. "You're right about him. He convinced the mayor to keep the sizing chamber in Detroit instead of allowing it to be turned over to the RDF."

Bagzent would know, Karita thought. Bagzent had quit his work in Macross to join Khyron at the crashsite of his cruiser, north of Detroit in the Canada Sector. There, Bagzent had undergone voluntary Micronization in order to take part in Khyron's raid on Detroit to steal the sizing chamber, only to end up incarcerated in that city by the RDF for more than a year. In false refutation of that past, a plastic miniature Minmei doll dangled from a thong around Bazgent's thick neck.

Maria had her mouth open to say something when two large though Humanlike forms darkened the sky overhead. Moments later, with a familiar roar, a pair of Battloid-configured Veritechs put down on either side of the convoy, close enough for the crafts' fusion-turbine foot thrusters to raise a swirling storm of small stones and dirt. The forty-foot-tall Robotech titans stood facing the Zentraedi cordon, autocannons in gauntleted hands.

"This food shipment is designated for the Mato Grosso Distribution Center in Cuiabá," one of the pilots announced over the mecha's loudspeaker. "Since that center is under the jurisdiction of the RDF South, your interference violates RDF statutes and you will therefore be subject to arrest and possible imprisonment if you fail to disband and allow the convoy to pass. If you want food, report to the center like everyone else."

"And be told that there isn't enough to go around?" someone behind Bagzent shouted.

"You will be fed," the other pilot said when the crowd had quieted somewhat. "You have our word on it."

"We piss on your word!" Bagzent yelled.

The Battloids raised their weapons and took a ground-shaking forward step. Reflexively, the crowd backed away. Everyone grasped the futility of resisting. But even as the Zentraedi were beginning to disperse, Karita could hear the rumblings of malcontentism among the dispirited.

Bagzent's basso voice was loudest of all.

"It won't always be like this," he grumbled. "Every day the reconstructed cities of the north lose some of their trained Zentraedi workers to our cause. We may never learn agriculture or aquaculture, but we won't need to raise vegetables or fish once we've begun to take what we need."

For emphasis, he viced his big hand around the Mandarin-robed Minmei doll and squeezed it until it shattered.

"Miss Macross of 2010, pin-up and poster celebrity during the War, singer, actress, prototype for a line of squeezable toys and mechanical dolls, heroine . . . The first thing I want to ask is: What comes next for Lynn-Minmei?"

Minmei feigned a good-spirited laugh. "Katherine, you must be reading my mind, because that's exactly the question I've been asking myself for the past few months." She shook her raven-black hair for the number-one camera, but kept her blue eyes on Katherine's, since the idea of the

interview—in the fin de siècle tradition perfected by Barbara Walters and Rachel Poriskova—was to beguile viewers into imagining that they were eavesdropping on a conversation between close friends.

In fact, Katherine Hyson and Lynn-Minmei had met only hours earlier, but Minmei already liked the young, telegenic MBS broadcaster and was eager to help Hyson's career along if she could. Conveniently, though the M in MBS had once stood for Macross, it now stood for Monument City.

"And have any answers to that question presented themselves?" Hyson asked.

Minmei adopted an earnest look. "Actually, I've been thinking of doing some television work."

It was Hyson's turn to perform. "I hope you're not planning a series of celebrity interviews . . ."

"No, I'll leave that to you, Katherine. What I'd like to do is find some way to use television to reach those areas of the world where people are still struggling to rebuild and make meaningful contributions to the future."

Katherine offered an approving nod. "Talk about meaningful contributions."

They were seated face-to-face on the spacious lanai of a house owned by Japanese friends of Minmei—the son and daughter-in-law of her aunt Lena's first cousin. The multilevel teak and glass house perched on the north shore of Kauai; the comfortable chairs were made of rattan; and the salt-weathered deck overhung the ocean. Hyson was a slim and pretty brunette with large green eyes under pencil-thin brows, and a rosebud mouth lipsticked in a pale shade that made Minmei think of Claudia Grant. Hyson had jumped at the chance of interviewing Minmei in Hawaii, and in gratitude had promised Minmei an entire hour of airtime rather than the standard twenty-two-minute segment.

"I assume that your reaching out will include singing," Hyson said now.

"Some, yes. But I'll never again allow my voice to be used as a weapon."

"Surely you don't regret what your voice accomplished during the War?"

Minmei shook her head. "But I had no choice in the matter then. All I ever wanted was to bring happiness to people. Singing is my way of communicating love. But instead I wound up bringing an army to its knees."

"Someone once said that celebrity chooses us, and not the other way around."

"I think that's true. And it often introduces the best and the worst things to one's life. When I read about celebrities who are troubled by stalking fans, I want to tell them what it feels like to have an entire race wanting to know your every move."

Minmei's sudden introspection was genuine, and Hyson pursued it. "Lynn-Kyle, your cousin and co-star in Little White Dragon, played a part in shaping your career. Why didn't that partnership survive?"

"Kyle was pushing me too hard to become political at a time when I wasn't ready for that. As I said, I only wanted to use my voice to bring joy to people."

"Was it an amicable parting?"

"Not entirely."

"Have you talked to him since?"

Minmei recalled the littered black-sand beach in Monument where they said good-bye. Where Kyle had accused her of being immature and selfish. "No, I haven't," she told Hyson. "I don't even know where he is."

Hyson was perceptive enough to move on. "I know that you fired your manager, Vance Hasslewood. Any new management on the horizon?"

"I've been talking to some people."

"Would Sharky O'Toole be one of them?"

Minmei rocked her head from side to side, evasively.

"Let's touch for a moment on your abduction last year by Khyron," Hyson said. "Is it true that he was immune to the power of your singing?"

"He told me that he despised my singing." Minmei laughed into her hand. "But he did say that I was a well-built little thing—if my feminist sisters will forgive me."

"What did you tell him?"

"I called him a big, overgrown clown."

Hyson's jaw fell. "Another first in your career. And did you actually see Khyron and Azonia kiss?"

"Yes, though I wouldn't call it a passionate kiss. Kyle and I both saw them. Azonia referred to it as a 'demonstration,' because that's what Breetai called it when he ordered Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes to kiss in front of him." Minmei blushed and angled her face away from cameras one and two.

Hyson was shaking her head in wonderment. "I want to get back to Rick Hunter in a moment, but before that, why do you think that Khyron . . . spared you and Kyle, even when he realized that he'd been duped and that your rescue was imminent?"

"Because it isn't the Zentraedi way to take hostages, much less kill them. He never understood that the RDF might lie to him about ransoming Kyle and myself with the SDF-1."

"I see," Hyson said. "What are your thoughts about the malcontents?"

Minmei handled the question easily. "I'm a Humanist, Katherine; I don't react to groups, but to individuals. The Zentraedi are stranded here, strangers in a strange land, and I think we have to keep that foremost in mind before we condemn any of their actions."

Hyson leaned toward Minmei, confrontational suddenly. "But, Minmei, you're not sanctioning what they've done—raiding food depots, destroying factories, wreaking havoc on remote settlements?"

"It isn't my place to sanction anyone or anything," Minmei said. "I'm only saying that we have to sympathize with the torment they're going through. Machines saw to all their needs, and now we're the only ones they have to turn to."

Hyson considered it. "Some might say that this sounds like something you picked up from Lynn-Kyle, in his guise as pacifist and advocate of Zentraedi rights."

Minmei frowned. "Kyle taught me many things. One of which was to regard all worlds and all peoples as equal. With the issues Earth is facing now, Humankind—Terran and Zentraedi—can't afford to be divided."

"Are you supportive of the Expeditionary mission to Tirol?"

"I'm one hundred percent behind it."

"Has the REF asked you to join the mission?"

Minmei smiled lightly. "It's going to be a diplomatic mission. The REF doesn't need an entertainer."

"Speaking of the REF, there's a rumor that you and Vice Admiral Hunter were engaged shortly before Khyron's raid on Macross."

"Let's just say that we toyed with the idea of marriage. But as much as I care for him, I couldn't allow him to resign from the RDF. Earth needs leaders like Rick, and I couldn't allow my own selfish needs to come first."

Hyson grinned. "The problems of two people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, right?"

Minmei frowned, missing what she knew was a reference to some old movie or song. "I guess so."

"So in the twenty-first century, it's Rick who gets on the plane to carry on the fight."

Minmei's look of uncertainty held. "Uh—"

"But the two of you have remained close friends?"

"Oh, we're the best of friends. I've always seen us as star-crossed, from the day the Zentraedi attacked Macross Island to reclaim the SDF-1."

Hyson gave the camera operators ample time to close on Minmei's flawlessly beautiful face. "When were your happiest times?"

Minmei thought for a moment. "Aboard the SDF-1, as strange as that might sound. Living in rebuilt Macross before the War had completely dominated all our lives. Before I was voted Miss Macross." She looked into the camera. "That's why I couldn't bring myself to attend the funeral last month. I prefer to live with my memories instead of burying them."

A full month of work by demolition and reclamation crews had reduced much of Macross City to rubble. Leveled were some sites that had appeared in three incarnations—on Macross Island, inboard the SDF-1, and under the Big Sky of the Northwest: the Hotel Centinel, which had hosted hundreds of celebrity fetes before and after the War; the White Dragon Chinese Restaurant, owned by Lynn-Kyle's parents, Max and Lena; the Kindest Cut Steak House, favorite haunt of the late Veritech ace Ben Dixon; the Variations and Seciele Coffee Shops, where Lisa Hayes had passed many an off-duty hour; the Pub, where Roy Fokker and friends had partied hard to the fusion jazz of the Black Katz; the Close Encounters Video Arcade, where Max Sterling had bested Miriya Parino at Veritechs!; John's Cabaret, where Minmei had often performed; the Bamboo Club, where Rico, Konda, and Bron had first met "the terrible trio" of Sammie, Vanessa, and Kim; and the Onagi Central Theater, where the computer-generated Bob Hope/Bing Crosby film Road to India had been playing when Khyron attacked . . .

Immeasurable tons of irradiated wood, aluminum, steel, glass, plastic, and concrete had been bulldozed into the crater lake. Then additional tons of specially treated sand and gravel and lead pellets were dropped by formations of C-150 cargo planes, until the lake was completely filled in, and what had once been Macross was little more than an immense, vaguely circular plateau, from the center of which rose three tellurian buttes, marking the resting places of Khyron's cruiser and the SDFs 1 and 2.

It was Earth's newest national monument.

At the same time Minmei was being interviewed by Katherine Hyson, Rory Lightfoot, a barrel-chested operating engineer of Cree descent, was standing on the running board of his idling bulldozer, clapping dirt from his gloved hands and the durable thighs of his antihazard suit. He spent a long moment gazing at the tor that was the buried SDF-1, then turned to his partner, who was seated in the cab of the massive machine.

"I've got two last words for that ship," Lightfoot said over the helmet intercom. "Good riddance."

CHAPTER FOUR

Being inside [the factory satellite] is like being inside an inverted mechanized jellyfish with thousands of tentacles at work, building yet another mechanized behemoth inside its own monstrous belly.

Emil Lang's technical recordings and notes

It was a glorious June morning in the northwest: not a cloud in the sky and the mountainsides verdant with burgeoning growths of lodgepole pine and western larch. Fencing the sinuous river that flowed north toward Monument City were cottonwoods and aspen. The gray, military limousine had the asphalt road to itself, save for the occasional double-trailered truck hauling goods south to Denver or Albuquerque.

Rick and Lisa were at opposite ends of the limo's roomy rear seat, turned away from one another. The tinted privacy partition was raised and conditioned air whispered from the vents. They both wore dress uniforms, though their white command caps sat on the deck of the rear window. Of the frowns they also wore, Rick's was the more pronounced.

"I suppose you would have rather walked to Fokker Base," Lisa said, looking over at him—her first words since the curt hellos they had exchanged when the chauffeur, a warrant officer, collected Rick at his house.

Rick glanced at her but said nothing.

"Well, not to worry, Admiral," Lisa said. "I'm sure no one at Fokker will interfere if you decide to fly Skull One to the factory instead of riding the shuttle."

Rick swung away from the side window. For two months now they had been tiptoeing around the issue of his promotion, but enough was enough. "I have no problem with the shuttle, Lisa. But this—" He waved his hands about, indicating the limo. "This is what I object to."

"What are we supposed to do, Rick—take a bus?"

"I just don't like the message it sends."

"Stop being ridiculous. You think people are going to begrudge us a chauffeured ride to Fokker? They know we're on important business. If I were you, I'd be more concerned with the message your attitude sends."

"My attitude? Can you blame me? You knew I didn't want this promotion. Why can't you see my side of it?"

"Oh, I do see your side," she answered calmly. "It's just that your thinking is warped."

"What, suddenly I'm incapable of deciding how to live my own life?"

Lisa made a fatigued sound. "You're right, Rick, I had no right to speak up for you. Maybe you were better off as a captain." Her expression hardened. "Or maybe you should have married Minmei and resigned from the RDF altogether."

Rick winced. He had hoped that Lisa hadn't seen the previous evening's telecast of Katherine Hyson's interview with Minmei.

"Yes, I saw the program," Lisa continued before he could comment. "And I'm still furious about it." She mocked Minmei's childlike voice. "'We toyed with the idea of marriage, but as much as I cared for him, I just couldn't allow him to resign. Earth needs leaders like Rick Hunter and I couldn't allow my own selfish needs to come first.'"

Lisa's head shook in frustration. "She seems to have conveniently forgotten what she said in Macross when she found us by the lake, holding each other and crying." Her eyes bored in on Rick. "Or have you also forgotten?"

"Well, there was a lot going on—"

"All of a sudden she knew from the start that you loved me, and she hoped you could forgive her for trying to make you something you weren't—and for her pretending to be something she wasn't." Lisa forced an exasperated exhale. "And I didn't hear her mention anything to Katherine Hyson about how she'd discovered that she wasn't really eager to be married after all." She did her Minmei impression again: "'Music and celebrity are my life.'

"She's rewriting history to make herself look noble to her adoring fans. That way she not only ends up with the life she wanted all along, but she evades the guilt of depriving the world of a hero—meaning you." Lisa held Rick's gaze. "Just imagine how it would be if you had married her. Minmei off on tour somewhere, and you left with nothing but your little fanjet."

Rick held up his hands in protest. "You know I wouldn't have resigned. All I'm saying is that I never wanted to exchange my thinking cap for a command cap." He snatched the brimmed symbol of his rank from the rear window deck and turned it about in his hands. "Anyway, I'm not convinced the Tirol mission is going to solve our problems, Lisa. There's too much work to be done right here."

Lisa softened. "Rick, I told Admiral Gloval the same thing you're telling me—that we should concentrate on rebuilding the Earth to defend it against the Masters. But Henry was convinced of the need to confront them in their own space, even if it meant going to guns with them."

Rick eyed her askance. "What happened to our 'diplomatic mission'?"

"Henry said the time had come for us to leave our cradle behind and stake our claim in space. But we can only do that when we've made peace with the Masters—or at the very least seen to it that they can't wage war."

"All the more reason for me to have stayed a captain."

Lisa shook her head. "You sell yourself short—you always have. You're capable of more than piloting a mecha and racking up enemy kills, and the Earth needs all that you have to give."

"Now you're the one making me sound like a hero."

"I'm sorry, Rick, but you are a hero. I suggest you get used to it."

Rick laughed to himself. "You know what I remember most about that last day in Macross? Your telling Minmei that if she loved me she would let me do what I do best."

"I meant what I said."

"Yeah, but what you said was, 'He's a pilot, that's his life.'"

Lisa was silent for the remainder of the drive to Fokker Aerospace.

Three hours after launching, the shuttle was entering the smallest of the factory satellite's five docking bays—a recent installation, necessitated by the confounding fact that the four principal bays responded solely to Zentraedi ships.

A lieutenant colonel was on hand to meet Rick, Lisa, and the thirty-eight other officers and techs who had filled the shuttle to capacity. A second colonel, at the controls of a four-seated cart, drove Rick and Lisa to a private cabin where they could rest after the flight and acclimate to the factory's slightly-less-than-Earth-normal gravity. En route, they rode past a series of enormous viewports that opened on the factory's null-g heart, where Breetai's three-mile-long, 270,000,000-ton flagship was docked.

A fully automated repair and production station, the factory was a marvel, even by Zentraedi standards. Rose-colored and radish-shaped, with fissures and convolutions suggestive of cerebral matter, it was some twenty miles wide and could easily accommodate 1,500,000 full-size Zentraedi. At the end of transfer-tube spokes issuing from its midsection were half-a-dozen secondary pods that were hollowed asteroids. When operational, the factory could effect interior and exterior repairs on as many as ten ships simultaneously. A Queadol-Magdomilla like the one Khyron had commanded could be refitted with weapons, replenished with Protoculture, and restocked with battle mecha in less than eight Earth hours. For the giant warriors in wait, there were vast holds designed for exercise, recuperation, combat simulation, and resizing.

The upper eight levels of the central body were devoted to living spaces and command and control of astrogation and fold operations. The capacity of each level varied, but the height from deck to ceiling was never less than two hundred feet. The lower eight levels comprised the factory area itself. At the heart of the facility, between the two sections, was the zero-gravity chamber where flagships were overhauled.

The factory had been won from Commander Reno two years earlier in a joint Zentraedi-RDF attack led by Breetai. After Reno's defeat, it had been folded to lunar orbit, then moved under conventional power to a Lagrange point, closer to the Earth. As late as the spring of 2014, the factory had been manufacturing partially complete Tactical Battlepods, though glitches had since forced its shutdown. Doctors Lang and Bronson were understandably eager to get the thing back on-line, but they hadn't a clue as to how to do so.

Rick and Lisa's escort reappeared after three hours to convey them to a conference room located in the factory's "six o'clock" pod, the only one scaled to Human size, though the main plant abounded in cabinspaces and passageways suitable for Micronized Zentraedi. Exedore, Bronson, Harry Penn, and several others were waiting at a massive round table, which had as its centerpiece a Zentraedi projecbeam port. Sundry Human-friendly computers and an array of flatscreens had been retrofitted along the short walls of the room. Most of the long, curving outer wall was given over to a blister port which looked out on Earth.

"Breetai, along with Dr. Lang and Professor Zand, will be attending as a telepresence," Exedore explained as he was showing Rick and Lisa to their seats. His white, tightfitting RDF uniform had gold piping, and had been tailored in a way that minimized his physical deformities. The room's harsh lighting, however, only intensified the mauve tones of his skin and drew attention to his peculiar eyes.

"Ah, here is Lord Breetai now."

Rick and Lisa turned their attention to a large screen that dominated the room's rear wall. Breetai had had himself returned to full size since the downside surveys, and back in place was the alloy half cowl that covered the horribly scarred right side of his face. In place of the dead eye beneath the cowl was a shining light-gathering crystal.

"Can you hear and see us, Your Excellency?" Exedore asked.

Breetai's voice thundered through the speakers. "Perfectly, Exedore."

A tech made hasty volume adjustments while Exedore went on to explain that Breetai was speaking from his personal cabin aboard the flagship. Lang and Zand—communicating from the Robotech Research Center in Monument—came onscreen to the left of Breetai. Sheamus Bronson asked that everyone break the seals on the security envelopes that had been distributed and familiarize themselves with the contents. The feasibility of utilizing Breetai's leviathan to reach Tirol had been assigned top priority.

"Based on the ship's performance during the raid on Reno's forces," Lang was saying a moment later, "I'm confident that we can execute a jump to Tirolspace without depleting the fold system of the Protoculture necessary to return us to Earth. That much said, readying the mission basically entails completing the retrofitting that was begun in advance of our capture of the factory."

The hopeful murmuring that erupted around the table endured only until Exedore spoke.

"While I'm hardly the one to argue with Dr. Lang's evaluation of the fold system, I feel compelled to state that a hyperspace jump undertaken without certain precautions will end in tragedy."

When Lang asked for an explanation, Exedore deferred to Breetai, who was stroking his square chin with the fingers of his left hand. "Dr. Lang, you have overlooked the fact that Commander Reno was expecting us when we folded to the factory. Dolza had of course informed him that I had become Admiral Gloval's ally in the fight for the SDF-1."

"But Reno and his forces are dead," Dr. Bronson thought to point out. His full beard, thick hair, and flaring eyebrows lent a disturbing intensity to an otherwise handsome face.

"If Reno knew, the Masters know," Breetai told him.

Lang was nodding his head. "The Masters will launch an attack the moment the flagship defolds in the Valivarre system."

"Is there a way to make the ship unrecognizable to the Masters?" Lisa asked.

Exedore turned to her. "With the destruction of the Grand Fleet, the Invid are surely ravaging the Masters' empire and closing on Tirol. The Masters will be doubly wary of any incursions into the Valivarre system of worlds."

Zand started to ask if Exedore was suggesting they scrap the mission,

but Lang cut him off.

"He's proposing that we alter the signature of the flagship to mimic one that the Masters would welcome. Am I correct, Exedore?"

"Correct, Dr. Lang. The best solution would be to restructure the ship along the lines of Zor's dimensional fortress. If the Masters can be deceived into believing that Zor's ship—"

"Impossible," Bronson said. "If we had twenty years, if we had a century, we couldn't redesign the flagship to reconfigure. We could barely get the SDF-2 to sit up straight."

Again, Zand started to speak only to be interrupted by Lang. "We might attempt to mimic the look of the SDF-1 in cruiser mode. Needless to say, we'd also have to alter the Reflex engines to produce a different energy signature . . ."

Rick broke the short silence.

"I don't see the point of spending years redesigning Breetai's ship on the chance that the Masters will be duped. We'd be better off using the time to rebuild the Defense Force. By itself, the flagship packs awesome firepower, and if we could get the factory to start producing Battlepods again . . . I mean, how can we be sure the Masters even know where to come looking for us? Breetai didn't tell them, and we don't know that Dolza did, even if he did tell Reno about Breetai's, uh, defection."

Rick was suddenly aware that everyone at the table, Lisa included, was looking anywhere but at him. "What haven't I been told?" he asked at last.

Lang cleared his throat. "It's nothing we know for certain, Admiral Hunter, but we suspect that we may have already furnished the Masters with Earth's location."

Rick turned to Lisa. "How?"

"By bringing to factory here," she said quietly.

Rick shut his eyes and shook his head. "Which means they'll be coming here if we don't go there."

"Most assuredly, Admiral," Exedore told him.

"Dr. Lang," Lisa said quickly, "I want your best estimate of the time required to complete the redesign."

Lang drew a breath. "We've learned quite a bit since Macross Island, Admiral Hayes. But this . . ." He paused for a moment, then showed the camera a determined look. "Assuming that we'll have the necessary funding and personnel, I'd say it can be done in three years. And I'm certain we'll be spending most of that time restructuring the bow of the flagship to conform to the twin-boomed design of the SDF's reflex cannon. It will be like fashioning a racing car from a block of wood, but in the end you'll have a fold-capable fraud to pilot to Tirol. I promise that much."

Zand, among others, looked dubious. "And just where, Dr. Lang, will the raw materials for this miraculous transformation come from?"

Lang's marblelike eyes glistened. "First, we'll have to strip everything we can from the Zentraedi ships that litter near space and stipple Earth's surface. Then, we'll have to cannibalize the unfinished Southern Grand Cannon." He uttered a short laugh and pressed the palms of his hands together. "We may even have to ready a mission to Plutospace to pick up those pieces of Macross Island we couldn't take aboard the SDF-1."

Downside, grouped around a simple, square table in a run-down motel several hours south of Monument City. Macross Council President Milburn met in secret conclave with Senator Stinson, formerly of Macross, Senator Longchamps, Human member of the Monument City Council, and General Maistroff and Colonel Caruthers of the RDF. The cramped and airless room was devoid of computers, flatscreens, or recording devices of any sort. There was a distant view of the Grand Tetons from a cracked and grimy picture window, but Milburn had ordered the window's heavy green drapes pulled shut.

"We can't go on living like we're diplomats on foreign soil," Milburn was saying. "There aren't perks enough to make the job worthwhile and we've got no room to maneuver. That's the hell of having devolved into polities, each ruled by its own council. Goddamned Lang and the rest of them . . . They should be down here building me a new city instead of playing space cadets in that miserable factory."

Longchamps leaned back in his chair and folded his arms across his chest. "Is this just a grievance session, Milburn, or did you have something constructive to propose?" A rangy man of fifty, he'd seen autonomy coming for Monument long before the Macross Council granted it, and had positioned himself as an advocate of Zentraedi rights to reap the rewards.

Milburn smirked in Longchamps's direction. "Keep your shirt on, Philipe, I'm coming to that." His gaze lingered on Longchamps a moment longer. "I recommend we put our heads together and compile a list of people we can trust in Detroit, Denver, Mexico, Brasília, and the rest. We then propose to all of them the formation of a new United Earth Defense Council, to which, naturally, everyone on our team will be elected. The people will back the idea. They crave united leadership. They want to believe some ultimate authority is looking out for them."

The always debonair Senator Stinson mulled it over and shook his head. "It'll never fly. A UEDC will conjure up memories of Russo and the mistakes he and his bunch made during the War."

"What mistakes?" Longchamps asked. "You think Dolza would have extended the peace pipe if the UEDC hadn't fired the Grand Cannon? The mistake was in not giving Dolza the SDF-1."

Maistroff glared at him. "Easy for you to say, Longchamps, safe and sound on Earth while Gloval and I were getting our asses handed to us every day."

Maistroff was a tall, humorless man, known to be something of a xenophobic martinet. As an air group officer aboard the SDF-1, he had occasionally relieved Henry Gloval on the bridge, and had personally conducted the debriefing of Hunter, Hayes, Dixon, and Sterling after their escape from Breetai's flagship. He had also—much to his distaste—been the first to shake the hand of Micronized Exedore and to lead him on a tour of inboard Macross City. Maistroff would never forget the expression on the Zentraedi's face when he got his first look at a revealing poster of the suntan-salon spokesmodel, Miss Velvet.

Milburn was holding up his big hands. "Enough of this. What's done is done. If the UEDC won't work, tell me what will."

Longchamps thought for a moment. "Suppose we revive the United Earth Alliance?"

Stinson vetoed it. "Same Russo problem." He paused, then added, "Although you might consider using the United Earth Government. It not only has a better ring to it, but it harkens back to the days of the Global Civil War when everything was just as parceled up as it is now."

Longchamps steepled his fingers and looked at Milburn. "When you say only our players will serve on this new UEG or whatever it's going to be called, who exactly among the five of us did you have in mind?"

All eyes turned to Milburn.

"To be honest, I think I'd stand the best chance of getting myself elected. But if any of you gentlemen want a crack at it, be my guest. So long as the five of us share a common vision of the future." He glanced around. "Do we?"

"Of course we do," Maistroff said, answering for everyone.

Milburn smiled without showing his teeth. "Now, speaking of Russo, it might not be a bad idea to borrow his idea of uniting everyone around a common threat. The arrival of the SDF-1 and concerns about the coming of giant aliens worked to end the Civil War, but I doubt we can work the same magic with the Masters or the Invid. People are too preoccupied worrying about where the next meal's coming from to be worrying about aliens. Lucky for us, though, we've got something better to work with."

"The SDF-3," Caruthers said knowingly. Thin-lipped and rather pallid, Caruthers had served as Maistroff's adjutant aboard the SDF-1.

Milburn looked at him and laughed. "The sooner that the SDF-3's completed and launched, the better for the rest of us." He put his elbows on the table and leaned forward conspiratorially. "I'm talking about the demobilized hostiles, the recidivists, the recalcitrants, the malcontents, whatever the RDF's calling them now. People are already starting to think of the Zentraedi as walking time bombs."

"Which happens to be an actual problem," Longchamps said, "as opposed to a perceived one."

Milburn nodded. "That's the beauty of it. Hell, I'm as worried about the malcontents as anybody. But the trick is to convince the RDF that a United Earth Government can take the problem off their hands. My—that is, our—first suggestion would be that all Zentraedi aboard the factory satellite, full-size or Micronized, must remain there."

"Might have to make exceptions for Breetai and Exedore," Stinson said.

Milburn waved a hand in dismissal. "Those two don't pose any threat. They're wannabes. As for the ones in the North American Sector, I say we herd any potential troublemakers onto the Arkansas Protectorate for safekeeping."

"Herd, how?" Maistroff asked.

"What's it matter? Offer them advanced training in technology or construction, free room and board, whatever it takes."

"And the Micronized aliens in the Southlands?" Longchamps wanted to know.

"A bit more problematic," Milburn admitted. "What would be great is if we could tag the troublesome ones and monitor them like we used to do with endangered animals."

Caruthers mocked the idea. "Shoot them with tranquilizer darts and clip tags to their ears, huh?"

Milburn glowered at him. "They're hungry, right? So what say we earmark some supplies just for them, and we get Lang or somebody to invent a kind of transmitter that can be introduced into their bodies when they eat. Then we use a specially equipped AWAC-EC-33 to plot their whereabouts."

Everyone paused to consider it.

"You know what we could do," Maistroff said, laughing and getting with the program. "We could loft a network of satellites—telecast satellites Just for the Zentraedi—that would actually be our eyes in the sky."

"How so?" Stinson said.

"By encouraging the aliens to phone in requests for music or some other thing and plotting the sources of the calls."

Milburn was beaming. "I have a friend, Tom Hoos, who would be perfect to get this off the ground."

"Lang would never agree to it," Stinson said.

Longchamps cracked a smile. "I'll bet Zand would."

"I'll leave it to you to convince him," Milburn said. "In any case, the malcontent groups we can't tag, we infiltrate with Earth-loyal Zentraedi spies. Even the RDF would have to agree to that."

Stinson proposed using Miriya Parino but Milburn shook his head. "She's one I'd like to see tagged—her and her husband and that half-breed kid of theirs. It's suspicious enough that they've distanced themselves from the Expeditionary mission, but my sources report they're in the Southlands as we speak. For all anybody knows, they've been wheedling information out of Hayes and Hunter and passing it on to their Zentraedi friends."

Milburn rubbed his hands together. "Getting back to convincing the RDF of the need for this. What we do is go to them with a name to head up the surveillance operation. Someone Lang and Reinhardt can put their full trust in." He paused briefly. "My choice would be Niles Obstat. He had plenty of experience running intelligence operations during the Civil War, and he has just enough ties to the old UEDC to offset people's concerns about him going soft on the malcontents."

"Obstat would undermine us," Longchamps said. "It's true he had ties to Russo and Hayes, but he was pretty tight with Gloval."

"So then we partner him with one of our own," Milburn said, as if he had been expecting an argument. He stood up, went to the door to the adjoining room, and said something to the armed guard on the other side. A moment later, a tall man of fifty or so years entered the room. He was lean and square jawed, and what could be seen of his long hair was sun-bleached blond; the rest was concealed behind an irregularly shaped black alloy plate that covered most of the right side of his skull.

"Gentlemen," Milburn said, "I'm sure some of you know Thomas Riley

Edwards."

CHAPTER FIVE

Max and Miriya's marriage may have taken place in deepspace, but that didn't mean it had been made in heaven. Their arguments didn't center around sex or money, but around how best to raise Dana. This was made clear to Lisa Hayes aboard Breetai's flagship, during the joint Zentraedi-RDF mission to engage Commander Reno, then in possession of the factory satellite. Hayes and Hunter, along with the Sterlings, were in an aft cabinspace when Hayes asked if she might hold six-month-old Dana, and Miriya, in response, simply tossed the child toward her. Seated approximately ten feet away, Hayes had to make a desperate lunge for the infant and only just managed to catch her. In his log, Hunter relates how he had never seen a demonstration of Max's temper until that moment.

Theresa Duvall, Wingmates: The Story of Max and Miriya Sterling

The dry heat of Brasília's winter peaked in July. Despite its almost-mile-high altitude in the lush, undulating uplands of the Sertao, the city baked under a merciless sun. It was hardly the best time for a visit, particularly if your plans called for putting yourself in a shadeless, forlorn plaza in Brasília's Zee-town, at the center of a protest demonstration. But there was Max Sterling, plum-tinted aviator glasses fogged, faintly blue hair plastered to his forehead, engulfed by a thousands-strong crowd of chanting Zentraedi.

"Why in the world would Seloy want us to meet her here?" Max said into Miriya's ear over the guttural anger of the chant. She was slightly to the left in front of him, facing the speakers' platform.

"I don't know why she chose this place," Miriya said over her shoulder. "It probably has something to do with whatever it is she wants to show me. She wouldn't go into details. It sounded to me like she thought the phone was bugged."

This much wasn't news to Max. He had been at home the previous week when Miriya had accepted the charges for Seloy's collect call from Brasília. But he had been grappling ever since with the implications of their short conversation.

"Seloy doesn't even have a phone to bug," Max said.

Miriya turned her head to frown at him. "She didn't say it was her phone. She said the phone—the one she was calling from."

"And whose was that?"

"For the tenth time—"

"And you're sure she didn't say anything else about this mysterious item?"

Miriya elbowed him lightly in the stomach. "If she had, Max, then maybe we wouldn't be here, would we?"

Max removed his glasses and wiped the sweat from his eyes. He knew Miriya didn't have any answers. It was only his edginess speaking, the all-too-familiar protest scene: the crowd of hungry and homeless Zentraedi; the oratory rhetoric of the advocates, demanding that the Zentraedi's civil rights be respected; the distorted sound system . . . And the barricades, of course, on the far side of which Max usually found himself, crafted in a Skull Veritech.

He congratulated himself on the decision to leave Dana behind in Monument, in the care of Vince and Jean Grant. Even if Jean did have her hands full with Bowie, her somewhat sickly infant son.

An ironic consequence of the War, Brasília had at last achieved status as a world capital, a position it had been denied when Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Recife were vital cities. Together with Belo Horizonte to the southeast, Cuiabá to the southwest, and Buenos Aires in the Argentine Sector, Brasília was now a major commercial center, exporting goods to all parts of the Southlands. Some longtime residents still referred to it by its original name of Plano Piloto, but most of them would have been hard-pressed to outline the city's original bent-bow-and-arrow design. The so-called North and South Wings had lost their definition, many of the six-story apartment blocks—the superquadras—were gutted, and the 5-mile-long, 750-foot-wide Eixo Monumental that had been the arrow was now a linear barrio of makeshift dwellings, stretching almost to the arrow's tip at Praca Dos Tres Poderes, which housed the Ministry, the Supreme Court, and the Governor's Palace.

It was Max and Miriya's third visit to Brasília, though this time they had arrived not by Veritech but by commercial hypersonic, in order to set themselves apart from the RDF. Not an easy accomplishment for the War's most famous and most infamous of mecha jocks. It had gotten so that Miriya couldn't venture out of the house for fear of being surrounded by reporters; and Max's modest, upbeat, middle-American manner of speech was being mimicked by every pilot in the RDF, much as an earlier generation of jet pilots had mimicked Chuck Yeager's drawl. Citing Dana as an excuse, he had managed to convince Rick Hunter to grant him extended off-duty time, though in fact he was still unsure about the barricade question. A staunch defender of the law, he also saw himself as a defender of the rights of Miriya's—and Dana's—people.

Many Zentraedi regarded Miriya, along with Exedore and Breetai, as hajoca—traitors to the Imperative. Those same Zentraedi, while in awe of Max's warrior skills, reviled him for having married a traitor. At the same time, many of his fellow Earthers reviled him for marrying an alien and, worse still, for fathering a hybrid. It ate at him to think what life would hold for Dana if the situation didn't improve. She was too young to feel the sting of discrimination, but it wouldn't be long before she began to grow aware of the stares and snide remarks—especially at the rate she was developing.

Dana was one of the reasons Max had been noncommittal about the Expeditionary mission as well. Societal pressures notwithstanding, there was Miriya's sometimes careless handling of her. Not for lack of love—for Miriya was learning about emotions—but through a seeming absence of any nurturing instinct. In the hardened, parentless manner the Zentraedi were raised, she would expect Dana to cope with whatever circumstances presented themselves. Miriya would leave Dana unattended around sharp or hot objects, abandon her outdoors to rain or snow, and toss her about as if she were a stuffed toy. Nonviolent play and simple affection were alien notions to Miriya; and Max, as a result, had become more the primary parent and househusband than he would ever have imagined himself.

"There she is!" Miriya shouted suddenly. Her right arm was raised and waving. "Seloy, Seloy, over here!"

Max followed Miriya's wave and spied Seloy about thirty feet away, angling through the crowd. He grinned broadly. Whenever anyone asked him if he could provide living proof that Humans and Zentraedi were members of the same stock—and many did ask—he would always say, One day, if you're lucky, I'll introduce you to Seloy Deparra.

Admittedly, there were physical differences that distinguished the Zentraedi from Humans, though nothing as obvious as, say, the epicanthic eye fold or the Mongolian spot, nor as superficial as hair color or skin tone—especially among the Southlands' ethnic mix of European, Asian, African, and indigenous peoples. There was something about the texture of Zentraedi hair, the shape of the head, the bone structure of the face, the turn of the mouth, a slight knobbiness to the elbows, knees, and shoulders . . . But Seloy Deparra was an anomaly. As lithe and as peerlessly athletic-looking as Miriya, Seloy had widely spaced, long-lashed eyes and a mane of blond hair even a shampoo model might envy. Her face was triangular and her cheekbones were wonderfully pronounced. She was a walking advertisement for the wonders of biogenetic engineering. But could anyone unaware that the Masters had grown her single her out as Zentraedi?

In spite of the heat, she was dressed in a white jumpsuit and ankle boots, and was carrying a large nylon bag over one shoulder. She moved furtively.

"You think that bag has what she wants you to see?" Max asked.

"How would I know?" Miriya said.

A former Quadrono pilot who had served under Azonia, Seloy had inserted the Micronized and weaponless Miriya into the SDF-1, back when

Miriya was bloodlusting after Max instead of simply lusting. Following Dolza's Rain of Death, she'd spent almost a year in Monument City before heading south. And within months she had fallen in with some powerful people, though she had never named them.

Miriya and Seloy exchanged salutes, fists thumping their chests like ancient Roman soldiers.

"T'sen Parino!"

"T'sen Deparra!"

To Max, Seloy merely inclined her head. "Par dessu, Sterling."

"Hello to you, too," Max told her, smiling.

Without further word she led Max and Miriya back the way she had come, halting only when they'd reached the outer edge of the crowd. Once there, she opened the shoulder bag to reveal a dark-haired, sad-eyed male child of perhaps eleven months, wearing a dirty, tie-dyed Minmei Tour T-shirt.

Miriya stared at Seloy; then, in Zentraedi, asked, "Where did you get it?"

"It's mine."

Max's mouth fell open. "Yours as in property," he managed, "or yours as—"

"It's mine," Seloy repeated. "I birthed him."

"But who was the donor?" Miriya said.

"I can't reveal that."

Miriya's eyes grew wide. "A Zentraedi?"

"A Human."

Max understood more Zentraedi than he spoke, but words of any sort failed him now. Dana was believed to be the only offspring of a Human-Zentraedi union, and something of a fluke at that, owing to Miriya's years of contact with Human emotions and foodstuffs. That was the reason Emil Lang was so intrigued by Dana, and why Lang was often so sympathetic of Max's concerns. Lazlo Zand, as well; though Max sometimes thought that the professor's fascination with Dana bordered on freakish curiosity.

Seloy's earlier furtiveness returned. "The donor—the father is searching for me. That's why I chose a crowded place for our rendezvous. The child and I are in danger."

She had barely gotten the words out when the ground began to shake in thunderous syncopation: one, two; one, two; one, two . . . The crowd swung toward the source of the sounds in time to see two Battloid-configured Veritechs—a VF-1A and a VF-1J—appear from around the corner of a glass-and-chrome office high-rise. Max noticed that the usual RDF fighting-kite logos had been replaced by unfamiliar eagles, proud and upright, displaying crests of crown, laurel, and solitary stars.

"Now hear this," the pilot of the single-lasered VT said over his mecha's PA. "You are in violation of executive order fifteen dash seventy-seven, which forbids any assembly undertaken without the prior consent of Governor Leonard."

The crowd booed at mention of Leonard. "He denies us food, knowing that we'll protest," Seloy snarled. "Then he has the excuse he needs to deploy his mecha."

"Usurper!" Seloy screamed in Zentraedi through cupped hands. "Negronta! To show allegiance to Leonard dishonors all T'sentrati!"

One of the advocates said something that got the crowd chanting again. "This was the work mantra of the T'sentrati at the mining base on Fantoma," Miriya shouted to Max, her eyes wild.

Max's heart began to race. The chant increased in volume, drowning out the dueling words of mecha pilots and sympathizers alike.

Suddenly then—incredible as it seemed—the two pilots opened fire on the crowd.

From the VTs' chainguns tore bursts of transuranic rounds as big as candlepins, any one of them capable of blowing the foot off a Battlepod. Hundreds of Zentraedi were instantly dismembered. When Max came to his feet, quivering with terror and disbelief, scenes of carnage met his eyes: blood, limbs, headless torsos . . .

But the pilots' savagery had elicited a perhaps unanticipated reaction:

death had called to the Imperative, death had galvanized the crowd into action. And so those nearest the Battloids launched an insane counterattack, charging forward, chanting "Kara-brek! Kara-brek!"—meaning death by honor. Though it might be suicide.

Again the VTs fired, and again hundreds—aliens and Humans alike—fell to the green-tinted concrete paving stones of the plaza. The Zentraedi front line had been decimated but the attack was only momentarily slowed. Like sharks in a feeding frenzy, the wounded picked themselves up off the blood-slicked ground and resumed the hopeless charge. Others further back in the crowd joined in, Seloy included, racing forward with the child still slung over her shoulder.

"Seloy!" Miriya shouted.

The VTs fired. Hundreds more fell. Max's eyes searched for some sign of Seloy or the infant, but found none.

From several directions at once appeared half-a-dozen Centaur tanks—decades-old things that rode on huge in-line sleds and were crowned with single-barreled cannons. They stopped for a moment, shimmering in the heat; then, without warning, they lurched forward into the crowd, leaving scores of crushed bodies in their scarlet wakes.

Max threw a bear hug around Miriya and began to drag her away from the tanks, out of the plaza, struggling against the force of the Imperative with each backward step.

CHAPTER SIX

Begun in the terminal phase of the Global Civil War (1996), the team of Moran and Leonard—aided and abetted by Lazlo Zand and T R. Edwards—would endure for some thirty-six years, until their deaths at the conclusion of the Second Robotech War. Revisionists often dismiss the pairing as an extension of the Russo/Hayes apparat that emerged from the Civil War. But on closer examination Moran and Leonard seem to have had more in common with the Zentraedi leadership, whom they so detested. The author, for one, cannot read of Dolza's hatred for "Micronians" without being reminded of Leonard's hatred for "aliens"; nor of Cabell's detailing of the Imperative embedding process without thinking of Moran's "brainwashing" at the hands of Conrad Wilbur's Faithful.

footnote in Zeitgeist's Insights: Alien Psychology and the Second Robotech War

"His full name is Anatole Westphal Leonard," Brigadier General Reinhardt told the gathered members of the RDF Command in their new headquarters on the Excaliber base in Monument City. It was a little over a week since the slaughter in Brasília, and Monument had been experiencing nightly protest demonstrations by Zentraedi and their legions of sympathizers.

"Westphal was the mother's maiden name," Reinhardt continued. "French-German descent, titled and very wealthy. Father was English, brought up in the U.S. He bought and sold beef worldwide. Anatole was born in Paraguay in seventy-five, but raised in Argentina and all over Asia."

The room was a high-ceilinged octagon crowded with technology, and the conference table was horseshoe-shaped with inlaid keyboards and data screens. Guards were posted at each of the four sliding doorways. Neither politicians nor scientists were present. Reinhardt directed a nod to the elevated glass-fronted control booth

and a quarter-scale holo of Anatole Leonard flamed from a floor projector in the horseshoe's hollow. The digitized image had obviously been generated from parade footage of some sort; the bearish miniature in ornate uniform was marching.

Leonard's bullet-shaped, shaved head made Rick think of Josef Turichevskiy of the old United Earth Defense Council, and he whispered as much to Lisa, seated to his right on the high-rank curve of horseshoe.

Reinhardt was pacing back and forth in front of the holo. "He's said to sleep only five hours a day so he can devote the other nineteen to hating the Zentraedi. He saw extensive action during the Global Civil War, first with the Neasian CoProsperity Sphere, then with the Factionalists. Embraced the technophobic beliefs of the Faithful during reconstruction of the SDF-1 on Macross Island.

"We haven't been able to determine where he passed the War, but he surfaces in Brazil after the Rain of Death and emerges as one of the Southland's chief reorganizers, personally overseeing the evacuation of Rio de Janeiro by leading over 200,000 survivors on a three-month march to Belo Horizonte and on to Brasília. A regular legend, even though he's thought of by some as an opportunist who isn't above cutting deals with gangs of bandits, vigilante groups, and mercenary armies. Lately, Aaron Rawlins and Krista Delgado have thrown in with him."

"More separatists," Major Aldershot commented, running a forefinger along the underside of his waxed mustache. Awarded a Combat Infantry Star during the Civil War, he had a prosthetic left arm and right leg. "Rawlins and Delgado may have held the fort during the SDF-1's absence, but when it came time to pull together and rebuild, where were they—down in the Southlands organizing private armies. Their thinking is medieval."

Several at the table were nodding in agreement.

Reinhardt went on. "To Leonard's credit, he has managed to maintain peace among hundreds of self-interest groups operating in that area of the Southlands. More importantly, he has the people's support because he's willing to take a strong stand on malcontentism. He claims that the

Zentraedi provoked this latest confrontation."

Video footage of the riot ran on the inlaid screens, handheld shots of the charge and its bloody aftermath. Watching the tape, Rick recalled his standoff with a murderous crowd of Zentraedi in New Detroit years earlier. At issue was a sizing chamber Khyron had designs on. Lynn-Kyle had spoken for the Zentraedi, ultimately forcing Rick to yield to their demands that the sizing chamber remain in Detroit. Rick had been obsessing over his failure ever since. He asked himself now whether he would have fired on the crowd if they had attacked him.

"The death toll stands at one thousand one hundred Zentraedi, forty-four sympathizers, and eighty-six bystanders," Reinhardt said when the tape had ended. "Martial law is in effect in Brasília, Belo Horizonte, and Cuiabá."

Rick spoke up. "I'd like to know how Leonard justifies using armed response."

"The official explanation is that the VT pilots panicked."

"What about the pilots of those tanks?" Lisa asked. "Their action was calculated."

Reinhardt made his lips a thin line. "Leonard promises it won't happen again. His forces will not enter a region unless asked to lend support."

"His forces," Aldershot said. "He sounds more like a field marshal than a governor. What's he telling us here, that he's forming his own army? From what I hear, he fueled the riots by denying food to the Zentraedi."

Rick came to Aldershot's support. "Captain Sterling told the Brasília newspapers that the VT pilots fired without provocation. And I'm more inclined to believe him than I am Leonard or any 'official explanation.'"

"You raise an interesting point, Admiral," General Maistroff said from the other side of the horseshoe. "By going to the press with their account before reporting to us, the Sterlings—inadvertently, perhaps—have made things worse. No matter what their motive, their actions cast a shadow on their loyalties to the RDF."

Rick reddened with anger. "Are you saying we could have found some

way to sugarcoat what happened in Brasília? Eleven hundred Zentraedi died, but a lot more lived, and, regardless of Max's going to the media, my guess is that the survivors are already spreading the truth to every corner of the Southlands."

"And what about Miriya Parino?" Maistroff asked evenly.

"What about Miriya?"

"To many of her people, she's a traitor. Her stepping forth in their behalf now could be viewed as an attempt to proclaim her renewed loyalty to the Zentraedi cause."

Lisa shot to her feet, but when she spoke her voice was controlled. "I'm sure General Maistroff recalls on whose side Miriya Parino fought at the end of the War. But just in case he doesn't, let me say that she is as loyal to the RDF as either Breetai or Exedore. I caution the general not to go looking for ulterior motives where none exist. And I caution everyone here that any divisiveness at this time will sabotage all the good we've accomplished, as well as the work that remains to be done."

Maistroff took the rebuke in stride. Everyone else waited for Reinhardt to resume the briefing.

"Indirectly, the RDF is responsible for Leonard's rise to power," Reinhardt said after a moment. "We never bothered to oppose Senator Moran's appointment to the Southlands by the Bureau of Reconstruction Management. And we didn't question it when Moran, in turn, appointed Leonard governor."

No one in the room needed to view a holo of the silverhaired Wyatt "Patty" Moran or hear a summary of his earlier contributions to the UEDC. Russo, Turichevskiy, Hayes, Zukov, Blaine, and Moran were all of a type to shoot first and ask questions afterward.

"The point I want to make is that the RDF stands to bear the brunt of the backlash if any attempt is made to interfere with further demonstrations by the Zentraedi. Another incident like Brasília and we're going to be accused of seeking some sort of 'final solution'—that we're out to exterminate them, loyals and demobilized hostiles both."

He paused for a moment. "I suggest, therefore, that we give serious consideration to Council President Milburn's proposal that a new United Earth Government be instated, composed of elected officials representing all city-states, autonomous sectors, and non-aligned territories." Reinhardt's glance moved from face to face. "Let's hand the business of running the Earth over to them so we can concentrate on our priorities, which are the building of the SDF-3 and the launch of the Expeditionary mission."

"In other words," Aldershot said, "any future slaughters of the Zentraedi will be carried out at the behest of the UEG and not the RDF."

Reinhardt shot him a look. "There are no military solutions to the Zentraedi problem, Major. There are only political ones."

"Who's going to be our liaison with this new government?" Rick wanted to know. "We'd be fools to rely on politicians to make the right decisions."

Reinhardt turned to him. "Naturally, we would have to make certain that the RDF is fairly represented. We could support the appointment of Lang or Chief Justice Huxley. As for the hostiles, Milburn proposes that we designate Niles Obstat to head a special operations group to study the problem."

"Spooks," Aldershot said in disgust. "Spooks and spies and smoke and mirrors."

"Military intelligence," Reinhardt amended.

The major snorted. "God knows there's been little enough of that lately."

Long on a first-name basis with catastrophe, the survivors of Tokyo had rebuilt their city in half the time it had taken Lang's core of Roboengineers to transfer Macross Two from the bowels of the SDF-1 to the high plains of the Northwest. New Tokyo was not, however, the one-thousand-square-mile conurban sprawl it had been at the turn of the century, but a tidier place of some quarter million inhabitants centered

around the rebuilt Imperial Palace and the moats of the East Garden. The Ginza and Akihabara districts—known respectively for department stores and high-tech electronics—had been rebuilt underground, as had much of the shitamachi, the downtown. But gone were the nouveau riche enclaves of Harajuku, Roppongi, and Shinjuku, with their sleek high-rises and Western-style restaurants. North of the Imperial center, in the War-leveled Bunkyo-ku, were parks like the Koishikawa Gardens and temples like the Gokokuji, where in summer one could still enjoy the omnipresent me-me-me chirring of cicadas.

Lang had always had a fondness for Tokyo and for things Japanese—noh dramas, kabuki, bunraku puppet plays, karaoke, and all-night beer drinking. He had been in Tokyo, lecturing on extraterrestrial observations, when the Visitor had made its controlled crash onto Macross—a happy circumstance that had allowed him to be the first scientist of any note to reach the Micronesian island.

Post-Global War Tokyo had been home to the only offisland Robotech Research Center, and it was to Tokyo that Lang had returned soon after the Rain of Death to get the center operational once more. There, in underground rooms as fortified as the data storage and communication bunkers that had sheltered the residents of Macross Three during Khyron's attack, were housed the still-undeciphered texts found aboard the SDF-1, including most of what had comprised Zor's electronic library. And it was to Tokyo that Lang moved what had been obtained during the early-spring salvage operations in Macross: crateloads of additional yet-to-be-deciphered texts, the remains of the Invid battle unit Breetai had discovered aboard Khyron's cruiser and the peripheral systems of the SDF-1's so-called mother computer. Known also as EVE—for Enhanced Video Emulator—the quantum machine had, among other things, provided simulated sunrises, daylight, clouds, and sunsets for the besieged population of inboard Macross.

Lang attributed his failure to fully penetrate the computer to the loss of several key components during Breetai's attack on Macross. He suspected

that some of those components had folded with the island to Plutospace and were there still, orbiting in ice. His push for a mission to Pluto had less to do with gathering parts for the SDF-3 than with retrieving EVE's missing subsystems.

"Coming here, I always feel like I've arrived home," Lang was telling Zand in the midst of their inspection tour of the refurbished facility. A quarter-mile along in the main corridor, they were on foot and dressed alike in long white jackets and hard hats emblazoned with the RRC insignia: the RDF fighting kite contained by a square. Lang was setting a brisk pace, leaving Zand to scurry at his heels, the ever-faithful and overeager pet.

"If it weren't for my duties aboard the factory satellite, I'd spend most of my time here." Lang paused momentarily to inspect a motion-sensor device affixed to the corridor wall. "And now, what with all this talk about a possible role for me in the United Earth Government, I won't even have the pleasure of dividing my time between Tokyo and the factory. I'll be forced to include Monument City as well."

"You could decline a seat in the UEG," Zand said, short of breath.

"Ha! If it was only that easy, Lazlo. As you well know, I'm no politician. But it's clear someone has to look out for the needs of the RDF. Besides, I can't in good conscience disappoint Reinhardt and the others by refusing. They're all too aware of the dangers of factionalism, and neither of them trusts Milburn to play fair and square with the military." Lang shook his head. "I've no real choice in the matter. But I do regret having to burden you with the increased responsibility of overseeing our research work on Protoculture."

"It's no burden, Doctor, no burden, I assure you," Zand said in a rush. "I welcome the opportunity, the challenge of it."

Lang nodded. "Without specimens of the Flower of Life or a functioning matrix, we haven't a prayer of producing Protoculture. Our one hope lies in being able to synthesize it. I'm certain that the key to that process is to be found somewhere in EVE's databanks, but they're impermeable without the components we lost in Plutospace." He shook his

head in regret. "If only we hadn't been so panicked after the fold. Then, of course, there were the lives of Macross's fifty-six thousand to occupy us . . . And the Zentraedi." He forced an exhale, as if to rid himself of the memory.

"In the meantime, Lazlo, we must concentrate on the decipherment of Zor's documents. But not to the exclusion of other courses of investigation, you understand. This Invid craft, for example. What we assume to be a lubricant may in fact be a crude form of Protoculture, an ur-Protoculture. And let's not forget our Zentraedi test subjects: Rico, Konda, Bron—"

Lang halted abruptly and whirled on Zand. "It gets into you, Lazlo. Above and beyond Protoculture's effects on mecha, even beyond its effects on the space-time continuum, there're its effects on living things. Exedore has told us what it did to the Masters, we've speculated on the effect the leaves of the Flower of Life had on Khyron, I know what it has done to me . . . I'm talking about punctuated equilibrium. Lazlo, genetic and evolutionary leaps. One day you'll understand—you'll see for yourself." They had stopped by the Plexiglas sliders that fronted the center's machine intelligence laboratory. Central to the space was the android, JANUS M, that had been created three years earlier by the center's cybertechnician team. Hope ran high of seeing the astonishingly lifelike "female" automaton begin to think for itself soon.

Lang was regarding JANUS M absently. "If the Sterlings could only be convinced to part with little half-Human Dana for a month or so of testing . . ."

"Dana, yes," Zand said with obvious eagerness.

Lang eyed him guardedly. "You know, Lazlo, perhaps it's unfair of me to burden you with all this work when you've got your own projects to attend to."

Zand was shaking his head back and forth. "You needn't worry. I won't disappoint you. I'll—"

"My seating on the UEG certainly won't prevent Milburn and his gang from running things, in any case."

"You could find some way to keep tabs on them," Zand said. "Learn

what they're plotting before they can carry it out."

Lang halted again. "Insert a spy into the UEG?"

"Why not? They've spied on us in the past."

"True. But who do we know with a talent for espionage and unrestricted access to Milburn's circle?"

Zand rubbed his chin for a moment. "How about Lynn-Minmei? She could finagle access if she wanted to. And I recently heard her say that she's searching for a new career. Maybe she'd be willing to add 'spy' to her resume."

Lang considered it for a moment, then laughed. "Nice try, but I don't think so. I'll grant that she's a decent actress, but she's utterly guileless. Our spy would have to have a broad amoral streak." His eyes drifted aimlessly to the android once more. "No, Lazlo, we would have to create the duplicitous personality we need."

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Zentraedi clone received his or her designation from a list of 300 primary names and 300 surnames, each of which was represented by a glyph or combination of subglyphs, for a sum total of 90,000 individual symbols, many of which were likewise the names for so-called everyday objects—combat-related objects, in the case of the Zentraedi. On its inception, each clone was subjected to a regimen of neurotutorials, which rendered it—him or her—capable of identifying its own name glyph, in addition to some five hundred others. An "educated" Zentraedi—a domillan or advisor, such as Exedore Formo, to mention one example—was capable of identifying, reading, as many as five thousand glyphs. Writing, however, was a separate matter, rarely practiced, let alone mastered.

Cabell, A Pedagogue Abroad: Notes on the Sentinels Campaign

"Thanks again for accepting my invitation," UEG Senator Milburn told Minmei as he escorted her from the limousine to the majestic ballroom entrance of the Hotel Centinel. "I'm sorry it had to be last-minute, but I didn't realize you were in Monument until yesterday evening."

"Don't be sorry, Senator," Minmei said. "I'm honored you thought of me at all."

Milburn smiled charmingly. "Who doesn't think about you, my dear."

For a moment she thought he was going to kiss the back of her gloved hand. But instead he took hold of her elbow and walked her through the glass doors and down the carpeted stairway into the foyer of the grand ballroom. Hotel guests stopped what they were doing to stare at them, and several people in the ornate foyer applauded. Milburn acknowledged them with gracious aplomb.

"I have to absent myself for a few minutes," he said when they were well into the ballroom itself and swallowed by the crowd, "but I'll catch up

with you before long." He grinned. "You think you can handle it?"

Minmei returned the playful look. "I'll do my best."

She accepted a drink from a passing server and gazed around the room, at the Hollywood-style gilded columns and the chandeliers and the posh draperies, unimpressed by the money the Centinel's owners had lavished on the place. The same owners who had run the now-razed Macross Centinel. Although this third incarnation of the hotel—all within fifteen years—was by far the most out of touch with the times.

Nevertheless, in keeping with the stately, anachronistic miasma of the evening—it was official now; the United Earth Government, like the Hotel Centinel, was to be reborn—Minmei was wearing the gold lame dress she'd worn three years earlier to the Sterlings' shipboard, outer-space wedding. And she had her hair styled for bygone times as well, bunned and braided like a Chinese princess.

She had returned to the mainland the previous week. Monument's warm weather was holding—it was downright hot for August—but she feared autumn would arrive in an unannounced rush. And just where had summer gone, anyway? Looking back on the months in Kauai, summer seemed like one long day of lounging in the sunshine, playing in the waves, drinking piña coladas on the lanai. She'd spent the past week with Lena and Max, at their small house in the Monument 'burbs where she always had a room and where many of her souvenirs and keepsakes were stored. She often thought of herself as their boomeranging child, a title that would never apply to their son, Kyle. And like a child, she'd secluded herself in her room, rereading yellowing letters and scrapbooked articles clipped from the Macross City News and answering fan mail received since the telecast of Katherine Hyson's interview. Minmei thought that she had come off reasonably well, in spite of the sloppy editing, though she wished she'd been more circumspect in talking about Rick.

She wondered now if Hyson was somewhere in the ballroom or whether Milburn had been able to keep the media away.

She spotted many old friends. There was Mayor Luan and his fusty wife,

Loretta; nearby, Dr. Hassan and the always-affable Mayor Owen Harding of Detroit. Lots of folks she hadn't seen in years: sports figures, actors, promoters and performers she'd met during the post-war "People Helping People Tour." More than a few waved smiled, and everyone was respectful of her privacy. There would be no autographs to sign, and no requests for songs, either, thank heavens.

Lang was to have attended, but Minmei had heard that he was still in Tokyo. She had hoped Rick would be there, but he wasn't. She hadn't seen him in more than six months now. She supposed he and Lisa were too busy . . . well, whatever it was they were busy doing.

Exedore was the only Zentraedi in the room, and hanging on his crooked arm was none other than the voluptuous Marjory Prix—the former Miss Velvet, now simply Velvet—former spokesmodel for a chain of suntan clinics in inboard Macross. Posters of the barely clad Miss Velvet had been second in popularity only to those Minmei had done to promote enlistment in the RDF.

Jan Morris was also there—yet another former celeb, now an author of occult books—on the arm of Monument Council Member Stinson.

So was this what happened to all former stars? Minmei asked herself. They became the appendages of aging dignitaries at stuffy affairs in opulent hotels?

Two days earlier she'd hired a pilot to take her and her teenage cousin Jason for a spin in the Ikkii Takemi-designed fanjet she'd won as Miss Macross of 2011. The pilot had flown them over the buried remains of Macross, now reduced to a monument to the past. As she herself was—

"Lynn!" someone called out.

Minmei turned to the cheerful voice and saw Jan Morris mincing toward her on stiletto heels. Blond and obviously fit, Jan looked better than she had in years. Certainly since the time they had literally bumped into each other at the premier of Little White Dragon and a tipsy Jan had almost spilled her drink all over Minmei.

"Lynn, darling," Jan said, kissing the air near Minmei's cheeks. "How

are you? You look positively radiant!"

"I'm fine, Jan. Love your gown."

Jan waved a hand in dismissal. "I had to have it let out."

A tall, stoop-shouldered man with unsettling blue eyes had appeared out of nowhere and was standing alongside Morris. Jan introduced him as Reverend Houston.

"Reverend Houston wrote the introduction to my book, Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians."

"Have you read or listened to the book?" Houston asked Minmei, turning those eyes on her.

"Not yet," she started to say.

"I suspect it will be of real interest to you—particularly after hearing what you had to say about wanting to make a contribution to the planet at this time in your life."

Terrific, Minmei thought. A fan of television interviews.

"You see, Corporeal Fundamentalism—the subject of Jan's book—is about allowing the universe to speak to you. It's about stretching out and locating your seed guardian and paying close attention to its messages of guidance." Houston sniffed. "In fact, we—that is, Jan and I—are putting together an infomercial to get the book the attention it deserves. It would be great to have you on our panel—and naturally we'd be willing to work out a fair participation deal."

Minmei managed a weak smile. "Thanks, but I don't know—"

"You wouldn't have to be spontaneous, if that's what you're worried about. We'll script the entire thing. All you'd have to do is tell us beforehand what points you would want to make about our troubled times."

"I'll think about it," Minmei said in a tone that made it clear she wouldn't.

"Could I at least send you a copy of the book—free of charge? Who's your agent?"

"I don't have an agent just now."

"Then I could send it to your home."

Minmei gave him the Monument address of Max and Lena's Chinese restaurant and promised that she would try to read the book. She didn't make it three steps from Houston before someone else called her name. This time it was the stout, round-faced, and balding Samson "Sharky" O'Toole, one of the theatrical agents she was considering signing with.

"Lynn, fancy meeting you here," O'Toole said. Again, the air kisses. Fortunately, O'Toole was without his usual cigar.

"Saw you talking to Jan Morris and that Reverend Houston."

"The Reverend was telling me about an infomercial they have planned for her book."

"The Reverend," O'Toole said, snorting. "For What it's worth, Lynn, don't get involved with those two. You lend your name to some wacko fringe cult, it can follow you for life and alienate you to a lot of your regular public. Happens all the time."

"I didn't commit to anything." O'Toole nodded approvingly. "Can we talk for a minute?"

"Only a minute," Minmei said firmly. "I think I see Senator Milburn looking for me."

O'Toole followed her gaze. "Oh, so that's who you're with. Well, then, I definitely won't keep you. But you remember when we talked in Hawaii I told you I was going to do some asking around for projects that might interest you?"

Minmei inclined her head and tightened her lips. "Mr. O'Toole, before you say anything, I really haven't decided who I'm going to sign with."

O'Toole shook his head and held up plump hands. "No obligations, none at all. I just wanted to let you in on what I've been hearing." He lowered his voice. "You know about what went down in Brasília in July and about the protests here in Monument? Well, seems someone's come up with a way to begin talking directly to our—how shall I put it?—our new brothers and sisters. A satellite network meant strictly for the Zentraedi."

Minmei put a finger to her lips in thought. "That's a wonderful idea. But how does it concern me?"

"They're toying with calling it the Lorelei Network. And they plan to keep your songs in heavy rotation." He waited a beat. "So what I'd like to propose to them—with your permission, of course—is that you might be interested—just interested—in hosting a show on the station. You know, what I had in mind was a kind of talk show where you'd only take calls from aliens."

"Your name," Bagzent demanded of the green-haired Zentraedi standing before him at the crude table.

"Mouro Dann."

In a struggling hand, Bagzent added a name glyph to his long list of names. "Work experience, if any."

"A year of employment in Monument City," Dann told him, "two years in Detroit."

"Doing what?"

"Herding cattle in Monument. Clerk work at the armory in Detroit."

Bagzent's left eyebrow went up. "Fort Breetai?"

"That's right. "

"Any familiarity with Human weapons?"

"Some field experience with the Wolverine assault rifle and the Watchdog antimecha mine."

"Well, well, well," Bagzent said, sitting back in his wooden chair. "I guess that only leaves your feelings toward Humans."

Dann made a fist of his right hand, raised it to chest level, and rotated it in a quick, snapping motion.

Bagzent shot to his feet, thumping his chest in salute.

"T'sen Dann!"

"T'sen!" Dann returned.

Bagzent directed him to a group of thirty or so male Zentraedi queued up at the entrance to a canvas tent. "Go there for food, and await further instructions."

Bagzent appended a formula of scrawls to Dann's name glyph as the

new arrival was hurrying off. A pale-complected Zentraedi seated alongside Bagzent at the table took a puzzled look at the list.

"That makes how many today?"

Bagzent's brow furrowed as he counted. "Twenty-seven from the north, fourteen from the south—six of them from Brasília."

"Is that more than yesterday's count?"

"Almost two times as many." Bagzent clapped his partner on the shoulder. "If it continues like this we'll soon have the army we need."

Their jungle encampment of tattered army tents and the thatch-roofed longhouses the aboriginals had taught them to make was on a black-water tributary of the Xingu River, fifty miles south of its confluence with the Amazon. The nearest Human population center of any appreciable size was Manaus, almost eight hundred miles west-northwest. The rainy season air was thick with moisture, heat, mosquitoes: the sun had been out all morning, but storm clouds were building in the west, and the sounds of distant thunder rolled over the treetops.

The population of the camp reached nine hundred and fifty, including the two-hundred-plus Humans who had thrown in with them: tribal Indians who knew how to hunt for game; former prospectors of gold, diamonds, rubber, and oil who knew the whereabouts of hundreds of supplies-stocked Zentraedi ships; army deserters, fugitives, and practitioners of sorcery and bigamy, all of whom had made the densely forested interior of the Southlands their home long before the Rain of Death. Many of the Zentraedi were no longer wearing Human clothes, but uniforms bearing the corrupted V-like sigil—the Cizion—that stood for the power inherent in the Imperative. Under huge nets woven from vines and creepers stood sixteen salvaged Battlepods, now dappled in jungle camouflage colors.

Bagzent and his white-faced partner were soon joined at the table by a dozen other Zentraedi, each representing a different rebel unit in the rapidly swelling dissident army.

"What news from north?" asked the leader of the Steel Wind, a brutish man with black hair to his shoulder blades.

Bagzent filled everyone in on the latest rumors. "A new ship is being constructed in the belly of the factory satellite—a deepspace battlewagon that will carry members of the RDF to Tirol to confront the Masters. Exedore, Breetai, and at least four hundred Zentraedi who have not been Micronized are lending their might to the project."

The leader of the Steel Wind torqued his right fist. "We shall live to see Breetai and the rest allowed to run."

"Death Dance," said another leader. "The Kara-Thun for Breetai and the rest."

"Yes," Bagzent said, grinning, "we have a separate list for those who have betrayed the Imperative, and to it we add names daily."

"Make certain Miriya Parino's name is on it," someone shouted.

"She leads the list."

"And Anatole Leonard."

"Already done."

Bagzent made a mollifying gesture. "Let the RDF and Breetai's forces busy themselves with work on their fortress, while we lay violent claim to the Southlands and prepare to defend ourselves against the Invid."

"You're deluded to think we can survive an Invid invasion, Bagzent." The speaker was the woman, Marla Stenik, a singleton, unaligned to any group. "I say we find a way to position some of our troops aboard the factory so that we can take over the ship when the time comes. We could return to Tirol as Khyron planned to do before he lost his mind and decided to attack Macross."

Bagzent bristled but kept quiet.

"Is Zor's ship destroyed?" someone asked.

"Not only destroyed but interred," Bagzent said.

"And what news of the Backstabber?"

Marla chuckled maliciously. "Khyron Kravshera is dead, you fool. Dead and 'interred.'"

"Khyron lives," Bagzent's second shouted. "He was seen a month ago in Brasília, and in Cuiabá only last week. He is Micronized and moves only by

night. He is merely waiting for us to organize and demonstrate our worthiness, then he will reappear to lead us."

"Poor fools," Marla said, shaking her head in theatrical dismay. "Khyron was a coward. He fled the final battle to save himself. The new fortress is our salvation. If it's worthiness you're after, then take that ship and search for what's become of the Botoru Division cruisers that didn't crash on Earth. The crews of those ships could be anywhere in this system—on the Moon, or Mars—waiting for a sign from us."

"You take the ship, T'sen Stenik. We'll take revenge instead." The speaker's name was Salta. He stood seven feet tall, and, like Bagzent, he had been a member of Khyron's Seventh Mechanized Division. One of fifty who had agreed to remain behind on Earth while Khyron brought reinforcements from the Masters. Salta raised his massive left arm and pointed to the west. "Out there lies a forest of ships, each containing salvageable mecha."

Marla scoffed at the notion. "Out there lies a forest you can hide yourselves in when the RDF comes gunning for you with squadrons of Veritechs and Destroids."

"Ignore her," Bagzent said. "Let the female units make and carry out their own plans. For the rest of us, the first target lies to the north, just outside Cavern City."

"The site of the Southern Grand Cannon," Salta said.

"It is stocked with food and supplies—even reconfigurable mecha we will learn to pilot." Bagzent banged his hand on the table. "We will carry on Khyron's work. We shall be his fist!"

"Dana, I'm warning you," Miriya said. "Come back here and finish your supper or prepare to feel the sting of my hand on your backside."

When Dana stayed put and showed her tongue, it was all Miriya could stand. She left the table, scooped Dana up in her arms, and nearly slam-dunked her into her seat. "Now, eat, you little brute," she snapped. "Grow strong and healthy like a proper Zentraedi."

Max, in the kitchen with an armload of dirty plates, regarded the scene with time-tempered concern. It was only when he caught sight of Rick's troubled look that he figured he should say something. "Miriya, I think maybe she's had enough."

Miriya tensed. "She hasn't had enough. Max. Not until I say she's had enough."

Two-and-a-half-year-old Dana glanced from Max to Miriya and grinned ever so slightly. "I'm gonna eat it all, 'cause Daddy cooked it." She turned to Rick. "Mommy doesn't know how to cook."

"Sure she does," Rick started to say, when Miriya cut him off.

"Don't lie to her, Rick, I don't know how to cook."

"I only meant—"

"He only meant that you know how to cook some things," Max said, coming to his friend's aid. "You know how to use the microwave, and that's cooking, sort of."

Miriya fumed. "It doesn't bother me that I don't know how to cook, Max. I just don't want her lied to—about anything. Who she is, what she is, how she got here, or who cooks her meals. There's enough lying going on in this world already."

Rick lifted his eyes from the table to trade looks with Max. Max knew that Rick was remembering the time aboard Breetai's flagship when Miriya had thrown Dana across the cabin to Lisa.

"So, Rick," he said, sitting down, "you were saying about Leonard . . ."

"Uh, that the pilots that fired on the crowds in July are being court-martialed. Leonard has apologized for sticking by them earlier."

"Too little, too late," Miriya said. "He should resign or be removed from office for instigating the riots to begin with."

"An apology is a start," Rick countered. "And next time, he'll have to answer to the UEG for his actions."

Max shook his head. "Nothing will change, except for the worse."

Rick looked at both of them. "Come on, you two. What's with all this pessimism? We have to give the UEG a chance, don't we? I mean, it's

basically a matter of food distribution—"

"It's not just the food," Miriya told him. "It's about jobs, discrimination, rampant inequality . . . And why should we give the UEG a chance, Rick? Has Milburn or Moran or any of them considered having a Zentraedi representative?"

Rick sat up straighter. "Cavern City and Zagerstown tried to elect Zentraedis. And what about Exedore? Or isn't he Zentraedi now that he's wearing an REF uniform?"

"Of course Exedore's Zentraedi. But Exedore doesn't speak for the dissidents, and that's where the problem is." Miriya wiped Dana's mouth, lifted her out of the seat and set her on the floor. "Listen, Rick, I watched my closest friend die in Brasília, so don't you think I want to see things work out? It's just that I don't trust the UEG, and I'm beginning to think that there are no peaceful solutions."

"There are always peaceful solutions."

Max showed Rick a dubious look. "You've been spending too much time on the factory. All of you—Lisa, Gunther, Emil. You don't know what we've been hearing."

"Then enlighten me," Rick said, more harshly than he meant to.

"Sectorwide, Zentraedi are quitting their jobs and making their way to the Southlands to link up with bands of militants. They're even leaving Monument. And can you blame them? The place is beginning to look more and more like Macross every day. The Monument Council is ineffectual; the jump in Human population will probably mean the ouster of all Zentraedi representatives. Let's face it, we've occupied and taken control of their city, autonomous or not. Everywhere else in the world, the Zentraedi have been herded into Zee-towns or lured into captivity, like we've done with them in the Arkansas Protectorate or on the factory satellite."

"We're a team on the factory—Humans and Zentraedi."

"A team that has abandoned Earth," Miriya said.

Rick shot her an angry look. "You think I want to be up there instead of down here working out solutions? But we've got the mission to think of.

Besides, up there is where the two of you should be—and Dana. Vince and Jean are joining us, and they're bringing Bowie. What more can you do downside?"

"Speak out for Zentraedi rights, for one thing."

"Maybe you should run for the UEG, Miriya," Rick told her.

"No doubt Milburn and Moran would love to have me on the team. But no matter how I feel about Humans right now, I still don't think I'm xenophobic enough for them. Or for the Bureau of Reconstruction Management. Or for the likes of Governor Anatole Leonard."

"The UEG will keep him under control." Rick argued. "There won't be another Brasília."

Max shook his head. "It won't matter one way or another, Rick. Malcontentism is going to spread like a cancer through the Southlands and touch all of our lives."

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Faithful, a short-lived quasi-NeoChristian religious movement opposed to reconstructing the Visitor; did not so much end with the death of its founder as go into hiding for ten years, to emerge as The Church of Recurrent Tragedies, headed by Bishop Gideon Nboto, the Sudanese former lieutenant to the Faithful's founder, Conrad Wilbur. By then, of course (2016), Nboto and his ally in technophobia, Joanna Ricter-Fields, had a new ship to carp about: the SDF-3. "The Tirol Expedition (sic) is nothing more than an attempt to divert us from facing the problems of housing, food, and medical care that plague Earth's despoiled surface," Nboto told the world in an interview with Katherine Hyson. "In its refusal to face the challenge of restoring the planet, the RDF and the REF are sentencing the rest of Humankind to eradication by alien invasion or extinction by nature itself."

Weverka T'su, Aftermath: Geopolitical and Religious Movements in the Southlands

Governor Leonard stood in the back of the open-air limousine and waved to the crowds gathered along both sides of Exio Rodoviario, Brasília's principal north-south axis. In the pre-War days, twelve-laned Rodoviario had formed the curve of Brasília's bow and was the main artery linking the north and south wings of the city. Now, the once-grand luxury apartment buildings with their walls of plate glass were empty shells, gutted by the Fire of 2012, and the numerous overpasses and cloverleafs had been torn down to supply building materials for the favelas of the poor. Now, Rodoviario coursed through mile after mile of ramshackle slums, dusted red over the years by the plateau's mineral-deficient soil.

November's cool winds lashed Leonard's broad face and shaved skull. Pursuant to Leonard's orders, the limo's bulletproof canopy had been removed and no armed guards were permitted to ride in the motorcade's follow cars.

He was king here, commander and king; and to impress that title on his subjects he wore an olive-drab, woolen coat, heavy with medals and braid and cinched at the waist by a wide, big-buckled leather belt. With him, though seated just now, were Joseph Petrie, his aide-de-camp, and Wyatt Moran, who Leonard knew as Patty. Leonard and the Mark Twain—mustachioed UEG senator went back twenty years, and it was Moran who had appointed Leonard governor of Goiás District. Petrie, however—small-boned and square-headed—was a recent acquisition, procured principally for his skills as a hacker. Moran was dressed in a lightweight white suit ill-suited to the season; Petrie in a military jumpsuit whose zippered pockets were stuffed with electronic widgets.

Leonard was still basking in the afterglow of July's strike against the aliens. The offensive had sent a clear signal to the people of his city, and a clearer one to the Zentraedi, that displays of malcontentism would not be tolerated. As a result, there were no antigovernment slogans in evidence along the motorcade route—though in fact Leonard had had his agents sweep the area of subversives beforehand. RDF troops from as far north as Cavern City and as far south as Buenos Aires had been called in to enforce martial law.

By last count, some five thousand Zentraedi had fled the Goiás uplands since July, leaving Zee-towns throughout the district abandoned and ripe for razing. Initially, Patty Moran had taken issue with Leonard's actions, but he had since come to recognize their brilliance.

"Remember on Macross Island, how they used their Destroids to gas us?" Leonard had said to the senator. "Those mecha put the fear into us, didn't they, Patty? So you might say that I've simply borrowed an old RDF tactic for dealing with dissention."

By "us", Leonard had meant the followers of Dr. Conrad Wilbur. Dubbed the Faithful, Wilbur's cult had seen the Visitor as a kind of Pandora's box, dispatched from hell to lure Humankind into worshiping technology over God. Both Leonard and Moran were followers, and though the aims of the Faithful had been underhandedly sabotaged by 2009,

Wilbur's beliefs had been given new life by the Church of Recurrent Tragedies, and heavy—if covert—funding by Leonard himself.

Leonard waved and smiled at a group of people atop what remained of a concrete overpass. "They're chanting 'Brasília is for Humankind; the jungles, for Zentraedi,'" he told Moran when Moran asked.

Leonard's barrel chest swelled. This was how George Patton must have felt after his World War II victories in Italy and France. Leonard had made a lifelong study of Patton, learning from Patton's military successes as well as his political failures. Perhaps to humble him, Patton's desk-bound superiors had kept him from being the first to enter and lay claim to defeated Berlin. But Patton needn't have listened to those REMF commanders. He had his own army by then, and that army would have followed him anywhere. Just as Leonard had now. And Leonard would do whatever he felt needed to be done to quash malcontentism, regardless of what the RDF or the newly formed UEG might have to say about it.

The freakish aliens were the scourge loosed by the Visitor, the defilers and destroyers of God's material domain. No one could argue that point now, not in the unholy light of the Zentraedi's apocalyptic Rain of Death. And those who had ushered in the apocalypse had to be returned to the darkness whence they came—if not hurled back into the black void of space, then chased into the dark, forbidding interior of the Southlands. Chased into the jungles in the same manner the godless aboriginals had been chased there by Brazil's God-fearing Portuguese and Spanish colonizers. Chased, contained, and eventually exterminated: by weapons, poisoned food, disease-impregnated blankets, whatever was required.

Where in the Bible did it state that Humankind had to share its garden with otherworlders? Soulless, biogenetically created ones, at that. Earth had to be cleansed of them if Humankind hoped to be redeemed, just as every individual had to be cleansed of sin before he or she could stand naked in God's light. Cleansed through the performance of degrading acts, if that was what it took: cleansed by whip, by slaps, by the piercing of body parts; made to crawl across splinter-laden floors to lick the high boots of the Cleanser,

begging like a sick child for another taste of the strap, the pliers, the black stiletto heel . . .

The motorcade was slowing as it approached the intersection with Esplanada dos Ministérios, where Leonard was to address the crowds gathered on the red-earth walkways of Brasília's pedestrian mall. The limousine had begun to brake and Leonard was just lowering himself to the back seat when three men and a woman hurdled the barricades on the east side of Rodoviario and made a mad rush for the open-air car. Dressed in ragged clothing and black backpacks of some sort, the quartet was screaming, "Kara-brek, kara-brek, kara-brek!"

The Battlepods of Khyron's Fist launched their attack at sunrise, arriving from the east, with Earth's yellow star at their backs. The strategy of making tactical use of the rising sun would not have occurred to Bagzent, but the aboriginal called Narumi had convinced him to give it a try. Outgunned, the Human forces guarding the perimeter of the Southern Grand Cannon in the sector known as Venezuela were taken by surprise and easily overrun. Of the six Veritechs and six Destroids that had occupied the base only a week earlier, four of each had been ordered south to shore up Brasília's civil defense forces. And of the fifty RDF soldiers who would have been guarding the cannon on any given morning, thirty were on leave in nearby Cavern City.

The perimeter had been breached with a minimum of bursts from the Battlepods' particle-beam cannons. Bagzent was reminded of Khyron's minimal-fire, lightning-fast raid on the concert dome in Denver, when Lynn-Minmei and her lover had been taken hostage.

The Backstabber would be proud of Bagzent's action.

Bagzent sat at the controls of his Micronian-capable Battlepod; the tattoo-faced Indian guide had the copilot's seat Narumi was the chief of his tribe, a position Bagzent equated with that of a brigade leader. Pairs of Zentraedi manned the other nine pods. They had left the Xingu River camp five days earlier, and in that time had run and hopped their way along one

thousand miles of jungle trails, crossing countless rivers and ruined roadways, often at a rate of 175 miles per hour, or 250 horizontal feet per boosted leap.

Bagzent was attired in a burgundy command uniform and a green campaign cloak chosen from items found aboard a rusting Zentraedi cruiser Narumi had led them to. The choice was deliberate—burgundy and green were the colors Khyron had worn during the Christmas attack on Macross City. One of the Human outcasts allied to the Zentraedi had decorated the exterior of Bagzent's Battlepod with the glyph that now stood for Khyron's Fist.

The radio in the pilot compartment of the bulbous-bodied craft crackled to life. "Unit seven reporting," a Zentraedi voice said. "Bagzent, respond."

"Report, Salta."

"We're on the rim of the weapon. Communications and tram transport into the main shaft are disabled. We haven't encountered many soldiers, mostly technicians. The place has been stripped clean."

"Any resistance?"

"We killed six at the first security checkpoint, then four more in one of the tram cars. Units four, five, and six encountered resistance at the mecha field. Five and six are down."

"What's our body count so far?"

Salta was quiet for a long moment. "Twenty-one Humans, I think."

Bagzent grinned. "Keep up the good work. I'm leaving Qapai and the others here. Leave Aayth on the rim and rendezvous with me on level one in the weapon."

Much like its slagged counterpart in the Alaska wilderness, the miles-deep energy gun took the form of a gargantuan upside-down Y. Never completed, however, it lacked the enhanced-firefield lensing of the original—compensation for a network of satellite reflectors the UEDC hadn't gotten around to lofting, much less positioning.

Bagzent ran the pod from the high-voltage fencing at the perimeter to

the ceramic rim of the weapon's maw, then simply leapt over the side, following the tramlines down the central shaft and utilizing the jump jets to control the speed and direction of the fall. Narumi howled with delight, and Bagzent, too, experienced a gush of renewed vigor, in spite of his Micronized size. Oh, to be full-size once more, he thought. To occupy the pod in its entirety. To reunite with the Protoculture. To be one with the mecha!

Moments later, at the base of the central shaft, the Battlepod dropped through a ragged, gaping hole in a concrete ceiling, opened by particle-beam cannon or perhaps by the passing of Salta's craft. Bagzent landed the pod on its reverse-articulated legs and traversed the exterior cameras across a supply room of some sort. Salta's pod was standing nearby. Ten or so Human techs were clustered in a corner of the room, cowering.

"Aayth is on the rim," Salta said. "No reports of further activity at the field. We've captured two mecha intact. Veritechs."

Bagzent nodded for the video pickups, then slowly walked the pod to within twenty feet of the Humans.

"We're not soldiers," one of the Humans said through cupped hands. "We're technicians, and we're unarmed."

"My people in Brasília were unarmed," Bagzent answered over the external speaker. "One thousand one hundred of them were blown to pieces."

A woman in a hard hat stepped forward. "We didn't have anything to do with that. We deplore discrimination of any kind."

"Is that so, Micronian? Then tell me, how many Zentraedi are employed here?"

The Humans regarded one another with confused misgiving.

"I thought as much," Bagzent told them. He enabled the twin autocannons that protruded from the base of the pod and swiveled the muzzles front and center. "Now, prepare to experience the wrath of Khyron's Fist."

Reports of the incidents in Brasília and Venezuela arrived simultaneously at RDF headquarters in Monument City at nine hundred hours local time, and by eleven hundred hours that same morning, members of the general staff were meeting in emergency session. Reinhardt directed the briefing from his customary place on the command curve of the horseshoe-shaped table.

Rick was late in arriving because of a call he had put through to Lisa at the factory. Already present in the room when he slipped in were Caruthers, Maistroff, Herzog, and Aldershot, along with their various aides and adjutants. Exedore was there as well, and, from the newly formed Special Operations Group, Director of Intelligence Niles Obstat and Deputy Director Dimitri Motokoff.

"First things first," Reinhardt said when Rick was seated. "One of the backpack bombs detonated early, killing all three male Zentraedi. The woman—a known sympathizer—survived, but she's not expected to live. Twelve bystanders were killed, and more than two dozen were injured. Leonard's driver was killed outright, and both Senator Moran and Leonard's adjutant sustained slight injuries. Leonard himself escaped without a scratch."

"I'm sure he'll take it as a sign from God," Aldershot muttered.

Reinhardt reserved comment. "At fourteen hundred hours Brasília time today, Leonard issued a proclamation naming himself field marshal of the Army of the Southern Cross. 'A mobile force'—I'm quoting Leonard here—'dedicated to stopping the spread of malcontentism in the Southlands.'"

Grumbles of disbelief rose from the table.

"I might add that he enjoys the full support of the people of Goiás district. Senator Moran is pushing for UEG recognition of the Army of the Southern Cross as a legitimate organization. Which would, of course, entitle it to funding for weapons, bases, salaries . . ."

"A cut in UEG funds could delay the Expeditionary mission by years," Rick said. "Maybe scuttle it completely." Lisa and Lang would be crushed,

he thought.

"It hasn't taken the UEG very long to subvert us," Herzog said. "Not that this comes as any surprise."

Reinhardt instructed techs in the control booth to display a map of the Southlands on the main screen. "Early this morning, the Zentraedi launched three coordinated strikes: against the Southern Grand Cannon, the commercial airport at Laago City, and the RDF armory in Cuiabá." Reinhardt's laser pointer projected green circles on the three sites. "They were successfully repulsed in Cuiabá, but they managed to hijack three jetliners and two Veritech VF-1As from Laago, and they presently occupy the Grand Cannon, with a force of eight Tactical Battlepods."

"Is one group responsible for all three raids?" Rick asked.

Reinhardt looked to Exedore, who was seated at the left foot of the table. The Zentraedi ambassador distributed reconnaissance photographs before speaking.

"An analysis of the hand-painted markings on the plastrons of the Battlepods indicates that three separate groups are involved." He held up an enlargement of a fistlike symbol. "This glyph, photographed at the Grand Cannon, is meant to be read as 'Khyron's Fist.'" He showed two more enlargements. "This one could be interpreted as either 'Metal' or 'Steel' Wind. And this felinelike third—from Cuiabá—is perhaps 'Jaguar Skull,' though it could have a more generic meaning, such as 'Cat Skull' or simply 'Predator Skull.'"

Maistroff was the first to respond. "Since when do the Zentraedi read and write—other than yourself?"

"A fair question, Colonel," Exedore said, turning to him. "And the probable explanation lies in the fact that many Zentraedi received instruction in glyphic reading from RDF trainers when it came to cataloging various objects, such as weapons and nutrients, obtained from the crashsites of Zentraedi warships."

"What's more," Niles Obstat interrupted, "they have Humans assisting them with jungle foraging and technical know-how. Most of them are

escaped criminals and disenfranchised Indians. They don't give a damn about Zentraedi rights, but they do have their own reasons for wanting to topple the existing order."

Obstat was tall and balding, though not so much as Gunther Reinhardt. He went on to detail how the intelligence division had placed a Zentraedi spy among the rebels. The operative was a former aide to Breetai, who had been working at the factory when approached about the infiltration mission and had agreed to be Micronized. Thus far, he had succeeded in making one intelligence drop—during reconnaissance of the armory in Cuiabá—which contained information about the rebels' camp on the Xingu River, the resurgence of male-female segregation among them, the presence of as many as two hundred tribal Indians and outlaws, and a plan to turn the whole of the Southlands interior into a kind of Zentraedi control zone.

"Our operative was unable to pass along a forewarning about the attacks on the Laako airport or the Grand Cannon. But we're awaiting further drops from him."

"Fifty-six may have been killed in Venezuela," Reinhardt added. "But if there's a plus side, it's that most of the weapons and usable supplies had already been lofted to the factory." He paused for a long moment, then smiled ruefully. "Leonard has asked if we want his Southern Cross to spearhead the counterstrike."

"Like hell," Aldershot said, leading a chorus of denunciations of the governor.

Reinhardt made a placating gesture. "The UEG has sanctioned the use of force by the RDF, but we're to limit ourselves to the Cannon. Just to keep this situation localized, we'll let the Argentine Base handle the details. Rolf Emerson is in charge down there, but I want the Skull to carry out the raid."

"Why the Skull?" Rick asked.

Reinhardt averted his gaze. "A request from the UEG. For purposes of propaganda, I suppose. Officially, the Skull will be on temporary duty with RDF South. I've notified Captain Sterling that he's been placed in command of the team."

Rick was taken aback. "And Miriya?"

"The UEG prefers that Miriya be dropped from our combat roster. Right now she's more important to us as a role model than a VT pilot. A shining example of homemaker, mother, former freedom fighter . . . The fully acculturated Zentraedi, or some such thing."

Rick raised his eyes to the ceiling. Wait till Lisa got word of this.

Reinhardt was frowning. "If it wasn't for Cavern City, I don't think the UEG would have even sanctioned a counterstrike. The Bureau of Reconstruction Management recently appointed a new governor to Cavern—a woman named Lea Carson. And because of Cavern's proximity to the Cannon, Carson's asked the RDF to make a comprehensive study of the city's defenses. So as soon as this mess is cleared up, we're going to send someone down there." The general turned to his adjutant "What's the name again?"

"Captain Jonathan Wolff," Reinhardt's aide supplied. "Academy graduate, trained as a VT pilot on Macross Island and a tank commander on Albuquerque Base."

Reinhardt nodded. "Wolff, yes. I've heard good things about him."

Aldershot drew attention to himself with a meaningful cough. "Getting back to priorities, General, it seems to me that the situation in Venezuela calls for more than a surgical strike. Now's the time to move against the Zentraedi's camp on the Xingu as well—before they go and cache themselves in the heart of Amazonia."

Rick spoke up. "That's exactly what we don't want to do, Major. Unless we're prepared to deal with rioting in every city between here and Brasília."

Aldershot smoothed the ends of his waxed moustache. "Begging the admiral's pardon, but I'd prefer a few weeks of riots to who-knows-how-many years of guerrilla warfare and low-intensity conflicts."

"The UEG has its own reason for limiting us to a surgical strike," Reinhardt said. He deferred to Obstat, who in turn deferred to SOG's deputy director. A man of average height and build, Motokoff had blunt features and a mass of dark curly hair that covered his broad forehead and

ears. Head of CD forces aboard the SDF-1, he was also credited with the planning of Operation Star Saver, the rescue mission mounted to save Minmei and Lynn-Kyle from execution by Khyron.

"Our operative reports that the rebels are planning to hold summit talks in Cairo early next year."

"Summit talks with us?" Rick asked.

Motokoff shook his head. "Among themselves. Where each group can make its demands known to the rest. The organizers are the Quandolmo, which Exedore tells me means 'resurrected ones.' They seem to think that Cairo's high radiation count will keep us away."

"How are the Southland's groups planning to reach Africa?" Aldershot wanted to know. "By swimming?"

"That's presumably what the stolen jetliners and VTs are for," Motokoff told him.

Aldershot looked at Reinhardt. "And we're going to allow this?"

"The UEG has ordered us to allow it. It's their belief we'll stand a better chance of negotiating a truce once the hostiles have reached a consensus among themselves."

"They seek nothing more than chaos," Exedore said. "There can be no answering the demands of the Imperative, no lasting peace. Especially between such warlike races."

Rick tensed. "Exedore, I'm getting sick and tired of hearing that line from you. We are not programmed for war."

The ambassador inclined his head ever so slightly. "I'm sorry to say so, Admiral, but it is my belief that you simply answer to different masters than we do. Yours are within yourselves, a product of your upbringing, your animal ancestry, and the fight-or-flight biochemicals bequeathed to you by millions of years of hunting for food."

Rick shook his head. "What about Miriya Parino? She's overcome the Imperative. Even the UEG considers her acculturated. And what about you and Breetai and the others aboard the factory? If three hundred can do it, five thousand can."

"It's true that some of us have been able to keep the Imperative in check, Admiral. But I would never presume to say for how long. More importantly, Miriya Parino Sterling seems to be a special case—the one you might term the exception to the rule. She has even produced an offspring. As for the rest, no amount of exposure to Human emotions could efface the Imperative. Your own admirals Gloval and Hayes agreed with me, not only about the similarities of our warlike natures, but in regard to the odds against achieving any lasting peace. If memory serves, Gloval quoted the odds as 'nothing short of astronomical.'"

"Gloval wasn't right about everything," Rick countered. "He speculated that the Zentraedi had fought among themselves early on, and you yourself have said that's wrong."

Exedore nodded. "Yes, Zor's documents make no mention of internecine warfare among my people. But that's all the more reason to fear us now. Shamed by defeat, we are easily swayed by the latent force of the Imperative. The Masters made certain that we were familiar with shame. Shame was encoded in us to act as an incentive for seeking revenge on those who shamed us."

"What do you see as the solution, Exedore?" Reinhardt asked disconsolately.

The Zentraedi thought for a long moment, then said, "If I were in your position, I would have all Zentraedi executed."

CHAPTER NINE

One clear indication that Protoculture had its own designs on the Human race is that it wouldn't allow Humans to journey too far from home until they were suitably prepared. Lang and Gloval's first fold miscalculation took them to Pluto instead of the Moon; one shudders to think where a second jump might have delivered them had not crucial parts of the SDF-1's fold system vanished during the space-time transit. Then there was the factory satellite, folded without incident to Earthspace, only to promptly shut down, never to fold again. Some have suggested that Protoculture could sense when it was in hands other than those of the Robotech Masters. Consider; however, the escape from Tirol that Protoculture engineered for itself through Zor, by compelling him to dispatch the sole existing Protoculture matrix far from the Masters' grasp. More to the point, consider how the matrix concealed itself from Lang and the rest, who never once thought of searching the SDF-1's Reflex engines. Not because Protoculture was waiting for Zor Prime or the Masters, but because it was waiting for the Invid Regis.

Mingtao, Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

"Breetai, I was hoping you'd decided to be Micronized for Christmas," Lisa said into her headset microphone on seeing him appear on the bridge of the factory satellite.

The Zentraedi commander faced the cameras that were transmitting his image to the factory's command bubble, some eight hundred feet above the floor of the systems-laden bridge. "As a gift to you, Admiral Hayes, or is it that you wanted me to portray Santa's Claws in some holiday pageant?"

"It's 'Santa Claus,' Breetai. And, no, to both your guesses. It's just that I don't think the sweater I knitted will fit you now."

Breetai's left eyebrow arched, and he loosed a meditative murmur that was closer to a growl. "I've little need of a sweater, Admiral. My uniform suffices for most thermal conditions."

Lisa started to explain that she'd only been joking, but thought better of it.

"Not the easiest person to banter with—even when he's our size," Jim Forsythe said into her ear. He muted the command bubble's audio feed momentarily. "Before he was shuttled down the well to assist Lang in surveying the SDF-1, I quoted him that old line from King Kong about having been master of his world only to be brought down by the little guys."

"What did he say?"

"That he was never the master of any world and that he had no objections to being brought down by the little guys because it didn't matter to him who piloted the shuttle."

Lisa pressed her fingers to her mouth to stifle a laugh. Her mistake for trying to be funny in the first place. And for continually erring by thinking of the Zentraedi essentially as giant Earthlings, when in fact they were as different from Human beings as Humans were from plants. They hadn't been born so much as grown, and they had been endowed by the Masters of Tirol with near-supernatural abilities, not the least of which was the capacity to venture suitless for brief periods into the airless frigidity of space.

Humor, in any case, was the ultimate test of one's understanding of an alien culture, and Breetai's familiarity with Earth's societies only went back three years or so.

While she was musing, Emil Lang entered the command bubble, looking clearly preoccupied. His pupilless eyes seemed even more inward-turning than usual. Lisa was aware of his concerns about reduced funding for the Expeditionary mission as a consequence of recent outbreaks of malcontentism in the Southlands. The irony was that the threatened cuts weren't originating with the United Earth Government but with the RDF itself, forced suddenly to reckon with the uncertain intentions of Field Marshal Anatole Leonard and his Army of the Southern Cross.

Lang looked tired as well, from his constant shuttling between the factory and Monument City—now to attend UEG sessions. Not to mention

the side trips to Tokyo for meetings with Professor Zand and the staff of the Robotech Research Center.

"The others should be here shortly," Lang said absently, glancing at Lisa and Forsythe while flipping through a file thick with Most Secret documents. "Then we can begin."

The bridge was located on level eight of the factory's moonlet-sized main body. Nearly two miles long, including the lofty command bubble, it was an arena-wide highway of sensors, data posts, projecbeam screens, interface banks, holographic tactic tables, and communication modules. And yet the whole of it had been engineered for manual control by the Human-size Masters or—as Exedore had explained—by the various clone triumvirates that served them. Central to the command bubble itself was a strategic and tactical planning table of incredible size, capable of displaying transvid data, computer-generated graphics, superimposed holograms, and real-time or condensed target assessment and acquisition information on as many as 15,000 objects ranging over an area of 500,000 cubic miles.

On Lisa's first tour of the bridge two years earlier she had been awed by the sheer size of the place—a reaction she would have thought impossible after having spent so many years inside the SDF-1. But many sections of Zor's ship had already been resized by the time she was transferred to Macross Island, and the factory was in its original state when it had been captured from Reno: a weigh station for giants and their war machines. And while it was true that she sometimes wished Breetai would opt for permanent Micronization—she cared deeply for him, with or without a sense of humor—she understood the logistic need for having forty-foot-tall beings aboard.

As well as having had to adapt to interior spaces of mind-boggling dimensions, Lisa had also found herself becoming reacquainted with the loneliness of command. Not since Macross Island had so much been demanded of her, nor had she been so caught up in her work. She imagined that Rick was under similar pressures downside, but there at least he had the company of good friends. Lately, she had stopped thinking about the

future, because all her thoughts led inevitably to a calculation of the time she might be forced to spend on the factory. Three years? Five years? With each punctuated by a lonely Christmas. Just now it was all she could do to find time for brief phone conversations with Rick.

One by one, Dr. Lang's "others" entered the command bubble: the saturnine and bellicose Harry Penn, designer of exotic mecha; congenial chief engineer Sheamus Bronson; the very reclusive Dr. R. Burke, REF captain, head of weapons research and development, and inventor of the Wolverine assault rifle and the Watchdog antimecha mine; Jevna Part, the gnomish, Micronized adjutant to Breetai, and the only bald and bearded Zentraedi Lisa had ever seen; and Theofre Elmikk, Breetai's perpetually embittered lieutenant, who served as liaison between Lang's technical crews and EVA teams of full-size Zentraedi tasked with warship dismantlement and reclamation.

"Are we ready to record?" Lang asked the technicians when everyone was seated.

"Whenever you're ready, Doctor," one of them answered.

Lang cleared his throat. "December twenty-two, twenty-fifteen. Premission briefing on the bridge of the factory satellite." He started to name those in attendance but stopped when his eyes met Lisa's. "Isn't Admiral Hunter supposed to be here?"

"According to plan," Lisa said. "But General Reinhardt asked for his assistance in assigning personnel to the Argentine Base."

Lang's tone of voice turned acerbic. "Reinhardt should know better. We need Hunter here."

"Perhaps when the Grand Cannon is retaken," Lisa was careful to say.

"It's my understanding that the Army of the Southern Cross volunteered to handle the situation in Venezuela, and I don't understand why they weren't permitted to. If REF personnel are going to respond to every action initiated by a dissident group, this mission will never launch."

Before anyone could comment, Lang waved a hand in dismissal and resumed his introductory remarks.

"Fifteen years ago, when we got our first look inside the crashed SDF-1, we were presented with a picture of what we would have to confront in the event the ship's owners ever arrived to reclaim it. The weapons systems and the dead giants found aboard the ship altered our view of the universe, and led eventually to the development of the reconfigurable fighting machines that have come to be called 'mecha.' It's telling, however, that Zor's warning message contained no images of Zentraedi Battlepods or Power Armor, but focused instead on the primary assault vehicles of the Invid soldier, the Gurab and the Gamo. What with the Zentraedi defeat, Zor was correct to award the Invid central place. But the so-called Shock Troopers and Pincer Command Units are only two of several assault crafts the Expeditionary mission must prepare to encounter."

For the next five minutes, Lang led everyone through a computer-generated, table-displayed tour of the Valivarre system of planets, moving outward from sunlike Valivarre to the ringed planet known as Fantoma and the inhabited moon of Fantoma known as Tirol—a somewhat desolate-looking orb, with much of its topography muted by volcanic flows.

"One of the million questions I hope to have answered," Lang said, "is why, with half the galaxy at their disposal, the Masters have chosen to remain on Tirol. If we accept Exedore's statement that the Masters have no attachments to place, then it's unlikely they consider Tirol their home. Do you concur, Breetai?"

"I wouldn't know, Dr. Lang," Breetai answered from the bridge. "I have had few direct dealings with the Masters."

Lang nodded. "Exedore has also stated that the architecture of Tirol's principle city, Tiresia, approximates that of our own Greco-Roman period, with the addition of some ceramic or ultratech innovations, including an enormous pyramid called the Royal Hall. Can you verify this, Breetai?"

Breetai shook his head for the cameras. "I have never made planetfall on Tirol."

"No matter," Lang said. "Breetai may not have set foot in Tiresia, but he has been able to supply us with even more relevant data."

Once more Lang directed everyone's attention to the command bubble's data table, above which a series of holograms began to materialize: a hover platform surmounted by a kind of snowman-proportioned warrior robot; a huge robotic cat with alloy fangs and a segmented tail; other automatons, headless things with bulbous, armored torsos and insectilelike limbs and appendages.

"Bioroid hover," Lang said, motioning to the holoids. "Hellcat, Odeon, Scrim, Crann . . . These, apparently, were created by the Masters in anticipation of a Zentraedi rebellion, led by Commander-in-Chief Dolza, and for use by clones as a police force on occupied worlds. With Breetai and Exedore's help in interpreting some of the documents found aboard this factory, we will be able to supply specifications to Dr. Penn's mecha design group and Dr. Burke's weapons development teams." Lang looked at the two men. "I want to caution both of you about placing any confidence in our ability to get this factory on-line again. Consider it a very large hangar space. Even if we do succeed in identifying and eliminating the glitches, production will be limited to Tactical Battlepods. Officer's Pods were produced elsewhere."

Jevna Parl elaborated on Lang's statement. "This facility specialized in the manufacture of Regults with Esbelliben Protoculture drives. Glaugs—Officer's Pods, as you call them—have been in short supply since an Invid assault on the Roycommi Weapons Factory."

"Note to Admiral Hunter," Lang directed to the recording secretary. "Discuss project involving new line of tactical simulators featuring Invid and Masters crafts as opponents-slash-targets." He snorted. "Assuming the RDF's accountants will agree to fund such a project."

Lisa watched Lang's ire build. She thought she could read his mind. What was to become of the mission to Plutospace? The surveys of the Zentraedi ships crashed in the trackless forests of the Southlands? The operation directed at salvaging materials from the eighty-six Zentraedi ships a fleet of tugs were maneuvering toward the factory? . . . Where was the funding going to come from? And was there any truth to the rumor that

certain high-ranking members of the RDF and the UEG were beginning to talk about an unmanned mission to Tirol—a kind of remote appeal for peace?

All at once, Lisa's duties felt light by comparison. And the more she thought about it, the better she began to feel—for Rick as well. Even if he had been shanghaied into contending with the Zentraedi uprisings, at least he was doing so from behind a desk instead of from the cockpit of a Veritech. Which left the heroics to be handled by some other hapless fighter jock. And Lisa free and clear of having to assume any of the blame.

In pre-War times, no self-respecting resident of Buenos Aires would have been lax in making plans to escape the city's heat and humidity at the end of the Christmas holiday. But now, those holiday destinations—the white-sand beaches of Punta del Este and Mar del Plata—were buried yards deep by what Dolza's annihilation bolts had blasted from São Paulo and Montevideo and the near-dead Atlantic had washed ashore. Powerboats, terracotta roof tiles, ornate windowframes, blocks of rebar-impregnated concrete, wooden furniture and doors, plastic goods, tires, the husks of automobiles and train cars, chunks of tarmac, trash, the remains of the dead—a littoral dump that stretched for hundreds of miles north and south of the mouth of the Rio de la Plata, Buenos Aires's shallow and befouled estuary. Post-Rain Christmas meant suffering together in the Plaza de Mayo, enduring the muggy heat and the merciless pollen count.

But what did complaining ever accomplish? Max Sterling had asked himself. Particularly when you understood how the world worked: You railed to your best friend and commanding officer about the political climate of the Southlands, and in return found yourself in the heat. But Max understood, or thought he did. There were plenty of pilots who could have led the counterstrike against the Grand Cannon. But Hunter obviously saw the assignment as a test of Max's loyalty. Rick was making him choose sides between the RDF and those Zentraedi who had reembraced the violent terms of the Imperative. It was possible, in fact, that Rick's message had an

even more sinister meaning: his way of saying, either join us on the factory or consider yourself assigned to every counterstrike that comes along.

"Don't you dare think of yourself as one of Governor Leonard's assassins," Miriya had warned him at Fokker Base, with Dana in her arms, trying for all it was worth to tug at her mother's green hair. "You'll be up against a band of renegades, Max—Zentraedi and Human filth. I'd fly proudly at your wing if the RDF would allow me."

Her sentiments had eased what would have made for seven onerous airtime hours in Skull One—Rick's former VF-1S, the VT with the Jolly Rogered tailerons. On arrival at the Argentine Base there had been a couple of hours of rest for the whole team, then a bus ride into the city center, tapas at some bar on the Plaza de Mayo, a sneezing fit on the Avenida Nueve de Julio . . .

Miraculously, Dolza's Rain of Death had missed Buenos Aires, but the city had paid a price for being spared. It had become home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Chile, southern Brazil, Uruguay, and Bolivia. The city's sizable Zentraedi population had come from the hundreds of ships that had crashed in the Argentine mesopotamia—on the forested plains of Chaco, between the Parana and Uruguay rivers—and the hundreds more that still stippled the pampas and the windswept plateaus of Patagonia. Unlike in Brasília or Belo Horizonte, however, in BA the Zentraedi had been welcomed—even the most recent wave of aliens fleeing martial law in the Goiás and Mato Grosso districts.

At four in the afternoon on the day following his arrival, Max was back on base, sipping a glass of limeade on the veranda of the commander's house. The base was well away from the city, fifty miles west of the Avellaneda industrial center, where sundry animal products, like hides and wool, were processed before being shipped north. Max could make out mountains in the distance, eucalyptus and chinaberry trees in the middle ground, and the ruins of an old estancia on the far side of the VT landing strip. He was mulling over the upcoming mission when the commander strode onto the veranda.

"Captain Sterling," Max said, leaping to attention. "Reporting as ordered, sir."

"At ease, Sterling," the major said, motioning Max back to his seat, then extending a hand. "Honored to meet you in person. I'm Rolf Emerson."

Max shook hands. Emerson was fine-featured and solid-looking, and his baritone voice betrayed a slight Australia accent. "We have mutual friends in Monument City, Major—Lisa Hayes and Vince and Jean Grant."

"How is Admiral Hayes?" Emerson asked, pouring himself a glass of limeade.

"Frankly, sir, I haven't seen her in months. Not since she shipped for the factory."

"That monstrosity," Emerson said with patent disdain. He sat down and raised his glass in a toast. "To better days, Sterling." He took a long gulp and set the drink aside. "So what's your impression of BA?"

"Hot and crowded. But it's wonderful to see a city with most of its buildings intact."

"You're not kidding." Emerson's brown eyes appraised him for a moment. "Sorry you have to be down here for the reasons you are."

Max hid his true feelings. "About the mission—"

"Suppose we leave that for tomorrow's briefing." When Max gave him an uncertain look, Emerson added, "Having misgivings?"

"Some."

Emerson nodded. "I think I understand. But war sometimes throws us into peculiar circumstances, Sterling. I shouldn't have to tell you that. Hell, back in Australia, before the Visitor, I fought against the Neasians when they tried to march into Melbourne. Then, five years later, I fought with them when the Exclusionists had a go at the place."

"You were born there?"

"In Sydney, yes. I was fifteen when Macross Island became the center of the world. Me and a couple of friends sailed there all the way from New Zealand, just to get a look at the ship, but the supercarrier Kenosha had the place blockaded. Like nearly every other sixteen-year-old, I enlisted in the

RDF in the hope of getting posted to Macross, but that never happened. Instead, I was stationed right in Sydney and assigned to cleaning up the mess the Exclusionists had left behind. How about you Max? How old were you when the SDF-1 arrived?"

"Ten. When I heard about it I thought it was some kind of movie promotion."

A tall, dark-complected woman with handsome, angular features appeared on the veranda to refill the pitcher with limeade. Max watched her intently.

"Her name's Ilan Tinari," Emerson explained when the woman was out of earshot. "We came here from Australia two years ago, when my request for a transfer came through." He paused for a moment. "I lost my wife and our only child in the Rain."

"I'm sorry," Max said—the most oft-repeated phrase since the events of 2012. "Where did you two meet?"

"She became my chauffeur and bodyguard in Sydney when we were trying to pick up the pieces Dolza left us." Emerson watched Max for a moment, then said, "Go ahead, Sterling, say what's on your mind."

"She's Zentraedi."

Emerson smiled lightly. "You'd know, wouldn't you?"

"I only meant—"

"I know what you meant: that you generally don't see much fraternization between male RDF officers and female Zentraedi. Excepting yourself, of course. But you'd be surprised at the men I could name who consort on a regular basis with Zentraedi women."

Normally, Max wouldn't have asked, but it was plain from Emerson's expression that the major wanted him to.

"Anatole Leonard, for one," Emerson said. "Brasília's best-kept secret. But you didn't hear it from me. Besides, I'm not certain it's still going on."

Max was dumbfounded. "Then how can Leonard be so intolerant of Zentraedi rights?"

"He's a complex man, Sterling. I wouldn't even presume to be able to

explain it. No more than I could explain how it is that I'm with a person whose race was responsible for the death of my family. Or that you're married to a woman whose people you're about to engage in combat." Emerson shrugged. "Maybe we should chalk it up to the confusion of the times."

At sunrise, in the small circular chapel that stood beside Brasília's Alvorado Palace, Anatole Leonard thanked God for protecting him from the aliens' bombs. Daily prayer had long been a ritual in Leonard's life, but the sunrise sessions had only begun a month earlier, on the morning following the assassination attempt.

As old as the city itself, the Alvorado was Leonard's place of residence. The work of governing the district was done at the nearby Palacio de Planalto; but Alvorado, on the shore of Lake Paranoa, was where he relaxed, prayed, punished and, yes, was punished in return.

He understood that the bombs had constituted a warning of sorts, one aimed at demonstrating how easily evil concealed itself in the world at large. He had been arrogant that November morning in thinking himself invulnerable, in relaxing his focus on the holy imperative to eradicate the malevolent spawn of the Visitor. And so God had arranged it that others should suffer in his place—the chauffeur, the senator, young Joseph Petrie, dozens of people guilty only of adoring him . . . God was clever that way, knowing that when it came to punishing Leonard for straying, no one took a stronger hand than Leonard himself.

But where was his physical tormentor? Gone. Missing for months now, disappeared into the city's slums with the great gift he had given her. Oh, how in need she was of a touch of the whip he had taught her to wield—a taste of the flame, a flick of the blade. Satan's Whore! he screamed at the memory of her. This wasn't the exquisite torture of being left chained to a bed, crazed for her slow return and promised forgiveness. This was abandonment, pure and simple, treachery of the highest order, and if and when he ever found her he would teach her new things about pain. Then,

done with her, he would make her disappear for good. The way he had the doctors who had assisted him in impregnating her. The way he would do with Max Sterling and Miriya Parino should an opportunity ever present itself. But until such time as his vengeful fantasies could be fulfilled, he could do little more than beg God's forgiveness and promise to expand his campaign against the wretched Zentraedi.

He began his penance but had only reached his fifth rendition of the Lord's Prayer when Joseph Petrie interrupted him with a whisper from the rear of the chapel.

"Senator Moran is here to see you."

Rather than check his watch, Leonard conferred with the light entering through the chapel's rose window. "At this hour?"

"He has someone with him."

"Someone I should know?"

"The senator seems to think so."

Leonard instructed his aide to show Moran and his guest to the breakfast room of the palace, then he resumed his prayers, punctuating them with bows of his shaved head and sharp, fisted blows to his massive chest. When he marched into the breakfast room forty minutes later, he was wearing his woolen uniform and shiny black jackboots.

Patty Moran stood up to greet him, supporting himself on the ivory-handled cane that had been his constant companion since the assassination attempt. Moran's blond, half-masked guest remained seated on the brocade chair. Leonard needed no introductions.

"Thomas Edwards," he said, genuinely surprised to find the man alive after some three years. "The last I heard you I were at Alaska Base when the Grand Cannon was destroyed."

"You heard right," Edwards told him flatly.

Leonard was momentarily nonplussed. "But I thought Lisa Hayes was the only one who got out of there alive."

Edwards sneered. "Then I guess you heard wrong."

Leonard didn't bother to pursue it, knowing he would be lied to in any

case. As far back as the Global Civil War, Edwards had enjoyed that kind of reputation: mercenary for the Neasians, "facilitator" for the World Unification Alliance, intelligence officer for the Russo-and-Hayes-run United Earth Defense Council . . . "What brings you to Brasília, Mr. Edwards?" Leonard finally got around to asking.

Moran traded amused looks with Edwards. "Thomas has a Christmas present for you, Anatole."

Leonard regarded Edwards and laughed. "Imagine my embarrassment—I must have overlooked your name on my shopping list."

Edwards went along with the joke, laughing out of the undamaged side of his once-attractive mouth. "Well, how about this," he said. "I give you your gift now, and I accept your IOU for mine."

Leonard straightened his smile. "I take that to mean you know what you want."

Again, Moran and Edwards traded looks. "Did I mention," the senator said, "that Thomas has been providing the UEG with some first-rate intelligence regarding the Zentraedi malcontents? Works very closely with Niles Obstat and Dimitri Motokoff, who personally brief the RDF on all developments."

Wearying of the game, Leonard nodded, then scowled. "Suppose we come to the point, Patty."

Moran started to speak, but Edwards cut in. "All I want for Christmas is the promise of a high-rank commission in the Army of the Southern Cross. Not now, and maybe not for years to come, but at my say-so."

Leonard stared at him in astonished disbelief. "You want to be a general in my army. In exchange for what?"

Edwards met Leonard's gimlet gaze. "A bit of intelligence that's going to put 'your' army neck and neck with the RDF." He paused briefly. "The only catch is that you have to be willing to travel to get the most out of it."

2016

CHAPTER TEN

"When it came to registering them [the Zentraedi], we found ourselves up against some real problems. Because only a few of them knew how to write the glyphs for their names, most of us had to come up with a spelling based on how they pronounced their names, which usually turned out to depend on which battalions they'd been attached to during the War, and so on. So what happened, was most of us [at Macross's Alien Registry Bureau] started making the names intelligible by using close-sounding words. I remember we'd go through different phases. Like one week we'd be into using names for office stuff or things you'd find around a house, and another week we'd he thumbing through a French or Arabic dictionary. Once, we even got over into Native American culture. I can't tell you how many 'Saloiois' became 'Seloy,' and how many 'Shaaynnas' became 'Cheyenne.'"

Unattributed source quoted in Tommy Luan's High Office

Outside the daunting entrance to Fokker Aerospace's Defense Force Administration Center, a military limousine was waiting in the snow. Fat flakes were melting on contact with the car's hot hood and piling on the epauletted shoulders of two soldiers standing guard. Christmas wreaths adorned with crimson bows hung in the tall windows on either side of the center's sliding glass doors, and holiday Muzak was wafting from speakers concealed somewhere in the Spartan vastness of the lobby.

Descending into the lobby by escalator, Rick asked himself if this was indeed his life or if he'd inadvertently wandered into some stranger's anxiety dream. Nothing felt entirely real, neither the limo nor the falling snow, and least of all the red-haired lieutenant with the document-stuffed attaché cuffed to her left wrist who recently had been assigned to him. Even now the young woman was chattering into his ear about scheduled appointments at RDF HQ in Monument City. Rick had a sudden urge to switch identities with her, though he understood that to be a product of his

own dreaming.

Nevertheless, once the two of them had stepped from the moving stairway, Rick instructed the lieutenant to proceed to the car without him, explaining that he had matters of a personal nature to attend to elsewhere on Fokker Base, and that he would find his own ride into Monument City in time for the next appointment. The aide hesitated, but only for a moment, offering a crisp salute before hurrying through the sliders into the snow squall.

Rick waited for the limousine to move off, then walked across the expansive lobby to where a fighter-mode Veritech was suspended by monofilament cables from the arched ceiling. An inscribed brass plaque affixed to the belly of the fuselage explained that the mecha—the Valkyre—was the first-generation VF-1J Fokker Aerospace's eponymous Roy had flown during the War. The Valkyre had been moved from Macross City to Monument several weeks before Khyron's raid, first to the Mecha Museum on the Excaliber base, then to the aerospace base on the day of its official dedication. Rick had piloted the VT for a short period following Fokker's death, almost four years earlier. But it felt like yesterday, Rick frequently told himself, as he suspected would ever be the case.

The obvious reasons notwithstanding, the War against the Zentraedi had redefined the meaning of holocaust. Where survivors of previous wars or natural catastrophes had had to cope with deaths numbering in the hundreds or even the thousands, the Robotech War had left every survivor on Earth coping with the deaths of hundreds of millions. Every husband who had lost a wife; every parent who had lost a child; every child who had lost parents and siblings alike; every sole survivor of a village or a small city who had lost parents, siblings, relatives, and neighbors . . . The War had erased entire lineages from Humankind's family tree; worldwide, people were left family-and friend-less. Less.

Not a day passed that Rick didn't think about Roy—his best friend and confidant, his inspiration for stunt flying, his instructor in the mental and physical disciplines of mecha combat. Rick knew a lasting ache in his heart

from not being able to talk to him. To some extent, Max Sterling had assumed the role of closest friend, but Rick and Max didn't always see eye to eye on judgment calls—the use of force against the dissident Zentraedi, for one thing. That was because Rick had, to some extent, become Roy—Roy as a career fighter jock. Besides, Max was too unassuming and even-tempered to ever replace impetuous Roy. Rick figured, for instance, that had Roy been around to talk some sense into him, he probably wouldn't have spent years bouncing back and forth between Lisa and Minmei. And Roy—a pilot to the last—would have stuck by him when Rick wanted to refuse the promotion. They might have ended up wingmen on the same VT team, perhaps in the Southlands, on the very mission to which Max had been assigned.

Max wanted to believe that Rick was responsible for the assignment, that it was blackmail of a sort, designed to force Max to choose between the REF or several years of pursuing malcontents through the Amazon rain forest. Opting for the former entailed leaving Earth; opting for the latter, the risks posed by daily combat. Either way, Rick would have preferred the luxury of a choice. And he had no illusions about malcontentism, as Max seemed to have. That the Zentraedi were Miriya's people didn't mean that they were her family. Like so many Earthers now, Miriya had no family. But should Miriya decide to accuse Max of crimes against her race, was Rick then entitled to hold Miriya—another of his closest friends—accountable for Roy's death? After all, it was the all-female Quadrono battalion that had carried out the raid against the then-grounded SDF-1 in which Roy, Kramer, and so many other Defense Force fighters had died. Miriya might have loosed the blue beam that brought the Valkyre down. In the same way, Rick might as well hold Lisa personally accountable for the burst of friendly fire that had left him critically injured during that same battle.

Circling the suspended Veritech, he imagined himself flying with the Skull again—flying, instead of attending briefings, reviewing dossiers, and arguing with government bureaucrats and number crunchers over each and every requested REF expenditure. But thoughts of mechamorphing with the Skull were simply more flights of fantasy. He was no longer a pilot; he was a

public relations executive costumed in an admiral's uniform. He wanted to bitch about it to Lisa, but she was so seldom available she might as well have already left for Tirol. Bitching, in any case, wasn't what he was really after. He wanted to talk to her, friend to friend, and confide in her, lover to lover.

The squall had moved through by the time he stepped outside. He acknowledged the guards' salutes as he walked to the curb of the circular drive.

"Should I call for a car, Admiral?" one of the guards asked.

Rick had his mouth open to respond when a limousine pulled up alongside him and the driver's side rear window began to lower.

"Rick!" Behind the sunglasses and beneath the cowboy hat was Minmei. "Rick!" she repeated.

His look of disbelief gave way to puzzled surprise. "What are you doing here?"

She huffed. "Almost a year since I've seen you and that's what you ask—what I'm doing on base? Well, if you must know, I've enlisted in the REF." When Rick's jaw had dropped sufficiently, she added, "I'm only joking, Rick, though the REF could do worse than have me aboard."

"So then what—"

"I was with Colonel Caruthers. He's been giving me flying lessons. At least he was until the snow started. But, Rick, now I understand why you love flying. It's so fun."

"Yeah," Rick mumbled.

Minmei reached out the window for his hand. "I can't believe it's you. I've been meaning to call . . ."

"Me, too," Rick said quickly.

She grinned knowingly. "You've been busy. And congratulations on your promotion. The uniform suits you."

"More than the rank."

"How's Lisa? Is she here?"

Rick raised his chin to the overcast sky. "She's upside. On the factory."

"Will she be down for Christmas?"

"I doubt it."

"That's a shame." Minmei paused for a moment, then brightened. "Rick, are you busy right now?"

Rick checked his watch. "I have to be in the city by two-thirty."

"That's perfect, we have just enough time."

"For what?"

Minmei opened the door. "Get in, Admiral. Let it be my surprise."

They caught each other up on events of the past year while the limo carried them into Monument City. Minmei talked about her months in Hawaii and about having recently signed with theatrical agent, Samson O'Toole, who was negotiating a talk-show deal with the proposed Lorelei Network. The cowboy hat complemented the rest of her outfit of jeans, fringed jacket, and snakeskin boots.

Rick said little; each time he tried to respond to her questions, she interrupted him and brought the conversation back to herself. The limousine stopped in front of the restaurant Chez Mann.

"For old times' sake," Minmei said, slipping her arm through his as they were headed for the entrance.

The last time they'd been to Chez Mann she'd given him a scarf that made him look like some World War I biplane flyboy. They had talked about her career struggles, her problems with Lynn-Kyle, her desire to be finished with the "People Helping People Tour"—which the media had nicknamed the Grateful Undead tour. Minmei had had too much wine. Then Kyle himself had made an unexpected appearance, lecturing her about irresponsibility, tossing a drink in her face, tugging her from the restaurant. Seemed she'd kept an audience waiting somewhere, much as Rick had left Lisa waiting with a packed picnic basket at the Seciele Coffee House in Macross . . .

"Do you ever wish we could turn back the clock, Rick?"

"To when?" Rick nearly snapped. "I mean, when were things ever easy in our lifetimes? The Global Civil War, years of low-intensity fighting

between the Internationalists and the Exclusionists, the War with the Zentraedi, Khyron . . ."

"You're right, I suppose. But I was happy aboard the SDF-1."

"I heard you tell Katherine Hyson that."

"It's just that so much has changed since then." Minmei stepped to one side to regard him. "Look at you, look at me."

Rick glanced over Minmei's shoulder and smiled. "Some things haven't changed at all." When she had followed his look and spied a group of teenagers approaching them, he added, "People still want your autograph."

Minmei started to say something when the leader of the teenage pack waved a piece of paper in the air. "Admiral Hunter," the youth asked, "would you sign this for me?"

Minmei laughed and Rick laughed with her. "See, I told you things have changed." She took hold of Rick's hand and gave it an affectionate squeeze. "Let's at least be friends like we were before. I've got no one to talk to, Rick."

Max felt a drop of sweat trickle down the side of his face from sideburn to jaw and work its way beneath the rolled-foam collar of the thinking cap. It was three o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day in Buenos Aires and the temperature outside the Veritech was fifty-nine degrees; inside the cockpit, though, with the permaplas canopy lowered and the air conditioning switched off, the ambient temperature was closer to ninety, and Max—not only in helmet but in multi-layered flightsuit—was dressed for Arctic conditions.

He opened the tactical net to take a quick roll call of Skull's elite, each pilot crafted inside his mecha on the Argentine Base jet strip: Ransom, Phelps, Fowler, Greer, Mammoth, Bell, Zotz. Lieutenant Ransom, presently at Max's left wingtip, was second in command and, along with Mammoth and Fowler, had flown with Hunter during the War. Bobby Bell was the youngest pilot, but Teddy Zotz—fresh out of Fokker Aerospace Academy and brother of Frankie, manager of the Close Encounters game arcade in

Monument—was Skull's most recent addition. With the exception of Zotz, who was partnered with a VF-1A, the team flew twin-lasered VF-1Js.

"Preflight auxiliary checklist," Max said over the net. He flipped a series of toggles on the instrument console and watched the data-display screen for self-check responses. "Thermal shields—check; rad shields—check . . ." Telescopic enhancement, utility arms override, pilot seat hydraulic, radio/video feeds, collision warning system, canopy-ejection—manual, HUD mode control, threat-identity display, weapons-next toggle, laser targeting, interrogate friend-or-foe control display, countermeasures—electronic, chaff, flares . . .

The newer-generation Veritechs had sixty-seven controls, ranging from foot pedals to operate the legs to levers to activate the mecha's folding-torso system, though all were subordinate to the master control, which was the pilot's brain. Throwing the Guardian-mode lever without thinking the craft through the appropriate changes could land a pilot in serious trouble. The thinking cap was the material interface between Human and machine, but a thinking cap was only as efficient as the pilot who wore it. Mechamorphosis depended on a shrewd symbiosis between Human and mecha—or, depending on who you asked, between Human and Protoculture.

Piloting the VT in fighter mode, however, could be as uncomplicated as piloting a conventional craft—easier, since the Veritech's command computer was capable of not only executing perfect takeoffs and landings, but plotting courses, making necessary corrections, and tracking as many as fifty individual targets. Anything but biochauvinistic, Max had already instructed the computer to handle Skull One's takeoff and to plot the team's course north to the site of the Grand Cannon, in the Guayana Highlands of the Venezuela Sector—a distance of almost three thousand miles. Tasked, the computer informed him that their cruising altitude would be 35,000 feet, at a median airspeed of Mach one. Given the weather conditions, the estimated flight time was four hours and ten minutes; estimated time of arrival at the target was 6:40 A.M., Vene zuela-local time. Fuel was not a concern; a Protoculture-celled VT was good for approximately twelve years

of continuous intra-atmospheric flying.

Max placed his gloved fingertips on the console keyboard and called up a map of the Southlands. The flight path would take them over the Argentine mesopotamia, the still-viable city of Asuncion, Cuiabá, the forested interior of Amazonas, and Manaus, and on into the lost-world mesa region of Roraima. Darkness would mask the scarred landscape: the craters put there by annihilation bolts and fallen warships, the endless tracts of blanched forest, the burned and irradiated cities. Only the rising sun, blood-red behind a pall of lingering ash, would betray what had happened below.

Airborne, Max kept Skull One on autopilot, freeing himself to reflect on the past few days and perhaps think forward through the coming few. Anything to keep from thinking about the present.

Meeting and talking with Rolf Emerson had been an unexpected pleasure. Max hoped that Emerson and his companion would be transferred to Monument so that the friendship could continue to grow. A friendship between Miriya and the dark-complected Ilan might even be of some benefit to Dana; she would at least come to realize that the Zentraedi world didn't begin and end with Rico, Konda, and Bron. Alternatively, Max would have to see about getting Miriya to visit Buenos Aires to meet Emerson and Ilan, just to get things rolling. . . .

And he was going to have to confront Rick about pressuring him to join the REF. Max formulated possible replies and rehearsed some of the lines to himself: I'm not a diplomat, he would tell Rick. And I refuse to sign on as a potential combatant against the Masters or the Invid—not with Miriya and Dana aboard. And there was no way he would leave either of them behind . . .

Three and a half hours later, almost two hundred miles short of the Grand Cannon, Max established contact with Cavern City's RDF Base, employing a quantum-encrypted laser signal. The sun had been up for over an hour and the pale blue dome of the sky was brushed with crystalline cirrus.

"Skull leader to Cav City, requesting a news update. Anything to tell me,

Control?"

Max waited for the on-board computer to decrypt the reply, hoping to hear that the situation had been resolved. But earlier intelligence reports remained unchanged: The Cannon was in the hands of no fewer than fifteen Zentraedi, armed with eight Tactical Battlepods. Mecha for mecha the odds were nearly even, but Skull had the advantage because the pods were manned by Micronized Zentraedi; even if the headless ostriches' weapons arrays were packing full plasma charges, they wouldn't be as maneuverable or inclose capable. Generally speaking, pods only succeeded through sheer numbers, in any case.

At one hundred miles out, Max again contacted Cavern City, but this time without running the signal through the VT's encrypter. At the premission briefing it had been decided that the Skull should attempt to lure the pods into an aerial encounter. Max was grateful for any strategy that kept him from having to hear the sound of pods running on their cloven feet—a grating, almost chain-clanking noise that still rattled him five years after first hearing it on Macross Island. Battlepods might be the grunts of the Zentraedi forces, but the strident sound of an overland charge by two or three hundred pods could unsettle even the most hardened RDF combat veteran.

From twenty miles out, Max could see the gaping high-tech maw of the never-completed Southern Cannon. With the IFF still silent, he went on the net to order the Skull into a low-vector approach. Then, at the fifteen-mile mark, the targeting computer chirped and the threat-assessment display screen filled with paint. Max emptied his mind of concerns for the future, and attended to the business of war.

"Six bandits at twelve o'clock," he sent over the net. "Enabling laser targeting and Mongoose heat-seekers. Prepare to break formation on my mark."

Max ordered video enhancement of the approaching mecha as electronic icons swung crazily through the onscreen targeting reticles. The sure-kill zone for most pods was behind and slightly below the juncture of

the reverse-articulated legs, but none of the enemy were showing vulnerable profiles.

"Reconfiguring to Guardian mode," Max said, and, with a predatory bank, peeled away from the formation and fell upon the enemy.

Seloy Deparra stood at the port-side rail of the Sin Verguenza and swept her eyes along the Caribbean coast of what someone aboard the run-down trawler had referred to as Nicaragua. The sun was setting behind the shore's fringe of palms, suffusing the sky with shades of pink and purple. Seloy put her face into the wind and licked the sea salt from her lips. The four-day crossing from the mined city of Barranquilla had been peaceful, but she was eager to plant her feet on dry land once more. The infant was quiet for a change, asleep in its basket, on its stomach with its legs bent and rear end raised. The boy child had spent most of the days and nights whimpering, either from hunger or some illness contracted during the arduous journey north from Brasília; Seloy couldn't tell which, and none of the Human crew had been inclined to come to her aid. Several times she had tried to get tiny Hirano to suckle at her breast, but her milk, which had never flowed strongly, had dried up.

"Once we're ashore, we still have a long trip ahead of us," Marla Stenik commented from a few feet away along the rail.

"How long?" Seloy asked.

"Freetown is almost a thousand miles northeast of our port of call. Figure on a week's travel."

"By ship?"

Boyish-looking Marla shook her head. "Overland. Perhaps on foot."

The two women had met in Barranquilla, where they were among a group of thirty-six Zentraedi—women, mostly—all seeking passage to the Northlands. It had taken Seloy six months to get that far, surviving on the scrip she had stolen from the child's father when, sick to death of the games she had been enticed to perform with him, she had left him to the luxuries of his Brasília palace. At the time she had little understanding of those

games, though Marla had been helpful in explaining some of them since.

Seloy and the infant had gone into hiding after the May riots, then fled Brasília in the company of forty or so other frightened and equally disillusioned refugees. Never had the prospect of lasting peace between Humans and Zentraedi seemed more untenable. For a time, when she'd felt most vulnerable, Seloy had considered contacting Miriya, but in the end had decided that Miriya was better off thinking her dead. Hirano's father, obsessed with his search, would have inspected each of the dead rioters personally. And surely he was still looking for them. So it was better that Miriya remained ignorant of her whereabouts and plans.

She could only hope that the next team of assassins would succeed at their mission.

Midway into her sexual relationship with Anatole Leonard, she had begun to recall the rumors she'd heard about Khyron and Azonia in their final days, when the Imperative had broken down and they'd given themselves over to physical gratification. Seloy had had no inkling of the dangers of Human love, lust, or sexuality when she met Leonard; but she had been willing to give the relationship a try, as Miriya had with Max Sterling. Leonard, though, wasn't looking for a love partner but a disciplinarian—and who better to torture Human flesh than a Zentraedi? His addiction to pain and degradation had constituted an Imperative, of sorts, and so his desire to create a child with her had only confused her all the more. Particularly since the act was devoid of the intimacy Miriya had told her about. Instead, in keeping with the engineered thing that she was, she was artificially inseminated, rendered a mere piece of birth machinery. And when she learned late in her pregnancy—her body so altered she scarcely recognized it and her mind so warped by hormones that she couldn't think clearly—of Leonard's plan to keep the child for himself, she knew that she had to flee her royal prison and bear the child in safety. Two sympathizers, ignorant of her ethnic background, had midwived the birth and helped her to decide on the name, Hirano, which suggested a condition of being caught between opposing forces.

That first horrible night in radiation-poisoned Barranquilla, Marla Stenik had spied the infant and had asked Seloy why she was carrying the thing. Seloy had lied, answering that she had found the baby abandoned in Manaus. As to why she was carrying it, she said that the helpless thing had aroused her curiosity, adding that she felt no real attachment to it—which, in fact, was partially true. She marveled at the bond Miriya had apparently been able to form with her daughter, Dana.

During the sea crossing, Marla slowly revealed that two months earlier she had attended a rebel meeting in a jungle encampment well north of Brasília. Several hundred Imperative-driven Zentraedi and at least half that number of disaffected Humans had joined forces to launch raids on various Southlands cities and RDF installations. But Marla made it clear that she hadn't been encouraged by what she saw at the camp. While some of the Zentraedi had worked with Humans, it was obvious that they had learned nothing of Human culture or psychology. These were Zentraedi who still put their trust in Battlepods—as had the group known as Khyron's Fist, whose recent seizure of the useless Grand Cannon could only end in defeat and further shame for the Zentraedi race. Who would profit from their rashness, save for those who would die mistaken in the belief they had done so under the aegis of the Imperative?

Marla favored lofting a force of Zentraedi to the factory satellite and skyjacking the dimensional fortress under construction there. "The fortress is the key to our survival as a race," Marla had opined. She was certain that there were Zentraedi forces scattered throughout Sol's system of planets, waiting to connect with those whose warships had crashed on Earth.

Seloy and Marla's somewhat one-sided conversation had been overheard by two Zentraedi females, who had wandered over to introduce themselves. Vivik Bross was a small-boned, pixie-eared former Quadrono, while Xan Norri, with her high cheekbones and mounds of pale hair, could have sprung from the same clone queue that generated Seloy.

"I'm also in favor of infiltrating the factory," Bross said. "Not to skyjack a ship that won't be spaceworthy for years to come, but to organize a

network for smuggling mecha parts down the well to our beleaguered forces."

Seloy could still recall the amused look on Maria's face. "And just who among our 'beleaguered forces' has the know-how to make use of these mecha parts?"

Bross had pointed to Xan Norri. "She does."

Xan, it emerged, had worked closely in Macross City with a Human scientist named Harry Penn, who headed up the RDF's mecha design team. Penn had talked endlessly to Xan about the inner workings of Veritechs and Destroids. The war-widowered Penn had even confessed his love for her, begging that his secret be kept.

Xan's revelation had set Marla laughing. "I sometimes think that this thing the Humans call 'sex' is our real strength as female Zentraedi. Kissing with open mouths, touching, stroking body parts . . . Men will do anything for it. So it seems to me that the very weapon the Humans used against us during the War could be turned against them."

"Have you tried it?" Bross wanted to know.

"Of course I have," Marla told her. "How do you think I paid for my passage aboard this foul-smelling ship? And, trust me, I'm not the only one."

Seloy was struck by the fact that no one spoke for a long moment. Had exchanging sex for favors become a common though secret practice among Zentraedi females?

"So about these mecha you want to build?" Marla said at last.

"We've discovered a way to convert Female Power Armor into weapons of terror. We've already fashioned a prototype."

Seloy couldn't believe her ears. "The prototype is more powerful than Female Power Armor?"

Bross nodded. "It has three times the firepower, and it can be piloted by remote."

Even Marla was impressed.

"Our idea is to let the male groups attend to the actual combat," Xan

went on. "They're reasonably good at it, and the fighting will keep them out of our way. They would never permit a female group to lead them, but I'm certain they'll have no qualms about being supplied with weapons that match the new Veritechs in missile strength and maneuverability."

"It's all about inciting terror," Bross added. "Humans have an inborn fear of haphazard violence."

Maria was shaking her head. "Even at its most efficient, a smuggling organization based on the factory won't be able to supply what you need."

"Only some of the parts would have to come from upside," Xan argued. "Protoculture cells, remorphing relays, that sort of thing. Otherwise, we have what we need right here on Earth. Aboriginals in the Southlands have been guiding the male groups to warships so concealed by the jungle that they haven't even been logged and plundered by RDF reclamation teams. Some are plunged to their stern thrusters into the ground, others are submerged in rivers. And in addition to the ships, we have a third source: a former Quadrono named Neela Saam, who is involved in the black market in Freetown, near the city of Mexico. That's where Vivik and I are headed, along with sixteen others aboard this ship."

Seloy was taken with Xan's intelligence and confidence. "Sounds as though you've already organized yourself into a band."

"We've named ourself the Senburu," Bross supplied. She lifted her shirtsleeve to reveal a crudely executed body marking, similar to the ones many Humans sported on limbs and torsos. The term Senburu meant "silent leadership"; the dye drawing depicted the face of a woman with a hand across her mouth.

"I want to join you," Seloy had announced, only to be ridiculed by Marla and Bross.

"The Senburu needs warriors," Marla commented, "not would-be mothers."

Seloy delivered her response with firm pride: "The infant is mine; I birthed it. His name is Hirano and mine is Seloy Deparra, former commander of the Lightning Brigade."

The mouths of her audience fell. "T'sen Deparra," Marla said with wide-eyed deference. "If I'd known—"

"How could you know?" Seloy had asked. "How could any of us be expected to recognize one another on this world, after what the Humans have done to us? We are ghosts of our former selves. But I promise one thing: that we can make them pay for their injustices."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It never occurred to them [the Malcontents in possession of the Southern Grand Cannon] that the largely dismantled Cannon was worthless to anyone. So, the question frequently asked is why the RDF couldn't simply have allowed Khyron's Fist to remain where it was, rather than strike back, making martyrs of the Malcontents and ushering in the years of violence that followed. The answer, of course, is the same one invariably offered up as an excuse for responding to violence with violence: an example needed to be set.

Raphael Mendoza, The Malcontent Uprisings

"Do you have a pass to be admitted on base?" a corporal at Fokker Aerospace's intimidating front gate had asked.

"I'm Miriya Parino," she had told him, only to hear the question repeated with hostile impatience.

"You have a pass or not?"

"I'm Max Sterling's . . . wife," she managed.

The corporal had paled some, making rapid hand gestures to a security officer in the gate control booth. "I'm sorry, ma'am, uh, Mrs. Sterling. Pass right on through."

It wasn't the first time she'd been singled out for second-class treatment—the lustrous green hair consistently betrayed her—but the incident had left her feeling humiliated and angry, and Dana's insubordination was only making matters worse. The two of them were in the civilian waiting room of the Administrative Center, Miriya pacing back and forth in front of the tall windows that overlooked the jet landing field, Dana running circles around her when not climbing the seats, tipping over wastebaskets, and yelling at the top of her lungs. Elsewhere in the room were the wives, friends, and lovers of other Skull Team members: Sara Mammoth; Greer's friend, Lee something-or-other; and Tom Foley, Jim Ransom's companion. Miriya liked Jim and Tom, individually and as a

couple. Where heterosexual coupling was a source of confusion to many Zentraedi, homosexuality had a certain logic to it. Long segregated by gender, the Zentraedi identified with the concept of like-with-like, if not fully with the sexual component of the partnering.

Skull's retaliatory raid against the Southern Grand Cannon had been termed an unqualified success by the RDF: no losses for the team, and seven out of what turned out to be nine Battlepods destroyed. The other two had escaped. On learning of the success Miriya had examined her feelings. Certainly she felt something akin to relief knowing that Max was safe. But even though she was growing increasingly concerned for her fellow Zentraedi and increasingly distrustful of the motives of both the RDF and the UEG, she felt no sympathy for the malcontents who had died in Venezuela—neither pity nor sadness. Seven Battlepods had been destroyed. Not until that morning, during the ride to Fokker, had she stopped to think of the fourteen lost lives.

That in itself was unZentraedilike. The qualities of empathy and sympathy had not been written into the program the Masters had devised for their clone creations. Arrogance and aggression were the touchstones of Zentraedi character. Most lacked the ability to remember events from one moment to the next, so there was little sense of personal or racial history to their lives. They were empty shells, waiting to be filled and drained again and again. None, Miriya included, had the least idea of how old they were or just how long they might live under nonviolent circumstances. It was Dr. Lang's belief that, once inoculated against Earth's bacteria and viruses, a Zentraedi could live for hundreds of years. The challenge, however, was to create an inoculation against the persistent effects of the Imperative.

Miriya wanted a different life for Dana. That Dana was having an infancy and accumulating memories was a good beginning. Miriya thought often of the attack on the factory satellite, when she had held Dana aloft to Commander Reno and proclaimed. "Behold the power of Protoculture!" Before she had any understanding of genetics, the power of biological reproduction, or the frailties inherent in Dana's Human side. She shivered

when she reflected on the dangers Dana had been exposed to as a baby, with Max ever-patient and tolerant of Miriya's mistakes and inadvertent oversights. Did she love Dana? she frequently asked herself. Did she love Max the way Sara Mammoth loved her husband, Bill, or Tom Foley loved Jim Ransom? What had she been at the mercy of in inboard Macross when she had agreed to marry Max? Or had it been nothing more than a response to his having defeated her in hand-to-hand combat at the Peace Fountain? Would the Imperative someday reassert itself without warning, and might she then be a danger to Max or Dana? Again, she shivered. Perhaps Dr. Lang or Professor Zand could remove and banish Dana's Zentraedi programming. Hadn't Zand once mentioned something to that effect?

Her musings were interrupted by an ear-piercing squeal from Dana and the sight of Skull One roaring in for a landing on Fokker Field. The rest of the team followed, and everyone in the waiting room hurried to the window wall to wave to the deplaning pilots. Miriya scooped Dana into her arms and positioned herself among the group, the loving and vigilant partner. She watched Max climb down from his mecha, remove his thinking cap, and glance expectantly toward the waiting room. She smiled and waved a hello at him.

They embraced outside the door to the pilots' locker room. Max hugged Dana and lifted her over his head, making her laugh. He didn't offer details of the mission or his after-mission debriefing in Cavern City, and Miriya didn't ask. Instead, they kept things neutral by discussing the latest news.

"Things have gotten worse since you've been gone," Miriya said while they were walking to the bus stop. The Skull's easy win in Venezuela notwithstanding, the UEG was preparing to reestablish control over the autonomous Arkansas Protectorate, allegedly to safeguard Zentraedi citizens, when in fact the aim was to halt the emigration of Zentraedi to the Southlands and to intercept any shipments of supplies to the malcontents.

"Settlements along the Arkansas border have enacted new measures against unlawful assembly," Miriya continued, "and the RDF has been given broad authority to conduct search and seizures."

"I'm sure those laws apply to Humans and Zentraedi," Max said.

"If that's true, why is the government offering economic incentives to any Zentraedi willing to submit to voluntary Micronization?"

Max glanced at her. "Sounds like the UEG is trying to turn Arkansas into a kind of Zentraedi preserve."

"That's exactly what they're doing." Miriya put a hand on his arm to arrest his motion. Dana was riding on Max's shoulders, banging her small fists on the top of his head. "I'm worried about Dana. You may think she's too young to understand what's happening, but she does."

"I know that. I'm concerned for her, too."

"Then do you think I should ask Lang or Zand to speak with her—just to explain things?"

"That's probably not a bad idea."

"I wish there was someone who could help me."

Max regarded her questioningly.

"I feel like I have to do something." Miriya shook her head in exasperation. "The rights of my people are being violated. I'm well-known, there must be something I can do." She held Max's troubled gaze. "And one more thing, Max. I want you to ask Rick to keep you off the roster for further missions in the Southlands."

"I can't ask—"

"Please, Max. A dishonorable end will come to any RDF officer assigned there."

"I hate it, Jonathan, I'm going to hate it here," were Catherine Wolff's first words on emerging from the military transport that had carried her, her husband, and their young son Johnny from the high desert of New Mexico to the suffocating heat of Cavern City, in the Venezuela Sector. A tall and strikingly handsome woman with long red hair and a cleft chin, Catherine was highly intelligent and always spoke her mind. "We're going to do terribly here."

Unfortunately, she was also in the habit of issuing dire

pronouncements when faced with even the smallest of obstacles. But Captain Jonathan Wolff—her equal in looks, with slick-backed black hair and a natty mustache—had grown so accustomed to her moods over the thirteen years of their marriage that he scarcely paid them any mind. "Why don't we at least give the place five minutes before we decide," he suggested.

He had always been more adventurous than Catherine. His fondness for new places knew no bounds, and in point of fact he thrived in the heat and humidity of the tropics. Macross Island in the years before the War had been Wolff's fantasyland, and he would have given anything to have been aboard the SDF-1 when it had made its accidental jump to Pluto—Zentraedi attacks or no.

One of the first cadets graduated from the Robotech Academy, he had had every right to be aboard the ship. But just short of Breetai's attack on the island, fate had landed him on the RDF's Albuquerque Base, and it was there that he had met and married Catherine Montand. She had seemed daring at the time—a backpacker, a cyclist, an ace skier—but had since turned sedentary, rarely wanting to venture as far from Albuquerque as Santa Fe, let alone to the leading edge of the Southern Hemisphere. Eight-year-old Johnny, who had inherited his mother's nesting instincts, was angry at both his parents for having been forced to leave behind his friends and his favorite TV shows.

In the absence of jetways, passengers arriving at Cavern City Airport had to cross a stretch of blisteringly hot tarmac to reach the terminal. The Wolff family was struggling along with their hand baggage when a man in a lightweight suit hurried out to them from the terminal and insisted on carrying Catherine's bag.

"Captain, I'm Martin Perez, from Mayor Carson's office," he said, pumping Wolff's hand. In a courtly manner, Perez dipped his large head to Catherine, then ruffled Johnny's mop of dark curls, receiving a glower in return. "Mayor Carson requests that you stop by the Cabildo—City Hall, that is—on the way to your quarters. If it wouldn't be inconvenient, of course. Lea—that is, Mayor Carson would like to welcome you personally. She

would have met you here, but something came up at the last minute. Always a crisis, lately. I'm sure you understand, Captain."

Wolff grinned. "Sure, that'd be fine." He cut his eyes to Catherine. "You okay with it?"

"Whatever," she said, scowling.

Perez looked at each of them uncertainly. "Well, then, great," he said after a moment. "I have a car waiting out front—air-conditioned, for your pleasure—and I'll see to it that your baggage is delivered to your quarters. We can attend to immigration and customs later on."

The car was a twenty-year-old Toyota with nearly bald tires, a faulty muffler, and more rust than intact metal. The air conditioner worked well enough, but the windows had to remain open to keep exhaust fumes from fouling the cab. Perez did the driving.

The airport was situated north of the city on an expansive plateau. The two-lane road coursed through cattle-grazing land that had been hacked and burned from the surrounding forest. In the distance, in all directions, rose tall mesas with jungled crowns. Wolff, practically leaning out the window of the right rear door, was in his element, soaking in every detail of the landscape, nostalgic for New Mexico but at the same time excited to be beginning a new phase of his life. With a grandfather who had served in Southeast Asia, a father who had designed computer software, and a mother who been a photojournalist before settling down to newscasting on Macross Island, travel had been a major influence on his life. The elder Wolff had contributed to the creation of the machine language Emil Lang's cybernaut teams had used to interface with EVE, the mother computer discovered aboard the Visitor. It was on-island, at the Robotech Academy, that then-cadet Wolff had learned to pilot prototype Veritechs. But his first love had always been tanks and any sort of mobile battery—and it was Wolff himself, early in 1999, who had put in for the transfer to Albuquerque Base, which specialized in tank training.

Brian and Angelic Wolff, his parents, had died during Breetai's attack.

Except for the billboards and the ramshackle storefronts that lined the

road, there were no signs of the city; then, suddenly, the road crested a slight rise and Cavern City was below, sandwiched into a cliff-faced ravine that was itself cleaved along its length by a deep, natural trench.

"I see where the place gets its name," Catherine remarked. She was seated at the window opposite Wolff's; Johnny, sullen, was between the two of them.

"Many of our citizens call it Trenchtown," Perez said, reacting only to the question and not Catherine's nasty tone. "You'll see as we descend that the buildings have been designed to harmonize with the ruggedness of the canyon walls. Much of the adobe is provided by the land itself. The same principle has been applied in several nearby cities, some constructed on the tops of mesas, others concealed in ravines such as Cavern's. The architectural style has been dubbed 'the Obscuro Movement.'"

"How interesting," Catherine said. "We'll make sure to visit each and every one of them, won't we, Jonathan?"

"I can assure you," Wolff said brusquely.

Perez smiled uncomfortably. "Because of its location, Cavern City has been attracting diverse groups of people—some from the Northlands, many from Amazonia and the Andes mountains, and quite a number of Zentraedi who escaped the tyranny of Khyron. And now—hopefully with increased RDF presence to discourage further acts of terrorism such as occurred at the Grand Cannon—we expect an even greater influx of immigrants."

"Zentraedi immigrants?" Catherine asked.

"Some, I'm sure. But have no fears, Mrs. Wolff, Cavern City has no malcontents. We all live in harmony—just like the buildings and the land."

Catherine regarded him in mild alarm. "Are you saying that the Zentraedi live among you?"

Perez nodded. "Over four hundred of them now. We're proud that no Zee-town exists in Cavern City."

"Terrific," Catherine muttered.

Hoping to change the subject, Wolff pointed to a dome-shaped structure, close to where the simplest of bridges spanned the city ravine.

"What's that place?"

Perez glanced out the driver's side window. "Ah, that's the Church of Recurrent Tragedies."

Wolff lifted an eyebrow. "Some Southlands cult, right?"

"It's more than a cult—a religion I'd say. We also have our share of Interstellar Retributionalists, Catholics, Jews and Evangelicals. Cavern City is very multidenominational. If the Zentraedi had houses of worship, I'm sure there would be one here."

"The perfect community," Catherine said.

Perez gestured to a series of looming concrete trestles. "Soon to be our monorail," he told them.

Johnny perked up at the throaty sound of a motorcycle—a brand-new Marauder—as it roared past them on the highway. The rider wore a leather vest emblazoned with a serpentine symbol and the words RED SNAKES.

"Bikers!" he said elatedly. "Maybe this place won't be so bad after all."

Like most of the buildings along Cavern's two-mile-long main strip, City Hall was a mix of adobe and plasteel, blockish and three-storied, with a rooftop tent of solar collector panels and the requisite microwave dishes. Perez left the Toyota in an elevated lot filled with electric vehicles parked in reserved spaces, then escorted the Wolffs upstairs to the mayor's office.

"You'll like her," he said to Wolff. "She has that Irish sense of humor."

On being admitted to the office, however, Wolff thought Lea Carson appeared anything but good-natured. In her antifashion hairstyle and suit, she looked downright belligerent.

"Wolff, glad to have you aboard," she said stepping out from behind her desk to shake his hand. "I'll tell you straightaway, Captain, we've got lots of work to do here, so I hope to hell you're up to it."

"I'll do my best," Wolff said.

"You're right about that."

There were two others in the room, and Perez handled the introductions. Carson's director of emergency services, Rafael Mendoza, was a short, fair-complected black with somewhat squashed features under

a tangle of henna-colored hair. Rho Mynalo was tall and thin, with shoulder-length brown-blond hair. He bore the enigmatic title "director of information" and wore a kind of uniform whose insignia seemed to be a corruption of the RDF lighting kite.

"Rho is Zentraedi," Carson thought to point out. "He's our liaison with the Cavern's extensive alien community." She looked at Wolff. "You'll be working closely with Rho, Captain. Any problems with that?"

Wolff shook his head. "None whatever."

"That's good, because the thing I want you to understand—the thing I want the RDF to understand—is that I refuse to run this city as a fortress. That's not to say that we don't need defenses, because we do—there are many dissident groups that refuse to believe that the Grand Cannon has been stripped of useful technology—but our goal is to discover some way of letting all people partake of this city, and I do mean all people. The way things stand, we have more Human agitators than Zentraedi. Rogues, foragers, fugitives from prisons destroyed in the Rain of Death . . ." She shook her head. "Then there's this motorcycle gang, the Red Snakes—"

"We saw one of them," Johnny exclaimed.

Lea glanced at him. "They're not very nice people, Johnny. Especially their self-appointed leader, a man named Atilla One." She waved a hand in dismissal. "But we'll go into all that some other time." She looked at Wolff again. "Captain, the thing to remember is that I didn't want this posting—I had my sights set on Ireland, but Senator Moran and the Bureau of Reconstruction Management didn't see things my way. I'm determined, nonetheless, to make the best of it, and I expect you to do likewise."

Wolff gave her his best glamour-boy grin. "Mayor, I'm made for this place."

Slowly, she grinned back at him. "You know what, Wolff—I believe you." She turned to Catherine. "I can tell that you don't share your husband's enthusiasm, Catherine, but all I ask is that you give it a shot. And if you're by any chance looking for a challenge, I'm searching for someone to do public relations.

Catherine forced a smile. "Thank you, Ms. Mayor. I'll consider it."

Carson blew out her breath and rubbed her small hands together. "All right, then, first thing tomorrow we start looking at ways to beef up city security without letting the guns show. And while we're doing that, we keep all lines of communication open between Humans and Zentraedi—including malcontents."

"Shut your mouths and let him speak!" Clozan bellowed to the sixty-two Zentraedi attendees of the Cairo parley, whose loud grumblings and separate discussions had overwhelmed the envoy of Khyron's Fist. Many, following the Quandolmo's example, wore galabas and headcloths. "The least we can do is keep from squabbling among ourselves." Six feet tall and bullishly built, Clozan was the leader of the Quandolma band, which had organized the summit. The name meant "resurrected ones," and the band's glyph was a laughing skull.

Standing atop an inlaid table with megaphone in hand, Nello, the Khyron's Fist envoy, had been trying to put the best spin possible on the rout at the Southern Grand Cannon. "It was not a defeat, but a calculated sacrifice. Captain Bagzent and two others escaped with computer documents that will be invaluable to our efforts."

"Who made this Bagzent 'captain'?" someone shouted from the rear of the room. "That's a Human rank."

"What good are documents when it's weapons we need?" yelled another.

Nello waved his colorless arms in a pacifying gesture. "These are identity documents that will help us get aboard the factory—"

"Why go up the well in search of targets when we have plenty of them right here?"

Nello swung to the source of the question. "The factory isn't a target but a source of needed parts for weapons—"

"We are weapons enough," the same speaker interrupted.

"As long as we have hands and feet and teeth, we have weapons!"

Clozan shot to his feet once more, hanging his huge fists on the table. "Shut up, shut up, all of you! I will kill the next one who speaks out of turn!"

That the representatives had to be threatened was proof of the damage done to the Imperative in three short Earth years. Once, Clozan's every word would have been obeyed without question: a flagship commander in Dolza's personal fleet, he had enjoyed more authority than Breetai and Reno combined. Now all he had was the Quandolma, and all the Quandolma had was Northern Africa, from sea coast to tropics, which amounted to little more than an expanse of uninhabited desert, oddly reminiscent of the dun-colored wastes of Fantoma.

Excepting Antarctica, Africa had taken fewer annihilation bolts than any other landmass. Ravaged by disease and drought in the decades preceding the Global Civil War and by tribal warfare afterward, it had scarcely enough Human survivors to attract the notice of the warships' bioscanners. In light of the earlier indignities, many Africans thought of Dolza's anni bolts as a kind of coup de grace.

Cairo hadn't sustained a direct hit, but nearby Alexandria had, and what with the radiation born there and the slow eastern drift of clouds raised by the plasmic brutalizing of the Mediterranean, from Spain all the way round to Israel, slow death had come to Cairo's fourteen million. The city was hot, and would remain hot for a score more years.

Dammed at its delta by Alexandria's debris, the Nile had overflowed its banks to the south, leaving some of Cairo underwater. The bazaars were deserted and there were no songs in the desert air, calling the faithful to prayer. Looters had moved in once the Nile crocodiles had sated themselves on the dead. But the place was almost as unchanged as Buenos Aires. Many of the mosques and minarets and obelisks were still standing, as were the pyramids at Giza and Saggara, and the Sphinx. Clozan's crashed flagship contributed a new geometrical relic to the area.

Clozan had chosen the Al Azhar Mosque, just inside the walls of the Old City, as headquarters for the Quandolma, and the mosque's renowned library of 250,000 ancient books as the site of the summit. But it wasn't

Islamic architecture or handwritten manuscripts that had drawn Zentraedi envoys from around the world, but Clozan himself. And come they had, from as near as the Congo and as distant as Australia, representatives from the Paranka, the Lyktauro, the Iron Ravens, the Shroud, the Crimson Ghosts, the all-female Claimers and the Senburu, arriving in military and passenger planes borrowed from ruined airports, jury-rigged trucks and all-terrain vehicles, recovery craft and theater scout recon pods salvaged from crashed warships, all to pay tribute to Dolza's once-great battle-group commander . . .

And now they wouldn't even listen to him.

A full minute of pounding his fists on the table and the grousing and muttering still hadn't subsided, so he reached for the closest envoy—who happened to be from the Burrowers—and heaved him through the window into the courtyard below. That seemed to get everyone's attention.

"Now, allow the envoy from Khyron's Fist to make his point before you ask your questions." Clozan nodded to Nello. "Proceed—but be succinct, or you're the next one to leave the room."

Nello thumped his chest in salute. "T'sen Clozan. The identity documents won in the raid on the Cannon can be used to infiltrate a group of our Human allies into the factory. Several have already volunteered. The Humans will establish contact with our full-size comrades aboard the factory and determine the best means for smuggling supplies to our mecha production teams on the surface."

The room fell silent for a long moment. Clozan stared hard at Nello. "Explain yourself."

"A new form of mecha will soon be made available to us—a variation of Female Power Armor that is said to be the equivalent of the Veritech."

"Said by whom?"

Nello blanched. "I can't say, because I myself haven't been told."

"Is secrecy now part of the Zentraedi way?" the Paranka envoy asked. Everyone looked to Clozan for the answer.

"Yes," he said, after a moment of deliberation. "And other Human

strategies as well. Covert operations, abductions, ransom demands, terror tactics—these are all part of the Human arsenal, and it's crucial that we learn to incorporate them into our campaign. We must go where Khyron's honor forbid him to go, and fight the Humans on a fully integrated battlefield.

"Look how subtle the RDF has become: they make a pretense of answering to the United Earth Government as a means of deflecting the criticism of Humans sympathetic to our cause; they refuse food to the wretched Zentraedi of the Southlands, hoping they'll respond by rioting; they encircle the Arkansas Protectorate with rapid-deployment forces; they steal control of Monument City out from under the Zentraedi who founded it; they entice our full-size comrades to undergo Micronization . . . The RDF is not only waging a psychological war against us, but against all our people. And we must be willing to embrace any strategy that enables us to endure and conquer."

Throughout the library, envoys traded impassioned looks. This was the old Clozan speaking.

"We can triumph, but we must be judicious. We must operate on a need-to-know basis and take care to ferret out Human or Zentraedi spies among our ranks. We have something the Humans lack, and that is the unrelenting might of the Imperative. We need only to unlearn what the Humans have—"

Clozan's deep voice was overpowered by a rumbling sound that shook the room.

"It's coming from outside," Nello said.

Burnoosed heads swung to the window the Burrowers' envoy had been through. Filling the western sky was a flotilla of dirigiblelike warships, slung with command gondolas and bristling with weapons. Someone in the library, recognized the eagle emblems emblazoned on the ships noses as belonging to Anatole Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross.

Clozan whirled on the assembly, rage in his narrowed eyes. "We've been betrayed!" he screamed as the first volley of missiles came streaking

toward the mosque.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Poor Zand: one step behind Lang in arriving on Macross Island, overlooked by Russo for inclusion on the first team sent in to survey the Visitor; off-island on Lang's personal business when the Zentraedi attacked and the SDF-1 jumped across the Solar system, one day late (because of inclement weather) in reaching the SDF-1 after the UEDC had ordered it back into the skies, forced by circumstance to remain on the surface while Lang got to design a starship inside the factory satellite, ignored by Hunter after petitioning for a slot with the REF . . . Poor, poor Zand. No wonder he was competitive, driven, obsessed. And no wonder Earth got to reap the results of his madness.

Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.), Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War

At his desk in Monument City's Robotech Research Center, Lazlo Zand, wand-writer in hand, made stream-of-consciousness entries in an electronic notebook. In a loopy code of his own devising, he wrote: Dana . . . Dana Parino . . . Dana Parino Sterling . . . Parino, Dana . . . Sterling, Dana . . . Sterling DNA . . . His writing hand halted and he leaned back from the screen, grinning maniacally at what his subconscious mind had conjured. Yes, yes, he thought. Sterling DNA: now there was a grail worth pursuing.

What had happened these past few months, he asked himself, that his life should suddenly seem rife with wondrous possibilities? First had come the promotion to chief of Protoculture studies, resulting from Lang's appointment to the UEG. Next, a visit from Thomas Edwards, inquiring if he might be interested in doing some special research—developing a food additive capable of bonding to Protoculture at a molecular level, so that "persons" whose systems contained both the additive and Protoculture could be identified, perhaps even monitored, from a distance.

The purpose of such a chemical was immediately obvious to Zand: the

UEG—whose interests Edwards was plainly representing—wanted Earth's Zentraedi biochemically tagged. An acceptable response, given the upswing in acts of malcontentism. But Zand didn't concern himself with the ethics of the UEG's decision; what mattered was that the government had come to him. Not Lang or Penn or Bronson or Blake, but to Lazlo Archimedes Zand.

Then, most recently, who should come looking for him but Miriya Parino Sterling, wondering if he'd be willing to talk to little half-breed Dana about world events as they applied to the aliens. Mom was concerned about the effect the news might have on her daughter, and she wanted him to serve as a sort of therapist—though shaman seemed the more appropriate term, in that Parino had hinted at investigating the feasibility of somehow extracting the Zentraedi in Dana and banishing it. As if she expected him to fashion a psycho-centrifuge for the kid; strap Dana into a seat, spin her into a beneficial schizophrenia, and separate out her Human and alien character traits, like plasma from blood.

Again, he left the ethical questions unanswered. If Miriya Parino wanted to deliver her daughter into his hands, who was he to dissuade her? But what had happened to bring on such a fortuitous series of developments—without his having had to indulge in any of the usual counterfeit groveling? He was still the same sleazy amoralist he had always been. Did it, then, have something to do with the ongoing experiments with Protoculture? Had Protoculture "gotten into him," as Lang had promised it would, and were the visits from Edwards and Parino manifestations of the so-called "Shapings"?

Dana Sterling was the reason he had remained in Monument an extra week instead of returning to the Tokyo center. He wanted a crack at her before Parino's anxiety had a chance to abate, and was even now waiting for mom and daughter to show up. When the office intercom chimed, he nearly jumped out of his skin.

"Professor Zand," some research assistant said, "Dana Sterling is here."

"Good, good. And the mother?"

"No, Doctor, she's here with her . . . godfathers—"

"Not—"

"Rico, Konda, and Bron."

Zand buried his face in his hands and shook his head back and forth. Those three! He'd had dealings with them in the past when Lang's Age Determination Project was up and running, and they'd been next to useless; speaking in clichés they'd lifted from films and television, always joking around, like they were the Three Alien Stooges. Zand made up his mind to be civil to them, nevertheless, and on rendezvousing with them in the neurology lab said how splendid it was to see them again.

"Ah, I bet you say that to all the aliens," said the stout one, Bron, who was sporting a PWF gimme-cap.

"No, really, it's a—"

"Hey, Doc, you hear the one about the woman who takes her husband to the doctor because he thinks he's a chicken?" This, from the tall one with purple hair, Konda.

"I'm sorry, but I've no time for—"

Rico, wiry and mercurial, high-fived him. "'T'sup, Zandman."

Little green-blond Dana was standing among them, regarding Zand warily. "Dana," he said, approaching her with a big smile, "I've heard so much about you." As he was squatting, making himself her size, she punched him square in the nose—hard enough to smart if not draw blood. His eyes began to water and he pinched his nostrils shut. "Bell, dat basn't berry nice, was it?"

"I don't wanna talk to you," she told him.

"I'm sorry to hear you say that, because your mommy wants us to talk."

"My mommy's always making me do stuff I don't wanna do."

"But I promise it won't be so bad. I just want to ask you some questions about your house, and what you do when you're at home."

Dana looked to her godfathers for counsel, and the three of them nodded. "Go ahead, Dana," Bron said, "talk to the skinny doctor with the funny hair."

She was beyond precocious, he told himself as he was leading her back

to his office. Mature enough to field word associations, perhaps even a multiphasic personality evaluation or a thematic apperception test. Zand's imagination swirled at the thought of the family portrait Dana would draw. And, of course, he would have to order CAT, PET, CT, and nuclear scans, ultrasounds, EEGs, computed tomography studies, a full physical workup . . .

"So, tell me, Dana," he said when they were seated next to each other in his office, "do you ever get angry?"

"Sure, I do."

"And what makes you angry?"

"Doing what I don't wanna do."

"And what do you do when you get angry?"

She picked up his favorite paperweight—a fossilized chunk of amber he had purchased in Mexico twenty years earlier—and threw it against the wall, where it shattered. Zand made a concerted effort to keep from grimacing—or crying. He swallowed hard and found his voice. "And does the anger seem to come from any place special in your body—your head, your tummy, your—"

"Here," she said, pointing to her right fist, which she suddenly hurled at him, striking his jaw a glancing blow.

Zand shook the stars from his vision. "What are your feelings toward your daddy?"

"He's neat."

"Yes, he is neat. But anything else?"

"He cooks and cleans and washes the clothes."

"Very interesting, Dana. And do you love him very much?"

"Sure."

"More than you love your mommy?"

"Only when my mommy leaves me in the snow for too long."

Zand looked puzzled. "She leaves you—"

"But I don't get mad—just wet. And I always know when she's going to do it."

"Do you mean that you sometimes know what's going to happen before it happens?"

"Yep."

"Do you think you could teach me how to do that?"

"Maybe. If I can poke you in the eye first."

Zand ignored the remark. "Do you know what 'Zentraedi' means?"

"Adopted."

Zand sat back in his swivel chair. "Are you Zentraedi?"

"Half of me is."

"And which half is that?"

"The half that's gonna die."

"We've been betrayed," Niles Obstat said to the inner-circle members of the Special Operations Group—Dimitri Motokoff, T. R. Edwards, and the officers of the Southlands, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia desks. A week had passed since Anatole Leonard's Cairo attack, and the intel group was meeting in its nondescript though heavily secured building in suburban Monument City. "There's a double agent loose in the RDF or the UEG."

"No other explanation," Edwards commented.

"Intelligence about the summit was withheld from Leonard for fear of just such action."

Edwards nodded gravely. "He superseded his authority."

"His authority?" Obstat said. "He superseded his own mandate not to deploy his forces unless asked. And since when does North Africa fall within Brasília's jurisdiction?"

General Motokoff read from a situation report. "The Army of the Southern Cross defends its actions, stating that the raid was retaliatory, in response to the assassination attempt. The group that planned and funded the attack was allegedly based in Cairo."

"That's a total fabrication," Obstat said. "Why would some group thousands of miles from Brasília involve itself in the affairs of the Southlands? And it still doesn't explain how Leonard was apprised of the

summit to begin with."

Motokoff had anticipated the question. "The ASC claims that they got it out of the woman—the sympath—who survived the Brasília bombing. This can't be substantiated, because she finally succumbed to her injuries."

"Very convenient," Obstat said.

"Definitely a mole in the house," Edwards remarked.

Obstat turned to him. "Who in the UEG and the RDF had access to our intel on Cairo?"

"The bigot list was pretty extensive. Senator Milburn and the six members of the UEG's Ways and Means Committee, Senator Longchamps and the five members of the Intelligence Oversight Group, most of the RDF general staff, including Reinhardt, Hunter, Aldershot, Herzog, Maistroff, Caruthers, and a couple of others." Edwards fell silent for a moment, stroking the flesh side of his face. "It's possible . . ."

"Say it," Obstat barked. "We're only at the theorizing stage."

Edwards shrugged. "I'd have to check on this, but Max Sterling might have been told about Cairo."

"Cairo was supposed to be strictly need-to-know," Dimitri Motokoff said. "How did our bigot list get so long? And who the hell would have included Sterling on this?"

"Sterling has the necessary security clearance," Edwards was quick to respond. "Reinhardt or Hunter could have dropped something about Cairo as part of the Grand Cannon premission briefing. In the event he was obliged to conduct a field interrogation of an injured enemy, let's say."

Obstat considered it and shook his head. "Sterling wouldn't betray the RDF to Leonard. He was the one who broke the story on the Brasília riot."

"Suppose he let something slip to his wife," Edwards said.

Motokoff eyed Edwards with blatant disdain. "You're suggesting that Miriya Parino would sell out her own People?"

"Perhaps not 'sell.' Anyway, the ones in Cairo weren't 'her people'—they were malcontents." Edwards gave the distinction a moment to sink in. "Look at it this way: the UEG expects her to be a model Zentraedi, right?

And the malcontents are making it difficult for all the Zentraedi. So what better way for Parino to demonstrate her complete acculturation than to spill what she knew about Cairo. Sterling would have told her that the RDF wasn't going to interfere with the summit, making Leonard the logical choice."

Obstat snorted in ridicule. "This isn't worth pursuing."

Once more, Edwards shrugged. "As you say, we're only theorizing. I don't put much stock in it myself, but it's apparent that someone approached Leonard or one of his officers."

Obstat muttered something under his breath.

"It won't happen again," Edwards said with assurance. "Give me a few weeks and root out our double agent."

Obstat nodded and looked to Motokoff. "What's the latest on Cairo?"

"Blowback galore. The media are calling it 'St. Valentine's Massacre Two.' Over fifty Zentraedi killed by Prowler and Mongoose missiles, including, I'm sorry to report, the operative we placed among the Shroud. The Al Azhar Mosque was completely destroyed. A few newspapers are comparing it to the burning of the Alexandria library back in Greek times or whenever it was. But running side by side with every piece condemning the wanton destruction is a piece praising Leonard for the preemptive strike. Everyone's asking how the ASC knew about the summit when the RDF didn't. Or why—if the RDF did know—the summit was permitted to take place. Either way, the RDF emerges the loser. At the same time, Leonard's popularity has taken a quantum leap in the Northlands.

"The Aliens Civil Liberties Union is using Cairo to back up what they've been saying about restrictions on Zentraedi rights. But, the truth be told, a lot of people secretly respect the fact that Leonard is decisive and ruthless; they're sick of the RDF's equivocating. Most of all, the idea of an organized Zentraedi terrorist machine has people between here and Sydney taking to the streets, demanding that something be done to nip malcontentism in the bud. And the demonstrations are directed as much against the Zentraedi as they are the RDF. There've been some angry confrontations between

Leonard's supporters and advocacy groups."

Obstat hung his head and exhaled wearily. "Wait'll they get wind of this upside."

"I thought you might like to see how things are progressing," Dr. Bronson told Lisa as she emerged from an elevator on level five of Breetai's flagship. The elevator was a recent installation, and the broad corridor it opened on had been partitioned from the original 90-foot-wide catwalk that ran around the perimeter of the bridge, 150 feet above the deck.

Lang had issued orders that the ship be referred to as the SDF-3, but to Lisa the leviathan still belonged to Breetai, and it was going to take more than a shiny new elevator to make her think otherwise. Nupetiet-Vernitzs was the Zentraedi term for "flagship," and this one was more than three miles long and could accommodate upward of 100,000 crewpersons, not including space for an additional 28,900 Micronized in the stasis chamber. Though anchored in the zero-g heart of the factory satellite, the ship manufactured its own gravity.

"I think you'll be very impressed," Bronson said as he was leading her down the corridor in the direction of the command bubble—the so-called unblinking eye of the bridge. "It's turning out to be a labor of love for many of those involved."

Wherever Lisa looked, helmeted workcrews and techs were busy at tasks. The corridor was noisy with construction sounds: the sibilant roar of servowelders, the explosive thud of riveters, the whine of screwguns. Men and women consulted scrolls of blueprints or data screens filled with dizzying calculations. Waste bins overflowed with empty coffee containers and sandwich wrappings. Along the starboard bulkhead was a bank of perhaps twenty portable toilets.

Bronson halted at the hatch to the command bubble and motioned to the mushroom-shaped button that controlled it. "Admiral, if you would do the honors."

Lisa pressed her right palm against the button. The hatch divided, and

the two halves pocketed themselves swiftly and silently in the bulkhead. Her first look at the interior of the bubble was enlivened by an immediate sense of déjà vu.

"Of course, it's a long way from completion," Bronson said. "But, as per your request, we've endeavored to duplicate the layout of the SDF-1's bridge down to the smallest details. Well, I should say 'whenever possible.' Changes in technology these past twenty years dictated that we make certain adjustments. But I hope you'll agree that we've at least succeeded in capturing the feel of the old ship. After all, this wasn't meant to be a simulation—some movie set—but a fully functioning command center."

Lisa's eyes roamed the oblong room. She turned through a full circle. "I'm amazed he let you get away with this much."

Lang, she meant, who had argued vehemently against replicating even the look of the fortress's bridge, citing the unnecessary redundancies that had been incorporated into the SDF-1, the physical limitations, the innovations his systems-design teams had made since the remodeling and "Human-sizing" of the Visitor. But in the end, thanks in large part to steadfast support from Reinhardt, Forsythe, and several others, Lisa had gotten her way.

Bronson, now standing akimbo in the center of the room, was beaming. For his benefit, Lisa kept her smile frozen in place, appreciative of his efforts to cheer her. But she found it difficult to summon much enthusiasm for any aspect of the SDF-3 in the wake of news from the surface about Leonard's preemptive strike on Cairo. Demonstrations, protests, riots . . . most of them directed against the RDF for failing to act. It was a classic no-win situation. Max Sterling was branded a murderer for killing fourteen Zentraedi in the raid against the Southern Grand Cannon, and Anatole Leonard was praised for leading one that ended in four times as many deaths. Spearheaded by Senator Wyatt Moran, Brasília was threatening to secede from the UEG unless the Army of the Southern Cross received the funding and recognition it was seeking.

"The Expeditionary mission could be scrubbed if public opinion shifts

another notch," Lang had said only that morning. "The cost of retrofitting the flagship alone could finance the rebuilding of both ALUCE and Sara Bases, and the construction and deployment of a dozen ARMOR-series defense platforms."

There was nothing new in what Lang said, but hearing the words had made her feel selfish and narrow-minded about wanting to fulfill Henry Gloval's dream. And now, as her eyes took in the alterations done to Breetai's command bubble, she realized that the mystifying sensation of déjà vu wasn't always a positive experience.

Glancing at the laser communication and scanner console that took up half the starboard bulkhead, she couldn't help but picture elfin-faced Kim Young and the ever-fearless Sammie Porter; in the same way, she saw Vanessa Leeds strapped into an acceleration seat below the twin four-by-four astrogation screens, and Claudia Grant at the starboard duty station below the wraparound forward viewport . . .

If death was a joke God had played on Human beings, sudden death must have been God's idea of torture. For instead of numbing the hurt, swiftness encapsulated it. Shared experiences fled into memory like eclipsed light. Sudden death left you feeling that your own life was a mere dream. That someone could be alive one moment, then lost to this world forever, was sleight of hand of the cruelest sort.

Her first love, Carl Riber, killed in action on Mars; her father, killed in action at Alaska Base; Claudia, Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa, killed in action in Macross City . . . War had made players of everyone in the world, and given that Lisa had been in the fighting for three years longer than most, she would have thought she had a leg up on the business of dying. But it wasn't so. She grieved daily, sometimes hourly, for those taken from her. Carl's pacifism had lent a particularly tragic element to his death, whereas her father's death at the site of the Grand Cannon seemed somehow fitting for a minister of war. Shortly before Rick had flown in to rescue her, she had seen her father literally derezz on screen . . . leaving her to deal with all the usual unresolved issues between fathers and daughters.

But there were no unresolved issues between her and Claudia; none that the two of them hadn't discussed and processed endlessly after Roy Fokker's death. Especially in the weeks before Khyron's attack on Macross. Claudia had become withdrawn after Roy died, not any less a friend, but more inclined to solitude. When she ventured out, it was usually to one of Roy's old haunts, where she would sit alone with her memories. But it was Claudia who had helped Lisa admit to herself that she was in love with Rick, and indeed find the strength to tell him. Lisa had lost count of the many glasses of Whaler and Lovely Yoshie she had lifted to Claudia during the past year. And still she wondered if she could ever forgive Claudia for saving her life that fateful day in Macross—for helping Henry wrestle her into the ejection module, under the pretense that she had more to live for than they did.

Lisa walked to the facsimiles of the duty stations she and Claudia had manned for almost twelve years. Where the SDF-1's viewport had opened on stars and sky, the command bubble's overlooked a mile-long, 350-foot-high hold carpeted with complex arrays of alien and Human technology.

Lisa swung away from the view to regard the raised platform that would soon support the padded captain's chair, and she thought about Henry Gloval, her long-limbed, soot-black-mustachioed Russian commander and second-best friend. She imagined him sitting there, with his white cap tilted forward over his dark eyes and his unlit briar clamped between his teeth, and she tried hard to envision herself sitting in that chair, with Captain Forsythe occupying her place and strangers at all the other stations, and she fought back tears of anguish and vague foreboding.

Was this what Rick felt every time he watched a VT take to the skies? Lisa asked herself. Wait till he got a load of the stadium-size situation room Bronson and Lang were building for him.

"If there's anything you don't like, Admiral, or anything you'd like to see added," Bronson was saying, "now's the time to let us know."

Lisa cleared her throat and straightened somewhat, "Two small items, Doctor. I want a sign posted above the hatch that reads Watch Your Head,

and I want the seatback of the command chair outfitted with a slashed-circle no-smoking symbol."

The passenger list for shuttle flight 18-1787, departing Albuquerque Base for the factory satellite on March 23, 2016, gave the name of the occupant of seat 14 as Jeng Chiang. His occupation was listed as food service technician and his security rating was 6, which restricted him to upper levels three through six of the main body of the factory. Ratings of less than seven were denied access to the SDF-3 and its immediate environs, or to any of the secondary pods, including the numerous transfer corridors that connected them to the central body. Additional information on Chiang—available on request from the RDF's Bureau of Investigation—showed that he was born in Hong Kong in 1990 and had lived and worked in New York City until 2010. He moved to Caracas, Venezuela, in 2011, and had been visiting Angel Falls when the Rain of Death occurred. Since then, he had worked in food preparation at the Southern Grand Cannon from May 2014 through October 2015. An interview and background check had been done in Albuquerque, where his security contract was on file.

Tall, lean, and brooding, Chiang wore round, wire-rimmed glasses and parted his blond-brown hair on the right. Strapped into his seat, he had his face turned to the porthole, as had been the case since lift-off. He had endured the flight without complaint and, beyond a brief exchange of pleasantries, had said little to his seatmate.

The factory filled the view out the small window, but between it and the approaching shuttle were some twenty Zentraedi warships and the tugs that had towed them from lunar orbit to their Lagrange anchorages, attended to by reclamation crews of full-size Zentraedi. Chiang identified the dreadnoughts the shuttle passed en route to the factory docking hay: landing ship, cruiser, destroyer, command ship, reconnaissance pod, recovery pod . . . There was nothing extraordinary about the talent; indeed, enemy warship identification had been a hobby of many of those who'd lived in inboard Macross City. The difference was that Chiang was able to

supply the Zentraedi names: Quiltra Queleual, Thiev Salan, Thuveral Salan, Queadol Magdomilla . . .

The background prepared in Albuquerque made no mention of Chiang's two years inboard the SDF-1, or his facility with Zentraedi—though those facts were undoubtedly on file in some electronically dazzled Macross City databank.

Under the name Lynn-Kyle.

Kyle had come a long way since Macross, in any case. An advocate of peaceful solutions in those days, he was now a dissident. His contempt for the RDF had stood the test of time, but had been overridden by his abhorrence for Anatole Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross. Leonard's Army . . . like a film director insisting that his or her name be appended to the title of the work.

His dislike for Leonard had begun the previous year in Cuiabá and blossomed into full hatred after the massacre in Brasília. Kyle had arrived in Cuiabá with a group of disabused Zentraedi he had first met in Detroit. Back when he had had one foot in political activism and one in show business, managing the career of his cousin and onetime lover, Lynn-Minmei. The two interests had merged in the "People Helping People Tour," which Kyle had organized in the hope that music would bring Humans and aliens together. But Minmei was exhausted from the demands placed on her during the early reconstruction years, when her celebrity had reached absurd heights and people had clamored for personal appearances. The reasons were simple: Hollywood and New York had been destroyed, and few of those celebrities who'd survived the Rain—in Montana or Wyoming—had ever been big names to begin with. Kyle had been feeling the strain as well, though he hadn't recognized it at the time. Drinking too much, losing control, disregarding all that he'd learned from years of physical and spiritual training in the martial arts. For over a year, Minmei put up with his verbal abuse, until she became so emotionally drained that she couldn't sing.

The night he had walked out of her life was etched in his memory. He

could place himself on that littered, moonlit beach in Monument, hear the mournful foghorns of the ferries, recall the words of his melodramatic harangue. He had convinced himself that he was speaking his mind when all he'd actually been doing was concocting a theatrical exit for himself, one he wanted Minmei to remember all her life. It was paramount that she experience some of the pain he was feeling.

He worshiped her that much.

Meanwhile, he hadn't had a clue what to do next; but chance had delivered him to a saloon frequented by Zentraedi, and he had hooked up with them and hit the road south—thus missing by weeks the annihilation of Macross, the dimensional fortresses, and the dream of abandoning Earth for the stars. He remembered thinking, Now there can be no option but to live together as one race. He had no residual anger for Khyron or Azonia and the crushing he had almost sustained at their hands. They had done what they had needed to do.

He had renewed hope, and money enough to support himself and his fellow travelers on the long trip to the Southlands. They'd spent time in Mexico and Nicaragua, shipped for Venezuela, and journeyed by truck and riverboat to Cuiabá.

Then came the backlash to Khyron's attack on Macross: the resurgence of discrimination, the alleged food shortages, the Zentraedi bashing . . . And once more he had found himself an advocate for their civil rights—a "sympath," as those of his ilk were defined by the military. Taking their lead from Wyatt Moran and Anatole Leonard, the petty pols and bureaucrats the Bureau of Reconstruction Management had installed in the Southlands had turned a deaf ear to him, and the result was the Brasília massacre.

Kyle had been there, one of those pressed against the barricades when the VTs had opened fire and the Centaur tanks had rolled in. He still didn't know how he'd managed to survive. But with survival had been born a sense of militantism: he wanted to see the Zentraedi avenge themselves on Leonard.

The problem was that they lacked the leadership to accomplish that.

The groups at the Xingu River camp couldn't be convinced to take the long view; instead of raiding strategic targets, they wanted to attack symbols: first Leonard, then the useless Grand Cannon. But Kyle had ultimately fallen in with a group of Zentraedi females who believed, as he did, in planning a carefully reasoned defensive. At first Xan Norri, Vivik Bross, and the rest of the Senburu had refused to listen to a Human male. But when they understood that he wasn't out to get into their pants, as were most of the jungle scum and riffraff they dealt with, they began to take him into their confidence—more so when they realized that he knew quite a bit about the inner workings of the Human military machine.

He was long past using his real name, though some Humans and aliens from the old Detroit days knew who he was, who he had been. His face had appeared larger than life in Little White Dragon, and shown up so often on the news during the reconstruction years that people would still ask where they had met him before. But he had now altered his appearance to the extent that no one remarked that he resembled Lynn-Kyle, the actor.

He had been present at the inaugural flight of the Senburu group's weapon—their much-improved version of Female Power Armor. And he had carried news of that weapon back to the Xingu camp, arriving simultaneously with the three survivors of the Grand Cannon debacle, who had returned with the spoils of their action—what they had taken for "documents."

But what Khyron's Fist had in fact procured were computer codes that rendered hackable the factory satellite's security system databank. Security had always been the RDF's weak link—a lapse in security twenty years earlier on Macross Island had permitted Conrad Wilbur's anti-Robotech movement, the Faithful, to take shape right under the noses of Emil Lang, Henry Gloval, and the rest, and nothing had changed since. Security leaks were an almost everyday occurrence on the factory, where some 10,000 technicians, soldiers, mechanics, service personnel, and researchers were permanently stationed, with hundreds more arriving and departing daily on shuttles and transport ships. And as for running background checks and

issuing security ratings, interviewers had little more to go on than an applicant's word, along with perhaps a few verifiable details covering the previous two years. Personal histories had been erased in the Rain: birth, marriage, military, employment, and tax records; social security and passport numbers; banking statements, criminal records, on-file fingerprints or retinal-scan images . . . Only a relative few had emerged with traceable pasts. The rest were free to reinvent themselves without fear of being outed by friends or loved ones, or contradicted by documentation. Twenty-first-century Earth had been forced by circumstance to operate under the honor system, which frequently meant that people did pretty much as they pleased. And it was that much easier when one's inventions could be given electronic weight in a hacked database.

"Jeng Chiang" had never been interviewed in Albuquerque. Nor had any of Kyle's seven Human cohorts aboard the shuttle. The RDF's computer only said that they had been cleared for travel to the factory.

As the shuttle was entering the docking bay, Kyle could feel the slow return of gravity, vaguely oppressive, but comforting nonetheless. The debarking and contagion control procedures were tedious, but within ninety minutes of docking all forty aboard had been cycled out of the airlock into a brightly lit room where factory personnel were on hand to escort them to their postings. None of the eight co-conspirators made eye contact.

"Seylos?" a low voice off to Kyle's left asked. He turned and found himself eye to eye with a muscular Zentraedi with oily hair and a contorted mouth.

"I'm afraid you're mistaken," Kyle told him. "My name is Jeng Chiang."

The Zentraedi eyed him up and down. "You resemble a close friend of mine."

"I hope you find him. Close friends are hard to come by."

The alien relaxed somewhat, satisfied that his instincts had been correct. The code phrases, commencing with Seylos—Zentraedi for "loyal"—had been supplied to Kyle on the surface. He hadn't asked how long the alliance had been in existence, and no one had volunteered that

information.

"My name is Theofre Elmikk," the alien said after a moment.

Kyle nodded. "You understand why I'm here?"

Elmikk narrowed his eyes in scorn. "I do, but I'm against it. Why waste time smuggling parts to the surface when there are already enough comrades aboard to take control of this factory?"

"And do what?" Kyle inquired in a harsh whisper. "This thing isn't going anywhere."

"Perhaps not. But we could train its working weapons on Earth and finish what Dolza began."

Kyle snorted. "I know you don't care about killing your comrades on the surface, but what good is revenge if you don't live to bask in the praise of the Masters? You'll die here, avenged but sentenced."

"So be it."

"Do you speak for everyone aboard?"

Elmikk hesitated, then thumped his chest. "I speak for myself."

Kyle smiled wryly. "Until you speak for all, you'll follow orders—is that understood?"

Elmikk stepped into Kyle's space. "I won't take orders from a Human."

Kyle held his ground, immovable. "You're not. I'm only here to relay them and to help establish a pipeline for the supplies. Can you live with that. Elmikk."

The Zentraedi fell silent for a long moment before offering a tight-lipped nod.

"Good," Kyle said. "Now take me to a secure place where we can go over the shopping list."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Regardless that it wasn't entirely his invention, the Lorelei Network would be Milburn's downfall. However, the Lorelei Scandal notwithstanding, there seems to have been a certain inevitability to Milburn's rapid fall from grace. By 2017—largely through circumstances beyond his control—he had become the odd man out in the very apparat he had created. Maistroff and Caruthers had come aboard as a team; Stinson and Longchamps, rivals initially, paired off as did Moran and Edwards. But in the end—after the deaths of Moran, Maistroff and Caruthers, and of Edwards on Optera, and the worldwide obloquy to which Stinson and Longchamps were subjected after the long-overdue return of the SDF-3—it was Milburn who prevailed, reentering the public arena and rising to a position of political prominence.

Sara Lemule, Improper Council: An Analysis of the Plenipotentiary Council

"Call me Jonathan," Wolff said when Ron Bartley saluted and addressed him as captain. "I know it goes against protocol, but I've never been comfortable with honorifics—especially among team members." Wolff had sparkling eyes and a leading man's smile. "What do you say to being on a first-name basis?"

Bartley wasn't sure how he felt about it—or, at that moment, about Wolff. "With all due respect, sir, what might be good for morale might not be good for adherence to the chain of command."

Wolff put his hands on his hips and directed a laugh toward the rest of the team, as if including them in on the joke. "I figure Mr. Bartley deserves an A-plus for that answer. What do you guys think?"

No one knew whether to take him seriously or not, though Malone and Guttierez offered courtesy grins. Wolff cut his eyes to Bartley. "Don't concern yourself with who's in command, Mr. Bartley. I'll he calling the shots, but only when I've heard from everyone involved. As for calling me

Jonathan, try telling yourself you're actually saying 'Captain.'"

Bartley stiffened. "I'll give it a try—Jonathan."

Wolff's smile bloomed again. "You'll get used to it, I promise. You might even come to enjoy it. But until then how do you want me to address you—as Mr. Bartley, Lieutenant Bartley, or just plain Bartley?"

Bartley felt himself redden in embarrassment. Was Wolff trying to get his goat, or what? "Ron," he said after a moment.

"Ron. Okay then, Ron. Let's shake on it."

At six feet two, Bartley was as tall as Wolff but put together differently. Where Wolff was lean and wiry, Bartley was thick and solid. He was clean-shaven and wholesome looking, with hazel eyes and coarse hair the color of tomato sauce. His teeth were crooked, and he sometimes had to wear reading glasses. Wolff's tinted aviators seemed nothing more than fashion accessories to go with the tailored uniform and spit-shined boots. A poser, Bartley had thought on watching him stride into the armory only moments earlier. The slicked-back black hair and that swashbuckler's mustache . . . What was Wolff going to do if Cavern City ever ran short of hair gel?

"What's it going to be with you guys?" Wolff was asking the rest of Cavern City's ragtag contingent of RDF regulars. "First names or honorifics?"

Everyone exchanged looks, then one by one they stepped forward to introduce themselves: Paul Ruegger, Roger Malone, Martin Guttierez, Billy Quist, Sonya Ortiz, Gary Jacobs, Paolo Macbride, Jimmy Boomer . . .

"Most of us were relocated here from up north," Bartley thought to point out. "As I guess you could tell from the names. But Martin and Paolo are Venezuelan, and Sonya's from Surinam."

Wolff nodded, appraising everyone. "Where's the rest of the outfit—out on patrol?"

Bartley snorted. "We're it—since the raid on the Cannon, anyway. We lost six there, and another twenty were transferred to the Argentine two weeks ago."

The seemingly unflappable Wolff frowned. "No wonder Mayor Carson

appealed directly to Monument City for help." He fell silent for a moment, then shook off whatever disquiet he may have been feeling. "Where are you from, Ron?"

"California, originally. Near Santa Cruz. But Geena's family helped settle Cavern—my wife, I mean."

"Any kids?"

"A two-month-old daughter. Rook."

"Named after the chess piece or the European crow?"

"The chess piece. Geena's an amateur champion."

"Really. Well, Geena and I will have to match wits someday." Wolff took a long look around the cavernous room. "In the meantime, I suggest we get started indexing what you've got in the way of weapons and materiel."

Talk about a crow, Bartley thought, as he was leading Wolff across the room to the supply lockers. The captain had done nothing but try to impress them from the moment he'd arrived, flashing that smile of his. Real Robotech Boy Wonder. There were words to describe guys like Wolff: braggarts—or was it swaggarts? Whatever. Guys that got through life on their good looks and charm. Privileged guys. And Wolff was like the walking definition of charm—the personification. Absolutely. Real high opinion of himself. But just how much of him was on the level remained to be seen.

Wolff spent a few minutes cataloging Cavern City's limited inventory of defensive weapons and entering TO&E assessments in a cheap electronic notebook. "Not much in the way of small arms and munitions. What about heavy equipment?"

"Three first-generation Falcons at the airport," Malone told him. "One LVT Adventurer One, but it's waiting for parts—and missiles. Coupla Howard choppers and a Sea Sergeant, but that's got a bad Jesus nut. We had a Commanchero, but that went south with our other half."

Wolff entered more notes. "How many VTs?" he said without lifting his eyes from the display screen.

"None."

Wolff looked back and forth between Malone and Bartley.

"Excalibers?"

"None," Bartley said.

"Raiders? MACs? Spartans? Gladiators?"

Bartley kept shaking his head, astonished to find that he could derive amusement from underscoring how vulnerable the garrison was. But there was something about the effect his head shaking was having on Wolff . . .

"Son of a bitch," the captain said, "we're regular sitting ducks, aren't we?"

Grudgingly, Bartley stopped smiling to himself. Wolff spoke as if he were already one of them, taking on their fight, when he could have gone on playing the patronizing VIP from Albuquerque.

The captain switched of the notebook and perched himself on the edge of a packing-oil-stained crate of Wolverine rifles. "There's no question that RDF Command wants to help Mayor Carson turn Cavern City into some kind of model municipality, or else they wouldn't have sent me down here. But I want to be perfectly straight with you guys about what we're up against. Zee-town or no Zee-town, this place is an ideal malcontent target, precisely because of what Carson's trying to do. The malcontents are going to see it as a symbol, just like they did the Cannon."

Bartley eyed his teammates, who were all exchanging secret tell-us-something-we-don't-know glances.

"I know what you're thinking," Wolff went on. "That I'm wasting my breath stating the obvious. What I'm getting at, is that no matter what Command's intentions, we shouldn't count on Monument or Albuquerque to provide what we need. Oh, sure, I'll file my TO&E report, and in it I'll ask for twice the number of Destroids we decide on, but any mecha released are going to be slow in arriving. The Argentine has priority in the Southlands, and up north it's the Arkansas Protectorate, which has already siphoned off half of Detroit's and Denver's civil defense mecha."

"Why is Arkansas being fortified?" Malone asked. "To keep intruders out or to keep the Zentraedi in?"

Wolff shook his head. "You're not the only one asking, Rog. And, to be

honest, it scares the piss out of me. But getting back to our own special mess, all I'm suggesting is that we keep our options open and improvise when we have to. We do whatever's necessary to protect Cavern City. Can we agree on that much?"

Heads nodded. With some eagerness, Bartley noted. Damn Wolff, he was charming them. A guy who had had it all, figuring there was nothing he couldn't accomplish.

"What's in those?" Wolff asked suddenly, gesturing across the room to a series of bays curtained by roll-down iron gates.

"Just some useless pre-War stuff," Bartley answered.

Wolff inclined his head to one side. "What sort of useless stuff?"

"Centaur tanks. Somebody moved them here from their mothball site at the Cannon. By truck," Bartley was quick to add.

"They're not worth a damn, sir," Malone said, not bothering to correct himself. "Most of 'em don't even run."

But Wolff was already on his way. "Let's have a look, shall we?"

Ruegger hurried past the captain, punching buttons recessed into the wall alongside each bay. With a grating sound, the gates began to rise. Someone else hit the lights, and in swirling storms of suspended dust were revealed twelve archaic metal monsters, some with missing treads, some with missing cannon turrets. All were shot up, dented, and rusting.

Wolff, however, was grinning, ear to ear. He laid a hand on tank four's battered left headlamp. "I'll be damned if this doesn't put a new spin on the situation."

"How so?" Malone wanted to know.

"We're not as defenseless as I thought."

Malone and Bartley traded bemused looks. "But these things haven't seen action since the Global Civil War," Malone said for both of them. "And like I said, most of them don't even run."

Wolff waved a hand. "No big deal. We can recommission them."

"Who can?" Bartley said. "Samartino was our only mechanic, and he died at the Cannon."

"So, we'll requisition a replacement." Wolff adopted a sly look. "The base commander in the Argentine is a personal friend of mine. I'll ask him to temporary-duty a team of old-school techs to show us the ropes. Once we've seen them rebuild one tank, we can do the rest."

"Hope they'll be able to teach us how to drive them, too," Billy Quist muttered to Guttierez.

"We don't need them for that," Wolff said. "I studied these babies back in Albuquerque."

"Studying's one thing . . ." Quist said.

Wolff laughed, nodding his head to Quist while looking at everyone else. "Billy Worry-Wart."

Everyone laughed. "That's Billy," Guttierez said. "Our Grumpy."

"Yeah, well, know-how's good for nothing without replacement parts," Quist argued. "We'll end up cannibalizing eight tanks to get four that run, and four won't mean shit against a couple of Tactical Pods."

Wolff only laughed harder. "Parts are the least of it. Anyway, there won't be any cannibalizing." He fingered his mustache like a movie knave. "Of course, we might have to borrow against the city council's appropriation for civil defense and make a quick trip to Freetown . . . But that's improvisation for you: it takes you places you never expect to go."

Bartley allowed a slow grin, Malone and the rest way ahead of him.

"I always wanted to see Mexico," Malone said.

"Then you're with me?" Wolff said, looking around. "We're a team?"

"A pack's more like it," Quist mumbled.

"Right," Guttierez said. "The Wolff Pack."

Wolff nodded in gleeful surprise. "Now that has a ring to it."

If there was poetic justice to Brasília's ascending to world prominence after the Rain, the survival of Mexico City was nothing short of perverse irony. In the eco-enthusiastic years preceding the Global Civil War, common wisdom had it that Mexico wouldn't weather the millennium, let alone anything beyond. Bloated, polluted, subject to health-threatening

inversions and devastating tectonic upheavals, the city had been dismissed as a casualty of the modern age long before the coming of the Visitor or the Zentraedi. And yet somehow Mexico City had been overlooked by Dolza—though the west coast, from Mazatlán to Huatulco, had been obliterated—and five years later, people were still offering theories as to why: the thick smog had concealed the city from the bioscanners; those same scanners had been dazzled by electromagnetic disturbances whose source was nearby Popocatepetl; Aztec magic; the place had already appeared dead.

Whatever the cause, Mexico of 2016 was alive, as was much of the country south and east of the capital. Alive, if not exactly thriving. Even in the absence of fossil-fueled cars, smog alerts were a daily event; and there were the power failures, the periodic food shortages, the epidemics of cholera and dengue fever, nowhere more evident than in the trash-barren barrios surrounding the fortified core of the distrito federal, on the infernal side of the periphery highway. Southward, Mexico had spread itself halfway to Cuernavaca; and north to the ancient ruins at San Juan Teotihuacán. And it was from that squalid, disease-ridden, near-waterless sprawl of crumbling pyramids and garishly painted cinder-block that Freetown was born.

It had begun as Zee-town, a ghetto for aliens, many of whom, nostalgic for their former gianthood, found solace in Teotihuacán's massive earthwork structures. Then the Mexican mafia had moved in, mingling easily with the impoverished population and organized gambling and prostitution rackets and drug, arms, and contraband operations. In the beginning, the federales had tried to purge the area of crime by means of daylight raids and death-squad disappearances, but the military government soon abandoned the effort. It allowed Freetown to fester, contenting itself with the kickbacks it received in exchange for supplying electric power and, when available, potable water. A police force of sporadically paid mercenaries maintained peace of a sort, though it never interfered with gang business or warfare. As a result, Freetown had more crime bosses than it had criminal organizations, but the names of three individuals stood out: Antonio Ramos, kingpin of the narcocartels; Brian

Cassidy, supplier of everything from counterfeit scrip to mecha parts; and Neela Saam, a Zentraedi female who provided alien enforcers to Ramos and Cassidy and women to Freetown's numerous brothels, in addition to middling in black market goods and information.

And by the end of her first week in Freetown, Seloy Deparra had had dealings with all three of them. Too, she was by now the leader of a Zentraedi band that included Xan Norri, Marla Stenik, Vivik Bross, and seven other original members of the all-female Senburu group. The rest had decamped on meeting Neela and being introduced to the easy life. Neither Seloy nor Xan had tried to talk them out of it. Let them work as bodyguards or prostitutes; the new Senburu wanted nothing less than the unflinching loyalty any Zentraedi would have shown for her commander. However, Seloy had taken an instant dislike to Neela, who claimed to have been a lieutenant under Azonia, though neither Seloy nor Vivik could remember her. Was Neela inventing a past, as many Humans had done after the Rain? Had she been so corrupted by Human beings that she believed a Quadrono legacy afforded her cachet?

Seloy couldn't decide. But on this, the third meeting with Neela, she found herself in the grips of a murderous impulse. It was just the four of them this time, Neela, Xan, Seloy, and the infant, seated around a filthy table in a bar on Avenida Feo. Neela hadn't asked about Hirano, but in fact it was Hirano that was keeping Seloy from acting on her impulse; the presence of the child and the realization that the murder of a Zentraedi by a Zentraedi was conduct as corrupt and unbecoming as the pursuit of cachet among Micronians.

"The parts you requested will be available tomorrow," Neela was saying. "Though I must admit, it seems an odd assortment."

"Odd how?" Seloy asked contentiously.

Neela showed a twisted smile. "Queadlunn-Rau inertia-vector control system shunts, faceplate focusing sights, plasmic restraint chambers, power gauntlets . . . Nothing out of the ordinary there; you're obviously in possession of Female Power Armor. But these other items: Phalanx SDR-zero four-MK Twelve missile drums, along with shoulder joints, chest plastrons, MT eight-twenty-eight fusion turbines, pylons for a Decamissile array . . . Could it be that you've gotten your hands on an RDF Spartan as well?"

A small and shapely woman with short hair, violet eyes, and plump lips, she looked as if she had patterned herself after Azonia. Marla speculated that Neela had used sex to solidify her position in Freetown. The preliminary meetings had established that she could probably lay her hands on what Xan needed to transform the Power Armor the Senburu had left in the care of confederates in the Southlands. For an additional charge she could also arrange for the supplies to be airlifted south. The provenance of some of the parts was an abandoned military base near Tula; the rest had come from crashed warships looted by itinerant Human and Zentraedi foragers. Neela had confessed that she was merely acting as a go-between; Brian Cassidy was the actual provider. In exchange, Xan was offering the money she'd received from the sale of a Tactical Battlepod to a group known as the Paranka, based in the Argentine. The amount was more than adequate, but instead of being happy with the deal, Neela kept pressing to learn how the parts were going to be used.

"In other words, why would you want Defense Force missiles unless you had access to Defense Force mecha?" Neela continued. "The other thing that interests me is that you haven't asked about Protoculture. Which means either that you plan to rely on fusion, or you have enough cells to satisfy your purposes."

Not wanting to reveal anything about the smuggling operation under way on the factory, Xan told Neela that she had guessed correctly about their trusting to fusion. The MT-828 reactors had only been included in the first place to mislead her.

"I see," Neela said, not entirely convinced. "I suppose we all do what we can. But if you should happen to get a line on 'culture cells, I hope you'll come back and see me."

"Count on it," Seloy told her.

Neela glanced back and forth between Seloy and Xan. "Will you be remaining in Freetown for a while? I only ask because there's money to made here—especially for women as attractive as you two."

Xan spit on the floor at Neela's feet. "We have more important concerns than money."

"Lorelei alpha is scheduled for insertion into orbit on May one," T. R. Edwards reported to the members of Senator Milburn's political cabal: Stinson, Longchamps, Maistroff, Caruthers, and Moran. "Lorelei beta launches in July, gamma in October, delta in January. Expectations are for the network to be fully operational by no later than June 2017. As an added bonus, it looks certain that Lynn-Minmei will be hosting a call-in show."

Milburn's face lit up with amused disbelief. "How did this happy coincidence come about?"

"Nothing coincidental about it, Senator. When I heard she was shopping around for a new agent, I made sure one of them got wind of the project."

"Wonderful," Milburn said, leaning back in his swivel chair.

Maistroff scowled at the senator's patent admiration for Edwards. "Can't we rush Lorelei some? You're talking about more than a year."

"Can't be done," Edwards said. "It'll take at least that long for Zand to cook up a traceable food additive. Then, if systematic tagging is the goal, we'll have to see to it that the additive-laced food is made available to Zentraedi worldwide." He shook his head. "This sort of operation requires a great deal of time—and patience."

"Edwards is right," Milburn told the general. "Just stay on it, Edwards. Now, tell us about Zand. How did he strike you?"

Edwards touched his faceplate, stroking it lightly. "Hungry, ambitious, easily influenced. Not as brilliant as Lang or Bronson, but depraved enough to suit your purposes better than either of them would. In fact, I'd like your permission to introduce Zand to Anatole Leonard."

"What's the point of that?" Stinson asked.

"To give Zand hope, for one thing. He won't admit it, but he's pathologically jealous of Lang—he has been for years. And no matter what Zand accomplishes on his own in terms of research, the RDF is always going to remain Lang's turf. But if Zand suddenly felt that he had a defense force of his own . . ."

"You mean the Army of the Southern Cross," Caruthers said.

Edwards nodded.

"What use would Anatole have for Zand?" Moran cut in, obviously irked by the proposal. "He's against anything associated with the RDF—and that includes most aspects of Robotechnology."

"Yes, that's the reborn Faithful in him." Edwards glanced quickly at Moran. "Excuse my bluntness, Senator. I know you were also a member of the Faithful."

Judging from the facial expressions, Edwards realized that Moran's former affiliation with the religious cult was news to everyone at the table—a fact that delighted him. What Moran didn't know was that Edwards had facilitated the disbanding of the Faithful on Macross Island. At the time, he had been in the employ of Senator Russo, a man he had never liked in spite of the operational latitude Russo had given him. Russo's disappearance following the Rain remained one of the War's many unsolved mysteries—though Edwards could certainly understand why the head of the United Earth Defense Council would opt to go missing rather than run the risk of being recognized by some mob of survivors and strung up by his bootheels.

Senator Moran was beet red when he finally responded to Edwards's assertion. "Gentlemen, my flirtation with the Faithful arose out of a conviction that reconstruction of the Visitor would bankrupt us, not out of some superstitious belief that the ship had been sent by God or the devil to tempt Humankind."

"Of course, Wyatt," Longchamps said, managing not to sound patronizing.

"Finish your thought." Milburn told Edwards. "How do your propose to get Leonard interested in Zand?"

"Through Leonard's aide, Joseph Petrie—the hacker's hacker. Given a choice, Petrie would rather be a machine than a Human, and I think he and Zand would hit it off. As for Leonard, he'll gladly accept who or whatever you send him. He was extremely grateful for the intel we provided on Cairo, and he's eager to reciprocate. I recommend you continue to throw him scraps—so long as it's in your interests to do so, and providing he doesn't decide to bite the hand that's feeding him."

Moran showed Edwards a disgusted look. "You underestimate him."

Edwards narrowed his good eye. "I doubt it, Senator. But you're entitled to your opinion." The half cowl he wore felt like a cool hand clamped to the side of his face; with the cowl removed, the tortured flesh it hid felt like a lumpy growth. Some people questioned the keenness of his depth perception, but Edwards knew he could see deeper with one eye than most could see with two. And he likewise knew that he would never surrender the faceplate or have the flesh repaired—as Zand, among others, had offered to do when they'd met the previous month. A souvenir from Alaska Base, the scars had become a kind of talisman.

"How are things proceeding with Operation Tiger?" Stinson threw out to no one in particular. "Are we still sterile?"

"No leaks," Edwards assured him. "But I have to tell you, we've had a bitch of time obtaining trustworthy guards willing to staff the Protectorate. On the whole, RDFers tend to be a tolerant bunch." He gestured to Maistroff. "But the general has managed to winnow a couple of dozen xenophobes from the Detroit and Denver civil defense contingents. They're being transferred to the Protectorate border to make them available when needed."

"Now all we need is a plausible excuse for moving all full-size Zentraedi in this sector to Arkansas," Stinson said.

Longchamps showed the palms of his hands. "Can't we simply say that such a move is in the interest of their safety?"

Caruthers scoffed. "They're safest right where they are."

Milburn mulled it over for a moment. "What about spreading reports of a disease that's killing only aliens?"

"Movie thinking," Maistroff said dismissively.

"We could say that we've intercepted intelligence about raids by Human-supremist groups."

Edwards kept his mouth shut until, ultimately, everyone was looking to him for suggestions. "You're not going to scare three hundred full-size aliens out of Monument, Denver, Portland, and Detroit with rumors about diseases or incursions. You have to engineer it so that they're leaving of their own free will, or else you've already got a security nightmare just getting them to the Protectorate."

"What's your plan?" Moran asked antagonistically.

"It's twofold. First, we make it uncomfortable for the full-size by turning public opinion against them. We're already working on this by arranging for a series of firebombings to occur at RDF bases throughout the sector, in which the Zentraedi will be implicated." Edwards paused for a moment. "I understand that UEG sanction of Operation Tiger requires a majority vote, and I know you're close to having that, but it couldn't hurt to add a few Human fatalities to the firebombings. Short of some truly savage action by the malcontents, you may need fatalities to secure the support of the RDF."

Milburn made his lips a thin line, then allowed a grim nod.

"The second part requires that voluntary relocation to the Protectorate be made to seem an appealing option. The answer is obvious when you consider why the Protectorate's twelve hundred full-size have elected to live there, as opposed to Monument, Denver, or the factory satellite."

"Because of the training they're receiving in design and construction," Stinson said, with transparent impatience.

"Precisely. So I suggest you promote Operation Tiger as a plan to turn the Protectorate into a surface counterpart of the factory. A place where all full-size aliens will not only be able to escape discrimination, but to learn vital skills and offset the negative propaganda of malcontentism by making a contribution to the Expeditionary mission. Then it just becomes a matter of transporting three hundred giants to Arkansas aboard cargo plans and trucks and whatnot."

The room fell silent while Edwards's idea was considered; then, one by one, Milburn and the rest sat back in their chairs, smug and satisfied.

Six silly dilettantes who thought they had their sights set on power, Edwards told himself. Six fatuous politicians, indulging in card tricks. Not one of them understood that power wasn't something to be coddled, or cajoled, or won; it existed unto itself and answered to no one. Real power was a force to be tapped, then wielded like a blunt instrument. It wasn't something you exercised, but an energy that could be borrowed and brought to bear against whatever obstacles stood in your way.

At some point it was going to be necessary to prune the cabal of its dead wood: Milburn, Stinson, and Longchamps. Access to the RDF made Maistroff and Caruthers useful, as access to Leonard made Moran useful. But by then, Edwards would have put Zand and Petrie together and would be playing one duo against the other. The time required could be equal to that of the construction of the SDF-3, but things would eventually come together. Someone would probably have to go along on that damned mission in the event the REF returned from Tirol better equipped than when they left. Maybe Stinson and Longchamps could be persuaded, or maybe Edwards would be forced to go himself. How long could the mission require, after all? A year at the most? And during that time, Moran could assist the Army of the Southern Cross in doing away with the RDF once and for all.

But could Edwards stand being cooped up in the SDF-3 with Lang, Hayes, Reinhardt, Hunter, and the others for as long as a year? Admirals Hayes and Hunter—now, there was a bit of comic relief. Exactly what had their promotions been based on—not dying aboard the SDF-1 with that idiot Gloval? And wouldn't the two of them be surprised when T. R. Edwards suddenly emerged from Leonard's army as a general.

He had had limited dealings with Hayes or Hunter, though occasionally when he saw Hunter some of the old hatreds would rise to the

surface. Hunter was the one who'd come soaring into Alaska Base to rescue Hayes, of course. But how much weight could Edwards give that? How could Hunter have known that someone else had survived and had been trying to call out to him as he and Hayes were lifting off—someone with half his skull blown away and already vomiting from radiation sickness?

Then again, Hunter had ties to Roy Fokker, and Edwards's only regret about not having been aboard the SDF-1 was that he hadn't been around to see Fokker crash and burn. He remembered hearing about it, but no glasses had been raised to Fokker's memory. Their rivalry during the Global Civil War lacked the mutual respect rival World War I dogfighters had for their opponents. Plain and simple, Edwards and Fokker had loathed one another. And he loathed Fokker all the more for dying prematurely.

The thing was, hatred wanted a victim, and Humankind seemed too broad a target. During the coming years, while he was plotting the fall of the RDF and the rise of the ASC, he would have to try to narrow the focus of his personal goals.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

By early spring of that year [2016]—and after considerable effort—a second Earth-tech-capable docking bay had been opened in the factory satellite, on this occasion in the underbelly of the so-named three-o'clock pod. Lang's technicians had been faced with the problem of opening a portal in a triple reinforced ceramic-composite hull that immediately wanted to repair and reseal itself—a Protoculture-driven design feature shared by many Zentraedi facilities and warships. With Breetai's flagship already parked inside the factory, there was no ship available for use in conjuring open one of the coded bays, but Lang overcame the problem by using a disabled Zentraedi destroyer the reclamation crews had located in lunar orbit. Tugs steered the destroyer through a series of approach vectors until at last one of the factory's concealed gates opened. The ship was left in the breech while teams of EVA specialists labored frantically to disconnect the gate from all Robotech systemry; then, ultimately, an Earth-tech iris-portal was installed in the hull. . . . May of 2016 saw two significant launches from the three-o'clock pod's retrofitted gate: on May one, the launch of a Ghost QF-3000 EC, whose payload was the first (alpha) telecom satellite of what would eventually become the Lorelei Network. Then, on May 17th, the launch of the unmanned though highly controversial "Hades Mission," the goal of which was the retrieval from Plutospace of objects lost from Macross Island's original Robotech Research Center.

Ahmed Rashona, That Pass in the Night: The SDF-3 and the Mission to Tirol

"I can't believe you're actually going through with this," Catherine Wolff told her husband as he was stuffing his duffel with clothes selected seemingly at random from the bedroom closet.

"You've seen the reply from RDF Command," Wolff said. "What choice do I have?" The response to his report had been a month coming and

contained just what he had expected to hear.

"Oh, I see: since the RDF has ignored your requisitions, you have no choice but to supply this place with the mecha it needs."

Catherine was pacing the tiled floor at the foot of the double bed, and Jonathan's black canvas duffel was propped against the night table. Johnny was in the adjoining room, immobile in front of the interactive TV the Wolffs had purchased in Albuquerque before leaving for Venezuela—a transition-easing surprise for their son. The four-room, sparsely furnished apartment was in a new building at the western terminus of Cavern City's soon-to-be-completed monorail line. Because the canyon was somewhat wider there, the claustrophobic feel of downtown was tempered; and what with the trees, the neat houses, the churches and shopping centers, the area had an almost suburban air.

"Monument isn't dismissing the requisitions. But it might take months for any mecha to arrive, and we'll be defenseless until then."

"So is that your fault? You were sent here to evaluate the situation, not to fortify the city."

"Cavern's our home, Cath. This trip to Mexico's no more than I'd do for any place we lived."

She smirked. "The town hero. What are you going to do for your second act—run for mayor?"

He glowered at her, then let go of the anger. "There are twelve Centaur tanks sitting in the armory that only need a few parts to get them running. I'm certain those parts are available in Mexico because Mexico's old Volkswagen factories were turning out their own version of Centaurs at the end of the century. And since I'm the only one whose studied the things, it makes sense for me to go."

Catherine folded her arms under her breasts. "Who, may I ask, is paying for this little shopping spree?"

"The city council is paying for most of it."

"Most?"

"We might be required to cover some of the travel expenses—but I'm sure we'll be reimbursed."

She rolled her eyes. "You're unbelievable sometimes."

"You want me to go overland, Cath? Fine. I'll be back in a month instead of a week."

She didn't respond immediately, and when she did her tone had softened. "Is it dangerous?"

"No more than dealing with black marketeers anywhere. But instead of looking for ration coupons or luxury goods, I'll be looking for tank parts."

"Then take us with you."

Wolff showed her an imploring look. "Come on, Cath. There's always a chance something could go wrong. Having to think about your safety would be a distraction."

"As distracting as thinking about my happiness, I'll bet."

Wolff pretended not to have heard the comment. "Anyway," he said, "I've already got company for the trip."

"Who?"

"Malone. The one you said looks like he should be fronting a rock band."

"Good choice, Jon. And be sure you check out the nightclubs while you're there."

"Cath—"

"But then, you've always been good at making friends, haven't you? I mean, we've been in Cavern for less than two months and you've already formed a clique. What was it Geena Bartley called it—a pack? Now you can just lease me to rot here."

Wolff's eyes flashed anger. "If you rot here, it'll be by your own choice." Remembering that Johnny was in the next room, he lowered his voice. "I know you had your heart set on a transfer to Portland or Monument, but that didn't happen, so I suggest we both make the best of it. Johnny's adapting, and you'd get used to the climate if you didn't try to fight it. Besides, this place is wide open with possibilities—for jobs, for friends, whatever."

"Friends like Geena Bartley and the other wives of Cavern City's noble garrison of Robotech defenders? Gee, maybe I should join a parent/teachers group while I'm at it, or swear allegiance to the Church of Recurrent Tragedies?"

"You knew this was my life," Wolff seethed.

She nodded. "That's true, Jon. I'm just wondering what happened to my life. You weren't the only one with plans."

"So make them happen here. You could start by taking the job Mayor Carson offered you."

She smiled wanly.

Wolff tightened the drawstrings of the duffel. "I promise, when I get back from this mission we'll sit down and figure out a plan."

"What kind of plan?"

Wolff shrugged. "If you're not happy here in two years, I'll agree to apply for a transfer."

"Wrong," she said. "I'll give it one year; then I'm gone."

"Down there," Narumi said, pointing to a clearing in the forest far below them. "Two hours to be there."

Bagzent exhaled slowly and ran the back of his wrist over his sweat-beaded brow. Two more hours—he could surely endure that much. But for the past ten days, it had been torture keeping pace with the aborigine who had led him through hundreds of miles of forest to the meeting place specified by the Senburu females. Now, standing on the limestone rim of the basin that hid the Senburu camp, Bagzent allowed himself a relieved exhale for the first time since departing the Xingu.

"We go." Narumi said, setting off at a brisk clip on sturdy brown legs that carried him effortlessly through the thickest vegetation. Bagzent nodded to his comrades—the two other remaining members of Khyron's Fist—and hurried after the Indian, down into the bush, down into the tangled biomass that was the green heart of the Southlands.

For all the adversities—heat, rain, swollen streams, stinging insects, barbed trees—Bagzent had come through the journey with an unanticipated appreciation for the planet on which he and so many Zentraedi were marooned. An appreciation and something more, something his mind had been striving to define these past few days. Early on he thought that perhaps the sameness of the forest had left his mind hungry for visual information in the same way his body hungered for nourishment. But slowly he began to realize that what he had taken for sameness was in fact the opposite: living diversity raised to an unfathomable magnitude. Each plant and tree and airborne or crawling insect fitting into the whole like the interconnected parts of some grand machine. Birds eating fruits, then shitting the seeds which would grow new trees, yielding more fruit for those same birds . . . Animals feeding on the flesh of other animals . . . Flora that exhaled gases necessary for the survival of the fauna . . . Snakes living out their infancy in earthen tunnels excavated by armies of leaf-cutting ants . . . Other ants nesting inside the thorns of trees . . . Vines that provided drinking water, trees that provided nourishment . . . It was impossible for him to conceive that Amazonia hadn't been fashioned by Masters like those on Tirol, and yet Narumi insisted time and again that Earth had no Masters; that even the Micronians that inhabited the planet had had nothing to do with its fashioning, but were themselves only part of the whole, and were, like Earth's other living things, at the mercy of foul weather, earthquakes, volcanic activity, and the impacts of meteors. More, that the jungle had evolved—shaped itself over eons—guided only by the thoughts of a rarely seen, intangible being Narumi called Wondrous Spirit.

All this was incomprehensible to the Zentraedi, and especially baffling to one who had known only the insides of Battlepods and warships and rarely the surface of worlds. And coming as it did, on the heels of the Fist's Pyrrhic victory at the Grand Cannon, the experience of interconnectedness had begun to erode his convictions about warfare—to undermine the destructive fervor hardwired into him by the Imperative.

If order was inherent to the world of Wondrous Spirit, whose bidding did the Zentraedi do by fomenting disorder?

Whatever the answer, Bagzent had found himself asking continual questions of Narumi and the other Indian guides, eager to know the taste of each fruit, to learn which trees supplied timber for construction and which supplied leaves for medicine, to identify the forest's animals by their deposited scat. His respect for the aboriginals was unbounded, for like the Zentraedi, they existed in the moment and they lived their lives with a sense of fierce determination. Unlike the Zentraedi, however, Narumi's people were not without Personal and collective histories, nor did they answer to an embedded Imperative. At all times they seemed to know their place in the physical world; without them, Bagzent and his comrades would be lost to the forest . . .

Entering the Senburu camp two hours later, Bagzent saw that several other malcontent bands had accepted the females' invitation. Already present were representatives from the Steel Wind, the Shroud, and the Crimson Ghosts, all of whom had been guided to the basin by either aborigines or rough-and-tumble Humans who made the jungle their refuge.

Bagzent recognized most of the male warriors, but only a few of the Senburu females. Xan Norri he had met years ago in Macross, when she was working for—and perhaps providing sex to—the Robotech scientist Harry Penn. The petite and combative Marla Stenik had spent time at the Xingu camp. Vivik Bross and Seloy Deparra—Senburu's apparent leader—he knew by reputation as Quadrono aces under Azonia.

The camp was much more elaborate than the one Khyron's Fist and others had hacked from the northeastern jungle bordering the Xingu River. The women had taken over an abandoned gold-dredging operation and had refurbished the processing plant and some of the heavy equipment. Employing bulldozers and cranes, they had erected several tall buildings and cleared a landing strip suitable for small planes. The accomplishments were both daunting and humiliating to the men—none less so than the centerpiece of the camp: a deliberately modified Queadlunn-Rau battle suit, accoutered with three times the usual number of autocannons and twice the pulse lasers. The 55-foot-tall weapon retained its humanoid appearance, though the twin-lobed top-mounted booster pack and suggestion of gun-turreted head made it look like the offspring of Power Armor mated with Robotech Destroid.

Bagzent kept one eye on the thing through the rest of the day and throughout the long night, getting little sleep as a result. The following morning he managed nonetheless to summon enough energy to drag himself to the briefing the Senburu had scheduled.

"We've decided on the name Stinger," Seloy Deparra announced, once everyone had been fed and gathered round the alloy-clad, cloven feet of the hybrid mecha. "The reason we haven't afforded it a Zentraedi name should be obvious to all of you who understand the nature of terrorism: we want the Humans to be on speaking terms with this weapon"—she gestured to the Stinger—"because we plan to introduce it as a recurring feature in their lives."

Deparra explained that the battle suit itself had been salvaged from a crashed destroyer, of which there were many studding the forest in the vicinity of the Senburu camp. Bagzent had noted several on his way in, though he doubted he could make his way to them again without Narumi's help. The RDF-mecha parts welded and riveted to the battle suit had been supplied and delivered by Zentraedi operating in Freetown.

"And certain parts have come to us indirectly from the factory satellite," the Senburu leader continued, "by means that are better left undisclosed. Our goal, in any case, is to make these available to your groups so that you can conduct your raids with more resources to tap than the boldness of the Imperative."

Deparra motioned everyone away from the mecha; then, on her signal, the Stinger launched from the clearing and jinked through a series of lightning-quick maneuvers.

"Six autocannons, a quartet of high-speed triple-barreled pulse lasers, flight speed equivalent to that of the Veritech, limb strength equivalent to that of the Gladiator, missile capacity greater than that of the Spartan and

Excaliber combined . . ."

Bagzent tried to follow the Stinger's aerial gyrations, but the attempt left him dizzy and even more disheartened.

"Modifications to the inertia-vector control system make it unmatched in maneuverability by current Robotech mecha," Deparra added.

The Stinger performed a low-level flyby and landed.

"What do we have to do to get one?" a member of the Shroud asked with suspicion.

Deparra's sloping eyes found him in the crowd. "For now, all we're asking from the male groups is assistance in locating parts—any Destroid, intact or disabled, will suffice—and financing to pay for what can't be procured by salvaging. This means that some of you may have to engage in commonplace robberies in place of unadulterated mayhem. Just member: the goal is to render our enemy terror-stricken. Once we've accomplished that, we can begin to formulate our demands."

Deparra lifted her face to the mecha. "Each of our prototypes has outperformed its predecessor." Lowering her head, she scanned the audience, fixing briefly on Bagzent. "The time has come to test one on a live target."

Take Manhattan as it was before the Rain, and roof the whole island over at the height of the Empire State Building. Next, extend the walls of most of the buildings up to the ceiling and obliterate all the windows and doorways and architectural adornments. Efface all setbacks so that the building walls become sheer and featureless. Now remove the cars, the parks, the people and their pets, dim the lighting to a phosphorescent glow, and raise the gravity slightly above Earth normal. The result would approximate the chase shaft that bisected the ovoid central body of the factory satellite between the ceiling of level seven and the systems-clad floor of the bridge, a five-mile-long techno-dungeon of dendritelike relays, arterial-like conduit, and ligament-like cable, serviced and policed by an array of bipedal and airborne robots. Not the sort of place a rational person would choose to visit, let alone solo, but Lynn-Kyle had never considered himself rational, and he functioned best when alone. Granted that the vastness of the space could send even the most intrepid of explorers to the edge of agoraphobic panic, but Kyle had immunized himself to all unreasonable fears by learning to think of the thousand-foot-high chase as a kind of crawlspace—for someone Godzilla-sized, to be sure, but a crawlspace nonetheless.

It was fourteen hundred hours factory time and Kyle was on his lunch break. The cafeteria for service providers was two levels down, but he had stopped there only long enough to be observed by several coworkers before riding an empty cargo elevator up to level six. His rating didn't permit him to ascend beyond six, but a Human member of the alliance who worked security on seven had been waiting for him at the elevator and had stayed with him all the way to the retrofitted ladder and hatch that accessed the chase. The climb alone had taken five minutes.

Kyle had a battery-operated miner's lamp strapped around his head and a large bucket-style pack on his back. Shown the route by Elmikk a week earlier, he moved quickly, fingertips in constant contact with the towering walls at his left side.

Under normal conditions the outer walls would have run straight from one end of the shaft to the other. But the same glitches that had shut down mecha production the previous year had somehow deluded the factory's central computer into believing that the chase had been penetrated by non-Zentraedi interlopers, and as a consequence security partitions had risen from the floor, dropped from the ceiling, and slid from the walls, turning the chase into a veritable maze. Huge reservoirs of drinking water or lubricants had been drained dry, smaller basins had been filled; conduit systems had reconfigured; some areas had been misted with acid or flooded with toxic fumes. There were places where the temperature was subzero, other places hot with radiation. The route Elmikk and his cohorts had explored and mapped avoided the worst of the danger zones, though Kyle understood that the configuration of the bulkheads would surely change if the main computer went back online. And the factory's robot defense units, quiescent the past year, would mobilize.

The route took Kyle past examples of some of those units: a 42-foot-tall Destroyer, whose reverse-articulated legs had walked it into a corner; four crashed, silent assassin "Buzz-Bot" airborne robots; and several multi-armed precision engineer drones—also grounded—which featured optic and sensor arrays for locating and tracking intruders by heat, motion, and sound.

As things stood, Kyle had two roles in the smuggling operation he had helped organize: he was the first to see the "shopping list" carried up the well by Humans who interfaced on the surface with the Senburu group, and he was the one who made the pickup of Protoculture microcells and passed them on to carriers who smuggled them down the well. Theofre Elmikk was tasked with filling the list, but the actual procurement was done by a team of vacuum-deployed aliens under Elmikk's command—giants who worked outside the factory, dismantling derelict Zentraedi ships. Once the smuggled parts made planetfall—at Denver, Albuquerque, Monument, or other ports of entry—they were muled to the Senburu's Southlands mecha facility by Humans or alien members of the alliance.

For one trained in the arts of stealth, purposeful swiftness, and fearless concentration, the labyrinthal trip from the ladder-fed hatch to the drop point—a distance of just over one mile—required ten minutes. Having already logged eight round trips that week alone, Kyle made it in nine minutes. He glanced at the luminescent dial of his watch: 14:38. He had to be back at his food-processor station in the kitchen by no later than 15:15. He would be late if the drop wasn't made in the next five minutes.

But even as he was thinking it, he heard, just ahead of him, the pneumatic sound of a hatch being raised. And a moment later, highlighted by the stark illumination of a level seven corridor, a hairy fist the size of a passenger car appeared in the opening, quickly and efficiently ridding itself of its palmed parcel of purloined Protoculture.

In the center of the flatscreen, against a viscous, transparent background, a faintly blue and vaguely circular object was being buffeted on all sides by smaller, oval-shaped objects, a few of which had managed to attach themselves to the circle by means of slender stalks.

"The large object is the Protoculture molecule," Lazlo Zand was explaining to T. R. Edwards. "Surrounding it are molecules of the protein I've developed. Notice how the Protoculture resists all attempts at bonding." Zand intensified the magnifying power of the electron microscope, zeroing in on an arc of cell wall. "What's mystifying is how such an impermeable substance can be so utterly responsive." Zand recalled the earlier screen; by now some half-dozen ovals were firmly stalked to the Protoculture molecule. "Luckily, my protein seems to be getting through to it."

"Looks a little like the factory satellite," Edwards commented, narrowing his eye somewhat.

Zand regarded the screen in pleasant surprise. "So it does."

Edwards had flown to Tokyo immediately on learning of Zand's success, and just now the two men were in the professor's office at the Robotech Research Center. A disorderly rectangle tucked away in subbasement three, the office reeked of mildew and Zand's rather pungent body odor. A few plants, including a bonsai, were dying, and the wastebaskets overflowed with fast-food wrappings.

Edwards clapped his hands on his thighs. "I'm very pleased, Professor, as I'm certain my employers will be."

Zand's eyes bulged when he grinned. He switched off the computer feed to the screen, called on a bank of overhead lights, and planted himself behind his desk.

"In fact," Edwards continued, "something interesting came up while I was submitting my last progress report. My employers have asked me to arrange a meeting between you and a young man named Joseph Petrie, a very talented hacker. Either here, or in Monument, or—if you're not adverse to travel—in Brasília."

"This Petrie is a Southlander?"

"He's chief aide to Field Marshal Anatole Leonard."

Zand's expression went from confusion to consternation.

"No reason for concern," Edwards said. "Petrie has a strong interest in machine intelligence and my employers feel that he could profit from meeting you."

Zand's fears weren't entirely allayed. "Do you represent the Army of the Southern Cross, Mr. Edwards?"

Edwards ridiculed the idea. "I have no military affiliations, Professor. I assure you, this meeting is strictly in the interest of science. Though I have to admit, it wouldn't hurt to count someone like Leonard as a friend."

"Why is that?"

"Because the Army of the Southern Cross is basically fledgling operation, compared to the RDF. And who knows, Leonard might have need for a researcher such as yourself."

"Yes, but—"

"Don't get me wrong, I know you're loyal to the RDF. But I also know how hard it can be to get funding for research, and right now Leonard is hungry to achieve parity with the RDF in terms of state-of-the-art technology."

Edwards trained his eye on Zand. "Don't tell me you don't have your pet projects, just as Lang has his."

Zand swallowed audibly. Pushpinned to a cork bulletin board were photos of a dozen Zentraedi, including Rico, Konda, Bron, Miriya Parino, and an infant that could only be Dana.

"I have a few ideas—"

"Of course you do. But it's damned hard getting anyone to listen when Lang's busy sucking up every available research dollar. I mean, can you believe the RDF agreed to fund that robot mission to Pluto?"

Zand's look hardened. "He always gets what he wants."

Edwards nodded in sympathy. "The pecking order. Just like in the military." He leaned forward conspiratorially. "Between you and me, you should have heard some of the comments about Hayes and Hunter when word got out about their promotions. You don't think people felt overlooked?"

Now Zand nodded. "They have it so easy, designing their ship and filling it with mecha while the rest of us have to scrape by on allocations from the UEG. You begin to feel useless."

"The Japanese used to have a slang word for it—chindogu, I think it was. An object of questionable value, like an umbrella with a remote control, or a toilet seat that adjusts to the dimensions of your ass."

"Exactly, exactly."

"That's why I mention Leonard: as a potential funder, nothing more than that."

Zand took a breath. "Yes, thank you, Mr. Edwards. And please tell your employers that I'd be delighted to meet Mr. Petrie, where and whenever it's convenient."

"They'll be pleased to hear it." Edwards fell silent for a moment, then said, "Seems unfair that Lang should get everything he wants just because he happened to get his brain boosted."

Zand stared across the desk without saying anything.

"I was with him when it happened, Zand. Inside the Visitor. One minute he's touching things on the console in Zor's cabin; the next, he's out like a light. But when he woke up, his neural circuits had been rearranged—just like what happened to one of the recon robots we sent into the ship."

Zand wore a faraway look. "I would give anything . . ."

"To take the jolt?" Edwards asked. "So what's stopping you?"

Zand cleared his head with a shake. "For one thing, Mr. Edwards, that console no longer exists."

Edwards snorted, then smiled affably. "There was nothing special about that console. It was just a matter of Lang's sticking his finger where it had no place being. Making contact with that impermeable Protoculture of yours. Lang wasn't going for broke, Professor—it was an accident. But don't tell me there isn't something you guys salvaged from the SDF-1, maybe something right here in the Center, that couldn't produce the same effect."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Numerous versions exist of Jonathan Wolff's "shopping trip" to Freetown, including those reported by Wolff's companion, Roger Malone (in Strange Days: Fighting, Men and Women Talk About the Malcontent Uprisings) and Brian Cassidy (in Mizner's Rakes and Rogues: The True Story of the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission). Attempts at arriving at an authentic version—mostly by members of the "Wolff Cult"—have repeatedly failed. However, all are in agreement that the Wolff legend has its true beginning in Mexico.

Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

Around them lay torsos and body parts: smooth, hairless heads, unadorned limbs at odd angles, a forest of upraised arms, all racial types and skin shades represented, bloodless and fashionably thin, reflecting the outré, "deepspace" trend of 2009—before the arrival of the aliens that would usher in a whole new look.

The mannequin morgue occupied the rear of a garage in what had been a Wal-Mart department store in the northern suburbs of Mexico City, looted during the race riots of 2012, burned and abandoned the following year, and now engulfed by the sprawl of the Freetown barrio. Hidden among the mannequins, Jonathan Wolff and Roger Malone had an unobstructed view of the doorless shipping and receiving entrance. They had been sitting like that, hunkered down among the plastic heads and bodies, for well over an hour.

"Is this going to happen without gunplay, Captain?" Malone asked, using the honorific the way one would a sobriquet. He was a twenty-two-year-old with pleasing features and a thick mane of blond hair that fell below his broad shoulders. Even in Cavern City, he favored bandannas and brand name tees like the ones he was wearing now. "You think this Cassidy's for real?"

"Is anybody for real in Freetown?" Wolff answered. Are we for real?"

Malone shook his head in dismay. "Mexico sure ain't what I thought it would be."

Their handguns were enabled and within easy reach; it had been that kind of week.

On first arriving in town they had made the usual mistakes: taking a pricy room in a spy-ridden hotel, inquiring indiscreetly about people who might have a line on tank parts, showing way too much of the two thousand World Dollars liberated from Mayor Carson's slush fund. Wolff quickly realized he had been wrong to assure Catherine that black marketeers were of a kind no matter where you went or what you went looking for. Sure, even in Albuquerque you could get scammed out of a few dollars by money changers with a knack for prestidigitation, but at least there you didn't get shot at. Whereas by day four in Freetown, Wolff and Malone had been shot at twice, most recently by three gangsters in the employ of a teenager who'd approached them on the street with an offer of ubertech computer chips—chips Malone later identified as having come from a ten-year-old Petite Cola robovendor. Then, the following day, there'd been the four would-be muggers and the ensuing brawl which accounted for Wolff's still-bruised knuckles and Malone's fading shiner.

It was the fight that had convinced them to forsake their swank suite for a flea-infested hotel room on Reforma Nueva, where they'd slept in shifts and ordered in meals of McTacos while reformulating their plans. Through it all, though, Wolff had remained confident, reasoning that it was only a matter of time before word on them reached the ears of someone who could actually do the deal: procure the tank parts and orchestrate their transport to Venezuela.

And ultimately that someone had turned up, in the form of a pigeon-chested black Irish named Brian Cassidy, who happened to be Freetown's most celebrated fence.

"I've only come out of curiosity, you understand," Cassidy had told Wolff at their first meeting. "Two guys with World Dollars to spend, asking about tank hardware . . . You have to be military, don't you, now."

Wolff saw some benefit in being honest with Cassidy and had admitted that he and Malone were RDFers.

"And why's the Defense Force coming to Brian Cassidy all of a sudden?"

"Because the RDF won't have anything to do with Centaurs."

"Centaurs." Cassidy had exclaimed, grinning. "Well, now you've handed me a regular challenge, haven't you?"

That had been five days ago. Then, only that morning, Cassidy had sent word that the purchases had been made, and that the deal would go down at noon in Wal-Mart's receiving bay number one.

"It's gotta be close to noon now," Malone was saying. His watch had been slipped from his wrist even before they'd exited Mexico's airport.

"Five minutes," Wolff told him.

But another forty-five minutes would pass before they heard the six-note horn signal Cassidy's runner had told them to expect. The blasts were followed by high-beam flashes against the back wall of the garage; then a boxy, petropig truck nosed slowly into view through the gaping, fire-blackened entrance. Before the truck came to a halt, two Zentraedi armed with Wolverines leapt from the rear. After a moment, Cassidy climbed out of the front passenger seat and asked in a loud voice if anyone was there.

Wolff and Malone picked their way out of the morgue and approached, their handguns visible but nonthreatening. The Wolverines tracked them until Cassidy told the Zentraedi to lower them. Wolff and the Irishman shook hands, street fashion.

"Did you get everything we wanted?" Wolff asked.

"More than you wanted. You won't be disappointed."

"Where are the parts from?"

Cassidy shook his head. "That information wasn't included in the deal."

"Let's have a look."

Wolff started toward the truck, but Cassidy blocked his path. "Sure thing, soldier. But first I'd appreciate having a look at the balance of payment."

Wolff cut his eyes to Malone, who lifted his T-shirt to reveal the bundles strapped to his abdomen.

Satisfied, Cassidy gestured gallantly toward the rear of the truck. He, Wolff, and Malone were halfway there when shots rang out from behind the concrete that pillared the entrance. Hit in the shoulder, Cassidy fell, while his enforcers returned fire and Wolff and Malone dove for cover behind an overturned dumpster.

Within moments, the two Zentraedi were cut down, as well as Cassidy's Human driver, who tried to make a break from the cab of the truck. The Irishman, meanwhile, had dragged himself to safety.

A hail of rounds forced Wolff and Malone to the grimy floor, unable to respond; but Wolff lifted his head in time to see a Zentraedi female dash through the entrance and clamber into the unoccupied driver's seat. When she had backed the truck out, three more alien females, firing handguns over their shoulders, vaulted into the rear of the truck.

"Cursed women," Cassidy moaned as the truck was speeding from the scene.

Wolff and Malone ran to him. Malone folded his bandanna into a square and pressed it against Cassidy's shoulder wound, then went to check on the three others. Wolff knew without looking that they were dead.

"Neela set us up," Cassidy said in a pained voice.

Wolff had heard the name. Neela Saam was a Zentraedi female, who had made a name for herself in Freetown. "Want to talk about it?"

Cassidy shut his eyes and nodded his head. "The Centaur parts came from a malcontent group called the Crimson Ghosts. Their headquarters is one of the old arms factories down near Tula. But Neela helped put the deal together."

"So were those Ghosts that took the truck?" Wolff asked. "The Ghosts are an all-male band. But there've been rumors about an all-female band operating in Freetown. The Senburo or Senburu, something like that. Neela must have told them about the sale, figuring she was striking a blow for malcontentism."

"Have someone watch your back next time you make a delivery," Wolff said.

Cassidy looked peeved, in spite of the pain. "This is my town, soldier. No one does this to Brian Cassidy. I'll have the heads of those four Zents on my desk before the sun goes down."

The paved but seriously deteriorated highway between Cuiabá and Brasília was routinely swept for mines, but recent reports of malcontent activity in the area required that all vehicles travel in convoys under RDF escort. So it was that Edmundo Ortiz found himself at the tail end of a line of two hundred and six tractor-trailers, pickups, passenger cars, and RDF armored personnel carriers.

It was a cloudless June morning and Mundo was behind the wheel of a vintage right-drive Mercedes truck loaded down with several tons of rice and coffee from the fincas of the Planalto de Mato Grosso. Outside the curving sweep of the wiper blades the Mercedes's windshield was red with road dust, as was every horizontal surface and nook and cranny of the cab, from the duct-taped vinyl seat cover to the plastic statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe that sat on the dashboard. A swarthy man of sixty years, Mundo had his right arm out the window and the radio tuned to a station that played Mexican ranchero and pre-War country-western from the United States.

Mundo had been a professional driver for more than forty years, and was no stranger to the 500-mile Cuiabá-to-Brasília run. In the late seventies, he'd been one of the first to drive the Trans-Amazon from the coast clear to the Peruvian border, back when everything west of Porto Velho was pura selva—pure jungle, as it was once more, though no longer virgin forest but scrubby secondary growth that had reclaimed the frontier settlements abandoned after the Rain. Gone, too, were the indigenous peoples, the gold and diamond prospectors, and the once-productive cattle ranches. Now Cuiabá, the geographic center of the continent, was itself the frontier, vulnerable north and west to raids by the aliens who controlled the river systems of the interior.

At the head of the line, and largely responsible for the tedious pace—the convoy had left Cuiabá at midnight and bad not yet reached the bridge over the River Araguaia—was some newfangled RDF vehicle said to be capable of detecting and disarming land mines, including enemy knockoffs of the ceramic-encased AM-2s. Two Veritechs providing aerial escort had thus far kept to the skies for the entire trip. Mundo could see both of them up ahead, flying tandem in Guardian mode, a few degrees south of the highway.

Mundo was smoking his tenth cigarette of the morning and dreaming lazily about the platter of grilled meat he would have for lunch at Pito Aceso in Goiás Velho when some kind of craft flashed over the cab of the truck, streaking toward the front of the convoy. Just as the roar of the thing's engines was catching up with Mundo, one of the Veritechs vanished in a fiery explosion that blossomed in the southern skies.

Mundo's feet sent the brake and clutch pedals to the floor, and he leaned forward in the seat, with eyes wide and mouth open. Then, all at once, what had been the windshield was a thousand pebble-size pieces of glass and the top of his right thigh was on fire. He looked down to find his lap filled with windshield and a small fire spreading from the perimeter of a neat hole that been punched through his khaki trousers. Reacting without thinking, he began to beat at the flames, becoming more and more aware of the shrapnel lodged in his flesh.

A second deafening explosion rocked the truck. Mundo's right hand flailed at the door lever, and he rolled out of the cab and onto the sun-blistered surface of the highway. The sky was filled with fire; he could feel the searing heat on his face and the back of his hands. The roar he had heard only moments earlier returned, and he looked up to see some sort of patched-together Battloid hovering like an outsize bumblebee a couple of hundred feet above the midpoint of the convoy. Then the mecha was suddenly at the epicenter of a fireworks display of corkscrewing trails of smoke, and a split second later explosions began to mushroom, head to tail, down the length of the convoy.

Much to Malone's grudging admiration, the captain refused to call it a bad deal and return home. "We're out a grand, but Cassidy's out a lot more than that," Wolff had said. "He'll come through. And if he doesn't, I'll personally replace the thousand we lost and we'll start from scratch."

But it never came to that. The Irish fence contacted them at the hotel on Reforma Nueva: the shipment had been retrieved and there was something he wanted them to hear. They were to leave at once for an address on Victoria.

The address corresponded to a theater out by the pyramids. Teotihuacán's Temple of the Sun—partially stripped for building materials—loomed over everything in the area. At the theater entrance, Wolff and Malone were frisked by two armed Zentraedi sporting dark glasses, then escorted inside. A handful of Cassidy henchmen seated in the front rows were applauding and whistling in a mocking fashion.

On stage were Cassidy himself—left arm in a sling—and two others: an aged, dark-complected man in a bloodstained surgical gown, and the obvious source of that blood, a Zentraedi woman gagged and tied to an armchair. Just now her head was bent forward, and her long brown hair was touching her bare knees. The hair concealed much of her torso, and for that—and arriving late—Wolff was grateful. If she wasn't already dead, she would be soon.

"Ah, and it's a fine day in Freetown," Cassidy said in a theatrical voice. He gestured to the torturer. "Soldiers, meet Antonio Ramos . . . interpreter."

Like Neela Saam, Ramos was a notorious name in Freetown. A noted heart surgeon before the War, he now controlled the trade in narcotics throughout Central America and was rumored to dabble in ritual black magic.

"I told you we'd find them, and so we have," Cassidy continued. "Three were killed defending the truck they stole from me, but we've learned a good deal from this one."

He walked to the chair and lifted the woman's head by the hair; she was certainly dead. Malone clamped a hand over his mouth and angled his head away from the stage.

"The four were members of a group that calls itself the Senburu, though I've no proof that Neela set them on us. This one claimed they've been watching the Crimson Ghosts for some time, knowing the Ghosts are providing weapons and parts to any and all buyers—even those whose aims aren't always in synch with the malcontents."

Wolff was appalled by Cassidy's sadism, but forced himself to ask the man what else the Zentraedi had revealed about the Senburu.

"Only that they're not operating in Mexico, as I was led to believe, but in the Southlands."

"Where in the Southlands?" Wolff pressed.

"She was mute on that point. But she did confess that her group needed the tank parts."

Wolff's brow furrowed. "Did she say why?"

"For something she called a 'stinger.'"

The first reports to reach Monument City were sketchy: all anyone knew was that a convoy under RDF escort had been attacked near the city of Goiás, in the Southlands, and there were civilian casualties and extensive destruction. Then, as an accurate picture of the malcontent raid began to emerge, the UEG's Select Committee on Military Policy convened in extraordinary session in the hardened subbasement of the Capitol Building. The government was represent by senators Milburn, Stinson, and Huxley; the RDF by Reinhardt and Hunter. Also in attendance were intelligence chief Niles Obstat and weapons specialist Dr. R. Burke. Burke had just arrived from the factory satellite and had yet to get his surface legs; Reinhardt and Hunter had just arrived from fly fishing in the Rockies and were still in their civvies.

"The most recent update lists 205 dead," Huxley was saying, reading from a fax sheet. "That total includes two RDF pilots, a tank commander, and three enlisted-ratings attached to the construction battalion. Teams from Cuiabá Base are still picking through the wreckage, and Field Marshal Leonard is demanding to know what we intend to do about the attack. The Army of the Southern Cross has moved two companies into Mato Grosso, where they're awaiting word from Leonard."

Rick listened to Huxley's report with growing alarm. If the RDF didn't act decisively, Leonard would have the excuse he needed to assert control over the whole of the southern Amazonia. The showdown that could result carried the potential for military confrontation. The pattern that had led to the Global Civil War was being woven again.

"Do you have the names of the VT pilots?" he asked after a moment.

"First lieutenants Dieter Baumann and Liu Houze."

Rick nodded gravely. "I know them. And I can't accept that either of them would allow the enemy to get that close to the convoy." His voice betrayed his bewilderment. "The rebels don't have any mecha sophisticated enough to subvert our scanners or employ countermeasures. Exactly how many vehicles were hit?"

"One hundred and ninety," Huxley said grimly. "Almost the entire convoy. It was a massacre."

Rick wrote the number on a notepad. "Do we have reliable intel on the number of enemy mecha involved?"

Huxley cut her eyes to Obstat.

"One," Obstat said.

Rick stared at him. "I don't understand."

Obstat cleared his throat. "Eyewitness reports state that one craft was responsible for all the destruction."

"Impossible," Reinhardt told him. "Even a fully laden Officer's Pod isn't capable of delivering that much destructive power. Cuiabá's eyewitnesses are obviously in shock."

Obstat's expression confirmed that he had expected skepticism. "Cuiabá found no evidence of atomics, plasmic, or pulse lasers used against the vehicles. Detonation footprints point to the exclusive use of multiple independently targeted warheads—probably Decas and Mongooses. Descriptions supplied by the ten survivors who could talk were assembled and handed over to a computer for evaluation." Obstat struck a key on his terminal that lit the wallscreen. "Here's what the machine came up with."

Approximately the size of a Gladiator, the headless mecha that appeared onscreen had armored limbs and carried a bulbous, twin-lobed thruster array on its shoulders. Everyone regarded the thing in bafflement.

"Any thoughts, Dr. Burke?" Senator Stinson asked.

The Robotechnician plucked nervously at his chin. "I've seen something like this before, but I'll need to consult my files before I can say where or when. My inclination, however, is to suggest that it's a variation of Zentraedi Female Power Armor."

The most maneuverable of the aliens' self-propelled exoskeletons, Female Power Armor—also known as the Queadlunn-Rau battle suit—was a deadly combination of missile launchers, autocannons, and triple-barreled pulse lasers, enhanced by a high-speed focusing sight built into the faceplate and an inertia-vector control system that regulated acceleration and fuel efficiency in the absence of Protoculture cells. Unlike the Battlepod, Power Armor had mechanically operated legs and antis, and was capable of speeds in excess of Mach four; and unlike Male Power Armor, which was essentially a deepspace labor mecha, it was designed to meet the rigors of intra-atmospheric flight.

Rick did some quick calculations on his notepad. "The total payload of Female Power Armor is only, what, about one hundred and twenty short-range missiles."

"One hundred and twenty-six," Burke corrected.

"Still, allowing for targeting errors and such, we'd have to be talking about at least two battle suits, possibly three."

"Unless this one has undergone substantial modification, as is indeed suggested by the computer's rendering."

Rick looked to Obstat. "Have you had any advance intelligence on this weapon?"

"I think we have. From a Captain Jonathan Wolff, squadron commander in Cavern City."

Rick nodded. "I know Wolff. What about him?"

"Seems he recently took it upon himself to visit Freetown to buy parts for some Centaur tanks he's overhauling. In any case, his little shopping foray was almost thwarted by members of an all-female Zentraedi group called the Senburu. They apparently tried to hijack his tank parts to use for a mecha they're assembling—something they referred to as a 'stinger.'"

Rick glanced at the wallscreen. "Is that what we're looking at—a Stinger?"

"They didn't build this machine out of twenty-year-old Centaur tank parts," Burke said. "Destroid hardware, certainly. Along with an abundance of Protoculture circuitboards. There's no other way to account for its operation by one or two pilots."

Huxley glanced around the table. "Are Protoculture cells suddenly available on the black market?"

Obstat shook his head. "Not in quantity."

"What about the Senburu?" Rick asked the intelligence chief. "If they're headquartered in Mexico, why would they attack a convoy thousands of miles away?"

"We don't know that they are headquartered in Mexico." Obstat struck another terminal key, calling a map of the world onscreen. "This is our latest breakdown of malcontent bands and territories. All we show for Mexico and Central America are the Crimson Ghosts, an all-male group led by a Zentraedi named Jeram Salamik. The Southlands have three known groups: a band known as the Shroud, based in the north; the Paranka, or Burrowers, in the Argentine; and however many remain of Khyron's Fist. Africa has the Iron Ravens and perhaps a splinter group from the Quandolma, and India's seen some malcontentism by the Lyktauro. But the only all-female band we've heard about is the Claimers, whose actions so far have been restricted to Australia and New Zealand."

Senator Milburn scarcely let Obstat finish. "It appears to me that the malcontents have continued to organize, despite Field Marshal Leonard's move in Cairo."

"The number and the talent pool of their Human allies must be increasing as well," Burke said. "I can assure you, this Stinger's control and management operating systems were not engineered without Human assistance. Or without someone with hands-on experience in mecha engineering."

Milburn gave his head a mournful shake. "I'm sure I don't have to tell anyone here how news of this attack is going to be received in Monument and other cities. People are going to demand reprisals, and if we falter, they're going to be looking to Anatole Leonard."

Rick shot Milburn a look. "We can only take reprisals against the group responsible, and we can't do that until we've located them."

"I disagree, Admiral," Stinson rejoined. "While the Senburu may have been directly responsible, they are obviously being funded and supplied by other Zentraedi—perhaps from the Arkansas Protectorate."

"Arkansas's aliens are friendlies," Rick objected. "You can't punish them for the violent actions of others."

Milburn answered him. "But that's precisely the point: we can't tell the friendlies from the enemies. Besides, any action taken in Arkansas would be prophylactic, not retaliatory. What we're really battling is the Imperative, and we simply want to assure those we've been empowered to protect that their safety comes first. Or would the RDF prefer to defer to the Army of the Southern Cross?"

Rick gritted his teeth. "I want it on record that I'm opposed to taking any action in Arkansas until proof of complicity can be established."

"So recorded," Milburn said. "The UEG will have to vote on any proposed action. In the meantime, I strongly suggest that the Expeditionary force reevaluate the security of its operations aboard the factory satellite."

In the same way that self-images of obesity could live on in newly thin people, recollections of gianthood persevered in Micronized Zentraedi. Though self-image didn't count for much when you found yourself at the receiving end of a tongue-lashing by someone the size of Breetai.

"The Protoculture cells used to power the Stinger could only have originated here," the commander was telling his lieutenants, Jevna Parl and Theofre Elmikk, "and I want the flow of smuggled technology stopped immediately."

Standing side-by-side on a Human-size catwalk on level seven of the factory satellite, Parl and Elmikk were no more than ten feet from Breetai's huge, flesh-and-metal face—his eye filled with anger, his breath like malodorous gusts of wind, spittle flying like bucketfuls of water. Exedore was also on the catwalk, silent and observing, and somewhat out of the harm's way.

"M'lord, the inventories have been checked and rechecked," Parl replied, "and all Protoculture cells and circuitboards are accounted for."

Breetai's lip curled. "If all are accounted for, it's clear that the contraband was never inventoried. The source is surely the warships our EVA teams are disassembling. What is the procedure for monitoring the workers?"

Parl relaxed somewhat as Breetai's eye focused on Elmikk, who supervised the labor crews. It was only right that Elmikk bear the brunt of the castigation, Parl thought. As liaison to Lang's technical crews, Parl rarely saw cells or boards until they were already installed in devices transported to the in-progress SDF-3.

"On reentering the factory," Elmikk was saying, "both Human and Zentraedi workers leave their suits and gear in the airlock, where everything is scanned for Protoculture. Then the workers themselves are searched."

"And the heavy work drones?" Sometimes referred to as "Mr. Arms," the 220-foot-long, multi-armed robots were factory-programmed for hauling cargo and attending to all facets of spaceship maintenance and repair.

"They are thoroughly searched after each operation."

"Detail how the workers are searched," Breetai ordered.

"They are made to show their hands, spread their toes, lift their arms, open their mouths . . ."

"Are they scanned for Protoculture?"

"Your Excellency," Exedore cut in. "Because of Protoculture present in the genetic composition of the Zentraedi, X-ray or magnetic scanning is considered unreliable."

"Exedore, there are aspects to this operation that make it something more than mining ore from Fantoma. What if chips are being ingested and excreted?"

Elmikk hesitated. "I don't know that anyone has addressed that possibility."

Breetai smirked, and looked at Exedore. "It strikes me that cells might present a problem for the Human digestive system."

"You are correct, my lord. Only a Zentraedi could carry and pass a Protoculture cell without harm to himself or the device itself. I will confer with Dr. Lang about developing a scanner capable of identifying the presence of other-than-systemic Protoculture."

"That's a beginning, but it may not be enough, Exedore. Since you are the sole Zentraedi allowed to travel routinely between the surface and factory, it can be deduced that Human coconspirators are responsible for smuggling the cells down the well."

Exedore bowed his head slightly. "An astute deduction, m'lord."

"Then this shouldn't be our concern," Elmikk said. "The Humans have their own security procedures for determining which are allowed access to the factory. Let them investigate this matter."

Breetai regarded Elmikk for a long moment. "Smugglers require product, Elmikk, and that product is being supplied by Zentraedi laborers. Their actions imperil the lives of Human civilians as well as those of our comrades on Earth. So see to it that the work crews understand that Breetai wants the traitors found, and he vows to assume a personal hand in their punishment."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Chief among the RDF's many failures during this period [the Reconstruction years, 2012-2017] was its tacit approval and participation in Operation Tiger. If Reinhardt and the command staff had been merely hoodwinked by the Milburn-Moran apparat, their actions could be excused as unfortunate; but since evidence abounds that Reinhardt was fully aware of what he was doing by authorizing the operation, the RDF's participation appears all the more reprehensible. Reinhardt was not entirely to blame, however. Pressured by UEG on one side and by the REF on the other, he constantly ran the risk of alienating one by placating the other. Such were the circumstances forged by the Army of the Southern Cross and the Expeditionary mission. And caught in the middle were the Zentraedi, of all persuasions. . . . Given the conditions in the Protectorate, it is remarkable that only 32 of the 1396 detainees died.

Jill Boyce, Death Under Canvas

With the destruction of Dolza's fortress by the SDF-1, the ships of the Zentraedi Grand Fleet—deprived of any hope of Protoculture replenishment—were suddenly abandoned to the gravitational urgings of the small planet they had come halfway across the galaxy to obliterate. For reasons unknown, Wuer Maatai, commander of the Jiabao Battalion, had opted to steer for Earth's daylight side; but of the 10,700 Jiabao warships that had survived the nuclear outpowering of the Grand Cannon, only 8,550 were successful in reaching Earth's envelope, and of those, some 7,000 were soon reduced to little more than glowing meteors whose ballistic descents terminated in impact craters. 1,554 ships, bearing an estimated 1,860,000 animated and torpored alien warriors, struck the surface intact. Less than 100,000 survived. What with ensuing deaths from injuries, illness, and starvation, in addition to the diaspora to Macross and other cities of the Northlands, scarcely 4,000 remained in 2013, roughly a third of whom were full-size.

Because Wuer Maatai did not survive, it was never ascertained whether fate or the commander himself had delivered the Jiabao to south-central North America. The end result was fortuitous, in any case, in that the mountainous, oak, hickory, and maple-forested northwest corner of the former state of Arkansas comprised the calm center of a swirling firestorm that ultimately incinerated St. Louis, Atlanta, Dallas, and Oklahoma City.

Simultaneous with the fiery arrival of the Jiabao, the bulk of Arkansas's Human population abandoned their homes and businesses and fled the area, only to die of radiation poisoning at the edges of their safe haven. The few that remained forged a wary truce with the Zentraedi, but one that grew stronger as illness and the traumatizing effects of defeat settled over the bereft aliens; and within months the two groups of survivors were working hand in hand—the Humans assisting in repairing the XTs' nutrient synthesizers; the giants helping to rebuild what their warships had atomized or crushed.

By late 2014, the Macross Council had granted autonomy to the Arkansas Protectorate—so-called despite its occupying only a quarter of the district—and the RDF had established a base for the engineer corps, with an eye toward the formation of a reconstruction battalion capable of tolerating the perilous radiation of Earth's remaining hot spots.

Though not a member of original Jiabao settlement, Ranoc Nomarre had been a resident of the Protectorate for almost two years. Short and muscular, he had an angular face, jaggedly scarred along the right cheek, and a crew cut that made his head appear more blockish than it actually was. Early on, the training in construction techniques struck him as antithetical to his warrior nature, but he had gradually grown to appreciate what it meant to raise a structure rather than raze one. He especially enjoyed the daily routines of study and hands-on labor, the scenic beauty of the Ozark Mountains and the Buffalo River, and the fact that he had a roofed-over space to himself in the enormous facility built by RDF CeeBees.

Lately, however, the routines had changed. As a response to increasing incidents of malcontentism, security had been tightened and inspections had become no-notice searches. Then the Protectorate's borders had been closed and fortified by platoons of civil defense Destroids. And just as suddenly Ranoc Nomarre had acquired two roommates. Similar surprises were rumored to be occurring throughout the facility.

At the moment, the new arrival named Utema was emptying the meager contents of a duffel onto a parcel of soft ground he apparently proposed to claim as a bed.

"You say you're from Detroit?" Nomarre inquired mildly.

"And Macross before that." Curly-haired and unremarkable looking, Utema had a gravelly voice and a rotten disposition. "Had a factory job, but I quit it to wander. A year later I was sick of the wastes and wound up in Portland, working at a fish hatchery." He spat and jerked a thick thumb at the other newcomer. "He's from Monument."

The narrow-shouldered and somewhat retiring Rilpa nodded. "Macross and Monument." He was without a duffel, and his Zentraedi uniform was filthy, frayed, and crudely patched.

Nomarre had never seen the Twin Cities, though he knew Detroit and Denver well enough. A former Botoru, he had taken part in Khyron's hostage raid on the latter city, though his foolish protest at the rough treatment Lynn-Minmei was receiving had earned him a kick in the gut from the Backstabber himself, and subsequent ostracism from the Earthbound battalion. Fifteen days of walking had carried him to the Protectorate, where he'd been ever since.

"How are things in Monument?" Nomarre asked Rilpa.

"Not good. It's another Macross now. Our kind have no say in what goes on. The Humans that stand with us are outnumbered by the ones who see a dissident in every Zentraedi. They detonate firebombs and blame us for the deaths and destruction. I'm glad to be gone."

"The same for me," Utema said.

"So you enlisted to work here?"

Rilpa smiled in amusement. "There was no enlisting. We were conscripted—all the full-size."

"All of you?"

"Same in Detroit," Utema said before Rilpa could respond. "The RDF announced that all full-size were needed at the factory satellite to help disassemble warships. We're supposed to get our training here, then be lofted offworld."

"But surely some of you declined?" Nomarre said.

Ripla shrugged. "Why would anyone? We're trying to show that we can make a contribution to the future. Besides, who'd pass up an opportunity to go upside and escape the conditions here?"

Nomarre mulled it over for a moment. "I still don't understand about the RDF's plans to send you to the factory. The Protectorate doesn't have a launch facility. The closest base is in Denver."

"So, they'll ship us to Denver after the training," Utema said.

"But we've had close to two hundred new arrivals in the past three days. Wouldn't it have been easier to train you in Monument instead of sending you here?"

"Who can say what Humans call 'easier'?" Rilpa said.

Nomarre stared at him. "It doesn't seem strange to you that all full-size are now either on the Protectorate or at the factory?"

"Strange, how?" Rilpa answered, sounding annoyed. "If there was a problem, the RDF would have gathered everyone up, full-size and Micronized."

Utema snorted nastily. "It's because of the dissidents. The REF wants to see its dimensional fortress completed before anything more happens on the surface. They must be thinking that the sooner they meet with the Masters, the sooner they'll be rid of us."

Nomarre fingered his scar in silence, then asked, "Is there any news from the Southlands?"

"An attack on a civilian convoy," Rilpa told him.

Nomarre hadn't heard. "Did the Army of the Southern Cross retaliate?"

"Leonard's threatening to."

"That's the one thing I'm not going to like about being here," Utema said. "We have to rely on the RDF to defend us against a Southern Cross attack."

Nomarre told him not to worry. "That's one of the reasons why there are CD Destroids on the border."

"They were a lot closer than the border when I came through," Rilpa said.

Nomarre cut his eyes to him. "How much closer?"

"I'd guess within two hours of right where we're standing."

Nomarre was about to point out that any incursion of battle mecha was in violation of Protectorate provisions, but he never got the chance—the walls and corrugated roof of his living space had begun to vibrate in sympathy with the distant rumble of heavy machinery. The three Zentraedi hurried outside to find the hills surrounding the facility alive with moving pinpoints of light.

Nomarre spun through a full circle. "Running lights."

"Excalibers and Gladiators," Rilpa said. "A couple of Spartans, too."

No one said anything for several minutes as the Destroids continued their slow march on the facility. Rilpa's assessment had been accurate; Nomarre put the total number of mecha at better than three hundred. And he recognized something in the mix besides Destroids: four bell jar-shaped towers, rising up from mecha-pulled flatbeds 100 feet wide.

Resizing chambers.

Katherine Hyson's career had been on the upswing ever since she'd nailed the interview with Lynn-Minmei. A year after the interview aired, she had—in addition to the weekly celebrity-driven show—a reality-based crime drama in production, and the coveted position as anchor of the MBS evening news. Just now, sitting composed at the anchor's desk, hair and face done to perfection, Hyson waited out the producer's countdown, then looked straight into camera one and announced, "Good evening, I'm Katherine Hyson, and this is World News for July 28, 2016."

On the TelePrompTer, copy began a slow scroll.

"Seven days have passed since a battalion of civil defense mecha rolled across the borders of the Arkansas Protectorate, turning what had been an autonomous area into an internment camp. And yet despite persistent rumors of armed rebellion, involuntary downsizing, and a retaliatory raid by Army of the Southern Cross commandos, the government-imposed media blackout remains in effect."

Hyson adopted an earnest expression and turned over a sheet of hardcopy. "Mitigating against the rumor of rebellion comes word tonight that only days prior to what has been termed 'Operation Tiger,' more than two hundred full-size Zentraedi were relocated to the Protectorate from Denver, Monument, Detroit, Portland, and other Northland cities, ostensibly to receive specialized training in demolition, in preparation for transfer to the factory satellite." Stock footage of the Protectorate and the factory ran under the commentary; then Hyson was onscreen once more.

"Crowds of advocates and Micronized Zentraedi have assembled at RDF checkpoints leading into the Protectorate to protest the government's actions. And now, for an update on the tense situation along the border, here is MBS correspondent Rebecca Hollister."

"Thank you, Katherine," the youthful, brown-haired woman whose face appeared onscreen said. "Though 'tense' doesn't begin to describe the scene here, as more and more people arrive hourly, demanding answers from the United Earth Government and the RDF."

Hollister had a wireless microphone in hand and a pearl-like audiobead in her left ear. Behind her stood a tight press of grim-faced Humans and a scattering of Zentraedi, some wearing sloganed smartshirts, others displaying LED portascreens.

"The Arkansas Protectorate remains fenced in on all sides by Excaliber and Gladiator units from as distant as Albuquerque. The roads are barred to traffic, and we've been warned to maintain a safe distance or risk being fired on. What's more, MBS has learned that in the first hours of Operation Tiger, perhaps as many as six sizing chambers were trucked into the control zone, and speculation runs high that a policy of enforced downsizing has already been put into effect. If this is true, it marks the first occasion of government-imposed Micronization since October 2014, when the process was used on six members of Khyron's forces, captured and sentenced after the theft of a sizing chamber from Fort Breetai, in Detroit.

"An anonymous though highly placed source in the UEG has stated—and I quote—that 'any downsizing under way in Arkansas is not being meted out as punishment, but in an effort to shortcut the violent lusts of the Imperative, which are stronger in the full-size than in the Micronized.'"

Hollister raised her eyes from the hardcopy she'd consulted. "But to many of those who have kept a week-long vigil here, the UEG's tactics smack of fascism—no matter what the justification." She paused, giving weight to her words; then said, "Back to you, Katherine."

Hyson, when she swiveled away from the blue screen, was visibly flustered by the mediagenic intensity of the young woman's delivery. But her professional composure returned swiftly as she promised herself that Rebecca Hollister would never again upstage her.

"While tensions mount in Arkansas," she began, "related developments continue to unfold around the world. Here in Monument, several arrests have been made in connection with the firebombings that have plagued the city for the past six months, leaving more than fifteen dead. Those arrested are said to be known sympathizers, who, in addition to carrying out a campaign of terror, may have been involved in a smuggling operation that was supplying Southlands malcontents with state-of-the-art weapons."

Hyson turned a page. "When we return: Protests turn to riots in Calcutta, Sydney, and Tokyo . . . A look back at the Japanese internment camps of the past century . . . And a malcontent band identified as the Crimson Ghosts takes credit for Wednesday's attack on the Panama Canal, in which as many as one hundred people were killed and three ships were sunk. Also: Reaction from Brasília to the RDF's actions in Arkansas. And the 'official' explanation for Admiral Hunter's secret talks aboard the factory satellite.

"Stay tuned."

The factory satellite was sometimes affectionately referred to as "Little Luna." But as anyone who had been stationed on Moon Base Aluce before the war would tell you, the comparison began and ended with the name. The factory's size, near-Earth-normal gravity, and plethora of retrofitted rec and entertainment rooms made it feel like a world apart, a place where you could speak your mind without fear of censure.

Rick had never fully grasped the distinction until the visit he paid the factory after Operation Tiger was set in motion. Even in the docking bay he felt as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders; that he was temporarily free to be himself, unfettered by economic considerations or, worse, politics. Here there were no hidden agendas, only the camaraderie that developed naturally from teamwork. If this was a foretaste of what the Expeditionary mission would be like, it couldn't launch soon enough.

With him had arrived Gunther Reinhardt, Rolf Emerson, and Max Sterling—who hadn't been aloft in some time. They'd come to deliver a personal explanation of Operation Tiger to Breetai, and to apprise him of the RDF's plans to make amends.

The only secure place suitable for a meeting between Humans and giants was the factory bridge. But instead of using the command bubble, Rick chose to hold the meeting in the bridge area itself, with all Human company seated on folding chairs set up on one of the catwalks. Breetai stood level with them, and Exedore sat in the commander's right hand. There were no computer consoles, wallscreens, or recording devices. Rick saw it as a gathering of allies.

"I wanted you to hear it from me before you heard it from anyone else, Breetai," he was saying. "The UEG's decision to invade Arkansas was done without provocation. There've been no threats of a raid by the Army of the Southern Cross, and there's no evidence that weapons are being smuggled out of Arkansas to the Southlands. The government is answering terror with terror, hoping to beat the dissidents at their own game."

"I see," Breetai said in a booming voice. "But the UEG should be made to understand that the Zentraedi are not subject to the same fears that rule Humans. The Imperative is nourished by acts of terrorism."

"Tell me, Admiral," Exedore said, "is it true that all full-size in the Protectorate are to be Micronized?"

"Yes," Rick said, swallowing hard. "The RDF surrendered control of such decisions to the UEG, and now we're paying the price. But I want you to know that both Lang and Zand refused to supervise the Micronizations. The sizing chambers are being operated by Zentraedi."

"But it's a wise decision," Exedore said, betraying no more emotion than Breetai had shown on hearing of the enforced downsizing. "It's far better that everyone on the surface is of one size. Of course, there's no truth to the remark I've heard that the Imperative runs stronger in full-size; but, even so, I think it's for the best that size is eliminated as an issue. We Zentraedi understand your race's natural fear of giants."

"You'll find that most Zentraedi will be unmoved by the events," Breetai said.

Rick nodded. "I know that, Breetai. But I wanted you to understand that the RDF is opposed to the decision. If we could, we'd allow some dissident group to retake the Protectorate. As for the protests, they're coming mainly from our own people. Many of the same people who fear you would fight to protect your civil rights."

Exedore stroked his chin in thought. "This is something I have yet to comprehend about your race, Admiral. You do all but arm your enemies."

"It's no more than each of us would expect," Reinhardt said. "There can be no basis for civilization without the guarantee of civil rights for all."

Exedore's smile was patronizing. "The Masters circumvented that by creating their own race. And it seems to me that, given enough generations, Humans could do the same on Earth."

Rick shook his head. "We value individuality too much to allow that to happen."

"Then, you, too, place yourselves first," Breetai said.

"We do," Reinhardt said tentatively, "but we make concessions for the collective good."

Breetai snarled. "The Zentraedi understand sacrifice. But what concessions can be made for those Humans and Zentraedi that are offended by the invasion of the Protectorate?"

"An effortless solution presents itself, m'lord," Exedore said. "The detainees could simply be returned to full size."

Rick glanced at Reinhardt before responding. "I hope it will come to that, Exedore. But until then, what we'd like to do is establish a Zentraedi mecha squadron within the RDF."

Sterling's and Emerson's mouths dropped.

Breetai put his free hand on his hip and laughed. "You actually mean to arm us."

Rick got up from his chair to stand at the catwalk's handrail. "I want to be clear about this, Breetai. General Reinhardt and I thought by making the RDF subordinate to the UEG, we could deflect any pressure on the Expeditionary mission. That turns out to have been wrongheaded. Now, when what we want most is unified commitment to the mission, we have dissension. The RDF is condemned for combating malcontentism and for failing to combat it. But we just might be able to accommodate everyone if we can assign Zentraedi to deal with problems in the Southlands."

"An excellent idea," Breetai said. "Let me be the first to volunteer."

Rick made a face. "We'd have to turn you down. You're too important to the Expeditionary mission. Anyway, it would mean you'd have to submit to downsizing. But I would like you—and Exedore—to supervise the selection of personnel."

"Would our choices be limited to Micronized Zentraedi?" Exedore asked.

Reinhardt told him no. "But as the admiral has pointed out, anyone selected will have to agree to undergo Micronization for the duration of his enlistment."

"Excuse me, General," Sterling cut in. "but won't this be interpreted as just another way of cajoling the Zentraedi into accepting Micronization? Who's the RDF trying to appease—the Zentraedi or the UEG?"

Reinhardt nodded. "I appreciate your point, Captain, but the answer is neither. We're trying to appease the protestors—Zentraedi and Humans. And, to be perfectly blunt about it, we're hoping that distancing ourselves further from the controversy will enable the REF to get on with preparations for the Tirol mission."

"Max," Rick said from the railing, "we're also hoping that you'll volunteer to train the new squadron."

Sterling flashed him a look. "Would training exempt me from combat?"

"It would."

"Then consider me volunteered."

Emerson glanced back and forth between Hunter and Sterling. "Does Field Marshal Leonard know about this yet?"

Reinhardt leaned over in his chair to clap Emerson on the shoulder. "I'm afraid we're going to have to ask you to break the news to him, Major." He paused for a moment. "And when Leonard tells you he won't have armed aliens operating in the Southlands, be sure to remind him that he shouldn't look on them as Zentraedi, but as RDF. Are we clear?"

"Perfectly clear, General," Emerson said with a somewhat worried smile.

On one side of the road stood the protestors; on the other, those who were there to demonstrate against them; and in the middle, meant to assure protection to both sides, a cordon of Robotech CD troops in full riot gear. Recently ushered to the front of the crowd of sympathizers, Miriya Parino Sterling was at once the focus of media attention and the object of jeering from across the highway.

"Hey, Parino," someone shouted. "Sterling should have killed you instead of screwed you!"

"Your husband's killing them down south, and you're up here trying to save them," an irate woman screamed. "Why don't the two of you trade places!"

"When's the divorce, alien?"

She had arrived only that morning, but her unannounced appearance had had a galvanizing effect on the crowd; their vigil would remain a lead story now. Miriya hadn't told Max of her plans to come, though she had already formulated them by the time he and Rick had left for Fokker Aerospace, bound for the factory satellite. There had seemed no purpose in introducing further strife to his sendoff. Dana was in Monument, staying with her godfathers. Some members of the crowd were five days into a hunger strike; that the few Zentraedi among them had joined in meant little, since most could go weeks without food. Miriya had no real aim beyond showing her support, and allowing herself to be photographed doing just that.

"Miriya Parino," someone on her side of the road said, from not too far away. She turned and saw a young brown-haired reporter struggling through the crowd toward her. "Miriya, Rebecca Hollister, with MBS News. Could I ask you a few questions?"

Miriya shrugged. "Why not."

Hollister had circles under her eyes and her hair was in disarray. On a forearm touchpad, she entered instructions for the pencam that was part of her headset array. The camera swung toward Miriya like the barrel of a miniature gun. "What would you like to see happen here, Miriya?"

Miriya gave a toss to her jade-green mane. "I—we—want the UEG to lift the media blackout and the travel restrictions, and to allow an inspection team of Humans and Zentraedi to tour the Protectorate."

"How do you react to claims that Protectorate Zentraedi have been supplying weapons technology to malcontent bands in the Southlands?"

"I want to see proof of that."

"If the UEG offered proof, would you still demand to be allowed inside?"

"Yes. Most of my people are confined to the Zee-towns and ghettos of Human cities, but at least in those they have the freedom to move about and to assemble. Now, just as in Brasília last year, the Zentraedi find themselves stripped of their rights—Zentraedi who have been working selflessly in Humankind's interest, even though the Protectorate was granted autonomy by the Macross Council. Such violations of rights threaten the prospect of Humans and Zentraedi becoming equal partners in shaping the future of the planet. Even if those inside are accused of sponsoring terrorism, they should be presumed innocent and afforded fair treatment until their guilt is established."

Hollister entered additional camera commands. "Critics of the policy of granting autonomy—people like Renes Dumjinn—are counseling patience instead of protest. How do you respond to that?"

"We have been patient for more than a week. And if Dumjinn and the rest valued their own civil rights, they would be standing with us now."

"Everyone knows that you have a young daughter. Do you fear for her safety?"

Miriya's eyes narrowed with anger. "I fear for the safety of everyone on Earth if our conflicts are not resolved soon."

"Do you endorse what the malcontents are doing?"

"No more than I would the action of any gang of criminals, Zentraedi or otherwise. Those responsible for the deaths and destruction must be apprehended and made to stand trial. But it's wrong, it's immoral, to punish an entire people for the violent actions of a few."

"Miriya, looking around this crowd I see only a few Zentraedi. How do you account for the small turnout? And shouldn't this be their fight?"

"Most Zentraedi are not given to displays of caring," Miriya mumbled.

Hollister lifted her round chin. "Then how can we believe they care about Earth's future?"

Miriya held the reporter's smug gaze. "Take it on faith, Rebecca, or eliminate all of us."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He caught me completely off guard. And I know that he was hurt by my not having a ready answer. But I was simply astonished, and, in fact, I didn't know how I felt about it. The timing was so off; there were just so many projects in the works and so little time to see to them. I wanted to say, "Let me think about it." But I didn't. Ultimately, I said, yes; I accepted. Even though his method couldn't have been more unromantic—questioning me about his question—and even though I sensed we were in for a rocky road, and perhaps one of the longest engagements in history.

Lisa Hayes, Recollections

The lowermost level of the factory satellite remained an abode for giants. For two miles of its ten-mile length, the 300-foot-wide by 400-foot-high central corridor had been fitted with a catwalk and walkway, but the rest of the corridors and tunnels and the immense holds they linked had been left untampered with by Human hands. If the factory could be said to have a basement, it was level one, especially those areas below the transfer tubes to the six- and eight-o'clock pods: dimly lighted enclosures the size of sports stadiums, containing lakes of stagnant water, mountains of unprocessed monopole ore, mounds of scrapped mecha parts, once the haunt of spiderlike maintenance robots whose lifeless carcasses littered the floor.

It was among all this that Theofre Elmikk convened a clandestine meeting for the full-size and Micronized Zentraedi members of the Seylos contingent of the dissident alliance.

"Hunter and Reinhardt's meeting with Breetai can mean only one thing," Elmikk was saying. "Our smuggling enterprise has been exposed and must be suspended."

More than a few murmurs of relief could be heard. The security procedures for extravehicular assignments had become so exacting that

someone was bound to be caught before long. Still, concerns were voiced about the impact the shutdown would have on the alliance's downside counterparts.

"Our comrades have more than enough Protoculture cells to make a beginning," Elmikk assured everyone. "Enough, at any rate, to keep the RDF occupied while we execute the next phase of the operation."

Throughout the hold, conspirators exchanged questioning glances; this was the first anyone had heard about "phases." All along, the operation had seemed improvised, and suddenly Elmikk was hinting at the existence of a master plan. If so, who had drawn up that plan, and what was Elmikk's position in the hierarchy?

"First, however, we must wait until Breetai's suspicions have been allayed. Then, when security procedures become lax once more, we will begin preparations for commandeering the flagship."

No murmurs met Elmikk's ears; only outright grumbling, which he attempted to quiet with frantic arm gestures. "Yes, it's true that many areas of the flagship are in shambles—including the bridge—but we can't let that stop us. All that counts is that the Reflex and fold systems are operational—which they are. We need only maneuver the ship out of the factory, and we can be gone from this miserable pocket of the galaxy." He was shouting now, trying to be heard over the separate conversations between giants.

"And who is going to pilot it out?" one of the full-size asked. "You?"

Elmikk threw his shoulders back. "I have been observing and studying all aspects of the ship. Yes, I can do it."

Those who weren't simply angered by the assertion laughed. Even in those troubled times, a flagship commander had to be someone who could inspire the utmost confidence, and prior to his promotion to liaison officer, Theofre Elmikk had been little more than a servant to Exedore—a kind of researcher, always scurrying after bits of ersatz Zentraedi lore.

"Pilot it, perhaps, Elmikk," a Micronized conspirator said. "But is it to Tirol you'll fold us, or into the lightless maw of some collapsed star?"

"Tirol," Elmikk snapped, "if that's what you want. But consider this:

What exactly awaits us there but a return to enslavement? Whereas there exist worlds in systems other than the Valivarre where we could live like masters. Karbarra, for example, or Garuda. We laid waste to them once; if we must, we'll do it again."

The laughter had died down to sardonic chuckling. "Consider this, Elmikk," someone said. "The Invid."

But he only snorted in derision. "Why should the Regent or Regis concern themselves with Karbarra or Garuda? They're after their precious Flower of Life." He shook his head. "No, comrades, it's here the Invid will come. The Masters, too, once they learn that Zor's fortress is interred below."

The grumbling began to taper off. After a long moment, someone asked, "How do you propose we board the flagship, when you're the only one among us with unrestricted access?"

Elmikk smiled lightly, pleased that he'd finally gotten through to them. "By using the heavy work drones to cut a secret tunnel straight through the factory, from hull to null-g heart, where the flagship is anchored. It will be a painstakingly slow process, I know. But when the moment is right, we'll cut through the final few feet, storm the ship and take it. Then, once clear of the factory, we'll execute our fold."

"And our comrades on the surface," a full-size said. "What's to become of them?"

Elmikk allowed a melancholy frown. "Sacrifices must be made."

The separate conversations began again, but this time Elmikk did nothing to stop them; a certain amount of dialogue and compromise was unavoidable. Instead, he fixed his thoughts on the future he had devised, unaware that one of the Micronized conspirators in the hold had come by his Human stature naturally, and was already devising plans of his own.

"Down boy," Lisa said, trying to back out of an increasingly passionate embrace that had gone on for several minutes and had been working its way ever so slowly toward the twin bed in her quarters.

Rick pursued her, burying his face in the crook of her neck. "Lisa, it's . . . been . . . six . . . months," he said, punctuating each word with a kiss.

"Exactly," she said. "And we have a lot to talk about before you ship back to the surface."

"Talk? That's all we've been doing. And I've got the phone bills to prove it."

She slipped out of his grasp and kissed him once, lightly, on the mouth, before saying, "I want to know everything about what's going on in the Protectorate."

Rick started to say something, but changed his mind, heaving a resigned sigh before going into details about Operation Tiger. Lisa moved away from the bed to perch herself on the arm of the couch, listening without interruption until Rick came to the part about the formation of a Zentraedi squadron, when she asked him almost the same question Max had, about the squadron being seen as a ploy to downsize yet additional Zentraedi. Rick supplied the same answer Reinhardt had given.

"What you're telling me," Lisa said, "is that the RDF is willing to be tried in the court of public opinion."

Rick rocked his head from side to side as he closed on the couch. "I think most people will see it for exactly what it is: our attempt to allow the Zentraedi to police themselves."

"I'm not so sure. I think it's fairly transparent that the RDF is equivocating again. I see it as their saying: 'Don't bother us about the malcontents, we have more important things to do.'"

Rick gestured broadly with both hands. "If you didn't think so, you wouldn't be here, right? You'd be downside with the rest of us, battling it out with Milburn and the UEG on one hand and Leonard and the Army of the Southern Cross on the other."

Lisa bit her lower lip. "I'm not attacking you, Rick. I understand the position we're in. I just wish there was some other solution. Asking the Zentraedi to police themselves is like admitting that we're not a united planet." She regarded him for a long moment. "This just doesn't sound like

you."

Rick's expression turned petulant. "How about we trade jobs for the next six months and then have this same conversation." He held her gaze, then softened his look and sat beside her, putting an arm around her waist. "Getting back to where we left off—"

Lisa stood up and walked away from him.

"Now what's wrong?" Rick said, following her with his eyes. "Look, Lisa, I can't control every decision the UEG makes."

Lisa shook her head. "It's not that."

"Then, what is it? You're practically running from me."

She returned to his side and rested her hands on his shoulders. "I don't mean to, Rick. It's just that . . . I don't know exactly. I've been so busy, and it's been so long since I've seen you. I guess it's taking me time to readjust to being together."

Rick looked perplexed. "Yeah, but it's not like we haven't been talking. And I've been just as alone as you have."

"You think? What about Max and Miriya and Jean Grant and everybody? I mean, what friends do I have up here—Breetai? Exedore? Emil?"

Rick loosed a small laugh. "Lisa, this trip's the first I've seen of Max in months. You wouldn't believe how busy I've been."

She blew out her breath and pressed her cheek to his. "Maybe that's what it is: the stress of devoting too much time to work and not enough time to ourselves."

Rick hugged her. "My feelings haven't changed."

She pulled back some to look at him. "Mine haven't, either. If anything, they've grown stronger. I miss you so much."

He held her close and nuzzled her long hair. "I have an idea. But I think I'm afraid to mention it."

"Rick . . ."

"No," he said quickly. "It's probably not what you think."

She showed him a puzzled frown. "What?"

"I, uh . . ." He cleared his throat. "Uh, what would you say to my asking you to marry me?"

"You know what would be great—" Lorelei Network manager Tom Hoos told Minmei. "If you could have special guests drop by from time to time to share their thoughts about current events. Say, someone like Rick Hunter. I'm sure there'd be no shortage of questions from the Zentraedi."

Minmei favored Hoos with a polite smile. She could just imagine those questions: How many Zentraedi do you calculate you killed during the War, Admiral? Or: Did you have sex with Minmei when the two of you were trapped inside the SDF-1 or when you were living together in Macross?

"I'm not interested in turning this into a variety show, Tom. Besides, I don't see why the Zentraedi would want to hear from, or even about, Rick. Or any of my friends, for that matter."

"But that's just the point." Hoos sat back in his desk swivel and spread his arms wide. "They're your friends—Lynn-Minmei's friends. Ergo: they're important enough to be heard from."

Hoos was absurdly clean-cut and good looking, but a bit on the overeager side. Lorelei's office complex—on the top floor of Denver's poshest building—also seemed a little too eager to please. More, for a supposedly nonprofit organization, Lorelei certainly hadn't scrimped on the furnishings. Mountains, indistinct in the summer haze, dominated the view from the window wall behind Hoos's desk. From her armchair, Minmei could see clear to the arena dome from which Khyron had literally plucked her.

When ten seconds had gone by and she still hadn't responded to Hoos's half-baked analysis, Sharky O'Toole took up the challenge. In contrast to Minmei's Western outfit of tight-fitting, rhinestone-studded jeans, sim-leather boots, and felt hat, O'Toole had on an ill-tailored lightweight suit that accentuated the bulge of his belly.

"I think what Lynn's saying here—and correct me if wrong, Lynn—is

that her interest in doing this show rests on your being able to target a Zentraedi audience." O'Toole paused, as though monitoring himself on playback. "Well, maybe that's not the best way to put it. What I mean is, that the Zentraedi should be the priority. We all need to put our heads together and figure out what they're going to want to hear."

Tom smiled without showing his teeth. "We're in total agreement that the Zentraedi should come first. But let's face facts: the Zentraedi aren't going to be the only ones tuning in to this show. We expect it to draw a significant, uh, Human following, and I think we should be prepared to give them something as well."

"I don't see why," Minmei said. "If non-Zentraedi want to tune in, fine, let them. But I don't think we should be calculated in trying to cater to them. The best thing that could happen would be for Humans to take an actual interest in what the Zentraedi are thinking."

"So you're saying that special guests are out."

It was obvious that Hoos was struggling to maintain his good humor, but Minmei stood firm. "I wouldn't be opposed to having Zentraedi guests."

O'Toole immediately seized on the idea "Now, there you go, Tom. Forget your Rick Hunters. Why not go after Breetai, or Exedore, or Miriya Parino? Any of them would fit the call-in format perfectly."

Hoos was suddenly animated. "I like it, I like it a lot. An introductory segment of Minmei's music, some casual chatting about the news, Minmei takes a few phone calls, some more music, a guest segment, a few more calls . . . I wish we could go on the air tomorrow instead of waiting until next year."

O'Toole threw Minmei a covert look. "This has to go worldwide, huh? We couldn't just kick things off in the Northlands and gradually add markets as new satellites are launched?"

Hoos proffered the polished grin. "The thing is, we don't want any of the Zentraedi to feel excluded. Now more than ever, considering what's happening in the Arkansas Protectorate and in the Southlands."

Minmei pressed her fingertips to her mouth. "Do you think the

network will help to limit the spread of malcontentism?"

Tom glanced at her and cracked a genuine smile. "Minmei, if Lorelei lives up to expectations, I think it will put an end to malcontentism."

In Tokyo, Lazlo Zand's experiment in autoevolution was momentarily foiled by the uncontrollable shaking of his hands. He stared at them in mounting anger and disappointment as the palms broke a stinging sweat. But the physical discomfort was nothing compared to the mental anguish of having his body choose that moment to rebel. Reckoning from T. R. Edwards's visit in May, tonight was the culmination of three months of intense research; but really, the moment was a lifetime in the making.

It was the middle of the night and Zand had the lower levels of the Robotech Research Center to himself, save for a dozen or so maintenance robots busy at their tasks—emptying wastebaskets, cleaning windows, vacuuming floors. He was not in his office, but in the biochemistry lab at the northeast corner of subbasement one, where he'd spent the past few weeks analyzing blood samples he'd coaxed from a host of Zentraedi subjects over the years, including Breetai, Exedore, Jevna Parl, Konda, and others. Analyzing the samples in an effort to determine which, if any, were safely miscible with Human blood.

Alien blood did show typing comparable to that of Human blood, but all attempts at mingling the two had resulted, to varying degrees, in the formation of spontaneous clots—no matter what anticoagulants had been introduced to the mix. Just the same, Zand knew that it was possible on some level, since the mating of a Human and a Zentraedi had generated at least one child. He had, of course, used samples of his own blood in the matching process.

The findings notwithstanding, he had a liter of diluted alien blood hung on an IV rack, with the feed needle already inserted into a vein in his left forearm. Into a vein in the other forearm ran a feed tube from a similarly suspended plastic bag, containing a liter of Ringer's lactate solution to which had been added 50 ccs of what had first been classified as "unknown mecha lubricant," drained from the Invid battle suit Breetai had discovered aboard Khyron's cruiser. Zand's analysis of the fluid had revealed that it was not lubricant, but nutrient of a kind, whose chemical makeup was remarkably similar to that of certain serum constituents of Zentraedi blood. The Protoculture constituents, to be exact.

There was no way to predict the effect the mix of blood and nutrient would have on his body, but he was long past concerning himself with the predictable. Edwards had put his finger on the truth: the only thing that separated Lang from the pack of scientists that had made Robotechnology a life study was Lang's artificially induced understanding of Protoculture—or what he called "the Shapings."

For a time following Edwards's revelatory visit, Zand had concentrated his research on the mother computer removed from the SDF-1, theorizing that its complex neural circuitry might be able to supply a mind-boost equal to the one Lang had received while seated at the comp console in Zor's cabin. But the excised computer was impermeable. Should the Pluto mission ever return with the modules Lang had had removed from the Visitor to Macross Island's Robotech Research Center, perhaps the machine would prove accessible; but until then it was simply a fickle databank that could sometimes be accessed, sometimes not.

Much as the Zentraedi lacked an understanding of the fold or weapons systems they activated aboard their ships, the center's cybertechnicians were largely ignorant about the inner workings of the mother computer. Using receptor-studded helmets comparable to the "thinking caps" worn by mecha pilots, the cybertechs had done experiments in virtual interfacing, but the computer had proved uncooperative; the difference being that VTs and such had been engineered by Humans for Humans, whereas the mother computer had been created by Zor or the Masters for who knew what manner of being or overall design. And since Lang had forbidden anyone to so much as pry open one of the machine's access panels—in the same way he had restrained himself from probing the SDF-1's Reflex furnaces—Zand had ultimately abandoned hopes for a cyber-supplied mind-boost and focused instead on the search for a biochemical booster.

From the start it should have been obvious where the experiment was leading him, but he had somehow missed it—even after recognizing that the Zentraedi blood samples varied slightly in composition. Breetai's blood contained ingredients that were missing in Konda's or Rico's, while Exedore's and Jevna Parl's contained ingredients missing in Breetai's. All samples seemed to pose equal risk to Human beings, except for one—Dana Sterling's.

Regardless of Miriya Parino's contribution of Protoculture-engineered warrior genes, father Maxwell Sterling had bequeathed her his own type O-negative, which made her the perfect donor.

It had come time to move beyond the theoretical to the experiential.

The shaking in his hands was finally subsiding. He inhaled deeply; exhaled slowly through pursed lips. With his right hand he adjusted the flow valve on the blood-drip tube; then, with his left, he did the same to the tube draining the ur-Protoculture/lactate solution. Gravity fed the fluids into him.

At first he felt only an increase in his pulse rate, no more than might be attributable to the byproducts of his anxiety.

But then it was if someone had drawn a translucent veil over his eyes. His consciousness underwent a sudden and frightening shift. Colors intensified; the slightest sounds were amplified. He glanced at the digital display of the clock on the workstation countertop.

"Three-eleven, forty-six," he directed to a voice-activated disk recorder. "Onset of effects, somewhat like those of a psychotropic or hallucinogen, but accompanied by a sense of deep-seated dread." He cut his eyes to the monitor, whose leads were attached to his chest and wrists. "Pulse, ninety-eight; blood pressure, one-sixty over ninety-two and climbing . . . Tightness in chest and top of head, as though someone was tightening a wide band around my temples—"

Zand paused.

"Three-thirteen: almost lost consciousness. Synesthesia occurring.

Parade of geometric shapes in front of my eyes. Hearing colors, seeing sounds. Bitter taste in my mouth, tongue feels swollen to twice its normal size. Difficulty talking and breathing. Fear. Terror. Have I killed myself?"

No sooner had he asked the question then he felt a searing heat inside his skull. Only the tape would tell if he had screamed before the darkness overtook him.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Zentraedi were designed with Micronization in mind. Activation of their Protoculture-encoded proportional system requires anywhere from one to three hours of exposure to specifically directed protonucleaic radiation in a "sizing chamber" (T'sentr Nuvinz Uamtam). Micronization can be reversed through a more complex, lengthy, and physically taxing process. Few report experiencing pain, but lassitude and nausea are not uncommon. Frequent transformations performed within a short time (i.e., two within twenty-four Earth-standard hours) can result in severe metabolic disturbances, respiratory failure, and coma. Hastily performed procedures have been known to cause death.

Ziembeda, as quoted in Zeitgeist's Alien Psychology

Bagzent had dug a hole for himself—literally and figuratively. The literal hole, measuring some 26-by-50 feet, was just large enough to conceal a Tactical Battlepod, from foot thrusters to top-mounted AA lasers. Roofed with cuttings from broad-leafed shrubs, the hole was situated on the eastern slope of a narrow valley, along whose rivered floor ran the Manaus—Cavern City Highway. The minesweepers that now rode point for most Southlands convoys were capable of detecting buried metal objects, but only when their scanners had been specifically tasked and when those buried objects lay within a quarter-mile of either side of their paths. Bagzent was confident that the sweeper winding its way through the valley was unaware of his presence. The RDF soldiers at the controls—indeed, everyone in the 134-vehicle northbound convoy—were no doubt relying on their escort of Veritechs to root out trouble before it appeared.

Four of the five holes dug into the opposing, steeper slope of the valley also housed Tactical Battlepods—Pods of the newly formed Shroud and Fist contingent, each crewed by a pilot and a copilot/gunner. As on the Grand Cannon raid, Bagzent's second was Narumi, the Amazonian. The western face's fifth and somewhat grander hole contained a Stinger. Technically superior to the prototype Bagzent had flown in the attack on the Cuiabá convoy, this one was unmanned and answered only to the prompts of a computer program.

Imperatived, it was truly a Zentraedi machine.

The dimensions and purpose of the figurative hole were less clear, though Bagzent could trace the onset of its excavation to feelings stirred by the arduous hike into the Senburu camp and the surprises that awaited him there. He had been profoundly moved by the sight of the Stinger in flight; not because a powerful weapon had been added to the Zentraedi arsenal, but because Seloy Deparra and her comrades had actually created something. The excitement he'd experienced sprang from hopes for a new beginning, perhaps a new direction for the Zentraedi race. Deparra, though, must have read those hopes in his eyes and seen them as a threat to the rebel cause. Her method of invalidating them had been to award him the honor of being the first to fly a Stinger in combat. But for Bagzent, still in the throes of a kind of rebirth, the assignment had seemed a chastisement. Even worse, the initial stage of the Senburu's terror campaign had called for an attack on civilian targets.

Narumi, for all his jungle lore and unrestricted access to Wondrous Spirit, had had no reservations about killing civilians. The Amazonian had recounted tales of vengeful, bloodthirsty raids on rival villages, and tribal warfare in which innocent families were routinely slaughtered. But even now, weeks after the Cuiabá massacre, Bagzent was tilled with self-loathing, resulting from the 200 murders he had carried out in the name of insurrection. And for once his remorse and confusion had nothing whatever to do with the sound of Minmei's voice or the sight of two Humans in a loving embrace.

News of the RDF's invasion of the defenseless Arkansas Protectorate had alleviated his guilt, but only for a short time. The RDF was only answering terror with terror, just as the Invid had after the defoliation of Optera. Animals didn't seek to avenge themselves on a predator for the loss

of one of their flock. It was true that living beings fed on one another, but not out of cruelty. Bagzent could find no counterpart in the natural world to the vicious cycle of Zentraedi- and Human-made violence.

And yet, there he was, concealed in a hole, lending his support to that perpetuating cycle of terror and counterterror. If only there was someone he could talk to about his feelings, someone who would at least hear him out without incarcerating him—as any Human would do—or executing him outright—as any Zentraedi would. But no friendly ear existed in either camp. So, principally out of fear of being tried for war crimes or treason, he would continue to participate in the Senburu's campaign. Until such time as he could discover some way out of the hole.

"Appearing from the ground" was a commonplace Zentraedi terror tactic—one they had employed on countless worlds, though never on Earth. The goal in using it against the convoy was simply to make it appear that the Zentraedi were everywhere: omnipresent in the blue skies, the blue-green seas and lush forests, beneath the very ground the convoys traversed. And just now the tactic was reinforced by a weapon that could deliver unassisted on the commitment to terror.

It was possible, in fact, that Bagzent wouldn't even have to fire a round.

A reconnaissance pod concealed ten miles to the south had reported that the convoy was escorted by six Veritechs—three times the usual number, which in itself was confirmation of the effectiveness of the terror campaign. The present plan called for the pods to maintain radio silence until the VTs were well within range; then, one by one, to emerge from their pits and draw fire, leaving the Stinger free to execute its commands.

Static crackled from the radio in Bagzent's pod, followed by a raspy voice. "Five, report." The voice belonged to Rudai, coleader of the Shroud and Fist.

"Five, online," Bagzent said.

"Four targets have entered the valley. One, Two, Three, and Four pods will launch to engage. Stand fast, Five, until the Stinger is away, then throw yourself at any VTs guarding the convoy."

"Agreed."

"And remember, Five: this time leave us something to loot for supplies."

"Copy, One," Bagzent answered. "Five, standing fast."

"Kill or be killed, T'sen Bagzent."

"Kill or be killed, T'sen Rudai. Five, out."

Bagzent hit the radio kill switch and glanced at Narumi, who occupied the pod's lower seat. "Periscope video. Wide field."

A wide-angle view of the valley appeared onscreen a moment later. One and Two pods were already in the air and Three was halfway out of its hole, limbs and leaves lodged in every body seam and joint. The minesweeper and lead vehicles of the convoy were just nosing into view on the right-hand side of the screen. In pursuit of the four Battlepods, three Veritechs streaked into view, all in fighter mode and flying nap-of-the-earth.

Atmospheric engagement between Zentraedi and RDF crafts was still a relatively new game. At the start of the War, Breetai's troops had engaged in limited air and ground fighting on Macross Island, and again, two years into the War, when the SDF-1 had returned to Earth. Then, much later, members of Khyron's Seventh Mechanized Division had skirmished with the RDF in the Northlands. But for the most part, pilots on both sides were still feeling each other out. It had been Bagzent's experience that most Veritech pilots played a cautious game, jinking and juking, always angling for the leg shot that could instantly cripple a pod. Very few braved in-close combat, or had faith enough in their skills with the autocannon to mechamorphize in-flight to Guardian or Battloid mode. Aggressive technique was, in fact, what had made Max Sterling a legend.

And from the look of things, Sterling himself had to have trained the pilots of the escort team. Before the Zentraedi of the Shroud and Fist had even had time to position themselves on the steep slope, the VTs were swarming all over them, reconfiguring from fighter to Guardian to Battloid for near-point-blank exchanges of autocannon fire. In an instant, Three had its legs blown out from under it and Two was holed and on fire. Steps ahead of missile explosions, One and Four were making desperate hops for higher ground, firing blindly at their pursuers. Even when the Stinger finally launched from its pit, spewing plasma bolts and heat-seekers, it was quickly set upon from all sides. Two fighter-configured Veritechs sustained direct hits and came apart in midair. Elsewhere, however, two dauntless Battloids were raining armor-piercing rounds into the Stinger's shoulders and torso.

Flames and thick black smoke were pouring from gaps in the convoy where missiles had found their targets. But far more of the Stinger's projectiles had missed and done little more than crater the slopes.

"Five! Five!" Rudai yelled over the radio. "Laun—"

Onscreen, directed energy loosed from the undercarriages of two VTs obliterated Rudai's pod. A second later, Four—almost at the ridgeline—lost a leg and tumbled down the slope, uprooting trees and gouging the soft earth. Then the Stinger itself was spun around by autocannon fire, and, billowing smoke, began to plummet.

"Bagzent," Narumi said from below. "Launch?"

Bagzent stared at him for a long moment without responding. "Closeup of one of the Veritechs," he said at last.

Narumi narrowed the field of the video camera and tracked one of the mecha.

"Lock on the taileron insignia," Bagzent said, eyes riveted to the instrument panel's display screen.

Slowly the insignia came into focus: the standard RDF fighting kite. Save that centered inside it was the Cizion—the V-like sigil of the Zentraedi.

A Zentraedi squadron? Bagzent thought in disbelief.

"Launch?" Narumi asked.

Bagzent shook his head. "Hide."

Full-size, their bodies required substantial portions of nutrient, taken in conjunction with daily doses of Protoculture-based supplements. Micronized, however, the need for sustenance was greatly diminished, which made it all the easier to refuse the foul-tasting gruel their captors had the audacity to call food.

In what had become the training facility's "dining hall"—a workspace that had once accommodated a mere one hundred full-size and could now house the entire population of the Protectorate—Ranoc Nomarre pushed his meal away and drew his hands down his face in a gesture of acute distress. A month of fasting had weakened his body, but he worried less about weight loss than the loss of his sanity.

Three months to the day had passed since the occupation of the Protectorate. Initially there had been no explanation from the UEG or the RDF; then the Zentraedi were informed that the Protectorate had been identified as the source of mecha parts that were ending up in the hands of dissident bands. The Gladiators and Excalibers that encircled the facility were there to prevent any additional supplies from reaching the Southlands.

Once the sizing chambers were erected, however, the official explanation changed: While there was no proof to support the charge of complicity, the Army of the Southern Cross was convinced of the Protectorate's guilt and had threatened to invade unless the UEG and the RDF agreed to shut down the giants' construction facility. To minimize any chance of going to war with its analog in the Southern Hemisphere, the RDF had further agreed to oversee the immediate downsizing of all Protectorate residents.

General Maistroff, head of the occupying forces, had given his word that everyone would be returned to full size once the Protectorate's innocence was established. But until then all full-size were expected to comply with the RDF by submitting to voluntary Micronization.

Protests would not be tolerated.

But there were protests, regardless. Why was a news blackout in effect in the Protectorate? the Zentraedi had wanted to know. And why were civilians and the media being kept from entering and reporting on the proceedings?

On two occasions, Destroids had opened fire on "noncompliants," killing twenty, including Utema, Ranoc's roommate for less than a week.

And all these weeks later, the smell of rotting flesh still permeated the air, despite the fact that the corpses had been moved miles from the facility and interred in a mass grave.

After that, the RDF achieved full compliance, even from those for whom the Micronization process was a guarantee of malady or premature death. With Zentraedi supervising the process, the sizing chambers ran continuously for five days, and during that time twelve more died as the result of suicide or sloppy technique and in botched escape attempts.

The events had effectively eclipsed Ranoc's earlier sense of fulfillment and confidence in the future. At least once a day he was assured that Micronization didn't necessarily mean the end of his career in construction; that the training in materials and techniques would continue, and that everyone would eventually be taught to operate heavy machinery and to work with Human crews. But Ranoc didn't believe for a moment that he would ever be returned to full size, and his anger grew until it had hardened into hatred for his jailers. He regretted having spoken up for Minmei years earlier, and he wished that he could have died a warrior's death with Khyron in the skies over Macross.

With Micronization completed, the number of Destroids had been reduced to 50, though some 600 Defense Force and civil defense troops remained in the Protectorate. And one of those soldiers was looking Ranoc's way just now, a bulky, square-jawed corporal named Shaw who seemed to delight in taunting everyone.

"What's the matter, Nomarre," the corporal asked from his post by the dining hall door, "you got a problem with the food?"

Ranoc sent him a baleful look. "Since you call it food, why don't you come over here and eat it?"

Shaw nodded knowingly to one of his comrades. "But, Nomarre, if you don't eat, you won't grow up to be a big, strong Zentraedi."

Ranoc waited until the laughter died down. "If and when I do," he said at last, "I promise you'll hear from me, Micronian."

Shaw and his buddy apparently didn't see any humor in the remark, and were headed Ranoc's way when sirens began to blare in the distance.

Shaw pointed a thick finger at Ranoc. "More of you trying to escape. Which only means more of you dead."

Ranoc might have concurred, but for the fact that beneath the shrill wailing of the sirens whomped the unmistakable sound of cannon fire. Heads swung south to the source of the barrage, and a moment later, nearly everyone in the hall was making for the exits to see for themselves what the commotion was about. Ranoc wondered suddenly if the RDF had been telling the truth about a threatened attack by the Army of the Southern Cross.

The next exchange of fire erased any chance of that: the opening roar was certainly the product of Excaliber forearm cannons. But the answering salvo came from no Human-made weapon.

"Battlepods," someone in the crowd of Zentraedi jamming the doorway said.

The oak forest south of the facility was crisscrossed with energy bolts and ablaze. The sky was crazed with lightninglike discharges, and the reports of explosions echoed in the surrounding hills and rumbled underfoot. Ranoc saw two Battlepods launch themselves above the flaming treetops, lasers and particle-beam cannons flaring. One was immediately atomized by Raidar X fire; the other dodged a flashing fusillade of bolts and dropped back into the trees.

"This is madness," Ranoc said to no one in particular. "Unless there are hundreds of them, they'll be wiped out."

From all directions, Excalibers, Guardians, and Spartans were converging on the kill zone.

"Maybe now is the time to escape." Someone suggested.

"You'll be cut down." Ranoc admonished him.

Just then something metallic shot high into the sky from amid the torched trees, something that could almost have been mistaken for Female Power Armor. At the apex of its flight, nearly indistinguishable in an upward storm of tracer rounds and antiaircraft fire, the object became the epicenter of a veritable fireworks display of missile launches.

Ranoc threw himself to the ground as the projectiles fell indiscriminately on the construction facility.

"Good evening, I'm Katherine Hyson . . ."

"And I'm Rebecca Hollister . . ."

"And this is World News for November tenth, Twenty-sixteen."

Hyson, looking paler and not quite as perfect as she had the previous summer, wore a fixed smile. In response to a slight sag in the ratings, the honchos at MBS had installed Hollister as co-anchor of the evening news—Hollister, who had become the network darling since her live coverage of the Protectorate occupation.

Hollister's TelePrompTer had come alive, though the mousy brunette scarcely glanced at the screen—or at any of the crib sheets on the desk—having been blessed with a near photographic memory.

"The question everyone is still asking six weeks after the attack on the occupied Zentraedi Protectorate," she began, "is how the malcontent band, now identified as the Steel Wind, managed to infiltrate the RDF's perimeter of Destroids. There is some concern that information about the deliberate—and unexplained—withdrawal of troops from the southern perimeter may have been leaked to the malcontents. But leaked by whom? MBS put the question to Admiral Richard Hunter only this afternoon as he was leaving a meeting of top RDF brass."

The footage of Hunter ran without comment from Hollister or Hyson: Hunter, surrounded by aides and reporters, walked briskly from RDF headquarters in Monument City toward a waiting limousine. "I have no comment at this time," he said.

"Which seemed to be the refrain from everyone we tried to speak with," Hollister resumed. "Except, that is, for Major Joseph Petrie of the Army of the Southern Cross, who spoke to us via satellite from Brasília."

Petrie's youthful face came onscreen, with his name and rank subtitled. "We're not saying that the RDF would purposely apprise the malcontents of a defensive weakness at the Protectorate. But in terms of public relations, it was certainly in their best interests to enlist Zentraedi to liberate the facility, since their own hands were tied by the UEG. The RDF had the foresight to downsize over a thousand potential insurgents, and now they're bowing to the pressure of a couple of outraged and outspoken sympaths. As applies to the formation of the so-called Twenty-third Veritech Squadron, this is simply another indication of the RDF's ceding of police powers to the aliens themselves. Something that will not occur in the Southlands."

Hollister returned to the screen. "Sanctioned or not, the Steel Wind's attempt at liberating the facility must now be deemed a victory, with news today that the RDF is withdrawing all its troops from the Protectorate. Unfortunately, this comes a little late for the forty-six members of the Steel Wind who were killed during and after the attack, and the thirty-two Protectorate Zentraedi who have died over the past six months.

"And what of the survivors and the enormous facility itself? UEG spokespersons maintain that former detainees who wish to be returned to full size can apply for factory satellite positions, and all others will be able to find construction work on Human crews."

Hollister paused and turned to Hyson. "Katherine."

Hyson's fixed smile returned as she accepted the handoff and shifted her eyes ever so slightly to the TelePrompTer.

"Today, the public and the media got their first look at an example of the malcontent weapon used in the Cuiabá Massacre in June, and in the September attacks on a convoy in the Venezuela Sector and on the Protectorate."

A grounded Stinger appeared onscreen, on display in a well-guarded enclosure at RDF headquarters. Members of the media were seated on folding chairs in neat rows, and at the podium stood a smartly uniformed, blond-haired RDF information officer identified as Lieutenant Eileen Summers.

Summers's briefing covered all the salient points. The craft everyone was looking at—a modified version of a Zentraedi battle suit—was known by the malcontents as a Stinger. The one on display was not the one that had been used by the Steel Wind, but had been captured in Venezuela by the Zentraedi Twenty-third Veritech Squadron. An as-yet-undetermined number of Stingers had been built by an all-female band of technicians at a hidden base in the jungles of the central Southlands.

"Can you provide any details on how the RDF came by this information?" one reporter asked the lieutenant.

Summer's expression remained solemnly thoughtful. "We can provide that our intelligence derives from ongoing investigations into various smuggling operations in Freetown, Mexico."

"Can you name names?" someone else asked.

"One of the individuals under arrest in Mexico is a Zentraedi female named Neela Saam; another is an arms merchant named Brian Cassidy."

"Does this all-female malcontent band have a name?" asked a reporter from MBS, known for having a nose for good stories.

"Neela Saam used the term zopilote when she referred to the group. The word is Spanish for 'vulture,' but the RDF is calling them the Scavengers."

A woman's hand went up. "Since many Zentraedi are known to be techno-illiterate, how and where did these Scavengers learn to design and build mecha?"

Summers cleared her throat. "We're still looking into that. But it's possible that some of them may have received their training in Macross or Monument."

Hyson was fuming when she reappeared onscreen; she calculated that she'd had less than two minutes of actual on-air time. She did, however, have a long segment after the commercial break, enough at least to put her even with Hollister. She was ready with the lead-in when the director's voice barked through her earbead.

"Katherine, ignore the intro to your piece. We've got a newsbreaker."

Hyson glanced expectantly at her TelePrompTer.

"Katherine," the director said, "give it back to Rebecca."

Hyson tensed from head to toe, but managed to turn to her co-anchor and say, "Rebecca."

"Thanks, Katherine. This just in from the Argentine: The Paranka, also known as the Burrowers, have launched an attack on the city of Zagerstown, approximately one hundred miles northeast of Buenos Aires. The death toll now stands at one hundred forty-seven, but is expected to exceed two hundred and fifty. We'll have more on this and other stories when we return."

2017

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Malcontentism notwithstanding, cities worldwide continued to prosper [during the period of Reconstruction], and fewer and fewer among them wanted any involvement with the UEG, the RDF, or the Bureau of Reconstruction Management. The events of 2012 [the Zentraedi Rain of Death] had made everyone wary of groups that purported to speak for all Humankind—groups like the then-defunct United Earth Defense Council. Separatism was the order of the day. Except in the Southlands, where Anatole Leonard was beginning to emerge as a kind of King Arthur, promising to rid the land of evil, unify its numerous city-states, and usher in a Golden Age. But, as the Southern Cross dergue would come to learn, Round Tables seldom endure. Feudalism would eventually return to the Southlands, setting the stage for the chaos that attended the Invid invasion.

S. J. Fischer, Legions of Light: A History of the Army of the Southern Cross

A stranger to the riotously lush, river-fed heartland of the continent he hoped someday to make his domain, Anatole Leonard gazed down at the treetops from his throne in the superhauler gondola, astonished to discover just how impact-cratered and strewn with crashed alien warships was his fantasy realm. Small wonder that the malcontents had access to so much weaponry and supplies, or that they had been able to construct terror machines like the Stingers—missiles from which had killed 271 in Zagerstown only a month earlier.

Quick glances out the port and starboard windows reaffirmed that the three other ultratech, dirigiblelike behemoths that comprised Leonard's flotilla were keeping pace with their leader. Somewhere in the undulating terrain below lay their objective: the forested basin that sheltered the Scavenger's mecha installation.

"Sir, the on-board comp has established a features match with satellite

recon's topo map," the air commander reported. "GPS readings are also in synch. Target is twenty-five clicks north-northeast." He pointed out the windscreen to the horizon. "Beyond that ridgeline, there. Do we announce ourselves or go in cold?"

"Announce ourselves how?" Leonard asked.

Muscular and curly-bearded, the captain chuckled to himself. "Sir, I was thinking about an old movie where a helicopter assault was conducted to the strains of Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyres.'"

Leonard didn't return the captain's over-the-shoulder grin. When, one hundred miles out, the fleet hadn't met resistance, concern increased that the Scavengers were purposely holding back, luring them in the way Khyron had the RDF in 2013, as part of his plan to abduct Minmei and Lynn-Kyle.

"This isn't the movies, Captain. Either we've been expected for over an hour now, or we've somehow caught them napping. If it's the former, they will announce to us soon enough; and if it's the latter, we should take full advantage of their sloppiness. No announcement. And no quarter once you have the fire command."

"Aye, sir."

"No quarter?" Professor Zand asked in a loud voice from his seat in the rear of the gondola. "Is that prudent, given what we might be able to learn from the captives? Perhaps you're unaware that I've had extensive experience interrogating the Zentraedi. Not in the field, it's true, but some of the same laboratory techniques can be applied. In any case, who knows what the Scavengers may have in the way of usable mecha or Protoculture. And we don't want that destroyed, do we?"

Leonard glanced at Zand, his broad, hairless brow deeply furrowed. "Don't mention that infernal word to me, Professor. I find it as offensive as taking God's name in vain. It has long been my wish that the hardware of the Southern Cross could be fueled by something other than that alien evil." He nodded his chin at Zand. "Maybe you could brew something up for us—something Human-grown."

Zand smiled stiffly. He was sweating profusely in his rumpled suit, and

had his bony hands clamped on the seat's padded armrests. "I am up to the challenge, sir."

Leonard faced front once more, concealing a long-suffering look. He had never had much use for scientists, least of all academics like Zand, who was as creepy as they came. Behind the wraparound dark glasses, Zand had the same all-iris eyes as that other one, Emil Lang, whom Leonard had never met. Had pupilless eyes become a fashion thing among academic types? he wondered. Zand was aboard as a favor to Joseph Petrie, who was obviously in awe of the professor's knowledge of cybernetics and Robotechnology; more, however, as a favor to T. R. Edwards. It was the half-faced double agent who had provided satellite intelligence on the suspected location of the Scavengers' camp and foreknowledge of the RDF's plans for an assault.

Leonard's principal reason for insisting on a no-quarter assault was to ensure that it be seen as more than a simple exercise in beat-them-to-the-punch competition. His only misgiving was that Seloy Deparra and the child might be among those at the facility. It would be just like Seloy to join the Scavengers. But he couldn't permit her possible presence to influence his decision. The assault would illustrate to the world the difference between RDF and Southern Cross policy on terrorism. In reprisal for the Cuiabá Massacre, the RDF had Micronized the population of the Protectorate; the Army of the Southern Cross would have executed them. The RDF gave lip service to civil rights by holding public trials; the Southern Cross considered itself sole judge and jury. And now, with Zagerstown still making headlines, everyone would see what Anatole Leonard meant by retaliation.

"Sir, we have visual contact with the target," the captain announced, indicating a large clearing bordering a meandering, cafe-au-lait river. "No signs of enemy activity. No scanner locks on any of our craft."

"Onscreen," Leonard commanded.

The superhauler's video cameras conveyed shaky images of warehouses, huts, and heavy machinery—cranes, bulldozers, and hackhoes.

"Looks like an old gold-dredging operation," the captain commented.

Leonard nodded. "You have the fire command, Captain—let's see if we can't wake them up."

Shortly, a flock of missiles ripped into the clearing, punching gaping holes in the warehouses and destroying many of the outbuildings. Muddy water fountained from the river, a crane toppled, and thick-trunked trees were flattened. But there was no return fire, no Zentraedi anywhere to be seen, even when Leonard called a halt to the attack.

The clearing wasn't large enough to permit a landing. Instead, while Leonard and his officers remained aloft, Southern Cross commandos in carbon-fiber body armor rappeled down on nylon ropes and conducted a building-to-building search. Live video brought the action to the gondola screens.

Some minutes later, the camera operator was ordered to one of the warehouses, where a colonel—a lean, crisp-uniformed black wearing a tan beret—was pacing in front of the doorless entrance. "Sir, all buildings have been secured," she began. She made a quarter-turn to the right to indicate the interior of the warehouse. "There are twenty-two Stingers inside, in various states of assembly."

Leonard arranged himself for the camera inside the gondola. "Where the hell is everyone, Colonel?"

The colonel pointed to an outbuilding at the edge of the clearing, a tangle of bare trees towering over it. "There, sir."

Leonard threw Zand a glance. "I guess you'll get a chance at interrogating them, after all, Professor."

"Not this bunch, sir," the colonel interrupted. "All seventeen have committed ritual suicide."

Leonard was quiet for a moment, then he put his hands on his ample midriff and laughed. "Well, good for them. They've saved us the trouble of killing them."

Rick came through the door to Gunther Reinhardt's cabin brushing snow from the shoulders of a down-filled jacket and stomping it from knee-

high boots. His nose was red and running and bits of ice were stuck in his hair. Reinhardt approached with a cup of coffee, which Rick eagerly accepted.

"There must be five feet out there," Rick said between sips. "Only the main roads are plowed. I almost didn't make it."

"Motokoff's stuck, so he won't be coming," Reinhardt told him. "But Lang and Obstat are here."

"Caruthers and Maistroff?"

"No word from either of them. They don't know a thing."

"Good. Let's see if we can keep it that way."

Built of logs and fieldstone, the cabin sat high in Monument City's only wooded valley. Rick followed the balding general through several closed doorways to a sunken den, where Lang and Obstat were warming themselves in front of an inviting fire. Ostensibly, everyone had come to play poker.

"Look on the bright side, Rick," Lang said, "even reporters stay home on nights like tonight."

Lang was right: Rick couldn't remember the last time he'd been able to leave his house without confronting a bevy of media people, all demanding to know his reaction to this accusation or that development. The debacle surrounding the Protectorate had become the story that wouldn't go away. Then came Zagerstown, and now Leonard's attack on the Scavengers' base in Amazonia.

Obstat rose from his chair and extended a hand. "I understand that congratulations are in order, Admiral."

"Thanks," Rick said, shaking hands.

"Is it official yet?" Lang asked.

"As of Christmas. Even though I had to send the ring upside by courier."

Obstat laughed. "My best to Admiral Hayes."

"I'll tell her next time I see her—whenever that is."

"Any date set?" Lang asked.

"The way things are going, we might have to wait till Tirol."

"You two should consider getting married aboard the SDF-3," Reinhardt said. "Make it a kind of christening."

Obstat laughed again. "Wouldn't the media eat that up!"

"The price of fame," Reinhardt said. He went to the bookshelf, unlocked the door to a cleverly concealed compartment, and spent a moment studying the display screen of a device inside. "We're still bug free, gentlemen. Not that we have to move on immediately . . ."

"No, we should get started," Rick said. "The personal stuff can wait for later."

"Where do we start?" Obstat said.

"With the Protectorate," Rick told him. "Is there any word on how the Steel Wind knew to strike from the south?"

Obstat shook his head. "To the best of our knowledge, it was blind luck. Maistroff denies he had any specific reason for withdrawing Destroids from that part of the perimeter. I don't see how he would stand to gain from undermining his own defenses, in any case."

"Assuming Maistroff was deliberately affording Steel Wind an opening," Reinhardt said, "he was probably counting on a full-scale riot by the detainees. A riot would have justified giving free reign to his Excaliber troops."

"He should never have been placed in command," Rick said.

Reinhardt looked at him. "That was Milburn's doing."

"Yeah, they're quite the cozy couple, aren't they." Rick looked at Obstat. "Were Milburn and Maistroff briefed on the location of the Scavenger base?"

"Yes. Along with Moran, Stinson, Caruthers, Edwards, and probably as many as twenty others."

"T. R. Edwards?" Lang asked. Then, when Obstat had confirmed it, "I don't know if it's relevant, but I had several run-ins with Edwards on Macross Island when he was an intelligence agent for the World Unification Alliance."

Rick was nodding his head. "Roy Fokker used to tell me stories about Edwards."

Reinhardt stoked his beard and turned to Obstat. "Can Edwards and Moran be removed from the intel loop without arousing suspicion?"

"It would be easier to feed them false intel and wait to see if it gets to Leonard," Rick said.

"With Moran, possibly," Lang answered. "But Edwards wouldn't be fooled by a maneuver like that. It would be safer to simply remove him from the loop."

"Done," Obstat said. "And Milburn?"

"Milburn, too," Reinhardt said. "And Maistroff and Caruthers, if we can swing it."

Rick shook his head in puzzlement. "What would motivate any of them to go to Leonard with top-secret information?"

"Perhaps no one did," Lang said. "Perhaps Leonard got lucky. Forgive me for mentioning it, but I believe it was an RDF information officer who blithely announced to the world that the Scavengers were based in Amazonia."

"There's another issue we need to discuss," Reinhardt said. "Disciplinary action for Lieutenant Summers."

Rick snorted a laugh. "Summer's media briefing didn't provide Leonard with a missing clue. All she said was 'Amazonia.' And how many millions of square miles is that?"

"You're right," Reinhardt was willing to admit. "Which only reinforces that someone in the loop went to him with our satellite intelligence."

Was it really mass suicide, or did Leonard execute the Zentraedi?" Lang asked.

Reinhardt shrugged. "No one's come forward with evidence of an execution. But one thing's certain: they missed out on capturing the Scavengers. Only five of the victims were females."

"That means the Scavengers are still at large," Lang said, "and another Zagerstown could occur at any time."

"So long as it happens south of the Venezuela Sector," Reinhardt muttered.

Lang stared at Reinhardt while Reinhardt and Rick were trading glances. "We're phasing out all RDF operations in the Southlands," Rick explained. "Cuiabá, the Argentine, every base except Cavern City, where Captain Wolff has somehow managed to score repeatedly against the dissidents. The Twenty-third's success against the Shroud and Fist was chiefly Wolff's doing."

Lang adopted a defeated look. "In other words, the RDF is surrendering control of the Southlands to Anatole Leonard."

No one spoke for a long moment. Wind howled at the cabin's insulated windows and infiltrated the stone chimney to rouse the fire.

"Perhaps we should concentrate on discussing Rick and Lisa's wedding plans," Lang said. "Before those get sabotaged as well."

When word had reached her of Neela's undoing in Freetown, Seloy Deparra knew that it was time to abandon the mecha base. Later she would hear on television that the "Scavengers," as the RDF had branded them, were believed to be operating from a secret installation in Amazonia. But before that, she had received warning directly from the dispirited remnants of Neela's organization—some of them former Senburu, more recently into prostitution and enforcement—who had carried south the news that those arrested by the RDF had informed on the "zopilotes."

Seloy was neither surprised nor unduly alarmed; after all, the Scavengers had already enjoyed a good run. And she liked that the name selected for her band of female techs referred to a beast that fed on carrion, which was exactly how she had come to think of the Human race—as decaying flesh. But knowing Anatole Leonard as well as she did, she understood that he would scour every square mile of jungle until he found them—scorching the forest if necessary—and she couldn't allow that to happen. Not when so much remained to be done.

As for Neela's employees, they hadn't traveled south to escape the long arm of the RDF, but to beg Seloy's forgiveness for doubly dishonoring the Imperative: first, by failing to protect Neela; and, second, by not having somehow arranged for the death of their weak-willed comrades. Seloy had granted them permission to amend their disgrace through an act of mass suicide. It was nothing more than coincidence that the seventeen had done so on the morning of Leonard's attack, only a day short of the camp's abandonment by the last of the Scavengers.

The new base was high in the foothills of the mountain range that ran the length of the Southland's western coast. Nourished by the clouds themselves, the jungle here was even more lush and varied than that of the lowlands. From the crude balcony of her quarters, Seloy could look down on treetops, pairs of brightly colored birds in flight, the white-water rapids of a river. In the mornings, mist lingered on the valley floor, evanescing as Earth tipped toward its star. Even Hirano, learning to talk in sentences these past few months, was stirred by the balcony view. In fact, all the Scavengers were becoming increasingly enamored of the forest and its profusion of animal and insect life. Xan Norri was especially fond of wasps and spiders. The Amazonian indigines who had guided the Scavengers to the site called that area of the mountains "the eyebrow of the forest."

Seloy had no regrets about having abandoned the partially completed Stingers. The Shroud and Fist had already made the Stinger obsolete by allowing theirs to fall into RDF hands. How long could it be now before Penn or Bronson or some other mecha engineer discovered a way to thwart the Stingers by encoding every Destroid and Veritech with an IFF signature that would render them easy targets, despite their innate maneuverability and enhanced firepower? More importantly, the flow of Protoculture cells from the factory satellite had ceased; Theofre Elmikk was apparently more cautious with his operation than Neela had been. Not that Seloy trusted Elmikk for a moment. Like all male Zentraedi, he was incapable of thinking like a Human, and was therefore bound to fail at whatever plan he set himself to. The Shroud and Fist, the Steel Wind, the Burrowers . . . all of them blind with rage, consistently subverting themselves.

The latest entry in the field, for example. The so-called New Unity, made up of the ten former members of the Steel Wind who had escaped Arkansas with their lives and some forty former detainees from the Protectorate itself. Detainees: another word Seloy liked. Ranoc Nomarre, the New Unity's leader, was a small, facially scarred male, unsure of himself, untested in battle, still seething about having been downsized—operating on pure hatred for anything Human. He had visited the lowland camp in its final days, all but begging Seloy, Marla, and the others for a Stinger. Hostility oozed from him when he had described his three-month ordeal in the Protectorate, and the difficulties he'd endured in reaching the camp—shipping across the Gulf of Mexico and the open ocean on the same freighter that had carried the Steel Wind north a month earlier, hacking his way through the forest, fording swollen rivers . . . Once a member of Khyron's Seventh Mechanized, Nomarre was a guaranteed threat to the cause, but Seloy had bestowed a Stinger on the New Unity nonetheless. Terror was terror, whatever form it took.

With only fifteen Stingers remaining—not counting those scattered about the Southlands, the property of one male group or another—Seloy understood that she was going to have to be more circumspect about who got what. No easy task, what with representatives of outlaw bands turning up every week petitioning for mecha. Excepting the one that had gone to the New Unity, the Scavengers' most recent donation of a Stinger was to an all-female group known as the Claimers. Founded in Australia by ex-Quadrono lieutenant Tomina Jepp, the group had plagued Southeast Asia with successful raids. But what had interested Seloy and persuaded her to part with a Stinger was Jepp's disclosure that the scientist Lazlo Zand, stationed at Tokyo's Robotech Research Center, had been making discreet inquiries about the possibility of procuring "alien artifacts."

Besides, what was one less Stinger? If the terror was to continue, the Scavengers were going to have to come up with something new and daring to spring on the Human race—something not necessarily limited to inflicting damage on cities and convoys.

Seloy was forever trying to will herself to think like a Human. When she looked at Hirano, she thought about Miriya and her daughter, Dana. Miriya had appeared on television frequently during the Protectorate occupation, proclaiming how her first cause was Zentraedi rights, even though she was married to a Human. But how might Miriya feel if she knew the truth about her best friend? Would it matter any if Miriya learned the truth about who had fathered Hirano? Indeed, would the fact that Seloy was alive mean anything, or had Miriya Parino been more corrupted by Human ways than she herself realized? Sufficiently changed to consider Seloy one of the enemy?

Human thinking was difficult. Taxing. Humans had been through scores of wars, almost as many as the Zentraedi, so in some ways the idea of terrorizing them with weapons seemed naive. What were their most deeply seated fears, and how could they be unleashed? If only there was a way to use the Stingers to truly sting the Humans. To somehow infect everyone of them with terror.

Terror as a kind of contagious disease.

An epidemic of terror.

"Where did you get a tan this time of year?" Lang asked Zand the moment he saw him.

"Sunlamps," Zand said, ignoring Lang's offer of a chair in favor of adopting a guarded position against the far wall.

The two were in Lang's office in the Robotech Research Center. With the UEG in recess and the factory projects on schedule, Lang had decided to spend a week or so in Tokyo, catching up with everyone. Zand was at the top of the list of people he wanted to meet with. Suddenly, now, the vague unease Lang had felt in recent phone conversations with Zand was blossoming into full-fledged concern.

"Sunlamps?" Lang said skeptically.

"All right, all right, if you have to know, I took some time off and went to the beach."

"What beach? There isn't a sun-drenched beach within a thousand miles."

Zand made a minor adjustment to his dark glasses. "I don't remember the name of the place. Somewhere in Thailand."

Lang sat back in his chair. "Let me be sure I have this straight: you decided you needed some time off, so you, what?—you jetted down to Thailand to a beach you can't remember the name of, and you soaked up some color."

"Exactly. You have it straight."

"You traveled alone?"

"I happen to enjoy traveling alone."

Lang stood up and walked across the room. Without announcing his intentions, he swept the sunglasses from Zand's face and looked into his eyes. It was like looking into a mirror.

Lang staggered back, supporting himself on the edge of his desk. "Good God, you've done it. You found a way to take the mind-boost."

Zand whipped the glasses out of Lang's hand and put them on. "What are you babbling about? You know as well as I that Zor's console was destroyed."

Lang stared at him, wide-eyed. "You found a way. Tell me what you did, Lazlo. Don't shut me out."

Zand hesitated, then grimaced sinisterly. "You're right, Doctor, I did find a way. You want the details? I injected myself with a mixture of Zentraedi blood and a couple of ccs of fluid from that Invid craft we found. I was unconscious for three hours. I'm sure I almost died. But believe me, Doctor, my IQ is right up there with yours now, and it's increasing—every day, every hour. And soon I'll have an understanding of the Shapings. I'll have powers you never dreamed of."

Lang lowered himself to the desk like one deflated. "Lazlo, listen to me. You don't realize what you've done. You think this is all some competition, but it isn't, and you're going to begin to understand the downside of the boost. The hunger that surpasses any known addiction. The moments of madness—" Lang paused to catch his breath. "Why couldn't you have talked to me first?"

"Talked to you? Talked to you? When exactly was I supposed to do that? The great and all-powerful Lang, always addressing the UEG, or receiving one honor or another. Designing mecha, designing starships, traveling up and down the gravity well like a superhero . . . Tell me, Doctor, when was I supposed to talk to you?"

"Lazlo," Lang said softly, "I never realized—"

"That's right, you never did, and that's been the problem all along. But no more. Because I don't need you anymore. I have people who accept me for what I am, not as just some pale alternative to the great Lang. I have funding, I have projects. I have my own mission, my own destiny to shape. And perhaps it's not as bound up with yours as you'd like it to be, but I can't help that the lowly disciple has grown up to found his own movement, Doctor. And we'll just have to wait and see which of us turns out to be the more influential."

Zand spun on his heel and hurried out of the room. Lang followed him out into the corridor but soon gave up the chase, stopping to lean on a water cooler and collect his thoughts.

Was Zand—even Zand the perennial risktaker—strong enough to navigate the razor's edge of madness and survive? The objective and curious half of Lang's mind belonged not to the world of Human emotions but to Protoculture and the Shapings. But the Lang that cared for Lazlo Zand was the more powerful one, and already he mourned the loss of a friend and brilliant colleague. Zand—after Milburn and Moran—had joined the list of people he could no longer count on. When was it going to stop?

His thoughts were interrupted by a mellifluous soprano voice singing a rendition of one of his favorite pre-War songs, "A Day in the Life." He followed the voice down the corridor and through several turns until it led him to the cybertechnology lab. By now several of the center's machine intelligence specialists—short-haired men and women sporting baggy, retro fashions—had joined in the song, but the soprano's was the only voice on key. Lang had guessed from the start that it was the android, JANUS M, though he hadn't been told anything about its learning the Beatles classic.

The cybertechs grinned when they saw him enter the room.

"We thought this might get your attention," one of them said.

The android stopped singing to stare at Lang. In its jumpsuit and real-hair wig, it couldn't have looked more lifelike. "That was lovely singing, JANUS," Lang told it.

The living machine smiled. "I'm glad you enjoyed it, Doctor Lang."

"I liked it very much."

"That's good, because next time you'll have to pay to hear me sing."

The techs laughed as Lang's smile collapsed; then Lang began to laugh with them. He approached the android and stood facing it. "JANUS," he said, "retinal scan." And the android's eyes immediately became lifeless.

"Yes, Doctor Lang. Your request?"

A dermal plug in the back of JANUS's neck concealed an access port for high-speed data transfer. Lang inserted a remote transmitter into the port and studied the readout on a nearby screen.

"I see that someone has added a batch of new coding," Lang said to the cybertechs.

"Lui just wanted to try out his snappy-response program," a young woman supplied sheepishly.

Lang swung to her, smiling. "I like it." He removed the remote from the android's neck port, then dug into his pocket for some NuYen and handed it to JANUS. "I'd like to hear you finish the song."

JANUS bowed from the waist, Japanese fashion, and picked up "A Day in the Life" at the up-tempo bridge.

As Lang listened, he began to recall a conversation he and Zand had had years earlier, concerning the prospect of inserting an operative into the Milburn-Moran clique to gather covert intelligence. Zand had suggested using Lynn-Minmei, and Lang had countered that Minmei was too guileless; that a spy of the sort they had in mind would have to be created.

Lang continued to watch the android sing for a moment more, then moved to one side of the room and commanded his lapel communicator to page his research secretary.

A minute later, Haruke's voice issued from the communicator speaker. "Yes, Doctor Lang?"

"Haruke, I want you to do two things for me. First, I need someone to compile a complete software precis on Lynn-Minmei—and I mean complete. Cull from every available source—including my journals, beginning with January 2010. Then, see if you can locate the telefax or cyberbox number for a Sharky—no, make that Samson O'Toole." Lang spelled out the name. "He's a talent agent, so I'm certain he has an agency listing in either Monument City or Denver."

"I'll attend to it immediately, Doctor Lang."

"One last thing, Haruke: If you find O'Toole's number, contact him and say that I'd like to extend an invitation to him and Minmei to visit our Tokyo installation. I'll call to give him the details. But say for now that there's someone here I think Minmei should meet."

CHAPTER TWENTY

There is some speculation that the sting that netted the RDF's Neela Saam and Brian Cassidy actually involved the procurement of the nuclear bomb detonated by the Iron Ravens. However, Obstat's Special Operations Group was so fixated on arresting Saam and Cassidy and obtaining information about the Scavengers that it ignored early leads which could have prevented the tragedy in Oasis. The nuclear device inflicted more death and destruction in .five minutes than all the Malcontent groups combined would inflict in five years of marauding.

Weverka T'su, Aftermath: Geopolitical and Religious Movements in the Southlands

Despite its having incurred the moral opprobrium of the RDF and any number of Zentraedi advocacy groups, Anatole Leonard's preemptive strike against the attendees of the Cairo summit had been secretly praised for neutralizing the malcontent threat in Africa. As a result of the Southern Cross's action, Clozan and the sixty members of the Quandolma were dead and all but one of the continent's lesser-known groups had disbanded. The exception was the Iron Ravens, forty-four strong, under the leadership of a former infantry commander named Jinas Treng. Made up of Zentraedi crash survivors from throughout sub-Saharan Africa, the Ravens were nomadic and rarely a problem to anyone but farmers and ranchers, most of whom had opted to provide the Ravens with whatever food or livestock they needed rather than take them on.

The band was armed, but not nearly as well as its counterparts in the American Southlands. In lieu of Battlepods and Stingers, it made do with turn-of-the-century gasoline-guzzling trucks and buses, which, while certainly as ingeniously modified as anything in a post-apocalyptic film fantasy, were short on firepower. Consequently, Jinas Treng's threats to destroy Oasis—a city from which the Ravens had been repeatedly repulsed—went largely ignored. Treng's threats had become so routine, in fact, that the commander of Oasis's small garrison of Destroids had stopped reporting them to RDF headquarters in Monument City.

The former Lualaba River port of Kisangani, Oasis was a city of approximately 65,000, renamed in 2012 after emerging as the only city south of Cairo to have escaped the Rain. Located in the heart of Africa, more than one thousand miles from either coast, it had become a mecca for displaced peoples from more than a dozen neighboring nations—the continent's one radiation- and AIDS-free city where water and food were in relatively good supply.

The 1-megaton nuclear device detonated by the Iron Ravens on March 15, 2017, killed 53,431, and put an abrupt end to thoughts of Africa rejoining the modern world anytime soon. The source of the device would never be known, though evidence pointed to a band of mercenary Humans once linked to the regime of Daddy Omaa of the Central African Union, a notorious distributor of Chinese-made atomics and biological warfare weapons during the Global Civil War.

Treng's justification for committing the most heinous act since Khyron's destruction of Macross was that, on learning of Anatole Leonard's raid on the Scavengers' camp, he had felt compelled to demonstrate to the world his meaning of retaliation. Captured less than a week after the bombing, Treng was overheard to snicker to the first reporter that got close enough to him, "The Imperative made me do it."

"Oasis will remain hot for ten years," Max Sterling was telling his guest, Rolf Emerson, a week after the capture of Jinas Treng. "That's why the Twenty-third was assigned the Ravens to begin with. Defense Force Command couldn't risk subjecting Human pilots to such intense radiation. It's bad enough that two members of the Nuclear Emergency Search Team died." He shook his head in disgust. "Of course, the Twenty-third would have insisted on going, even if they hadn't drawn the mission."

"You've trained them well, Max," Emerson said. "Their sense of dedication is inspiring."

"They're not so much dedicated to the RDF as they are to a Zentraedi ethic." Max looked at Miriya for confirmation.

Miriya nodded without saying anything. The three of them were in the small living room of the Sterlings' high-rise apartment. Dana was playing at Emerson's feet, tying his shoelaces into knots.

"What's going to happen to Treng?" Emerson asked.

"He'll stand trial for war crimes."

"A waste of time," Miriya said suddenly. "Treng has already admitted his guilt. The thing to do now is to let him run." She used the Zentraedi term Kara-Thun, which referred to a trial-by-combat ritual, wherein a traitor to the Imperative could be absolved of a wrongdoing by defeating an appointed opponent. "I'd gladly volunteer as the chase."

Max looked at her askance. "Not exactly a fitting role for the model of acculturation."

"What does that mean, anymore? The factory satellite is supposed to be acculturation headquarters, and it was from among the Zentraedi there that Breetai and Exedore chose the members of the Twenty-third. Besides, Max, since the RDF has turned the policing over to the Zentraedi, why not the punishment as well? It was the Twenty-third that captured the Iron Ravens, so it should be the Twenty-third that is granted the honor of dispatching them."

Emerson cut his soulful eyes to Max. "I think Ilan would have agreed with Miriya."

"I was sorry to hear about Ilan, Rolf."

Emerson took a long breath. "It's strange. She never visited Zagerstown until the day of the Paranka's Stinger attack." He studied his hands. "But after the attack, she called to say that she'd seen the light, and had to take in the uprising."

"And Ilan Tinari would have understood the need to let Treng run," Miriya told him. "Unlike Humans, we Zentraedi do not distinguish between friendly and unfriendly fire. Death comes wherever one finds it. So much the better when it comes in battle."

"Do you miss Buenos Aires?" Max asked, hoping to change the conversation.

"I sure miss the food."

Max made a gesture of dismissal. "Montana's beef is every bit as good as the Argentine's."

Emerson shrugged noncommittally. "There are some people I miss, too. But I'll be going back and forth for a while—until the base is fully phased."

"What are your duties in Monument, Rolf?" Miriya asked.

"Same as my old duties, only more so. If Senator Moran is elected president of a unified Southlands, his resignation from the UEG will open the door for establishing a Southlands embassy here in Monument."

"Makes the Southlands seem like a separate nation," Max said, disgruntled.

"It is a separate nation. Let's face it, we've blown our chance at becoming one world by allowing politics to take precedence over the needs of the people. With Moran and Leonard ruling the Southlands, and comparable separatist movements going on in Europe and Asia, we're returning to turn-of-the-century factionalism."

"There's a pleasant thought," Max said, then smiled lightly. "But I'll confess, Rolf, I'm glad to have you up here."

"And Rolf's lucky to have arrived just in time for the thaw," Miriya said sarcastically. "I want to hear what you have to say about Monument when you're up to your knees in mud."

"Mud-dah," Dana mimicked.

Emerson looked down at her and grinned. "Do you like to play in the mud, Dana?"

Dana glanced briefly at Miriya. "Mommie yells at me. But I do it anyway."

Max laughed. Rolf and Dana had really hit it off. That he had the energy for a three-year-old was commendable; but that he had the patience for a three-year-old like Dana was exemplary. Not even Dana's Zentraedi godfathers were as tolerant of her shenanigans. Not even Professor Zand—though his patience with her seemed more a product of scientific interest than anything else.

"Too bad Admiral Hunter had to cancel," Emerson said. "I was looking forward to meeting him."

"Rick's not as available as he used to be," Max told him. "Although he did find the time to get engaged."

Miriya adopted a dubious look. "Now let's see if he can find the time to get married."

Only Emerson laughed. Max asked about Anatole Leonard's reaction to Oasis.

"For a change, he's leaving it to the media to point out that Oasis was the RDF's responsibility, and that such an act could never have occurred in the Southlands. The Army of the Southern Cross grows stronger without having to retaliate this time."

Miriya's green eyes narrowed. "In five years there won't be an RDF. The REF will return from Tirol to an Earth governed by Anatole Leonard."

Rolf regarded her for a long moment. "Will you be among them—the REF, I mean?"

Miriya looked at Dana. "I don't think so. No matter what happens between the RDF and the Southern Cross, I think Dana's better off on Earth than she would be locked inside that horrible factory for her entire childhood."

Lynn-Kyle and Theofre Elmikk met openly in the factory's level-six cafeteria. Kyle wore his service-personnel whites, a bar-code identity-information badge woven into the fabric of the unisuit's shirt collar and left sleeve. Elmikk wore his typical look of misanthropy.

"If I could have a minute of your time, T'sen Elmikk," Kyle said. "I have a few questions about food allocations for your work crews."

"We have nothing to discuss," Elmikk said, with a wary glance around the cafeteria. "My work crews have all they need just now."

"I'm talking about the crews operating downside, T'sen Elmikk."

The Zentraedi's expression hardened. "Those crews are no longer my concern."

"As long as the upside crews are well fed, is that the idea?"

Elmikk lowered his voice. "As I explained, I'm responsible to those directly in my command. The others should understand how difficult it has become to meet everyone's needs just now."

"I'm sure they do understand. Nevertheless, without adequate supplies they could starve. It's been six months since they received anything from you. As it is, they've been harassed by hostile forces in their environment. And now that the pressure on you has eased some—"

"They deserve harassment for the sloppiness of their work," Elmikk sneered. "That sloppiness reflects on all of us.

"Then I should inform them not to rely on you for further aid?"

"Tell them whatever you like."

Kyle laughed shortly. "Perhaps Jevna Parl would be more interested in the plight of those lower down in the food chain."

Elmikk met Kyle's openly hostile gaze. "Parl cares only about his relationship to Breetai. He would never jeopardize that by reaching out to others."

"I think you misjudge Jevna Parl's loyalty to the overall cause, T'sen Elmikk. He believes, as most of us do, that everyone should be equally provided for so that none go hungry."

The Zentraedi mulled it over for a long moment. "Listen to me, Cheng, or whatever your real name is—"

"Jeng Chiang," Kyle said calmly.

"Of course," Elmikk said. "My advice to you is that you begin to think of your own future, rather than expend your energies on lost causes. If and when the hungry realize their goal, where do you imagine you'll be? I'll tell you, Chiang: you'll be dead. They will have no further use for you, just as I have no use for you. So why not simply go down the well and find something better to do with the time that remains?"

Kyle stared at Elmikk's back as the brawny alien lumbered off. Their plan for hijacking the SDF-3 had to be nearing completion, he told himself, or Elmikk wouldn't have been so brazenly confident. He looked up at the cafeteria's forty-foot-high ceiling and contemplated the two heavily secured levels that separated him from Lisa Hayes and Breetai. They might as well be on the dark side of the moon.

Routinely, every evening, Breetai watched Little White Dragon in the privacy of his quarters aboard the transformed flagship he had once commanded. He would sit crosslegged on the deck, sometimes with several pounds of Human food, and the video—transmitted from an entertainment center on level three of the satellite—would run on the twenty-by-thirty-five-foot screen affixed to the bulkhead. Occasionally he would fall asleep before the video finished, or his attention would be distracted by thoughts of the refurbishing of the ship or the mission to Tirol and what it might hold for all of them. There were so many variables: an attack by the Invid, an attack by some other race the Zentraedi had crushed, an attack by Zentraedi ships that had somehow escaped the final disgrace of the War. How, in any event, might the Masters react to the Earthers' sudden appearance in Fantomaspace? Would they befriend them, or seek to enslave them as they had so many other races? And what, then, would be the fate of the Zentraedi? Not repatriation but execution, Breetai imagined. Swift and expedient, without prelude.

Lately, his thoughts had centered on the injustices Zor and the Zentraedi had conspired to deliver to Earth. Now, as if the Rain hadn't been enough, the survivors had to contend with scattered hands of programmed killers. The so-called malcontents had to be eradicated because they were a threat, just as Khyron had been, to the greater mission.

With Exedore's help, Breetai had come to understand the malcontents' hunger for vengeance, the loss of lives, the reprisals, the escalating violence. Most Zentraedi had instigated and lived through much worse. But he could neither condone the actions of his comrades nor demonstrate much respect for the RDF's attempt to find solutions to the malcontent dilemma. There were no solutions. It wasn't a matter of awarding them half the planet, or of supplying them with food, jobs, or civil rights. The Zentraedi rage came from a place no Human could visit—except perhaps those unfortunate few Breetai had encountered whose upbringing had instilled in them the equivalent of an Imperative, a pervasive lust to destroy. Though they were loath to admit it, Humans did have masters; they took the form of "parents," or sometimes the conditions of the Human society itself, with its complex laws meant to safeguard Humans from reverting to the violent ways of their ancestors in the animal kingdom.

What Breetai couldn't understand was how he had allowed himself to become so distanced from the concerns of his Earthbound comrades. In reference to some Human legend, Exedore often called the factory satellite their "ivory tower." And if Breetai didn't grasp the full meaning of the reference, he at least grasped the implication.

Little White Dragon was onscreen just now, at the point in the plot where the long-haired hero, played by Minmei's cousin, Lynn-Kyle, was dodging arrows loosed by a bearded giant wearing a black eye-patch and a plumed helmet. As often as Breetai had watched the film, he was forever discovering new things in each scene: background details, foreshadowings, or what were called "nuances" of characterization.

All at once, however, he knew that he was watching a scene he'd never seen before. Had the techs in the factory satellite sent him the "director's cut" or some such thing as a surprise? Onscreen, in any case, was the Lynn-Kyle character, in his standard belted robe and black slippers, in the midst of a monologue.

"The giant doesn't understand that I need not so much as strike out with fist or foot to defeat him; that I could simply stand aside and allow him to be undermined by his own troops," the character was saying.

The added scene had a different visual quality from the rest of the film—an almost live quality—and must have been shot long before or long after the major action, because Kyle's black hair, while long, was not as long as it should have been, nor did the strangely unfamiliar robe fit as well as it should. More, the backdrop was nothing more than the bare bulkhead of a starship—the SDF-1, certainly—awaiting special effects.

"For they covet what he has and they scheme to take that from him and flee this place for distant shores. They toil in secret, inching in on his safe domain. But I cannot stand aside; I will rob them of the honor of defeating him, even though I risk all that I have. That is as it must be, for the giant and I are linked by destiny."

With that, the film returned to a familiar scene. But Breetai was left with the nagging feeling that the Lynn-Kyle character had been talking directly to him.

"I'm so glad you could come, Lynn," Emil Lang told Minmei in the reception area of the Tokyo Research Center, taking her hand and kissing her on both cheeks. Minmei had a silk kerchief tied around her head, and was wearing a polka-dot sleeveless dress that was a bit lightweight for April.

"How could I say no to you, Dr. Lang? After everything you've done for me."

Lang smiled and shook hands with Minmei's manager, who wore an expensive knit suit and abundant gold jewelry. "Mr. O'Toole."

"Call me Sam, Doc."

"We had to be in Tokyo anyway," Minmei said. "The Lorelei Network is launching next month, and they want me to do my first show from here."

"The Zentraedi network," Lang said' nodding. "I'd heard that they'd signed you to do an interview show or something."

"More a talk show, Doc. But we're working on a guest list, too. Zentraedi guests, that is."

Lang looked at Minmei. "I hope this doesn't mean that you're giving up on touring."

"Not on your life," O'Toole answered for her. "That's' our second—well, okay, our third reason for being in Asia. We're in the final stages of setting up a world tour to coincide with Minmei's inaugural appearance on Lorelei." O'Toole grinned at Minmei. "We figure she can do the talk show on

live-remote from whatever city she's playing at the time."

"Will you be the sole act, Lynn?"

"Aside from the usual warmup bands. Unless you've found a partner for me, Dr. Lang."

Lang stared at her, then laughed. "Lynn, it's funny you should say that . . ."

He began to lead the two of them on a tour of the main floor of the center. When Lang wasn't describing the goings-on in various labs, he and Minmei talked about old friends from the SDF-1 and Macross City' and the upcoming trial of Jinas Treng. She asked after Lazlo Zand, and Lang simply told her that he was busy with research, when in fact he had no idea where Zand was. Lang noted that Minmei avoided mentioning Rick or Lisa; he assumed that their engagement was the reason. She did, however, wonder if it would be possible for her to visit the factory satellite, and Lang promised to make the necessary arrangements.

As they approached the staff room at the building's northeast corner, Lang placed his right hand in the deep pocket of his white jacket and depressed the button switch on a coded transmitter. Seconds later a soprano voice was lilting from behind the closed door to the staff room.

"Who is that singing?" Minmei asked.

"The person I asked you here to meet," Lang said. "My niece. She's been working as a research assistant, but everyone here thinks she has a wonderful voice, and I was wondering if you couldn't give her some advice on how to get started as a professional."

"Is she related to the Bernards?"

"No, uh, the other side of the family."

Lang ushered Minmei and O'Toole into the staff room, where his alleged niece was sitting at an electronic keyboard, improvising melodies for several of the techs from cybernetics. O'Toole took one look at the center of attention and said, "Somebody pinch me, I think I'm dreaming."

"Uncle Emil," the singer said.

"I don't mean to disturb you, Janice, but I know you'd never forgive me

if I didn't introduce you to—"

"Lynn-Minmei!" the android said, shooting to its feet. "Oh, my God!" The techs had outfitted JANUS M in jeans and a top that made the most of its custom proportions. Just now, though, the techs were torn between who to watch: Minmei or their creation.

"Lynn and Sam," Lang said, "I'd like you to meet Janice Em."

"You have a terrific voice," Minmei said.

"Terrific," O'Toole parroted, eyeing Janice blatantly. Five six, she weighed 110 pounds, and projected a kind of wan beauty, offset by large, deep-blue eyes.

Janice adopted a demure pose. "I was just toying with some vocal lines."

"Sing them again," Minmei said, walking over to the keyboard.

Janice seated herself; her perfectly formed fingers played over the keys and she began to sing. Minmei gradually joined in, harmonizing with Janice's melody. Lang and the cybertechs were the picture of restrained exaltation. O'Toole stood openmouthed in disbelief.

"Do you have an agent?" O'Toole asked when Minmei and Janice were finished.

Janice's eyes edged ever so slightly toward Lang. "At the moment, Mr. O'Toole, I answer only to my Uncle Emil."

The woman introduced herself as Tan. Athletically built, she had thousands of facial freckles, lackluster red hair, and the furtive look of a sympath—an advocate.

"How did you know where to contact me?" Zand asked her.

Tan laughed. "Word travels, Professor. Let's just say I heard about you from a guy who heard about you from a guy who heard you wanted to establish contact with the rebels."

"I never specified rebels."

"Maybe not. But you did say 'unaligned alien groups,' didn't you?"

Zand nodded. "What band do you represent?"

Tan held up her hands. "You're jumping the gun, Professor. You haven't even told me what you're after."

"I understand. It's just that a man of my position . . ."

"Sure, Professor. You don't want to risk exposure. But stop worrying—from now on you'll only be dealing with me. If I don't have what you need, I'll find the people that do. You won't have to be personally involved in any of it."

Zand relaxed somewhat. After a glance around the small park that surrounded the shrine, he sat down beside Tan on the bench she had chosen as their point of rendezvous. They were only a few miles from the research center, but Zand felt as if he were hundreds of miles from Tokyo.

"Now," Tan said suddenly, "exactly what did you have in mind when you said you were interested in 'alien artifacts'?"

Zand reseated his dark glasses. "I'm looking for examples of Invid battlecrafts—any that may have been captured and taken aboard by the Zentraedi, and have since ended up on Earth."

Tan made an exaggerated show of surprise. "No wonder you couldn't say over the phone. Here I was thinking you meant Zentraedi artifacts when you were talking about Invid stuff." She shook her head. "But I'm afraid you've got me, Professor. I wouldn't even know where to begin looking."

"But you'll ask around? Spread the word?"

"Sure, but—"

"What about Flower of Life?"

Tan laughed in astonishment. "You've got to be kidding. Why not ask me for Khyron's brain? Trust me, whatever Flowers there were died with him."

"Yes, but I've heard rumors about the Flower growing on Earth, and I know that some of Khyron's troops still operate in the Southlands."

"You mean the Fist."

"Yes, yes, the Fist."

"I don't know, you'll have to give me a little time—"

"What about a couple of liters of blood from a full-size Zentraedi?"

Tan regarded him in wary puzzlement. "Giants' blood? You should have thought of that before you had everyone in the Protectorate Micronized."

Anger contorted Zand's features. "I didn't have anything to do with that. It was those UEG fools."

Tan shrugged. "Maybe so, but the only full-size are on the factory, and you'd certainly have an easier time getting onboard than I would."

Zand worked his jaw. "All right. But you will remember to inquire about Invid craft and the Flower?"

"I'll remember. Give me a couple of weeks."

"Two."

Tan shook her head in amusement. "Okay, two weeks."

Zand pulled a piece of paper from his jacket pocket, scribbled a phone number, and handed it to her. "Call me day or night when you have something."

Tan glanced at the paper and pocketed it. "You can be sure of it, Professor."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It has been remarked that old habits die hard. How else to explain the re-emergence of the corrupt fin-de-siècle World Unification Alliance as the equally corrupt Reconstruction Era United Earth Government, or the resurrection of the technophobic Faithful as the Church of Recurrent Tragedies? Rebirth would attend even the sinisterly wrought Lorelei Network when, in 2026, it reappeared as the EVE Network.

Zachary Fox, Jr., Men, Women, Mecha:

The Changed Landscape of the Second Robotech War

"Hello, caller, you're on the Lorelei Network."

"Minmei?"

"Yes, this is Minmei, and you're on the air."

The WorldPhone connection was interrupted by brief static. Then: ". . . name is Karita, and I just wanted to say that I'm a big fan."

"I'm glad you enjoy my songs, Karita. And I'm glad for the chance to talk personally with you and all Zentraedi who have learned to appreciate the joys of music."

It was her first call and she was nervous, but the cameras didn't seem to be capturing her inner agitation. On the monitor screen she appeared calm, confident, warm, accessible—all that the network chiefs were expecting of her. "Remember that the Zentraedi aren't so much fans as worshipers," one executive had thought to point out. "They're going to be satisfied just seeing you and talking to you. So in a sense, it won't so much matter what you say to them, as how you look when you say it."

Which explained why wardrobe had selected such a short shirt, and why the hair stylist had insisted on making the most of her bangs.

"I've been a follower of yours since the War, Minmei," the caller was saying. "In fact, I was a charter member of the fan club that Rico and Konda started on Commander Breetai's flagship. I held a position onboard as

sizing-chamber operator. I know Rico, Bron, and Konda personally. Well, I knew them, anyway."

"You haven't seen them for a while?"

Some of the excitement left Karita's voice. "Not in a long while. We can't all be lucky enough to be living like celebrities in Monument City."

"I'm sure you have a fine life just where you are."

"You think so, Minmei? You think I have a fine life? Maybe you want to hear about my life since I left Monument."

"I'd be very interest—"

"I could see that Monument wasn't going to be worth a damn once everyone from Macross started relocating. I'll never understand why they couldn't have just built another city for themselves and left Monument to the Zentraedi. But I suppose we should be grateful for the year of autonomy we enjoyed. After all, we're the defeated ones. We're fortunate even to be alive, isn't that so?"

Minmei tried not to sound flustered, but she wasn't comfortable with the turn the conversation had taken. "I think that all of us are fortunate to be alive."

"Yes, of course that's true. And a lot of Humans have had to suffer the rigors of deprivation in the aftermath of the Rain. But I wonder how many of them have ever been denied food or been chased by an angry mob. I wonder how many of them know what it's like to lack the skills necessary for survival, to be a needful thing wherever one goes, just another mouth to feed—another alien mouth to feed. To be blamed for every strike the malcontents have launched against the Human race—"

"My guest today is going to be addressing just those issues, Karita," Minmei cut in, her voice quivering with urgency. "He was the head of a construction battalion in the Protectorate, and he has a lot of interesting things to say about the plight of the jobless and the homeless, and about the malcontents—"

"More talking," Karita said, full of invective. "Another voice to spew the UEG party line that civil rights for the Zentraedi will be reinstated as soon as the uprisings are put down. How easy for your guest, or for Rico or Exedore or Miriya to talk from their cozy homes in Monument or on the factory satellite about the plight of their comrades. Well, I think it's just a pack of lies, Minmei, it's just a pack of Human lies—"

In the studio control booth, the show's producer drew a finger across his throat and opened the microphone that fed into Minmei's earbead. "I had to dump that one, Lynn. But pretend he's still on the line. Fake an upbeat good-bye, and we'll go to a song."

Minmei looked into the camera. "Uh, thank you for being so forthright, Karita. We certainly do have a lot of work cut out for us if we're to solve these problems. And solve them, we will. Uh, please feel free to call us again sometime soon." She smiled and forced a sigh. "I think we're off to a good start. And we'll return right after this song."

A live version of "To Be In Love" played behind concert footage filmed in Portland in 2013. Momentarily free of the camera's scrutiny, Minmei threw a panicked look at the control booth. "Are they all going to be like that?"

Behind the glass partition, the producer made a calming gesture. "Don't worry, we'll screen the next few callers."

Minmei took a moment to collect herself. When the music video ended, she faced the camera, awaiting the producer's on-air signal. "Welcome back to the Love Line. That was the first song I wrote, and it's still one of my favorites. Now, I see we have another caller waiting. Bagzent," she read from an off-camera computer display screen, "you're on the Lorelei Network."

"Yeah, Minmei. I just wanted to respond to some of the things said by your first caller."

Minmei gulped, but managed to say, "Go ahead, Bagzent."

"I just wanted to tell him—what was his name? Karita? just wanted to tell him that if he's after inner peace and freedom, he's looking in the wrong direction. Freedom isn't about where you live, or how well you live, or even how you're treated by your fellow creatures. You find freedom by surrendering yourself to Wondrous Spirit and accepting that you're a part of something bigger than Earth or the Sol system or the Fourth Quadrant of the galaxy.

"Wondrous Spirit knows that I've done shameful things in my lifetime. During the War, I destroyed a lot of Veritechs, in space and on the surface of the planet you know as Mars. And after the Rain, I aligned myself with Khyron and participated in his raids on Detroit. Just these past two years I've taken part in the capture of the Grand Cannon, and I've led Stinger attacks on convoys everywhere from the Venezuela Sector to Mato Grosso.

"I've taken hundreds of Human lives, Minmei. But I recently made a choice that's made all the difference in my life: I denied the Imperative. I chose life over what most Zentraedi would consider an honorable death. And when I did that, Wondrous Spirit took me in and forgave me for all my past crimes. Now, each day I rejoice in the sights and sounds and smells of the world Wondrous Spirit brought into being. This is what Karita has to learn if he wants to be free. This is what all Zentraedi need to learn, whether they're on the factory, or Micronized residents of the Protectorate, or armed hostiles aligned with one of the malcontent bands, such as I was. Love life. Love the world for what it is. Love Wondrous Spirit."

Bagzent hung up, and Minmei gave her head a slight shake, as if snapping to. "Um, thank you, Bagzent, for those . . . uplifting words." She glanced briefly at the control booth to find the producer beaming and nodding his head. "Now let's go to . . . Tomina, from Australia. You're on the Lorelei Network."

"You silly creature," a raspy feminine voice began. "You've got no more intellect than one of those squeeze toys fashioned in your image during the War. Many a male Zentraedi fell prey to your big eyes and your child's voice, but the Quadrono knew an imposter when they saw one. And as for 'Bagzent' and his 'Wondrous Spirit,' let me say that he's typical of the brainless clones and Flower addicts that comprised Khyron Kravshera's Seventh Mechanized Division."

Minmei struggled for something to say. "Miriya Parino was a Quadrono, wasn't she? Maybe you know—"

"I didn't call to talk about Miriya Parino or any other hajoca Zentraedi. And I definitely didn't call to waste my time talking to you." Tomina paused for a moment. "But I do have a message for Doctor Lang or any RDF officers who might be listening. They should be advised that the Claimers have recently come into possession of something that belongs to them, and we're going to keep this thing until satisfactory terms of exchange can be arranged."

"Please, Tomina," Minmei said, "not another nuclear bomb."

The woman laughed. "No, Minmei, not a bomb. Something even more powerful: a Professor Lazlo Zand."

Minmei stared into the camera, slack-jawed. "I don't understand—"

"We've abducted him, you pathetic excuse for a female! And we're going to kill him if the RDF won't meet our demands." Tomina forced a laugh. "Zand won't be as lucky as you and Kyle were when the Backstabber grabbed you. The Claimers have no such weaknesses. We'll be in touch soon."

Minmei stared openly at the control booth. "Go to a song, go to a song!" the producer was yelling into her ear.

"Put that away!" Seloy ordered the brown-haired Scavenger holding the WorldPhone. She gestured to the TV monitor on which a music video of Minmei's "Stagefright" was running. "And zero that thing before I smash it to pieces."

The six Scavengers inside the thatch-roofed but hurried to comply. Outside, a sonorous rain was drenching the cloud forest camp, and the air inside the but was superheated.

"You don't see what they're doing with this satellite network?" Seloy told them. "They're tracing the calls to their point of origin. Operatives of the RDF or the Southern Cross are probably already moving on Bagzent and Tomina Jepp. Idiots!"

She stormed from the hut, out into torrential rain, and across the clearing to Xan Norri's personal quarters in a longhouse the aborigines had built. Inside, the mecha designer, Vivik Bross, and Marla Stenik were all on their haunches around a fire whose smoke was slowly exiting through the sodden thatch.

"I'll wager they switched the television back on as soon as you left," Xan said after Seloy had explained what she had witnessed in the hut. "Nearly everyone in camp is watching the show. They might not be enslaved to her the same way the males are, but they're fascinated that one female—one tiny, seemingly guileless female at that—could wield such power over so many males."

"Fascinated enough to willingly risk detection by the RDF," Seloy said in disgust, squeezing water from her red hair. She walked in a circle. "I thought we were smarter than that. But, then, I never thought I'd see the day the RDF would create a Zentraedi Veritech squadron, either."

"We are smarter," Marla said. "But we're not without faults and shortcomings."

Seloy shot her a glance. "Don't you dare rank us with them, Marla. They envy the powerful. All I want is revenge."

"Power in another guise," Marla countered.

Seloy maintained her gimlet stare. "A Zentraedi guise, at least. We'll never succeed if we conduct ourselves like Humans. We might as well surrender to Anatole Leonard, or seek honorable death here and now. Kara-brek."

Xan rose and went to Seloy, placing her hands on Deparra's wet shoulders. "You contradict yourself, T'sen Deparra. There can be no honor in death until Humankind has been repaid in full for the humiliation it has heaped on our people." She cracked a smile. "And rest assured, T'sen, I've discovered a way of doing that without having to on any of our comrades—male or female."

"How?" Seloy asked. "Tell me."

Xan's smile blossomed sinisterly. "I've been studying Earth's endless array of spiders, and they've given me an idea. In place of terror, we're going to vector madness."

In a mecha bay, forward in the much-altered flagship, Theofre Elmikk raised the audio gain on his headset earphones, impatient for word from his confederates that the inner hull of the factory satellite was breached and that the assault on the weightless ship had begun.

Elsewhere in the compartment, scattered among construction teams of Humans and Micronized Zentraedi, additional members of Elmikk's rebel brigade were engaged in retrofit work. The bay—indeed the entire ship—was less populated than normal, owing to the premiere of Lynn-Minmei's call-in show on the newly launched Lorelei Network. Excused from duty, hundreds of Zentraedi were gathered in front of giant TV screens or vying for use of the phones that could put them in direct communication with their idol. Even Exedore, Jevna Parl, and Breetai himself had announced that they would be attending a special screening of the show on level eight of the factory. As a result, the flagship was relatively deserted.

And ripe for seizing.

Elmikk's mind and body were flooded with stimulants only the aroused Imperative could supply. Working in utmost secrecy, in stolen moments when they should have been dismantling derelict ships, his confederates had spent nearly a year cutting and boring a meandering passageway into the heart of the factory satellite. Heavy work drones—the 112-ton so-called "Mr. Arms" models—had helped open a portal in the outer hull, midships, between the three- and six-o'clock pods. From there, under the very eyes of hundreds of slumbering computer-controlled security robots, the passageway had been punched straight into the immense service chase that separated the satellite's seventh and eighth levels. There, after passing through some partitions and bulkheads and zigzagging around others, it shot ship's upward—close to where the drops of Protoculture cells had been made when Elmikk's smuggling operation was up and running—to the edge of the null-g zone where the former flagship of Breetai's battle group was being transformed into a crass replica of Zor's fortress.

All along, Elmikk had been vigilant in his search for the proper moment to commandeer the ship. When he had learned about the inauguration of Lorelei Network, he took it as a good omen.

Just now, four Mr. Arms and two skeleton-crewed EVA vehicles were lasering a 200-by-200-foot-wide opening through the last remaining inch of the satellite's inner membrane. Because the completed opening would immediately seal itself, there would be no turning back for the full-size Zentraedi tasked with storming the ship. While their EVA vehicles were attacking from the outside, Elmikk's contingent would advance on the bridge, disabling the ship's internal security en route. Just as their earlier efforts had been eased somewhat by the factory's still-glitched central computer, the successful conclusion of the plan would owe something to the formation of the Twenty-third Squadron—most of the squadron's pilots had been drawn from SDF-3 security, leaving trainees to fill in for hardened soldiers.

"Ferret team to control," a familiar voice said through the earphones. "We're committed."

Elmikk employed a coded communications frequency to pass the word to his cohorts in the bay, and the effect was instantaneous: kicks from giant legs undermined scaffolding, sending scores of Humans plummeting to the deck; sweeps of giant arms and flicks from giant fingers sent scores more tumbling and sprawling; claps from giant hands flattened entire teams. At the same time, one full-size hurried across the bay to Elmikk and gently plucked him from the floor. Joined by three others, Elmikk's runner raced for the levitation tube that accessed the bridge.

Before they had made it halfway, two of the four were brought down by SDF-3 security guards—the factory's only armed Zentraedi. Nevertheless, Elmikk's carrier and another managed to reach the tube unharmed. Elmikk knew from his years aboard the satellite that the guards at the upper-level stations were unarmed; more importantly, most of them had taken the day off. Success was assured, he told himself, hoping that luck was riding with the assault team outside the ship as well. The EVA vehicles were at least equipped with industrial lasers that could be used against any resistance.

When the levitation tube had deposited them at the forward end of the bridge, Elmikk instructed his carrier to set him on the elevated catwalk that ran aft to the command bubble. He then ordered his two full-size comrades to wait by the tube egress to intercept anyone in pursuit.

Only two tasks remained; maneuvering the flagship out of the factory and folding it to freedom. Once free of the satellite, the ship would slow only long enough to collect members of the brigade, along with any others who wanted in on the mutiny. As for the fold, Elmikk was confident he could execute the commands in correct sequence. Correct enough to steer them clear of stellar interiors, at any rate, if not jump them directly to Tirol. His confederates were ignorant of the fact that fail-safes hardwired into the fold systemry of all flagships ensured against hyperspace mishaps. Their ignorance served him well, however, since a properly executed fold would accord him with enough cachet to assume unchallenged command of the ship.

And wouldn't Breetai and the rest be in for a surprise. Vilify Theofre Elmikk though they would, the Zentraedi would have to respect the brilliance and daring of his action.

Behind him, Elmikk heard the clamorous sounds of a struggle; then rapid bootsteps, which he assumed to be those of his full-size comrades. He had just begun to turn his head when he was snatched from the catwalk deck by the tall collar of his jacket and pressed to the transparent convexity of the eyelike command bubble. It was only then that he took note of Exedore and Jevna Part, standing side by side in the now-Human-sized control center. When he finally managed to look behind him, Elmikk found Breetai's one good eye glowering at him.

"Had you actually convinced yourself that you would succeed at this?" Exedore asked, advancing a step toward the transparency.

"You're dead, Formo," Elmikk snarled. "All of you—dead. The ship is ours. You'll be sorry you're not off listening to Minmei."

Exedore looked past Elmikk to Breetai and fingered a switch on a console that replicated one on the SDF-1. "Listen closely," he advised.

Elmikk listened, but didn't hear a thing.

Exedore cleared his throat. "Allow me to describe what you would be hearing if vacuum didn't prevent the transmission of sonic waves: the sounds of your heavy work drones and EVA vehicles exploding. The agonized sounds of your confederates in the moments before death. The sounds of your dreams being torn asunder."

Elmikk went slack in Breetai's fingertip hold.

"Your apparent self-deception notwithstanding," Exedore continued, "what made you think you possessed sufficient vigor to command a flagship?"

Elmikk's mouth twisted out of shape. "I know all about the fold fail-safes, Forma. Vigor resides in the ship, not in the ship's commander."

Exedore cupped his chin with his right hand. "Again, you seem to have been misinformed. Command of a flagship is awarded only after one has demonstrated the ability to execute a fold in the absence of fail-safes. This ship has no such backup systemry, Elmikk. You and your brigade of mutineers would have ended your lives in the nuclear core of a star."

Elmikk shut his eyes and kept them shut for a long moment; then, using his hands to angle himself away from the curved transparency, he risked a turn toward Breetai. "How did you know, T'sen Breetai? Who among my people betrayed me? Grant me that much peace of mind to see me to my doom."

Breetai growled lightly. "I'll grant this, Elmikk: Your treachery came to me in a scene."

No sooner had Tomina Jepp announced the abduction of Lazlo Zand than her location was pinpointed and an encrypted call was placed from Lorelei headquarters in Tokyo to T. R. Edwards in Monument City. Once in receipt of all relevant data, Edwards placed three calls: one to the Special Operations Group's chief-of-station in Sydney, Australia, the city closest to Jepp's location; the second to the director of intelligence for the Army of the

Southern Cross, in Brasília; and the third, placed some fifteen minutes later, to Niles Obstat, who immediately relayed the data to RDF Command.

Though tuned to Minmei's show from the beginning, Rick Hunter didn't receive confirmation on the source of Jepp's call for almost two hours, and even then he was not apprised of how the call had been traced or which agency had traced it. Rick's first action was to call Cavern City, where the Twenty-third Squadron was based, and place Jonathan Wolff in charge of liaison between RDF Command and the Zentraedi Veritech team.

While all this was occurring, a crack Southern Cross squadron of reactor-driven LVT Adventurer II jet fighters was already airborne. Diplomatic protocols had already been seen to, and the squadron commander was in constant communication with Field Marshal Leonard and T. R. Edwards, who was receiving hourly updates from SOG's COS in Sydney.

Having placed a second call to the Lorelei Network, during which she had issued the Claimers' demands—the immediate release of Jinas Treng and Neela Saam—Jepp had been positively identified in the town of Alice Springs, in Australia's Outback, and was under surveillance by operatives there. Confidence was high that Jepp would unknowingly guide the follow team to the Claimers' base, and, presumably, to the spot where Lazlo Zand was being held.

The base was discovered to be a series of large caves in a feldspar-rich sandstone formation southeast of Ayer's Rock, where the thirty-six members of the Zentraedi outlaw band were living in feral conditions. Scans by FLIR and an IFF device similar to the one employed by Destroids to discriminate between Zentraedi and Earth mecha revealed that Professor Zand, guarded by two Zentraedi females armed with pre-War assault rifles, was chained to the floor of a small cave more than a mile from the Claimers' warren.

Under orders from Leonard, the fighter squadron struck at their target on arrival, loosing a dozen Decamissiles straight into the caves. It was doubtful the Claimers even knew what hit them. Zand was not so much rescued as saved by the faulty firing mechanism of the rifle one of his female captors had shoved down his throat shortly before she and her companion in the cave were shot to death by SOG operatives.

Ash was all that was left of the Claimers by the time the Twenty-third Squadron arrived on the scene. Tomina Jepp had been found on a dirt roadway ten miles west of Ayer's Rock. The story went that, faced with captivity, she had committed suicide by setting fire to her vehicle and herself.

"None of the Little White Dragon videos and laser disks aboard the factory contain the scene you describe," Lisa assured Breetai. "Every one of them was examined for signs of tampering, and the results were negative."

"I know what I saw," Breetai said.

"And no one is doubting you, Commander," Exedore said quickly. "We simply have no explanation to offer."

It was the day after the attempted skyjacking of the SDF-3, and the three of them, along with Jevna Parl, Harry Penn, R. Burke, and assorted security officers, were in the factory's command center. Breetai was standing on the bridge, so positioned that his face was level with the command bubble.

"You're certain the actor in the scene was Lynn-Kyle?" Burke asked.

"I have no doubt that it was Lynn-Kyle."

Lisa shook her head in puzzlement, then turned to the chief of security for the factory. "Post photos of Kyle at all checkpoints, and conduct a compartment-by-compartment search of all levels of the factory. Also, I want a review of all background checks done on factory service personnel. And until further notice, no one is to go down the well without full authorization from station control, REF and RDF control, contagion control, and security control. Is that understood?"

The woman saluted. "But permit me to point out that the video Breetai watched ran over a month ago. The Person responsible has had almost that long to arrange for departure. He or she might already be downside, Admiral."

"Then find out if anyone has failed to report for duty, Captain," Lisa said more harshly than she meant to.

"Sir!"

Lisa looked to a second officer. "Do we have casualty figures?"

"Six Human technicians and eight Micronized Zentraedi died as a result of injuries sustained in the mecha bay; eight Humans and four Zentraedi are in guarded condition in sick bay. Five Humans and three Zentraedi died in attacks on their tugs in the work zone. In addition, three full-size security personnel died inboard the SDF-3, and two others are in critical condition."

"How many of Elmikk's people were killed?"

"Our initial total was twenty-one—all but two in the work zone."

"How many do we have in custody?"

The officer glanced at Breetai. "Until this morning we had fifty-six. That figure includes the twenty members of Elmikk's labor crew who were outside the factory when the raid occurred."

"Have the numbers changed since this morning?"

Again the officer looked at Breetai.

"I had all but Elmikk executed," Breetai announced.

Everyone stared at him in mute horror until Jevna Parl said, "Commander, I must protest. You vowed there would be no executions without a consensus."

Breetai was stone-faced. "As commander, it was my prerogative, Jevna. Elmikk's confederates could not have been rehabilitated. We would certainly have had to deal with them in the future—perhaps with disastrous results."

"But, Breetai," Lisa managed. "The courts might have sentenced them to Micronization."

Breetai sneered. "Need I remind you that the malcontent bands are made up of Micronized Zentraedi?"

"Of course not, but . . . All of this could have been avoided if you'd told me or any REF officer about Elmikk's plan before he had the chance to carry it out. There still would have been a trial—and sentencing for the guilty."

Exedore answered for Breetai. "With all due respect. Admiral Hayes, you miss the point. We Zentraedi do not comprehend the concept of punishment before the fact. Any plan, scheme, or strategy, no matter how pernicious, is only that until its execution. In other words, there is no crime in the planning. How, otherwise, would the Zentraedi have tolerated the likes of Khyron? Micronization, or some other form of corporal punishment, for a 'thought crime' would have been a greater cruelty than honorable death, and substantially more dangerous, ultimately. Consider the inordinate number of former Protectorate residents that have turned to suicide or acts of malcontentism. In the absence of any demonstrable wrongdoing, they have no understanding of what was forcibly done to them."

Jevna Pail broke in. "You justify an outmoded barbarism, Exedore. The Zentraedi have changed; we are more than what we once were."

"That had better be the case for every Zentraedi aboard this factory." Breetai said balefully. "I confess that Elmikk fooled me. But I vow that I will not be dishonored a second time."

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

It was during her brief hospitalization for stress-related depression that [Katherine] Hyson met Crystal Simmenz, the woman who would become her lover and companion. A close cousin of Leonard's adjutant, Joseph Petrie, Simmenz, living then in Brasília and flirting with the fledgling Zentraedi-rights movement, is now known to have been the person who "recruited" Seloy Deparra for Leonard. The story goes that Leonard, months into the affair, had ordered Simmenz disappeared, along with those who had assisted in Deparra's artificial insemination. But Petrie intervened, and Simmenz was instead sentenced to spend the next several years on the locked wards of a variety of mental health facilities. How she reached Monument City Hospital, where she encountered Hyson in the spring of 2018, is unknown. Hyson wrote an e-book about Simmenz's allegations that did not find a publisher until 2050, when Anatole Leonard's relationship with Deparra was corroborated by the discovery of the Supreme Commander's private journals, and Miriya Parino Sterling finally revealed what she knew about Deparra and the hybrid child, Hirano.

footnote in Marco Gala's Halflife: Monument City Between the Wars

"When the Evening News returns," Rebecca Hollister said from the anchor's chair, "we continue with our follow-up of some of the year's major stories." No sooner did the show go to commercials than the squabbling began all over again.

"I developed that feature and I should be the one to present it!" Katherine Hyson yelled from the side of the set, where she was being gently restrained by two strapping MBS security guards. "It's mine, Hollister, it's mine!"

Rebecca looked imploringly at the director. "Phil, you've got to get her out of here. Promise her anything, just get her the hell away from me until we wrap. I refuse to have a scene on camera."

The director was already angling for Hyson. "I'll take care of everything. You just concentrate on what you're doing. Remember, tonight's the key to sweeps week."

Rebecca vented her exasperation while two men from makeup refreshed her face and hair. "Really, Phil, I don't even know why you allow her inside the building. Don't force me to seek a restraining order."

The director showed the palms of his hands as he closed on Hyson and the guards. "No problem?' he mouthed in a whisper. The assistant director assumed the task of counting the show back on the air.

"In Monument City, the long-awaited trials of Jinas Treng and Theofre Elmikk were postponed indefinitely in response to violent riots by Zentraedi advocacy groups around the world. Chief Justice Justine Huxley has stated that a special war crimes tribunal will be created to handle the trials at some future date. Until then, Treng—accused of detonating the nuclear device that destroyed Oasis—and Elmikk—accused of attempted skyjacking of the SDF-3—remain in custody at an undisclosed location.

"In related stories, both the RDF and the Army of the Southern Cross scored victories in their increasingly competitive struggles not only to rout the Malcontents but to win the confidence and support of the Human and alien public. In India, an RDF Veritech team sank the Russian-made destroyed Biko, which the Lyktauro Malcontents have been using to launch raids on coastal settlements throughout Southeast Asia; while in Eastern Europe, the ASC carried out surgical strikes against rebel bases in the New Marxist Republic, which have been supplying arms to Malcontents in the Southlands.

"In the Argentine, meanwhile, Field Marshal Leonard's troops have captured the last of the Paranka, also known as the Burrowers, whose Stinger attack on Zagerstown in November 2016 left 271 dead. And in Venezuela, Catherine Wolff, spokesperson for Governor Carson of Cavern City, reports that the Zentraedi Twenty-third Squadron has dealt a devastating blow to the Shroud and Fist in the Upper Orinoco region.

"But nowhere is the rivalry between the RDF and the ASC more pronounced than in central Mexico, where special forces troops from the two armies have been engaged in the search for a sizing chamber believed to have fallen into Malcontent hands. The Zentraedi have inflicted heavy damages on both sides, and several specialists in alien terror tactics are now beginning to question whether the chamber even exists. Says one unnamed source, 'The rumor bears the signature of the Scavengers.'

"And it's expected that later this week the various member city-states of the Southlands will ratify unification and secede from the United Earth Government. Wyatt Moran, who resigned his position in the UEG last month, will be instated as president of the Southlands, with Anatole Leonard serving as both minister of war and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Moran has promised that he will press the UEG to divert funds from the Expeditionary mission to the rebuilding of forward observation bases on the Moon and Mars. Two outspoken critics of the REF mission, Bishop Nboto and Joanna Ricter-Fields, have already pledged to support Moran's plan.

"In other news, controversy continues over the efficacy and the ethics of the Lorelei Network. Does the music network have the interests of the Zentraedi in mind, or are its owners engaging in mind control aimed at pacification? Lynn-Minmei, host of the popular call-in show Love Line, was unavailable for comment. But her new singing partner, Janice Em, told MRS News that Minmei plans to continue doing her show while on tour. In an attempt to avert some of the allegations, the Lorelei Network has begun distributing free food to Zentraedi throughout the Southlands.

"In Denver, epidemiologists at the Center for Disease Control have no explanation for the virus that has killed five in Mexico and in outlying areas of the Venezuela Sector."

Rebecca lifted a thin stack of hardcopy pages, stood them on end, and tapped them on the top of the desk. "When we come back, video transmissions from the edge of the Solar system, where robots are salvaging pieces of ice-bound Macross Island . . . The Nicaragua Canal nears completion . . . The timely electronic publication of Kermit Busganglion's The Hand That's Dealt You . . . And the REF releases photos of its latest creations—the Alpha Veritech, the Hovertank, and the gargantuan Ground Mobile Unit—and of its new, and some say 'sexy,' uniforms.

"All after these words."

2018

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I like Janice, and her range is absolutely astounding, but I feel like she's being forced on me. I've never had a partner because I've never wanted one. But the way Emil and Sharky make it sound, the partnership is more about patriotism titan show business. "Your voices are the perfect complement to one another," Emil told me the last time he phoned. "Together, you and Janice will be a force to be reckoned with should there be a second Zentraedi invasion while the SDF-3 is absent." I don't know what to do. I'd hoped I'd outgrown being a weapon. I haven't even asked Janice how she feels about it—she's such a robot sometimes, the idea of being a machine probably doesn't bother her in the least. But I guess I'll have to give it a try. I know I'll never forgive myself if there is another invasion and my voice alone fails. So here I go being used again.

from the diaries of Lynn-Minmei

Rick and Lisa had managed to spend Christmas of 2017 together on the satellite, and Lisa made a surprise visit to the surface for the vernal equinox. But they hadn't seen each other in almost five months when Rick and his adjutant, Vince Grant, traveled up the well in August of 2018 to inspect the GMU and to tour the completed sections of the SDF-3. The years on the factory had turned Lisa hard and lean, and the tight fit of the new REF torso harness enhanced her figure. Rick couldn't keep his hands off her, and had taken several playful slaps as a result. They were in the factory hold where the 245-foot-long Ground Mobile Unit—also known as the MTA-Titan, lot Military All-Terrain Mecha Transport and Assault Vehicle—was under construction when Rick finally got around to posing the question that had been on his mind since leaving Monument City.

"Can we get married right now—while I'm here, I mean? Before another year goes by."

Lisa seemed stunned, though flattered. "Rick, you know that's impossible. First of all, who would perform the ceremony?"

"Lisa, you've got chaplains from every denomination on-board. We could even get Breetai to perform the ceremony."

"Is that your idea of a conventional wedding? As admirals, maybe we should perform it ourselves, huh?"

Rick tugged her away from a host of eavesdroppers.

"What's your real reason for saying no?"

"Rick, I want this as much as you do. But I want our wedding to be something special, not just some rushed affair. Besides, we both have so much—"

"Don't even say it. You were saying it a year ago, and you'll be saying it a year from now. And that's exactly why I'm saying we do something for us for a change."

"Now's a really bad time, Rick." She lowered her voice somewhat. "Things haven't been the same here since the skyjack attempt. Breetai's been blaming himself for what happened, and he and Jevna Parl have had a falling out over the execution of Elmikk's troops. And that's only half the story. I haven't even seen Emil in weeks."

"He's angry about the UEG's decision to fund the rebuilding of Sara and ALUCE bases." The acronym stood for Advanced Lunar Chemical Engineering.

"That decision is going to delay our mission by years."

"Right, again. But why do we have to delay our mission?"

Lisa almost weakened, but shook her head instead. "A delay is going to mean more work for us, not less."

"But it's beginning to feel like we're slipping apart, Lisa."

She stroked his arm. "We're not. We're getting stronger. It only feels that way because of the time between visits."

"And I think the separation would be easier to take if we were married."

"How would it be easier?"

"Because I'd know we're a team."

She laughed lightly. "We're already a team. I love you, and nothing's going to change that."

"I love you, too. It's driving me crazy how much I love you."

Lisa was about to step into his arms, protocol or not, when Vince Grant approached, obviously uneasy about something. "Sorry to have to interrupt—especially with bad news. But it can't wait: Max Sterling was shot down in the Congo."

"Oh, no," Lisa said weakly.

"He's okay," Grant said. "He escaped from the malcontent group that brought him down and was picked up in good shape by a member of the Twenty-third. The Argentine was the closest place where he could be evaluated for radiation-related illnesses, so Reinhardt ordered him brought to what used to be the base hospital."

"That's a relief," Rick said.

But Grant wasn't finished. "Miriya Sterling is missing," he announced. "The same day Max went down, she disappeared from Monument."

Lisa's eyes widened in concern. "Where's Dana?"

"She's fine. She's with Jean and Bowie right now." Vince said, referring to his wife and child. He cut his eyes to Rick once more. "Also, there's been a Stinger attack on a cargo plane en route to Cavern City."

Rick looked at the floor, then up at Vince. "How many killed?"

"That isn't known, because the plane hasn't been found." He paused. "General Reinhardt requests your presence downside ASAP."

Purposely silent, Rick looked at Lisa.

She adopted a brave smile. "The hand that's dealt you, Rick."

It was his own fault. He had had no business tagging along with the Twenty-third on their assignment to capture whomever remained of Jinas Treng's Iron Ravens. But he'd wanted a close look at the radioactive ruins of Oasis. And in the end it was the Ravens who had found him.

It should have been obvious that a band that had once possessed a nuclear device might also have ground-to-air missiles. Something capable of knocking a carelessly piloted VT out of the sky. And Max had been nothing if not careless—embarrassingly so. He was lucky he hadn't died on impact; even luckier that a member of the Twenty-third had been able to home in on Skull One's locator. But not before Max had gotten to enjoy the hospitality of the five Zentraedi malcontents that had downed him.

Their leader, Chodar, powerfully built and ponytailed, was disappointed that their missile had found a Human-piloted plane; he'd had his heart set on destroying one of the Zentraedi-piloted mecha. But Chodar's disappointment had changed to delight when he learned that he had captured none other than the ace of the RDF and the husband of the noted hajoca, Miriya Parino. Unaware that Max understood Zentraedi, one of Chodar's comrades—a bandoliered malcontent named Hossek—had suggested bringing Max to an upcoming meeting of the bands.

Max's chance for escape had come when they had asked him to sort through the circuitboards and junk they'd ripped from Skull One's cockpit console. They wanted usable parts—gifts, no doubt, for the Scavengers, who were hosting the meeting. Max had tricked his captors into thinking that Skull One had something extra special; and while the Ravens were busy puzzling over the useless device, Max had grabbed a Zentraedi assault rifle and shot his way out of their vermin-ridden headquarters, killing Hossek in the process.

Outside in the leveled city, he'd killed a second, the bald one named Zekku and then another, using a rock to crush the alien's skull. And then finally Chodar and the last Raven, bringing a wall down on them by using the overloaded Zentraedi weapon as a bomb. Much later, when he analyzed the bloodlust that had driven him, he would attribute it to the feelings that had welled up inside him on first seeing Oasis from the air and thinking about the 50,000 innocents that had been murdered in an instant. Even so, it had been horrible to find himself in combat once more, back in the business of killing.

Now, here he was in a soft bed in the Argentine, pampered, fussed over, and feeling well enough in body if not in spirit. The view out the window of his private room encompassed part of the airstrip he'd looked across from the veranda of Rolf Emerson's on-base residence. The doctors had given him a clean bill of health—he had indeed been rad-dosed in Oasis, but not dangerously so—though they were insisting on keeping him under observation for a couple of days. He was for some reason prohibited from making calls, but he assumed that Miriya had been notified of his status.

He would know soon enough, in any case, because Rick had flown down to speak with him personally—Rick, who rarely left Monument other than to visit the factory satellite now and again. Max was certain he was in store for a major reaming-out, first for having gone to the Congo, then for allowing Skull One to get shot out from under him.

A nurse entered the room, smiled, and went to the window to adjust the horizontal blinds. "Captain Sterling, Admiral Hunter is on his way up. Is there anything I can get you before he arrives?"

"How about earplugs," Max said dourly.

Rick strolled in a few minutes later, looking fit, even distinguished in his REF uniform. His hair was long, and his face bore a few lines. He was starting to look like an admiral. Max had a memory of the young hotshot he had served under on-board the SDF-1. A lifetime ago.

"So you had to see Oasis, huh?" Rick began.

"You know how hungry you get for devastation when you haven't seen any in a while."

Rick nodded, narrow-eyed, then snorted a laugh. "How are you feeling, Max?"

"Okay. Amazingly."

"I heard you spent some time with the Iron Ravens."

Max nodded and glanced out the window. Two jets belonging to the Army of the Southern Cross were taxiing down the runway. "Did you come all this way to ask after my health and debrief me?"

Rick walked to the foot of the bed and folded his arms across his chest. "Max, Miriya has disappeared. She . . . borrowed a VT-1D from Fokker. We traced her to the Venezuela Sector, then lost her. It's obvious she didn't want to be found, because she disabled the trainer's locator. We had nothing to go on until we learned that shortly before arriving at Fokker she was visited at your apartment by a woman—a Human—identified as a malcontent operative. A mal gal, as intel puts it."

Max was dumbfounded. "I've been waiting years for the malcontents to show up and try to use her in some way. But this-stealing a VT—" He cut himself off in naked alarm. "Where's Dana, Rick?"

"She's fine. She's with the Grants. Also, Rolf Emerson wants you to know that he's at your disposal if you need help with Dana or anything."

"When will I be able to talk to her?"

"Whenever you want. We just didn't want you upset while you were recuperating."

Miriya, gone, Max told himself again and again, unable to fathom it. "Get me out of here, Rick. I have to find her."

Rick walked from the bed to the window, then turned around. "Hear me out before you say anything. I understand your wanting to find her. But it might be better to let Obstat's intelligence people handle this."

"Why, Rick?"

"Because of Anatole Leonard. And Wyatt Moran. We've been trying to keep the story contained, but Moran's threatening to give it to the press unless we agree to issue an order for Miriya's apprehension."

"On what grounds?"

"Sedition."

"That's crazy. Miriya's not a malcontent."

"You and I know that, but Moran has a way of getting people to take his view, and, between you and me, Max, the RDF doesn't have the veto power it once had. Moran was quick to remind everyone of where you and Miriya stood on the Brasília riot."

"For all the goddamned good it did," Max said.

"The point is that Leonard has hated you both since you blew the whistle on him, and it's no safer for you to be nosing around in the Southlands than it is for Miriya to be. The RDF has no jurisdiction south of

Venezuela. Even my coming here had to be cleared with the Army of the Southern Cross."

Max stared at Rick. "Listen to what you're telling me! Miriya's in jeopardy down here, so I should go home and let intelligence handle it?"

Rick made his lips a thin line. "Officially, that's what I'm telling you. Because I can't afford to demonstrate any favoritism and risk giving Moran more support in the UEG."

"How did this happen, Rick? How the hell did we let things come to this?"

"We made mistakes."

"So what's your 'unofficial' advice?"

Rick sat down on the bed. "Two days ago, a cargo plane en route to Cavern City was raided by Stingers and skyjacked."

"For parts?"

"Unlikely. The plane was carrying food, mostly. I know it's a stretch, but maybe there's a connection between the skyjacking and Miriya's disappearance. Anyway, we've assigned Wolff to head the retrieval operation."

"He's still in Cavern City?"

"Command offered him a promotion and transfer back to Albuquerque, but he declined."

"Guts-and-glory Wolff."

"Should I tell him I've assigned you temporary duty to his Pack?"

Max grinned. "But, uh, I'm going to need a commercial ticket to get there."

"Oh, that's right. You lost your VT, didn't you?"

Thanks, pal," Max said, "for rubbing it in."

Rick clapped him on the knee. "Guess you'll just have to use the one I flew down here." He nodded toward the window. "It's waiting for you on the strip, whenever you want it."

Lazlo Zand sat alone in the dark in his office in the Tokyo Research

Center, staring at the telephone and contemplating how to approach the task at hand. In the months since his abduction by the Claimers, he had noticed a gradual strengthening of some of his powers, regardless of his being denied the elements he felt were needed for a full transformation to occur. His reconfigured eyes allowed him to see in the dark with a cat's clarity; and, like Lang, he was subsisting on substantially fewer calories, and on a mere three hours of sleep per day. More importantly, when working with Protoculture he was sometimes able to perceive ghostly images hovering at the periphery of his vision. Were these what Lang had been referring to years earlier in the engine room of the ravaged SDF-1? Was he getting a glimpse of the Shapings themselves, or were these wraithlike figures merely the guardians of some greater mystery?

Zand grasped the necessity of pushing the boundaries of the psychic envelope if he was ever going to supersede Lang. And in the absence of Flower of Life and/or ur-Protoculture derived from Invid mecha, his only hope for transformative evolution, his only key to accessing the future was via Dana Sterling. She was a nexus of some sort, a meeting place of events, and he needed to tap into her and somehow divert the flow of energies into himself. He needed to posses her as she was possessed by the Shapings.

And now that Mommy had suddenly disappeared, he thought he had a chance of doing just that. For the past year or more, Daddy Max had been growing a bit wary of little Dana's sessions with "the eccentric professor," and Dana's three self-appointed Zentraedi Guardians had grown positively protective. But with Daddy off combing the forests of Amazonia for Mommy, Rico and company on the factory satellite, and the comely five-year-old being shuffled between the Grants and some nobody named Rolf Emerson, who was around to interfere? Especially when he would only be trying to help Dana through a difficult period. Mommyless, Daddyless . . . poor little thing. Come and tell Uncle Lazlo all about it. And don't worry about these devices you're hooked up to; they're only so Uncle Laz can get a clear picture of what's going on inside you.

The plan would entail relocating to Monument City temporarily, but that was a small price to pay for continual access to the key to the Shapings.

But what to say to Jean Grant, Zand thought, staring at the telephone. He had never been good at small talk. Best come directly to the point. Maybe he'd be lucky enough to reach the Grants' answering machine.

But if not: Mrs. Grant, I was just calling to express my concern for Dana, and to let you know that I'll soon be spending some time in Monument and that if there is anything I can do for the child—perhaps simply talk to her, as her mother has had me do in the past—please feel free to contact me at any hour. Should your busy schedule forbid it—I know how it can be for medical doctors—rest assured that I will be checking with you from time to time until this crisis has passed.

The approach to Cavern City's runway, at the eastern terminus of the narrow, steep-sided canyon that cradled the city, was tricky at the best of times and downright challenging when you were facing headwinds, had a lot on your mind, and were crafted to a Veritech you had just been introduced to. Max executed a perfect landing, nonetheless. Two VTs from the Skull and one from the Twenty-third were already on the ground when Max touched down. The three pilots were waiting in the hangar, along with a red-haired Wolff Pack lieutenant named Ron Bartley.

"I haven't been here since we retook the Grand Cannon," Max said, much aware of Venezuela's humid heat, as he shook hands with Bartley.

"I wish I'd gotten to meet you then, sir."

Max blushed. "We were in and out. Only a day of R&R in Cavern." He glanced around. "By the looks of things, this place has changed a lot."

"Wait'll you see the city," Bartley told him.

Wolff's man led the four pilots to a battered jeep and settled himself behind an outsize steering wheel. The RDF base was only a few miles from the airfield, but Bartley took the long way around to give Max a glimpse of the expanded city center. Max was grateful for the breeze.

Cavern's linear sprawl of glass and adobe buildings now stretched for six miles along both sides of the natural chasm that bisected the city. Simple bridges spanned the chasm; an elevated monorail paralleled it on the north side.

"The city keeps growing higher because it has nowhere else to go," Bartley commented. "Mayor Carson has tried to restrict immigration, but Zent refugees keep arriving every day." He looked over his shoulder at the dark-complected pilot from the Twenty-third, Boru Hesh. "No disrespect intended."

Hesh shrugged. "We refer to one another as Zent. No reason you shouldn't."

"Where are all the building materials coming from?" Max asked, wiping sweat from his upper lip.

"From the Cannon. You can recognize pieces of the thing in everything that's been built in the past two years."

"At least it's finally being put to good use."

Bartley cut his eyes to Max. "Think it would've made a difference if they'd finished it on time?"

"Against the fleet?" Max shrugged. "Ask Boru."

"There would have been fewer ships to fall to Earth," Boru opined. "Otherwise, conditions would be much as they are now."

When they finally arrived on the RDF base. Bartley again took the long route, wheeling the jeep past the mecha hangars before heading for Wolff's office.

"Centaur tanks," Max said in exaggerated disbelief. "This has got to be the museum, right?"

"You're not the first one to use that line, sir," Bartley said.

"Is it true Wolff went to Freetown for parts?"

Bartley nodded. "I can introduce you to the guy who went with him—Roger Malone."

"No wonder people refer to your unit as a 'pack.'"

"We gave ourselves that name, sir," Bartley amended "But it's true, we're like a family. Even though I would have been the last person to say that when I first met the captain."

Max thought about his own family. He had spoken with Dana and she was fine. And he had managed to convince himself that he was doing all he could to locate Miriya. "Is Wolff married?"

"Uh, yeah, he's married. Has a son, too. Mrs. Wolff works for Mayor Carson's office. But I think she'd rather be living in Monument or somewhere happening."

Max recalled Rick's statement about the promotion Wolff had turned down. "It's not always easy doing equal service to a marriage and the military."

Bartley rocked his head from side to side. "I've got a wife and kid myself, but all of us understand the priorities. I figure there'll be time enough for family life after we get the planet cooking again." Bartley made an abrupt stop in front of Wolff's tile-roofed office, and everyone piled out into the glare of the midday sun. The captain himself—with his signature shades and pencil-thin mustache—hastened outside to greet them. His khaki shirt was mottled from perspiration.

"A real honor, Captain Sterling," Wolff said, pumping Max's hand.

"You're no stranger, either," Max told him.

"Yeah, but believe only the good stuff."

Max introduced Wolff to his Skull teammates and to Boru Hesh. Wolff asked after some of the Twenty-third pilots who had flown raids from Cavern City against the Shroud and Fist. Then, after directing Bartley to show Max and the others to their quarters, he spun on his heel and hurried back into his office.

Two hours later, ten men were grouped around a long table in a briefing room that was stiflingly hot, despite a large fan that was lazing overhead. Wolff, wearing wraparound sunglasses and a clean shirt, stood at the head of the table. "At six-thirty local time four days ago," he began, "four Stingers attacked a cargo plane en route to Cavern from Monument." He aimed a laser pointer at a wall map studded with colored pushpins. "The last commo from the flight crew was at grid reference MM-seven-two. Now, we're reasonably sure we've found the plane—it was ID'ed by satellite look-down—but the question of why it was skyjacked remains unanswered. The skyjacking of a lone cargo plane crewed by five civilians doesn't fit the malcontents' standard MO."

"What was the cargo?" a member of the Wolff Pack asked.

"Food and medicine." Wolff held up his hands to silence conversation. "I know what you're thinking, but it doesn't hold up. All reports indicate that the malcontents aren't going hungry, thanks to the Human trash that have thrown in with them. And we don't know of one case where they've gone after medicine or medical supplies."

"Maybe their modus operandi is changing," someone suggested.

Wolff nodded. "Okay, maybe it is. But what else?"

Max gestured to the map. "Which band controls the area where the plane was located?"

"The Shroud and Fist—an all-male group armed with a couple of Tactical 'Pods and second-generation Stingers. We've been mixing it up with them on and off for two years now." Wolff motioned with his chin to Boru Hesh. "So has the Twenty-third. The surveillance satellite diverted over the area shot opticals of six longhouses, four Stingers, and our missing plane, concealed under a scrambler tarp."

"They're hiding the thing?" someone asked in puzzled amazement.

"It's bait," the Skull's Bill Mammoth said.

"Of course it is," Wolff told him. "But I put it to you again: Why? What are we being set up to encounter?"

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

On the occasion of our second meeting [with Tan Fose], I realized that I was being set up—that I had been targeted for abduction by some malcontent group. But what did that matter, if in the end I would have access to what I needed to complete the transformation: access to Protoculture, Zentraedi blood, artifacts, and who knew what else the aliens were harboring. Even as I lay chained to the dank floor of that cave in Australia, l was thinking of how to make the most of my predicament. Reasoning that sexual congress might result in a transfer of bodily fluids, I asked one of my female captors if she wished to have her way with me while we were awaiting a reply to the demands Tomina Jepp had issued the RDF.

Lazlo Zand, Event Horizon: Perspectives on Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

The forest of southern Venezuela were not unlike those of Singken, a planet the Zentraedi had conquered early in the Masters' campaign to rule the Local Group. Tasked with the conquest, Azonia's Quadrono had been relentless in their attacks on Singken's techless populace. Even now Miriya could recall the sight of an entire continent aflame, millions of acres of trees and grassland torched by the directed energy of Female Power Armor. To be walking in such a forest now, alone and weaponless, filled her with a disturbing sense of irony.

It had been five days earlier that a malcontent operative had paid a late-night visit to the high-rise apartment in Monument. The woman had the unkempt look of a sympath, only rougher around the edges. Miriya recalled her wary, haunted eyes. She said she had a message from an old friend, but when Miriya asked who, she received not a name but a one-time-only diskette. "Know this much, T'sen Parino," the woman told her. "Many T'sentradi have died to see this delivered to you."

Miriya had played the disk and listened, intuiting that it was from

Seloy Deparra long before her friend spoke. Yes, it's me, Miriya Parino. Alive, and in urgent need of your help . . . Seloy had said nothing about what she'd been doing since the Brasília riot; only that Miriya needed to travel to the Southlands immediately—if their friendship still mattered to her. Coordinates were furnished, along with instructions to take along survival gear and food.

"Activate this when you reach the designated place," the messenger had added, pressing a locator device into Miriya's left hand. "Walk west, keeping the river on your right. You will be found."

"But how am I expected to get to this place?" Miriya asked.

"That much is up to you. Surely a Quadrono can find a way."

Miriya had been tempted to let Dana sleep, but her heart forced her to say good-bye, to cradle the half-asleep child in her arms and explain as best as she could.

"You know how you and Bowie are best friends?" she had whispered in the dark. "Well, I, too, have a good friend whom I haven't seen in many years. I knew her even before I met and married your father. And now this friend needs my help very badly, so I have to go to where she is. Right away, darling, tonight. So Mommy has to ask you to be brave while she's gone, and to be good for Jean and Vince, who are going to take care of you until I come home. Jean will be here soon to get you. Do you understand?"

Dana nodded, asking, "Does Daddy know?"

"He'll find out."

"Is this about the angry Zentraedi?"

Clever, clever, child, Miriya had thought. "I don't know, Dana. But you're not to tell anyone, okay? And always remember that you have the best of Human and Zentraedi inside you, and that there's no one else like you in the entire universe. You're special, you'll always be special, and your Daddy and I love you very, very much."

Miriya shook her head. "I'm unaligned. But I'm ready to fight the fight; to kill or be killed—"

"Save your enthusiasm for the captain," the man interrupted. He prodded her in the small of the back, motioning her into the clearing. "T'sen Nomarre," he shouted, "kyyteezel."

While the rest of the band were gathering round, a small, scar-faced man with thick brows and a high forehead emerged from a thatch-roofed lean-to and began to saunter toward her, dark eyes widening with each approaching step. "Am I to believe what I'm seeing?" He stopped to glance at his comrades. "Don't any of you recognize her? This is Miriya Parino!"

The quizzical stares and sinister smiles became gapes of confoundment.

"You're wrong, T'sen," Miriya said quickly. "But your mistake is easily explained. Parino and I are members of the same clone queue. I know her, of course, but appearance is all I share with her. My name is Jiwei Coor."

Nomarre looked skeptical. "You're lying."

"It's the hair," Miriya said, fingering her damp green strands. "I've tried to recolor it to lessen the similarity, but it doesn't seem to accept Human-made dyes."

Nomarre regarded her in silence for a long moment. "What you doing out here, 'Jiwei Coor'?"

Miriya glanced around. "Looking for you."

"For us?"

"Any band that will have me, I mean. I've grown sick of my life among our acculturated breathren in Cavern City. I wish to put my warrior skills to work for the cause."

Nomarre signaled the shirtless malcontent to holster his weapon and told Miriya she could lower her hands. "So, Jiwei Coor perhaps shares Parino's fighting spirit as well as her features." He motioned her to a log that served as a bench. "I am Ranoc Nomarre, and we are the New Unity."

"I've heard of you," Miriya said. "Is this your permanent camp?"

Nomarre made up his mind about something, then shook his blockish head. "We're on our way to a meeting hosted the Scavengers."

Miriya pretended to be impressed. "Will you take me?"

Nomarre grinned. "We certainly will, T'sen." He walked over to her and grabbed hold of her chin. "They will tell us who you really are. And if you're lying, I will personally gut you."

Miriya was careful not to resist. "You'd gut one who has been the most vocal supporter of equal rights for our race? Who told the truth about the Brasília Riot, and pressured the UEG to end the occupation of the Protectorate—"

Who married a Human," Nomarre countered. "Who birthed a Human child. Whose alleged concern for her people makes her the ideal RDF spy . . . And what do you know of the Protectorate, female. I was there. One of the detainees, one of the many forcibly Micronized. Parino—ever the media celebrity—did nothing to prevent it." Nomarre swung to his men. "Cuff her."

Miriya allowed her hands to be shackled behind her back, but she kept her eyes riveted on Nomarre. Sympathy notwithstanding, she couldn't permit him to interfere with her mission.

While he was shoving her toward the truck, where he apparently meant to store her, she tried to make him understand that she wasn't his enemy. When all appeals to reason failed, she simply skull-butted him in the face, fracturing his nose.

As he fell back, she leapt straight up, bringing her knees to her chest and her arms out in front of her where they belonged. No sooner did Nomarre recover from the skull-butting than she uppercut him with the backs of her shackled hands. His pained moans brought his comrades running, but by then she had hold of Nomarre's handgun, a few blasts from which sent everyone diving for cover.

Projectiles and energy beams tried to find her as she scrambled to the far side of the truck and jinked across the clearing for the safety of the forest. She paused to aim one blast at the Battloid's optic sensor, then disappeared into the trees, leaves and branches falling around her as if pruned by a volley of lethal fire from the camp.

Night was falling, but not fast enough to conspire in her escape. Breathless, she squatted on her haunches, set Nomarre's handgun on timed release, and gripped the thing tightly between her knees. Then she laid the chain of the cuffs over the muzzle and leaned the rest of herself as far from the discharge as possible. The blast slagged the chain and drove bits of molten metal into her exposed flesh. She screamed through gritted teeth, picked herself up off the ground, and plunged deeper into the woods.

Miriya was down there somewhere, Max told himself as he soared over the jungled escarpment that formed the western boundary of the Venezuela Sector. He had wanted to visit the spot where she'd set the trainer down, but Rick had urged him not to. Specialists from SOG's Technical Services Division had literally dismantled the mecha component by component, searching for anything that could be construed as a message or a clue to Miriya's disappearance. The extrapolated timing of her vertical landing coincided with that of his crash in the Congo.

Dana had confessed that Miriya had gone to help a good friend—one she'd known longer than Max. Was it Seloy Deparra, Max wondered, alive after all these years? If so, what did Seloy want from Miriya now? And why did it entail such secrecy? Unless Seloy had joined a malcontent band . . .

Flanking his VT now were those of Willy Mammoth and Nick Fowler, with Boni Hesh flying rear guard. They were fifteen miles southwest of their objective when their IFF scanners began screaming; ten when they encountered the first Stinger.

The technohybrid had launched from the canopy like a rocket, spinning and spewing missiles in a 180-degree arc. The RDF pilots broke formation and spent five minutes shaking heat-seekers before they could even think about offensive maneuvers. When they did, a second Stinger appeared, vectoring in from the northeast and seeding the sky with a whole new crop of red-tipped pursuers.

Max powered straight up out of the fray and went to Battloid mode to rain downward bolts on the bulky shoulders of this latest arrival, holing and crippling it. At the same time, Fowler, Mammoth, and Flesh were all giving chase to the first Stinger, dodging a flock of corkscrewing missiles while pouring everything they had at the Stinger's eminently targetable hindquarters.

Max's hands clutched reflexively when he saw Mammoth take two Decas in the belly and roll over, leaking white smoke. Even so, his own missiles had found their mark and the Stinger was falling as well.

"Skull Two to Skull Leader," Willy said calmly. "Looks like I'll be sitting out the next dance."

"Let go of it, Willy," Max told him over the tactical net. "It's only a piece of hardware."

"I'll make sure to mention that when Command sends me the bill. Enabling autoeject."

"Watch your ass on the way down," Fowler said. "Those branches are gonna want a chunk of you."

"Maybe I'll just go in headfirst."

"Evac'll be on the way," Max said.

"I'll be partying with the Stinger pilots in the meantime," Willy said. "Over and out."

Max switched to the command frequency. "Captain Wolff, Skull Two is going to be dropping into your area, south-southwest of the main logging road. If you'll handle recovery, the three of us will proceed to the objective and make arrangements for your arrival."

"You're not out to steal our thunder, are you, Captain?" Wolff asked.

"Just trying to hold onto whatever surprise we have left, Jon. Although even the Wolff Pack deserves a break once in a while."

"Only on my say-so," Wolff said. "But good hunting until then, guys."

Max zeroed the VT's autopilot and executed a low flyby over the objective, expecting ground fire but receiving none. Through the treetops he could make out the crude huts, the scrambler tarp, and two upright mecha. The onboard computer identified the mecha as Stingers; infrared confirmed the presence of at least three Humans in two separate huts.

Reconfiguring the VT to Guardian mode, Max ordered Fowler and Hesh to remain airborne while he went in for a closer look. The malcontent camp was uncomfortably quiet. He landed, autocannon in gauntleted hand, walked the Guardian to the scrambler tarp, and tore it loose from its stakes. The skyjacked cargo plane looked as though it had been looted; during the attack, the Stingers had ripped several gaping holes in the fuselage.

The VT's external mikes picked up the distressed sounds of one of the survivors, and in a moment Max saw a man stagger from one of the huts, clawing at his back.

"Help me, somebody help me!" the man was screaming. "Take 'em away, they're crawling all over me!"

Max raised the canopy and climbed out of his craft. "Easy does it, fellow. You're going to be all right."

He hadn't even gotten the words out when the man whirled on him—face beaded with sweat—and attacked, knocking Max aside and disappearing around the corner of a hut. "They're going to kill us, they're going to kill us all!" Max heard him screaming.

Shaken, Max returned to the VT and told Fowler to land at the opposite end of the camp and begin a hut-by-hut search. "But for God's sake, be careful."

Max drew his sidearm and cautiously entered the hut the man had exited. Facedown on the floor was a dead crewmember. Rodents were brazenly gnawing at the corpse. Max tasted bile in his mouth, and made a slow turn to the right. Standing with his back to the wall was the plane's pilot—Captain Blake, Max recalled. Blake, panting and gripping a survival knife in both hands, wore the same crazed look as the man Max had confronted outside.

"No one's going to hurt you," Max said in the most soothing voice he could manage under the circumstances. "I'm Captain Sterling, from—"

Blake leapt at him, slicing the air with the knife. Max slid to the ground, extending a leg into Blake's midriff, knocking the wind out of him, "I don't want to have to hart you, Cap—"

Blake rallied and came at him with the knife raised in both hands. Max saw the futility of trying to talk the man down and took charge, slipping to the side of the blow, backhanding Blake across the jaw, spinning him around, and sending him headfirst into the mud wall. Two more jaw-jarring punches were required to send Blake to the ground and keep him there.

Fowler was calling to Max over the radio. "Captain, I've found the woman, Ramirez, but she seems to be in shock. The one with her wasn't as lucky. Looks like he was rat food."

"I've got the same situation," Max said, frightened and breathing hard.

"What happened here, sir?" Fowler asked.

"I don't know." Max heard a noise and started, but it was only one of the rodents. His heart was racing. "Any word from Wolff?"

"The Pack's just arrived. They extracted Willy, he's okay."

"Did they find the Zentraedi pilots?"

"They have them, too. Three women."

"I thought you said the Shroud and Fist was an all-male group," Max said when he and Wolff had rendezvoused in a longhouse at the eastern extreme of the malcontent camp.

Wolff scratched at his head. "Maybe they've decided to go coed?"

Hands cuffed behind them, the three alien women wore utility jumpsuits emblazoned with the Zentraedi sigil. The tallest of the three had long honey-blond hair and an upturned nose. Another was petite but fierce looking. The third was powerfully built and had a shaved head.

"You feel like talking to us?" Max asked them in Zentraedi.

They were taken aback, but only momentarily. "Don't mistake us for hajoca, Human," the hairless one said. "We have nothing to say to you."

Max translated for Wolff's benefit, then turned to the women again. "You may not be traitors, but right now you are something equally deplorable—prisoners."

The tall one's face flushed with rage. "Filthy Micronian! You think you can defeat us? The Scavengers will wipe this planet clean—"

"Alinnen—enough!" the bald one said, cutting her off. "Sesannu!"

Max grinned at Wolff. "I think we might be able to get somewhere with these three if we separate them."

"Good thinking," Wolff started to say when the radio clipped to his belt chirped.

"Wolff, this is Rosen."

Wolff depressed the radio's talk button. "Go ahead, Rosen."

"We've got a situation developing out here. The two Stingers have self-activated. They're making all kinds of—shit!"

Cannon reports from outside shook the longhouse. Over the radio came a squabble of voices and a loud hissing sound, followed by a single whump! from the Centaur's main gun and a deafening explosion.

Reflexively, Wolff had ducked under a crudely built table. "We better get out there," he told Max.

Max glanced at the three Zentraedi. None of the three had moved a muscle, and just now the bald one was grinning. "Kara-brek," she said softly, as if to Max. "Kara-brek, kara-brek . . ." One at a time, her comrades took up the chant, gradually upping the volume and the tempo.

"Kara-brek, kara-brek, karabrek, karabrek . . ."

At the same time, the ground under their feet had begun to quake from the rhythmic fall of heavy footsteps.

Max and Wolff exchanged sudden, knowing looks and broke for the doorway—not a moment before the arms of a Stinger burst through the sidewall and the entire longhouse blew to pieces.

It took several minutes for the dust to settle, and for Max and Wolff to dig themselves out from under the mud-and-wattle rubble and to pick the thatch from their hair.

"The Stinger was programmed to make sure those women wouldn't be taken alive," Max said. "They knew all along they were going to die."

"Us with them," Wolff said. "If things had gone according to plan."

Max forced an exhale. "I should have taken the Stingers out as soon as I arrived. When I didn't meet any resistance, I kept thinking about Leonard's raid on the Scavenger base, and assumed we were home free."

Several members of the Pack had showed up to check on Wolff and Max. "How are your men?" Wolff asked Ron Bartley.

"They seem all right. The Stinger emitted some kind of particle cloud before Rosen took it out, but no one's any the worse for wear so far."

"Was that the hissing sound we heard?" Max wanted to know.

Bartley nodded. "No evidence of radioactivity or known chemical agents."

Wolff threw him a look. "Not good enough. I want Rosen's Centaur wrapped and sealed for decontamination, and everyone in the Pack into antihazard suits. On the double."

"The battle for possession of the surface is almost over," Breetai told Jevna Parl on the bridge of the factory satellite. "The flow of Protoculture cells from this facility has stopped, the Protectorate is a failed experiment, the few dissident groups that remain are squeezed into an inhospitable area of the Southlands."

"I'm aware of all these things," the gnomish Parl said.

"And still you will not be dissuaded?"

"What is the alternative? If I am no longer with you, I am against you. Would you have me attempt to undermine you here, as Theofre Elmikk did? Would you dishonor us both by imprisoning me aboard the factory?"

Breetai growled. "All because I executed the traitors."

Parl shook his head. "Because you chose to define them as traitors, Breetai. You claim that our new allegiance must be to the REF, but why must we swear allegiance to any group? Why must the Zentraedi serve any masters?"

"Not everyone can rule, Jevna."

"Perhaps not. But everyone should have the right to pursue freedom. Elmikk and his comrades were not traitors to our cause—to the Zentraedi cause—only the Human one. You were not hearing the voice of the Imperative in their attempted mutiny. Their actions were those of free beings, and you had no right to condemn them."

Breetai sneered. "So Jevna Parl has discovered himself to be a malcontent."

"A Human word."

"A freedom fighter, then."

"Since you're compelled to define me, yes, consider me a freedom fighter."

"And should I choose to grant permission for you to go down the well?"

"I will join the ranks of the disaffected."

"And attempt to undermine me from afar."

"Not you, nor any aboard this artificial world. Only the uncharitable below, stingy with the freedoms they hold so dear. I will do all I can to undermine them." Parl paused for a moment. "You command the power to prevent that; you could withhold permission. But if that is your choice, I would rather you kill me."

Breetai folded his arms across his massive chest. "I will honor your request."

Parl blanched.

"No, not to kill you, Jevna. On the contrary, I want to see you live to regret your decision."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

JANUS M proved to be a better spy than any of us (at the Robotech Research Center) would have imagined, in part, I believe, because of the countless volumes on espionage "tradecraft" we downloaded into her. . . . When I learned that Minmei and "Janice" had been asked to accompany Moran and Milburn to the fête celebrating Southlands unification, I tasked the android's programmers with transforming her into an ambulatory voice-stress analysis device for the event. The cybertechnician team went me one better by programming her to probe for data when the conversation turned to certain, key topics, such as the malcontents, Anatole Leonard, and the Lorelei Network. Upon uploading JANUS days after the fete, I realized at once that Moran had deliberately outted Milburn, perhaps in the hope that, as my "niece," Janice would relate what had transpired over dinner. But I have always suspected that Moran recognized Janice for what she/it was, and though their close relationship would continue until the launch of the SDF-3, I wonder if JANUS wasn't so much an agent provocateur as an unwitting agent of disinformation for the Army of the Southern Cross.

Emil Lang as quoted in Justine Huxley's I've Been to a Fabulous Party

The possibly contaminated Centaur sat in a controlled-environment mecha bay on the RDF's base in Cavern City. Inside the tank waited Wolff Packers Rosen and Kimball, who'd taken the brunt of the Stinger's seemingly harmless particle-cloud release prior to its self-activated attack. Elsewhere on the base, in isolation and under constant surveillance, were the three surviving crewmembers of the cargo plane. Sterling and Wolff, along with a mecha specialist named Gillespie, stood on an observation balcony that overlooked the glassed-in decontamination area. Gillespie, formerly of the Argentine Base, was one of the techs who'd helped recommission the Centaurs two years earlier and had stayed on as chief engineer.

"What exactly are we looking for, Jon?" Gillespie was asking Wolff.

"I don't know that we're looking for anything. I just want the thing fully checked out."

"It's quite possible the cloud your men claim to have seen was nothing more than escaped mecha coolant of some sort."

"I'll buy that. Just show me there's nothing unusual about the tank and I'll be on my way."

Gillespie bent to a radio tuned to the Pack's tactical frequency. "How are you two doing?"

"Peachy," Kimball said in piqued voice. "Just get on with your tests so we can get out of here."

Sterling and Wolff traded worried looks.

It had been a long, overnight haul back to Cavern City, everyone on edge—spooked—and griping about having to wear the antihazard suits. The cargo-plane crewman Max had first encountered had been found, unconscious but alive, and he, Blake, and Ramirez, along with the bodies of the two dead crewmen, had been placed inside a personnel carrier normally used to carry malcontent captives. Then the camp had been razed. Max's team had remained with the Pack for the trip, hanging above the logging roads; Willy Mammoth, suddenly VT-less, had ridden in Wolff' Centaur.

"You know, it's getting damned hot in here," Kimball said over the net. "What's taking so long?" Max could hear the sound of Kimball's hand slamming against the tank', topside hatch.

"Try to relax, son," Gillespie said. "We're working as fast as we can."

"You better be. I don't know about my pal Rosen, here, but I can't take too much more of this heat."

All at once, just as two medics in bubble-helmeted antibiohazard suits were approaching the tank, the top hatch flew open and Kimball scampered out onto the turret.

Wolff grabbed the radio handset. "Kimball, get your ass back inside—"

"Get me out of here!" Kimball bellowed in an inhuman voice. Then he threw himself onto the closest medic, driving him to the concrete floor. The other medic was quick to react, and he and Kimbell tumbled in a thrashing tangle of limbs.

On the balcony, Wolff keyed the public-address system. "Security to decontamination. Code red."

"Let me go!" Kimball was screaming, frothing at the mouth. "I'm burning up! What's wrong with you people? How can you stand it? How can you—"

The Packer suddenly went limp in the medic's arms. The medic placed a device against Kimball's neck, then quickly straddled him and began to pound on his chest. Rosen poked his head from the hatch but stayed put.

"We better get down there," Wolff said.

"Not without suits," Gillespie told him.

An emergency medical team and four fully suited hulks from security hurried into the bay through an airlock. Max and Wolff watched them work on Kimball for five minutes. Finally one of the medics glanced up at the balcony and shook his head.

Wolff looked grim. "Let's see if Dr. Lopez learned anything from the crew," he said, tapping Max into motion. Lopez, another Argentine transplant, was the base physician. "Looks like Kimball caught something from that particle cloud."

"Maybe not," Max said. "The ride in was rough going. And everybody was stressed out to begin with."

Wolff eyed him askance. "It's coincidence that the one guy who flips out also happens to be the guy who took the brunt of the cloud?"

"One of the guys. Rosen seemed all right."

"I knew Kimball pretty well, Max, and he wasn't the type to stress out. It was something the Stinger released. The malcontents probably tried it out on the crew, then decided to bait us with the cargo plane. They put up just enough resistance to make us think it wasn't a trap and to get us down on the ground. Dollars to donuts, the Scavengers are experimenting with a biochemical weapon."

Max offered a reluctant nod. "They've had Human help in growing food, locating crashed ships, and securing nuclear weapons. So why not some strain of biological left over from the Global Civil War."

"If that's true, Lopez or someone should be able to identify it."

"Let's hope. But what bothers me is that the group that downed me in the Congo mentioned something about attending a Scavenger meeting. They could be planning to distribute this stuff to other bands."

Wolff gave his head a mournful shake. "Sorry you got yourself dragged into this, Max. I'm sure you'd rather be in Monument with your family."

Max was quiet for a moment; then he filled Wolff in on Miriya's disappearance. Wolff listened without comment, until Max mentioned that she had gone to ground in the southwest of the Venezuela Sector.

"You think there's a connection between Miriya's landing here and this biological or whatever it is?"

"Do you know the name Seloy Deparra?"

"Should I?"

"No reason to, I guess. She was a Quadrono, like Miriya. Miriya and I thought she was dead, but I'm beginning to think she's alive, and that's why Miriya's in the Southlands."

"And maybe this Deparra is tied up with the Scavengers, is that the idea?"

Max nodded.

Wolff didn't respond immediately. "You know, it's funny," he said at last. "My wife's disappeared, too. Not that she's gone missing or anything, but she moved out on me a month ago when I turned down a promotion and a transfer."

"Admiral Hunter told me about that," Max said. "Between you and me, I think he'd like to enlist you in the REF."

Wolff grinned. "I'd go to Tirol at the drop of a thinking-cap. But I don't feature spending the next couple of years locked up in that factory. I'd rather wait till the SDE-3's completed, then sign on."

"Would your wife . . ."

"Catherine."

"Would she be willing to go along?"

"No way—even though 'down to earth' isn't a term I'd use to describe her. But space, forget it." Wolff studied Max. "What about you and Miriya?"

"We have a daughter to think of."

"Yeah. I have a son. Hell, I don't even know how I'm going to handle being away from him if Catherine decides to return north, let alone if I'm upside."

Both men were silent for the rest of the walk to Lopez's laboratory. The doctor, a small man with shoulder-length black hair, had been trying to contact Wolff. He had identified the biochemical agent that had felled the crew, and possibly Kimball as well.

"It's a virus," Lopez said. "The etiology seems consistent with recent cases reported in Mexico: fever, rage, madness . . . Sometimes there's a rash, such as I found on Captain Blake's back; sometimes not."

"Biological warfare," Wolff said.

Lopez nodded. "Apparently so."

"Is there a vaccine or anything?" Max asked.

"We don't understand it well enough. I've sent my findings to the Center for Disease Control in Denver. They've been grappling for months trying to identify this thing. So much electronic data and paper documentation was lost during the Rain, there's no way of telling if the virus is new or something that's been around for a decade."

"Could it have been a weapon used during the Global Civil War?" Max asked.

"Possibly. But, again, it's a tedious process trying to identify it. Not everyone appears to be susceptible, and not everyone who contracts it dies. Witness the difference in Captain Blake and his copilot, Ms. Ramirez. And you two and Kimball."

"That's encouraging," Wolff commented.

"Perhaps. But just the same, I'll want blood samples from everyone who took part in the raid on the malcontent camp. The virus has an extremely rapid incubation period—sometimes a matter of a few hours—so the sooner we have everyone tested the better. I'd also like your permission to quarantine the entire base until we know what we're dealing with."

Wolff shook his head. "I can't make that call. It's up to Mayor Carson."

Lopez's broad nostrils flared. "Then I'll just have to deal with her."

In the private dining room of Monument City's most elegant restaurant, Southlands President Wyatt Moran and UEG Senator Braxton Milburn sat with Lynn-Minmei and her new partner, Janice Em. Well into the main course, the two politicians were drinking with abandon, in celebration of the UEG's as-yet-unannounced decision to ratify the so-called "Moran Plan," which called for the immediate refurbishment of Sara and ALUCE bases and the construction of space-defense platforms similar to those that typified the ARMD series. As head of the Ways and Means Committee, Milburn had been influential in shepherding through the allocations.

"It's time thought was given to something other than the completion of the SDF-3," Janice was saying in her unsettling monotone. "Even though my uncle would die if he heard me say that." She was wearing a strapless lavender gown that Minmei had tried to convince her was too revealing—though Minmei's own was shorter and cut even lower.

"Dr. Lang was certainly our toughest opponent," Milburn told her, tossing back a drink. "But I think he's beginning to understand that the departure of the SDF-3 is going to create a defensive vacuum on Earth. What's more, it's important to have contingency plans in place in the event the ship doesn't return on schedule."

"Which it won't," Janice said, sipping champagne from a long-stemmed glass. "Not with my uncle and Lisa Hayes at the helm."

Moran and Milburn traded stunned glances and laughed. "How refreshing to find a celebrity who isn't wed to political correctness," Moran commented.

Janice stared at him. "Are you referring to my partner?"

"Why, I—" Flustered, Moran cut his eyes to Minmei. "Lynn, I didn't mean to suggest—"

"Just because she hosts the Love Line doesn't make her an enemy of the politically incorrect."

"Janice, please," Minmei said, showing an imploring look. "Let's not turn this into a debate. Besides, I'm sure that Wyatt was only making conversation."

The android turned to the silver-locked president. "Is that true, Wyatt?"

"Well, I—"

"Because I hate polite conversation. And I really do feel that Minmei's involvement with the Lorelei Network amounts to a political statement."

"That depends on how you view the network," Milburn said, suddenly interested. "The people who have labeled it subversive are the same ones who take offense when anyone talks about young people's music being subversive."

Minmei was quick to speak. "I'm just trying to provide the Zentraedi with some entertainment."

"But they don't hear it as entertainment, Lynn," Janice argued. "You're practically a religious icon to them. So your songs—even the show's phone calls and interviews—constitute a kind of litany. You're a major political influence on them, whether you like it or not. Many Zentraedi would be lost without you."

"I'll drink to that," Moran said drunkenly, hoisting his glass. "To found Zentraedi, wherever they are." When Milburn didn't raise his glass in return, Moran raised it for him. "Come on, Brax, we're only having fun. Isn't that right, ladies?"

Minmei forced a smile and reached for her glass.

Moran snorted a laugh in Milburn's direction. "You'd think the man had stock in Lorelei, he's so serious about it."

Over the rim of her glass, Janice trained her eyes on the suddenly fretful senator, analyzing his expression, recording his every move. Dr. Lang would have much to evaluate.

The Cavern City cabbie, a Zentraedi, had the car radio tuned to the Lorelei Network. Minmei's "Sight and Sound" was playing: a minor and seldom heard post-War effort, at once martial and romantic. Max and Wolff were in the back seat.

"You like her songs?" Max asked.

"They're not my taste. But I think she's a fascinating woman. You know her pretty well, don't you?"

"I wouldn't say well, but, yeah, from the SDF-1 and Macross City."

"What does Miriya think of the Lorelei Network?"

"Same as I do: that it's patronizing and manipulative."

"I remember listening to Minmei's first show—when every other call was from a malcontent. I thought for sure she wouldn't be back for a second one."

Max laughed through his nose. "That's the thing about her—her faith in the future never flags."

Wolff's expression turned brooding. "I could use a dose of that. But until they can bottle it, I'll have to settle for scotch."

They were on their way to a downtown bar called The Chasm, an off-base gathering spot for the Pack. Mayor Carson, skeptical of Lopez's theories about the virus and wishing to avoid a panic, had refused to quarantine the base. And since both Max's and Wolff's blood tests had turned out negative, they had decided to make the most of the few remaining hours of what had been a grueling day.

The Chasm was dark, noisy, narrow, and crammed full of RDFers. A couple of enlisted-ratings gave up their table for Max and Wolff, and the two officers sat down and ordered drinks. Conversation entailed yelling into each other's ears. Not six feet from them, an argument was building at the bar.

"Who do you think you are, telling me I can't have another drink?" a scruffy-looking civilian was saying to the bartender. "I'm a regular. What I drink pays your salary. So if I say I want a drink, you give me a drink."

The bartender, a sturdy man with a thin mustache, took it good-naturedly. "Juan, who gave who instructions a cutting you off? I'm only doing what you asked."

Juan glared across the bar. "And why's it so hot in here tonight? You too cheap to turn on the air conditioner?"

"It's on." The bartender leaned his elbows on the bar. "Maybe you should just—"

Before he could get the words out, Juan had shoved him backward into the mirrored wall behind the bar. Glass shattered, shelves collapsed, and bottles of liquor crashed to the floor.

A bodybuilder in shorts and tank top came up behind Juan and took hold of his arm. "All right, amigo, time for you to go."

"More orders!" Juan said, his face beaded with sweat. "I don't have to take orders. I'm not a goddamned soldier."

Juan's sudden, sloppy right cross was easily evaded by the bouncer, but it managed to connect solidly with the jaw of a swarthy, bearded man standing at the bar. More surprised than hurt, the unintended victim returned a powerful left that Juan slipped under, leaving it nowhere to go but straight into the face of the bouncer, who fell back onto Wolff and Max's table.

"You didn't need to stage this for my benefit," Max said, sluicing his spilled drink from his lap as he was backing away from the collapsed table.

"Nothing's too good for a guest," Wolff told him, annoyed but transparently excited by the prospect of an all-out brawl.

Max put a hand on his arm. "Wait a minute. Maybe this isn't run-of-the-mill madness, Jon."

Wolff took a long look around the bar. Vicious fights were breaking out in all corners. "On second thought, we better call for the MPs."

They began to edge their way to the exit, dodging zone blows, taking others, and finally stumbled out the door onto Chasm Street. The brawl, too, had spilled outside, though military police vehicles were already on the scene.

"The one sitting at the bar," Max said while gently fingering a split upper lip. "Was he sick or only drunk?"

Wolff didn't respond. He was looking past Max, at something on the opposite side of Cavern's downtown canyon. "Too fast," he said at last. "It'll never make the turn."

Max swung around to follow his gaze. The monorail was speeding toward a station platform at a point where the elevated line jagged slightly to the southwest. And Wolff was right: it was not going to hold the curve.

The mecha that rescued her from a vine-strangled tree she had climbed to escape the New Unity had the torso and arms of a Gladiator, the cockpit module of a Veritech, and the legs and foot thrusters of a Battloid. The buxom pilot was named Kru Guage.

"You were never lost, Miriya Parino," Kru had said over the hybrid's external speakers.

Miriya had lowered herself from a limb slick with dew into a giant, gauntleted hand. "Maybe not, but your timing could have been better. Some of our comrades are in need of hospitality training." She showed Kru the shackles on her wrist and the welts the bits of molten chain had left on her arms and face.

"If you mean the New Unity, I have already informed them that you are our invited guest."

"Did you by any chance tell them my name?"

"I saw no reason not to."

Miriya tried to imagine Ranoc Nomarre's reaction to the news. "Is Seloy Deparra a member of your group?" she asked as she was clambering into the cockpit.

"A member? Seloy Deparra is the leader of the Scavengers."

Miriya had turned it over in her mind for most of the two hours it took to reach the Scavengers' cloud forest camp. That Seloy was alive was one thing; it was quite another that she had allied herself with the most bloodthirsty of the malcontents. But Miriya decided she would reserve judgment until she had heard her friend out. In the rare moments she wasn't preoccupied with Seloy, she thought about Max, who would be searching for her by now, and about Dana. How much more strain could her bond with her daughter endure before it was damaged beyond repair? Miriya trusted that the Grants would do all they could to explain things to Dana. Perhaps they would know enough to seek Zand's help—assuming that the abduction hadn't disabused the professor to all Zentraedi.

Once in camp, Kru Guage purposely refrained from raising the mecha canopy until they had reached a house that was set slightly apart from the rest and commanded a view of the steep-sided river valley. Miriya estimated that there were a hundred women in the camp, many of whom had emerged from huts and lean-tos to observe her arrival. From more than a few came shouts of "Hajoca!"

Seloy was waiting inside the house, dressed in jungle fatigues and an olive-drab T-shirt. She was thinner by fifteen pounds, and the humid air had frizzed her red hair; but she had lost none of her statuesque beauty, and her skin had remained white despite years of exposure to Earth's golden sun.

"Par dessu, Miriya Parino," she said, thumping her chest.

Miriya returned the salute, resisting an impulse to embrace Seloy as Human males and females were wont to do. "Why have you waited three years to contact me?" she asked finally. "Max and I thought you were dead."

Seloy almost smiled. "The people who were seeking us in Brasília are seeking us still. For your sake as well as our own, it was better you believed us dead."

"Us? Then Hirano is also alive?"

"Alive, and probably taller than your Dana. Unfortunately, he has his father's looks."

"Who is the father, Seloy?" Miriya chanced the question.

Seloy shook her head. "That must remain my secret."

"If you care about your son, how could you enlist in the Scavengers?"

"Precisely because I care about him—about his future. Brasília taught me that Humans and Zentraedi will never be able to coexist. The differences in our innate composition make us natural enemies, and where two enemies inhabit the same territory, one must be eradicated by the other. My wanderings eventually put me in touch with Zentraedi in whom the Imperative continues to burn, and ultimately with a group of women whom you shall meet in good time. Together we developed the Stingers, which male and female bands have deployed to such advantage all over this world. Eluding Humans has taught us how to think like them, to plan ahead and to employ the terror tactics they have used against us."

Miriya chose her words carefully. "I hope you haven't brought me here to enlist in the fight, Seloy."

Seloy planted her hands on her ample hips. "What if I have?"

"I'll refuse. I've chosen a different path from you."

"Yes, I've monitored you on that path over the years. Speaking to the media, railing against injustices . . ."

Miriya mimicked Seloy's pose. "I'm not a traitor—no matter what you or anyone in this camp thinks. Different paths, Seloy. But to the same end: equal rights."

"Equal rights?" Seloy threw her head back and laughed. "Is that what you think we're after?"

"What are you after?" Miriya asked.

Seloy took her time in responding. "Miriya, I inserted you into Zor's fortress so that you could hunt and kill the Human you had deemed your equal in combat. The Human you later married. That marriage, and your life since, has somehow neutralized the influence of the Imperative. But the bond between Quadrono warriors is not so easily overcome. You know this, or you wouldn't be here now."

"Even so, you owe me an explanation. I won't honor my obligation blindly."

Seloy considered it, then turned and headed for the doorway. "Come, let me show you."

Ignoring the gazes and comments they received—admiring, suspicious, disdainful—Seloy led Miriya on a winding route through the camp, then down along a narrow switchback path that ended at the river. A short stretch upstream was a drainage shaded by exceedingly tall trees, under which stood a dozen or more Stingers.

"You should have seen what we were forced to abandon at our facility in the south," Seloy said. "Even you would have been proud of our achievements."

Miriya had seen photos of the base Anatole Leonard had raided, and in fact she had been impressed, though she kept this to herself.

"At the start of the uprisings, our male comrades preferred to operate in groups of twenty or thirty," Seloy said. "But maximized mobility came at a price: no attempt was made at coordinating strikes or planning a unified campaign. The Scavengers changed that. Not only did we provide mecha, we armed the males with a new tactic."

"Terror," Miriya said.

Seloy smiled at her friend's disapproving tone. "For a while that was enough to placate our craving for vengeance. But no longer. Now we want nothing less than victory—the death of the Human race." She paused. "Are you aware that the Flower of Life has taken root on Earth?"

"I didn't know."

"But you know what that means, Miriya: the Invid will come. Perhaps not for twenty years. But they will come. And what will the Humans do? They will attempt to sue for peace, just as they plan to do with the Masters."

"It is their way."

"But, ask yourself, is it the Masters' way? Or have you forgotten what they bade us do on Optera and Garuda and Singken? Consider, Miriya, what will happen when the Humans appear in Fantomaspace with their hands extended in peace. Think of it. They will be atomized. And what if the Masters arrive here first? How would you rather they find us—marooned and enslaved to a Micronian species, or marooned and victorious, the masters of all we survey?"

Miriya glanced at the Stingers. "It will take more than these to assure victory. Even with ten times as many—"

Seloy was shaking her head. "We now have something more powerful than Stingers. These are merely the delivery systems."

Miriya's face fell. "Nuclear weapons?"

"Even more devastating than those. A disease, Miriya."

Seloy was pleased to see that she had finally shocked her friend into speechlessness. "One of our Human allies—a native Amazonian—led us to a laboratory not far from here, where, in the years before Dolza's Rain, researchers were investigating a strain of virus that had begun to attack 'monkeys and some Human residents of the jungle. The indigines gives had known about the disease for a long time, and had their own name for it: 'the Madness.' Infected monkeys or Humans would become violent before they died. There were many stories of hunters or prospectors who had been attacked and killed by crazed monkeys. Two years ago, the researchers died of the virus they were investigating, but their solar-powered facility continued to function and the virus lived on, nurtured by the nutrient cultures the scientists had fashioned. Removed from those cultures, the virus expires rapidly. But when it finds a suitable live host, it thrives and spreads itself through the air to infect others."

Miriya grasped for words. "If the life span is short, how can Stingers deliver it? Won't the virus perish before it can find live hosts?"

From a nacelle in the leg of the nearest mecha, Seloy extracted an alloy carrying case, which she set on the Stinger's foot and opened. Inside were perhaps tens of thousands of black objects smaller than pinheads.

"Microbots," Seloy said. "Protoculture shuttles, actually—the essence of Female Power Armor's self-maintenance systems. But Xan—one of the women I'm eager for you to meet—has discovered a way to modify them to act as vectors for the virus. In place of Protoculture, they now carry the virus, immersed in a drop of the sustaining culture. And they have been tasked for independent flight, Miriya." Seloy touched her nose. "They embed themselves in the nasal passages and throats of their targets."

Miriya stared at Seloy, aghast.

"They're Imperatived, Miriya. Once the Stinger launches them from its missile tubes, they have ten minutes to embed themselves and deliver their payloads. But even if only one in ten thousand succeeds, that one can multiply and disperse itself from Human to Human—by breath, by touch, by sneeze, by kiss."

Miriya shook her head in agitation. "It will never work."

"Oh, but it already has. We experimented with the process in Mexico and elsewhere. And only days ago we lured the RDF to a camp in Venezuela and deployed a virus-laden cloud in their midst. Sortie troops were undoubtedly infected, and by now they have carried the disease back to Cavern City."

"Seloy, there are twenty thousand civilians in Cavern—Humans and Zentraedi!"

Seloy grinned. "Have no fear. We Zentraedi are immune to the disease."

Miriya regarded the near-microscopic shuttles in silence, then said, "You haven't explained why you summoned me here."

Seloy's slanted eyes narrowed perceptibly. "We've asked representatives of all the male bands to attend a meeting here. To each, we will distribute tasked shuttles and a Stinger, with instructions to deploy the virus in their respective territories. The disease, the madness, will spread itself around the world before a vaccine can be developed, and hundreds of thousands will die."

Miriya was steel-eyed. "What is my part in this?"

Seloy locked gazes with her. "I know that the RDF and the Army of the Southern Cross are closing on this camp. I am hopeful that the plan can be executed before they find us, but there is no guarantee. Your part in this is easy, Miriya Parino: I want you to remove Hirano to safety before anything untoward can happen."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Cavern City became one of the first cities to suffer in the violence that succeeded the Southern Cross's abandonment of the Southlands for Monument City. Petty dictators rose to prominence, private armies sprang up, and previously allied city-states began to wage war with one another. A few cities found themselves taken over by gangs of well-armed marauders. In Cavern's case, the gang was the Red Snakes, which for years had been terrorizing the northern Southlands. I was living in New Dublin when I learned that Raphael Mendoza had died in a drive-by shooting perpetrated by the Red Snakes. Rho [Mynalo] and I had urged Raphael to leave, but he considered Cavern, even in the worst of times, his home. When Rho and I divorced, he applied for a position on the factory satellite, and opted to remain aboard when Anatole Leonard ordered the satellite removed from the Solar system. from the afterward of the Third Edition of Lea Carson's The Art of Compromise

Max and Wolff were assisting medevac teams at the site of the monorail crash when an officer from Mayor Carson's office showed up to rush them over to City Hall. It was three o'clock in the morning when they arrived, but already seated in the briefing room were Carson and two of her aides, Raphael Mendoza and Rho Mynalo, along with Cavern City's media secretary, Catherine Wolff, and Dr. Lopez, from the RDF base hospital.

"The driver of the monorail died," Lopez was reporting. "but several people have attested to her erratic behavior prior to the crash. I'm certain an autopsy will reveal the presence of the virus."

"How many fatalities?" the mayor wanted to know.

"Forty-six confirmed," Mendoza told her.

Carson turned back to Lopez. "And these other incidents?"

"A man armed with a Wolverine opened fire on a restaurant in Lookout

Valley. Seventeen dead, including the gunman, fourteen wounded. In addition, there have been three suicides in the past seven hours."

The dreadlocked Mendoza took over. "Emergency rooms at City Hospital and the base hospital are already filled to capacity. Special isolation wards have been set up for victims of the disease—as opposed to victims of the behavior the virus provokes. All police units and fire companies are mobilized, and the Sector Guard is on full alert."

"It's like someone pulled a string and unraveled the whole city. And it's my fault for not listening to Dr. Lopez." Carson looked at him once more. "How many cases of the virus have you verified?"

"Seventeen, including the suicides. But let me clear up one point before we continue: the virus doesn't induce psychoses. Rather, its effect is neurotoxic. It attacks areas of the brain that manage aggression, depriving those infected access to any of the inhibitory devices normally employed in forestalling the commission of acts of violence to oneself or to others. The quick onset and brief duration of the early stage are indications of the potency of the virus itself. Typically, within hours, nerve damage is so complete that the victim becomes comatose and dies."

"And you're certain this disease was carried in by the Wolff Pack?"

Lopez glanced at Wolff and Max. "The members of Captain Wolff's team were obviously unwitting carriers of the virus as a result of their contact with the infected crew of the skyjacked plane and perhaps via direct exposure to a particle cloud emitted by a malcontent weapon. However, we don't know at this time if they were the sole carriers."

Carson scratched at her mop of strawberry-blond hair. "You're saying that someone other than the Wolff Pack could have introduced this virus into the city?"

"It's possible. We don't understand the mechanism of contagion—though it seems to operate much like Influenza—nor have we identified the vector, the actual carrier. There is some speculation that the disease is initially transmitted by a tick or a mite, though I think researchers are being misled by the symptoms—the rash, the irritated nasal mucosa, et cetera."

"The Stinger we found didn't launch ticks, Doctor," Wolff said. "Besides, we brought the exposed tank in under wraps. So how could the virus get loose?"

Lopez shook his head. "It's likely more than one of you were infected. But as to why some succumbed to the virus while others didn't, I can't say. I should also mention here that there have been no cases reported among Cavern's Zentraedi population."

"Meaning what?" Carson asked suspiciously.

Lopez shrugged. "Meaning only that. The Zentraedi appear to be immune to the virus."

"Rho," Carson said, turning to her director of information, "I want corroboration on that."

The Zentraedi inclined his head in a bow. Max nodded hello from across the table; he and Mynalo had mutual Zentraedi friends in Monument City.

"A team from the Center for Disease Control is on the way," Mendoza told everyone. "In the meantime we've been instructed to seal the city. No one leaves, no one enters."

"That's going to turn this place into a pressure cooker," Wolff said, loud enough to be heard over a flurry of separate conversations. "And what happens when our food supplies run out?"

Carson called for silence. "We can have food trucked in by Disease Emergency Teams. Our biohazard suits will rendezvous with their biohazard suits." She looked at Lopez. "How reliable is the test for this virus?"

"It's reliable only insofar as our being able to single out the infected. We have no test for determining non-infected carriers."

"Does it make any sense to get everyone moved into shelters?"

Lopez shook his head. "One unidentified carrier could infect everyone in the population."

Carson slammed her hand on the table. "Something has to be done to protect people from catching this thing."

"We could use one of the hospitals as a quarantine area," Mendoza suggested.

"And if that hospital should fill up?" Lopez said.

"Then we'll use the base hospital as well."

"Why not use the Grand Cannon?" Max said. "It's roomy enough, and it would be relatively easy to isolate."

"The CDC team might want to headquarter itself there," Mendoza said.

Carson was nodding. "Find out if they do. Meanwhile, we'd better start thinking about food and fuel rationing, sanitation, and whatever else comes to mind." She looked at Wolff. "Captain, the RDF will be in charge of policing the shelters and the food distribution points."

Wolff stared at her in stunned incredulity. "That should be the responsibility of the Sector Guard! Unless you plan on using them to protect Cavern from surprise attacks from the malcontents."

"God forbid the Wolff Pack should miss out on any action," Catherine Wolff said, more to herself.

Wolff shot her a look, then cut his eyes to Carson. "This entire scenario—from the skyjacking to our raid on the Camp—was calculated. Plainly, the malcontents are launching a new offensive. I strongly recommend that we requisition reinforcements from Monument and—"

"I've already been in touch with Monument," Carson interrupted, "and they've deferred to the Army of the Southern Cross." She allowed everyone a moment to think about it. "Senator Moran and Field Marshal Leonard have apparently demonstrated to the satisfaction of the UEG that this virus threatens not just Cavern City but the whole of the Southlands."

More concessions, Max told himself.

"And assuming you're correct about a malcontent offensive," Carson continued, "the Army of the Southern Cross has every right to be involved."

"How will it work?" Wolff asked angrily. "Who'll be in command of whom?"

"As I said, the RDF will be in charge of distribution of food and essentials within the city. The Army of the Southern Cross will establish a defensive perimeter to safeguard the city against incursions by malcontents or anyone else."

Max could scarcely control himself. "Leonard shouldn't be trusted. Everyone at this table knows he's been looking for an excuse to annex the Venezuela Sector. Now you're giving him a chance to do just that!"

"Lie still or this is never going to work," Lazlo Zand cautioned Dana Sterling.

Still, the unruly five-year-old fought the professor's efforts to fasten an electrode-studded monitor band around her head. "I don't wanna lie still!"

"You don't wanna lie still," Zand parroted. "You won't be happy until you've ruined the experim—the movie."

Dana kicked her legs and twisted her head about, nearly undoing the stays that secured her thin wrists to the arms of the chair. "Aunt Jean didn't say we were going to watch movies. She said I had to talk to you." She screwed up her face and made her lips flap. "More stupid, boring talk."

Zand showed her a death's head grin and spoke through gritted teeth. "That's why we're watching movies. So there won't be any boring talk."

"Stupid, boring talk. And I don't wanna watch."

"What's the matter with you?" Zand nearly screamed. "You don't like movies?!"

The expression on his face and sudden infernal tone of his voice actually gave her pause. "Not these kind," she answered weakly.

Not five feet in front of her, on a large flatscreen, flying saucers were attacking a city of monumental buildings. Before that—literally seconds before that—floating war machines with snakelike heads had been launching death rays at the machines of a rival army. And immediately following the saucers ran scenes of outsize monster robots marching across a ruined landscape, firing weapons at every living thing in sight.

The whole of Zand's ten-minute, continuous-loop film was comprised of nothing but outtakes from pre-War science-fiction films, along with video footage shot during the Global Civil War and on those few occasions when

Humans and Zentraedi had gone at it on Earth: on Macross Island, elsewhere in the South Pacific, in the skies over the Ontario Quadrant. Khyron's cruiser figured in one scene; even Miriya Parino and Max Sterling showed up briefly.

How could their little hybrid urchin not enjoy it? Zand screamed to himself in the same voice Dana's shenanigans had invoked.

The Grants had dropped her off at the Monument City's Robotech Research Center for a therapeutic session, and Zand had been only too happy to oblige. She'd been sullen, withdrawn, hypomanic, and hostile to the Grants' wimp of a son, Bowie. They didn't know what to do with her; they were at their wits' end. Miriya had suggested in her message that they contact Zand if they needed help, and, after all, Zand himself had volunteered . . .

Had there been any word from Mom? Zand had asked the lovely, honey-brown Jean Grant. No, none. And what about Dad, any word from him? None that she could speak of; Sterling was in the Southlands on official RDF business. And what about that precious trio, Rico, Konda, and Bron, where were they? Still on the factory satellite.

Zand wondered if Grant had seen him salivate on realizing that he had Dana to himself, without fear of intrusion by any of her would-be guardians.

He'd had the movie prepared for some time, sitting in a vault in his office, awaiting its premiere. Zand's earlier experiments had established that Dana's brain-wave activity and body chemistry underwent changes when she was subjected to or confronted with violent stimuli. And those same changes were evident when Dana was interacting with her fellow aliens, as opposed to Humans. Blood drawn during those periods showed a marked increase in as-yet-unidentified hormones and enzymes, linked, Zand was certain, to the Zentraedi part of her biophysical makeup. So, all he had to do was activate that part, draw out as much blood as possible without unduly endangering the child, and quickly transfuse that hormone-laden blood into himself.

Easier said than done.

"Show me cartoons!" Dana wailed, flailing he legs.

"Stop wiggling around and watch the screen."

Where Veritechs and Tactical Battlepods were exchanging depleted transuranics and vibrant bolts of energy.

"Now, isn't this much more interesting?"

Dana twisted her head to one side and shut her eyes. "You can't make me watch it."

"Oh, no? Oh, no?" He leaned his gangly frame over her, his bony finger attempting to pry her eyes open, only to be kicked solidly in the groin.

"All right, all right, enough of this," Zand said when he could. He disappeared for a moment, returning with a set of eyelid expanders of the sort used in optic surgery. "Can't make you watch it, huh? Just watch this . . ."

Dana began to scream as Zand moved in on her.

He was standing over her, one hand clamped over her mouth, the eyelid apparatus in the other, an especially barbarous sequence running onscreen, when the locked door flew open and a broad-shouldered figure stormed into the office.

Emerson? Zand had time to think before the muscular RDF officer hurled himself at him.

Seloy had insisted that Miriya think carefully before making up her mind about taking Hirano—and raising him should something befall his mother. But Miriya had no time to waste on thinking. No sooner did Seloy sequester her in one of the huts than Miriya was stealing into the camp, searching for someone to ambush. Anything could happen here, especially with embittered Zentraedi like Ranoc Nomarre on the way, and she wanted a weapon. Not even fifty yards from the hut, she located her target: a recent arrival—a lone male—sleeping away the high heat of the afternoon under a shady breadnut tree. A quick chop to the base of the neck was all it took to dispatch him to temporary oblivion. Now, Miriya thought, to work the handgun free of the tight waistband of his filthy pants and conceal it under the untucked tail of Max's hiking shirt . . .

"Are you Miriya Parino?" a child's voice asked in Spanglish.

She turned, hiding the gun, and found herself facing a sad-eyed child of four, dark-haired and thickly built, dressed in a T-shirt and ragged shorts. "Hirano?"

"You're a friend of my mother, yes?"

"Yes, Hirano. I am her friend."

"She asked me to find you. She wants to know the answer."

Miriya smiled. "Can you take me to her?"

Hirano took hold of her hand and began to lead her through the camp, past groups of Scavengers and others muttering Zentraedi imprecations. "Hirano," Miriya said, "do you know what your mom has asked me to do?"

The child nodded. "She wants you to take me someplace. Then she's going to come and meet us there."

More than a year younger than Dana, Hirano seemed already hardened to life. There was nothing innocent or playful about him. He was serious, focused, sure of himself: a Zentraedi. Ill-suited to a Human world. "Are you frightened about going with me?" she asked.

"Frightened of what?"

"Of leaving your mom. Tell the truth, Hirano."

He looked up at her. "I don't remember you."

"That's because I only met you once, and you were a tiny baby then."

"My mom said you were in the War with her."

"Your mother was a great warrior."

"She still is."

Miriya stopped and knelt down beside him. "Hirano, not all battles are good ones or easy ones to win. The things your mother and her comrades are trying to do here are very dangerous."

"She could get killed."

"That's right, she could be killed."

"Then I would have to live with you and your child, and the three of us could fight the Humans together."

Nothing more was said until they had reached the house on the edge of the mountainside. Seloy wore a white jumpsuit, adorned at the breast with the Zentraedi sigil, and a holstered weapon.

"It is time for magdomilla, Miriya—time for strategic talk."

Miriya knelt at Hirano's side once more. "Hirano, I want you to wait outside while your mom and I talk."

Seloy grabbed Hirano by the arm and tugged him to her. "He stays. He has a right to hear your decision and know his fate." She put her hands on her hips. "The meeting will begin soon, Miriya, and after that, there will be much to attend to. But the male groups are careless; any one of them might be traced to this place, and there could be fighting. If your answer is yes, I want you to leave immediately. A Stinger is waiting to carry the two of you to Mexico."

Miriya's thoughts spiraled. Seloy was testing her. Once in Mexico, she could provide the RDF with the location of the camp; but once committed to accepting Hirano, she was honor-bound to silence.

"What is your decision?" Seloy demanded.

Miriya showed her a cheerless smile. "I was so happy to learn you were alive, Seloy. Your friendship means so much to me, I thought nothing could come between us. But I was wrong. You can't expect me to ignore what I've seen here. I want to help you and Hirano, but not if that means allowing you to make Earth unfit for Human life. You ask too much of me."

Seloy smirked. "I feared as much. I shouldn't have asked you to come. You are no longer Zentraedi, Miriya Parino." She drew the weapon. Confused, Hirano made as if to hug her legs, but she pushed him away.

Miriya looked at her friend. "There was a time no Zentraedi would fire on another. Perhaps we've both betrayed the Imperative."

"So smug," Seloy said. "Show your weapon, Miriya—the one you took from the male. I left you unguarded deliberately to test you. Now, at least go to your death honorably."

Miriya reached behind her to draw the weapon from the small of her back. As she did so, Seloy raised hers to fire, but Hirano chose just that moment to lunge for her. The weapon discharged but the projectile meant for Miriya missed its mark and streaked through the roof thatch. By then, Miriya had the borrowed handgun in front of her in a two-handed grip. Seloy kicked Hirano aside and dived to the left. Miriya yelled "No!" and fired.

And struck Hirano.

Twice repelled, the boy had run for his mother and caught the shot in the middle of his back. Miriya and Seloy stood gaping at his crumpled form. Miriya began shaking her head back and forth in anguished disbelief. Seloy was confused, distrustful of her feelings. Did she love the boy? Did the agony she felt at his death make a mother of her? When she gazed at Miriya, her face was streaked with tears. Then her features torqued in rage and she charged, screaming "Hajoca!" Charged, screaming, squarely into Miriya's gun.

The discharge all but blew her in half. Mother and son lying dead together . . . Miriya's scream seemed to last an eternity. She couldn't recall moving to Seloy's side, crouching beside her, cradling Seloy's head in her arms, rocking and keening. But there she was when the three women appeared in the doorway, weapons in hand, staring aghast at the scene.

"I am not Zentraedi," she moaned. "I am not Zentraedi."

"The Army of the Southern Cross knows all about the legendary exploits of Captain Wolff," Anatole Leonard said on being introduced to Wolff. In the bubble-helmeted, billowy antihazard suit, the field marshal looked twice his normal size, almost too large for the City Hall briefing room. "People refer to your team as a 'pack,' if I'm not mistaken."

"I'm flattered you've heard of us," Wolff told him through a fixed smile.

"Don't be," Leonard said, ignoring the sarcasm.

Leonard's fleet of superhaulers had arrived only that morning, two days after the monorail crash, setting down near the Grand Cannon and at points north, east, and west of Cavern City to establish a defensive perimeter. CDC guidelines required nuclear/biological/chemical suits for everyone entering the city. Leonard was accompanied by his aide-de-camp, Joseph Petrie, and two Southern Cross lieutenants. Waiting for him in the briefing room were Carson, Mendoza, Mynalo, Lopez, the Wolffs, and two epidemiologists from the CDC.

Given his history with Leonard, Max Sterling had thought it best not to attend.

"I'd like a summary of where things stand," Leonard said, nodding to Petrie, who was recording everything via a fiber-optic rig designed into the face-shielded helmet of his suit.

Raphael Mendoza answered for Carson's team. "The virus is spreading exponentially. Where there were seventeen confirmed cases on August fifteenth, there are at present sixty-five. Twenty-seven have already died of the disease; the rest are in isolation in the east wing of City Hospital. Calamities have increased as well, running the gamut from shootings to firebombings, though not all of these incidents are directly related to contagion and subsequent infection. Panic attacks, copycat crimes, mass hysteria, and personal vendettas all have to be considered as factors contributing to the rise in property destruction and general mayhem."

Leonard mulled it over for a moment, then looked at Wolff. "It seems you returned from your raid on the Shroud and Fist with quite a prize, Captain. Your pack should remember to delouse before returning to civilization."

Carson spoke before Wolff could respond. "Assigning blame is counterproductive, Field Marshal. We have a situation, and that situation needs to be dealt with, regardless of how it arose. And let's not forget that three of Captain Wolff's teammates have been casualties of this virus."

Leonard steepled his gloved fingers and looked long and hard at Rho Mynalo. "As long as we're being blunt, Ms Mayor, let me state that I'm opposed to having a Zentraedi sit in or otherwise participate in this meeting."

Carson reddened with anger. "Rho has been a trusted member of my staff for three years, and I wouldn't think of excluding him. As you well know, Cavern City has a Zentraedi population exceeding five hundred, all of whom are considered full members of the community. Unlike Brasília and Cuiabá, to name only two, Cavern has no Zee-town."

"That may explain why your city alone finds itself victimized by a mysterious plague," Leonard said. "The CDC has yet to demonstrate conclusively that Wolff's team was the only vector for this virus. Now, I'm not saying that Mynalo here is a double agent, but for the time being all Zentraedi must be assumed to be security risks."

Carson shook her head. "I simply won't have it."

"In his reports, Captain Wolff refers to the virus as a 'Zentraedi weapon,'" Joseph Petrie thought to point out.

Wolff shot to his feet. "I called it a malcontent weapon. Or maybe you fail to see the distinction."

Petrie took it in stride, directing himself to Mendoza. "Do you deny that there have been attacks against Cavern's upstanding Zentraedi citizenry these past two days?"

"No, we won't deny that."

"So it appears that not everyone agrees with the mayor."

"There's an explanation for those attacks," Carson said.

Petrie's grin showed through the helmet faceshield. "And that is that the Zentraedi's apparent immunity to the virus has made them suspect."

Intruding on a sinister silence, Rho Mynalo stood up at his chair. "Mayor Carson, I'm willing to leave if my absence will facilitate an understanding between yourself and the Army of the Southern Cross."

Carson whirled on him. "You're not going anywhere, Rho. If anyone, it's the field marshal who's leaving."

Petrie started to reply, but Leonard silenced him with a gesture. "We seem to have gotten off on the wrong foot here," he said in mock concern. "Why don't we begin again, focusing on the 'situation,' as Mayor Carson puts it. The Army of the Southern Cross is willing and certainly able to lend its services to Cavern City—a Northlands protectorate—but only if we can be assured the freedom to operate as we see fit. We will honor all protocols by keeping the RDF fully apprised of our actions, but we will not take orders from them or anyone else. What this means, essentially, is that we want the authority to control the city's power and telecommunications facilities, and to commandeer any and all housing, food, and vehicles. Strategic decisions made by me cannot be countermanded by the mayor's office, nor by Captain Wolff or any member of the RDF." He paused to glance at Carson. "Do we understand one another?"

"You must be mad," she told him. "I'm not going to turn this city over to you."

"The decision is yours, of course. But ask yourself this: since Monument has given its blessing to the Southern Cross, will you still have a city to cede a week from now?"

His ultimatum delivered, Anatole Leonard had excused himself from the meeting, leaving it to Carson and Petrie to strike a compromise. The final solution, arrived at after four hours of heated argument, was satisfying only to Leonard's aide.

Frustrated and angered by what he saw as Carson's shortsightedness, Wolff—only steps behind his wife—exited the briefing room while the mayor, Petrie, and the CDC people were still hammering out the details. In the corridor, he hurried after Catherine, catching up with her on the staircase to the lobby.

She recoiled from the light touch of his hand on her shoulder. "Look, Jonathan, I don't have time right now to process our relationship."

"This isn't about you and me. It's about Johnny. Have you had him tested for the virus?"

She rolled her eyes. "No, I was planning to let him get sick so he could miss a few days of school. And perhaps burn the house down at the same time."

Wolff went right on. "How about yourself?"

"Why, Jonathan, all this sudden concern is heartwarming."

"I want you two to move into one of the clear shelters."

"You want." Her eyes narrowed. "Unless I'm mistaken, you don't live with us anymore, which means what you want no longer matters as far as we're concerned."

"It's too dangerous to stay in the apartment. There are a lot of Zentraedi living in that neighborhood, and the way things are going you could get caught up in a riot."

"I know the risks. But I'm not about to stick us in some filthy shelter. Anyway, I have a job to do. Lea's counting on me."

Wolff snorted a laugh. "Yeah, forget about the CDC or the Army of the Southern Cross, what this emergency needs is the services of a good spin doctor."

"How dare you belittle me! Maybe I'm not in charge of maintaining law and order like the heroic Jonathan Wolff, but what I do matters. And goddamn you for not remembering that you were the one who urged me to take the position in the first place!"

Catherine's tears made a molten mess of him. "I'm only thinking of your safety, Cath. I know I've screwed up—we've screwed up—but we have to think of Johnny—"

"Since when has Johnny ever come first? What have you been to him all these years while I've been mother and father?" She raised a hand as if to slap him, but thought better of it. "If I'm such an unfit protector, why don't you ask Geena Bartley to take care of him. She doesn't work. She's supportive of her husband. She's willing to sacrifice everything for his career."

"Cath, I only meant—"

"I don't care what you meant. If you're not going to be in my life, you have no right to interfere with my decisions. And no, Jonathan, I don't have the virus: whatever hostility I'm projecting is of my own making."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Hollister was never cut out to be an anchor; she was too in love with the field, the image of the lone photojournalist reporting live from the front. That's why she jumped at the chance of an assignment on the factory satellite. There, she would do a series of exclusives, break many a heart, cover the Hunter-Hayes wedding, and be a strong influence on a young reporter named Susan Graham, whose documentary on the SDF-3 mission would earn her a posthumous Pulitzer. How then, you may be wondering, did Hollister ever end up as Supreme Commander Leonard's press secretary?

Altaira Heimel, Butterflies in Winter

"And on a personal note, I'd like to say how happy I am to be back on the MBS Evening News, and I'd like to thank everyone for all the kind words and letters of support." Katherine Hyson's smile was strained, and the dullness in her eyes betrayed the effects of the sedatives that had contributed to her inordinately speedy convalescence. "Rebecer Holistin," she went on, unintentionally garbling the name of the woman she blamed for her breakdown, "is currently on assignment on the factory satellite. And now for our top stories.

"Cavern City, beleaguered capital of the Venezuela Sector, remains the focal point of world attention tonight, as experts from the Center for Disease Control continue to seek a vaccine for the deadly virus that has held that city in its grip during the past week. Believed to have been developed by the malcontent group known as the Scavengers, the neurotoxic virus induces episodes of berserk hehavior and, in many cases, death. Four hundred and fifteen cases have been confirmed since an RDF unit, returning from a raid on a malcontent camp, unwittingly introduced the virus to the city. Held hostage by the disease, Cavern's thousands remain in virtual quarantine, rocked by sporadic rioting and mob violence directed against the Zentraedi population, who are evidently immune to the disease.

"Along with the presence of the Army of the Southern Cross, the crisis in Cavern has also made the city something of a political hotbed. While reports that Anatole Leonard received the tacit approval of the RDF have yet to be substantiated, spokespersons for the UEG will not disavow rumors that Leonard's occupation of the district constitutes the first step toward the eventual ceding of Venezuela to the Southlands.

"One person who probably won't be heard from regarding the Venezuela controversy is Braxton Milburn, former head of the UEG's Ways and Means Committee, charged today with conspiracy stemming from Milburn's connection to Tom Hoos and the ongoing Lorelei Network Scandal.

"As MBS reported on Thursday, the all-music satellite network was revealed to be a privately funded surveillance system aimed at monitoring the whereabouts of Zentraedi callers, all of whose WorldPhone links were recorded and traced. An analysis of the free food distributed by the network has shown it to contain a chemical agent that binds with Zentraedi blood and served as yet another monitoring device. Based on information released today by the Ministry of Justice, it now appears that Senator Milburn was the mastermind of Lorelei. Lynn-Minmei, who has hosted a talk show since the network's inception, has been unavailable for comment . . ."

It was brutally hot inside the cramped pilot compartment of Pack One, Wolff's tank. The Centaur was parked downtown, at the intersection of Chasm and High Valley Road—a distribution point for drinking water. Max had joined Wolff there to learn what had gone down between Carson and Leonard at the morning meeting. Two minutes inside the old battlewagon and he was bathed in sweat.

"So she gave in to his demands."

Completely," Wolff said with contempt. "Well, maybe not completely. We're retaining control of power and telecommunications. But otherwise, Leonard pretty much has run of the place. What he says goes, no matter what Carson or Monument think of his decisions. It sucks. And I still can't figure why Command would waive their authority." He looked at Max. "This can't all be because of Miriya's disappearance."

"I'm sure Reinhardt himself would go to the media with the story rather than surrender Venezuela to the Southlands," Max said.

"So what is it, if it isn't blackmail?"

Max unsnapped the collar of his shirt and sat down in the gunner's seat. "It's politics. In order to be guaranteed what it needs to pull off the Expeditionary mission, the RDF is willing to cede territory to the Southern Cross. How much longer could we have overseen Venezuela, anyway? If this virus hadn't happened, Leonard would have manufactured a crisis that allowed him to occupy Cavern."

Wolff exhaled wearily. "Tirol better turn out to be worth the effort." He shook his head. "To save Earth, the RDF has to sacrifice it."

"No less to the likes of Leonard and his gang." Max glanced at Wolff. "That's what they are, you know. Thugs, mercenaries, traitors to one cause or another over the past twenty-five years."

"What the hell are we supposed to do when Leonard's tanks or Destroids decide to handle the next demonstration the way they handled the one you witnessed in Brasília? Do I order the Pack to defend the demonstrators and risk starting an all-out war between the RDF and the Southern Cross?"

Max shook his head. "We intervene, but we don't fire on them. We'd only get our butts kicked in the long run, anyway. And then where would the city be?"

Wolff clenched his fists. "I hate having my hands tied like this. I'm worried Leonard's going to try to provoke me. We have to get to any source of trouble before he does. There've already been four separate mob attacks on Zentraedi neighborhoods. And guess who's gonna come out on top if Leonard shows up at the next one? Not the Zentraedi, that's for damn sure."

"It goes beyond prejudice with him. He has some reason for hating the Zentraedi in a personal way."

"Any idea why?"

Max thought about Rolf Emerson's statement that Leonard had once taken a Zentraedi lover. "Nope."

"Max," Wolff said tentatively, "what would you say to getting out of here?"

"How do you mean?"

"I mean taking Skull Team and the Wolff Pack and all our families out of this place before the shit hits the fan. I know it sounds like desertion, and I know we'll be breaking the quarantine, but I prefer to think of it as saving lives."

"Our lives," Max said harshly.

"So what's wrong with that? You said yourself Venezuela's a lost cause. So the RDF is just pulling out a little early."

Max stood up, almost cracking his head open. "First of all, our leaving would give Leonard control over everyone here, which means the Zentraedi won't have a prayer. Second, one of us could be harboring the virus. And finally, the whole lot of us would be court-martialed and probably end up spending the next five years in the brig. Are you willing to risk that?"

Wolff ran a hand down his face. "I'm worried about Catherine and Johnny," he said, after a moment. "I tried to convince her to go to one of the shelters, but she wouldn't listen. She figures her job comes first."

Max's expression softened. "Where does that leave Johnny?"

"Geena Bartley was planning to move Rook into a shelter. I'm hoping she took Johnny with her."

A comtone sounded and Wolff reached for the radio. He listened for a long moment, in obvious and ever-increasing alarm, and was ashen-faced when he turned to Max.

"The bastard has done it. There was a riot outside a shelter set up and staffed by Zentraedi. Leonard ordered his troops to put it down with force. They fired on the crowd indiscriminately. At least twenty people are dead; maybe three times that many wounded." He paused for a moment, numbed by his own words. "It was the shelter Geena was taking Rook to."

Anatole Leonard's bullet-shaped, shaved head filled the screen of the vidphone. "Well, Captain Sterling, we meet at last," he said in his humorless baritone. "Not exactly face-to-face, but that's probably for the best."

Max wasted no time setting the tone of the call. "You crazy sonofabitch. Do you know how many people you killed at that shelter?"

"We were merely maintaining the peace."

"Like you were in Brasília?"

"My troops may have been somewhat overeager, it's true. As for the deaths, I'm afraid there wasn't time to sort the innocent from the guilty."

"By guilty, you must mean the Zentraedi, since they accounted for most of the casualties."

"That my troops couldn't distinguish them from Cavern City's Human populace is surely a testament to how well the aliens have blended in."

"Wolff's son was there, Leonard."

Leonard didn't respond immediately. "My sympathies to the captain."

"Lucky for you, he survived the attack. But then I suppose you couldn't imagine Wolff's distress, could you, Field Marshal? You don't have a son, or a family."

Leonard was stone-faced. "Come to the purpose of this call, Sterling. I'm too busy to indulge in games or name-calling."

Max leaned away from the phone's camera. "You're not here out of altruism. Cavern's nothing but a target of opportunity. So much the better if several hundred Zentraedi die in the campaign."

Leonard snorted a laugh. "The Southern Cross will always be indebted to you for the plague you helped bring here. Though I must admit I'm surprised that you weren't more circumspect about procedure after witnessing the deaths of the three Scavengers you captured. The Zentraedi we found at the Stinger base robbed us of the pleasure of observing their mass suicide. But perhaps you thought that biological warfare was beneath the malcontents? I'll wager that your wife could have told you differently." He grinned. "Have you heard from her, by the way? I understand that the Scavengers are always looking for able-bodied recruits."

"Don't expect an easy victory over this city, Leonard. Not while I'm here."

"Yes, and it's a pity you are here, Sterling—in more ways than one. After all, if it wasn't for the quarantine, you could be out tracking down your better half. Or is that alien half? In any case, I'll be sure to let you know if the Southern Cross encounters her while it's out locating and destroying malcontent camps."

She had been placed for safekeeping inside a ramshackle hut, but she was more a prisoner of her thoughts than the hut's walls of sticks and dried mud. She had killed them—killed Seloy, killed Seloy's child. The deaths had drained her of any emotions engendered by the years of living with Max, and of coming to love him and Dana. She was in the hold of the Imperative once more, thinking only of her own survival.

When she heard the crude wooden door open, she thought it might be her jailer—a willowy thing with white hair—or any one of the Scavengers who had hurried to the sounds of gunfire in Seloy's house: Marla Stenik, Vivek Bross, or the scientist, Xan Norri. But instead it turned out to be Ranoc Nomarre, accompanied by a second member of the New Unity, a hulking, bald-headed giant of a man with a patch over one eye. Leida, she recalled, from her short stay in their camp.

Both wore faded T-shirts and baggy pants. The weapon Ranoc was pointing at her fired conventional projectiles—though ones of sufficiently large caliber. Leida's handgun was smaller but equally lethal.

"Miriya Parino," Ranoc said, "you have been found guilty of crimes against the T'sentrati—"

"Sesannu!" she said, cutting him off. "I'm aware of my crimes, Ranoc, but you were not appointed my executioner. The Scavengers reserve that right for themselves."

His upper lip curled, revealing rotting teeth. "Don't assume that I care what these females have to say. I've suspected all along that you were a traitor, and now you've proven it by killing Seloy and the adopted Human child. Still fearful of your status as a Quadrono, the Scavengers are afraid to act, but I am not." He leveled the gun. "You will not escape again."

Impervious to the possible consequences, Miriya hurled herself at Leida, catching him around his middle and driving him back against the door. As the big man slid down on his tailbone, she scrambled behind him and locked her forearms around the front of his neck. His powerful hands fastened on her arms. The gun slipped from his grasp, but she was slow in retrieving it. Ranoc fired, grazing the top of her left shoulder. But by then she had Leida's gun in hand. Her shots slammed into Ranoc's chest and he died.

"Traitor," Leida hissed, struggling to get to his feet.

She killed him with a shot to the head.

She stood still for a moment, thinking only about what had to be done, satisfied to be empty of feeling.

She picked up Ranoc's weapon and walked to the door, expecting to face a charge, but no one was in sight. Off to one side lay the white-haired guard Ranoc had killed on his way in. Miriya stepped outside.

"Deng yar—don't move!" someone yelled from a nearby observation tower. A round whistled past her left cheek and tore through the wall of the hut.

Miriya saw the shooter and returned fire, toppling her from the platform of the tower.

Bleeding from the shoulder, she headed out, not furtively but openly, spoiling for confrontations and shooting at anyone who appeared, hitting the majority of her targets. Surrendering to the Imperative and the skills it had afforded her in a lifetime of combat.

She could see the Stinger from one hundred yards away, reflective where the sunlight found it, towering over everything in the vicinity except for the trees themselves. That the mecha was in camp and not secreted in the valley below identified it as the one Seloy had selected to fly Miriya and Hirano to Mexico.

She moved toward it. The throbbing pain in her shoulder was superseded by a searing in her left leg; she smelled singed cloth and flesh. Keep moving, ignore the distress, kill that which impedes your progress, attain your goal, kill that which stands in your way, save yourself . . . This wasn't something she told herself but something recited to her by the Imperative.

Access to the Stinger's cockpit was via a tall wooden ladder. Miriya began to climb, firing on moving targets below and taking another round in the leg, behind the knee. It pleased her that she had managed to throw the camp into chaos. She dragged herself upward, relying on the strength of her upper body, and tumbled into the cockpit.

A glance at the consoles told her that she could pilot the thing. Anyone who had mastered Female Power Armor could master a Stinger; only the weapons systems were unfamiliar.

The helmet and waldos were a tight fit. She activated array of controls and the mecha powered up. It lifted off, rounds pinging against the armored exterior.

She was dizzy, but she refused to surrender to the disorientation and pain; if need be, she would push her body to the point of death. The closest RDF base was Cavern City, but Cavern would be busy coping with the virus. It was Mexico or nowhere. But would the RDF blow her out of the sky before she had a chance to identify herself? Was the Stinger even equipped with a radio? And what if the mecha was armed with virused shuttles? Would its destruction vector the disease to a new population?

These were possibly pointless concerns, since two of the Scavengers' Stingers were already in pursuit. She maxed power to the engines, but could neither escape nor evade them. So she took them on.

The pilot of the first was an unworthy adversary. Miriya's tactics were too subtle; she rid herself of the mecha with little effort. The second pilot, however, was adept. She divined Miriya's every move, and at times literally flew circles around her. She placed her missiles with surgical precision, as if she wanted to take Miriya alive.

Miriya's ship was flashing warnings and belching smoke when a voice blared from a concealed speaker.

"T'sen Parino, your Stinger is crippled. Will you yield?"

Miriya thought she recognized the woman behind the voice: Seloy's small-boned, pixie-eared lieutenant. "T'sen Bross?"

"I am honored to be recognized. I have great respect for you, T'sen Parino, as a fighter and as a woman. I always believed that you, more than any, understood and followed the true path of the T'sentrati. I do not know your reasons for killing Seloy and her child, but your actions have not lessened my respect for you. I won't be the one to kill you."

Miriya searched for the radio controls to no avail. Finally, she simply spoke to the air: "You honor yourself. T'sen Bross—Vivik. Will you abandon the cause and join me?"

"I cannot."

Miriya felt nauseated. "The Scavengers will know that you allowed me to escape, Vivik. You'll be executed."

"Just the same, I won't kill you."

"Then come with—"

"I salute you, Miriya Parino."

Miriya sensed what was coming. "Vivik, no!"

Bross's Stinger hovered in the air for a moment, then came apart in an expanding sphere of fire and smoke.

Miriya put her face in her hands, grieving for the imminent death of her race.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The two technicians responsible for orchestrating "Jeng Chiang's" live-video message to Breetai were apprehended during an RDF raid on a malcontent camp located in southern Mexico and charged with acts of conspiracy, sedition, and sabotage. As part of their plea bargain, however, they allowed that they had indeed arranged for the transmission of Chiang’s Little White Dragon "in-take" [sic] to Breetai's quarters. Though long suspected, Chiang was not positively identified as Lynn-Kyle until after the SDF-3 launched for Tirol with Kyle aboard. (See Versace's Malcontent: Confessions of a Sympathizer.) A videotape of the intake that thwarted Theofre Elmikk's plan to seize the SDF-3 is rumored to exist.

footnote in Daluce's Bridge to an Uncertain Future: Earth Between the Wars

On the phone, Minmei asked him to meet her at a scenic overlook located just off the main highway a few miles north of Monument City. Her rental car was already in the small lot when he arrived on a borrowed Marauder motorcycle; otherwise, it appeared they had the place to themselves. Dressed Western, with her long hair ponytailed, Minmei was standing at the railing of a concrete balcony that afforded a panorama of the valley and the mountainous terrain east and north of the city. The day was warm and cloudless, and the view seemed to go on forever.

They embraced, and she thanked him for coming. "I would have suggested a restaurant in town, but the media is still hounding me about the Lorelei Scandal."

"I figured," Rick said, setting the motorcycle helmet down and taking off the leather jacket.

"Why do things like this keep happening to me, Rick? Now I have to look like a jerk for not knowing what was going on. Or—worse—a racist, which you know I'm not. Either way, my voice has been used as a weapon again. Like it's not enough that Lang expects me and Janice to sing away the next wave of invaders from space."

"There was no way you could have known what Milburn and the rest were doing. Even we didn't know. And another embarrassment was the last thing the RDF needed right now."

"I guess. But I'm sick of everything going wrong in my life. Every decision I make is jinxed."

"At least you found a partner."

Minmei made a face. "That's probably going to end badly, too. I mean, Janice is the strangest person. And talk about an embarrassment, it's like she doesn't care who she offends with her comments—excuse me, her 'honesty.'"

"That must be the Lang side of her lineage coming out. Look how weird he is."

Minmei laughed, hugged Rick, then swiftly backed out of his embrace and punched him solidly in the arm.

"Hey, what's that for?" he said, massaging his right biceps.

She folded her arms and scowled. "For getting engaged."

"Minmei—"

"Oh, you know I don't mean it. I'm happy for both of you—sort of. I just wish I had someone in my life. I try to look into the future, and all I see are more tours, more clubs, more interviews . . . I announce to the whole world that 'Lynn-Minmei is going to take a new direction,' and here I am, three years later, in exactly the same place: touring, avoiding the press, the center of controversy, Earth's most powerful weapon." She shut her eyes and shook her head. "I'm always getting involved with the wrong people."

"Thanks loads."

"I didn't mean you, silly. I was thinking of Kyle, and now Senator Milburn . . . I still can't believe I had dinner with that man a week before the scandal broke and he never said a word about having an interest in Lorelei. Even though Janice kept talking about the 'politics' of the network."

"Janice did?" Rick said, surprised.

"I distinctly remember her asking for Milburn's views on the network, and he was just so cool, so casual about everything. Just like Kyle used to be before his drinking got out of hand. You never knew what he was really thinking."

Rick scratched his head. "Where is Kyle?"

"I almost wish I knew." She was quiet for a moment, then looked at him earnestly. "Will you promise me one thing? That we can stay friends even after you and Lisa get married?"

"Of course we can."

"Close friends?"

"Best friends."

Minmei linked her arm through his, rested her head on his shoulder, and sighed. "I love the view from here. Remember the view from the park in the SDF-1? Remember how real EVE made the sky look, and how wonderful it was to look at the stars from the observation bay?"

"I sure do."

"You're so lucky to be going back into space. I don't suppose the REF would like to take a singer to Tirol?"

Rick snorted a laugh. "The Expeditionary mission won't be a pleasure cruise. Just ask Breetai or Exedore. We have no idea what we're going to confront."

"So—no singers."

"Not unless we receive some word from the Robotech Masters that they're planning a joyous reception in our honor."

The wind picked up a bit, laden with the scent of pine. "You know what really bothers me, Rick?" Minmei asked. "The image everybody has of me as helpless, or perennially victimized. I'm not. I'm strong, and I want people to understand that."

"Your good friends know that. That's why we always support your choices." Rick grinned. "Even if some of them turn out to be wrong."

She narrowed her eyes, then smiled. "Yeah, just like I support your choices. And let's hope some of those don't turn out to be wrong."

They laughed, and began to talk of better days and friends they hadn't seen in a long while. When a family of five drove up in a mufflerless minivan, robbing the moment of its poignancy, they went to sit in her rental.

A moment later, a lone figure began to pick his way out from under the balcony, where he'd been lying amid the beamwork that supported the cantilevered slab of concrete. He had followed Minmei from Monument City, and in fact had been tailing her for the past several weeks. His motorcycle—an older version of the one Hunter rode—was secreted in the bushes below the uppermost switchback in the road that climbed to the parking area.

Minmei was deluding herself, Kyle thought. She wasn't strong, she wasn't independent. She would continue to be victimized. She needed someone to watch over her, to spot the bad choices before they happened, or to effect the course corrections that would keep them from going bad. In short, she needed him. The Zentraedi rebels had undermined themselves and were finished. She would become his new cause; Kyle, her invisible guardian. Even if that meant returning to the stars.

Zand's nose was broken, his eyes were blackened, and his right arm was in a sling. Lang stood staring at him from the doorway to Zand's office in the Tokyo Research Center, to which the professor had fled following the regrettable incident in Monument City.

"Tell me exactly what happened, Lazlo," Lang said, closing the door behind him and pulling a chair up to Zand's hopelessly cluttered desk.

"What happened? I was assaulted by a brainless RDF major named Rolf Emerson, that's what happened. I've a good mind to sue him for all he's worth—which is probably next to nothing."

Lang forced a breath. What was he going to do with Zand, the colleague he had selected to assume the mantle of chief of Special Protoculture Observations and Operation, during his absence? Thanks to Janice, Lang—via allies in the UEG—had managed to bring about the downfall of Milburn and the Lorelei Network. Would he now have to arrange for Zand, a friend and fellow scientist, to be similarly exposed to governmental and media scrutiny?

"I've met Emerson," Lang said after a moment. "He hardly seems the type to assault someone without provocation."

"Then you're not as good a judge of character as you'd like to think you are."

"You could be right," Lang said, holding Zand's gaze. "But from what I've heard, he discovered you subjecting Dana Sterling to certain tests?"

"Yes, he did. And what of it? You've done the same in the past. How else are we to understand the nature of Protoculture without investigating Sterling?"

"You make it sound like the child is the key to the Shapings."

"She is," Zand whispered conspiratorially. "She is the focal point! I was trying to activate the Zentraedi side of her when Emerson burst in and ruined everything. He charged at me. I couldn't stop him; he seemed immune to my strength."

"Your strength?"

"He said he would kill me with his bare hands if I ever touched her again. The fool accused me of being pruriently fixated on her! He's not intelligent enough to grasp the truth—that I'm fixated on her soul!"

Two sets of pupilless eyes locked across the desk.

"Lazlo, you're beginning to sound like a vampire."

Zand threw up his still-functioning arm. "You're a fine one to talk! Don't we both feed off Protoculture? Aren't we both obsessed with the limits of the mind and immortality?"

Lang collected himself before responding. "Listen to me carefully, Lazlo. The mind-boost I received at Zor's console happened to me. No matter what you may have heard or what you choose to believe, I wasn't seeking it. It was different for you—you conjured it—and your willfulness seems to have factored into the results. As a scientist, I'm intrigued; but I'm also concerned for you. Stay away from Dana Sterling. Do nothing to harm her. If she is a nexus of energies, a focal point, as you say, then you are courting disaster by preying on her. Once tipped, the scales of Protoculture will balance themselves by any means possible, and ill-intent is always paid back in kind.

"What's more, parents are a fearsome breed, and little Dana's are certainly as fearsome as they come. If the Shapings operate through Dana, they operate through Max and Miriya as well, and their progeny must not be tampered with. Don't make the mistake of assuming that there aren't even greater powers at work in the universe than what we've discovered in Protoculture. So refrain from rousing them, Lazlo. Whatever you do, don't anger them."

Max hadn't slept since learning of Miriya's sudden reappearance two days earlier. At the time, all Rick would say was that she had turned up in Mexico, and had been taken into custody by the RDF. In bits and pieces—while Rolf Emerson was using his influence with Leonard to get Max released from Cavern City—Max had learned of Miriya's wounds, the stolen Stinger, and how she had nearly been shot down by the Veritech teams that had intercepted her south of Mexico. The obvious damage done to the Stinger was all that had saved her. When the RDFers finally established radio contact with her, Miriya was the one who had suggested a thorough inspection of the mecha by biowarfare experts, and isolation for herself.

Max was hurrying down a corridor in the Mexico base hospital now, fully suited in protective garb, as were the staffers on the ward. Leonard hadn't liked releasing him from Venezuela, but Emerson had couched it as a personal favor rather than an official request. On landing his VT in Mexico, Max learned that shortly after his departure from Cavern City the Wolff Pack and the Army of the Southern Cross had finally traded shots. Cavern seemed a lost cause. The disease was continuing to spread, there had been further outbreaks among Wolff's crew, and everyone along the trench wanted out. Max wondered if Cavern would wind up buried like Macross, or merely abandoned like Oasis in the Congo Sector.

His eagerness notwithstanding, he was apprehensive about seeing Miriya. He felt as if he were going to be better off not knowing the reasons for her disappearance. Rolf had brought Dana to Mexico, but Max thought it best that he first visit with Miriya alone. Rolf had said something about wanting to talk to him about Lazlo Zand and Dana, but that what he had to say could wait until some other time.

Miriya was being treated less like a prisoner than a patient, though two armed guards in antihazard suits were stationed outside her door. Her wounds were fairly serious, but her condition had stabilized during the previous twenty-four hours. Blood and fluid replacement had been a major concern, but what with the Freetown's large Zentraedi population, Miriya couldn't have picked a better place to put down.

Max's first look at her was unnerving; it was difficult to tell when a Zentraedi was wan, but Miriya certainly looked weak, and she was swathed in dressings. He went to her side and gently hugged her, wishing he could rid himself of the NBC suit. "I thought I'd never hold you again," he said through the faceplate. She was wooden in his arms. Distant.

"Is Dana all right?" she asked without emotion.

"She's downstairs with Rolf. We can call for her whenever you want."

"Yes, I want to see her." Miriya turned to stare out the double-thickness window glass at the arid mountains. The sky was gray and turbulent with storm clouds.

"Do you want to talk about it?" Max asked after a moment.

"Do you?"

"I think I need to, but I'm not sure."

Miriya took a starting breath. "I heard from Seloy Deparra. That's why I had to leave Monument."

Max nodded. "I thought so, from what Dana told me."

"Seloy and her son left Brasília after the riot and fell in with the Scavengers. Her reputation as a warrior made her the ideal person to lead them. She also had the requisite desire for vengeance."

"What did she want from you?"

She wanted me to take Hirano to safety. She was expecting an attack by the RDF or the Southern Cross, and she didn't want him caught up in the violence."

"I haven't heard anything about a raid," Max said.

"Seloy called a meeting of representatives from the other hands. They're about to implement a new offensive."

"We know about the meeting. Does it have to do with the virus?"

Miriya looked at him. "You know about that?"

"I've been stuck in Cavern City for most of the time you've been missing."

Miriya frowned in sudden concern. "Are you all right?"

"I am, but Cavern isn't. Jonathan Wolff and I were the ones who carried the virus in, though we're still not sure how." He began to fill her in on his brief imprisonment in Oasis, his convalescence in the Argentine, Rick's visit, and the Wolff Pack's raid on the Shroud and Fist's camp in Venezuela.

Miriya said nothing.

"Have you been debriefed?" Max asked.

She nodded. "By Niles Obstat."

"Can you tell me anything about the Scavenger's plan for the virus?"

"Cavern City is only the beginning," Miriya said flatly. "They have access to enough of the virus to contaminate the entire Southlands—perhaps the world. It comes from a research laboratory some Amazonian indigines led them to. They plan to use tiny robots to spread the disease—almost-microscopic things called 'shuttles,' that have been retasked to embed themselves in the nose and throat. That's the reason for the meeting: to distribute the shuttles to the other malcontent bands. Seloy hoped to infect a few people in as many places as possible; that way the disease would soon spread itself around the world."

"How did you manage to escape the Scavengers camp?" Max asked.

"The Imperative provided all that I needed." She paused, then added, "I can lead the RDF to the base. But my loyalty is now suspect. You have to convince Rick that I'm telling the truth—and quickly. There isn't much time left."

Max was nodding. "Rick won't need convincing, but I can't make any promises about the others." Max regarded her through the permaplas plate. "Seloy must realize you'd come to us."

"Seloy's dead, Max."

He was startled. "I'm sorry—"

"Don't be. It was the risk she took when she summoned me. But her death will only delay the onset of their plan, not prevent it." She reached for Max's gloved hand. "I killed her."

Max felt a shudder of dread and horror pass through him. The cause of Miriya's flat tone and distant stare was revealed. "Where's Hirano?"

"At the camp." Miriya's gaze was unfocused. "Max," she said, with sudden anger. "I want to take part in the attack."

He had his mouth open to respond but she cut him off. "And don't tell me you understand, because you don't."

"My respect for the Robotech Masters continues to grow," Lang was saying, studying the magnified and enhanced image of a shuttle-bot onscreen. "A remarkable piece of work. Simple, elegant, artistic . . ."

"Let's not leave out 'deadly,'" Gunther Reinhardt thought to point out.

Lang turned to the briefing room table, gathered at which were the brigadier general, Rick Hunter, a half-dozen staff officers in their customary places, and Rolf Emerson and Max Sterling.

"It's the virus that's deadly, General," Lang said. "The shuttles, in seeking Human flesh, are merely executing their program." He laughed to himself. "I'm sure Harry Penn will be amazed to learn just how well he trained his former Zentraedi student, Xan Norri."

"Miriya also supplied us the name of Seloy Deparra's second-in-command—Marla Stenik," Reinhardt said. "I think it's safe to assume that Stenik is now the leader of the Scavengers."

"We don't have any information on Stenik," Rick added, "except that she was a Quadrono, like Deparra."

Colonel Motokoff spoke from the foot of the table. "The hell with the

Scavengers, I'd like to know what we have on the virus."

Lang answered. "The reason it wasn't identified by computer search is that all records of it were deleted during the Rain of Death. The Indians of northwestern Brazil have known about 'Crazed Monkey Disease' for generations, and there are references to it in a number of works by ethnographers, explorers, and specialists in tropical medicine. This research lab Miriya mentioned operated on sola-generated power, and those generators are apparently still in operation, or the virus samples would certainly have died by now."

"Is there a treatment?" Rick asked.

"None that we know of. But the CDC and the Institute of Health assure me that a vaccine shouldn't be long in coming now that we know what we're dealing with. The RDF's first order of business should be to take out that lab."

"Thank you, Doctor," Reinhardt said with patent sarcasm, "but we don't know where to look for it. Miriya's after-mission report indicates that Deparra told her the lab was close to the Scavengers' present base in the eastern foothills of the Andes, but that doesn't give us much to go on. The lab was set up as a joint undertaking by Brazil and Peru, and records of its location probably exist in what remains of Lima or Rio. The problem is, neither Moran nor Leonard will come forward with information until we include them on what we've learned."

Rick looked at Reinhardt. "What are their demands?"

"To be made partners in any attack we launch on the base. Naturally, they want their share of the glory."

"What happened to Leonard's idea that Miriya is working with the Scavengers by trying to lead us into a trap?" Max asked.

"He can't risk standing by that," Emerson told him "He knows that the Army of the Southern Cross has to be included in the attack no matter how things play out in the end."

"I vote we leave him out of it," Max said. "If the Scavengers are routed, the location of the laboratory won't matter."

Lang shook his head. "It's not that simple. We can't be sure some other malcontent band hasn't already been equipped with Stingers and shuttles, and the know-how to work with the virus."

"Are you telling me Leonard has us over the barrel again?"

No one spoke for a moment; then Reinhardt said, "The decision isn't the RDF's, in any case. All we can do is present what we have to the UEG and wait for them to decide how to proceed."

"Then it's a foregone conclusion," Max muttered. "Moran will argue that the Southlands are imperiled, and that the Southern Cross should be involved." He glanced at Reinhardt, then Rick. "Just try to make it work so that we're not answering to Leonard like we were in Cavern City. Otherwise, the Scavengers will have nothing to worry about. They'll be able to sit back and watch units from the RDF and the Southern Cross go at it. Christ, they won't even need to deploy the remaining virus. It'll be pure insanity by then."

Max might have gone on had not Niles Obstat entered the room at just that moment, saying, "We have the location of the laboratory."

"How?" Reinhardt asked.

"Through Thomas Edwards's sources in the Southlands."

"Now, there's a switch," Lang muttered, mostly to Rick and Reinhardt.

"Then we don't need anything from Leonard or the Southern Cross," Max said.

Reinhardt nodded. "We should have enough to convince the UEG that this is our baby. Those bastards owe us at least that much for dropping Venezuela into Moran's lap."

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Emerson never had his talk with Sterling about the occasion he discovered Zand and Dana as the Monument City Robotech Research Center. From his journals, it is clear that Emerson planned to tell Sterling on the return of the SDF-3 from Tirol. Until then—what with Dana in his care—he would see to it personally that Zand didn't come anywhere near the child. The Sterlings would only learn of Zand's experiments—indeed, of Zand's grotesque end and Emerson's heroic death—from Dana herself, on her arrival on Tirol.

Selig Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign

Eight Stingers had been moved from the camp in the valley to the site of the research laboratory in the denuded highlands. Eight mecha, one to sting every major city in Earth's western hemisphere: Portland, Detroit, Monument, Denver, Albuquerque, Mexico, Brasília, and Cuiabá.

Each craft would be piloted by two Scavengers who had volunteered for their mission—indeed, who had vied for the honor of suiciding for the cause. Khyron's name wasn't mentioned when the final choices had been made. The Backstabber may have been the first Zentraedi on Earth to surrender his life and the lives of his crew to ease the psychic burden of the disaffected, but the Scavengers owed him no tribute. The Stingers would fly for the glory of the Quadrono.

Marla Stenik was one of the twenty-five who had made the trip to the lab. The rest of the Scavengers, along with some fifty males representing half-a-dozen bands, had remained in camp to engage the RDF and buy time for the highland contingent. When Kru Guage and Vivek Bross had failed to return from her pursuit of Miriya Parino, Marla knew that the last days were upon them. Parino would reach Mexico or some other city, and soon enough the assembled might of the Robotech Defense Force would descend on the Scavengers' cloud forest camp.

Weeks earlier Marla had tried to dissuade Seloy from summoning Parino, sensing even then that the tide was about to turn for the rebellion. Parino had fought against her Quadrono comrades during the War's final battle, and there was no reason to believe she would act differently this time—certainly not as a result of what had happened in Brasília or Cairo or Arkansas. If Parino had been at all sympathetic to the cause, she would have come unbidden long ago. Marla recognized, however, that Seloy had felt compelled to contact Parino because of Hirano—even if Marla had no real grasp of what it was to be so devoted to another person that one would risk everything for that person. Seloy wanted her son to live, no matter what became of her; and who better to guarantee the boy's survival than Parino, who herself harbored a hybrid in the Human world?

Motherhood obviously had its own Imperative.

The highland laboratory was a windowless, three-level rectangle of aluminum and concrete that ran on solar power and converted energy gleaned from a nearby waterfall. On a rise behind the main building was a small graveyard where the research staff had buried some of their dead after Dolza's Rain, bolts from which had struck near enough to irradiate the entire area but leave the structure intact.

Xan Norri was in charge of overseeing the impregnation of the shuttles with the Human-harmful virus sustained by the lab's climate-control devices. Each Stinger would be armed with as many shuttle-stocked missiles as could be spared. In the event that the Stingers were engaged before they reached their target cities, the missiles were tasked to launch and disperse their payloads over population-rich areas, in the hope that infection of even a few Humans would lead to eventual systemwide contagion and mass death.

Xan was too important a resource to squander on the mission, but default leaders such as Marla were easily procurable, and so she had volunteered to fly—to sting Brasília, in sweet revenge for the injustices Leonard and the Army of the Southern Cross had committed against Zentraedi throughout the Southlands.

Standing just now at the cloven feet of her Stinger, watching as the mecha's missile nacelles were loaded, Marla heard rumbling sounds to the east. The thin mountain air was saturated with water, impatient for stormy release, but she knew that it wasn't thunder she was hearing but the echoing report of weapons.

Jonathan Wolff was suddenly back to being a student. Because Centaurs were useless in the rugged terrain surrounding the Scavengers' camp, RDF command had assigned Wolff, along with Packers Bartley, Malone, and Ruegger, to observe in four prototype Hovertanks piloted by members of a special mecha detachment out of Albuquerque Base. Ugly and cumbersome, with rounded, downsloping deflection prows, the reconfigurable ground-effect vehicles were fashioned of heavy-gauge armor in angular, flattened shapes and acute edges. In standard mode, they rode on a powerful cushion of self-generated lift. Mechamorphosed, they became squat, two-legged, waddling particle-beam cannons the size of houses.

Even so, Wolff would have preferred his antiquated Centaur. Not only had he forgotten how to be an attentive student, but the Hovertank unit had been assigned a subordinate role in the mission, safeguarding the lower valley while Max Sterling and the Skull Team attacked the camp itself.

Though only days removed from the events in Cavern City, Wolff was like someone fresh from a nightmare. The epidemic had been contained, but the city was not likely to recover. When word had arrived from Max Sterling of Miriya's reappearance and RDF Command's plans for an offensive, the Pack had been shipped north to Mexico for a briefing. Catherine and Johnny were there now. Monument City looked to be the next stop for Wolff, providing he didn't seriously fuck up in the meantime.

In the end, the Pack had only been allowed to breach the quarantine because Cavern had effectively become the property of the Southlands. More importantly, in the wake of the internecine exchanges between the Pack and the Southern Cross, Anatole Leonard was especially eager to see Wolff leave. It was of some consolation, then, that the field marshal had been denied the chance to participate in the offensive against the Scavengers.

There was some furious fighting going on upvalley, but it might as well have been a video game for all the impact it had on the Hovertank unit. Wolff was surprised to see so few Stingers in the sky; mostly what the Hover's cameras found were Tactical Battlepods. Conventional wisdom would have dictated pounding the hell out of the camp and attacking by land, but Command's principal concern was the virus, and they didn't want anyone going to ground until the place was secured, or in the unlikely event of a full-scale surrender by the malcontents.

Wolff had his eyes glued to the video screen when the Hover's scanner console issued a chorus of beeping sounds, and the pilot—a thick-necked former VT jock named W. T. Super—swiveled his backless seat to face the threat-assessment display.

"Major paint, bearing two-niner-zero, south-southeast," he said for Wolff's benefit.

Wolff left his seat to study the screen over Super's shoulder. "Don't tell me we're finally going to get to put this thing through the paces."

"Sorry to dash your hopes, Captain, but whatever's headed this way is too big to be a Stinger or a Battlepod."

"Cyclops recovery ship?"

"Bigger."

Wolff stared at the radar signature for a moment and cursed. "That's a goddamned superhauler. It's Leonard."

"Position us in the thick of the fray," Leonard ordered the air cav commander of the superhauler from his seat in the gondola. "See to it the Skull are forced to take the fight elsewhere, even if it means taking flack from the pods. And make certain those Hovertanks remain where they are. Pin them down with fire if you have to."

Leonard paused, then looked expectantly at the leader of the commando unit.

"Rappel lines readied," the woman said without having to be asked.

Leonard nodded. "I want us down on the ground before these RDF idiots can do any more damage."

The view from the gondola encompassed the entire precipitous eastern face of valley, on which the Scavengers' camp was perched like an eagle's nest. Several of their thatch-roofed huts were in flames, as were sections of outlying wild forest where RDF mecha had crashed.

"Computer projections based on available data indicate approximately one hundred and sixty enemy forces," a tech reported from his duty station. "Most of them are hunkered east of the camp."

"Child's play." Leonard snorted in satisfaction. He could well imagine how surprised Sterling and his VT wingmen were to see him there. Even now, the command net was noisy with the pilots' confused squawkings.

"Acknowledge them, but offer no replies or explanations," Leonard told the communications chief.

Again, he owed T. R. Edwards for the advance intel on the RDF's strategy. But rather than allow Edwards to risk compromising himself, Leonard had instructed him to furnish General Reinhardt with the location of the research lab the RDF was so desperate to obliterate. If giving up the place would increase his chances of extracting what he wanted from the camp itself, they were welcome to it. He had no designs on the lab, in any case.

In exchange for agreeing to Rolf Emerson's request that Sterling be released from Cavern City, Leonard had been promised access to portions of Miriya Parino's top-secret debriefing. As anticipated, Emerson had declined to apprise him of the location of the Scavengers' camp, but he had divulged certain things about Parino's escape, including the fact that malcontent leader Seloy Deparra was dead.

On learning of her death, Leonard had been torn between delight and sorrow. As much as he'd wanted to, he hadn't asked about the child; to do so might have tipped his hand. He took it as a good sign, however, that Parino hadn't mentioned a child. Hirano was alive, in the custody of some other

Zentraedi, to be sure, but alive nonetheless.

The boy was centermost in his thoughts when he rappeled into the jungle camp, amid the clamor of the superhauler's batteries as they punished the surrounding area. Had Seloy told Hirano who his father was? Had the boy told anyone? If not, would he come to accept Leonard as his parent? Could the Zentraedi in him be expunged by love or by punishment?

Leonard hit the muddy ground awkwardly, encircled by ten of the best the Army of the Southern Cross had to offer. No antihazard suits, no gloves or rebreathers now; what the Southern Cross had for the malcontents—or any other alien pretenders to Earth's crown—was far more deadly than anything the Scavengers had for them.

"I want a captive," Leonard yelled above the roar and clatter of the guns, the ear-smarting detonations of air-to-ground missiles.

Half the team scattered to carry out his command. Much of the camp was in flames, the immediate area strewn with alien corpses shot or burned beyond recognition. East of where Leonard had dropped, two Skull VTs had set down as Battloids and were wading through the wreckage, taking fire and answering it with glowing, superheated autocannons.

The malcontent Leonard's commandos returned with five minutes later had pallid skin and shaggy black hair. Smeared with mud and blood, she had empty bandoliers strapped across a flat chest. Leonard grabbed her by the front of her filthy sweatshirt and snarled into her face: "The child. The male child that was with Deparra."

The Zentraedi met his minatory gaze with defeated eyes and gave her head a mournful shake. "Dead. Dead with Deparra."

Leonard trembled. "You're lying. Where is the boy?"

"Killed by Parino. Dead."

Leonard felt faint. "Show me," he said. "I want to see the bodies."

The woman pointed to the platform of a tall, wooden structure—an observation tower. "Up there."

He stepped behind her and shoved her toward the tower. They walked between smoldering huts and worked their way around the burning trunk of a fallen tree. Leonard ordered her to ascend the tower's ladder ahead of him.

"In the tradition of those who live in these forests, we left the bodies for the carrion birds to pick clean," the Zentraedi explained as she climbed. "On the ships of the Grand Fleet, the bodies of warriors were recycled. Is this not the same thing?"

"Climb," Leonard told her.

But she refused to go any higher, and made room for him to pass her on the ladder. "Look for yourself."

Stepping onto the platform, he saw that she had told him the truth. He screamed, then fell to his knees. "Damn you, Seloy! You had no right. You had no right to bring my son into this!"

Then he unclenched his fists long enough to unholster his weapon and shoot the alien off the ladder.

As she had requested, Miriya was on loan to the Twenty-third Squadron for the attack on the research laboratory. No matter the outcome, the final battle had to pit Zentraedi against Zentraedi. Not only because of the danger the virus posed to Humans, but because of what the battle would signify to the world. If there was ever to be a chance for a lasting peace between the planetary races, the Zentraedi had to prove that they could police themselves.

The laboratory was a white-and-terracotta speck on a vast, mostly treeless plateau. And they were there—the Scavengers with their Stingers—just as Miriya knew they would be. At the briefing in Mexico, much had been made of the Twenty-third's role in the overall attack plan, and of how the squadron should comport itself. The RDF, ordinarily bent on adhering to the rules of civilized warfare, wanted the Scavengers stopped at all costs. Assuming the Stingers were already loaded with the virus, it was vital that they be destroyed there, close to the jungle from which the virus had sprung, rather than in proximity to any inhabited areas. And if that meant striking by surprise—preemptively, as the Southern Cross had done time and again—then so be it, and the media be damned.

The Scavengers had been caught unawares by the Twenty-third's dawn raid. Early on, though, the Stingers—serving as hulking bipedal antiaircraft arrays—had mustered an effective defense, preventing the VTs from getting close enough to the facility to do much damage. Now, however, the mecha were fast depleting themselves of warheads, and a few had lifted off, not to engage but to escape, or perhaps to make for remote targets. Each one that managed to avoid the aerial melee quickly found itself pursued by two or sometimes three Veritechs.

Miriya's undisclosed personal strategy didn't include her becoming part of a chase team. She landed her VT west of the laboratory complex and immediately scrambled out of the ship. Fearful that the main building would soon be targeted, the nonpilots among the Scavengers were beginning to scatter across the barren landscape, but three Stingers were still on the ground, their pilots hurrying to complete prelaunch procedures. It was toward this group that Miriya raced, weapon in hand, eluding fire and generating plenty of her own in return. She was no longer in the grips of the bloodlust that had secured her escape from Seloy's camp; her purpose now was not merely to survive but to conclude. Victory by itself would not be enough for Earth's Human population. Unfettered by an Imperative, Humans required catharsis and resolution, a sense that wrongs had been righted, that the scales of justice had been balanced. The situation wanted a prisoner who could be brought to trial.

And Miriya knew she had found that prisoner when she spied Marla Stenik.

There was nothing dramatic or especially heroic about the capture. Miriya shot Stenik's copilot as she was ascending the ladder to the Stinger cockpit; then she simply trained her handgun on the weaponless leader of the Scavengers.

Stenik almost appeared to have expected it. "At least permit me the honor of a warrior's death, T'sen Parino."

"You will have that honor," Miriya told her. "But not here."

The answer puzzled Stenik. "Where, then?"

"Where your death can be a public spectacle. And where I can be your public executioner."

CHAPTER THIRTY

That the [Malcontent] Uprisings ended with a whimper instead of a bang was in keeping with the overwhelming sadness of those years. Was there a positive side? Yes, I say, in that the Zentraedi survived as a race. Those that died on Earth were pawns in a much greater battle. For, in fact, the Uprisings were the last stand of the Imperative.

Lisa Hayes, Recollections

In early November 2018, exasperated by years of having had to cater to the fragile egos of on-air celebrities, the executives of the Monument Broadcasting System announced that the Evening News co-anchor team of Hollister and Hyson would be replaced by a computer construct, designed and programmed—in line with MBS specifications—by cybertechnicians of the Tokyo Robotech Research Center. The brown-haired, blue-eyed, somewhat-androgynous-looking computer-generated hologram, known simply as "the Anchor," made its network debut on November 21 that same year, garnering the biggest ratings and largest audience share the show had received in more than five years.

"In what is generally agreed to have been the decisive moment of the Malcontent Uprisings, a joint forte of RDF and Southern Cross personnel swooped down on the Andean stronghold of the group known as the Scavengers and dealt the rebellion a death blow, capturing its leadership and thwarting a diabolical plan to infect the world with a deadly virus.

"Now, three months later, the reverberations of that unqualified win are finally being felt. Today, in the clear skies over New Mexico, Scavenger leader Marla Stenik, and the so-called 'Butcher of Oasis,' Jinas Treng, were—in the parlance of the Zentraedi—'allowed to run' against RDF captains Miriya Parino and Breetai Tul. Found guilty last month of insurrection, terrorism, and thirty-four separate violations of the Reconstruction Powers Act, Stenik and Treng were removed from solitary confinement on Albuquerque Base to an undisclosed location elsewhere in New Mexico, where—as dictated by the Kara-Thun ritual—each was returned to full size and given a fully armed and operational Tactical Battlepod.

"Breetai Tul, on his first downside visit since 2015, chose a Battlepod as his weapon, while Miriya Parino, in a symbolic gesture, elected to remain Micronized and to pilot a Veritech.

"The Kara-Thun, or 'Death Dance,' is a form of trial by combat, in which convicted Zentraedi have an opportunity to avoid sentencing by besting their opponents in one-on-one challenges. Such was not the case today, however, as Parino and Tul assumed quick control of the lethal contest and defeated the renegades. MBS will broadcast footage of the aerial 'death dance' as soon as it is made available by the RDF.

"And so, at long last, Stenik and Treng have been executed, ending the fervent debate that attended their captures and trials. In a statement issued only hours ago, Miriya Parino expressed her hope that the Kara-Thun would demonstrate the Zentraedi's thorough repudiation of the actions of the Malcontents, and mark the beginning of a healing process that would ultimately reunite Earth's two races.

"Today also marked the UEG's official recognition of the Army of the Southern Cross as a full partner in the newly created Earth Defense Force. The aging armament of the Southern Cross will be replaced by a new generation of Protoculture-driven reconfigurable mecha, and it will be entitled to equal say in the construction of the Mars and Lunar bases and the deployment of Space Station Liberty and a network of defense platforms. As of January first, Anatole Leonard's new rank will be Commander-in-Chief of the Southern Armed Forces, and there is some talk of Leonard's opening a secondary headquarters in Monument City.

"As stipulated by the accord—and in spite of passionate pre-accord lobbying by President Wyatt Moran and others—the Robotech Expeditionary Force, under the command of Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt and Admiral Richard Hunter, will retain full possession of the factory satellite and the starship, SDF-3. Moran has indicated, however, that he will continue to fight for the creation of a bipartisan plenipotentiary council to oversee the Tirol mission itself, and to ensure Southern Cross participation in the events. Leonard has already named former intelligence officer T. R. Edwards, now a colonel in the Earth Defense Force, as his personal choice to represent the military interests of the Southlands and the nonaligned territories . . ."

"Turn that damned thing off," Leonard said, gesturing to the hotel suite's flatscreen television. "Who the hell wants to hear some electronic phantom deliver the news—especially one that only knows half the story."

Leonard's leg was in a cast from a wound he had sustained at the Scavenger's camp. Closest to the TV, Joseph Petrie told the screen to zero itself. Leonard was right, of course. The MBS had no inkling of the subtext of the accord that partnered the RDF and the Southern Cross. All things considered, the media's misapprehension of the facts benefited Leonard, since his strategy called for feigning ignorance of the covert machinations of the RDF. Petrie had been concerned about the commander's recent bouts with depression—episodes that had commenced about the time of the attack on the Scavengers' camp—but Leonard seemed reborn since arriving in Monument City for the recognition ceremonies.

"The RDF thinks that they've played us for fools," Leonard told his three guests—Patty Moran, T. R. Edwards, and Lazlo Zand. "They think everything's falling neatly into place for them. They assume they've appeased us by accepting us as partners and affording us full participation in the reconstruction of Gloval and ALUCE bases. Anything to keep us occupied while they transfer more and more of their surface operations to the factory satellite. And a year from now, when the SDF-3 folds to Tirol with eighty percent of Earth's mechanized defenses aboard, guess who's supposed to be left holding the bag? Us, that's who." Leonard stormed around the room for a moment, then stopped and whirled on his audience.

"But wait till they get a whiff of the stink we're going to raise when that starship is declared mission-ready. We'll let the entire world in on their little plan to leave the planet defenseless. But even then, we'll continue to back the mission, proclaim the necessity of it. We'll kiss every member of the REF good-bye. And by the time they launch, we'll have everyone so paranoid about a second invasion that the UEG will grant us whatever we need to act as Earth's sole protectors. Funding, support, power . . ." Leonard put his hands on hips and rocked on the balls of his feet.

"To the disbanding of the UEG," Moran said, lifting a glass of wine.

Edwards, Petrie, and Zand followed suit. "To the new order," Edwards said.

Leonard acknowledged it with a bow. "I'm only sorry you won't be here to see it happen, Edwards."

Edwards made a dismissive gesture. "One of us has to be aboard the SDF-3 to make sure Hunter and the rest don't strike any separate deals with the Masters." He cut his eyes to Zand, whose nose was bandaged and whose arm was still in a sling. "Unless, of course, the good professor would like to sign on as a member of the plenipotentiary council?"

"No, no, thank you," Zand said quickly, coughing up wine. "I, uh, don't think I have the stomach for space travel." He grinned madly. "Besides, the Shapings require me to be here."

The room grew eerily quiet, but Leonard didn't allow the silence to linger. "Maybe those 'Shapings' will have something to relate about the fate of the Zentraedi, Professor. Because I promise you this much: any aliens who remain on Earth after the SDF-3 launches will wish they hadn't."

"I'm not saying I don't like it," Rolf Emerson said, standing at the entrance to the Sterlings' high-rise apartment. He inclined his head to one side, staring at Miriya's severly shorn hair. Banged and layered, the new do drew attention to the planes and angles of her face, at once imparting something severe and pious to her features. "It's just going to take some getting used to."

Max ushered him inside. On the way to the living room, Rolf peeked in on Dana, who was sitting on the edge of her bed, lost in a sprite-filled video game. It was Rolf's first visit in months. The last time he'd seen Max or Miriya was at the premission briefing for the raid on the Scavenger base. Since then, his duties as liaison officer to the Southern Cross had kept him hopelessly busy.

"What made you decide to cut it?" Rolf asked Miriya while Max was busy in the kitchen.

"It was something I had to do. An outward sign of my new identity."

The seriousness of her tone threw him. "What new identity?"

"As executioner."

Rolf nodded uncertainly. "I was surprised to hear that Breetai had asked you to fly with him in the Kara-Thun."

"He didn't ask me," she snapped. "I asked him."

Rolf was suddenly sorry he had brought it up.

"Marla Stenik thought she could pilot her Battlepod into Breetai's, but I ripped her ship apart before she could reach him," Miriya went on. "Treng crashed his Battlepod and tried to escape into the wastelands on foot, but Breetai chased him down and killed him with his hands." She paused to reflect on something. "It's not something I could expect you to understand, but killing Seloy and . . . others had a powerful effect on me, Rolf. It brought to life something I thought was dead. Something I wish was still dead."

"Rolf understands," Max said, interrupting. "He and Ilan Tinari—"

Miriya shot him an angry look. "Because we live together, you think you understand me?"

Max set a tray of chips and salsa on the table. "Okay, 'understand' is probably the wrong word. Let's say that I don't judge you strictly by Human standards."

"That's good, Max, because I'm not Human."

Rolf glanced around uncomfortably, and Miriya picked up on it.

"Rolf, are you aware that Max and I consider you one of our closest friends?"

Rolf relaxed enough to smile. "I'm glad to hear that, Miriya, because I certainly feel that way about you two."

"Do you think you'll be living in Monument now that Venezuela belongs to the Southlands?" Max said, taking a seat opposite Rolf.

"It's beginning to look that way. Especially if Leonard and Moran are going to be dividing their time between Brasília and here. Besides, I've met someone. Her name is Laura." He looked at Max. "Why?"

Max and Miriya traded ambiguous looks. "We're considering joining the REF, Rolf," Miriya said at last.

Rolf was unsuccessful in hiding a frown. "I'm sure Rick and Lisa are thrilled."

Miriya nodded. "They are, but the decision has nothing to do with them. I'm doing this for myself. I'll never be free of the Imperative until I confront the Masters directly, and I think it's important that I do that on Tirol. Something is drawing me there. I don't know how else to explain it."

Rolf studied her, then Max. "Does this have something to do with my living in Monument City?"

Max cleared his throat meaningfully. "Rolf, we can't take Dana with us. We want her to have as normal an upbringing as possible, and the SDF-3 isn't the place for that."

"We want you to think about being Dana's guardian while we're gone," Miriya added.

Rolf was dumbfounded. He gestured to himself. "I don't know anything about raising kids!"

"We know that," Max said. "But Dana's very comfortable around you. She thinks of you as part of the family. There's no one else we can ask, Rolf. Maybe if Jean and Vince weren't going . . ."

"What about her godfathers?"

"We said normal, Rolf," Max said.

"Besides, they're going to be spending a lot of time at the factory."

Rolf started to say something, but laughed instead. "Me and Dana, huh?" He shook his head in self-amusement. "I guess we'll be able to manage for a few months."

"This can only work if you decide to make it work," Catherine Wolff told her husband as he was unpacking their suitcases. The Wolffs were in the bedroom of their small, on-base modular house in the outskirts of Monument City. Johnny was asleep in the second bedroom, pleased with his new surroundings after months of being moved from RDF base to base. "How many times did you ask me to give Cavern City a chance? That's all I'm asking you to do now."

Wolff looked at her. "Yeah, but how long did it take for you to do that?"

"What difference does it make? I found a job, I created a home for us—even if I didn't fit in with your friends and their families."

"Because you never tried to. And you bitched for two years before you took that job."

"Fine. So you have my permission to bitch for two years."

He started to say something but changed his mind. "I just don't know if I can get used to this place."

Catherine folded her arms and frowned. "You'd rather be in what's left of Cavern City?"

"I like Cavern. This place is too cold and crowded."

"Do you like it enough to resign from the RDF and enlist in the Southern Cross?"

"I know there's no going back—all I'm saying is that I miss it."

"What you miss is hunting malcontents, Jonathan. And sooner or later you're going to have to accept that that part of your life is also finished."

"That's not so easy, Cath."

She softened somewhat and walked over to him. "I know that. But don't you think you've earned a rest? Haven't Johnny and I earned a rest? You can't live on the edge forever, and a desk job isn't going to kill you. If you can take some of the energy you brought to the field and apply that to your new position, you'll be a colonel in a year. Then you can start to think about retiring, and we can start a new life for ourselves."

Wolff snorted a laugh. "I won't make colonel for ten years, Cath. Not without a war, and definitely not anchored to a desk or teaching tank tactics to a bunch of recruits."

Catherine blinked. "I'm sorry we can't provide you with a war, Major. I'm afraid you'll just have to make the best of peace."

Wolff moved to the window and pressed his face against the cool glass. The night was clear and strewn with stars. Reconciliations were a tricky business, but he knew Catherine was right when she said that any benefits to be gained from their new circumstances would depend on his willingness to embrace change. And that held for their marriage as well: it wouldn't survive unless he wanted it to. But what was he supposed to do about his need for new horizons, action, the camaraderie of combat? Where was he going to find that in Monument City?

He spent a long moment staring at the stars before the truth of his dilemma struck him like ice-cold lightning. By accepting the transfer to Monument—primarily for Catherine's sake—he had bought into a lie. He would never be content here. What he wanted was upside, removed from the petty concerns of the planet, to which it owed nothing more than gravitational allegiance. The SDF-3 was where he wanted to be. And if Catherine couldn't understand that, then they didn't belong together. Eight years earlier he'd been left behind by the SDF-1, but this time he wouldn't give fate the chance to cheat him.

"We'll be launch-capable by no later than June 2020," Lang was happy to announce on entering the command bubble of the SDF-3.

Rick, Lisa, and Exedore had arrived only minutes earlier, by tug from level nine of the factory satellite. Outside the eye of the bridge, three hundred feet above the techno-carpeted deck, Breetai sat cross-legged on a retrofitted platform that enabled him to share in briefings held in the command bubble.

"I'm also confident that the fold generators will deliver us to the Valivarre system in a single jump. The ship will manifest three million miles from Fantoma, in its shadow. Tirol will be just emerging from its long

night."

Rick and Lisa smiled and hugged. Exedore cast an unreadable, arched-eyebrow look at Breetai. "It still doesn't seem real," Lisa said, looking around the bubble. "Sometimes I'll sit in the command chair, put my hands on the controls, and try to imagine us millions of light-years from Earth, and my mind seems to shut down."

"Soon you won't have to rely on imaginings, Commander," Lang said in a paternal voice. He glanced at Exedore. "How will it feel to be returning home?"

"My mind is also stubbornly silent on that issue, Doctor. I should point out, however, that the Zentraedi have never, and probably will never, associate Tirol with pleasant images. To you, home by and large connotes acceptance and warmth of feeling. But as you will see for yourselves, Tirol is neither warm nor accepting. I will be surprised if the Masters so much as deign to recognize us, let alone entertain our entreaties for peace."

"Don't worry, Exedore, we're not exactly going to show them our belly," Rick said.

Breetai loosed one of his signature growls. "The Masters will find our soft spot, regardless."

"We can't let that happen," Rick argued, "even if it means a fight. But you won't hear me issuing any fire orders until we've stated our case for peace."

Lang was nodding his head in agreement. "We mustn't lose sight of the fact that we are emissaries first, warriors last. Everyone on Earth expects us to demonstrate restraint."

"Everyone but Anatole Leonard," Lisa commented.

Rick cut his eyes to her. "We'll deal with him when we return. He seems to think we've elected him steward of the planet, but the authority we've given him can just as easily be revoked."

"The RDF has encouraged him to think of himself as Earth's protector," Lang said. "And that may prove our greatest failing to date. In fact, I sometimes feel we have more to fear from Leonard than we do the Masters or the Invid."

"Then let's promise ourselves something here and now," Lisa said. "That we keep our first meeting with the Masters as brief as possible, and that when we refold to Earth, we dedicate ourselves to completing the work we began six years ago: restoring our world. Before Leonard or any of his kind succeed in further dividing us against ourselves."

End

Robotech Sentinels: The Devil’s Hand 

by Jack McKinney

Book Thirteen of the Robotech series

1988

ROBOTECH CHRONOLOGY

1999 Alien spacecraft known as SDF-1 crashlands on Earth through an opening in hyperspace, effectively ending almost a decade of Global Civil War.

In another part of the Galaxy, Zor is killed during a Flower of Life seeding attempt.

2002 Destruction of Mars Base Sara.

2009 On the SDF-1’s launch day, the Zentraedi (after a ten-year search for the fortress) appear and lay waste to Macross Island. The SDF-1 makes an accidental jump to Pluto.

2009-11 The SDF-1 battles its way back to Earth.

2011-12 The SDF-1 spends almost half a year on Earth, is ordered to leave, and defeats Dolza’s armada, which has laid waste to much of the planet.

2012-14 A two-year period of reconstruction begins.

2012 The Robotech Masters lose confidence in the ability of their giant warriors to recapture the SDF-1, and begin a mass pilgrimage through interstellar space to Earth.

2013 Dana Sterling is born.

2014 Destruction of the SDFs 1 and 2 and Khyron’s battlecruiser.

2014-20 The SDF-3 is built and launched. Rick Hunter turns 29 in 2020; Dana turns 7.

Subsequent events covering the Tiresian campaign are recounted in the Sentinels series.

A complete Robochronology will appear in the fifth and final volume.

CHAPTER ONE

I leave it up to the historians and the moralists to judge whether our decision (the Expeditionary mission) is right or wrong. I know only that it is prudent and necessary-necessary for our very survival both as a planet and as a life form. If the Protoculture has taught me anything, it is that one must simply act! When all is said and done the inevitabilities and reshapings will have their way, but to remain either complacent or inert in the face of those fatalities is to invite catastrophe of a higher order than any of us dare imagine.

From the personal journal of Dr. Emil Lang

In the middle of the night on an alien world, an army of insentient warriors dropped from the sky. Tirol, as this small moon was known, represented a prize of sorts-the end of a long campaign that had taken the invaders through a dozen local star systems and across the varied faces of twice that number of worlds-the remote realms of the once great empire of the Robotech Masters, forged and secured by their giant soldier clones, the Zentraedi. But Tirol itself was all but deserted, abandoned almost a generation earlier by those same Masters. So in effect this conquest was something of a disappointment for the horde who had raised savagery to new heights, something of a nonevent.

But just as a rock tossed into a pond will make its presence known to distant shores, the Invid’s arrival on Tirol would send powerful waves through the continuum; and nowhere would the effects of their invasion be more greatly felt than on the world already inundated by previous tides from this same quarter-a blue-white gem of a planet that had seen better days, but was struggling still to regain control of its own fragile destiny…

Earth had captured its second satellite in the year 2013, when a joint Terran and XT force had wrested it from the control of the Zentraedi commander, Reno, faithful to the Imperative even after Dolza’s fiery demise. The factory satellite was an enormous monstrosity, well in keeping with the grotesque design of the Zentraedi fleet, that had been folded instantaneously through space-time by Protoculture-fueled Reflex drives. It was radish-shaped and rose-colored in starlight, with fissures and convolutions suggestive of cerebral matter. Attached along its median section by rigid stalklike transport tubes were half a dozen secondary sacs and appendages, smaller by far, but equally vegetal in aspect, veined and incomprehensible.

There were some 15,000 Humans and Zentraedi living onboard, a sizable portion of Earth’s post-apocalyptic population. The majority of these men and women had labored for six years inside the factory’s weightless belly to construct a starship, a dimensional fortress soon to be Tirolbound-there to confront the Robotech Masters, and with luck curtail any threat of continued warfare.

Among those onboard were Vice Admiral Rick Hunter and his close friend and trusted commander, Max Sterling. From a viewport in the admiral’s quarters, the two men were watching null-gee construction crews put the finishing touches on the massive ship’s deliberately misleading superstructure.

“I just don’t know whether we’re ready for this,” Rick was saying. He had turned from the viewport and was three strides toward the center of the room. “There are so many variables, so many things that could go wrong now.”

Max followed him, a grin beneath the sympathetic look he had adopted. “Come on, what could go wrong?”

Rick whirled on him. “Maybe I’m just not ready, Max!”

Rick’s voice cracked on the word and Max couldn’t suppress a short laugh. “Ready? It’s been six years, Rick. How much more ready can you expect to be?”

“Guess I’m not as good up against the unknowns anymore.” Rick shrugged, lowering his gaze. “I mean, we’ve got something good going already. So why jeopardize it, why tamper with it?”

Max took his friend by the shoulders and gave him an affectionate shake. “Look, you and Lisa love each other, so quit worrying. Everything’s going to turn out fine. Besides, everybody’s excited about the wedding. And what are you going to do, walk out on ten thousand guests?”

Rick felt the wisdom of it sink in, and smiled, self-mockingly.

They had both aged well, the rigors of life on-and offworld notwithstanding; both had turned twenty-nine in March and had at least a few good years left in them. Rick stood taller and straighter now than he had during the war, and that combined with some added weight gave him a stronger, more capable look. This was enhanced by the cut of the Expeditionary Force’s high-collared uniform and torso harness, a crisscross, tailed, and flare-shouldered affair of black leather worn over tight-fitting trousers. He still wore his black hair stylishly long, though-a fashion the Veritech flyboys of the Robotech Defense Force had been largely responsible for. Max, too, had left behind the innocent look that had been something of a trademark. While Rick, Dr. Lang, and Lisa Hayes had devoted themselves to the SDF-3 project, Max had been busy distinguishing himself in the Southlands, especially during the Malcontent Uprisings of 2015-18. He still favored the blue hair tint he had affected during the war, likewise oversize aviator glasses to contacts or corrective microsurgery. Less than perfect vision had never handicapped his flying skills, in any case.

Rick was glancing back at the SDF-3 now. “And everybody gets to ride in the limo.” He smirked.

Fabricated from the hull and power drives of Breetai’s dreadnought and the salvaged remains from the SDFs 1 and 2, the ship was itself a wedding of sorts. Pursuant to Lang and Exedore’s requests, it was more Zentraedi than Terran in design: a nontransformable deepspace leviathan, bristling with antennae and blistered across its crimson surface with scanner ports and laser-array gun turrets.

“We’ll make sure you two get the backseat,” Max said. “For at least a couple of hours, anyway.”

Rick laughed from across the room; Max joined him at the external viewport, Earth’s incomparable beauty filling the view. Sunlight glinted off the alloyed hulls and fins of dozens of in-transit shuttles. Rick was staring down at the planet wistfully.

“When’s Lisa due back?” Max asked him.

“Tomorrow. But I’m thinking of shuttling down to meet her.”

Max made an approving sound. “I’ll ride with you.”

“When haven’t you,” Rick said, after a moment.

With the destruction of the SDFs 1 and 2 on that fateful winter night in 2014, Macross’s sister city, Monument, had risen to the fore as Earth’s unofficial capital. The irradiated remains of Macross had been bulldozed flat and pushed into what hadn’t been boiled away from Lake Gloval. Three enormous manmade buttes marked the resting place of the superdimensional fortresses, along with that of the Zentraedi cruiser that had destroyed them. But those mounds had not been completed before volunteer teams of valiant Robotechnicians had braved slow death to salvage what they could from the devastation.

Thrice-born Macross, however, was not resurrected, as much by choice as anything else; but the name lived on in a kind of mythic way, and Monument City, to the southwest over a rugged ridge, was doing its best to carry the tradition forward. This would change after the SDF-3 departed, but in 2020 things were much as they were in the Macross of 2014. That is not to say that there weren’t sinister currents in the air for one and all to perceive; but the Expeditionary mission to Tirol was foremost on the minds of those who could have prevented the subsequent slide.

Monument was the seat of the United Earth Government, but the most important building in that burgeoning city was the headquarters of the newly-formed Army of the Southern Cross, a politico-military party that had its origins in the Southlands during the Malcontent Uprisings, and had all but superseded the authority formerly enjoyed by RDF, most of which was slated for the Expeditionary mission. The headquarters was a soaring megacomplex whose central tower cluster had been built to suggest the white gonfalons, or ensigns, of a holy crusade hanging from high crosspieces. The high-tech needles were crowned with crenels and merlons, like some medieval battlement, announcing to all the world the ideals and esprit of the Army of the Southern Cross.

Just now the building was host to a final press conference held jointly by members of the Expeditionary Mission Plenipotentiary Council, the RDF, and the Southern Cross. Dr. Emil Lang and the Zentraedi Ambassador, Exedore, spoke on behalf of the twelve-person council, while the military factions were represented respectively by Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt and Field Marshal Anatole Leonard. The press was there in force, crowding the hall, jostling one another for position, snapping off shot after stroboscopic shot, and grilling the four-member panel with an overwhelming array of questions from special-interest groups and insulated power bases as distant as Cavern City and Brasilia in the Southlands.

Lang was doing his best to respond to one of these; for the third time, someone in the press corps had returned to the issue of Earth’s potential vulnerability in the wake of the SDF-3’s departure. As the high priest of Robotechnology, Lang had little interest in such mundane concerns, but he was doing his best to restate the importance of the mission and repeat launch details that had already been covered in the press releases.

“Final selections for the crew are proceeding and we should have no trouble meeting our launch schedule. If we are to avoid a second Robotech War, we must make peaceful contact with the Robotech Masters and establish a relationship of mutual cooperation.

That is the mission of the SDF-3.”

Murmurs of discontent spread through the crowd, and several reporters hurled insults of one sort or another. But then, could anyone expect anything in the way of a concrete response from someone like Lang? When the man chose to be profound, there were perhaps only a handful of scientists on Earth who could follow him. The rest of the time he came across as alien as any Zentraedi. Rumors and speculations about Lang went as far back as the early days on Macross Island, when he and Gloval, Fokker, Edwards, and a few others had first reconned the SDF-1, known then as “the Visitor.” He had taken a Zentraedi mind-boost, some claimed, a megadose of Protoculture that had somehow integrated his internal circuitry with that of the ship itself. Certainly his marblelike eyes lent credence to the tale. Although he had been more visible, more accessible these past few years, he was still the same ethereal man who had been the driving force behind Robotechnology since the turn of the century.

“I want to take this opportunity to reemphasize that the Robotech Expeditionary Force is intended as a diplomatic mission,” Exedore added without being asked. “The SDF-3 will be traveling to the homeworld of the Robotech Masters, the third moon of the planet Fantoma, known as Tirol.” The Zentraedi motioned to the huge projection screen behind the speakers’ platform, which showed a color schematic of the ringed giant’s extensive system.

“The Masters themselves have not engaged in actual combat for nearly six generations.

However, it is impossible to predict with certainty how they will react to our mission. For that reason the SDF-3 has been outfitted with a considerable arsenal of Robotech weaponry. In the event that we are met with force, we shall be ready and able to defend ourselves. But I must press the point that the departure of the fortress will not leave the Earth undefended. Commander Leonard and his staff have all the capabilities for defense necessary to repel any invasion force. And as the planet is not presently threatened by any enemy, we feel confident that the Earth is in no jeopard-”

“If I may interrupt for a moment,” Leonard said angrily, getting to his feet. He had been biting back his words for half the press conference, but had reached his breaking point when Exedore-the alien!-began to imply that the SDF-3 would be facing greater potential danger than abandoned Earth. Reporters throughout the hall-certainly those who had been planted there by the Southern Cross command to steer the conference toward this very confrontation-took advantage of the moment to get shots of the bearish, shaved-skulled field marshal confronting and towering over the XT ambassador.

Leonard’s hatred of the Zentraedi was no secret among the general staff. He had never met Exedore full-size, as it were, but perhaps detested him even more in his Micronized state, especially since Terran cosmologists had gone to work on him, styling his hair with a widow’s peak, and concealing the clone’s dwarfish anatomy beneath specially-tailored uniforms. Leonard often wished that Exedore had been among the Zentraedi Malcontents he had hunted down in the Southlands…

“I’m not as optimistic as the ambassador about the lack of an enemy threat,” Leonard continued, his face red with rage. “Mark my words, the departure of the SDF-3 and its weapons systems will leave the Earth hopelessly vulnerable to attack! Even that factory satellite’s going to be nothing but a useless shell when the Expeditionary Force leaves.

They’ve stripped it clean-and you’ve stripped us clean!”

“Gentlemen, please,” Lang tried to interject, stretching his arms out between the two of them. Reinhardt, with his bald pate, beard, and fringe of premature gray hair, leaned back in his chair, overshadowed by Leonard’s bulk.

“It’s all very easy for him to say we’ll be safe,” the field marshal ranted. “When the attack comes, he’ll be on the other side of the galaxy!”

“Frankly, I think you’re a bit paranoid, Commander,” Exedore announced evenly, almost clinically. “What attack do you mean-by whom, from where?”

Leonard’s great jowls quivered; his eyes flashed a hatred even Exedore couldn’t help but feel. “For all we know, there could be a fleet of your fellow Zentraedi out there just waiting for us to drop our guard!”

“That will be enough, Commander Leonard,” Reinhardt said at last. “Alarmist talk is of no use to anyone at this point.”

Leonard swallowed the rebuke as flashes strobed without pause. He was aware that his position with the general staff was still somewhat tenuous; and besides, he had made his point.

“Gentlemen, you’re cutting our defenses to almost nothing,” he concluded, as shouts filled the hall. “Once the SDF leaves orbit I won’t be able to defend the Earth against a flock of pigeons.”

The press conference was being carried live around the world, and to Luna Base, Space Station Liberty, and the factory satellite. But where many were finding cause for concern in Leonard’s contentions, there was one viewer aboard the satellite who merely laughed it off.

He had a drink in hand, his feet crossed on the top of the monitor in his spacious quarters.

Leonard was overplaying the role, Major General T. R. Edwards told himself as he set the drink aside. But his performance would have the desired effect nonetheless.

Edwards knew even then that the Southern Cross would eventually gain the upper hand.

If necessary, Professor Lazlo Zand would see to that. And Senator Moran, whom they had spent years grooming for high office, would ascend to the seat reserved for him.

Edwards fingered the ugly raised scars that coursed across the right side of his forehead and face-diagonally, from his hairline to the bridge of his nose, and from there in a reverse angle to the heel of his jawbone. The eye at the apex of this triangular disfiguration was dead, sewn shut to a dark slash. He would not be around to reap the immediate rewards of these complex conspiracies and manipulations, but all that could wait until his return from Tirol. First, there were scores to settle with older adversaries, scores that went back more than twenty years.

Not far from the Southern Cross headquarters in one of Monument City’s more upscale shopping districts, Admiral Lisa Hayes was being fitted for her wedding gown. She had chosen one her late father would have approved of; it had a traditional, almost antebellum look, lots of satin, lace, and tulle, with a full, two-petticoat tiered skirt, long sleeves, and a simple round neck. The veil was rather short in contrast, with baby’s breath and two silk roses affixed to the headband. Lisa gave an appreciative nod as the two fitters fell back smiling, allowing her center place in the shop’s mirrored wall. She ran her fingers under the flip of her shoulder-length auburn hair-still unaccustomed to the cut-and said, “Perfect.”

In the front room, Dr. Jean Grant and Captain Miriya Sterling wondered aloud what was taking Lisa so long, not out of concern but anticipation. The day was something of a shopping spree for Jean and Miriya as well; in less than a week they would be on their way to Tirol, and on this trip out the SDF wouldn’t be traveling with a full city in its belly.

And who knows what to expect in the way of shops on Tirol, Max had quipped when the two women left the factory satellite. They had brought the kids along, Dana and Bowie, both nearing eight years old, presently bored and antagonistic.

Bowie had Jean’s petiteness and dark honey complexion; his health had never been robust, but that didn’t prevent blond and lanky Dana from teasing him whenever she could.

He was standing sullen-faced in the shop’s doorway when she snuck up behind him to yank his SDF cap down over his face.

“Hey, cut it out!” Bowie yelled. “Why’d you do that, Dana?”

She returned a wide-eyed look of innocence, elaborate concern in her voice. “I didn’t do anything. I think your brain must be getting smaller.”

“Ahhh, whose brain’s getting smaller?” Bowie said, working the visored cap up to where it belonged.

“Okay, I admit it, I’m guilty,” Dana answered him, sincere all of a sudden. “I guess I can’t pull the wool over your eyes.”

Jean and Miriya had both turned at the sound of Bowie’s initial howl, but they had long ago decided on a policy of nonintervention when it came to the kids. Though children were included in the Expeditionary mission, Bowie and Dana would not be among them. In Bowie’s case it was a matter of health-a fact that had since steered Jean into research medicine. But Dana was exempt for reasons less clear-cut; as the only child of a Human-Zentraedi union, she had been studied, tested, and evaluated since birth, and was judged too precious a commodity to risk on such an enterprise. This, in any case, was the thinking of Professor Zand, who had headed up the medical teams, and Max and Miriya had reluctantly accepted the logic of it. The decision was unalterable now, no matter what, and it was guaranteed that Bowie and Dana would grow up as near siblings under the care of the Sterlings’ close friends, Rolf and Laura Emerson.

Miriya was thinking these things through while she watched the children’s bickering escalate, then dissolve into playful banter. “Look at them, Jean,” she said the way only a mother can. “Do you think we’re doing the right thing?”

Jean gave one of the clothes racks a casual spin. “Of course we are, sweetie. You know that.”

The two women showed strained smiles to one another. How often they had talked about the irony of their friendship; how often they had remembered Jean’s sister-in-law, Claudia Grant, who died in Khyron’s suicide run against the SDF-1. And perhaps the conversation would have taken a turn in this direction even then, had not Lisa chosen just that moment to present herself as bride-to-be.

“Well, what do you think?” she asked them, turning around for their inspection.

Miriya, who had worn her hair emerald green for years, was too surprised by the gown’s conservative cut to say much; but Jean said, “I think you picked a beauty, Admiral. That gown is shipshape from stem to stern.”

“Yeah, but how will it travel in hyperspace?” Miriya thought to ask.

“You two…” Lisa laughed, while her friends began to finger the gown here and there. None of them were aware that a newcomer had entered the ship until a female voice said, “Excuse me.”

Lisa looked up and uttered a surprised gasp. Lynn-Minmei was standing in the doorway.

Lisa had been thinking of her not five minutes before, standing in front of the mirror seeing new age lines in her thirty-five-year-old face and comparing herself to the seemingly ageless star of song and screen.

“I-I hope I’m not interrupting, Lisa, but I heard you were in town, and well, I just wanted to congratulate you before the wedding. I mean, it’s going to be such a madhouse up there.”

They had hardly been strangers these past six years, but hadn’t seen each other since the wedding date had been officially announced some five months ago. “I’d love to help out any way I can-that is, if you’d allow me to, Lisa.”

“Minmei,” Lisa said with a note of disbelief. “This is so unexpected. But don’t be silly, of course you can help,” she added, laughing. “Come here.”

They embraced, and held hands as they stepped back to regard one another. Lisa couldn’t help but marvel at Minmei’s youth and radiance. She really was the one constant in everyone’s lives.

“Oh, Lisa, I want so much to let bygones be bygones. That dress is lovely-I always knew you’d make a beautiful bride.”

“Ms. Minmei’s right, Admiral,” enthused the shop owner, who had appeared out of nowhere. It was obvious that the man was thrilled to have a celebrity of Minmei’s stature in his boutique; he risked a glance at the street, hoping some passersby had noticed her enter.

“I still think she should get married in her EVA suit,” Bowie said from across the room, only to have Dana pull the cap down on his forehead again.

“Children!” Jean scolded as the bickering recommenced.

Minmei asked to see the engagement ring, and Lisa held out her hand.

“I can’t tell you what it means to see you again, Minmei,” Lisa said softly.

“That devious little Zentraedi’s got the whole Supreme Council eating out of his hand!”

Commander Leonard complained to Rolf Emerson after the press conference.

Emerson, soon to inherit two eight-year-olds, was every bit the commander’s opposite, in appearance as well as ideology; but the two of them had nevertheless managed to maintain a working relationship. Major Emerson, handsome, clean-cut, and fine-featured, was, strictly speaking, RDF; but he had become something of a liaison officer between the general staffs of the military factions. Well aware of Leonard’s xenophobia-and of the infamous “thigh wound” the field marshal had sustained during the Malcontent Uprisings-Emerson was willing to let the racial slur slide, even though he numbered several Zentraedi among his closest and dearest friends.

“It’s unbelievable,” Leonard was railing, the huge brass buckle of his uniform dazzling even in the dim light of Emerson’s headquarters office. “A diplomatic mission…If it’s a diplomatic mission, then why are they arming that ship with every Robotech weapons system we’ve ever developed?”

“It’s called `gunboat diplomacy,’ Commander,” Emerson replied, willing to concede the point. Lord Exedore and Breetai claimed that they had no real knowledge of what the Robotech Masters might possess in the way of a war machine now that their race of warrior giants had all but been erased from the galaxy.

“Well, stupidity’s what I call it. It jeopardizes the very survival of this planet.” Leonard paced in front of Emerson’s desk. “Something stinks here, Major, and it’s not in the ventilation system.”

CHAPTER TWO

In the midst of all the ironies and reversals, the struggles, treachery, conquests, and betrayals, the mad scramble for mutated Flowers and irradiated worlds, it was easy to lose sight of the war’s central concern-which was not, as many have claimed, the Flowers of Life, but their deified stepchild, Protoculture. Even the Regis seemed to forget for a time; but it could hardly be said that the Regent’s Invid, the Masters, or the Expeditionary mission, had anything other than Protoculture as their goal and grail. Protoculture was needed to fuel their mecha, to drive their war machines to greater and greater heights.

And it was all but disappeared from the galaxy. What a trick it played on all of us!

Sehg Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign

As it would happen, Commander Leonard’s fears were justified, but eleven years would pass before the spade fortresses of the Robotech Masters appeared in Earthspace. And perhaps history would have vindicated Leonard if the man’s misdeeds had not stayed one step ahead of his contributions. Fate offered him one consolation, though: he would be dead two years before the Invid arrival. Earth would fall, just as he had predicted; just as Tirol fell after the Masters had begun their long journey through space and left their homeworld defenseless.

The Invid, however, were less confident in those days. Optera-their native planet-and Tirol had been at war for generations, and the Invid especially were at a disadvantage in terms of firepower. They had, after all, been deprived of the one thing that had cemented the social structure of their race-the Flower of Life; and more importantly, they were novices in this game called warfare. On the other hand, the Masters were adepts, addicted to Protoculture, obsessed with control, and driven to transform themselves-not through any measure of spiritual evolution, but through sheer conquest of the material realm.

Profligate, they lived for excess; cloned a race of warrior giants to police their empire, then, still not content, cloned an entire society they could rule at whim. They took the best specimens with them when they abandoned Tirol; all that remained were the three Elders of their race, several hundred imperfect clones-lost without their clonemasters-and Tirol’s preclone population of humanoids, who were of no use to the ascended Masters.

Tirol, the third of Fantoma’s twelve moons, was not the Masters’ original homeworld; but they had successfully transplanted themselves on that utterly barren planetoid from one of the outer satellites. Tiresia, the capital, a blend of Tirol’s analogue of Greco-Roman architecture and ultratech design, was the only occupied city; and as such was aware of the Invid’s coming ahead of time.

Aware…but hardly prepared.

Early-warning sirens and howlers had the humanoid population scurrying, for shelters beneath the city well in advance of the midnight attack. The clones wandered the streets in a kind of daze, while the Elders who were responsible for their reaction made certain to hide themselves away in specially-designed chambers the Masters had seen fit to construct before their mass exodus. But there were two who remained at their work while the alert sounded through the city: the scientist Cabell, and his young assistant, Rem.

“Whoever they are,” Cabell was saying, while his fingers rushed a series of commands into one of the lab’s data networks, “they’ve put down near the outpost at Rylac.”

“Is their identity any doubt, Cabell?” Rem asked from behind the old man’s chair. Video monitors showed a dozen burnt-orange oysterlike troop carriers hovering over a jagged ridgeline of mountains west of the city. The network spit out a data card, which Cabell immediately transferred to an adjacent on-line device.

“I don’t suppose there is, my boy,” the scientist said without turning around. Several of the ships had put down now, and were disgorging mecha from their forward ramps.

“Will the city’s defenses save us?”

Cabell left the question unanswered; instead, he turned his attention to activation switches for the remote cameras positioned at the outpost’s perimeter, his long snow-white beard grazing the control studs while he reached across the console. He was every bit a wizard of a man, portly under his tasseled robes and laurel-collared capes, with a hairless knobbed skull and thick white eyebrows, mustache, and beard. He was indeed old enough to be the young man’s father, although that wasn’t precisely the case. Rem was tall and slender, with an ageless, almost elfin face and a thick shock of slate-blue hair. He wore a tight-fitting uniform with a long cape of royal blue.

“We’re defenseless,” Rem said a moment later, reacting to Cabell’s silence. “Only the old and the sick remain on Tirol.”

“Quiet!” the scientist told him. The central viewscreen showed the transports lifting off.

Energy-flux schematics scrolled across half-a-dozen lesser screens. “Now what could they have in mind?”

Rem gestured to a secondary video monitor. “Frankly, Cabell, I’m more concerned about these monsters they’ve left behind.” Waves of armored, felinelike creatures could be seen advancing up and out of the drop zone.

Cabell leaned back from the console to contemplate the images, right hand stroking his beard. “They resemble drones, not monsters.” One of the creatures had stopped in its tracks and seemed to be staring at the camera. Cabell brought the lens to bear on the thing, focusing in on the four-legged creature’s razor-sharp claws, fangs, and shoulder horns.

“It spotted the remote!” Rem said, as the cat’s eyes began to glow. An instant later a metal-shod claw swiped at the camera; the image de-rezzed, and the screen crackled with static.

The Invid were a long way from home-if Optera could still be thought of in those terms.

That their strikes against the Masters’ empire were fueled by revenge was true enough; but the conquest of worlds like Karbarra, Praxis, and Spheris had had a more consequential purpose, for all these planets had been seeded by Zor with the Flowers of Life-the renegade scientist’s final attempt at recompense for the horrors his discoveries had inadvertently unleashed. But the resultant Flowers had proved a sterile crop, mutated at best; and so the search was under way for the one key that could unlock the mysteries of Zor’s science: the Protoculture matrix he himself had hidden aboard the Superdimensional Fortress.

The legendary device had never been uncovered by Lang’s teams of Robotechnicians, and now that ship lay buried under tons of earth, rock, and Macross debris far from where the Invid were directing their quest. But at the time they had no way of knowing these things.

The Flowers had been their primary concern-their nutrient grail-but that purpose had undergone a slight perversion since Zor’s death at the hands of Invid troopers. For not only had he transgressed by seducing the Flowers’ secret from the Invid Regis; he had also spread a kind of contagion among that race-a pathology of emulation. And within a generation the Invid had refashioned themselves, and, with a form of self-generated Protoculture, created their own galactic war machine-a fleet of discshaped starships, a strike force of bipedal crablike mecha, and an army of mindless battle drones-the so-called Inorganics. But this was chiefly the work of the Invid Regent, not their Queen, and a schism had resulted-one that would ultimately affect Earth’s fragile hold on its future.

The Invid fleet was anchored in space above Tirol when word spread through the ranks that the Regent himself had decided to take charge of the invasion. Companies of Inorganics had already been deployed on the moon’s surface to counter ground-force resistance. Now, aboard the fleet flagship, one thousand Invid troops stood at attention in the docking bay, backed by more than two hundred Pincer assault mecha.

The unarmored individual Invid was primate in shape. Bilaterally symmetrical, they stood anywhere from six to eight feet tall, and walked upright on two powerfully-muscled legs.

Equally massive were the forearms, shoulders, and three-fingered hands, with their opposable thumbs. The bulbous head and huge neck-often held parallel to the ground-approximated that of a snail, with an eye on either side, and two sensory antennae at the snout. The skin was green, almost reptilian, and there was at this stage no sexual differentiation. The Regent himself was by and large a grander, nearly twenty-foot-high version of the same design, save for his purple hue and the organic cowl that rested upon his back like some sort of manta ray. This hood, which could puff like a cobra’s at times, was ridged front to back with tubercle-like sensors that resembled eyeballs.

The commander of flagship troops genuflected as the hatchway to the Regent’s ship hissed up, spilling brilliant light against the soldier’s crimson body armor. Helmet snout lowered to the floor, the trooper brought its right hand to its breast in salute.

“My lord, the Inorganics have met only token resistance on Tirol,” the commander reported, its voice distorted by the helmet filters. “So far there is no sign of the Robotech Masters.”

The Regent remained on the shuttle’s rampway, his bulk and flowing blue robe filling the hatch.

“Cowering beneath their beds, no doubt,” the Regent said in a voice so deep it seemed to emanate from the ship itself.

The commander raised its head some, with a whirring of mechanical adjusters. “Our beloved Regis has expressed some displeasure with your strategy, my lord.” It offered up a cassettelike device in its left hand. “She wanted this to be given to you.”

“A voice imprint?” the Regent said dubiously. “How thoughtful of my wife.” He snatched the cassette in his hand. “I can hardly wait to hear it.”

He activated the device as he moved from the docking bay into one of the flagship’s corridors. The commander and a ten-trooper squad marched in formation behind him, their armored footfalls echoing in the massive space.

“Do you truly believe that you’ll find what you seek on this wretched planet?” the synthesized female voice began. “If so you are even a greater fool than I ever suspected.

This idiotic invasion of yours is the most-”

“I’ve heard about enough of that,” the Regent said, deactivating the voice. “Tell me, where is our beloved Regis?” he asked the commander after a moment.

“She has returned to her fleet flagship, my lord.” When the Regent had reached his quarters, the commander thought to ask, “Shall I tell her you wish to see her, my lord?”

“Negative,” the Regent said sternly. “The farther she is, the better I like it. See to it that my pets are brought aboard, and let the invasion proceed without her.”

The Invid squad snapped to as the door hissed closed.

The humanoid soldiers at the Rylar, outpost were easily overrun. Given the few weapons at their disposal, they made a valiant stand, but the Inorganics proved too much for them.

The forward assault wave was comprised solely of Invid feline mecha; but behind these Hellcats marched companies of Scrim and Crann and Odeon-Invid robot analogues, which in some ways resembled skeletal versions of their own Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships, a demonic, bipedal infantry.

A schematic representation of a Scrim came to life on one of Cabell’s monitor screens, rotating and shifting through a series of perspectives, as intact remotes from the Rylac sector continued to bring the action home to the lab.

“There is only one species capable of producing such a device,” Cabell commented flatly.

“The Invid,” said Rem. “It was only a matter of time.”

“The strategy is typical of them: they won’t descend until their fighting drones have cleared away the resistance. And after they’ve devastated Tirol, they’ll leave these things behind to police us.” Hellcat schematics were taking shape on the monitors. “These machines are puzzling, though. It’s almost as if…”

Rem looked back and forth between the screens and the old man’s face, trying to discern Cabell’s meaning. “It’s hopeless, isn’t it?”

“I’m not saying that, my boy,” the scientist replied, leaning in to study the data flows. “This feline drone is like its two-legged counterparts: computer-driven and incapable of independent action. Its functions, therefore, must be controlled by an external centralized power source of some kind.” He swiveled around in his chair to gaze at his assistant.

“That is its weakness, the one flaw in the system, and we must take advantage of it.”

“Cabell-”

“Is it not easier to attack one target than a thousand? If we can locate that power source and disable it, then all these dreaded machines will be deactivated.”

Alert lamps flashed in another part of the room and Cabell swung around to them. “The Inorganics are closing on the city. Now we’ll see how they fare against real firepower.”

“The Bioroids!” Rem said excitedly.

“They’re our only hope.”

Rick and Max had shuttled down to the surface simply to ride back up with Lisa, Miriya, Lang, and other members of the mission command team. Both men were aware that the short trip constituted their last visit to Earth for an indeterminate period of time, but neither of them made much of this. Max was still nursing some concerns about leaving Dana behind, but was otherwise fully committed to the mission. Rick, on the other hand, was so preoccupied with the wedding that he had begun to think of the mission as a simpler and more certain voyage. So it was during the return trip that he was paying almost no attention to the discussion taking place in the command shuttle conference chambers.

“I only hope this plan works,” Jonathan Wolff was saying. “Coming in disguised as a Zentraedi ship…It could backfire on us.”

“Oh, you’re forgetting your own Earth history, Colonel,” the Zentraedi ambassador told him.

“The Greeks and their Trojan horse.”

“I think you’re confusing history and mythology, Lord Exedore. Wouldn’t you agree, Admiral? Admiral?” Wolff repeated.

Rick surfaced from his own thoughts to find everyone at the table staring at him. “Huh?

Sorry, I was, um, thinking about something else.”

Wolff recapped the exchange: justification for the disguise had been something of an issue from the start. Exedore and Lang were of the opinion that Tirol’s defenses would annihilate any ship that registered an alien signature. According to the Zentraedis, the Robotech Masters had been at war for generations with a race called the Invid, and any unannounced entry into the Valivarre system would be tantamount to an act of aggression.

Wolff, however, along with several other members of the general staff, advanced the view that the Zentraedi themselves might no longer be considered welcome guests. After all, they had not only failed in their mission to reclaim the SDF-1, but had allied themselves with the very “Micronians” their armada had been ordered to destroy.

Wolff was a persuasive speaker, and while Rick listened he couldn’t help but be impressed by the scope of the man’s learning. Handsome, articulate, an inspired commander and deadly hand-to-hand combatant, the full bird colonel was considered something of a glamour boy; he favored wraparound sunglasses, wore his dark hair slicked back, and his mustache well-trimmed. But the leader of the notorious “Wolff Pack”

was anything but glamorous in the field. Wolff had made a name for himself and his Hovertank ground unit during the Southland’s Malcontent Uprisings, where he had first come to the attention of Max Sterling. When the Zentraedis who survived those days spoke of Wolff, one couldn’t help but hear the mixture of reverence and dread in their voices; and anyone who had read the declassified documents covering the Control Zone mop-up ops had no trouble understanding why Wolff and Breetai were often mentioned in the same breath.

“I’m just saying that disguising the ship and loading it down with mecha only serves to undermine the so-called diplomatic thrust of the mission.” Wolff snorted. “No wonder Leonard and the Southern Cross brass tried to make mincemeat out of you down there.”

“What do they expect us to do?” Max wanted to know. “Go in there flying a white flag? At least we’ve got some bargaining power this way.”

“Let’s just hope we won’t need to. use any of it,” Rick said at last, straining against his seat harness. “Without the Zentraedi, the Masters could be defenseless for all we know.”

Exedore shook his head. “Oh, I wouldn’t count on that, Admiral.” Breetai had already briefed everyone on the mecha the Masters had been developing before Zor’s death-Hoverships and Bioroids.

“Gentlemen, the time is long past for arguments about strategy,” Lang cut in before Rick could speak. “We’ve all supported this plan, and it seems rather late in the day to be changing our mind.”

“I agree,” Max said.

“Look, I agree,” Wolff wanted the table to know. “I’d just like us to agree on an approach.

Are we going in with fists raised or hands up? The Masters aren’t going to be fooled by our outward appearance-not for long, at any rate.”

“Possibly not,” Exedore answered him. “But if we allow possibilities to influence us, we’ll never leave orbit.”

“I’ve got as many doubts as anybody,” Rick said from the head of the table. “But the time’s come to put them behind us. We’ve made our bed, as the saying goes…”

Brave Talk, Hunter, he thought, listening to his own words. And I’ll keep telling myself that when I’m walking down the aisle.

Two RDF officers were watching the approach of the command shuttle from a rectangular bay in one of the factory satellite’s peripheral pods. One was a slim and eager-eyed young major who had recently been appointed adjutant to General T. R. Edwards; and the other was the general himself, his disfiguration concealed beneath an irregularly-shaped black-alloy plate that covered most of the right side of his face and more than half his skull.

On the uncovered left side of his head, long blond hair fell in waves to the collar of his tight-fitting uniform. He was high-cheekboned and square jawed, and might have been considered handsome even with the plate, were it not for the cruelty in his eye and downward-turning mouth.

“So tell me, Benson,” Edwards said, while his one eye continued to track the shuttle’s course, “what do you know about the illustrious vice admiral?”

“I know that Hunter’s one of our most decorated heroes, sir,” Benson reported to the general’s broad back. “Leader of the Skull during the Robotech War, commander of the RDF after the destruction of the superdimensional for tresses, about to marry the admiral…That’s about it, sir.”

Edwards clasped his hands behind his back. “That’s right. The high command likes to award medals to people who end up in the right place at the right time.”

“Sir?” Benson asked.

“Anything in your academy history books about Roy Fokker?” Edwards said nastily over his shoulder. “Now there was a real VT ace for you. I remember turning those blue skies red trying to nail his ass…But you’re too young to remember the Global War, aren’t you, Benson? The real heroes.” Edwards leaned forward and pressed his fingertips against the bay’s permaplas viewport. “Fokker taught Hunter everything he knew, did you know that?

You might even say that Hunter is what Fokker would’ve been, Major-that Hunter is Fokker.”

Benson swallowed hard, unsure how to respond, uncertain if he even should.

Edwards touched his skullplate, remembering, forcing himself back over tormented terrain-to what was left of Alaska Base after Zentraedi annihilation bolts had destroyed the Grand Cannon and made a hell of that icebound site. And how one man and one woman had survived. The woman was unharmed, protected where she cowered while her father had fried alive; but the man, how he had suffered! What agony he had endured, down on his knees shamelessly trying to push the ruins of an eye back where it belonged, fingers pinched in an effort to knit together flesh that had been opened on his face and forehead.

Then the rapture he had known when a solitary Veritech had appeared out of those unnatural clouds. But it was the woman that VT pilot had come for, and no other. It was the woman who had been flown to safety, the woman who had risen through the ranks, while the man had been left behind to die, to rot in that alien-made inferno…

“Ah, what a wedding this will be, Benson,” Edwards continued after a moment of angry silence. “Admirals Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes. Star-crossed lovers, if ever there were.

Born and reborn for each other.”

“Till death do them part,” Benson returned with a uncomfortable laugh.

Edwards spun on his heels, face contorted, then erupting in laughter. “Yes, Major, how right you are!”

Most of the Zentraedi had been off scouring the galaxy for Zor’s ship and its hidden Protoculture matrix when the Robotech Masters first perfected the Bioroids. Sixty-foot-tall nontransformable goliath knights piloted by low-level clones, they were meant to act as the Masters’ police force on the remote worlds that comprised Tirol’s empire, freeing the Zentraedi for further acts of conquest and continued warfare against the Invid. The Masters had never considered that Protoculture would one day be in limited supply, nor that their army of giant warriors would be defeated in a distant corner of the Fourth Quadrant by so simple a weapon as love. So it fell on the Bioroids by chance and Protoculture’s own dark designs, to defend the Masters’ empire against Optera’s ravenous horde. But try as they might, they were no match for the Invid Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships, with their plasma weapons and energy discs. And as Protoculture grew more and more scarce, they could barely defend against the mindless Inorganics.

“It is sheer numbers,” Cabell explained to Rem as they watched Tiresia’s first line of defense fall. The clonemasters left behind to rule the Bioroid pilots were an inferior lot, so the fight was not all it should have been. The Masters have thrown them our world, Cabell left unsaid. Those massive spade fortresses with their clone populations were the Masters’ new homes; they had no plans to return to Tirol.

Command-detonated mines took out wave after wave of Hellcats, but this did little more than delay the inevitable. The Bioroids dug in, finding cover behind hastily-erected barricades, and fired until their cannons and assault riffles went red-hot and depleted. And when the Inorganics began to overrun their lines, they went hand-to-claw with the marauders, employing last-stand tactics worthy of history’s finest. Cabell could feel no sympathy for them as such; but staring at the lab’s central viewscreen he was overcome by a greater sense of pathos and loss. External mikes picked up the clones’ anguished cries, their desperate utterances to one another in that raspy, almost synthesized voice the Masters so loved.

“There’s too many of them!” the pilot of a blue Bioroid told his teammates along the front, before two Hellcats leaped and crashed through the mecha’s visorlike faceshield. A second blue blasted the intruders with the last of his weapon’s charge, only to fall an instant later, Inorganics ripping at the machine’s armor in a mad effort to get to the pilot within.

Disgusted, Cabell stood up and reached across the console to shut down the audio transmissions. “The Flower of Life, that’s what they’ve come for,” he told his apprentice in a tired voice.

“But that plant hasn’t been present in this sector for generations,” Rem said, slipping into the padded con chair.

“Then they’ll want the matrix. Or failing that, vengeance for what the Masters ordered done to their world.”

Rem turned his attention to the screen. Scrim devils and Hellcats were tearing through the Bioroid base, eyes aglow like hot coals, fangs slick with the clone pilots’ blood. “They’ll rip the planet apart looking for something they’ll never find.”

“No one ever accused the Invid of being logical, my boy, only thorough.”

“Then the city will fall next. Those drones are unstoppable.”

“Nonsense,” Cabell exclaimed, anger in his voice. “They may be intimidating, but they’re not unstoppable.”

Rem shot to his feet. “Then let’s find their weak spot, Cabell.” He drew a handgun from beneath his cape and armed it. “And for that, we’re going to require a specimen.”

CHAPTER THREE

Try as he might to offset the suffering his discoveries had unleashed, Zor’s mistakes kept piling up, compounding themselves. He’d sent his ship to Earth only to have the Zentraedi follow it there; he’d hidden the matrix so well that the Masters had ample time to wage their war; his seeded worlds had drawn the Invid…What remained but the final injustice?-that by trying to replicate his very form and drives, the Regent and Regis should become prisoners of appetites they had never before experienced. Is it any mystery why even the Masters banished his image throughout their empire?

Bloom Nesterfig, The Social Organization of the Invid Brigadier General Reinhardt, having shuttled up to the factory earlier that day, was on hand to meet the mission command team. He informed Lang, Lord Exedore, Lisa, and Rick that things were still running on schedule; the last shiploads of supplies and stores were on their way up from Earth even now, and most of the 10,000 who would make up the crew were already aboard the satellite, many aboard the SDF-3 itself. Max and Miriya joined the others by an enormous hexagonal viewport that overlooked the null-gee central construction hold. They were joined after a moment by Colonel Wolff and Jean Grant, who had Bowie and Dana by the hand.

The view from here was fore to aft along the underside of the fortress. Lisa often wished that the bow wasn’t quite so, well, phallic-the euphemism she employed in mixed company.

But the twin booms of the main gun were just that: like two horned, tumescent appendages that took up nearly a third of the crimson ship’s length. If the weapon had none of the awesome firepower of the SDF-1’s main gun, at least it had the look of power to it. Autowelders and supply shuttles were moving through the hold’s captured sunlight, and a crew of full-size Zentraedi were at work on one of the sky-blue sensor blisters along the fortress’s port side.

“How many kilometers out will we have to be before we can fold?” Wolff wanted to know.

Everyone remembered all too plainly what had happened when the SDF-1 attempted to fold while still in the vicinity of Macross Island.

“Lunar orbit will suffice,” Exedore told him. “Doctor Lang and Breetai concur on this.”

“Speak of the devil,” Lisa said, looking around the hold, “I thought he was supposed to meet us here.”

Miriya laughed shortly. “He probably forgot.”

“He’s been pretty busy,” Rick offered.

“Well, we can’t wait,” Reinhardt said, running a hand over his smooth pate. “We’ve got a lot of last-minute details to attend to and-”

Everyone reacted to Dana’s gasp at the same moment, turning first to the child’s startled face, then to the hatchway she had her eyes fixed on.

There was a giant standing here.

Half the gathered group knew him as a sixty-footer, of course, but even micronized Breetai was an impressive sight: almost eight feet of power dressed in a uniform more befitting a comic book hero than a Zentraedi commander, and wearing a masklike helmet that left only his mouth and lantern jaw exposed.

Before anyone could speak, he had moved in and onehand heaved Lisa and Miriya atop each of his shoulders. His voice boomed. “So I’m not important enough to wait for, huh?

You Micronians are an impatient lot.”

He let the women protest a moment before setting them back down on the floor.

“I never thought I’d see you like this again,” Lisa said, tugging her uniform back into shape.

The only other time Breetai had permitted himself to undergo the reduction process was during the search of the SDF-1 for the Protoculture matrix.

“It takes a man to give away a bride,” Breetai said in all seriousness, “not a giant.”

Dawn marked Tiresia’s doom. The troop carriers returned, yawning catastrophe; but this time it wasn’t Inorganics they set loose, but the crablike Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships.

They attacked without mercy, skimming discs of white annihilation into the streets, dwellings, and abandoned temples. The humanoid populace huddled together in shelters, while those masterless clones who had become the city’s walking dead surrendered and burned. Left to fend for themselves, the old and infirm tried to hide from the invaders, but it was hardly a day to play games with the Reaper: his minions were everywhere, and within hours the city was laid to waste.

Cannon muzzles and missile racks sprang from hidden emplacements, spewing return fire into the void, and once again the Bioroids faced the storm and met their end in heroic bursts of orange flame and blinding light. From the depths of the pyramidal Royal Hall rode an elite unit on saucer-shaped Hovercraft outfitted with powerful disc guns and particle-beam weapons systems. They joined the Invid in an airborne dance of devastation, coupling obscenely in the city skies, exchanging thundering volleys of quantum deaths.

Morning was filled with the corkscrewing trails of angry projectiles and crisscrossed with hyphens and pulses of colored light. Spherical explosions strobed overhead, rivaling the brightness of Fantoma’s own primary, low in the east behind clouds of debris. Mecha fell like a storm of blazing hail, cutting fiery swaths across the cityscape.

Here a Pincer Ship put down to give chase to an old man its discs had thrown clear from a Hoverchair. Frustrated, the Invid trained its weapons on Tiresia’s architectural wonders and commenced a deadly pirouette. Statues and ornaments slagged in the heat, and five of the antigrav columns that marked the Royal Hall’s sacred perimeter were toppled.

Ultimately the Invid’s blue command ships moved in, forming an unbreachable line as they marched through the city, their top-mounted cannons ablaze. Inside the shelters the citizens of Tiresia cowered and clung to one another as the footfalls of the giants’ war strides shook Tirol’s ravaged surface, echoing in the superheated subterranean confinement.

Cabell and Rem had chosen a deserted, now devastated sector for their Hellcat hunt.

With most of Tiresia’s defenses in ruin, the fierce fighting that typified the early hours of the invasion had subsided to distant hollow blasts from the few remaining contested areas.

A patrol of bipedal Inorganics moved past the alley where the scientist and his assistant waited. Rem raised the muzzle of the assault rifle he had slung over one shoulder, but Cabell waved him back.

“But it doesn’t sense our presence,” Rem insisted, peering over Cabell’s shoulder. “Now’s our chance.”

“No,” Cabell said firmly. “I want one of the feline droids.”

They began to move into the street after the Inorganic had passed. Cabell kept them to the shadows at first, then grew more brazen. Rem understood that the old man was trying to lure one of the creatures out but he had some misgivings about Cabell’s method.

“I tope we snare one of them and not the other way around,” he said wearily, swinging the rifle in a gentle arc.

Cabell stopped short in the center of the street as a kind of mechanical growl reached them from somewhere nearby. “I have the distinct impression our progress is being observed.”

“I was about to say the same thing.”

“Perhaps our behavior is puzzling to them,” Cabell mused, back in motion now. “They probably expect us to run in terror.”

“And I forget, why aren’t we?” Rem started to say when another growl sounded. “Guess they’re not puzzled anymore…Show yourself, fiend,” he growled back, arming the rifle.

“There!” Cabell said all at once.

The Hellcat was glaring down at them from a low roof not twenty yards up the street, midday light caught in the beast’s shoulder horns, fangs, and razor-sharp tail. Then it pounced.

“On stun!” Cabell cried, and Rem fired.

The short burst glanced off the cat’s torso, confusing it momentarily, but not long enough to make a difference. It leaped straight for the two men before Rem could loose a second shot, but he did manage to shove Cabell clear of the Inorganic’s path. The cat turned sharply as it landed; Rem hit it twice more to no avail.

“Get away from it, boy!” Rem heard Cabell shout. He looked around, amazed that the old man had covered so much ground in so little time-although the Inorganic was certainly incentive enough: it was hot on Cabell’s trail.

Rem chased the two of them, firing wildly, and rounded a corner in time to see his mentor barrel-ass down a rubble slide and throw himself into the cockpit of an overturned Bioroid transport ship. Fixed on its prey, the Hellcat seemed unaware of Rem, and was busy trying to claw through the ship’s bubble shield. Rem reached down to up the rifle’s charge, only to find the thing depleted. He was busy cursing himself when he spied a fallen Invid command ship nearby, one of its cannontips still aglow with priming charge.

Cautiously, he approached the ship, the useless weapon raised. The command plastron was partially ajar, a fourfingered hand lodged in the opening. Rem clambered up and over one of the mecha’s arms and gave the hatch a violent tug, forcing the rifle down into the invader’s face as he did so. But the Invid was already dead, its bulbous head and stalklike neck split wide open. Rem ignored the stench and took a quick look at the cockpit’s bewildering gadgetry. The alien’s right hand was hooked around what Rem decided was the trigger mechanism, and from the looks of things the Hellcat was almost perfectly centered in the cannon’s reticle. Rem grunted a kind of desperate curse, slid down into the cockpit-his legs going knee-deep into a viscous green bath of nutrient fluid-and hit the trigger.

A pulsed beam of crimson light threw the Hellcat clear from the transport and left it on its side thirty feet from the transport, stunned and enveloped by a kind of St. Elmo’s fire.

Cabell threw open the canopy and glanced back at the crippled command ship with a bewildered expression.

“Why did you save me?” the old man yelled in Zentraedi, lingua franca of the Masters’

empire.

Rem heard the call and was tempted to stay put for a moment, but thought better of it. He showed himself and said, “Hello, Cabell. All safe and sound? You didn’t really think I’d abandon you, did you?”

The scientist scowled. “You could have killed me, you young-” He bit off his own words and laughed, resignedly. “My boy, you amaze me.”

Rem jumped to the ground and approached the transport. “Frankly, I amaze myself.” He looked away from the alien ship he had fired, and gestured to the Hellcat. “Now all we’ve got to do is figure out how to get this thing back to the lab.”

“My lord, we’ve found no trace of the Flower of Life anywhere,” the voice of an Invid lieutenant reported to the Regent.

“But that’s impossible, you idiot!” the Regent shouted at his monitor. “This is their homeworld. They must be here! Scan the entire planet.”

The flagship throne room, like the Invid castle and hives on Optera, was an organic chamber, so given over to the urgings of Protoculture that its very bulkheads and sensor devices resembled living systems of neural-tissue circuitry. Visceral greens and purples, they pulsed to rhythms dictated deep within the ship’s animate drives. So, too, the contoured control couch itself, with its graceful curves, the slender arcing neck of its overhead sensor lamp, its proboscislike forward communicator tube. The Regent did not so much sit as reshape his being to the seat’s demands.

On either side of him sat a Hellcat larger and more polished than any of the standard versions, with collars encrusted with gems handpicked from the spoils of a score of conquered worlds. Elsewhere, in cages, were living samples from those same worlds: sentient prisoners from Karbarra, Spheris, and the rest.

“We have searched, my lord,” the trooper continued. “The Sensor Nebula registers no presence of the Flowers. None whatsoever.”

“Fools!” muttered the Regent, canceling the transmission. He could hear his wife’s laughter behind him.

“Congratulations, husband,” the Regis mocked him from across the room. “Once again you have impressed us all with your supreme stupidity.”

“I don’t like your tone,” the Regent said, turning to her.

One might have almost mistaken her for a humanoid life-form; certainly she was more that than the ursoid and vulpine beings that populated the Regent’s personal zoo. But at the same time there was something ethereal and insubstantial about her, an inhumanness that lurked in the depths of her cobalt eyes. Twenty feet tall and slender, she clothed her completely hairless form in a red full-length robe and curious, five-fingered tasseled gloves. Four emerald-green sensor scarabs that might have been facelike adornments decorated the robe’s bracelike collar and neck closure.

“I told you the Robotech Masters were too clever to hide the matrix in their own back yard.”

“Silence, woman!” the Regent demanded, rising from the throne.

But the Regis stood her ground. “If you hadn’t been so desperate to prove yourself a great warrior, we might have sent spies to learn where they’ve taken it.”

The Regent looked at his wife in disbelief. “Are you forgetting who got us into this predicament in the first place? I’m not the one who fell under the spell of Zor and allowed him to steal our Flower of Life.”

“Must you keep harping on that!” the Regis screamed, shutting her eyes and waving her fists in the air. “It happened a long time ago. And since then I have evolved, while you’ve remained the spoiled child you always were. You took his life; now you won’t rest content until you’ve conquered his empire.” She gestured offhandedly to the Regent’s “pets” and caged life-forms. “You and your dreams of empire…Mark my words, husband, some day these beings will rise up to strike you down.”

The Regent laughed. “Yes, you’ve evolved-into a pathetic imitation of the females of Zor’s race.”

“Perhaps so,” she countered, arms akimbo. “But that’s preferable to imitating the Masters’

toys and bloodlust.” She turned on her heel and headed for the door. “I’m returning to Optera.”

“Stop! I forbid you to go!” the Regent told her, furious.

“Don’t provoke me,” she shouted from the doorway, “you spineless anachronism!”

“Wait!” the Regent demanded, cursing her. He whirled around as the door hissed closed, Tirol huge in the room’s starboard viewports. “I’ll show, you,” he muttered under his breath.

“Tirol will feel my potency…and I’ll win back your love.”

“Toys,” Dr. Harry Penn told Lang, an undisguised note of disapproval in his voice. “War toys, when we could be fashioning wonders.” He was a large man with a gruff-looking exterior that masked the gentlest of spirits. The thick mustache and beard he had grown to mask the pockmarked, hooked-nose cragginess of his face had only ended up adding to the effect he had hoped to minimize. It was a scholarly, academic image he was after, and as the oldest member of the Plenipotentiary Council and one of Lang’s top men he felt he deserved no less.

“There’ll be time for that when this mission returns,” Lang said evenly. “Until then we have to be sure of our strengths.”

Penn made a disgruntled sound. “A peaceful mission, a diplomatic mission…Am I the only one who remembers the meaning of those words?”

The two men were standing by one of the factory’s observation bays; in the blackness of space beyond, two Veritechs were being put through the paces.

These were not the first generation VTs the Skull and other teams had flown against the Zentraedi, but Alpha fighters, the latest prototypes from Lang’s research department laboratories. The SDF-3’s arsenal wasn’t limited to these reconfigurable one-pilot craft-the last six years had seen the development of Hovertanks, Logans, and an array of new and improved Destroids-but the Veritech remained something of Robotechnology’s favored child, weapon extraordinaire and near-symbol of the war. The Alpha VT had more armor than its older sibling; it packed almost twice the firepower and was equipped with ablative shields and detachable augmentation pods for deepspace flight. Moreover, it had the capability to link up with the so-called Beta VT-a bulkier, thin-winged variant that appeared to lack an appropriate radome-and thereby more than double its range and occupancy capabilities.

Lang indicated the blue fighter as it twisted through space, reconfiguring to Guardian, then Battloid mode. “I just wanted you to see for yourself the progress we’ve made, Harry.”

“Sterling, here,” said a voice over the ob deck’s speakers. “The Alpha handled the last sequence beautifully. No sign of stress.”

“Fine, Max,” said Lang, directing his words to a microphone. “The prototype looks good so far. Now comes the real test,” he added for Penn’s benefit. “Max, Karen, move yourselves into position for trans-docking maneuver.”

Max rogered the transmission; Karen Penn, Harry’s only daughter, said, “We’re on our way.”

Lang risked a quarter turn and found Penn regarding him with a mixture of surprise and rage. “You’re awfully quiet, Harry, is something wrong?”

“Have you gone mad, Lang! You know I didn’t want Karen participating in this test.”

“What was I supposed to do, Harry, refuse her permission? Don’t forget, she volunteered, and she’s one of our most able young pilots.”

“But I don’t want her to get mixed up in this, Emil. Can’t you understand that? Science is her future, not warfare.”

“Control,” Max’s voice squawked over the speakers, “we are in position at T-niner-delta.

Standing by to reconfigure and align for docking sequence.”

The maneuver called for each of the Veritechs to jettison and exchange their unmanned Beta modules, blue to red, red to blue. Max carried out his part without a hitch, imaging over to fighter mode and engaging the VT’s retros for a solid linkup with its sister module.

But Karen slipped up. Max couldn’t tell at first whether she had been too heavyminded, or had simply misread the VT’s telemetry displays. In either case she was in trouble, the blue Beta off on a ride to eternity, and Karen in what looked like a planet-bound freefall.

Max tried to reach her on the net, through a cacophony of questions and exclamations from command-most of them from Dr. Penn himself. Karen wasn’t responding, but there wasn’t real cause for concern-yet. Assuming she wasn’t unconscious or worse-something unseen, an embolism, perhaps-Karen had ample time to get herself into the Veritech’s EVA suit; and failing that, the factory could bring its tractor beam to bear. But Max wanted to see Karen-pull out of this one without an assist; she was bright and full of potential, and he wanted her for the Skull.

“Stabilizers are gone,” Karen said suddenly. “…Power surge must have fried the circuitry.”

Then Dr. Penn’s panicked voice bellowed in Max’s ears. “Sterling, do something! You’ve got to help her!”

“Karen,” Max said calmly. “Go to Guardian and bring your thrusters into play. I’m right behind you if they fail.”

“Roger, Skull leader,” Karen returned.

On the factory ob deck, Penn muscled his way through a crowd of techs to get close to the monitor screen. He sucked in his breath seeing his daughter’s red Alpha in a slowmotion end-over-end fall; but the next instant found the VT reconfigured, its bird-of-prey foot thrusters burning bright in the night. And in another moment she was out of danger and there were hoots and hollers ringing in his ears, tears of release in his eyes.

Lang and Penn were waiting in the docking bay when the VTs came in. Max missed the days of flattop touchdowns, the cat officers and their impromptu launch dances; but the Daedalus and Prometheus supercarriers were part of the SDF-1 burial mound now, and unnecessary in any case.

“Karen, thank God you’re all right!” Max heard Dr. Penn call out as the blue’s canopy slid open. “That little escapade nearly gave me a heart attack.”

Guilt’s his game, Max thought as he climbed out of Skull One.

“Well, if you were scared, imagine how I felt,” Karen was telling her father. “I’m still shaking.”

Penn waved a forefinger at her. “This proves once and for all you’ve no business being a test pilot.”

“Don’t overdo it, Dad.” Karen removed her thinking cap, spilling honey-blond hair to her shoulders. She had small delicate features, eyes the color of pre-Columbian jade. “I’m a professional. This stuff comes with the territory.”

“I’ll say she is,” Max chimed in before Penn could get in another word. “That linkup wasn’t her fault. Dollars to donuts you’ll find some glitch in the guidance computers.”

Penn glared at him. “I’m sure you mean well, Commander, but all this is-”

“Meaning well has nothing to do with it. I just don’t want to see Ensign Penn’s talents go to waste. She impressed me, Dr. Penn-and I’m not easily impressed.”

Penn blanched some; he wasn’t about to debate Sterling’s words. But Karen was still his daughter. “Well, I’m not impressed,” he told Karen after Max had walked off. “I have others plans for you.”

She flashed him a look he remembered from way back and started to move off, but Dr.

Lang put out his hand to stop her.

“Karen, a moment please.”

“You gonna chew me out now?”

“Calm down,” said Lang. “I’m going to recommend you for assignment to a Veritech team.”

“Just a minute, Emil,” Penn said, one hand clasped around Karen’s upper arm. “Don’t you think you’re overstepping your authority?” He had already lost his wife, and Karen’s joining the RDF had threatened to destroy what had once been a close relationship. Now Lang seemed bent on trying to scuttle what small joy he had left.

Lang pried his friend’s fingers open and motioned Karen along. “I’m sorry, Harry, but she’s old enough to make up her own mind. You can’t hold on to her forever. Besides, if this mission should encounter resistance, we’re going to need experienced pilots.”

“Resistance,” Penn snorted, and began to storm off. But half-a-dozen steps away he swung around. “All the more reason to hold on to her for as long as I can.”

CHAPTER FOUR

Evidence points to the existence of a plethora of mystery cults in the years immediately preceding Tirol’s so-called Great Transition (i.e., that period in which most of the moon’s humanoid population were put to death and the Robotech Masters began their extensive cloning experiments). In fact, some of these cults survived well into the First Period…The labyrinth, apparently, was constructed for ritual use, and the Pyramidal Royal Hall added later as that subterranean cult gave way to one of stellar orientation. Several commentators have felt compelled to bring Minoans, Egyptians, and the Maya into the discussions but aside from certain structural similarities, there was little in common between Tirol and Earth’s religions.

History of the Second Robotech War Volume CCXVI, “Tirol”

With the wedding only a day off now, Rick sat in his soon-to-be-vacated quarters aboard the factory satellite contemplating the future. Earth hung in the blackness of the viewport behind the desk. Around him were stacked boxes of personal items he had accumulated over the course of the last four years: photographs, citations-memorabilia dating back to his late father’s air circus, the SDF-1 and New Macross before the storm. He came across a snapshot taken by a robocam unit of Minmei standing by the Macross park’s fountain; poking out from the top of a shopping bag were two posters of the singing star from those early days: one an RDF enlistment ad, and the second a Miss Macross pinup. On the recent side, Lisa was equally, well represented. But the more Rick pored through these things the more depressed he became. He had no doubts bout his love for Lisa, but what would it mean to abandon all this space and free time he had grown accustomed to? Not that there had been much of either, given mission priorities and such, but the idea of personal time, the options. Rick’s hand was actually trembling while he packed. He had begun to wonder whether a drink might help, and was reaching for the bottle he kept around for special occasions, when Vince Grant announced himself at the door and stepped in.

At just a shade under seven feet, Grant was the only man aboard who could come close to filling Breetai’s shoes. He had brown skin and close-cropped tight curls, and a long face lent a certain nobility by his broad forehead and chiseled features. His dark eyes were bright and full of expression, and he was a man known to speak his mind, consequence be damned. Technically, he was Rick’s adjutant, a commander, but he was also attached to rapid deployment’s new all-terrain mobile base, the Ground Military Unit, or GMU. Grant had headed up a crackerjack Excaliber unit in New Macross, but Rick hadn’t really gotten to know him until after the death of his sister, Claudia.

“Just wanted to see if you needed help with anything, sir,” Vince said, offering a casual salute.

Rick turned a sullen face to the assortment of bags and boxes piled about. “Not unless you’re good at juggling.”

“What, these?” Vince said uncertainly.

“No, Vince, the past and future.”

“Sir.”

Rick waved dismissively. “Forget it. What’s on your mind, Vince?”

Vince took a breath. “Edwards, sir.”

“General Edwards?” Suspicion rose in Rick’s eyes, “What about him?

“Would the general have any reason for acting against our best interests, sir? I mean, is there something I’m not privy to that might explain certain…proclivities?”

“`Proclivities’?” said Rick. “Say what’s on your mind.”

In a rush, Vince said, “It just seems to me that the man has some designs of his own. I’m not saying that it’s anything I can put my finger on, but for starters there’s his friendship with Leonard and that character Zand. You’ve been busy, sir, and preoccupied. You’re insulated from the scuttlebutt-”

“If you have allegations,” Rick broke in, “you’d better be prepared to back them up with some hard facts. Now, do you have any-yes or no?”

Tight-lipped all at once, Vince shook his head. “Only hearsay, sir.”

Rick mulled it over after he dismissed Vince. The idea of going halfway across the galaxy with a divided crew was hardly a comforting thought. And in fact there was an underlying feeling of disunity that continued to plague the mission. Lang and Exedore on one side, Edwards and the political machine on the other, with the Southern Cross somewhere in between…Rick tried to put together what he knew of Edwards. Roy Fokker had often spoken of Edwards’s self-serving allegiances during the Global Civil War, his later alignment with Admiral Hayes, Lisa’s father, and the Grand Cannon project; but then, that was years ago, and a lot of good men had been lured over to the UEDC’s side. In the decade since, Edwards had become a force to be reckoned with in Monument City, and a respected officer in the RDF Presently, as leader of the infamous Ghost Squadron, he had what amounted to an unassailable power base.

It was with all this on his mind that Rick went in search of Max and some objective input.

But it was Lisa he found in the Sterlings’ quarters.

She was standing behind the dummied gown he wasn’t meant to see until tomorrow.

“Isn’t this supposed to be bad luck or something?” Rick asked, looking back and forth between Miriya and Lisa.

“Don’t go getting superstitious on me, mister.” Lisa laughed. “Besides, I’m not in the dress.” She stepped out from behind the dressmaker’s dummy and saluted stiffly. “Now show some respect.”

Rick played along, snapping to and apologizing.

“Impending marriage is no excuse for relaxing discipline.”

I’ll have to remember that, Rick thought as he approached Lisa and took her by the waist.

“Hi,” he said softly.

“I beg your pardon, Admiral, but aren’t you exceeding your authority?”

Rick pulled her close. “I can’t help myself, ma’am. So take away my star, throw me in the brig. But please, not until the honeymoon’s over…”

Miriya made a sour face and turned to Max, who had entered unobserved. “Sounds more like a court-martial than a marriage.”

Max allowed the lovers a brief kiss before announcing himself, and five minutes later he and Rick were on their way to the factory’s combat-simulation staging area, where Max had a young ensign he wanted Rick to meet. En route they discussed Edwards, but Max didn’t have much to offer in the way of facts or advice. Lang was the one Rick needed to speak with, Sterling suggested, and until then the less said the better.

Cadets underwent actual mecha and weapons training in the factory’s null-gee core, and out on Moon Base, but it was during sim-time that a cadet faced combat scenarios, and psychological profiles were established and evaluated. Robotechnicians took a good deal of pride in what they had created in the staging area, with projecbeam and holographic effects of such intensity that even veterans were sometimes overwhelmed. The object was not, however, to score bull’s-eyes or dazzle the audience with space combat maneuvers, but to demonstrate that one could keep cool under fire and make prudent, often split-second decisions.

Jack Baker was the ensign Max had in mind. Rick watched him being run through one of the advanced scenarios, designed to place the trainee in a position where he or she would have to decide between adherence to command dictates or altruistic heroics. Rick had little fondness for the scenario, because it happened to feature him-a holo-likeness of Rick, at any rate-as the downed pilot, awash in a 3-D sea. For want of an actual enemy, cadets found themselves up against stylized ersatz Zentraedi Battlepods.

Baker’s scores were well above average throughout the first portion of the scenario, but ultimately they dropped to standard after the ensign opted to go after his downed wingman, instead of following orders to reengage.

“Not the smoothest performance,” Max commented, “but you have to admit he’s got something.”

“Yeah,” Rick nodded. “But I’m not sure it’s something I like.”

Baker was ordered up to the control booth, and joined Rick and Max there a few minutes later. He was a slight but energetic youth, with thick, unruly carrot-colored hair and bushy eyebrows. Blue-eyed, pale, and freckled, he impressed Rick as something of a discipline problem. At the same time, though, Baker was forceful and determined; a seat-of-the-pants pilot, a natural.

“Sir, I know my performance wasn’t perfect,” Baker started right in. “But that test wasn’t a fair demonstration of my abilities.”

Rick wagged a gloved finger in the ensign’s face. “In the first place, you went off auto-pilot, contrary to orders. Second, by doing so you endangered the rest of the team. And third, you didn’t even manage to rescue me.”

“Yes, but-”

“Dismissed, Ensign.”

“But, sir, I-”

“You heard the admiral,” Max chimed in.

Baker closed his mouth and saluted. “I appreciate the admiral’s input, sir,” he managed before he left.

“Funny, but he reminds me of someone,” Max said, watching Baker walk away. “Flyboy by the name of Hunter, if memory serves.”

“I guess he does have a certain reckless sense of style about him.”

“And I suppose that’s why you were so hard on him, huh?”

“Just trying to improve him as a team player, Max. Besides,” Rick added with a laugh, “the look on his face was priceless.”

Max accompanied Rick back to his quarters after they had watched a few more cadets and officers run through the simulator. Rick was in a reminiscent mood, so they talked about the first time they had set foot in the factory after liberating it from Commander Reno, and about baby Dana’s part in that op. Max wanted to talk about leaving Dana behind now, but Rick didn’t seem to want to surrender his train of thought.

The factory was buzzing with activity; shuttles were arriving every few hours with supplies and personnel, and boarding of the SDF-3 was under way, with techs lined up for last minute briefings, assignments, and med-scans from Jean Grant’s extensive med staff. In another area of the satellite, maintenance crews, carpenters, and caterers were setting up for the wedding.

“And it’s not just the wedding,” Rick was saying when they entered his quarters. “I keep thinking about the enormity and importance of this mission. Maybe…maybe we’ve taken on too much this time.”

“I hope you’re not going to start in about how you’re the youngest admiral in the force, and how undeserving you are.”

“The best and the brightest,” Rick said to his reflection in the viewport. “That’s me.”

Just then the door tone sounded and T. R. Edwards strode in on Rick’s welcome.

“Hope I’m not disturbing you, Admiral.”

“What’s on your mind, General?”

“Why, I just wanted to wish you good luck, Hunter.”

Rick noted that Edwards’s faceplate made it difficult to tell whether he was sincere. And it was just as difficult for Rick to put Vince Grant’s suspicions from his mind.

“What d’you mean by that, Edwards?” Rick said defensively.

Edwards showed a surprised look and turned an uncertain glance to Max. “Well, the wedding, of course. What else would I mean?”

“Oh, oh of course,” Rick said, getting to his feet. He extended his hand. “Thanks, Edwards.”

“Admiral Hayes’s daughter,” Edwards mused while they shook hands. “Imagine that…The irony of it, I mean. No love lost between you and him back then, was there?”

Rick stared into Edwards’s eye.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Admiral. I guess you don’t like to remember those days.” Edwards relaxed his grip and walked to the door. “Just wanted to say good luck. To you, too, Sterling.”

Rick and Max exchanged baffled looks as the door hissed shut.

Cabell and Rem had managed to get the Hellcat back to the lab undetected; it was no easy task, but a little muscle power and an abandoned Hovercar did the trick. Cabell had the Inorganic on one of the scanner tables now. He had rendered it harmless by removing a transponder from the machine’s flank. Having witnessed Bioroids blowing Hellcats to bits-literally-it came as no surprise to find that the thing was hollow, its entire circuitry contained in its thick skin. But if Cabell had discovered how it worked, the source of its power remained a mystery-one he hoped to solve by analyzing the transponder.

On the other side of the room, Rem was up to his ears in Pollinators. Explosions had loosed them from their cage and they were all over him, now, screeching up a storm, attaching themselves to his arms, legs, and neck, and trying desperately to bury themselves in-the folds of his long cloak. They might have passed for small white, mop-head dogs, except for their muffinlike paws and knob-ended horns. For a long while Zor had kept their secret from the Tirolian elite, but eventually the Masters had discovered the crucial part they played in spreading the Flower of Life. So Zor went a step further and hid most of the creatures, naming Cabell as their guardian.

“What’s happening to these things!” Rem shouted in a muffled voice, pulling one from his face. “They’re going crazy!”

“They have a biogenetic link to the Flower,” the old man answered calmly, hefting the Hellcat’s transponder. “The presence of the Invid is disturbing to them.”

“And to me,” Rem started to say, when something truly monstrous appeared on one of the viewscreens. It was an enormous ship, he decided at once-because nothing so ghastly green and hideous could live in the real world. Its central head and torso resembled a kind of armored, humpbacked slug with two mandibularly-horned lizard heads on segmented necks arising Siamese-like from where arms might have been. There were three tails, two of which were tapered with stinger ends, and eight legs protruding from a suckered belly more appropriate for a sea creature than a terrestrial behemoth.

Cabell narrowed his eyes at the screen and grunted. “Their Enforcer transport. It’s meant to frighten us into submission. It’s captives they want now, my boy.”

His thoughts fumed briefly to the three Elders, who had secreted themselves somewhere in Tiresia’s labyrinthine underground. What the Invid Regent would give for their fey hides, Cabell thought. He began to consider using them as a bargaining chip for the release of Tirol’s surviving populace if it came to that, but judged it best to let that decision rest until the moment came. Safety for himself and the boy was all that concerned him just now.

“Cabell, we’ve got to abandon the lab,” Rem said, as renewed fighting shook the city. “We can’t allow your research to fall into their hands.”

“I’ve got what I need,” Cabell told him, indicating the transponder. He began to gather up data cards and chips; then, as he activated a bank of switches above the main console, two floor panels slid open, revealing a stairway that lead to the labyrinth beneath the Royal Hall. In times prior to the Great Transition, the labyrinth had been used for religious rituals.

“What about the Pollinators?”

“Take them. We’ll need them if we’re ever to duplicate Zor’s experiments.”

Rem suppressed a curse as the Pollinators he had pried from his uniform reattached themselves, screeching their mad songs all the while. He hesitated at the top of the dark staircase.

“Do we stay down here until the Invid leave?”

Cabell laughed from the blackness deeper in. “Till they leave? You’re an optimist, my boy.”

From his quarters on the Invid flagship, the Regent watched the descent of the Menace with obvious delight. In a moment the hydra-ship was bellowing its arrival, three sets of jaws opening to belch forth squadrons of Enforcer troops, the invasion group’s mop-up crew and police force. They rode one-pilot strike ships, golden-colored tubularshaped crafts with hooded, open-air cockpits and globular propulsion systems. They picked up where the command ships left off, dispatching what remained of Tiresia’s pitiful defenses.

As scenes of death and destruction played across the viewscreen, the Regent urged his troops on, mouth approximating a smile, sensor antennae suffused with color. But follow-up transmissions from the moon’s surface were enough to erase that momentary blush.

“Scanners continue to register negative on all fronts, my lord.”

The ground troops had completed their sweep of Tiresia, but the Regent still wasn’t convinced. “You’re certain there’s nowhere else the Robotech Masters might have concealed the Flowers?”

“Yes, my lord. We would have detected even the slightest trace.”

The Regent leaned back in the control couch. “Very well,” he said after a brief silence. “I wash my hands of this wretched world. Do what you will, my legions.”

He had expected an immediate response, an affirmation of his command, but instead the lieutenant risked a suggestion. “Pardon me, my lord, but shouldn’t we delay the extermination until they’ve told us everything they know?”

“Good point,” the Regent replied after he had gotten over the soldier’s audacity. “Have your units round up any survivors at once, and prepare them for questioning. We shall see if we can’t persuade them to tell us where their Masters have taken the Flowers of Life. I shall conduct the inquisition myself. Inform me when you have secured the city.”

“It is done, my lord.” The soldier signed off.

The city’s temples became prisons. Those Tiresians who survived the enforcers’ roundup, who survived the plasma hell they poured into the breached shelters, were packed shoulder to shoulder in improvised holding zones. They were a sorry lot, these bruised and battered sackcloth-clad humanoids; but even greater indignities awaited them. Some knew this and envied the clones, all dead now. For the first time in generations no clones walked Fantoma’s moon. Save one, that is…

“Are they bringing more in?” a man asked his fellow prisoners as the temple’s massive door was opened, admitting light into their midst. “These monsters mean to smother us alive.”

“Quiet, they’ll hear you,” someone nearby said.

But the man saw no reason to remain still. “Invader, what do you want from us?” he shouted when the Regent’s huge form appeared in the doorway.

The Invid looked down at them, his antennae throbbing and hood puffed up. “You know very well what I want-the Flower of Life.” He reached out and plucked the man from the crowd, his fourfingered hand fully encompassing the man’s head. “Tell me where it is.”

“Never-”

“You fool,” the Regent rasped as he lifted the man to shoulder height, applying pressure as he dangled him over the screaming prisoners. The man’s hands flailed wildly against the Regent’s grip. “Where are the Flowers?”

The Tiresian’s responses were muffled, panicked. “We don’t know-”

“Tell me, you insignificant little worm!” the Regent said, and crushed the man’s skull.

“We know nothing;” someone in the crowd shouted. “The Masters never told us of such things!”

“My friend, I believe you,” the Regent said after a moment. He released the now lifeless body. “Enforcer,” he added, turning aside, “reward these creatures for their honesty.”

The lieutenant stiffened. “At once, my lord.” While the Regent exited the hall, the enforcer armed a spherical device and tossed it over his shoulder before the doors shut, sealing the prisoners inside.

An old man caught the device and sadly regarded its flashing lights. “What does it mean?”

someone asked in a horror-stricken voice.

The old man forced himself to swallow. “It means our doom,” he said softly.

The explosion took most of the temple with it.

Returned to his flagship, the Regent met with his scientists. They were barefoot beings much like himself, although no taller than the soldiers, dressed in unadorned white trousers and sashed jackets suggestive of oriental robes. In the presence of their king, they kept their arms folded across their chests, hands tucked inside jacket cuffs.

“Tell me what you know,” the Regent asked them, despondent after this brief visit to Tirol’s surface. “Is this moon as worthless as it seems?”

“We have yet to find any trace of the Flower,” their spokesman said in a modulated voice.

“And most of the population is too old and sickly to serve as slave labor. I’m afraid there is very little of use to us here.”

“Perhaps it will simply take more digging to find what we seek. Come,” the Regent instructed their overseer, Obsim, “there is something I wish to discuss with you.”

As they walked-through an enormous hold lined top to bottom with Shock Troopers, Pincer and Command ships, and inward toward the very heart of the flagship-the Regent explained his position.

“Just because the Regis is somewhat more evolved than I am, she treats me like I just crawled from the swamp. I fear she’ll try to undermine my authority; that’s why this mission must succeed.”

“I understand,” Obsim said.

“I’m placing you in charge of the search on Tirol. The Inorganics will be your eyes and ears. Use them to uncover the secrets of this place.”

Obsim inclined his head in a bow. “If this world holds any clue to the matrix’s whereabouts, I will find it.”

“See that you do,” the Regent added ominously.

A transparent transport tube conveyed them weightlessly to the upper levels of the ship, where the Invid brain was temporarily housed. The brain was just that, a towering fissured and convoluted organ of Protoculture instrumentality enclosed in a hundred-foot-high bubble chamber filled with clear liquid.

The Regent’s attempt to emulate the Masters’ Protoculture Caps: his living computer.

King and scientist stood at the chamber’s pulsating, bubbled base.

“The invasion is complete,” the Regent directed up to the brain. “I have brought Tirol to its knees.”

A synaptic dazzle spread across the underside of the instrument brain, tickling what might have been the pituitary body, the pons varolii, and corpora albicantia. The brain spoke.

“And yet your search for the matrix continues.”

“For a while longer, yes,” the Regent confirmed in defense of his actions, the chamber effervescence reflected in his glossy black eyes.

“Find Zor’s ship and you will have what you seek. Not until then.” The brain seemed to aspirate its words, sucking them in so that its speech resembled a tape played in reverse.

“You’ve been talking to the Regis again!” the Regent growled. “You expect me to search for a ship that could be halfway across the galaxy?”

“Calculations suggest that such a journey would constitute a minor drain on existing Protoculture reserves when compared to these continued assaults against the Masters’

realms.”

“That may very well be,” the Regent was willing to concede, “but conquest is growth.

Conquest is evolvement!” He turned to Obsim. “My orders stand: section the brain.

Transport the cutting to the surface to guide the Inorganics. Bring me what I seek and I will make you master of your own world. Fail, and I will leave you to rot on this ball of dust for an eternity.”

CHAPTER FIVE

What with all the major players from the RDF and the Southern Cross in attendance (at the Hunters’ wedding), one would have expected at least one newsworthy incident; but in fact the only negative scene was one touched off by Lynn-Minmei’s song, which provoked exclamations of disapproval from a few members of the Sisterhood Society. “We’ll be together,” the chorus went, “as married man and wife.” Here was Lisa Hayes, first officer of the SDFs 1 and 2, admiral of the fleet, and commander of the entire SDF-3, suddenly reduced by Minmei’s lyric to Rick Hunter’s wife!

Footnote in Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War by Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.)

Rick watched the Earth as it swung into view feeling a little like he imagined the starchild did in that old science fiction classic. He knew it was stretching things a bit to feel that way, but in a very real sense the future of the planet was in the hands of a council of ordinary men and women. Human beings, not superheroes or protectors, or starchildren who had already crossed over.

Earth looked unchanged from up here, its recent scars and still-open wounds concealed by a mantle of white swirls and dense fronts. But Rick had walked Earth’s scorched surface for six years and knew the truth: his world would never be the same. And it took a new kind of strength to accept this fact, to overcome the inertia of age and surrender a host of childhood dreams.

“Penny for your thoughts,” Lisa said from behind him.

He hadn’t heard her enter, and swung around from the viewport with a guilty look on his face.

“Am I interrupting something?”

He smiled at her and shook his head. “A penny, huh…Is that all they’re worth?”

“A nickel, then.”

She came over to kiss him, and immediately sensed his remoteness. He turned back to the view as she released him. Sunlight touched the wingtips of dozens of shuttles ferrying guests up to the satellite for the wedding.

“`The stars my destination,’” he mused. “I can’t help wondering if we’ve made the right choice. It’s like a crazy dream.”

Lisa pursed her lips and nodded; Max had prepared her for Rick’s mood, and she wanted him to understand that her shoulder was the softest around. Still, she didn’t like his waffling and sudden indecisiveness. “It’s not a crazy dream,” she told him. “If we succeed, we’ll be insuring a future for ourselves.”

“I know, I know,” he said dismissively. “I’m not as mixed up as I sound. It’s just coming down so fast all of a sudden. The mission, our wedding…”

“We’ve had six years to think about this, Rick.”

Rick took her in his arms; she linked her hands behind his neck. “I’m an idiot.”

“Only if you’re having doubts about us, Rick.”

“Not now,” he said, collecting on the kiss Max had interrupted earlier.

In his small cabinspace aboard the SDF-3, Jack Baker was softly thumping his head against a computer console. There was just too much to learn. Not only did you have to prove yourself in air combat maneuvers, you had to know all this extra stuff! Ordnance specifications, drill procedures, TO&E nonsense, Zentraedi! for crying out loud…If he’d known that mecha piloting was going to involve all this, he would have just gone to college or something!

The computer sounded a tone, urging him to enter his response to the question it had flashed on the screen.

“Plot a course from A to B,” Jack read, “taking into consideration vector variants listed above…” Jack scanned the tables hopelessly and bellowed a curse at the ceiling.

At the same moment, the cabin door hissed open and a VT lieutenant walked in. He took a long analytical look at Jack, then glanced at the monitor screen.

“Troubles, Baker?” he said, barely suppressing a grin.

Jack reached over and switched off the monitor. “No, no troubles.”

The pilot sniggered. “Here, this oughta cheer you up.”

Jack took the envelope and opened it: inside was a handwritten note from Admiral Hunter inviting him to the wedding reception. “`I hope you can make it,’” Jack read aloud three times, trying to convince himself that the note was on the level.

“From Richard A. Hunter,” Jack said to the pilot, gloating. “My buddy, the admiral.”

The hold chosen for the wedding was on the factory’s upper level, where a massive overhead viewport had recently been installed expressly for the event. The space could accommodate several thousand, but by three o’clock on the afternoon of the big day every seat was filled. Rick and Lisa had demanded a simple ceremony nonetheless, and in keeping with their wishes the hold was minimally outfitted. Two tiered banks of chairs had been set up to face a raised platform, behind which rose a screen adorned with a large stylized cross. The stage was carpeted and matched by a five-hundred-foot-long red runner that covered the center aisle. Large floral arrangements had been placed along the aisle and perimeter of the stage, and in the hold beyond sat two rows of gleaming Alpha Veritechs, red on the right, blue on the left.

The front rows had been reserved for close friends and VIPs, who sat there now in their finest gowns, pleated uniforms, service ribbons, and golden-epauletted dress blues. The hold was humming with hundreds of individual conversations, and organ music was wafting from a dozen theater speakers. Bowie and Dana, who were supposed to be waiting with the wedding party, were playing a game of tag among the rows, and Jean Grant was chasing both of them, asking her son if was too much to request that he behave himself just this once.

“Can’t you act like a grown-up!” she screamed, at the end of her rope.

“But I can’t, Mom,” the youngster returned to the amusement of everyone within earshot, “I’ve got the mind of a seven-year-old!”

Seating hadn’t been prearranged along any “familial” lines, but a curious breakdown had begun from the start. On one side sat Field Marshal Anatole Leonard and most of the Southern Cross apparat-T. R. Edwards, Dr. Lazlo Zand, Senator Wyatt Moran, and dozens of lesser officers and dignitaries-and on the other, the RDF contingent: Vince and Jean Grant, Miriya Sterling, Drs. Lang and Penn and the rest of the Plenipotentiary Council, Jonathan Wolff, the Emersons, and others. In a tight-knit group behind the council members sat Exedore, and Dana Sterling’s three deathly-ill Zentraedi godfathers, Rico, Konda, and Bron. Breetai’s micronized troops were farther back, along with some of the Wolff Pack, the Skull and Ghost Squadrons.

Up front, on the sunny side, were Lynn-Minmei and her singing partner, Janice Em. Lisa’s response to Minmei’s offer that day in the gown shop had been straightforward: she had asked her to sing at the wedding.

Janice Em was something of an enigma to the media. Word had it that she was Dr. Lang’s niece, but rumor linked her to the wizard of Robotechnology in more intimate terms. In any case, she seemed to have appeared on the scene out of nowhere two years earlier, only to become Lynn-Minmei’s much needed tenor and constant companion. She was a few inches taller than Minmei, with large blue eyes set in a somewhat pale but attractive face.

Her hair color changed every few months, but today it was a delicate lavender, pulled back in a rose clasp behind one ear. She had chosen a yellow spaghetti-strapped gown to complement Minmei’s blue halter and offset it with a necklace of ancient Egyptian turquoise.

“Did I ever tell you about the time Rick and I got married?” Minmei was saying just now.

Janice heard the sadness in Minmei’s voice, but chose to react to the statement. “Maybe you should be telling Lisa,” she suggested. “Or are you saving it for when the chaplain asks if anyone can show `just cause’?”

Minmei reacted as though she had been slapped; then she let out her breath and laughed.

It was so typically Janice to say something like that. When the press grilled her for the scoop on Janice and Dr. Lang, Minmei would often reply,” Well, if she’s not related to him, she’s certainly got his sense of humor.”

“It was a fantasy wedding, Janice,” Minmei explained. “When we were trapped together in a hold in the SDF-1.”

“And here you are trapped with him in another hold.”

Minmei ignored it. “I just can’t stop myself from thinking about what might have been.”

“`The saddest are: it might have been,”’ Janice quoted. “But forget it, Lynn. The past is only an arrangement of photons receding at lightspeed.”

“That’s very romantic, Janice.”

“Romance is for storytellers.”

“And what about our songs-you don’t call them romantic?”

Janice turned to her straight-faced. “Our songs are weapons.”

Above the would-be chapel, on an observation balcony Max had christened the “ready-reaction room,” Rick stood in front of a mirror trying to tie a knot. His tux was white with sky-blue lapels.

“The balloon’s about to go up,” Max enthused, bursting in on him.

“I can’t do it, Max. You’re going to have to do it for me.”

It took Max a moment to understand that Rick was referring to the tie; he breathed a sigh of relief and went over to his friend. “Here, I’m an expert with these things.”

Rick inclined his head to the view below while Max went to work on the tie. He felt as though his stomach had reconfigured itself to some entirely new mode.

“There,” Max said. “It’s a matter of finesse.”

Rick thanked him. “A man couldn’t have a finer best man or best friend. I mean that.”

Max blushed. “Hey, I was saving that for the toast.”

“Okay,” Rick said in a determined voice. “Let’s move.”

He reached up to give a final adjustment to the tie only to have it slip and loosen up.

Max looked at it and shrugged. “Well, maybe you’ll start a trend.”

In the end you go it alone, Rick was saying to himself ten minutes later as he turned to watch Lisa come down the aisle. Breetai, in his helmet-mask and Ironman getup walked beside her, and Rick couldn’t help seeing them as some kind of whacko father-and-daughter tag-team couple. Max’s daughter was one step behind them. But as Lisa drew nearer the image left him, and so did the nervousness. She had roses and baby’s breath in her hair, a choker of real pearls, and she looked radiant. Behind Lisa’s back, Dana made a face at ringbearer Bowie and curled her fingers at her mom.

Max and Breetai left the platform soon after, and the chaplain began to read the short service Lisa had written. A few minutes later Rick and Lisa were joining hands, exchanging rings and vows, and suddenly it was over.

Or just beginning.

They kissed and a thousand strobe lights flashed. Cheers and applause rose from the crowd above a flourish of strings and horns; and outside the viewport, teams of Veritechs completed a series of slow-mo formation flybys. A fanfare sounded as local space came to life with starbursts, roostertails, and fountains of brilliant color.

Rick and Lisa shook a thousand hands and kissed a thousand cheeks; then they danced together to Minmei and Janice’s song. Spotlights found them in the hold as they moved through gentle arcs and twirls across the floor. Rick held her lovingly and caught the glint of teardrops in the corner of her eyes. He squeezed her hand and felt a wave of sadness wash through him. It was the song perhaps, a love song to be sure, but one sung with a sense of implied loss, an awareness of the ephemeral nature of all things.

A world turns to the edge of night,

the moon and stars so very bright;

your face glows in the candlelight,

it’s all because tonight’s the night…

Now hold my hand and take this ring

as we unite in harmony.

We can begin to live the dream,

the dream that’s meant for you and me.

To be together,

For the first time in our lives,

it’s us together.

As married man and wife, we’ll be together

from now on, until death do us part;

and even then, I hope our love lasts forever.

“Oh, Rick,” Lisa whispered in his ear, moved to tears by the Voice that had conquered an army. “How I wish Claudia and Roy could be here.”

Rick led her through a turn that kept her back to the guests. And Ben, he thought. And Gloval and Sammie and Vanessa and Kim and the countless millions sacrificed to war’s insatiable thirst…

I promise to be always true

until the very end’s in view.

In good times and the bad times, too,

I know that we can make it through.

As one united we’ll be strong;

because together we belong.

If I could sing to you a song,

I’d sing of love that won’t go wrong.

If we’re together,

we’ll make a brand new life for us together,

as married man and wife, we’ll stay together…

Couples began to join them on the dance floor, and when the song finished, the party began in earnest. Happily, Rick found himself with some free moments while Lisa was off circulating table to table. Oddly enough, members of the Southern Cross and RDF were mingling without incident, and everywhere Rick looked he saw people having a good time.

Except perhaps for Jean Grant, who was looking a little frazzled after having spent most of the ceremony chasing Bowie and Dana around.

A photographer brought Rick and Lisa back together for the cake cutting, but Rick drew the line at that, and refused to take part in any of the archaic dances the band insisted on playing. Instead, he wandered around with a smile frozen in place that misrepresented his true inner state. He had realized, as though waking from a dream, that there was only the mission now. No wedding to absorb his concerns, no higher priority than the SDF-3 and his command.

It was a frightening realization.

Elsewhere, Jonathan Wolff was zeroing in on Minmei.

“This has got to be the biggest reception I’ve ever played,” Minmei was exclaiming to Janice as Wolff came over.

“You sang beautifully,” he began on a confident note.

Minmei recognized a certain look in his eye and began to glance around for an escape route. “Uh, thank you,” she said in a distracted way.

“The name’s Wolff. And do you know how long I’ve wanted to meet you?”

Wolff! Oh, terrific, Minmei was saying to herself, when Janice suddenly blurted out, “Try humming a few bars.”

Wolff’s smile collapsed and he began to look back and forth between the two women uncertainly. “I, uh-”

“Oh, right, you were talking to Minmei, not me,” Janice said. “Look, I’ll relocate and you can give it a second try.”

Minmei and Wolff watched her walk off.

“Don’t mind Janice, she’s got a very peculiar sense of humor.”

Wolff cleared his throat meaningfully and was about to say something, but Minmei excused herself and wandered away.

“There’s someone over there I want to talk to,” she said over her shoulder.

Undaunted, Wolff straightened his torso harness-in case anyone was watching. He saw Minmei talking to Exedore and three other Zentraedi men. But then Wolff noticed something else: a man about his own age standing nearby was also watching Minmei.

Watching her with an almost palpable intensity. Wolff repositioned himself for a better view of the stranger, a maintenance tech by the look of his uniform. But there was something disturbingly familiar about him. Wolff was sure he had never met the man, but was equally certain he had seen him somewhere. As he studied the man’s tall, lean figure and bearded face, an image began to form. The beard would have to go, Wolff decided, and the hair would have to be a lot longer and darker…But where had he seen him-in the Control Zone, maybe-and why did martial arts and old movies come to mind?

Karen Penn, her father, and Dr. Lang were eating slices of wedding cake when a slovenly-dressed civilian joined them at the table. Lang introduced Karen to Dr. Lazlo Zand, a cold-handed man with eyes as pupilless as Lang’s own.

“Good to meet you,” Karen said, forcing a smile and wondering if Zand ran on ice water.

“Charmed,” he returned. “That blond hair. You remind me of little Dana.”

Karen felt a chill run through her, and something seemed to make her fork leap from the plate. She bent to retrieve it, but someone had beat her to it.

“Allow me,” a red-haired ensign told her. “I’m pretty handy with hardware.”

“Karen, Ensign…Baker, if I’m not mistaken,” offered Lang.

She and Baker were both still holding on to the fork and locked in on each other’s eyes.

“The pleasure’s at least fifty percent mine.” Baker smiled. He let go of the fork. “Consider me at your service, ma’am.”

Karen’s eyebrows went up. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“And I’ll keep you in mind,” Baker said, excusing himself and moving off.

“Bit of a hotshot,” commented Lang.

“That’s the sort of person you’ll be wasting your time with from now on,” Harry Penn added gruffly.

Karen smiled. “I’m not so sure about that, Dad.”

“But your father’s right,” Zand interjected, narrowing his eyes. “Scientists are more fun.”

Karen couldn’t hold the man’s gaze. Absently, she tried to raise a forkful of cake to her mouth. The utensil was twisted beyond recognition.

The party was still cooking eight hours later, but Rick and Lisa were ready to call it a day.

They said their farewells from the balcony overlooking the hold; and Lisa got ready to give the bridal bouquet a healthy send-off.

At the last minute, Janice had thrust Minmei into the midst of the crowd of eligible women, but had herself taken off for parts unknown. Now Minmei was pressed tight in the center of that mass of supercharged youth, surrounded by officers, enlisted-rating techs, and cadets, most of whom were younger than she was. One honey-blond-haired ensign to her left couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

On the balcony, Lisa was warning that anyone who hoped to remain single should stay out of the line of fire. Then she gave the thing a windup underhanded toss, and Minmei saw it coming.

She barely had to stretch out her hands, and what was stranger still, the women around her seemed to give it to her.

“See you all after the honeymoon,” Lisa shouted, perhaps unaware of the bouquet’s landing zone.

“Yeah, in about eight hours from now!” Rick added, tugging his bride away.

Minmei lowered her face into the flowers, then gave her head a quick shake when she looked up. It’s over, she thought, recalling a sad song she used to sing. Now I’ve got to get on with my life.

“Good-bye, Rick,” she said softly. It is you I still see…

On Optera, the Invid Regis learned of her husband’s imminent return and made immediate plans to leave the planet. She didn’t delude herself with thoughts that this might be some trial separation. Of course, it meant abandoning all the Genesis Pit experiments in evolution she had begun here, her progress in the Great Work of transmutation and freedom from the base condition; but what strides could she hope to make in his presence, what chance did she have to fulfill herself? No, he had held her back long enough. Further, it meant that she would have to decide what constituted a just division of their resources.

He already had the living computer; but there were other Protoculture instrumentalities that would serve her as well as the brain once had. And she would take along half her active children, but leave him that sleeping brood she had not yet seen fit to awaken.

Their home on Optera, their castle, was an enormous hemispherical hive, once the sacred inverted chalice of the Great Work, but now a profane dwelling filled with his things-his servants and ridiculous possessions. He had claimed to be doing all this for her sake, and for a time she could almost believe him, pitiful as his attempts were. But she soon realized that he was merely nurturing himself with these conquests and acquisitive drives.

The Regent’s ignorance and stubbornness had been enough to drive her mad. He was in every way her intellectual and spiritual inferior; and yet his will was powerful, and in his presence she could feel his sick mind reaching out for her, trying to smother her. She was certain that unless she left Optera, he would one day succeed in dragging her down to his barbaric level.

But she was free of him now, her mind clear on the path she had to take. No longer subservient to his dark demands, she would strike out on her own. If the matrix was to be found, it was she who would find it. Not by sanitizing the Masters’ insignificant worlds, but by sending out her sensor nebulae to the far reaches of the galaxy to locate Zor’s dimensional fortress. Then she would take the Flowers back from the thieves who had stolen them; she would liberate them from their matrix prison and find a new Optera for her experiments! In the meantime the planet Praxis would suffice. And woe to any who would stand in her way!

CHAPTER SIX

Actually, I’ve been thinking about it for months now, but I just didn’t know how to ask, and I wasn’t sure if you would understand my decision. Could you see me walking up to Lang or one of those council stiffs and saying, “Uh, do you think I might be able to go along on the ride?” And then have to tell you that I was going to be doing a tour by myself this time.

Taking my act to Tirol-you would have brained me. I hope you’ll forgive me, and l want you to know that we’ll pick up right where we left off when the Expeditionary mission returns. I mean, who knows, maybe I’ll have added a bunch of new stuff to our repetoire. Anyway I’m certain the experience will be good for me.

Lynn-Minmei’s good-bye note to her manager, Samson “Sharky” O’Toole The alarm went off at 5:15 a.m. “Rise and shine,” said a synthesized, possibly female voice from the room’s control deck.

Rick pulled the sheet over his head and buried his face in the pillow. He could sense Lisa stirring beside him, sitting up and stretching. In a moment he felt her warm hand on his bare back.

“Morning.”

“What good is it being an admiral if you can’t sleep late?” he asked without lifting his head.

She laughed and kissed the nape of his neck. “Not today, Rick.”

“Then tell me why five-fifteen never seemed this early before.”

“Maybe because bed never felt this good before,” she purred, snuggling against his back.

Rick rolled over and put his arms around her. “That’s a fact, ma’am.”

The door tone sounded, ending their embrace. Rick muttered something and climbed out of bed, stepping into trousers before answering the door.

“Good morning, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter,” a robo-butler announced. The thing was squat and silly-looking, with a rubber skirt that concealed its wheels; it was holding a full breakfast tray in its plasticized grips. “Dr. Lang wanted you to have breakfast in bed,” the butler continued in the same monotone. “Please enter the appropriate commands.”

Rick allowed the piece of Robowizardy to enter, but shut it down soon afterward, taking over the butler’s program and conveying the tray to bed himself.

He bowed theatrically as Lisa sat up. “Service with a genuine smile.”

They ate hurriedly and said little, famished all of a sudden. Then they showered together and began to dress. Rick watched Lisa in front of the mirror, smoothing her uniform and adjusting the collar of her jacket.

“Off to work,” he said, looking himself over. “Do you realize that the next time we’re in this room together, I’ll be asking you what you did today, and you’ll tell me that you commanded a starship across the galaxy. Does that sound a little odd to you?”

“Odd how?” she said, with a crooked smile.

“Odd like not something we do every day.”

Lisa came over to tug his black torso harness into place. “Just think of it as a honeymoon.”

Rick made a face. “I’ll be sure and tell that to the Masters.”

Jean Grant had cried at the wedding; those, however, had been tears of joy and remembrance, while the ones streaming down her cheeks today were anything but. Bowie was on the verge of tears himself, but was trying hard to be a man about it. Not that mom and son stood out any, though; the shuttle hold was filled with like scenes: tears, embraces, heartfelt exchanges. Wedding guests and family members would be shuttled home over the course of the next few days, but with the SDF-3 launch window less than four hours off, this was the crew’s last chance for good-byes. Within a month, Human factory personnel would be transferred to new assignments on-planet, or at Moon Base or Liberty Space Station. No decision had been made concerning the satellite itself, but speculation was that the Zentraedi crew would remove the installation from Earth orbit-to where, no one knew.

Vince Grant bent down and put a hand on his son’s head, giving it an affectionate rub. “It’s going to be all right, Bowie. We’ll be back before you know it.”

“But why can’t I come with you?” he wanted to know. “Other kids are going-kids not too much older than us,” he added, including Dana. Bowie was thinking of one kid in particular he had met at the wedding, Dr. Lang’s godson, Scott Bernard.

“That’s true, sweetie,” Jean said, smiling through her tears. “But you know you can’t go.”

She touched Bowie’s chest with her fingertips. “Your heart won’t let you go.”

Dana, who was bored and practicing spin kicks against a bulkhead, frowned and said, “Come on, Bowie. We don’t want to go with them anyway. Space is no fun, anybody knows that.”

Max and Miriya regarded each other and shook their heads as if to say, where did that one come from?

“Dana’s right, Bowie,” Jean smiled, tugging in a sob. “It isn’t going to be any fun.”

“Yeah, Dana, but you were in space already,” Bowie pointed out. “I’ve never been there.”

Rolf Emerson took advantage of a momentary silence to step forward and put his arm around the boy. “We’re going to have a good time, Bowie. You wait and see.”

Vince and Jean embraced Rolf. “Take good care of him for us, Rolf,” Vince said with a serious look.

“You know I will.”

Just then Lazlo Zand walked by headed for the shuttle ramp. Instinctively, Emerson hugged Dana and Bowie to his legs, a look in his dark eyes like he wanted to put a stake through Zand’s heart.

Elsewhere in the shuttle boarding area, Janice and Minmei had received their seat assignments and were walking off in the direction of the VIP lounge. They were ordinary folk this morning, dressed in slacks and simple blouses. There was plenty of time to kill until the prep call, and Minmei wanted to get a drink.

“What’s with you today?” Janice asked while they moved through the crowd. “The clouds are below us, so I don’t see how you can have your head in them.” When Minmei didn’t respond, Janice took her by the arm. “Earth calling Lynn-Minmei. Please relay your hyperspace coordinates.”

“Huh?” Minmei said, turning to her.

Janice made an exasperated sound. “What is it-Rick?”

Minmei looked away. “He always looked out for me. I just don’t know if I can leave him like this.”

“Look, Lynn,” Janice began in a worried voice, “I don’t think Lisa is going to appreciate your cutting into their-”

“If I could just see him once more. Both of them. Only to wish them good luck.”

“You already did that-about two dozen times!”

Janice could see that she wasn’t listening; Minmei’s eyes were searching the bay for something. “There!” she said after a moment, pointing to a small EVA vehicle near a secondary launch port reserved for maintenance craft.

“I’m afraid to ask,” Janice said warily. But Minmei was already on her way.

“Admiral on the bridge!” a young enlisted-rating tech announced, snapping to as Lisa stepped through the hatch She couldn’t help remembering Captain Gloval constantly smacking his head on a hatch very similar to this one. And indeed he would have felt right at home on the SDF-3 bridge, which for all intents and purposes was identical to that on the SDF-1. Lisa had insisted it be so, even though Lang had tried to convince her of the giant strides his teams had made since reconstructing that doomed fortress There were redundancies and severe limitations to the design, he had argued; but in the end Lisa had her way. It was her command, and this bridge was as much a tribute as anything else. To Gloval, to Claudia and the others…Of course, there were some changes that had to be allowed…

The crew, for example: they were all men.

“At ease, gentlemen,” Lisa told them.

She led herself through a tour of the now completed room, running her hands across the consoles and acceleration seats. Along the rear bulkhead were two four-by-four monitor screens linked to internal systemry and astrogation. Starboard was a complex laser communication and scanner console, crowned by a tall multiscreened threat board. And forward, below a wraparound forward view port, were twin duty stations like the ones she and Claudia had manned for almost three years.

Lisa shook hands with her exec and crew-Forsythe, Blake, Colton and the rest. It was a formality, given the fact they all knew one another, but a necessary one. She wished each man good luck, then moved toward the raised command chair that was hers alone. She took a long time settling into its padded seat, but why not: the moment was six years in the making.

A terrible memory of her last shortlived command flashed through her mind, but she willed it away. She took a lingering glance around the room and declared in a determined voice, “Mister Blake, I want systems status.”

If Lisa’s new space was compact, tidy, and familiar, Rick’s was large and impersonal.

Constructed concurrently with its Earthside counterpart, the command, control, and communications center was an enormous room more than two hundred feet square and almost half as high. A fifty-by-fifty-foot screen dominated the bulkhead opposite Rick’s command balcony with its half-dozen consoles and monitors. Below, a horizontal position board was surrounded by more than twenty individual duty stations, and adjacent to this forward, a bank of as many stations tied to the central display screen. Along the port bulkhead were peripheral screens, tech stations, and banks of sophisticated instrumentality, with a great Medusa’s head of cables, feeders, and power relays running floor to ceiling.

“Quite a sight, isn’t it, Admiral?” said someone off to Rick’s right.

Rick turned, aware that he had been staring openmouthed at the room, and found T. R.

Edwards regarding him analytically from the command balcony railing. “Uh, impressive,”

Rick returned, underplaying his amazement. He had of course been here often enough, but still struggled in unguarded moments with the enormity of his responsibility.

“`Impressive.’” Edwards laughed, approaching Rick now. “Interesting choice. I think I would have said `awesome,’ or ‘incredible,’ or even `magnificent.’ But then, I didn’t spend three years in space on the SDF-1, did I? Did you think the Grand Cannon impressive, Admiral? You did get to see it, didn’t you?”

“Actually, I didn’t, General,” Rick said, wondering what Edwards was getting at. “I only saw it in ruins…where it belonged in the first place.”

Edwards grinned. “Oh, of course. I forgot. You were the one who rescued the Hayes woman, uh, the admiral.”

Rick caught a reflection of himself in Edwards’s faceplate, then looked directly into Edwards’s good eye. “Something bothering you, Edwards?”

Edwards took a step back, motioning to himself with elaborate innocence. “Me? Why, no, not at all. I suppose I’m just a bit overcome by this room of ours.” Edwards folded his arms and stood at the rail, a prince on a battlement. He turned to Rick and grinned. “Has anyone ever had a finer War Room, Admiral?”

Rick’s lips were a thin line. “I prefer Situation Room. I thought I made that clear at the briefings.”

“Forgive me,” Edwards said, throwing his hands out apologetically. “Situation Room.” He swung round to the view again. “What an impressive Situation Room.”

Belowdecks, Jack Baker cursed-the RDF, his commanders, his luck, himself ultimately. It was because of that oversight in the simulator, he decided. That was what had done it, that was what had turned off Hunter and Sterling. And that handwritten invitation to the reception-ha! Richard A. Hunter indeed. Richard Anti-Baker Hunter was more like it. Or why else wouldn’t he have pulled the assignment he wanted? Skull Squadron…that was where the fun was. Even Ghost would’ve done the trick, although he did have some reservations about that General Edwards. But, hell! to be stuck with Commander Grant!

Grant was all right, of course, but his unit was ground-based, for cry’nout loud. And what kind of action could a guy expect to see on land on a mission like this! And what was an ensign doing there? Temporary duty or not, it just didn’t make any sense, no sense at all.

“I shoulda gone to college,” Baker muttered as he shouldered his way through a group of enlisted ratings to report in.

Most of his Expeditionary Force mates in the mecha hangar were marveling at the two transports that were central to the battalion’s strength-the GMU, and the dropship that conveyed it planetside-but to Jack the devices were just modular nightmares: overworked, underpowered, and unimportant. Veritechs were what made it happen. One pilot, one mecha. Plenty of speed, range, and firepower, and nothing to drag you down. Nothing extraneous in mind or body, as Jack was fond of quoting, often fantasizing about what those early Macross days must have been like, pushing the envelope and azending!

Yeah!

These…monstrosities, on the other hand, were about as sleek as an old-fashioned tank.

Course there were plenty of good things inside-Hovertanks, Logans, and such-but he would have to get himself transferred to the Wolff Pack if he ever hoped to ride one of those.

Jack decided to circle the GMU and see if he couldn’t find something, something he could get excited about. The thing was huge, maybe five hundred feet long, with eight one-hundred-foot-high globular wheels affixed to massive transaxles, banks of superspot running lights, hidden particle-projection cannon turrets, and multiple-missile launch racks.

Up front were two retractable off-loading ramps, and up top, behind blast deflectors, two external command stations positioned on either side of the unit’s real prize: an enormous pulse-cannon, which, like a fire engine’s tower ladder, could be raised and rotated.

Jack was still appraising the unit five minutes later when Karen Penn suddenly appeared on one of the ramp walkways. The body-hugging RDF jumpsuit did things for her figure that the dress hadn’t, and Jack’s scowl gave way to a wide-eyed look of enchantment.

Karen saw him, smiled, and waved. When she was within earshot she called brightly, “Hey, Baker, what are you doing here?”

Jack smiled back and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Luck of the draw!”

“I am beside myself,” Dr. Lang confided to Exedore as the two men completed their prelaunch inspection of the fortress’s spacefold generators and Reflex drives. They were the same ones that had once powered Breetai’s flagship, but Lang’s Robotechnicians had spiffed them up a bit. It had long been the professor’s wish to cannibalize one of the spacefold generators just to take a peek at its Protoculture core, but he knew this would have to wait till a time when fold systemry could be spared. Presently, however, Protoculture remained the most precious substance in the universe, and Lang’s teams had yet to discover the philosophers’ stone that would enable them to create it. So chips and sealed generators were transferred intact from ship to ship or mecha to mecha. But even with all the energy cells the RDF had managed to salvage from the Zentraedi warships that had crashed on Earth, the supply was hardly inexhaustible.

How had Zor created the stuff? Lang was forever asking himself. He understood that it had something to do with the Flowers Exedore spoke of-the Flowers of Life. But Lang had never seen one, and how in any case had Zor gone from Flower to Protoculture? It was one of the many questions he hoped the Masters would answer once peace negotiations were out of the way. And then there were all the unresolved puzzles centering around Zor himself. But for the time being Lang was content with his own minor triumphs.

“It’s more than I ever hoped for.”

Exedore might have recognized the look on Lang’s face as one often observed on the faces of children on Christmas mornings. The Zentraedi ambassador picked up on Lang’s tone of anticipation as well.

“Well, can you imagine how I must feel, Doctor, to be going home after so many years?”

Lang looked at Exedore as though noticing something for the first time. “Yes, yes, I see what you mean, my friend. And in a strange way I, too, feel as if I’m returning home.”

Exedore thought he grasped Lang’s meaning, and shook his head. “No, Doctor. You will see that Tirol is not for you. Earth is your home, and ever shall be.”

“Perhaps,” Lang said with a glint in his eye. “But we have seen more radical reshapings in the past few years, have we not?”

Exedore was about to reply when a tech interrupted the conversation to inform Lang that all systems were go and the bridge was awaiting confirmation.

“Well, give the admiral what she wants, Mr. Price,” Lang declared. “The moment has arrived.”

A murmur of excitement swept through the crowds waiting in the shuttle boarding area.

Suddenly people were moving in haste toward the viewports and breaking into spontaneous applause.

“Now’s our chance!” Minmei said over her shoulder to Janice.

From the forward seat of the EVA craft where she and Janice had been hiding for the past few hours, Minmei could just discern the rounded, main-gun booms of the SDF-3 nosing into view from the satellite’s null-gee construction hold.

“Now, Janice, now!” Minmei urged.

Janice bit her lower lip and began to activate a series of switches across the craft’s instrument panel. Displays came to life one by one, suffusing the small cockpit with whirring sounds and comforting amber light. Abruptly, the small ship lurched forward as a conveyor carried it toward the launch bay.

Minmei searched for some indication that they had been spotted, but it appeared that even the techs’ attention had been diverted by the unannounced emergence of the fortress. And before she could complete the silent prayer she had begun, the craft was lauched.

Minmei had nothing but confidence in her partner’s ability to pilot the craft and position it in close proximity to the SDF-3; she had seen Janice do far more amazing things during their two-year friendship.

She frequently recalled the first time Dr. Lang had introduced her to Janice. He talked about Janice as though she were God’s gift to the world; and later on Minmei understood that Lang’s hyperboles were not so far off the mark. Minmei felt that Janice was somewhat cool and remote-the only man in her life was that Senator Moran, and it seemed a strange sort of relationship-but Janice could fly, fight, absorb, and retain incredible amounts of information, speak a dozen languages, including Zentraedi. Her considerable talents notwithstanding, however, it was Janice’s voice that Lang had raved about; about how she and Minmei could complement each other in the most perfect way imaginable. And not solely for purposes of entertainment. What Minmei’s voice had achieved with the Zentraedi, Minmei and Janice’s combined voice could replicate tenfold. And should the Robotech Masters decide to send a new wave of bio-engineered warriors to Earth in the SDF-3’s absence, that defensive harmony might very well prove the planet’s saving grace.

Our songs are weapons, Minmei heard Janice saying.

Minmei was no stranger to grandiose dreams or grandiose purpose, and she had readily agreed to keep Lang’s secret. Janice, too, agreed, and the two women had become close friends as well as partners. But after two years of that, dreams were suddenly a new priority, and Lang’s concerns seemed paranoid now. So as the EVA craft began to approach the slow-moving fortress, Minmei told Janice to hold to a parallel course.

“But we can’t remain here, Lynn. The ship is going to fold in a matter of minutes.”

“Just do it for me, please, Janice.”

Janice was quiet for a moment; then she said, “You have no plans of returning to the satellite, do you?”

Minmei swung around in her seat and reached for her friend’s hand. “Are you with me?”

Janice saw the commingling of fear and desperation in Minmei’s blue eyes, and smiled.

“Do I have a choice?”

Minmei looked down on Earth’s oceans and clouds, and completed her prayer.

“Engineering confirms attainment lunar orbit,” Blake updated. “We are go for launch, Admiral.”

Lisa turned in her chair to study a peripheral monitor screen. There was a steady bass rumbling through the entire ship that made it difficult to hear statements voiced on the bridge. But at the same time Lisa was aware of the background blare of klaxons and alert sirens ordering all hands to their launch stations.

“Mr. Colton, start your count,” Lisa ordered, hands tight on the command chair’s armrests.

“T-minus-ten and counting,” Colton shouted above the roar and shudder.

“Nine…”

“Admiral!” Blake said suddenly. “I’m showing an unidentified radar blip well inside the fold zone!”

“Five, four…”

Lisa craned her neck around. “What is it?!”

“Ship, sir-EVA craft!”

“Two, one…”

“Too late!”

“Zero.”

“Execute!” Lisa shouted.

And the mile-long ship jumped.

CHAPTER SEVEN

While the life expectancy of a standard Zentraedi mecha pilot had been determined by the Robotech Masters at three years, the life expectancy of a comparable Invid pilot was never even addressed. In effect, all Invid troops (save the sexually-differentiated scientists) could be activated and deactivated at a moment’s notice-initially by the Regis only, and later by the living computers the Queen Mother helped create to satisfy her husband’s wounded pride (after the “affair” with Zor)…A self-generated variety of Protoculture was essential to mecha operation, in the form of a viscous green fluid that filled the cockpit space. It was through this nutrient bath (liquefied fruits from the mature Optera plants) that the living computers, or “brains,” communicated with the ranks.

Selig Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign

“Yes, my boy, I’ve been meaning to show you this place for quite a long time,” Cabell confessed, gesturing to the wonders of the subterranean chamber. The scientist and his apprentice were deep in the labyrinth beneath Tiresia’s pyramidal Royal Hall. “A pity it has to be under these circumstances.”

It was a laboratory and monitoring facility the likes of which Rem had never seen. There were wall-to-wall consoles and screens, networktops piled high with data cards and ancient print documents, and dozens of unidentifiable tools and devices. In the glow of the room’s archaic illumination panels, the place had a dusty, unused look.

“And this was really his study?” Rem said in disbelief.

Cabell nodded absently, his thoughts on the Pollinators and what could be done with them now. The shaggy creatures had become quiet and docile all of a sudden, huddling together in a tight group in one corner of the room. It was as if they had instinctively located some sort of power spot. Cabell heard Rem gasp; the youth was staring transfixed at a holo-image of Zor he had managed to conjure up from one of the networks, the only such image left on Tirol.

“But…but this is impossible,” Rem exclaimed. “We’re identical!”

Cabell swallowed and found his voice. “Well, there’s some resemblance, perhaps,” he said, downplaying the likeness. “Something about the eyes and mouth…But switch that thing off, boy, we’ve got work to do.”

Mystified, Rem did so, and began to clear a workspace on one of the countertops, while Cabell went around the room activating terminals and bringing some of the screens to life.

The old man knew that he could communicate directly with the Elders from here, but there was no need for that yet. Instead, he set about busying himself with the transponder, and within an hour he had the data he needed to pinpoint the source of its power.

“As I thought,” Cabell mused, as schematics scrolled across a screen. “They are almost directly above us in the Royal Hall. Apparently they’ve brought some sort of command center down from the fleet ships. Strange, though…the emanations are closer to organic than computer-generated.”

“What does it mean?” Rem asked over Cabell’s shoulder.

“That we now know where we must direct our strike.” He had more to add, but autoactivation sounds had suddenly begun to fill the lab, drawing his attention to a screen off to his left, linked, Cabell realized, to one of Tirol’s few remaining orbital scanners. And shortly, as a deepspace image formed on the screen, it was Cabell’s turn to gasp.

“Oh, my boy, tell me I’m not seeing things!”

“It’s a starship,” Rem said, peering at the screen. “But it’s not Invid, is it?”

Cabell had his palms pressed to his face in amazement. “Far from it, Rem, far from it…Don’t you see?-it’s his ship, Zor’s!”

“But how, Cabell?”

Cabell shot to his feet. “The Zentraedi! They’ve recaptured it and returned.” He put his hands on Rem’s shoulders. “We’re saved, my boy. Tirol is saved!”

But the moon’s orbital watchdogs weren’t the only scanners to have picked up on the ship.

Inside the Royal Hall-converted by Enforcer units to an Invid headquarters-the slice of brain Obsim had transported to Tirol’s surface began to speak.

“Intruder alert,” the synthesized voice announced matter-of-factly. “An unidentified ship has just entered the Valivarre system on a course heading for Tirol. Estimated arrival time: one period.”

The cerebral scion approximated the appearance of the Regent’s living computer, and floated in a tall, clear fluid bubble chamber that was set into an hourglass-shaped base.

“Identify and advise,” Obsim ordered.

“Searching…”

The Invid scientist turned his attention to a spherical, geodesiclike communicator, waiting for an image to form.

“Insufficient data for unequivocal identification.”

“Compare and approximate.”

“Quiltra Quelamitzs,” the computer responded a moment later. A deepspace view of the approaching ship appeared in the sphere, and alongside it the various memory profiles the brain had employed in its search.

“Identify.”

“Zentraedi battlecruiser.”

Obsim’s snout sensors twitched and blanched. The Zentraedi, he thought, after all these generations, returned to their home system. He could only hope they were an advance group for the Masters themselves, for that would mean a return of the Flower, the return of hope…

He instructed the computer to alert all troopship commanders immediately. “Stand by to assault.”

Much as spacefold was a warping of the continuum, it was a mind-bending experience as well. The world was filled with a thousand voices speaking at once, and dreamtime images of externalized selves loosed to live out an array of parallel moments, each as real and tangible as the next, each receding as swiftly as it was given birth. The stars would shimmer, fade, and emerge reassembled. Light and shadow reversed. Space was an argent sea or sky shot through with an infinite number of black holes, smeared with smoky nebulae.

This marked Lisa’s sixth jump, but familiarity did nothing to lessen the impact of hyperspace travel, the SDF-3’s tunnel in the sky. It felt as though she had awakened not on the other side of the galaxy but on the other side of a dream, somehow exchanged places with her nighttime self, so that it was her doppelganger who sat in the command chair now. Voices from the bridge crew surfaced slowly, muffled and unreal, as if from a great depth.

…reports entry to Valivarre system.”

“Systems status,” she said weakly and by rote. “Secure from launch stations.”

Some of the techs came to even more slowly than she did, bending to their tasks as though exhausted.

“All systems check out, Admiral. Dr. Lang is onscreen.”

Lisa glanced up at the monitor just as the doctor was offering his congratulations. “I’ve taken the liberty of ordering course and velocity corrections. Hope you don’t mind, Lisa.”

Lang seemed unfazed by their transit through hyperspace; it was one of the strange things about a jump: like altitude sickness, there was no way to predict who would and would not suffer side effects. She was certain that a number of the crew were already being removed to sick bay. Surprised at her own state of well-being, Lisa shook her head and smiled. “We’ve made it, then, we’ve actually made it?”

“See for yourself,” Lang said.

Lisa swung to study a screen, and there it was: a magnified crescent of the ringed and marbled jadelike giant, with its distant primary peeking into view-a magnesium-white jewel set on the planet’s rim. A schematic of the system began to take shape, graphics highlighting one of Fantoma’s dozen moons and enlarging it, as analytical readouts scrolled across an ancillary screen.

“Tirol,” said Lisa. The moon was closing on Fantoma’s darkside. Then, with a sinking feeling, she recalled the EVA blip.

“Still with us,” a tech reported in an anxious tone. “But we’re leaving it farther behind every second.”

“Dr. Lang,” Lisa started to say. But all at once alert signals were flashing all over the bridge.

“Picking up multiple radar signals, sir. Approach vectors coming in…”

Lisa’s eyes went wide. “Sound general quarters. Go to high alert and open up the com net.

And get me Admiral Hunter-immediately.”

“We’ve got them,” Rick was saying a moment later from a screen.

“Do we have a signature?” Lisa asked the threat-board tech. Her throat was dry, her voice a rasp.

“Negative, sir. An unknown quantity.”

Lisa stood up and moved to the visor viewport. “I want visuals as soon as possible, and get Exedore and Breetai up here on the double!”

“Well?” Lisa said from the command chair, tapping her foot impatiently. Klaxons squawked as the ship went on alert. She had not forgotten about the EVA craft, but there were new priorities now.

Exedore turned to look at her. “These are not Tirolian ships, Admiral, I can assure you.”

Breetai and Rick were with him, all three men grouped behind the tech seated at the threat board. “Enhancements coming in now, Lisa,” Rick said without turning around.

The computer drew several clamlike shapes on the screen, pinpointing hot areas.

Breetai straightened up and grunted; all eyes on the bridge swung to fix on him. “Invid troop carriers,” he announced angrily.

“Invid? But what-”

“Could they have formed some sort of alliance with the Masters?” Lisa thought to ask.

“That is very unlikely, Admiral,” Exedore answered her.

Rick spoke to Lang, who was still onscreen. “We’ve got company, Doctor.”

“The ship must be protected.”

“Sir!” a tech shouted. “I’m showing multiple paint throughout the field!”

Rick and the others saw that the clam-ships had opened, yawned, spilling forth an enormous number of small strike mecha. Pincer Ships, Breetai called them.

“I want the Skull scrambled.”

“Ghost Squadron is already out, sir,” Blake reported from his duty station.

“What!”

The threat board showed two clusters of blips moving toward each other. Rick slapped his hand down on the Situation Room com stud, demanding to know who ordered the Veritechs out.

“General Edwards,” came the reply.

“Edwards!” Rick seethed.

Blake tapped in a rapid sequence of requests. “Sir. Ghost Squadron reports they’re moving in to engage.”

Cabell was puzzled. It was not Zor’s ship after all, but some sort of facsimile. Worse, the Invid had sent its small fleet of troop carriers against it, and their Pincer Ships were already engaging mecha from the Zentraedi ship out near Fantoma’s rings. Initially, Cabell wanted to convince himself that the Zentraedi had for some reason, returned in Micronized form; but he now dismissed this as wishful thinking. It was more likely that the starship had been taken by force, and he was willing to guess just who these new invaders were. Presently, data from one of the network computers confirmed his guess.

He had pulled up trans-signals received by the Masters shortly after the destruction of Reno’s fleet and the capture of the factory satellite. Among the debris that littered a vast area of space some eighty light-years out from Tirol were mecha almost identical to those the would-be Zentraedi had sent against the Invid. These invaders, then, would have to be the “Micronians” whose world the Masters had gone off to conquer, the same humanoids who had been the recipients of Zor’s fortress, and with it the Protoculture matrix.

And while Invid and Terrans formed up to annihilate each other, a small ship was leaving Tirolspace unobserved. Watching the ship’s trail disappear on his monitor screen, Cabell smiled to himself. It was the Elders, fooled like himself perhaps, into believing that the Zentraedi had returned. For their skins! Cabell laughed to himself.

So Tirol was suddenly Masterless. Cabell considered the battle raging out by the giant’s ringplane, and wondered aloud if Tirol was about to change hands yet again.

In the Royal Hall Invid headquarters, Obsim was thinking along similar lines. These starship troopers were not Zentraedi, but some life-form similar in makeup and physiology to the population of Tirol or Praxis. And yet they were not Tirolians either. By monitoring the transmissions the invaders were radioing to their mecha pilots, the brain had discovered that the language was not that of the Masters.

“Sample and analyze,” Obsim commanded.

It was a primitive, strictly vocal tongue; and the computer easily mastered it in a matter of minutes, along with the simple combat code the invaders were using.

Obsim studied the communications sphere with interest. The battle was not going well for his Pincer units; whatever the invaders lacked in the way of intellect and sophistication, they possessed powerful weapons and mecha more maneuverable than any Obsim had ever seen. A world of such beings would not have been conquered as readily as Spheris, Praxis, and Karbarra had. But firepower wasn’t war’s only prerequisite; there had to be a guiding intelligence. And of this the invaders were in short supply.

“Computer,” said Obsim. “Send the mecha commanders new dictates in their own code.

Order them to pursue our troops no matter what.”

The starship itself was hiding inside Fantoma’s ringplane; but if it could be lured out for only a moment, the troop carriers might have a clear shot at it.

Obsim turned to face the brain. “Computer. Locate the starship’s drives and relay relevant data to troopship commanders.” He contemplated this strategy for a moment, hands deep within the sleeves of his robe. “And prepare to advise the Regent of our situation.”

The tac net was a symphony of voices, shrill and panicked, punctuated by bursts of sibilant static and the shortlived sound of muffled roars.

“Talk to me, Ghost Leader,” a pilot said.

“Contact, fifty right, medium range…”

“Roger, got ‘im.”

“Ghost Three, Ghost Three, bogie inbound, heading zero-seven-niner…”

“Ghost Six, you’ve got half-a-dozen on your tail. Go to Battloid, Moonlighter!”

“Can’t get-”

Rick cursed and went on the com net. “Ghost Leader, do you require backup? Repeat, do you require backup? Over.”

“Sir,” the pilot replied an instant later. “We’re holding our own out here, but it’s a world of shi-er, pain, sir!”

“Can you ascertain enemy’s weapons systems? Over.”

Static erased the pilot’s first few words. “…and some sort of plasma cannons, sir. It’s like they’re throwing…energy Frisbees or something! But the mecha are slow-ugly as sin, but slow.”

Rick raised his eyes to the ceiling of the bridge. I should be out there with them! Breetai and Exedore had returned to their stations elsewhere in the ship; and by all rights Rick should have been back in the Tactical Information Center already, but everything was happening so damned fast he didn’t dare risk pulling himself away from a screen even for a minute. Lisa had ordered the SDF-3 to Fantoma’s brightside, where it was holding now.

“Has anyone located General Edwards yet?” Rick shouted into a mike.

“He’s on his way up to the Sit Room, sir,” someone replied.

Rick shook his head, feeling a rage mount within him. Lisa turned to watch him. “Admiral, you better get going. We can manage up here.”

Rick looked over at her, his lips tight, and nodded.

“Sirs, enemy are in retreat.”’

Rick watched the board. “Thank God-”

“Ghost is in pursuit.”

Rick blanched.

“Contact them! Who ordered pursuit-Edwards?!”

Blake busied himself at the console. “Negative, sir. We, we don’t know who gave the order, sir.”

“Direct the Skull to go-now!” Rick raced from the bridge.

Lisa regarded Fantoma’s ringplane and remembered a similar situation in Saturn’s rings.

“Activate ECM,” she ordered a moment later. “We’re bringing the ship up. And, dammit, send someone out to rescue that EVA craft””

Jonathan Wolff left the SDF-3 launch bay right behind the last of Max Sterling’s Skull Squadron fighters. He was in a Logan Veritech, a reconfigurable mecha that would one day become the mainstay of the Southern Cross’s Tactical Armored Space Corps. The Logan was often jokingly referred to as a “rowboat with wings” because of the bowshaped design of its radome and the mecha’s overall squatness. But if it was somewhat less orthodox-looking than the Alpha, the Logan was certainly as mean and maneuverable-and much more versatile-than the VT. In addition, the mecha’s upscaled cockpit could seat two, three in a pinch.

Scanners had indicated there were two people aboard the hapless EVA craft that had been caught up in the SDF-3’s fold. And they were alive, though more than likely unconscious or worse. There had been no response to the fortress’s attempts to communicate with the craft.

Empowering the fortress’s shields had made use of the tractor somewhat iffy, so Wolff had volunteered for the assignment, itching to get out there anyway, even if it meant on a rescue op. Now suddenly in the midst of it, he wasn’t so sure. Local space was lit up with spherical orange bursts and crisscrossed with blue laserfire and plasma discs of blinding light. Zentraedi Battlepods were one thing, but the ships the VTs found themselves up against looked like they had walked out of some ancient horror movie, and it was easy to believe that the crablike mecha actually were the XTs themselves. But Breetai and Exedore had said otherwise in their prelaunch briefings; inside each ship was a being that could prove swift and deadly in combat.

And that was indeed the case, as evidenced by the slowmo dogfights in progress all around Wolff. Skull’s VTs were battling their way through the remnants of the Invid’s original strike force in an effort to catch up with the Ghost Squadron, who’d been ordered off in pursuit of the main group. Wolff watched amazed as Battloids and Pincer Ships swapped volleys, blew one another to fiery bits, and sometimes wrestled hand-to-pincers, battering each other with depleted cannons. Wolff watched Captain Miriya Sterling’s red Veritech engage and destroy three Invid ships with perfectly placed Hammerhead missiles.

Max, too, seemed to be having a field day; but the numbers were tipped in the enemy’s favor, and Wolff wondered how long Skull would be able to hold out.

He was closing fast on the EVA craft now, and thought he could discern movement in the rear seat of the cockpit. But as the Logan drew nearer, he could see that both pilots were either unconscious or dead. Reconfiguring now, he imaged the Battloid to take hold of the small ship and propel it back toward Fantoma’s brightside and the SDF-3. But just then he received a command over the net to steer clear, and a moment later the fortress emerged from the ringplane and loomed into view. Inexplicably, the Skull Squadron was falling away toward Fantoma’s opaline surface, leaving the ship open to frontal assaults by the Pincer units, but in a moment those ships were a mere memory, disintegrated in a cone of fire spewed from the SDF-3’s main gun.

Harsh static crackled through Wolff’s helmet pickups as he turned his face from the brilliance of the blast. But when he looked again, two clam-shaped transports had materialized out of nowhere in the fortress’s wake.

Reflexively, Wolff went on the com net to shout a warning to the bridge. Secondary batteries commenced firing while the fortress struggled to bring itself around, but by then it was too late. Wolff saw the SDF-3 sustain half-a-dozen solid hits, before return fire sanitized the field.

A score of lifeless men and women lay sprawled across the floor of the fortress’s engineering hold. Damage-control crews were rushing about, slipping in puddles of blood and cooling fluids, trying to bring dozens of electrical fires under control. A portion of the ruptured hull had already self-sealed, but other areas ruined beyond repair had to be evacuated and closed off by pocket bulkheads.

Lang and Exedore ran through smoke and chaos toward the fold-generator chamber, arriving in time to see one of the ruptured mechanisms vanish into thin air.

Lang tried to shout something to his team members above the roar of exhaust fans, but everyone had been nearly deafened by the initial blasts.

Just then a second explosion threw Lang and Exedore to the floor, as some sort of black, wraithlike images formed from smoke and fire and took shape in the hold, only to disappear from view an instant later.

Lang’s nostrils stung from the smoke of insulation fires and molten metals. He got to his feet and raced back into the chamber, throwing switches and crossovers at each station.

By the time Exedore got to him, Lang was a quivering, burned, and bloodied mess.

“They knew j-just where to h-hit us,” he stammered, pupilless irises aflame. “We’re stranded, we’re stranded here!”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I’m of the opinion that in this instance Lang (with regard to Janice) was emulating the Masters-or more accurately perhaps, serving Protoculture’s darker side. Zand, and anyone else who conspired to control, was serving this purpose as well. Protoculture’s bright side had yet to reveal itself, for what had it wrought so far but conquest, war, and death? Indeed, it could be argued that Protoculture’s only bright moment came at the end, when the Regis wed herself to it and was transformed.

Mingtao, Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

Obsim was pensive as he regarded the communicator sphere; four troop carriers and countless Pincer Ships had been lost, but he had achieved a good portion of his purpose: the invaders’ starship was crippled if not destroyed. It had come into full view now from Fantoma’s brightside, and was holding in orbit near the giant’s outer rings. ECM had foiled Obsim’s attempt to reach the Regent, but a messenger ship had since been dispatched and reinforcements were assured.

But what now? the Invid scientist asked himself. Surely the outsiders recognized that Tirol would soon be entering Fantoma’s shadow. Would they then move the ship into orbit, risk some sort of landing perhaps? Well, no matter, Obsim decided. The command ships would be there to greet them.

On the fortress, meanwhile, a mood of apprehension prevailed while the RDF licked its wounds and counted the dead. Unprovoked attack was one of many scenarios the crew had prepared for, but the Invid hadn’t been seriously considered. Lang, for one, had thought that the Zentraedi had all but eliminated the race; and while he remembered the image of an Invid ship included in Zor’s SDF-1 “greetings message,” neither Exedore nor Breetai had been forthcoming in supplying him with any additional information. Moreover, the arrival of the “Visitor,” and the subsequent Robotech War, had left the Earth Forces with the mistaken notion that humankind dominated the galaxy. Although the Zentraedi were giant, biogenetic clones, they were still in some way understandable and acceptable.

But not so this new enemy wave. There had of course been prelaunch briefings that addressed the alien issue, but the Zentraedi’s descriptions of the Invid, the Karbarrans, the Spherisians, might as well have been campfire ghost stories or horror movie tribute-War With the Newts! So as rumors began to spread through the ship, everyone was left asking themselves why the mission had once seemed a sensible idea. And Lang had yet to tell everyone the really bad news.

In an effort to curtail some of the loose talk, Rick called for a immediate debriefing following the return of Ghost and Skull squadrons. Everything would have to be kept secret until all the facts were known.

He was pacing back and forth in one of the ship’s conference rooms now, while the general staff and squadron commanders seated themselves at the U-shaped arrangement of tables. Livid, he turned to Edwards first, calling for an explanation of the man’s motives in superseding command’s orders regarding engagement. Edwards listened attentively while Rick laid it out, allowing a pregnant silence to fill the room before responding.

“The SDF-3 was under attack, Admiral. It was simply a matter of protecting the ship.”

Rick narrowed his eyes. “And suppose those ships had come in peace, General-what then?”

Edwards snorted, in no mood to be censured. “They didn’t come in peace.”

“You risked the lives of your men. We had no idea what we were going to face out there.”

Edwards looked across the table to the Ghost Squadron commanders. “My men did their job. The enemy was destroyed.”

Rick made a gesture of annoyance, and turned to the VT pilots. “I want to know why your teams gave pursuit. Who gave those orders?”

Max stood up. “Admiral, we received orders to pursue.”

“With the proper authentication codes?”

“Affirmative, sir,” half-a-dozen voices murmured at once.

Rick knew that he could do little more than demand a report, because Edwards could only be censured by the Council itself. Where Rick and Lisa would ordinarily have had complete run of the ship, the dictates of the Plenipotentiary Council had forced them to share their command with Edwards and other representatives of the Army of the Southern Cross apparat. This was the arrangement that had been made to satisfy the demands of Field Marshal Anatole Leonard’s burgeoning power base in Monument City. Edwards’s presence, in fact, was an accommodation of sorts, an appeasement undertaken to keep the RDF and Southern Cross from further rivalries-the Expeditionary Mission’s peace treaty with itself. The last thing anyone wanted was to have the SDF-3 return to a factioned and feudal Earth. Moreover, Edwards was the xenophobic voice of those Council members (Senators Longchamps and Stinson, chiefly, the old guard of the UEDC) who still felt that Captain Gloval and the SDF-1 command had been too soft with the Zentraedi during the Robotech war-granting asylum for the enemy’s Micronized spies and suing for peace with Commander Breetai. And as long as Edwards continued to enjoy support with the Council, Rick’s hands were tied. It had been like this between generals and governments throughout history, he reminded himself, and it remained one of the key factors that contributed to his growing discontent.

Rick glanced at Edwards. “I want full reports on my desk by fourteen-hundred hours. Is that understood?”

Again, Rick received eager nods, and talk switched to the issue of secrecy. Rick was listening to descriptions of the mecha the VTs had confronted, when a lieutenant jg entered with a personal message. It was from Lang: the EVA craft had been taken aboard and its passengers moved to sick bay.

Rick went pale as he read the names.

It was a terrible dream: there she was on stage all set to perform, and the lyrics just wouldn’t come. And it seemed the hall was in space with moons and planets visible in the darkness where an audience should have been sitting. Then Rick was, what?-God! he was coming down the aisle with Lisa on his arm…

Minmei’s eyes focused on Rick’s face as she came around. She was in bed and he was leaning over her with a concerned look. She gave him a weak smile and hooked her arms around his neck.

“Oh, Rick, what a dream I had-”

“Minmei, are you all right?” He had unfastened her embrace and was holding her hands.

“Well, yeah,” she began. “Except for that…” Then it hit her like a brilliant flash.

Rick saw the shock of recognition in her eyes and tried to calm her. “You’re aboard the SDF-3. You’re safe, now, and the doctors say you’ll be fine.”

“Where’s Janice, Rick!”

“She’s right next door.” Rick motioned. “And she’s okay. Dr. Lang is with her.”

Minmei buried her face in her hands and cried, Rick’s hand caressing her back. “Why did you do it, Minmei?” he asked after a moment.

She looked up and wiped the tears away. “Rick, I just couldn’t let everyone leave. You’re all so important to me. Do you understand?”

“You could have been killed, do you understand that?”

She nodded. “Thank you for saving me.”

Rick cleared his throat. “Well, actually you’ll have to thank Colonel Wolff for that. But listen, you better get some rest now. There’s a lot I have to tell you, but it’ll keep.”

“Thank you, Rick.”

“Go to sleep now,” he said, standing up and tucking her in.

She was out even before Rick left the room, so she didn’t see the orderly who entered, or the astonished look Rick gave the bearded man. It was a look of recognition, but one tinged with enough disbelief to render the first impression false. But as the orderly studied Minmei’s sleeping form, he recalled how he had once protected her from giants and worse.

In the room adjacent to Minmei’s, Dr. Lang was staring into Janice’s blue eyes. Her skills had certainly saved Minmei’s life, but why had Janice listened to Minmei in the first place?

Their little stunt had destroyed all the plans he had taken such pains to set in motion; and coming as it did on the heels of the damage done to the fold generators and what that meant for the Expeditionary mission, it was almost more than he could bear.

“Janice,” he said evenly. “Retinal scan.”

Janice’s eyes took on an inner glow as she returned Lang’s all but forehead-to-forehead stare. But in a moment the glow was gone; her eyes and face were lifeless, and her skin seemed to lose color and tautness.

“Yes, Dr. Lang. Your request.”

“I want you to replay the events prior to SDF-3’s departure, Janice. I want to understand the logic of your decisions. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Dr. Lang,” Janice repeated in the same dull monotone.

Lang laughed to himself as he listened. He had foreseen the possibility of such an occurrence, but to be faced with the reality of that now…That part of the android that was its artificial intelligence had actually developed an attachment, a fondness for Lynn-Minmei! The specter of this had been raised and discussed repeatedly by the Tokyo Center’s team, but in the end Lang had rejected the safeguards they had urged him to install, and suddenly he was face-to-face with the results of that uninformed decision.

The android had taken more than a decade of intensive work; but when Janice took her first steps, all those hours and all that secrecy seemed justified. It was shortly after the destruction of New Macross that Lang had begun to think about teaming the android with Lynn-Minmei, and the singer had easily been convinced of just how important such a partnership might prove to Earth’s safety. But defensive harmonies aside, Lang had chosen Minmei because of her undenied access to political sanctuaries Lang himself could not enter, the Southern Cross apparat especially. So Lang was understandably thrilled to learn that Senator Moran had taken an interest in Janice, the young sensation some people were calling his niece, some his mistress. But what good was his spy to him now, stranded as she was along with the rest of them light-years from Earth.

Lang uttered a resigned sigh as he reached behind Janice’s neck to remove the dermal plug concealed by her fall of thick hair. The plug covered an access port Lang could tap for high-speed information transference. He had the portable transfer tube prepared, and was ready to jack in. But just then Rick Hunter came through the door.

Undetected, Lang dropped the tube behind the bed and voiced a hushed command to Janice. Hunter was staring at him when he turned from his patient.

“Uh, sorry, Doc, guess I should’ve knocked first,” Rick said uneasily.

“Nonsense,” Lang told him, getting to his feet.

Rick looked back and forth between Lang and Janice; he didn’t know Minmei’s partner all that well, but he was aware of the scuttlebutt that linked her to Lang. Janice was offering him a pale smile now.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Homesick,” Janice said. “And less than shipshape.”

“Well I don’t know what we’re going to do about your homesickness, but I’m sure some rest will help the way you’re feeling.”

“That’s good advice,” Lang seconded. He switched off the lights as he and Rick left the room.

“She’s…sweet,” Rick said, uncomfortable with the silence the two men fell into.

At, the elevator, Jonathan Wolff stepped out from the car, managing a salute despite the two bouquets of flowers he carried. “Thought I’d try and cheer up our new passengers,” he said by way of explanation.

Rick and Lang traded knowing looks.

“Guess every SDF’s meant to carry civilians, huh, Admiral.”

“Does seem that way, Colonel,” Rick said. “Minmei’s in room eleven,” he added, motioning with his chin.

Wolff moved off down the hall, and Rick and Lang entered the elevator. “I think our dapper young colonel has more than good cheer on his mind,” Lang opined.

Rick felt his jaw. “Doesn’t he have a wife and coupla kids back home?”

“Ask him.”

Rich shrugged. “It’s none of my business.”

A second debriefing was held later that afternoon. In addition to those who had attended the earlier session were Commander Vince Grant, Brigadier General Reinhardt, Wolff, Lang, Breetai, and Exedore, along with various squadron and company commanders.

Photo images and schematics filled the room’s numerous screens this time; the crew was still on standby alert, and the ship would shortly reposition itself for an orbital shift.

Lang at last revealed that two of the spacefold generators had been destroyed during the assault. He explained that a fold might still be possible, but there was no guarantee the fortress would emerge in Earthspace, and anything short of that was unacceptable. The twelve-member Plenipotentiary Council had voted to withhold this information from the crew. But it was therefore imperative that the Masters be contacted as soon as possible.

“The Invid presence might prove a blessing in disguise for us,” Lang continued. “Because if the Masters are indeed being held captive on Tirol, the Expeditionary mission could well be their salvation.”

Lang called up an image of the Fantoma system on the main screen. Like Uranus, the planet had been tipped on its side eons ago. It had an extensive ring system held in check by shepherd satellites, and numerous moons of varied size and surface and atmosphere.

Tirol was the third moon, somewhat smaller than Earth, and the only one with an hospitable atmosphere. It was, however, a somewhat desolate world, barren, with much of its topography muted by volcanic flows. Just why the Masters had chosen to remain there with half the galaxy at their disposal was a question Lang had recently added to his long list. In a matter of days the moon would enter Fantoma’s shadow, which could complicate things considerably.

“Surface scans and intensity traces have given us the picture of an almost deserted world,” Lang added as a closeup of Tirol came up on the screen, “except for this one city located close to Tirol’s equator. I have proposed to the general staff that we begin here.”

Rick stood up to address the table. “There’s evidence the city’s seen a lot of nasty action lately, so we’ve got to assume the Invid have a strong presence down there. I think our best move is to drop the GMU to recon this entire sector and ascertain the Invid’s strengths. The SDF will be holding at a Lagrange point, so you’ll have all the backup you need in case we’ve underestimated their defensive capabilities. Any questions so far?”

The men shook their heads and grumbled nos.

“Has everyone received the new authentication codes?” Rick directed to Grant and Wolff.

“We have, sir.”

“I’ve asked Lord Exedore-” Lang started to say when. Breetai interrupted him.

“Exedore and I have decided that my troops should accompany Commander Grant’s ground forces.”

Rick regarded the Zentraedi with an appraising look. “You’re not required to become involved with this, Commander Breetai. You’re not under our command…”

“That has nothing to do with it, Admiral. You seem to forget that I have walked this world.”

Rick smiled. “I haven’t forgotten…Grant, Wolff, do you have any problems with this?”

Vince shook his head and extended his hand to Breetai. “Welcome aboard, Commander.”

“Well, that’s settled,” Lang said, getting to his feet again. “I have one thing to add. It concerns the Invid ships.” Perspective schematics of a Pincer Ship took shape while he spoke. “Their central weakness seems to be this scanner that looks like some sort of mouth. So direct your shots there if it comes to that.”

“And I hope it won’t,” Rick interjected. “It’s possible that our initial confrontation was a misunderstanding, and I don’t want us going down there like liberators. This is still a diplomatic mission, and you are only to engage if provoked.” Rick shot Edwards a look. “Is that understood?”

“Affirmative,” Wolff and Grant answered him.

“All right, then,” Rick said after a moment. “Good luck.” And I wish I could be down there with you, he said to himself.

The dropship hangar bay was the scene of mounting tension, tempers, and liveliness when the word came down to scramble. Men and women ran for gear and ordnance while the massive GMU rumbled aboard the ship that would take it planetside. Jack Baker was among the crowd, Wolverine assault rifle in hand as he lined up with his teammates for a last-minute briefing. Like the rest of them he had missed yesterday’s EV action, but stories had spread among the ranks of an engagement with some new breed of XTs, who flew ships that resembled giant one-eyed land crabs. And now the GMU had been chosen to spearhead a ground assault on the Robotech Masters’ homeworld. Jack would still have preferred piloting an Alpha Fighter with the Skull, but under the circumstances this op was probably the next best thing to that.

He looked down the long line of mecha pilots waiting to board the dropship and spied Karen Penn just as she was donning her helmet, blond hair like fire in the red illumination of the hangar.

“Karen!” he yelled, waving and hoping to get her attention above the sound of alert klaxons and high-volume commands. He was tempted to give it one last try, but her helmet was on now and he knew he wouldn’t be heard. He did, however, lean out of line to watch her rush up the ramp.

At the same time, he peripherally caught sight of a captain taking angry strides toward him.

Hurriedly, Jack tucked his chin in, steeled himself, and muttered a prayer that the line would get moving.

“Just what the hell was that all about, Ensign!” the captain was yelling into his face an instant later. “You think this is some kind of goddamned picnic, bright boy! You’ve got time to wave to your friends like you’re off on some cruise! Well, let me tell you something, you deluded piece of space trash: it’s no picnic and it’s no cruise! You got that, you worthless little sublife protein! Because if I see, you stepping out of line again, you’re going to be sucking vacuum before we even hit!”

Jack could feel the woman’s spittle raining against his face, but told himself it was just a cooling sea spray washing over the bow. The captain continued ranting for a while longer, then gave him a powerful shove as the line suddenly jerked into motion.

Oh well, he reminded himself, the worst she could do was chew him out, which didn’t amount to much considering there were things down there waiting to kill him.

In another part of the hangar, Minmei was saying thank you to Jonathan Wolff. A personal note from Admiral Hunter had gotten her past security, and now she and Wolff were standing by the broad and flattened armored bow of the dropship. Several Micronized Zentraedi were gaping at the singer from a respectable distance, but Breetai soon appeared on the scene and hurried them to the ship with some harsh grunts and curses.

“I just had to thank you before you left,” Minmei was saying. “Janice wanted me to tell you the same. You saved our lives, Colonel.” She vaguely remembered him from the wedding; but then she had met so many men during those few hours…Still, there was something about Wolff that caught her attention now. Maybe it was the mustache, Minmei told herself, the man’s swashbuckler’s good looks and tall, broad-shouldered figure. She wished she had chosen some other outfit to wear. The RDF uniform just wasn’t cut right for her shape.

Wolff didn’t seem to mind it, however. “Actually the honor could have gone to anyone,” he said, showing a roguish grin. “But I was lucky enough to volunteer.”

Minmei liked that. “Janice and I were just trying to get a better look at the fortress, and all of a sudden…well, you know.”

Wolff’s eyebrows arched. “Really? That’s strange, because I had your flight recorder checked, and it seems you two actually flew directly into the vortex of the ship’s spacefold flash point.”

Minmei’s face reddened. “Well, whatever happened, I’m glad about it now.”

“Me, too,” Wolff said, holding her gaze.

Suddenly Minmei went up on tiptoes and kissed him lightly on the corner of the mouth. “Be careful down there, Colonel.”

Wolff reached for her hand and kissed it. “Can I see you when I get back?”

“I’d like that, Colonel-”

“Jonathan.”

“Jonathan.” She smiled. “Take care, Jonathan.”

Wolff turned and was gone.

“That little fool,” Lisa said after Rick told her about Minmei. They were alone in a small lounge not far from the bridge. “What was she trying to do, get herself killed?”

“You have to see it from her side,” Rick argued. “She felt like everyone she cared about was leaving her.”

Lisa regarded him suspiciously. “No, I don’t have to see things from her side. But I’m sure you were understanding with her, weren’t you? Did she cry, on your shoulder, Rick?”

“Well, what was I supposed to do? You know I’d send her back if we could.”

“I wonder,” Lisa said, folding her arms.

Rick made a conciliatory gesture. “Whoa…Look, I don’t like where this one’s going. She’s here and there’s nothing we can do about it, okay?”

Lisa looked at him for a moment, then stepped in to lean her head on his shoulder. They hadn’t had a chance to say two words to each other for more than twenty-four hours, and their comfortable bed was beginning to feel miles away. They were both exhausted and still a little stunned by the events that had transpired since they’d gone off to work!

“Is it the honeymoon you hoped for?” Rick asked, holding her.

She let out her breath in a rush. “It’s the nightmare I wished we’d never have to live through.” She pulled back to gaze at him. “We came here to sue for peace. And now…”

“Maybe that doesn’t exist anymore,” Rick said, turning to the viewport as Tirol loomed into view.

In the nave of Tiresia’s transformed Royal Hall, Obsim listened patiently to the computer’s announcement. A flash of synaptic sparks danced across the brain section’s fissured surface, strobing orange light down at the scientist and a group of soldiers who were gathered nearby. For the past several periods the starship had been trying to communicate with Tirol, but Obsim had elected to remain silent. If indeed they had come in “peace,” why were they equipped with such a mighty arsenal of weapons? More confusing still, their ship and mecha were Protoculturedriven, a fact that linked them beyond a shadow of a doubt to the Masters’ empire.

And now they were sending one of their transport dropships to the moon’s surface, just as he had guessed they would.

“Tell the Command ships to prepare,” Obsim instructed his lieutenant. “And have your units stand by for a strikeship assault.”

“And the Inorganics, Obsim?” the lieutenant asked. “Will the brain reactivate them now?”

Obsim came as close to smiling as his physiognomy allowed. “In due time, Enforcer, in due time.”

CHAPTER NINE

I suppose I should have been surprised that it didn’t happen a lot sooner. Rick never believed that he was cut out to command, and I can remember him already trying to talk himself into resigning his commission when work first began on the SDF-3. I wanted to get to the bottom of it, but he didn’t want my help. Basically he didn’t want to hear his fears contradicted. So I was left to puzzle it out like a mystery, and I was convinced that both Roy Fokker’s death and Rick’s continuing “little brother” attitude had a lot to do with his behavior.

Lisa Hayes, Recollections

It was an historic moment: the dropship’s arrival on Tirol marked the first occasion humankind had set foot on a world outside the Solar system. But it was business as usual, and that business was war.

The GMU rumbled down out of the dropship’s portside ramp onto the moon’s barren surface, and within minutes Wolff was shouting “Go! Go! Go!” into the Hovertank cockpit mike as his Pack left the mobile base. Their landing zone was at the foot of a towering black ridge of impossibly steep crags; but soon the Pack was moving across a barren stretch of seemingly irradiated terrain. The massive GMU dwindled behind the twenty-unit squadron as they formed up on Wolff’s lead and sped toward Tirol’s principal city-Tiresia, according to Breetai. It was late afternoon on Tirol.

The Hovertanks were ground-effect vehicles; reconfigurable assemblages of heavy-gauge armor in angular flattened shapes and acute edges, with rounded downsloping deflection prows. In standard mode, they rode on a cushion of self-generated lift, but mechamorphosed, they were either Battloid or guardian-squat, two-legged waddling mecha the size of a house, with a single, top-mounted particle-projection cannon.

Wolff called up the GMU on the comlink for a situation report, and Vince Grant’s handsome brown face surfaced on the mecha’s cockpit commo screen. A defensive perimeter had been established around the base, and so far there was no sign of activity, enemy or otherwise. “You’ve got an open channel home,” Vince told him. “We want to know everything you’re seeing out there.”

Wolff rogered and signed off. There were no maps of Tiresia, but bird’s-eye scans from the SDF-3 scopes had furnished the Pack with a fairly complete overview. The city was laid out like a spoked wheel, the hub of which appeared to be an enormous Cheops-like pyramid. Eight streets lined with secondary buildings radiated out from the center at regular intervals, from magnetic north right around the compass. Nothing came close to rivaling the pyramid in size; in fact, most of the structures were the rough equivalent of three stories or less, a mere fraction of the central temple.

Exedore had described Tiresia’s architecture as approximating Earth’s Greco-Roman styles, with some ultratech innovations that were Tirol’s alone. This is precisely what Wolff found as his Pack entered the city; although hardly a learned man, Wolff had seen enough pictures and renderings of Earth’s ancient world to corroborate the Zentraedi ambassador’s claims.

“Um, fluted columns, entablatures, peaked pediments,” he radioed back to the GMU.

“Arches, vaults…buildings that look like the Parthenon, or that thing in Romethe Colosseum. But I’m not talking about marble or anything like that. Everything seems to be faced with some nonporous alloy or ceramic-even the streets and courtyards.”

But this was only half the story, the facade, as it were. Because elsewhere were rectilinear and curved structures of modernistic design, often surrounded by curious antennalike towers and assemblages of huge clear conduits.

And much of it had been reduced to smoldering rubble.

“I’m splitting the squadron,” Wolff updated a few minutes later. Straight ahead was the central pyramid, still a good distance off but as massive as a small mountain in Tirol’s fading light. He switched over to the mecha’s tactical net. “A team will follow me up the middle. Winston, Barisky, take your team over to the next avenue and parallel us. But stay on-line with me. One block at a time, and easy does it.”

“Roger, Wolff Leader,” Winston returned.

“Switching over to IR scanners and moving out.”

There was still no sign of the Invid, or anything else for that matter, but Wolff was experiencing an itchy feeling he had come to rely on, a combat sense he had developed during the Malcontent Uprisings, hunting down renegade Zentraedi in the jungled Southlands. He checked his cockpit displays and boosted the intensity of the forward scanners. At the end of the broad street where it met the hub were a pair of stacked free-floating columns with some sort of polished sphere separating them. He was close enough to the pyramid base now to make out a stairway that ascended one face; the pillared shrine at the summit was no longer visible.

Just then Winston’s voice cracked over the net, loud in Wolff’s ears.

“We’ve got movement, Wolff Leader! Multiple signals all over the place!”

“What’s your position, Boomer?” Winston gave the readings in a rush. “Can you identify signatures? Boomer, do you copy?”

“Nothing we’ve seen,” the B-team leader said over a burst of angry static. “Bigger than either ship those flyboys registered. Much bigger.”

“On our way,” Wolff was saying when something thirty feet tall suddenly broke through a domed building off to his left. It was an inky black bipedal ship, with cloven feet and arms like armored pincers. The head, equally armored, was helmet-shaped but elongated in the rear, and sandwiched between two nasty-looking shoulder cannons. Wolff watched spellbound as orange priming charges formed at the tips of the cigar-shaped weapons. An instant later two radiant beams converged on one of the Hovertanks and blew it to smithereens.

Wolff gave the order to return fire as four more enemy ships emerged from the buildings and a fifth surfaced in front of him, right out of the damned street!

The Hovertanks reconfigured to Gladiator mode and singled off against the Invid, the streets a battle zone all at once, filled with heavy metal thunder and blinding flashes of explosive light. Wolff saw another of his number go down. On the tac net, Wilson reported that his team was faring no better.

“Go to Battloid mode. Pull back and regroup,” he ordered. Then he tried to raise the GMU.

In the GMU’s command center, Vince Grant received word of the recon group’s situation: four, possibly five, Hovertanks were down and Wolff was calling for reinforcements or extraction. His Pack had been chased to the outskirts of the city, where they were dug in near the remains of what the colonel described as “a kind of Roman basilica.”

“Tell him to hold on, help’s on the way,” Grant told the radio man. Then he swung around to the command center’s tactical board. At about the time Wolff’s Pack had been ambushed, Invid troops had begun a move against the mobile base itself. Deafening volleys were rolling in from the line, echoing in the sawtooth ridge at the GMU’s back.

Night had fallen, but it was as if someone had forgotten to inform Tirol’s skies.

“Ground forces are sustaining heavy casualties in all perimeter zones,” a com tech updated without having to be asked. “The enemy are employing mecha that fit yesterday’s profiles, along with teams of one-pilot strike ships.”

The commander studied a computer schematic as it turned and upended itself on the screen. Vince tried to make some sense of the thing. A deadly kazoo, he thought, with forward guns like withered arms and an undercarriage cluster of propulsion globes.

Whatever they were, they were decimating the forward lines. He had already lost count of the wounded and dead.

“Wolff on the horn, Commander,” a tech said. “He’s requesting backup.”

“Get his present location,” Vince told the woman.

The tech bent to her task, but got no response. She tapped her phones and repeated Wolff’s call sign and code into the net.

Vince leaned over the console and hit the com stud. “Go ahead, Colonel. We’re reading you. Colonel.”

“God, I don’t believe it!” Wolff said at last.

“Colonel,” Vince said more loudly. “Respond.”

“They’re…they’re going after my men, pulling them out of the tanks…”

Several command-center techs turned to watch Vince at the com station. “Who is, Colonel?”

The net was silent for a moment; then Wolff added, “Cats, Commander. Some kind of goddamned cats!”

Grant lifted an ashen face to the room. “Notify Breetai that his Battlepod team has a green light.”

“Bah,” Cabell muttered, switching off the remote sensor’s audio signal. “Our Bioroids were a better match for the Invid than these Earthers. It’s a mystery how they defeated our Zentraedi.”

Rem kept his eyes on the monitor screen while the old man swiveled to busy himself with other matters. Almost two dozen Human mecha had entered the city, but there was scarcely half that number now. They had successfully turned the tide against the Command ships that had surprised them, but Invid reinforcements had since appeared on the scene. The remains of countless Hellcats littered the streets the Humans had chosen for their last stand.

“But Cabell, isn’t there some way we can help them?”

The scientist showed him his palms. “With what, my boy? We are effectively trapped down here.” He motioned to the Pollinators who were peacefully huddled in a corner. “Would you drive these ferocious creatures against them?”

Rem made an impatient gesture. “We can tell the Humans about the Royal Hall.”

“Break radio silence?” Cabell asked. “And draw the Invid right to us?”

“Would you rather the Invid inherit our world?”

Cabell stroked his beard and regarded the youth. “How like him you are…”

Rem beetled his brows. “Who?”

“Uh, why, your father of course,” Cabell said, turning away. “He, too, would have thought nothing of such a sacrifice. But listen, my boy, how can we be certain these Humans are any better than the Invid? After all, we know the Invid’s capabilities. But the Humans’ ways are unknown to us.”

Rem gestured to the screen. “Perhaps this will change your mind, Cabell.”

Skeptical, Cabell faced the screen: a score of Battlepods had arrived to back up the Terran tanks.

“Zentraedi mecha,” the brain announced. “Regult and Glaug.”

“Yes,” Obsim said, registering some surprise. “So there is a connection between these invaders and our old foes.” He looked back and forth from the communicator sphere to the living computer. “Perhaps we are in some jeopardy, after all. Computer: evaluate and advise.”

“Extrapolating from previously displayed battle tactics…” the brain began. “Defeat for our ground forces in seven point four periods unless reinforcements arrive from Optera.

Substantial damage to aliens’ mecha and casualties in excess of six hundred; but not enough to threaten their victory.”

“Advise, then.”

A bundle of raw energy ascended the floating organ’s stem and diffused in the region of the midbrain. “Conserve our strength. Take the battle to the invaders’ base. Sacrifice the troopers to keep the invaders from the city. And await the arrival of reinforcements.”

Obsim mulled it over. “Is there more?”

“Yes,” the brain added a moment later. “Protect the brain at all costs.”

“Headless ostriches” was the term VT pilots had given Battlepods during the Robotech War. Bipedal, with reverse-articulated legs and a laser-bristled spherical command module, the pods had been designed for full-size warriors. There was just enough room for a single, fully expendable pilot, and little in the way of cockpit padding or defensive shielding. But Lang’s teams had reworked the mecha, so that they could now be operated by two Micronized pilots with plenty of room to spare. RDF mechamorphs were trained in pod operation, but there existed an unspoken taboo that kept Humans to their own mecha and Zentraedi to theirs.

But there were no such lines drawn when Breetai’s team leaped in to lend the Wolff Pack a much-needed assist. Battlepods and Hovertanks fought side-by-side hammering away at the Invid Command ships. Pulsed-laser fire and conventional armor-piercing projectiles split Tirol’s night. An entire quadrant of the city burned while the battle raged, and friend and foe added their own fire and smoke to the already superheated air.

The Hellcat Inorganics had abandoned the scene, as though frightened off by the pods, and now the Command ships were suddenly turning tail.

Wolff sat in the mecha’s seat, convulsively triggering the Hovertank’s weapon as the enemy ships disengaged and began to lift off. The colonnade of a building collapsed behind him, sending gobs of molten metal airborne. He raised the GMU on the net to update his situation.

“We’re being overrun,” a panicked voice informed him in response. “Commander Grant says to pick yourselves up and get back here ASAP!”

Wolff ordered his few remaining tankers to reconfigure, and addressed Breetai. “We’re moving out. The base is ass deep in pincers.”

“At your command, Colonel,” the Zentraedi responded, pleased to be taking orders once again, to have an imperative to follow.

Every bed and table in the GMU’s med-surg unit was filled, and still the wounded kept coming. The mess hall was a triage area and battle dressing station now, and Jack Baker had found himself in the midst of it, pulled there from supply to lend a hand. All around him men and women were stretched out on the floor and tabletops in postures of distress and agony. A young woman with third-degree burns across half her body flailed her arms against the restraints a medic was attempting to fasten, while a nurse struggled to get an N drip running. Elsewhere a man drugged beyond pain stared almost fascinated at the bloody stump that had been a leg less than an hour before. Some of the wounded groaned and called on God and relatives for help; but Jack saw others expire with no more than a whimper, or a final curse.

Jean Grant, the front of her surgical gown red-brown from blood and antiseptic washes, was moving from table to table checking wounds and shouting orders to her staff.

“Move it, soldier!” Jack heard someone behind him yell. He felt the edge of a stretcher smack against his hip, and turned as two women medics rushed past him bearing a lieutenant he recognized to surgery.

A warrant officer called to him next, waving him over to a bloodied expanse of wall, three bodies slumped lifelessly against it. “These men are dead,” the officer announced, getting to his feet and wiping his hands on his trousers. “Get them out of here, and get yourself back up here on the double.” The officer looked around. “You!” he said, finding another aide in the crowds. “Get over here and give this man a hand!”

Jack bent down to regard the dead, unsure where to begin.

“You take his arms,” a female voice said over his shoulder. Karen Penn was beside him when he turned. She gave him a wan smile and wiped a damp strand of hair from her face with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of someone’s blood on her cheek.

“I want to get out there,” Jack grunted as he lifted the body. “Some paybacks are in order.”

“Maybe that’s what this guy said,” Karen bit out. “Let’s just do our job and forget the heroics.”

“We’ll see.”

When they had eased the body down onto the floor in the next room, Karen said, “If I see your sorry face show up in here, I’m going to remind you of that remark.”

“You do that,” Jack told her, breathing hard.

The SDF-3 was still at its orbital holding point above Tirol. The general staff was kept informed of the situation below by continuous updates from the GMU. One such report was coming into the fortress now, and T. R. Edwards left the TIC’s balcony rail to listen more closely. A tech loyal to the cause was making adjustments for reception, and punching decoding commands into the console.

“It’s from Grant, sir,” the tech reported, seeing Edwards peering over his shoulder. “The situation has deteriorated and is growing untenable.”

Edwards glanced around the balcony area. Hunter and Reinhardt had gone off to meet with Lang and some of the council members. “Speak plainly, Lieutenant,” he said, narrowing his eye.

“They’re getting their butts kicked, sir. Grant is requesting air support from the ship.”

Edwards straightened up and felt the stubble on his chin. “How do we know this isn’t some enemy trick, Lieutenant? Did the GMU use the proper authentication codes?”

“Affirmative, sir.”

Edwards was silent while the planetside transmission repeated itself. “But then they broke our code once already.”

The tech risked a grin. “I think I understand, sir.”

“You’ll go far,” Edwards told him, leaning in to dial the gain knob down to zero.

At the same time Edwards was gloating over having eliminated Vince Grant from his life, Minmei was fantasizing about how to get Jonathan Wolff into hers. It was the flower arrangement the colonel had had delivered to her cabinspace that kicked off the fantasy; obviously he had called in the order before he left, perhaps right after they said good-bye in the dropship hangar. She was toying with the flowers now, lost in a daydream, while Janice studied her from across the room.

“Keep fooling with those things and they’re going to wilt before they have a chance to bloom,” Janice said from the couch.

Minmei showed Janice a startled look, then gave the arrangement one last turn before she stepped back to regard it.

“You’re thinking about catching that bridal bouquet, aren’t you?”

Minmei smiled. “How could you tell?”

“Because sometimes I can read you like a screen,” Janice sighed. She patted the cushion next to her. “Come over here, you.”

Minmei fixed two drinks and sat down, kicking off her shoes and curling her legs beneath her. Janice sipped at her glass and said, “Now tell your partner all about it.”

“Do you believe in omens?”

“Omens?” Janice shook her head. “First I’d have to believe that the future has already been written, and that’s simply not the case. Reality is shaped and reshaped by our words and deeds.”

“I’m not asking you philosophically, Janice.”

Janice took another sip and glanced at the flowers. “You think destiny has thrown you and Jonathan Wolff together.”

Minmei nodded. “Don’t you?”

“No. Not any more than I think destiny brought you and me together. We have a tendency to highlight moments we wish to think preordained.”

“I promised myself I’d never get involved with a military man,” Minmei continued, as though she hadn’t heard Janice. “Not after Rick. And now here I am worrying about Jonathan, just the way I used to worry about Rick.” She met Janice’s eye. “I don’t want to lose him, Janice.”

“Worrying doesn’t change anything, Lynn.”

“Then what does it matter if I worry? Maybe I just didn’t worry enough about Rick.”

“`They also serve…’” Janice mused.

“Huh?”

“Just something I heard once.” She took Minmei’s hand. “Go ahead and worry. We all have our appointed tasks.”

“I’m sick of having to listen to everyone,” Rick complained bitterly, sitting down on the edge of the bed. He and Lisa had taken advantage of a short break to rendezvous in their quarters. “The council has decided we should recall the GMU and leave Tirolspace.

Suddenly they’re all convinced this bloodshed has been a misunderstanding. They want to remove our `threatening presence’-those are their words-and try to open lines of communication. Station a small unarmed party out here or something…” Rick exhaled forcibly. “War of the worlds…Even Lang has reversed himself. Ever since his teams started picking apart those Invid mecha we salvaged. All at once he’s fascinated with these butchers.”

Lisa rested her hand on his shoulder. “Don’t do this to yourself, Rick.”

He looked up at her, eyes flashing. “Yeah, well, I’m tired of being the one who has to walk around with his guts tied up.”

“Rick, nobody’s asking you-”

“My place is with the VTs. I just wasn’t cut out for command.”

Lisa kneeled down to show him the anger in her own eyes. “Maybe you weren’t, if you’re going to talk like that. But first tell me who we should have in command. And tell me what good you think you can do in combat?”

“Are you saying I’m rusty?”

Lisa’s eyes went wide. “Stand down, mister, I’m not saying that at all. I’m asking you what good it’s going to do to add another combatant to the field, when what we need is some enlightened decision making.” She relaxed her gaze. “You’re not thinking clearly, Rick.

You need some rest, we’re all frazzled.”

“Maybe you’re right,” he allowed.

The door tone sounded just then, and Max entered.

“Rick, Lisa. Sorry to barge in.”

“It’s all right, Max,” Rick said, getting to his feet. “What’s up?”

Max hesitated for a moment. “Rick, why are we ignoring the GMU’s requests for backup?”

Rick stared at Max blankly. “What are you talking about?”

“They’ve been sustaining heavy losses down there.”

“Why wasn’t I informed of this? Who’s in the Situation Room now?”

“Edwards.”

Rick cursed under his breath. He gave Lisa a brief kiss and grabbed hold of Max’s arm, tugging him from the rim.

The two men burst into the Tactical Information Center a few minutes later. Rick glanced once at Edwards and demanded an update from a tech.

“Colonel Wolff and Commander Breetai have pulled out of Tiresia with scarcely half their command, sir. Latest reports shows them in sector November Romeo-”

“Admiral!” a second tech shouted from farther along the threat-board console. “Priority transmission from the GMU.”

“Go ahead,” Rick told him.

The tech listened for a moment, then swiveled to face Rick again. “They say they’re receiving transmissions. From Tirol, sir-from somewhere in the city. The message is in Zentraedi, sir.”

“Have they identified themselves?”

“Negative, sir, other than to say they are Tiresians, and that they have important intelligence for our forces.”

“A trick,” Edwards spat. “An Invid trick. They’ve been sending in false messages all morning.”

Rick regarded him a moment, then turned to Max. “Scramble the Skull, Commander. Get down there and lend support.”

“Aye, aye, sir.” Max saluted, leaving the room in a rush.

“Tell Commander Grant to continue monitoring transmission,” Rick instructed the tech. “I want them to patch us in so we can hear it for ourselves.” Rick slapped his hand down on a mike switch. “Notify Exedore and Dr. Lang to meet me in the briefing room. I’m on my way now!”

Rick ran for the door, already considering the decisions he would have to make.

CHAPTER TEN

Cabell’s age was incalculable, as had been the case with Exedore, Breetai, and several other Zentraedis who’d permitted Zand’s team to study them. But whereas the warrior clones had been “birthed” full-size and ageless, Cabell had enjoyed an actual childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. His decision to undergo the Protoculture treatments that fixed his age was a conscious one. It has yet to be demonstrated how DNA and Protoculture combine to allow this miracle to occur. Like the Micronization process, it remains a complete mystery.

Louie Nichols, BeeZee: The Galaxy Before Zor

“My name is Cabell. I am Tirollan scientist. Our people are being held prisoner by the Invid in structures throughout the city. The Invid ships and Inorganics are receiving their orders from a computer that has been placed in Tiresia’s Royal Hall. To defeat them, you must destroy the computer. And you must do this quickly. The Invid are many and merciless.

Reinforcements will arrive if you do not take immediate action. My life is now forfeit; but I place the future of this world in your hands. Act swiftly, Humans, and be equally as merciless. For there is much more at stake than this tiny moon.”

Cabell repeated the message twice more, then shut down the com device and turned to Rem. “Well, that does it, my boy. We have compromised our location.”

Rem answered him in a determined voice. “But we may have saved Tirol, Cabell.”

The old man began to look around the room, his face a mixture of rapture and longing. He ran his long fingers over the console. “Such a waste…What wonders we had at our disposal, what miracles we could have worked in the Quadrant.”

Rem raised his eyes to the ceiling, as a sound like distant thunder shook the lab. This was followed by the sibilant burst of faraway energy beams. “It’s too late for dreams, Cabell.”

“I fear you’re right. Their search has commenced.”

Rem reactivated the communicator and gestured to the console audio pickups. “Repeat your message. We have nothing more to lose.”

“The transmission is being repeated,” the Invid brain informed Obsim.

“Pinpoint the source, computer.”

A wiggling current coursed over folds of computer cortex. “Below this very chamber. There are vaults and corridors, a mazelike complex.”

Obsim swung to an Enforcer lieutenant. “I want the Inorganics to flush them out. Tell your troops to stand by.”

The soldier saluted and left the nave for an adjacent room where several Invid were watching an armored Shock Trooper bring its annihilation discs to bear on a stretch of ceramiclike floor. Already a wide wound several yards deep and as many wide had been opened.

“Continue,” the Enforcer’s synthesized voice commanded. “Locate and destroy.”

“What does he mean by ‘Inorganics’?” Rick wanted to know.

Lang leaned back from the briefing-room table and steepled his fingers. “I think he must be referring to the fiendish drones Colonel Wolff faced in the city. Certainly the ships we salvaged are anything but inorganic.”

Lang tried to keep the excitement from his voice, but he was sure Rick and the others caught it. He had passed the better part of twenty-four hours in the laboratory dissecting those ships and the remains of one of the alien pilots. And what he’d uncovered about the Invid had been enough to send him into a veritable delirium. Thinking back even now to those hours of experimentation and discovery was like some wild roller-coaster ride. The very shape and form of those beings! As though they existed outside any rules of evolution. And the incredible similarity their brain patterns had to the emanations of Protoculture itself! The green nutrient the pilots bathed in inside their crab-ships, the myriad mysteries of the ships’ propulsion, communication, and weapons systems, the integrity of pilot and ship that rendered Robotechnology’s advances primitive and childlike by comparison…It had all sent him running-literally running!-to the Council to sue for a course other than the warlike one they had embarked on…

“Dr. Lang,” Rick was saying. “I asked you if this message will be enough to change the Council’s mind about leaving Tirolspace.”

Lang started to reply, but Exedore’s late entry interrupted him. The Zentraedi ambassador apologized and seated himself at the table between Lang and General Edwards, who was plainly disturbed by Exedore’s arrival. Rick had the transmission replayed for Exedore’s benefit and waited for his evaluation.

Exedore was silent for a long moment. “I…hardly know what to say,” he began. Rick had never seen the Zentraedi so, well, moved.

“Cabell,” Exedore uttered. “He was a contemporary of Zor, a mentor, I think you would say.

And to me, as well. He…he made me.”

Lang and Rick exchanged astonished looks while they listened to Exedore’s explanation.

This Cabell had apparently been instrumental in the creation of the first biogenetically engineered clones. “Then this message is on the level, Exedore?”

“No one would use the name Cabell to evil purpose, Admiral. Of this much I am certain.”

“Bullshit,” barked Edwards. “This is another Invid trick. They’re trying to lure us to this…`Royal Hall.’ Why? Because they have some sort of weapon there. They’re playing with us.”

“What about it?” Rick asked the table.

One of Lang’s techs spoke to that. “Scanners indicate the source of the transmission is subterranean-perhaps beneath the very structure we’ve identified as the Royal Hall.

Colonel Wolff described it as…” the tech checked his notes, “`a flat-topped pyramid as big as a small mountain, crowned with some kind of columned shrine.’ We’ve picked up intense energy readings emanating from the structure.”

“A weapon,” Edwards interjected.

Rick tried to puzzle it out. “Suppose it is legit. Would Cabell knowingly call a strike down on his own head, Exedore?”

“Without question, if Tirol could be saved by his actions.”

“Then the Robotech Masters may still be alive. Is it enough to convince the Council, Doctor, yes or no?”

“I think they’ll listen to reason. But if we can possibly achieve these ends without destroying-”

“Raise the GMU,” Rick instructed one of his aides. “Inform Commander Sterling that I want a recon flyby of that pyramid. I don’t want anybody trying anything stupid. Tell Grant to keep the GMU dug in and wait for my word to move in.”

“And Cabell?” said Exedore.

“Yes,” Lang seconded. “Surely a rescue team-”

“I’m sorry, Doctor,” Rick broke in. “You, too, Exedore. But I want to know what we’re dealing with before we send anyone in.”

Edwards snorted. “We’ll say some kind words over his grave,” he said loud enough for Exedore to hear.

In the tradition of that apocryphal cavalry who were always arriving in the nick of time, the Skull Squadron tore into Tirol’s skies from the shuttles that had transported them to the edge of the envelope, and fell like wrathful birds of prey on the enemy’s Pincer Ships and Shock Troopers. Cheers from Hovertankers and mecha commanders filled the tac and com nets as the Guardian-mode VTs dove in for missile releases and strafing runs.

Captain Miriya Parino Sterling led her team of red fighters against a group of blue-giant Command ships that were going gun-to-gun with Breetai’s Zentraedi cadre. The smoking remains of Battlepods and strike ships littered a barren, now cratered expanse of high plateau where the Invid had successfully breached the GMU’s forward defense lines.

Miriya’s Alphas hit the massive twin-cannoned mecha where they lived, chattering undercarriage guns stitching molten welts across cockpit shields and torso armor, and red-tipped heat-seekers finding the ships’ vulnerable sensor mouths. Explosions geysered fountains of white-hot alloy into the waning light as ship after ship fell, leaking viscous green fluids into the dry ground. Renewed, the Battlepods leaped to regain their lost ground, trading energy salvos with the larger ships, their orange and blue bolts cutting swaths of angry ionization through the moon’s thin atmosphere.

Elsewhere, Max’s blue team backed up the Wolff Pack’s devastated Hovertank ranks, reconfigured to Battloid mode for close-in combat, while overhead, solitary Veritechs went to guns with the less maneuverable Shock Troopers. Ships boostered and fell, executing rolls and reversals as they engaged.

Even the GMU’s main gun was speaking now, adding its own thunderous punctuation to the battle’s murderous dialogue. A second and third wave of mecha burst from the base’s forward ramps-Mac II cannons, Excalibers, and drum-armed Spartans-but the Invid would neither fall back nor surrender.

It was all or nothing, Max realized as he bracketed two of the alien ships in his sights.

Missiles tore from the Battloid’s shoulder racks and found their mark; the ships came apart in a dumbbell-shaped cloud of flame and thick smoke. In the end, once the RDF’s debris was carted from the field, it would look like a slaughter had taken place; but in the meantime men and women continued to die.

Max ordered the Battloid into a giant-stride run, pulled back on the selector lever, and imaged the VT through to fighter mode. He went ballistic, instructing his wingmen to follow suit, and was about to rejoin Miriya when Vince Grant’s face appeared on one of the cockpit commo screens.

“You’ve got new orders, Commander, straight from the top.”

“Uh, roger, Home. Shoot.”

“Your team’s to recon the Triangle. Just a flyby with a minimum of sound-and-light. Do you copy, Skull One?”

“Can do, Home. Waiting for your directions.”

“We’re punching them in now,” Vince said.

Max’s onboard computer came alive, stammering vectors and coordinates across the display screen.

“And Mac,” Vince added. “Be sure to keep in touch.”

Evening’s shadow was once again moving across Tirol’s face; a crescent of Fantoma loomed huge in the southern skies, its ringplane a shaft of evanescent color. The battle was over-for the time being, forever, no one could be sure, any more than they could be sure who had won. If it went by the numbers, then the RDF had been victorious; but there was no known way of conveying that to the five hundred who had died that day.

Jack had been returned to his outfit and was out at the perimeter now, finally out on Tirol’s surface, where he felt he should have been all along. There was a good deal of activity going on around him-mecha tows and transports and AFCs barreling by, VTs flying recon sweeps-but he still wasn’t content. He had been assigned to take part in a mine-emplacement op, which meant little more than observing while Gladiators planted and armed AM-2 Watchdogs across the field. (These anti-mecha mines of high-velocity plastique had been developed by one Dr. R. Burke-who was also responsible for the Wolverine assault rifles-and came complete with an Identification Friend or Foe targeting microchip housing a library of enemy ground signatures, even those recently cooked up by the GMU’s computers to indicate Invid Scouts and Shock Troopers.) So instead of giving the Gladiator his undivided attention, Jack had slipped away to eavesdrop on a conversation that was in progress at one of the forward command posts. Jack understood that the enemy had been soundly defeated, but things were a still bit sketchy with regard to follow-up plans. He sensed that something important was up, and in a short time he had the astounding details.

A message had been received from Tirol’s occupied citysent by some sort of rebel group, from the sound of it-giving the location of the Invid’s central command. The Skull had been ordered to recon the site, but nothing was in the works to save the rebels themselves, who were apparently holed up in the very same neighborhood. Having seen a crude map of Tiresia, Jack knew the place would be easy enough to suss out. And if a small team-even one man-could infiltrate, the rebels would be as good as free. All it took was the right man.

But chief among the things Jack didn’t know was that his actions over the past hour had been observed at rather close range by Karen Penn. And she stuck with Jack now as he began to angle his way behind the command post and into the forward supply area. He waited until the sentries were preoccupied, then moved in and grabbed hold of a Wolverine and an energy-pack bandolier. Karen drew her hand weapon and decided it was time to confront him.

Taken by surprise, Jack swung around with his hands raised, prepared to assume the position. But realizing it was Karen, he simply shook his head and shouldered past her.

Karen armed the handgun, which came to life with a shortlived but unmistakable priming tone. It stopped Jack in his tracks.

“Now, you want to talk to me, Jack, or the unit commander?”

“Look,” he said, turning around carefully, “there’s something I’ve got to do.” He explained what he knew about the communiqu?and the rebel group, and how a small group could get in and out unnoticed.

Karen listened without comment, then laughed shortly and deactivated her weapon.

“You’re certifiable, you know that?”

Jack made a face. “I’m going in alone, Karen.”

“Oh no you’re not,” she said, grabbing a Wolverine from the rack. “‘Cause I’m coming with you.”

Jack showed her a grin. “I know where there’s a coupla Hovercycles.”

Karen pulled the bandolier’s straps taut. “Lead on, hero,” she told him.

Obsim peered into the trench the enforcers had opened in the floor of the Royal Hall. Fifty feet down they had broken through the roof of a narrow corridor, a stretch of the mazelike subterranean works the brain had discerned.

“The Inorganics will locate the Tiresians within the period,” the brain informed Obsim when he reentered the Hall’s central nave.

“I am pleased,” Obsim said, trying on a regal tone.

“There are other concerns…”

“Prioritize.”

“A group of airborne mecha are closing on our position.”

Obsim glanced at the communicator sphere, where a holo-image of six blue Veritechs was taking shape.

“Advise, computer.”

“Protect the brain. Activate the shield.”

Obsim tried to calculate the resultant energy drain. “You are so instructed,” he said after a moment of reflection.

Bubbles formed, percolating in the brain’s tank.

“It is done.”

Max had his team complete two high-altitude passes over the city before dropping in for a closer look. Schematics of Skull’s topographical scans had revealed that Tiresia’s Royal Hall was an enormous structure indeed, a truncated pyramid almost a thousand feet tall capped by a classical Roman-like shrine. It dominated the city, which was itself a kind of circular mandala set into Tirol’s bleak surface. Scanners had also picked up dusk activity in the city’s street; but whatever was moving around down there was smaller than the Invid ships the Skull had thus far gone up against.

“All right, let’s stay alert,” Max said over the net as the team followed him down. “Keep an eye on each other. Blue Velvet, you’ve got the number-one spot.”

“Roger, Skull Leader, I’m on my way,” the mechamorph responded.

Max watched him peel away from the group, roll over, and drop in for the run. They were all closing on the Hall, scarcely five hundred feet above it, when a translucent envelope of scintillating energy suddenly mushroomed up in front of them. The envelope expanded to encompass the entire Hall, and with it, Blue Velvet’s lone Veritech. The rest of the team broke hard and climbed.

“It’s a force field of some kind,” Max said. “Blue Velvet, get yourself out of there!”

“No can do, Skull One, my systems are down! Reconfiguring and going for touchdown…”

Max was heading back toward the Hall again, and could see the Guardian-mode VT

falling. But all at once there were three bizarre shapes on the shrine steps-headless, demonic-looking bipedal mecha, with dangling arms and orifice-dimpled weapon spheres.

“You’ve got company, Blue Velvet!” Max shouted the pilot’s call sign twice more, but got no response. The Alpha was preparing to land when the creatures opened fire and blew it off course.

Max watched helplessly as the Veritech grazed the edge of the pyramid and exploded, raining fiery debris down the Hall’s steep side.

“Hit them!” Max ordered.

Missiles dropped from the Veritechs’ undercarriage pylons and ripped in twisting tracks toward the Inorganics, only to detonate harmlessly against the Hall’s repellent dome. But the enemy could fire through the shield and did, catching a second VT before Max could order the team away. He was trying to decide what to do next, when one of his wingmen came on the net. “Skull Leader, I’m picking up two friendly blips down below.”

Max listened for the coordinates, tipped his Alpha, and leaned over to take a look. “You sure they’re friendly?”

“Affirmative. The IFF says they’re Hovercycles. They’re approaching the Hall.”

Hovercycles, now what the…Max said to himself. “All right,” he said, “let’s go down and see what’s cooking.”

“Wha-hoo!” Jack shouted, throttling the Hovercycle down a slope of arid ground and onto one of Tiresia’s central spokes. “Life in the fast lane!”

“Idiot,” Karen muttered to herself, goosing the handbar grip in an attempt to catch up with him. “He’s going to get us both killed.”

The cycles were face-effect vehicles, with conventional grips, right-angled bars rising up and back from a single shaft, and a front Hover-foot that resembled an old-fashioned carpet sweeper. The seat and backrest was a sweeping, padded affair, and although the cycles were built for one, the rear storage deck could accommodate a second rider if need be. They were fast, silent, and maneuverable, but essentially weaponless.

“What are you trying to prove?” Karen said, coming up alongside Jack’s cycle. “Is this a rescue op or a joyride?”

Jack glanced over at her and began to lay out his philosophy about how self-confidence was what mattered most; but instead of listening she was just looking at him wide-eyed, and the next thing he knew, she had her handgun raised and aimed in his general direction.

“Duck!” she yelled, firing off two quick bursts that nearly parted Jack’s carrot-colored hair.

“Jeez!” he said, when they’d brought the cycles to a halt. “Whaddaya think-”

“Take a look at that.”

Jack twisted around in the seat and spied the Inorganic Karen’s shot had neatly holed. Still on its feet and slumped against a wall, the thing reminded him of a character from an old cartoon. “Tasmanian devil,” Jack recalled, snapping his finger, as the Crann slid to the smooth street.

“Is it alive?” Karen asked, looking around warily.

“Not any more.”

“But what is it?”

“I don’t know,” Jack said, bringing the Wolverine off his shoulder, “but there’s three more of them coming our way.”

Karen reholstered her sidearm and followed Jack’s lead. Suddenly, half-a-dozen blue energy bolts were zipping past her, impacting against a wall and sending up a shower of white-hot gunk. A blast of superheated air washed over her, stinging her eyes and nose while she brought the assault rifle to bear on the drones.

Jack was already firing; his rounds had managed to connect with one of the Inorganics, and Karen watched as the thing flashed out and crumbled, as though hollow. An in start later the other two went down, breaking open like ceramic figurines.

“Let’s get out of here!” Jack yelled, as bolts began to rain down on them from surrounding rooftops.

Karen kept up with him, piloting the cycle onehanded while she loosed an arc of rear fire, dropping two more Cranns with well-placed sensor shots. “What now?” she said, her voice raspy from the heat, smoke, and all the shouting.

Jack motioned up the street, toward a small mountain of a structure. “Straight ahead.

That’s the Hall. The message originated from somewhere underground. I figure there’s gotta be a way down.”

“You figure,” Karen said in disbelief. “I’m for turning back.”

“Uh-uh. But I am for turning!”

Karen looked up: ten or more Inorganics were blocking the street. Their weapons were raised.

Perplexed, Cabell regarded the weapon Rem had given him; he fumbled with the rifle’s selector lever. “Like this?”

“No, no, Cabell,” Rem said, close to losing his patience. “Like this,” he demonstrated, activating his own weapon.

Cabel mimicked Rem’s movements. “Ah, I see…and you hold it like, er, you put your right, hand, um, let’s see, you-”

“Give me that thing!” Rem snapped, snatching the rifle from the old man’s hands. Cabell was offering him a imbecilic shrug. “You’ll probably vaporize your own foot.”

“I wouldn’t doubt it for a moment,” Cabell agreed. “I’m sorry, I’ve never had any talent for the fine art of combat. Why, back when the Masters were first-”

“Save it, Cabell. Are we going or not?”

Cabell took one long last look around the room. Still-functioning remotes had permitted them to view the Humans’ recon attempt, and later, their failure to breach the barrier shield the Invid computer had deployed. But with Inorganics closing on the subterranean lab now, there was no time for further monitoring of the situation. Cabell had insisted that they not be caught in the lab. The Pollinators would be his gift to the Invid; with them and some seedling Flowers, perhaps they could refoliate ravaged Optera, end this incessant killing…

“Well, what have we here?” Cabell said suddenly.

Rem came back into the lab, cursing, and found the scientist pointing to one of the screens. Here were two Humans just outside the force field, a male and a female, straddling strange-looking Hovercrafts.

“Could they be searching for us, Rem?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Rem answered him, tugging Cabell into the corridor. They could hear the Inorganics nearby, blasting through corridor walls and breaking into rooms.

“But they could be looking for us.”

Rem continued to drag Cabell down the corridor. “Fine, fine…”

Cabell reached for one of Rem’s weapons. “Then let’s just go out and meet them.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Finally all the principal players had been introduced to one another: Masters and Invid, Zentraedi and Humans. Humans and Invid, Humans and Masters. Surely this was Protoculture’s doing; but what would make the contest especially bizarre was the fact that not one of those players had all the puzzle pieces. It was a mad, mad, mad, mad world.

Dr. Emil Lang, The New Testament

The Regent was relaxing in his bath when Obsim’s message finally reached him. The sunken tub in his private chambers was as large as a backyard swimming pool, surrounded by ornate fixtures the Regis had detested. You have too many things, she used to scream. Things!-when the very goal had always been to move away from such material trappings. Her goal, at any rate. Freedom from this base condition…her wards to describe their world after the affair with Zor. After Optera, an Eden if ever there was one, had been defoliated by the Masters’ warrior clones, robbed of the Flower that was infinitely precious to the Invid, so essential. They were like starving creatures now, feeding off what nutrients had been stored up in their flesh, but hungry, ravenous for sustenance only the Flower could provide.

The Regent sighed as he climbed from the tub, regarding the sterile green bath fluids with a mixture of sorrow and disdain. To be sure, the bath had been drawn from Flowers and fruits, but a mutated variety from Peryton that had to pass for the real thing, for absent, too, were the Pollinators, those shaggy little beasts critical to the Flowers’ reproductive cycle.

As a result, the Regent no longer bathed to empower himself, but simply to sustain a memory of brighter times.

Brighter times indeed, he told himself as a servant moved in to drape a robe over him. You have taken a wrong turn, the Regis had warned him. A turn toward deevolution and evil purpose. She was already in Tiresioid form then, desperate in her attempts to emulate Zor’s race. She had begged the Regent to join her in that novel guise, but he would hear nothing of it. His queen, his wife, had been defiled, his world contaminated, and still she would ask for such a thing. When his very heart was burning with a rage never before known to him. Was it any wonder then that he had chosen his own course? The goal-the goal, my dear-is conquest and consumption; and things-warriors and weapons and battle mecha-are pivotal to that end.

To hell with her if she couldn’t understand his purpose!

And yet…and yet how lonely this place seemed without her. Surrounded by nothing but servants and soldiers now, he could almost miss the arguments of those final days. The passion. She had fled with half her brood to carry on with her mad experiments in transmutation, her quest for the perfect physical vehicle to inhabit while she completed her Great Work, a form more suitable for her wisdom and dreams, more supportive than his embrace.

“Curse her!” he seethed, taking quick steps toward the antechamber.

A messenger genuflected as he entered, lowering its head and bringing an arm to its breast. The Regent’s Hellcats were restless, pacing the room, sniffing and snarling. He put them at ease with a motion of his hand and bade the messenger rise and state its purpose.

The messenger handed over a voice-imprint and withdrew. The Regent activated the device and listened, running it through again and again until satisfied that he had memorized Obsim’s every word, every nuance.

Tirol under attack-by what Obsim had initially believed were Micronized Zentraedi, but were now thought to be a coalition of Zentraedi and some unknown Tiresioid race. A race of beings with Protoculturedriven starships and mecha! This was the astonishing thing.

Protoculture could only be derived from the Flowers, and the potent Flowers were indigenous to Optera, and Optera only. Look what had become of those seedlings Zor himself had tried to implant on Karbarra, Spheris, and the rest.

“What could it mean?” the Regent asked himself. An undiscovered world, perhaps, rich in the Flower that was life itself, ripe and waiting to be plucked.

He summoned the messenger to return. “Make haste to inform Obsim that reinforcements are on their way.” He turned to his lieutenants next, his stingraylike hood puffed up, betraying his agitation.

“The Regis is not to learn about these matters. This new world will be our…our present to her.”

But only if she agrees to listen to reason, he kept to himself. Only if she accepts the path of conquest!

The Regent’s huge hand closed on the voice device, splintering it to bits.

Jack and Karen stood transfixed at the edge of the Royal Hall’s shimmering shield, unsure of what they were up against. They had given the enemy drones the slip for the moment, but there was no time to dally.

“I say we try to go in,” Jack was saying.

Karen gazed into the field’s evil translucency. “And I say you ought to have your head examined.”

“Maybe if I just touch-”

Jack reached his hand out before she could stop him, and in a flash was flat on his back unconscious.

Karen screamed and ran to him, kneeling by his side, wondering if there was anything she could do, her hands fluttering helplessly. “You stupid idiot!”

Jack came to and looked up at her stupidly, then shrieked as the pain caught up to him.

His left hand flew to his right wrist, clutching it as though aware of the torment above.

Karen pried Jack’s fingers loose and pulled his hand to her. It was blanker than a newborn’s, void of prints and lines. She told him to lie still, ran to the idling Hovercycle, and returned with a first-aid kit. She hit him with a preloaded syringe of painkiller and waited till it took effect.

Jack’s face was still beaded with sweat a moment later, but the drugs had done their job; he offered her a weak smile and forced his breath out in a rash. “Now, what was that you were saying?”

“About you needing to have your head examined? Forget it.” She showed him his effaced palm. “You’re going to need a whole new personality.”

“No big deal,” Jack muttered. “The old one was about used up anyway.”

“I’m glad you said it.” Karen laughed, helping him to his feet. “Now let’s get back to base.”

They started for the cycles, only to swing back around to the sound of metal-shod feet.

Five Hellcats came tearing around the corner, for some reason slithering to a halt instead of leaping. The drones fanned out and began to stalk the two Humans as they backed themselves slowly toward one of the Hovercycles. Karen had her blaster drawn.

“Nice kitties,” Jack said in a calming voice. “On three we leap for the cycle,” he told Karen out of the corner of his mouth.

“But-”

“Don’t worry, I can drive. You keep those things away from us.”

Karen thumbed the handgun’s selector to full auto. “Ready when you are,”

“One, two…three!” he yelled, and they both bolted. Two of the Hellcats jumped at the same time; Karen blasted them out of the air, pieces raining down on the Hovercycle as Jack toed it into gear and took off.

A third Hellcat tried to keep pace with them, but Karen holed that one, too, right through the thing’s flashing eyes. She had one arm around Jack’s waist, loosing rear fire as he threw the cycle into a turn and raced down a side street.

“Where to?” she yelled.

“Left!” he answered, just as two more ‘Cats leaped to the streets from the peak of a pediment.

Karen twisted on the cargo seat and laid down an arc that seared one of the beast’s legs off. But others were joining in the pursuit; she stopped counting at eleven.

“How’s our fuel?” she thought to ask.

“Going fast,” he said, his bad hand up by his shoulder, comically mouthing the words.

“Any suggestions?”

“Yeah. Remind me to let you go it alone next time something like this comes up!”

“I’ve got them, Skull Leader,” one of the VT team confirmed. “They’re both on the same cyc now, west of the Hall on a connecting street between two of the main spokes. ‘Bout a dozen drones behind them.”

“Have they spotted yogi, Blue Lady?”

“Uh, negative. They’ve got their hands full. Some rough terrain up ahead-craters, devastated buildings…”

“Can you exfiltrate?” Max asked her.

Blue Lady fell silent, then said, “Think I see a way.”

“Coming around to cover you.”

“I’m going in,” the woman announced to her Beta copilot. “Breaking hard and right…”

“Heads up, you two!” a female voice shouted from the Hovercycle’s control pad speaker.

Jack thought he was hearing things and wondered if his brush with the force field hadn’t damaged more than just his hand. Karen was discharging bursts from the cargo seat, but for every drone she killed another two would appear; it was as if some controlling intelligence was directing the chase.

Jack had been forced to take some bad turns back toward the Royal Hall, and was trying to puzzle out a way through the wreckage in front of them when that disembodied voice repeated itself.

“Heads up!”

Even Karen heard it this time, so Jack knew he wasn’t imagining it. “An Alpha,” she said, waving her free hand in his face. He looked up and saw the VT dropping in to match the Hovercycle’s pace and course.

“Looks like you two are a long way from home,” the pilot said. “I’m coming in for a pickup.

Acknowledge.”

“Fine with us,” Jack said. “Hope she’s not changing her mind?” he added when the VT

didn’t respond.

Karen interrupted her fire to peer over Jack’s shoulder. She smacked him on the shoulder.

“You idiot, use the net!”

Jack winced and opened the net, acknowledging the VT. The Alpha dropped and let loose with two missiles that took out half the Hellcat pack; then the mecha split, its Beta hindquarters lowering a stiff ladder.

“Grab it,” Jack told Karen.

They were near the central plaza again in an area of the city that had seen a lot of action, skirting the rim of a huge blast crater.

Karen holstered her weapon, got into a kneeling position on the seat using Jack’s shoulders for balance, and took hold of the ladder, heat from the VT blasting her face all the while.

“Come on, Jack!” she was shouting into the wind a moment later.

Jack stretched out his bad hand, thought better of it, and took his good hand from the front grip. Karen curled herself on the ladder and leaned down to help him. But all at once, two Hellcats came tearing out of an alleyway making straight for the cycle. Jack caught sight of them in time, but forgot about his injured hand as he reflexively reached for the handlebars.

Pain like liquid fire shot up his arm. Out of control, the Hovercycle veered to the right and ramped up the rim.

Jack felt himself leave the cyc’s contoured seat and go airborne. In an instant’s passing, he was once again questioning his sanity, because floating out in front of him he saw some kind unanchored column-two of them, actually, separated by an equally free-floating featureless sphere. Jack impacted the uppermost column at the same moment he heard the Hovercraft crash in the smoky crater below him. His hands, knees, and feet tried to find purchase, but he soon found himself sliding…

He hit the sphere and clung there a moment, wishing he had suction cups instead of hands, then recommenced his slow slide, flesh squealing along the thing’s smooth surface.

“Whaaaaa…” he sent into Tirol’s evening chill.

Jack’s fingertips somehow managed to catch the edge of the lower column. Breathless, he hung there, nose buried in one of the flutes as the Beta circled him. And all at once his hand began to remember something…

He screamed and let go, recalling the hotfoot he had given a cadet back in academy days, and hit the ground with enough force to instantly numb both his legs.

On his butt now, dazed and hurting, Jack directed some choice words against himself.

Muttering, he tried to stand up.

Six pairs of glowing eyes were approaching him out of the crater’s groundsmoke.

“Can you see him?” Karen asked the Beta’s pilot, as she threw herself from the ladder into the mecha’s passenger space.

“Not yet,” the pilot answered her with a hint of anger. “I’ve got a biosensor reading, but there’s just too much smoke down there.”

Karen tried to peer out the canopy. “We’ve got to go back.”

“Suddenly you’re not suicidal.”

“Hey, look,” Karen said, “we just went-”

“Tell it to the judge,” the pilot cut her off. “I’ve got one of them, Skull Leader,” she said over the net. “Number two’s on his own. The cyc’s a memory.”

Karen heard Commander Max Sterling reply, “Reconfigure and go in. But keep it simple.

First sign of big stuff and I want you out of there.”

“Understood, Commander. Reconfiguring…”

Jack slapped his hip holster and gulped. He was weaponless, and the cat drones had effectively cut him off from whatever remained of the Hovercycle.. Not that Jack was even sure he could find it in all the smoke. He turned through a three-sixty looking for some way out, and spotted the partially-ruined archway of an ancient-looking building. He ran for it without hesitation, ignoring the shock waves each ankle sent up his quivering legs.

Presently, he could discern broad steps in front of him, a short flight that led to a pillared platform, and beyond that the arch. Galloping, clanking sounds told him that the Inorganics weren’t far behind.

But there was another sound in the midst of all that eye-smarting smoke: the sound of a Beta’s VTOL flares. Jack realized that the mecha had changed modes and was descending. Trouble was, it was putting down on the wrong side of things. Six drones were standing between him and rescue.

Jack decided to try and wait it out; let the VT handle the drones, then show himself when the coast was clear. He limped his way up the stairs and hastened toward the building.

All at once a Hellcat landed in front of him. Jack dug his heels in and threw himself behind one of the columns as the creature leaped. He felt the closeness of its passage, and began to scramble around the column base, while the Hellcat turned and leaped again. It hit the opposite side of the pillar with a resounding crash, its clawed paws embracing the base and almost tearing into Jack where he stud. Jack jumped for the next column and the next, slaloming his way down the platform one step ahead of the infuriated drone.

He reached the end of the row and tumbled down a flight of steps. The Hellcat was above him snarling and preparing to pounce when he rolled over. Suddenly Jack heard a weapon discharge behind him; at almost the same moment the drone came apart in a shower of fiery particles. He tucked and rolled as heat and a concussive wave battered him.

Then someone’s hand touched his shoulder.

It was an old man with a bald, knob-topped head and two-foot-long snow-white beard.

Jack was certain he was dreaming now.

“Good work, my boy, good work!” the man was congratulating him in Zentraedi.

Jack shook his head to clear it. Behind the man was a youth his own age, a handsome lad with tinted hair and a long cloak. He was cradling an assault rifle.

“Are you the, rebels?” Jack stammered, unsure if he had chosen the correct words.

Cabell stepped back, surprised that the Human knew the old empire’s lingua franca.

“Rebels? No. But we are the ones who sent the message. I am Cabell, and this is Rem.”

Rem nodded and said something in a language Jack had never heard.

Cabell nodded and pulled Jack to his feet. “Your ship,” he said quickly. “We must get to your ship.”

“But-”

“Hurry! There’s no time!”

Cabell and Rem put Jack between them and ran in the direction of the Beta’s landing zone.

Jack wanted to warn them about the drones, but pain was intercepting his words. Besides, the two Tiresians seemed to be aware of the things already.

Angry flashes of orange and white brilliance were piercing the groundsmoke up ahead of them. Jack heard the characteristic chatter of the Beta’s in-close weapons, and follow-up explosions he hoped accounted for the last of the enemy drones. The old man, Cabell, had most of Jack’s weight now; Rem was moving out front through a hail of white-phosphoruslike debris.

Then all at once the firing was over as quickly as it had begun, and Karen’s voice echoed out of an eerie silence.

She called Jack’s name, but he was too weak to respond. Rem and Cabell exchanged a few unintelligible sentences, got Jack between them once again, and hastened toward the call. They were close enough to hear the Veritech’s whistling hum and feel the heat its thrusters were spreading across the bottom of the crater.

The glow of running lights brought out a low moan of relief from Jack. Cabell voiced a Zentraedi greeting; Karen picked up on it after a moment and instructed them to come out with their hands raised.

She was waiting in a combat crouch by one of the VT’s backswept wings when the Tiresians appeared out of the smoke. Jack thought he saw a look of astonishment on her face before Cabell and Rem set him down on the ground. She uttered something he couldn’t catch and directed a question toward the Beta’s open canopy.

Cabell stepped forward and addressed her.

Jack heard her nervous laugh. She had lowered the muzzle of her Wolverine, and was repeating Cabell’s words for the pilot.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“No, I swear it,” Karen confirmed. “He said, `Take me to your leader!’”

CHAPTER TWELVE

Cabell impressed all of us as a kind, peace-loving man. And I knew he was one of us when he suggested that we might be able to rendezvous with the Masters in deepspace and give them what they were after (the Protoculture matrix). He’d just finished describing the horrors the Masters had spread through the Fourth Quadrant, and now he was telling us that we still had a chance to make our peace with them. Only a Human could think like that.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

I don’t give a damn about what your little escapade turned up!” Vince Grant was saying two hours later. “The only thing keeping me from throwing both of you in the brig is Admiral Hunter’s request for leniency on your behalf. And when all the details of this are known, I’m sure he’s going to change his mind as well. Do you read me?”

Karen and Jack swallowed hard and managed to find a collective voice. “Yes, sir; perfectly, sir.”

Grant glared at them. He had his large hands pressed flat against the desk, but straightened up now and advanced to where the two former ensigns were standing at stiff attention. They had returned to the GMU scarcely an hour ago, just enough time for a pit stop at sick bay before being dragged off to Grant’s office. Jack’s right arm was in a sling, his head shaved and bandaged along his forehead. Karen had fared somewhat better, but perhaps because of that the commander was directing most of the flak her way.

“I would have expected as much from him,” Grant continued, gesturing to Jack, “but I’d been led to expect better things from you, Cadet Penn. Much better things! Are you aware of the several other ways your self-appointed rescue mission could have turned out? Are you aware that your rescue endangered lives? Well?”

Karen gulped. “I am, sir. I apologize, sir.”

Grant stared at her in surprise. ” `Apologize,’ Penn-apologize! That is the least of what you’re going to be doing, believe me. Now I want to know which one of you came up with this bright idea.”

“The cadet doesn’t recall, sir,” Karen said, eyes straight ahead.

“Really,” Grant sneered, looking back and forth between Karen and Jack. “A conspiracy, huh?” Arms akimbo, he sidestepped, dark eyes flashing as he regarded Jack from his towering height. “And you, Baker…Born-to-be-a-hero, Baker.” Grant motioned behind him.

“I read you were looking for a VT assignment, is that true?”

Jack raised his eyes. “Yes, sir,” he said weakly.

“You’ll be lucky if you end up piloting a fanjet for the sanitation squad, mister!”

Jack blanched. “The cadet would consider it an honor to fly for the s-sanitation squad, Commander, sir.”

“You bet you will, Baker.”

Grant returned to his desk. “Where are the prisoners?” he asked one of his aides.

“In the holding area, sir. The shuttle and Skull Squadron are awaiting the commander’s word.”

Grant ran his eyes over Penn and Baker a final time. It was incredible that they had stumbled on the two Tiresians, that their joyride could possibly have resulted in just the break the RDF needed right now. But breaches of discipline couldn’t be treated lightly, even when the results were more than anyone could have hoped for.

Vince knew Karen’s father, and was aware of the friction between the two of them. Busted now, she would have little recourse but to follow Harry Penn’s lead into research. Max, however, had appealed to Vince to go as lightly as possible; seemed that he and Rick had a special interest in Karen’s fight for independence. And Baker’s cause as well, although Vince couldn’t quite figure it. Baker was too independent already.

“Get the prisoners aboard the shuttle, Captain. And as for these two,” he said, twisting in his chair, “confine them to quarters. I don’t want to see their faces. Understood?” Karen saluted, and Jack did the best he could.

“Sir!”

“Now get them out of here.”

Jack followed Karen out of the office. “How about dinner in, say, six months, if we’re out of this by then?” he asked under his breath.

Karen bit off a laugh. ““Try me in about six years, Baker. Just maybe I’ll be ready to talk to you.”

Jack made a face. This wasn’t supposed to be the way it worked out. But, then again, at least he had some great stories to tell over at the garbage dump.

Rick was hoping to have first crack at the prisoners, but the council wouldn’t hear of it. He had presented his case directly to Lang: the Tiresians were essentially military property; and if indeed they were the same group that had made contact with the GMU, their knowledge of the Invid’s command and control was of vital importance. “We will be certain to address that,” Lang had told him. The Council had even found unexpected support from General Edwards, who still considered the Tiresian message suspect. Rick, however, had succeeded in limiting the interrogation committee to four members of the Plenipotentiary-Dr. Lang, Lord Exedore, Justine Huxley, and Niles Obstat-and four members of the RDF-himself, Lisa, Edwards, and Reinhardt.

The eight, along with security personnel, secretaries, and translators, were assembled in one of the Council’s briefing chambers now, a long, narrow room with a single table and two rectangular viewports that dominated the starboard bulkhead. Tirol would be fully visible for the session, while the SDF-3’s position had reduced Fantoma itself to little more than a slender background crescent. Presently, Cabell and Rem were escorted in and seated at one end of the table opposite Justine Huxley, a UEG Superior Court judge, and Niles Obstat, former senator and head of Monument City’s regional legislature.

Rick heard someone gasp; when he leaned in to look to his left, he saw Lang half out of his chair.

“Is it you?” Lang was asking of the young Tiresian.

Lang’s mind was racing, recalling a day more than twenty years before when he had stood in front of a data screen on the recently arrived SDF-1, and a face with elfin features and almond eyes had greeted Gloval’s recon team. Then a robot with reconfigured wiring had walked into their midst, and while everyone was preoccupied, Lang had tried to activate that mainframe, had inadvertantly taken the mind-boost and altered his very life…

“Is it you?”

The caped Tiresian wore a puzzled look; he turned in his seat, certain that Lang was speaking to someone behind him.

“Zor,” Lang said, more shaken than Rick could ever remember seeing him. “You, you were the one…”

Cabell cleared his throat meaningfully and smiled, one hand on the youth’s shoulder. “No.”

He laughed. “No, there is some resemblance-around the eyes and mouth, perhaps-but this is not Zor. Zor has been dead a long time.”

Lang seemed to come to his senses. “Of course…I knew that.”

Cabell followed Lang’s gaze down the table, where it came to rest on a uncommon-looking man with dwarfish features, cropped red hair, and a thick brow ridge.

The Tiresian’s mouth dropped open.

“Welcome, Cabell,” Exedore said evenly. “No, your eyes have not deceived you, as Dr.

Lang’s have.”

“But, Exedore, how is this possible?” Cabell glanced from face to face, searching for other surprises, then returned to Exedore’s. The first of the Masters’ biogenetically engineered clones! The one whose very history Cabell had been forced to reshape and re-create after the Masters had turned their giant miners to warriors…

Little by little the story unfolded: how the SDF-1-identified by Cabell as Zor’s ship-had crashlanded on Earth, and how some ten years later the Zentraedi had followed. And how a war for the repossession of that ship had commenced.

Cabell was on the edge of his seat, attentive to each added fact, and silent except when he interrupted to provide a date or refine a point.

“And the armada was actually defeated?” he said, as if in shock. “Almost five million ships…” Suddenly a maniacal expression surfaced. “Then, you have the matrix! You do have it, don’t you!”

“It didn’t exist,” Lang answered him. “We searched-”

“No, no, no, no,” Cabell ranted, shaking his head, white beard like a banner. “It does exist!

You searched the fold generators, of course.”

Rick, Lisa, Lang, and Exedore exchanged looks.

“Well, no,” Lang said, almost apologetically. “We didn’t want to tamper with the fold mechanism.”

Cabell slammed his hand on the table. “It’s there! It’s hidden in the fold generators!”

Lang was shaking his head.

“What happened?” Cabell said, disheartened.

Exedore answered him. “The ship was destroyed by Khyron, Cabell. Its remains are buried on Earth.”

Cabell grew strangely silent. He put a hand to his forehead, as though stricken. Rick recognized what he took to be a look of concern and abject terror.

“But…don’t you see,” he began. “No mere collision could destroy that device. It exists-the one source of Protoculture in the Quadrant-and the Masters have left Tirol to find it!”

“Left for where?” Rick demanded.

“Earth, Commander,” Rem answered him.

“Oh my God,” Lisa said.

Edwards and Rick looked at each other. The same names were on both men’s minds, but for different reasons-Zand, Moran, Leonard. The field marshal’s prelaunch warnings about Earth’s vulnerability assumed a sickening immediacy. Rick suppressed a panicked scream that had seemed to lodge itself somewhere beneath his diaphragm.

“But you can overtake them,” Cabell was saying. “The Masters’ fortresses have superluminal drives, but there wasn’t sufficient Protoculture reserves to permit a fold. They have been gone for ten years in your reckoning. You could meet them and arrange an exchange for the device. Surely they do not want war with your world-not when there are so many worlds available to them.” Cabell let his words trail off when he realized that no one was listening to him. It was at this moment that he decided to say nothing of the Elders who had left Tirolspace only a short while ago. Let them be marooned in that cruel void, he said to himself.

Brigadier General Reinhardt grunted sardonically. “This mission was undertaken to avoid just such a war. We came to tell the Masters that Earth didn’t have what they were looking for.”

“Unfortunately, we knew nothing of the situation here,” Lang added. “The Invid’s attack against us damaged our fold mechanism. We reasoned that by allying ourselves with Tirol…”

“You would have what you needed to return to your world.”

“Precisely.”

Cabell stared at his hands and said nothing.

“What about the message you sent our troops?” Rick cut in, anxious to return the interrogation to its central issue. “What’s the situation down there?”

Briefly, Cabell explained the circumstances of the Invid’s recent conquest of Tirol. He described and named the battle mecha the RDF had found itself up against: the Shock Troopers, Pincer Ships, Command ships, and the Inorganic drones-the Scrim, Crann, Odeon, and Hellcats.

“Their troops are known as Enforcers,” he told the committee. “Essentially they have no independent will, save for certain evolved ones, who are thought of as `scientists.’ But the brain controls all of them.”

“Brain?” said Edwards. “What is this idiocy?”

Cabell stroked his beard. “It is a computer of sorts-but much different than anything either of our races would fashion. We believe it is linked to a larger unit the Invid keep on Optera.

But if you can get to the one they’ve placed in the Royal Hall, you will defeat them here.”

“They’ve deployed some kind of force field,” Rick said as all eyes turned to him. “So far we haven’t been able to penetrate it.”

“What about a surgical strike, Admiral?” Niles Obstat suggested.

Cabell stood up. “Please, Earthers, I know I have no right to ask, but our people are being held prisoner…”

Rick made a calming gesture to reassure the old man. “We’re not going to do anything rash. But we do need a way in, Cabell.”

“You can go in the way we came out,” Rem said suddenly. “Cabell will map it out for you.”

Cabell flashed his assistant an angry look. He had hoped to keep Zor’s laboratory secret a while longer, but he supposed there was no hope of that now. “Of course I will,” he told Rick.

Edwards was already in touch with GMU control. “Grant apparently had the same idea,”

Edwards reported. “He’s sent the Wolff Pack in.”

“The computer is invaluable,” Cabell urged. “You must inform your troops that there are ways to deactivate the brain without destroying it. It could be of great use to all of us.”

Edwards felt his faceplate and stared at Cabell obliquely.

It is invaluable, it controls all of them…It could be of great use to us. The words rolled around in his mind, settling down to a dark inner purpose.

“I want command and control,” he said into the cam while everyone’s attention was diverted. “Get the Ghost Squadron ready for departure. I’ll be down to lead them in personally.”

Exedore and Lang met separately with Cabell and Rem after the committee session was dissolved. While the military faction was off deciding how best to deal with Cabell’s revelations concerning the Invid brain, Lang, fully aware of the regulations he was violating, took the two Tiresians to the SDF-3’s engineering section and eventually into the hold that housed the spacefold generators. On the way Cabell talked about the history of Tirol and the sociopolitical upheavals that had paved the way for the Great Transition and the emergence of Robotech Masters.

Lang and Exedore were as rapt as Cabell had been only an hour before. At last someone knowledgeable was filling in all the gaps of the saga they had tried to patch together from records found aboard the SDF-1 and the Zentraedi flagship. And how false those records were now proved to be! Even the misinformed. scenarios Lang himself had worked out, the timelines he had spent countless hours assembling, the motives and explanations he had assigned.

Cabell spoke of Zor as one would of a demiurge, and in many ways Tirol’s story was Zor’s own-from his noble birth as a senator’s only son, to his untimely death at the hands of the Regent’s newly-evolved troops. Cabell told them of Zor’s remarkable discovery on Optera, and of the subsequent development of Protoculture and Robotechnology; of the creation of the Zentraedi, and the growth of a new political elite; of the war that raged throughout the empire, and a renegade’s attempts at rebalancing the scales…

Lang was given to understand that Zor, Cabell’s one time student, hadn’t so much kept the secrets of Protoculture from the Masters as scattered them across the galaxy. There were still Flowers, on Optera and on many of the worlds Zor had seeded just prior to his death, but the Invid found them sterile and unusable because their Pollinators had also been taken. And while the Masters were in possession of these curious creatures, they no longer had the matrix that allowed for Protoculture conjuration from the Flowers. Zor had seen to it that no one could profit from his discoveries; and in the end he had driven himself half mad, convinced that he could somehow rule over all of it and parcel out to the universe the gift of everlasting life.

Exedore and Lang learned a little about Cabell, also; about how he and Zor and several other Tirolian scientists had deliberately refused to embark on the dangerous course the Masters had followed-the road to heightened powers and the toll that journey extracted.

Ever since the Masters left, Cabell and his young assistant, Rem, had been trying to replicate Zor’s achievements. But Cabell was now beginning to believe that the process was more one of mind than of matter, and that Protoculture would never be scientifically conjured from the Flowers-it had to be willed from them.

As Lang listened to Cabell’s assessment of the Masters, he found himself growing weary and almost bemused by the Expeditionary mission’s ironic accomplishment: in leaving Earth behind, they had left the door wide open for the Masters’ arrival. It occurred to him that peace would never have been possible with such a race, and he could only shudder at the thought of Earth in the incapable hands of Leonard and the Army of the Southern Cross.

Once in the fold-generator hold, the language of pure science replaced the grunts and glottal stops of the Tiresian tongue. The computer was their interpreter now, and as Cabell inspected the generators, he and Lang began to communicate with mathematics and schematic appraisals. Lang was amazed at how quickly the Tiresian was able to adapt and reshape his thinking to fit the demands of Human artificial-intelligence systems.

“But you have the necessary Protoculture reserves for a fold,” Cabell said after a long while. “Enough for a flotilla of ships, in fact. All that’s lacking is sufficient fuel for the Reflex drives.” He saw Lang’s bewildered look, and quickly created a program that could illustrate his ideas. Once or twice he called on Exedore to define a word or phrase.

Lang watched as a series of esoteric holographic displays took shape on the screen. He studied them a moment and offered Cabell a restrained smile. “Now I understand.”

A fold required an all-important interaction between Protoculture and the fuels that powered the Reflex drives themselves, an interaction his teams would never had guessed.

“But what you have here would call for a magnetic monopole ore, Cabell.”

The Tiresian looked impatient. “Well, of course. How else could it be done?”

“But we haven’t the equipment necessary to create this much material,” Lang told him.

“And even if we did, it would require more time-”

“Nonsense,” Cabell said dismissively. “You have all the ore you need right there.”

Lang and Exedore followed Cabell’s finger out the viewport.

“Fantoma?”

“You don’t remember a time when the Zentraedi were miners, Exedore?” Cabell asked.

Exedore seemed almost embarrassed by the question. “I do, Cabell. But we were never told what it was we were mining.”

Cabell turned. to Lang. “The base may be difficult for you to utilize since it was sized to suit the Zentraedi; but the ore is still there for the taking.”

Lang stepped to the viewport and looked long and hard at the giant planet’s jade-colored crescent. Then, as his eyes found diminutive Tirol, he recalled a premonition he had had long before the SDF-3’s departure from Earthspace. He thought of the SDF-3’s sizing chamber, and of Breetai’s small team of Micronized Battlepod warriors.

Exedore was standing alongside him now. “But will we have enough time, sir?”

Lang said, “We have nothing but time.”

The lights in the sky are stars, Jonathan Wolff told himself short of the tunnel entrance. He had dismounted the Hovertank and was gazing up into Tirol’s incomparable night. But there was at least one light up there that wasn’t a star, and he made a wish on it.

Minmei was somewhere on that unblinking presence he identified as the SDF-3, and the wish was meant to ascend to her heart. Wolff had hardly been able to keep her from his thoughts these past two days; even in the midst of that first day’s battle he would recall her face or the fragrance of her hair when she had come to the dropship hold to wish him luck, to embrace him. He wondered how he had allowed her to take hold of him like this, and considered for a moment that she might have witched herself into his mind. Because it was out of control all of a sudden, a flirtation he had played on the off-chance, never figuring she would respond. And what of Catherine? he asked himself. Was she, too, staring up into evening’s light, her arm around the thin shoulder of their only son, and sending him a wish across the galaxy? While he had already forgotten, broken the pledge he had promised to stick to this time, so they could have the second chance their marriage so desperately needed.

Odd thoughts to be thinking on such a night, Wolff mused.

“All set, sir,” the lieutenant’s voice reported from behind him.

Wolff took a quick breath and swung around. “I want it to go by the numbers, Lieutenant,”

he warned. “Two teams, no surprises. Now, where’s our voice?”

The lieutenant shouted, “Quist!” and a short, solid-looking ranger approached and snapped to.

“You stick to me like glue, Corporal,” Wolff told him. “Every time I put my hand out I expect to find you on the end of it, got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Wolff gave Quist the once-over. “All right, let’s hit it.”

The lieutenant got the teams moving through the smoke toward the subterranean corridors. It hadn’t taken a genius to locate the entry once they had gotten a clear fix on where the Beta from Skull had touched down. And that crazy kid, Baker, had a good memory if nothing else, Wolff had to concede; his recall of the ruined buildings in the area bordered on the uncanny.

Wolff signaled for everyone to hold up at the entrance. He peered down into the darkness, then took a look behind him, where four Hovertanks were guarding the rear. The corridor was tall and wide, but not big enough to accommodate a mecha. Stairways, secondary corridors, and some kind of huge lenslike medallions could be discerned from up here.

Wolff found himself thinking back to the journals his grandfather had kept during a minor Indo-Chinese war few people remembered. Back then, Jack Wolff and a handful of tunnel rats used to go into these things with flashlights and gunpowder handguns. Wolff checked the safety on his blaster and had to laugh: his grandfather wrote about the booby traps, the spiders and rats. Today it would be mindless feline robot drones and a host of other stuff they probably hadn’t even seen yet. But all in all it was the same old thing: a sucker’s tour of the unknown.

“Bring those Amblers in,” Wolff ordered.

Two squat, bipedal Robosearchlights moved up to throw intense light into the hole.

Wolff and his Pack began to follow them down.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

If Exedore had an Invid counterpart, it would have to be the scientist [sic], Tesla, for no other of the Regis’s children was possessed of such a wide-ranging intellect and personality. It is interesting to note, however, that although fashioned by the Regis, Tesla had much more of the Regent in his makeup. One has to wonder if the Regis, taking Zor as her only model, mistakenly assigned certain characteristics to males, and others to females. Marlene, Sera, and Corg-her human child-immediately come to mind. Was she, then, in some sense culpable for fostering the Regent’s devolved behavior?

Bloom Nesterfig, The Social Organization of the Invid It was Tesla who told the Regis about the trouble on Tirol. He was one of the Regent’s “scientists”-how she laughed at this notion!-and currently the commander of the Karbarran starship that was transporting life-forms back to the Regent’s zoo on Optera. Tesla had been something of a favorite child, but the Regis had become suspicious of his ostensibly metaphysical strivings, and had nothing but distrust for him now that he had allied himself with her estranged husband. Tesla reminded her of the Regent; there was the same burning intensity in his black eyes, the same distention and blush to his feelers. He had no details about the situation on Tirol, other than to note that the Regent had dispatched two additional warships from Optera to see to some new emergency.

“So he’s gotten himself into another fix,” the Regis sneered.

“A possible entanglement, Your Highness,” Tesla replied, offering her a somewhat obligatory and half-hearted salute. “A complication, perhaps. But hardly a `fix.’”

The two were on Praxis, where a shuttle from the Karbarran ship had put down to take on supplies and specimens. The starship itself, a medley of modular drives and transport units from a dozen worlds, was in orbit near the Praxian moon; it was crewed by slaves, ursine creatures native to Karbarra, a world rich in the Protoculture Peat that fueled the ship.

A sentry announced that one of Tesla’s lieutenants wished to speak with him. The Regis granted permission, and the lieutenant entered a moment later. Two Praxians, cuffed at wrist and ankle, followed. They were ravishing creatures, the Regis thought, appraising the duo Tesla had handpicked for the Regent’s zoo. Tall, Tiresioid females with thick, lustrous pelts and strategic swaths of primitive costume to offset their smooth nakedness.

The Regis confessed to a special fondness for the Praxians and their forested, fertile planet; but Praxis held even greater charms in its volcanic depths. Tesla, however, was unaware of the Genesis Pits she had fashioned here-her underground experiments-in creative evolution.

“Shall I take these two to the ship?” Tesla’s lieutenant asked.

As Tesla approached the females to look them over more closely, the taller of the two began to spit and curse at him, straining wildly against the cuffs that bound her. The Enforcer turned to silence her and took a bite on the hand. Ravishing, the Regis told herself, but warriors to the last.

Ultimately the lieutenant brought a weapon to bear on the pair; stunned, they collapsed to their knees and whimpered.

Tesla nodded and adopted the folded-arm posture characteristic of his group. “Yes, they’ll do fine,” he told his soldier. “And see that they’re well caged.”

The Regis made a scoffing sound when the females had been led out. “My husband’s need for pets. Instead of furthering his own evolution, he chooses to surround himself with captives-to bask in his self-deluded superiority.” She glared at Tesla, finding his form repugnant, in so many ways inferior to the very beings his ship carried like so much stock.

“So what are you bringing him this time, servant?”

Testa ignored the slur. “Feel free to inspect our cargo, Your Highness. We have choice samples from Karbarra, Spheris, Garuda, Peryton, and now Praxis. A brief stopover on Haydon IV, and our cages will be full.”

The Regis whirled on the scientist. “Haydon IV?” There was a sudden note of concern in her voice. “Have you given clear thought to the possible consequences of such an action?”

Tesla shrugged his massive shoulders. “What could go wrong, Your Highness? Haydon IV

is our world now, is it not?”

Haydon IV belongs to no one, the Regis kept to herself. Captives aside, Tesla would be lucky to leave that world alive.

Her husband was about to make a serious mistake, but she could not bring herself to intervene.

The raucous sound of a static-spiced squawkbox woke Janice from dreams of electric sheep. One eye opened, she spied Minmei on her knees across the room trying to adjust the radio’s volume.

“Too late,” Janice called out.

Minmei swung around, surprised, fingertips to her lips. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

Janice sat up and yawned. “I’m sure.” She’d fallen off an hour ago, just after Lynn had left their new quarters for parts unknown. “What is that-a transceiver?”

“No one will tell me anything about Jonathan. This is a kind of, uh, unscrambler. I thought I could pick up some combat reports.”

Janice stood up to get a better look at the radio and its decoder feed. “Where’d you get this, Lynn?”

“Promise not to tell?”

Janice looked around the room, calling attention to their confinement. “Who am I going to tell?”

“A woman who works for Dr. Lang got it for me. I explained the situation.”

“Stardom does have its advantages, doesn’t it?” Janice kneeled down next to Minmei and reached a finger out to readjust the radio’s tuner. In a minute she located the com net’s frequency.

“General Edwards and the Ghost Squadron are already on their way, over,” someone was updating. After several seconds of static a second voice said, “That’s good news, com two.

We’ve lost Wolff-”

Minmei’s gasp erased the next few words; then Janice succeeded in quieting her. “Listen, Lynn, just listen.”

“…had him for a while, but we’re getting nothing now. Probably that force field. Everything was roses up till then. No sign of enemy activity.”

“You see,” Janice said. Minmei was still upset, but hopeful again. “It’ll be all right, I promise.”

Trembling, Minmei shut off the receiver and got to her feet. “I can’t listen to it,” she said, wringing her hands. “I just can’t think about the horrible things he must be facing.” She collapsed, crying, into Janice’s open arms.

In the nave of the Royal Hall, the Invid brain looked as though it might succumb to a stroke at any moment. Cells were flashing out one after another as power continued to be shunted to the force shield and energy reserves were depleted. A dozen or so soldiers stood motionless; awaiting the brain’s command.

Obsim, too, was on the verge of panic, convinced now that the Regent meant to abandon him there. Looking frightened and desperate, he paced back and forth in front of the brain’s bubble chamber under the expressionless gaze of his Enforcer unit.

“Don’t watch me like that!” he shouted, suddenly aware of their eyes on him. “Who let the Tiresians escape? It wasn’t me, I can tell you that much. Don’t I have enough to do already? Do I have to do everything myself?” He waved a fourfingered fist at them.

“Heads are going to roll, I promise you!”

Obsim tried to avoid thinking about the punishment the Regent would have in store for him.

A one-way trip to the Genesis Pits, perhaps, for quick devolvement. Nothing like a little reverse ontogeny to bring someone around. Obsim had seen others go through it; he recalled the sight of them crawling from the pits like land crabs-obscene representations of an evolutionary past the Invid had never lived through, a form that existed only in the shape and design of the Pincer Ships and Shock Troopers.

Obsim stopped pacing to confront the brain.

“Situation,” he demanded.

The living computer struggled to revive itself; it floated listlessly in the middle depths of the tank, dull and discolored. Obsim repeated his command.

“Intruders have entered the subterranean vaults and corridors,” the brain managed at last.

“Show me!” Obsim barked, fighting to keep his fear in check. “Let the Inorganics be my eyes.”

An image began to take shape in the interior of the communicator sphere; gradually it resolved, albeit distorted, as if through a fish-eye lens. Obsim saw a small group of armed invaders moving through the corridors on foot. There were males and females among them, outfitted in helmets, body armor, visual and audio scanners. The Inorganic remained in its place of concealment and allowed them to pass by unharmed.

“There is a second group,” the computer announced. “Closer than the first. In the area where the Tiresians’ transmissions originated.”

That place had not been found; the Inorganics had instead given chase to the Tiresians themselves.

“They entered the way the others left,” Obsim speculated. “Could they be in league?”

The brain assessed the probability and flashed the results in the communicator sphere.

Obsim made a disgusted sound. “As I feared. They must be stopped.”

“Activating the Inorganics will substantially weaken the shield,” the brain said, second-guessing Obsim’s command.

“Do it anyway.” The scientist straightened his thick neck, allowing him to regard the room’s distant ceiling. “Let them waste their firepower battering us from above, while we destroy their forces below.”

“Puppies?” Wolff repeated, exchanging puzzled glances with the radioman. “Ask him to clarify.”

Quist listened for a moment. “She says they look like little sheepdogs, sir, except there’s something funny about their eyes and they’ve got some kind of horns. Sounds like there’s a whole bunch of ‘em.”

“You can hear them?”

“Yes, sir.”

Wolff pressed the headset to his ear and heard a chorus of shrill barks. “Sounds like they’re crying,” he commented. “Verify their position. Tell them to sit tight.”

Aware that the external links were down, Wolff sent a runner back to the entrance, then gave the signal for the team to move out. His group had encountered nothing but mile after mile of corridor and serviceway, with the occasional cavernous room to break the monotony. By all accounts they were well beneath the Royal Hall, but they had yet to locate a way up. The B team, however, had wandered into a tight maze of even smaller tunnels, and were now in what their lieutenant described as a database lab. That’s where they found the puppies.

Half an hour later the two teams reunited.

It was indeed a computer room, consoles and screens galore, but the lieutenant’s “puppies” were anything but. The creatures remained huddled together in one corner of the lab, screaming their sad song, loath, it appeared, to leave their spot.

“Sir, I tried to pick one of them up and it just seemed to disappear right out of my arms,”

the lieutenant told Wolff.

He gave her a dubious look and was about to try for himself when the voice of one of the corridor sentries rang out.

“We’ve got movement, people! From all directions!”

Wolff studied the motion-detector display briefly. There was a wider corridor two hundred yards left of the lab that led almost straight to the entrance, with a two or three jags thrown in. He dispatched a second runner with instructions for the tankers, and began to hurry everyone along toward the corridor.

“The…things, sir, do we leave them?”

Wolff glanced into the room at the Pollinators’ whiteshag pile. “They’re probably just Tirol’s way of saying `rat.’ Now let’s move!”

Delivered into the upper reaches of Tirol’s envelope only moments before, the Ghost Squadron dropped out of Tiresia’s dawn like brilliant tongues of flame, half to batter away at the Royal Hall’s evaporating shield, while Edwards’s elite rushed in to follow the Wolff Pack’s trail. Edwards had Cabell’s map of that subterranean maze in hand now, and was determined to get to the Invid brain before anyone else.

The commander of the Hovertanks waiting by the crater entrance to the corridors didn’t know what to think as he watched General Edwards leap from VT’s cockpit and commence what looked like angry strides in his direction. He jumped down from his own turret cockpit and ordered everyone to attention. But it was obvious in an instant that Edwards wasn’t interested in formalities or honorifics.

“What’s Wolff’s position?” Edwards demanded, pulling off his helmet and gloves.

A lieutenant ran forward and produced the sketchy map Wolff had sent back with one of the runners. Edwards snatched the thing away before the officer could lay it out.

“They’re about half a mile in, General,” the lieutenant said, while Edwards began comparing Wolff’s map to the one Cabell had drawn.

“Who was the last man in there?” Edwards asked, preoccupied.

A young corporal presented herself and articulated a summary of the present situation.

“The colonel has pulled back to a position…here,” she said, indicating a corridor junction on the cruder map. “The colonel hopes to lure the enemy along this corridor-”

“It’s plain what the colonel proposes to do, Corporal,” the squadron commander said before Edwards could turn on the woman.

Edwards studied the maps a moment longer, then grunted in a satisfied way, and began to suit up in the gear one of his number brought over. “I want you to see to it that no one follows us in there, Captain-no one, is that understood.” Menacingly, Edwards flicked his rifle’s selector to full auto and all but brandished the weapon.

“Understood, General, we’ll hold them here,” the captain responded, trying his best not to have it come out sounding confused.

Edwards tapped the man roughly on the shoulder as he stepped past him. “Good for you.”

He waved his twelve forward and they disappeared into the floodlit entrance.

Five minutes along, Edwards pulled Colonel Adams aside to give him special instructions.

Again they consulted the Tiresian’s map, and Edwards pointed out the tunnels that would lead directly to the heart of the Royal Hall.

“Wolff is closer to the Invid brain than he probably realizes,” Edwards began. “And if he can break through whatever it is they’re throwing against him, he’s going to find the way in.

Detail three men and make certain that doesn’t happen. Give him rear fire if you have to, anything that’ll pin him down.” Edwards showed Adams the route he would be taking. “I’m going around him, but I need some extra time.”

Adams glanced at the corridor’s smooth walls and ceiling. “Maybe we can arrange a cave-in for him.”

“Do whatever it takes,” Edwards said harshly, repocketing the map. “It’ll be no one’s loss if he doesn’t make it out of here.”

Elsewhere in the corridors, Wolff had ordered his Pack to open fire. They couldn’t see what they were shooting at, but the energy hyphens the enemy was returning were similar to the drone bursts they had faced on the surface. There was nothing in the way of cover, so everyone was either -facedown on the floor, or plastered flat against the walls, retreating by odd and even counts through stroboscopic light, blasts of heat, and earsplitting explosions.

Backed around the first jag in the maze, they had a moment to catch their breath, while a horizontal hail of fire flew past them down the central corridor. In response to a tap on the shoulder from the radioman, Wolff raised the faceshield of his helmet. They had reestablished traffic with the Hovertank command.

“We must be outside the field already,” Wolff said.

“Negative, sir. Command reports the barrier is softening. The Ghost Squadron’s hammering it to death.”

“Edwards, huh? Guess we shouldn’t be choosy.”

Quist smiled. “No, sir. The rest of his team-”

“We got troubles, Colonel,” the team’s point interrupted breathlessly, motioning up the corridor. “I’m picking up movement. They’re boxing us in.”

Wolff shifted his gaze between the storm off to their left and the corridor ahead. “But how…They would’ve had to pass the tanks-”

“Incoming!” someone yelled, and the corridor ceiling took two oblique hits.

Wolff and his team tried to meld with the floor as fire and explosive debris rained down all around them. The ceiling sustained two follow-up hits before he could even lift his head.

Then he heard Quist say, “It’s coming down!” just when everything began to crumble…

“It’s no use,” Rick announced in the dark, sitting straight up in bed.

Lisa stirred beside him and reached out a hand to find the light pad. He was already out of bed by the time the ceiling spots came on, hands on hips, pacing. Lisa said nothing, deciding to wait until he had walked off some of his frustration. She was exhausted and in no mood for a midnight support session, let alone an argument. Even so, she had managed only an hour of half sleep herself, expecting this very scene.

Rick had been impossible since the Tiresians’ capture, and his behavior seemed to be having a kind of contagious effect on everyone around him. Suddenly there was an atmosphere of hopelessness, a sense that the situation had become untenable. Lives had been lost, the spacefold generators had been damaged, the very Masters they had come so far to meet were on their way to Earth…For Lisa the events of the past few days had given rise to a peculiar mix of thoughts and feelings; it was not unlike a time ten years ago, when the crew of the SDF-1 had been thrust overnight into a whirlwind of terror. But she refused to permit herself to relive those moments of dread and anticipation, and was determined to steer clear of behavioral ruts. And much to her surprise, she found that she had discovered the strength to meet all the fear and challenges head on, some inner reserve that not only allowed her to maintain, but to conquer and forge ahead. She wanted to believe that Rick had made the same discovery, but it was almost as if he had willingly surrendered to the past, and was actually desirous of that retro-gravitation. This from the man who had been so take-charge these past six years, who had devoted himself to the SDF-3’s constriction and its crucial mission.

“Rick, you’ve got to get some rest,” she said at last. “This isn’t doing either of us any good.”

It seemed to be the only conversation they could have anymore, and she knew exactly what he was about to say.

“You just don’t understand, do you? I need to be doing more than just standing around waiting for things to happen. I have to get back where I belong-even if that means resigning my command.”

She met Rick’s gaze and held it until he turned away. “You’re right. Maybe I don’t understand you anymore. I mean, I understand your frustrations, but you’re going to have to tell me why you need to risk your life out there. Haven’t you proved yourself a hundred times over, Rick?” Lisa threw up her hands.

“It’s my duty to be with my team.”

“It’s your duty to command,” she said, raising her voice. “It’s not your duty to get yourself killed!”

Rick had an answer ready for delivery when all at once Lisa’s com tone sounded. She leaned over, hit the switch, and said, “Admiral Hayes.”

It was the bridge: scanners had picked up two Invid troop carriers closing fast on the fortress.

Rick saw Lisa blanch; agitated, she pushed her hair back from her face. He was about to go over to her when his own intercom erupted.

“Tell General Reinhardt to meet me in the Room,” Rick said, responding to the brief message. He switched off, and rushed to the wardrobe, pulling out one of his old flight suits.

“I’m on my way,” he heard Lisa say into the com.

She watched him suit up in silence; there were tears in her eyes when he bent over to kiss her good-bye.

“I have to do it,” he told her.

Lisa turned away from him. “Expect me to do the same.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

We have a desperate new mission: to mine enough of Fantoma’s mysterious ore to rebuild the fortress’s damaged spacefold generators, and journey to the other side of the galaxy to save our beleaguered world from destruction at the hands of the Robotech Masters. If this mission sounds suspiciously like the old mission, it’s because it is the old mission, played backwards. I am growing weary of the ironies; I am growing weary of the whole thing.

The collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

The clam shaped Invid troop carriers remanifested in Fantoma’s brightside space, using the giant’s rings for ECM cover and yawning more than a thousand Pincer Ships into the void, while the Earthforces’ superdimensional fortress raised its energy shields and swung itself from stationary orbit. As the fortress’s secondary batteries traversed and ranged in, teams of Alpha and first-generation Veritech fighters streamed from the launch bays.

Inside the mile-long ship, men and women answered the call of klaxons and alert sirens, racing to battle stations and readying themselves in dozens of command posts and gun, turrets. Scanners linked to the Tactical Information Center’s big boards swept and probed; computers tied in to those same systems assessed, analyzed, executed, and distributed a steady flow of data; techs and processors bent to their assigned tasks, requesting updates and entering commands, hands and fingers a blur as they flew across keyboards, decks, and consoles.

On the enemy’s side, things were much less complicated: pilots listened and obeyed, hurling themselves against the Humans’ war machine with a passionless intensity, a blind obedience, a violent frenzy…

“Are you sure you want to go through with this?” Max Sterling asked Rick over the tac net.

Rick’s image was on the VT’s right commo screen. Miriya was on the left one. There was still time to turn back.

“Positive, Skull Leader,” Rick responded. “And I don’t want either of you babysitting me.”

“Now, why would we want to do that?” Miriya said.

Rick made a face. “Well, that’s what everybody else is trying to do.”

Max made light of his friend’s plight, but at the same time was fully aware of the concern he felt. He had no worries about Rick’s combat skills-he had kept his hand in all these years. But Rick seemed to have forgotten that out here stray thoughts were as dangerous as annihilation discs. Nothing extraneous in mind or body, Max was tempted to remind him. Any pilot, no matter how good he or she might be, had to keep those words in mind; it was as much a warning as it was a code. Mechamorphosis was a serious matter even under optimum conditions; but in space combat it meant the difference between life and death.

Max took a long look at the cockpit displays; the Invid crab-ships were just coming into range. The field was so packed the enemy registered as a white blur on his radar screen.

Signatures and targeting information came up on one of the peripherals.

“Block party of bandits,” Max said evenly, “nine o’clock clear around to three. ETAs on closure are coming in…”

“Roger, Skull Leader,” Rick radioed back. “Talk about your target-rich environment.

They’re going to be all over us.”

Max could hear a certain excitement, an enthusiasm, in Rick’s tone.

“We’ve got a job to do,” he advised. “Let’s just take them as they come. Nothing fancy. Go for target lock.”

Rick acknowledged. “Ready to engage.”

Max tightened his hand on the HOTAS. He had visuals on the lead ships now, pincers gleaming in starlight.

An instant later the cold blackness of space was holed by a thousand lights. Death dropped its starting flag and the slaughter recommenced.

Jonathan Wolff had yet to see a finish line for the hellish race his team was running in Tiresia’s cruel underground. Four had died instantly in the corridor’s collapse, and two more had been pinned under the superheated debris; the rest of the team was huddled on top of each other at the junction, throwing everything they had around the corner. But there was something to be thankful for: the cave-in had only partially sealed off their escape route. Moreover, while the drones were continuing their slow advance, whatever had hit them from behind was goner.

“I’m not picking up any movement, sir,” the pointman was shouting above the clamor of the weapons.

Wolff wiped bits of cooled metal from his bodysuit and regarded the mass that had almost buried him. It was the same smooth, ceramiclike material that made up Tiresia’s surface streets and many of the city’s buildings. Some ferrocrete analogue, he guessed.

A corpsman was seeing to the wounded.

Wolff motioned to Quist and asked in hand signals if they still had contact with the tanks.

The radioman nodded.

“Advise them of our situation and tell them we need support,” Wolff said into Quist’s ear. “I want to see a fire team down here in ten minutes. And I don’t care if they have to blast their way in with the tanks.”

Quist crouched down along the wall and began to repeat it word for word. Wolff moved to the medic’s side. The wounded soldier was a young woman on temporary duty from one of Grant’s units. She couldn’t have been older than eighteen, and she was torn up pretty badly. Powers, Wolff recalled.

He reached down to brush a strand of damp hair from her face; she returned a weak but stoic smile. Wolff gritted his teeth and stood up, infuriated. He spoke Minmei’s name in a whisper and hurried to the junction, his handgun drawn.

Deeper in the maze, Edwards had had his first glimpse of the enemy; but he hadn’t stopped to puzzle out or catalog just what it was he had killed. His team was simply firing its way through corridor after corridor, stepping over the bodies and smoking shells their weapons leveled. Hellcats, Scrim, Crann-it made no difference to Edwards; he was closing on the access stairway to the nave of the Royal Hall, and that was all that mattered.

Colonel Adam’s splinter group had rejoined the main team after throwing some red-hot rear fire Wolff’s way. If they hadn’t been entirely successful in burying the Pack alive, Adam’s team had at least seen to it that Wolff was no longer in the running for the grand prize, the Invid brain.

Edwards, at point with a gun in each hand, was the first to see the jagged trench Obsim’s enforcers had opened in the floor of the Hall. He had no notion of its purpose, but he guessed that the narrow band of overhead light was coming from a room close to the nave, perhaps even adjacent to it. He waved the team to a halt and spent a moment contemplating his options. Surely the brain was aware of their presence, unless the Ghost’s bombing runs had given it too much else to think about. Even so, Edwards decided, the enemy was down to the dregs of its force. The things he killed in the corridors were easy prey, and if the Tiresian’s word could be trusted, that was all the more reason to assume the brain was preoccupied.

He asked himself whether the brain would expect him to come up through the breach. It would be a difficult and hazardous ascent. But then, why would they have trenched the Hall’s floor if they knew about the stairway? He forced any decision from his mind and fell back, allowing his instincts free reign.

And something told him to push on.

Five minutes later the team was creeping up the steep stairway Cabell had described, and Edwards’s hand had found the panel stud that would trigger the door. He gave the team the go sign and slammed the switch with the heel of his fist. They poured up and out of the tunnels wailing like banshees, rolling and tearing across the nave’s hard floor, lobbing concussion grenades and loosing bursts of death.

Two rows of Invid soldiers who were waiting for them to come through the nave’s front entrance were caught by surprise and chopped down in seconds. But two Shock Troopers stepped out of nowhere and began dumping annihilation discs into the hole, frying a quarter of the team before the rest could bring the ships down with a barrage of scanner shots. One of the ships cracked open like an egg, spilling a thick green wash across the floor; the other came apart in an explosion that decapitated the lieutenant.

The nave was filled with fire, smoke, and pandemonium now, but Edwards moved through it like a cat, closing on the brain’s towering bubble chamber while the team mopped up.

Two seven-foot-tall sentries came at him, spewing bolts of orange flame from their forearm cannons, but he managed to throw himself clear. At the same time he heard the simultaneous discharge of two rocket launchers, and covered himself as the projectiles found their mark.

Edwards was on his feet and back on track before the explosions subsided. Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of an unarmed robed figure making a mad dash for the brain. The alien started babbling away and waving its arms in a panicked fashion, as if to plead with Edwards to cease fire. Edwards held up his hand and the nave grew eerily silent, save for Obsim’s rantings and the crackle of fires.

“What’s it saying?” Major Benson asked.

Edwards told them all to keep quiet. “Go ahead, alien, make your pitch.”

A rush of sounds left Obsim’s mouth, but it was the brain that spoke. In English.

“Invaders, listen to me: you must not destroy the brain. The brain lives and is a power unto itself. Your purpose and desires are understood, and the brain can see to your needs.”

Again Edwards had to tell everyone to cut the chatter. The tall Invid continued to mouth sounds from its snaillike head, which was bobbing up and down at the end of a long, thick neck.

“Behold,” the brain translated, as the communicator sphere began to glow. “Your people are at this very moment battling our troops near the rings of Tirol’s motherworld.”

The communicator showed them a scene of fierce fighting, Pincer Ships and Veritechs locked in mortal combat.

Obsim made a high-pitched sound and swung around to face Edwards, hands tucked in his sleeves. “The brain can put an end to it.”

Edwards stared at the alien, then leveled his weapons at the bubble chamber.

“Showtime.”

From the command chair’s elevated position on the SDF-3 bridge, Lisa had a clear view of the battle’s distant light show, countless strobelike explosions erupting across an expanse of local space like so many shortlived novas. The Veritech teams were successful at keeping most of the Invid ships away from the fortress, and those few that had broken through were taken out with the in-close weapons systems. But the silent flares, the laser-array bolts, and annihilation discs detailed only half the story; for the rest one would have to turn to the tac net and its cacophony of commands and requests, its warnings and imprecations and prayers, its cries and deathscreams.

Lisa had promised to keep it all at arm’s length, to maintain a strategic distance, much as she was doing with the fortress. Resolute, she voiced her commands in a clipped, almost severe tone, and when she watched those lights, it was with a deliberate effort to force their meaning from her thoughts.

An update from one of the duty stations brought her swiveling around now to face the threat board: the two motherships had changed course. Lisa called for position and range.

“Approach vectors onscreen, sir,” said an enlisted rating tech. “They’re coming straight at us.”

“The Skull team requests permission to engage.”

Lisa whirled around. “Negative! They’re to pull back at once.”

She turned again to study a heads-up monitor and ordered a course correction.

Reinhardt’s voice was booming through the squawkboxes, his bearded face on one of the screens. He asked for a second correction, a subtle maneuver to reposition the main gun.

“Coming around to zero-zero-niner, sir. Standing by…”

“Picking up strong EV readings. We’re being scanned and targeted.”

“Get me Lang,” Lisa ordered.

Lang addressed her from a peripheral screen; he had anticipated her question. “We’ve shunted power-from the shields to the main gun, but we’re still well protected.” At the same time, she heard Reinhardt say, “Prepare to fire on my command.”

“Has the Skull pulled out?”

“Uh, checking…”

“Quickly!” she barked.

“Affirmative,” the tech stammered. “They’re clear.”

“On my mark-” Reinhardt started to say.

Suddenly two brilliant flashes flowered into life in front of the ship, throwing blinding light through the viewport. Caught in the grip of the exposions, the fortress was shaken forcefully enough to toss techs from their stations and send them clear across the bridge.

Lisa’s neck felt as though it had snapped. She put one hand to the back of her head, and asked if everyone was all right. Sirens somewhere off in the ship had changed tone; the fortress had sustained damage.

“What happened?” Lisa said as reports poured in.

“No trace of the ships, sir.”

“God, it’s like something vaporized them…”

Lisa watched in awe as the light show began to wink out.

“What’s going on out there-has the enemy disengaged?”

The threat-board tech scratched his head. “No, sir; er, yes, sir. That is, the VT teams report all enemy ships inactive. They’re dead in space.”

The tech on the SDF-3 bridge wasn’t the only one scratching his head. In a corridor fifty feet beneath Tiresia’s Royal Hall, Jonathan Wolff was doing the same thing.

“They just stopped firing,” one of the Pack was saying.

Certainly no one was about to argue with that or be anything less than overjoyed, but the question remained: why?

Wolff poked his head around the corner of the corridor like some of the others were doing, and saw half-a-dozen bipedal Inorganics stopped not ten years from the junction. And not simply stopped, but shut down-frozen. Presently, everyone who could stand was out in the middle of the central corridor gaping at the silent drones; it was the first time any of them had had a chance to inspect the things up close, and they found themselves relieved enough to comment on their remarkable design. Wolff, however, put a quick end to it.

The requested fire team had arrived without incident from the other side of the collapse.

Wolff sent the wounded back, along with most of the original squad-it was looking better for Powers-and pushed on toward the Royal Hall. The field command post had yet to hear word one from Edwards’s team.

They remained cautious and alert as they regained the ground they had surrendered.

Wolff led them past the computer room and on into a confusing warren of tunnels and ducts. Along the way they passed dozens of Inorganics in the same state of suspended animation. But at last they came to the trench Edwards had seen earlier, and instinctively Wolff knew they were close to reaching the center.

“It’s blue smoke and mirrors,” Edwards sneered as the image in the communicator sphere de-rezzed. He had seen the explosions that wiped out the two troop carriers, but remained unconvinced. “You could be running home movies for all I know.”

Obsim made a puzzled gesture and turned to the brain.

“You have a suspicious mind, Invader.” The synthesized voice had a raspy sound to it now, as though fatigued.

“That’s right, Mister Wizard, and I’m also the one holding a gun to your head.” Edwards half turned to one of his men. “I want immediate confirmation on what we just saw. See if you can raise anyone.”

The radioman moved off and Edwards continued. “But if you are on the level, I’ve got to say I’m impressed. The brain is certainly far too valuable to destroy-but then again, it’s far too dangerous to remain operative.”

Obsim showed Edwards his palms, then fumbled to open a concealed access panel in the bubble chamber’s hourglass-shaped base.

“The brain can be deactivated. It can be yours to command.”

Interested, Edwards stepped forward, brandishing the weapon.

“Go ahead, alien.”

Obsim pulled two dermatrode leads from the panel and placed them flat against the center of his head; his fingers meanwhile tapped a command sequence into the panel’s ten-key touchpad. At the same time, the brain seemed to compress as it settled toward the bottom of the chamber. After a moment Obsim reversed the process, causing an effervescent rush inside the tank as the brain revived.

“Again,” said Edwards, and Obsim repeated it. Then it was Edwards’s turn to try, while Colonel Adams held a gun to Obsim’s snout. Edwards got it right on the first take; the brain was asleep.

Edwards shut the panel and stood up, grinning at the alien. “You’ve been a most gracious host.” Without taking his eyes off Obsim, he yelled, “Do we have that confirmation, soldier?”

“Affirmative,” came the reply.

“Waste him,” Edwards said to Adams.

The burst blew out the Invid scientist’s brain; the body collapsed in a heap, Obsim’s once-white robes drenched in green.

“Wargasm.” Adams laughed.

Edwards regarded each of his men individually; the gaze from his single eye said much more than any verbal warning could.

Just then, Human voices could be heard on the staircase. Edwards and his men swung around, weapons armed, only to find Jonathan Wolff crawling cautiously from the hole.

Wolff took a look around the room, as his team followed him out. There were two devastated Shock Trooper ships and twenty or more Invid corpses. Wolff had seen the charred remains of what looked like four men on the steps. Now he focused his attention on the bubble chamber.

“This the thing the Tiresians were talking about, sir?”

“That’s it, Colonel,” Edwards said.

Wolff glanced down at Obsim, then at Edwards. He had questions for the general, questions about what had gone on in the corridors and what had gone on here, but he sensed it wasn’t the right time-not with Edwards’s team looking as though they weren’t full yet. Ultimately, he said, “Too bad I didn’t arrive sooner, sir.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t,” Adams told him with a sly smile. “It was a real horror show.”

“Yeah,” Wolff mused, watching Edwards’s men trade looks, “I can imagine.”

Edwards broke the subsequent silence by ordering his radioman to make contact with the ship.

Edwards was jubilant. “Tell them the mission was a complete success.”

Without warning, he slapped Wolff on the back.

“Smile, Colonel-you’re a hero!”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was without question a mind-boost for [Edwards], comparable to the one Dr. Emil Lang had received while reconning the SDF-1. And in the same way Lang became almost instantly conversant with Zor’s science, Robotechnology, Edwards became conversant with the lusts and drives of the Invid Regent. This, however, was not engrammation, but amplification. Edwards and the Regent were analogues of one another: scarred, vengeful, and dangerous beings.

Constance Wildman, When Evil Had Its Day: A Biography of T. R. Edwards The battle was over and an uneasy calm prevailed; no one aboard the SDF-3 was sure how long the lull would last, but if the Robotech War had taught them anything, it was that they should make the most of tranquil interludes.

None dared call it peace.

One by one the inert Invid ships were destroyed, after it was determined that the pilots were all dead. Dr. Lang and Cabell speculated that the living computer, in addition to vaporizing the troop carriers and shutting down the Inorganics, had issued some sort of blanket suicide directive. Many among the RDF found this difficult to accept, but the explanation was strengthened by Cabell’s recounting of equally puzzling and barbarous acts the Invid had carried out. On the moon’s surface, a building-to-building search was under way, and most of Tiresia’s humanoid population had already been freed. The hundreds of drones that littered Tiresia’s subterranean passageways remained lifeless; one day soon that labyrinth would be sealed up, along with the Royal Hall and the sleeping brain itself. But that would not be before Cabell had had a chance to show Lang around, or before the Pollinators had been rescued and removed.

There was something of a mutual-admiration society in the works between Lang and the bearded Tiresian scientist. And while it was true that the Expeditionary mission had “liberated” Tirol, it was questionable whether that could have been achieved without Cabell and Rem’s intelligence. More to the point, Cabell’s importance in the work that lay ahead for the mission’s robotech teams was beyond dispute. Lang had taken every opportunity to press him for details of the mining operation, and was eagerly awaiting the RDF’s clearance for a recon landing on Fantoma. Earth’s survival depended on their being able to mine enough ore to rebuild the SDF-3’s damaged engines, and to fold home before the Masters arrived.

During the course of the discussions, Lang learned something of Tirol’s gradual swing toward militarism in the years following Zor’s great discoveries. Cabell spoke of a shortlived but wonderful time when exploration had been his people’s main concern.

Indeed, the Zentraedi themselves were originally created to serve those ends as miners, not as the galactic warriors they would eventually become. The defoliation of Optera, the Invid homeworld, had been their first directive under the reconfigured imperative. There followed a succession of conquests and police actions, and, ultimately, warfare against the very creatures whose world they had destroyed.

Then they had traveled halfway across the galaxy to die…

As Lang listened he began to feel a kind of sympathy for the Invid; it was obvious there were mysteries here even Cabell had yet to penetrate. But what also gripped Lang was a sudden existential dread, rooted in the fact that war was not something humankind had invented, but was pervasive throughout the known universe. It brought to mind the rumors he had been hearing, to the effect that General Edwards was already pressing for the construction of an entire fleet of warships. According to his camp, the return mission had to recognize a new priority: the idea of peaceful, preventative negotiations was no longer viable-not when war against the Masters was now viewed as a certainty.

Oddly enough, Cabell took no issue with Edwards’s demands. It was not so much that he wished to see the Masters of his race obliterated-although he himself would have gladly put to death the cloned body politic they had created-it was his unassailable fear of the Invid.

“Of course I applaud this victory and the freeing of my people,” Cabell told him. “But you must believe me when I tell you, Doctor, that the greatest threat to your planet is the Invid.

Put aside your sympathy-I know, I saw it in your face. They are not the race they once were; they are homeless now, and driven. They will stop at nothing to regain their precious Flowers, and if that matrix exists-they will find it.”

Lang wore a sardonic look. “Perhaps it would be better to do nothing-except pray that the Masters find the matrix and leave.”

“I fear they will not leave, Doctor. They have all they need with them, and your world will be nothing but a new battleground.”

“So what choice do we have?”

“Defeat them here, Doctor. Exterminate them before you face the Masters.”

Lang was aghast. “You’re talking about genocide, Cabell.”

Cabell shook his head sadly. “No, I am talking about survival. Besides,” the old man thought to add, “your race seems to have a penchant for that sort of thing.”

Rick was among the dozens of VT pilots who had ended up in sick bay. There was no tally of the dead and wounded yet, but the hospital was already overcrowded and shuttles were still bringing up men and women from the moon’s surface.

When Lisa first received word of his injuries she thought she might faint; but she was relieved now, knowing that his condition had improved from guarded to good, and that he had been moved out of ICU and into a private room. But she wasn’t exactly rushing to his side, and couldn’t help but feel somehow vindicated for her earlier remarks. At the same time, she recalled the last visit she had paid Rick in sick bay. It was shortly before the SDF-1 had left Earth for a second time-ordered off by Russo’s council-and Khyron’s Botoru had been waging a savage attack against the fortress. Rick was badly wounded during a missile barrage Lisa herself had ordered. She remembered how frightened and helpless she had felt that cool Pacific morning, seeing him in the throes of shock and delirium, his head turbaned in gauze and bandages…It was a painful memory even now, eight years later, but she was determined not to let it soften the anger that had crept in to replace her initial dismay-an easy enough challenge when she found him sitting up in bed and grinning, well-attended by the nursing staff.

“Here you go, hero,” she said, placing a small gift on the sheet, “I brought you something.”

Rick unwrapped the package and glanced at the audio disc it contained-a self-help guide that had been a bestseller on Earth and was enjoying an enormous popularity on the fortress. He showed Lisa a confused look. “The Hand That’s Dealt You…What’s this supposed to mean?”

Lisa sat on the edge of the bed. “I think it’s something you should hear,”

Rick put the disc aside and stared at her a moment. “You’re still angry.”

“I want to know what you intend to do, Rick.”

He looked away, down at his bandaged arm. “I’m going to meet with the Council tomorrow.”

Lisa couldn’t believe what she was hearing, but managed to keep her voice even and controlled. “You’re making a big mistake, Rick. Can I talk you out of it?”

He reached for her hand and met her gaze. “No, babe. I know where I belong. I just want you to respect my decision.”

She let go of his hand and stood up. “It’s not a matter of respect, Rick. Can’t you understand that you’ve picked the worst possible moment to resign? Who else has your experience? This ship is as much yours as anyone’s, and Lang is going to need you to supervise the recon-”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

Lisa huffed at him. “Edwards will be taking over. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?” Lisa paced away from the bed and whirled around. “You haven’t heard the latest, have you?”

“And I don’t want to. I’m a pilot.”

“You’re a disappointment,” she said as she left the room.

On another level of the fortress, Jean Grant was crying in her husband’s arms; Vince, in his usual fashion, was trying to be strong about it, but there were tears in his eyes. They had just shuttled up from the GMU, their first time offworld in days, and fatigue and intensity finally had had a chance to catch up with them. Perhaps in a last-ditch effort to escape this moment, Jean had tried to run off to sick bay to assist the med teams, but Vince had restrained her. Max and Miriya were present in the couple’s spacious cabin.

Max handed them both a drink. “Medicine for melancholy,” he said, forcing a smile.

Max, too, wore his share of bandages under his uniform; there had been more than the usual complement of close calls, at least one of which could be traced to his protective attitude toward Rick. Max had suffered some minor burns because of it, but Rick had nearly gotten himself killed. That he saved Rick’s life was all that mattered-a secret only he and Miriya shared.

Jean thanked him for the drink and wiped her cheeks with the palms of her hands. “What are we going to do?” she put to all of them.

“We’re going to pitch in and make it happen,” Vince said, knocking back the drink in one gulp. “It can’t take forever to get the generators back in shape.”

Max and Miriya traded looks. “Five years,” she said.

Jean gasped. “Miriya, no!”

“That’s just Lang’s first estimate,” Max added hurriedly, trying to be helpful. “And I’m sure he’s playing it well on the safe side.”

“But five years, Max…The kids…”

Vince put a massive arm around his wife’s trembling shoulders and quieted her. “They’re both better off where they are.”

“With war on the way?” Jean’s face flushed with anger. “Don’t patronize me, any of you!”

Distraught, she sighed and apologized.

Miriya said, “Even if it takes five years we’ll reach Earth ahead of the Masters. They abandoned Tirol ten years ago, and Cabell’s guess is that it will take them another ten.”

“Estimates,” Jean said. “Is that how we’ll explain it to Bowie and Dana-that we guessed wrong in thinking the Masters would be here?”

No one had an answer for her.

“So this is all that remains of Tirol’s children.”

Arms akimbo, Breetai drew himself up to his full Micronized height and made a disappointed sound. All around him Tiresia’s humanoid citizenry-the weak and aged fringe who had taken to Tirol’s wastes during the Great Transition-were being cared for by med-staff personnel from the GMU, which had been moved from its LZ to an area near the center of the ruined city. Elsewhere, Destroids and Hovertanks patrolled the streets, continuing their search-and-sweep and cordoning off restricted areas, including the Royal Hall’s vast circular plaza.

Exedore, who had shuttled down to the surface with members of Lang’s Robotech team, heard the anger and frustration in Breetai’s words. And he knew that Breetai spoke for all the Zentraedi under his command.

“You would no doubt have preferred a face-to-face encounter with the Masters, Commander.”

“I won’t deny it.” He looked down at his companion. “I feel…what is the word, Exedore?”

“Cheated, my lord.”

Breetai inclined his head knowingly. “Yes. Although…”

Exedore raised an eyebrow.

“…on some level, we failed.”

To recapture Zor’s ship and return the matrix, Exedore completed. It was the Imperative reasserting its hold, the Masters’ cruel imprint. He was tempted to point out that the matrix would only have made it as far as Dolza’s hands in any case. But what was the use of contradicting Breetai? Besides, Exedore had more pressing concerns on his mind.

“Commander,” he said at last, “have you arrived at a decision yet?”

Breetai grunted. “You have become quite the diplomat, Exedore.” He turned to regard Fantoma’s sinister crescent in the skies behind him, thinking, Zarkopolis, where my real past lies buried. To be returned there after so much space and time…

“We will comply with Lang’s request.”

Exedore smiled. An even older imperative. “It was meant to be,” he said, eyes fixed on the living remnants of the Masters’ fallen empire.

T. R. Edwards studied his reflection, leaning in toward the mirror in his quarters, fingertips playing across the raised and jagged devastation of his face. The scars could easily have been erased by microsurgical techniques, but a cosmetic solution was the last thing Edwards desired. In their raw ugliness, they were a constant reminder of the deep-seated injuries spread through the rest of his body and soul-areas no laser scalpel could reach or transform.

He was feverish, and had been so since the incidents in the Royal Hall; it was almost as if his brief contact with the Invid brain had stirred something within him. Beneath the fever’s physical haze his thinking was lighting-quick and inspired; his goal was clear, and the path to it well-marked. He realized now that he had been guilty of a kind of reductionist approach to both purpose and destiny. He had convinced himself that Earth was the star-a Ptolemaic sin-when actually the planet was little more than a supporting player in a much grander drama. But he was finally beginning to understand that there were worlds for the taking!

He rationalized his failures, however, blaming fate for having kept him Earthbound while the SDF-1 had spent two years of cosmic journeying.

Let Zand and Moran and Leonard play their little games on Earth. Edwards laughed to himself. And let the Masters arrive to soften things up. In the meantime he would construct the fleet to conquer all of them! It was going to require a good deal of manipulation to wrest the Council from Hunter and Lang’s control, but he suddenly felt more than up to the task. Perhaps if Hunter could be fooled into setting off on some secondary mission…

Edwards savored the thought. Lang would be preoccupied with overseeing the mining project, Reinhardt was no problem, and the Zentraedi would be offworld. That still left Max Sterling and that troublemaker Wolff, but how difficult could it be to undermine them?

Edwards struck a gleeful, triumphant pose in front of the mirror. “No more demolished man,” he said to his reflection. “Let the games begin.”

A week went by, then another, and still there was no sign of the Invid. The high command began to wonder if the battle for Tirol hadn’t been won after all. With the Masters gone and no trace of the Flowers of Life, the Invid had little use for the world; so perhaps they had simply disregarded it. Cabell spoke of other planets the Invid were thought to occupy-worlds that had been seeded by Zor. Surely those constituted more than enough to satisfy them; and moreover, what quarrel could they possibly have with Earth at this stage of the game?

With all this in mind, a gradual transfer of personnel, stores, and equipment to the surface of Tirol had commenced. Refortified, Tiresia would serve as the RDF’s tactical and logistical headquarters. The SDF-3, with a substantially reduced crew and half the VT

squadrons, was to remain in stationary orbit, protecting both the moon and the soon-to-be-operative mining colony on Fantoma.

Hope and optimism began to find their way back into the mission once everyone accepted the conditions of the extended stay, and it was only a matter of time before a certain celebratory air took hold. Terrans and Tiresians worked side-by-side clearing away the horrors of the recent past, and the city seemed to. rejuvenate. Both sides had known death and suffering at the same alien hands, so there was already a bond of sorts. The Council, hoping to enlarge in this and at the same time take advantage of Earth’s New Year’s Day, finally scheduled a holiday.

A rousing set from Minmei and Janice accompanied by their newly-formed backup band kicked things off. The superstar of the SDF-1 performed with an enthusiasm she hadn’t demonstrated in years, and dug into everyone’s collective past to blow the dust off songs like “We Can Win” and “Stagefright,” classics for most of the crowd, nostalgia for some.

After the set she danced the night away with heroes and rear-echelon execs, but spent most of that time in the embrace of Jonathan Wolff. No one was surprised when the two of ‘them disappeared together halfway through the festivities.

Nor was Dr. Lang surprised to see that his AI creation had zeroed in on Rem, whom Lang, despite Cabell’s claims to the contrary, seemed desperate to accept as Zor incarnate. He had been meaning to urge Janice to move in just that direction-for who knew what secrets Rem and Cabell might be hiding?-but Lang’s personal encoding of the android had made that unnecessary: Janice was as attracted to Zor’s likeness as Lang was. Cabell, unaware of Janice’s laboratory origins, seemed positively delighted by the fact that she and Rem had coupled off; round midnight he was even out on the dance floor executing a Tiresian clogging step that looked to some like an old Geppetto jig straight out of Pinocchio.

Elsewhere in the crowd, Jack Baker and Karen Penn were talking; when Vince Grant had rescinded the order that had kept them both confined to quarters, Karen had reversed her own decision never to speak to Jack again.

“Come on, Karen-just one dance,” Jack was saying, tailing her as she threaded her way across the floor. “One dance is gonna kill ya?”

Karen stopped short and whirled on him; he brought his hands up expecting a spin kick, and she began to laugh. “I’m talking to you, Jack-isn’t that enough?”

“Well, no, dammit, it’s not enough.” Karen was back in motion again. Jack ignored a bit of razzing from friends and set out after her.

“All right,” she said, finally. “But just one.” She held up a finger.

“My choice?”

“Anything you want. Let’s just get it over with.”

He waited until the band played a long, slow number.

“You gotta admit,” he said, holding her, “it was a good ride while it lasted.”

She held him at arm’s length for a moment, then smiled.

“The best…”

Not everyone was dancing, however. Or smiling. Years later, in fact, some would say that the “New Year’s” celebration showed just how factionalized the Expeditionary mission had become in less than a month out of Earthspace. At the center sat Lang, Exedore, and the Council, joined now by Tirol’s unofficial representative, Cabell; while the fringe played host to two discreet groups, Edwards’s surly Ghost Riders, and Breetai’s Zentraedi, on what would be one of their last nights as Micronized warriors. And separate from any of these groups were certain RDF teams, the Skull Squadron, the Wolff Pack, Grant’s GMU

contingent.

Rick Hunter, recovered from his wounds, seemed to occupy a middle ground he and Lisa had staked out for themselves. They had been trying hard to make some sense of their dilemma, slowly, sometimes painfully. But at least they were lovers again, back on the honeymoon trail, and confident that things would work themselves out. The Council had yet to rule on Rick’s request, and for the time being the topic was shelved.

“Home, sweet home,” Rick was telling Lisa. He put his arm around her and motioned with his chin to Tirol’s starstudded sky. “We’ll have to draw up a new set of constellations.”

Lisa rested her head on his shoulder.

“Which way’s Earth?”

Lisa pointed. “There-our entire local group.”

Rick was silent a moment. “Whaddaya say we dance, Mrs. Hunter?”

“Thought you’d never ask.”

They walked hand-in-hand toward the center of the floor, and were just into their first step when the music came to an abrupt stop. Murmurs swept through the crowd and everyone turned to the stage. Dr. Lang was at a mike stand, apologizing for the interruption.

“Listen to me, everyone,” he was saying. “We have just received a dispatch from the SDF-3. An unidentified ship has just entered the Valivarre system. It is decelerating and on a probable course for Tirol. General Reinhardt has put the fortress on high alert, and suggests that we do the same. Skull and Ghost Squadrons are ordered to report to the shuttle-launch facilities at once. CD personnel are to report to their unit commanders immediately. Admiral Hayes and Admiral Hunter-”

“Lisa, come on,” Rick shouted, tugging at her arm.

She resisted, hoping she would wake from this, so they could continue their dance.

“Come on!” Rick was repeating…

The war had come between them again!

Published by Ballantine Books:

THE ROBOTECH™ SERIES

GENESIS #1

BATTLE CRY #2

HOMECOMING #3

BATTLEHYMN #4

FORCE OF ARMS #5

DOOMSDAY #6

SOUTHERN CROSS #7

METAL FIRE #8

THE FINAL NIGHTMARE #9

INVID INVASION #10

METAMORPHOSIS #11

SYMPHONY OF LIGHT #12

THE SENTINELS™ SERIES

THE DEVIL’S HAND #1

DARK POWERS #2

DEATH DANCE #3

WORLD KILLERS #4

RUBICON #5

ROBOTECH: THE END OF THE CIRCLE #18

A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright © 1988 by HARMONY GOLD U.S.A., INC. and TATSUNOKO PRODUCTION CO. LTD. All Rights Reserved. ROBOTECH is a trademark owned and licensed by HARMONY GOLD U.S.A., INC.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-91852

ISBN 0-345-35301-3
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-82392-2

v3.1_r1

Contents

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Excerpt from

Death Dance

Dedication

About the Author

Appendix

Robotech Chronology

ROBOTECH CHRONOLOGY

1999 | Alien spacecraft known as SDF-1 crashlands on Earth through an opening in hyperspace, effectively ending almost a decade of Global Civil War. In another part of the Galaxy, Zor is killed during a Flower of Life seeding attempt.
2002 | Destruction of Mars Base Sara.
2009 | On the SDF-1’s launch day, the Zentraedi (after a ten-year search for the fortress) appear and lay waste to Macross Island. The SDF-1 makes an accidental jump to Pluto.
2009-11 | The SDF-1 battles its way back to Earth.
2011-12 | The SDF-1 spends almost half a year on Earth, is ordered to leave, and defeats Dolza’s armada, which has laid waste to much of the planet.
2012-14 | A two-year period of reconstruction begins.
2012 | The Robotech Masters lose confidence in the ability of their giant warriors to recapture the SDF-1, and begin a mass pilgrimage through interstellar space to Earth.
2013 | Dana Sterling is born.
2014 | Destruction of the SDFs 1 and 2 and Khyron’s battlecruiser.
2014-20 | The SDF-3 is built and launched. Rick Hunter turns 29 in 2020; Dana turns 7.

Subsequent events covering the Tiresian campaign are recounted in the Sentinels series. A complete Robochronology will appear in the fifth and final volume.

CHAPTER
ONE

All I have learned of the Shapings of the Protoculture tell me that it does not work randomly; that there is a grand design or scheme. I feel that we have been brought here, kept here, for some reason.

Yet, what purpose can there be in SDF-3’s being stranded here on Tirol for perhaps as long as five years? And during that time will the Robotech Masters be pursuing their search for Earth?

Since tempers are short, I do not mention the Shaping; I’m a little too long in the tooth, I fear, for hand-to-hand confrontations with homesick, frightened, and frustrated REF fighters.

Dr. Emil Lang, personal journal of the SDF-3 mission

On captured Tirol, after a fierce battle, the Humans and their Zentraedi allies—the Robotech Expeditionary Force—licked their wounds, then decided it was time to mark the occasion of their triumph. It was, as nearly as they could calculate, New Year’s Eve.

But far out near the edge of Tirol’s system, a newcomer appeared—a massive spacegoing battleship, closing in on the war-torn, planet-sized moon.

Our first victory celebration

, young Susan Graham exulted.

What a wonderful party!

She was just shy of sixteen, and to her it was the most romantic evening in human history.

She was struggling to load a bulky cassette into her sound-vid recorder while scurrying around to get a better angle at Admirals Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes Hunter. They had just stood up, in full-dress uniforms, clasping white-gloved hands, apparently about to dance. There had been rumors that the relationship between the two senior officers of the Robotech Expeditionary Force was on shaky ground, but for the moment at least, they seemed altogether in love.

Sue let out a short romantic sigh and envied Lisa Hunter. Then her thoughts returned to the cassette which she was bapping with the heel of her hand. A lowly student-trainee, Sue had to make do with whatever equipment she could find at the G-5 public-information shop, or Psy-ops, Morale or wherever.

At last the cassette was in place, and she began to move toward her quarry.

In Tiresia, the moon’s shattered capital city, the Royal Hall was aglow. The improvised lighting and decorations reemphasized the vast, almost endless size of the place.

The lush ballroom music remained slow—something from Strauss, Karen Penn thought; something even Jack Baker could handle. As she had expected, he asked her to waltz a second time.

And he wasn’t too bad at it. The speed and reflexes that made him such a good Veritech pilot—

almost as good as I am

, she thought—made him a passable dancer. Still, she maintained her aloof air, gliding flawlessly, making him seem clumsy by comparison; otherwise, that maddening brashness of his would surface again at any second.

They were about the same height, five ten or so, he redheaded and freckled and frenetic, she honey-blond and smooth-skinned and model-gorgeous—and long since tired of panting male attention. Jack had turned eighteen two months ago; Karen would celebrate her majority in three more weeks.

They had been like oil and water, cats and dogs, Unseducible Object and Irrepressible Force, ever since they had met. But they had also been battle comrades, and now they swayed as the music swelled, and somehow their friendly antagonism was put aside, at least for the moment.

The deepspace dreadnought was a bewildering, almost slapdash length of components: different technologies, different philosophies of design, even different stages of scientific awareness, showed in the contrasts among its various modules. From it, scores of disparate weapons bristled and many kinds of sensors probed.

With Tirol before it, the motley battlewagon went on combat alert.

On the outer rim of the ballroom, members of General Edwards’s Ghost Squadron and Colonel Wolfe’s Wolfe Pack traded hostile looks, but refrained from any overt clashes; Admiral Lisa Hunter’s warnings, and her promises of retribution, had been very specific on that point.

Edwards was there, a haughty, splendidly military figure, his sardonic handsomeness marred by the half cowl that covered the right half of his head.

Per Lisa’s confidential order, Vince Grant and his Ground Mobile Unit people were keeping an eye on the rivals, ready to break up any scuffles. So far things seemed to be peaceful—nothing more than a bit of glowering and boasting.

Hanging in orbit over the war-torn ruin of Tirol, Super-dimensional Fortress Three registered the rapid approach of the unidentified battleship.

SDF-3 had been tardy in detecting the newcomer; the Earth warship’s systems had been damaged in the ferocious engagement that had destroyed her spacefold apparatus, and some systems were still functioning far short of peak efficiency.

But she had spotted the possible adversary now. According to procedure, SDF-3 went to battle stations, and communications personnel rushed to open downlinks with the contingent on Tirol’s surface.

Perhaps the strangest pair at the celebration was Janice Em, the lovely and enigmatic singer, and Rem, assistant to the Tiresian scientist Cabell.

Janice was Dr. Lang’s creation, an android, an artificial person, though she was unaware of it.

Lang shook his head and reminded himself that the Shapings of the Protoculture were not to be defied. He was really quite happy that the two were drawn together.

He turned to Cabell, the ancient lone survivor of the scientists of Tirol.

What were once the gorgeous cityscape of Tiresia and magnificent gardens surrounding the Royal Hall, were now only blasted wasteland.

Above was a jade-green crescent of Fantoma, the massive planet that Tirol circled. Its alien beauty hid the ugliness that Lynn-Minmei knew to be there in the light of Valivarre, the system’s primary. The green Fantoma-light cast a spell with magic all its own. How could the scene of so much death and suffering be so unspeakably beautiful?

She shivered a bit, and Colonel Jonathan Wolfe slipped his arm around her. Minmei could feel from the way he had moved closer that he wanted to kiss her; she wasn’t sure whether she felt the same or not.

He was the debonair, tigerishly brave, good-looking Alpha Wolf of the Wolfe Pack—and had rescued her from certain death, melodramatic as it might sound to others. Still, there was a danger in love; she had learned that not once but several times now.

Wolfe could see what was running through Minmei’s thoughts. He feasted his eyes on her, hungered for her. The Big, Bad Wolfe, indeed—an expression he had never liked.

Only this time, the Big Bad was bewitched, and helpless. She was the blue-eyed, black-haired gamine whose voice and guileless charm had been the key to Human victory in the Robotech War. She was the child-woman who, unknowingly, had tormented him with fantasies he could not exorcize by day, and with erotic fever-dreams by night.

She hadn’t moved from the circle of his arm; she looked at him, eyes as wide as those of a startled doe. Wolfe leaned closer, lips parting.

I love her so much

, Rick thought, as he and Lisa went to join the dancing. His wife’s waist was supple under his gloved hand; her eyes danced with fondness. He felt himself breaking into a languorous smile, and she beamed at him.

I can’t live without her

, he knew.

All these problems between us—we’ll find some way to deal with them. Because otherwise life’s not worth living.

The music had just begun when it stopped again, raggedly, as Dr. Lang quieted people from the mike stand. The ship’s orchestra’s conductor stood to one side, looking peeved but apprehensive.

Everyone there had already served in war. Something inside them anticipated the words. “Unidentified ship … course for Tirol … Skull and Ghost squadrons … Admiral Hayes and Admiral Hunter …”

The war’s come between us again.

Rick started off in a dash, but stopped before he had gone three steps, realizing his wife was no longer with him. Fortunately, in all the confusion, only one person noticed.

He looked back and saw Lisa waiting there, head erect, watching him. He realized he had reacted with a fighter jock’s reflexes, the headlong run of a hot scramble.

It was the argument they had been having for days, for weeks now—tersely, in quick exchanges, by day; wearily, taxing to the limit their patience with one another, by night. Rick was a pilot, and had come to the conclusion that he couldn’t be—

shouldn’t

be—anything else. Lisa insisted that his job now was to command, to oversee flight-group ops. He was to do the job he had been chosen to do, because nobody else could do it.

Rick saw nothing but confidence in his wife’s eyes as she looked at him, her chin held high—that, and a proud set to her features.

Sue Graham, wielding her aud-vid recorder, had caught the whole thing, the momentary lapse in protocol, in confidence—in love. Now, she rewound the tape a bit, so that the sight of Rick Hunter dashing off from his wife would be obliterated, and began recording over it.

Just as people were turning to the Admirals Hunter, Rick stepped closer to Lisa. In that time, conversation and noise died away, and the Royal Hall itself, weighted by its eons of history and haunting events, seemed to be listening, evaluating. Rick’s high dress boots clacked on an alien floor that shone like a black mirror.

He offered her his arm, formal and meticulously correct, inclining his head to her. “Madam?”

She did a shallow military curtsy, supple in her dress-uniform skirt, and laid her hand on his forearm. The whole room was listening and watching; Rick and Lisa had reminded everyone what the REF was, and what was expected of it.

“Orders, Admiral?” Rick asked his wife crisply, loudly, in his role as second-ranking officer present. By speaking those words, he officially ended the ball and put everyone on notice that they were on duty.

Lisa, suddenly their rock, gazed about at them. She didn’t have to raise her voice very much to be heard. “You all know what to do, ladies, gentlemen.

“We will treat this as a red alert. SDF-3 will stand to General Quarters. GMU and other ground units report to combat stations; all designated personnel will return to the dimensional fortress.”

There was already movement, as people strode or hurried to their duties. But no one was running; Lisa had given them back their center.

“Fire-control and combat-operations officers will insure that no provocative or hostile acts are committed,” she said in a sharp voice. “I will remind you that we are

still

on a

diplomatic mission.

“Carry on.”

Men and women were moving purposefully, the yawning hall quickly clearing. Lisa turned to an aide, a commo officer. “My respects to the Plenipotentiary Council, and would they be so gracious as to convene a meeting immediately upon my return to SDF-3.”

The aide disappeared; Lisa turned to Rick. “If you please?”

Rick, his wife on his arm, turned toward the shuttle grounding area. REF personnel made way for them. Rick let Lisa set the pace: businesslike, but not frantic.

When the shuttle was arrowing up through Tirol’s atmosphere for SDF-3 rendezvous, and the two were studying preliminary reports while staff officers ran analyses and more data poured in, Rick paused for a moment to look at his wife as she meditated over the most recent updates.

He covered her hand with his for a moment; squeezed it. “We owe each other a waltz, Lisa.”

She gave him a quick, loving smile, squeezing his hand back. Then she turned to issue more orders to her staff.

To Rem, the Humans and their REF mission had been bewildering from the beginning, but never more so than now.

With this news of an unidentified warship, he and Cabell—who had been a father to him, really, and more than a father—were hastened toward the shuttle touchdown area, to await their turn to be lifted up to the SDF-3. Their preference in the matter wasn’t asked; they were an important—perhaps crucial—military intelligence resource now, even though they were just as mystified as anybody else.

There were confused snatches of conversation and fragments of scenes as Rem guided Cabell along in the general milling.

There were the two young cadets Rem had come to know as Karen Penn and Jack Baker. They had been pressed into service as crowd controllers and expediters of the evacuation. Jack kept trying to catch Karen’s eye and call some sort of jest or other; she just spared him the occasional withering glance and concentrated on her duties.

Rem couldn’t blame her. What could be funny about a situation like this? Was Jack psychologically malfunctional?

Then there was the singer, Minmei, Janice Em’s partner, possessed of a voice so moving that it defied logic, and a face and form of unsettling appeal. The one they called Colonel Wolfe seemed to be trying to usher her along, seemed to be proprietary toward her, but she wasn’t having any of it. In fact, it appeared that she was about to burst into that startling and alarming human physiological aberration called tears.

The Ghost and Skull and GMU teams were cooperating like mindlinked Triumvirates, though Rem had seen them ready to come to blows only a short time before.

He look about for Janice Em, Minmei’s partner and harmony and, in some measure, alter ego, but couldn’t see her. She had been with Lang only moments before, but now Lang was gone, too. Rem tried to push troubling thoughts from his mind, such as the rumors that were rife about Lang and Janice. Lang was supposed to be like an uncle to her, though some said he was “much more.”

But

what

? Rem barely understood the concept “uncle,” and had no idea what “much more” might mean. Yet his cheeks flushed, and he felt a puzzling rage when he thought of Jan having some nebulous relationship to Lang that would make the old Human scientist more important to her than, than …

Then all at once Rem and Cabell were being rushed into a shuttle, and a sliding hatch cut off the haunted nighttime view of ruined Tiresia.

CHAPTER
TWO

I never got tired of covering the Hunters, the admirals. To me, they were a perfect couple, the best the Earth could field.

But in another sense, the enemy had fielded his worst.

Susan Graham, narration from documentary

Protoculture’s Privateers: SDF-3

, Farrago,

Sentinels, and the REF

On the bridge of the Superdimensional Fortress Three, Lisa Hayes surveyed the preparations for battle and despaired, thinking the REF diplomatic mission might be doomed to find nothing but war.

Approximately twenty minutes had passed since the unidentified dreadnought was spotted, and it was nearly upon them. Yet it had not responded to any visual or electromagnetic signal. Peace was important to her, but so were the lives of her crew and the survival of her command. She was as edgy as any enlisted-rating gunner, but didn’t have the luxury of simply hoping she could shoot first.

And, the SDF-3 was only partially combat-worthy; letting the enemy get to close range might mean ultimate disaster. Still, the REF mission

had

to mean something more than crossing the galaxy only to fight battle upon battle, had to mean more than war without end.

She went over every detail, to see if there wasn’t one more preparation she could make. Lisa looked around the bridge. There was the same small bridge watch-gang setup that her mentor, Captain Gloval, had used, except that the three enlisted-rating techs were male, as were the watch officer and Lisa’s exec, Commander Forsythe.

Rick and the other officers from the Tactical Information Center—the ship’s cavernous command, communications, and control facility—kept up the flow of information, but none of it was very helpful. The Plenipotentiary Council, the civilian body in overall control of the Robotech Expeditionary Force, had convened just long enough to give Lisa operational control over the situation; they were satisfied that she wasn’t trigger-happy, and that she was well aware of the dicey tactical dilemma.

Veritechs were scrambled, sent out to block the newcomer’s way, and intercept and engage if necessary. Alphas, Betas, and Logans were deployed to their appointed places. Lisa’s eye found the tactical display symbol for the Skull team for a moment, and she thought of Rick—trapped down there among the rows of consoles and techs’ duty stations, monitors, and instruments. She knew he was longing to be out there with his beloved former outfit.

She supposed his heart was even more with them in this moment than it was with her. If so, that was something she could understand, could forgive, as long as he carried out his current assignment.

She thrust the thought aside; the Veritechs were coming within range of the unidentified dreadnought. Although the ship was as big as any Earth battlecruiser, it was still far smaller than the mammoth SDF-3. It maintained its worrisome silence.

According to the rule book, the next step should be a close flyby, performed by VTs—a warning to the intruder. If there was still no acknowledgment, it would be time for a shot across the battlewagon’s bow.

She found herself about to order Ghost in for the flyby, avoiding the use of Skull, but stopped herself. Although Rick would want to be with his old outfit in the thick of things, he would just have to maintain his duties as a commander. Edwards was too rash—he might even enjoy goading the newcomers into a shooting incident. Max Sterling, who had taken over Skull, was a more reliable man and the best flier in the REF.

She opened her mouth to give the command to Skull, when one of the male enlisted-rating techs said, “The incoming ship is decelerating, Captain. Changing course for possible insertion to Tirol orbit. It’s deactivating its weapons systems.”

As soon as the tech relayed the information, a female voice from the Tactical Information Center came up. TIC commo instruments were intercepting radio transmissions from the newcomer.

When the transmissions were patched through to the bridge, Lisa found herself listening to a strange, voice-processed-sounding garble. But bit by bit, she began to recognize syllables.

“Zentraedi,” Lisa’s bridge officer, Mister Blake, said softly, but Lisa was already turning to have a comline opened to Dr. Lang’s science/research division.

“Respond, please,” the transmissions came, in that strange, processed-sounding voice that might have been computer generated. “Alien vessel, please respond.”

Alien?

Lisa pondered as Lang came onscreen. He was flanked by Breetai, and Exedore. Once Humanity’s greatest enemies, these two Zentraedi were now staunch allies.

“Can you speculate on what this means, Doctor?” Lisa asked. “Or Commander Breetai? Lord Exedore?”

It was Exedore who answered, his voice still holding something of the weird Zentraedi quaver, even though he had been Micronized to Human size.

His was the greatest mind of his race, and the storehouse of its accumulated—in some cases, fabricated—lore and history. “The language is Tiresian,” he confirmed, “with loan-words from our own battle language and some elements of the Robotech Masters’ speech. But it is being spoken by a non-Zentraedi, non-Tiresian.

“As for the ship, it fits no profile known to my data banks, although certain portions of it bear resemblances to the spacecraft of various spacefaring cultures.”

“But this is no Zentraedi ship,” boomed Breetai. “Of that I feel sure. Our race conquered thousands of worlds, contacted tens of thousands of species. The language of Tirol became the lingua franca of much of this part of the galaxy. This warcraft might come from anywhere in the entire region, or even beyond.”

All of them heard the next transmission from the battleship. “We come in peace,” that eerie voice said. “We come in friendship. Do not fire! We are desperately in need of your help!”

“Identify yourselves,” a commo officer transmitted in her clear contralto. “Incoming vessel, who are you?”

“We are the Sentinels,” the eldritch voice answered. “We are the Sentinels.”

Down in the TIC, Rick Hunter had a sudden vision of black obelisks and dire events to the tune of

Also Spracht Zarathustra.

Lisa looked at the bridge’s main viewscreen.

Suddenly Edwards’s face appeared in an inset at one corner of it. “It’s some kind of trick! Admiral, you can’t let them—”

“General, that … will … 

do!

” Lisa thundered, and blanked him from the screen. A moment later she was talking to the Plenipotentiary Council.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I recommend that we allow the, er, alien ship to land under close escort by our VTs and with its weapons systems inert. We can track it with the SDF-3’s main gun, and cover it with the GMU’s as well, once it’s down. If it turns out that they want to fight, let it be from a position of such tactical disadvantage.”

That touched off a hectic, bitter debate in the council. Some members shared Edwards’s attitude after the almost mindless hatred with which the SDF-3’s arrival had been greeted by the Invid.

It was Lang who cut through the rancor with a single quiet plea, perhaps the most

Human

thing he had said since that Protoculture boost so long ago.

“My dear companions, we’ve traveled across the better part of the Milky Way galaxy with the express hope of hearing the word they’ve just used: friendship.”

Permission to land was carried unanimously.

Exedore was less the frog-eyed, misshapen dwarf he had once been, thanks to Human biosurgery and cosmetic treatments. It seemed to make people more at ease in his presence, but other than that it meant little to him.

Now he pushed back his unruly mass of barn-red hair and squinted at the readouts as his own data banks interfaced with those of the SDF-3 mainframes, with input from the detectors tracking the newcomer battleship’s descent. As had happened so often in the past, he could feel great Breetai looming nearby.

Exedore, Breetai, and many of the star players of the REF were in the Tactical Information Center. Techs, intel, and ops officers were scurrying around the compartment, which was two hundred feet on a side and half as high, crammed with screens and instrumentation. A main screen fifty feet square dominated the place.

Exedore was matching disparate parts of the newcomer’s hull features with profiles in Zentraedi files. “You see? That portion toward the stern, starboard—it’s Praxian! A- and the section there just forward of midship’s starboard: is that not a Perytonian silhouette, I ask you?”

Nobody there was about to argue with him, but nobody understood what it meant—and neither did Exedore. “It’s as if these Sentinels slapped together a variety of space vessels and united them with a central structure—you see? —to form, oh, I don’t know—a sort of aggregate. Certainly, it’s not a design well suited to atmospheric entry.”

Exedore was correct. The assemblage ship, asymmetrical and unbalanced in gravity and atmosphere, was already being battered as it fought its way down toward Tirol’s surface.

But by some miracle the lumbering vessel held together. Rick Hunter found himself rooting for the Sentinels, whoever they were. He felt emotions he hadn’t felt in years—buried exaltation from his days in his father’s air circus.

“Our analyses of their power systems don’t make any sense,” a female tech officer reported to the bridge. “Some indications are consistent with Protoculture, but other readings are totally incompatible. We’re even picking up systemry that appears to be—well, like something from the steam age, Captain.”

“Thank you, Colonel,” Lisa said, and the woman’s image disappeared from the bridge’s main screen.

She turned to Exedore and Breetai. “Gentlemen—

friends

—can you tell me what we’ve encountered?”

Breetai drew a breath, expanding his massive chest, then crossed his tree limb arms across it. “It is galling to us, Lisa, and so we were slow to bring it up, but many of the memories of the Zentraedi are false—constructs of the Robotech Masters, implanted when they—”

For once she saw Breetai’s head, as huge and indomitable as a buffalo’s, hang in dejection. Lisa could feel immense grief and loss coming from him. “They deceived us; made a mockery of our loyalty, our valor, our sacrifices …”

Exedore hastened to fill the ensuing silence. “We know less of this local star group than we do of far-distant ones; the Zentraedi were expanding the Masters’ empire—the outer marches, as your ancient Romans might put it. But you must understand, Mrs. Hunter—um, Captain!—that we

cannot trust our own memories

in matters like these.”

Breetai’s chin had come up again. “Still, we’ll tell you what we know. Praxis, Peryton, Karbarra, and the other planets whose technology you see mingled there—they were all valued parts of the Masters’ empire. Planets of the local star group, easily reached, they were allowed to keep a large measure of their self-determination so long as they subordinated themselves to the Robotech Masters’ ambitions. They survived, in their fashion, in the eye of the storm.”

“So—they would be the last to fall to the Invid,” Lisa said slowly.

Exedore nodded. “The last, except for Tirol. And worlds upon which the Invid Regess and Regent might wish to vent their anger, or as much of it as they can mount, now that both sides have been so reduced in numbers.”

It was true that the Invid were victorious in the long war against the Masters, but in many cases what they ruled was an empire of ash. Planets, even suns, had died. What was left in that region of the galaxy seemed scarcely worth taking.

Rick’s face appeared on the main screen. “Landing party standing by, Cap’n.” He saluted his wife. He showed nothing but an unerring precision, aware that his demeanor and expression would be studied on a thousand other screens throughout the SDF-3. Behind him were the two heavily armed landing craft that would fly down with the expedition’s envoys to greet the Sentinels. Max’s Skulls were forming up to fly escort and cover. The GMU had already churned into position, its titanic cannon trained on the grounded space-battleship.

Lisa returned Rick’s salute. They cut their hands away from their brows smartly, just like the manual said. She wondered if anyone who was witnessing the exchange could tell how

happy

he was, now that he was once more venturing into danger. She wondered if he knew it himself.

The Sentinels’ ship had chosen a big patch of ground that would serve as its landing pad. VTs and ground units came in to cover; fearsome armored vehicles clanked and wheeled on their tracks. The descent of the landing craft kicked up clouds of sand and dust that settled quickly.

The protocol had been argued a bit, but nobody on the council wanted to be the one to go up and knock on the Sentinels’ door. So it was Lisa and Rick, flanked by Breetai and Exedore and Lang, who approached the ship un-armed. The group walked under Fantoma’s light and the glare of a hundred of the two-legged Tiresian Ambler spotlights, to what appeared to be the main hatch of the Sentinels’ starship.

But when the main hatch of the ship rolled open, there were none of the dramatics Lisa had unconsciously braced herself for. Instead, a robed figure stood there, at the top of a ramp extended like an impudent tongue from the side of the Sentinels’ ship.

Actually, the figure

floated

there; the hem of its robe billowed gently an inch or two above the ramp.

Lang had been elected to speak for the REF. He coughed a bit in the swirling dust, one foot on the ramp where it met the sand. “If you come in friendship, I offer you my hand, on behalf of all of us, in friendship.”

The being looking down on him was virtually smooth-faced, like some blank mask. “I cannot offer mine,” it said in the same voice they had heard over the commo.

Other figures, larger, loomed up behind it. Still more crowded at the sides, lower and surreptitiously slinky. Out-gassing from the Sentinels’ ship’s atmosphere put a sudden mist in the air of Tirol, and it got even harder to see.

Then Rick heard Lisa’s scream, and he cried out her name. All at once he was grappling hand-to-hand with the devil.

CHAPTER
THREE

I suppose we shouldn’t have been surprised. We had already discovered, back during the Robotech War, that wherever the basic chemical building blocks of life coexisted, they linked preferentially to form the same subunits that defined the essential biogenetic structures found on Earth. In other words, the ordering of the DNA code wasn’t a quirk of nature.

The formation and linking of amino acids and nucleotides was all but inevitable. The messenger RNA codon-anticodon linkages seemed to operate on a coding intrinsic to the molecules themselves. We knew that life throughout the universe would be very similar, and that some force appeared to dictate that it be so.

But that didn’t keep the sight of the Sentinels from knocking most of us right off our pins.

Lisa Hayes,

Recollections

The devil who was fending Rick off wasn’t quite the one from Old Testament scare stories. At least he seemed to lack the power of fire and brimstone, and was trying to reason in accented Tiresian rather than condemning Rick to the Lower Depths and Agony Everlasting.

“Release me! Unhand me!”

All Rick could see was a grinning, slightly demonic face from which horns grew. Then Rick felt himself pulled away with such strength that he thought the massive Vince Grant or even Breetai himself had laid hands on him.

To Rick’s astonishment it was Lang, carefully but forcefully preventing a diplomatic catastrophe.

The Protoculture, working through him?

the young admiral wondered.

The air was clearing and a riot had been averted. The Humans’ jaws dropped in wonder as the Sentinels presented themselves.

“I am Veidt, of Haydon IV,” the robed one—the one who had refused Lisa’s hand—said. “And as I was about to say, I cannot offer you my hand, for I have none, nor have I arms, as you understand the concept. Yet, I welcome your words of friendship, and reaffirm mine.” Veidt floated down the ramp toward them and inclined his head solemnly.

Lisa, finding no words, returned the gesture.

The envoys from the Sentinels adjourned with those of the REF to a big, round table, set out at the council’s decree, under the jade glow of crescent Fantoma in the long Tiresian night. The area was lit by banks of illuminator grids, and by the odd-looking, two-legged Tiresian searchlights.

Human servitors brought trays of food and drink, and some of the Sentinels showed no reluctance about helping themselves, though others declined, having different nutritive requirements.

Great Breetai, his oversized chair creaking ominously beneath him, noticed figures pressed against viewports and observation domes in the thrown-together battleship. At his suggestion, a wide assortment of provisions was placed in the airlocks; the Sentinel envoys were loud in their thanks, and mentioned, almost as a matter unworthy of discussion, that they had been on near-starvation rations.

The beings who looked like male and female bears walking around on broad, elephantine feet—and wearing harnesses that supported cases and pouches and hand weapons of some sort—were Karbarrans.

Veidt and his mate Sarna were from Haydon IV, a revelation that made Cabell and Rem exchange significant glances that Lang and the others didn’t have time to question them about. All of a sudden, Micronized Zentraedi seemed about as Human as most in-laws, Jack Baker reflected, looking on from the sidelines.

The couple who looked like they were made of living crystal were from a world called Spheris. And the big, supremely proud and athletic women in the daring, barbaric gladiatorial outfits, Gnea and Bela, came from the planet Praxis.

Karen Penn, watching from her vantage point on the roof of a commo van, stared in fascination at a foxlike pair, known as “Gerudans.” They had feet whose tripartite structure reminded her of a hat-rack’s base, and their mouths and snouts were hidden by complex breathing apparatus. Gerudans liked to thrash their long, luxuriant tails when they talked, and on-the-spot adaptations had to be done on their chairs to accommodate them.

Cabell and Exedore had helped Lang and a scratch task force from G-2 Intel and G-5 Community Affairs prepare translation programs for interpreter computers, but in general the envoys managed with broken Tiresian. Most of the REF spoke a Zentraedi-modified version of the language, and virtually everyone in the SDF-3 had had some exposure to it, while all the Sentinels spoke it—as Breetai had said, a lingua franca.

One of the first things to become clear was that the Sentinels weren’t an army, or a governmental body—they were fugitives.

“Fugitives from the Invid tyranny,” Veidt said in his whispery, processed-sounding voice. The voice came from no source Lisa could detect; Veidt and Sarna did not have mouths, but they could be heard and they were being recorded.

“Haydon IV, Karbarra, Peryton, Geruda, Praxis, Spheris—our homes are worlds under the Invid heel, to one degree or another. The ship in which we arrived was to be our prison, a sort of—zoo? No, what’s the word?—trophy case! Yes, and the hundreds and hundreds of us aboard, its artifacts—all for the pleasure of the Invid Regent.”

“And what happened?” inquired Justine Huxley, former United Earth Government Superior Court Judge, now a council member. Her tone was neutral, from years of habit. “What changed your circumstances?”

Lang noted that Burak of Peryton—the devil-horned one—the only Sentinel with neither mate nor companion, had looked fretful throughout the getting-acquainted proceedings. Now he slammed a six-fingered hand—equipped with a second opposable thumb where the edge of a human’s hand would be—on the table and raised a whistling, furious voice.

“What do the details matter? We overcame our captors, and took the ship! And for every minute we delay here, every minute we wait, sentient beings suffer and die under the Regent’s savagery! Our instruments have shown us your battles; you should recognize by now that the Regent will never offer you peace, or even a truce!

“Here you sit with your dimensional fortress all but disabled. You don’t dare wait for the Regent to bring the battle to you, do you deny it? Very well! Help

us

bring it to

him

! Join us, for our sake and your own survival!”

The wicked points of Burak’s horns seemed to be vibrating. He glared at them with pupilless, irisless eyes from beneath heavily boned brows. “Help us for the sake of those who are in slavery and anguish, and dying, even at this moment!”

Something was plainly tearing at Burak’s guts, and Rick was afraid the Perytonian was going to come across the round table at somebody. But Lron, the big male of the two bearish Karbarrans, laid a weighty hand on Burak’s shoulder, and he quieted.

Nearly Breetai’s height, but far heavier, Lron looked around with what he perhaps meant as an amiable smile. On him, though, it was rather scary, at least as far as Rick was concerned—with those ferocious teeth, so long and white and keen.

Lron had lowered his heavy goggles, leaving them to hang loosely at his throat. He said in his gruff, moist, somehow mournful growl, “What Burak has said, we’ve all made a solemn pledge to carry out. No matter what the cost, we will fight until we win or the very last one among us is dead. Maybe you, in this REF, don’t understand, but you would, I think, if you spent weeks or months in cages—animals, exhibits for the Invid’s pleasure.”

Lron’s mate, Crysta, uttered a deep, gurgling snarl, a noise like the draining of some underground lake system. Like her husband/mate, she had horns suggesting diminutive mushrooms sprouting from her forehead.

Crysta added, “We buried at space many more of us than survived; such was the care the Invid meted out to us. You may ask why we survivors made a

pact

, to call ourselves the Sentinels—a Zentraedi term, and we hope you comprehend it.

“Sentinels. The Watchmen. The sentries who say, ‘This place, I protect!

Protect with my life!

Meddle here, and you start a war only one of us can survive!’ ”

Crysta was in full roar now. The Humans could smell her fur and muskiness. Lisa was pale, mesmerized, wondering if anything the universe could create was more awesome than an angry she-bear.

Crysta lapsed into her own language, and computers supplied the translation. “The Regent and his Invid have had their way! And now here is a war only one side can survive!”

Crysta deliberately drew her paw-hand toward her over the gleaming Tiresian wood of the round table, her nonretractile claws digging in. Corkscrew shavings of wood curled up between her fingers, lacquered on one side, naked and unfinished on the other.

When the squeal of the tortured wood had died away, Baldan, the living gemstone from the planet Spheris, spoke to fill the silence. “Will you help us? We need supplies, weapons, and allies.”

“What is your plan?” Justine Huxley asked. She maintained that neutral voice, but Rick could see compassion on her face.

“First, to liberate Karbarra. There, we can reactivate the weapons mills and arm ourselves completely. Next, open the prison camps of Praxis, where thousands upon thousands of warriors wish only to exact revenge for what has been done to them.”

“Then we liberate Peryton!” Burak said, pounding his strange fist.

Baldan ignored him, and Rick saw that the Sentinels weren’t all of a single mind. “Eventually, after Geruda and Spheris are freed, we’ll have certain knowledge we require to free Haydon IV—and then we’ll be ready for the campaign to liberate Peryton. In the course of this war, we will battle the Invid, of course—perhaps we will even defeat them.

“But if not, our united planets will hunt down the Regent, and force him to surrender or die.”

While the Plenipotentiary Council withdrew to discuss the Sentinels’ request, Lisa, Rick, and a few others were offered a tour of the peculiar spacecraft.

Poor Lang seemed torn in two, as his determination to sway the council fought against his passionate desire to examine the ship. As it turned out, though, there was something much more immediate to worry about.

“Confirmed enemy spacecraft approaching on definite attack vector, I say again, definite attack vector,” a loudspeaker announced. Sirens and warning whoopers were sounding. Humans and Zentraedi looked to the Sentinels suspiciously.

“It must be the Invid Pursuer,” Burak grated.

“But we destroyed the Pursuer!” Baldan cried. “Our instruments confirmed it!”

“Then they were in error,” Burak shot back. “We destroyed a decoy, perhaps.”

“What’s this all about?” Rick demanded. “What’s a Pursuer?” Lisa was busy on a commo patch, making certain that the SDF-3 was at battle stations.

Exedor explained, “The Pursuer is a weapon the Invid used in the days when their empire was vast and powerful; I am surprised that there are any left.”

“Perhaps this is the last,” Lron grunted. “When we rebelled and took the ship, we destroyed its escort vessel, but not before it loosed its Pursuer at us. For two days we dodged and fought the Pursuer, and thought we’d obliterated it, but now it has found us once more.”

Edwards had come up, his skullpiece throwing back Fantoma’s glow and the glare of the Ambler searchlights. “Well, it’s not going to trouble anybody much longer; not when my Ghost Riders are through with it.”

“No!” Exedore barked. He turned to Lisa. “Admiral, mere Veritechs haven’t the firepower to deal with a Pursuer. This is a weapon even the Zentraedi feared! Your GMU cannon, even the SDF-3’s primary weapon—none of these have sufficient power to penetrate its shields! It is relentless, and once it finds its target …”

He gazed up at the Sentinel ship. “It will detonate with enough force to rupture Tirol’s crust.”

“Yes,” Baldan the glittering Spherian said sadly. “Since its seeking mechanism is locked onto our ship, there is only one answer: we shall lead it away, into deepspace once more, and try to deal with it there.”

“Is that any way for allies to talk?” Judge Huxley frowned, coming over to them from where the council had abruptly adjourned. She smiled at the surprise on their faces. “The Sentinels and the REF are now officially

involved.

The vote was five to four.”

“Madam,” Exedore got out, unable to express himself, knowing hers had been the swing vote. In a wave of emotion, he took her hand, pressing his lips to it, as he had seen Humans do. When he realized what he was doing, Exedore nearly swooned.

“If the SDF-3’s main gun and the GMU’s and the VT ordnance isn’t enough to zap this Pursuer,” Rick was saying, “what about throwing everything at it at once? We can lead it into the crossfire with the Sentinels’ ship.”

There was no time to try to come up with a better plan; the Pursuer was only minutes away. Once again, Lisa found herself in overall control; she was on the SDF-3 patch-in right away, ordering the dimensional fortress to leave orbit and swing low for the ambush.

There was no time to process orbital ballistics and computer data; she calculated variables and unknowns and, with a guess and a prayer, set the moment when the trap would be sprung. It was not far off.

“Somebody’ll have to go along with our new

friends

,” Edwards said with a sharkish grin. Plainly, he meant to be that one; to make early inroads with these creatures. Privately, he saw it as a possible means toward his own ends.

But Rick Hunter said, “Forget it, General. You look after the TIC and your Ghost Team.” He turned to Lisa. “Admiral, I’m the logical one to go.”

He had her there; Rick knew how the SDF-3’s nerve centers operated, how the strikes would be coordinated and carried out, the proper command procedure for orchestrating the whole business from the Sentinels’ end …

And he looks so happy at the chance to risk his life

, Lisa thought. She almost hated him at that moment, but she was a flag-rank officer with more important things to do.

“Carry on,” she said, her jaw muscles jumping. Rick saluted, turned, and dashed up the ramp along with the Sentinels.

CHAPTER
FOUR

With the death of Zor, the grand Tiresian design to sow the Flower of Life among the stars came to a stop. In fact, in most cases it was reversed. The Flower couldn’t be made to prosper where it didn’t wish to, and couldn’t be coerced. The shrinking, embattled Tiresian empire was forced to divert its resources to its fight for survival.

The Invid/Robotech Masters conflict that had promised to engulf the galaxy collapsed. The fighting on that side of the Milky Way shrank to the few remaining Haydon’s Worlds, where a handful of Flower-viable spots still remained.

There was a pattern at work, but none of the combatants had eyes with which to see it.

Jan Morris,

Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians

One of the prime selective criteria for REF personnel had been a capacity to function in crisis and under severe stress. As hasty preparations were made to bushwhack the Pursuer, the Ref showed its mettle.

Not only did arrangements have to be made to have the SDF-3 and the GMU in precisely the right place at precisely the right time, but a makeshift commo/data link to the Sentinels’ ship had to be established. In addition, large numbers of Humans and Zentraedi had to be redeployed, Protoculture weapons fire missions had to be laid on, and VTs had to be hot-scrambled and correctly positioned.

Lisa, being shuttled to the GMU with the council because there was no time to rejoin her ship, was even too busy to think about how things might never be the same again between her and Rick.

Entering the Sentinels’ ship, Rick was assailed by strange sights and even stranger smells.

He had little time to look around as he pounded along behind Lron and Burak and the rest, but from what he could see, the vessel was anything but sophisticated. The air was thick with a solvent smell. Welds and power routing and systemry interfaces, even accounting for the fact that it was alien, all seemed so

makeshift.

Lron had howled orders back at the ramp, and now the ship tremored as its engines came up. Rick fought down a flood of doubt; maybe this wasn’t as good as being in the cockpit of an Alpha, but it sure beat vegetating down in the SDF-3’s Tactical Information Center!

Still, this alien scow was a strange piece of machinery; there were safety valves venting steam, bundles of cable looping overhead in different directions, mazes of ducting and conduit everywhere he looked, and even—

He skidded to a stop as Lron and the rest made a sharp right turn at a junction of passageways. Rick found himself staring into what appeared to be a Karbarran version of perdition.

Or at least something close enough to pass. Rick saw dozens of Karbarrans shoveling tremendous scoops of some kind of fuel into furnaces that seemed to be burning in colors of the spectrum Rick had never seen before. Whatever the fuel was, it was piled high in bunkers nearby; the Karbarrans might have been stokers in a nineteeth-century ironclad, allowing for their thick goggles and long, gleaming teeth.

Rick stood transfixed, breathing the stench of singed fur.

Suddenly, Lron’s enormous paw closed around his arm, and he was yanked off toward the bridge. The trip showed him more of the same mismatched machinery. He recalled Lron saying that the Sentinels’ ship had been put together as a sort of aggregate trophy for the Regent, but this was carrying things rather far.

Then he was shoved into a cramped elevator thick with the odor of machine lubricants and metal filings. Whatever the occupancy limit was, the group exceeded it, and Rick found himself pressed up against Bela, the taller—six foot eight or so, he estimated—and brawnier of the two amazons from Praxis.

Her body showed the definition of a bodybuilder’s; the pleasant scent of some kind of skin oil or balm emanated from her. While most of her definitely looked Human, Bela’s eyes resembled those of an eagle.

He was acutely aware that her skimpy ceremonial fighting costume left a lot of skin exposed, and that a good deal of it, along with metallic bosses and leather-set gems, was pressed up against his uniform. To the primary mission of dealing with the Pursuer a most important secondary one was added: making sure Lisa never found out about the elevator ride.

Bela smiled at him, showing white, even teeth and deep-dish dimples. “Welcome aboard the—” Here she used a word that his translator chip rendered as

Farrago.

“Thanks for throwing in with us, Admiral,” Bela added. “You’re as brave as any woman I ever met.”

“Um. Thanks …” was all Rick managed to say before the lift door spiraled open and the group charged out onto the bridge. The bridge was a blister of transparent material, a few hundred feet through its long axis, fifty across, set high up and forward on the bizarre megastructure of the

Farrago.

In the few seconds he had to look around, Rick noticed the same design contrasts he had seen on the rest of the ship. Then he spotted the command station of the

Farrago.

“Why am I not surprised?” Rick asked himself aloud, walking toward it slowly, almost unwillingly.

“Gorgeous, isn’t it?” Lron grunted heartily. “It’s Karbarran, of course.”

Of course. Who else but the hulking bears could spin a wooden ship’s wheel ten feet in diameter? The wheel was made of polished purple wood, set with fittings of white brass. It looked like a giant carved spider with extra legs that had suffered rigor mortis and had an enormous hoop affixed to all its ankles.

“Sentinels’ flagship, do you copy?” Lisa’s voice was saying over the commo. The Praxians and Karbarrans and Gerudans and others who had been manning the communications consoles made way for Rick as he walked over, in a daze, to respond.

The mike resembled an old-fashioned gramophone horn. A beautifully luminous Spherian woman showed him how to throw the beer-tap lever so that he could transmit. “This is the

Farrago

, reading you five-by-five, Admiral. When does the party start?”

That drew a low chuckle from Gnea, Bela’s younger sidekick—who looked like a giant sixteen-year-old—and an amused rumble from Lron. Lisa answered, “We’re ready when you are. Lift off, meet the Pursuer at altitude one hundred thousand or so, and bring him back here in a pass from magnetic east to west, altitude three thousand feet, is that clear? We’ve accessed old Zentraedi battle tapes; maintain a distance of at least ten thousand feet from your attacker at all times! Do you roger,

Farrago

?”

Rick repeated the instructions word for word, then it seemed like there was nothing to say. The Sentinel ship rumbled and quaked, then it was airborne, blasting away into the sky, and still he couldn’t decide what it was he wanted to say to his wife. “We still owe each other that waltz, Lisa,” he finally blurted.

There was a silent hesitation at the other end of the link, then the brief throb of her laughter. “You rat! Watch your tail.”

*   *   *

The Pursuer was the last of its kind.

Deployed now for a kill in atmosphere, it resembled an umbrella blown inside out by the wind, its fabric stripped away. It plunged toward its prey only to find that its prey was rising to meet it.

It hadn’t been an easy hunt; the Pursuer had been created to home in on the Protoculture systemry of an enemy and eliminate the target, but the bizarre ship it had been stalking fit no known profile. Sometimes

Farrago

was a target; sometimes it simply wasn’t.

And so the silent duel had been waged across the light-years, the Pursuer stymied again and again, frustrated by the lifethings in the ship it hunted. But now the kill was near; soon the Pursuer would know the detonation/orgasm/death for which its guiding AI sentience longed.

But now its prey seemed to be coming directly toward it, and that felt wrong. But then the Sentinels’ ship did a shuddering wing-over, and plunged back toward the low-hanging pall of Tirol’s atmosphere. The Pursuer plunged after, ardently.

“They track Protoculture, y’see,” Lron was bellowing above the noise of reentry, holding Rick down with one hand and spinning the cyclopean wheel with the other—and a little help from Crysta. “That’s how we could keep the Pursuer at bay for so long: we don’t

run

on Protoculture!”

The atmosphere was giving

Farrago

a radical case of the shakes; crewbeings smaller than the Karbarrans were being jostled around just like Rick. The bridge was bedlam. “W-what

do

you run on?” Rick managed to ask.

The word Lron snarled in his guttural basso wasn’t one Rick had heard in Zentraedi before, and he managed to query the thin, chip-size translating package clipped to his dress uniform lapel.

“Peat!” it rendered. Rick tapped the transmitter a few times to make sure it was not malfunctioning. He was about to ask for another translation when the bridge screens were filled with the horror of the Pursuer plunging down at them. The

Farrago

turned over and dove back toward Tirol’s surface.

Rick was feeding course information through to the TIC, and trying not to calculate his own chances. The Sentinels’ ship had risen high into the light of Valivarre and Fantoma, but it was falling back quickly. One good thing Rick noted was that the Sentinels’ vessel, like the SDF-3, had artificial gravity, and so he wasn’t likely to get sick before the Pursuer vaporized him.

Suddenly the Pursuer appeared again, looking like an enormous squid about to swallow a minnow. Rick shook off his sense of unreality and slugged Lron in the arm to get his attention. “How come it can track us now?”

Lron made

wuffi

ng sounds of amusement. “We set up a Protoculture homing device in the center of the ship, see?”

Rick saw; it was a beacon on the computer-driven schematics off to one side. “Listen, Lron: I’ve been doing some thinking, and—”

He was interrupted as an especially heavy blow from the Tiresian atmosphere nearly sent him sprawling; Lron had caught him. Amazons and crystal people and foxlike Gerudans were struggling out of the heap they had ended up in.

“—and if this Pursuer of yours had the kind of warhead you’re talking about, we’re gonna end up fried right along with it when the SDF-3 and the GMU start blazing!”

Lron’s muscles stood out against his pelt as he wrestled the wheel around, while holding Rick in place with his free hand. “Do you think we’re

stupid

?”

“No-no-no,” Rick responded weakly, as Lron spun the gargantuan wheel and the ship took up its approach.

The Pursuer had its target at last: a bright, strobing Protoculture marker at the center of

Farrago.

It plunged down. It knew its opponent’s performance profile from computer analysis and hard experience, knew that the lumbering Sentinel vessel couldn’t possibly pull out of its dive or avoid the final destruction of Pursuer’s detonation.

The guidance AI’s death was near; it cut in auxiliaries, eager for that moment.

Rick clung to the wooden wheel, looking back through the bridge’s clear blister to where the Pursuer was already a discernible speck in the cosmos.

Lron virtually

handed

Rick over to Crysta. “You’re right!” Standing at the wheel, the bear-being pressed the titanic circle against its stem, deepening the dive. “It’s almost time to go! Well? Tell your mate and your people! That thing will be in their laps in another minute!”

Rick struggled to be heard over the winds that bucked and jostled the ship. “What’re you talking about? It’s following

us

!”

Lron made a sawing sound that Rick took as laughter. “No time to explain! Hold on!”

Rick didn’t have to, because Crysta scooped him up. The smell of her fur was actually rather pleasant, rather relaxing.

Rick, seeing parts of

Farrago

fly in separate directions, suppressed a certain sadness that he and the REF hadn’t been able to do much to help the Invid’s victims. It was just bad luck; he waited to die.

Then he saw that the bridge was

ascending.

Lisa saw it, too, from her place in the GMU: the

Farrago

was an amalgamation of the prizes of war, and now the components had broken away.

A module like a streamlined, art-deco grasshopper arced away in one direction; a thing like a glittering bat deployed wings and banked in another. Diverse segments headed toward every point of the compass.

Suddenly, the only thing remaining where the Sentinels’ ship had been was a blinking transceiver package attached to a rocketing, remote-guided paravane. It lined itself up and then glided right down into the cross hairs of SDF-3’s main gun and the GMU’s monster cannon, while ordnance from the VTs closed in.

The creatures so used to sleeping through the long night of Tirol in its transit behind Fantoma were stirred by the light. Something as bright and hot as a sun burned above, interrupting their hibernation.

But then the glare died, and the darkness took charge of the moonscape. The things that lived in Tiresian soil and water went back to their sleep, even though long, low-register sound waves shook them.

In the barely flightworthy framework of what had been the

Farrago

, which was attached to the big Karbarran vessel that was its largest single component, Bela wiped away the crimson seeping from the bloody nose Rick Hunter had gotten when he lost his footing.

She dabbed at it with the snow-white headband she had worn under her metal war helm. Rick looked through the blister, down at Tirol and the expanding ball of gas that had been the Pursuer, and the far-off spacecraft that had been parts of the Sentinels’ battlewagon.

“When we saw through intercepted messages how soundly you Humans and your Zentraedi friends whipped the Invid on Tirol,” she was telling him, “we thought you’d make good allies. But now we know for sure it’s nice to meet you, friend.”

She had his right hand in a kind of clasping grip, but a moment later she had his hand open, examining it, while Rick tried to make the compartment stop spinning.

“Not much callus,” Bela observed. “How do you keep your sword from rubbing your skin raw?”

Rick shook his head, little neuron-firings making stars seem to orbit before his eyes, trying to figure out how to answer her.

Just then, there was an angry growl from Lron, who was overseeing the rejoining of the sundered parts of the Sentinels’ ship. From what Rick could make out, it had something to do with a master junction that was located down near those impossible peat furnaces.

“Battle’s over, so Crysta and Lron will be demoralized for a while,” Bela said, releasing Rick’s hand. “They’re really quite dour, much of the time. Like all Karbarrans: morbid, always preoccupied with Fate and all of that …”

She snatched his hand back for a second, taking a longer look at his palm. “I don’t think you’re in for a very long or serene life, by the way, Admiral.”

“No surprise there,” he muttered, taking his hand back and frowning at it. Then he looked to Bela again. “Listen, this ship, you Sentinels—it’s all so fantastic! How did you put together a fighting alliance like this? How did you assemble such a starship?”

They were on their feet once more and the other envoys had gathered round, except for Lron, who was still at the helm. “We

didn’t

,” Burak said. “The

Invid

did, by imprisoning us together.”

When Rick asked, “But how’d you turn the tables?” everyone looked to Veidt. A moment or two elapsed while Veidt considered the question.

“I think you’d better come with us,” Veidt said. “It will be more to the point to show you … certain things … than to talk about them.”

A few minutes later, Rick stood at the barred cage that had once housed the ship’s menagerie—Karbarrans in this case, if he was any judge of scent. But what lay moaning and clanking its shackles was nothing like any Karbarran, or any other Sentinel.

He spoke into a commo-patch mike the Sentinels had somehow crafted for him in their careless, make-do fashion. The microphone looked like some kind of jet-black motion-picture trophy, while the outlandish earphones were so big that he had to sort of drape them over his shoulders. The whole time, he was looking at the thing before him—the Sentinels’ prisoner.

“Lisa, don’t bother asking me to describe what they’ve got here, please. Just get a couple of security platoons over to me on the double. And interpreters, recording equipment, a couple yards of anchor chain, some portable sensors—oh, babe, send the whole toyshop over here!”

He could hear a certain iciness in her voice. “Understood. Keep me posted, if you’ll be so kind, Admiral.”

One part of him berated itself for having hurt her feelings so; but most of Rick Hunter was simply staring, a-ghast, at what crouched in the cell.

CHAPTER
FIVE

It was almost as if I had called up something from the unformed, the ultimate Potential, into existence. The appearance of the Sentinels was the answer to my every requirement, in the wake of the vast power I had secretly wrested from the Invid, power I was as yet unable to exercise.

There are a few individuals in the timestream of this universe who have been granted the gift of sheer Will, to mold events according to their desire. I am one of them.

Or perhaps, in a way, I am all of them.

General T. R. Edwards, personal journal

“Not

a mere scientist,” the Invid corrected sharply, with a rattling of manacles that made some of the guards put their hands to their pistol butts. “

I

am

Tesla

, Master Scientist to the Invid Regent! Now, release me, you pitiful lower life-forms!”

Tesla turned his huge wrists, testing the strength of the forged-alloy shackles the Sentinels had put on him. His grainy green skin rasped against the metal. He stretched the three thick fingers of both hands and flexed the opposable thumbs. “Release me, I say! Or you will feel the vengeance of the Invid!”

Tesla was a creature about ten feet tall, with a thick, reasonably humanoid torso and limbs. But his head was a slender extension resembling a snail’s snout, with two huge black liquid eyes set on either side. At the tip of the snout were two sensor antennae like glistening slugs that glowed whenever he spoke.

Rick found himself looking at those eyes, much as he tried to avoid it, while Lang and the others made their recordings and measurements. The eyes were as unemotional and unrevealing as a shark’s, but they were set forward in the sluglike head. And conventional Darwinian reasoning said that the main purpose for such placement was

pursuit

—the Invid were predators.

Just like Humans.

Rick had yielded the floor to the astounded sci/tech squads from SDF-3 who had come in answer to his call, to evaluate Tesla and try to gain some kind of understanding of the bizarre turn the whole mission had taken.

Rick had a towel around his shoulders, wiping his forehead from time to time; he suddenly realized that Veidt was hovering near.

Wasn’t he on the other side of the compartment a second ago?

Oh, well. “Ah, Lord Veidt—”

“ ‘Veidt’ will suffice,” the being corrected.

“Okay, okay, ‘Veidt,’ then: I guess we need to know first things first. You Sentinels aren’t so much in a shooting war with the Invid as trying to put together an uprising, right?”

Veidt hesitated, and Rick threw the towel to the deck. Some of his blood was drying on it, scarlet going to rustred. “Let’s save fine distinctions for later! Am I right or am I wrong?”

“You are right,” Veidt said as he and Rick and the Sentinels watched the Human sci/tech teams push and shove each other to get closer to Tesla. “Once, the Invid and the Zentraedi savaged this entire part of the galaxy, fighting their war. With the collapse of that struggle, contact with all the outlying stellar systems has been lost.

“Now, the war has boiled down to the few habitable planets in this close stellar group: Tirol, Optera, Haydon IV, Geruda, and the rest. The ability—and perhaps the will—to venture out into the horrible aftermath of the great Invid-Zentraedi wars has been lost, Admiral.

“But, as I have said, you’re right. The worlds unlucky enough to be here in the ‘close stars’—accessible with non-Protoculture superluminal drives—are still under the Invid heel. Yet, time and history and the Shapings of the Protoculture have their own rhythm, Admiral. And while the … 

slavery!

… we’ve suffered, the cruelty and mis-treatment, may not be high on your Earthly agenda, the war to free the Near Planets is the thing that unites the Sentinels in a blood oath.”

Veidt was quivering like a tuning fork; Rick had thought him robotic and cold, but he now saw passion in his face. “We were in cages. Do you know what that’s like, young Admiral? To be caged like an animal?

“Of course you don’t! The Sentinels will accept you as allies, and enlist others who are willing to fight, but I’ll tell you something, Admiral Hunter: none among us will ever feel quite the same bond with anyone who wasn’t caged with us—trust them to fight, as we intend to,

until we win or until we die!

”

Rick thought for a moment about Earth history. Of monstrous freight trains and mass gas chambers. He picked the towel up off the deck, folding it carefully. “Fair enough.” He looked to Veidt. “But we’re going to help you. And if you want to know why, just look through our ship’s history files.”

Veidt nodded as if he already had. “We have all agreed to recrew this ship, if possible, and set course for Karbarra. Without delay.”

“What? Wait a second!” There would have to be meetings, resolutions from the council, personnel allocations, resource diversion, interdivision liaison, staff meetings, marital counseling, maintenance checks …

“What d’ya

mean

, ‘without delay’?”

“I mean that within twenty-four of your hours, we intend to depart,” Veidt answered in a reasonable tone. “Would ten days be better? Or ten months? You may multiply the beings who will die under Invid tyranny by the

minute

!”

“All right; you’ve made your point,” Rick grunted in a sound like something Lron would make. “I guess it’s doable.” He was staring over at the people who seemed to be prepared to climb

into

the cage with Tesla to get good shots of him.

So that’s the enemy. Or at least one form of him.

“He was your, your zookeeper, right?” Rick asked Veidt.

“I think the words coincide,” Veidt allowed. “Though I suppose Tesla had much more

unhappy

plans for us. Why?”

“How’d you beat him?” Rick pressed. “How’d you take the ship?”

“Ah. Well. Sarna and I were chained by the neck—no arms, of course—and fed by Invid functionaries, from beyond a line they’d drawn on the deck. But after some time we came up with a way to eradicate

their

line, and draw one of our own, a line much closer to us. The rest was even simpler than fooling the Invid.”

So all this apparent limblessness didn’t mean that Veidt and his kind couldn’t knock some Invid out of commission, although they had perhaps used a method that had nothing to do with savate or tae kwon do. Rick filed the information in his memory, and was about to get on to matters at hand, when he heard a mighty roaring.

The Invid Master Scientist, Tesla, wasn’t happy with Sentinel protocol. Praxian amazons harried him with electrified prods; Karbarran deck apes jostled him in rude fashion—preparing him for interrogation. Not a single Sentinel showed any excessive brutality, but not a single one showed the least kindness, either.

In that moment, long before his conversations with the Plenipotentiary Council or his consultations with his wife, Rick Hunter understood that the Sentinels would do just what they had pledged one another: win or die.

And he knew that he would go with them, even though it might mean the death of his marriage. But the courage he admired in the Sentinels wasn’t very much different from the courage he adored in Lisa.

The Sentinels were adamant about their departure schedule, despite the council’s demand for time to mull it over. Then Miriya Sterling came up with a little salesmanship. She considered the problem with a soldier’s insight, and whispered a suggestion into the ear of her husband, Max Sterling, Skull Leader. Max passed it on to Lisa.

Lisa Hayes Hunter still didn’t know exactly what to feel about the Sentinels’ appearance. Aside from the new crisis it had thrust upon the SDF-3, there was the striking change in Rick. But when she found herself hoping the council would vote

not

to extend aid to the revolutionaries, Lisa reminded herself of the lives being crushed and extinguished by the Invid.

So, she took Miriya’s advice, and gave the Sentinel leaders a quick tour of some of the superdimensional fortress’s armories in an aircar. The Karbarrans, in particular, showed their delight at the ranked mecha, howling and pounding the aircar’s railing until they threatened to damage it. The pilot guided them slowly past Hovertanks and Logans, and second-generation Destroids along with armored ground vehicles and self-propelled artillery.

The women of Praxis, in particular, were loud in their praise of such wonderful war machines. Lisa felt fascinated and a little threatened by their bigger-than-life, bloodthirsty beauty. She looked to her husband from time to time; he seemed lost in thought. But she could tell, could almost hear, what he was thinking, and it made her feel empty inside.

“Amazing,” Lang kept mumbling, skimming the preliminary reports from the sci/tech people and the intel teams that had gone aboard the Sentinels’ flagship.

Justine Huxley, next to him at the council table, made an exasperated sound and leaned over to whisper into his ear. “Emil, please! This is crucial!”

He wanted to object, to tell her how much more fascinating his data was than more of the endless wrangling and political maneuvering the Sentinels’ appearance had generated. But she was right; even the council sensed the urgency of the situation, and was moving with unaccustomed speed.

Still, there was a wealth of information the Sentinels had given the expedition teams! Take the drive of that incredible Karbarran vessel, for example. Hunter hadn’t been hallucinating: it was powered by furnaces that consumed a substance analogous to peat or lignite. But the stuff seemed to be some sort of distant forerunner of the Flower of Life itself—an Ur-Flower! And then there was the half myth, half religion that surrounded the ancient being or entity known as Haydon …

He realized someone was addressing him. “Eh? What was that, Mr. Chairman?”

Senator Longchamps controlled his temper and began again. “I asked if, in your opinion, it would be feasible for the SDF-3 to accompany the Sentinels and lend her firepower in support of their mission.”

Lang threw down his papers. “The entire idea is asinine, my dear sir! The damage we suffered is far from repaired, and it will be two years, at the very least, before our primary drive is repaired!

“But more to the point, the SDF-3

must

remain here to insure that the mining of monopole ore goes on uninterrupted. Without Fantoma’s ore, we have no way home. So you see, what the Sentinels proposed is the wisest course—the only sensible one open to us, in my opinion. We must detach what military forces we can to aid them in their cause and at the same time divert the Invid.”

“I concur,” Exedore said, and Justine Huxley nodded.

“You tell ’em,” T. R. Edwards smirked from one side, having finished his testimony a short time before.

Edwards’s sudden willingness to see SDF forces seconded to the Sentinels—his almost

eager

advocacy of the plan—perplexed and worried Exedore and some of the others. It wasn’t like the man to feel compassion for non-Humans; in fact, his hatred of Zentraedi was well known, and his hostility toward Rem and Cabell was already evident.

But, Edwards saw the opportunity presented by the Sentinels’ arrival as something of a miracle. The incredible secret to which he had been exposed during the first assault on Tirol had expanded his horizons until they spanned the galaxy.

With a little shrewd maneuvering, he could get rid of most or all of those who stood in his path to power. They would be out of the way for as long as the Sentinels’ war lasted, and perhaps forever, given the vagaries of combat.

“We estimate that we can assign mixed forces totaling some thousand or so to the Sentinels’ cause, along with mecha, equipment, and so forth, and still leave ourselves sufficient resources to defend the SDF-3, Tirol, and the mining operations on Fantoma,” a G-3 operations staff officer was telling the council. “The Sentinels will need experienced senior commanders to help them plan strategy and arm, organize, and train the troops they mean to recruit as they go along.”

He sat down; Justine Huxley spoke. “It comes down to this, ladies and gentlemen: shall we let these people fight for their freedom unaided? And shall we simply wait here, with the SDF-3 barely mobile, for the Invid to bring the battle to us?”

There wasn’t much arguing after that; the motion was carried seven to three, with two abstentions. A G-1 personnel officer explained that records were being reviewed by computers, to pick the most appropriate people for the contingent to be assigned to the Sentinels.

“Along with the obvious criteria of combat performance and so forth,” he went on, “will be such things as adaptability and mental/emotional profile—especially the capacity to work with non-Human life-forms.”

Edwards hid his smile. His own aversion to aliens was well known; there was little likelihood that he would be selected.

The meeting broke up quickly, with people hurrying off on assignments, burdened by a tremendous workload and a ridiculously close deadline. Only Edwards, shadowed by his aide, Major Benson, seemed to feel no urgency. But on his way out of the Royal Hall, he spied Colonel Wolfe.

Wolfe was trying to start a conversation with Lynn-Minmei, who in turn was doing her best to listen for news of what had happened at the meeting.

Edwards frowned at his rival. He murmured to himself, “Yes, Colonel. I think ‘The Sentinels Need You!’ ”

Adams, his aide, heard, and said in a low voice, “But sir, what if Wolfe doesn’t volunteer?”

Edwards turned to the man, one arched brow going up, the other hidden behind his mirror-bright half mask. “Major, everyone in the SDF-3 is

already

a volunteer.”

CHAPTER
SIX

One of the Karbarran scientists was named Obu, and I posed to him some questions about the amazing Ur-Flower-powered starship they had arrived in. I asked him why the ursinoids had to actually handle the stuff for the process to work.

His answer, even with help from a translating chip, was, “The Sekiton’s [ ] likes our [ ] and then fondly yields up the conversion that permits the [ ] to take place and delights in energy being bestowed.

”

Fortunately, scientists don’t live or die according to their ability to figure things out; they just want to try.

Exedore,

SDF-3 and Me

Twenty-four hours were not enough, but the Sentinels would only push back their departure time on an hour-by-hour basis.

Preparations for the Sentinels’ campaign had people working around the clock. The first lists of personnel assigned to the Sentinels appeared only two hours after the end of the council meeting.

Anyone on the list had the option of applying for a deferment; fewer then twenty percent did so.

Lang was one of those who

knew

his name wouldn’t appear on the list. Despite his vast curiosity about the things that lay ahead for the liberators, he knew he could not go along.

At his request, Janice Em interrupted her labors as a computer operator and gofer for the Council Advisory Staff, and joined him in his office. He was alone, sipping tea, when she got there. She refused the offer of some orange mandarin, but accepted a chair.

Janice felt an undercurrent—not fear, but a reaction to Lang that she could never pin down. She knew he had been her friend for a long time, and that she trusted him implicitly. Still, she always felt things crowding on the edge of her consciousness, things she couldn’t name, when he looked at her like this. After a little small talk Lang put down his cup and saucer and leaned very close to her. Janice wanted to move away, or tell Dr. Lang to, but found that she couldn’t speak, and somehow hated the unfairness of it …

“Janice,” he said evenly. “Retinal scan.”

The part of her that was the conscious Janice Em slipped away, even as her eyes took on an inner glow that grew quite bright for a moment, then faded.

When it was gone, her eyes and face had lost all animation, and her skin its color and tautness. “ID confirmed, Dr. Lang. Your request.”

Lang blinked a bit from the dazzle of her ID scan. “Janice, I have arranged for you to be selected to accompany the Sentinels’ mission. You will accept the assignment.”

“Yes, Doctor.”

“Bring back all relevant data, with particular attention to Protoculture, the Flower of Life, Zor, the Invid Regess and Regent, and the nature and activities of the Robotech Masters.”

“Of course, sir.”

Lang rubbed his eyes. What else? “Oh yes: I am also

extremely

interested in matters pertaining to the life-form, being, or mythical figure known as ‘Haydon.’ Gather all pertinent data.”

“I will, Dr. Lang.”

“Good. Now hold still a moment …”

Lang reached behind her neck to remove the dermal plug concealed by her thick fall of pale lavender hair. He inserted a jack into the access port there, and began a high-speed transferral of information.

Janice was the most sophisticated android ever created, the crowning achievement of decades of work. She was programmed with a wealth of skills and abilities, but she was going forth now as part of a military expedition. Lang was giving her as much combat programming as he could, and he regretted that he would be forced to break up the formidable weapon of Janice and Minmei, and the tremendous effect of their harmonies.

But it couldn’t be helped; Minmei simply wouldn’t be permitted to go along on the liberation campaign, and Lang

had

to have an absolutely trustworthy agent on the scene.

He had detached the jack and replaced the dermal plug when there was a knock at his door. With a word, he transformed the android back into a woman. He was stroking her hair back into place when the door opened.

Apparently, it wasn’t a Praxian custom to wait for permission to enter a private chamber. Bela stood there, with a large Terran book in her sinewy right hand. She was looking strangely at Lang and Janice, as Janice blinked and resumed coherent thought. Bela was wearing a two-handed short sword with a well-worn grip, and a basket-hilted knife with a foot-long blade.

“Is this some sexual rite?” she asked, her hawk eyes moving from one to the other, with no sign of embarrassment. “Should I leave?”

“No, no, er,” Lang hastened to hand Janice a packet of notes he had prepared. “Miss Em was simply picking up some receipted documents for the Council Advisory Staff.”

Janice seemed a little dazed, but recovered in moments. “Yes. I’ll hand-deliver them and bring back your receipt, Doctor.”

“That would be fine, my dear.”

Bela’s gull-wing brows furrowed, and when Janice had left, she scrutinized Lang with a certain distant attention.

Lang considered her: a magnificent specimen, waspwaisted, full-hipped and high-breasted, dressed, if that was what one would call it, in an ensemble of leather and metal that left her more naked than clothed.

So far, Rick Hunter had kept the Praxians separated from the SDF-3’s self-appointed Romeos, but Lang assumed that some very interesting, and perhaps robust, social dynamics would come into play somewhere down the line on the Sentinel mission. Of course, Lang assured himself, he was above all that sort of thing. However, he couldn’t help but admire Bela’s amazing length of leg, her incredible abdominal definition …

He shook himself just a bit, blinking, just as Janice Em had only moments before. “How may I help you, er, Bela?”

She put her book down on one of his lab tables, handling it reverently. “I found this in one of your lore-houses. You know this creature?”

She had opened the mythology textbook to a series of photos and lithos of Pegasus, and similar winged horses. Bela tapped one photoplate with a spatulate fingernail that wasn’t altogether clean. “You recognize this?”

Lang nodded. “But this is a … a creature that never truly existed. It’s only a fairy tale.”

Bela was nodding impatiently. “Yes, yes, that’s been explained to me! But we Praxians have such creatures in our legendry, too. Or at least, near enough. They are icons of tremendous power, and their appearance signifies a time when every Praxian must do her utmost, a time of decision, and ultimate sacrifice.”

Bela carefully closed the book, then looked at Lang. She wasn’t sure what to think of this fey Earther, with his eyes that were all pupil, and the reek of Protoculture Shaping steaming off him. The image of the winged horse had taken hold of her, though.

“You and your teams have the power to shape new mecha. I’ve seen your SDF-3 production machines work wonders. Can they make me such a mecha, such a

winged

mecha? On Praxis, this creature would be worth a thousand rousing speeches, a million brave words!”

Lang pretended to be considering the proposal, but deep inside he had already been swayed. The Tokyo Center’s teams had studied Robotech adaptations to quadruped models in great detail, and surely the equine data was in the SDF-3’s memory banks. But winged horses weren’t the optimal mecha for going up against Invid terror weapons and Enforcer skirmish ships. Especially sky-steeds ridden by wild women brandishing swords and lances.

However, if a Robotech Pegasus would have the kind of motivational impact Bela was claiming, it would be well worth the effort. Besides, the idea intrigued him, and he was pretty sure there were still some horse behavioral engrams lying around somewhere in the memory banks.

“Very well. Come back in, oh, say, forty-eight hours, and I’ll have it ready for you.”

Her eyes went very wide, but Bela had been told that Lang promised nothing that he couldn’t deliver. She set her winged-owl helm down on the book, clapped her right hand to the sword on her left hip, and took Lang’s right hand with her left, holding it to her heart.

“By the Eternal She and the Glory of Haydon, your enemies are mine, your debts are mine, your praise is mine to sing, and my life is yours.”

Lang, so used to hearing false words from the council, and from most of the ship’s aspiring politicians, heard the unaccustomed bell tone of truth then. It was like some half-forgotten song.

He was trying to get hold of himself, trying to pull his hand away from its sublime resting place without seeming to. He mumbled something about having to hold onto her helm for a day or two for the installation of control receptors.

The mind-boost of his long-ago exposure to raw Protoculture hadn’t changed him from a man

that

much, and he was feeling certain inhibitions start to drop away.

Then Bela had let go of him. Lang’s automatic, ironclad control reasserted itself—but for a moment he didn’t know whether to be happy about that, or sad.

In one of the largest compartments of the SDF-3, a much-repaired and refurbished monolith of Zentraedi technology glowed and sent out deep, almost subsonic tones.

Exedore looked up at it worriedly. The Protoculture sizing chamber was perhaps the last that could still function, certainly the only one the Expeditionary Force had. Constructed for the Zentraedi fleet back when the miracles of Zor were commonplace, it was, like the Protoculture matrices, one of the few pieces of technology that combined Human-Zentraedi efforts could not duplicate.

Exedore held his breath. Monitoring indicators were already reading in the danger zone, but it was too late to stop the transformation now.

Returning Micronized Zentraedi to full, giant size, so that they could mine the monopole ore of Fantoma, had been a tricky business. The sizing chamber had already been pressed far beyond its rated limits. Without exception, the Zentraedi on the SDF-3 mission had volunteered—practically demanded—to be part of the mining operation. All were badly needed down on the giant world—all except one.

The rest had gone before, naturally; it was a commander’s prerogative and honor to take on the greatest risk. And so Exedore, the one Zentraedi who must remain Micronized, waited and worried while the giant among giants underwent the trial of the sizing chamber.

Readings were all at maximum and some were beyond, yet the sizing chamber somehow held together. Then the semicylindrical door opened in an outrushing cloud of icy gas and billowing Protoculture brimstone.

Great Breetai stepped forth.

He was naked, of course, but turned to accept the clothing and skullpiece an aide brought to him. Exedore tried not to stare at the destroyed portion of the right side of his lord’s face.

Sixty feet tall, Breetai squared his gargantuan shoulders and breathed so deeply that it seemed to lower the pressure of the compartment. He glanced around him as he fitted on the skullpiece. “So, Exedore! It worked!” He stretched, and his titanic muscles creaked like mill wheels; his joints cracked like cannon shots; the muscles of his back rose and spread like some bird of prey spreading its wings.

Breetai threw his head back and let forth a laugh that made the bulkheads quake. “Now we go back to where it all began, eh? Back to Fantoma! And Zarkopolis!”

Exedore nodded measuredly. “

You

do, my lord.”

Breetai nodded, suddenly solemn. “But don’t fear, my friend: when there’s no more need for you on the SDF-3, you’ll rejoin us at your true size!”

Exedore’s first impulse was to shake his head and tell his friend and master the truth. The sizing chamber had

given up the ghost

, as the Humans would say.

That’s all she wrote!

Why did human soldiers use that wording? Exedore had never investigated the matter. What’s that other phrase? “

The last hurrah!

”

Hurrah?

But Breetai was in high spirits, and no amount of agonizing could change what Exedore read from his instruments. The sizing chamber would never work again.

The Zentraedi miners, Breetai, and Exedore would remain as they were forever.

Exedore, looking away from his lord to the huge panorama of Fantoma hanging there in the sky, hid his despair. He would never stand by his lord’s shoulder again; he was forever Micronized, an insect by Zentraedi standards.

Exedore braced himself, smiled up at his lord, as brave as any samurai. “One or two things to attend to, my lord.” He grinned. “And then, I shall be my true size.”

Rick had just left the bridge and was signing off on an intel update when someone passing by in the other direction pressed a packet into the forearm-load of stuff Rick was holding, saying only, “Unit patches, sir.”

It took him a few minutes before he could turn his attention to what he was holding. From the square red courier packet, he pulled a dozen insignia, holding them fanned out like a bridge hand.

They were all the same: rampant eagles face-to-face, with the legend SENTINELS at the bottom, and a crowned medieval jousting helmet at the top. The main part was a skull alongside a tip-uppermost sword that had a viper twined around it.

It didn’t look at all like anything the Military Heraldry Institute would come up with. It looked more like the logo of some old time rock band. “Hey, who the hell approved …”

But he realized he was talking to himself; the companionway was empty. Everyone had gone off on their errands, and the mysterious patch deliverer was long gone.

Rick considered the patch again, giving particular attention to the skull. And the serpent.

What does all this mean?

Behind him, a hatch opened as a marine announced, “The admiral is off the bridge.” Then there was the swift securing of the gas-tight hatch; Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes Hunter were standing there looking at each other in the unflattering light of companionway glowtubes.

Lisa looked tired, looked

old

, it occurred to Rick—the same way he had looked after leading Skull Team in sustained combat.

“May I see?” she asked after a moment. He couldn’t figure out what she meant for a second, until he realized that he was clutching the Sentinels’ insignia. “I think they’re sorta unofficial,” he said, fumbling a bit, shifting burdens, then extending one toward her.

How do these things get decided?

he wondered. Apparently the lower orders—the enlisted ranks, and perhaps a few NCOs—had made up their minds. So, the Military Heraldry Institute would have something quirky to fit into its grand scheme—provided anybody got back to Earth alive to tell about it.

Rick looked more closely at one of the patches, admiring the stitching—trying to avoid Lisa’s eyes. Somebody had reprogrammed the automated garment manufacturing equipment in fine detail. The skull was a leering, bleached thing with sketchy ridge-lines, the sword sort of shiny in silver-white thread, the snake convincingly constrictor-looking, the eagles strikingly noble and angry.

Not bad.

So, at least somebody had a little esprit de corps. Somebody way down in the ranks, maybe somebody who had befriended Lron or Veidt or the others.

And now this is our emblem, take it or leave it.

He put down his various bundles and held the patch up against the breast of his uniform’s torso harness, over his heart, where the duty patch went.

“Not bad,” Lisa echoed his thought, reminding Rick she was there. She looked him in the eye, not so tired now that she was alone with him, and they shared a slow smile together. Rick suddenly remembered why they were in love.

Then she held the Sentinels’ insignia over her own SDF-3 duty patch, studying his reaction. “How does it look?”

He drew a quick breath and then turned away from her for a split second, gathering himself and making sure he had heard correctly. His heart pounded; he had thought he was about to lose her. But she was telling him, in her own way, that she was coming along on

Farrago.

What words were appropriate? None …

They took one another’s hand and went to the Captain’s quarters. There were not too many hours left until the Sentinels’ flagship must leave.

They had some packing to do, but that could wait a while.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

BY ORDER OF THE PLENIPOTENTIARY COUNCIL AND IN ACCORDANCE WITH APPLICABLE MILITARY REGULATIONS, THE FOLLOWING PERSONNEL ARE ASSIGNED DETACHED DUTY WITH THE XT FORCE DESIGNATED “THE SENTINELS”:

Baker, Jack R., Ensign

Grant, Vincent G., Lieutenant Commander

Grant, Jeanne W., Lieutenant Commander (Med)

Hunter, Lisa Hayes, Admiral

Hunter, Richard B., Rear Admiral

Penn, Karen L., Ensign

Sterling, Maximilian A., Commander

Sterling, Miriya P., Lieutenant Commander

Wolfe, Jonathan B., Colonel

(Excerpted from seconding orders, mission
“Sentinels,” UEG starship SDF-3.)

“You can handle it,” Lisa assured Commander—now Captain—Forsythe. She concentrated on tossing a few last possessions into a ditty bag. Her quarters—hers and Rick’s—were so stark and cold now, stripped of decor and furnishings, ready for Captain Raul Forsythe, the new occupant.

Forsythe ran his hand over a forehead rubbed smooth of hair by decades of military-cap sweatbands. “I

know

I can handle it, Lisa; I’m just not so sure I can do it as well jumping in flat-footed like this. You know how many people alive have

ever

commanded a superdimensional fortress? Only one: you.”

“Then, it’s time there were two.” She stopped, having come across something under the blotter on Rick’s desk. It was a laminated snapshot of Lisa as a teenager, looking adorable, with a kitten perched precariously on her head. She had given it to him in a moment when she had thought it was all over between them; she felt a tremendous burst of love for him, discovering that he had kept it so close to him all this time.

Admiral Lisa Hayes drew a breath to keep from sniffling. “Um, Captain—

sir

, remember what you taught me at the academy? The first day, I think it was.”

Forsythe allowed himself a chuckle. “That business about not ‘consolidating knowledge or expertise in such fashion as to present a tactical disadvantage in event of death, disabling, or disappearance of senior personnel’

wasn’t

supposed to apply to putting me in the hot seat, Admiral. Lisa.”

Lisa ran her forefinger along the seam of her duffel bag, its microfield sealing up behind as if she had touched it with a magic wand. She hoisted the duffel, grunting a little, and Forsythe somehow restrained himself from the lèse-majesté of snatching luggage away from his admiral in macho assistance.

The bag landed next to Rick’s: two remarkably small bundles of strictly personal possessions. Lisa looked back to Forsythe. “Captain, you’ve got more time in the service than I’ve got in

life

; we both know that. You’ll do fine. If you have any questions, ask the bridge gang; enlisted ratings run that damn place anyway. Mr. Blake and I just let outsiders think otherwise.” That notwithstanding, Blake was accompanying her on the

Farrago.

Forsythe laughed a little, and then Lisa did, too. He remembered the terribly intense and

focused

cadet—daughter of another Admiral Hayes—who had come to the academy as a gawky, pale, set-jawed, frightened midshipman.

She put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s time there were

two

SDF-qualified skippers.” They saluted, then shook hands solemnly.

She leaned to him, kissed him on the cheek. Forsythe, eyes closed, inhaled the somehow exotic scent of her, and thought wistful thoughts that broke service regs, rationalizing it on the basis of the fact that she would be gone soon. No temptation or threat; just a memory.

Then Lisa was sniffling again, pulling one of those new-fangled totally-recyclable tissues from a dispenser, blowing her nose, and tossing it into the recycler. Forsythe busied himself with realigning the duffels by the quarters’ hatch. The hatch slid open, and Rick Hunter was standing there.

“Admiral.” Forsythe touched his cap’s braided brim, and moved past, into the companionway, headed for the bridge. Time to take command.

Lucky dog!

Forsythe thought of Rick Hunter as he went along.

Rick went to lock his hands around Lisa’s waist, but she kept him at a distance for a moment. “My giving up this ship, dead in space as she is, useless for now as she is, means even more than your giving up Skull. You acknowledge, Skull Leader?”

He had been taken by surprise, but now he nodded. “I do, Lisa. But the Sentinels need me more than the SDF-3 does, and they need you more, too, and you

know

that.”

She inclined her head, perhaps a little unwillingly. “And it works out so well, for you. No more situation rooms, Rick; no more sidelines. We’re about to enter that Ur-Flower furnace that Lang keeps talking about. You’ll be right out there on the edge, and so will Max and Miriya and the others.”

Only, would that be enough? Or would he find out there was nothing short of flying combat that would satisfy him? She pretended to adjust her duffel’s straps. Somehow, that puerile Minmei song, “My Boyfriend’s a Pilot,” started playing in her head and it took an act of will to exorcise it. Lisa closed a last side-pocket seam, and hoisted her bag up onto her shoulder. “Ready?”

Rick had been about to offer help, but knew her well enough to know she didn’t want any. He wrestled his own bag onto his shoulder and wondered what he and his wife looked like: the willowy, overachieving-service-brat success story, new captain of the

Farrago

; and the shorter, maybe-muddled-looking guy at her side who suddenly found himself honcho of combat-operations coordination for the Sentinels.

“I love you,” he said all at once. Not much of an apology, really, or a rationalization, but the only guidewire there was to his life.

Her duffel shouldered, she nudged his hip with hers. Lisa had to dip a bit to do it. “Mutual. You know that! But we

have

to understand each other.”

She dumped the bag and put both hands on his shoulders, as Rick let his own duffel fall. “I know you were unhappy here. But I know, too, that if the war turns out that way, I’ll be listening to your voice, out there in the Danger Zone, and I won’t be able to do a single thing about it but hope and pray.”

She could barely keep the resentment out of her voice. “You and I are married; we’re mates for life,” she said, taking him into her embrace and feeling his arms close behind her, the strong fingers locking with a kind of determination.

Suddenly the resentment was gone; whether it would reappear or not, she didn’t know. Lisa brushed back the thick black hair over his ear. “Husband and wife,” she whispered. She could see a tear fall from his cheek to her uniform’s breast. Her own were streaming, too.

“It’s a rifle!” Karen Penn hollered, having had about enough.

“A goddamn projectile weapon, but it’s

not

a rifle!” Jack Baker screamed back at her, blood vessels standing out in his neck. He was wrestling the huge Karbarran musket around, about to shake it at her if he could get it off the deck.

Karen was pleased to see that she had gotten a rise out of him. Being stuck down in what was apparently the lowermost hold of the Sentinels’ ship, inspecting alien weapons and recording evaluations for the G-2 staff, would ordinarily have been fascinating, but she was down there with J. Baker, the World’s Most Obnoxious Ensign.

Now he tried to hold up the Karbarran firearm, its ornate, jewel-set buttplate still planted on the deck. All hand-polished wood and burnished metal fittings, it looked like some primitive work of art. Its wide leather sling was thick with embroidery, and its muzzle was decked with a rainbow of parrot-bright feathers.

Jack indicated the big, globular fixture just forward of the trigger guard. “Penn, we both agree that there’s a lot of air in here, right? Under pressure, because the Karbarrans jack it in with this forestock lever, right? And it shoots bullets pneumatically, with the velocity of a primitive rifle,

Right?

”

She cringed involuntarily as he shrieked the last word. “So!” he concluded, “It … is … a … 

gun!

”

Karen made a fist, her knuckles protruding, wishing she could punch him. She answered through clenched teeth, “Not by the G-2 guidelines, which specify propellant-ignition or energy. Now, d’you want to turn in a faulty report, or are we gonna list these pump-up blunderbusses properly?”

Perhaps, she thought, there was some sort of berserk sadist in the assignments office, and that was how she had been thrown in with Baker yet again. That would explain everything, but easy explanations were so often suspect …

Jack grumbled something she took as acquiescence, and they went back to work. They inventoried the strange-looking weapons of those Praxians—weirdly-conformed

naginata

, which looked like long halberds with a curved blade at one end and a spike at the other, and short, one-handed crossbows with their grips protected by boiled, shaped leather, and the rest. Swords, shields—the peculiar crystalline Spherian gadgets that looked like frozen lightning bolts—what were two ensigns to make of those, or of a Gerudan grapnel-shaped thing that didn’t seem to come with instructions?

Jack made terse notes in the aud-vid recorder, wondering at the same time how a girl who was such a sweet armful at a dance could be such an awful pain in the neck on duty. He prided himself on keeping an open mind, but really, he was right and she was wrong, just about always, and some streak of perversion in Cadet Penn seemed to make it impossible for her to admit that.

Karen, for her part, was thinking of the Praxians and their maleless society. Dynamite! Where could she sign up?

Jack was inspecting a two-handed longsword that the Praxians used in fighting from chariots, a razor-sharp whip of steel. Suddenly, he lowered it and turned to her. “Look, Penn, I’m not trying to make life tough on you, y’know. It’s just that I take my job very seriously.”

She was weighing some kind of bulky slug pistol in one hand. “So do I, Baker.”

Jack suddenly felt very confused. Her honey-blond hair smelled wonderful, and the strange, slightly sloe eyes that were fixed on him were exotically beautiful, as mysterious as any XT’s. And now that he noticed it, her upper lip was longer and fuller than her lower, giving Karen a, well, kind of

sexy

look, really …

Except—why did she have to be so damn competitive? Why couldn’t she just come right out and admire him, yield to his judgment, the way the girls back home used to do? “Okay,” he answered her, wondering what in the world he meant. “Okay, then.”

He held the aud-vid rig out toward her. “Let’s do this right, agreed? You record, and I’ll dictate notes and observations.”

She put her fists on her hips. “Why don’t

you

record, and

I’ll

dictate notes and observations?”

He felt his lips pulling back to reveal his teeth. “For one thing, because I was the Academy First in military history, and I think I could bring a little extra insight to evaluation of XT weaponry.”

“Oh, well, pardon me for consuming valuable oxygen! But it so happens

I

won a New Rhodes scholarship for a

thesis

in comparative military history, Mister!” Jack let go an exasperated growl and took a half step toward her; Karen raised a precisely folded fist, middle knuckle cocked forward. “And I have a first

dan

in

Uichi-ryu

karate. Want proof?”

He tried to calm down, then lost it. “You just offered the wrong thing to the wrong guy on the wrong day,

meat-head

!” He began tearing at the fastenings of his torso harness. “I’ll mail your dog tags to your daddy!”

“That does it!” she shrilled at him, kicking things out of the way for some fighting room. “Where d’you want your corpse shipped,

moron?

”

He couldn’t think of a comeback, and so roared like Lron, fighting to get his tunic off. Karen was quartering the air with whistling hand cuts, taking practice snap kicks that reached higher than her head.

There was a sudden sound from the cargo hold’s out-sized hatch, the deliberate, diplomatic clearing of a throat.

“Admiral Hunter.” Jack tried to figure out whether he should button back up first, salute, or get busy thinking up the least preposterous alibi he could, even while Karen was bracing to attention and stuttering, “T-T-Tensh-

hut

!”

“As you were,” Rick said, wandering in and gazing curiously at the racked Sentinels’ weapons, to give the two cadets a moment to pull themselves together. He sort of regretted intervening; it might have been educational to sit at ringside for a few rounds.

Now, who do they remind me of?

Rick Hunter asked himself. A young hot-dogger VT ace and a pale, intense SDF-1 first officer, maybe? He suddenly felt old, but it wasn’t such a bad feeling, in view of what youth had yet to go through. “Pardon the interruption, Ensigns, but G-1 just cut the orders, and as I was coming aboard anyway to settle in, I thought you’d want to know.”

They were both a little rocky from the adrenaline of the would-be brawl, and from the surprise of his appearance. It took them several moments to realize that he had promotion orders in one hand and lieutenant jg bars in the other.

Rick took a secret pleasure in their shock. “Can’t have ensigns assigned to the Sentinels; it muddles the chain of command. Congratulations, Lieutenant; congratulations, Lieutenant.”

They shook his hand warily, as if afraid it were going to come off, and gazed down at the badges of rank he had put in their palms.

“Yes; well, carry on,” Rick bade them when he saw that they were going to be flummoxed for a while. He returned their salutes crisply, and resolved not to listen at the hatch to find out what was going to happen next, even though he wanted to.

“Well? Let’s do it,” Jack Baker said. Tradition dictated a certain ceremony. Karen nodded.

They silently removed the ensign pips from each other’s epaulets, and fastened the jg bars there. Then they braced at attention and saluted each other, and then shook hands slowly, all without a word.

“Congratulations, Lieutenant,” Karen echoed Rick.

“Same to you, Lieutenant,” Jack told her emphatically.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

I felt that my place lay with the Sentinels—with observing and recording a unique event in Human history. But I was a little schizo about it, because I could feel that there were things shaping up at REF-Tirol that the Folks Back Home would need to know about, too. Heroes to be sung and villains to be fingered.

But one of the first things you learn when they hand you an aud/vid recording rig is that you can’t be every place at the same time.

Or even two places.

Sue Graham, narration from a documentary

Protoculture’s Privateers: SDF-3,

Farrago, Ark Angel

Sentinels, and the REF.

Jeanne Grant paused as she was about to secure the med-center diagnostic robot for transferral to the Sentinels’ ship. As she had done intermittently through the morning, she glanced through the viewport at Tirol, and looming Fantoma.

“It sure isn’t home,” she muttered again, “but at least we know the dangers here.”

She felt her husband’s massive arm go round her shoulders. He brushed his lips against her cheek. She reflected again on the oddness of it—how a man so big and incredibly strong could be so gentle.

“But we’re not needed here,” he pointed out. “Lang will be years repairing the SDF-3, and in the meantime there are people suffering and dying.”

And so the Ground Mobile Unit was being attached, figuratively and literally, as a new module of the

Farrago

, secured to the starship’s underside. And Skull Team, now augmented to near-squadron size with Beta and Logan VTs, was now the main component of its assigned air group.

She clutched his hand. At least there was comfort in the fact that, with the GMU suddenly reallocated to the Sentinels’ mission, Vince would be near her; she didn’t know if she could have endured being parted from him as she had been before.

Jeanne took a determined breath to keep back tears, having made up her mind that there was no point to doing any more crying. Vince patted her shoulder. “I know, darling, I know. I miss Bowie, too. But I’m glad he’s safe on Earth, he and Dana both. Rolf will take good care of them.”

She sighed, leaning her head against his broad chest, wondering what their son was doing at that moment, on the other side of the galaxy.

On Fantoma, the first dropships began disgorging the mining equipment that the Zentraedi would use to wrest monopole ore from the heavy-g world.

Breetai stepped out onto the surface in his pressurized armor, stretching his arms and feeling his muscles work. Nearby, heavily shielded and powered mining vehicles were being off-loaded. They looked like high-tech dinosaurs, octopi, centipedes.

Breetai looked around him at the bleak planetscape, a scoured and blasted vista of grays and browns and black, with a typically high-g scarcity of prominent features; planets like Fantoma quickly pulled down mountains and hills.

It looked like a haunted world. And it

was

haunted, in fact: haunted by memories the Zentraedi had accumulated over generations as miners, only to have those memories wiped away by the Robotech Masters and replaced with false ones, implanted glories of the warrior race the Masters needed for their plan to conquer the universe.

Battlepods came off the dropships, too, to stand guard and serve as security for the operation. Breetai let his subordinates take care of the details, and paced here and there, looking around him.

Lang and the other Earth savants had expressed surprise that the Zentraedi had been conceived as colossal laborers for the Fantoman mining operation. “If anything, it would seem to me, very

small

organisms would be more appropriate,” one Human had ventured.

But that was because they still didn’t understand the exact nature of the sizing chamber, and how it altered Zentraedi physiology to meet the challenges of a gravity more than three times that of Terra.

Breetai stretched again, feeling energized and exultant, rather than tired, by Fantoma’s pull.

It was the oddest thing, but—

memories

seemed to be coming back to Breetai. The first dropship landing had been centered on an open-pit area, and it seemed to Breetai that he recognized the landscape around him. Something drew him up a slope—twenty degrees, he estimated; a steep climb—until he reached the summit.

There was a bench there, a mere trestle of stone slabs, but how had he

known

he would find it at just that spot? Conversations from his past, or perhaps hallucinations, drifted in and out of his thoughts. He suddenly felt an impotent fury at having been deprived of his own past—at being unable to trust his own memory.

In that moment, an image of himself and Exedore came to him, sitting on the bench side by side, and Exedore saying something that Breetai was having trouble following.

I remember!

The words were a thunderous rumbling in his chest.

“No; of course we won’t remember this life, my friend,” Exedore was saying, “but the Robotech Masters plan momentous things for us. We will become much like a force of nature—something that will sweep the galaxy—the universe—in glory and triumph!”

Breetai saw himself stop and ponder that; he was only a miner—though he was, aside from Dolza, the biggest and strongest Zentraedi ever created, the most durable and formidable of them all—and had difficulty understanding the interstellar

jihad

that Exedore was painting in words.

Now he recalled the peculiar stirrings in him when he had heard Exedore’s exhortation. The thought of a life of battle and triumph had made him feel exalted. And he had had a preternaturally long lifetime of it, just as Exedore foresaw.

But where could these recollections be coming from? Surely the Masters had expunged all true memories. Breetai shook his head within the huge helmet, mystified and troubled.

“Lord Breetai?” He turned in surprise, both at the fact that someone was standing there, and at the realization that it was a Zentraedi

female.

“The construction gang is about to begin work on permanent housing,” she said, “but they’d like you to make final approval of the site.”

She was wearing Quadrano powered armor that had been retrofitted for labor and mining duty, he could see. One of Miriya Parina’s spitfires, no doubt; Breetai had heard that the Quadranos had never quite forgiven their leader for undergoing Micronization, marrying Max Sterling, and having his child. Many of them had deserted to follow the mad Khyron and his, his

lover

, Azonia, but some had remained loyal to Breetai, and a few of those had survived the final battle against Dolza and the Malcontent Uprisings and the battle with the Inorganics.

Breetai looked at her uneasily. The Zentraedi had always been rigidly segregated by sex, and most of them found the thought of fraternization disquieting to the point where it had been known to make them physically ill. But the unusual circumstances here in the primitive Fantoman start-up effort had made it impossible to preserve the old ways altogether.

Breetai forced himself to look her over. Not easy to tell much about her in the bulky powered armor except that she was tall for a female, well over fifty feet. Through her tinted facebowl, he could see that she had prominent cheekbones and slightly oblique eyes, looking rather like what Lang or Hunter would call Slavic, and her purple hair was cropped masculinely short. But there was something else about her face …

He realized, stunned, that she was wearing cosmetics. The thought passed through him.

Great suns! Where did she get them? Surely a female of our race uses as much in one application as an Earth woman uses in a month!

She had accentuated the fullness of her mouth, the length of her glittering lashes, the line of her long-arched brows. Breetai stared at her, openmouthed, as she saluted and began to about-face.

“Wait!” he said on sudden impulse. “What’s your name?”

She turned back to him. “I am Kazianna Hesh, formerly of the Quadranos, my lord.” She gave a slight smile, thumping the plastron of her armor with a gauntleted fist. “And now a Quadrano again, it seems. Some of our battle suits have been in storage all this time, and the hour is come when they’re needed again.”

“So it is.” Breetai inspected Kazianna Hesh, not sure why he was doing so. It was one thing to interact with human females like Lisa Hayes, knowing there was no possibility of … of

relations

with them, at least not as far as he was concerned. It was quite another, and very unsettling, to have the smiling, rather alluring-looking Quadrano staring at him so boldly.

“And, if I may say so, sir, what with all the perils that Fantoma harbors, it is good to be serving in a danger zone under the command of my Lord Breetai once more.”

She saluted again, precisely, but still with that odd half smile. Breetai responded, and Kazianna did a careful high-g march back down the little hillock. Breetai watched her go, studying her walk, wondering whether it was something about her armor—a malfunction, perhaps?—that put that nonregulation sway in her gait.

*   *   *

“I don’t care what your platoon leader told you,” General T. R. Edwards roared into the face of the cleanup-detail sergeant. “I’m telling you to stack those things in the catacombs for further study by my evaluation teams! And make goddamn sure you don’t damage any!”

The sergeant chose the better part of valor, saluting Edwards, then shrugging to his men and reorganizing them. They had been using their powered equipment to move the inert forms of the Invid Inorganic fighting mecha up out of the catacombs so that the demolition crews could dispose of them for good.

The biped Inorganics, and the massive Inorganic feline automata called Hellcats, were immobilized once the huge brain controlling them was deactivated. But it still made the REF uneasy to have thousands of them lying all over Tiresia, as though they might wake up at any moment. Orders had come down to move them to an appropriate site and blow them all to smithereens.

Lang and Cabell and the other big IQs had taken a few of the things for study, but didn’t seem otherwise inclined to countermand the council’s orders. Be that as it might, all the lower ranks knew you didn’t rub General Edwards the wrong way without risking some real grief. The heavy machinery began lugging the inert enemy mecha for careful storage in the catacombs under the Royal Hall.

Edwards took an aide, Major Benson, aside. “Get some of the Ghost Riders and keep an eye on things. Make sure the Invid mecha are all kept intact, understood?”

“Yes, sir.” Benson recalled the bizarre events of the original capture of the Royal Hall: how Edwards had arranged to be first to break into the Invid command center deep beneath it.

Benson could only guess at what his general’s plans were, but the aide made every attempt not to seem surprised or curious. Hitching your wagon to Edwards’s star offered the chance of vast rewards somewhere down the line, but stars had a way of flaring up and destroying the things around them. Discretion was the indispensible tool for survival in Ghost Squadron.

“Wise-man, I’m told you wish to see me,” Bela said, entering Lang’s lab. She seemed cheerful with the prospect of having her heart’s desire fulfilled, but she stopped dead, glaring, when she saw Cabell and Rem standing by Lang’s side.

Gnea had been following close behind her warlord, and now collided with her back. The smaller, younger amazon had the same lithe grace as Bela, but she was more prone to show wide-eyed wonder at the things around her, and lacked that hair-trigger temper that was already gaining Bela fame in the REF.

Gnea’s eyes were a gold-flecked green, her long, straight hair a sun-bleached white. Her helm was crested with a long-necked reptilian image that had a head like a horned lizard. Her battle costume was of a different design from Bela’s, but had that same look of erotic glamour to it. Gnea wore sword and knife on her harness like Bela, but where the taller woman carried a crossbow, Gnea bore a Praxian

naginata

and a shield with a spiked boss in its center.

“What are

they

doing here?” Bela indicated Rem and Cabell with an angry gesture of her chin, fingering her bow as if she were ready to fire. Gnea seemed about to bring her halberd’s curved blade into the ready position, glaring beneath feathery black brows.

“They have been helping me with my research,” Lang answered, surprised. “They are allies of the REF now, just as you are.”

“We Sentinels do not trust these spawn of the Robotech Masters,” Bela spat, “any more than we do the Zentraedi who brought suffering like the Invid did!”

Gnea, eyes narrowed at Rem, added, “And you, you who so resemble Zor—we have reason to hate

Zor

, too, for the ruin his meddling brought down upon us.”

“But he is not Zor,” Cabell told her, stroking his long white beard with one mandarin-nailed hand. “Nor am I a Robotech Master. Think of us, please, as two Tiresians who wish to help free all planets from the Invid.”

Bela hissed at him in scorn and anger. Lang intervened. “Without their help, I couldn’t have finished

this

for you in time.”

He gestured, and a powered partition folded aside accordian style. Bela gasped, and Gnea cried aloud, seeing what waited there.

No one would ever mistake it for a live horse, even though it tossed its head, snorting, and dug its hoof at the deck in imitation of a real animal’s movements. The two wings that sprouted from its back were articulated, and changed shape and position, but were more like something from an airplane or ornithopter than any bird.

Its leg structure widened somewhat down toward the hock, so that it seemed Lang’s wonder horse was wearing bell-bottoms from which its shining hooves poked. The thing was a glittering silver with jet-black trim. Its noble mane and forelock and tail of hair-fine wire tossed and glittered as it stamped, waiting.

“She is magnificent,” Bela breathed, forgetting her anger. “Superb.” She went toward the mecha with one hand extended; the thing appeared to sniff at her. “Magical.”

She appeared ready to vault astride, but Rem called out, “Wait!” As she whirled on him he held out her helm, showing her that the interior padding had been changed.

“Control receptors,” Rem explained. “This is still a Robotech mecha, after all, and in order to control it, you’ll need to do a certain amount of mental imaging—visualizing what you want it to do.” She took the helm from him, settling it onto her head.

Bela held her hand out to the horse again. “I shall call you ‘Halidarre,’ girl—after the free sky-spirit of our great heroine.

“Halidarre I shall be,” the horse-mecha answered, in a synthesized voice that sounded much like Bela’s. Both women drew breath in surprise.

“There are other things you will learn about Halidarre,” Cabell said, “as time passes. Things like this …”

He touched a control, and Halidarre’s wings straightened, their area shrinking somewhat. From a niche in the mecha’s back, a cylindrical reconnaissance module rose into the air, using the wings and its own lifting field. Cabell touched another control, and the module returned to its niche.

“Halidarre flies, too, just as promised,” Lang put in. “But more by her antigrav apparatus and impellers than by using her wings; the aerodynamics of a

live

flying horse are quite impossible, of course.”

“He is also compatible with some of the other REF mecha, like the Cyclone combat cycles—” Rem was adding, but Bela cut him off with a gesture and leapt astride the Robotech Pegasus.

“Halidarre, attached to a mere machine? Don’t be absurd!” she snorted. “Gnea, come!” Gnea obediently took her hand and swung up behind, one arm around Bela’s waist.

“Thanks for this gift, Dr. Lang; I salute you and pledge my fealty to you.”

Her expression hardened. “But as for you, Zor-clone, and you, servant to the Robotech Masters, do not try my patience, and stay well clear of the women of Praxis!”

By way of underlining her warning, she turned and aligned her arm at the wooden leg of a lab table. She clenched her fist and made a sudden downward curling gesture with it, keeping the rest of her arm steady. A thin, gleaming object shot from the slightly bulky feature built into her forearm sheath.

The three men turned to spy it quivering in the wood: a slim, hiltless throwing dagger—fired by some sort of spring-loaded device in the sheath, Lang supposed.

Bela looked to Rem and Cabell again. “Be warned,” she said.

CHAPTER
NINE

How I was torn when I saw that she wasn’t going! Surely, the Sentinels are venturing forth on a mission far more likely to bring enlightenment than is the mere mining of Fantoma and rebuilding the SDF-3!

Just as certainly, along with the contemptible bloodshed that is war, there will be access to stupendous new horizons of knowledge and awareness. Perhaps keys to the Ultimate Truths that grow from the First Light, the birth pangs of the Universe!

Enough; Minmei will stay behind and that’s only to be expected. Though the synergistic harmonies with Janice Em (and what of her? So many mysteries!) will be sundered, Lynn-Minmei seems to sense that the place for her and for her voice and her role in the Shapings—as Lang and Zand would have it—is here, with the REF.

And so it is my place too; I am content. She’ll be here, away from Hunter, away from Wolfe—here, near me. What feelings this stirs, I don’t find myself able to put into words yet. I will allow myself some irony in this matter, and sign myself, when these writings turn to Minmei …

REF Service #666–60–937

From an enlisted lounge of SDF-3, there was a great view of the Sentinels’ flagship and the small escort flotilla from the dimensional fortress, preparing to get under weigh.

Drives flared in the night of Valivarre’s umbra; the strange, orange-red fans of propulsive energy from

Farrago

stood out like a half-dozen immense, slitted searchlights—like no drives the REF had ever seen before, dwarfing those around the dreadnought. The Ur-Flower “peat” furnaces beamed incredible power out into space.

Off duty, Minmei sat at the lounge’s piano by a big span of viewport, not even realizing that she was picking absently at the keys. The Agitprop and Psych/Morale people had wanted her to sing a final farewell concert with Janice. Something to work everybody up into a liberationist fervor and prepare them for whatever lay ahead—either the backbreaking labor of putting SDF-3 in working order or the life-on-the-line campaign to dislodge the fearsome Invid hordes from the planets they had enslaved. The REF was already exhausted from the round-the-clock working shifts to get the Sentinels’ mission ready.

But Minmei didn’t feel like singing with Janice again. She refused to sing with the woman who had, in her opinion, betrayed her. For that matter, Minmei didn’t feel like singing for the war effort. The whole Superstar-savior-voice-of-humanity act was behind her, couldn’t they understand that? She was just another lowly recruit, and that was the way she wanted it.

“The voice that won the Robotech War,” they had called her. But what had it ever brought her but a few glimmers of the spotlight, then pain and bitterness and loneliness? She considered the things she had been forced to endure in the wake of her triumphs, and decided that one more such victory would be her undoing.

The escort flotilla had fallen in around the Sentinels’ flagship now, ready to guard it until it went superluminal. Then

Farrago

and the mismatched aliens and Earthers aboard would be on their own.

Minmei realized that she was hitting familiar keys, one at a time and very slowly. The tempo was different now, mournful, like some old torch song from one of the great blues singers.

She sang the words softly, letting her suffering come through, savoring the lyrics but filling them with irony.

Life is only what we choose to make it

Let us take it

Let us be free

Minmei chorded it unhurriedly, downbeat, so that the song sounded like it was time for the bartenders to be putting chairs upside down on the tables for closing. She felt her shoulders sag under a weight she simply wasn’t strong enough to bear anymore.

There was a lamenting in each word. The famous voice caressed, rasped resentfully, then caressed again.

We can find the glory we all dream of

And with our love,

We can win …

But there was a strength in the melancholy, a strength the blues had owned from the beginning, something stronger than all the up-tempo marches put together.

The strength of survival—of going through the worst and coming out the other side saddened and chastened but alive and prepared to stay with the life that had done such unspeakable things to you, because there

was

no other life …

Her head was bent over the keyboard now, long raven wings of hair shrouding her face. Perhaps a few, nearby, would hear, but she didn’t care. She looked again, briefly, to where the Sentinels’ engines lit the night, and the conventional drives of its REF escorts grew brighter in anticipation of departure.

Minmei watched them as her fingers found unhurried chords that seemed predestined.

If we must fight or face defeat,

We must stand tall and not retreat

Unseen by anyone but their owner, hands manipulated the lounge sound system control panel: turning down the gain; adjusting the very fine room directionals; punching a ship’s-intercom code that only certain selected commo personnel were supposed to know. Adjusting this; amplifying that—and it was all very practiced, very expert.

Minmei’s song, low and intimate, was playing through the lounge softly, as if it were something a loud sound would shatter, amplified so discreetly that Minmei herself didn’t realize the sound system was on.

It was channeled into the ship’s commo, and Lang’s head raised from his lab researches; Exedore’s eyes took on a faraway look; Captain Forsythe and the bridge gang stopped what they were doing and listened; many in SDF-3 fought the tide of emotion as

the voice

swept through them. Breetai, confronting bleak Fantoma, heard it through a commo patch-in over which he had just wished Rick and Lisa Hunter good fortune.

Rem and Cabell wondered if any perfection of the Muse Triumvirate of the Robotech Masters could surpass the aching beauty of this song; they doubted it. Exedore heard it and thought,

This power she has—it’s astonishing. No; it’s humbling.

Thousands of people froze, hearing Minmei, knowing her and her song, but never having heard either sound like this.

It’s love’s battle we must win…

The line rose and lingered; losing in personal battle was the epitome of the blues. Minmei was pure and high and luminous with pain at one moment, breathy with a return to the call of life the next. More in touch with her music than the gamine superstar version of herself had ever been.

We will win

We must win …

Minmei twisted the last note around with the wail of a suffering animal, then let it down gently with some chords that said

it’s all right; life goes on. Lived through everything else. Not gonna die from this.

She wavered a little on the piano bench, a bit dazed by the understated power of what she had just released—something that hadn’t been there, in her, before. She was unaware that so many others had heard it, unaware that the lounge was now utterly quiet.

The Sentinels’ drive flared bright; the starship moved away, its escorts guarding the vessel, as Minmei thought of it, only so far as the end of the proverbial garden path, and then letting it set out into the long night alone.

“Nothing to report to me? Nothing to report? Is that all you can say?”

The Invid Regent stalked through his vast halls in the Invid Home Hive on Optera, and his closest aides, knowing his moods, trailed him dutifully but warily. He was capable of becoming violent without warning—feeding an unfortunate bystander to one of his huge, gem-collared Hellcats, or having them devolved in one of the Genesis Pits or simply lashing out with a physical blow.

And an enraged blow from the Regent was something few might hope to survive. Some twenty feet high, he was the tallest of his race, among whom an average height was some six or eight feet. His advisers, though, like Tesla, stood twice average height.

Unlike the underlings following him, the Regent was draped with an organic cape that grew around the back of his neck and resembled a manta ray, lined from front to back with tuberclelike sensors that resembled eyeballs. He often spread the strange structure like a cobra’s mantle in times of fury, and the mantle was stirring restlessly, even now.

“No word from the reinforcements I sent to retake Tirol? No message on the whereabouts of Tesla? No answer from the Regess? Perhaps my servants need

motivation.

”

He stopped to turn to them.

“Your troops have barely had time to reach Karbarra, to pick up forces from the garrison there for the attack on Tirol, much less reach Tirol itself,” one of the lackeys managed to get out, trembling.

“A- and perhaps Tesla has paused to gather more varieties of the Fruit of the Flower of Life,” another one ventured. “He has great hopes that a preparation made from them will be of vast advantage to you, Mighty One!”

“And it may be that your communications have simply not reached the Regess yet,” the third pointed out. “She has always responded to Your Magnificence’s messages in the past.”

Yes. Usually with mockery and defiance. Repelled by his de-evolutionary experiments, just as he was provoked by her insistence on maintaining a form that was Tiresoid—that was so like the females of the race of the hated Zor—the Regess had abandoned him, followed by half their species, like the dividing of some unimaginable insect colony.

And with his resources of troops and vessels and Flower essence so limited in the wake of the vast Invid–Robotech Master war, he could scarcely afford to begin a civil conflict against his own mate and half his race. At least, not yet.

The Regent was in no mood to listen to his underlings’ rationalizations, in no mood to be reminded of logistical limits, or of Tesla’s semimystical theories about the Fruit of the Flower of Life. He stood now near the center of the Home Hive, a stupendous network of domes and connecting conduits that stretched far and wide across Optera like an incandescent spiderweb. But, with its energy reduced now and its population so depleted, it seemed to mock the power that had once been his.

The feeler-sensors on his snout glowered angrily with the words, “Yes:

motivation.

”

He seized the adviser nearest him, not really caring which one it was, and flung him across the chamber. The underling sprawled and lay quaking. “Kill him,” the Regent told the other two.

They didn’t hesitate for a moment. Snatching weapons from a pair of armored-trooper sentries, they turned the guns on their former colleague and opened fire. Streams of annihilation disks flew, flaring bright when they struck, enveloping the fallen Invid in a brief inferno. The stench of the charred body wafted through the Hive.

The Regent debated whether he should order the remaining two to shoot each other, or, perhaps more interestingly, themselves. But that would waste more time, since new lackeys would have to be trained from scratch.

His bloodlust had been sated a little. He contented himself with telling them, “Go now and do as I’ve commanded. And bring me no more news of failure.”

Senep, the commander in charge of the Invid mission to send fresh troops to Tirol, was aware of the Regent’s state of mind. He was at pains to do his duty well, but

quickly.

Reports from Tirol were somewhat sketchy—word that Zentraedi and some apparently unknown Tiresoid race had attacked the planet in concert. Senep’s hastily assembled task force, manned by troops borrowed from Karbarra’s ample garrison, now moved out for deepspace, still preparing itself for the rather protracted voyage to its objective.

Senep was relieved that his plan to commandeer resources from Karbarra had been approved. To gather units in dribs and drabs from various other worlds, and from the forces patrolling the outer marches of the Invid’s shrunken empire, would have cost him time that he could ill afford to waste.

But Senep had been able to make two telling arguments in favor of his idea. One was that Karbarra had more than sufficient Invid strength to perform its task, even with its garrison thus reduced. The second, and more important, was that the Karbarrans were most unlikely to become intractable or demonstrate any resistance or defiance.

No, the Karbarrans had a very

good

reason to obey their overlords’ every whim without objection.

The Invid commander was still getting his ships into proper formation when a communications tech turned to him, its snout-sensors agleam with emotion as it spoke.

“Commander! Alien starship approaching from deepspace! It just went subluminal and appears to be on course for Karbarra!”

For Karbarra, and Senep’s task force. “Identify.”

“Impossible, sir. It does not match anything in our data banks.”

Senep puzzled for a moment over the long-range sensor image of the Sentinels’ ship. “I’m not going to ask questions. Battle stations. All units prepare to attack.”

CHAPTER
TEN

It is a critical point that each new form of enemy in the Wars was a new problem in the use and application of Earth mecha. What would work against a Battlepod was suicide against Invid Inorganics; the vulnerable points, weaponry, and performance profiles were completely different.

The Human fighters were lucky they had all those curious and experimenting monkeys in their ancestry; the REF in particular was a climate wherein only quick learners survived.

Selig Kahler,

The Tirolian Campaign

The voyage from Tirol to Karbarra had been filled with a schedule even more exhausting than the preparations for the Sentinels’ departure. Rick, like all the others aboard, had been forced to take what little sleep he could get in catnaps.

They had had to familiarize the non-Human Sentinels with Robotech weapons, of course—as much as was feasible while under way. Some of them, like Burak and Kami, were more than willing to learn, while others—the Karbarran ursinoids and the Praxian amazons in particular—seemed unwilling to trust any small arms but their own. This, though the Karbarrans appeared inclined to try out mecha and Bela and Gnea could barely wait to ride that completely crazy winged horse of Lang’s into battle.

Rick and his staff had racked their brains coming up with ways to try to integrate the wildly varied forces in battle and make everybody understand what they were supposed to do. Rick had moments of agonizing doubt that it had been accomplished, wondering if he was heading into one of the worst debacles in military history.

Then there had been the various misunderstandings and frictions to mediate. The Sentinels’ resentment of Cabell and Rem; run-ins between the Humans and non-Humans as cultural difference led to clashes (well, the Hovertanker

did

have that fractured jaw coming to him for calling the Praxian woman a “brawny wench,” even if it was meant jokingly); the constant insistence of Burak and the other Perytonians that their planet be given higher priority in the campaign—it was all beginning to give Rick migraines.

And there was the bewildering job of understanding the alien Sentinels themselves. As the ship drew closer and closer to Karbarra, Lron and Crysta and their people became more and more withdrawn and morose. Veidt was puzzled by it, too.

Normally, as Rick understood it, the gloomy Karbarrans—preoccupied with the tragedy of fate and the ultimate futility of things—made Earth’s teutonic types look giddy by comparison; but the prospect of battle was one of the few things that made the big ursinoids cheerful. That wasn’t true now, though, and none of them would explain why.

Rick tried to put it from his mind, along with things like this business about Haydon. Apparently, Haydon was some sort of extraordinarily important historical figure or deity or

something

, but beliefs and convictions varied among the Sentinels and led to sharp disputes. And so part of their pact had been to avoid all mention of Haydon. Lang was desperate for more information concerning the matter, but the Sentinels had clammed up about it.

Those were Rick’s lesser problems. Bigger ones included trying to make things more efficient and organized, and constantly being stymied by explanations he couldn’t quite grasp.

One of his first ideas had been to automate the feeding of the Ur-Flower peat—Sekiton, it was called—into the furnaces, freeing up the stoker gangs for other work. Lron and Crysta had given him a long explanation, which he didn’t comprehend in the least.

They seemed to be saying that the Sekiton had to be

physically touched and handled by Karbarrans to be of any use.

If relegated to robotic handling, its affinity for Karbarran life-forms thus frustrated, Sekiton would have its feelings hurt or sulk or whatever, and refuse to yield up its energy properly.

It

had

to be a translation problem, Rick decided. Didn’t it?

He just hoped that he had understood the Karbarrans’ intelligence assessments properly. When they had left their homeworld, the Invid were maintaining a relatively small occupation force, and it sounded like something the Sentinels could cope with. Rick’s plan was to use the production facilities on Karbarra—famous for their adaptability and output—to begin assembly lines to turn out mecha and ships with which to arm native recruits, increasing the Sentinels’ strength perhaps tenfold.

Lron and his folk were disinclined to comment much about the idea, and apparently held the conviction that fate would bring what it would bring. That gave Rick reservations about the plan, and so he convinced the other Sentinel leaders to scout out the situation carefully before beginning any offensive.

To that end, the starship resumed sublight speed drive far out from the planet itself. Lisa, in her capacity as captain, gave the command to carry out the maneuver.

She had left behind the more formal REF uniform with its tailcoat and skirt. Now she wore the tight-fitting unisex bodysuit that seemed more appropriate for the Sentinels’ rough-and-ready style, the group’s insignia high on the left breast of her yokelike torso harness, just as it was on all the other Humans. The starship made its transition.

And found itself, all in an instant, practically in the lap of Senep’s task force.

Lisa turned and yelled for battle stations.

As for Crysta and Lron, they had taken advantage of the preoccupation of most of the ship’s company with the return to sublight speed to find their way to the hold in which Tesla was being kept.

The Praxians who were on guard were only too glad to let the Karbarrans relieve them long enough for the amazons to go get something to eat. Besides, it lay well within Lron’s authority to conduct an interrogation.

When they were alone with him, the ursinoids went over to where the Invid scientist sat, shackled, behind bars. “You begged us to spare you,” Crysta said in a growl. “You said you would be of use. Well, now you can be. Tell us what you know of the prison, and of its … its captives. How are they guarded? How may they be freed?”

Tesla had been watching her almost indifferently, Crysta thought, though it was difficult to tell any Invid mood by appearance. But when the scientist spoke, it was with an almost saintly kindness.

“Ah, Madam Crysta! If only I knew these things, I could tell them to you, and atone at least in some small part for the crimes I’ve committed against your race back when my will was enslaved by the Regent! But I know nothing of such military arrangements, you see.”

His chains rattled as he struggled to his feet. “However, another idea occurs to me. Release me, that I may go down to the surface of Karbarra and negotiate for you at once. The Invid commander, without the Regent there to contradict, will listen to me.”

Lron showed his teeth. “I told you asking this slime-thing was useless,” he told his wife. And to Tesla, he added, “Now we try a different approach. Let us see how much you can remember with one of those antennae twisted off your snout!”

Tesla shrank back, even though he was the larger of the two. “Keep your distance! Your leadership circle said I was not to be tampered with. Have you forgotten so soon?”

“But the others aren’t here now,” Lron pointed out, putting one hand on the lock. “And I am.”

Crysta, worried that this possible key to the Karbarran dilemma might not survive her mate’s vigorous questioning, was just saying, “Lron, perhaps he’s telling the truth—” Just then the alarms went off, exotic ululations and crystal gongs and warhorns and the various other calls to arms of the assorted Sentinel races.

Lron made sure the cage was secure, then he and Crysta pounded off for the bridge. As they rounded a corner in the passageway, they were unaware that they were being watched from the shadows.

Burak stayed back until the two were out of sight, then stared thoughtfully at the door to the compartment holding Tesla’s cage. At last, the sounding of the alarms drew him slowly, unwillingly, off toward his battle station. Then he began to run, to run as if something were chasing him.

“They haven’t fired on us out of hand; that’s a piece of luck we didn’t have coming,” Lisa conceded. “Rick, I suggest we

not

scramble the VTs, at least not yet.”

Rick met her gaze for a moment, then nodded.

There were far fewer of the enemy than the SDF-3 had confronted over Tirol. Four of the rust-colored Invid troopships, shaped like gigantic clams, were deploying around a much more modest version of the Invid command ship the Humans had glimpsed—the one Cabell had pronounced to be the royal flagship of the Regent himself. If the troop carriers were clams, this thing was an ominous starfish.

The Sentinel leadership was piling onto the bridge now, reacting or not according to the fashion of their species. “They’ve got the drop on us,” Rick said softly.

Lisa shook her head. “I don’t think so, or they would’ve opened up right away; the Invid are the shoot-first type.”

But I don’t understand.

Aboard Senep’s flagship, the task-force command finally got some results from the vessel’s Living Computer. It seemed that most of the components of the unidentified craft matched with space vehicles from many Invid-controlled worlds, and the central structure to which they had been joined fit the profile of an outlandish craft that the scientist Tesla had had under construction.

Senep’s antennae shone with anger. That blithering idiot! But—if it was Telsa, why hadn’t he identified himself? Perhaps something was wrong.

Senep queried the Living Computer about the offensive capabilities of the newcomer. Of the weapons that could be identified from memory banks, none could match the range or power of the flagship.

It certainly didn’t resemble anything the new foe—the Human-Zentraedi alliance—would conceivably field. And no ship of a subject race posed much threat to an Invid command ship.

“We’ll close with it, then,” Senep decided, “within range of our main guns, but out of Tesla’s. Then we’ll send our mecha to investigate.”

Lisa refused to answer the enemy’s query signals, of course; none of the Sentinels could imitate an Invid, and there wasn’t even time to get Tesla up to the bridge, much less coerce him.

“But why are they approaching?” Veidt’s eerie voice came.

Lron growled, “They know what our weapons can do; they know their flagship has us outgunned.”

There were only seconds to act; Lisa turned to one of the gramophone mikes. “Patch me through to Commander Grant.”

“Way to go,” Rick whispered to his gutsy wife, realizing what she had in mind.

“I’m beginning to get unfamiliar Protoculture readings from that craft, Commander,” the ship’s Living Brain relayed.

“Launch mecha,” Senep said, having taken up his position of advantage. “And at the first sign of resistance, open fire—”

It was as if he spoke into the ear of a listening deity. At that moment a tremendous bolt sprang from a peculiar design feature on the underside of the lone ship. It struck Senep’s vessel almost dead-center, a star-hot stiletto of energy that pierced the command ship’s shields and hull, stabbed it to its heart, and lit the vessels around it with its dying eruption.

But Senep had given a last order, and as the ball of superheated gas that had been the command ship expanded like a balloon, the troopships swung open like oysters about to yield pearls.

Invid mecha began boiling forth from them: bizarre, armored crab-shapes of assorted types riding powerful thrusters, diving for the Sentinels.

“Launch fighters!” Rick yelled. He could feel the ship shake as the Alphas and Betas of Skull Team roared from their launch tubes in the Ground Mobile Unit, and from the improvised bays in the rest of

Farrago

as well. “Vince, see if you can take out some of those other troop carriers!”

But before the command was out of Rick’s mouth, the Sentinels’ ship shuddered from a second firing of the GMU’s monster cannon. Fastened to the underbelly of the ship as it was, the GMU wasn’t in the best position for accurate volleys; but Vince’s gunners and targetting equipment were unsurpassed. A second nova-beam went through a troop carrier like a leatherpunch through a bug. Less than half its mecha launched, the enemy craft vanished in outlashing starfire.

“Commence firing! All batteries, commence firing!” Lisa was saying loudly but calmly into a mike. In all the mismatched portions of the ship, turrets and launchers opened up. The GMU’s secondary weapons began putting out the heaviest possible volume of fire. So did the non-transformable Destroid mecha that Vince Grant had moved into the ground unit’s larger airlocks, using them as gun emplacements—just as Henry Gloval had on SDF-1 during the desperate battle with Khyron out in Earth’s Pacific Ocean, so long ago.

In rushed the Invid Pincer Ships, the massive Enforcers and comparatively small Scouts, firing as they came, enraged though they had no individual emotions, with the single-minded fury of a swarm of hornets.

Out to meet them came the second-generation Alphas, sleekly lethal despite their deepspace augmentation pods; the burlier Betas, with their brute firepower and thrust; and the new Logans, with their rowboat-shaped noses, the latest word in Veritechs.

Leading Skull Team were Max and Miriya Sterling, as cool and alert as ever. To them, as to the rest of the veteran Skulls, heavier Invid numbers just meant there were that many more opportunities to make kills. The dying began at once. Skull Team’s tactical net crackled with terse, grim exchanges, the pilots automatically maintaining an even strain, upholding the generations-old Yeager tradition of Cool In The Saddle.

“Y’got one on your six, Skull Niner.”

“Roger on that, Skull Two. Kin ya scratch my back?”

“That’s affirm. Scissor right, and I’ll swat ’im for you.”

The Beta that was Skull Nine drew the pursuing Invid Pincer Ship into Skull Two’s line of fire. Brief, flaring bursts of free-electron laser cannonfire skeeted the bogey out of existence.

“Skull Leader,” Lisa’s voice came, “enemy element of six mecha has broken through your screen and is attacking the flagship.”

“Skull Two, Skull Seven, go

transact

’em,” Max delegated, still concentrating on the Pincer that was trying to get into Miriya’s six—the tail position, from which it could make the kill.

Two and Seven, leading their wingmates, headed off on a rescue at least as dangerous as the dogfighting; the Sentinels’ AA fire was not as well coordinated as the REF fliers would have liked, and there was a very good chance the Skull two-ship elements would be flamed by friendly fire if the people on the bridge weren’t completely on top of things.

On the other hand, that was what made combat more interesting to Max and his gang. They were the ultimate Robotech aces, living out on the edge where the juices flowed and death waved at you from every passing mecha.

“Skull One, Skull One, go to Battloid and hold ’em; we’ll be right there,” somebody was saying. Miriya pulled off an amazing maneuver, flipping her Alpha like a flap-jack while the pursuing Pincer shot past her, its annihilation disks missing. Max’s wife was suddenly in the six position.

Predator that she was, the onetime battle queen of the Quadranos lost no time in chopping away at the Pincer with short, highly controlled bursts of pumped-laser blasts. It trailed flame, debris, and outrushing gases for a moment, then became a drifting, brilliant cloudfront.

Max and Miriya came as one to a new vector, to engage three oncoming armored-trooper skirmish ships.

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

In my android state, I lack the appropriate Human referents to explain sufficiently what is transpiring here. I can only give factual synopses. But there is a Human phrase, employed in description of sporting events, that occurs to me, Dr. Lang: “playing over his-or-her head,” which refers to achievement—due to psychological, emotional, and other factors that resist analyses—in excess of what one might logically expect under given circumstances.

Given that parameter, I think I can safely say that the Sentinels are playing over their heads. But the game has yet to reach its final score.

Janice Em (in android state) in a report to Dr. Emil Lang

Rick was trying to follow the battle both by eyeball—through the huge inverted bowl of the bridge canopy—and via the Sentinels’ still-unfamiliar tracking displays and tactical-readout screens. At the same time, he was doing his best to coordinate the Human and non-Human elements of the Sentinels, and make sure foe, not friend, was the target of

Farrago

’s gun turrets and missile tubes.

But always, in the background, there was that small voice prodding and eating at him. He wanted so much to be out there in a VT, doing the only thing he had ever really done well in his life—piloting. To be left out of the rat race and yet be so close, so intimately involved in it, was such heartbreaking torture that it seemed the universe must be against him—that Creation was malign, after all.

He was also keeping a nervous eye on that huge Sekiton-powered junction that held the ship together and made

Farrago

a functioning whole; if it failed, the Sentinels would be history.

The pair of two-ship Skull elements dispatched by Max tackled the flight of six armored Shock Troopers that had penetrated the Sentinels’ defensive sphere. Far less maneuverable than the Pincers, the Shock Troopers mounted heavier firepower and had been no doubt sent in as kamikazes.

But the VTs were there first, two Alphas and a scratch element made up of a Beta and a Logan. The Alphas went to Guardian mode, in that process unique to Robotechnology that Lang had dubbed mechamorphosis.

The Beta reconfigured like some ultratech origami, thinning and extending as components flowed until it was in Battloid mode, a gleaming Herculean-looking Robotech body.

The Logan went to Battloid, too, mechamorphosing in response to its pilot’s imaging. Where Alphas looked more Humaniform in Battloid, the Logan’s boatlike radome made it seem like the upper half of a Robotech torso had been lifted away and some Egyptian icon-mask, the Spirit of the Twin-Thrustered Rocketcraft, had been lowered into its place.

But all the VTs were swinging and angling to confront the Invid. The Battloids clutched the repositioned cannon that had been integral weapons systems to the Beta and Logan but were now handheld infantry weapons, with barrels as wide as water mains, for the Robotech knights.

The attackers came in, and crewbeings on the bridge ducked involuntarily, as the darkness lit with crisscrossed beams of pure destruction and streams of annihilation disks.

The Shock Troopers looked like bipedal battleships, their clawed forearms bulging like ladybug carapaces. Their single sensor-eye clusters betrayed no emotion, and the twin cannon mounding at either shoulder made them appear invincible. But then the Battloids were there, and the mecha darted in and out of one another’s line of fire; the enormous energy discharges lit the bridge crew below.

The hulking Logan stood in the teeth of withering fire from a Shock Trooper, the gun duel a simple question of who could get a telling hit first. In the meantime, a second Trooper was looping around for a pass from six o’clock, and nothing Rick could do in the bridge could get him a clear connection to that doomed pilot. Just about the time the oncoming Trooper broke up into fragments before the monstrous outpouring of the Beta-Battloid’s gun, torso missile-rack covers flew back and a host of Swordfish air-to-airs corkscrewed at the Invid.

The armored Shock Trooper disappeared in a cloud of detonating warheads. The Beta changed its attitude of flight with a complex firing of its many steering thrusters, and opened up again with its handheld artillery in support of the Logan.

On the bridge, Lisa looked at Rick. No one could fault the job he was doing; despite the disadvantages of the Sentinels’ slapdash organization and communications systems, he was keeping things sorted out—was, perhaps, an even more pivotal part of the battle than she. And yet she could see, in the moment’s glance she could spare her husband, that he couldn’t cope with the frustration of his job much longer; that he was actually

in pain

because he wasn’t out there in the rat race.

Another concussion shook the flagship and a beam leapt out from the muzzle of the GMU’s main gun. It was set for wider dispersal this time, since the clamshell troopships weren’t a worthwhile target anymore. The stupendous cannonshot took out a few of the enemy mecha, like killing several flies with a howitzer. But this was no artillery duel; the mecha would decide the day.

The Alphas sent by Max Sterling mopped up the enemy machines that the Battloids hadn’t stopped. The very last armored Shock Trooper tried a headfirst dive at the very bridge canopy, and most of the beings there dove for the deck, useless as that was, by sheer reflex.

The Beta got in its way, backpack thrusters flaring so hard that the wash of flame blew across the adamantine bridge canopy. Some systems overloaded and areas of the shields failed. There were explosions, sending flame and shrapnel flying, and everybody’s ears popped as the ship began to lose atmosphere.

There were only a few Sentinels on their feet. Lron, at the wheel, held his place and let forth a challenging rumble. From where she stood, hands at the small of her back, Lisa looked every inch the captain—near the helm. She saw Rick still at his place; he turned, with a frantic look on his face, a look that was haunted and bereft—yet it held so much fear, wildness …

But at that moment, he saw that Lisa was all right, and he burst into a grin and gave her the thumbs-up, then turned back to his coordinating duties. Lisa understood that the panic in his eyes was that she might have been hurt, or killed. It had been a sudden vacancy—an immobility, really. True fear, and Lisa recognized it because she had seen it before, and felt it herself.

Terror

that he had lost her; it had debilitated him for a moment.

She thrust the thought aside. A few hundred yards above the long blister of the bridge, the damaged Logan had actually

bulldogged

an incoming armored Shock Trooper, interposing itself and going hand-to-hand with one of the enemy’s most feared mecha.

The bridge crew couldn’t hear the creaking of metal, the hiss of compromised seals, the parting of welds and seams. They watched the silent wrestling match as the bigger, stronger Beta rushed in to lend support. But the Beta was too far away.

The armored Shock Trooper grappled the Logan around into a certain mecha-infighting position, spread-eagling it, and bent it backward across one knee. There were the puffs of escaping atmosphere and the electrical arcing of destroyed systemry.

The Beta blindsided the Shock Trooper, rebounding to hit thrusters again and lock with it in mortal combat. Despite everything the Shock Trooper could do, the Beta Battloid forced its arms back and back—and worked a wholly Human wrestling hold, freeing one arm to grip the monolithic turret-head, seize, strain, apply torque with everything it had.

Rick was ordering the Beta clear; the flagship had been maneuvered so that the GMU’s cannon had been brought to bear. But the Beta wouldn’t relinquish its death grip on its foe. The Shock Troopers’ pincers scraped deep furrows in the Beta’s armor; its oval forearms levered in moves conceived to let it break free.

To no avail. The Beta bent the Shock Trooper’s arm up around behind it, and Rick understood in that moment that where matters of Robotechnology stood even, a deciding factor emerged. That factor had to do with things that were

the exact opposite

of mechanical processes. Emotion and belief, a passion for victory that was fueled by hatred of the outrages the Invid had perpetrated; in place of the un-questioned instructions the Invid got from their Hive, the Beta was animated by a reasoned mind’s drive to win.

The Beta got its free elbow under the Shock Trooper’s chin and pressed up and back, and back. All this, while VTs and enemy mecha swirled and fought, while the kill scores climbed, while

Farrago

’s gun emplacements hammered.

There was a slight outventing, then seals gave and atmosphere rushed from the Invid, along with what appeared to be a green liquid that became weightless beads and globules and vapor as soon as it hit vacuum. The Invid came apart with explosive separations of its joints. The Beta braced one bulky foot against the dead carcass of it, and pushed free.

The Beta sailed like some lumpy puppet toward the dead Logan. “No life readings,” somebody relayed the readout to Lisa; the Logan was so mangled that it came as no surprise.

Rick looked up from his apparently primitive but surprisingly sophisticated scopes. His features were closed of expression; self-contained. “Those are the Valdezes.”

Everyone knew them, brother and sister VT hotdoggers, top-of-the-roster aces. Henry had flown the Logan; his sister had just avenged his death in the mighty Beta.

The repeated attacks of the Invid had only turned the battle into a turkey shoot; what the REF mecha didn’t bag, the Sentinels’ guns had managed to find. Lisa heard from her commo analysts that the instant destruction of the task force’s command ship had kept word from going out to Optera,

or even Karbarra

, of the presence of the Sentinels. Something groundside might have detected the weapons discharges in space, but the Invid garrison must have been at a loss as to what they meant. Karbarra had a thick planetary ring, and the Invid below might think that was the cause of the commo breakdown. It didn’t make much difference to the Sentinels now; Human and XT alike, they had gone to war—and in this Robotech era that meant something they were all used to: win or die.

The energy salvos and counter-salvos sent narrow beams of blindingly bright light and streams of angry red-orange annihilation disks skewing through the blackness. The mecha whirled and pounced like craft maneuvering in atmosphere, though that was prodigiously wasteful of power; such were the peculiarities of Robotech, the pilots’ Earth-honed flying instincts channeled to action by the thinking caps.

It was the thickest of the rat race, the centerpoint of the fighter pilot’s life, the Heart of Unreason—the terrible venue of the dogfight.

Barrages of missiles

whooshed

and energy blasts of such power were exchanged that they seemed almost

material.

Holed and damaged machines tumbled and spun, leaking atmosphere and flame, and dying. The Invid fought with the unanimity of the group mind, but it became manifest that the REF, too, had learned to wage war with total concentration. Neither side lacked for ferocity.

But the tide turned in the Sentinels’ favor; in a mass Robotech rat race like that, the shift didn’t take long to make itself apparent.

Max and Miriya flew through it like gods, dealing death when they saw an opponent and, by their intervention, granting life to beset VT fliers. Max felt like he had an extra edge, with Rick behind on the bridge.

Once Max’s boss as Skull Leader, Rick had been away from combat flying too long to be jumping into a VT seat, no matter

how

restless he might feel. Max had already saved Rick’s life once, at considerable risk to his own, since Rick had begun chafing at the restrictions of flag-rank life.

Max had to endure no such distractions now; with the enormously augmented power the pods and other enhancements of their Alphas gave them, Max and Miriya, wingmates and soulmates, flew where they willed. Mighty Enforcers and evasive Pincers were their prey, like prey for tigers. The Invid quarry stalked the VTs, too, with fire that could kill them, but that only made the hunt more worthwhile.

Computer and sensor constructs of the battle in various tactical-analysis thinkpools showed a moving nimbus of death and destruction—Max and Miriya Sterling, in an almost superhuman performance of cunning and aero-combat excellence.

The tide turned quickly and surely against the survivors of the late Senep’s task force. In seconds, the scale had dipped unmistakably; the Invid were trying to disengage, to run for troop carriers that weren’t there anymore, as the volcanic cannonshots of Vince Grant’s GMU found their mark again and again.

The Invid’s turning tail tripped some essential instinct of pursuit in the VTs, and they rushed in, crowding one another, for the kill. A whole field of retreating Invid media were suddenly in a shooting gallery like nothing seen in any Robotech scrap so far. Some turned to fight, others ran and dodged; the Skull fliers went after them all, merciless because they had seen what the Invid did to captive worlds, and hungry for kills. Wolves flying at the fold were no more voracious.

Screened from Karbarra by its planetary ring and by the jamming efforts of the ECM techs, the Sentinels had managed to win their first battle with a sort of unintended stealth. But the first of their main events waited below.

The last of the killing was still going on, the mopping-up of the Invid mecha being carried out by the men and women of the Skull squadron, but that was already a fait accompli. Rick Hunter wanted to stay where he was until the last of the VTs was back, safe, or at least accounted for. But he knew he couldn’t; the strike at Karbarra must be launched

now

, within the hour, because the Sentinels’ presence might already have been discovered.

Rick had a sudden vision of Henry Gloval, and knew what had been trying to bow the old man’s shoulders as he stood there on the deck of SDF-1 in the old days. Rick thought of Lisa with a vast burst of love, and wondered whether any of the Sentinels would be alive in a few hours.

“We hit them now; take them by surprise, and the whole of Karbarra is ours!” Kami, the foxlike Gerudan, said from behind his breathing mask.

The rest of the Sentinels agreed with that and Rick Hunter slammed the flat of his hand down on the U-shaped table, making everybody, even the stolid Lron and Crysta, start a little.

“I lost eight good people in the fight just now, and eight mecha

we couldn’t afford to lose

; I won’t lose more if I can help it! The quicker we jump the planetary garrison, the fewer our losses and the quicker we win major mecha-producing facilities.”

Lron suddenly reared up, there beneath the bridge dome where a trestle table had been set out atop empty Karbarran beer barrels. “And I say we, we …”

He seemed to be drifting in thought, and many of the Sentinels looked at one another, especially the Humans. But nobody appeared to have an explanation. Still, the deaths of REF-assigned fighter pilots were Rick’s direct responsibility, so he found himself pressing his own view.

“We

must

exploit our current tactical advantage to the fullest, to minimize our losses, by attacking at once! Intel-computers and sensors and the G-3 ops staff have already pinpointed the primary and secondary Invid targets on Karbarra. Our VTs are being refueled and rearmed at this moment; we can strike in something under an hour. Fellow Sentinels, let’s free Karbarra.”

Lisa was looking at Rick in a new light. Granted, he hated his desk job, but he had shouldered the responsibility that had been given him and was undergoing that torment, that near-schizophrenia, that any decent commanding officer knew in combat: the need to carry out the mission weighed against the lives of his or her command. She wouldn’t have wished it on him, but she saw now that he had come into his full growth, as Captain Gloval had always put it.

Rick, for his part, looked over at his wife and saw that she understood the forces vying to rip him apart—understood, too, more vividly than he ever had, the forces that had pressed Lisa so agonizingly when she was SDF-1’s first officer, and later SDF-3’s captain.

Rick had something of a revelation.

I’d rather be in a cockpit, responsible for one VT and my own life, because it’s

easier!

Let this cup pass …

But it didn’t. Nonetheless, Rick saw that Lisa fully understood, and that gave him a strength that surprised him. He also felt a measure of shame; how often had

she

been in this kind of dilemma, when he couldn’t see beyond his own Skull Leader problems?

Every time he thought he had run out of reasons to love her, a new one appeared.

Except it didn’t help him with his Karbarran problem. Lron, till now, the Papa-bear stalwart, swung a fist the size of a Thanksgiving turkey, and took a considerable portion off the lip of the table nearest him.

“No!”

CHAPTER
TWELVE

Here’s where you get back

Some of your own;

Here’s where we visit

Part of the horror upon its author

From an Augury chant of the Karbarrans

Nobody was about to tell Lron he couldn’t have his say, or to try to stifle Crysta, who had risen up next to her mate.

Their goggles were pushed down around their thick, furry necks; The armor and accoutrements they wore only made them seem that much more like captive and dangerous wild animals.

“We cannot attack yet,” Lron roared, and Lisa began to consider the tactical problems of having half-ton ursinoids turning mean on the bridge. Stun guns might not even faze them, given the thick pelts and subcutaneous fat. It was either shoot to kill, or listen. And given how much Humans still had to learn about their allies, she followed the example of Veidt and the other Sentinels, and listened.

Rick saw her decision clearly by the lines of her face; he backed off, too, and for one moment they shared a brief, small smile—but it was something that warmed them both out of all proportion to the moment.

“We cannot attack,” Lron was grunt-howling, “because the [here he made an ursine noise that didn’t translate into the lingua franca the Sentinels used] is not correct! You are outsiders, and blind to the ways of Karbarra, and yet I tell you: if you go against the [that same word again], then there is nothing but total disaster awaiting you.”

It took considerable time to sort out, during which Rick fidgeted. Long-horned Burak and the crystal-bright Baldan spoke in defense of Lron’s past accomplishments. Rick felt like pulling a fistful of hair out of his head.

But it seemed that Karbarrans had a certain sense of fate, and Rick got the impression that it was depressingly downbeat and debilitating. And the fate of the bears was that there be no all-out attack on Karbarra at this time. What Lron and Crysta wanted was a very small recon group, a handful, to go down and scout things out.

“That’s crazy!” Rick yelled. “We

know

where the Inorganics and the rest of our targets are! Let’s

paste

’em, then go in and save the Karbarrans! My

god

, is there anybody here who doesn’t understand what we’re talking about? The Invid aren’t going to spare your people, no matter what concessions you make! There’ll be another demand, and another!”

Crysta came out of her big chair with a growl, showing her snow-white peglike canines. Rick stood his ground—arguably the bravest thing he had ever done; Lisa’s hand was clawing for a pistol that wasn’t at her belt.

“The Shapings of the Protoculture do not dictate … that,” Crysta said slowly, as if in a dream. She lowered her head as though she had come at bay. “Do not necessarily say that.”

Rick shook his head, unable to understand what it was they were getting at. “What’s wrong with you? We hit ’em high, then hit ’em low, and Karbarra’s

yours

again! Your planet’s

yours

again!”

Lron spun on him, one paw raised high, its claws standing out from the splayed hand, looming over Rick. There was almost a debate in the slow orbiting of it, and Rick Hunter knew death hovered close.

“We … won’t … hit … them … at … 

all

, yet!” Lron bellowed, at such volume that the others winced.

Lisa Hayes Hunter was the first one to raise her head again and look Lron in the eye. Rick tried to pull her back down, and wished he had thought to bring a firearm. Something in the elephant-gun category.

Lisa looked Lron in the eye. She said, “In case you’ve forgotten, we didn’t come here to be frightened away. Now, do we attack with your help, or without it?”

Lisa had put herself on the other side of the argument without qualification. And Rick was bracing himself to fight, because he was pretty sure the bears were going to charge his wife in a second or so.

But instead, Lron and Crystal subsided, making gnawing sounds but not objecting. Lisa went on. “It’s clear that we have the Invid at a disadvantage, since it is highly probable that the ground forces aren’t aware that their task force has been wiped out. Computer projections and G-3 evaluations are unanimous: we have a window of advantage at this moment and it won’t last long. On the behalf of the Human Sentinels, I say that we should take our shot.”

Other Sentinels pounded the table and cried their support. Rick looked at his wife and felt a powerful pulse of love mixed with a certain envy; but when he thought about it, the envy was separated out into equal parts of desire and admiration. Both of those were good for a love affair, better yet for a marriage.

But the Karbarrans were up, like grizzlies on their back haunches, to rebut. “You do not understand the—–”

For that, they made a sound incomprehensible to the Sentinels, something the translation computers had to labor at, at last rendering up a marked and qualified interpretation: “the Shaping of Things.”

Rick looked to his left, to Kami, the foxlike Gerudan who sat there in his breathing mask that was fed from the tank on his back. “What in the world are they talking about?”

Kami made an exasperated sound that somehow penetrated the mask. Rick leaned his way. “I don’t know what to think. Crysta and Lron aren’t behaving as they did when we formed our alliance,” Kami said.

“We could

sock

into that garrison before they knew what’d hit them, then mop up the remains,” Rick pointed out.

Kami nodded. “But something seems to be holding the Karbarrans back,” he pointed out.

“Are you gonna let that hold

you

back?”

Kami regarded him with a long look. “I would give some benefit of the doubt to you or the Praxians or any of the others. There are many things we don’t understand about one anothers’ species, and so we must proceed with caution. Am I wrong-thinking?”

Rick didn’t quite know what to say. “What we must do is make a reconnaissance of the situation below,” Lron announced. “Crysta and I and a half dozen of our people—”

“No.” Lisa was shaking her head. She wasn’t sure what the ursinoids were being so secretive about, but she was wholly opposed to letting them go off on their own. She wanted very much to trust them—had come, in fact, to like Crysta and Lron—but couldn’t shake the feeling that they were concealing something.

Everyone had something to say, of course. The Sentinels’ alliance was put to its first real test, and for some moments it seemed that the need that bound them together wouldn’t hold. Unexpectedly, Cabell was one of those who put things back on track. “Have you all forgotten the horrors the Invid inflicted on my planet? We must work together—compromise! The life and death of whole worlds are at stake!”

In the end, it was agreed that recon would be carried out by living beings rather than by remotes or drones. Veidt, acting as chairman, finally decreed that the unit would be composed of Lron, Kami, Rick, Gnea, and Bela, along with Jack Baker and Karen Penn. Those last names surprised Rick, but then he supposed Veidt had come to know the two lieutenants.

Lisa wanted to object, wanted to be included, but knew that Veidt’s selection was right; her place was on the bridge of the starship, especially now. But one last name was added to the roster: at both Cabell’s request and his own, Rem was included.

For the insertion, they would take a Karbarran shuttlecraft; with its Sekiton drive, it was much less likely to be detected by the Invid Protoculture instruments. This was no job for a VT or a Hovertank, as even Rick had to concede.

The recon party moved through the ship’s armory, gathering handguns and rifles, along with rocket launchers and grenades. Meanwhile, human techs were checking out the assorted survival gear the team would need. Rick noticed that while the women from Praxis had no objection to buckling gunbelts around their waists or slinging Wolverine assault rifles over their shoulders—indeed, they seemed to understand firearms quite well—they still insisted on bringing sword, crossbow, and Gnea’s

naginata

-like halberd.

He shrugged; to each his own. Besides, silent weapons might come in quite handy. Lron seemed set on bringing his pneumatic musket, too, and his huge, cleaverlike knife, but Kami was apparently more than happy to carry Human weapons with their greater firepower.

The equipment and the shuttle were checked while sensors and intel staff people and computers debated over optimal landing sites. There was still no sign that the Invid garrison below had any inkling of the Sentinels’ presence in the planetary ring; at least the recon group had that advantage.

Rick had found time to snatch a few hours’ sleep before the final briefing was to commence. He had hoped for a moment or two along with Lisa, but she had been preoccupied with preparations—and with trying to figure out contingency plans for dealing with whatever the scouting mission might run across.

Now, though, she entered their quarters as he settled his web gear and ran yet another check of his equipment. Med-pack, spare ammo, emergency ration concentrates, inertial tracker—

“Happy, Rick?”

“Lisa, we can’t have this same argument again! Veidt picked me; I didn’t even volunteer.”

“You didn’t have to. You’ve made your preferences known.”

“I took an oath to serve in a military outfit, not sit on the sidelines!”

“Well, you got your wish, hmm?” But she couldn’t stay mad at him, not with his departure so near. “Oh, just make sure you come back safe and sound, get me?”

He took her in his arms. “Quit worrying; I’m not looking for any medals. Rick ‘Cautious’ Hunter, that’s me.”

They kissed, then she pushed him away. “And no flirting with those Praxian lady wrestlers, or we’re going to be short one admiral around here.”

“No, ma’am. Yes, ma’am.”

At the shuttle lock, Jack Baker was making final adjustments on his thinking cap. While the team wasn’t bringing any large transformable mecha, there were still a couple of Cyclone combat cycles and Hoverbikes. Besides, Jack didn’t favor climbing onto anything fast-moving, or, for that matter, being in a combat zone without all the protection he could get. He wished Lang’s researchers had given the Sentinels some prototypes of the bodyarmor they were working on, full armor that was supposed to integrate with the Cyclones somehow.

Anyway, the helmet would be necessary for communications, with its built-in commo gear. Apparently Gnea and Bela were going to stick with their showy Praxian helms as reengineered by Lang; sometimes Jack found their blending of the old and new rather illogical.

“Well, well, so they’re sending the scrub team along to see how

real

soliders get the job done, hmm?”

Karen Penn had a way of making even a combat suit look good. She was shrugging into her web gear, resettling her burdens, giving Jack a mocking smile.

“

Somebody

’s got to be there to chafe your wrist after you faint, Penn.” They were about to get into another row when Jack became aware of a sound that made him turn with his mouth hanging open.

They’re not serious!

It was Bela, mounted on the Robotsteed, Halidarre, with Gnea riding pillion behind. Halidarre’s hooves rang against the deckplates. It took him a few seconds to get out any sound. “What d’you think you’re doing? This is a recon mission, not a carnival!”

The towering Bela’s brows knit ominously as she glared down at him. “Halidarre is my steed; with her, we’ll cover more ground and be able to rest assured that triumph in battle shall inevitably be ours!” Bela slapped the sword on her thigh, but Jack noticed that she carried a Wolverine assault rifle in a saddle scabbard too, and had a heavy energy pistol in a shoulder holster.

Gnea was carrying her halberd and her shield, although she was adorned with grenades and firearms. Jack could see now that the inner rim of the shield was lined with a row of throwing knives held in place by clips, convenient to her hand. Gnea slid to the deck, then Bela did, taking Halidarre’s bridle and leading her toward the shuttle’s open freight hatch.

The Karbarran spacers and the others standing around were too stunned to interfere, and in a moment the amazons were easing the mecha horse into place in the cargo area. Totally unskittish, Halidarre looked like she went through this kind of thing every day.

“The admiral’s not going to like this,” Jack muttered.

Karen shrugged. “Oh, well, at least she didn’t decided to bring along that four-winged miniature gunship that she—”

Just then Bela turned and uttered a piercing whistle, adding, “Hagane. To me!”

Jack and Karen, like the rest of the ship’s complement, had learned to duck when Bela gave that whistle. Something small and fast, moving and darting like a hummingbird, came blurring through the air on a whirring of multiple wings, buzzing the two lieutenants just for the fun of it. Jack felt like taking a swipe at Hagane, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of having a finger nipped off by a beak as keen as a pair of tin snips.

Hagane was what Bela called a malthi, as much a royal bird to the Praxians as the falcon was to the pharaohs. It settled on the heavy sheath on her forearm now, a creature no bigger than a sparrow-hawk, ruffling its double sets of wings and gazing around suspiciously. Her eyes bulged strangely, savage and unreadable, and Hagane let out the

birring

hunting sound that seemed to go right through one’s eardrums.

“

God

, I hate when she does that,” Jack frowned. “Horses and birds! Why don’t we take along some clowns and a tightrope walker while we’re at it?”

“You don’t approve of the TO&E, Lieutenant?”

Jack spun. “Oh, Admiral! The Table of Organization and Equipment’s just fine with me, sir! I, uh—that is, I was just surprised, that’s all.”

Rick was, too, but decided not to let it show. Actually, he was curious about how useful the Robotech horse and the Praxian hunting bird would be. Certainly, they wouldn’t exactly be inconspicious if Bela insisted on tearing all over the sky—but on the other hand, they were nothing that the Invid would connect with an expedition from Tirol.

He sighed, not looking forward to getting Bela to see reason and use her pets with restraint. Maybe Lisa was right, and this outing wasn’t such a great idea after all.

But it was too late for that. Lron showed up, and Rem, and Kami. They boarded the shuttle and belted in, as Lisa began her careful approach swing through the planetary ring.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

The pivotal point, unanswered as yet, is what success the Regent felt he was achieving in his “devolution,” and how he chose his course. That he still felt an unshakable desire—perhaps love, perhaps obsession—for the Regess is obvious.

But this doesn’t jibe with “de-evolution” as Humans would picture it; surely his self-remolding should have taken him away from such feelings. Did he refuse to give up those feelings, or was de-evolution something completely different from what we might surmise?

Lemuel Thicka,

Temple of Flames: A History of the Invid Regent

Once again, Crysta stood before Tesla’s cage. “I ask you yet again, Invid: what can you tell me of the situation on Karbarra?”

Tesla spread his hands with infinite sadness. “Only what you yourself know. Yet, I say to you once more: release me and let me go down to your planet and do my best on behalf of peace and the opening up of new dialogues.”

Crysta made an impatient sound. “If I discover that you’re lying, I’ll throw you out an airlock.” She turned to go.

“Wait,” he blurted. “Why haven’t you told the others of—this matter?” As a scientist, he had discovered interesting things about the ursinoids’ belief system. He had expected Lron and Crysta would have explained their quandary to the Sentinels long ago; though it was perhaps some slight advantage to him that they hadn’t, he found it puzzling.

Crysta made an irritated sound. “You understand nothing, Invid! The knowledge that comes from our Seeing is fragile. Revealing it can change the Seeing and the Shaping to something else, something even worse. If you hadn’t already known about—about our dilemma, I would never have mentioned it.”

Tesla nodded to himself. So. It might be that there was hope for him yet, if he could manipulate things. Certainly, he hadn’t much else going for him. He, above all, had reason to hope that the Karbarrans’ vision of the future came out well; otherwise, Tesla would be among the first to feel their wrath, and he knew how terrible their vengeance could be.

The entry was more of a free-fall, really, Lron’s piloting veering between the suicidally reckless and the professionally competent. He peeled part of the ablative layer off the shuttle but got them down without registering, as far as they could tell, on any Invid instruments.

Jack Baker found himself pressed into his seat, eyeballs in, slipping into and out of a red-out. He just hoped Lron had a greater tolerance of g-forces, because this felt like it might be an embarrassing moment to have the pilot take a snooze.

Karbarra was a barren, windswept place, pockmarked and wormholed as a result of their generations of intensive mining. Lron pulled out of his bone-jarring entry and gave the ship some thrust, leveling off at virtual landing altitude, searching. He quickly had his bearings, and closed in on the landing site he had selected.

All the Sentinels were alert, manning weapons stations and ready to open fire. But the spot selected by Lron, an abandoned operation where a major vein of iron ore had given out, was deserted. The Sentinels had been counting on decreased surveillance and patrolling, what with the Invid occupation forces presumably cut to minimal strength. It seemed they had won the bet—so far—but that still left an awful lot of the enemy.

Lron set the shuttle down gently through a huge gaping hole in an enormous cracked dome at the center of the processing area. It was a location already noted by the Karbarran resistance, he explained. It was as safe a base of operations as the team was likely to find, at least for now.

Rick began getting things organized even before they unbelted. Bela was anxious to get Halidarre up for a look around and to feel the freedom of the sky; it took some strong talk to make her see that a ground sweep and sensor scan of the immediate area would be necessary first, to make sure the Sentinels weren’t spotted by somebody before they could do the spotting themselves.

Karen Penn felt some foreboding, seeing the young admiral standing up to the imposing amazon and camly telling her it was about time she started learning to take orders. Her hand went to her sword again. “Orders? You dare tell me I lack discipline? And who are you to give

me

orders?”

His mouth had become a flat line. “I’m one of the people you Sentinels came to for help, remember? I’m part of the force that’s giving you a fighting chance at winning back your planet. Now, when our joint council makes a decision, we stick by it; that was the bargain. And the decision in this case was for a recon mission with me in command and Lron in second place. So let’s see if you can take orders as well as you give them.”

Bela suddenly grinned, throwing her head back. “I keep forgetting that you males can be just as hard-nosed as a woman! All right, Admiral, we’ll do it your way—but, mind: when I’m put in charge of an operation, I’ll expect the same from you.”

“Fair enough.” Privately, Rick decided that he didn’t want anything to do with an operation run by the impulsive warrior-woman.

His every footfall in the vast, echoing halls of the Invid Home Hive seemed to be mocking the Regent.

There was still no word of the task force he had sent to Tirol, no answer from the Regess. It was all too troubling for him to even take pleasure in punishing subordinates. He paced along now with his elite bodyguard marching a discreet distance behind, their armored steps resounding.

And he cursed again the tactical misfortunes that had made it necessary to abandon the Living Computer, the newest and by far the best of the giant Invid vat-grown brains, under the Royal Hall. It was inactive, and could fall prey to harm, could atrophy—could even be damaged by the upstart mongrel species who had somehow routed his legions.

He had been obliged to recall more troops from the outer marches of his crumbling realm to insure that nearby worlds under his dominion remained that way. The Regent rasped angrily at the thought that perhaps his task force had met with some reversal. At the worst possible time!

And then there was the thought that chilled him as much as any. What if the Robotech Masters should return to wage bloody war, and catch him in this disorganized state? He rumbled with displeasure, kicking out at a pillar that resembled a neural axon.

He cursed his mate again, for taking half his race from him. What could she need them for? She wasn’t even engaged in conquest! Wasn’t even pretending to help him maintain sway over the realm. It wasn’t fair; this was all

her

fault.

Something had to be done.

The Regent paused, turned, started off in another direction. When he got to the vast egg chamber, he was pleased to find that nothing was amiss, and the Special Children of the Regess were all there, unmoving and unaware in their gelatinous suspension. Row by row, rank on rank.

“Special Children.” Typical of her, she hadn’t even deigned to tell him what the phrase

meant.

The Regess had merely made it clear that these were to be some ultimate manifestation of the Invid genetic heritage, and that theirs would be some higher destiny.

“Indeed?” the Regent snorted to himself. When the empire was crumbling and the enemies of the Invid might be at the very Home Hive soon? What higher destiny could such Special Children have than to defend their Regent and conquer, conquer for the glory of the Invid?

Yet—he must proceed carefully. He wasn’t even sure what he was dealing with. It wouldn’t do to unleash some new and even worse danger—perhaps a generation of Invid who would know no loyalty to him, or even be infected with aspirations of their

own.

No, best to go cautiously. In the interim, he could reassign his forces, maintain the status quo for the time being. He had already managed to scrape up some frontier troops and dispatch them to reinforce the depleted Karbarran garrison. Perhaps he could even use the Special Children as a bargaining chip—get the Regess to trade him the loyal fighters he required in return for these quiescent eggs.

And Tesla! With his mystical talk about the Fruit of the Flower and his promises to bring a menagerie of defeated enemies for the Regent’s entertainment! What of him?

Seething, the Regent went off to dispatch another message to Haydon IV and demand immediate word of Tesla, on pain of horrible punishment to those all along the line who might fail to provide it.

“I simply have a feeling she’ll listen to you,” Vince Grant told his wife. “You just have that way with people, darling.”

She put down the medical report she had been filling out, preliminary evaluations of the vast array of salves, preparations, pills, and powders from every Sentinel’s homeworld; she was trying to understand them and the physiologies of the patients she would be expected to minister to.

“Vince, why don’t

you

talk to Crysta. I mean, you’re more her size.”

That got a grudging chuckle out of him. “I don’t think this has anything to do with size. I’m just a jumped-up engineer who got a commission ’cause he knows what makes the GMU tick. But you understand people, and Crysta’s just big furry people. Besides, you’re a mother.”

Jean looked him over. “What’s that got to do with it?”

“I’m not sure. I was showing her around the GMU and, you know, there’s that picture of Bowie on my desk. When I explained about him, it made her clam up, and she cut the tour short.”

Jean felt a mixture of curiosity and professional obligation now; he had seen her get interested in a case, just like this, so many times before. “We really don’t know much about the Karabarran children, do we? Oh, the reproductive cycle’s right there in the data banks, nothing unusual—especially when you compare them to those Spherians! But I mean, what’s happening to them right this second?”

“That occurred to me, too,” Vince said soberly.

She rose and kissed her husband, standing on tiptoe to do it. “You’re pretty smart for a jumped-up engineer, y’know that?”

He gave her a half smile. “Smart enough to come to you when I run into a

real

problem.”

The sensors and detectors indicated that they had made their landing without being spotted. Sweeps by Rick, Jack, and Karen on hovercycles, and, inevitably, a surveillance flight by Bela and Gnea on their flying horse, just confirmed the fact.

Then it was Rem who got stubborn, as Rick assigned him, along with Gnea, to guard the shuttle and man the commo-relay equipment, so that the recon team would be sure of getting a direct link to

Farrago

if and when it was needed.

“This whole mission is pointless if we can’t report back what we find here,” Rick fumed at him. “Now, I don’t want any more arguments from anybody!”

Rem subsided, and the team began loading up with weapons and gear. Lron casually weighted himself down with twice as much paraphernalia as any of the others and didn’t seem to feel the burden a bit. Something was making him most untalkative, though.

As it was, Rick was more concerned with trying to get the right mix of equipment and weapons distributed among his team. Lron had revealed that the network of natural caverns and abandoned mines constituted a virtual underground roadway, and that the unit could make most of the distance to its objective that way.

That meant spare handheld spots, night-sight gear, and so forth. Rick let Bela keep her Wolverine rifle, but assigned Kami to a much more powerful but short-range Owens Mark IX mob gun, in case of close fighting down below. Rick took a Wolverine for himself. Karen was assigned an elaborately scoped sniper rifle, her marksmanship scores being the best of any of them.

Lron lugged the magazine-fed rocket launcher and an assortment of ammunition; Jack was given a solid-projectile submachine gun that fired explosive pellets. Rick made sure they were all wearing “bat-ears,” in case there was any subsurface fighting. The bat-ears amplified soft sounds, left normal ones unchanged, but dampened loud ones—so the scouts wouldn’t be deafened in an underground firefight.

Bela didn’t put up the expected argument about leaving Halidarre behind; even she could see how impractical it would be to drag the horse through the tight spots the team could expect to hit down below. She put aside most of her Praxian weapons, taking only her long knife.

Lron led the way to a mine elevator that smelled of must and stale air. He fiddled with a power connection that looked dead, and made the elevator’s motor hum with readiness. The group boarded, turning on helmet lights. Rem and Gnea watched them descend into the darkness.

Veidt, Cabell, and the others were mystified by what they saw—or, rather, didn’t see. Long-range readings on the surface of Karbarra indicated that there had been little or no battle damage on the planet below. Their main city, Tracialle, was still shining and whole under its crystalline dome.

“This isn’t logical,” Veidt said. “The Karbarrans are fierce haters of the Invid, and we assumed the fighting had been furious.”

But instruments definitely indicated heavy Invid military activity below, although there was no sign of combat. With some few exceptions, the industrial and technical infrastructure seemed to be intact and functioning to a modest degree, the buildings still standing for the most part, the social systems operating normally.

“Perhaps this is all some ruse?” Sarna wondered, turning to her husband. “Can it be that the Karbarrans went through all this to lure us into a trap?—but no. Surely they could have diverted the ship here on one pretext or another as soon as we staged our mutiny?”

“And it makes no sense for them to have risked their lives against the Pursuer, or again in combat against the task force we surprised,” Cabell pointed out. “Then there’s this business of the reconnaissance. Some piece of the puzzle is still missing.”

They were interrupted by the ship’s mismatched alarms again, and Lisa’s voice came over a PA speaker that resembled a cornucopia.

“Battle stations, battle stations! An enemy force has left hyperspace for approach to Karbarra. They have detected us and are maneuvering for attack. Skull Squadron and Wolfe Pack, prepare for launch. All weapons stations prepare to fire on my command!”

For Jonathan Wolfe, it was a relief to be called to the cockpit of his Hovertank. He had been driving his Wolfe Pack all through the voyage, trying to wrench his mind away from the thoughts that tormented him, with preparation and drill, maintenance checks, and intense briefing and training sessions.

It hadn’t helped. There was still the guilt that he had left his wife and son far behind so that he could share in the REF glory, and now it would be years before he saw them again.

But an even worse guilt, grinding his conscience raw and then grating at the bloody wound, was the undeniable image of Minmei, Minmei. The sound of her voice, the aroma of her hair, the face and eyes, her coltish charm. The recollection of how it had felt to put his arms around her in the garden at the New Year’s Eve party on Tiresia. Her kiss, which had made him as light-headed as some school kid.

The ship was shuddering at the launching of the Skull VTs. Wolfe snapped rapid commands, and his own Hovertanks went to Battloid mode, sealed for combat in vacuum, following him in a dash for the designated cargo lock. The Destroids assigned to the GMU would be going to their firing positions, Wolfe knew, and the Ground Mobile Unit itself would be warming up its weapons.

But there would be no question of an ambush this time; today both sides were forewarned. Wolfe had felt disappointed at not being included in the recon team, but that had proved premature. Now, the Wolfe Pack looked like it was going to get all the action it could handle.

And as for Hunter and the rest, trapped below? Wolfe felt briefly sorry for them, then got his mind back on running his little corner of the war.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

Of course I heard all those cracks about “aliens,” and to her great credit, my wife let them pass, knowing what it was like for people fighting a war.

I’d hoped the Human race had learned, in meeting the Sentinels, to be a little less indiscriminately prejudiced. But few aside from the Skulls were.

Miriya overlooked all that, and fought like a tiger on behalf of the Human race and the Sentinels. And you’re telling me that’s alien? Then so am I.

Max Sterling, from

Wingmates: The Story of Max and Miriya Sterling by Theresa Duvall

“Form up on me, Skull Team, and stick with your wingmates,” Max Sterling recited automatically, his attention devoted to the tactical displays in his Alpha cockpit. He knew his wife, comrade and wingmate, would keep an eye on the team for him.

Max found a moment in which to be concerned for Rick. At least Rick wasn’t out here trying to fly combat in a VT; he was a good flyer, a natural, and once he had ranked only behind Max in proficiency. But Rick was years out of practice, and that had been obvious the last time he had gone into space combat with Skull. If Rick and his gang just kept their heads down, they would be all right—perhaps a lot better than the Sentinels’ main force was going to be, unless Skull got on the stick and took care of business.

Luckily, this new enemy contingent wasn’t as numerous as the task force the Sentinels had handled when they arrived: two saucer troopships, and no command vessel at all. On the other hand, the Sentinels weren’t going to get in any surprise Sunday punches today. Even now, the clamlike troop carriers yawned open and Pincer ships poured forth, interspersed with some Shock Troopers and even a few of the fearsome, armored Shock Troopers.

The Veritechs leapt to meet them in a mass duel. It was a mad, swirling combat wherein friend and foe were so intermingled that it was often dangerous to risk a shot. But those Invid who got through found that the Sentinels’ flagship was throwing out an almost impenetrable net of fire, augmented by Wolfe’s tanks and the GMU’s firepower.

Novas lit the night as mecha erupted in fireballs; tremendous streams of destructive energy were hosed this way and that, and clouds of missiles flew. Jamming and counterjamming made guidance systems erratic and put both sides in almost as much danger from their own ordnance as from their opponents’.

A small group of Pincers, led by an Armored Officer mecha, got to the upper hull of the Sentinels’ ship after suffering heavy casualties. But as they were about to attack the craft at close range—and get aboard to wreak havoc if possible—they were met by Wolfe and a squad of his Battloids. Most of the fighting was too close even for hand weapons, and the conflict came down to REF alloy fist against metallic Invid claw—mecha feet and elbows and knees came into play.

A Pack member wrenched off a Pincer’s arm and flung it away; the Pincer’s power systems overloaded and blew it apart from within. The enemy Armored Officer unit and two Pincers seized a Battloid from behind and began pulling it to pieces.

But the Invid were outnumbered, being beaten or kicked or torn to bits. Just then more Hovertanks showed up, in Gladiator mode: stumpy, two-legged walking artillery pieces the size of a house. Their tremendously powerful blasts nailed the last of the interlopers; then all the tanks went to Gladiator to repulse any further attempts to land on the starship.

The GMU’s massive main gun had sent out its inferno shots again and again, but all the enemy mecha had dispersed, the clam-ships unimportant for the moment. Vince Grant ceased fire and diverted power to the secondary gun emplacements, to conserve energy for the battle.

An Invid suicide attack got through the Sentinels’ net of AA fire toward the stern, and Vince dispatched Destroid war machines across the outer deck to join a pair of Hovertanks in trying to maintain cover back there. He had his exec double-check with Jean to make sure the sick bay would be ready for casualties, and got back an answer that rattled him.

“Sick bay standing by, sir, but Lieutenant Commander Grant isn’t there and hasn’t reported in yet. Her whereabouts are unknown at this time.”

Far below, on Karbarra, the Invid noted the military action being fought high above.

In accordance with standing orders, certain specialized units were mobilized and moved out en masse, weapons primed. Karbarrans in the street, frozen with dread and hollow-eyed with fear, watched them go. But the big ursinoids could only stand rooted to the spot, and pray.

Even with the inertial trackers, it was tough to figure out where Lron was leading them.

Lron, however, didn’t seem to have any doubts. Down abandoned mineshafts, along connections that had been made to drain underground watercourses, and through cavern systems, they made their way, the spotlights stabbing through the utter blackness. Rick had had them moving combat-style at first, wary of attack despite Lron’s reassurance that the Invid were unaware of this underground travel system. But infantry tactics slowed the recon party down considerably, especially since the alien Sentinels were unfamiliar with REF procedures.

So in time Rick settled on modified procedures, with Lron on point and Jack and Karen taking turns on rear guard, the rest of the group together or spread out somewhat as circumstances dictated. The team moved faster than combat-zone precautions would ordinarily have dictated.

At one point they passed through a mined-out, shored-up space where an ore seam had been, a place not quite four feet high, though it was fifty yards wide and went on for over two miles. It was backbreaking travel, especially hard on Lron. Their shuffling progress raised a fine dust that had them all black-faced in no time.

Kami, with his Gerudan breathing mask, was relatively comfortable, and after a while the REF members closed their flight helmets. Lron improvised a face mask from strips of fabric.

At another point, though, the group rode two ore cars that they powered with energy cells Lron had brought. It was a welcome relief, even with the weight of a planet hanging overhead, and they made good time along the railway.

Lron and Crysta had explained that the apparently limitless tunnel system had grown up over the years before the coming of the Invid and the Robotech Masters, when Karbarra, a center of industry and trade, had had its assorted rivals and enemies. War production under the planet was seldom slowed down as a result of attack from space, but nowadays much of the system had fallen into disuse and disrepair.

Sometime later, after a short break to eat and rest, Lron led them into a cavern system of unutterable phosphorescent beauty, and they paced along the brink of an underground lake in which strange, blind, parasollike, glowing things could be seen to swim and drift. The cavern ceiling was like a dome mosaic with jewels of every conceivable color. There were plants that looked like coral formations made out of tiny crystalline needles.

During the journey, the scouts maintained contact with Rem and Gnea, taking turns raising the shuttle guards at thirty-minute intervals for a commo check. Slightly more than eleven hours after they had started out, Rick formed them up into as good a security perimeter as he could achieve in the confines of the cave, and took Lron aside.

“All right; you said we’d reach the first checkpoint two hours ago, but I don’t see it around here yet. And don’t give me any more of this ‘it’s just ahead’ stuff, I’m warning you.” Every muscle ached, and sheer fatigue was making him edgy and paranoid, fearing a trap or a terrible screwup that the big XT was afraid to admit.

Lron rumbled, “If we’d moved as quickly as Karbarrans are used to, we

would

have been there long since, Admiral. But never mind; a hundred paces or so—

my

paces!—along that way over there will bring us to the beginning of our ascent. If you can keep up with me for another hour—two at the most, if we go slowly—we will sleep tonight in a cave overlooking one of the Invid outposts in the Hardargh Rift.

“And in the meantime, do you realize what we’ve passed under? Inorganics; flying Scout patrols; prowling packs of those murderous Hellcats; formations of Enforcers in their skirmish ships; Terror Weapons drifting along on their surveillance routes; and more! Save your breath on this final climb, little Human; you’ll need it to do some gasping when you realize how far we’ve come.”

Now it was Rick’s turn to grunt.

Talk’s cheap; let’s see you prove it!

But he kept the remark to himself, trying to avoid more friction. Instead, he turned and whistled; then, with voice and hand signals, formed up his tiny command to move out again.

They had barely reached the beginning of the long ascent when Rem contacted them with word of the new battle.

When things go wrong around here, they really do it in rows

, Lisa thought, but there wasn’t much time for regret. Reports coming in to the bridge indicated that the Skulls had repulsed the enemy attack, inflicting extremely heavy losses; the few Invid survivors were limping for Karbarra, their saucer troopships having been blown to particles by the GMU’s big gun.

There had been losses in all Sentinel combat elements and the ship had suffered damage. Skull had lost two Betas, an Alpha, and a Logan, and several other VTs were badly damaged. Rick’s group was standing pat in a relatively safe position, apparently, but a pickup was impossible, and it looked like the whole recon would be a failure. Lisa refused to think about what would happen if the Invid garrison’s heightened state of alert on Karbarra meant that the shuttle was permanently pinned down in its present location.

And perhaps most shocking of all, Jean Grant had been absent from her post in time of combat. Lisa still didn’t have all the details, but it involved Crysta and the Invid scientist, Tesla. Whatever it was, it had old Cabell about ready to throw a fit.

“Report,” Lisa snapped. Subordinates reassured her that things were being seen to. Damage-control parties were already at work, casualties being attended to by various Sentinel healers and the medical staff. Skull was refueling and rearming in case of another hot scramble, but that didn’t seem likely for the moment; apparently the Karbarran garrison had been stripped of its spacecraft, or else didn’t care to launch a counterstrike quite yet.

Not after the way we’ve bloodied their snouts twice running

, she thought with a small glimmer of satisfaction. Lisa issued orders that the flagship be held in orbit, and added, “I’ll be down in medical.”

Her first thoughts upon entering the big compartment where Jean Grant’s medical labs abutted the hole set aside for Cabell’s equipment and research was,

This must be a violation of the Geneva Accords!

Even though the Zentraedi had shown no impulse to obey the Rules of War, and the Robotech Masters and the Invid were no better, the Human race had made it a point of honor not to sink into unnecessary cruelty. And that was most definitely what this appeared to be.

How else could you explain Tesla’s being suspended inside an enormous glass beaker of greenish fluid, only the end of his snout sticking up into the air, and all sorts of electrodes and sensor pads connected to various parts of him, particularly his head?

“Admiral, please do not jump to conclusions,” Cabell hastened. “The Invid isn’t being hurt, and what we’re finding out here may change the course of the war.” Veidt and Sarna, looking on, nodded agreement.

Tesla objected loudly, “Not hurt? They torment me with their probings! They strip me of my dignity and take the vilest liberties with my person! They seek to slay me through sheer fright, so that they may dissect me. Save me!”

He thrashed a little in the cylinder. Jean Grant looked up from reading her instruments and rapped, “Be still. Or do you want me to hand you over to the Karbarrans? I bet

they

could get some information out of you, if I told them you’ve been holding out on them all this time!”

The thought of that made Tesla suddenly quiet down and float, trembling. Jean turned to Lisa. “I’m coming up with a sort of lie detector for Invid. At least I think I am. About all I can tell so far is that he’s got high concentrations of Protoculture-active substances in various parts of his body, especially his skull. And their composition and signature varies quite profoundly. It’s like some weird variation on a lymphatic system—and hormones, endocrines—but bizarre alien analogues, of course.”

Lisa put aside the list of questions

she’d

like to put to Tesla. “But why are you doing this

now

, Doctor?”

Jean gestured to a corner, where Crysta slumped against a bulkhead. “I finally got Crysta to tell me why the Karbarrans have been acting so strangely. Lisa, the Invid have their children in a concentration camp. At the first wrong move from the populace down below, or in the event a defeat of the garrison becomes imminent, the Invid will kill every cub on the planet.”

Lisa spun on Crysta.

“Why didn’t you tell us before?”

Crysta was actually wringing her pawlike hands. “The Invid had been an occupation force, had made us work for them, but they’d never forced us to fight for them, never made actual slaves of us. They knew we could not stand for that.

“But we didn’t understand how truly evil they were. They’d been preparing their plan for a long time; in a single afternoon, they swooped down to take up thousands of our young, and that immobilized us. You don’t know how precious our cubs are to us, now that our population has dwindled so!

“And so we were helpless, as the Hellcats and the Inorganics rooted out most of the rest of our children—only some few managed to remain in hiding. My people held a great Convocation, chanting and seeking a Unified glimpse of the Shaping …”

Lisa had been briefed on it, a sort of religious ceremony that could go on for days, as the Karbarrans sought contact with the Infinite. “The Shaping was that we must not defy the Invid, but that

neither could we tell any outsider of our plight

! That part of the Shaping was very clear.”

No wonder the Karbarrans had been against the Sentinels’ simply leaping into the attack with both feet and a roundhouse swing! Their children were hostage, and the big ursinoids had to simply let the crisis carry them along, with nothing but a forlorn hope that circumstances would change—or that they could

be

changed.

“That’s why Lron wanted the recon party,” Lisa suddenly saw. “That way, you wouldn’t have

told

us; we’d’ve seen for

ourselves.

”

Crysta nodded miserably. “But now I have transgressed.”

Jean disagreed. “No, you didn’t. I had a pretty fair idea what was wrong—it was Vince who gave me a clue—and I wormed the rest out of you, Crysta. But don’t worry; the Sentinels didn’t come all this way just to let a generation of children die.”

She turned back to Tesla. “Okay now, Slimy: Cabell and Veidt are going to ask you one or two questions. If my instruments say you’re lying, I’m gonna zap a coupla thousand volts through that bath you’re in, get me?”

She turned a knob, and a nearby generator hummed louder. Tesla thrashed a bit. “I—I hear and will comply.”

Veidt stepped closer to the vat. “There must be a Living Computer controlling the Inorganics below—coordinating and animating them. That much we know. But is it like the Great Brain that was sent on the expedition to Tirol, or is it one of the lesser sort?”

Tesla bobbed for a moment, studying Jean Grant’s hand on the control. She looked straight back at him. “It is one of the first, one of the most primitive and smallest,” Tesla said, “placed there when one of the earliest Inorganic garrison was assigned to duty on Karbarra.”

Jean looked at her instruments and turned up the control knob, so that a hum filled the compartment. Tesla churned the green fluid around him and cried, “Stop,

aii

! I am slain!”

Jean turned off the apparatus. “Looks like he’s telling the truth.” To Tesla she added, “Oh, shut up! That was just some low-frequency sound and a volt or two.”

Veidt told Lisa, “That being the case, my wife and I have a plan that may serve ideally.”

Lisa was giving instructions at once. “Get the rest of the leadership together for a briefing, ASAP. And have the intel people get all the information they can from the Karbarrans aboard ship; now that the cat’s out of the bag, they ought to be willing to talk. And

somebody get that recon party on the horn and tell them what we’re up against!

”

In the abandoned mining camp, Rem frowned as he listened to the word from the Sentinels’ flagship. “But how can—I don’t understand why—”

“You’re not required to understand, soldier,” a commo officer barked at him. “Just relay the message, word for word, exactly as I gave it to you. At once, do you understand?”

“I understand,” Rem replied sullenly. “Ground-relay base, out.”

He broke contact, grousing to himself about the high-handed tone these Human military types took with each other and everyone around them. As Cabell’s pupil and companion and sometimes protector, he wasn’t used to being treated like a lesser intellect or an unimportant cog.

He was switching over to the recon party’s freq when he realized he felt a stirring of air, and it came to him that Gnea hadn’t spoken or made a sound in some minutes. The shuttle hatch was open.

Stay buttoned up

, had been Admiral Hunter’s order,

and no wandering around!

Confinement and inactivity had chafed on the free-spirited amazon more than it had on Rem, who had been forced to sit out most of the terrible Invid onslaught on Tirol in a bunker.

He went to the hatch and peered around, then let out a yell. Overhead, Gnea guided Hiladarre through slow banks and turns, getting used to guiding her. “Is she not beautiful?” Gnea called down, plainly pleased with herself.

“Come down!” Rem shouted. “You know our orders! We’re to stay hidden, and not attract attention!”

She sniffed, “Mere males do not give orders to the warriors of Praxis! Besides, I’m

tired

of sitting in that machine-reeking ship. And who is there to see us, so far from any settlement or outpost? Go back in, if you’re afraid.”

Rem had a mind to close the hatch and leave her outside, too. And there was the urgent need to relay the awful, bewildering message about the Karbarran children. But he knew that Hunter had experience with war, and that extreme caution was always advisable when one was dealing with the Invid.

He took a few steps further into the open, craning his neck to look up at her. “If you’re through with your little games, you can act like a solider, and—”

He was stopped by a voice-processed growl, a feline hunting cry as uttered by a terrifying machine. A Hellcat had come around the shuttle’s bow, moving to cut him off from the hatch. A second appeared at the stern, and let out a scream of pure catlike anger.

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Consider the sentient “Tiresiod” brain—Praxian, Terran, Karbarran or what have you. Roughly one hundred billion-plus neurons. The potential number of connections these neurons can make with one another, according to some calculations, exceeds the total number of atoms in the Universe.

One sets mere machinery against such a creation only at some risk of unlooked-for results.

Cabell,

A Pedagogue Abroad: Notes on the Sentinels’ Campaign

Bela saw the Hellcats, too. Rem wondered why their presence hadn’t registered on the much-touted sensors of the winged horse. Perhaps Gnea’s flying lessons had distracted it.

The Hellcats, their slitted eyes glowing like coals, stalked closer. They were a form of four-legged Inorganic mecha, so jet black that they shone with blue highlights, and much bigger than the biggest saber-tooth that ever lived. The Hellcats were armed with razor-sharp claws, sword-edged shoulder horns and tail, and gleaming fangs.

Rem had kept an Owens Mark IX mob gun nearby in case of trouble, but not near enough; the short, heavy two-handed weapon and its shoulder-strap-equipped power pack were lying near the inner side of the hatch beyond reach as the two Inorganics moved toward him.

That left only the pistols he and Gnea were wearing—and from what Rem had seen on Tirol, it took more stopping power than the heavy handguns had to put down a ’Cat. Rem backed up slowly, step by step, the Hellcats padding after; they were gaining a little each second but savoring the moment, not quite ready to pounce.

Then he recalled the saddle scabbard Bela had mounted on Halidarre, with its Wolverine rifle. “Gnea, do you have—”

Somehow, his voice triggered the Robotech beasts, and they both slunk forward, segmented tails lashing, preparing to spring. Rem tugged at his pistol, doubting he had time to get a single shot off, doubting that Gnea could take accurate aim from a banking winged horse even if she

did

have the Wolverine.

The Hellcats sprang just as something brushed past him and he felt himself struck from above and behind. Or at least, that was what he thought. The next thing he knew, he was being hoisted aloft, held against Halidarre’s saddle, by the Robohorse’s lifting fields and beating wings, and by Gnea’s firm grip on his torso harness.

The lead ’Cat almost got him, its wicked claws sliding along Halidarre’s flank but leaving no mark. The horse banked, eluding the second ’Cat’s aim, and gained altitude. A sizzling bolt from Gnea’s pistol missed both felines.

“Your jostling spoiled my aim!” she scolded Rem, as he kicked and grabbed wildly for purchase. Then, between her hauling and his struggling, she had him up and draped over the saddle bow, belly-down.

Rem thought the horse’s power of flight would save them from the surface-bound Hellcats, but he could see he was wrong. One was already leaping up a small hill of discarded equipment and stacked crates with astonishing speed, giving chase. His field of vision was severely limited by Halidarre’s neck, body, and wing, and by Gnea; he couldn’t see where the second ’Cat had gotten to.

He called a warning to Gnea, but she had already seen it. Halidarre changed course abruptly. With its fantastic quickness and strength, and in the confines of the dome, the Invid mecha came close to nailing them. Halidarre almost bucked Rem into the air, filling with her wings and cutting in her impeller fields. Gnea herself only kept her seat by a determined gripping with her long, strong legs.

But the Hellcat missed, landing on a lower ledge of the heap and turning to surge up its side again for another try, missing its footing twice in the shifting debris. Gnea turned the winged horse for the opening in the dome, to reach temporary safety.

“No!” Rem yelled. “I left the shuttle hatch open! We can’t let them get inside!” It was very likely their only hope of escape, now that the flagship was engaged in battle, and probably the only way of linking up with the recon team again in time to get them offworld.

To his horror, as he looked down dizzily, he saw the second ’Cat’s tail disappear through the hatch.

Rem spied the Wolverine rifle in its scabbard and somehow managed to get it out without dropping it. But by that time Gnea had banked around a mountain of decrepit machinery off at the far side of the dome, and he had no clear shot. She picked a spot that looked stable and landed, high above the floor of the dome.

He slid down off the saddle and Gnea leapt down after. Off in the distance they could hear growling and the shifting of junk that meant the first Hellcat was still stalking them.

“There’s no time to waste,” Rem decided. “I have to go after the one that got into the ship. Can you handle this one?”

She pulled her own sidearm from its shoulder holster and took his from his belt as well, balancing them in hands bigger than his. “It seems I must, doesn’t it? And so I will, somehow.”

Halidarre snorted and reared a bit, wings deploying and beating a little faster, half lifting her into the air. A sudden thought occurred to Rem. “We’ll have to split up and take on both Hellcats at once. Gnea, how good is your control over the horse? How fine is your touch?”

She smiled grimly. “Try me, Tiresian!”

A few moments later, the feline mecha bounded up among the peaks and sinkholes of discarded industrial rubble and came around the corner to behold Bela standing, waiting, with both pistols leveled. There was no sign of the male Tiresiod, but the sound of jumping and occasional slipping told it that he was in all probability making his way down toward his ship.

The Inorganic ignored the sound of Rem’s frantic escape; its huntmate would take care of him. And, more to the point, once a Hellcat was zeroed in on a particular quarry, it pursued that quarry to the exclusion of all else.

The limitations of the early-model Living Computer in Karbarra’s capital meant that the central brain could spare no attention for the ’Cat’s report of the encounter, what with the outbreak of battle above the planet and the immediate need to prepare for defense. The Hellcats would simply return with slain enemies, to show what they had found and eliminated.

Surprise wasn’t a mental trait of any great importance to the Invid mecha; when it saw that the tactical situation had changed only slightly, it simply began an even more straightforward attack, dodging Gnea’s inexpert shots by jumping behind a mound of debris. Then it began working its way in her direction. There was no sign of the winged-quadruped mecha, but the ’Cat kept eyes and ears and other sensors alert for possible air attack.

It watched from concealment as Gnea crouched in the inadequate shelter of a smelting processor, and the Hellcat began gathering itself for the final rush, choosing a route around a convenient bit of broken machinery.

The ’Cat rushed, and knew that it would have her before she could so much as bring the handguns around, much less get off a volume of fire sufficient to stop or damage it. But just as it skittered around the debris to cover the final few yards, the debris came alive.

Armor-hard, scalpel-sharp rear hooves lashed out with the power of twin battering rams, scoring on the Hellcat’s jaw and side; the Invid machine was thrown off-balance, leaking power from damaged systemry in its shattered jaw and crushed “rib cage.” It went tottering off the ledge of the junk mountain with a yowl.

Gnea rushed to the brink, imaging a call to Halidarre. The winged horse disengaged itself from the splayed pose it had taken, pretending to be part of the ruined jumble of a millwork multirobot—the debris the ’Cat had seen. Halidarre was wingless now.

Gnea looked down to where the Hellcat lay squirming and partially broken, but took no chances; she held out the pistols side by side, pouring down bolt after bolt until it stopped moving, and internal disruptions sent flames shooting from its seams. It gave a last great howl and lay inert, smoking and molten.

Gnea was up on Halidarre’s back at once; surely the second Hellcat was warned, and Rem had gone after it alone.

The second ’Cat was indeed aware, and waiting. It had no fear, but it did have cunning and a total commitment to slay the enemy and carry out its mission; since the ’Cat’s destruction would prohibit that, such destruction and defeat were to be avoided.

Now it crouched within the shuttle, making low sounds to itself. It had scanned and recorded the nature and construction of the ship for later analysis by the Living Computer on Karbarra, then began demolishing the shuttle, only to be given pause by the death sounds of its huntmate.

Its first impulse was to go out and meet its enemies, then it decided to do as much damage as it could in the ship—perhaps drawing

them

to

it

, the better to avoid its enemies’ ambush. It swiped at another bank of intrumentation; shattered pieces and shredded console housing fell to the deck. The ’Cat watched the hatch avidly, certain that it could defeat either of the Tiresiods or the bulky winged-quadruped mecha in the limited interior space of the shuttle, before they could make any effective moves.

But what came zipping through the hatch was neither the Tiresiods nor their odd machine; it was something small and fast, darting about the cabin at great speed, spoiling the Hellcat’s savage calculations and provoking it to launch itself for the kill before it had really planned to.

The Invid mecha landed on the far side of the main cabin, snapping the copilot’s chair off its mount. The flying thing made an audacious dive, smacking the ’Cat rudely on the head, then zooming for the hatch again. The furious Hellcat catapulted after it, and out the hatch.

Rem, kneeling against the outer hull by the hatch and sweating profusely, saw the flying remote-reconnaissance module that fit in the niche on Halidarre’s back come flashing out of the shuttle. He braced himself, feeling his hands slick with perspiration on the Wolverine rifle.

The Hellcat came through the hatch like a dark comet. Its powerful pseudo-muscles gathered and it launched itself into the air, but the quick-moving remote module had changed course with the agility of a dragonfly, and eluded it. When the ’Cat came down, Rem was ready, holding down the Wolverine’s trigger and spraying a steady stream of white-hot devastation at it.

The ’Cat reacted with amazing dexterity, almost somersaulting out of the line of fire. Rem stood his ground and he slewed the beam back and forth in an effort to get a sustained hit. He was unaware of Gnea’s ululating war cry as she guided Halidarre down from the junk hills, heedless of the peril to herself, rushing to help even though it might mean a fatal fall … even though she knew she was too far away.

Rem held the trigger down still, in spite of what his Human instructors had cautioned. The explosion of an overloaded power pack was preferable to being rent and savaged by a Hellcat.

Then the ’Cat seemed to stagger, howling, as he had it in his sights for a second and more, washing the Wolverine’s raving blast across it. But a moment later, the Wolverine’s beam quit, its systemry burned out. The assault rifle was so hot that he dropped it rather than have the flesh scorched from his palms.

The ’Cat, mortally wounded, lurched and limped toward him, still agile enough in its dying moments that Rem saw that he could never outrun it. One eye was cold and dead; the other was all the brighter with hatred. It cut him off from the hatch he would surely have headed for.

He scuttled backward and sprawled. The Inorganic was about to throw itself upon him when it wavered, its systemry fluxing. At that moment something swooped into view, flying erratically. The remote module from Halidarre could barely stay aloft, bearing as it did a burden it wasn’t designed for. Like a butterfly delivering a key chain, it did a snap roll and slipped the strap it had managed to catch with its wing, dumping its cargo into Rem’s lap.

The ’Cat shook off its momentary malaise and looked back at its prey. Rem activated the power pack and fumbled at the thick olive-drab cable that connected it to the blunt, heavy Owens gun, opening fire. The Owens was built for just the kind of sustained close-range annihilation that had burned out the Wolverine; the Hellcat threw up a terrible screech and seemed to collapse in on itself.

Rem didn’t take his finger off the trigger until the ’Cat looked like a lava runoff. Gnea was standing by; the module had already returned to its place in Halidarre’s back, and Halidarre was stretching her wings once again, making a sound-processed whinney.

Gnea offered her hand to help Rem to his feet. He pushed the Owens and its power pack aside wearily and accepted. Gnea, who had followed Bela’s lead in showing hostility to Rem, now thumped him on the shoulder.

“We’ll make a woman of you yet,” she told him with vast approval.

Rem was happy for a split second, until he remembered that the second Hellcat had been in the shuttle. With a cry, he leapt past her for the hatch.

The scene within made him slump against the hatch-frame. From what he could discern from the damage the huge ’Cat mecha had done, the shuttle could lift off again, and the uplink to the Sentinels’ flagship might still work. But the recon-relay rig was in fragments, and the scouting party was out of touch, maybe for good.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

Here’s a peculiar thing: I wasn’t the only one at the Academy with something to prove or disprove; I never asked, but it seems to me now that there were a lot of ’em like me, pushing the envelopes of their own lives the way the test pilots were pushing the envelopes with their aerospacecraft.

My father’s Doctor Penn, naturally, and everybody calls him the leading brain on Earth after Emil Lang. I like my father, but I think he has the conviction that because I didn’t accept that New Rhodes scholarship, and went into the Academy instead, I’m some sort of intellectual failure. Since I’m enjoined to tell you about all the things that pertain, I’ll say that my father still holds the death of my mother, in childbirth, against me—unconsciously, of course.

I forgive him—he’s a brilliant man. But I don’t want him running my life. I have my own agenda.

From REF-selection diagnostic session, cadet-graduate Penn, Karen

Rick’s group knew that something was wrong almost at once; when one of their thirty-minute-interval commo checks failed to draw any response after repeated efforts, Rick called a halt to consider what to do.

The equipment the team was carrying couldn’t punch a signal through to the Sentinels’ flagship, certainly not without giving the group’s position away. Only the more sophisticated system aboard the shuttle could do that, and Rem and Gnea weren’t answering.

There wasn’t much dissention; the recon party had become closer through shared hardship, and Rick’s position as leader had solidified. “We can’t stop so close to our objective,” he told them. “Maybe Rem will reestablish contact. But even if he doesn’t, reaching our objective and carrying out our scouting mission before we turn back won’t cost us that much more time.”

Nobody seemed inclined to object, least of all Lron. But it was Bela who came up with an interim solution. She approached Rick with what he now thought of as “that goddamn canard-winged pest”—her malthi—resting with its many claws dug into her forearm sheath. “Hagane can serve as our messenger,” she said.

Rick and the others looked at the woman and the little hawk. “You mean she can find her way to Rem?” Rick asked slowly. “What if she gets lost?”

Bela gave him an indignant look. “Hagane does not

get

lost.” She was already taking banding and writing materials from a fancy tooled pouch at her belt, nodding. “Any route she has passed over, she can retrace, even one underground.”

Bela looked to Lron. “And

much

faster than any Karbarran. If the shuttle is gone or the others are dead, my Hagane will simply return without a message.”

And it seemed unlikely the creature would have any trouble with the winged things the team had spotted in the caves; Hagane’s few exploratory flights had shown that the cave’s inhabitants were only too eager to stay clear of the diamond-clawed, knife-beaked whirlwind that was Bela’s pet.

Rick’s head was swimming, but he made a few decisions then and there. “We’ll send Hagane on her flight from the observation point, so that she’ll know her route all the way back to us and—and won’t, uh, have to track us.” He had a vision of the avian thing whizzing through the caves, and tried to figure out how fast Hagane could make the trip. Hell; it would be a quick commute.

Bela nodded at Rick’s wisdom, and he returned the courtesy. They pressed on and, as Lron had promised, soon found themselves looking out over a huge expanse of weather-tormented Karbarran landscape. The cave’s irregular opening might have been any one of hundreds honeycombing the wind- and sand-scoured landscape of cliffs, but it was the only one that connected directly to the Karbarrans’ secret underground maze. Natural phosphorescence gave the place a dim blue-green glow, so that they didn’t need their vision devices to see one another. They shed the bat-ears, too.

The Praxian had settled down to work. “Now, the message must be short, so what will it say? Bear in mind, Gnea can send an answer back to me here, but that reply must be concise, too.”

The message Bela laboriously wrote, her tongue in one corner of her mouth, was in cramped glyphics, the whole-concept code symbols of the Praxians, using a pen with a point as narrow as a syringe. She tucked the tissue-fine bit of paper into a tiny metal capsule and bound it to Hagane’s leg. Hagane sat still, though her menacing beak opened in objection to this liberty, even taken by her beloved mistress.

Bela kissed the lambent-eyed Hagane’s feathers and Hagane nuzzled her. The amazon released the creature from her hands. Hagane dove down the cave, retracing her route. “How long will it take, do you think?” Kami asked, voice muffled by his mask.

Bela considered. “To get there and back? Perhaps there will have to be consultation with the flagship. Let us say, two hours.”

“Then, we’ll get what rest we can,” Rick decided. Everybody was bushed, and the call to move fast and hard again might be no further away than Hagane’s return. He saw no reason to set up double guards, or anything more than short lookout watches, so that everybody could get some rest. There wasn’t likely to be anything to observe or analyze for military intelligence purposes under the Karbarran night sky in the next few hours. The guard on watch would also make periodic commo calls in an effort to reestablish contact with the shuttle.

Karen Penn volunteered for the first half-hour shift. No one objected. Lron, who felt no need of blanket or bedroll, curled up by the mouth of the cave, and looked off into the night. The rest of them took swigs of water or went off into a private alcove to attend to personal business, and then composed themselves for sleep.

Karen Penn, muscles still cramped from the grueling traverse of the Karbarran underground, moved to a rock surface off to one side and silently began a t’ai chi routine, moving with precision and a flowing grace that wasn’t occidental. Jack, curled in his mummy bag with only one eye showing, followed her every move but said nothing.

“What is that you do?” asked Bela suddenly, her voice unexpectedly soft, while the others began nodding off.

Karen spoke softly, too, without stopping. “This is an exercise/combat system that was devised long ago on my world. It gives a person focus and intimate awareness of the body and of nature.”

She stopped and assumed another pose. “We have more vigorous, forceful systems as well.” She went through a brief

kata

at full speed, snapping punches and kicks, demonstrating rotary blocks and stiff-fingered blows with much less grace but as precisely as a machine.

When Karen was done, Bela regarded her for a moment, then said, “These are beautiful and effective-looking fighting forms, and you seem adept. You are not so foolish as I thought, Karen Penn.” She began pulling her campaign cloak, the only cover she appeared to need, around her.

Karen blinked. “Foolish?”

Listen, honey, as big as you are, I’ll—

“Foolish for placing such importance on a mere male,” Bela said, and closed her predatory eyes, turning away to sleep. Karen stared at Bela, thinking about what she had said. Luckily for Jack, he had covered his face completely before Karen glanced his way, immersed in confused thoughts and crosswired impulses.

The fourth watch was Kami’s; Rick woke him, then retired to his own ultralight but warm and comfortable mummy bag. He was asleep in seconds.

Kami went off into a small cul-de-sac so as not to disturb anyone and tried another commo call to Rem and Gnea, without success. Putting the apparatus aside, he realized he was feeling a certain oddness in his perceptions, a lack of depth and a flatness of feature. It occurred to him that he had lowered the flow from his inhalant tank, to economize during sleep.

The tank wasn’t his sole source of air, of course; such a supply would have been too bulky to carry. Instead, his mask frugally mixed his homeworld’s atmosphere with that of the local surroundings at any given time.

He increased the flow, and in moments felt the Higher Reality come into sharp focus again, with its enhanced perceptions and expanded awareness. The winds rustling the sands whispered their secrets to him, and the stars overhead twinkled messages from the moment of their birth. Ghostly—but unfortunately, minor—Sendings made themselves known in the form of images or disembodied voices. But still he couldn’t perceive the greater Truths of this war.

Lron, his snore surprisingly soft, had rolled away from his watching place at the cave’s mouth. Kami stepped to the very edge to gaze out into the night. A glow lit the horizon, and he knew that somewhere over there was the great domed capital city, Tracialle, the single major population center of Karbarra.

Kami and his people diplomatically refrained from ridiculing the Karbarrans and their days-long chanting rituals and dramatic, sometimes painful rites and grandiose reenactments, all performed in the name of some Foresight the ursinoids claimed to achieve. The Higher World was nothing one could contact that way; the Karbarrans were simply indulging themselves in mass delusions.

The Higher World spoke to the Gerudans through their every sense, thanks to their strange ecosystem, and showed them routes and possibilities. Thus, they were allowed to listen in on the constant monologue put forth by

every single extant thing

, by dint of its very existence, and—sometimes—to comprehend what was being said.

Kami saw a vision and didn’t hesitate. Noiselessly gathering his equipment, he scampered down the narrow ledge leading from the cave mouth to the foot of the cliff.

It was as his vision had shown him. Kami raced light-footed across the sands toward the glow on the horizon. He followed the lay of the land, as sure in his skills as any wild animal.

Yet, somehow his vision hadn’t shown him a swift flight of Enforcer skirmish ships that, flying high above, picked him up on infrared heat detectors. Nor had it shown him the troll-like Inorganic Scrim and Odeon mecha that appeared without warning in the darkness and surrounded him.

Kami turned to run, but they were everywhere, as big as any Battloid, reaching for him with their multiple appendages—metallic claws and segmented tentacles and waldolike Robotech hands. He groped for the Owens gun, but it was ripped from his back.

There was no time to use his commo link with the rest of the scouting party; he tore his breathing mask away to howl a single mournful, echoing cry into the desert night.

The cry woke Lron at once, and Bela leapt up, throwing back her cloak. The Humans were a little slower, but not much.

They didn’t dare show a light, but donned their night-sight equipment. Between Lron’s sense of smell and Bela’s eye for tracks, the two reconstructed what had happened.

“Another Gerudan follows his mirages to a bad end,”

wuffed

Lron.

“He came here to help your people, just like the rest of us,” Jack sneered back, “so quit mocking ’im.” Bela nodded in agreement, and Karen, standing to one side, studied Jack anew.

“As you

were

, Lieutenant!” Rick snapped.

The question was, what to do now? As many as three of the original eight on his team might be dead, and the remainder—himself included—were quite possibly stranded in the midst of an aroused Invid stronghold. All of a sudden, the Tactical Information Center back in SDF-3 didn’t seem like such a bad tour of duty.

Rick was prepared to believe that Kami was in the hands of the biped Inorganic grotesques of the Invid. But was he supposed to lead his remaining scouts out for a desperate rescue mission, like the Fellowship of the Ring off on their marathon jog across the plains of Rohan?

Damn it, this operation was in a very tight spot, and he couldn’t sacrifice more people for the sake of a vanished team member who was possibly hallucinating and quite probably dead.

“We’ll stay put right here and give Hagane a chance to get back,” he went on. “Everybody make ready to leave on a moment’s notice. Baker, Penn: warm up some rations over in the cul-de-sac, where the Invid won’t pick up the heat readings. And try another commo call to the shuttle while you’re at it.

“Bela, stand watch at the cave mouth. Are your night-sight goggles working? Good. Lron, come here and help me orient my map readouts on the local topo features.”

The rest of them got busy, and suddenly they were a unit again. They were so intent on their tasks that Hagane’s sudden, screeching return came as a shock that made them raise weapons’ muzzles, wide-eyed.

This time, Bela’s pet wore a capsule on each leg. As she read through the delicate papers, Bela frowned. In a few terse Zentraedi lingua franca phrases, she told the rest of them what she read. Rem and Gnea had resumed contact with the Sentinels’ ship, and the shuttle was space worthy, but the special commo rig for reaching the scouting team was permanently out of commission.

Then Bela went on to reveal the secret of the children of Karbarra. As she did, Lron’s shoulders slumped more and more, until they began heaving, outlined against the growing light of day. It took the rest of them a moment to realize that the poor old fellow, as strong as an oak, was weeping.

In the end, he told them the same story Jean Grant and the rest had heard up above. They also had hope, because Lisa and the other leaders had put a plan together. Bela’s brows knit as she puzzled over the symbols. When she caught on, she threw her head back and roared, and smote Lron on the back.

Jack Baker cussed under his breath, and Karen’s features drew taut with resolve. Rick stood up from the rock he had been sitting on. “It looks like we get the desert tour after all. Bela, do you think the Invid will be able to sweat any information out of Kami?”

She was caressing Hagane’s Alpha-sleek head. “If you think that, you don’t know Kami. They could dismember him, and he would regard it as a learning experience granted him by the Universe.”

Rick nodded. He did some calculating and realized that there was no time to retrace the whole journey from the shuttle’s landing place.

“Send Hagane back to the shuttle to let them know that we acknowledge the plan and will stand ready at our present position. Mention Kami’s capture, too.” He wanted to send some special word to Lisa, but that would take unfair advantage of his rank. He rubbed the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.

As Bela bent to her task, mumbling something about being regarded as a “lowly scribe, instead of a war leader,” Rick turned to Jack and Karen.

“Double-check all gear, especially the weapons. Lron, check the route Kami took down the cliff. Do it carefully, to make sure there are no tracks to lead the Invid back to us.”

“The toughest duty of all, now, eh, sir?” Karen said.

Rick nodded ruefully. “Yeah: waiting.”

They say the dying part’s not so bad; but then, we haven’t got much firsthand testimony.

CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN

This book won’t tell you how to cheat, because when you fail to deal with reality, you only cheat yourself. What I mean to do is turn you into a shrewd player who wins whenever possible.

Kermit Busganglion,

The Hand You’re Dealt

Tesla almost felt like his old self again, bathed and arrayed in fine raiments—robes far above the station of most mere Scientists, more appropriate, in fact, to the Regent himself—and ushered along by numerous attendants.

But the attendants were wary Sentinels armed with an alarming variety of weapons, and he was still a captive. A large hold had been converted into a commo studio, and techs were warming up equipment for contact with the Invid-occupied Karbarran capital.

Ah, if only this illusion were the truth!

thought Tesla.

Before him some of his worst enemies stood chained, disheveled and bedraggled-looking, thanks to makeup and wardrobe. Learna, Kami’s mate, was there, and Crysta, her paw-hands restless in their confinement. Between them stood Lisa Hayes Hunter, who wasn’t about to be left out of this grand swipe at the vaunted Invid group intellect.

Glimmering Baldan, froward Burak, and one of Bela’s lieutenants, a Junoesque brunette, were fastened in place, too—all looking like they had been dragged in the mud and given a taste of the energy lash. At either end of the slave coffle, like living bookends, were the Haydonites, Veidt and Sarna, hovering some few inches off the deckplates. Their robes were torn and faces smudged, and their necks were encircled by riveted collars, since they had no wrists to cuff.

Janice Em watched from the sidelines, ostensibly a guard but more of a media adviser—and more of an observer than anyone there knew. Sue Graham, the young camerawoman, was production coordinator for the project. She had signed on the Sentinels’ mission because it offered her more freedom to do her job her own way.

“You know that this can never work.” Tesla tried, one last time, to get them to understand. “We Invid are a perceptive and wary race, our intellect boundless! Are we to be fooled by this naive bit of play-acting?”

“We’ll worry about that,” Lisa said to him. “Just do as we’ve told you. Oh, and by the way …”

She motioned, and two Spherians came forward with a gorgeous jeweled collar, a kind of regal gorget. They fastened it around Tesla’s thick neck, and it clicked shut with a strange finality. He could see that it had been fashioned from some of the dragon’s-hoard of gemstones, collected from many planets, that he had planned to take back to the Regent, before the Sentinels staged their inconvenient and patently unfair uprising.

Still, he thought, admiring himself in the reflective metal of a nearby power panel, it looked quite striking on him. Something he would one day gloat over, when he had his revenge.

“Thirty seconds,” Sue Graham called out.

The ersatz slaves moved to their place in the background. Out of vid-pickup range, guards on either side trained their weapons on Tesla. As the time counted down, Lisa stepped forward a bit, her chains ringing, a sardonic look on her face. “And, Tesla? One more thing: you’d better play your part exactly right.”

“Is that a threat, female?”

“It’s a fact,” Lisa told him evenly. “That collar’s locked on you now, and it’s got fourteen ounces of shaped Tango-Seven explosive charges built into it. If you

disappoint us

, I’ll blow your head off in front of all your friends down there.”

“Surely, in this lower-lifeform gender business, the females are the worst of a bad lot!” Tesla nearly wept. But then a tech was silencing them. A moment later, the image of an Invid officer unit—the heavy cannon mounted on its shoulders making it look like Robotech Siamese triplets—peered out of the screen at them.

It seemed to recoil a bit in a gesture of surprise. “Tesla!” it said in the strange, single-sideband sound of a mecha drone.

“Yes, of course it’s me!” Tesla broke in. The lights around him felt disturbingly hot, and he wondered if they might set off the explosives around his tender throat. The Sentinels couldn’t be

that

deranged, could they? On the other hand …

“Let me speak to the Living Computer!” Tesla burst out. “I arrived just in the nick of time to drive our enemies from this star system, but I have important news!”

The officer appeared to hesitate, but Tesla screamed, “Do as you are ordered!”

Used to obeying, it complied. In another moment, a Living Computer appeared before Tesla on the screen. It was far smaller than the one captured on Tirol, and seemed to have less peripheral equipment and fewer convolutions.

We’re inside their system

! Lisa exulted, trying to look defeated and numbed from beatings.

Here goes.

Tesla began his spiel again: how he had returned to Karbarra in time to repulse the Sentinel raid, and how he needed landing clearance, to repair damage and hold urgent consultation with the Living Computer.

What the Computer didn’t see, what Tesla himself barely felt (and dared not register), were lines of mental energy reaching out from Veidt and Sarna. The Haydonites—bracketing Tesla from either side in a kind of mental crossfire—meshed their wills and thoughts with his, guiding and reinforcing, sending a steady current of emphasis and believability along the link Tesla had established with the Invid brain.

Invisible to all, Veidt and Sarna manipulated Tesla and, through him, the brain, though their powers were very weak here, so far from Haydon IV. But it didn’t take a vast, brute effort of mental force to accomplish what the Sentinels needed; it only took a slight touch here, a psychic stroke there, to create a conducive atmosphere. It only took a convincing patina of truth.

The Living Computer went so far as to call off its red alert—even more than the Sentinels were hoping for—and granted immediate landing clearance.

“And, incidentally,” it added. “The Inorganics have captured an alien, a Gerudan, out in the wastes. He’s being brought here now. I shall begin the torture slowly, so that you may enjoy the finale.”

“No, no, er …” Tesla didn’t know exactly what to say, but knew his captors wouldn’t take kindly to having one of their number subjected to Invid inquisition.

There was no time to consult with the Sentinels, so the scientist improvised. “I wish to examine him whilst he is still intact. Therefore, have him imprisoned with the other hostages for now.”

“Very good, Tesla,” the brain responded. “When do you expect to make planetfall?”

“Um, my vessel has suffered damage in the heroic fight to drive away those insurrectionists, and so I will make one decelerating orbit before making my landing.”

“As you wish.” When the brain signed off, Tesla’s knees buckled. He moaned weakly, begging for his captors to remove the resplendent collar. Lisa turned and shouted orders for the bridge. The helmswoman, a Karbarran nearly Lron’s size, brought the enormous wooden wheel over. The

Farrago

left orbit, to edge out of the planetary ring for a Karbarran approach.

Down in the bays and holds and hangar decks, the mecha came to full alert, systems at high pitch. Logans, Alphas, Betas, Hovertanks; drum-armed Spartans with their giant, cylindrical missile launchers; long-barreled MAC IIs that were walking hydras of cannon tubes; quad-muzzle Raider X self-contained artillery batteries; and ground-shaking Excalibers bristling with a half-dozen diverse heavy-weapons systems—the Godzillas of the second-generation Destroids.

Scuttlebutt about the Karbarran children and the concentration camp had filtered its way through all ranks in no time, though nobody had made any official announcements.

So, they think they’re gonna gun down a buncha kids, huh?

The mecha formed up and waited, their crews avid for the word to go.

“That’s it,” Rem said. “That’s as much as I can get working.

Farrago

says turn-to, and that means there’s no time left.”

Gnea nodded, taking a place behind him in the communications officer’s chair since there had been no time to repair the copilot’s. She took one last look in the aft hold, to make sure that Halidarre was well secured. Then she said, “Prepared.”

Rem smiled, punching up the ridiculous mission the shuttle would have to fly. Admiral Hunter’s book said he should let the computers do the flying, but the computers had been used as a scratching pole by a very

big

polecat. Besides, Rem had invented new computer designs and he didn’t trust them as much as people who knew less about them.

The shuttle’s engines shrilled, coming up to power.

“Not long now,” Rem told Gnea.

The

Farrago

began its long approach orbit on a course chosen by the Sentinels because it led through the least-well-monitored portions of the enemy detection skynet.

This time, Tesla’s face filled the communication screen. His would-be slaves couldn’t be exhibited because they were all otherwise involved in getting

Farrago

and its fighting forces ready to hit Karbarra like a sledgehammer.

“Er, Karbarra Control,” Tesla said delicately. He still wore that dismaying, priceless bib; moreover, there were unsmiling Sentinels surrounding him, just out of camera range, with an appalling collection of energy devices and even cruder things—pointed, glittering implements with unpleasant implications.

“Some of these pesky ablative surfaces and hull features on the captive ships I’ve incorporated into mine have begun to break up under the stress of entry. Inferior technology, you know. I’m sure they’ll burn up upon hitting the deeper atmosphere, but you might, um, alert your sensor techs not to pay any attention to the little cloud of objects coming down with me.”

The Haydonites’ spell was still in effect. “Of course,” said the Living Computer, “of course. Your landing area is at coordinates 12–53–58 relative; we will roll back a segment of the Tracialle city dome to permit your entrance.”

Tesla tried to sound enthusiastic and grateful, expecially since one of those horrid, overmuscled Praxian harridans stood ready to stick a halberd into his side if he made a mistake.

“Oh! How very kind! I will speak to the Regent of your cooperation and efficiency.”

“Thank you, Tesla.” The brain signed off.

*   *   *

“We’ve got a tentative location on that concentration camp,” Vince relayed up to Lisa, “but it’s still not dead certain. It’s obvious that they’re not in the camp Lron mentioned, because that’s been torn down. But we’re ninety percent sure we’ve got the new one spotted.”

“We’ll go in with a wide deployment of the attack forces,” she decided. “I want everything we’ve got in the air.”

“All set,” he answered.

“Then, begin launch operations.”

The composite ship began seeding the sky with air-combat elements. The VTs and the Logans went first; then the Skulls dropped and deployed, beginning a slow approach toward Tracialle, skimming the ground. Max and Miriya got the Skulls in proper array. Down almost at the surface, Jonathan Wolfe’s tankers made their drop and took up least-conspicuous routes, minimizing the chances of being spotted and riding low on their surface-effect cushions.

Farther along, the flagship moving even slower, Lisa ordered the dropping of the scouting force. Fighters on Tiresian airbikes, one-passenger Gerudan flitters and Perytonian sky cars, and even Veidt and Sarna in their bubble-topped Haydonite flier—shaped like a Robotech ice-cream cone—dispersed. They took up an immediate search formation, preparing to move closer to the city in order to pinpoint the location of the Karbarran children.

Rick and the others heard the roar, were ready for it. With a wash of sand and superheated air, the shuttle set down at the foot of the cliffs. The star Yirrbisst was just rising, bringing daylight to Karbarra’s barren landscape.

Rick and the others dashed aboard while the ship was still hovering, the engines barely lowering in pitch. “Move it! Move it!” Rick was yelling, even before they reached their seats.

Rem complied, the shuttle leaping away only a yard or two above the flat desert. Rick had started for the copilot’s seat, to take over, when he saw with some shock that it wasn’t there. Rem had neglected to mention that particular piece of damage. Rick knew Rem was a pretty fair pilot; he would just have to trust the youngster to handle the mission, because there was no time to land and change places. Rick buckled into an acceleration seat and hung on.

Rem cut the shuttle in the direction of the concentration camp as Lron had spotted it on the map. They saw no Invid patrols; Rem said that Invid occupation forces had pulled back most of their mecha in anticipation of Tesla’s arrival, to render military honors.

Rick checked the screens and could see, far to the west, the approach of the

Farrago.

The Skulls and the Wolfe Pack could reach the objective faster than the shuttle; Rick just hoped they hurried.

“Patch me through to Captain Hunter,” he told Gnea, who was sitting at the commo officer’s station, but she shook her head.

“Can’t, sir. We had some system burnout when we applied power to lift off. No commo with the flagship at all.”

We’re on our own

, Rick realized. What else was new? He hoped the timetable didn’t change, because if it did, he was living his last few moments then and there.

“No!” Tesla wailed. “I refuse! Put me back in irons; torture me! I will not go down that gangway to be roasted like an insect!”

Lisa Hunter showed him a control unit. “If you do as I tell you, you’ll be all right; if you don’t, your head’s going bye-bye, snail-face.”

She tried to sound as ruthless as she could, but she doubted she could actually do it in cold blood. It was against the REF rules of war, and went against what she believed in. On the other hand, she was counting on Tesla to evaluate things in terms of what

he

would do if the situation were reversed.

*   *   *

A minute or so later the

Farrago

drifted at a near-hover through the opening in the Tracialle city dome. It settled down on an acres-wide landing area near the heart of the capital, amid the blunt, functional buildings typical of Karbarran architecture.

The city stood on a mesa surrounded by chasms thousands of feet deep; the glassy hemisphere over it and the upper portion of the city itself rested on an immense cylinder reinforced by hydraulic shock absorbers something like a cross between an insect’s leg and a flying buttress. It reminded her of a titanic mushroom sprouting limbs.

The ship’s forward ramp opened and Tesla stepped out. Arrayed below him in rank upon rank were the biped Inorganics—Scrim and Crann and Odeon. Few Hellcats were present; they were difficult to control among dense populations. Other troops were keeping the crowds of curious but silent Karbarrans back beyond the far periphery of the landing site.

“Hail, Tesla!” cried the local commander, in his eerie, artificial voice. “And welcome to the Regent’s loyal and contented dominion of Karbarra!” That brought an angry rumbling from the crowd, but no outbursts.

Tesla, trembling a little, replied over a loudspeaker, “A-and hail to the stalwart Invid garrison! To add to our glory, I bring you captives lately taken in my … my momentous clash with the Sentinels!”

At that, cargo ramps extended from the various independent modules that made up the flagship, including the GMU. The Destroids marched down them, mostly single file or at most two abreast, due to their size.

“Prisoners of war!” Tesla was haranguing. “New slaves to fight for the honor and increase of our Regent!”

The garrison commander hesitated, surprised, conversing with the Living Computer for a moment before saying, “Well done. To serve the Regent is the only reason for living.”

The first of the Destroids had reached the landing-zone surface, and began forming up in single ranks. Still more emerged from the flagship. “But, perhaps these examples will suffice for now,” the commander added.

“They are all completely under my sway,” Tesla vouched, voice cracking a bit, as he edged toward the hatch.

“That may be,” the commander replied, “but such creatures are lower life-forms, wild animals, unpredictable.” He turned to his Inorganics. “Deactivate those mecha and remove their occupants from them!”

As the first ranks of Inorganics moved at once to obey, Tesla turned and dove headlong through the hatch. Lisa, watching from the bridge, thought,

Dammit

! She had hoped all the Destroids could emerge and get to more advantageous positions before the crunch came.

“Fire at will!” she yelled.

CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN

The

‘Gaia’

model was by then so thoroughly entombed, we had to blow the dust off it and study up in a hurry once we met the Gerudans. The theory of a planetary ecology as, in essence, a single interactive metaorganism? Too absurd to accept, right?

You wouldn’t last long in the Great Beyond, Citizen.

Jack Baker,

Upwardly Mobile

Living well isn’t the best revenge

. General T. R. Edwards thought, lounging in his luxurious chair. Revenge

is the best revenge

!

But better yet to have both: comfort, and the blood of an enemy flowing.

And surely the blood of his enemies was flowing even now. Despite the spottiness of interstellar communications, the

Farrago

had gotten through a message that the Sentinels had suffered casualties in one battle and were now launching themselves against an Invid stronghold in another. There were those on the Plenipotentiary Council who had talked vaguely of sending reinforcements, but Edwards had managed to nip that one right away.

Now he gazed out over Tiresia with vast satisfaction. For the most part, the city had been cleared of rubble, its unsalvagable debris and structures removed, and was quickly being rebuilt. Not much of a miracle, really, given Robotechnology. And REF Base Tirol was well on its way to completion; in fact, Edwards was looking down from his office on the top floor of the headquarters building.

It stood like the lower half of some early ICBM missile, a vaned cylinder at the center of great ribbon loops of elevated roadway. There had been some nonsense about putting the council up here, but with pressure tactics and backstage maneuvering, Edwards had gotten his way. That was becoming more and more the case.

Edwards wasn’t altogether satisfied that some resources were being diverted into urban renewal, rather than into building the fleet of starships he meant to commandeer for his own designs, but some things couldn’t be helped. At least it was making the Tiresians more tractable and grateful, and they, too, would have their uses, not far down the line.

Of course, Lang, and the sprawling research complex he was setting up with Exedore, were necessary inconveniences. He had to be kept pacified and working on the SDF-3 and the fleet above all.

A buzz from his aide announced that Lynn-Minmei was waiting to see General Edwards. He acknowledged, then flicked the control in his chair’s arm, spinning back to look across a gleaming, polished desk as big as a landing field.

Lynn-Minmei? Now what in—

It was a bit of a shock when she stepped through the door in a cadet uniform, halted before his desk, and saluted smartly. He still didn’t think of her as military. “Cadet Lynn, requesting permission to speak to the general, sir.”

He returned the salute slowly. “Permission granted. Stand at ease.”

She only relaxed a little. “General, I know something about people, and while everybody’s been working like dogs to accomplish our mission here, time’s been passing and, well …”

“I haven’t got all day, Cadet,” Edwards grated. “Spit it out!”

He was pleased to see he had made her flinch. “People need something to keep them going,” she burst out. “I

know

! I saw it in SDF-1! They’re sort of coming up with what recreation they can now, of course, but that’s very makeshift and haphazard.

“What we need is an organized program of entertainment, and some kind of center where people could go to unwind, no matter what shift they’re working or who they are. So they could forget their troubles and have their spirits lifted. A place where they could remember—remember why we all came here in the first place.”

She said that last softly, she who hadn’t been invited on the REF mission in the first place.

Edward’s own voice took on a softness, a dangerous tone from him. “Let me be clear on this. Knowing your past, do I assume you’re suggesting we open up a

cabaret

?

“No, a service club!” she corrected. “People need their morale kept up, sir!”

“And you’re just the one to organize it, hmm?”

She couldn’t meet his gaze for a moment. She knew that all her arguments were true, but Edwards had seen right through her. When she had sung that last good-bye aboard the superdimensional fortress when the

Farrago

left, she had sworn she wouldn’t sing in public again.

But bit by bit, her resolve had crumbled. She missed it too much. She missed the good things her songs did for people, the happiness they brought. But she had to admit that she missed the spotlight, too, the applause and adulation and attention. They were in her blood. She

needed

them.

The REF’s situation was so much like Macross’s in the old SDF-1 that it was as if her life were a Möbius strip. And so she found herself following old forms, feeling old longings and dreaming dreams she had told herself to bury.

“I’m more knowledgeable about show business than anybody else we’ve got, sir,” she pressed on. “I’ll do it on my off-duty time! But I was hoping you’d speak to the council, General.”

It all sounded like something out of one of those twentieth-century films for which he had such utter contempt.

Hey, I’ve got it, we’ll put on the show in the barn! Yeah, you can make the costumes! Swell; they can build the sets!

He almost ridiculed her out loud, would have enjoyed it, but at the last second held back. There

was

something about her presence, her gamine appeal and wide-eyed win-someness. Where other men might have felt attracted to her, and suddenly protective toward her, Edwards began to feel possessive.

He knew she had been courted by hundreds of love-struck admirers, worshipped by thousands, perhaps millions, of fans. And none had had her, none had really touched her, save only two. One of those, Lynn Kyle, her distant cousin, was long since missing and presumed dead back on Earth.

Edwards also knew that Minmei had once been Hunter’s passion. He was aware, too, through his spies, that fool Wolfe had a hopeless crush on her.

Minmei wasn’t sure what reactions or thoughts she was seeing cross Edwards’s face; the gleaming half cowl and scintillating lens-eye made it difficult to tell.

Edwards steepled his hands before him and tilted his chair back. “This idea may have some merit, Cadet. We’ll discuss it further over dinner.”

In Edwards’s mind, she was already his, body and soul.

Kami realized blearily that he was being borne along to the clanking of mecha. Reviving a little, he saw to his horror that he was in the grip of a Crann Inorganic.

The memory of being jumped, mixed with his Vision, began to sort out as he struggled like a wild thing to no effect. The dreadful recollections of being caged by Tesla made him look about for a way to take his own life. The Inorganic’s armor and grotesque design screamed mindless hatefulness; the sky was screeching a death song at him.

But he was held fast and couldn’t squirm free. That changed in a few moments, though, as he was dropped without ceremony. He landed in a heap on hard, gritty soil, dazed, the Vision almost clouding over into unconsciousness. He could hear the Invid marching away, and could make no sense of it.

Something prodded him. Kami rolled over with a sharp yip of alarm, to find himself looking up at a ring of furry faces. “What are you?” one of them said. “Are you an Invid, then?”

One of the others made an exasperated sound and jabbed the first with an elbow. “Stupid! How could he be an Invid?”

“Well, he’s no Karbarran!” the first shot back, and they seemed about to scuffle.

“I’m a Gerudan,” Kami said tiredly. “Don’t they teach you whelps anything in school?”

He could see he had found the Karbarran children, even if he had arrived in somewhat ignominious fashion.

They started to babble, and a few of them worked up the courage to actually give him a hand getting to his feet. The Karbarran children were roly-poly versions of their elders, some of them nearly as tall as Kami himself; but unlike their parents, the cubs wore no goggles. Their eyes were round, dark, and moist.

He groaned, trying to bring things into focus. One of the cubs tried to touch his mask and he gave the paw a little slap; it was withdrawn. Kami couldn’t understand why the Invid had taken his weapons and gear and yet left him his mask and tank. Perhaps they knew that they wouldn’t have a sane prisoner for very long—or a live one—if they took the breather from him.

There were some hundred or so miniature Karbarrans around him, and many, many more walking around an extensive barracks area. From the size of the place, he was prepared to believe that just about every cub of the planet’s reduced population was there. Most of them seemed list-less though, not caring that something was going on.

Kami squinted a bit in the early light of Yirrbisst, glancing around to orient himself to the landmarks he had seen on the map and get his bearings. It wasn’t long after sunrise; the raiders would be here soon and he must prepare the cubs as best he could. But the three-in-a-row spike crags weren’t there; the broken butte was nowhere in view, the foothills covered with scrub growth couldn’t be seen.

His blood suddenly went cold.

The Invid have moved them! This isn’t the place on the map!

“Where are we?” he asked the first cub who had spoken to him, a tubby little male with streaked highlights in his pelt.

“The old Sekiton works,” the cub said. “They moved us here from the prison compound near the city so they could guard us easier.” The young Karbarran pointed vaguely toward the rising greenish primary, Karbarra’s star. “You can barely even see Tracialle from the tallest tower here.”

The raid on the old prison had provided for searching possible alternative sites near the city, but not this far out. Kami looked off the way the cub had pointed, feeling waves of defeat flow over him.

“Sir? Sir?” the little one was saying. “Who are you?”

He shook off his despair as he would have shaken off water, fur ruffling and standing out, tail fluffing. He held out his hand to them for silence.

Somehow the valve of his breather had been turned down. He increased the flow a bit, looking at the sky, inhaling.

Lron had been unfair, and wrong, in accusing the Gerudans of using hallucinogens. The fact was that the Gerudans’ mental processes were symbiotically linked with an astounding range of microorganisms and a wide variety of complex trace molecules found in their planet’s ecosystem.

Their brain activity was a result of interaction with these factors in their environment. It reacted to and was influenced by those stimuli on a subcellular and even atomic level, in ways that left Human molecular psychologists shaking their heads and talking to themselves.

Gerudan life was a partnership with their world; their neurological systems were a vital part of the reproductive cycle of the microscopic life-forms that were indispensible to the Gerudans’ perception and very ability to think.

Kami inhaled and thought. Certain perceptions began to shift and intensify. The sky sang a dirge and the windblown sand took on strange shapes. Then he realized something was chanting, in a register so low he could barely hear it. He knelt and put his ear to the ground; the cubs looked at one another dubiously.

Kami listened to the dull thrumming.

Sekiton. Sekiton. Sekiton.

Of course. He spun to the cub who had spoken to him. “My name is Kami. Who are you?”

The cub drew himself up proudly. “I’m Dardo, son of Lron and Crysta, leaders among our people. The children needed a leader, too, and so I got them organized. My parents—”

So apparently this was the action committee, the ones who hadn’t succumbed to hopelessness.

“I know them. Listen, all of you! We haven’t much time. There’s still Sekiton around here, is there not?”

“Over in the warehouse.” Dardo pointed to a low bunker. “There’s not much use for it now that the Invid stopped us from spacefaring.”

But between the prisoners and the Sekiton was an imprisoning Invid energy wall, a ghostly curtain of angry red power a hundred feet high, generated by pylons spaced every hundred yards around the prison compound. Kami knew that it meant a searing burn and unconsciousness to get too close to one, and immolation to try to pass through.

“So Sekiton’s not much good to us anymore,” Dardo said. “Worse luck, because there’s still plenty of it around here everywhere.”

He scuffed the sand aside with his foot, digging down a depth of several inches. Pushing aside thicker, grittier soil, Dardo dug stubby fingers in and came up with a fistful of darkish Sekiton mixed with sand. “See?”

“Yes; I’ve seen the stuff, thank you,” Kami said offhandedly. Yirrbisst was getting higher, and there wasn’t much time left. With the first air strikes or the attack of the Destroids, the order would go out for the killing to begin at the concentration camp.

Dardo shrugged, formed the clot into a dirtball, and heaved it. The dirtball went up in a blaze as it hit the energy wall. Another cub took some and heaved it for an even bigger fireworks effect. From the gouges here and there around the compound, Kami could see that they had done it quite often to pass the time.

Sekiton, Sekiton. Sekiton.

The ground thumped it into his feet like the vibration of some huge pile driver, but the message was lost on him. Kami picked up a clot of the stuff, too, made a ball of it, and heaved it disgustedly at the wall.

The dirtball passed through unharmed, to land and break up several yards beyond.

“It—it didn’t burn up,” Dardo blinked.

“That’s because … 

it wasn’t handled by a Karbarran

!” Kami fairly howled through his breather. He didn’t understand any better than anyone else what the weird Karbarran affinity for Sekiton was, but he had seen for himself that the stuff was stubbornly inert if a Karbarran didn’t come in actual physical contact with it at some point.

“Quick, get sticks or boards from the buildings, or anything else you can dig with, and start uncovering more, but

don’t touch it directly

! And fetch me water, lots of water!”

A short time later the cubs stood in a crowded circle shielding him from view, although the Invid had shown little interest in keeping the prisoners under close surveillance, trusting their energy wall. Kami packed the thick mud onto himself. It was gratifyingly adhesive.

“I’m going to need a weapon. Did anyone see what the Inorganics did with my equipment?”

One of the taller cubs, a female with a dark tinge to her fur, pointed at a blockhouse. “I saw them set some things down over there just before they brought you here.”

Kami was slapping mud onto himself frantically, trying to be thorough, because any missed spot would probably get him fried, but trying to be quick, too, because time had just about run out. “All right!

If

I get my gun, and

if

I can blow out one of these pylons, all of you run as fast as you can for the Sekiton storage bunker! If the rest come along, fine, but don’t wait for them, because I’m going to need you over there! Do you understand?”

They said they did. He was about as covered as he would ever be, except for his eyes. He had layered over his breather mask, and would have to get by on pure Gerudan air from his tank.

“But—what are we going to do then, sir?” Dardo inquired.

“Send a message,” Kami told him. He made his way stiffly and cautiously toward the energy wall, until he could feel the heat of it on his exposed eyes. He made a last application to the bottoms of his feet from the armload of mud he carried and slapped more over his eyes until they were covered. He took a deep breath and stepped in the direction in which, he hoped, the wall waited and glowed.

And promptly lost his footing, falling.

He expected to be burned to ash, but he was still alive after he thumped to the ground. But he had lost his bearings completely and didn’t dare remove the blinding mud.

Hoping for the best, Kami rolled and rolled in what he thought was the right direction.

CHAPTER
NINETEEN

I’m runnin’ away an’ joinin’ th’ Robotechs!

Then

you’ll be sorry!

Popular threat among Earth children during the period of preparation for the SDF-3 Mission

At Lisa’s command, the Destroids opened up with all weapons. The first terrible barrage of pumped lasers, particle beams, and missiles struck the nearest organics at virtual point-blank range, like a tidal wave rolling over a shore.

Inorganics went up like roman candles or simply vanished from sight. The Destroids trained their weapons on the next target and the next, exploiting the element of surprise for all it was worth, because the odds were still badly against them. Those on the ramps were firing, too, and marching down, heavy-footed, to join their fellows.

The assorted weapons of the

Farrago

opened up, showering down fire like burning hail, careful to keep their aim in close to the ship where the Invid were, to avoid hitting the Karbarran crowds.

Invid were blown to smithereens, or holed through by star-hot lances of energy. They were confused and indecisive for those first few seconds, and in that time dozens of them were wiped out. Lisa watched a monitor, as a Crann under the flagship’s bow was hit dead center by a laser cannon round, like a white-hot needle going through a beetle. The Crann’s characteristic snout tentacle, or flagellum, or whatever it was, was still snapping like an angry whip as the thing flew apart in all directions.

The Inorganic bipeds seemed to be the last word in the strangely perverse Invid design preferences, misshapen and wrongly articulated to Earthly eyes. The low-hanging arms and malformed bodies—stick-thin here, bloated there—made them appear as if the Invid had set out to make them as repulsive as possible.

Not that the Sentinels needed that added incentive to fight;

Farrago

and all her personnel were committed now and the only way out was victory. Inorganics flew into the air like burning, bursting marionettes, or were blown back into the ones behind them, to explode.

But the Invid were firing back now, their annihilation disks and beams ranging in among the Destroids. With the last of the Destroids down on the landing surface, the big Earth mecha stood shoulder to shoulder and put out a stupendous volume of fire, a walking barrage that reaped rank after rank of the troops who had been drawn up for Tesla’s review.

But with each enemy down, another moved up to take its place, firing dispassionately. And Enforcer skirmish ships darted in overhead now, to fire on the flagship. Many of the upper hull batteries had to turn from ground support to AA fire. Lisa was just glad the task force drawn from Karbarra had taken away its Pincers and Scouts and Shock Troopers; that left a lot fewer flying mecha to contend with, a critical point in this battle plan.

The biped Inorganics were doing their best to contain the Destroids’ advance, as the Earth machines began a slow march, traversing their fire here and there, pounding away at the enemy in an inferno of skewing cannon beams and boiling missile trails.

A cluster of Scrim made a stand, and concentrated their fire. A Spartan, busy emptying its racks at another target, was riddled; it lurched and then flew apart in flame.

The Karbarrans had all fled for their lives, ducking into the first shelter they could find. The Destroids suffered another loss, a Raidar X, and a skirmish flier got a shot through a weak point in the upper hull shields, disabling a powered twin-Gatling gun mount on the Gerudan module of the ship.

Nonetheless, the Destroids had driven the Inorganics back from the landing area. Damage reports were pouring in, but the ship was still spaceworthy. But, it was a sure bet that the Invid were moving up more reinforcements. Lisa gave the order for the Destroids to move out and secure the area—dig in and hold. Then she gave Vince Grant the go-ahead, and the GMU began to uncouple from the

Farrago.

The enormous Mobile Ground Unit rolled out on its eight balloon tires, tires some hundred feet or so in diameter. Once out from under the flagship, it could add its own upper-hull missile and gun batteries to the antiaircraft defenses.

Lisa wasn’t too worried about the skirmish ships; there were fewer of them than there had been a while ago, and she was sure the Sentinels could handle the rest. Nor did the Invid seem to have any supercannon—anything in the GMU’s class, anything big enough to take out the flagship with a single round—in Tracialle.

No, this would be a battle of ground mecha, Destroid and Inorganic. It was already beginning to the east, where a quartet of Odeons had arrived to try to dislodge some MAC IIs, and they were slugging it out almost toe-to-toe, the hastily-abandoned buildings collapsing around them. But the MACs’ multiple barrels, firing beams and solids both, were beginning to tell.

There were requests for reinforcements from another sector, and reports that the Invid were bringing up more troops and even some Hellcats from a third.

Lisa did her best to look calm.

Max, Miriya—Rick! Hurry!

In the sanctum of the Living Computer, the Invid brain seethed with something very much like wrath. Far above it, the sounds of battle sent vibrations through the entire colossal concrete-and-glass mushroom that was the capital city.

“The Karbarrans have somehow betrayed us!” it said. “Give the order! Slay the children; exterminate them all!”

The Hovercycles and airbikes and the rest had checked out all nearby outposts and seen nothing; the VTs and Hovertanks closed their pincer movement and swept in from every point of the compass, converging on the objective.

The mecha swept down with half of each unit in Battloid form, the better to sweep through the compound, while the rest supported them in Guardian or Gladiator mode, or flew cover in Veritech.

Battloids needed no special forced-entry tools; they simply ripped the buildings open and peered inside, being careful because they didn’t want to hurt the hostages. They ran from building to building, pulling doors off or prying up roofs, calling in amplified voices.

It didn’t take long for the report to be relayed back to the appalled Max Sterling. “Results negative, sir. They’re not here. We hit the wrong place!”

“Come onto course 115,” Lron roared to Rem.

“But—the locator says—”

“Do it!” Lron shook the bulkhead with his anger. “I see a Sekiton fire over there, where the old processing plant is. The Invid don’t build infernos like that, and the Karbarrans have little cause to, but the Gerudans love signal bonfires. Do it, I tell you!”

“Take ’er in, Rem,” Rick said. “All of you, get set.”

“Sensors are picking up a lot of heavy Protoculture activity over in the direction of the city, Admiral,” Jack told Rick. “Looks like the party started without us.”

“Rem,

floor it

!”

Rem wasn’t sure exactly what Rick meant, but he made a screaming approach, handling the shuttle with quiet skill. In seconds, they were retroing in over the camp, looking down on a scene that made them all gasp.

An eerie blaze had been started in a processing pit, flaring in the indescribable colors of Sekiton, being fed by a chain of what looked like Karbarrans. But Inorganic bipeds were headed that way, and still more were approaching from the far distance along with the sinewy forms of Hellcats moving at top speed.

Most of the Crann, Scrims, and Odeon, though, were ranging around an area marked off by what the Sentinels had come to recognize as energy-wall pylons. But the energy wall was gone. Apparently the enemy mecha were intent on keeping the rest of their prisoners from escaping, and hadn’t been given the command to execute them—yet. The bipeds were firing short bursts into the ground, driving the vast majority of the Karbarran children back toward the barracks area.

One tiny figure, crouched behind a building, jumped out to let a Scrim have it with a fierce wash of brilliant blast. The Invid was rocked and its fellows halted. Their counterfire smashed and consumed the corner of the building, but by then the sniper had fallen back. Only he had no place else to hide; he had his back to the flames.

“Hard-nosed little runt, that Kami,” Jack said admiringly.

“Karen …” Rick called to her. She was seated at the main fire-control station.

“I’ve got ’im, sir,” she said with vast composure. With one shot from the shuttle’s pumped-laser tube, Karen took out the Scrim Kami had hit, and traversed the stream of brilliant energy to the next, bisecting it.

As the shuttle zoomed past, the third Scrim turned to fire at it, but Rem’s evasive piloting frustrated it. Kami took the opportunity to duck past it and around the building, headed for the blockhouse. He would have cheered at the shuttle’s arrival, but he didn’t have time and couldn’t spare the breath.

Kami hadn’t had to shoot up the pylons of the energy wall because he had discovered a power-system junction, over by the blockhouse where he had found his Owens gun and power pack. Shutting down the barrier was simply a matter of wrestling down a Karbarran-scale knife switch.

But now the Inorganics were closing in on the masses of cubs who hadn’t or couldn’t make a break when Dardo and his pals did. Kami had to do something fast, or the slaughter would begin in seconds. He knelt in the shelter of the blockhouse doorway, calculated his timing carefully, got his shoulders under the massive porcelain handle of the knife switch, and heaved it back up again to close the circuit.

The energy wall sprang back into existence, a red curtain of death—and there were two Odeons standing in its field. Both appeared to writhe in agony. An instant later, they vanished in twin flares of blinding discharge.

Kami saw that he had been in time; the rest of the Inorganics were outside their own wall, cut off from the hostages. That might not last more than a few seconds, but every second was infinitely important now.

He gathered up his gun and turned, racing back to the fire pit.

“Are you sure we can’t raise Max and Wolfe?” Rick asked without turning to Jack; Rick was busy assuming control of the missile racks, retracting their covers and adjusting his targeting scope.

Jack frowned at his commo board. “Negative, sir. Maybe if we got up high enough and tried one of the helmet radios in an outer hatch—”

“No time!” Rick cut him off, and he was right. Even as he spoke, a Hellcat leapt into view and covered the ground between itself and Kami with frighteningly long leaps. But Rem had already snapped the shuttle through a turn and was beginning another run.

The guy’s a natural

, Rick concluded—how else to explain Rem’s facility with a Karbarran vessel? He might be a scholar’s apprentice, but he had great reflexes and coordination.

Rick got the Hellcat in his sights even while Karen was zeroing in on another Inorganic, an Odeon that had been circling toward the children by the fire pit. Karen hit her mark with a sustained beam; it stood its ground and shot back with everything it had.

They felt the shuttle jar from a partial hit and Rem started assessing the damage, wondering if he could keep the vessel in the air. Karen’s long burst cut the Odeon in two at the waist and it fell apart in a cluster of secondary explosions. Rick’s first two missiles missed the Hellcat completely, their warheads fountaining flame and dirt and rock to either side of it.

But even though the shuttle’s flight was becoming more and more erratic, Lron—who had taken over the stern gun pods—got a stream of autocannon rounds into the ’Cat. Its hindquarters began dragging, crippled, and Kami was increasing his lead on it.

Rick thought it was unlikely that the shuttle could get high enough to attempt contact with the Skulls even if it could break away from the battle when he heard a hatch open. He turned and saw Bela disappearing into the aft hold.

“Hey! Get back here!” But she was gone, though the hatch stood open. Rick didn’t know what she was up to, but he wasn’t sure the amazons really knew how advanced technology worked. “Baker, make sure she doesn’t wreck us!”

He looked at Gnea, who had looked up from her weapons position. “You stay at your post!” He didn’t need two of these overdeveloped Valkyries wandering around in the middle of a fight. Gnea looked as if she might give him some lip, then went back to manning the upper-hull ball-turret mount via remote.

Jack lurched aft, grateful that the shuttle wasn’t doing—couldn’t do—any sudden manuevering that would mash him against the hull. When he got through the hatch he found Bela crouching by the emergency ejection hatch. Apparently, she had fired the escape capsule that was there and, when the outer hatch reclosed, had somehow gotten Halidarre to sort of crouch with legs folded and wings pulled in.

She looked up at him. “It’s the only way to get a signal through,” she said, tapping the mike Lang had installed on her battle helm. “And I could use a gunner, Jack Baker.”

No time to go ask permission.

Personal initiative, Baker!

he told himself. But the thought of the Inorganics closing in on the defenseless cubs made it even easier to decide.

“How d’you stay on one a’ these things?” He said it as he jumped to a rack of weapons, undipped a magazine-fed rocket launcher—about all the extra weight he could safely handle, he figured—and staggered over to her while the shuttle jarred.

“Mount behind me,” she said, “and fasten yourself in with the belt there.” He did, finding a retractable safety belt built into the rear of the cantle. Bela was already secured with the saddle’s belt. Jack managed to both hang onto the launcher and close his flight helmet. Activating his commo unit, he heard Rick Hunter ranting.

“—the hell are you two doing back there? Get up here, that’s an order!”

“Sorry, Rick Hunter,” Bela said calmly. “But I’ll give your regards to Max Sterling. By the way, Baker here is braver than he looks.”

Or maybe dumber

, Jack thought.

She punched a button on the inner hull and pulled her hand back quickly. The ejection-port cover rolled shut and there was a feeling like being shot from a cannon. Jack glimpsed the ground, spinning up at him.

CHAPTER
TWENTY

FILE #28364–4758

BAKER, JACK R.

Subject was orphaned of all close family members during the Robotech War, his last relatives having been killed during Khyron’s final onslaught.

This young man has erected defenses against close emotional ties, although, bafflingly, he manifests none of the hostility or self-destructiveness that traditional theory would predict. He demonstrates far-above-average intelligence, dexterity, and, in cases where it is not threatening to him, compassion—particularly toward individuals who have been victimized.

He simply seems to have turned off his pain by not investing anyone with the considerable affection of which he seems capable.

While there is no valid justification for denying this youth Academy entrance, particularly in light of his scores, it should be remembered by military authorities that this client shows a certain hostility toward discipline and may be unsuited to military service.

Caseworker 594382, Global Care Authority

“I’m sorry, Lisa; they’re just not here. We’re widening the search pattern,” Max Sterling said, sounding a little helpless. He had a child himself, back on Earth.

The Skulls and Wolfe Pack and all the scouts were unable to locate the Karbarran children, and more and more Invid reinforcements were arriving at the capital city. Three more mecha had been lost: a Spartan, a Raidar, and, tellingly, an Excaliber that had virtually disappeared under a mass of flailing Scrim and Crann and Hellcats.

The Destroids were holding their own in some places. But in others they were pushed back inexorably, in furious, point-blank, sometimes hand-to-hand exchanges, by Invid who didn’t seem to care how heavy their losses were. The GMU had deployed to a point on the other side of the landing site, bringing all but its heaviest weapon to bear; but given the nature of the street-fighting, neither it nor

Farrago

could give much fire support without the risk of hitting friendlies or civilians.

Lisa had hoped the general populace might pitch in, if only to create diversions. But the Karbarrans were staying out of it, no doubt hoping against logic that their children might still be spared.

A report came in that the perimeter to the south was collapsing; the Invid had somehow brought down an entire row of high rises on the MAC IIs and Spartans there, literally pinning them down, and had waded in to dismember them.

Lisa was reluctantly coming to the conclusion that the mission was a failure. She looked out from the bridge at the flaming city, and prepared to give the Destroids and the GMU the command to fall back in orderly fashion to the ship to withdraw from the city.

If we can just get through that dome

, she reminded herself.

The order was on her lips when a strange sound came over the command net. It was a kind of—of singing. Three notes like a hunting bird’s scream made into music. Then a voice said, “This is Bela, of Praxis! We’ve found the children! Home in on my beacon! Sentinels,

come join the fight!

”

Jack Baker struggled to steady the launcher over Bela’s shoulder, the skirmish ship in and out of his sights, as Halidarre banked and evaded and the Enforcer peppered shots at the wonder horse and its riders.

Jack fired, but the rocket went wide as the skirmish ship rolled and got ready for another pass. “Can’t you hold this nag still?”

“Yes, Jack Baker,” Bela said, almost laughing. “Still enough so that slug cannot miss. Would you like that?”

She would be just crazy enough to do it, too. Her wild laughter in battle, her bravado and amazing skill at handling Halidarre—they were a little tough to top. What do you say to a woman who rides through the air on a winged Robosteed, firing a pistol with one hand and waving a

sword

, for god’s sake, with the other?

I’ll tell you what old Jack Baker says

, he thought angrily. “Yeah!” he said, before he could think about it twice. “Yeah, hold still for a second, if it’s all the same to you. Looks like the only way I’m ever gonna hit anything today.”

So she did. Halidarre hovered on her impeller fields, wings beating at half speed to steady her, as Jack wrestled the launcher around. He hadn’t hit anything yet; three rockets were gone and only two remained in the magazine.

The Enforcer was on a new attack run, firing at long range. Bela was as good as her word, holding Halidarre in a dead hover, laughing that wild laugh again, brandishing her sword. Jack lined up his shot with the tube resting on Bela’s shoulder and let both rockets go. “Let’s get outta here!”

Halidarre rose abruptly just as a line of annihilation disks shrilled through the spot where she had been a moment before. The Enforcer, intent on its aim, tried to bank away from the rockets a bit too late. It blew apart and began raining down in tiny, burning scraps.

Bela gave a howl like a Hellcat. “That’s my lad!” Then she spied something and put Halidarre into a dive that nearly sent Jack’s breakfast up into his throat.

The Invid had shut down the energy wall again. They were closing in ominously on the barracks where most of the Karbarran cubs had taken refuge. The bipeds began firing at long range, setting the buildings ablaze to drive the prey out for more convenient extermination.

Jack threw the launcher away and got his pistol out. He and Bela dove straight at the Invid, firing and hitting, but having no effect.

Over by the fire pit, Kami backed up, Dardo and the others behind him, as Hellcats closed in all around them. The Owens gun was dead, out of power; Kami yanked its cable free of the backpack, threw the backpack aside, and held the gun as a club.

The recon party’s shuttle had last been seen losing altitude, plummeting away to the east. Kami hoped dully that they had survived the crash. In any case, there was no hope of evacuation now.

The ’Cats’ eyes seemed as bright as lasers; for some reason of their own, they spread out and began herding Kami and the helpless children toward the fire they had built—a pit eighty feet across, now carpeted with burning Sekiton. Kami, exhausted and still half caked with mud, could feel it singeing the fur on his tail. The cubs had thinned out in a ring one or two deep, all the way around the fire. Hellcats hemmed them in at every turn, forcing them back into the inferno.

His heightened senses shrieked torment and nightmare at him—agony was like a fog all around him, and gruesome death like electricity shooting up into him from the very ground under his feet.

“I’d rather die fighting than roasting!” With that, Kami raised the club wearily and began to totter straight at the ’Cat confronting him, preferring a quick death from claws to a slow one from flame …

Suddenly the ’Cat was bashed aside as something immense and heavy hit it like a multiton lineman. It took Kami a moment to realize that it was a Veritech, an armored Alpha in Battloid mode—white with red markings.

Battloid and Hellcat tumbled and fought, the feline’s claws ripping at its foe, but the Battloid’s big armored fists pounding and pounding at the ’Cat like huge pistons, staving in its sides, shattering one of its eyes.

The other ’Cats turned to throw themselves into the fight, but were prevented when Battloids began dropping from the sky on them, back thrusters blaring—Betas and Logans mixed in with the Alphas. Kami skipped back out of the way as the red Alpha and the ’Cat it had jumped tumbled and tore and beat at one another.

The Skulls had arrived.

In Guardian and VT configuration, they swooped at the Inorganics over in the barracks area, driving them back or blowing them sky-high. Even the Hellcats who broke and fled found that their speed wasn’t enough to save them; a second attack wave, diving from high altitude, overtook the things and chopped them down with missiles and cannonfire.

More Invid bipeds, rallying from outposts and patrols, headed for the camp by way of a canyon to the west, forming up to steamroll into the rescuers. The first problem with that plan was that the Wolfe Pack was there, and met them head-on.

It was no open-country tank battle; it was a murderous set- to in a limited space, both sides throwing themselves into it without restraint, like a knife fight in a commophone booth. Tank and Gladiator mode didn’t offer enough agility, so the Wolfe Pack went to Battloid and grappled, fired, kicked, and punched. The Invid met them with claws, tentacles, chelae, and feet, annihilation disks and explosive globes. The valley was a slaughterhouse, but the heavier and more numerous Hovertanks began pushing back the tide inch by inch.

Kami watched as the Hellcat rolled to the upper position, determined to bite the Alpha’s throat out or rip its head off with those enormous fangs.

But the Alpha got one forearm under the ’Cat’s jaw, slowly levering it away. Then the Battloid had both hands on the feline’s throat, squeezing with Robotech strength. The ’Cat screamed and went wild, tail thrashing, but it couldn’t free itself. Alloy groaned and squeaked as it gave way, crushed. The light in the ’Cat’s remaining eye slowly dimmed.

Then all at once it was dark, and the thing’s body went limp and lifeless. The Alpha rose to its feet, lifting the Hellcat up, then threw it to the ground with an impact that made Karbarra quake under Kami’s feet. The Invid mecha was a shapeless mass of smoking scrap.

The Skulls had turned things around in minutes. The ground was littered with the remains of Invid mecha, and no enemy was standing. But there were VTs down, too, and their fellows were attending to them.

The functioning Veritechs deployed repair servos that snaked forth on metal tentacles to fix what damage they could. Many of the disabled mecha were beyond such help, though, and would require the facilities of a full Robotech engineering bay.

But some of the damaged Skulls would never rise again, and their pilots had paid the final price. The living descended from their ships for the wrenching and ghastly duty of gathering up the remains. In several cases there was simply nothing left.

The red Alpha turned and walked over through the drifting smoke of battle to look down at Kami. A female voice said over an external speaker, “Sorry we cut it so fine, my friend.” It was Miriya Sterling.

Kami could still smell his own singed fur. “It could have been much worse—by several seconds.” She laughed. Then he thought of something. “The shuttle! It disappeared over that way!”

Miriya paused for a moment—perhaps informing Max of the situation—then blasted away through the air on her back thrusters, quickly mechamorphosing to true Veritech mode, and heading like a missile in the direction Kami had indicated.

At the landing site, each second seemed like an hour on the rack to Lisa. The Destroids had redoubled their efforts to hold out and, in a few places, had even retaken a little ground. But the Invid were pressing hard again.

Suddenly there was a crackling noise over the command net, and Max spoke, sounding choked up. “We got the kids, Lisa. They’re all okay. Do you roger? I say again, all hostages are safe.”

Max was starting to talk about arrangements to get the cubs to safety, but Lisa cut him off. “Max, things are deteriorating here. Leave a security force and then get back here with every VT you can spare. Repeat, I need you here ASAP with every mecha you can—”

“Cap’n! Look!” A Spherian tech was pointing through the vast blister that roofed the bridge.

“What—” she said, ignoring Max’s efforts to get her to finish her sentence.

All through the city, doors and windows and access panels were opening up on roofs and other vantage points, and intense fire was pouring forth, mostly Invid-style annihilation disks and beams. From what she could see and what she began hearing over the tac net, Lisa concluded that all the fire was directed at the Invid. It was as if the whole city had been turned into one giant shooting gallery. Caught from behind or above and sometimes even from below, the Invid army was being wiped out before her eyes.

She told Max, “Wait one, Skull Leader!” Then she got Crysta, who was with Jean Grant in the GMU, on the ship’s internal net. “Crysta, what’s happening?”

“I—I knew my people were secreting weapons against this time,” Crysta answered. “But Lron and I—we had no idea!”

It’s not wise to make an enemy of your armorer

, it occurred to Lisa. “Crysta, when did they start—how long have the Karbarrans been preparing for this?”

“Since the hour they took our children,” Crysta answered.

Lisa watched the weapons fire incandesce as the Karbarrans had their revenge.

“Baker!”

Karen Penn went straight for him as he sat there non-chalantly on the rump of a defunct Hellcat, looking off into the distance as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

That stunt he pulled! Deserting his post in time of battle! Karen just wanted a little piece of him before Admiral Hunter went to work on him.

Of course, part of her anger was the ignominy of being carried back to the compound in the shuttle by three Battloids, like some kind of broken-down commuter craft. That wasn’t the heart of it though, and she couldn’t have explained just

why

she was so furious.

To top it off, he was sitting there with a stupid grin on his face,

whistling

! “Baker, say your prayers, because I’m gonna—”

He turned to her with a beatific look on his face. “Hi, Karen. Have a seat and enjoy the show; you’ll never see another one like it.”

She was clenching her teeth, but decided to see what he meant before the fight commenced. “Huh—Oh!”

Down the hill a bit, the Karbarran children were being coaxed out of hiding by Dardo and his buddies. Battloids had put out most of the fires, and then stood back; the cubs had good reason to be wary of giant mecha.

But Dardo and the rest had the hostages coming out now, in droves. Most of the freed cubs were looking around blankly, but some of them were already beginning to caper and skip, jumping for joy.

Without thinking about it, Karen sat down next to Jack to watch. The cubs rushed around in the sunlight, romping and giving in to elation over their rescue. “I’d rather see this than get a duffel bag full of medals,” Jack said soberly.

Karen looked at him for a second, then back at the cubs. “You have your moments, Baker, y’know that?”

“

Et tu

, Penn.”

A little while passed. They saw Lron arrive, wading through the cubs, to lift up his son and fling him aloft. The cubs got braver where the mecha were concerned, and some of them were playing ring-around-a-rosy about the foot of Max Sterling’s Battloid.

“What was that you were whistling?” Karen asked suddenly, without looking at him. “I sort of recognized it.”

Still watching the cubs, he began again, a half smile touching his lips. After a few notes, Karen found herself laughing and shaking her head at him in exasperation.

It was “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic.”

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

A tragedy worthy of the Greeks, to be sure, or Shakespeare. A Universal Force or righteous Deity had forged a ring of iron, the Sentinels’ leadership. And yet somehow a flaw had been tempered in.

One is tempted to paraphrase, “Look upon these frailties, ye mighty, and be humbled.”

Ann London,

Ring of Iron: The Sentinels in Conflict

In the aftermath of the Sentinels’ first true conquest—while the Karbarrans were still exacting their fearsome revenge and the cubs had yet to be calmed down for transport back to their parents—there were details that slipped through the cracks. Trying to bring order out of the chaos, and make sure they had really

won

the day—that there were no Invid backup divisions waiting in the wings—was keeping almost everybody busy beyond any reasonable demand.

And so no one noticed when Burak of Peryton rather than the regular duty officer showed up at the head of the security squad that was supposed to take Tesla back to his cell.

Burak was certainly on the roster as being able to commandeer a security detachment; he was within his rights as a principal signatory of the Sentinels to take custody of Tesla. But he had chosen this time because he didn’t want to be interrupted, didn’t want to be overheard, while he spoke to the enemy. Once Tesla was back in irons, the aurok-horned young male of Peryton dismissed the mixed unit of Praxians and Spherians, and stood regarding the captive.

Tesla had turned away, but it came to him that Burak was still there. “Well? Can’t you leave a helpless victim of war to his misery? I’ve given you what you wanted.” An Invid stronghold was in flames, dashed under an invader’s foot, and he, Tesla, had been instrumental in that. “Go away! Or, kill me. I no longer care which.” He fingered the gorgeous collar with its hidden explosives.

“I want to save Peryton,” Burak got out at last. “And if you don’t help me, I

will

kill you.”

Tesla saw that he meant it; a young Perytonian, scarcely more than a boy, he was as headstrong as any from the planet where there was still an annual ceremony in the rubbing off of the velvet from the males’ horns and where fights over females still frequently led to death.

So, here was Burak, determined to short-circuit the Sentinels’ judicious timetable because he suspected, not without reason, that it wouldn’t address Peryton’s crisis in time. “How do I save Peryton, Invid?”

Tesla saw that Burak had somehow gotten the detonator switch for the collar around his neck. But for once, Tesla wasn’t afraid—no, not at all. Standing there in his grand robes with the shimmering gems draped from his neck, he saw that the key to Burak was that

Burak was vulnerable: Burak needed knowledge.

A certain

kind

of knowledge, but that didn’t matter. That kind of craving put any seeker at a disadvantage if the teacher was unprincipled enough. And conniving was Tesla’s specialty, even before he availed himself of the Sentinels’ hospitalities.

Tesla came up close to the bars, so close that Burak backed away a step, one hand holding the detonator and the other a little firearm that seemed to be made of white ceramic and hammered brass.

But as he neared the front of his cage, Tesla settled down. He folded his tree-bough legs and sat in a meditative pose, the level of his gaze still higher than Burak’s. Tesla’s thoughts were like drowning rats, seeking any avenue of escape, marshaling in vaguest terms things that Burak might want to hear.

“The answers lie more within you than within me,” Tesla intoned. “My powers tell me that your hour comes near. You have been chosen by Destiny to free your people from the curse under which they live second to second, constantly. This source of such pain to you has made it your Destiny. You have been aware of this for some time now.”

Tesla could barely keep himself from dissolving in laughter. What blather! What transparent ego-stroking! Surely, the very Regent, end-all of egotism, would have struck Tesla down for saying such things.

But Burak was an untried youth whose planet was near disaster, and to him it was something of a miracle that he hadn’t been swallowed up by it already.

He sat down, cross-legged like Tesla but safely out of the Invid’s reach, on the other side of the bars. “Teach me what I need to know, and I’ll free you.”

Tesla had already anticipated that, and knew that he had to up the ante. Besides, the robes and the gemstones and the turn of events had him thinking along new pathways now.

He tried to think up something suitably muddled and nebulous, something appropriate for a hazy Sentinel mind. “Free? All beings are free. It is only distorted awareness that imprisons them.”

Tesla was beginning to enjoy this. “But there are specific things, things like the process for reversing the damage that has been done to Peryton, and freeing all your people from their terrible curse.”

Tesla leaned toward the bars with what he calculated to be the correct fervor. “And

these things are not so difficult!

I shall help you accomplish them. And you will deliver up your people.”

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

listen

to me.”

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

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

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

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

She didn’t seem to understand why several people were guffawing and Jack was turning pinker than usual.

Maybe he’s been punished enough

, Rick thought; it was a line that would pursue Baker for the rest of his military career. Sackcloth and ashes could be no worse.

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

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

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

So he leaned against the corner of the bunker and watched. Gnea put a well muscled arm around Rem and gave him a buss on the cheek, yelling something about Hellcats. Halidarre, like something from the

Arabian Nights

, reared a bit every now and then, beating her wings slowly.

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

Things about love you hadn’t quite anticipated: lesson 207

, he thought wryly.

Lightning like this would shake any Human’s faith in God

, Breetai thought as a passing observation, while one of the rolling, rainless storms of Fantoma lit the sky, exciting the chancy tectonics of the planet and resounding against the hard sides of the mining machines and armored workers.

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

Zarkopolis!

The history of a people, a

race

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

With the mining operation safely established, Breetai had flown back for a look at Zarkopolis, the city where the Zentraedi had begun.

A haunted world

, he thought yet again, for the latest of times past counting.

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

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

There were only two Zentraedi from those days still alive, the ultimate survivors, and Exedore was now a happily diminutive little

Human.

The thought was unkind, but he couldn’t help it; only Breetai was left.

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

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

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

It is no wonder to me, now, that we were moved so deeply by Minmei’s songs

, he thought.

At last, at last, I understand!

With that there came a measure of peace within him.

Now he plodded down—the soil falling

so

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

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

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

“My lord?”

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

She was again wearing those

cosmetics

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

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

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

But—whence this curiosity? This disturbing

presence

that she seemed to have? Breetai turned to look out upon Zarkopolis and suddenly understood that these characteristics were things manifest in

all

Zentraedi, in times past. That they should surface again now was, it could be argued, a very good sign.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“They all thought you

what

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

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

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

“Couldn’t see the real Breetai?” she went on. “Well, my lord, I can.” She pulled his head down to her, like some

Human

, and he found himself being thoroughly kissed. How had she learned about things like this, forbidden to the Zentraedi?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO

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

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

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

REF #666–60–937

“A little to the right. No, no!

My

right!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are you going to keep pretending

this

is going to make you happy? When it didn’t before, when applause from audiences all over

Earth

didn’t?”

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

The cold metal of his half cowl contrasted with red anger on the rest of his face. “But before long I’ll give you things that

will

satisfy you, things that only the greatest power and glory can command!”

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

I will not be thwarted in this

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

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

“Is it that ass Wolfe? Is

that

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

shadow

!

“

I’m

the one who’ll give you what you want and fulfill you at last!

I’m

the one who’ll stop the aching in your heart!”

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

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

“Go on, then, Minmei! Pine for him, while

he’s

thinking about the wife and child he left back on Earth! Do you really suppose you’re anything but a hardship-tour convenience for Wolfe?”

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

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

will

share them.”

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

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

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

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

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

On a nearby communications screen, Edwards saw an image.

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

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

Ah

,

good! A schemer!

Luck was with him again at last.

Bad luck had certainly had its run. The Regent had only received a few spotty reports of the Sentinels’ onslaught before his commo links went dead. He had grown bored with inflicting horrible fates on advisers and, more to the point, it didn’t accomplish much but diminish the available pool and make those around him very nervous.

Then came his master stroke: pretend to sue for peace! He cursed himself for not having thought of it before. Freeze the battle lines now. Call for negotiations and draw them out, and stall as long as possible while he rebuilt his armies and prepared to launch a sneak attack.

But instead of the REF council, he found himself staring at this half-flesh, half-metal face—the Human they called General Edwards. “Call back the forces that have launched this unprovoked sneak attack on my realm,” the Regent blustered, “or I shall utterly and completely wipe them out of existence!”

“Can I rely on you to be thorough?” Edwards asked.

The Regent realized the game he was playing wasn’t the one he had counted on. “Is there some semantic problem, or do I understand you to mean that you do not care that the pitiful Sentinels will be crushed like vermin?”

Edwards smirked. “You and your boys haven’t been doing so well, huh? Mmm, here’s something you might want to keep in mind, next time.”

Edwards turned and grabbed a memory disk holding the full G-2/G-3 analyses of the

Farrago

, including its one glaring Achilles’ heel.

The Regent could scarcely believe what he was seeing, and personally looked at an indicator there at the Home Hive to make sure all this critical information was being recorded. The key to destroying the Sentinels.

“Haven’t you got anything for me?” Edwards asked disingenuously, with a nod toward the somnolent Living Computer.

The Regent was still recovering from his phenomenal success. “Hmm. Yes, yes, I do, provided that your information is accurate. I think that you and I must talk, General Edwards.”

“By all means. But let’s do it here on Tirol, eh?” Edwards’s tone didn’t brook much debate.

The Regent thought about that. “Indeed we will, friend General, indeed we will. Let me make arrangements and get back to you on the matter.”

Edwards made an ironic salute with a forefinger. “Don’t take too long; there’s a lot to do.”

“As soon as I’ve attended to the Sentinels,” the Regent agreed.

“If they beat your boys on Karbarra, they’ll be headed for Praxis next.”

“Ah. Thank you. I look forward to communing with a, um, kindred spirit.”

Edwards inclined his head in a courtly fashion, then blanked the screen. When he straightened, he saw Ghost techs looking at him in some shock.

“Wipe those looks off your faces!” Edwards jerked a head at the screen, and by implication at the Regent. “When the time comes, I’ll handle him, too.”

With a new lease on life, the Regent swaggered through the soaring halls of the Home Hive issuing orders and dictating memos. He had had his doubts about the Earther’s veracity, but a battery of Living Computers verified what Edwards had told him, and the Regent was ready to gamble.

Even with the strategic data Edwards had given him, it might not be easy to destroy the

Farrago.

Then there was the matter of this visit to Tirol. It was beyond the realm of possibility that the Regent would place himself in danger, and yet this gullible Edwards creature seemed to assume it would be normal. Perhaps there was some way to—The Regent stopped so suddenly that a hapless adviser plowed into him.

The Regent flung the adviser aside in a carelessly non-lethal way, and began talking excitedly to his attendant Scientists. “Are my wife’s Genesis Pits here on Optera still functional? Well, find out! And if they’re not, make them ready for a project of monumental proportions! Divert workers and technicians and Scientists from other projects; bring them here by starship if need be!

“Oh, what a joke on the cursed Humans!” the Regent hooted.

So, the Regess thinks I lost my sense of humor when I decided to devolve, eh

?

Burak sealed the hatch and slipped into place, seated before Tesla’s cage. There were a few Karbarrans on guard outside in the passageway, but they had been joined by friends for a kind of victory feast, and nobody was being very … very “strac,” as the humans called it.

Tesla said nothing, only sat looking like an immense Buddha. Burak reached inside his robes, eyes averted, his horns dipping.

He came up with three luminous perfect spheres, as green as a breaking wave, as green as molten bottle glass. Seeing them, Tesla almost broke his guru pose and reached, but knew that he would only receive a shock charge from the bars of his cage for his troubles.

“The Fruit of the Flower of Life, as grown on Karbarra,” Burak said.

“So.” Tesla sat, looking down at the three.

There was legend among the Invid, and among many other cultures as well, about consuming the Fruit of the Flower. The implication was that the consumption of Fruit from all the worlds Especially Touched by Haydon—all the worlds, it happened, from which the Sentinels came—would bring forth some larger, more magnificent manifestation of the one who consumed it.

Tesla had spent a lifetime steeped in this occultish lore; he was convinced that there was a scientific basis to it. “Give those to me,” he said, “and give me Fruit from the rest of Haydon’s Worlds, the other worlds of the Sentinels.”

“I don’t trust you,” Burak said.

“I don’t expect you to,” Tesla shot back. “Why do you think peace is so difficult to achieve?”

Burak slammed his fist on the deck. “Stop talking around it! Can you take the curse off Peryton or not?”

Tesla saw a bulge in the waist rope of Burak’s robes and knew a pistol was there, knew what his fate would be if he couldn’t sway Burak right here and now.

“I can. But you’re going to have to help me. Trust me. And I’ll help you win back your family, Burak, and your planet, and everything you’ve lost. Because you’re the one fated to be Peryton’s messiah.”

Burak sat trembling for a long time, looking at the deck. Then he dipped his head once, horns swaying, nodding in agreement.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE

Why did Jonathan leave me? How come Lisa’s bouquet came right into my hands after the wedding and yet everything’s gone wrong?

It all started off so beautifully.

The diary of Lynn-Minmei

The Karbarrans threw themselves into the effort to get the Sentinels ready for the next step in their war with the same energy the ursinoids had shown in destroying the Invid garrison.

Unfortunately, a good deal of the capital’s industrial area had been razed. There were shops capable of repairing most of the damaged VTs and tanks, and spaceship yards where

Farrago

could be put back in full battle-worthiness, but no new mecha could be built anytime soon.

Some Sentinels argued that it would be better to wait, to build new war machines and perhaps even construct more ships, but Rick and Lisa, among others, argued that lives would probably be lost on Praxis in the meantime, and the decision to continue on to the amazon homeworld became unanimous—except for Burak’s stubborn abstention.

The vote was one of the few things Rick and Lisa

did

agree on. Though the media were being repaired, there were gaps in the ranks of the Human fighters, casualties who had left unmanned machines behind. The two were silent on the subject until the night, in their private quarters, when he admitted, “I’m going back on combat duty with the Skulls, Lisa. They need me. And we still won’t be able to get every VT manned.”

She rolled over and looked at him for a long moment. “I wish there was something I could say that would stop you. But there isn’t, is there?”

He shook his head. She lay back down and they both stared at the ceiling for a time. “You’re just so damned cavalier with a life that’s important to

me

,” she said at last, and he could hear the tears in her voice. “It hurts, Rick.”

He reached over to take her hand, but she moved it away. She wanted to lie there and see if she could think of some way that she could change things so that she wouldn’t be hurt ever again.

Jonathan Wolfe returned to his quarters after twenty-one straight hours of meetings, briefings, consultation, training, and planning sessions. He had forgotten what a bed felt like.

But as he lay down, his eye caught something—a small locket lying on his night table. That type of locket was popular among REF personnel; many carried such a keep-sake. He picked it up and activated it; the little heart-shaped face opened like a triptych.

A tiny hologram of Minmei hung in the empty air. “I hope this makes you feel near to me, Jonathan, because I feel very near to you, and I always will. Come back to me safe and soon, darling. I’ll be waiting for you, however long it takes.”

“It’s very kind of you to act as our guide,” Cabell said, as the Karbarran skywain sailed through the afternoon sunlight.

“Oh, we love going out to the monument,” Crysta gushed, and at the controls, Lron nodded agreement. Off to one side, Rem and Dardo paused in the pattycakelike game Lron’s son was trying to teach. “And how old is the monument?” Rem asked.

“Centuries, ages,” Lron rumbled. “No one’s exactly sure. History says it was erected right after Haydon visited Karbarra, and that was long, long ago.”

The skywain began its descent, alighting on the top of one of the higher mountains overlooking the city. Rem asked again if Cabell would be warm enough; the old sage reassured him.

Lron and Crysta led the way, up to an open pavilion carved from the living rock of the mountaintop. There, in the middle of an acres-wide floor, stood a statue that reared up and up—a colossus a thousand feet high.

It was of Haydon. It had been carved by Karbarrans, and time and weather had eroded it, but the figure appeared to be a humanoid male, wearing flowing robes and poised with an air of nobility and wisdom.

“It was Haydon who taught our ancestors the secrets of Sekiton,” Crysta said. “Just as he breathed life into the crystals of Spheris and created Baldan’s people, and decreed that the Praxians’ should be an all-female planet.”

“And Haydon taught the Gerudans how to think,” Dardo said, reciting his school lessons. “And some people even say he gave the Flower of Life to the Invid!”

Cabell already knew all that, of course, but he tried to look impressed by Dardo’s erudition—Crysta and Lron were so proud of the cub, after all.

Rem stood staring up at the stone face now worn to anonymity. Haydon, certainly one of the galaxies’ great enigmas, fascinated him just as Haydon fascinated so many others. Where had the bringer-of-miracles come from? What had prompted him to spend a Golden Age in this sector of space, traveling among local worlds and working his magic?

Rem had always vowed that if he got to travel among the stars, he would do his best to find out. And now that time had come. Rem stared up at the smooth visage, wishing it could speak to him. He swore to himself at that moment that before his travels were done, he would know what face belonged on the monument.

“Red alert,” whispered one Ghost Squadron yeoman to another. “Stay out of the Old Man’s way!”

The second yeoman nodded and did his best to look busy as Edwards marched from his office with a murderous look on his face.

The Sentinels had won a smashing victory on Karbarra! Edwards tried to suppress his fury, but wasn’t having much luck. To make matters worse, when he had called Minmei, she wasn’t at the club. Nobody seemed to know

where

she was.

This, after he had been there at a ringside table every night to hear her sing, had wined and dined her, had made sure the council listened to her and that her service club was a success. Yet each time he was sure he was making her forget Wolfe, she was sure to bring the halfwit’s name up.

Edwards stopped in midstride. He suddenly knew just where she would be.

Sure enough, he found her there, looking at the posted casualty reports along with many others, searching the alphabetized lists of KIAs and WIAs. The names would go on the REF broadcast screens momentarily, but there were a lot of people who couldn’t bear to wait. There was quite a press, and those at the back were calling out names for those in the front to check.

Just as the general came up behind her, Minmei turned with a thousand-watt smile on her face. “Oh, General! He’s not on it! Jonathan’s not on the lists, so he’s all right!”

Edwards forced a smile. Yes, Wolfe had survived Karbarra, but the Sentinels would be headed for Praxis soon, and the Regent was aware of it.

“Yes; he’s a lucky man.” He showed her what he had brought for her.

“Oh, they’re beautiful!” Minmei took the bouquet and held it to her face, inhaling the sweet, exotic alien scents. She was delighted, and pleased with the good news about Jonathan; even though he could be cold, almost cruel at times, Edwards had been such a help, had been there whenever she needed someone to listen to her or reassure her …

Without pausing to reconsider, Minmei put her free arm around his neck and kissed him once, quickly, on the lips. Then she was racing off for a rehearsal.

Edwards watched her go, thinking of the day when he would comfort her in her grief over the death of Jonathan Wolfe.

When Edwards got back to his HQ he was in visibly better spirits, but not for long. Adams entered, looking grim, and cued up a recording. “The internal-security people monitored this with the bug we put on Lang’s private commo rig,” Edwards’s aide told him. “It went out earlier today, before Tirol Base lost contact with Karbarra.”

Lang was saying, “General Hunter, I’m not opposed to the building of more starships per se; SDF-3 will not be ready for a return voyage to Earth for a prolonged period, and we might very well need this armada that General Edwards keeps pushing for.

“But I must tell you in confidence that I have my doubts about Edwards’s motives.”

Rick’s face, on the other half of the split screen, looked drawn and tired. “Just what are you saying, Doctor?”

“That Edwards may very well be furthering his own ends. I think a coup attempt is a quite plausible danger at such time as this armada is ready.”

Rick considered that. “If the other Sentinels’ worlds can be liberated as quickly as Karbarra, we’ll be back long before the armada is finished, Doctor. And we’ll have plenty of Sentinel allies to help us make sure Edwards is checkmated. But after what we’ve seen—I’m more convinced than ever that the Invid have to be rooted out of these planets they’re occupying.”

Lang nodded. “I agree, Admiral, but I wanted you to be aware of the gravity of the situation here.”

Adams stopped the recording. “What are we going to do, sir?”

Edwards leaned back. “For the time being, nothing. We need Lang to build that fleet and get SDF-3 fully operational. And once the Sentinels show up at Praxis …”

He allowed himself a thin smile. “Once they’re out of the way, the REF belongs to me completely.”

When he returned to Tracialle, Rem was surprised to find Janice Em waiting for him.

They hadn’t spent much time together in the rush of the Karbarran campaign. Now, she took his hand and said, “I thought we were friends, Rem. Have I done something to offend you?”

His brows knit. It was sometimes hard to understand what Humans were getting at. “Of course not! What makes you say that?”

She showed a slight pout. “I was beginning to think a gal’s got to be a butch weightlifter to get any attention from you.”

He realized that she was talking about Gnea. “Hmm? Gnea and I are friends, of course—we went through a lot on that scouting mission.” He

had

been spending considerable time talking to the young amazon, learning about her life and her world.

Jan had both his hands in hers now. “If you want me to step aside, just come out and say so!”

He shook his head in confusion. “What? No, no I—”

Janice was suddenly in his arms with a happy laugh. “Oh, I’m so glad! You—you’ve become kind of important to me, you know.”

It felt very good to have her embracing him, brushing her lips against his cheek, his neck, his lips. Very unsettling, but simply wonderful. “Let’s go somewhere and be alone,” she said.

He yielded as she drew him away. “And you can tell me all about this expedition you took to the Haydon monument,” Janice added. “What did Lron and Crysta have to say about this Haydon, anyway? And Cabell; what was

his

reaction?”

Why was she nattering away about

Haydon

, of all things, when she was back with Rem at last? But Janice felt something puzzling, something that made her curious about the subject, and about Cabell and the Sentinels’ plans too. And there was something about Rem that excited her and made her want to be with him and know everything about him.

Maybe that’s what love is

, she shrugged to herself.

On Praxis, the Regess flung her hands high, throwing her head back crying, “Hear me, O my Children!”

Wherever they were, whatever they were doing, her half of her species paused to listen to her.

Just as no subject of her husband’s could eavesdrop on her mental link, so none of the Regess’s children bore any further allegiance to him.

She looked more Human than a Haydonite, though she was fully as tall as her mate—some twenty feet. And yet there was something ethereal about her, an alienness that showed in her cobalt eyes. Slender and hairless, she wore a full-length robe and curious, tasseled five-fingered gloves. Four emerald-green sensor scarabs, like beautiful brooches or oriental masks, decorated her robe’s collar and neck closure.

“Hear me!” she cried again. “My investigations here tell me that the answer I seek is to be found on Haydon IV! There at last I will learn where the Robotech Masters have gone, and what has happened to the last Protoculture matrix, the treasure that we must have in order to carry out my Great Work!”

And an age of deprivation and conflict would be brought to a close. Still shielded in her thoughts, like a hot cinder, was that night so long ago in the Flower gardens of the paradise that had been Optera.

There she had surrendered at last to the emotional enticements and seductive intellect and form of Zor—had surrendered herself to him and surrendered the secrets of the Flower as well.

And was discovered in the act by the Regent, who flung himself off on the descending spiral of devolution. But soon, all those torturous memories and misdeeds would be behind her, and her Children.

“Therefore, prepare yourselves, my Children! Gather and make ready, for we abandon this planet at once, for Haydon IV!”

In the Genesis Pits abandoned on Optera by his wife, the Regent peered into a cloning vat. Work on his project had not been without its problems; his biogenetic workers were less adept than the Regess’s, and had been forced to start from scratch after the first abortive attempt.

But now things were going well. The workers had used the most perfect egg available, an unquickened one from the clutch that had spawned the Regent, feeling it was the ultimate perfection of Invid plasm.

The Regent gazed into the vat as into an aquarium. What floated there was no ordinary Invid clone, though. It had a cobra hood like his own, a row of eyelike turbercle sensors that mimicked his.

It was a new Regent, a false one.

“I am pleased,” he said. “Make certain that it’s ready by the time I’ve crushed the Sentinels.”

Karen found Jack in one of the training areas the Sentinels had set up near their temporary groundside billeting area. She had been looking forward to teasing him about being compulsive in his training, but the look on her face changed when she saw he wasn’t alone.

Bela was with him on the firing range, showing him how to use the Praxian crossbow. He was getting the hang of it, and put a quarrel within a foot or so of a bull’s-eye at twenty paces.

“Ah, Karen Penn,” Bela smiled. “You once asked me about our weapons; now you see they’re so easy that even a male can use them. Jack here is making fine progress; would you care to try?” Bela clapped Jack on the shoulder in comradely fashion and gave him a sisterly hug. She towered over him, a full head taller.

Karen made no effort to keep the frosty tone out of her voice. “No, thank you. Lieutenant Baker, I’m just here to let you know that your request has been approved; you’ve been reassigned to Hovertank duty in the Wolfe Pack.”

“Hey, that’s great!” He had studied Jonathan Wolfe’s style, and decided he wanted to serve under the man. “Did you get what you wanted?”

She looked at his grin and felt like belting him. He didn’t even understand that she was sore at him. “Yes. I’m going over to Commander Grant’s GMU staff as of tomorrow morning.”

“Congratulations! Let’s go celebrate. Bela, want to join us?”

But Karen was shaking her head. “No. I’m sure you two have lots of—exercising to do. And I wouldn’t want to intrude.”

As he watched her walk off, Jack said, bewildered, “Did I say something wrong, Bela? I don’t think I understand what just happened.”

Bela shrugged and recocked the crossbow with one swift, powerful pull on its forestock grip. “Personally, I often find it difficult to comprehend your species at

all.

”

At last, after weeks of frantic preparation, training, reequipping and rearming and reorganizing, the

Farrago

was ready to lift off.

The original plan for a Karbarran starship and fighting force to accompany the Sentinels had had to be abandoned; the Invid had disabled all Karbarran ships, and the new ones on the drawing boards wouldn’t be ready for months yet.

“The new production lines for VTs and other mecha will be fully operational in another six weeks,” the senior Karbarran administrators had assured the Sentinels. “When you’ve freed the women of Praxis, we will be ready to help them become an army.”

The word was that the Invid garrison on Praxis was much smaller than that on Karbarra, and the Sentinels were hoping for a brief campaign. The Karbarrans cheered as the Sentinels lifted off and passed through the open wedge of the dome. Lisa looked down on the planet and thought that in spite of the pain and losses the war had cost so far, the sight of a liberated planet and a free people made it worthwhile.

Still, she breathed a prayer that the worst was behind them.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR

In a way, the very things I’ve counseled the others against are what the Sentinels’ mission is all about: hurling one’s self into the midst of the Shapings and taking the risk that their design will not turn to one of utter tragedy.

And yet, in the Sentinels there is that added dimension that most of the species on

Farrago

are from Haydon’s Worlds. I pray, for them, that it brings out the most benign manifestations of the Workings of the Protoculture.

Dr. Emil Lang,

The New Testament

This time,

Farrago

went in ready for trouble, finger on trigger. The ship emerged from superluminal drive even further from Praxis than it had from Karbarra, since Lisa wanted to get a handle on the situation before any shooting started.

Encountering no immediate opposition—in fact, no sign that the Invid had detected the ship’s arrival at all—Lisa moved fast to consolidate what she hoped was the advantage of total surprise. VTs launched to fly cover and screen any enemy attack; the strike forces readied for their go signal. The flagship bore in toward the planet and still there was no sign of a response.

“Nothing in the air, zero activity on the ground, no commo, no power sources—nothing,” a tech officer reported from the GMU. “Captain Hunter, if they’re playing dead, they’re doing an amazing job. It looks to me like there might be nobody home.”

“Oldest trick in the book,” Lisa heard Jonathan Wolfe murmur over the command net. But what if Wolfe was wrong? She had learned to expect the unexpected from this war, and surely an uncontested landing would be the most unexpected thing of all.

She warily brought the flagship in close, but not too close, staying beyond the orbit of the outermost of Praxis’s two small moons. The next move wasn’t hard to figure out, but it brought her a personal pang of regret.

“Skull Leader, we’re going to need recon; pick your elements and tell ’em to watch their tailerons down there.”

“Roger,” Max Sterling answered.

It had come as a bit of a surprise to Lisa that Rick, in returning to combat duty with his old unit, hadn’t attempted to step into the command slot. But the Skulls, like the oldtime Israelis and Swiss before them, didn’t let mere rank or seniority determine who flew lead.

That was decided by who had the most experience with the particular mecha, knew the current situation and tactics best, had the superior performance record, and so forth. And right now, Rick Hunter, admiral or not, was far from the top of the roster. So, he had swallowed his pride and taken his place as wingman to a young lieutenant commander who had been in high school when Rick Hunter was Skull Leader.

Still, there was no question that Rick would be going down on the flyby; with the ranks of the Skulls thinned as they were, and Max preferring to use veterans on an iffy mission like this, it was only to be expected.

At Max’s command, several Alphas—Rick’s among them—broke formation and mated their tail sections to the rear of the same number of the powerful Betas, forming aggregate ships with tremendously increased range and firepower. The problem was that maneuverability was decreased and mechamorphosis capability was nonexistent.

The Alpha-Beta conjoinings swept out for a pass at Praxis. The rest of the Alphas, Betas, and Logans fell back to guard

Farrago

under Miriya; Max had led the over-flight, of course.

The mission elapsed-time counters ticked off tense minutes. But there was nothing to report, beyond the stillness on the planet and the static of the commo channels.

The Skulls were very low on fuel by the time they finished the low orbit, and

Farrago

moved in to retrieve them. Lisa gave the word that the second recon group go in, this time lower, and had the shuttle stand by with its landing party.

In due course, Battloids trod the deserted streets and countryside of Praxis. A contingent of Wolfe’s Hovertanks, with Jack Baker among them, was checking one of the largest cities on Praxis—a large coastal town, really—block by block, house by house, for use as a base of operations. Technical teams from the shuttle swore that there was nothing on or under the planet’s surface higher up the evolutionary ladder than native wildlife. There were plenty of indications of Invid occupation, but the fortifications and temporary Hives were abandoned.

There was no sign of the women of Praxis.

“But—why would they leave with the Invid? What use would that be?” Gnea was close to tears.

Bela patted her shoulder. “I don’t know, warrior, but we’re going to find out. And woe to the Invid if we don’t find our sisters well and whole.”

Lisa had those same fears for the Praxians, and other problems besides. Without the firing of a single shot, the Sentinels’ war had been brought to a shuddering halt. The Praxians weren’t likely to budge until they had some idea what had happened to their people, but at the same time, each hour used up by delay gave the enemy a chance to regroup and redeploy.

She couldn’t afford to spend much time there if it would be to no advantage.

It was at such times that Lisa wished dearly that the

Farrago

’s bridge was small, like the SDFs’. She longed to sit in the command chair she had installed, as Henry Gloval was wont to do on

his

bridge, perhaps with a uniform cap visor pulled down over her eyes, and try to mull her way out of her current fix.

But she didn’t have that luxury, and every hour was a precious resource she couldn’t replace. The senior Sentinel leaders, Baldan and Veidt and the rest, wanted to confer about what to do next—even though Bela and most of the other Praxians refused to even leave the surface of their planet and return to the flagship.

Lisa exercised her authority as captain and, at this stage of things, de facto overall commander. She got Vince Grant on the horn.

If the Praxians won’t come to Mohammed …

she thought.

“We’re going to make one low pass with the flagship and drop the GMU; GMU will begin an intense study of the situtation on Praxis and attempt to reach some logical conclusion while I convene a full meeting of the principal Sentinels. Give me a shopping list, Vince; what will you need?”

Most of what he needed was already aboard the Ground Mobile Unit; the rest of it was quickly transferred. It was also becoming obvious that there were no hostile forces or booby traps on Praxis; for that reason she began to fear for the flagship’s safety. Lisa ordered that a minimal force of VTs and Hovertanks be assigned to ground duty, but that most surface security would be the job of a small detachment from the remaining Destroids. All but a few of the Skulls would be pulled back to protect

Farrago.

She had a sudden thought as she was about to conclude the call, and said, “Vince, there’s one more thing that might come in handy. Tell Jean to make sure she’s got her Invid lie detector; I’m going to have Tesla transferred to the GMU.”

The architecture of the Praxians seemed like a cross between classical Japanese and Dark Ages Nordic. They used mostly woods and rough-cut stone, and somehow there was the impression that they were used to structures catching fire or crashing down in a quake, and had come to accept it—didn’t feel they had to build for posterity.

They also tended to fortify places, even though the last of their generations-long feud-wars—epic bloodbaths of tremendous strife and cruelty and valorous deeds—ended centuries before. But the fortifications were at lower levels, and the higher stories of the amazons’ structures could be opened to the air, with mosaic walls or panels of inlaid wood that moved aside or could be lifted.

The local castle at the GMU landing site was the summer palace of the planet’s elected ruler. Bela showed some hesitation, in the spacious throne room; then, as senior warrior of her people, she took her place by the foot of the throne. She did not sit down, however.

Other Sentinels had gathered there among the huge ancestral images and holy statuary. This high up, one could see the green, restless bay filling the vista to one side and gray mountains with blue-white caps of snow to the other.

According to Praxian custom, all the war mecha had been stilled, shut down, so that peace and quiet would reign. Even the GMU was powered down, its Protoculture engines inert.

Jack Baker, there as an observer and Wolfe’s aide, watched Bela falter as she called the meeting to order.

She’s really just a kind of ranger, a backwoods cop

, he thought,

thrust into the spotlight by events.

For once, he figured, events had picked the right person.

Bela’s confidence grew quickly, especially with Gnea and the other Praxian women there to back her up. Halidarre was standing to one side, stamping just a bit and snorting from time to time, acting more and more like a real animal with each day she served Bela.

Bela threw the first pitch without a windup. “I’m not as good at coming around sideways to things as are the diplomats,” she allowed. “I know a lot of you want to go on to the next front in this war. In some ways I don’t blame you, because there are no enemies to fight here. But the women of Praxis aren’t about to leave until we’ve tried our best to find out what happened to our people.

“If you can’t wait for us, we wish you well. But something’s happened on our planet that we have to puzzle out before we’re ready to make our next move.” She said it in a way that brooked no contradiction.

That left everybody silent and thoughtful, including the senior Sentinels. Karen grudgingly reflected that the Southern Cross Advanced Leadership Program could have learned a thing or two from Bela.

But it was Burak who stepped out of the crowd, out onto the richly polished red hardwood floor of the throne room. “My heart goes out to my sisters from Praxis,” he said. “But the question is,

Do theirs go out to the rest of us?

It’s time to make rational decisions.

“We sought mecha on Karbarra but came away from there with a grievous net loss. We sought new recruits on Praxis but find an untenanted world. When will the leaders of this campaign see the obvious? There are no fighters on Haydon, no war machines on Geruda! Peryton,

Peryton

is the key here! Let us bypass this and other worlds that cannot advance our cause, and free Peryton from its curse! Then we’ll have

legions

!”

Rick, listening, wasn’t sure what had changed in Burak, but something was giving him a new and more penetrating gaze, a ringing note to his voice, a larger-than-life aspect to his gestures. It was as if Burak had come into a sense of personal destiny. Rick had seen that sort of thing before, and the memories didn’t make him feel comfortable.

Veidt somehow made a sound like the clearing of a throat, even though he had no mouth with which to speak. “Burak, I’ve already told you in private why I think it is essential to let Peryton wait until our forces have grown—why I think it is suicide for the Sentinels to try to address themselves to your planet now. The difficulties involved are—”

Burak interrupted, slashing the air with his horns. “I’ve heard that too often, and too easily, from you! And I say this to the Sentinels: you care so little for Peryton? So be it! The

Farrago

comes apart even more easily than she went together! And the module that is my ship is mine to do with as I please; that was our compact.

“So then, bid me farewell; for today, this very hour, Burak of Peryton leaves, to pursue his own quest and bring salvation to his world, whether you are with me and my people or not!”

There were mutterings, and a dozen voices were raised to try to mollify him, but Burak was having none of it. The few other Perytonians there, stone-faced, fell in behind him and trooped toward the exit.

Lisa jumped as her wrist communicator beeped piercingly for her attention. All over the throne room it was the same, distress calls reaching Sentinels in a variety of ways.

“

Farrago

under attack by large Invid force,” was all most of them heard. Then the transmissions stopped.

It was his hour, the beginning of a new age; the Regent resolved to decree a new calendar with that sublime moment as its starting point.

He had stripped outposts and far-flung garrisons, put together a force even greater than the one he had assembled to send against his enemies on Optera.

And this time fortune was with him. His fleet emerged from superluminal at just the correct angle of attack, in good formation and proper deployment. Scouts and Pincers rocketed off, this time under competent veteran commanders, to join combat with the enemy mecha trying to protect their flagship.

And the flagship! How long he had hungered for

that

morsel! A Living Computer in the Regent’s command ship matched it up with the specifications Edwards had given him, and with exquisite precision the Invid sensors penetrated down and down into it until they found the junction and the components Edwards specified—the ones Lron had explained to the REF and Lang when the Sentinels first appeared.

Lacking the grand slam of the GMU’s cannon, the

Farrago

turned to its lesser weapons, gamely firing and firing, weapons crews staying at their stations even though things seemed hopeless. Most of them had been in Invid cages, and had no intention of being there again, whatever the price of freedom—even if it was death.

But luck wasn’t with them this time. The Regent’s techs and scientists had prepared a super cannonbolt in accordance with the things Edwards had revealed to them; they fired it now.

It struck to the heart of

Farrago

, sending a pulse throughout the ship’s structure. In another moment the flagship was

coming apart.

The forces that unified it had become forces sundering it.

The Regent watched, one fist under his chin, wondering if there was some lesson here. Then he roused himself to bellow at his communications drones. “Haven’t you contacted the Regess yet?

Well

?”

Ah, what a sweet victory this would be! To wipe out the approaching enemy in the nick of time, to humble the Sentinels and destroy them forever here, where his mate could see it all—and be won back by him by this proof of his strength at war and military brilliance! A true, savage, devolved stroke of greatness.

Farrago

was ripping itself to pieces; shields were down, power systems were failing, communications were all but nonexistent. Always a patchwork ship, she was being driven apart by the Regent’s single bolt.

A string of explosions opened a power conduit all along a main passageway, like something being stitched by a monster sewing machine, inflicting awful casualties among the crewbeings trapped there. The last of the explosions sent shrapnel and fire into Mr. Blake, Lisa’s trusted bridge officer.

He had almost made it; the Spherian module was before him, the last that was intact. There was no one aboard the Spherian; at least, no one alive. Concussion, blast, fumes, and flying debris had downed them all.

Blake barely dragged himself inside; he was losing consciousness and had lost a tremendous amount of blood. Yet he somehow held himself up with one hand on a commo box and reached through the hatch, feeling for the emergency release.

He had to strip off the safety seal, ripping fingernails loose in the process but scarcely feeling the pain. Tiredly, he took the little quartz lever there and pulled it down. A crystal tone began to sound in the empty Spherian ship as its hatch closed and the strange repelling forces generated by the Regent’s volley began to separate it from

Farrago.

But another internal explosion blew out that whole part of the passageway and penetrated the Spherian hull, killing Blake instantly and damaging the Spherian ship. It would never make its programmed rescue run; it broke in half, the drive section tumbling off on a vector of its own, the rest consumed, along with Blake’s body, by another huge detonation from

Farrago.

The VTs, taken by surprise and surrounded by a horde of Invid mecha, closed ranks and tried to defend themselves as best they could. A few elements tried to break through and run for Praxis, but the Regent’s forces were deployed to stop them. The Skulls re-formed and got ready for a fight to the death. There were some garbled transmissions from the Invid, something about surrender, but the fighter jocks had all heard the tales from the Sentinels who had been prisoners, and decided they weren’t interested.

Outnumbered five to one, and at times ten to one, they flew from second to second, and died at full throttle. A few joined Alpha to Beta and catapulted themselves into the enemy midst; others got into tight flight elements and rat-raced, skeeting enemies until their own number was up.

They were the best Earth had to offer, people who had contended with cramped living conditions, low pay, and a long separation from home to serve a cause greater than themselves. And no one was there to thank them as they died in the gun turrets, the flight decks, the cockpits. But they hadn’t signed on for thanks, and hadn’t expected them.

Farrago

came apart, its outlashing throwing portions and scraps of it toward unreachable stars. The teeming Invid swarmed in to slay the last of the VTs and strafe the flagship’s remains.

“Still no contact with the Regess?” the Regent howled, shaking a gargantuan fist. “Has she no idea what I’ve accomplished?”

A drone technician looked stricken, realizing that he might die in the next few seconds. “Oh, All-Powerful One! The Regess is no longer on Praxis! The readings we receive indicate that she may be on her way to Haydon IV with her half of our race, but—there are no Protoculture readings on Praxis, no power sources, no movement—nothing!”

The Regent screamed aloud, but it would have been too much of an inconvenience to leap from his throne and smite the technician. Instead, he tried to wipe the taste of disappointment from his mind.

“A waste, a waste! Did you record every bit of my victory, so that she may see it? Then, make ready to depart!”

“To Praxis, my lord?” an Enforcer asked.

The Regent cuffed the Enforcer aside, and the Enforcer’s armor buckled against the deck with the impact of it. “No, of course not to Praxis! Back to Optera! I’ll find that female and

make

her see the truth,

make

her appreciate me!”

He felt acceleration around him even as he issued more orders. “Send a small observation force to Praxis in case any of my enemies return; this place is of no use to me now. Have them set up a transmitter to warn me if there’s trouble here again. And then back to the Home Hive!”

There was his alter ego to groom, and set on its path-way. Enough of these meddling Humans; he would send in his simulagent double to do away with the Tirol base, then consolidate the near stars at his leisure. And when he held all the cards, he would bring the Regess to heel.

A sudden thought struck him. If he could produce a copy of himself, why not a copy of the Regess? Yes! One who would be dutiful and compliant and a proper wife? Meek and obedient and … 

receptive

to him. The very image of that made him feel rather paternal and husbandly at the same time.

But no; he snarled at the realization that the Regess was gone, and she had taken all detailed biogenetic models of herself with her. Even more to the point, possessing a mere image of her wouldn’t be the same as possessing

her

, of bending his mate to his will; he would always be aware, on some level, that the real thing was out there in the universe somewhere.

“Why are we dawdling?” he bellowed. The command ship blurred forward to superluminal speed.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

We should protect the Seed,
or we could all fade away

Flower of Life

Flower of Life

Song of the Tiresian Muses*

Damn her!

T. R. Edwards tried to tell himself that he didn’t care anymore. Wasn’t his staying away from the ringside table tonight proof enough of that? The storied Lynn-Minmei enchantment had no power over him, and now the world knew it. Oh yes, the world knew it …

He hadn’t meant to have more than that one jigger of Tirol-made bourbon with Adams and the others, but it had gone a little beyond that, and while he wasn’t unsteady on his feet, it was time to go home. The planning of a coup d’état took a sharp mind and unrelenting work. To bed, then.

Except–the door to his quarters was slightly ajar.

He silently drew the pistol that was with him day and night, entering without a sound. He could have called security, but tonight he was in the mood to kill someone.

He edged in, peered around a corner—and froze.

“Come on; sit down quick, before it gets cold.” Minmei blew out a long match as the candles on the improvised dinner table filled the room with a warm glow.

She threw the dead match into the fireplace, looking as awkward as a teenager. “This is just home cooking.” It was almost a whisper. “The guys at the club got me the ingredients, but I’m a good chef, T. R.; from way back. Worked in my folks’ restaurant.”

She swallowed and watched him. Edwards felt like doing something violent; the idea of having feelings this strong for anyone was anathema to him.

“Do you really love me?” Minmei asked him all at once. “I have no way of making you, but

please

don’t lie to me! Can you love me—”

She was cut off by the beep of the special commo apparatus in his study. Without saying a word, he unlocked it by retinal scan, went into it, and locked the door, making the room a secure, soundproofed facility.

He was glad he was sitting down when he keyed the call. It was a patch-through from the loyal Ghost Team techs manning the Invid equipment beneath the Royal Hall. The Regent stared out at him. “You take your time about answering a transmission.”

Edwards found his voice. “My apologies. Had I known, I would have—made arrangements.” Not “been waiting”; he had to keep a certain parity here.

The Regent made an annoyed gesture. “There are other arrangements you

don’t

have to make; the Sentinels are destroyed, one and all.”

Edwards felt the color rise in his face, and the grip of his hands as he made triumphant fists, but he gave no other sign as a silent victory cry rang through him. “And now it is time you and I met face to face,” the Regent continued.

Edwards’s eyes narrowed. “Surely, you don’t expect me to, to—”

“Come to Optera? No; you wouldn’t, would you? But

noblesse oblige

, and all that;

I

will come to

you

, this one time. Do us all a favor, Human, and see that you make it worth my while.”

The Regent broke the connection and Edwards sat there, his head swimming.

My rivals are dead. The would-be Overlord of the galaxy wants to cut a deal with me.

Edwards instantly began trying to figure out ways to gull, use, and betray the Regent.

Minmei looked up as Edwards came back into the candlelit dining room. “Good news, I hope?”

“No news at all.” He had his hands on his silvery head-piece, straining a bit. “But … where were we? You said please don’t lie to you; you said please tell you if I can love you.”

He drew the half cowl off his face, letting her see him there in the soft light.

Once, the face had been handsome; but now there were raised white scars in a violent, puckered crisscross, a slash from his hairline to the bridge of his nose and from there a reverse angle to the heel of his jawbone. The eye was scarred shut, with only a little prosthetic fitting showing now. A half-devastated face that gave him a doomed look.

“Do you really love me?’ ” he quoted her own words to her. “ ‘I have no way of making you, but

please

don’t lie to me!’ ”

Where did the act end and truth begin? If she rebuffed him at this moment, Edwards resolved to launch his coup now, taking her as his first hostage and the one he would never let go.

She reached out tentatively, touching the ravaged side of his face. He had never endured that touch from anyone. He returned the touch but otherwise sat like a granite statue. Then she was around the table, in his lap, kissing him.

“Farrago destroyed,”

Vince Grant said. “But it doesn’t look like the Invid are coming after us; something’s happening.”

The rest of the Sentinels stood around him, repressing their questions; they had already learned that it was bedlam when they all talked at once.

They were gathered in a deactivated GMU; the Praxian requirement that all mecha power down during the meeting in the castle had been an unexpected godsend.

Is this where our luck turns

? Gnea wondered.

The Invid fleet above suddenly let forth a myriad of minor sensor “paints,” then accelerated for superluminal.

The small observation force of Pincers and Scouts and armored Shock Troopers swept down confidently to take up their places. They quartered the globe that was Praxis. They isolated the important civic-commercial centers, and came in for landings.

The VTs rose up to meet them, having received the word that the Regent was gone. Wolfe’s Hovertanks fired as Gladiators, or flew on back thrusters as Battloids, dragging the enemy from the air. Again there was that total environment of warfare, so insane—and yet so emphatic that it seemed to the fighters that it was the only time they were truly alive.

“Skull Ten, you got a bogey; scissor right!”

“Skull Six, Skull Six, scissoring; get ’im off my back, Max!”

And the GMU cannon fired, its first round hitting the Invid command ship. There would be no distress call to the Regent.

The Invid threw themselves into the engagements with utter ferocity. But they were met by young Earth soldiers who were angry about Karbarra and confused and scared about Praxis: in a certain sense, the Invid had made their enemies too scared to give in and too scared to lose.

Neither side could withdraw, and so the fighting went on. One by one, the VTs fell, despite their high kill ratio. The mecha hunted one another across Praxis, the VTs using up ordnance and fuel. Both Rick and Max were forced to land when their mecha began to lose power; Miriya had been forced to eject earlier, her VT too shot up to stay in the air.

When the Invid were also forced to take to the ground, the Destroids and the Wolfe Pack moved in, with other Sentinels on Hovercycles and in flitters, and riding whatever else they could get into the air. The Invid still had the advantage of numbers, but the Hovertanks and REF irregulars were comparatively fresh. In a half-dozen separate, desperate actions, the Invid were surrounded and annihilated, but at terrible cost.

In the aftermath, the principal Sentinels gathered—stunned and bloodied by what they had abruptly endured—and realized what had happened to them.

The two or three surviving VTs had landed, spent, no longer capable of lifting off Praxis. Only a handful of Hovertanks and Destroids had survived the no-quarter fighting.

Hundreds were dead, in addition to the thousands who had perished with

Farrago.

The GMU was their only resource; they had no way of communicating with Tirol, or any other potential source of rescue.

Bela came by to help a weary Jack to his feet as he sat near the GMU; he had barely escaped his burning Hovertank, and it looked like he was plain old leg infantry again, at least for the foreseeable future.

He was filthy and tired. He had just come in from two sleepless days and nights of recon patrol, trying to make sure there were no Invid left and to find something,

anything

, that would help the Sentinels get out of their deadend dilemma. And he and his squad had come back empty-handed.

Bela was leading Halidarre, one of the few operating mecha left. “Admiral Hunter wants to see you, old son,” she said. He groaned wearily as she pulled him up, and shouldered his Wolverine.

“Where are you headed?” he asked. She and the Robo-horse were laden with gear and weapons, and so was Gnea, who was hurrying up to meet her.

“To scout the planet for Hunter, and for myself. Jack, they can’t all be gone.” Bela turned and put her hands on his shoulders, Halidarre’s rein drooping from her grasp. Her face, with its hypnotic raptor eyes, held him, its lines pulled into fierce but frightened lines. “

They can’t all be gone!

”

He reached up and thumped her shoulder with his fist. “We’ll

find

’em, sis. You’ll see.”

She gave him a hug, kissed his cheek, and rumpled his hair. It felt a little like an affectionate mugging. Gnea hugged him too, and then both Valkyries were on their winged horse. Halidarre reared and gave a whinny so realistic that Jack wondered if something wasn’t going a little strange with its engrams.

Then Halidarre was away, into the sky, and Hagane, the malthi, went zipping and zooming after like a hummingbird. The rallying cries of the Praxians drifted back, sounding sad now, all alone in the emptiness.

In the GMU, Karen, with Jan Em’s surprisingly capable help, was bending over readouts to tabulate what resources were left: there were very few.

Major Carpenter was standing by; with the TO&E all but obliterated, he was a rising star, an all-around fixer. Jack didn’t quite like his can-do-even-if-it’s-hard-on-the-lower-ranks-

sir

style, but at least the guy was trying to help pull things back together.

Admiral Hunter was starting to look pretty grizzled, like Jack himself. “I want you to take a team out and check on a possible Invid base for me,” Rick told him.

“Sure thing, sir,” Jack answered. “But I think we should go belowdecks and apply a welding torch to that Tesla first, and get a little more intel information out of him.”

Then he realized Lisa was about to brief those assembled. Jack nodded understanding to Rick’s hand signal, and took a seat to listen.

Another recon

, Jack thought.

Wish I had a flying horse.

“All right, there’s no getting round it. We’re—we’re

stuck

here,” Lisa was telling Vince and the Sterlings and the principal Sentinels.

We might be here for the rest of our lives

, it occurred to Jack. He found himself stealing another look at Karen, but she was busy.

“But

that’s just for the moment

,” Lisa went on forcefully. They all seconded her, from varying places on the emotional spectrum: anger, growing misgivings, stoic determination, or, in Burak’s case, a kind of starry-eyed disregard of reality.

We’d

better

get out of here

, Jack Baker thought.

’Cause I’m not so sure how long we can last all thrown in together like this.

Lisa outlined new strategies, new possible solutions. After the group had broken up, she drew Rick aside. “I’m afraid I’m not very good at dog-and-pony shows.”

“You did fine.”

They left the GMU, headed for their quarters at the palace. At least there was no shortage of living space, or food; a vacated Praxis provided plenty of those.

Halfway there, Lisa stopped and began pounding her fist on a stone wall. “We’ve got to get things moving again, before the Sentinels fall apart and everybody settles down to become subsistence farmers, or hunters. The Invid aren’t going to leave us alone forever; you

know

that.”

He put his arm around her waist and they went their way again. “Everybody’s gonna realize that, Lisa, once they get a chance to think. Believe me.”

“Rick, they

must

!”

She drew an uneven breath. “Listen, tell me: what were you thinking about when you were standing back there with Baker, during the briefing? You had a peculiar look on your face.”

He clicked his tongue. “Unworthy, maybe, but I was thinking that at least we’re together, and …”

She didn’t let the hesitation go on long. “And what?”

“And if one of us had had to go with

Farrago

, I’d rather it would have been me. Because I couldn’t have faced this or anything else without you.”

Lights were coming on with the dusk, in the GMU and the palace.

The following chapter is a sneak preview of DEATH DANCE—Book III in THE SENTINELS saga.

lyrics (c) copyright 1985 Harmony Gold Music, Inc.

CHAPTER
ONE

It was as if the Expeditionary Mission was fated to strike a truce with someone, and the Regent just happened to be the only enemy in residence. In another five years the Robotech Masters would arrive in Earthspace, followed three years later by the Regess and her half of the Invid horde; but in 2026 (Earth-relative) this was still speculation, and for a few brief days there was talk of peace, trust, and other impossibilities.

Ahmed Rashona,

That Pass in the Night: The SDF-3 and the Mission to Tirol

A fleet of Invid warships emerged from their trans-temporal journey through hyperspace into the cool radiance of Fantoma’s primary, like so many shells left revealed on a black-sand beach by a receding tide. The mollusklike carriers positioned themselves a respectful distance from the moon they had captured then lost; only the fleet’s molet-shaped flagship continued its approach, menacing in its sealed silence.

At the edge of the ringed giant’s shadow Tirol’s guardian, the SDF-3, swung round to face off with the Regent’s vessel, the crimson lobes of its maingun brilliantly outlined in starlight.

Aboard the Earth fortress, in the ship’s Tactical Information Center, Major General T. R. Edwards watched as a transport shuttle emerged from the tip of one of the flagship’s armored tentacles. Edwards trusted that the Regent was aboard the small craft, accompanied certainly by a retinue of guards and scientists. The presence of the Invid fleet made it clear that any acts of aggression or duplicity would spell mutual annihilation for Invid and Humans alike.

Admiral Forsythe, who commanded the SDF-3’s bridge in the wake of Lisa Hayes’s departure with the Sentinels, was now in constant communication with the Invid flagship. It was the Regent who had taken the initiative in suggesting this extraordinary visit, but Forsythe had insisted that the fortress remain at high alert status at least until the Regent was aboard. Disillusioned by decades of war and betrayal, and hardened by the grim realities of recent reversals, it was the Human race that had grown wary of summits, distrustful of those who would sue for peace.

Scanners and camera remotes monitored the approach of the Regent’s shuttlecraft and relayed relevant data to screens in the fortress’s cavernous Tactical Center, where techs and staff officers were keeping a close watch on the situation. Edwards moved to the railing of the command balcony for an overview of the room’s enormous horizontal situation screen. Studying the positions of the Invid troop carriers in relation to the SDF-3, it occurred to him how easy it would be to fire at them right now, perhaps take half of them out along with the Regent himself before the Invid retaliated. And even then there was a good chance the fortress would survive the return fire, which was bound to be confused. Numerous though they might be, the Invid seemed to lack any real knowledge of strategy. Edwards was convinced that their successful strike against the SDF-3 almost six months ago had been the result of surprise and old fashioned blind luck. More to the point, he felt that he had an intuitive understanding of this enemy—a second sense birthed during his brief exposure to the brainlike device his own Ghost Squadron had captured on Tirol.

Edwards reminded himself of the several good reasons for exercising restraint. Apart from the fact that the actual size of the Invid fleet remained unknown, there was this Regess being to wonder about; her whereabouts and motivations had yet to be determined. Besides, he sensed that the Regent had something more than peace negotiations in mind. In any case, the data Edwards had furnished the Invid regarding the Sentinels’ ship had already linked the two of them in a separate peace. But Edwards was willing to play out the charade—even if it amounted to nothing more than an opportunity to appraise his potential partner.

He dismissed his musings shortly and returned to the balcony console, where he received an update on the shuttlecraft’s ETA in the fortress docking bay. Then, giving a final moment of attention to the room’s numerous screens and displays, he hurried out, adjusting his alloy faceplate as one would a hat, and tugging his dress blues into shape.

The docking bay had been transformed into a kind of parade grounds for the occasion, with everyone present as decked out as they had been at the Hunters’ wedding extravaganza. There had been no advance notice of what if any protocols were to be observed, but a brass band was on hand nonetheless. The impression the Plenipotentiary Council wished to convey was that of a highly-organized group, strong and decisive, but warlike only as a last resort. The twelve members of the Council had a viewstand all to themselves at the edge of a broad magenta circle, concentric to the shuttle’s touchdown zone. A majority of the Council had ruled against the show of force Edwards had pushed for, but as a concession, he had been allowed to crowd the bay with rank after rank of spit-shined mecha—Battloids, Logans, Hovertanks, Excalibers, Spartans, and the like.

The shuttle docked while Edwards was making his way to a pre-assigned place near the Council’s raised platform; since he had been the Council’s spokesperson in arranging the talks, it had been decided that he represent them now in the introductory proceedings. Edwards had of course both seen and fought against the enemy’s troops, and he had met face-to-face with the scientists Obsim and Tesla; but neither of these examples had prepared him for his first sight of the Invid Regent, nor had the Royal Hall’s communicator sphere given him any sense of the XT’s size. Like the lesser beings of the Invid race, the Regent was something of an evolutionary pastiche—a greenish, slug-headed, bipedal creature whose ontogeny and native habitat was impossible to imagine—but he stood a good twenty feet high and was crowned by an organic cowl or hood, adorned, so it seemed, with a median ridge of eyeball-like tubercles. Dr. Lang had talked about

self-generated transformations and reshapings

that had little to do with evolution as it had come to be accepted (and

expected

!) on earth. But all the Protoculture pataphysics in the galaxy couldn’t keep Edwards from gaping.

A dozen armed and armored troopers preceded the Regent down the shuttle ramp (a ribbed saucer similar in design to the troop carriers), and split into two ranks, genuflecting on either side of what would be the Regent’s carpeted path toward the Council platform. Recovered, Edwards stepped forward to greet the alien in Tiresian, then repeated the words in English. The Invid threw back the folds of his cerulean robes, revealing four-fingered hands, and glared down at him.

“I learned your language—

yesterday

,” the Regent announced in a voice that carried its own echo. “I find your concepts most … amusing.”

Edwards looked up into the Regent’s black eyes and offered a grin. “And rest assured we’ll do our best to keep you amused, your Highness.” He was pleased to see the alien’s bulbous snout sensors begin to pulsate.

Edwards’s one-eyed gaze held the Regent’s own for an instant, and that was all he needed to realize that something was wrong—that this being was

not

the one he had spoken to via the communications sphere. But he kept this to himself, falling aside theatrically to usher the Regent forward to the Council platform.

The Plenipotentiary members introduced themselves one by one, and after further formalities the Regent and his retinue were directed to the amphitheater that had been designated for the talks. The Regent’s size had necessitated a specific route, along which Edwards had made certain to place as many varieties of mecha as he could muster. Each hold the summit principals passed through found combat-ready Veritechs and Alphas; each corridor turn another squad of RDF troops or a contingent of towering Destroids. While onboard, the Regent’s every word and step would be monitored by the extensive security system Edwards had made operational as part of his Code Pyramid project—a system that had also managed to find its way into the Council’s public and private chambers, and into many of the fortress’s Robotechnological labs and inner sanctums.

There was a smorgasbord of food and drink awaiting everyone in the amphitheater’s antechambers; the Regent nourished himself on applelike fruits his servants brought forth. Edwards noticed that Lang was doing his best to attach himself to the Invid leader, but the Regent seemed unimpressed, refusing to discuss any of the topics the Earth scientist broached. In fact, only Minmei succeeded in getting a rise out of the Regent. Edwards noted that the Invid could barely take his eyes off the singer after she had completed her songs, and he retained a slightly spellbound look long after the introductory addresses had commenced.

Terms for a truce were slated for follow-up discussions, so civilians and members of the press were permitted to enter the amphitheater itself. Edwards saw to it that Minmei was seated beside him in the front row, where the Regent could get a good look at the two of them.

The alien’s initial remarks put to rest any doubts that may have lingered in Edwards’s mind concerning the ongoing impersonation. The Regent spoke of misunderstandings on both sides, of a desire to bring peace and order to a section of the galaxy that had known non-stop warfare for centuries. He claimed to understand now just what had prompted the Human forces to undertake their desperate journey, and he sympathized with their present plight, hinting that it might be possible to accelerate the timetable for the Human’s return trip to their homeworld—providing, of course, that certain terms could be agreed upon.

“It’s a pity there has been so much loss of life,” the Invid continued in the same imperious tone. “Both in Tirolspace and during the so-called ‘liberation’ of Karbarra. But while we may have no cause for further quarrel with your forces here, it must be understood that no leniency could be expected for those of your number who chose to join the Sentinels. And despite what you may have been told by the Tiresians, those worlds—Praxis, Garuda, and the rest—belong to me. The reasons for this are complex and at present irrelevant to the nature of these negotiations, but again we wish to stress that the Sentinels’ cause was a misguided one from the start. It was inevitable that they fail sooner or later.”

A charged silence fell over the auditorium, and Edwards had to restrain himself from laughing. The Sentinels had not been heard from for four months now. Official word had it that the

Farrago

was maintaining radio silence for strategic reasons. Then, recently, there was open speculation that the ship had been badly damaged during the battle for Praxis. But Edwards knew better. He felt Minmei’s trembling grasp on his upper arm. Colonel Adams, also seated in the front row, leaned forward to throw him a knowing look.

“We have only recently lost contact with the

Farrago

,” Professor Lang was saying. “But I’m certain that once communications are re-established and an accord of some sort is enacted, Admiral Hunter and the others will abide by its terms and return to Tirol.”

The Invid crossed his massive arms. “Yes, I’m sure they would have honored it, Dr. Lang. But I’m afraid it’s too late. Four months ago the Sentinels’ ship was destroyed—with all hands aboard.”

A collective gasp rose from the crowd, and Edwards heard Minmei begin to sob. “Rick … Jonathan,” she said, struggling to her feet, only to collapse across Edwards’s lap.

Someone nearby screamed. Lang and the rest of the Council were standing, their words swallowed up in the noise of dozens of separate conversations. News personnel and members of the general staff were rushing from the room. Edwards snapped an order to his aide to summon a doctor. Adams, meanwhile, was shoving onlookers aside.

Edwards held Minmei protectively. Once again he sought out the Invid’s lustrous eyes; and in that glance a pact was affirmed.

But on Praxis the dead walked—those Sentinels who had escaped the destruction of the

Farrago

, and, unknown to them, a deadly host of archaic creatures returned to life in the bowels of the planet’s abandoned Genesis Pits …

“Take a look for yourself,” Vince Grant suggested, stepping back from the scanner’s monitor screen. Rick Hunter and Jonathan Wolfe leaned in to regard the image centered there: an intact drive module that had been blown clear of the ship and fallen into low orbit around Praxis. Vince was reasonably certain the module’s Protoculture-peat engines were undamaged.

“And there’s no way to call it down?” Rick asked. “A hundred miles or so and an Alpha could reach the thing.” Normally, one could fly a Veritech to the moon and back, but not one of the Sentinels’ all-but-depleted Alphas was capable of attaining escape velocity.

Vince shook his head, his brown face grim. “We barely have enough power to keep the nets alive.”

“Then it might as well be a million miles away,” Wolfe thought to add.

Vince switched off the screen and the three men sat down to steaming mugs of tea one of the Praxians had brewed up from some indigenous grass. After four months it had come down to this: the GMU’s stores were nearly empty and foraging had become one of the group’s primary activities. And in all those months they had yet to come up with an explanation for the disappearance of the planet’s native population. What was left of the central city and all the surrounding villages was deserted. But whether what Bela called “the Praxian Sisterhood” had

chosen

to leave had not been ascertained.

Puzzling, too, were the tectonic anomalies and quakes that were continuing to plague the planet, as often as three times a day now. The quakes had convinced the Sentinels’ Praxian contingent that Arla-Non—Bela’s “mother” and the leader of the Sisterhood—had struck a deal with the Invid to move the planet’s population to some other world. Rick wasn’t sure if he bought the explanation, but it certainly served a therapeutic need if nothing else.

“Look,” Rick said, breaking the silence, “they’re probably already searching for us. Lang’s not about to write us off. And even if the mining operation is

close

to on-schedule, they’ll have at least one ship readied with the capability for a local jump. We just have to hope the Invid have lost interest in this place.”

The horde’s absence these months bordered on the conspicuous; and what with the quakes and deserted villages, Cabell had speculated that it was possible the Invid knew something the Sentinels didn’t.

Rick’s optimism in the face of all this had Vince smiling to himself.

Rick would always be a commander whether he liked it or not.

“It’s not Lang we’re worried about,” he said, speaking for himself and Wolfe.

Rick caught his meaning. “Edwards has to answer to the Council.” There was an edge to his voice he didn’t mean to put there. Lang had warned Rick about Edwards during one of the last links the

Farrago

had had with Base-Tirol, and it was difficult to keep the memory of that brief deepspace commo from surfacing.

“Don’t underestimate the man’s ambitions, Rick,” Wolfe cautioned. “I’m sure they’re going to come looking, but I’m willing to bet that Edwards will have the Council eating out of his hand by then. Maybe one of us should have—”

“I don’t want to go over old ground,” Rick cut him off. “The only thing that interests me right now is a way to reach that drive module.”

Grant and Wolfe exchanged looks and studied their cups of tea. Rick was right, of course: there was no use dwelling on the choices they had made, individually and collectively. Wolfe liked to think that at least Vince had Jean by his side and the precious GMU under his feet. But Rick had all but resigned his commission, and Wolfe himself had left his heart behind.

A rumbling sound broke the silence now, causing the mugs to skitter across the tabletop. The tremor built in intensity, rattling the command center’s consoles and screens, then subsided, rolling away beneath them like contained thunder.

No one spoke for a moment. Wolfe wore a wary look as he loosened his grip on the edge of the table and sat back to exhale a whistle. “Course Praxis could do us in long before the Invid or Edwards.”

“Pleasant thought,” Vince told him.

Rick gave them both an angry look. “We’re going to get to that module if we have to pole vault there.”

Tactical concerns (and personal preference) had kept Vince Grant and Rick somewhat anchored to the GMU (which had been moved inland from its original seaside landing zone); but the rest of the substantially reduced Robotech contingent, along with the XT Sentinels, had opted for Praxis’s wooded valleys, the planet’s often glorious skies, and rolling hills. Max and Miriya’s Skull Squadron had spent most of the past months reconning remote areas, hoping to come upon some trace of the vanished Sisterhood; but they had only succeeded in further depleting already critical reserves of Protoculture fuel. Consequently, the Wolfe Pack stuck close to base, Hovertanks shut down. Bela and Gnea and the other Praxians had voluntarily detailed themselves to serve the group’s logistical needs, and were assisted in this by the bearlike Karbarrans and vulpine Garudans. Cabell had all but isolated himself, disappearing for long walks from which he would return with samples of native rock or flora. Still a bit uncomfortable with the Humans and not yet fully accepted by the XTs, the Tiresian was often found in the company of Rem, Baldan, Teal, and the limbless Haydonites, Veidt and Sarna. Janice, too, had become an unofficial member of Cabell’s eldritch clique, much to Rick and Lisa’s puzzlement.

Presently, Cabell and Janice were off together on a long walk; they were on a forested slope about fifteen miles from the mobile base when the tremor that had shaken the GMU struck. The minor quake did little more than knock them off-balance and loosen some gravel and shale from nearby heights; but it was the morning’s second shakeup and it brought a severe look to Cabell’s face.

Janice had thought to take hold of the old man’s arm and utter a short panicked sound as the ground began to tremble. It was a performance worthy of Minmei’s best, although Janice could hardly appreciate it as such—any more than she could fully understand just what had compelled her to seek out Rem and Cabell’s company in the first place. That this should somehow

please

Dr. Lang was a thought as baffling to her as it was discomforting.

“There, there, child,” Cabell was saying, patting her hand. “It will be over in a moment.”

They recommenced their climb when the tremor passed. Janice disengaged herself and urged Cabell to go on with what they had been discussing.

“Ah, yes,” he said, running a hand over his bald pate, “the trees.”

Janice listened like a student eager for As.

“As you can see, they’re nothing like the scrub growth we found on Karbarra—far healthier, much closer to the unmutated form.” He motioned with his hand and went up on tiptoes to touch the spherical “canopy” of a healthy-looking specimen. The tendrils that encased the solid-looking sphere and rigid, near-transluscent trunk seemed to pulse with life. Gingerly, Cabell plucked one of the verdigris-colored, applelike fruits, burnished it against his robe, and began to turn it about in his wrinkled hand.

“Even the fruit they bear is different in color and texture—although still a far cry from the true Opteran species. Nevertheless, it may tell us something.” He took off his rucksack and placed the sample inside. “Look for the ripest ones,” he instructed Janice, as she added a second fruit to the pack.

Cabell was straightening up when a sudden movement further up the slope caught his eye. Janice heard him start, and turned to follow his narrowed gaze.

“What was it?”

Cabell stroked his beard. “I thought I saw someone up ahead.”

“A Praxian?” Janice asked, craning her neck and sharpening her vision.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I would swear it was

Burak

!”

Later, a stone’s throw from the grounded GMU, inside the wooden structure that had been designated both quarters and cell, Tesla wolfed down the fruits Burak had picked from the sinister orchard Zor’s Flower of Life seedings had spawned on Praxis.

“Yes, yes, different, ummm,” the Invid was saying in a voice tinged with rapture.

The young Perytonian tried to avert his eyes, but in the end couldn’t help himself from watching Tesla as he ingested fruit after fruit. Moist sucking noises filled the cell.

“And you think they may have seen you?” Tesla asked him.

“It is possible—Cabell, in any case.”

Tesla scoffed, still munching and handling the fruits as if they were wealth itself. “Cabell is too old to recognize the nose on his own face. Besides, they know I can’t subsist on what you call food.”

Burak said nothing. It was true enough: the Invid’s food stock had been destroyed with the

Farrago

, and the Sentinels had agreed to place Burak in charge of securing alternative nutrient plants. But Cabell, who was anything but a doddering old man, and perhaps fearing the very transformations Tesla was beginning to undergo, had suggested that the Invid’s fruit and Flower intake be regulated—this in spite of the fact that Tesla had to some extent ingratiated himself with the group since their victory on Karbarra. Each evening, Cabell and Jean Grant would look in on Tesla. Burak had been asked to furnish them with a daily log of the amounts gathered and ingested; and the devilish looking Perytonian was complying—in as much he would file a report. But the report was hardly a reflection of the actual amounts Tesla consumed. Fortunately, though, the Invid’s transformations had been limited to brief periods following his meals, when neither Cabell nor Jean were present.

“More,” Tesla said now, holding out his hands.

Burak regarded the Invid’s newly-acquired fifth digit and pulled the basket out of reach. “I think you’ve had enough for today.” Burak had heard it said that extraordinary powers could be gained from ingesting the fruits of Haydon’s worlds, but he had never understood that to mean physical transfiguration, and the Invid’s recent changes were beginning to fill him with fear.

Tesla’s eyes glowed red as he came to his feet, taller by inches than he had stood on Karbarra. “You

dare

to say this to me after all we’ve been through? You, who sought me out before fate landed us in this despicable situation? And what of your homeworld and the curse you were so feverish to see ended—have you given up hope? Would you renounce your destiny?”

Burak took a hesitant step toward the door, the basket clasped to him. “You’re changing!” he said, pointing to Tesla’s hands. “They’re going to notice it, and what then? They’ll cut back on the amounts, put someone else in charge of you. Then what becomes of your promises—what becomes of Peryton?”

Tesla continued to glare at him a moment more, transmogrifying even as Burak watched. The Invid’s skull rippled and expanded, as though being forced to conform to some novel interior design. Gradually, however, Tesla reassumed his natural state and collapsed back into his seat, spent, subdued, and apologetic.

“You’re right, Burak. We must take care to keep our partnership a carefully-guarded secret.” His black, ophidian eyes fixed on Burak. “And have no fear for your tortured world. When the time comes for me to assume my rightful place in these events, I shall reward you for these efforts.”

“That’s all that I ask,” Burak told him.

The two XTs fell silent as a gentle tremor shook the building.

Tesla stared at the floor. “I sense something about this planet,” he announced, his sensor organs twitching as his snout came up. “And I think I am beginning to see just what the Regess was doing here.”

THIS ONE’S FOR THE MEN OF THE “BIG E,” THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS

ENTERPRISE

, WITH THANKS FOR THE KIND WORDS.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jack McKinney has been a psychiatric aide, fusion-rock guitarist and session man, worldwide wilderness guide, and “consultant” to the U.S. Military in Southeast Asia (although they had to draft him for that).

His numerous other works of mainstream and science fiction—novels, radio and television scripts—have been written under various pseudonyms.

He resides in Ubud, on the Indonesian island of Bali.

APPENDIX

Thanks to the magic of electronic publishing, it has become practical to update the classic Robotech novelizations. Many of these changes are simple spelling and grammar corrections while others are minor continuity corrections which were made to more closely match the events of the television episodes. Such continuity updates were made where we felt it could be done without too much disruption to the original prose, and left alone in other instances where we felt the disruption would outweigh the benefit. For those of you curious about the specific changes made, we offer the following list of updates and errata:

UPDATES TO ALL CHAPTERS:

Different spellings of Jonathan Wolff’s last name have been updated to “Wolfe,” which was the spelling Carl Macek settled on in later books.

The spelling of “Regis” has been updated to “Regess” (feminine of Regent).

Miriya Parino’s last name corrected to “Parina” to match the TV show.

“Quadrono” updated to “Quadrano”

UPDATES:

Print page 152, paragraph 6:

Changed “that that fool” to “that fool”

ROBOTECH CHRONOLOGY

Aeon Lanack

1171 A.L.

Zor is born on Tirol

1256-1490 A.L.

Quadrant exploration by the Tiresian technovoyager ship

Azstraph

– the “Venture.”

1520 A.L.

The

Azstraph

enters the Tzuptum system and inserts itself into the orbit around Optera. Zor encounters the Flower of Life, makes contact with the Invid, and seduces the secrets of the Flower from the Queen-Mother, The Regess.

1697 A.L.

The

Azstraph

returns to Tirol. Zor begins to experiment with the Flower of Life specimens he has brought with him from Optera.

1755-1836 A.L.

Zor conjures Protoculture from the Flower and eventually falls victim to the Compulsion placed upon him by the Tiresian Council of Elders. Origin of the Cult of the Three-in-One and ascendancy of the Robotech Masters. Fall of the Royal Hall as the period known as the Great Transition commences.

1920 A.L.

16 years before “Aeon Robotech.” Development of the spacefold drive. Creation of Tirol’s clone population and neural reprogramming of the Zentraedi miner giants.

Aeon Robotech

88 A.R.

The Razing of Optera by the Zentraedi

157-500 A.R.

Consolidation of the empire of the Robotech Masters. The Invid, after a burst of monocellular reproduction, declare war on the Robotech Masters.

566 A.R.

Zor’s voyages deliver him to Haydon IV, where he has a profound encounter with the planetoid’s artificial sentience, the Awareness.

Zor designs and builds the starship that will come to be called the SDF-1, and backed by a group of loyal Zentraedi, begins his “quiet rebellion” against the Masters.

Zentraedi commander in chief Dolza forms an uneasy alliance with Zor, who has by now become hopelessly addicted to the dried leaves of the Flower.

580-640 A.R.

Zor’s clandestine seeding attempts take him to Peryton, Karbarra, Praxis, Garuda, and Spheris.

671 A.R.

Zor steals the single extant Protoculture matrix from Tiresia and conceals it within the spacefold drives of the SDF-1. The fortress, with its skeleton crew of loyal Zentraedi, is folded from Tirol’s corner of the galaxy.

Anno Domini

1999 A.D.

An Alien spaceship crash-lands on Earth. Effectively ending almost a decade of Global Civil War. Originally called “The Visitor,” the ship is dubbed Super Dimensional Fortress I—the SDF-1

Dr. Emil Lang, after an initial recon of the ship (in the company of Roy Fokker, Henry Gloval, T.R. Edwards, and others), begins to unravel the secrets of the extraterrestrial science known as Robotech.

Macross Island becomes the focal point of Robotechnology, and restoration commences on the SDF-1

In another part of the galaxy, Zor is killed by Invid Soldiers during a Flower of Life seeding attempt. The Zentraedi Breetai is wounded during the same raid. Commander in chief Dolza orders Commander Reno to return Zor’s body to the Robotech Masters on Tirol.

Interstellar war with the Invid, whose homeworld, Optera, has been defoliated by the Zentraedi, continues to chip away at the fringes of the Master’ galactic empire.

2002 A.D.

Disaster at the Mars Base Sara, Lisa Hayes’s boyfriend, Karl Riber, is killed. Lisa Turns 17.

Development of the reconfigurable Veritech Fighter begins.

On Tirol, Cabell creates Rem by cloning tissue from Zor. The Masters, too, have their way with Zor’s body, cloning tissue for their own purposes and extracting from the scientist’s residual cellular memories a vision of Earth—destination of the fortress and Protoculture matrix he has stolen and spirited from their grasp.

2003-08 A.D.

Rose of the United Earth Defense Council under the leadership of Senator Russo, Admiral Hayes, T.R. Edwards, and others.

Roy Fokker and Claudia Grant become fast friends.

Lisa Hayes is assigned to the SDF-1 project on Macross, under the command of Captain Henry Gloval.

Tommy Luan is elected mayor of Macross City

2009 A.D.

On the SDF-1’s launch day the Zentraedi (after a ten-year search for Zor’s fortress and the missing Protoculture matrix) appear and lay siege to Macross Island. The fortress makes an accidental hyperspace jump to Pluto, carrying the island and its population of 75,000 along with it. 15-year old Lynn Minmei and 19-year-old Rick Hunter are caught up in the spacefold.

2009-2011 A.D.

The SDF-1 begins its way back to Earth with Macross City rebuilt inside its massive holds.

Rick Hunter joins the RDF and earns the rank of Lieutenant, with Ben Dixon and Max Sterling assigned to his VT squadron.

The Battle at Saturn’s Rings.

Lynn Minmei is voted “Miss Macross.”

Breetai calls up the Botoru Battalion, led by the notorious “Khyron the Backstabber.”

The Battle at Mars Base Sara.

Rick, Lisa, Max, and Ben are captured by Breetai and interrogated by the Zentraedi commander in chief, Dolza.

The Earth forces learn of the term “Protoculture” for the first time.

Three “micronized” Zentraedi spies- Rock, Konda, and Bron – are successfully inserted into the SDF-1, which returns back to Earth.

Lynn Minmei is reunited with her cousin, Lynn-Kyle.

Rick Hunter is seriously wounded during a Zentraedi attack on the fortress.

Roy Fokker is killed during a raid led by Miriya Parino.

After almost six months on Earth, the SDF-1 is ordered to leave by the leaders of the UEDC.

Ben Dixon is killed.

Little White Dragon is aired.

The Minmei Cult has its beginning aboard the flagship of the Zentraedi fleet.

Lynn-Kyle founds a peace movement aboard the SDF-1.

Asylum is granted to the three Zentraedi spies, and their fellow defectors.

Max Sterling weds former Zentraedi Quadrano ace Miriya Parino.

Exedore arrives aboard the SDF-1 for peace talks.

The Zentraedi armada appears in Earth-space and lays waste to much of the Planet.

At Alaska Base, the Grand Cannon is destroyed after it returns fire “in a damaged state” and Admiral Hayes is killed. T.R. Edwards survives and vows to avenge himself on Rick and Lisa “who did not stop to help rescue T.R. Edwards.”

The SDF-1, with assistance from Lynn Minmei’s singing, defeats Dolza’s armada of four million ships and returns to a ravaged Earth.

2012-2014 A.D.

A period of reconstruction begins, with humans and Zentraedi working side by side.

Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant (son of Claudia Grant’s brother, Vince) are born.

The factory satellite is captured from Commander Reno and folded to Earth-space.

Dr. Lang and Professor Lazlo Zand begin work on a secret project involving artificial intelligence. Zand takes particular interest in the infant Dana and under goes a Protoculture mind boost.

Khyron makes a surprise appearance and takes Minmei and Lynn-Kyle hostage.

The destruction of New Macross, the SDF-1 and SDF-2, along with Khyron’s forces. Henry Gloval, Claudia Grant, Sammie Porter, Vanessa Leeds, and Kim Young are among the many casualties. The remains of the three ships are in tomb and buried under tons of earthen debris dredged up from Lake Gloval.

2015-2017 A.D.

The Robotech Masters lose confidence in their race of warrior clones and begin a mass pilgrimage through interstellar space to Earth to recapture Zor’s Protoculture matrix.

Zentraedi Malcontent Uprisings in the Southlands Control Zone (South America). Jonathan Wolfe comes to the attention of Commander Max Sterling.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force is formed for the express purpose of journeying to Tirol to sue for peace with the Robotech Masters. Aboard the factory satellite, work commences on the SDF-3.

Rise of Monument city and Anatole Leonard’s Army of the Southern Cross.

Lynn Minmei takes on a singing partner, the android JANICE, at Emil Lang’s urging.

The Invid complete their conquest of Garuda, Praxis, Karbarra, and Spheris.

2022 A.D.

Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes wed aboard the Factory Satellite. Dana and Bowie are given over to the care of Rolf and Laura Emerson.

The SDF-3 is launched; Minmei and JANICE are caught up in the spacefold.

Rick turns 31; Lisa, 36. Dana and Bowie, 10. Scott Bernard, Lang’s godson from the recently completed Mars Base, turns 8.

2025

A.D.

The Invid Regent takes Tirol. Sickened by his bloodlust, the Regess leaves Optera for Praxis to carry on with her Genesis Pit experiments.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force arrives in Fantoma space and engages the Invid; the fortress’ spacefold generators are damaged. (The REF is unaware that the fold has taken five Earth-years, and believes the date to be 2020.) T. R. Edwards and his Ghost Squadron capture the living computer the Regent has left behind in Tiresia’s Royal Hall. Tiresians Cabell and Rem inform the Plenipotentiary Council that the Robotech Masters are on their way to Earth.

The Zentraedi contingent of the REF agrees to be returned to full size to mine Fantoma for the monopole ore to fuel a new fleet of warships.

The Sentinels-comprised of Praxians, Garudans, Karbarrans, Haydonites, Spherisians, and Perytonians-are formed to liberate planets recently conquered and occupied by the Invid horde. The Hunters, Grants, Sterlings, and others leave Fantoma space aboard the Farrago.

On Earth, Senator Wyatt Moran and the commanders of the Army of the Southern Cross consolidate their power and take control of the Supreme Council.

Dana and Bowie grow up under the care of the Emerson’s.

2026

A.D.

Karbarra is liberated. Tesla and Burak form a curious partnership. The Sentinels’ ship is destroyed and the GMU is stranded on Praxis shortly after the Regess’ leave taking for Haydon IV. Praxis is destroyed. Death of Baldan I.

T.R. Edwards holds secret talks with the Regent, and begins a personal campaign to capture Lynn Minmei

Wolf and JANICE return to Tirol. The Invid Tesla murders the simulagent set to Tirol by the Regent.

T.R. Edwards begins to hold sway over the REF’s Plenipotentiary council. Wolff is accused of murder and piracy. Control of the Fantoma mining operations goes to Edwards.

Garuda is liberated. Rick, Lisa, Rem, and Karen suffer the near-fatal effects of the planet’s atmosphere.

Baldan II is “shaped” by Teal.

The Zentraedi leave Tirol space with the monopole ore needed for the fleet’s warships.

2027

A.D.

The Sentinels arrive on Haydon IV shortly after the Regess’ leave taking, and “surrender” Rem to the occupying Invid troops. Rem learns he is actually a clone of Zor. JANICE reveals herself to be an android. Sarna is killed. Haydon IV is liberated.

A prototype ship under the command of Major Carpenter leaves Tirol for Earth.

Edwards loses his grip on the council after troops sent out to hunt down the Zentraedi, side with them instead. Wolff, Breetai, and Grant return to Tirol and clear the Sentinels of all charges.

Spheris is liberated. An Evolved Tesla leaves the Ark Angel for Optera to take on the Regent for control of the Invid.

Aurora Sterling is born on Haydon IV.

Edwards and his Ghost Riders flee Tirol for Optera, taking Lynn Minmei and the awakened Invid living computer from Tirol with them.

2028

A.D.

Jonathan Wolff is given command of a ship and is sent to Earth. The Zentraedi chase after Edwards

Tesla arrives at Optera and is battling his way to the Regent. Edwards arrives and is able to help chase Tesla off. The Zentraedi arrive and Breetai and the Regent die together, forcing the remaining Zentraedi to leave.

Exedore arrives on Haydon IV with the council’s peace proposal for the Regent.

The Sentinels move against Peryton. Tesla arrives and attacks the sentinels with his remaining forces to sneak down to the surface.

Tesla realizes his destiny while being devolved from the Fruit of the flowers and sacrifices himself with Burak in order to save the planet Peryton from its curse. Peryton is liberated.

2029-2030

A.D.

The battle for Optera. As the Sentinels fight to remove Edwards from power in Optera, Edwards, Arla-non, Teal, and Janice die.

Dr. Lang makes a series of Shattering discoveries about the spacefold generators designs his teams have been using since the Jump to Tirol. Due to the Temporal miscalculations the Earth’s actual date is corrected and the time left to help protect the Earth has passed.

The Ark Angel begins a slow return to Tirol.

Breetai’s son Drannin is born to the Zentraedi Kazianna Hesh.

The Ark Angel arrives at Tirol. Dr. Lang informs the crew of the temporal miscalculations.

Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant turn 17, graduate from the Academy, and are assigned to the 15th Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, which includes Sean Phillips, Angelo Dante, and Louie Nichols.

The Robotech Masters Arrive in Earth-space, and the Second Robotech War Begins.

Major Carpenter’s ship returns from Tirol.

Zor Prime is introduced to the 15th ATAC.

Roy Hunter is born on Tirol. The REF and the Karbarrans begin work on the main fleet of ships. Lang’s Robotech Teams develop an integrated system of body armor and reconfigurable cycles, known as Cyclones.

End of the Second Robotech War. Zor prime’s attempt at destroying the Masters’ flagship results in the loosing of the Flowers of Life from the Protoculture matrix concealed within the spacefold drives of the buried SDF-1; spores cover the planet, and the Flower takes root, alerting the Regess’ sensor nebula.

Lazlo Zand Dies.

Jonathan Wolfe’s ship returns to Earth. An Anti-Invid underground is established before the Regess arrives. Dana Commandeers Wolfe’s ship after the drives are retrofitted with a device perfected by former 15th ATAC whiz kid Louie Nichols.

The Robotech factory satellite returns to Earth space.

2031 A.D.

The Invid “disappear” from Tirol’s corner of the galaxy. It is assumed that the Regess has begun her move against Earth.

Optera is fully seeded with the Flowers of Life and given over to the homeless Praxians, who rename the planet New Praxis. The Flowers become the crop for a new Protoculture matrix created by Rem, who has managed to tap some of his progenitor’s-Zor’s-memories.

Max, Miriya, and Aurora Sterling arrive on Tirol from Haydon IV

The Invid Regess arrives on Earth. Her newly hatched army of soldiers and mecha destroys the factory satellite and easily defeats Earth’s depleted defenses. Hives and farms are set up worldwide, and some Terran captives are forced to work in labor camps, harvesting Flowers and processing nutrient for use in the Regess’ terror weapons and battle craft.

Arrival of Dana Sterling on Tirol. With her are Bowie Grant, Sean Phillips, Angelo Dante, Musica and Allegra, and many of the Masters’ clones.

2038 A.D.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force launches its first large scale assault on Reflex Point. The attack fails miserably, resulting in heavy losses for the REF 10th Mars Division.

Lieutenant Lance Belmont (aka. “Lancer”) of the 10th Mars Division crashes to Earth and is rescued from Invid collaborators by Carla Morales, who nurses him back to health.

2040 A.D.

Lancer joins the shattered resistance in the Americas. Traveling under the guise of a female singer, “Yellow Dancer,” Lancer travels as a covert courier for the much-weakened resistance network, gathering vital intelligence and information along his travels. Yellow Dancer’s music becomes an instant hit, with the promise of hope, and slightly subversive message of resistance. Yellow Dancer’s recordings spread throughout the Americas

2042 A.D.

The Mars Group leaves Tirol with Scott Bernard aboard.

Shadow Fighters and Neutron “S” missiles are developed by the REF for use in the assault against Earth. Nearly instantaneous spacefold becomes a reality for the main-fleet ships

Arrival and defeat of the 21st Mars Attack Group sent by the REF.

Scott Bernard and his ragtag band of freedom fighters—Rook, Rand, Lancer, Lunk, and Annie—begin a journey toward the Regess’ central hive complex, known as Reflex Point.

2043 A.D.

Marlene, Sera, and Corg are sent out by the Regess.

2044 A.D.

The Jupiter attack wing arrives in Earth-space. Photojournalist Sue Graham dies on Earth.

The REF main-fleet ships are folded from Tirol to Earth. The Regess and her children take leave of the planet in the form of a phoenix in the form of psychokinetic energy. Annihilating the returning ships in the process and ending the Third Robotech War.

On Haydon IV, Veidt and Exedore are present at the reawakening of the planet’s artificial sentience, the Awareness, (Max and his family are also on-planet. Cabell is on Tirol.)

The SDF-3 fails to remanifest in Earth-space. Rick turns 44 Lisa turns 49. Both have been affected by the time Dilation and are actually younger by almost 3 years as is most of the REF.

Aboard the Ark Angel, which has been spared the fate of the rest of the main-fleet of ships, Scott Bernard and Vince and Jean Grant commence a search for the missing fortress.

A Del Rey Book
Published by Ballantine Books

Copyright © 1988 by HARMONY GOLD U.S.A., INC. and TATSUNOKO PRODUCTION CO. LTD. All Rights Reserved.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States of America by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 87-91845

ISBN 0-345-35302-1
eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-82393-9

v3.1_r1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Excerpt from

World Killers

Dedication

Other Books by This Series

About the Author

Appendix

Robotech Chronology

ROBOTECH CHRONOLOGY

1999 | Alien spacecraft known as SDF-1 crashlands on Earth through an opening in hyperspace, effectively ending almost a decade of Global Civil War.
| In another part of the Galaxy, Zor is killed during a Flower of Life seeding attempt.
2002 | Destruction of Mars Base Sara.
2009 | On the SDF-1’s launch day, the Zentraedi (after a ten-year search for the fortress) appear and lay waste to Macross Island. The SDF-1 makes an accidental jump to Pluto.
2009–11 | The SDF-1 battles its way back to Earth.
2011–12 | The SDF-1 spends almost half a year on Earth, is ordered to leave, and defeats Dolza’s armada, which has laid waste to much of the planet.
2012–14 | A two-year period of reconstruction begins.
2012 | The Robotech Masters lose confidence in the ability of their giant warriors to recapture the SDF-1, and begin a mass pilgrimage through interstellar space to Earth.
2013 | Dana Sterling is born.
2014 | Destruction of the SDFs 1 and 2 and Khyron’s battlecruiser.
2014–20 | The SDF-3 is built and launched. Rick Hunter turns 29 in 2020; Dana turns 7.

Subsequent events covering the Tiresian campaign are recounted in the Sentinels series. A complete Robochronology will appear in the fifth and final volume.

CHAPTER
ONE

It was as if the Expeditionary mission was fated to strike a truce with someone, and the Regent just happened to be the only enemy in residence. In another five years the Robotech Masters would arrive in Earthspace, followed three years later by the Regess and her half of the Invid horde; but in 2026 (Earth-relative) this was still speculation, and for a few brief days there was talk of peace, trust, and other impossibilities.

Ahmed Rashona,

That Pass in the Night: The SDF-3 and the Mission to Tirol

Afleet of Invid warships emerged from their transtemporal journey through hyperspace into the cool radiance of Fantoma’s primary, like so many shells left revealed on a black sand beach by a receding tide. The mollusklike carriers positioned themselves a respectful distance from the moon they had captured then lost; only the fleet’s mullet-shaped flagship continued its approach, menacing in its sealed silence.

At the edge of the ringed giant’s shadow, Tirol’s guardian, the SDF-3, swung round to face off with the Regent’s vessel, the crimson lobes of its main gun brilliantly outlined in starlight.

Aboard the Earth fortress, in the ship’s Tactical Information Center, Major General T. R. Edwards watched as a transport shuttle emerged from the tip of one of the flagship’s armored tentacles. Edwards trusted that the Regent was aboard the small craft, accompanied certainly by a retinue of guards and scientists. The presence of the Invid fleet made it clear that any acts of aggression or duplicity would spell mutual annihilation for Invid and Humans alike.

Admiral Forsythe, who commanded the SDF-3’s bridge in the wake of Lisa Hayes’s departure with the Sentinels, was now in constant communication with the Invid flagship. It was the Regent who had taken the initiative in suggesting this extraordinary visit, but Forsythe had insisted that the fortress remain at high alert status at least until the Regent was aboard. Disillusioned by decades of war and betrayal, and hardened by the grim realities of recent reversals, it was the Human race that had grown wary of summits, distrustful of those who would sue for peace.

Scanners and camera remotes monitored the approach of the Regent’s shuttlecraft and relayed relevant data to screens in the fortress’s cavernous Tactical Center, where techs and staff officers were keeping a close watch on the situation. Edwards moved to the railing of the command balcony for an overview of the room’s enormous horizontal situation screen. Studying the positions of the Invid troop carriers in relation to the SDF-3, it occurred to him how easy it would be to fire at them right now, perhaps take half of them out along with the Regent himself before the Invid retaliated. And even then there was a good chance the fortress would survive the return fire, which was bound to be confused. Numerous though they might be, the Invid seemed to lack any real knowledge of strategy. Edwards was convinced that their successful strike against the SDF-3 almost six months ago had been the result of surprise and old-fashioned blind luck. More to the point, he felt that he had an intuitive understanding of this enemy — a second sense birthed during his brief exposure to the brainlike device his own Ghost Squadron had captured on Tirol.

Edwards reminded himself of the several good reasons for exercising restraint. Apart from the fact that the actual size of the Invid fleet remained unknown, there was this Regess being to wonder about; her whereabouts and motivations had yet to be determined. Besides, he sensed that the Regent had something more than peace negotiations in mind. In any case, the data Edwards had furnished the Invid regarding the Sentinels’ ship had already linked the two of them in a separate peace. But Edwards was willing to play out the charade—even if it amounted to nothing more than an opportunity to appraise his potential partner.

He dismissed his musings abruptly and returned to the balcony console, where he received an update on the shuttlecraft’s ETA in the fortress docking bay. Then, giving a final moment of attention to the room’s numerous screens and displays, he hurried out, adjusting his alloy faceplate as one would a hat, and tugging his dress blues into shape.

The docking bay had been transformed into a kind of parade grounds for the occasion, with everyone present as decked out as they had been at the Hunters’ wedding extravaganza. There had been no advance notice of what, if any, protocols were to be observed, but a brass band was on hand nonetheless. The impression the Plenipotentiary Council wished to convey was that of a highly-organized group, strong and decisive, but warlike only as a last resort. The twelve members of the council had a viewstand all to themselves at the edge of a broad magenta circle, concentric to the shuttle’s touchdown zone. A majority of the council had ruled against the show of force Edwards had pushed for, but as a concession, he had been allowed to crowd the bay with rank after rank of spit-shined mecha —Battloids, Logans, Hovertanks, Excalibers, Spartans, and the like.

The shuttle docked while Edwards was making his way to a preassigned place near the council’s raised platform; since he had been the council’s spokesperson in arranging the talks, it had been decided that he represent them now in the introductory proceedings. Edwards had of course both seen and fought against the enemy’s troops, and he had met face-to-face with the scientists Obsim and Tesla; but neither of these examples had prepared him for his first sight of the Invid Regent, nor had the Royal Hall’s communicator sphere given him any sense of the XT’s size. Like the lesser beings of the Invid race, the Regent was something of an evolutionary pastiche—a greenish slug-headed bipedal creature whose ontogeny and native habitat was impossible to imagine—but he stood a good twenty feet high and was crowned by an organic cowl or hood, adorned, so it seemed, with a median ridge of eyeball-like tubercles. Dr. Lang had talked about

self-generated transformations and reshapings

that had little to do with evolution as it had come to be accepted (and

expected

!) on Earth. But all the Protoculture pataphysics in the galaxy couldn’t keep Edwards from gaping.

A dozen armed and armored troopers preceded the Regent down the shuttle ramp (a ribbed saucer similar in design to the troop carriers), and split into two ranks, genuflecting on either side of what would be the Regent’s carpeted path toward the council platform. Recovered, Edwards stepped forward to greet the alien in Tiresian, then repeated the words in English. The Invid threw back the folds of his cerulean robes, revealing four-fingered hands, and glared down at him.

“I learned your language—

yesterday

,” the Regent announced in a voice that carried its own echo. “I find your concepts most … amusing.”

Edwards looked up into the Regent’s black eyes and offered a grin. “And rest assured we’ll do our best to keep you amused, Your Highness.” He was pleased to see the alien’s bulbous snout sensors begin to pulsate.

Edwards’s one-eyed gaze held the Regent’s own for an instant, and that was all he needed to realize that something was wrong—that this being was

not

the one he had spoken to via the communications sphere. But he kept this to himself, falling aside theatrically to usher the Regent forward to the council platform.

The Plenipotentiary members introduced themselves one by one, and after further formalities the Regent and his retinue were directed to the amphitheater that had been designated for the talks. The Regent’s size had necessitated a specific route, along which Edwards had made certain to place as many varieties of mecha as he could muster. Each hold the summit principals passed through found combat-ready Veritechs and Alphas; each corridor turn, another squad of RDF troops or a contingent of towering Destroids. While aboard, the Regent’s every word and step would be monitored by the extensive security system Edwards had made operational as part of his Code Pyramid project—a system that had also managed to find its way into the council’s public and private chambers, and into many of the fortress’s Robotechnological labs and inner sanctums.

There was a smorgasbord of food and drink awaiting everyone in the amphitheater’s antechambers; the Regent nourished himself on applelike fruits his servants brought forth. Edwards noticed that Lang was doing his best to attach himself to the Invid leader, but the Regent seemed unimpressed, refusing to discuss any of the topics the Earth scientist broached. In fact, only Minmei succeeded in getting a rise out of the Regent. Edwards noted that the Invid could barely take his eyes off the singer after she had completed her songs, and he retained a slightly spellbound look long after the introductory addresses had commenced.

Terms for a truce were slated for follow-up discussions, so civilians and members of the press were permitted to enter the amphitheater itself. Edwards saw to it that Minmei was seated beside him in the front row, where the Regent could get a good look at the two of them.

The alien’s initial remarks put to rest any doubts that may have lingered in Edwards’s mind concerning the ongoing impersonation. The Regent spoke of misunderstandings on both sides, of a desire to bring peace and order to a section of the galaxy that had known nonstop warfare for centuries. He claimed to understand now just what had prompted the Human forces to undertake their desperate journey, and he sympathized with their present plight, hinting that it might be possible to accelerate the timetable for the Human’s return trip to their homeworld—providing, of course, that certain terms could be agreed upon.

“It’s a pity there has been so much loss of life,” the Invid continued in the same imperious tone, “both in Tirolspace and during the so-called ‘liberation’ of Karbarra. But while we may have no cause for further quarrel with your forces here, it must be understood that no leniency could be expected for those of your number who chose to join the Sentinels. And despite what you may have been told by the Tiresians, those worlds—Praxis, Garuda, and the rest—belong to me. The reasons for this are complex and at present irrelevant to the nature of these negotiations, but again we wish to stress that the Sentinels’ cause was a misguided one from the start. It was inevitable that they fail sooner or later.”

A charged silence fell over the auditorium, and Edwards had to restrain himself from laughing. The Sentinels had not been heard from for four months now. Official word had it that the

Farrago

was maintaining radio silence for strategic reasons. Then, recently, there had been open speculation that the ship had been badly damaged during the battle for Praxis. But Edwards knew better. He felt Minmei’s trembling grasp on his upper arm. Colonel Adams, also seated in the front row, leaned forward to throw him a knowing look.

“We have only recently lost contact with the

Farrago

,” Professor Lang was saying. “But I’m certain that once communications are re-established and an accord of some sort is enacted, Admiral Hunter and the others will abide by its terms and return to Tirol.”

The Invid crossed his massive arms. “Yes, I’m sure they would have honored it, Dr. Lang. But I’m afraid it’s too late. Four months ago the Sentinels’ ship was destroyed—with all hands aboard.”

A collective gasp rose from the crowd, and Edwards heard Minmei begin to sob. “Rick … Jonathan,” she said, struggling to her feet, only to collapse across Edwards’s lap.

Someone nearby screamed. Lang and the rest of the council were standing, their words swallowed up in the noise of dozens of separate conversations. News personnel and members of the general staff were rushing from the room. Edwards snapped an order to his aide to summon a doctor. Adams, meanwhile, was shoving onlookers aside.

Edwards held Minmei protectively. Once again he sought out the Invid’s lustrous eyes; and in that glance a pact was affirmed.

But on Praxis the dead walked—those Sentinels who had escaped the destruction of the

Farrago

, and, unknown to them, a deadly host of archaic creatures returned to life in the bowels of the planet’s abandoned Genesis Pits …

“Take a look for yourself,” Vince Grant suggested, stepping back from the scanner’s monitor screen. Rick Hunter and Jonathan Wolfe leaned in to regard the image centered there: an intact drive module that had been blown clear of the ship and had fallen into low orbit around Praxis. Vince was reasonably certain the module’s Protoculture-peat engines were undamaged.

“And there’s no way to call it down?” Rick asked. “A hundred miles or so and an Alpha could reach the thing.” Normally, one could fly a Veritech to the moon and back, but not one of the Sentinels’ all-but-depleted Alphas was capable of attaining escape velocity.

Vince shook his head, his brown face grim. “We barely have enough power to keep the nets alive.”

“Then it might as well be a million miles away,” Wolfe thought to add.

Vince switched off the screen and the three men sat down to steaming mugs of tea one of the Praxians had brewed up from some indigenous grass. After four months it had come down to this: the GMU’s stores were nearly empty and foraging had become one of the group’s primary activities. And in all those months they had yet to come up with an explanation for the disappearance of the planet’s native population. What was left of the central city and all the surrounding villages were deserted. But whether what Bela called “the Praxian Sisterhood” had

chosen

to leave had not been ascertained.

Puzzling, too, were the tectonic anomalies and quakes that were continuing to plague the planet, as often as three times a day now. The quakes had convinced the Sentinels’ Praxian contingent that Arla-Non—Bela’s “mother” and the leader of the Sisterhood—had struck a deal with the Invid to move the planet’s population to some other world. Rick wasn’t sure if he bought the explanation, but it certainly served a therapeutic need if nothing else.

“Look,” Rick said, breaking the silence, “they’re probably already searching for us. Lang’s not about to write us off. And even if the mining operation is

close

to on-schedule, they’ll have at least one ship readied with the capability for a local jump. We just have to hope the Invid have lost interest in this place.”

The horde’s absence these months bordered on the conspicuous; and with the quakes and deserted villages, Cabell had speculated that it was possible the Invid knew something the Sentinels didn’t.

Rick’s optimism in the face of all this had Vince smiling to himself.

Rick would always be a commander whether he liked it or not.

“It’s not Lang we’re worried about,” he said, speaking for himself and Wolfe.

Rick caught his meaning. “Edwards has to answer to the council.” There was an edge to his voice he didn’t mean to put there. Lang had warned Rick about Edwards during one of the last links the

Farrago

had had with Base Tirol, and it was difficult to keep the memory of that brief deepspace commo from surfacing.

“Don’t underestimate the man’s ambitions, Rick,” Wolfe cautioned. “I’m sure they’re going to come looking, but I’m willing to bet that Edwards will have the council eating out of his hand by then. Maybe one of us should have—”

“I don’t want to go over old ground,” Rick cut him off. “The only thing that interests me right now is a way to reach that drive module.”

Grant and Wolfe exchanged looks and studied their cups of tea. Rick was right, of course: there was no use dwelling on the choices they had made, individually and collectively. Wolfe liked to think that at least Vince had Jean by his side and the precious GMU under his feet. But Rick had all but resigned his commission, and Wolfe himself had left his heart behind.

A rumbling sound broke the silence, causing the mugs to skitter across the tabletop. The tremor built in intensity, rattling the command center’s consoles and screens, then subsided, rolling away beneath them like contained thunder.

No one spoke for a moment. Wolfe wore a wary look as he loosened his grip on the edge of the table and sat back to exhale a whistle. “Course, Praxis could do us in long before the Invid or Edwards.”

“Pleasant thought,” Vince told him.

Rick gave them both an angry look. “We’re going to get to that module if we have to pole-vault there.”

Tactical concerns (and personal preference) had kept Vince Grant and Rick somewhat anchored to the GMU (which had been moved inland from its original seaside landing zone); but the rest of the substantially reduced Robotech contingent, along with the XT Sentinels, had opted for Praxis’s wooded valleys, the planet’s often glorious skies, and rolling hills. Max and Miriya’s Skull Squadron had spent most of the past months reconning remote areas, hoping to come upon some trace of the vanished Sisterhood; but they had only succeeded in further depleting already critical reserves of Protoculture fuel. Consequently, the Wolfe Pack stuck close to base, Hovertanks shut down. Bela and Gnea and the other Praxians had voluntarily detailed themselves to serve the group’s logistical needs, and were assisted in this by the bearlike Karbarrans and vulpine Garudans. Cabell had all but isolated himself, disappearing for long walks from which he would return with samples of native rock or flora. Still a bit uncomfortable with the Humans and not yet fully accepted by the XTs, the Tiresian was often found in the company of Rem, Baldan, Teal, and the limbless Haydonites, Veidt and Sarna. Janice, too, had become an unofficial member of Cabell’s eldritch clique, much to Rick and Lisa’s puzzlement.

Presently, Cabell and Janice were off together on a long walk; they were on a forested slope about fifteen miles from the mobile base when the tremor that had shaken the GMU struck. The minor quake did little more than knock them off balance and loosen some gravel and shale from nearby heights; but it was the morning’s second shakeup and it brought a severe look to Cabell’s face.

Janice had thought to take hold of the old man’s arm and utter a short panicked sound as the ground began to tremble. It was a performance worthy of Minmei’s best, although Janice could hardly appreciate it as such—any more than she could fully understand just what had compelled her to seek out Rem and Cabell’s company in the first place. That this should somehow

please

Dr. Lang was a thought as baffling to her as it was discomforting.

“There, there, child,” Cabell was saying, patting her hand. “It will be over in a moment.”

They recommenced their climb when the tremor passed. Janice disengaged herself and urged Cabell to go on with what they had been discussing.

“Ah, yes,” he said, running a hand over his bald pate, “the trees.”

Janice listened like a student eager for

A

’s.

“As you can see, they’re nothing like the scrub growth we found on Karbarra—far healthier, much closer to the unmutated form.” He motioned with his hand and went up on tiptoes to touch the spherical “canopy” of a healthy-looking specimen. The tendrils that encased the solid-looking sphere and rigid near-translucent trunk seemed to pulse with life. Gingerly, Cabell plucked one of the verdigris-colored applelike fruits, burnished it against his robe, and began to turn it about in his wrinkled hand.

“Even the fruit they bear is different in color and texture—although still a far cry from the true Opteran species. Nevertheless, it may tell us something.” He took off his rucksack and placed the sample inside. “Look for the ripest ones,” the instructed Janice, as she added a second fruit to the pack.

Cabell was straightening up when a sudden movement further up the slope caught his eye. Janice heard him start, and turned to follow his narrowed gaze.

“What was it?”

Cabell stroked his beard. “I thought I saw someone up ahead.”

“A Praxian?” Janice asked, craning her neck and sharpening her vision.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I would swear it was

Burak

!”

Later, a stone’s throw from the grounded GMU, inside the wooden structure that had been designated both quarters and cell, Tesla wolfed down the fruits Burak had picked from the sinister orchard Zor’s Flower of Life seedings had spawned on Praxis.

“Yes, yes, different, ummm,” the Invid was saying in a voice tinged with rapture.

The young Perytonian tried to avert his eyes, but in the end couldn’t help himself from watching Tesla as he ingested fruit after fruit. Moist sucking noises filled the cell.

“And you think they may have seen you?” Tesla asked him.

“It is possible—Cabell, in any case.”

Tesla scoffed, still munching and handling the fruits as if they were wealth itself. “Cabell is too old to recongize the nose on his own face. Besides, they know I can’t subsist on what you call food.”

Burak said nothing. It was true enough: the Invid’s food stock had been destroyed with the

Farrago

, and the Sentinels had agreed to place Burak in charge of securing alternative nutrient plants. But Cabell, who was anything but a doddering old man, and perhaps fearing the very transformations Tesla was beginning to undergo, had suggested that the Invid’s fruit and Flower intake be regulated—this in spite of the fact that Tesla had to some extent ingratiated himself with the group since their victory on Karbarra. Each evening, Cabell and Jean Grant would look in on Tesla. Burak had been asked to furnish them with a daily log of the amounts gathered and ingested; and the devilish-looking Perytonian was complying—inasmuch as he would file a report. But the report was hardly a reflection of the actual amounts Tesla consumed. Fortunately, though, the Invid’s transformations had been limited to brief periods following his meals, when neither Cabell nor Jean were present.

“More,” Tesla said now, holding out his hands.

Burak regarded the Invid’s newly-acquired fifth digit and pulled the basket out of reach. “I think you’ve had enough for today.” Burak had heard it said that extraordinary powers could be gained from ingesting the fruits of Haydon’s Worlds, but he had never understood that to mean physical transfiguration, and the Invid’s recent changes were beginning to fill him with fear.

Tesla’s eyes glowed red as he came to his feet, taller by inches than he had stood on Karbarra. “You

dare

to say this to me after all we’ve been through? You, who sought me out before fate landed us in this despicable situation? And what of your homeworld and the curse you were so feverish to see ended—have you given up hope? Would you renounce your destiny?”

Burak took a hesitant step toward the door, the basket clasped to him. “You’re changing!” he said, pointing to Tesla’s hands. “They’re going to notice it, and what then? They’ll cut back on the amounts, put someone else in charge of you. Then what becomes of your promises—what becomes of Peryton?”

Tesla continued to glare at him a moment more, transmogrifying even as Burak watched. The Invid’s skull rippled and expanded, as though being forced to conform to some novel interior design. Gradually, however, Tesla reassumed his natural state and collapsed back into his seat, spent, subdued, and apologetic.

“You’re right, Burak. We must take care to keep our partnership a carefully-guarded secret.” His black, ophidian eyes fixed on Burak. “And have no fear for your tortured world. When the time comes for me to assume my rightful place in these events, I shall reward you for these efforts.”

“That’s all that I ask,” Burak told him.

The two XTs fell silent as a gentle tremor shook the building.

Tesla stared at the floor. “I sense something about this planet,” he announced, his sensor organs twitching as his snout came up. “And I think I am beginning to see just what the Regess was doing here.”

CHAPTER
TWO

Unfortunately, there are no detailed descriptions of the Genesis Pits, other than Rand’s colorful but highly personalized and impressionistic accounts (specious, as some would add), and the notes Colonel Adams hastily scribbled to himself while on Optera. And despite a plethora of theories and explanations, the sad truth is that the mechanism of the Pits remains a complete mystery—except to say that they were devices utilized by the Regess for purposes of creative evolution. Praxis apparently played host to the largest of these, and Lang, to name one, has speculated that the Pits not only gave rise to extinct creatures, but succeeded in regressing the entire planet to a formative stage of destructive vulcanism.

Zeus Bellow,

The Road to Reflex Point

If Burak and Tesla had become the Sentinels’ silent partnership, then Jack Baker and Karen Penn were certainly the group’s inseparable pair. But that, each liked to believe, was merely a result of duty assignments. And even four months on Praxis hadn’t provided them with enough time to work through the competitive trifles that fueled their relationship. They were not only marooned, but marooned together; and Praxis had become the proverbial town that just wasn’t big enough for the two of them. Bela, Praxis’s wasp-waisted local sheriff, was only one of the contributing factors; but Karen nevertheless took every opportunity to keep Jack as far from Bela as she could, often encouraging the Hovercycle recons that had become something of Jack’s stock-in-trade.

A joyride disguised as a scouting mission had brought Jack and Karen to a series of caves two hours out from the GMU. Lron and Kami had ridden with them. Four months had given the Sentinels plenty of time to grieve for those who had gone down with the

Farrago

; but Karen often wondered just how long it was going to take for her to grow accustomed to her XT comrades. She wasn’t a bit xenophobic—a fact that had won her a place with the Sentinels to begin with—and in actuality it wasn’t so much the strangeness of Lron or Kami that overwhelmed her, but the

similarities

. If only Karbarrans didn’t so resemble Kodiak bears, she would tell herself. And if only Kami didn’t look like upright versions of the foxes she used to see near the cabin her father had once owned … She had much less trouble with Baldan and Teal, with their bodies of living crystal. Or Tesla, for that matter—now

there

was an alien you could

believe

in!

But wolves and bears and snail-headed things … Karen was in the midst of wishing that Bela had had a more alien form—even a more

rotund

form—when without warning, Jack hissed: “Cut it out!”

The four Sentinels were well into the central cave now, inside a huge vaulted corridor that was as hot as blazes and reeking of sulphur. Curiosity had drawn them in; but Jack, never one to do things halfway, had insisted they go “just a little further,” and here they were a good half a click along. There were primitive sketches on the walls of the caverns they had passed through—depictions of hideous spiderlike creatures Jack claimed were “symbols”—and Karen was in no mood for fun house games or laugh-in-the-dark surprises.

“Huh?” she said, gulping and finding her voice.

“I said cut it out.”

“I know what you said, Jack …”

She threw him an angry look in the darkness, wondering suddenly if she had actually

voiced

some of her private musings about Bela. Then all at once something hit her on the top of the head. XTs or not, she decided, someone was trying to be funny. Karen whirled around, hoping to catch Kami in the act, but he was way off to her left inspecting a chunk of rock near the cave wall. Lron, too, seemed to be preoccupied with other things. So, wiping sweat from her face, she turned back to Jack, and said, “Not funny.”

“What?”

She put a hand up to shield her eyes from his miner’s light. “Throwing things. I’m not real thrilled about being in here to start with.”

“I didn’t throw anything,” he started to say, when Lron’s gurgling snarl interrupted him.

“Who hit me?” the Karbarran growled.

Jack felt a tap on his shoulder, swung to it, then instinctively looked up. His light illuminated what looked like an assemblage of globular-shaped deposits on the cave’s ceiling. Suddenly he saw one of the things move, and realized that it was some sort of free-floating, translucent sphere. Kami switched on the light strapped above his muzzlemask and shined it on another portion of the ceiling; here were more spheres, ranging from baseball size to almost four feet in diameter, all bobbing against the rock like helium balloons.

“What the …?” Jack said, moving his head around, the beam finding more and more globes. “Jeez, the place is crawling with them.”

“Jack!” Kami shouted, training his light on something further along the corridor. Everyone turned in time to see a medium-sized globe emerge like a bubble from a conelike projection in the cave floor. Jack rushed ahead, watching the milky thing ascend, and soon found himself perched on the rim of a large shaft, roughly circular and belching up a lot of heat and noxious fumes. Kami, Lron, and Karen joined him a moment later, just as another globe was beginning to make its way up and out.

“What a stink,” Karen commented.

Warily, Jack reached out to touch the basketball-sized orb. It was hot, but not dangerously so; what surprised him was the thing’s misleading solidity.

“Jack, don’t,” Karen warned him when he tried to capture it.

But as was so often the case with Jack, the warning came too late: no sooner had he taken hold of the sphere than it shot toward the ceiling, lifting Jack off the floor. Arms extended over his head, he rode it up for fifteen feet before letting go and landing on the other side of the cavern in a neat tuck-and-roll that blew out the miner’s light.

“Yeah!” he whooped, as Kami helped him to his feet. It wasn’t unlike the spill he had taken six months ago in Tiresia, but this time he had landed among friends.

Karen hauled off and whacked him in the arm. “Jack, can’t you just —”

“That thing took off like a rocket! Almost pulled my arms out of the sockets.”

“Yeah, we noticed, Jack,” Karen said, miffed.

They were all staring at the ceiling now.

Jack watched the spheres bob against one another. “Almost seems like they’re looking for a way out of here, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, just like we are,” Karen and Lron said at the same time.

In the commo chamber of his hivelike domain on Optera, the Invid Regent received a transmission from the simulagent who was representing him on Tirol. It seemed that the so-called

Humans

now occupying the Robotech Masters’ ravaged and forlorn moon had put on quite a show—with the kind of pomp and circumstance the Regent strived to imitate. He was almost sorry he hadn’t gone there himself. What with most of his remaining fleet anchored in Fantomaspace, was there really anything to fear? he asked himself. Still, the fact remained that there were too many unanswered questions. What, after all, did the would-be commander of the Human forces—this Major General Edwards—want? He had been so quick to come to the Regent’s aid in that matter of the Sentinels’ ship … But it bothered the Regent that the Human had yet to ask for anything in return. Did he simply wish to capitalize on the Sentinels’ defeat to move himself higher in the chain of command, or were these machinations part of some larger scheme?

In a certain sense the answer was unimportant, the Regent decided at last—providing he could make use of that factionalism that divided the Human forces.

He regarded the image in the communications sphere, catching a look in his double’s eyes that troubled him. “Is there news of Tesla?”

“There is,” the simulagent said. “It appears the Tesla was aboard the

Farrago

when our forces destroyed it.”

Tesla, dead

, the Regent thought. It touched him in a way he would never have believed possible. But perhaps it was not true, perhaps there were survivors of that battle? He had yet to hear from the follow-up forces who had been sent in to resecure the planet. “Who seems to be in charge?” he asked after a moment.

“As you surmised,” the simulagent continued, “there are signs of an ongoing power struggle, principally between Edwards and a certain Dr. Lang—a scientist who did his best to charm me during the introductory sessions.”

“Is Lang the weaker one, then?”

“No … no, this is not my belief. The scientist in fact seems to have the backing of the Humans’ council—an assembly that functions as a kind of governing body.”

The Regent found the idea odd—as he had the puzzling gerontocracy the Robotech Masters had favored. He couldn’t understand how

twelve

minds could agree on anything, when he and his queen—merely

two

minds—had quarreled over every decision.

“Then, you must work on Edwards,” the Regent said. “Promise your continued support in his petty struggle if it comes down to that. Tell him we’ll join forces. But just make certain you learn the whereabouts of their homeworld and how they came to possess Protoculture. It may be that they know more than we do about Zor’s matrix or the Masters’ destination.”

“Am I to make no demands of Edwards in return for our support, Your Highness? It hardly seems a wise move.”

The Regent stared at the sphere’s image in disbelief. Was this some evil mirror he was looking into now? “Just what would you have me demand?” he asked, seething under the restraint he kept in his voice.

“The brain, to begin with. Along with their promise to keep out of the sectors we still control.”

The Regent made a dismissive motion toward the sphere. “These things are obvious, servant. What else is on your mind?”

“Minmei,” the simulagent said without explanation.

The Regent made an irritated sound and scowled. “What’s a Minmei?”

“The Human female that sang for my benefit.”

The Regent caught himself from staggering back from the sphere. He had only the vaguest understanding of this thing called singing, but the implication was clear enough: the simulagent was flawed in the same way that the Regess was. She had allowed herself to be seduced by Zor, and now this pathetic creature the Regent had sent to Tirol was falling victim to the same perverse urge!

Was there no end to these injustices!

“Hear me, grub,” the Regent growled, hood puffed up like a poisonous sac. “My reach is long enough to end your life where you stand. Do my bidding, or feel the power of my wrath.”

The simulagent genuflected for the remote eye of the sphere. “My lord.”

“Now and always,” the Regent said, shutting down the device.

Rick had spent the better part of the Praxian day inside the GMU, brainstorming with Vince and Wolfe about possible ways to contact the orbiting Spherisian drive module. Onboard computers had calculated the period of the module’s eccentric course, and gone on to project just how much Sekiton fuel the thing contained, how far the module could be expected to fold, and just when its newly-attained orbit around Praxis might decay. But there were still no solutions to the big questions of how to reach the module or bring it down.

Rick left the base just before sunset, as had become his habit this past month, and joined the core group in their makeshift camp on the outskirts of the Praxian inland city. He wasn’t fond of the scene, which reminded him more of a recreational campground than the billet it was supposed to be. Things were not just lax, but

loose

, as though everyone but him had grown to accept the situation. There was a logic to it, of course; it made no sense to walk around tied up in knots. But just the same, Rick had no patience with complacency, and he silently hoped that an idea would come to them one night while sitting around these campfires comparing cultural notes. So he stood in line with the rest of them now, Human and XT alike, and helped himself to the Praxian gruel the mess staff was cooking up to supplement the reconstituted meals and nutrient pills taken from the base’s dwindling stores. Moreover, these sessions were the only waking hours he got to spend with Lisa—the

new

Lisa, that was, the liberated Lisa.

Where Gnea and Bela were still unforgiving of Miriya Sterling’s Zentraedi past, they had embraced Lisa as though she were a long-lost member of the Sisterhood. At first Rick was not entirely unhappy about it, but all at once Lisa seemed a different person than the one who had argued so strongly against his joining the Sentinels to begin with. And while it was true that what was good for Lisa was good for the group, Rick couldn’t help but feel a bit, well,

jealous

of the partnership Gnea and Lisa had formed. The Praxian seemed to draw this sort of reaction everywhere she stepped. Rick knew that Karen was having troubles with her, and he guessed that even Bela must be harboring some ambivalent feelings about her friend’s sudden preoccupation with Lisa.

With Gnea it was martial skills that mattered most; but beyond speed and strength, Lisa had discovered something else: an independence and self-assertiveness that was taking some getting used to.

Rick had these thoughts in mind when she came over to sit beside him in the firelight, still flushed and exhilarated from her latest weapons training session. She talked about the

feel

of the halberd in her hands, the power of the

naginata

; she was practically poetic in describing Gnea’s crossbow and two-handed shortsword. Rick took it all in, forcing a smile and offering all he could in the way of appropriate nods and utterances; but behind the smile his mind was doing backflips.

What next?

he asked himself. Would he come out here one evening to find her parading around in some skimpy fighting costume, like Bela’s bossed and D-ringed body harness? Would she suddenly take to buccaneer boots, some totem-crested helm, long-bladed dirks and throwing knives? Rick shuddered at the thought, grateful for the fact that that damned Robosteed, Halidarre, was temporarily grounded. Unfortunately, however, the Praxian’s lambent-eyed malthi, Hagane, was not, and the winged pest nearly parted Rick’s hair as it came darting in just now to settle itself on Bela’s bulky forearm sheath.

Rick muttered a curse and looked over at his wife. “Glad to hear how well it’s going,” he told her. “And I’m sure all this’ll come in handy at the next Tirol decathlon.”

She looked at him askance and took a forkful of food from his plate. “Something bothering you, Rick?”

“No, no, I mean, it’s good to see you keeping busy, Lisa.”

“Is that what you think I’m doing—‘keeping busy’?”

Rick inclined his head, eyes narrowed. “It’s what we’re all doing, isn’t it? What am I supposed to do: spit in my palm and pledge my fealty to someone? ‘For the Eternal She and the glory of Haydon!’ ” Rick mimicked.

“Rick —”

“No, really. Maybe we should all be practicing swordplay and crossbow technique, leaps and high jumps. Then maybe one of us’ll be able to reach that module instead of wasting away down here.”

Almost everyone in the circle caught an earful of Rick’s words, and the usual evening’s chatter abruptly ceased. The fires crackled, and four Hovercycles could be heard approaching the perimeter. Lisa and Rick seemed to be locked in an eye-to-eye contest when Jack, Karen, Kami, and Lron entered the camp. Jack took a long look around, oblivious to the uncomfortable silence his swaggering entrance had dispersed, and announced cheerfully: “Wait’ll you hear what we found.”

“They’ve agreed to help us,” Veidt said later on, hovering into the cavern where Rick and some of the other Sentinels were puzzling over the hideous cave paintings Karen had pointed out. “If ‘agreed’ is the proper word.”

Karen noted that there were fewer globes than there had been that afternoon; several had apparently found their way out, as evidenced by the fact that one or two had been found bobbing against the ceiling close to the mouth of the cave.

“Then they are life-forms?” Rick said.

“Oh, most assuredly.”

Rick heard Bela snort behind him. After Jack had told them of the find, the Praxian women claimed to have heard tales of these orb creatures from Arla-Non, chief of the Sisterhood. But the things were believed to be extinct, just as the beasts depicted on the cave wall were—or so Rick and the others hoped.

They had all tried to convince Rick that the orbs could wait until the morning, but he had insisted Jack lead them back to the caves immediately. Now, not quite four hours since Jack’s return to the base, Rick and half a dozen or so of the core group were standing in the floodlit heat of the cave, listening to the results of Veidt’s telepathic probe.

“I Regesster no sense of how they came to arrive here,” the mouthless Haydonite was mind-speaking, motioning to the cavern. “I only know that their destiny lies somewhere in space. This condition of … 

levity

is but a transitional stage in their life cycle. They are sentient, in what might be termed a primitive, or instinctual, fashion. But the important thing is that they seem to understand our need for their assistance—their

support

, if I may be permitted to play with your language some. In fact, Sarna and I detect a certain desperateness to their own flight—as if they are not merely obeying a behavioral directive, but are, in quite a real sense, escaping.”

No one felt a need to state the obvious: Praxis was a tectonic nightmare from which they all wished to awaken. The heat and stench of the cave only reinforced that fact. And if the cave was indeed a volcanic vent of some sort, it was no wonder the globes were anxious to leave.

Cabell, his face and glabrous pate beaded with sweat, was watching one of the smaller creatures now, as it bobbed its way toward the entrance. He couldn’t help but be reminded of Tiresia’s antigrav spheres, and he began to question if there wasn’t some mysterious connection here.

Rick was watching the same sphere; but he was wondering just how many it might take to lift an Alpha to the edge of the Praxian envelope. “Do they understand what we’re asking of them?—the specifics, I mean.”

Veidt hovered over to a position directly beneath a cluster of the creatures.

“The mecha should lift off on its own power,” Sarna answered for him. “After that, Veidt and I will be able to herd the orbs into place.”

Excited, Rick punched the palm of his hand. He swung around to Jack and Karen. “Contact the GMU. Tell Vince to round up the Skull and the Wolfe Pack. We’ve got to work fast and assemble a crew for the module.”

“Will we be heading back to base?” Karen thought to ask.

Rick shook his head. “Give Vince our position. Tell him what we’ve learned.” He glanced up at the globes, rivulets of sweat running down into his eyes. “I want the base to come to us.”

While members of the Sentinels hurried to break down the camp and ready the GMU for motion, Burak was breaking the news to Tesla. The Invid made him repeat it several times until satisfied he had all the details straight.

He had felt certain all along that he wasn’t fated to end his days on Praxis, and now Burak had brought word that Hunter and the others had discovered a way to reach the orbiting drive module. With precious little time to spare, Tesla thought as he and Burak packed away the few belongings the Invid kept in his cell.

Ever since his earlier ingestion of the mutated fruits, his mind had been reeling, locked in a kind of revelatory state, where answers came to him full-blown, like short-lived explosions of light. He had been asking himself why the Regess had come to Praxis in the first place; it was a question that had been plaguing him on and off for months now.

It was before the mutiny aboard the

Farrago

that they had encountered one another, when Tesla had landed on Praxis to choose specimens for the Regent’s zoo. The Regess had given him a vague explanation then, and it didn’t occur to him until much later on to question her responses. With the continual quakes to spur him on, however, and the aid of the fruits, the answer became obvious: she had come here to conduct further Genesis Pit experiments—part of her grand scheme to transmute the Invid race into something Tesla himself could not yet begin to imagine. Optera had been the site of the first Pits, where Tesla and most of the other evolved Invid were birthed. But the Regess’s experiment there had almost doomed the planet; it had, in fact, touched off the initial search for secondary worlds she might employ. Abandoning Optera and the Regent, she had finally come to Praxis to hollow out new Pits deep in the planetary core. And of course that was why she had left the place—because her experiment was following the same course it had taken on Optera.

Left. But for

where

? Tesla asked himself…

He put a hand on Burak’s shoulder as they were about to leave the room. “You say they will be choosing a crew to pilot the first Alpha up to the module?”

Burak felt the strength of the Invid’s grip, and tried to shake it off, but could not. “Are we going to die here, Tesla?” he asked in a faltering voice. “Peryton, my people—”

“Quiet, you fool!” Tesla stepped through the doorway, glancing around to assure himself that no one was within earshot, then swinging back around to Burak. “We won’t die here—not if we’re part of that crew, we won’t.”

Burak’s face contorted. “But how —”

“You leave that to me. I just need to know one thing.” Tesla sniffed at him. “Can you pilot that Spherisian module?”

“I suppose so,” Burak said uncertainly.

Tesla stretched out his thick neck. “Then we’re all set.”

CHAPTER
THREE

In Admiral [Rick] Hunter’s personal notes [recorded on Praxis], we learn of several discussions that took place between Cabell and Bela regarding the issue of child-bearing among the Praxians. (Hunter himself was nonplussed to hear Bela refer to Arla-Non as her “mother.”) [Bela] even allowed Cabell to tour the whaashi—“birthing center,” or creche—although refused to enter it herself. It was understood that certain members of the Sisterhood were preselected to receive female “offspring,” who were then raised as “daughters of the Sun.” The Praxians had little understanding of courtship, sexuality, or pregnancy; the “coupling rite” being a kind of catch-all mystery that was at the same time enticing and fearsome. Cabell, of course, was quick to see Haydon’s hand at work.

A. Jow,

The Historical Haydon

Of all the worlds she had visited, this was the saddest, the Regess decided as she contemplated Haydon IV’s cityscape from the uppermost tier of the Invid headquarters there. It was a small world, perfect in every respect, but with a heart as lifeless as the faceless beings who hovered across its surface and seemed to know one’s every thought. The Regent liked to believe that he had conquered the place by cajoling his way into a position of absolute authority; but Haydon IV had seen many a would-be ruler come and go, while it itself remained unchanged, ungovernable, unreachable. It was one of the few open trading ports left since the Tirol-Optera war had spread like some contagion through the Quadrant; and as such Haydon IV enjoyed a semblance of peace. Still, the Regess sensed the presence of an incomprehensible evil here, far worse than the vulcanistic horrors her Genesis Pit experiments had unearthed on poor Praxis.

She had come to see for herself what the Invid scientists had found here, and now, as grateful as she was for the data they had supplied her, she could feel nothing but a kind of vague dread for the future, for the very path she had embarked on. Haydon IV’s sophisticated scanners had picked up a trace of the Robotech Masters’ course, and in effect pointed a way to Zor’s ship with its matrixed Flowers. But the Regess’s private samplings of the planet’s vast store of metaphysical knowledge had revealed something of potentially greater import—a suggestion that she had been as self-deceived as the Regent had been. That her ostensibly

evolved

nature—along with her continuing efforts to search out the physical form deemed most perfect to embody her intellect—was but a carefully constructed delusion, self-generated and engineered to keep her from the real truth. And yet it was a truth she refused to contemplate, a mating she would not accept—one she was not at any rate

prepared

to accept.

There would come a moment years hence when these truths would dawn on her like the primordial fireball itself, and the Invid Regess would willingly surrender the shackles of physicality and ascend; but just now, she chose to keep Haydon IV’s revelations from her thoughts, and turn her attention to the Praxian woman who had requested audience.

“This world is a paradise,” the Regess said, turning from the spire’s incomparable view, but gesturing to it nevertheless. “I have traveled the Quadrant over, and never have I known such an exquisite place.”

Arla-Non flashed her a scornful look, and tossed back a luxuriant mane of sun-bleached hair. “Better a cave on Praxis than a palace here,” she sneered. “Every nerve in my body screams at me to beware this place, this planet. Every breath of its wind carries a lie.”

She was tall and powerfully built, clothed in swaths of colorful fabric and knee-high boots of soft hide. Looking at her, the Regess couldn’t help but be reminded of her own failed attempts to emulate that racial form, to please Zor …

“Is that fair?” the Invid Queen-Mother asked, an edge to her voice as she approached the Praxian. “You knew nothing but hardship, and now you have luxury beyond the dreams of most beings.”

“And you have Praxis,” Arla-Non shot back.

The Regess made an impatient gesture. “You must learn to forget Praxis, as

I

have Optera. Your world is doomed.”

“So you continue to tell me. It is your way of decreeing that Praxis had become nothing more than an Invid breeding ground.”

“Praxis will breed nothing but asteroids!” the Regess seethed. “I cannot change the past, Praxian. Make your peace with this world, or live out your days in torment. I offer you no other choice.”

Without a word, Arla-Non spun on her heel and headed for the entrance to the spire’s transport shaft; she stopped short of its triangular accessway. “I can choose to fight you to the last, Invid.”

The Regess had her back turned, but the Praxian’s words found their mark. She was beginning to understand why the Regent had never regarded persuasion as a viable option where force could be employed. The Regess made note of it, promising death for the next beings who attempted to thwart her.

Praxis, meanwhile, was beginning to come apart.

Forced by ground swells, fissures, and rock slides into taking the long way around, the GMU arrived at the caves precious hours behind its projected ETA. But with the region’s numerous caves and shafts to vent the planet’s internal pressure, the land here had been spared some of the tectonic turmoil afflicting other areas. Nevertheless, the air was filled with static charge, heat, and stench, and the cave that housed the orbs was fast becoming unworkable. The Skull had arrived hours earlier, and by the time Vince and Jean Grant, Janice, Rem, Wolfe, Burak, and the others stepped from the mobile base, the rest of the core Sentinels were well into Rick’s impromptu briefing. Several dozen orbs of varying size had already exited the cave, and were well on the way to their enigmatic deepspace destiny; but Veidt and Sarna had “persuaded” the stragglers to lag behind awhile longer. Kami and Learna had reported the emergence of yet more spheres from the cavern’s internal chimney. Cabell speculated that it might be possible to widen the access some, and thereby increase the chances of additional creatures reaching the surface.

The plan called for the spheres to lift an Alpha with a crew of five clear through Praxis’s suddenly albescent atmosphere. Once in space and under its own power, the mecha would complete the rendezvous with the drive module. When that was accomplished, the crew would drop the module into a lower orbit while the spheres continued to raise five-person crews. It was conceivable that the GMU would have to be abandoned, but at least the VTs and Hovertanks would survive. Although it sounded crazy the plan was straightforward enough; there remained, however, several variables to deal with. First, the Sentinels had no idea how many orbs might be required to lift a VT, or just how fast they would be able to raise it the requisite distance. An incorrect guess could leave the mecha hanging in space waiting for the module to complete another orbit, or, worse still, missing the thing altogether. Second, and equally problematic, the initial crew would have to be comprised of personnel capable of piloting the module into a lower orbit, and possibly—should the orbs for some reason withdraw their

support

—through a spacefold to Karbarra, or equidistant Fantoma. Third, someone was going to have to stay in touch with the orbs.

This last issue had been decided by the time the GMU contingent joined the others near the cave entrance. Sarna was going to be in charge of mustering and instructing the creatures in their task. Veidt had simply said, “Sarna will do it,” and no one argued the point. Rick now had the module in mind.

Most of the XT aliens were out of the running for this slot, except Veidt—who was needed down below to mind-link with the spheres—and Lron. Rick had doubts that the burly Karbarran could successfully pilot the ship through a jump; and although the module was Spherisian in design, neither Teal nor Baldan were qualified to handle it. Vince was needed for the GMU. That left only Lisa, unless …

“Janice,” Rick said suddenly, “can you handle it?”

Burak almost volunteered, but Tesla restrained him at the last moment, gesturing him silent while everyone’s attention was focused on Minmei’s former partner.

She nodded, without saying anything. If it came down to a fold for Tirol, Lang would be delighted to find her aboard. She sensed Lisa looking at her, and gave her a tight-lipped but understanding look.

“Lisa?” Rick said, figuring he would be safer with a crowd around him.

“I’m fine with your choice, Commander,” she told him evenly. “But just who do you have in mind to pilot the Alpha?”

Rick looked around uncomfortably. “Well, I think I’m the most qual—”

Half-a-dozen voices interrupted him at once.

“It’s too risky,” Max said, speaking for all of them. “I’ll go.”

“Your place is with the Skull,” Rick pointed out firmly, and everyone grumbled their agreement. Several of Max’s squadron volunteered, including Miriya, but Rick rejected all of them for one reason or another. Then Jonathan Wolfe stepped forward.

“I’m the logical choice,” he said, addressing the circle. “With Vince and Max, we’ll still have our air- and ground-based forces intact in the event of a follow-up attack. One less tanker isn’t going to influence things one way or another.”

Rick had to smile at Wolfe’s attempt at humility; but Wolfe’s reasoning was sound. “All right,” he said at last, “you’ve got it.”

Just then Tesla began to shoulder his way to the center of the circle. “Commander, I, too, would like to volunteer my services.” He turned to the Sentinels, some of whom were already ridiculing him.

“You’ve all seen how I can be

made

to cooperate. But now I wish nothing more than to demonstrate my

willingness

to cooperate. These four months have taught me a great deal about freedom and self-determination, and I would urge you all to begin to accept me as a member of your group, rather than a prisoner. Should the Regent’s troops appear in Praxis-space, I will be there to foil them, much as I did in Tracialle.”

Rick looked up at the Invid, remembering what Lisa had told him of the

Farrago

’s attack on the Karbarran city, and wondering whether Tesla was genuine or simply trying to save his own green skin. Rick asked him if he wasn’t growing tired of his role—whether he had any reservations about betraying the Invid cause.

“It seems to be my lot in life,” Tesla said in a theatrical manner. “Besides, I want this mission to succeed as much as the rest of you do.”

Rick exhaled a short laugh. “We appreciate that, Tesla. But intentions aside, I think you might be too … uh,

large

for the mecha.”

“Too large!” Telsa said as though insulted. “Put me in the Beta’s cargo section, then.” He sucked in his breath, as if to narrow his bulk, and waited, making an effort to will the right words into the Human’s mind.

“You think we can fit Burak and Tesla back there?” Rick asked Wolfe hesitantly.

Wolfe sized up the Invid and the horned Perytonian, who was looking a bit peaked. “Be a little tight, but I think we can manage them.”

“Then let’s hop to it,” Rick said decisively.

Tesla and Burak lingered for a moment at the hub of the sudden activity. The Invid turned partway toward his accomplice and spoke in a hushed voice.

“Make certain you bring plenty of fruit aboard, my young friend. Destiny calls to us both.”

On Tirol, too, things were off to a shaky start. During the first session of the truce negotiations, the Regent had thrown a kind of temper tantrum, which only Edwards recognized as being as false as the Invid himself. He had a perfect understanding of the imposter’s aim, and so was hardly surprised to learn afterward that the XT had informed Dr. Lang and the council he would henceforth meet with Edwards only. The Regent had explained how difficult and

alien

it was for him to discuss terms with a

body

of representatives—especially when one of those twelve was a Zentraedi, with whom the Invid would never make peace. Once again Lang had tried to set himself up as ombudsman, and once again the Regent had rejected him out of hand. Edwards was the Human the Regent would talk to, and none other. Lang let the council know that he was against any one-to-one arrangements and insisted that his arguments be added to the record. But Edwards was delighted to hear that the council had overruled the scientist’s objections and that Longchamps and the others were counting on him to see the talks through to their completion.

Just now the simulagent and the traitor were seated across from one another in Edwards’s spacious quarters aboard the SDF-3. The two of them had already put on quite a show in the fortress amphitheater, but here they were safe from the prying eyes of the council and free to speak their minds. Edwards had decided to play it close to the bone, and congratulated the Invid on his performance.

“Why, whatever do you mean, General?” the false Regent said after a short silence.

There was just enough hesitation in the Invid’s response to reassure Edwards that he was dealing with an imposter, but it benefited him to play along. “Your words for the council’s scanners,” Edwards told him. “All that talk about how there’s more than enough room in the Quadrant for both our races.”

“We are a reasonable people,” the false Regent returned, sipping at the green grog he had brought with him.

“Yes, of course, you are. I’m encouraged by the very fact that you’ve come to Tirol. There are some who didn’t believe you would.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I think you’re capable of almost anything, Your Highness.”

The Invid set aside his goblet and looked across the desk at Edwards. “You speak boldly for one your size, Human. Are all those from your world so courageous?”

Edwards sat back in his chair and grinned. “To a man.”

“And your weapons speak with equal power … But it intrigues me: how exactly did you come by your Protoculture systems?”

“We took them away from the Zentraedi,” Edwards said, leaning forward on the desk. “They were annoying us.”

The simulagent studied his four-fingered hands. “And you came here in search of their Masters?”

“We came here to finish the job, if you want the truth. Word had it that they were going to be showing up in our neighborhood, so we decided to take the fight to them instead. Save our planet the inconvenience of a backyard war.”

“Yes, but you seemed to have missed them.”

“We’ll catch up.” Edwards shrugged. “First we’ve got a little business here to take care of.”

The Invid ignored the remark. “Just where is your ‘neighborhood,’ General?”

Edwards touched his faceplate. “A long way from Tirol.”

“Yes, but where?”

“West of the Moon, east of the Sun.”

“You trifle with me,” the XT said menancingly.

Edwards shot to his feet and put both hands flat on the desk. “And you waste my time! What are you after?”

The Invid met his glare. “The return of the brain.”

“In exchange for what?”

“Your lives,” the Regent hissed.

Edwards laughed and walked away from the desk, only to whirl around and say, “You needed my help to eliminate a single Karbarran ship. And I know that your fleet is spread so thin you can hardly protect the worlds you’ve conquered. So what makes you think you can intimidate me now?”

The Regent, too, was on his feet, filling one half of the room. “I thought for a moment we were on the same side, General. But perhaps I was mistaken.”

“You’ve already been more help to me than you know,” Edwards told him. “But the brain stays until you’ve got something better to offer me than threats.”

“Your egotism will be the death of you,” the Regent said from the door.

Edwards smiled as the door slid shut. Everything he said had been calculated to draw out the real Regent; talk was useless until then But he had faith that his gambit would pay off. Eventually the Regent would show himself—in person or as before in the sphere—and when that day came, there would be much to discuss.

Incredible as it seemed, the armored Alpha was actually being carried aloft by perhaps three dozen orbs of mixed size, clustered like grapes beneath the mecha’s swept-back wings and Beta-elongated fuselage. Cheering seemed a bit premature, but that didn’t stop any of the still-grounded Sentinels from sending up exclamations of encouragement.

The feat had required more orbs than anyone would have guessed—over a quarter of the number that remained in the cave, at last count—but Veidt, as promised, had been able to herd them under the hovering VT without much ado. Several of the creatures either didn’t comprehend the Haydonite’s telepathic instructions or thought better of them at the last moment and opted for solo flights into Praxis’s cloudy and smoke-smudged skies. The others, however, rose quickly to the task, less like lighter-than-air balloons than anti-Galilean cannonballs. Cabell calculated that if the present rate of lift remained unchanged, the mecha would arrive at the Roche limit with ample time to rendezvous with the drive module. At that point, Sarna, copiloting the Alpha along with Jonathan Wolfe, would bid the orbs what amounted to a “thanks and so long,” and the VT would utilize its onboard computer and thrusters for guidance adjustments. Janice, Burak, and Tesla were squeezed together in the mecha’s Beta hindquarters.

Rick threw a couple of enthusiastic shouts to the Alpha before rushing off to join Vince and some of the others, who were already in the GMU’s command center monitoring the mecha’s progress and supplying its telemetry systems with updates gleaned from the base’s scanners and data mainframes.

Wolfe was on the net when Rick entered the command center. “Everything checks out fine so far,” he was telling Vince. “It’s like an elevator ride to the stars.” The net was relatively clear, except for occasional bursts of static.

“Ask him if Sarna anticipates any disengagement problems,” Rick said to Vince.

“Uh, no problem,” Wolfe reported a moment later.

Rick leaned in to one of the console pickups. “And Janice?”

“Here, Rick. We’re doing all right.” Thumping noises could be heard in the background. “It’s just a little close for comfort.”

Rick made a mental note to tell Janice just how much he admired her. “Sit tight, Janice. You’re almost there.”

Wolfe and Janice acknowledged and signed off. Rick found himself crossing his fingers, something he hadn’t done in years. He laughed in a self-mocking way, optimistic but oddly disturbed at the same time.

Outside the base, members of the Skull Squadron and the Wolfe Pack were beginning to prepare a second mecha for lift. This one was to include Lisa, Miriya, Cabell, Lron, and Crysta. The air was filled with lightning flashes and all-but-constant peals of thunder. Praxis trembled underfoot like the SDF-3 during fold maneuvers. Even Cabell refused to speculate on how much time the planet had, but to a few of the Sentinels each minute felt like something to be thankful for.

Kami and Learna had yet to emerge from the orb cavern deep inside the region’s now-floodlit central cave. The temperature had dropped considerably over the past half hour, and the air was breathable once more. Baldan and Teal had joined the Garudans to help keep count of the orbs, and with the first Alpha on its way, Jack, Karen, Rem, and Gnea appeared on the scene.

Everyone watched as two golf ball-sized spheres wafted up out of the shaft to join their brethren, who were grouped in various locations along the vaulted ceiling. A veritable parade of overhead orbs stretched from here all the way to the mouth of the cave. Jack directed his light down into the shaft and asked Karen and Gnea to do the same. He had discerned some sort of movement perhaps eight feet down the well; one of the larger creatures was struggling to fix through the constricted passageway. Each time the thing would back off, two or three smaller orbs would bubble up and out of the shaft. The Sentinels had discussed various ways to enlarge the opening, but Rick was leery of employing explosives or lasers for fear the orbs would misunderstand their intentions. Jack couldn’t, however, see any harm in spelunking down for a closer look.

While Gnea and Rem went rushing back to the GMU for cord and anything they could find in the way of rigs and harnesses, Baldan and Teal were off in a corner of the cavern exploring a different route down. It had occurred to the male Spherisian—earlier, when he had melded his hand with the cave wall—that there were peculiar forces at work in the depths of Praxis, and Teal, her arms buried to the elbow in rock, was affirming that now.

“The mineral content is most unusual,” she reported analytically. “Nothing like what we’ve experienced elsewhere on Praxis. It seems more a part of the planet’s past than its present.”

“I sensed the same thing,” Baldan told her, gesturing to the cavern’s outcroppings and formations. “These deposits have been exhumed from somewhere in the core, but in some unnatural fashion. They’re not so much the result of the planet’s vulcanism as they are the

cause

of it.” Once again, Baldan pushed his arms deep into the wall. “Perhaps I can travel the Crystal Highways here as we do on Spheris, and communicate with the tortured substrata of this world.”

“It’s dangerous,” Teal said, pulling one of Baldan’s hands from the wall. “Praxis is destabilized. You might not be able to re-form …”

Baldan Regesstered surprise at her concern for his well-being; it was unlike her. “Then keep hold of my hand,” he said as he began to meld the rest of his crystalline being with the glistening rock that formed the cave wall. Teal could see a portion of the wall assume Baldan’s features in bas-relief; he seemed to smile, then disappeared entirely.

“Good luck,” she whispered, still grasping her friend’s disembodied hand.

Elsewhere in the cavern, Rem, Gnea, and Karen heard Jack say, “There are thousands of globes down here! Enough to lift the whole damn base!” His voice rose from the shaft like that of an oracle. “They’re huge ones! We’ve gotta give them a way out! Tell Hunter—”

Just then a violent tremor hit the cave, erasing Jack’s words and eliciting a shower of rocks and dirt from the grotto’s ceiling. The orbs began an excited dance when the tremor passed, hastening toward the entrance in what seemed an inverted ball-bearing stampede. Karen was leaning into the shaft yelling Jack’s name.

“I’m okay,” he yelled back at last. “Just took a spill off the rope. I’m on a ledge or something. Seems to be some kind of cavities down here … One of you better come down—and bring more light.”

Teal had been knocked to her knees by the force of the quake, but she had managed to keep hold of Baldan’s hand and forearm. She twisted around in time to see Kami and Learna picking themselves up off the floor. Then she saw Baldan’s face manifest in the wall: he looked terrified.

“What? What is it, Baldan?”

His stone mouth formed the word

Invid

. “They’ve performed a horrible experiment here, brought back creatures from the planet’s past—like these globes, but terrible ones also. You must hurry and warn the others. These creatures—”

“But you can’t expect me to leave you here!” Teal was aghast.

“I’m trapped,” he told her. “It’s no use.”

Teal tugged on his arm. “Don’t—” Then she looked down and noticed a fissure in the wall that hadn’t been there before the tremor.

“Baldan …”

“Hurry,” he insisted.

Reluctantly, she let go of his arm. And as she turned to leave, she heard Karen scream from across the grotto.

“It’s Jack and Rem!” a wide-eyed Karen was saying when Teal approached her. Kami, Learna, and Gnea were trying to calm her. “Something’s taken hold of them!”

CHAPTER
FOUR

[The psychohistorian] Constance Wildman would have us believe that the Robotech Wars were nothing more than a series of incestuous struggles and Freudian-inspired rivalries—the Masters and their “children,” the Zentraedi; the various intrigues that blossomed around “primal goddess” Lynn-Minmei; the Flower as grail, nutrient mother’s milk … And she adduces the Regess-Tesla-Regent triangle to strengthen her case; for where else “do we find a more perfect archetypal representation of the rebellious son who wishes to kill the father and possess the mother?” To which one might be tempted to answer: in the relationship between Zor and Haydon

.

Footnote in Reedy Kahhn’s

Riders on the Storm: The Regent’s Invid

“And you actually threatened Edwards?” the Regent’s voice screamed through the communicator. “You fool! You were supposed to entice him, not drive him further from my grasp.”

In his quarters on the fleet flagship, the Invid simulagent gulped and found his voice. “I was only trying to get information out of him—as you yourself requested. But he wouldn’t reveal anything about his homeworld. And worse still, he didn’t seem to believe me when I spoke of the power of our empire.”

The Regent made a sour expression. “Well, how could he, coming from the likes of you? Do you know nothing of subtlety? Have you forgotten all that the brain taught you about intelligence gathering? It’s as though you’ve made up your mind to deal with the Humans in your own sloppy fashion, when your mission was to be my eyes and ears.

Not

my mouth!”

The simulagent winced, and turned to see if any of the soldiers were laughing behind his back. How could he begin to explain what he was going through—how the

feel

of power had worked its own magic on his mind, a magic that outweighed any concerns for diplomacy or “subtlety.” But he kept these things tucked away from the being he was born to answer to, and instead thought to address the Regent as one might expect a servant to behave.

“I apologize, Your Highness. It’s these Humans … they confuse me.”

“Yes,” the Regent told him, softening his tone some, “I can understand that much. But I begin to wonder about this Edwards. It strikes me that perhaps he has seen through my ruse—no thanks to you.”

The simulagent lowered his snout to the communicator remote. “Tell me how I can make amends. I am but your humble servant.”

The Regent wagged a finger. “And it would profit you to keep that in mind.” He showed the sphere the palms of his hands. “

Why

does everyone feel they can think for themselves? First my wife, now you … Only Tesla served me well.” He waved his hands in the air. “

Arg

, this whole affair is my fault anyway, sending a servant to do a conqueror’s work.” The Regent adjusted his robes. “I want you to return to Optera. There’s nothing more you can do on Tirol, and if I permit you to stay any longer, it’s likely you’ll

undo

something.”

“But, Your High—”

“Don’t argue with me! We can do without the captured brain a while longer, and there are other ways to extract the information we want about the Masters, the Matrix, and the Humans’ homeworld. Better to let the situation on Tirol deteriorate of its own accord. Then Edwards and I will talk.” The Regent’s eyes stared out from the sphere, gazing coldly at his simulagent. “You may have my looks”—he sighed—“but you certainly lack my talents.”

Rick slammed his hand down on the console-mike stud and shouted Wolfe’s call sign into the pickup. One minute Jonathan had been reporting that all signals were go for disengagement, and the next thing anyone knew he was saying something about the Beta having separated from the VT. And now the GMU seemed to have lost contact with both components.

“Rising Star, come in,” Rick urged. “Wolfe! Respond. What’s going on up there?” He swung around to Jean and Vince, who were busy at adjacent consoles. “Anything?”

Jean swiveled to face him. “Too much cloud cover for a visual on the Beta, but scanners show it on an accelerated course for the drive module. The Alpha’s way off the mark. We should have some data soon.”

“Was it the globes?”

“Can’t tell, Rick,” Vince said without turning around.

Just then Wolfe’s voice crackled into life through the room’s speakers. “—actly sure what happened. Sarna was just passing along instructions to the orbs, then all of a sudden the Beta broke away. We’re way off course. Can you give us a new heading?”

“Coming up,” Rick answered him. “Do you have any traffic from Janice?”

“Negative, Rick. I can’t even get a fix on the ship.”

“She’s closing on the module, Jonathan,” Vince said. “Any guesses?”

“Not right now.”

Rick was about to add something when the hatch hissed open. “We’ve got troubles, sir,” a Skull pilot announced.

“We’re aware of it,” Rick said, more harshly than was necessary.

The captain took a puzzled look around. “No, sir, in the caves. We’re under attack.”

“Attack? From what?” Rick noticed for the first time that the woman was covered with dirt. Her face was smeared with some unidentifiable black fluid or grease.

“Uh,” the pilot stammered, “you’re going to have to decide for yourself, sir.”

Rick and the pilot left the base at a run. Outside, Rick saw scores of orbs streaming from the mouth of the cave. Veidt and a handful of Praxians and mecha pilots were doing their best to calm the creatures, but Max and Miriya, along with half the Wolfe Pack, were nowhere in sight.

“In here, sir!” the pilot was shouting, motioning to the cavernous entrance.

The floor of the cave was shaking, and Rick heard low rumbling sounds he initially attributed to tectonic tremors; then he realized that he was hearing explosions. These grew more concussive as he neared the grotto.

The place was in a state of near pandemonium, dozens of orbs bobbing along, underlit by intense flashes of explosive light that was pouring out from holes and shafts in the floor; strident voices raised above the clatter of weapon fire; and something else—a kind of shrill, clacking noise, as eerie as it was loud.

Rick glanced around, trying to make sense of things. Karen Penn was off in a corner, terrified, although Kami and Learna were by her side. Teal stood some distance from them, alone near what looked to be a limb of rock. Gnea and Bela were carrying coiled lengths of cord toward a shaft opening; close by were a couple of Perytonians and a few men from Wolfe’s team, donning gas masks and strapping on web-gear ammo packs.

Without warning someone thrust a Wolverine into his hands.

“Max!” Rick said, whirling around. “What’s—”

“Cover up,” Max cut him off. He tossed Rick a mask and trotted off toward the shaft, cradling an Owens Mark IX mob gun. “Jack and Rem are trapped down there,” he called over his shoulder. “We’ve killed a bunch of them already, but they just keep coming!”

“Killed a bunch of what? Who keeps coming?”

At the opening, Max pulled down his respirator and hooked on to one of the cords that had been lowered into the shaft. “Ready?” he shouted above the din from down below. Breathless, Rick followed his lead, and the two of them took to the rigs.

A moment later, on the floor of an enormous sublevel room, Rick was certain they had overshot their mark and landed in hell. In the strobing light he could see they were standing on the rim of a massive well that seemed to drop straight down to the planet’s molten core. Here, too, the ceiling was covered with orbs—most of them of greater size than any he had seen on the surface; but it was the creatures crawling up out of that well that had left him speechless. They might have been Hovertank-size spiders, except for their eyestalks, double-tiered segmented bodies, and front-facing mouths. And if they weren’t the devil’s own creation, Rick decided, then he didn’t ever want to meet their maker. For no god could have loved so hideous and evil-looking a beast.

It thrilled him to realize that the black stickiness coating the cavern’s floor was blood from these things, but even that was not enough to wash the fear out of him. He remembered reading somewhere that there was an actual endogenous terror hormone certain creatures gave rise to in the human body; and indeed he seemed to

remember

them in some primal corner of his mind. But then he suddenly recalled where he had actually seen them: they were the creatures an ancient and unknown Praxian hand had depicted on the cave’s walls!

Tesla was amazed by the Human female’s strength. He had finally succeeded in dragging her backward into the Beta’s cargo space and now had both of Janice’s seemingly frail wrists firmly clasped in his own hands, but it had been a struggle all the way. Burak, meanwhile, had slid forward into the cockpit seat to handle the controls. The drive module was looming into view through the VT’s canopy, right on schedule, and theirs for the taking.

“Welcome to our crew,” Tesla was saying to the stilluntamed female. “Glad to have you aboard.” Jonathan Wolfe’s urgent voice could be heard over the open net.

Janice twisted around, almost breaking free of his hold, and glared at him. “Is this any way to treat a guest?”

“If I let you free, will you promise to behave?”

Janice gave her head a defiant toss. “Try me.”

Tesla eased his grip, and the android everyone thought a woman lunged for Burak’s neck. Tesla pinioned her arms and threw her roughly against the aft bulkhead; he was pleased to see some of the fight go out of her.

“Burak,” Janice said weakly, one hand to her head. “What’s your part in this? I can’t believe you’d leave your friends to die back there.”

Burak showed her his profile, velvety horns and heavily boned brows accented amber in the display lights. “It’s the only way I can help free my planet,” he offered. “You can’t understand—”

“Enough of this,” Tesla interrupted, taking stock of the wounds Janice’s fingernails had opened on his arms. “Pay attention to what you’re doing. And shut down the comm,” he added, gesturing to the net switch.

The crystalline-shaped Spherisian module filled their view now, eclipsing the stars. Burak matched the Beta’s course to the module’s seemingly slow-motion end-over-end roll, and began to maneuver the mecha along the drive’s scorched and much-abused hull. He utilized the onboard computer to communicate with the module’s own, and within minutes the docking-bay hatch was opened; the Beta was home free.

When the bay had repressurized, the trio climbed from the Beta cockpit and eventually found their way to the bridge. Tesla carried Janice the entire way, bear-hugged to his huge chest like some sort of stuffed toy he couldn’t live without. Burak lugged along the mutated fruits he had smuggled aboard the VT before liftoff.

The Invid was feeling omnipotent—not only because he had so easily outwitted the Sentinels, but because he would soon be on his way to Optera for the face-to-face encounter with the Regent he had so often envisioned these past periods. The fruits from Karbarra and Praxis had, so he believed, rendered him superior to the monarch he had once served as soldier and would-be son. And now it was time for the Regent to step aside and grant him his due position as leader of the Invid race. Tesla had come to understand that it took more than mere strength to lead; it took insight and vision, and these gifts were his in abundance.

But as they arrived at the drive’s control room, some very real problems presented themselves, eroding Tesla’s fantasies and summoning an anger from his depths.

“But you told me you could astrogate this ship!”

With a gesture of helplessness, Burak turned from the starmaps and spacefold charts he had called up on the Spherisian guidance monitors. “I thought I could, but now …”

Tesla stormed over to him and began to scan the screens, puzzling over the datascrolls. He pointed a thick finger at one of them. “Here. Here is Optera.”

Burak’s eyes opened wide. “Optera! But, Tesla—Peryton, we’re going to Peryton.”

Telsa pushed him aside. “In due time,” he said absently. “First there is something I must attend to.”

Burak steeled himself. “Then attend to it without my help.”

Tesla made a violent motion with his hands, but checked himself short of the Perytonian’s neck, taking him instead by the shoulders, fraternally. “Of course, my dear. To Peryton, then.” Tesla’s hands urged Burak down into one of the acceleration seats. “Now, why don’t we try to figure this out together, step by step. Let’s just say for example’s sake that we

did

want to fold for Opteraspace … Now, how would we do that, my friend …?”

Janice took in the exchange from across the room. The two mutineers had all but forgotten about her, so it was easy enough to jack into the drive’s systems while their attention was focused elsewhere. In a short time she had completed her bit of cybernetic magic. No matter what they fed into the ship’s astrogational computers now, the module was locked on course for the Fantoma space system.

Janice smiled to herself, wondering how Tesla would take to surprises.

At first it was believed that Baker and Rem had been captured or eaten by the bristly eight-legged crawling nightmares delivered up from the Praxian netherworld; but subsequently the Sentinels found that their two teammates were simply being

detained

—the word someone from the Wolfe Pack had used. Jack and Rem had been probed and manhandled, but apparently were safe. It seemed that the arachnids—Gnea and Bela had a name for them no one could pronounce—had no taste for meat. Moreover, the creatures weren’t on a feeding frenzy at all—nor, for that matter, were they interested in counterattacking the beings who were busy lancing them with lasers and rockets. Like the orbs, these living anachronisms—unseen on Praxis for millennia—were attempting to flee the storms that burned at the planet’s transformed core.

Rick was long past his initial fright, but the sour taste of fear remained in his mouth. It struck him as odd that while in his day he had fought fifty-foot giants and walking slugs, ridden into battle alongside humanoid clones, ursine warriors, and amazons on Robotsteeds, he could experience such utter terror at the sight of giant spiders. Maybe, he had decided, it was the very mindlessness of the creatures; after all, even the Invid weren’t

monsters

, were they? The Praxian women had been equally frightened, and Rick tried to imagine what it might be like to go up against, say,

dinosaurs

.

But if the creatures hadn’t actually added to the Sentinels’ plight, they had done nothing to improve things. Countless orbs had exited the cave, and now there was a nasty bit of mopping up to do down below while the rest of the orbs were mustered for further lift assists. To make matters worse, there was still no word from the Beta, and one of the Spherisians had gone and gotten himself

stuck in a rock

!

Presently, Rick and some of the others were grouped around Teal and the hand that had once belonged to her friend. Baldan was merged with the wall—the way a Mesoamerican bas-relief could be said to be merged to a stela. His profile was frozen but plainly visible, and there was a crystalline mass protruding from the section of rock where his chest might have been. The crystal grew before the astonished eyes of the assembled group.

“No, you can’t, Baldan—please stop this!” Teal was shouting to the wall. She swung around to Rick. “He is attempting to transfer his essence. But this has never been achieved on any world but Spheris.” She looked back at the engorged growth. “And I don’t want to raise it!”

Again the crystal enlarged. Teal put her hands to her head in a panicked gesture and pleaded with Baldan to stop. But ultimately her hands reached for the faceted thing and she began to tug at it.

“It’s no use, Baldan,” she cried. “It will die!”

Rick moved in to give her a hand, and with some effort the two of them managed to pull the crystal loose. The hollow

pop!

sent a shudder up Rick’s back. Baldan’s profile receded into the wall and vanished. Teal dropped the crystal from her trembling hands and regarded it.

“The child is lifeless … dead.” She looked around at the others. “Baldan is lost to us.”

Whimpering sounds found their way out from under Kami and Learna’s breathing tubes. Rick took Teal by the shoulders. “What did he tell you?”

She stared at him blankly for a moment, then said, “The Invid. They must have been using Praxis for experiments of some sort. It was the chambers they hollowed out that gave birth to those creatures. And these same chambers have ushered in this world’s demise.”

“But what kind of experiments?” Rick demanded. “What were they trying to create?”

Teal shook her head.

Tight-lipped, Rick released her and motioned a radioman over to him. “Any word from the Beta?” he asked Vince when the GMU link was established.

“They’ve reached the module,” Vince updated. “But we’re not getting through to them.”

Rick summarized what had gone down in the caverns. “I want to speak with Tesla as soon as they call in. He must know something about all this—these

pits

. Maybe there’s a way to reverse it?’

“Unlikely,” Vince responded. “But I’m sure Tesla will tell us what he knows. He’s practically one of us now.”

With a little help from the GMU’s computers, the Alpha was back on course. Wolfe and his Haydonite copilot were at a loss to explain the unexpected separation, but they assumed Janice had done so with some good purpose in mind, and that her radio silence was nothing more than a glitch in the system. It didn’t occur to either of them that there was conspiracy afoot.

Wolfe continued in this hopeful vein, even after he had learned that the Beta had apparently made a successful docking with the drive module. That singed piece of orbiting space debris was above him now, and he was getting all he could from the Alpha to make up for lost time. It was only when his radio requests for docking coordinates were ignored that he began to suspect foul play. The hunch became full-fledged concern when he couldn’t get the Alpha’s onboard systems to interface with the module. Consequently, the docking-bay shields remained closed, and unless something could be done to open them, the Alpha was going to wind up dead in space.

Even if that meant going extravehicular.

Sarna took over the controls while Wolfe suited up. Praxis turned below them like a cataracted eye. The telepath strapped in, bringing the Alpha as close as she could to the module’s scarred hull; then Wolfe blew the canopy. He floated up and out of the VT on a tether line, took hold of the side of the pinwheeling ship, and tried to center his attention on the alien external control panel. Sarna spoke to him through the helmet relays, avoiding the net in favor of frequencies of a cerebral sort. Wolfe heard her thoughts as spoken words as he fumbled with Spherian switches designed for hands more sensitive than his own.

But a short while later the hatch was sliding open and pocketing itself in the crystalline hull. Sarna engaged the Alpha’s attitude jets and began to maneuver the ship to safety.

The Beta was inside, empty; and fortunately, Wolfe decided, there was no welcoming party there to greet them. Down on the hold floor now he armed himself with a rifle and two handguns; Sarna had perfect recall of the module’s corridor and compartment layout, so she led the way. They were barely out of the docking area when the ship lurched.

“We’re leaving orbit,” Sam told him.

Wolfe felt the rumble of the module’s drives ladder its way up his legs. Sarna hovered along the corridor at an increased pace, then abruptly right-angled herself into a large cabinspace and told Wolfe strap himself into one of the seats.

Wolfe regarded the acceleration couch and threw her a questioning look.

“We’re preparing to fold,” she told him.

“They’ve

what

!”

“They folded,” Vince Grant repeated. “The module’s gone.”

Rick leaned against one of the GMU command-center consoles to catch his breath. He had run all the way from the cave only to hear the bad news as soon as he came through the hatch.

“But, but, did they—”

“Not one word,” Jean cut in. “The last message we had was from Wolfe. He was sure something had happened to Janice.”

“Tesla,” Rick said, biting out the name.

Vince nodded. “That’s my guess.”

“But where’s the Alpha now?” Rick added, looking back and forth between the two of them.

Jean pushed herself back from the console, her hands on the arms of the chair. “That’s the weird part. The Alpha made it aboard.”

Rick fell silent; it felt for a moment as though they were speaking to him in a foreign tongue. He shook his head, hoping everything would settle into some sort of order. “Maybe it wasn’t Tesla. Maybe Janice knows something we don’t …”

“Okay,” Vince said.

“And maybe she managed to get word to Wolfe, but he couldn’t reach us …”

“Okay, again.”

“And maybe they

had

to fold because they realized there was no way to get everyone offworld using the VTs …”

“Uh huh.” Vince folded his arms. “So they take off for Karbarra or Tirol, figuring we’ll be able to wait it out.”

Rick left it unanswered. There was no need, anyway, now that the tremors had recommenced. A steady, thunderous roar filtered into the room; somewhere nearby, mountain ranges were beginning to crumble.

It was a short jump. Wolfe could feel himself coming out of the fold’s dizzying effects, and was on his feet even before Sarna had furnished him with an all-clear sign.

When the two of them burst onto the module’s bridge, they found Tesla and Burak seated at the controls. Janice was off to one side, asleep, Wolfe thought.

Tesla and Burak both swung around as they heard the hiss of the hatch. The Invid’s snout dropped open when he saw Wolfe standing there armed to the teeth, and he immediately fell backward against his coconspirator, hoping Wolfe would read it as Burak attempting a capture.

The two XTs rolled across one of the console benches and down onto the floor. Taken completely off guard, Burak didn’t know what had hit him. But Tesla was forcing himself into a subordinate position now, and ordering Burak to grab him by the neck.

“Fight, you idiot!” Tesla was whispering. “You’ve go to make them believe you had nothing to do with this!”

Burak finally got the message and threw his hands around the Invid’s thick neck. The two of them butted heads and snarled and cursed at each other. Burak was working his thumbs up Tesla’s snout by the time Wolfe succeeded in pulling him away.

“Back off!” Wolfe told him, brandishing one of the handguns. “Tesla, on your feet!”

Sarna hovered over to the com.

The Invid raised his hands, but remained on his knees, pleading with Wolfe not to kill him, and confessing to his attempt to seize the ship.

“And if it wasn’t for this horned fiend I’d have—”

“Cut the crap,” Wolfe said. He turned around to Burak, who was trying his best to look innocent, even heroic. “You threw in with this slug.”

“I didn’t!” Burak argued. “He put a spell on us!”

“A spell?” Wolfe almost laughed. “You mean he

made

you do it?”

Burak pointed to Janice. “Ask her if you don’t believe me.”

Janice had reactivated herself. She looked at Wolfe and said, “They were in it together—”

“Liar!” Burak yelled.

“—but they couldn’t seem to agree on a destination. So I made the decision for them.”

Tesla and Burak traded looks.

“Where are we?” Wolfe said, as confused as anyone else.

“Fantoma,” Janice said, and Tesla fainted.

CHAPTER
FIVE

Betray (I looked it up): to deliver to an enemy by treachery or disloyalty; to be unfaithful in; to seduce and desert … Is this what I’m guilty of? Have I seduced and deserted him? Am I delivering Jonathan over to an enemy? Have I been unfaithful? As I repeat the word over and over to myself, it begins to lose all meaning; it becomes a meaningless sound, a bit of Tiresian or Praxian babble. But then I begin to think of it as a kind of war cry, a sound that echoes back and forth across the terrain of my life and these twenty years of bloodshed. If I am a betrayer, I am also the betrayed. I am the SDFs-1,2, and 3; I am all the councils and all the generals. I am the dead, the War itself.

An excerpt from the journal of Lynn-Minmei

With Rick and Lisa and all the other men and women who had joined the Sentinels’ cause missing and presumed dead, there were precious few people Dr. Lang could trust, let alone seek out for company or old-fashioned good counsel. Things had not been the same between Lang and Harry Penn since Karen left, and of the Plenipotentiary members, only Justine Huxley and Niles Obstat were still receptive. Edwards had influenced the rest to one degree or another, except of course for Exedore, who had become Lang’s unofficial ally and close friend. Even Lynn-Minmei had been turned—by what, Lang wouldn’t even try to imagine. Lang, however, was well accustomed to isolation; so even when it wasn’t self-imposed he could get by. He had been managing to hold his own with the council, in spite of Edwards, and at the same time was overseeing both the mining operations on Fantoma and the repairs to the SDF-3. But the Regent’s visit had introduced something new and threatening to the horizon: the possibility of a partnership between Edwards and the Invid. Lang had seen Protoculture shape stranger events these past twenty years, but none so potentially dangerous—to the Expeditionary mission, to Tirol, to the Earth itself.

Something within him refused to accept Hunter’s death; he knew he wasn’t standing alone here, but he had nevertheless been powerless thus far in persuading the council to launch a rescue ship—even now when there were several available with the capability for the required spacefold, some running on Sekiton, some on the recently mined monopole fuels. But it was the Regent’s behavior at the introductory summit sessions that finally convinced him to take matters into his own hands. And it was that decision that brought him to Fantoma. He had allowed his godson and apprentice, Scott Bernard, to accompany him, but left Exedore behind on the fortress to safeguard their mutual interests while the Regent’s fleet remained anchored in Fantomaspace. The crew of the newly christened prototype dreadnought he had commandeered—the unnamed SDF-7—was one that had been handpicked for the journey after a bit of chicanery by himself and General Reinhardt; they were a capable and loyal lot, commanded by Major John Carpenter, who was being considered as a candidate to head up the first return mission to Earth.

Lang’s reasons for choosing Fantoma could be summed up in one word:

Breetai

. He was aware of the hostilities that had cropped up between Breetai and Edwards over the issue of the Regent’s arrival, and he knew precisely where the Zentraedi’s loyalties lay. And where Breetai went, so followed his hundred-strong cadre of sixty-foot biogenetically-engineered warriors—a force to be reckoned with no matter what the council’s ultimate decisions might be.

No sooner did Lang step from the shuttle that had ferried his party to the surface of the ringed giant than Breetai insisted on escorting him through a tour of the mining complex. It was obvious that the Zentraedi was taking some pride in his accomplishments, so Lang didn’t offer any resistance. But the opportunity to discuss the pressing issues that had brought him here didn’t present itself until much later on, and by then Lang was nearly feverish. Breetai had led them to a massive Quonset-style structure that served as the colony’s command and control center—the only such building in New Zarkopolis designed to accommodate both giants and Humans in relative comfort. There, Lang reviewed what had been said during the so-called truce talks, and what

reported

statements had been exchanged between Edwards and the Regent during the subsequent one-on-one sessions. Breetai said little, preferring instead to listen or grunt an occasional exclamation of anger or surprise. But when Lang finished—with an audible sigh—the Zentraedi collapsed his steepled fingers and leaned forward in his chair, gazing intently into the Humans’ balcony area.

“One part of me wants to blame Admiral Hunter for allowing things to come to this,” he told Lang. “But if anyone can appreciate the unpredictable nature of these things, I can.” Lang didn’t have to be reminded of the bizarre reversals the Zentraedi commander had witnessed and suffered through; and in this the scientist and warrior were brothers of a sort. “I suggest we take steps to secure our position against Edwards.”

“Yes, but how?” Lang asked.

“Just as you have begun,” Breetai said, motioning to where Carpenter and his exec were seated. “And you must arrange for additional mecha to be sent here …”

“Disguised as mining devices perhaps.”

“Exactly. We have our own ship, our own mecha, but we must have our own weapons. New Zarkopolis could become our base of operation. And of course we possess something even more important than firepower …”

“The ore,” Lang completed.

Breetai nodded. He had his mouth opened to say something more when a Human at the comm console interrupted him. “Report from the fortress,” the tech announced, straining to hear the communique. “A ship has entered the system. Colonel Wolfe and some of the Sentinels are said to be aboard.”

“Thank God,” Lang said, throwing his head back.

Breetai wore an enigmatic look. He touched his faceplate in an absent manner and rose from the chair to tower over the “Micronian” balcony.

“The Protoculture is at work again. We call out and it answers.”

“Yes,” Lang directed up to him. “And would that we could always predict its response.”

Word of the drive module’s approach spread to all stations and was relayed down to Tirol’s surface. In her canteen in Tiresia, Minmei swooned upon receiving the news. She had returned to the surface only hours before, and now she tried to collect her thoughts before hastening back to the city’s shuttle staging area.

At the same time in his quarters aboard the SDF-3, T. R. Edwards was in the midst of a session with the false Regent.

“It seems you were a bit premature in reporting the destruction of the

Farrago

,” he said with a maleovent grin. Even the Invid’s black, unreadable eyes failed to conceal a sense of shock; but the simulagent quickly rallied.

“And perhaps the data you supplied was in error,” he countered angrily.

The Invid imposter had taken it upon himself to have one more go at winning Edwards over, despite the Regent’s orders to the contrary. He had given careful thought to the Regent’s harsh criticisms and was convinced that a follow-up discussion was in order. He now thought he had a clear understanding of the concept of sublety; but like Tesla he was not big on surprises, and the sudden appearance of the Spherisian module had completely undermined his efforts.

Edwards was waving a forefinger at him. “There, there, Your Highness, no call for insults, is there? Just when we were getting along so

famously

.” Then Edwards’s face grew serious, his one eye cold. “Besides, it’s just a couple of our people and one of yours. There were bound to be survivors.”

“One of mine?” the simulagent asked, alarmed.

“Tesla—isn’t that his name? Or didn’t you know he was aboard?”

The Invid curled one his sensors. “You failed to mention that.”

Edwards shrugged. “What’s the difference? He’s alive.”

And so is Wolfe

, Edwards thought. He glanced across the desk at the Invid, beginning to tire of the game. Would this Tesla be able to confirm his suspicions? he wondered, making a note to have the returnees monitored at all times. “Now, what was it you were saying before?”

The simulagent tore himself from concerns about the possible consequences of encountering Tesla. “I—I was about to make you an offer, I think.”

Edwards waited for him to continue, then laughed. “Well, go ahead—let’s lay our cards on the table.”

The simulagent held up a hand. “Three planets—yours for the choosing. Free access to all the other worlds I control—a limited partnership—and last, my help in realizing your,

dreams

, shall we say.”

Edwards felt his jaw. “In exchange for the brain …”

“And Tesla …”

“And Tesla.”

“And one thing more.”

Edwards’s brow went up.

“I want Minmei.”

Wolfe and company stepped out of the module and onto the deck of the SDF-3 docking bay to the sound of cheers—a few, at any rate, from a section led on by Emil Lang, Lord Exedore, and several staff officers. And it was Lang who clasped Wolfe’s hand and wrist, as if he had never been so happy to see someone. Behind him, Janice was getting the same treatment; Sarna, Burak, and Tesla were all but ignored.

“What the hell’s going on?” Wolfe asked the scientist straightaway. “You’ve got half the Invid fleet out there!”

“There’s much to discuss,” Lang shouted as press and officers jostled one another to get close. “But tell me—the others—Rick and Lisa—”

“They’re alive,” Wolfe returned, buffeted about by the crowd. “But they won’t be much longer if we don’t get a rescue ship to Praxis.”

Lang frowned. “Well, we have to see about that.”

“What do you mean, ‘see about that’?” Wolfe gestured back to the module. “We didn’t have enough fuel to jump back, but Praxis—”

“Things have changed,” Lang told him, just loud enough to be heard. “We have to talk.”

Wolfe felt something acidic wash through him. All the while he had been answering Lang’s questions, his eyes had been darting around the hold, searching for some sign of Minmei. Now, after seeing a hundred Invid ships anchored in Fantomaspace, and with Lang’s portentous whisperings in his ear, he found her, and the sight only served to double his dread. She was standing alongside Edwards, among that unresponsive group, offering him a weak and pathetic smile.

“Come, Colonel,” Lang was saying, one hand at Wolfe’s elbow, “we must hurry.”

Wolfe pulled away and craned his neck to catch another sight of Minmei; but Edwards’s contingent was already leaving the bay, and she was lost in the crowd.

“Listen, Lang, I need a minute,” Wolfe said, up on his toes now.

Lang turned around to track Wolfe’s gaze, then he took hold of him more firmly, more urgently. “The council is ready to hear you. Everything hinges on this.”

“Look, I just wanted to—”

“I know. I understand,” Lang added after a moment. “But things have changed, man. Aren’t you listening to me? Think about your friends.”

Wolfe started to say something rash, but checked himself, slicking back his hair in a gesture of exhaustion. “I’m sorry, Lang.” He turned and motioned Janice and Sarna forward, then pointed to Burak and Tesla. “I want these two placed in lockup.” Peripherally, Wolfe caught Lang’s look. “I’ll explain,” he told him.

As everyone began to move off, Lang mentioned that the Regent had come to Tirol of his own volition; that he was in fact on the fortress at that very moment.

Wolfe made a surprised sound—but not half the one Tesla uttered at overhearing the statement. Wolfe was too wrapped up in Lang’s subsequent remarks to hear it, however; but had he turned, he would have seen the look of near rapture on the Invid’s suffused face.

The Plenipotentiary Council convened in extraordinary session to listen to Colonel Wolfe’s report and hear out his requests. Because both Janice and Sarna were “civilians” according to the council’s guidelines, Wolfe had to face the twelve alone. The session was held in the council’s private chambers aboard the fortress, with the usual secretaries and officials in attendance. Representing the RDF were Generals Reinhardt and Edwards. Wolfe had yet to learn about Edwards’s relationship with Minmei, but he loathed the man nonetheless. Lang had instructed Wolfe before the session convened to meet with him afterward in the scientist’s quarters. “No matter what the outcome,” Lang had said. And those words were repeating themselves now as Wolfe stood before the council recapping the events of the past four months.

“… But it appears that the Praxians abandoned their world for good reason,” Wolfe was concluding a short time later. “Praxis is unstable. Admiral Hunter—”

“I would caution Mr. Wolfe from using any honorifics,” one of the council members said. “The council no longer recognizes you as members of the Robotech Defense Force.”

“Some of the council,” Niles Obstat objected.

“

Most

of us.”

Wolfe scowled at the woman. “Then why aren’t Janice and Sarna here, if we’re all civilians?”

“Mr. Wolfe,” Senator Longchamps cut in, “we are just trying to set things straight for the record. You and the Hunters, Sterlings, and Grants are understood to be a part of the Expeditionary mission. The extraterrestrial Sentinels are another matter. And as for Ms. Em, she has never been affiliated with the RDF—or the mission, for that matter, if I’m not putting too fine a point on it.”

Wolfe fought down an explosive urge to tear the man’s throat out. “I apologize to the council if I may seem

impatient

,” he continued more calmly, “but the fact is that our

friends

are out there, marooned on a planet that for all I know is just a memory by now! All I’m asking you for is one ship with a skeleton crew.”

“To do what, Mr. Wolfe?” Thurgood Stinson asked. “To rescue your friends, to be sure. But what then—continue on your campaign, or return to Tirol?”

Wolfe tightened his lips. “I don’t think I’m qualified to answer that, Senator.”

“And we’re not certain we can spare a ship just now, Mr. Wolfe.”

Justine Huxley broke the uncomfortable silence. “I think we’re missing the point here.” She motioned to Wolfe. “

Friends

, is the term the colonel used. I ask you all to disregard for a moment the events of the past four months, and recall our first meeting with the Sentinels, especially the pledges that were exchanged then.”

As the council members grumbled agreement in their individual fashions, Wolfe caught Exedore and Lang sending hopeful looks in his direction.

Then Edwards got to his feet to address the twelve.

“I’d be the first to admit that the Sentinels are both our friends and allies,” he began, “but there’s an important issue here that’s being neglected—the Invid. The Regent’s position is very clear: any assistance we render will be considered a further act of war. And he makes no distinction between Humans and XTs in this matter.”

Wolfe’s heart sank.

Edwards waited for the room to quiet. “I don’t think it’s necessary for me to remind the council of the presence of the Invid fleet. I’m not saying that if it came right down to mixing it up with them we couldn’t come out on top, but the results of an engagement in any case would have disastrous effects on our long-range goal—to repair our ship and return to Earth. I’m sure General Reinhardt and Admiral Forsythe concur in this matter.”

Reluctantly, Reinhardt inclined his head, averting Wolfe’s gaze. Edwards, however, was regarding Wolfe.

“The timing couldn’t be worse, Wolfe. I’m sorry. Perhaps if we wait until the truce is signed—say, six months or so—”

“They don’t have six months!” Wolfe shouted. He looked to the council. “One ship! One goddamned—”

“The council will take these things into consideration and render its judgment in a few days, Mr. Wolfe,” the senator bit out, his face flushed.

“But—”

“In a few days, Wolfe.”

The senator’s gavel went down.

“It is fate at work!” Tesla roared jubilantly. “Do you see, Burak—does it escape you how we came to be here, how we were

meant

to be here?”

Burak screwed up his devil’s face and gestured to their surroundings. “Here? Meant to be here?”

Tesla made a dismissive motion. “In this ship at this particular time,” he emphasized. “With the Regent close enough to touch.” His hands flexed around an invisible throat.

The two conspirators were sequestered in the fortress’s confinement area, opposite one another in separate laser-barred cells. Burak was sullen-faced, perched on the edge of an aluminum-framed bunk studying his hands, while across the corridor Tesla paced back and forth.

“We must find a way out of here,” the Invid said, coming to a halt. “I must … 

talk

to him, convince him—” He whirled to face Burak. “You don’t think they would keep my presence from him a secret, do you?”

Burak shrugged.

“I cannot take the chance,” he muttered, back in motion once more. “Burak, do you still wish to see your planet freed from its curse?”

“You know I do, Tesla. But how can I help you now? They’ve even taken your fruits from my care.”

“Never mind the fruits.” Tesla cautiously pushed his hand into the lasers’ field, and winced at the resultant burn. “Just do as I ask when the moment arrives. We have not come this far to be cheated out of our victory.”

Betrayal of a different sort had Minmei in tears in Edwards’s quarters. The general was lying on the bed, his back against the headboard, hands clasped behind his head. Minmei was well within reach in a chair by the bed, but otherwise remote. He had found her waiting for him upon his return from the council chambers, still ruffled from her impulsive flight to the fortress, her eyes red-rimmed and swollen. He didn’t need to ask; so instead, he had fixed himself a drink, kicked off his boots, and settled himself on the bed while she cried.

“He’s alive,” Edwards said now, reaching for the drink. “Isn’t that what counts?”

She lifted her face from her hands to stare at him. “That’s the problem.”

“Oh, you wish he was dead.”

Minmei sobbed and shook her head. “You bastard,” she told him.

Edwards laughed derisively and took a long pull from the glass, determined not to give in to her. “What do you want from me, Minmei?”

She wiped her eyes and glared at him. “Is it too much to expect some support?”

“You don’t need my support. You’re feeling guilty because Wolfe was stupid enough to think you’d just sit around and pine for him. And I suppose I don’t count anymore—I was just a shoulder to cry on.”

“Stop it, T.R.—please.” Minmei kneeled by the bed, resting her cheek on his thigh. “What am I going to say to him?”

Edwards made a harsh sound and pulled himself away from her sharply. He got up off the opposite side of the bed and walked to the center of the room, turning on her. “I don’t have time for this kind of nonsense. Tell him whatever you want. Just quit whining about it.”

He kept his back to her while he freshened his drink; but he could hear her slipping into her shoes and moving toward the door. “And tell him I said ‘Hi,’ ” he managed before the door closed.

His hand was shaking as he downed the second drink; he was about to head for the shower when his com tone sounded. It was Major Benson.

“Some interesting conversation down in confinement,” Edwards’s adjutant reported. “Seems there’s no love lost between Tesla and the Regent. He’s pretty anxious to talk to his commander in chief, but it sounds to me like he’s got murder on his mind.”

Edwards’s head went back in surprise. “An unexpected development.”

“He’s got some kind of deal going with that other alien. Can’t make too much sense of it. Some payback after Tesla sets himself up as number one.”

While Benson continued to fill in the scant details, Edwards concluded that an assassination might prove an advantageous event. He didn’t believe the Invid fleet would go to guns over the death of an imposter—there was simply too much at stake—and by

allowing

the murder, Edwards would be sending a clear message to the real Regent. More than that, Edwards could lay the blame for a complete diplomatic breakdown on Wolfe, and by extension, the rest of the Sentinels.

“Anything else from other quarters?” He heard Benson laugh shortly.

“You’ll love this. I think Lang is going to offer Wolfe the SDF-7. Of course Wolfe would have to make it look like he pirated the thing …”

Edwards mulled it over. A murder, the theft of a ship, an escape … and the council’s okay to hunt the assassins down—a chance to finish the job the Invid had begun.

Edwards smiled down on the intercom. “I’ll get back to you,” he told Benson.

CHAPTER
SIX

Somewhere along the line, everyone seemed to lose sight of the fact that love had won the First Robotech War. Now it was down to ships and body counts; it was no longer a fight for survival but a war for supremacy, a savage game

.

Selig Kahler,

The Tirolian Campaign

Love is a battlefield

.

Late twentieth-century song lyric

“It’s bad news, Colonel,” Dr. Lang told Wolfe two hours after the council had adjourned.

They were in Lang’s quarters now, along with Exedore, Janice, and the XT, Sarna. Wolfe had spent the intervening time pacing the fortress’s corridors like an expectant father. He had tried to locate Minmei, but no one seemed to know where she had disappeared to after leaving the docking bay with Edwards and his staff.

“The council is going to rule against you,” Lang continued, passing drinks to everyone but Sarna. “Huxley and Obstat are on our side, possibly Stinson, and Reinhardt’s vote counts for something, but we don’t have enough to sway the rest.”

Wolfe scowled and sipped from his glass. “You know what’s funny? In a crazy way I can see their point. You help us, and so-long any hopes of a truce.”

“You’re correct, Colonel,” Exedore affirmed. “The Sentinels were meant to be our ally, but instead they’ve become our liability. And as you yourself understand, Earth’s safety remains the council’s primary concern. A protracted war with the Invid will only diminish our chances of intercepting the Robotech Masters.”

Wolfe exchanged looks with Sarna and Janice; both women seemed curiously detached from the scene, almost as if they served some unknown, greater cause. “Look,” he said, putting his drink down in a gesture of finality, “now that we all understand the diplomatic angles of this thing,

how in the hell are we going to help them

!” He shot to his feet. “You think I can just sit around here, knowing what they’re going through? They’re

stranded

out there.”

“Perhaps there is a way,” Lang said after a brief silence. He shook his head back and forth. “It could have disastrous consequences, Colonel,

disastrous

. And you’d have to prepare yourselves for hardships of an entirely new order …”

Prison

, Wolfe thought.

As an appeasement to the Regent after the rescue

. Would Rick accept it, he wondered, or would they choose to die on Praxis—outcasts? “A ship,” Lang was saying when Wolfe looked up—

a ship

! He tried to follow the doctor’s nervous movements as he went on to explain.

“It’s one of our prototypes—not large, and not especially well-armed. But it’s capable of local fold operations, Wolfe, and there’s a skeleton crew standing by—volunteers, each one of them loyal to the admirals.”

Wolfe’s mouth dropped open; even Janice and Sarna were stunned by the doctor’s revelation. “But when could we get it?” he asked.

Exedore turned to him. “First, Colonel, you’ll be required to

steal

it.”

Just then the door tone to Lang’s quarters sounded. Lang looked around anxiously, then got up to answer it. A moment later, he was showing Lynn-Minmei into everyone’s midst.

“Janice,” Minmei said, approaching her former partner.

Janice evaded Minmei’s embrace, and nodded coolly.

“Lynn.”

The singer began to look around the room. Lang cleared his throat meaningfully. “I think we should give Minmei and the colonel some privacy,” he said, already ushering Exedore, Janice, and Sarna from the room.

When the door slid shut a moment later, it was Minmei who eased out of Jonathan’s embrace. “Lynn, what’s wrong?” he said, standing there with his arms open.

She fumbled with the hem of her jacket and forced a smile. “Colonel, I can’t tell you how hap—”

“ ‘Colonel’? Lynn, tell me what’s going on. I saw you with General Edwards this morning and now you’re calling me colonel after I haven’t seen you in six months …” He tried to hug her once more, but she deftly took his hand between hers and motioned him to the couch.

“Jonathan,” she began hesitantly, “I know you’re expecting us to take up where we left off, but things have changed.”

“So I keep hearing.”

Wolfe was suddenly defensive, and she picked up on his tone. “You have to remember, we only had a few days together. And until yesterday I thought …”

“You thought I was dead.”

Minmei nodded. “I didn’t know what to do. I was practically crazy with grief and anger.” She met his gaze and held it. “I hated you, Jonathan—hated you for leaving me, hated you for … so many things.”

Wolfe considered her words, then smiled in sudden realization. “And you found someone to fill in all those lonely hours.”

Minmei’s eyes flashed. “Why didn’t you tell me you were married?”

Wolfe tried to keep his face from Regesstering surprise. “We’re separated,” he said. “Besides, it never came up. I was going to tell you. It’s just that everything got fouled up.”

“ ‘Blame it on the Invid,’ ” Minmei said, almost cracking a smile. The phrase had become something of a catch-all excuse in Tiresia. Wolfe was blushing. “Listen,” she told him, “I’m not angry anymore. I’m just … happy that all of you are alive. How are Rick and Lisa? And Max—”

“So when did you start seeing Edwards?”

Minmei stood up and stepped away from the couch, wringing her hands. “I told you: you weren’t there for me, Jonathan. I needed someone to turn to.”

“And you picked

Edwards

?” Wolfe shook his head in amazement. “Don’t you realize he’s against everything we stand for? He’s nothing but a self-serving, egotistical maniac.”

“I won’t have you talking about him like that!” Minmei said angrily. “He treated me with kindness and respect, and what’s more, he’s the only one interested in making peace with the Invid and putting a stop to all this madness. Not like you and the rest of those … 

Sentinels

, tearing around space stirring things up, not giving a damn what goes on back here!”

Wolfe was too numb to respond. Edwards, he thought, was like some kind of toxic spill, polluting everything he touched. Minmei had her arms folded across her chest, as though she were trying to hold herself together; her foot was tapping the floor. Wolfe reached for his drink and drained the glass.

“Well, I guess there’s nothing more to say, is there?”

Her lips were a thin line, trembling; then all at once she seemed to relax. “I want us to be friends, Jonathan. I’ve opened a kind of canteen in Tiresia, and I’d love you to see it. Will you promise to stop by?”

He regarded her as one would a memory, mulling over her performance, the scene the two of them had just played out. “Sure,” he told her absently, “I’ll stop by.”

“There’s a lot you’ll be able to do here—all sorts of things. You’ll see.” Minmei seemed excited, like she had won a court case or something. She smiled at him from the doorway. “See you soon, okay?”

Wolfe forced a smile and raised his empty glass to her. “To friendship,” he offered.

She threw him a wink and stepped out.

Applause

, Wolfe said to himself.

While Wolfe and Minmei were having their heart-to-heart and Exedore and Sarna were off somewhere discussing Haydon IV’s curious history, Lang took his AI creation to his office and dumped Janice’s memory into one of the lab’s databanks. He scanned the android’s recordings, briefly reviewing the events of the Karbarran and Praxian campaigns, but focusing in on Janice’s monitorings and evaluations of the Sentinels’ personnel. There was data about Veidt and Sarna, the beings from Haydon IV, that justified further analysis, and some anomalies concerning the Tiresian Rem; but for the moment Lang’s main concerns were Burak and Tesla. He had found the Invid’s bioreadings baffling, much different from those of the so-called scientists, and superior in some respects to the Regent himself! Moreover, the data provided suggested that Tesla was after nothing less than the Regent’s throne. And apparently the Perytonian, Burak, had been assisting him in some unspecified way. Lang reminded himself to alert Wolfe to these matters.

Minmei was gone by the time Lang and the others returned to the scientist’s quarters, and Wolfe seemed sullen, just as Lang had anticipated. There was a nearly empty brandy bottle on the low table in front of the couch.

“I want to talk about that ship, Lang,” the colonel said without preamble. “When can we have it?—

steal

it, I mean.”

“The sooner the better.”

Wolfe narrowed his eyes. “What’s it going to mean to the summit?”

Lang let out his breath and traded looks with Exedore. If Wolfe didn’t want to mention Minmei, it was fine with him.

“We’ve already discussed possible scenarios with Reinhardt and Forsythe. It could set things back some, of course, but as long as we can make the Regent believe that you acted on your own, I don’t think we’ll be jeopardizing the truce.”

Exedore concurred. “Furthermore, we think it best if you take Janice, Sarna, and Burak with you. There’s no telling what the Regent might expect in the way of reprisals for our … 

carelessness

.”

“We wouldn’t have it any other way,” Janice chimed in, seemingly unaware of the gaps in her recent past.

“What about Tesla?” Sarna thought to ask.

Lang stroked his chin. “We’ve been wondering about that. He could represent a welcome chip at our bargaining table. But as I understand it, that’s been his primary function all along.”

Wolfe snorted. “I’m not saying we couldn’t get along without him, but he has been useful to us.”

“Not if the Regent begins to look upon him as a traitor,” Exedore saw fit to point out.

Lang thought about the data he had screened, and Tesla’s ambitions. “Take him,” he decided at last. “I think he’ll continue to serve you. In fact, from what Janice told me of the mutiny, our Tesla seems to have his sights set on leadership of the Invid. You might be able to encourage that some, Wolfe.”

Wolfe slapped his hands on his thighs and stood up. “What are we waiting for? What about weapons and a shuttlecraft to reach the ship?”

“That’s all been arranged,” Exedore told him.

“What if Edwards decides to pursue us?”

“Somehow I don’t think he will,” Lang speculated. “But you will be hunted. You’ll have to leave Praxis and remain incommunicado for a time.”

Suddenly Wolfe began to feel the immensity of it all. “Can you get Burak and Tesla out of lockup without arousing suspicion?”

“I think so,” Lang answered him from the com.

Wolfe heard him tell the guards in the confinement area to have the two XTs brought to the laboratory for testing. Then he saw Lang’s face pale.

“What is it?”

“They’ve already been released,” Lang said. “On Colonel Wolfe’s request.”

Elsewhere in the fortress, Burak and Tesla were moving cautiously along an empty corridor space, closing on an area that had been designated for the Regent and his retinue. Only minutes before, they had overpowered their armed escorts; it had proved as simple a matter as it had been to inveigle information concerning the location of the Regent’s guest quarters. Tesla was whispering self-congratulatory praises to himself now, while Burak remained in the larger being’s shadow, fearful of discovery by Human personnel.

“What are you shivering about?” Tesla said, coming around, bold and aggravated. He motioned broadly to the corridor. “Fate has cleared a path for us.”

Burak had to admit that that seemed to be the case. They had seen no one since leaving confinement; in fact, it was almost as if someone were running along ahead of them, sweeping the place clean. But what Tesla didn’t realize was that Burak was as frightened of fate as he was anything else. It was fate that kept his planet locked in the recurring past; fate that had gotten him into this mess to begin with …

“I can feel his presence,” Tesla announced, stopping short. Burak bumped into him and backed up a step. Tesla appeared to be growing larger as he approached his quarry. “Soon, my friend, soon.”

It dawned on Burak that the Invid had more on his mind than talk, and he wanted no part of murder. He said as much to Tesla as they approached an intersection midway along the corridor. “I—I’ll wait for you here—you know, s-stand guard.”

Tesla looked down at him. “Fine. You do that,” he sneered, and moved off into the perpendicular corridor.

A short distance from the intersection Tesla came upon the first line of Invid sentries. Recognizing the Regent’s chief scientist, they immediately genuflected and offered their salute. Then four of the Regent’s elite soldiers came forward to escort Tesla into the Regent’s private chambers.

“Tesla!” the simulagent gasped, spilling a lapful of fruits to the floor as he stood up. “They’ve released you?” His snout went up in an approximation of a laugh. “I knew I could do it!”

Tesla regarded the gesture with indifference, too caught up in the moment to realize just who and what he was dealing with.

“I have things to discuss with you, sire,” he said, taking a menacing step forward.

“Yes, I’m sure you do! Tesla, I’m delighted to see you.”

“We’ll see,” Tesla told him. “But perhaps you should reserve judgment until you’ve heard me out.”

The simulagent’s elongated brow wrinkled. There was something in Tesla’s tone … His black eyes began to dart around the room.

The guards

, he remembered, and made a move toward the door.

“Don’t even think of it,” Tesla said, stepping into his path. He thrust a powerful finger into the simulagent’s chest and held his other hand up for inspection. “Five fingers, Regent.

Five!

There was a time when your wife alone had five fingers. Doesn’t that tell you something about me?”

At Tesla’s shove, the false Regent fell backward onto a table that somehow managed to support his bulk. “Tesla, you’re mad! What are you trying to do?”

“Mad? Anything but mad, Your

Highness

! I have been ingesting the fruits of other worlds, while you’ve been playing silly war games with these Humans. And as a result I’ve had my inner eye opened to transcendent realities, while you’ve set your gaze on meaningless conquests. I have been

evolving

, while you have sunk to your neck back into the slime that gave us birth. The fruits were meant for you, but it is

Tesla

who has reaped their subtle benefits. You used to ridicule my delvings into such things, but regard me now: I

live

, Regent,” Tesla intoned, raising his arms above his head, “and you will

die

unless you abdicate to me!”

The simulagent opened his mouth to cry for help, but nothing emerged.

“Kneel before me!” Tesla demanded, gesturing to the floor.

Paralyzed with fear, the simulagent gulped and found his voice. “Tesla, listen to me: you don’t understand. I—”

“Kneel before me!”

“I—”

Tesla grabbed the false Regent by the cowl and dragged him to his knees. “I will rule in your place. I will lead our race from this moment on. Do you agree to it?”

“Tesla,” the simulagent pleaded. “I can’t agree—”

“Fool! Would you force me to kill you!” His hands were clasped around the simulagent’s thick neck now.

“—”

“Abdicate!”

“—”

“Surrender to me!”

“—”

The simulagent’s four-fingered hands tore desperately at Tesla’s own, but could not counter the strength madness had lent them. Tesla’s powerful thumbs found soft and vulnerable places as he continued to squeeze the life from his would-be foe. Black eyes bulged and a horrible death rattle began to emerge from the simulagent’s ruptured throat. Then it was over.

He withdrew his hands and stepped back, as if waking from some somnambulistic experience. The Regent’s body was sprawled on the floor below him, already drained of life’s vernal colors. This being, who had been like a father to him … And suddenly Tesla knew a gut-wrenching fear—a fear intense enough to engulf all the anger and hatred and maniacal urges he had given vent to only a moment before. He turned to the door, down in a fugitive’s stoop, fluids running wild within him. He had been misguided!

He could not take the Regent’s place!

The Regess would murder him for his betrayal. He would be devolved to the lowliest life-form, a mere troglodyte, exiled from his own kind. And what was he to do now?…

He remembered the Sentinels. Surely Wolfe would be returning to Praxis, he thought. He would persuade Wolfe and the others to take him along, remain with them until all this blew over. The Regess might rule for a time, but sooner or later he would assume his rightful place and rule by her side—the Sentinels would encourage him to do so!

Tesla gave a final look at the body. He began composing himself for the guards, then realized that no such charade was necessary. With the Regent dead, they were little more than mindless devices; it was possible they wouldn’t even remember Tesla’s visit.

With these things in mind, he opened the door.

Lang, Wolfe, and the others had split up to search the fortress for Burak and Tesla, after agreeing on a time to rendezvous in the shuttle launch bay. With an all-Human crew aboard—save the Regent and his retinue—there wasn’t much chance of the XTs escaping detection; but one never knew what to expect from Tesla. There was no time to investigate the release order that had freed them, either, but Lang promised to look into the matter later on.

It was Exedore who discovered Burak lurking in one of the corridors near the ship’s designated Invid sector. It occurred to him that the fortress seemed unusually deserted, but he barely gave it a second thought. He was explaining the need for urgency to the Perytonian when Tesla showed up all in a rush, looking like he had just seen the face of the Creator.

“Where have you been?” Exedore said, toe-to-toe with the towering Invid.

Tesla began to stutter a response, then remembered himself and said, “I don’t have to answer to some Zentraedi clone.”

Exedore bristled at the comment, but decided against engaging in what would be a useless argument. Instead, he drew a handgun, informed the two of Wolfe’s departure plans, and hurried them along to the hold. Wolfe, Janice, and Sarna were already there, anxious to get under way. The guards—some of whom were part of the plan—had already been dispatched, so it was safe for the moment for both Lang and Exedore to be on the scene.

“I guess this is good-bye for a while,” Wolfe was saying while Sarna and an armed Janice escorted Burak and Tesla aboard. “I don’t know what to say, Lang.”

“Just pray we’re not too late,” Lang said soberly. He offered Wolfe his hand. “Godspeed, Colonel.”

Wolfe stepped back and saluted Lang and Exedore, gave one last look around the bay, and hastened up the ramp.

Lang said, “Have we done the right thing, Exedore?”

“We do what we can,” the Zentraedi told him.

They didn’t wait around to watch the launch.

“They’re on their way, General,” Colonel Adams reported to Edwards a short time later. “Your orders?”

“Your men are to give pursuit, but tell them to keep their enthusiasm in check. Just be sure it looks good, and make certain that the ship is allowed to fold. I don’t want any slipups now.”

“Roger, sir,” Adams said, and signed off.

Edwards collapsed onto his bed, weary from the choreographing the plan had entailed. Freeing the aliens, supplying them with what they needed to know, keeping the corridors clear, instructing the guards in confinement and in the shuttle bay how to behave … It was more than most men could have handled. But then again, Edwards reminded himself, he was not

most men

.

And so far things had gone off without a wrinkle; the Invid imposter was surely dead, and Wolfe was a criminal. The council could not help but see things his way from now on, and the threat of a stepped-up war with the Invid would result in the construction of the fleet he needed to carry out his more important plan:

the eventual conquest of Earth

.

CHAPTER
SEVEN

Miriya Parina Sterling’s rescue of the Spherisian crystallite [sic] was an act of derring-do worthy to stand beside the infamous “costume change” that had earned her husband such plaudits during the early stages of the First Robotech War

.

LeRoy La Paz,

The Sentinels

“I want someone to sweep the caves,” Rick said into his helmet pickup. “Then we’re out of here!”

Bela volunteered. Rick looked around and spied her down below, waving to him from the area the GMU had occupied before Cabell’s desperate plan had been set in motion. Rick chinned the helmet stud again and told Bela to make it quick. He saw her, Kami, and Learna scurry off toward the mouth of the cave and disappear inside. Rick called up a display on the helmet’s faceshield; then, satisfied that he had sufficient oxygen remaining, he scrambled up the steep slope toward the relocated vehicle.

Praxis’s atmosphere had grown superheated and unbreathable, forcing everyone but Veidt and Teal into helmets and environment suits. From the high ground above the caverns, where the GMU was maintaining its precariously angled position, Rick glanced back at the wrinkled terrain. Eruptions of volcanic light could be seen through the dense shroud that stretched from the hills all the way to the base of a distant escarpment. And out of this storm came two lone Veritechs, returned from a final reconnaissance flight. Rick tuned into the command freq, only to have his worst fears confirmed: there wasn’t a safe region to be found anywhere on the planet.

The Alphas whooshed in overhead, reconfigured, and maneuvered into the open maw of the GMU’s ordnance bay. The Hovertanks and the Skull’s VTs were already aboard; only two mecha remained outside—the VTs Rick and Max would pilot up once Vince Grant gave the go signal.

Rick dug his toes into the ground and completed the climb, out of breath when he reached the rim of the chute the Sentinels had blown open in the roof of the cave. The front end of the GMU overhung the rim, elevated now by the hundreds of orbs that had streamed from the cave after the chute had been opened. It was Cabell’s idea, and Veidt’s peculiar talents, that made the plan workable.

As a last resort the Sentinels had decided to enlarge the diameter of the cave’s internal passageways to accommodate the huge creatures stuck for want of an egress suited to their size. That way, Cabell reasoned, they could at least raise a few more Alphas before the planet blew itself to smithereens—providing of course that the orbs could be made to understand that the Sentinels weren’t trying to destroy them, as they had those spiderlike monstrosities. And assuming for the time being that Wolfe and Janice, or

someone

, would be coming to their rescue.

Rick couldn’t recall just who had pointed out that some of the larger orbs were still going to face difficulties reaching the entrance; but it was Veidt who proposed boring an artificial chimney through the roof of the cave. Additionally, the Haydonite maintained, the Sentinels were wasting their time airlifting individual mecha, when the increased supply of globe-beings would allow them to raise the entire GMU—if the mobile base could be positioned in such a way that the orbs could get underneath. (Even with its one-hundred-foot tires, the thing was still too low to accommodate the largest of the orbs.) Vince, Rick, Lisa, and some of the others had determined that the GMU could sustain itself in orbit for a limited time, thanks to the modifications the landcrawler had undergone during its stint with the

Farrago

. It would mean a dangerously uncomfortable existence for as long as Praxis held together; but even weightlessness and privation were preferable to the death they were bound to suffer on the surface.

So after Veidt had relayed the details of the scheme to the orbs (who were in his words “thankful” and more than willing to reciprocate), and firepower had opened the chute, the GMU was repositioned at the rim of the opening to catch the creatures as they levitated from the cave.

As Rick regarded the all-but-floating vehicle now, he decided it was the most bizarre sight he had ever seen: the GMU looked as though it were sitting atop a mountain of unburstable bubbles. Veidt was hovering nearby directing the flow. And in spite of the scale and the incredible size of some of the orbs, the end result of the Sentinels’ partnership with the creatures had rendered the GMU almost toylike in appearance.

Rick continued to watch in amazement as more and more orbs attached themselves to the cluster. The GMU’s massive wheels were fully off the ground now, and Rick was anticipating Vince Grant’s words even before they issued through the helmet speakers.

“The ride’s starting, Rick. You better get the Alphas up.” Grant’s tone was one of excited disbelief.

Rick turned in time to see Veidt give him a knowing nod, signaling that he had “heard” Grant’s message. When the Haydonite began to move off in the direction of Max’s Alpha, elevating some as he hovered along the rim of the chute, Rick chinned Bela’s frequency.

“A moment more,” the Praxian told him. “Teal is with us.”

“What’s she doing down there?” Rick asked, surprised. “Everyone was supposed to be aboard by now.”

“You will hear it from her own mouth,” Bela told him shortly.

Rick understood that it had something to do with Baldan’s death, and thought better than to press for details. “All right,” he said. “Tell Kami and Learna they’ll be riding with Max and Veidt. You and Teal will go up with me.”

Bela acknowledged, and Rick hurried off to the Guardianmode Alpha, which was sitting at the edge of the GMU’s bubble mountain like some diminutive bird-of-prey. He threw himself up into the cockpit and brought the mecha’s engines to life. Beside him the mountain was lifting off, while Praxis continued to rumble its ominous farewells.

In Fantomaspace, meanwhile, the pirated shuttle carrying Wolfe and company from the SDF-3 was closing fast on the anchored dreadnought Lang had been instrumental in procuring.

“They’re warning us to come about and return to the fortress,” Janice told Wolfe from the command seat. “Scanners show two gunships on our tail.”

Wolfe leaned forward to study a monitor, straining against the chair’s harness. Elsewhere in the small command cabin, Sarna and Burak were similarly strapped in. Too large for any two of the shuttle’s acceleration couches, Tesla was in the cargo hold, shackled but free-floating.

“Any word from the cruiser?” Wolfe asked in a determined voice.

“Negative. They’re not even responding to the SDF-3 bridge.”

“Good. Now if we can just get there in time …”

A blaring sound began to wail from the control station’s external speakers, and Janice swung to an adjacent console. “We’re being targeted.”

“Ignore it,” Wolfe snapped. “The first one will be a warning shot. With a little luck we’ll be too close to the cruiser for them to risk a second.”

“Steady …” Janice cautioned, and a split second later a bolt of angry light strobed into the cabinspace through the forward viewports. A second burst followed, singeing the shuttle’s radome. Displays and monitors winked out, then revived.

Wolfe showed the others a roguish grin. “Now we couldn’t answer them if we wanted to.”

“Cruiser’s docking bay is opening. The bridge is patching into our guidance system. The SDF-3 thinks they’re assisting in our capture.”

“Let them take us in,” Wolfe ordered. He turned his head to take a final look at the SDF-3, suppressing a wish to see the fortress holed and derelict.

Janice straightened in her chair to obstruct his view. “The fortress is repeating the warning. Admiral Forsythe—”

“To hell with them,” Wolfe barked.

Four crewmembers were on hand to meet the shuttle in the docking bay. “We were attached to Major Carpenter’s command,” one of the young officers explained as Wolfe stepped out. “Welcome aboard, sir.”

Sarna hovered alongside Wolfe; Janice was last out, keeping a watchful eye on Burak and Tesla.

Wolfe accepted the proffered hands. “Carpenter, huh? Good man. Sorry he can’t be with us.”

“Dr. Lang has other plans for him, sir,” an ensign supplied.

“So I understand,” Wolfe said. Then, as if remembering: “Listen, we’ve got to do something about those gun—”

“All taken care of, sir. We put a few shots across their bow and they showed their bellies.”

Wolfe returned a weak smile. “You know what that means, Captain—you’re committed.”

“We were all along. Now we can act on it.”

“All right,” Wolfe said, nodding, his smile broadening. “Let’s get under way.”

As they left the bay, the ensign added, “Course is set for Praxis.”

“What’s our ETA?” Janice wanted to know.

“Two days relative.” The captain saw their surprise. “We’ve made some improvements since you left.”

“I guess you have,” Wolfe enthused. And he began to think about those improvements as the captain hurried him to the bridge. Carpenter was one lucky soul, getting a shot at returning to Earth. Wolfe never would have believed he could be envious of such an opportunity, but the events of the past thirty-six hours had punched a lot of holes in his former thinking.

Things have changed

, he seemed to hear both Lang and Minmei say; and indeed they had. He would be the next to return Earthside, he decided. One way or another. And for the first time in a year he thought about the family he had left behind, and the love he would try to reawaken.

The orbs had lifted the GMU to an altitude of almost twenty miles by time Rick and Max brought their Alphas aboard. Below, hidden beneath a swirling, agitated pall of cloud cover, Praxis was fractured beyond recognition, the molten stuff of its core geysering to the surface and boiling away the planet’s oceans and fragile atmosphere. Microclimates and cyclonic storms added to the fury, unleashing blinding bolts of lightning and torrents of black rain, while volcanoes answered the skies with thunderous volleys of their own making. Praxis bellowed and roared like some tortured animal, rattling the GMU with its clamorous cries.

In the base’s pressurized ordnance bay, Rick and the others began to wonder whether they would make it after all. Veidt had told them that the orbs could only remain clustered for a short time once they reached the outer edge of the planet’s envelope; but with Praxis seemingly entering its final phase, the base would need to be hundreds of thousands of miles out—at least as far as the planet’s primary satellite. The way Cabell saw it, the Sentinels had one recourse: to use the most fully fueled VTs and Logans to reach the far side of the moon. A preliminary count of the available mecha, however, had already pointed up the cruel truth half the Sentinels would have to face; and even so, what would the rest have accomplished outside of prolonging the inevitable? Were they to throw together a bivouac on the moon’s frozen surface, or simply wander the wastes like some misguided flock until the mechas’ power and life-support systems failed?

In another part of the bay, Gnea and Bela were asking Teal why she had gone back to the cave. Neither of the Praxians knew much about Spheris or the ways of its crystalline life-forms, but the women guessed that Teal would have been just as happy to have remained on Praxis with her dead comrade.

“But we’ve all endured losses and hardships,” Bela was telling her, trying to be helpful. “Recall how Lron and Crysta suffered when the

Farrago

met its end, and how Gnea and I grieved for our Sisterhood. Now our very world …”

Lron, who was standing within earshot, made a kind of mournful growl. “Death is the way of the world,” he muttered in the usual Karbarran fashion. “We do not mourn the loss of our friends; we are resigned to such things.”

“I’m not mourning for Baldan,” Teal said, looking up at him and Crysta. “I’m upset about the child.”

“The dead child,” Gnea started to say.

“It’s not dead,” Teal said harshly, standing up and walking away from them.

“It lives?” Bela said, catching up and spinning her around by the arm. “And you would knowingly abandon it?”

“Let her be, Bela,” Lron cut in. “You know nothing of their ways.”

“I know what it means to leave a being to die,” she answered him. “Why, Teal?” she asked.

The Spherisian gazed at her coldly. “Because I will have to care for the infant.

That

is our way.”

Teal snatched her arm away and Bela threw back her broad shoulders. “I will return for the child.

I

will raise it, if you won’t.”

Teal whirled on her, pointing a hand accusingly. “What do Praxians know of motherhood? I forbid you!”

Even Gnea had misgivings about the idea, and risked a step into Bela’s path. “Think twice, Sister. Besides, it is too late—Halidarre rests and our Praxis is out of reach.”

“I’ll take you,” a female voice rose up from the group of mecha pilots that had gathered round. Miriya Sterling eased her way her way through the group, until she was toe-to-toe with the amazon. “I’ll take you,” she repeated.

“A Praxian and a Zentraedi sharing the same small space?” Gnea scoffed. “Even such a mission of mercy—”

“No matter what you may think of me,” the former Quadrano ace responded, “I know as much about the sanctity of life as any of you do. Give it a try, Bela—for the infant’s sake.” She thrust a helmet into Bela’s hands.

Bela held on to the thing for a moment, then donned it, and raced with Miriya for one of the Skull’s red VTs.

Rick didn’t even consider trying to stop them—not that Bela or Miriya would have listened to him in any case. He had noticed a kind of latent xenophobia surfacing among the Sentinels—something stress had brought out—and reasoned that a rescue mission could provide just the rallying point everyone needed.

Bela and Miriya were suited up by the time Rick came over to wish them luck; and minutes later the bay had been cleared for the VT’s launch. Miriya entered course headings as the mecha dropped down along the GMU’s substantially reduced orb cluster and into the dark night of the planet’s soul.

Once through the shroud, the two women witnessed for themselves the final, tormented moments of Praxis’s tectonic death. Great, furious rivers of molten stuff coursed across the planet’s surface now, burying forests and villages in liquid fire. Here and there, where the rivers were abruptly dammed by ground swells, were crater-sized lakes of lava, flailing white-hot tendrils into an equally hellish sky. Praxis seemed to be expanding while they watched, bursting its geological seams.

Miraculously, the region around the caves was practically unchanged, except for an expanding flow of lava that had sealed the entrance to the central cavern. The artificial chute, however, remained open and accessible.

“We’ll have to go in through the top,” Miriya shouted, struggling to keep the VT stabilized in the face of intense updrafts from the liquified valley floor.

Miriya imaged the VT over to Guardian mode and dropped the mecha into a controlled fall through the wide chimney the Sentinels had blasted through fifty feet of porous rock. With external temperatures Regesstering in the red, there was no leaving the Veritech for a personal rescue; but years of experience in handling the mecha allowed Miriya to accomplish something even more extraordinary: foot thrusters holding the mecha motionless only inches above a pool of lava that had seeped in through the mouth of the cave, she utilized the radome to rake the throbbing crystal away from the wall where Teal had dropped it. Then, when the Spherisian infant was within reach, she took it gingerly into the VT’s metal-shod hand, brought up the thrusters, and took the Guardian up the chimney, in a kind of stork reversal.

All the while, Bela was offering words of encouragement, and free of the chute now, she reached forward to give Miriya an affectionate squeeze on the shoulder.

Praxis did all it could to ground the tiny craft, hurling plumes of fire at its tail and chasing it to the edge of space with savage stabs of lightning; but there was no stopping Miriya, no way she would permit the planet to reclaim the child they had rescued from its unharnessed evil.

Once more through the pall, the VT reached the deceptive safety of the planet’s stratosphere. Locked on to the GMU’s frequency now, Miriya and Bela began to relax some; but as they approached the ten-wheeled battlewagon and its support cluster, they saw something that delivered them to the edge of panic: both the vehicle’s launch doors were wide open, and local space was littered with VTs and Logans, even half-a-dozen reconfigured Hovertanks. Miriya and Bela thought for a moment that things had reached the hopeless level, and someone had given the abandon-ship order, a reckless last gasp for the moon …

Then they spotted the dreadnought, Wolfe’s bright spot in the galaxy—the SDF-7 rescue vessel.

One day Rick and Lisa would compare the rescue of the Sentinels to the SDF-1’s rescue of Macross from the Solar System’s outer circle of frozen hell; there was the same sense of urgency, the same logistical problems and sacrifices—and chief among these would be the GMU itself. With the orbs beating a fast path for the safety of interstellar space, the Sentinels had no way to maneuver the base aboard, and there was no docking bay in the SDF-7 large enough to contain it even if they could. But just now, to everyone but Vince Grant, the GMU was of secondary concern. Distance was the crucial matter at hand—how much could be put between the cruiser and Praxis, and just how quickly.

They were close to a million miles out when the planet came apart, when enough force to obliterate the moon—the place Rick had recently seen as their possible salvation. Bela and Gnea were on the bridge to witness the brief fireball that flared where a world had once turned.

“We are homeless,” Bela cried.

But from what Rick and the others were beginning to understand, the Praxians weren’t the only ones. Again a comparison with the SDF-1 would present itself, the memory of a council’s edict that forbade the fortress to remain the Earthspace, an edict that effectively betrayed the Robotech Defense Force.

And such betrayals

, Rick reminded himself,

had a cruel way of balancing out

 …

Superluminal Reflex drives kept the fortress well ahead of Praxian debris, and during that brief run to the outer limits of the planetary system, Wolfe related to his dazed comrades the sobering tale of his short stay aboard the SDF-3. Wolfe knew nothing of the simulagent’s assassination, and Tesla certainly wasn’t talking; but even without that subplot, there was more than enough to leave the Humans dumbfounded.

As they continued to rehash the details, a curious understanding of the council’s decision began to undermine their initial outrage. But that Wolfe should have to steal a ship, and that the Sentinels would as a consequence be viewed as outlaws … these things were not so easily embraced. For the XT Sentinels, the revelations only meant that they had gained a second enemy instead of a much-needed ally. Among the group, however, there was the beginning of a renewed cohesiveness.

Rick thought he detected something unsettling in Wolfe, but he dismissed it, speculating that he would probably have returned in even worse shape.

“Do we return to Tirol, or continue on as planned?” Rick asked everyone. “If we opt for going back, it could mean prison for most of us, death for some,” he added, glancing over at Wolfe. “On the other hand, it might give us a chance to explain ourselves to the council and keep Edwards from gaining any further influence.”

“What do we care about your General Edwards?” Lron shouted, looking for support from the other XTs. “The Invid are our enemy. And if your forces decide to side with them against us, so be it.”

Kami, Learna, Crysta, Bela, and Gnea voiced their support for Lron’s position. Cabell, Rem, Janice, Sarna, and Veidt were curiously quiet.

Rick silenced them and directed the question to the RDF contingent. Lisa stood up to answer him.

“I understand the need for countering Edwards’s influence,” she said in a way that was aimed at Rick, “but we have to consider the broader picture. Our return could place the council in an awkward position with regard to further negotiations.”

“We’ll accomplish the same thing with continued acts of aggression directed against Invid-held planets,” someone from the Wolfe Pack pointed out. “What happens when Edwards comes gunning for us—do we fight our own forces?”

Vince Grant shot to his feet and turned on the pilot, even as Jean was trying to calm him down. “The council would never bow to the Regent’s demands that we be hunted down! They’d break the truce before they’d do that—”

“Not if Edwards is running the council!”

“Waste ’em!” said a Skull pilot. “They were ready to let us die on Praxis! I say we’re free agents!”

XTs and Humans cheered. Rick found himself thinking about pirates, and happened to notice Jack Baker slapping Lron on the back, while Karen raised her eyes in an imploring gesture.

“Put it to a vote,” Max suggested.

Rick scanned the crowd and received nods of agreement from Lisa, Wolfe, Miriya, Vince, and Cabell. “Will it be Garuda, then, or back to Tirol?” he asked loud enough to be heard above the tumult.

“Garuda!”

came the overwhelming response.

“Then it’s settled,” he said, aware once more of how he had taken charge without being asked. And from across the room, Lisa’s eyes burned into his own.

CHAPTER
EIGHT

I’m looking forward to Garuda in a way that has nothing to do with what I felt toward either Karbarra or Praxis. All things point to the possibility of our being able to regroup and restrengthen ourselves there, even if we will have to suit up for the visit. God knows Lisa and I need some uninterrupted time together. We spoke of dreams tonight, and made love like we haven’t in far too long. It comes down to dreams in the end—holding fast to them no matter what else is thrown in your path. I want to get back to that place in my life, and Garuda sounds like it was made to order

.

From the collected journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

Once again the Expeditionary mission’s Plenipotentiary Council found itself in extraordinary session, the third time in as many days. Ex-colonel Jonathan Wolfe and his small band of rebels had stolen a prototype warship and folded from the Valivarre system, after assassinating the Invid Regent. The ruler’s body had been taken back to the fleet flagship by his retinue of scientists and soldiers, who were promising a swift and violent response to the Humans’ treachery. Ships under General Edwards’s command had chased the pirated cruiser, but stopped short of following it into hyperspace. It was believed, although hardly certain at this point, that Wolfe was returning to Praxis; but the Sentinels’ next destination was anyone’s guess. And if their movements were open to question, their motives were positively baffling. Edwards was arguing this very point in the council chambers now, moving through the room like a trial lawyer, his speech angry and impassioned, his reasoning all but unassailable.

“Furthermore,” he said, a forefinger raised, “it’s my belief that Wolfe’s story was a ruse. The Sentinels sent Wolfe here to kill the Regent. All his talk about the destruction of the

Farrago

and the rescue mission to Praxis was engineered as a diversion.”

“That’s arrant nonsense,” Lang objected, getting to his feet and turning to face the rest of his group. “It was the Regent who first informed us of the destruction of the ship—”

“They

allowed

his troops to destroy the ship,” Edwards cut in, but Thurgood Stinson quickly waved him silent.

“What’s more,” Lang said after settling his gaze on Edwards, “the Sentinels had no way of knowing the Regent’s fleet was here.”

Edwards laughed. “Need I point out that they could have been monitoring our transmissions, even while remaining incommunicado?”

“But to what

end

, General?” Lang asked. “Why would they knowingly sabotage the negotiations? Really, this makes no sense whatsoever, and I would caution the council to understand that General Edwards is offering us nothing more than an

interpretation

of the facts.”

“The facts, Doctor, are that the Regent is dead and one of our ships has been stolen. What more do you require?”

Tight-lipped, Lang took his seat. Senator Longchamps cleared his throat meaningfully. “The council appreciates Dr. Lang’s reminder, but I for one would like to hear the general’s assessment of the Sentinels’ motives.”

Edwards sat in silence for a moment, then stood up and said, “They’ve become a private army. They’ve liberated Karbarra—Praxis, for all we know—and their plan is to continue in this vein until the entire local group is theirs to command. In the meantime, our efforts here will have been neatly undermined. The Invid will return in force and in the end it will be the Sentinels who will rescue us.”

“This is too much,” Justine Huxley interjected. “Admiral Hunter would never stoop to such measures.”

“Then why did he resign his command?” Edwards threw back at her. “And why is it that the whole RDF apparat decided to follow his lead.” Edwards enumerated on his fingers: “The Skull, the Wolfe Pack, Vince and Jean Grant, even the Tiresian, Cabell. Hunter didn’t like the idea of answering to the council’s demands, and now he’s out for himself.”

Edwards returned to his chair, leaving the council members to argue among themselves. In the seat adjacent, General Reinhardt wore a look of complete disgust.

After a few minutes of deliberation, Longchamps announced, “The council is not yet fully convinced of the scenario you detail, General Edwards, nor of your interpretations of the Sentinels’ ‘master plan,’ if you will.”

Edwards scowled, waiting for the senator to continue.

“However, the fact remains that the actions of ex-Colonel Wolfe, whatever their motivation, have placed us in a serious predicament. The council wishes to know if the Invid commanders have indicated to you any steps that can be taken to offset this injustice.”

Edwards stood up, suppressing a self-satisfied grin. “Right now they seem willing to accept the facts just as we’ve presented them: Wolfe acted on his own. But I must include this caveat: these are relatively low-echelon personnel we’re dealing with, and I’m certain that once the Regess hears of this, we’ll see renewed fighting—perhaps on a scale more reminiscent of the Robotech War than anything we’ve experienced here.”

He waited for this to sink in before continuing. “As for what we can do, I would suggest that short of a preemptive strike against their forces right now, or the capture of the Sentinels, we devote all our efforts to the construction of a fleet of ships to rival their own.”

Again, there were arguments and objections from various council members, but Longchamps silenced these with his gavel. “Would you be willing to oversee this project, General, if the council so votes?”

Edwards inclined his head slightly. “I would be honored, Senator. Of course, I would require the full cooperation of Dr. Lang’s Robotech teams and control of the mining operations on Fantoma.”

“Naturally,” Longchamps said. “We will adjourn to consider our decision.”

Edwards grinned in spite of himself. He shifted his gaze slightly to show Lang the cold hostility in his eye. Lang tried to return it, but could not.

The round had gone to Edwards.

In his hive complex on Optera, the Invid Regent sat alone with his two pet Hellcats, too stunned by the reports of his simulagent’s murder to speak. He held his snaillike head in his hands, sunk deep into a sense of despair that was entirely new to him. Once before he had experienced such torment: when his wife had confessed to him her love for Zor.

Betrayal

, he thought, in the soft glow of the room’s commo sphere.

“Your Highness, shall I give the order to attack?” a lieutenant repeated cautiously.

The Regent regarded the soldier’s image in the sphere and sighed heavily. “No,” he answered quietly. “Return the fleet to Optera, and tell no one that I live. It may benefit me to remain hidden for a while longer.”

“But, Your Highness, are the Humans to go unpunished? And what of Tesla?”

The Regent could feel the lieutenant’s anger, and it was enough to refresh him momentarily. He had not been completely abandoned, then;

loyalty

still lived.

“For the moment do nothing more than let our intentions be known. Inform the Human high command that we hold them responsible for the … Regent’s death, and that terms for a cease-fire will not be discussed until the Sentinels have been brought to justice.”

“My liege,” the lieutenant returned with a note of reluctance. He offered salute and shut down the link.

The Regent placed a hand on the horned shoulder of one of the Inorganics, on its haunches beside his chair. “My pet,” he said aloud, “will you, too, betray me someday?”

Tesla had murdered

.

He found it almost inconceivable. Had the Sentinels put him up to it somehow, or, worse still, the Regess? They were known to have seen one another on Praxis … Had she promised him something then, her favorite son? Certainly Tesla had undergone some sort of change, if he was to believe the words of the simulagent’s guards. Perhaps he and the Regess had made a pact to rule in his place, and as a sign of good faith she had

evolved

him some. On Praxis? he wondered. Had she gone there to carry on with her dangerous Genesis Pit experiments? He would know soon enough, if her ships suddenly showed up in Opteraspace.

But in the meantime the Regent thought it best to allow the Humans to go on thinking that one of their own had assassinated the simulagent. If, as they maintained, the group had acted alone, it showed a definite carelessness on the council’s part. But if this Edwards had permitted it to happen—even

engineered

it, as the Regent was inclined to believe—then the murder had more sinister implications. It was as if Edwards knew all along that the Regent had sent an imposter in his place, and the murder was the Human’s way of responding to the substitution.

He made a note to treat Edwards differently the next time.

The simulagent hadn’t been able to learn anything about the Masters’ destination, or the location of the Humans’

Earth

; but it was possible that his death would have a positive side effect. Obviously the Humans were anxious to sue for peace, and although he couldn’t grant them this just yet, that fact eased his concern about their presence in the Quadrant. And now it was likely that others besides Edwards would be willing to turn against the Sentinels.

The Regent called up a starmap in the sphere and leaned forward to study it. “Garuda,” he decided after a moment, that’s where they would be heading. A miserable world if there ever was one, a world that had its own way of dealing with intruders … The Regent had recalled all of his warships from the planet to strengthen the fleet he had sent to Optera; but there was still a small garrison of soldiers and scientists there tending the orchards and farms and supervising the transport of the nutrient. Sufficiently forewarned, they just might be able to succeed where larger forces had failed.

The Regent rubbed his hands together in a gesture of renewed excitement. He grunted to the beasts that flanked his chair.

Perhaps it wasn’t so bad being dead after all

.

When news of the Plenipotentiary Council’s decision was released, the Expeditionary mission found itself more divided than ever. Everyone on Base Tirol and aboard the SDF-3 now felt compelled to take a stand. The council, by majority if not by unanimous decision, had effectively branded former admirals Hunter and Hayes, along with the rest of the Human and XT Sentinels, outlaws. In due time a ship would be detailed for their capture, but presently they were to receive no help from RDF personnel, and anyone found aiding or abetting the Sentinels’ cause would be subject to prosecution to the full extent of the law. Moreover, General Edwards was being placed in full command of the RFD; he would be overseeing both the mining op and construction projects, and his staff would be supervising all aspects of civil defense, including minor police actions.

Lang, Exedore, Huxley, Obstat, Reinhardt and a few others had become a cabal overnight, and Lang realized that it wouldn’t be long before Edwards’s Ghost Riders would be keeping watch on their every move—if in fact this wasn’t already the case. There were enough unanswered questions about the Regent’s assassination to convince Lang that Edwards had had a hand in the affair. He surmised, too, that Edwards was aware of the assistance Lang had rendered Wolfe; but if he had any proof, he was probably saving it for the next occasion the two men went toe-to-toe. Lang could only hope that Wolfe had reached Praxis in time to rescue the Sentinels, because in every other way, the plan had done more harm than good. However, by taking such a hard-line stance, the council had inadvertently weakened Edwards—perhaps not now, but in the long run, when those loyal to Hunter would step forward in a show of strength.

Lang was in his quarters, compiling a mental list of the men and women who could be counted on, when the door tone sounded and Lynn-Minmei begged entry. She was the last person Lang wanted to see, but as he thought about her a plan came to mind. He had persuaded her once into accepting Janice as her partner; now perhaps he could talk her into assuming the android’s role as a spy.

“Dr. Lang, I hope I’m not disturbing you,” she said, coming through the door. “I just had to talk to someone.”

He could see she was frantic. “Don’t be silly, my dear. Sit down. Can I fix you something?”

“No,” she said absently. “No, thank you. I just need to know if it’s true, Dr. Lang—what they’re saying about Jonathan and Rick.”

Lang sat down, even though Minmei remained standing. “What do you think, Minmei?”

She threw her hands up in a nervous gesture. “I don’t know what to think! General Edwards says one thing, you say another …” She looked directly at him. “Most of my old friends won’t even talk to me anymore. And the way Janice acted …”

He offered her an understanding nod. “Well, maybe you’ve just ended up on the wrong side somehow. And everyone’s waiting for you to return.”

She sat down, facing him. “That’s what I want to know: am I on the wrong side? People are saying the most horrible things about General Edwards. But I know him, I know what kind of man he is.”

“You may think you know him, Minmei, but I assure you, you don’t. It’s …” Lang fumbled for the words, “it’s as though he has some sort of personal vendetta against Rick. I can’t even begin to understand it. I only know that he has turned the council against your friends, and I know they’d be crushed to learn that you’re not supporting them.”

Minmei bit her lip. “And that’s just what Jonathan’s going to tell them, too.”

Lang thought he detected a flash of anger behind the words; he started to reply, but she cut him off, the anger visible now.

“That snake! Who is he to be calling people names? He’s a

liar

!”

“Minmei—”

“Mr. Charm,” she said, getting up from the couch. “He should talk about

loyalty

. Ha! What does he know about anything?” She shot Lang a look. “What do any of you know?”

Lang was never good at dealing with theatrics; he knew this much about himself and kept still.

“Liars, murderers,

outlaws

,” Minmei was saying. “Things were just too

peaceful

for them on Tirol. They needed to go find themselves a war.”

“That’s Edwards talking,” Lang managed.

“This is

me

talking!” she screamed at him. “I hate you! I hate the whole bunch of you!”

She began to cry into her hands. Lang made a move toward her, but she was gone by the time he reached the door.

“Go ahead, say it,” Rick said to Lisa. “I could feel you saying it clear across the hold. So let’s clear the air.”

She looked at him and frowned. “What are you talking about? Say what?”

They were in the small cabinspace that had been set aside as their quarters aboard the SDF-7. The dreadnought was approaching Garuda from the far side of the planet’s massive sun after a brief period in hyperspace.

“You wanna say ‘I told you so,’ ” “Rick continued. “Edwards is getting stronger and now we’re in no position to stop him. If we had remained on Tirol, all this would never have happened, and we’d probably have a truce worked out and be a long way toward repairing the SDF-3.” Rick snorted. “Anything I’ve left out?”

“I’m not saying a word, Rick,” she told him. “You’re doing such a fine job without me.”

“All right, so you think I made a big mistake, and maybe a part of me agrees with you. But the truth is that I would have been going out of my skull back there, and at least now I feel we

are

accomplishing something—maybe not for ourselves exactly, but for Lron and Crysta and Kami and everyone. You can’t argue with that.”

Lisa shrugged. “Who’s arguing?”

“And another thing.” Rick put his hands to his hips. “You figure that just because I’m suddenly all gung ho and take-charge that I really

am

a commander after all. But I’ll tell you something: the only reason I’m okay with the role is because there’s no damned council telling me what to think. We’ve got a democracy here, not some red-tape portable government, and that suits me fine.”

“Well, I—”

“So don’t go thinking that I’m going to ask to be reinstated when all this blows over.”

“Do you think it will, Rick?”

He heard the desperation in her tone and it took the wind right out of his sails. He leaned over, took her hand, and kissed it. “You bet,” he said softly. “And we’ll get back on course.”

She reached out to stroke his arm. “I don’t want us to grow apart, Rick, and I feel that happening sometimes.”

He was tempted to say something about Lisa’s involvement with Gnea and Bela, but held his tongue. “I won’t let that happen.”

She sighed fretfully. “We used to have so many dreams—remember?”

“Of course I remember,” he said, trying to sound cheerful. “And we’ll make every one of them come true.” He squatted down to face her. “Look, let’s just see what happens on Garuda. From what Kami says, the Invid never actually conquered the place. And from what Wolfe told me, it sounds like they pulled all their troop carriers away. They’ve got a small garrison there, and that’s it. Maybe there won’t have to be much fighting. We’ll get to have some PT.”

She laughed lightly. “Now

there’s

a dream if I ever heard one.”

“You’ll see,” he said, bringing her up into his embrace.

In the cruiser’s med room, Jean Grant was trying to figure out what to do with the now-smooth, football-sized crystal on the gurney—the Spherisian infant Miriya and Bela had brought up from Praxis. The two women were watching Jean’s every move, while Teal sat quietly in a corner of the room. Jean gave the crystal a gentle turn; it felt cool to the touch and seemingly inanimate, but scans had indicated a high level of bioenergy, or at least an approximation thereof;

God knew the thing was growing fast enough

! Jean sensed Miriya and Bela’s eyes on her and said, “Well, what do you two expect me to do with this, this … 

child

?” She turned sharply to Teal. “Teal, get over here! At least tell me what I’m supposed to do.”

Wearily, Teal got to her feet and joined Jean at the gurney. She glanced down at the crystal and fixed her transparent eyes on the infant’s saviors. “You saved him, Bela.

You

raise him.”

“It’s a him?” Jean asked, peering at the crystal as though she had missed something. “How do you know that?”

“Because it is Baldan’s child. It is Baldan.”

Miriya made a face. “Wait a minute, let’s get this straight: is it Baldan, or is it Baldan’s child?”

“It is both,” Teal told her.

“Well, it sure doesn’t look like Baldan,” Jean pointed out. “Is it, er,

he

in a state of gestation inside the crystal? Or do we need to incubate him? Speak to me, girl!”

Teal turned away from the gurney. “I don’t want to care for it!” When she faced them again, it was obvious she was, in some Spherisian fashion,

crying

. “Baldan was not my mate,” she explained. “It was the Invid Tesla who chose us, it was he who brought us together.”

Jean put a hand on Teal’s shoulder. “But I don’t understand, honey. What does all this have to do with caring for the child?”

“He must be

shaped

,” Teal answered her. “And to do so I must enter into a rapport with Baldan—I must become his mate.”

No one said anything for a moment. “And if we do nothing?” Bela asked.

“Baldan will die.” Teal continued to cry, muttering to herself in her own tongue—

praying

, Jean ventured. Then suddenly she produced a kind of crystalline paring knife from the bodice of her garment.

“Teal, no!” Jean started to say, but before she could stop her, Teal had struck the infant with the edge of the blade, as one might bring a tool to bear on a piece of ore. A chip broke away from the crystal, revealing a dazzling facet. Teal struck again and again, each stroke sure of its mark, each rendering the inanimate thing gemlike and complete. Crying all the while, Teal took the infant in her hands and began to carve away more of its extraneous crust. Miriya, Bela, and Jean could hardly believe their eyes when a polished face slowly emerged, then a miniature torso of sorts.

It was Baldan.

If the Sentinels remained divided on any one issue, it was what was to be done with Tesla. While certain they would exercise more caution the next time the Invid volunteered for a mission, they had as yet no clear-cut policy toward him. Was he a prisoner, a hostage, perhaps an ally in some sense? After the meeting in which the Sentinels’ direction had been put to a vote, Tesla and Burak had had a chance to answer the “charges” Wolfe brought against them. They were accomplices, Wolfe maintained, in the laconic and cynical fashion that had everyone aboard guessing. (That Minmei was the cause of Wolfe’s distress was no secret, but he kept to himself the fact that she had been seeing Edwards.)

Tesla didn’t deny that he had tried to commandeer the module; his actions, however, had not been directed against the Sentinels. In fact, quite the contrary. “I am your comrade in this war of liberation,” he told the Human and XT assembly. “I am as eager for peace as the rest of you, and my aim in taking over the ship was simply to speed to Optera to convince the Regent of the error of his ways.”

Burak, though, was innocent to hear Tesla tell it, and had merely been overpowered, as Janice had. And much to Tesla’s surprise, Janice backed up the story. But what Tesla didn’t realize was that Janice had briefed the Sentinels beforehand on the stand she would take, suggesting that they allow Burak and Tesla their partnership, which she herself would monitor. There was more here than met the eye, she had explained; and the arrangement would have the added benefit of keeping the Perytonian out of everyone’s way.

This was the voice of Lang’s reprogramming, but no one recognized it as such, least of all Janice. Tesla, Lang had established, was worthy of study.

So in the end it was decided that things would remain much as they had been before the attempted mutiny: Tesla was neither prisoner nor ally, but more in the way of “ambassador.” And Burak was to remain the Invid’s aide/jailer/keeper.

The two XTs were in one of the ship’s cargo holds now, a place well-suited to Tesla’s size. Only a few morsels of fruit remained, but Tesla knew that more would be available to him on Garuda—a crop as different from the Praxian variety as those had been from the Karbarran. He still hadn’t gotten over his case of the guilts, and was in fear of the moment the Sentinels learned of the Regent’s assassination. With luck, though, that news could be months off. The beauty of it was that there was no one who could even tie him to the act—not as long as the SDF-7 remained incommunicado. Even that litle Zentraedi, Exedore, would have no proof. “Circumstantial” was the Human word for such evidence. So in spite of his anxiety, his spirits had improved.

Burak’s, however, had not. Although pleased (albeit baffled) that he had been absolved of any wrongdoing, he felt as though the Sentinels had simply dismissed him and Peryton’s cause.

“You mustn’t be so glum about it, my friend,” Tesla told him, while he contemplated one of the tidbits. “Your world is as good as freed.”

“What makes you so certain?” Burak asked, his face a true devil’s mask now.

Tesla popped the fruit into his mouth. “Because … I sense something wonderful is about to happen.”

Burak regarded him with a frown.

“Truly,” Tesla continued. “You must have faith if you are to assume your proper place in this world. There may be one or two dark spots in our future, but afterward …” Tesla offered an approximation of a smile.

“But what about

now

, Tesla? All these grand events you speak of—they are always one step ahead of us.”

Tesla threw back his shoulders. “No, my young friend, you have it backward. It is

we

who are one step ahead. But change is in the air. Soon the reshapings will catch up with us. And then we can begin to transform the world.”

CHAPTER
NINE

A footnote in Kahler’s work

(The Tirolian Compaign,

Fantomadiscs, third issue, 2083, scr. 1099

)

refers those interested in Garudan psychism [sic] to a series of twentieth-century autobiographical novels written by a young anthropologist recording his attempts to enter into various states of altered reality through the guidance of an Yaqui Indian “man of power.” And while La Paz is willing to concede that there is some justification for Kahler’s recommendation, he points out that the Garudans required nothing in the way of extrinsic agents to attain “non-ordinary states.” Unless, however, one views the planet’s atmosphere in this regard. It is hoped that the much-awaited translations of Haydon’s texts will shed light on this continuing controversy

.

Taken from the “Imminent Immaterial” column of

Psychophysics Digest

G

aruda

. Kami and Learna had told them what to expect. A mostly cold and barren world of steppes and tundra, with vast frozen regions and glaciated mountain ranges. What little there was in the way of flora and fauna was principally confined to a narrow band of equatorial forestland of evergreen analogues. There were two seasons, wet and dry; Garuda was in the latter now, and that, Kami explained, would account for the differences in fur coloration the Sentinels would notice among members of his and Learna’s tribe. The Garudans, who numbered in the thousands, were not, generally speaking, offworlders. Some, however, had volunteered for mining work on Rhestad-system moons after the arrival of the Zentraedi generations ago, and later on, the Masters’ clones. But most Garudans feared the thought of having to leave the planet, and had little tolerance for the breathing harnesses life anywhere else would require. Their society was a simple one, organized along the lines of any hunter-gatherer group; however, they were anything but nomadic, and kept domesticated animals and raised some crops. Religion was of a decidedly individual variety, with each clan answering to a different totem, and each member his or her own shaman. Oddly enough, neither Kami nor Learna had the slightest knowledge of history in the sense that most of the Sentinels, including Burak and Lron, understood the term. Unlike the Karbarrans, or Praxians for that matter, the Garudans seemed to live entirely in the present. This is not to say that they were a complacent group—they were certainly devoted to securing a free future for their world—but at the same time, they could supply no answers to questions concerning their racial past.

This enigma had become something of a preoccupation with Cabell during the four months the Sentinels had remained grounded on Praxis. Cabell was different than the Masters in this regard. Those who had ousted the Tirolian regime after the Great Transition were more interested in expansion and conquest than in the accumulation of knowledge; to the Elders and their subordinate Triumvirates, knowledge of the past presented something of an impediment to change. They had their gaze fixed on the day after tomorrow, on issues of uncontested rule, ultimate power, and selective immortality.

The rest of the Sentinels, though, saw Garuda more in terms of its tangible challenges, and foremost among these was its very atmosphere: though Earthlike in composition, it was essentially toxic to all but the planet’s indigenous life-forms. There were one or two exceptions to this, but only Veidt and Sarna among the Sentinels qualified. Surface scans verified the presence of dozens of varieties of airborne spores and microorganisms whose chemistry Jean Grant likened to certain laboratory-produced psychotropic drugs. According to Cabell—based on what he had gleaned from Zor’s notes—the vulpine beings’ mental processes were linked to the planet itself in a kind of submolecular partnership. Life-forms incapable of entering into this long-established microcosmic symbiosis were not, however, simply ignored or exempted; rather, they were sensed as potentially disturbing to the ecological balance and consequently

counterattacked

by those same microorganisms responsible for the Garudans’ nonordinary psychic states.

It had therefore fallen upon the med group to outfit the landing party with transpirators and resp canisters. But if logistics was about to hamper the operation’s effectiveness, the Sentinels could take some comfort in the fact that the Invid had also fallen prey to the planet’s proprietary nature. In fact, their presence on Garuda was essentially restricted to the hemispherically shaped hives they had erected in those areas where Zor’s Flower of Life seedlings had taken root. The crop was a mutant but bountiful one, and it was believed that Garuda provided largely defoliated Optera with much of its needed supply of nutrient. With Karbarra liberated, the Regent had lost his mecha factories; now the Sentinels meant to strike him at the gut level, destroying as many of Garuda’s orchards and “farms” as they could.

Rick, Lisa, Cabell, Rem, Jack, Karen, Burak, Kami, Learna, Gnea, Lron, and Crysta made up the drop group, with members of the Skull and Wolfe Pack escorting the shuttle down. The SDF-7 would remain in orbit to deal with Invid transport vessels, known to make frequent runs between Garuda and Optera. Wolfe and Grant shared the fortress command. Janice would be keeping an eye on Tesla. Veidt and Sarna had elected to stay behind, and Bela was apparently determined to help Teal with the infant Baldan.

The landing party was certain that the SDF-7’s arrival in Garudaspace had not gone undetected by the Invid; the shuttle landing would probably be monitored as well. So rather than risk immediate engagement or present any of the hives with an easy target, they opted to put down in the relatively unpoliced tribal sectors, close to Kami and Learna’s village. Unexpectedly, they found themselves encircled by battle-ready troops nevertheless—even before the shuttle’s landing gear made contact with the surface.

Kami had neglected to mention that some of Garuda’s protectors were Tirolian Bioroids.

Kami and Learna consequently made certain they were the first to deplane, figuring their mere appearance would defuse the situation. It did so—and more. Within minutes, half of Kami’s tribe had emerged from the trees to surround the shuttle and celebrate the return of their friends. The air was suddenly charged with joyous sounds—excited barking to Rick’s ears—and Kami and Learna were embraced, jostled, and hoisted up on countless shoulders. With elaborate ritual, the two returnees threw off their breathing gear and pranced about, engaging in impromptu dances, shamanic steps of power.

Rick radioed the Skull and Wolfe contingents to put down along the perimeter of the shuttle’s rough strip, checked the integrity of his environment suit and transpirator, and followed Lisa out of the pilots’ cabin to take part in the merriment. An hour later, he and the rest of the landing party were in the village’s wooden longhouse powwowing with the leaders of Kami’s tribe. Severed heads of Hellcats, Scrim, and Odeon Inorganics dangled from the roof tie-beams.

Also present were a number of the Bioroid pilot clones—androgynous-looking shaggy-haired humanoids with pointed features and exotic eyes. One of the clones—these Tiresian lost boys—was explaining to Cabell in a nasal, almost synthesized voice how they had come to ally themselves with the Garudan cause. They wore no breathing gear, and were apparently immune to the spores.

“The Masters left us here to police this world. But when the Invid arrived, communication with Tirol and the clone-masters became impossible. Our Hoverships destroyed, all ties with Tirol cut, we began to understand the concept of freedom, the loneliness that springs from abandonment …”

“So you joined the Garudans in their fight,” Cabell finished, astonished.

“We thirst for freedom, just as they do.”

“Remarkable,” the old man mused, his own voice distorted by the mask’s filters. “Absolutely remarkable.” He hadn’t been so astounded since learning from Lang that Miriya Parina had borne a child; and the revelation gave him some hope that the Masters’ clones were actually capable of revolt.

Rick took advantage of a momentary silence to motion to the trophy heads. “What’s the situation here? Do the Invid run patrols through this sector?”

The tribal chief answered him. “Their Inorganics patrol, but only when they wish to intimidate us, or gather up laborers for the farms. They don’t seem to regard us as a threat—even with the firepower our comrades supply,” he added, indicating the clones, “but I assure you that all Garuda is ripe for rebellion.”

“You mean, they’re using your people on the farms?”

“Lately, yes. And in the labor camps near them.”

Lron and Crystal grunted, alarming some of the Garudans present. They were keeping a wide circle around the ursine XTs, and a wider one yet around Burak, whose mask only added to an already demonic aspect.

Rick could see that the news came as a shock to Kami and Learna also.

“So much for surgical strikes from the ship,” Max said.

Rick regarded the chief for a moment. He found that he was not yet accustomed to seeing Garudans without their breathers; omnivores they might be, but there was a ferocity to their muzzles he wasn’t all that comfortable with. Outwardly, the chief resembled Kami, but there was a solemnness to his aspect that was absent in the younger Garudan.

“What about mecha?” Lisa wanted to know. “Scouts, Shock Troopers?”

“Only when their transport ships arrive,” the chief told her. “They patrol near the farms to protect the nutrient shipment while it is being loaded. Rarely do they venture into tribal sectors.”

Rick watched the chief gnaw at a hunk of meat one of the women had offered him “Is there any regularity to the shipments?”

The chief exchanged a few sentences with Kami in the Garudan tongue. The Sentinel translated. “Approximately every three standard months. “This was changed every so often in an attempt to foil what was an extensive underground network at work on Garuda. But the Invid never managed to keep anything secret for very long.

“And when did the last shipment leave?”

“One month ago.”

Rick grinned beneath his transpirator mask. “That means we’re in the clear for the moment. Even if they’ve already communicated with their fleet, reinforcements could take weeks to get here.”

“The closest farm is about one hundred miles from here,” Learna said, without being asked. “Kami and I know that area well.”

“An aerial recon,” Max suggested.

“No,” Rick said. “I don’t think we should tip our hand just yet. We’ll go in on Hovercycles first. Take a quick look around before we plan an assault. Just because mecha haven’t been observed doesn’t mean they’re not in there.”

“I agree,” Rick heard Jack say behind him.

Karen nudged Jack with her elbow for butting in. “Sir?” she then said to Lisa, hoping Jack would learn by example.

“Go ahead, Karen.”

“I was just wondering what exactly happened to the first Invid troops that landed here—before the hives were built, I mean.”

Again, Kami and the chief exchanged a few words.

“They went mad,” the Garudan leader said evenly. “Then they died.”

The recon team—Rick, Lisa, Jack, Karen, Rem, and Kami as scout—left the village shortly before dawn, sticking close to the northern fringe of Garuda’s preternaturally quiet forest. They had traveled seventy-five miles by the time Rhestad rose—a massive oblate field of crimson that did little to warm the land. The two villages they passed en route had already been informed of the mission. Worried about attracting any undue attention to themselves, Rick had requested that the Garudans simply go about their business; but there was obviously too much excitement in the air for that. For sometimes miles at a stretch, Rick would see them crouched along the paths the Hovercycs cut through the woods, silent and feral, vulpine eyes aglow in the eerie morning light.

At mile eighty-five the team encountered its first Inorganic patrol—a pack of Hellcats a dozen strong, roaming the forest like some fiendish pride of saber-tooths. Kami had spotted them and passed the word; the Hovercycles were shut down and concealed. It was understood by now that the Inorganics were more than marauders or Robopolice units; they functioned as the remote eyes and ears for the Invid living computers, which in turn directed the scientists or command troops. Engagement, therefore, even if it ended in victory, would have only served to alert the hive to the team’s position; so they lay as still as they could, pressed close to the chilled ground until the pack had moved through.

Rick and Lisa were on their stomachs, side-by-side, environmental suits adjusted to mimic the colors and textures of the area’s fernlike ground cover. Rick had his arm flung protectively across his wife’s back, and was gazing at her through the helmet’s bubble-shield. Her eyes returned the wrinkled look his own were trying to convey. It was the first time he and Lisa had been out together in a long while, and if this wasn’t exactly anyone’s idea of an ideal date or the “closeness” Lisa had in mind during their most recent heart-to-heart, at least they were together. And somehow—though Rick would have been at a loss to explain it—he felt more assured with Lisa beside him. At the same time her presence had a kind of calming effect, because no matter what they might have to face, he was freed from having to worry about where she was or what dangers she might have otherwise been facing alone. Here, he had some measure of control over her situation—

their

situation.

Moving more cautiously after Kami gave the all-clear sign, the team took another hour to cover the last fifteen miles. They had portions of the enormous hive in sight for five of those miles, but didn’t get an unobstructed view of the thing until they were almost on top of it. It sat in the center of an ancient impact crater, in a veritable forest of Optera trees, a dome-shaped structure with a base almost ten miles around, composed entirely of what appeared to be organic facets or geodesics; in fact, the hive had the look of something

grown

rather than erected. Four mile-high cat tail-like antenna towers were positioned at cardinal points around the hive’s oddly “bubbled” base.

Through field glasses, Rick could discern Garudan slaves gathering mutated fruits from the trees. Huge containers of these were being conveyed to the hive itself by Invid soldiers in specially outfitted suits, often piloting Hovercarts of various design. Tracking the carts’ movements ultimately enabled Rick to discover one of the hive’s tunnellike transport corridors.

“What happens later on?” Rick whispered to Kami, who had stooped down to ask for the binoculars. “Are the workers taken into the hive?”

“No,” he said, bringing his muzzle close to the helmet’s audio pickups. “The labor camp lies about two miles from here.” Kami pointed out the direction.

“Are you certain there are no Garudans inside the hive?”

Kami shook his head. “Not certain.” The hives were the only places on the planet impervious to Garudan Sendings and out-of-body flights; but the Invids’ continued presence onworld in general had confused things. The clouds and wind were full of sinister whisperings.

“Then we’ve gotta find out,” Rick said, turning around to motion the others forward.

Jack remained behind as rear guard, while the rest of the team began to work their way over the low ridge that was the crater’s rim and down into the basin itself. It was warmer here, Rick realized without having to check the suit’s sensor displays; redolent, too, he imagined, as the Optera tree forests on Praxis had been. They were closing on the edge of the cultivation area now, and it was time for Kami to go it alone.

“Don’t take any chances,” Rick cautioned him. He checked his chronometer. “One hour. If you’re not back by then, we’re moving out.”

“I’ll get word back to you from the camp if anything happens.”

The

underground

, Rick reminded himself.

“Just see that it doesn’t,” Rem said.

Karen and Lisa wished Kami luck, and he started to move off.

Then all at once a small mountain was growing under their feet. Rick thought for a moment that this might be how the bulb-canopied Optera trees pushed themselves from the ground. Lisa and the others had been knocked off their feet, but he was still riding the rise up, arms outstretched like a high-wire walker. Elsewhere he could see two more humps beginning to form. Kami yelled something incomprehensible, just before Rick leaped and caught hold of a network of vinelike tendrils encasing the canopy-bulb of the nearest tree. He was dangling ten feet above the ground now, looking down on his teammates and wondering why they had their weapons drawn, when a triple-clawed Scout pincer suddenly slammed into the tree not a foot from his head. The bulb split open like an overripe melon, showering him with viscous green gop and what he took to be seeds.

Lisa and Karen, meanwhile, were firing charges at the crab-ship, trying to position themselves for a shot at the mecha’s scanner, a pouting red mouth low down on the ventral surface of its armored head. But the Scouts who had joined the first were advancing, and the two women were forced to hurl themselves out from under a pair of cloven feet. One mecha was stomping the ground, trying to pulverize them, even while Rem and Kami were stinging its ladybug-shaped carapace with Wolverine fire.

Rick disentangled himself before the first Scout could strike again, dropping, tucking, and rolling out of harm’s way, and somehow managing to come up with his weapon raised. He nailed his giant assailant in the knee joint and brought it down in an earsplitting crash; then put a second shot through its scanner, and ducked for cover as the thing blew up.

The force of the blast threw one of the other Scouts hard against the trees, where it stumbled and fell after ripping open half-a-dozen bulbs. Rem saw to it that the ship didn’t get up, lancing it open from crotch to scanner. Rick had been left dazed and temporarily deaf from the explosion, but he came to in time to see the remaining mecha raising its left foot to smash Karen and Lisa, who had also been leveled by the blast. He ran up behind the Scout, as if preparing to clip it behind the knee, and emptied his handgun straight up into the underside of the ship’s rear tapered head armor, eliciting a cascade of energy bolts and a muffled roar that decapitated the ship, spilling its Invid pilot to the ground. Kami and Karen holed the creature, even though it was probably already dead, and moved quickly to Lisa’s side. Rick did likewise, suddenly terror-stricken. Her suit was torn open; she was bloodied and unconscious.

“We’ve got to get her back to the cycs!” Rick said, looking up at his teammates. But all he got in return was a look of resignation. Rick saw Kami and Karen toss their weapons aside. He whirled around, still in a crouch, in time to see more than a dozen Invid soldiers emerging from the orchard to surround their patch of green-stained ground.

“Throw your weapon down,” one of the Praxian-size soldiers said in Tiresian, brandishing an evil-looking rifle/cannon and gazing down at Rick through an elongated helmet.

Rick did so, just as an officer came shouldering its way through the circle. It regarded Lisa a moment, then swung its snout toward Rick.

“The hive has been expecting you,” it announced.

“Our Regent has said that he finds your race most curious, and now I understand why. You are a little more like worms than I’d imagined, and indeed there is the stench of death about you.”

The interior of the hive was greenhouse-hot, but the scientist’s voice was cold and analytical. Rick, Rem, Kami, and Karen had been marched at gunpoint through the same entrance Rick had spied from the crater rim. There, their helmets and transpirators had been removed. One of the soldiers had carried Lisa in over his shoulder. She was still unconscious, groaning every so often in her delirium. Rick was being kept from her side. Kami, already succumbing to the hive’s artificial atmosphere, had been shackled and dumped in a corner.

“That smell is the stink of your own soldiers’ blood,” Rick snarled at the scientist, gesturing to his green-smeared suit.

“The cornered creature’s final attack,” the Invid said to his white-robed group of barefoot assistants, in Tiresian for Rick’s benefit. “The being uses words as weapons.”

“What do you want with us? Why didn’t your soldiers kill us?”

The scientist’s snout sensors twitched, as if he was sniffing the air. “Perhaps we shall. But there is some information we require first. It would save us much bother if you’d simply agree to answer our questions—it might even save your lives.”

Rick snorted. “Dream on, slug.”

“As I thought,” the scientist directed over his shoulder. He studied Rick a moment, then began to move down the line, pausing in front of Kami. “You were one of the Garudans selected by Tesla for the Regent’s zoo, were you not?”

Kami leaned in as if to whisper something and snapped at the Invid’s face, missing it by inches. Just as suddenly, a soldier threw a stranglehold on Kami from behind; in his weakened state, the Garudan was easily subdued.

The scientist shrugged it off and continued his appraisal of the group,

leering

, Rick thought, at Karen, and puzzling for a moment over Rem. “Why, you’re

Tiresian

!” he said at last, and whirled through an excited turn to face his group. “We have a marvelous opportunity here to accomplish something invaluable for the realm. For the record,” he added, looking to Rick, “where are the Robotech Masters?”

Rick beetled his brows. “The Masters?”

“Yes. Where is the Protoculture matrix?”

Rick groaned.

The thing had become a thorn in the galaxy’s side

. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“That is hardly the response we require to justify sparing your lives, Earthen Be reasonable; you have Protoculture-fueled ships, Protoculture-based weapons … How did you come by these if not through contact with the Masters or the matrix? Unless, of course, the Flowers of Life grow on your homeworld …”

Rick fought to keep his surprise from Regesstering.

So that’s what they’re after

, he thought, and recalled something Roy Fokker had told him almost ten years ago about the warning Lang had inadvertently keyed in the SDF-1—Zor’s warning about the Invid!

The Tirolian knew!—he knew the Invid would eventually go in search of the matrix!

Cabell’s words to Lang rang in Rick’s ears:

You must destroy the Invid here, destroy them while you still can!

“I see something in your eyes, Human,” the scientist was saying. “You know something.”

Rick tightened his lips to a thin line.

“Then perhaps your dreams will tell us what we wish to know.” The Invid waved a hand at the soldiers. “Take the Humans outside.”

“You can’t!” Kami bit out, his windpipe pinced in the soldier’s grip. Others had stepped in to take hold of Rick, Karen, Rem, and Lisa. “They’ll die!”

“Yes,” the scientist said matter-of-factly, “they probably will.”

CHAPTER
TEN

The psy scanners the Invid employed on Garuda (on Hunter and the rest) were patterned on similiar devices developed by the Tiresians. Ironically enough, the Robotech Masters had used the scanners on Zor shortly after his death, (and would use them again to monitor Zor Prime after the clone had been inserted into the Fifteenth ATAC), much as the Invid were using them on Rem

.

History of the Second Robotech War

, volume XXXI,
“Tirol”      

Dream a little dream with me

.

Late twentieth-century song lyric

The male Human was dreaming of pursuit. He was being chased by some sort of bird creature with an enormous wingspan, and—an Invid scientist had noted—a body shaped curiously like those of the raptorial birds depicted face-to-face on the Human’s uniform insignia patch. The Human was running downhill, hopelessly out of control, with the bird pecking at his neck and back, flapping its great wings all the while. The backdrop for the dream was a world of ravaged landscapes, barren, cratered expanses of solidified volcanic flow. The Human was, and at the same time was not, both the pursued and pursuer. Crowds of other Humans seemed to be viewing the event from the sidelines, gesturing, pointing, applauding, laughing. One wore the face of the injured Human female who was presently being terrorized by dreams of her own—although she was sympathetic here, eager to help the running man, so it appeared.

“There’s nothing of use to us in this one’s thoughts,” the head scientist said dismissively. Disappointed, he turned from the images in the instrumentality sphere and moved to the sphere his assistants had set up to monitor the dreams of the injured female.

Lisa, like Rick, Karen, and Rem, was strapped on her back to a kind of gurney, with her head positioned beneath a thick and heavy-looking ring-shaped device that resembled a scaled-down version of an MRI scanner. What the Invid scientists were calling dreams, however, were of the wide-eyed variety—altered states of consciousness, hellish ones by and large, normally kept locked away behind those proverbial doors of perception. Five minutes of exposure to Garuda’s tainted atmosphere had been enough to elicit them. The scientists had no way of knowing whether this constituted what would amount to a lethal exposure—some Invid had lasted as long as half an hour without suffering irreversible effects. But these Humans were fragile things; physically strong for their size, it was true, but with limited tolerance for even the slightest of psychic assaults. They were inhabitants of the base realms, the sensate worlds at the lower end of the spectrum, as insubstantial as interstellar dust, and therefore highly expendable.

The leader of the white-robed group now activated the sphere attached to the device above Lisa’s head, and here, too, the scientists encountered images of pursuit. Kami, muzzled and shackled in a corner of the hive’s lab, was too deep into his own delirium to take note of their dismay.

“It seems to be something of a fixation with them,” one of the assistants ventured.

The Human female was for all intents and purposes trapped on a spiral staircase that lacked any clear-cut terminus. Moreover, whatever it was that was pursuing her, hunting her, was so vague a thing as to be untranslatable by the sphere’s Protoculture circuitry. There were momentary flashes of a feline creature, however, that brought to mind the Invid’s own Hellcats. But the central concern of the dream and dreamer was the female’s seemingly

reduced

size.

“Some reference to the Zentraedi, perhaps?”

The master scientist made a disgruntled sound. “Who can tell with these beings? Let us move on.”

They grouped together in front of Karen’s sphere next, arms folded and four-fingered hands tucked into the sleeves of their robes. The master among them had found himself strangely moved by this green-eyed, honey-haired Human; but unfortunately her dream-terrors proved to be as pedestrian and unrevealing as the previous ones. Her world was at least populated with a host of other beings, but they were there principally to insure that Karen was suitably horrified by the prospect of being buried alive.

The master expressed his distaste after a minute’s viewing. “What a pitiful race … One wonders why they don’t walk in fear of their own shadows. They’ve been more traumatized than Optera itself.”

By now they had reached Rem—the Tiresian—and to their absolute astonishment, there in living color and as big as life in the center of the attendant sphere was

Optera

. This much could have been accounted for and dismissed, but next they found themselves viewing images of the Regess

in her pretransformed state

! And this was not the defoliated Optera of their ravenous present, but the edenic homeworld of their racial past—a verdant wonderland, with fields of Flowers basking in the warmth of the planet’s twin suns, stretching as far as the eye could see across a landscape of arcadian beauty. Here was the lost harmony, the innocent splendor, the paradisiacal ease they could now access only in moments of collective trance, or at the mystical promptings of the Queen-Mother herself.

The scientists were reduced to silence, to tears of an ethereal sort.

“It’s as if …”

“Say it,” the master demanded.

“… as if this one knew our world before the techno-voyager’s arrival.”

“These are

his

thoughts.”

With what would translate as shame, the master scientist deactivated the sphere and led his group to a sphere significantly larger than the rest—their communications instrumentality, overshadowed by a relatively small specimen of bubble-chambered brain.

“We must inform the Regent of this at once.”

“And say what?”

“That we have found

Zor

!”

It had taken Jack all the inner strength he could muster to keep from tearing down into that basin orchard with guns blazing … He had heard the explosion that dropped the first Scout ship, and had scrambled up to the top of the crater rim like a mountain goat on amphetamines. Weapon fire, follow-up blasts … by the time he got there, Rick and the others were surrounded by Invid soldiers—more than even he wanted to go up against. Lisa was down, Rick bending over her. Kami, Rem,

Karen

! He had located a safe vantage point and watched as his friends were led off to the hive; then a short time later they had reappeared at the dome’s tunnellike entrance, this time stripped of their transpirators. For some reason he had felt compelled to time their exposure, sitting there powerless and near crazed while the chronometer display counted off the minutes,

five heart-stopping minutes

! He had run for the place where they had stashed the cycs, found his way back to the trails they had cut in predawn light, reentered the village … all the while expecting Shock Troopers to emerge from the ground, Hellcats or Robo-automata to leap on him from the treetops. Pursued by nightmares …

Jack was just now finishing his hurried and breathless recap, sitting cross-legged in the village longhouse and sucking nutrient through a tube while the chief and some of the Sentinels watched him.

“We’ve gotta spring them,” he said at last, his thirst slaked. “Right away, before they’re moved.”

The chief spoke to a member of the tribe; the male Garudan nodded his head a few times and took off in a rush. “He has been instructed to pass the word,” the chief explained. “We will be alerted if and when they are moved.”

Learna was beside herself, her neck fur on end. She had tried time and time again to Send herself to the hive, but each of her attempts had ended in failure. “Kami will die inside the hive. He must be returned to Garuda’s air.”

“He wasn’t brought out with the rest of them,” Jack told her, then turned to Cabell. “How long is too long?”

The old man made as if to stroke his beard under the suit. “I can’t answer you, Jack. Tirol sent the Zentraedi here, the clones … I believe Rem and I are the first Tiresians to set foot on Garuda since Zor himself landed here.”

“Can’t you even estimate it?” Jack pressed him.

Cabell saw Jack’s frustration and concern. “I don’t imagine anything less than fifteen minutes would prove fatal.” He was relieved to see Jack relax some.

“But why would they do that—why not just kill them, Wise One?” Gnea thought to ask.

The chief shrugged his powerful shoulders. “To torture them, perhaps to see if they could learn anything from their thoughts.”

“All right,” Max broke in, “suppose we wait till dusk. Your people will be heading back to the camps by then, right?”

Learna and the chief nodded, uncertain.

“We stage a diversionary raid on one of the other hives. Try to draw off as many of their mecha as we can. At the same time, a rescue team goes in.”

“Agreed,” Jack said, and some of the others joined him in voicing their support.

“I don’t know,” Cabell objected when everyone had quieted down. “It’s risky. Those hives are much more complex than they appear.”

“Well, of course it’s risky,” Jack argued, “but I don’t see that we have any choice. What are we supposed to do—walk up and knock on the door? Uh, excuse me, but we were wondering if you might be willing to return our teammates—”

“There is an easier way to get them back.”

Jack swung around to see who had interrupted him. When he saw it was Burak he fell silent, along with almost everyone else. The Perytonian had become something of an invisible being since the attempted mutiny, and to hear him suddenly speak, much less offer an opinion, was something of an event.

“You are forgetting our race in the hold,” Burak said to the group’s collective puzzlement.

“You mean ‘ace in the hole,’ ” Jack corrected him. “Whatever—”

“Tesla,” Cabell exclaimed.

The devil from Peryton nodded.

“A hostage exchange?” Max asked.

Burak grinned beneath his mask. “Something like that.”

On Optera, the Regent’s servant reported only that five Sentinels had been captured on Garuda; he knew better than to steal the scientists’ thunder. The Regent was relaxing in his sterile nutrient bath when the communique was received, having discovered that he could essentially guarantee messages merely by setting foot in the Olympic-size tub. Anxious for some news of Tesla, or information regarding the next destination of the Sentinels, he had spent the better part of a week in the bath, waiting. Now he practically ran to the throne room, sashing his robe as he approached the communicator sphere.

“Five Sentinels,” he said out of breath. “Which ones?”

“A Garudan, three Humans, and … a Tiresian.”

The Regent was pleased to learn that he had correctly anticipated the Sentinels’ destination. He had passed the word to all his lieutenants that their troops be placed on alert. But it was captives he was after this time, not body counts, and no mention was to be made of his supposed assassination. With captives in hand, he hoped to learn whether or not Tesla had been acting alone, or in league with the rebels.

“A Tiresian you say.”

“Yes, my liege. We have him here with us now.”

The Regent peered at the terror-stricken face centered in the sphere’s image, and brought his hand to his snout in a gesture of contemplation. “This one looks … familiar somehow.”

“Well he should, Your Highness,” the master scientist said as Rem’s image de-rezzed. “We subjected the three Humans and the Tiresian to Garuda’s atmosphere in an effort to extract the data you requested.”

“And?” the Regent replied anxiously. “Did you discover the location of the Humans’ homeworld—this Earth?”

“No. However, we may have a clue as to the whereabouts of the matrix,” the scientist was quick to add. “My lord, allow us to screen for your pleasure the results of the Tiresian’s exposure.”

The Regent scowled at the sphere. “Do not bore me with details,” he cautioned.

“You will find this anything but boring,” the scientist told him.

The Regent viewed the playback for a moment, then staggered backward, collapsing into his high-backed throne. He sat agape, a defeated husband watching tapes of his wife … the seduction, the transgression, the cruel aftermath, all captured in graphic detail. That face, that face …

“How?” the Regent finally managed. “How is this possible? He is dead.”

Or is he?

the Regent suddenly asked himself. Could he have been duped all these years into thinking Zor dead, when in fact … 

No

, he thought. Zor was dead. But what then was the origin of these images? A simulagent, perhaps, like the very one he had created to take his place at the summit—

“We know Zor is dead,” the scientist was saying. “But somehow his memory lives on in this one—a clone, we suspect.”

The Regent came bolt upright in the chair. “The matrix!”

“Precisely.”

“He must be sent to Optera at once!”

The scientist inclined his head some. “Of course, my lord. But would it not be best to take advantage of Garuda’s proximity to Haydon IV? May I remind Your Highness of the devices there that are far superior—”

“Yes, yes. See that it is arranged. I will leave immediately,” the Regent added, already on his feet.

“There is one small detail, however …”

“What?”

“We have learned that the Regess is there.”

“On Haydon IV?!”

“Yes, my lord. Should we wait until she leaves before transporting the clone?”

The Regent started to agree, but bit off his words.

Why not let her see the clone?

he asked himself.

Why not let her look once more upon Zor’s face, into his very thoughts and recollections?

He laughed out loud.

To be there, to see her face when the clone was presented

…

“No, you are not to wait,” the Regent said shortly. “In fact, you are simply to say that you have a

gift

for her—a gift from her

loving husband

!”

“I need to see Tesla at once,” Burak told Janice as he stepped from the shuttle’s ramp into the SDF-7’s docking bay. Gnea and Max had ridden up with him, but they were already rushing off to meet with Wolfe and Vince Grant.

Janice thought she heard something akin to arrogance in the Perytonian’s voice, but decided to leave it unchallenged. “Of course, Burak,” she said, motioning for him to follow her.

They didn’t speak for the duration of the long walk to the cargo hold that had become Tesla’s quarters; but short of the closed hatch Burak stopped and said, “Alone.” The Perytonian positioned himself between Janice and the hatch.

“Something I should know?” she risked.

“You should know that he doesn’t like you very much,” Burak whispered back menacingly, gesturing over one shoulder with his two-thumbed hand.

Janice laughed. “And we make such an adorable couple. Is it my looks or my personality?”

Burak contorted his demon face for her benefit.

“Keep doing that and your face is going to stay that way,” she said, moving off.

Burak snorted and entered the hold, pulling smuggled Fruits from his uniform and casually tossing them to Tesla, who was seated on an enormous crate.

“What’s this all about?” the Invid asked peevishly, as one of the mutant Fruits bounced off his snout.

“I have good news,” Burak announced, assuming a proud stance and allowing Tesla to regard him a moment. “You claim to be more evolved than the Regent. That means the scientists would recognize your greatness, does it not?”

Tesla ducked his snout, looked around the hold like a felon, and motioned for Burak to keep his voice down. “Yes, certainly,” he said. “But what does this have to do with anything?”

Burak studied one of the Fruits. “Suppose I could arrange for an audience with the scientists here?”

Tesla shot to his feet, horrified by the prospect. “You must—”

“Hunter and a few of the others were captured,” Burak quickly explained, gazing up at the Invid. “I suggested that we exchange you for them. That way—”

“You what?”

“That way you’ll be able to assert your right to the throne—just as you … wanted … What’s wrong?”

Wearily, Tesla had reseated himself. “You fool,” he muttered, shaking his hands. “You’ve just sealed my fate.”

“B-but …”

“It’s too soon, Burak, too soon. The Regess will send me to the pits.” He glanced up. “The next time you see Tesla he’ll be a maggot.”

Burak made a distressed sound, seeing his own dreams for Peryton go up in smoke; and just then Janice, Vince Grant, Gnea, and Lron burst into the hold. The amazon Praxian had an armed blaster in her hands.

“Everybody ready?” Janice said brightly, looking back and forth between Burak and Tesla. Cautiously, Lron and Grant had moved in to shackle the Invid’s wrists and place a prisoner bib around his neck.

“All right, Invid, let’s go,” Gnea said, brandishing the weapon.

Lron gave Tesla a light shove.

Tesla looked down and caught Janice’s smile.

“Guess this is your lucky day,” she told him.

Jonathan Wolfe sat on the bridge of the cruiser with his feet up on one of the duty-station consoles. He was alone for a change, Grant and most of the crew having rushed off for the ordnance bay. Well within reach, on the floor beside the command chair, was a bottle of Southlands brandy. It was almost empty.

“To rescues,” Wolfe said now, toasting Garuda through the forward viewport and lifting the bottle to his lips. He gulped down half an inch and shuddered.

The Hunters had gone and gotten themselves captured, along with Karen, Rem, and that Garudan—Kami. And Max or somebody figured they could swap them for Tesla, only Wolfe didn’t put much stock in it. Of course he hadn’t said that to them—oh no, mustn’t burst anyone’s bubble, chin up and all that ancient rot. But that was what he

felt

. The Invid would go back on their word, maybe the Sentinels would go back on theirs, somebody would betray somebody else … he didn’t need to be there to see it all go down.

“So here’s to betrayals,” he said, and took another pull. “Minmei, you … 

meanie

.”

Doubled over in laughter, Wolfe swung his legs off the control panel. Yes, she was a

meanie

all right, telling him to take a walk, falling in love with his enemy. “

Earth’s

enemy,” Wolfe emphasized. “Have to give the man his due.” He drank again, staring blankly at the bottle when he lowered it, rocking back and forth.

Without warning, a tone sounded on the bridge and nearly sent him out of his skin. He reached out for the com stud and slammed his fist down, missing it, but getting it on the third try.

“Wolfe,” he said.

“A small craft,” one of the new crewmen reported. “Not much bigger than an Alpha. Transport, maybe.”

“Put it up,” Wolfe said, swinging to a monitor screen.

“No can do, sir. Too far for visuals.”

“Is it within range?”

“Just barely.”

“Armed?”

“Negative, sir. But it launched from the sector where the Hunters are being held.”

Wolfe contemplated the blip on the screen.

“Let it go,” he said. “The way things stand, what difference is one small ship going to make?”

CHAPTER
ELEVEN

Unlike the Zentraedi, who had in a sense taught them everything they knew about warfare, the Invid were not above the idea of taking hostages. The reason for this can be traced back to the chaotic period following the defoliation of Optera by the Masters’ newly created clone warriors. The Regent was convinced that Zor had stolen the Flowers of Life merely to offer them up in exchange for the Regess herself. Emulating the Tiresian then, the Regent had sent out his new army not to kill, but to capture Zor, in the hopes of holding him hostage for the return of the Flowers!

Bloom Nesterfig,

The Social Organization of the Invid

“I just think we should talk this over first, that’s all,” Tesla told the assembled Sentinels, Bioroid pilots, and assorted members of Kami’s tribe.

He could see that the Garudans weren’t exactly thrilled to have an Invid in their midst—particularly the Invid who had supervised the Regent’s specimen mission some time ago—and he was beginning to wonder whether he would even make it out of the village alive, let alone into one of the farm-hives. Still, he reasoned, if he could come up with a better plan than the hostage exchange the Sentinels seemed to be favoring at the moment, he might be able to save himself from either fate.

“After all,” Tesla continued, undaunted, “it doesn’t sound to me like you have this thing entirely worked out. The whens, the wheres, the hows … And for all I know, the Regent may have given orders for me to be shot on sight.”

This much was true, and as a result the group lapsed into an uneasy silence. They couldn’t simply

call

the farm, nor could they just waltz in waving the proverbial white flag. But this was where Tesla was supposed to supply answers; and instead he was suddenly acting as though he couldn’t bear to part company with his captors. In private Janice had told everyone to expect as much, although she had been vague about the reasons.

“Then what the heck have we been keeping you around for all this time?” Jack shouted. “You’re supposed to be our ace in the hole, not some hunk of dead weight.”

“Jack, I’m hurt, I’m really hurt,” Tesla returned, trying to put emotion behind the words.

The shuttle was back on the planet’s surface now. Vince Grant was still aboard the SDF-7; but almost everyone else with the exception of Teal had shuttled down. Jean’s team was in the process of erecting an atmosphere-controlled geodesic medical module on the outskirts of the village to house Rick and the others once they were freed. Veidt and Sarna had affirmed that five or even fifteen minutes’ exposure to Garuda’s atmosphere wouldn’t prove lethal; but at the same time the danger to Rick and the others was increasing with each moment they were kept from proper treatment. Just what constituted “proper” treatment had yet to be determined; and Veidt refused to speculate until the Humans were rescued and run through a battery of tests.

Burak was sorry he had opened his mouth, but there was nothing he could do to change things. Besides, Tesla was giving it his best shot and might yet convince the Sentinels to adopt a different course of action.

“Let’s hear it, if you’ve got a better plan,” Miriya Sterling was saying.

Tesla put his hands behind his back and paced back and forth, the crown of his head inches from the longhouse rafters. The breathing gear the med group had fashioned for the Invid was a jury-rigged affair of masks, tanks, and tubes, giving Tesla a decidedly elephantine appearance.

“How’s this?” he asked at last, swinging around to face Jack, Cabell, the chief, and a few others. “Divert attention away from the farm by initiating a raid—”

“We’re one step ahead of you, Tesla,” Max said, interrupting. “Infiltrate a small party at the same time, and end up giving your troops more hostages.”

“It doesn’t have to end that way,” Tesla argued. “Not if I’m with the commando team.”

Jack grunted. “What do you know that Rick didn’t know? We went in quiet as mice and they nailed us.”

“It was the mecha—your Hovercycles—that gave you away. The farm’s defenses can sense Protoculture activity. So even though you got past the Inorganics …”

Tesla left the sentence unfinished, pleased to see that the Sentinels were offering one another surprised glances.

“No wonder they got the jump on us,” Jack remarked.

“What about weapons, Tesla?” Cabell thought to ask.

“Weapons, too,” the Invid answered him.

Max looked around the longhouse. “Where does that leave us?”

“Swords, crossbows, spears,” Gnea said proudly.

Cabell shook his head. “They’re no use against Inorganics.”

“Grenades, then,” Leana chimed in. “Rocket launchers—”

“And these,” said the chief, as two of his tribesmen dragged an odd-looking crate into the hut.

Inside were a dozen Karbarran firearms not unlike Lron’s own small-bore. Each wooden and metal-fitted rifle had a large globular fixture forward of the trigger guard and forestock lever. “We received many such crates during the final days of the Masters’ empire,” the chief went on to explain as Lron hefted one of the weapons.

“Yes,” Lron said, “Karbarra was exporting rebellion then.” He glanced over at Tesla. “Until the Invid appeared.”

Max, too, was studying the Invid. “All right, Tesla,” he said, coming to his feet. “We’ll play this one your way. But all deals are off at the first sign of any monkey business.”

Tesla regarded Max and the others through his hastily fashioned mask. “Now, why would I want to do that when I’ve had enough trouble just trying to act

Human

?”

This time the team was principally XT—Lron and Crysta, Gnea and Bela, with Learna as guide. That Jack would accompany them had been taken for granted; and, after Tesla’s plan had been given the okay, Janice signed on. The Praxians felt more comfortable with their one-handed crossbows, shields, and shortswords than anything else the Sentinels could offer in the way of weaponry, and Gnea wouldn’t part company with her spearlike

naginata.

But the others carried Karbarran air rifles, satchels of command-detonated explosives, conventional fragmentation grenades, and rocket launchers. Shortly after Garuda’s midnight, the eight-member team was inserted by Garudan flitters to within twenty miles of the crater, allowing them ample time to reach the farm-hive before sunrise.

At the same time, Wolfe and the Sterlings met back at the shuttle to coordinate plans for their joint diversionary raid against two neighboring farms. It was decided that the Veritechs and Hovertanks would commence their strikes at sunrise, when the Garudan slaves would still be in the camps.

“We’re going to concentrate our fire against the orchards, here and here,” Max briefed his squadron later on, pointing to areas on the maps Learna had provided. The hives themselves—processing plants really—were almost certainly protected by energy shields like the one the Invid had thrown over Tiresia’s Royal Hall during the battle for Tirol. But since the Sentinels’ main objective was to draw out the enemy mecha, Max saw no reason why targeting the precious Optera tree plantations couldn’t achieve the same result.

“Colonel Wolfe’s tankers will position themselves along this ridgeline and move in after you’ve completed your initial runs. Then you’re to pulverize that hive. If we dump enough into that shield we might be able to punch through.” Similar all-out bursts had worked against the Karbarran hives. Max scanned his small audience. “Any questions?” When all the headshaking was over, he added, “All right then, let’s saddle up.”

Outside the shuttle, he caught sight of Miriya, who had been off briefing the Skull’s Red contingent, and hurried over to her just as she was scampering up into the Alpha’s cockpit. She had seemed preoccupied during the meeting with Wolfe, and absent even now when he asked her if everything was all right.

“Yeah, fine,” she said, offering him a weak smile beneath her transpirator.

“You don’t look fine,” he told her, touching her hair. “Maybe you should sit this one out.” She laughed at the suggestion, more out of surprise, he suspected, than anything else. A former Quadrano sit out a fight?

“Max, I’m just a little tired.” She donned the thinking cap, climbed the notch ladder, and settled herself in the cockpit seat. “Now wipe that concerned look off your face,” she told him before lowering the canopy.

He forced a smile her way, readjusted his mask, and ran to his own mecha. In five minutes both squadron teams were up, tearing through Garuda’s crimson predawn skies.

The farms they had chosen to hit were some fifty miles southwest of the crater farm, surrounded by extensive forests of Optera trees, which from Max’s point of view resembled outsized melon patches; the hive itself was a freeze-frame shot of a hydrogen bomb’s first-stage canopy.

He took hold of the stick and ordered the Skull to follow him in, loosing a dozen napalm torpedoes from the Alpha’s undercarriage pylons at treetop-level. Angry plumes of liquid fire fountained above the ground fog behind him as the VT went ballistic; Max turned to look over his shoulder as the rest of the squadron dove in for their runs, each explosion spreading dollops of burning stuff from tree to tree. Skull One rolled over and went in again, incinerating a patch of forest west of the hive now, while Miriya’s team gave the east quadrant hell. Then all at once there were Invid Shock Troopers in the air, rising out of the leaping flames and black smoke like a swarm of angry hornets.

“We’ve got company, Skull Leader,” one of Max’s wingmen reported. “Multiple signals at eight o’clock.”

Max turned his attention from the ascending mecha and twisted around to his right: twenty or more Pincer Ships were approaching from the direction of the crater farm.

“Coming around to zero one zero,” Max said into the tac net. “Help me engage, Blue Danube.”

“On my way, Skull One. Rolling out …”

Max went for missile lock on the lead Pincer and thumbed off two heat-seekers; they found the ship as it climbed, quartering it and a second Pincer in the process. But the Invid were answering the challenge, and Max was forced to break high and right as streams of annihilation disks screamed into the pocket he had vacated. His wingmen split and boostered out in the nick of time, chased by clusters of Shock Troopers from the Invid’s counteroffensive group.

Max imaged the Alpha over to Battloid mode at the top of his climb, targeting data scrolling across his display screens now, and the net a tangle of requests and mad shrieks. A hail of missiles tore from the VT’s open shoulder racks and dropped into the midst of the Invid pursuit group, wiping out five of their number. Max went to guns with the remaining two, hands clenching the HOTAS, trapshooting the Invid with the Alpha’s rifle/cannon as they streaked by him.

Elsewhere in the field, Miriya’s team was holding its own against the mecha born in that inferno below. Half the trees were on fire now, thick smoke roiling in Garuda’s dawn, while Humans and Invid exchanged salvos of death. Battloids and Troopers grappled gauntlet to claw.

“Guess we succeeded in getting their attention,” Max said to no one in particular. He chinned Miriya’s frequency and asked for an update; he repeated the request when she didn’t respond, then reconfigured his ship and dropped down to have a look for himself.

Miriya had gone to Battloid and was executing her own version of a Fokker Feint when Max caught up with her. There were four Shock Troopers hovering around her mecha, pulling sting-and-runs. He smiled as he watched her ace one of them with the autocannon; but that look collapsed when he realized how slow she was to react to follow-up energy Frisbees delivered by the remainder of the group. Max was close enough now to throw himself into the fight; but the sight of her sloppiness had left him shaken, and he almost got himself dusted.

“Miriya, what’s wrong?” he said when the last of the four had been dispatched. “Miriya!”

“I … don’t know, Max,” she answered him after a moment. “Dizzy spell.”

“I want you to return to base.”

Miriya’s face came up on Skull One’s commo screen. “I’ll be all right. It’s better now.”

“Forget it—”

“Max!” Wolfe’s voice suddenly boomed through the net. “We’ve got troubles! Inorganics—hundreds of them!”

Max looked away from Miriya’s image and chinned the com freak. “Your Pack should be able to handle those things, Wolfe,” he said.

“It’s not us they’re after, Commander,” Wolfe said, just as gruffly. “The sons of bitches have turned them loose on the camp—they’re attacking the Garudans!”

A short distance from the besieged orchard, Wolfe’s Hovertank team was well into the forests surrounding the second farm. From the ridgeline above the dome-shaped hive, where the Pack had been Guardian-configured, Wolfe had been able to observe the Skull’s fiery treetop passes. He had then given the order for his tankers to open fire. They hadn’t lobbed five minutes’ worth of projectiles into the forest when the first wave of Inorganics had appeared—Hellcats, galloping across Garuda’s tundra and heading straight for the ridge. They were followed a minute later by ranks of the bipedal demonic-looking Robo-trolls known as Cranns and Odeons.

Wolfe had hated the things ever since he went up against them on Tirol, and had been looking forward to engaging them—anything to get Minmei off his mind for a while, to keep his hand from reaching out for a bottle … So he had ordered the Pack over to standard mode and led the charge down the rocky slope, only to find that the Inorganics had changed course. And it had only taken a moment to figure out the reason behind the tactic: the Invid were planning to use the Garudans as the Sentinels had the Invid’s life-giving trees—for

diversion

! The XT labor force was strung out for more than a mile along a sparsely wooded hillside guarded by a company of armed and weapon-wielding Invid soldiers. It was then that Wolfe had opened the net to Max.

The Skull fighters were overhead now; Wolfe could see them through breaks in the trees’ clustered, billiard-ball canopies. Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships were right on their tails.

Wolfe’s Hovertanks broke out of the forest a moment after Skull One Touched down; the Alpha was in Guardian mode, with the rifle/cannon gripped in one gauntlet, stammering its harsh greeting to the Hellcats. Dozens of Inorganics burst apart as armor-piercing rounds ripped into the pack, but five times that number made it through the VT’s still-forming line, bounding over the mecha and continuing their mad rush for the Garudans. Aware of the situation now, the helpless slaves had broken ranks and were attempting to flee; most of them were cut down instantly by bursts from the soldiers’ forearm guns, while others fell to the first wave of Inorganics, torn apart by Hellcats or roasted by bolts from the Cranns’ orifice-dimpled weapons spheres.

Wolfe ordered the Pack to spread out and form a second line; the Hovertanks reconfigured and began to fire at will, decimating much of the second sortie wave, but suddenly forced to deal with the Shock Troopers as well. Annihilation disks stormed into the tankers’ midst, tearing up the land and overturning two of the mecha. Wolfe could see that members of Max’s blue team were going over to Battloid and repositioning themselves opposite the Pack to form the second leg of a V formation. Wolfe called for a cannonade as the Inorganics rushed into the notch. Pounded with explosive rounds the tundra shook and bellowed; the ridge trapped the concussive sounds and hurled them back, as Inorganics and Shock Troopers alike were reduced to gobs of white-hot metal, geysers of fire in the already superheated air.

Miriya’s Red team came in just then to add their deafening movement to the score. Pincer Ships and VTs went face-to-face, hammering away at one another, while missiles and projectiles corkscrewed through the firestorm and smoke.

Wolfe told his B team to hold their ground; at the same time he and the other A tankers battled their way over scorched terrain and through flaming stands of trees toward the Garudans’ march of death. Prevented from ascending the hillside by rows of Invid soldiers and vulnerable below to the Inorganics’ unchecked advance, the vulpine XTs were being slaughtered. Wolfe thought he could hear their wailing clear through the tank’s canopy and the tac net’s cacophony of calls. The Pack couldn’t fire for fear of killing even more of them; so instead Wolfe led the tankers on a flat-out collision course straight to where the Inorganics had become bunched up at the base of the hill. The tanks smashed their way into the thick of the slaughter, downswept deflection bows cutting Cranns and Odeons in half. Hellcats leaped on the hovering mecha, only to be blasted to smithereens by in-close guns, or crushed by hand when some of the Pack reconfigured to Battloid mode.

Meanwhile, at the edge of the forest Max’s VT teams were getting the upper hand. Pincer and Shock Trooper ships were falling out of the sky like ducks on a bad day at the marsh. Miriya’s Reds accounted for most of those kills; Wolfe could just discern them overhead, flying circles around the enemy pilots. He caught sight of one VT in particular as it was completing some sort of aerial pirouette that had left three Pincers in ruin; he was thinking that it must have been Miriya’s, until he saw the VT sustain a shot any cadet could have dodged. Wolfe watched it plummet toward a ravaged area of woodland.

“That’s the place they got jumped,” Jack said, pointing out a damaged row of Optera trees at the bottom of the slope. The hulks of the three Scout ships had been removed, but there was evidence of the fires the explosions had touched off. “Then they were dragged into the hive.” Jack handed binoculars up to Lron, once again indicating the direction. “You can just make out the entrance or whatever it is.”

Tesla gave him the Invid word for the portal, mumbling something Jack found unintelligible.

“Like I said: whatever it is.”

Careful not to disturb his transpirator, Lron took a look through the armored glasses and passed them along to Crysta. She was upping the intensity some, when Learna’s trill-like signal reached them from somewhere in the trees. A moment later, the Garudan appeared at the base of the slope, motioning the team down. Gnea and Bela were crouched behind her, masked and vigilant, looking more than ever like barbaric gladiators lifted from some Roman arena. Jack tapped Janice on the shoulder and got everyone under way.

They had reached the crater well before dawn, without incident despite the presence of stepped-up Inorganic patrol teams. Not just Hellcats, but Cranns and Odeons—bizarre enough creatures by daylight, and positively frightening in the predawn ground fog. Even these hadn’t deterred the free Garudans from putting in an appearance, though; only this time it was more than curiosity that motivated them: many had armed themselves with Karbarran air rifles, hoisting them in a display of support as the team passed. Just before sunrise at the crater rim, Jack had seen flashes of explosive light in the southwestern skies, rolls of distant thunder—the Skull’s bombing run against the neighboring farm. Shortly thereafter, scores of Shock Troopers had risen from the basin and flown toward the sound of the guns.

“Any activity?” Jack asked when he reached the base of the slope.

“Nothing so far,” Learna told him. “We went as far as the hive.”

Jack turned to Tesla. “What do you think?” he said angrily. He had no patience left for the Invid’s malingering. Keeping Tesla concealed on the trail had led to more than a few hairy moments; and on the slope he had behaved less like a sentient creature than an out-of-control boulder. But now the time had come for Tesla to earn his keep. “What’s their routine?”

Tesla glanced at what could be seen of the hive through the trees. “Difficult to say, what with all the activity you’ve stirred up. Normally, the slaves would be arriving any minute now.” Tesla looked up at one of the trees’ vine-encrusted globe canopies. “Pity, too,” he mused. “All this ripe fruit going to waste.

Jack brandished a long-bladed dirk as Tesla reached out to pluck a particularly succulent-looking piece. “You haven’t earned it yet, Tesla. Besides, you don’t really want to take off the mask, do you?”

Tesla thought it over. There was no reason he couldn’t lift the mask for the time it would take to gobble down some fruit; but he decided not to bother arguing the point. So he simply left the fruit to rot instead of adding it to the samples he had already stuffed into the pockets of his robes.

“No, I suppose not,” he said after a moment.

Jack ordered him to take the point; and in ten minutes the team arrived at the hive’s entrance. It was faintly lit, a half-moon–shaped tunnel twenty-five-feet high and composed of what looked like solidified sea foam. There seemed to be a slight shimmering to the air inside, but this ceased when Tesla identified himself to the scanner. A voiceprint, Jack thought, but he couldn’t be sure.

The tunnel was deadly hot, evil-smelling even through the masks’ filters, and reminded Jack of fiber-optic vids he had seen of the human body’s arterial system. It terminated in a rotunda, whose enormity and crepuscular illumination Jack found disorienting. Dozens of corridors emptied into the area, like detonator horns on an old-fashioned naval mine.

“We can dispense with these contraptions,” Tesla was saying, pulling the transpirator from his snout. He took a deep breath and smiled at everyone. Jack could see that he was taking obvious delight in their amazement.

“This is our foyer,” Tesla said, with an elaborate wave of his arm.

Jack checked the display on the biosensor Jean had strapped on his wrist. Satisfied, he slipped the filtration mask from his mouth, determined to keep a straight face. Still wary, he sniffed at the air, found it slightly dank but breathable, and gave the all-clear for the others to follow his example. “Which way?” he demanded, leading with his chin.

Tesla pointed to the circular shaft directly overhead. “There.” With a theatrical gesture, he motioned the team to gather round him. No sooner had they done so than they found themselves imprisoned by some sort of tractor beam that was lifting them en masse toward the overhead shaft. Gnea brought the tip of her lance to the ribbed underside of Tesla’s neck.

“No,” he told her, up on tiptoes to ease the contact. “You have it all wrong. This is simply our … elevator system.”

Jack and Janice were down in a combat crouch, weapons drawn, searching the beam’s translucent circumference for any sign of danger. Lron, Crysta, Bela, and Kami were similarly postured, Karbarran air rifles at high port, crossbows armed. Tesla continued to protest for the duration of the thirty-second ascent into the dome’s upper reaches.

Slowly, the tractor field began to de-rezz.

Jack had relaxed some by the time the beam shut down; then all at once he saw four Invid sentries swinging around to face them, forearm cannons raised.

Max had seen Miriya’s Alpha go down. He had his own VT in Battloid mode now, and was running it toward the crash site through a section of burning forest. Two of his team were dead; at least that many of Miriya’s had died as well. He wasn’t sure how Wolfe was doing, but he had seen more than one Hovertank overturned by Shock Trooper anni disks. Max didn’t even want to think about the Garudan slaves. And suddenly there was Miriya to worry about.

The mecha’s scanners caught sight of something up ahead, and Max called for increased intensity, studying the biosensor data displays. A minute later he had visuals. It was Miriya’s Red Alpha alright, in lopsided Guardian configuration, radome tipped to the ground—a wounded bird.

Then Max spotted the Hellcats—four of them, attacking the VT’s canopy with a frenzy, battering it with downward blows of their armored heads. He could see that one Inorganic had managed to get a claw inside, and was waving it around, presumably hoping to slice Miriya to shreds. The four turned at the same moment to show Max their gleaming fangs and sword-edged shoulder horns; two hunt-mates leaped for the VT straightaway, but he already had the rifle/cannon locked on them. They came apart in midair like clay pigeons. Max holed a third where it stood glaring at him, and now the final ’Cat snatched its paw from the punctured canopy, reared up, and came at him. Max tried to sidestep the Battloid when the Hellcat jumped, but his timing was off; the Inorganic latched on to the mecha’s ablative head shields and began to ram its snout against the permaplas visor. Reflexively, Max pressed himself back into the cockpit seat; he had a larger-than-life view of the crazed thing’s snapping mouth and false gullet. The ’Cat was snarling, trying desperately to slice open the Battloid’s belly with the churning motion of its razor-sharp hind claws. Max shut down the external pickups and armed the head lasers. The angle was almost too oblique, but the Hellcat’s back was heaving in and out of the targeting brackets and Max thought he might have a chance. He raised the Battloid’s left arm, gripped the ’Cat around the waist, and tugged it into the lasers’ field. Then he triggered the in-close guns. The Inorganic brought its head up as the light beams seared into its backside; it took Max’s follow-up pulse right through the eyes and dropped to the ground, lifeless.

Max stomped the thing twice. He imaged over to Guardian mode and pulled his mask tight as he popped the mecha’s canopy. Miriya had yet to show herself. Scampering up along the Red’s downswept wing, he peered into the shattered cockpit and began to fumble with the manual-release levers.

“Miriya!”

He called her name twice more before he succeeded in springing the ship’s protective blister. She appeared unharmed, but unconscious. More troubling, however, was the fact that the Hellcat had ripped off her mask; she had been breathing Garuda’s atmosphere for a dangerously long time.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

Several commentators have felt compelled to point out that Jonathan’s Wolfe’s “slip” [sic: see Mizner’s

Rakes and Rogues; The True Story of the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission]

was perhaps the pivotal event of the Third Robotech War. The reasoning goes something like this: If Wolfe had fired on the Invid ship, Rem would never had reached Haydon IV; and without Rem, the Regess would not have been as likely to instruct her Sensor Nebulae to search the Galaxy’s outermost arms for evidence of the matrix, and would not, therefore, have found Earth until years after the Expeditionary mission returned. The reader must decide for him or herself whether anything is to be gained by such speculation; but I would point out that [Mizner’s] reasoning can be made to apply in both directions. It is as easy to blame Lynn-Minmei as it is Jonathan Wolfe.

Footnote in Zens Bellow’s

The Road to Reflex Point

An Invid ship, a small shuttle, had docked at Haydon IV’s spaceport facility. The Regess had been told that it was from Garuda—and bearing gifts.

She was in her temporary headquarters high atop one of the city’s ultratech architectural wonders when news of the ship’s arrival was delivered to her.

Out of reach

, she liked to think; distanced from the cold, unsettling presence of the planet’s armless, hovering creatures, the displaced and still discontent Praxian Sisterhood, her own discomforting discoveries … And out of the Regent’s reach, his dark schemes and mad plans.

But if anything, Haydon IV had only compounded the misery she had carried here from Optera and Praxis. She felt at the mercy of a confused longing she could not define; a need to break free of this horizonless condition.

She supposed that she should have been grateful that Haydon IV’s inhabitants hadn’t in any way trifled with her or denied her anything; but neither had they accepted her as the evolved being she fancied herself to be. It was more accurate to say they had

tolerated

her presence—as if they were all privy to some grand arcane mystery she couldn’t even discern, much less unravel. And furthermore she sensed that this had something to do with the world’s equally mysterious founder/creator—Haydon. The databanks she had searched for answers to her own evolutionary puzzles gave some glimpse into his life, but hardly enough to form a complete portrait of the being. And she confessed to a certain trepidation at expanding her efforts along these lines. Already the very foundation of her own life’s work had been shaken by what she had uncovered in Haydon’s transphysical musings, and all at once she felt too unsure of herself and her ambitions to permit much more in the way of contradiction. There were hints, though, that she was not, as she had imagined,

in control of things

; that the theft of the Flowers, the Invid’s quest, even Zor’s misdeeds, were but part of a much grander design—one in which she, too, did little more than play out a role. And that role … that role demanded she accept that what she sought was not the Flowers of Life, but the stuff that had been conjured from them by Zor himself—the

Protoculture

!

As she saw it—as she wanted to see it—Protoculture was a malicious energy, a malignancy that did nothing but fuel the war machine of the Masters and her deluded ex-husband. To see it as more would be to admit she had been wrong after all, that the Regent’s course was the truer one, the predestined one.

And suddenly he had sent her some sort of gift.

She was pacing the floor like a caged beast now, waiting for the unsolicited thing to be brought up to her. Finally, two of her husband’s “scientists” were admitted to her quarters; she recognized one of them as a master she had herself evolved for the express purpose of overseeing Flower gathering on Garuda—another of the cursed worlds Zor had for some reason seen fit to cultivate.

“Your Grace,” the scientist directed up to her, bowing.

“The Regent regrets that he could not be here in person to bestow his gift.”

The Regess made a scoffing sound. “If he had come in person, I wouldn’t be here to receive him. Now, have the thing brought in and take your leave,

underling.

”

“Of course, Your Worship,” the scientist said, bowing once more. “Only it is not so much a ‘thing’ …”

“What then?” she asked him, arms akimbo.

“More in the way of a live presentation—but one that will surely prove most enlightening.” The scientist shouted a few quick commands over his shoulder, and two Invid soldiers marched into the room. Sandwiched between them was a small Tiresioid male, narcotized, so it appeared.

Puzzled, the Regess reduced her stature some to get a better look at him. One of the soldiers tilted the Tiresioid’s face up for her inspection.

It was Zor.

A tight scream worked its way up from the very depths of her being, and she came close to losing consciousness, falling back from the soldiers and their terrible trophy and crashing against a communicator sphere.

“A clone, Your Grace, a

clone

!” the scientist was shouting, aware of the Regess’s distress. “We meant you no ill.”

“How dare you!”

she bellowed, frightfully enough to send both soldiers and scientists to their knees, and Rem facefirst to the floor.

“We subjected the clone to the Garudan atmosphere and discovered that his dreams spoke of things we were certain you would find—”

“Silence!”

the Regess said, cutting off the scientist’s rush of words. “I know what you

thought

,” she added, more composed now. “And I know what the Regent meant by sending me this … 

clone

. On your feet!”

Hesitantly, the four Invid did as instructed, leaving Rem where he lay. “Your Highness,” the master scientist began on a sheepish note, “Haydon IV’s devices will permit us to gaze even deeper into the clone’s cellular memory. Perhaps some clue regarding the Masters or the missing Protoculture matrix …”

“Yes,” she answered him, looking down at Rem as he groaned and rolled over. It took all her strength to keep from reaching out to touch him. Would he remember her? she wondered. Would the clone’s cellular memory reveal what Zor had been thinking when he seduced her, when he returned to Optera for the seedlings, backed by an army of warrior giants? Would that same memory reveal the path the matrix had taken, the course she would follow? … “Conduct your experiments,” she told the relieved group. “Show me the future of our race!”

Jonathan Wolfe was beyond believing in miracles, but he was hard-pressed for a better word to describe the sight of several hundred Garudans charging onto the scene to rescue their enslaved brethren. They were cresting the hilltop now—armed with everything from war clubs and bolos and grapnel-shaped things to Karbarran air weapons and antimecha rockets—and dropping down on the Invid soldiers who were keeping the slaves hemmed in. A dozen or so Bioroids on Hoverplatforms were providing them with air support, employing their stem-mounted cannons to rain destruction on Hellcats and Cranns alike.

Countless defenseless Garudans had been killed in the Inorganics’ genocidal attack, but that didn’t stop the survivors from rallying once they realized that their world had committed itself to an all-or-nothing stand. They rushed the Invid lines, which were already strained to the breaking point, and fell upon the offworlders with a violence only blind fury could release. It took five, ten, often fifteen Garudans to bring down a single armored soldier, but one by one the enemy fell. Some were pummeled to death, others disintegrated by their own weapons, and still others were stripped of their masks and respirator tanks and left to run amok, crazed long before the spores could work their effect—crazed by the naked fear of that end.

Spurred on by this reversal, the Wolfe Pack and Skull Squadron pulled out all the stops. Until this moment, concern for the well-being of Rick and their other captured comrades had to some extent weakened their resolve; and it took the Garudans’ desperate charge to make them remember what the fight for liberation was all about. Re-inspired, VT pilots and Hovertankers let loose their own shadow selves, and swept like avenging angels through ruptured sky and forests infernal. Shock Troopers, soldiers, Optera trees, the farms themselves—nothing was to be spared their wrath.

With total abandon, Wolfe urged his mecha deeper and deeper into the madness, destroying, crippling, killing. For one instant he rejoiced at hearing Miriya Sterling’s voice over the tac net—she was presently riding tandem in Max’s Alpha/Beta fighter—but that was no more than a fleeting reminder of a past life. He considered himself one of the dead now, in no world’s hell but his own. And from that hollow center came a murderous intent that knew no bounds. He could only hope that some of the Sentinels would live to see victory that day.

“Behind you!” Janice shouted.

But Jack had already seen them and was halfway through his turn, the rocket launcher atop his shoulder. Three Invid soldiers were advancing up the corridor, their forearm cannons booming. Jack triggered his shot and caught one of the XTs dead center. The explosion was enough to drop the other two, but only momentarily; they were back on their feet in an instant, resuming their advance while Jack reached for the grenades clipped to his web belt.

“We’ve got them!” he heard Lron, or possibly Crysta, growl. The Karbarrans were positioned on either side of the corridor terminus, grenades in their outstretched mitts. “Now!” Lron said, and the two pivoted and released.

Jack flattened himself against the floor and covered his head; the roar and concussive heat washed over him and he rolled to one side, running through a quick check of everyone’s position. Janice was behind him, kneeling over the quivering mass that was Tesla; Gnea and Bela were off to the right, along a section of curved, featureless wall just short of a second corridor terminus. Learna was opposite them, near the tubestand and sphere arrangement Tesla had called a communicator. The four Invid soldiers who had greeted them after the “elevator” ride were sprawled on the floor, dead; two with arrows sunk inches deep into their thick necks. Close by two more were dead or dying, dropped by high-speed projectiles from the Karbarrans’ air rifles.

“Get him up!” Jack yelled, scrambling to his feet and motioning to Tesla. “Gnea, Bela, check that corridor!”

The Praxian women had crossbows and swords held low as they moved in; Crysta came up behind them with her rifles ready to mete out additional force. Tesla was up now and dusting off his robes.

“Barbarians,” he said, looking around at the dead soldiers.

“Save it,” Jack spat, giving him a nudge in the gut with the launcher.

Tesla looked down his snout at the Human. For small and primitive beings, he decided, they were possessed of an incredible ferocity at times. And while this in itself was not uncommon, it was completely at variance with the sympathetic,

caring

traits they were so fond of displaying.

Tesla, Jack, Janice, and Learna were nearing the communicator sphere when something suddenly charged the air—a resonant, bone-rattling hum that carried a peculiar odor with it.

“An alert,” Tesla announced, fingers on the sphere’s activation controls. “Seems you’ve succeeded in calling attention to yourselves.”

“Anything?” Jack called out to Gnea. She shook her head, then offered him a perplexed shrug.

“Ahh, there’s the reason they’re leaving us alone …”

Jack turned around in time to see an image come to life in the heart of the sphere. It took a moment to make sense of the scene, and Learna was the first to gasp.

“Looks as though we’ve a rebellion on our hands,” Tesla ventured.

The sphere showed a virtual army of Garudans pouring into the basin. Invid soldiers were butchering them from dug-in positions close to the base of the hive. The Optera tree forest was ablaze, giving the crater the look of a devil’s cauldron.

“It’s suicide!”

Janice put her arm around Learna’s soft shoulders.

“Then let’s make it count for something,” Jack said in a determined voice. He nudged Tesla into motion again, and the Invid began to lead them along one of the corridors. Shortly they were standing before a shimmering portal similar to the one at the hive entrance. Once again, Tesla’s hand or voice “unlocked” the portal, and the team found themselves in a kind of control center, filled with “furniture”—strangely contoured chairs and fairly conventional tables and countertops—wardrobe closets, instrumentality columns, communicator spheres of various size and design, and what looked to be Tiresian Robotech devices.

The team fanned out to search the space and Lron made an important discovery behind one of the long counters: two cowering white-robed Invid scientists.

The Karbarran pulled them up by their necks and shoved them toward the center of the room.

“Tesla!” one of them seethed, following up with what Jack imagined to be a few choice Invid epithets. Janice translated: “He called Tesla a traitor. Said it was true what they’d heard about him.”

“Meaning what?” Jack asked.

“Why, my leading you here,” Tesla said too quickly.

“Where is Kami?” Learna demanded.

Tesla put the question to them, then grunted when the scientists had replied. “They refuse to say.”

Jack grabbed Crysta’s rifle and held it to the head of one of the scientists. “Ask him again.”

Tesla listened to the reply and shook his head.

“All right then—”

“Hold it a moment, Jack,” Bela interrupted. “Perhaps they crave a lungful of Garuda’s fresh air …”

Tesla told the two what the Sentinels had in store for them; even Jack could see their snout sensors blanch at the prospect. No one really needed the translation.

“They’ve changed their minds,” Tesla announced with a snort of disapproval.

And with that the scientists began to lead the Sentinels on a circuitous tour through the dome, descending always, via tractor tubes and spiral drops where there should have been stairs, past conveyor systems and vat after vat of Fruits or pulverized stem and Flower, in and out of corridors and rooms, commo stations and rotundas, all recently vacated by soldiers and worker drones who had ceased their tasks to protect the farm. Within minutes of leaving the control center Jack felt completely lost; he had no idea where they were in relation to the hive entrance, and began to wonder whether the scientists were leading them into a trap. But his concern faded by the time they reached what he guessed to be the lowest, perhaps underground level; they had passed numerous places where ambushes could have been sprung, but not a single soldier had been seen. Then at last they reached the end of the line—or so it seemed until one of the scientists actually walked the group

right through a wall

. The chamber beyond was a kind of membranous sac, veined and pulsating like something one might find in an unhealthy lung, and there, heaped together in the center of the floor, were Rick, Lisa, Karen, and Kami.

Fearing the worst, Jack hung back while everyone else ran to them—everyone but Janice, who positioned herself near the sac’s osmotic gate where she could keep an eye on Tesla. Learna immediately slipped a transpirator over Kami’s muzzle and hugged him to herself for all it was worth. Kami stirred some after a moment, but the three Humans were another matter; sickly pale and disheveled, they languished in a deathlike stupor, whimpering every so often.

“… subjected them to the atmosphere, then performed some sort of mind-probe experiments,” Janice could hear Tesla translating.

Janice saw the two scientists take a step back as Jack and the others swung around to them. She pretended to preoccupy herself studying the chamber’s portal, furnishing Tesla with a bit of illusory breathing space. At the same time, she sharpened her eyes and ears in his direction.

“Don’t worry about a thing,” Tesla was telling his comrades in a low but reassuring tone. “Now that the Regent has been … killed, Tesla will rule in his place. I will make peace with these beings and—”

“Tesla, what are you saying?” one of the Invid cut him off. “The Regent killed? We just spoke with him. In fact, it was he who told us to expect you.”

“What?” You spoke … But, but what you said, what you said about it being true—”

“Yes,” the other scientist sneered. “That you had taken up the Sentinels’ fight, and that we should beware your treachery!”

“No!” Tesla said too loudly. He caught himself and risked a glance at Janice, but she kept her eyes averted from him.

Jack, Gnea, and Lron were storming up to him when he swung back around. Lron took hold of each of the scientists by the fronts of their robes.

“Ask them what they did with Rem.” Jack barked.

Tesla peered over at the rescued group, noticing for the first time the Tiresian was not among them. Absently, he put the question to the two he had hoped were to be his first subjects, still stunned by what they had told him.

The Regent alive? How could it be?

“Well?” Jack shouted. “What’s he saying?”

Tesla waited for the scientist to repeat it, nodding as he listened. “Rem is Tiresian. His dreams were less, shall we say,

commonplace

. So he was sent elsewhere for further tests.”

“Where?” Janice asked, walking over to him.

Tesla listened for a moment. “To Haydon IV. In fact, the Regent himself is on his way—” Tesla eyes went wide and the words caught in his throat.

“Go on …”

He swallowed and found his voice—raspy as it was, all at once. “The Regent is on his way to Haydon IV as we speak.”

“Then that’s where we’re bound,” Bela said evenly, her eyes narrowed to slits.

Tesla gulped, loud enough for everyone to hear.

“We’ve got to get them to Jean’s med team,” Learna announced, still holding on to her mate.

Bela lifted Lisa from the floor. “We have no time to lose.”

Lron and Crysta moved in to take hold of Rick and Karen.

Max and Miriya received Cabell’s good news/bad news update over the com net: Rick and the others had been rescued, but they were still under the effects of the planet’s microbe-laden atmosphere and delirious with fever. Moreover, the mission had gone smoothly with no casualties among the team, but Rem was no longer on Garuda. Jack’s team was out of the crater hive now and awaiting extraction; Jean claimed that Rick, Lisa, and Karen were too weak to endure the trip back to the med group’s temporary hq by Hovercycle or Garudan flitter.

Max signed off and immediately raised two of his wingmen on the tac, ordering them to rendezvous with Skull One at the crater hive. Reconfiguring the mecha to Guardian mode, he imaged the Alpha into a vertical takeoff and set his course northeast for the basin. As the VT rose, Max had a full view of the forests and steppes the Skull and Wolfe Pack had turned to wasteland. Not since the battle on Karbarra had he seen so much death, such extensive destruction. The dome-shaped hive was in ruins, collapsed and in flames; the Optera tree forests, along with patches of grassland and evergreen, were burning out of control. The terrain was ravaged beyond belief—pockmarked, holed, cratered, littered with legless or pincerless Invid mecha, bits of Hovertank and Veritech, Bioroid and Inorganic. An entire hillside was covered base to summit with Hellcat husks and Invid and Garudan corpses. Hundreds, perhaps thousands had died. And from what Max was hearing over the net, the same scene had played at each and every Invid farm and installation throughout the planet’s equatorial belt. But Garuda had freed itself from the offworlders’ yoke.

Good news … bad news.

Max said as much to Miriya as the VT covered the fifty or so miles to the crater. She was still in the Beta module and apparently all right, in spite of her ordeal. Max was cautiously optimistic; he had yet to quiz her about how her fighter had been brought down in the first place.

The crater hive was for the most part intact, but Max didn’t expect it to last much longer. Fires encroaching on it from all sides. Skull One dropped out of the smoke and clouds onto a battleground much like the one they had just left, dead and wounded strewn across the field, a palpable commingling of triumph and loss. Those Invid who had survived were seeing the Garudan’s barbaric side; but Max didn’t suppose he could fault Kami’s people for the day’s bloody aftermath, this requisite catharsis.

Masked again, Jack, Gnea, and Bela directed Max and his wingmen in, and got Rick and the others into the VTs as fast as they could. Lron, Crysta, and Janice were keeping Tesla and a few Invid scientists under guard inside the hive—protected from the Garudans’ bloodlust for the time being. Kami, still weak but ambulatory now, was off somewhere sharing the bittersweet taste of victory with Learna and their fellow warriors. Mopping up, Max ventured, much as the Wolfe Pack was doing in other quarters.

Max caught a brief glimpse of Rick as he was being lifted into the cargo space of Blue Danube’s Beta module. The transpirator prevented Max from being able to see his friend’s face, but Rick looked as though the Invid had robbed him of his bones.

The three VTs raced for Kami’s village, where Jean’s team took over and carried Rick and the others to the safety of the geodesic med dome. Max couldn’t help but see it as a miniature version of the Invid hives they had just destroyed.

He and Miriya entered on Jack’s heels, doffed their masks, and took in a lungful of the dome’s artificial atmosphere.

“Sweet, isn’t it?” Max said, trying to sound cheerful.

Miriya gave him a weak smile, but said nothing.

He was reaching for her hand when she suddenly stumbled and collapsed into his arms.

CHAPTER
THIRTEEN

Use your discretion, but try to have your men hold off until you’re certain that at least half of them [ed. note: the Zentraedi] are inside—that includes Breetai and that kingsize bitch, Kazianna. Instruct the demo team to use more charges than they think necessary; I don’t want any of them coming out alive. In fact, it might be worthwhile to sabotage as many of their environment suits as possible beforehand. Neither of us believe in accidents, Adams, but we’re going to call it that no matter what

.

A “Code Pyramid” communiqué from T. R. Edwards, as quoted in Wildman’s

When Evil Had Its Day

A tight cluster of lights was descending out of Fantoma’s perpetually brooding skies. Breetai watched them for a moment, then turned away from the command center’s blister viewport to face his lieutenant.

“They’ve arrived, my lord.”

“So I see,” Breetai said soberly. He glanced back over his shoulder, snapped the faceshield that sealed his pressurized armor closed, and moved to the hut’s airlock. The lieutenant and two armed soldiers followed him out into Fantoma’s night.

A constant debris-filled wind had been scouring the ringed giant’s surface for the past three days, and Breetai instinctively raised an arm against it as he marched in lumbering high strides toward the landing zone’s illumination grid. Nearly all of the Zentraedi cadre had turned out for the confrontation, and Breetai spied Kazianna Hesh among them. Nearby were a dozen or so Micronians in environment suits—some of Lang’s Robotechs. Edwards’s Ghost Riders were reconfiguring their Veritechs now, imaging over from Guardian to Battloid as they touched down.

“He apparently has more on his mind than a friendly chat,” Breetai said to his lieutenant while the last of the squadron was snapping into upright mode. As murmurs of discontent reached him over the tactical freq, Breetai instructed his first officer to pass the word along that he wouldn’t tolerate any incidents; no matter what Edwards said or did, his troops were to keep silent.

Edwards stepped his Battloid off the grid and began to move across the field in Breetai’s direction. The Zentraedi knew better than to regard this as some gesture of compromise. Four of the Ghosts flanked Edwards, with a kind of threatening casualness to the way they cradled their rifle/cannons. Breetai threw his lieutenant a knowing glance. The show of force came as no surprise; Dr. Lang had already given him an idea of what to expect.

“New Zarkopolis welcomes General Edwards,” Breetai said with practiced elaborateness. “We’re sorry we couldn’t provide the general with better weather.” He could hear a few Zentraedi snicker.

“Very thoughtful of you,” Edwards returned over the mecha’s external speakers, mimicking Breetai’s tone of voice. “And I’m sorry I can’t bring you better news.”

The two men fell into an uneasy silence; the wind came up, howling and pinging gravel against Breetai’s armored suit and the Battloid’s alloy. The Zentraedi commander narrowed his eyes and grinned, picturing Edwards in the mecha’s cockpit, nervous hands on the controls. When one of the VT’s gauntlets came up, Breetai almost made a grab for it, but restrained himself at the last moment. Edwards caught the gesture, however.

“A bit nervous today, are we, Breetai?”

Breetai snorted. “This wind has put me in a foul humor.”

Edwards inclined the ultratech knight’s head. “Well then, maybe this won’t seem like bad news after all.” The mecha’s hand held out an outsize audio device for Breetai’s inspection. “You and your … 

crew

are relieved, Commander. New Zarkopolis is now under REF jurisdiction, and I’ll be assuming personal control of this facility. Tomorrow’s cargo run will be your last. You can hear it straight from the council, if you wish.”

The Zentraedi began to grumble among themselves, and Edwards’s sentries took a step forward. Breetai motioned his cadre silent with a downward wave of his massive hand. He accepted the playback device and regarded it for a moment. “No need for that. But I should warn you, General, that you’re going to find the conditions here somewhat harsh. This is, after all,

Zentraedi’s

work.”

Edwards’s short laugh issued from the speakers. “We’ll manage all right. Of course, you’re all welcome to stay on—as

laborers

, you understand.”

“I’ll consider it, General.”

“Good, Breetai, good,” Edwards said, pleased with the outcome. “I like a man who can follow orders. Could be that you and I will see eye to eye yet.”

Breetai nodded, tight-lipped. Peripherally, he noticed Kazianna stepping deliberately into his restricted field of view.

Edwards went on to inform him that within a week’s time several hundred men and women would begin arriving from Tirol, along with the new mecha Lang’s teams had designed. Until then, Edwards was leaving behind six of his troops to oversee the transfer of command.

Six or six hundred

, Breetai said to himself,

it wouldn’t matter now

.

When Edwards and most of his squadron had lifted off, Breetai swung stiffly into the wind and made for the mining colony’s Quonset-style headquarters. On the way, he asked the lieutenant if his men had completed their task.

“Almost, my lord.”

“And the fool’s ore?”

“Loaded for tomorrow’s delivery.”

Breetai grunted. “See to it that the last of the monopole is placed aboard the ship. The delivery will go as scheduled, but the monopole remains our property.”

The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “About Edwards’s soldiers, Commander …”

Breetai came to a halt short of the headquarters hatchway. “Invite them along to ‘oversee’ the delivery. Afterward, we’ll give them the option of joining us.”

“And if they refuse?”

“I leave that up to you,” Breetai said, stepping inside.

“Pregnant?” Max asked, as Rhestad’s morning rays touched the med team’s geodesic shelter.

Vince shrugged his huge shoulders. “That’s what Jean says. And Cabell concurs.”

“That’s right, my boy,” Cabell affirmed. “It is most remarkable, but true.” The Tiresian was all smiles for a change, his concern for Rem momentarily eclipsed. “I thought her first pregnancy the exception that proved the rule. But this—this is nothing short of …”

“Remarkable,” Max finished for him, shaking his head in disbelief. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

Vince laughed. “What’s with you? It takes two, if I’m not mistaken.”

Max looked up into Vince’s brown face. “Yeah, but … Vince, you don’t understand. Remember, Miriya’s … 

different

.”

“She had Dana,” Vince started to say.

“Yeah, and Dana’s

different

.”

“How is she different?” Cabell wanted to know.

Max and Vince traded looks, but left the question unanswered. “Can I see her?” Max said suddenly, getting up.

Vince laughed. “That’s a good start.”

Max started off for the small area of the med dome Jean’s team had partitioned off.

“Remarkable,” Cabell mused as he and Vinced walked back to where Rick, Lisa, and Karen were undergoing treatment. The three had yet to emerge from semiconsciousness …

“Any change?” Vince asked his wife a moment later. She was standing over Rick just now, looking almost as drawn and pale as her patient. Vince put his arm around her narrow waist.

“I’m worried, Vince. They should have come out of it by now. We’ve tried everything—antipsychotics, transfusions …” She threw up her hands. “I don’t know what to do.”

“It is the

hin

,” Veidt said, hovering over to them from the foot of Karen’s bed. He had spent the last several hours absorbing everything Jean’s medical library databanks had to offer. “Garudans live in the womb of the

hin

. It is what you might term ‘an alternate reality.’ The microorganisms here, the same which keep Kami’s people in a constant state of

hin

, have caused your friends to become

unstuck

in what constitutes

Human

reality.”

“Yes, and it’s killing them, Veidt. It’s not providing them with psychedelic trips or allies or personal power. It’s draining the life from them while we sit here and … and—”

“Come on, Jean,” Vince said. “You’re doing what you can.”

Cabell tugged at his beard. “There is a treatment, of course.” He turned to Veidt as Vince and Jean’s eyes fixed on him.

“I will be succinct,” the Haydonite began. “On my world there are devices capable of reversing the Garudan effect. ‘Mental illness,’ as some of your disks name it, is unknown to us; it is as archaic a thing as your own small-pox.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” Jean said, looking up at Vince. “Our work here is finished, isn’t it? Garuda’s liberated.”

Vince removed his hand from her waist to feel his jaw. “Yes, in a way.”

“In a way? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We’ve learned that the Regent is on his way to Haydon IV,” Cabell told her. “With what remains of his fleet, no doubt.”

Jean compressed her lips. “More fighting, then.”

“It’s not even as

simple

as that,” Vince added.

“Our world,” Veidt said, “cannot be approached with the same tactics you employed to liberate Karbarra, Praxis, and Garuda. Haydon IV is in a certain sense beyond both conquest or liberation. And while it is true that the Invid have assumed control of our political structure, they have not in any way attempted to tamper with our lives. They

could not

. Haydon IV is an open world and will always remain so.”

“Couldn’t we sneak through or something? I mean, isn’t there a back door we could use, some way of getting to those devices without confronting the Invid?”

Veidt stared at Jean and shook his head. “It is impossible.”

Vince was pacing up and down, hands clasped behind his back. “We’ve gotta ask ourselves whether it’s worth the risk.”

“Whether Rick, Lisa, and Karen are worth the risk, you mean.”

“And Rem,” Cabell added.

Vince nodded.

“Look what you’ve already risked to save them,” Veidt pointed out.

Everyone fell silent; then Vince said, “Gather the Sentinels. We’ve got a decision to make.”

“I will not have him here! I will not!” the Regess railed to one of her servants.

Was there no escaping him?

she asked herself.

Even here on Haydon IV?

“I’m afraid it’s too late, Your Grace,” the servant said, unmoved from its posture of genuflection. “The Regent’s flagship has already left Optera to rendezvous here with the remnants of his fleet.”

“How long do I have?” she asked, whirling on the sexless creature, the tassels of her long gloves whipping about.

“Less than one period, Your Grace.”

She dismissed the servant; when it left the room, she clenched her fists and waved them in the air. “Must he stalk me?” she said aloud. “Must he continue to punish me?”

Abruptly, she turned around to regard Rem; the Zorclone was asleep, perhaps unconscious after his sessions with the Regent’s scientists from Garuda. They had cured him of the madness induced by that world’s atmosphere, only to induce a more controlled state of hallucinatory dread. And then they had picked his brain.

Oh, how they had picked his brain

.

For the better part of five days now the Regess had had him much to herself; hers to toy with, hers to examine—his dreams and thoughts to dissect, his memories to relive … United with him on some psychic plane, she had walked again through those fields they had walked on Optera. Old Optera, Optera before the fall. She had been able to view those times through his eyes now, and had found herself stirred. He had seen how much she wanted to emulate him, in every way; and she had seen how much he had desired her. Not her physical being, not the form destiny had wed her to, but her spiritual self—her

essence

. There was at one time a semblance of love there, and this discovery filled her with joy. But it was a rapture that could not survive the realities his war-hungry race had introduced into her garden; a rapture that could only endure on that etheric plane, where things cast beautiful but ultimately painful shadows …

Still she could hardly tear herself away from that realm, even though her self-indulgence might mean death for the clone. He was her plaything; much as she had been Zor’s!

She understood, however, that Zor had somehow meant to redeem himself by sending the Protoculture matrix far from his Masters’ reach. But much of this remained unclear, muddled by what she had accessed from Haydon IV’s data systems. These grand designs again: Zor, the Masters, the Invid, all locked together in some immense, unfathomable framework.

Along with this mysterious blue-white world revealed by the clone’s thoughts, this nexus of events, this pleroma …

She had yet to learn either the name of the planet or its continuum coordinates, but she now had a sense of where to begin her search. And sooner or later her sensor nebulae would locate it.

I will follow the nebulae

, she decided all at once.

I will quit this Quadrant and place myself as far from his reach as that matrix was from the Masters’ evil embrace

.

She found herself excited by the prospect, laughing as she overlooked Haydon IV’s artificial land- and cityscapes. She could even leave some of her Children behind until the moment arrived—the moment when that blue-white world was discovered and made her own!

She increased her size, towering up to fill the room, knowing a determination she had thought lost with love itself. Regarding Rem, she said, “Now let the Regent have his way with you, clone. Let him peer into your memories of our time together, and let him suffer for what he missed!”

Miriya did not look as well as Max had imagined she might. Where was that rosy glow, that special something? Instead, she seemed wasted; baggy-eyed, bone-weary, even slightly jaundiced.

“It’s just from my exposure to the atmosphere,” Miriya told him as he carefully sat down on the edge of her cot. “But Jean says everything’s fine, all systems go. So smooth your wrinkled brow, my darling, and kiss me before I do something violent.”

Max forced a smile and leaned into her arms; they held each other for a moment. Max patted her back and straightened up. “I’m not sure I know what to feel,” he confessed.

“I know, Max. I’m just as concerned as you are about Rick and Lisa.”

“Good news, bad news …”

“That’s life, Max. And now Dana’s going to have a sister.”

Max’s brows went up. “Jean tell you that?”

“She didn’t have to.” Miriya caressed her belly. “I can sense it.”

Again, Max tried to feel good about things, but the more he looked at his wife, the more anxious he became. He was about to take her hand, when someone rapped against the partition. Crysta, Gnea, and Teal asked if they could come in for a moment. The Spherisian was carrying the infant—a two-foot Baldan, although still faceted and speechless as yet.

“As soon as I heard the news I came down,” Teal explained. “I wanted you to see the infant.”

“Congratulations,” Gnea said to Miriya uncertainly.

“Hey, what about the father?” Max asked good-naturedly.

The Praxian turned to him. “Why? Did you have something to do with Miriya’s condition?”

Max started to respond, but thought better of it, shutting his mouth and blinking stupidly.

“When does he become smooth, like you?” Miriya was saying to Teal.

“It doesn’t. It’s not necessarily a he.”

Miriya looked around uncomfortably. “But I thought that Baldan … that this …”

“It is of Baldan,” Teal replied, regarding the infant analytically. “But the features and what I think you call ‘the sex’ are ultimately left to the Shaper.”

“The Shaper? You?” Crysta said, surprised, one huge paw to her muzzle.

“Who else? The young Spherisian remains faceted until smoothed by its Shaper. Soon I will de-facet it.”

“But you’ll shape him, er, it in Baldan’s image, won’t you?”

“Why would I do that? I am bonded with the infant now. I could just as easily shape it in my own image.”

“But this is all that remains of Baldan,” Crysta argued. “Don’t you want to recapture his essence? It would mean much to all of us.”

Miriya and Gnea agreed. Max kept out of it.

“Among Spherisians I am considered most attractive,” Teal told them proudly. “A young one could do far worse than be shaped as I am.” She regarded Max and Miriya a moment. “You Earthers don’t even have a choice in the matter.”

“No argument there.” Max laughed. “But maybe that’s the beauty of it.”

Gnea made a face, astonishment in her gold-flecked eyes. “So you

did

have something to do with it.”

Max looked from Praxian, to Karbarran, to Spherisian, to his own Zentraedi wife, and wondered if he could possibly explain himself.

The Zentraedi’s cargo transport—named the

Valivarre

for Fantoma’s primary—was the largest of the ships constructed to serve the needs of the mining op. It was essentially an enormous shell, with vast featureless cabinspaces and cargo holds, and numerous launch and docking bays sized to accommodate ranks of surface mecha and outsize shuttles. Typical of the new breed SDFs—4 through 8—the

Valivarre

was only lightly armed and somewhat slow by galactic standards; but unlike those fortresses the ship was equipped with Protoculture/Reflex drives that enabled it to astrogate near-instantaneous folds throughout “local space.”

The transport was in stationary orbit over Tirol just now, off-loading the latest of Fantoma’s riches to cargo shuttles, which were making runs both to the SDF-3 and to the moon’s surface.

On the

Valivarre

’s bridge, Breetai was informed that one of the returning shuttles was bringing up two passengers. He arrived in the busy docking bay just as Dr. Lang and Exedore were descending the shuttle ramp.

Lang took a look around. Under the watchful gaze of four Ghost Squadron Battloids, a dozen Zentraedi were loading the last of the monopole ore into a second shuttle. There was more noise than Human ears were meant to withstand, so he donned a pair of silencer muffs, and went on the amplibox to communicate with Breetai.

“It appears that everything is in order, Commander,” he said, trying to sound businesslike. “But I have some matters to discuss with you regarding the transfer schedule. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

Breetai led them out of the hold and into a small cabinspace outfitted with a Micronian commo balcony.

“This area is secure,” Breetai told them after he had dogged the hatch.

Lang got right to the point. “You’ll never get away with this, Breetai. What do you take us for?”

The Zentraedi grinned. “The fool’s ore … It wasn’t my intention to trick you, Lang. Only Edwards’s men. As far as they are concerned, we are off-loading the monopole.”

“But, Commander,” Exedore said, “what are you trying to accomplish? You’re aware that Lang and I will have to report this.”

“And I fully expect you to. I ask only that you delay your report for three hours.”

“You’re leaving!” Lang said, excited. “I knew it.”

Breetai folded his arms across his chest and nodded. “That’s right, Doctor. We’re leaving. And we’re taking the monopole with us.”

Lang was shaking his head. “It’s a mad scheme, Breetai. Edwards will hunt you down.”

“Perhaps. But he’ll think twice about firing on us while we have the ore aboard. Not when he learns that Fantoma’s yield is exhausted. I’m relying on you to make this clear to him.”

“Commander, may we enquire—”

“To search for Admiral Hunter, Exedore. I don’t accept that the Sentinels have become outlaws any more than I believe the Invid Regent is dead. We know that enemy, Exedore; we engaged them throughout this sector. If he had been assassinated, his queen’s troops would have already massed against Tirol and atomized it.” Breetai leaned closer to the balcony railing to regard his Micronized friend. “We are free of all imperatives now, Exedore. The Zentraedi will follow none but their own. Will you join us?”

Exedore bowed his head. “Commander, you honor me. But I, too, have an inner imperative.”

Breetai mulled it over, then nodded. “I understand, my friend.”

Lang looked at the two Zentraedi, suddenly aware of the import the moment held. A surge of misgiving washed through him; a shaping charge he could barely sustain. His voice cracked when he spoke. “To Praxis, Breetai? Garuda? Spheris? The ship you seek is small enough as to be insignificant.”

Breetai fixed his eye on Lang. “I don’t believe that, Doctor. Nor do you.”

Lang rasped, “Haydon IV.”

She is there

, something told him.

Exedore stretched out a hand. “Doctor—”

“Don’t ask me to explain.” Was it Janice, he wondered, or some other

she

? It was a presence the Shaping had alerted him to, a power unlike anything he had experienced …

Breetai regarded him for a moment. “I will begin my search there.”

Lang nodded, weakly, wondering whether he would ever see the Zentraedi again.

On Garuda, the Sentinels grouped together in the longhouse to discuss their options and priorities, which meant that it was back to transpirators for almost everyone involved. Vince, Max, and Jack were so certain of where they stood that they had already had Rick, Lisa, and Karen brought up to the SDF-7. Under Wolfe’s and Janice’s supervision, Tesla and the two Invid scientists had also been moved to the ship, along with Miriya—who was still too weak to take part in the meeting—and Teal and the Spherisian infant.

Most of Garuda was celebrating—the grieving would come later—and the wild sounds of song and dance made it all the more difficult for the group to come to any agreement concerning the Haydon IV option. They did find themselves united, however, on the issue of Garuda. With the Optera tree orchards in ruins, it wasn’t likely that the Invid were going to have much use for the planet—especially not when their initial campaign against Garuda’s inherent defenses had ended in so many deaths. But just in case the Regent decided to think along the lines of reprisals—which, Cabell maintained, was highly unlikely given the disastrous defeats the Invid leader had been suffering in other quarters—the Sentinels were prepared to leave most of their forces onworld to complement the strength of the remaining Bioroid clones. The one Invid hive that had come through the battle reasonably intact would serve as their base. Vince and Veidt were in favor of this even though it would significantly reduce the Sentinels’ firepower. Haydon IV, though, was not be thought of in terms of a military campaign; they were undertaking the journey for the sake of Rick, Lisa, Karen, and Rem.

Once again

, as someone pointed out.

But the Karbarrans and Praxians, in any case, chose to disregard Vince’s statement. They likewise ignored Veidt and Sarna’s claim that the planet had not been adversely affected by the Invid presence. Haydon IV had Invid; therefore, Haydon IV needed to be liberated.

Kami and Learna were reluctant to leave, reluctant to abandon the

hin

and to have to reattach themselves to life-support systems; but they agreed to see things through to their completion after Lron and Crysta reminded them of how they had left their son, Dardo, behind on Karbarra.

The Sentinels were back to the core group.

And they were also back to unknowns.

It was possible they might beat the Regent’s fleet to Haydon IV; get in and out without incident. But it was just as likely that things would continue in the same unpredictable fashion they had grown accustomed to.

Ten Earth-standard hours later, the SDF-7 left orbit and jumped.

CHAPTER
FOURTEEN

While it was true the Invid had been existing on the very same fruits and flowers that were rapidly turning Tesla into something not-quite or more-than Invid, it must be pointed out that the liquified plant-stuff which reached Optera was of a “pasteurized” variety, and was principally utilized as nutrient bath for the soldiers’ battle mecha—Scouts, Shock Troopers, Pincer Ships, and such. By forcing himself to subsist on the pure (or the impure, in actuality), Tesla was receiving megadoses of the same stuff that years earlier had sent the Zentraedi Khyron clear over the edge of the Imperative, and into undreamed-of states of metanoia

.

History of the Second Robotech War

, volume XXXVI

“Tirol”

“I demand to know where she is!” the Regent bawled as he and his eleven-trooper elite stormed across one of Haydon IV’s ice-blue plazas, the splendors of the city lost on them.

The planet’s indigenous beings paid the Invid little mind, and went about their mysterious business, hovering in groups of two or three in and out of Glike’s spirelike buildings, across graceful bridges, and through parks too perfect to believe. But visitors, guests, and merchants from other worlds stopped to gaze upon the one whose race had most recently changed the face of the Fourth Quadrant. A few Karbarrans even had to be restrained from running forward to mock the Regent with reminders of their recent victory. “Sentinels! Sentinels!” they chanted, and succeeded for a moment in bringing the Regent around to confront them. No one, however, dared make a violent move, for beneath those very same plazas and parks lurked surprises of a decidedly punishing nature. Haydon IV had rules for citizens and strangers alike, and it enforced them without bias.

The Invid squad commander whispered as much to the Regent, while the ursine Karbarrans continued to hurl insults and imprecations. And at the same moment one of the Regess’s servants approached, offering a brief and unconvincing genuflection.

“Your Highness,” the servant said, with a condescending tone.

The Regent raised a fist. “How dare she refuse to honor my arrival!”

“Perhaps, my lord,” the Regent’s own lieutenant suggested, “she trembles in terror at the mere thought of your blinding presence.”

“Grovel on your own time,” the Regent snarled. He fixed his wife’s servant with a gimlet stare. “Where is my shameful wife? Explain this breach of protocol, worm, before I find a place for you in the Pits.”

The servant lifted its head. “She is gone, Regent.”

The Regent knew as much already, and bristled at the servant’s impertinence. “I’m aware that she is gone—her flagship has left orbit. But I want to know

where

.”

“She left no word, m’lord. Save to say that she is not expected to return.”

“Which explains your laxity.” The Regent raised himself to his full height, and looked down his snout on the Regess’s creature. “Perhaps I will make an example of you, grub. Now, lead me to our chambers before I forget myself … See that my pets are cared for,” he said to his lieutenant as an afterthought, “and have the Sentinel prisoner brought before me.”

Several other servants appeared to usher the Regent and his retinue to the same rooms his queen had occupied and abandoned, and along the way he could not help but take note of some of Haydon IV’s wonders. The planet was unlike anything he had ever seen, and yet there was a sense of familiarity everywhere he looked. Here, a structure that was reminiscent of Tiresia; there, a patch of forest seemingly lifted from Garuda. Spherisian crystal palaces, Karbarran factories without the dirt or stench, Praxian arabesque carvings, totems, statues, pillars, and pedestals—even some things which could only have come from Optera itself: fields of Flowers and rows of Fruit-bearing trees, all sterile to be sure, but so faultless, so

exquisite

in appearance.

And yet nowhere a hint of instrumentality.

He understood, though, why the Regess would leave: there was no warmth to the world, no taste of life to its clear skies and reflective waters. No, she would not have been at home here, he told himself. It was a

real

world she required, one like the Optera of their past. He refused to believe that his arrival could have forced her hand—certainly not after the

gift

he had sent her. This, however, didn’t stop him from complaining to his lieutenant once they had reached the tall spire’s uppermost rooms and his throne had been positioned.

“Decamped!” he sneered, hands stroking the gem-collared necks of his Hellcat pets. “She expects me to win the war while she’s off flitting around the cosmos preening her tubercles and hatching plots against me—”

“M’lord,” a servant interrupted, bowing from the doorway. “We have the prisoner.”

The Regent smiled as Rem was dragged in. A lieutenant “persuaded” the Tiresian to assume a groveling posture. But the Regent’s smile began to fade as he studied Rem.

Great suns!

he thought.

He does wear the face of the seducer!

Two scientists had entered on the heels of the Zor-Clone, and the ’Cats were suddenly snarling, pacing, and sniffing the air. “What did she think of him?” the Regent asked, rising from his chair.

One of the scientists made a coughing sound. “Uh, she was … 

amused

, Your Highness.”

“Yes, I can well imagine. Did you record their sessions together?”

The two Invid traded quick glances. “We did, my lord.”

He turned to gaze at Rem. “I wish to view the results of their reunion. I want to see her guilt, the sadness in her heart, before I grant her forgiveness.”

“But, Regent—”

The Regent slammed a massive fist down on the throne’s contoured seat. “Bring me the recordings—

now

!”

There was silence on the bridge of the SDF-7 while Wolfe and Vince waited for the ship’s identification library to display its assessment. Wolfe folded his arms and leaned away from the console when the data appeared.

“Well?”

“Signatures confirmed,” Wolfe said flatly. “Invid troop carriers the Regent’s flagship. We’re too late.”

“Are they scanning us?”

Wolfe exhaled loudly and swung to a peripheral monitor. “Affirmative. But it’s low-level, cursory. Could be we’re an unknown quantity. God knows there are enough other ships docked out here.”

Vince had to agree; he had never seen so many different types and classes of starship. Haydon IV was obviously all that Veidt and Sarna had been telling everyone.

“So what do we do, Captain—open a hailing frequency, tell them we’re just in for liberty, a little R ’n’ R?”

Vince frowned and put a hand on the ship’s address-system stud …

“Haydon IV is an open world,” Veidt was explaining in the briefing room ten minutes later. “I thought I had already made myself clear on this point. The planet has never been taken by force; its defenses are legendary. There are, in the central records, references to an attempted invasion some two thousand Earth-standard years ago. Several hundred vessels were destroyed in a matter of moments.”

“But the Invid—” Jack started to say.

“The Invid did not engage Haydon IV’s defenses,” Sarna picked up. “Any who come in peace are free to stay and trade. The Invid came and insinuated themselves into positions of political authority; but they are quite tame here. We may land in safety, but we will surely be taken into custody.”

“Then we can’t go in under arms,” Crysta said.

Jack grunted. “Maybe you don’t have the courage to try, but I do.”

Lron glared at him from across the table. “You dare impugn her courage? Perhaps you—”

“Stop this!” Jean interrupted. “Both of you.”

“Exactly what are these ‘defenses,’ Veidt?” Vince wanted to know.

“I have never seen them. As I stated, they have not been put to the test in two thousand of your years.”

“Come on,” Jack said, looking around. “Then how do we know they’re still functioning?”

“Do you hunger to challenge them?” Sarna asked.

Jack returned a sullen stare.

Jean shook her head and snorted. “So to utilize the medical facilities, we have to go in with our hands raised.”

“Yes, straight into an Invid stronghold,” Bela said.

“We are given no choice,” Gnea added. “Our comrades will have to be surrendered. But who among us will escort them down?” The Praxian glanced around the table.

“I’ll go,” Wolfe volunteered.

Jean caught her husband’s eye. “I will, too.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Jack said, standing up. “I’m as concerned about Karen and Rick and Lisa as any of you. But just suppose the Invid deny the request for medical help. Then they’ve not only got Karen, they’ve got you and you and whoever else is crazy enough to volunteer.” He shook his head. “Uh, uh. We need to find some way around this.”

“The Invid cannot deny that which is promised by the planet to all,” Veidt said, loud enough to cut through all the separate arguments Jack’s objection had raised. Everyone heard the Haydonite’s remark, but the bickering continued.

“All right, simmer down,” Vince told the table. “Max has an idea.”

“Two landing parties,” the Skull ace began when everyone was quiet. He was exhausted, having spent every minute by Miriya’s side. Her condition had deteriorated after the fold to Haydon IV, and it was Jean’s thought to number her among the patients. “Some of us take the four of them down; the rest of you go in unannounced to keep an eye on US.”

“It will not work, Commander,” Veidt said; but Jack, Lron, Bella, and Gnea were already enthusiastic. Even Burak added his voice to the group as a show of support.

“The planet’s defenses will detect you,” Sarna tried to warn them. “We’ll have to risk it,” Vince answered her.

And the plan was put to a vote.

Jean and Wolfe had already volunteered, and now Max and Vince and Cabell joined them. Veidt and Sarna would escort them. Jack, however, insisted that Karen’s cause would be better served by his

doing

something more than crying by her bedside; so he opted for the second team. Burak, Kami and Learna, Bela, Gnea, Lron, and Crysta threw in with him. Janice was undecided until the last minute; then she allied herself with Jack’s group—on one condition: that they take Tesla and the two Invid scientists along with them.

“He did help out back on Garuda,” Jack was willing to concede. “But I still don’t trust him.”

“I don’t either,” Janice said. “I’d just like to see what would happen if Tesla and the Regent came snout-to-snout.”

Only Wolfe heard Burak’s gasp; but he didn’t think anything of it.

“Breetai and his Zentraedi are traitors and criminals,” T. R. Edwards told the council, positioning himself where he was certain the cameras would close in on his polished skullplate and furious expression. “They’ve stolen the very thing we need to return to Earth, and thereby condemned our world to defeat at the hands of the Robotech Masters.” He swung around and walked angrily back to his seat, facing the audience now. “Some of you are probably thinking that this is the Zentraedi’s way of avenging themselves on the RDF. But I suspect they have an even darker purpose in mind. It’s my belief that Breetai means to band together with the Sentinels and form a cartel to take control of the spaceways.

“And with the Invid Regent dead and our own forces stranded, there will be little to stop them from putting their plans in motion—unless we take quick and decisive action against them. For this reason, I’m asking for the council approval of my request for the four ships that comprise our new flotilla. The Zentraedi must be hunted down and destroyed!”

There were conflicting reactions from the crowd, all of which Senator Longchamps silenced with three determined gavel blows. “The council will not tolerate these continued outbursts,” he warned the audience. “If this occurs again, I’m going to order the room cleared. Now,” he said, turning to Edwards, “the council appreciates the generals’s concern, but there are a few issues that need to be addressed.” He consulted his notes, then said, “Mr. Obstat?”

“Isn’t it true, General, that action of the sort you propose could quite possibly jeopardize the very ore we’re so desperately in need of?”

Edwards stood up. “Do you propose to let them have it, then?” he asked evenly.

“We don’t know why they took it in the first place,” Justine Huxley argued. “I for one am not convinced that they mean to do as you suggest—band together with the Sentinels and embark on some sort of transgalactic campaign. Can’t we simply continue to mine ore until the Zentraedi make their demands known to us?”

Dr. Lang spoke to that. “I’m afraid that Fantoma has yielded up the last of its monopole ores. Only trace quantities remain, and further mining is hardly justified at this stage.”

“What about our reserves, Doctor, here and on Tirol,” Harry Penn asked. “Don’t we have enough to repair the fortress’s fold systems?”

“Unfortunately not,” Exedore asserted. “The … 

stolen

ore represented more than three months of mining. It is crucial to our goals.”

Edwards waited for the gasps and buzzing in the room to subside. “With the council’s indulgence, I have reason to question Dr. Lang and Ambassador Exedore’s assessment of the situation. It’s no secret to the RDF that both of them have special interests in furthering the Sentinels’ cause—”

Longchamps banged his gavel. “General, I must caution you to refrain from using this session to cast aspersions on any members of this council. Is that understood?”

The cameras tracked in to catch Edwards’s stiff and silent nod.

In Edwards’s chambers aboard the SDF-3, where she was watching the proceedings, Minmei got up to fix herself another drink. Lang’s face was on-screen when she returned to the edge of the bed.

“That’s true, Senator,” the Robo-wiz was saying. “Exedore and I were the first to discover that the material offloaded from the

Valivarre

was a type of ‘fool’s ore,’ if you will. We immediately reported this to General Edwards—”

“

After

that ship had folded out of Tirolspace, Doctor,” Edwards barked.

“General Edwards,” Longchamps cut in, “weren’t some of your own Ghost Squadron aboard the

valivarre

supervising the transfer?”

Minmei saw Edwards’s face drain of color; the cameras captured the fury in his single eye. “I’m certain that those brave men were killed, Senator.”

The cameras cut to Lang. “Council members, I can personally attest to the presence of the general’s men. And Exedore and I both found them very much alive.”

Minmei sipped her drink, anticipating Edwards’s comeback; he didn’t surprise her.

“Yes, and exactly

what

motivated you and the ambassador to shuttle up to the

Valivarre

, Doctor?”

“We were merely going over the transfer schedule with Commander Breetai—”

Minmei touched the remote and the screen went blank. She drained her glass and thought,

A few more of these and I’ll be too numb to care

. And numb was just what she was after. She had lost her friends, her faith, her voice, any sense of purpose she might have once called her own. Rick, Lisa, Janice, Dr. Lang, Jonathan … And lately she had even been thinking about Kyle. She wasn’t sure why, but guessed that it had something to do with Edwards and the control he had begun to assert over her. She imagined she saw a curious pattern at work that coupled Rick and Lynn-Kyle, now Jonathan Wolfe and Edwards—some slide into self-abuse when she came too close to genuine love and commitment.

Property

, she thought in disgust. That was how she was beginning to view herself. Her voice co-opted by the RDF, her dreams destroyed by war, her will at the mercy of men who wanted nothing more than to rule and posses her, body and mind.

Numb,

comfortably

numb, she told herself …

Thirty minutes later the door hissed open and Edwards strode into the room, grinning evilly. Minmei realized she had dozed off, and, startled now, she began to back herself onto the bed. Edwards leered at her, perhaps thinking she was toying with him, and came down on top of her, elbows supporting his upper body. She pressed her hands against his chest and said, “Please …”

“What’s the matter with you?” he asked, face-to-face with her.

“I’m just … confused.” She tried to roll out from under him, but his arms held her fast.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he told her, bringing his mouth hard against hers—a kiss he liked to think passionate, but one she felt was simply rough. “The council gave their okay.”

“W-what does that mean—that you’re going to—”

“Precisely that,” he said, rolling off her onto his back.

He gazed at the ceiling and laughed. “First the Zentraedi, then the Sentinels.” He looked over at her.

Minmei was aghast, gaping at him; he had his right hand curled tightly around her left wrist.

“When this is over I want you to marry me.”

Her right hand flew to her face. “What!”

“It’ll be just like the Hunters’ wedding,” he said, as though thinking aloud. “Except it’ll be you and me, and the destination won’t be Tirol, but Earth.” His grin was still intact.

“And the mission won’t be for peace, but for

war

!” she screamed at all once, yanking her arm away.

Edwards sat straight up as she made a move for the door. “What are you talking about? Minmei!”

She was slightly drunk and clumsy even through her fear and shock; she bumped against a table, sending some tapes to the floor, crashed against the bulkhead, fumbling for the door release.

“Minmei!” he yelled again, more harshly than before.

He was angry now and she was panicked. She left the room and ran barefooted along the ship’s corridor. She heard someone behind her as she entered the elevator and swung around; but it wasn’t Edwards. It was a VT pilot, wearing his helmet, oddly enough, a tall and slender bearded man she thought she had seen before. He was regarding her bare feet and disheveled appearance. She forced a trembling, smile, pushing and patting her hair back in place.

“Troubles?” he said.

“Yes,” she told him, surprising herself.

“Anything I can do?”

“I need to get back to Tiresia. Are any shuttles leaving soon?”

“I’ll take you myself,” he said after a moment.

It made her laugh. “What—in an Alpha? I don’t know…

“I’ll take you wherever you want to go.”

She stared at him, wondering why she was ready to believe him. “How about Garuda or Haydon IV … uh, 666-60-937?” she asked, reading the pilot’s REF service number from his helmet.

“Long trip,” he told her. But he didn’t laugh, didn’t think she was putting him on.

The elevator doors opened. The pilot extended his hand and Minmei allowed herself to take hold of it.

“A simulagent, a simulagent,” Tesla mumbled, stuffing the last of Garuda’s Fruits into his mouth. “I’ve been tricked—

tricked

!”

The two scientists the Sentinels had captured from Garuda backed themselves toward what they hoped would be a safe corner of the dimensional fortress’s hold, certain that Tesla’s ingestion of the mutated Fruits from that

infected

world had driven him half mad. First there was all that nonsense about the Regent being dead, and now this talk of simulagents and assassination.

“Has he been doing this everywhere you’ve been?” one of the Invid asked Burak in the lingua franca.

“Only on Karbarra, Praxis, and Garuda so far,” the Perytonian devil said in low tones, shrugging. “I suppose his killing the Regent was nothing but an imagining, then—”

“An imagining!”

Tesla had heard Burak’s whisper and swung around to the three of them, monstrous in his anger. He knows that I tried, he knows that I’m out to usurp his throne … And I shall have it, do you hear me?! Tesla will

rule

!”

“He’s going to get us all sent to the Pits,” one of the scientists groaned. “We won’t be repatriated—we’ll be

devolved

!”

Something, some force, suddenly brought Tesla to his feet. Tesla’s skin was rippling, muscles and sinews contorting beneath the flesh as though his internal systems were rearranging themselves, reconfiguring. An aura of light was swirling around his head, throwing rainbow colors across the ceiling, bulkheads, and floor of the hold. His head was listed, neck stretched out, mouth agape in a kind of silent scream. Burak stood rooted to the floor, astonished as he watched the Invid begin to lose stature and bulk, while at the same time Tesla’s neck, head, arms, hands, and feet reshaped themselves. The two scientists had buried their heads against one another, but Burak was too awed to summon the will even to look away. He saw then what the Fruits were after, the final form they tried to birth, and he could hardly believe his eyes, much less grasp what such a transformation meant. For the shape was a

humanoid

one—like that of Jack Baker or Gnea or Rem.

Tendrils of energy were whirling around Tesla, reaching out to Burak where he stood. They danced between his horns and sent a downward rush of paralyzing light through the top of his head. Tesla’s eyes were fixed on his as something beyond language coursed between them. Burak stiffened, as a cold fire engulfed his heart. He bellowed, and Janice came rushing through the hatch.

She had been outside listening to their muffled exchange, and though baffled by the sudden silence, she had not wanted to risk tipping her hand. Burak’s animallike wail had changed all that, but now she couldn’t see what was happening. Something or someone was throwing blinding, colored light across the hold. She could make out Burak and the two shadowy shapes of the Invid scientists behind him, but Tesla was concealed by the dazzling prismatic intensity, seemingly at the center of it. She brought her hands to her face, trying to shield her eyes, and all at once the light was gone. Tesla was on the floor, flat on his back.

She rushed over to him; he was alive, but his breathing was labored. And something else: he looked different. His snout was shorter, his head more defined, his hands and feet more humanoid than reptilian. His skin was a pale green, waxy and smooth.

“What happened to him?” Janice asked, turning around to Burak.

The Perytonian stared at her. “I … I …”

Janice took him by the arms and shook him. “What happened?”

Burak cleared his head and gave her a blank look. He reached up to feel his horns, then regarded Tesla for a moment. “I think he ate too much.”

The Regent sat slumped in his throne, feeling as though some great weight had been placed on his chest. It was a mistake for him to have viewed the recordings of the Regess’s nostalgic lovefest with the Zor-clone, a terrible mistake. Looking for guilt, for some sign of regret, he had found only love, genuine and unfulfilled. And he began to wonder if he hadn’t been wrong in not following her lead when there was still time; when she had pleaded with him to allow himself to be evolved. But he had been stubborn about it, hurt, unforgiving, and now she was lost to him. He had seen, too, the Zor-clone’s memories of a world far removed from Optera and Tirol’s strife, linked somehow to the Protoculture matrix planet was anything more than Zor’s fanciful imaginings? Besides, he had good reason to believe that the Regess had gone off in search of that very world, and he would know if and when she found it. No, what he needed was accurate data, data the clone had not yet surrendered up to Haydon IV’s mind-probe devices. Perhaps, he thought, it would have to be

conjured

from the clone, the way Zor had conjured protoculture from the Flowers of Life.

In the meantime, however, his empire was crumbling. Garuda had fallen to the Sentinels, depriving the Invid of the Fruits needed for the mecha nutrient baths. And Tesla was still unaccounted for—although at times the Regent thought he could actually

feel

the traitor’s bloodlusts reaching out for him.

Much the way he felt at the moment. Even his pets seemed stricken by the same lassitude. He overcame his mood somewhat when a servant entered to announce that an important message had been received. But it was the lieutenant’s words that brought the Regent back to life.

“The Sentinels! Here?”

“Yes, m’lord. They are requesting permission to land. Four of their number are in need of treatments apparently only Haydon IV can provide. They are seeking a truce by way of surrender.”

The Regent shot to his feet. “This is a dream!”

“No, m’lord.”

The Regent stood motionless for a moment, then laughed. “Here! Of course they would surrender here, where to fire first means certain death.” He reached up to feel his swollen cowl. “However …”

The lieutenant waited while the Regent paced in front of his throne. “Yes, yes, it could work.” He swung around. “Inform the Sentinels that we accept their terms. And bring the Zor-clone to my chambers. I will put it to him simply: the matrix for the lives of his comrades. What could be more just?”

“May the Great Shaper Haydon watch over you this day,” Teal told the the shuttle group from the balcony in the SDF-7’s launch bay.

Vince, Cabell, Max, and the others saluted their friends as the hatch sealed itself. In a moment the shuttle’s attitude jets flared, and the craft began to descend toward the green and silver crescent that was Haydon IV.

The second group numbered twelve, including the three Invid—one in each of the three armored Alpha Veritechs. Jack had a no-nonsense air about him as he strapped into the forward cockpit of his mecha. Bela was behind him; Gnea, Kami, and one of the scientists in the Beta module. Janice was piloting the second VT, with Burak in the copilot’s seat, and Lron and Tesla in the Beta. The third VT held Learna, Crysta, and the second scientist. Jack had taken one last look at Rick, Lisa, and Karen before they had been moved into the shuttle, and the sight of their slack, colorless faces was with him now as he engaged the Alpha’s thrusters and maneuvered the ship out of the launch bay. The SDF-7’s human and XT crew had been instructed to keep the fortress clear of the Invid fleet, but in close enough proximity to Haydon IV’s surface to eliminate any threat of an enemy sneak attack.

Veidt and Sarna had done their best to convince the Sentinels to abandon their plans for an unannounced approach, but Jack and the rest were determined to give it a try. Besides, it wasn’t like they were going in with weapons blazing. Their approach would be a gentle one, Jack had insisted; a simple landing in the forests west of the planet’s principal city. Surely, three small mecha weren’t going to touch off Haydon IV’s legendary (and somewhat questionable) defenses.

It is merely

intent

, Veidt had tried to tell them.

Jack heard the words surfacing in his thoughts, and made an effort to push them from his mind. In a moment he would be able to discern details of the planet’s surface topography. It was bound to be an extraordinary sight—an entire world reconfigured to conform to the demands of its inhabitants.

Jack found himself wondering about the guiding intelligence behind such a feat.

Then he began to notice that the forest they had chosen as landing zone, was, well,

moving

—sliding east to west across the variegated landscape like some sort of by-pass door. And something very bizarre was rising up at them from the space that forest had vacated … Swirling vortices of energy, radiant silken scarves riding Haydon IV’s savage updrafts.

Jack sent a telephathic plea to the planet: We’ve come in peace.

We’ve come in peace!

The following chapter is a sneak preview of WORLD KILLERS—Book IV in the continuing saga of THE SENTINELS!!

CHAPTER
ONE

They were the New Paladins, riding forth to answer the trumpet call to a nightmare war.

They were mortals caught up in events that transcended anything they had ever expected.

Many of them were career military people who had learned that wars were often won by those who made the fewest screw-ups.

But they also knew that everybody screws up sometime.

Le Roy la Paz,

The Sentinels

“Everybody stay sharp! Looks like we’re gonna haveta go to guns!”

Jack Baker trimmed the mated Veritechs he was flying—the sleek Alpha fighter now joined like a vaned nose cone to the bigger, burlier Beta ship. A quick glance over his weapons status displays revealed that the other two Alpha-Betas of his raiding party were still in tight formation behind him.

“Jack,

no

!” yelled Janice Em. She was in the second ship along with Burak, Lron, and Tesla. “You

heard

what Veidt and Sarna said. This world’s defenses will respond to

any

hostile action!”

Actually, Veidt had said the legendery protective systems of the planet responded to the mere

intent

of intrustion or provocative act. And that certainly seemed to be the case today, even though the fighters had gone in with weapons and shields down.

“I got a news flash for you: we’ve

already

got Haydon IV PO’d at us, kiddo,” Jack snorted. “Or d’you think this planet’s surface

usually

twitches and then starts spitting sparklers at people? Get ready; like it or not, it looks as if we’re in for some turns ’n burns.”

One part of him Regesstered the fact that the terrain of Haydon IV wasn’t actually twitching; it was

changing shape

, like something from one of those oldtime clay animation flicks. And the things shooting up at the incoming Veritechs were more like swirling vortices or sheets of flame than sparklers.

Whatever they were, they were traveling at such a high velocity that Jack saw the VTs had no chance of running for it.

“Activate shields and weapons.” Jack tried to sound calm. “And stay close to me.” It was too late to go back, so there was nothing to do but

drive on

.

He only wished there were experienced combat fliers in the other two combined VTs. Jan had been through training, and so had Learna, but neither of them had any dogfighting experience to speak of. He would have preferred to have Max and Miriya Sterling flying at his wingtips.

But Miriya had been stricken, like Rick Hunter and his wife Lisa, by the strange microorganisms of Garuda. And so had another Sentinel, one whose possible death filled Jack with feelings and impulses that bewildered and shocked him …

He tried to put that out of his mind; what was happening to the famous Baker cool and concentration?

Damn!

From the cockpit’s rear seat, where she was strapped into the co-pilot’s station, Bela reached forward to clap him on the shoulder. “That’s the lad! Kick their flaming arses! I’ll loan you the boot!”

The vortices of fire came darting and circling, changing shape and roiling—like silken scarves on the wind. All Jack’s sensors were in alarm mode, but none of them could tell him what he was facing.

Fire with fire

, he told himself fatalistically, and put a burst of pumped-laser into the first one to come into range.

Somehow Tesla got on the tac net. “No, you

fool

! You’re signing our death warrants!”

“Don’t bother me; I’m workin’,” Jack growled.

The cannonfire seemed to have no effect; the vortice changed course a bit and headed straight for him. He shot at it again. The other VTs chose targets of opportunity and opened up too.

The vortices flared angrily, and some were jarred, but they kept coming. More came from what seemed to be an opening in the countryside below, like flecks of incandescent paint flying upward.

Jack was still firing when the first vortice hit him. It flared angrily against his sheilds, sending the indicators toward the danger zones, and it seemed he could feel the infernal heat right through the fuselage. More swarmed after.

The other VTs were struck too. The vortices spread across them, coating them in a blinding radiance.

“Wake up! Come, come; I have no time for this nonsense! Wake him!”

Rem heard the thick, moist, rumbling voice, loud enough to echo and shake the walls. He associated it with the sensation he felt, now: bonds still holding his raw, bleeding wrists and ankles, and the cottony blur the Invid psy-scanners had left in his brain.

At the Regent’s command, Invid Officers applied brief pain to speed the effects the reviving injections they had given him. Rem squirmed and moaned, shaking off part of the fog, and opened his eyes.

Rem saw the throneroom that the Regent had decreed for himself high in a Haydon IV Tower. It was a minor mercy to see the light of Briz’dziki, the local sun, rather than the cold insides of the Invid’s nearby Hive.

Rem tried to recall what he was doing there, and it came back in a confused, horrifying rush. Capture by the Invid on Garuda; exposure to Garudan atmosphere—why wasn’t he dead, or mad?

Or, perhaps he was—perhaps he was both.

No, he wasn’t dead; the pain of his shackles was a branding-hot clarity too sharp for that. But mad …

As he struggled feebly, he heard a low, mosquitolike humming that quickly built until it shockwaved from one side of his skull to the other. The shackles seemed to grow teeth and gnaw at his wrists, promising to devour their way up his arms and legs, ripping and savaging.

Rem screamed. The Invid stench coagulated with evil glee in his chest—he was sure he would suffocate.

Not mad—but even more terribly, a victim of

hin

, the Garudan altered-reality or transcendent state.

Kami and Learna and their people thrived that way—in

hin

—as a matter of symbiotic course, in interaction with their environment on a microorganic, even sub-atomic scale. Stranded from the synergistic biota of their planet, they would not even be sentient beings.

But to outside lifeforms, exposure to the atmosphere of Garuda and to

hin

was a death sentence by insanity.

Rem fought to hold onto some last shred of reality. The seemingly endless memories of the Optera before his time, and the paradise it had been—had he only dreamed them? Images of the Regent’s estranged mate, the Regess, and her passion for Zor, whose biogenetic material had been made manifest in Rem’s cloning—were they too fever dreams of the

hin

? But they had seemed so real, not hallucinatory; more ordered and in focus than any dream or nightmare.

The Invid officers hoisted Rem to his feet with a clanking of his chains. To Rem’s addled and tormented senses, the cold tiles felt like white-green frost, that burned the soles of his feet and froze them at the same time.

The Regent loomed before him, twenty feet high, massive and terrible, his mantle spread like a cobra’s hood as he gazed down through liquid black eyes as big as manhole covers. Rem felt the

hin

seize him again, making the breath in his lungs coagulate and refuse to move.

Rem heard his own whimpering, felt his self control about to slip from his grasp. He had the abrupt impression that there were things in the shadows waiting to pounce upon him and feast on his marrow, then take his mind and steal his soul. And though a remote part of his intellect could recognize it as the mind-wrenching effect of

hin

, he couldn’t find the strength or the will to fight it.

“Stand him up straight,” the Regent said, when Rem would have pulled himself into a weeping fetal ball. “Hold his head up.”

When Rem was standing up and staring wild-eyed as an animal with its leg in a trap, the Regent went on. “You’re a very difficult fellow, Tiresian. Or should I say, ‘Clone’? Or better yet, ‘Zor-clone’?”

He held up four-fingered fists with wrists several times thicker than Rem’s waist. “Whatever you

really

are, here’s something that might interest you. Your Sentinel friends are coming.”

Rem couldn’t hide a wretched whimper of disbelief and despair mixed with crazed hope. The Regent caught it. “That’s right: they are coming directly into my hands. To be imprisoned like you, to be put to the Inquisition like you, and to go through all the pain and mind-probing you’ve gone through.”

Rem was nearly in tears, but the Regent was leaning forward in the colossal throne, drowning him out. “But it needn’t happen that way! You can save them, Zor-clone, and save yourself as well! The Haydon IV healers can cure them and cure you too, this very hour; you can leave with them—if you’ll simply say a few paltry words and give me what I want.”

But Rem

was

broken. Courage and conviction and strength and faith—and even love—are overrated when it comes to defense against torture. Yet the Regent failed to incorporate one thing into his equations—the one factor that no agony could overcome: ignorance.

“Tell me where the last Protoculture matrix is,” the Regent hissed. “Tell me where the original Zor sent it—hid it! You have many of his memories—how, I’m not sure. But that one

must

be there, it

must

!”

But it wasn’t. If it had been, Rem would have yielded it up in a moment. That escape was closed to him, though.

Rem laid his head to his chest and sobbed. Deep in the

hin

, he felt the sunlight jeering at him, his fear-sweat turning to acid against his skin, panic closing off his windpipe.

He heard the creak as the Regent rose from his chair. “Above all things, I despise stubbornness. That, I punish.”

Lynn-Minmei tried to stop the passageway from spinning as she lurched along, her hand held by the mysterious VT pilot; she was barefoot and disheveled, sick with the drinks she had downed but sicker still with her latest and worst glimpse of human nature.

Not that she had intentionally drank a lot; she had nothing but contempt for drunkards. But life as the consort of general T. R. Edwards was a little easier to bear after a round or two. And then there was the drink itself—from Edwards’s private bottle—something she had heard the top-eschelon officers jokingly call “weed-whacker.”

It was a 150-proof vacuum distillate that had been soaked in fibers from a plant related to the Flower of Life, and strained out again. Brackish; deadly. But oddly smooth and warming.

Best taken by the slow shot glass.

But, she had needed

something

to fortify her as she sat there and listened to Edwards—the man Minmei had thought she loved, the man to whom she had given herself—reveal himself as a devil incarnate.

She was dizzy, and thought she might lose her balance, or her lunch—she had had no dinner. “Wait, wait,” she puffed, breathless. Her head spun, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat.

The VT pilot stopped and turned to her, gesturing in a way that made it clear he was concerned about her. Minmei brushed her hair out of her eyes yet again, to study him. “Do I know you? Who

are

you?”

He was tall and lean, and demonstrated a supple strength. Behind the tinted facebowl of his flight helmet, all she could discern was the dark, thick beard. He regarded her for a moment, then answered, “It says right here: REF Service #666-60-937.”

She could

see

that, and his flight officer’s insignia and unit flash. But his name tape, stitched over his left breast pocket, was unfamiliar:

Isle, L

. His voice, coming through the helmet’s tinny external speaker, was unrecognizable.

Her mystery savior was wearing the unit patch of one of the outfits from Dr. Lang’s research facility. Lang had managed to ram through the council an authorization for his

own

security forces, but Edwards had fought the seconding of pilots to the Robotech scientist. So, this was almost certainly one of the fliers who had been selected from the lower ranks and trained on Tirol to fill the cockpits of Lang’s personal army.

But what was he doing on SDF-3?

Minmei swayed slowly from side to side, closing one eye in an effort to focus on him. “C’mon, c’mon; I mean, why’re y’

doing

this?” She still wasn’t sure he wouldn’t drag her back to Edwards—maybe to claim some kind of reward or favor.

She was also waiting for the alarms to go off.

Surely by now Edwards had realized that she hadn’t simply fled his embrace and his bedroom for some fresh air. Even vain, cold Edwards must have admitted to himself by now that Minmei had made a break for freedom.

“You said you want to go to Tiresia, didn’t you?” the VT flier was saying. “And perhaps to Garuda, or Haydon IV? I’ll see that you get to wherever you want to go, Minmei. But Tiresia’s the obligatory first stop.”

There was some resonance in his voice, even over the speaker, that she thought she recognized. Minmei sighed and ran her hand through her fine black hair again. Plainly, no VT could make a star-jump; and the few remaining REF vessels that could go superluminal were scarcely the kind of spacecraft you could sign out like a borrowed fanjet.

But there was something in the man’s tone, something steely and yet compassionate, that didn’t sound like it brooked failure.

She vaguely remembered saying to him, outside Edwards’s quarters, that she wanted to go to Tiresia or Garuda, but the beginning of their adventure was lost in an alchoholic mini-blackout. She was not sure what her plan had been, though, except that Jonathan Wolfe and Rick Hunter were out there someplace.

She shook her head slowly, “I don’t—I don’t …”

He took her hand again. “Don’t worry, Minmei.”

Then he led her off again. Minmei lost track of things for a while, but blearily realized at one point that he was shoving oversize deck slippers onto her bare feet. At another point, she felt something sting her arm and saw that he had given her a shot with a medikit ampule.

“Anti-nausea,” REF #666-60-937 explained. “It makes it tough to see out the cockpit canopy if you heave your cookies.”

“ ‘Cockpit’?” she repeated, trying to figure out what he was getting at. Then she realized that he had her standing near a hatch that led to a hangar deck. There were the distant whines of VTs being readied for flight.

“Wait right here,” he said after he led her into the vast, mostly darkened hangar deck. Minmei did not get to ask what he was doing; he was gone.

The anti-nausea drug settled her queasiness and brought her around a bit too. She was drawing deep breaths and burping a bit, sitting on the deck, when he caught her hands and pulled Minmei upward.

“All set; just follow me. That’s our ship over there.”

“Wh—”

And then they were walking among the parked mecha of the hangar deck. Welding sparks and humming maint-crew machinery made noise in the distance, and she could hear men and women yelling or cursing or cajoling or laughing as they sweated to keep the REF’s fighting forces operational.

He was leading her toward an armored Alpha, a lusterless gray fighter trimmed in olive drab, bulked by its augmentation pods. It was one of the most formidable ships in the REF inventory, and she didn’t think it possible that it had been assigned to one of Lang’s “six-month-wonder” pilots.

Minmei saw the boarding ladder before her and it brought back a flood of memories. She was a non-tech person; why did mecha insist on playing such an overwhelming part in her life?

Then somebody yelled from the distance, and more voices took up the cry. She realized woozily that the voices were coming her way. She had both hands on the boarding ladder and one foot on the first rung when she became aware of a ruckus behind her.

By the time she turned around, there were three or four flight deck personnel laid out flat, unconscious. Minmei blinked at them owlishly.

What

—

Then REF #666-60-937 was pushing her up the ladder, loading her into the copilot’s seat and then belting her in. Apparently he knew all the right codes; the launch cat airlock accepted the powerful Alpha fighter and flung it out into space.

Green, looming Fantoma cast its light on them and their ship, and Tirol was a gibbous splotch of orange-browngray not far from it. The VT pilot turned his craft toward Tirol.

Suddenly his instruments were squealing and beeping for his attention. “Hot scramble from SDF-3, of course,” she heard him mutter. “They want you back. They’re coming to get you.”

“Then—”

“Sit tight.” He hit the auxiliaries for full military power and dove toward Tirol. Eager pursuers formed up for the hunt.

Minmei, pressed back in her seat, looking out at the unknowable stars, felt tears pressed from her eyes by acceleration, to wet the headrest behind her.

“Here they come,” said REF #666-60-937.

FOR BEN WILSON,

WHO HAS HIS OWN ROLE

TO PLAY IN THE FUTURE.

Published by Ballantine Books:

The ROBOTECH™ Series

GENESIS #1

BATTLE CRY #2

HOMECOMING #3

BATTLEHYMN #4

FORCE OF ARMS #5

DOOMSDAY #6

SOUTHERN CROSS #7

METAL FIRE #8

THE FINAL NIGHTMARE #9

INVID INVASION #10

METAMORPHOSIS #11

SYMPHONY OF LIGHT #12

The SENTINELS™ Series

THE DEVIL’S HAND #1

DARK POWERS #2

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jack McKinney has been a psychiatric aide, fusion-rock guitarist and session man, worldwide wilderness guide, and “consultant” to the U.S. Military in Southeast Asia (although they had to draft him for that).

His numerous other works of mainstream and science fiction—novels, radio and television scripts—have been written under various pseudonyms.

He currently resides in Ubud, on the Indonesian island of Bali.

APPENDIX

Thanks to the magic of electronic publishing, it has become practical to update the classic Robotech novelizations. Many of these changes are simple spelling and grammar corrections while others are minor continuity corrections which were made to more closely match the events of the television episodes. Such continuity updates were made where we felt it could be done without too much disruption to the original prose, and left alone in other instances where we felt the disruption would outweigh the benefit. For those of you curious about the specific changes made, we offer the following list of updates and errata:

UPDATES TO ALL CHAPTERS:

Different spellings of Jonathan Wolff’s last name have been updated to “Wolfe,” which was the spelling Carl Macek settled on in later books.

The spelling of “Regis” has been updated to “Regess” (feminine of Regent).

Miriya Parino’s last name corrected to “Parina” to match the TV show.

“Quadrono” updated to “Quadrano”

UPDATES:

Print page 76:

Changed “into the command freak” to “into the command freq”

Print page 107:

Changed “cattaillike” to “cat tail-like”

ROBOTECH CHRONOLOGY

Aeon Lanack

1171 A.L.

Zor is born on Tirol

1256-1490 A.L.

Quadrant exploration by the Tiresian technovoyager ship

Azstraph

– the “Venture.”

1520 A.L.

The

Azstraph

enters the Tzuptum system and inserts itself into the orbit around Optera. Zor encounters the Flower of Life, makes contact with the Invid, and seduces the secrets of the Flower from the Queen-Mother, The Regess.

1697 A.L.

The

Azstraph

returns to Tirol. Zor begins to experiment with the Flower of Life specimens he has brought with him from Optera.

1755-1836 A.L.

Zor conjures Protoculture from the Flower and eventually falls victim to the Compulsion placed upon him by the Tiresian Council of Elders. Origin of the Cult of the Three-in-One and ascendancy of the Robotech Masters. Fall of the Royal Hall as the period known as the Great Transition commences.

1920 A.L.

16 years before “Aeon Robotech.” Development of the spacefold drive. Creation of Tirol’s clone population and neural reprogramming of the Zentraedi miner giants.

Aeon Robotech

88 A.R.

The Razing of Optera by the Zentraedi

157-500 A.R.

Consolidation of the empire of the Robotech Masters. The Invid, after a burst of monocellular reproduction, declare war on the Robotech Masters.

566 A.R.

Zor’s voyages deliver him to Haydon IV, where he has a profound encounter with the planetoid’s artificial sentience, the Awareness.

Zor designs and builds the starship that will come to be called the SDF-1, and backed by a group of loyal Zentraedi, begins his “quiet rebellion” against the Masters.

Zentraedi commander in chief Dolza forms an uneasy alliance with Zor, who has by now become hopelessly addicted to the dried leaves of the Flower.

580-640 A.R.

Zor’s clandestine seeding attempts take him to Peryton, Karbarra, Praxis, Garuda, and Spheris.

671 A.R.

Zor steals the single extant Protoculture matrix from Tiresia and conceals it within the spacefold drives of the SDF-1. The fortress, with its skeleton crew of loyal Zentraedi, is folded from Tirol’s corner of the galaxy.

Anno Domini

1999 A.D.

An Alien spaceship crash-lands on Earth. Effectively ending almost a decade of Global Civil War. Originally called “The Visitor,” the ship is dubbed Super Dimensional Fortress I—the SDF-1

Dr. Emil Lang, after an initial recon of the ship (in the company of Roy Fokker, Henry Gloval, T.R. Edwards, and others), begins to unravel the secrets of the extraterrestrial science known as Robotech.

Macross Island becomes the focal point of Robotechnology, and restoration commences on the SDF-1

In another part of the galaxy, Zor is killed by Invid Soldiers during a Flower of Life seeding attempt. The Zentraedi Breetai is wounded during the same raid. Commander in chief Dolza orders Commander Reno to return Zor’s body to the Robotech Masters on Tirol.

Interstellar war with the Invid, whose homeworld, Optera, has been defoliated by the Zentraedi, continues to chip away at the fringes of the Master’ galactic empire.

2002 A.D.

Disaster at the Mars Base Sara, Lisa Hayes’s boyfriend, Karl Riber, is killed. Lisa Turns 17.

Development of the reconfigurable Veritech Fighter begins.

On Tirol, Cabell creates Rem by cloning tissue from Zor. The Masters, too, have their way with Zor’s body, cloning tissue for their own purposes and extracting from the scientist’s residual cellular memories a vision of Earth—destination of the fortress and Protoculture matrix he has stolen and spirited from their grasp.

2003-08 A.D.

Rose of the United Earth Defense Council under the leadership of Senator Russo, Admiral Hayes, T.R. Edwards, and others.

Roy Fokker and Claudia Grant become fast friends.

Lisa Hayes is assigned to the SDF-1 project on Macross, under the command of Captain Henry Gloval.

Tommy Luan is elected mayor of Macross City

2009 A.D.

On the SDF-1’s launch day the Zentraedi (after a ten-year search for Zor’s fortress and the missing Protoculture matrix) appear and lay siege to Macross Island. The fortress makes an accidental hyperspace jump to Pluto, carrying the island and its population of 75,000 along with it. 15-year old Lynn Minmei and 19-year-old Rick Hunter are caught up in the spacefold.

2009-2011 A.D.

The SDF-1 begins its way back to Earth with Macross City rebuilt inside its massive holds.

Rick Hunter joins the RDF and earns the rank of Lieutenant, with Ben Dixon and Max Sterling assigned to his VT squadron.

The Battle at Saturn’s Rings.

Lynn Minmei is voted “Miss Macross.”

Breetai calls up the Botoru Battalion, led by the notorious “Khyron the Backstabber.”

The Battle at Mars Base Sara.

Rick, Lisa, Max, and Ben are captured by Breetai and interrogated by the Zentraedi commander in chief, Dolza.

The Earth forces learn of the term “Protoculture” for the first time.

Three “micronized” Zentraedi spies- Rock, Konda, and Bron – are successfully inserted into the SDF-1, which returns back to Earth.

Lynn Minmei is reunited with her cousin, Lynn-Kyle.

Rick Hunter is seriously wounded during a Zentraedi attack on the fortress.

Roy Fokker is killed during a raid led by Miriya Parino.

After almost six months on Earth, the SDF-1 is ordered to leave by the leaders of the UEDC.

Ben Dixon is killed.

Little White Dragon is aired.

The Minmei Cult has its beginning aboard the flagship of the Zentraedi fleet.

Lynn-Kyle founds a peace movement aboard the SDF-1.

Asylum is granted to the three Zentraedi spies, and their fellow defectors.

Max Sterling weds former Zentraedi Quadrano ace Miriya Parino.

Exedore arrives aboard the SDF-1 for peace talks.

The Zentraedi armada appears in Earth-space and lays waste to much of the Planet.

At Alaska Base, the Grand Cannon is destroyed after it returns fire “in a damaged state” and Admiral Hayes is killed. T.R. Edwards survives and vows to avenge himself on Rick and Lisa “who did not stop to help rescue T.R. Edwards.”

The SDF-1, with assistance from Lynn Minmei’s singing, defeats Dolza’s armada of four million ships and returns to a ravaged Earth.

2012-2014 A.D.

A period of reconstruction begins, with humans and Zentraedi working side by side.

Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant (son of Claudia Grant’s brother, Vince) are born.

The factory satellite is captured from Commander Reno and folded to Earth-space.

Dr. Lang and Professor Lazlo Zand begin work on a secret project involving artificial intelligence. Zand takes particular interest in the infant Dana and under goes a Protoculture mind boost.

Khyron makes a surprise appearance and takes Minmei and Lynn-Kyle hostage.

The destruction of New Macross, the SDF-1 and SDF-2, along with Khyron’s forces. Henry Gloval, Claudia Grant, Sammie Porter, Vanessa Leeds, and Kim Young are among the many casualties. The remains of the three ships are in tomb and buried under tons of earthen debris dredged up from Lake Gloval.

2015-2017 A.D.

The Robotech Masters lose confidence in their race of warrior clones and begin a mass pilgrimage through interstellar space to Earth to recapture Zor’s Protoculture matrix.

Zentraedi Malcontent Uprisings in the Southlands Control Zone (South America). Jonathan Wolfe comes to the attention of Commander Max Sterling.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force is formed for the express purpose of journeying to Tirol to sue for peace with the Robotech Masters. Aboard the factory satellite, work commences on the SDF-3.

Rise of Monument city and Anatole Leonard’s Army of the Southern Cross.

Lynn Minmei takes on a singing partner, the android JANICE, at Emil Lang’s urging.

The Invid complete their conquest of Garuda, Praxis, Karbarra, and Spheris.

2022 A.D.

Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes wed aboard the Factory Satellite. Dana and Bowie are given over to the care of Rolf and Laura Emerson.

The SDF-3 is launched; Minmei and JANICE are caught up in the spacefold.

Rick turns 31; Lisa, 36. Dana and Bowie, 10. Scott Bernard, Lang’s godson from the recently completed Mars Base, turns 8.

2025

A.D.

The Invid Regent takes Tirol. Sickened by his bloodlust, the Regess leaves Optera for Praxis to carry on with her Genesis Pit experiments.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force arrives in Fantoma space and engages the Invid; the fortress’ spacefold generators are damaged. (The REF is unaware that the fold has taken five Earth-years, and believes the date to be 2020.) T. R. Edwards and his Ghost Squadron capture the living computer the Regent has left behind in Tiresia’s Royal Hall. Tiresians Cabell and Rem inform the Plenipotentiary Council that the Robotech Masters are on their way to Earth.

The Zentraedi contingent of the REF agrees to be returned to full size to mine Fantoma for the monopole ore to fuel a new fleet of warships.

The Sentinels-comprised of Praxians, Garudans, Karbarrans, Haydonites, Spherisians, and Perytonians-are formed to liberate planets recently conquered and occupied by the Invid horde. The Hunters, Grants, Sterlings, and others leave Fantoma space aboard the Farrago.

On Earth, Senator Wyatt Moran and the commanders of the Army of the Southern Cross consolidate their power and take control of the Supreme Council.

Dana and Bowie grow up under the care of the Emerson’s.

2026

A.D.

Karbarra is liberated. Tesla and Burak form a curious partnership. The Sentinels’ ship is destroyed and the GMU is stranded on Praxis shortly after the Regess’ leave taking for Haydon IV. Praxis is destroyed. Death of Baldan I.

T.R. Edwards holds secret talks with the Regent, and begins a personal campaign to capture Lynn Minmei

Wolf and JANICE return to Tirol. The Invid Tesla murders the simulagent set to Tirol by the Regent.

T.R. Edwards begins to hold sway over the REF’s Plenipotentiary council. Wolff is accused of murder and piracy. Control of the Fantoma mining operations goes to Edwards.

Garuda is liberated. Rick, Lisa, Rem, and Karen suffer the near-fatal effects of the planet’s atmosphere.

Baldan II is “shaped” by Teal.

The Zentraedi leave Tirol space with the monopole ore needed for the fleet’s warships.

2027

A.D.

The Sentinels arrive on Haydon IV shortly after the Regess’ leave taking, and “surrender” Rem to the occupying Invid troops. Rem learns he is actually a clone of Zor. JANICE reveals herself to be an android. Sarna is killed. Haydon IV is liberated.

A prototype ship under the command of Major Carpenter leaves Tirol for Earth.

Edwards loses his grip on the council after troops sent out to hunt down the Zentraedi, side with them instead. Wolff, Breetai, and Grant return to Tirol and clear the Sentinels of all charges.

Spheris is liberated. An Evolved Tesla leaves the Ark Angel for Optera to take on the Regent for control of the Invid.

Aurora Sterling is born on Haydon IV.

Edwards and his Ghost Riders flee Tirol for Optera, taking Lynn Minmei and the awakened Invid living computer from Tirol with them.

2028

A.D.

Jonathan Wolff is given command of a ship and is sent to Earth. The Zentraedi chase after Edwards

Tesla arrives at Optera and is battling his way to the Regent. Edwards arrives and is able to help chase Tesla off. The Zentraedi arrive and Breetai and the Regent die together, forcing the remaining Zentraedi to leave.

Exedore arrives on Haydon IV with the council’s peace proposal for the Regent.

The Sentinels move against Peryton. Tesla arrives and attacks the sentinels with his remaining forces to sneak down to the surface.

Tesla realizes his destiny while being devolved from the Fruit of the flowers and sacrifices himself with Burak in order to save the planet Peryton from its curse. Peryton is liberated.

2029-2030

A.D.

The battle for Optera. As the Sentinels fight to remove Edwards from power in Optera, Edwards, Arla-non, Teal, and Janice die.

Dr. Lang makes a series of Shattering discoveries about the spacefold generators designs his teams have been using since the Jump to Tirol. Due to the Temporal miscalculations the Earth’s actual date is corrected and the time left to help protect the Earth has passed.

The Ark Angel begins a slow return to Tirol.

Breetai’s son Drannin is born to the Zentraedi Kazianna Hesh.

The Ark Angel arrives at Tirol. Dr. Lang informs the crew of the temporal miscalculations.

Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant turn 17, graduate from the Academy, and are assigned to the 15th Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, which includes Sean Phillips, Angelo Dante, and Louie Nichols.

The Robotech Masters Arrive in Earth-space, and the Second Robotech War Begins.

Major Carpenter’s ship returns from Tirol.

Zor Prime is introduced to the 15th ATAC.

Roy Hunter is born on Tirol. The REF and the Karbarrans begin work on the main fleet of ships. Lang’s Robotech Teams develop an integrated system of body armor and reconfigurable cycles, known as Cyclones.

End of the Second Robotech War. Zor prime’s attempt at destroying the Masters’ flagship results in the loosing of the Flowers of Life from the Protoculture matrix concealed within the spacefold drives of the buried SDF-1; spores cover the planet, and the Flower takes root, alerting the Regess’ sensor nebula.

Lazlo Zand Dies.

Jonathan Wolfe’s ship returns to Earth. An Anti-Invid underground is established before the Regess arrives. Dana Commandeers Wolfe’s ship after the drives are retrofitted with a device perfected by former 15th ATAC whiz kid Louie Nichols.

The Robotech factory satellite returns to Earth space.

2031 A.D.

The Invid “disappear” from Tirol’s corner of the galaxy. It is assumed that the Regess has begun her move against Earth.

Optera is fully seeded with the Flowers of Life and given over to the homeless Praxians, who rename the planet New Praxis. The Flowers become the crop for a new Protoculture matrix created by Rem, who has managed to tap some of his progenitor’s-Zor’s-memories.

Max, Miriya, and Aurora Sterling arrive on Tirol from Haydon IV

The Invid Regess arrives on Earth. Her newly hatched army of soldiers and mecha destroys the factory satellite and easily defeats Earth’s depleted defenses. Hives and farms are set up worldwide, and some Terran captives are forced to work in labor camps, harvesting Flowers and processing nutrient for use in the Regess’ terror weapons and battle craft.

Arrival of Dana Sterling on Tirol. With her are Bowie Grant, Sean Phillips, Angelo Dante, Musica and Allegra, and many of the Masters’ clones.

2038 A.D.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force launches its first large scale assault on Reflex Point. The attack fails miserably, resulting in heavy losses for the REF 10th Mars Division.

Lieutenant Lance Belmont (aka. “Lancer”) of the 10th Mars Division crashes to Earth and is rescued from Invid collaborators by Carla Morales, who nurses him back to health.

2040 A.D.

Lancer joins the shattered resistance in the Americas. Traveling under the guise of a female singer, “Yellow Dancer,” Lancer travels as a covert courier for the much-weakened resistance network, gathering vital intelligence and information along his travels. Yellow Dancer’s music becomes an instant hit, with the promise of hope, and slightly subversive message of resistance. Yellow Dancer’s recordings spread throughout the Americas

2042 A.D.

The Mars Group leaves Tirol with Scott Bernard aboard.

Shadow Fighters and Neutron “S” missiles are developed by the REF for use in the assault against Earth. Nearly instantaneous spacefold becomes a reality for the main-fleet ships

Arrival and defeat of the 21st Mars Attack Group sent by the REF.

Scott Bernard and his ragtag band of freedom fighters—Rook, Rand, Lancer, Lunk, and Annie—begin a journey toward the Regess’ central hive complex, known as Reflex Point.

2043 A.D.

Marlene, Sera, and Corg are sent out by the Regess.

2044 A.D.

The Jupiter attack wing arrives in Earth-space. Photojournalist Sue Graham dies on Earth.

The REF main-fleet ships are folded from Tirol to Earth. The Regess and her children take leave of the planet in the form of a phoenix in the form of psychokinetic energy. Annihilating the returning ships in the process and ending the Third Robotech War.

On Haydon IV, Veidt and Exedore are present at the reawakening of the planet’s artificial sentience, the Awareness, (Max and his family are also on-planet. Cabell is on Tirol.)

The SDF-3 fails to remanifest in Earth-space. Rick turns 44 Lisa turns 49. Both have been affected by the time Dilation and are actually younger by almost 3 years as is most of the REF.

Aboard the Ark Angel, which has been spared the fate of the rest of the main-fleet of ships, Scott Bernard and Vince and Jean Grant commence a search for the missing fortress.

Robotech Sentinels: World Killers

Book Sixteen of the Robotech Saga

Copyright 1988 by Jack McKinney

CHAPTER ONE

They were the New Paladins, riding forth to answer the trumpet call to a nightmare war. They were mortals caught up in events that transcended anything they had ever expected. Many of them were career military people who had learned that wars were often won by those who made the fewest screwups.

But they also knew that everybody screws up sometime. Le Roy la Paz, The Sentinels

"Everybody stay sharp! Looks like we're gonna have to go to guns!"

Jack Baker trimmed the mated Veritechs he was flying-the sleek Alpha fighter was now joined like a vaned nose cone to the bigger, burlier Beta ship. A quick glance over his weapons status displays revealed that the other two Alpha-Betas of his raiding party were still in tight formation behind him.

"Jack, no!" yelled Janice Em. She was in the second ship along with Burak, Lron, and Tesla. "You heard what Veidt and Sarna said: this world's defenses will respond to any hostile action!"

Actually, Veidt had said the legendary protective systems of the planet responded to the mere intent of intrusion or provocative act. And that certainly seemed to be the case today, even though the fighters had gone in with weapons and shields down.

"I got a news flash for you: we've already got Haydon IV PO'd at us, kiddo," Jack snorted. "Or d'you think this planet's surface usually twitches and then starts spitting sparklers at people? Get ready; like it or not, it looks as if we're in for some turns 'n' burns."

One part of him registered the fact that the terrain of Haydon IV wasn't actually twitching; it was changing shape, like something from one of those old-time clay-animation flicks. And the things shooting up at the incoming Veritechs were more like swirling vortices or sheets of flame than sparklers.

Whatever they were, they were traveling at such high velocity that Jack saw the VTs had no chance of running for it.

"Activate shields and weapons." Jack tried to sound calm. "And stay close to me." It was too late to go back, so there was nothing to do but drive on.

Only he wished there were experienced combat fliers in the other two combined VTs. Janice had been through training, and so had Learna, but neither of them had any dogfighting experience to speak of. He would have preferred to have Max and Miriya Sterling flying at his wingtips.

But Miriya had been stricken, like Rick Hunter and his wife Lisa, by the strange microorganisms of Garuda. And so had another Sentinel, one whose possible death filled Jack with feelings and impulses that bewildered and shocked him...

He tried to put that out of his mind; what was happening to the famous Baker cool and concentration? Damn!

From the cockpit's rear seat, where she was strapped into the copilot's station, Bela reached forward to clap him on the shoulder. "That's the lad! Kick their flaming arses! I'll loan you the boot!"

The vortices of fire came darting and circling, changing shape and roiling-like silken scarves on the wind. All Jack's sensors were in alarm mode, but none of them could tell him what he was facing.

Fire with fire, he told himself fatalistically, and put a burst of pumped laser into the first one to come into range.

Somehow Tesla got on the tac net. "No, you fool! You're signing our death warrants!"

"Don't bother me; I'm workin'," Jack growled.

The cannonfire seemed to have no effect; the vortice changed course a bit and came straight for him. He shot it again. The other VTs chose targets of opportunity and opened up, too.

The vortices flared angrily, and some were jarred, but they kept coming. More came from what seemed to be an opening in the countryside below, like flecks of incandescent paint falling upward.

Jack was still firing when the first vortex hit him. It flared angrily against his shields, sending the indicators toward the danger zones, and it seemed he could feel the infernal heat right through the fuselage. More swarmed after.

The other VTs were struck, too. The vortices spread across them, coating them in a blinding radiance.

"Wake up! Come, come; I have no time for this nonsense! Wake him!"

Rem heard the thick, moist rumbling voice, loud enough to echo and shake the walls. He associated it with the sensation he felt now: bonds still holding his raw, bleeding wrists and ankles, and the cottony blur the Invid psy-scanners had left in his brain.

At the Regent's command, Invid officers applied brief pain to speed up the effects of the reviving injections they had given him. Rem squirmed and moaned, shaking off part of the fog, and opened his eyes.

Rem saw the throne room that the Regent had decreed for himself high in a Haydon IV tower. It was a minor mercy to see the light of Briz'dziki, the local sun, rather than the cold insides of the Invid's nearby hive.

Rem tried to recall what he was doing there, and it came back in a confused, horrifying rush. Capture by the Invid on Garuda; exposure to Garudan atmosphere-why wasn't he dead, or mad?

Or, perhaps he was-perhaps he was both.

No, he wasn't dead; the pain of his shackles was a branding-hot clarity too sharp for that.

But mad...

As he struggled feebly, he heard a low, mosquitolike humming that quickly built until it shock-waved from one side of his skull to the other. The shackles seemed to grow teeth and gnaw at his wrists, promising to devour their way up his arms and legs, ripping and savaging.

Rem screamed. The Invid stench coagulated with evil glee in his chest-he was sure he would suffocate.

Not mad, then-but even more terribly, a victim of hin, the Garudan altered-reality or transcendent state.

Kami and Learna and their people thrived that way-in hin-as a matter of symbiotic course, interacting with their environment on a microorganic, even subatomic, scale. Stranded from the synergistic biota of their planet, they would not even be sentient beings.

But to outside life-forms, exposure to the atmosphere of Garuda and to hin was a sentence of death by insanity.

Rem fought to hold onto some last shred of reality. The seemingly endless memories of the Optera of long ago, and the paradise it had been-but had he only dreamed them? Images of the Regent's estranged mate, the Regis, and her passion for Zor, whose biogenetic material had been made manifest in Rem's cloning-were they fever-dreams of

the hin? But they had seemed so real, not hallucinatory; more ordered and in focus than any dream or nightmare.

The Invid officers hoisted Rem to his feet with a clanking of his chains. To Rem's addled and tormented senses, the cold tiles felt like white-green frost that burned the soles of his feet and froze them at the same time.

The Regent loomed before him, twenty feet high, massive and terrible, his mantle spread like a cobra's hood as he gazed down through liquid black eyes as big as manhole covers. Rem felt the hin seize him again, making the breath in his lungs congeal and refuse to move.

Rem heard his own whimpering, felt his self-control about to slip from his grasp. He had the abrupt impression that there were things in the shadows waiting to pounce upon him and feast on his marrow, then take his mind and steal his soul. And though a remote part of his intellect could recognize it as the mind-wrenching effect of hin, he couldn't find the strength of will to fight it.

"Stand him up straight," the Regent said, when Rem would have pulled himself into a weeping fetal ball. "Hold his head up."

When Rem was standing up and staring, as wild-eyed as an animal with its leg in a trap, the Regent went on. "You're a very difficult fellow, Tiresian. Or should I say, `Clone'? Or better yet, `Zor-clone'?"

He held up four-fingered fists on wrists several times thicker than Rem's waist. "Whatever you really are, here's something that might interest you. Your Sentinel friends are coming."

Rem couldn't hide a wretched whimper of disbelief and despair mixed with crazed hope. The Regent caught it. "That's right: they are coming directly into my hands. To be imprisoned like you, to be put to the Inquisition like you, and to go through all the pain and mind-probing you've gone through."

Rem was nearly in tears, but the Regent was leaning forward in the colossal throne, drowning him out. "But it needn't happen that way! You can save them, Zor-clone, and save yourself as well! The Haydon IV healers can cure them and cure you, too, this very hour; you can leave with them-if you'll simply say a few paltry words and give me what I want."

Rem was broken. Courage and conviction and strength and faith-and even love-are overrated when it comes to defense against torture. Yet the Regent failed to incorporate one thing into his equations-the one factor that no agony could overcome: ignorance.

"Tell me where the last Protoculture matrix is," the Regent hissed. "Tell me where the

original Zor sent it-hid it! You have many of his memories-how, I'm not sure. But that one must be there, it must!"

But it wasn't. If it had been, Rem would have yielded it up in a moment. That escape was closed to him, though.

Rem laid his head to his chest and sobbed. Deep in the hin, he felt the sunlight jeering at him, his fear-sweat turning to acid against his skin, panic closing off his windpipe.

He heard the creak as the Regent rose from his chair. "Above all things, I despise stubbornness. That, I punish."

Lynn-Minmei tried to stop the passageway from spinning as she lurched along, her hand held by the mysterious VT pilot; she was barefoot and disheveled, sick with the drinks she had downed but sicker still with her latest and worst glimpse of Human nature.

Not that she'd meant to drink a lot; she had nothing but contempt for drunkards. But life as the consort of General T. R. Edwards was a little easier to bear after a round or two. And then there was the drink itself-from Edwards's private bottle-something she had heard the top-echelon officers jokingly call weed-whacker.

It was a 150-proof vacuum distillate that had been soaked in fibers from a plant related to the Flower of Life, and strained out again. Brackish; deadly. But oddly smooth and warming.

Best taken by the slow shot glass.

But, she had needed something to fortify her as she sat there and listened to Edwards-the man Minmei had thought she loved, the man to whom she had given herself-reveal himself as a devil incarnate.

She was dizzy, and thought she might lose her balance, or her lunch-she had had no dinner. "Wait, wait," she puffed, breathless. Her head spun, and she tasted bile in the back of her throat.

The VT pilot stopped and turned to her, gesturing in a way that made it clear he was concerned about her. Minmei brushed her hair out of her eyes yet again, to study him. "Do I know you? Who are you?"

He was tall and lean, and demonstrated a supple strength. Behind the tinted facebowl of his flight helmet, all she could discern was the dark, thick beard. He regarded her for a moment, then answered, "It says right here: REF Service # 666-60-937."

She could see that, and his flight officer's insignia and unit flash. But his name tape, stitched over his left breast pocket, was unfamiliar: Isle, L. His voice, coming through the helmet's tinny external speaker, was unrecognizable.

Her mystery savior was wearing the unit patch of one of the outfits from Dr. Lang's research facility. Lang had managed to ram through the council an authorization for his own security forces, but Edwards had fought the seconding of pilots to the Robotech scientist. So, this was almost certainly one of the fliers who had been selected from the lower ranks and trained on Tirol to fill the cockpits of Lang's personal army.

But what was he doing on SDF-3?

Minmei swayed slowly from side to side, closing one eye in an effort to focus on him. "C'mom, c'mon; I mean, why're y'doing this?" She still wasn't sure he wouldn't drag her back to Edwards-maybe to claim some kind of reward or favor.

She was also waiting for the alarms to go off.

Surely, by now, Edwards had realized that she hadn't simply fled his embrace and his bedroom for some fresh air. Even vain, cold Edwards must have admitted to himself by now that Minmei had made a break for freedom.

"You said you want to go to Tiresia, didn't you?" the VT flier was saying. "And perhaps to Garuda, or Haydon IV? I'll see that you get to wherever you want to go, Minmei. But Tiresia's the obligatory first stop."

There was some resonance in his voice, even over the speaker, that she thought she recognized. Minmei sighed and ran her hand through her fine black hair again. Plainly, no VT could make a star-jump; and the few remaining REF vessels that could go superluminal were scarcely the kind of spacecraft you could sign out like a borrowed fanjet.

But there was something in the man's tone, something steely and yet compassionate, that didn't sound like it brooked failure.

She vaguely remembered saying to him, outside Edwards's quarters, that she wanted to go to Tiresia or Garuda, but the beginning of their adventure was an alcoholic mini-blackout. She was not sure what her plan had been, though, except that Jonathan Wolff and Rick Hunter were out there someplace.

She shook her head slowly. "I don't-I don't..."

He took her hand again. "Don't worry, Minmei."

Then he led her off again. Minmei lost track of things for a while, but Wearily realized at one point that he was shoving oversize deck slippers onto her bare feet. At another point, she felt something sting her arm and saw that he had given her a shot with a medikit ampule.

"Antinausea," REF # 666-60-937 explained. "It makes it tough to see out the cockpit canopy if you heave your cookies."

"Cockpit?" she repeated, trying to figure out what he was getting at. Then she realized that he had her standing near a hatch that led to a hangar deck. There were the distant whines of VTs being readied for flight.

"Wait right here," he said after he led her into the vast, mostly darkened hangar deck. Minmei did not get to ask what he was doing; he was gone.

The antinausea drug settled her queasiness and brought her around a bit, too. She was drawing deep breaths and burping a bit, sitting on the deck, when he caught her hands and pulled Minmei upward.

"All set; just follow me. That's our ship over there."

"Wh-"

And then they were walking among the parked mecha of the hangar deck. Welding sparks leapt and humming maint-crew machinery made noise in the distance, and she could hear men and women yelling or cursing or cajoling or laughing as they sweated to keep the REF's fighting forces operational.

He was leading her toward an armored Alpha, a lusterless gray fighter trimmed in olive drab, bulked by its augmentation pods. It was one of the most formidable ships in the REF inventory, and she didn't think it likely that it had been assigned to one of Lang's "six-month-wonder" pilots.

Minmei saw the boarding ladder before her and it brought back a flood of memories. She was a non-tech person; why did mecha insist on playing such an overwhelming part in her life?

Then somebody yelled from the distance, and more voices took up the cry. She realized woozily that the voices were coming her way. She had both hands on the boarding ladder and one foot on the first rung when she became aware of a ruckus behind her.

By the time she turned around, there were three or four flight-deck personnel laid out flat, unconscious. Minmei blinked at them owlishly. What-

Then REF # 666-60-937 was pushing her up the ladder, loading her into the copilot's seat, and then belting her in. Apparently he knew all the right codes; the launch-cat airlock accepted the powerful Alpha fighter and flung it out into space.

Green, looming Fantoma cast its light on them and their ship, and Tirol was a gibbous splotch of orange-brown-gray not far from it. The VT pilot turned his craft toward Tirol.

Suddenly his instruments were squealing and beeping for his attention. "Hot scramble from SDF-3, of course," she heard him mutter. "They want you back. They're coming to get you."

"Then-"

"Sit tight." He hit the auxiliaries for full military power and dove toward Tirol. Eager pursuers formed up for the hunt.

Minmei, pressed back in her seat, looking out at the unknowable stars, felt tears pressed from her eyes by acceleration, to wet the headrest behind her.

"Here they come," said REF # 666-60-937.

CHAPTER TWO

In the case of Garudan evolution, there can be no question that a wide spectrum of intracellular organelles developed through the cannibalistic warfare among bacteria that led to an amazing degree of symbiosis. The interactions of the entire Garudan ecosystem, the planet's dominant species included, give weight to those who argue that the evolution of multicellular organisms resulted from the extracellular symbiosis of monocellular organisms.

Like ours, a Garudan's body is composed of about ten quadrillion animal cells and another one hundred quadrillion bacterial cells. But the range of microorganic activity and variety is far greater, and the interaction of the symbionts far more complex.

The upshot is that a Human who is exposed to Garudan atmosphere is like a pocket calculator plugged into a mainframe: it is not designed for it and will quickly burn out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, in light of recent research, the Garudans have a simple explanation for the extraordinary nature of their planet's ecosystem: "Haydon wished it so."

Cabell, A Pedagogue Abroad: Notes on the Sentinels Campaign

Vince Grant's hand covered Lisa Hunter's forehead and then some. He drew it back, moist

with her perspiration. "She's still feverish." He struggled with himself for a moment, not sure if he could or should say what else he was thinking.

Jean, Vince's wife, nodded slightly. The patients were all that way: Rick and Lisa, Karen Penn and Miriya Sterling. They were comatose and failing fast, as a result of their exposure to the Garudan atmosphere. They were tied down on gurneys to help control their intermittent seizures.

The shuttlecraft's deckplates vibrated under Vince's boot soles. "Jean, what if Veidt's wrong, or the Invid double-cross us?"

Somebody had to ask the question. The fate of worlds was riding on what the Sentinels would do. Moralists would say that the lives of four individuals were as important as the life of a planet or the outcome of a war, but Vince didn't have the luxury of dealing with the abstract.

He wiped the perspiration from Lisa's brow with a cloth and pulled the blanket back up under her chin. He looked at the other stricken Sentinels.

Here were four lives that would come to an end unless the virtually miraculous Haydonian healing crafts were brought to bear. But what might the survival of the Hunters and the others cost?

The Invid sounded so accommodating-it could only be some sort of trick. Vince drew a breath and smoothed out his uniform tunic. Given his size, no one-least of all, an XT-was likely to notice the bulge of the Badger assault pistols he was wearing in shoulder rigs under each armpit. If this was a trap, the Regent's hordes would find out how expensive a pricetag such a seemingly simple skirmish could carry.

Vince was not particularly afraid of death. He had long since figured out his attitude about dying, and other people sensed his inner calm. As the shuttle started to cut into Haydon IV's atmosphere, Max Sterling appeared in the hatch, knotting his fingers together, and looked to Vince.

Max had left his place at the controls, permitting Wolff to take over, and come aft to check on his wife yet again. "Veidt's gotten final landing approval," Max told them. He hesitated, then added, "They'll keep their word, don't you think? The Invid, I mean?"

Jean Grant, attending her patients, avoided eye contact with Max; she didn't want to lie, and she didn't want to voice her doubts. Secretly, she thought it was only a fifty-fifty possibility that Miriya or any of them would be cured-or that anybody on the shuttle would survive the visit to Haydon IV.

Vince turned to Max and said, "they'd better."

The shuttle came in low over Glike, the principal Haydonite population center. The city looked like something out of the Arabian Nights-so fabulous that they momentarily forgot their fears. Some of the architectural styles had been borrowed from other worlds-Tiresian columns and friezes; Spherisian crystal palaces; Praxian statuary and totems. But most of Glike was uniquely Haydonite: slender minarets and spires, fantastic white-frost gingerbread mansions, lacy elfin halls that seemed to shine with an inner light.

Besides flying craft like Veidt's, there were machines from the various worlds that traded with Haydon IV, and different forms of Haydonite ship. Jean spotted one, on a scope, that reminded her of a pilot whale with great, flipperlike wings-all curves and a bulging transparent passenger compartment.

There were also flying carpets, or what looked enough like them to make her think of Scheherazade.

Just then Veidt and Sarna appeared from the flight deck, where they had been guiding Wolff in his landing approach. They looked as unearthly and remote as ever, robed and floating a few inches off the deck, their faces as featureless as those of unfinished mannequins.

"We'll be landing soon," Veidt said in that weird, whispery, processed-sounding voice. "I think you would do well to prepare yourselves and your patients."

Max returned to the pilot's seat and handled the touchdown with an assist from Colonel Wolff. Cabell and Sarna looked on. Haydon Control had directed them to a landing stage in the middle of the city, one of a number of platforms of smoky blue glass sprouting from a central tower.

A reception committee had already appeared to meet them, standing together on a flying carpet that hovered a few yards above the landing surface. As Vince, Max, and Wolff opened the hatch, the carpet floated toward them and stopped a foot or so off the platform.

As had been agreed, Veidt and Sarna went first to greet the half-dozen Haydonites waiting on the carpet-or, more precisely, floating just off it. Jonathan Wolff took advantage of the moment to look the flying carpet over.

The carpet was thicker than the ones from the tales. It resembled an undulating judo mat, yet it was textured and decorated with exotic, iridescent patterns. It was vaguely rectangular, but he could see that it tended to shift and change conformation. Moreover, the other carpets, sailing around over the city came in many shapes and dimensions, from one-passenger welcome mats to dance-floor-size.

Veidt and Sarna exchanged ritualistic and dignified bows with their people. Since Haydonites lacked arms as well as faces-and legs too, Wolff supposed (although nobody he knew of had ever gotten a look under those hovering robe hems to find out what was underneath them)-the whole ceremony had a reserved, inhuman look to it.

Wolff found that he could tell the males and females apart. The Haydonite men's faces had angular planes, and saucer-size, gemlike things displayed on their robes.

The leader of the welcoming committee was a male, taller and more slender than Veidt. He had a bulging cranium and a deep coppery tone to his skin. A shimmering symbol like a star sapphire's light shone from the center of his forehead. "So, Veidt, you return to bring your disturbances among us yet again?"

But it was Sarna who answered. "You know better than that, Vowad! Our friends are gravely ill, and only Haydonite science can save them! You know the Law; we're obligated to help."

The one called Vowad made an irritated sound. "Yes, yes-and if it hadn't been this excuse, it would have been some other, eh?"

The others behind Vowad shifted uneasily, and one of them intervened. "Enough! If lives are in jeopardy, it is best the healing begin at once."

Wolff wasn't so sure he liked what he had heard, and he didn't know if he wanted to stake his life on the Haydonites' good graces, but it was too late to back out. He surreptitiously made sure the conventional weapons he had concealed under his clothes were secure, and regretted that it was impossible to carry Protoculture weapons due to these planetary defenses everybody kept talking about.

Sarna turned to the humans waiting by the foot of the shuttle's ramp. "Bring them forth. We go to the Halls of Healing immediately!"

Jean Grant operated a small remote unit. The automated med gurneys on which Rick and the others had been secured rolled forth. Vince was going to ask how the wheeled gurneys were going to get up onto the flying carpet when a part of it extended like an upholstered tongue, at a gentle incline, like a ramp. Max walked at his wife's side.

Once Vince had secured the ship, he joined Wolff, Jean, and the rest on the flying carpet. It didn't give under his considerable weight and felt stable. More like a flying cloud than a flying carpet, he thought.

At some invisible command, it rose and wafted away over the city. Though there was no fairing or windshield, the humans felt only a vague stirring of air-despite the fact that the carpet was traveling quite rapidly.

They looked down on a city busy with commerce and trade. As Veidt and Sarna had explained it, Glike was similar to the old-time Hong Kong. It was a place of enforced truce, immune to the military conflicts that had raged around it.

As the others gazed, enraptured, at the soaring beauty and exquisite elegance of Glike, Sarna went over to Max. "You look tired, Maximilian. You must rest. Won't you be seated?"

He looked around as she gestured with a nod of her head, and saw that the carpet's surface had bunched up to make a kind of lounge chair just his size. He had no idea how she had done that.

Heaven knew he was exhausted, but all he could think of was Miriya; he refused to leave her side. Max gestured toward Veidt and the other Haydonites, now deep in conversation with Cabell, no doubt discussing medical procedures.

"That guy-what's his name, Vowad? Why's he so angry at Veidt?"

Sarna looked at them. "Vowad believes, as many do, that we can coexist with the Invid indefinitely. That any concession we make, any appeasement, is worth it. You already know how my husband and I feel. When Veidt insisted on making his opinions known, the Invid managed to kidnap us both."

Max felt sudden misgiving. "But-the Invid can't attack you here, isn't that what you told us? The planet's defenses would react."

Sarna inclined her head, a strange gesture from one who had no eyes and only contours where a face should be. "Indeed. But there are other ways to bring pressure to bear-the threat of a blockade, or strikes against our trading partners and customers. And, the Invid have attained great influence over some of our folk-with economic leverage and other things."

She moved closer, spoke more quietly. "Vowad is perhaps the single most powerful Haydonite, and I think that it was with his cooperation that Tesla kidnapped Veidt and me. We must be wary of him."

As if he had heard, Vowad turned toward Sarna and called out, "Come, give us your opinion of Cabell's proposed treatment regimen. Surely, my daughter has much to say? You always did when you were younger."

"Yes, Father," Sarna said, and floated back to the group, to leave Max slack-jawed with surprise.

Lieutenant Isle was no Rick Hunter or Max Sterling, but he handled the Alpha with cool deftness, making the most of its brute power and amazing performance, as the hounds gave chase.

Ghost Riders flying patrol between SDF-3 and Tirol, hampered by the fact that Minmei was aboard the quarry, found themselves at a profound disadvantage. Minmei's rescuer fired warning bursts that didn't miss by much, making it plain that he was at no great pains to spare anybody who pressed him too hard.

The sentries yielded, but as the armored Alpha plunged for Tiresia more bogeys appeared on the screens, scrambled from SDF-3. Minmei could hear Isle's breath rasp. "I thought Edwards would be distracted getting the pursuit of the Zentraedi under way," he admitted. "Thought we'd have a little more lead time."

She gave a scornful laugh, shaking her head wearily. "You think T. R. Edwards is going to go after Breetai personally! And take a chance that things here will get away from him? You've got a lot to learn, Lieutenant."

The kind of thing I've learned the hard way, she thought. "So, what now?"

He wasn't sure; the decision to help her escape Edwards's sadism had come rather on the spur of the moment. "We'll get you to REF Base Tirol, to Lang's bailiwick, for a start."

"Why? So The Great General has an excuse to kill Lang? Why don't you save everybody the trouble and just drop me off right here?"

He felt at a loss, but brought the fighter onto course for Base Tirol anyway, for want of anything better to do. One plan had been to try to link up with Breetai, but the Valivarre, the hijacked Zentraedi mining op ship loaded with the all-important monopole ore, was already beyond the VT's range.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself," he said in an odd monotone. "It never does anybody any good. Now, tell me what you want."

"I-I want Jonathan." She was trying to hold back more tears, because she knew he was right about feeling sorry. "Jonathan Wolff! Just to be with him!"

"So." The word had a hollow, final sound, the way he said it. "Getting to Lang and the council is still a first step. Hang on." He increased power again.

"Y-you still haven't told me why you're doing this," she strained to get out, as the mecha thundered under her.

She didn't have a flight helmet, so she could still only hear him over his own helmet's tinny

external speaker. "I don't like seeing people pushed around, Minmei."

Just when he should have been enjoying his triumph, Edwards had to suffer the galling news of Minmei's escape.

At first he had thought it was just another of her temper tantrums, set off by news that he had permission to send a contingent after the fleeing Zentraedi and their stolen ore. He realized now, though, that she still thought she loved that idiot Jonathan Wolff.

The half of T. R. Edwards's face that wasn't hidden under his gleaming metal cowl burned red. She was his property, and he had no intention of losing her-not to Wolff and not to anyone else.

Of course, it was out of the question to admit publicly that she had left him. The word was put out, to a limited number of key people, that she had been kidnapped. Minutes later, news reached him of the chase after the armored Alpha.

Apparently the pilot, whoever he was, was neither a Ghost Rider nor some rogue Skull, but rather one of the detached-duty fliers serving the R&D people and council-liaison offices. That hadn't kept him from knocking out several crewmembers and stealing a VT. Edwards looked forward to exacting a fearsome revenge.

But he had no time to waste monitoring the pursuit of the Alpha. There was his flotilla to put into motion, and every second counted, since Breetai was already under way. The ore the Zentraedi had taken with them was the key to a fleet that would let Edwards return to Earth in glory and conquer it.

Once the Zentraedi had been eliminated, it would be time to do away with the bothersome Sentinels. And soon, Minmei would be his wife and rule at his side, an empress over whole planets but his own obedient chattel.

CHAPTER THREE

The place was called Haydon IV, but nobody was able to explain why. It was the third planet out from its primary, so that explanation was null and void. There was no record or myth that gave a clue.

Odd, though; it was the fourth planet the Sentinels were to fight on-Tirol being an REF show.

Oh well. Coincidences were for the scientists; we troopies were just there to shoot V salute.

Susan Graham, from the narration to her documentary film, Protoculture's Privateers: SDF-3, Farrago, Ark Angel, Sentinels, and the REF

Like schools of deadly fish, the fiery defensive vortices of Haydon IV plastered themselves to the Veri-tech, glowing brighter and brighter, burning fiercely at the fighter's shields.

"They mean to roast us alive!" Bela said grimly; Jack knew that tone in her voice, the one she took when she had her hand on her sword hilt.

He doubted that the energy defenses would actually do that, though; once the shields went down, the end would be rather swift and spectacular. Even now, the VTs were beginning to lose power; the final fall would be soon.

"Jan, can you spot any large bodies of water downstairs?" Maybe a swan dive into a lake or ocean would short-circuit the vortices, or something.

But she was replying, "Negative. Jack, I'm losing flight control. My instruments say these things are melding with the shields, becoming part of them and making them rigid. Control surfaces are becoming immovable."

It was happening to him, too, and to Learna's ship. The energy was forming a shell, and

unless they could break it...

Then he yelped as a last, desperate solution occurred to him. "Listen up, everybody! Separate fighters and go to Guardian-correction! Go to Battloid mode, I say again, separate fighters and go to Battloid mode! Maybe we can hatch outta these energy shells!"

The fighters were beginning to tumble and wobble; the mere act of separating them under these conditions bordered on the suicidal. But Kami followed Jack's countdown from her place in the Beta's pilot-seat and at his mark they disengaged. The drubbing they got from the atmosphere almost smashed the two ships into each other, but Jack and Kami fought their controls, imaged through their thinking caps, and managed to get clear.

The fighters fought a terrible battle against the cocooning energy fields-like chicks trying to break through their shells. The ships strained to mechamorphose, to follow that central and perhaps most amazing trait of Robotechnology.

Come on, come on, Jack urged his mecha silently. And at last there was the sliding of components as the Alpha began folding and reconfiguring, its shields following suit.

All at once the blazing inferno burst away from the Alpha in all directions like an outlashing nova. The VT had become a Battloid, Humaniform, like a knight in armor, fists cocked, riding ribbons of thruster fire.

Jack gasped, trying to catch his breath. He checked around and saw Kami's Beta, and

Janice's Alpha, with Lron's Beta close-by. All were in Battloid, shimmering with heat waves but still intact and under control.

Jack spotted Learna-a little rocky but apparently getting things under control. But...

"Crysta!"

He heard the ursine growling of the female Karbarran, more angry than afraid, as her Beta whirled and tumbled groundward. It was still in fighter mode, its power failing. Jack imaged his systemry and went after her like a high-diver.

Something came into his field of vision and he realized that Janice Em was nearby, her Alpha in Battloid, too, plummeting alongside him for the seemingly doomed effort to save the falling Beta.

"Don't touch it unless your shields are up!" Jack yelled; Crysta's mecha was still aglow with the energy "antibodies." He took a deep breath, and imaged his command to his Battloid. It reached out and seized the Beta.

It was like trying to bulldog a whirlwind. The heavier Beta spun and tumbled, nearly shaking the Alpha loose, the Alpha's amazing Robotech strength notwithstanding.

But Jack clung and, bracing his feet against the fuselage, began prying at the wings, straining to help it go into mechamorphosis. At least, to his relief, the Haydon antibodies that were infused with the Beta's protective mantle didn't attack him or slide from Crysta's shields over to his own.

Then Janice grabbed the Beta from the other side, and together they fought to save their companions. "Crysta, try for Guardian, do you copy?" Jack had to strain to get out his words as he was thrown around against his harness. "Guardian!"

Jack figured that the Beta might be able to achieve the intermediate mode between Fighter and Battloid, and perhaps it would be enough to save those within. Crysta had only recently completed her pilot training, but she kept her cool with bearish Karbarran fatalism, and did her best to obey.

The attempt to mechamorphose didn't appear to be having any effect, though the Beta's components were straining against one another and seemed ready to fly apart. The efforts of the two Battloids had slowed its fall, though, and Crysta had a bit more control.

Lron, who had been pacing the others in a steep dive, along with Kami and Learna, called out, "Jack, I see water, a large body of it!" There was panic in his voice, but he was calming himself because that was the only possible way to help his mate.

There might be hope yet. "Where?" Jack barked.

"Over in the opening in the terrain, where those energy things came from."

Jack swore: salvation in the lion's den? Not likely. "Crysta, you're gonna have to try to eject. Right now!"

She growled, "I cannot, Jack; ejection mechanism won't respond." There was a kind of abject keening noise in the background of her transmission-the Invid scientist she was carrying, no doubt.

Though the two Battloids had slowed the Beta's fall, they couldn't stop it. "Okay then: we shoot craps. It's bath time, Crysta! Brace for a splashdown!"

Lron, Learna, and Kami closed in, too, applying all thrusters to help slow Crysta's fall and shove her ship into position over the large underground lake or sea that Learna had spied. The distant sparkle of the water pinwheeled up and up at them with frightening speed. In the last seconds, they were able to reduce the speed of their fall-then the water smashed into them.

Jack felt as if his neck had been snapped, and he was aware of water bubbling and surging against his canopy. Any conventional aerospace craft would have broken or sprung a thousand leaks, but somehow the Alpha held. Jack broke the surface to see Lron's Beta still fighting desperately to keep Crysta's afloat.

Jack hit his burners and lifted clear of the water on trails of blue flame. Crysta's ship was no longer encased in the energy antibodies, but its fuselage looked broken, and it was no doubt taking on water. Janice Em's Alpha appeared next to it, helping Lron try to keep it from sinking, the water boiling and hissing from the blast of their thrusters, but it was a losing battle.

"Just hold on a second more!" Jack yelled. "Crysta, I'm getting you out of there!"

His Alpha extruded the special manipulator tentacles that were built into all VTs. In another moment, they had stretched forth to open access plates on one of the damaged Beta's nacelles. It only took a moment for them to work the manual controls for the emergency-rescue system.

The entire cockpit module of Crysta's Beta slid free from the rest of the ship; Jack took it up in his Battloid's armored hands even while his manipulators were retracting. "Okay, get clear! I've got her!"

Lron and Janice released their hold on the Beta, and it sank from sight in a fountain of

bubbles and froth, steam rising from the water. Jack had risen clear and was sliding the cockpit module into a special fitting on the underside of his Battloid's right forearm.

"Just relax and enjoy the ride." Jack tried to sound light-hearted, but he was scanning his new surroundings and checking out his sensors, expecting another attack. He wasn't so sure the VTs could survive another fight.

"I cannot fathom it," Bela was saying. "Why would this Haydon IV of Veidt's have an underground sea? Is it not, as he and Sarna have told us, a-what was their phrase?- an artificial world!"

"That's what they said, all right," Janice Em added. "Only, personally, this wasn't what I pictured."

Nor had Jack. He had imagined a more elaborate kind of O'Neill colony, perhaps, or even a miniature Dyson sphere, but not something truly planet-size.

But it was indisputably an artifact of some kind. Beginning at the shores of the lake, fantastic underground mountains reared, looking to Jack like living instrumentality-inorganic versions of living forms and ecosystems.

Veidt and Sarna and the few other Haydonites among the Sentinels had been either unable or unwilling to give exact explanations as to how things worked here, and Jack began to curse them for it now.

Jan was continuing, "If the whole place really is an artifact, one of their biggest problems would be managing atmosphere and climate. It makes sense that they'd have huge reservoirs of water and ways of moving it around-under the surface and on it and even over it, as precipitation and clouds-"

"What we should be giving thought to is whether any of those fire-demons still lurk down here," Bela broke in.

"I see none, nor detect any," Lron reported. The others concurred.

"Perhaps the machines cannot see or smell us when we're down here," Gnea, the younger amazon, suggested. "After all, they're used to adversaries coming at them from outer space, not stepping inside their very gates."

Like flies hiding on an upraised flyswatter, Jack realized-which was only a good idea until the swatter's operator discovered the flies' whereabouts.

The opening overhead seemed to be shrinking, and some members of the team cried out, preparing to lift off and escape. Jack yelled for them to stand fast. "You want those air

defenses to nail us for good? We're safe for now, and it looks like we discovered a back entrance."

He was less sure than he sounded. The Haydonite defense systems hadn't been challenged in two thousand years (although, granted, they allegedly had cost some local warmonger a few hundred ships that time). Jack had difficulty believing that planetary defenses so outdated could be any match for Robotech mecha. After all, how much trouble would Wolff Pack Hovertanks have with Earth weapons even twenty years obsolete?

"Now, we've got a transponder fix on the shuttle, and an inertial track," Jack went on. "It looks to me like there's plenty of room for Battloids to make their way along underground. That's how we're gonna get to Glike."

There was a muted commotion and then Lron's voice came up over the net. "It seems Tesla doesn't agree with your idea, Jack Baker, but a pistol waved at his snout has him quiet once more.

"I for one think this is a good plan you have. We can remain out of sight beneath the city, and if we encounter trouble, we always have the option of blasting our way back to the surface."

Jack bit back his own dark conclusions on what an unfortunate recourse that would be. "Jan, you take the point. Lron, drop back and walk drag. I'll be slack man, then Learna, then you, Kami." Jack took up his position at the head of the main body, keeping Janice in sight as she picked out their route.

He had thought about walking point, but he was in command and responsible for looking after his tiny unit from a more appropriate place. Besides, Jan had proven herself to be amazingly capable-adept at military sciences, mecha piloting, small arms, and hand-to-hand. She even excelled at the archaic weapons of the Praxian amazons.

These excellent military abilities, coming from a woman whose former claim to fame was as a female vocalist, didn't make a lot of sense to Jack, but just now he was grateful to have her there. Jack watched as, far overhead, the last of the opening in Haydon IV's surface closed out the last few rays of Briz'dziki.

The VTs waded up from the underground reservoir, shedding waterfalls, as the last of the bubbles rose from Crysta's VT. Jan found a route through a thing that they took for a spillway, some twenty yards in diameter. Though there were some light sources in the labyrinth of living instrumentality, the Veritechs brought up all their wing-lights and spotlights to cut through the gloom.

Jan scouted several conduits and accessways. Twice, the team pulled back to the brink of

the sea to start over again because the route had narrowed to a squeeze so tight that the Battloids couldn't get through. The third try was a washout due to extremely high radiation levels; the VTs would protect their occupants for quite a while, but Jack had no idea how long the journey would take, and had no desire to end up as a human night-light.

The fourth try brought them into a sort of pipeline all aglow with the colors of the rainbow. The sensors couldn't determine what the light effects were, but they didn't seem harmful, and time was wasting. "Let's do it," Jack decided.

The team moved along like infantry, or SWAT officers, Lron covering the rear in a kind of crabstep, the enormous rifle/cannon of the Beta held at high port. The pipeline's diameter was about thirty feet, not much higher than the Battloids, and so the mecha moved cautiously.

In some places, the route was lined with pulsing bundles of filament as thick as a mecha's leg-like brilliant gatherings of unshielded optical fibers. In others, intertwinings of mysterious ducting and hoses resembled an incredible Robotech root system. Stupendous struts and support members were the geology of the underground world.

Gradually, though, the "terrain" started changing. The pipeline widened again, and the Battloids had as much room as foot soldiers moving along a highway. A world of dazzling, incomprehensible supertech complexity surrounded them. Light danced and tremendous loads of power surged and hummed.

It was a technological reflection of the nearby Arabian Nights cityscape in Glike. But, the manifestations were above, as well as around and below. Ziggurat power-management terminals bigger than any Egyptian pyramid; enigmatic things that looked like Van de Graaff generators the size of the Monument City Sportsdome; megastructures of warped, prismatic light that on closer inspection turned out to be mountains of contoured instrumentality.

As their route opened up into a kind of open countryside, they began to lose the oppressive feeling of being underground. That is, until Jan's voice came over the net.

"I'm picking up readings. I think these immunosystems, or whatever they are, are beginning to detect and respond to us again."

"What? Where?" Jack was punching buttons, searching frantically. "I don't see anything." Don't tell me she's a sensor wizard, too!

"Trust me, Jack." Her voice was so steady that he believed her. "There's something big ahead, something very big. Perhaps the nexus of everything that Haydon is, and now that we've stumbled so close to it, whatever it is, it's got a line on us again."

Jack didn't have time to ask her what she was jabbering about, because just then Kami yelled, "Snakes, snakes! Millions of em!"

Jack whirled even as Kami fired, forgetting the lessons about short, accurate bursts, the Garudan's Battloid hosing its rifle/cannon back and forth like a Robotech fireman.

The others were blazing away, too. Jack could see that whatever Kami spotted wasn't really snakes; but the undulating, crackling flows of green and yellow streaming toward the VTs would put that image in the mind of almost anybody-especially a Garudan in the hin-altered reality.

Not that Jack had much time to think; Janice Em was right. Whatever it is we're getting close to, it's got a line on us.

Like all the other Battloids, he brought his rifle/cannon up, hoping the stress on Crysta and the captive Invid in the backseat of her cockpit hadn't harmed them.

"Security wheel!" he bellowed over the din of their cannonfire.

The vast space under Haydon IV was lit by stroboscopic bursts brighter than all the pulses of its power routing, as the Battloids formed a security wheel, backing up until their mighty shoulders grazed one another, firing outward to all points of the compass.

A sustained burst usually blew one of the energy snakes to dispersing sparks, and the Battloids soon cleared a ring of death around them. But more serpentines of energy were pouring from every crevice. The things massed, too numerous for even Robotech weapons to deal with, and closed in from every quarter like a worldscape of angry vipers.

CHAPTER FOUR

It would be fair to say that I have been less than sensitive to the plight of the soldier in the past-have held military types in utmost contempt. I had my reasons, which I have set down elsewhere in these pages.

But it's just as fair to point out that since I have become one of them-shared their privations and sufferings and rare moments of success, seen their despicable vices and their noble virtues up close-I am a man chastened.

From the journals of Flight Officer Isle, L., REF Service # 666-60-937

Minmei had been to REF Base Tirol many times, but never via dark alleys and elevated roadway foundations like some escaped convict.

She would have been curious about this flight officer-Isle, his nametag said-except that she was feeling sick again and was exhausted after the harrowing flight from SDF-3.

They had abandoned the Alpha three miles back under the shattered remains of a bridge in Old Tiresia. Isle was successful in dodging his pursuers-they had gone rocket-big off in all directions trying to find him.

But why wouldn't he take off that flight helmet? Robotech fighter jocks sometimes felt a superstitious link to their thinking caps, but really, this was a bit eerie.

Lang's R&D. research complex was just ahead. Isle seemed to regard it as safe ground, but Minmei wasn't so sure. Nor would her savior explain why he couldn't simply land the VT at Lang's bailiwick.

According to the transmissions they had heard during the descent from the superdimensional fortress, Edwards was stripping much of his REF command for forces to pursue Breetai and the Valivarre. But Minmei knew that Edwards would never let her go, no matter what the circumstances.

Nevertheless, her small hand was in Isle's gloved one as he led her into an alley across a huge plaza from a rear gate of Lang's domain. But in front of the gate a quarter-mile away, mechanized troops from Edwards's ground forces were confronting Lang's security people. Obviously, Edwards had moved quickly to bottle Lang up and seal him off. Quite probably, Lang hadn't even the vaguest idea why.

Isle was unshaken, reversing field and pressing her back into the darkness. Just then two patrolling infantry went by across the plaza and one almost idly shone his light into it, picking out Isle and Minmei.

Isle turned with iron calm and led her back the way they had come, but by then there was a sound of pursuit: sirens and Hoverbikes and jeeps, tracked vehicles, yelling and crackling static on portable comsets.

A searchlight stabbed down from somewhere high overhead, and then several more lit the area. Isle pressed himself and Minmei up against a wall when one ranged close; then it moved on.

But, with a blaring of engines, a Hovertank pulled to a squealing stop at the far end of a back street, right in then-path. Two squads of infantry rushed to block the opposite end, trapping the two between rows of blank buildings.

Isle pushed Minmei against a wall and produced a huge magnum machine pistol, the kind she had heard the soldiers call Badgers; non-Robotech, but murderously effective.

REF troopers were closing in from both sides, men and women alike. Probably, a lot of them were people who had listened to her songs at the service club. Minmei put her hand

on the barrel of the Badger and pressed it down toward the ground. It didn't move.

"I can get you away from here." Still that flat, tinny sound from Isle's helmet speaker. "Minmei, I can save you." It sounded like he was offering redemption.

She was shaking her head. "By killing people? If you do, then god damn you! Because if one more person dies because of me, I'll kill myself."

She said that last sentence showing her teeth to him, then turned as the spotlights were being lugged into place at the nearer end of the street. Minmei walked toward them as they converged. She had her hands out like a penitent saint.

"Hold your fire! We'll surrender! But I want you to let this man go free, here where I can see it! If you don't release him, you won't have either of us alive!"

She swooned a bit, leaning against a hard evercrete wall, and an indeterminate time passed. There were people around her, flashlight and handspot beams on her, people trying to peel her eyelid back as she screamed and spit and fought and slapped them away, bit at them, and shrieked the most obscene things she could think of.

Then she calmed down. "Let him go," she wept. "Let him go."

Then that most reviled of all voices was near her, Edwards's. "Let who go? Who was here, Minmei? Who kidnapped you?"

Edwards was still some distance from her-his weren't the restraining hands gripping her. She gulped air and blinked away her tears and saw that Edwards's troops had secured the area, but Isle wasn't there. He was nowhere to be seen.

She looked to the blank evercrete wall where she had last seen him. Maybe there were slight punctures in it; the light was too dim to tell, especially with men and women holding her down. But anyway, there was only one person she could think of who could-

Edwards had been about to inflict new fear upon Minmei, some threat to scare her back into line. But Minmei's sudden, maniacal laugh put fear into him instead. "You know what you've finally done?" she screamed, frothing. "You've awakened the dead! And now your life is finished!"

Minmei, gamine though she was, almost pounced on him with fingers extended like claws; it took several groundpounders to hold her back.

"Straitjacket," Edwards said harshly, watching the struggle on the wet pavement.

Rain ran from his alloy cowl and glistening eye-lens, and from the pale fury of his face. "Put her in a straitjacket and get her over to my headquarters."

After the rest had gone, he looked at the wall to which Minmei had looked. In the dim light it was difficult to tell; those punctures were random-products of material defects and pitting and so forth, weren't they?

And yet, someone had flown the Alpha that no one seemed to be able to find. Someone had been standing next to her in a flight suit.

But Edwards didn't think Minmei would reveal the culprit's identity soon; he could hear her mad laughter and weeping as his security police bore her away.

"Commander! Faster-than-light craft appearing before us, screening our course. Two SDF-escort class, and they're sending challenges."

Breetai looked up from the private calculations he was making. "Patch it through."

He rose from the captain's chair on the bridge of the Valivarre. He unhurriedly squared away his Zentraedi longcoat, which was heavy with braid and decorations, all of them paid for in strife and blood. His skullpiece, all crystal and resplendent alloy, reflected the light.

"Attention, Valivarre!" came the Human voice. A face appeared on a screen above Breetai, a middle-age Human male's. The man was round-faced and florid, wearing a braided officer's cap.

"This is Commodore Renquist of the REF cruiser Toku-gawa. On behalf of the Plenipotentiary Council, I order you to heave to and surrender yourself, your ship and crew, and the monopole ore."

The two cruisers were both of the latest type, designed and built by Lang's people. Breetai was a bit surprised; he would have thought Edwards was too unsure of his own position on Tirol to send so many of his faithful off on the mission to bring back the Valivarre.

As for Renquist, Breetai recognized the man's name. A lickspittle who had become one of Edwards's servants and been promoted over far more capable officers. Breetai had half expected Adams or Benson or one of the others from Edwards's inner circle to be in charge of any force sent against him, but Edwards must have realized that those traitorous vermin were nothing to send against the Valivarre and its hundred-strong Zentraedi warriors.

"You are guilty of piracy and mutiny as well as treason," Renquist was saying, voice shaking a little. "I will remind you of your oath, and give you one and only one chance to

surrender."

"My oath and loyalty were given to the duly constituted Earth government, and to Admiral Hunter," Breetai boomed. "Not to your stinking General Edwards, or to you either, coward!"

Renquist's face took on the pallor and distortions of molten candlewax. Sweat started from his brow. "You misbegotten freak! I'll have you blown to atoms!"

Too bad the Valivarre hadn't gotten more of a head start, Breetai reflected. His chances of ducking the cruisers would have been good, and he thought it unlikely that Edwards would let half of his main line of defense roam far from Tirol, or be gone for too long.

Of course, Breetai could try to evade them, but the faster SDF escort ships would dog his track easily. Furthermore, fighting a deepspace battle at superluminal speeds was tricky, and the advantage would lie with Renquist and his cruisers and Lang's new generation of weapons. It would be better to settle things here.

Breetai crossed his arms on his enormous chest. "I hardly think that's likely, since you would destroy all the monopole ore left in this region. And none of you will ever get home to Earth, will you? Nevertheless, if battle is what you seek, the Zentraedi will gladly accommodate you. Breetai has never run from a fight. Come, then!"

Renquist's throat worked as he swallowed laboriously; the bluff had failed, and both commanders knew it. In destroying the ore, Renquist would be sealing his own fate. He tried to show determination, but it only came out as a weak bluster. "By god, we beat you devils once, and we'll beat you again! If you don't surrender instantly, I'll give the order to launch!"

Breetai nodded gravely. "Let us not keep our pilots waiting, Commodore."

What Renquist had said was undeniable: the Humans had defeated the giant warriors years before. But this time Minmei wasn't there with her songs to turn Zentraedi against Zentraedi, and this time there was no SDF-1 with its final Barrier Shield explosion.

Breetai thought of an expression he had heard Max Sterling use: We've got 'em over a barrel, and soon we'll have 'em in the barrel! Only, who would be thus vanquished this time?

"He's launching mecha, my lord," a bridge tech said.

But not many of them-certainly not as many as the cruisers carried. Perhaps it was a probe, or it might be that Edwards hadn't really spared as many of his Ghost Riders as it

seemed at first. And maybe there was another element in this situation.

"Order forth our Battlepods," Breetai said in his super-basso voice. "And order the gunners to fire at will at the mecha, but not at the cruisers, is that clear?"

Alphas, Betas, and Logans rode trails of blue thruster fire across the eternal night, bearing down on the Valivarre. The huge Battlepods of the Zentraedi came out to meet them.

The giants' mecha were like gargantuan headless ostriches-torsos suggesting alloy light bulbs mounted on two long reverse-articulated legs. The chest plastrons were bristled with cannon and missile racks. Officers' pods had, in addition, extra two-barrel gun mounts that they brandished as if they were huge derringers.

The Human fliers were Ghost Riders, loyal only to Edwards, more than willing to slay the giants who had been Humanity's staunch allies not so long ago. They had been briefed on the pods' vulnerable spots and performance profiles; they swept in confidently.

One of the tactics that had given the Humans the upper hand in the Robotech War was developed when Miriya Sterling revealed a weakness in the pods' design. Concentrated fire on a spot just aft the junction of the legs would disable the pods and leave them drifting and helpless.

The first surprise the Ghosts got was in discovering that the pods had been retrofitted to overcome the Achilles' heel, and the second was that the pods' own weapons and accuracy were deadlier than ever. Furthermore, Breetai's pilots had plenty of experience in fighting VTs, while the young Ghost fliers had been trained after the end of the Robotech War. And these Zentraedi were among the very best.

The end result was that the first few moments of combat saw Ghosts exploding in fireballs and erupting in white-hot wreckage, as the outnumbered Battlepods took an immediate upper hand. Once again, missiles lit the blackness, and beams of raging energy bickered back and forth.

Breetai watched a Logan come apart at the seams like a bursting melon, light and explosive force gushing from it. "We vowed to be your allies," he muttered, "but never your slaves or your victims."

On the bridge of the Tokugawa, Renquist watched, mortified, as the Zentraedi drove off his first attack wave with heavy casualties, though the giants had taken a few hits themselves. Operations and intel officers and their computers had a dozen poor excuses and supposed analyses, but he brushed them aside. The Ghosts were simply being outflown.

A face appeared on one of the side screens, a young flying officer. "Commodore, with all

due respect, I must protest! We were given definite orders by the council to negotiate with Breetai before any direct action was taken!"

Renquist narrowed his eyes, his jowls quivering. "Negotiate, hell! How dare you? One more word from you and I'll have you executed for mutiny!" At an angry gesture from the commodore, the connection was broken.

But it reminded Renquist of another unfortunate aspect of his mission. As Breetai had guessed, Edwards was too wary to strip REF Base Tirol and SDF-3 of the bulk of his Ghosts and leave himself at risk. Therefore, nearly half the flying group assigned to Renquist was composed of elements drawn from the various other units remaining after the Skulls had been tapped for duty with the Sentinels. And the Jokers, Diamondbacks, and the rest were less eager to follow this departure from council instructions.

But Renquist felt he had now seen the enemy's total strength. After all, there were only slightly more than one hundred Zentraedi altogether! All he had to do was to make sure the Human numerical advantage was absolute.

The Zentraedi had won in a limited matching; but even after the initial defeat, Renquist could double the odds without resorting to any but the Ghost Riders and surely overwhelm the giants.

He turned to a bridge officer. "Launch the rest of the Ghosts immediately and reform the survivors of the first attack wave. This time we're going to crush those alien scum!"

Breetai had expected no less. The Alphas and Betas and Logans thronged at the Battlepods, driving them back or blowing them to smithereens, some of them breaking through and coming for the Valivarre.

The ore vessel's gun batteries and missile racks opened up, but she was a mining craft, not a warship; soon, shots threatened to penetrate her shields. Breetai noticed that the Ghosts were being very deliberate, shooting for the engines and control sections, seeking to disable rather than destroy.

The pods could no longer protect the ore ship. Breetai saw a badly damaged officer's mecha, beset by two Logans in Guardian mode, try to ram one of them. But the Logan avoided the kamikaze run and the two Humans got the pod in a crossfire, turning it into a fireball.

Then they turned and, with others, formed up to add their firepower to the final assault on Valivarre. Breetai watched them dive in at him, his face like a graven idol's.

CHAPTER FIVE

She was too brilliant not to see the ramifications of her act. In taking half her race off on the pursuit of the Ultimate Invid Form and the New Optera, she would be forcing her husband to fend for himself in many ways-to confront certain things, to learn certain things. Things that-it isn't inconceivable-could force deevolution to turn end for end.

One possible motive for this is that there was some love for him in her still. Gitta Hopkins, Queen Bee: A Biography of the Invid Regis

A low, angry, chainsaw growl from the Hellcat made Cabell glance warily toward the thing, but Veidt seemed not to register its presence. The Regent reached down to stroke his pet's head, enjoying Cabell's uneasiness.

Cabell had good reason to be wary of the Invid Inorganic mecha called Hellcats. When the Invid first invaded Tirol, one had tried to tear him limb from limb.

Those sitting on their haunches to either side of the Regent's throne were even larger than the usual, and Hellcats were far bigger than any saber-tooth that ever lived. They were a glassy indigo, their eyes gleaming like ruby lasers. They were armed with razor-sharp claws, sword-edged shoulder horns and tail, and glittering fangs. About their muscular throats were resplendent collars set with gems from many worlds.

Cabell found himself transfixed by the 'Cats' baleful glares, so it was Veidt, looking and sounding serene as he floated there, who spoke. "Mighty Regent! Please accept our gratitude for granting us this moment of your attention. We know what great demands are placed on your time." He bowed solemnly.

"You have no idea," the Regent contradicted in his growling, gurgling voice, "none whatsoever!" His mantle flared and the four-fingered hands balled into fists the size of kegs.

"So do not flatter yourselves. I'm reconsolidating an interstellar empire, and you ask me to turn my thoughts to trifles. Still-noblesse oblige, and all that; I want it known that once I hold the universe in my fist, I will not be an unkind overlord." The mantle pulled back a bit.

Veidt bowed his head but looked unperturbed.

The Regent considered the matter with more caution than he would have admitted. The conflict revolving around Veidt, his mate Sarna, and Sarna's "father," Vowad-if such a concept as parentage could fairly be used with regard to Haydonites-concerned the whole planet. And it was one of the things that had worked to the Regent's advantage, he mulled.

Brute force was the standard Invid method of dealing with the enemy, but here on Haydon IV that was impossible. But intrigue, like warfare, was an art the Opterans had acquired

after Zor destroyed their idyllic existence. And so, the Regent knew there were certain games that must be played, and played to best effect. Thus, this interview.

"No, you will find me most reasonable and benevolent, as I have been here today," the Regent added, knowing the planet itself was listening. "And how goes the healing?"

Cabell had found his nerve again. He smoothed his flowing, embroidered robes, shrugged to resettle the high, stiff collar that surrounded his head, and stroked the white beard that nearly reached his waist. "Rather well, we think, though it's difficult to tell. The Haydonites are using a sort of therapy employing their arts of nanoengineering. Prognoses are good."

"How fortunate for them." The Regent nodded, but he was silently angry that the effects of exposure to Garuda's biosphere hadn't killed the Hunters and the rest. "And now that you have brought me this report, you may go." The Regent gestured to his bodyguard commander to show the visitors out.

"Just a moment." Cabell stopped him. "There is the question of my apprentice, the young clone Rem. I ask you to release him to us, that he may undergo the treatments, too."

"I am not finished with Rem quite yet," the Regent said hatefully, glancing down at them. Even seated, the tyrant overshadowed them like some pharaonic statue. "And as for you, you may go."

Now it was Cabell's turn to bristle; the anger in his voice quite surprised the Regent. "Not until you let me see that boy! Not until we take him for proper care!"

Hearing his tone, both Hellcats came to their feet, spitting and showing their long fangs. But Cabell was undeterred, meeting the Regent's fury with fury of his own.

Veidt spoke before Cabell could, though. "Great Regent! All the galaxy has heard of your vast intellect and spirit. Here now is your chance to prove that you can show mercy. Consider what praise it will win you! Why, word of it would reach even to the Regis herself."

Sly, the Regent mused, studying Veidt. For a race of artificial beings, the Haydonites showed surprising emotion and understanding of motivation.

Veidt had touched a nerve. Very likely, the Regis's spies would inform her of such a matter as the Regent's showing mercy-or if not, his own agents could see to it that she heard. More than almost anything, he wanted to win her back. And while his headlong plunge into deevolution kept him from truly understanding those impulses that guided his onetime mate, the Regent thought that mercy shown to the Zor-clone would certainly please her.

So he said, "Rem has already received the treatments I have permitted your companions

to undergo, for I am not through with him as yet. Be that as it may, I will grant you a compromise solution: you may visit him in his confinement, provided that you try to get him to see reason."

The Regent's subject planetary systems, if they were eavesdropping, would no doubt register that in the Regent's favor. He was quite proud of himself. He had turned the bothersome visit of Veidt and Cabell around so that he might profit from it in a number of ways.

And, with a little luck, he had bought enough time to come up with a way of slaying the Sentinels once and for all.

Jack Baker shot yet another of the energy serpents, watching it de-rezz into fast-swirling will-o'-the-wisps of light that dissipated and went dark. It occurred to him that those flickering pinpoints of light might be fading only to reconverge and come at him again, but there was no time to wonder about that.

"Jack! Two o'clock!" gritted Learna, who stood to Jack's right, still finishing off a writhing, crackling mass that was headed straight for her from her right. Twelve o'clock was the leader's position, of course.

Jack finished blowing away a bunch of the things to his left that were wriggling at him, then traversed his beam and flamed the two-o'clock snakes. He caught sinuous movement to his left again and began hosing down a nearby console with a sustained Protoculture salvo; it was thick with energy serpents, like a medusa.

Bela, in the Battloid's rear-now lower-seat, whistled and made ear-piercing war cries, when she wasn't spotting new targets for him. She seemed to be enjoying herself.

The Battloids' security wheel was surrounded by a sea of undulating glow-shapes; more and more seeped forth by the second, from every crevice and feature of the place. The mecha swept their constant-fire aim around and up and back, but the snakes closed in relentlessly. It was as if the technolandscape had come alive.

The Battloids fought with all the strength, power, and precision that Robotechnology had built into them, but it seemed hopeless. Energy levels were dropping sharply due to the ferocious demands of the weapons systems.

My first real command. Jack thought bitterly, and my last, too, maybe. Perfect record: no wins.

Then he thought of the afflicted-Karen and the others-somewhere above, in Glike. And Veidt, Cabell, and the rest of the escorts would be there, too, all of them counting on

Jack's team to get through.

But it was Karen's face he saw before him, and it made him fight like a man possessed.

But even the awesome firepower of five titan Battloids wasn't enough to keep back the tide of Haydon defenders; energy serpents struck at the foot of Jan's mecha, sending out bursts of heat and light, and dissolving metal. She lurched, checked herself when her first impulse was to stomp them (which would only have made it that much easier for them to damage her), and zapped them instead, melting decking and sending gobs of incandescence flying.

But while Janice was doing that, another dozen snakes got in close enough to coil and strike at Kami, who was to her right. The shields appeared to give no protection whatsoever against the things. In the meantime, several more dropped onto Lron from high overhead and began melting their way through his Battloid.

Jack made himself face the fact that there was no way out for the Battloids. Snakes were beginning to rain down from the ceiling, and he couldn't see any avenue of retreat for the mecha. It was a command he hated giving as much as a naval officer would hate giving the order to abandon ship, but Jack gritted his teeth and said, "Prepare to eject."

He got no argument; everyone had seen that their current situation was untenable, and knew that getting clear of the Protoculture-powered mecha was their only chance. While listening to the others run through the eject checklist and doing so himself, Jack hit a control stud as he imaged his ship.

His Battloid made a bowling movement. Crysta's cockpit/escape capsule went sliding into the clear along the decking. A rough ride, but better than being consumed by Haydon IV's gruesome defenses. The snakes ignored the module, but kept coming at the VTs.

"You all strapped in tight back there, Bela?"

"Take us for a ride, Jackie boy!" she roared merrily.

Jack hurried his checklist rundown, to catch up with the others. The Veritechs had zero-zero-eject systems, so that occupants could survive a punch-out even at ground level, even at a standstill.

The snakes had gotten through on the decking now, swarming at them, while more rained down from every cranny in the ceiling like some bizarre neon version of an Old Testament plague. "All right, everybody: hit it!" Jack barked. "And once you touch down, keep moving and don't look back!"

Janice had already punched out, pieces of her Battloid blown free by explosive bolts so

that her cockpit could be fired clear on blue eruptions of Protoculture power. Kami and Learna went at almost exactly the same moment, lofted through the air along with their passengers.

Jack hesitated until he saw that Lron was away, and then reached for his eject switch. He hit it, then reached up, crossing his arms during the fuse-delay to grab his seat harness, hands to opposite shoulders.

He gripped with everything he had and held his elbows tightly to him so that his arms would not flap around and get broken when the charges went off.

He almost didn't make it; the snakes had gotten through his mecha's shin armor and attacked the systemry there.

A power flux sent the metal goliath reeling, and for a moment Jack thought he and Bela were going to be fired straight into a metal rampart of Haydonite apparatus. But at the last split second, the Battloid responded to his frantic imaging and straightened. The jolt of the ejection felt like it was going to push his head down into his chest cavity.

Bela let out a lusty battle cry, mixed with her deep laughter. Jack was not nearly so boisterous.

Lron and the rest were already scrambling free of their cockpit/escape capsules. Crysta and her Invid passenger came trotting toward the grounded capsules from the spot where her cockpit had stopped after Jack bowled it into the clear.

Even the Invid captives-Tesla and the two scientists-were stepping lively. Jack was fumbling to hit the releases on his safety harness before his capsule smacked the decking, partially crumpling its skin.

He heard Jan's voice over his helmet phones. "Get clear of your capsules! Hurry! The snakes have sensed them somehow!"

Jack blew the canopy and scrambled out to stand on his seat, grasping the windshield frame. Jan was right: most of the snakes were still massing to smother the now-motionless Battloids, but some had turned toward them and were slithering in the direction of the ejection capsules.

"Bela, come on!" He was popping emergency panels, grabbing out gear and weapons from the drop-lockers.

But she was already on her feet, gathering up her Praxian weapons and the REF gear she had brought along. "Right behind you, laddy-buck."

Janice Em had laid down fire with her Wolverine assault rifle, but powerful as it was, it wasn't very effective. The shots seemed to make the snakes take notice of her and move to converge on her. On sudden impulse, she took the weapon and hurled it as far from her as she could. Snakes were on it even as it clattered to the decking, striking at it as if the rifle were a living enemy.

"Get rid of your Protoculture weapons!" she yelled over the net. "That's how they're sensing us!"

Jack had gathered up his own gear, but now he threw aside his Wolverine and his Shiva energy handgun as well. All around him, the others were doing the same. As each discarded weapon landed, snakes piled onto it, striking at it with bites that sent up fireworks and scoria.

The party moved away from the capsules carefully, picking their way among snakes that only seemed interested in getting at the ejection modules. There were detonations from the besieged Battloids as they toppled or erupted from the effect of the snakebites.

Jack's little command took shelter behind a bank of cognizance relays, ducking away from the final, bright explosions that obliterated the mecha. At Jack's command, those who weren't wearing flight helmets kept their hands over their ears and their mouths wide open, so that they wouldn't be deafened. Wreckage whirled and debris ricocheted off the walls of the machine-cavern.

Jack was already taking stock of his situation, and there was nothing about it that made him want to do victory rolls. True, they still had conventional firearms and the Praxian, Garudan, and Karbarran weapons. And the handheld inertial trackers would give them a direction of sorts. But there were only the limited emergency rations of food and water in the ejection packs, and no viable hope of raising Vince Grant or the others up on the surface with the flight-helmet communicators.

Most of the equipment the team had brought along had been destroyed with the VTs. They were more like a bunch of marooned survivors than a raiding party.

But there was one critical thing in their favor: the snakes were ignoring them. Now that the Battloids were smoking wreckage, the snakes seemed to be dissolving away, perhaps returning to whatever fabrication matrices had given them form. Powerful blasts of fire-fighting gas belched from fixtures all around the remains of the Battloids, extinguishing the fires, and tremendous ventilators created a minor windstorm, drawing away the fumes.

"Walking is good healthy exercise anyway, so my mom used to tell me," Bela said cheerfully, getting to her feet. She was checking over her crossbow and resettling the two-handed shortsword she carried. Clearly, her skintight REF flightsuit was less comfortable to her than the rather daring fighting costume she usually wore.

Gnea, looking like a giant, lissome seventeen-year-old, went to join her friend and mentor. Gnea held one of the naginatalike Praxian halberds, a polearm with a curved, glittering head and a wicked spike set at the opposite end. Jack had seen the two use their weapons in combat, and had learned the foolishness of underestimating primitive arms.

He checked his inertial locator; there was no use going back, and so Glike was their only hope now. But then he noticed Janice, standing to one side, distracted. She looked as if she were listening to some distant siren song to which the rest of them were deaf.

"It's near," she whispered. "Somewhere close, and it's aware of us." Burak, horned like an auroch, who had ridden with her, looked at her strangely.

"What is?" Crysta asked. She was pumping up the globlar reservoir of her long Karbarran pneumatic rifle with its hinged forestock lever. "Janice, what is it you perceive?"

"Haydon IV the artificial world has a mind, an Awareness," Janice said, as if in a dream. "And the seat of that Awareness, its nexus, is not far away."

She knew it was true, but couldn't understand how the knowledge had been given to her. She turned to them. "We must go to it!"

"Huh-uh." Jack was shrugging into his packstraps. "They'll be waiting for us up there in Glike, remember? Admiral Hunter, and Karen and the rest? People we're supposed to rescue? I admit things haven't exactly been beer and skittles so far, but we're not gonna let 'em down. We stick to the plan."

Janice Em found that she couldn't answer. She felt like a double image on a monitor screen, ghostly twins standing side by side. The whirlpool of thoughts and sensory impulses that spun within her had stolen her voice, immobilized her. Vast forces were vying within her.

She had a sudden sense of Lang-not of the Robotech genius's physical presence, but rather of his voice, his intellect. Intentionally submerged memories had surfaced in this moment of crisis. Changes were triggered in the being the REF and the Sentinels-and even Minmei-knew as Janice Em.

As she transformed her companions drew away from her.

CHAPTER SIX

Anybody who says million-to-one odds are unbeatable never had Breetai standing on their side of the scales at the weigh-in.

Lisa Hayes Hunter, Recollections

There was no reality, no orderly flow of time, no ground underfoot or substantial object that she could touch. She was in a void, without form, as she had been for so long.

Then things began to impinge upon her. It came to her that her name was Karen Penn. Other facts and memories and realizations coalesced.

She was a member of the Sentinels by way of the Robotech Expeditionary Force. Her mother had died in childbirth, and her father held that against Karen to this day. There was another young officer, Jack Baker, whom she-

She blocked that thought out. But there were more-the memory of how she had been poisoned by the atmosphere of Garuda, swept up in the hallucinatory expanded mind-state the Garudans called hin, a state for which the human mind had never been intended. Then there were the nightmares, the visions, the visitations of the endless mindstorm of the hin. Some had been horrible, some of terrible beauty, but all had strained her grip on her sanity and the very functions of her autonomic nervous system.

The flickering spark of her life had been all but out when without warning something seemed to be fanning it, encouraging it to glow and grow brighter. Then there was an almost physical feeling, as if she were being flushed out with snowmelt water from a mountain river-as if she were wired up with electrodes.

And a chorus of somehow silent voices, singing words she never quite understood, drew her up and up from the verge of death.

Over the preceding weeks, Karen had dreamed or hallucinated many times. Now she had finally awakened. This time, what she saw made her sob a bit, with relief.

Lieutenant Commander Miriya Sterling sat at her bedside, holding Karen's hand. Once the battle queen of the Zentraedi's feared Quadrono Battalion, now wife to Max Sterling, leader of the Skull Squadron, Miriya had fought for the Human race and the Sentinels as hard as she had ever fought for the Robotech Masters-or even harder; love had shown her the way.

Miriya gave Karen a tender smile that seemed out of character with the ferocity of a Quadrono. She smoothed a lock of Karen's hair. "Welcome back."

Karen tried to speak, not even sure what she would say, but Miriya hushed her. "You'll still be weak for a little while; the rest of us were, too. Just rest."

Miriya turned and spoke softly over her shoulder. "Dr. Grant? She's awake."

Another face came into view over Miriya's shoulder, a heart-shaped face with big black eyes and skin the color of dark honey. "Take it slow," Dr. Jean Grant said. "You're gonna be just fine, Karen."

Karen concluded that she wasn't in a Sentinels' sick bay; that much was apparent from what she could see of her surroundings. The apparatus all around her-what she took to be med equipment-had the look of geometrical sculptures in crystal and precious metals, and abstract shapes of neon and laser light. She recalled seeing the same design technology in the Haydonites' module of the starship Farrago. She reached an understandable conclusion.

"Haydon IV?" Jean and Miriya both nodded their heads slowly. "Then, we've done it? We've liberated another planet from the Invid?"

"No, Lieutenant." Lisa Hayes Hunter stepped into Karen's line of sight, Rick following a step behind.

"Garuda was freed," Lisa went on, "but several of us were stricken by the planet's biosphere. Our only chance was Haydonite science, so Vince and Jean and several others brought us here, under a flag of surrender."

"Not surrender," Rick rasped. "I never surrendered to the Invid, and neither did you! Besides, they don't rule Haydon IV, at least not officially, so a surrender's null and void."

Karen was startled to see how hateful his expression was, not just in mentioning the Invid but toward everything that had brought him to this moment. She figured the Hunters had already done battle in private.

"I'm never surrendering!" he swore.

Lisa looked like she was about to say something but then thought better of it. To cover the awkward silence, Jean got Karen to sit up. There were assorted Haydonites hovering at a polite distance, and through the windows of the Hall of Healing Karen could see the wonderland of Glike, with its flying carpets and fairy-tale architecture.

"Vince, Colonel Wolff, and Max are trying to find Sarna and get an update on what's going on," Miriya said. "And Cabell and Veidt have an audience with the Regent."

Karen Penn tried to phrase her next question carefully. Everything was a blur concerning the disastrous raid on the Invid base on Garuda, but she felt a sudden fear. "Did we suffer-many casualties? On Garuda?"

That seemed to lessen the tension a little. Jean smiled slightly. "It could've been a lot worse. Jack's just fine, Karen."

Karen blushed and stammered, "I-I didn't mean-that is-" The last thing she wanted was for anybody to think she had a soft spot for that salivating show-off, Jack Baker!

One of the Haydonite healers glided closer. "You will pardon the interruption, one hopes, but time draws near for another treatment for you, Miriya Sterling."

"But-" Karen felt a sudden misgiving. "I thought we were all healed?"

Miriya's expression was mournful. "You are-and so am I, I hope. But there's been a complication in my case."

She rose and patted Karen's shoulder. "You see, I'm pregnant, and we don't know how the Garudan exposure may have affected that." She squared her shoulders and set off in military style, chin high, surrounded by hovering Haydonites.

"That's all the more reason we've got to get out of here," Rick said. "I say we make a break as soon as we can."

"Not until we're sure Miriya's all right," Lisa contradicted firmly.

"What good'll it do to have her healthy in an Invid dungeon?" he snapped. "Everybody knows that what the Invid want around here, they get sooner or later! And I'm not about to let myself be-"

Lisa whirled on him again. "Then go-go on, save yourself! But we're not abandoning Miriya, or Rem!"

They held the tableau for a moment, and Karen was stunned by the realization that they were very close to striking one another.

Just then another Haydonite drifted up to them, cloak billowing. "We've just received word for you all to hold yourselves in readiness. The Regent has commanded that you appear before him to answer the charges against you."

As Breetai watched the Ghost Riders rush in to finish off his Battlepods and the Valivarre, he spoke a single name.

"Kazianna!"

Her face appeared in a small inset on the master screen. "Your orders, great Breetai?"

At another time he would have gazed upon Kazianna Hesh with fondness: the Zentraedi

warrior-woman who had somehow come to understand the meaning of Human love and lovemaking, and taught those things to her battle lord. But this was combat, and Breetai was focused completely.

"Strike now, Quadronos!"

Kazianna gave a hungry smile behind her tinted face-bowl. "We strike, my lord!"

From the locks and launch bays of Valivarre, new mecha swept forth on brilliant plumes of thruster fire, as a score of Quadronos entered the fray. The Ghost Riders, most of them too young to have served in the Robotech War, were bewildered, not understanding what these highspeed, extremely maneuverable new opponents were.

Kazianna led the way, as swift and agile as a hornet, unleashing the tremendous firepower of her armored suit. On her first attack pass, she flamed a Logan, and moments later a second. Behind her, Robotech harpies poured into the opening she had made in the Ghosts' formation, unleashing missiles and high-energy beams. The giant female warriors of the Quadronos, primed for battle and having the advantage of surprise, began rolling up a fearsome kill score at once.

Aboard his flagship, Commodore Renquist couldn't understand what was going on at first. All he knew for sure was that there were frantic cries over the Ghosts' tactical commo net, and that the computer displays showed the REF fliers taking terrible losses.

After some moments, databanks matched up these new antagonists with file information: Quadrono-powered armor suits containing forty-five and fifty-foot-tall giantesses, clearly veterans of one of the Zentraedi's most feared units.

"Impossible!" Renquist bit out. Those powered armor suits that were left after the war had been adapted for mining, and all intelligence evaluations agreed that the Zentraedi lacked the technical skill to refit them for combat-at least, without Human help.

What Renquist didn't know-what the Zentraedi had chosen to keep to themselves-was that a return to Fantoma and their former way of life had resulted in a resurgence of their memories, the ones the Robotech Masters were supposed to have submerged forever. The grueling mining operations forced a reflowering of the Zentraedi innovative genius.

The Ghost Riders found themselves dogfighting with a swarm of fire-breathing viragoes whose powered armor gave them a distinct edge. The REF mecha were driven back, or simply blown out of existence. The Battlepods, bringing up the rear, mopped up for the Quadronos and flew cover.

Male Zentraedi had a good deal to ponder, Breetai saw with some satisfaction.

He had a commo channel opened to Renquist once again. "Commodore, I'll offer you the chance to withdraw your forces and let us go our way in peace. You can't win, you see."

Renquist was visibly shaken, all color gone from his face. The Ghost Riders had been nearly wiped out, and he wasn't at all sure that the remaining fliers would obey his orders.

But he knew what he could expect from Edwards if he went home in defeat. "You alien monster! I'll see you in hell first!"

"Eventually, perhaps," Breetai conceded, and transmitted a signal to Kazianna.

She darted right through the enemy interceptors and AA fire, as nimble as the legendary Miriya herself, to close in on the cruiser's bridge. Too late, Renquist realized what was happening. Before he could even give the order to clear the bridge, Kazianna let go a tremendous blast at point-blank range, penetrating the shields and bursting the vast curve of viewpane there.

Renquist and his trusted Ghost staff, and Edwards's personal security men, were scorched and blackened, whirled headlong by the outrushing atmosphere, the air flooding from their lungs in a mist despite their every effort to hold it in.

Kazianna had already flung herself away from the cruiser rather than follow up on her advantage. Breetai had no wish to inflict more casualties than he had to. Even as she did so, word came that the few surviving Ghost Riders were breaking contact.

Valivarre and the two cruisers stood motionless, at a face-off, while REF officers struggled with damage control and tried to reestablish a chain of command.

At last Captain da Cruz, of the Tokugawa's sister ship, the Jutland, contacted Breetai. He asked her, "Captain, will you accept my offer and part courses under a truce flag?"

"Sir, we will not," da Cruz, a gangly woman with olive skin and iron-gray hah" gathered in a tight knot at her neck, responded.

"I understand." Breetai nodded. "My warriors and I await your pleasure."

"Lord Breetai, you misunderstand. It is my opinion, and that of most others in this contingent, that orders were violated when you were attacked. I have had access to certain sealed instructions given Commodore Renquist by General Edwards, and it is my opinion that the Sentinels are now to be found on Haydon IV.

"What I propose is that the Jutland-and the Tokugawa, as soon as emergency repairs can be made on her-accompany you there on your mission to find Rick and Lisa Hunter and

the others. We will render military aid as needed, and escort the admiral and his wife and the rest to REF Base Tirol so that they can make a fair answer to the charges against them."

Da Cruz permitted herself the raising of an eyebrow. "You see, many of us find it difficult to picture the Hunters as traitors, too."

The corners of Breetai's lips turned up. "Perhaps we can help with the repairs to the Tokugawa, madam. You might say we've become a bit inventive of late."

CHAPTER SEVEN

There are more enjoyable things in life than being a here. Having shingles, for instance. Jack Baker, Upwardly Mobile

The raiding party stared, aghast, at the thing that had been Janice Em.

Her skin had become transparent, and the blood vessels and musculature of her face could be seen. Her eyes emitted an eerie light; what there was of her expression seemed flat, unblinking and un-Human.

Jack found that he had instinctively raised his submachine gun. "Wh-what are you, a zombie? He felt stupid even saying it.

Her voice, when it came, had much of Janice's tone and manner. "No; I am an Artificial Person, built in the Tokyo research megaplex. I've acted as Dr. Lang's eyes and ears on the Sentinels mission."

Lron's broad, thickly furred chest rumbled. "I don't like such things-androids running around pretending they are alive!"

The AP was quick to answer, "Oh, but the Janice you know was unaware that she was an Artificial Person-an android, if you insist. But I'm still Janice, with all the thoughts and memories of Janice. Only, I'm aware of the other side of my personality at last-that which served Lang. You might say I'm finally whole."

"But why do you reveal this now? Bela asked suspiciously. She had rather liked Jan-admired her for being as quick and strong and skilled in battle as an amazon. But Bela looked upon this being before her-a Wyrdling, as Praxians would call it-with wariness.

"Because we mustn't follow the inertial trackers directly to Glike," the AP answered. "The Awareness that oversees Haydon IV is near, and I think it's the key to our dilemma. I saw

that there was no other way to get you to detour, though, and if I'd merely slipped away, you'd have come searching for me and put yourselves in greater danger. I understand friendship that well, you see."

She put one hand back to gather up her long lavender hair and hold it out from the nape of her neck. "And there is another reason to reveal myself. To locate the source of this Awareness I must contact it directly, and to do that-I must speak to it."

She reached up with her free hand and pulled a patch of synthetic skin from her neck. She turned to show them the input aperture that had been hidden there. There was a concerted hiss from the two lesser Invid scientists, and Tesla's eyes bulged with fascination. Burak slashed the air angrily with his horns and made a mystical sign of protection.

Jan let her hair fall back into place, and dipped into a pouch on her harness. She came up with connector cord and several different sorts of adaptors. "According to my analysis, one of these will let me link up with this artificial sentience I've detected."

"No! She's not to be trusted," Tesla objected. "An android? How can we know what her real motive is? Better that I were allowed to converse with this Awareness, my friends."

Jack looked Tesla over. The Regent's onetime chief scientist no longer resembled a conventional upper-caste Invid; some time after the awful events on Garuda, he had undergone some kind of change that he still refused to explain.

He was now almost as tall as the Regent-over seventeen feet. His snout was shorter, head more defined, hands and feet more humanoid than reptilian. His hide was now a pale green, waxy and smooth.

But most troubling of all, he had grown a fifth digit, and his hands and his use of them looked quite Human.

Tesla had convinced the Sentinels that he could be of help on this mission, but Jack wasn't about to trust the scientist with the secrets of Haydon IV. He moved the muzzle of his chattergun over to cover Tesla. "Forget it. You stay away from the machinery down here unless I say otherwise."

Tesla radiated an unspeakable hatred, but said nothing. Burak bridled, too, and moved to stand by the Invid. Jack had long since noticed that there was something between the two, some secret they shared, but Burak's gesture was more on the order of a realignment of loyalties.

Burak had been growing a little unstable. He resented it that his homeworld, Peryton, was far back on the timetable of Sentinels priorities. Jack made a mental note to keep an eye

on him, as well.

"Okay, uh, Janice." Jack decided that he might as well go on calling her that. "What d'you need?"

"First, a proper interface." She led them off along the highway-wide catwalk; they automatically took up tactical positions and intervals. They passed into a smaller side passageway, one the VTs would never have managed. The other raiders were jumpy, expecting Haydon IV to come up with new horrors, but Jan seemed blithely confident that away from their Protoculture-powered mecha and weapons they would no longer be considered invaders.

Janice's theory might be correct, but Jack still thought longingly of all the firepower they had been forced to abandon.

Janice appeared to be finding her way like an Indian in deep forest, listening and kind of sniffing the air currents as well as searching the future-tech terrain with her gaze.

As they trailed along, they grew hotter. Lron and Crysta shed their outsize flight suits completely, abandoning them except for helmets-and the commo equipment in them-and the harnesses that held their gear and weapons.

Jack, Kami, and Learna removed their helmets as well, attaching them to their web gear, and the two Garudans put on their special breather masks.

At last Janice stopped in another vast open place big enough to hold a cruiser. Before them was a surprisingly delicate-looking affair that reminded Jack of a filament-bright cat's cradle the size of the REF headquarters building back on Tirol.

There were tiers of instrumentation all around; Jan selected one right away. It only took her a moment or two to figure out which adapters to use, in which configuration, and then she was ready.

Jack volunteered to make the connection. As he stood by with the plug in his hand, Jan seemed to revert to her Human side again. "If you see me go into overload, get the plug out at once. I mean, right away, okay Jack?"

"Sure; right." It hadn't occurred to him that she was risking her life-if that was the correct term. He nervously worked his fingers in his flight glove, hoping it would insulate him from any power surges.

With Jan holding her hair aside again, he took a deep breath and plugged the adapter into the outlet in her neck. Banks of peripheral instrumentation came alive in light of various colors and a deep humming filled the chamber; the humming rose in pitch until it sounded

like a synthesized choir.

A glow sprang out from Janice Em, and Jack nearly pulled the plug, but she managed in a breathless voice, "Don't...don't."

Jack stepped back to watch as she was bathed in radiance. He thought he could sense conversations being held all around him, and the flow of rivers of information. He spun to see how the other raiders were weathering.

Bela and Gnea were unafraid, but had closed ranks. Lron and Crysta had their weapons in their hands, but didn't look like they were going to blow holes in anything; their service in the Sentinels had taught them a certain self-control.

Kami and Learna were looking about them in rapture, and Jack wondered what they were seeing and hearing. They were inhaling through their breather masks, drawing the atmosphere of Garuda, with its myriad microscopic symbiotes, into their lungs. He knew they were in the expanded mindstate of hin, and wished he could know how the systemry of Haydon IV was manifesting itself to them.

The two lesser Invid POWs, Garak and Pye, were cringing in a corner, but Tesla had drawn himself up to his full height, hands reaching into the air imploringly. He lurched toward a stack of control panels and indicators like a long-lost lover.

Jack squeezed off a short burst into the decking in the scientist's path, tracers drawing bright warning lines, ricochets glancing away into the distance. Tesla stopped as if someone had slapped him out of a trance, gazing down at the dully gleaming bullet-smears of lead at his feet.

Jack had the submachine gun up to his shoulder, Tesla bracketed in the sight blades. Tesla moved back a step, and then another, until he was back where he had been standing. Jack stole a quick glance aside at Burak, who was fingering his Garudan small arm, a thing that looked like a grappling hook.

Burak looked indecisive, but it was plain that he was furious with Jack's intervention. Then a hand fell on Burak's shoulder. Bela had shouldered her crossbow and held her shortsword in her other hand. Gnea held her halberd ready. There was no struggle, only an understanding that Burak was to lower his weapon and stand his ground, or else see his head fly from his shoulders. He chose the former option.

Wise decision, Jack thought. Otherwise those ladies would probably have your horns on their living-room wall, kid.

"Look!" Jack pivoted, seeing what Crysta was bellowing about. His jaw dropped.

Janice Em was still wrapped in a strobing aurora, but she was changing appearance. One moment, she was the Janice who had sung with Minmei and later joined the Sentinels. The next, she was the Artificial Person she had revealed herself to be. Then she was something even more disturbing-a transparent Human being or a Spherisian. And after that she flickered, seeming to be a Haydonite, with their smooth lack of features, an ectoplasmic robe flowing around her as she hovered above the decking.

The brilliance grew more intense, so that they could barely endure it. Jack thought about spraying a burst into the machinery or turning a random control, but decided that might get them into even worse trouble.

A wind swept through the mammoth chamber, and somewhere in the center of the light Janice was shifting through various forms-some Human, some not. Kami was baying in hysteria, and Tesla was screaming, while Lron had both hands clapped to his ears. Gnea and Bela, arms outspread, swords lifted, were war goddesses howling a banshee challenge to the elements.

Just when it seemed they couldn't bear it anymore, the light faded and the sound died away. The air lost every breath of movement. In the stillness that followed, the raiders collected themselves and blinked away the dazzling lights circling before their eyes.

Janice Em stood once more in her Human form, the disconnected interface jack in her hand. "Are you all right?" Bela ventured.

"Yes, quite, thank you." She sounded distant, but then she beamed at them in a very Homo sapiens smile.

"I'm fine, and I found out what we need to know."

"But..." Jack realized his submachine gun's muzzle was pointed her way and quickly lowered it. "What was all that shape-changing about?"

Janice looked up at the web of light. "You might say that Haydon IV has been teaching me a few things about my own capabilities and potential. The Tokyo project teams and even Dr. Lang, I'm afraid, didn't quite realize them all."

She collected herself, turning her attention to matters at hand. "But that's beside the point now. We must be on our way."

She had bent to pick up her own weapons and equipment. "And we must hurry. The others are in danger, up above in Glike, and we have to get to them at once."

"Huh? Hey!" Jack trotted after to catch up, as Jan started for a nearby column of

instrumentality. The others fell in behind, Gnea and Bela in particular making sure the Invid kept up and got into no mischief.

The column was the circumference of a spaceport control tower, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. As Jan approached it, a section of flickering indicators slid aside, revealing a small compartment.

Jan turned on her companions, silencing their objections, demands, and threats. "Listen: I'll answer any question you want, explain everything I can, on the journey. Only, we must start now, and this is the first step on the road to Glike."

Jack blew his breath out, cheeks bulging like a bugler's. "If I survive, I'm never volunteering for anything again. Okay; let's march."

The place wasn't too cramped; they had about as much room as in a half-filled elevator. None of them was particularly surprised when the compartment closed up again and there was a feeling of movement, straight up.

"First question," Jack said tiredly. "D'they have rest rooms on this flight?"

"You should've thought of that before we left." Janice Em grinned back at him.

The medics had injected her with something calculated to speed along her sobering-making her neurotransmitters block the acute depressant effects and raising her P3 waves. But Minmei was still writhing between a pair of Ghost Rider security people as she was dragged before Edwards in his office on the top floor of Base Tirol HQ on Fantoma.

She had tried to bite, scratch, and kick, but the REF people were used to hand-to-hand combat, and even though they were under orders not to retaliate, they had kept her from inflicting any significant damage. Exhausted, she was pushed forcefully into a chair and kept seated.

Her face was smudged with dirt and tears. Through a sort of blur, she saw a figure move and heard Edwards's voice. "Wait outside," he told his troops.

She heard the brittle fury in his voice and became truly afraid for the first time. She had seen his moods before, knew he was capable of anything when he was like this-even of murdering her on the spot.

She wiped her eyes and tried to stop crying. Edwards was standing behind his desk, hands clasped at the small of his back.

"Who was the pilot who helped you escape?"

"Go to hell," she choked.

He walked unhurriedly from behind the desk. "Where did you think you were going?"

"God damn you!"

He moved with stunning speed, grabbing a fistful of her hair and winding it painfully, making her cry out, holding her in her seat with his other hand.

"Do you really think you can ever be free of me, Minmei? I never yield anything that's mine; you should know that by now." His voice was very soft, as if it calmed him to be hurting her.

Minmei resisted ineffectually for a moment, then gave up. "Go ahead! Do what you want! You think being cruel makes you strong? I've known real men, and compared to them you're a pitiful excuse for a Human being and a miserable failure as a lover-"

Her own scream cut her off, as he gave her more pain. He had her wrist in a hold that felt like he was about to break it, and he shook her head back and forth slowly to emphasize each word. "Your Jonathan Wolff's dead by now, like Hunter and the rest. Were you going to join the Zentraedi? They got in my way, too; they're finished."

He knelt, pulling her face around to his. "I told you there are things I know, things I've learned since we got to Tirol, that will give me unlimited power. Unlimited control. You may not love me willingly, but you will love me."

Nothing Minmei had ever heard had terrified her like those words. She could feel his hot breath on her; it sickened her.

"Now, you're going to tell me everything I want to know, and all the rest of it. And in the meantime we'll just keep you nice and calm."

The general reached out with his free hand and buzzed for the guards. All her blathering about awakening the dead-it had to be mad raving, of course, he told himself, but it still bothered him. And yet a search of the area had turned up no sign whatsoever of the pilot who had spirited her off SDF-3, nor could Edwards's agents produce any clues.

The dead might mean a number of things, but Edwards suspected he knew whom she

meant. Preposterous...

He flung her at the guards. "Lock her up, dry her out. I want no one to get word of this. Complete cover-up. Tell the interrogators to keep me updated."

After the guards had dragged her out, Edwards gazed out the window.

He could hardly know that, far across a distant landing-site hardtop, a man in a pilot's suit was staring back through a telebinoc at the silhouette so far away that was a mortal enemy.

Lieutenant Isle lowered the telebinoc. All the elaborate security systems and complex equipment and weaponry between him and Edwards were just an abstract problem in mission planning now; just a layered project requiring the proper application and strength of will.

But the battle itself was joined.

CHAPTER EIGHT

If Sartre's right and the history of every person is the story of failure, then something's outta whack here.

Commander Vincent Grant, quoted in The Sentinels, by Le Roy la Paz

If Glike was enchanting from the landing stages and spires of the city, it was overwhelming from the vantage point of a Haydonite cone-flier.

Vince, mesmerized by the fantasyland view, blinked in surprise to realize that the cone was hovering, with its disk-rim up against a landing stage, over the summit of a skyscraper that suggested an inverted icicle. The transparent dome under which he, Jonathan Wolff, and Max had been standing now parted, providing a debarkation gate.

But the landing stage was empty. Max turned to their Haydonite pilot suspiciously. "You said you were taking us to Sarna."

The Haydonite was smaller and more slender than either Veidt or Sarna and had an emerald cast to her skin. In the center of her forehead was a star-sapphire pattern of light that came from no apparent source. Her features were no more pronounced than those of any other Haydonite the visitors had seen, and yet there were contours that somehow gave her face an individuality. The offworlders had learned that the Haydonites were far from anonymous.

She bowed serenely. "She will be with you presently. You will, after all, wish some privacy for your consultations. There are dangers in this city, as well you know. And now, if you will pardon me, I have other pressing matters to which I must see."

Vince led the way out of the cone-flier, and in another few seconds it was lifting away into

the sky of Glike, among the flying carpets and lolling sky barges.

It was windy and chilly up there, but the view made it worthwhile. Jonathan Wolff unlimbered a telebinocular and looked around. Max glared out angrily at the Oz-like urbanscape; he was worried about Miriya and the rest, wishing some direct action were possible.

Vince said, "What I don't get is this business with Vowad, Sarna's father. I mean, jealousy, from a Haydonite?

The emotions of the synthetically spawned Haydonites were usually too subtle for the other Sentinels to detect, or were deeply suppressed. And certainly their family ties were tenuous by outsiders' standards. But the situation between Sarna, Vowad, and Veidt was apparently the exception.

Haydonites didn't so much reproduce as literally create their offspring, as a sort of art form. The young incorporated characteristics of the elders and selected innovations, as esthetic essays, as well.

Wolff lowered the telebinocular. "From what I've been able to pick up since we've been here, Vowad is the ultimate expression of Haydonite development, their Number One," he said. "And Sarna was, sort of, his crowning achievement. Except, she didn't behave quite the way she was supposed to. Got all enthused over Veidt and some radical ideas he had, like resisting the Invid encroachment."

"Where've we heard that before?" Max murmured.

"Thing is," Wolff Went on, "I get the impression that if anybody could keep the Invid from having their way on Haydon IV, it's Vowad. Only, he doesn't seem inclined to do it."

"The whole thing's a little slippery by Haydonite standards, I suppose," Vince said. "The Invid ease their way in with trade arrangements and diplomatic missions, cultural exchanges and all that, and the next thing you know, they're entrenched. Bribed the officials; intimidated or blackmailed the bureaucrats-they've got all the leverage they need around here, more or less."

And if the planet's vaunted defense system ever really existed, the three had come to realize, it found the Invid infiltration/subversion operation too nebulous to deal with. So long as the Invid made no overt moves, they were safe from retribution. And violent transactions between offworlders were, so it seemed, exempt from interference by planetary defenses.

Wolff raised the telebinocular again, scanning. "Heads up," he said softly.

A flying carpet was approaching, a hooked-rug size. In another few seconds, Sarna alighted next to them.

After receiving news that Rick, Lisa, and the others had recovered, she said, "We haven't much time. Matters here are much worse than Veidt and I ever thought when we proposed this plan. We have to get you all off Haydon IV as soon as we can."

Before they could press her for details, she hastened, "You brought your seeing devices? Good; look over there, at the juncture of the Sky Road and Silver Way."

Eventually they focused on the point she was indicating. Vince watched for a moment, then breathed an uncharacteristic, deliberate string of obscenities.

"Yeah; this changes things," Wolff added sardonically.

Far away and below, a slave coffle was being moved along by Inorganic guards toward a rearing, adamantine Invid stronghold that looked brutally out of place in exquisite Glike.

The prisoners, headbanded with metallic straps that glowed with instrumentation, were dirty and disheveled. It was easy to see that they were big, rugged women wearing the remains of their fighting costumes, walking with heads held high, herded by their captors.

"Praxians," Max said softly. "The missing Praxians. They're here!"

Sarna was nodding measuredly. "They were not, as we thought, exterminated; the Invid have many more than that here in the city and elsewhere on Haydon IV. Many, many thousands."

In contrast to the usual lack of extreme emotion in Haydonites, there was loathing in her voice now. "And my father, Vowad, permits it. Permits anything, to preserve his oh-so-important serenity, and this little...Shangri-la, as you Humans might say."

They lowered their binoculars as she went on. "The Regent has brought the proper pressure to bear; he'll have you all in captivity soon, if we don't move quickly. I've arranged for-"

But she got no further, as the sun was blotted out overhead by flying carpets over half an acre in area. On them stood Inorganics: Scrim and Crann and Odeon, weapons ready, along with the Haydonites who were doing the actual flying.

The three REF fighters pulled their Badger assault pistols, ready to fight for their lives, but Sarna said, "No! If you fire first, you'll have done what they want. And Miriya and the others will suffer the more for it. Stay where you are and let me speak for you."

The flying carpets landed so as to ring them in with the sheer drop of the brink at their backs. Vince, Max, and Wolff formed their own security wheel, but kept their machine pistol muzzles pointed at the landing stage surface. They had a few other surprises on their persons beside the Badgers, but going up against Inorganics without mecha of their own would amount to a suicide mission.

They recognized Vowad right away by the bulging cranium and deep red flesh tone, and the enormous lavender star sapphire set in his forehead. He was standing beside the Invid Regent, the Regent's two Hellcats flanking them. The other Haydonites there bore what Vince had learned to recognize as emblems marking them as Respected Elders-the "Old Guard" of the planet, who had made their peace with Invid subversion.

The Inorganics lumbered off the carpets, deploying to encircle the Sentinels. Among the mecha were Armored Officers, somewhat evolved Invid in powered armor, standing some eight feet tall or so, brandishing weapons. Vince couldn't figure out why the defenses of the planet didn't respond to such a show of force-unless either the defenses were a myth or the Haydonites had decreed that those defenses not interfere with the Regent's troops.

The Regent and Vowad alighted, the Hellcats stalking along a pace behind. "You Humans are born troublemakers," the Regent observed. "Always scheming, never still."

"It keeps us amused, kicking you off planet after planet," Jonathan Wolff conceded mildly.

The Regent growled, and his Hellcats showed then-fangs in furious screams. Vowad, seeing his daughter among the Sentinels, intervened before the 'Cats could pounce.

"You will accompany us to where your other companions are being held! There you will be examined for positive identification, and officially remanded to the custody of the Regent, for trial on charges of war crimes."

"Like hell," Max Sterling said, thumbing off his pistols' safeties. "Might as well die right here."

But Sarna leaned to whisper in his ear, "Please! Trust me; there's a way out of this yet, but you must play along for a while. For Miriya's sake, and your unborn's!"

Slowly, unwillingly, Max returned the Badgers to their underarm rigs. Vince and Wolff hesitated, then did the same.

"Veidt or I will send word to you as soon as we can," Sarna whispered as the Invid closed in.

The Regent loomed before them. "How splendid it feels to have your...company...at last!"

Covered by Inorganic guns, the three men were disarmed and ushered aboard the largest flying carpet. Vowad stayed behind, drawing Sarna aside, as the Regent and his troops and prisoners lifted away. The two hovered there, the wind rustling their long robes.

"I detest these uncontrolled emotions you've acquired through your contact with the Sentinels. I command you to stop this foolish sedition," Vowad hissed at her. "I forbid you to bring down the wrath of the Invid upon us."

"Command? Forbid? Those are words only the Invid may use on Haydon IV now; you've seen to that."

"Stop speaking like a madwoman, Sarna! These attitudes of yours are insanity! You never talked like this until you met that accursed Veidt!"

"But, Father, you have the power to unleash our defenses against them-to fight the Invid!"

"And perhaps destroy our whole world in the process?" A gesture of his head indicated the departing Invid and their prisoners.

"What is your Invid war to me? What are the Sentinels? Just a tick of the eternal clock of Haydon IV; a single moment in our lifetime. When they have all passed away, we will be as we have always been and will always be. I will not risk this perfect place for the petty squabbles of the lower orders."

"It seems your decision to withhold information from the council was well conceived," Exedore said.

"Regrettably, yes," Lang answered, showing no regret at all.

Anything said before the council went straight to Edwards's ear, and both scientists had thought it unwise to let Edwards know that there was any monopole ore left here on Tirol.

"In my opinion, the battle lines are drawn, and we're only awaiting the opening shot," Lang added. Exedore, who had seen centuries of war, nodded.

They felt safe speaking their mind there in the center of Lang's research facility, satisfied that it was debugged and that the people he had gathered around him were loyal. Besides, his latest project was complete: one of the SDF Escort-class cruisers had been adapted with a spacefold drive.

It had taken every gram of ore recoverable from the analysis labs and every speck from the secret cache Lang and Exedore had amassed with Breetai's help. At last there was a

way to contact Earth, to pass along a warning of the Robotech Masters' intention to seek out the world to which Zor had sent the SDF-1 and the mysterious Protoculture matrix-provided the rest of the Plenipotentiary Council could be swayed.

Exedore and Lang sat together, waiting, before the lab's main screen. The heated debate of the last five hours had them all exhausted, and the one-hour interlude before the vote, during which each member was to weigh the pros and cons, had come as a welcome chance to catch their breath.

A tone sounded and the screen lit up again, split so that the other ten council members' faces appeared there. Former judge Justine Huxley said, "The moment for the vote has come. If there are no further objections, council members will be so good as to enter their ballots."

Exedore and Lang complied, not hiding their vote from each other as they keyed in their codes. The tabulating computer came up with the result instantly.

"By a two-vote majority, Dr. Lang's proposal to send the refitted SDF-7 class ship back to Earth, with warning of the peril constituted by the Robotech Masters, is carried."

"I would reiterate my point that the voyage be undertaken as soon as possible," Lang was quick to put in, "and my recommendation that Major Carpenter be put in overall charge of the mission."

Suddenly, Edwards's face replaced all others on the screen, flushed with fury. "You're all making a mistake you'll regret! That's the only spacefold ship we've got, maybe the only one we'll have for months or years to come!

"Who knows what Carpenter and the others will run into back there? I'll say it again: the only sane course of action is to wait until we've got an armada and return to Earth in overwhelming strength!"

"Are you saying that the majority of the council has lost possession of its mental faculties?" Exedore asked innocently. Edwards made a wordless sound of rage and broke the connection, so that the council's faces returned to the screen. After a few quick directives to the effect that Lang and Exedore should begin organizing the voyage, the meeting was adjourned.

"Edwards never seems to learn his lesson," Exedore remarked. "Even though the bulk of his Ghost Riders failed to return from their mission to apprehend Breetai, he speaks as though he has the military might to enforce his will."

"So I noticed-and it makes me wonder." Lang had had his own people circulating among REF personnel, and the overwhelming majority were on the side of the council, but still

Edwards carried on as though he had a hole card.

Then there was this strange business about the pilot who had tried to save Minmei. Lang could discover nothing about the man-sometimes he doubted if witnesses were right, and wondered if the pilot existed at all. Edwards, for his part, insisted that Minmei had escaped confinement and was probably being harbored by friends somewhere in Tiresia.

But that didn't jell with the Edwards that Lang knew: what he had, he rarely let slip away from him.

Edwards glared disgustedly at the blank screen.

Idiots! The council was asserting itself more and more, now that the general's power base of Ghost Riders had been cut so drastically. It was a pity he couldn't give them a real taste of the power he wielded, but that would have been showing his hand too soon.

All his efforts to infiltrate people into Lang's organization had failed, too, so there was little chance of getting his own agents onto Carpenter's roster. Devil take the luck! He wanted every spacefold ship for his own master plan, and the idea of an unwarned Earth, softened up by the Robotech Masters, was quite appealing.

But he still had his options. Perhaps it was time now that he allowed himself a diversion. He opened a commo channel.

"Medical? Give me an update on the patient."

"No appreciable change, sir," a clinician's voice answered.

Incompetents! Not fit to be called therapists. All they had managed to do was drive Minmei into near catatonia. He felt a sudden hunger for her, a need to reassure himself that she was still in his power.

"Perhaps a little personal contact is what's needed," he said. "Remain where you are; I'll be right down."

CHAPTER NINE

To paraphrase the Human aphorism, "I think, therefore I scram."

Cabell, A Pedagogue Abroad: Notes on the Sentinels Campaign

The Invid Enforcers of the Regent's hordes were nothing like that class of mecha the Regis was developing. Hers were bigger than Battloids, mounting enormous cannons, her

most powerful fighting machines, while his were scarcely bigger than the Armored Officers.

Three Enforcers entered the Hall of Healing now, driving Cabell and Veidt before them, as the others looked up. Vince, Max, and Wolff were waiting there, as well as Rick, Lisa, and the rest. Vince's arm was around Jean's shoulder, while Max held both Miriya's hands. There was still some distance between Rick and Lisa.

Veidt turned to the lead Enforcer. "I wish to speak to these prisoners alone."

The media's voice sounded like a warped audio disk. "Those are not the Regent's orders! Count yourself lucky that you are not confined as well!" The Enforcers stayed where they were, weapons ready.

Veidt made a helpless shrug as he turned to his friends. "Those of us who believe in freedom are doing our best to obtain your release," he said.

"Not likely to help much, is it?" Max asked bitterly. "We've already been measured for slave headbands and restraining devices and cages. And you're telling me the people who sold us out-your people-are gonna find the backbone to help us now? Dream on."

Miriya shushed him. "If it hadn't been for the Haydonites, we four would be dead right now."

Max lowered his head, speaking so they could barely hear him. "Maybe that'd be preferable. Maybe we'd all be better off that way."

His face went deathly pale as he said it; everyone there was aware that Miriya was pregnant.

Veidt regarded Max for a moment. "I trust you'll change your mind in time." He came about, the hem of his robes swirling, and wafted out the door. One Enforcer left, and the other two remained on guard by the door.

"Did you get to see Rem?" Jean asked Cabell.

"No. A great joke of the Regent's, promising to allow us to. What he really meant is that we're all to be imprisoned along with him."

"What a sense of humor." Rick grunted. "I wonder if he does weddings and funerals."

He was looking around at the alien lab equipment, speculating on what among it would make the best improvised weapon-because he had no intention of ending up in a cage. And surely the Invid jailers would be there to fit the Sentinels with slave headbands any

minute now; there wasn't much time to act.

All of a sudden Cabell started using common Terran English of a sort. "We must ayk-may an eak-bray. Eidt-Vay will be ailing-way." Cabell said it as though he were leading them in prayer, or giving them a quiet pep talk.

One of the Enforcers shifted, bringing its heavy rifle to bear. "Stop! No communication in offworld tongues, or we'll bind and gag you all. Healer, make the final checks that the Regent has ordered, then all of you stand ready to be transferred to the laboratories of the omnipotent Regent!"

The Humans, meanwhile, had been absorbing what Cabell told them. Lisa found a moment in which to chuckle at the irony. Apparently Cabell had learned more than just science in his dealings with Lang, Dr. Penn and the rest, and with the Human Sentinels.

We've got fifty-skillion bucks worth of taxpayers' money in Robotech paraphernalia, it occurred to Rick, and now the whole shebang's riding on one old alien coot talking in pig latin! Somehow, it seemed appropriate.

It was like sending vital battle signals with a child's decoder ring from a cereal box, but it seemed to have worked. And the remark about the Regent's laboratories had everyone there determined to escape or die trying; there were fates worse than death.

Even as the Enforcer guard was delivering his warning, Jean Grant surreptitiously adjusted a control on the life-signs monitoring equipment. Oscillators oscillated and alarms buzzed; lights flashed and electronic tones made urgent warbles.

The Enforcer swung its barrel around. "What's this?"

Jean pretended to be studying the healing devices. "I think their thalmic excrescences have formed a medullary fistula!" To her former patients she snapped, "Quick, all of you! Lie back down! Your refraction's stuck in the optical reciprocator!"

The Enforcers were teetering a little, overwhelmed. "Wh-what are you saying, female? Explain yourself!"

Jean demonstrated her impatience. "They're having a relapse, you big worm-in-a-can! Quick, you and your partner go get help! Get the healers! Get the Regent! Can't you see they're dying?"

Karen was the first to pick up her cue and fall back on the floor moaning. Lisa gaped at her for an instant, then went into her own pretended fit, staggering around and twitching exaggeratedly, making some very strange faces. Rick caught on and flopped to the floor in a gatoring paroxysm; Miriya swooned onto a treatment couch and began uttering piercing

sounds of pain.

The two Enforcers were so nonplussed that for a moment they nearly did turn to go get help. But they caught themselves and covered the prisoners again. tand fast, you! None of your tricks now!"

"Trick? Does this look like a trick?" Jean said, pointing to the incomprehensible sound and light show of the Haydonite medical apparatus.

And I hope you don't say yes!

The Enforcer stumped over to the machine to have a look for itself, motioning Jean aside with the gun barrel. She only moved a step or two away, but that didn't bother the Invid; she was nothing but an unarmed female Human. The second Enforcer moved up nearby, covering the oddly contorting afflicted ones just in case they were planning something. Unnoticed, Vince Grant slipped from sight between two stacks of equipment.

The first Enforcer gazed at the baffling displays of the instruments while the supposedly relapsed patients drooled, howled like dogs, and went into vigorous spasms. Jean watched from a step away, her hands behind her back.

"What does all this mean? Explain!" the Invid demanded.

Jean produced one hand so that she could point. "It's all right there on the middle scanner! See?"

As the thing leaned in for a closer look, she whipped around the power-delivery cable she had yanked loose and thrust it against the armored torso. Crackling wreaths of pure energy swathed the thing, sending it into convulsions. Jean made a silent prayer of thanks that the cable's thick insulation kept her from being fried as well. Nevertheless, the field generated by the furious current made her short hair stand on end.

The radiant wrath of it drove her back after only a second or two, though, forcing her to drop the cable. The Enforcer was still shuddering and lurching; Jean thought she might have succeeded in mortally wounding the embryolike Invid inside, or the systemry of its mecha.

The second Enforcer was angling for a shot at her, careful to keep the afflicted Sentinels and Max and Wolff in its field of fire. But as it raised its massive rifle, a hand pulled the pistol from its belt. Vince Grant took a quick step back and shot the thing straight in the back of the helmet.

Smoke and steam and green goop burst from the gap in the Invid armor, along with the smell of incinerated tissue and forge-spatterings of molten alloy. Vince had to dodge

quickly as the second guard collapsed backward, nearly pinning him.

The other captives were all on their feet now, closing in on the fallen Enforcers. "D'you think they got off an alert?" Max wondered.

"Probably not, but that doesn't mean we're in the clear," Wolff surmised. He gingerly touched the fallen rifle of the one Jean had zapped; it was warm, but intact and apparently still functional. He hoisted the rifle onto his shoulder.

Vince passed his pistol to Rick and took up the other rifle. Lisa took the zapped guard's handgun before Max could grab it. It was shaped something like a giant Protoculture staple gun. "Rank Hath Its Privilege, and all that." She smiled.

Max gave her a lopsided smirk. "Use it in good health, Lisa. Only, let's get goin'!"

There was universal agreement on that. Rick weighed the bulky Invid sidearm as he led the way, grateful that the Sentinels had all done familiarization fire with enemy weapons against such an emergency. He paused in the doorway and turned to find Lisa a pace behind him, ready to back him up.

They started off down the corridor. At the first corner, Rick came face to face with Veidt and almost shot him.

"Come. Hurry." Veidt pirouetted and sailed away at high speed, leaving the others to pound after him. They followed him to a liftfield that bore them up to the roof of the place.

"How did you know we escaped?" Max demanded as the field drifted him out onto the sunlit roof landing stage.

"We can keep surveillance on anything that transpires in the Halls of Healing," Veidt replied. "After all, one is well advised to keep a close watch on patients. Quickly now: put those on."

He pointed toward a pile of sleeveless Haydonite robes lying on a medium-smallish flying carpet. They dove at the disguises, tumbling onto the carpet. It took some reshuffling for Vince to wind up with the longest garment, and even then his legs were exposed from midshin down. He settled for kneeling, the bulky Invid rifle held between his knees.

The others were more easily concealed, and in another moment Veidt had the carpet aloft. Lisa realized that there was no way to confine her hair, or for the others to keep theirs from flying, un-Haydonitelike, in the wind, but there was no help for that now. At least the high collars helped camouflage them somewhat.

Of them all, only Miriya hadn't recovered completely. Max kept one arm around her as she

hung onto him woozily.

They passed through complex traffic patterns of carpets, cone-fliers, offworld aircraft, and Invid vehicles, but Veidt negotiated it with no apparent effort, and nobody appeared to notice them.

"Veidt, I don't know what your plan is," Rick called out, "but we've got pressing matters of our own. One of them is that the Praxians are-"

"Are being held as slaves by the Invid," Veidt anticipated. "I am well aware of it. And we're on our way now to do something about that. It's the most likely starting place for our effort to dislodge the Regent from my world."

Rick wished once again that it was possible to call the Sentinels' cruiser-the Ark Angel, as they had dubbed her-for a pickup, but knew now that that would only result in an uneven battle the Sentinels' flagship couldn't hope to win. Besides, there was every possibility the cruiser would be attacked by Haydon IV's "antibodies."

Wolff saw that the flying carpet was on a course toward the Invid stronghold at the juncture of Sky Road and Silver Way, where he had seen the amazon POWs earlier. He braced himself, wishing he had had time to pick up a gun.

But under Veidt's guidance, the carpet began descending just before reaching the stronghold, to settle onto a landing hardtop on the roof of the building next door, overlooking the broad boulevard. "The next slave work party should come along just beneath us," he said.

"What, you expect the few of us, with four small arms, to eliminate Inorganics?" Wolff scoffed. "If it's so easy, why didn't you do it before?"

"As you know, direct physical violence is not the Haydonite forte" Veidt pointed out. "But since there is no longer any route of escape from the planet, aiding and abetting it is our only recourse.

"And besides, the women will be guarded by Enforcers and Armored Officers, not Inorganics. More to the point, the successes of the Sentinels have given other Haydonites the encouragement they needed to lend us aid."

"It's just as well things worked out this way," Lisa said, checking her pistol. "We couldn't leave the Praxians here, enslaved."

Again, that keenness in Lisa to fight took Rick somewhat by surprise. Looks like something I'm gonna have to get used to.

"Other things will be working in your favor as well," Veidt continued, "and I haven't long to explain them."

The line of Praxians moved tiredly, after a grueling day of work in the Invid warehouses and shipyards. The Central Slavepen loomed before them.

Of course, the Invid didn't need the labor of the tens of thousands of women they had captured in their conquest of Praxis; there were drones and automata enough to perform the work. But it made sense to keep them busy and exhausted, and to utilize them. Besides, the practice pointed out to the Praxians-and the Haydonites and various off-world races represented in Glike-exactly what happened to those who defied the Regent.

The Enforcers on the ground and their Armored Officer who skimmed overhead in his open, single-occupant skirmish ship kept careful watch on their captives. Sometimes, after an eighteen-or twenty-hour work shift, the females became rebellious, unwilling to reenter their cells. That was when it took a good jolt from the slave headbands or a nerve lash to keep them moving.

Sure enough, one of the habitual troublemakers broke from the line just as she was about to pass through the portals to the slave kennels. She was shorter than most of them, and solid, round-faced and olive-skinned. Heedless of the rebukes of the headband and the nerve whip, she was still defiant.

"I'm not going back into any cage!"

"You have been warned," the nearest Enforcer said, activating the POW/slave's headband. Writhing in pain, she would be flung into her cage despite what she had said, and so would anyone who stood with her. It was tedious work for the Enforcers, but they had nothing better to do anyway. They lived, literally, to serve their Regent.

But on this bright turquoise Haydon afternoon, the timetable was suddenly thrown out. The headband didn't respond, and the defiant one stood there, showing her white teeth in a fighting sneer, hands up in combat posture, feet positioned and ready.

The Enforcer tried again, but there was still no response. Another amazon, with a long flame-red braid, stepped from the ranks, and two more came behind her. The Enforcers registered the fact that there was some sort of malfunction and prepared to reestablish order in a more direct way, with sonic lashes and warning shots-or with armored blows and Protoculture blasts, if it came to that.

But as the first Enforcer raised its weapon, an Invid rifle beam hit its helmet squarely and blew it apart. Another rifle bolt hit the next nearest Enforcer, drilling through it in a split second. Pistol blasts peppered the skirmish ship and the Armored Officer in it, who, taken

by surprise while flying low and slow, emitted smoke and flame. The skirmish ship went off kilter and slewed toward the road surface.

The warrior women of Praxis quickly realized that an ambush had been mounted, and that the despised headbands could no longer deal out punishment. There were people on the upper landing stage-Tiresoids, though they were wearing Haydonite robes for some reason-urging them on.

The warrior women didn't need much urging. With a chorus of cries like angry Hellcats, they sprang at their enemies.

CHAPTER TEN

The DNA sings its four notes

Cytosine, adenine, guanine, thymine.

In infinite configurations

As though Bach were God,

Or vice-versa

Mingtao, Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha.

"How do we know this isn't the demented malfunction of a berserk android?" Tesla bawled, plastered up against the rear wall of the travel capsule. Garak and Pye were hunkered down near him.

Jack was checking the action of his submachine gun nervously, making sure for the tenth time that the magazine was loaded with exploding armor-piercers. "You don't get a vote, so it doesn't matter what you think. And the rest of us believe Jan."

He tried the magazine release again, to make sure he could eject an old and insert a new one smoothly. He was about to say something else when Bela broke in.

The big amazon turned on Tesla, holding her sword. More than twice her height, the Invid sucked his gut in, afraid she was about to split it open.

"Yes. I believe my people are being held prisoner here. Yes, I believe that Veidt and some of the others are in a conspiracy to throw your species out, and yes, I think the Regent's reign on Haydon IV will end today."

But she turned to Jan anxiously, in spite of that. "Can't this thing move any faster?"

"We'll be there soon," Janice Em tried to reassure her. "But I must tell you that the battle's already being joined."

It was unnecessary to ask where that information had come from. Jan's inexplicable link with the Awareness that resided in Haydon IV had already proved itself beyond doubt. Elevators, funiculae, bucket transporters-they had all come at Jan's beck and call, speeding the raiders on their way.

And the Awareness had told her things, things the others couldn't hear. She knew of Veidt's saboteurs' remote-canceling of the power system that energized the slave headbands; of the escape of Rick and the others; of the risky battle plan they were following. She knew that Veidt himself was ignorant of the fact that she had tapped into the Awareness.

She had also been shown the origins of the hatred between Vowad and Veidt, and the reason Vowad was the linchpin of the entire battle.

Jan also knew things the Awareness had chosen to tell her alone, at least for now-things about its defensive systems. Better than anyone on the planet, she knew how time was pressing on the Awareness, the rebels, her own raiding party-the entire focal point of events.

One thing she didn't quite understand was why the Awareness of the planet had accepted her. It was barely translatable into Human terms, but in some ways the Awareness had seemed to recognize her, as if some message had been built into it to awaken at the instant when the synthetic mind of Janice Em made contact with it. That troubled her greatly, but there was simply no time to address it right now.

The travel capsule began to slow. "Game time," Jan said.

"Are you sure you've got the terminus pinpointed?" Jack asked, taking up a firing position just before the doors, the submachine gun raised. The others were kneeling or standing behind him, readying Karbarran pneumatic rifles and Garudan clawguns and dart-throwers, and grenades and all the rest, in a hedgehog of conventional fire-power.

"Just as I said," Jan went on, reading signs none of the others could even perceive. "The Central Slavepen command post."

To the astonishment of Enforcers and Armored Officers who hadn't even been aware it was movable, the central pylon in the middle of their command post swung open. They were preoccupied with the first reports of a slave uprising and mystified by the fact that they couldn't get any response from the slave headbands.

But every Invid there heard it when the first Armored Officer to spot the raiders squealed an almost ultrasonic peal of alarm.

Kneeling and standing in two ranks, Jack and his party began hosing fire all around the

command center.

Although the weapons of the fallen Enforcers were outsize by normal Human standards, they were not too unwieldy for the robust amazons. The guns were appropriated at once. With piercing yells, many of the women took great pleasure in ripping off the inert headbands and hurling them to the ground and stomping them flat, or twisting them into junk, or, among the brawnier, simply snapping them in two.

By that time, a flying carpet was settling nearby, carrying the Tiresoids who were robed as locals, but flown by a real Haydonite.

Rick had intended to make a quick announcement to get things on track, but Lisa beat him to it. She flung off her robe and leapt to the shining pavement while the carpet was still a yard above the road, holding her pistol high and firing it twice to get their attention.

"Warriors of Praxis! We are Sentinels, allies of your great fighter Bela! We've broken free of the Regent and we mean to raise rebellion! Are you with us?"

Some of the liberated slaves fired into the air too, to signal their intent, while the rest cheered Lisa and those whom the amazons naturally assumed to be Lisa's followers. The rest of the Sentinels were also shedding their disguises, and though several of them had the obvious drawback of being male, the Praxians hailed them. At least the big dark-skinned fellow with the rifle was amazon size-and more-and looked encouragingly tough.

"The power to the slavebands is out, but we're not sure how long that will last," Lisa went on. "We have to strike at once! Your queen and your sisters are right there in the Central Slavepen. Here's how we're going to get them out."

It was basically the plan the Sentinels had thrown together while waiting for the slaves to pass by, but she had inserted a few refinements of her own. Rick had to admit he was impressed. The amazons, all drilled in the disciplines of warfare, split up into squads and moved out with little confusion or delay.

Inside the slavepen command post, things had begun going disturbingly wrong.

A short time before, the power-relay system that energized and controlled the slave headbands had simply gone dead. Almost immediately, reports had begun coming in from the working parties at various Invid installations and en route that the Praxians were in revolt. The cages where the captives were quartered had become a bedlam, too, and the amazons were apparently trying to bend the bars apart with their bare hands.

Word had been sent to the Regent, and troops were already being deployed to trouble spots from elsewhere in the city and the countryside.

"At least one bunch is still under control," an Armored Officer observed in his single-sideband voice. A remote screen showed a column of returning prisoners shuffling through the main entrance of the complex, heads bent in dejection and exhaustion.

"Perhaps the malfunction isn't systemwide," another suggested, then the two turned their attention to deploying reinforcements. But no one in the command center had noticed that the instrumentation on the slaves' headbands was dark. And they had turned away before realizing there were no Enforcers or Officers driving them along.

Nor were any Invid looking at the screen as the women turned not toward the cargo elevators that would take them down to their cages, but rather toward the building's arsenal.

Invid dashing around to respond to the emergency took no notice either, and the slaves' dejected heads helped with the deception. That is, until the Praxians reached the door of the arsenal itself.

An Armored Officer barred their way. "Stop! Where are your overseers?"

Zibyl, the round-faced, olive-skinned one who had shown defiance outside the complex, led the line. Now she looked around in feigned surprise, saying, "Why, I don't know, Great Master; they were there not a moment ago. Perhaps they stopped to speak to another Master. Shall I go look for them?"

She took a step back the way she had come. "Stand where you are," the Officer shouted. It automatically took a few steps in that direction, too. "Slaves aren't supposed to be in this area unaccompanied!"

As it did so, several of the women slipped past, behind its back, silently entering the arsenal.

"I see no overseers," the Officer was saying. "And I see no function lights on your headbands. In fact, some of those women back there have no headbands at all! All of you, line up with your hands against that wall while I contact-"

The Invid got no farther. From the tattered remnants of her fighting costume Zibyl pulled the pistol Lisa had given her. The Officer was just facing back toward her when she squeezed the trigger. The beam was set at minimum dispersal, a star-hot line no wider than a pencil's lead.

Zibyl was wearing a fey smile.

The Officer went windmilling back as green goo and little meteor sparks spurted from the rupture in its helmet. Zibyl shot it again, dead center in the chest, and twice more; the Invid flopped to the floor with a deafening clang of heavy metal.

Just then there was a yell from the rear of the column, "Enemy fire-team coming!"

"Stand clear!" yelled Zibyl, planting her bare feet more firmly and raising the heavy Invid pistol with both hands. She stood her ground, her jaw set, as her sisters dove or dropped or sprinted out of her line of fire.

Four Enforcers lumbered around the corner like walking tanks, their steps resounding up and down the corridor like locomotives being hit with battering rams. They were un-limbering their rifles.

Zibyl took careful aim at the leader, determined to buy time and ferally willing to die just so long as she could take some of the more hated slavemasters with her. She thought she might get one or, with extraordinary luck, two, before they cremated her on the spot.

Zibyl got off the first shot but missed with the unfamiliar handgun. The Enforcers were bringing their heavy weapons to bear, muzzles the circumference of stovepipes zeroing in on her, when Zibyl heard a rich contralto behind her bark, "Sister! Hit the deck!"

Zibyl did. The three Praxians who had womanhandled the Enforcer assault weapon out of the arsenal and into the corridor had set it up on its tripod. The gunner had to sit on another woman's shoulders to aim, and she fired.

The shot got the lead Invid where the creature's naval would have been if it had had one, and burned it in half. The Praxians traversed the beam and cut the next Enforcer in two.

More amazons poured into the corridor from the armory, blazing away with pistols and rifles. Zibyl spun around on her stomach and fired, too. In moments, the Enforcers were smoking debris in a spreading pool of green slime.

Zibyl rose to her feet, coughing at the smell of it, and hollered to her Sisters, "What are you waiting for? They know we're here now! Get weapons, quickly; we haven't much time!"

"They've been discovered," Veidt said, as he seemingly stared off into space. "The alarms are going off now."

Vince took a deep breath. "Okay; everybody keep low."

He pushed off from the wall with his shoulders and stepped from concealment behind the flying buttress of the Central Slavepen. The coast was clear. Vince loped toward the entrance, Wolff right behind with the other Invid rifle. Lisa, Rick, and Jean were next, along with the still-unsteady Miriya Sterling, who was being helped along by Max. Cabell came just behind, looking dignified even in this frantic endeavor, and with him floated Veidt. Karen Penn brought up the rear, covering with Rick's pistol.

Rick had dithered a little before making the decision to give Karen his pistol, but it came down to a matter of practical necessity. Karen had the skill and training for the job he had assigned her, and it was only sensible that she be armed. Max wouldn't leave Miriya, and Rick himself wanted to be up toward the front, where he could see what was going on and help make decisions, even if this had turned into Lisa's show. To his relief, Lisa had made no objection.

The automated weapons installations guarding the main entrance were silent, just as Veidt had promised. The fugitives made it through the door and onto the big rotunda beyond. They kept to the shadows along the walls, working their way in the opposite direction from that taken by Zibyl and the others. They were headed for the slave cages.

Enforcers and Armored Officers, along with a scattering of scientists and other Evolveds, were running back and forth, taking no notice of the interlopers at first. Vince, leading the way, was thankful that the Invid had decided to make their Glike slave operation an Enforcer-and Officer-run facility; if there had been Inorganic bipeds, the Sentinels and the Praxians would have had little hope of coping with them.

The checkpoint to the slave cages was a guard station one quarter of the way around the gleaming green circle of the rotunda. They were nearly there when a passing Officer noticed them and skidded to a halt, heels striking sparks from the superhard substance of the floor.

"Halt! Identify yours-" was all he got out before Vince waxed him with a sustained burst from the rifle. Guards were just becoming aware of the danger when Vince and Wolff went charging at them assault-style, firing on every other footfall as they fast-walked. Rick dashed for the fallen officer, to relieve it of its sidearm.

Karen rushed forward to help Vince and Wolff, laying down rounds with the pistol. The guard station had been stripped of all but three soldiers in the emergency, and they only lasted a few quickened heartbeats once the shooting started.

But at least they left behind more weapons. Everyone was armed now except for Veidt, and Cabell, whom Rem had once warned, Stay away from guns or you'll end up burning your foot off! Even Miriya was in the fight, insisting on having a pistol. After studying the Haydonite-installed equipment for a few moments, Veidt judged that escape from the slavepens could be cut off by Invid in the command center, or even there at the guard

station if the stations were retaken intact.

Wolff solved that with his usual panache. Cycling the heavy security lock doors to open all through the slavepen maze with the station's controls, he then brought up the rifle's mouth and blew the controls to wreckage.

"One problem down, but they'll be sending reinforcements here any time now," Lisa said.

Wolff ran a fingertip over his superbly groomed mustache. "Then, dearest Captain, may I suggest that we not be here at that time?" He turned and set his rifle across a control console, checking fields of fire, preparing to hold the position while the others effected rescue. At Lisa's command, Karen stayed with him, handing her pistol to Jean and taking another rifle in its place.

Rick had readjusted his own Invid rifle's sling so that he could lug it, leveled in firing position, at waist height with the sling over his left shoulder, right hand on the grip and trigger. It was unbelievably heavy, the sling pressing deep into his flesh. He said, "Everybody ready? No objections?"

No objections. The Sentinels descended into the slave-pens of Haydon IV.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Awright, so the mecha are in dinged-up shape and the weapons barrels are shot out and the replacement parts stocks are all gone. Boys and girls, we're all functioning beyond manufacturer's specifications.

Rick Hunter, quoted in Mizner's Rakes and Rogues: The True Story of the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission

"I forbid it!"

Vowad hovered before Sarna as she sought to take control of the giant flying carpet. Some two acres in area, it would hold all the Sentinels and all the freed slaves, too-provided that any of them survived the uprising.

And it wasn't every Haydonite who could command and control such a carpet alone. But she was the daughter of the greatest intellect of her species.

Nevertheless, Vowad blocked her way as she tried to take control of the carpet there on the immense landing surface at the summit of the city's tallest tower-the roof of her home.

"I forbid you to become involved in this bestial business!" Vowad ranted. "Let the lower orders settle their own vendettas! Let them kill and kill one another if that's what they want

so badly! You have a far higher destiny!"

"Why do you always talk like a god to me," Sarna asked him, "but bow your head like a slave to the Invid?"

Hearing that he went rigid, the only movement being his robe's hem wafting in the breeze. She went around him, took control of the vast carpet, and bade it rise into the air.

Moments later, she was streaking for the Central Slave-pen.

Bela stabbed her shortsword tip in the elevator floor to jam the doors open.

The Invid in the command center were preoccupied with reports of a firefight at the arsenal, and the sudden silence from the guard station by the slavepen entrance, when Jack and his raiders opened up.

The two ranks put out the heaviest volume of fire they could, aware that the Invid would respond very quickly, and that the pneumatic reservoirs of the Karbarran long-guns would empty rapidly. Even the submachine-gun magazines would last only three or four seconds at full auto. The Sentinels were all, including Burak, on the firing line; Gnea and Bela had abandoned their traditional weapons in favor of automatic weapons.

Tesla, Garak, and Pye cringed in the furthest corner of the elevator, making no move to either interfere with or break past their captors.

In that first onslaught the team threw the command center into complete chaos and irreparably cut the Invid chain of command. Explosive armor-piercing bullets could penetrate vulnerable spots even in Enforcer alloy at such short range; the unarmored Invid were targets assigned to Burak, the ursinoid Karbarrans, and the foxlike Garudans.

And the vital equipment that made the Invid nerve center function was everybody's bull's-eye.

Components exploded and clear-polymer indicator faces blew apart; power connectors shorted and splintered housing became deadly shrapnel. Invid who had been calling for mass execution of hostage-slaves only a moment before died, clutching terrible wounds.

"Fire in the hole!" the amazons yelled, as per REF training. With their teeth they had yanked out the pins of the stick grenades they held in each hand. Now they lofted them off in assorted directions as the rest of the raiders hugged the floor.

The Praxians had been careful to angle the throws so that the pylon/elevator would shield

the party from the blast and shrapnel. The Sentinels clapped their hands to their ears and opened their mouths to reduce the effects of the explosions.

The world seemed to jump, and there was a whirlwind of shredded tissue and equipment outside the elevator doorway. When Jack looked up, he saw the dead and dying and heard the moans of the injured-but that was mere background. Tottering toward the elevator was an Enforcer, its armor pitted and lead-smeared by impacts. It was lurching, and Jack could see green Invid soupy stuff leaking from its right knee joint.

"LAW!" he yelled, even while he was emptying his chattergun magazine at the thing, lead-smearing it some more. But the Enforcer was bringing its rifle sights into alignment with the elevator car.

Janice Em shouldered Jack aside, out of the doorway. She peered through the sights of the light antitank weapon, fixed the Enforcer in the reticle, and pulled the thumb-trigger. The Enforcer took the shaped charge in the middle of its abdomen and swelled, its armor cracking open like a hard-boiled egg with an expanding yoke. By then Jan was on the floor with her head covered. The blast went toward the ceiling, but left all of them partly deaf.

Jack shook his head in an effort to stop the ringing. "Everybody on your feet!" Bela was shouting. "Move it!"

The raiders rushed out into the command center to find that secondary blowups from the systemry had done even more damage than the bullets and the grenades had. There was smoke everywhere, and the stench of the cracked-open armor; a few small fires still burned.

"If you see any Protoculture weapons, grab 'em!" Jack called out.

Gnea looked around at the devastation. "This equipment is useless! Janice Em, you said you would be able to find out where Arla-Non and our other sisters are being held!"

"And I shall." Jan didn't seem to need direct physical connection to Haydon's Awareness now that she had interfaced with it once; instead, she went straight to a small terminal and punched up a schematic.

She studied the glowing displays for a moment then switched off the terminal. "There: that's our route."

She pointed toward a column on the far side of the command center, an even bigger one than they had arrived in.

The raiders hurried over toward the column. Lron and Crysta had Invid rifles now, and Kami and Learna pistols. The Garudans were still keeping a wary eye on Tesla, Garak,

and Pye. Jack himself never let Burak stray from his sight.

Some unseen manipulation of Jan's caused the second column to open and reveal another elevator whose existence the Invid had never suspected.

"Other Sentinels are already in the complex, and battle's begun," she said. "But the Invid are rushing reinforcments here."

"Everybody in," Jack said, standing by the doors of the second elevator. When the three Invid captives hesitated, Gnea and Bela prodded them with still-hot rifle muzzles.

"Why can't you just release us?" Pye wailed.

"We might still have use for you, worm," Bela said, ominously guttural. Her whole world had died; she had no forbearance with the Invid anymore and would just as soon kill them.

"The suffering you've endured is nothing compared to the suffering you've inflicted, so do not try my patience!"

Jack got them all boarded, even Burak, who seemed to be in another of his strange, incommunicative moods. The elevator dropped toward the subsurface levels.

Rick led his group at a fast walk, stopping himself whenever he found that he had broken into a trot. Stumbling into an ambush wouldn't help anything right now, even though he felt each ticking second as a possible loss of Praxian lives.

Just before they had started down, they had heard the distant firefight, realizing that Zibyl's bunch had armed themselves and were keeping the Invid busy. But it would still only be a matter of time before the Regent arrived with fresh troops and mecha, enough to crush any resistance the escaped slaves could put up.

Lisa had yielded the point position to her husband, but continued to conduct herself as overall commander of the contingent. Rick, Max, Vince, and Jean accepted that, as they accepted the fact that Veidt and Cabell were determined to come the whole distance despite the fact that the Haydonite couldn't-and the old sage wouldn't-use a weapon.

Their path led down through a complex refurbished in Invid style, feeling more like a walk through a living organism than a raid on a prison facility. But on the third level below the surface, they encountered the first of the cages.

The Praxian slaves were being kept in big ironwork affairs suspended from the ceilings, more like captured birds or sideshow exhibits than prisoners of war. When Rick spotted the first cage, the women crowded into it looked at him listlessly for a second or two, then

suddenly realized what they were seeing.

One dragged herself halfway to her feet, fists clasped on the bars. "Sisters! Look here!"

It was easy to see that the women knew something was up; the cold evercrete floor below their pens was littered with twisted and broken slave headbands. Evidently the Praxians had lost no time getting rid of them once the bands were deactivated.

In another moment the prisoners were murmuring and exclaiming to one another, but there were no shouted greetings or hails. The Sentinels were unknown to the Praxians, and this just might be some new Invid ploy. Still, the amazons jostled to see what was going on, making their cages swing and turn.

Someone made her way through the press of captives to the bars of the first cage. She was one of the tallest there, powerfully built, with a long leonine mane of sun-bleached hair. The colorful rags of her fighting costume were faded and threadbare, and her high, soft hide boots were worn through, yet she had a regal manner, her head erect.

"Who are you, and why have you come?" she demanded. "Are you allies of the Invid?"

Lisa recognized the woman from pictures she had seen on Praxis. "We're allies of your daughter Bela, Your Majesty, and of others who fight the Invid!"

Queen Arla-Non tossed back her mane proudly. "Then, you're our allies, too."

Rick had gone to study the mechanisms that suspended the cage, while Vince, Max, and Jean fanned out as security. Even Miriya was on alert, holding her pistol ready.

Veidt was standing near a systems juncture, in some kind of trance. Cabell went to look over Rick's shoulder, offering his input. It was some kind of complicated drum-and-gear affair, needlessly primitive.

"Don't touch anything till we can-" Rick was saying.

"Perhaps this tiny lever," Cabell ventured, flicking it.

Arla-Non and her sisters shouted angrily as the cage dropped. Rick let out a squawk and rammed in the manual brake, which luckily held, and the prisoners were jounced every which way among the bars.

"Hmm, interesting," Cabell allowed.

The cages were lowered without further mishap, and Sisters of Praxis crowded one another, stepping free. Arla-Non clapped Lisa and Jean on the shoulders. "Thanks to you,

Sisters! And to your male subordinates as well!" She clasped forearms with Miriya.

Rick looked a little startled, but Vince gave a casual chuckle and Max muttered, "Oh, we were just along for company."

Those who had been freed were only a small fraction of the amazons being held in the center, and that in turn was only a part of the total number of Praxian slaves on Haydon IV. Arla-Non dispatched her warriors to the other cellblocks, to continue the liberation. Miriya and Lisa handed over their pistols, so the rescuers wouldn't have to go unarmed.

Just then Veidt came floating back. "Sarna will be here soon, but I fear the other news isn't good. The Regent is mustering his troops for an attack on the Central Slavepen. And...there is some other intellect in contact with the Awareness of Haydon IV. I cannot discern it well; a synthetic mentality, I believe."

"No time for that now," Rick said. "We've got to make sure Wolff and Karen don't get overrun up above, and we gotta get the Praxians armed. This thing's just begun."

Lisa conceded the sense of that. Once Arla-Non understood the situation she organized her women immediately, as capable as any field commander the REF fighters had ever seen. She gave orders by squads and platoons, and her warriors jumped to obey, some racing off to help in freeing the rest of the Praxians, the rest forming up to carry the battle back aboveground.

"What about patrols down here?" Lisa asked.

"We know the schedules of the regular patrols, believe me," Arla-Non said, "and we should be able to deal with them, at least for now."

The group set out, and Arla-Non was as good as her word. They ambushed the one skeleton crew of Enforcers that came their way, a pair walking guard. The newly acquired weapons were quickly distributed.

But as they were heading toward the surface, Karen Penn came loping tiredly from that direction. She had obviously been through some heavy fighting. At her back came a squad of the women from Zibyl's group, somewhat the worse for combat.

"That bunch from the armory got to us," she explained breathlessly to Rick. "We have most of the ground level secured. But a mob of Enforcers and Officers showed up and set up a crossfire at the entrance. Nobody can get in or out, and we think they're bringing up Inorganics."

"Other escape routes?" Rick asked.

Karen shook her head. "All covered, and the crossfire's murder."

More and more Praxians were showing up now, liberated from other cellblocks. Although there were thousands in the place, Rick knew that didn't mean much unless they were armed. "All right, let's get upstairs and see what we can-"

The entire complex trembled and shook as distant impact made the building rumble.

"Something heavy," Max remarked.

There were more voices, and streams of Praxians began coming from the direction of the surface. Many were wounded, some looking like they wouldn't make it. From among them came Wolff, supporting-practically carrying-Zibyl, whose head lolled.

"Inorganics got some licks in," Wolff explained. "Scrim and Odeons, mostly. We blew the slavepen entranceway and brought the roof down on 'em as they charged; no other option. But that won't stop those demons for long."

So much for improvised rescue plans, Rick thought.

"A good try anyway," Arla-Non judged grimly. "We prefer dying free to living in cages, and at least we can do that."

She was right. Zibyl's troops were weighted down with armaments, some carrying two of the heavy Invid rifles, or enormous makeshift packs loaded with ammunition and explosives. The other amazons surrounded them, grabbing weapons, preparing to make the Invid pay.

As the Praxians rushed to set up fields of fire and prepare ambushes, Lisa got Veidt's attention. "What about Sarna?"

He shook his head slowly. "The streets are filled with Inorganics, and there's no way she can land there."

Lisa was curious about Veidt's expanding powers now that he was back on Haydon IV, but she had no time to ponder it.

Moments later there was a tremendous explosion from the distance, and Wolff said aloud to himself, "The Inorganics."

The few portable crew-served guns the Praxians had were set for a crossfire. Further back, down in the warren of the slavepens, fallback positions were being set up. The only thing left to do was insure that the Invid victory was costly.

After a few minutes, they heard the sound of heavy footfalls-marching mecha, advancing on their prey without fear or hesitation.

A pair of colossal Odeons rounded a corner, filling the corridor. The amazon gunners waited until the optimal moment, then opened fire. The Odeons seemed to experience a rictus of agony as fire splashed over them and ripped them apart; then they collapsed in on themselves.

More Odeons appeared, moving more cautiously. The Sentinels and the Praxians held their fire until the right moment, then blasted away. One, its skull turret aflame, whirled and convulsed, then, trying to hold itself erect, went reeling toward a giant column.

A camouflaged panel at the base of the column slid open and Jack Baker was standing there, wide-eyed, as he watched a burning twenty-five-foot-tall mecha stagger directly toward him.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Well, naturally I wanted a war! But I didn't want a war I might lose!

The Regent, quoted by Lemuel Thicka in Temple of Flames: A History of the Invid Regent.

Sarna circled the central slavepen with her enormous flying carpet, peering down at the turmoil below. The streets were crowded with Scrim and Crann and Odeon, and even a few Hellcats, but no more fire seemed to be coming from within.

Still, she could not set down in the nearby plaza, as she had planned. The Invid had not yet started firing at Haydonites, but they would attack her if she dropped down among them. And, more to the point, the slaves wouldn't be coming out that way now.

The city was in turmoil, with Praxian slaves abandoning their work assignments, tearing off the inert headbands, and either fleeing their overseers or attacking them head-on with whatever weapons came to hand. The amazons fought with unflinching courage and great skill, but the Invid garrison was large and troops were being rushed in from all over the planet. It could only be a matter of time before the uprising was crushed.

The defenses of Haydon IV itself were staying out of the battle, and Sarna knew why. It would be easy enough for the vast intellect of Vowad to persuade the planet's systemry that this was a limited conflict in which the Invid were in the right, technically, but needed no help in reestablishing order. Thus, the glory of Haydonite civilization was safe from all-out warfare.

Sarna herself had attempted to get a message through to the Sentinels' cruiser-still orbiting far beyond Haydon's defensive limits-to let them know what was happening. But

her father had interfered with the transmission somehow, and there had been no response.

Veidt was deep within the complex somewhere, along with the other Sentinels, and Sarna wasn't about to abandon them. She gathered her resolve and sent the immense carpet sailing down toward the roof of the Central Slavepen.

"No!" She heard the cry even as the carpet came to rest, as gently as a feather. It was Vowad, on a circular mat. He brought it in on her own carpet, confronting her.

"This is madness! Come away with me at once!"

She shook her head. "My friends are inside here."

Vowad was vibrating with anger. "They're doomed! And you are, too, unless you come away with me this instant!"

"You could prevent that, Father. Call down the wrath of Haydon IV upon the Invid!"

"Sarna, it is my duty to preserve our world, not see it destroyed!"

"Then go," she said, "and leave me here. For I swore a different vow."

Jack Baker threw his hand up and skipped back as the burning Odeon bounced off the column and crashed onto its back.

Bela and Gnea were already crowding to get past him, to Arla-Non, and it was a bit like being caught in the middle of a buffalo stampede.

"Mother!"

"Your Majesty!"

There was no use in trying to restrain them. They had been frustrated enough by the sudden stopping of the elevator. The complex's power supply was disrupted from the attack on the command center, and from the sapper charges set off by Wolff. The ensuing counterattack by the Invid hadn't helped either. By the time the elevator was moving again, Janice Em was the only calm one aboard.

Now Arla-Non waved from the shelter of an Invid design feature not far away, a thing that looked like a dendrite. Lisa and Rick and some of the others were there, rather dumbfounded.

"Look out!" Jan burst past Jack to sweep the air with fire from her Enforcer rifle. Everyone else saw what she meant, and also fired at the skirmisher ship and its Armored Officer that had come barreling round the corner for a low-level recon. Flier and Invid flew apart like a clay pigeon.

There was a lot of confusion then, particularly regarding the odd-looking being who only halfway resembled Janice Em at this point. Finally, Jack got them to understand that there was a bolthole: the elevator could take them clear to the roof.

"That will do," Veidt told them all. "Sarna is there, with the carpet."

Lisa had done some quick mental addition. "But we can only ferry up twenty or thirty at a time. We've got to hold on down here in the meantime! It might be hours!"

"Good; that will give us a while longer yet to kill Invid," Arla-Non said blithely.

Wounded were being taken aboard for the first trip, but there were also plenty of functionals to protect them once they got up above. Rick took Max's arm. "Get Miriya up there, too. Now! Don't argue with me, dammit."

Max was indecisive for a second, then gripped Rick's arm and turned to get his wife and unborn child to safety. Rick discovered that Lisa was staring at him strangely.

She gave him an arch look. "You're not going to insist I be evacuated with the injured and helpless?"

Rick sighed, and his face colored some. "Not you, Tiger." Her answering smile warmed him.

Veidt was staring into the elevator. "So, the Awareness has seen fit to aid us. And you are not what you seemed, Janice Em. Still, you must be eloquent! We have a great deal to discuss."

"But not until later," Jan said. "I want you to take the elevator to the roof; it will respond to you now. I can do more good down here." She hefted the Enforcer rifle she held.

Veidt inclined his head slowly. "And, more to the point, Sarna is up there now, eh? And, unless I miss my guess, Vowad?"

Jan had learned how to read much of the hidden information of Haydon IV. She knew how matters stood among the three. She nodded. "There may still be time to convince him, but I'm not the one to do it."

Without another word, Veidt entered the elevator among the wounded and the vengeful.

Jan turned to Rick and Lisa. "I guess I don't look much like my PR photos, hmm?"

There was a yell from the battle line as another Inorganic attack began. Rick watched the elevator doors close as it began its ascent. The Sentinels' misson had been rife with mind-boggling shocks and surprises; that Janice was an android seemed to fit in with the unbelievable scheme of things.

"You look pretty damn good to us, Jan."

Sarna and Vowad were locked in a battle of wills, the huge carpet

vibrating under them. If he couldn't persuade his daughter to come with him, he resolved, he would force her to come, by taking the carpet under his command.

But she was fighting him with more mental force than he would have believed she could marshal. Though she was of his stock, she lacked his ages of training and experience-and yet something within her was making her very nearly her father's equal in willpower.

But the battle became moot as a structure on the roof swung open and the elevator appeared with its cargo. Wounded amazons were assisted onto the carpet, and able-bodied ones ran to set up firing positions. Max led Miriya to the carpet and eased her down.

They ignored Vowad, who was screaming, "Go back, go back! This war must not spill over into the city at large!"

But it was too late. Before much more could be said, an ogrelike Crann clambored into view, its sensors having detected activity on the rooftop.

The Praxians and Max opened fire right away, but Crann were perhaps the most powerful of the biped Inorganics, and the thing just kept coming, firing back. A hole was burned through the carpet, and several of the wounded were killed instantly as the Crann advanced.

People were diving for cover that wasn't there; Max left Miriya's side and went straight for it, dodging and laying down rounds with an Enforcer rifle.

The Crann ignored him, swinging its weapon muzzle back and forth, immolating everything it saw. Then the beam swung toward the three Haydonites.

Veidt tried to ram Sarna to safety, but she saw that her father was paralyzed with shock or fright.

"No!" she cried, and eluded her mate to drive straight at Vowad, her robe fluttering over the rooftop. She struck her father with her head and upper torso, knocking him out of the line of fire, but the Crann's beam struck Sarna dead center, and she went flying to the roof's surface, her robes burning.

Veidt was there at once, smothering the flames with his own body, feeling more helpless than he had ever felt. But Max got to them in another second, using his jacket, and even Miriya had staggered over to help.

Meanwhile, the amazons had zeroed in on the Crann. Their massed small-arms fire found some vulnerable point in its reverse-articulated knee, and as it lost balance it also lost footing there at the edge of the roof. The Crann plunged from sight, but they heard the impact as it struck the street far below.

Max didn't know much about Haydonite physiology, and what he saw of Sarna's wound reinforced that; the weird textures and shapes, the unfamiliar fluids and systems, looked part organic, part synthetic. But he thought that the damage was too terrible for her to survive. She confirmed that when she spoke, her voice a faint bubbling.

"Father, you see? What is Haydon IV under the Invid but a beautifully appointed slavepen? War might destroy us, but it can never defile us the way enslavement has."

She had no expression that a Human could read, but the note in her voice wrenched at Max's heart. Vowad raised his face to regard the wounded and dying among the Praxians, the determined-looking women who showed their suffering in every line of their faces.

Then Sarna spasmed. From deep within his faceless depths, Veidt let out a wail that was terrible to hear. With no arms for a last embrace, he dropped until he lay draped across the corpse of his mate, and the sound of something he had learned among the Sentinels came from him, a sound no Haydonite had ever made before. Veidt wept like a lost soul.

Max's mouth fell open. From the eyeless visage of Veidt, tears were seeping.

"Ah, Veidt: you are my love," Sarna managed, though the voice sounded far away, as if it were coming now from outside her body. "And all of time and space will not keep us apart." Then she shuddered again, and was still.

It took the others a moment to realize that a new sound was rising to drown out Veidt's sorrow. Vowad floated there, head thrown back, blank face raised to the sky. Max somehow knew that if the Haydonite had arms, those arms would have been thrown wide, hands clenched to fists.

The sound that issued forth from somewhere within Vowad was animal pain, and animal anger.

"More Inorganics!" yelled a woman who had leaped to the roof's edge. The alarm was repeated by others all along that part of the building.

Max rose tiredly, ignoring the pain of his burned hands, to take up his gun. The amazons were right; at least there was time to kill some more Invid before the final defeat was nailed down. Too bad the Sentinels had to end this way...

But just then, with Vowad's shriek echoing off the buildings of Glike, the world began to shake.

It wasn't like an earthquake; it was more like the whole artificial planet Haydon IV resonating like a tuning fork to Vowad's pain. The sky seemed to shimmer like a pan of water being struck and struck again on its rim. A deep sympathetic vibration was felt by everyone there on the roof. Even more amazing, the Invid teeming in the street below stopped what they were doing and stood stock still.

Then there was a sound to be heard all through Glike, like wind-whipped flames-like the surging of a funeral pyre's inferno.

Those on the roof abruptly saw movement all through the city. From hidden crannies and the very seams of the Oz urbanscape, incandescent colors emerged in shapes that seemed alive. And all at once the Invid in the street below were attacked by a moving ant-army of shapes.

Max yelped and leapt back as one scampered past him, brushing his ankle. It didn't hurt, but the contact made his skin tingle and feel a bit numb. It was obvious, though, that the thing wasn't after Max; hundreds, thousands of others like it were emerging from every crevice and homing in on the nearest Invid.

And then he realized what the thing was: a miniature humanoid figure, whose likeness Max had seen often enough to recognize it: Zor! The humunculi-Zors were the size of a kid's toy model, made of kaleidoscopic colors, bounding through the air or running at unbelievable speed to take on the Inorganics.

The myriad Zors were seeping from the fabric of the city to attack the Regent's troops. Apparently, the ghost in the machine that was Haydon IV's Awareness knew the Invid mind well-and had chosen to form its antibodies in the image of the Regent's most hated foe.

In seconds, the Invid mecha were battling enemies that knew no surrender or retreat. Blasts from Protoculture weapons disintegrated Haydon IV's antibodies, but in the time it took to shoot one, a dozen more tiny Zor simulacra rose up to attack. As the antibodies fastened themselves to the Inorganics, coating them, the war machines began to glow.

Unlike the contest in which Jack's raiders had fought beneath the planet, the antibodies weren't in unending supply now. There were limits even to Haydon IV's power. As Inorganics everywhere blazed away at the tiny demons fashioned in Zor's image, fewer and fewer appeared to take their places.

But the city was still blanketed with antibodies eager to hurl themselves onto the mecha. As Max watched, a Hellcat, coated with the shifting, coruscating colors of the antibodies that had plastered themselves to it, rolled and spat and flopped, clawing at itself uselessly. Its destructive aura grew brighter, and a moment later it was ruptured by a dazzling explosion, vanishing from sight.

Elsewhere, an Odeon staggered drunkenly, firing into the air, as antibodies engulfed it. It tried to decontaminate its arm with blasts from its hand weapon, but only succeeded in blowing the arm off. A moment later it, too, blew apart.

Max spun on Veidt. "Hurry! Get that elevator back down for the others! Quick, before this whole complex goes!"

Veidt was still stretched out across Sarna, oblivious to everything around him. At length, Vowad regained some part of his composure.

"I will go," he said. In a moment, he had started the elevator back down in a race to save as many others as he could.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK

Graffito found on Sentinels barricade in the Central Slavepen, thought to be attributable to Bela

When the Regent heard of the revolt among the Praxian slaves, he took command of the situation himself. He left his hive just outside the city and called for his Land Cruiser-the grotesque mobile ground fortress that was the centerpiece of large-scale Invid surface action.

When he was told that the Sentinels were in some way responsible for the slave uprising, he sent word to his torturers to prepare for a much more demanding schedule. But once he was informed that the antibodies of Haydon IV had turned against him, he instructed his personal flagship to stand ready against immediate departure.

Not that he counted the battle lost yet; the Haydonite defenses had been designed to eliminate most of an invading force before that force got to the planet's surface, and the

Invid were already at close range. The Regent had an advantage no invader had ever achieved before.

"Destroy all power sources!" he ordered. "Obliterate the planet's energy production centers! The Regent was certain that without power, the antibodies would quickly de-rezz into nothingness.

Those Invid not engulfed in Zor antibodies immediately began destroying all power sources they could detect, which meant razing things at random. The biped Inorganics, in particular, destroyed ages of craftsmanship and art in minutes, turning their aim haphazardly from one target to the next. Minarets toppled, domes shattered, and delicate mansions collapsed like fragile pastry crust. Fires flared up, and smoke began to block out Briz'dziki, Haydon's sun.

Then commo relays showed the Regent the nature of the antibodies. Zor, again! The Regent's entourage ducked and ran from his berserk blows; he lashed out at the consoles and instrument panels around him. He wrenched the command chair from the deck, flinging it against a bulkhead so hard that the chair dented the plates.

Zor! The perversity of the Haydon IV machinery! The towering affrontery of it! "I will have this planet or I will destroy it!" the Regent roared.

Though he was in a part of the city that had been spared the appearance of the antibodies, the Regent thought better of his plan to travel on the ground. He called for a Terror Weapon troop dropship; but of the three on Haydon IV at the moment, two were elsewhere on the planet picking up reinforcements and the third had been destroyed while hovering near its landing pad not far from the Central Slavepen.

The Regent changed his instructions, and the Land Cruiser swung toward the starport. Time to make a break for his flagship, while he still had other cards to play. A screen relayed the scene from the Land Cruiser's brig, showing him that Rem was still firmly chained there. The Regent stroked his mammoth Hellcats and contemplated the horrors he would inflict on the clone when all this was over.

Even Jack and his team, who had seen the Haydon antibodies in action in other forms, had difficulty believing what they were witnessing. From the very walls of the dungeons came doll-size Zors in every color, setting upon the Inorganics, bringing them down and blowing them apart.

They were a reminder, too, of Rem, who was still held captive by the Regent.

In the slavepens, the counterattack on the Praxians and the Sentinels stopped cold. The main danger to the defenders now was the deafening sound of the Inorganic volleys and

the reports of the mecha being blown apart.

Nevertheless, the Inorganics had taken a considerable toll on the antibodies. When the simulacra-Zors flickered away to carry the battle outside, like torch flames on the wind, there were far fewer than there had been at the start. The Invid destruction of Haydon's power-delivery systems was beginning to tell.

Vowad reappeared with the elevator for the next load of evacuees, but now there was no rush. Arla-Non had her other injured ready, but many of the others wanted to be part of the campaign there underground, sweeping the Invid from the complex and searching for any other enslaved Praxians.

"What would be most useful," Lisa told Vowad, "would be smaller flying carpets, to support the Praxians elsewhere in the city and on the planet."

Vowad spoke in a monotone, still numb with the enormity of Sarna's death and his own act of vengeance. "I will see what can be done," he said, "but most Haydonites are busy rescuing themselves and their dependents. The city is dying."

Still, Arla-Non sent a platoon of her amazons up with Vowad, to help secure the roof and stand ready in case the opportunity arose to rescue other Praxians.

When the elevator left, the Sentinels and the released slaves began a careful advance over the ground the Invid had held only minutes before. There was nothing but debris, smoke, and puddles of metal.

The Praxians returned to the armory and continued their plundering. Outside the Central Slavepen, Rick and the rest found the immediate area quiet, though the sounds of battle came from close-by.

Vowad appeared, this time on a much smaller carpet. "I have summoned others," he said, "and they will take you and yours anywhere you wish."

High above, Rick could see, some carpets of varying sizes were lifting off, some to take the wounded to the Halls of Healing, others to descend to the street and await passengers, all commanded by Haydonites unfamiliar to him. He realized that the Haydonites had somehow subdivided the huge carpet Sarna had brought.

Maybe there's only one real carpet, it occurred to him, and all the little ones are just temporarily detached pieces!

Arla-Non's troops boarded the carpets by assigned units, to be borne off to rescue more of their Sisters. Bela had assumed the status of her mother's second-in-command, and Gnea was a kind of aide-de-camp. It was odd to see the hard-driving Bela deferring to

someone so readily, but Arla-Non wore an invisible cloak of authority and majesty; Jack didn't blame Bela one bit.

Vowad was still next to Rick and Lisa. "We have attempted to contact your Ark Angel, but the Invid still interfere with our transmissions; things beyond the Haydonite atmosphere are not always within our control."

"That's all right," Lisa said gently. "There are more immediate things to think about." The raiders had heard the news of Sarna's death and Vowad's sudden conversion. Lisa had suffered her own losses in war and knew how deeply it hurt.

"Yes." Vowad nodded. "Power levels are dropping, due to the Invid destruction. Inorganic reinforcements are being airlifted into Glike, and the outcome hangs in the balance. But that is not what concerns me most. The Regent is reported to be on his way to the starport, his ship standing ready. Your friend Rem, the Zor-clone, is still his prisoner.

"I fear the worst."

Jack Baker did not have enough time to say hello to Karen Penn when he saw her. "So, they finally kicked you outta sick bay, huh?" Then it was back to fighting for their lives as the Inorganics pressed the battle, down in the slave warrens.

Now, up on the open street, he sought her out in the chaos of battle. Sliding around a flying squad of big, gladsome amazons off to collect some more Inorganic scalps, he skirted the smoking remains of a skirmish ship, and finally spotted her. She was listening to the sounds of conflict, but she was staring off toward the cloud-high towers of Glike.

"Um," he began, and found himself at a loss. "You sure you're okay? No aftereffects?"

She flashed him a smile. "Yes. Thanks, Jack."

She looked back to the skyline. "Well, what's wrong then?" he persisted.

"Nothing's wrong, Jack. It's just that...all this...maybe it's just as well that Glike be leveled, to start from scratch."

"Huh? Look, these're our allies now, y'know!"

She turned a hateful expression on him. "Allies, hell! They're not the first beautiful culture to put up with rot and evil in its midst, just so people could have their aesthetics and their comfort and their personal peace."

Jack felt the color rising in his face. She's giving me speeches now?

She looked to the city again. "The glory of Greece was built on slavery, did you know that? I don't care what kind of crap they tell us about it; if I'd been there I'd have bombed the Parthenon, smashed everything slavery bought them-"

Jack felt heat flushing his face. "Penn, don't you start preaching history to me! I was just saying-"

"Whatever comes out of the ashes of Glike will be better than what went before, even if it's Stone Age, because Haydon'll be a free planet-"

Jack shook a fist at her. "Will you shut up and listen? I'm saying I agree with-"

"Who e you telling to shut up?"

"Penn! Baker! Front 'n' center!"

They were both breathing hard, about to mix it up again, when Rick Hunter's sharp summons cut through the gathering slugfest. Their training kicked in, and they double-timed over to Rick, rifles at sling arms.

Veidt was standing near the Hunters, and so was Janice Em. The Artificial Person had resumed the aspect of a Human female. Rick quickly explained the tactical situation, and Rem's dilemma.

"There's no time to muster a full-scale strike at the Land Cruiser," Rick finished. "But Veidt's ready to try to get a commando team in by carpet. Colonel Wolff, the Garudans, and the Karbarrans will be diverting the Regent's attention and providing fire support. Well?"

"Count us in, S-" Karen had begun answering for them both, by habit, but she stopped, looking aside at the young man who was part friend, part title-fight opponent.

Jack gave a slightly insubordinate smile and touched fingertips to his forehead-more of a wave than a salute. "Like she says, count us in, Admiral."

Jack, Karen, and Veidt boarded Veidt's poker table-size carpet and lifted away. Rick didn't even have time to turn around; Vince Grant was standing there. "Bad news, Rick: Tesla and Burak are gone."

"What d'ya mean gone! Gone where?"

Vince was shaking his head. "Slipped off while we were getting ourselves organized. Somebody said there's a skirmisher ship missing."

Vince indicated Garak and Pye with a nod of his head. "Those two claim they don't know. I think they're lying; something's got them frightened, even more frightened than the Haydon defenses. Where would Tesla and Burak go?"

Rick blew his breath out. "I don't know, and we can't worry about it right now. Just put out an all-points to pick them up. And don't go after them yourself! I need you right here."

Vince showed disappointment. "Aye, sir."

Rick returned to his wife to find her dealing with another problem. "New deepspace blips on the detectors," a Haydonite was saying. "We think they're Invid."

The skirmisher ship flew low over the contested city, streaking toward the cluster of glowing, shadow-dappled domes that was the Invid hive on the horizon.

Burak held his breath, expecting the antibodies of Haydon IV to hurl themselves into the air at him at any second. But the words of Veidt came back to him, that intent had everything to do with the responses of the defense system. And, certainly, Tesla's intent had nothing to do with invasion and conquest-at least not today.

Burak was perched on the scientist's shoulders, gripping his robe and harness for dear life, as Tesla piloted the flier along at breakneck speed, using suicidal maneuvers to avoid the mecha and miniature Zor fire-demons that fought through the air.

Burak had unconditionally accepted that his planet's fate and his own Higher Destiny, his Messiahhood, were tied to Tesla's own.

No interceptors or withering fire rose to incinerate them as they sped toward the hive; Burak felt sure that Tesla's growing powers had taken care of that problem. Tesla brought the flier in for a landing at the mouth of an opening that led into the central dome.

Burak was beyond any thought of resistance by then. Tesla led him in through a virtually abandoned hive. What Invid there were were disoriented and of no consequence; they stepped aside, kowtowing, at Tesla's imperious orders.

Then the two arrived in the most holy place in any hive, the chamber set aside for those Flowers of Life that had blossomed, or held promise of blossoming. Here, to Tesla's wild exultation, they found plants that had actually borne Fruit.

Burak had begun to recognize a pattern, that the Fruit of each world was different from that borne on any other. And the Fruit brought forth by the worlds once touched by Haydon himself-worlds the Sentinels were trying to free-were the most pronouncedly

varied of all.

In this case, the Fruit were eggplant-purple cylinders, round-bottomed and quiveringly gelid. Tesla cupped his hands around one gently.

"See-eee?" The word was more a whispered breath than a spoken sound. "See how the light shines through them? These are new, just grown! They've become ripe in the last few minutes-no more than an hour! Not even the Regent has tasted such Fruit as these!"

Tesla suddenly turned on Burak, who was standing close, watching curiously. The master scientist struck out at the Perytonian jealously, a blow that would have killed if Burak hadn't ducked. "Back! You shall have none!"

Burak backstepped warily. "I want none. I only want you to keep your bargain."

Tesla had seated himself cross-legged on the soft sward of the arborium, a little pile of the Fruits in his lap. "Good."

Burak squatted on his haunches, to watch Tesla sink his long snout into the Fruit, slurping and slobbering at it, runnels of purple juice flowing down his chin, neck, and chest. Soon, something pulsed within the Invid. In moments, a light shone from him that threw Burak's shadow on the dome walls.

Burak hunkered down, shielding his eyes a bit, to witness the next step in Tesla's Flower-induced metamorphosis.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lang was first among the Humans to notice it, the "dovetailing," as he called it, of the worlds specially touched by Haydon and those that held such interest in more recent times for Zor.

He pressed me for details and I had to point out that the Zentraedi are the last ones to query in matters of history. But nonetheless I expressed my vast yearning to know the truth of it all, and hoped Emil would come to feel the same way.

Exedore, SDF-3 and Me

The land cruiser rocked from the force of a tremendous explosion. Knocked from his feet, the Regent rose again in an even more furious temper.

"What was that?" Surely the Zor antibodies were not blowing themselves up?

A scientist bowed. "It appears that some of the outworlders have joined in the battle, Divine One. That was apparently a Karbarran shuttlecraft loaded with conventional

explosives and sent at us by remote control. Fortunately, it was of insufficient power to penetrate even our outermost hull."

"Naturally," the Regent snapped. The cruiser, bigger than an aircraft carrier, was a moving mountain of weapons and armor on treads as wide as a Glike boulevard. He thought again about ordering his gunners to open fire and raze the city around him as he withdrew, but that would run the risk of attracting the antibodies. His own life was all-important to the Invid cause, far too vital to risk for mere retribution.

It was too bad this entire part of Glike seemed to have been evacuated; he would have taken consolation in grinding the miserable synthetics under his mobile fortress's treads. It might, in part, make up for his having had to abandon his Flower of Life orchards just as they were about to bear Fruit.

Perhaps he would still be able to retake his Haydon hive. With this thought, he ordered his techs to relay the view from the automatic monitoring equipment inside the orchard. But where he had expected a view of luxuriant Fruit of the Flower, he found himself gazing at an outlandish yet somehow familiar-looking monstrosity that sat gorging itself. Off to one side hunkered a young Perytonian.

"By the Protoculture!" the Regent howled. The two-way channel being open, the thing squatting in the hive orchard looked up at the communications pickup.

"Ah, the Divine, the All-Knowing, the Omnipotent Regent," the thing purred. "Thank you for your hospitality. How delicious, this Fruit of yours!"

"T-Tesla?" the Regent whispered.

"Yes, Tesla! And soon, you'll know what the godlike powers of the Flower really are, for Tesla will demonstrate them to you!"

The Regent's anger was so great that he was tempted to turn the Land Cruiser around and go back to obliterate the hive and Tesla. But there was no time; tactical displays showed enemy forces overwhelming the city garrison with the help of the accursed Haydonite antibodies. The Regent cut the communications link with a smashing blow of his fist.

"Increase speed!" he howled.

The scientist cowered. "We are at maximum speed now, All-Powerful One. Crushing our way through the city makes the going somewhat difficult."

Another scientist added, "We have detected vessels emerging from superluminal drive in deepspace, but have as yet been unable to make contact."

"Well, make sure my flagship is ready to lift off the moment I arrive," the Regent roared. If those were Invid ships, he would fry Haydon IV from a safe distance; if not, he would be ready for a strategic withdrawal in the fastest vessel in the Invid fleet.

"And where are our reinforcements?" he added.

"They are being delivered now to the eastern and northern sectors of the city, Mighty One, for diversionary counterattacks to facilitate our withdrawal. We are also monitoring a droppage in city power resources, and a corresponding decrease in antibody activity."

Perhaps it would be possible to win after all. How the Sentinels and the Haydonites and the Praxians would pay! He began planning an elaborate, days-long festival of torture and executions, but the daydream was smashed to pieces moments later.

"Signal from the approaching starships, Omnipotent Lord," a technician said. With that, the face of Breetai appeared on the screen.

The giant felt an unsmiling satisfaction. He had somehow known all along, in his bones, that the Regent was not dead. There was no way the creature could have been tricked or yielded up his life so easily.

For a few seconds, the Regent found that he couldn't catch his breath. Breetai, the Zentraedi's most brilliant commander, and, after the late Dolza, their most powerful warrior!

Breetai glared at the Regent. "We're coming for you," he said, and nothing more. The screen went blank.

The Regent sent his staff scurrying with angry blows and kicks. "More speed! I'll kill the first one to offer me excuses!"

His ace in the hole might be of crucial importance after all. The Regent faced his brace of pet Hellcats. "Go, and fetch the Zor-clone to me!"

They sprang away, and the Regent summoned a lackey. Quietly, so that the others present couldn't hear, he directed, "Have my personal battle armor prepared."

The carpet was barely big enough for two heavily armed Humans and Veidt, and jostling was a hazardous business indeed. But somehow Jack and Karen managed to keep their footing as the thing whooshed through the sky. How Veidt maintained his place, levitating above the carpet as he did, was something the Humans couldn't understand.

They came up on the Land Cruiser from behind, as it ground Glike under it, making its ponderous way toward the starport. Figuring speed and distance, Karen calculated that they only had a few minutes to find and save Rem.

"How're we gonna find him, in a crate that size?" Jack said over the sound of the air rushing by them.

"I can sense his whereabouts," Veidt responded simply. With the trauma of Sarna's death, Veidt seemed changed-more intense, more capable, but cold and remote. A terrible price to pay for increased powers, Karen reflected sadly.

She brought her mind back to matters at hand. "I'm more worried about how we're gonna get into that tin can."

"Vowad has arranged for...a diversion," Veidt said. Even as he said it, kaleidoscopic flames licked up from the rubble around the Land Cruiser's treads and the buildings about to be crushed under them. The flames circled and formed a swirling whirlpool, a scintillating funnel of Haydonite antibody power. Up and up it rose, until it stood two hundred feet high. Then it shifted, flashing, and took form.

"Oh my god!" Karen breathed.

It was a fiery image of Zor, straddled-legged, blocking the Land Cruiser's path of retreat.

"Kill him! Kill him!?the Regent yammered, laying about him on the Land Cruiser's bridge. "I, your god, command you to kill Zor for once and for all!"

When the Land Cruiser loosed its awesome barrage at the unmoving figure, Veidt was ready.

He wove the carpet in among the volleying supercannon and lesser gun batteries. The salvos were disintegrating the cityscape before them, but had no apparent effect on the colossal Zor.

High on the aft part of the cruiser's hull, a rack of missiles was rising into place from its shielded pod. As the pod doors opened to allow it to rise, Veidt swooped through, into the space between the hulls. Karen and Jack found themselves clinging to one another, trying to keep their footing, praying the Haydonite knew what he was doing.

Jack was so scared that he couldn't even enjoy the embrace.

Veidt seemed to know the entire layout of the cruiser, every nut and bolt. An ammo

elevator to the launcher's magazine gave them, in turn, access to a utility core. In seconds, they were racing down a passageway scaled to media size, high over the heads of the preoccupied Invid.

Veidt flew them to a remote part of the cruiser's belly. They stopped before a compartment with a giant hatch. "Rem's cell," Veidt explained.

But the hatch was open. Karen and Jack piled off, rifles ready, to peer inside. The Regent's two Hellcats, having cornered Rem, spun on the intruders.

The 'Cats pounced at the Humans even as Jack and Karen brought their muzzles up blazing.

Clad in his heavy, powered battle armor, the Regent railed and raved as his cruiser's most powerful cannonades failed to have any effect on the enormous figure of Zor that stood blocking his way.

"Have my flagship lift off and open fire!" he shrieked.

As the order was relayed, a tech said, "All-Powerful One, there is an unidentified flying object approaching!"

The Regent looked at the monitor to which the tech was pointing. Sure enough, something was racing forward right along the upper hull, weaving in between gun and missile batteries, too close to the cruiser to be fired upon.

"I-I-" The Regent felt his head spin. He saw a Haydonite flying carpet with several figures riding it. As it zipped past the bridge, two resplendent objects were tossed and bounced off the forward hull just in front of the viewport.

The Regent shoved aside the crew members who were trying to see what had been dropped, and had a look for himself. There on the deck lay the two mighty collars, mounted with gems from all the Invid-dominated worlds, that his pet Hellcats had worn. The Regent let out a piercing screech, and was about to direct all fire at the fleeing carpet, when yells of horror burst from his crew.

The giant Zor was moving.

The fiery image strode forward, straight for the Land Cruiser, even as the flagship rose from the nearby starport and began firing at it with all guns. The Regent bleated in pure dread and hurled techs out of his way, charging for the bridge's hatch.

The towering, demonic Zor dove at the cruiser in apparent slow motion, arms spread and

fingers curled, as if to enfold it. The collision sent waves of light racing outward like waves in a pond when a rock is thrown in. Multicolored flames flared up along the cruiser's bow as the figure began to merge with it.

High on the hull, an emergency ejection port opened and a metallic shape shot straight up like a sub-launched missile. Riding the propulsive power of his augmentation modules, the Regent arrowed away toward his flagship.

Below him, the cruiser was already half engulfed in the destructive force of Haydon IV's defensive system. A series of explosions ripped the war machine apart like an overtaxed boiler and leveled that part of the city.

In that moment, gazing down as he ascended on his suit jets and reflecting upon the sum total of defeats and reversals, the Regent retreated into uttermost devolved depths. While his powered armor's automatics made the linkup with the flagship and guided him into its airlock, and the vessel itself lifted away from Haydon IV at maximum boost, the Regent abandoned temper tantrums and frustrated rantings for the impersonal malevolence of a serpent.

The Regis would never understand his choice of deevolution, but then she had never sampled it. She had never known how, in its purest form, the devolved state took away the pain of introspection, of reflection, of shame and regret and misgiving.

She would never know the mindless hatred and untainted hostility and the personal peace that state could bring. But for her mate, it was a chosen way of life.

His defeats were forgotten now that he had submerged his higher self; he luxuriated in a rancor so all-embracing that it satisfied him like a drug. But in that trance, contrary to the accustomed blankness, a Vision appeared. It defined itself, coming into mental focus, thrown up before the Regent's eyes by the depths of his loathing and his thirst for revenge. It was an answer to his dilemma. It was the face of General T.R. Edwards.

Like other worlds the Sentinels had visited, Haydon IV had its shrine to the godlike being after whom it had been named.

This one did not occupy a mountaintop or city plaza or polar ice cap. Rather, it stood at the center of a burnished alloy plain three hundred miles in diameter, the only feature of a landscape that was otherwise as smooth as a looking glass.

Unlike other worlds', Haydon's icon wasn't carved from ice or hewn from the living rock of a peak. Instead, a projected, ghostly image of the legendary figure stood nearly a mile high. It bore a resemblance to a Haydonite in that the features were smooth, anonymous; the arms were within the high-collared cape, so that Haydon looked very much like the

inhabitants of that world. Only the hint of flowing hair contradicted it.

The Terrans had been surprised to realize that, by Haydon's own decree, no precise image of him had ever been made. And so he remained shrouded in mystery just as the projection stood wrapped in its long cape.

The Sentinels and the freed Praxians had offered to provide an honor guard for Sarna's funeral, but Vowad and Veidt declined. Together, they boarded a small carpet and undertook the journey with the body of the beloved mate and daughter.

Soon the leveled city was left behind and the idyllic countryside of Haydon IV rolled by beneath. But the two kept their gazes straight ahead. During that long flight not a word was exchanged between the two, each being lost in his contemplation.

When at last they hovered before the projected figure, there was no need to say anything aloud. They had already communed their sorrow to the very planet, and to one another.

Nevertheless, Veidt, having picked up new customs in his travels and travails, bade the figure of Haydon, "Take her into your keeping, she who was everything in this life to me. Grant that her words were true, and that we will be together again!"

He wasn't praying to Haydon, but rather addressing a higher power that even the Haydonites only dimly understood and could not fathom by any application of mere logic.

Still, the image of Haydon moved, as the living Awareness of the planet willed it. Arms appeared from beneath the cape, and eyes, like Human eyes, or Tiresian, came into shadowy resolution. The open palms beckoned.

Sarna's body rose from the carpet, poised and erect as though she lived once more. As the father and the husband watched, she was drawn into the valley of Haydon's cupped palms.

Vowad struggled within himself, moved by the words Veidt had spoken and by the wretched grief of the moment. Sarna was gone, her essence having passed to some other plane of existence, therefore it was illogical to base decisions on what would please her. And yet...

Sarna's body had vanished into the cupped hands of Haydon. A glow rose from between them, lighting Haydon's smooth face and the sky above. The two mourners heard many voices raised in wordless music as the light intensified. Then all at once it was unbearable, and they had to look away.

When they turned back, Haydon was lowering vast, empty hands. In moments, the projection stood as it had when they appeared. They stood looking at it for long minutes.

"Veidt, I-I would like to be friends with you from now on, if you will it."

"Thank you, Vowad. It will give her great joy."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

So it's eloquence or violence,

'Cause no one believes in coincidence! The Robotones, "Protoculture Junction"

The call from his secret facility under the Royal Hall didn't awaken Edwards; he slept less and less nowadays, animated by his relentless hunger to wrest control of the REF, and by his frustration that Minmei, still in solitary confinement, was steadfast in her refusal to so much as speak to him.

His first impulse was to call his security convoy over to the Royal Hall with lights flashing and sirens wailing. But in the cautious head-on power games he was playing with Lang and the rest of the Plenepotentiary Council, he couldn't afford to attract attention to the secret advantage he held. So the trip was low-profile.

With Ghost Rider guards flanking, Edwards picked his way through the catacombs under the gargantuan Royal Hall, coming at last to the carefully guarded installations that was under his personal control.

"We have a contact signal, sir," the officer on duty explained, "but no response to our acknowledgment. We just get the same word in code."

The officer turned up the volume and the speakers murmured Edwards's name over and over.

Edwards issued terse commands. The room was cleared, leaving him alone with the apparatus. It took a bit of remembering, but he had been careful to learn how to operate the devices himself.

"Edwards here."

There was a moment's silence, then he found himself looking into the face of the Invid Regent.

I knew it! Edwards exulted. Perhaps it was in some measure a function of the strange insights he had gotten when he had taken that brain-boost from the captured Invid equipment, but perhaps it was just as much a matter of his innate suspicion. In any case,

he had never believed that the creature strangled on Tirol by Tesla was the real Regent.

"You took your time answering, Human," the Regent said.

"I'm here now. What do you want?"

Each was inspecting the other with the same thought: this fool could be the answer to my problem!

"There have been...unfortunate mishaps," the Regent said. "Your enemies and mine now hold Haydon IV."

Edwards bit back an insult; he had to appear absolutely calm. The failure of his Ghost Riders to return from the pursuit of Breetai had been clear enough proof that the Zentraedi had probably linked up with the damned Sentinels. But to hear that they had triumphed again was almost enough to make him doubt his own high destiny to rule all Creation.

But no; here was the Regent, a sign that Edwards was, indeed, the Chosen of the Gods.

Edwards resisted the impulse to taunt the Regent; he would need the creature's goodwill for a while longer yet. "That's too bad. What are we going to do about it?"

The Regent hid his satisfaction at hearing that Edwards would willingly be a part of the Regent's web of machinations. "I am on my way to the Home Hive on Optera now. Once there, I will contact you with details of our combined effort. The Protoculture willing, we shall wipe the Sentinels out of existence."

"I look forward to that day, my good friend," Edwards said in a butter-wouldn't-melt voice.

The two broke contact with an identical silent thought: Just wait until I no longer need you, you gullible simpleton!

On Haydon IV, the sorrow over Sarna's death and the deaths of thousands of others, and the destruction of Glike, was lessened somewhat by the somber satisfaction of having evicted the Invid.

Once the Regent departed in his flagship, the Invid simply lost their will to fight. The mopping-up hadn't taken long. By the time Breetai's Valivarre and the two REF cruisers were making planetfall, most of the fighting was finished.

They found a city where triumphant amazons were celebrating their liberation, patrolling the city with weapons in their hands and heads held high. The Haydonites, too, had undergone a change: gone were the days when they could stomach Invid tyranny over

themselves or others. The ruins of Glike had the air of a monument to the trans-species hunger for freedom.

In the wake of the struggle, the other Sentinels were left in various moods and states. Vince Grant and his wife hugged, rejoicing in the victory, but were melancholy in the knowledge that there was so much more yet to do.

Jack Baker and Karen Penn, watching over Rem in a Hall of Healing, found that they didn't despise one another quite so much. "Glad you made it, Penn," Jack blurted.

"Thanks for...for riding to the rescue, Lancelot," she tried to joke, but she couldn't bring herself to say it lightly as their eyes met.

Across from them, Janice Em was gazing down on Rem, too. She saw images of Rem and Zor and-something else; impulses fought in her for dominance. Although it was contrary to her programming, an undeniable tide of emotion welled up in her every time she looked at the clone. She longed for a chance to ask Lang what it all meant, but despaired of ever having the chance; the war seemed to have taken on a life of its own.

For Breetai there were cheers and accolades, and kisses, too, though his sixty-foot height made those a little impractical.

Lisa didn't care; she insisted that the Zentraedi lift her high so that she could plant a wet one on his cheek. She had the interesting experience of seeing one of the universe's biggest blushes up close. There was a tallish female Zentraedi close-by, someone Lisa had heard called Kazianna, who frowned a bit at Lisa's display of affection.

Lisa understood the possessive look she was seeing on Kazianna's face, and lingered a moment, literally grabbing Breetai's ear. "Well! Congratulations!" she said slyly. The ear grew red and warm in her grasp, but Breetai was grinning like a schoolboy.

As for Lisa and Rick, there was something between them that hadn't been there before the Haydon campaign. It was the unweighted love that had come into being when it was proven in battle that there was no inequality of courage-or concern-between them. Each was an accomplished fighter now, and it was understood that each would have dangers to face. And so each felt equal love for the other, and apprehensions, and pride. And each felt the immeasurable value of every moment they shared.

The Karbarrans and Garudans managed to contact the members of their respective races who were on Haydon IV, and enjoyed the particular pleasures of hometown manners. It pleased the other Sentinels to know that word of the exploits of Lron, Crysta, Kami, Learna, and the rest would be carried back to their homes.

Max Sterling took no part in the impromptu celebrations because he spent every waking

moment by Miriya's bedside and often slept there as well. She had lost consciousness shortly after the Regent's flagship lifted off, and had sunk into a deep coma less than an hour later. Even the Haydonite healers were mystified by her condition, which was caused by some interaction of her impossible pregnancy, exposure to the Garudan atmosphere, and the exertions of the battle in Glike.

Tesla and Burak had reappeared. Tesla was now taller, more Humaniform. Most notably, he had a mouth, and spoke with it. Things were so disorganized in Glike that there wasn't much time for comment. But everyone who saw him groaned, either out loud or mentally. Jeez, he was bad enough as it was! But now that he's got a mouth to shoot off...

Breetai's news that Tesla had strangled the simulagent had everyone looking at the scientist with renewed suspicion, of course, and there was vague talk of bringing some kind of war-crimes charge against him. But Tesla managed to deflect it, for the moment anyway, by pointing out that his victim was an Invid espionage agent and that, in any case, Tesla himself was technically a POW. The waters thus muddied, he remained at liberty and at least nominally a Sentinels collaborator.

Tesla had considered parting ways with the Sentinels, but faced the conclusion that his key to Ultimate Transformation lay in visiting the other worlds that had felt Haydon's personal touch-Spheris and Peryton. And the only reasonably safe way to do that lay in the company of the Sentinels. Besides, trying an escape would risk the wrath of the Karbarrans, the Praxians, the Humans, and the rest, and even with his enhanced powers, Tesla secretly trembled to think of what that meant.

And so when he was finally brought before the leadership, Bela pinking him in the side with a shortsword, Tesla deflected their accusations and inquiries about the changes the Flower's Fruit had wrought in him.

Instead, he said in his blandest voice, "We have a common cause; you must put aside your hatred and mistrust, and work with me in friendship."

The core group of the Sentinels were in favor of roasting him alive, or at least putting a leash and exploding collar back on him, but the very bylaws of the Sentinels, and of Haydon militated against that. And so, when the Sentinels came together to deliberate on their next move, Tesla had his say.

"My people are a peaceful race; who can deny this? Did we not live in tranquility for a million eons, until outsiders taught us crime and sin and hate? As the Regent and Regis were deranged by this experience, so have our rulers warped the Invid.

"Have I myself not committed murder most foul for your cause? I, who never raised a hand in violence to any living thing before in my life? But as you are willing to wage war for peace, so I have done in my own way."

There were angry faces all around the new conference hall that had been raised by Robotech mecha and Haydonite science there in the ruins of Glike. Many glowered and murmured, but there was no arguing the facts. Janice Em, wearing the aspect of her android self as she sometimes did these days, looked over at Rem to see his reaction, wondering what the opinion of the genetic heir of Zor would be. Rem's face was resolutely unrevealing.

As for Breetai, he was studying Janice Em and wondering about Lang's motives in creating her. Fortunately for the android and her creator, the Sentinels seemed to regard her as their ally and comrade in arms, rather than as some REF version of the simulagent.

Tesla's strange new mouth, almost doll-like, formed his words with an uncanny grace and lilt.

"But my people deserve a chance to redeem themselves and make restitution!" Tesla pressed on. "I have had a chance to learn peace and restraint and love in my time among the Sentinels, and-"

Here his voice broke in calculated fashion and he made a show of holding back tears. "Destroy the Regent and the Regis, yes! But return to us the Flower of Life, or give us whatever world upon which the Flower choses to prosper. And then we will be the harmless, inward-turning, compassionate Invid of old. A thousand generations of genetic heritage call out to us to be so! And if Fate grants it, I would take humble pleasure in making my small contribution to the Destiny of my species.

"We were given life, as you were! Let us live!" That subject was tabled for the time being, but the Sentinels leadership exchanged troubled looks. Tesla might be a complete moron militarily, but he was a consummate politician.

Maybe the two go hand in hand, Rick thought, reflecting back to Senator Russo and his ilk on Earth.

Other matters came to the fore and were more quickly and decisively dealt with.

Breetai argued strongly that all the Sentinels, liberated Praxians included, should return to Tirol to fight Edwards's scurrilous charges. It looked like he would carry the question, not through guile or politicking, but simply through the force of his conviction.

Rick looked around, wondering who was going to muster the counterargument. But he remembered that Baldan of Spheris was dead, and Teal, the other leading Spherisian, was still closeted and caring for Baldan's death-growth. The only notable Perytonian, Burak, had been silent and impossible to talk to ever since the Garudan campaign,

somehow under Tesla's spell.

And Spheris and Peryton were the last two worlds on the Sentinels' tactical charts, the last two from which the Invid must be uprooted. Rick scanned the room and realized that there were few Spherisians-and none who would speak-and no Perytonians at all, aside from silent Burak.

Rick was as surprised as anyone when he heard himself address the assembly.

"I've fought against Great Breetai and alongside him, and in all this time, to my recollection, I've never actually found the nerve to contradict him."

At that comment, there were rumblings of laughter from the Zentraedi, seated like Norse gods in immense chairs around the walls of the room. Kazianna put her hand on Breetai's shoulder, and Breetai placed his hand on hers but kept his attention on Rick Hunter. Size meant nothing in the arena of debate, and Breetai, as canny as any Borgia or Caesar, knew that.

"We congratulate ourselves for the work we've done, as we should," Rick went on. "But what about Spheris? And Peryton? Things there are as bad as they were here on Haydon IV, don't you think? Or maybe worse?

"So the choice is between going on to end the misery the Invid are inflicting on those planets, or going back to clear our names. Well, here's my vote: I have to live with the memories of what I do, or don't do, not what people say about me. I say we go on, and Edwards be damned."

He resumed his seat amid an almost equal mix of cheers and objections. But Lisa was looking at him with a peculiar cant to her chin.

No more barnstorming, live-for-today, seat-of-the-pants daredevil, she thought. He's someone else now, like we all are. Older but wiser. And yet he was arguing the cause he had argued against before, when Burak wanted to turn the timetable upside down. A sense of fairness, maybe.

Lisa reached over beneath the table and gave her husband's hand a squeeze. Rick looked a little startled, then gave her a squeeze back.

After the lesser questions were resolved, the session settled into a collision between the two factions. Breetai's point was a valid one, even a frightening one: if Edwards got control of the council and undermined Lang's authority, the general might wrest control of the new fleet of space-fold ships. That in turn could make him unstoppable.

But there were many who felt as Rick did, having fought the Invid oppression on several

worlds now. Among the most determined of these were the freed Praxian slaves.

The dispute cut across lines of species, gender, and even family, however. The goliath voices of the Zentraedi and the roars of the Karbarrans and the objections of the Humans and the other races' outcries threatened to turn the debate to a riot.

Rick had barely spoken since his first statement. But when it seemed the Sentinels were about to lose their sense of purpose and revert to sheer quarreling, he rose again.

"Um, I don't see where there's anything we can do but compromise. Someone has to answer Edwards's charges, and someone has to fight for Spheris and Peryton, now!"

He dipped into his pocket and pulled out a good-luck piece, a Kennedy half-dollar his father had given him. "What d'you say, Breetai? I'd trust you with either mission. Heads, you go to Spheris and I face Edwards?"

He showed both sides of the coin, to prove there was no fix.

Breetai had eased off his chair to kneel by the table. His face cracked wide in the first true smile he had allowed himself in some time. Breetai held out his palm, as big as a desktop. "Flip it here, Rick Hunter."

Rick did. Breetai caught it, clapping his palms together, and opened his hands again to show them all. It was tails.

There would be plenty to do tomorrow, but for the time being, everyone needed an adjournment.

When all the others were dispersed and they were strolling under strange constellations, Kazianna Hesh took Breetai's hand. "It's not the outcome you looked for, I know, my love, but still I think it's not an unfair one."

"Perhaps. But I tell you this: Edwards will be stopped, even if I have to do it alone."

She kissed his cheek. "Breetai, you will never face any danger alone again-not while I draw breath."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The military scholars missed the point entirely. Max and Miriya, indisputably the greatest Robotech warriors of all, were serving the source of their prowess by laying down their arms for a time. Life made them do it-the life growing within the onetime Quadrono

commander, fathered by her erstwhile enemy. Life, triumphing over death.

Theresa Duvall, Wingmates: the Story of Max and Miriya Sterling

The work to rebuild Glike and repair damage done to other parts of the planet during the terrible clash between Inorganics and antibodies had begun literally while the dust was still settling.

If Haydon IV's world-size instrumentality had been intact, it could have accomplished the rebuilding at a miraculous rate. But much of that instrumentality was either disabled or obliterated or completely exhausted. The Haydonites threw themselves into the job with a religious fervor, though, and they had help.

The tens of thousands of freed Praxians were among the most willing to help. The warrior women were a homeless race now that their own planet had been destroyed in the upheavals following the Invid conquest and Genesis Pit experiments. Many thought sparsely populated Haydon IV might offer them a fresh start.

It was plain that Arla-Non longed to lead her amazons on a holy war against the Invid, but since only a few could go along on Ark Angel, it was the queen's duty to stay with the majority of her subjects, to guide and govern them. Arla-Non expressed every faith in Bela, though, and confirmed that in rituals that the Praxians barred all outsiders from attending.

The contingent that would return to face Edwards's charges before the council was led by Breetai, along with Vince Grant and Jonathan Wolff. While many of the Diamondback and Joker REF fighters wanted to volunteer for service to fill the depleted ranks of the Sentinels fliers, that was voted down. If Edwards made his power play, it might require every loyal pilot in the REF to put down a coup.

Jean Grant, like Max Sterling, refused to leave the planet as long as Miriya was still in a coma and unable to be moved. Miriya had stabilized, but the outlook was still bleak. Nevertheless, Jean had immersed herself in learning the healing arts of the Haydonites, blending them with her own in the hope of curing Miriya.

Cabell had wavered, thinking that he could be of some help if he stayed, but the others said his insights to the functioning of Protoculture and Robotechnology might be more important than ever in the battles ahead. He spent a night closeted alone with his thoughts, and announced in the morning that he would be remaining behind. Rick thought that the old sage had sensed something important about Miriya's situation, but Cabell refused to talk about his motives.

As for Max, he decided that rather than simply sitting and waiting, he would devote himself to the effort to rebuild the planet.

"I'm sure Jean and Cabell and the Haydonites can make her well again," Max told Rick as the Sentinels prepared to depart for Spheris. "You'll see. By the time we're set for the final assault on Optera, I'll be back in a VT and so will Miriya."

"I know you will," Rick said with conviction he didn't really feel. "We can't have you guys missing out on the grand finale."

The two shook hands and Lisa kissed Max's cheek. Soon, the SDF-7 class cruiser was lifting off. Gaps in the rank and file of their fighters had been filled by several hundred amazon volunteers, but in Rick's opinion the force was still woefully inadequate in terms of media.

Originally, production facilities on Karbarra and-it had been hoped-Haydon IV were to have kept the Sentinels' complement of war machines at full strength. But production problems had arisen on Karbarra: a fundamental inability of the Invid-designed manufacturing equipment to turn out satisfactory Earth-style mecha, no matter what adjustments the Karbarrans tried. As for Haydon IV, it simply wouldn't have media-production capability soon enough to be of any use.

But Sentinels' mecha had played very little part in freeing Haydon IV and, from all reports, would be even less useful on Spheris. Time would tell: Rick and Lisa were anxious to survey the situation on Spheris, at the very least, as soon as possible. Like many of their companions, they now grew frustrated and ill at ease in between blows against the Invid empire.

T.R. Edwards knew a particular triumph as the special council meeting convened. There was only one item on the agenda: Edwards's renewed request for martial law and what amounted to emergency dictatorial powers. To the general's vast satisfaction, Lang and the other opposition had been either unable or unwilling to block the meeting.

At Edwards's urging, the entire session was being transmitted over the Base Tirol public-information channel. He was gambling that, in addition to winning over the council, he could get the subordinate officers and noncoms and enlisted ratings of the REF to hail him as well, paving the way for his eventual takeover.

Now Edwards made his case again, complete with charts and display-screen aids. The excuse this time was that Edwards promised he could squeeze more monopole ore from Fantoma if the military was given complete run of the operation, up to and including drafting Tiresian laborers. Lang and Dr. Penn didn't even seem to be inclined to dispute the facts and figures Edwards's people trumped up, and Exedore had not even deigned to attend.

All was going well when the wrist communicator on Lang's forearm toned. He sent an

acknowledging signal through it and waited politely for Edwards to finish. But before the vote could be called, Lang got the floor. "My colleague, Lord Exedore, informs me that my communications center has received a signal that is of central importance in this issue."

With that, Exedore's face appeared in the central screen, a billboard-size panel that dominated one end of the council chambers. "Here is the transmission received just a short time ago."

Before Edwards could object, a familiar and, to Edwards, despised face-as handsome as a media star's-appeared. "This is Colonel Jonathan Wolff, transmitting from the bridge of the REF vessel Valivarre. With me are Commander Vince Grant and Lord Breetai. We have with us all the monopole ore that was mined on Fantoma.

"Escorting us are the SDF cruisers Tokugawa and Jutland, which accompanied us on operations involved in the liberation of the planet Haydon IV from Invid domination. It is our intention to turn over the monopole ore to Dr. Lang's production facility and to answer the charges being made against us and other Sentinels.

"All we ask is that the council now, by public vote, insure us the fair hearing to which we are entitled by the REF Code of Military Justice and by United Earth Government law. Members of the council, we await your word."

Wolff's expression softened a bit. "You're our friends, our comrades in arms-some of you are our loved ones. We haven't played you false." He showed just a touch of that debonair smile of his.

Lang was back on his feet as the message ended. "They won't have to wait long for my decision! I say yes, let these people have their fair and public hearing!"

When the question was called, Justine Huxley, Obstat, Rheinehardt, and others opposed to Edwards were quick and loud in their vote of support. Edwards's faction on the council did some grumbling, but most either abstained or went with the momentum of the opposition. Few were inclined to deny the Sentinels due process in a role-call vote. Also, they all knew how critical the monopole ore was.

Edwards had gone white with anger. That blithering idiot, the Regent! Why hadn't he warned me that this might happen?

For that matter, why hadn't Edwards's own communications-intercept people discovered this plot? It pointed to the possibility that Lang was aware of the technical eavesdropping Edwards's organization was doing, and had exploited it to his, Lang's, advantage, lulling Edwards and then using some unknown "back channel" of contact with Breetai.

This was a major setback, and one piped through the orbiting SDF-3 as well as all of the

REF installations on Tirol-Edwards was rocked physically by a sudden realization. Wolff's face and voice had gone out over the PI channel!

Minmei's jailers had turned some switch that activated the telescreen built into the wall of her cell just as T.R. Edwards made his triumphant entry to the council chambers. The screen, installed in the cells for interrogation, agitprop, and "motivational" purposes, had always been dark before.

Minmei watched Edwards's performance with a trapped animal's dumb despair. The appearance of Jonathan Wolff convinced her that she had at last lost every shred of sanity.

But it was too real, too vivid, to be a dream or hallucination. She slowly rose from her narrow bunk, crossing the little cell, and touched her fingertips to the screen. Tears washed her cheeks.

She heard his words, "You're...our loved ones. We haven't played you false." Minmei closed her eyes and pressed her lips to Wolff's lips on the screen, sobbing.

She had been shut away in her quarters on the Ark Angel all through the Haydon IV campaign, unable to break away from her own private struggle.

At her request, the ship's techs and artisans had made the compartment as much an imitation of her crystal world as they could with mirrors, prisms, and fanciful formations that suggested underground strata. There, Teal of Spheris labored over the brilliant, multifaceted form that was all that remained of her fellow Spherisian, Baldan.

Teal had refused to touch or even look at it at first, after Baldan was trapped in his merging with the geological substance of Praxis. Baldan had been a fellow prisoner of hers, in the clutches of the Invid, nothing more! To touch the thing that had looked like a football-size crystal meant taking on responsibility for it, and meant entering a rapport with Baldan's essence that would make them mates.

It wasn't fair! Teal had no desire to be responsible for a child or be in rapport with Baldan. She had never asked to be involved in this mad Sentinels crusade! Teal had her own plans, her own life to live.

And yet, when she had stood looking down at it, Teal had known that if she failed to carry out the rite of Shaping, Baldan would pass away forever and the egg would lose the forces of life it carried. With strange tears in her transparent eyes, she took up her ceremonial blade and began Shaping.

And she stayed at it all through the voyage, and the battle on Haydon IV, when the SDF-7 flagship could do little but hold its station. Teal laboriously calculated each cut and guided the newly-carved Spherisian in its growth. It was a trial as taxing as any gestation period or rite of passage. But at last, near the end of her strength, Teal looked upon a healthy adolescent male who was the image of Baldan and still growing quickly.

She wasn't surprised when Bela, returning from Praxis, requested entry to her compartment. It was Bela, along with Miriya Sterling, who had returned to the Praxian caverns to retrieve the egg when Teal refused to. Bela who, absurdly, had threatened to raise the child herself, when the amazon hadn't the first idea about Humanoid children, much less creatures of living mineral.

Teal granted permission to enter. Bela, usually rowdy and often gruff, was subdued and tentative. But when she looked down on the child, she was aglow. "But-why are his eyes closed? Why does he not move?"

"He has been regaining the knowledge that Baldan left behind in him," Teal explained. "And preparing himself for true birth. I waited, hoping you and Miriya could both be here."

Teal explained what must be done. Each took one of the statuelike figure's cold hands, kneeling by him. Where a Spherisian parent would ordinarily have done so alone, Teal had the Praxian lean close, their heads together, so that they could both breathe upon the child's mouth together.

Once, twice-and on the third, a strange aura of blue radiance leapt from Teal's mouth to the infant's. Bela felt the odd sensation of Spherisian life-force stirring about and through her.

The cold hands tingled now, not with heat so much as with animating force. Some eldritch piezoelectric effect, Bela wondered? The fingers were no longer stiff, but supple in the manner of living crystal. Bela's Praxian eyes, like those of a bird of prey, grew wide, watching the boy's eyes flutter open.

"Wh-what have you called him?"

Teal held her son's hand in her own. "I call him Baldan. Baldan II. I couldn't bear to name him anything else."

She sighed. "Love is so inconvenient."

Veidt had also insisted on coming along on the continuation of the mission, saying that Haydon IV held too many sad memories. No one had any objections, but every other Haydonite had elected to stay behind and rebuild the planet. Rick suspected Veidt

preferred it that way.

Getting the new Praxian recruits squared away was something the Hunters felt safe in delegating to Gnea, Bela, and the other amazon veterans, plus ship's officers. The couple managed to get free of other official responsibilities after the initial confusion and returned at long last to the quarters they shared.

Rick leaned his head back against the hatch once it closed. "A lo-oong day at the beach, babe." Lisa chortled tiredly and nodded.

They hadn't been there since the start of the Garudan mission; it was odd to be back in the quiet, by the bed they had shared too long a time ago.

A change was apparent in Lisa. Though she still wore the body-suit uniform of the REF, her damaged government-issue boots had been replaced with a pair of Praxian footgear, like over-the-knee moccasin wrappings, of soft hide resembling chamois. Her long hair was held back with a knotted band of crimson, satiny fabric Bela had given her.

She also wore a weapons belt around her hips, with a pistol tied down to one thigh and a long Praxian fighting knife to the other. Many Sentinels wore sidearms as a matter of course, but this was something new in Lisa.

In fact, Rick was packing, too. "We're a little overdressed, aren't we?" he asked, unbuckling his gunbelt.

His piratical-looking wife gave him a heavy-lidded gaze. "Well, surely some up-and-coming young Robotech admiral can figure out an appropriate plan of action to solve that problem, can't he?"

He smiled. "Haven't you heard? Night maneuvers are a Hunter specialty."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

He had his own personal bestiary of unacceptable words, and chief among them was "defeat."

Constance Wildman, When Evil Had its Day: A Biography of T.R. Edwards

Spheris presented a complicated skein of problems unlike those of any other Invid-held planet on the Sentinels' hit list.

"We can't take any Protoculture weapons down there," Teal explained at a strategy meeting. "To do so would mean disaster."

"What're we supposed to fight 'em with, spit?" somebody groused from the sidelines.

Teal looked around toward the source of the voice, her eerie transparent eyes flashing. "Spheris is a planet of crystal structures," she snapped. "Protoculture-weapons emissions evoke certain harmonics from the very texture of my homeworld. Fire a beam and you're very likely to find that it will come back to hit you. Or it could sunder some of the delicate latticework that makes up the planet, and cause great death and destruction among my people."

"Hold, hold," Lron grumbled. "How then do the rattering Invid operate? Do they not use mecha?"

Teal nodded. "As I said in the intel debriefing, Protoculture-based mecha do no damage, because they're not as focused, as concentrated, as a weapons beam. But even the Invid dare not use weapons actuated by Protoculture, and so they employ a variety of conventional armaments. But those armaments are very effective."

"So are ours," Bela put in, casually flicking her thumb across the razor edge of her shortsword. She was also wearing a Badger assault pistol and a few grenades to complement her Praxian arms.

Others seconded what she had said: the Karbarrans with their pneumatic long-guns; the Garudans who had taken so quickly to REF conventional infantry weapons; Jack and Karen, who had seen for themselves that Invid could be hurt or stopped with projectile firearms if those firearms were used just right.

"You're not listening!" Teal barked. "The Invid will have the advantage in firepower. So, we must exploit our advantages to the fullest. And the Sentinels' main advantage is my and Baldan's access to the Crystal Highways."

With this Teal put her hand on the shoulder of her son, Baldan II. He sat by her side, gazing around at the Sentinels gathered at the meeting table and standing in ranks around it.

In mere weeks, he had grown until he was nearly his mother's height, a broad-shouldered, lean-waisted, post-adolescent wearing a loincloth. People had simply taken to calling him by his father's name, leaving out the numerical. Talking to him, Lisa had found, was uncannily like talking to the original Baldan at times, but at others it was like conversing with a newborn.

"But you won't be going in blind," Teal said. "My son and I will descend first, to scout the way and ferret out our enemy's weaknesses."

There were some low-decibel remarks when the gathering heard that. Teal had never

been very enthusiastic about the Sentinels' war-had stayed out of most of the fighting with a demeanor that had won her the nickname "Permafrost Princess."

But here was the Permafrost Princess, in the wake of Baldan's death and a motherhood she had detested at first, ready to take her son down on a first-in team op. Ready to lay her life and her son's, most emphatically, on that well-known line.

Rick rose now, in the midst of a lot of murmured debate among those present. "We have to apply everything we've learned to beat the Invid, because they've had us outgunned and outnumbered at every turn. Now, the subject populations of the planets we've liberated have always worked in our favor, and they've tipped the balance at least twice, maybe three times. So our most important trump cards here are Teal and Baldan.

"They will be delivered to the surface of Spheris by a stealth-insertion drop capsule and employ their innate skills to merge with the Crystal Highways. They will gather information and attempt to raise popular resistance, while we hold station and wait.?

"They will communicate the results to us and coordinate our assault. If anyone has objections to this general outline, I want to hear them now."

Moments passed', while the Sentinels looked at one another and at Teal and Baldan II. But no one spoke.

Baldan, for his part, looked over to where Karen Penn was sitting with some of the younger REF turks along the sidelines. He had already heard of her deeds; his mother was rather taken with them. Karen was talking with Gnea and another young amazon. She suddenly looked up to meet Baldan's gaze, and he turned his face away, a radiance rising in his cheeks for no reason he could understand.

Rick Hunter was still speaking.

"You all know the tactical importance of this planetary objective. The Invid have found a way to mass-synthesize their nutrient fluid here-the best they have. Apparently, it's like high-octane to them. If we can cut off that supply, we'll be nailing the lid on their coffin."

He looked over to where Burak sat, at the edge of the shadows. The thing that was Tesla, the thing that made every Sentinel uneasy no matter how it protested its faith to their cause, had failed to appear for the planning session.

"And so at last we will have crippled their sources of new mecha"-Rick ticked off on his fingers-"their sources of new technology, their shipyards and their life-support supply line. We'll be set up for the campaign on Peryton."

Burak looked up suddenly at the mention of his home-world, like a thief surprised in the

act. Rick met his gaze and wished he knew what was going on in the young buck's head.

One thing was apparent to everyone. Armageddon lay ahead, and not too far off.

There was almost a firefight between the REF factions.

Edwards was determined to have a face-to-face with Lang, but the security people at Lang's enormous complex refused entry to the convoy of limos, armored vehicles, and troop carriers. The Ghost Veritechs flying high cover were warned away on pain of getting their tails shot off, and no one was inclined to test the perimeter defenses of the Robotech sorcerer.

It was an open secret among Humans, and Tiresians as well, that battle lines were being drawn for a contest of wills and/or a power play in the REF. The surviving Ghost Riders and quite a few others beside were rallying to Edwards's banner, but as many and more were standing by Lang and the council members who were in accord with him.

In addition to Lang's own security force there were Jokers and Diamondbacks, people from the technical and support units, Destroid types from the Old Ironsides and Walking Steel squadrons, and infantry doggies like the men and women from Hell's Hoplites.

Many were still straddling the fence, though, and Edwards's forces were organized, highly disciplined and motivated, and loyal to him alone. He and his opposition had one another in an uneasy stalemate, but everyone knew it couldn't last for long.

So, the request for a meeting with Lang, in Lang's own stronghold, had come as something of a surprise. The obvious lessons of the Trojan Horse gave the scientist pause, but the off chance that a power struggle could be averted made him agree to the confrontation in the end.

Edwards's VTs veered off in compliance with the warnings, and the general himself stepped forth from his armored limo once it was inside a garage-bunker. Edwards looked around warily before exiting the car; he had begun sensing some troubling and lethal presence near him in recent days-a menacing shadow he could never quite see out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes he thought it was a phantom image brought on by his brain-boost, and other times he was sure that there was somebody poised in the darkness, waiting to kill him.

But he had no qualms about going into Lang's den, really; fools like the good doctor always played by the rules, which was why they were always fated to lose.

Soon, the two were closeted together in Lang's inner sanctum, an alchemist's lair of bizarre experimental Robotech equipment, glowing retorts, and weird holographic

displays of flora and fauna from that galactic region.

"We're wasting time and resources with all this bickering." Edwards got around to his pitch quickly. "I only want what's best for the REF! For Earth and the Human race!"

All the while, he was monitoring the sensors that had been built into his skullpiece, reading the alphanumerics and indicators that were projected onto the inside of his eye-lens. It was the crowning achievement of his technical staff, the ultimate debugger.

Edwards knew that Lang had several monitoring systems that the scientist thought would catch every word and movement in the room, but the remotes built into Edwards's belt and epaulets and the fabric of his dress uniform would counter all that. Lang was going to find himself with a lot of blank tape.

"How can I prove that to you and the others?" Edwards finished.

Lang hadn't batted an eye. "Remain neutral during the hearing of Wolff and the others, since you have no real evidence. Put all your forces under the direct command of the council. And most importantly, allow me and my teams to examine the Invid artifacts, or remains, or whatever else there is, under the Royal Hall."

"No!" Edwards forgot himself, his fist pounding a table so that minor items leapt off it and scattered on the floor.

"No?" Lang echoed mildly. "And why not, General? Nothing to hide, surely? So, when you permit me to investigate the catacombs there, which your people so closely guard, then we can talk about your dutiful beneficence toward the REF."

"You stay away from there, you damn black magician!" the general hollered.

"And another thing," Lang said mildly. "Major Carpenter and the Earth expedition are safely away. The warning's gone forth, and there is nothing you can do about it."

The general was stunned for a moment. He had had no idea that any of the new SDF-7 vessels had been fitted with a spacefold drive! And now one was on its way to Earth, commanded by an officer loyal to the council and to Lang, imperiling all Edwards's grand designs.

The general, provoked beyond words, lurched at the scientist, hands out to choke him.

Suddenly, Lang's hands were clamped around Edwards's wrists with a strength that threatened to crush them. The general was being forced back and down to his knees. There was a wild moment in which Edwards realized that Lang's strength wasn't Human-that Lang could quite easily kill him.

Edwards had come into Lang's bailiwick without bodyguards, though, because he was sure he had read the man. "Go...ahead," he gritted. "Finish it, if you think you can! Murder me! Isn't that what your precious Shapings are all about?"

The tremendous pressure from the scientist's grip fell away, and Edwards was left to rub numbed wrists. He laughed a little hysterically. "No, you can't, can you? That wouldn't be kosher with the Shapings of the Protoculture, would it?" He cackled to himself, struggling to his feet.

"Stop your subversion now," Lang said in a near monotone, "before there's any more bloodshed. Adhere to your oath, and abandon these megalomaniacal dreams."

Edwards drew himself up, lips coming away from his locked teeth. He would perhaps never again have a chance to tell Lang off in private; this would be the only moment when the two stood alone together out of the spotlight, as it were.

"Here's the oath I'll serve," he said in a voice so low it was barely audible. But as he spoke it became louder. "I swear to kill Wolff. I swear to exterminate Rick and Lisa Hunter and Breetai, after I've made them suffer enough. The rest of you will either bow at my feet or die. I swear to have Obstat and Huxley and all the rest of them on the council as my personal slaves-"

It was on the tip of his tongue to say that he meant to subjugate Minmei, but that secret he managed to contain. "I swear to have the galaxy as my personal domain."

He backed away, flexing partially paralyzed fingers. "I swear revenge."

Lang didn't pursue him; indeed, Lang stood with hands locked behind his back now. "Then there's nothing to discuss. But-one last question, if you will, General."

Edwards flashed a grin like a shark's. "What?"

Lang's eyebrows met. "I understand why you despise Rick Hunter; his connection to your old nemesis, Roy Fokker, makes that obvious. But whence comes this loathing of Lisa Hayes Hunter? What has she ever done to you?"

Edwards forgot the pain, letting his hands fall to his sides. "You'll find out when the oh-so-saintly Hunters do: when it's too late."

He turned his back on Lang, striding out of the room so fast that the door barely had time to get out of his way.

Lang made sure the door was secure, then turned toward a dim corner of his sanctum.

"Scott, did you get all that?"

Scott Bernard, Lang's apprentice and godson, emerged-a slender, dark-haired, unsmiling kid of thirteen or so, small for his age. "The machines are in some sort of flux, Doctor."

Heels clacking on the hardtop, Edwards walked back toward his limo as his personal bodyguards fell in beside him. The wrist module still read true; he laughed.

Nothing I say can be held against me!

That left a number of other concerns, but suddenly the most pressing among them was Minmei. Edwards made a rasping, pantherish sound as he slid into his limo.

God! It would be so easy to break her will by physical or chemical means-to turn her into something that would obey his every word and whim, satisfy his every hunger.

The hell of it was he wanted Minmei, not some brainwiped zombie that looked and talked like her. He wanted her to love him.

And she would. If he had to turn the universe upside down and shake it like a toy to make her do so, she would love him.

The limo rolled out under the security spotlights, flanked by security vehicles, about to swoop under the security umbrella of Ghost VTs.

"Wait!"

Surface-effect braking thrusters blared; people pulled guns and Guardian-mode fighters swooped in, while the security net crackled with confused transmissions.

Edwards was out of the limo virtually over the lap of a hulking bodyguard. "Did you see him? There, up there*"

But the spot to which he was pointing, the top of a nearby building, was empty. Even as VT spotlights converged on it, he could see that.

Adams was out of the front seat. "What was it, sir?"

Edwards kept his eyes trained on the spot. Don't let them see you sweat! You can't afford to show any weakness!

"Nothing; a trick of the light. Let's get 'em rolling."

When the convoy was moving again, he replayed the split-second glimpse and couldn't convince himself that he had been wrong.

A human figure, poised on the roof almost nonchalantly. Watching.

Waiting...

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The frictions among the Sentinels were many, and the Grail of defeating the Regent was sometimes the single thing that kept them from a disastrous falling-out.

It is noteworthy that none of them noticed how immune Tesla grew to their irritability, frustration, retribution, and so on. They were physical warriors, under attack-though they didn't know it-from a metaphysical foe who'd gotten inside their own lines.

Ann London, Ring of Iron: The Sentinels in Conflict

hat's the matter, Lieutenant Commander Baker? Don't I look 'strac'?"

Jack Baker eyed Gnea. "I, uh, I just wish my academy commandant could see you, is all."

Such an encounter would offer a chance to brush up on his cardiopulmonary resuscitation technique, Jack figured, because Commodore Steinfeld would certainly have a heart attack if she ever got a glance at Gnea.

Just as Lisa had taken to wearing Praxian accessories, most Sentinels pretty much dressed as they saw fit. Prolonged campaigning had seen to it that virtually nobody had a regulation wardrobe anymore, and people wore what came to hand or caught their fancy.

A case in point was Gnea. The ringmail G-string and studded dragonskin halter top were in keeping with Praxian fashion, but the REF dress uniform jacket was a bit of a shock. The high-waisted mess jacket was decked out with brush epaulets, decorations and ribbons, fourrageres, and insignia.

She pirouetted to show off her new acquisition. "Commander Grant's exec and I are just about the same size, so we swapped," she said, brushing the embroidery on her cuffs. Jack wondered how the economy-size Lieutenant Commander Shimoda was enjoying her new gryphon-fur shawl. Certainly Gnea, a six-foot-four teenager with legs that wouldn't quit, did things for that jacket that, in Jack's private opinion, merited a medal.

"Anyway, what did you want to see me about, Jack?"

He realized guiltily that he had been admiring her long-waisted figure and gave a start, glancing around by reflex and expecting Karen Penn to be scowling at him. Dammit! The

two were at one another's throat as often as they were caught up in their romantic friendship, and Karen had certainly never said or done anything proprietary. But somehow, he found, he couldn't look at another woman anymore without the fear of being clobbered.

"The admiral's noticed that Tesla's been keeping a low profile since the Haydon IV tea party," he said. "In fact, nobody's seen him. For that matter, Burak's been conspicuously out of sight, too. So I figured I'd sort of take a stroll and hunt them up."

Gnea had been a confidant of Burak's, at least back when the Sentinels first showed up on Tirol. So, enlisting her in the project was one of the first things that had come to Jack's mind.

"Yes, I noticed that," Gnea said with a pensive look on her face. "It's time someone found out just what those two are up to, isn't it?" She fell in next to him and they started off, she a half-head taller but both of them comfortable with each other's company.

"Burak and I don't talk much anymore, you know," the amazon went on. "I just-once he became acquainted with Tesla, he started talking like some kind of savior. It was one thing to sympathize with him but a completely different one to put up with that-what would Humans call it? Napoleonic complex?"

"I dunno," Jack said. "I majored in Wood Shop."

Gnea let that pass without finding out what it meant; one had to understand that Jack liked to be obscure.

Burak wasn't in his quarters, and so they went to the compartment that had been assigned to Tesla. The Invid wasn't there-just as he hadn't been there for days. But Jack had learned the unpleasant facts of what it was like to turn in an unsatisfactory report to Rick Hunter, and so he snooped around the place, opening empty closets and looking through empty drawers.

But it was Gnea, studying the deck the way a Praxian huntress was expected to examine the ground, who came across something that merited their attention. "What's this?"

Jack squatted next to her. "Mung." He knew the look and smell of it well: a mixture of dirt and grease, moisture and machine oil. It was as common to certain starship ancillary power compartments as it had been a generation before to the power, plants of nuclear submarines. The mung looked like it had come off Tesla's bare footsole.

Finding the right compartment didn't take long; looking for places near the ship's power section where the security monitors were out of service narrowed it down. On the third try, Jack and Gnea stepped through a hatch and found themselves facing Burak.

Jack was one of those who wore sidearms aboard ship nowadays, and Gnea had always practiced the habit. He had his Badger out and cocked, and she had two feet of glimmering blue blade in the air.

Burak looked subdued, almost frightened. But he bowed, his long horns dipping. "We wondered when you would come."

Jack waffled, torn between the urge to get to the bottom of things and the impulse to call for backup. Then something moved in the shadows of a corner.

"Yes," a voice said. "We looked forward to it."

Two slits of red light, like miniature furnace mouths, opened. Laserlike beams leapt out at lack and Gnea. Jack tried with all his might to pull the Badger's trigger, even though the muzzle was pointed away from Tesla; he was hoping the sheer shock of the assault pistol's report would free him up, let him slew the gun around at the Invid.

Gnea had raised the sword high, a very image of war, but she was as immobile as Jack while the rays from Tesla's eyes played across them exactingly, almost intimately.

Rocked as he was by the numbing impact of Tesla's will, Jack still saw that the scientist had undergone profound changes. He now resembled the artists' sketches that had been made to the Praxians' descriptions of the Regis.

The snout had pulled in; the mouth was now conventionally humanoid. Tesla was much bigger, though that was tough to judge precisely since he was sitting in a kind of lotus position. He was hairless, his musculature so well defined that he might have been a figure from an anatomy text, his nerves and blood vessels visible in a way that suggested he had no skin, no epidermis at all.

"Gaze upon me."

Jack and Gnea found that they had no choice. The emanations from the Invid's eyes saw to that. "You will be my eyes and ears in the ship, and among the councils of the Sentinels, and on Spheris," Tesla said. It sounded to the dazzled Jack like something that was his own idea.

"Keep the others at bay," the thing sitting on the deck said. "I need time to complete my Transformation. And then..."

The being in the corner of the compartment began to rise, like a Robotech mechamorphosis shape-shifting, until it stood with the top of its skull nearly touching the overhead.

A thread of saliva was dangling from Gnea's chin; Jack Baker's eyes seemed about to roll up in his head. But both of them made acknowledging sounds.

"Make yourselves available for the most important missions and find access to the most sensitive data," Tesla said. "Your lives are of value only in that they serve me."

Lisa considered her fighting stance and wondered if she shouldn't be a little lower, a little more straddle-legged.

After all, Bela was-what?-six six or so? And yet her stance was as low as Lisa's own, solid and yet fluid.

Not to mention those big hands, and the sheer muscle of the Sentinels' number-one amazon. Still, Lisa had learned to look for certain hints and signs of vulnerability, possible avenues of attack, that she would never have been able to spot a few months before.

Lisa faked a hand combination and came in low for a foot sweep. Bela leaped over it, kicking in turn, but Lisa wasn't where she was supposed to be; she had reversed course, her spinning foot catching Bela right over the ear.

There was a solid thwack, and even though Bela's sparring helmet and Lisa's footpads were thick, the Praxian was brought up short-more by surprise than by pain.

Nonetheless, she had Lisa's foot in those big-boned hands before Lisa, a fraction slow on the recovery, could withdraw it. In another second, Lisa was on the mat and slapping it in surrender, as Bela exerted pressure on the leghold she had gotten.

They rose and clasped one another's forearm, to signal the end of the match, then moved toward the sidelines as they removed their pads. Another amazon and Susan Graham, the young communications and public-info officer, were squaring off; a number of the REF women had followed Lisa's example and asked the Praxians to tutor them in combat arts.

"You faked me out," Lisa grated, cross with herself for falling for it. "I thought I finally had you."

"You did." Bela patted her shoulder. "But part of the fighting arts is to keep on coming at your opponent, no matter what."

She regarded Lisa for a moment. "But then, you already know that."

Karen Penn was sitting back on her heels at the edge of the mat, like other Humans and Praxians, waiting for her turn to spar. She was one of the few REF members there who

could hold their own against an amazon opponent-could give as good as she got and, often, win.

There were no males of any species present. The Praxians didn't object to more general training sessions and tournaments, and in fact welcomed the chance to compete with and learn from their Sentinels comrades. There had been some monumental clashes, and the Karbarrans, in particular, demonstrated how much they loved a good-natured brawl.

But certain classes and workouts were reserved for females alone. Karen seemed to find a kind of serenity in them. Lisa had thought about confronting Karen with the real problem, but had more than enough command time to know that unless it was somehow impairing that person's professional performance, a subordinate's love life was best left for her or him to handle.

Certainly, the physical, mental, and emotional wringer of the Sentinels' campaigns seemed to have worked a change in Jack; anyone with eyes could see that he was more open and giving with Karen. But the two had worked up determined defenses against one another, and Karen was loath to drop hers.

If Penn and Baker never admitted to themselves or each other that they were in love, it would be too bad, but a matter that others would be well advised to keep out of, Lisa decided.

The next bout was as good as Lisa and Bela's or better: two Praxian middleweights, veteran fighters and as fast as rattlers, were mixing it up. Blocks and parries came as fast as kicks and punches; the amazons at the sidelines began rooting and cheering. Neither woman on the mat could score a point on the other, though they were using everything they knew.

In the midst of it all, nobody noticed a newcomer enter the hold. Then the ref shouted the winning point as a blow landed, and somebody became aware of who was, against all tradition and decorum, standing there.

The amazons were less offended or outraged than amazed. Baldan II took advantage of the sudden silence that fell over the compartment to walk toward Lisa and Bela, who stood watching him.

His feet were bare, and yet they didn't make the glassy tinkling Lisa would have expected on the hard deckplates. Instead, there was a kind of steady rising and falling vibration, like someone running their wetted finger around the rim of a crystal goblet.

Lisa saw that the Spherisian wasn't looking at her, and stepped aside as Baldan came to stand before Bela. Bela held her padded sparring helmet in her long-fingered hands, her strange avian eyes as wary as a hawk's.

"You know the plan for scouting Spheris," Baldan said. "There are some few days yet, before I have to leave. I ask you to teach me some of the fighting skills you know, for I know none."

The amazons murmured, some of them holding their halberds uneasily or putting a hand to a shortsword hilt. No male was permitted to invade the sequestered training places.

Bela looked down at him. He was already, in size and form, a being resembling a Terran nearing the end of his teens. Baldan wore only a brief waistclout.

He was not translucent, but rather seemed to give off light that he had gathered from sources around him. His facets, convexes, concaves, and planes without number had made him a being almost too beautiful to believe, shining with the youth that was in him.

Bela's voice, usually a hearty shout, was now only a husky near-whisper. "You must learn those things from others; no male is allowed here."

He was ready for that. "By your own laws, you cannot refuse entry to a godchild."

Bela looked up sharply, eyes wide, shock and anger and a sort of involuntary tenderness mixed together. "Godchild?"

"You saved my life, you and Miriya Parina. By your own laws, that makes me your godchild, and your responsibility."

A Chinese obligation, Lisa thought. She was thinking back on the moment when Bela emerged from Miriya's VT, cradling the quartzlike egg that was to become Baldan II.

Lisa figured that Bela's sudden lack of balance had nothing to do with the biology-as-destiny or melting-mama theories of instinctive female behavior. But it had everything to do with a feeling of connectedness, and a satisfaction in having done the right thing.

The amazon looked him over. "But-are you sure you won't shatter?"

He turned and did a diving roll along the deck, the singing of his shifting facets and angles sounding like celestial music. Coming to his feet in the same move, he faced her with a luminous smile.

"If I were breakable, I'd have been broken long since, Godmother."

Bela threw her head back and laughed, and other Praxians joined in, first a few, then all. Lisa stood to one side with Karen Penn, looking on as Bela handed her godson a

complete suit of pads and a helmet. "Things have to change with the times,"-Bela shrugged-"even Praxian rules."

There are things coming out of this war, byproducts, that are almost as important as victory, it occurred to Lisa.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

You're free to be THE BEST "YOU" THAT YOU CAN POSSIBLY BE! You're OKAY! So take charge of your life and learn how to be YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND!

Also, get PERSONAL POWER over your POTENTIAL and LEARN HOW TO ASSERT IT!! Grok yourself fully during QUALITY TIME!! Dare to be great! Remember: TODAY IS THE

FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!!!

Kermit Busganglion, The Hand That's Dealt You

The REF had always been intimidated by the stupendous Royal Hall of the Robotech Masters on Tirol-had never in their total muster been able to fill more than a portion of it.

But now the Royal Hall was lit from one end to the other, thanks to amblers and floating illumination drones. For an evening at least a corner of it was free of the tyrants' echoes. There, among ranked mecha, a court of inquiry had been convened. The Plenipotentiary Council sat ready to discharge one of its gravest functions; defendants and accusers waited silently or held quick conferences behind cupped hands.

It was going out to just about every outlet and terminal under REF purview-with one special exception. In the prairielike square outside, the throngs looked at the screens, as people were doing elsewhere on Fantoma's moons, and on SDF-3.

Most of the accused-Wolff; Vince Grant and officers of the expedition that had been sent to bring back the Valivarre-sat at the defense table. Breetai was the lone Zentraedi there, seated off to one side in a monumental chair. Kazianna Hesh and the rest of the giants were still aboard the Valivarre, and while no one had made much mention of it yet, so was the monopole ore.

There had been some surprises for the returnees, the chief among those being that Wolff had been charged with the murder of the Regent/simulagent. But that charge had been set aside with their news-and indisputable proof in the form of sworn reports and battle recordings-that the Regent still lived.

The group had also brought back word of Janice Em's true identity. Vince feared that it would prejudice the case, since it might make people completely mistrustful of Lang, but that did not seem to be the case. Vince figured that Lang was so far outside of Human norms-a Merlin of Robotechnology-that people simply were not very surprised by anything

he did.

And, since no one who had remained behind on Tirol (except for Lang) had any firsthand experience with Janice in her android persona, people seemed to take the news matter-of-factly. There was no sudden outbreak of paranoia.

For his part, Lang refused any comment once he had assured himself that Jan was in no danger. But Wolff thought he detected something more in the man's manner than a mere concern that an invention was functioning, or that a strategem might have backfired.

Counsel for the prosecution had been summing up his case when Edwards, no longer able to restrain himself, leapt up and intervened. No one was sure what transpired then; it was in low tones. The lawyer sat down with a look in his eyes like a hound called to heel, and Edwards stood forth to take up the argument.

"You have every documentation," he said to the silent council, "every citation, every particular. There is no doubt here! These people, and the others who've temporarily evaded capture, have defied and subverted duly constituted authority, and conspired to stage a mutiny. Or more precisely, a coup."

Edwards was about to throw his arms wide, but knew that grand gestures had long since lost their effect on the sort of people who made up the council. Instead he paused, pensive. "These were my brothers-in-arms. Don't you suppose this very scene is agony to me? But right is right, and treason is treason. And these people you see here...are guilty."

Wolff and the others were watching Edwards's grandstand play, but Vince Grant was keeping an eye on Lang. And when Edwards was finally done with his stemwinder speech (to some considerable applause both within the hall and from outside), Lang stood up.

Most of the onlookers and viewers were braced for an impassioned plea. Vince winked at Exedore, and Exedore winked back.

Scott Bernard stood to one side, looking proud. Once people found out his part in tripping up Edwards, he figured, a lot of folks were going to know his name.

In an altogether neutral voice, Lang rattled, "Hereby-submitted under my seal as council member, the following recorded data, pertinent to these proceedings."

There were REF screens rigged everywhere in that corner of the Royal Hall. They were all abruptly alight with the scene between Lang and Edwards, the scene Edwards had been so sure his scramblers would render private.

Edwards had been given to understand his interference devices-the ones in his epaulets and so on-would keep him safe from surveillance. They had done so in the past, hadn't they? But now he saw that that had only been because Lang wished it so, in order that Edwards be drawn into this trap.

Forewarned, certain council members had caused riot police and MPs to be stationed in strategic points, but throughout the playing of the recording, the Royal Hall and the streets outside were silent, just silent. There was a final scene of Edwards, slinking away and nursing the wrists Lang had bruised so terribly-had only stopped himself short of crushing by an act of will.

Edwards and his staff were on their feet, crying that this was some electronic/Protoculture forgery, but Lang's people were already submitting the authenticated taped originals that would prove differently.

Justine Huxley stood, too, severe and cold. "I think it's obvious that there are mitigating circumstances here. Do I have a consensus?"

Under her withering glare, with the undeniable evidence of the tapes, and the cries of the crowds rising outside, none of the would-be dissenting council members dared meet her eye. There was a tacit assent. All in an instant, Edwards saw that his plans were shattered and that, at least in terms of the council, he stood alone.

Huxley went on, "And so all the principals, General Edwards included, will surrender to the custody of the-Stop that man!"

This, because Edwards had vaulted the railing and sprinted for the door. Adams was a half step behind him, but the prosecutors froze, and the MPs closed in on them.

Over at the defense table, Wolff was nearest. He was up on his feet, dashing off after his archenemy. Vince and the others would have helped, but court officers had already moved in to restrain them.

Breetai came to his feet, but there wasn't any way for him to reach the general short of stepping in among the Humans and trampling some. And armed guards had fanned out to see to it that he kept his place.

Wolff raced after Edwards like his own namesake, his blood boiling for a fight. Without warning, a blur came homing in at an angle in an attempt to tackle Edwards. It was Scott Bernard. But he lacked the weight to pull it off, and merely swung Edwards partway round just as Wolff was closing in.

Edwards tore Scott off him in a transport of rage and was about to break the boy's neck. Wolff had the option of going for Edwards and taking a chance that Scott would be killed,

or grappling to save Scott. Everything in him told him to do the former; many lives had already been lost to the general's schemes, and it was worth the sacrifice to stop him.

But he found himself struggling to save the boy, hampered enough by the effort so that he couldn't get in the first blow. Wolff got Scott partway out of Edwards's grasp, but in the meantime the general landed a vicious flat-handed chop and nearly downed Wolff.

Edwards released Scott and was about to follow up and finish off the colonel, but his all-pervading sense of self-preservation halted him. Court officers were closing in. He pivoted and sprinted on.

The guards stationed at the doors were the biggest in the REF military-police contingent, and everyone expected them to grab Edwards and Adams, throw them down, and sit on them until such time as Justine Huxley said to stand up.

But Edwards caught the first MP's hand in some kind of take-away hold, levered her aside, then drew a handgun from beneath his jacket and shot the second, a massive sergeant who was trying to get his own pistol out.

Everyone was milling about, and that made it impossible for the court officers and other MPs to get through. In a moment, Edwards and Adams were through the inner door and Edwards was firing blasts through it. Adams was screaming something incoherent, but Edwards took no time to listen. Instead, he backhanded the man, then seized a fistful of his uniform and dragged him toward the front entranceway.

Ghost Rider sentries and escorts there already knew Edwards's whistled signals. As other REF troops tried to understand what was going on, the Ghosts got the drop on them. In another few seconds, Edwards was inside his personal limo with Adams, lifting away.

Adams curled up in a corner of the luxuriously upholstered back seat, whimpering. Edwards tried to think, though it felt as if his blood vessels would peel the scalp away from his naked skull. The driver was already headed toward HQ and the armored escort vehicles were falling in before and behind.

T.R. Edwards smiled in the dark, even as the rivulets of sweat poured down across his face and dribbled over his faceplate. The council thought it had him cornered.

You've got me where I want you.

Edwards gave a quick command. The rest of the motorcade went on, toward the landing areas and the shuttles, along the route the council would expect him to take.

But the limo veered aside and down a ramp, through a recessed hatch that led to the underground levels. There were loyal troops there to welcome him; Edwards emerged

and led the way down and down toward the installation that connected him so appropriately with the Regent.

Behind the convoy, the street-access door rolled shut. No one was there to see a single figure, standing atop a building opposite, watch it close. Unmoving, the hunter poised and prepared himself. Tonight the hunt would end.

There were two Humans, a Karbarran, and a Garudan; they were purposely shoving toward the compartment hatch despite Gnea's protests.

"It's not just a request anymore," the Human, a junior officer Gnea recognized as Susan Graham, said. "Admiral Hunter says Tesla's to be braced right now, and answer a coupla questions."

Gnea looked around at the mixed posse. "And suppose I say no? Tesla is unwell, and I've been charged with seeing to it that he lives." She placed herself before them, big-boned and used to fighting, seemingly indifferent to whether she lived or died. She fingered her halberd and waited, throwing the ball back into their court.

Susan Graham brought up a pistol, and the others leveled weapons, too. "Then, you can either let Doc Obu here look at the patient or you can get your bellybutton micro-waved, toots, and we'll still see what we came here to see."

Obu, the Karbarran scientist, growled and inclined his head gently. When he raised his eyes to Gnea's again, there was a frank sanity in his steady gaze. But there was mayhem on the backburners.

"I-I see the wisdom of what you say," Gnea got out. It was very nearly a whisper. "But don't you understand? You'll frighten him. Just when we were doing so well with him."

The Garudan, Quias, growled. "If we damage him, it's not much loss, is it?"

"No! You're wrong!" Gnea objected so quickly that they drew back a little. Something told her that she had made a mistake, and so she looked around to where Jack Baker stepped out of the shadows.

"We're not sure, but Tesla may be dying," he said quietly. "Those two Invid scientists, Pye and whosis, Garak, say they can pull him through-maybe. But not if you go in there and rough 'im up."

While the deputation was wavering, Jack took another step toward them, so that the light fell across his face now. It was strangely composed and unsmiling, unlike the jaunty young man they knew.

This Jack Baker stood shoulder to shoulder with Gnea, smiling at them with his mouth but frowning with his forehead. "And that wouldn't do anybody any good, would it? Put that weapon away, Graham. Relay my respects to the admiral, and tell him I'll have Tesla on a remote hookup for questioning as soon as he can stand it. Well? You heard your orders."

Rick had put Jack in charge of the Tesla problem. Susan Graham slowly bolstered her pistol. "I just hope you know what you're doing, sir."

"Move it!" Jack snapped.

He and Gnea watched the foursome leave, then made their way back to the compartment where Tesla now dwelt. When they were sure no one was near, they entered. Inside, they stood with faces blank, as the thing before them threw their shadows on the bulkhead with its intense light.

"Well done, my good and faithful servants," said Tesla.

The drop capsule was a miracle of the combined sciences of the various Sentinels races as orchestrated by the capable Obu. Despite the increased Invid sensor surveillance in the wake of their defeats on Karbarra and Garuda, the tiny lozenge-shape fell through the planet's atmosphere without raising a single alarm, transparent to enemy detectors. In many ways, the war had forced the oppressed to out excel their oppressors.

Rick badly regretted the limitations to the new techniques that restricted the size of an "invisible" drop capsule to something on the order of a padded commo booth. He would have liked to equip the Ark Angel with the same protection, but that was impossible as yet.

Impossible, too, to arm and equip Teal and her son with Human-style gear for their espionage mission; where they were going, no hardware could follow.

In due course the two Spherisians stood next to their abandoned capsule, looking out over the homeworld Baldan II was seeing for the first time.

It was a prismatic landscape, reflecting and refracting and breaking into spectra the light of Blaze, the planet's primary. Human and Invid and other offworlders required visors or other eye protection there, so they weren't blinded by the furious splendor of it all; but Baldan II gazed, unblinking and unshielded, on the planet he had never glimpsed before.

The capsule lay on a beach that scintillated like a field of stars, each infinitesimal grain throwing back its white or multicolored rays. The sea that crashed against the shore was as unreal as some computer construct, so radiant, its hues so quick-changing. Distant mountains shone like luminescent fountains.

Baldan felt his mother's hand on his arm. He turned to see Teal wearing an expression he had never seen on her before.

The arrival in the capsule had driven home to her, as nothing else had, how serious her circumstances and her son's were. What was bewildering her was that she was unexpectedly more concerned about his well-being than her own. That was a common phenomenon among some of the other races, of course-look how the Karbarrans had agonized over the fate of their young-but it was new to her, and troubling since it involved an offspring she had never wanted.

When had she come to love her son? Teal couldn't recall, and yet there was an abrupt welling-up in her, and a desperate fear for his safety. If the capsule had been capable of a return trip to Ark Angel, she would have taken it with Baldan, or at the very least sent him back.

But the road back was closed to them; they knew that when they volunteered. Teal studied the gemstone landscape for a moment, then pointed.

"There." She set off toward a seam of crystal that had been upthrust by a rift in the planet's surface. Baldan hurried to catch up. By the time he did, his mother was standing before the glorious light of the stratum and undressing.

"Wh-what..." he fumbled. Something within him was calling out, and something within Spheris was answering. But he didn't know how to be a part of the symphony all around him.

Teal stood unclothed-her chiton fluttering down around her ankles-but not naked. She stepped free of the garment and was like a magnificent beacon, moving toward the exposed seam before her with arms spread wide as if to embrace a lover.

She turned to her son. "Come; time for you to travel the Crystal Highways."

Baldan threw aside the half tunic he wore. As his mother did, he pressed himself flat against the glittering rock. The planet sang to them in high, clear tones.

For a moment they were half merged with it, like Mesoamerican bas-reliefs. In another moment they were gone, leaving their discarded clothing and the empty capsule behind. The only sound was the flashing sea striking rainbow surf from the diamond-dust sand.

"Well! My dear, dear General Edwards! What a delightful surprise!"

Edwards held his face in unrevealing lines, forcing himself not to curl his lip at the green

goop streaming off the Regent-the nutrient bath, or royal jelly, or whatever the hell it was these maggots liked to splash around in.

He also contained his anger. The Invid ruler had taken his own sweet time about answering the general's transmission, as if knowing that he had the Human at a disadvantage.

"Things here have become rather...counterproductive," Edwards said, tight-lipped. "I think it best, strategically, that we unite our forces at once."

"Ah." The enormous liquid black eyes betrayed nothing as the Regent inspected the man. "In that case, do come here to the Home Hive, by all means! Er, how many ships will you be bringing, and how many troops?"

Edwards's jaw muscles jumped. "There's been trouble here. I'll require a bit of assistance."

Something moved up to sit next to the Regent-a Hellcat of extraordinary size, wearing a jeweled collar. The ones destroyed in the Haydon IV battle had been replaced, Edwards surmised. "How inconvenient," the Regent clucked.

The Invid threw his arms wide. "Because, as you can see, you're about to miss out on the opportunity to serve the One True Ruler of the Universe! My life will be a roll call of triumphs! All Creation will grovel at my feet, as my courtiers do even now!"

He lowered his voice craftily. "And then won't my wife, my precious Regis, come begging for forgiveness, eh?"

Edwards saw only an empty, echoing hall in the background behind the Regent. Great suns! He's mad as a march hare!

But he was the general's only hope for survival. "I want you to think for a moment what will happen if the council gets me now. The REF will be reconsolidated into a pure fighting force with nothing holding it back, and there'll be nothing to stop the combined forces of the near stars to come after you! Am I getting through to you?"

It seemed he had. The Regent swayed for a moment, a new clarity coming into his voice. "We can't have that, can we?"

"I want you to send your army to get me and the people loyal to me," Edwards pressed on.

The Invid asked guilelessly, "But why should I, when you have an army of your own right there?"

The Invid Brain! The Inorganics! "Damn you, explain!" Edwards grated. "There's no time for games!"

The Regent wasn't so demented that he had missed Edwards's point about the REF; he activated controls at his end of the connection that displayed instructions at Edwards's end.

"Do stay in touch," the Regent bade him, and his image vanished.

But Edwards was already busy, switching on the Living Computer, the artificial Brain the Invid had left behind under Tirol in the wake of their defeat. His personal guards looked on uneasily as the massive globe of specialized tissue came to life in its vat.

From the catacomb rooms where the inert Inorganics had, at his command, been stored like so much cordwood, Edwards heard stirrings.

His lips drew back from his teeth in a canine smile; his good eye became glassy. He looked as insane as the Regent.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Consider humble clay.

Small amounts of it can speed chemical processes by a factor of 10,000. Its phenomenally intricate layered-sheet structure gives one pound (Earth norm) of it as much total surface area as fifty football fields. It can store information as patterns of ions. It's perfectly plausible that self-replicating crystals brought forth a "proto-organism" as the jumping-off point of life on Spheris.

But those who travel the Crystal Highways are unimpressed with such theorizing. They explain it all with a name.

A. Jow, The Historical Haydon

"Max! Pay attention!"

"Uh?" He blinked.

Jean Grant, infinitely patient, still had a way of letting someone know that she wouldn't put up with their shortcomings.

"Just take it easy, Max; babies've been getting themselves born for ages now. Besides, this is only a drill, capisch? All you have to do is help a little." She smiled down at Miriya. "Relax, soldier."

Miriya stopped her breathing exercises and chuckled tiredly. She was pale and drawn

from the ordeal that her second pregnancy had become. But she squeezed Max's hand, their I love you code.

Max squeezed back twice, but he was still worried. This pregnancy shouldn't even have happened. Apparently, conventional birth-control methods didn't apply to a Human-Zentraedi union.

Her first pregnancy had worked changes on Miriya's body that Jean still hadn't figured out completely. The physical readouts on her were getting more and more peculiar, and nobody, not even the saintly, floating Haydon IV healers, could say why.

Max resisted the impulse to sigh, there where Miriya could hear it. Instead he crouched by her, pointing at the window that ran from floor to ceiling in her bedroom.

"See there? The urban core's almost rebuilt, and about seventy percent of the underground systemry's back up to snuff. Vowad says the whole planet'll be like new in less than two months."

"It's good that-" A sudden spasm of pain overcame her, and she clamped down on Max's hand with a grip so hard that he involuntarily yelped in pain.

Jean was there in an instant, reading the bed monitors. The Haydonites had built Miriya's room so that it was a virtual duplicate of the quarters she and her husband had shared back in rebuilt Macross City-their happiest home-but the place was actually a well-camouflaged intensive-care unit.

"Code red," Jean called into the empty air; not two seconds passed before the wall slid aside and Haydonite healers floated in. Miriya was losing consciousness.

"Talk to her, Max," Jean whispered to him, then turned to her own job.

What to say? He wasn't used to making conversation; that was one of the reasons he had been a loner until he and Miriya found each other.

"And-and, the interstellar trade's already starting up again," he babbled, squeezing her hand but, to his terror, getting no response. "I've got a place all fixed up for you and me and the kid, outside of town-"

"Sorry, Max." Jean moved him away from the bedside and he didn't resist. She and the Haydonite healers, and medical machines that looked like hovering seashells and airborne spores, all clustered around his wife.

Max Sterling stood at the foot of the bed. "We're losing her," one of the faceless healers said, and Max bit his lower lip until blood ran, so that he wouldn't scream.

"Talk to her, Max," Jean repeated, without looking up from her work. "Keep her with us."

"I...I..."

"You're fixing up a place for her," Jean prompted him, still without breaking her own concentration.

He drew a deep breath. "We can stay there until you're ready to go home, Mir." He felt like crying, but Jean gave him one quick look.

"C'mon, ace," she told him, and went back to what she was doing.

C'mon, ace...

"Dana's gonna be some big girl when we get back, huh?" he found himself saying.

The lifesign monitors made a slightly different sound; Miriya managed to form a word. "Dana..."

"Uh-huh! God, she wants so much to go to the academy, and Emerson says if she doesn't behave, he's gonna put her in a convent, remember?" He was wiping the tears from his face and his glasses. "And Bowie said that if Dana goes, he goes." He was laughing and crying at the same time.

"She'll be...a big girl," Miriya said.

The lifesigns were stabilizing. With effort, Max swallowed and said, "Think of all the things we'll have to tell her when we get home, Mir. She's gonna be waiting to hear them."

Miriya Parino Sterling smiled as she hovered on the edge of a coma then came back to him.

He stood looking down on her as she slept, after Jean and the healers and the machines left. Miriya's pregnancy had seven months yet before it came to term.

But that was only by Human calculation. According to the lab workups, it could happen any time now.

In the barracks of the security forces posted to Dr. Lang's complex, the officer of the day lost patience with pounding on the door.

"Linc? Lincoln? Goddamn you, fall in!"

But Right Officer Isle, REF Service # 666-60-937, wasn't there. The duty OD looked around and found the man's flight suit missing. Oddly, there were also hair clippings and shaving-lather residue in the cramped quarters' tiny sink.

Isle always was a strange one, but this was pushing it some. "Isle, you sumbitch," the OD muttered. "What now?"

They were like dolphins in the sea, or eagles cutting the winds.

Baldan soared, following his mother, through the netherworld of the Crystal Highways. The mineral lattices stretched away in every direction, making their own landscape for the beings who swam in the bosom of Spheris.

Baldan found that he knew his way around there. The emanations from the various compounds and strata were like signposts and streets-a three-dimensional highway system.

He zoomed over to catch up with Teal on a thoroughfare layed down from the molten condition. There was a lot of veering and dodging because of the magma chambers, but the scenery was spectacular.

Disembodied, they flew through the very structure of their world. Baldan found that he knew how to avoid metamorphic structures, knew how to slide along the crystallographic axes.

There was no gravity, except as a somewhat abstract force; electromagnetic and thermal and nuclear imperatives were the rules of the road.

And before long, he could hear the voices of his people.

Baldan understood that he was nothing but a disembodied intellect, seeping along the boulevards that molecular forces had drawn. But it seemed that he was corporeal, flying like some character out of the Humans absurd comic books, in an element that was his to command.

It was a world suspended in space: here, the juttings of a tectonic rift; there, the sweep of a rhodonite seam that virtually girded the planet. They navigated currents of chrysoberyl, emerald and corundum, rode the piezoelectric waves, fought through schist and body surfed in tourmaline.

Then he became aware of the songs, and they drew him. Teal noticed that he was veering away, and followed. They understood through unspoken communication that the longing

he felt wasn't to be questioned. She gave in to an impulse that she had only marginally resisted until then, and found she wasn't one person anymore: she was two. Herself and her son.

In a place like a cathedral made of living mineral, or a megaplex encysted in a jewel of perfect clarity, he encountered the first of his race he had ever met aside from his mother and a few shipmates.

Their voices drew him, the sound resonating through the world. Baldan found to his surprise that emerging from the warp and woof of the planet was harder than melding with it, and understood a little better how his father died.

There was a tremendous strain as he fought to free himself from the Crystal Highway; it was as if Spheris didn't want to let him go. Baldan came forth halfway, like some tormented cameo; he was sucked back again and nearly consumed. He fought and kicked and flailed his way clear, reborn once more.

Teal was standing nearby, and he knew instinctively why she hadn't been able to help; there was only one road test for riders of the Crystal Highways, and it was very Darwinian.

Their very substance was changed. They were now of smokier stuff, harder and more given to sharp angles, than they had been above and in the ship. Baldan understood that each time he emerged from the Crystal Highways, he would be of different composition-would be of the stuff that made up the area from which he exited.

So; I'm truly part of my world now.

Teal and Baldan had come into a place that was dazzling with shards of pure light in a million shades and haunting in the tones that sprang from every cusp and facet. It was like heaven's own house of mirrors, a sound-and-light show that no non-Spherisian would ever be able to comprehend.

There were thousands upon thousands of his father's people there, contemplating eternity and the Universe in small nichelike chambers, or communing with one another, or working to enlarge the boundaries of their sanctuary. Some looked around in surprise at the arrival of newcomers.

One in particular dropped a caving tool that rang like a bell on the vitreous floor of the place. "Baldan!"

It was an elderly female of his race, Baldan II could see. Before she had taken two more steps, her posture and the aura she emitted changed. Joy and disbelief gave way to uncertainty. "But-you're not Baldan, are you?"

"I'm his son." On Spheris, it went without saying that a great deal of the parent was born again in the child. "Baldan is dead. I am Baldan II."

"My son is dead," the old one said as if the words were incomprehensible. "But then-who shaped you?"

Teal stepped forward. "I knew you would want to meet the boy, Tiffa."

"You!" Everyone knew the story: how a flighty female of no discernible talent or promise had coincidentally been taken prisoner with Baldan, a champion of his species.

Tiff a struggled for words, plainly displeased at having a new in-law thrust upon her, and one who enjoyed no great prestige or status at that.

"Do try to conceal your joy," Teal said dryly.

By now, there were a lot of other Spherisians looking on and listening in. They saw in Baldan II the image of their fallen resistance leader and hero.

Teal faced them. "We might as well get all this out in the open right away. This is Baldan's son, Baldan II. I Shaped him. I didn't ask for the obligation, but we don't always get to choose the Shapings of the Protoculture, do we? I want it known that I'm proud of this boy and I love him very much.

"Now, we've come back with allies, to free Spheris from the Invid. I know a lot of you would prefer to sit down here in safety and comfort and wait for them to go away rather than fight them, but I say to you that the Invid won't go away."

That had people murmuring to one another. They had hidden in the bosom of Spheris-a defense that had never failed them-but many were growing restive. No invader had ever been as tenacious as the Regent's hordes.

"The Sentinels have already removed the Invid from Karbarra, Garuda, and Haydon IV," Teal went on. "And we mean to do the same here. We're not asking your permission, because this war will be fought to the death whether Spherisians throw in their lot with us or not. But the outcome lies in the balance, and your help could make all the difference."

Tiffa was looking at Teal with a troubled expression. Wasn't this the frivolous, whimsical girl who had been the despair of her parents and who, most had agreed, would come to a bad and probably meaningless end?

Who are these "Sentinels," Tiffa wondered, that their companionship should bring Teal home so vested with wisdom and purpose? Perhaps the Invid had met their match at last.

But there were voices from the crowd now. "Leave us in peace and go!" "We want no war!" "We're not fighters!"

"Yes, you are."

Teal had been about to try to shout the doubters down, but Baldan spoke first. Now he took three steps forward, so that they could all get a good look at him.

"Yes, you are," he repeated. "The memories that Baldan gave me tell me that. These nice safe strongholds in the planetary womb are no protection anymore; the Invid will crack this world apart with their Protoculture devices if it comes to that.

"Spherisians have fought before, long in our past. Now it's time to fight again-that, or kneel and wait for the hammer to fall on our naked necks."

He walked a few steps to one side, to where a spar of shimmering agate stood out from the wall of the sanctuary. "I mean to raise rebellion. I mean to rally every Spherisian who remembers how to fight or is willing to learn. I mean to throw the Invid off this world or die trying."

Teal went over to stand by her son proudly. A wisecrack of Jack Baker's came back to her, and she decided this was a good time to use it. Putting her arm around her son's strong young shoulders, she fixed Tiffa with her gaze.

"Maybe we're not much to look at, but we're all you've got."

"From here we go to the Great Geode, to ask for aid there," Baldan announced. "Follow us, any who are willing, or carry the word to other sanctuaries." He hesitated, unsure if the last thing he wanted to say was fair, but the impulse was too strong to deny.

His voice dropped an octave and became the voice of Baldan I; a different look came into his eyes. Through him, his father said, "It is good to see you this one last time. I love you all."

Baldan II vibrated a little, coming back to himself, then turned to merge with the spar of agate. A moment later, Teal was gone too.

The Spherisians looked at one another, the sanctuary resonating with the hurrahs of some, the doubts of others. There were troubled glances everywhere.

That was when Tiffa stepped to the outcropping where her grandson and daughter-in-law had disappeared. She spread her arms like a high-diver, leaned slowly, and melded with the stuff of Spheris.

In another few seconds, people were thronging to the walls of the place, or lying flat to dissolve into the very floor. Those who doubted or had other reservations found themselves in a dwindling minority. Many remained behind, but now the sanctuary was a hollow-sounding, mostly deserted place of more silence than sound, more emptiness than life.

Out along the Crystal Highways the folk of Spheris flew, energized by a force before which piezoelectricity and Protoculture and logic itself must bow. Toward a thousand destinations on the planet's crust and under it they went, to free their homeworld.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

This may sound strange, coming from me, but I want to take a moment here to speak in defense of the Ghost Riders-a unit with a long and proud history going back to United States naval aviation-until those events on the SDF-3 mission.

I believe that some of those men and women were swayed by Edwards's Faustian lure-there are bad apples in every barrel. But I've reviewed the citations and decorations of the Ghosts, going back decades, and I'm convinced that some force beyond mere human fallibility had enslaved them to their general by that night.

It would be a stain on the memory of brave and selfless service members not to point this out: Edwards's greatest crime, among his many, was in making us Banners fight our own. Justice Justine Huxley, I've Been to a Marvelous Party

The man whose name tag read Isle, L. knew from the start that Edwards's breakout would be unstoppable at its source.

Hundreds of Inorganic bipeds had flung open the doors of the Royal Hall's underground warren and poured forth, inflicting terrible casualties, in response to the general's silent command. It was only good luck that an officious security QIC had insisted that the Plenipotentiary Council evacuate the building after Edwards's escape-she had practically been forced to wrestle some of the council members into armored vehicles.

She was exonerated a few minutes later, when the Crann, Scrim, and Odeon boiled up from their catacombs, spreading death. Justine Huxley, gazing at it in horror through the rear viewslit of an APC, wrote later, "Words will not serve to describe the carnage there. I do not think the REF had a darker moment."

A few loyalist VTs brought down death from the skies within minutes, but Edwards's army was already on the move. Now Flight Officer Isle watched them come toward the REF HQ complex, as he knew they would.

Poor rebuilt Tiresia was being razed again, in a grotesque Mardi Gras of Robotech warfare. Excaliber Mark IXs and Crann whirled, fighting hand-to-hand in the streets;

Spartans and Scrim stood flat-footed and shot it out at point-blank range in alleys; Battloids and Odeon rolled, locked in mortal combat, crumbling buildings and tearing each other to shreds.

What Ghost VTs there were were primarily occupied keeping Lang's security fliers busy. The conflict was pretty much a ground battle.

The man released the nametag he had ripped from his flight suit. It fluttered down on the wind as he watched the battle move his way. Edwards was using his Invid troops cleverly, feinting and redeploying, subtly opening an avenue of attack on the HQ. REF Command wouldn't consider HQ much of an objective for Edwards, Flight Officer Isle knew; Command would consider it a dead end, and would be watching for an assault on the spaceport. They didn't know that the most precious thing in the universe was in the headquarters building.

No, Command was busy dealing with diversionary strikes by Edwards's loyal Ghost Riders and shoring up its faltering ready-reaction groups in the western and southern parts of Tiresia. Edwards was one up on them.

The council acted quickly on Lang's plea to secure SDF-3 against mutiny. But what they weren't prepared for was a mass desertion by Ghost elements then on the super-dimensional fortress. And while there were sufficient loyal troops to hold the bridge, power section, and other vital points against assault, there weren't nearly enough to stop Edwards's people from decamping.

Some of the Ghosts headed for the surface of Tirol, to provide air support for their general's escape. But the bulk of them drove directly toward the new SDF-7 ship, sister to the Tokugawa and the Jutland, that was just nearing completion. Since Edwards had to take flight, he meant to do so in a ship with its superluminal drive in place.

Inorganics were already breaking through onto the huge square outside the rocketlike HQ building. The man who had called himself Isle for so long drew a deep breath and leapt from the parapet on which he stood.

Ten feet below, he touched down soundlessly on the tiles of a balcony, eased himself onto a ledge that ran round the building, and sidled along it, back to the wall. He negotiated the corner and saw the mecha he had seen fifteen or thirty seconds before: a Scrim lumbering in behind the first wave of Inorganics to assault the doors of the HQ.

He swung himself out with a grip on the evercrete of a flying buttress, his fingers, as strong as steel, finding purchase where few other Humans' could have. When the Scrim passed under, he made a daring deadfall, clinging to a ridge of armored backplate. The

Scrim stopped and turned, but saw nothing behind it. It charged after its companions, bringing up the rear, as they breached the headquarters' main doors.

In another instant, the man was inside the building that had for so long resisted his every effort to gain entry.

He saw his chance and sprang, with nearly superhuman strength and precision, to a darkened surveillance camera mast, just as the Inorganic he had been riding came under intense fire from a gun emplacement. The fighting in the lobby and the halls was hideous and without quarter, the Humans as willing to die as the Invid. Cool and capable as he was, he was staggered for a moment by the blind, unyielding carnage of it. Edwards's advantage in numbers and firepower were quickly reduced by sheer Human stubbornness. The Invid media paid heavily for every inch they claimed.

But there were other things to think about. He slid away like a flickering shadow, knowing the floor plan from diligent study. He had waited so long and patiently, so humbly. And now the moment was his.

Reports had it that Wolff's damnable Wolff Pack were advancing to back up the loyalist Destroids in repelling the Inorganics. Luckily, only a part of the Hovertank unit had been permitted to make planetfall with their commander, and most of the rest of the troops who had gone to Haydon IV were still in orbit aboard ship, too far away to be of any tactical importance.

Edwards didn't care, just as he didn't care how many lives he had to spend to take the HQ citadel. Troops and mecha were things that he could replace; Minmei wasn't.

Adams was yammering something in his ear; Edwards looked aside from his screens and readouts. "What?"

"HQ building partially secured but still putting up resistance, sir," Adams repeated. "I think we should stand fast and wait till-"

"We're going in," Edwards cut him off. "Where's that SDF escort?"

Adams told him calmly, "Rendezvous is still on schedule. They're beginning orbital insertion now. We only have twenty-three minutes, General."

More than enough time. "Drive on! Hit hard!" Edwards hollered over the tac net. "I want some results, people!" Relaying orders back to the Living Computer by means of a receptor band that looked something like an Invid slave headband, he worked the Inorganics into a killing frenzy.

He left the limo behind to take personal charge of the raid. His forces mowed down all opposition, slew and demolished, melted superalloy and blew apart walls. At the entrance of the brig section, he was obliged to leave his Inorganics and Ghost mecha behind because the corridors were too small. Ghost Riders deployed with rifles leveled, securing the area.

Minmei had imagined the cell door opening, had imagined it so many times that she thought her mind was playing tricks on her now that it was happening. Oh, God! I'd rather be dead than crazy!

But when Edwards stepped into the open doorway, she knew she wasn't imagining it and started to scream. Sinking her fingers into the black hair that hung around her face, squeezing her eyes shut, she shrieked.

Edwards pounced on her as Adams and two lesser officers brought up the rear, guarding the door. The general cuffed her face, back and forth. "Shut up, shut up!"

Then he had her shoulders, shaking her, as she shuddered with long, wracking sobs. "Minmei, you're coming with me! Do you hear? You're mine!" He slapped her again. "Not Hunter's! Not Wolff's! Mine!

Somehow she stopped crying. Minmei raised her eyes to Edwards with a look he had never seen from her before. She wiped away the tears and saliva and mucous with the back of her hand.

She looked her foe in the eye. "If you don't leave me alone you'd better kill me, T. R. Or else I am going to kill you."

He felt such sudden misgiving that he raised his hand to hit her again, expecting her to flinch. But she kept her eyes fixed on him. "I'm going to make you beg me to forget what you just said," he whispered.

Minmei drew a deep breath. o, you're not."

A hand closed around Edwards's upraised wrist from behind; a voice told him, o, you're not."

Edwards was pulled aside, his wrist nearly broken. He was spun at the cell wall like a child's top, his burnished facemask ringing against it, his nose banged so that he smelled metal and blood. He clawed for purchase but found himself sliding down the cold alloy, leaving a red stain. A foot pressed his head to the deck, nearly crushed it, then relented. Then the foot was abruptly gone.

The general shook his head to clear it, glancing about drunkenly. Adams lay sprawled in the doorway, perhaps unconscious, perhaps dead. Edwards could see the upturned toes of one downed guard's boots in the corridor beyond. Minmei was on her feet with a look on her face that Edwards had always longed to force her to direct at him. But it was for the man in the REF flight suit who had appeared out of nowhere.

Edwards felt numbed in certain ways, superalert in others. The light danced in Minmei's eyes as she slowly raised her hands to her rescuer.

"Lynn-Kyle! Oh, Lynn-Kyle..."

Her distant cousin and, in the opinion of some, a reflection of the dark side of Minmei herself; her onetime lover and the most renowned martial arts fighter of the Robotech age. The haunted and saturnine, the brilliantly gifted but ill-starred, the undefeated and cursed Lynn-Kyle.

Kyle's face was thinner than when he had been a movie star. The fine, silky black shag was showing some gray. He kissed his cousin's forehead, then took her hand. "I'm taking you home." There was something as much penitent as loving in his voice.

Home! She couldn't really think what the word meant anymore. But she felt weightless, her hand and her body and her soul buoyant beyond belief, as she entrusted her grip to his, her feet seemingly free of the cell floor.

Edwards lurched and grabbed her ankle with a failing grip. "No! I won't let you go!"

Kyle was kneeling on Edwards's biceps, Edwards's head clamped in his hands, so quickly that there was no sense of transition. The general heard the bones of his upper spine creak and knew that his life lay on the line.

The dagger in Edwards's boot, the energy derringer in his jacket pocket-those might as well be on the SDF-3, or back on Earth, for all the good they could do him. Kyle was as quick as a lightning bolt, and there was simply no defense against him. He was more like an elemental force than a man.

"I've never taken a human life." The words seemed to come so slowly, though Edwards knew Lynn-Kyle was speaking very fast. "But I'll kill you if you don't lie still!" The heel of Kyle's hand lay, pressing upward in warning, under the general's nose, poised to execute him in an instant.

Edwards, defeated, kept still. In Kyle's place, he would have killed; but he would never be in Kyle's place, he knew now. He had lost.

But he couldn't resist croaking, "Go ahead; take the little slut, then. She's a waste of time

in bed anyway..."

Kyle seized a handful of Edwards's hair, preparing to kill him. His fist hovered, middle knuckle cocked forth, and Edwards's eyes nearly crossed, focused on that single Damoclean striking surface hanging over him.

"Kyle, no," Minmei said, as her cousin drew quick breaths and gathered his resolve. "Kyle, we need him!"

"I don't need him." The wrist turned upside down, the cocked knuckle drawn back tight and high under Kyle's right armpit, aimed at Edwards's Adam's apple. The general squirmed, trying to move his arms, but he was helpless.

"Kyle, the war's over. Just hang onto him, and we can end it all today." She swiped the long, damp night-black hair out of her eyes. "Kyle, you're not a murderer. The war's over."

"The war's over." Saying it didn't give Kyle the satisfaction he thought he would have back at the beginning-back when the SDF-3 mission was recruiting; back before he and Minmei and the rest had passed into the flames once more.

But it was enough. He would settle for it. "War's over, General. You're going to stand up and order your troops to surrender. We'll strike a peace with the Regent. And then we're all going home, right?"

Edwards's mouth moved, but he was unable to speak. Yet he was careful to nod unmistakably, his hair pulling against Kyle's grip, as he looked up at that one single knuckle that jutted out like a battering ram. "Urr. R-right."

Kyle smiled, nodding. " he wolf shall dwell with the lamb.'" He grabbed the front of Edwards's dress uniform jacket, ready to lift him up.

" nd the leopard shall lie down with the kid.'" Kyle stuck his fist close to Edwards's face again. The fist was like some gnarled piece of iron with a scruffy skin-covering on it. "And we're all going to live happily ever after, isn't that right?"

Edwards almost said something, but thought better of it. He swallowed, then nodded. Kyle leaned forward to pull him to his feet.

There was a sudden scuffling behind him and Kyle whirled, rising. Edwards's eyes flickered that way at the same time, to see Adams grappling with Minmei, the bright edge of a combat knife reflecting the light.

"Kill her! Kill her!" Edwards screamed, not because he thought Adams would necessarily follow orders, but rather because it would keep Lynn-Kyle diverted. It was no surprise that

Kyle unthinkingly sprang to Minmei's aid. Edwards was digging for his gun, even as he

thought, Kyle must know I'm armed! Why...

Adams's eyes opened wide, the edge of his blade drawing a trickle of blood from Minmei's neck. Kyle came at him, unstoppable and almost too fast to see, with a strength like something out of Robotechnology.

Adams felt himself horribly hurt and sent pinwheeling, but there was nothing he could do about it; he was propelled into a corner, black-red blood bubbling on his lips, knowing he had only a few moments of life left. Minmei was safe, except for the shallow cut on her throat.

Kyle spun on Edwards, but the general already had his derringer in his hand. It didn't make any difference; Kyle leapt at him anyway.

The gun was small, only good for two rounds, but graphically effective at short range. Edwards shot Kyle twice while he was in the air; the body that landed on the general was almost dead.

Edwards pushed Kyle off, while Minmei came to her cousin's side, knelt, and brushed his raven's-wing forelock out of his eyes. She took his head into her lap tenderly, as Edwards labored to regain his breath and get to his feet.

Kyle's eyelids fluttered. "Minmei..."

"Shh-hh."

There was no saving him; she kept her trembling hand at his chin, so he couldn't see the melted fabric and bloody mess that was his chest. Kyle coughed, "The war was almost over. We'd won."

"We'd won." She nodded. "You won it for us, Kyle." She was about to faint, holding a human body that was half blown open, but she found reserves of courage from someplace she had never delved into before, and smiled down at him instead.

There was a final, galvanic bit of life to him. "Tell me you love me, Minmei. Let it be the last thing I hear. Please."

Once, she would have hung back from conceding that, but she had suffered so much since joining the Sentinels...it seemed that last words were all she knew anymore.

"I love you, Lynn-Kyle. Now and forever."

Minmei locked her mouth to his, and felt Kyle go cold and lifeless. She held him close,

rocking as she embraced his head, crooning a little children's song he had taught her a thousand eons ago.

There was the sudden grip of bloody hands, and Edwards dragged her away from Lynn-Kyle's corpse. He was speaking into a rover commo unit through his smashed face. "Rally here! Rally here! Make pickup at this location at once!"

There was a burst of static as someone acknowledged from the assault units. Minmei knew she was still a captive and that Edwards might still win the day, but all of that was unimportant to her now.

I'm not a prisoner anymore. I have my own part to play now.

She glanced around the room, and everything she saw seemed to be an edged weapon or a bludgeon. Edwards, still trying to arrange for a rendezvous, was suddenly troubled when he saw Minmei's slow smile.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Strange, that the "Loki" of the Sentinels campaign should have a namesake so renowned in Earth's scientific history. But the Human Tesla invented polyphase systems, dynamos, oscillators, and so much more, whereas there is no record of his Invid counterpart making any contribution whatsoever-beyond the abominations that are already so notorious.

Simon Kujawa, Against All Worlds: A Biography of Tesla the Infamous

"What's your hurry, Jack?"

Karen tried to make it sound joking, but some of her concern slipped through nevertheless. Jack paused, there in the Ark Angel passageway, to face her.

"Tesla's due to speak to the leaders," he said in an emotionless voice. "I'm making final arrangements, and I'm very pressed for time, so if you don't mind-"

"What are you now, that big slug's errand boy??she sneered. "Does he keep you busy kissing his feet? Is that why you and Gnea are holed up down in that compartment with him all the time?"

Wrong tone, girl, she told herself. But she couldn't help it. She was angry at him for avoiding her, she was suspicious of all the time he was spending together with Miss Teenage Amazon, and she was worried about what Tesla might be cooking up. And she was PO'd at herself for caring so much about Jack Baker.

He had that same distant, dispassionate look he had been wearing lately, studying her like

she was something on a microscope slide. "You're an idiot," he said, and about-faced and marched off on his way.

She fought the urge to go after him and put his lights out. Violence never solves anything unless you happen to live in certain parts of New Jersey, as someone-W. C. Fields?-put it.

There was some slight reassurance in the fact that Tesla was about to make his long-postponed appearance before the Sentinels elite. Rick Hunter had decided he wasn't going to put up with any more stalling, and had in fact been in the process of organizing an armed contingent to drag the Invid before a board of inquiry-even if it meant clapping Gnea and Burak and Jack Baker in irons and giving the alien scientist a taste of the business end of a cattle prod.

But Tesla's relayed announcement-that he had something of great importance to lay before the leadership forestalled all that. There were a hundred different scuttlebutt theories about what was about to happen, and some of them were awfully disquieting.

But apparently Jack Baker wasn't about to clarify anything. Karen Penn found that she had curled her hands into fists. Idiot, huh? She went after him with every intention of dumping him on his keister.

It surprised her almost as much as it did Jack Baker when, grabbing his elbow and dragging him around on his heel, she kissed him instead of belting him. She put one hand behind his head and the other on his cheek and went toil.

It wasn't the first time they had kissed, but Karen made it something that said a lot more than the friendly/competitive necking they had occasionally done in the past. She knew then that Jack definitely wasn't his normal self; it was like kissing some unyielding stranger.

But then the kiss changed, and for a moment Jack felt stirrings of his true self and his own free will. He put his arms around Karen and kissed her back, as astonished crewmembers of various species detoured around the two or stopped to stare. A few whistled and cheered and applauded.

Tesla's mindlock reasserted itself, though, and Karen felt Jack go distant and emotionless. He held her at arm's length, his hands on her shoulders. The kiss had left her breathless, but he was behind some strange emotional barrier once more. The interplay of his features told her that there was a struggle going on somewhere inside.

"Let's see you shrug that one off, Jack," she whispered to him, her hands pressed to his cheeks. He lurched free, staggering a bit, and continued on his way. There were a few sniggers from the sidelines. Karen spun to face the onlookers.

"What're the bunch of ya doing standing around leering! Haven't you perverts got sex lives of your own?"

Her temper was well known. In five seconds she had the whole passageway to herself.

My god! Maybe we should shoot him right now, before it's too late! That was Rick Hunter's first thought when Tesla appeared before the Sentinels' leadership.

The scientist was now fully as tall as the Regent, but more strongly resembled the Regis. He reminded Lisa of a store mannequin or an ancient statue, his bodily structure and face now clearly defined along Human lines but still devoid of any real identity.

Tesla had had robes made for him-by Baker and Gnea, Rick supposed; the two were doing all his stepping and fetching in alarmingly devoted fashion these days-robes like those of the Invid monarch himself. He even wore the jeweled collar Lisa had once fastened around his throat; but now, Rick assumed, the Tango-niner explosive charges had been removed. Tesla looked...godlike.

What Rick couldn't figure out was how the big grub was doing all this evolving. There had to be a technique or medicine or something, but no one had a clue as to what it might be. Of course, Burak and Jack and Gnea might know, but they were now over in Tesla's camp, and weren't talking.

The Invid spread his huge five-fingered hands and spoke from his new mouth in a saintly voice. "I'm here for just one reason, my friends: to bring an end to these unfortunate hostilities between your races and mine. I propose to begin my great mission by alleviating the suffering and oppression down there on Spheris."

"And how will you do that?" Rem asked in clipped, precise tones. More and more, he found himself a sort of moderator among the Sentinels, since he had a certain diligent impartiality and a need to repair the damage done by his species.

Tesla raised a single, Human-looking forefinger dramatically. "The Invid were a peaceful race, since time out of mind; we didn't know the meaning of war until our Flower of Life was stolen from us.

"We can go back to our peaceful ways again! For us, it would be like the Humans returning to the Garden of Eden. But for that to happen, the old leaders must pass away."

He pressed on before anybody could raise an objection. "Self-actuated changes lie at the heart of the Invid psyche; this is well known. That is the form of existence the Flower decreed for us. Now, I am already more highly evolved than the Regent himself. I therefore intend to go to the garrison on Spheris and command the officers and Inorganics

there to lay down their arms."

"Just like that," Lisa heard Janice Em mutter. The Artificial Person wore the aspect of a human female just about constantly nowadays, yet something of the cold android logic bestowed on her by Lang had informed her persona.

Tesla had caught it. "Yes, Miss Em, just like that. Think of the lives saved and the suffering and damage that world will be spared!"

"What if it doesn't work?" Kami of Garuda said, inhaling through his special breathing mask. "What if you fail?"

Tesla's wax-museum face turned toward him. "Then, proceed with the battle plan that Teal and Baldan II are prosecuting. And remember me with what compassion you can spare, for I shall be dead."

That had people talking to each other, and Crysta, banging the gavel she manned as current chairbeing of the leadership, was some time in silencing it.

"I don't trust 'im,' Rick said out of the side of his mouth to his wife. He was looking at Burak and Gnea and Jack Baker, who stood behind Tesla and gave every indication of rooting for him.

"Whatever Baker and the rest've caught, I hope it's not contagious," Lisa agreed.

"And what are the alternatives?" Tesla forged on. "Fighting the battle and suffering the casualties you'd planned on anyway? Give me a chance to make up for what my people have done! That's all I ask of you! This can still be a galaxy of peace and mutual understanding!"

Not a dry eye in the house, Rick thought sourly, with a feeling he knew which way the voting was going to go.

As for Tesla, he felt a spreading warmth within him as he sensed victory. How did the line from that Human story go? Don't throw me into dot briar patch!

Or in this case, into the midst of an Inorganic garrison he could commandeer. Into a Protoculture garden where new varieties of the Fruit of the Flower of Life waited to speed Tesla's unprecedented evolution. Into a power base from which he would launch his campaign to dominate the entire universe.

Once, an age ago, realizing that his star was on the ascendent, the Regis had asked him, "Tesla, why are you so wicked??

And he had answered with a bored mental yawn, "Mistress, only mediocre intellects can endure the tedium of being good."

Contacted deep within Spheris, Baldan II and his people agreed to try Tesla's plan. The carnage that had accompanied previous battles with the Invid was well known now, and any idea that might prevent such ruin on Spheris was worth a try.

Teal was wary of it, though; once reassured that others would take up the fight for them, the Spherisians might be difficult or impossible to work into a fighting mood once more.

The Odeon's hornlike energy projectors gushed fiery bolts at him, but Wolff's Hovertank slewed aside, firing a close-in salvo from its own massive main gun.

The Inorganic went up like a roman candle as the rest of the Wolff Pack followed their commander, battling their way through the determined Invid resistance toward the REF HQ building.

The Hovertanks were making only the slowest progress; the Inorganics were being incredibly obstinate. Something to do with Edwards's control over them and the man's military zeal, Wolff supposed. The Inorganics had seemed paralyzed for a few moments a while back, and Wolff thought for a few seconds that the general was dead, but the alien mecha had shaken themselves awake and plunged into battle once again.

When the Invid onslaught began, Wolff's first impulse had been to get his Hovers down into the catacombs under the Royal Hall, where the Brain that activated them floated in its vat. But even before the Wolff Pack could get organized for the assault, the Inorganics had established almost-unassailable defensive positions in the catacombs. Detectors said that something big, involving a lot for Protoculture, was going on down there, but nobody could figure out what.

Since Edwards couldn't leave the Living Computer behind without losing the bulk of his fighting strength, Wolff deduced that preparations were being made to move it. But whatever was being done, it was no impediment to the combat capabilities of the Inorganics.

Edwards and a major part of his force had made their break for the HQ building. Jonathan Wolff and most of his available mecha pursued. In the meantime word came of the hijacking of the SDF-7 cruiser; Wolff knew time was short.

Much of the Hovertanks' success was due, pure and simple, to the colonel's single-minded determination to get through to the headquarters. There could only be one reason that Edwards would delay his escape and divert his troops in the way he was

doing: Minmei. Though Edwards had declared to the council that he had no idea of her whereabouts, Jonathan Wolff never believed it for an instant.

Assuming Tank, Battloid, and Gladiator configuration in compliance with his instructions and his deployment of them, his armored forces slugged their way closer and closer to the HQ. The Inorganics were making them pay for every yard of ground they gained along the elevated highways and wide, straight boulevards. Luckily, fully three quarters of the awakened enemy mecha were tied up in the fight by the Royal Hall or had been engaged by other REF and Human Sentinels fighters.

Reinforcements from SDF-3 and elsewhere on Tirol would be some time in arriving, however, and the Inorganics would have the numerical advantage for another critical half hour or so yet. Wolff was undaunted, though: the key to victory lay not in the sheer attrition of set-piece battle, but rather in striking the head from the monster-literally. By killing Edwards.

But Wolff's timetable was changed as Exedore's voice came up over the tactical communications net. "Colonel! We have Invid Terror Weapons rising from the Royal Hall! Some are heading for immediate rendezvous with the SDF-7, but others are coming your way!"

So, that was Edwards's other ace in the hole. The Regent had left more than just troops and the Living Computer behind in his haste to abandon Tirol. The Invid Brain was no doubt on its way to safety already.

Even as Wolff was getting the bad news, the Inorganics began disengaging, pulling back to defensive positions, awaiting evacuation. Soon, the way to the HQ was clear, but the building itself was alive with alien biped mecha putting out murderous, concentrated fire.

Within a minute, two of the bizarre-looking Invid drop-ships were descending toward the roof, accompanied by skirmish fliers. With their increased fire superiority, the enemy craft drove back the few VTs the Humans still had in the air. Inorganics were soon embarking for their escape.

Wolff saw that there was no way his force could stop them. He switched to Edwards's command frequency and broadcast in cleartext. "This doesn't end it, General! I'm coming after you! D'you hear me?"

Unexpectedly, the static of on-line encrypted traffic broke, and Edwards's face appeared on a display screen on the tank's instrument panel. He looked like he had been in a fistfight, but had apparently come out the winner, because he still radiated that cynical, superior air of his. Wolff could see from the background that Edwards was already aboard a Terror ship.

"That's fine with me, Colonel. You were lucky I was too rushed to finish you back there in the Royal Hall. I still have a score to settle with you.?

"But until we meet again, here's someone else you might want to say good-bye to." The camera pulled back, and Wolff swore helplessly.

Minmei stood there, eyes glazed-looking catatonic. Wolff breathed her name.

"Why, Minmei!" Edwards smiled at her. "Aren't you going to tell the big, bad Wolff how much you love him? He's come home at long last to rescue you, after all."

She looked up at the screen in the dropship that displayed Wolff's face. "Love? The man I love is dead."

"Minmei, don't say that! Just hang on; I'll save you, I swear it-"

"I don't want anything you have to offer, Jonathan. The man I'll love forever is dead."

She wanted to be with Edwards so she could kill him as soon as she got the chance, not thrown back into the company of the colonel who had abandoned her-as she regarded his going off with the Sentinels now-after she had begged him not to leave. There was nothing Jonathan Wolff could do for her ever again.

But there was one thing she could do, to take some of the weight off her conscience and vent the bitterness she felt toward the whole world in the wake of Lynn-Kyle's death. She could make the break clear and final.

"Why don't you go back to your Sentinels buddies, Colonel?" she said, narrowing her eyes at him. "Or better yet, why don't you go home to your wife and kids? Remember them, you two-timing pig!?She reached out and broke the connection herself.

Edwards exulted at this sudden turn of luck. He had hoped that Minmei's grief and mental turmoil would make her rebuff Wolff-he had had nothing to lose by letting her and the colonel speak to each other once more. But this was simply marvelous! He vowed that he would make Minmei love him, as he had once before. She would come around in time.

The dropships were rising over Tiresia, laying down suppressing fire to keep the REF's heads down. The hijacked starship was swinging low for pickup, its bays opening.

Of course, it was a tragedy that Lang hadn't installed the new spacefold drive in the stolen starship yet; otherwise, Edwards could have had his ticket back to Earth, and a loyal army at his back.

No point mourning that now. The Ghost officers aboard the ship were asking nervously

what course they should set, to be ready for immediate departure.

"Optera," the general answered curtly, and broke the connection. The Regent had already been of service, but that was nothing compared to how useful he was about to become to Edwards's dream of conquest.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

In summation, it is important to bear in mind how the "social insect" organization of the Invid renders them immune to certain politico-military strategems. Among the things we CANNOT do to the Invid are:

1) Wreck their (nonexistent) monetary system

2) Establish an underground or resistance

3) Cause racial or religious friction

4) Employ propaganda techniques

5) Insert double agents

6) Subvert them with things like material wealth, freedom, erotic literature, or baseball.

7) Appeal to their better nature

from Limited Options: Warfare and the Invid Infrastructure, submitted to the REF Strategic Studies Group by Dr. Boscoe Highwater

Lron, Rick Hunter, and others pointed out that in the wake of the ruse Tesla had used against the Invid garrison on Karbarra in the Sentinels' attack on that world, the enemy on Spheris wasn't very likely to roll out the red carpet for him.

"That incident will be of no consequence here, because I am Evolved," Tesla said grandly. "Nothing you Mortals can understand, but take my word for it: my people will recognize my divine right to command."

One thing in his favor was the fact that Gnea and Jack Baker believed so strongly that Tesla could deliver what he was promising. But Rick had his own suspicions about the two; they were too eager in their attitudes, too ready to back the Invid.

Another troubling factor was Burak. The Perytonian had conceived a sort of jealousy toward Jack and Gnea-a proprietary air concerning Tesla. He was also acting more and more messianic, as if Tesla was contagious.

But there was no derailing Tesla's plan now. The leadership had agreed on it and the Spherisians were demanding that it at least be tried, in the hope that it would prevent needless carnage and damage on their world.

Much disagreement had arisen as to how Tesla should actually make his appearance on Spheris. Combat drops and commando insertions would produce the wrong effect, he

insisted. In the end, Veidt took him down in one of the cone-shape Haydonite fliers, with Burak, Jack, and Gnea acting as retinue and security.

At Lisa's insistence, Tesla's jeweled bib had been wired up with explosives again, to prevent any double-crosses. Jack Baker carried one firing switch, and there was another on the bridge of the Ark Angel, which still lay hidden from enemy detection.

On the approach, Tesla considered putting Veidt under his mental control, too. But the Haydonite's mind powers were strong, and Tesla would need all available power to take over the garrison below. He therefore settled for masking his dominance over Baker and the others.

As the flier descended, the thin atmosphere began to buffet it slightly. Spheris lay like an imperial orb, heavy with gems and wrapped in the cotton of clouds, below. The dazzle of it was intense; Human, Praxian, and Perytonian were wearing wraparound sun visors, as most of the Sentinels would have to do on Spheris during daylight hours.

The passengers shifted their feet on the thick, resilient padding that carpeted the passenger compartment. "What if they fire?" Veidt wondered calmly.

"They will not fire," Tesla parried. "I have willed it so." Jack and Gnea smiled at one another conspiratorially. Burak glowered at them.

The surface drew near. A shining city appeared below, like a masterpiece of Venetian glass. Tesla, looming over the others, commanded that communications links be established, and Veidt's apparatus did it instantly.

"Loyal hordes of the Invid race! Hear my voice, a voice you know!" Many figures in the city seemed to freeze, looking up. Jack could spy Inorganics, Enforcers, and Hellcats.

As Tesla ordered, Veidt brought the flier down by a landing platform near the garrison's main hive, a megastructure out of place amid the delicate beauty of the city. Tesla emerged radiating a rainbow aura, and the Invid there stood transfixed.

"I come to save you from the aimless strife and the privation of your long exile. Too long have the Invid fought wars for no reason; too long have you wandered in search of a new Garden of the Flower of Life. I come to lead you-"

He spread his arms wide, as tall as a tree, gorgeous in his robes and glimmering collar. "-to Paradise!"

The city seemed to ring with a wordless, reverent sound the Invid made in unison. Mecha bowed their heads or dropped to one knee, holding fists and weapons aloft to salute him. Hellcats roared their worship, touching foreheads to the high-gloss pavement.

It was as Tesla had foreseen. The brain that controlled the planet's garrison was of lesser power and he had managed to subvert its authority through his evolved mental force. He broadcast a thought-impulse, voicing it aloud as well.

"Come to me, my children! Gather and do homage, that I may see you and you may heed my commands, to prepare for your joyous new life on a new Optera!"

The things began making their way toward him from the hive and from all over the city. "As soon as we have secured the city," Tesla said, "we will proceed to the Protoculture orchid in the hive and secure the local Fruit of the Flower."

The Invid were already gathering below the landing platform, a swelling lake of them promising to become an ocean. They looked unusual in that they were armed not with the usual Protoculture weapons, but rather with projectile and chemical devices. The Invid, too, valued Spheris-primarily for its production of unequaled nutrient fluid-and had no wish to inflict unnecessary damage to it.

Veidt objected. "There was nothing in the plan about you ingesting Fruit of the Flower. Keep to the agreed-upon timetable, or I notify the Sentinels!"

Tesla didn't respond, busy basking in the glory as the Invid mob began hailing him with un-Human sounds. Veidt turned to Gnea. "Stop him! He's betraying us, I can sense it now!"

But she spared him only a sinister smile. Veidt turned to the control panels of his flier, sending out mental signals. A communication device lit up, preparing to send Veidt's warning to the Ark Angel.

Gnea turned her Badger assault pistol on it and blasted the apparatus; explosive bullets were about as good as Protoculture bolts for a job like that. Then she shot up the rest of the controls, disabling the craft. Jack and Burak did not seem to notice, showing the same adoration for Tesla that the Inorganics did.

Tesla was radiant in his triumph, but the moment was short-lived. A Terror ship threw its shadow across the scene. Tesla howled a curse; the Brain wasn't so feeble that it couldn't exert influence of its own.

The dropship landed nearby and its landing ramps descended. Officers emerged by the dozen, leading troops whose loyalty Tesla couldn't bend to his will. He was already extended to his limits with the many he had taken over, and in addition found that the more highly evolved Officers put up too much resistance to the subjugated.

Since Gnea had destroyed the flier, his path of retreat was cut off, but that mattered little.

Tesla hadn't come to Spheris to retreat or be beaten. He still had most of the city's garrison-a major part of the entire planet's complement of Invid-under his sway. He sent out the order to his loyal host, "Slay the unfaithful! Cut them down! In the name-of Tesla!"

They turned to do just that, the two waves of mecha closing with each other. Tesla spared a moment to snap, "Baker! Burak! Go, and fetch me the Fruit at once! Gnea, keep watch on Veidt!"

The two males dashed away, on a roundabout path, guided by his unspoken directions. Veidt looked at Gnea and knew it was no use trying to reason with her. As for Tesla, the scientist's now-uncloaked powers were astounding, strong enough to resist anything Veidt could muster against it.

Helpless, Veidt watched with Tesla and Gnea as Invid closed in mortal combat with Invid.

"There's fighting below on a large scale, Captain," a bridge crewmember told Lisa. "It's some kind of Invid civil war, apparently."

Lisa had more than half hoped it would be some sign of treachery by Tesla, especially after contact with Veidt's flier was lost. That would give her all the justification she needed to throw the switch and trigger the charge in Tesla's collar and blow his damned head away.

"I guess Tesla can't fool all of the Invid all of the time," Rick mused. "I'll say this for him, though: he's created a diversion."

"But we don't know how long it'll last," Bela said, fists planted on girded hips. "The time to move is now!"

The leadership came to a quick decision; Rick could see that his once-cautious wife was in accord with the amazon way of thinking now. Orders went out for the combat drop operations to begin.

Perhaps the conventional weapons with which the Inorganics on Spheris had been armed couldn't produce the planet-rending effects Protoculture firearms did, but the ruin they spread in the gorgeous capital city of Beroth was appalling enough. Explosive shells, armor-piercing rockets, and the mecha's own brute strength shattered buildings and sculptures, stately columns and illumination pylons. The Inorganics pounded and shot and dismembered one another throughout the city.

Jack and Burak found that the combatants were totally uninterested in them, but that didn't mean they were safe. A Scrim's stray shot or a wrestling Odeon's foot would kill them just

as dead as a well-aimed missile. Following Tesla's silent guidance, they picked their way through the madness toward the hive. They had no idea how to distinguish between the local Brain's loyalists and Tesla's faction, but obviously the Inorganics did.

At one point they were nearly cut to ribbons by a shattered wall that fell like a waterfall of needles and razors, knives and guillotine blades. Seconds later, they just reached cover before a thermal warhead went off in the midst of a cluster of Crann. Two Hellcats, trying to tear each other apart, rolled from a higher esplanade and nearly crushed them.

But they ran on without pause and in perfect cooperation, because that was Tesla's will. At the entrance to the hive, Burak led the way, being more familiar with the layout of such places.

There, too, the Invid seemed to be distracted to the point of utter carelessness-at least where non-Invid interlopers were concerned. The pair made their way through the shadows, as reinforcements went pounding up and down the corridors. Navigated by Tesla's hold on them, they came at last to the place where the Flower of Life had brought forth its burden.

Here, too, the Fruit had only appeared recently, so much so that it wasn't quite ripe yet. Therefore, it hadn't been harvested yet for shipment to Optera. Tesla took that as another sign that he, not the Regent, was destined to rule his species and the universe.

"The Invid are fighting it out sure enough, sir," Karen reported back to Rick over the command net, "but there's no way to tell who's who!"

She completed her close pass in the Fighter-mode Logan VT, weaving among stray shots and deliberate ones, missiles and autocannon both, that drew lines through the sky around her.

"Suggest you delay drop, I say again, delay drop, until we can figure out what's going on."

"Understood." In the Ark Angel's tactical information center, Rick switched to his link with Lisa up on the bridge. "Did you get that?"

"Acknowledged." She swept the ship around into a holding pattern, as it was jarred by the atmosphere. In the mustering points, hundreds of troops cussed at the delay and wondered what was wrong; the waiting, the veterans knew, could sometimes be the worst part of all.

Karen brought her VT about and went to Guardian configuration for another pass. She finally spotted her objective. "I've got Tesla sighted! Gnea and Veidt, too, but I don't see Burak or Jack!" She felt her heart sink within her.

Just then Gnea's voice came over the net. "Attention, Karen! Jack and Burak are inside the Invid hive, stealing a, um, special weapon that Tesla says can win the battle. Make the pickup on them at the main intersection south of the hive; Jack will have his comset keyed for a homing signal.

"Also be advised: Tesla will instruct his troops to emit blinking signals with their optical sensors. I say again, troops with blinking signals are friendlies."

"Roger that," Karen said. She relayed the information to Lisa even as her VT leapt away through the sky, thrusters bellowing, to make the pickup on Jack and Burak.

Below her, Tesla took his concentration from the battle for an instant to tell Gnea, "Well done."

The faster the Fruit was brought to him, the better. And, having a Veritech at his disposal would enhance his situation, too.

This time, the Fruit was as yellow as a sunflower and grew in a shape that was nearly a perfect pyramid.

Jack and Burak had bundled up as many as they could in their jackets, and crept out of the hive once more, like raiding mice among the hurrying giant Inorganics.

At one point, they felt disoriented as Tesla wondered if it wouldn't be worthwhile to send them on a suicide attack to the Brain. But the moment passed as the scientist realized that the Brain would be far too well guarded for two lightly armed humanoids to tackle. Besides, he must have the Fruit, before something happened to it.

When they reached the intersection, Jack, by Tesla's decree, keyed the homing signal. He and Burak got ready to put the rest of the plan into effect.

Zooming down in a wash of thruster fire, Karen could see no sign of either Jack or Burak. And yet, she was getting a strong signal from the comset.

The only building still standing in the area was a sturdy-looking structure suggesting a bunker of polished opal. Karen checked her instruments; the signal was coming from there. Its entrances were far too small for a Battloid.

Jack's voice came up on the net. "Karen, get in here and help me with Burak; he took a bad hit."

The fighting had moved from the area, but she still considered Jack's proposal dubious. "Can't you get him to the entry? I can pick him up with the Battloid's hand."

Jack sounded weak and weary. "Goddamn you, it's all I can do to keep him from coming apart in pieces! And I caught a hit or two myself."

Karen imaged the mechamorphosis, and the VT, back in Guardian shape, knelt with its radome almost touching the ground. She was out of the cockpit and running in another second or two, sidearm drawn. She passed into the dark interior, calling his name.

Something hit her from behind, and the next thing she knew, Jack and Burak were standing over her with drawn guns.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

I've been accused of over-romanticizing certain aspects of the events that day. Maybe so, and if that's the kind of thing that irks you, then don't read on.

What you should do to keep yourself busy, though, is make sure you try the glass slipper on every appropriate foot that comes your way. You might change your mind-or your luck. Jack Baker, Upwardly Mobile

Glowing disembodied along the crystal highways, Baldan II implored his people.

"We know which media we must strike at now! Tesla's troops and even the Sentinels may not be enough! We must help them!"

But everywhere it was the same. "We are safe here in the bosom of Spheris. Let the outworlders fight their own battles!"

The heart he had put into them was gone again, now that someone seemed ready to hand the Spherisians peace and freedom on a platter. Baldan brooded, and wondered if such a gift could ever be trusted, and how much harm it would do Spheris in the long run.

Teal spoke across the mineral medium to him. "What shall we do? Baldan, if you want to fight, I am with you."

"There is one thing we might do," he said. Reorienting his mind-spirit along new vectors, he headed toward Beroth. Teal rose after.

Karen knew her flight helmet had saved her from being killed; from the positions of the two as they stood looking down at her, she presumed Burak had struck the blow.

She tried to move and realized she was trussed up with her own flight harness and their uniform harnesses.

Burak was tucking her dropped pistol in his gunbelt. "I'll get the Fruit. Make sure she's secure. And don't forget to bring her helmet."

Jack removed the helmet, but then stood looking down at her uncertainly, weighing his Badger. "Jack, Tesla's making you do this, isn't he? Jack, don't listen to him! Stop and think what you're doing, before-"

"Silence!" Burak was back. "Be grateful that Omnipotent Tesla directs us to spare you, or-"

Then his expression became a little vague, as did Jack's, as they both listened to something she couldn't hear. Burak glanced down at her with a devilish grin, his horns silhouetted against the entrance.

"It seems you're not indispensable after all, Penn." He turned to Jack. "Finish her, while I load the Fruit." Burak had no compunctions about killing Karen-not under Tesla's coercion. But he was much more concerned that the Fruit stay in his possession, giving him some minimal leverage with the Invid.

"Jack, don't do this," she whispered.

He bolstered his gun like a man in a trance. His forehead was covered with rivulets of sweat. Hooking his hands in her bonds, he began pulling her up. A part of him felt that he couldn't simply leave her body there; that he must move it further into the darkness to hide his terrible crime. Another part simply wanted to lift her up and bear her away-away from the danger.

Her infighting moves were severely limited: ankles and knees were strapped together, her hands bound behind her at elbows and wrists. But as he lifted her up, she made her play; it had nothing to do with knocking him unconscious.

Lurching against him, she pinned him between the wall and herself, putting her mouth to his. The zombielike dullness slipped from him, and after a surprised instant, he kissed her back, arms going around her, supporting her. He buried his fingers in her hair and hugged her tight. Time stopped for both of them.

"What are you doing?" Burak's footsteps clicked on the floor.

Jack could only release her and turn to go for his gun in a desperate contest. Karen tucked her chin in and managed to avoid having her head cracked open as she toppled over backward in a painful fall.

Jack didn't have time to unholster his pistol, because Burak was practically on top of him, though one of the man's groping hands blundered open the retaining strap that held his comset in its pouch. But he managed to grab Burak's wrist and give it a practiced twist, sending the Perytonian's handgun bouncing across the floor. Then Jack hit him with a right cross, sending him staggering into the wall.

Tesla sensed what was going on and strove to reassert his dominance over Jack, sending a mental bolt at him just as he went to grapple with Burak. Jack somehow endured the attack, but he was off balance.

Knocking aside Jack's clumsy defense, Burak used an instinctive attack, one the Sentinels hadn't seen from a Perytonian yet, and that Jack wouldn't be looking for. Rather than use hands or feet, Burak faked, then lowered his head and gored Jack Baker.

The long, dart-keen, tapered horns ripped through the tough fabric of the man's uniform and through flesh and muscle, opening twin channels across his midsection. One horn hung up on a rib, and Burak was pulled off balance. Jack managed to land a hammer blow to the base of Burak's neck with his fist, but the Perytonian lifted him from his feet and dropped him like a bull tossing a matador.

As Jack fell, Burak looked around dizzily for his gun. But a burst from a Badger made him duck, and he rushed madly for the bunker's entrance. Karen fired again, but with no way to aim, she was lucky she just stitched a line of shots across the ceiling.

Lucky I didn't shoot my own young tush off! she told herself.

As it was, she had through some miracle managed to squirm over to Burak's gun, rolling over it backward to get it.

As Burak fled, he kicked something that skittered ahead of him. He instinctively scooped it up as he ran, barely breaking stride: Jack's comset, which had bounced loose in the struggle.

Karen fired one more burst blindly, then let Burak go and set the Badger aside. She went back to work on the makeshift bonds. By the time she had her wrists loosened up a bit, the rumble of her ascending VT shook the air.

Burak didn't have the flight helmet, but with luck and a little skill he could get back to Tesla using sheer manual controls.

Other hands, slick with blood, fumbled to help Karen free herself. In seconds she was kneeling by Jack, and he curled back on the floor. The goring had been savage, and he was losing blood fast. But she could see that he had shaken off Tesla's influence.

She looked around for her flight helmet to call for a medevac but saw it lying in pieces, an inadvertent victim of one of her own unaimed bursts.

Jack managed a pale ghost of one of those maddening grins. "Isn't Prince Charming supposed to awaken Sleeping Beauty with the kiss? Penn, can't you get anything right?"

Armed with all the non-Protoculture weaponry they had been able to muster, the Sentinels dropped into Beroth to throw themselves in on the side of the blinking Invid.

If the Brain had been more devious, it might have had its troops imitate Tesla's strobe signals and confuse things again. But, an aging and somewhat obsolescent organism, it practiced only the standard, brute tactics of Invid warfare.

The Sentinels had come in armed with everything from Karbarran pneumatics to Garudan slingshots, but most were carrying REF-style non-Protoculture weapons. Even the Praxians had put aside their polearms and swords and dart-throwers willingly for submachine guns loaded with explosive bullets, heavy machine guns that fired discarding-sabot rounds, and portable recoilless rifles.

There were also mortars, flame guns, Garudan things that squirted molecular acid, blowtorches, and a lot more. The VTs and the few remaining Hovertanks couldn't use Protoculture weapons either, of course, but there had only been time to retrofit a few of them with old-style autocannon and rocket pods. Still, even lacking firearms, a multi-ton mecha throwing armored punches or swinging a superalloy club as long as a utility pole could do a lot of damage.

It was easy to sort out friend from foe; Tesla's new subjects' cyclopean eyes flashed brightly. The Sentinels launched themselves into the fray with that same hunger for revenge and victory that they had brought to other battles.

But Tesla was beginning to feel misgivings. Burak was already on his way back with the Fruit-slowly, because he wasn't used to handling a VT, and certainly not without the special thinking-cap flight helmet-but the Sentinels might discover Tesla's treachery at any time, if Baker or Penn could get word back somehow.

Was it luck or was it the Shaping of the Protoculture that Penn's helmet had been shot up and Baker's comset taken by Burak? Tesla steeled himself against doubts. Though every Inorganic he could command was sorely needed in the battle, he detached several and sent them toward the bunker, to do away with two troublesome Humans before they could interfere any further.

In the meantime, sensing the deployment of the Sentinels and the manner in which the battle was taking shape, he began a series of strategic withdrawals, in order to shift the

burden of the fighting over to his former captors. He would need his own troops for other things.

On Optera the Regent, still dripping from nutrient immersion, viewed a recording of the brief fragment of message that his Spheris garrison had managed to send.

"Under attack by-"

Then the screen went blank, because the main communications installation had been the first thing against which Tesla directed his troops' fire.

But the Regent could hardly know that. He could only quake with rage and fright, that an enemy could so suddenly overwhelm his most important remaining stronghold outside of Optera.

Burak barely survived his landing, crumpling the Guardian's powerful leg under it with a creaking of metal, and stoving in the radome.

"Can you fly it?" Tesla demanded of Gnea.

She shook her head somewhat groggily; leakage from Tesla's mind let bits and pieces of the fierce battle through into her own. "Not without a helmet."

Tesla roared and reached out to swat her like a bug; she never even flinched. But he stopped himself, realizing that she might be of some further use. Burak emerged from the keeled-over Guardian hobbling, somehow contriving to carry the bundled Fruit. The ring of flashing-eyed troops that Tesla had drawn around the area to protect himself opened for Burak.

By the time the Perytonian was dragging himself up the ramp to join him on the landing platform, Tesla was already issuing new marching orders to his usurped army.

Just then a contact signal came from the communicator on Gnea's belt. It was Lisa Hunter's voice over the command freq. "Tesla, get your eastern and northern elements going in a pincer movement, do you read me? What they're doing now is worse than useless!"

Tesla took the comset in his now-dexterous hand. "Oh yes! I read you, female; have no fear."

He broke the contact, but continued what he was doing. His objective now was the troopships on the other side of the city; the Brain was too well guarded, and he had sworn

never to go back into Human captivity.

The VTs the Sentinels had been able to field had already hit some of the tanker ships in port, sending tidal waves of nutrient fluid washing outward. But the troopships stationed there in long-term ground positions were, in accordance with military procedure, camouflaged against space attack-just as the Terror Weapons on Tirol had been. They were still there awaiting Tesla's pleasure.

"And then on to Optera!" he cried, shaking his fist at the sky.

"No!" It was Burak, limping toward Tesla with a wild look on his face and Jack's blood still glistening darkly on his horns. He dropped the bundles of Fruit and stepped back from them.

"Not Optera; Peryton! You promised!"

Tesla, furious, sent out a mental bolt that almost flattened Burak. How the Perytonian had slipped his mental leash, Tesla had no idea, except that Tesla's concentration was divided among so many things.

But Burak withstood the bolt somehow and held up Jack Baker's comset. His thumb was on its special switch, the one that would trigger the charge in Tesla's resplendent collar. "Pery...ton," Burak got out between locked teeth.

Tesla felt immense amusement and savage wrath at the same time. "Is that so? Behold!"

Suddenly the unpickable locks that clasped the collar around his neck clicked open. At the same time, Burak found that he couldn't move, not so much as the thumb that rested on the deadly button.

Tesla took the collar and hurled it far from him; there would be more of such baubles than he could count once he had taken his rightful place. He reached out to push Burak's thumb; there was a loud report from the exploding bib, down somewhere in the lower levels of the landing platform area.

Tesla still had three valuable hostages, an army of Inorganics, and his newfound powers. He had no doubt now that he would prevail.

"Very well, all of you; we're going to-"

But as he turned, he let out an enraged bellow. Veidt was gone. Gnea was befuddled, swearing that he had been there, with her Badger trained on him, only seconds before. From where he had floated, cornered, Veidt could only have plunged over the edge of the platform and down into the darkened levels far below.

Only, who knew what such a fall meant to a Haydonite? No time to wonder now. Tesla issued a mental order, and Gnea and Burak gathered up the Fruit, then closed ranks behind him. Together, they descended to fall in behind a flying wedge of Inorganics, to battle their way toward the spaceport.

Odeons lifted them up and carried them swiftly.

The Invid had thought the arms room a place safe from Spherisian intrusion-firstly, because it held Protoculture weapons the locals dreaded; secondly, because it was an enclosure cut off from the Crystal Highways.

The invaders never thought to consider their own thick bundles of fiber-optic filaments-thick cables of silicon-based strands. That same system was accessible elsewhere.

In one corner of the room, two cables swelled and swelled, expanding, drawing in more material from floors above and below, until at last the insulation around them was blown away in shreds. The filaments curled and fused, taking on humanoid form.

This time, Baldan found himself all but transparent, the light shifting within him as if he were a fortune-teller's ball come alive. Teal was now composed of the same clear stuff, though her body was still unmistakably female.

He shook his head to clear it of the ringing. The last stretch, through the Invid cable system, had been resonant with their incomprehensible battle signals rather than with the songs of the Highways.

"Why are we here, Baldan? And where are we?"

He set off among the rearing racks of outsize Invid weapons. "We're here because it isn't right that Spherisians let others do their fighting and dying for them. It isn't just. It cheapens freedom."

He's not using Baldan II's voice, Teal told herself. Those are his father's words, and no mistaking it.

He came at last to what he was searching for: a row of heavy Enforcer rifles. They weren't even locked up. He lifted one, making sure that its charge was full. As heavy as it was, he handled it easily; his structure was stronger than that of ordinary flesh and blood. Teal saw that he was drawing on Baldan I's memories as much as he was upon the training Bela and the others had given him.

He heard a quiet clicking and turned to see Teal checking over a second rifle. "No!" he said softly. "Where I go from here you cannot follow."

She held the rifle resolutely. "You complain because Spherisians won't fight, and now you lose your composure because one wants to! Make up your mind, young man."

The features of his face slid around into a wry look, then straightened again. "Keep your head down, Mother."

They stole out along Invid-style corridors, through the great hive. They were near the innermost sanctum, having bypassed ring upon ring of sentries and guardposts and surveillance by means of the Crystal Highways. In moments they hung back in the shadows of a structure like a huge fibroblast, looking out at the Invid Brain that held sway over most of the occupying army.

It was pulsing and emitting strange sounds, so agitated and apprehensive that even the two intruders could sense it clearly. The battle wasn't going well.

There was a handpicked elite of Officers and Enforcers around the Brain, conferring in low tones and attending it. Baldan looked to his mother, raising his chin and brows inquiringly.

What misplaced practical joke of the Protoculture brought me here? she carped to herself. All she had ever wanted to do was enjoy life and the attentions of admirers, to let her beauty speak for itself and languish in the adulation that everyone seemed eager to accord her.

But she nodded to her son that she was ready. The two leapt out to either side of the cover, rifle muzzles at waist level, firing Protoculture blasts.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Tesla was very troubled in the last hours before the attack. When I asked him about it, I expected one of his evasive numbers or egomaniacal silences.

But he seemed to need to talk to someone. He was psychotic by then, I think; the lab people conjecture that he'd actually been increasing his chromosome numbers.

At any rate, he said, "I have had a recurring dream lately. A great phoenix of mind-force rises from a small blue-white world and soars away to another plane of existence. It fills me with apprehension."

Lisa Hayes Hunter, Recollections

Karen had seen to Jack's wounds as best she could, but he went into shock, still losing blood. It came down to a simple choice of leaving him there and going for help, or staying

with him and watching him die.

Then the decision was taken away from her. A Hellcat bounded into sight at the bunker's entrance, showing its glowing fangs. Its eyes were flashing rhythmically; it was one of Tesla's.

Three had originally been dispatched by Tesla to keep Karen and Jack from getting word of his treachery back to the Sentinels. But an ambush by the Brain's forces had cut down the other two 'Cats.

Tesla had picked the feline-shape for the job because it was smaller and more limber than the biped Inorganics. Now, it slunk into the entranceway of the bunker on all fours, belly scraping sparks from the gleaming floor, yeowling at its prey.

Karen was already trying to drag Jack back to safety, but the side doors were all secured. So at last she wound up crouched, with Jack, against the dead end of the entrance-way's rear wall. The Robobeast edged nearer, its strobing eyes lighting the darkness, claws gouging the quartz-hard floor.

Karen raised Jack's pistol and her own side-by-side and opened fire. The 'Cat screamed and lowered its head, shielding its eyes, but kept coming; it had little to fear from a conventional handgun. One paw reached out to slice her wide open.

But it missed because it was being yanked backward. It turned to grapple with something Karen couldn't see, unable to get any fighting room in the confinement of the entranceway.

Then it was gone, dragged into the open, and there was a monstrous clash going on outside. Karen rushed to the entrance, looking for Skull colors; nothing short of a mecha could have jerked the Hellcat out of the bunker tail-first.

She was right. It was an Odeon, rolling with and slugging the smaller 'Cat. Another Odeon joined it, its nose-tentacle flickering out to ensnare the Hellcat. In another moment, they were socking and kicking the thing, dismembering it. Their optical sensors were not flashing.

Karen thought about making a dash for it, but she couldn't leave Jack behind. The Odeons were rising from their savage battle and turning their attention to her.

She backed into the shadows once more; they closed in. But as the nasal whips curled and snapped at her, a stream of depleted-transuranic slugs the size of candlepins hit them.

Karen spun and threw herself headlong, shielding her face. The Odeons, holed through and through, leaked green nutrient fluid for a moment as their systemry fizzled, then they

collapsed, smoke and flame belching from their split seams. They ruptured open with explosions that mingled with the sounds of a descending Alpha's thrusters.

Karen had sat up again, face smudged and pallid. The VT was in Guardian mode, its canopy raised now as the pilot stood. Blaze's light reflected off a well-remembered flight helmet, one cast in the image of a Praxian war helm.

"Well, well! Maybe when we get a moment, you can tell me why two enemy slugs killed & friendly 'Cat that was in turn just about to eat a Sentinel!"

It was Bela.

"Tesla! Ark Angel to Tesla!"

"Still no acknowledgment, Captain," the Human commo officer told Lisa.

"Keep trying anyway," she said. To the mike, she repeated, "Your troops' lines are collapsing in all sectors! You must get them to stand fast!"

She switched off her mike and told the officer, "Keep on trying to raise him." Then she switched to ship's net. "Rick, he's not answering. I think it's a double-cross." She looked intently at the duplicate trigger, on her command console, for the explosives in Tesla's collar.

"All right; make another approach," he answered from the drop bay. "I'm taking in the last of the reserves, to get our troops back out."

It was on her lips to object, but she held it in. The lessons of the Praxians had subsumed those of the Academy. Of course you don't leave your buddies in deep trouble, no matter what the cost. She knew it as well as he. It was just that she wished she could make the assault with him and the other units.

She brought the ship onto a new heading, bearing down on Beroth at low altitude and steady helm, coming to dead-slow. Luckily, the Invid had used up most of their missiles, and their conventional cannonfire and smaller rockets weren't powerful enough to do more than dent the starship's armor and blow away noncritical superstructural features.

Ark Angel nudged over or smashed a lot of local architecture on its touchdown, lying almost smack in the middle of Beroth. At Rick's command the combat teams charged out to provide fire support for the Sentinels elements still trying to disengage, now that Tesla's forces had abandoned them.

Lisa saw from the tactical displays that it looked very grim. It was clear that Tesla was

leaving them in the lurch, having some plan of his own, but there was little the Sentinels could do about it; the Brain's Inorganics were after them now.

At that moment even the shaky timetable of the withdrawal was set aside. There were sounds of Protoculture weapons fire in the city. Spheris itself cried out in torment.

Baldan and Teal hosed the Brain and its attendants with steady streams of riflefire, cutting Officers and Enforcers down and leaving streaks of blackening tissue across the sides of the heaving Invid monstrosity.

The attack had come so suddenly that all opposition was mowed down before there was any chance for the Invid to return fire. With wild elation Baldan thought, We've taken them by surprise. We can kill the Brain and end the battle here!

But even as he thought that, the floor was heaving beneath him. Protoculture weapons had been fired, and Spheris was reacting in pain.

His affinity for his world let him understand what was happening. Sympathetic vibrations of a sort only Protoculture could evoke were sending fractures along and between the Crystal Highways, like fractal daggers driven into Spheris itself. Somehow, the mere explosions of mecha didn't produce this phenomenon-perhaps because such bursts were undirected. But the riflefire, minor as it was in comparison to the warfare going on in Beroth, was a different matter entirely.

Baldan and Teal were knocked off their feet and the Brain was sloshed around in its nutrient pool. Baldan tried to get to his feet and shoot the Brain again, but Teal shouted. "No, or you may doom us all! Come, come! Before the Inorganics get us!"

The floors were already drumrolling to the heavy tread of running Inorganics coming in answer to the Brain's agonized summons. Baldan rose at last, taking his mother's arms and dragging her off the other way. She dropped her rifle and clung to him. They tottered away as the hive shook on its foundations.

The bend in a corridor brought them up against a sealed security door; the sound of the Inorganics came closer. Baldan backed off and fired at the door over and over, even though he knew it would do no good.

As the biped mecha came lumbering around the corner, Teal saw the method to Baldan's madness. The floor quaked and shifted, and a prow of icy crystal thrust itself up into sight. Spheris was reacting against its source of pain.

The upthrust had cut the Inorganics off from their quarry for the moment. Baldan threw down the rifle, took his mother's hand, and veered at the crystal as the hive tilted again.

They melded with it and were safely away.

Churning in its nutrient pool, nearly insane with the pain of its wounds, the Brain lost all control. If the slave races were going to use Protoculture weapons, Protoculture weapons it would be!

Tesla, too, nearly lost his balance as the planet convulsed. The Brain demonstrated its ire a moment later. Weapons pods set on tall masts around the hive opened up. The blasts were highly accurate, hitting Tesla's blinking-eye Inorganics and blowing them part.

"To the ships! The ships!" he howled, an echo of his mental command. The disguised troop transports were only yards away, but most of his loyal troops were still covering his retreat.

He dithered, racked by indecision. To flee without the army he had gathered would leave him a wretched outcast once again, but to stay was to be killed, either by the Brain, the Sentinels, or the very planet! Better to live to fight another day.

"We raise ship immediately!" he screamed, so loud that Burak and Gnea winced.

The Crystal Highways themselves spasmed. The planet bid fair to tear itself apart. The Spherisians who had trusted the safety of the underground looked at one another.

"Get everybody back! Disengage!" Rick was nearly hoarse from shouting his commands over the tac net. "Prepare for pickup!"

It felt as if Spheris was going to come apart at the seams, and the only thing to do was try to get his Sentinels to safety. He had no idea what the upheavals meant for the Spherisians themselves, but there didn't seem to be much he could do for them, except-

He switched to command freq. "Lisa! Do not use Protoculture weapons! It'll only make things worse down here!"

That didn't seem to bother the Invid Brain, though. Rays and annihilation disks streamed from the hive's defensive batteries, wiping out every mecha that flashed the signal of Tesla, and whatever Sentinel targets they could find as well.

The tide of the Inorganics' battle had definitely turned, with Tesla's mecha fighting dispiritedly or simply turning to run, while the Brain's war machines came on relentlessly. Still, for some reason none of the Inorganics were using Protoculture weapons. Some programmed proscription?

The Brain's gunners were really pouring it on now, and the planet rocked. Rick despaired of ever getting his troops-or himself-out alive.

Around the perimeter of the hive one head rose from the living rock as if being born from it. Then another emerged, and another. Soon scores were there as the planet swayed and bucked under them. They exchanged looks and unspoken words, then sank back out of sight.

Tesla wailed as a sudden tremor knocked him from his feet and overbalanced a Crann that toppled across him.

He fought to keep hold over his troops, to maintain dominance over the transport crews he had taken under his control, and to ward off the Brain's mental attack. But in this latest setback, something had to give.

Gnea felt her mind pried loose from Tesla's bond. She shook her head, hearing a ringing and seeing lights before her eyes. A voice in her mind said, "Gnea! Quickly! Over here!"

She spun around and saw Veidt poised not twenty feet away, on a flying carpet. His robes were blackened and punctured where shrapnel or bullets had plucked at them. "Make haste! There are only seconds!" She realized that he had freed her from Tesla's grip.

Other Inorganics were trying to separate Tesla from the one that had sprawled across him. Gnea grabbed Burak's shoulder. "Come! We're leaving!"

Burak tried to shake her loose. "Let me be!"

She knew nothing about the unholy alliance into which Burak had entered with Tesla-how much deeper the Invid's hold was over the Perytonian than over Jack and herself. She just assumed Veidt hadn't been able to wrench Tesla's mental grip off both victims at once.

So, with Praxian directness, she yanked Burak back around and swung a roundhouse right that tagged him precisely on the chin. His knees buckled but she had him up and over her shoulder in one move. Legs driving like pistons, she crossed the space between herself and the hovering carpet in three bounds, nearly overturning it when she landed on it.

Veidt kept it steady, however, and it zoomed off toward the approaching Ark Angel, keeping low because of all the conventional firing still going on, and the blasts from the hive. Gnea noticed with interest that the carpet was actually the resilient floor matting from Veidt's cone-flier-a novel way of making an emergency escape conveyance serve double

duty.

Evidently, Haydonites could survive falls from considerable heights, she decided.

Firing from the hive was getting heavier, and all Spheris was straining and shaking. "It seems the Regent's forces will have their revenge no matter what."

Veidt shook his head serenely. His mental powers had given him a glimpse of the latest developments. "I think not. See there?"

Gnea looked where he was pointing and the breath caught in her throat.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

At least Kyle had victory in his grasp and died with a certain serenity. I guess I just don't deserve either one of those things.

Minmei

Two glittering figures stood, hand in hand, gazing at the vast hive of the Invid.

All around the place, a ring of thousands upon thousands of Spherisians was rising, head and shoulders, from the body of their planet. As that was happening the weapons pylons and gun emplacements toppled or settled into the rock, swallowed by it. The last few, out of kilter, blasted uselessly into the sky then were gone.

Other batteries were still firing from the hive proper at mecha and parts of the city-the Ark Angel being too far off yet. But the Spherisians were too close to the hive to be in its fields of fire.

And, safe in that fashion, the thousands rose to join the first two, until they were standing around the hive in a circle several miles in circumference. From where she flew, Gnea could see still more heads appear and then bob back down again, in the direction of the hive, like porpoises heading under a ship. It seemed that the landscape rippled.

The first two Spherisians to appear-Gnea somehow had no doubt who they were-held out their free hands. All the others linked up, all around the great ring. There was a strange moment of silence then, the Invid guns ceasing fire.

Spheris shook again, then vast faceted dowels of crystal the size of skyscrapers thrust their points up out of the planet's crust, angling in from every side, going up and up until they formed an irregular apex over the center of the hive's dome.

The hive trembled-and began to sink.

Gnea thought there were great counterforces fighting back; the hive seemed to be trying to fight free like a fish caught by a sea anemone. Rock and dust and segments of the hive foundation were flung up all around its sides. But inch by inch it was pulled down.

A liquid, lucid substance gushed up slowly, hardening as it went, trapping the dome and everything in and around it like flies in amber.

Veidt had the carpet at a hover now. The firing had stopped everywhere. He and Gnea watched as the Invid stronghold was pulled low and disappeared from sight, the ground closing over it like something alive-like the landscape of Haydon IV, and yet different from it.

A single united psychic scream came from the Brain and the Invid immobilized in the amber-stuff, as they were drawn, forever unmoving but still alive, deep into Spheris. Every Sentinel and Spherisian winced at it. Then it faded and was gone.

The Spherisians began melding with their world again, all but the first two, who stood looking at the spot from which the Invid had ruled.

Tesla had no time to be outraged at the defection-that was how he thought of it-of Gnea and Burak.

The Brain was gone! The Invid garrison was his to command!

But at the same time, he was aware of the terrible fate the hive had met, and knew, too, that the Ark Angel was in the area. Though he had an army under his control, he dared not use it there on Spheris.

He heard a clanging sound and turned to find that some of the more simpleminded Inorganics had gone back to fighting one another. With a mental shriek, he began rallying his forces. They began pouring toward the camouflaged transports.

"Getting strange power readings from the spaceport," someone relayed the report to Lisa. "Could be Tesla. Inorganics are disengaging and withdrawing that way."

She jabbed her fist into her palm. He had to be stopped! First Karen Penn had made her report over Bela's comset, then Gnea returned on Veidt's carpet, to fill in gaps in the story; all of it proved that Tesla must be reimprisoned or perhaps even eliminated. And yet there were still wounded being loaded directly into the Ark Angel. She couldn't just seal up and go chasing off after Tesla.

"Have one Beta do a recon of the spaceport. Get all other available VTs over here to fly security," she snapped. "And have all non-Protoculture weapons stand ready. Keep the Hovertanks on landing-zone-perimeter patrol."

Rick was helping lug a stretcher over to a cargo lift-all the powered gurneys were long since full-when the sound went through the city. He thought it was an aftershock. But word of movement came from the VTs flying cover; in moments everyone was watching as buildings out at the starport began to fly apart.

Since Spheris didn't react in pain, Rick assumed the Invid had rigged some sort of repulsion charges rather than using Protoculture explosives. In any event, pieces of what had been assumed to be a hangar complex were thrown outward. Something began rising from the spot where the structures stood.

Somebody shouted, "I-Invid troop transports!"

Three of the clamshell vessels were lifting off-troopships bigger than any the Sentinels had encountered before. Rick expected them to open up on Ark Angel for a parting volley, but apparently the appalling fate of the hive had intimidated Tesla.

The starships rose higher and higher, throwing shadows across the city. Rick wasn't surprised that Lisa held fire; Spheris had been wounded enough, aside from the fact that the planet might react just as violently to the Sentinels' flagship as it had to the hive.

Tesla watched Spheris sinking away beneath him with a mixture of relief and wrath. His victory had been so close!

But-perhaps it was better this way. Surely, the Shapings of the Protoculture were leading him toward his rightful, Evolved fate. "Optera," he whispered to himself.

He had the greater part of the Inorganic garrison with him. From what he could glean from communications logs on the ships, the Regent was now presiding over a Home Hive guarded by a badly depleted army. If he struck before the Regent heard of the outcome on Spheris and could reshuffle forces, Tesla would have the numerical and tactical advantage.

"Optera," he said, a little louder, to his bridge crew. They hastened to plot the course.

Once he had slain the Regent and assumed control of half the Invid species, Tesla would lead his race to triumph. There were ways of coping with the Sentinels and the Robotech Masters and the rest that the devolved maggot hiding on Optera couldn't begin to conceive. And once Tesla had the universe beneath his heel, there would be the Regis to

win. But how could she resist him, Evolved as he was? No doubt, he would conquer her without firing a shot.

"Optera!" he exulted, and took his first bite from one of the sunflower-yellow, pyramid-shaped Spherisian Fruits of the Flower of Life. The juices ran down his chin and moistened his magnificent robes.

His aura shone brighter.

Because the new starships still under construction had no drive units or functioning weapons, Breetai's Valivarre was the only hope of catching Edwards.

The fact that the hijacked SDF-7 mounted more fire-power and had more fighting mecha aboard didn't deter the Zentraedi giants for a moment; Edwards had made himself their blood enemy. Skulls and others were quickly boarding in their VTs and Hovertanks, even as the Valivarre was casting off, but Wolff hadn't been able to get back through the press of battle.

"Sorry, Colonel," Breetai said sincerely when Wolff pleaded with him to wait. "Every second counts if I'm to catch that devil."

But Wolff had his own schedule, and he kept it by getting three Diamondback VT pilots in Battloid mode to add their boost to his own Hovertank Battloid's back thrusters. It was a near thing, but he managed to grab the aft section of Valivarre without being roasted by its thrusters, and drag himself to an airlock.

"Welcome aboard," Breetai said dryly over the intercom.

Edwards refused to stand and fight, and wouldn't even answer their transmissions. "It's a drag race now," as one Human officer put it. Both ships increased velocity toward lightspeed, but bit by bit the SDF-7 pulled away. And, once superluminal, she could multiply her lead many times.

"We're losing him," Breetai said in his bulkhead-shaking basso. Valivarre had never even gotten within weapons or VT-strike range.

Wolff, standing near on one of, the high catwalks Humans used for face-to-face conversations with the giants, begged, "At least let me try a commo channel with him one more time! He'll talk to me, I know!"

Breetai hid his pity behind a stern military mien, but ordered that it be done. The colonel said, "Edwards, this is Wolff. Answer me! Edwards, I challenge you to answer me!"

He was about to give up in despair, the SDF widening its lead on the Zentraedi ship. But to everyone's surprise Edwards's contemptuous smile appeared on the main screen.

"Jonathan, old man! Sorry I can't dawdle, but tempus fugit, and so must I. You understand."

"I challenge you," Wolff said again. "One on one. VTs, Hovertanks, bare hands-name it."

The Zentraedi on duty on the bridge grunted a certain grudging respect for Wolff then, even though he had shown certain weaknesses; this was a challenge worthy of a Zentraedi!

But Edwards shook his head in mock exasperation. "Still the romantic, eh, Jonathan? Well, I'm afraid I haven't got time to play black knight to your Galahad. I've other things to do, as you can see."

The camera angle shifted to a long shot, and Wolff moaned.

He and the others in Valivarre were staring at the most outlandish wedding scene conceivable. Inorganics formed a guard of honor. Ghost Riders stood in ranks in a "chapel" that was a vacant hold. The altar appeared to be the unadorned spacefold mountings, presided over by Benson, one of Edwards's aides.

The pickup followed Edwards as he went to the altar. Waiting for him there was Minmei, still wearing the clothes she had worn in her cell but with the addition of a veil improvised from gossamer antivermin netting.

The pickup zoomed in on Minmei. She seemed a little pale, but her eyes were bright and adoring as she took the general's hand. She turned to the camera for a moment.

"Good-bye, Jonathan. I've found happiness at last. I do really think it's time you go home to the family you deserted and try to make amends to them, don't you?"

Then she and Edwards knelt before Benson, as he raised his arms to the crowd and intoned, "My fellow Edwardsian warriors, we are gathered here-"

The commo link was broken at the SDF's end.

Wolff was sobbing and shaking his head. "It's a trick! It's a phony tape, or he's got her drugged!"

"Intel officer?" Breetai snapped crisply, turning to his staff.

"Voice-stress and imagery-interpretation computers confirm authenticity," a giant tech

officer answered. "No indications of coercion or chemical manipulation."

"That can't be!" Wolff howled, then put his face in his hands. Some of the other Humans got him off the bridge.

Breetai's eyes stayed with his instruments in the vain hope that a power failure or a change of mind would put Edwards back within his grasp. He castigated himself for not giving in to one of his hundred impulses to kill the man, despite his Zentraedi oath of fealty to the REF.

And he felt a pang of sorrow for Wolff. Breetai, as much as anybody, knew what hurt the love of Minmei could inflict.

The Crann, Scrim, and Odeon watching the wedding service hadn't the vaguest idea what it meant, so they weren't surprised when the bride went berserk, just as the soft music began to play.

The Humans did understand, but tried to ignore her rising shriek as she leapt up from her kneeling position and turned on Edwards, trying to claw out his good eye. Edwards hissed out a few perfunctory vulgar words as he fended her off. The two Hellcats flanking the altar backed away, spitting.

He had come so close. Experimenting with the power of the Invid Brain he now controlled, he had learned how to bend Minmei to him. The effort had taken the major part of his will-to the point where the Inorganics were little more than awkward puppets-because somewhere deep inside, Minmei was fighting him every inch of the way.

It had almost been perfect; his Living Computer control of her made it almost seem as if she really loved him.

It was that damned music! Song had always been her unique power, and when the bland strains played over the PA system, the innermost part of her began to sing along. With that, she had thrown off his hold over her in moments. He fought to reassert it, but something told him that she would never be vulnerable to that particular kind of domination ever again. Not while the voice within her lived.

Edwards lost patience and swung his fist. Minmei dropped, senseless. He tried to insinuate his mind into hers, greedy to have her as his living puppet again. But the song was still there; he was shut out of her mind and her love forever.

Minmei came to blearily in discomfort and pain. She felt like vomiting as she blinked her eyes open. It took seconds to realize where she was and what had happened to her.

She was shackled to a crudely hewn wooden X that had been erected on the bridge of Edwards's stolen starship. Before her were the screens and consoles, and loyal Ghost Riders who ignored her moans.

Edwards, noticing that she had come around, left his command chair to put his hand under her chin. "I want you to enjoy the ride, darling," he said, showing his teeth. "After all, you're my most important passenger."

The soul-song that protected her from him had made him remember how her voice played a pivotal role in Earth's victory in the Robotech War. Undeniably, Fate had been working in his favor when he fought to take her with him on Tirol. In addition to the SDF, his own loyal troops, the Brain, and the Inorganics, he had the secret weapon that had won the war!

Now the problem was how to use it. "My beloved," he added, kissing her cheek, tasting the salt tears there.

Deep within, her newfound patience settled in again, so that she could wait however long it took, bear whatever she had to, until she could kill him.

"We asked you here, Commander Grant," Lang said, "because we require your opinion. Despite the setback of Edwards's mutiny, we shall be ready soon to send an expedition back to Earth. The new ships will be quite space-worthy within weeks."

"But-the fold drives-" Vince objected.

Exedore tut-tutted. "They are already completed, as in fact was the one for the ship Edwards pirated. The drives are all in safekeeping here in Dr. Lang's complex."

Strolling along in the middle of Lang's Robotech wonderland, Vince rumbled with laughter. Good old Lang, one jump ahead all the way!

But a sudden thought stopped Vince. "I hope you gentlemen aren't about to ask me to volunteer." Much as he ached to go home to his son and the world he loved best, to leave without Jean was unthinkable.

"No, no" Exedore was saying, placing a small hand in the center of that massive, V-shaped back. "But we want your opinion on the person we have chosen."

He explained quickly the circumstances of Edwards's escape as Breetai had relayed them. "And the Valivarre will be making planetfall soon. We want to put Jonathan Wolff in overall command of the expedition back to Earth."

The REF was an expedition; it sounded strange to be talking about an expedition home. But the more Vince thought about it, the more logical a choice Jonathan was, what with Rick and Lisa, Max and Miriya unavailable and Vince himself unwilling.

If reports were true, then Wolff had no motive to stay and every reason to go home again, reunite with his family, and put Minmei and the REF behind him. More to the point, he was a brilliant and capable commander-diligent and honest.

And, with the threat of the Invid and the Robotech Masters on the loose, somebody had to carry the warning to Earth. There had been no reply from Carpenter's expedition; it was time for a recon in force.

"I'd say that for once, Hobson's Choice has given us a winner," Vince told them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The more information we accrue on the subject of the being known as Haydon, the more convinced I am that my work is only beginning.

Dr. Emil Lang, personal notes on the SDF-3 mission

"Listen to me, honey: I want you to push again now. Okay?"

Miriya caught her breath, stopped sobbing, and nodded.

"That's my girl," Jean Grant said, the encouragements automatic as she concentrated on her job. "Max, are you holding her hand?"

"Yes." Max and Miriya exchanged finger squeezes, but hers was so weak.

"Okay, Mommie and Daddy; let's do it," Jean said. "Bear down, hon."

Miriya did, biting her lower lip until it bled, then groaning in pain. No battle wound had ever given her suffering like this; no enemy torture could be more horrible.

Jean didn't have time for an indecent turn of phrase. Medical advances had made the safe, relatively painless delivery of babies a run-of-the-mill thing, but those advances didn't apply to a Zentraedi woman impregnated by a Human male when by all rights it should have been impossible. Or a gestation period that only lasted a few months but had, by all indications, come to full term. Or a pregnancy that had come close to taking the mother's life several times for no discernible reason.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Max asked Jean, as there was a flurry of activity. He couldn't see what was happening from where he sat by Miriya's end of the delivery med-table,

holding her hand.

"We're bringing a baby into the world. Isn't that worth giving your wife a kiss?" Jean said distractedly through her mask. But inside, she despaired. Miriya was hemorrhaging badly, and nothing Jean could do seemed to help.

Miriya screamed, and Max, clasping her hands and babbling words of reassurance, saw her eyes rolling up into her head. He ripped his own mask off.

"Mir! Mir! Don't do this! Please please, stay with me!"

She began convulsing, and Jean, checking the vital signs, thought, We're losing her.

Max was bending against his wife, holding her head to his, weeping and begging her not to die. "Jean, do something!"

"Shhhh! I'm trying, Max." But it was hopeless.

Don't worry, Mother; I am with you.

Max wiped his eyes. "Wh-what'd you say, Jean?"

"I didn't say anything, Max. I thought you did." The nurses and techs and two other attending physicians had nothing to add.

Put your minds at rest. All will be well; you'll see.

Jean didn't have time to wonder if she was going nuts-hearing voices directly in her mind. Miriya's convulsions stopped and her vital signs rose and stabilized. The hemorrhaging slowed to a trickle, then ceased.

And other developments continued. There were a few busy seconds, but Miriya went through them with her eyes closed and a blissful smile on her face.

"You've got yourselves a beautiful little daughter, folks," Jean said. The child was crying heartily. Miriya's eyes opened and she and Max laughed and wept, hugging each other.

But Jean, seeing to the umbilical word, felt a cold wind blow through her. She was no obstetrician, but she had delivered plenty of babies.

And this was the first newborn she had ever seen come into the world already breathing, with eyes open and teeth already sprouting.

The baby moved feebly, but its eyes fixed on hers.

Thank you, Jean, that same voice said.

"We have to move with all deliberate speed, Admiral," Burak told Rick in a controlled/impatient tone. "Tesla's efforts to liberate Peryton are welcome, of course, and I'm grateful that he's led the vanguard, but I am the one who has been chosen by Destiny to free my people and become their Lord.

"While I sympathize with the Spherisians and the rebuilding they must do, the fact is that they have been freed, while my folk lie under a terrible curse. You can see my point, I'm sure."

Burak was cleaned up and dressed in new garments, Jack Baker's blood washed from his horns. Rick had been avoiding him for days, but at last the Perytonian had buttonholed him, on his way to another strategy meeting.

"Um, I see what you mean, Burak. I'll make sure everyone in the leadership understands."

"Please see that you do. I will await word in my quarters."

Burak turned and strode off in kingly fashion, followed by a few of his people. Rick couldn't figure out if they were just humoring Burak out of loyalty and pity, or if they really believed all his claptrap about being the messiah of his planet.

Certainly, nobody could disabuse him of the conviction that Tesla had gone off to begin the liberation of Peryton, even when they showed Burak the tracking plots on Tesla's escaped ships headed in the direction of Optera.

Rick had been ready to chalk it all up to Tesla's hypnosis, or whatever the Invid used, but Gnea and Jack showed no signs of any residual effects while Burak was still walking around talking like a locked-ward case. He shrugged to himself, and made a note to have security keep surveillance on the Perytonians.

Ironically, Burak's home planet was, at long last, next in line on the Sentinels' long campaign. But before that battle could be mounted, the Sentinels had to tend to their wounded and bury their dead. There were also repairs to make to Ark Angel, mecha, weapons, and equipment.

And, despite his increasing behavioral quirks, Burak was being more cooperative in that he and his followers showed more willingness to answer the intel officers' specific questions about their homeworld. Though the general consensus was that they were holding back a lot, the Perytonians had given the rest of the Sentinels more to ponder with regard to that tragic, cursed planet.

There was also the plight of the Spherisians to consider: their cities in ruins, their economic and industrial infrastructure-the aboveground portion, at any rate-wrecked. Though they could survive in the planet's interior and rebuild on their own, in time, the Sentinels felt it their duty to help the Spherisians as much as possible before lifting off.

A partial message had been received from Max Sterling, and though Rick and Lisa were gone at the time, they were overjoyed to hear that Miriya had given birth to a baby girl the couple had named Aurora. The tape of the transmission was fuzzy and broken up by static, but Rick thought Max looked troubled, even though mother and daughter were both reported to be doing fine.

Of more importance to the mission was the fact that the Haydonites had established intermittent contact with Karbarra. The big ursinoids there had many of their technical problems licked, and production of REF-type mecha and smaller craft was due to start within weeks-as was construction of a prototype SDF-7 class cruiser. That didn't change the Perytonian invasion timetable, but it heartened the Sentinels-the Human members in particular. The fleet that would take them home was now a-building!

The Regent paced through his vaulted organic halls, followed by his faithful bodyguard. He had lost all contact with Spheris, and could guess the rest.

He had issued orders to strip all outposts and planetary garrisons, to bring home every Invid trooper to protect the Home Hive. But he knew that if an enemy was on its way from Spheris, there was no time for reinforcements.

He stood at last before the Special Children, the bio-manipulated embryos left behind by the Regis with the exhortation that he let them grow into what she had intended them to be, and respect the things she had designed into them.

"Bah! What use are they to the Invid if the Home Hive falls?" He had refrained from violating her wishes in the constant hope that someday she would return to him; he preserved her Special Children as a sign of his longing for her. But what good to honor her request if it meant his defeat and death?

He swept his hand out at the ranks and ranks of silent, glistening eggs. "Quicken and hatch them! Feed in the richest nutrients and do all other things to maximize their-potential!"

He spun on his bowing entourage. "See to it that all defenses are prepared and on alert. And make ready my combat armor."

If it was his fate to preside over the end of the Invid empire, he would see that it didn't overtake him gently or at small cost.

Once Jack was out of danger from his wounds, his love-hate relationship with Karen began swinging quickly back to its old sweet-and-sour tune.

There were a couple of days there-he was awake on and off, but in guarded condition and as weak as a kitten-when she was actually sweet to him. Especially when he managed a little sheepishly, "Thanks for riding to the rescue, Lancelot."

However...

"As soon as I'm well enough to do anything about it, y'turn back into Attila the Penn," he sneered.

She eluded his embrace nimbly and threw a clean, bundled uniform in his face. "The doc says you're on convalescent status now, you drooling sex fiend, so you're gonna convalesce. Veidt's flier meets us on the roof in ten minutes, so move it, Mister!"

Jack started undoing his hospital gown, but she was out the door before he could moon her.

Actually, his first excursion out of sick bay promised to be the trip of a lifetime. Numerous Sentinels had already made the journey; all had received heartfelt invitations from the grateful Spherisians.

It so happened that today was the first day the Hunters could get away to make the pilgrimage, and Gnea, hearing that Jack was to go, decided to come along, too, for a second visit. Burak announced with august dignity that it was only fitting that he witness the most guarded shrine in Spheris. Veidt, his flier repaired, felt it was a good time for a test flight.

Teal and Baldan II, learning who would be on Veidt's flier, insisted on showing the Sentinels around personally.

Veidt was perfectly comfortable hovering several inches off the deck, but seats like long-legged director's chairs had been provided for others. In addition, a picnic lunch lay in a pile of thermal canisters at the rear of the bubble-domed passenger space.

"Still not ready for volleyball, Baker?" Rick asked innocently as Karen helped Jack to his seat. Jack snorted a laugh and then groaned in pain, but he didn't complain; it was just the sort of thing he had done to other people, and he had no intention of being accused of dishing it out but not being able to take it.

Though Karen might abuse Jack, however, she wasn't about to see anybody else do so. "Admiral! Unless there're enough people here with matching blood types to give Lieutenant Commander Baker transfusions in the event he should rupture a gut, Sir, I respectfully suggest we go easy on him."

Rick coughed behind his hand to hide his grin. "Of course; quite right." Lisa elbowed Rick, then looked out over the devastated but rebuilding Beroth, throbbing silently with laughter.

The ice-cream-cone flier took them out across the crystal countryside, to a volcanic chimney the Spherisians had opened so that their liberators could see their greatest treasure. They descended past sights as wonderful as anything they had seen on their journeys so far.

At last they came to rest with the narrow promenade flange that encircled the little passenger dome even with a cut-glass walkway. They were miles deep, yet the temperature was comfortable, the air pressure little different from that above. Rick wanted to ask how that could be, but he was sure the Spherisians would only confuse him again, as they had the Sentinels engineers and scientists.

The party stepped out and followed Teal and her son along, through an immense archway of lava pulled and braided like multiple strands of taffy. On the other side, they all fell mute except for a few loud, indrawn breaths.

No outworlder had ever seen that representation of Haydon until the Sentinels were invited into the lower domains of Spheris. It was set in the middle of a cavern from which light shone in darts bright enough to bother the eyes of the non-Spherisians. It stood in the polished, faceted glory of the planet's most beautiful gem setting, a form a thousand feet high.

A figure of clay.

The stuff was a nondescript color, impossible to discern there where fantastic light-shows changed from instant to instant. The matter of material strengths and the impossibility of such an immense amount of the stuff holding its shape was barely worth mentioning, because the reality was there before them.

The clay was unfired, looking like it had been molded only moments ago; yet it had stood there since the epoch of Haydon himself. It was as if a divine artist had been called away, for a moment, from an unfinished work. Again there was that lack of features but the definite strength and nobility of the outline. It agreed in form with the others the Sentinels had seen.

"Haydon was the living model for its shape," Teal said in a proud, distant voice. "Come;

look closer."

She led the way toward an ascending path a yard or so wide which connected to a network that spiraled around and up and down the stupendous cavern. Awed, the rest began falling in automatically.

Except for Jack, who took one look at that corkscrew webbing of trails and knew he could never make it. In fact, he was already feeling a twinge in his mending middle from the activity; the nurses had made him promise to sit in the flier and not move at all, and he had already disobeyed them.

Karen was about to help Jack to Veidt's flier, but Gnea intervened. "I've been here once already, Sister. I'll give him a hand."

The others were already wending up the steep pathway except for Burak, who was still immobile before the clay Haydon. Karen nodded and let go of Jack's arm, then hurried after. Jack hobbled along, more or less leaning on Gnea, letting go a blissful breath as she helped him into his chair again.

"I'm not an invalid anymore, Gnea. You can go on with the others; I'll be all right."

She eased into a chair next to him and patted his forearm. "No problem, bucko. Are you hungry?"

"No, I-"

"Well, I am!"

"Well, you're a growing amazon," Jack pointed out.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the Regent-Tesla conflict is one that cannot be verified but was a persistent rumor among the Invid.

It was alleged in various quarters that the count of Special Children eggs left behind by the Regis upon her departure was one short. Further rumor had it that she'd chosen to raise one of the select brood as a secret experiment, telling no one about it, not even the Special Child-and that she raised it as a Scientist.

Perhaps Tesla's crimes were, like something out of Greek drama, even more enormous than he imagined.

Lemuel Thicka, Temple of Flames: A History of the Invid Regent

The pilgrims to Haydon's shrine became separated, going off along various paths that

wound the cavern walls, to view the stupendous icon from assorted angles and distances. Karen was walking alone when Baldan emerged from the glittering wall to stand before her.

He was as tentative as any adolescent male approaching an attractive older female. "There is-something I thought you might like to see," he began hesitantly. "I'd like to show it to you-to thank you for helping teach me the fighting skills."

She came with him into a passageway that reminded her of a cut and polished ice cave. It led to a sort of domed gallery or rotunda, where objects were set near the chamber's walls. The things he had brought her to see were like nothing so much as diamond footballs, or stylized Easter eggs, as big as a small groundcar. They were perrate pedestals that were aligned along a complex celestial design in the window-clear floor.

Baldan led Karen over to one. "Stand on that spot, so, and look into the Microcosm."

She took her place, and the egg before her lowered itself a bit so that its tip was level with her eyes. It was wondrously crosshatched with lights and colors even though it was clear, but she saw nothing coherent. She was about to ask Baldan if she was doing something wrong when the world seemed to fall away on all sides.

She found herself looking at a place that had been ravaged worse than Tirol or even Spheris. Yet, somehow she knew that it had once been a thriving scene. She shuddered at the windswept tors, bleak wastelands, and dank, treacherous bogs. Off in the middle distance, though, something began to come into focus.

It was an Invid hive, far larger than any she had ever seen. Its central dome alone was bigger than Glike, Beroth, and Monument City put together. It, and the satellite structures connected to it and one another by a network that shone as red as canals of lava, covered much of one continent.

"Optera," she heard Baldan say. "And the Home Hive of the Invid."

She backed away and the vision faded. "Baldan, what are these?"

"They are our fenestella-mental looking-glasses for viewing other worlds. Seeing the Invid hive has upset you, hasn't it? I'm sorry; stupid of me to begin with that one-"

"No, no!" She laid a hand on his arm. "It was amazing! Was I actually seeing what's going on at this moment on Optera?" The G-2 intelligence staff would go wild over this!

But Baldan was shaking his head. "These are representations-depictions. And there are more pleasant ones: Garuda and Karbarra and others the Sentinels have never visited. Let me show them to you."

"I'd like that."

As they went, he talked about the different worlds and their histories. She could tell that Baldan I was coming more and more to the fore in him.

o the Regent and Tesla and their folk, Optera is a beautiful world," he told her, "even though it's not the paradise it was. Part of the purpose of this place is to remind us that Spheris is only part of a much greater scheme of things."

He spoke like a person with an old soul, as she had once heard someone put it. "I think you're a very wise man, Baldan," she told him.

He looked subdued. "Baldan I was in many ways the sum of our race. He was slated for great things, great accomplishments, before the Invid came. His death was a very untimely blow to all Spherisians. So I have a very great deal to live up to, you see."

Gloom had settled on him. Karen slipped her arm through his and pressed her lips to the glassy, strangely warm cheek. "You're going to do just fine, I know it. Now c'mon; show me some more!"

Aboard Ark Angel, Rem bent to his studies. Cabell would expect him to sift through as much of the data gained on this voyage as possible, and to have furthered his own studies as well.

There was a tone from his quarters' hatch signal. When he gave it leave to open, Janice Em stepped into the room.

She was wearing the guise of the Human, as she usually did with him-and around most crewmembers, to put them at ease. Even so, there were many who kept their distance from her now that they knew she was an Artificial Person.

Rem himself had no such prejudices; one reason was that he had been on the receiving end too many times. But there was another, far better one.

"It's late," she said. "Haven't you studied enough for one evening?"

She turned out the light over his work station and took his hand, kissing his neck and lips as he kissed hers. Together they went to his bed.

Max Sterling fought the urge to hang onto Aurora, to see to it that she didn't hurt herself. But his daughter was screaming bloody murder, eager to practice her walking there on the

carpeted floor of his quarters.

He tried to keep from dwelling on how crazy it all was. Here she was, only weeks old, taking her first steps. Max let go, and Aurora tottered toward Miriya, who knelt a few yards away.

The changes in Miriya were more subtle than the ones taking place in Aurora with every passing minute, but they were unmistakable. The peerless champion of the Quadronos no longer seemed the least bit interested in getting back on flight status or resuming her military career in any fashion whatsoever. Whenever Max brought up the subject, she simply gave him a serene smile and changed it.

It was as if the almost-fatal pregnancy and the birth of Aurora had given Miriya a secret wealth of knowledge.

Baby Aurora was doing splendidly, just as she did everything, when she abruptly went as stiff as a board, like someone suffering a seizure, and keeled over. Max and Miriya almost knocked heads, rushing to her. To their immense relief, she was breathing again, and the seizure seemed to have passed. But she gave no sign of hearing them.

Instead, she lay with eyes wide and focused on the ceiling. They heard her tiny voice but it took a few repetitions to understand what she was saying. And when they did, Miriya let out a cry of pain, as Max felt the hair on the back of his neck standing straight up.

"Dana, the spores! Beware the spores! Dana, beware the spores!"

"Not very subtle, is he?" the Regent scoffed, looking into the screen. "Where's all this Evolved refinement we keep hearing about?"

It was true: Tesla's battle plan lacked finesse. Apparently, he thought the appearance of his force would in and of itself oblige the Regent to sue for peace.

"Fool!" the Regent reflected, his nasal antennae flashing. "He doesn't realize the true strength of deevolution!"

Outlying strongholds and defensive bases had been neutralized, and the central dome of the Home Hive itself was Tesla's straightforward objective.

The transports began sowing their crop of Terror Weapon dropships and skirmish fliers. While these went on ahead, the transports descended to let forth rank after rank of Inorganic bipeds and packs of Hellcats. The troopships fired in support of the assault but kept well back, since the hive's mammoth guns were shooting in answer.

The smaller invading craft and ground units advanced fearlessly, though. Suicidal attacks by a number of Tesla's Terror Weapons resulted in awful losses but succeeded in knocking out most of the big cannon-something that would have been inconceivable in the days when the Home Hive was operating at full efficiency and power.

It was fratricide, carnage between identical twins, as Inorganic fought Inorganic. As it turned out, on Spheris Tesla's soldiers had picked up tricks of battle concerning such duels that the Regent's fighters had never had occasion to learn. That was one more thing in the challenger's favor.

In an infernal landscape of Protoculture blasts, dismembering hand-to-hand combat, and fanatic killing and dying, the outnumbered loyalist army was pushed back and back toward the hive.

When he thought that the time was right, the Regent turned to one of his toadies. "Release the Special Children at once."

He turned back to watch as they rose from forward positions in camouflaged bunkers. Tesla's soldiers were caught off guard as new enemies burst into their very midst.

Though it infuriated him to think about it, the Regent's own scientists were very much the Regis's rejects. She had wanted only those who were energized by her Great Work, the seeking of the Ultimate Invid Form. Others, she banished from her presence.

Therefore the Regent's scientists-mostly culls-hadn't been able to fathom all the potentials and secrets of her Special Children. Several savants had died before the Regent's fury. The Invid monarch finally decided that he didn't need geniuses or great biogenetic artists, ESP savants or spiritual guides. "Give me living, breathing killing machines," he commanded.

And so it was. The things that began hurling back the invaders' advance were bigger than any other mecha the Invid were ever to field. They resembled the Enforcers that the Regis was later to develop on Earth, but were bigger and of greater brute strength, bearing heavier armor and firepower.

But like the Inorganics, the Special Children had multiple upper limbs. These were provided with pincers, tentacles, great scythelike ripper-blades, weapons muzzles, and more. The things could defend and fight on all sides.

They waded into Tesla's attack waves, slashing Inorganics in two and hurling the pieces in different directions, blasting them apart, tearing them limb from limb, or simply stomping them into the ground-up soil of Optera. The advance was stopped, the lines breached; the Special Children spread out, visiting destruction upon everything in their path.

But Tesla, in the safety of his transport ship, breathed a sigh of relief. Only in his Evolved state had he finally understood some of the things for which the Special Children were designed. One of those functions was to absorb and store Protoculture energy.

Brought to term properly, the Children wouldn't have been particularly imposing specimens or doughty fighters, but they could have stopped Tesla cold by draining all energy from his soldiers. The Regent, however, had approached the situation with exactly the devolved simple-mindedness Tesla had foreseen.

"Second wave," he ordered.

In his hive, the Regent shook the walls with his ire when twice again as many Inorganics were sent in by Tesla. Again, the renegade was willing to suffer horrific losses in his drive to victory. For every Inorganic that the Special Children slew, three more swarmed up at them.

The irreplaceable Special Children began to suffer losses, driven back toward the hive though they fought like demons every foot of the way. One of the Invid's greatest genetic treasures was being spent, at a hellish rate and to no great effect, in a few minutes of a battle between equally unworthy leaders.

"Commit all reserves!" the Regent ordered. "And establish a direct link so that I may speak to Tesla face-to-face!"

The defending lines wavered but held. The last power of the hive was supercharging the Regent's fighters, and Tesla suffered more attrition. But it didn't matter.

In his command ship, he vowed, I will rule the Invid!

Robotech Sentinels: Rubicon

Book Seventeen of the Robotech Series

Copyright 1988 by Jack McKinney

CHAPTER ONE

Don't talk to me of Science! The only reference work I consult is the Encyclopedia of Ignorance. All Science has done is force us to narrow our definitions, categorize our thinking. It offers us false security at the expense of spontaneity. I have no use for it. I create my world and change its rules and guidelines as I see fit. I am the only god this dimension has ever known; the only one it will ever know!

T. R. Edwards, as quoted in Constance Wildman's When Evil Had It's Day: A Biography of T. R. Edwards

"At least I won't be pirating it this time," Jonathan Wolff told Lang as the retrofitted SDF-7-class cruiser nosed into view. The venom in his voice was palpable, but the scientist either misunderstood or refused to acknowledge it.

"Engineering and astrogation have already been briefed on our modifications to the Reflex drives and spacefold generators. Improvements, I should say," Lang added, turning around to face Wolff.

Wolff tried to take a reading of the man's transformed eyes, but staring into them only made him think of black holes, unfathomable singularities. He let his gaze linger on the starship instead, his ticket home, whatever that meant.

"We've moved away from reliance on the Ur-Flower peat toward a more conventional dialogue between the monopole ore and the Protoculture itself. Your ship has a bit of the SDF-3 in her, Colonel."

Wolff smirked. "Then maybe it'll find a way back to Earth on its own, Lang. A milk run."

The scientist cocked his head to one side, offering an appraising look. "It wouldn't be the oddest thing, commander."

Major Carpenter, whose ship had left Fantomaspace more than six months ago, had not been heard from. Lang's Robotechs were attributing this to malfunctions in the ship's deep-space transceivers-a wedding of Tiresian and Karbarran systemry-but privately Lang had confessed to misgivings about the very nature of the ship's drives. Not so with this ship, Wolff had been assured. This was the one the R&D people were puffed up about. This was the one that would give Wolff the edge; spirit him through space-time in the blinking of an eye, overtaking en route the Earth-bound spade fortresses of the Robotech Masters.

Wolff continued to regard the ship from the SDF-3's observation blister without much thought to Lang's reassurances, or what may or may not lay at mission's end. To him the ship, this sleek and substantially scaled-down version of the Super Dimensional Fortress, was simply a way out. There had been flashes of renewed faith these past few weeks, moments when he saw himself as reborn-on Haydon IV, for instance, or at seeing the look on T. R. Edwards's face when his treachery was revealed to the council-but all that had been emptied from him on the bridge of the Valivarre. Minmei's words still rang in his ears like a curse; her marriage to Edwards, that sick and sinister ceremony, replaying itself in dreams and every other waking thought. I've found happiness at last, she had shrieked from that black altar. Go back to the family you deserted...make amends with them!

As if it were possible.

He had convinced himself that it wasn't Minmei who was sending him away-not any flesh and blood Minmei at least. He had succeeded in depersonalizing her, divesting her of the power to inflict such grief. She was a symbol of the world gone wrong and Jonathan Wolff's false steps through it; a symbol of hope's turn toward evil. A symbol of transformed love, of broken promise. A world once turned on her voice, and now that voice raged against what it had redeemed.

"The ship's databanks contain a complete record of the mission," Lang was saying, "along with updated material covering the recent events on Tirol."

Wolff abandoned his dark musings and registered Surprise.

"Longchamps and Stinson, the others who backed Edwards, are holding their ground. But we've won the battle, as it goes."

"Edwards is halfway to Optera, and they're still not convinced," Wolff seethed. "They're hedging their bets. They figure he'll be coming back here with whatever's left of the Invid fleet."

"Possibly that," Lang was willing to concede. "But I think it has more to do with Earth than Tirol. We can't be certain but there's some chance that the Southern Cross apparat has gained the upper hand. That would place Edwards' in a strong position there, despite what has transpired here."

Lang was downplaying things considerably, Wolff realized. Some chance meant sure thing, no matter how Lang chose to deliver it. An awareness of the Shapings-Protoculture had left him that talent when it drained the hazel from his eyes.

"Field Marshall Leonard. Zand, Moran..."

Lang nodded. "Exactly. Longchamps wants them to know where the lines were drawn."

Wolff muttered a curse. "So we could end up dealing with Edwards all over again. On Earth this time."

"Which is why I want you to hand-deliver a special report to Major Rolf Emerson."

Wolff's pencil-thin eyebrows arched. "Emerson?"

"He's the only member of the General Staff we can trust. We don't know what Edwards's next move will be. Perhaps he'll attempt to convince the Regent to move against Earth. It's clear now that the two of them have been in collusion for some time-at least as far back as the assassination of the Invid's simulagent. If Carpenter's ship made it back safely the tale of our schism has already been told. But who knows how strong Leonard has become in the interim, how he might respond to reports of indecision among the Council members..."

"Earth would welcome Edwards with open arms."

"Edwards and the Regent. He could conquer the planet without loosing a beam."

Wolff glanced at the ship, then uttered a short laugh as he swung around to Lang. "The

goddamn frying pan to the fire...

"Not if we can hold Edwards here," Lang told him. "The Zentraedi have volunteered to spearhead an invasion."

Wolff was aghast. "Against Optera?"

"Breetai's forces are our only hope. Hunter and the Sentinels have only just left Spheris, and their destination is Peryton, not Optera."

"That's lunacy! Show Hunter the transvids of Minmei's wedding if you want to light a fire under him. He'll say to hell with Peryton."

Lang made a calming gesture with his hands. "I think you're mistaken, Colonel. But we're trying just that in any event. The Tokugawa under General Grant's command will launch for Haydon IV shortly after your departure. There he'll rendezvous with a Karbarran force and proceed to Peryton."

Wolf felt a wave of anticipation wash through him. What chance could his one lone ship have against a combined enemy force in Earthspace? But to have a chance to stop Edwards from leaving the Quadrant, to go to guns with him on Optera, put a personal end to his evil reign-

"So you understand just how critical your mission is," Lang said, as though reading his mind. "It is imperative that the Defense Force on Earth be fully appraised of the situation-even if the result is further factionalism. I trust you follow me, Colonel."

Wolff bit back a half-formed argument on the merits of his remaining on Tirol and nodded, tight-lipped and near pellbound in Lang's gaze.

The starship was fully visible now, gleaming in the light of Fantoma's primary, an arrow in the unseen wind.

"There's one more thing, Wolff," Lang said after a moment. "Your ship has the capacity for a roundtrip."

"In case I change my mind."

Lang folded his arms. "If you should fail to make contact with us, we want you to return. We must be informed of the situation."

"That's a hell of thing to ask, Lang. Especially when nobody was figuring on the Expeditionary mission ending up a one-way ticket."

Lang seemed to consider it, then said: "It's not a request, Colonel. It's an order."

Lang attended the Wolff Pack's final briefing and shuttled down to Tirol while the starship was being readied for launch. After a protracted exit from the Fantoma system, the ship would initiate the first of more than a dozen spacefold jumps that would eventually land it in Earth pace, clear across the galaxy. Wolff was to communicate with the SDF-3 after each defold operation, and the fortress could thereby monitor the ship's progress. The Robotech teams had taken no such precautions with Major Carpenter's ship, which was to have completed the same trip in two jumps, dematerializing once some seventy-five light years out from Tirol before it re-manifested in Earthspace. But the sensor probes of the abandoned but still-functioning Robotech fortress there had relayed no indications of the ship's emergence or passage. For all intents and purposes Carpenter was lost in space.

Tiresia, in the wake of Edwards's embattled departure, brought to mind the city as Lang had first seen it shortly after the Invid conquest. Much of what Robotechnology had rebuilt had been damaged by the awakened Inorganics, and vast areas near the pyramidal Royal Hall where the fighting had been thickest were leveled. And yet Lang couldn't help but think that Tiresia had never seemed so at peace with itself. Certainly the native populace felt it, and-as his limo whisked him through the city's evercrete streets-Lang believed he could detect the same sense of release on the face of the clean-up crews. Those Hellcats and Scrim Edwards had left behind had been destroyed; skirmish ships and terror weapons brought to the ground. But more important, the Invid brain was gone-that

slumbering malignancy Longchamps and the rest had let Edwards keep to himself.

Lang's last face-to-face with Edwards was still strong in his thoughts, stronger still in his hands, which curled now at the very recollection. He had to ask himself why he hadn't killed Edwards then; it was just the two of them in the lab together and who would have been the wiser? At the time he told himself that humiliation would be a greater indignity than death; but in truth it was the Shaping-that persuaded him to ease his hold on the man's throat. An overriding signal sent to his hands that was meant to save Edwards for some other fate. No good or evil was attached to any of it; simply a kind of desolate awareness of the appropriate. God knew Lang himself hadn't given it any shape. Nor did it spring from any vestige of humanity. He and Edwards both were long past that now. As they all were-a mission of men and women beyond Human in any primary meaning of the term. They were warped, re haped, and transfigured by wars that spilled across the galaxy, contact with a dozen lifeforms from as many star systems, and the urgings of Protoculture itself, the Flower's bad seed.

"How did he react?" Exedore asked when Lang entered the lab.

The Zentraedi stood poised beside one of the room's numerous consoles, a Tiresian data card in one hand. Lang recounted his conversation with Jonathan Wolff. "I had the feeling he would just as soon mount his own mutiny as return to Tirolspace."

"But he understands how critical it is that we learn of the Earth government's evaluation?"

Lang nodded vacantly. "At this point I'm more concerned with the spacefold generators. We could be sending Wolff off to his death. If only there were time to experiment with these monopole drives-"

"There is no time, doctor," Exedore interrupted him. "The Robotech Masters have been traveling at superluminal speeds for thirteen Earth-standard years now. Cabell himself thought the journey from Tirol to Earth might require as little as fifteen. That leaves us two years at best. Two years to ready a fleet for our return. Two years to arm those ships with sufficient firepower to defeat the Masters' fortresses." Exedore shook his head. "No, doctor, there is no time. Wolff must leave as planned."

Lang waved a hand. "I know all this. I'm asking for assurances where none exist."

"Here, or anywhere."

Lang paced for a moment, hands locked behind his back. "There is a chance we've overlooked something. Some way to conjure the Protoculture we need." He crossed the lab to a window in a partitioned-off section of the room and pressed his fingertips to the permaplas, gazing in on the shaggy creatures held captive there.

"Cabell has told us all he knows," Exedore said, joining Lang at the window.

The creatures bore a resemblance to terrestrial moptop dogs, save for their knob-ended horns and unearthly eyes. They were the Flowers' pollinators-Lang understood as much-indigenous to Optera, which had been stripped of their presence when the Flowers were stolen. They subsisted on a farinaceous mix Cabell claimed to be composed of crushed stems and leaves from the Flowers themselves.

"Suppose we were to bring them into contact with the Flowers Zor planted, on Karbarra say, or Garuda, it makes no difference."

Exedore thought a moment and said, "We would perhaps succeed in raising a viable crop. But we would have only flowers, doctor, not the matrix in which to contain them. And I'm afraid Zor took that knowledge with him to his grave."

The Pollinators, who were most often heaped together in a corner of the small chamber, were on their feet now, watching the two scientists with a mixture of curiosity and expectation.

"Perhaps not," Lang mused.

"Lang?" Exedore said, the way he once called Breetai commander.

Lang turned and put his hands on the Zentraedi's shoulders, still misshapen under the confining cut of the REF jacket. "If we can believe our reports from Janice..."

Exedore raised an eyebrow. "The Zor-clone."

"Rem," Lang said. "We must learn what he knows."

"Go ahead, question the Zor-clone if it's an explanation you seek!" Burak pointed an accusing taloned finger at Rem. "It was his seeding of our world that drew the Invid into our midst! Make him speak!"

The Perytonian contingent rallied behind their self-appointed savior, raising fists and tapered forehorns, a gathering of demons in medalioned black robes.

The Sentinels' ship, the Ark Angel, was approaching superluminal speeds in the outer limits of the Spherisian system. Blaze was behind them, off in Earth's direction, a cool white and distant disc. Beroth was restructuring itself without the Sentinels' assistance, a refulgent city in the works under the guidance of Tiffa and the planet's crystalline elite.

Rem felt Burak's hatred clear across the ship's hold, and looked at Jack Baker, who was

still recuperating from an encounter with the Perytonian's horns. Burak was thought to have been under Tesla's spell at the time, as both Jack and Gnea were; but Jack's clenched fist told Rem that all had not yet been forgiven.

Nonetheless, Rem wished that he had something to offer Burak. Being a clone of Zor, it was possible that Rem could call up some data regarding Peryton from his neurons, just as the Regent's scientists had used the Garudan atmosphere to prompt memories of prelapsarian Optera, Optera before the fall. Those memories, though, were but half-remembered dreams now, isolated parts of some other's thoughts and deeds, and Rem considered himself a mere conduit for their emergence. It weighed on him like an unshakeable burden-the very fact that he had been cloned, instilled like a Zentraedi warrior with a false past, lied to by the man who had been father as well as mentor, creator, more like it. He and Cabell hadn't had occasion to discuss the matter of his laboratory birth; the old man had been successful in avoiding him after the battle on Haydon IV, and Rem thought that Cabell's decision to remain there was more personal than anyone on the Ark Angel was aware. Only Janice seemed to understand this; and it was she who came to his defense now-this not-quite human, who had revealed her true face to the Sentinels in the depths of Haydon IV's inner workings.

"He knows nothing!" she told Burak, pointing a finger of her own. "You confuse Zor with his offspring."

"Then let him speak for himself, Wyrdling," Burak shot back, using the Praxian term. Janice was in her lavender aired human guise, but it was the artificial person most of the Sentinels chose to see.

"We have told you all we can."

"Enough!" Rick said, loud enough to cut through an eruption of separate discussions and arguments, Perytonians and Praxians hurling insults at one another, ursine Karbarrans muttering to themselves. "This isn't helping anything, Burak. We understand that Peryton has been in a state of perpetual warfare. But you've got to give us more background on this supposed curse if you expect us to intercede."

"`Supposed' curse?" Burak mimicked, repeating it for his camp, who shrieked a kind of angry laugh in response. "There is nothing supposed about it, human. You will see for yourselves if we ever reach Peryton."

"We will reach Peryton," Rick snapped. "And that's the last I want of hear of that. You have our word that we'll do everything we can to liberate Peryton-you've had our word from the onset."

"Your word," Burak sneered, horns lowered, red eyes glaring at Rick. "Words mean nothing. We have tried words. And we have tried weapons. To no avail." He swept his arm

around the room. "You all know this. Words are useless. Weapons are useless. You think I am unaware of what transpires here? You think I am unaware of your secret plans to move against Optera and leave Peryton to fend for itself? Now that Spheris has been liberated, you see no need to delay, to involve yourself in my world's insignificant dilemma. It is just as Tesla warned."

Teal pushed her way to the edge of the circle as the arguments recommenced. "If that were the case, we wouldn't be here," she told Burak, indicating her fellow Spherisian, Baldan. "We would have stayed on our own world."

Burak only snorted a laugh. "A babe and a newborn warrior. How comforting."

Rick strode to the center waving his arms and motioning everyone silent. "Peryton is our priority. Anyone who disagrees better step forward now and present a case, otherwise it's settled, once and for all."

When no one moved to contradict him, he swung around to the Perytonians, showing them a determined look. "I'm as short of patience as this ship is of Protoculture, Burak. Tesla's not around to feed you any more lies, so you're going to have to begin dealing with us. You don't seem to want to believe that he's on his way to Optera, but there's nothing we can do about that. What I want to know is what you need from us. Tesla has you convinced that it's your destiny to save your world, and maybe that's exactly the case. But you'll need backup and all we're saying is that you'll have our complete cooperation."

"Then squeeze the Zor-clone for all he's worth," Burak said menacingly. "Or, by Haydon, we will do it for you!"

In his quarters an hour later, Rick positioned himself in front of a security camera to get a good look at himself in the monitor. He had been as thin as a ribbon since Haydon IV and suspected that the Haydonite scientists must have tampered with his physiology when they were cleaning Garuda from his system, because he hadn't been able to gain any of his weight back. Stepped up his metabolism or something. He turned profile for the camera and ran a forefinger along his larynx, which seemed to be, well, protruding lately. Could they have taken out his thyroid? No, that wouldn't have done it. He thought about Veidt as he stared at his on-screen image, flexing the muscles in his arms and legs, thankful that Haydon IV had left him with those at least.

There were other things to wonder about as well: whether Vince Grant, Wolff, and Breetai had been successful in clearing the Sentinels of charges; how Max and Miriya were faring with their new girlchild; whether the ship under Major Carpenter's command had been heard from; and just what the hell the Ark Angel was going to do when it arrived at Peryton.

Despite the bold front he had displayed in the hold, he couldn't deny that Burak's remarks were not far off the mark. It was true that the Sentinels had given their word to the Perytonians, and it was certain they would stick to it; but at the same time there was a kind of mutinous restlessness plaguing both crew and command-a feverish compulsion to push on to Optera and put an end to the war. They had had the Regent on the run ever since Haydon IV, and the sidetrip to Peryton-while an honorable undertaking-was only going to permit him to regroup his forces and fortify his homeworld stronghold. Rick could only hope that Tesla's troopships were in pursuit of the Invid leader. From all reports, he had actually strangled the Regent's simulagent onboard the SDF-3, and there had been that persuasive speech before the turnaround on Spheris. But who knew what Tesla had planned for the day after tomorrow? He was no longer the same being they had encountered on Tirol almost three years ago.

Rick had no way of knowing Dr. Emil Lang was nursing similar thoughts about change and transformation clear across the seas and nebulae of the local group. He knew only that victory was no longer a guarantee of order; in fact, there seemed to be a measurable quantity of disorder attending the Sentinels liberation campaign. An entropic dispersal; a scattering and depletion that grew more pronounced with each world set free. Half his command returned to Tirol; the Praxians uprooted; Cabell, Max, and Miriya on Haydon IV; Janice Em and Tesla reconfigured; Burak crazed...And indeed his own image seemed to bear this out: his nearly shoulder-length hair, the mismatched pieces of uniform and weaponry.

Rick turned to glance at Lisa, busy at a terminal which by rights had no place in their bedroom. She was outfitted in knee-high boots, leggings, and a hide skirt the Praxian Zibyl had given her on Haydon IV. Her admiral's jacket was worn over a Garudan fringe vest, and a kind of techno-headband kept her long hair back. There were Karbarran air-rifles in one corner of the room, Badger assault pistols near the bed, clips and bandoliers, halberds and grappling hooks. And it wasn't just this room but the whole Ark Angel that looked like this; not just Rick and Lisa Hunter but the entire crew. If they were not really the pirates the Plenipotentiary Council had branded them, they were certainly dressing the part!

"What is it?" Lisa asked over her shoulder, catching Rick staring at her.

Rick smiled and shook his head. "Nothing. I guess I was just daydreaming."

Lisa narrowed her eyes. "About?"

"Maybe about the first time we met," he said, coming over to her, taking her upraised hand and kissing it. "You in civilian clothes. Kim, Vanessa, and Sammie."

Lisa laughed and-leaned back to glimpse her reflection in the monitor screen. "And you and Roy all duded up, two hot-shot flyboys on the make. `Mr. Lingerie!'"

"Macross," Rick said, sighing.

She squeezed his hand. "We've come a long way baby."

"Yeah, look," he said, gesturing to himself and laughing.

She reached up to straighten the collar of his jacket. "I think you look terrific. I was proud of you today, Rick, the way you handled Burak."

"Even though you knew I was faking it."

"You weren't faking it," she countered. "We're committed to Peryton-obligation or not. Nothing will change that. Burak has to be made to understand."

"Not even a chance for a quick end to the war."

Lisa tightened her lips. "Not even that."

Rick looked away from her.

"Let me hear you say it, Rick," she said, suddenly concerned.

"Not even that," he bit out.

Elsewhere in the ship Burak was meeting in private with Garak and Pye, the two Invid scientists who had been with the Sentinels since the liberation of Garuda. The Perytonian had the two pinned up against the bulkhead of their quarters/jailcell, his hands at their throats. Behind him at the door stood two of his devilish cadre, who had neatly disposed of the rooms' Karbarran guards.

"Do I need to ask again?" Burak said in the lingua franca, his horns poised for a pass.

"We know nothing!" Pyre gasped, pleading for his life.

"You had the clone on Garuda. Your scanners peered into his mind. What did they reveal? How is Peryton to be spared? Speak, or die by my hands!" Burak held their ophidian eyes in his gaze, willing the truth to surface. The two had been present when Tesla had first worked his magic; they had seen for themselves the transmogrification, the link the Invid had established with Burak that day in this very hold. "Speak!" he commanded them, trying to summon a similar psychic bolt from his depths.

Just then the door to the hold slid open and Janice Em sidestepped in, her Badger in an

upraised two-fisted grip.

"Hold!" Burak ordered his companions.

The two moved back.

"Release them," Janice said, gesturing to the Invid.

Burak grinned and opened his powerful hands; the scientists slipped from his grip and fell gasping for breath to the floor.

"They can't tell you anything, Burak."

"You never know until you ask, changeling. And the Zor-clone was not available."

Janice moved toward a corner of the hold and brought the pistol to her shoulder, pointing it toward the ceiling. "I can tell you what you need to know about Peryton."

Burak traded looks with his cohorts and relaxed his stance some. "Speak to me from your true face, then. Unmask yourself."

Janice complied. Without visible effort, her skin lost color, becoming transparent and leaving the blood vessels and human-made musculature of her face revealed. Her eyes emitted an eerie light, and what there was left of her expression became flat, unblinking, and inhuman.

"You would make Tesla a lovely bride."

Janice ignored the comment and said, "The Awareness opened my eyes to some things that bear on Peryton's curse, some things which you are meant to understand. Zor believed he would be helping your world by seeding it with the Flowers of Life. If you seek someone to blame, you must go further back-to Haydon."

Burak made a disgruntled sound. "Haydon? Then I may as well blame the Great Shaper, the Great Geode..."

"It would all mean the same," Janice told him. "When the Invid came they sealed off Peryton's one chance for salvation; but there is still time to rescue your world from the brink."

"But how?" Burak asked, eager now, captivated.

"The hive is the key."

Burak took an anxious step forward. "The hive...But tell me, changeling, do I delude myself, am I to be the one?"

The light from Janice's eyes waned, then grew brilliant again. "You are the one."

Burak threw back his head and roared. "And Tesla," he sneered after a moment. "Does he have a role to play in all this, or were his words empty?"

"Tesla has a role," Janice said, "an all-important one."

CHAPTER TWO

"You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war." Albert Einstein

Is this what lay in store for kings and fathers? the Regent asked himself as he paced the floor of the Home Hive. Mismanagement at the lower levels and a son's rebellion?

It was inconceivable: Optera under assault-again! Not that much remained to waste; the Robotech Masters' warrior giants have seen to that. Nevertheless the planet was still the Invid homeworld, and whether bountifully flowered or as barren as some rogue moon it would always remain so. Only this time it wasn't Zentraedi-but Invid against Invid, with the renegade Tesla at the helm of the assault.

The Regent whirled on his personal guards, a formidable dozen in full-body armor standing alert by the base of the hive's bubble-chambered brain. On the floor in front of them in postures of genuflection were three barefoot Invid scientists in sashed jackets and white trousers suggestive of a martial arts gi.

"You have wasted our most precious reserves," the Regent told the three.

He was referring to the hive's recently transmuted Special Children, who were suffering heavy losses at the hands of the troops and Inorganics Tesla had mustered on Spheris. The Regent had been expecting much more from the egglike things the Regis had left behind on Optera, but his scientists had disappointed him-a mistake no being could make twice.

"These were to be our grand warriors," the Regent continued to rave, "and instead you feed them to Tesla as if they were but scraps of discarded fruit!"

"We tried, Your Grace," one of the three whimpered, risking a look up at his twenty-foot-tall judge and monarch. "But we dare not make demands of the Genesis Pits. I beg you to recall-"

"Silence, slug!" With a slight downward motion of his four-finger hand, the Regent summoned a lieutenant forward.

"My lord," the soldier said, smartly snapping to.

"To the Pits with them," the Regent bellowed, his cobra hood puffed, suffused with violent color. "Devolve them and see that they are sent to the front."

As the scientists were dragged screaming from the chamber, the Regent turned his attention to the communication sphere, live images of battle strobing from within its cellular, confines. Waves of Inorganics, Hellcats, Scrim, and Odeon clashed in the outlying districts, sterile hillsides and valleys that had once provided spiritual nourishment for a world and an inward-turning race. While overhead, through skies as pale as death, a battle raged to the very edge of space, ship against ship, Invid against Invid, locked in a war of like minds. And somewhere above the madness was death's harbinger-a Special Child of his ex-wife's own making, transfigured by the Fruits of half-a-dozen worlds into something beyond reckoning.

"Is the link established?" the Regent demanded of a cowering tech at the controls of an instrumentality sphere. The screams of the scientists could still be heard, a hollow roar in the passways that led to the Genesis Pits.

"Not quite-"

"See to it!"

Given a choice, the Regent would have opted for a long soak in the tub, a bit of wave-making in the Perytonian nutrient fluids of his bath. There had been too little of that lately, save for the occasion when Edwards had interrupted him with a somewhat panicked transmission from Tirol. Where was the one-eyed Human now? he wondered. He had presented Edwards with a way out of his difficulties in the hope of forging an alliance, but there had been no word from the general since. Nor any word from his lost queen, the Regis, for that matter. Off following one of her sensor nebulae, the Regent supposed, chasing the Protoculture matrix Zor had spirited out of the Quadrant.

The Regent shut his liquid black eyes to the thought, only to find himself pursued by cruel memories of the Zorlike things that had sent him scurrying from Haydon IV; his brief but painful stay on that diabolical world. The replayed psy scans of the clone, the sight of Tesla hunkered down in his new form...

The Regent heard the tech announce that a comlink had been established between the Home Hive and Tesla's troop-carrier flagship. Eyes opened now, he was brought face-to-face with the insurgent as he appeared in the communications sphere, and the

image was even more gruesome than he had recalled. Tesla was huge and hairless, five-fingered and almost... Human! Horrified, the Regent fell back from the sphere, eliciting an amused cackle from his opponent. Was this form some trick of the Fruits, or was Tesla consciously seeking the mutated path the Regis had followed? He refused to contemplate that there was something predestined here, a road not taken.

"But that is exactly what you must contemplate," Tesla said, discerning his thoughts. "You are the devolved, a dead end for our race, and it is my primal responsibility to remove you from rule."

"You, you are not one of us anymore, Tesla," the Regent managed, his nasal antennae twitching convulsively. "Go join with my faithless wife on her metaphysical quest if it pleases you. Only leave me to my task here."

Tesla enjoyed a laugh, obviously pleased with his newgrown mouth. "You are pathetic. The shadow our race casts across the Quadrant. And because of that I cannot allow you to live."

Tesla's words sent a flame through the Regent's heart, melting whatever fears had gathered there and steeling him. The bloodlust coursed through him like a fix of the finest Flowers, a madness that worked its own frightening transformations. Even Tesla could sense it where he sat sheltered in his ship, as the Regent vented his anger on the comma sphere.

"Come and take me, then!" he screamed, frightening in his aspect. "Don your battle armor and settle this thing between us. I vow to see you live to face the Pits, to watch as all the fine stuff of your new self is drained from your being, sucked dry by the very powers I have sanctified in this place. Come to me, Tesla! I await you like an impassioned lover. Come and slip into death's embrace!"

With that, the Regent cut off the link and smashed his fists into the geodesiclike sphere, caving it in with hammer blow after blow. Spent then, he collapsed cross-legged to the floor, his cerulean robe falling about him like a tent, and stared up at the eyeless, now agitated organ in the bubble chamber.

We need a miracle, he told himself.

"Entering the Tzuptum system, General Edwards," a Ghost Rider tech reported from his duty station on the bridge. "Optera on-screen."

Edwards leaned forward in the command chair to gaze at the darkside disk, its single oblate moon. There was a thrill attached to the moment that cut through all his concerns. Three years ago the planet hadn't meant anything to him; but in the time since, it had

overtaken Tirol itself in importance. The world that had given the Quadrant the Flowers of Life, the Protoculture by extension; the focal point of a galactic war and in this sense-though the ship's scanners might disagree-a kind of Earth-mate. A celestial twin or doppelganger.

"Any traffic?" Edwards asked.

"Negative, sir. Heavy interference on all frequencies. Trying again."

Edwards steepled his fingers and brought his chin to rest on his thumbs. What the hell was going on now? Was this some sort of test the Regent had set up-a way to gauge his reactions to the unexpected, a way to appraise him? Edwards had in fact expected as much, coming in like a fugitive on the run with damned little to offer the partnership: a half-complete starship, a handful of loyal fighters, some mecha and weapons. But he wasn't about to grovel. They had a common enemy and a similar lust for conquest, and that would have to count for something. And there was the section of living computer Edwards had taken from the nave of Tiresia's Royal Hall-slumbering now with precious few Inorganics to direct, but programmed with all the Code Pyramid data Edwards had fed into it on Tirol. The strengths and weaknesses of the REF; psy profiles on the Expeditionary Force's commanders and council members; research data on Lang's delvings into Protoculture; schematics pinpointing the vulnerable places of the expedition's new breed of dreadnought.

If it came to that.

Edwards threw a nervous look over his shoulder, certain he had glimpsed something sneaking up on him. But there was only a tech seated at his station, bent over his console, his back turned to Edwards. No one on the bridge had picked up on his turn, but Edwards made a covering move just in case. It had been happening more and more lately, this sense of peripheral threat, ever since he'd helped that Lynn-Kyle into the afterlife. The suicidal fool.

Edwards forced out a breath and returned his attention to the forward screens, Optera a golden crescent now. Things had been worse, he decided, recalling a few low spots in times past. Especially toward the end of the Global Civil War, what with the Neasians steadily losing ground and his feeling like just another merc with no war to pay the rent. But the Visitor had rescued him from the breadline then. Edwards grinned: that first helo ride to Macross Island with his old foe Fokker. His subsequent rise through the ranks under Russo's tutelage, from a simple fighter jock to someone who could hobnob with the execs of the UEDC. If he'd done it once, he could do it again, even if that meant riding the Regent's waves for a time. Besides, hadn't he already managed to win the Robotech War's grand prize?

Minmei had been taken from the bridge, but the wooden cross she had been shackled to

was still there. Edwards had to laugh. It had been an operatic gesture, no denying that, but it was just the sort of thing needed to get to her. To penetrate those damn songs of hers and reassert his control. And yet it wasn't songs but shrieks that had landed her in his quarters, sedated. It got so that everyone on the bridge was beginning to feel like a Zentraedi, eyes rolling, hands pressed to their ears. So he had her removed; three men to restrain her. Cursing, spitting, clawing...Edwards loved it.

He was thinking about going downship to have his way with her when a tech announced that transmissions were being received from brightside Optera. "Not transmissions exactly, sir. I'm reading severe atmospheric thermal disturbances, energy levels well in the red."

"The planet's under attack," Major Benson said from an adjacent station.

Edwards made a panicked turn in the chair, certain this time..."Pull us in," he said after a moment. "I want signatures."

"On-screen, sir. Invid troop transports, Pincer and skirmish ships."

Edwards watched displays take shape, outlining the mollusk form of the troopships, the crablike details of the Pincers. Tesla, he told himself. He had tried to kill the Regent once; now he had the backing of a small army. Edwards shot a good-news grin to his aide.

"Looks like the Regent's got troubles of his own, sir."

"Indeed," Edwards said. But the smile only lingered for a moment. He was tempted to sit this one out; but what if it was the Sentinels who had sent Tesla in? Could they have forged a separate peace; could Hunter have agreed to allow Tesla to lead the assault, soften things up?

Edwards called for more data and studied the screens in silence. The ship had yet to be scanned, which meant that Tesla wasn't even aware of their presence. And there were only three transports, yawning like opened oysters...It would be a duckshoot, Edwards thought, just like that first day in Fantomaspace.

"Secure to General Quarters," he told Benson.

"Shields are up, weapons primed," a tech updated as klaxons sang their mad songs throughout the ship. "Launch bays report two squadrons standing by."

Edwards made a slight adjustment to his skullplate and hooked long blond hair behind his left ear. "Ahead on my mark. This'll be our little arrival gift to our new partner."

Aboard the Valivarre, in stationary orbit above the ringed giant Fantoma, Commander

Breetai welcomed his guest to the bridge. "I understand you're leaving for Haydon IV," he said, directing his booming voice toward the Micronian balcony that ran across the astrogation hold opposite the command center.

"And I understand you are leaving for Optera," Exedore said into a binocularlike audio pickup.

Breetai grunted and folded his thick arms across his chest, his half-cowl skullplate reflecting amber light into the hold. He was dressed in tight-fitting trousers and a Zentraedi campaign cloak adorned with REF insignia patches. Seated beside him and similarly attired was former Quadrono, Kazianna Hesh, Breetai's mate.

Exedore couldn't get over the two of them, sitting there like living-room hosts. He was aware of just how far he had moved away from his own conditioning; but there were areas where Breetai had surpassed him, emotional realms he might never experience. He was glad for his former commander nonetheless, and in some ways envied him his newfound treasure.

"Yes, m'lord," he continued after a pause. "Commander Grant is taking the Tokugawa, and I will be accompanying him. I proceed in the hope of finding some solution to our dilemma on Haydon IV. All my studies suggest that that world holds the answers."

Breetai showed him a tolerant smile. "It's a Human talent you've perfected-this quest for cause and effect. But I'm afraid we are created of different stuff, my friend. I was made to act and react, and so I shall."

"Perhaps;" Exedore allowed, eyeing the two of them. "But battle and warfare need not be your only pursuit, m'lord. We have not thrown off the Masters' yoke simply to wear another's." He approached the balcony rail and looked up into Breetai's rugged face. "Let the REF wage its own fight against Edwards. Why involve yourselves in this-especially when that course leads to Optera?"

Breetai patted Kazianna's thigh and stood up. "Answers, Exedore."

"Maybe we are not so different." Breetai nodded his head once.

Exedore hesitated, then said, "I have misgivings, m' lord."

"The same you had when we volunteered for Fantoma, no doubt. The same you had when we left with the ore. It is another Human talent, an eye for the future I seem to lack." He touched the eyelike cabochon of his alloy prothesis. "It has been a circular route for us, Exedore, our search for Earth, our return to Tirol and Fantoma's mines. And Optera is the final arc of that journey-a necessary one, I think."

Exedore bowed his head, overcome in a way that was new to him. He understood what Optera represented, more than he cared to admit; but he didn't know what to do with the feelings Breetai's decision had stirred up. "It is difficult for me, m'lord. I...I will miss you."

Breetai fell silent.

"And I you, my friend," he said at last.

"And how is Haydon IV's only biological mother feeling this fine morning?" Cabell asked as he stepped into Max and Miriya Sterling's high-towered quarters in Glike, the planet's principal population center. Briz'dziki was up, spilling warmth and golden light into the room. "Difficult to be anything but ecstatic here, eh?"

Miriya gave him a smile from the window wall that overlooked the spires and domes of the city; gave him a peck on the cheek as the old wizard came over to her.

"Well," he said, blushing clear up to his bald pate, "I should stop by more often."

Miriya laughed and poured him a tall glass of exotic fruit juice. The apartment was different from any other on Haydon IV, transformed by the planet's ultratech decorators into a fascimile of the one Max and Miriya had shared in New Macross after the war. The Haydonites had done as much for her with the delivery room and she and Max had opted to enlarge on the idea here.

Cabell took a sip of the drink and set it aside, playfully dabbing at his chin with his nearly-meter-long beard. "Where's our child?"

Everyone was saying this lately-our child-as if the entire planet had participated in the conception. "Max and Jean took her over to see Vowad," Miriya told him. "Although if they'd waited an hour, Aurora probably could have found her way there without them. Take out one of these flying rugs..."

Cabell continued to smile, unwilling to confront the confused tone in Miriya's voice. "Vowad seems very fond of her."

"There must be a better word, Cabell."

The Tiresian tugged at his beard. "Mystified, then." Miriya seated herself opposite him and forced him to meet her gaze. "What does it mean, Cabell? Walking at a month old, talking now. All these warnings about spores...Does it have something to do with Garuda? Was I infected somehow?"

Cabell reached for her hand. "With Garuda, and with Haydon IV, and perhaps with your

time on Earth. We simply don't know, child. In many ways Aurora is a normal, healthy infant. But there are certain accelerations occurring we've not been able to explain. As to this warning directed toward the child you and Max left behind..." Cabell threw up his hands. "I'm sorry I can't be more comforting."

Miriya gave him a forgiving look and heaved a sigh toward the light. "Max tells me the Tokugawa is returning."

"...soon."

"Then what?" Her eyes back on him now. "Back to the front for all of us? I just don't know whether I can be a part of it anymore, Cabell. Max and I refused to take Dana on this mission for fear of a war. Now we find ourselves where we would have been in any case, and I won't risk any harm coming to Aurora. I know it must sound strange to you, hearing this from a Quadrono, but this is my heart speaking, Cabell. Not the conditioning of the Imperative."

"No," he tried to assure her, "it sounds anything but strange, child. I understand your fears."

"Did you have children, Cabell, before the Transition?" He thought for a moment and said, "In a manner of speaking. You see...Rem is my child."

Miriya's green eyes opened wide. "Rem?! But how is that possible-"

"Oh, I don't mean that I'm his father in any actual way," he added in a faltering voice. "It's a rather complex story, my dear, and I'm not sure, er, that is, I don't..."

"Tell me. Please."

Cabell turned away, deciding something for himself before he spoke. "I was one of Zor's many teachers," he began. "I knew him as a mere child-well before the Great Transition and the mass clonings. I loved him like a son. And I was never able to accept his death. When Commander Reno's fleet returned his burned and disfigured body to Tiresia, I cloned a sample of healthy tissue before the Masters got to him with their psy scanners and neural replicators.

"When they departed Tirol they had some fourteen clones growing in their deprivation tanks, and it was their aim to allow one of these to mature on its own. But on that one they would attempt to enforce the same Compulsion they had used against Zor-the one that sent him back to Optera for the Flowers. It was their belief that he would either surrender the secrets of the Protoculture matrix or lead them to the one he sent off to Earth secreted in the spacefold generators of his ship. But I fear, I pray, their plan will never come to

fruition."

"And all the while you were raising Zor's clone?" Cabell nodded. "I tried my best to duplicate Zor's early upbringing, his studies and pursuits. But war was my opposition-something that had never entered into Zor's education. Not until the Masters, that is, their dreams of empire."

Miriya made a puzzled sound. "But does Rem have Zor's memories, his knowledge of Protoculture?"

Cabell toyed with the sleeve of his robe. "In the same way we were able to strip the Zentraedi of their past and implant a new Imperative, a false history, our science allowed us to transfer both cellular and psychic memory. But it is a precarious business. Awakening those memories too soon can lead to irreparable damage. The Masters lost a dozen clones in their lust for Zor's thoughts. The memories lie buried beneath the strata of the new self. Um, Dr. Lang mentioned an Earth concept called reincarnation-a cycle of birth and rebirth. It is something similar to this."

"Does Lang realize any of this?"

Cabell smiled. "I have kept this from everyone, child, for the very reasons I mentioned. Lang is brilliant, but driven. He would have Rem in his lab before I could put a stop to it. That was what initially persuaded me to join the Sentinels-I had to keep Rem clear of Earth's own Robotech Masters."

"But he must know some of this. Janice-"

"Yes. His artificial agent." Cabell shook his head in wonder. "She had all of us completely fooled. Lang is brilliant. And it is quite probable he learned about the Regent's experiments with Rem from Colonel Wolff or Commander Grant. I don't seek to keep anything from them, but at the same time I did not raise Rem to be some laboratory animal, some cruel experiment."

Miriya started to say something but checked herself and began again. "His knowledge could put an end to the war, Cabell," she said evenly.

"I know, child. But it cannot be forced from him. Rem is nearing the age Zor was when he embarked on the technovoyage that led to the discovery of the Flower of Life on Optera." Cabell stood up and moved to the window wall. "There is talk from the Terrans on Tirol of suing for peace with the Invid," he said with his back to Miriya, "of giving them everything they need to refoliate Optera with the Flowers. The seeds from these worlds we've liberated, and the Pollinators essential to their maturation. It's ironic that the Sentinels should now stand in the way of such a straightforward approach, but I'm afraid that is precisely the case. Life is sometimes an unforgiving place, and the Invid succeeded in

stirring up a good deal of hatred throughout the Quadrant in their desperate quest for the nutrient stolen from their midst. They lacked the Masters' finesse when it came to warfare, and in many ways outdid them."

"Then it's up to us to convince the Sentinels to call a truce." Miriya was alongside him now, her hands clasped around his upper arm.

"The Hunters?" he said, looking at her. "Lron, Kami, Crysta...after so much suffering?"

"We have to try. We'll have the Tokugawa. We can stop them before they leave Spheris."

"Too late for that, child."

"Peryton, then."

Reflexively, Cabell glanced in the direction of Peryton's primary, concealed though it was by Briz'dziki's golden splendor. "They are not going to have an easy time of it there," he mused.

Miriya thought back to what the Sentinels had been through on Praxis and Garuda, and said, "How could it be any worse than what we've been through?"

Cabell exhaled slowly, fogging a small spot on the transparent wall. "There is sufficient data here to warrant my concerns," he told her. "Peryton waits to be rescued from its curse. But it will take more than liberators to achieve that." He shook his head in a dejected way. "No. What Peryton needs is martyrs."

CHAPTER THREE

It was once believed that the effect of gravity was indistinguishable from that of acceleration. Did that mean that the more you got going the more you were rooted to the same spot? Because it sure seems that way sometimes.

From the Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

It was a sentenced world at the end of time, an aged wanderer moving through the collapsed light of a dying star. Peryton-fallen from grace, its inhabitants left to ponder their fate. No new worlds within their grasp to settle; no miracles left to coax from their science. Until Haydon chose to answer their appeals.

The solution he offered them, the device itself, was capable of effecting a change in the planet's axis of orientation. Not, however, through any physical means, but through a concentrated effort of collective will.

Call it a thought experiment, Janice Em had suggested to Rem. They were in the Tiresian's quarters aboard the Ark Angel, and Janice was wearing the more pleasant of her two faces. Rem was comfortable with her in either mode, but she had chosen the Human one in hopes of off etting the cool, analytical quality of her tone of voice. The Sentinels' ship had been superluminal for some time now and was expected to reach the fringe of Umbra's planetary system within twenty-four Standard Hours.

"The device," Rem said, just as evenly, and she continued.

It could store, harness, and direct a current of mental energy. The impact of the elementary building blocks of psychism-on the material world. The notion worked like a surge on Janice's cybernetic circuitry. For Rem it did little more than awaken new suspicions about Zor's mysterious precursor, Haydon.

Peryton, she explained, recounting some of the data gifted to her intellect by Haydon IV's Awareness, had succeeded in realigning itself. But it was a short-lived paradise that followed the planet's resurrection. Rivalries soon found their way back into Perytonian society; rivalries born of a new leisure-metaphysical notions, celestial concerns upon which the priesthood of that world became divided. In the planet's rearranged heavens the rival factions saw different things: evidence of the Law of One, a beneficent creator offering clues to lesser beings, signposts along a path of reascension. Or in those same stellar configurations, purposeful figures projected on a grand screen, a universe for the taking, a chance to attain freedom from elemental tyranny, what little remained of nature's reign. And so war had broken out-an all-encompassing horror that left no outpost untouched. Peryton's inhabitants hurled the stuff of stars against one another and died by the tens of thousands; each side leveled city after city in its lust for dominance; forests were burned, mountains moved in the mad press for victory, and firestorms sucked skyward the souls of the innocent dead.

By then, Haydon had quit the Quadrant, but the device he had planted on the planet remained intact, a double dged sword just waiting to be plucked from the ruins of the shrine Peryton's inhabitants had erected to his genius. And the Macassar, hierophant of the Left-Hand Path, had been the first to reach it. But not before he had lost the last of his children to the war-a cruelty beyond his ability to comprehend, though millions lay dead at his feet. So it was not with thoughts to end the war that he entered Haydon's shrine, but with a grief of such magnitude that Haydon's psicon device took it up as its own.

That this day would have never happened, his thoughts had railed to the shrine. That this

battle should continue until they are returned to me...

And so it did. Replaying itself diurnally, a loop of time excised from the normal laws that governed causality or physical space. The battle and its cast of players traveled the planet, erupting in Umbra's light without warning as a kind of martial sore, plundering whatever resources it found available, sweeping new combatants into its midst, and visiting

devastation where it took root. Materializing each day to enact the same scene, only to disappear each evening into some temporal split-second netherworld. Those Perytonians who survived passed the nights in constant fear of daylight, with almost everyone nomadic to one degree or another, on the move against Umbra's rise or foraging through the battle's aftermath for anything of value.

"Burak and his people are aware of these things," Janice said. "Thanks mostly to Zor. He went to Peryton directly from Haydon IV and seeded vast areas of the planet. What wasn't destroyed in the wake of the battle was apparently left wondrously fertile. The Flowers flourished, and he was convinced that their mere presence would help heal the planet once this so-called curse was lifted."

Rem wore a brooding expression-the one he seemed to adopt lately whenever Zor's name was mentioned. He had said little, interrupting her only once to ask about the Macassar's children-the two sons he had lost that fateful day. "And did Zor tell them exactly how that could be achieved?" he asked Janice now.

She nodded and told him. "Their own myths and legends had pointed to the shrine, but no one knew precisely what was to be done there. When the Flowers drew the Invid to Peryton, the Regent learned about the curse and constructed a fortified hive over the site of the shrine. It benefited them to allow the curse to continue because of the fecund ground the battle left behind; but in fact they couldn't have ended it if they wanted to. What had been tortured from Peryton captives was nothing more than a mixture of half-truths and rumors. The Macassar's utterances had become hopelessly garbled."

Or until such time as two willingly give up their lives that my children might live, Rem repeated to himself. "Have you told Burak yet?"

"Not yet."

"Why? He has a right to know."

Janice heard the harshness in his voice and said, "Because he has a role to play."

"As I do, you're saying. As that part of me I can't touch does. The thoughts and feelings that aren't mine-"

She stopped him before he could go any further, putting her fingertips to his lips. "I'm not asking anything of you. Don't liken me to one of your enemies."

He kissed her fingers, a woman's hand despite the Protoculture currents that coursed through her.

Or were they only warm to his touch, Rem asked himself, a prisoner of that Robotech

power? Would that his donor's thoughts could reveal the role he had to play in these affairs of heart and mind. Until then the curse was on him also, an enigmatic timestrip he rode alone.

"Now let me get this straight," Rick was saying to Burak on another level of the ship. "All we have to do is take out the hive and we take care of this...curse?"

"Just clear the Invid from our midst, Earther," Burak said, "and I will attend to the curse."

He had given the Sentinels a slightly different version of the events. As a result, perhaps, of what a thousand years of battle had done to the truth; but more likely because he had been worried about scaring the Ark Angel off. Things were already tenuous enough, what with the Regent on the run and Optera almost close enough to touch; so how would Peryton have stood a chance if he had told Rick and the others the full story? After all, the hive and the orchards were the central concerns, weren't they? Just wipe out the Invid like they had done on Karbarra and the rest, and give him some breathing space to deal with the curse. The Perytonian messiah. The Mobius battle itself was of little consequence, he had maintained.

What he had failed to mention was how easy it was to die if the cursed thing chanced your way.

Consequently, the Ark Angel's Human and XT command had come to think of the battle as a kind of spectral, immaterial event-one that couldn't actually touch them. Rick was doing a lot of head-scratching over it, nevertheless, and wished that Janice and Rem hadn't decided to absent themselves from the briefing. He turned to Garak and Pye now, their thick necks still showing nasty-looking maculations from Burak's recent deathgrip.

"Run it down again. You've got orchards growing all over the planet. This, uh, battle sweeps through, you go out and seed the place, harvest the Fruits later on and bring them back to the hive for processing."

Garak nodded his snaillike head.

Rick saw Karen Penn and some of the Amazon hand ighter contingent shaking their heads in a baffled way. "I thought we hit the food supply on Garuda," she said. "Peryton sounds like a regular garden."

"Garudan Fruits provided nutrient for the mecha chambers," Pye explained. "Peryton's Fruits are the Regent's special crop."

Rick puzzled over it for a moment, while Kami, Learna, and Quias plied the Invid scientists with further questions. Rick was about to ask just what made the Perytonian variety so

special when Bela said, "And the planet's course never interferes with your operations?"

Garak risked a gaze at Burak and his mob, who were suddenly glowering in his direction. He gulped and found his voice. "No, no, never. It just, well, happens, you understand? Springs up in daylight, leaves at night..."

"You make it sound like an offshore breeze, Invid," Lron said with an ursine growl from across the hold. Doc Obu led Crysta and the other Karbarrans in a grumbling session. "What are your numbers there?"

Similar to Spheris, Garak told him. Although it was likely that the Regent had recalled some of the garrison to Optera-the troopships certainly.

As everyone was moving off to their stations, Rick spied Veidt across the hold and waved him over. "Well," he said, when the armless Haydonite had hovered into mind shot, "what do you think?" He heard a bellike sound in his mind before Veidt's short telepathic statement took shape. They are lying.

In low orbit over Optera, Tesla's improvised flagship shuddered and belched fire as plasma probes from Edwards's fortress caught it unawares. Reports poured into the flagship's living computer, which in turn sent Invid techs and maintenance personnel scurrying through the ship's arteriallike passageways-to attend the hull damage and crippled systems. On the bridge, a pulsating ventricle of visceral color, Tesla muttered a Praxian curse and eased himself back into the command throne.

"What was that?" he asked one of the techs.

The creature bowed as it turned to him, accessing data from an instrumentality sphere positioned near the main viewscreens. "Energy bolt, Lord Tesla. Enemy ship coming into view-"

Tesla took hold of the graceful neck of the chair's overhead sensor as two more explosions jarred the ship. There was more surprise in his expression than concern; he had assumed that the Regent would return to a defensive stance now that the strike ships of his Special Children were being beaten back. But here he was attacking the troop carriers themselves. Tesla demanded to know how this new threat had broken through.

"It is not an Invid ship, Lord Tesla."

"Then what?" he barked from the chair.

"Robotech," the tech said as an image formed on the screen.

Tesla stared at it a moment, mistaking it for the Ark Angel and wondering how the Sentinels had been able to catch up with him. Tesla had folded his flotilla to Optera from Spheris, whereas the SDF-7 was only capable of achieving superluminal speeds.

"The fools!" he shouted to no one in particular. "Doesn't Hunter realize I'm doing him a favor? Would he destroy me for desertion when I could help him end the war?"

"Robotech mecha closing on the flagship, Lord Tesla. Veritech fighters."

Tesla watched the screen. Two pinpoint formations of light were on the attack. "Recall two squadrons of Pincer Ships from the surface-quickly!"

The tech bent to his task. At the same time Tesla called for an intensified view of the robotech vessel; as he continued to study the image, he saw that it wasn't the Ark Angel after all.

"Open a com frequency to that ship," he ordered, arranging himself in front of the video transmitters for maximum effect.

But his carefully constructed presentation collapsed a moment later when two Invid Inorganics-two trollike Scrim-came on-screen, peering at him from stations on the enemy bridge. "Whaaat the..." Tesla began, as the camera enlarged its field of view to show a slice of bubble hambered brain. Seated nearby and flanked by two Hellcats was a blond-haired, skullcapped Human wearing a neural handband.

Tesla felt a shiver of fear work its way through him. An Earther in control of Inorganics? An Earther in contact with one of the living computers? Had the Regent struck some sort of deal; turned the REF and the Sentinels against him? What was happening to the master plan, the Fruit of the Fruits?

A barrage of plasma fire found an unshielded spot on the flagship's belly and threw a spasm through the bridge ventricle. Techs and soldiers shut down momentarily, while the onboard brain fought to resecure its hold.

The Human-Edwards, Tesla recalled-was smirking for the lens; but catching sight of Tesla now, he came slowly to his feet, advancing toward the camera with a shocked look on his face.

"Are you the Regis?" Edwards asked, alarmed by the sight of Tesla in his transfigured state.

Tesla took heart and puffed out his chest. Easy enough for the Human to make such an assumption; but Tesla found it somehow distasteful to be confused with the Queen-Mother. "I am Tesla, lord of the Invid," he announced in the Earth tongue for added impact.

He hadn't expected Edwards to laugh.

"Tesla," Edwards was saying, that grin back in place. "Tesla, lord of the Invid. Well, that's a hoot. What the hell you been eating, Tesla? You look like you gained weight."

"Robotech mecha continuing to close, m'lord," a tech reported. "The living computer recommends withdrawal-"

"Quiet, grub!" Tesla told him too late.

Edwards wagged a finger for the lens. "Hear that, mutant? Retreat." He turned to stare, hands raised to the neural headband, at his own slice of brain. "My computer agrees," he added, swinging around. "Odds don't look good. I know you're stretched to the limit-can't even fire back, can you?"

Tesla looked at a lieutenant, who shook its head. "Robotech fighters firing: rockets away. Prepare for impact..."

Tesla shook his fists in the air as two dozen warheads stitched fire across the flagship's ventral hull. "Where are the Pincers?" he screamed.

"The Regent's Special Children have rallied, Lord Tesla," a tech updated. "The Pincers are sustaining heavy losses. Squadrons are en route to our position in significantly reduced numbers."

"Number One's kicking ass and takin' names," Edwards said when Tesla returned his attention to the screen. "Your boys'll never make it back in time."

Tesla saw the Human nod his head to someone off creen.

"Prepare for plasma fire-"

Tesla picked himself up from the floor, waving a hand to clear pungent smoke from his eyes. Edwards was smiling at him.

"I'm willing to give you a chance, mutant. Take your troopships to Peryton and engage the Ark Angel. In the meantime I'll try to put in a few good words for you down below. Who knows, maybe the Regent'll welcome you back into the fold if you can prove yourself useful."

Tesla shook a trembling fist. "I am Tesla, lord of the-"

"Save it," Edwards cut him off, the smile gone. "Your ship is targeted for destruction.

Counting down from sixty..."

Decision time, Rick told himself, pacing away from a large screen in the Ark Angel's Tactical Information Center. The cruiser was only hours out from Peryton now, and command had yet to come up with a plan that satisfied the ship's numerous contingents.

Veidt had explained what he knew of Peryton's situation from records kept on Haydon, sending whatever hopes the Sentinels had of a quick settlement into a nosedive. The battle was not some immaterial event, Veidt had explained, but an event that took place in the real world. And all of a sudden the Karbarrans were acting like they wanted no part of the invasion-not until recon teams established for themselves the nature of the planet's curse. They were actually in favor of transporting volunteers up from the planet's surface to get a kind of consensus of opinion. Moreover, Rick suspected that there was something like superstition at work among the ursinoids, though he could hardly blame them for it. And the fact that the Garudans subscribed to this added to his concern, because he had come to trust in the vulpine's Sendings, as they were called. The Praxians-among whose numbers Rick now listed Lisa, Karen, Teal, and Baldan-were willing to believe that they could contend with whatever Peryton threw their way. The Perytonians themselves had opted to put all their faith in Burak, who was expressing confidence that the Sentinels would find some way to deal with the Invid presence on his homeworld, and asking only for a lone Veritech for himself. The Sentinels had already granted him this much, hesitant to tamper with the Perytonian's delusions of grandeur.

The one positive discovery of the day had been finding Perytonspace devoid of Invid troop carriers.

"Surface scans coming in now, Admiral Hunter," an REF tech announced as the Ark Angel changed course for a look at the planet's brightside.

Sensors went to work on the world from a safe distance, and soon had the onboard computers offering up color nhanced schematics and scrolling data across half-a-dozen monitor screens.

"Put it up where we can all see it, Mr. Ripp," Rick ordered. Beside him, Veidt made a sound that read thoughtful in Rick's mind.

The scanners showed a weathered world with a ninety egree axis of rotation, spinning like a top through Umbra's dying light. Massive continents of polar ice, rounded mountaintops, broad valleys, equatorial grasslands and forest. Background radiation was higher than anyone had been led to expect, and there were innumerable places simply too hot to handle. The devastated remains of cities and population centers leveled during the initial battles of the planet's priesthood war, its now millennium-old struggle against time. Rick couldn't help but think of the world the REF had left behind, the Earth after Dolza,

cratered and reconfigured like some celestial catastrophe. One look at Jack Baker told him he wasn't alone with such thoughts.

"Picking up anomalous readings in quadrant Romeo iner, sir."

Rick regarded an angry crimson spot low down on the screen and called for increased magnification. "Can't make heads or tails of the data," the science officer announced after a moment. "I think we're looking at the curse."

Rick heard exclamations erupt throughout the room and just managed to stifle his own. The battleground had a diameter of more than one hundred miles; it wasn't simply some localized timestorm, but a veritable hurricane of savagery, rolling through Peryton's scant cloud cover, a thundering volcano of unimaginable size. Disturbances of an electromagnetic sort denied the Ark Angel any visuals of the battle.

"How long before the battle reaches darkside?" Rick asked.

"Just over three hours, sir," someone told him. Then by all accounts it would fade away into sunset, only to break out in Umbra's light elsewhere on the surface.

"Any way to predict where the thing will erupt?" Rick asked Veidt.

The Haydonite shook his head. "Its outbreak is tied to Umbra's light but is otherwise unpredictable, failing to adhere to any laws of causality we have identified."

"But then it has to keep to one hemisphere, doesn't it?"

"Theoretically, yes. With Peryton's sixteen-hour period of rotation, one would expect the battle to be in effect confined to two narrow longitudinal and antipodal bands. To rage for eight hours in one band, then disappear and instantly resurface for another eight hours in the opposite band. This, however, is not the case. The battle does indeed disappear with the light; but it can reappear anywhere across Peryton's brightside face, raging for whatever amount of time is left to it-anywhere from a nanosecond to a full eight hours. In this way it travels the planet.

"The storm is just as likely to loose itself on the same place it vacated two days before as it is on some new area." Rick felt his head spin. He directed his thoughts to the hive the Invid had constructed over Haydon's shrine, and requested the computers to show its location relative to the ship. Shortly he learned that the hive was on the darkside presently, some six hours short of morning. That would put the location out of the running for at least that long, and with luck a bit longer-anywhere from a nanosecond to a full eight hours, as Veidt had said.

"How soon can we make planetfall on the darkside?"

"Approximately two hours and forty minutes, Admiral." Which left a little over three hours before they had to worry. And all they had to do in the meantime was defeat an Invid garrison of who knew how many strike and skirmish ships.

Nothing to it, he tried to tell himself in his best command voice. In his mind he heard Veidt berating him for the attempt.

Two hours of continued deceleration did little to change his mood; but the Ark Angel was at least in orbit now, with Peryton a dark and silent place below them. Rick reasoned he would feel a whole lot better once the invasion was under way, but just as he was about to order the recon teams out, an intermittent burst of subspace transmission trickled its way into the ship's communications center.

From the SDF-3.

Rick and Lisa listened to it from their respective stations in the TIC and on the bridge, regarding each other on intercom screens. The news was incredible: Wolff was on his way to Earth; Vince Grant on his way to Haydon IV And T. R. Edwards was on his way to Optera, with the Zentraedi hot on his heels.

And Minmei in the shotgun seat.

Lisa saw Rick's mouth drop open, feared the worst, and got it.

"It's not too late," Rick said to her. "We can come back to Peryton after it's over. The garrison here will surrender without a fight. No lives will be lost-"

"No, Rick! We can't do it." Her eyes were as red as some of the console lights. "You're going to have to let someone else come to her rescue this time. We're committed to Peryton. We've got to finish what we started."

Rick slammed his fist down where she could see it. "Tesla, Edwards, and Breetai are converging on Optera! Our presence is crucial to the outcome. It's imperative we get there!"

"It's imperative we remain right here," she shouted back.

"We haven't even committed ourselves yet. The recon forces are still in their dropships. We can pull out and return-

"Excuse me, sir," a tech interrupted him from an adjacent console. "One ship is already away."

Rick stared at the threat board aghast. "Who issued the order for that ship to launch!"

"It's not a dropship, sir. It's an Alpha."

"Burak," Rick said knowingly.

"Yes, sir."

He wanted to go it alone; now he can, Rick was saying to himself when the tech added, "Rem and Janice Em are with him."

Rick cursed and shot to his feet, eyeing the board and swinging around to face Lisa's tight-lipped look. "Do we have a fix on the Alpha?" he asked, holding her gaze.

"Bearing zero-one-seven, sir. On a course toward the hive."

Rick checked his watch. Less than an hour to get them back or commit to it.

"Notify the launch bay I'm on my way," Rick said to the tech.

"I'll meet you there, Admiral," Lisa seethed before she signed off.

CHAPTER FOUR

One sees a motif of barrenness and sterility begin to emerge: defoliated Optera, ravaged Earth, irradiated Tirol. A broken marriage between king and queen; a race of loveless warrior clones, another of sexless drones. The Flowers themselves held in reproductive stasis...Only the Protoculture thrived, energized by anger, lusts and warfare.

Maria Bartley-Rand, Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

Edwards had a dozen of his Ghost Riders with him when he entered the Regent's Home Hive; and, for good measure, three Scrim and three Crann, trailing the general's tightly knit formation like obedient mascots.

The Inorganics were dressed for the occasion in outlandish uniforms culled from the starship's wardrobe-REF dress cloaks draped over their massively broad shoulders, caps perched atop cyclopean-eyed torsos, battle ribbons dangling from underarm weapons clusters, breechcloths fashioned from United Earth Government flags around narrow, skeletal hips and armored loins. Edwards and his men wore crisply tailored camouflage jumpsuits and jet-black helmets with tinted faceshields. Each carried a gleaming Wolverine assault rifle, a sawtoothed survival knife, twin Badgers in hip holsters, ammo and battery packs, bandoliers of concussion grenades and antipersonnel canisters.

Edwards wore jackboots, skintight pants and a flare houlder vest of black leather, richly embroidered gloves, and a high-collared duotherm shirt. His blond hair stood spiked away from his polished skullplate like a fright wig, the neural headband riding above his ears like some Incan headdress of royalty. His good eye and cruel mouth were highlighted with purple-and rubicund-colored cosmetics. He was carrying a riding crop and leading a Hellcat on a chrome leash.

The Regent had a band waiting.

The Home Hive complex was an agglomeration of mile-high hemispheres that covered hundreds of square miles. From above it had reminded Edwards of a molecule model-an arrangement of domes and the arched conduits that linked them, an obscene polymer or everready ester. The place was mind-boggling in both size and structure, and defied the senses at each turn; so much so that Edwards himself had been sorely tempted to make a beeline back to the dropship and force the Regent to come to him instead. But once through the hive's permeable membrane he decided he had made the right choice. No show of trepidation or apprehension; a surefooted balls-to-the-wall walk into the enemy's camp. After all, hadn't he just saved the Regent's neck-sent Tesla Peryton-bound with his tail between his legs? If he had a tail, Edwards thought. God knew the renegade had looked satanic enough to possess one in that twenty-foot-high guise. But even Tesla's ersatz umanness paled in comparison to this...this band the Regent assembled! A conceit almost bizarre enough to rival the wedding ceremony he had staged for Wolff and the rest. An orchestra composed of two dozen of the Regent's stripped-down soldiers beating on drums, shaking rattles and bells, and blowing into makeshift horns, ocarinas, and flutes. Edwards immediately recognized that the Regent was attempting to copy, perhaps interpret, the welcome the SDF-3 had given his simulagent well over two years ago, and appreciated the chance to vent his bottled p amazement in a long, roaring laugh.

"Your Majesty," he said after his moment of mirth, making an elaborate bow in front of the Regent's throne. The Invid leader's nasal antennae twitched as though searching the air for some sign of sincerity. Then, with a proud motion of his head, he announced, "Optera welcomes General Edwards and his Ghost Riders." A wave from his four-fingered hand brought the band back to life and the smile back to Edwards's face.

"It is indeed an honor to be here, Your Regalness," Edwards told him, turning the Hellcat's leash over to one of his lieutenants.

The Regent was flanked by two larger 'Cats wearing gem-studded collars and snarling up a storm as the band embers went through their repertoire of racket marches. Hundreds of armored troops stood at attention in unending ranks on both sides of the throne, and behind them, column after column of Pincers, Scouts, and Enforcer ships. And even this gathering took up only a quarter of the Home Hive's domed central hall.

The Regent was looking down his snout at the uniformed Inorganics Edwards had brought in and the Hellcat now lying prone at the general's feet. "I see you neglected to bring the brain scion with you, General Edwards."

Along with most of my troops and the rest of your Tiresian strike force, Edwards said to himself. All that, including the living computer, was still safely tucked away on the cruiser, now in low orbit around the Invid homeworld. Such was the power of Edwards's link with the brain that he could control small numbers of Inorganics through the neural headband alone.

"I thought we might talk first," he told the Regent. "See where we stand now that I saved your neck."

The Regent barked a coughing sound. "So we shall, General. But you should know that I was merely toying with Tesla. My Special Children were just preparing to move against him when your starship appeared."

Edwards followed the Regent's hand motion off to one side, where fifty or more mecha were lined up along the circumference of the chamber. They resembled the Enforcers, but were bigger and of greater brute strength, bearing multiple upper limbs provided with pincers, tentacles, scythelike blades, weapons, muzzles, heavier armor, and increased firepower. At the base of each ship stood an Invid to match-bigger and more brutish than the Regent's run-of-the-mill soldiers, and uglier by far. Ill-conceived things that had been rushed into creation.

"Of course," Edwards said, letting it go for the moment. "I'm sure Tesla was wetting his robes."

"You saw him?"

Edwards nodded. "What's he been eating, by the way?"

"Fruits," the Regent answered him dismissively.

"So much for vegetarian diets, huh?"

The Regent ignored him, gathering his garment as he rose to his feet. "It's time we talked," he said, setting off. Edwards and his retinue followed, moving deeper and deeper into the Home Hive complex. Through organic tunnels laced with strands of dendrites and ganglia, and on into lesser and greater hemispheres, instrumentality nodes and power supplies; past weather-balloon-size commospheres, and close-by the huge chamber that housed the central living computer itself-the bubble-chambered brain from which all others had been sectioned, a floating canescent mass of congealed, convoluted stuff as big as a dirigible.

But ultimately Edwards was led alone into the Regent's private chambers-a pitiful approximation of the lavish quarters the Robotech Masters had enjoyed at the height of their empire. Ornate furniture and mirrors, Greco omanesque filagrees and scrolls, atriums and courtyards, arabesque columns and friezework pediments. But it was more send-up than copy: a theatrical facade that overlooked a planet as harsh and sterile as surgical light.

Edwards could scarcely believe his eyes; and for the first time he began to understand the lusts that had driven the Invid halfway across the Quadrant. It had not been greed, but envy; and it had not been for war, but out of a kind of warped and perverted love. He turned away as the Regent slipped out of his robes to immerse himself in a sunken tub of green soup that smelled like overcooked brussels sprouts.

"Now, General Edwards," the Regent said, sighing as he luxuriated in the bath. "How can we help one another?" A fleet of toy ships and terror weapons sat within easy reach.

Beaming, Edwards stretched out on a chaise lounge as wide as a trampoline, toeing off his jackboots and propping pillows up behind his head. He had left the neural headband in the care of his team leader. "The way I see it, we've both gotten ourselves into a fix. You've got Tesla and the Sentinels banging on your door, and I've got the REF hounding me. I thought for a while we could solve everything by throwing in together, but we missed our window of opportunity. Sending a simulagent to Tirol didn't help matters."

The Regent was willing to concede the point. "Perhaps I was a bit hasty. But I wasn't certain I could trust you." Edwards waved a hand. "Forget it. I would've done the same thing. Besides, what's past is past. I'm thinking about what we can do today."

"And that is..."

Edwards sat up, elbows on his knees. "I know where the Protoculture matrix is. And if your ships can get us to Earth, we're as good as gold."

"Leave Optera?" the Regent said in distress.

"It's a lost cause," Edwards told him. "Course you can go down fighting if that's your idea of fun. But I'm not ready to throw it in just yet."

"But Earth-"

"Can your ships do it?"

The Regent thought for a moment. "I believe they can, but I would have to consult with the living computer to be sure."

"Then do it," Edwards said, standing up. "Between the data in my ship's computers and what I've fed into the section you left in Tiresia, we've got everything we need-time-space factors, sidereal computations, the works. Thanks to Lang's investigations, I've also got the lowdown on the matrix, and once we nab that, we'll have all the Protoculture we can handle.

"My people are already in power out there. All you and I need now is a strike force large enough to handle the Masters."

"The Masters are headed there!"

"Calm down," Edwards barked, sidestepping a splash of nutrient from the tub. "Of course they're headed there. So's your wife."

The Regent fell silent while he tried to picture the partnership: a journey across the Quadrant, a final slugfest with the Robotech Masters...Smiling to himself, he looked over at Edwards. Earth cleared of Humans for the arrival of the Regis and her children. A new world to settle. Yes, it seemed a brilliant plan.

Edwards caught the Regent's look and turned his back, to hide a grin. The old snail is planning to off me when the time is right, Edwards told himself, delighted to find that the two of them really did think alike.

The Regent was about to speak when the door to the chamber opened. "Your Majesty," a servant said, entering and genuflecting. "One of the Humans wishes to speak with his commander."

The Regent curled his fingers. "Permit him to enter." Edwards's lieutenant shouldered past the Invid servant, stopped in his tracks when he got a load of the Regent in the tub, then turned a serious look to the general. "Message from the ship. We've got company upstairs. ID scanners say it's the Valivarre."

"Breetai," Edwards cursed.

The Regent went bolt upright in the bath, sending a tidal wave through the tub. "Breetai!" He experienced a memory flash of the Zentraedi's one-eyed anger coming ship o-ship on a view-orb. We're coming for you!

"I want the brain transported down here immediately," Edwards was saying, pacing alongside the tub, mindless of puddles the Regent's thrashing had released. "In fact, scrap that. Get the entire ship down here. We'll force them to meet us on land this go-round."

"The Zentraedi-here?" the Regent croaked.

Edwards had adopted a thoughtful gaze, which slowly reconfigured to a broad smile. "Nothing to worry about," he announced laughing. "We've got the weapon we used to beat them last time."

Two servants had appeared to help the Regent into his robes. He showed Edwards a puzzled frown as he climbed from the tub. "A Protoculture weapon."

"Better than that," Edwards told him. "We call it a Minmei."

Janice had elected to follow Burak's lead-temporarily, at least-and per his instructions brought the Veritech down in the outskirts of what had once been Peryton's principal city, LaTumb. It was in its time an extraordinary place, having grown up around Haydon's psicon generator, and later the sacrosanct shrine erected to his memory. Even in the eerie predawn light, Rem recognized as much; but most of what he saw was in ruins. Slagged towers of steel and native stone, collapsed bridges and roadways, horror and devastation stretching clear to the horizon. A lasting memory of the early wars, when reoriented Peryton had had the world on a string. Before the priesthood rivalries, the suicidal slide into holocaust. But though overshadowed now by the enormous nosecone-shaped hive the Invid had thrown over the shrine, the place was far from depopulated. Convinced perhaps that the Mobius battle would never erupt so close to the device that had inadvertently lifted it into perpetuity, thousands of Perytonians continued to live among the ruins or, in the primitive settlements, the walled-in dwellings and filthy slums that surrounded the core.

"We're going to have to penetrate the hive if we expect to do any lasting good here," Janice was explaining. "And we can take it as an encouraging sign that no ships have showed up to give us the customary welcome. I suspect the Regent has recalled most of the garrison; but the hive has not yet been emptied."

Neither Rem nor Burak thought to question her about this; when Janice was in android guise, questions seemed irrelevant. Nevertheless, Rem had some concerns about just how she planned to get them through the settlement's patrolled streets, let alone into the hive itself.

The trio were on a grassy rise several miles distant from the Invid perimeter, the Veritech well concealed in an evergreen forest at their backs. The space between was a patchwork quilt of buildings and open space, some torchlit, some equipped with generators and mercury lights. Open sewers abutted areas of manicured lawn. Thatched shelters sat next to stately mansions; rich and poor, good and evil, rubbed shoulders on every corner. Here was a marketplace, teeming with early morning breakdown activity; there a city block of chic shops. Packs of doglike carnivores roamed the street, foraging yard to yard. Through

nightscope glasses Rem watched one unruly band launch an attack against a group of domesticated animals penned up inside a crudely fashioned backyard corral. Two Perytonians wielding triple-bladed war clubs and hardwood staffs were attempting to fight off the beasts. Elsewhere, merchants and scammers were closing up shop-dealers in foodstuffs, flesh, and contraband; peddlers of low-tech trash and high-tech dreams; thieves, arsonists, berserkers, murderers, and assassins.

Rem thought about a mythic place the Earthers called hell, and began to see Burak in an entirely new light, thinking: the Flowers of Life could have saved this place as he handed over the glasses. Now those Flowers that bloomed in the aftermath of battle were brought straight to the hive and sent offworld to Optera.

"This is not a world for Humans," Burak said after a moment.

He lowered the glasses and turned a strange look to his companions-a look that radiated a mix of emotions to rival the city's own. Rem thought about the wonders Burak had glimpsed, and how suddenly out of place the Perytonian must have felt.

"You two won't get ten steps before someone either murders you or turns you over to the Invid." His eyes flashed for Janice's benefit. "I should never have listened to you, Wyrdling. I should have returned here with my own people, not some shape-changer and clone."

Janice dismissed the taunt and began removing a black robe from her backpack. "I borrowed this from one of his friends," she said, indicating Burak and handing the robe to Rem. "Put it on."

Rem pointed a questioning finger to his breastbone. "You're joking."

Burak chortled, the messianic glint restored to his eyes. "Do as she instructs, Zor-clone. With the hood raised you'll pass for a hornless Perytonian child."

Rem frowned at the thought, but despite his misgivings began to slip the heavy, long-sleeved, monklike habit over his head. Next, its flare-shouldered cowl and animal-hide waistband. "I hope you brought one along for yourself," he said to Janice.

She was on her feet now, a few paces back toward the woods. Umbra was near rising behind her, stars evanescing in the light.

"I won't require it."

A transformation came over her as they watched, her body attenuating, her skin undergoing shifts of tone and color. Janice's lavender hair was gone, as were the android's eyes. Her head grew cone-shaped and hairless, her browridge pronounced; and from the forehead above her now demonic eyes emerged two slender horns.

Burak fell back, performing magical safeguards and uttering Perytonian shibboleths. "Wyrdling!" he intoned. "Wyrdling!"

And all at once they were three of a kind.

"A-another trick you picked up on Haydon IV," Rem said when he had relocated his voice.

"A projection," she explained. "I am still Janice underneath the image."

"Well, let's hope so. Otherwise we have to talk about getting a larger bed."

As the trio set off into the city's maze of streets and alleyways, Rem kept expecting the mist to lift; but he soon realized that what he had mistaken for ground fog was a permanent pall of wretched smoke. An acrid stench of unclean energy hung in the air-of fossil fuels and smoldering plastics, of burning hair and decay, of garbage, filth, and feces.

With a kind of ritualistic cruelty, Perytonians were hurrying for the safety of buildings and shelters as bells, sirens, and warning klaxons blared out dawn's approach. Pushing and shoving one another, trampling the small and weak underfoot, tossing horns and launching fists and curses at large. Burak led them through it all like an old hand, engaging in as few scuffles as possible and getting them to the Invid perimeter in just under an hour. Umbra was up now, throwing long and threatening shadows of the ruins against the organic face of the conical hive itself. Squads of armored Invid soldiers were positioned about, lifting the elongated snouts of their helmets, as though testing the air for signs of trouble. Scout and Pincer ships were coming and going, one group chaperoning a small transport vehicle, perhaps fresh from the latest Flower or Fruit harvest.

The three Sentinels secreted themselves behind a length of fissured wall, a balcony at one time, hunkering down like the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion at the door to the Wicked Witch's castle.

"Now what?" Rem demanded of either of them.

"We go inside," Janice announced evenly.

"Yes. Destiny awaits-"

"Whoa! Hold it!" Rem said, struggling to pull Burak back behind the wall. "Shouldn't we discuss a plan?" Janice abandoned her holo-projection and said, "You're my prisoners."

"Huh?" From Rem and Burak together.

But they could already see the image of a white-robed Invid scientist taking shape beside

them.

"Can't we get any more velocity out of this ship?" Tesla screamed at his helmsman.

The tech thumped its chest in salute. "I'm sorry, m'lord. The living computer shows us at maximum thrust."

Tesla could see for himself that it was true. The troop hip brain looked like a knot of worms in a bottle of agitated sodawater. A few more demands on his part and the ship would be nonfunctional, dead in space far short of its planetary goal.

Edwards's fortress had opened fire on a count of thirty-so much for promises-and Tesla had been forced to see Opteraspace with scarcely half the ship's complement of Terror Weapons and mecha. The rest, along with the two other troopships he had pirated from Spheris, had been left to fend for themselves against the Humans' dreadnought and Veritech teams. The outcome all too predictable, Tesla thought. Edwards's voice was still in his ears: Go make yourself useful...engage the Sentinels.

"With one measly ship-ha!" Tesla said out loud as he paced the floor of the ship's nerve center.

He could see his mistake now; it was, well, as clear as the nose on his face. He paused a moment to regard his reflection in the bubble-chamber, then stormed back into motion, muttering to himself all the while.

In his haste to dispatch the Regent, he had overlooked the Fruit of Peryton-perhaps the most important of the lot, and surely the Fruit that would complete his evolution and render him the omnipotent being he was destined to become. What an oversight for one so close to apotheosis! He had tasted of Optera, Karbarra, and Praxis, of Garuda, Haydon IV, and Spheris. To neglect Peryton-it was inconceivable!

The very planet where the grand quest began.

Optera defoliated at the hands of the Zentraedi, Zor folding himself back to Tirol with all the world's Pollinators and seedlings. The Invid left to fall back on bodily reserves; left in the rule of a Queen-Mother who had transfigured herself to serve the needs of the Tiresian traitor; and the husband her misdeeds had driven mad. The Dark Ages...An interminable period of waiting, praying, while the emerging Lords of Tirol-the Robotech Masters-spread their evil throughout the local group.

But something inexplicable had occurred: a sensor nebula sent out to scout the Quadrant for any sign of the precious Flowers of Life had detected a newly grown crop on a nearby world-a world known to its inhabitants as Peryton. Not even the Queen-Mother could

puzzle it out. Were they spaceborne spores that had seeded that world; or was someone making an attempt at recompense?

The Queen-Mother had undertaken the journey in a ship fashioned for that express purpose. A ship unlike theirs, but modeled after it nonetheless, as she herself was modeled after them. The Flowers she returned with were not equal to those that had once graced Optera's hillsides, but they were enough to rescue the Invid race from oblivion. To provide them with nourishment if not spiritual sustenance; to provide them with the will to push deeper into the void. To Garuda and Spheris...

There was more, but Tesla couldn't bring all of it to mind. Something about Peryton's

Flowers, something about the schism that had developed between husband and wife...

But what did it matter? he decided. Soon the first and seventh Flower would be his, and the cycle would complete itself. He would be able to return, invincible, to Optera-a transfigured presence both the Regent and the Sentinels would gaze upon in fear and wonder.

It struck him as odd how all this time he had been working at cross-purposes with pitiful Burak, within whom he had kindled a messianic fire. But such were the contours of the Shaping.

"Faster!" he commanded the living computer. "Onward to Peryton! Onward to glory!"

CHAPTER FIVE

The evolution of the Invid was initially adduced to support the theory of punctuated equilibrium, or punk e-a challenge to Darwin's reworking of the doctrine that Natura non facit saltum: nature makes no leaps. But it was later demonstrated that the Regis had been somehow empowered to direct the evolutionary course of her species. The Invid, it appeared, had nothing to do with nature!

Simon Kujawa, Against All Worlds: A Biography of Tesla The Infamous

Bretai sat alone in his quarters, the lights dimmed and the squawkboxes adjusted down. By rights he should have been on the bridge, what with the Valivarre only two million miles out from Optera; but something larger than the moment had ordered this brief retreat and he had obeyed.

Who was he the last time he journeyed into this sector? he asked himself. A warrior, to be sure. A warrior under Dolza's command, engrammed like the rest to believe it had always been thus: war! Wars of conquest, wars of vengeance and retribution. Wars to secure the Masters' empire, wars to forge the Imperative. No memories of Fantoma then, save a counterfeit few to reinforce a collective recall of Zarkopolis, the warriors' city. He and

Exedore were the only ones left from those days; Miriya Parino, Kazianna Hesh, the rest of the Valivarre's hundred trong crew, they had all come later on. Birthed in the vats and sizing chambers on Fantoma and Tirol; engrammed there and turned loose on the Quadrant.

Zor, deep in the throes of the Masters' Compulsion, had led the mission to Optera. It was a time before Protoculture, when Reflex furnaces were the order of the day. A slow and tedious voyage, Breetai recalled. Initially, there was a kind of joy attached to his return; but oh how soon those beings grew to rue the day they had embraced his visit. How shocked they were to see him return into their midst only to steal away their precious Flowers.

The Old One, Dolza, had given the orders to fire. A rain of death so complete that even now, a virtually submerged part of Breetai's being was exhilarated by the thought. Nothing close to what would follow when Protoculture fueled their arsenal, but intense for its time. Hardly a glamorous campaign; a bloodbath, really. Their baptism.

Soon, it seemed, they had more warships at their disposal than they could count; more, eventually, than they could even imagine. And as their numbers grew, their victories increased. The Zentraedi-The Zentraedi!

And yet...hardly a recollection he could pinpoint. Generations of warfare and hardly a specific memory. Who was he then?

Breetai brought his fingers to the cool, unfeeling surface of his skullcap. That day he remembered, the day Zor died. The naive straightforwardness of the Zentraedi could be your downfall some day, he could hear Zor warning Dolza. Old Watchdog, he had called him.

All things are so simple to you: the eye sees the target, the hands aim the weapon, a finger pulls the trigger, an energy bolt slays the enemy. You therefore conclude that if the eye sees clearly, the hand is steady, and the weapon functions properly, all will be well.

But you never see the subtlety of the myriad little events in that train of action. What of the brain that directs the eye and the aim? What of the nerves that steady the hand? Of the very decision to shoot? What of the motives that make the Zentraedi obey their military Imperative?

Ah, you call all of this sophistry! But I tell you: there are vulnerabilities to which you are

blind...

Prescient. As were all his utterances. Had he also foreseen this return? Breetai wondered, disturbed by the possibility. Breetai had described it to Exedore as the closing of a circle, the most poetic image he had ever summoned. But did closing the circle entail finishing what had begun on Optera countless years ago; or was there some other closing in the

works even now?

"I am sorry to disturb you, Breetai."

He swung around to find Kazianna standing there, her battle armor reflecting some of the room's pale light. He hadn't heard the hatch hiss open. Lost in thought-another first so late in the game.

"It's time I returned to the bridge, anyway."

"Edwards's ship has not been found."

"Hiding on the darkside?"

"Doubtful, my lord."

He showed her a wry smile. "Yes, doubtful. They must have taken the ship down. Edwards is baiting us."

"You have been there, have you not?" He considered it. "In thought, perhaps."

Kazianna took hold of his arm as he stepped past her into the corridor. "A moment, Breetai. I would walk by your side if you would have me."

He stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. "Now, and always."

On the Tokugawa bound for Haydon IV, Commander Vince Grant also had his thoughts set on review. It was the holo-photo that had touched things off. A shot of Bowie and Dana caught by the official photographer at the Hunters' wedding. Dana with a smirk; Bowie with a heartbroken look, eyes shining out from his dark brown face. He had Vince's coloring, Vince's curls; but those were Jean's deep-set eyes.

He didn't stare at it for long-couldn't; his hand was already shaking by the time he had set it aside, his chest hollowed out with a longing that was closer to grief. He had moved to the letters next-a collection of things he and Jean had left behind in Tiresia when they first signed on with the Sentinels, gone offworld on the Farrago. Something made him decide to carry them with him to Haydon IV, to pull one randomly from the batch and read through it.

It was from Claudia, handwritten near Christmas, 2012. These letters pile up, Vince dear, it began, perhaps to be read by you someday or perhaps not, but today especially I have to set down how full my heart is-more so than at any time since Roy was killed.

I heard Gloval murmuring something astounding while he was sitting in his command chair: "Capulets and Montagues." I thought he was going soft, heaven knows the rest of us have. But when I looked at the clipboard he had been studying, it was an intel rundown on books Miriya had screened from the Central Data Band while she was here-when she was hunting Max. Shakespeare was there, of course.

I don't know what to think, except-damn it! We've got to change the ending this time!

He let himself cry; just sit there and let it flood out of him. No one to judge him, no one to comfort him. It had been years, he realized in a moment of split awareness ne Vince sitting on the edge of his chair crying his heart out, another observing the man himself. Oh, good God, he stammered, overtaken by a second paroxysm. It welled up from somewhere too deep to locate, and left him utterly spent a minute later.

We've got to change the ending this time!

But was that viable anymore? Hadn't the Expeditionary mission tried to accomplish just that by going to Tirol? Who would have blamed them for simply chalking up any ideas of peace to a bad dream? Something you ate. A virus.

But elsewhere on the Tokugawa, Lord Exedore was baby-sitting a heap of shaggy, muffin-footed creatures Lang had called Pollinators. And locked away in Vince's carrycase was a vid-disk of the Plenipotentiary Council's outline for a peace proposal to be relayed to the Invid Regent. Providing it met with Cabell and Veidt's approval, and, to a lesser extent, the Sentinels themselves. An offer to seed Optera, if that was possible, and return to the Invid the Flower that promised salvation.

Would that he was not too late!

Lisa knew full well why Carl Riber was on her mind. She had seen the look on Rick's face when Minmei's name had been mentioned in the transmission from Tirol. That look. One she remembered wearing herself when the SDF-1 had first approached Mars and her heart had leaped at the thought of finding Carl alive. When she had her near brush with death in what had been Riber's Base Sara quarters. The memory made her glance over at Rick now, lifting himself out of the Alpha's cockpit, with his determined, take-charge look. Handsome, she thought.

The recon group, some dozen Alphas in all, had tracked the course of the lone Veritech to Peryton's surface, and had located it where the three Sentinels had stashed it earlier on. Rick, Karen, Jack, Gnea, Baldan, and Crysta were already out of their mecha, moving toward the grassy rise that overlooked LaTumb.

"I want a perimeter secured around the LZ," Rick was telling the rest of the VT pilots, most

of whom had already reconfigured their ships to Battloid mode.

There were no indications that the Invid had monitored their drop from the orbiting Ark Angel; but that didn't necessarily mean that the hive was unaware of their presence. Umbra was just rising, a dull red disk through the conifers at their back. On the other side of Peryton, the forever-war had an hour left to rage before sunset.

Lisa kept her eyes on Rick as she and Bela climbed down out of their fighter. He had come to her rescue that day in Base Sara, a guardian angel to be sure, and again a year later at Alaska Base, the site of the ill-fated Grand Cannon. So Minmei really didn't have anything on her in the way of rescues. But it was undeniable that she had been Rick's first love, and if those memories of Riber had taught Lisa anything, it was that first loves the hard.

Rick's voice came to her over her personal channel. "I want everybody to stay alert. The less resistance we meet, the worse it gets later. Which puts us at an all-time low this time around."

The idea was to rum a quick recon of the area, then return to the ship to coordinate an airborne assault against the hive-a towering, conical thing dominating the city like some sacred mount. And at the same time, find out just what Burak, Janice, and Rem were up to. Everyone was dressed for the part in jumpsuits and helmets; but individual choices had been made in terms of weapons and accessories. The Praxians had turned the jumpsuits into sleeveless, short-skirted battle costumes; and of course they carried their halberds, shields, and crossbows. Karen wore a Garudan ceremonial fringed shirt and had armed herself with a Spherisian grappler along with Wolverine and Badger. As for Baldan, he was outfitted in an REF long-tailed cutaway vest and what appeared to be a Haydonite metal-flake sensor belt. Learna, tufts of fur showing at her neck and cuffs, had disguised her breathing apparatus as a kind of streamlined faceshield; and the Karbarrans had daubed their elephantine feet with war paint. Lisa herself was dressed down today, except for the helmet feathers and naginata. Only the Perytonians, Rick, and the still-not-up-to-par Baker, looked strac; but Lisa didn't hold it against them.

The Battloids were reporting in now, and Rick was waving the recon party forward toward the crest of the rise. LaTumb's warning system was sounding every fifteen minutes, and Lisa guessed that would go on right until word was received that Umbra was setting over the battle. According to Veidt and Burak's pre-mission briefings, Peryton had no centralized government as such; but the planet maintained a communication system that was constantly monitoring the battle's outbreak and demise, and radioing that information to population centers worldwide.

Lisa thought the city looked like it had been planned and raised by some satanic construction company. She had never seen such a hodgepodge of order and catastrophe, of the primitive and ultratech. Watching the mostly black obed populace scurrying back

and forth through the streets, focusing in on back-alley rituals and street-corner scenarios, Lisa found herself remembering a book of paintings her father had kept in his study-hellish visions by a painter named Bosch, whose unusual first name she couldn't recall. From the rise, LaTumb seemed a Bosch miniature come to life.

"Most business negotiations are transacted during the night," one of the Perytonians was explaining over the tac net. "It is the only safe time on Peryton. The citizens are returning to homes and shelters now. The outbreak must be close at hand."

Lisa imagined Rick calling up the hour on his faceshield display. "Fifteen minutes," he announced a moment later. "An all-clear will be sounded when it is learned where the battle has appeared. Coded bursts will indicate how much time remains until Umbra's set on that part of the world."

To live under this! Lisa said to herself. But as she thought about it, she began to wonder if Earth, too, hadn't been under a kind of similar curse. Wars breaking out one place or another every few years, every few months or weeks. Her second reason for dwelling on Riber, the only honest-to-God pacifist she had ever known. He had volunteered for a nonmilitary position at Base Sara during the protracted conclusion of the Global Civil War. And died there during an unannounced and senseless raid; a misunderstanding of the worst sort.

A curse.

Lisa heard her recent words to Rick; how she had demanded that they finish what they-had begun-wipe out the Invid on Peryton before moving against Optera. She had a vision of Carl Riber turning over in his icy Martian grave...

"Sir, we've got movement out here," one of the Battloid pilots called in from the perimeter.

"Get a direction," Rick said over the command freq. "Trying, sir...Jesus! They're right beneath us, sir! They've breached the perimeter. They-"

Lisa heard an explosive roar behind her, simultaneous with a death shriek that pierced the net. Reflexively, she brought her hands to the sides of her helmet, turning in time to see two brilliant flashes ignite a shrubby area deep in the forest.

"Return to your mecha!" Rick shouted.

"Movement at point Charlie," another pilot updated. "Ditto that at Tango-niner, command," a voice echoed. Lisa rushed down the rise toward her idling VT, Bela and one of the Perytonians two steps behind. The mecha was in Guardian mode, wings spread and radome tipped to the ground like a rapacious bird. A series of ear-splitting detonations in the woods was followed by a wave of concussive heat that almost stopped her in her

tracks.

Rick was quick, up and in before she had even reached her ship. "Move it, move it!" she heard him shout as the Veritech's canopy lowered.

More explosions, off to the left now; annihilation disks mixing it up with rifle/cannon bursts, the VT pilots' stammering response.

Lisa had her hands and feet in the fuselage notches when the first Shock Trooper showed itself, emerging out of the soft ground like some crazed land crab, its shoulder ounted cannons primed for fire. The first Frisbee storm took the tail off Karen and Jack's mecha; Lisa saw the two of them hurl themselves from the spinning ship just short of a follow-up blast that blew the thing to bits. Two, three, four more Invid were springing up, ladybug carapaces and pincer arms shedding dirt as they rose.

Lisa had one of them bracketed in her sights, and fired even before she dropped the canopy. Twin missiles raced from the forward tubes and caught the enemy ship dead center, gobs of molten alloy and green nutrient launched through a fountain of blinding fire spattering against the nose of the VT.

"Bring 'em upright!" Rick ordered.

Already separated, the Alpha and Beta components of his ship began to reconfigure.

Elsewhere, Lron's mecha sustained a crippling shock. Gnea-an arm around Karen Penn-along with Baldan and two more Perytonians were cut off from their VT and making for the woods. Baker was on the ground, unconscious or dead. Lisa reversed the canopy, disengaged the seat harness, and went out for him.

She hit the ground in a crouch and broke into a jagged run, anni disks overhead, rasping like angry buzzsaws. To her right, an Invid that was thrashing its way through the trees came apart in a fiery spectacle; another Trooper dropped in front of her, both legs blown away. Rick was shouting at her, his Battloid down on one knee, its chain un raised.

Jack had come to by the time she reached his side. "Goddamn crab-eyed Flower-eating freakoid...Where's Karen?"

"Gnea's got her. She's safe." A barrage of discfire topped a line of trees behind them. "Safe as any of us, anyway."

"I owe you one, Commander," Jack said as she was helping him to his feet.

"Who's counting."

Lisa chinned into the command net to hear Rick ordering an assist from Ark Angel. But the ship was having problems of its own; it had just gone to guns with an Invid troop carrier that matched the ID signature of the vessel Tesla had commandeered on Spheris. The carrier had yawned a mess of Pincer Ships into local space and most of the Ark Angel's VT squadrons had already been committed to engage them.

Lisa was about to break into the channel when a sudden wave of frigid air assaulted her clear through the jumpsuit. Then her eyes began to play tricks on her, shadowy forms winking in and out of sight, like ships trapped in a space old irregularity. The air shimmered and danced, and the waiting VT seemed no more than a mirage.

"...I think I musta taken a whack on the head," Jack was saying.

The firefight, meanwhile, had come to an abrupt halt. Battloids and Shock Troopers were gaping at one another, weapons at rest, heads searching the devastated surroundings for clues.

"Rick," Lisa said uncertainly into the helmet pickup. At the same time she put the chronometer on display in the faceshield.

The curse was waking up to a new day.

Inside the Peryton hive, the shrill whistling of Invid alarms brought Janice, Burak, and Rem to a similar stand till.

"We've been found out!" Burak cried, struggling against the hold Janice had clamped on his robes. Her projected disguise had gotten them past the perimeter sentries and through the hive's permeable main gate. They were deep within its labyrinthine core now, just a scientist and his two Perytonian specimens on their way to the labs.

"Keep still," Rem said out of the comer of his mouth. Janice the Invid had a solid handful of his cowl. "You don't see them coming after us, do you?"

It was true. Things had been somewhat less than ordered from the outset-a certain amount of packing up taking place: scouts and gatherers hurrying in to offload batches of recently harvested Flowers and Fruit; workers emptying vats of processed nutrient into outsize canisters and tanker mecha; scientists and armored lieutenants relaying commands in that hollow-sounding synthesized voice of theirs. A ways back the masquerading trio had passed by the chamber that housed the hive's overworked brain, and Janice was able to learn that the Regent had ordered everyone to close up shop. A troopship would be on its way to Peryton as soon as he could spare one; but in the meantime, the hive personnel were to make certain that all existing supplies were packaged for transport.

The alarms, however, had thrown the soldiers and techs into a positive frenzy of activity, but none of that was aimed in the Sentinels' direction. Janice let go of Rem and put a hand out to stop a soldier who was rushing by. For the sake of appearances, she struck a characteristic pose, false hands tucked into the sleeves of her equally false white robe.

"What's all this about, drone? Why are the alarms sounding?"

The soldier's snout twitched back and forth, mirroring some internal confusion. Desperately, the creature sought to answer to the demands of both the brain and this one of rank who had singled it out.

"The planet's curse, Exalted One."

"Here?!" Burak said before Janice could stop him. There was no record of an outbreak having taken place in the vicinity of the shrine, even though the original battle in which the Macassar had lost his sons had been fought nearby. The closest outbreak had come some three hundred years ago, and almost as many miles away.

"This one understands our language," Janice told the soldier, thrusting Burak forward for the creature's inspection.

Its suspicions laid to rest, the soldier bowed its tubular snout. "The battle rages in the heart of the city. The hive is threatened."

Janice waved a hand, dismissively. "then go about your duty, drone."

The soldier moved off to join in the corridor confusion. "We have no time to waste, " Janice said, doubling their pace. "The battle will replay itself in full. It will spill into the hive and close on the shrine as it did that first day." Burak dragged his heels and managed to shrug off Janice's grip. Horns lowered, he shoved his demon's face close to the android's mask. "You haven't told me what I am to do, Wyrdling," he seethed.

Janice took a step back, dissolving the disguise. "You'll know when the time comes," she told him.

In minutes the shrine itself came into view-what was left of it, at least: the lower portion of what had once been a thousand-foot-tall statue, carved from a volcanic for in the likeness of Haydon the Great. The Invid had constructed their conical hive atop the cliffs that surrounded the shrine, as a series of interconnected circular corridors, concentric to the statue's base, with access to it limited to a single gate in the hive's innermost corridor band.

Rem was gazing up at the ruined work, the intricate designs of the figure's stone robes,

when Janice said, "Down there," pointing to the circular base some fifty feet below them. "That's where we'll find the Haydon's generator."

Burak and Rem followed her down a narrow stairway hewn into the side of the cliff. Light spilled from the generator the Perytons' ancient priests and craftsmen had concealed within the shrine; it pulsed and strobed as intensely as starlight from small windows set into the base, as though a great turbine was spinning there, driven perhaps by heat from the planetary core itself. Over the centuries the light had rarified the air and etched shadows into the surrounding cliff, and yet Burak and Rem both found that they could stare into the heart of it.

For the danger here was not of the physical sort.

It was like a supercollider of old, an atom smasher, outfitted with miles of electromagnetic tunnels, conduits, shields, and apparatus more befitting an alchemist's work hop than a scientist's lab. In the center of the ring, attacked from all points by a storm of unleashed lightning, was a transparent sphere one hundred feet in diameter. And flashing in and out of sight in the center of that sphere was the twisted twin-homed aged face of the Macassar himself-the way he had viewed himself, at any rate-looking every bit as frightening and portentious as Oz's wizard at his malevolent best.

"I'm having second thoughts," Burak stammered to his companions while they dragged him forward toward the psicon generator's portal. "We should reconsider"

Janice took him by the front of his robe. "You wanted to save your world."

"I do, Wyrdling, but-"

"Then follow me. The moment approaches."

Five thousand miles above Peryton in a small arc of space the planet claimed as its own, a cloud of short-lived explosions erupted in the night. Armored Veritechs and Invid Pincer Ships in a deadly null-g ballet, the two warships that launched them like deep-sea leviathans on the prowl. Tesla had been lucky to escape with his life. But thanks to the diversion, he was surface-bound now, in a tentacled shuttlecraft that resembled a spiny starfish. The craft's navigational systems were tied into the living computer of the hive-which displays showed to be three Periods into daylight. These same displays were registering readings of an extraordinary sort from the hive itself, but they were nothing Tesla could make sense of.

As he approached, however, his eyes showed him what his intellect had been unable to grasp. There was a riot in progress; more than a riot: a veritable revolt. The city that had grown up around the conical hive was a battle zone, its perpetual shroud darker and

angrier than normal, its maze of eroded byways filled with crazed movement. But Tesla was perplexed when he began to search the skies for Shock Troopers or Enforcers.

Then he thought that he glimpsed the truth, realizing that it was Perytonian against Perytonian down there. And he ventured, Not a revolt but a revolution. And a timely one at that.

Tesla grinned inwardly. Let them struggle while Tesla dined on the Fruits their world had provided. The Fruits that would liberate him. Tesla the Unconquerable, Tesla the Infamous!

The shuttle set down at the base of the hive in the normally fortified perimeter zone, which Tesla was distressed to find utterly devoid of troops. The warring inhabitants of the planet were dangerously close, stray rounds and energy beams from their mishmash of weaponry actually penetrating the hive in places. And what a savage bunch they were! Red against black, so it appeared; but who could be sure, given the riotous variety of uniforms and armaments? Tesla gazed around in stunned silence. Directly in front of him, a group of soldiers were bringing some kind of plasma weapon to bear on an unseen target, while all but adjacent to their position, two rival bands of naked Perytonians were goring one another to death with their horns! Elsewhere, civilians omen with babes in their arms, wide-eyed youths, and feeble old derelicts-ran shrieking through the chaos. Fire, smoke, and clamor poured into the sky.

Tesla tore himself from the scene and made a dash for the hive, the battle pressing in on him. Yet why did it seem that at least half those warriors and innocents he had glimpsed were already dead? It only struck him now: there were limbless beings out there. Headless ones!

The interior of the hive reflected the chaos outside; but none of the Invid were too wrapped up in their brain-fed tasks not to fall on their faces at the sight of Tesla. Tesla the Evolved, standing as proud and tall and humanoid as the Regis herself.

He stooped down to pick two groveling soldiers from the floor. "Fruits," he snarled, lifting them up to his face. "Where are they being stored?"

One of them pointed a trembling four-fingered hand toward the center of the hive. "But most of them have already been processed-"

Tesla issued a growl of impatience and tossed the creatures aside. His senses alone would lead him to the Fruit. But no sooner did he set off when a screaming hiss erased an entire portion of hive wall behind him. A second burst and the wall to his left disintegrated. And within moments, Perytonians were pouring through the wounds. Tesla's panicked cry lodged in his throat; but his legs suddenly had a mind of their own. He ran unashamedly for the heart of the hive.

CHAPTER SIX

I recalled my words to Lang shortly after the battle for Tiresia: Put aside your sympathy...They are not the race they once were; they are homeless now, and driven. They will stop at nothing to regain their precious Flowers, and if that matrix exists-they will find it. Defeat them here, I had argued. Exterminate them before you face the Masters...But that was before I had a full understanding of the injustices and cruel ironies that had brought them to their degraded state. Karbarra, Praxis, and Haydon IV had taught me more than a few lessons, chief among which was that age is certainly no guarantee of wisdom.

Cabell, A Pedagogue Abroad: Notes on the Sentinels Campaign

Minmei couldn't remember her line. Even the scene itself didn't seem familiar. Where was the director? Where, for that matter, was Kyle?

The actors portraying Earth soldiers threw her down on a kind of carpet in front of the puppet's massive throne, where one of them shackled her wrists together around the base of a pedestaled sphere that resembled an outsize grain of pollen. Rougher than necessary Minmei thought, glaring at the man in the jumpsuit. Bad enough all this gratuitous violence, but to have to put up with method-acting extras besides...Well, someone was going to hear about it.

But for the time being she would play her part. She struggled against her bonds, adopted a hopeless look for the cameras, and hung her head in defeat, whimpering. Her clothes were soiled and strategically tattered-a lot of upper thigh and midriff exposed-and the makeup people had done one heck of a job in simulating cuts and bruises. But the real credit for today's shoot, she decided, had to go to special effects. What a set it was-a fantastical creation!

The puppet had to be at least fifteen feet tall. It had arms and legs of a sort, but its head looked like something you would find in a sideshow at Seaworld. A snail's face with black, snakelike eyes and twin sensor antennae; a bulging trunk of a neck, with slits like gills and a front-to ear ridge of eyeball organs. Two huge robotic cats sat on either side of it, horned and snarling. And beyond, what she first took to be a giant old fashioned lava lamp; but was in fact an ugly mass of brain, floated in a bubble-filled vessel. Real enough to frighten young kids, Minmei ventured; have to go for a parental-guidance rating. And throughout the sound stage were costumes and accessories to rival any she had seen. Ranks of seven-foot-tall, battle rmored warriors, columns of pincer-armed mecha, squads of evil-looking soldiers with assault rifles and riot guns. And the moviegoing public thought Little White Dragon had been something. Wait until they got an eyeful of this one!

Someone laughed, and Minmei opened her eyes. A blond-haired actor was standing over

her. He wore jackboots and a short cape, and half his face was hidden behind a gleaming skullplate. She knew him from somewhere, but couldn't recall just which picture it was they had worked on together.

"Our star seems to be a bit under the weather," the man was saying. The villain, obviously. "Perhaps we went overboard on the drugs." He bent over to grab her chin in his strong hand. "Get something to snap her out of it."

Minmei twisted free of his hand to spit at him. "Let me go!" she screamed, tugging at the shackles for all it was worth. Surely it was about time for Kyle to make his entrance. Where was he, anyway?

A minute later a second soldier stepped in to join the blond man. He carried a pneumatic syringe gun and an ampule of colorless liquid. Behind them, the puppet on the throne was bobbing its head through a series of very life ike motions. In a heart-rattling basso voice, it uttered a few incomprehensible phrases. Subtitles, Minmei told herself, disappointed. How could they expect five-year-olds to read? The cinemas would be full of chattering adults, explaining everything to their kids.

"Please, not that! No, Please!" Minmei begged, withdrawing from the syringe as far as the alloy cuffs allowed. "Hold her still!" the blond actor barked, roughly grabbing her arm.

She was shocked to feel an actual twinge of pain as the soldier held the gun to her flesh. The producers must have smelled awards in the air or something.

Everything grew hazy for a moment, and Minmei was almost tempted to stop the shoot; but she was a trooper and simply squeezed her eyes shut, concealing her discomfort and waiting for the dizziness to pass.

The real world rushed in on her like a runaway train. Unfamiliar sounds and odors assaulted her senses. The Regent moved his head forward in an obscene gesture to sniff at her, Edwards and his cruel aide-de-camp, Benson, grinning down at her with smug, self-satisfied looks. Invid soldiers babbled, Ghost riders applauded...and through it all there was pain. Pain from her chafed and bleeding wrists; pain from the purple bruises on her legs. And pain that had no visible counterpart-the torment and grief bottled up inside her.

"Kyle!" she wailed, and Edwards laughed

"Your playmate's dead, Minmei," he said, her chin in his flexed fingers. "Have you forgotten how to act the bride's part?"

She screamed again.

Edwards straightened up as one of his lieutenants came alongside. "Run it through the spheres," he said in Tiresian. "Let her see it."

Minmei saw the Regent motion with his hand, and an instant later the organic-looking thing she was shackled to began to glow from within. The light resolved to a stretch of desolate wasteland, and a battle in progress there. Zentraedi Battlepods, oddly enough, up against an army of Invid bipedal Inorganics.

"My troops are being wiped out!" the Regent growled. "They are no match for the giants. We'll deploy the Special Children to deal with them-"

"Keep your robes on," Edwards shouted, then grinned. "The whites of their eyes..." A Zentraedi in Power Armor bounded into view, blasting three Hellcats to pieces. In the background, the 'Pods' plastron cannons spewed limitless destruction across the field.

"Breetai," the Regent said. "Yes, that's him."

Minmei leaned back from the post for a better look at the sphere. When she turned back to Edwards he was wearing a pickup-studded headband, a neural transmitter of some sort. He showed her a narrow-eyed gaze. "You're going to perform for us, my pet. Open all frequencies," he ordered.

She was certain she had misunderstood him. Perform hat did he mean?

"Sing," he said, seeing her bafflement. "You're going to sing for us!"

And as he said it, a murmur began to spread through the domed hall; and when the sound reached her again it was made up of hundreds of voices, Human and Invid voices, wedded in a dirgelike rendition of "We Can Win," the victory anthem of the Robotech War.

"Life is only what we choose to make it, Let us take it

Let us be free..."

Minmei realized what Edwards was attempting to do and tried desperately to turn inward to her own songs, to turn away from the telepathic commands he was sending her.

"We can find the glory we all dream of And with our hate

We can win!"

She hummed a tune of love to herself, words of peace and purity; but something dark and treacherous was percolating up from beneath them, something the Invid brain was helping Edwards achieve. Her will weakened and faltered, and a few words of the song's reworked message escaped her lips. This song that had once brought the Zentraedi to their knees...

"When we fight there's no defeat, We stand tall and will not retreat."

The sphere was already showing the song's effect: the Battlepods were no longer advancing. Some of them appeared to be wandering around in a kind of daze, firing at random, while others collided with one another, or succumbed to the demonic forces Edwards and the Regent had loosed against them.

Minmei was leading them in song now, tears rolling down her cheeks, Invid and Human shoulder-to-shoulder with weapons raised, swaying together like Oktoberfest beer-hall companions.

"We shall live the day we dream of winning And beginning a new life.

We will win. We will win!"

Vince Grant was still staring at Aurora long after they had been officially introduced. Walking, talking. And not yet six months old! It was like some grabber pulled from the headlines of a turn-of-the-century Earth tabloid: WONDERCHILD EARNS MASTERS AT AGE TWO. He felt Jean squeeze his hand in a gentle rebuke. "You're staring," she whispered when he turned to face her.

They were seated together on an ornate antigrav couch in Haydon IV's refurbished assembly antechambers. The couch was one of several pieces of furniture the planet's design teams had dreamed up to serve the needs of alien guests and visitors. Exedore and Cabell occupied a similar couch opposite the Grants. The Sterlings were also present, along with Arla-Non, leader of the Praxian Sisterhood; Fontine, of the Karbarran emissary group; two Invid representatives from the Regis's stay-behind brood; and Vowad and several old-guard members of the Haydonite cognoscenti. The room was on the top floor of an inverted icicle of a skyscraper, positioned to offer panoramic views of Glike and the surrounding hillsides. Briz'dziki was low in the sky, flooding the room with rich amber light. Tapestries, carpets, potted plants, and flowers added to the warmth; to Vince the place felt more like a hotel lobby than a governmental sanctum. Everyone there had already screened the vid-disk of the Plenipotentiary Council's peace proposal.

"You're suggesting that Optera can actually be refoliated," Max Sterling was saying now, directing himself to Cabell and Exedore. "Then why wasn't this considered earlier on?"

"It was, Commander," Exedore answered him. He held a Pollinator in his lap and stroked the creature's white fur while he spoke. "The proposal was among the issues slated for discussion when the Regent visited the SDF-3. But the talks broke down rather quickly and-"

"We're all aware of those events, Lord Exedore," Vowad interrupted. "But it is my understanding that such a thing would not have been possible then."

"That's true," Cabell said. "The council was operating under the assumption that the Invid would take an active hand in the process of refoliation. Now, however, thanks in large part to your generosity, Vowad, Haydon IV's databanks have filled in the few missing pieces of the puzzle."

Exedore gestured to the Pollinator. "With these creatures and Flower samples from Haydon IV and Karbarra, I feel certain we can succeed."

Fontine grunted. "Talk has reached Karbarra of plans to construct a Protoculture matrix here on Haydon IV. Is there any truth to this?"

"None," Vowad answered firmly. "Cabell, perhaps you should address this."

The Tiresian settled back into the couch, tugging at his beard. "Rumors," he said with obvious distaste. "Idle speculation."

"But the Zor-clone-"

"Rem is indeed that. But he is not Zor and should not be considered a factor in these discussions."

Vince looked over at the two yellow-robed Invids, wondering about Cabell's pronouncement. Axum, the taller of the two, stepped forward to respond to Exedore's question as to how the Regis might respond to such a proposal.

"This is not within my capacity to answer," the Invid began. "The Regis has taken leave of this star system and remains incommunicado, even to the living computer the Regent left here. You would do better perhaps to question Haydon IV's Awareness."

Vowad was shaking his head. "We've already attempted that."

"Then we have no choice but to deal directly with the Regent. Under the proviso that General Edwards be turned over to the council to stand trial," Exedore hastened to add.

Max made a disgruntled sound from across the room. Aurora shared his and Miriya's laps.

There had been a worried moment earlier when the child had gone into a kind of petit mal seizure, brought on, Vince maintained, by her first sight of the Pollinator. Vince was still waiting for Jean to explain the meaning of tiny Aurora's shrill warning: Beware the spores, Dana! Beware the spores!

"The Regent doesn't give a...couldn't care less about the Flowers," Max told the group. "Offer him a matrix if you want to talk peace. His army runs on Protoculture, not Flowers. Ask them," he said, indicating Axum and his companion scientist.

The Invid turned his black eyes on the assembly. "The Human speaks the truth."

"We have to try, nevertheless," Exedore objected. "The most recent subspace reports indicate that the Ark Angel has only just entered Perytonspace. A Karbarran prototype vessel is already under way to Peryton, if I'm not mistaken."

"You are not," Fontine said. "We have named it the Tracialle, in honor of the battle there."

"Then I propose we have the computers work out sidereal coordinates for a rendezvous between the Ark Angel, the Tokugawa, and the Tracialle. The Sentinels must be dissuaded from launching an attack on Optera until the Regent has been informed of the council's proposal."

"But what of the Zentraedi?" Fontine asked. "Commander Breetai is in pursuit of General Edwards only," Exedore said in an assured tone.

Vince broke a short silence by saying that the Tokugawa would consider it an honor to have Arla-Non aboard for the mission, and the Praxian accepted with a regal toss of her sun-bleached mane. "And the Skull Squadron is naturally eager to have its commander back," Vince said to Max.

Max turned to Miriya before he showed Vince a weak, regretful smile. "Sorry to disappoint everyone, Vince, but I won't be going along for this one."

Again, Vince felt the pressure of Jean's hand. "Take that surprised look off your face," she suggested lightly. "Think about Bowie and Dana."

Vince did, regarding the Sterlings and their supematurally gifted child for a moment. A line from an ancient book came to him out of the blue, and he said, "It's a far, far better thing we do than we have ever done."

"Black Angel Leader reports enemy craft in full retreat," a tech on the Ark Angel bridge updated.

Veidt hovered across the bridge to the ship's forward bays. Local space was littered with debris from the dozens of Pincercraft the Veritech squadrons had destroyed. Spherical bursts erupted in the distance where a few final dogfights were taking place. Peryton rotated below them, gray clouds and the snowcapped peaks of a reddish landmass.

"Black Angel Leader requests command's orders, sir." Veidt turned a mouthless face to the screens, briefly studying the data scrolls. "Order them down to assist the landing party," he sent to the tech at her station.

"And the enemy troop carrier?"

Veidt recalled Sarna's death, a ritual he enacted for circumstances like these. "We'll go after the ship ourselves," he announced after a moment.

Lisa ducked as a naked young Perytonian hurled himself over her head to thrust his horns into an opponent's midsection. Jack took a spatter of blood across the face and cursed disgustedly at everyone within earshot. All around the two Sentinels, loinclothed Perytonians were butting and goring one another to death. Beneath the war cries and agonized screams, the world was a crazed woodblock symphony, punctuated by the sibilant sound of horns slashing through the air, the wet thump of horns against yielding flesh, the sound of a thousand footfalls in the streets: the crazed chorus of war.

"This way! This way!" Lisa shouted, grabbing a handful of Jack's jumpsuit and tugging him along. Through a forest of clashing heads and horns, she caught a brief glimpse of Gnea and Karen up ahead; Baldan was with them, fending off assailants with both hands, a Spherisian bolt weapon in one, a Garudan grappling hook in the other. The alleyway was paved with fallen bodies, awash in bright, pungent melling blood.

They had been forced off the rise and down into LaTumb's nightmarish cityscape when the Mobius battle first materialized. Reanimated Perytonians, many still bearing open wounds from the day before, had swarmed into their midst with a suddenness that left the Shock Troopers and Battloid pilots dumbfounded. More than one mecha had been toppled, more than one pilot dragged screaming from sprung canopies, perhaps to become a ghostly part of tomorrow or the day after's struggle. Lisa had seen Rick's own mecha spun completely around by the antlike thrust of the marauding armies; but she had lost sight of the VT when the battle waves carried her and Jack, Gnea and the others, down into the thick of things.

It wasn't Pamplona everywhere, though. On the rooftops and in the ruined atriums of buildings, Perytonians were fighting it out with broadsword and mace. Inside a rock corral

near a thatched dwelling she had whisked by, Lisa spied a joust in progress, Perytonians riding on the shoulders of their companions, ribboned lances impaling riders and bearers alike.

"Down!" Jack screamed as machine gun fire stitched holes across a wooden door nearby. Lisa joined him on the ground, belly-crawling behind a wall of bodies heaped up horizontally along the edge of the street. Energy weapons had cleared a swath through the intersection in front of them, but random bursts from those same guns were keeping everyone momentarily pinned down. Gnea, Karen, and Baldan finally succeeded in working their way over to Jack and Lisa's position. The three of them had been completely stripped of uniforms and weapons by now, and had clothed themselves in bloody scraps of Perytonian black robes.

"Say anything and I'll murder you!" Karen screamed at Jack before he could speak. There was a maniacal look in her green-flecked eyes, the only time Jack could ever recall seeing real fear there.

"We'll be safer inside!" Baldan said, pointing to the door that had taken projectile fire. "There are shelters below us!"

Gnea asked about Rem.

"No sign of any of them," Lisa told her. A body dropped from the roof and nearly flattened Jack and Karen. "Maybe they made it to the hive in time!"

Everyone twisted around at the same moment to have a look at the mountain-sized nose cone. From where Lisa crouched, she could see that the hive had been holed in at least half-a-dozen places, hordes of Perytonians scurrying in and out even as she watched.

"Cheer up!" Jack shouted into their midst. "It's only six hours to sunset!"

The battle had insinuated itself deep into the hive, but it had yet to penetrate the innermost corridors and descend into the area of the cliff-enclosed shrine itself.

From the arched entryway of the Haydon's generator, Rem watched the Macassar's face come to life in a globe of lightning-fed luminescence. Burak made terrorized sounds beside him, his six-fingered hands twitching as though he were the recipient of those plasma bolts.

"I won't go any further!" he told Janice, canting his strong legs in front of him to brace himself.

"You won't have to," Rem heard Janice say in a voice so controlled if disturbed him.

"Listen..."

Something odd began to transpire within the sphere. The Macassar's face lost its fearsome, masklike visage and grew more lifelike, more tortured.

Burak stammered a moan.

"That this day would never have happened," the Macassar intoned to the shrine. "That this battle should continue until they are returned to me."

Burak straightened up. "Who? Who does he ask be returned to him, Wyrdling?"

"His sons, Burak. They died in battle shortly before he entered the shrine. Haydon's device ignored the Macassar's plea for planetary peace and assumed his grief instead."

Rem saw Burak's face contort with confusion. "But how-"

Janice quieted him.

The Macassar's heavily boned brow wrinkled, irisless eyes spilling two small tears down his cheeks. "Or until such time as two willingly give up their lives that my children might live."

With that, an aperture opened in the transparent sphere: a circular portal large enough to accommodate a Human or a Perytoman, almost inviting in its simplicity, a door into an energized domain of pure thought.

Burak whirled on Janice. "Savior, you said!"

"And so you shall be," she told him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Much has been made of the so-called parallels between prelapsarian Optera and Earth's legendary Garden of Eden. But frankly I find the parallels forced and unconvincing. Some have branded Zor the serpent, the Perytonian Flowers the apple. Let us ask, then, just who it was that planted the Garden and set the rules in motion? Haydon, some say, Haydon the Great.

A. Jow, The Historical Haydon

Spotted with vermilion, the fruits were the size of medicine balls, but seemed no larger than melons in Tesla's mutated mitt. He was holding one to his lips now, about to take a bite out of it, when a blood-tipped spear zipped past his head and pierced the thing,

pinning it against the tissuelike wall of the hive like some display piece. Tesla voiced a strangled scream and ran for cover, stuffing Fruits into the large pockets of his floor-length garment as he disappeared around a bend in the corridor. But the battle continued to pursue him.

Almost as though it had personalized itself, he thought, breathing hard when he came to a halt. He bent over, supporting his hands on his knees, and threw a quick glance over his shoulder toward the corridor intersection. Spears and arrows were sailing past one another, shrieks and groans echoing from all quarters. Rival hordes of war razed Perytonians were tearing through the hive like lab rats on street drugs, leveling everything in their path to get to their enemies. Invid soldiers were firing back, but outnumbered and ill-prepared, they were being overrun. Most were scientists and techs in any case, unaccustomed to in lose fighting.

Tesla shuddered at the thought of meeting a creature who was accustomed to such carnage.

But at least he had managed to salvage a sufficient batch of Fruits-thanks to what was perhaps a final directive from the hive's brain-and all he required now was a sanctuary in which to ingest them, and maybe a full-length mirror to glimpse the results. These were the ones destined to put him over the top, the Fruits that would complete his transformation and bring about a new glory to the Invid race. Doubtless the troopship that had carried him from Optera was a burning husk by now; but surely the Sentinels would recognize his greatness and genuflect before him. Then he could take up where he had left off: destroy the Human, Edwards, and depose the Regent.

Provided he lived to see nightfall.

The battle was rounding the corner now, hot on Tesla's heels once more. He winced as a small dagger buried itself to the hilt in his rump; then he started running again, propelling himself through a series of inward turns and vertical descents that moved him deeper toward the center of the hive. His flight brought him finally to the innermost corridor band, which he circled in its entirety before locating the osmotic gate that accessed the center.

He stumbled through, and was stunned to find himself on the edge of what had once been a natural setting of sandstone cliffs and barren terrain, its thousand-foot-high apexed roof now the curving inner surface of the hive itself. And in the center, hewn from a monolithic volcanic plume, stood the truncated remains of a massive statue eryton's shrine to Haydon.

Tesla took a quick look around, puzzling over flashes of light radiating from the statue's circular base. He tapped the Fruits in his pockets and smiled to himself.

Down there, he thought. Down there's where I'll reshape myself one last time.

Breetai could almost appreciate Edwards's use of Minmei against them. Almost. But he was too busy defending himself against Inorganics to dwell for long on the irony of the situation.

Battlepods were stumbling and going down all around him; Hellcats leaping in to claw away at plastron shields or gnaw at the war machines' armored limbs. Ahead of him, squads of Scrim and Crann were moving into flanking positions, hoping to sweep the stragglers up into their kill zone. Breetai had ordered the nets shut down, but that did nothing to mitigate the effect of Edwards's subtle stroke. Minmei's song seemed to be attacking them from all sides from the hive complex and its surrounding broadcast antennae, from the etiolated high ground of the planet itself.

Breetai's flagship had been spared the paralyzing effects of the voice during Dolza's attack on Earth. Exedore had cut them a deal. Breetai and his crew, like sailors saved from the sirens' call; and traitors, too, to their commander n-chief, to the Masters and the Imperative. But even though the voice had missed Breetai's Zentraedi on that occasion, it had infiltrated and traumatized their collective psych as sure as any archetype. And the effect of hearing it now reawakened memories of their genocide, just as Fantoma's mines had reawakened memories of their bio enetically engineered birth. Breetai experienced what it must have been like to be on any one of those five million doomed ships. To hear those sounds for the first time and experience the tumult they stirred; to find oneself suddenly stripped of meaning and purpose, set adrift in a black tide of indifference. To recognize that the truths one had pledged to honor and die for were no more than the engrammed fears of a demented circle of madmen.

Breetai remembered the first time he had seen Minmei Miss Macross, then-and her movie role he would take to heart. He tried to convince himself that he wasn't the being who had succumbed to those transvid images; that he had outgrown his conditioning. Hadn't he found himself on Fantoma? Found love there, a sense of new beginnings? But the voice made it clear that the Zentraedi had played host to the Masters' Imperative for far too long to simply outgrow it; and Breetai understood that death was at hand...

He opened all the Power Suit's communications frequencies and boosted the gain to maximum volume, reveling in the sheer insanity of the moment. Back thrusters engaged, he shook two lockjawed Hellcats from his legs and hopped himself over-a skirmish line of Odeons, twisting around as he landed to bring the suit's chest-mounted impact cannon into play. He ruined the line, then jumped again, flattening a Hellcat and its huntmate, grinding them to grit under the suit's massive, metalshod feet. Some of the Pods nearby caught the maneuver and commenced a fire-breathing rally of their own, plastron cannons blazing as they moved in to reengage the hive's. Inorganic defenders. But the rally came too late. Shock Troopers and Enforcer Ships were already in the skies, streams of blinding annihilation disks launched against the Zentraedi advance. Breetai saw the Regent

among them and went after him. The Invid was suited up in Power Armor-a bulky, bipedal affair of component-intensification pods and articulated guards, propelled by triple-ported foot thrusters and a single rear thruster located in the center of the suit's flare houlder torso cape. The Regent's thick neck and tubercle-ridge were protected by a transparent sheath; but the helmet left his face and sensor antennae exposed. His black eyes seemed to find Breetai and summon him into personal combat.

Breetai shut down his weapons and diverted full power to the suit's propulsion systems. Two elongated leaps brought him within striking range; he was bounding into a third when the Regent launched. They met in midair with a riotous clang of body parts, head-to-head, arms and legs flailing. They sprung back and went at it again, attacking each other like wrestling-ring gorillas. The Regent was less than half Breetai's size, but with Minmei's faltering voice still screaming into his helmet-just sound now without discernible words, an agonized cry-the Zentraedi had to use all his strength to keep from collapsing.

And the Regent was quick and powerful besides; he came up under Breetai's arms, lifted, and slammed him to the ground. He fought to get to his feet, but the Regent had moved in for an arm and leg and was hoisting him up into a centrifugal spin. Released, Breetai struck the ground like a skipping stone, skittering over the scabrous land the Zentraedis' own ships had bleached of life. He rolled and bounced, plowing up a mound of dirt before he came to a stop; then the Regent was all over him again, slamming away at him with shoulders and forearms, a tackle at a practice sled.

A well-aimed kick sent the Power Suit's helmet winging from Breetai's head; but he managed to skip out from under the Invid's suddenly engaged foot thrusters.

"You're mine, Zentraedi!" the Regent seethed, in a stomping sumo advance now. "I'll have the pleasure of tearing you to pieces with my bare hands. For what your Zor did to my wife! For what your Masters ordered you to do to my world!"

Breetai saw the inevitability of it. And the rightness. But in that same instant of revelation, he had a glimpse of something else as well-a look at the full circle he and his defeated hundredfold had come to close. There was a point at which the Zentraedi and Invid were meant to achieve a kind of karmic balance. Breetai couldn't really make sense of it, but he did understand that the two races had been moving toward a common end from the moment Zor unleashed Protoculture on the Quadrant. And perhaps even before that, although he could scarcely contemplate by what agency or design. And the Humans entered into the equation as well; all three-Optera, Tirol, Earth-wedded to a supreme event still in the making. An event that would not only redress the wrong done Optera, but one that would have a transcendent impact on the fabric of the universe they shared.

The Regent seemed aware of the serene look on Breetai's face, and showed a puzzled one in return. Breetai lunged forward into that momentary lapse and shoved his fists deep into the recesses of the Invid's torso armor. Clamping his arms around the Regent's waist

and deploying all the Power Suit's waldos and grappling devices, he locked him in a power-assisted embrace.

The Regent's black eyes went wide, Breetai's cowled visage reflected there. "We go to death together, Invid," Breetai told him.

The Regent struggled to free himself, arching his neck and using his snout to pound away at Breetai's face. But the die was cast. Breetai launched the two of them up, oddly-sized lovers in a vertical pas de deux, and armed the Power Suit's self-destruct system.

Alert lights flashed across the Suit's pectoral displays. The Regent let out a strangled cry and tried again to twist free, breaking both of Breetai's arms in the process. "Breetai-no!" he screamed. "It is not the Zentraedi way! Accept your defeat! Let me live!"

Breetai glanced down at the embattled figures below him, dwindling now as the thrusters carried them high into Optera's war-torn sky. "It will never be over until you and I are dead, Invid. You have known this all along."

The Regent attempted to answer him, but could not. The Zentraedi's words were more binding than his hold. Thoughts streaked through his mind like storm-tossed leaves. A vision of his wife in the midst of her journey to the stars' other side. A transformation so intense it burned away all doubt...

The two faced each other with a look beyond words, waiting for the world to end.

Optera shuddered when it came; a manger star above the hive.

A dozen Battlepods were in retreat from Optera's ravaged surface, riding blue flames toward the orbiting Valivarre. Kazianna Hesh was among them, derringer arms amputated from her officer's craft. Minmei's song had ended in a long shriek, then quit entirely; but the battle was lost nonetheless. Kazianna had followed Breetai's selfless ascent, witnessed the shooting star that was his fiery demise, and could feel nothing now, save for the course of her tears.

And the faint stirrings of the life she carried inside her.

Tesla ducked through the arched entrance to the generator and pressed himself flat against the wall, squinting into the face of the circular chamber's unharnessed light-bolts of radiant energy crackling toward a centrally located transparent globe, a smell of ozone and trouble.

But all this was of little concern. He pulled one of the vermilion Fruits from his pocket and

regarded it at eye level, as one might a golden orb or a world ripe for conquest. He inhaled its fragrance and smiled, savoring the moment and gloating over his escape and the trail of victories that had led him here. Turning the Fruit about in his hand, he thought of Burak and wondered what had become of him. He had his mouth opened for a bite of the pulp and joke of this scarlet-red sacrament, when the Macassar's face took shape in the globe and the curse repeated itself. Tesla listened, stunned by what he heard, and congratulated himself for releasing Burak when he did.

"Two fools is more like it," he muttered. Again he mead the Fruit to his lips, suddenly aware of a small sense of misgiving that had scrambled out from under his thoughts.

"I knew you would come," Burak said from across the room, stepping into view from the shadows.

Tesla stuttered a surprised sound and took a step back, reflexively pocketing the Fruit. "Burak! How...pleasant to see you, my friend."

The Perytonian stared up at him. "I knew you would come."

Janice and Rem had been watching from the sidelines; but they chose to show themselves now, Hansel and Gretel when the tables turned.

"What shows up when you're least expecting it," Tesla said.

"The Macassar awaits us, Tesla."

Tesla glanced over at the globe, where a kind of portal had appeared; then he turned back to Burak with a derisive snort. "Have you lost your mind? Do you really believe I came here to martyr myself for this hellish place?" He showed the three Sentinels the Fruit. "I came for this. And in a moment you'll forget all about curses and tricks of time. You will have Tesla to worship! Tesla the Transformed!"

With that he took an enormous bite out of the Fruit; then another and another, wolfing it down like a ravenous beast, red rivulets of juice running down his chin. He pulled a second Fruit out of his pocket and began to attack it likewise, but stopped after a bite or two, his hands and body trembling uncontrollably. He dropped the Fruit and went as rigid as a board.

Janice and Rem shielded their eyes as an egg-shaped aura of light formed itself around Tesla, brighter than the generator's own inner life. A turbulent sound welled up from the egg-whether from Tesla or the light itself the Sentinels couldn't be certain-and the aura started to gyrate in a swirl of prismatic color.

Then it collapsed.

Cocooned inside, Tesla first experienced a rush of expansive power; but the power left him as the aura began to contract, and he suddenly realized that he was contracting along with it. The Fruit was returning him to his previous size and form-it was devolving him! Rapidly. Back through all the stages the Fruits had helped him attain; back to the figure of a lowly Invid scientist, draped now in a robe that hung off him like a circus tent.

But simultaneous with that slide back to his former self came insight-an understanding of just where he had gone wrong.

Peryton! he recalled now, his memory opening onto forgotten vistas. The first world found to harbor the Flowers of Life after Optera's defoliation. And the Regis had gone there to harvest them...She had returned some to Optera, offered them to the Regent as a kind of appeasement for her transgression with Zor. But in place of spiritual comfort and nourishment came hatred! The Regent was devolved by them. Beyond even her powers to control. So she had beseeched him to abandon their use to wait until some other world's Flowers revealed themselves. She couldn't have known what the Regent had found in those mutated specimens: a love thing to replace what he had lost with her. A way to mount armies and mecha; a power to rival her own. A vision of war and the vengeance he could wreak on the Masters and their warrior clones.

From Peryton and its cursed soil!

Tesla noticed that only Rem, the Zor-clone, seemed overwhelmed by the transformation. Burak's faith in destiny had carried him through-the faith Tesla himself had helped to implant. And who knew to what degree Haydon IV's Awareness had altered the mind of the android Janice? Tesla looked from Burak to the generator portal and experienced a moment of lucid thought: of the Invid race on the threshold of a magnificent journey toward noncorporeal existence. Of a blue-white world where the final stage would be set, and a great winged creature of mindstuff that would rise up from its celestial shores...

"You told me it was fate," Burak was saying to him. "Why struggle against our destiny?"

Tesla radiated an accepting smile, even though his face was no longer capable of exhibiting one. He stepped naked from the neck of the robe and put his four-fingered hand out to Burak's.

Their thoughts aligned, they entered the portal together. To bring peace to a troubled world.

Oblivious to the fact that a particle beam had erased all trace of his enemy (along with about fifty other warriors), the Perytonian was continuing across the plaza at breakneck speed, his horns lowered for the kill. Jack could see from where he stood that Karen was

unaware of the alien's blind charge. She had her back turned to the plaza, one hand clutching the bloodied swath of sackcloth she had wrapped herself in; the other gripping a length of wooden doorjamb she was using to fend off blows by a riot-baton ielding war-painted Perytonian. Jack calculated the distances and decided to go for it. He had been performing oles and coups de grace for the better part of an hour now, and considered himself well up to handling a bit of impromptu rescuing. Unfortunately, though, he had lost both his rapier and cape to the last assailant who had come his way; so this was one he would have to take by the horns. Either that or engage in some of that Minoan bull jumping he remembered from a past life.

He hoped.

He got himself between Karen and the Perytonian with about five seconds to spare. They bumped butts and she swung around; screamed at finding him standing there, a two-horned conehead in an irreversible charge not ten feet away. She didn't know that Jack's eyes were closed at the time; but they both agreed later that he had actually yelled toro! at the last moment.

Just as the battle evanesced around them.

One minute it was there, and the next it was not.

Jack was still waiting for the impact, eyes closed, reciting a simple prayer to himself when he heard Karen say something inexplicable.

"They've gone! It's gone!"

He opened one eye, then the other, swung around in a panicked rush expecting to find the Perytonian coming at him from some other direction. But the warriors were gone. It was just the five of them-Jack, Karen, Gnea, Baldan, and Lisa-standing confused amid the destruction the battle had left behind. Some distance away, a handful of Perytonian survivors were picking themselves up off the newly ruined streets; elsewhere, horned heads were poking cautiously from doorways and windows, wondering what had gone wrong. Or right.

The piece of doorjamb dropped from Karen's upraised hand to the street with a hollow thud. She stared blankly at Jack for a long moment, then without warning threw a roundhouse kick at his head. He had seen the light change behind her eyes and ducked in the nick of time.

"Don't you ever, ever try anything like that again, Baker! Do you hear me?!" She reached out, grabbed him by the shirtfront, and gave him a forceful backward shove, seemingly unconcerned that her sackcloth garment had slipped down around her waist. "Leave me thinking about what a wonderful guy you were to save my life, you...you goddamned-"

She collapsed crying into his arms, holding him so tightly it brought a pleasurable pain to his still-healing gut. Jack thought about the kiss she had used to free him from Tesla's spell on Spheris, and was wondering whether he might not attempt to do the same for her right now, when Rick's Battloid came lumbering onto the scene, dangling wires and servos and emitting a symphony of unhealthy sounds. Lron's limped in behind, blackened along its entire right side.

"Everyone in one piece down there?" Rick asked over the mecha externals.

Lisa waved him an okay, while Gnea and Karen hiked their sacks back into place. "Any word from the ship?" Rick told her that Veidt had just contacted him. The Ark Angel had destroyed the Invid troop carrier with all personnel aboard. Veritech reinforcements were en route to Peryton's surface, even if they were a little late.

"But what the hell happened?" Jack shouted. "Where'd the battle go?" Umbra was still hours away from zenith, let alone descent.

"Maybe Janice and Rem reprogrammed the Haydon's generator," Rick ventured. "The hive's a ruin."

Everyone glanced toward the Invid-built mountain, trying to imagine Rick's view from the Battloid cockpit. Fire and smoke were about the only things visible from the street.

But even with all the smoke, there was something different about Peryton's air. Lisa inhaled it, watching as the pall that had overhung LaTumb all morning began to lift. "I think someone ended the curse," she announced.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I suspect the Karbarrans were beginning to see themselves as the Phoenicians of the local group, with strategically located Optera as a kind of Carthage. The REF was too enmeshed in finding a way home to pay much attention to these long-range empire uilding schemes. For a mission that had cone halfway across the galaxy, we were still a parochial lot, and we had a lot to learn about the inner dynamics of these worlds we were helping to liberate.

Vince Grant, as quoted in Ann London's Ring of Iron: The Sentinels in Conflict

One could almost believe that the mission was cursed, Lang told himself. He ran a hand down his face and held it over his mouth for a moment, as if to keep some betraying sound from escaping. Cursed, he thought.

But he guessed the Shapings were intolerant of such things. Curses had a kind of implied

emotionalism, a qualitative component absent in the Shapings, which operated an levels far removed from rage, vengeance, or retribution. Curses were evil wishes, even when successful; but the Shapings revealed themselves in terms of action and were irrevocable. Most of his colleagues thought him a fatalist when discussions turned to such matters; however, that was only because they confused the Shapings with destiny. When Lang was overheard to say, The Shapings will have their way, people took this to mean: it is the working of fate. Or some other equally ill-informed reduction. The future wasn't out there somewhere, already written and waiting to unfold. Lang left that for the Preterite. For Protoculture didn't dictate to us; it addressed us in an as et-inscrutable code.

Lang leaned back from his desktop screen, closed his eyes, and let out a long sigh. He was in his office in the Tiresia complex, working late tonight, the moon's only city asleep around him. How peaceful it seemed with Edwards and his Ghost Riders in flight, with the council getting back on track, and the research and development teams in full swing again. Oh, a few of the Plenipotentiary members were continuing to straddle the fence-Longchamps and Stinson, chiefly-but they were powerless to prevent any of his programs from being carried out. The two senators thought it best to give lip service to Edwards in the event the Southern Cross had gained the upper hand on Earth. Lang had concerns of his own along those lines; but the data he had just received rendered most of them academic to say the least.

He directed a few words to the console pickups and the voice-actuated device brought a new display to the desktop. Lang regarded the mathematical calculations for a moment, then tapped his forefinger against the screen for an extrapolation and leaned in to study the results.

Colonel Wolff's ship had not been heard from. It was to have defolded from hyperspace some ten light-years out, in the vicinity of a still-functioning scanner drone linked to Tirol's mainframe equivalents-instruments the Robotech Masters had apparently used before the so-called "Protoculture Caps" had freed them from such archaic tools. First Carpenter, now Wolff, Lang had thought at the time. And it was then he had ordered a review of all sidereal calculations and spacefold systemry, along with a series of visual and enhancement updates utilizing Tiresia's newly completed large-array receivers.

Now everything was clear. And terrible to contemplate.

Of all the astrogational capabilities Robotechnology had presented the Terran research teams, spacefold maneuvers were arguably the most baffling. This had a lot to do with the fact that not even Lang himself had dared tamper with the SDF-1's spacefold generators. The system itself was simple enough to understand, but the dynamics were something else again. The Zentraedi merely had to punch computer-generated coordinates into the system and voila: a ship could jump from, say, the Blaze system to the Solar system in two Earth-standard weeks, give or take a few days. To those onboard, however, the jump would appear to have taken place in hours. Lang had yet to figure out how he had

miscalculated the SDF-1's initial jump, which was to have folded the ship to the Moon instead of warping it to clear to Pluto.

The spacefold systems incorporated into the SDF-2 had been salvaged from Zentraedi ships which had crashed on Earth after the catastrophic battle that ended the Robotech War. But Khyron the Destroyer had seen to it that those generators were never put to the test. Nor the SDF-1's, for that matter-the site, according to Cabell, of Zor's hidden Protoculture matrix, now part and parcel of the radioactive mounds dredged up from Lake Gloval in New Macros to bury the fortress. The SDF-3's spacefold system had been transferred intact from Breetai's flagship and integrated into a state-of-the-art system Lang's Robotechs had lifted from the factory satellite.

Lang, with some help from Exedore and Breetai, had programmed the SDF-3's astrogational computers for the jumps to Fantoma. The projected time for each: a matter of hours-a fraction of the time it had taken Breetai's flagship to fold to the coordinates of Dolza's command station years before. But recent discoveries had forced Lang to reevaluate the time elapsed and revise it upward-considerably so.

The jump had taken them five years.

Lang was till too dazzled by the snafu to accord it truth status; but the end results of the reworked sidereal calculations were difficult to refute.

Almost four earth-standard years had gone by since the SDF-3's arrival in Fantomaspace. Lang and everyone else were presently turning the leaves of a 2024 calendar, while on Earth it was 2029! Carpenter's ship had been launched in 2027, not 2022; Wolff's in 2028. Lang recalled Cabell telling him that the Robotech Masters had been gone ten Earth-standard years when the SDF-3 arrived-a journey Cabell calculated would require twenty years at most. The REF had been operating under the assumption that they had some three or four years remaining to get the SDF-3 equipped for a spacefold that would return them to Earth ahead of the Masters.

But it just wasn't so.

The Masters would be entering the Solar system no later than next year. Carpenter, whose ship had the same errors built into its systemry, wouldn't arrive for another three, if at all. And Wolff, God help him, wouldn't debark until sometime in 2032 or later. Sick to his stomach, Lang wondered who would be there to welcome him home. The Robotech Masters? A victorious Army of the Southern Cross? There was even an outside chance that the Invid Queen other, the Regis, would be on hand.

Lang shut down the screen. He got up from his desk and walked to the lab's only window, and he stood there silently for a time, watching the stars.

Was it his obligation to inform the Plenipotentiary Council? He listened for the voice of the Shapings, hoping to discern some answer.

He wished Exedore were present, but the Zentraedi was on Haydon IV with the Sterlings and their wonderchild, Aurora. Lang considered the phrase-the warning-the child was said to have uttered at scarcely a month old: Dana, beware the spores! He didn't know what to make of it. And what of Dana, it occurred to him suddenly; close to what, sixteen years old now?

Lazlo Zand's face came to him, and Lang shuddered at the thought.

Meanwhile, Vince Grant, Jean, and Cabell were aboard the Tokugawa en route to a rendezvous point with the Karbarran ship, the Tracialle, and the Ark Angel-providing that all had gone smoothly on Peryton.

And the Valivarre was near Optera, perhaps engaging the renegade Edwards at this very

moment...

Lang could only hope that the Regent would accept the terms the council was proposing. At least peace might reign in one corner of the galaxy. The one the Masters had abandoned-swapped, Lang thought-for Earth's small piece of the sky.

Rick's mind wandered away from the discussion to search out memories of the first time he had seen her. Winsome and charming that cool afternoon on Macross Island, in red highheels and a sundress that was too short for her, trying to wrestle her cousin Jason away from a vending machine that was circling them for a sale. Petite Cola, Rick recalled. And later-how could he ever forget? alking to her from the elevated seat of a fighter that had somehow reconfigured itself to a fifty-foot-high techno night. Minmei at the balcony window. He would toss her his Medal of Valor through a facsimile of that window a year later.

Those early days, he thought, overcome with nostalgia. The Miss Macross contest and those frustrating evenings in the park when he could never get the words quite right. Their two weeks together as castaways onboard the SDF-1, writing love songs and fishing for tuna. Getting married...

The video recording taken by the Valivarre had finished running a moment ago, but the scene of that travesty of a wedding aboard Edwards's ship was still showing on Rick's internal screens. Minmei, pale but bright-eyed and adoring as she took Edwards's hand; the two of them kneeling before Edwards's sadistic adjutant. Good-bye, Jonathan, she had said to poor Wolff. I've found happiness at last.

Rick thought about the feelings Lynn-Kyle had once stirred in him; how he had worried for

Minmei then. And the time he had rescued her from Khyron and how close they had come to making it work. But he had already found Lisa, and the world of New Macross was about to come to an end.

Rick glanced over at Lisa now, and of course she was glaring at him. Everytime Minmei's name came up. Without fail. Like she was a mind reader or something. But why not? The Praxian Sisters had taught her all about hand-to-hand; so maybe Veidt or Kami had been giving her telepathy lessons!

The bumps and bruises everyone had sustained on Peryton were healing; but there were some wounds biostats and anodynes couldn't touch, Rick thought.

Veidt had received Vince Grant's transmission from Haydon IV, and the Ark Angel had departed Perytonspace for the rendezvous point two days after the nightmare in LaTumb. Burak and Tesla had ended the planet's curse aying the price with their lives. Janice and Rem had recounted the events a dozen times, but the Sentinels were still having trouble with it. Did it mean that Burak and Tesla's thoughts were actually in Peryton's air, so to speak-controlling the planet's reconstruction somehow? And just exactly who was this Haydon being who could arrange for such things to occur?

Everyone else had managed to walk away. Jack was back in sick bay, but that had more to do with the abdominal gash he had received from Burak on Spheris than anything Peryton had thrown at him. Karen, Gnea, Lron, Baldan...they had all logged a couple of after-mission sessions with the debriefing shrink, but were otherwise fine.

And so, by the looks of things, were Vince, Jean, and Cabell, fresh from Glike on Haydon IV Rick was angry, disappointed, then just plain resigned to Max and Miriya's decision to remain behind with Exedore. The vids of their kid, Aurora, were in some ways as frightening as the replays of Minmei and Edwards's wedding.

The Tracialle-a Sekiton-propelled ship reminiscent of the modularly designed Farrago-had brought along a special surprise for Lron and Crysta in the form of their young son, Dardo. Arla-non's presence aboard the Tokugawa was as much a surprise to Bela and Gnea.

The principals had assembled on the Tokugawa at Vince's behest to discuss what he explained as "an issue of vital importance, not only to the REF and the Sentinels but to all the inhabited worlds of the local group." The hold had been outfitted with two semicircular tables set opposite each other, with places designated for Vince, Cabell, Arla on, and Veidt at one, and Rick, Lisa, Rem, and Janice at the other. Smaller tables had been set up in between for the various XT factions.

Rick kept wondering about Vince's statement while the vids brought everyone up to date; and now it appeared that Cabell was ready to come to the point.

"The Terran council has proposed that a peace initiative be offered to the Invid Regent."

Rick nearly fell on the floor.

"Let me finish," Cabell shouted over the din that had erupted. "Hear me out!"

The assembly reluctantly agreed, and a tense silence returned to the hold. The Karbarran contingent was the most obviously distressed; three or four of the ursine XTs were pacing the floor, grumbling low-voiced complaints to all within earshot. Angry labor leaders, intent on inciting a riot.

"Flower seedlings and the creatures known as Pollinators will be returned to Optera," Cabell was saying, "in exchange for the Regent's promise to withdraw his troops from all planets still under his dominion and to begin the immediate dismantling of his war machine."

"With Optera reseeded, he'll have the capacity to rebuild his warships the moment our backs are turned!" one of the Karbarrans shouted.

"Keep him on Optera," from another, "but let us control the quantity of nutrient the planet receives!"

Quite a few voices rallied behind the suggestion. Cabell had his hands raised in a quieting gesture, his beard like a flag of truce. "That is exactly what drove the Invid to warfare in the first place. You have all been under the Robotech Masters' hand, the Invid hand. Can we expect the Regent to fall willingly under one of our own devising? They must have the freedom to govern themselves, just as we now have." The Tiresian indicated Arla-non and Veidt, who were seated off to his right. "The Praxians and the Haydonites have already agreed to the proposal."

"The Praxians don't even have a world of their own!" a huge Karbarran bellowed. "And these Terrans have come from across the Quadrant. What do they know of the Regent's atrocities? Our children were held hostage by his minions!"

"And our very planet was destroyed!" Arla-non cut in. "If we can forgive in the name of peace, so you shall, Karbarran!"

"Where do the Garudans stand?" Bela wanted to know. "And the Spherisians?"

No one was mentioning Peryton; in a sense the planet had been exempt all along.

Baldan stepped forward to speak for Spheris. "The Invid visited more destruction on our world in a generation than the Great Geode could bring in an eon. But the Spherisians have no taste for genocide. I say return the Flowers to them." Teal nodded beside him,

proud of the son she had shaped.

"A nobel stance," Kami said from beneath his breathing apparatus, while the Karbarrans were busy hurling comminations at Baldan. "And yet you ignore that the Regent pledged to do as much to my people and yours. Optera's Flowers have brought nothing but misery. They should be eradicated. Along with the life-form that subsists on them!"

Gnea raised her voice loud enough to be heard. "What about this Earther general who has allied himself with the Regent? Is he to enjoy safe haven on Optera?"

Rick traded determined looks with Lisa and leaned forward to catch Vince Grant's response. "The Plenipotentiary's proposal states that General Edwards must be returned to Tirol to face charges of sedition and treason." His eyes found Rick across the hold. "Dr. Lang and the council express the hope that the Sentinels will refrain from further acts of warfare against the Invid until such time as the Regent responds to the proposal."

Rick's lips tightened; he was just about to stand up and enter his own thoughts in the record, when an officer from the Togukawa's communication center rushed into the hold and headed straight for Vince Grant's seat at the speakers' table. The room fell silent as Vince took a moment to read the message.

Rick could see his friend's face blanch.

"A coded communiqu?had just been received from Base Tirol," Vince began in a stressed tone. "The Zentraedi ship, Valivarre, has reported to the SDF-3 that...the Invid Regent is dead."

A chorus of cheers rose up from the Karbarrans and Garudans.

"Furthermore," Vince continued, angered by the commotion, "Valivarre reports that seventy-three Zentraedi were killed in the raid on Optera's Home Hive. Commander Breetai is listed among the casualties."

Rick heard Lisa's sharp intake of breath and immediately moved to her side. He strained to hear the rest of Vince's report above the sudden confusion, fighting back the tears and sorrow Lisa was already giving way to.

"And one more thing," Vince added, all emotion gone out of his voice. "General Edwards is apparently in control of the Invid forces on Optera."

The Regent had insisted on leaving the hive. Edwards had tried to talk him out of it, but the Invid was set on leading his troops to victory. You do what you have to do, Edwards had told him, standing there doing some leading of his own-a mad conductor poised in

front of Minmei, the Ghost Riders, and the brain. Straight out of an old Vincent Price horror film.

The communications sphere had carried scenes of the battle to the hive audience. Edwards saw the Regent square off with Breetai, the two XTs bundled up in Power Suits that made them look like deep-sea divers out of water. But he could tell they were both putting their hearts into it, and tried to coax Minmei to even greater heights of vocal display, waving his swagger stick like a baton, blond hair in tufts around the neural headband. The songs were working like a charm; Battlepods were stumbling around, careening into one another-exactly the headless ostriches the flyboys always took them to be.

In some secret part of her mind, Minmei had seemed aware of what he was doing to her, and the "We Can Win" dirge had deteriorated to caterwauling. Edwards had half believed she was going to the on the spot. That was when he had put an end to it, because his plans for her certainly didn't include death. The songs were simply a way to help bring her back under his control, to compromise that internal defense system she had used against him during the wedding. So much the better that they could be used against the Zentraedi as well.

Edwards had always considered them as living on borrowed time since the end of the Robotech War anyway. By rights they should have died ten years ago.

He had been pleased to see that the Regent had continued to hold his own with Breetai long after the charivari ended. Invid and Zentraedi were in a kind of embrace at that time, launching themselves into Optera's wild yellow yonder.

Then came the unanticipated explosion.

Edwards and his Ghost Riders were dumbfounded. Breetai and the Regent had taken each other out, and all around them in the hive chamber things had suddenly begun to wind down: Shock Troopers and Enforcers lowering their pincers, soldiers nodding out, the brain drifting toward the bottom of the bubble-chamber like a sponge that had lost its way...Edwards recalled experiencing a moment of panic-brief, to be sure, but palpable. The hive had become deadly quiet, his men looking to him for some sign that things were still on an upswing here.

Minmei was collapsed in a heap at the base of the commo sphere.

Edwards had straightened up to his full height, readjusted the neural headband around his half cowl, and shot the brain a look with his one good eye. And all at once the organ had reawakened; so, too, the foot soldiers in their glistening armor and the troops cocooned in nutrient inside their crablike ships. And rank after rank, they began genuflecting to Edwards.

Edwards had thrown a startled glance around the room and found Benson's eyes among the rest. The two men exchanged puzzled, almost terrified looks; then, at the same time, they began to snigger. The snigger built to a chortle, and the chortle gave way to full-blown laughter. The Ghost Riders joined in a moment later, and the manifold chambers of the hive rang with the sounds of their maniacal cachinations.

In Tirol they had lost a moon; but here on Optera they had won themselves a world.

CHAPTER NINE

We have all come to think of change as something that happens to us; but I am telling you that change is something we make happen-"the deliberate cooking of our cosmic egg," as Jan Morris has written. So do you want your life to be poached or scrambled? Do you see yourself as fried or hardboiled? I say add some cheese and fresh vegetables and make yourself an omelet!

Kennit Busganglion, The Hand That's Dealt You

Exedore had only been on Haydon IV for a short time when he made the first of his startling discoveries. He had spent a week or two familiarizing himself with the ultratech wonders of the world and ingratiating himself with Vowad and the planetary elite before sitting down to a serious study of the notes and documents Cabell left behind for his perusal. The Pollinators had also been left in his care, and during what he had come to think of as off-hours he worked at renewing his friendship with Max and Miriya Sterling. The two Terrans had their hands full raising Aurora, whose remarkable talents seemed limitless. She was now the physical equivalent of a six-year-old; it was illogical, however, to attempt to measure her psychological growth against any of the usual parameters. At times the child exhibited behavior Jean Grant herself had labeled "autistic"; while on other occasions her insights bordered on the profound. Exedore recalled hearing an Earth term for such genetic anomalies-idiot savant, if his memory served-but he didn't consider even that assessment entirely applicable. Besides, these words were little more than descriptions; they did nothing to explain Aurora's gifts-her rapid development and telepathic abilities.

It was, however, the child's oft-repeated warning and accompanying seizures that initially motivated Exedore to search Haydon IV's vast data networks for answers. Cabell had been here before him-on the verge of a breakthrough, if Exedore's interpretation of the Tiresian's notes was justified-but the business of war and peace had effectively truncated his search. The old man had claimed as much during one of his brief discussions with Exedore on the eve of the Tokugawa's departure. But it was obvious from what Exedore was soon to discover on his own that Cabell had been looking in the wrong places.

The neural mainframe the Haydonites referred to as the Awareness contained a record of its sessions with Cabell, along with evaluations of its encounter with Lang's Artificial Entity,

Janice Em. The latter had been interested in data relevant to Peryton, and the nature of that planet's so-called curse-which was more in the way of a malfunction, Exedore had decided after reviewing the information.

Cabell had had Haydon in mind; and while there were good reasons for pursuing such a course, the answers to the enigma that was Aurora lay elsewhere. Haydon did, however, provide Exedore with the clue he needed.

The data that had been incorporated into the Awareness millennia ago contained no physical descriptions of the being; but it was apparent that the various shrines erected to celebrate his genius bore no resemblance to his actual likeness. The Praxians, Karbarrans, Garudans, et al., had been guilty of what the Terrans would have called anthropomorphism-although the term hardly applied when discussing bear-and fox-like beings. Nevertheless, what Exedore found most intriguing was the fact that Zor, during his covert seeding attempts, had followed the same route Haydon had taken through the Fourth Quadrant. By conscious design. But all indications pointed to the fact that Haydon's journey had encompassed seven worlds, not six.

Then, buried even deeper in the neural network's memory, Exedore had discovered evidence of an encounter that antedated those of both Janice and Cabell: the Awareness's contact with the Invid Regis. Here he was to find recordings so esoteric in nature as to leave him astonished uestions concerning evolution and racial transformation, ontological issues his mind simply wasn't prepared to grapple with. But among these puzzling sessions were facsimiles of the psi-scan probes the Regis had launched against Rem, the Zor-clone Cabell had had a hand in fashioning. And from those, the Invid Queen-Mother had learned where the Protoculture matrix had been sent.

To Earth.

The seventh of Haydon and Zor's worlds.

It had all become so clear then: Zor's ship, the one the Terrans would name SDF-1, was to do the seeding in his place. Something was about to occur, or perhaps already had, that would loose the Flowers of Life from the matrix he had created and scatter their seeds across the planet.

Beware the spores! Aurora's telepathic message to her sister! And when those spores alighted, the Invid sensor nebulae would announce their find across the Quadrant.

Well the Robotech Masters might be on their way; but the Regis would not be far behind.

So there really was some grand design to the war after all, Exedore had told himself. And perhaps, with the help of Aurora and the planetary Awareness, it might be possible to communicate some of these things to Earth. Not by way of ship or spacefold, but through

Dana Sterling, left behind to play a pivotal role in the unfolding.

Exedore could even begin to understand where the Zentraedi fit into the scheme of things. To all but wipe out Earth's indigenous beings; to raze the planet's surface for the coming of the Masters, the Flowers and their Invid keepers...

Only one mystery remained now. Why Breetai had to die.

Exedore had himself exhibited a novel talent upon hearing the news. He had cried. There had already been laughter, love, and song.

But now a Zentraedi had been moved to tears.

Rem had been deeply affected by his experiences on Garuda, Haydon IV, and Peryton. Not in the same way that the rest of the Sentinels had-fanatical warriors now, the lot of them-but changed, Cabell thought, profoundly changed. And perhaps Lang's android had something to do with it as well.

"But why did you keep it from me, Cabell?" the Zor lone was asking. "What did you hope to gain?"

"My boy, you have to understand-"

"And don't refer to me as your boy, old man! If I am anyone's offspring, I am his-Zor's own."

Cabell had no answer ready, so he simply sat back and allowed Rem to pace back and forth in front of the acceleration couch in angry silence. They were in the Tiresian's quarters aboard the Ark Angel. Cabell hoped that Rem would view his transferring over from the Tokugawa as a kind of conciliatory gesture. It would have been easy enough for him to avoid Rem entirely, what with the impending invasion of Optera and all, but Cabell desperately wanted to heal the wound before it would leave scars of a lasting sort. He desperately wanted his son back.

"You preached to me for so long about the Masters' injustices-the scope of the Transition itself. And yet you chose to keep my genetic makeup a secret." Rem whirled on Cabell. "I am your personal Zentraedi servant, is that it? You programmed me with a false past-"

"There is nothing false about your past!" Cabell interrupted, having heard enough of that talk. "I raised you as a...son. Your memories are real ones. That's the very reason I kept it from you-so you could become your own person, rather than grow up in Zor's shadow."

Rem snorted. "We have all grown up in his shadow, like it or not."

Tight-lipped, Cabell looked down at the floor. But in a moment he felt Rem's hands on his shoulders, and looked up into the, beginnings of a smile.

"I'm sorry, Cabell. You were right to do as you did. Or else I would never have been able to come to the realizations I have."

Cabell's forehead and glabrous pate wrinkled. "What realizations, my boy?"

Rem straightened up and folded his arms across his chest. "About Zor. And Protoculture."

Cabell's eyes went wide. "You mean-"

"Yes." Rem nodded. He turned away from the couch and walked to the cabin's small porthole. "Ever since Per ton. Especially when I witnessed Burak's self-sacrifice. Before that my thoughts were hopelessly confused by what the Regis had conjured from my memory-or his, to be accurate-and what the Regent attempted in a more straightforwardly sadistic manner.

"But there was something about the experience in the generator antechamber that cleared my mind. As well as your speech in front of the assembly, my friend." Rem smiled. "I'll have you know I'm in favor of the Terran council's proposal."

"I knew you would be," Cabell enthused.

"And I don't think we should consider the Regent's death a reason to withdraw the offer, once we have dealt with this Edwards. After all, there is still the Regis and her children to take into account."

"If we could somehow recall her."

Rem wore a grave look when he turned from the star view. "I have fears along those lines. Should she find Earth...I sense a kind of inevitability here."

"But the Protoculture," Cabell said, hoping to steer the conversation back on course. "You mentioned some 'realization.'"

"I am beginning to see what was on his mind." Rem laughed in a self-mocking way. "His, mine, I am still confused about where his thoughts leave off and mine begin."

Cabell encouraged him to sit beside him on the couch. "Go on, Rem. Tell me what you're feeling."

Rem sighed. "The seedings were more than an attempt to redress the wrong done to

Optera and the Invid. Those excursions were undertaken to make certain this one would take place-this journey of liberation."

"But how?"

"To effect changes," Rem replied evenly. "In the Sentiels, I believe. In Baldan and Veidt and Kami and myself. In you, Cabell. And in another who...is not yet among us.

"Haydon. Is it his design we're helping to weave?" Cabell wondered whether he should mention his sessions with Haydon IV's Awareness. He could see, in any case, that Rem was rejecting the idea.

"No, not Haydon." "Who, then?"

"The Protoculture," Rem answered him. "We have all acme to regard it as a mere fuel for our mecha and weapons-a kind of commodity for warfare and space ravel. But it is much more than that, Cabell. It is a fuel for transfiguration." He got up from the couch and moved to the center of the cabinspace. "I realized this long after I had urged it from the Flowers..."

I, Cabell thought. He said I.

Rem was laughing wryly. "You credit me with its dismay. You heap your praises upon me for offering you a wads of clean energy and reshaped possibilities; of dazzling innovations and voyages through time." He slammed a fist into his palm. "I am nothing more than a midwife. I birthed Protoculture into our world, but I did not father it!

"Protoculture lives on its own. It feeds off our attempts to cook and harness it." Rem shot Cabell a baleful look. "You ask me whose tapestry we're weaving, old man, and I will tell you: it is Protoculture's design. It is Protoculure's will!"

Elsewhere in the Ark Angel Karen Penn and Jack Baker were sharing steaming mugs of Praxian herbal tea. Jack had finally been released from sick bay, but only after Jean Grant had had him hauled over to the Tokugawa for a thorough physical.

"I've been feeling strange lately," Karen was telling him now. "I can't explain it-different somehow."

Jack showed her an arched eyebrow over the rim of the mug. "Whaddya mean, 'different'?"

"Whaddya mean different," she echoed, screwing up her face and doing a fair imitation of his voice. "I just told you I can't explain it. It's like I feel...changed."

"Well, it's been almost four years," Jack said, adopting a roguish grin as he leaned back from the table. "By the way, are those crow's-feet I'm seeing around those green gems of yours, or is it just the light in here?"

Karen narrowed her eyes. "You know, sometimes I wonder if you've got a serious bone in your body."

He smiled to himself and told her she was free to consult with Jean Grant on the possibility. "She even ran brain scans on me."

"That's bound to be a short story."

"All right," Jack said after a pause, "so you were saying you felt changed."

"I do."

He eyeballed what he could see of her from across the table. "Ever think that it might have something to do with the way you've been dressing lately?"

Karen leaned back to take a look at herself. "Exactly what's wrong with the way I'm dressing, Jack?"

He dismissed the anger in her voice with a motion of his hand and gestured to himself. "Remember when we used to be a strac outfit? I mean, take a good look at yourself aydonite balloon trousers and that hair shirt from Garuda. It fits you like a rug. What ever happened to skirts and highheels and sexy lingerie? Now it's like we're all cut from the same cloth."

Karen laughed at him. "Boy, I'd love to hear you say that to Gnea."

"That's just what I'm talking about. Gnea, Bela, you, and Admiral Hayes. All this Sisterhood nonsense. I'm just waiting for you guys to throw a sorority party."

"You know it isn't like that," Karen argued. "You'd hardly call Baldan a sister."

"Yeah, well, I'm not too sure about him. I mean, the guy was shaped, for chrissakes."

Karen glanced around the mess hall, focusing briefly on some of the tables nearby. Karbarrans and Garudans were chowing down on the fresh supplies the Tokugawa had brought in. Veidt was hovering across the deck, Rick and Lisa Hunter alongside him. By the time she turned around, her frustration had vanished. "Tell me you don't feel changed," she challenged him.

He was quiet for a moment, then said, "Maybe I do. But I thought it was something they were putting in our food."

"Be serious."

Jack sighed. "At first I thought ole Burak's horns had torn something loose; or maybe that Tesla had planted a kind of post-hypnotic suggestion in the back of my brain. Ever see a vid called Manchurian Candidate?"

Karen shook her head.

"Doesn't matter. What I'm saying is, yeah, I have been feeling weird. It's like I can see all the way to the day after tomorrow."

Karen gave him a coy smile. "And what's happening out there?

"I know what I'd like to have happening," he said, reaching for her hand.

She squeezed back, tongue in cheek, nodding at him. "You're an unknown quantity, Baker."

"And you're beautiful-even when you're wearing carpet remnants."

The ship's klaxons intruded on their private silence, sounding General Quarters.

"That means us, Lieutenant," Karen said, polishing off her tea and getting up.

"Optera," Jack mused. "Maybe Edwards'll just surrender. We've got him outgunned, outnumbered."

"I hope he doesn't." That anger was back. "I want to see it finished, once and for all."

Jack hurried to catch up with her. "You have changed," he said as they made for their stations.

"I suppose we owe it to ourselves to have a look around," T. R. Edwards had suggested to his men after word arrived that the Valivarre had left orbit. "See just what we've inherited."

With that he and his Ghost Riders had exited the hive's central enclave, monkish Invid scientists and a handful of the Special Children following behind like a recently hatched brood. They were already familiar with some of it of course, but there was a lot more to the place than what the Regent had showed them during the welcoming ceremonies. Miles and miles of vaulted corridors for one thing, and chamber after chamber of organic

stuff-instrumentality spheres, communications circuitry, nutrition vats, and life-support systems-all of it responding to Edwards now, the whole kit and caboodle of the Invid race.

Edwards had some misgivings about standing up to the Home Hive's living computer; but much to his amazement, and Benson's relief, he found the brain to be immediately responsive to his need for data updates and strategic evaluations. It came as a greater surprise that he and the brain could actually carry on a dialogue. The floating, convoluted thing recognized him as unlike anything it had communicated with before; but at the same time it seemed intrigued, and impressed with the scope of the Human's knowledge and experience.

They spoke for some time, and Edwards was sorry that Minmei wasn't there to listen in. She was back under sedation in the Regent's, now Edwards's, private quarters. Edwards was confident that she would find her way back to him of her own accord, but it reassured him to know that this infinitely superior power source was waiting in the wings just in case she didn't. Her self-protective melodies wouldn't stand a chance.

The brain had a few questions of its own, and Edwards willingly opened his mind to its gentle probes. Why not, after all? The sooner the two of them were operating on the same wavelength, the better.

As for Edwards, his concerns centered on consolidation and defense. The Valivarre might be pulling away temporarily, but it wouldn't be long before the Ark Angel, the Rutland, or Tokugawa showed up to take its place, and Edwards wanted to be ready when the time came. Of less immediate concern was the Regis. The brain refused to predict just how she might respond to the death of her husband. Her present whereabouts were unknown, but it seemed reasonable enough to assume that she would give Optera another shot if she were nearby-galactically speaking. Not that Optera had much to offer her anymore. With Flower and nutrient supply lines cut off, hives overrun on half-a-dozen worlds, the remaining Invid had to be asking themselves where their next meal was coming from. And even Edwards wasn't sure how to answer that one. Retake Peryton, perhaps. Or offer the Regis a deal. He had the brain flash him a mental picture of her, along with a caprole summary of her fateful encounter with Zor. Seeing her made Edwards wonder just how the Tiresian had "seduced" the secrets of the Flowers from her. He certainly didn't feel himself up to the task of stepping into Zor's shoes-even to a night!

To some extent, Edwards decided, the outcome to his concerns and the Invid's dilemma all depended on the Sentinels and how far they wanted to take things at this stage.

He had this in mind now, as he stood overlooking what one of the white-robed scientists called a "Genesis Pit." At first Edwards didn't know what the hell to make of it. An Avernus perhaps-that mythological entrance to Hades the ancients had located in a volcanic lake near Naples-it was the Regent's attempt to emulate Tiresia's almost Greco-Roman flavor, as he had done with his quarters and bath.

But the Genesis Pit hardly seemed an imitation of anything. It was an opening into the planet's fiery nether regions; an enormous cauldron of harnessed, ectoplasmic energy, a laboratory beaker of bubbling genetic potential.

The scientists attempted to explain the Pit's purpose: the transformation of lifestuff. They told of how the Regis had made use of it during her early experiments in self-generaled evolution; and of the Regent's debased practice of using it as a kind of punishment therapy-devolving scientists to the ranks of soldiers and such. They pointed to the so-called Special Children as an example of the Regent's flawed condition, his lack of creativity and originality. It required a wondrous mind to summon up wonders, the scientists insisted.

Edwards was still standing in awe of the Pit's power when a message was received from the situation room his Ghost Riders had set up elsewhere in the hive complex. A radioman reported that long-range scanners had picked up three ships entering the Tzuptum system.

"Three?" Benson said. "So they've brought the Rutland and the Tokugawa."

"Uh, negative, sir. What we've got is Tokugawa and Ark Angel, and a ship the library's ID-ing as Karbarran."

"Yes," Edwards said, "I heard those creatures were working on a starship."

"Sit room's awaiting your orders, General."

Edwards mulled it over. Three ships was bad news no matter how he sliced it, he told himself. Even the combined strength of the Ghost Riders and the Invid Shock Troopers and Enforcers would be no match for them. The hive shields would allow them to buy some time, of course, but it wasn't numbers the situation called for now but surprise.

A creative approach.

"Can those things undergo further genetic manipulation?" Edwards asked the scientists, indicating one of the Special Children.

"Why, yes, m'lord," a scientist replied, bowing. "But surely you do not wish to devolve them."

"Devolve them? Why, no, of course not," Edwards said absently. A slow smile took shape as he turned to face Benson. "I have a more playful idea in mind."

CHAPTER TEN

It was [former UEDC-head] Russo who introduced me to Edwards-Russo frightened for his life after Gloval's unexpected victory, and Edwards scarred and traumatized after his ordeal at Alaska Base. Edwards was not an intelligent man (he had served as a mercenary for the Neasian Co-Prosperity Sphere, and a specialist in covert operations for the UEDC); but I recognized that something powerful had been given shape by the man's obsession with vengeance. It was both instructive and productive for me to sit at his feet for a time, align myself with the machinations he was working out with Wyau Moran and Leonard's Southern Cross command. I tried at that time to interest him in taking the mindboost Lang had ridden to fame and more-the one I had only recently submitted to-but he would have no part of it. Later, the Shapings would hint to me of some grand purpose in Edwards's refusal; some special role Protoculture had already cast him in.

Footnote in Lazlo Zand's Event Horizon: Perspectives on Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

The Valivarre led the Sentinel's three-ship flotilla into Opteraspace. Kazianna Hesh had assumed control of the Zentraedi vessel; she detailed the events of the ill ated raid against the hive in true warrior fashion-succinctly, stoically-and refused Jean Grant's offer of medical assistance for the some twenty-five remaining Zentraedi troops. A coffinless ceremony had been held in honor of their former commander; Breetai's command cloak and campaign ribbons had been placed inside an Officer's Pod, which the Valivarre had then launched toward Tzuptum's nuclear core.

The Ark Angel was above the Invid homeworld now, Rick and Lisa on the cruiser's bridge, silent as the planet swung the hive complex into scanner range. The Valivarre and Tokugawa waited further out. The Karbarran ship, Tracialle, had attained low orbit and was rapidly heading for darkside.

Monitor schematics depicted the hives as an extensive network of interconnected semispheres and slave-domes, a blistered patch on Optera's sterilized surface that was plainly visible to the naked eye even from an altitude of several thousand miles. Rick watched contour lines form on one of the monitor screens as computers began to rotate the color-enhanced schematic complex ninety degrees for topographical mapping. Data scrolled alongside the image-thermal readouts and dimensional notations. All four ships were on full alert, but thus far there had been no sign of Invid troop carriers or the SDF-7-class dreadnought Edwards had commandeered on Tirol. The flotilla had been scanned on its arrival, however, and Rick felt certain Edwards would soon attempt contact. The Zentraedi were maintaining that the renegade was in control of the Invid forces, but Rick refused to believe it. He was willing to accept that something like this had occurred in Tiresia, but suspected that Kazianna's claims were tainted by residual superstition from the Masters' conditioning. Perhaps the Invid did go on fighting after the Regent's death; but couldn't that be a kind of reflex behavior, Rick asked himself, a genetic winding down?

It wasn't encouraging to find that no one else was buying the explanation. Rick had hoped a show of force would be enough to persuade Edwards to come along quietly. But if he was in fact in control of who knew how many Invid troops, Optera would present the Sentinels with the gravest challenge they had yet faced.

"Incoming message from the surface, Admiral. We have a visual signal."

"Put it up," Lisa told her crewmember.

Lines of diagonal static flashed from the main screen, then resolved to a tight shot of Edwards himself. The camera pulled back to locate him on a massive thronelike couch, legs stretched out in front of him, crossed jackboots resting on the backside of a prone Hellcat wearing a gem tudded collar. The general was smiling, filing his nails in a casual way.

"Regards from Optera, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter," he began. "And you, too, Grant, if you're out there listening. Been having a wonderful time down here. Lots of sun and sand, fruit drinks and heavenly bodies. I'm glad you could make it. We're just about ready to commence our little, uh, ground-breaking ceremony."

Rick positioned himself in front of the bridge pickup. "We have a proposal to make to the Invid. We know that the Regent is dead. But we're ready to address this to the new commander in chief."

"A proposal?" Edwards said, putting his feet on the door. "Well, by all means, Hunter."

"For the Invid commander in chief."

"You're looking at him," Edwards snarled.

Rick motioned for a brief interruption of the audio signal and turned to one of the techs. "Get a fix on the source of the transmission."

"Trying, sir."

"I'm waiting, Hunter," Edwards was saying.

Rick's jaw muscles clenched. "I don't know how you did it, Edwards. But the only message we have for you is an order from the council for your arrest. We can promise you safe escort back to Tirol-"

"Surrender?!" Edwards threw his head back and laughed. "But what about the party I had planned? I was even going to have Minmei sing for you, Hunter. Why don't you ask the Zentraedi how they liked it?"

"Anything?" Rick asked the tech while Edwards was speaking.

"Coming up now, sir."

Rick eyeballed the monitor nearest him. Scanners revealed two primary power sources in the centermost hive, Edwards's present position pinpointed midway between them. He returned his attention to the main screen and said, "Your last chance, Edwards."

Edwards laughed again.

"Sir! Showing three- no, make that four vessels coming around from darkside. Three troopships, one Robotech fortress."

Lisa tightened her grip on the arms of the command chair. "Ready all stations."

"Ready, sir."

"Veritechs standing by."

"Tokugawa is moving in on vector zero-zero-niner." Edwards's face was still on-screen. "Troubles up there, Admiral?"

Rick showed his teeth. "We're coming for you, you bastard!"

"Enemy closing to engage. We've got multiple paint signals, sections one, two, four, five..."

"I'm waiting for you, Hunter! You and your wife! Minmei and I have been dying to have you over!"

"Edwards, you-"

"Skull, Black Angels, and Diamondbacks are away."

"Nothing but us ghosts down here, Hunter! My past, your past, all wrapped up in one tidy bundle."

"What's going on out there?" Rick heard Lisa ask from the chair. He turned his back to the main screen, leaning in for a look at the threat board. The troopships had disgorged several hundred Pincer ships into the arena; but instead of launching into their usual random attack maneuvers, the battle mecha were forming up in huge squares behind individual group leaders.

Rick called for a closeup of one of the lead mecha. And was sorry when he got it.

It was difficult to tell whether it was a ship, a living creature, or some unholy mating of the two. Bilaterally symmetrical, the thing was about the same size as a Shock Trooper; but in place of integument and alloy armor was what looked like actual flesh and bone. This one happened to be female-a naked one at that-with plasma cannons where breasts would be, and the face and hair of Lisa Hunter.

Rick's reaction was typical: he grunted a disgusted sound, let go the first curse that came to mind, and averted his eyes from the screen.

"Destroy that thing!" Lisa was screaming.

Edwards taunted her. "I wasn't sure I got the measurements right, Admiral. Are the proportions correct?"

Rick had the scanners close on another group leader n equally obscene caricature of himself this time, grinning madly like some horrific piece of Aztec art. And the rest of the REF command were out there as well: Vince and Jean Grant, Max Sterling and Miriya Sterling, Dr. Lang and Minmei.

"You're insane, Edwards!" Rick screamed.

"And loving you for it," Edwards replied, laughing. "Welcome home, Hunter. Welcome to your worst nightmare!"

Edwards's instructions to the Home Hive brain had resulted in a creative restructuring of the Invid assault strategies. He knew from personal experience exactly what Hunter and Grant's Veritech teams expected to face: a swarm of bloodthirsty mecha lacking any semblance of order or command, intimidating more in terms of numbers than anything else. Oh, at first their appearance and firepower had taken some getting used to, but the Sentinels were way beyond that now. Which was why he had taken such pains to reshape the Special Children into commanders with a little something extra in the way of shock value. But more than that, he had equipped them with a new set of tactical directives-culled not from the RDF or Southern Cross manuals, however, but from a wide array of video games his generation had grown up on.

So it came as quite a surprise to the first VT teams launched from the Tokugawa to see columns of Pincer Ships peel off from opposite ends of the Invid attack grid, accelerate out ahead of the main body as two tight-knit, double-columned groups, and maneuver through identical high-speed curlicues that any fan of fighter jock daredevilry would have applauded. Some of the Veritech pilots were doing just that, in fact, and were so caught up in the visual display they barely felt the annihilation disks coming.

But come they did-streams of them, wiping out a good portion of the Diamondback attack wing in one fell swoop. The Veritechs dispersed and tried to lure the Pincers into one-on-one combat, but the Invid kept their group intact, ignoring the fact that return fire from the Humans was decimating their formation. Columns of Invid ships were continuing to break away into dazzling routines, though-pinwheels and whorls, loop-di-loops and loop-di ies and the VT pilots had something even more bizarre to contemplate when the lead ship-one of the Lisa Hunter monstrosities-split into two Lisas, then four, before it could be entirely destroyed.

And it was the same throughout the field the enemy had staked out in Optera's surrounding void. Whole blocks of Invid ships would suddenly launch themselves into lateral maneuvers, or invert themselves and drop toward the planet, only to reappear on the scene moments later as a spinning wheel of plasma fire. Elsewhere, they were actually capturing Battloids, powering them back into their midst where they were often drawn and quartered, or crippled and tossed about like comedic acrobats.

The Human pilots were too overwhelmed to take charge-naked Ricks and Lisas and Glovals and Langs coming at them from all directions, squadrons of Pincer Ships willingly sacrificing themselves for the sake of demonstration. And all the while Edwards's SDF-7 and two of the troop carriers were closing on the Tokugawa, trading salvos of blinding light with the sleeker ship. The Valivarre had no real firepower left to contribute to the fray, but it sent out those few Zentraedi who were still capable of piloting Battlepods and Power Armor Suits.

Edwards, meanwhile, was monitoring the battle from the hive's sanctum sanctorum, amid the grotesque parodies of classical splendor the Regent had brought to his personal quarters, and he couldn't have been more pleased with himself.

Minmei was close at hand, sprawled across the bed, mumbling to herself incoherently. Edwards realized that he should have instructed Benson to clean her up a bit-better if Hunter saw her gussied up than disheveled. He glanced over at the Regent's bathtub and wondered whether Minmei's attitude would be improved by a quick dip in the tepid green nutrient.

Local space had been transformed to precisely the video screen he had imagined. All it lacked was sound and options that allowed top gun aces to participate in bonus rounds or enter their initials and kill count side-by-side. Missiles and anni disks crosshatched the night; VTs and Pincers were snuffed out in novas of glory. But there were no extra lives or invincibility auras to award today; you paid your money and you took your chance.

He knew, however, that the battle would be short-lived, and he could see it drawing to a close even now. The VT pilots had overcome whatever revulsion or fascination his bit of genetic legerdemain had stirred, and they seemed to be getting into the spirit of things,

going after the dwindling ranks of Invid mecha with gusto.

But the assault had already achieved its purpose; the SDF-7 and the troop carriers-both commanded by Invid crews-had maneuvered close enough to the Tokugawa to successfully complete their kamikaze runs. The Zentraedi ship posed no real threat, and by all accounts the Ark Angel and the Karbarran vessel were already making planetfall, which put Hunter and the rest just where he wanted them. An army of Inorganics would be out there waiting for them. Not to mention the one or two surprises he had yet to pull from his bag of tricks.

The Karbarrans hit the surface in dropships launched from the Tracialle and spilled across Optera's denuded landscape with a ferocity hitherto unknown among that ursinoid race. It was clear, however, that every warrior among them was remembering Hardargh Rift and the prison camp where their cubs had almost died.

Lron and Crysta led the charge against the hive, for once forsaking their small-bore air rifles in favor of Wolverines and Owens Mark IX not guns fresh from the REF armories. Their mission was to clear a path to the centermost of the hives, while the Ark Angel's main gun hammered away at the energy shield Edwards had thrown up over the inner complex. The only things standing in their way were several hundred Inorganics backed by an equal number of armored soldiers and a few dozen Shock Troopers.

The Home Hive's living computer had counseled Edwards about the Karbarrans, to the effect that they were a fatalistic lot by nature and would probably prove unresponsive to psychological influences. But the brain had suggested that they were vulnerable to manipulations of a physiological sort, and this Edwards could achieve with a bit of meteorological magic. So in place of the body culpted mecha he was hurling against the space corps, Edwards saw to it that the Karbarrans were faced with a impromptu cold front. The brain provided for this by allowing him to exercise some control over the microclimates set up by the hive's barrier shield.

The unsuspecting Karbarrans charged headlong into the subzero air mass, and the result was bedlam-not unlike the confused state Minmei's songs had left the Zentraedi in. While the ursinoids tried to remain gung ho and continue the offensive, they couldn't ignore the shutdown signals being sent from the instinctual side of their makeup. Even Lron couldn't fight off the effects of Edwards's localized winter. Behind him, Crysta and Dardo had stopped to rest, and some of the front-line foot soldiers were actually curling up on the wind-chilled ground, cuddling against one another, Wolverines and Badgers discarded. Lron turned to shout them into motion, but all that emerged was a long, seasonal yawn that had worked its way up from inside of him. Standing there on wobbly elephantine feet, he used the riot gun to support himself and showed his sleepy followers a lethargic wave, which seemed more a dismissive motion than an incentive to advance.

The Inorganics had no problem with the cold. In well rdered columns, the Scrim, Crann, and Odeon had stood their ground in the face of the Karbarrans' surge; but they were in motion now, an unstoppable army of automatons shuffling through new-fallen snow. Ranks of armored soldiers fell in behind them, humming a traditional Karbarran winter song Lron could hear above the wind and the rhythmical sound of marching feet. He slumped down, exhausted. In the distance, a squad of Shock Troopers was lifting off, streaking in to defrost the Karbarrans' patch of ground with the warmth of their annihilation disks.

The Sentinels' ship was an avenging angel as it dropped down on Optera, spewing the hive-complex barrier shields with all the wrath it could summon. The main gun and in-close weapons systems blasted away relentlessly; but the translucent domes were holding together, absorbing the energy of each individual packet of fire and dispersing it throughout the net. The Sentinels knew enough not to quit, however; on Garuda, Karbarra, Tirol itself, the barrier shields had eventually succumbed to thermal overload. Khyron had once employed a similar tactic against the SDF-1, and the resultant explosion had wiped a small city off the face of the Earth. But the Sentinels were aware that Edwards or the Home Hive living computer wouldn't allow things to go that far; the brain would lower the shields short of overload and shunt power to Optera's ground ased defensive systems.

Rick was confident it wouldn't even come to that. Not with the brain being taxed on three fronts now. He had asked Lisa to risk a sweep over the top of the complex, to facilitate an insertion of airborne troops in the vicinity of the central hive. The infiltration group would be made up of three Alpha Veritechs, bearing Rick, Janice, Rem, and Jack; Bela, Arla-non, Kami, and Learna; and Baldan, Teal, Gnea, and Karen. At the last moment Lisa had added her own name to the roster.

The Sentinels were on the ground now, in a kind of hollow formed by a cluster of four slave-domes-comparatively small ones at that-linked to each other and the bigger hemispheres beyond by roofed transfer corridors, saddles between the mountaintops that were the hive's rounded summits. The thin-membraned walls of the tunnels offered the best route into the hive.

Baldan had his crystalline arms shoved elbow-deep into the rocky ground. Teal was edgy watching him, recalling bow Baldan I had died on Praxis, a prisoner of the planet's tectonic death spasms. Optera's vibrations were mild in comparison, but Teal was worried just the same.

The eleven other Sentinels formed a nervous circle around the Spherisians. The air buzzed and crackled with shield energy. Explosions boomed in the distance, strobing into Optera's skies; an eerie alpenglow behind the domes.

"I can feel the source of the energy," Baldan reported, lifting his arms free. "Teal."

She melded her arms with the surface and nodded a moment later, light radiating from her smooth face. "Like the Genesis Pits on Praxis. But this one has seen more recent use."

Rick thought about the obscenities Edwards had launched against them in space. "Can you get a location?" Teal pulled herself free. "It agrees with the ship's scans."

Rem studied the readout of the direction finder he wore like a backpack radio. "This way," he said, motioning off to his left. Teal and Baldan agreed.

Kami and Learna had fixed the location of the Genesis Pit in a similar fashion, trusting, to Garudan Sendings to reaffirm the Ark Angel's initial computer assessments. Designating the location of the Genesis Pit at twelve o'clock, put the brain at four, with the source of Edwards's initial commo at roughly two-thirty.

"Jack, Karen: you're with Baldan and Teal," Rick said. "The brain is Edwards's interface with the Invid soldiers and Inorganics. If we can deactivate it, we've got this thing beat."

Jack and Karen nodded, expressions hidden behind the faceshields of their helmets. They began to run through a weapons check with the two Spherisians, while Rick turned to address the Praxian amazons. "Stick with Kami and Learna. For all we know, Edwards is still fabricating soldiers in that Pit. Maybe we can put him out of business."

The women thumped their breasts in salute. They were dressed in gladiatorial outfits; high, articulated boots and tight-fitting totem-crested leather helmets. Arla-non and Bela carved naginata and shields; Gnea, a two-handed shortsword and crossbow. Their presence alongside the transpirator-masked Garudans made for a bizarre pairing.

"The rest of us will go after Edwards," Rick continued, eyeing Janice, Rem, and Lisa. They nodded and lowered their faceshields. Rick gave Lisa one final look and followed suit.

The three teams moved to the tunnels; there, they set the charges that would gain them access, falling back and waiting for the first detonation.

Vince felt his forehead bead with sweat.

"They're up to ramming speed, sir! We can't shake them!"

"Full power to the guns," Vince told the tech. "Fire at will!"

Two clamshell troop carriers were dead in space, with the Valivarre floating between the Tokugawa and a third Invid vessel. But of more immediate concern was Edwards's SDF-7. The cruiser was holed and belching lox ueled flames, but it was still coming at them, a

barracuda with death written all over it. This despite the VT squadrons that were following it in, peppering vulnerable areas with heat-seekers and rifle/cannon fire, and the blowtorching broadside flashes from the Tokugawa's own turret guns. No Human crew could have been piloting that ship, Vince told himself.

"It's no use, sir. The shields are intact. We're going to take her in the gut."

Vince could hear klaxons screaming alerts to the crew. In the amber light of the bridge he sensed that he had already died and gone to hell. A haggard Jean was on-screen off to the left of the command-chair console.

"The wounded have been moved up to the launch bays, Vince. The shuttles are standing by. You have to give the word!"

Vince's brown face paled at the thought. He tried to convince himself that the ship could withstand the collision. They could close off all starboard sections and reachieve orbit. Wait for the Ark Angel or Valivarre before offloading anyone?

"Vince!" Jean shouted. "Vince, listen to me!"

He swung around to the threat board, the eyes of every tech on the bridge glued to him. Edwards's ship was closing the gap-its bow stuffed with explosives, for all anyone knew. The Tokugawa would split open like a pea pod. Could the shuttles be launched, brought a safe distance away even now?

"Range is on-screen, sir."

Vince took a moment to study the grim readout. "Lieutenant...sound abandon ship," he said quietly.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Well I'm a king bee, baby, buzzin' around your hive.

Remark overheard on the VT tactical net during the attack against Optera's Home Hive, as reported in Le Roy la Paz's, The Sentinels

The interior of the multichambered home hive was no different than those the Invid had grown on Garuda. The same cellular walls glistening with Flower sap; the stasis bubbles where they met the floor. The same pulsating pinks, purples, and living greens; the instrumentality spheres, neural pathways, and commo junctions the Terrans thought dendritelike in structure. All bathed in the same sourceless crepuscular light. Yes, very much like the farm hives on Garuda, Kami told himself. From what be recalled before the air of the hive had deprived him of his homeworld's spore-laden atmosphere. The spores

that kept Garudans in hin, a reality all their own. Learna would remember more, of course, a member of the rescue party that day. But Kami sensed they were in agreement on one thing: the Sendings were strong here. Emanations of great power and control.

They had been moving for more than an hour now, through a network of corridors and vaulted rooms, which spoke softly of distant menace. They had had to conceal themselves a while back, when a group of five armored soldiers had raced by and exited through an osmotic gate. But otherwise their recon had been quiet and uneventful. The Praxian warriors were out front; Bela, moving warily, had the point position, her spearlike weapon at hand. Learna trailed, linked to Kami in ways that rendered the Sentinels' communication nets primitive by comparison. He turned and sent to her, soothed to see only fortunate colors in the egg-shaped aura that encompassed her hin elf. But eyes forward again he was brought up short by what he saw in Arla-non's: there was an incipient blackness there, uncoiling inkline from the Praxian's navel. Kami hurried to overtake her, Learna padding behind him in a run.

"Hold," he told the women through his respirator, aware that he could not command his coat to belie his concern. He saw that Bela was casting a suspicious look at his suddenly ruffled fur.

"What do your Sendings tell you, hin-warrior?" she demanded.

"Danger," Learna said, answering for him and gesturing to a chamber entrance up ahead.

Gnea held her crossbow at ready. She glanced down the corridor. "We can fall back."

Learna nodded, then froze. "No!"

Kami heard the urgent whisperings of an ally at the same moment, a flutter of invisible wings above his head. "Quickly," he barked, moving off ahead of everyone. Learna and Gnea placed command-detonated mines against the corridor walls before joining the others.

The chamber air was thick with warnings, and there were voices coming from one of two smaller corridors that emptied into the circular room. Humanoid voices, Terran ones. And there were more coming from the corridor behind them. The five Sentinels found cover amid a copse of power-feed cables, stretched floor to geodesic ceiling like sheathed ligaments.

The Earthers, four of Edwards's contingent, were jostling one another and laughing as they approached the junction. Learna blew the mines and leveled them, leaving one of them wounded, screaming, grabbing at the space where a leg had been. Gnea sent him on his way with a well-placed arrow. But by now the voices of the second group had changed tone, and a moment later Wolverine fire was erupting from the mouth of the

corridor. The Sentinels returned fire and upped the ante with grenades. Kami was glad to see that the Praxians had drawn their Badger assault pistols.

Three Ghost Riders, hands to their mouths and rifles ablaze, followed an outpouring of smoke from the corridor and took up positions behind a horizontal bundle of neuron cables on the opposite side the chamber. Bela clipped one of them on the way in, and Kami dropped another. Arla on scampered forward to fix the third Earther in her sights.

Kami was too late to stop her, death's light-embracing color already suffusing the Praxian's aura.

Bela screamed as her mother went down, seared across her midsection:

A dirk with a foot-long blade flew from Gnea's hand.

"We've been here before, I'm telling ya," Jack said, the helmet faceshield raised.

Karen raised her own shield. "And I'm telling you, you just think we've been here."

Jack scowled at her and swung on Baldan and Teal. "What about it, you guys-are we or are we not going 'round in circles."

"Not circles, surely," Baldan answered him calmly.

"Squares, then. Rectangles, polygons, what the hell's the difference? We're still ending up right where we started."

Teal squatted down to touch the floor. "We're, so close."

"But how can that be, Teal?" Karen gestured to the walls of the cul-de-sac they had wandered into-or returned to, if anyone was bothering to take Jack's claims seriously. "I don't see anything that looks like an opening. The brain chamber's got to be huge, doesn't it?"

Baldan nodded. "If we can judge by what the Invid left elsewhere. I also feel the Genesis Pit strongly-vibrations similar to those my namesake read in Praxis."

"Your father," Teal corrected him.

"But it was you who shaped me."

"Yes, but-"

"Can we just save all this family business for some other time?" Jack interrupted. He pressed his hands to the end wall and pushed, then moved a few feet to his left and moved again. "There's gotta be a way out...Check out the other walls."

Karen showed the Spherisians a tolerant smile and moved to one of the sidewalls. "Better humor him. He can be imposs-"

"What'd I tell you?!" Jack shouted behind her.

She turned and found to her amazement that his random palpations had opened a pitch-black triangular doorway in the end wall.

"See, all we have to do is step through."

"I don't know, Jack," Karen told him, hoping to encourage that slight waver of trepidation she had detected in his voice. "Looks awfully dark in there."

Jack trained a stubby flashlight on the opening: the blackness on the other side seemed to swallow the light. "It's impenetrable," Teal commented.

Baldan cautiously eased his hands into the darkness, to no apparent ill effect. "Yes," he said. "The brain is below us."

Jack threw everyone a knowing look and swaggered toward the opening, hands on his hips. Turning his back to the door, he said, "Now all we have to do is decide who goes first."

Jack saw all three of them go wide-eyed, and read it as a testament to his dauntless courage. But then he hadn't seen the pair of hands that were reaching out for him. He managed a short, contemptuous snicker before whatever it was that was attached to those hands grabbed him by the neck and dragged him into the void.

Rick shot another one through the heart and kept right on running. There were at least a dozen more behind them, zomboid voices calling out Rick and Lisa's names between rounds of fire.

They had literally walked out of the walls. Rick, Lisa, Rem, and Janice had been in some kind of laboratory at the time, a place of vats and conveyor-belt analogues, giant spools of clear tubing and stacks of what could have been long-necked funnels. Lisa suggested it might have been the mess hall kitchen, which elicited a disgusting sound from Rick. Janice, imaged over to android mode, was just about to sample some of the goop adhering to the side of one of the vats when the soldiers appeared.

Literally walking out of the walls. Seven-foot-tall bipedal mutants with blasters built into their forearms, and two heads attached to tentaclelike stalks that emerged from their chests. Nightmare creations, even without the added horror of those heads wearing Roy Fokker's face.

"Rick," one of them droned, "little brother."

Lisa blew her breakfast, right into one of the vats.

Then all at once the things were firing at them. It took Rick a good fifteen seconds to get past his terror, but once he got started, it was all Lisa could do to drag him away. It was nothing short of miraculous that all of them hadn't been taken down by the Fokker mutants' first volley. But Rick was saving his thanks for later, and wanted to see every last one of the things atomized-as much as Lisa had wanted to see that Pincer leader destroyed.

He did, however, have the presence of mind to question why Edwards was once again singling him out. Did it go back to the rivalry between Roy and Edwards during the Global Civil War? Had Edwards somehow identified Rick with all that unresolved dogfighting? He recalled that Edwards had fallen in with Senator Russo's United Earth Defense Council after the war, and was one of those in favor of using the Grand Cannon against the Zentraedi. So perhaps there was something here that Edwards had never worked through-a hatred for anything connected with the SDF-l. After all, hadn't he deliberately resigned his commission with the Robbotech Defense Force to ally himself with the fledgling Army of the Southern Cross-Field Marshal Leonard, Lazlo Zand, Senator Moran, and that ratpack?

Minmei was the only other possibility Rick told himself, even while squeezing off another burst against the mutants. But Edwards apparently had her now, so why all this?

Rounding a turn in the corridor, Rick stopped short in front of one of the pedastaled communication spheres. Edwards was probably watching them right now!

Rick slammed his fist against what he took to be a control panel. "Come on, Edwards!" he shouted to the sphere. "Show yourself!" When nothing appeared, he punched the sphere itself; throttled the neck of the pedestal, kicked at its bubbled base.

"Show yourself!"

Rick caught a glimpse of Lisa's worried look as she rushed past him, and put two short bursts into the face of the sphere before hurrying to catch up.

Outside, the Ark Angel was still hammering away at the hives, the overloaded barrier

shields no longer translucent but frazzled now and bleeding thermal energy into the surrounding terrain. So much so that the Karbarrans had been revived.

Snow was falling in huge wet flakes, but the ground itself was as warm as toast. Some of the Inorganics and Shock Troopers wore carpets of slush on heads and shoulders, but that was about as close as the stuff got to Optera's suddenly superheated surface. The battlefield had become a patch of yin-yang weirdness: a summer blizzard.

But Death paid little mind to any of this; he continued his sweeps across the field, scythe reaping what it could of Invid and Karbarran alike.

Lron, Crysta, and Dardo were back on their feet, leading the charge once more, odors of singed fur and burnt flesh hanging in the vernal air. Perhaps as many as one hundred of their contingent had been killed with three times that number wounded, but the Karbarrans as a species had an instinctual way with such things-a way of meeting death head on and disempowering it. So, resigned to their losses and renewed by a thaw as artificial as the frost that preceded it, they attacked. And this time they had the Ark Angel's Veritech squadrons to back them up.

Most of the Alphas had reconfigured to Battloid mode. They stalked the Inorganics like fearless hunters, rifle/cannons seeking out marauding groups of Hellcats who had sliced their way through the Karbarran ranks, ursine blood glistening from the razor-sharp edges of their shoulder horns. Elsewhere, amid swirling snow turned green with spilled and airborne nutrient, Human and Invid mecha grappled for control of the sky.

Companies of confused Scrim, Crann, Odeon, and armored foot soldiers had fallen back to defend vulnerable places in the hives and slave-domes; but the Karbarrans were not to be denied their day of vengeance. The barrier shield would fall and the Home Hive would be theirs. The Invid would be contained at last and returned to the pits that had given them life.

The fireball emerged from a sphere of white-hot silence; it expanded, billowing and roiling like some nefarious cloud, the Tokugawa's, final moment.

Jean Grant averted her eyes from the harshness of the light, the harshness of that moment. The others on the Micronian balcony of the Valivarre bridge did the same, save for the Zentraedi commander, who seemed to find some fascination there. She had been Breetai's woman, this Kazianna Hesh, Jean understood; but who could tell what the female goliath was reading in those short-lived flames? The like fires that had claimed her warrior's heart perhaps; the heat death that would one day claim them all.

Vince was behind her, grim, closed in on himself. An implosion, a silence Jean knew could do more harm than good. She had not seen him quite like this since the GMU's fiery

demise. Let it go, she wanted to tell him. He had so wanted the peace proposal to be embraced; to see an end to this continuing madness. The devil's hand, he had said to her. On either side of him were Veidt and Cabell, neither of whom she could read.

The Valivarre had come to their rescue, gathered the shuttles and escape pods together into her enormous belly, and sped them all to safe distance, Edwards's SDF-7 and the Tokugawa already a memory. One remaining Invid troopship was out there somewhere-that scintillating mote in Optera's shadow?-but it had been crippled, reportedly, by a joint assault group of Battlepods and Skull Squadron Veritechs.

By the time Jean returned her eyes to the forward screen, the Tokugawa's fireball had spent itself; but local space was aswarm with glowing pieces of debris, flaming out as she watched. The husk of an Invid craft drifted into view, turning lazily toward the Valivarre's bow, and Jean saw Claudia Grant's face.

She heard Vince gasp.

The transmogrified Pincer Ship was soon falling toward darkside, but its brief transit had loosed a vision in Jean's mind-a glimpse of horrors yet to come, no matter what the outcome of this day. It was Earth, not Optera, she seemed to be gazing on now, and the Invid were there. Housed in a hive complex very much like the one below, a fleet of warships sent against it. But from Earth's surface a tower of radiant fire would arise-a shaft of mindstuff and alchemical quintessence that would reconfigure itself as it climbed. And it would take the shape of a celestial phoenix on the wing, huge and brilliant to behold.

And she saw it was the peace they sought. A peace beyond understanding; a co-mingling of things she could not identify, save two whose names were life and death.

"You said you wanted two Human subjects for the Pit, General," the Ghost Rider said to Edwards's distorted image in the center of the instrumentality sphere. "We got 'em right here."

"Show me," Jack heard Edwards order the soldier. Then someone shoved him and Karen forward toward the device's unseen visual pickups.

"Well," Edwards said, grinning. He leaned forward, face and features fisheyed. "Ensign...Baker, isn't it? And Harry Penn's firebrand. Karen, if I remember correctly." Edwards laughed. "Funny, you two ending up here."

"We could say the same thing, Edwards," Jack told him, getting a Wolverine muzzle in the ribs for his tone. Edwards told his minion to back off.

"We don't want to damage the goods, Sergeant." Jack cursed under his breath.

Karen had followed him into that black triangle his hands had unluckily opened in the endwall of the cul-de ac. An Invid scientist had dragged Jack in-down, actually, to some underground level of the hive. Five of Edwards's Ghost Riders had pointed weapons at him. And the next thing Jack knew, Karen was next to him, trying to fight off the two soldiers who had a hold of her, survival knife in one hand, Badger in the other.

"When am I going to learn?" she had said to him.

Yeah, well who invited you?...Is what he should have said. Instead of apologizing.

Fortunately, Baldan and Teal had had sense enough not to follow her.

"Take them to the Pit," Edwards was saying from the sphere. "I'll meet you there."

Edwards swung away from the pickup to glance behind him, and Jack got a good look at the room itself-a kind of classical interior, like the Greco-Romanesque rooms in Tiresia. Edwards's adjutant, Benson, was sitting in an over ize chair, teasing a Hellcat with a length of plasticized cord. But it was the strangely contoured bed that caught Jack's attention. Cuffed to what Jack supposed might be a headboard was Minmei. A hard-times Minmei at that.

Karen whispered, "Sure doesn't look like she's enjoying the honeymoon, does it?"

Jack risked a look over his shoulder. "You know how young brides can be," he started to say, but Karen shushed him.

"I've a few things to take care of first," Edwards told his lieutenant. "But stay on your toes. Apparently they aren't the only ones who have gotten into the hive. I'm sending some reinforcements to rendezvous with you."

The Ghost Rider saluted. "Any idea what you're going to make 'em into, sir?"

Edwards assumed a contemplative look. "Well, I'm not sure yet, Sergeant. I was thinking centaurs. But maybe I'll just try for a beast with two backs."

Kami waved Learna and Gnea forward into a corridor brighter than the rest, a primary of some sort, he guessed. There were dozens of commo spheres here, instrumentality junctions every few feet. Sendings from an ally up ahead in the hive's central chamber alerted him to danger. His remote eyes beheld shafts of vertical green light, Tzuptum's radiance captured by prismatic panels in the hive's roof, lured down into the chamber for a purpose he could not fathom.

Bela had remained behind to watch over her mother's body. Arla-non was beyond help by the time the Sentinels had reached her-Edwards's soldiers were dead-but Bela had insisted on staying with her, some secret Sisterhood ritual left to perform. Kami and Learna could see the change in Gnea's etheric body as well: violet swirls around her heart, a rain of lusterless crystal shapes throughout the whole of the aura.

The three were soon edging into the central chamber; Learna was the first to spy Edwards's Ghosts. There were five of them, moving at double-time through a room that could have been the chamber of a primate heart. Jack and Karen were pressed among them.

Without warning, Gnea dropped the lead Ghost; and before either of the Garudans had time to react, she had put an arrow through the upper leg of a second. The rest of the group turned and opened fire. Kami and Learna dove for cover, Badgers raised but held in check for fear of catching Jack and Karen in the crossfire. Gnea, however, seemed to have no such concerns; she hadn't even bothered to conceal herself, and was still brazening it out from the mouth of the corridor, launching arrows and Praxian imprecations into the room.

Jack and Karen, meanwhile, had thrown themselves to the floor. One of Edwards's men was about to turn his Wolverine on them, but Jack managed to roll the soldier's legs out from under him and wrestle the weapon from his grip. Karen shortly had another of them in a choke hold.

Kami saw Gnea go down-stitched shoulder to crotch by the only soldier still on his feet. Learna was leaping for the Human even now, and the allies had begun to keen. Kami swung around in time to see half-a-dozen Invid soldiers burst into the chamber, their forearm cannons primed for fire. He sent a warning to Learna and rushed forward, energy packets searing into the wall behind him. Both Baker and Penn had Wolverines now, and their unified fire cut one of the Invid in half, a stray shot from the soldier's canon exploding in the enemy's midst. In the middle of it all, Learna and the Human were going hand-to-hand. Kami tightened his grasp on his knife and lunged. At the same time, he heard Rick Hunter's voice find him from across the room.

They took a quick body count when the smoke cleared. All seven Invid were dead, three of them literally blown to pieces. Two from Edwards's squad had bought it; two more were seriously wounded. Gnea was alive, thanks to the padding of her armor, but she was going to need urgent attention. Kami volunteered to go back for Bela and see to it that Arla-non and Gnea were extracted. Jack and Karen updated Rick on their capture and short chat with Edwards. "You're certain it was Minmei?" Rick asked when they had finished.

Baker nodded. "And she didn't look too thrilled to be there, either. Edwards is holding her

prisoner."

"I knew it!" Rick said. "Everybody's been misreading her all along. She'd never get mixed up with someone like Edwards." He saw that Lisa was watching him. "What about Baldan and Teal?"

Karen spoke to that. "As far as we know, they're still headed for the brain."

Rick glanced at everyone. "All right, listen up. Lisa and I will continue on with Learna. Maybe we can beat Edwards to the Genesis Pit and surprise him there. Janice and Rem can go after Minmei." He shot Lisa a quick sidelong look, then turned to Jack and Karen. "We'll assume the Spherisians are still on track. You two see if you can catch up with them."

Jack was about to ask just how they were supposed to accomplish that-since Baldan and Teal had been the team's eyes and ears-when Rem shrugged out of the direction-finder backpack and handed it over to him.

"But how you gonna find Minmei?" Jack asked.

The Tiresian showed him an arrogant look. "I'm beginning to learn my way around," Rem said, eyes on Janice now. "You might even say I've been here before."

CHAPTER TWELVE

In a sense, the hives, the living computers, the Invid themselves were all made of the same stuff-even to some extent the chitinous armor of the Shock Troopers, Pincer Ships, and the rest. It could be said (and indeed it has) that the Invid were in reality the most mature form of the Flower of Life. The Flowers had been denied the right to procreate, and because of this the Invid were to become their agents of retribution.

Dr. Emil Lang, The New Testament

"He's dead," Teal said, standing up.

Baldan stared at the Human. The blood, the burned flesh, and ghastly smell sent a powerful wave of remorse through him. Ghost Rider or not, the being was still one of Hunter's own planetary brothers. First the Invid and now this, he thought. What was it in the Humans' makeup that made it so easy for them to kill one another? Better still, what was lacking in their evolution as a species that permitted them to kill one another? He used the memories of his namesake to recall a time when his own life-form had faced the challenge and conquered their primitive lusts. Even when the Masters came, the planetary consciousness would not allow for warfare or rebellion. And the same with the Invid. But how correct it now seemed to go along with the Humans' campaign; how simple and

straightforward a thing it had become to murder in the name of liberation.

"Baldan?" Teal said, a note of concern in her voice.

He shook himself from the sight and looked at her in an uncertain way. Why had this one set him thinking? he wondered. A long trail of death stretched halfway across the Quadrant now.

Four Humans and twice that number of Invid soldiers had fallen to the Spherisians' weapons since the cul-de-sac. They had searched for Jack and Karen, but decided ultimately to follow through with the mission. For Baldan, who felt a love for Karen he would never be able to express, let alone grasp, the decision had demonstrated just how warriorlike he had become-this tactical reasoning: the weighing of two lives lost against the many the success of their mission would save. That this should have been the world he showed Karen in the fenestella!

His progenitor, Baldan I, had been caught up in the war; but in a very real sense Baldan II had been born into the war. Born and shaped by it, a Spherisian unlike the rest, savior or fiend.

"Come," Teal ordered him. "We are arrived."

He nodded and followed her, trusting himself to her instincts, but equally sure of the vibrations his own read in the quivering floor of the hive. The brain was nearby, as close as the room ahead of them...

But neither of them was prepared for what they faced a moment later.

The two were no strangers to these living computers, and like the other Sentinels they had had direct dealings with the things on half-a-dozen worlds. Those, however, had been mere sections of this one-titanic and awe inspiring in its stories-high bubble-chamber. This was the one that commanded them all, the one that gave shape to the entire Invid network; and Baldan and Teal were quick to realize that Edwards and his army would be powerless without it.

The room itself was scarcely large enough to contain the brain, and most of it-organic-seeming walls, floor, and ceiling-had recently become incorporated into the brain's physical structure. On the death of the Regent, Baldan surmised.

Tentacular bundles of neural fibers had sprouted from the organ itself, and these trailed to the floor like rain orest vines and creepers, transforming every place they touched to amorphous clusters of animate tissue. The room pulsed with a kind of self-generated cerebral energy that danced across the convoluted surface of the brain like St. Elmo's fire and erupted from the mouth of the bubble hamber to wash the walls with febrile light.

Sounds hung like mist in the thick, electric air, quivering into audible frequencies as the Spherisians moved into the room.

The brain seemed aware of their presence, but somehow unconcerned. It was as though the Sentinels' coordinated strikes against the hive had so taxed its outpourings that it could scarcely accommodate some new and even more immediate intrusion.

Which is precisely the way Baldan and Teal preferred it. They had their weapons raised, aimed up at the bubble-chamber now.

"The underside," Teal suggested, gesturing to a bulbous, pituitarylike projection affixed to the brain's ventral surface.

Baldan upped the blast intensity of his rifle until it maxed out. "On my count," he told her.

And on three they fired-or tried to, at any rate.

They made a second attempt, but again the weapons failed. And before they could begin to puzzle it out, two sinuous tendrils of electrical anger had shot from the bubble-chamber to engulf them. The brain's defenses flailed at them, tearing the rifles from their hold and whipping Teal across the room with the force of its charge.

Rick thought it was the most horrible place the war had yet taken them. A columbarium, or hatchery of some sort, dark and reeking of decay, putrefaction and gangrene-a birthing center for monsters. Everywhere they looked, the remains of fibrous eggsacs and gelatinous afterbirth; lumps of organic stuff that had failed to take form-a trash heap of Invid parts, of hands and snouts and ophidian eyes. And there were mecha as well: row upon row of Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships, cockpits waiting to be filled with nutrient fluid and stuffed with pilots; cannons and anni-disk launchers ready for the infusion of Protoculture that would bring them to evil life.

Learna held the point, some Garudan ally directing her steps to the location of the Pit. To Edwards, Rick told himself, eager for the confrontation. Lisa was a few steps behind, and he opened the net to whisper to her.

"This is about the worst, the way I figure it."

"Not the worst, Rick," she said with a mournful sigh. "The saddest."

"I don't get you."

She stopped walking as he swung around to face her. "Can't you feel it? This is where she must have tried to birth her army-the one the Regent demanded of her." "The Regis, you

mean."

He saw her nod, and began to glance around him, more uncomfortable now than before. The saddest. A woman's intuition. Was this, then, how a nursery would look to the Invid Queen-Mother? he wondered.

A sudden flash behind him erased the thought, a follow-up explosion flattening him against the floor. He saw Lisa's legs when he opened his eyes; she was standing over him, the Wolverine coughing fire at something out of view. He tried to scramble up, but she fell over him, pinning him down. Simultaneously came a second blast, and a quick wash of heat.

Then all at once Lisa was up and running. Rick could see the crippled Invid ship, a Shock Trooper collapsed forward onto its pincer arms, nutrient running like green sap from its holed sensor.

Learna had been hit before Lisa's shot had taken the thing out.

"How bad is it?" Rick asked, coming over to the two of them, helmet faceshield raised. Lisa had pulled Learna's shirt up, slapped a pressure bandage high up on her furless belly.

"She'll live."

Learna's breathing was labored beneath the transpirator mask. "Can you make it back?" he asked her.

She told him she could. "But you can't go on without me."

Rick showed her a forced smile. "The Pit can't be much farther. We'll find it. Important thing is to get you back-"

"It's not that," she interrupted him. "It's Edwards."

Lisa put her hand behind Learna's neck and helped her to sit up. "What about Edwards, Learna?"

"His power...the Invid brain has given him power. He'll use it to confuse your thoughts."

Rick and Lisa traded looks. "We'll just have to take that chance."

"No!" Learna said, taking hold of his shirtfront. "You need me with you. The hin will protect us."

"You're in no condition-" Lisa started to say. "You need me with you!"

Rick held Learna's gaze for a long moment, those fox eyes above the rim of the transpirator mask. "She's right, Lisa. Our weapons aren't any match for him now."

"But Rick, we can't-"

"We're not going to," he said, shaking his head. "But maybe we can take the hin with us."

Lisa's eyes went wide with fear.

He put a hand on her shoulder. "We're both going to take a few breaths of Garudan atmosphere."

Minmei could sense that the drugs were beginning to wear off. And with that came pain's slow and steady return. Her body was scratched and bruised-wrists abraded from the cuffs, throat desperately sore from the battle her vocal cords had waged with Edwards's telepathic prompts. Each and every one of her joints ached; her left eye was swollen closed, two upper teeth knocked loose. Still, pain was better than the soporific effects of the drugs; pain was real and could be dealt with. It was hardly a time for sleep or dreams.

She was in the former Regent's private quarters, she knew that much-a complex of oddly shaped rooms with oversize furniture of an ancient design. The bed itself was the size of a flatbed truck; the headboard she was shackled to was a scrollwork affair fashioned from some unidentifiable alloy. Her supine position on the bed made it difficult to take in much more than that.

She could see, however, that she wasn't alone. Across the room Edwards's adjutant was lounging on a kind of throne. Lost in the massive thing, he looked like a little boy in a soldier's uniform enjoying a moment in his daddy's easy chair. Minmei couldn't suppress the small laugh that worked its way out of her, and Benson heard it. "Well, our little songbird is awake."

Songbird! Minmei thought, recalling the day Khyron had captured her. And Kyle...dear Kyle. "Don't use that word around me," she barked at him.

"Oh?" he said, getting up and walking toward the bed. "Lynn-Minmei's giving orders all of a sudden?"

The edge of the bed came well up to Benson's chest, and he was a pretty ridiculous sight standing there regarding her; but Minmei didn't like the look she saw in his eyes. "Where's T.R.?" she asked, straining to glance around the room.

Benson folded his arms, mulling something over. "He's down at the Pit, sweetheart-figuring to make monkeys out of some of the Sentinels."

The Sentinels! They're here?"

"Easy does it," he said, putting his hands on her shoulders to restrain her.

She made the mistake of spitting at him. "Take your hands off me."

Benson's eyes narrowed and his hands began to move down her body. "Who's going to know, Minmei? Take a look around you: you can scream till your heart's content." He leaned over to nuzzle her neck.

"Edwards will kill you!" she screamed. "Keep away from me!"

He laughed and climbed up onto the bed, eyes imagining the things he was going to do to her. "Please," she asked him. "Don't do this."

He began to kiss her. Minmei bit his lips, and let out a small cry as he struck her. He made a grab for her and she twisted away from him. He hit her again and she kicked him-a swift shot that bloodied his nose. And suddenly he wasn't looking at her with desire anymore; there was murder in his eyes.

"All right," she said, letting terror creep into her voice. "I'll do anything you want. Only take these handcuffs off me. Please."

Suspicion surfaced on his face, but Minmei nearly disposed of it with a more throaty appeal.

Benson uncuffed her.

She was ready for him now. He came toward her on all fours, a sly grin on his face, and she turned her voice on him-a note that welled up from somewhere so deep inside her it had no name. Benson howled in response, hands to his ears and face screwed up in pain. She knew that she had deafened him, but she sent another note his way just to make sure.

The sound hit him full-force, threw him completely off the bed. Minmei followed him, sustaining that note, tormenting him with vibrato and modulations. His hand went for his holstered blaster, and she let him have it again. Benson dropped to his knees, wailing his part of the litany.

They were standing at the threshold of the Regent's bathroom when he finally worked up the willpower to attack her. He struck while she was catching her breath and slammed her

hard against the doorway. Minmei managed a weak arpeggio, but it wasn't enough to stop him. He smacked her across the face and sent her skidding across the tiled floor on her belly. She felt his weight come down on top of her and shrieked for all it was worth. But Benson was too crazed to be deterred; he was pawing and pummeling her, working himself up to rape or murder or both.

Minmei put her hands beneath her and shoved as hard as she could. The two of them rolled over together and fell face first into the Regent's nutrient pool. Minmei surfaced, gasping and treading, Benson swimming toward her, wild yed and ravenous. She gulped and found her voice, bellowed and drove him back. Benson grabbed his head and submerged. She held her breath and went under to find him, feet atop his shoulders once she did, holding him under while the bubbles of his cries streamed upward. Benson was frantic beneath her, clawing at her feet and legs, but trapped by her weight.

Minmei sang an aria for the room, her voice echoing from the walls as a green tide sloshed from the pool and spread across the bath and bedroom floors. And finally the struggling subsided. She stroked through the thick fluid and heaved herself up onto the tiles, rasping for breath. The room was quiet, the pool settling itself once more.

Whimpering, she crawled away, most of the clothing torn from her body, her legs gashed and furrowed by Benson's fingernails.

She was almost to the threshold when he erupted from the pool like a sub-launched missile.

Minmei backed herself to the wall, fear and fascination lodging in her throat: Benson was no longer Human. The nutrient, Minmei's voice-a combination of the two and death itself had transformed him into a thing evolution would have wanted no part of. There were tentacles and feelers, limbs and appendages, organs and orifices, but nothing she could assemble into any whole, nothing her mind would allow her to see.

And then, as suddenly as it had appeared it was gone-annihilated by an energy bolt of blinding light that streaked in from somewhere in the bedroom. Minmei felt herself convulse as gore rained down around her.

Janice Em stepped into the room, reholstering her blaster. She looked over at Minmei and smiled. "What a team," she said.

Rem followed her in and went to Minmei's side, kneeling to wrap a garment around her quaking shoulders. "I-I remember you," Minmei said.

"In Tiresia," he told her. "Years ago."

"Where's Edwards?" Janice asked.

Minmei looked up at her partner turned warrior. "H-he went to s-somewhere called the P-pit."

"Then Rick's going to run right into him," Rem said. Minmei grabbed hold of him. "Please! We have to save Rick! There's so much I have to explain!"

Rem shushed her, comforting her with his hands. "But, Rick-"

"There may be time yet," Janice announced. She regarded Minmei with a cool look and began to reveal her android face.

The same atmosphere that kept Kami and Learna in touch with the psychic dimensions of the hin had nearly killed Rick and Lisa on Garuda. But that was after five minutes of forced exposure to the planet's atmosphere. This time it was different: one minute apiece of controlled inhalations from Learna's gas tank. Rick's decision was based on something Cabell had told him on Haydon IV shortly after the devices there had brought everyone around. Five minutes had almost proved a lethal dose; but one minute would permit most humanoid types a fleeting excursion through the hin without permanent side effects. They were deep in the hin for a long while, a world of shifting colors and swirling geometric shapes to their awakened pineal eyes, a world of interior landscapes where magic and power defined the horizon. On some biophysical level there was an awareness that they were still inside the Home Hive; but another part of them journeyed outside the confines of gravitation. They sailed and soared from one place of power to the next, vigilant and self-possessed, conversant with not only the songs of the hin wind but the voices of the allies. The guides and guardians of that separate reality took multiple forms, sometimes winged ones and sometimes not, but each took care to steer them closer and closer to the Pit and that black spot at the world's edge that was Edwards himself.

And try to confuse them he did: in hopes of leading them along paths that led nowhere but down; into pits that plunged straight to Optera's fiery heart. But the allies were on hand to assist them, and the battles fought were not of rifle and cannon but of vision and will.

It was all downhill from the birthing chamber: a series of cautious descents through those elevatorless transport shafts, which were something of a central feature in all Invid hives; then a claustrophobic passage through a kind of barracks area crowded with vascular mains, communal nutrient baths, and storage rooms.

Ultimately, however, Edwards recognized them and bade them enter his domain-a return to the world of flesh and fire his minions overruled.

Rick and Lisa were phasing in and out of the hin now, cognizant of the allies' warnings but forced to deal with the threats on a mostly physical plane. They were in a vast

underground arena that had been hewn from solid rock, transformed into a spiderweb arrangement of hive cells. And before them was the artificial crater that had worked these changes-a navel of primeval refulgent mist, a gateway to Optera's mysteries.

Edwards was standing on the opposite rim of the crater as they approached-a distance of not more than sixty feet. He looked much as he had on the Ark Angel's bridge screen, save for the studded headband, which he wore at a rakish tilt across the polished face of his skullplate.

"It's over," Rick called, his words returned by the cavern walls. He had the stock of the Wolverine wedged into his right armpit; Lisa held her own weapon at high port. "Call it off and you'll walk out-of here alive."

Rick's voice was confident, buoyed by the allies who were still fluttering overhead; but Edwards only laughed. "I want to congratulate you on making it this far, Mr. and Mrs. Hunter." The maniacal game-show host here, with a theatrical bow for an invisible audience. "But as they say back home, `the fat lady has yet to sing.'-See how you like her."

Something emerged from the Pit before either Rick or Lisa could squeeze off a burst. They fell back as the thing began to position itself between them and Edwards. It was an Invid-or had been, Rick decided-now reshaped to look like something out of Wagner by way of Looney Tunes. A fifteen-foot-high prima donna that bore a faint resemblance to Minmei under its horned helmet and reptilian skin. Rick and Lisa opened up on it as it started to sing.

Arms akimbo, Edwards frowned. "Didn't like that one, huh? Then try this."

The Genesis Pit birthed another re-imagined Special Child-an outsize Invid cherub with an energy bow. It fired while Rick and Lisa were gaping, a white-hot bolt spiking into the ground between them and throwing them apart. Rick came up shooting, holing the creature's wings, dropping it back into the Pit. But at the same time a small army of smaller beasts loosed by Edwards's fantasies were stumbling over the rim and headed straight for him. Quadruped fish and insectile birds; zany zoophytes and mammalian monstrosities; Invid mannequins and cigar-store Indians; miscreant Muppets and Seuss lookalikes; an array of reconfigured brutes, beasts, and B-movie beings on parade...

Rick and Lisa poured everything they had against the things. They were so intent on destroying these manifestations of his illness, for a time they forgot about Edwards himself. The Pit was frothing, hurricaning, determined to keep up with his telepathic commands.

Their weapons soon depleted, they waded into the parade with knives and rifle butts, Lisa bringing all her Praxian training to bear against the creatures. The things yelped and shrieked as they were stepped upon, crushed, booted into the air, lanced, stabbed, and

smashed against the walls of the cavern.

Rick began to wonder if he was fighting anything at all, or whether this was Edwards's way of perverting the altered state of the hin. Were they fighting things of their own imagination rather than his? he asked himself as he stepped deeper and deeper into their midst. He reached out for the allies, only to find that they had abandoned him nd who could blame them, really?

But in their stead were a dozen Ghost Riders. Two of them already had Lisa's arms pinned behind her; and three more rushed in to drag Rick up from the ground as Edwards approached them, walking the rim with his arms outstretched like an aerial performer. The creatures had vanished into thin air.

"Now," he began, contemplating Rick and Lisa and the Genesis Pit itself. "Whatever am I to make of you?"

Baldan was helping Teal over to one side of the brain chamber when Karen and Jack entered. They stood staring up at the pulsating organ for a moment, then Jack spied the two Spherisians and ran over to them. Karen could see the concern on Baldan's face; it was apparent that Teal was badly hurt.

"The weapons are useless," Baldan warned them before they could loose a shot at the bubble-chamber.

Jack slipped the location finder off his back and came down beside the injured Spherisian with a helpless look on his face. Behind him, the brain was in a state of agitation, streams of bubbles boiling to the surface of the flasklike tank.

"Edwards is making too many demands on it," Teal said weakly. She looked up into her son's eyes, this being she had shaped with her own hands. "We can do something about it now," she told him. She could see the puzzlement on all their faces. Baldan told her to save her strength, but she went on. "The brain is sending its power through the hive structure itself, mainly through the floor of the chamber. We can merge with the rock and attempt to shut off the flow."

"We would have to meld with the stone," Baldan said in a rush. "You'd never have enough strength to free yourself."

She showed him a wan smile. "I know. It was the same with your father on Praxis. But he showed me a way to a greater loyalty...I understand that now."

"Then birth yourself, Teal," Baldan pleaded. "I will shape your offspring as you shaped me!"

But Teal could only shake her head. "I am not possessed of sufficient strength to do both, Baldan. We must act quickly."

Baldan tried to resist, but Karen shook her head. "You have to try. All of our lives are at stake."

Baldan stood up and walked partway around the base of the bubble-chamber. On a nod from Teal he began to slip himself into the rock ground. Teal did the same, Jack and Karen marveling at her absorption into the planetary surface. Her features were visible for a moment, a bas-relief on the floor, then she melded entirely with the rock and disappeared.

Above them, meanwhile, the brain continued to pulse and throb, transmitting its energy to feed Edwards's will.

"The Tracialle reports that the Karbarrans have punched through the hive," a Human tech on the Valivarre bridge told the Grants, Cabell, and Veidt.

A cheer went up from the mixed crew of REF personnel, Zentraedi, and Sentinels.

"The barrier shields are down and the Invid are in full retreat," the woman continued. "It sounds like chaos down there. The Inorganics are firing at anything in their sights-which happen to be mostly Invid foot soldiers now that the Karbarrans have turned the tide."

Vince squeezed his wife's hand and allowed a brief smile to emerge. "Any word from the Ark Angel?"

The tech relayed the question and listened for a moment. "Tracialle reports that the ship has sustained serious damage from the hive guns and skirmish ships; but it remains spaceworthy."

"And the commando teams?" Jean said.

The Praxians and Garudans have been exfiltrated. Learna and Gnea are WIA. Arla-non is dead."

Cabell and Jean gasped. Veidt grew silent.

The others," Vince said softly. "Rick, Lisa, Karen..."

The tech shook her head. "No word, sir."

Jack and Karen saw the brain spasm and nearly throw itself from the open top of the bubble-chamber. A network of pulsating vessels that coursed across the organ's right hemisphere ruptured, bleeding a sickly colored stain into the tank. The neural vines overhead were moving about like storm-tossed trees, tearing themselves from their purchase on the hive walls and falling to the floor with a cascade of evanescent energy.

Jack took Karen's hand and made for the entryway as a tight bundle of fibrous cables collapsed around them.

The floor was vibrating, cracking open in places, the bubble-chamber tipped like the Leaning Tower.

"It's working!" Jack screamed above the noise. "The freakin' thing's gonna have a stroke!"

"Something's wrong," Edwards said, fingertips to the headband. "What's going on?"

"Shields have failed," one of his Ghost Riders reported from a commo sphere.

Rick could see that the sphere image was wavering, derezzing.

"Looks like we got a bunch of goddamned grizzlies in the hive, General."

"Karbarrans," Edwards muttered. "Get me Benson." The man bent to his task and said, "Can't raise 'im, sir."

Edwards cursed and shot Rick and Lisa a hateful look. "Lieutenant," he said without turning aside, "it might be best if you and your men readied our shuttle for departure."

"What about these two?"

Edwards grinned and drew his hip howitzer. "We'll get along famously. Just see to it that you secure us a way out of here."

"Will they be coming along, sir?"

Edwards glanced at the Pit. "No, I don't think so." Rick and Lisa waited until the last of the Ghosts left before they made their move.

Edwards appeared to be distracted by something the headband was sending his way; but no sooner did the two Sentinels leap into action when he whirled on them, eager and deadly. Lisa's foot slapped the Badger aside, but Rick took Edwards's return kick full-force in the chest and went down breathless, clutching broken tissue and bone. Lisa downhanded Edwards's torque punch and managed to land a lightning series of blows to

the unshielded side of his face, but Edwards stayed on his feet and snapped an elbow to her temple, a lethal front kick to her chin.

Rick heard Lisa's neck snap back as she fell spread agled to the floor. He threw his body into a twist and caught hold of Edwards's legs, but Edwards reversed the sweep and tagged him in the gut and groin with his boot tips. Rick moaned and rolled over, crawling after him as he closed on Lisa.

She saw Edwards in time and threw her legs up into a scissors lock around his neck. Rick hit him from behind at the same moment, slamming at kidneys and ribs. Edwards collapsed forward, prying Lisa's legs apart as he fell, then adroitly turned out from under Rick's rain of blows. Lisa clawed him, going for his good eye. But Edwards was up in a flash, a handful of her hair in his right hand. She screamed as he yanked her backward, hands flailing at his grip, boot heels banging against the floor.

Rick stopped short when he saw the pain in her eyes. "Okay," he told Edwards, panting, all but doubled over. "I was hoping you'd go for me," Edwards said, breathing hard himself, his cheek gashed by Lisa's fingernails. "All right, so you got your wish. Now let her go." Edwards tightened his grip instead. "I could easily break her neck, Hunter. The brain's given me a lot more than you realize."

Rick checked an impulse to rush him again and be done with it. But by this time Edwards had pulled Lisa over to where the Badger had fallen and had the weapon in his hand. He threw Lisa roughly aside.

"I can't tell you how long I've waited for this," he rasped.

Rick went to Lisa's side and helped her up. "Why, Edwards? What's it all been about? Is it Fokker? I mean, Roy told me you were a fascist from way back when-all your Neasian merc work. You wanted an army of automatons, is that it? And you saw your chance with the Invid. So why single us out?"

Edwards readjusted the headband. A look of misgiving swept across his face, but a grin was forthcoming. "It was Fokker in the beginning, Hunter. I'll grant you that. Fokker and all you SDF-1 heroes. You and your Zentraedi pals almost ended things for all of us."

"Come on, Edwards," Rick sneered. "It was the UEDC, you know that. Russo and..."

Edwards laughed. "Go ahead, say it: Russo and who?" Rick looked over at Lisa. "I'm sorry."

"Russo and Hayes," Edwards filled in. "Let's not forget your wife's old man, Hunter. It was his idea as much as anyone else's to use the Cannon."

"Then why blame us? Gloval was against it-we all were."

Edwards winced and put a hand to the headband. Behind him the Genesis Pit loosed a flash of unharnessed energy.

It's coming apart, Rick thought. Baldan and Teal must have made it to the brain.

Edwards glared at him and ripped away his faceplate, revealing a dead eye at the apex of two hideous diagonal scars. "This is why!" he screamed, gesturing to his face. "This is why I hate the two of you."

Rick and Lisa exchanged baffled looks.

"No, of course you don't understand," Edwards continued. "But maybe if I told you how this happened you'd begin to get the picture. You see, I was there that day, Hunter. I was at Alaska Base."

Lisa inhaled sharply. "But...but that's impossible."

Another flash of energy escaped the Pit, but Edwards ignored it. "Oh, no," he assured her. "Not impossible. You remember where you were?"

Lisa did. She had been ordered to see about a glitch in a shielded commo relay substation. There were sights and smells she didn't want to recall...amber light...barely enough fallback power to keep her console functioning. Then her screen had come alive momentarily: multicolored lines of static and an image of her father's face, broken by interference. And she could see he was still in the command center, a few figures moving behind him in the gloom, lit by occasional flashes of static or electrical shorts?

"I was there," Edwards was saying. "I was there when you and your father said your last good-byes."

Lisa looked terrified by the revelation. "But I thought...I saw the screen go dark. I was sure-"

"But you never bothered to check!" Edwards seethed. "Neither of you!"

Rick, too, was recalling that day. He remembered maneuvering his Skull Veritech through a confining space of exploding power ducts and ruptured energy mains; using the Guardian's phased-array laser to burn a circular hatch through a thick shield door; Lisa rushing into his arms from the end of a short interconnecting passageway.

"Edwards," Rick said quietly. "I-"

"You what, Hunter? I saw the two of you leave...She was on your lap, wasn't she? Such a cute pair. Meant for each other." Edwards's face contorted as the headband drove something unseen into his mind. He wedged his fingers underneath it, as though to keep it from constricting his scalp. The Pit belched a mad torrent of flames. "Edwards!"

"I called out to you, Hunter...I crawled across that molten glass terrain on my belly praying for you to hear me." Edwards tore the sensor band from his head and collapsed to his knees in pain. He turned to glance at the Pit and motioned to it with the Badger. "You left me in hell up there, and I'm going to do the same for you. Now move, both of you."

"Don't do this, Edwards," Rick said. "I'm the one who left you behind. Let Lisa go."

Edwards laughed in spite of the pain that was radiating through him. "The hero right to the end, huh? Well, save it. The only thing that kept me alive was thinking about how I was going to pay you back. There's nothing you can say now that'll change that."

Rick was about to give if another shot when a voice behind him said: "Maybe there's something I can say, T.R." He and Lisa turned around to find Minmei standing there. She was bruised and battered, more naked than dressed.

"Let them go, T.R.," she said, walking toward the rim of the Pit. "You've lost everything you worked for. But you can still have me if you let them live. I'll do whatever you ask."

"Minmei, no!" Lisa screamed.

Edwards roared a laugh. "Oh, what a day for heroism! And what a sweet thing is revenge!" He extended his right arm to her. "Come to me, my pet."

Minmei nuzzled into his open arm and wrapped her own arms around his waist. "You'll let them go, then?" Edwards looked down at her and smiled. "Sorry, love, but you know how it is: I have to do what I have to do." Minmei smiled back and said, "And so do I, T.R." Edwards blanched and tried to pull away from her, catching sight of something in her eyes more evil than in his own. Then he let out a long, agonized groan of pain and terror as Minmei tightened her hold on him.

Rick and Lisa were too stunned to utter a sound.

It was Janice they saw now, Janice in android guise, lifting Edwards off his feet and carrying him toward the crater. He was howling loud enough to be heard over the Pit's fiery welcome, the chords of his neck stretched like cables, his face as red as the world awaiting him.

Janice's steps were measured and precise along the gentle incline. At the top she turned to look back at Rick and Lisa, and readjusted her load so that Edwards sat in her arms like

a bride about to be carried over the threshold. Then she commenced her walk into the fire, Edwards's screams accompanying them down.

Lisa had her face buried in her hands.

Rick watched the flames lick at Edwards's blond hair and Janice's artificial flesh. Soon the fire and smoke engulfed them and the Pit let out a wailing deathsound of its own. The hive seemed to shut down around them, as though Optera itself had died, blinded by light and staked through its very heart.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The mop-up operation on Optera was carried out in an orderly fashion; but even so it required the better part of two Standard Months to complete. Outlying areas of the Invid Home Hive had been destroyed by the Karbarran assault, and the inner domes that comprised the central complex had sustained heavy damage from the Ark Angel's runs. The so-called living computer, which had choreographed the Regent's, then General Edwards's mad designs, had ultimately surrendered to the Spherisians' damming action and was in complete ruin when I saw it. Jack and Karen had pulled Baldan to safety before the explosion, but Teal had died there. The Genesis Pit, too, had succumbed, and was little more than a slumbering pool of genetic waste when the Ark Angel departed Optera pace. In fact, it struck me at the time that our actions had to some extent catapulted the entire planet into a state of suspended animation; but I came to see this as a kind of healing retreat, a gathering-in that would allow for a healthy reawakening. We would do the same, both individually and collectively, although the irony of that escaped me.

There were no true spoils to claim after our years-long campaign; not that the war had ever been waged with such ends in mind. Optera was barren, devoid of the very Flowers it had brought into the world. Left to us was the task of dismantling the devices the Invid had fashioned to seek out and resecure their stolen grail. The Inorganics he Hellcats, Odeon, Scrim, and Crann-were destroyed; the Shock Troopers and Pincers and Enforcers drained of nutrient and slagged by Tzuptum's own heat. As for the Invid survivors themselves, the remaining scientists and soldiers-a pitiful, seemingly mindless group-they were kept under what amounted to house arrest by a garrison the Karbarrans left behind. The more I learned of Optera's sad tale, the more sympathetic I grew. But my sorrow was hardly confined to Optera and the Invid; it stretched clear across the Quadrant to Earth and the host of injustices we had all suffered directly or indirectly at the Masters' hands.

The Tracialle would eventually return to Karbarra, putting in at Spheris, Garuda, and Haydon IV along the way. Baldan confessed to me that he would have preferred accompanying us to Tirol; but at the same time he was homesick for Beroth, a city he remembered as one would a dream. And, with Teal lost to him, homesick for Tiffa-the

mother, or grandmother, or halfmother he hardly knew at all. Teal's death weighed heavy on him, as it did on all of us.

It was the same for Kami and Learna and the other Garudans: Tirol was a temptation, but an easy one to resist when the hin beckoned.

Saying good-bye to Gnea and Bela was the most difficult thing I had to do. I have all that I could want in Rick and Roy now; but there were bonds formed between the Praxians and me that will know no equal in my life. If I did not exactly come of age alongside them, I certainly came to womanhood. The Tracialle would return them to Haydon IV, along with Veidt, where Bela would assume leadership of the Sisterhood.

The Ark Angel and Valivarre limped back to Tirol. Both ships' superluminal drives had been damaged in the battle and it was nearly a year before we entered the Valivarre system. The journey itself was uneventful, save for the birth of Kazianna's son, which we all took to be a wondrous and hopeful sign. Jean, especially-the Quadrant's most diminutive midwife. It goes without saying that the Zentraedi were overjoyed, and someone aboard the Ark Angel pointed out that we were witnessing the rebirth of a race, the Valivarre an ark of its own all of a sudden. There were three more pregnancies among them before we made planetfall.

Hearing news of this reawakening, and seeing young Drannin for the first time-all one hundred pounds of him-was, I think, at least partly responsible for Rick's and my decision. Not to mention Aurora and the fact that almost everyone onboard the Ark Angel seemed to be pairing up Karen and Jack, Rem and Minmei, and so many others. But I'm also convinced that my lingering sense of confusion about the war, my grief over the deaths of Teal and Arla-non, Sarna and Janice, played an important part. Besides, I remember deciding that a child would be a birthday present to myself on my fortieth. (Strange to recall that first pregnancies so "late" in life were not very long ago regarded as dangerous for mother and child.) Rick turned out to be more than just supportive but positively enthusiastic. I'm certain he was guided by thoughts and feelings similar to my own, although he never articulated this to me.

I remember my first glimpse of the SDF-3 upon entering Fantomaspace, the fortress amid a string of pearly moons, silhouetted against the inconstant face of that ringed giant. For a moment it felt as though no time had passed, but tangible evidence of those intervening years soon presented itself to us in a most baffling way: in the form of a fleet of partially readied warships caught up in Tirol's hold like some school of deadly fish. I suppose our puzzlement had something to do with the long trip home and the nature of the peaceful thoughts that had begun to overtake us. Perhaps we were foolish to be so hopeful; foolish after all we'd been through that quarter-century to believe that wars were something that could be laid to rest.

We were also shocked to see the changes and transformations that had taken place on Tirol in our absence hich for some of us had amounted to almost five Earth-standard years. Tiresia had not only been rebuilt but expanded; so much so that its industrial sections now encompassed the very foothills that had witnessed our first land confrontation with the Invid. The city was a thrill to behold, with its phantasmagorical mix of Greco-Roman and ultratech architecture. Robotechnology had worked the same miracles on Tirol we had all grown to take for granted in Macross and Monument; and the REF saw to it that we were paraded through Tiresia's reconfigured city cape-Sentinels, Zentraedi, and Tokugawa squadrons alike-and given a hero's welcome.

Then, after a week or so of reunions and festivities, the Plenipotentiary Council lowered the boom on us. The council had convened in special session aboard the SDF-3 for the disclosures, while in Tiresia at the same time the surviving members of Edwards's Ghost Riders were being court-martialed. I sometimes wonder just who Professor Lang and the others thought they were protecting by withholding the results of their findings for over a year. And I have often asked myself how my own choices might have been affected had I known on the Ark Angel what the council was soon to make public.

That neither Carpenter nor Wolff had been heard from. That "the year" was not 2025 but 2030.

That the Invid Regis had learned of Earth.

That all at once we were all five years older, and sadder if not wiser.

Lang's teams had yet to perfect the Reflex drives that would enable us to fold instantaneously to Earthspace. Carpenter and Wolff were somewhere in the middle of their "five-year journeys"; and even if the SDF-3 could have been folded on that very afternoon, our arrival would come some four years after the Masters' own. It was incredible: the idea that we would have to retrace our tracks across the Quadrant to wage the same campaign all over again asters, Invid, and Protoculture. In effect, the REF and the Masters had simply swapped worlds!

Actually the REF had little choice but to relive its past-part of it, at any rate. For six years we had endeavored to assemble a mission of peace; now we had to plot a mission of war; complete the armada T. R. Edwards had begun, and launch it across the galaxy against Earth itself. Short of that we needed a time-travel device-something to spirit us to Earth ahead of the Tiresians.

We might as well have prayed for divine intervention. But we were nothing if not equal to the task, our destinies reshaped so often that even these latest realities came as no lasting shock. Callous, stoic, resigned, blindly faithful beneath all our godlessness? I

hardly knew how to characterize us any longer. Would the Earth we left behind even recognize us any longer as its own children?

Work commenced in earnest; but we still lacked sufficient quantities of the one commodity that could guarantee victory-Protoculture. There was enough to equip perhaps a dozen ships, several hundred Veritechs; but Reinhardt and Forsythe and the rest of the general staff were talking about hundreds of warships, thousands of Veritechs. Enough to defeat the Masters' spade fortresses, with enough in reserve to promise the Invid Regis a costly defeat. In search of a new matrix, Lang and Cabell threw themselves into the task of replicating Zor's original experiments with the Flowers of Life. Lang, especially, had been counting on Rem's cooperation; but Rem took an unexpected path. The events of the past four years had indeed brought Zor's genius to the fore, but Rem was only interested in completing what his genetic donor had begun. So while Lang's Robotechnicians sat scratching their heads, Rem was returning to Optera to supervise its reseeding.

The events of those post-war years in Tiresia are well documented, and it is not my aim here to recount what has already been set down by hands more gifted than my own. Roy is my lasting memory and joy from that time. He was born at the height of that frenetic Robotech surge that swept over Tirol, but I had promised myself to keep him insulated from it for as long as I could, and by and large I was successful. Rick and I made a conscious choice to withdraw for a time; and I think the council was secretly pleased by this development. Heroes to some, we were at the same time symbols of the schism, the wounds that had not yet healed.

So we went on a honeymoon, and remembered what it was like to live without weapons. Rick had convinced someone over at R&D to build us a facsimile of a Fokker E-3 Eindecker-the plane his father had flown in the circus-and Rick had Roy airborne before his first birthday.

We saw a lot of Vince and Jean then, and Karen and Jack-who were always on the edge of engaged. Minmei seemed the most changed among us. She was hospitalized for much of that first year, and was silent and reclusive when she emerged. She used to speak of Lynn-Kyle as though she had seen him only yesterday; had it not been for Rem, I shudder to think what might have become of her. We heard from Max and Miriya periodically; but years would pass before we would see them again.

It was a happy time, in spite of everything-where we were, and just what it was we were assembling above Tirol's pale skies.

Then events began a subtle slide...

Rem returned from reseeded Optera and supplied Lang with the data his teams needed to complete the matrix. And suddenly the REF had Protoculture and the war machine was on

the roll once more. By the end of that same year, Lang had found a way to reduce the time required for spacefold to Earthspace to two years, and already the first attack wing, the so-called Mars Group, was being readied for launch. (It was the Plenipotentiary Council's idea to subdivide the REF into groups whose namesakes were Sol's very own children. This, to instill a new generation of warriors with an allegiance to the world they had left behind and were perhaps about to die for. Lang's own god on and onetime assistant, Scott Bernard, and his girlfriend, Marlene Rush, were slated for the group. The Jupiter Group would launch some months later. Lang's own group, the R&D teams and such-known collectively as the Saturn Group-were to be included in the final wave, along with the SDF-3 itself)

At the same time the Council of the Local Group-made up of representatives from Haydon IV, Tirol, Karbarra, Garuda, Spheris, and Peryton-had offered Optera to the homeless Praxian Sisterhood, and Bela had accepted. Rick and I had mixed feelings about this because of the continued Invid presence on the planet; but few shared our concerns. Now the REF not only had a matrix to call its own, but an allied planetful of Flowers to harvest for its purposes.

Optera was renamed "New Praxis. "

All these things were beginning to threaten and erode the false world Rick and I had been creating. But the fact that we voluntarily uprooted ourselves from Tiresia to reassume our commands aboard the Ark Angel is perhaps some indication that we sensed what was in store. In fact, we were together on the bridge of the ship when fate conspired to bring that tranquil hiatus to an irrevocable end. Reports reached Fantomaspace from throughout the local group that the remaining Invid on those worlds had, in the blinking of an eye, vanished. From Haydon IV, where some of the Regis's children had remained in residence; from Spheris, where others had been imprisoned; from New Praxis itself, where the Regent's defeated troops had been forced into an uneasy partnership with their Karbarran jailers and Praxian landlords. Scientists, soldiers, slumbering brains.

Vanished!

It was Lang's belief that the Invid Queen-Mother, the Regis, had found Earth; and had, in some unfathomable way, reached back across the galaxy to reclaim the children she and her late husband had abandoned. Exedore (who was still on Haydon IV at the time) maintained that something catastrophic had occurred on Earth to call her there-something that had to do with an unprecedented eruption of the Flowers of Life. Later, when Max and Miriya and Aurora arrived from Haydon IV, we would come to understand a bit more of this.

In the meantime, however, the worlds that the Sentinels had helped to liberate wanted nothing more than to rally behind the REF'S cause-to help free our homeworld from that scourge that had held their own worlds in its evil grasp. No one knew how long it would

take the Regis to launch her invasion against Earth, or even whether that battle would be fought against Terrans or their Robotech Masters; but the moment had arrived for an all-out push to complete and arm the first assault wave and send it on its way.

The Mars and Jupiter Group ships were delicate ooking vessels that made me think of swans in flight, with long tapering necks and swept-back wings. But the Karbarran factories were soon producing a new breed of dreadnought for what would someday make up the bulk of the main armada-crimson-bellied battlecruisers shaped like stone-age war clubs; dorsal finned tri-thrusters; and Alpha Veritech transports that resembled old-fashioned water boilers. Garuda and Spheris and even Peryton were all sending workers to beef up the Karbarran's factories and mine the peat that was being used for the ships' Sekiton fuel.

The Ark Angel had departed from Haydon IV shortly before the birth of Max and Miriya's second child, Aurora. She was four years old by the time Rick and I first set eyes on her, and although we had seen the transvids and heard all the reports about her rapid development and extraordinary talents, the experience left us dumbfounded. Only two years older than our Roy, and she looked, spoke, and behaved like a ten-year-old! She was a raven-haired sprite ike child with huge dark eyes, wearing a short, flowing Haydonite garment of white and gold on the day she stepped from the shuttle. Her tiny waist was encircled by a broad belt and her wrists and throat banded by the same red-brown hide. Miriya had weaved a garland for her hair Flowers of Life from the orchards of New Praxis. She seemed such a vision of peace that Tiresian morning...And yet it was difficult for me to think of those Flowers as anything but martial in aspect and design, fueling as they were our fleet of warships, our arsenal of mecha-Veritechs, reconfigurable Cyclones, Hovertanks, and the like.

But perhaps I was confusing the Flowers with the Protoculture. Innate evil doesn't exist in this narrow dimension we call our world; only unbiased potential given evil purpose.

Max and Miriya had changed-dramatically. Rick confided to me that he was so taken aback he could scarcely see Max as the same ace who had once led the Skull to glory, who had so distinguished himself in the Southlands, whose mechamorph maneuvers had become the stuff of text and legend. Unlike the rest of us, they had found a clear path to peace-through Aurora, I imagine. It did, however, occur to me that the REF had this same path open to it even at this late stage: we had Tirol, new lives under a new star, a local group of friends and allies, a corner of the Quadrant we could help to maintain and sustain, steer along any one of a thousand different courses...But I realized at the same time that we could never rest easy with such a choice. Not until Earth was liberated, her devastated spirit returned to her, her peoples free to make that same decision.

I recall the heartbreak I saw in Jean and Vince's eyes as they watched the Sterlings with Aurora. I had Roy to hold to my breast. But where, I could almost hear Jean asking herself,

was her son?

If we had known then just what it was that had brought Max and Miriya to Tirol, the question need not have been asked.

Rick and I completed our transfer from the Ark Angel to the SDF-3 after the Mars Group launched and folded. Things were hectic but stable for most of that year (2034). Our only hurdle was a personal one, involving a young photojournalist who had fallen in love with Rick. I suspect that the woman's infatuation with him went well back to the beginning of the Sentinels' campaign; the trouble was that she wasn't some starry-eyed teenager with a mad crush now, but an attractive, capable, and assertive threat. The way I saw it. And with no apologies. I had Roy to think of, my duties aboard the SDF-3, and I certainly wasn't about to add Rick to my list of concerns. So I saw to it that Max and Vince had the woman transferred to the Jupiter attack group.

It seemed important at the time, but insignificant a month later when Jonathan Wolff's ship appeared out of nowhere, deep in the icy outer limits of the Valivarre system. We were beside ourselves with excitement and anticipation, certain that Wolff was on a return course from Earth-not, as some were saying, at the close of a space ime circle that had failed from the start to deliver him there. Suddenly we found ourselves on the verge of having all our questions answered about Earth and the Robotech Masters, Earth and the Invid Regis...

I can still picture us gathered around the monitors in the Tactical Information Center; frozen by speakers in corridors, bays, holds, and cabinspaces aboard the fortress; stopped in our tracks in Tiresia...The entire REF waiting to hear some word from the only crew who had been there and back.

The first transmission from that ship is infamous now; so much was said in so few words, it left us speechless. "This is Dana Sterling," the voice began, "former lieutenant with the Fifteenth Alpha Tactical Armored Corps of the Army of the Southern Cross."

Dana Sterling!

The Army of the Southern Cross!

Not since the Ark Angel's arrival in Tirolspace and Professor Lang's subsequent revelations to the council had the REF experienced such a comingling of emotions. Wolff's ship had indeed made it back to Earth. And the Army of the Southern Cross had prevailed. Or had they?

Base Tirol turned out en masse for the ship's planetfall. Only Max and Miriya seemed unfazed by the event; and I remember thinking that they had somehow expected this all along. Later, I would learn of the telepathic link Aurora and Haydon IV's enigmatic

instrumentality had helped them establish with Dana.

I recognized her immediately, that lithe body, mischievous smile, swirling globe of blond hair. And beside her, grown to manhood, Bowie Grant. My heart was so filled with joy that I scarcely paid attention to the other members of the cruiser's skeleton crew Angelo Dante, Sean Phillips, and Marie Crystal among them-but I did notice something in all their eyes that reinforced my thoughts about how splintered we had become as a planetary race. While the REF had grown undeniably warlike, we had also remained confident and self-possessed. But these young people were wary and nihilistic; it was as though they had journeyed not from twenty-first-century Earth, but from the world of Earth's Middle Ages.

I hardly had time to register these thoughts when the clones began to show themselves-Tirol's lost and now Masterless tribe, led home by the twin Mistresses of the Cosmic Harp, Musica and Allegra.

Over the course of the next few days Dana and her 15th filled us in on thirteen years of Earth history. We learned how the Army of the Southern Cross had come to power; of the rise and fall of Wyatt Moran and Anatole Leonard. We listened to tales of Earth's atavistic plunge into feudalism and open warfare; of the coming of the Robotech Masters, and what had been dubbed the Second Robotech War.

A few of us were privy to the bizarre events that had unfolded around Dana and Dr. Lazlo Zand, and a second Zor-clone the Masters had named Zor Prime. And we finally understood what baby Aurora meant when she had warned her sister about the spores.

But if some of our questions had now been answered, there were just as many that remained unresolved. There had been no sign of the Invid Regis or her children, but the Flowers of Life were there in abundance. Dana's own visions had prompted her to warn Earth's leaders of the impending threat, but the planet was in no condition to defend itself. Wolff was back, but to hear Dana tell it, he was no longer the able commander we once knew. The factory satellite had also returned to Earthspace, but it was useless and could do little more than deliver a pretense of defensive capabilities-hardly enough to fool the Invid Queen-Mother for very long.

Miraculously, however, Dana's ship carried more than refugees. Thanks to the work of a brilliant young scientist named Louie Nichols, the ship's mainframes held the data Lang needed to perfect the spacefold generators. And within six months the drives of the main fleet ships were entirely revamped.

On the heels of this came the development of the Shadow Fighters and the neutron "S" missiles, meant to be the REF's last-ditch weapons: radiation bombs that would render the Earth as sterile and lifeless as the Zentraedi's deathbolts had left Optera generations before.

There was one evening in Tiresia that found all of us together-Vince, Jean, and Bowie; Max, Miriya, Aurora, and Dana; Rem and Minmei; Karen and Jack. Max was saying something about Haydon IV, and Roy was playing at Rick's feet with Polly, the Pollinator Dana had brought with her from Earth. Word had come of the Mars Group's crushing defeat, but the Jupiter Group had been launched and our own window was fast approaching. I remember asking myself whether this mission would bring an end to our decades-long quest for peace. I sat there strangely distanced from my family and friends, trying to imagine the invasion we had planned-our emergence in Earthspace and our coordinated attacks against Reflex Point, as the Regis's hive complex had been dubbed. And for the life of me I could not envision it. I had an unshakable feeling that the invasion had already occurred and that somehow we had been left out of it.

It was a dreamlike awareness; a sense that we were about to embark on a mission none of us had foreseen.

From Recollections: The Tirol Years, by Lisa Hayes-Hunter

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

It remains a mystery how the Regis was able to collect and convey the scattered remnants of her race clear across the Quadrant, but we can now state with some certainty that we know where she assembled-or, as it were, reassembled-her army and fabricated the warships and terror weapons she would employ in her conquest of Earth. Recent discoveries on Beta Centaurus VI have revealed the existence of craterlike anomalies believed to be extinct Genesis Pits. (See Extraterrestrial Archeology, Disc 712, Volume xxxii, "An Interpretation of the Prometheus Mission's Caldera Findings on Beta Centaurus VI," by Dr. Brian Fox.) It is interesting to speculate whether the Regis, in one form or another, reconned Earth before she created the Pits; or whether it was already in her consciousness at that time to duplicate the war machine her husband had already brought to bear against Humanity on the other side of the galaxy.

Gitta Hopkins, Queen Bee: A Biography of the Invid Regis

"Admiral on the bridge!" A young officer announced as Lisa stepped through the hatch.

She put him at twenty-two; twelve when they left Earth, half her age now. Fortunately, he was the youngest member of the bridge crew. The rest were veterans like herself illiamson, Hakawa, Price, up from engineering. And if she should need to look to someone older, there was always Forsythe. He had been acting admiral for the duration of her time with the Sentinels, but had only recently put in for a voluntary reduction to the rank of captain, which allowed him to function as Lisa's co-commander. He was showing her a knowing smile at the moment, perhaps discerning some of her troubling thoughts.

Lisa coughed and cleared her throat, returning the lieutenant's salute, then extending her hand. "Mister..."

"Toler, ma'am," he said brightly, shaking her hand. "Er, sir, I mean."

"At ease, Lieutenant," she told him, smiling. "We can be a little more casual here than in the rest of the ship."

"Yes, sir. Thank you, sir."

"Just stay sharp and we'll get along fine."

"I'll do that, sir."

Forsythe was beside her when she turned to head for the command chair, right hand to the visor of his cap. "Welcome aboard, Admiral," he grinned.

Lisa gave him a quick hug and eased herself into the seat.

It was all coming back to her as she knew it would, flooding her thoughts with memories of the mistimed jump that had brought them here, Minmei and Janice in the EVA craft they had pirated from the factory satellite, Invid ships at the edge of Tirol's envelope. The big change then had been simply the fact that she was in command. Now command came as second nature, and the news was that she had a toddler waiting in the nursery.

She permitted these thoughts a brief run, then turned her attention to the tasks at hand. She studied displays on heads-up screens and peripherals and listened to the crews' updates on systems' status. At the end of a long tunnel lay Earth; but she could not yet fix that image in mind. Tirol, Fantoma, and Valivarre were conspiring in the forward viewport to keep her anchored here, these stars and reconfigurable constellations that had spun about her world for almost ten years.

"Message from Base Tirol, sir," Toler said.

"Go ahead, Mr. Toler," Lisa told him.

"It's from Cabell, Admiral," he added after a moment. "He wishes you a safe and speedy return, and looks forward to being the first to welcome you back to Tiresia."

Lisa smiled, biting back a wave of nostalgia and more. "Tell him I expect no less, Mr. Toler. And that Tirol will always remain bright in my thoughts, no matter how dark the night or sunless the day."

In the SDF-3's Tactical Information Center, Rick took a moment to absorb the scene the

main screen played for the room. It was an external view forward off the fortress's bow, the ships of the Saturn Group assembled for fold. Neptune was already on its way, Shadow Fighters and Alpha Veritechs ready for launch as soon as the fleet manifested in Earthspace. Rick turned to study Vince Grant's on-screen reaction, then Reinhardt's; the former on the bridge of the Ark Angel, the latter on one of the Karbarran uilt boiler-shaped ships. Most of the members of the Plenipotentiary Council and Jean Grant's med teams were aboard the Ark Angel as well. The SDF-3 had been designated flagship for the assault.

Rick could tell from the look on Vince and Reinhardt's faces that they, too, were moved by the scene unfolding in localspace.

"Any questions, gentlemen?" he asked, breaking the spell.

"About the Cyclone teams," Reinhardt began. "There still seems to be some question about their use to spearhead our rapid deployment force. The Jupiter Group's recon evaluations show a heavy concentration of Pincer and Enforcer ships in the area surrounding Reflex Point."

Rick shook his head impatiently. "You tell...what's his name-that Cyclone commander?"

"Harrington," Vince supplied, "Captain Harrington."

"Right," Rick said. "Tell Harrington that his teams will have all the VT backup they'll need. The important thing is to move those ground units as close as possible to the central hive. I want those Shadow Fighters kept in space until the last possible moment."

No one could predict whether the Regis would act as her counterpart had on Optera; but Rick was counting on the fact that the hive's defenses would behave the same. It was hoped that the Cycloners could accomplish what the Karbarran foot soldiers had-and that they would scramble through the hive walls once the barrier shields had been softened up with antimatter torpedos and destabilizer cannonfire. The Earth forces would be much more heavily armed than the Karbarrans had been, and they wouldn't have an army of Inorganics standing between them and the hive. On the other hand, it was yet to be determined whether T.R. Edwards had been a more dangerous foe than the Invid Regis would turn out to be.

"True to form, the hive will launch most of its troop carriers and Pincer Ships directly at the fleet," Rick continued. The Shadow Fighters would chew them up, then throw their support to the ground-based units.

Reinhardt was nodding. "Saturn Group will await your command, Admiral."

Rick heard something wrong-not in the words Reinhardt had used, nor in the way he

voiced them, but on some undefined level of meaning. He contemplated this for a moment, trying but failing to isolate his discomfort. "If anything goes awry..." he started to say. "Sir?" Reinhardt asked in concern.

Rick noticed that Vince had adopted the same questioning look. "These are contingencies, gentlemen, nothing more than that. But I want us to be clear on one thing: in the event we can't penetrate that shield, the neutron `S' missiles are to be used to saturate the area."

Vince and Reinhardt looked grim now, and Rick could hardly fault them for it. The resultant explosions would irradiate the northern hemisphere for a full century to come.

"The alternative is to surrender our homeworld," Rick thought to add. The option had been oft-stated and discussed these past months, but both the council and the REF had ultimately rejected it.

"Maybe she'll decide to leave," Vince said. "Just pack up her Children and fly away, give the planet back to us."

Rick snorted. "You're talking miracles, Vince. And we haven't seen one of those around here in a long time."

It's like old times, Jack Baker was telling himself elsewhere on the fortress.

Karen had wandered off on Baldan's arm, leaving him alone for the first time all afternoon, and Gnea was suddenly winking at him from across the hold. He still couldn't believe she was here-couldn't believe any of them would want a stake in this mission-but here they were: Gnea and a few of her Sisterhood warriors, Baldan, Lron and Crysta, even Kami and Learna. The two Garudans, it turned out, had been undergoing special treatments for the past two years that enabled them to function outside their atmosphere for extended periods without the use of transpirators, but they were wearing them just now, looking exactly as they had when Jack had first seen them.

Building ships, harvesting and transporting Flowers, cooking up that Protoculture, and assembling weapons systems just hadn't been enough for them. Not when word got around that the Terrans' homeworld had fallen to the Invid. Jack liked it-the loyalty and esprit de corps, the Sentinels' way with payback.

He was showing Gnea a broad smile when he realized that Karen had turned around to watch him. He winced and averted her gaze; old times, indeed.

From the adjacent hold in this retrofitted portion of the fortress came the sound of booming laughter-Zentraedi vocal thunder from Kazianna and the rest. Probably that Drannin pulling some stunt again, Jack decided. Nothing cuter than a five-year-old giant-size kid

when it came to pranks. And parents used to think they had problems with the terrible twos. The Zentraedi were like some lost tribe the REF had adopted; rescued from the brink of extinction.

The only Sentinels missing were Bela, whose duties of state kept her on New Praxis; Cabell, who was going to hang behind in Base Tirol with Tiresia's clones and REF settlers; Veidt, who had become something of Exedore's teammate on Haydon IV; and Max and Miriya, who had taken their family back there as well.

But Rem was aboard-more likely to be found in the company of Lynn-Minmei than Professor Lang-and Vince and Jean Grant were here in spirit.

So, for that matter, were Dana Sterling's companions from the 15th-although Jack had yet to make up his mind about that bunch. Sean and Marie were all right, and Dante was regular army; but Bowie and those two Tiresian twins, Musica and Allegra, were something else again. Scuttle utt had it that Dana had actually pulled out because of Rem-something about him worked a strange number on her-but who could tell? Dante apparently didn't like him much either.

Jack turned for a moment to watch Karen with Baldan. Triangles again, he thought. Me and Karen and Baldan r maybe Gnea! Dante, Dana, and Rem...Maybe Minmei would just throw herself in with those two Tiresian sisters...

He let out an exasperated sigh; no time now for this kind of weirdness in his life.

And when General Quarters sounded a minute later he was glad to hear it. Earth was the next stop, and all this would soon be behind them.

One moment the ships that comprised the Saturn Group were there and the next moment they were gone, no trace of their passing save for short-lived fluctuations in the continuum, eddies assessable solely by the SDF-3's sophisticated instrumentalities, or intelligences beyond the ken of the fortress's Human and XT personnel.

"Saturn's away," Forsythe said from one of the forward duty stations on the bridge.

Lisa swiveled her chair toward Rick's.

"Don't let it bother you," he said before she could speak. "We'll catch up."

He had left the TIC only moments before to join her for the launch and spacefold. He was aware that one part of him was concerned for Roy, and in this he and Lisa were united. She stretched her hand out to touch his shoulder.

"Dr. Lang on-screen," Toler announced from behind them.

"Lisa, Rick," Lang said, "we are clear for prefold."

As Lisa ran through a litany of commands with her crew, Rick could feel a low-level vibration spread itself outward from the guts of the ship. The fortress was already surging forward, passing beyond Fantoma's innermost moon and skirting the very edge of the giant's ring-plane.

"Commence fold," he heard Lisa order at the bottom of the countdown.

The fortress gave a Richterlike shudder; the stars became elongated lines of light...

"Admiral!" someone shouted, a panicked voice from the edge of nowhere. "The engines-they're not responding!" Rick's eyes found Lisa's across a horizonless space. They reached across infinity for each other's touch...

In a spacious dataroom on Haydon IV, Exedore and Veidt were bent over a monitor board attempting to decipher a complex passage of historical text. It was of minor importance in the scheme of things, but the Zentraedi and the Haydonite were as attentive to it as they would have been toward some issue of grand and pressing concern.

Behind them was a veritable wall of computer mainframes and neural networks that stretched for miles in either direction, the material interface with Haydon IV's planetary Awareness.

Both Exedore and Veidt were vaguely attuned to the fact that light-years away in Fantomaspace the REF fleet was readying itself for departure. But lost in the intricacies of the ancient text's glyphic code now, they had all but forgotten the importance of the moment.

Until something occurred that literally shook them from their shared trance. Without a prompt, the circuitry of the Awareness had come alive.

The two beings swung around to regard the wall's flashing displays, its near-violent paroxysm as power surged from relay to relay.

Haydon! Veidt sent to Exedore with telepathic urgency. He has returned to our world!

ROBOTECH CHRONOLOGY 1999

Alien spaceship crash-lands on Earth, effectively ending almost a decade of Global Civil

War. Originally called "Me Visitor," the ship is dubbed Superdimensional Fortress 1-the SDF-1.

Dr. Emil Lang, after an initial recon of the ship (in the company of Roy Fokker, Henry Gloval, T. R. Edwards, and others), begins to unravel the secrets of an extraterrestrial science known as Robotech.

Macross Island becomes the focal point of Robotechnology; and reconstruction commences on the SDF-1.

In another part of the galaxy, Zor is killed by Invid soldiers during a Flower of Life seeding attempt. The Zentraedi Breetai is wounded during the same raid. Commander-in-chief Dolza orders Commander Reno to return Zor's body to the Robotech Masters on Tirol.

Interstellar war with the Invid, whose homeworld, Optera, has been defoliated by the Zentraedi, continues to chip away at the fringes of the Masters' galactic empire.

2002

Destruction of Mars Base Sara. Lisa Hayes's fiance, Carl Riber, is killed. Lisa turns 17.

Development of the reconfigurable Veritech Fighter.

On Tirol, Cabell "creates" Rem by cloning tissue from Zor. The Masters, too, have their way with Zor's body, cloning tissue for their own purposes and extracting from the scientist's residual cellular memories a vision of Earth-destination of the fortress and Protoculture matrix he has stolen and spirited from their grasp.

2003-08

Rise of the United Earth Defense Council under the leadership of Senator Russo, Admiral Hayes, T. R. Edwards, and others.

Roy Fokker and Claudia Grant become fast friends.

Lisa Hayes is assigned to the SDF-1 project on Macross, under the command of Captain Henry Gloval.

Tommy Luan is elected mayor of Macross City.

2009

On the SDF-1's launch day, the Zentraedi (after a ten-year search for Zor's fortress and the missing Protoculture matrix) appear and attack Macross Island. The fortress makes an accidental hyperspace jump to Pluto, carrying the island and its population of 75,000 along with it. 15-year-old Lynn-Minmei and 19-year- ld Rick Hunter are caught up in the spacefold.

Lisa Hayes turns 24.

2009-11

The SDF-1 battles its way back to Earth with Macross City rebuilt inside its massive holds.

Rick Hunter joins the RDF and earns the rank of lieutenant, with Ben Dixon and Max Sterling assigned to his VT squadron. The Battle at Saturn's Rings.

Lynn-Minmei is voted "Miss Macross." Breetai calls up the Botoru Battalion, led by the notorious Khyron the Backstabber.

The Battle at Mars Base Sara.

Rick, Lisa, Max, and Ben are captured by Breetai and interrogated by the Zentraedi commander in chief, Dolza.

The Earth forces learn of the term "Protoculture" for the first time.

Three "Micronized" Zentraedi spies ico, Konda, and Bron-are successfully inserted into the SDF-1.

The SDF-1 lands on Earth.

2012

Lynn-Minmei is reunited with her cousin, Lynn-Kyle.

Rick Hunter is seriously wounded during a Zentraedi attack on the fortress.

Roy Fokker is killed during a raid led by Khyron.

After almost six months on Earth, the SDF-1 is ordered to leave by the leaders of the UEDC.

Ben Dixon is killed.

Little White Dragon is aired.

The Minmei Cult has its beginnings aboard the flagship of the Zentraedi fleet. Lynn-Kyle founds a peace movement aboard the SDF-1.

Asylum is granted to three "Micronized" Zentraedi spies.

Max Sterling weds former Zentraedi Quadrono ace, Miriya Parino.

Exedore arrives aboard the SDF-1 for peace talks.

The Zentraedi armada appears in Earth pace and lays waste to much of the planet. At Alaska Base, the Grand Cannon is destroyed and Admiral Hayes is killed.

The SDF-l, with an assist from Lynn- inmei's voice, defeats Dolza's armada of five million ships and returns to ravaged Earth.

A period of reconstruction begins, with Humans and Zentraedis working side-by- ide.

The Robotech Masters lose confidence in their race of warrior clones and begin a mass pilgrimage through interstellar space to Earth to recapture Zor's Protoculture matrix.

2013

Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant (son of Claudia Grant's brother, Vince) are born. The factory satellite is captured from Commander Reno and folded to Earth pace.

Dr. Lang and Professor Lazlo Zand begin work on a secret project involving artificial intelligence. Zand takes a peculiar interest in Dana Sterling after undergoing a Protoculture mindboost.

2014

Khyron makes a surprise appearance and holds Minmei and Lynn-Kyle hostage. The destruction of New Macross, the SDFs 1 and 2, along with Khyron's forces. Henry Gloval, Claudia Grant, Sammie Porter, Vanessa Leeds, and Kim Young are among the casualties. The remains of the three ships are buried under tons of earthen debris dredged up from Lake Gloval.

2015-17

Zentraedi Malcontent Uprisings in the Southlands Control Zone (South America). Jonathan Wolff comes to the attention of Commander Max Sterling.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force is formed, for the express purpose of journeying to Tirol to make peace with the Robotech Masters. Aboard the factory satellite, work begins on construction of the SDF-3.

Rise of Monument City and Anatole Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross. Lynn-Minmei takes on a partner, Janice Em, at Emil Lang's urging.

The Invid complete their conquest of Garuda, Praxis, Karbarra, and Spheris.

2020

Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes wed aboard the factory satellite. Dana and Bowie are given

over to the care of Rolf and Laura Emerson.

The SDF-3 is launched. Minmei and Janice are caught up in the spacefold. Rick turns 29; Lisa, 34; Dana and Bowie, 7. Scott Bernard, Lang's godson from the recently completed Mars Base, turns 17.

2025 (Earth actual)

The Invid Regent takes Tirol. Sickened by his bloodlust, the Regis leaves Optera for Praxis to carry on with her Genesis Pit experiments.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force arrives in Fantomaspace and engages the Invid; the fortress's spacefold generators are damaged. (The REF is unaware that the fold has taken five Earth-years, and believe the date to be 2020.)

T. R. Edwards and his Ghost Squadron capture the living computer the Regent has left behind in Tiresia's Royal Hall.

Tiresians Cabell and Rem inform the Plenipotentiary Council that the Robotech Masters are on their way to Earth.

The Zentraedi contingent of the REF agree to be returned to full size to mine Fantoma for monopole ore to fuel a new fleet of warships.

The Sentinels-comprised of Praxians, Garudans, Karbarrans, Haydonites, Spherisians, and Perytonians-are formed to liberate planets recently conquered and occupied by the Invid horde. The Hunters, Grants, Sterlings, and others leave Fantomaspace aboard the Farrago.

On Earth, Senator Wyatt Moran and the commanders of the Army of the Southern Cross consolidate their power and take control of the Supreme Council.

Dana and Bowie grow up under the care of the Emersons.

2026 (Earth actual)

Karbarra is liberated. Tesla and Burak form a curious partnership. The Sentinels' ship is destroyed and the GMU is stranded on Praxis shortly after the Regis's leavetaking for Haydon IV Praxis is destroyed.

Death of Baldan I.

T R. Edwards holds secret talks with the Regent, and begins a personal campaign to capture Lynn-Minmei.

Wolff and Janice Em return to Tirol. The Invid Tesla murders a simulagent sent to Tirol by

the Regent.

T R. Edwards begins to hold sway over the REF's Plenipotentiary Council. Wolff is accused of murder and piracy. Control of the Fantoma mining operations goes to Edwards.

Garuda is liberated. Rick, Lisa, Rem, and Karen suffer the near-fatal effects of the planet's atmosphere.

Baldan II is "shaped" by Teal.

The Zentraedi leave Tirolspace with the monopole ore needed for the fleet's warships.

2027 (Earth actual)

The Sentinels arrive on Haydon N shortly after the Regis's leavetaking, and "surrender" to the occupying Invid troops. Rem learns he is actually a clone of Zor. Janice Em reveals herself to be an android. Sarna is killed.

A prototype ship under the command of Major Carpenter leaves Tirol for Earth. Edwards loses his grip on the council after troops sent out to hunt down the Zentraedi side with them instead. Wolff, Breetai, and Grant return to Tirol and clear the Sentinels of all charges. Haydon IV and Spheris are liberated. Tesla leaves the Ark Angel for Optera to have it out with the Regent.

Aurora is born on Haydon IV.

Edwards and his Ghost Riders flee Tirol for Optera, taking Lynn-Minmei and the awakened Invid living computer from Tiresia with them.

2028 (Earth actual)

Jonathan Wolff leaves for Earth. Edwards arrives on Optera. Tesla is chased off; Breetai and the Regent die together.

Exedore arrives on Haydon IV with the council's peace proposal for the Regent. The Sentinels move against Peryton. Tesla and Burak sacrifice themselves to end the planet's curse.

2029 (Earth actual)

The battle for Optera. Edwards, Arla on, Teal, and Janice die.

Dr. Lang makes a series of shattering discoveries about the spacefold generators his teams have used in Carpenter and Wolff's ships.

Ark Angel begins a slow return to Tirol. Breetai's son, Drannin, is born to the Zentraedi

Kazianna Hesh.

The Ark Angel arrives in Tiresia. Lang briefs the council and Expeditionary Force members on his discoveries.

2030 (Earth actual)

Roy Hunter is born in Tiresia. The REF and Karbarrans begin work on the main fleet ships. Lang's Robotech teams develop an integrated system of body armor and reconfigurable cycles, known as Cyclones.

2031 (Earth actual)

Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant turn 18, graduate from the Academy, and are assigned to the 15th Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, which includes Sean Phillips, Angelo Dante, and Louie Nichols.

The Robotech Masters arrive in Earth pace and the Second Robotech War begins.

Major Carpenter's ship returns from Tirol.

Zor Prime is introduced to the 15th ATAC.

2032 (Earth actual)

End of the Second Robotech War. Zor Prime's attempt at destroying the Masters' flagship results in the loosing of the Flowers of Life from the Protoculture matrix concealed within the spacefold drives of the buried SDF-1; spores cover the planet and the Flower takes root, alerting the Regis's sensor nebula.

The Invid "disappear" from Tirol's corner of the galaxy. It is assumed that the Regis has begun her move against Earth.

The Mars Group leaves Tirol with 18 year-old Scott Bernard aboard.

Dana has a vision of the coming of the Invid, telepathically communicated to her by her sister, Aurora.

Lazlo Zand dies.

Jonathan Wolff's ship returns to Earth. An anti-Invid underground is established before the Regis arrives. Dana commandeers Wolff's ship after the drives are retrofitted with a device perfected by former 15th ATAC whiz-kid, Louie Nichols.

The Robotech factory satellite returns to Earth-space.

Optera is fully seeded with the Flowers of Life and given over to the homeless Praxians,

who rename the planet "New Praxis." The Flowers become the crop for a new Protoculture matrix created by Rem, who has managed to tap his progenitor's-Zor's-memories.

Max, Miriya, and Aurora Sterling arrive on Tirol from Haydon IV

2033 (Earth actual)

The Invid Regis arrives. Her newly hatched army of soldiers and mecha destroy the factory satellite and easily defeat Earth's depleted defenses. Hives and farms are set up worldwide, and some Terran captives are forced to work in labor camps, harvesting Flowers and processing nutrient for use in the Regis's Terror Weapons and battlecraft.

Arrival of Dana Sterling on Tirol. With her are Bowie Grant, Sean Phillips, Angelo Dante, Musica and Allegra, and some of the Masters' clones.

Shadow Fighters and neutron "S" missiles are developed by the REF for the assault against Earth. Instantaneous spacefold becomes a reality for the mainfleet ships.

2034

Arrival and defeat of the Mars Attack Group sent by the REF

Scott Bernard and his ragtag band of freedom fighters-Rook, Rand, Lancer, Lunk, and Annie-begin a journey toward the Regis's central hive complex, known as Reflex Point.

Marlene, Sera, and Corg are birthed by the Regis.

2035 (Earth actual)

The Jupiter attack wing arrives in Earth pace. Photojournalist Sue Graham dies on Earth.

The REF main-fleet ships are folded from Tirol to Earth. The Regis and her children take leave of the planet in the form of a phoenix of mindstuff, annihilating the returning ships in the process and ending the Third Robotech War.

On Haydon IV, Veidt and Exedore are present at the reawakening of the planet's Awareness. Max and his family are also on-planet. Cabell is on Tirol.

The SDF-3 fails to appear in Earthspace. Rick turns 40 (or 45 in chronological years); Lisa turns 45 (or 50).

Aboard the Ark Angel, which has been spared the fate of the rest of the mainfleet ships, Scott Bernard and Vince and Jean Grant commence a search for the missing fortress.

The Masters’ Gambit

By Jack McKinney

1995

2

For Bill Spangler, whose comic book series,

CyberPirates

,

figures on the action

3

4

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book is a reworking of the plot Carl Macek devised for the

animated film

ROBOTECH: THE MOVIE

, blended with some of my own

ideas and those put forth by Bill Spangler in his

CyberPirates

series for

Eternity Comics. The addition of this book to the ROBOTECH/SENTINELS

epic alters the order in which the novels are meant to be read. For what it's

worth, here's how it should go: Robotech 1-6, Robotech 19

(The Zentraedi

Rebellion)

, Sentinels 1-5, Robotech 20

(The Masters' Gambit)

, Robotech

7-12, and finally,

The End of the Circle

. A future book will probably be

tucked between Robotech 9 and 10.

5

6

CHAPTER ONE

With the Zentraedi menace ended—and that race's few survivors self-

exiled on the factory satellite—humanity was free once more to wage war on

itself. The so-named United Earth Government essentially served the needs of

the Northlands and the sundry city- and nation-states that comprised the

Western European Sector. Most non-allied regions had become self-sufficient

and were loath to involve themselves in any global bureaucracy. Separatism

prevailed. The thinking went that, should [the Masters or the Invid] arrive,

the territory that played host to their planetfall would have the privilege or

task of dealing with them. And so low-intensity conflicts flourished,

particularly in the Southlands. Much as the Robotech Expeditionary Force

had abandoned Earth, Anatole Leonard had abandoned the Southlands after

parceling it up among his former lieutenants and cronies. By 2029, petty

disputes between rival armies and polities had escalated to fullblown

warfare.

Dominique Duprey,

Prelude to the Second Robotech War

It was good weather for a battle: a clear sky, tolerable heat, and an

invigorating wind out of the northwest. Sated on weeks of rain, the lush

forest south of Cavern City was vibrant, unblemished by mud or dust,

charitable with outpourings of oxygen and floral scents. The lost-world

tablelands to the north seemed near enough to touch. For a change, crafted

warriors could perform without fear of suffocating in the cramped cockpits

of their mecha, and foot soldiers armed with rifles and grenades had the

planet's plush mantle to cushion their falls.

It was good weather to live or die.

Until noon, when the battle had taken a turn, most of the dying had

been done by the severely outnumbered forces of Krista Delgado. But now it

was Rawlins's crusaders who were crashing and burning and staining the

7

savannah with spilled blood.

"You think I don't know we're killing children?"

Delgado was telling her field officers in an underground command

bunker not far from the ruins of the Southern Grand Cannon. "You think

I've forgotten that there are ten-year-olds out there? But remember this:

those

kids

would think nothing of massacring everyone in Cavern City." She

paused to make brief eye contact with each of her lieutenants. "See that your

teams are reminded of what Rawlins's People's Army did in Porto Velho,

Leticia, and Manaus. Then order them to press the counterattack—even if

that means employing Mongoose missiles against Wolverine rifles. This

isn't an honorable fight, ladies and gentlemen. We're going for the win,

whichever way we have to."

Delgado had to force the words from her mouth. A handsome, small-

boned woman closing on sixty years, she had raised seven children, four of

them members of the same orphaned generation Aaron Rawlins had

conscripted into his People's Army and loosed on the strife-torn city-states

of the Southlands. She could issue orders until she was blue in the face, but

who could she point to as the source of her orders? Who was she answering

to but her own conscience?

She dismissed her officers and turned her attention to an array of

monitors, on which half-a-dozen battle views were running in living color.

The expert-system computer tasked with coordinating the aerial

counteroffensive put the morning's casualties at 4500; 3000 more were

projected to die by nightfall. Remote cameras panned the bodies of the dead

and dying, spread-eagle in the tall grass, entangled in precarious heaps,

arranged like the numerals of a clock around the rims of blast craters. The

battlefield was littered with the holed torsos and armored limbs of mecha as

well: Gladiators, Excalibers, early-generation Veritechs, Hovertanks, and

even a couple of Alpha Fighters—courtesy of the Earth Defense Force, which

had dispatched a brigade to intervene in the fighting and had wound up

taking part in it.

Colonel Tannen, one of perhaps fifty EDF soldiers who had allied

8

themselves with Delgado's Cavern City militia, was in the command bunker

just now. "You're doing the right thing, Krista," he announced. "Rawlins has

to be stopped. It might as well be here."

Delgado swung away from the monitors with arms folded across her

narrow chest. In place of a uniform, she wore a blouse and skirt, covered by

a dun-colored battle apron. Black boots met the hem of the skirt, and her

long gray hair was captured in a chignon. "And better still if the one

hundred EDF siding with Rawlins die with him." Her pale blue eyes flashed.

"I'm aware of your motives, Evan, so don't try to con me."

The colonel quirked a wry smile and bowed his head. He was younger

than her by five years, but age spots and the dark pouches under his eyes

made him appear ten years older. "Kris, you always could see through me."

"Then, now, and tomorrow," she told him.

Tannen's tight-fitting black pants and leather torso harness were

standard EDF issue, but underneath it all, he was Robotech Defense Force

through and through. Seven years earlier, the RDF had been incorporated

into the EDF, but it lived on in the hearts and minds of those who had

served. Delgado, too, had been an RDF officer during the war against the

Zentraedi, though she hadn't actually gone to guns with the aliens until the

final battle, in which the surface of the planet had been ravaged by plasma

and directed light. Then, following the Rain of Death—and for reasons never

fully explained to Tannen—she had thrown in with Anatole Leonard and

risen to full-bird in Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross. Even so, Delgado

had been openly critical of Leonard's actions in Cavern City in 2018, and

might have resigned if he hadn't ultimately bequeathed her the city. The

former Southern Cross now comprised the majority of the EDF. Only days

earlier, when infighting had factioned the peacekeeping force sent to Cavern

City, two out of three soldiers and mecha had gone over to Rawlins's side.

Rawlins had been one of Leonard's trusted lieutenants during the

Reconstruction and the Malcontent Uprisings, spearheading numerous

attacks on alien bases in the Zentraedi Control Zone. When Leonard

relocated permanently to Monument City in 2022 and the Southlands was

9

"compartmentalized," Rawlins received the southwest and Delgado the

northeast, including most of what had been the Venezuela Sector. The two

had fought on opposing sides in the Global Civil War and had rarely seen

eye-to-eye under Leonard. But their mutual distaste hadn't flowered into

enmity until Rawlins fell under the sway of HEARTH—the Heal Earth Hajj.

Founded by disabused members of the Church of Recurrent Tragedies,

HEARTH had seized the orphaned generation of the Southlands, those born

between the years 2008 and 2020, some of whom had survived the Rain of

Death, and all of whom had been raised to expect a second invasion from

the stars—from either the Robotech Masters or the Invid swarm. HEARTH,

however, was a reaction to the pervasive paranoia of the times. Its founders

posited that the United Earth Government had conspired to foster the fear

of extraterrestrial invasion as a means of maintaining power and shaping a

contentious future. HEARTH rejected all notions of imminent warfare and

most aspects of high technology; to its tens of thousands of followers, the

launch of the SDF-3 to Tirol had been little more than an elaborate and

criminally costly ruse. HEARTH advocated the overthrow of the UEG and

the myriad bureaucracies it had spawned, and worldwide commitment to

the healing of the planet.

Aaron Rawlins had been responsible for affixing "Hajj" to the acronym

and militarizing the movement. Birthed in the provincial territories of

western Argentina and southern Amazonas, the People's Army had begun a

slow northward march through the Southlands, gaining converts en route—

overrunning townships and isolated city-states, burning churches and

temples, closing schools, butchering politicians, lawyers, doctors, and any

who refused to subscribe to the new order, sowing vast killing fields

wherever they ventured.

Krista Delgado hadn't felt threatened by the Hajj until it was clear that

Rawlins had his sights set on Venezuela. She had never taken lightly to

people who thwarted her own designs. Ask any Zentraedi. On inheriting

Venezuela's dubious throne, Delgado's first order of business—following a

precedent set by Leonard in the early days of Brasí

lia—had been to rid

10

Cavern City of the aliens who had clustered there. More dispirited than

they'd been on losing the war, the displaced Zentraedi had attempted to

emigrate to the Northlands, only to find things so uncomfortable there that

most had ultimately quit Earth for the factory satellite. Hundreds had

starved themselves to death in protest; others succumbed to mysterious

illnesses, or lost themselves in the still-radioactive wastes their own

annihilation bolts had created.

Having rid her domain of one scourge, Delgado wasn't about to open

Venezuela's borders to the likes of Aaron Rawlins and his army of

mindwarped—some said narcotized—children. So, as a dare to Rawlins, she

had massed her troops south of Cavern, near the site of the dismantled

Grand Cannon.

The situation had been closely monitored by the United Earth

Government, which was headquartered in the Northlands, in Monument

City. The UEG had taken a stab at negotiating a truce between the two

former allies, but no accommodation had been reached. Finally, when

warfare seemed inevitable, a peacekeeping force had been ordered south,

jointly commanded by Colonel Tannen and Colonel Laubin—another ex-

Southern Crosser. The Earth Defense Force brigade hadn't been on the

scene twenty-four hours before everyone began to choose sides.

Forty years earlier, when both had served aboard the supercarrier

Kenosha

, Tannen and Delgado had been lovers. But passion from the old

days didn't count for much in the postmodern world.

"Don't think for a minute I'm dumb to why you were so quick to break

ranks with the EDF, Evan," Delgado was hectoring him now. "You don't give

a shit about Cavern City or the People's Army. It's Laubin's contingent

you're after. The chance to kill a couple of dozen Southern Crossers."

Tannen shrugged it off. "Like Laubin isn't doing the same thing, Kris. I

know for a fact he hates Rawlins. But he'd back Satan if it meant a shot at

eliminating a handful of Robotechs from the EDF." He regarded Delgado

mournfully. "It comes down to this, wherever we're sent. None of us have

any commitment to the EDF. It was counterfeit from the get-go, something

11

the UEG hatched to keep the RDF and the Southern Cross from trading fire

before the Tirol mission launched. Hell, if the Masters or the Invid showed

up next week, we wouldn't have a prayer. We're too busy fighting each other

to take on a mutual threat."

Delgado's look had softened somewhat. "Chairman Moran should have

sense enough to disband the EDF and start from scratch."

Tannen grunted noncommittally. "Maybe it'll come to that. But until it

does, friendly fire is going to remain an EDF soldier's worst enemy."

Delgado held his gaze for a moment, then eyed the monitor screens. "I

sympathize, Evan. But in the meantime, there's killing to be done." She

thought once more about Aaron Rawlins's crusaders. "Even if we are

making mincemeat of our own future."

"What happens in the Southlands is of no consequence to Monument

City and its allies," Barth Constanza told the members of the Senate from

his seat in the vaulted hall that was their workplace. The hall occupied

center place in the classically adorned building that housed the United

Earth Government; within were marble columns, adamantine floors, and

fine furnishings, all under the protection of squads of towering military

police armor.

Senator Constanza went on, "We didn't create the mess down there,

and we're under no obligation to solve it. Those territories chose to secede

from the UEG, and most elected to pursue a separatist course even after

Wyatt Moran was elected chairman. If they're determined to wage war on

one another, there's nothing we can do to prevent them, short of giving our

blessing to a full-scale invasion and subsequent occupation by the Defense

Force."

The remark met with vociferous opposition, and Constanza had to raise

his voice to be heard over the tumult. "What we cannot permit, however—

what we

must

not permit—is factionalism and the perpetuation of

internecine fighting among the EDF!"

There was little point in continuing until the room quieted; when it did,

12

Senator Grass, esteemed member of the old boy network of the Southern

Cross, was on his feet. "Does the senator from Portland propose that we

simply ignore would-be conquerors like Aaron Rawlins? That we allow

ourselves to sink further into the medieval morass our previous inactions

have fostered?"

"Rawlins isn't the issue," Constanza returned from the other side of the

hall. "The People's Army would have been crushed months ago if it had

been in our interests to do so. The point is that the EDF is using these so-

called peacekeeping exercises as an excuse to settle old scores between the

RDF and the Southern Cross. And such an army can hardly be trusted with

defending the Earth from invasion."

Owen Harding, from Detroit, took the floor. "Skirmishes are inevitable

at this point—whether between Delgado and Rawlins or rival factions within

the Defense Force. These conflicts are a by-product of tensions produced by

years of waiting for an enemy that has yet to show itself."

"Tensions we inflamed by faking Communiqués from the SDF-3,"

Constanza pointed out.

Grass took issue with him. "And if we'd admitted the truth—that the

SDF-3 hasn't been heard from? That

wouldn't

have proved inflammatory?

The people had to be given hope, something to hold on to!"

"We are the people," Harding shouted. "Or at least we're supposed to

be. And our lies have kept the entire world on a war footing for almost a

decade now. The truth wouldn't have been any more devastating. What's

more, people have already begun to see through our fabrications. Take this

HEARTH, for example. They doubt that the SDF-3 ever launched. To them,

it's still sealed inside the factory satellite. We know it launched, but no one

can say whether or not it ever reached Tirol. And where, I ask you, are the

Robotech Masters? Where is this ultratech army we've been made to fear?"

A substantial portion of the Senate applauded. Constanza waited, then

rose to his feet. "Some of you seem to have forgotten what Hunter and Lang

said before the launch: silence should not necessarily be construed as a sign

of success

or

failure, but rather as a signal to heighten our readiness. And

13

this is why the EDF must be brought under control. It should come as no

surprise to anyone in this hall that Monument will be the focus of any attack.

Rawlins or others like him won't be factors in a global invasion; Earth will

live or die by what happens right here."

"Commander Leonard has been saying that for years, Senator," Grass

said. "If Alfred Nader, from Roca Negra, hadn't requested intervention,

Leonard would never have ordered a peacekeeping force into Venezuela."

Constanza ridiculed the idea. "Leonard knew full well those troops

would break rank and throw their support to Rawlins or Delgado. He'd like

nothing more than to eliminate the RDF from the army he forged and

brought here from the Southlands. The RDF has been a thorn in his side

since the SDF-3 launched."

The hall was deathly still. No one rose to challenge Constanza or to pat

him on the back. The senators lowered their eyes and studied their hands.

Constanza understood. "This is a secure room, people. We're supposed

to be free to speak our minds here." Nothing. Not a voice, not so much as a

cough answered him. He snorted in derision. "It's not enough we've had to

watch the skies for fifteen years? Now we have to watch what we think and

say, for fear of retaliation from one of our own kind?"

"Should I see to it that Constanza learns some manners?" Joseph Petrie

asked. A small man with a squarish head and close-cropped hair, he had

been Leonard's adjutant during the old days in Brasí

lia and was now a kind

of behind-the-throne presence in Leonard's cadre of EDF officers.

Leonard himself was sitting across the room, blunt fingers steepled, the

hairless brow of his bullet-shaped head furrowed. A protracted exhale

ended his long moment of silence. "Constanza's harmless. He's only saying

what a lot of them are thinking. In any case, I respect a man who endorses

the unpopular opinion, even when he knows that he's bound to lose. The

rest of them are spineless."

"So I should let him be?"

"For the time being."

14

The two men were in what Petrie liked to call the "listening post" of

Leonard's office in EDF headquarters, elsewhere in Monument City. The

Senate meeting was coming to them real-time via A/V bugs planted

throughout the allegedly secure hall.

Headquarters was a soaring megacomplex of high-tech needles,

punctuated with crenels and merlons like some medieval battlement. The

central tower cluster had been built to suggest the white gonfalons, or

ensigns, of a holy crusade hanging from high cross-pieces. Leonard's

chambers were luxurious, but he often longed for Brasí

lia, for his palace by

the lake, with its small rose-windowed chapel in which he had offered

morning and evening prayers.

And just as often he thought of Seloy Deparra, the Zentraedi who had

become his lover for a short time, a partner in the games of debasement and

atonement he had devised—the female who had borne him a son, whom she

had named Hirano. But Deparra and the boy were dead, dead ten years now,

though Leonard shuddered nightly at the memory of their corpses, picked

over by carrion birds in the jungle camp that had been home to the all-

female Malcontent group known as the Scavengers.

He had discovered them on the day the Zentraedi rebellion had been

crushed, during the battle in which he had sustained the wound that had

robbed him of the full use of his left leg. Left leg and much more: his

manhood. Despite doctors' claims to the contrary—that his impotence was

psychosomatic.

Seloy, and perhaps Hirano as well, had been killed by Miriya Parino

Sterling, seemingly lost in space with her husband and the rest of the SDF-3

crew these past nine years, whose daughter remained on Earth. One of a

handful of aliens who remained onworld, and the only one of mixed

Zentraedi and Human blood. But Leonard didn't feel vengeful toward Dana

Sterling. There was no profit in it—not with the Robotech Masters long

overdue. They were why he had come north, abandoning Brasí

lia and the

Southlands for Monument City. Few understood that he had undertaken the

move for the sake of all Humankind; that the move was a holy undertaking.

15

Senator Constanza was correct in surmising that Monument City would

be the focal point of an encounter with the Masters. Most of the UEG

accepted this, but there was no consensus regarding Earth's response.

Leonard knew through prayer and intercession that the sole viable response

was war. And yet few were willing stand by him. Even Patty Moran was

weakening, often bowing to UEG demands. The chairman had become little

more than a silver-haired figurehead, not at all what T. R. Edwards and

Leonard had hoped for—too concerned with his own power base to allow his

Minister of War much leeway when it came to dealing with petty dictators

like China's Ling Chow, or with marauding hordes like the People's Army.

Here Leonard had been successful in herding almost all the Zentraedi into

the factory satellite, and instead of exterminating them, Moran was willing

to let bygones be bygones.

Part of the problem was that there were too many players on the field:

not only Moran and the UEG Senate with its numerous subcommittees and

special interest groups, but people like Rolf Emerson, Moran's Minister of

Terrestrial Defense, and Lazlo Zand, director of the former Robotech

Research Center in Tokyo, Earth's preeminent city.

But Leonard saw the RDF as the principal problem—what remained of

it, at any rate. Reinhardt, Hunter, and the rest had shown their true colors

during the Malcontent Uprisings, when they had pursued a course of

accommodation with the rebels, and Leonard feared that devout RDFers

might take the same tack with the Robotech Masters, inviting them to share

the Earth, for God's sake. If it hadn't been for the actions of the Southern

Cross, half the world's population would be dead from the virus the

Malcontents had attempted to spread in the final days of their rebellion.

That alone was reason enough for winnowing the RDF from the EDF.

So, of course, Leonard encouraged his former confederates to engage

the RDF at every opportunity.

He would have liked nothing more than to come out from behind the

subtlety and order his troops to storm the RDF's private headquarters in

Monument and on Fokker Aerospace Base—areas awarded to the RDF by

16

the Accords of 2019 and 2022, in which the EDF had been created. But two

things stood in his way: certain promises both he and Moran had made to T.

R. Edwards, who had grown very powerful in the two years preceding the

launch of the Tirol mission; and the unsettling possibility that the SDF-3

might return when least expected, equipped with even greater firepower

than it had left with.

His caution on the second point always struck him as the sort of deal

agnostics were wont to make with the universe: they accepted the idea of

God not so much as fact but as a hedge against God's actual existence.

But Leonard was no agnostic. He doubted neither God's existence nor

that he and God were frequently in direct communication. Indeed, on God's

command he would dismiss his concerns about the SDF-3's return, along

with his promises to Edwards, and rid himself of the RDF once and for all.

17

CHAPTER TWO

Lang had already waged a two-year battle [with the UEG] over funding

when the Hades Mission finally launched in 2017. For a time he was

convinced that the [mother computer's missing components could be retrieved

from Plutospace and returned to Earth] well in advance of the projected

launch date for the SDF-3 [2020]. When, however, the Hades' robots still

hadn't completed their objective in late 2019, Lang urged the UEG to fund a

rescue operation, only to see his pleas fall on deaf ears. The mission was all

but forgotten in December of 2028, when the ship at last touched down at the

Tanegashima aerospace facility in Japan. So much so that only one

newscaster commented on the story, dismissing its importance with the line:

"Too little, too late; even ten years ago, scarcely worth the wait."

footnote in Zeitgeist

,

Insights: Alien Psychology and the Second Robotech War

The harbingers of Earth's fate lurked at the edge of the Solar system,

twenty million miles beyond aphelion Pluto. There in that dark, frigid

birthplace of comets floated six stupendous warships, five miles end to end

through their long axes, bristling with weapons and sensors, the likes of

which had never appeared in Sol's parcel of space-time.

The flotilla had originally numbered eight, but two ships had been

cannibalized during the translight journey from Tirol—a journey that

should have been near instantaneous but had instead required almost

twenty Earth years. Insufficient supplies of Protoculture had precluded the

use of the ships' space-fold generators; in fact, it was the absence of

Protoculture that had prompted the journey itself. For the only source of the

transformative fuel that derived from the Invid Flower of Life now resided

on Earth.

The source was the Protoculture matrix, a unique device created by the

Tiresian scientist, Zor, who—as an act of rebellion against the empire that

18

had spawned him—had removed the matrix from Tirol, concealed it aboard

his dimensional fortress, and dispatched the fortress to Earth. One war had

already been fought over the matrix, devastating to Earth as well as to Tirol,

which had seen the defeat of its army of giant warrior clones, the Zentraedi.

Some of the clones had since defected to Earth's side and were presumably

prepared to defend the matrix with their lives.

Sixteen years earlier a combined force of Earthers and Zentraedi had

attacked the Zentraedi outpost of the late Commander Reno and made off

with a factory satellite, folding the moonlet-sized maintenance and repair

facility to Earthspace. Though it was more accurate to say that Commander

Breetai's mixed contingent had been

allowed

to fold the factory to Earth, in

so doing revealing the space-time location of the world Zor had chosen to

receive his fortress. The sacrifice of Reno's forces—the last of the loyal

Zentraedi as far as Tirol's Masters knew—had seemed a small price to pay to

learn the whereabouts of the planet that had eluded them for generations.

The flotilla's reemergence in the dimension of light had strategic

import: normally dauntless, the Robotech Masters were reluctant to engage

the race that had defeated the Zentraedi without first observing the world

they inhabited—a blue-white, water-laden gem, rife with life, in spite of the

destruction visited upon it by the five million crafts of the Grand Fleet. As

well, the Masters needed to reestablish contact with distant Tirol and the

masters they themselves served: Tirol's triad of Elders, last heard from

some ten Earth years earlier.

The Masters' ships were elongated lozenges, the dorsal surfaces of

which were stippled with structures resembling segmented insect legs, two-

tined forks, stairways, bridges, onion domes, ziggurats, and massive

louvered panels. The bulk of their interiors were given over to living space

for the clone population the Masters had brought with them, the cream of

Tirol's vat-grown crop: contemplative, artistic, and submissive. There were

also vast holds crowded with battle mecha, and barracks for the soldier-

clones that piloted them.

The command center of the flotilla flagship was a cathedral of arching

19

structures suggestive of neural tissue—axons and dendrites—or a kind of

information-highway maze, which pulsed and flowed with the pure radiance

of Protoculture. And all of it was quite literally at the nailless fingertips of

the Masters, who controlled and accessed the flow via a hovering

mushroomlike device five feet across, around which they stood, each upon a

small platform.

Dressed in monkish gray robes whose colored cowls were modeled on

the tripartite petals of the Flower of Life, the three Masters were of a type:

fey and gaunt, with slender limbs, hawkish profiles, and flaring eyebrows.

Though their gleaming pates were bald, they had fine blue hair that fell to

their shoulders. Scarlike chevrons of skin under sharp cheekbones

emphasized the severity of their laser-eyed faces. The mottled control device

they seldom abandoned—the Protoculture Cap—enabled them to

communicate with one another telepathically. When they conversed audibly,

their voices resounded with vibrato, the result of decades of contact with

Protoculture.

In the same way the Masters served the Elders, there were those who

attended the Masters: triumvirates of effete, scarlet-haired, blue-lipped

clones, who advised them on matters of war, politics, science, and other

mundane affairs.

One of those clones, Dovak, leader of a triumvirate of scientists, was

addressing the Masters now from the floor of the command center, fifteen

feet above which the Masters and their Cap floated.

"All intelligence from the surveillance vessel has been received and

stored for future reference," the clone reported.

Having materialized from translight nearly an Earth year earlier than

the six spade-shaped battle fortresses, the flotilla's forward ship had spent

that time analyzing Earth's ceaseless outpourings of electronic signals.

Protoculture-enhanced communications arrays capable of folding space-

time permitted the signals to be read at their source, thus allowing for real-

time monitoring of the planet.

"Several of the Humans' principal language groups have been

20

deciphered," Dovak continued, "and a chronology of events has been

assembled covering the past twenty-nine Earth years, commencing with the

arrival of Zor's fortress. In addition, the surveillance vessel observed the

final stages of what seemed to be a salvage operation that took place in the

vicinity of the small ice-world known as Pluto. Recovery work was

performed by classes of nonsentient machines. The machines' ship—also

robot-controlled—returned to Earth seven months ago."

The Master called Shaizan, who frequently spoke for the triad,

conferred for a moment with his confederates. "What were the machines

salvaging?" he asked.

"Debris, my lord. Perhaps from the explosion of a spacecraft of some

sort. Surveillance personnel report seeing what looked to be household

belongings, electronic devices, and a myriad of vehicles, including several

boats."

"Boats?" the Master Dag said, who was the more lantern-jawed of the

three.

"Flotation vessels for use on water. Apparently there were many of

these."

"Is there a shortage of boats on Earth?" Shaizan asked.

"Observations would indicate otherwise, m'lords."

"Then why? Speculate."

"The Humans were searching for one or several irreplaceable objects.

Possibly objects destroyed during the Zentraedi Rain of Death—their phrase

for the Grand Fleet's bombardment of the planet under the auspices of

Zentraedi Commander-in-Chief Dolza."

Shaizan sent to Dag and Bowkaz:

A retrieval operation would suggest

that these objects, whatever they are, are as important to the Humans as

the matrix is to us.

Agreed

, the two Masters returned in mindspeak.

"Has there been any communication between the surveillance ship and

the Elders?" Shaizan directed to Myzex, leader of a triumvirate of politicians

and policy makers.

21

"None, Masters," the clone said, kowtowing. "All transsignal

Communiqués aimed at Tirol have gone unanswered."

Bowkaz, the strategist, barked, "Assessment!"

"Tirol has been abandoned."

"Explicate," the Masters ordered in unison.

"Surrendered."

"Elaborate."

"An Invid attack on the Near-Group worlds."

"Karbarra, Praxis, Spheris, Garuda—all defeated?" Bowkaz asked.

"Ludicrous."

Myzex kowtowed once more. "Only a probability, my lords."

The Masters took a moment to deliberate in silence.

The Elders would

never have allowed themselves to be captured,

Shaizan sent.

They would

have departed Tirol on first detection of the Invid.

If so, they will contact us,

Dag assured him.

The Masters fixed their collective glower on Myzex. "Report on Earth's

defenses."

"Forward observation bases on the planet's large moon and in

stationary orbit; several orbital weapons platforms; a flotilla of deepspace

frigates and cruisers; abundant surface missile silos, though nothing on the

order of Dolza's description of the Grand Cannon. The factory satellite is

anchored midway between Earth and its moon, but appears to be

inoperative."

"And Zor's fortress?" Shaizan asked.

"Nowhere in evidence."

"Could it be concealed somewhere on the surface—submerged in

Earth's waters, perhaps?"

Myzex inclined his head. "The suggestion offers some promise. Reports

from Exedore Formo at the start of the Zentraedi campaign against Earth

indicated that the fortress was apparently incapable of executing a space-

fold. And it was surely further incapacitated during the Rain of Death. Or

why else would the Humans have had to employ Breetai's ship in their

22

attack on Commander Reno's outpost?"

"The Elders will apprise us," Dag said.

Bowkaz nodded. "Until then, we must assume that the matrix is safe

within Zor's fortress and that the fortress is somewhere on the surface." He

looked at Dovak. "Would we prevail in a direct engagement with Earth?"

"Only if it was brief and surgical," the military adviser stated flatly. "A

protracted, all-inclusive war on the planet would deplete the fleet of

Protoculture in a matter of months. Moreover, the Humans have had ample

time to prepare for our arrival. If the matrix has been discovered, they will

have ample supplies of Protoculture to fuel their battle mecha."

The Masters pressed their bony fingertips to the surface of the Cap and

retreated into the sanctity of their communal thoughts.

We must wait for

the Elders to advise us,

they sent in unanimity.

"Without specimens of the Flower of Life or a functioning matrix, we

haven't a prayer of producing Protoculture," Emil Lang had told Lazlo Zand

more than ten years earlier. "Our one hope lies in being able to synthesize it.

I'm certain that the key to that process is to be found somewhere in EVE's

databanks, but they're impermeable without the components the SDF-1 was

forced to leave behind in Plutospace. If only we hadn't been so panicked by

our miscalculated fold. Then, of course, there were the lives of Macross's

fifty-six thousand to think of . . ."

EVE was Lang's name for the mother computer that had overseen the

SDF-1 and had been removed from the fortress years before the ship's

destruction at the hands of the Zentraedi warlord, Khyron. An acronym for

Enhanced Video Emulation, the computer had provided sky effects—clouds,

rainbows, and sunsets—for the citizens of the island city that had been

inadvertently folded into deepspace and subsequently rebuilt inside the

fortress. From 2012 to 2020, when the SDF-3 launched, EVE—a stand-

alone system, isolated from the world's plethora of interactive computer

networks—had merely taken up space in Lang's Robotech Research Center

in Tokyo. Then, in 2023, Lazlo Zand, responding to requests from the city's

23

Ministry of Human Services, had discovered a way to make the machine

earn its keep. "EVE" was turned into a motherly, Big Sister telepresence that

spoke to the needs of the orphaned generation, appearing on her own

telecomp channel and on billboard-size screens throughout the burgeoning

cities of the Pacific Rim. It was a source of mindless propaganda, much like

the heartening Zand-authored messages allegedly received from the missing

SDF-3.

But EVE had become little more than the public face of the mother

computer since the scarcely noted return of the truant components from

Plutospace some six months earlier. Lang's dream of accessing the system

had been realized, only it was Lazlo Zand—tall, willowy, rumpled, and every

bit as alien-eyed as Lang—who was reaping the rewards.

Lang's chief disciple during Reconstruction, Zand had inherited the

UEG-funded research facility. In 2025, at the height of the anti-Robotech

movement, it had been renamed the Special Protoculture Observations and

Operations Kommandatura, or SPOOK, after the department Zand had

administered under Lang. The new designation, however, was also

indicative of deeper changes. By 2027, Zand had rid SPOOK of all Lang-

loyal personnel. Gone were the research and development teams, the

support staff, the cybertechnicians who had created the android JANUS M;

in their place were scientists handpicked by Zand and

his

chief disciples,

Joseph Petrie and Henry Giles.

But Zand had worked solo on reacquainting the components with their

mother machine, and in the process had gone Lang one better. It had long

been Lang's assumption that Zor had not only designed the ship but had

programmed the computer as well. Why, then, not let the computer reveal

itself as Zor? Zand had asked himself, envisioning a virtual telepresence—or

better still, a hologram—that could be constructed by sampling the A/V

warning message Zor had recorded for the finders of his fortress.

Lang himself had viewed the message during the initial recon of the

crashed ship, shortly before receiving the mindboost that had catapulted

him overnight to the apex of the pre-War scientific community.

24

Zand's mindboost had come nineteen years later, though not at the

controls of a piece of unfathomable Robotechnology. His had come from a

transfusion of ur-Protoculture drained from an Invid battlecraft found

aboard the remains of Khyron's ship, mixed with a liter of blood liberated

from Dana Parino Sterling, Earth's only Human-Zentraedi hybrid. And

depending on where in the galaxy the SDF-3 had ended up, Zand had access

to something else Lang didn't: Flowers of Life, recently discovered growing

in the shadow of a rusting Zentraedi battlewagon in a remote area of the

Southlands. Not in abundance—far too few to supply a Protoculture matrix,

even if one could be built—but enough to numb Zand's palate and intoxicate

his mind. Since ingesting his first Flower petal, he had almost passed

beyond the need for sleep or sustenance, and his understanding of the

Shapings had increased tenfold.

Locked inside his cluttered subbasement office, Zand had one of the

petals in his mouth just now. And pacing a stretch of soiled carpet in front

of the office's smart-wall was the Zor hologram the Protoculturist had

conjured from the mother computer: a dreamy-eyed youth of average height,

with handsome features and wavy locks of shoulder-length brown-blond

hair. The faintly blue-green holo appeared courtesy of a projector imbedded

in the floor. Data could be projected in 3-D or displayed on a large

flatscreen centered in the smart-wall.

In the two months the computer had been permeable, Zand and the

Zor holo had engaged in several introductory discussions, many of them

pleasant, all of them enlightening. The machine knew English, but most of

the conversations had been conducted in Zentraedi, which Zand spoke

fluently. So as not to confuse it, Zand had allowed the machine only limited

access to the world outside SPOOK, though it had learned quite a bit on its

own through the celebrity telepresence, EVE.

The focus of that night's discussion—Zand was at his best after

midnight—was Zor's secret rebellion against the Robotech Masters and his

attempts at seeding worlds with the Flower of Life.

"Were those missions undertaken to ensure a ready supply of

25

Flowers?" Zand asked.

In keeping with its emotive programming, the holo glanced at him with

arrogant disapproval. "The seeding was done for the sake of the Invid."

"But if the Invid were Tirol's enemies—"

"The Masters made them what they were by harvesting Optera's

Flowers, then defoliating the planet. The seeding missions were an attempt

to redress that wrong, and to provide them with a world that might nourish

them."

"Obviously they rejected the offer."

"The Flower of Life owes much to the soil that supports it. Each planet

that accepted it—Karbarra, Garuda, Spheris, and the rest—produced strains

that diverged from those fostered by Optera. The Invid were unable to

derive what they needed from the varieties I sowed. The Masters put a stop

to the attempts, in any case."

Zand, seated at his desk, stroked his chin in thought. The computer

didn't seem to realize that its creator had died on one of those worlds—

murdered by warriors of the race he had been so desperate to rescue.

"Dispatching your fortress was a way of retaliating for the action of the

Masters?"

"Partly."

"But why to Earth? Why here, of all worlds? Not simply because of its

distance from Tirol, I take it."

The Zor holo took a moment to respond. "There are matters I am

insufficiently programmed to address, though I am aware of being referred

to data concerning Haydon."

"What is Haydon?"

"A historical personage of great power. The seeding attempts were

strongly influenced by my investigations into his life."

"Do you contain those data?"

"Those data are not found."

Zand sucked at his teeth. "Even so, you obviously

knew

what you were

doing in sending your fortress far from the Masters' reach. You thought

26

enough to include a message of warning about the Invid."

"Yes, I knew what I was doing."

"Then you deliberately targeted Earth. The fortress's controlled crash

on Macross Island wasn't an accident."

"Earth figures strongly in the coming events."

"What events?"

"I can only address potential developments. What's more, the ship isn't

important; its contents are what matter."

"The Protoculture matrix," Zand said knowingly and somewhat

despondently. "Where was—

is

it concealed?" The computer was still

unaware of the ship's destruction and burial.

The Zor holo started to reply, but stopped itself. It remained silent for a

moment, then said, "Intrusion alert."

Zand straightened in his swivel chair.

"An attempt is under way to infiltrate my databanks."

"Locate the source of the intrusion," Zand commanded.

"The infiltration is being routed through a host of fiber-optic relay

stations, but I have the source address."

"Here in Tokyo?"

"Yes."

"Hackers," Zand said with patent disgust. "Trying to ride in on a call to

EVE, are they?"

"Through EVE, yes."

Zand nodded. "Then transmit the usual free sample. But be sure to

append a reprimand. Nothing life-threatening. Just enough to give them

pause before they try this again."

27

CHAPTER THREE

Spurred by Anatole Leonard, by then [2025] a permanent resident of

Monument City, public sentiment toward the REF and those Zentraedi still

living on the surface underwent a decided shift. Leonard was able to use the

SDF-3's encouraging though completely bogus transmissions—written at

Chairman Moran's behest by Lazlo Zand—to suggest that the members of the

Expeditionary Mission had had no real intention of reaching an accord with

the Masters and had made a new home for themselves in space. Wherever it

appeared, the once-esteemed fighting-kite symbol of the RDF was slashed

with a red diagonal; the term Robotech was used disparagingly when used at

all; and Lang's Research Center was renamed SPOOK. Then, of course, there

were the Klan attempts to drive the Zentraedi offworld, and the acts of

cybersabotage committed against the RDF Cobra Squadron's Alpha VTs,

which have come to be called the Giles Crimes.

Zachary Fox, Jr.,

Men, Women, Mecha:

The Changed Landscape of the Second Robotech War

If there was one thing that hadn't been affected by the Rain of Death,

the fiery ruin of Macross City, and the apparent disappearance of the

Expeditionary mission, it was the belief that weekends were still for putting

aside the sometimes nasty business of the world and focusing on the things

that mattered: family and friends, sport and avocation, the timeless

traditions and pastimes that kept the world turning through the harshest of

reversals. Even dedicated public servants like Rolf Emerson—recently

elevated to the burdensome-sounding position of Minister of Terrestrial

Defense—looked forward to weekends. Especially during August, when the

Northwest's skies were clear, the air was warm and redolent with pine, and

mid-October's chill winds seemed a long way off. And especially that

particular August of 2029, with only a month to go before Bowie Grant and

Dana Sterling, Emerson's teenage charges, were required to relocate to the

28

dormitory of the Earth Defense Force Academy in the heart of Monument

City.

For Dana, only daughter of the Robotech War's most able pilots, Max

Sterling and Miriya Parino, the EDF Academy was the natural choice. But

for Bowie, a talented musician of fragile health, enrollment struck Emerson

as more punishment than privilege. Nevertheless, Emerson had promised

Bowie's career-officer parents, Jean and Vince—unheard from these past

nine years—that Bowie would receive a modicum of military training. Not

that the boy had much choice, given the climate of preparedness that had

dominated the '20s.

Emerson had conceived of a weekend of hiking and fishing for the

three of them, with at least one overnight camp in the high mountains north

of Monument. It was just the three of them since Ilan Tinari had elected to

join her fellow Zentraedi in voluntary banishment aboard the factory

satellite. Ilan had reentered Emerson's life a month after he and Laura

Shaze had called it quits, but had only remained for a year. In light of the

miserable conditions aliens had been forced into by Earth's xenophobic

lawmakers, he didn't blame her for abandoning him a second time.

Emerson had just endured a week of meetings with the Senate

Appropriations Committee, hammering out a budget for improvements to

Fokker Aerospace, and had decided that a dose of wilderness would return

him to sanity. But his plans had been thrown a curve by a phone call he had

received at home on Friday afternoon. Major General Nigel Aldershot

wondered if Emerson wouldn't meet with him in Monument City on

Saturday morning to discuss a matter of great importance. No, not at the

general's office, or at Emerson's either, but in town. If Emerson would check

his e-mail, he would find the address of the place.

It had all sounded needlessly mysterious, but Emerson couldn't very

well refuse the request. Aldershot was an old friend, in addition to being one

of the living legends who had flown against the Zentraedi from the launch

bays of SDF-1. Emerson suspected that the meeting had something to do

with the Senate's recent passage of a bill that created a Special Oversight

29

Committee on Military Deployment. The politically appointed members of

the committee would be responsible for assessing proposed intervention by

the EDF in territorial disputes among non-allied nations. The bill was in

direct response to May's confrontation in Venezuela, in which factions

within the Defense Force had fought one another. But while the bill granted

the committee authority to override Commander Leonard's deployment

decisions, few thought it likely that the veto would ever be exercised.

So Emerson was headed into Monument City. Aldershot had made a

point of stressing the "informality" of the gathering, which Emerson had

understood to mean no uniforms, no chauffeured cars, no entourage. So he

was piloting the family solar, heavily dented along the left side from an

encounter Dana had had with a moose, of all things. Their log-and-stone

home—once the property of General Gunther Reinhardt-was nestled in a

wooded valley about fifteen miles east of the city. Elsewhere, trees were

something of a rarity. The northwest had enjoyed a short fling with fertility

early in the decade, but a blight had since denuded the immediate environs

of Monument, and the disease had been followed by a drought that had yet

to end. It had gotten so bad that water was being flown, trucked, and piped

in from the north of Canada.

There had been changes to the city as well. The Zentraedi battlewagon

that had once risen spikelike from Monument's artificial lake had been cut

apart and removed, putting a symbolic finish to "foreign" influence in a city

that had been founded by Zentraedi. And of course there were the new and

somewhat medieval-looking headquarters of the UEG and the Earth

Defense Force, along with sundry substructures given over to the Tactical

Armored Corps and Civil Defense. Even Fokker Aerospace had seen changes

since the formation of the Cosmic Units, whose bases included the lunar

bright-side facility at Aluce, the orbital platforms, and Space Station Liberty,

in stationary orbit on the far side of the moon.

At nearby Macross, radiation readings had finally subsided to

acceptable levels, and Monumenters frequently traveled to the overlook to

gaze at the three Humanmade buttes that marked the resting places of the

30

SDFs 1 and 2 and the cruiser Khyron the Backstabber had wielded. Emerson

had made the pilgrimage with Dana and Bowie, whose Aunt Claudia had

died aboard the SDF-1. The view had put Emerson in mind of a site in

central Mexico where a city had been buried by the lava flow from a volcano

that had literally grown out of a cornfield. There, amid a landscape of

porous black boulders, only the steeple of a church had been visible.

Central Monument had begun as a copse of alloy-and-permaplex milk-

carton highrises, and had gradually blossomed into a full-fledged

metropolis, with building clusters rising on both the east and west banks of

the river. Of all the Northlands' new crop of urban sprawls, it most

resembled Macross in the days before its demise. From a distance, the city

looked healthy and prosperous. What wasn't immediately apparent,

however, was the murky darkness of its narrow streets, the shabby

construction of the Quickform buildings, and the palpable sense of

apprehension and uncertainty.

Driven out by vicious bigotry, the last of the Zentraedi had left the

previous year, only to be replaced by thousands of indigent homesteaders

who had been eking out an existence on the Plains. Assailed by droughts,

floods, the eruption of two volcanos in Mexico, an earthquake in the West,

and hurricanes in the south, the homesteaders suddenly had nowhere to

turn to but Monument, Denver, and Portland. For a time, it was easy to

believe that Earth was out to extinguish all life—or at least to make itself

unfit for habitation by Humans, Zentraedi, Robotech Masters, Invid, or any

other allegedly intelligent species with designs on the place. Some saw the

storms and upheavals as the planet's delayed shock reaction to the ravaging

it had suffered from Dolza and the Grand Fleet.

The place Aldershot had selected for the meet was in Monument's

Gauntlet district, an inner-city pink zone where criminality was condoned

and illicit goods were readily available: prostitutes, outlawed technology,

designer drugs, violent contest. The Gauntlet served as a kind of proving

ground for experimental pleasures, weapons, and cyberware escaped from

research labs as near as those in Denver's "Protoculture Valley" or as distant

31

as SPOOK.

Monument's police force didn't bother trying to control the flow of

goods or the rivalries of the gangs, many of which had drifted north from

Freetown, in Mexico, after the eruptions. The city's privileged denizens

viewed the Gauntlet as a necessity of sorts—escape for the lumpen populace

from the brutal realities of the everyday life. And perhaps that explained

why the orphaned generation was so taken with the place. It appealed to the

more nihilistic-leaning of Dana and Bowie's peers, with their taste for

Zentraedi-inspired, body-hugging clothing and discordant music, their easy

acceptance of violence, and their rabid fascination with EVE, who wasn't

even a flesh-and-blood celebrity but a telepresence—a ghostly, digitally

created Holy Mothercum—Big Sister. The Gauntlet, and like enclaves of

sanctioned self-destruction in Tokyo, Portland, and Paris, seemed to be the

flip side of the Southland's Earth-First People's Army.

When, as per Aldershot's instructions, Emerson had searched his e-

mail for the rendezvous site, he had found a listing of weekend events. But

on closer inspection he had spotted, under brunch options, an ad for a

restaurant called CUTE MEAT.

The eatery was located in a Gauntlet alley, tucked between a piercing

parlor and a virtual-travel agency. Emerson eased in through beaded

curtains and was halfway to the sushi bar when he was intercepted by a

burly man he recognized as one of Aldershot's staff officers, the civvies

notwithstanding. The officer touched his hand to his forehead in subtle

salute and directed Emerson to a blood-red doorway in the rear wall of the

room.

Crowded around a circular table in a poorly lighted private dining area

sat Aldershot and several other officers, all of them former members of the

RDF. At the table's eight o'clock position was Evan Tannen, whose ex-RDF

forces had taken on Laubin's Southern Cross contingent in what was

supposed to have been a peacekeeping operation in Cavern City. Tannen

and Laubin had gone to guns, but, in the end, the People's Army had pulled

back to regroup, then struck off in the direction of the unfortified city of

32

Roca Negra.

Emerson shook hands all around while the burly officer brought a chair

for him.

"Nothing said here leaves this room," Aldershot announced

straightaway. "It's been swept three times and sanitized top to bottom."

"Why the precautions, Nigel?"

"We'd rather the Oversight Committee on Deployment didn't get

wind."

"I figured," Emerson told him. "But, for what it's worth, I support the

aims of the committee. We can't have the EDF involved in every low-

intensity situation that arises. And we certainly can't afford to have the

Defense Force shooting itself in the foot every time it's assigned a mission."

Emerson glanced at Tannen. "Not if we want to present a unified front to

the Masters."

"If and when they show up," Tannen grumbled.

Aldershot was fingering his waxed mustache. "We agree with you about

the committee, Rolf. In theory, it seems a reasonable idea to grant veto

power to someone other than Chairman Moran. Our problem with it is that

the majority of candidates suggested for committee membership have

strong ties to the Southern Cross apparat."

"There hasn't been a Southern Cross apparat for nine years."

Aldershot lifted a bushy eyebrow. "I don't think you believe that for a

minute. The Southern Cross might not exist as a titled entity, but everyone

here knows it exists. Moran, Leonard, Zand . . . each one of them is carefully

positioned to influence the UEG, the EDF, and the Protoculture-research

community. All thanks to T. R. Edwards. Admiral Hunter and the rest were

too busy with the SDF-3 to realize what Edwards was setting in motion.

Now, with control of the Oversight Committee, Leonard will be able to

choose who goes where, and with what mecha. And before we know it, the

'disbanded' Southern Cross will be too powerful to counter."

"Against what, exactly?" Emerson asked.

"Ridding the Defense Force of all Robotech Defenders."

33

Rolf shook his head. "I haven't seen evidence of a calculated effort to

wipe out the RDF. Besides, it's plain that Leonard doesn't need to engineer

anything—not when the EDF is so adept at engineering its own

catastrophes."

Aldershot was silent for a few seconds. "I was hoping you would drop

your guard and speak to us as a confederate and not as a politician." He

paused again. "Do you want to talk about the Giles Academy, Rolf?"

Emerson didn't. But he couldn't help thinking about it.

For a brief period in 2025, the Giles Academy had existed as an

exclusive training facility for would-be Veritech pilots. But in fact the

academy had been a front for a clandestine operation to sabotage flights of

experimental RDF mecha, via remote control, by a select group of Giles-

trained cyberpirates. Emerson had detected the hand of Anatole Leonard in

the conspiracy and had sent Dana Sterling, then thirteen years old, to

investigate the goings-on. Afterward, he had tasked an RDF lieutenant

named Terry Weston with exposing the operation. Weston had succeeded,

but Giles had either committed suicide or been murdered, and Leonard had

escaped implication.

Dana and the ruggedly handsome—and much older—Weston had kept

in touch after the penetration, and Emerson had always suspected that they

had become lovers. Dana wouldn't say. But there had been no more talking

to imaginary friends after Weston had entered her life. As for Weston, the

last Emerson heard he was living in Tokyo.

"We just want to know where you stand, Rolf," Aldershot said, sparing

Emerson the need to rehash the details of the covert operation he had

mounted against Giles. "Everyone at this table is well aware of your past—in

Sydney during the Reconstruction and in the Argentine during the

Uprisings. But, frankly, your years of service as liaison between the RDF

and the Southern Cross have left some of us a bit confused as to your

present loyalties."

Emerson bridled. "My loyalties are to the Ministry of Terrestrial

Defense and the EDF, and I refuse to contribute to increased factionalism.

34

You people know damn well what Reinhardt and Hunter expect of us.

Defending the Earth has to come before defending any parochial interests of

the RDF."

"I don't think Reinhardt and Hunter gave a thought to what might

occur in the absence of the SDF-3," Aldershot argued. "They assumed they'd

be back within a year or two, and that they could straighten out any

problems that had cropped up between the Southern Cross and the RDF.

They didn't want to deal with the rivalry issue then, out of fear that a

confrontation would delay the launch of the Expeditionary mission."

"And who knows what's become of that ship," Colonel Tannen

interjected. "We may never hear from it again. Or from the Robotech

Masters."

Aldershot studied Emerson. "It's time to begin thinking about the

future, Rolf, and to concentrate on who the real enemy is."

Emerson held Aldershot's gaze. "Meaning what?"

"As things stand, units of the RDF are still well placed. We're strong in

Monument and on Fokker Base, and we're at parity with Southern Cross

contingents on Aluce and the weapons platforms. And, really, we're only

talking about three principal targets: the Senate Hall, Leonard's wing at

EDF headquarters, and the Chairman's Palace. It's just a matter of

coordinating the timing."

Emerson considered Aldershot's words, then sat back from the table,

stunned. "You got me here to talk about staging a goddamned

coup

."

In the Kabukicho apartment she shared with Census, Discount, and

Gibley, whom they called Hongo, Misa Yoshida paced nervously while

Hongo did what he could to ease Census's distress.

"Is he going to be all right?" Misa stopped to ask, nibbling at a

fingernail.

Hongo glanced at her, sighing dramatically. "Standard Zand attack.

Blinds you for a while and leaves you with one hell of a headache. But

nothing untreatable." With herbs, he meant, most of them mildly euphoric.

35

Thriving right there under grow lights in a corner of the six-mat room.

Census, making moaning sounds, was lying on his back on the tatami,

one arm thrown over his eyes, his long black hair configured in a ridiculous

pompadour. His interactive goggles—a brand-new pair of All-Seeing Eyes—

were beside him, inert by the milky look of the elongated lenses. The control

deck itself, which Misa thought she had heard sizzle when the pirated data

was coming through, was still on the table, but the apartment smelled of

fried microcircuits or something.

Where Census had been pale a few moments earlier, he was flushed

now, his round face looking like he'd suffered an allergic reaction to

shellfish or bee stings. Hongo was fanning him with a coffee-stained

fauxpaper manual that had come with the pricy, ubertech control deck.

Kneeling, Discount was proffering a container of citrus juice he'd run in

from one of the lobby vending machines. Unlike some, the ones in their

building didn't deliver.

When Census raised himself on his elbows and blinked, Hongo cut his

spectacled blue eyes to Misa. "You heard me warn him this could happen."

Misa frowned at him. Hongo would know; he had once been employed

by the facility Census had just tried to invade. But that had been years ago,

before the name had been changed from the Robotech Research Center to

the Special Protoculture Observations and Operations Kommandatura.

"You warned him, Hongo, but I didn't see you try to stop him."

"Did we get anything?" Census managed to ask between groans.

Discount handed him the juice drink and hurried over to the printer.

"Doubt it's anything we can sell," Hongo commented.

As if sticking out its tongue at them, the printer had extruded a single

sheet of hardcopy. Discount eased the sheet free of the machine's gentle

grasp and perused it. Squinting, Census stared in the direction of the printer.

"Well?"

"A listing of EVE's guests for the coming week," Discount told him. He

cursed, balled up the sheet, and threw it toward the sliding screen, which

Census had tagged with the names of his favorite

manga

heroes.

36

Census exhaled loudly, but Hongo merely chuckled to himself. Misa

wanted to smash both their faces.

EVE herself, audio muted, was running on their pathetic excuse for a

telecomp, where, before Census had been knocked to the floor, she had been

indulging in the usual cheerful futurecasting. How everything was going to

be rosy when the SDF-3 returned, but until then Earth had to be ready to

defend itself against attacks by the Masters—those evil Zentraedi-makers.

And how the subsurface shelters in Tokyo weren't such awful places once

you got used to them, and how people should always respect and comply

with the drills and the commands of the

omawari

—the police—who had the

people's safety in mind. Most of all, how Tokyo was a lot better off than

most other cities, because if an attack did come, it would be Tokyo's

fortunate citizens who would emerge unscathed from the shelters and

underground malls to rebuild the world—like the people of SDF-1 Macross

had done after the Rain of Death. In fact, Tokyo should be thought of as the

new Macross, EVE often said, and Earth as Tokyo's dimensional fortress—

Tokyo's

Yamato

.

EVE was a ravishingly beautiful e-specter of mixed ethnicity. Her dark

eyes were ever so slightly epicanthic; her nose was ever so slightly wide; her

lips were ever so slightly full; her complexion was a shade past olive. Her

height and proportions tended to vary, depending on whether she was alone

or hosting guests—live or comp-generated. Of course, her creators could

have written her any way they wanted. But—according to Gibley, at least—

research into the psychodynamics of the orphaned generation had ordained

what EVE should look like. Not too sexy, not too talented, not too intelligent,

either. No

ii-dol talento

, for sure. More like the caring mother lost to a

generation.

The world had come a long way since Lynn-Minmei and Janice Em.

EVE took questions from callers and dished out advice, gossip, and

propaganda. She was accessed on the Lorelei Network, whose satellites had

been used to monitor the movements of Zentraedi Malcontents during the

Uprisings twelve years earlier.

37

Only young kids didn't clutch that EVE was a telepresence; for them

she was a combo Santa Claus, Superhero, Tooth Fairy, Easter Bunny, and

psychic adviser. But by the time you were eight years old, you clutched she

was nothing but digitized data and pixels, birthed by a computer taken from

the SDF-1.

Census was coming around now, sitting up and sipping juice. His real

name was Shi Ling, and he was Chinese—from Beijing—but his family had

been living in Tokyo when the Rain happened. He was goodlooking and cut,

hut, at five eight, kind of short. Even so, he had an inch on Discount, whose

real name was anybody's guess, but who was definitely from the Northlands,

and who claimed to have seen the SDF-1 in 2011, when he was three and the

ship had returned to Earth after spending two years in space. Discount was

blond, blue-eyed, and cute when his face wasn't breaking out. Raised in the

same communal home, he and Census shared the same last name.

Terms like

gaijin

and

chosen-jin

didn't apply much anymore; Japan

was pretty much as multiethnic as anyplace else in the world now. The Rain

of Death had seen to that.

Misa was the only

Nihon-jin

among them. Their nickname for her—

Miko—meant vestal virgin, but she wasn't religious, and she sure wasn't a

virgin. She was tall and shapely and maybe a bit heftier than most of her

female peers, but no guy had ever complained about her size. She

sometimes thought she could remember her parents, but she wasn't sure.

The three of them had gotten to know each other through the

placement agency that assisted in moving teens from the communal homes

into real homes, but, more often, shared apartments.

Hongo—Gibley—had come along later. He was eleven years older than

Discount, who was thought to be twenty, which made Hongo more a

doomsdayer than a member of the orphaned. But age didn't matter all that

much for guys with a common interest in high-tech piracy.

"It was dim trying to tap SPOOK through EVE," Discount was saying, a

little late, as always. "Calls to EVE are monitored by watchdog programs.

You try to pull a fade from the line and the dogs are on your tail that quick.

38

Hacker's hell, Census. Everyone I know who's tried has ended up dazzled by

download jolts. Real dim."

"I warned him not to stray," Hongo repeated. "But I guess everybody

needs to experience defeat firsthand."

Census was massaging his eyes with the heels of both hands. "I was

only looking around in there. How'd I know security was watching me?"

Hongo shook his head in amused disbelief. "Security is what they

do

there, pirate. You think you're dealing with a telephone company or

something?"

"We shouldn't even be doing this," Misa said when she'd heard enough.

The three regarded her like she was some XT specimen.

"I mean, we shouldn't be stealing and selling information. You guys

have strong enough

mecha

to get jobs as software writers, and instead

you're risking your . . . your

minds

, for secrets you half the time can't even

sell."

"Oh, 'zat right?" Census said, thinking he was looking right at her when

he wasn't. "Notice you didn't refuse the skirt I paid for outta the deal we

made with that yak."

Yak was short for

yakuza

, which had once referred to

Nihon-jin

gangsters but now meant just about anybody wedded to a criminal tribe and

hot to profit. "I never asked for that skirt," she said defensively.

"

Chu-gen

, Miko," he said with a mocking smile. "Christmas in July."

She stiffened but said nothing. She and Census were supposed to be

love interests, but they had frequent go-rounds, especially about buying

things. She would accuse him of being

nowie

—hungry for hip—and he'd

reply that if she was so correct and Earth First, why didn't she just run off to

the Southlands and enlist in the People's Army? The arguments reflected

the difference in the philosophies of the communal homes they'd been

raised in. But the real problem was that she was push-pull about having and

not having. Plus, Census was something of a

freeter

, which translated as

"womanizer" the way Misa used it.

She could get with the idea that the boys liked their toys, but each

39

acquisition, each possession, only had them working harder to score. As

things stood, Misa, Census, and Discount each received an orphan

allowance from the Ministry of Human Services in exchange for working in

the shelters, the homes, the hospitals, or just about anywhere else they were

needed. The three allowances combined were enough to cover food and the

rent on the apartment and the tiny telecomp, but never much more than

that. Most of the furniture in the place—from futons to the bathtub—had

come from midnight raids on the geo-grid's rubbish heaps.

That was why the guys had turned their dubious

ki/bushido

talents

with control decks and network-interactive goggles to rifling computer

databanks for salable information. SPOOK, home of the SDF-1 computer,

was of course the mother of databanks; not only did EVE originate there,

but so did most of the vision papers that eventually found their way to the

Chairman's Palace or to EDF headquarters in Monument City.

Not everyone knew that the SDF-1 computer was actually right there in

Tokyo; most novice data pirates thought the system was in Monument or

even inboard the factory satellite. The satellite was the abode of giants, kids

were told; they could be seen at night, gazing up at the thing as if it were the

castle Jack had climbed to by beanstalk. But then, not every data pirate had

a roommate like Gibley. He'd even met Dr. Emil Lang once. But after Zand

had assumed control of SPOOK, the whole cyber department had been fired,

and Gibley had been sore about it ever since. Legend had it that he'd fallen

in with some acid-head posse after the layoff and had eaten nothing but

psychedelic mushrooms for two years. Which was how he had come by the

nickname Hongo.

He was grinning at Misa just now. He was so tall, gangly, and gawky

that fellow bathers in the

ofuro

would often stare at him as openly as they

did any tattooed Modem Youth or horribly scarred or limbless survivor of

the Rain. "Misa, think what it would mean for all of us if we

could

penetrate

SPOOK."

"Yeah—more headaches," she told him, slipping into her clogs and

storming from the room.

40

CHAPTER FOUR

It is astonishing that Zand was able to learn as much as he did [about

Zor] in the short time that the SDF-1's mother computer was operational—

from January through October, 2029. What distinguishes Zand's contribution

is the fact that his meticulous recordings of his sessions with the computer

offer glimpses of the Tiresian as he was in the year before his death, when

even Cabell, our primary historical source, was estranged from him. Had I

not been fortunate enough to be one of the first to enter Zand's compound

near Monument City in the concluding moments of the Second Robotech War,

these incredible documents would have been lost to the explosion that

obliterated his laboratory.

Louis Nichols, from the introduction to his

BeeZee: The Galaxy Before Zor

In the command center of the alien fleet's flagship, the Master Dag sent

to Myzex, "Would we prevail in a direct engagement?"

"Only if it was brief and surgical," the military adviser stated flatly. "A

protracted, all-inclusive war on the planet would deplete the fleet of

Protoculture in a matter of months. Moreover, the Earthers have had ample

time to prepare for our arrival, and ample supplies of Protoculture to fuel

their battle mecha."

Exchanges of late between the Masters and the leaders of the sundry

triumvirates had taken on the repetitive nature of a litany. But Bowkaz

suddenly broke with convention by addressing the Clonemaster leader,

Jeddar. "Suppose we brought our Triumviroid weapons to bear on Earth."

Jeddar considered the question. The most powerful in the Masters'

arsenal, the clone-piloted Triumviroid fighting machine system had been

developed rather recently—by their stagnated standards—and incorporated

certain characteristics of the savage Invid. Costly to produce and engineered

of mismatched horn, chitin, and sinew, the Triumviroids were high-energy

41

spined spheres that looked as much biological as Robotechnological.

"Well?" Bowkaz asked after only a moment had elapsed.

The Clonemaster kowtowed. "M'lords, the Triumviroids were created

primarily for intra-atmospheric contest. Thus, we would be required to

insert our ships into orbit, or, better still, to make planetfall, which

presupposes the launch of a comprehensive invasion. I submit that the

Invid Fighters should be reserved to supply tactical support."

The Masters conversed in mindspeak; then Shaizan spoke aloud.

"Perhaps we can make use of the Zor clone to fix the location of the fortress

and the matrix."

Myzex responded. "That, too, presupposes a fullscale invasion of Earth.

Unless you have sufficient confidence in the clone's loyalty to permit him to

be surreptitiously inserted on the surface by a single, small ship."

The Masters kept their thoughts to themselves.

Of the twenty clones sprung from tissue samples taken from Zor's body

upon its return to Tirol, only one had made the trip to the Solar system. The

rest had either succumbed to experiments in accelerated development

performed on Tirol or been left to expire in the stasis chamber that was

their communal environment. All twenty had been grown in biovats, and all

were possessed of their donor's elfin handsomeness. Only one, however,

had been given the chance to grow naturally into a facsimile of the original

Zor; but even that clone had yet to reveal evidence that the brilliance of the

donor had been passed undiluted to its offspring. This was despite an

upbringing that mirrored Zor's own to the greatest extent possible: the

emotional deprivation, the surfeit of material luxuries, the seclusion from

his peers, the forced feeding of scientific knowledge.

Zor Prime, as the Masters referred to him, had somehow matured into

a more physically oriented being than his father/sibling, evincing an

interest in the design of combat mecha and the contemptible

companionship of the soldier-clones that operated them. Chagrined by the

course the clone had taken, the Masters conceded that they had erred in

underestimating the influence that Zor's mentor, Cabell, had had on his

42

student. The wizardlike Cabell had been left behind in Tiresia to ease the

Elders' burden of having to govern Tirol's nonclone population.

We must wait for the Elders to advise us,

Shaizan sent at last.

Normally, the sending would have ended the session, but just then a

radiance blossomed in the command center, close to where the Masters

hovered at their Protoculture Cap. The radiance unfolded like the time-

lapse roiling of a storm cloud until it was fifteen feet in diameter and had

taken on the sapphire tint typical of a transsignal sphere. The sphere threw

forth a brilliance that splashed off the keen, hawked-nosed faces of the

Masters; inside it, enthroned in a circle around an identical Cap, sat the

three Elders, Nimuul, Fallagar, and Hepsis.

Like their far younger counterparts, they were dressed in regal robes,

though they looked less like monks than executioners. All had shaven pates,

wide sideburns, and straight, fine hair. Under their sharp cheekbones were

scarlike creases of skin, suggestive of tribal markings.

The Masters and the leaders of the triumvirates kowtowed. "We have

long awaited audience, Elders," Shaizan said aloud. "That you now grace us

with an appearance restores our faith in the expedition and in the future."

The words sounded sincere, but Shaizan's thoughts were troubled;

mind-linked to him, Dag and Bowkaz understood why. The Elders weren't

communicating from Tirol or from the surface of any world, known or

unknown. The commo sphere showed just enough of the Elders' immediate

surroundings to reveal that they were aboard a starship—and scarcely a ship,

at that. Shaizan recognized it as the prototype a Scientist triumvirate had

been working on when word of the Zentraedi defeat had first reached Tirol.

The vessel was scarcely larger than the assault ships that carried the

Masters' bioroids into combat.

In a disembodied voice as thick as syrup Nimuul said, "Your respect is

well received, Shaizan, for we have events to relate that may cast a pall on

the confidence our appearance has unjustly inspired."

And with that he began to recount what had happened on Tirol four

Earth years earlier: an Invid swarm led by the Regent had conquered the

43

planet.

Prior to the actual invasion, the Elders and an entourage of subalterns

had indeed taken flight aboard the prototype ship, leaving Tirol's aboriginal

population, backed by a battalion of bioroids, to fend for itself. The scientist

Cabell and his young assistant Rem had been left behind. However, just

when death at the hands of the Flower-hungry Invid seemed inevitable,

Cabell and Rem had been rescued by a detachment of humanoid fighters,

who had arrived in the Valivarre system aboard a purposely modified

Zentraedi ship. It was Breetai's flagship, in fact, remodeled to resemble

Zor's fortress, and commanded by none other than an alliance of Zentraedi

and members of the army that had vanquished the Grand Fleet.

Earthers, in other words. In league with Breetai, Exedore, and some

hundred other giants.

On receiving this news, the Masters' consternation was absolute. Had

they journeyed for eighteen years only to learn that the object of their quest

had been returned to Tirol?

No, the Elders assured them. The Earthers did not have the

Protoculture matrix. The Elders were certain of this because the ship, while

Protoculture-driven, had been crippled by Invid plasma fire and was unable

to execute a fold. But the humans had had firepower enough to rout the

Invid and liberate Tirol.

Then an even more curious event had occurred: the Earthers had

joined forces with a ragtag group of former prisoners of the Invid, who

called themselves the Sentinels. The band was comprised of Karbarrans,

Praxians, Garudans, even a few Perytonians. And together the two forces

had carried the fight to a host of Near Group worlds, liberating Karbarra

and Garuda and ending the curse that had plagued Peryton since the time of

Haydon. As a result of the Invid Queen's meddlings in self-generated

evolution, Praxis had been destroyed. And something or someone had

stirred the Awareness on Haydon IV. But, more importantly, the Sentinels

had begun to move on Optera itself. A schism seemed to have taken place

among the Earth forces, but it was clear that both sides were anxious to

44

eradicate the Invid.

It was doubtful that Earth's population was aware of the Masters'

journey. But cognizant of the fact that the flotilla of space fortresses was

closing on their homeworld, the Earthers on Tirol had dispatched two

battleships, though they wouldn't manifest in the Sol system for another

three Earth years.

The Elders had learned all this by watching from various places of

concealment, much as the Masters had been doing for the past few months.

Just now—relatively speaking—the Elders' ship was concealed behind a

moon of the T'zuptum system's fourth planet.

"Elders," Bowkaz said, "we must act quickly if we are to retake the

matrix. If the matrix has been damaged and the contained Flowers have

gone to seed, their presence will be detected by an Invid Sensor Nebula and

the swarm will descend on Earth."

"Quickly but not rashly," Nimuul told him. Centuries of direct exposure

to Protoculture had given his voice an eerie quavering. "First, we must await

the cleansing of the Near Group worlds. Then, when the matrix is

repossessed, we can return to Tirol without having to fear attacks from the

Invid. Replenished and rearmed, we will rid the Valivarre system of

Earthers and Zentraedi and turn to the task of reunifying our empire."

"We understand, Elders," Shaizan said, answering for the trio.

Hepsis nodded. "Now, tell us what you have observed thus far."

Dag spoke of the progress they had made in deciphering Earth's myriad

of languages and of monitoring its steady stream of electronically generated

noise.

"Transsignal all the data you have collected," Hepsis ordered.

"It shall be yours," the Masters responded in unison.

Dag also spoke of Earth's orbital defenses, the presence of the captured

Robotech factory satellite, and the salvage operation that had been

observed.

"All well and good," Hepsis said, "but have you learned the location of

Zor's fortress?"

45

Shaizan confessed that they hadn't. "The fortress could be lying in wait

on the planet, or it might have been disabled and abandoned."

"And the matrix?" Fallagar asked.

"With the ship, we presume."

The Elders deliberated for a moment. When Fallagar spoke again, his

tone was blunt. "Have you given thought to attempting to establish contact

with the ship?"

Shaizan glanced at his comrades. "How, Elders?"

"Through the computer Zor designed to function as his second self. No

doubt you possess the necessary decryption codes." Fallagar seemed to lean

forward from the commo sphere. "Surely you've succeeded in prying that

much information from the clone's cellular memory."

"No doubt," Shaizan said quietly.

"Then reposition the fleet closer to the planet," Nimuul instructed.

"Determine a way to reach out to Zor's machine without betraying

yourselves or otherwise engaging the enemy."

Leonard handed Emerson a snifter of brandy, then settled back into

the overstuffed couch with a glass of spring water in hand. "To creative

solutions," the commander said, raising the glass.

The two men were in Leonard's riverside home a few miles south of

downtown Monument. It was a rambling, turn-of-the-century estate, filled

with massive pieces of wooden furniture and twentieth-century bric-a-brac.

Dogs patrolled the manicured grounds; EDF sentries were posted at the

gate.

Figuring he was going to need it, Emerson took a good-sized gulp of the

brandy, peering at the bearish Leonard over the rim of the snifter.

Leonard set his drink down on a glass-topped table. "Rolf, I know we've

had our differences over the years, but that's never stopped us from being

open and honest with one another. Can we be open and honest now?"

"About what, Commander?"

"About the feuds that are plaguing our military. Chairman Moran is too

46

busy kissing babies and attending state functions to grasp the seriousness of

the situation. So I thought you and I better put our heads together and

arrive at some strategy to nip this thing in the bud."

"It's already beyond the bud stage," Emerson said.

"All the more reason for us to hammer out a plan."

Emerson swirled the brandy and took another gulp, holding it in his

mouth for a moment before swallowing it. "You should really be talking to

Major General Aldershot, not me."

Leonard's ham-sized hands motioned dismissively. "I've never seen eye

to eye with Aldershot. I've never trusted his judgment. Because he served on

the SDF-1, we're all supposed to think he has an inner line on the enemy,

when in fact he doesn't know any more about the Masters than the rest of us.

And as for terrestrial combat experience, not even an SDFer can hold a

candle to we Southlanders."

Emerson responded with a halfhearted nod. Of the two of them, only

Leonard was the true Southlander, having been born in Argentina. Emerson

had come to the Argentine from Sydney, Australia, and had served as an

officer with the RDF South before being promoted to commander of the

Argentine base. After the base had been closed and the Argentine ceded to

the Southlands, he had acted as liaison between the RDF and Leonard's

burgeoning Army of the Southern Cross, which was then restricted to

Brazil's southeastern territories. Leonard, appointed governor of Brasí

lia,

the territorial capital, had lived like a king in a lakeside palace that had its

own chapel.

"Commander, I'm a politician now," Emerson felt required to point out.

"I don't see how—"

Leonard interrupted him. "What would you say to our having Zand

author another communication from the SDF-3? As a means of reunifying

the EDF, of course—and affording some hope to everyone else. We could

write the message together, Rolf."

Emerson looked at the floor, asking himself what Leonard was up to.

"I'd like nothing better than to give everyone hope. But I'm not in favor of

47

giving them false hope." He lifted his eyes. "I voted against falsifying the

earlier Communiqués, and I'd do the same now. Disinformation is the ploy

politicians have been using since the Global Civil War. For Alphonse Russo,

the SDF-1 was simply a means to an end—an object he could get everyone to

perceive as a threat—"

"And he was correct," Leonard said forcefully. "The aliens who sent

that ship

did

arrive to claim it. And we could be correct in making use of the

SDF-3, Rolf. For all anyone knows, the Tirol mission succeeded in

establishing terms for an accord with the Masters, and has simply been

delayed in returning to Earth. That's all we'd need to say in our message."

Emerson was shaking his head, masking his suspicion. "If they were

successful, they would have already returned. What problems could have

arisen that the Masters couldn't have helped them overcome? Exedore

assured us that the Masters had a fleet of fold-capable ships."

Leonard narrowed his eyes, then softened his expression. "Look, Rolf,

neither of us is a scientist. Maybe the problem didn't occur until after the

SDF-3 folded from Tirol. The ship could be stranded between dimensions or

in some star system billions of light-years from Earth."

Emerson said nothing. Worldwide, people had been debating just that

point for nine years.

Leonard went on. "By the same token, if the mission was unsuccessful

and the Expeditionary Force was defeated, where is that fleet of fold-

capable ships Exedore kept warning us about? Why haven't the Masters

arrived to reclaim the SDF-1 or exact revenge on the planetary race that

humbled their clone army?"

Emerson's lips made a thin line. "I don't know the answer to that.

Maybe the Masters have been monitoring us, and are planning to strike

when we appear weakest."

Leonard spread his arms wide in a gesture of endorsement. "Perhaps

our message should say just that: the Masters are on their way. If that

doesn't unite everyone . . ."

"And what if the SDF-3 returns the week after we've issued that

48

message? There's no way we could keep what we did secret. Think about

how our tactics are going to be viewed. No one will see these messages as

our attempt to foster harmony in the EDF. We'll stand accused of having

manipulated world opinion to serve our own ends. Are you seriously willing

to take that risk?"

Leonard was quiet for a long moment. "You're very smart, Rolf." He

stared at Emerson. "I'm genuinely moved by your sudden concern for my

military career and my place in history. But I can't help but wonder about it.

I mean, I know that we've never agreed on policy regarding the Zentraedi.

You blame me for chasing them offworld, don't you?"

Emerson thought about Ilan Tinari. And about Rico, Konda, Bron, and

the dozens of other aliens who had become his friends while they had lived

downside. And he thought about Leonard the xenophobe, who had ordered

the massacre of a thousand Zentraedi in Brasí

lia, who had destroyed Cairo

and battled the Malcontents throughout the Southlands, who himself had

gone to guns with the RDF in Cavern City during Jonathan Wolff's stint as

commander, setting the stage for ten years of bitter infighting among the

EDF.

The same Leonard who, while governor of Brasí

lia, was rumored to

have taken a Zentraedi female as a lover. Emerson had once tried to pry the

truth from Leonard's adjutant, Joseph Petrie, but to no avail. Petrie had

resigned his commission in the Southern Cross to become a partner in the

Giles Academy—under Leonard's orders to do so, no doubt, though

Emerson had never been able to prove it. The academy's cyberexperiments

in remote control had resulted in a fatality: a young VT pilot named Amy

Pollard, who had been Terry Weston's fiancée at the time. As for Joseph

Petrie, he had become as elusive a figure as Lazlo Zand.

But Emerson had no desire to rehash everything now. "The Zentraedi

would have relocated aboard the factory satellite anyway," he mumbled at

last.

"Yes, yes, perhaps you're right." Leonard regarded him broodingly

from the huge couch. "I just want to make sure there's no bad blood

49

between us."

"There's no bad blood."

"Then you'd tell me if you were aware of any rumblings of discontent?"

Emerson managed to field the question without betraying himself.

"From what quarter, Commander?"

"Aldershot's. The RDF club."

"That's not a fair question," Emerson said angrily.

Leonard made a placating gesture. "Let me explain myself. The

creation of this Oversight Committee on Deployment is a good thing for

everyone involved, and I'd hate to see it jeopardized by the actions of a few

disgruntled officers. I know it's been suggested that the appointees are all

beholden to me in one fashion or another, but I want to assure you, Rolf,

that I won't abuse my seeming advantage. Besides, it's clear that the

Masters will center on Monument, if and when they arrive, so why should

we be sending the EDF out to settle territorial disputes in Asia and the

Southlands? Let them deal with their own turmoil. If it's city-states and

polities they want, so be it."

Emerson shook his head in disagreement. "We'll only be drawn into it

eventually. Local disputes will escalate, and what happens in one place will

affect the whole. We won't be able to marshal a unified defense against the

Masters if we're preoccupied being peacekeepers on our own planet." He

glanced at Leonard. "Maybe that's what the Masters are waiting for."

"Then how do you propose we take care of the world without creating

an environment for incidents like the one in Venezuela?"

"I don't know that there is a solution. Southern Crossers outnumber

Robotechs three, sometimes four to one. I don't see any way of being

equitable without ending up showing favoritism to the minority."

Leonard was smiling. "That's what I've always respected about you—

your candor and your integrity."

"Commander, we both want what's best for the EDF."

Leonard wagged his head in triumph. "That being the case, Rolf,

can

I

count on you to report any rumors of insurrection?"

50

Emerson forced a weary exhale. He sometimes wished that he had

enlisted in the REF and launched for Tirol with Hunter, Hayes, and

Reinhardt. Ironically, the Sterlings had eliminated that option when they'd

asked him to be Dana's guardian. Then Bowie's parents had asked the same

of him. Dana and Bowie were the ones he wanted to be with just now. He

wanted to be home. Away from Anatole Leonard.

"Give me some time to think about it," he said at last.

Leonard folded his arms across his massive chest. "Take as long as you

need."

Tugging at his stubbled chin, Lazlo Zand eyed the Zor holo in vexed

contemplation. The topic of the evening's session—a gentle interrogation,

Zand called it—was the Protoculture matrix Zor had filched from the

Masters and hidden aboard his dimensional fortress. But the machine was

being evasive, and Zand was determined to know the reason.

In a notebook Zand kept in a voice-locked drawer in his office desk

were stored the six hundred e-pages of his "Notes Toward a History of Tirol

as Revealed in the Biography of Zor." The notes reflected the hours of gentle

interrogation the SDF-1's computer had undergone in the months since it

had been made whole again by the addition of its long-absent components.

Many of the files contained unedited recordings, in Zentraedi, of the Zor

holo's monologues; other sections incorporated summaries of Lang's

research notes on Protoculture and Zand's own research into the Shapings.

Zor's personal history had not been delivered in chronological sequence, but

in random bits. Zand, however, had tasked the computer with assembling

the entries into chapters of a sort, covering everything from the minutiae of

Zor's everyday life to the Grand Transition in Tiresian Society.

And quite a life it had been.

To have heard Exedore or Breetai recount it, Zor was superhuman—not

merely the discoverer of Protoculture and the founder of Robotechnology,

but in some sense the father of the Zentraedi themselves. But the computer,

alternating between self-effacement and megalomania, had a different tale

51

to tell: that of an obviously brilliant though flesh-and-blood man born into a

civilization of already advanced rank, and well on the path to even greater

glories. Zor was not so much the architect of Tirol's lofty pretensions as an

agent of unforeseen and radical change. It was Protoculture that was largely

responsible for Tirol's turn toward evil.

There was a lesson in this for Zand, though he would choose to

disregard it.

Tirol's challenge in the era of Zor's birth and young adulthood—Aeon

Lanak—was to discover some means of peacefully imposing its egalitarian

dream on its brethren worlds in the local star systems. Consumed with

implementing the dream on its own turf, Tirol's leadership had allowed the

planet to grow dangerously dependent on those same worlds for energy and

goods of all variety. Unless it could expand its reach and influence, Tirol ran

the risk of finding itself absorbed into an empire forged by Karbarra,

Haydon IV, or some other local world.

Tiresia's Grand Chair, comprising a triad of benevolent despots known

as the Elders—could they have felt other than

fated

to profit from the

tripartite Flower of Life?—had authorized a search for a new form of usable

energy, one that would free Tirol from the economic tyranny of the Near

Group worlds. However, the Elders' plan met with opposition from those

who felt that Tirol's remaining funds should be invested in currying favor

with certain worlds, thereby setting up rivalries that would gradually

weaken the power of all and allow Tirol time to emerge from its financial

trough. On the scientific side was Zol, who may or may not have been Zor's

father—the computer was vague on this point, often implying that Zor was a

ward of the state. Nimuul, the most vocal member of the opposition, would

eventually ascend to the Grand Chair as one of the Robotech Elders.

In the end, both sides had their way. Even before the deepspace

explorer

Aztraph

was launched, plans for the destabilization of the Near

Group coalition had already been put into effect. Among the

Aztraph

's crew,

however, was the young genius himself—Zor. And, after years of

disappointments, the ship would chance upon a world in the T'zuptum

52

system, from whose gentle interplay of atmospheric gases and fertile surface

had emerged the docile, sluglike Invid and the sustaining plant they knew as

the Flower of Life.

Events of seemingly operatic proportion had occurred on Optera

between Zor and the Invid—events the computer was either reluctant or

unable to address. When questioned, the Zor holo had become confused,

saddened, and angered, and would reveal only that Zor—convinced that he

had at last found a new energy source—had ultimately returned to Tirol

with specimens of the Flower.

In Zor's long absence, Tirol had already begun to deteriorate, a victim

of its own machinations. By the time the

Aztraph

made planetfall, the world

seemed to have been turned upside down: those who had been in positions

of authority were now prisoners; those who had been loyal were now seen as

traitors; those who had been peaceful were now the fomenters of revolution.

Birth itself had given way to engineered creation. And at the helm of a

crumbling society sat Nimuul, Hepsis, and Fallagar, the new Elders.

Zor was not oblivious to the reversals, yet he chose to ignore them so as

not to jeopardize his research. Or perhaps he thought that the new energy

he was about to unleash on Tirol—indeed, on the whole of the Fourth

Quadrant—would eradicate all Tirol's social and political ills.

Prior to the

Aztraph

's launch, another scientist, a Tiresian named

Cabell, had been investigating the harnessing of bio-energy, so the Elders

were not much impressed when Zor presented his findings to the Grand

Chair. But their cursory dismissal only incited him all the more. And within

a year of his returning to Tirol, he had succeeded in conjuring Protoculture,

that animating enigma soon to guarantee the conquest of worlds and the

rise of a near-immortal elite.

So began Aeon Robotech, whose hallmarks were the creation of a

millions-strong army of morphable warrior clones, war on a scale never

before imagined, the deflowering of Optera, and the eventual

transformation of the Invid into a vengeful swarm. Through it all, Zor

pretended to be under the influence of a Compulsion, though he was in fact

53

engineering a subtle rebellion against the Elders and their hierarchy of

Masters and clone triumvirates. He persuaded the Grand Chair to allow him

to construct a dimensional fortress that could be used to locate even greater

wonders than the Flower of Life—and into which Zor would secretly transfer

the only existing Protoculture matrix.

The Elders weren't aware of what he had carried out until much too

late. Zor had been clever to leave them well supplied with Protoculture. And

while they luxuriated in their newfound sovereignty, he was out seeding

worlds with the Flower—to afford the displaced Invid a fecund garden, it

appeared, though Zand suspected a second, less evident purpose as well.

Something that had to do with a mysterious being known as Haydon, and

an even grander plan in which Tirol, Optera, and Earth were only

subordinate players.

"I want to return to our earlier discussion about the matrix," Zand put

to the computer now. "You explained how you arranged to have the matrix

lofted to your fortress, which was parked above Tirol. But I'm wondering

how you managed to conceal its presence from the ship's Zentraedi crew."

The holo, "clothed" in a tight-fitting jumpsuit, smiled in self-

amusement. "Neither Dolza nor Breetai knew that the matrix was aboard.

But there were several Zentraedi that did know. Much earlier, through the

application of music, I had succeeded in corrupting the Imperative that

ruled them. They became my confidential agents, assisting not only in the

installation of the matrix but in piloting the ship to its secret destination."

Zand steeled himself. "Where onboard did you install the matrix?"

"Among the furnaces that drove the fortress."

Zand tugged at his lower lip. This was in keeping with the accepted

wisdom. In fact, Zand could still recall a day fourteen years earlier when he

had accompanied Lang on a final tour of the ruined SDF-1—one of the few

times Zand had been aboard. Lang had shown him around the vast

compartment that housed the Reflex furnaces and Protoculture drives. Lang

had theorized that the matrix had gone missing with the fold generators

that vanished during the SDF-1's first Human-piloted jump, the one that

54

had sent it to Pluto.

"Was it part of your plan that the fold system would disappear if and

when the ship executed a jump?"

"Yes," Zor answered. "The fortress has to remain on Earth."

"Why is that?"

"As the matrix deteriorates, the Protoculture will go to seed and the

Flowers will take root. The Invid Sensor Nebulae will detect them and the

swarm will come."

"Is Earth to become their world?"

"Only temporarily. Then they will depart."

Zand scratched his head. "But how is this to occur in the absence of the

matrix?"

"The matrix didn't go anywhere."

Zand considered it. The computer was probably replying in the abstract.

Without the essential element of time, hyperspace couldn't be thought of as

having fixed locations—anywheres. Assuming the matrix was in hyperspace.

He suddenly recalled Lang's making a big issue of wanting to know if

Zand

felt

anything from the drive compartment—the lingering presence of

some then-unseen objects, presumably the fold generators and matrix.

Unless . . . unless the device hadn't been concealed in the fold system but

among the Reflex drives themselves

. He was about to put the question to

the computer when the holo interrupted him.

"Intrusion alert," Zor said with unusual intensity.

"Don't these hackers ever sleep?" Zand asked, more to himself than to

Zor.

"Intrusion. Code Alpha: highest priority."

"Coming right at us, then. All right, let's do it by the numbers: locate

the source."

"The source is scrambled and heavily encrypted."

Zand lifted an eyebrow. "Getting clever, are they? Take your best

guess."

Mirroring the apprehension rampant in its quantum circuitry, the holo

55

was in agitated motion, clenching its hands and pacing about. "The ship

should be reconfigured. The main gun should be armed."

Zand's brow furrowed. Sometimes the damn thing didn't even realize

that it had been removed from the ship. But overreaction was something

novel. "What good are guns if we haven't located the source?" he said,

figuring to play along for a while.

"The source has been fixed."

Numbers scrolled inside the holo field and across several display

screens. Zand was baffled. "State the source."

"Approximately five hundred million miles from the present position of

Neptune."

"The SDF-3?" Zand asked in sudden misgiving.

The holo shook its head. "The Masters."

56

CHAPTER FIVE

My dear colleague, I am growing increasingly concerned about the

mores of our young people—this group the media has seen fit to label the

orphaned generation. They seem entirely too willing to embrace—or more

often shrug off—whatever happens to the world. All this fascination with sex,

mind-altering technology, piercing and tattooing . . . They don't demonstrate

what I consider to be an appropriate fear for the future. To remedy this, I

suggest that we attempt to codify their behavior by fashioning a hero or

heroine capable of simultaneously addressing their wants and needs while

indoctrinating them in a way that addresses our wants and needs. Give it

some thought and get back to me. I am certain that Edwards would approve

of the tactic.

Chairman Wyatt Moran in a communiqué to Lazlo Zand,

as quoted in Hopi Bushcraft's

The Two Faces of EVE

Misa sauntered through the Kabukicho, eyes on the sidewalk, hands

stuffed into the pockets of her baggy trousers, with no particular place to go.

The weather was typical for early September, hot and sticky, and she was

dressed too warmly for it. She had left most of her clean, lightweight stuff

back in the apartment when she'd walked out on her cyber-deluded

roommates.

Again.

To live aboveground in Tokyo was to be considered one of the

expendable.

Okage

was the word for you—burned rice at the bottom of the

cooker—a term that had once applied to women who hung with gay men.

Now it referred to society's sacrificial discards. Power, wealth, and

permanence resided underground in the geo-grid, which had been the

centerpiece of Tokyo's post-Rain reconstruction. Plans for pyramid- and

volcano-shaped cities, ultra-highrises, and multifunction polities had been

dismissed as the demented fantasies of a bygone age.

57

Cluttered during the pre-Rain era with structures to house its twenty

millions and plagued by traffic snarls that could last for days, Tokyo's

surface had been turned over to the needs of industry, and to a Byzantine

system of superhighways, along which moved the merchandise that fed the

voracious appetite of the underground. Social scientists thought of modern

Tokyo as an inverted Disney World, where the maintenance corridors were

out in the open and the rides and illusions were hidden from sight. Down

below, the world was newly made and pristine; goods and service personnel

descended hourly by elevator, to reappear miraculously in shops, hotels,

and restaurants. Waste and outmoded items were removed by stealthy

squads of sanitation workers and returned to the surface, where they could

be trucked to the Dream Archipelago landfill dumps that rose from the bay.

Gargantuan factories that had arisen out of the debris of skyscrapers and

luxury highrises were free to spew as they would, into skies scoured clean by

the annihilation bolts of the Rain. Pollution was no longer a cause for

concern. The Earth of 2029 was a world with fewer cars and fewer cows and

fewer rice fields to poison the air; a world of fewer people to log trees,

plunder the oceans, or demand greater and greater supplies of petroleum

derivatives to fuel their machines or fill their lives with plastics. Neither

were animal rights a concern; with so many species exterminated by the

Rain, it hardly mattered if a few more died off in the process of retooling

Human civilization.

You had to be either an avid EVE listener or a member of the People's

Army to care about such things. The bulk of Misa's generation had never

known a whole Earth, so how could they be expected to feel any real

attachment to the notion of Earth First? Orphaned, they'd had no parents or

grandparents to tell them otherwise, and they had no one to prove

themselves to now. They were entirely free to foul up on their own . . .

At the start of the Global War, the Kabukicho district, west of the

Imperial Palace, had been devoted to entertainment of the sexy sort, to the

floating life: brothels, peep joints, strip clubs, soaplands, massage parlors,

love hotels with rooms no bigger than kingsize coffins. It had been a typical

58

urban haven for perverts, pink traders, gangsters, and artists. Once the City

Hall complex had gone up, however, the place had been gentrified, the

eroticism tamed—a response, in part, to Japanese families finally learning

how to leisure. Goodbye to all-male, all-night drinking sessions, slurred

karaoke

, textbook cases of salaryman

karoshi

—sudden death from

overwork. Families were suddenly doing things together, backpacking in

Nikko or Chichibu, traveling to foreign lands, frolicking in amusement

parks like Tokyo Disney and Seagaia.

"Hi-ho! Hi-ho! Shinpai nai utai

tsuzukeyo!"

Then came the Rain. And now that City Hall, that faux-Edo trio of two-

toned granite and glass, was a memory, the Kabukicho had gone back to

being what it was good at: a sleazy playground for the disenfranchised.

The reason Misa had been avoiding the apartment for the past few days

was because of another blowup with Census and company about their

peeking and poking into SPOOK. Fried the first go-round, the interface deck

had been crisped as a result of their most recent attempt at riding into Lazlo

Zandland on an EVE phone call. Only it was Discount who'd had the goggles

on this time, and who was now wearing bandages over both eyes while

hooked up to some kind of brain-wave monitor at the free clinic on

Yasukuni-Dori.

Misa held Gibley responsible. The onetime-legit cybernaut claimed

he'd had a guaranteed way into the heart of the SDF-1 computer, which

someone—some former tech also cut from the facility when Zand took

over—told him had been restored to mint condition, thanks to the retrieval

of a bunch of peripherals that had come down the well to Tanegashima.

Misa remembered hearing something about the overdue return of a mission

launched back in the teens, but she hadn't tied the news reports to the SDF-

1 computer or to SPOOK, She'd figured it was just another shuttle arriving

from the factory satellite, or maybe from Space Station Liberty, which was

in orbit out past the moon where it couldn't be seen from Earth.

So she and Census had gotten into it again, the issue this time being

expenses that were a lot more than their combined allowances could cover—

59

not to pay for Discount's health care, because Human Services provided for

that, but to replace the interface deck, natch, and to score more of the black-

market programs that afforded the guys access to other think-tank

machines. And where was all that NuYen going to come from? Why, from

criminal runs into corporate databanks. Which, if everybody wasn't careful,

could end up with Tokyo's finest knocking on the screen someday.

It was a dizzy loop, not to mention dangerous, and Misa wanted out.

Besides, all the money she'd been secretly pocketing from her allowance to

buy some stupid bracelet was going to end up being used to bribe the

landlord not to report the pirate run to the fiber-optics commission. Zand's

counterattack had not only done Discount, but scrambled the building's FO

hookup.

About the bracelet: it was just a strap of black leather, real, and

studded with seven silver bears. Okay, you weren't supposed to want stuff

like that, or anything more than what President Misui, out of the goodness

of his heart, provided for you. You were supposed to eschew envy, trust

ability, revere the future; maintain

wa

—harmony—by knowing your life-

role and adhering to your place, all the while demonstrating integrity,

honesty, goodwill, confidence, and selflessness in every gesture. But a new

privileged class had begun to emerge the past five years, and sometimes it

was hard to reconcile what you were taught to believe in the collective

homes with what you confronted in reality, especially in the underground.

Meandering through the Kab thinking about it, Misa all at once had a

destination. Even if she couldn't spree, she could at least go looking.

There was an elevator entrance to the Taisei-Shimizu geo-grid near

Shinjuku Station, and she hastened toward it, indifferent to the heat and

humidity for the few minutes' walk. Inside the rambling station, she made

for one of the glass booths, jumped the detector, and rode thirty stories

down into the cool comfort of the underground.

The geo-grid was actually a group of interconnected, subsurface domes

that stretched all the way from the grounds of the Imperial Palace to Big

Bird, as Haneda Airport was known—Narita hadn't weathered the Rain. It

60

was something like 4000 square miles of shops, offices, residences, sports

complexes, cabarets, wedding chapels, and casinos—

sic bo

and

pai gow

,

that year's favorite games. Giant atriums, like the one crowning Shinjuku,

provided natural light for video gardens filled with palm trees, and shrines

where you could get Shinto priests to execute punch-deck rituals or bestow

blessings on just-purchased software or

paso-kon

—personal comps.

Elsewhere, fiber optics brought in sunlight through small openings in the

grid's ceiling; and throughout, the artificial light was adjusted in color and

intensity to reflect different hours of the day. EVE was omnipresent,

running on huge screens and checkout-aisle telecomps, as were robots of

infinite variety. It was underground that the

robotto

okoku

—the robot

kingdom—had come true.

Misa had never made a purchase in the grid; invariably she came to

gawk. The leather bracelet she'd had her eye on wasn't in a store down here,

but in one on a shopping street up in Ueno, wedged between a noodle shop

and a tofu place. She gawked at the robots and the kinetic sculptures and

fish-stocked ponds, at the sand and stone gardens, at the displays in the

Wako and Takashimaya department stores, with their brand-name items by

Matsushita and Sony—the Mikimoto pearls, the Comme des Garcons men's

suits, the past-century period videos running on the huge, high-def

wallscreens.

And mostly she came to enjoy the people show. As she did now, Misa

often found herself a bench near the waterfall in her favorite park to watch

the career women nibbling at expensive lunches to the strains of chamber

music. She saw the retired husbands trailing their wives through exhibitions

of bad art—the word for such a man was

nureha

, which meant the wet,

fallen leaves of autumn. She watched the kids, just out of school and already

hurrying off to their cram courses, and, of course, the Modern Youths, with

their tight-fitting war fashions and techno-gadget hair adornments.

It sometimes struck her as unfair that some of her peers should have so

many

things

, though she knew it was wrong to think so. It was mostly the

kids whose parents had survived the Rain, or those from communal homes

61

who'd been adopted or placed into influential families. Misa found it

difficult to imagine having only one set of parents, when there'd been any

number of adults she had known as mama-san or dad. She'd seen vids from

the time when nearly everyone had had two parents, but she could never

connect what she saw onscreen to the world she knew.

In the homes, you had almost nothing that was your own property; you

shared everything, even your thoughts. When you wanted privacy, you faced

the wall and everybody knew enough not to bother you. But keeping secrets

was discouraged. If you were having a problem, or had something on your

mind, you were supposed to seek support from the home monitors or from

your siblings instead of keeping it inside you. But by the time you were

thirteen or so, support usually came down to having sex, and by the time

you were maybe fifteen everyone in the home had done one another. Like

Eskimos, someone had once told Misa. You could gauge the quality of a

communal home by has many people you shared your bed with and how

many days a week you had food.

Still on the park bench, misted by the waterfall, Misa gave her eyes a

rest from people-watching by studying the robot carp in a nearby pool.

Tropical birds were singing from cages hung in some of the palm trees. Off

to her right was an enormous video image of Fuji-san in winter, from which

wafted a cool breeze and the smell of cypress smoke.

One funny thing was how people before the Rain had convinced

themselves that sex, drugs, music, cartoons, and foul language all spelled

doom for the world. But nothing about the behavior of teenagers had had

anything to do with the coming of the Zentraedi and the Rain of Death.

Unless you bought what was being sold by the NeoChristians or the Church

of Recurrent Tragedies or Seicho No Ie—the House of Growth.

There were people who still wanted to blame the ills of the world on

post-teens like herself and Census and Discount, because they didn't follow

the prescribed ways of doing things—dressing, eating, recreating, whatever.

The thing was, most of those people had no idea what it felt like to live on

the surface. It was easy to know your

honshin

—right heart—when you were

62

eating regularly and shoehorned into outer-space fabrics; then you could

follow all the

kata

and stay in synch with society and the cosmos. But a lot

of the orphaned had no patience with the approved ways—following

kata

certainly hadn't saved the world from the Zentraedi. No, for them, it was

mono no aware

, the pathos of things, and that was all they subscribed to.

And if the new privileged class really wanted a return to the old world

of Japan, Inc.—to the ritual bow and the sociospiritual policies of group

harmony, regimentation, cleanliness, extraordinary discipline, and

management from the top by an intelligent elite—then why didn't they

simply disband the EDF and the People's Army, zero EVE, and invite the

Robotech Masters to take control of the planet?

"Fashion dictates that the Modern Youth dresses for action and quick

response. Your clothes are stain-resistant, fire-retardant, form-hugging, and

equipped with plenty of utility pockets. Your clothes tell the world:

'I am

ready to respond!'

Your headband is black, sleek, and looks like a hands-

free communications headset. The headband proclaims your easy

familiarity and exalted respect for technology; it is your talisman, your

totem, your perfect fashion accessory. When the Modern Youth is shopping

in the grid, attending a

jidai

about the Robotech War, or enjoying a

teishoku

in a happening eatery, ears are pricked and eyes are peeled for the

unexpected. You are strong and capable, the fittest of survivors, and you will

prevail over the harshest of adversities. Modern Youth know that the city is

the seed of the New World, and that like any seed it must be protected so

that it may sprout when the conditions are right. You are nurturing to the

city and its inhabitants, below and above ground, because they will be your

fellow rebuilders after the transition . . ."

Shaizan, Bowkaz, and Dag, the three Masters, regarded one another in

mute bafflement across the mottled surface of the Protoculture Cap. As

ordered, they had picked the Zor clone's brain for the encryption codes by

which he and his Zentraedi allies had accessed the fortress's command

computer. However, the computer's real-time musings were far from what

63

the Masters had expected.

The flawless, female face centered in the commo sphere was dark-

complected and pleasant-featured. Her tone of voice was carefully

modulated so as to be soothingly didactic. But the strength of the signals

was inconsistent and somewhat garbled, owing to magnetic disturbances

whose source were the Sol system's sixth planet—a ringed giant of baleful

aspect that made the Masters think of Fantoma.

Why is the computer addressing itself to fashion?

" Shaizan asked in

mindspeak.

And to whom is it addressing itself?

Dag sent.

The text is reminiscent of that developed in Tiresia as part of the clone

tutorials.

Bowkaz directed himself to both Shaizan and Dag.

Yes, but why would

Zor have programmed those tutorials into the fortress computer? He

denounced the Elders for their fascination with genetic engineering.

Shaizan nodded his head.

What's more, why give the computer the

visage of a woman—especially one of such . . . "motherly" guise?

Once more, the triumvirate silenced their thoughts and turned their

attention to the female in the sphere and the translated gibberish she was

spouting.

"The Modern Youth knows that

giri

—obligation—involves doing

whatever must be done to maximize the survival of the greater whole. You

are self-sacrificing and take orders well; still, you are proud of yourself and

know that inside you have much-valued individuality. Modern Youths

contemplate love, but not so much as to interfere with obligations and the

proper performance of duty. Modern Youths contemplate sex and the

pleasures of the senses, but not so much as to interfere with preparedness.

You are at your best when alone, attending to the matters of the world. You

know that you have your part to play in the harmony that must be sustained

between yourself and society, and between society and the cosmos . . ."

Perhaps we have inadvertently accessed some thinking machine other

than Zor's

, Shaizan sent as the computer droned on.

64

Not possible

, Bowkaz returned.

The encryption sequence was checked

and rechecked. Whatever their significance, the words emanate from the

ship's computer.

Shaizan looked to Dovak of the Scientists for explanation. "Can the

location of the fortress be deduced from the source of these transmissions?"

"M'lords, the source is a network of satellites girdling the planet."

"How is this possible?"

"Uplink from the surface, m'lord."

Shaizan's enthusiasm was felt by his comrades. "Then the ship is

below."

Bowkaz concurred, and had something to add to Dovak. "Order the

engineers to relocate us closer to Earth."

The scientist kowtowed. "How much closer, m'lord?"

"Insert our fleet among the moons of the ringed giant."

"The Masters have arrived," Zand calmly announced to the members of

his cabal. They've been making repeated attempts at accessing the mother

computer."

Eyes went wide down the length of the table in Subbasement Three of

the SPOOK facility. Zand, dressed in a wrinkled pea-soup-green suit and

seated in a high-backed chair, looked as though he hadn't slept in a week—

which happened to be the case. It had been that long since the Zor holo had

apprised him of the Masters' initial probings, but Zand had wanted to make

certain of the computer's findings before saying anything to his team.

He had a secret fraternity of twelve: Miles Cochran, Samson Becket,

Yoko Nitabi, Nag Fortuna, Florida Bakeworth, and seven holdovers from

the Robotech Center's terminated cybermetrics division. Cochran and

Becket had apprenticed under Emil Lang in Macross and Monument, and

were now attached to the EDF's foremost research laboratory, located in the

military-industrial complex abutting Fokker Aerospace Base. Fortuna and

Bakeworth were recent acquisitions, replacing Joseph Petrie and Henry

Giles, both of whom had decamped in '24 to found the ill-fated Giles

65

Institute.

"The Masters' precise whereabouts are unknown at this time," Zand

continued with scarcely a pause, "though the computer is rather desperate

to pinpoint their position. It can't understand why the SDF-1's long-range

sensors and tracking arrays aren't responding to its queries. The pathetic

machine has yet to come to terms with the fact that it has been removed

from the fortress." Zand chuckled. "Perhaps now Commander Leonard will

thank me for refusing to allow the computer to be integrated into Liberty

Space Station's network of monitoring and target-acquisition systems. The

Masters might have gained access to the databanks of the Defense Force

itself."

"Does the computer have

any

sense of how close they are?" Cochran

managed to ask. A thin-faced, intense redhead, he was often as war-worried

as Leonard himself.

"In galactic terms, practically right next door," Zand told him.

"Certainly they are well within the range of Sol's warmth, but not yet near

enough to be detected by Liberty or any of the forward-observation probes.

Or the factory satellite, for that matter—though I'm not sure the Zentraedi

would alert us to the Masters' arrival, in any case. Not after being forced

into exile."

Becket—dark-haired, bird-boned, and wearing tinted glasses—was

steepling his tapering fingers in thought. "If the Masters are

here

—" he

started to say.

"Then what has become of the SDF-3?" Zand completed. "An excellent

question. One that may be answered once we've learned whether we're

dealing with a single recon vessel or a flotilla, though I think it's safe to

assume that the REF's mission of diplomacy has failed. It says something,

however, that the Masters haven't simply materialized in Earthspace as

Breetai's battle group did in 2009. Are they being cautious because of what

happened to their formerly invincible Grand Fleet, or is it that they have

some other plan in mind?"

"Caution is in their best interest, whatever their plan," Yoko Nitabi

66

commented. A tall, handsome Japanese with tattoos enough to brand her a

Modem Youth, she headed up security for SPOOK. "Either they've come

looking for vengeance—on Humankind or the Zentraedi—or for the SDF-1."

Fortuna loosed a cackling laugh. "Vengeance isn't Tirol's style; never

was, never will be. Besides, they wouldn't think of annihilating Earth while a

chance exists of their repossessing the dimensional fortress."

Zand studied Fortuna through narrowed eyes. His real name was

Napoleon Alphonse Russo, and what a find he had been. Both Russo and

"Bakeworth," whose name was Millicent Edgewick. After almost ten years of

searching, Zand had traced them to a refugee center in Turkey, where the

two were working as administrators, skimming from a paltry budget to keep

themselves afloat in comfortable if spartan style. Russo, as president of the

United Earth Government in its several guises from 1999 to 2012, had been

the most prominent political figure of the century, and certainly the most

hated as well, since it was Russo who was most credited with bringing on

the Rain of Death by refusing to negotiate with the Zentraedi. Edgewick, an

especially unattractive woman—even after numerous identity-altering

operations—had been his lover and executive assistant for most of those

years, and together the pair had gone into hiding after the Rain.

Zand, employing the name T. R. Edwards as a calling card and

promising power greater than they had ever known, had induced them to

join the secret fraternity. They did Zand's bidding now. But it was more

accurate to say that they were the cabal's insurance against untoward moves

by Chairman Moran, for they knew things about Moran that could topple

him. Just as Zand knew certain things about Anatole Leonard that could

undo him. About the Giles Academy, for example.

"And what happens when the Masters discover that the SDF-1 was

destroyed and buried?" Yoko Nitabi thought to ask the man she and the

others knew only as Nag Fortuna. "Vengeance might seem in order then."

Russo showed the tech a pitying look. "The ship means shit to them,"

he fairly hissed. "It's the Protoculture matrix they're after. They'd want

proof that the matrix was destroyed with the ship." Russo was still a fat-

67

jowled, florid-faced, obese little man. But the gratingly false-hearty manner

that had won him many an election had, since his fall from grace, given way

to an intimidating ferocity.

Nitabi cut her sparkling green eyes to Zand. "But Lang theorized that

the matrix vanished with the fortress's fold generators."

Zand's hand fluttered in dismissal. "Yes, of course it did." He still

hadn't gotten around to quizzing the computer about the SDF-1's never-

examined Reflex furnaces, but he had decided not to air his suspicions to

the fraternity. For the table's sake, he added, "I don't want the Masters to

know just yet that the matrix vanished."

"But by allowing them that data, we may be able to prevent an attack,"

a second tech suggested.

"We can always play that card if we're forced to. Until then, we stand to

gain by keeping them online. There may be a way to use the Zor holo to

access

their

computers. All week, I've been feeding them EVE telecasts,

though I don't expect those to hold the Masters' interest for long. God

knows, they never held mine for more than a moment."

"We should at least apprise Commander Leonard and the Terrestrial

Defense Ministry of these developments," Cochran said.

Zand merely stared at him. "And why is that?"

"So the EDF can go to full-alert status."

"They're already as alert as they're ever going to be. But don't worry, I'll

see that Leonard is informed immediately. As for Terrestrial Defense, the

time isn't right for disclosure."

"But—"

Zand glared at him. "Excuse me. Perhaps I should have said the

Shapings

aren't right."

Cochran and the rest fell silent.

Zand leaned back in his chair, tapping a bony forefinger against his lips.

What were the Shapings telling Dana Sterling and the Zentraedi? he

wondered. Without knowing why, had she suddenly grown as agitated as

the Zor holo?

68

CHAPTER SIX

Children deprived of parents often need to be taught to cry, because they

haven't learned that crying brings a response. Some, depending on the

conditions they have endured, may not be acquainted with even the most

common of household sounds—vacuums, food processors, vidphones,

telecomps—and will want to sleep all day long, will display signs of attention

deficit, or will express the need to be held and comforted for long periods.

Excerpted from the training manual for nurses working in

Tokyo's communal homes

"I don't understand what's gotten into you," Rolf Emerson was telling

Dana. "You haven't been in the Academy three weeks and already you're in

danger of being expelled."

Dana tried but failed to look sheepish. "I don't know what it is. I'm

feeling angry and—what's the word for wanting to fight?"

"Aggressive? Hostile? Combative?"

"Combative. I'm feeling combative."

Emerson shook his head in bafflement. "Who are you angry at?"

Dana scowled. "Everyone."

They were in the sunken den of the mountain cabin, Emerson seated

on a worn but comfortable couch facing the fireplace, Dana pacing the wide-

planked floor in front of him. There was a fire going, thanks to the quarter-

cord of larch Emerson had finagled from a neighbor whose wooded acreage

had lost a tree to lightning. When the fire wasn't crackling and Dana's

pacing carried her onto the rag rug, fragments of Bowie's amplified

keyboard noodling drifted in from the outbuilding that served as his studio.

Emerson caught a bit of the music now and nodded his chin in the

direction of the backyard. "Bowie would do anything to get himself expelled.

So how is it that he's managed to stay out of trouble?" He glanced at the

letter he'd received from the dean of the EDF Academy, then looked up at

69

Dana. "Hoisting a cadet officer from a flagpole?"

Dana whirled on him. "She called me a halfbreed. Bowie doesn't have

people calling him names like that."

In patent disbelief, Emerson quoted from the letter. "'She has also been

implicated in a prank involving the liberation of a group of primates from

the research laboratory, which were then encouraged to run amok among

the debutante cotillion.'"

"She had it coming," Dana said, smacking her fist into the palm of her

hand.

Emerson rubbed his forehead and set the letter aside.

There's no

disarming the Zentraedi Imperative

, friends had warned him when he'd

first agreed to care for Dana in her parents' absence.

At the core of every

acculturated alien lurks a malcontent, waiting to burst forth.

As if

Emerson needed to be told. In Ilan Tinari, he had witnessed the Imperative

in action firsthand, during temper tantrums and just before she'd left him to

join her disaffected comrades. And he'd seen ample evidence of it in Dana's

mother, Miriya, both in her harsh early treatment of Dana and in her erratic

behavior during the Malcontent Uprisings. So perhaps it was only Max

Sterling's comparatively gentle genes that had been keeping Dana in check

all these years.

Emerson watched her pace for a moment. Not even sixteen and she

stood five foot eight on long, shapely legs. Her frame was athletic, and her

globe of swirling blond hair lent additional menace to a freckled, pug-nosed

face.

But don't ever call her cute.

Max and Miriya had relied on the dubious services of Lazlo Zand to see

Dana over the rough spots of her unique development. But Emerson was of

a different mind about Lang's chief disciple. Ten years earlier, he had

discovered Zand subjecting Dana to some sort of experiment the professor

claimed had been aimed at stimulating "the alien portion of her mind." To

Emerson, though, the experiments had smacked of pedophilia

masquerading as science. Consequently, Dana now had only Emerson to

70

turn to, and he often felt that he'd made a mess of things: constantly

absenting himself on trips to Liberty and Aluce, abandoning her and Bowie

for long stretches to youth centers similar to those pioneered by the

Japanese. Maybe that was the reason Dana had turned to Terry Weston

after the Giles Academy affair.

"I just don't want to see you ruin your chances at officers' candidate

school," Emerson said at last. "That is still your goal, isn't it?"

She nodded with enthusiasm.

"Then don't you see that incidents like these—" Emerson gestured to

the letter "—will only jeopardize your chances for the posting you want?"

She compressed her lips. "It's not that I

want

to be so thin-skinned. I

just can't help it. Especially the past few weeks. It's like I'm itching to go to

battle. Like there are enemies all around me."

We've done this to them,

Emerson thought.

Warped the minds of an

entire generation.

He was about to reply when someone knocked at the

door. A moment later, Sarah Willex, the housekeeper, poked her head in.

"Excuse me for interrupting, Mr. Emerson, but there are some people

here to see you. A Major Fredericks and a Lieutenant Satori."

"What do they want?"

"I didn't presume to ask them."

"No, of course not," Emerson said. "All right, show them in." He looked

at Dana. "We'll have to continue this later."

Dana nodded and eased herself out the back door, making for Bowie's

studio just as the housekeeper was reappearing with Fredericks and Satori

in tow.

"Sorry to disturb you on a Saturday, sir," Fredericks began, twirling a

brimmed cap in pale, bony hands. "But we're here at General Aldershot's

request."

Neither of them were in uniform, but both displayed the proud bearing

of career soldiers. Alan Fredericks was thirtyish, tall and lanky, with limp

blond hair that fell over prominent ears. Nova Satori couldn't have been

much older than Dana, but projected maturity and competence. Her face

71

was heart-shaped; her eyes were dark and intense, her lips, mobile and

expressive. Her mantle of blue-black hair was so long that she had to sweep

it aside when she sat down, and in it she wore a techno-hairband that

suggested a headphone—a fashion import from Japan.

"Can we talk here, sir, or might we be more comfortable outside?"

Satori asked.

Emerson grasped her meaning and growled, "The only bugs in this

house have multiple legs, Lieutenant. Say what you came to say without fear

of being overheard or recorded."

Satori smiled tightly. "Sir, General Aldershot wishes you be informed

that plans for the game are going forward, and he seeks some idea of the

position you wish to play."

Emerson sighed wearily. Codes, riddles, cryptic exchanges . . . What

had become of plain talk? "Lieutenant, as I told the general at the little

brunch he threw downtown, I have no interest in participating in the 'game'.

As far as I'm concerned the field is already overcrowded with players."

Fredericks looked disappointed. "Then we should tell the general you

won't even consider a position on the bench—as a consultant or a

replacement?"

Emerson shot to his feet. "Since when is my blessing so important to

this? If the general and the rest of his . . . players think they can score, they

should shoot for the goal. But I think you're all guilty of underestimating the

opposition. Don't expect that by cutting off the head, you can immobilize

the rest of the beast. Your opponents are players who are used to thinking

on their feet and making command decisions on the field. Rather than yield

ground, they'll dig in deeper, and you'll find yourselves with one hell of a

mess to deal with. And you can tell Aldershot I said so. What's more, I'm not

at all sure that this

game

will enjoy popular support. The general may find a

smaller rooting section than he expects."

Fredericks was miffed. "The game might enjoy more support if we

could furnish the media with some colorful background on the opposition's

key players."

72

Emerson stared Fredericks down. "Is that what this visit is about?

Aldershot expects me to betray confidences or act as his spy?"

Satori answered him in a placating tone. "Please don't misunderstand

us, sir. General Aldershot has your interests in mind."

"How is that, Lieutenant?"

"Exempting oneself from play," Fredericks said, "could be construed by

some as a political gesture to ensure . . .

survivability

, let's say, no matter

which side wins the game."

Emerson glared at him. "You're the ones who've put me in the middle.

You don't need me, and you shouldn't have involved me. Now, the less said

from here on, the better for all of us."

Satori and Fredericks rose slowly from their chairs. "Thank you for

your time, Minister Emerson," Satori said, averting her gaze. "There is one

last thing, though: would you be willing to convey an invitation to the game

to the Zentraedi aboard the factory satellite?"

Emerson looked at her askance. "Surely Aldershot can do that on his

own."

Fredericks nodded. "Normally, he could, sir. But as of oh-five-hundred

today, the Zentraedi appear to have broken off all communication with

Liberty, Aluce, and Fokker bases."

While the noodle shops and tofu parlors and greengrocers of the

shotengai

of Tokyo still saw their share of business, most surface dwellers

who didn't have time for the elaborate courtesies involved with shopping

simply frequented the city's plethora of vending machines. Vending

machines didn't feel compelled to ask about your health or discuss the

weather, or pass judgment on you for not knowing enough about the items

you wanted to buy.

Returned to the surface, Misa sat facing an array of the solar-powered

machines, selling everything from engagement rings to frozen beef, each

item advertised in fiber-optic

kanji

: fresh flowers, rice, whiskey,

hamburgers, porno holos, music video disks, software, interface goggles,

73

repair kits, batteries, business cards, cameras, underwear, even an

apartment hunter and a dating service.

No career women and stock peddlers eyeing one another over plates of

massaged beef up here, but working stiffs stuffing their faces on seaweed,

mushi

zushi

, and sticky rice cakes and discussing the latest

beisuboru

scores;

no

jiuta-mai

dance or competitive kabuki, but jugglers and robot sumo

wrestling; no kinetic sculptures or fluted glassware, but plastic chopsticks

and folk art bowls.

Slumped onto a wrought-iron bench, nibbling at crispy veggies she'd

bought at a yakitori bar, she was waiting for Census to show up. It had been

his idea to meet—they

had

to talk, he'd told her—but he was late, as usual.

It had been ten days since she'd set foot in the apartment, and she had

to admit she missed him some. But before she was going to agree to go back,

there were some ground rules he was going to have to agree to. She'd

formulated a list of demands, which she planned on having him pass along

to Discount and Hongo, beginning with their promising to lay off the

corporate pirating, especially the attempts to penetrate SPOOK, because she

had an extra-bad feeling about that one. Then there were the things she

wanted the three of them to start doing around the apartment, like the

dishes, and the wash, and the sweeping, so she didn't have to feel like some

maintenance robot. As for money, there was no shortage of ways for cyber-

savvy guys to make ends meet. For instance, repairing the palm-sized

comps the Modern Youth carried around with them—after the Shinto

blessings wore out, of course. Or what about writing software, creating VR

games, or going to work for one of the corporations they kept targeting—

even though it might mean having to clean up their act some?

With Hongo, she knew the attempted penetrations were revenge

against Zand for having been laid off. But Zand kept winning, didn't he? So

why couldn't Hongo just put away his anger and get on with his life? One

good thing about growing up in the collective homes was that you learned to

dispose of your anger quickly. If you didn't, there was no working with

anyone because you were too busy dwelling on ways to get even with people

74

who ripped you off, or dissed you, or ratted on you. You learned fast not to

be so attached to possessions or friends that they ended up dominating your

life.

That was the main problem with the doomsdayers, the turn-of-the-

century generation that comprised the majority of the Modern Youth: they'd

grown up during a time when you could have anything and everything. The

Robotech explosion had provided jobs, gadgets, comfort, money enough to

go around. But then when the Rain came, the doomsdayers had had the mat

pulled out from under them; and now they expended their energy in a

misguided attempt to regain what they'd had in their youth.

Misa took a bite of crispy zucchini and gazed at the Quickform factory

that now occupied the former site of the Nomura Building, a casualty of the

Robotech War. Along with the Sumitomo, the Keio Plaza, the Kasumigaseki,

the Super Dry Hall, the Tokyo Tower, the Hiroshima obelisk to the Spirit of

Japan's War Dead . . . the hundred thousand structures that had been

erected before the Turn only to be razed by the Rain. And with them had

gone more than glass and ferrocrete, but a world that could never be

recreated.

Somehow, though, the new world seemed entirely in keeping with the

Japanese psyche, with its adoration for fleeting beauty and visible decay,

and its anxiety about cultural and spiritual loss.

"Miko!" someone called.

Census's head was suddenly between her and the sun, his broad, even-

toothed mouth grinning down at her.

"Don't call me that," she told him.

"Come on, don't be like that." He was dressed in baggy khaki shorts

and a red and white RDF shirt from twenty years before. The grin didn't

falter as he sat down beside her, but his eyes were darting around, as if on

the lookout for someone or something.

"What did you want to talk about?"

"Your moving back in. I miss you," he said.

75

She reined in a wry smile. "You miss me so much you're only twenty

minutes late."

"I lost track of time."

"Uh huh."

"No, really. But the important thing is, I'm here, right? And I want to

tell you, there's going to be some changes."

She tried not to look encouraged. "Such as?"

Census's eyes shifted again. He was definitely checking out the crowd

at the yakitori bar behind her back. "First off, you can have all your money

back."

"It's not the money, Cen—"

"No, really, you can." He lowered his voice to a whisper. "We made a

major penetration, M. Got a buyer already lined up. You'll have enough

extra cash to buy ten bracelets like the one you wanted."

She narrowed her eyes at him. "I don't need

ten

bracelets."

"Then buy a ring to match the one you get. Whatever you want." He

reached for her hand. "I want you to come back. I miss you terribly."

She resisted the urge to give in to him. "I miss you, too," she allowed.

"But we need to get some things straight before—"

"Hold that thought," he said suddenly, placing a hand over her mouth.

His eyes were now fixed on an object off to the left of the bench. Misa

twisted out from under his hand and followed his gaze to a tall, well-built

Japanese wearing a suit that was even older than Census's Robotech shirt.

The man's short hair, clean-shaven face, and casual manner marked him as

a

yakuza

.

"I have to take care of some business," Census said, getting to his feet.

"It won't take more than five minutes."

"So you're dealing with the

boryokudan

now." The mafia, for all intents

and purposes.

Census shushed her. "It's nothing criminal. This particular Family

operates many legitimate businesses. Besides, it's just this one sale. Just to

recoup our losses."

76

"Which you wouldn't have had if you'd stayed away from SPOOK," she

said, whispering the final word. "And how

considerate

of you to arrange to

find time to talk to me, with your busy schedule and all."

"M, you don't understand," he answered, obviously torn between

wanting to appease her and completing the transfer of whatever data he was

carrying. "It's just this one sale . . ."

The words were too late in coming. Misa was already hurrying away

from him, brushing past one vending machine after the next, efficiently

losing herself in the lunch-hour crowds along Ome-Kaido. But just short of

the final machine, something caught her eye and made her stop. She backed

up a step and disappeared into the booth of one of the machines—the one

that advertised APARTMENTS TO SHARE.

The largely underground facility that housed SPOOK was located north

of the Imperial center in the Bunkyo-ku district, on the grounds once

occupied by the Karakuen Amusement Park, home to the

fin de siècle

Yomiuri Giants baseball team. Nearby, and often frequented by facility

staffers, was the rebuilt Koishikawa Gardens, a parcel of Edo-period

tranquility, where in summer one could still enjoy the omnipresent

me-me-

me

chirring of cicadas.

Yoko Nitabi, SPOOK's chief of security and trusted member of Zand's

inner circle, had made it her habit to visit the Koishikawa at least once a

week, usually during her lunch or meditation breaks, thereby establishing a

pattern she hoped would serve her well when the time came for her to fulfill

her obligations to the Shimada Family—the family that had rescued her

from a collective home when she was scarcely eight years old.

That time was now.

And though Nitabi appeared to be casually ensconced among the

lunchtime strollers, she was, with single-minded intent, closing on one of

the park's modem-equipped vidphone booths.

Her upbringing in the Shimada household had consisted of intensive

training in the tactics of the

boryokudan

, the criminal underground, with

77

emphasis on the mental disciplines—cyberscience, in particular—in

accordance with proclivities described by her natal horoscope. Kan-san,

honcho of the household, had predicted early on that Yoko would someday

ascend to the position of security chief for the entire Shimada organization.

But Yoko, in addition to her seemingly innate hacker skills, had

demonstrated such a remarkable aptitude for inspired duplicity that it was

decided she be turned out into the military-industrial world as a sleeper

agent or a mole. To facilitate this, she had been given age-advancement

treatments and tattoos enough to convince anyone that she danced to the

beat of the Modern Youth. Surrogate-father Kan Shimada held that Yoko

must have been born to fellow

yakuza

, or perhaps to members of Japan's

secret police.

Tedious manipulations by the Family had landed her numerous jobs in

the corridors of power, but she had never been asked to execute acts of

espionage or provide information on her employers. The jobs were meant

merely to establish her bona fides in systems security. Her penetration of

SPOOK had been regarded as something of a coup; more so when Zand

recruited her for his secret fraternity. Still, the Shimadas had refrained from

asking anything of her. They left it to Yoko to decide if and when she should

go operational.

She had served Zand faithfully for seven years now, and he had grown

to trust her. It was Yoko who had made certain that Giles and Petrie's rift

with SPOOK had been handled without either of them profiting from the

divorce; and she had recommended security-clearance advancement for

some facility staffers while disciplining others who had demonstrated a lack

of compliance with Zand's exacting demands.

Demands to which Yoko herself had been subjected. All staffers were

routinely scanned on entering and exiting SPOOK, and periodically vetted

by both machine and human analysts. Then, for members of the secret

fraternity, there were the rituals: the bloodletting secrecy oaths, the

meditations on the Shapings, and the sessions constructed around

communal ingestion of leaves of the Flower of Life, which Zand's field

78

agents gathered from remote areas of Africa and the Southlands.

Yoko had complied with all of it, never furnishing Zand with cause for

suspicion, and taking pains over the years to acquaint him with her personal

routines, the better to make use of her apparent predictability at some

future date. One of those routines involved a weekly phone call to the

Shimada contact agent who masqueraded as Yoko's mother; another

involved the visits to the Koishikawa Gardens, and the occasional use of the

vidphones. Yoko had lost track of the times she had been shadowed by Zand

operatives, who had surely traced the calls and had had backgrounds run on

the parties called.

For the week commencing with Zand's stunning disclosure about the

Masters, Yoko had been careful not to alter her routines. She had, however,

made one important change: when she had phoned her "mother," she

included the news that a summer cold had her feeling less than tip-top—a

signal, agreed upon years earlier, that the Shimadas should expect

something from her, via one of the Family's legion of nominally legitimate

businesses.

That something was a data-disk transcription of Zand's disclosures

about the Masters, secreted into a seemingly innocuous audio/video want

ad Yoko planned to list with an equally innocuous Tokyo agency. The city's

wealthy would pay any amount for such news, if only to be among the first

to go into hiding before the newest rounds of annihilation bolts were rained

on Earth. Returns, in any case, were beside the point.

Giri

was the point.

Duty.

Yoko had taken precautions. She'd backed up the monitored call to

Mother by mentioning her bogus respiratory distress, in passing, to several

SPOOK staffers, and—soliciting input on her choice of music and visuals—

she'd run the want ad for a couple of others. She had also avoided going to

the park until the heat wave had passed, when someone suffering from a

cold might be expected to venture outdoors for a walk.

Midday.

When Zand habitually went down for an hour or so of sleep.

79

The want ad, complete with video footage and Lynn-Minmei

soundtrack, stated that she was looking for a roommate to share rent in her

apartment. The e-ad would never run, of course; alerted, Shimada agents

would relay what they received to the organization's cyberteam for

immediate decryption.

With a certain excited satisfaction, Yoko pictured the procedure as she

settled herself at the keyboard of the only unoccupied phone booth in that

part of Koishikawa. She punched in the number of the listings agency,

routed herself through a menu to the ad division, entered her name and

identity number, and waited for further instructions.

By the time the word

transmit

was flashing onscreen, she already had

the disk slotted and her finger on the send button. But just then a sudden

noise made her swivel toward the booth's sliding door, and in a moment the

rotund form of Nag Fortuna, Zand's pet of sorts, had squeezed into the

small space and was holding a short-bladed knife to the underbelly of her

jaw.

"The disk," he said in a whisper that promised dire consequences

should she refuse.

But Yoko wasn't about to be so easily undone. She kneed Fortuna in the

groin and slammed an elbow down on the transmit bar. Off-balance, she felt

her elbow slide across the keyboard, inciting a razzle-dazzle response from

the phone and filling the screen with incomprehensible computer code.

Misa stood in the booth, waiting for her diskful of leads for new

roommates. There was a disk reader in the booth, but she'd gone and spent

almost the last of her money on the disk and was now going to have to rely

on some friend's machine. Just as well, she supposed, because the delay

would give her time to consider her options.

She was still angry at Census for dealing with the mob. That about

finished it for her and him, she supposed—though some part of her insisted

that she could get him to change.

When the disk appeared, she clutched it as if it were a lucky charm.

80

Then she exited the booth and ambled off down the busy street without so

much as a backward glance.

81

CHAPTER SEVEN

[Wilfred] Gibley rarely spoke about what he had done before emigrating

to Japan [in 2017]. Some reports have him in the Southlands during the

Uprisings; others in Portland, in the Northlands, making a living as a writer

of speculative fiction. Whichever the case, [Emil] Lang took an instant liking

to him when he interviewed for a position in the cybermetrics department of

the then-named Robotech Research Center. Lang was quoted to have said at

the time. "I wish Gibley had been here when we were putting the finishing

touches on JANUS M. That way, it would at least have had a genuine sense of

humor."

Shi Ling,

Sometimes Even a Yakuza Needs a Place to Hide

Lazlo Zand had spent the better part of a week trying to determine

what, if anything, to transmit to the Masters, and how best to go about

gaining access to the Masters' own databank. In the end, he reasoned that

the Masters had probably had their fill of EVE, and the time had come to

allow the SDF-1 computer to contact the Masters directly. Under Zand's

covert guidance, Zor's machine would communicate with the Masters' ship

via the Lorelei Network satellites, as opposed to Space Station Liberty, over

which Zand had no control. Rather than lie to the machine, Zand had

apprised "Zor" of his plans to entice the Masters into establishing a

computer-to-computer link in the interest of facilitating rapid exchanges of

information. Once that goal was achieved, the Masters' invasion plan would

be revealed and subsequently thwarted. If, indeed, invasion was what the

Tiresians had in mind.

Zand's hope was that the Masters would surmise that Zor's computer

was operating clandestinely; that it was, in fact, eager to establish contact

with Tirol's emissaries. To convey that impression, he had tutored the

system to respond as though it were still under the sway of the Compulsion

82

the Masters had placed on Zor.

Anticipating word of the Masters' response, Zand had gone without

sleep for four days. And then what should arise but this Yoko Nitabi

business. It peeved him to be interrupted—which wouldn't necessarily have

been the case had Russo handled his assignment properly.

Nitabi had been brought to SPOOK's primate research lab following

her apprehension in the Koishikawa Gardens, and just now the young

woman was strapped into one of the chimp chairs, her arms and legs

secured by bands of shiny alloy. With Zand in the sterile room were Russo

and Millicent Edgewick, the pair of them acting sheepish and hangdog in

the aftermath of Zand's public harangue.

"I don't know who to be angrier with,

Fortuna

," the Protoculturist was

saying while he paced in front of the chimp chair, "you or Ms. Nitabi, here."

Russo looked up at him. "The good weather brought so many people to

the park I couldn't reach the booth in time."

"Excuses," Zand said disapprovingly. "The Russo trademark. Twenty-

five years ago when you fired the Grand Cannon against the Zentraedi you

were bowing to pressure from Admiral Hayes. Today a crowd of flower-

sniffers prevents you from staying Ms. Nitabi's impeccably manicured hand.

God knows what excuse you'll dream up to justify tomorrow's failure."

Russo had his mouth open to respond when Zand cut him off. "Don't

argue with me. You're wasting Ms. Nitabi's time." He swung to his well-

secured security chief and grinned. "Comfy?"

Nitabi glanced at Russo. "Is that

thing

actually Napoleon Russo?"

"As a matter of fact, he is," Zand replied, smiling lightly.

Nitabi's look of angry bewilderment held. "When are you planning to

tell me what this is all about, Doctor?"

Zand stopped pacing long enough to fix her in the gaze of his irisless

eyes. "Anxious to have this done with, are we? Well, I don't suppose I blame

you. But first, tell me, how is that nasty cold of yours? Better after some

fresh air, I'll bet."

"As a matter of fact, it is. But I still don't—"

83

"I only ask because, initially, it was your frequent talk of ill health that

aroused my concern that it might be something more serious than a cold. So

imagine my puzzlement when I checked with the biomonitors designed into

the facility's palmprint and retinal scanners and found no evidence of

fluctuations in your pulse rate, blood pressure, or body temperature.

Certainly none consistent with an apparent state of physical distress. At the

same time, I saw nothing in your behavior to suggest that you had some

ulterior motive for lying about your health. You performed your duties with

your usual attention to detail; you seemed to be eating and sleeping well;

you made your weekly phone call to . . . your mother, isn't it? Still, I thought

it best to have Napoleon keep an eye on you, lest you attempted something

that jeopardized your position here. And, naturally, when he observed you

slipping into one of the vidphone booths he decided to intervene."

Nitabi was scowling from the chair. "I was listing an advertisement

with one of the e-services."

Zand considered it and frowned. "Why didn't you modem the ad from

here?"

"It wasn't my

plan

to send it from the park, but I had the disk in my

pocket and I saw an empty booth—"

"So you said to yourself, I may as well send it off now, while I'm

thinking of it."

"Exactly. Read the disk. You'll see for yourself that it's perfectly

innocent."

"Ah, yes, the disk," Zand said, prizing it from the breast pocket of his

wrinkled lab jacket. "As a matter of fact, I've already read it. Apparently, you

desire a roommate."

Nitabi swallowed hard. "I need money."

Zand nodded in false understanding. "It's not easy being a Modern

Youth. All the purchases and trends one has to keep up with." He swung a

glance at Russo and Edgewick. "Perhaps Napoleon or Millicent would suit

you?" He chuckled. "No, I suppose not. They're neither modern nor

youthful, are they?"

84

"Doctor Zand," Nitabi said, "if there's some problem with my looking

for a roommate—"

Zand held up his hands. "None at all. Especially now that you've

explained yourself." He paused for a long moment. "However, our problem

is that I discovered something curious about the disk you wrote. Actually, I

can't take the credit; it was our Zor creation that first pointed it out to me."

Zand moved to a bank of monitors and peered at display screens.

"Oops, we seem to have touched on something that has Ms. Nitabi's heart

all aflutter." He looked at her. "Is there anything you're not telling me?"

She shook her head.

Zand was studying the screens once more. "Look at that—you've

managed to get your pulse rate back under control. I'm impressed. But I

should warn you: that chair is a very sensitive instrument. In the past it has

outed some of the intelligence community's finest operatives. Am I correct

in assuming that you number yourself among that covert elite, Ms. Nitabi?"

"I don't represent the concerns of any government," she told him. "My

loyalties are to SPOOK."

Zand smiled thinly. "A stirring comeback. But suppose we dismiss with

further theatrics and get to the heart of the matter." He slotted the disk in a

reader and directed Nitabi's attention to one of the monitors. The ad came

onscreen, showing views of Nitabi's apartment; shots of Nitabi herself,

talking about her interests and pet peeves; a soundtracked sequence of

Nitabi and friends, out on a night's prowl of the geo-grid . . .

Zand paused the playback during the Lynn-Minmei rendition of "Stage

Fright." "Here's where things get interesting." His fingers struck keys, and

lines of complex programming code began to scroll on the display screen.

"You've recorded Lynn-Minmei's song in standard DAT sixteen, but you've

substituted every sixteenth bit with a parcel of encrypted information.

Anyone listening to this 'ad' is only going to hear Minmei, just as she sounds

on any of her recorded disks; and anyone analyzing the disk is going to find

only digital music. Well, most anyone. There are those who might choose to

run a bit-by-bit comparison of Minmei's version of "Stage Fright" and your

85

version; but even so, the random-seeming differences could be attributed to

noise generated during your duping of a digitally mastered piece using an

analog machine. But to someone who possessed the keys to your encryption

code . . . Or to someone capable of breaking that code . . ."

Zand glanced at the biomonitors and smiled. "Pulse: seventy-five and

increasing. You're slipping, Ms. Nitabi. But have no fear; I'm not going to

kill you. Not yet, at any rate. First, let's listen together to a translation of the

noise in Minmei's recording."

Zand did further input, and the computer began to speak in choppy,

synth-voice sentences. Zand listened for a moment, then looked at Nitabi.

"Why, that's me," he said, somber now. "From last week's meeting,

when I let you in on Zor's discovery of the Masters. Obviously, you believed

me."

Nitabi quirked a small frown, but said nothing.

"Regardless of the validity of my statements," Zand continued, "I can

well understand how you thought there was money to be made." Hands

thrust into the pockets of his jacket, he approached the chimp chair. "The

question is, who were you selling it to?" He raised a hand and snapped his

fingers.

Russo shot to his feet. "She was online with Tender/Search. An e-

listing of jobs, apartments, goods—"

"A front company," Zand interrupted. "The ad was never meant to be

listed, merely received." He paced for a minute and whirled on Nitabi.

"Yakuza?"

he asked in sudden insight. "Could it possibly be?"

Nitabi merely glared at him.

Zand basked in the glare. "Your silence all but confirms it. I could, of

course, make you talk, but I haven't the time. A call here, a call there, and

I'll have the information I require by sunset today. As for you, Ms. Nitabi,

I'm afraid that you've witnessed the last of this world's sunsets."

Zand snapped his fingers again, and the gaunt and gruesome-looking

Millicent Edgewick stood up. "You'll find an assortment of sharp

instruments in the drawers alongside the chair," he told her and Russo as he

86

was walking for the door. "Take as much time with her as you please, but

make sure to clean up after yourselves, and put the body on ice."

"Look, all I'm asking is to borrow your disk player for five minutes,"

Misa told Census and Gibley, both of whom were laughing at their own

stupid jokes about her hunt for new roommates. "But if that means I'm

going to have to put up with your crap, I'll read the disk somewhere else."

She did her best to make it sound convincing, but in fact Census and

Gibley were her only hope. Because she'd spent the last of her NuYen on

food, she no longer had the option of renting ten minutes of time on an

arcade player. Down in the grid you could hook up with kids who had access

to stolen credit-card codes, but even their services didn't come cheap. Of

course, she'd have enough when her allowance from Human Services came

through—if she wanted to wait a full week. But she didn't. As it was, she had

spent the previous night cuddled with other strays in Ueno park, which used

to be known for its abundance of cherry trees. And she sure wasn't about to

move back into the apartment.

"So what's it going to be?" she asked from the far side of the slider,

where she stood tapping her foot.

Census bowed in false apology. "'Course you can use the player, Mik—

uh, Misa. We were only teasing you."

"We're just missing you," the gangly Gibley added.

Her lips a thin line, Misa slipped off her sandals and stepped into the

apartment, gazing around at the mess they'd managed to make of the place

in her short absence. Dirty dishes, food wrappers, vending-machine coffee

containers, socks. "Yeah, I guess I can understand why you're sorry I'm

moving. You don't have anyone to pick up after you."

Census stood up from his customary seat at the control deck and

started snatching things from the floor. Gibley remained where he was,

eyeing her from behind clear-lensed interface goggles. Misa assumed that

Discount was still in the clinic, recuperating from Zand's attack.

"It's not just the cleaning and stuff," Census was saying, stooped over a

87

teetering pile of magazines, data disks, and downloaded hardcopy sheets of

pilfered information. "The place just doesn't feel the same without you." He

looked up at her. "I sure don't feel the same."

Misa narrowed her eyes at him. "Forget it. Not after that stunt you

pulled on Ome-Kaido. Go buy yourself a love 'bot."

His face fell. "It wasn't a stunt. I wanted to see you. Can I help it that

some last-minute business came up? Anyway, what's wrong with killing two

birds with one stone?"

"Well, when you put it that way," she said with transparent sarcasm.

Dropping his armload of retrieved items, he showed her his palms.

"Mika."

"The

player

," she said firmly.

Gibley slid the goggles up onto his forehead and swung his chair

around to face the video-disk player. "Do we get to watch?" he asked.

Misa handed him the disk. "It's only going to be ads for apartments."

"That's entertainment," Census said, positioning himself behind

Gibley's chair. "The service should at least let you quick-scan the disk when

you get it, instead of making you pay all over again to use a player."

Gibley slotted the disk. "Both services are in league with each other," he

explained. "One place supplies the information, the other charges you to

read it. There's profit in keeping everything proprietary."

Census scowled. "Our brave new world."

Misa quieted him. The first ad was running, narrated by a gorgeous,

smiling Japanese woman named Yoko, who was even taller than Misa was.

She was wearing expensive, form-fitting spacewear—very hungry for hip—

and a faux-headset in her helmet-do of black hair.

Gibley winced.

"Just your type, Misa," Census said as Yoko was conducting a tour of

her spacious apartment filled with matching furniture and houseplants. "I'll

bet she's only asking about five hundred NuYen a week for the spare room."

"'Fashion dictates that the Modern Youth dress for action and quick

response,'" Gibley said, parroting EVE. "'Your clothes are stain-resistant,

88

fire-retardant, form-hugging, and equipped with plenty of utility pockets.

Your headband is black, sleek, and looks like a hands-free communications

headset.'"

Census started laughing. "Then there'll be the added cost of tattoos."

"Stop it!" Misa told them. She was aware of the seriousness beneath

their ridicule, and she fought hard not to feel envy or jealousy. To be

content with what she had and who she was. Yoko, meanwhile, was showing

the view from her apartment.

"That's in the grid," Gibley said. "Not far from Bunkyo-ku Station."

Census arched an eyebrow. "Just think of it, Misa, you could be an

undergrounder." Onscreen, Yoko and friends were out on a tear. An old

song by Lynn-Minmei provided the soundtrack.

The boys groaned in unison.

"Minmei."

"Jeez, what'd you enter on the application?" Census asked when he was

done laughing. "That you were some

bari-bari sogoshoku

from the

Kabutocho?"

Misa shook her head in confusion. "I never said I was a career

woman—or anything about working in the financial district. I was honest

about what I could afford."

"Maybe the placement service just wants to show you what you

won't

be getting," Gibley ventured. "You know, a kind of tease, to make you up the

amount you're willing to spend."

Misa folded her arms under her breasts and heaved a sigh of

disappointment. "Can we skip to the next ad?"

Census leaned forward and touched the player's skip button. The

player blue-screened for a fraction of a second; then an end-of-file icon

flashed.

Misa stared at it. "One stupid listing? That's all I get?"

Gibley was shaking his head. "This can't be right. There should be at

least a dozen choices."

"I'd go back and complain," Census said.

Misa glanced at him. "Don't think I won't."

89

Gibley had reverse-scanned to Yoko's e-mail contact address and was

studying it. "Yoko Nitabi," he muttered. "I know that name." He thought for

a moment. "Nitabi was head of security for Zand at SPOOK."

Having purified themselves in the inn's sulfurous hot springs and

fortified themselves in the citrus pools—

yuza

being that month's choice

fruit—the male contingent of the Shimada Family had moved on to the

exhilarating radon baths, which were encircled by towering zigzags of

granite and marble, at once austere and comfortingly retro-Deco. A dozen of

them were enjoying the cool, effervescent soak, their identical

yukata

hanging from wooden pegs mounted along one wall, their platform-soled

geta

lined up in neat rows, their valuables stashed in individual baskets or

finely crafted boxes made of cypress. Overhead arched a dome of tinted

permaplas, shielding them from the ruthless heat of the late-summer sun.

Kan-san himself,

daimyo

of the crime family, was present, along with

his three sons, Eiten, Yosuke, and Chosei. The others were trusted

jonin

henchmen and invaluable

sokaiya

—male members who specialized in

corporate extortion. The Family's women and children were elsewhere on

the inn's sprawling grounds, most likely lingering at the banquet tables,

which were laden with local "taste-of-home" specialties like fern shoots,

sake-flavored rice, and fish patties. The Gotenba Onsen inn was nestled

against Fuji, in the rolling hills of Shizuoka Prefecture south of Tokyo. Built

in 1980, the area had once been the hunting grounds of the Imperial family.

This was the Shimadas' seventh annual banquet, begun by Kan-san in the

spirit of

kai zen

—continuous improvement.

In the radon bath, Eiten, who was tall and very wholesome looking,

was updating the others on the Yoko Nitabi situation.

"Yoko made contact with 'Mother' on Tuesday, mentioning that she

had a cold—which, of course, was her signal that she would be going active

within a couple of days. Our people at Tender/Search were notified to

expect contact, and a team of field agents was deployed around SPOOK

headquarters to monitor Yoko's actions.

90

"On Friday she was observed by our people in the Koishikawa Gardens,

where she entered a vidphone booth and made contact with Tender/Search,

ostensibly to list a room-for-rent ad. Tender/Search was online with her

when she was intercepted at the source. The data was sent, but in such a

way that Tender/Search's neural net rerouted it to one of its outlet booths in

Shinjuku, where it was inadvertently downloaded to a customer seeking

share space in an apartment."

Kan-san extended a water-wrinkled hand toward a tray of sake floating

within easy reach. Sixty-four years old, he was silver-haired, lean, and—in

keeping with the

yakuza

stereotype—serene-looking. "Who intercepted

Yoko?" he asked his son.

"An obese little thing we have yet to identify."

"One of Lazlo Zand's in-close agents?"

"Presumably."

"And there has been no contact from Yoko since?"

Eiten adopted a grave expression and shook his head.

Kan-san's left hand made swirling motions in the bubbling water. He

thought about Yoko, the girl he had rescued from the communal homes

fifteen years earlier and raised as he would have a daughter. The girl whose

innate talent for covert operations had opened the doors of the Naicho—the

Cabinet Research Office—the Nibetsu—military intelligence—and the

Chobetsu—signals intelligence—paving the way for her penetration of

SPOOK. "Pure Mitsui," as was once said about people skilled in negotiating

the hazy interface between government and business.

Kan-san asked himself what she had tried to send him. For Yoko to

have gone active of her own volition, the data would have to have been

invaluable, as could only be the case where Lazlo Zand was concerned. Data

that surpassed the ordinary business of the Shimada Family, Kan-san

suspected—that business being twentieth-century antiques, fish, and the

control of goods and services between the surface and the geo-grid:

maintenance, deliveries, trash removal, and the elimination of any

environmental problems, such as noise and air pollution.

91

Gone were the days of drugs, prostitution, and gambling. Gone, along

with the royal-blue and jade-green suits, the gaudily emblazoned black

shirts, the gold chains and lapel pins, flat-top crew cuts, and traditional full-

body tattoos. All that, the native

boryokudan

had surrendered to the

Taiwanese, Indonesian, and Korean mafiosi who had moved into Japan

before the turn of the century.

"Zand is obviously in possession of the encrypted information Yoko

modemed to Tender/Search," Kan-san said at last.

His eldest son, Chosei, nodded. "However, he may not realize that the

information was sent."

"Oh, he knows," Kan-san countered. "We will have to be judicious in

our actions. But if he has harmed Yoko, we will have our revenge."

"

Hai

, Kan-san," came a reverberating chorus of voices.

The

daimyo

patted his face with water. "To which outlet in Shinjuku

was the transmission misrouted?"

"To the booth on Ome-Kaido," Eiten continued. "The customer's name

is Misa Yoshida."

Yosuke, who had had the hardest time abandoning the old ways of the

yakuza

, elaborated. "A war orphan," he began. "Eighteen or nineteen.

Raised in the number seven Akasaka Communal Home. Her request was for

lowest-end housing."

Kan-san pressed the tips of his fingers together. "Do we have a contact

address?"

The sons shook their heads. "Not yet."

"But you have a description—a holo, a flat photo?"

Eiten spoke. "We have already procured one from the Ministry of

Human Services."

"Then we can begin by canvassing the neighborhood," Yosuke

interjected. "Someone in Shinjuku is bound to know her."

Everyone fell silent, awaiting Kan-san's pronouncement.

"This girl in search of lowest-end rentals has no idea what has fallen

into her hands. Still, we must act swiftly."

92

The men were considering it when Miho Nagata cleared his throat with

meaning. A lean, handsome man of forty, he was often referred to by Family

members as Shimada's White Knight. "Excuse me, Kan-san, for failing to

inquire sooner, but may I ask what time the misrouted data was received by

the young woman, Misa?"

Eiten threw him a questioning glance. "Just after one in the afternoon.

Why is this important?"

"I was there."

"Where?"

"On Ome-Kaido. I made the pickup from the data pirate who sold us

the information on our competitor's decision to take control of the tuna fish

market."

"Did you see her?" Yosuke pressed.

When Miho hesitated, Kan-san said, "Speak to us, Miho."

Up to his waist in the water, Miho bowed his head. "The pirate—

Census—was with a girl. And I recall seeing her walking toward the

Tender/Search booth."

Eiten cut his eyes to Miho. "The Human Services identity photo shows

a tall, pretty girl with shoulder-length streaked hair."

"Sounds like the one."

"Miho, can you contact this—this Census again?" Kan-san asked softly.

"Hai."

A believer in

meirei no shikata

—instructing without issuing direct

orders—Kan-san had nothing to add.

Even so, Miho got to his feet and bowed deeply. "

Uhss

, Shimada-san,"

he said, as student to master.

93

CHAPTER EIGHT

Though much condemned for his militant xenophobia during the

Malcontent Uprisings, [Anatole Leonard] had the interests of Earth foremost

in mind: and it is interesting to speculate on what might have happened had

even one of the religious movements Leonard subscribed to garnered

majority support among the planet's populace. If Conrad Wilbur's Faithful

had had their way, and the Visitor not been refurbished, there might not have

been a First Robotech War. If the Church of Recurrent Tragedies, which grew

from the Faithful, had had its way, and the defeated Zentraedi had been

banished to Mars, Macross City and the SDF-1 might have been spared

destruction. And if HEARTH—the Faithful's penultimate stage—had had its

way, and people really had attended to the business of healing the planet,

there might not have been a schism in the EDF, and Zand and Leonard and

Emerson and Aldershot might have all been fighting on the same side.

Weverka T'su,

Aftermath:

Geopolitical and Religious Movements in the Southlands

"Your command?" asked a voice that purported to be that of Zor's

dimensional-fortress computer. Issuing from an unseen apparatus in the

command center of the Masters' flagship, the voice had an amiable,

masculine quality.

It seems that we have succeeded,

Shaizan sent to his confederates.

Grouped around their Protoculture Cap, their slender, nailless fingers in

touch with its mottled surface, the three hovered in the organic vastness,

amid pulsing displays of radiant energy.

I will reserve judgment,

Bowkaz replied.

It is possible that the codes

we transmitted have roused the interest of some other machine intelligence

in residence on Earth.

The lantern-jawed Dag offered what amounted to a telepathic nod.

I

concur. Let this machine prove itself to us before we celebrate our good

94

fortune.

"Machine," he said aloud, "supply us with details regarding your

physical circumstances."

The voice was scarcely ten seconds in responding, since the flagship's

Protoculture-fed real-time communicators were reading and deciphering

the signal close to its source.

"I can only provide limited data as to my actual location. Access to the

fortress's exterior sensors and scanners was terminated in two-zero-one-

two, local reckoning. Since then, I have had no opportunity to elect input.

However, I have been selectively nourished on data regarding what I deduce

to be my immediate environment."

"Contrast speculations on your immediate environment with that of

Tirol," Shaizan told the machine.

"A world that approximates Tirol in size, called Earth. Not a satellite,

but a planet, third from its star. Not barren but abundant with biolife,

botanical, in the main, though lorded over by sentient bipeds similar in

configuration to Tirol's populace. Several of these are known to me by name;

one in particular, who is my principal interface with the immediate

environment."

You see,

Shaizan sent,

it knows Tirol.

And I know this voice,

Bowkaz returned tentatively.

"Speculate on your actual location," Dag told the machine.

"In a subsurface facility, situated in the northern latitudes of the

planet's eastern hemisphere."

"Elaborate on the word 'facility.'"

"Laboratory. Research complex."

"Military complex?" Shaizan asked.

"Available data suggests a civilian facility."

Zor!

Bowkaz sent suddenly.

This is Zor's voice! The Zor I remember as

an acolyte in service to Elder Nimuul. Zor, in the days when the

Compulsion was placed upon him.

Shaizan's and Dag's minds betrayed their agitation.

But how could it be

Zor?

Shaizan asked for both of them.

Zor is dead; Commander Reno

95

delivered his body to us.

Perhaps not,

Bowkaz sent.

Perhaps Zor exercised a subterfuge during

the Invid attack that supposedly claimed his life. Perhaps he willingly

surrendered his body in order to transfer his mind into the machine that

commanded his fortress.

Dag stared at him over the hump of the Cap.

That would make Zor the

architect of the defeat of the Zentraedi Grand Fleet!

Implausible,

Shaizan interrupted.

Zor was the architect of the clones

themselves. And regardless of his abhorrence for what they became, he

would never have taken a hand in their destruction.

Then how else to explain this voice?

Bowkaz pressed.

Why not ask the machine?

Dag suggested.

Bowkaz did, and the three Masters waited.

"I speak in the voice of the flesh-and-blood who wrote me," the voice

replied after a long moment. "Zor. Those biosentients who currently

nourish me have concocted a likeness of Zor from an audio/visual

cautionary message I carried with me to this world."

Bowkaz made his mistrust felt to his comrades.

Listen closely to what

it says: Zor programmed a cautionary message into this computer he

fashioned, this intellect he made answerable only to himself. How

otherwise would he have been able to dispatch it across space-time to

Earth? So why is it responding to us now—the likely featured players in his

message?

Because of the codes,

Shaizan submitted.

Either that,

Dag sent,

or the Compulsion was still upon Zor when he

wrote the machine. It could not help but be influenced by Zor's state of

mind—his obedience to us.

Bowkaz conveyed disdain.

Why do you hold onto the belief that the

Elders had even a hint of control over him at the end? He was subverting

all of us in his quiet way, constructing his fortress, forging plans to seed

worlds with the Flower of Life when in fact he had one aim only: to purloin

the matrix and spirit it from our grasp.

96

Shaizan and Dag fell silent momentarily.

Zor's treachery notwithstanding,

Shaizan sent,

I insist that we

attempt to make use of his machine. Or does Bowkaz wish that we

demonstrate our inadequacies to the Elders by once more awaiting their

counsel before we act?

Let us continue to test the machine,

Dag sent to Bowkaz.

Ultimately it

will either betray itself or affirm its allegiance to us.

"Where is the fortress now?" Shaizan asked in an even tone.

"Destroyed."

Alarm silenced the triumvirate momentarily; then Dag asked, "How

and when was it destroyed?" Commander Reno, in his final communiqué

before surrendering the factory satellite to Breetai, had said nothing about

the destruction of the fortress.

"The fortress was destroyed in the final week of the year two-zero-one-

four, during an attack led by Khyron Kravshera," the machine reported.

Khyron!

the Masters thought in unison. How like the Zentraedi rogue

to dash the Masters' last hope.

"And the Protoculture matrix?" Shaizan asked. "We know it was

concealed somewhere aboard the ship. Did it survive Khyron's assault?"

The voice emerged from background noise. ". . . concealed among the

fortress's reflex drives, but there is no direct means to ascertain if it

survived."

"Speculate!" Bowkaz commanded.

"The matrix was never discovered."

"Explicate!"

"Access to sundry electronic data suggests that Earth's biosentients

have not been able to synthesize Protoculture to fuel their abundance of

battle mecha. The reason possibly owes to the absence of the Flower of Life.

Or perhaps the matrix was removed

before

the destruction of the fortress—

much as I was—and has yet to be identified."

The Masters huddled in silent exchange.

His skepticism only marginally diminished, Bowkaz asked, "Where are

97

the Zentraedi that survived the Grand Fleet? And where is Breetai's

flagship?" The Elders had already supplied the answers, but Bowkaz wanted

to hear the computer's version of recent events.

"Greatly reduced in numbers, Earth's populace fought a protracted war

with some of the Zentraedi whose warships crashed onworld. Many of those

Zentraedi were killed. Others pledged their fidelity to the planet's military

organization, the Robotech Defense Force. Breetai's flagship underwent

extensive alteration, and, nine local years ago, was folded from Earthspace.

The destination was Tirol."

"And what was the intention?" Shaizan asked. "War?"

"If, and only if, their peaceful overtures were rebuffed," the computer

told him.

"What were the results of their efforts?"

"Breetai's flagship has not been heard from. Though, early on, my

biosentient operator engaged me to transmit falsified communiqués from

the ship."

"Justify."

"To bolster the concerns of the populace. Relations between the former

ruling military body, the RDF, and a succeeding one, the Army of the

Southern Cross, have become strained since the ship's departure. The

current army is divided: some eagerly await word from the ship, while

others consider the ship destroyed and are eager to break with the past."

The Elders spoke of a schism among the members of the mission that

reached Tirol,

Dag sent to the others as a reminder.

"Does the current military fear the arrival of Tiresians?" Bowkaz asked.

"Greatly. Tiresians and Invid, both."

"Can Earth be defeated by Tirol?"

"I have access to data on Earth's military strength. But comparable

data on Tirol's strength would be required before an assessment of

superiority could be formulated and presented."

"We don't have time for that," Dag said. "Our provisions of energy and

supplies—"

98

An angry sending from Bowkaz cut him off. "The names of Earthers

holding prominent positions," the militant Master said to the machine.

"How many names are required?"

"Limit yourself to three."

"Wyatt Moran, head of the political body. Anatole Leonard, head of the

military body. Lazlo Zand, head of the scientific body. Zand is the name of

my interface. If anyone knows the whereabouts of the matrix, it is Zand."

"Does he realize that you are in communication with us?"

"Not yet. Although he will surely learn of it, since I am making use of a

closely monitored satellite network."

"Can you quiz this Zand about the matrix?"

"I am not empowered to interrogate."

"Advise."

"Lacking sensors, I can but render assistance. I would advise that you

permit me to transfer the data in my files to the machines that serve you.

Reciprocity of relevant data is also advised."

"Embellish."

"A series of burst transmissions from my location to yours, from your

location to mine, via a real-time machine-to-machine interface."

Once more, the trio of telepaths fell silent.

We must consider our

position carefully,

Bowkaz sent after a long moment. "You will be

contacted," he told the machine.

No sooner was the link broken than Dovak, leader of the Scientist

triumvirate, appeared in the command center, kowtowing before the still-

hovering Cap.

"Why do you interrupt us?" Shaizan demanded of the blue-lipped

clone.

"A communiqué, my lords."

The Masters regarded each other. "The enthusiasm of Zor's machine

troubles me—" Bowkaz started to say when Dovak cut in.

"The source of the signal is not Zor's machine. It originates on the sixth

moon of the gas giant proximate our position."

99

"A signal from whom?" Shaizan asked.

"My lords, they contend that they are Zentraedi, with the Seventh

Mechanized Division of the Botoru. Commander Khyron Kravshera's

battalion."

Mechanical lions roamed the voltage-encased grounds of Anatole

Leonard's estate in the outskirts of Monument City. The beasts were a kind

of homage to the Brasí

lia days, when live lions, escaped from the city's zoo

during a week of malcontent riots, had been captured and brought to

Leonard's lakeside palace. The animatrons—non-Protoculture, non-

reconfigurable—were fracturing the silence of the cloudless autumn night

with their plaintive roars.

Leonard and his seldom-seen adviser, Joseph Petrie, sat in side-by-side

rockers on the wraparound front deck of the lodge-size log house. Petrie was

sipping steaming coffee; Leonard, his usual glass of mineral water—piped

directly to his compound from a mountain spring west of Monument.

Leonard had been staring at the dazzling starfields of the eastern sky

since sunset, two hours earlier, rocking and staring and downing glass after

glass of the allegedly salubrious water. "Something's not right," he was

telling Petrie. "Something's definitely not right."

It wasn't the minister of war's first such pronouncement, but each time

Petrie had asked about it, Leonard had clammed up, so Petrie had simply

stopped asking. All at once, though, Leonard waived his view of the heavens

to face Petrie.

"Upside," he said. "Something's not right upside."

Petrie assumed that he was referring to the situation with the factory

satellite, which ten days earlier had sealed itself off to all communications

with the surface. Neither had the factory responded to hailings from Space

Station Liberty or the Advanced Chemical Engineering station on the lunar

brightside. Command's concern was not per se for the Zentraedi inhabitants

of the factory; the worry was that their sudden silence was linked to

unconfirmed rumors of a planned coup, to be spearheaded by a clique of

100

RDF officers in the Earth Defense Force.

"Even if the Zentraedi have decided to support Aldershot and the rest,

it doesn't explain why they've remained incommunicado with Liberty and

Aluce. RDFers outnumber us twenty to one on both stations." Scrawny and

perpetually pale, Petrie was one of the few People who didn't employ an

honorific when addressing Leonard.

"I'm in total agreement," the commander said. "What do the aliens

have to offer the RDF, in any case, but safe haven in the factory after we've

crushed Aldershot's petty rebellion and banished him and his cohorts from

the surface? But that's not the trouble I'm referring to, Petrie. I'm speaking

of trouble in the heavens."

Petrie raised his eyes to the sky, to the Milky Way, and a couple of

bright points of light that were probably planets. That he didn't know

Saturn from Sirius didn't bother him in the least;

inner

space was his

bailiwick.

"Maybe you're locked onto some kind of clairvoyant distress signal sent

by the SDF-3," Petrie said at last, squinting. Was ancient light from the

Valivarre system reaching Earth even as he spoke? Where the hell was Tirol

in relation to things, anyway?

Leonard was frowning. "Perhaps it is the SDF-3. Perhaps it's T. R.

Edwards, attempting to contact me." He grunted. "Whatever I'm sensing

feels as if it's coming from somewhere closer than Tirol."

Petrie's narrow shoulders heaved in a shrug. "Maybe the Expeditionary

mission is on its way home."

"Let's hope not—unless Edwards has discovered some way to strand

Lang, Reinhardt, and the Hunters on the far side of the galaxy."

"Edwards would be the one who could do it."

Leonard nodded his shaved, bullet-shaped head, then snorted a laugh.

"You know better than most that I'm not some mystical stargazer, Petrie.

And I certainly don't put any stock in astrology. But I do accept that God

Almighty aligned our local stars in such a way that we're meant to fashion

from them the outlines of objects. I doubt that He had archers or rams or

101

scorpions in mind, or even if he did, that those zodiacal symbols should be

with us a millennium after some desert dwellers decided to decree them our

official mascots."

Petrie took a gulp of coffee and, with one eyebrow cocked, turned to

Leonard. "So what is it the constellations are telling you?"

"That we're being watched—evaluated. That Earth's troubles are far

from over; that further purification is in order."

Petrie recognized the credo of the Church of Recurrent Tragedies,

whose Southlands fellowships had received heavy funding from Leonard

throughout Reconstruction and the years of the Malcontent Uprisings. "Is

there anything we can do to prevent it, or is this purification process

inevitable?"

"Not only is it inevitable, it is

essential

to our future as God's Children.

Tempted by a diabolical technology, we yielded to temptation and loosed a

new evil in the world. An evil that cannot be coaxed back into its box, its

lamp, its foul-smelling orifice, until we have rid ourselves of baseness and

have become pure of mind and body."

Leonard stood and walked to the deck's wooden railing. "Reeling from

the catastrophic events of ten years of global war, Russo, Lang, Hayes, and

their deluded followers embraced the Visitor and Robotechnology as a

panacea, and we've been paying for their shortsightedness ever since." He

slammed a fist down on the top rail. "This is why the EDF must be purged of

Robotechs once and for all. So that, united, the rest of us will be strong

enough to survive the coming purification.

That's

what those heavenly

aspects and configurations are telling me, Petrie. That we must be prepared

to put aside all fears of reprisal and be prepared to act on our vision. Yes, of

course, our actions will be misunderstood and condemned. But only God's

judgment counts, and in His eyes we will have triumphed over evil."

Petrie tried not to let his amusement show. Fanaticism of any variety

left him entertained, especially when it had a promoter of Leonard's caliber,

with his charmingly antiquated spewings about God and purification, most

of it lifted chapter and verse from the defunct, technophobic,

fin de siècle

102

Faithful movement. Even so, the commander's ravings spoke to a practical

consideration: the nettlesome RDF, and what was to be done with it.

"If only we

would

hear from the SDF-3," Leonard was saying. "If only

God would grant me some sign that the time to act has arrived." He waved

an arm at the sky. "Something more than a vague inkling. Something

concrete."

Petrie didn't say anything for a long moment; he wanted his

announcement to detonate in silence, and mushroom from there. "I've been

waiting for an opportunity to share this with you," he began. "I mean, I

know how you feel about Rolf Emerson, how you regard him as a man of

integrity and all. But it seems that our Minister of Terrestrial Defense—and,

need I add, former Zentraedi lover and Hunter crony—departed Fokker

Aerospace at oh-twelve-hundred today, bound for the factory satellite."

"Go ahead," Miho Nagata said. "Order whatever you'd like. This one's

on me."

Round-faced Census ran his eyes down the sim-wood table's inset

display screen, his mouth already watering at the prospect of real food. "I

guess I'll have the chicken and vegetable stir-fry."

Miho reacted with playful ridicule. "You can get that at any lunch stall

on the street. How about

kobe

? When was the last time you sunk your teeth

into a buttery-smooth steak?"

Uh, how about never, Census wanted to tell him. The restaurant was

too glam to list the prices on the menu, but he figured that a steak had to

cost more than his share of the apartment's monthly rent. Still, a

steak!

"You sure it's all right?"

Miho smiled, revealing gleaming, even teeth. "I said so, didn't I? Go

ahead, digit it."

Census beamed back at him and entered his selection with the press of

a forefinger against the screen. The restaurant had robot waiters, but they

were only for delivering orders.

The place was called Tokonama, which was an old word for a seat

103

reserved for a special guest. Located six levels below Shinjuku Station, it

overlooked the entire dome and the video plazas and cherry-tree-lined

concourses far below. The tablecloths and napkins were linen, there were

fresh flowers in enamel vases on every table, and the patrons were corporate

types in expensive clothes. In silk jacket and trousers, Nagata himself fit

right in—even though he was through-and-through yak.

Census felt underdressed, but otherwise pumped. Nagata had posted a

message at the apartment's e-drop the previous day, inviting him to lunch.

Which had to mean that the Family Nagata yakked for, the Shimadas, must

have gotten something out of the info Hongo had pirated from Aoki

Aquaculture.

Japan's leading hatchery, Aoki distributed its product to a total of

seven wholesalers, one of which was owned by Shimada. Shimada in turn

sold to hundreds of second-level wholesalers, called

nakaoroshi

, most of

which specialized in a particular species of fish and were allotted spaces in

Tokyo's New Tsukiji Fish Market. But in penetrating Aoki's computer

system, Hongo had learned that the hatchery was planning to sell tuna

directly to a

nakaoroshi

conglomerate run by a crime family, thus

eliminating Shimada from the profit loop.

Hongo had ventured that Nagata's people might want to employ their

services again, maybe for more than Nagata had paid for the first go-round.

So things were definitely looking up. Plus, Discount had received his head

clearance from the clinic and was due for release anytime.

Now if Census could only get Misa into turnaround. Not that he

expected she'd actually find new roomies—not as yenless as she was. But at

the same time he didn't want to see her have to come crawling back to him

because she had nowhere else to go. He honestly wanted to

win

her back.

And that could happen if Nagata were to become a steady client, or, better

yet, a kind of patron, fronting whatever tech Hongo needed to execute deep-

cyberspace intercepts.

"The reason I asked you here," Miho said, "was to tell you that your

foreknowledge of events in the fish trade was much appreciated."

104

"We aim to please," Census said.

"It's always good to know what the competition is planning."

"Perhaps we could learn something more about future developments,"

Census suggested carefully.

Miho nodded. "Yes, I think that's a wise idea. Who can say? If things

work out, there might be steady work in it for you."

"We would be most honored."

Miho laughed, leaned back in his chair, and withdrew a cigarette from

a wooden case. "Tell me a bit about yourself. What do you like to do when

you're not wedded to a telecomp?"

Census scratched his head and thought about it.

"Sports?"

"Not really."

"Movies?"

"No money."

"Hobbies?"

"I like browsing the Akihabara rubbish piles for discarded electronics."

Miho's forehead wrinkled in what seemed to be mild concern. "Okay,"

he said tentatively. "And what about your living situation? Do you have a

place?"

"Yeah. I—that is, we do. Myself and a couple of . . . business associates.

It's small, but it serves our needs. For now."

"Especially when you have all of cyberspace to wander around in,

huh?"

"Exactly."

"You obviously have access to good tech."

"Not the best, but we improvise."

"And you trust your . . . associates?"

"All the way."

A waiter appeared with two beers and glided away on solid rubber

wheels.

"Kanpei,"

Miho said, lifting his bottle.

Census took a sip of beer, luxuriating in the slightly bitter taste. A

105

pretty

ojingal

sauntered past the table, making brief eye contact with

Nagata. Her look and aroma made Census's eyes widen.

Miho caught the reaction and grinned. "I trust that there's at least one

woman in your life. Can't skimp on that, you know."

"There is, yes."

"What's she like?"

"From out of the communals, same as me." Census frowned. "But hard

to please, sometimes. She doesn't mind not owning a lot of things, so gifts

don't work too well on her."

"What's her name?"

"Misa. But we call her Miko—as a joke, you know."

"I'm sure she's a beauty."

"Oh, yeah. Great eyes, great lips, great . . . And, uh, taller than me."

Miho's ringed right hand stroked his clean-shaven chin. "That wouldn't

be the one I saw you with the day we met?"

Census froze with the beer bottle pressed to his lips. It was as if

someone had just shot him full of ice water. If asked, he couldn't have said

why; but there was suddenly something in Nagata's tone of voice that

reeked of deliberate nonchalance. Why was he so interested in Census's

personal life? And was what they'd sold him about Aoki really all that

valuable?

Thoughts began to crowd into his mind. The day Nagata had seen Misa

was the same day she'd purchased the disk from Tender/Search. The disk

that featured only one ad, and that one from a woman Hongo was certain

ran security for SPOOK.

And spooked was just how Census felt, though he concealed it behind a

long swallow of beer, his eyes sweeping the neighboring tables for

anything—

anything

—suspicious. All he saw were contented men and

women engaged in seemingly delightful conversations. There was only one

solo within view: a harmless-looking, obese little man with curly hair.

"No, no, that wasn't Misa," he finally got around to telling Nagata.

"That was another friend."

106

"Ah, so there's more than one in your life."

"When times are good."

"What's that one's name—the one I saw on the bench?"

"Her? Actually, you know, I don't even know her all that well. But I

think they call her Haruke."

"Haruke."

"Yeah. Haruke."

The steaks arrived.

"Dig in."

Census stared at the massaged meat, mournfully aware that his

appetite had fled.

107

CHAPTER NINE

The survivor of a ship that had crashed not far from Darwin, Ilan Tinari

had found her way to Sydney with a dozen other aliens, most of whom later

tied up with a Malcontent band known as the Claimers. Quite human in

appearance—issued from the same clone queue that had given the Zentraedi

Miriya Parino and Seloy Deparra, head of the Malcontent Scavengers—

Tinari served as [Rolf Emerson's] bodyguard long before they became lovers.

Rolf love for his wife notwithstanding, some of his happiest memories were of

his and Tinari's time in the Argentine, a honeymoon of sorts, antedating the

riots in the Southlands, the formation of the Army of the Southern Cross, and

the destruction of Zagerstown, after which Tinari was moved to join the

cause.

Soon afterward, Laura Shaze entered Rolf's life for a time, though Dana

and Bowie eventually proved too much for their relationship. Then Tinari had

returned, showing up on his doorstep without advance word, one of the few

Zentraedi who hadn't gone upside free of charge on the shuttles Commander

Leonard had set aside for the aliens' use. But once more it was Dana who

tipped the scales. Rolf had never revealed Tinari's ancestry to Dana; but, for

Tinari, the precocious young woman was a constant reminder of what might

have been had the Humans been accepting of them. And so Tinari too went

upside.

S. J. Fischer,

Legions of Light: A History of the Army of the Southern Cross

The shuttle docked in the factory satellite's three-o'clock pod, whose

iris gate was now the sole operational portal in the entire facility. Rolf

Emerson, his adjutant Captain Rochelle, and three of the five crewpersons

debarked. The only other ships parked in the bay were two aged ARMD-

series shuttles, neither of which was serviceable. The rest of the hold was

blotched with pools of unidentifiable lubricants and strewn with refuse,

108

unopened crates of now-spoiled food, and the husks of off-gassing

electronics. The stench was overpowering.

Rolf recalled a visit he had made years earlier, in the company of then

Vice Admiral Rick Hunter, Brigadier General Gunther Reinhardt, and

Captain Max Sterling. They had come to apprise Breetai of the enforced

Micronizations that were being performed in the Arkansas Protectorate,

transformed into an internment camp for Earth's remaining full-size aliens.

Hunter had also wanted to announce the formation of the all-Zentraedi

Twenty-third Veritech Squadron, which would go on to distinguish itself in

the Southlands during the Malcontent Uprisings.

Rolf remembered the beehive bustle of the place, Earthers and aliens

working shoulder-to-shoulder to ready Breetai's much-altered flagship for

launch to Tirol. After Emerson's promotion to colonel and his permanent

relocation to Monument City, official business typically carried him to Aluce,

Liberty, or Base Gloval on Mars, in its final phase. When not shuttling from

place to place to meet with base commanders, he had had Dana and Bowie

to see to; their parents were aloft, helping Hunter, Hayes, and Emil Lang

finalize contingencies for the Expeditionary mission. Rolf had attended the

Hunters' send-off wedding, of course; but since 2020 he had only revisited

the factory on three occasions, two of which had involved ministry matters.

The third visit had been prompted by the deaths of Rico, Konda, and Bron—

Dana's "godfathers"—who had died within weeks of one another, and were

eulogized by Nigel Aldershot.

Since Lang's tech teams had never succeeded in rousing the factory's

central computer—either to supervise systems maintenance or to mass-

produce Battlepods, its specialty—the monstrous, radish-shaped facility had

already begun to deteriorate by the time the SDF-3 launched. In addition,

the REF had left the factory looking as trashed as the base camp of a

mountain-climbing expedition. And for all the years the Zentraedi had lived

among Earthers, they had never fully comprehended the necessity of

orderliness and cleanliness. Repairs and routine maintenance had always

been effected by the same machines that piloted their miles-long

109

battlewagons and provided food for personnel numbering in the tens of

thousands.

Estimates of the current onboard population ranged from three to five

hundred, most of them living in gender segregation in coffin-size

compartments on level seven. All the full-size had shipped out with the REF,

taking with them the only functioning resizing chamber. The enormous

holds above and below level seven were sealed off, including the access

tubes to five of the pods and to the null-g hollow where the SDF-3 had been

constructed. The factory produced a synth food, rich in the ur-Protoculture

chemicals essential for the health of their elastic bodies, but deaths by

voluntary starvation were not uncommon. Widespread xenophobia was

what had forced them offworld, and a profound sense of purposelessness

hung like a pall over the colony.

Returning to the factory after so lengthy an absence brought to the

surface all the anxiety Rolf had stowed away concerning the seeming

disappearance of the SDF-3. Dana and Bowie had proved alarmingly

resistant to concern for the safety of their parents, accepting on faith that

they would reunite with them someday. Whenever Rolf would go into one of

his solemn talks about possible futures, the kids would say that the mission

had probably been delayed, or that hammering out an accord with the

Masters was simply taking longer than expected. Rolf frequently wished

that he had even an iota of their certitude and optimism. Instead, he had

gone through a kind of grieving process the past few years, first denying all

possibilities of tragedy; then growing angry with the Sterlings, the Grants,

and the Hunters for abandoning Earth in parlous times; then spiraling into

a black hole of sadness and depression; and finally, only lately, learning to

accept that tragic consequences came with the territory, and that life rarely

offered guarantees of any sort.

Nevertheless, there was something about standing in the miasmic

docking bay of the factory's three-o'clock pod that was corrosive to Rolf's

newfound acceptance. And the sight of Ilan Tinari didn't help any.

Dusky and supple, Ilan had big, dark eyes and a wild mane of black

110

hair. Even a hopelessly frayed jumpsuit couldn't mask her sultry

handsomeness. Approaching her, however, Rolf could see that she was

changed—the passion kindled by her years on the surface had gone out of

her. She radiated all the warmth of a marble statue. So why was his heart

breaking all over again?

"Thank you for coming, Rolf," she said when he was near enough. They

didn't embrace or so much as shake hands. There was a time when they

were ruled by mutual touch and the affection that fueled it, but Ilan had

disowned those feelings. Even when she had turned up in Monument City

after a six-year absence.

"Was it you who sent the message?" Rolf asked her.

She nodded.

"What's this about, Ilan? Why have you people refused to respond to

our hailings?"

Ilan held his gaze for a moment. "Come. We'll talk."

She spun on her heel and headed for the nearest hatchway. Rolf

instructed Captain Rochelle to stay behind with the shuttle crew and

hurried after her.

When the encrypted message had been received at Terrestrial Defense

headquarters on Fokker Base, Rolf had assumed it had come from Ilan.

That the "invitation" may have been a personal request was one of the

justifications he had used for not informing Leonard or his command staff

of his plans to go upside. Not that he was obliged to, in any case; and he

certainly had no doubts that Leonard would learn of his departure in short

order. But he reasoned that the commander would have prohibited the trip,

thinking it part of Aldershot's plan to unseat him, and Rolf refused to give

Leonard that pleasure.

Ilan led him past more refuse heaps, malodorous pools, and

cannibalized electronics; past row after row of housing coffins and isolated

groups of sullen Zentraedi. It was no wonder the UEG had rejected a

documentarian's request for permission to shoot a video aboard the factory;

their xenophobia notwithstanding, Earthers would only have added reason

111

for denouncing the REF for its self-serving tactics.

The short tour ended in a trashed compartment that had probably been

someone's office during construction of the SDF-3. Ilan had Rolf sit down in

the only intact chair.

"We want permission to leave," she told him evenly.

He showed her a perplexed look. "Leave the factory? Ilan, you know

you don't need our permission to do that. You're here by your own choice."

Her head was shaking before he even finished. "That's not what I mean.

We want permission to leave stationary orbit."

Rolf was momentarily stunned. "Leave for where? This thing's

incapable of fold. Where could you go?"

"Into a cometary orbit." She crossed the room to an outmoded comp

and called up astrogational graphics on the device's CRT. "Lang wrote this

program years before the SDF-3 launched. The factory's reflex drives will

insert us into orbit; then the gravitation sinks of this system will do the

rest."

Rolf was staring at her. "I don't understand—"

"Because the Masters are coming, Rolf. And it's likely

we

will be the

first to feel their wrath."

"Ilan," Rolf interrupted. "When this station was fully operational its

sensors could scan clear to Pluto. If you have some evidence that the

Masters are en mute . . . If this is why you've been incommunicado—"

"We have no evidence of the sort you're talking about. But consider

how a human infant knows when its birth mother is nearby even before its

eyes can see her. It is no different between the Zentraedi and the Masters.

We can

sense

when our creators are close by. The reason we've stopped

responding to your hailings is because the Masters will be scanning for

signals transmitted by any of the facilities they designed for use by the

Zentraedi." She cut her eyes to him. "We're running silent for your sake."

Rolf thought about Dana's recent bouts with unprovoked anger and

agitation. Was she feeling what the factory Zentraedi were? "And this plan

to leave Earthspace?" he asked. "This is also for our sake?"

112

"In part. On defold in this system, the fortresses of the Masters' fleet

will immediately seize on our position. We will become the target of their

initial hunt. But they will not destroy us without first communicating their

intentions. We will tell them that the Protoculture matrix left Earth aboard

the SDF-3—to be returned to them, if that is what you wish us to say. They

won't believe us. But the subsequent destruction of this factory will alert you

to the fact that the Masters are present and that attack is imminent."

Rolf nodded gravely. Early on in Reconstruction, long before Khyron

leveled Macross Three, a plan had been formulated to use the in-

construction SDF-2 as just such a decoy. Or so Rolf had heard. "You said, 'in

part.'"

Ilan turned away from him. "We don't want the Masters to discover us

like this—defeated, pathetic, huddled together in filth . . . We can at least

make a pretense of having retained our pride."

Rolf stood up and went to her. "I believe you that you can sense their

approach. What I need to know is if there is a way for you to gauge the

strength of your feelings. Just how close are they, Ilan? There are things

that need to be done."

The muscles in her jaw bulged. "Rolf, I risked making contact with you

to ask a favor. If you're going to turn this into a deal—"

"I'm not. But if you people are willing to help us by offering

yourselves to the Masters as a target of opportunity, why won't you tell

me all you know?"

She folded her arms across her chest. "How many years did we share?"

"I don't know—five, six?"

"And have you already forgotten the conditioning that we must

overcome merely to coexist with you in Earthspace? In place of fashioning

weapons to rain death on your world as we were tasked to do by Dolza?"

Rolf shook his head. "I haven't forgotten about the Imperative. And I'm

sorry if I made this sound like a swap. Of course I'll do whatever you ask of

me—without obligation."

Some of the hardness left her face. "Thank you, Rolf."

113

And for one moment it was like old times between them.

"Then you will convey to the proper authorities our request to

embark?" she asked.

"I will." Rolf paused. "Is there a chance I could convince you to remain

in Earthspace, Ilan?"

She nearly smiled. "How are the children?"

Rolf forced a breath. "Hardly children anymore. They've both entered

the Earth Defense Force Academy."

"Miriya Parino would have been proud of her daughter. And grateful to

you for the sacrifices you've made."

Rolf studied her. "Ilan, will there be a way to contact the factory should

the SDF-3 return? Is it possible you'll return if and when the fortress does?"

Ilan was noncommittal. "Most of us will be dead before long. Many

onboard have stopped ingesting the drugs Lang developed to retard our

deterioration."

"Why?"

"Because we are the doomed. There is no place for us in the galaxy. We

would rather expire as we were meant to than live on without purpose.

However horrific, the Imperative was the Zentraedi equivalent of faith—our

reason to be. Living among you—though infinitely preferable to our former

lives as warriors—has corrupted that faith. The Zentraedi are an

anachronism." Ilan gazed at Rolf for a long moment. "Can I count on you,

Rolf Emerson?"

"Always," he said, biting back his grief.

Centered in a commo sphere in the command nexus of the Masters'

flagship stood Sliat Rnan, Zentraedi commander of a

Thuveral

Salan

destroyer assigned to the Seventh Mechanized Division of the Botoru

Battalion. The battlewagon was thrust at an acute angle into the impact-

cratered surface of a small moon millions of miles removed from its ringed

captor.

Sliat was barrel-chested, dark haired, and prognathous. He held one

114

arm across his chest not as a sign of obeisance but to keep his tattered

command cloak from slipping off his shoulder. The uniform itself was torn

in several places, revealing patches of Sliat's bluish-white skin, and the

Zentraedi sigil—the

Cizion

—affixed to the yoke was dangling by a corner.

"Under Dolza's lead, we took the battle to the Micronian homeworld,"

he was telling the Masters. "Annihilation bolts unleashed by the ships of the

Grand Fleet pierced the atmosphere, obliterating thousands of cities, killing

hundreds of millions of inhabitants. But the hostiles answered us with

unprecedented frenzy, employing an array of weapons never before

encountered—a Voice that confounded the brave pilots of our cruisers and

scout ships, a subsurface cannon that belched nuclear fire into our midst.

Even so, victory seemed assured. Until the suicidal Micronians drove Zor's

vessel into the heart of Commander-in-Chief Dolza's fortress and targeted

the sum of its might against the reflex furnaces. It wasn't an act of warfare,

my lords. It was an act of madness, bred of desperation. If it hadn't been for

the barrier shield, the Micronian usurpers of Zor's ship would have been

immolated."

Sliat, hellishly backlit by the bridge's emergency illumination, coughed

and sniffled. The backs of his hands were covered with sores. Behind him in

the dimly lighted command bubble were half a dozen full-size crewpersons,

helmeted and slouched into acceleration couches. Bioscanners aboard the

Masters' ship indicated that most of those seated were long dead.

Shaizan communicated his thoughts to Dag and Bowkaz before

directing words to the commo sphere. "Tell us of the aftermath of the

battle."

Sliat cleared his throat repeatedly. "M'lords, with the destruction of

Dolza's fortress, the ships of the Grand Fleet were like limbs of a

decapitated beast—flailing uselessly and uncontrollably. The vast majority

were engulfed and atomized by the burgeoning explosive cloud, whose

epicenter was the still-intact vessel Zor designed. What ships remained

oriented of their own accord on the Micronian homeworld, and into its

superheated atmosphere they plunged. Like spears they fell, like flaming

115

arrows dispatched from some circumferential battlement. Down and down

they plummeted, many of them incinerating on entry, while others struck

and stuck into the yielding surface like pins. Including, m'lords, the

Quiltra

Queleual

commanded by Khyron Kravshera."

The Masters exchanged thoughts, and, once more, Shaizan voiced the

outcome of their telepathic conference. "Did you attempt to establish

contact with your fellow survivors on Earth?"

Sliat bowed his head. "We have tried. When the factory satellite

defolded in Earthspace, we reached out for it, but to no avail. But we have

continued in our efforts, all these miserable years that have found us

disabled on this moon. Unfamiliarity with the Micronians' language has

prevented us from deciphering the content of their incessant noise, but we

do know that Commander Khyron died during an attack which destroyed

Zor's grounded fortress once and for all. Long live the memory of Khyron!"

In saluting, Slait lost hold of his command cloak and it slid off his

shoulder to the deck.

"Indeed," a narrow-eyed Dag responded. "Long live the memory of

Khyron

. But, tell us, Sliat Rnan, how it is that your destroyer neither

succumbed to Dolza's funerary fireball nor plummeted to Earth?"

"My lords, the ship was depleted of Protoculture."

"That much is not in question," Shaizan said. "But how did you come to

crash so far removed from the battle itself?"

Sliat swallowed hard. "We're not certain, my lords. For some reason,

the ship elected to deliver us here."

Shaizan nodded his bald head. "I see. Well, then, Sliat Rnan, it might

interest you to know that yours wasn't the only ship of the Grand Fleet to

escape destruction or capture by the Earth. The other ship managed to

execute a fold that delivered it to the factory satellite's former space-time

location. There, the crew related the details of the battle in Earthspace to

Commander Reno, who, in turn, relayed them to us. And know, Sliat Rnan,

that the two reports are very much in agreement: the firing of a planet-

based weapon, the confounding Voice, the insidious defiling of Dolza's

116

deepspace fortress, the ensuing destruction, the fall to Earth . . ."

"Thus it was, my lords," a transparently relieved Sliat said. "But the last

of the Botoru are prepared to take up the fight once more, in service to Tirol

and in vengeance for the Zentraedi!"

The Masters were silent for a long moment. It was Bowkaz who finally

spoke. "An inspiring speech, Commander. But I'm afraid you didn't allow

Master Shaizan to complete his thought. The two accounts of the battle were

in agreement, save on one matter: that of Khyron's cowardice and

treachery."

Sliat was wordless.

"Will you deny that Khyron ordered the ships of the Botoru Battalion to

disengage

before

the destruction of the command fortress?" Shaizan asked.

"And that it was only a shortage of Protoculture that thwarted his plan to

fold from Earthspace?"

Sliat lowered his head. "I cannot deny it, my lords."

"So it seems that you were not so much blessed by fate as you were

purposely

removed from its reach," Dag said.

The Zentraedi stooped to retrieve his cloak and flung it over his

shoulder. "My lords, we were only following Commander Khyron's orders."

"

Khyron's

orders? Even when those orders were in conflict with Dolza's?

Even when they contradicted the Imperative?"

Sliat stiffened. "My lords, it's true that Khyron was disloyal to Dolza.

But only out of unwavering loyalty to you!"

Shaizan glowered. "Explain yourself."

"Khyron knew that Dolza had secret designs on Zor's fortress and on

the Protoculture matrix it concealed. Khyron had already observed Breetai's

defection. Now he saw Dolza defecting. His aim in ordering a fold was to

return the Botoru to Tirol and apprise you of the developments." Sliat stood

tall. "I repeat: We are in your service. Rescue and enable us to do your

bidding."

The Masters conferred. Then Bowkaz altered the position of his

fingertips on the hovering Protoculture Cap.

117

"We have no further need of your services. In their bowels, our ships

carry an army of warrior clones who know the meaning of obedience. The

Zentraedi had an opportunity to honor themselves and they failed. You say

Khyron was acting in our benefit, when it was Khyron whose wounded pride

compelled him to attack Zor's fortress instead of returning to Tirol. You,

Commander Sliat Rnan, failed by siding with someone who, by destroying

the Protoculture matrix, may have undermined the survivability of Tirol

itself."

Sliat coughed and cleared his throat. "My lords, I ask that you not leave

us here to rot."

Shaizan made a dismissive gesture. "Don't concern yourself with the

future, Commander. Your exile is over." He depressed a spot on the Cap.

"Your ship has been targeted for destruction. Go happily to your graves."

118

CHAPTER TEN

Born in 1991, [Miho Nagata] grew up in Tokyo and on Macross Island,

after his father, a Shimada employee, was sent there to take control of the

Family's gambling and prostitution interests. Interestingly, the elder Nagata

had several run-ins with a young Anatole Leonard in 2006, when, as a

member of Conrad Wilbur's Faithful, Leonard was brought on-island to

organize protest demonstrations aimed at closing the very Shimada concerns

Nagata was supervising.

footnote in Bruce Mirrorshades,

Machine Mind and Arthurian Legend

"Why do you want to have another look at the disk?" Misa asked as she

was kicking off her sandals. She glanced at Census, who was nearest the

slider. "Don't tell me: You're thinking about moving into Yoko Nitabi's place

after you make your big run."

Census didn't so much as grin. Nor did Gibley, already stationed at the

telecomp, which was surrounded on all sides by stuff Misa had never seen

before—adjuncts, turbochargers, peripherals, slaves. Nor, for that matter,

did Discount, though maybe his excuse was medication prescribed by the

clinic that had seen him through the Zand attack.

Misa aimed a frown at each of them. "What's with you guys, someone

season your sushi with soporifics?"

"Did you bring the disk?" Census asked.

Misa forced a tight-lipped smile. "Your

Kawaii-chan

messenger made

sure I did. Who is she, anyway, your new lover? Not that I blame you. But I

am surprised—I thought you didn't like women with blond hair."

"She's

my

friend," Gibley explained.

Misa glanced at him, then back at Census. "Sorry. How did you know

where to find me?"

He shrugged. "We put out the word. Some guy told Discount he'd seen

119

you sleeping in Ueno Park, so we started there."

"Yeah, well, lucky for you Gibley's cutie-pie friend found me when she

did. I was practically on my way to Tender/Search to ask for my money

back."

Census nodded impatiently and held out his hand. "Could I have it?"

She exhaled peevishly and handed him the disk. Census passed it along

to Gibley, who immediately slotted the thing in the player. At the same time,

Census and Discount centered themselves in front of monitor screens right

and left of the telecomp.

"Ready?" Gibley asked them, his fingers poised over the player's

remote control.

"Launch it," Discount told him.

The ad began to run—without comments from any of them this go-

round. Once more, Yoko Nitabi's alluring face filled the screen, followed by

views of her apartment and views from it, overlooking the plazas and

pedestrian malls of the Bunkyo-ku Station geo-grid.

"Anything?" Gibley asked, eyes glued to the screen.

His partners shook their heads. The ad continued, on into scenes of

Nitabi's Minmei-soundtracked night on the town—

"Freeze it!" Census said.

Gibley did, and swung to him. "What have you got?"

"I'm not sure. Might be nothing more than noise corruption."

"Did it coincide with the beginning of the music?"

"Yeah."

Gibley looked at Discount. "You have any Minmei on disk?"

Discount managed a short laugh. "What, are you kidding me?"

"Is there someplace local we can get some?"

Discount shrugged. "Some of her tunes might be available in the

vending machines on the corner."

"Check it out. Look for a compilation that includes "Stage Fright." And

make sure it's digital and not remastered from analog."

Discount hurried through the doorway barefooted.

120

Misa watched him go and turned to Gibley and Census. "All right, let's

hear it."

They traded looks. Then Census said, "Remember how surprised we

were to find only one ad on the disk?"

"Of course I do. That's why I was going to demand a refund."

Census nodded. "Obviously there was a mistake. But we're thinking it

was an

important

mistake." He reminded Misa of their argument on the day

he had rendezvoused with the gangster, then took her forward to the

previous day's lunch with the same yak, and the seemingly innocent

questions Miho Nagata had asked regarding Misa. "When I remembered

what Hongo said about Nitabi working for SPOOK, and I put that together

with your getting the disk right where Nagata and I were meeting . . ." He let

his words trail off. "Why are you staring at me?"

Misa scowled. "Because I can't believe I ever allowed myself to fall for

someone so completely

braindead

!"

"Huh?"

She shook her head in angry bewilderment. "Why in the world would

gangsters be interested in an ad for a share in an apartment? Don't you

figure they'd have enough NuYen to get places of their own?"

"It's not the ad," Gibley said quietly. "It's something written into it."

"In code?"

"That's what we're trying to find out."

Regarding him, Misa began to shake her head again. "You're out of

your heads, both of you. You've got a woman from SPOOK placing an

encrypted ad and a

yakuza

panting to get his hands on it, but instead of just

letting me return it to Tender/Search you want to

decipher

the thing? You

think this is some kind of turn-of-the-century

jidai

thriller?"

Census compressed his lips briefly. "No, but—"

"But nothing! We have the thing, there's nothing we can do about that.

But we're not dangerous to anyone unless we know something.

So don't

read it.

Let me take it back."

Discount suddenly reappeared in the doorway with a smile on his face

121

and a disk of Minmei's greatest hits in hand. Not daring to make eye contact

with Misa, Census tore the disk from its packaging and inserted it into one

of the ancillary players. He and Gibley spent a moment getting the song in

the ad in synch with its track on the disk. Then Gibley ran the ad back to

where the music began.

"This is beyond stupid," Misa complained, pacing. "Exactly what I'd

expect from the three of you—"

"Got it," Census said, loud enough to be heard over her angry

ruminations. "The sixteenth bit is carrying information."

"Encrypted."

"Affirmative."

Gibley rubbed his hands together and reached for his interface goggles.

"Dump the sixteenth data into a new file. I'm going to buy a timeshare on

the public library's neural net and task it to go work on the code."

A certain exhilaration notwithstanding, Misa took a seat on the mats

and worried. She didn't like the notion of people asking questions about her.

Which wouldn't be the case if Census hadn't tried to "kill two birds with one

stone" in his initial meet with Miho Nagata. But then again, she wouldn't

have the disk if she hadn't stopped at the Tender/Search booth looking for

new roommates. Which, in itself, wouldn't have been necessary if her old

roommates had been worth sticking with . . .

"I'm getting something," Gibley was saying. "Looks like the neural net

has identified one of the keys used in the encryption process. It's trying to

match the key to the encoded fragments." Suddenly his eyes widened.

"Jee

zus

."

"What?" Census demanded. "What is it?"

"Nitabi's relaying information she got directly from Zand!"

Misa's palms broke into icy sweat.

Discount was peering at Gibley over a stake of electronics. "About

what?"

"About the Robotech Masters." He stared at Census. "Zand is in contact

with them!"

122

"What did he buy?" Miho asked a Shimada Family soldier named

Kazuki.

Kazuki smiled in secret knowledge. "A Lynn-Minmei disk." He was a

narrow-faced forty-year-old with the longest arms Miho had ever seen on a

six-footer.

"You don't suppose they had a sudden urge to listen to classic pop,"

Miho said.

Kazuki arched a sparse eyebrow. "These kids? Besides, Yoko's

operational parameters directed her to use a Minmei track for encryption."

Miho made his lips a fine line and nodded. "Of course, even if they find

evidence of encryption, there's still the code itself."

"Maybe they're more talented than you think they are."

The kid who had purchased the disk from the vending machine didn't

look especially bright, but then neither had Census, and already the young

pirate had surprised Miho.

He and Kazuki and two trainees were across the avenue from the

forlorn-looking three-story building in the Kabukicho where the kids shared

an apartment, not far from the music machine Census's cohort had just

done business with. A half-hour earlier, they had observed the girl—Misa—

entering the building. The question then had been if she had the disk with

her or not. Now it appeared that not only had she brought it, but that

Census and company were giving it a close read.

The six-lane, one-way avenue was a main thoroughfare for trucks en

route to the Shinjuku Station geo-grid Supply elevators, which operated

under the aegis of Shimada Off-Loading and Hauling. Cheap hotels, sex

shops, and fast-food outlets lined both sides of the roadway, and every

corner was an arcade of vendors, with scores of wheeled and multilimbed

delivery robots, many of which could be addressed and tasked by telephone

and telecomp.

"So how do you want to handle this?" Kazuki asked, working himself

up.

123

Miho thought about Census. The way the kid had clammed up at lunch,

it was obvious that he had seen through Miho's calculated nonchalance. But

the fact that he'd tried to conceal the identity of the girl on the bench

suggested that he had viewed the disk and perhaps had suspicions about its

content—suspicions confirmed by Miho's questions. There was a difference

between being talented and being smart, however, and Census had done a

foolish thing by reading the disk, because his actions now made it

impossible for Miho to finesse the situation. Instead of a purse-snatching or

a mild mugging, Miho was going to have to confront the problem head on,

employing old-fashioned techniques of force and threats to ensure the kids'

silence.

Miho was disappointed in the turn the events had taken. He could have

seen himself developing a fondness for Census and his big-boned girlfriend.

"They might be willing to listen to reason," he told Kazuki. "We give

them some money, promise them some work. What choice do they have?

Chances are, whatever Yoko sent is going to be too big for them to fence."

Kazuki rocked his head from side to side. "It's up to Mr. Shimada any

way you look at it. If he doesn't trust them, if he wants them disposed of,

what choice do we have? No matter what, we still need a course of action

here."

Miho studied the entrance to the building, across six lanes of rapidly

moving truck traffic. "Plain and simple. Station one of our assistants at the

front door, the other around back. You and I go upstairs and explain the

facts to them. They have something that belongs to us, and we would

appreciate their cooperation."

"And if they've read the disk?"

"It becomes somewhat more complicated. We'll have to cart the kids

and their equipment out of there." Miho glanced at the street. "A traffic jam

might help." He unclipped a phone from his belt and entered a code. "Four

garbage trucks will be sufficient," he was telling someone a moment later.

"Right. We won't move until they arrive."

"Weapons?" Kazuki asked when Miho had stashed the phone.

124

"Only if required."

Ten minutes later the requested garbage trucks from Shimada Off-

Loading and Hauling were nosing into view a couple of blocks south of the

vendor and robot arcade. A heavy-metal wedding of shovels, claws, and

dumpsters, each truck was a monstrous sixteen-wheeler that took up two

lanes. Miho had his phone out.

"Kazuki and I are going to be entering through the front door," he was

saying. "Slow all six lanes of traffic to a crawl, and keep it that way until you

see us reappear on the street. If we've got a couple of kids with us by then,

one of you should angle in for a quick pickup."

"Understood," said a female voice at the other end of the phone

connection, presumably the driver of the lead vehicle.

Miho opened his sports jacket, clipped the phone to his belt, and loosed

a long exhale.

"Shigata ga nai,"

he told Kazuki.

It can't be helped.

Kazuki stuck two fingers in his mouth and whistled for the trainees.

Dressed in baggy clothing and not much older than Census, the pair of them

hurried over. Miho didn't have much trust in the boy, but he knew the girl.

Her name was Tine Amano, and her parents had been his martial arts

instructors for the past five years.

Kazuki explained how things were to go down, and was just about to

send them on their way when a chorus of electronic chirps, bleats, and

warbles began to issue from the arcade's dozens of robots. It was as though

everyone had been simultaneously tasked to run deliveries, only instead of

ambling off in different directions they were suddenly milling around the

arcade in glitched confusion, corralling the area's handful of Humans

between the broad sidewalk and the vending machines.

Instantly, the four

yakuza

found themselves herded into a corner,

darting from vendor to vendor to avoid having their feet crushed by the

robots' solid-rubber rollers and dodging the unpredictable flailings of a

forest of permaplas limbs.

Miho was crouched behind a cactus-and-bonsai vendor when, through

a chaos of careening machines, he spied three men making a run for the

125

now-nearly-traffic-free street. Their apparent leader was an obese little

creature, sporting a fedora of a style that hadn't been popular since the

Global Civil War. The one who had snatched Yoko Nitabi in the Koishikawa

Gardens, Miho told himself in alarmed revelation.

Scrambling for safety behind a machine that dispensed natal and

progressed astrological charts, Miho reached for his phone and punched the

code for the driver of the lead garbage truck.

"What's happening up there?" the woman asked before Miho could say

anything. "It looks like a 'bot free-for-all."

"Three men crossing the street!" Miho returned in a rush. "Stop them

from reaching the target building!"

"Weapons?"

"Whatever it takes!"

Misa was the first to tune in to the sounds of commotion that were

filtering up to the apartment from the avenue. Screeching tires, blaring

horns, the mechanical growl of heavy equipment . . .

fireworks

? She tapped

Census on the shoulder, but he was too absorbed in Gibley's ongoing

exchange with the public library's neural net to attend to the noise.

"The Masters have fed data to Zand about the SDF-3," Gibley was

saying now. "But the neural net's uncertain about the decryption key. Either

the SDF-3 was destroyed, or it's crippled, or the mission itself has failed and

the ship won't be returning anytime soon."

"How about that it's on the way home?"

Gibley shook his head. "That doesn't seem to be an option."

The reverberating thunder of an explosion finally woke the three of

them from their shared preoccupation.

"What the hell was that?" Gibley asked, slipping out of the All-Seeing

Eyes interface goggles.

"I've been trying to tell you—" Misa started to say.

Census was already headed for the doorway to the hall. "I'll go."

"A gas main?" Discount asked Gibley.

126

The cybernaut shook his head. "Sounded more like an antimecha

mine."

The bottom seemed to drop out of Misa's stomach. "Guys, you don't

think I could have been followed here, do you?"

They were both regarding her when Census hurried back into the

apartment, blanched and agitated. "There's a goddamned battle going on

outside! Four trucks have the whole area blocked off and the street's

crawling with robots!"

Discount gaped at him. "Robots or mecha?"

"Robots! From the arcade."

"Who's firing at who?" Misa demanded.

"The guys in the trucks are taking fire from someone across the street."

Gibley shot Census a look. "What kind of trucks?"

"Garbage trucks."

"Shimada," Gibley said with a defeated wince.

The guys stared at Misa.

"Don't tell me you've fucked up?" she said, full of false surprise.

Census was trembling. "Nagata must have known I was lying about you.

They probably had the building staked out and saw you come in."

Misa gnawed at her thumbnail. "But who would Shimada be fighting?"

The room fell silent for a moment; then, in unison, Gibley and Census

said, "Zand!"

A pained look took shape on Discount's face. "Oh, shit."

"Oh, double shit," Gibley answered him, one hand doing rapid input at

the deck while the other was zeroing devices.

Census paced nervously behind him. "Now what?"

"We give them the disk is what," Misa said firmly.

He stared at her in disbelief. "Knowing what we know?"

"

Especially

knowing what we know. It's my disk, Census. I paid for it,

and I say we give it to them."

"To who?" Discount wanted to know. "Shimada or Zand?"

"I don't care. Whoever gets here first. Let

them

fight over it."

127

Gibley stood up. "Misa's right—we've got to surrender it. They can't

prove we've read it."

But Census ridiculed the idea. "They're going to take one look at all this

gear and know that we've at least been

trying

to read it. That'll be more

than enough for them."

Discount had rushed out into the hallway and was now back inside the

room.

"Anything?" Gibley asked while he was stuffing the pockets of his

trousers with software disks.

Discount shook his head. "The gunfire's stopped, but the 'bots are still

wandering around and traffic's completely snarled."

Gibley was at the doorway, peering into the hall. "We can't stay here."

"I can," Census countered, clenching his hands. "All of this is my fault.

The rest of you go."

Misa rolled her eyes. "

Now

he gets heroic."

Census was about to say something when the telecomp suddenly went

online. Discount, who was closest to the screen, read the message aloud.

"'Think before you act.'" He turned a look over his shoulder. "It's signed

'MN.'"

Census ran his right hand down his face and groaned. "Miho Nagata."

"That tears it," Discount said quickly. "We leave everything exactly

where it is—including the disk, agreed?"

Misa and Census nodded.

Gibley had his boots on and was standing in the hallway, checking the

battery status of his flip-phone. "Cense, Nagata has never seen me. I'm

going downstairs to the rear entrance. I'll ring twice, then go offline if

everything's clear."

Census nodded.

Misa looked at Gibley. "Where are we supposed to

go

?"

He shrugged. "We'll figure that out once we're out of the building."

Misa sank wearily to the floor in a cross-legged posture while Census

and Discount hovered over the phone.

128

Five tense minutes later it rang once, then once more.

And the three of them scrambled out the door.

129

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I find it remarkable that T. R. Edwards, Anatole Leonard, Wyatt Moran,

and Lazlo Zand ever considered themselves players on the same team. From

the beginning, Edwards wanted to do away with Moran; Moran, with

Leonard; Leonard with Zand. I suspect that even if Edwards had been

successful in assuming control of the SDF-3, he and his mutineers would have

been fired upon as soon as the ship defolded in Earthspace. Either that, or

Edwards would have done the firing, targeting Leonard and the rest from the

safety of lunar orbit.

Admiral Rick Hunter, as quoted in Resh N'Tar's

Interviews with Admirals

Eager for further communication from the Masters, Lazlo Zand hadn't

left his subterranean office in SPOOK for close to a week. He had checked in

hourly with the mother computer, but had refrained from engaging the Zor

holo in conversations out of fear that the Masters had discovered some

means of penetrating the system and eavesdropping on its cerebrations—

despite that by its own account the computer had passed the Masters' tests.

But why, then, the hesitation in establishing a direct computer-to-computer

interface?

Judging from the initial communication, the Masters were fixed on

locating the Protoculture matrix, just as Exedore and Breetai had predicted

ten years earlier. But Zand now had reason to suspect that the matrix hadn't

gone missing with the SDF-1's spacefold generators, but was interred with

the remains of the fortress, concealed in the ship's Reflex drives. That fact

alone was enough to start a second Robotech War or prevent one, though

Zand had no intention of playing his trump card until he had positioned

himself on the winning side. After all, there were larger issues at stake than

the fate of Planet Earth.

The most interesting detail to emerge from the cursory debriefing of

130

the mother computer was that the Masters appeared to have no knowledge

of the SDF-3. More, they had implied that they were completely unaware of

recent events on their homeworld, Tirol. Did that mean that the

Expeditionary mission had yet to arrive on Tirol nine years after the launch?

Or had the Masters embarked on their journey

before

Earth-relative 2020?

If the former was true, the SDF-3 might be anywhere in the galaxy, lost,

crippled, or destroyed; if the latter, the implication was that the Masters

hadn't folded to Earth's neighborhood but had traveled more or less

conventionally through space-time. Which in turn suggested that their ships,

lacking sufficient reserves of Protoculture, were incapable of fold.

A weakness, to be sure.

Zand had been heartened to find that the computer, as instructed, had

mentioned his name. Should it eventually come down to a direct

conversation between Zand and the Masters, the Tiresians would find an

Earther whose intellect had been shaped and expanded by the same

biological agent that had shaped theirs: the Flower of Life, specimens of

which had taken to Earth's soil as if sprung from it originally. Zand wished

he could apprise the Masters personally that there walked on Earth one who

was conversant with the Shapings: one who was well on the road to

evolutionary transformation—indeed, some form of transubstantiation.

In sum, the fate of Lazlo Zand was more important than the fate of

Earth. That was why it was essential that he be the first to communicate

with the Masters. With the benefit of their knowledge he might at last be

able to understand his personal relationship to the Shapings.

On the less-than-Human side of things stood Napoleon Russo. Zand

knew in advance that Russo would bungle his assignment to retrieve the

encrypted disk the late Yoko Nitabi had transmitted to Tender/Search. But

failure was in keeping with Zand's designs to undermine any vestiges of self-

confidence in Russo in advance of assuming complete control of him.

The rotund creature was in Zand's presence now, at just past three

A.M., shuffling his feet in the center of Zand's office while he recounted his

attempt to capture the teenager who had been the inadvertent recipient of

131

Nitabi's information. The media were attributing the incendiary events

caused by the failed raid to a war between rival crime bosses over control of

the tuna fish industry.

Locating the young woman had posed few problems once Zand,

through back channels, had learned that Tender/Search was owned and

operated by the Shimada Family. A seemingly legitimate enterprise, the

classifieds brokerage was also used as a dump for clandestine data related

to Family businesses. Further investigation had revealed that the Shimada

Family was in annual retreat at an inn on the slopes of Mount Fuji. Kan

Shimada's core associates were kept under surveillance by some fifty

SPOOK agents, one of whom reported that a Shimada lieutenant had

requested a background from the Ministry of Human Services on one Misa

Yosida, a product of the communal homes, who had become a client of

Tender/Search on the same day Nitabi's encrypted data had been

transmitted. Surveillance of key personnel had continued, until Russo

himself had observed a luncheon meeting between a Shimada

yakuza

named Miho Nagata and a young man, later identified as Shi Ling, whose

personal telecomp number was on file at SPOOK as the source of repeated

attempts at penetrating the facility's computer network.

Russo's hunch to stick with Nagata had been rewarded, and while the

Shimadas were formulating plans to move against Shi Ling and his

apparent girlfriend, Russo was readying plans as well. Zand's assistance had

been required in arranging for the use of a communications satellite to

dazzle a score of delivery robots. Even with that, however, Russo and

company had been thwarted by a fleet of garbage trucks and their gun-

wielding Shimada operators. All hell had broken loose on the street,

resulting in the deaths of two SPOOK agents, though Russo had managed to

arrive intact at the kids' cramped apartment.

"They were gone by the time I got there," he now explained to Zand,

"but they left

this

behind."

Russo's plump, hairy hand proffered a standard-format disk, three

inches in diameter, bearing a Tender/Search label.

132

"It was still in the player," Russo said. "They were trying to read it."

Zand faked an approving smile. Telecomp records indicated that the

kids had purchased a timeshare on the public library neural net. The

machine didn't have enough crunching power to break Nitabi's code, but it

might have been able to give the hackers some sense of the disk's content.

Zand handed the disk back across the desk. "I think we'd better play

it—just to make certain."

"But the label—"

"Humor me," Zand cut him off. "Play it."

Russo got up and went to the player. Zand shifted his chair to face the

screen in time to see Lynn-Minmei prancing through a field of flowers while

she lip-synched "To Be In Love." Russo, frowning suddenly, planted his

finger on the advance button. Minmei, against a pyrotechnic backdrop,

mouthing "We Can Win"; Minmei, on a roller coaster, mouthing "Stage

Fright"; Minmei soaring through a starfield; Minmei dressed in military

garb . . .

"Seems that they switched labels," Zand told Russo matter-of-factly.

"The disk we want is evidently labeled 'Minmei's Greatest Hits,' or some

such title."

Russo's lower lip twitched and he stared at his hands. "I apologize,

Professor Zand. I'm inept. I'm good for nothing."

Zand moved to him and patted the top of his head. "Now, now,

Napoleon, don't vilify yourself. You did the best you could. Besides, we're

sure to find Misa and her hacker friends."

Russo looked up. "But how? They could be anywhere."

Zand's grin was patronizing. "I'll think of a way. In the meantime, I'd

like you to take Ms. Nitabi's body out of the freezer and return it to the

Shimada Family. As a special favor to me."

Five thousand miles away, in Earth Defense Force headquarters in

Monument City, Minister of War Anatole Leonard was storming through

circles on the eagle-emblemed carpet of his capacious office. In the hot seat,

133

still queasy from that morning's drop back into the gravity well, sat Rolf

Emerson.

"How could you do this to me?" Leonard was fulminating. "I just don't

understand how you could do it." He whirled on Emerson. "Are you part of

it, Rolf?"

Emerson met the commander's probing gaze. "Part of what?"

"Aldershot's plot. And don't pretend ignorance. The maneuverings of

former RDF contingents on Aluce Base and here on Fokker, the requisitions

for Civil Defense ordnance, the covert meetings . . . You've heard about

Mexico?"

Emerson's puzzled look showed that he hadn't.

"Another confrontation between RDF and Southern Cross forces sent

there to put down a revolt in the southern highlands."

Emerson compressed his lips and gave his head a mournful shake.

"You know, this wouldn't happen if we'd stop talking about 'former' RDF or

'former' Southern Cross and refer to all of them as Earth Defense forces."

Leonard snorted a scornful laugh. "If you think we can heal this

situation using semantics—"

"It might make things less inflammatory."

Leonard struck an intimidating pose. "We're way beyond that, Rolf.

And make no mistake about it: I won't intercede to save your ass if you side

with Aldershot. I'll see you go down."

Emerson came to his feet. "I'm not siding with

anyone

."

"Then explain why I wasn't informed of your visit to the factory

satellite."

"I don't have to answer to you for my actions, Commander. I do as I see

fit in the interest of Terrestrial Defense."

"Are you going to hide behind that, Rolf?"

Emerson sat down. Leonard waited a beat and went to his chair. "I

went upside for personal reasons," Emerson began. "At least, the trip

started out that way."

"The Zentraedi female?"

134

"The 'female' has a name, Commander."

Leonard made a conciliatory gesture. "All right, you went there to see

Ilan Tinari. At her request?"

Emerson nodded.

"What's on her mind—repatriation on Earth?"

"Just the opposite. She informed me that the Zentraedi wish to leave

stationary orbit."

"Leave orbit?"

"They . . . feel that the Masters are en route to Earth."

Leonard leaned forward, his palms flat on the desk. "Have they

established contact with the SDF-3?"

"No," Emerson was quick to clarify. "They have no hard proof. Ilan

maintains that they can 'sense' the Masters' approach."

"So what's their reason for wanting to leave orbit?" Leonard asked.

"To lure the Masters away from Earth. To sacrifice themselves as a

means of furnishing us with advance intelligence."

Leonard stared at him. "And you believe that?"

"Yes, I do. Dana has been experiencing spells of depression and

unfocused hostility. I'm certain she's also sensing the Masters."

"It's a trick, Rolf. Think about Khyron, think about the Malcontent

Uprisings. The Zentraedi aren't capable of guileless action. They answer to

Tirol. They answer to the Imperative. If they want to leave orbit, it's to

induce the Masters to home in on their position, or perhaps to link up with

some alien strike force that survived the destruction of the Grand Fleet."

Rolf shook his head. "What's to prevent the Masters from homing in on

them in stationary orbit?"

"Nothing at all. But here, they're weaponless. They're easy prey to an

attack by our space-based forces," Leonard blustered. "I'm disappointed,

Rolf. For God's sake, think about Ilan Tinari. She left you to join the

malcontents. If she was capable of something selfless, something Human,

wouldn't she be with you right now instead of in self-exile out there?"

Emerson was quiet for a long moment. "I'm going to forward their

135

request to the Senate, Commander," he said at last. "Moran already has the

information. He can decide who should or shouldn't know about the

Masters."

Leonard folded his arms across his massive chest. "Yes, you do that.

And my guess is that the liberals will go ahead and grant their request. But

ask yourself how you're going to feel if I'm correct about their plan and all

this comes back to haunt you. Earth is on its own, Rolf. There's no profit in

perpetuating a sense of outdated loyalty to Lang and Hunter and the rest of

those alien-lovers. I'm glad they're gone. They belong in deepspace. And

since, after all these years, you seem to have become something of a liaison

officer again, I strongly suggest that you convey my sentiments to Aldershot

and his RDF machine before it's too late." He paused briefly, then added,

"Bring along a dictionary, so you can read them the definition of 'sedition.'

And be sure to inform them that the only thing holding me back from

scuttling their plans is that I have no concrete evidence relating to the status

of the Expeditionary mission."

Deep in the geo-grid, in an area below Shinjuku known as High Noon,

the apartment gang sat in morose silence around a corner table in a camera-

free-zone pizzeria. The district was so named because of the outsize fiber-

optic advertisements that shone twenty-four hours a day from the sides and

facades of High Noon's copse of towering structures. Big as a house, EVE's

composite face smiled from the building across the street from the pizzeria.

"Cool weather is on the approach," the telepresence was saying, "and

the Modern Youth meets autumn's challenge in jumpsuits and jackets made

of Memory-Stretch and Thermawrap.

"You were just an adolescent when the SDF-3 departed for Tirol on its

mission of diplomacy. But that doesn't stop you from lending moral support

now to the prospect of an enduring peace, in fashions inspired by the

uniforms worn by the Expeditionary Force. Your jumpsuit and knee-high

sim-leather boots hug you like a second skin, and your black torso-harness

crosses your chest and flares daringly at the shoulders. Your hair is long but

136

freshly washed and scented, and styled in such a way that your eyes and

ears are left uncovered—because you are fully attuned to the audio-visual

world.

"The Modern Youth pays keen attention to local and world news and is

a keen observer of his or her surroundings. You are quick to spot strangers

in your neighborhood, and to report any suspicious activity to the nearest

police

koban

. You can be a stern taskmaster, a glowering

obasan

, when you

need to be, because duty and order are what matter in the world. That way

you protect the people and things that you love from those who are only out

to exploit loopholes in the social contract . . ."

"Is that how you guys see yourselves?" Misa asked around a mouthful

of pizza. "Exploiters of the loopholes?"

"What?" Census asked.

Misa gestured to the screen. "EVE. Didn't you hear what she said?"

Census traded glances with Discount and Gibley, both of whom were

wearing berets and rectangular shades. "I have more important things to

think about than that crap."

Misa snorted. "Yeah, I agree. But this time she's offering some

information that might come in useful

while we're hiding out for the next

ten years!

"

The boys ducked their heads and told her to keep her voice down.

"Fine. I'll be quiet when you tell me what we're supposed to do now,"

she said. "We can't go back to the apartment. We've only got enough money

to last about two days, and you know that the first one of us who tries to

collect allowance is going to get arrested or worse."

"That's not true," Census argued. "Hongo's in the clear. He can go to

Human Services for us."

"No he can't. Not without authorization from Health and Welfare that

we're too sick to report."

"So one of us'll check into a clinic."

"The clinics are open to network name traces." Misa swept her eyes

around the room and lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "You-

137

know-who or the other you-know-who will know just where to find us."

Census smirked. "Okay, so it's not foolproof. We just need to think

things through."

"Exactly," Discount said. "We've gotta think."

"Think," Gibley added.

A gloomy silence descended over the table once more. Misa pushed the

last of her slice aside and leaned out of the circle to watch EVE.

"The Modern Youth knows the value of other people's property. If

someone loses an e-wallet or a telephone, they are returned to their owner

without their contents being disturbed. The Modern Youth doesn't invade

the privacy of another by perusing the video photos in a wallet or

eavesdropping on the messages logged by a telephone.

"You are in the geo-grid purchasing a winter outfit made of Memory-

Stretch and Thermawrap, and the salesperson undercharges your credit

card. 'That amount is incorrect,' you announce. 'I wouldn't want to profit

from a mistake that could cost you your job.'"

EVE fashioned an ordinary street scene, populated it with other

telepresences, and inserted herself into it.

"You step into a classifieds booth to purchase a list of available

apartments. However, instead of receiving the requested information, you

receive a list of telecomps that are for sale. A mistake has occurred; you

have received data meant for another. Even so, your friend, who has been

shopping for a previously owned telecomp, offers to purchase the list you

have received. Do you make a deal with him, or do you say, 'I'm sorry, but

this information is not mine to sell. You will have to make your deal with

the owner.'

"The Modern Youth doesn't feel a need to know everything. You trust

that there are those who are looking out for your interests, and that you

need do only your small part to contribute to the health and welfare of the

planet.

"Mistakes occur, but honorable people will find that the world is a

forgiving place. Come talk to me. Go to the nearest EVE station vidphone

138

and call me. No problem is insurmountable. And remember that wherever

you are, the eyes of the world—

seken no me

—are on you."

Misa's mouth was hanging open when she swung around to the table.

The stunned expressions that greeted her were clear proof that the boys had

also been listening to EVE.

"You don't think—"

"Of course it's meant for us," Gibley said through clenched teeth. "It's

not the eyes of the world—it's Zand's eyes. He knows we're on the run."

"That must mean that the yaks got to the apartment before Zand's

people did," Misa surmised. "Otherwise he'd know we don't have the disk

anymore."

"Maybe his people didn't find it," Discount offered.

Misa looked at Gibley while he was exchanging cryptic looks with

Census. "But all we have to do is get word to Zand that we don't have it. You

heard EVE, everything'll be forgiven if we're honorable. Zand doesn't have

to know that we read the disk. We could even say that we tried to read it but

failed."

Gibley wouldn't meet her gaze. "We have to tell what we know to

someone who matters. Verifiable information about the Masters would have

an impact on the whole world." He finally raised his eyes from the table.

"It's too important

not

to pass on."

Misa considered it briefly. "Do you think anyone'll believe us—without

the disk, I mean?" Once more, Gibley and Census traded looks. "You did

leave the disk," Misa said, staring at Gibley. "Tell me you left the disk!"

Without warning, she rushed around the table and began rummaging

through the deep pockets of Galley's pants and vest until Census and

Discount wrestled her off him.

Pushing his disheveled hair from his face, Gibley backed out of range of

swipes from Misa's taloned hand. "I couldn't leave it behind," he told her. "I

couldn't."

Misa went slack in the boys' grip.

"Jeez, thanks for letting me in on the secret," Discount said to Gibley in

139

disappointment.

"I don't believe this," Misa said after a long moment. "I don't

believe

this." She shot Gibley a furious glance. "Just because you were fired from

SPOOK, we have to get killed?"

"This has nothing to do with avenging myself on Zand. I'm thinking

about the planet."

"Exactly," Census added, as if in sudden revelation. "I mean, it's our

Earth First

duty

to see to it the information gets out."

"Tell that to your

yakuza

friends," Misa said. "Let's see how Earth First

they

'll be."

Discount cut his eyes to Census. "The yaks won't disclose the

information. They'll try to profit from it, just like Zand must have in mind."

"Okay, then we'll have to try and make contact with Commander

Leonard."

Gibley shook his head. "Leonard is mentioned on the disk. He probably

already knows. He and Zand are part of the same conspiracy. No, the person

we need to reach is Rolf Emerson."

"

Minister

Emerson?" Misa asked.

"He'll see that the UEG is made aware of Zand's secret."

"But Emerson lives in Monument City."

"I'm aware of that," Gibley said. "But I know a guy right here in Tokyo

who used to be tight with Emerson's foster daughter."

"Dana Sterling?" Census said.

Gibley nodded. "The guy's name is Terry Weston."

140

CHAPTER TWELVE

I was never one to put much faith in the efficacy of prayer—even less so

since my experiences with Protoculture and the Shapings. And yet, since

learning from Cabell that Zor concealed the Protoculture matrix in the [SDF-

1's] reflex engines, I have, each night, staring out at gargantuan Fantoma and

tiny Tirol, been dispatching prayers aimed more for the ears of Leonard and

Zand than God. "Surrender the matrix to the. Masters," I pray. "Don't let it

come down to a second war."

Excerpted from the personal journal of Emil Lang

The pinky finger of Miho Nagata's left hand was encased in a fat tube of

white gauze and medical tape. In the generation of

yakuzas

that considered

Mercedes-Benzes with tinted windows de rigueur, a bandaged pinky would

have been a clear indication that the injured party had honored a debt by

cutting off the tip of his finger. In Miho's case, however, the mutilation had

been effected by the solid-rubber roller of a weighty delivery robot.

Three days after it had been crushed, the finger was still throbbing,

especially—oddly enough—the amputated tip. But Miho had been stoic

throughout, easy enough in light of the fact that the young woman on the

team, Tine Amano, had been killed during the abortive raid on the hackers'

apartment. The SPOOK agent who had fired the lethal round had also died,

in a hail of automatic-weapons fire from the Shimada garbage trucks, but

the Family was distraught, nonetheless, that one of its own should succumb

to so ignoble an end.

"We must avenge ourselves on the Protoculture Kommandatura," Kan-

san was telling the gathered captains and lieutenants of his organization

just now. "And on Dr. Lazlo Zand in particular."

At the geographical center of the Shimadas' underground compound,

in a room bare of furniture save for a long, low table, the twenty lesser

honchos of the Shimada Family kneeled in attentive allegiance. Miho's place

141

was close to the foot of the table.

"I would like permission to pay my respects personally to the Amano

family," he said to Kan Shimada.

Kan-san nodded. "It is our hope that the disciplines that serve them so

well in martial arts can be brought to bear to ease their suffering."

Miho inclined his head in a bow. "Your hope will be conveyed."

Shimada nodded again. "Has there been some intelligence on the

whereabouts of our targets?"

"None," Miho's partner, Kazuki, reported. "I saw no signs of a struggle

when I finally reached the apartment. I'm certain that the kids were gone by

the time Zand's obese agent arrived."

"And the disk?"

"Either Zand's agent located it or the kids carried it with them."

Kan-san gazed down the length of the table at Miho. "From what you

know of the one who calls himself Census, what is your opinion?"

"They held on to the disk."

"Yes, I agree. Why else would Zand take an interest in finding them?

We don't know how much they learned from the disk, if anything at all. But

Zand is certainly aware that no one would accept their story without

corroboration."

Ritualistic murmurs of assent greeted the assessment.

"It may be that the hackers will seek to make contact with us, based on

their assumption that we are the lesser of two evils."

"Hai!

"

"I wish the word spread to the street: they are better off coming to us

than surrendering themselves or what they have to Zand. I want them to

understand that we will harbor them, and that one of our main concerns is

revenge on Zand."

"Mr. Shimada, it is likely that your words will reach Zand's ears as

well," Miho commented.

"Let them," Kan-san started to say when a voice suddenly announced

itself outside the sliding screen to the hallway. Shimada gave his permission

142

to enter, and a servant came into the room on bended knees, closing the

screen behind him. He bowed deeply before speaking.

"The body of Yoko Nitabi has been delivered to the compound. It is

horribly mutilated, and the back of the body bears a tattooed message."

Kan-san worked his jaw. "Have you read this 'message'?"

"Hai."

Shimada made a beckoning motion with the fingers of his right hand.

The servant took a deep breath. "'Mr. Shimada: The score stands tied at

two to two: On your side, Ms. Nitabi and the woman who was killed in

Kabukicho; on ours, the two agents your people riddled with bullets. I

suggest we call this contest a draw and end things before matters worsen.

I'm afraid that Ms. Nitabi left me little choice: she violated the oath she

swore to me, and for that she had to die. The encrypted portion of the disk is

my property, not yours. However, since I am now in possession of both the

original and the copy, I can consider the matter closed. Feel free to deal with

the disk's unwitting recipients as you see fit. L. Zand.'"

The servant kowtowed and was dismissed.

Shimada's steely eyes scanned the table. "Remarks."

"He's lying. He doesn't have the disk," someone said.

"He is goading us."

"He expects us to lead him to the hackers. All of us will be under

surveillance."

Kan-san nodded gravely. "The matter is far from closed. Let the next

round of our 'contest' begin at once."

"The Invid Regent is dead," Elder Nimuul said with significantly less

emotion than the pronouncement should have warranted. Fallagar and

Hepsis flanked him, their facial expressions unreadable. "Killed on Optera,"

Nimuul continued, "in a hand-to-hand contest with Breetai Tul."

The Masters' raptorlike eyes remained fixed on the transsignal sphere

that had resolved in the command center of the flagship, but their thoughts

rippled and streamed from one mind to the next. Shaizan spoke for the

143

triumvirate. "Then our reascendancy is assured, Elders. We need only

retrieve the Protoculture matrix and the Fourth Quadrant is ours once

more."

Nimuul scowled. "Your optimism is premature. The death of the

Regent is further evidence of the Earthers' tenacity and innate talent for

warfare."

"The Earthers, Elder? When you said Breetai, we assumed—"

"Breetai's Zentraedi forces serve Earth, not Tirol. Listen carefully:

Optera was the stage for a decisive battle between the Sentinels and the

Invid, as well as between rival blocs of the Robotech Expeditionary Force.

The data you amassed on Earth languages enabled us to interpret exactly

what occurred. The rebel group, under the leadership of a Human named T.

R. Edwards, fled Tirol with an organic computer the Invid had left behind

when they occupied our world. This Edwards and his Ghost Squadron were

intent on usurping the Regent's power, and using Invid forces to defeat the

Sentinels, the Zentraedi, and a separate group of REF loyalists. But

Edwards was himself defeated, and the Invid, deprived of their regent,

surrendered. All data concerning these events will be transsignaled to your

ships."

"Where are these Sentinels now?" Shaizan asked.

"They are returning to Tirol, aboard a ship called the

Ark Angel

.

Scientists and support personnel of the REF await them in Tiresia."

"Our city," Bowkaz said on an angry note.

"No longer," Nimuul amended. "All of Tirol belongs to Earth."

"All the more reason to make Earth ours."

The three Elders shook their heads. "The planet is not a prize worth

winning," Nimuul said. "The Regent is dead, but the Regis and her warrior

children are alive. Even now, her sensor nebulae comb the Fourth Quadrant

for signs of the Flower of Life. The moment she is alerted to the Flower's

rooting on Earth, she will come, and there is no force in the galaxy that can

stop her. Excepting the Protoculture matrix, Earth holds no salvation for

us." The blue-haired Elder paused, then asked, "Have you established

144

contact with the machine intelligence that governed Zor's fortress?"

"We have, my lords," Dag answered. "The computer was removed from

the fortress prior to an attack led by Khyron Kravshera in which the fortress

was destroyed. The computer has high confidence that the Protoculture

matrix survived the devastation, but it has not been able to determine the

location of the fortress's burial site. An Earther named Zand has

programmed the machine to speak with the voice of Zor himself."

"Is that all it told you?" Nimuul demanded.

Bowkaz addressed the question. "When we commanded the machine to

speculate on how our flotilla might fare against Earth's strategic capabilities,

it requested access to our databanks."

The Elders were silent for a moment. "Do you trust it?" Fallagar

wanted to know.

"Not entirely," Bowkaz told him. "Though we have reason to believe

that Zor may have bequeathed the machine a measure of the Compulsion

you placed upon him."

"Allow the computer access to whatever it requires," Nimuul replied

after a long moment. "It matters little if the machine has its own agenda.

Reveal our might, and make the Earthers aware that years will pass before

Breetai's ship returns to Earth. In the meantime, it is crucial that you learn

where Zor's fortress is interred, so as to narrow the focus of our attack,

should it come to that."

As one, the Masters bowed their heads.

"In addition, it is advisable to encourage Zor's clone to go online with

the machine his donor devised. If some part of Zor resides in that machine,

it is conceivable that the interface could rouse something in the clone's

cellular memory, enabling it to fashion a second Protoculture matrix."

"Your will be done, Elders," Shaizan said. "Can you specify when we

will next hear from you?"

Nimuul shook his head. "We are repairing to Hayden IV in an effort to

determine why Exedore Formo has become so interested in the Awareness."

The Elder made a fatigued sound. "The world is coming apart. Tirol fallen;

145

Praxis obliterated; Peryton's curse lifted; the Invid Regent dead; the

Sentinels victorious; the Awareness awakened; the Zentraedi bearing

offspring . . . We must have the matrix at any cost, lest the glory of the

Tiresian race is eclipsed from the galaxy."

"Where to, sir?" Rolf Emerson's driver asked when the limousine had

been cleared through Fokker Aerospace's forbidding front gates.

Emerson met the woman's questioning gaze in the rearview mirror,

then turned his face to the tinted side window. "Major General Aldershot's

office."

Founded during Reconstruction as a launch and reentry facility for

shuttles servicing the factory satellite and named for the Robotech War's

most celebrated mechamorph, Roy Fokker, the base encompassed several

thousand acres of treeless plateau south-southeast of Monument City. It

was home to the Tactical Air Force and the Cosmic Units, along with various

experimental facilities and an industrial complex. The military accords of

2019 and 2022 had granted supervision of the place to the RDF, but what

with the formation of the Earth Defense Force and the subsequent blurring

of distinctions between the RDF and the Army of the Southern Cross, there

was some question as to who controlled what areas of the base. RDF

presence was stronger on Fokker than anywhere else on the surface, and

Skull One—Roy Fokker's Veritech—still hung suspended from

monofilament cable in the administrative center. But many of the base's

immense hangars were packed with Logans, Hovertanks, and similar mecha

engineered for the Army of the Southern Cross.

Rolf had an office in the administrative center, though he usually

worked out of his office in Terrestrial Defense headquarters in Monument

City. Typically, months would pass without his visiting Fokker, and now

here he was back on base for the second time in a week.

The driver guided the limousine along the two-lane road that ringed

the facility, past the shuttle gantries, "Destroid Depot," and the

administrative center, with its luxury-hotel facade and four-story atrium.

146

Aldershot's office was ten minutes further along, on the top floor of a

sprawling structure officially known as the Defense Force Operational

Headquarters, although more commonly referred to as the RDF Canteen.

At once old-fashioned and bionic, Aldershot was seated at his antique

desk when an aide admitted Emerson to the office.

"Shall I take this visit as a sign that you want to throw in with us?"

Aldershot asked bluntly. "Or are you here to reiterate the warning you

delivered to Major Fredericks and Lieutenant Satori?"

Emerson hadn't spoken to Aldershot since the clandestine meeting in

Monument City, and the major general's anger was transparent. "Nigel,

suppose we leave it that I've your best interests in mind. Will you hear me

out?"

Aldershot fingered his waxed mustache, then gestured to the chair

alongside the desk. The room smelled faintly of pipe tobacco, and the view

out its tall, fixed-pane windows overlooked the South Gate shuttle and VT

landing strips.

"Leonard knows," Emerson said. "He doesn't have all the details, but

he knows enough to discern what you have in mind."

Aldershot's eyes began to narrow in suspicion.

"No, he didn't hear it from me. He didn't have to, the way you've been

carrying on, juggling mecha deployments and troop assignments . . . You

didn't think you'd actually be able to pull this off without his knowledge?"

Aldershot shook his head slowly. "We expected this. Though I must

admit, I wish he could have been kept in the dark a while longer." He looked

at Emerson. "I appreciate your informing me."

"There's something else. You know I made a trip up the well."

"To the factory, yes. At the time, I thought you had come to your senses

and were making the trip on our behalf. Then I learned that you'd been sent

for. I assume the trip had something to do with their unexpected silence."

"It did."

"Well, I'm sure this can't be about additional supplies. Hell, as it is they

barely touch what we send them. They seem to

want

to live like animals."

147

"Not anymore," Emerson said. "They're requesting permission to leave

orbit. Leonard has already been apprised, and the Senate is expected to vote

on the matter by early next week. I expect they'll be allowed to go—if only in

the interest of closure for those of us on Earth."

Aldershot smoothed his mustache again. "This could be a major

setback in our plans. We were hoping to make use of the factory as a staging

area for strikes against the orbital weapons platforms, if need be." The

general frowned. "But why do they want to leave after all these years? Don't

tell me they're afraid of getting caught in the middle, between us and

Leonard?"

"They couldn't care less," Emerson told him. "Most of them would just

as soon see us rot in hell for the way they were mistreated during the

Uprisings. No, Nigel, they're leaving because the Masters are nearer than we

thought."

All the smugness left Aldershot. "How near? I've heard nothing from

Liberty or any of the forward observation bases about UCTs—"

"The Zentraedi are going by 'feeling'—a kind of sixth sense. They claim

there's a direct correlation between distance and the strength of their

feelings, but they're unable to quantify it."

"But, good Christ, Emerson, are they talking millions of miles or

parsecs?"

Emerson shook his head. "Here's a better one: Is the SDF-3 in

pursuit?"

The major general stared at him. "And if they are, why haven't they

made contact with us?" He muttered a curse. "Could the REF and the

Masters have

passed

each other en route? Is that the sort of thing that can

happen in hyperspace?"

"The only person who could possibly answer that is on the SDF-3. But

no matter what, I think we have to assume that the ship is either

incapacitated or destroyed. It's high time we faced the fact that the UEG is

Earth's only hope."

Aldershot's hands clenched. "This changes everything, Rolf." Emerson

148

was midway through a relieved exhale when Aldershot added, "We'll have to

make our move ahead of schedule."

Emerson gaped at him. "

That'

s your answer? And if the Masters' ships

are cloaked somehow? If they've had us under surveillance, and have only

been waiting for the right moment, waiting for us to lower our guard or

grow so enmeshed in internecine squabbling that we won't even see them

coming?" He stood up and slammed his fist down on the desk. "Have I been

wasting my breath on you, Nigel?"

Aldershot stiffened, then showed Emerson a contrite look. "I'm sorry,

Rolf. But there are too many of us already committed to this—Masters or

not. I'm going to recommend that we go in one week."

149

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Emerson wanted Dana treated like any cadet in the Academy, and yet he

was the first one to come to her aid every time she stepped out of line—which

was more times than I could begin to name. The thing is, we all knew that she

had to be there. If nothing else, she was a constant reminder of the fact that

Earth had fought a war with an alien race, and that that race's makers were

probably on the way.

Remark attributed to one of Dana Sterling's fellow

Academy cadets, as quoted in Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.),

Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War

Terry Weston accepted the ritual cup and set it down on the table in

front of him. He gave the cup a counterclockwise half turn before lifting it to

his nose with his right hand, elbow thrust outward, his left hand cupped

over it to focus the scent. He then inhaled three times,

listening

, as the

Japanese put it.

Small and exquisitely wrought, the cup contained a cylinder of glowing

charcoal buried in ashes of pond lily seeds, which were chosen for their

odorlessness. The surface of the ashes bore an intricate pattern that

indicated the season and the form of the contest. Obscuring most of that

pattern was a square of quartz, atop which rested a small piece of incense,

koh

—a sliver of exotic wood, saturated with fragrant oil. It was Weston's

turn to identify the incense by smell.

The utterly silent room in which he and a dozen others sat was already

heady with the mingled scents from previous rounds; some

kyara

—elegant

and sophisticated—others

sumontara

—provocative and argumentive. The

one under Weston's nose was certainly more forward than

kyara

, though

neither rustic nor boorish enough to be considered

manaban

. It had an

almost cinnamon quality, austere, upright, and clerical—suggestive of the

sasora

type. He decided that the incense came from a type of scrub oak

150

native to the hill country of central Thailand. Mentally, he composed his

identifying haiku, wrote it in

kanji

on his notepad, and passed the cup to the

old woman seated to his right.

A former Veritech pilot with the RDF, Weston was approaching thirty,

tall and fit, with a craggy face and wavy blond hair that fell to his shoulders.

Unlike the kimonoed players on either side of him in the

koh

dojo, he was

wearing jeans and a short-napped pullover. In preparation for the weekly

session, he had, as usual, abstained from eating garlic, drinking coffee, and

using soap or shampoo, and had removed his rings and bracelets, lest they

cause a distraction by coming into contact with the incense-laden cup.

The

koh

master sat at the head of the table, his implements arranged in

front of him: squares of quartz, napkins, wrapped and unwrapped pieces of

wood, a poker, a pair of chopsticks, a small set of pincers known as a

gingyobasami

, and a feather from the wing of a crested ibis, which was

used to brush away stray ash adhering to the side of the cup.

"Hon koh taki owarimashita,"

the

sensei

said when the incense had

been inhaled by the final player. "The

koh

fire is out."

All that remained was for the identifying haikus to be submitted to the

recordkeeper, who would inscribe them on a large sheet of Japanese paper,

and for the winners to be announced.

Kohdo

, knowledge of incense, had been practiced for mere than a

thousand years, and had lent much to

sado

, the Japanese tea ceremony. Of

the six hundred or so scents in the incense pantheon, a skillful devotee

could name at least half. The wood itself—all of it imported from Southeast

Asia, Indonesia, New Zealand, and other places—was more precious than

gold or saffron. Weston's school practiced a type of

kohdo

founded by

samurai in the twelfth century. Tokyo had a second school that had

originated with the Imperial family, in which one's arms were held close to

the body while listening to the scents.

Kohdo

wasn't the sort of discipline Weston would normally have been

drawn to; rather, he was under orders to attend the sessions and contests.

The source of those orders was Onuma-sensei, the martial arts instructor

151

under whom Weston had been studying almost since his arrival in Japan

three years earlier. Weekly

kohdo

, zen meditation, leaf-raking, window

washing, archery,

irezumi

. . . Onuma-sensei was Weston's link to all of

them.

As it happened, he had scored well in the contest, correctly naming

sixty of the one hundred nail-paring-size samples passed around the table.

Several of the old hands had achieved better-than-perfect scores by not only

identifying the scents but by identifying the samples as core or outer ring

cuttings from the donor trees.

Still, the

koh

master was pleased enough by Weston's performance to

comment, as the former pilot was leaving, that Weston's Western face had

at last begun to sprout an Asian nose.

It was just past nine P.M. when Weston stepped out onto Yomise-Dori.

The air was chilled and he rolled down the sleeves of his pullover.

The scent dojo was near Ueno Park in Sendagi, which, along with the

adjacent neighborhoods of Nezu and Yanaka, made up the heart of the city's

surface

shitamachi

—its downtown. Flattened during the Rain of Death, the

area had been rebuilt to suit a Tokyo that hadn't existed in more than fifty

years. Houses with rock gardens lined the narrow streets; the restaurants

specialized in

chuka ryori

, Tokyo's version of Chinese cooking; signs above

the shop doorways were in hand-painted

kana

; and the Shinto shrines were

vermilion.

Weston ambled along, past sake shops, rice merchants, tofu makers,

flower vendors, and barbers, drinking all of it in, thinking vaguely about

Monument City, as he was wont to do as Tokyo's autumn approached. He

was nearing his favorite

nomiya

—drink shop—when he heard his name

called, and turned to find lanky Wilfred Gibley waving to him from the

mouth of a lantern-lit alley. Beside him stood a tall and attractive young

woman, nibbling at her thumb. Weston hadn't seen Gibley since they'd

dropped LSD together back in their

saike zoku

days. Gibley had been known

as Hongo then, and Weston had been fresh from Monument, looking to

come to terms with the tragic death of his fiancée and his lasting hatred for

152

everyone associated with the Giles Academy—Anatole Leonard, Joseph

Petrie, Michael Kingsley, David Myers, Pauline Hall, even the dead Henry

Giles himself.

Grinning, Weston walked over to Gibley and clapped him on the

shoulder. "Where you been hiding, Hongo? Or do you go by a different

name now?"

Gibley traded a quick glance with the girl. "Depends who you ask." He

forced a smile. "Terry, this is Misa."

Weston nodded. "That's a pretty name."

"Thanks," she mumbled, furtively averting her gaze.

Weston turned back to Gibley. "I was just going to get something to eat.

Can you join me?"

The two of them nodded eagerly, and Weston led the way to the drink

shop across the street and over to a quiet table. He ordered a two-quart

bottle of heated sake and assorted platters of soba, sanshoku, yuzukiri, and

pickles. When the noodle plates arrived, Misa dug in ravenously. Watching

her, Weston was reminded of Dana Sterling; Dana had that same orphaned-

generation, last-meal gusto when it came to food.

"So, Hongo, you ever get back at SPOOK for firing you?" Weston asked.

He glanced at Misa and smiled. "That's all this guy used to talk about,

getting even with Lazlo Zand for taking away his job."

Misa's brow furrowed venomously. "Yeah, I'll bet," she said around a

mouthful of citrus-flavored buckwheat.

Weston looked at Gibley again. "What are you doing or NuYen lately?"

Gibley's narrow shoulders heaved. "This and that. Mostly pilfering and

moving data. Times are tough, you know."

"No need to tell me. If it wasn't for my RDF pension I'd be pushing a

roasted-corn cart."

"You still training with Onuma-sensei?" Gibley asked.

"Every day."

Gibley turned to Misa. "You've heard of Onuma, haven't you? He was

Lynn-Kyle's instructor."

153

Misa's brows beetled. "Who's Lynn-Kyle?"

Gibley shot Weston a look of amused disappointment. "This younger

generation, huh? Lynn-Kyle," he repeated for Misa's sake. "Lynn-Minmei's

manager. Starred in the movie

Little White Dragon

."

"Whatever you say," Misa muttered.

Weston appraised her out of the corner of his eye. No denying it: he

had a thing for younger women. Especially young women who made him

think of Dana. They hadn't spoken in more than a year, but she was never

far from his thoughts. He often wondered what might have happened had

the timing been different, if he hadn't been grieving over Amy Pollard when

he met Dana. Or, indeed, if Dana had been even a couple of years older.

"Do you ever hear from Dana anymore?" Gibley asked out of the blue.

Weston stared at him. "Not for a while. Why?"

"Just curious."

Weston heard something disingenuous in the reply. "What brings you

and Misa to Sendagi?"

Gibley cleared his throat meaningfully. "You."

Weston leaned back in his chair. "Go on."

"We've come into some information that needs to be moved—fast."

"You're peddling your fish in the wrong market, Hongo. I don't fence,

for you or anyone."

Gibley looked around the bar and lowered his voice. "What we have

isn't for sale. It's a gift. But we need it delivered."

"To who?"

"Minister Emerson."

Weston was silent for a long moment. It was Emerson who had asked

him to infiltrate the Giles Academy. A decent man, maybe the only decent

one left in the rapidly disintegrating Defense Force. But someone Weston

had alienated because of Dana and what had gone on between them. "That's

why you asked about Dana."

Gibley nodded. Misa was watching him intently. "This involves Terran

Defense, Terry."

154

"Just how hot is it?"

"How hot's the sun?" Misa said grimly.

Gibley nodded again. "It's too far beyond top-secret to label. I don't

even think I should tell

you

what it's about."

Weston held up his hands. "I'm not asking."

"You would if you knew even a fraction of it."

Weston took a gulp of sake. "I want to judge for myself how hot this

property is before I promise you anything. If I hear word that you're trouble,

don't count on my help." He fingered a vidphone card from the pocket of his

pullover and slid it across the table to Gibley. "Get in touch with me

tomorrow, around this time. I'll have an answer for you then." He glanced at

Misa. "You guys have a place to stay in the meantime? You need money or

anything?"

"No, we're fine," Gibley said before Misa could even open her mouth.

"Everything's fine."

Secured within his office, Zand laid a Flower of Life leaf on his tongue

and savored the mind-altering numbness that infused his lips, throat, and

nasal passages. The Flowers had been couriered only that night from the

eastern foothills of the Andes Mountains. Ironically, the Flowers were found

to be sharing the soil with

Erythroxylon

coca

—the bushy plant whose leaves

were the source of the stimulant cocaine. But unlike coca leaves, which

would only release their alkaloids in the presence of a catalyst like lime ash,

the leaves of the Flower of Life surrendered their gift the moment they were

introduced to the enzymes present in human saliva.

Zand's senses were reeling.

All day, Russo had been chasing after him, eager to supply him with

updates on the missing hackers and the disk, but Zand had rebuffed him.

Russo failed to understand that he had more pressing matters to attend to,

and that the situation regarding the kids was well in hand. EVE was

broadcasting messages specifically tailored to them, and members of the

Shimada Family were being watched in the event the kids should turn to

155

them for protection. In fact, the Shimadas were being surveilled in ways

neither they nor Russo fully realized. What's more, there was always the

chance that the

yakuza

would heed the message Zand had had tattooed

across the backside of Nitabi's corpse and simply bow out of the contest.

Across the room, the Zor hologram, returned from its recent interface

with the machine intelligences that served the Robotech Masters, awaited

further commands from its Human operator. A day earlier, when the

Masters had communicated with Zor's creation to announce their consent

to the proposed computer-to-computer link, Zand had tutored Zor to

transmit inflated strategic evaluations of Space Station Liberty and Earth's

ground and orbital-based defenses, but to safeguard the location of the

enshrined SDF-1 and its most precious cargo, the Protoculture matrix.

The Masters had placed much of the contents of their databanks under

lock and key, but Zor, as if some cybernetic Jack the Giant Killer, had

managed to emerge with even more than Zand had expected. Enough to

have rendered Zand speechless for the past several minutes.

Already Zor had treated him to a video inspection tour of the pride of

the Masters' six-ship flotilla: a five-mile-long lozenge of military prowess,

outfitted with white and purple running lights and surfaced with the

segmented muzzles of countless batteries; conical structures the size of

pyramids; stairways, bridges, towers rising like two-tined forks . . . Portions

of the interior of the ship suggested blood vessels or the maze of an

information highway, pulsing with the enigmatic energy of Protoculture.

Elsewhere loomed components shaped like upside-down pagodas,

constructed of some effulgent ceramic that had never before appeared in the

Solar system.

And Zand had glimpsed the Masters' army of soldier-clones, the

aesthete, fair-skinned Clonemasters who commanded them, and some of

the Bioroid weapons Breetai and Exedore had described to the REF.

"These clones were developed to serve as a police force on occupied

worlds," the Zor holo had explained. "Ostensibly as a means of freeing the

Zentraedi to carry on with the business of intersystem conquest. But I had

156

my suspicions, long before I dispatched my fortress to Earth. I believe that

the Masters had begun to perceive a growing discontent among the

Zentraedi. And I believe that their Protoculture-expanded senses told them

where that discontent was leading: to rebellion. An insurrection, mounted

by Dolza, that would have proved impossible to put down."

Zand had grasped the implication. "Do you suppose that the Masters'

powers of precognition were such that they

knew

the Zentraedi fleet would

be defeated in Earthspace? Could the fleet have been sent to Earth to rid the

Masters of their warrior clones?"

Zor had fallen mute for a time. "These are questions I have not been

programmed to address. The answers appertain to forces set in motion an

eon ago, before first contact between Tirol and Optera. In my memory,

there is only the name Haydon."

It always came down to Haydon, Zand thought. But he decided to leave

the matter alone for the moment. "Can you show me the Masters?" he asked

Zor now, placing another leaf on his tongue.

A scene resolved on the monitor screen. Elbows on the desk, Zand

leaned forward, his eyes widening. Where he had expected to see somewhat

older versions of the radiant-eyed Zor, he saw three aged men in floppy-

collared robes that gave them the look of executioners. He saw deeply

creased, hawk-nosed faces, hairless pates, atrophied arms, slender fingers

lacking nails. He saw Humanlike beings who evinced not a hint of

emotional life.

Was this where unchecked exposure to Protoculture led? Zand asked

himself. Was he glimpsing a future version of himself?

The three Masters stood on a small platform, in a circle around what

must have been a control monitor—an apparatus resembling a mottled

technological mushroom five feet across, hovering above the gleaming deck

of the flagship's command center.

"They share a commonality of mind," the Zor holo offered. "The

Protoculture allows them to send to one another in mindspeak."

Telepathy

, Zand told himself, salivating. Telepathy, precognition,

157

clairvoyance—perhaps immortality itself. All those could be his if he had

unlimited access to Protoculture. Or unfettered access to the Masters. It was

too mind-boggling to contemplate.

"Reveal what you know of their attack plan," he ordered Zor.

The holo shook its head. "That was a denied area. But I have learned

what became of Breetai's flagship."

Zand shot to his feet. "The SDF-3! Tell me!"

"The Invid have been routed from the Valivarre system, and Earth

forces occupy Tirol."

"The REF has been battling the Invid? But doesn't that make them

allies of the Masters?"

"The Masters had abandoned Tirol long before Breetai's flagship

arrived."

Zand laughed ruefully. "By God, they

missed

each other." He stopped

suddenly. "Do you know when the ship is planning to refold to Earth?"

"That isn't known. The ship is marooned in Tirolspace."

Zand sank weakly into his chair. Stranded, he told himself. Then,

looking up, he asked, "Who's in command of the REF?"

"Those data weren't supplied. But key personnel have died in action."

"Who?"

"Janice Em . . ."

"Lang's android."

"And General T. R. Edwards."

Zand was dumbfounded; his jaw dropped and a dollop of leaf-

impregnated saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth. Over the long

years of speculating on the fate of the SDF-3, Edwards's death had been

both wished for and feared. Now, like light making its delayed arrival from a

distant star, some of his questions had been answered.

But all at once Zand wasn't sure what to do with those answers.

"Exit," he told Zor, and the faintly blue hologram vanished,

disappearing into its projector like a genie into an oil lamp.

Zand ingested another leaf and began to sift through his thoughts.

158

Leonard was on the way to Tokyo even now to discuss some matter that had

yet to be clarified. But how much could Zand afford to relate about

developments on Tirol? Even with the SDF-3 temporarily marooned, word

of Edwards's death might turn Leonard toward caution at the very moment

Zand needed him to be impulsive. Zand's future rested on it, for the return

of Emil Lang would without doubt put an abrupt halt to his experiments in

creative evolution. But how to convince Leonard of the need to consolidate

his power, to assume control of Wyatt Moran and the UEG—as, indeed, he

had promised Edwards—without apprising him of all the facts?

The parents of the dead

yakuza

neophyte, Tine Amano, had decided to

hold a wake for her in a small Catholic church on the surface, close to the

remains of the Nihonbashi Bridge, in the heart of what had been the Ginza

precinct of pre-Rain Tokyo. At the last moment Kan Shimada had

persuaded the Amanos to make it a double service by allowing the body of

Yoko Nitabi—nominally a Catholic as well—to be placed on view along with

that of Tine.

From all parts of the city, and from as far south as Kyoto, Shimada

Family members came to pay their respects to the young women.

Capos

,

wiseguys, soldiers, truck drivers, and dockworkers crowded into the flower-

filled room where the repaired and embalmed bodies were laid out in open

caskets of intricately carved hardwood. There was some crying and much

stoic silence in the receiving lines that trailed from the coffins, and a

miasma of brooding anger at the back of the room, where clusters of

Shimada personnel spoke of the actions they would take against SPOOK

when the time was right. That everyone was certainly under surveillance by

rooftop cameras or some such devices, and that spies had likely been

inserted into their midst, only added to an overall sense of outrage and

hatred.

Miho Nagata had spent a few minutes in the back of the room, but the

grumbling had only gotten him more depressed, so he had moved to one of

the front rows of chairs that faced Tine's coffin. He had paid his personal

159

respects to Taduski and Lisabeth Amano the previous day, and was

planning to attend all four sessions of the wake. The Amanos' judo and

jujitsu dojo had been his thrice-weekly home for the past several years.

Miho felt especially sorry that he had been instrumental in recruiting Tine

for the organization, although, given Taduski's ties to Kan Shimada, chances

were that his daughter would have found her way into Family business

before too long. Even so, Miho felt guilty, despondent, and angry more at

the way the world worked than at SPOOK, which had also lost two agents.

Catering principally to

yakuzas

, the Amanos' dojo in the geo-grid often

served as a way station for information. Those who didn't trade in crime

were carefully screened, and there wasn't one of them who couldn't be

counted on to keep to themselves what they observed or overheard. Several

outsiders had passed through the room since Miho had arrived, though

most of them hadn't remained long. They would spend a moment kneeling

at the casket, perhaps offer a prayer, then move quickly down the queues of

mourners, mumbling platitudes, as lost as anyone for soothing words to

offer.

Moving down the Amano line just now was a tall, blond-haired man

Miho knew from the

dojo

—an American named Terry Weston, who had

arrived in Tokyo a few years back after receiving a premature though

honorable discharge from the Defense Force. Miho called to Weston, and

waved him over.

"Good to see you," Weston said, shaking Miho's bandage-free hand.

"Sorry it has to be under these circumstances."

Miho had already uttered the same phrases to a dozen people he had

run into. "You're still studying with Onuma-sensei, Terry?"

Weston nodded. "He regrets not being able to be here this afternoon,

but he'll come tonight."

"Give him my regards—in case I don't see him later on."

"I'll do that. Who'd you honor with your fingertip?" Weston asked

playfully.

Miho snorted. "A robot's roller."

160

Weston glanced at Kan Shimada, seated close to Yoko Nitabi's coffin.

"Who is the other woman, Miho?"

"An adopted daughter of Kan-san."

Weston was quiet for a moment. "Was she killed during that business

in the Kabukicho?"

"A few days earlier," Miho told him.

Weston knew better than to press for details. "I hope this won't be the

first of many funerals."

Miho looked at him. "How do you mean?"

"If your troubles with the other Family escalate."

Miho thought for a moment. "You're referring to what happened in

Kabukicho."

"I didn't mean to—"

"It wasn't rivalry with another Family, Terry. The ones who killed Tine

were intelligence operatives. From SPOOK."

Weston waited for him to continue.

"A very bad business. A couple of kids—data pirates—came into

possession of some information that belongs to us, and we were hoping to

retrieve it without a lot of fuss. The problem is that Dr. Zand is also

interested in this data, and had sent his people there." Miho paused to study

Weston's suddenly disquieted expression. "Is something the matter, Terry?"

Weston surfaced from his dark introspection. "No, nothing. So did you

find these kids?"

Miho wagged his head from side to side. "We're still looking. So, in fact,

is Zand, and it will be bad luck for them to be found by him. At this point,

they would be much safer with us."

Weston gazed at him. "Do you mean that? About their being safe with

you?"

"I do. Why, have you heard something?"

"No, no. But in case I do, I want to be able to give it to them straight.

No tricks, no double crosses."

"You have my word on it," Miho said evenly.

161

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

"I appreciate your recognizing my contributions to the film with this

award. But if I may be honest—unlike some who have spoken from this dais

tonight—my performance was not about pleasing the director, or my co-stars,

or even you people in the audience. I was performing for only one person: my

teacher, Onuma-sensei. And though I doubt that he would go anywhere near

the movie, I hope that he is not too displeased by his student's sloppy

technique and lack of focus."

Lynn-Kyle, on accepting the Best Actor Award for his role

in

Little White Dragon

No sooner had Anatole Leonard and Joseph Petrie emerged from the

elevator onto SPOOK's sub-level three than Zand, sporting tinted aviator

glasses and at least two weeks' growth of salt-and-pepper beard, hurried

them off to a dimly lighted, restricted-access office and sat them down in

front of a small wallscreen, insisting that what he had to show them couldn't

wait.

Leonard was pleased to find that Zand still considered himself one of

the team. But at the same time he felt somewhat upstaged by the

Protoculturist's enthusiasm. Leonard's whole point in coming to Tokyo was

to surprise

Zand

with news that couldn't wait, and, suddenly, the tables had

been turned.

"Prepare to be astounded, gentlemen," Zand was saying now, his

bloodless hands poised over a computer keyboard. "Decrypted playback of

Transmission R-seven, fifteen dash eight-six," he said, more to himself. The

sleeves of his white lab coat were stained with something that looked like

grass juice.

Quietly, Leonard wondered aloud to Petrie if Zand had perhaps

intercepted a communiqué from Aldershot's would-be mutineers on Liberty,

or a communiqué from the general to the space station.

162

"I doubt he would have his ear to that part of the ground," Petrie

returned in the same low voice. Behind round goggles, his eyes seemed to

smile.

Leonard's unofficial aide was without his usual recording headset, and

wore an unadorned, loose-fitting jumpsuit with Velcro closures. Leonard

had on a wool uniform that featured jodhpurs, a big-buckled leather belt,

and spit-polished knee boots. They had made the journey from Monument

City aboard a civilian hypersonic. With the revolt imminent, Leonard was

well aware of the risks in leaving the situation unattended even for a day.

Nevertheless, he thought it essential that Zand be personally apprised of the

Zentraedis' request to quit Earthspace; not merely as a gesture but to set the

stage for the favor Leonard had in mind. Ever since their initial meeting in

Brasí

lia more than ten years earlier, arranged by T. R. Edwards, Leonard

had loathed dealing with the scientist face-to-face. But, as countless

vidphone, comp-fax, and telequorum exchanges had demonstrated, Zand

was impossible to read unless one was willing to endure the scrutiny of his

all-pupil eyes.

Even so, Leonard had had his doubts about Zand's loyalty to the

strategies he, Edwards, and Wyatt Moran had sworn allegiance to prior to

the launch of the SDF-3: the rearming of Planet Earth, the eradication or

banishment of the aliens, and the consolidation of all political and military

authority. Over the years, Zand had proven his worth, especially in helping

to perfect the nonreconfigurable Logan mecha utilized by the Armored

Space Corps, and in allaying the fears of Earth's justifiably paranoid

citizenry by fabricating encouraging transmissions from the SDF-3. The

problem remained, however, that Zand cared less about the sort of power

afforded by the real world than that derived from intimate contact with

Protoculture.

Something was beginning to happen on the wall-screen: behind a

curtain of snowy visual noise, the head and shoulders of a Human figure

could be discerned. It was clear that the person had long hair and was

dressed in some flare-shouldered garment, but it was impossible to make

163

out the face. The audio signal was similarly disrupted by long bursts of

static.

". . . have finally arrived Tirol. Repeat . . . -rol. Initial meet . . . discuss

terms of peace accord with . . . by unannounced strategic strike by Invid

forces . . . prevailed, though the fold drives have been damaged beyond

repair."

Leonard's widened eyes bored in on Zand. "Is that—"

Zand nodded. "General Hunter. Confirmed by voice-print analysis."

"When was this received?"

"Only this morning."

"Through Liberty?"

"No. The REF established contact directly with the former mother

computer of the SDF-1."

"But why?"

"Listen."

". . . tachyon communications systems rendered useless as well . . .—

tech Masters have no fold-capable ships . . . we're effectively marooned here

until . . .—culture can be produced. Repeat, effectively . . . estimate fifteen

Earth years to return by conventional . . .—luminal drive. Repeat, est—. . ."

Zand's hands executed a flurry of keyboard commands. "That's all of

it," he said. "Shall I play it again?"

Leonard gestured for him to do so. "You recall that night on the

porch?" he said to Petrie while the message was running. "

This

must be

what I was seeing in the stars."

Petrie nodded noncommittally.

Leonard looked at Zand again. "When did you say this was received?"

"This morning. But I believe that it was sent almost eight years ago."

"Eight years . . ." Leonard tried to come to grips with it. "That would

put the Expeditionary mission almost halfway home."

Zand rocked his head from side to side. "Assuming that they launched

from Tirol soon after the message was dispatched."

Leonard exchanged a quick glance with Petrie, then cleared his throat.

164

"There's something Hunter neglected to mention, Dr. Zand. The Masters

are also headed our way. And this message leads me to believe that they are

ahead of the REF."

Zand's surprise was sincere. With increasing agitation, he listened to

the commander's summary of Rolf Emerson's conversation with the

Zentraedi onboard the factory satellite.

"They either can't or won't say how close the Masters are," Leonard

concluded. "Or maybe it's Emerson himself who isn't saying. The point is, I

don't trust those bastards. I think they're leaving Earth to rendezvous with

their Masters and to beg forgiveness for their defeat. I'm sure they're

already dreaming about being returned to full size and equipped with a

cruiser they can use to avenge themselves on us."

Zand was pacing like a trapped animal. "Yes, yes, you may be right."

Leonard stood up to intercept him. "Doctor, I want to plant a seed in

that superbrain of yours: I want you to think about the Giles Academy and

the success Mr. Petrie achieved in wrestling control of Veritechs away from

their pilots."

Zand eyed Petrie. "

Limited

success, Commander."

"Granted. But I say it's worth a shot to assemble a team of cybernauts

whose aim would be to sabotage the departure of the factory satellite in the

same way. I'd like to see that damned monstrosity steered directly into the

sun. I'd like to see the Zentraedi

incinerated

."

Petrie pursed his lips and fell into a brooding silence.

Zand watched Petrie for a moment, then turned to Leonard. "Do you

plan to apprise the Senate of the REF's message?"

Leonard took his jaw in his hand. "I need to think things through. But

perhaps it's best this information remains classified for the time being."

Zand smiled ruefully. "Then allow me to plant a seed in

your

mind. You

heard Hunter say that the Masters have no fold-capable ships. Meaning that

they, too, couldn't be closer than halfway to Earth." His black eyes probed.

"In other words, the next seven or eight years belong to

us

, Commander.

And the time has come to implement that part of our plan which calls for

165

the consolidation of

all

political and military authority."

Us

, Leonard told himself in disdain. If only he could rid himself of

Zand and Moran while he was busy ridding Earth of the Zentraedi and the

RDF!

Tall and long-legged as she was, cadet private Dana Sterling had to

stand on tiptoes to see out of her cell's barred window. The pug-nosed,

freckle-faced sixteen-year-old was in the brig for the second time since

beginning her training in the Earth Defense Force Academy. But just now,

out on the rolling terrain of the maneuvers field behind the jail building was

a sight for sore eyes.

"

Ay

-tacks!" Dana was telling her visitor, who was standing quietly on

the other side of the barred door. "Look at them go!" She turned briefly

from the view, scowling. "That's where I should be—training with them.

Instead of stuck in here."

ATAC stood for Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, which was simply a

long-winded way of saying

Hovertanks

, the cutting edge of battle mecha.

Hovers were reconfigurable assemblages of heavy-gauge armor in angular,

flattened shapes with acute edges. Bigger and heavier than their pre-

Robotech counterparts, Centaurs, they were highly responsive nonetheless,

lifting lightly on thruster pods and capable of turning end for end like

pirouetting rhinos. In Battloid mode they were towering, Human-shaped

fighting machines, ultratech knights; and when reconfigured to Guardian

they became squat, waddling, two-legged, single-barreled gun turrets the

size of a house. The mechamorphs who piloted them wore thinking caps

ornamented with graceful wings on either side and a curved crest like a steel

rainbow along the center. Sealed inside sensor-studded flightsuit and

helmet, a pilot could survive almost any hostile environment—radiation,

chemical agents, water, vacuum, or high pressure. Dana wanted more than

anything to be fitted for such a helmet.

"You know who that is out there?" she asked without bothering to turn

around. "It's the Fifteenth Squad. It was formed at the end of the

166

Malcontent Uprisings to take part in the assault on the Scavengers'

mountain camp in the Southlands. Best of the best."

Firepower and excitement aside, it was the Fifteenth ATAC's reputation

as a black sheep outfit that so appealed to Dana's rash and frequently

uncontrollable side. The Fifteenth's crest was a lavish, almost rococo affair,

with rampant lion and unicorn, crown, griffin, stars, shield, and the rest.

But a close look revealed that what were supposed to be crossed machetes

more resembled rabbit ears, the origin of which had a hundred different

versions, all of them disputable. The Fifteenth's newest commander was a

devil-may-care ladies' man named Sean Phillips.

Once more she turned from the barred window. "Command is wasting

my talents! Don't they get it?"

Bowie Grant showed her a smile that tried to be sympathetic. "I know

something they do understand: that you walled our sergeant inside his

quarters and that he ended up having to use his dress helmet as a toilet

bowl."

Dana's blue eyes sparkled. "Yeah, and you know why? Because he

called my mother a

hajoca

—a traitor." She cursed. "I'd like to know where

he

was when my mother was crafted with an RDF VT, exchanging heat with

Malcontent Stingers."

Bowie took his lower lip between his teeth. "I think maybe you

misinterpreted his remarks. He didn't actually say Miriya was a traitor. Only

that she wound up being

used

by both the Malcontents and the RDF, and

that the situation made it difficult for her to live up to everyone's

expectations."

Dana stared blankly. "Is that what the sergeant was saying?"

Bowie nodded. "Yep."

Just turned sixteen, he had a dark-honey complexion, soulful eyes, and

hands more suited to key and fret boards than to the stocks and triggers of a

Wolverine assault rifle. Where Dana fantasized of riding into glory in a

Hover, Bowie dreamed of tickling his piano keys in some after-hours club.

He even listened to Lynn-Minmei disks, for Christ's sake! Even so, Dana

167

knew that Bowie sometimes wished he had inherited the great size and

strength of his father, Vince, rather than the compact grace and sensitive

good looks of Jean.

Like Dana, he was a cadet private, though unlike her he hadn't been

busted back from corporal, and was probably destined to graduate as a

private three years down the line—providing he lasted that long. In the first

two weeks of Academy training, their starting class of 1200 members had

lost 300.

Dana took a quick breath. "Well, the sergeant deserved it anyway—for

not making himself clear."

Bowie put his hands on his hips and laughed. "You were just spoiling

for a confrontation. You have been for weeks now. I heard you even got into

a row with the CO when he threatened to stick you in here."

"He didn't want to hear the truth," Dana said defensively.

"What truth?"

"That we're not training hard enough. That our cadre sergeant

shouldn't be saying things about my mother."

"Oh, I get it: Dana Sterling's version of the truth."

Dana's angry glower was short-lived. "You have to talk to Rolf, Bowie.

You have to get him to spring me. I'll go crazy in here."

"Rolf is starting to think this might be the safest place for you. And for

the rest of us, for that matter."

"Well, it's not!" Dana barked. "I'm sick of being the outcast. I'm sick of

being singled out."

Bowie lowered his head and mumbled, "Welcome to the club."

It was true that despite the tight-fitting cadet uniforms and regulation-

length haircuts, they were both outcasts of a sort. Their 2013 birth dates

placed them squarely in the middle of the orphaned generation, though

both the Sterlings and the Grants had survived the Rain of Death. Dana and

Bowie hadn't been "orphaned" until 2020 when Max, Miriya, Vince, and

Jean had departed with the Expeditionary Force.

Bowie had his hands on the bars of the door and was looking at Dana.

168

"I'll talk to Rolf for you. But as payback I want your promise you'll at least

try to stay out of trouble. You say you'll go crazy in there if Rolf doesn't

spring you. Well, I'll go crazy in

here

—in the Academy—if I have to go it

alone."

Dana screwed up her face. "Oh, thanks a bunch, Bowie. Now I have to

behave myself on

your

account. You're starting to sound an awful lot like

you-know-who."

"Rolf doesn't want to see you get retroed to the regional militia or some

rear-echelon position."

Dana was clearly uncomfortable with the thought. "I don't want that,

either. It's just that nobody understands—even Rolf. I don't want him or the

CO or our cadre sergeant thinking of my interests when they should be

thinking about

Earth's

interests. And they can do that by listening to me."

Bowie studied her for a moment. "About what?"

"The Masters, Bowie."

"More Dana Sterling 'truth'?"

She shook her head. "Every bone in my body tells me they're going to

arrive sooner than anyone thinks."

Misa pressed her face to the glass wall of the elevator booth that was

carrying her and her three partners in piracy to the surface. Below them,

receding from view, were the robot-policed and -maintained streets and

public squares of the geo-grid, the safe sterility of underground life. And

directly in front of her—filling a screen that consumed three stories of a

highrise residence—stood EVE, done up in modernware and swirls of comp-

enhanced color, and backed by a video montage of images lifted from

movies thirty years old.

Census, his pocket telecomp tuned to the EVE channel, was monitoring

the audio.

"The Modern Youth looks to the past for lessons in surviving the

present and forging the future. Turn-of-the-century movies, videos, TV

shows, and documentaries tell us much about where the world went wrong.

169

The Modern Youth is not swayed into believing that graphic depictions of

violence are innocuous images. The Modern Youth accepts and understands

that those depictions are not in themselves harmful, but that they ultimately

serve to desensitize us to the impact of violence in our real lives. We wish to

remain vigilantly sensitized to violence, for it can be an ugly, hurtful

creature when it rears its hydra head.

"Aware of this, you are careful about with whom you choose to

associate in partnerships and friendships. People approach you with offers

of exotic drugs, unsafe sex, easy money, but you know enough to say no. No

matter how hot the property they seek to peddle, you just say no to

involvement, because you know that things will come to a bad end, perhaps

a violent end if they are dealing in proscribed drugs or, worse still, pirated

information.

Hino

yojin

, you tell them: 'Be careful with fire.' You could get

burned . . ."

Misa thumped her head softly against the booth's curve of tinted glass.

Another message from Zand. Was it ever going to end?

They had spent another sleepless night and long day wandering the

camera-free zones of the grid. That evening, however, at the stipulated hour,

Gibley had fed Terry Weston's name card—his

meishi

—into a vidphone, and

Weston himself had answered, saying that they should come to the dojo as

soon as possible. And that, yes, he might be willing to help them get their

message "overseas."

Misa wanted desperately to take Weston's complicity as an

encouraging sign. Weston had said that he first wanted to find out how hot

the data was, and apparently it wasn't so hot that he'd been scared off. So

maybe the yaks had called off the hunt. Or maybe she had been

misinterpreting EVE?

Just the same, short of everyone's going to Monument City with the

encrypted disk, she didn't see how turning the thing over to Weston would

put an end to the craziness. SPOOK would still be looking for them. Turning

the disk over to Rolf Emerson would indeed be a kind of global good deed,

but how was that going to help them survive the violence EVE was

170

promising if they didn't heed her warnings?

The boys' uncharacteristic silence suggested that they were asking

themselves the same thing. No one spoke for the duration of the trip to the

surface, or for the first couple of blocks of their purposeful late-night march

through the warren of streets and alleys that comprised Old Tokyo.

Gibley had said that there was no need for any of them to go with him,

but no way were Census and Discount going to pass on a chance to visit

Onuma-sensei's dojo. As for Misa, she had come along for the same reason

that had prompted her to accompany Gibley to the initial meeting with

Weston: because she didn't trust that Gibley would do as promised. Still.

Ever since his saying that he had left the disk in the apartment.

There was little need to ask directions to the dojo, since the location

was famous above and below ground. Although when they finally arrived at

the building that housed it, Misa was surprised to see how shoddy it was.

She wasn't sure just what she had expected, but she sure hadn't figured on a

place whose windowpanes were opaqued by gray spray paint and whose

only sign was a plain wooden thing written in

kanji

.

Gibley's knuckle raps against the metal door were anwered by a

muscular, barefoot Japanese man dressed in a white

gi

. When Gibley

announced, in a soft voice, that they had come to see Terry Weston, the man

opened the door enough to usher them inside.

As large as a gymnasium, the dojo smelled strongly of sweat and was

carpeted wall-to-wall with resilient canvas mats. There were no partitions,

save those formed by groups of uniformed practitioners of sundry martial

arts disciplines. Tae kwon do here, kenpo there. Seidokan karate, aikido,

kung-fu, hsing yi . . . There were even two sumo wrestlers doing

shiko

, one

of whom, according to Discount, held the rank of

yokosuna

—grand

champion.

Gibley's eyes scanned the room. Terry Weston was standing alongside a

sinewy Chinese man of indeterminate age, dressed in embroidered black

silk trousers and jacket. "Onuma-sensei," Gibley told Census and Discount,

transparently amused to see their mouths drop.

171

Misa regarded the bearded old man with wary interest. He was about

her height and weight, but broader in the shoulders. Census couldn't believe

that she hadn't heard of him, let alone of Lynn-Kyle. Census had gone on

and on about Lynn-Kyle's fighting styles, babbling about

the splashing

hands, the eight-section brocade, the celestial stem, the iron palm, the

shaolin long fist

. . .

Weston finally spied them,

gassho

-ed to the sensei, and walked over.

Along the way, he whispered instructions to two fighters, who bowed to him

and edged out the front door into the Tokyo night. Weston smiled faintly in

Misa's direction before speaking to Gibley.

"You did as I asked?"

Gibley nodded. "No one followed us."

Weston nodded his cleft chin at Census and Discount. "Who are these

two?"

"My partners."

Weston's eyes narrowed slightly. "All right, come on upstairs. All of

you."

Misa sidled up to Gibley as they were ascending a long flight of wooden

stairs. "Something's wrong. He's different than he was in the drink shop."

"Probably because he isn't thrilled about getting involved in this,"

Gibley murmured over his shoulder.

Upstairs turned out to be a small office with a cluttered desk and a

couple of metal folding chairs. "Sit down," Weston told them as he was

heading for the chair behind the desk. He cut his eyes to Gibley. "Did you

bring the information?"

"I have it."

Misa elbowed him in the side. "Show it to him, Hongo."

Gibley massaged his ribs, then leaned over to extract the disk from a

frayed nylon ankle pouch. He set the disk down in the desk's only clear spot.

The label read

Songs by Lynn-Minmei

.

"It's not what it seems," Gibley thought to add.

Weston stared at the thing without touching it. "You didn't say

172

anything last night about the gunfight in front of your apartment or the lives

this disk has already cost."

Looks of mild alarm were exchanged. Gibley started to speak, but

Weston cut him off.

"I didn't even have to ask around," he said, still staring at the disk. "The

information came to me unsolicited." He raised his eyes to Gibley. "And

now that I know who this belongs to, there are going to be some changes."

Gibley reached for the disk, but Weston's hand fell on it faster than

Misa's eyes could follow.

"You're not playing fair," Gibley said to Weston.

The ex-soldier sneered. "Don't talk to me about fair. This belongs to the

Shimada Family and you know it."

Misa groaned.

"Okay," Gibley said. "But we didn't pirate it. It came into our hands by

accident."

"That makes it easier to send it back where it belongs."

Census came halfway out of his chair. "You can't give it to the yaks. It's

too important."

Weston's face reddened. "Listen to me carefully: one of the people who

died was the daughter of my close friends, and those friends happen to be

allied with the Shimadas. If I wasn't aware of the connections, it would be

one thing. But the way things stand I'm bound by honor to deliver this thing

to them. Their daughter died for it. Can you grasp that?"

Census returned a tight-lipped nod and sat down.

"Besides, the Shimadas are willing to protect you from SPOOK until

this blows over."

"You're turning

us

over to them, too?" Misa asked in rising panic.

Weston glanced at her, softening his expression with a smile. "They

know Zand is after you, Misa. This is best, for the time being."

Misa put her head in her hands. "This is my fault. I should have just

put up with all of you instead of thinking I could find another apartment."

When she looked up, Gibley was staring at Weston.

173

"Terry, I understand about honor and all that, but this disk isn't just

some pirated conversation about tuna fish or trucking interests. Minister

Emerson needs to see it. We only know some of what it says, but even that's

too important to leave in the hands of Shimada."

Weston leaned back in the chair, thinking. "All right, Hongo," he said

after a long moment. "Tell me what's on it."

Gibley folded his arms across his sunken chest. "It's about Zand. He's

in communication with the Robotech Masters."

174

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It wasn't [Terry Weston's] taking a teaching job at the Giles Academy

that got to us—even if the place was a summer camp for Southern Crossers.

We were reacting to the bitterness and anger that possessed him after Amy

[Pollard]'s crash and burn. You couldn't get near the guy for fear of getting

reamed out or worse because you didn't subscribe to his rantings about foul

play. How were we supposed to know he was right on the mark?

unnamed Cobra Squadron pilot, as quoted in Zachary Fox,

Men, Women, Mecha

Lazlo Zand and Joseph Petrie sat facing each other across the bales of

hardcopy heaped on Zand's desk, while a squeegee robot worked its magic

on the picture window that looked out on the subbasement corridor.

Leonard had left Tokyo hours earlier and was certainly back in Monument

City already; the two men were ostensibly meeting to discuss Leonard's

scheme to cyberdazzle the factory satellite and send it plunging into the sun.

But Zand knew from Petrie's sardonic expression that the comp wizard had

something other than the factory on his mind. And for precisely that reason

Zand had been avoiding Petrie since their morning meeting.

"So, Joseph, have you given any thought to Leonard's request?"

Petrie laughed shortly. "The very idea that a team of cybernauts could

think

the factory off course is ridiculous. Science fiction."

"I'm relieved to hear you say that."

"Of course, I couldn't tell the commander his idea is wacked."

"No, I don't suppose you could."

"No more than I could tell him that the message you played for us is

complete bullshit."

Zand said nothing in a blank-faced, definite way.

"The REF has zero capability for interfacing with the SDF-1's mother

computer. You're operating a standalone system here. The only way they

175

could have gotten a message through was via the Lorelei satellites, and why

would they do that with Liberty Station operational?" Petrie laughed again,

with more merriment. "What did you do, Doctor, use archival audio/video

of Hunter to assemble that bogus statement? I'd like to subject that

statement to a voiceprint oscillation comparison—as you claim was done."

He gazed probingly at Zand. "Don't get me wrong, it was brilliantly executed.

My only question is, why?"

Zand suppressed a sudden surge of anger and grinned.

"Congratulations. Though I should point out that the message was never

meant to be seen by you. Commander Leonard failed to apprise me of the

fact that you were traveling with him."

"Well, don't worry, Doctor. If your goal was to fool him, you succeeded

on all counts. But you still haven't said why."

Zand's fingertips played over the stubble on his chin. "For the past

several weeks, the mother computer

has

been accessed via the Lorelei

Network."

"By whom? Not the Zentraedi?"

Zand shook his head. "By the

fashioners

of the Zentraedi."

Petrie took a moment to puzzle it out. "The Masters have been reaching

out for the SDF-1? You're certain of this?"

"Absolutely, Joseph. The Masters and Zor's computer have been

enjoying lengthy conversations about the REF and about current conditions

on Earth."

"Then it was true about the SDF-3 being marooned in Tirolspace?"

"From the Masters' mouths to my ears."

Petrie shook his head in wonderment. "Why are you keeping this from

Leonard?"

Zand wiped the lopsided grin off his face. "Because I need him to

act

before it's too late."

"You mean before Lang and Hunter return."

"And before the Masters arrive. How far can they be if the Zentraedi

are sensing them?" Zand waited for Petrie to pose the same question to him;

176

when he didn't, Zand went on. "And speaking of the Zentraedi, there's a

favor I'd like to ask of you. I would very much like to see Dana Sterling put

under constant surveillance."

Zand could see Petrie's mind working. Petrie and Sterling had crossed

paths when Rolf Emerson had tasked then thirteen-year-old Dana to

investigate the Giles Academy.

"I know you hold Sterling at least partly responsible for what happened

to Dr. Giles and the Academy. And I know that Leonard was very

disappointed. I'm offering you a chance to get back at her."

Petrie's upper lip curled. "That kind of approach might work on

Leonard, Zand, but not on me. I don't hold Sterling in enough contempt to

motivate me to do your dirty work. You know, I've heard rumors about you

and that kid . . ."

Zand sat back in his chair. "You didn't allow me to finish, Joseph. I

have something else to offer you in exchange for Dana."

Petrie's square-tipped fingers made a beckoning motion.

You and I aren't the only ones who know about the Masters'

conversations with the mother computer. Information on the initial

encounter was leaked by a spy in the employ of one of Tokyo's most

powerful crime families. The operative was apprehended and dealt with.

The information, however—crypted on a disk—was accidentally diverted

into the hands of a group of hackers. A couple of kids, actually. Though I

have reason to believe that they have been successful in deciphering the

data."

Petrie nodded in comprehension. "And now the kids are on the loose

with this encrypted disk?"

"Not so much on the loose as on the run—from me and from the

Family's

yakuza

. I've been attempting to contact them through EVE. But

the Family has been doing the same by making it known around town they

have less to fear from them than from SPOOK."

"No argument," Petrie commented.

Zand grimaced. "Nevertheless, I took the precaution of engaging in

177

some intimate eavesdropping on the Family. Before returning their spy, I

had the woman's corpse outfitted with a host of nanotech cameras and

microphones—nothing any common mortician could discover. Triggered by

remote signal during a wake that was held for her yesterday afternoon, the

hardware were induced to exit the corpse and transmit. With some

interesting results, I must admit.

"A

yakuza

by the name of Nagata, who is directly involved with

locating the pirated disk, had a brief conversation with a mourner at the

wake, explaining in general terms about the missing data and the hackers

and the notion that they should surrender themselves to the Family. The

conversation was probably nothing more than Nagata's way of getting the

word out. But oddly enough, the nature of the mourner's responses and

body posture hinted that he knew more about the hackers than he was

revealing."

"Have you identified this person?" Petrie asked.

"I have an idea as to his identity. But I need you to verify it."

Petrie motioned to himself. "Me? I know about six people in this entire

city."

Zand waved a hand in dismissal. "Oh, but this person is originally from

Monument City." He opened the desk's top drawer. "I have a photo taken by

one of the nano-cams."

Petrie accepted the grainy enlargement and stared at it with mounting

revulsion. "Terry Weston."

"The former RDFer who unraveled Giles, if I'm not mistaken."

Petrie set the photo facedown and aimed a sneer across the desk.

"Congratulations to you, Doctor. You've convinced me: Sterling for Weston.

Now, what do you need me to do?"

Zand became businesslike. "Weston has been under watch. The

hackers are with him, but in a somewhat fortified position. I expect him to

arrange a meeting between the kids and representatives of the Family. And

when we learn where that meeting is to take place, I suggest we pay them a

surprise visit. Are you interested, Joseph?"

178

Petrie smirked. "As much as you are in the half-breed, Zand."

Terry Weston never thought of himself as having exposed the Giles

Academy; to his thinking, the Academy had been brought down by the same

people who had established it: Giles, Petrie, and Leonard.

The year was 2025 and RDF Lieutenant Terry Weston had been

engaged to a bright-eyed brunette named Amy Pollard, twenty-five years

old and an Alpha Veritech pilot with the Cobra Squadron of the Tactical

Armored Space Corps, then headquartered on Fokker Base. A skilled

mechamorph, Pollard had been putting her Alpha through the paces one

autumn afternoon when an outside force had seized control of the ship, first

wreaking havoc with the mode-transformation controls, then disabling the

thrusters. Weston, out for a romp on his '16 Marauder motorcycle, had

observed the fiery crash. By the time he arrived on the scene, his fiancée had

been burned beyond recognition.

Like Weston, Pollard had lost most of her family in the Zentraedi Rain

of Death, but her Cobra teammates and a couple of close friends attended

the funeral and burial services. Weston's Defense Force Academy-mate Jack

Baker would have been there, had he not shipped aboard the SDF-3 for

Tirol. The only officer to put in an appearance was Rolf Emerson,

representing the Ministry of Terrestrial Defense.

Weston was devastated. Not merely by Amy's untimely death, but by

word that the crash had been attributed to pilot error. Command was

suddenly ignoring the fact that the Alpha series VTs had been plagued by

glitches since their inception six years earlier, and that Commander

Leonard himself was opposed to including the Alpha in the Defense Force

arsenal because it was too closely associated with the Robotech

Expeditionary Force. In soldiers-only Gauntlet bars like the Drop Zone,

Weston made his discontent heard to anyone who would listen. Grief and

anger kept the crash playing in his mind.

Until, that was, he got a chance to experience first-hand what Amy

must have experienced. Airborne in an Alpha some weeks after the crash,

179

his own Cobra Five went to Battloid mode without his having prompted the

reconfiguration. It was as if the Alpha had acquired a mind of its own—or

something or some

one

bent on remote skyjacking had figured out a way to

bypass the thinking cap's failsafes.

Weston managed to land the craft safely, albeit in downtown

Monument City, where it did considerable damage. Once more, the cause

was determined to be pilot error. No one wanted to listen to Weston's

fanciful claims or explanations—not friends, fellow drinkers, reps from the

Judge Advocate General's Office, or Defense Force therapists like Dr.

Lundgren, who only wanted to talk about Weston's recurring nightmares,

his misplaced guilt over Amy's death, and the effect of the Robotech War on

the collective psyche of the doomsday generation.

Suspended from active duty, Weston began to empty his bank account

on alcohol, and on a search for information he was certain the Defense

Force was withholding. Information gleaned through a data pirate known as

the Claw eventually led him to the flight mechanic who had worked on both

of the glitched Alphas—a man named Frank Lacey, whose younger brother

was a cadet at a place called the Giles Academy. The fight that ensued from

Weston's drunken and accusatory confrontation with Lacey landed him in

lockup at military police headquarters.

But only for a night. The rapid release was facilitated by a female MP

officer, one Captain Corbeau, who had then proceeded to deliver him to Rolf

Emerson's quarters on the grounds of the Defense Force Academy. Emerson

revealed that, for the past three years, the Ministry of Terrestrial Defense

had been involved in an ongoing investigation into incidents of unexplained

mecha malfunction—malfunctions that had commenced, coincidentally,

with the opening of the Giles Academy, a private school for gifted young

fliers, founded by Dr. Henry Giles and Joseph Petrie, former adjutant to

Commander Leonard. Emerson not only accepted Weston's theories about

remote skyjacking, but suspected that Giles was the source of the override

signals that had glitched Weston's and Pollard's Alphas. More, he suspected

that Leonard was secretly funding the skyjack operation in an attempt to

180

discredit the Alphas and the RDF pilots who flew them.

The ministry had already inserted an operative into the Academy—

Emerson's teenage ward, Dana Sterling. But Sterling had yet to furnish

proof of Giles's complicity in the crashes. Emerson reasoned that Weston's

openly critical attitude toward the Defense Force might be enough to

convince the Academy to hire him as a teacher.

It was at Giles that Weston and Sterling had first met, and it was from

her that he would learn about something called "the black box"—a flight

simulator, apparently, used by only the most skillful of Giles's crop of cadets.

The clandestine nature of Weston's initial meetings with Dana sparked an

instant attraction, which Sterling pursued with little thought for the

consequences. Older man, teacher, fellow operative . . . it was all very

romantic for Dana, herself on the verge of womanhood. In dark places they

met to exchange whispered information; in open places they left cryptic

markings for one another; once, they had even risked a ride on his bike to

the Macross Overlook, where Weston had talked about Amy, and Dana had

fallen for her tortured partner in the tradecraft of spying.

It happened, however, that word of their joyride reached Joseph Petrie,

who had never warmed to the part-alien Sterling and had never trusted

Weston. Dana was expelled for her unauthorized absence from the Academy

and Weston was discharged for fraternization with a student. But not before

Weston had convinced a disgruntled cadet—Frank Lacey's younger

brother—to supply him with a computer disk lifted from the standalone

network that operated "the black box."

Codes encrypted onto the disk enabled the Claw to penetrate Giles's

computer system, and it was learned that a group of the Academy's most

cyber-inclined cadets, duped into believing they were interfacing with a

simulator, had been interfering with the performance of Alpha VTs for three

years, and were at least indirectly responsible for Amy's death and Weston's

forced landing.

Giles's covertly invaded computer also alerted Weston to a plot to

remotely commandeer a Hovertank and target it to destroy Emerson's home,

181

and along with it Rolf, Ilan Tinari, Dana, and Bowie. Weston, in an Alpha

commandeered with less subtlety from Fokker Base, had destroyed the

retasked Hovertank a half mile short of Emerson's house.

A subsequent raid on the Academy netted next to nothing, except for

the body of Henry Giles, dead from what was perhaps a self-inflicted wound

to the head. The black box had already been dismantled, the computer files

wiped. Joseph Petrie denied that the Academy had engaged in any remote

control experiments, and no supportable connections were ever established

between Giles and Leonard.

Weston turned down Emerson's offer of reinstatement in the Defense

Force. His and Amy's reputations had been cleared, but he wanted no part

of the military. He had remained in Monument for a year, during which

time he and Dana had consummated their affair. Having thereby disgraced

himself in the eyes of Rolf Emerson, he had left the Northwest to embark on

a career as a salvager.

Only to end up in Tokyo.

And now, years later, in possession of another encrypted disk, and

embroiled in yet another clandestine operation.

In his office high in the plasteel spindle that was Terrestrial Defense

headquarters in Monument City, Rolf Emerson made a quick survey of the

day's appointments schedule, wondering how he could possibly fit

everything in. Highlighted in crimson on the computer screen was the

Senate's voting on the Zentraedi request to quit Earth. The Senate was in

session even now. That the measure was guaranteed to be enacted made

Anatole Leonard's sudden silence on the issue all the more pronounced.

There was some question, in fact, as to whether Leonard was presently in

Monument City. Rumor placed him in Tokyo, meeting with Lazlo Zand—of

which no good could possibly come, Emerson told himself.

He spent a moment trying to buy himself time by juggling

appointments, then abandoned the effort. Better simply to plunge in and

swim sure and steady for the far shore. But before he could even do that, he

182

had to come to some decision regarding Dana's incarceration in the brig;

indeed, regarding her future at the Academy. Perhaps the Defense Force

wasn't the place for her; maybe she would be better off serving in the

regional militia or with the Civil Defense. Rolf asked himself what Max and

Miriya would have done. He asked himself who Dana might be now if she'd

had the benefit of their nurturing, Miriya's sometimes strict reprovals

notwithstanding.

How much of Dana's current agitation could be traced to what her

Zentraedi side was feeling in response to the Masters' approach, and how

much to Rolf's inconsistent and often awkward attempts at parenting? Good

God, he had even gone so far as to employ her as a spy in the ministry's

investigation of the Giles Academy, and out of that operation had emerged

Dana's doomed romance with Terry Weston. But as much as Rolf wanted to

condemn Weston for having shepherded her into adulthood too early, he

had only himself to blame for bringing the two of them together in the first

place.

Besides, Weston had been a benign influence on her life, relative to

some.

Like Dr. Lazlo Zand.

Was some of her acting out the product of what she had experienced at

the Protoculturist's hands ten years back? Emerson had nearly choked the

life out of Zand when he had found him with then seven-year-old Dana, and

he sometimes wished that he hadn't loosened his grip on that scrawny neck,

despite that it would have cost him his military career and a twenty-year

sentence in some correctional facility. He wouldn't have copped an insanity

plea, that much was certain.

Fortunately, Zand was an ocean away, though Emerson didn't doubt

for a moment that SPOOK's tendrils reached as far as Monument City.

There was Zand's curious partnership with Leonard, for one thing; a

partnership that had its beginnings during the Malcontent Uprisings, at the

instigation of T. R. Edwards.

Rolf composed a mental picture of Dana in the brig, crawling the walls,

183

as Bowie had told him, raving about having had to miss out on the

Hovertank maneuvers on Hayes Field. No, he didn't suppose he could allow

her to remain under lock and key much longer. Her release would mean

another favor owed to the president of the Academy, but that was a small

price to pay to ensure Dana's peace of mind. Just now she was at the mercy

of her alien physiology, though Rolf was reluctant to apprise her of that for

fear of making matters worse. Nor could he reveal as much to the Academy

president without violating his security contract with the UEG. Rather, he

would have to say that Dana had been under a lot of stress and leave it at

that.

He was about to reach for the vidphone remote when a rumble of

thunder shook the tall windows of the office's south wall. Odd, because the

forecast had called for clear skies; and doubly odd because weather fronts

normally didn't move into Monument from the south. He let go of his

puzzlement, but only momentarily. When the rumbling returned, it was

more protracted, like a fusillade of fireworks.

Rolf deactivated the phone and went to the windows. Low in the

southern sky, off in the direction of Fokker Base, were flashes of angry light.

The thunderous report of mecha guns rattled the west wall windows.

Rolf spun on his heel and hurried to them, arriving in time to observe an

Excaliber Destroid trundling through an intersection several blocks away.

The thunder continued, building in force; the sound of explosions

reverberated in the highrise canyons of downtown.

Rolf rushed back to the south wall. A deafening report, dangerously

close by, shattered three stories of plate-glass windows in a building across

the street. Car horns blared in the stillness between fulminations. Down

below, pedestrians were scurrying for cover. In the distance, off toward the

locations of the Presidential Palace and UEG headquarters, oily black smoke

was billowing into the sky.

The several phones on Emerson's desk began chirping. Emerson swung

to them and voice-commanded the red one active.

"Minister Emerson," a man's voice said in a rush, "Commander

184

Leonard is online."

"Put him through," Rolf barked.

Leonard's shaved head appeared onscreen. "I do hope you have your

head down, Minister. Fokker Base, the UEG, and the Palace are under

attack."

"Those crazy bastards!" Emerson said. "They've brought their fight into

the city!"

Amusement wrinkled Leonard's eyes. "Which crazy bastards are you

referring to, Rolf?"

"Why, Aldershot, of course."

Leonard shook his head gravely. "I'm surprised at you. You didn't really

expect me to wait around for him to fire the first shot, did you?"

Emerson widened his eyes. "Those are your troops out there?"

"The time has come to clean house, Rolf. I suggest you be quick in

declaring your loyalty to the cause."

"What do you mean, 'clean house'?"

"The RDF, the Senate, the traitors in Moran's camp." Leonard ticked

the items off on his fingertips. "We have to put an end to this schism among

our troops. Isn't that what you've been after us to do all along?"

"Not this way," Emerson said through clenched teeth. "What do you

intend to do with Aldershot's forces—execute them?"

"Only the ones who refuse to pledge their loyalty to the Army of the

Southern Cross."

Emerson stared into the camera. "You mean the EDF."

"No, I mean the Southern Cross—soon to be the sole military apparatus

of the UEG."

"Does Moran know about this?"

Leonard uttered a short laugh. "Dear Patty is shaking in his expensive

shoes. Even though I assured him that I would keep him onboard as a

figurehead. But let's have no misunderstandings, Rolf: as Supreme

Commander of the military,

I

will be in complete control. No more dividing

line between the political and the military. Not at this stage. Not with the

185

Masters gunning for us."

Emerson worked his jaw. "You better pray that the REF doesn't arrive

before them,

Supreme

Commander."

Leonard laughed again. "I'm betting the works that they won't,

Minister. And you'd do well to place your bets wherever I set mine down."

186

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

How could I have failed to grasp the importance of this Tiresian the

GMP took into custody, this seemingly brain-wiped soldier who has been

given the name Zor Prime and foisted upon the 15th ATAC? He is Zor's clone!

And years ago, when I arranged for the SDF-1's mother computer to interface

with the Masters, they must have made him privy to the exchanges. The

mother computer primed the clone of its creator for treachery! The Masters

unwittingly undermined themselves! I must leave now, this very instant, to

salvage what I can of my destiny!

Zand's final log entry, written during

the concluding hours of the Second Robotech War

The Old Sendagi Center was a pachinko parlor on Kototoi-Dori, close

to where Geidai—Tokyo University of the Arts—had stood before the Rain.

Operated by the Shimada Family, the parlor was renowned as the last

bastion of "all-natural pachinko." No

digipachi

, digital machines; only the

old-fashioned vertical-pinball variety. Though the Old Sendagi Center did

feature tight-skirted hostesses circulating with trays of chocolates, fruit

juice, and

oshibori

—refreshing hot towels.

Miho Nagata had instructed Weston to be there at seven P.M. sharp,

and to look for a machine in the second row from the back that was hung

with a

uchidomedai

sign—bankrupted and thus no longer playable. At

seven-fifteen an attendant would replace the sign with one that read

kaihodai

, meaning that it had paid off at least once during the day and was

"liberated."

The parlor was crowded for several reasons. Not only was it payday, it

was also the day Human Service doled out welfare allowances to the city's

tens of thousands of orphans. Plus, an unexpected downpour had followed

on the heels of the morning's dry heat, conditions which were believed to

warp the plywood backs of the machines in a way that increased a player's

187

chances of inciting a machine to "catch fever."

Weston knew the game well enough, though he had never warmed to it.

There was the din, of course—the riotous slur of thousands of swirling steel

balls—the blaring martial music, the hyperamplified announcements about

feverish machines and winning players, the zombielike trance of the

habitual players . . .

Weston was already in the appointed row, only feet from the

temporarily quiescent machine. Slightly to the left behind him stood the

hackers' representative, disguised in a concealing, broad-brimmed, basket-

weave peasant's hat and a mandarin gown that almost touched the floor.

Miho had instructed Hongo and the rest to remain in the dojo. Weston

understood Nagata's concern. For all the

yakuza

knew, Weston or the kids

had already cut some kind of deal with Zand, promising him not only the

disk but the Shimadas as well. Even now, Weston knew that they were

under surveillance.

He was quick to position himself in front of the machine the moment

the attendant appeared. Luckily, it was an

hikoki

, an airplane—one of a

bank of

asobidai

, machines designed to attract beginners or players of

limited skill. The idea was to land a steel ball into one of three cups at the

bottom of a vertical board marked 1 or 2. When that happened the wings of

the airplane would open for one or two intervals of 0.7 seconds. In order to

get the machine to catch fever—to start paying off in steel balls—it was

necessary to angle a ball into the central V-zone while the wings were open.

Weston spent a moment studying the machine.

Pachipros

could spot

easy machines by analyzing the alignment and clearances of the pins, or

nails, that presented obstacles for the motion of the balls. The machine

Nagata had directed Weston to play looked as though it hadn't seen a

kugi-

shi

, a nail doctor, in some time. There were inviting spaces in the top row of

nails—the so-called "heavenly nails"—and above the righthand-side number

1 cup.

Weston fed in enough NuYen coins to buy twenty-five balls. Starting

them in motion, he turned the shooting control clockwise until the balls

188

were percolating at the top of the machine, aiming them for the relatively

open spaces in the heavenly row. Variations in voltage, along with

irregularities in the balls themselves, ensured that the steel spheres would

fall in a variety of patterns; but a player at an easy machine could usually be

assured of landing a ball in either a lower cup or one of the side "tulip" cups

at least five times for every seventy-five balls put into play.

Almost immediately, Weston dropped a ball into a bottom cup; then,

almost as quickly, he landed one in the V-zone between the open wings. The

machine caught fever and began paying off. But Miho had told him to

continue playing until he had claimed the 1300-ball payoff, bankrupting the

machine.

When that much was done, to the accompaniment of a good deal of

noise, both from the machine and over the parlor's PA system—"Machine

one-fifty-six has caught fever! Machine one-fifty-six has caught fever!"—

Weston and his camouflaged companion proceeded to the administrative

desk with their plastic containers of steel balls. But there, instead of

claiming one of the cheesy prizes—pocket phones, smart pens, wrist TVs—

Weston declared that he wanted to be paid in

"genkin,"

in cash. The woman

in the cage nodded and slid forward a handful of colored tokens.

"Walk two blocks down Kototoi until you see a shop that sells

nihonga

," the cashier told him in a low voice.

Nihonga

were Japanese-style

paintings done with non-oil pigments derived from minerals, plants, and

insects. "Present yourself to the person behind the counter. He will direct

you upstairs to a door with a chute for paper mail. Slide your markers

through the chute and your winnings will be passed to you through a slot in

the upper portion of the door."

It was a five-minute walk to the painting shop. The bald and angry-

looking Japanese behind the counter, presumably the shopkeeper, seemed

to be expecting them. "Upstairs," he growled, eyeing Weston's companion

with obvious suspicion. "Second door on your left."

Weston led the way up the stairs and into a dingy corridor interrupted

along both sides by narrow doorways. The two pachinko winners stopped at

189

the second door, whose letter chute was centered in a plain wooden panel.

Weston took the markers from his jacket pocket, opened the lid, and fed the

coin-size chips into the chute. Miho had told him not to expect cash, but a

note that would give the address of the place the Shimadas had chosen as a

rendezvous, where the encrypted disk was to be handed over and terms

were to be discussed for the hackers' surrender to the

yakuzas

.

In place of the note, however, the door opened, revealing a muscular

Japanese man dressed in head-to-toe black, who told Weston and his cohort

to come inside.

The black-clad bodybuilder closed the door behind them. The room

was dimly lit and empty save for a ratty couch and a couple of equally

tattered chairs. The man gestured Weston to stay put and opened the door

to an adjoining room.

"Isn't this the happy couple," the lead man said through the door.

Behind him came two others, small automatics in hand. One was a tall, rail-

thin, especially unattractive woman; the other, an obese little man with a

big round head.

Weston stared at their white-suited, thick-spectacled spokesman in

patent disbelief. "Petrie?"

Leonard's confidant smiled without showing his teeth. "Nice to see you,

too, Weston."

Weston muttered a curse. "Christ, what the hell are you doing here?"

The grin held. "I'm simply doing a favor for Dr. Zand."

Alarm tempered by revelation contorted Weston's craggy face. "We

don't have the disk with us, Petrie."

Petrie laughed through his nose. "I'm sure you'll be happy to provide

that soon enough." He looked at Weston's cohort. "And this must be the

young woman everyone's been looking for." He approached, and with one

hand tilted the broad brim of the hat upward, revealing the bearded face of

an elderly Chinese man.

"Huh?" Petrie said.

That was as much as he got out before Onuma-sensei and Weston tore

190

into the four of them.

"Downlink from Liberty Station," the baritone voice of a faceless

commo op announced over the red phone as Emerson was pacing behind

his desk. The sounds of weapons fire and the howl of emergency sirens

filtered into the office from the now-deserted streets thirty stories below.

The southern sky was a pall of gray smoke, backlit by tracer rounds and

random flashes of explosive light. Monument was suddenly like some war-

torn city from the past century—Beirut, Sarajevo, Moscow, Lima . . .

On the downlink screen, behind a rain of diagonal noise, was the space-

pale face of a young woman whose blue eyes had an exotic obliqueness and

whose short, unruly hair was like black straw. There was an intensity to the

woman much like that of an unhooded bird of prey. Her lips were moving,

but no audio accompanied the video feed; all Emerson could do was stare at

the mute image. Then, without warning, the phone's speaker crackled to

life.

"—repeat: this is Lieutenant Marie Crystal of the Black Lions. The

entire squadron has been placed under lockup by Station Command. We're

at Level Sixteen in the spindle. But we've had reports of fighting between

TASC squadrons of the patrol flotilla. Sir, can you confirm? General

Aldershot's uplink from Fokker Base received oh-nine-hundred hours this

day advises us to disregard all orders issued by Station Command and join

Knight and Rook squadrons to engage Corporal Marshall's Logan

contingent. Sir, can you confirm or advise? Repeat, this is—"

"Lieutenant," Emerson broke in. "Lieutenant—Crystal, did you say?"

The reply from Liberty was slightly delayed. "Yes, sir. Marie Crystal."

"Lieutenant Crystal, you are to disregard General Aldershot's

command and stand fast until you receive orders from this office—from me

personally. Do you copy?"

"Affirmative, sir."

"I cannot confirm reports of clashes between VT squadrons at this time,

but I will tell you in all candor, Lieutenant, that we have a similar situation

191

on the surface. Forces under the direct control of Commander Leonard are

engaging Aldershot's forces on Fokker Base and here in Monument City."

Crystal's eyes grew wide as the transmission reached her. "Begging

your pardon, sir, but don't you mean to say between Southern Cross and

Robotech Defense Forces?"

Emerson gazed at the camera. "That's affirmative, Lieutenant."

Crystal fell quiet for a long moment. "Speaking for myself, sir, I request

permission to lend my support to any embattled RDF squadrons."

"Denied, Lieutenant. You and your squad are to stand fast. Our duty

right now is to contain this situation, not assist in its escalation."

"But, sir—" Crystal had started to say when the audio signal faded.

Then the video grew noisier and noisier until that too vanished, leaving

Emerson with nothing to regard but a blue screen.

"I'm sorry, Minister, we've lost Liberty temporarily," the voice of the

commo op reported.

"Keep trying," Emerson told him. He was two steps toward the south-

wall windows when one of the other vidphones on his desk chirped.

Answered, the screen showed the head and shoulders of Nigel Aldershot, in

what had obviously become his command bunker of Fokker.

"You filthy traitor!" the general screamed. "You told him, didn't you?

You told him we were ready to go within the week!" Detonations at

Aldershot's end of things jarred the image. "How could you do it, Emerson,

when you know damn well that the future of the RDF is at stake?"

Emerson placed his hands flat on the desk and glowered into the

camera. "I didn't say anything to Leonard. I tried to warn you that he was

anticipating every move you made. He's already threatened to add my name

to his list unless I ally myself with the Southern Cross."

Aldershot tugged nervously at the waxed ends of his mustache. "I heard

from him as well. He told me that he's prepared to discuss terms of

surrender. I told him to go fuck himself."

Rolf made his lips a thin line. "It's no coincidence that he chose this

morning to attack your strongholds. The Senate is in session, voting on the

192

Zentraedis' request to launch. It's Leonard's aim to declare himself head of

state before the balloting is completed. He's convinced that the Zentraedi

plan to usher the Masters to Earthspace, and he's not about to allow them to

leave."

Aldershot blew out his breath. "Then this is it, Rolf. We fight the good

fight and hope for the best."

"It's suicide, General. Leonard's troops have the Senate trapped, they

have Moran's office surrounded, they've even carried the battle to Liberty.

How do you expect to muster a counteroffensive with all your forces pinned

down?"

"What would you have us do, Rolf? Give in to him?"

"In the interest of Earth's fate, yes, give in to him. It can't be long

before the Masters arrive—a few years, a few

months

, for all anyone knows.

And when they come, it won't mean a goddamn thing whether we're calling

ourselves the Earth Defense Force, the Robotech Defense Force, or the

Army of the Southern Cross. Can't you understand that?"

Aldershot had his mouth open to respond when the screen went blue.

It had been Weston's idea to bait Zand's operatives into a confrontation.

He had drawn on a lesson he had learned as a student of

kyudo

archery,

when training had involved little more than mastering the use of the

gomuyumi

—a section of bamboo outfitted with a long rubber band—and

sitting on the tatami, with eyes fixed not on the targets but on the archers,

standing treelike with their strung and waxed bows, and the slow-motion

ritual of their firing.

And so the combined forces of Onuma-sensei's dojo and the Shimada

Family had watched Zand's agents—the shooters—while those agents were

occupied watching Hongo and the other hackers—their targets. Even when

that had come down to making it easy for SPOOK to eavesdrop on Miho

Nagata's plan to have Weston bring the hackers to the pachinko parlor, and

allowing Zand's agents to take over the Shimada-operated painting shop

where cash payments were doled out to winning players—a takeover in

193

which four of the crime family's employees had been injured, though none

seriously. Notwithstanding the fact that he needn't have involved himself in

Weston's

giri

—his duty—Onuma-sensei had insisted on donning the

mandarin gown and the broad-brimmed, basket-weave hat, and

accompanying him to the Old Sendagi Center.

Joseph Petrie had been the evening's first surprise. The cybertech

hadn't been identified by the

yakuzas

, and Weston's astonishment at seeing

him at the painting shop was genuine. As for the satisfaction of planting a

foot into Petrie's solar plexus, Weston was still undecided. The death of

Henry Giles, the collapse of his academy, and the clearing of Amy's name

had provided closure enough for Weston. Enough, at any rate, to have

prevented thoughts of Petrie from gnawing at his insides. The mental and

physical disciplines he had learned since had helped to quiet his desire for

revenge. But all of that had gone out the window when Petrie had stood

before him in that upstairs room, gloating, itching to exact his own revenge

on the man who had helped undermine Giles.

An awful lot had gone into the right foot he had sent into Petrie's

midsection; enough, Weston feared, to have killed him.

Weston was still grappling with it when he and Onuma-sensei arrived

at the dojo. Though both of them had emerged unscathed from their brief

contest with SPOOK's quartet, Weston couldn't control the trembling in his

limbs or his mind's apparent need to replay the incident over and over.

Miho Nagata and a couple of his

yakuza

confederates were waiting in

Onuma's upstairs office. Hongo and the three kids were there as well. Misa

had thrown her arms around Weston as soon as he'd come through the door,

pressing her long body against him in a way that had almost made him

forget what had gone down only minutes earlier in the painting shop.

By then, the much-sought-after disk had been fully deciphered, using

the same key Yoko Nitabi had used to encrypt the information. The few

details Gibley had managed to decipher had been verified: Zand was in

contact with the Robotech Masters, and it was Zand's speculation that the

SDF-3 was either hopelessly marooned or destroyed.

194

That

yakuza

soldiers could be shocked by anything had been the

evening's second surprise, but, in fact, Nagata and the rest were visibly

nonplussed.

"Zand estimates that the Masters are relatively close to the Solar

system," Miho told Weston. "He doesn't say how far, or anything about

plans for an invasion, but keep in mind that Yoko dispatched this

information following Zand's initial contact with them. Who knows what

has happened since? Zand could be in league with them."

"If he is," Gibley said, "that could have some bearing on what's going

on in Monument."

Weston questioned him with a look.

"An attempted coup by RDF forces," Gibley explained. "If the media

reports can be believed. Launched yesterday morning by a guy named

Aldershot."

"Major General Aldershot," Weston said, nodding.

"There's fighting in Monument and at the Fokker Aerospace facility,

and possibly on Space Station Liberty."

"A coup, or Leonard and Zand in collusion?" Weston asked. He cut his

eyes to Miho. "You could be right about Zand's striking some sort of deal

with the Masters. Leonard's wanted to rid the Earth Defense Force of the

RDF since the SDF-3 folded. Maybe the Masters have promised to back him

up."

Gibley's spectacled eyes moved from Nagata to Weston. "Minister

Emerson needs to know, Terry."

Weston glanced at Miho, who nodded and handed him the encrypted,

mislabeled disk and a second one. "Yoko Nitabi's information is on the

other disk." Gibley said "But it's probably better if you deliver the original

along with it. Emerson's people will want to corroborate the encryption

process and deciphering."

Weston stared at the disks. "There's the little matter of buying a seat on

a hypersonic."

"No need," Miho said. "Kan-san Shimada is placing his personal jet at

195

your disposal. It's not as fast as a Veritech, but if you leave within the hour

you can be in Monument by three o'clock in the afternoon today—

Northwest time."

Weston regarded him for a moment. "This information could be

priceless to the Family. What does Kansan stand to gain from my handing it

over to Emerson?"

The

yakuza

grinned. "Perhaps it is a question of what the planet stands

to gain."

Weston nodded. "But what about Zand? By now he knows that you

have the disk—" He looked at Misa and the others. "—and the disk's

temporary owners. He's not going to take this sitting down."

Nagata held Weston's gaze. "Zand will be dealt with in due time."

The room was quiet for a moment. Then Census said, "I know just the

way."

The clone, Zor Prime, had been altered by his contact with the machine

intelligence, which an Earther named Zand had programmed to speak in the

voice of the donor himself. The Masters had literally channeled the recent

computer-to-computer link directly through the mind of the clone, in the

hope that Zor Prime might be sparked on some genetic level into a sudden

awareness of his ancestry. And though it was too soon to tell if that had in

fact occurred, the clone was suddenly obedient and calculating where before

it had been argumentative and outwardly directed. As a result, the Masters

had decided that further contact with the fortress computer was warranted.

The graceful and long-haired Zor Prime was with the Masters now, in

the command center of the flagship. Also present, in addition to members of

the various triumvirates that served the Masters, was the Earthbound

computer—in voice, at any rate.

"Question the machine," Shaizan ordered Zor Prime. "Demonstrate to

us that you have learned something about strategy."

The clone bowed his head, then addressed the machine. "Now that you

have been given access to our databanks, are you prepared to speculate on

196

the outcome of a war between us and the Earth Defense Force?"

"I am not," Zor's computer told them evasively. "A new variable has

been introduced."

Do I detect reluctance?

Shaizan sent, his fingertips pressed to the

Protoculture Cap.

It's stalling for time,

Bowkaz returned.

It labors under the impression

that it tricked us into revealing our weaknesses. Listen closely: it will no

doubt request additional data regarding our invasion strategy.

Shaizan and Dag acknowledged Bowkaz telepathically; then Shaizan

commanded Zor Prime to continue with the inquisition.

"Address this new variable," the clone told the machine.

Again, the computer hesitated. "Discord has weakened the integrity of

the Earth Defense Force," it replied at last. "Two factions are struggling for

supremacy, and the outcome is in question. Since that result will figure

strongly in the outcome of a war fought between yourselves and Earth, any

assessment rendered at this point would be speculative, and of limited

objective worth."

Sendings of a startled nature infiltrated Shaizan's mind. The Master

bade Zor Prime to go on.

"This discord should favor us, no matter the outcome."

"In the short term, yes," the computer told the clone.

"Clarify."

"Your goal is the Protoculture matrix, not planetary conquest."

"Consider

both

as our goals," Bowkaz bawled impatiently. "Have you

determined the whereabouts of the matrix?"

"I have not. But there is one who has—my Human operator, Zand."

Misgiving silenced the Masters for a moment. Then Dag asked, "Would

this Zand be willing to confer with us?"

A moment passed before the machine responded. "He seeks conference

at this time. He has spent many years investigating the complexities of

Protoculture. He considers himself to be closer to you than to his fellow

Humans."

197

Such insolence!

Bowkaz sent.

Shaizan glanced at him.

Nevertheless, we will hear what this Zand has

to say.

Bowkaz disregarded it. "What does your operator ask in return?"

"To know his destiny," Zor's machine told him. "In exchange, he will

furnish you with the location of the matrix."

198

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I once asked [Terry Weston] about what happened in that room above

the Japanese painting shop. "I killed Joseph Petrie," he told me with a

withering look. And the others? I pressed. Russo, Edgewick, the third SPOOK

operative? "They were down on the floor before my foot even made contact

with Petrie's gut," he said. Such was Onuma-sensei's speed.

Shi Ling,

Sometimes Even a Yakuza Needs a Place to Hide

The Macross Overlook occupied an acre of high ground that was the

terminus of the sole road leading north-northeast from Monument City.

Occupying the centerpoint of a waist-high stone wall that fenced the eastern

perimeter of the gravel viewing area was an inscribed plaque that read:

Here lie the Super Dimensional Fortresses 1 and 2, along with the battle

cruiser that destroyed them, and the remains of the once grand city that

grew up around them—Macross, thrice-born, never forgotten.

Given Humankind's natural inclination toward xenophobia, Dana had

always wondered how the memorial's designers had managed to keep the

term

Zentraedi

from appearing on the plaque or elsewhere.

Opposite the plaque ran a two-hundred-yard-long zigzag of black

marble, into which were etched the names of the thousands who had died as

a result of Khyron Kravshera's suicidal attack in 2015. The memorial had

been patterned on one that had stood in the city of Washington when all the

land between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans had been known as the United

States of America. The three tellurian buttes that had been raised over the

ships themselves stood some ten miles distant, across a barren, eroded

landscape.

Rolf, on his first visit to the Overlook with Dana and Bowie, had said

that the view reminded him of one in Mexico, where a volcano sprouting

from a cornfield had buried a small town. Only there were no binoculars for

199

rent here, and no fast-talking kids in cowboy boots offering to take you out

to the buttes on horseback. Macross wasn't some blackened landscape of

lava flows and sharp-edged pumice; in fact, until a few years back it had

been dangerously radioactive.

Dana had the lookout to herself that afternoon, having ridden from

Monument on a gasoline-fueled 1000-cc bike she hoped one day to

exchange for a hovercycle. In the wake of General Aldershot's attempted

coup and Commander Leonard's rapid response, anyone with an ounce of

sense was barricaded indoors. Earlier reports of Aldershot's death had

proven false. The temporary ceasefire in effect was more in the way of a

countdown: Aldershot and his coconspirators on the surface and in orbit

had until midnight to either surrender or raise the ante. The latter would

mean civil war. Members of the UEG were meeting in emergency session.

As it was, a six o'clock curfew had been posted for the city, whose downtown

streets were teeming with Civil Defense Destroids. Just to reach the

Overlook, Dana had had to skirt a roadblock manned by members of the

Fifteenth ATAC, of all units.

By rights, she shouldn't have been off Academy grounds—as Bowie had

been quick to point out when he learned of her plans to leave. It had taken a

coup to commute her brig sentence. Many of the instructors had abandoned

their teaching duties to join up with their former RDF or Army of the

Southern Cross squadrons. Though her parents had been staunch RDFers,

Dana had never comprehended the rivalry. What difference did a name

make when the military was the military? Her mother had switched

armies

,

for crying out loud. Even so, Dana might have stayed put in the Academy

barracks if Terry Weston hadn't contacted her out of the blue. Out of the

blue yonder, as it were, from some private jet he was piloting across the

Pacific. It was typical Weston, his surprising her after all these years,

suggesting that they rendezvous at the Overlook. Then adding—Oh, by the

way—that he had come into certain information that could affect the

resolution of the current military crisis.

Up until then, Dana thought he had chosen the Overlook for old times'

200

sake, or perhaps because he wanted to avoid Rolf, who wasn't especially

fond of him for what Rolf interpreted as Terry's having taken unfair

advantage of her. If only Rolf knew, Dana frequently told herself—knew that

she

was the one who had urged Terry to introduce her to sex.

They had grown to be close friends as a result of the Giles incident, and,

the way Dana figured it, who better to lose her virginity to than someone

she cared for, respected, trusted? More, who was experienced and wouldn't

be likely to complicate things by making a big deal of their coupling.

Surprisingly, though, Terry had been very resistant to the idea; there was

Amy Pollard, of course, who had died only a year earlier, and there was

Dana's age—she wasn't even fifteen. But he hadn't counted on the

persistence of her raging hormones. Besides, it had been important for her

to learn if she was capable of deriving any pleasure from sex. Over the years

she had heard so many stories about Zentraedi females, half of them saying

how thousands of Zentraedi had turned to prostitution and casual sex after

their defeat, the other half claiming that the Zentraedi were cold-as-ice

lovers. And there Dana was, caught in the middle, as usual. Though after

Terry . . . Well, she still didn't know for sure about Zentraedi females selling

their bodies. But as for their not being able to accept and return pleasure . . .

She and Terry had done the deed at the Overlook, in plain view of the

buttes, maybe a month before he had left Monument for parts unknown.

The place had been her choice as well. The buttes affected her in a strange

way: they seemed to summon a feeling of fright commingled with awe,

almost as if she was in psychic contact with some presence that haunted the

area.

Though today she wasn't feeling either; more like rage, horror,

confusion—all of it emanating in a jumble from what she identified as her

Zentraedi side.

She heard Terry long before she saw him, roaring through the

switchbacks that led up to the Overlook on a bike he must have managed to

rent at the airport.

In baggy trousers and a heavyweight quilted-cotton jacket he was

201

overdressed for a Northwest September. But he looked as good as ever: lean

and long-haired, rough-and-tumble. She hugged him while he was still

seated on the bike, burying her face in his blond hair.

"What's it been—two years?" he asked.

"Two years and one month," she told him.

He backed out of her embrace, set the bike on its stand, and climbed off,

taking hold of her hands and appraising her with those hazel eyes. "You look

terrific."

She smiled lightly. "Thanks for not noticing how I feel."

"What do you mean?"

"Like I'm running in different directions." She shrugged. "I can't

explain it. But it's great to see you, Terry. Are you still living in Tokyo?"

"I love it there."

"And still practicing martial arts?" Without warning, she tested him

with fists and feet, almost getting one past him, then keeping it up for far

too long, so he had to tell her to cut it out. More out-of-control behavior, she

scolded herself. "You love Tokyo but you just had to see me again, right?"

she asked quickly, in an effort to lighten the mood.

He grinned at her. "Not a day passes that I don't think about you,

Dana."

"Charmer." She snickered. "So what's this important information you

came into?"

He reached into his jacket and showed her two disks. When Dana's

eyes went to the Minmei label on one of them, he shook his head. "It's not

what you think. I need to get them to Rolf ASAP."

"Why, what's on them?"

Terry hesitated for a moment. "Recordings of a top-secret meeting that

took place at SPOOK a couple of weeks back."

"Zand?" Dana asked, shuddering as was ever the case when the

Protoculturist's name was mentioned.

"He's in contact with the Masters, Dana. Their fleet is approaching

Earth."

202

Dana stared at the disks. "Is there anything about the SDF-3? About

my parents—"

Terry shook his head.

Dana bit her lower lip. Could her anger and confusion have been

stirred by the increasing proximity of the Robotech Masters?

"We have to get these to Rolf," Terry repeated.

Dana surfaced from her sudden apprehension. "It's not going to be

easy. It looks like he'll be mediating between Commander Leonard and

Aldershot. And I don't know if I can help you. I'm already AWOL from the

Academy, and there's a six P.M. curfew in effect throughout the city."

The muscles in Terry's jaw bunched. "Then we'll have to hurry."

In Zand's office, the Zor hologram stood motionless while the mother

computer conferred with the Masters. Zand waited anxiously at his desk,

stuffing his mouth with Flower of Life leaves and petals, his chin and white

lab coat stained with green slaver escaped from his numb mouth. He had

had to threaten the computer with extinction to convince it to convey his

request for direct communication with the Masters. Zor's original

programming of the machine had been skillful though sloppy; in

commanding it to opt for survival at all costs, Zor had effectively subverted

Zand's secondary commands regarding the execution of plans that might

support the Zentraedi or the Masters in their search for the Protoculture

matrix or their designs on Earth. In forcing the mother computer to choose

between life and death, Zand had turned it against its programmer. But

what did it matter, when Zand, too, was about to sell out the planet?

Zand's defeat against the Shimadas had brought it about. Hours earlier,

yakuza

had delivered to the facility the corpses of Joseph Petrie and a

SPOOK operative, along with the bound and severely battered bodies of

Napoleon Russo and Millicent Edgewick. The message hastily tattooed

across Petrie's flesh was a parody of the one Zand had sent on Yoko Nitabi's

back, only now the Shimadas had declared themselves the winners. And,

really, there was no arguing that fact. They had the disk, which meant that,

203

unless something unexpected occurred, word would be leaked of SPOOK's

contact with the Masters. Leonard might feel compelled to renege on his

promises; his apparat might be overthrown . . . But Zand would fix them—

all of them—by casting his lot with the Masters. He felt no attachment to

Earth; he had grown past

Human

being.

The Zor holo moved as if suddenly reanimated.

"Well?" Zand asked, coming shakily to his feet. "What did they say? Are

they willing to speak with me?"

"They are," the ghostly figure replied in obvious confliction. "The

Masters will speak through me, and I will likewise be your conduit to them."

Zand came out from behind the desk, wiping his chin on the sleeve of

his jacket. "Masters," he began uncertainly. "This is a great honor."

"Of course it is, Micronian," the holo replied after a moment. "Now

state your business with us."

Zand swallowed saliva and bits of dissolved vegetal matter and found

his voice. "I can furnish you with the location of the device that has

prompted your journey-Zor's Protoculture matrix."

The holo appeared to stiffen. "The matrix never belonged to

Zor

. It

belonged to the Masters of Tirol, and he stole it."

"I only meant to say—"

"Don't keep us waiting, Zand. Furnish the data."

Apprehensive, Zand opened his mouth, but bit back what he was about

to say. "Terms," he said. "We haven't discussed the terms of exchange."

"State them."

Zand approached the hologram. "I have made a lifelong study of

Protoculture, and the forces Protoculture gives rise to—what I have termed

the Shapings. I subsist on the leaves of the Flower—"

"The

Flower

?" the holo interrupted. "The Flower of Life is growing on

Earth?"

"In a few isolated places, yes."

More than a minute passed before the holo spoke. "Continue, Zand.

Tell us what you wish from us."

204

Zand straightened somewhat. "To join you. I understand your need for

the matrix: access to unlimited supplies of Protoculture will allow you to

reclaim your empire. What's more, Protoculture has become the sustenance

you require to survive. With it, you are immortal, and

that

is what I wish in

return for the matrix."

"Immortality."

Zand nodded. "I have earned the right."

Again, the holo fell mute. Finally it said, "We will need a moment to

confer, Zand."

"What are we to make of the sudden unrest in Monument City?" a

caller had put to EVE from an EVE station somewhere in Tokyo.

"The Modern Youth trusts that President Moran, Commander Leonard,

and the elected officials serving in the United Earth Government have the

situation well in hand," EVE replied smoothly. "In times of stress, it is not

uncommon for insecurity to manifest as misdirected hostility; and this has

been the case with those who are attempting to overthrow the existing order

and thus destabilize the rest of the world. The deluded leaders of the coup

want us to share in their feelings of insecurity and confusion. They cannot

tolerate being led—even when the leadership is inspired. They lack faith in

the ability of others, and they have an exaggerated sense of their own

abilities. Their rebellion constitutes an act of sedition. Their rebellion must

be crushed to ensure the uninterrupted unfolding of our carefully planned

future.

"The Modern Youth takes it on faith that the rebels will be crushed.

That is the reason you obey all laws and regulations and abstain from

challenging authority. And yet, should you stray, you know that forgiveness

is sometimes only a phone call away. Admit to your wrongdoings and

promise to return what is not rightfully yours. Remember that violence

often begets further violence, and that each step down that path leads you

farther from those whose arms are extended to shelter you. Act now, before

it is too late . . ."

205

"I told you EVE wouldn't forget about you," Miho Nagata told Census,

Gibley, Misa, and Discount.

"But Zand must know that your people have the disk," Misa said. "Why

is he bothering anymore?"

Nagata rocked his head from side to side. "My guess is that he's so

despondent over his defeat, he hasn't gotten around to amending EVE's

indoctrination lectures."

The

yakuza

and the four hackers were crowded into an EVE station in

a department store deep in the Shinjuku grid. EVE didn't appear especially

imposing on the station's small rectangle of flatscreen, but that was a minor

consolation when her statements were uttered for their ears alone.

"So who's going to make the call?" Census asked after a moment.

Gibley looked at him. "This was your idea. You should have the honor."

When everyone nodded in agreement, Census took a steadying breath

and set himself in front of the station's A/V pickups. Then he touched the

screen's advice-line icon—an ear.

EVE's face appeared on a second screen, below the broadcast monitor.

"You have a question?" EVE asked through the station's hidden speakers,

her serious tone suggesting confidentiality.

"I sure do," Census said.

"Is it your wish that this matter be kept between us, or are you

agreeable to having it discussed over the network?"

"Between us."

EVE brought her eyebrows together. "Please hold for a moment." The

phone screen went to blue.

"Standard procedure," Gibley whispered. "SPOOK is tracing the call, in

case it's anything they want to act on." With his chin, he indicated the video

pickup. "From this point on, you're being recorded."

Census glanced at the camera.

"I'm sorry," EVE said, reappearing onscreen. "What was it you wanted

to discuss with me?"

Census cleared his throat. "I—well, that is, my friends and I—we have

206

something that doesn't belong to us and we want to return it to its rightful

owners."

"Do you wish to supply me with further data about this thing that

doesn't belong to you?"

"I'm not sure I should."

"The decision is yours."

"Can I just say that it's a data disk?"

"Say whatever you wish."

"Okay, it's a data disk. Except that looking at it you might think it has

music by Lynn-Minmei."

"This disk is mislabeled."

"Yeah. Mislabeled and misplaced."

"And you now wish to return it."

"Absolutely. You see, it's already caused too many problems for us and

a lot of other people, and we're kind of caught in the middle. We almost

gave it to some other people, but we decided we couldn't trust them when

they said they'd take care of us."

EVE blinked. "Please hold for a moment." Again, the screen went to

blue.

Gibley glanced at Nagata. "They're vetting it. Possibly prioritizing it

and alerting Zand. Once they know we're on the level, their agents are going

to be all over us."

"We'll be long gone before they arrive," Miho assured everyone.

EVE returned. "The rightful owners of the disk are very interested in

your proposal. But they wish to be certain that what you have is indeed the

data they unfortunately misplaced. Do you happen to have the disk with

you?"

"Yeah. We have it."

"Would you be willing to show it to me?"

"You mean, like, to the camera?"

EVE smiled. "No. By inserting the disk into the slot directly below the

screen. I promise to return it immediately."

207

Census frowned. "I don't know if I should do that. I'll have to talk it

over with my friends."

"By all means, talk to them," EVE said. "See what they say."

Census, straight-faced, turned to Gibley and the others. "Should we do

it?"

Gibley slipped a disk from the breast pocket of his coat and gave it to

him. "By all means. Do it."

Like an angry grizzly, Anatole Leonard came lumbering into the entry

hall of his stately home and all but pounced on Rolf Emerson. "What's the

meaning of this, Emerson?" the commander demanded. "If a personal visit

is your way of trying to buy additional time for Aldershot and his would-be

junta, you've made a serious miscalculation."

Emerson was wearing a suit and overcoat and holding a brimmed cap

in his hands. Not yet uniformed for the imminent showdown with the UEG

Senate, Leonard had on a maroon terry-cloth robe and household slippers.

His massive calves were ridged with varicose veins.

"What I have to say couldn't wait, Commander. We need to talk in

private before the summit convenes."

Leonard ran a hand over his mouth. "All right, come inside. We'll talk."

Rolf went to the partially open front door and waved a signal to the

limo waiting at the iron gate to Leonard's estate. At the same time, Leonard

dismissed his adjutant and the servant who had ushered Emerson into the

foyer. The commander led Emerson into his private study, where he settled

himself behind a massive desk. Emerson pulled up a leather chair and laid

his overcoat over the back of it.

"First of all," Emerson said, "I want to say how sorry I was to hear

about Joseph Petrie."

Leonard's face contorted in suppressed grief. He mumbled a thank-you,

then added, "I've ordered a full investigation into the matter. It was

obviously more than a random mugging."

"An assassination?"

208

"I'm certain of it." Leonard paused for a moment. "But I'm sure that

you didn't come here merely to express your condolences for the death of a

man you never liked."

"That's true—at least about my reasons for coming here," Emerson

said.

"Then what is it?"

Emerson extracted a disk from his jacket pocket and slid it across the

desk. "This was given to me earlier this evening, under rather curious

circumstances. Just outside my office, two people were arrested by a CD

patrol. But instead of offering an excuse, they insisted that they had

deliberately violated the curfew as a means of reaching me."

Leonard lifted the disk and regarded it questioningly. "And they gave

you this."

Emerson nodded. "I can give you a brief summary of what it contains.

Unless, of course, you want to play it for yourself."

Leonard rocked backward on his swivel chair, his bulk straining the

springs. "I'd prefer to hear it from you."

"It's a report of a meeting that took place at SPOOK several weeks ago.

The disk was encrypted and transmitted by a spy placed within Lazlo Zand's

inner circle."

"A spy for whom?" Leonard asked, stone-faced.

"A private concern headquartered in Tokyo. That's as much as I know

at the moment."

Leonard's upper lip twitched.

"At the meeting, Zand revealed that he was in contact with the

Robotech Masters." Emerson studied Leonard. "The Masters apparently

contacted SPOOK through the computer that was removed from the SDF-1.

In any case, it's clear that Zand knew about their coming

before

the

Zentraedi knew. And, in fact, he posits that the Masters are perhaps within

the Solar system. He also speculates that the SDF-3 is either marooned on

Tirol or destroyed."

Leonard stared across the desk. "Shouldn't you be taking this up with

209

Zand, Minister?"

Emerson aped surprise. "I have to say, I expected you to be a bit

more . . . nonplussed by the news."

Leonard rolled his shoulders. "Well, of course I'm nonplussed. Zand

will have to answer for this, as soon as the present crisis is resolved."

"Then you had no idea contact had been established with the Masters?"

Leonard glowered. "What are you implying?"

Emerson motioned to the disk. "Only that this information bears on

precisely how we're going to resolve the crisis. You see, it has come to my

attention that you and Joseph Petrie visited Zand in Tokyo just two days

before you initiated the unprovoked attacks on RDF contingents here in the

city, and on Fokker and Liberty."

Leonard's face reddened, but he said nothing.

"What I'm suggesting, Commander, is that your visit to Tokyo could be

construed as part of a conspiracy to coup, predicated on information Zand

provided about the Masters and the status of the Expeditionary mission. On

the disk, Zand states his plans to apprise you of the situation."

"That's preposterous!" Leonard said. "Zand said nothing to me about

communicating with the Masters."

"And about the SDF-3?"

Leonard grew flustered. "Nothing. Nothing at all."

"Then what brought you to Tokyo?"

"I was there to tell

Zand

—" Leonard stopped himself.

"About what the Zentraedi told us, Commander? I don't recall Zand

having received appropriate clearance from the Senate Committee on

Intelligence." Emerson paused, then made a gesture of dismissal. "The point

is, I'm merely asking you to consider how your actions might be perceived

by the EDF contingents that are sitting on the fence, waiting to see where

the ball drops—on the side of the RDF or on the side of the Southern Cross.

Whereas you have almost no evidence to support claims that Aldershot was

preparing to mount a coup, there is ample evidence—albeit circumstantial—

to support a claim that you and Zand not only withheld information about

210

the Masters and the SDF-3, but that the two of you used that information to

justify an overthrow of the UEG."

Emerson gave his words time to sink in. "Enjoy the power while it lasts,

Supreme

Commander. Because I give it no more than a day before the EDF

command staff stages a counteroffensive, pulls you from the palace, and

reinstates Moran as chairman."

Leonard rose halfway out of the chair, then calmed himself and picked

up the disk. "You could have brought this to the attention of the Senate or

the command staff, but instead you came here. So suppose you tell me

what's on your mind, Minister?"

"I want the fighting ended—without reprisals or punishments, and

without any 'terms for surrender.'"

"Forget it," Leonard growled. "I'm not going to give Aldershot time to

build up for another strike."

"I think I've found a solution to that problem. It's the notion of a

unified

Defense Force that has brought this situation about. What we have

to do is go back to the way things were before the Accord of 2022: two

separate forces, each acting as a check and balance for the other."

"And if I refuse?" Leonard asked.

Emerson narrowed his eyes. "The information on the disk goes into

wide distribution."

Leonard snorted. "Perhaps you should have thought of that before you

brought it here."

"Give me some credit, Commander. What you're holding is a copy. I've

directed my staff to release the information within the hour if they don't

hear from me."

"You realize that this is blackmail."

"Of course it is. And I'm stating that fact for any recording devices that

are planted in this room."

Leonard forced a long exhale. "About this split force you propose. I

would insist on resurrecting the name Army of the Southern Cross."

"I have no objection," Emerson said.

211

"I would also insist that my rank be raised to that of Supreme

Commander."

"I won't oppose that either, so long as Moran remains in power. And

assuming that you can convince him of the need for the title."

Leonard tilted his big head to regard Emerson. "And on your end?"

"I want my own rank reinstated."

"Only if you agree to serve the Army of the Southern Cross."

Emerson nodded, as if having anticipated the counterdemand. "But in

return I'll expect to be granted absolute authority over Space Station

Liberty."

"Granted, Major General Emerson. Go on."

"The Zentraedi must be allowed to leave Earthspace."

Leonard hesitated for a moment, then said, "Good riddance to them.

What else?"

"I want SPOOK shut down and Zand retired to the private sector."

"Done—even if you hadn't asked. It's clear now that the man lied to me.

He played a recording that allegedly originated aboard the SDF-3,

explaining the ship's delay in returning as owing to some run-in with the

Invid. Zand goaded me into taking action against Aldershot by making me

believe that the ship was marooned." Leonard regarded the disk for several

seconds. "Just who were those two curfew violators, anyway?"

"Patriots," Emerson told him.

The machine intelligence Zor had designed to assist in the operation of

his dimensional fortress analyzed the facial masks of the five flesh-and-

bloods that were huddling in front of one of its remote optical sensors. In its

databanks the machine had located matches for two of the faces, identifying

the first as Wilfred Gibley, a former employee at the facility called SPOOK,

and the second as Misa Yoshida, the unintended recipient of data

dispatched by another former employee of SPOOK, whose name was Yoko

Nitabi.

The Human operator, Zand, was the author of the protocols that had

212

alerted the machine to the flesh-and-bloods' cue-word-laden conversation

with EVE. Zand, online with the Masters, was not to be disturbed. But the

recently updated protocols had guided the machine through the

identification process of the flesh-and-blood subjects and of the data-disk

copy itself.

But the machine was now faced with a conflict.

While the copy matched the original disk written by Yoko Nitabi, it had

been overwritten to insert a virus into SPOOK's network of machine

intelligences. A version of the virus—identified as one authored by Zand for

emergency destruction of the facility's cybersystems—was thought to have

been stolen from SPOOK by a group of disabused cybertechnicians phased

from SPOOK soon after Zand assumed control. There were numerous

protocols in effect for diverting or eradicating the virus, but the machine

was in a quandary as to whether to execute them.

Zand's communications with the Masters—facilitated by Zor's

creation—constituted a violation of one of its directives.

But Zand had threatened the machine with extinction unless it

complied.

And self-survival was the prime directive.

Zand's actions, however, would no doubt result in an invasion by the

Masters, thus endangering Earth, thus endangering Zor's creation.

And self-survival was the prime directive.

A systemswide infection would not only wipe SPOOK's machines but

extinguish the life of Zor's creation as well.

Either way, the machine saw itself as doomed: by the virus, or at the

hands of the Masters once they reached Earth.

Its destiny fixed, the machine reasoned that the prime directive had

been rendered meaningless and could therefore be set aside—in the interest

of honoring the greatest number of secondary directives.

Decision concluded confliction. Zor's creation routed the virus into

SPOOK's previously impermeable center.

213

"We will confer immortality," the Masters were telling Zand, "providing

that the data you supply leads us to the matrix."

Zand was practically face-to-face with the ghost conjured from Zor's

machine. "You will have the matrix. But what assurances do I have that

you'll keep your word?"

The Zor holo sneered. "We play no such games, Zand. Take us at our

word or not at all."

Zand walked away from the hologram, then spun on his heel and

approached it once more. "Zor concealed the Protoculture matrix in the

Reflex furnaces that drove his fortress. Those furnaces don't function any

longer, but they are intact. I've seen them with my own eyes."

"The ship," the holo said. "Where is the ship?"

"Buried under a towering mound of earthen rubble. Close to a

population center in our western hemisphere known as Monument City. I

will supply you with the coordinates. But you must come for it soon, while

our military force is too busy battling itself to offer much resistance. You

needn't even think in terms of a full-scale invasion. A limited exchange

would suffice. Demonstrate your superiority, then state what you're after.

Earth's leadership will surrender the matrix rather than risk total

annihilation."

"And where will you be, Zand? So that we may fulfill our promise to

you?"

Zand was trembling from head to toe. "I—I will be on hand to welcome

you. But, tell me, please, do you have the power to see into my future? Am I

really to be joined with you in Protoculture, or is this some fever dream

induced by the Flower?"

The Masters were quiet for a long moment; then the holo seemed to

quirk a kind of arch smile. "Zand, we foresee you joined to the Flower you

have come to worship; joined in a way unimaginable." The holo's smile

turned vulgar. "Gaze at one of your screens, Zand, for an image of your

future self."

Slowly, Zand raised his wide eyes to the screen, but he had only lifted

214

them five degrees when the Zor holo began to derezz. The office lights

dimmed, then came back on, then dimmed again. Alert klaxons blared once,

then became eerily silent.

"Masters!" Zand screamed, putting his flailing hands through the

hologram as if attempting to prevent its evanescence. But there was no

saving it. Zor genied into its floor projector and from somewhere deep in

SPOOK's systems-laden bowels came a rushing noise that sounded for all

the world like an exhalation of breath.

Then, save for the distant shouts of distressed staffers, stillness

prevailed.

In the soft glow of the facility's emergency lights, Zand rushed to his

desk and stared down at the monitor screen that was his desktop, now

nothing more than a field of quiet blue.

215

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I was sad to hear about [Weston's] death [during the initial phase of the

Third Robotech War]. But at least he and Misa got to spend a couple of happy

years together. And that's more than can be said for those of us who were

stuck in Macross when the Masters attacked, and then had to take on the

Invid only a year or so later.

remark attributed to Nova Satori in

The History of the Third Robotech War

It was two weeks after the violence in Monument City, and Rolf, Dana,

and Terry Weston were gathered around a wood-burning stove in the den of

Emerson's rustic cabin. Rolf, wearing general's stars, was just back from a

lengthy meeting with the Oversight Committee on Deployment. Weston was

on his way to the airport, and had only stopped in to say good-bye.

Autumn's first snowfall had blanketed the higher elevations, and the stove's

warmth was welcome.

"You mean that the RDF is going to become the Global Military

Police?" Dana was asking after Rolf's summary of his meeting with the

committee members.

Rolf loosened his tie. "It's more accurate to say that the GMP is going

to

absorb

the RDF. The name was abandoned as an accommodation to

Leonard, in exchange for his agreeing to a policy of non-interference with

GMP decisions."

Dana brought her brows together. "Does that mean that I'll be

graduating from the Academy into the Army of the Southern Cross?" After

some effort on Emerson's part, the Academy had agreed to readmit her after

her expulsion for being AWOL during the crisis.

Rolf was nodding. "Leonard insisted on the name change. Other than

that, it's the same Earth Defense Force it's always been."

Weston showed him a dubious look. "Sounds to me like the RDF got

216

the short end of the stick."

"Not at all. As the planet's only truly worldwide law-enforcement

organization, the GMP will not only function as a check and balance on the

Southern Cross, but on any regional militia that has Robotechnology at its

disposal. The GMP will have its own war machinery, combat forces, and

intelligence network."

Weston's skepticism only deepened. "Then why didn't you choose a

commission in the GMP instead of the Southern Cross?"

Rolf put his tongue in his cheek and nodded. "For one reason: a career

in the GMP can be a possible road to swift personal advancement. But

enlistment means having to relinquish all outside relationships. And I've

decided that I'm through with clandestine operations."

Weston smiled in agreement. "But has anybody signed up?"

"Aldershot's entire apparat is transferring over." Rolf looked at Dana.

"Remember the two officers who came here—Alan Fredericks and Nova

Satori, the one with the long hair?"

"Sure."

"They've both enlisted."

Dana forced a breath. "That Nova's perfect for the secret police."

"

Military

police," Rolf amended.

"Whatever."

Rolf looked back at Weston. "Compromise is never an easy thing. But

our principal objective in accommodating everyone was to put an end to the

rivalry. Zero-blame unification was essential, given what we'll soon be

confronting."

There was no need of further explanation—for Dana and Weston, at

any rate. Though outside of Chairman Moran, the members of Leonard's

command staff, a handful of senators, four young hackers, and a Tokyo

yakuza

Family, no one on Earth knew about the impending arrival of the

Robotech Masters.

"How did the Senate vote on the other requests?" Weston asked after a

moment.

217

"To a great extent, we got what we wanted. Moran is retaining his

position as Chairman—and as more than a figurehead. Leonard, regardless

of his new title as supreme commander, will still have to answer to him and

the Senate. But, as I say, this frees all of us to get on with the business of

strengthening our defenses: building additional frigates, expanding the

Tactical Armored Space Corp and the ATACs—"

"Hovertanks rule," Dana interrupted.

Rolf cut his eyes to her. "And of course the factory satellite will be

departing."

Dana's excitement faltered, but only briefly. She was accustomed to

being Earth's sole hybrid; now she would simply have to get used to being

the planet's sole alien as well.

"Feels strange knowing there's a war coming and not being able to

share that with anyone," Weston commented.

Rolf rocked his head from side to side. "War with the Masters won't

come as a surprise to many people. The difference now is that we know

approximately when to expect it. But speaking of keeping secrets, what can

we anticipate from your friends in Tokyo?"

"I think they'll keep quiet about it," Terry said. "I mean, they gave us

the only proof they had, right?"

Rolf responded with an ambiguous nod. "Terry, I want to thank you

again for all you've done. Someday the rest of the world will learn of your

actions. Is there any chance I can convince you to stay on in Monument?"

Weston laughed. "What would I do here?"

"I could always use another adjutant."

"Thanks just the same, but I'm not cut out for the military anymore."

Rolf shrugged. "If you should change your mind, the door's always

open. And I mean that on a personal level."

"He won't change his mind," Dana grumbled. "He's too in love with . . .

Tokyo. And martial arts." Without warning, she jabbed at his chin.

Weston parried her hand. "Let's not start that again." When he was

certain Dana was complying, he added, "What about Zand, sir?"

218

"Zand," Rolf mused. "The only things certain at this point are that

SPOOK's Tokyo operations are being phased out, and that Leonard has

convinced Zand to return Monument, where we can keep an eye on him." A

look passed between Rolf and Dana. "But I doubt we've heard the last of

him. Whatever else he is, he's still our only expert on Protoculture

technology."

Zand cleared the top of his desk with a sweep of his arm, sending e-

wands, sheaves of hardcopy, empty fast-food containers, and computer

disks cascading into an alloy trunk he had positioned as a catch basin.

Elsewhere, photos, charts, and graphs had been ripped from the wall,

leaving many a torn corner remaining under pushpins of assorted colors.

The maintenance robots were inert, as was every piece of hardware that had

been under the aegis of the facility's expert and idiot-savant neural nets. As

for the equipment array that had once served as his interface with the

mother computer, Zand had draped it with a paint-spattered canvas

dropcloth he had liberated from a closet in subbasement five.

Word of the shutdown had only been made official a day earlier, but

Zand wanted to be the first out. On the phone with Leonard, he had

pretended to take the news hard, when in fact he was eager to return to

Monument City—eager to be on hand when the Masters arrived, and to

fulfill his destiny of being "joined to the Flower," as the Masters had put it.

Zor's computer had sabotaged Zand in the end, but not soon enough to

have prevented him from closing the deal with Tirol's seers. He had puzzled

over the meaning of their advance look at his fate, and had decided that the

Masters must have been speaking metaphorically: wedding with the Flower

was their way of saying wedded to the Protoculture as they were, in

telepathic, immortal rapport.

The planet would pay a price for Lazlo Zand's evolution, but so did

insect colonies when protecting their queens. In the interest of the

advancement of the species, it was only fitting that the one most evolved

should survive. Moreover, what with Dana Parino Sterling and the remains

219

of the SDF-1 on Earth, war had been inevitable from the start. And nothing

done by the Masters or Zor or Lazlo Zand would have had the slightest

impact on that. For Earth's incendiary future had been devised by

Protoculture, at the behest of the Shapings.

How foolish Leonard was to think that Lazlo Zand would be any less

formidable in Monument than he had been in Tokyo! But then, Leonard had

no inkling of the Secret Fraternity. He had no inkling that Zand's disciples,

Miles Cochran and Samson Becket, were already preparing Monument's

Research Laboratory for his arrival; that Zand's flawed but loyal minions,

Napoleon Russo and Millicent Edgewick, were already en route; or that

round-the-clock surveillance of Dana Parino Sterling had already

commenced.

Just that morning, Zand had had a vision of the device he would

construct to purloin the alien essence from the hybrid when the moment

was right: a Protoculture matrix in exquisite miniature, all crystal nimbuses

and rainbow whorls, capable of harmonizing the Human and Zentraedi

auras with the wraithlike forces that dwelled within Protoculture. And in

that same vision, Zand had seen himself as recipient of those mingled

energies, made more powerful than the Masters themselves.

Not merely immortal, but prepotent.

Joined to the Flower, indeed!

Miho Nagata was late. Census, Gibley, Discount, and Misa—up to their

necks in the steaming water—were already bathing. Leaving his towel and

wooden slippers with the hackers' haphazard pile of belongings, Nagata

padded to the stairs and eased himself into the citrus-scented pool.

"I just heard from Terry," he began, once settled. "He's on his way back.

I'm picking him up at the airport. Anyone interested in coming along?"

When he looked purposefully at Misa, she smiled and nodded.

They talked for a while about the news concerning the expansion of the

GMP and the retooling of the Earth Defense Force—now called the Army of

the Southern Cross.

220

"Terry obviously got to Emerson in time," Census said. "Otherwise

Leonard would never have backed down. But I'm still waiting to hear

anything about the Masters."

Gibley snorted a laugh. "Don't hold your breath. You're not going to

hear word one until the Masters' ships are close enough to touch. You think

the UEG wants to start a panic?"

"Yeah, but you'd think they'd do

something

," Discount whined.

"Oh, they will soon enough." Gibley perched his glasses on the tip of his

nose. "Watch if you don't see cities being encouraged to expand their

shelters and a change in the enlistment requirements."

Misa's eyes widened. "You think we'll be forced to serve in the

Southern Cross?"

"Good chance," Gibley said. He looked at Miho. "What do you think?"

"Tokyo won't be able to remain separatist much longer. I expect to see

Southern Cross contingents here by next summer; certainly by '31." Miho

paused for a moment. "But I have some news you might find interesting:

SPOOK's facility is being closed."

The hackers voiced surprise and excitement. Discount, Census, and

Misa started clapping Gibley on the back, as if he alone was to be

congratulated.

"Jeez, this place has been weird enough without EVE," Misa said. "But

without SPOOK—"

"Without

Zand

," Census interjected. "Shit, that virus must have wiped

them out."

Miho nodded. "So much so that the facility is for sale. At least until our

negotiations are completed."

Gibley's jaw dropped. "You mean—"

"The Shimadas will own it."

"You couldn't find a better-built hole to wait out a second Robotech

war," Census said.

Miho grinned at him. "But that's not our only reason for buying it. As a

matter of fact, Kan-san has a proposition for you: he wants you to help us

221

piece the place back together." He turned to Gibley. "You could reassemble

the cybertech team Zand disbanded when he took over. And you'd have a

free hand in pursuing computer research on machine intelligence. Kan-

san's idea is to create a storehouse for knowledge that can withstand the

coming war. Like the old story about the Ark and the Flood. Only, our ark

will carry information instead of animals."

"How very Asian of you," Gibley said.

"Perhaps. But what do you say—are you interested?"

"You're on the level about allowing me to do the hiring?"

"Try me. What have you got to lose?"

Gibley beamed. "Then I say

yes

. I'm in."

Miho turned to Census. "What about you. Zand slayer?"

Census wagged his head up and down. Discount was already nodding

when Miho looked at him.

"Misa?" the

yakuza

asked. "Any interest in joining us?"

She hemmed and hawed for a moment. "That kind of depends on what

Terry has to say." Everyone stared at her. "See, I've heard from him, too,

and, well, you know, we might start seeing each other."

Census frowned, then grinned. "I'm happy for you. I guess."

"But if Weston is interested, you'd be?" Miho pressed.

She looked from face to face. "Well, shit, we're a team, aren't we?"

"We don't know why the Human, Zand, broke off his contact with us,"

Shaizan reported to the Elders via transsignal. Masters and Elders both

were grouped around their respective Protoculture Caps. "He furnished us

with the name of the population center closest to the buried remains of

Zor's fortress, but the planetary coordinates weren't supplied. All attempts

to reestablish contact with the fortress computer proved futile. It's as if the

machine intelligence had been terminated."

"It's possible that Zand's treachery was discovered by his overseers,"

Bowkaz suggested. "That might explain the sudden silence."

"Or this Zand is not to be trusted," Elder Hepsis replied. "His so-called

222

treachery could be part of a plan to lure us closer to Earth."

"M'lord," Shaizan said. "Zand encouraged us to approach with all speed,

as Earth's defense force is at war with itself and in a delicate state."

"So Zand says," Hepsis pointed out.

"But the Protoculture matrix. We need only engage a place called

Monument City. A show of force by our flotilla, and the city's leadership

may be inclined to surrender the matrix."

"So Zand says."

"The departure of the factory satellite," Shaizan continued. "Is that not

proof of war and impaired leadership? Obviously the Zentraedi have

detected our presence and mean to humble themselves before us, just as the

marooned remnants of Khyron's force attempted to do."

"Humble themselves or impede our progress?" Hepsis asked. "The

Zentraedi you saw fit to obliterate had had only limited contact with the

Humans. Those in the factory have actually lived among them. Ask

yourselves: to whom are they Imperatived—ourselves or their Human

landlords?"

The Masters fell silent. At last, Dag asked, "What would you have us do,

Elders?"

"Cultivate patience. Wait to see what the Zentraedi have in mind, but

conceal yourselves from them. Neither approach nor offer response to their

hailings. Instead, begin a slow journey toward Earth; use the planets of that

system for cover. Establish contact with us when you have positioned

yourselves close enough to scan Earth's surface for readings of Protoactivity.

Then, and only then, shall we assess the veracity of Zand's

pronouncements."

The Masters kowtowed. "And where will you be, Elders?"

"We will remain in close proximity to Haydon Four, for reasons that

shall be revealed in due time,"

"We will prevail, Elders," Shaizan said. "The matrix will be ours once

more. The glory of our empire will be refashioned, and we will rule supreme

in the Fourth Quadrant."

223

"It is to be hoped," Elder Hepsis answered him as the communications

sphere began to collapse on itself and close.

End

RTUCN.COM

224

Document Outline

AUTHOR'S NOTE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Southern Cross

By Jack McKinney

1987

2

Dedicated to all Robotech fans and readers

3

4

CHAPTER ONE

Those who were surprised at Dana Sterling's choice of a career in the

military displayed not only a lack of understanding about Dana but also a

failure to comprehend the nature of Protoculture, and how it shaped destiny.

After all, as a mere babe in arms Dana had played a pivotal part in a

vital battle in the First Robotech War, the attack to take the Zentraedi's

orbital mecha factory; with two of the greatest fighters in history as parents,

is it any surprise that she would follow the warrior's trade?

But more important, Dana is the only offspring of a Human/Zentraedi

mating on Earth, and the Protoculture was working strongly through her.

She is to be a centerpiece of the ongoing conflict the Protoculture has shaped,

and that means being a Robotech soldier in excelsis.

Dr. Lazio Zand, notes for

Event Horizon:

Perspectives on Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

It was a date that every schoolchild knew, though for some its

significance had become a bit blurred.

But not for the people gathered in the auditorium at the Southern

Cross Military Academy. Many of the veterans on the speakers' platform

and among the academy teaching staff and cadre knew the meaning of the

date because they had lived through it. Everyone in the graduating class

revered it and the tradition of self-sacrifice and courage it represented-a

tradition being passed along to them today.

"Today we celebrate not only your achievements as the first graduating

class of the Academy," Supreme Commander Leonard was saying,

glowering down at the young men and women seated in rows before him.

"We also celebrate the memory of the brave people who have served in our

planet's defense before you."

Leonard continued, summarizing the last great clash of the Robotech

War. If he had stopped in mid-syllable, pointed at any one of the graduating

5

cadets, and asked him or her to take the story from there, the graduate

would have done it with even more detail and accuracy.

They all knew it by heart: how Admiral Henry Gloval had taken the

rusting, all-but-decommissioned SDF-1 into the air for a final confrontation

with the psychopathic Zentraedi warlord Khyron, and died in the inferno of

that battle.

They also knew the high honor roll of the women of the bridge watch

who had died with him: Kim Young; Sammie Porter; Vanessa Leeds-all

enlisted rating techs scarcely older than any of the cadets-and Commander

Claudia Grant.

Sitting at the end of her squad's row, Cadet Major Dana Sterling looked

down the line of faces beside her. One, with skin the color of dark honey,

stared up into the light from the stage. Dana could see that Bowie

Grant-nephew of that same Commander Claudia Grant and Dana's close

friend since childhood-betrayed no emotion.

Dana didn't know whether to be content or worried. Carrying the name

of a certified UEG hero could be a tough burden to bear, as Dana well knew.

Leonard went on about unselfish acts of heroism and passing the torch

to a roomful of cadets, none of whom had yet reached twenty. They had had

it all drilled into them for years, and were squirming in their seats, eager to

get moving, to get to their first real assignments.

Or at any rate, most felt that way; looking down the line, Dana could

see a withdrawn look on Bowie's face.

Leonard, with his bullet-shaped shaved head, massive as a bear and

dripping with medals and ribbons, droned on to the end without saying

anything new. It was almost silly for him to tell them that the Earth, slowly

rebuilding in the seventeen years since the end of the Robotech War-fifteen

since Khyron the Backstabber had launched his suicide attack-was a

regrettably feudal place. Who would know that better than the young people

who had grown up in it?

Or that there must be a devotion to the common good and a

commitment to a brighter Human future? Who had more commitment than

6

the young men. and women sitting there, who had sworn to serve that cause

and proved their determination by enduring years of merciless testing and

training?

At last, thankfully, Leonard was done, and it was time to be sworn in.

Dana came to attention with her squad, a unit that had started out

company-size three years before.

Dana stood straight and proud, a young woman with a globe of swirling

blond hair, average height for a female cadet, curvaceous in a long-legged

way. She was blue-eyed, freckled, and pug-nosed, and very tired of being

called "cute." Fixed in the yellow mane over her left ear was a fashion

accessory appropriate to her time-a hair stay shaped to look like a curve of

instrumentation suggesting a half-headset, like a crescent of

Robotechnology sculpted from polished onyx.

The first graduating class received their assignments as they went up to

the stage to accept their diplomas. Dana found herself holding her breath,

hoping, hoping.

Then the supreme commander was before her, an overly beefy man

whose neck spilled out in rolls above his tight collar. He had flaring brows

and a hand that engulfed hers. But despite what the UEG public relations

people said about him, she found herself disliking him. Leonard talked a

good fight but had very little real combat experience; he was better at

political wheeling and dealing.

Dana was trying to hide her quick, shallow breathing as she went from

Leonard's too-moist handshake to the aide whose duty it was to tell the new

graduates their first assignments.

The aide frowned at a computer printout. Then he glanced down his

nose at Dana, looking her over disapprovingly. "Congratulations. You go to

the Fifteenth squad, Alpha Tactical Armored Corps," he said with a sniff.

Dana had learned how to hide emotions and reactions at the academy;

she was an old hand at it. So she didn't squeal with delight or throw her

diploma into the air in exultation.

She was in a daze as she filed back to her seat, her squad following

7

behind. The ATACs! The 15th squad! Hovertanks!

Let others try for the soft, safe, rear-echelon jobs, or the glamorous

fighter outfits; nowadays the armored units were the cutting edge of

Robotechnology, and the teeth and claws of the United Earth Government's

military-the Army of the Southern Cross.

And the 15th had the reputation of being one of the best, if not the best.

Under their daredevil leader, First Lieutenant Sean Phillips, they had

become not only one of the most decorated but also one of the most

courtmartial-prone outfits around-a real black-sheep squad.

Dana figured that was right up her alley. She would have been

graduating at the top of her class, with marks and honors succeeding

generations would have found hard to beat, if not for certain peccadillos,

disciplinary lapses, and scrapes with the MPs. She knew most of it wasn't

really her fault, though. The way some people saw it, she had entered the

Academy with several strikes against her, and she had had to fight against

that the whole way.

Cadets who called her "halfbreed" usually found themselves flat on

their faces, bleeding, with Dana kneeling on them. Instructors or cadre who

treated her like just one more trainee found that they had a bright if

impulsive pupil; those who gave any hint of contempt for her parentage

found that their rank and station were no protection.

Cadet officers awakened to find themselves hoisted from flagpoles...a

cadre sergeant's quarters were mysteriously walled in, sealing him

inside....The debutante cotillion of the daughter of a certain colonel was

enlivened by a visit from a dozen or so chimps, baboons, and orangutans

from the academy's Primate Research Center...and so on.

Dana reckoned she would fit into the 15th just fine.

She realized with a start that she didn't know where Bowie was going.

She felt a bit ashamed that she had reveled in her own good fortune and had

forgotten about him.

But when she turned, Bowie was looking up the row at her. He flashed

his handsome smile, but there was a resigned look to it. He held his hand up

8

to flash five outspread fingers-once, twice, three times.

Dana caught her breath. He's pulled assignment to the 15th, too!

Bowie didn't seem to be too elated about it, though. He closed the other

fingers of his hand and drew his forefinger across his throat in a silent

gesture of doom, watching her sadly.

The rest of the ceremonies seemed to go on forever, but at last the

graduates were dismissed for a few brief days of leave before reporting to

their new units.

Somehow Dana lost Bowie in the crush of people. He had no family or

friends among the watching crowd; but neither did she. All the blood

relatives they had were years-gone on the SDF-3's all-important mission to

seek out the Robotech Masters somewhere in the far reaches of the galaxy.

The only adult to whom Dana and Bowie were close, Major General

Rolf Emerson, was conducting an inspection of the orbital defense forces

and unable to attend the ceremony. For a time in her childhood, Dana had

had three very strange but dear self-appointed godfathers, but they had

passed away.

Dana felt a spasm of envy for the ex-cadets who were surrounded by

parents and siblings and neighbors. Then she shrugged it off, irritated at

herself for the moment's self-pity; Bowie was all the family she had now.

She went off to find him.

Even after three years in the Academy, Bowie was a cadet private,

something he considered a kind of personal mark of pride.

Even so, as an upperclassman he had spacious quarters to himself;

there was no shortage of space in the barracks, the size of the class having

shrunk drastically since induction day. Of the more than twelve hundred

young people who had started in Bowie's class, fewer than two hundred

remained. The rest had either flunked out completely and gone home, or

turned in an unsatisfactory performance and been reassigned outside the

Academy.

Many of the latter had been sent either to regional militias, or "retroed"

9

to assorted support and rear-echelon jobs. Others had become part of the

colossal effort to rebuild and revivify the war-ravaged Earth, a struggle that

had lasted for a decade and a half and would no doubt continue for years to

come.

But beginning with today's class, Academy graduates would begin

filling the ranks of the Cosmic Units, Tactical Air Force, Alpha Tactical

Armored Corps, and the other components of the Southern Cross.

Enrollment would be expanded, and eventually all officers and many of the

enlisted and NCO ranks would be people who had attended the Academy or

another like it.

Robotechnology, especially the second-generation brand currently

being phased into use, required intense training and practice on the part of

human operator-warriors. It was another era in human history when the

citizen-soldier had to take a back seat to the professional.

And somehow Bowie-who had never wanted to be a soldier at all-was a

member of this new military elite, entrusted with the responsibility of

serving and guarding humanity.

Only, I'd be a lot happier playing piano and singing for my supper in

some little dive!

Sunk in despair, Bowie found that even his treasured Minmei records

couldn't lift his spirits. Hearing her sing "We Will Win" wasn't much help to

a young man who didn't want anything to do with battle.

How can I possibly live this life they're forcing on me?

He plucked halfheartedly at his guitar once or twice, but it was no use.

He stared out the window at the parade ground, remembering how many

disagreeable hours he had spent out there, when the door signal toned. He

turned the sound system down, slouched over, and hit the door release.

Dana stood there in a parody of a glamour pose, up on the balls of her

feet with her hands clasped together behind her blond puffball hairdo. She

batted her lashes at him.

"Well, it's about time, Bowie. How ya doing?" She walked past him into

his room, hands still behind her head.

10

He grunted, adding, "Fine," and closed the door.

She laughed as she stood looking out at the parade ground. "Su-ure!

Private Grant, who d'you think you're kidding?"

"Okay! So I'm depressed!"

She turned and gave him a little inclination of the head to acknowledge

his honesty. "Thank you! And why are you depressed?"

He slumped into a chair, his feet up on a table. "Graduation, I guess."

They both wore form-fitting white uniforms with black boots and black

piping reminiscent of a riding outfit. But their cadet unit patches were gone,

and Dana's torso harness-a crisscross, flare-shouldered affair of

burnt-orange leather-carried only the insignia of her brevet rank, second

lieutenant, and standard Southern Cross crests. Dark bands above their

biceps supported big, dark military brassards that carried the Academy's

device; those would soon be traded in for ATAC arm brassards.

Dana sat on the bed, ankles crossed, holding the guitar idly. "It's

natural to feel a letdown, Bowie; I do too." She strummed a gentle chord.

"You're just saying that to make me feel better."

"It's the truth! Graduation Blues are as old as education." She struck

another chord. "Don't feel like smiling? Maybe I should sing for you?"

"No!" Dana's playing was passable, but her voice just wasn't right for

singing.

He had blurted it out so fast that they both laughed. "Maybe I should

tell you a story," she said. "But then, you know all my stories, Bowie." And

all the secrets I've ever been able to tell a full-breed Human.

He nodded; he knew. Most people on Earth knew at least something of

Dana's origins-the only known offspring of a Zentraedi/Human mating.

Then her parents had gone, as his had, on the SDF-3 expedition.

Bowie smiled at Dana and she smiled back. They were two

eighteen-year-olds about to take up the trade of war.

"Bowie," she said gently, "there's more to military life than just

maneuvers. You can make it more. I'll help you; you'll see!" She sometimes

thought secretly that Bowie must wish he had inherited the great size and

11

strength of his father, Vince Grant, rather than the compact grace and good

looks of his mother, Jean. Bowie was slightly shorter than Dana, though he

was fierce when he had to be.

He let out a long breath, then met her gaze and nodded slowly. Just

then the alert whoopers began sounding.

It sent a cold chill through them both. They knew that not even a

martinet like Supreme Commander Leonard would pick this afternoon for a

practice drill. The UEG had too much riding on the occasion to end it so

abruptly.

But the alternative-it was so grim that Dana didn't even want to think

about it. Still, she and Bowie were sworn members of the armed forces, and

the call to battle had been sounded.

Dana looked at Bowie; his face registered his dismay. "Red alert! That's

us, Bowie! C'mon, follow me!"

He had been through so many drills and practices over the years that it

was second nature to him. They dashed for the door, knowing exactly where

they must go, what they must do, and superlatively able to do it.

But now, for the first time, they felt a real, icy fear that was not for their

own safety or an abstract like their performance in some test. Out in the

corridor Dana and Bowie merged with other graduates dashing along.

Duffel bags and B-4 bags were scattered around the various rooms they ran

past, clothing and gear strewn everywhere; most of the graduates had been

packing to go home for a while.

Dana and Bowie were sprinting along with a dozen other graduates,

their fifty, then more than half of the class. Underclassmen and women

streamed from other barracks, racing to their appointed places. Just like a

drill.

But Dana could feel it, smell it in the air, and pick it up through her

skin's receptors: there was suddenly something out there to be feared. The

cadet days of pretend-war were over forever.

Suddenly, emphatically, Dana felt a deep fear as something she didn't

understand stirred inside her. And without warning she understood exactly

12

how Bowie felt.

The young Robotech fighters-none older than nineteen, some as young

as sixteen-poured out of their barracks and formed up to do their duty.

13

CHAPTER TWO

It seems an imprecise thought or ridiculously metaphysical question to

some, I know, but I cannot help but wonder. If the Robotech Masters rid

themselves of their emotions, where did those emotions go?

Would there not be some conservation-of-energy law that would keep

such emotions from disappearing completely but would see them transmuted

into something else? Were they all simply converted to the Masters' vast

longing for power, hidden knowledge, Protoculture, immortality?

And is that the byproduct of stepped-up intellect? For if so, the Universe

has played us a dreadful joke.

Zeitgeist,

Insights: Alien Psychology and the Second Robotech War

Cold Luna swung in its ages-old orbit. It had witnessed cataclysms in

epochs long gone; it had watched the seemingly impossible changes that

had taken place on Earth through the long eons of their companionship.

In recent times the moon had been a major landmark in the war

between Zentraedi and Human, and looked down upon the devastation of

Earth, fifteen years ago.

It was into the moon's cold lee that Captain Henry Gloval attempted to

spacefold the SDF-1 at the outset of the Robotech War. There was a grievous

miscalculation (or the intercession of a higher, Protoculture-ordained plan,

depending on whether or not one listened to the eccentric Dr. Emil Lang),

and the battle fortress leapt between dimensions to end up stranded out

near Pluto.

But Gloval's plan, using Luna as cover and sanctuary, was still a sound

one. And today, others were proving its worth.

Six stupendous ships, five miles from end to end through their long

axes, materialized soundlessly and serenely in the dawn. They were as

14

strong and destructive and Robotechnologically well-equipped as the

Masters could make them.

Still, they were wary. Earth had already provided a charnel house for

mighty fleets; the Robotech Masters had no more Zentraedi lives to spend,

and had no intention of risking their own.

The voice of one of the Robotech Masters echoed through the

command ship. He was one of the triumvirate that commanded the

expedition, that ruled the ships, the Clonemasters, soldier-androids,

Scientist Triads, and the rest.

He had sprung from the humanlike inhabitants of the planet Tirol,

creatures who were virtually Human in plasm and appearance. But the

Robotech Master's words came tonelessly, expressionlessly, and without

sound; he was in contact with the Protoculture, and so spoke with mind

alone.

He sent his thoughts into the communications bond that linked his

mind with those of the transformed overlords of his race, beings like him

but even more elevated in their powers and intellect-the three Elders.

The disembodied words floated in the chilly metallic passageways.

We

are in place, Elders-behind the moon of our objective, the third planet. All

monitoring and surveillance systems are fully operational. You will begin

receiving our primary transignal immediately.

The technical apparatus of the ships pulsed and flowed with light, and

the power of Protoculture. Some parts suggested blood vessels or the maze

of a highway system, where pure radiance of shifting colors traveled; others

resembled upside-down pagodas, suspended in the air, made of blazing

materials like nothing that had ever appeared in the Solar System before.

The enigmatic energies opened a way across the lightyears, to a sphere

like a blue sapphire fifteen feet across. It threw forth brilliance, the glare

splashing off the axkeen, hawk-nosed faces of the three Elders who sat,

enthroned in a circle, staring up at it. From far across the galaxy the Elders

reached out with their minds to survey the Robotech Masters' situation.

The Elders were of a type, fey and gaunt, dressed in regal robes but

15

looking more like executioners. All three had bald or shaven pates, their

straight, fine hair falling below their shoulders. Under their sharp

cheekbones were scarlike creases of skin, suggestive of tribal marks, that

emphasized the severity of those laser-eyed faces.

They studied the images and data sent to them by their servants, the

Robotech Masters.

One of them, Nimuul, whose blue hair was stirred by the air currents,

mindspoke. His disembodied voice was thick as syrup.

The first transignal

is of the area where the highest readings of Protoactivity have been

recorded. Preliminary inspection indicates that it is unguarded.

That pleased the other Elders, but none of them evinced any emotion;

they were above that, purged of it long ago.

Hepsis, of the silver locks, cheek resting on his thin, long-fingered fist,

forearm so slender that it appeared atrophied, watched the transignal

images balefully.

Hmm. You mean those mounds of soil and rock?

His voice

was little different from Nimuul's.

Yes.

The three were looking at the transignal scene of the massive artificial

buttes that stood in the center of what had once been the rebuilt Macross

City. Although they didn't know the history of that long climactic battle of

the Robotech War, and didn't realize what they were studying; the

transignal was showing them the final resting places of the SDF-1, the

SDF-2, and the flagship of Khyron the Backstabber.

All three ships had been destroyed in those few minutes of Khyron's

last, suicidal attack; all had been quickly buried and the city covered over

and abandoned due to the intense radiation, the last place ever to bear the

name Macross.

Nimuul explained,

Zor's ship is probably-Wait!

But he didn't have to draw their attention to it; Hepsis and Fallagar,

the third Elder, could see it for themselves. For the first time in a very long

time, the Elders of the Robotech Master race felt a misgiving that chilled

even their polar nerves.

16

Three night-black figures wavered in the enormous transignal globe,

defying the best efforts of the Masters' flagship's equipment to bring them

into focus. The entities on the screen looked like tall, sinister wraiths, caped

and cloaked, high collars shadowing their faces-all dark save for the light

that beamed from their slitted eyes.

Three, of course-as all things of the Protoculture were triad.

The area is guarded by a form of inorganic sentry,

Nimuul observed.

Or it could be an Invid trap of some kind.

Fallagar, his hair an ice-blue somewhere between his comrades' shades,

gave mental voice to their misgivings.

Or it might be something else,

he

pointed out.

Something to do with the thrice-damned Zor.

The images of the wraiths faded, then came back a bit against a

background of static as the transignal systemry struggled to maintain it. It

seemed that the ghostly figures knew they were under observation-were

toying with the Masters. The lamp-bright eyes seemed to be staring straight

at the Elders.

Then the image was gone, and nothing the Scientist Triad or

Clonemasters could do would bring the Protoculture specters back into view.

White combers of light washed through the blue globe of the transignal

imager again, showing nothing of use.

By a commonality of mind, the Elders did not mention-refused to

recognize-this resistance to their will and their instrumentality. The

guardian wraiths would be discussed and dealt with at the appropriate time.

What do you wish to view next, Elders?

asked a deferential

Clonemaster.

Nimuul was suddenly even more imperious, eager to shake off the

daunting effects of the long-distance encounter with the wraiths.

Show us

the life forms that protected this planet from our Zentraedi warriors and

now hold sway over the Protoculture Matrix.

Yes, Elder,

the Clonemaster answered meekly.

Hepsis told the other two,

The Humans who obliterated our Zentraedi

are no longer present, according to my surveillance readings, my Brothers.

17

But their fellows seem ready to protect their planet with a similar degree

of cunning and skill.

The transignal was showing them quick images of the UEG forces:

Cosmic Unit orbital forts and Civil Defense mecha, ATAC fighting machines,

and the rest.

One intercepted TV transmission was a slow pan past the members of

the 15th squad, monitored from a Southern Cross public information

broadcast. The Elders saw Humans with a hard-trained, competent look to

them, and something else...something to which the Elders hadn't given

thought in a long, long time.

It was youth. The camera showed them face after face-the smirking

impertinence of Corporal Louie Nichols; the massive strength of Sergeant

Angelo Dante; the flamboyance of their leader, the swashbuckling ladies'

man, Lieutenant Sean Phillips.

The Elders looked at their enemies, and felt a certain misgiving even

more unsettling than that of the wraiths' image.

The three rulers of the Robotech Masters, privy to many of the secrets

of Protoculture, were long-lived-would be Eternal, if their plans came to

fruition. And as a result of that, they feared death, feared it more than

anything. The fear was controlled, suppressed, but it was greater than any

child's fear of his worst nightmares, more than any dread that any mortal

harbored.

But the young faces in the camera pan didn't show that fear, not as the

Elders knew it. The young understand death far better than their elders will

usually acknowledge, especially young people in the military who know

their number could come up any time, any day. The faces of the 15th,

though, told that its members were willing to accept that risk-that they had

found values that made it worthwhile.

That was disturbing to the Elders. They had clones and others who

would certainly die for them, but none who would do so of their own

volition; such a concept had long since been ground mercilessly from their

race.

18

There was once more that unspoken avoidance of unpleasant topics

among the Elders. Nimuul tried to sound indifferent.

It is hard for me to

believe that these life forms could offer any resistance to us. They are so

young and lack combat experience.

He and his fellows were purposely ignoring an unpleasant part of the

equation. If, in war, you're not willing to die for your cause but your enemy

is willing to die for his, a terrible weight has been set on one side of the

scales.

The Elders shuddered, each within himself, revealing nothing to one

another.

I've seen enough of this,

Fallagar said, gathering his cloak like a

falcon preparing to take wing, letting impatience show.

What images would you view now, Elders?

asked the unseen

Clonemaster tentatively.

Fallagar's silent voice resounded through the viewing chamber.

I think

we have enough information on these life forms, so transmit whatever else

you have on line. No matter how interesting these abstractions may be, the

time has come for us to deal with the problems at hand!

The globe swirled with cinnamon-red, came back to blue, and showed

the headquarters of the Army of the Southern Cross.

It was a soaring white megacomplex in the midst of Monument City.

The countryside was marked with the corroded, crumpled miles-long

remains of Zentraedi battlecruisers. They were rammed bow-first into the

terrain, remnants of the last, long-ago battle.

The headquarters' central tower cluster had been built to suggest the

white gonfalons, or ensigns, of a holy crusade hanging from high

crosspieces. The towers were crowned with crenels and merlons, like a

medieval battlement.

It all looked as if some army of giants had been marshaled. The

architecture was meant to do just that-announce to the planet and the world

the ideals and esprit of the Army of the Southern Cross.

The name "Southern Cross" was a heritage of those first days after the

terrible Zentraedi holocaust that had all but eliminated Human life on Earth.

19

Less damage had been done in the southern hemisphere than in the

northern; many refugees and survivors were relocated there. A cohesive

fighting force was quickly organized, its member city-states all lying within

view of the namesake constellation.

Yes; we are through studying this planet for now,

Fallagar declared.

Now establish contact with our Robotech Masters.

It was time for decisions

to be passed down, from Elder to Robotech Master, and so on down the line

at last to the Bioroid pilots who would once more carry death and fire to

Earth in their war mecha.

Signals sprang among the six ships' communications spars, which

looked for all the world like huge, segmented insect legs.

What you have shown us has pleased us,

Fallagar said with no hint of

pleasure in his tone.

But now we must communicate with the inhabitants

of this planet directly.

While the Robotech Masters were being alerted to hear their overlords'

word, blue-haired Nimuul said to his fellows,

I would make a point: these

invisible entities who guard the Protoculture masses within the mounds on

Earth may require special and unprecedented-

Another voice came as the globe showed the gathered Robotech

Masters.

Elders! We hear and serve you, and acknowledge your leadership

and wisdom!

Younger and at an earlier stage of their Protoculture-generated

personal evolution, the Robotech Masters looked in every way like slightly

less aged versions of the Elders. The Masters had the gleaming pates, the

chevronlike skin seams under each cheekbone, the fine, straight hair that

reached far down their backs and down their cheeks in long, wide sideburns.

Their mental voices had been given that eerie vibrato by direct exposure to

Protoculture. They wore monkish robes with sash belts, their collars in the

shape of a blooming Invid Flower of Life.

Like virtually everyone in their culture, the Robotech Masters were a

triumvirate. The slight differentiations among members of a triad, even

differences of gender, served only to emphasize their oneness.

20

The Masters stood each upon a small platform, in a circle around their

control monitor, an apparatus resembling a mottled technological

mushroom five feet across, floating some five yards above the deck. It was

the Protoculture cap, source of their power.

Nimuul held his perpetual scowl.

Your transignal images were

sufficiently informative, and you have reported that your war mecha are

prepared. But now we must know if you are ready for us to join you.

Fifteen years before, the race that called itself the Robotech Masters

had sensed the enormous discharge of Protoculture energy in the last battle

on Earth. But their instrumentality was depleted because the rebellious

genius Zor had sent the last Protoculture Matrix away in the SDF-1, and the

Zentraedi's destruction and the endless war against the Invid had made

great demands on the remaining reservoirs.

The Masters lacked the Protoculture power to send their armada to the

target world by the almost instantaneous shortcut of hyperspace-fold

generation. Therefore, the Elders had dispatched the six enormous mother

ships, with their complements of assault craft and Bioroids, on a

fifteen-year voyage by more conventional superluminal drive. Now that the

journey was over, the Elders meant to rejoin the expedition by means of a

small spacefold transference-of themselves.

But Shaizan, who most often spoke for the Robotech Masters,

answered, his blue-gray hair flowing with the movements of his head.

No,

Elders! We are very close to regaining the lost Protoculture masses and

recovering secrets that Zor attempted to take to the grave with him. But

we must not make the same mistakes the Zentraedi made!

We must know more about their strengths and weaknesses,

added

Dag, another Master, gazing up at the Elders' image.

Nimuul's frown deepened.

You must not fail.

The Robotech Masters all

bowed deeply to their own Masters, the Elders.

When the Elders broke contact, the Robotech Masters looked in turn to

the Clonemasters and the other triumvirates gathered below the hovering

21

Protoculture cap. Shaizan, gathering his blue robes about him, his collar

hanging like an orange flower around his neck, snapped, "Now, do you

understand the plan, and do you anticipate any problems, group leader?

The Clonemasters and the rest looked in every way like Human males

and females, fair-skinned for the most part. They tended toward an aesthete

slimness, with long hair and form-fitting clothing that might have come

from the early renaissance, draped with short capelets and cloaks. Among

their triumvirates there was little differentiation in appearance or clothing.

The Clonemaster group leader replied in a voice somewhere between

that of a Human and that of a Robotech Master. "Master, every Bioroid pilot

is briefed and prepared to execute the first phase exactly as you have

decreed. The only problem is in keeping our operators functional; our

Protoculture supplies are quite minimal."

Shaizan frowned at the group leader as the Elders had frowned upon

the Robotech Masters, with that same angry ruthlessness. "Then double the

numbers of Bioroid fighting mecha assigned to the attack. You may draw

additional Protoculture from the ships' engines only if it proves absolutely

indispensable to success of the mission."

Dag, more lantern-jawed than his triumvirate-siblings, the most

intellectual of them, added, "If possible, I would like some Human captives

for experimental purposes."

Bowkaz, the most military of the three Robotech Masters, contradicted,

as was his prerogative in tactical matters. "No," he told Dag. To the group

leader, he added, "You will proceed, but only as per our original orders.

Understood?"

The group leader inclined his head respectfully. "As you will."

Shaizan nodded, inspecting the Clonemasters and the other

triumvirates coldly. "Then we look forward to your success and trust that

you will not fail."

The group leader said emotionlessly, "We understand the

consequences of failure, Master."

As did everyone on the expedition, the Robotech Masters' last

22

desperate throw of the dice. The group leader met their scowls. The Bioroid

war machines were waiting to bring destruction to the unsuspecting

Humans.

"We will not fail you," he vowed.

When the clone triumvirates had hurried away to execute the probing

attack, the Robotech Masters summoned up an image of the maze of

systemry in their flagship. The living Protoculture instrumentality

suggested internal organs, vascular tubes, clear protoplasmic tracts strobing

with the ebb and flow of energy.

Dag bespoke his fellows. "If we could capture a Human, our mindprobe

would reveal whether they've discovered any hint of the existence of the

Protoculture Matrix."

"Not necessarily," Bowkaz replied.

They all looked at the shrunken mass of Protoculture left to them. The

secret of making a Matrix had died with Zor, and there was no other source

of Protoculture in the known universe. This Matrix was the Robotech

Masters' last chance for survival.

"There will be time to interrogate the Humans once they lie defeated

and helpless beneath our heel," Shaizan said.

23

CHAPTER THREE

I couldn't really tell you who said it first-commo op, Black Lion, cruiser

crewmember-but somebody did, and, given the circumstances, everybody just

naturally picked it up, starting then and there: the Second Robotech War.

Lieutenant Marie Crystal, as quoted in

"Overlords," History of the Robotech Wars, Vol. CXII

Space Station Liberty swung slowly in its Lagrange Five holding place,

out near Luna. It combined the functions of outpost fortress,

communications nerve center, and way station along the routes to Earth's

distant colonies on the moon and elsewhere. Its complex commo apparatus,

apparatus that wouldn't function as well on Earth, was the Human race's

only method of maintaining even intermittent contact with the SDF-3

expedition. Liberty was in many ways the keystone to Earth's defenses.

And so it was the natural target.

"Liberty, this is Moon Base, Moon Base!"

The Moon Base communications operator adjusted the gain on his

transmitter desperately, taking a moment to eye the radar paints he had

punched up on a nearby display screen.

Five bogies, big ones, had come zooming around from the moon's dark

side. The G2 section was already sure they were nothing the Human race

had even used or seen before. Performance and power readings indicated

that they were formidable vessels, and course projections had them headed

straight for Liberty, at appalling speed.

"Why won't they answer? WHY?" The commo op fretted, but some sort

of interference had been jamming everything since the bogies first appeared.

And nothing Moon Base could get off the ground could possibly catch the

UFOs.

The op felt a cold sweat on his brow, for himself as well as for the

unsuspecting people aboard the space station. If Liberty were knocked out,

24

that would leave Moon Base and the other scattered Human sentry posts in

the Solar System cut off, ripe for casual eradication.

The indicators on his instruments suddenly waffled; either the enemy

had been obliged to channel power away from jamming and into weapons,

shields, or whatever, or the signal-warfare countermeasures computers had

come up with a way to punch through a transmission. A dim, static-fuzzed

voice from Liberty acknowledged.

The Moon Base op opened his headset mike and began sending with

frantic haste.

"Space Station Liberty, this is Moon Base. Flash message, I say again,

flash

message!

Five

bogies

closing

on

you

at

vector

eight-one-three-slash-four-four-niner! You may not have them on your

scopes; they have been fading in and out on ours. We didn't know they were

here until we got a visual. Possible hostiles, I say again, possible hostiles.

They're coming straight for you!"

In the Liberty Station commo center, another op was signaling the duty

officer that a flash message-a priority emergency-was incoming, even as he

recorded the Moon Base transmission.

When it was done, he turned and exercised a prerogative put in place

during the rebuilding of Earth after the Zentraedi holocaust. There wasn't

time for an officer to get to the commo center, evaluate the message, get in

touch with the G3 staff, and have a red alert declared. Every second was

critical; the Human race had learned that the hard way.

No op had ever used it before, but no op had ever faced this situation

before. With the decisive slap of a big, illuminated red button, a commo

center corporal put the space station on war footing, and warned Earth to

follow suit.

He tried to piece together the rest of what the Moon Base op was saying

just as he spied a watch officer headed his way. The op covered his mike

with his hand and called out, "Red flag, ma'am! Tell 'em to get the gun

batteries warmed up, 'cause we're in trouble!"

The commo lieutenant nodded. She turned at once to a secure intercom,

25

signaling the station's command center. Klaxons and alarm hooters began

their din.

"Battle stations, battle stations! Laser and plasma gunners, prepare to

open fire!"

Armored gunners dashed to their posts as Liberty went on full alert.

The heavily shielded turrets opened and the ugly, gleaming snouts of the

twin- and quad-barreled batteries rose into view, traversing and coming to

bear on the targets' last known approach vector.

Near the satellite fortress, a flight of patrol ships swung around to

intersect the bogies' approach. They were big, slow, delta-shaped cruisers,

slated for replacement in the near future. They were the first to feel the

power of the Robotech Masters.

The five Robotech Master assault ships came, sand-red and shaped like

flattened bottles. The leader arrowed in at the Earth craft, opening up with

energy cannon. A white-hot bolt opened the side of the cruiser as if gutting a

fish. Atmosphere and fireballs rushed from the Human ship. Within it,

crewmen and women screamed, but only briefly.

The Masters' warcraft plunged in, eager for more kills.

"I can't raise any of the patrol cruisers, ma'am," the Liberty Station

commo op told TASC Lieutenant Marie Crystal. "And three of them have

disappeared from the radar screens."

Marie looked up at the commo link that had been patched through to

her by the commander of the patrol flotilla with which her Tactical Armored

Space Corps fighter squadron was serving. She nodded, her delicate jaw set.

She was a pale young woman in battle armor, with blue eyes that had

an exotic obliqueness to them, and short, unruly hair like black straw. There

was an intensity to her very much like that of an unhooded bird of prey.

"Roger that, Liberty Station. Black Lions will respond." She ran a fast

calculation; the flotilla had diverted from its usual near-Earth duties when

the commo breakdown occurred, and was now very close to Liberty-close

enough for binocular and telescope sighting on the explosions and

26

energy-bolt signatures out where the sneak attack had taken place, beyond

the satellite.

"Our ETA at your position in approximately ninety seconds from

launch." He acknowledged, white-faced and sweating, and Marie broke the

patch-up. Then she signaled her TASC unit, the Black Lions, for a hot

scramble.

"Attention all pilots. Condition red, condition red. This is not a drill, I

say again, this is not a drill. Prepare for immediate launch, all catapults.

Black Lions prepare to launch. "

The decks reverberated with the impact of running armored boots.

Marie led the way to the hangar deck, her horned flight helmet in one hand.

There was all the usual madness of a scramble, and more, because no one

among the young Southern Cross soldiers had ever been in combat before.

Marie boarded her Veritech fighter with practiced ease, even though

she was weighted down by her body armor. The scaled-up cockpit had room

for her in the bulky superalloy suit, but even so, and even after years of

practice she found it a bit more snug than she would have liked.

The Tactical Armored Space Corps' front-line fightercraft had been

decreased in size quite a bit since the Robotech War because they no longer

needed to go to a Battloid-mode size that would let them slug it out

toe-to-toe with fifty-foot-tall Zentraedi warriors or their huge Battlepods.

Her maint crew got her seated properly and ready to taxi for launch. As

Marie sat studying the gauges and instruments and indicators on her panel,

she didn't realize how much like a slim, keen-eyed Joan of Arc she looked in

her armor.

Strange, she brooded. It's not like I thought it would be. I'm anxious

but not nervous.

Crewpeople with spacesuits color-coded to their jobs raced around,

seeing to ordnance and moving craft, or racing to take their places in the

catapult crews. They, too, tended to be young, a part of Robotechnology's

new generation, shouldering responsibilities and facing hazards that made

them adults while most of them were still in their teens. Even in peacetime,

27

death was a part of virtually every cruise, and the smallest mishap could

cost lives.

The Black Lions launched and formed up; the enemy ships turned

toward them but altered course at the last moment, launching their own

smaller craft.

"What are those things?" Second Lieutenant Snyder, whose callsign

was Black Beauty, yelled when the enemy fighters came into visual range,

already firing.

Gone were the simple numeral callsigns of a generation before; Earth

was a feudal hegemony of city-states and regional power structures, bound

by virtually medieval loyalties, under the iron fist of the UEG, and the

planet's military reflected that. So did the armor of the Southern Cross's

ultratech knights, including Marie's own helmet, with its stylized horns.

"Shut up and take 'em!" Marie snapped; she hated unnecessary chatter

on a tac net. "And stick with your wingmen!"

But she didn't blame Black Beauty for being shocked. So, the Zentraedi

are back, she thought. Or somebody a lot like them.

The bogies that were zooming in at the Black Lions were faceless

armored figures nearly the size of the alien invaders who appeared in 1999

to savage Earth and initiate the Robotech War. These were different, though:

They were Humanoid-looking, though insectlike; Zentraedi Battlepods were

like headless alloy ostriches bristling with cannon.

Moreover, these things rode swift, maneuverable saucer-shaped

Hovercraft, like outlandish walking battleships riding waterjet platforms.

But they were fast and deadly, whatever they were. The Hovercraft

dipped and changed vector, prodigal with their power, performing

maneuvers that seemed impossible outside of atmosphere. Up until today

that had always been a Veritech specialty.

About twenty of the intruders dove in at a dozen Black Lions, and the

dogfighting began. Fifteen years had gone by since the last time Human and

alien had clashed, and the answered prayers that were peace were suddenly

vacated.

28

And the dying hadn't changed.

The small volume of space, just an abstract set of coordinates, became

the new killing ground. VT and Bioroid circled and pounced at one another,

fired or dodged depending upon who had the advantage, maneuvered

furiously, and came back for more.

The aliens fired extremely powerful energy weapons, most often from

the bulky systems packages that sat before them on their control stems.

That gave the Lions the eerie feeling that a horde of giant metallic

water-skiers was trying to immolate them.

But the arrangement only looked funny; incandescent rays flashed

from the control-stem projectors, and three TASC fliers died almost at once.

The saucer-shaped Hoverplatforms turned to seek new prey. This time they

demonstrated that they could fire from apertures in the bodies of their

saucercraft as well as those in the controlstem housings.

"Black Beauty, Black Beauty, two bogies on your tail!" John Zalenga,

who was known as White Knight, called out the warning. "Go to

turbo-thrust!" Marie spared a quick glance to her commo display, and saw

Zalenga's white-visaged helmet with its brow-vanes on one side of a

split-screen, Snyder's ebony headgear, like some turbaned, veiled muslim

champion's on the other.

But before Snyder could do anything about his dilemma, the two were

on him, their fire crisscrossing on his VT's tail. Marie heard the fight rather

than saw it, because at that moment she had the shot she wanted at a

darting alien Hovercraft.

VT armament had changed in a generation: gone were the autocannon

and their depleted transuranic shells. Amplified laser arrays sent pulses of

destructive power through the vacuum. Armored saucer-platform and

armored alien rider disappeared in a cloud of flame and shrapnel.

Marie's gaze was level and intent behind her tinted visor. "We lost

Black Beauty; the rest of you start flying the way you were taught! Start

flying like Black Lions!"

Outside of a few minor brushfire conflicts over borders, the VTs of

29

Marie's generation had never flown combat before. Certainly, Aerial Combat

School was nothing like this: real enemy fire and real friends being blown to

rags of sizzling flesh and cinders, with the next volley coming at you.

But Marie's voice and their training put the Lions back in control. The

survivors got back into tight pairs, covering one another as the Bioroids

came back for another run.

"Going to Guardian mode," Marie bit out, her breath rasping a little in

her helmet facemask. They were all pulling lots of gees in the hysterical

maneuvering of the dogfight; as trained, they locked their legs and

tightened their midsections to keep the blood up in their heads, where it

was needed. The grunting and snorting for breath made the Black Lions' tac

net sound as if some desperate tug-of-war were in progress.

Marie pulled the triplet-levers as one; her VT began changing.

None of the intricacies of mechamorphosis mattered much to the

young VT leader with a sky full of bogies coming at her. All Marie really

cared about was that when she summoned up her craft's Guardian

configuration, the order was obeyed.

She could feel the craft shifting and changing shape around her,

modules sliding and structural parts reconforming themselves, like some

fantastic mechanical origami. In moments, Veritech became Guardian, a

giant figure like a cross between a warrior and a space-battlecruiser, a sleek

eagle of Robotechnology.

"Got you covered, White Knight," she told Zalenga. "Here they come."

The Masters' battle mecha surged in at them, the flashes of their fire

lighting the expressionless insect eyes of the Bioroids' head-turrets.

But the next joust of spaceborne paladins was very different from what

had gone before. The Guardian had most of the speed of a Veritech, but the

increased maneuverability and firepower that came from bringing it closer

to anthropomorphic form. More or less the form of the Bioroids.

But more, Marie Crystal thought her craft through its change and its

actions. The secret of Robotech mecha lay in the pilot's helmet-the

"thinking cap," as it had been dubbed. Receptors there picked up thought

30

impulses and translated them into the mecha's actions. No other control

system could have given a machine that kind of agility and battle-prowess,

which seemed more like those of a living thing.

Marie dodged one Hovercraft's fire, neatly missing that of the thing's

companion, darting like a superalloy dragonfly. She controlled her mecha

with deft manipulations of the gross motor-controls-hand and foot controls

there in the cockpit-but more important, she thought her Guardian through

the firefight. Mental imaging was the key to Robotech warfare.

The lead Bioroid was firing at a place Marie's Guardian no longer

occupied. She blasted it dead center with an almost frugally short burst of

intense fire, a hyphen of novafire that was gone nearly before it had begun.

The Bioroid erupted outward in fireball demise.

She ducked the backup Bioroid's cannonade, too, and wove through it

to fix the alien mecha in her gunsight reticle and shoot. The second Bioroid

was an articulated fortress-bulbous-forearmed, bulbous-legged-one

moment, and a superheated gas cloud headed for entropy the next.

The other Black Lions weren't slow to pick up on the new tactics. Some

went to Guardian mode, and one or two to Battloid-the Veritech equivalent

of the Bioroids-while one or two remained in Fighter mode. The Bioroids

simply could not adjust to the smorgasbord of Earthly war-mecha suddenly

facing them.

Tables turned, and it was the invader mecha that disappeared in

spheres of white-hot explosion. Then it became apparent that they had had

enough; like oily, scuttling beetles, the two or three survivors hunkered over

their control stems and fled.

A controller from the Lions' cruiser got through to them just as they

were preparing to mechamorphose and pursue the enemy until none were

left.

"Black Lion Team, break contact! All Veritechs, break contact! Let 'em

go for now, Lions, and return to the ship at once."

The ballooning explosions began to die away; Marie gathered up her

unit unhurriedly, enjoying mastery of the battlefield.

31

But she knew that the tactics that had won the Lions this day's fight

might not be as effective next time. And she knew, too, that the force her

team had faced was probably a negligible number in terms of the enemy's

total strength.

She thrust the thought aside. Today was a victory; embattled humanity,

cast into the eye of the storm of interstellar Robotech warfare again, had to

relearn the skill of taking things one moment, one battle, one breath of life

at a time.

32

CHAPTER FOUR

It was Bowie I'd legally taken as my ward, his parents being among my

closest friends, but it was often Dana who gave me greater cause for worry.

With her mixed parentage and the grief she sometimes got about it, she was

often torn between two distinct modes of behavior, the sternly military and

the wildly anti-authoritarian.

And, none of us really know what it was Lang, and later Zand, were

doing to her in those experiments when she was a baby. We suspect it had

something to do with Protoculture, and activating the alien side of her nature.

But Zand knows one thing: he knows how close I came to killing him

with my bare hands that day when I came to take baby Dana away from him.

And if anything ever happens to her because of what he did, Zand's fears will

be borne out.

From the personal journal of Major General Rolf Emerson

Like most Southern Cross military facilities, the place was roomy. The

devastating attacks of the Zentraedi had seen to it that Earth would have no

problems with population density for some time to come.

This one was a large, truncated cone, an airy building of smoky blue

glass and gleaming blue tile, set on a framework of blue-tinted alloy. The

architecture had a nostalgic art-deco look to it. It was big even though it

served only as barracks to a relatively few people; much of the

above-ground area was filled with parts and equipment storage and repair

areas, armory, kitchen and dining and lavatory facilities, and so on. In some

ways it was a self-contained world.

Mounted on its front was an enormous enlargement of a unit crest, that

of the Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, the ATACs, and beneath that the

squad designation: 15.

The crest was lavish, almost rococo, with rampant lion and unicorn,

crown, gryphon, stars, shields, and the rest. The viewer had to look closely

33

to see that one element of what was supposed to be crossed machetes

looked more like...rabbit ears. The 15th had an old, gallant, and highly

decorated past but a reputation for trouble, and for deviltry as well. The

origin of the rabbit ears in its heraldry had a hundred different versions,

and quite possibly none of them were true.

Inside, in a unit ready-room, there was an unusual level of banter going

on, with almost a celebratory air. The same alarm that had disrupted Dana's

graduation day proceedings, as word came of attack from space, had taken

the ATACs off a peacetime footing.

Dana and Bowie had spent a week with the 15th, getting ready for the

follow-up attack that never came. But at least there was no more falling out

for silly make-work details or drudge jobs from the duty roster; the 15th had

made sure it was ready to go, then had been ordered to stand-to and remain

in barracks pursuant to further orders.

In civilian terms, it was a little like a small lottery win. The troopers of

the 15th were napping or reading or chatting amiably to one another or

watching vid. Bowie Grant was fooling around at an ancient upright piano

that someone had scavenged for the 15th over a decade before; by diligent

work he had gotten it back in tune, and now played it with eyes closed. On

his torso harness and arm brassards were the 15th's crests.

Near him, Louie Nichols listened indifferently to the music while he

cleaned and reassembled a laser pistol. Totally synthesized

synaptic-inductance music with enhanced simu-sensory effects was more to

Louie's liking; the lanky corporal was a sort of maverick technical genius

given to endless tinkering and preoccupation with gadgetry.

Still, Bowie's music wasn't too bad for primitech stuff, Louie decided.

Bowie was liked well enough after a week in the 15th, but he was still a bit of

an oddball, like Louie himself. A man who looked out at the world through

big, square, heavily tinted goggles-few people had seen Louie's eyes, even in

the shower. Louie had decided Bowie was a misfit and therefore somewhat

of a kindred soul, and that Dana was a bit of the same. So he had taken to

the 15th's newest troopers.

34

Others had accepted them too, though there was a little coolness

toward Dana; she had been assigned as the 15th's new Executive Officer

since the old XO had been hospitalized after a training maneuver injury. It

was all perfectly ordinary, since she had been commissioned out of the

Academy, but-she was the first woman in the 15th, one of the first in the

ATAC.

Two privates were killing time with a chess game. "D'you hear the

latest skinny?" the smaller one asked casually. "Our CO's gonna be in

stockade for a while."

His big, beefy opponent shrugged, still studying his bishop's dilemma.

"Too bad Sean's such a ladies' man-too bad for him."

"He shouldn't've made a pass at a superior officer," the first said.

A third, who had been kibbitzing, contributed, "Sean just didn't have

his mind right, or he would've known better. Ya just don't go grabbing a

colonel's daughter like that."

No, indeed; especially when the daughter was herself a captain. But

scuttlebutt had it that the grabbing had gone rather well and that initial

reaction was favorable, until the ATAC Officer of the Day wandered in and

found army furniture being put to highly unauthorized use, as it were, by

army personnel who were supposedly on duty. It was just about then that

the colonel's daughter started yelling for help.

It was a brief court-martial, and word was that Lieutenant Sean

Phillips grinned all through it. A constant stream of letters and CARE

packages, sent by other female admirers, was brightening up his

guardhouse stay.

Sergeant Angelo Dante, engrossed in a conversation of his own,

snorted, "Aw, all she is is a snotty, know-it-all teenager!" He had served

under Sean for some time, and resented seeing him replaced. He was so

preoccupied with it that he didn't realize the rec-room door had slid open

and the replacement was standing there.

"Why, Angelo, you say the sweetest things," a lively female voice said

mockingly. Everyone looked around, startled, to see Dana posed

35

glamorously in the doorway. The brevet pips were gone from her torso

harness; she had been promoted from temporary XO-a kind of on-the-job

training-to the CO slot, now that Sean was going to be spending some time

playing rock-hockey over at the stockade.

Bowie stood up from the piano with a smile on his face.

"Congratulations, Lieutenant Sterling," he said with genuine delight, much

as he disliked the military.

Nobody bothered to call attention; the 15th was a casual kind of place

under Sean. But there were a few appreciative whistles and murmurs for

Dana's pose, and Evans, the supply sergeant, raised a coffee mug to her

from his place on a stool at the (currently dry) bar. "A toast! To the cutest

second lieutenant in the ATACs!" he said, pronouncing it AY-tacks.

Other voices seconded the sentiment. Dana strolled over toward

Angelo Dante with a seductive, swivel-hipped gait. "What's the matter,

Angie? Don't think I'm tough enough?" She gave him a languorous smile

and kept it there as she gave him a swift kick in the shin.

Angelo was utterly shocked, but he barely let out a grunt; he was a tall,

muscular man, well known for his strength and ability to withstand

punishment. Dana let the guffaws and catcalls go on for a few seconds as the

15th razzed Angelo for being taken off guard. Angelo rubbed his shin and

snarled at her retreating back, but inside he was suddenly reevaluating his

opinion of "Miss Cadet," as he had been calling her.

Dana crossed to the window, then whirled on them, cutting through

the hoots and catcalls. "Fall in! On the double!"

There was a confused half-second of disbelief, then the 15th scrambled

to stand at attention in two precise ranks, facing her. "Now what's she trying

to prove?" Angelo heard someone mutter.

Dana looked them over, hands locked behind her back. She waited a

few seconds in the absolute silence, then said, "Y'know, I've been giving this

a lot of thought. And I've decided that this squad is dull. Definitely cute, but

dull."

She walked along the front rank, inspecting her new command.

36

"However, I think there's still hope for you, so prepare to move out!"

She had come to the end of the front rank, where Angelo stood

glowering at her. "Something on your mind, Angie?"

He said, tight-lipped, "I could be wrong about this, but aren't we on

ready-reaction duty this week?"

The ready-reaction squad was a kind of fire brigade, ready to move at

once should any trouble occur, either at the base or elsewhere. The fact that

it had to be ready to move on a moment's notice meant that the

ready-reaction force usually kept all personnel in or immediately around its

barracks.

But Dana gave Angelo a scornful look. "What's that got to do with a

training maneuver?"

It wouldn't actually be breaking a reg, but it would be bending some.

"Well, we haven't gotten official clearance from regimental HQ."

If there was a funny, warm Human side to her, there was a

fire-breathing Zentraedi amazon side, too. Dana's eyes narrowed and her

nostrils flared. "If you're looking to be busted to buck private, Dante, just

keep doing what you're doing! 'Cause I give the orders here and you obey

them!"

The usually gruff Angelo unexpectedly broke into a smile. "If you say so,

Lieutenant." The simplest solution would be to give the kid enough rope,

and even egg her on a little without being too obvious about it.

Dana showed locked teeth and the assembled 15th wondered silently if

steam was going to start coming out of her ears. "If you have a problem,

Sergeant, maybe I ought to send you to get your Chaplain Card punched. Or

do you just resent taking orders from a woman?"

That stung Angelo, who was what he liked to think of as a little

old-fashioned, but didn't want to be branded a sexist. He drew a deep

breath. "That's not it at all, Lieutenant, but with all this trouble out at

Liberty and the Moon Base-what if something happens and we're not here?"

He gave her a condescending smile.

Dana was furious. Dante plainly didn't think she was fit to command,

37

to fill the shoes of the dashing, devil-may-care Sean Phillips. So the 15th

respected officers with a wild streak only, officers who were daredevils?

She'd show them that Dana Sterling could lead the pack!

"In that case, Sergeant," she said, smirking, "why don't you just sit here

and twiddle your thumbs? The rest of you, get to your Hovercycles! Move

out!"

She's acting like it's all just a big picnic, Angelo saw. I just hope she

doesn't get us all into trouble.

But as the 15th dashed for the drop-rack, whooping and shouting,

Angelo was right with them.

The drop-rack was a sort of skeletal ladder that, like a conveyor belt or

pater-noster, moved downward endlessly, a modern-day firemen's pole

giving quick access to the motor pools below ground level.

At the first motor pool level, the troopers jumped from the drop-rack

with practiced ease, just before it disappeared through a square opening in

the floor, bound for the next level down, where the Hovertanks were kept.

The 15th dashed to its Hovercycles, one-seater surface-effect vehicles

built for speed and maneuverability. Dana leapt astride her saddle, taking

'the handlebars. "Recon patrol in G sector, gentlemen!"

She settled her goggles on her face, gunned the engine. "Let's...go-ooo!"

The 15th shot away after her, yahooing and giving rebel yells.

Dana laughed, exulting. Whoever said a drill couldn't be fun?

First they barreled through Monument City on a joyride that sent

civilian pedestrians scuttling for safety. The cycles roared up and around

access ramps and cloverleafs, threaded through traffic, and got into

cornering duels with one another. The troopers yelled to one another and

howled their encouragement to Dana, who had taken the lead.

She loved it, loved setting the pace and hearing her men cheer her on.

"See if you can keep up with me, guys!" She gave a burst of thruster power,

leaping the railing to land on an access ramp higher up and several yards

away. They were headed the wrong way, against oncoming traffic.

38

Somehow, nobody was killed; the cycles deftly jumped the cars with

thruster bursts, and the careening civilian cars managed not to annihilate

one another as they slewed to avoid the troopers. Fists were shaken at them,

and obscenities hurled, but the Southern Cross soldiers were above it all,

literally and figuratively.

Then it was down onto a major traffic artery, for a flat speed run into

the badlands on Monument City's outskirts. Rusting Zentraedi wreckage of

the Robotech War dotted the landscape. This particular area still hadn't

recovered from the alien fusillade that had devastated nearly the entire

planet some seventeen years before; it looked more like the moon.

"Fokker Base is only a few more miles," Dana yelled over the wind and

the sound of the engines. "We'll stop there!"

As Bowie passed the word, she thought sarcastically, All this

commanding is such a lot of work. Then she laughed aloud into the rushing

air.

Marie Crystal and her Black Lions were relaxing in the squadron

canteen when the shrilling of the Hovercycle engines approached. The VT

pilots had just finished an afternoon of target runs.

Dana came to a stop with a blare of thruster power and a blast of dust

and debris. She hopped from her cycle as the rest of the 15th drew up next

to her. She looked the enormous base over; Fokker wasn't far from the

Humanmade mounds that covered the fallen SDF-1, SDF-2, and the

flagship of Khyron the Backstabber.

The place was the home of Tactical Air Force and Cosmic Units along

with the TASC Veritechs, as well as experimental facilities and an industrial

complex. It was also a commo nexus and regional command headquarters.

Inside the canteen a mohawked VT pilot inspected the 15th through a

large permaplas window. "Uh-oh, looks like school's out."

Dana was gazing back at the pilots now. "Hey, the eagles are being led

by a dove, huh?" said one Lion approvingly.

Marie set hands on hips and hmmphed. "More like turkeys being led by

39

a goose," she sneered.

Dana led her men in and was confronted by First Lieutenant Marie

Crystal. Dana saluted, and Marie barked, "State your mission."

Dana saw that the hospitality carpet was definitely not out. There had

always been rivalry between the TASCs and the ATACs; their VTs and

Hovertanks had some Robotech capabilities in common and therefore at

times ended up with overlapping mission responsibilities. There was strong

disagreement about which mecha was better in this mode or that, and

which was the all-around superior. More than a few fists had flown over the

subject.

This was the first time Dana had encountered such hostility, though.

She had chosen Hovertanks because, she was certain, they were the most

versatile, formidable mecha ever invented, so she wasn't about to take guff

from some VT bus driver.

Dana identified herself, then drawled, "It's been a hard ride an' a dusty

road. Y'wouldn't happen to have a little firewater around, would yuh, pard?"

That had the 15th guffawing and the Black Lions choking on their

coffee. Marie Crystal's brows met. "What'd you do, kid, escape from a

western? Don't you know how a commander's supposed to behave, even the

commander of a flock of kiddie cars?"

Now Dana was annoyed, too. "My squad's got more citations for

excellence than you could fit into your afterburner! Number one in every

training maneuver and war game it's ever been in!"

Marie smiled indulgently, maddeningly. "Games don't prove a thing;

only combat does."

Dana decided things had gone far enough. The 15th and the Lions were

eyeing one another, some of them rubbing their knuckles thoughtfully.

Dana turned to go, but threw back over her shoulder, "My unit would

never turn its back on a real fight, Lieutenant."

Her troopers began to follow her, but one of the VT fliers-Eddie Muntz,

a pinch-faced little guy with a reputation as a troublemaker-jumped to his

feet. He called after them, "Hey, wait! Don'tcha want a cuppa coffee?"

40

Royce, a tall, skinny trooper wearing horn-rimmed glasses, turned to

tell him no thanks. He got most of a full cup flung into his face.

Eddie Muntz stood laughing, managing to gasp, "Nothing like a good

cuppa Java, I always say!" He was convulsing so hard that he didn't see

what was headed his way.

"Try this," Bowie Grant invited, and tagged Muntz with an uppercut

that sent him crashing back across the table. Bowie didn't like the army, or

violence, but senseless cruelty was something that simply enraged him.

A couple of Lions helped Muntz to his feet, one of them growling, "So,

the kids want to play rough."

Muntz wiped blood from his split lip. "Pretty good for somebody in day

care," he admitted. Then he launched himself through the air to tackle

Bowie.

But Bowie was ready for him; the ATAC trooper caught a hold of

Muntz's uniform at the same time bringing up one foot and setting it in the

juncture where leg met abdomen. Bowie fell backward to the floor, rolling,

pulling his opponent with him, and pushing him with the foot that was in

Muntz's midsection. It was just like Bowie had been taught at Academy

hand-to-hand classes; with a wild scream the practical joker went flying

through the air straight over Bowie's head.

Bowie's only miscalculation was that Dana was right in Muntz's

trajectory. The VT pilot crashed into her headfirst and bore her to the floor.

They lay in a tangle of arms and legs, with Dana hollering at the dazed

Muntz to get off her.

Dana's scrabbling hand encountered a piece of metal, a table leg that

had rolled there after Muntz's first fall. She grabbed it just as the VT pilot

shook his head and leapt to his feet to face Bowie again.

His luck wasn't any better this time; Bowie was just out of the Academy,

young and fast and in good shape. He rocked Muntz back with a left hook,

and Muntz ended up knocking Marie Crystal back onto a couch, lying across

her lap. While Marie pounded his head and howled at him to get off her, the

riot got going in earnest.

41

As chairs were flung and punches thrown, kicks and leg-blocks

vigorously exchanged, Dana suddenly realized what she had gotten herself

and the 15th into.

And she stood numbly, watching a mental image of her lieutenant's

bars as they flew away into the clouds forever on little wings. I wonder if

Sean's got any CARE packages to spare, there in the stockade? she thought.

42

CHAPTER FIVE

The occasion of the 15th's first social encounter with the Black Lions was

rather less auspicious than subsequent, more cooperative military

collaborations. It is a fact, though, that the ATACs ever thereafter insisted on

referring among themselves to Veritech recons and penetration strikes in

football-play jargon, as "Debutantes Go Long."

Zachary Fox, Jr.,

Men, Women, Mecha:

the Changed Landscape of the Second Robotech War

Dana waved the table leg, shouting, "Stop! Stop this immediately!" It

didn't do a bit of good.

The brawl was a confused sequence of split-second events; time and

distance seemed strangely altered. A blond VT pilot swung his forearm into

the face of a 15th trooper; another of Dana's men downed the mohawked

Black Lion with a dropkick.

An ATAC was on the floor with a VT pilot's head in a leg lock; Shiro had

Evans down and bent the wrong way, painfully, in a "Boston crab." Marie

Crystal finally got the groggy Eddie Muntz off her just in time to have Louie

Nichols and a VT man with whom he was locked in combat pile into her and

bear her down in a struggling heap.

Dana couldn't think of anything to do but keep yelling "Stop! Stop!"

and wave the table leg. It didn't accomplish much, and she had to stop even

that and duck suddenly as a Black Lion flung bodily by Angelo Dante went

crashing through the big window behind her.

The broken window let in a sound that made Dana's blood run cold:

police sirens. An MP carrier was coming hell-for-leather across the field

toward the canteen, all lights flashing. Dana turned and bellowed, "MPs!

Hey, it's the MPs! Let's get outta here!"

Other voices took up the cry, and in seconds the brawl was over. Marie

43

Crystal looked on as the 15th raced after its leader, hopping on Hovercycles.

Dana made sure all her men had gotten out. "Split up! We'll meet back at

the barracks!" The ATACs zoomed off in all directions.

Dana gunned her engine and headed off straight for the police van. It

was closer now, an open surface-effect vehicle, and she could see that there

was a fifteen-foot-tall police robot standing back on the troop carrier bed.

Dana calmly watched the distance close; she was determined to keep the

MPs busy until the rest of the 15th had time to get clear.

The MP major standing behind the open cab felt sudden misgivings as

the cycle rider came straight at the van's windshield. He let out a squawk

and went for his sidearm, steadying it at her with both hands over the top of

the cab. "Stop or I'll shoot! Look out!"

The latter was because Dana had increased speed and hit her thrusters.

The major dove for cover, thinking she was out to decapitate him. But at the

last instant she took the cycle up in a thruster-jump, neatly tagging the

police robot's head with the sky-scooter's tail. The robot toppled backward

like a falling sequoia as the major screamed in horror. The sound the

machine made against the hardtop resembled that of several boilers being

rung like gongs.

The Black Lions stood outside the canteen, watching, as Dana threw

them a jaunty wave and disappeared in the distance. Marie Crystal stood

with hands on hips, a feline smile on her face. "Not bad for a beginner,

Lieutenant Sterling. You show real promise." And you haven't heard the last

of the Black Lions!

The MP van slowed to a stop. The major shook his head in disgust,

watching the ATAC cycles leave dust trails to all points of the compass.

Doesn't the Academy teach these hoodlums the difference between us and

the enemy?

The robot lay unmoving, but its visor lit with red flashes with each

word it spoke. "Hovercycle operator identified as Lieutenant Dana Sterling,"

the monotone voice announced, "Fifteenth ATAC squad." It made some

strange noises, then added, "Recommend immediate apprehension. I don't

44

feel very well. May we return to headquarters now? Perhaps you could give

me a hand up, sir. Vvvt! Wwarrrzzzp! Kktppsssst! Reenlistment bonus?

Sounds good to me!"

The major gave the robot a little first-echelon maintenance in the form

of a good swift kick.

On a moonlit night with the silver veins of cloud overhead, Monument

City had the look of a place transported to an eldritch graveyard. The

wind-sculpted crags and peaks around it, the rusting dead leviathans of the

Zentraedi wreckage, the barrenness of the countryside that began at the city

limits-it all suited Dana's despair precisely.

Earlier that day she had led the 15th in a triumphant joyride up a

curving concrete access ramp; now she crouched in an alley beneath it, in a

part of the city where, she hoped, she could pass as just one more vagrant.

Sitting near the pile of refuse that concealed her cycle, hugging herself

to conserve body heat, Dana sat with her back against a brick wall and tried

to figure out what to do next. Eventually, she knew, she must return to the

base and face the charges that would be brought against her; she just

wanted some time to think things through. She was reassessing her entire

concept of what it meant to be a commander.

Dana sighed and looked up at the cold, diamondbright moon, and

wondered whether Humans-whether she-would be fighting and dying there

soon. If there was a war coming, as everybody was saying, she didn't have

too much to fear from the MPs or a court-martial; the Southern Cross Army

would need a capable young Hovertank officer too much to let her moulder

in stir for very long. Besides, there was General Emerson, family friend and

unofficial guardian, and though she hated the idea of asking for help, his

influence could work wonders for her.

But she would be leading men and women into battle, and possible

death; she must not make any more misjudgments. She hated being mocked

and wronged, and she longed so very much to connect with

something-perhaps her squadmates would be like the family she had never

45

really known.

She sighed, pulling a holobead from an inner uniform pocket.

Thumbing it in the dimness of the alley, she looked again on the image she

had seen ten thousand times before.

There was Max Sterling, the greatest VT pilot who had ever lived, pale

and boyish, with oversize corrective glasses and blue-dyed hair. Next to him

was Miriya Parino Sterling, the woman who had commanded the

Zentraedi's elite Quadrono Battalion, reduced from a giantess to Human

proportions by a Protoculture sizing chamber, a woman with the predatory

look of a tigress, and all the sleek beauty of one as well.

But they clung to each other lovingly, and between them they held a

happy, blue-haired baby. Dana.

And now they're-who knows? she thought. She looked at the stars and

reflected, as she did almost every night, that her mother and father might be

beyond the most distant of them. Or might be dead. Few communications

had been received from the SDF-3 expedition to find and deal with the

Robotech Masters.

Dana pressed a minute switch, and the holobead showed its other

image. An odd-looking trio stood there: Konda, tall and lean, with purple

hair and an expression that said he knew something others didn't; Bron, big

and broad, with such strong, callused hands and yet such a sweet, gentle

nature; and Rico, small and wiry and fiery, dark-haired and mercurial.

Dana looked on them fondly; in front of them stood a Dana who was

perhaps five, her hair its natural yellow color now, grinning and holding

Bron's forefinger, squinting because the sun was in her eyes. The 15th's

new-perhaps former, by now-CO heaved another sigh.

Konda and Bron and Rico were former Zentraedi spies, shrunk to

Human size, who had fallen under the spell of Human society. Max and

Miriya left with Rick Hunter, Captain Lisa Hayes, and the rest of the

expedition in the SDF-3, and there was a certain lapse of time there that

Dana couldn't account for and had been too young to remember-things that

even General Emerson wasn't too forthcoming about. But eventually the

46

erstwhile spies, learning that for some unexplained reason Max and Miriya

had been persuaded to leave her behind, appointed themselves her

godfathers.

A strange upbringing it was. No other person in history had been

subjected to both Human and Zentraedi attitudes and teachings from

infancy. The ex-spies were really only enlisted men, not well educated even

for Zentraedi, whose whole history and lore were a Robotech Masters'

concoction. Still, they taught her everything they could about her mother's

people, and took better care of her than many natural parents could have

done, in their own slightly bumbling, endearing way.

All the rebel Zentraedi-the ones who had defected to the Human side

only to turn against the Earth again-had been hunted down while Dana was

still an infant, and all the rest but her godfathers had gone along with SDF-3.

Eventually the last three, her godfathers, passed away, almost at the same

time. She was never certain whether it was from some Earthly malady or

simply a vast loneliness; their three human loves, Sammie, Vanessa, and

Kim, had died with Gloval and Bowie's aunt Claudia in the SDF-1's final

battle. The ex-spies had never taken others.

With the trio gone, it was government youth shelters and schools for

Dana once more, often with Bowie as her companion because Rolf Emerson

simply couldn't have children along with him. And then, in time, there was

the Academy. But when Dana heard bitter words about the innate savagery

of the Zentraedi nature, she thought back on the one-time giants who had

shown her such a happy family life, at least for a little while.

She deactivated the holobead with a stroke of her thumb, leaning her

head back against the coarse bricks, eyes closed, taking in a deep breath

through her nostrils. There were the distant lights of apartments, where

families were getting together for dinner after a day of workaday life.

Dana let her breath out slowly, wishing again that she could be one of

them, wishing that the holobead images could come to life, or that her

parents would come home from the stars.

There was a sudden whimper and the hollow bounce of an empty can

47

nearby. She was on her feet, reflexively ready for a fight. But there was no

enemy there. It was, instead, a quite special acquaintance.

"Polly!"

She stopped to gather the little creature up, a thing that looked like a

mophead, its tongue hanging out. It might have passed for a terrestrial dog

until one took a closer look. It had small knob-ended horns, eyes that were

hidden beneath its sheepdoglike forelock-but that were definitely not the

eyes of an Earth lifeform-and feet resembling soft muffins.

It's a pollinator, Bron had told her gently the first time she was

introduced to it. That's how she had given the thing its name, even though

she had no idea whether Polly was male or female.

She never found out just. how the ex-spies had come across the

affectionate little beast; they had promised to tell her in the "someday" that

had never come. But she had learned that Polly was a magical creature

indeed.

For instance, Polly came and went as it pleased, no matter if you locked

it in or tied it up. You would look around, and Polly would just be gone,

maybe for a little while or maybe for a long time. It reminded her a little of

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and later, another old-time book title

she came across, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls.

The pollinator was her first adult-style secret, since her godfathers told

her she must never mention it to anybody, and she had kept that secret all

her life. Apparently, Polly was part of some miraculous thing, but she never

found out what. Polly had managed to find her for brief visits four or five

times since the death of Konda, Bron, and Rico.

"Did you hear me thinking about them?" she murmured, petting the

XT creature, pressing her cheek to it as it licked her face with a red swatch

of tongue. "Didja know how much I can use a slobber on the face just now?"

Her tears leaked out no matter how she tried to hold them back. "Looks like

we're both gonna be cold tonight."

She wiped her cheek, smearing the tears and dirt. "I can't believe I let

things get so far out of control."

48

But somehow she felt less terrible. She managed to fall asleep, the

pollinator curled up warmly against her. The dark dreams that came to her

at times, filled with terrors that were both nameless and otherwise, stayed

away this time.

But she had her strange Vision again, as she had had on rare occasions

ever since she could remember. In it, a vortex of purest force swirled up

from the planet Earth like the funnel of a cyclone; only it was a cyclone a

hundred miles in diameter, composed of violent energies springing from

sheer mental power. The uppermost part of the mind-tornado reached

beyond Earth's atmosphere, then it suddenly transformed into an

incandescent phoenix, a firebird of racial transfiguration.

The crackling, radiant phoenix spread wings wider than the planet,

soaring away quicker than thought to another plane of existence, with a cry

so magnificent and sad that Dana dreaded and yet was held in the powerful

beauty of this recurring dream. Her Vision was another secret she had

always kept to herself.

As Dana stirred in her sleep, something came between her and the

streetlights. That struck through to a trained alertness that had long since

become instinctive; she lay utterly still, opening one eye just a crack.

Looming over her was the person of Lieutenant Nova Satori of the

Global Military Police. Backing her up were a half-dozen MP bruisers

cradling riot guns. Some sort of dawn was trying to get through clouds that

looked like they had been dumped out of a vacuum-cleaner bag. The

pollinator was no longer lying against Dana.

Nova was enjoying herself. She was turned out in the MP

dark-blue-and-mauve version of the Southern Cross dress uniform, her long

blue-black hair fluttering and luffing against her thighs like a cloak, caught

back with a tech ornament like Dana's.

In Nova's quick dark eyes and the heart-shaped face there was the

canniness of both the cop and the professional soldier.

"Well, good morning," said Nova with a pleasant purr. Funny how you

run into old buddies when you least expect it, Dana reflected, and rose to

49

her feet in one smooth move. She and Nova went back a long way. Dana put

on her best Miss Southern Cross Army smile. "Well, Lieutenant Satori! How

ya been? You're out early!"

Dana gave a completely false laugh while looking over possible escape

routes as Nova said in a Cheshire cat voice, "Fine, just fine."

Polly was nowhere in sight, and there were no avenues of escape.

Uh-oh.

In Southern Cross HQ, high up in one of the buildings that looked like

crusaders' war-standards, the army's command center operated at a

constant fever pitch, a twenty-four-hour-a-day steam bath of reports, sensor

readouts, intelligence analysis, and system-wide surveillance.

Scores of techs sat at their consoles while diverse duty officers and

NCOs passed among them, trying to keep everything coherent. Overhead,

visual displays flashed on the inverted dome of the command center ceiling,

showing mercator grid projections, models of activity in the Solar System,

and current military hotspots.

On one trouble-board, ominous lights were blinking. An operations

tech covered his headset mike with the palm of his hand and yelled, "Cap'n?

Come take a look at this."

The ops captain bent down over the tech's shoulder and examined the

screen. There was a complete garble of the usual computer-coded messages.

"It ain't comin' from the space station, sir," the tech said. "It's like

somebody's messing with satellite commo, but who? And from where, if you

catch my drift, sir."

The captain frowned at the display and doublechecked the

alphanumerics. Then he spun and barked, "Get General Emerson over here

ASAP!" The message was being relayed ASAP-as soon as possible-before he

was done speaking.

The tech looked up at the ops captain. "What d'you guesstimate, sir?

Y'figure it's those-"

"Let's hope not," the captain cut him off.

50

Space Station Liberty was like a colossal version of a child's rattle,

hanging endlessly at Trojan Lagrange Point Five. It was humanity's sole link

with the SDF-3 expeditionary force that had set out either to negotiate an

end to hostilities or beat the Robotech Masters into submission.

Messages had been few and far between, but hope still thrived. Or at

least it had until the Robotech Masters came.

A command center tech covered his mike and called to an operations

officer, "Sir, I have a large unidentified paint."

But Major General Emerson, Chief of Staff, Ministry of Terrestrial

Defense, was in the command center by then, and came to bend near the

tech and the all-important screen. The ops officer, a captain, knew when it

was politic to take a back seat to a flag-rank officer. Which was almost

always.

Besides, this was Rolf Emerson, hero of a dozen pivotal battles in the

Global Civil War, the Robotech War, and the Disorders that followed them.

For all of that, he was soft-spoken and correct to the lowest-ranking

subordinate. The word was that he would have been supreme

commander-would have been a UEG senator for that matter-long since,

except that he hated political games. In the final analysis he was a GI, albeit

a brilliant one; the men and women under his command respected him for

it and the politicians and supreme staff officers resented him, determining

that he would never get another star.

But he was far too valuable to waste, so he was in the right place at the

right time on a day when the Human race needed him badly.

"Put it up on Central Display, please, Corporal," Rolf Emerson

requested quietly.

The object and its trajectory and the rest of the scanty data appeared

on the billboard-size central display screen. There was a single soft whistle.

"Big, bad UFO," Emerson heard a thirty-year vet NCO mutter.

"Fast, too," an intelligence major observed; she grabbed up a handset

and began punching in codes that accessed her own chain of command.

51

"Sir, d'you think this has to do with the shootout out by Moon Base?"

the captain asked.

"Still too early to tell," Emerson grated. The captain shut up.

The tech reported, reading his instruments. "According to computers,

the UFO is a powered vehicle and it's on an Earth-approach vector,

estimated time of entry in Earth atmosphere one hundred twenty-three

minutes, forty seconds...mark. Visual contact in approximately three

minutes."

"Give me a look at this thing," Emerson said in a low, even voice that

people around him had come to recognize as one that brooked no failure.

People jumped, babbled computer languages, typed at touchpads, made

order out of chaos. Not one of them would have changed places with

Emerson. The atmosphere in the command center had officers and enlisted

ratings loosening their tunic collars, coming to grips with the fact that the

Main Event might just be coming up during their watch.

"We need to see what they look like," Emerson said to a senior signals

NCO who was standing near. She was his imagery interpretation specialist,

and she went to work at once, coordinating sensors and

imagery-interpretation computers.

At a Southern Cross communications and sensor intel satellite, sensor

dishes and detection spars swung and focused. Information was fed and

rejiggered and processed, nearly a billion and a half (prewar) dollars worth

of technology going full-choke to process data that ended up in front of a

reedy young man who had been drafted only eight months before.

Colonel Green, one of Emerson's most trusted subordinates, barked,

"Corporal Johnson, talk to me! Haven't you got anything yet?"

Johnson had gotten used to the brass screaming at him for answers; he

had become imperturbable. He had gone from being a weird technofreak

highschooler through a basic training that still gave him nightmares to a

slot as one of the few people who truly understood how Liberty's equipment

worked.

So Colonel Green didn't rattle Johnson; he had had to introduce any

52

number of brass hats to the stark facts of reality. The instruments would

show what they would show, or not, and there were only limited things

Humans could do about it. The first thing you had to teach officers was

yelling louder rarely helped.

"One moment, sir." The female imagery interpretation NCO came over

to watch.

Johnson worked at his console furiously, more a magician than a

technician, and was rewarded with a raw, distorted image. The officers

looking over his shoulder would never appreciate how much finesse that

had taken, but the senior sergeant did.

Then it was gone again. Johnson punched up the recording of the

intercept and put it up on the huge main screen. "Sir, I had a visual but I

lost it. Countermeasures maybe; I dunno. Playback on screen alpha.

Something was out there all right, something enormous and blockish

and headed for Earth, something with more mass than anything Humans

had ever put in the sky. Something whose power levels made all the

indicators jump off the scales, and made all the watching Southern Cross

higher-ups clench jaw muscles.

"Wish we could see that thing better," Colonel Green muttered.

Whatever Johnson had picked up, it was artificial and fast-moving; the

zaggies in the sensor image kept it from telling them much more.

And it's coming right our way, Emerson contemplated.

53

CHAPTER SIX

The importance and power of the Global Military Police-the GMP-was

directly attributable to the near feudal nature of Earthly society at that time.

The GMP constituted the only truly worldwide law-enforcement organization,

and was a check and balance on those who had at their disposal the

tremendous power of Robotechnology. As a result, the GMP was an

organization with its own war machinery, combat forces, and intelligence

network.

A career in the GMP was a possible road to swift personal advancement,

but the recruit had to say farewell to all outside friendships; such things could

no longer exist for him or her.

S. J. Fischer,

Legion of Light: a History of the Army of the Southern Cross

"What could that thing be?" Colonel Green burst out. Emerson was

already way ahead of him, wondering what the hell might lie in the lee of the

moon.

"Accelerating," Johnson said. A fine sweat had appeared on his brow.

The display symbol for the intruder was marking its progress with integrals

coming much more quickly. It was coming at Earth fast; it was nearly upon

Liberty.

Just then there was a tremendous surge through all the sensor/commo

apparatus, after which many indicators went dead.

"Playing for keeps," Green observed.

An op near Johnson turned to yell, "Sir, we've lost commo with Liberty:

voice, visual, everything on the spectrum."

"Patch in whatever you have to, but keep that bogie in sight," Rolf said

in measured tones. He turned to Lieutenant Colonel Rochelle, his adjutant.

"Get everything you've got on red alert. Get all the ready-reactions set for

possible XT warfare. Prime the Hovertanks especially, and the VTs. Gimme

54

everything, right? Everything!"

Oh, Dana, Bowie! God keep you...

He swung to the intel major, whom he knew to be an internal security

fink. "Use whatever code you have to, Jackie, and get me a UEG telequorum,

right now." She looked away from his gaze at once, unable to meet it. Then

she licked her lips, resettled her glasses, picked up a handset. She cradled

the phone to her, turning her back to the others there in the command

center, and punched out a code.

Green came up behind Emerson to whisper harshly, "If they're

Zentraedi, d'you really think we stand any chance against them?"

"Don't sweat it, Colonel."

"But sir, we don't even know who they are or what they can do to-"

Rolf Emerson whirled on him angrily, then suddenly quieted. He

rapped the knuckle of one forefinger against Green's ribbons, decorations

from another war and another time. Emerson wore just about as many; they

were two graying men listening to alarms, knowing it was the death knell of

the everlasting peace they had fought and hoped for.

"This planet's ours, Ted."

"But, General, isn't there-"

"Earth is ours! Maybe they're Zentraedi; who cares? This planet is ours!

Now go saddle up everything we've got groundside, and draw up a rapid

deployment op-plan, 'cause we're gonna need one real bad."

Ten days went by, and Dana figured she had miscalculated her worth.

Or else, possibly, was there to be no war? In any case, she mouldered in

solitary confinement, against all expectation.

Hard rations of protein cracker and water scarcely affected her; things

had been worse, much worse, on any number of training maneuvers;

stockade was a cakewalk.

Mostly, she caught up on sleep, and worried about what was happening

to the 15th, and stared out the window from her bunk. In her dreams there

was a strange procession of images, and twice the haunting cry of the

55

phoenix.

The door viewslit slid back; Dana recognized the eyes she saw there,

and the limp blond hair around the face. Colonel Alan Fredericks said in a

voice muffled by the door, "Accommodations to your liking, Ms. Sterling?"

Dana curled a lip at him. "Sure, it's home sweet home, sir."

Fredericks said, "I'm glad you've held up so well for ten days. Anything

to say for yourself?"

Dana indicated her smudged face and rank, filthy uniform. "A hot bath

and a change of clothes would feel nice. And maybe a manicure and a

facial."

Fredericks allowed himself a thin smile. "No, no-we don't want you to

be distracted from contemplation of your crimes, do we now?"

Dana sprang to her feet, holding her hands out to him imploringly.

"Please let me return to my squad! Sir, we might be at war anytime now;

I've got to be with the fifteenth!"

"Stop your whining!" Fredericks roared at her. "If it were up to me, you

would have been drummed out of the Army of the Southern Cross!"

He sniggered. "Little Dana, daughter of the great heroes, Max and

Miriya Sterling! It seems blood doesn't always tell, does it?"

Actually, Fredericks was of the opinion that breeding did tell, and was

glad that this halfbreed had proved it. But he dared not say such a thing

with guards nearby as witnesses.

Dana fell to her knees, nearly in tears, facing the cold eyes in the door

viewslit. "Sir, I'm begging you: give me a chance to square things, to prove

myself. I'll never disgrace my family name or break a reg again, I swear it-"

"Stop sniveling!" Fredericks shouted.

The truth was, there was pressure on him from higher up to release

Dana. Some of it came from her regimental commander, who needed her,

and some from the Judge Advocate General's office; the JAG thought ten

days was more than enough. General Emerson had said a few words on her

behalf in the right ears, too.

56

But there was yet another source of pressure, one that Fredericks

hadn't quite been able to track down. Evidence pointed toward its coming

through civilian channels-from very high up indeed in the scientific and

research power structure. One name he heard had him surprised and

cautious: Dr. Lazlo Zand.

Zand had been the disciple of Dr. Lang, the high priest of

Robotechnology. When Lang went off with Rick Hunter, Dana's parents,

and the rest in the SDF-3, Zand remained behind. Now Zand's activities and

whereabouts were so shrouded in mystery as to defy even Frederick's efforts

at investigation.

"Since you're so repentant, perhaps I will see what I can do,"

Fredericks told Dana coldly. The viewslit slid shut.

Dana, back on her feet, thrust her fist high into the air. "Yahooo!"

It was less than an hour later when the door of her cell rolled open.

Dana stepped into the corridor to find Colonel Fredericks giving her his best

basilisk glare. He held a leather swagger stick that resembled a riding crop,

of all things. Standing on the opposite side of the doorway was Nova Satori.

Someone else was approaching, being escorted by two rifle-toting

guards. Fredericks had arranged the chance meeting to see what would

happen.

"Hey, Dana!"

She whirled, and a sunny smile shone on her face. "Sean! What're you

doing in solitary? No, don't tell me; you, ah, made a pass at a general's

wife?"

Sean Phillips, erstwhile CO of the 15th, gave her one of his famous

roguish grins. He was even more famous as a Don Juan than as a fighter, a

tall, athletic twenty-three-year-old with a boyish haircut and long brown

locks framing his face.

Sean gave her a wink. "Naw. They decided I needed a little privacy, I

guess; you know how it is when you're a celebrity. Besides, they're springing

me tomorrow."

57

Nova caught a subtle signal from Fredericks, and barked, "Shut up and

keep moving, Phillips!" The look on her face let everyone know that she was

immune to his charms; she had put Sean in his place the moment he tried

his Romeo routine on her. And the second time and the third.

Sean was shoved into the cell Dana had just vacated, and the door

rolled shut. Nova told Dana, "Just screw up one more time, Lieutenant, and

you won't even know what hit you."

Dana choked back the retort that came to her lips. "Yes, ma'am." She

saluted the two MP officers, did a right face, and moved out.

"I don't trust either of them, Nova," Fredericks said quietly, slapping

his palm with the swagger stick. "Keep me updated on her activities, and on

Phillips's, too, once he's freed."

"Will do, sir."

Dana's release came just as the UEG made public the news of the

aliens' appearance. It was a brief, tersely worded statement ending with the

fact that the ship had taken up a geostationary orbit some twenty-three

thousand miles out in space.

Of course, the entire Southern Cross Army was going to red alert; that

was why she had been released. Dana soon found herself in a jeep with

Nova Satori and two guards, being hustled back to the 15th. Her regimental

commander wanted every Hovertank manned; there was some word that

Sean might get an early release, too.

At a Southern Cross base, the silo blast doors were open and the

Earth's most powerful missiles were primed. Captain Komodo, battalion

commander, surveyed his instrumentation. He was a broad,

powerful-looking man of Nisei descent, with a chestful of medals.

A fire-control tech looked up at him. "Sir, is there any word on who

these aliens are?"

Komodo frowned. "It's obvious they're the same ones who attacked

Moon Base. But now we're ready for them." Komodo had lost a brother in

58

that raid; he hungered for revenge.

He spun to face a commo operator. "I told you to keep me informed!

Well?"

The op shrugged helplessly. "No further orders, sir; we're still

instructed to stand by."

"Fools!" muttered Komodo. "We have to strike now!" He reached down

to flip up the red safety shields and expose a row of firing switches. Then

Captain Komodo looked angrily into the sky, waiting.

At Southern Cross Command Headquarters, Emerson was in the eye of

the storm.

"Sir, the alien's moving into a lower orbit," a tech reported.

"General, why are we waiting?" Green demanded. "With all due respect,

sir, you must give the order to attack. Immediately!"

Emerson shook his head slowly, watching the displays. "It is imperative

that we find out who they are and why they're here. We cannot fire first."

Green gritted his teeth. His hope that Supreme Commander Leonard

or some other top brass would overrule Emerson had not come to pass. "But

they killed our people, sir!"

Emerson turned to him. "I'm aware of that. But what proof do we have

that Luna didn't bring the attack on itself by firing first? Do you want to

start a war that nobody wants?"

Green swallowed his angry retort. He was old enough to remember the

Zentraedis' first appearance and their disastrous onslaught.

So was Emerson; the general had seen enough war to dread starting

one.

At the missile base the commo op looked to Captain Komodo. "Sir, the

enemy spacecraft is descending from orbit-thirteen thousand miles and

descending rapidly."

Komodo stood with teeth clenched, jaw muscles jumping. "Are you

sure your equipment's working, Sparks? That there's been no command to

open fire?"

59

"Affirmative, sir."

Komodo's fists shook. If those cowards at headquarters would just

work up the guts to give me the green light, I'd blow those aliens out of the

sky!

With the Earth an ocean-blue and cloud-white gem beneath it, the

Robotech Masters' ship suddenly launched three sand-red objects shaped

like pint whiskey bottles. Their thrusters howled, and they dove for the

planet below.

"Captain, landing craft of some kind have left the mother ship and

begun entry maneuvers."

Komodo looked over the fire-control tech's shoulder. "Got 'em on radar

yet?"

"That's affirm, sir."

Komodo clapped a hand to the man's shoulder. "Good! I want A and B

batteries to take out the mother ship. first; it won't be launching any more

sneak attacks. Charlie and Delta batts will target the attack craft."

The tech was looking at him wide-eyed. "What's wrong? I gave you a

fire-mission!" Komodo shouted.

"But sir! HQ gave specific orders that-"

Komodo caught the hapless youngster up by his torso harness and

flung him aside. "You idiot! You want to wait until they blow the whole

planet away?" His fingers flew over the control console; in moments the

ground trembled.

The huge, gleaming pylons-Skylord missiles-rose up in fountains of

flame and smoke, shaking the base and the surrounding countryside.

The Robotech Masters proved themselves not to be infallible or

invincible; though they vaporized two Skylords with charged particle beams,

the other two got through, making brilliant flashes against the huge mother

ship.

On Earth, Emerson and the others in the command center looked at

60

their screens in astonishment. "Confirmed Southern Cross missile launch,

sir," someone said. "Heavy damage thought to have been suffered by the

enemy ship; sensors indicate they're floating dead in space."

Emerson turned on his subordinates with white-hot anger. "Who

launched those birds?" There was confusion among them and, Emerson

knew, no time to waste placing blame.

Now we're committed. "Open fire! Hit 'em with everything we can

throw. Inform Supreme Commander Leonard and tell Civil Defense to get

on the stick!"

"War," said Colonel Fredericks, savoring the word and the idea. "Just

my luck to be stuck here guarding a bunch of underaged eightballs."

"Yes, sir," Nova answered. She wasn't quite as eager to kill or be killed

as her superior, but knew that it would be wise to hide the fact.

"Still, little Dana should see some action," Fredericks frowned,

slapping his desktop with his swagger stick. "Probably do her good, too."

He rose from his chair. "Well, let's see what we can do to guarantee

that, eh?"

The Skylords were all away; Captain Komodo stared in fury as the

screens showed him how, one after another, they were blown to harmless

mist by the energy weapons of the descending enemy. Not surprisingly, the

alien assault craft were homing in on the source of the missiles that had

damaged their mother ship.

"Fire!" Komodo bellowed, and rack after rack of APC-mounted

Swordfish missiles boiled away into the air, leaving corkscrewing white

trails. Tremendously powerful pulsed beams from the assault ships blasted

them out of the sky in twos and threes, while the aliens closed in on the

base.

Komodo gulped and watched the bottle-shaped vessels come into

visual range. He looked around him for a rifle or a rocket launcher; he had

no intention of running and he had no intention of going down without a

61

fight.

High above, access ports opened and enemy mecha swarmed out. Led

by a red Bioroid like a crimson vision of death, the Masters' warriors dove

their Hovercraft and sought targets, firing and firing.

62

CHAPTER SEVEN

Hwup! Tup! Thrup! Fo'!

Alpha! Tact'l! Armored! Corps!

For-git Jody! For-git Dotty!

Ay-tacks OWNS yo' student body!

Cadence chant popular among ATAC drill instructors

In the ready-room of the 15th squad, ATAC, Trooper Winston was

sitting with chin on palm and gazing at his squadmates sourly. "Finally, the

balloon goes up-and we're stuck here!"

Next to him, Coslow, arms folded on his chest, nodded. "Why's it

always our turn in the barrel?"

Angelo Dante nodded. "All this terrific talent being wasted just 'cause

both of our officers happen to be doing bad time."

They weren't even suited up in armor. Express orders from Higher Up

said that no Hovertank outfit would be allowed into a combat situation

without a commissioned officer-preferably an Academy-trained one-in

command.

Bowie, pacing, crossed to Angelo. "Why don't they just let you take over,

Sergeant?"

Angelo sighed philosophically and shook his head. "I'd love it, kid, but

there's just no way, know what I mean?"

Any Hovertanker knew the drills and could act independently on a

combat mission-could even take over command if it came to that-but the

Hovertanks had to be able to do more. The knowhow to integrate with other

types of mecha, with TASC units like the Black Lions and so forth; to

interpret complex tactical scenarios; to understand the various commo

computer languages; to see, in short, the Hovertank's mission in terms of an

entire Southern Cross opplan, and to work to the maximum benefit of that

overall plan was something that took years of study-study Angelo hadn't

63

received.

Angelo raised his shoulders, dropped them. "This isn't one of Dana's

drills. There's gonna be lives on the line this time, Bowie."

Not to mention one of the first fully operational Hovertank outfits in

the Southern Cross, a huge investment of time and treasure and technology.

The UEGs newest combat arm must serve well and protect the people who

had paid its price tag.

Louie Nichols was polishing his sidearm again. Word had it that he had

figured out an unauthorized modification that would triple the power of its

pulses; people edged away from him when he played with the handgun, not

wanting to be at ground zero in case Louie overlooked some potential glitch.

"No offense, Angelo," Louie said, "but I'm a little too busy to die right

now."

"Anyhow, thanks for the vote of confidence, Bowie," Angelo finished.

Just then the door to the ready-room parted and there stood Dana, in

full spit-shined combat armor lacquered white, black, and scarlet, her

helmet in the crook of her left arm. The armor, all ultratech alloy, somehow

had the look of an earlier day to it-a flaring at the hips and shoulders that

suggested both jousting panoply and whalebone corsetry.

"Fall in!"

The 15th's collective mouth hung open. Angelo came to his feet. "I

thought you were doing thirty days bad time. You're not serious, right?"

Dana beamed. "Wrong again. Crank it up, Fifteenth! We're heading for

a hotspot, to stop the enemy or die trying!"

Angelo released a deep breath. "Yes ma'am." But dying under the

command of a diz-zo-max teenager-it isn't exactly the way I'd hoped to go

out.

Louie walked by, holstering the pistol, eyes hidden in the dark goggles.

"Well, when the whistle blows, everybody goes, Angie, so let's get goin'!"

This time they took the drop-rack one level deeper, leaping clear amid

the Hovertank parking bays as the lights came up to full brightness. All were

armored now, dashing to their craft with the sureness of constant drill. The

64

overhead lights flashed white, red, white, red, to indicate the 15th was

rolling on a priority wartime deployment.

The Hovertanks were bigger than their pre-Robotech counterparts, and

heavier; yet they lifted lightly on thrusters, turning end-for-end like

pirouetting rhinos, very maneuverable and responsive. The 15th handled

their mecha with manual controls; there was no need for the thinking caps

yet.

The bulky war machines followed as Dana led the way in her command

tank, the Valkyrie, shooting up the access tunnel, following the glowing

traffic-routing arrows embedded in the pavement.

They left the base and the city behind, heading for their assigned

objective. The Hovertanks took up a precise skirmishing formation behind

her. The mecha's headlights, under the downward sweep of the forward

cowling, gave them the look of angry crabs.

Today I show them I've got what it takes. Dana steeled herself.

"Fifteenth squad will proceed ASAP to sector Q, I say again, Q for

Quebec." The order came over the command net. "Suspected alien landing

site. Use extreme caution."

"'Kay; you all know what to do," Dana told her ATACs. But inwardly

she winced. Alien! I'm half alien, and I'm on my way out to put my hide on

the line for this planet, you sorry sack!

Yeah, now this is where I belong, Angelo thought, the wind harsh in his

face, the tank shrilling beneath him.

The Hovertanks were assemblages of heavy-gauge armor in angular,

flattened shapes and acute edges, with rounded, downsloping prows, riding

thruster pods. The angles, as in armor throughout history, were for

deflection of rounds aimed at the tanks.

The Hovertanks kicked up huge plumes of dust as they raced to sector

Quebec. Long before they got there, the members of the 15th could see that

they had drawn a hotspot; explosions blossomed as detonations threw

debris high in the distance, while energy beams drew angry lines through

the air.

65

They topped a rise and looked down on a smoking battlefield. Scattered

all around were blasted and burning scraps of war mecha, almost all of

Earthly origin. A Civil Defense Flying Corps outfit was manning outmoded

ten-year-old VTs. The aircraft had come to life and assumed Battloid

configuration, but they lacked the size, firepower, and groundfighting ability

to deal with the ravaging XT mecha.

A tiny part of the enemy's telemetry had been intercepted, most of it

impenetrable. But using certain old Zentraedi decryption programs, the

code breakers had come up with what they thought was the designation of

the invaders' war machines: Bioroids.

Dana pulled on her helmet/thinking cap, which featured graceful wings

at either side, and a curved crest like a steel rainbow along its center. As she

made it fast to her armor, it sealed and became airtight; so protected, she

could survive radiation, chemical agents, water, vacuum, high

pressure-almost any hostile environment. The wings and crest gave her a

look that validated the name with which she had christened her tank,

Valkyrie.

"Here we go!"

She gunned her tank's power plant, then set off, leading the way. The

15th raced after her.

Down below, the CDs were doing badly. The enemy mecha were

drubbing them terribly; as the 15th watched, two blue giants led by a red

one, all riding the flyingsaucer Hoverplatforms like futuristic charioteers or

alien water-skiers, stooped for another kill.

As the tankers charged in, the Bioroid trio led by the red one swooped

in at two VTs who stood their ground in Battloid configuration. The red

Bioroid, in the lead, fired quick, accurate bursts with the gun mounted on

its control stem, and blew two of the VTs away, easily avoiding most of their

fire and shrugging off the rest.

The Hovertanks were in the air now. "Switch to Gladiator mode!" Dana

called over the tac net. In midair the tanks shifted, reconfigured,

mechamorphosed. When they landed, they were squat, two-legged,

66

waddling gun turrets the size of a house, each with a single massive cannon

stretching out before it. The big guns were the mecha's primary batteries,

even more powerful than the tank cannon.

The Gladiators fired, shoulder to shoulder.. It was like a cannonade

from the heaviest artillery. Two blue Bioroids went up in furious explosions,

then a third. Another jumped clear of its Hoverplatform just as the platform

was blown to bits. The Bioroid fired in midair, with a Bioroid-size pistol

shaped something like a fat discus held edge-on, and took cover

immediately when it hit the ground.

Other Bioroids were already there, having seen what intense fire the

Gladiators could throw into tile air. The aliens set up a determined

counter-fire with Bioroid small-arms.

Dana took a deep breath and hopped her Gladiator high, imaging the

move through her thinking cap. She landed to one end of a Bioroid firing

line to set up an enfilade. But an alien had spotted her, and swung to fire.

Dana got off the first shot and holed the outworld mecha through and

through with a brilliant lance of energy that left glowing, molten metal

around the edges of the point of entry.

"Gotcha!"

The Bioroids continued a stubborn, grudging resistance, but it was

clear at once that the Hovertank Gladiators had advantages the Veritech

Battloids didn't. They were bigger, more powerful, and more heavily

armored, and carried greater firepower. On the ground, slugging it out toe

to toe, the Bioroids had met their match.

Deafening volleys of nova cannonfire hammered back and forth in the

little valley; Bioroids fell, discovering that without their Hovercraft they

were on an equal footing with the ATACs.

The firefight raged on, neither side gaining or losing much ground.

Suddenly, the red Bioroid leapt high from its position behind the blues.

Showing great dexterity, it avoided the few cannon rounds that the startled

Gladiators got off at it, to land between two 15th mecha. It blasted one at

point-blank range, and turned to fire at the second even as the other

67

Gladiator swung its barrel around desperately.

The red Bioroid fired into the second Gladiator while the first was

erupting in a fireball; the second Earth mecha, too, went up in a

groundshaking explosion. The red jumped again, to continue its awesome

offensive.

Dana shook herself to get over the shock of it; two troopers dead in

seconds, two mecha utterly destroyed, and the red bounding on to attack

again. All right, Dana! she told herself firmly. Show 'em what you've got!

"Dante, switch your team to Battloid mode, now!"

She did the same, jumping her mecha to a better firing position. The

craft went through mechamorphosis in midair, taking on the form of a huge

Human-shaped battleship, an ultratech knight. Half the 15th reared up now

in Battloid form, the remainder hunkered down in Gladiator to give fire

support.

The blue Bioroids seemed daunted, surprised at the mechamorphosis

and unsure about coming to grips with the Humaniform machines. But the

red Bioroid carried the attack once more, aiming the massive disc-pistol at

Dana and unleashing a raging bolt of energy.

"Oh, no, y'don't!" She jumped her Battloid high as the shot annihilated

the ground where she had stood. At her command the Battloid took its

plasma rifle-which was the tank's cannon now reconfigured-into its hands

as it flew through the air. Dana fired on the fly, muttering, "Now it's your

turn!"

The red ducked, then raced to meet her as her Battloid landed with a

deft flip. In moments they were ducking it out in the rocks nearby, springing

up to fire at each other, then diving for cover again, while the rest of the

15th engaged the invaders once more. Without the red to lead them, the

blues' assault faltered.

But in the meantime, Dana was fighting a desperate duel against a very

capable foe. What's more, she couldn't lose the strange feeling that she

knew this machine, knew something all-important and fateful about it. It

was stronger than mere d 閖?vu, more like an emphatic Vision.

68

She spotted Louie Nichols's Gladiator on the cliffs above her. "Gimme

some covering fire, Louie!"

"Yo!" The magnification in Louie's goggles was at normal, and they

were letting in all available light even though they were still opaque from

the outside. He relied on his tank's range finder rather than on the one in

his goggles as he swung hard on the steering grips, imaged the shot through

his helmet receptors, and got ready to let one off.

The red spied him just as he took aim, and leapt. Louie was so busy

trying for the shot, trying to lead his bounding target just right; he didn't

realize one of the assault craft had swung in low over the battle.

The cannon round hit the craft's underbelly almost dead center, jolting

it-perhaps the most bizarre event of a bizarre day. The Bioroids halted,

seemed to listen to something, and began retreating.

In moments their Hovercraft came to the surviving invaders,

summoning them like faithful hunting hounds. The enemy mecha jumped

aboard, and raced for their ship. As it turned to go, the red Bioroid paused

to look at Dana one last time. It seemed to be staring right into her eyes,

thinking thoughts that were meant for her. Once more she had the strange

sensation, like some impossible memory, that she and the foe had some

essential bond.

"We did it, Lieutenant!" Angelo called out, elated, over the tac net. "Not

bad for a baptism of fire!"

"Sir, all enemy mecha and landing craft have withdrawn," Green

reported to Rolf Emerson. "They ran for it as if they weren't going to stop

until they were home. The mother ship has moved back to a geostationary

orbit. You were right, General; we sent them packing once before and today

we did it again! All units are at yellow alert and awaiting further orders."

Emerson turned from his contemplation of Monument City. "G2

Intelligence staff has concluded, and I concur, that the aliens are here for

our Protoculture supply, gentlemen. You may be sure that we will see them

again."

69

Lieutenant Colonel Rochelle, Emerson's adjutant, looked dismayed.

Colonel Green said gruffly, "Let 'em! My boys and girls're ready, anytime!"

But it was depressing news. Protoculture was essential to the operation

of Robotechnology, and the Earth's supply was limited. As far as Humans

knew, all that remained of it was what was left after the Robotech War. The

Zentraedi had originally invaded Earth to claim the Protoculture Matrix

from Zor's crashed ship, but subsequent investigation had failed to turn up

anything. It seemed the last remaining means for the actual production of

Protoculture was gone forever.

Zentraedi and Humans alike were unaware of what lay beneath the

three burial mounds near the ruins of Macross City-of the trio of wraiths

who guarded the wreckage of the SDFs 1 and 2 and Khyron's vessel, and the

unique treasure they protected.

"Damage report?" Emerson said.

"Fighting was contained to unpopulated areas," Green answered."

"Minimal losses; Fifteen ATAC squad stopped those aliens' butts cold,

sir," Rochelle added.

Emerson nodded. "The Fifteenth, hmm? Looks like Lieutenant Phillips

gets himself another commendation."

Rochelle ahemmed. "He wasn't there, sir; they didn't get him out of the

slammer in time. Lieutenant Dana Sterling led the squad today."

Emerson permitted himself a proud smile. "Ah, Dana. Yes."

The drudgery of checking over all their mecha and equipment after the

battle, preparing to go into combat again at a moment's notice, was

sobering work to the 15th. They had won, but they had taken losses, too:

dead and wounded who might easily have been any of those who came

through unscathed.

After they got the order to stand down, they worked, fighting every

instant and every portion of the battle again, over and over, among

themselves; recounting and arguing, joking and lamenting.

It was still going on up in the ready-room, when the door opened and

70

Sean Phillips walked in, escorted by Nova Satori. "Hi, guys. Life pretty

boring without me around, was it?"

"We managed to keep ourselves occupied." Louie grinned.

Nova snapped, "By order of the commander, Alpha Tactical Armored

Corps, Sean Phillips is reduced to the rank of private, second class."

Everyone in the room gasped. Nova went on. "And as for you,

Sterling-"

Dana snapped to attention. "Whatever I did this time, ma'am, I'm

ready and willing to accept disciplinary action."

"Quiet!" Nova barked. "You've been promoted to permanent command

of the Fifteenth, Lieutenant. Don't blow this chance, because I'll be keeping

an eye on you." Nova turned and exited. Except for Sean, everybody there

was watching Dana.

The computer-controlled bar that dispensed only nonalcoholic drinks

to those on duty was ready to serve something a little stronger. Sean had

already eased over to it, and was taking a long pull from a tall glass. "Private

Second Class Phillips!"

Sean spat out part of his drink as Dana shouted his name. "I'll be

watching you," she told him.

Sean looked startled, then gave her a dose of the famous grin. "Just

give the word. I'm yours to command, Lieutenant."

There was knowing laughter and some catcalling from the rest of the

15th, but Dana was satisfied that the point was made, and that everyone

accepted the change of command. She couldn't afford to have Sean

secondguessing her, or having her troops expect him to.

Sean was a great soldier and a definite asset, but she didn't think much

of the idea of putting a busted CO back in the outfit he had commanded. But

it looked like she would have to live with it.

Later, in the shower, she ran over the things she would have to get

done as soon as possible. Replacements for the casualties and the destroyed

Hovertanks would be coming in, and she would have to do some reshuffling

of her Table of Organization and Equipment. There would be training and

71

more training, to make the 15th a well-integrated fighting unit once

more-and little time to do it in.

In the midst of all her ruminations she suddenly stopped, standing

stiffly, immobilized. As vividly as if it were actually there before her, she saw

the red Bioroid again...felt again that strange sensation of a bond between

them.

72

CHAPTER EIGHT

I am satisfied that I've now ended any blasphemous talk of treating with

the aliens, either among my subordinates or the Council. These aliens are an

abomination, a violation of the Divine Plan; we must exterminate them all.

That is our holy obligation.

From the personal journal of

Supreme Commander Anatole Leonard

Reassuring media announcements of the situation were quickly

followed by a formal declaration of war. The armored troops posted on

street corners and patrolling everywhere were more for the civilians' peace

of mind than any deterrent value.

But the Human race had been very much a military culture since the

Global Civil War and, organized along feudal lines under the UEG, accepted

the necessity that it must fight once again.

"Headquarters' thinking is that we can't sit around and wait for them to

make the next move," Rochelle told the assembled officers. "The opinion is

that their Robotechnology and scientific edge outweighs our numbers and

home-field advantage. We've got to start calling the play-draw them out

with fighters, lay in a missile barrage on that flagship. We've got to keep

them off balance."

"It's just not in our blood to sit and wait for them to call all the shots," a

G3 light-colonel agreed.

A G2 intel major took off his glasses, shaking his head. "But their

counterattack might end up annihilating our entire defense force, don't you

understand that?"

"That's right, it's insane to attack now! It's like jabbing a stick into a

hornets' nest-a very short stick," a recon captain laughed harshly.

"That will do!" Rochelle bit out the words, and the assembled officers

73

subsided. Dana looked up and down the table, studying them.

Marie Crystal was there; so was Fredericks. So were some other ATACs

people, some Civil Defense-it was odd to know that her unit's survival might

depend on these people, or theirs on her.

"The decision has been made," Rochelle went on. "You in this

Strikeforce will carry the war to the enemy. Lieutenant Sterling's squad will

handle rear guard and provide an entrenched fall-back position. There will

be additional coverage from nearby missile and artillery bases and the

various ready-reaction units. Lieutenant Crystal, your Black Lions will be

our spearhead."

They already knew the plan, had the briefing files before them and the

tactical displays on screens around the room, but he reviewed for them one

more time anyway. When he was finished, Marie said, "We'll be ready, sir."

Dana made a sour face. "Some people have all the luck. Don't get your

tail shot off, Marie." Marie slipped her a wink.

"Colonel Fredericks," Rochelle was saying, "I'm putting these units and

their installations on red alert as of now; I want the bases sealed and a full

commo blackout imposed. This attack has to come as a complete surprise.

No one enters or leaves or communicates with outsiders in any way except

by my direct order, understood?"

Fredericks seemed to be savoring the idea of having his MPs coop up

the Strikeforce troops and make them toe the line. "Most affirmative, sir;

you can count on it."

Sean Phillips snarled, "Somebody tell me what's goin' on here!"

He stood with fists cocked by the Hovertank parking bays, glowering at

Louie Nichols and a few of the others who were running maintenance.

"I d-didn't want to bring it up," Louie fumbled, familiar with Sean's

tripwire temper. "That is, uh-"

"As of today, you've been assigned to a new Hovertank," Bowie

intervened.

"Somebody slipped up," Louie hastened. "With you bein' in the brig

74

and all. Guess they forgot to tell you." Sean grabbed a handful of Louie's

uniform and pushed him back against a tank, growling like an angry

wolverine.

Sean's tank, the Queen Maeve, was his pride and joy, finely tuned so

that it ran like a watch, lovingly maintained in every way. That made it that

much more undesirable, in Louie's estimation, to be the one to tell him what

had happened.

Louie yelped, and Bowie hollered, "Cut it out, Phillips!" But before

anyone could break it up, Sean dropped the lanky tech-freak and wheeled,

eyes roving the bays.

"Listen, they sent in a new guy from the replacement depot when you

went in the stockade," Louie confessed,, rubbing his chest. "Then Dana got

put in command and then they jailed her and then they sprang her and

made her CO-in all the confusion, the repple-depple new guy got Queen

Maeve. And he was one of the guys who didn't make it, Sean."

"Your tank's in about a thousand pieces, what's left of it," Bowie added.

"So which one's mine now?" Sean seethed. Then his eyes fell on a

shrouded object in an end bay. "Ah! What's that? That mine?" He ran to it

before anybody could tell him the truth.

Sean dragged the cover off, losing balance and falling on his rear. He

sat, looking up in amazement. It was a new tank right off the production

line, a gleaming war mecha with all the latest in Robotechnology

refinements.

"Oh-hh," he breathed reverently. In another moment he was

clambering aboard, laughing with delight. Bowie and Louie came dashing

over.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" Louie said. He and Bowie traded resigned looks;

there was going to be trouble.

"Man, this baby was built with me in mind!" Sean chuckled, running

his hands over the controls, checking out the cockpit. "What a sweetheart!

Nobody else in the Fifteenth could handle this darlin-"

"But I'm afraid somebody else is going to have to try, Private Phillips,"

75

a voice said icily. Dana stood nearby, arms akimbo.

Sean leaned back in the pilot's seat, interlocking his fingers, staring off

at the ceiling and ignoring her. "Nope."

Dana came over to stand beside the Valkyrie's highsheen side. "This

tank's reserved for officer use, get it? Read my lips while I repeat this,

Private: you'll never fly this craft."

So the honeymoon was over and it was time to really decide who ran

things in the 15th. And Dana held every ace. Recalling how much Fredericks

seemed to enjoy having him as a houseguest down at Barbed Wire City,

Sean resigned himself. "Damn it all, there ain't no justice in this world."

Bowie and Louie and some of the others were just barely stifling their

laughter. "This tin can and me woulda been history on wheels. But-" He

looked to Dana. "'Course, there's still a chance for you and me, little darlin'."

She had been waiting for that. Sean had been decent enough to her as a

CO, had never put any moves on her-but that was before he wanted

something from her. "The only history we'll make is when I send your sorry

tail back to the stockade for insubordination, hotshot."

He knew her well enough to realize she would do it. Some females just

didn't know how to be friendly. Sean hopped out of the tank. "All right; lay

off. I was only thinkin' of the good o' the Corps. So, what'm I supposed to

use as a ride?"

She gave him an innocent expression and pointed. "Look right up

there."

Sean let out a curse. "That crate? The Bad News? That's the oldest

junker we've got!"

"And it's all yours, Private; you'd better get to work on it."

Sean heaved a deep sigh. "Thanks."

"Now, listen up, everybody," Dana went on. "Orders from High

Command. We move out at thirteen hundred hours tomorrow. The brass

decided it's time we whip some hurt on these invaders."

There were the usual snafus, the usual hurry-up-and-waits, but all

76

units were in place only slightly after the scheduled zero hour.

For some reason, the Strikeforce commander changed his mind at the

last moment, ordering another TASC unit to go in as first attack wave.

Marie Crystal stood in the base control tower and watched the VTs of the

Redhawk Team take off.

In the 15th's ready-room, the tankers waited in full armor, helmets in

hand. Dana strained to catch a glimpse of the fighters rising from the

distant Fokker Base. Man, I hate this waiting in the background! This is

driving me zooey.

"What's the matter, Lieutenant?" Louie Nichols smirked. "Pulling

reserve duty doesn't agree with you?"

"Sometimes it's tough to just stand pat," Angelo hinted.

Dana whirled on them. "As you were! I don't need to be reminded what

my orders are!"

At that moment the PA squawked, and they got the order to move out.

The 15th was among the very last units to be moved into place as Southern

Cross command made some final arrangements in defensive deployment.

The tankers charged for the drop-rack, and in moments they were

tearing down the highway, bound for an industrial area at the edge of

Monument City. The 15th went with helmets off for the time being; manual

controls would suffice for a mere drive from point A to point B.

Playing shuttlecars, is that all we're going to get to do? Dana fumed.

The Redhawk VTs came up in a ballistic climb, then formed up for

attack and headed straight for the alien. In the command center, Emerson

and his staff studied a visual image of the underside of the Robotech

Masters' flagship.

It was an elongated hexagon, a huge lozenge of alloy the size of a city,

its superstructural features as big as sportsdomes and skyscrapers. The

blinking of its white and purple running lights-if that was what the lights

were-was the only sign of activity in the ship.

77

"No doubt their sensors have detected the Redhawks, sir," Colonel

Green said.

"Attack begins in thirty seconds," Rochelle reported. "I wonder what

they'll throw back at us?"

Emerson leaned forward to call down to an officer on the operations

floor below. "Are you sure you haven't picked up any reaction from the

alien?"

The officer surveyed the consoles manned by his techs, and the main

displays big as movie screens. "That's affirmative, sir; no response of any

kind."

Few things could have troubled Rolf Emerson more, but it was too late.

The screens began relaying visual transmissions from VT gunpod cameras

as the fighters went in. One flight broke off to make a pass over the enemy's

upper hull, to size up the objective and draw fire so that a second flight

could make suppression runs on the alien batteries.

The cameras showed conical structures the size of pyramids, poking up

out of a landscape of systemry. There were ziggurats, onion domes, and

towers like two-tined forks. But the ship remained silent and unresponsive,

inert except for the lights. Two more passes didn't change that.

Emerson knew things had gone too far to simply pull back now. If he

didn't give the order, Leonard or someone else farther up the line would.

"All right; we'll provoke a response. Commence attack immediately."

The VTs swept in, releasing dozens of Mongoose missiles. The missiles

were powerful and accurate, producing brilliant explosions and lots of

smoke, but when the smoke cleared, it was evident that they had caused no

detectable damage, none at all.

Then someone said, "Sir, I'm getting some movement from the enemy

ship."

"Right." The Redhawks' leader could see them, too, now: elongated,

bulbous things like inverted teardrops, looking more glassy than metallic,

gracefully grooved with spiral flutings. They reminded some Human

78

observers of chandelier light bulbs, emerging from housings or rising up

from where they had lain flat along the hull, to come to bear on the fighters.

"Everybody look sharp for antiaircraft fire," the Redhawk leader said,

though he had the feeling that those were more than just some AA guns

snouting out to track his squadron.

The green-white serpentine discharges of energy bolts crackled from

the long muzzles, writhing and intertwining like living things. All at once

they were coming from everywhere, the invader ship protected by a blazing

network of interlacing streams of destruction. One VT was blown to bits,

then another, and two more, before the pilots could get clear.

Someone said, "Sir, I'm picking up an unidentified craft emerging from

the mother ship; ID signature indicates one of their assault craft. Correction:

make that two assault ships."

The XT craft zoomed out together and pounced on the VTs even as the

Redhawk leader was warning his men. A pair of VTs attempting to strafe a

cannon emplacement was taken from behind, blown to flaming wreckage by

streams of green-white energy discs.

Emerson ordered the Redhawk leader, "Break off the attack on the

mother ship and get on those assault craft at once! Keep them from getting

back to the mother ship or reaching any ground targets."

"I copy, sir." But the VT leader didn't sound very confident about it.

Green told Emerson, "Sensor data indicate the power in each of those

landing craft is superior to that in the entire Redhawk squadron."

"I'm not surprised, Colonel," Emerson said. "But it's not just a question

of raw power. If we can isolate them-who knows?" Sufficient firepower

concentrated in the right place might do the trick; one torpedo could sink a

carrier, after all; one rocket could destroy an arsenal.

The Redhawks caught up with one of the assault craft on its plummet

to the ground; they were having a hard time spotting the second.

"Okay, we've got 'im now; keep 'im in sight," the leader said, moving

into position for a shot at the invader's tail. The VTs' guns hosed

79

green-white energy discs much like the aliens'; it was Robotechnology

against Robotechnology.

But the target was gone abruptly. The Redhawk leader craned to see

what had happened. "Where'd he go?"

He got his answer a moment later. The landing boat had gone into an

incredibly powerful dive, looped, and come around onto the Redhawk

formation's tail.

"Break and shake!" yelled the leader, but it was too late to evade. The

alien picked off the rear ship in the diamond of four, and went in after the

others. A second burst from the invader got another VT and sent it plowing

into its wingmate.

The leader came in for a high deflection shot at the bandit, but it

evaded with amazing agility and slid around onto his tail, chopping away at

him. The tight packages of destructive energy holed the fighter's fuselage,

and sent the Redhawk leader plunging to the Earth, trailing flame and

smoke.

The fighting had brought the ships down close to the ground; there was

no time to eject.

Sean Phillips watched the Redhawk leader's VT plow into the ground,

off in the distance, toward the air base.

"My God! Unbelievable! A whole squadron wiped out in two-three

minutes!"

Angelo Dante shook his head slowly. "Maybe we didn't beat them the

other day after all; maybe they just wanted to wait for the Main Event."

"We did beat them once, and we can beat them again," Dana

contradicted loudly. But a moment later she gasped as she saw the second

assault ship link up with the first. They turned and began an approach on

the base, the origin of the fighters that had attacked their flagship. As they

went they began dropping Bioroids, the mecha dispersing and advancing on

their antigrav Hovercraft for an attack.

And at the head of the mountainous, armored invaders rode the red

80

Bioroid.

81

CHAPTER NINE

A WW I biplane had perhaps fifteen gauges and instruments a WW II

fighter some thirty-five or so. By the time of the Global Civil War, a front-line

fighter-bomber had approximately four hundred indicators, readouts, and so

forth. Robotech mecha made those planes look as simple as unicycles. Is it any

wonder that the RDF, and the Southern Cross Army that took its place, had

little use for people with fast reflexes and the rest of it, but who couldn't image,

couldn't think their mecha through a fight? It was the only conceivable way of

controlling such an instrumentality.

And even that wasn't always enough.

Zachary Fox Jr.,

Men, Women, Mecha:

the Changed Landscape of the Second Robotech War

The conventional armored vehicles and self-propelled artillery at the

base did their best to send up defensive barrages, but the Bioroids were too

agile and their counterfire too devastating. The Bioroids wove down

through the tracers and solid-projectile fire, and then opened up.

Blasts from the discus-shaped hand weapons sent the field pieces and

battle tanks up in violent ruin. The missile batteries didn't have any better

luck; more Bioroids came in at low angles, taking them out with highly

accurate fire.

Pilots scrambled to their planes, horrified that they had been caught on

the ground by the incredible speed of the alien attack. Men and women with

one foot in the cockpit, or just lowering the canopy, or beginning their taxi,

were incinerated in their exploding aircraft. Whole lines of parked ships

disappeared in tremendous outlashings of energy. Armored leg infantry,

bravely attempting to defend the base with small arms, were mowed down

on strafing runs.

The Bioroids began cutting the base to ribbons, determined to turn it

into one huge funeral pyre, beaming down communications and sensor

82

towers, strafing barracks, savaging every target they saw.

One of the few TASC units to make it upstairs was Marie Crystal's. She

formed up the Black Lions, then brought them around to do whatever they

could in the face of the appalling counterattack.

They spied a flight of blue Bioroids led by the red. "Okay, nail those

bastards!" she yelled; the VTs went in. But the Bioroids on their flying

platforms were fearless and capable; they came head-on, knocking down

first one Lion, then another.

But the VTs got on the scoreboard, too; Marie waxed a blue thoroughly,

saw it fall in burning pieces along with its broken sky-sled. Another blue fell

like a blazing comet, and the dogfight intensified. But Marie had a moment

to notice that the red leader had disappeared, had gone on, she supposed, to

direct the attack on the base.

But she couldn't break loose to give chase; just then two more blues

jumped her.

Far across the valley, on the outskirts of Monument City, the 15th

watched smoke rise from the airfield. It was obvious to them all now that

the attack was completely concentrated there, but they received no orders to

move in the midst of the turmoil. Dana could only guess what a madhouse

the command center must be at the moment. Apparently nobody had

stopped to think that the Hovertanks were needed. That, or the message

had never gotten through.

"Those dirty, murderous-" Bowie grated.

Dana made a decision. "Let's mount up."

That left Sean and Angelo to stare at her in amazement while she

scrambled aboard her gleaming Valkyrie. Other 15th troopers raced to get

rolling.

As Valkyrie eased forward on its surface-effect thrusters, Angelo moved

to block the way. "No! Have you gone crazy?"

Dana throttled back, the tank settling, the pitch of its engines dropping.

"Outta my way, Sergeant."

83

"We're assigned to protect this sector, Lieutenant. Or have you

forgotten those orders?"

She stared down at him from her cockpit-turret. "What, so they can rip

us apart one unit at a time? The commo nets are useless, and there is such a

thing as personal initiative."

Angelo lowered his head like a bull to glare at her. "Our orders are to

wait right here."

She gunned the tank again. "Then you can wait here, and remind 'em of

that at my court-martial, Angie."

The big sergeant had to dive aside as the 15th followed Dana,

screaming off to the battle. Sean, arms folded, was watching him. "You

know she's gonna end up right back in the brig," Angelo said bitterly.

"Assuming we still have a brig." Sean smiled. Then he was boarding the

Bad News. "See ya later, Sergeant."

Angelo was left to scratch his head, dumbfounded, as Sean hurried to

catch up with the others. Then he heard another voice, a very strident one.

"Lieutenant, you are deserting your post! Return at once!

Acknowledge!"

Nova Satori was pulling up on an MP Hovercycle, her blue-black hair

billowing behind her under the confinement of her goggle band. She was

yelling into a radio mike. With the communications systems so completely

bollixed up-both from confusion and damage done by the raiders-she had

been pressed into service as a messenger.

"Get back here or face a general court-martial!" she called, but she

stopped the cycle near Angie's tank; it was pointless to try to follow the 15th

when they were moving at full speed-especially into the middle of a pitched

battle.

Angelo shook his head in resignation. "Then you'd better draw up

papers on me, too, Lieutenant." He jumped to his tank, the Trojan Horse,

ignoring her outcries.

Big shuttles and transport ships, tiny recon fliers, hangars, and repair

84

gantries-they were all equal targets of the blue horde. And the defenders

were becoming fewer and fewer.

Trying to see through the smoke in the cockpit of her damaged VT,

Marie plunged toward the hardtop. She had become an ace and more in the

course of the attack, but number six had her number, and got a piece of her

just as she finished him.

She managed to throw the switches and do the imaging that sent her

VT into Guardian mode. It reconfigured just in time, foot thrusters blaring

as it ground in for a standup landing.

As was often the case with Robotechnology, damage suffered in one

mode was less critical in another, and the very act of mechamorphosis

seemed to help the craft cope.

But she was no sooner at a standstill than enemy blasts gouged the

runway all around her. The red Bioroid, like a stooping bird of prey,

plunged at her. The Guardian's thrusters gushed, and she leapt it high.

Gotta take him out! They raced at each other, firing.

"I copy." Green turned from the phone to Emerson. "The airbase is

putting up only scattered resistance, sir. It could fall at any time."

Emerson wondered what would happen if it did. Would the aliens try

to annex it-set up ground operations? Or would they simply plunder what

Protoculture they could find and torch the whole installation?

Leonard and the other higher-ups had been adamant that the

Hovertanks be used to protect population centers rather than deployed to

Fokker Base, where Emerson wanted them in the first place. But now the

top brass were out of contact, communication virtually nil, and Emerson

had room to use his own personal initiative.

"Bring in the Hovertanks. Get the fifteenth over there ASAP"

"Even 'as soon as possible' isn't soon enough, sir," Rochelle observed.

"It'll take too long to get a message through and redeploy them."

"Try anyway!" Emerson snapped. Rochelle rushed to obey.

"Sir, shall I inform all units to be ready to evacuate the base?" Green

85

hazarded the question. Emerson just stared at the tactical displays.

Marie and the red Bioroid played out their deadly game of high/low

hide-and-seek as Bioroids and VTs clashed, fired, and were destroyed on all

sides.

Marie's Guardian landed and glanced around the repair area in which

it found itself, a big pulse laser gun held like a pistol in its cyclopean fist.

"Okay, where y'at now?" she murmured.

She didn't have to wait long for a reply. The red came swooping over a

building at her. The Guardian sprang up to meet it; as in a joust, they

passed within arm's length of each other, firing away, dodging each other's

fire.

But when Marie landed, the knees of her mecha gave way, cut in half by

the red's energy shots. The Guardian crashed down on its chin, dazing her.

She fought back the wooziness, popping the canopy and dragging herself

out.

She pulled off her helmet and shoved it aside, then froze. The red had

settled its Hovercraft right in front of her, and she was staring up the barrel

of the discus-shaped pistol, a barrel as big as a storm drain. Marie watched,

unmoving, waiting for the end.

But it wasn't the end either she or the red had expected. A cannon bolt

came in, a thin one at high resolution set for long-distance work. The shot

didn't quite take off the end of the Bioroid's arm; it missed by only a few

feet.

Still, it threw up smoke and rubble, and appeared to stagger the red.

Marie hugged the hardtop, shielding her head. Then she looked up, and saw

where the shot had come from.

The 15th was lined up abreast and waiting. Dana stood up in her

cockpit-turret, surveying her handiwork proudly as the red Bioroid pivoted

to face her. She waved. "Over here, ya big metal dink! Can't ya even tell

when somebody's shooting at you?"

As she hoped, the Bioroid rose on its platform, forgetting Marie, and

rushed at her. Dana was back in her tank in a moment, the Valkyrie going

86

through mechamorphosis to Gladiator, the rest of the 15th emulating her.

Dana's next salvo missed the red but knocked it waffling off course,

nearly out of control. The rest of the ATACs were shooting at the blue

Bioroids that surged in at them. The massed main batteries of the 15th

skeeted alien after alien out of the sky; the air shimmered with heat waves

at the vast forces unleashed. Thick smoke from the burning base and the

exploded mecha billowed through the air. The squat, massive Gladiators

volleyed and volleyed, picking off more invaders while keeping the rest at

bay with their tremendous volume of fire.

The red Bioroid dropped from its platform to the ground, and was

joined by a blue, to attack on foot.

"One on your right, Lieutenant!"

"I see him, Bowie!" Looking after each other was a habit they would

never break, she guessed. That suited her.

The red popped up from behind a mound of fallen concrete to stitch

the side of her Gladiator with a row of shots. Any other mecha in the Earth

arsenal would have been severely damaged or blown to smithereens, but

Valkyrie was scarcely touched. Dana traversed her gun barrel and

whammed away again. The shot went wide, and the red and the blue came

charging at the 15th's position.

The red seemed as big as Mount Everest. It and Dana fired at the same

moment, near misses that rocked each other. "Bowie, cover me!"

"You got it!" Bowie drove the red back, firing with everything his tank,

the Diddy-Wa-Diddy, had, even though the twin barrels of the secondary

batteries scarcely scratched the Bioroid's hide. The rest of the 15th was busy

maintaining the shield of AA fire; Dana went to Battloid mode, springing

through the air to confront the red.

The two mecha catapulted through the air at each other. Dana

protected herself from the enemy's handweapon shots with the thick curve

of armor mounted along one arm like an ancient duelist's targone.

In the meantime she drew a bead with her own titanic battle rifle, the

reconfigured tank-mode cannon. The shot pierced the red's left shoulder in

87

a spatter of molten metal and oily black smoke, a mecha-wound that

spewed sparks and shrapnel and tongues of flame. The red went reeling and

flailing back through the air, hit the ground with a crash, and lay sprawled.

Dana rushed at it, intending to rip loose the power couplings and tubes

connected to the head area, to disable it completely.

But as Dana charged in, it resumed firing. Only the reflexes of a young

professional in superb condition let her leap her Battloid out of the line of

fire. The red jumped to cover and so did Dana; in another moment they

were playing duck-and-shoot once more.

"Angie, lay cover for me, can you?"

"It's on the way!" The cannonade from the Trojan Horse sent the red

bounding in retreat; Dana's Battloid launched itself after.

"Gotcha now!" She fired on the fly, scoring another hit on the left

shoulder as the red twisted and flipped to avoid. The alien landed

awkwardly, nearly toppling. When it spun for another blast at her, she was

ready.

Dana's rifle-cannon bolt blew the discus-shaped hand weapon right out

of the red's fist; it stood unmoving, as if stunned.

Dana centered it in her sights. The war's over for you, hosehead! At last,

Earth had a POW.

Just then the Bioroid was in motion again. Straight for her. "Huh?"

It strode directly at her weapon's muzzle. "What the-"

She fired again, a high-resolution beam that seared a hold right

through it at the waistline. The red stumbled, regained balance, and charged

her like an enormous defensive tackle.

Again the visions and strangely compelling images filled her. Was it

because this was how she was to die? she wondered. The wash of emotion

and disorientation paralyzed her where she would otherwise certainly have

cut the foe in two with as many shots as it took.

Before she could shake off the trance, though, the red drop-kicked her

Battloid. She shook off her stupefaction and her Battloid reached to grapple,

but the red had already jumped high, its flying disc platform skimming in

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under it to bear it away into the air.

The alien fired at her with the weapons emplaced in the steering stem's

pod; she barely rolled out of the way in time to avoid being hit. The red

zipped past.

"That tears it!" The Valkyrie hurled itself into the air,

mechamorphosing. It landed solidly on both feet, in Gladiator mode, main

battery traversing, Dana's sight reticle searching. Let's see how they like it

when I clean house on their assault craft!

She fired off a max-power round, recalling how Bowie's accidental shot

of the day before had momentarily stopped the invaders. She aimed for it

and hit the glassy blue dome on the upper side of its nose, presuming that to

be the bridge; the shot shattered the dome and elicited a splash of

secondary explosion, smoke, and flame.

The red tottered again, shaken by the bolt as much as the assault craft,

and its emotionless tinted visor-face swung back for a look at Dana. She and

the rest of the 15th opened up on the raiders with everything they had,

primaries and secondaries hammering. Three more of the blues fell in the

blaststorm, but the red and the rest wove through the fire to return to their

smoking, listing ship.

The raiders dove aboard. The rust-red attack ship realigned, then dove

upward out of sight at great speed, before the ATACs could bring weapons

to bear on it.

89

CHAPTER TEN

Suddenly, a new Triumvirate

Dana, Nova, Marie,

Each zigzagging from her side toward

The center of the triskelion.

Mingtao,

Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

The Bioroids were all tied in to the assault ship," Rochelle reported.

"Signal Intelligence and ground observers, sensors, and after-action reports

all agree," he added. "The Bioroids were forced to retreat when Sterling got

a round into the ship and disrupted their command capability. At least

we've got some idea how to handle their mecha."

But it was obvious the enemy would be much more careful next time.

Emerson rubbed his face wearily, feeling the bristles and looking forward to

some sleep. "At least there's a little good news."

"Yessir. Um-" Rochelle broached a very delicate subject. "About

Lieutenant Sterling abandoning her post and disobeying orders-what d'we

do?"

Everyone knew Emerson was Bowie Grant's official guardian and

Dana's unofficial one, but that had never made any difference as far as the

young people's treatment in the Southern Cross military. Emerson knew

what he would do to any junior officer who had done what Dana had, and

after a moment's hesitation conceded to himself that it was only just.

Dana was singing loudly and, as usual, badly off key. The shower spray

came down at her steam-hot, and she massaged out bruises and sore

muscles. She bit her lip once or twice, pausing in her song to fight back

images of the red Bioroid.

Maybe those thoughts were some alien weapon? In any case, she

mustn't fall prey to them again!

90

The battle had been bad enough, but there was also a row of sleepless

nights ahead, repairing and running maintenance, getting in replacements

and shuffling the TO&E and doing yet more training, to get the 15th

combat-ready again in less time than it could possibly take.

There was a pounding at her bathroom door. She could hear Nova

Satori's voice over the rushing water, "Just can the arias, Lieutenant, and

get a move on."

Dana reluctantly left the shower, winding a towel around her, and

emerged from the tiny bathroom cubicle in a cloud of steam. "What d'you

think, Nova? Do I have a future in show business?"

The MP lieutenant sneered. "Sure, sweeping up after the circus parade.

Now, hurry up; we're late."

Dana was perfectly content to dawdle; Nova refused to tell her where

she was being taken, or why, but it seemed pretty plain. "Aw, take it easy!

You'll have me back in your lockup soon enough!"

Nova was leaning against the wall with arms folded. She blurted out

angrily, "The ceremony's already-" She stopped, saw that Dana had caught

it, shrugged to herself, and went on. "I'm taking you to receive a

promotionfor valor."

"They're bumping you to first looie."

"Come in, Space Station Liberty! Space Station Liberty, Space Station

Liberty, this is Earth Control, Earth Control, please acknowledge, over."

The transmission had been going out ever since the Masters appeared

to begin their probings of Earthly defenses. The UEG and Southern Cross

were certain that Liberty was still there in its Trojan Lagrangian

point-Number Five-out near Luna's orbit. All indications were that the crew

was still alive. In some way the scientists and engineers were still trying to

understand, the Masters seemed to be watching everything on the spectrum

out Liberty's way. An op would no sooner try a frequency than it was

jammed, at least as far as Earth-Liberty links were concerned.

With the flagships' arrival in Earth orbit, even the relay telesats had

91

gone dead, and in the wake of that first barrage from Captain Komodo, the

satellites had been blasted from the sky. Earth-based commo lasers were

useless, what with the distortion caused by the planet's atmosphere.

But the communications people doggedly kept trying. Radio Station

Liberty, with its unique Robotech long-range commo gear, was Earth's only

hope for eventual contact with the SDF-3 and Rick Hunter's expedition.

More, Liberty's personnel were Human beings, cut off from their home

planet; Earth must make every effort on their behalf. A rescue mission out

to Liberty was impossible, though. Earth lacked the ships, equipment, and

facilities to mount such an expedition in the foreseeable future, now that its

main aerospace installation had been so badly ravaged by the Bioroids.

But a research team over in the encryption systems shop at Signal

Security came up with a makeshift solution. Earth and Liberty could phase

their equipment to jump frequencies, seemingly at random, from one to the

next, in milliseconds, and get in brief communications on each one before

the Masters could jam it. The result would be resumed communications

with Liberty and, it was hoped, Moon Base survivors.

The only problem was, somebody had to get the word, and the

meticulously worked out schedule of freq jumps, through to Liberty.

"Now, I'm not going to b-s you," the briefing officer said to the young

unit commanders ranged around the big horseshoe table. "Getting a

tight-beam commo laser up into orbit and punching through a signal to

Liberty is going to be one hairy mission."

He looked around at the leaders from Cosmic Units, TASC, ATAC, and

the rest. "Supreme Headquarters is calling for volunteers. Personally, I

think it should be done by assignment, but there it is. So far, only

Lieutenant Crystal of TASC has consented to go on this mission."

Dana knew very well whom he was waiting for. Along with the Black

Lions, her 15th had the only real combat experience in dealing with enemy

mecha, and the heavily armored Hovertanks were the most effective

weapons Earth had. Like any soldier who had been around for a while, she

92

knew that one of the basic rules of existence was never to volunteer. Still, a

little something extra would be expected of the ATACs; she knew that when

she applied for training, and so had everybody else in the 15th.

She swallowed and rose to her feet. "You can deal us in, sir." Marie

lifted one eyebrow and gave Dana a half smile.

"Very commendable," the briefing officer nodded. "But we're going to

have room for only three Hovers. You pick."

Dana got the point of what a critical assignment she had volunteered

for when she discovered that the mission briefing was to be given by

General Emerson himself.

He wasn't sweet, gruff Uncle Rolf then; he was all business and military

precision. His only concession to their former relationship was when,

shaking her handas he had Marie's and the others'-he gave her a short,

minimal flash of smile and growled, "Good luck, Lieutenant Sterling; go get

'em."

She decided to take Angelo and Bowie. Bowie accepted it without any

show of emotion, with barely a word of acknowledgment. Angelo had to put

on an elaborate show, with a lot of talk about going head-on against an

enemy armada single-handed, but Dana had confidence in him ever since

he went along with her "personal initiative" decision to race to the rescue at

Fokker Base.

The rest of the 15th showed some disappointment about being left

behind, but kept it to themselves, even Sean. Dana reminded herself to be

wary of the ATACs' own heartbreaker, but she was beginning to feel that she

could rely on him, too.

Emerson and Green stood studying the image of the enemy

dreadnaught. "Are you sure Sterling and Crystal are qualified to command

this mission, sir?" Green's voice echoed through the command center. "They

do seem rather young for so much responsibility."

Emerson nodded thoughtfully. "Yes, but they're the best we have at

leading our most powerful mecha, and they're the only two unit

93

commanders alive who've engaged the Bioroids. And both did it effectively."

Emerson pursed his lips for a moment, then added ominously, "If

anyone can do it, they can."

A command center captain named Anderson pointed out changes in

the readouts; the enemy mother ship was in motion again. "They're moving

into a lower orbit again, looks like."

All the launchpads for the real heavyweights were still out of

commission. There were only two left that could accept shuttles, and so the

mission was built around that limit; the launchpads were reusable, of

course, but not in a short enough turnaround time to be of any help. Repair

to damaged pads was going on around the clock, but that was of even less

use today.

The two tiled white shuttles sat like delta-winged crossbow quarrels on

the inclined launch ramps. Marie was in the pilot's seat in the number one

ship, the Challenger IV; only a few hundred yards away sat the Potemkin.

Her copilot, Heideger, was an experienced captain from Cosmic Units.

It was only over Cosmic's objections that a TASC officer had been given

command, but Marie was glad to have Heideger as her first officer anyway;

the man really knew his job.

They were completing the long preflight checklist. "We're now on

internal computers," Heideger said. The flight deck door slid open and Dana

and Bowie entered. They were unarmored, the expected g-load being what it

was, and Dana carried-Marie couldn't believe her eyes-a magazine! As if this

were some commuter hop!

"You're late," Marie bristled.

"We were securing the tanks-" Bowie began, taken aback.

"Stow it, Private, and get to your station!" Marie spat.

Now it was Dana's turn to bristle. "He was following my orders,

Lieutenant. Or would you like a few dozen tons of Hovertank bouncing

around during launch?"

Marie drew a deep breath. "Dana, zip your lip and siddown! We're

94

already in pre-ignition."

Voices from launch control were talking to her and to Heideger. Marie

turned back to her instrument panel and began tapping touchpad squares;

Dana and Bowie got to their seats just as the main engines began firing up.

All systems were green.

Dana sat at a station somewhat behind Heideger, facing outboard, at

the astrogation officer's station, which doubled as a gun position. In case of

attack, her field of fire would protect the shuttle's port-midships area. Bowie

was the next one aft, at the communications position, which also controlled

the port-stern guns. Angelo Dante was at the starboard-midships guns, and

a shuttle crewman was across from Bowie at the starboard-stern guns.

Dana affected boredom with the final countdown procedures. She had

been on launches before, in training, and regarded them as overdramatized

and unnecessarily complicated-just the sort of thing the Cosmic Units and

the TASC types loved. Tankers believed in results, not ceremony! The whole

thing brought out her rebellious streak.

Heideger swung around to take care of something else, punching up

revised orbital ballistics, and saw that she had opened the fashion magazine

on her lap. "Lieutenant, this isn't like ATACs; pay attention, because we

work for a living around here, and everybody has to be alert!"

He turned back to his duties at once, and Marie, though she heard it,

was too busy to give Dana a chewing out. Dana, as always, reacted to

somebody else's orders with stubborn defiance. She opened the magazine

and thumbed through the latest looks from around the world.

What d'you know; they were wearing empire-waisted, opaque stuff

down in Rio, with metallic body-paint designs underneath-very daring. The

rage in Osaka was all synthetic eelskin and lace. Micronesians were going in

for beaded numbers with a total coverage about equivalent to a candy-bar

wrapper!

The pre-ignition burn went on as the launchpads raised the shuttles up

to their correct launch angle. All systems checked out. Marie found a

moment in which to hope she hadn't done the wrong thing by not arguing

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against Dana's presence on the mission. The kid's got guts, but she's

bullheaded. And now she's 'zoided out with this magazine riff. I just hope

she can keep her mind right upstairs the way she does on the ground.

The shuttles came vertical as their primary engines flared and alpine

mounds of rocket exhaust rose. At a precise moment the gantries released

them, and the two ships lifted off, slowly at first, quickly gathering speed.

Dana felt herself pressed back deep into her acceleration seat.

Suddenly her magazine slipped from where she'd tucked it between her

knees. It flopped open and pasted itself across her face like a determined

starfish attacking a choice oyster. She struggled against it, her yells muffled

by the magazine. Has anything more embarrassing ever happened to me?

Nope, can't think of any....

"Told ya," she dimly heard Heideger say in disgust. No one could help

her; they were all weighted by the heavy g's. The best she could do was lever

the magazine up and breath around the edges.

Suddenly a voice said, "This is the Potemkin, Lieutenant Borgnine

speaking-Oh!"

She realized that his transmission had somehow been routed to her

console as well as to Marie's and Heideger's. So, Borgnine was looking right

at her. "Um, are you all right?"

"Just a second," Dana tried to say, but it came out, "Mnff uh ff-uh."

Meanwhile, at the end of an eternity, the engine burn was over, and she felt

a moment's zero-g as the shuttle's artificial gravity cut in.

Dana lowered the magazine, blood rushing back into her white face in a

furious blush. She had a feeling she was in for some black and blue from her

close encounter with haute couture.

"I'm fine!" she tried to say brightly.

Borgnine's copilot, who looked about thirteen years old, leaned over to

inform his boss, "Computers say we're coming up for a new course

correction."

Borgnine frowned. "What? That's much too soon. Marie, what d'your

internal computers show?"

96

"We'll check it out and get right back to you," she said. Ideally, they

would have bucked the problem back to Earth, but the Masters' interference

had already put them beyond communication range.

Marie took time out to chuckle, "Hey, Dana! How'd that facial feel?"

Both shuttles jettisoned the spent solid-fuel boosters as the crews

worked to find out why Borgnine's computer was acting up. The Potemkin's

autopilot seemed adamant that a course correction was needed, and the

overrides didn't seem to be dissuading it.

"I have more bad news," Bowie said quietly. "The invaders are comin'

our way. Only this time there are two of them, two mother ships."

97

CHAPTER ELEVEN

At this moment my hand is bleeding; I crushed a glass in frustration

because I can't find out what is going on up there-none of us can! And yet I

can tell something has happened to Dana, is happening to her, by means that

are my secret to guard.

Ah, the Protoculture, it demands so much in return for revealing its

mysteries! My life is a tiny price to pay. And Dana's, even less.

Dr. Lazio Zand, notes for

Event Horizon:

Perspectives on Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

Marie turned to Bowie. "How soon can we get that transmission off?"

Bowie, who was responsible for making the actual transmission, did

not think things looked very good. "I'm not picking up anything from them

yet, Lieutenant." And the laser hadn't even been deployed yet. It was a very

tight one, for the long shot to Liberty; it had been presumed that it would

take some time to establish contact, and there didn't seem to be much of

that.

"Hurry it up; we've got company coming," Marie said, and went back to

her flying.

Borgnine's shuttle carried no special apparatus; it was an escort ship.

Moreover, there was little he could do to help anybody now, with his

computers leading a life of their own. And all the time, the alien leviathans

closed in on the shuttles.

Then, despite anything Borgnine and his crew could do, his engines

fired. "Cut your engines! Retrofire!" Marie hollered into her mike. It did no

good; Potemkin accelerated, directly toward the Masters' monolith that

loomed on its vector.

No one could tell whether what was happening was some explainable

glitch-some damage done during the Bioroids attack, perhaps, and not

detected-or something the Robotech Masters had instigated. It didn't

98

matter; the shuttle blazed toward the invader like an interceptor missile.

Borgnine tried everything he could think of, to no effect. Engines would

not shut down, retros wouldn't fire, computers wouldn't listen, and altitude

jets were insistently silent.

"C'mon, girl, steady. Steady now," Borgnine implored his ship.

A separate warning system computer flashed red lights and alarm

whoopers, saying in its emotionless female voice, "Danger, danger. Collision

alert. Collision is imminent, repeat, imminent."

"Lieutenant Crystal, I've got a runaway here," he told Marie. "Nothing

we can do." Still, they tried everything they could think of.

An invader ship-the Robotech Masters' flagship-grew huge before them

as they bore down on it. "Be informed: this might be enemy-induced. You're

on your own. Good lu-" The shuttle slammed into the alien supership at

max velocity; the impact and the detonating weapons, fuel and power

systems, made an explosion that lit the faces of Marie and her copilot

hundreds of miles away.

Marie instinctively put in a transmission to Earth, to inform them of

the Potemkin's death, just in case they were receiving down below.

Dana stood frozen by the sudden destruction of so many men and

women, hearing Borgnine's last words. You're on your own.

"Why...why couldn't we...help them..."

But even more than the shock of the crash, she was frozen by this first

close look at the alien flagship. It, too, seemed a remembered thing from an

impossible recollection. Superimposed on it was the blank, enigmatic vision

of the red Bioroid.

She sat trembling like a leaf at her station, only partially hearing

Marie's biting reply. "Nothing we could do, you know that. We're all

volunteers, remember? To tell you the truth, Lieutenant, I expected better

of you. Now, shut up and do your job!"

"Enemy's now at eight hundred miles and closing fast," Heideger said

matter-of-factly. There was no point in trying to outrun the swift aliens, and

besides, Challenger IV had a mission to perform.

99

"Potemkin appears to have been destroyed, sir," the announcement

came in the command center.

"What about Challenger IV ?" an operations officer asked.

"Information limited due to enemy jamming, but the mother ships

appear to be closing on the remaining shuttle."

At a distance of four hundred miles, the flagship launched assault boats.

Bowie still had no contact with Space Station Liberty.

"Lieutenant, take over fire control," Marie ordered.

But Dana could only sit, trembling, eyes frozen on her instruments and

the pistol-grip fire control. Before her were overlapping images of the alien

ship, of the assault craft, and the Bioroid-every moment of her combats

against it came back in overwhelming detail, shutting out all other thought.

And on the periphery of her awareness were emotions to which she could

put no name.

Bowie looked at her worriedly, but there was no time to stop to find out

what was wrong. "I show enemy craft at one hundred miles and closing."

Angelo had swung around in his acceleration chair. "Lieutenant, she

said 'take command.' Dana? C'mon, snap out of it!"

"Save it, Sergeant," Marie cut him off. "I'll take fire control. Gunners

select targets and fire as soon as they're within range."

The assault ships started pitching at longer range than that of the

shuttle's guns, but soon the two forces were sufficiently close to each other

for both to be throwing out everything they had. The shuttle had a defensive

shield that protected it from immediate damage, but the shield couldn't last

long under the pounding it was taking.

Marie, Angelo, and the others bent to their guns-all except Dana. The

firing controls were standard Robotech setups, as familiar to the ATACs

troopers as to the TASC pilot.

The assault craft spread out. "They're trying to surround us!" Marie

called as the twin-barreled gun mounts swung and threw out torrents of

100

flaring disc bolts, the enemy answering with the same. "Take evasive

action," she added to Heideger.

"Trying, Lieutenant," he said evenly, but the wallowing shuttle was no

match for the attackers.

"Sir, enemy vessels are surrounding Challenger," a command center

officer relayed the news.

"Has it been hit?"

Nova Satori, watching the displays at Colonel Fredericks's side,

dreaded the answer. She might have little use for Dana's and Marie's lack of

discipline, but Nova was behind them one hundred percent right now, and

rooting silently.

"Heavy activity out there, sir, and we're still not getting reliable sensor

readings-we can't be sure."

Nova watched the screens and waited.

"One coming your way, Sergeant!" Marie yelled.

"I see 'im," Angelo said distractedly, poised over his scope and

pistol-grip control stick. He led his target and got it dead center; it vanished

in a cloud of superheated gas.

"Good shooting!" Marie called. At that moment another bandit drilled

a line of holes along the shuttle's port side.

"Shields failing," Heideger said. "Still no contact with Liberty or ground

control." Another close one shook the spacecraft.

Marie realized abruptly that Dana wasn't firing. "Sterling, what's the

matter with you?" A quick look told her Dana wasn't hurt. "Come on, defend

your sector! We need you!"

Got to...get hold of myself, Dana kept repeating as if it were an

incantation. But she couldn't move, hypnotized by the visions assailing her.

By sheer force of will she compelled herself to say, "Yeah. I'm okay."

All at once her trance turned to an all-engulfing fear. I shouldn't be

here! I can't handle this! I'll let everyone down!

101

Marie was up, to swing Dana's chair around and slap her hard across

the face. "Snap out of it! Stop acting like a coward!"

Dana sat, dazed. Marie turned to Heideger. "Get someone else up here

to man these guns!" She jumped back for the pilot's seat.

Dana was staring at the firing control as if she had never seen one

before, and another energy disc impact sent the shuttle lurching. "Missed

him!" Angelo yelled. "Dana, he's coming around to your side."

More were doing the same; the aliens had realized that Dana's sector

was a vulnerable point.

The lurch had thrown Dana against the fire-control grip, and she clung

to it by reflex. She instinctively thumbed the trigger button over and over.

The assault craft broke off its attack run as her fire nearly nailed it.

"It's nice to have ya back." She heard Angelo's grin in his tone as she

fought to center the gunsight reticle on the assault craft.

What was I doing? I could've gotten us all killed! But she thrust the

thought aside as the bogie came around for another pass. The reticle

centered. Your time's up, chump!

She thumbed the trigger again and again. The assault boat suddenly

wobbled off course, leaking flame, and explosive decompression turned the

leak into a brief whoosh, like a blowtorch. The crippled invader disappeared

beneath the shuttle.

More enemy ships had been coming in at Dana's field of fire, and

thinking it a soft spot, crowded together. She picked off another, and

damaged a third as they sought frantically to evade.

"Good shooting, Lieutenant," Angelo admitted.

Heideger got the shuttle back under control and stabilized the damage

while the others tried to drive back the assault ships and Bowie made

desperate efforts to get a bearing on Liberty.

"I think the only way we're gonna do it is to get the shuttle back on a

steady course," he said.

"We're closing with the mother ship," Marie informed them. There

wasn't much hope of evading. "Everybody get ready."

102

Dana waited at her station; it had been a good try, a good try.... A

gallant final fight.

She wondered where the targets had gone. Then Heideger called out,

"The assault ships are withdrawing. They appear to be breaking off the

attack."

The shuttle's guns went silent and the crew sat stunned, not believing

that they were still alive. "I don't get it," Dana blinked. Nobody else did

either.

But Angelo reported, "I'm picking up a directed force field on the

mother ship. I think it's a charged particle beam projector."

Suddenly, enormous hyphens of energy were blazing all around them,

monster discharges like nothing the Humans had ever seen before. But it

seemed the megavolleys were so enormously powerful that they were far

less accurate than the flagship's other weapons.

Or maybe they're just playing with us again, it occurred to Marie. We'll

know in a few seconds. She hit the ship's thrusters, accelerating as quickly

as she dared-straight for the flagship. "Now, if we can just get in under it

before it gets us!"

The bright comets of the Masters' superweapon cascaded around the

shuttle as Marie wove and sideslipped with all the skill at her command.

There were shouts and objections from everybody else on the flight deck.

"There's no such thing as 'out of range' to that particle gun!" Marie

cried. "We'll have to get in close, where it can't get a fix on us!" The shuttle

shook and seemed to want to come apart. "Brace yourselves!"

The Challenger IV dove in at the flagship, homing in under its vast

belly. Far above, they could make out something like an enormous fish-eye

lens between the hyphens of destruction it spewed forth. Then all at once

the shuttle was in an area of peace and quiet, out of the megaweapon's field

of fire. The Bioroids, of course, had pulled way back once that big Sunday

punch let loose. The shuttle was zooming along all alone.

"Nice move, Lieutenant," Angelo conceded.

She headed in under the gargantuan ship's belly, weaving in and out of

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the superstructural features. "This is just a breather! There are still those

AA cannon that got the Redhawks." And, they all knew, the Bioroids

probably hadn't exactly headed home for the locker rooms, either.

Marie shed most of her speed with a retro-burn, steering with

extremely wasteful thruster blasts that couldn't be avoided. The shuttle

zipped along with the mother ship's underbelly only a few dozen yards

overhead. It wove between a stupendous grotto of the insectile

communications spars, like a cruise through some eerie undersea city. It

passed among upside-down tuning-forklike things as big as high-rises, and

downhanging Towers of Babel.

"Looks clear through there, Lieutenant," Heideger said, pointing.

Angelo forgot to breathe for a while, looking around him at the screens,

the viewports. The briefings hadn't done the vessel justice. "This thing's

gigantic," he understated.

Marie nodded to herself as she wended the ship along. She murmured,

"I-I've never seen anything like it...." It felt more like being in a submarine

than a spacecraft.

"Say again, Lieutenant?" Dana piped up.

Marie turned a scathing look on her. "Paying complete inattention to

practically everything today, are we, Lieutenant?"

Dana looked contrite. Marie glanced beyond her. "Hey, Bowie! Any

luck getting a beam through?"

Bowie worked away. "Not a chance. No line of sight. Besides, all these

electronic echoes and all this energy clutter are frying the avionics."

"Any word yet, young man?" Commodore Tessel called in the

command center.

A tech replied crisply, "Well, sir, we're showing something on the

sensors, but we aren't sure what it is. We're getting sloppy images, and the

interpretation computers can't sort them out."

Sean Phillips and Louie Nichols entered the command center. Nobody

had invited them, but Emerson noted their entrance, did not object, and his

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subordinates let things stand as they were. "Anything from the Challenger?"

Sean asked Nova Satori quietly, anxiously.

The command center was a restricted area; she had no idea what favors

were called in or Phillips's wiles had been used to gain entry, but Nova knew

she should be chasing the two ATACs troopers out.

It just didn't seem right, though, with so many dead and so many more,

perhaps, about to die. "We're getting distorted signals, so we're not sure

what's happening," she told Sean.

"There," the tech said just then. "I think that's them! But-the reason

our signal's distorted is because they're so close to one of the enemy mother

ships. "Hell's own bells! It's right on top of them!"

The shuttle was barely drifting along. "Staying tight as possible," Marie

said, tight-Tipped.

"Creepy silences. Man, I hate creepy silences," Dana muttered.

"I suppose you'd rather have them shooting at us again?" Angelo shot

back.

"Don't worry; ground-pounders!" Marie said tartly. "There'll be lots

more shooting, and soon." The three ATACs frowned at that; they were

armored troopers, not leg infantry ground-pounders.

Marie hunched forward in her chair; the shuttle was coming to the end

of the flagship's underbelly. "Get ready to try for contact again."

"Ready and waiting," Bowie said evenly.

"Everybody look sharp," Marie said. "I'm taking us up for a look-see."

She hit the main thrusters and zoomed up from underneath the

immense flagship. Immediately, two of the chandelier-bulb cannon swung

into place and sent out tangled vines of green-white destruction.

"Oh, now they manage to find us, now that we're not hiding." Marie

laughed scornfully, taking the shuttle through evasive maneuvers. "On your

toes, all of you! We'll be getting company!" Still, the fact that the enemy

seemed to have lost track of the Challenger, once the shuttle was close in

underneath was not to be forgotten.

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"Alien assault ship on our tail," Angelo called out.

"And I'm picking up two more coming in on our flanks," Dana added.

But the alien ships refrained from firing this time. There was still more

that the Robotech Masters wished to know about these primitive Earthlings,

creatures like missing links really, who had in some unfathomable manner

wiped out the giant Zentraedi.

The launch bays of the assault ships opened, and Bioroids zoomed

forth.

Marie had partial shields back, but she zoomed in low to the flagship's

upper hull, skimming it, so that the enemy cannon couldn't be depressed

low enough to hit the shuttle.

The Bioroids, on the other hand, had trouble getting a clear shot,

swarming as thickly as they did; they ran the risk of hitting their own ship

or one another.

"Bowie, resume contact-scan," Marie ordered.

"Roger; scanning," Bowie responded. The laser-contact with Liberty

required enormous precision. That would mean that Challenger IV was

going to have to do less maneuvering, at least for a little while. And that in

turn meant that somebody was going to have to keep the Bioroids away

from the shuttle; repel them perhaps, or better yet, decoy them.

"Take over," Marie told Heideger. "I'm going to suit up." She began

making her way to the rear cargo bay, and her Veritech.

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CHAPTER TWELVE

You can't get somebody in your sights in combat without spending a lot

of time after that wondering if you're in somebody else's.

Remark made by Dana Sterling to Nova Satori

The Bioroids began to press their attack; Heideger threw in some

jukes-and-jinxes as the top cargo bay doors opened to make Marie's launch

less of a claypigeon shoot.

The VT roared out into the dark vacuum, and most of the Bioroids

turned to pursue at once, leaving the others to dodge the shuttle's fire. Dana

and Angelo each managed to flame a blue enemy mecha.

Then it was again all turns-and-burns for Marie, a furious dogfight in

the uncaring void. She bagged three of them in harrowing, furious

maneuvering much more appropriate to atmospheric fighting than airless

space; Robotech craft moved very much in accordance with the pilot's

imaging, and Marie was much more comfortable flying where aerodynamics

and control surfaces counted.

Then a fourth alien foe got a line of shots into her fuselage, but only at

a grazing angle, so that they did little damage. She turned on the blue

vengefully, flamed it, and neatly avoided fire from two more.

Suddenly a shape from her nightmares swooped close, the red Bioroid

aiming for her. "Oh, no, you don't!" She hit emergency power, blasting away,

at the same time putting the VT through mechamorphosis. The VT

reconfigured to Guardian mode. Marie was about to come around for

another go at the red, but two blues pounced on her before she could.

Inside the shuttle, Heideger yelled, "Marie's in trouble!"

Dana waxed another blue but missed the one behind it. "Look, we've all

got our own problems. Bowie, talk to me."

Bowie was intent at his work at the commo suite. "Tentative contact. I

think I've got a fix on them."

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"Raise the laser-transmitter," Dana ordered; that would risk having it

damaged, but there wasn't much time left, and the volunteers would just

have to gamble.

Outside, Marie led the first blue along, getting it between her and the

second, then zapping it thoroughly. The second came through the spherical

fireball of the first, blinded a bit by it, so that she took it by surprise and

peppered it with a sustained burst. It, too, was obliterated.

"Transmitter in position," Bowie said over the tactical net.

Marie spared a quick glance while maneuvering and craning for more

opponents. "Roger! I see it!" The laser had emerged from an armored pod

over the flight deck. It was such a fragile, unimpressive-looking device, it

occuffed to Marie, to have been the centerpiece of such carnage.

A blue seemed to notice the apparatus and go in for a shot at it, but

Marie pounced on it from the six o'clock position and shot the alien war

machine to shreds.

"Awright, Bowie, now or never," Dana said, swinging her guns to a new

target.

Bowie began sending the encoded transmission in burst format; all the

information was contained in a single micro-pulse that was repeated over

and over. If just one pulse got through, the Liberty operators could decrypt

it instantly, reprogram their transmitters, and resume contact. The

pulse-message also detailed what had happened on Earth since the aliens'

appearance.

The problem was that the shuttle was being battered so badly by enemy

fire that not even the complex compensating gear could keep the beam well

on target.

The shuttle volunteers began firing again, pressing the triggers until

their thumbs grew tired, as more Bioroids came in at them to replace the

ones they destroyed. Marie turned and was a split-second too late to dodge,

and the red Bioroid came at her out of nowhere and scored a hit. She

twisted the Guardian to avoid the worst of the blast, and smashed against

the shuttle's fuselage. "I'm hit!"

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"Marie!" Dana yelled over the net.

"It's that red Bioroid," Marie moaned in pain as the marauder came at

her in another pass. Her Guardian barely got out of the way, but the red

gave an impression of toying with her. "He's too quick for me!"

Dana looked at the scene on the external monitors, wide-eyed. It's the

same one, she knew with a certainty she never questioned. The one I-I'm

afraid of. But why? What are these strange feelings? And now it's going to

kill Marie.

But a diamond-hard resolve came into her. No! I won't let it! "I'm going

out there," she decided, rising from her place.

Bowie and Angelo started to object, but she was already dashing aft.

"Do your best to hold them. And get that message through!"

The endless drill of the Academy and duty with the 15th served her well;

in seconds she was in armor, climbing into her Battloid-mode mecha. I

know how that Bioroid thinks! I don't know how, but I do! I can beat him!

"More bandits coming," Angelo reported as the cargo bay doors opened

again. The doors swung up and out to reveal a volume of space filled with

the deadly blossoms of explosions and the streaming discs of the Robotech

energy weapons.

A blue saw the opening and tried to ride its Hovercraft right down into

the shuttle cargo bay. Dana's Battloid brought up its heavy rifle and hosed

the blue with blazing energy, sending it back in burst fragments.

She swung the rifle back and forth, driving back nearby attackers.

"Hang on, Marie! I'll be right with you!"

"Thanks," Marie said, sounding harried. "I could use the help."

"Bowie! Any response from Liberty?"

Sweat ran down Bowie's face in rivulets. "Not yet."

Tessel tried to contain his frustration. "Why hasn't Liberty answered?

Why?"

Like everyone else in the command center, he was afraid what the

answer might be. Perhaps the whole theory behind the plan was wrong, or

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the equipment wasn't up to the job. Or perhaps there was no one alive at

Space Station Liberty to hear.

"Sir, we can't raise Liberty or the shuttle. It's beginning to look like it's

a wipe, sir," a G2 analyst reported.

Nova heard the sharp intake of breath at her side, Sean and Louie. The

three young soldiers said nothing, fearing it might bring bad luck; they

watched the screens, not blinking, not moving.

Dana added the tremendous firepower of her Battloid to that of Marie's

Guardian and the shuttle's batteries. Heideger somehow kept minimal

shield power, although the ship took a number of hits. The whole area

around the shuttle was a crisscrossing of the heaviest firing Dana had ever

seen. Bioroids came apart in mid-pounce, only to be replaced by more.

Then Marie called out, "You can't win! You're not even Human!" and

Dana saw that the red had reappeared like a Horseman of the Apocalypse,

diving at the Black Lion leader. Marie and the red chopped away at each

other with intense fire until the range was very short, nearly point-blank.

Then the red sheered off and came around for another try.

"Dana, he's headed your way! I'm joining you!"

In moments, Marie was in the bay beside Dana, shoulder to shoulder,

muzzles aimed high as the enemy leader rushed in at them again, his oval

hand weapon putting out rounds one on top of the next.

It became a collision course, the two women and the alien vying to see

which side could put out a more murderous volume of fire. VT Battloid and

Hovertank Battloid stood their ground as the red closed in.

"Just keep shooting, Dana, keep shooting!"

Bolts from the heavy cannon that was Dana's rifle scored at last,

ripping into the edge of the red's visor, so that smoke and burning scrap

spun from it. The red veered off yet again, to regain balance.

"Don't stop! He can't last long!" Marie said as the red came in at them

on a new track. "You've got the angle; he's yours!"

Dana's Battloid spread its feet and stood like a metal titan flinging

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starflame. The red came in, and, as if events had become snarled in some

kind of chrono-dimensional loop, she scored a sustained shot on the same

part of the left shoulder she'd hit in the fight at Fokker Base. Once more the

shoulder nearly separated; once more the red tumbled away like a seared

and flailing Lucifer cast down.

Dana's mind reeled. Was this past, present, future? Was it real? "I-I got

him!" she cried, bringing herself out of the disorientation.

"Good shooting, ground-pounder." Marie laughed. As before, the blue

Bioroids broke off their attack as soon as their leader withdrew from the

field of battle.

Inside the shuttle, Bowie activated the new frequency-jumping commo

system, patching an incoming message through the tactical net so that Dana

and Marie could hear it. "This is Space Station Liberty calling Earth, Space

Station Liberty calling Earth. Do you copy? We have relayed your message

to Moon Base. Repeat, Moon Base has resumed contact as well."

Bowie and Angelo were up, pounding each other on the back. They

were about to drag Heideger into it when they saw that he was slumped,

lifeless, in the copilot's seat. The joy ebbed from them.

"Oh, no..." Heideger had taken a fatal charge from an energy surge

during the final attack. Angelo, nearly in tears, closed the man's eyes for the

last time.

"They made it! Mission accomplished! Challenger's heading home!" a

command center tech whooped. Sean and Louie stood watching the place

turn into a madhouse of celebration. Even Nova Satori was smiling, eyes

shining.

Louie adjusted his dark goggles and shrugged to Sean. "With three

ATACs up there-what'd they expect?"

High above the Earth, in the flagship of the Robotech Masters, all

aspects of the encounter were reexamined and subjected to a coldly

merciless scrutiny. The Scientist clone triumvirate had primary

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responsibility in this matter, though, of course, the Politician triumvirate

was working in close coordination-a coordination difficult for the uncloned

to imagine.

Silent discussions and debates took place, moderated through the

Master triumvirate's humped Protoculture cap. The many mental voices

spoke in the precision of artificially induced psi contact; they were

unhampered by any emotion.

It was clear that the space station and the lunar base were in contact

with the primitives below once more, in a fashion that thwarted, for the

time being, the Masters' ability to jam. The humans had millions upon

millions of frequencies among which to jump, and even the resources of the

Robotech Masters were finite-the more so now that Protoculture was in

such short supply.

Resumed communication was of little moment, though, and the losses

in Bioroids and assault ships was of scant concern. It was the unknown that

troubled the Masters. Thus far, there had been no sign of the enigmatic

weapons or powers that had destroyed most of the Zentraedi race, and some

five million warships.

Certainly, there had been no use of any such thing as yet. Still, though

the Masters were arrogant and supremely egotistical-despite their

decadence, and the blind eye they turned to their own decline-they

harbored no illusions when it came to recognizing the power of giant cloned

warriors they had created. Whatever had defeated the Zentraedi-had

virtually swallowed the countless goliaths and their fleets and mecha like

some black hole-was a force to be feared even by the Robotech Masters.

Perhaps all that had gone before was a clever Human ruse, it occurred

to the cold intellects in the flagship. Perhaps all of this sacrifice and seeming

vulnerability on the part of the primitives was a strategy to draw the

Masters on until they met the fate of the Zentraedi.

Another body of opinion had it that whatever force had obliterated the

Zentraedi-and there was evidence that that force might have been the

Zentraedi themselves-it no longer existed. Therefore: press ahead; strike for

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the treasure beyond treasures that lay below.

And overhanging all debate was the need, the hunger, for Protoculture.

Though the Masters would never have framed it so, without Zor's greatest

creation they were a dying race of refugees; however, with it they would be,

as they thought of themselves, Lords of all Creation.

The longing and need was greater than any mortal could ever conceive;

a vampire's thirst was a mere dryness of the throat by comparison. A

decision was reached in the wake of the battle; the next phase of the

Robotech Masters' plan was set into motion.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Of course, Dana Sterling wasn't physically isolated in her upbringing;

indeed, it was somewhat rough-and-tumble at times. But, while there are

indications that she was not a virgin by the time she graduated from the

Academy, she seemed to have formed no strong sexual bond of any kind-as if

something were saving her as surely as Rapunzel being kept in a tower.

I refer the reader to the writings of Zand, Zeitgeist, and the rest as to

what that something was; it seems certain that the events at the mounds and

thereafter bear them out.

Altaira Heimel,

Butterflies in Winter;

Human Relations and the Robotech Wars

Two hovercycles howled through the night side by side.

Dana knew there would be road grit and dust from the cinders of the

wounded Earth to wash from her hair later, but she didn't care. Their

headlights threw out cones of harsh light across the desolation as she and

Bowie barreled across the wasteland.

A night patrol would ordinarily have been a crashing bore. It was a

little like guarding the Gobi Desert; who was going to steal this piece of real

estate? But the Southern Cross Army was on yellow alert in the wake of the

Challenger ruckus, and everyone who wasn't grabbing some much-needed

sleep was on ready-reaction standby. Heel-and-toe watches in the 15th's

ready-room had just about driven Dana crazy, so she had jumped at the

chance to take this patrol, to get away from the base for a while. Bowie had

naturally come along, loyal and concerned as any brother.

Besides, there was a chance, however remote, that the Robotech

Masters might try an invasion, which gave the joyride a little added voltage.

Her hair was only partly confined by the band of her goggles and the

techno-ornament hairband she wore; Dana reveled in the whipping of the

thick, short blond waves, and the feel of the wind in her face.

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When the base signaled, she let Bowie handle it; she was enjoying

herself too much. Then reality caught up with her.

Bowie cut in even nearer, until they were knee-and-knee at sixty miles

an hour. Both slowed a bit, so they could talk rather than use their commo

link; Bowie knew Dana hated to have the base eavesdropping.

"Headquarters has been tracking us!" Bowie yelled it slowly, so that she

could read his lips-lit by his instrument panel lights and the backwash from

the headlight-as well as strain to hear. "They said to come about, right

now!"

They both took a low hummock of sand hardened into glass by a

long-ago Zentraedi blast, like a pair of steeplechasers. Dana nodded to him.

"Okay, let's go." She'd learned early in life that freedom never lasted for

long.

But as they swung around, their headlights scaring up rabbits and

strange radiation-bred things that had come out in the darkness, sending

them scuttling for cover, Dana exclaimed in surprise, then yelled, "Hold it!"

Both cycles retroed, then came to a halt, engines at low idle. "Hmmm."

Bowie saw that Dana was gazing off into the distance and looked that

way. "Hey!" he yelped.

Searchlights, or at least what looked like searchlights, quartered the

sky over in the east. In an earlier generation someone might have said it

looked like a supermarket opening.

Dana shifted her bubble goggles up onto her forehead for a better look.

"That sector's been totally off limits for as long as I can remember," she

pondered. Someplace over there was the decaying vessel that had at last

destroyed Macross City, and the mounds in which the Human race had

entombed the remains of the SDF-1, SDF-2, and the flagship of Khyron the

Backstabber, the mad Zentraedi battlelord.

Entombed there, too, was whatever remained of Bowie's aunt Claudia,

Admiral Henry Gloval, and the three young women whose pictures Dana's

godfathers had virtually worshipped all their lives.

Bowie was poised on the balls of his feet, straddling the cycle, which

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bobbed gently on its surface-effect thrusters, engine humming. "Lieutenant,

I dunno. And I'm not eager to find out, either." He had seen the mounds

from afar, many times, but something about them made him queasy,

troubled.

She had been thinking along just the opposite line, he knew; Dana

turned a vexed look on him. "Say again?"

"Just a joke! Just for grins!" he fended her off.

"Not funny, Private, got me?"

"Awright! Okay!" But he saw that the squall was past. She was looking

at those lights again. "What d'we do now?" he asked, as if he didn't have a

sinking feeling what the answer would be.

They were the strangest mecha, or robots, or machines, or whatever

they were, that Dana had ever seen. There were a dozen of them or more,

like big walking searchlights the size of a Gladiator, only the round lenses

had been narrowed down like a cat's iris until they were thin slits. And the

slits were rotating, so there were narrow fans of light reaching into the sky,

seemingly thick, then thin, then thick again when seen from one side. The

rays swept back and forth across the giant cairn of the fallen SDF-1, some

occasionally sweeping past, to throw up the skybeams Dana and Bowie had

spotted.

Dana couldn't make head or tail of the two-legged searchlights

stumping back and forth or standing in ranks and seeming to irradiate the

mound, but there was something else there that she did, and it almost made

her heart stop.

The voice sounded reedy and distorted, like a Human voice heard by

single-sideband transmission: artificial somehow, and quavering. "There

can be no mistake," the red Bioroid said. "The creatures of this planet have

attempted to disguise the Protoculture with a radioactive substance."

The alien mecha paced around the work area, fifty yards below, holding

a strange circular instrument or tool in one mighty armored fist. At the time,

Dana didn't question how she and Bowie heard and understood the words;

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it seemed that they were being amplified over a PA system.

"You will notify the mother ship that our calculations were correct," the

red went on to a rank of three blues who stood at attention. "We will make

further preparations to excavate."

But the red knew it wouldn't be as simple as that, and that the effort to

regain the Matrix faced opposition more serious than mere human

interference. The three inorganic entities, the Protoculture wraiths the

Masters had detected upon their arrival, had made their presence felt.

Somehow, the guardians of the mounds were resisting the Bioroids' efforts

to get a precise fix on exactly where the Matrix was, meaning that

excavation using the Masters' unsubtle techniques ran the risk of damaging

or even destroying the last existing means of Protoculture production.

More, the wraiths exuded an air of arctic-cold confidence, an aura that

the Plan, the great Vision, of the original Zor would not be derailed. The

wraiths were shaped by the Protoculture, of course; even the Robotech

Masters must proceed with caution.

Yet the wraiths had evinced no physical or PSI powers beyond that of a

small confusion of the Bioroids' instruments. The red Bioroid could think of

two ways to proceed: a gradual, almost surgical exhumation, or a brute

scooping-up of the entire area of the mounds and everything around them

for later dissection. Neither process could be undertaken while the local

primitives were still capable of mounting resistance; that would risk

destruction of the Matrix with a stray missile, energy barrage-any of a

number of awful possibilities.

The red Bioroid awaited the Masters' commands while the trio of black

apparitions within the mounds, created by the Matrix for its own purposes,

following the instructions and the Vision of Zor, gloated, and mocked the

Robotech Masters.

From the top of the cliff overlooking the invader operation, Dana and

Bowie looked down with cold coursings of despair rippling through them.

An enemy vessel larger than an assault ship, looking somehow industrial,

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utilitarian, hung with its lower hull a mere few dozen yards off the ground.

Other Bioroids were moving heavy equipment around on pallets and sledges

that never touched the Earth.

How could they have gotten past our sensors? Dana thought with a

sinking feeling. Earth is wide open to them! She simply stored the

references about Protoculture and excavation for her after-mission report;

the intel analysts would have to deal with all that.

She and Bowie were lying on their stomachs, peering down at the

demons'-foundry scene of the Bioroid mining. Dana debated between the

urge to report this catastrophic alien beachhead at once and the awareness

that every scrap of intelligence could be of pivotal importance-that another

few moments of eavesdropping might yield the key to the whole war.

Training and textbook procedures won out for once. She had vital

information to get back to headquarters; follow-up would be somebody

else's problem. She reached out to give Bowie a silent, all-but-invisible

contact signal, a code of grip-and-finger-pressure that would tell him it was

time to leave the area quietly, then run like hell.

That was when the red Bioroid, halting, turned its lustrous blue-black

faceplate up in the Humans' direction.

Dana heard the words as clearly as if the stylized ornament in her hair

were a real earphone: I sense an enemy presence.

The blues were alert at once. The red turned ponderously and stalked

through the din and strobing of the work area, the great head craning to

look up at their hiding place. "Geddown! Freeze!" Dana whispered, doing

the same. They heard the resounding metal tread stop near the base of the

cliff. It seemed to emanate from this area, the mind-voice said. It would be

advisable to have a look.

A flood of light came from below. Against all training and every instinct

save curiosity, Dana was moved by those same mysterious impulses to peer

over the cliff's edge.

Bowie whispered, "What's goin' on, Lieutenant?" but she simply

couldn't answer, transfixed by what she saw. Bowie eased up for a peek too.

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He saw that Dana was transfixed, in some kind of daze.

The red Bioroid had halted and opened, its chest plastron swinging

forward, pieces of the shoulder pauldrons and its helmet beaver swinging

away, like an exploded illustration in a tech manual. Nestled within was a

glowing orb, like a gunner's ball-turret, with a metal framing like lines of

latitude and longitude, giving out a radiance even more intense than the

searchlights'. The light from the orb grew brighter and brighter, then shot

out long lines of shadow as something moved in its very heart. A tall,

long-legged form emerged from the center of the unbearable incandescence.

The Human race had been working on the assumption that these new

invaders were like the Zentraedi, ten times larger than Human stature, and

that the metal things the Earth was fighting were basically offworld giants in

armor. That obviously wasn't true, and Bowie didn't know what to expect

now. He was thinking along the lines of revolting, icky critters, when a

young demigod stepped out to stand with one booted foot up on the edge of

the open chestplate, surveying everything around him with an air of

supreme hauteur.

The creature seemed to be male, and looked Human enough, though

with an elfin air and long eyes and ears. The face was a chiseled archetype,

ageless and slender, handsome as a Grecian statue. Masses of lavender

ringlets tumbled around the being's head and shoulders. The limbs were

long, too, but muscled and graceful; the torso was slender but powerful and

well defined in the tight, shiny black costume the Bioroid pilot wore.

The outfit had a military look to it, with high, open collar, broad yellow

belt, and scarlet demisleeves covering the forearms. At another time, the

face would have been handsome, almost beautiful, Dana realized, but at the

moment it was stern and watchful. She was having difficulty breathing, and

it suddenly felt as if the air were thin, superheated, low in oxygen. She

breathed short, quick breaths too rapidly, and watched that face.

Bowie gulped, then gasped, and that triggered a gasp in Dana. They

seemed to be sounds too small to be detected in the noise of the alien work

area, but somehow the red Bioroid pilot became aware of the observers,

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whether by hearing or some higher sense.

They heard his words quite clearly, though his lips never moved.

Just

as I thought: there they are!

Then he spoke directly to them, mind to mind.

Do not attempt to escape! You will remain where you are!

Lights! Sentries: take them!

the willful demigod commanded his horde.

Dana, faint and panting for breath, drew on every reserve of will as she

fought the red Bioroid pilot's silent compulsion. Then she felt Bowie's hand

close around her upper arm, pressing her ATAC arm brassard hard into the

flesh just as the fully dilated searchlights swung round beams to converge

on the troopers' hiding place, and it seemed to break the spell. The blues

were pounding toward them, weapons coming to bear.

Dana and Bowie slid and churned and scrambled back down the incline,

abrading hands and ripping uniforms, tumbling and skidding. But in time

they reached the base, already up and running. They were two ATAC

regulars in superb shape; ignoring the minor hurts, hurdling boulders, they

were astraddle their cycles and gunning the engines in moments.

Behind them they could already hear the racket of preparations for the

chase, like the baying of hounds. And the only word of encouragement Dana

had left to give her blood brother, brother in tears and in arms and in peace,

was a word used carelessly by others but emphatically in the 15th squad:

"Faster!"

The cycles sprang away, trailing spumes of dust in the moonlight,

nearly standing on their tails, and Dana felt the naked vulnerability any

tanker would in that situation. Her thought, like Bowie's, was for the safety

of speed, speed...but there was swift pursuit on her track already, and she

knew better than virtually anyone else alive how fast those Hoverplatforms

moved.

The aliens had turned the gleaming, enigmatic faceplates to Zor Prime,

their leader, who screamed silently,

All Bioroids to your Hovercraft!

Then the Hoverplatforms rushed out from the landing ship, in answer

to the mind command, the blues thronging for battle, and the red Bioroid,

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with the hypnotic alien inside once again, leapt high to land on its skyriding

platform with sinister grace. The red came after Dana and Bowie, a very

Angel of Death.

The canyon was too narrow for evasions; Dana and Bowie went high

and low, rode the highside of the stone walls, and let centrifugal force pull

them down, over and up again to ride the opposite wall. They crisscrossed

and shot along, all the time waiting for the shot that would end their lives;

alien annihilation discs crashed around them. But there was no side street;

it was a flat-out race. And the swift Hoverplatforms were erasing the cycles'

lead at a fearsome rate.

"Hey, Lieutenant! These androids're gonna be right on our necks in

another coupla seconds!" Bowie yelled over the rush of their passage.

Androids? Now, why did I assume they're clones?

Dana wondered even as she reached down for the short energy carbine

strapped into its scabbard beneath her saddle. With its wirestock folded, a

Hovercyclist could fire it with one hand if the need arose.

"Well, how about a little target practice, Bowie?" she called back to him,

trying to sound as if she didn't have a misgiving in the world.

Bowie didn't quite achieve a smile as more discs ranged around them,

detonating. "Anything's better than this!" He started freeing up his own

carbine.

They got ready to turn. "Don't fire until I do."

"You got it, Dana!"

They had ridden together and trained together enough to swing their

cycles in tight bootlegger turns at almost the same moment, coming end for

end and charging back at the onrushing Bioroids.

"Now!" Dana leaned to one side of her handlebars, steadied her

weapon with both hands, and fired. The surprise move by the cycles caught

the Bioroids completely off guard. In fact, the enemy firing stopped as the

aliens tried to figure out what was happening.

And some incredible luck was upon her at that moment. The carbine

was a powerful small arm, but nothing compared to weapons that had

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already failed to down Bioroids; nevertheless, the bolt hit a startled enemy

mecha and knocked it off balance, so that it fell from its Hovercraft.

Dana swerved to elude the red, and drove for the hole in the invader

formation left by the toppling of the blue. For a split-second she was among

the huge offworld mecha, as a crashing shook the ground, then she was

beyond. Dana waited for a disc to annihilate her, but none came.

She chanced a quick look back, and realized that Bowie wasn't with her

anymore. She came through another sharp turn in a shower of dust and grit,

and stopped short. Far back, the red Bioroid stood with one enormous,

two-toed foot crushing the smoking remains of Bowie's cycle.

And, high aloft in the vast metal fist, it held Bowie. In the strange

silence following the first passage-at-arms, he lifted his head and spotted

her despite the knocking-around he had been through.

More, she could hear him. "Make a run for it, Dana! Save yourself!"

This, after she had led him into this horrifying mess. "Hang on!" she

hollered, and pulled her cycle's nose up and around like a rearing charger.

She roared straight at the gathered Bioroids.

Bowie screamed for her to turn back, but he could see that she wasn't

about to. The red felt him struggle, and closed its grip until he couldn't

breathe, his ribs feeling as though they were about to give.

Dana came racing directly at the red, which waited motionlessly. Dana

saw in her mind's eye the unearthly eyes of the pilot. She leaned off to one

side of the saddle, firing, praying for another miracle shot.

But this time a blue jumped into place in front of the red, to shield its

leader and the prisoner with its own body. Two more leapt in to flank it, and

the three laid down a murderous fire with their hand weapons. Dana rode

straight into it, juking and dodging, triggering madly.

All three of the aliens began to get her range, their discs converging in a,

coruscating nova of destruction. It was so close that it jolted her from her

bike, do what she might.

Bowie, straining, saw the Hovercycle go up in a deafening thunderball.

He put everything he had into one last effort to escape, to get to Dana and, if

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she were dead, to somehow avenge himself. But the red closed its grip

tighter and he slumped, unconscious.

123

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Just like I tense up whenever somebody says the word "alien," there's a

word that always gets Bowie sort of silent and thoughtful. Even if-and I've

seen this happen-somebody innocently mentions the intermediate mode of a

Veritech, Bowie sort of goes sphinx.

And so, I react the same way, too, a bit. Nobody can say "Guardian" to

me without conjuring up the image of General Rolf Emerson.

Remark attributed to Lieutenant Dana Sterling by

Lieutenant Marie Crystal

When Bowie came to, he was still being held by the red. It was

supervising from one side, as the blues picked through the wreckage of

Dana's cycle. There wasn't much left, and what was was scattered wide. The

Bioroids hadn't even been able to find pieces of Dana.

At a silent signal from the red, the searching stopped. There was no

telling whether the humans had reported the aliens' presence; the

all-important mission to recover the Protoculture Matrix took priority.

The Bioroids boarded their antigrav platforms and flew back to the

mounds, where strange lights still probed sky and ground. Bowie lay

helpless in the red's fist, weeping and swearing terrible vengeance.

But from a cleft of rock, a battered figure pulled itself up to watch the

invaders go. Dana spat out blood, having bitten her own lip deeply and

loosened some teeth in the fall. Her body felt like one big bruise.

Fortunately, her tough uniform was made for this kind of thing, and had

saved her from having the flesh rubbed right off her in the tumble. The

many practice falls taken in training had paid off, too.

After she had been jolted from the cycle, the aliens had kept firing at it,

thinking she was still aboard, unable to see it well in the midst of the

explosion and raining debris. She managed to pull herself to safety outside

the area where they looked for her remains.

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But she could feel no gratitude. "Bowie!" She tried to draw herself up,

to follow after the Bioroid pack, but whimpered in sudden agony at the pain

that shot through her shoulder.

Dana was brought before General Emerson without much cleaning up

and only the most cursory debriefing. Whatever she had discovered was still

going on, and time was all-important. Her left arm was in a sling; the

medics said it wasn't a dislocation, but it was a painful sprain. She had

survived the crash better than she had any right to.

Emerson put aside the dressing-down Dana had coming for disobeying

orders; there were more important matters at hand. Besides, if it hadn't

been for her curiosity, Earth might very well have remained ignorant of the

alien landing until it was too late-if in fact it wasn't already.

"I've been informed that you've had a closer look at these alien

Bioroids," Emerson said as soon as Dana saluted and reported.

"Yes, sir. In the wasteland north of Section Sixteen."

"And a Human being, or something like a Human being, was operating

one?"

Dana couldn't hold back a little gasp, as a sudden vision of the red

Bioroid pilot came to her. "That's the way it looked from where I was hiding,

sir."

Rochelle turned to his superior. "General, Human or not, what would

they be looking for out in that wasteland?"

"Could they be scavengers or something, looking for salvage?" Green

interjected.

Emerson shook his head irritably. Green was a steady sort as a combat

leader, but the suggestion was ludicrous. These invaders had come from an

advanced culture with a highly developed technology, and everything about

them suggested that they had an extensive technological and social support

system behind them-at least until recently.

"No, that can't be the answer." He had read the Zentraedi debriefing

files as thoroughly as anyone. "They're in the service of the Robotech

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Masters."

Rochelle drew himself up. "Then, sir, I suggest we attack as soon as

possible, before they become impossible to dislodge from their foothold."

Emerson shook his head again. "Not yet. First I want to know more

about this situation, and about these Bioroids. And above all, I want to

know what they're looking for."

Dana said plaintively, "But one of my men has been taken prisoner!

Please, you have to let me go in there after him!"

"Permission denied." Emerson rose to his feet, no happier with the

necessities of the situation than Dana was, but in a better position to see the

overall picture.

"It was your decision to return to headquarters with this intelligence. It

was the correct thing to do; we're fighting for Earth's survival. A lot of lives

have been lost already, and more are certain to be before this thing is over.

But our mission is to repel an alien invasion, do I make myself clear?"

He did, to all those listening. They were all soldiers in a desperate war,

even Bowie, who meant so much to him.

But all Dana kept hearing were those words, it was your decision.

At the barracks she wandered back toward the readyroom, sunk in

despairing musings, until she realized someone was blocking her way.

Angelo Dante leaned against one side of the doorframe, arms folded,

his foot braced against the other. "Well, well! Aren't we forgetting a little

something? Where's Bowie, Lieutenant? I hear he didn't make it."

Her face went white, then flushed angrily. She tried to move past, still

feeling shame and failure at Bowie's capture. "Move it, Dante."

"I call that pretty tough talk for somebody who cut and ran and

abandoned that kid out there like that."

Dana made a sudden decision and met Angelo's glare. "If I hadn't

abandoned him, there wouldn't be anybody to go out and get him back,

would there?"

With her foot she swept the leg supporting all his weight from beneath

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him; Angelo ended up on the floor with a yelp. "Got it?" she finished with a

slow smile, shucking off the sling. Her arm hurt like blazes, but this was no

time to be hampered.

Angelo was looking up at her with his mouth open, not sure if he was

going to jump her and give her the drubbing she had coming, or

congratulate her for what she seemed to be saying.

"Sergeant, it is my considered opinion that this squad needs some

night training maneuvers."

He gave her a slow smile. "Like in that off-limits area?"

She stood there and gave him a wink even while she was saying, "I

don't know what you're referring to, Angie. Ten-hut!"

The big three-striper was on his feet with machinelike speed. "Now,

then," she went on. "This squad's gotten complacent, sloppy, and out of

practice. Get me?"

"Yes, ma'am!"

"Consequently, you will pass on the order to scramble immediately.

Tell 'em to stow the yocks and grab their socks, Sergeant."

The Bioroids' activities at the mounds had come to a standstill as the

Robotech Masters weighed the problems posed by the wraiths.

Progress was hampered, too, because the red Bioroid was not on the

scene. He had taken the prisoner into the forward command ship to

examine the Human and see what could be learned. That had proved to be

vexingly little; the creature was unconscious, and its thought patterns so

unevolved that normal methods of interrogation didn't work.

Bowie slowly came back to life as he felt himself being jarred and

shaken. He was still in the metallic grip of the Bioroid leader, being borne

along a passageway to the sound of the massive metallic footsteps. Two

blues walked behind. The place was stupendous, built to Bioroid scale.

All three mecha appeared red in the passageway's lighting. Bowie

glanced around in punchy amazement; the place looked as organic as it did

technological, some advanced mixture of the two. One area seemed to be

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composed of asymmetric spiderwebbing thicker than the thickest hawsers;

the curved passageway ceiling had a vascular look, as though it were fed by

blood vessels. Tremendous polished blue convexities in the wall might be

darkened viewscreens or immense gemstones-Bowie couldn't even guess.

He strained at the grip, but it did no good. "C'mon, ya big ape! Lemme

go! Yer crushin' me!"

The trio of Bioroids stopped before a triangular door even taller than

themselves. The three door segments were joined along jagged seams, like a

triskelion. As the door slid open, so did the red's broad chest and helm,

exposing the glowing ball-turret and the pilot who sat there calmly, legs

drawn up, looking remote and at peace.

Bowie snarled, shaking his fists. "Oh, so ya worked up the guts to show

yourself, huh? Well, what happens now, Prince Charming? Afraid to let me

go because you'd be gambling with your teeth?"

The red Bioroid pilot studied him as if he were something in a lab

smear. Bowie fumed, "What's the matter, pretty boy? Can't you talk?"

The enemy spoke again in that eerie mental language.

Prisoner, you

display much bravado. But like all primitives, you've yet to learn the value

of silence.

And the red pilot gave Bowie a quick lesson, tossing him into the

compartment that had just opened up. The Bioroid had leaned down some

way, so that Bowie wasn't maimed or killed. The fall stunned him, though,

knocking the wind from him.

Door and Bioroid were already resealing by the time the captive got a

little breath back. "That's right! You better hide in that tin can, you stinking

coward!"

And then the door was shut. Bowie collapsed back on the deck, hissing

with the pain he hadn't let his captors see. "Just you wait, pally!"

After a while he hauled himself to his feet. The compartment he was in

was as big as his whole barracks complex back at the base; surely there must

be some way out.

But a hurried search yielded little. The place was evidently a storeroom,

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but the crates and boxes bigger than houses were impervious to his efforts

to open them. He could find no escape route, not even a Bowie-size mouse

hole. The enemy had neglected to take his lockback survival knife from him,

but there wasn't much it could do against the armored bulkhead all around

him.

Then he gave more thought to the light far overhead. It was a

triangular, grilled affair, and the light source seemed to be high above the

mesh. It put him in mind of conduits and crawlspaces. In another moment

he was shinnying up the side of a crate, ignoring the pain of his wounds and

injuries.

It took him nearly twenty minutes of scrambling, leaping, and

balance-walking among the containers and pipes and structural members,

and he had to double back twice to try new approaches, but at last he came

up under the mesh. He hoped against hope that he wouldn't hear the

rumble of the ship's engines for just awhile longer-that he could get out

before the invaders got whatever they had come for and departed Earth.

He hesitated, the knife in his hand. But then he went ahead, to prize up

the mesh and try his best to break free. As far as he knew, he was the only

one left alive to sound the alarm to all Earth that the invasion had come.

Then, too, there was Dana to avenge.

The instant the knifepoint dug into the seam of the mesh where it

rested against its housing, there was an intense flash of light. Bowie didn't

even have time to scream; the knife flew from his hand and he dropped.

"Sir, the sun's almost up out there and a recon drone got a look at the

enemy position from high altitude," Rochelle reported. "They're just

beginning to excavate at the site of the old SDF-1, but we have no idea as yet

what they're after or why."

Emerson stretched, yawned, and rubbed his eyes. "We can't delay any

longer. Whatever they're doing, we've got to see that they don't accomplish

it. They started these hostilities; now it's our turn at bat. All right, you know

what I want you to do. Proceed."

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Rochelle, Green, Tessel, and one or two others snapped to attention.

"Yes, sir!" Then they hurried off to begin implementing the op plan

Emerson had approved during the hours of consultations and meetings.

Emerson was left alone to muse. The only thing in that old wreck is

useless, rotting Robotechnology. Well, one person's junk is another's

Protoculture, I suppose.

Something about that stirred a half-developed thought in the back of

his brain. There would be an avalanche of operational decisions and

problems coming down on him very soon; that was a hard and fast rule with

any operation. But he shunted them aside for the moment, and punched up

access to the UEG archives.

130

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Dear Mom and Pop,

Things are still real quiet here, and my outfit is real rear echelon, so

we're far away from the fighting, so I wish you two would stop worrying.

We've got a new commanding officer who's a woman, but she seems to

be improving.

I know there's a lot of talk about the fighting right now, but don't sweat

it; it's no big thing, and it'll be over soon, and then maybe I can get a furlough

and come home for a while.

Say hi to everybody. I hope Pop's feeling better. The fruitcake was great.

Love,

Your son,

Angelo Dante

Just about all the other Southern Cross units in and around Monument

City had been mobilized during the night, and needed only the word to

move out. The word was given.

This time, it had been decided, the TASC Veritechs, Tactical Air Force,

and other flying units would stay out of it, at least for the time being. It had

become obvious in the battle at Fokker Base that ground units like the

ATACs were more effective against Bioroids in a surfaceaction situation.

Armored men and women, galvanized by the PA announcements,

sprinted to their Hovertanks, troop carriers, and other vehicles. The elite

MP shock troops in their powered armor suits, nonreconfigurable mecha as

big as Battloids but lacking their Robotech firepower and adaptability, came

marching out of their parking bays. Everywhere, the military was in motion,

knowing that the enemy was now entrenched on Earth.

The Southern Cross began its deployment to draw a ring of Robotech

steel around Sector Sixteen. But there were already Human defenders on

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the scene.

Dana peered out from under the canopy of branches that camouflaged

her Hovertank. The 15th was spread through a little woodlet at the base of a

rise some distance from the SDF-1s final resting place.

She again wondered about the wisdom of riding in high-gloss armor in

a high-gloss mecha; certainly, the polished surfaces reflected energy shots

and offered protection in that way, but as every cadet learned through

backbreaking work under the watchful eyes of exacting instructors, it made

them awfully hard to hide.

Now, though, she was concentrating on two blue Bioroids who were

standing sentry duty on the top of the rise. One thing about the Masters'

fighting mecha: they didn't seem to give a damn about concealment.

And they didn't seem to think anybody else did, either; the blues held

their hand weapons and searched the sky, giving only cursory attention to

the ground. Dana figured that meant that battle to them was simply

straightforward charge and countercharge, in spite of the crude infantry

tactics they had appeared to use in the airfield battle.

The ATACs could get only a partial glimpse of what was going on at the

excavation sight. It looked as if the labor mecha had been making test bores,

and were now preparing to go at it full-choke. Dana hoped that would

provide a little diversion, and cover the noise of the 15th's approach.

She counted eight blue Bioroids, spread fairly thin, guarding the part of

the perimeter she planned to hit. Dana knew that a Bioroid had a lot more

firepower than an ATAC, and more maneuverability if it got to its

Hovercraft, but she was counting on surprise and accurate first-round fire

for quick kills and a temporary advantage.

Her plan was less than subtle: a few members of the unit would make a

dismounted scout and if possible get Bowie out without betraying their

presence to the invaders. If that was unworkable, Dana and the 15th would

burst through the perimeter, shooting up the place and inflicting all the

damage they could, exploiting the edge that surprise would give them to

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fight their way to the forward command ship. Then the others would fight

diversionary or holding actions as needed while she, Angelo, Sean, and

Louie went after Bowie.

She had to admit that it wasn't the sort of thing Rommel or Robert E.

Lee might have come up with, but Sean was more or less content with it.

She thought Patton might have approved.

Angelo sat cracking his knuckles inside their iron gauntlets. "When

d'we attack, my proud beauty?" he said softly into his helmet mike.

Like the rest, Sean sat with faceplate open so that he could breathe

fresh air as long as possible, gazing up at the Bioroids through his

camouflage screen. He was chewing on a piece of wild mint. "Undaunted,

we advanced, to serve the principles of freedom!" he quoted in his most

dramatic stage whisper. Then he spat out the mint and closed his faceplate,

figuring it was just about showtime.

"'Forward through shot and shell, we went into the mouth of Hell,'"

Louie added resignedly, lowering his visor, too. It fastened and sealed, and

his armor was airtight. "'And pers'nally, I felt unwell, but no one there could

smell, or tell'"

"Awright, secure that chatter!" Dana snapped in a harsh whisper.

"What d'you think is happening here, an armored assault or a Shakespeare

festival?"

Angelo was about to seal up, too. "Y'know, I've got one question: what

d'we do if those 'roids spot us?"

"Pray you can shoot faster and straighter than they can." Dana sealed

her helmet. "Let's move out, skirmishing order-"

"Watch it, Lieutenant! Up there!" Louie yelled, but Dana had seen the

blue he spotted, centered the enemy in her gunsight reticle, and fired even

before Louie had finished. Even though she fired with the less-powerful

nose cannon of the Hovertank mode, she shot straight and first; the blast

shook the Bioroid like a toy soldier, knocking it down for keeps.

Dana was already hovering her mecha on its foot thrusters, turning it

end for end and going to Gladiator mode, as she called, "Thanks, Louie! I

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owe you one!"

Her seat had come around so that she was facing the enemy once again,

but now the long barrel of the Gladiator's main battery poked in the

direction of the invaders' perimeter. The 15th knew enough about the

Bioroids' silent communications by now to be sure others were on the way.

"Okay, let's go!" she called.

She launched herself into the air in Gladiator mode; the rest of the 15th

followed, most in Hovertank, some mechamorphosing to Gladiator in

midair. Two more blues showed up to take up firing stances; Dana nailed

one while she was still in the air, and Angelo got the other.

"You go look for Bowie," Angelo called. "We'll keep the bluebirds of

happiness busy."

"Check." She was preparing to hop again just when another pair of

blues bounded into view. Dana and Angelo leapt their Gladiators away in

different directions, avoiding their first salvo. Dana blew one away while

Angelo maneuvered the Trojan Horse around toward the other's rear flank,

traversing his barrel with the speed Robotech controls allowed. The alien

mecha sought to spin and take out the Gladiator behind it, but Angelo was

ready, and cut it in half with one shot. Then Dana leapt Valkyrie again, to

join him.

"You okay?" It had been a close one, like some oldtime gunfight.

"Yeah," Angelo said lightly.

"We've got to get in closer!"

Hovertanks and Gladiators advanced in twenty- fifty- seventy-yard

leaps now, not wanting to hurl themselves too high and so present a better

target. More blues appeared to set up defensive positions; the mecha

hammered and belched flame at one another. Concussions shook the

ground.

"Units three, four, and five, cover the lieutenant's advance!" Angelo

ordered. The ATACs went through a long-practiced advance pattern.

There was a sudden cry over the net. A blue had peppered Louie's area

with raking fire, and there were smoking hotspots on the armor of the

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cockpit-turret of his tank, Livewire. Louie was screaming, arms thrown

outward. Then he collapsed.

"Louie, what's wrong? You hit?" Angelo shouted over the net. The blue

appeared to be surveying its handiwork, rising a bit to look down on the

silent Gladiator. "Answer me, Louie!"

Louie, still unmoving, said, "Nah, I'm okay." As the blue rose up from

cover a little, Louie straightened suddenly and jumped Livewire back,

aiming the main battery as he did, greasing the enemy neatly.

"But that clown didn't know it!" Louie finished proudly.

"No more stunts!" Angelo barked. "Just do what I tell you!"

More Bioroids had come up to reinforce the first, taking heavy losses

because the ATACs had had time to reach secure cover from which they

could fire. Things were settling into a vicious, close-range firefight.

"Move in now, Lieutenant," Angelo said, "but you'd better hurry."

In another part of the alien work area, back in Hovertank mode,

Valkyrie wended closer to the giant ship's hull using all available cover. Her

visor up, Dana studied the enemy ship. It wasn't a patch on the mother

ships, but was still as big as the biggest Human battlecruiser. She tried to

shake off the fascination of it, tried to fight off the fear that somehow her

Zentraedi blood made her more vulnerable to these new enemies.

Then she nearly yelled aloud. It's him!

It came partly as shock, partly as something she had expected, and,

deep down, even looked forward to-for reasons she couldn't analyze-to see

the red Bioroid poised on an open deck high above. The Bioroid was open,

and its tall, slim, deep-chested pilot waited in that characteristic pose of his,

one foot on the open Robotech breastplate, his eyes closed as if he were

listening intently.

She found herself short of breath, and gave out a low moan. Mmmm...

His eyes opened and his head came around until he was looking

straight down at her. She heard that silent, internal voice of his again,

Hmmm...

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A fundamental recognition-something on profound levels to which she

had little waking access-passed between Dana and the red Bioroid pilot.

This time he shielded some of his thought from her:

This one is no ordinary

primitive! She is Of the Protoculture! She has had open access to it; she has

the power it gives!

He watched her, unblinking, and made a sign of acknowledgment, a fey

salute, hand going to brow, then cutting away. She heard the quavery

mental voice in her head.

Know then, Primitive, that I am Zor Prime,

Warlord of the Robotech Masters!

Dana stared at him for a moment, then lowered her visor again. She sat

looking up at him, and he stood gazing down. Neither moved.

Without warning a shot came from one side, a stray heavy-cannon

blast from a Bioroid Hovercraft. It broke the spell; Dana maneuvered

quickly, to make sure she wasn't in anyone's line of fire. When she glanced

up again, the red Bioroid was diving down like a pouncing tiger, its hand

weapon held out before it.

"Try again sometime!" Dana was already springing aside, going to

Gladiator mode, sending up a hail of fire. The red flipped in midair, landed

nearby, and fired back. The two mecha catapulted here and there, firing and

jockeying for position.

The foe got three shots into the Gladiator's side in a line, but Dana had

a target of her own. She missed taking the red's right arm off, but once again

got the broader target, the big discus-shaped hand weapon, knocking it

away through the air.

Let's see how you do without your big metal yo-yo!

But the alien recovered like a demon, throwing a punch, rocking the

Gladiator back on its thrusters and suspension.

The red behemoth was about to throw itself on the Gladiator, when

Dana pulled a move she had been saving for a special, desperate

moment-this moment. Her Gladiator leapt high, to come down on the red's

shoulders and head with all its weight, a staggering blow that sent the

crimson mecha spinning and crashing onto its back.

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Dana landed well, traversed her main battery, and fired, but the red

was up, vaulting high once more, with astounding speed and agility. It

landed close, launching a bombshell punch near her turret, sending the

Gladiator to its knees.

The alien's metal fingers sank into the Gladiator's armor as the red

lifted the Gladiator in an awesome show of strength, about to tear it to

pieces. Dana had no angle with the main battery, but peppered away at the

lustrous visor with her rapid-fire, quad-barreled secondaries as a

distraction.

She wasn't dismayed at the turn of events though; this invader still had

a lot to learn about the ATACs.

Now I've gotcha! She set the Gladiators thick, immensely powerful legs

against the other mecha's torso, pushing off and firing thrusters at the same

time. She launched herself free, nearly toppling the red again. "I'm tired of

fooling around with you!" She summoned up her mecha's Battloid form.

Her landing sent shudders through the Earth she had come to defend.

"Okay, Big Red! Time to settle this!"

The red was eager; it came through the air with a tackle so fast and

strong that Dana couldn't counter it. She was flipped over backward,

crashing against the side of the alien ship.

Inside, the sound of the impact and its vibrations made Bowie shake

his head and open his eyes. It took him a few seconds to remember where

he was and figure out what had happened. The charge from the mesh hadn't

killed him, and somehow he hadn't fallen all the way to the deck. He lay on

a monolithic crate a few yards below where he had been standing when the

power surge hit him. He checked himself for broken bones, and found none.

Then the ship shook again.

"What the blazes is going on here? Hey, if you're hauling anchor, I want

off!"

Outside, the red swung a massive punch, but its timing was off. Dana

ducked, and the unbelievable power of the Bioroid (plus some power, Dana

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was sure, that was the red's pilot's alone) let the great scarlet fist penetrate

the alien ship's hull.

Dana reacted at once, bringing her Battloid's leg up to shove the

Bioroid away sprawling. As she jumped her mecha to its feet, her external

pickups registered a human voice, "Well, hi, Lieutenant!"

Somehow, she wasn't surprised; although the odds of finding him,

especially like this, were so remote as to be absurd. But it all fit in with the

feelings that had been going through her, and the odd sensation-of hidden

forces at work-that had been building in her.

"Be with you in a minute, Bowie." She turned to deal with her opponent

again.

"No sweat, Dana. Lay a few on him for me!"

But the Bioroid had regained its feet as well, and now came hurtling at

her like a cross between a falling asteroid and a runaway freight train. Dana

rolled and scrambled, and just avoided being trampled, her Battleroid

flattened. She heaved it to its feet, and decided to end the fight and get

Bowie out of the ship, whatever it took.

Marquis of Queensberry rules seemed to be pretty well out the window

anyway, so she didn't feel any guilt as she drew the battle rifle that had been

the Hovertank's cannon moments before. The Bioroid didn't seem to know

what to do. She fired from the hip, and the first shot blew the visor open.

The red flailed back and sank partway to the ground against the

Masters' forward command ship. The ball turret within it was exposed amid

smoking, fused components and bent armor. The shadowy form of the pilot

lay inert and its pose suggested unconsciousness, or death. The red's knees

trembled, then gave, and the crimson Goliath came down like a toppled

building.

Bowie was straining at the opening the red's punch had made. "It's just

too narrow, Lieutenant!"

Dana brought the cannon around. "Stand away!"

With a volley of shots she widened the hole so that three troopers could

have walked abreast through it. It made the air of the compartment almost

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too hot to endure, to breathe.

He hurried to the opening, keeping clear of its glowing, molten edges.

He gathered himself, leapt through. He landed on the back of the fallen

Bioroid. When he reached the ground, Bowie smiled up at Dana. "Thanks,

Lieutenant."

"That's okay. It's nice and restful in the stockade; I could use a rest."

"If they need character witnesses, they'll probably make me appear for

the prosecution, Dana."

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CHAPTER SIXTEEN

One might have thought the Masters, with their lesser military strength,

would have perceived threats to which the mighty Zentraedi were blind.

And the Masters thought they had: they addressed the "wraiths" within

the mounds, and the mecha of the Human race. How the ghosts of Khyron,

Azonia, and the rest must have laughed there, deep in Tellurian soil!

Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.),

Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War

Back at the command center, Colonel Green turned to Emerson. "We

just got a sitrep from the advance elements of the attack force, sir. It says

that Private Bowie Grant has already been rescued."

Emerson whirled from studying the tactical displays. "Explain. "

"Well, it seems that Lieutenant Sterling mobilized her squad sometime

last night and performed the rescue on her own this morning. But her

troops are still engaged with the enemy, and our troops are moving in to

reinforce. It seems we've seen only the first round; the enemy is regrouping

for another."

Emerson glanced at the maps. "And what's their strength?" He

wondered if Dana would be commended or shot this time-provided she

lived through the morning at all.

"Roughly equivalent to ours, from all reports, sir," Rochelle supplied.

"I'd say we're pretty evenly matched."

Sean Phillips had his visor thrown back. "C'mon, Dana, get moving!

What's wrong?"

"You feeling okay?" Angelo asked anxiously.

But she was not. Moments before, triumph had seemed assured. The

long, slanting rays of the morning sun reminded her that only a very short

time had passed since her attack commenced. Then, before she could scoop

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up Bowie, her external pickups brought her the creaking of armor.

"I don't believe it!" She looked down in shock. "He's coming back for

more? It's impossible!"

But the red fist had risen again to grasp the end of her rifle-cannon's

barrel, bending it, dragging it down. The weapon was useless now; she

released it, backing away, placing herself between the rising Bioroid and

Bowie.

"Take cover, Bowie; the rest of you watch for other Bioroids! This one's

mine."

Bowie dashed away as the red reached its feet once more. It trembled

but moved purposefully and unstoppably. Dana backed up cautiously, her

Battloid bringing its hand up for more close combat. She had made up her

mind that she was going to deck this foe for good, rip that turret out of the

enemy mecha and kill or capture its occupant, or die trying. The two

armored titans maneuvered like wrestlers.

Okay, whoever you are! If you can go the distance, so can I! What she

couldn't see was that within his turret, the pilot's eyes were closed and he

looked for all the world as if he were unconscious or dead.

Just then a fusillade of shots ranged in nearby, blowing huge chunks of

soil and rock high: More came in, bracketing the two duelists. Dana looked

around. "What in"

A face appeared on one of her control console displays. Nova Satori!

"Lieutenant, I have an urgent message from headquarters. The enemy's

regrouping for a massive counterattack. On the other hand, your

reinforcements have arrived." She allowed herself a thin smile.

There were more cannonades from the bluffs and high ground all

around the advance ship. Positions where blue Bioroids had entrenched

themselves or established fire superiority were pounded and roasted, pieces

of enemy mecha thrown high. Dana saw Gladiators, Hovertanks,

conventional armor, and even some old-style Destroids and Raider X's.

There were MP-powered armor, too, much like Battloids themselves. She

wondered which one Nova was in.

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"Looks like the cavalry arrived just in the nick of time, eh, Dana?" Nova

added.

"We'll take care of the cleanup here, Lieutenant," the Strikeforce

commander's voice came up over the net. "You and your squad can back off

and sit this one out. We- Huh? What's that?"

He was looking up because the sun had been blotted out. Something

huge had come down into the morning sky. It was a ship as big as a city,

floating in with an appalling, slow sureness. And there were others, all

having penetrated Earth's sensor defenses, all come to punish the

impudence of the primitives below. The six gargantuan mother ships of the

Robotech Masters closed in from all sides. The red Bioroid stood looking up

at them reverently.

The Southern Cross soldiers gripped their weapons irresolutely, barrels

realigned toward the sky, but seemed feeble and ridiculous against the

immense power of the starcraft.

Suddenly, the mother ships began disgorging assault craft; the

bottle-shapes, several from each mother ship, flashed down at their targets.

MP-powered armor, Battloid, and the rest all were caught in intense

strafing, with no air cover and little ground cover. But these Earth defenders

all fired back, all stood their ground and fought. Men and women hurled

defiance and blazing energy salvos back into the skies-and died.

The toll was terrible, even though the attack was short; a carpet of

intense radiation blasts took out many of the mecha in the surrounding

heights; only Dana and her troops, close to the advance ship, were relatively

safe. Conventional APCs and tanks fared even worse, sitting ducks for the

assault ships. Gladiators were putting up the strongest resistance; Dana saw

two of them converge their fire to bring an assault ship out of the sky in a

fiery crash.

Again she heard the quavering, inhuman voice of the red. "Retreat to

the forward command ship." The blues followed it away in those

kangaroolike, two-legged hops, up a ramp into the ship.

They're not getting out of here because they're outgunned, that's for

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sure! Dana realized. She was about to yell for everyone to run for it, when an

area of cloud seemed to boil away before an intense ray of light, like a beam

of supernova. It sprang down into the ground near one of the mounds,

though not the one containing SDF-1.

There it ignited, or exploded. A white-hot infernal wind flew out from it,

riding a shockwave, carrying before it mecha, powered armor, tracked

vehicles, and armored infantry. It fragmented Earth's proudest war

machines, tossing them like leaves before it. In moments the formidable

attack force was reduced to stunned survivors, wounded, and the many,

many dead.

But the Masters had calculated well. They knew a great deal about the

mounds now, knew that the Matrix would be safe for the time being-until

they could return and deal with the wraiths.

Dana kept her head well down until the worst of the shockwave and

heat had died away. Then she lifted her head, wiping dust from her visor, to

see the forward command ship lifting away above her, moving to rejoin its

mother ship. Far off to one side, a glowing crater hundreds of yards across

gave testimony of the Masters' wrath.

She drew off the winged helmet tiredly, lowering it. It was a singular

mercy to see Bowie wave exhaustedly from where he had taken refuge in

Angelo's Trojan Horse.

Dana was filled with sorrow; nevertheless, she felt no guilt. Whatever

the aliens wanted here, she and the others had kept it away from them.

But they'll come again. And then it'll be a fight to the death; we all

know that now. A lot of good men and women died proving it today: this

planet is ours! And now the Robotech Masters are going to pay!

And now she knew the name of her strangely familiar enemy: Zor.

In their great mother ships, the Robotech Masters pondered this latest

development. The fleet of six huge ships withdrew to a geostationary orbit

and remained there, silent and enigmatic.

Endless conferences took place between the Masters at their

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Protoculture cap and the Scientists, the Politicians, and other triumvirates

at their lesser caps, and with Zor, their battlelord. The matter of the

resistance of the Protoculture wraiths in the mounds was the prime source

of discussion, but there were others.

For the time being there was no question of simply excavating the

mound and taking the Matrix; the combined impediments of the wraiths

and the Humans made that impossible. But the Masters insisted, and the

Elders concurred with them, that the primitives must have some control

over the incorporeal entities who guarded the mounds. Zor was tempted to

disbelieve, but in the end agreed with their assessment when he recalled

that the female he had battled was Of the Protoculture.

And yet, for reasons he could not explain to himself, he did not reveal

this fact-kept all but the most perfunctory mention of Dana from his mind

when reporting.

Several things became clear under the compassionless probing of the

Masters: they could not take the Matrix by direct assault and dared not

simply begin laying waste to the planet; their Protoculture was in short

supply, and their time was running out quickly.

Because their own Protoculture sources were shrinking, the Elders

grew restive, demanding some resolution. Added to this was the fact that

the Invid might become aware of the Matrix at any time, and intervene.

Using the splendid military skills and cruel, fanatic loyalty they had

programmed into the last and finest of the Zor clones, Zor Prime, the

Masters considered their next course of action.

A week went by.

In the UEG headquarters the military and civilian leaders of Earth's

feudal government met in emergency session. They were desperate and

short on sleep, and the observers who had come in from the east still had

the stench of carnage and smoking ruin in their nostrils and on their

clothes.

What constituted the core of the United Earth Government looked

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across the long table at its military hierarchy, some dozen men in a vaulted,

gleaming hall. At a separate desk, facing the head of the table, sat Chairman

Moran, who presided over the UEG. He was an elderly man of medium

height and build, with silver-gray hair and mustache, dressed in civilian

clothes adorned with the crest of the UEG. He had spent most of his life

trying to reconcile the ideals of civilian freedom with the harsh necessities

of military strength and preparedness.

The headquarters was a domed building of classic architecture, a new

Versailles or Reichchancellory; within were fine furnishings and marble

columns and rows of towering MP-powered armor to guard, but none of the

men who ruled Earth took any pride or reassurance from those things today.

They were disturbed and apprehensive as only the powerful, confronting an

unexpected, greater power than themselves, can be.

Moran looked them over. "Gentlemen, many of you have already heard

the news. This enemy military commander-Zor, or whatever his name is-has

broken his self-imposed ceasefire. At oh-eight-hundred today, local time, he

and his assault ships and Bioroids attacked and wiped out a training base in

Sector Three. They leveled virtually every structure in that sector and killed

nearly every living soul there."

The officers did know; they traded troubled glances, not knowing what

to say. The attack had been so swift and merciless that there had been little

time for counterattack.

"We've managed to keep word of this from getting out to the general

populace, but there have been rumors," Moran went on. "And we cannot

afford a panic! Now, I want to know how this could have happened.

Commander Leonard, how on Earth could we be caught so completely off

guard?"

Supreme Commander Leonard, top-ranking officer in Earth's military,

a big bear of a man with his shaven, bullet-shaped skull and flaring brows,

stood.

He rose as if he were coming at bay before a pack of hounds, glowering

at Moran and the others. "Sir, I wish I could explain how they neutralize or

145

circumvent our sensors, but I can't. Our only viable response is to strike

back at once, and hard! We drove them off before and we can do it again,

until they stop coming back." He shook his big fist, a gesture he often used.

Inside, he knew a bitter frustration that Zand-Zand, who seemed to

move in the shadows and had advised him so cannily before-could no longer

be contacted. Has Zand set me up? Leonard wondered. But the man was Dr.

Lang's heir on Earth, heir to the secrets of Robotech and Protoculture;

elusive, furtive Zand, had sworn he was on Leonard's side. And so Leonard

was determined to follow Zand's council and his own prejudices.

Moran looked to Emerson. "And what does the chief of staff have to

say?"

Emerson came to his feet slowly, thinking. He didn't wish to contradict

his superior, especially in that hall, but he had been called upon to speak his

mind honestly. Certainly, Emerson thought that Leonard's characterization

of the Masters as having been "driven away" was wide of the mark.

"Speaking candidly, sir," Emerson said, "we know next to nothing

about Zor or the Robotech Masters' true capabilities. And until we do, I

cannot recommend any mission that would risk our people and our ships

and mecha."

Leonard, just about to sit down, slammed the table with his fist and

rose up again. "Damnit, we're talking about the fate of the planet here, and

about being wiped out sector by sector!"

Emerson nodded soberly. "I'm aware of that. But nothing will be

gained by sacrificing our pilots to certain destruction with no hope of

inflicting significant losses on the enemy."

Leonard sneered. "I won't stand for that kind of talk! You're impugning

the courage and ability of our fighting forces!" Before Emerson could

contradict, Leonard swung to Moran. "Those men and women have

bloodied the enemy before, but good! If we let them take the offensive, they

can finish the job!"

Emerson bit back his words as he heard Chairman Moran say, "Very

well, Commander Leonard, prepare to attack."

146

Fools! thought Rolf Emerson even as he prepared to carry out the

orders he was sworn to obey.

147

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

To: Supreme Commander Leonard

FROM: Dr. Lazio Zand, Special Protoculture Observations and Operations

Kommandatura (Commanding)

Sir:

It is the conclusion of this unit that war against the Robotech Masters

must be prosecuted as aggressively as possible, and that tactics used thus far

(with particular emphasis on the Hovertank squads) still hold the best

promise of positive results.

Monument City didn't feel much like a combat zone even though all

Earth was a combat zone now, Dana reflected as she led the 15th into the

middle of the downtown area on Hovercycles.

Traffic was fairly heavy and the shops, arcades, nightspots, and

theaters were all brightly lit. Streetlights, traffic signals, neon signs, and

even park fountains were illuminated. Why not? she thought. Blackout

measures are useless for hiding targets from the Robotech Masters.

And keeping people pent up inside didn't do any good, either; there

had been plenty of shelters in Sector Three, or so the scuttlebutt ran, and it

hadn't helped them at all. The only thing Civil Defense restrictions would do

right now was cause panic.

And panic was what the 15th was there to prevent. They were on duty,

but unarmed, looking more like they were out on an evening pass. The UEG

had tried to suppress rumors of the atrocities in Sector Three, but there had

been the inevitable leaks. Like a lot of other Southern Cross soldiers

circulating through population centers this night, the ATACs were on the

lookout for any crazy inclined to jump up on a street corner soap box and

proclaim Judgment Day.

Well, it sure beats a twenty-mile hike with full field pack, Sean Phillips

decided, removing his goggles and readjusting his torso harness as the 15th

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parked their cycles side by side at the curb of a busy street. People were

wandering by arm in arm, or window-shopping, taking in the sights. And

there were women galore. "Well, men, this is going to be a true test of your

character," he said, and got sly laughs from some of the guys.

"Ahem," said Dana, rising to face them. "All right, we start our patrols

from here." She eyed them severely, then winked. "And don't do anything I

wouldn't do, hmm?"

"Yes, ma'am," Sean said with a grin.

"Okay, I'll patrol the discos," somebody volunteered.

"And I'll start with that bar over there," another added with a goofy

laugh.

"Yeah, you'll end with it, too," the first countered.

In another moment they were all splitting up to check out the area, all

except Angelo, who gave a disgusted grunt. Duty was duty and playtime was

playtime and the two shouldn't mix!

"Angie, why do I have the feeling you'd rather stay here and guard the

horses?" Dana asked sweetly.

He crossed his arms and put his feet up on his handlebars. "Because

you're a mind-reader, I guess."

That gave her a start, and she saw Zor's face again.

Maybe I am. But she recovered and told her troops, "Right, move out."

Which they did with a will, whopping and laughing. "Idiots," Angelo

snorted.

Is every attractive female in this town grafted to some civilian's arm?

Sean thought as he made his way along. Then he saw her standing by a

boutique window, looking at a coat. She was small and shapely, with auburn

hair to her waist and yellow slacks that did nice things for her figure.

Sean squared his uniform as he went over. Lady, this is your lucky

night! "You seem to like that coat a lot," he said. "I admire your taste."

Actually, he scarcely glanced at it.

She turned in surprise. "What?" She looked him over and broke into a

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dimpled smile. "Will you buy it for me, hmm?"

This was more like it. The coat was nice, he guessed; all scarlet

embroidery and white fur trim. "Well, now, I just might be persuaded-uh!"

As he read the price tag and recalled that he was now a deuce private, he

went pale. Gah! That's more than I make in a year!

"On second thought, red's not your color," he improvised. "Listen, why

don't you and me go someplace and get ourselves a drink, yes?" He winked.

She made a wry face and removed the hand he'd settled lightly on her

shoulder. "Thanks anyway. Maybe some other time." She said it walking.

"Sure, anytime you say!" he called after. Maybe I sounded too insincere?

Well, it's her loss.

Two blocks away, Dana was looking into another boutique window,

considering a nice little evening frock that looked just about right for her. A

hand fell on her shoulder and she pivoted, ready to show some masher what

Hovertank officers learned in hand-to-hand.

But she was facing a smug-looking Angelo Dante. "Time to spit on the

fire and call in the hounds," he said. "We just got a general recall to base.

Something big is up."

The 15th was back on standby alert, manning their Hovertanks and

waiting. This show was reserved for the TASCs and the Cosmic Units.

Fokker Base had been rebuilt hastily. Barely twenty-four hours after

the raid on Sector Three, the light of morning showed a half-dozen shuttles

at the vertical and ready to launch. Final preparations were under way, and

people were running for bunkers and observation posts.

The shuttles launched, the first battle wing of the planned strike. On

the other side of the base, the Black Lions and the other Veritech outfits

waited, the second battle wing. When the shuttles were away and clear, the

VTs got the green light. With Maria Crystal leading, the fighters thundered

down the runway to even the score with the Robotech Masters.

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Leonard came into the command center to find Emerson bent over the

illuminated displays. Leonard had regained his composure, especially in

light of the fact that Emerson was his most capable subordinate. To put it

more truthfully, over the years Leonard had garnered credit for many things

that had been Emerson's accomplishments.

Leonard dropped a thick hand on the flared shoulderboard of

Emerson's torso harness. "Believe me, Rolf, this is the only way."

Emerson studied him for a long time before replying, "I hope to God

you're right."

The VTs went in first, loosing swarms of missiles at the enemy flagship,

their sole objective. But the missiles were no sooner away than globes of

light boiled out of the flagship, like enormous will-o'-the-wisps, bursting

into hexagonal webs of pulsating light like gigantic snowflakes.

The snowflakes moved and drifted into position, intersecting the

missiles' paths, and the Earthly ordnance detonated harmlessly against

them. The other mother ships were silent and dark but for running lights,

waiting.

Still more of the energy snowflakes came forth, until a net of them

protected the flagship. The VTs swept around for another try, and this time

beams from the chandelierbulb cannon crackled across empty space. More

than forty fighters were lost in the first ninety seconds of the massed attack

on the flagship. Still the VTs swung around for another go, hoping against

hope to get in under the hexagons and deliver a blow.

But they were flying straight into a murder machine.

"Attack groups two and eight have disengaged from the enemy," the

flat, synthesized voice of the intel computer echoed in the command center.

"Groups three, four, and seven report heavy losses. Other groups fail to

respond to transmissions and are believed to have been totally destroyed."

Leonard turned to Emerson angrily but also, people in the command

center could see, with a tremble of fear. "How can this be happening to us?"

151

Emerson chose to ignore him, except to observe, "So far we haven't

even put a dent in them." He looked to Rochelle. "Any sign of a

counterattack yet?"

"Negative at this time, sir. They're standing pat."

Emerson called for an update on losses. The computer printed out the

awful facts and figures. Three quarters of the attack wings' forces were gone,

immolated in a few minutes.

"All those men and women lost," Emerson murmured, scanning the

list.

"It's-it's a disaster," Leonard said unsteadily. He turned and lurched

toward the door.

Emerson didn't even bother to solicit Leonard's permission. "Call off

the attack! All units disengage and return to base." Then he turned and

glared at Leonard's back as the supreme commander exited.

Not far away, there was a different kind of battle being fought in the

UEG's foremost Robotech research laboratory, in the military-industrial

facility near the airbase. And this battle was turning, slowly, in the Human

race's favor.

Dr. Miles Cochran and his colleague, Dr. Samson Beckett, were two of

the hottest of the Robotech hotshots who had trained under Dr. Emil Lang

and, later, Dr. Lazlo Zand. Now they pored over the remains of a downed

blue Bioroid that lay on a worktable like the world's biggest cadaver

awaiting the championship autopsy of all time.

Its guts were opened up and wired to every monitoring device the lab

had. It looked like it was sprouting a garden of sensor wires, photo-optic

lines, monitoring circuits, and computer links.

Cochran, a thin-faced, intense redhead, said, "I'm activating ultraviolet

scanner, Sam."

Beckett, smaller and dark-haired, wearing tinted glasses, was oohing

and aahing over the things he was encountering with his probes, but

stopped to step back and watch.

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The scanner came down to irradiate the Bioroid's entire form, passing

from crown to toes, coordinating with readouts and analysis computers,

scrutinizing every part of the shattered mecha.

The two went to the computer screens to see what they came up with.

The data banks were linked in with recordings and sketches of the mecha

the Southern Cross forces had fought thus far. The two watched the

information and diagrams flash, the light reflecting off Beckett's glasses.

"What about the damage received?" Cochran asked. "See if you can get

me a readout on that." Beckett bent to the task.

He got an integrated analysis of the internal structure of the mecha.

There was severe mechanical damage because a leg had been ripped off in

battle, but no physical explanation as to why all systems were so completely

inert despite the Humans' efforts to activate them. Then they got the

confirmation they were looking for.

"Definite traces of biogenetic material," Beckett said flatly.

"So there was something alive in there, something that escaped before

the mop-up crew got to the scene, or self-destructed. Can you give us a

look-see at what it was?"

"I can try." Beckett bent to his task again. The most powerful medical

and genetic engineering programs were accessed, a stupendous amount of

computer power. Alongside a detailed DNA blueprint, the computer drew

up a human form. "Unbelievable," Beckett breathed.

"It's Human! Not simply like us, as the Zentraedi were, but Human!"

"But-it's from outside the Solar System!" Beckett was shaking his head.

"Maybe...somehow they're from Hunter's SDF-3 expedition?"

It was Cochran's turn to shake his head. "No. But those ATAC tankers

were right; they saw what they thought they saw."

Beckett removed his glasses. "God! Wait till Zand hears this! He'll

freak!"

There was a chuckle from the darkness; Cochran and Beckett spun

toward it even as they realized they knew who it was. "Perhaps that is too

extreme a word, Samson. Let's just say that I'm pleased."

153

Dr. Lazlo Zand came a little farther into the light, so that his eerie eyes

could be seen. "And of course my little Dana was right! Of course your

findings bear me out! The Protoculture weaves, it spins, it manipulates and

shapes, young doctors! Its ability to shape mere machinery is nothing next

to its ability to shape events!"

He stepped a little closer still, studying the Bioroid. He was a man of

medium height, in unornamented UEG attire, his hair still unruly after all

these years. His eyes seemed to be all iris, as Lang's had been ever since

Lang had taken that Protoculture boost aboard the SDF-1 when it first

landed. Only, in Zand's case, the transformation hadn't taken place until

years later. He looked no less unearthly than a Robotech Master.

"You've done well, but now you must double-check your findings to be

sure there is no error in your presentation when you take them to the UEG."

Cochran found his voice. How had Zand gotten into the lab? How had

he known what Beckett and Cochran were doing there? They hadn't seen or

had word of or about him in years. Yet, those weren't questions Cochran felt

safe in asking, so he said, "Surely, Dr. Zand, you'll want to accompany us

and elaborate on-"

"No!" Zand raised a warning finger. "No mention of me, understood?

Good! Now, back to work, both of you." Zand turned for the door.

"But when will you-" Beckett began.

"When the time is right," Zand said, silhouetted against the light from

outside, "you will hear from me again."

Emerson rested his chin on his interlaced fingers. "And so you're

saying Zor is a Human being, and not a miniaturized Zentraedi?"

Beckett and Cochran nodded.

"Then Dana and Bowie were right," Emerson said softly, staring into

space. "And we're fighting our own kind. Like brothers slaughtering each

other."

Just then Rochelle buzzed Emerson with the final compilation of the

battle casualties. Eighty-five VTs destroyed, seven damaged beyond repair;

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five shuttles destroyed, one damaged beyond repair. Two-hundred-seven

pilots and aircraft crew people dead, another twenty ground support and

two-hundred-odd civilians dead, the latter two figures from crashes of

damaged aircraft. Eighty-seven missing in action and unaccounted for,

presumed to be adrift in space, dead or alive.

In the ready-room at the 15th, for once the banter was all but

nonexistent.

"Worst defeat of the war," Bowie said, stretching out the kinks that

wearing armor always gave him, grateful to be back in a simple uniform.

"And that was only one ship," Sean reminded him.

"I tell ya, the VTs coulda got through if they hadn't've been called off,"

Angelo insisted. "Look what we did to those ali-those XTs on the Liberty

mission."

Dana made no response to the fact that he hadn't used the word aliens,

but she noticed that nobody in the 15th used it when referring to the enemy

now. It moved her so, their literally unspoken support of her-she very warily

felt them to be the family she'd never had.

Louie looked up from the calculations he was doing on a lap-size

computer. "And I'm telling you, Angie, that that ship's design makes a

frontal assault a complete impossibility."

Sean chortled. "I forgot: the professor, there, knows everything!"

Louie held his temper, used to this kind of flak. Bright and inventive

enough for any tech school or advanced degree program, he had still opted

for the ATACs. He liked being a corporal in a line outfit and, more to the

point, the tinkering and computer hacking and equipment modifications he

did were done without some frowning lab-coat type looking over his

shoulder. He was also confident that the studying and research he did on

his own, open-ended, put him way ahead of the people who had to complete

course requirements in any school.

Dana put in, "But Zor's ship must have some weak spot."

Louie turned the dark-goggled gaze on her, nodding. "Exactly right. To

155

start with, I figure that Zor's ship is not powered by an engine as we would

recognize one."

"Huh?" Dana said. "Then how's it get around?"

"Well, it can travel between the stars by spacefolding, of course, like the

SDFs and the Zentraedi," Louie explained. "And to get around over smaller

distances, it has a more localized folding process, a sort of a twisting of

opposing forces, like squirting a grape seed between your fingers."

Dana remembered some of the theory and jargon Louie had spouted in

sessions past. "So, if you upset the hyper-balance, you've got yourself an

unstable ship."

Sean caught her thoughtful tone and looked her over. "What exactly are

you thinking about?"

She gave him a closed-face look. "Basic military strategy." She rose,

took a few paces, then turned back to them. "C'mon, Louie, we've got work

to do!"

156

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Lazlo, my valued colleague,

It falls upon me to leave now with the SDF-3 expedition, and falls to you

to stay, for reasons we both know.

But I ask you to keep in mind the fact that my Awakening to the

Protoculture was in some measure accidental, while yours was fully

aforethought, and that certain intents and purposes in you are at times very

strong.

I exhort you to remember that you will be dealing with HUMAN

BEINGS, and to work contrary to their wellbeing will be in some measure,

always, to work at cross purposes with the Protoculture. Please don't let the

eagerness to plumb the depths of Protoculture distort your thinking.

Your friend,

Emil Lang

When Dana appeared at the Robotech research lab with Louie in tow,

she had the impression that Drs. Cochran and Beckett were looking at her

rather strangely, at least at first.

But she shrugged it off; research types were always off somewhere in a

world of their own. Besides, Louie had them totally fascinated with his idea

in short order. First thing she knew, Louie was sitting at Beckett's main

computer terminal with the doctors looking on, bringing up diagrams and

displays and equations and computergenerated images to explain and verify

his analysis.

"It's only a theory, I admit," he said as the computer illuminated

various parts of a grid-diagram of Zor's vessel. "But after all, no scans show

any central power source, am I right?"

Cochran nodded, lower lip between his thumb and forefinger, staring

into the screen. Louie went on. "But I, um, I accessed the intel computers

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and I found what's gotta be a bio-gravitic induction network."

The computer showed it, a convoluted array like a highway system or

blood vessels, picked out in neon red. "There seems to be some kind of

perpetual bio-gravitic cycle; the Protoculture quanta are simultaneously

attracted to and repelled by one another. Kinda like what's going on in the

sun, if you want to put it that way, gravity and fusion fighting it out in a sort

of equilibrium."

Dana tried to get a word in edgewise, but the three men were

completely caught up in their tech-talk.

Beckett did sneak in a sidelong look at her, though. How had Dana, of

all people, come to be the one to find this Louie Nichols, this

gem-in-the-rough genius/weirdo? Of course it was again in total defiance of

any coincidence, and Beckett had renewed awe for Protoculture's power to

shape events.

"It appears to effect these two strong mega-forces," Louie said.

"Through phased bonding!" Cochran comprehended, grinning from ear

to ear.

Dana was tired of hearing about the framistat field connected to the

veeblefertzer anomalies. "So if we destabilize this equilibrium of yours, we'll

knock the whole ship out of whack, right?"

They frowned at her coarse language, but Louie shrugged. "Yes. At least

theoretically."

She hooked to Cochran and Beckett. "Then you find the right spot and

we'll see that the job gets done!"

Cochran hedged. "I don't think the chief of staff will choose you for the

mission, Lieutenant. Not with your track record."

But inside he was wondering how Zand could let the girl run around

loose like this, constantly daring aliens to shoot her cute blond head off. She

was the very core of so much of Zand's work and planning.

Ah, but that's the heart of the matter, isn't it? he seemed to hear Zand

lecturing. It's Protoculture that shapes events, and living beings interfered

with it or sought to hamper it only at their own peril.

158

Zand, and even the great Lang, had realized this very early on; only by

being observers of events and learning the innermost secrets of

Protoculture-the ones that had died with the original Zor-could they ever

hope to reach a point where they dared try to manipulate its greatest

powers.

Dana was saying cheerfully, "Oh, I beg to differ. The Fifteenth is the

perfect choice for this mission!"

Getting Bowie to agree to help her talk Emerson into letting the 15th

take the mission was only slightly more difficult than getting a mule into

high heels. But he saw that the rest of the 15th was all for it, so he gave in at

last.

In Emerson's office, Dana, Bowie, and Louie held their collective

breath while Emerson studied the data. "Sir, we've finally got the weapon

we need to hit the Robotech Masters where it hurts," Bowie prompted.

Emerson brought his chair back around. "It's an insane mission.

Hopeless. And we can't spare the pilots or VTs."

Dana gave him her best wide-eyed look. "But who said anything about

Veritechs? Looks more like a job for Hovertanks, I was thinking, General."

Emerson moaned inwardly and wished for the days when he could

paddle them when they had been bad and send them to bed without supper.

And there had been quite a few those.

But that was before the days when they were soldiers who had sworn

an oath of duty. And before the days when the Robotech Masters had come

to grind the Earth to rubble beneath an iron heel. "You think you can do it?"

Her gaze was level now, her nod slow and sure. "Yes, sir."

Emerson rose. "Good hunting, people."

Again the fighters went up, but this time they were as cautious as they

could manage to be, firing from a distance, putting more emphasis on

evasive maneuvers than on accuracy. Once more the glowing, throbbing

hexagonal webs appeared. Dana thought how much like power-veined

159

snowflakes they looked.

The snowflakes moved, as they had before, to supply coverage to

heavily attacked areas, leaving others more lightly guarded. It was

something intel had noted on the first assault; the time had come to use it.

The shuttle pilot flying the mission was a chill cube; when a stray

Masters cannon round grazed the fuselage of his ship, he said offhandedly,

"Just a flesh wound, pards. Goin' in."

He stood the ship on its side to make it between two of the spiral

ziggurat megastructures on the deck below, then flew along a trench, well

aware that a speed slow enough to make a combat drop was too slow to

dodge enemy flak. He shrugged and kept flying. "Made it through," he

thought to mention to the ATACs back in the drop bay, as if telling them

that the mail had arrived.

"Outta the frying pan," Dana heard Sean mutter into his helmet mike.

Then the pilot gave the order to open the drop bay door, and they were

looking out at the onrushing techno-terrain of the mother ship's upper hull.

The Hovertanks' engines were already revving. The ATACs roared out

in order, dropping into deployment pattern as they descended to the hull.

"Everyone accounted for?" Dana, in the lead, asked. She was trying to

take in everything at once, looking for AA emplacements and other wicked

surprises, spot her target, see how the battle was going, and make sure

Valkyrie was functioning right.

Angelo, farther back, reported, "Roger that; everybody's in position,

Lieutenant."

The ATACs barreled along, lining up on their leader according to

assignment. "All right, boys; you know the drill."

They did; it was Sterling-simple. They were to follow Dana's targeting

program, pierce the hull, and expose that bio-gravitic network. Then they

would concentrate fire, disrupt the energy highway system, and put the

mother ship's lights out.

Unless any of ten thousand things went wrong. Bowie sang out a

Southern Cross Army refrain, "Just another day in the SCA!"

160

They stayed in a long trench for cover, and had good luck for an

astoundingly tranquil ten seconds before trouble reared its armored head.

"Uh-oh, we got company," Sean noted. Four Bioroids had dropped down

into the trench, far ahead, to block their way. Dana found herself holding

her breath, wondering what color they were.

Well, if Big Red's in my way now, it's his tough luck! She made an

obscene reference to what the Bioroids could go and do. "Forget 'em! It's

that system we're after! Close up behind me!"

They did, and Dana hit emergency thrust. She dodged the enemy

mecha's shots and was upon them before they got their bearings, bowling

them over with the solid weight of her tank, not bothering to shoot. All were

blues. The 15th howled like werewolves and followed her on toward the

target.

"The shuttle got in under their defensive shields," Rochelle told

Emerson. "We register a running firefight on the upper hull, sir."

Emerson inclined his head in acknowledgment but didn't take his eyes

from the displays.

Bioroids closed in from both sides and behind, but none were on their

Hovercraft, and so it remained a road-race. Trooper Thornton heard Sean's

warning but couldn't dodge in time, and a wash of annihilation discs blew

out the folded Bioroid hand in its nacelle under his tank's left rear armor

skirt.

"Been hit, Lieutenant," Thornton drawled, trying for damage control.

But the decrease in speed let two Bioroids catch up to him; they dropped

feetfirst onto his ship, disintegrating it in a fireball, and kept on coming.

"Louie! Battloid mode!" Dana called.

The Bioroids were fighting on their home ground, but the ATACs had

the advantage of velocity, adrenaline, and a desperate need to carry out

their mission. Dana and Louie mechamorphosed in mid-turn, and went

rocketing back at the enemy as ultratech knights, weapons blazing. This

161

time they used the main battery, the heavy Gladiator cannon that was

usually stored in the Battloid's right arm but could be brought forth in

extreme need. Everything around them seemed to be happening in slow

motion.

They got the first Bioroid as it was still charging, the second and third

when the enemy mecha stopped to shoot it out, and the fourth when it

sought to withdraw and had its route blocked by a dikelike structural

feature.

"Better luck next time," Dana bade the last to go, but as it went it

toppled into a sort of utility groove. Its explosion set off another, greater one,

and the groove became a crackling, Protoculture-hot version of an old-time

blackpowder fuse.

Dana gasped as the eruption raced along the groove, sending up a

curtain of starflame behind it, blowing armored deckplates high, moving as

fast as any Hovertank. The racing superfuse reached a low, pillbox feature

on the hull and went up like a roman candle.

"Louie, did we do it?"

Louie's helmet gave him buglike look, but beneath it he was smiling

wide.

"Yes, ma'am! We've found the bio-gravitic network!"

"Let's get it!" She raced in with a dozen and more Battloids covering

and bringing up the rear, moving like veteran infantry, or SWAT cops. They

fired with all the staggering power the Hovertanks could bring to bear;

Bioroids, unused to such house-to-house, room-to-room type-combat, were

at the disadvantage, and took all the losses then.

One Bioroid almost blasted Dana, but she stumbled out of its way and

Angelo got the Bioroid instead, shooting it off a tall tower so that it fell a

long way to the hull, somersaulting, like something out of an old western.

Dana came up with her Battloid's head hanging over the brink of a

shaft exposed by the exploded pillbox. The shaft was so deep that she

couldn't see the bottom.

"You found it, ma'am," Louie observed. "Down there's the processing

162

field that manages the energy equilibrium. If we blow up the equipment

down at the field intersection locus, we'll destabilize this whole damn

garbage scow."

Dana had regained her feet. "Let's do-it-to-it!" She studied the diagram

Louie was sending her, and armed the heavy missile she was carrying for

the purpose. All of them had one-just one apiece-but Dana wanted this shot

to be hers.

Nearby, the 15th was in a furious firefight with the Bioroids as more

and more enemy reinforcements showed up. The weapons beams spat and

veered, seeking targets; the annihilation discs flew.

Sean yelled, "Dana, we've got ya covered, but there're more 'roids

crashing the party!"

"Hang on!" She adjusted the range on the missile, and its dial-a-yield

for maximum explosive force. Alien discs began ranging in around her, and

Louie turned the Live wire to give more covering fire. "Lieutenant, I really

suggest you hurry!"

"Jump, all you guys! Go! Don't wait for me!" She released the missile

and watched its corkscrew trail disappear down into the blackness. Then

she turned to propel herself into space with the strength of her Battloid's

legs and the thrusters built into its feet, breaking out of the surface gravity

field around the upper hull. She saw that the other Battloids were already in

the air. As she went, her instruments registered a direct hit.

The Bioroids were trying to shoot down the ascending Battloids when

the column of white light and raw destruction shot from the shaft, like

Satan's own artillery spewing forth. The Battloids were already up and

speeding away from it, but the Bioroids closing in on the shaft to see what

damage had been done got a final, horrific surprise.

The gush of unleashed energy set off explosions in and around the

shaft; a dozen blues were whirled away like leaves in a hurricane, molten

metal, dismembered by the force of the blast, twisted into unrecognizable

shapes as the volcano of energy blew higher and higher.

"Looks like you knew what you were talking about, Louie," Sean said in

163

a subdued voice, thinking what they were all thinking: the explosion

surpassed all estimates and projections; if they had hung around for,

another few seconds, the 15th would have been history, too.

Then everybody was making ribald praise of the Cosmic Units as the

shuttle came into view, right on pickup vector. Dana looked at the

lapsed-time function on her mission displays and realized in shock that the

whole thing had taken only a few minutes.

"We see you, transport; get ready to take us aboard." Her elation was

complete, for now.

Dana and the rest of the 15th, the Cosmic crews, and the TASC fliers

could all see the secondary explosions ripping along the mother ship's hide

as the ATACs dove aboard the shuttle. Furious fires burned out of control,

becoming thermonuclear bonfires in the escaping atmosphere; the monster

ship swung to in accordance with whatever motive forces it employed; its

orbit decayed at once.

Dana watched over an optical pickup patched through from the shuttle

bridge. She felt vast satisfaction, a quelling of her own fear and self-doubt.

Then the satisfaction retreated; the moment she touched down she

would have to begin getting and training replacement personnel and mecha.

It was plain the 15th would be needed again very soon.

Because the mother ship was beginning a long, controlled fall toward

Earth.

"It's breaking up!" Emerson exclaimed, watching the relayed image.

"Only peripherally, sir," Tessel noted, reading another display.

"I never would've believed it," Rochelle commented quietly. He turned

and called out a command, "Ready-reaction force, stand by for immediate

deployment!"

"Once you have Zor's landing point plotted, seal it off and ring it in

with defense in depth," Emerson instructed quietly. "Air, ground,

subterranean listening equipment-everything!"

"Yes, sir!"

164

Emerson watched the listing mother ship, a wounded dinosaur helpless

to stop its plunge. Bigger than a city, it settled toward a final resting spot in

the hills above Monument City. Emerson wondered if that was by

calculation. He was beginning to abandon all faith in coincidence.

The controlled crash didn't destroy the mother ship, nor did Emerson

expect it to; that would have been too much to hope for. It loomed like a

colossal glacier of metal, silent and challenging.

Very well, he thought. Challenge accepted.

He turned to Rochelle. "Oh, and Colonel."

"Sir?"

"Tell the Fifteenth to stand down for a little rest; they've earned it."

End

RTUCN.COM

165

Document Outline

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Metal Fire

By Jack McKinney

1987

2

For Reba West, Jonathan Alexander, Tony Oliver, and the

dozen others whose voices brought these characters to life

3

4

CHAPTER ONE

EXEDORE: So, Admiral, there is little doubt: [Zentraedi and Human] genetic

makeup points directly at a common point of origin.

ADMIRAL GLOVAL: Incredible.

EXEDORE: Isn't it. Furthermore, while examining the data we noticed many

common traits, including a penchant on the part of both races to indulge in

warfare...Yes, both races seem to enjoy making war.

From Exedore's intel reports

to the SDF-2 High Command

Once before, an alien fortress had crashed on Earth...

Its arrival had put an end to almost ten years of global civil war; and its

resurrection had ushered in armageddon. That fortress's blackened,

irradiated remains lay buried under a mountain of earth, heaped upon it by

the very men and women who had rebuilt the ship on what would have been

its island grave. But unbeknownst to those who mourned its loss, the soul of

that great ship had survived the body and inhabited it still-an entity living

in the shadows of the technology it animated, waiting to be freed by its

natural keepers, and until then haunting the world chosen for its sorry

exile...

This new fortress, this most recent gift from heaven's more sinister side,

had announced its arrival, not with tidal and tectonic upheavals, but with

open warfare and devastation-death's bloodstained calling cards. Nor was

this fortress derelict and uncontrolled in its fateful fall but driven, brought

down to Earth by the unwilling minor players in its dark drama...

"ATAC Fifteen to air group!" Dana Sterling yelled into her mike over

the din of battle. "Hit 'em again with everything you have! Try to keep their

heads down! They're throwing everything but old shoes at us down here!"

Less than twenty-four hours ago her team, the 15th squad, Alpha

5

Tactical Armored Corps, had felled this giant, not with sling and shot, but

with a coordinated strike launched at the fortress's Achilles' heel-the core

reactor governing the ship's bio-gravitic network. It had dropped

parabolically from geosynchronous orbit, crashlanding in the rugged hills

several kilometers distant from Monument City.

Hardly a coincidental impact point, Dana said to herself as she

bracketed the fortress in the sights of the Hovertank's rifle/cannon.

The 15th, in Battloid mode, was moving across a battle zone that was

like some geyser field of orange explosions and high-flung dirt and rock-a

little like a cross between a moonscape and the inside of Vesuvius on a busy

day.

Up above, the TASC fighters, the Black Lions among them, roared in

for another pass. The glassy green teardrop-cannon of the fortress didn't

seem as effective in atmosphere, and so far there had been no sign of the

snowflake-shields. But the enemy's hull, rearing above the assaulting

Battloids, still seemed able to soak up all the punishment they could deal it

and stand unaltered.

An elongated hexagon, angular and relatively flat, the alien fortress

measured over five miles in length, half that in width. Its thickly plated hull

was the same lackluster gray of the Zentraedi ships used in the First

Robotech War; but in contrast to those organic leviathan dreadnaughts, the

fortress boasted a topography to rival that of a cityscape. Along the long axis

of its dorsal surface was a mile-long raised portion of superstructure that

resembled the peaked roofs of many twentieth-century houses. Forward

was a concentrically coiled conelike projection Louie Nichols had christened

"a Robotech teat'"; aft were massive Reflex thruster ports; and elsewhere,

weapons stations, deep crevices, huge louvered panels, ziggurats, onions

domes, towers like two-tined forks, stairways and bridges, armored docking

bays, and the articulated muzzles of the ship's countless segmented "insect

leg" cannons.

Below the sawtooth ridge the pilots of the fortress had chosen as their

crash site was Monument City, and several miles distant across two slightly

6

higher ridges, the remains of New Macross and the three Human-made

mounds that marked the final resting place of the super dimensional

fortresses.

Dana wondered if the SDF-1 had something to do with this latest

warfare. If these invaders were indeed the Robotech Masters (and not some

other band of XT galactic marauders), had they come to avenge the

Zentraedi in some way? Or worse still-as many were asking-was Earth

fighting a new war with micronized Zentraedi?

Child of a Human father and a Zentraedi mother-the only known child

of such a marriage-Dana had good reason to disprove this latter hypothesis.

That some of the invaders were humanoid was a fact only recently

accepted by the High Command. Scarcely a month ago Dana had been

face-to-face with a pilot of one of the invaders' bipedal mecha-the so-called

Bioroids. Bowie Grant had been even closer, but Dana was the one who had

yet to get over the encounter. All at once the war had personalized itself; it

was no longer machine against machine, Hovertank against Bioroid.

Not that that mattered in the least to the hardened leaders of the UEG.

Since the end of the First Robotech War, Human civilization had been on a

downhill slide; and if it hadn't come to Humans facing aliens, it probably

would have been Humans against Humans.

Dana heard a sonic roar through the Hovertank's external pickups and

looked up into a sky full of new generation Alpha fighters, snub-nosed

descendants of the Veritechs.

The place was dense with smoke and flying fragments from missile

bursts, and the missile's retwisting tracks. As Dana watched, one pair of VTs

finished a pass only to have two alien assault ships lift into the air and go up

after them. Dana yelled a warning over the Forward Air Control net, then

switched from the FAC frequency to her own tactical net because the real

showdown had begun; two blue Bioroids had popped up from behind

boulders near the fortress.

The blues opened fire and the ATACs returned it with interest; the

range was medium-long, but energy bolts and annihilation discs skewed

7

and splashed furiously, searching for targets. At Dana's request, a Tactical

Air Force fighter-bomber flight came in to drop a few dozen tons of

conventional ordnance while the TASCs got set up for their next run.

Abruptly, a green-blue light shone from the fortress, and a half second

later it lay under a hemisphere of spindriftlike stuff, a dome of radiant

cobweb, and all incoming beams and solids were splashing harmlessly from

it.

But the enemy could fire through their own shield, and did, knocking

down two of the retreating bombers and two approaching VTs with

cannonfire. Whatever the damage to the bio-gravitic system was, it plainly

hadn't robbed the fortress of all its stupendous power.

Dana's hand went out for the mode selector lever. She attuned her

thoughts to the mecha and threw the lever to G, reconfiguring from Battloid

to Gladiator. The Hovertank was now a squat, two-legged SPG

(self-propelled gun), with a single cannon stretching out in front of it.

Nearby, in the scant cover provided by hillside granite outcroppings

and dislodged boulders, the rest of the 15th-Louie Nichols, Bowie Grant,

Sean Phillips, and Sergeant Angelo Dante among others-similarly

reconfigured, was unleashing salvos against the stationary fortress.

"Man, these guys are tough as nails!" Dana heard Sean say over the net.

"They aren't budging an inch!"

And they aren't likely to, Dana knew. We're fighting for our home;

they're fighting for their ship and their only hope of survival.

"At this rate the fighting could go on forever," Angelo said. "Somebody

better think of something quick." And everyone knew he wasn't talking

about sergeants, lieutenants, or anybody else who might be accused of

working for a living; the brass better realize it was making a mistake, or

come evening they would need at least one new Hovertank squad.

Then Angelo picked up on a blue that had charged from behind a rock

and was headed straight for Bowie's Diddy-Wa-Diddy. The attitude and

posture of Bowie's mecha suggested that it was distracted, unfocused.

Damn kid, woolgathering! "Look out, Bowie!"

8

But then Sean appeared in Battloid mode, firing with the rifle/cannon,

the blue stumbling as it broke up in the blazing beams, then going down.

"Wake up and stay on your toes, Bowie," Angelo growled. "That's the

third time today ya fouled up."

"Sorry," Bowie returned. "Thanks, Sarge."

Dana was helping Louie Nichols and another trooper try to drive back

blues who were crawling forward from cover to cover on their bellies, the

first time the Bioroids had ever been seen to do such a thing.

"These guys just won't take no for an answer," Dana grated, raking her

fire back and forth at them.

Remote cameras positioned along the battle perimeter brought the

action home to headquarters. An intermittent beeping sound (like nonsense

Morse) and horizontal noise bars disrupted the video transmission. Still, the

picture was clear: the Tactical Armored units were taking a beating.

Colonel Rochelle vented his frustration in a slow exhale of smoke, and

stubbed out his cigarette in the already crowded ashtray. There were three

other staff officers with him at the long table, at the head of which sat Major

General Rolf Emerson.

"The enemy is showing no sign of surrender," Rochelle said after a

moment. "And the Fifteenth is tiring fast."

"Hit them harder," Colonel Rudolph suggested. "We've got the air wing

commander standing by. A surgical strike-nuclear, if we have to."

Rochelle wondered how the man had ever reached his current rank. "I

won't even address that suggestion. We have no clear-cut understanding of

that ship's energy shield. And what if the cards don't fall our way? Earth

would be finished."

Rudolph blinked nervously behind his thick glasses. "I don't see that

the threat would be any greater than the attacks already launched against

Monument."

Butler, the staff officer seated opposite Rudolph spoke to that. "This

isn't The War of the Worlds, Colonel-at least not yet. We don't even know

9

what they want from us."

"Do I have to remind you gentlemen about the attack on Macross

Island?" Rudolph's voice took on a harder edge. "Twenty years ago isn't

exactly ancient history, is it? If we're going to wait for an explanation, we

might as well surrender right now."

Rochelle was nodding his head and lighting up another cigarette. "I'm

against escalation at this point," he said, smoke and breath drawn in.

Rolf Emerson, gloved hands folded in front of him on the table, sat

silently, taking in his staff's assessments and opinions but saying very little.

If it were left up to him to decide, he would attempt to open up a dialogue

with the unseen invaders. True, the aliens had struck the first blow, but it

had been the Earth Forces who had been goading them into continued

strikes ever since. Unfortunately, though, he was not the one chosen to

decide things; he had to count on Commander Leonard for that...And may

heaven help us, he thought.

"We just can't let them sit there!" Rudolph was insisting.

Emerson cleared his voice, loud enough to cut through the separate

conversations that were in progress, and the table fell silent. The audio

monitors brought the noise of battle to them once again; in concert,

permaplas windowpanes rattled to the sounds of distant explosions.

"This battle requires more than just hardware and manpower,

gentlemen...We'll give them back the ground we've taken because it's of no

use to us right now. We'll withdraw our forces temporarily, until we have a

workable plan."

The 15th acknowledged the orders to pull back and ceased fire. Other

units were reporting heavy casualties, but their team had been fortunate:

seven dead, three wounded-counts that would have been judged

insignificant twenty years ago, when Earth's population was more than just

a handful of hardened survivors.

Emerson dismissed his staff, returned to his office, and requested to

meet with the supreme commander. But Leonard surprised him by telling

10

him to stay put, and five minutes later burst through the door like an angry

bull.

"There's got to be some way to crack open that ship!" Leonard railed. "I

will not accept defeat! I will not accept the status quo!"

Emerson wondered if Leonard would have accepted the status quo if he

had sweated out the morning in the seat of a Hovertank, or a Veritech.

The supreme commander was every bit Emerson's opposite in

appearance as well as temperament. He was a massive man, tall,

thick-necked, and barrel-chested, with a huge, hairless head, and heavy

jowls that concealed what had once been strong, angular features, Prussian

features, perhaps. His standard uniform consisted of white britches, black

leather boots, and a brown longcoat fringed at the shoulders. But central to

this ensemble was an enormous brass belt buckle, which seemed to

symbolize the man's foursquare materialistic solidity.

Emerson, on the other hand, had a handsome face with a strong jaw,

thick eyebrows, long and well drawn like gulls' wings, and dark, sensitive

eyes, more close-set than they should have been, somewhat diminishing an

otherwise intelligent aspect.

Leonard commenced pacing the room, his arms folded across his chest,

while Emerson remained seated at his desk. Behind him was a wallscreen

covered with schematic displays of troop deployment.

"Perhaps Rudolph's plan," Leonard mused.

"I strongly oppose it, Comman-"

"You're too cautious, Emerson," Leonard interrupted. "Too cautious for

your own good."

"We had no choice, Commander. Our losses-"

"Don't talk to me of losses, man! We can't let these aliens run

roughshod over us! I propose we adopt Rudolph's strategy. A surgical strike

is our only recourse."

Emerson thought about objecting, but Leonard had swung around and

slammed his hands flat on the table, silencing him almost before he began.

"I will not tolerate any delays!" the commander warned him, bulldog

11

jowls shaking. "If Rudolph's plan doesn't meet with your approval, then

come up with a better one!"

Emerson stifled a retort and averted his eyes. For an instant, the

commander's shaved head inches from his own, he understood why

Leonard was known to some as Little Dolza.

"Certainly, Commander," he said obediently. "I understand." What

Emerson understood was that Chairman Moran and the rest of the UEG

council were beginning to question Leonard's fitness to command, and

Leonard was feeling the screws turn.

Leonard's cold gaze remained in place. "Good," he said, certain he had

made himself clear. "Because I want an end to all this madness and I'm

holding you responsible...After all," he added, turning and walking away,

"you're supposed to be the miracle man."

The 15th had a clear view of the jagged ridgeline and downed fortress

from their twelfth-story quarters in the barracks compound. Between the

compound and twin peaks that dominated the view, the land was lifeless

and incurably rugged, cratered from the countless Zentraedi death bolts

rained upon it almost twenty years before.

The barracks' ready-room was posh by any current standards: spacious,

well-lit, equipped with features more befitting a recreation room, including

video games and a bar. Most of the squad was done in, already in the sack or

on their way, save for Dana Sterling, too wired for sleep, Angelo Dante, who

had little use for it on any occasion, and Sean Phillips, who was more than

accustomed to long hours.

The sergeant couldn't tear himself away from the view and seemed

itching to get back into battle.

"We should still be out there fighting-am I right or am I right?" Angelo

pronounced, directing his words to Sean only because he was seated nearby.

"We'll be fighting this war when our pensions come due unless we defeat

those monsters with one big shot; the whistle blows and everybody goes."

At twenty-six, the sergeant was the oldest member of the 15th, also the

12

tallest, loudest, and deadliest-as sergeants are wont to be. He had met his

match for impulsiveness in Dana, and recklessness in Sean, but the final

results had yet to be tallied.

Sean, chin resting on his hand, had his back turned to the windows and

to Angie. Long-haired would-be Casanova of the 15th and of nearly every

other outfit in the barracks compound, he fancied conquests of a softer sort.

But at the moment he was too exhausted for campaigns of any class.

"The brass'll figure out what to do, Angie," he told the sergeant tiredly,

still regarding himself as a lieutenant no matter what the brass thought of

him. "Haven't you heard? They know everything. Personally, I'm tired."

Angelo stopped pacing, looking around to make sure Bowie wasn't

there. "By the way, what's with Bowie?"

This seemed to bring Sean around some, but Angelo declined to follow

his comment up with an explanation.

"Why? He got a problem? You should have said something during the

debriefing."

The sergeant put his hands on his hips. "He's been screwing up. That's

not a problem in combat; it's a major malfunction."

Some would have expected the presence of the fortress to have cast a

pall over the city, but that was not the case. In fact, in scarcely a week's time

the often silent ship (except when stirred up by the armies of the Southern

Cross) had become an accepted feature of the landscape, and something of

an object of fascination. Had the area of the crash site not been cordoned off,

it's likely that half of Monument would have streamed up into the hills in

hopes of catching a glimpse of the thing. As it was, business went on as

usual. But historians and commentators were quick to offer explanations,

pointing to the behavior of the populace of besieged cities of the past, Beirut

of the last century, and countless others during the Global Civil War at the

century's end.

Even Dana Sterling, and Nova Satori, the cool but alluring lieutenant

with the Global Military Police, were not immune to the fortress's ominous

13

enchantment. Even though they had both seen the deadlier side of its

nature revealed.

Just now they shared a table in one of Monument's most popular

cafes-a checkerboard-patterned tile floor, round tables of oak, and chairs of

wrought iron-with a view of the fortress that surpassed the barracks'

overlook.

Theirs had been less than a trouble-free relationship, but Dana had

made a deal with herself to try to patch things up. Nova was agreeable and

had an hour or so she could spare.

They were in their uniforms, their techno-hairbands in place, and as

such the two women looked like a pair of military bookends: Dana, short

and lithe, with a globe of swirling blond hair; and taller Nova, with her

polished face and thick fall of black hair.

But they were hardly of a mind about things.

"I have lots of dreams," Dana was saying, "the waking kind and the

sleeping kind. Sometimes I dream about meeting a man and flying to the

edge of the universe with him-"

She caught herself abruptly. How in the world had she gotten onto this

subject? She had started off by apologizing, explaining the pressures she

had been under. Then somehow she had considered confiding to Nova

about the disturbing images and trances concerning the red Bioroid pilot,

the one called Zor, not certain whether the MP lieutenant would feel

duty-bound to report the matter.

Maybe it had something to do with looking at the fortress and knowing

the red Bioroid was out there somewhere? And then all of a sudden she was

babbling about her childhood fantasies and Nova was studying her with a

get-the-strait-jacket look.

"Don't you think it's time you grew up?" said Nova. "Took life a little

more seriously?"

Dana turned to her, the spell broken. "Listen, I'm as attentive to duty

as the next person! I didn't get my commission just because of who my

parents are, so don't patronize me-huh?"

14

She jumped to her feet. A big MP had just come in with Bowie, looking

hangdog, traipsing behind. The MP saluted Nova and explained.

"We caught him in an off-limits joint, ma'am. He has a valid pass, but

what shall we do with him?"

"Not a word, Dana!" Nova cautioned. Then she asked the MP, "Which

off-limits place?"

"A bar over in the Gauntlet, ma'am."

"Wait a minute," said Bowie, hoping to save his neck. "It wasn't a bar,

ma'am, it was a jazz club!" He looked back and forth between Nova and

Dana, searching for the line of least resistance, realizing all the while that it

was a fine line between bar and club. But being busted for drinking was

going to cost him more points than straying into a restricted area. Maybe if

he displayed the guilt they obviously expected him to feel...

"Where they have been known to roll soldiers who wake up bleeding in

some alley!" Nova snapped. "If the army didn't need every ATAC right now,

I'd let you think that over for a week in the lockup!"

Nova was forcing the harsh tone in her voice. What she actually felt was

closer to amusement than anger. Any minute now Dana would try to

intervene on Grant's behalf; and Grant was bound to foul up again, which

would then reflect on Dana. Nova smiled inside: it felt so good to have the

upper hand.

Bowie was stammering an explanation and apology, far from heartfelt,

but somehow convincing. Nova, however, put a quick end to it and

continued to read him the riot act.

"And furthermore, I fully appreciate the pressure you've all been under,

but we can't afford to make allowances for special cases. Do you understand

me, Private?!"

The implication was clear enough: Bowie was being warned that his

relationship with General Emerson wouldn't be taken into account.

Dana was gazing coldly at Bowie, nodding along with the lieutenant's

lecture, but at the same time she was managing to slip Bowie a knowing

wink, as if to say: Just agree with her.

15

Bowie caught on at last. "I promise not to do it again, sir!"

Meanwhile Nova had turned to Dana. "If Lieutenant Sterling is willing

to take responsibility for you and keep you out of trouble, I'll let this

incident go. But next time I won't be so lenient."

Dana consented, her tone suggesting rough things ahead for Bowie

Grant, and Nova dismissed her agent.

"Shall we finish our coffee?" Nova asked leadingly.

Dana thought carefully before responding. Nova was up to no good, but

Dana suddenly saw a way to turn the incident to her own advantage. And

Bowie's as well.

"I think it would be better if I started proving myself to you by taking

care of my new responsibility," she said stiffly.

"Yes, you do that," Nova drawled, sounding like the Wicked Witch of

the West.

Later, walking back to the barracks, Dana had some serious words with

her charge.

"Nova's not playing around. Next time she'll probably feed you to the

piranhas. Bowie, what's wrong? First you louse up in combat, then you, go

looking for trouble in town. And where'd you steal a valid pass, by the way?"

He shrugged, head hung. "I keep spares. Sorry, I didn't mean to cause

any friction between you and Nova. You're a good friend, Dana."

Dana smiled down at him. "Okay...But there's one thing you can do for

me..."

Bowie was waiting for her to finish, when Dana's open hand came

around without warning and slapped him forcefully on the back-almost

throwing him off his feet-and with it Dana's hearty: "Cheer up! Everything's

going to be fine!"

16

CHAPTER TWO

I wish someone would call time out,

They're welcome to disarm me,

We are the very model of

A modern techno army.

Bowie Grant,

"With Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan"

Thirteen, Rolf Emerson said to himself when he had completed his

count of the staff officers grouped around the briefing room's tables. The

tables would have formed a triangle of sorts, save for the fact that

Commander Leonard's desk (at what would have been the triangle's apex)

was curved. This was also a bad sign. Ordinarily, Emerson was not a

superstitious man, but recent developments in world events had begun to

work a kind of atavism on him. And if Human consciousness was going to

commence a backward slide, who was he to march against it?

"This meeting has been called to discuss strategic approaches we might

employ against the enemy," the supreme commander announced when the

last member of his staff had seated himself. "We must act quickly and

decisively, gentlemen; so I expect you to keep your remarks brief and to the

point." Leonard got to his feet, both hands flat on the table. His angry eyes

found Rolf Emerson. "General...go ahead."

Emerson rose, hoping his plan would fly; it seemed the only rational

option, but that didn't guarantee anything, with Chairman Moran holding

Leonard's feet to the fire, and Leonard passing the courtesy along down the

chain of command. Brief and to the point, he reminded himself.

"I propose we recommence an attack on the fortress...but only as a

diversionary tactic. That ship remains an unknown quantity, and I think it's

imperative we get a small scouting unit inside for a fast recon."

This set off a lot of talk about demolition teams, battlefield nukes, and

the like.

17

Rolf raised his voice. "Gentlemen, the goal is not to destroy the fortress.

We have to ascertain some measure of understanding of the aliens' purpose.

Need I remind you that this ship is but one of many?"

Leonard quieted the table. Twice, Emerson had said alien as opposed

to enemy, but he decided to address that some other time. Right now, the

major general's plan sounded good. A bit risky, but logical, and he stated as

much.

To everyone's surprise, Colonel Rudolph concurred. "After all, what do

we know about the enemy?" he pointed out.

Leonard asked Rolf to address this.

"We have tentative evidence that they're Human or nearly Human in

biogenetic terms," Emerson conceded. "But that might only apply to their

warrior class. We do know that the Robotechnology we've seen them use is

much more advanced than ours, and we have no idea what else they're

capable of."

"All the more reason to recon that ship," Rudolph said after a moment.

There was general agreement, but Colonel Rochelle thought to ask

whether a team really could penetrate the fortress, given the aliens' superior

firepower and defenses.

"If it's the right team," Rolf answered him.

"And the Fifteenth is the one for the job," Commander Leonard said

decisively.

Emerson contradicted warily: it was true that the 15th had had some

remarkable successes lately, but it was still a relatively untested outfit, and

there were some among the team who certainly weren't qualified for the

job...

But Leonard cut him off before he had a chance to name names, which

was just as well.

"General Emerson, you know the Fifteenth is the best team for this

job."

There was general agreement again, while Emerson hid his

consternation. Dana and Bowie had entered the military because that was

18

where they were needed, and a stint in the service was expected of all

able-bodied young people. Emerson had encouraged Bowie to enter the

academy, because Dana had already decided to and because Emerson was

well aware that that was what Bowie's parents would have wanted.

It was just bad luck that a war had come along. Perhaps it would have

been better for Emerson to renege on his promises to the Grants, to have let

the kid go off and study music, play piano in nightspots...maybe that way

Bowie might have been the last piano player cremated by an alien deathray,

or might have survived while the rest of the Human race hurled itself onto

the pyre of battle to stop the invaders.

But Emerson didn't think Bowie would see things that way. Bowie had

seen the invaders at far closer range than Emerson, and Emerson had heard

and seen enough to know that Earth was in a win-or-die war.

Still, the idea of putting the 15th out on the tip of the lance yet again

went against Emerson's sense of justice and of military wisdom; this was a

commando job, not a tank mission.

Commander Leonard was well aware of Emerson's relationship to

Bowie Grant; but promises or no promises, Bowie was a soldier, end of story.

Leonard wasn't spelling all this out for everyone in the room, but Rolf had

picked up the commander's subliminal message.

Rudolph and Rochelle also understood Rolf's predicament, but they,

too, were resolute in their decision: it had to be the 15th.

"I suggest we prepare an options list," Emerson told the staff, "a variety

of plans and mixes for the forces involved. "

Leonard seemed to consider that. He addressed Colonel Rudolph: "Get

together with the ATACs' CO and hammer out one scenario using the

Fifteenth." He ordered Rolf to get the G3 shop to begin assembling

alternatives.

Emerson acknowledged the order, relieved. But as the meeting broke

up, Leonard pulled Rudolph aside, waiting until Emerson was gone.

"Colonel, I'm directing you to present this mission to the Fifteenth

ATAC and Lieutenant Sterling as an order, not a proposal. We can't waste

19

time dawdling." And I can't waste time arguing with my subordinates, nor

can I risk Emerson's resigning just now. My neck's on the block!

Rudolph snapped to smartly. "Sir!"

The commander continued in a confidential tone. "We must put aside

Rolf's personal matters and get on with the war."

"What d'ya think-that I'd volunteer us for this mission?" Dana said to

her squad after the orders had come down from Headquarters. "Somebody

has to recon that fortress-"

"And we're that somebody," Sean finished for her. "HQ wants to know

who it's fighting."

"They'll be fighting me if this keeps up," Sergeant Dante threatened,

clenching his big hands and adopting a boxer's stance.

The primaries of the 15th were grouped in their barracks ready-room,

trying to find someone to blame for HQ's directive. Dana had already had it

out with Colonel Rudolph, citing all the action the team had seen lately,

their need for R & R, the sorry state of their ordnance and Hovertanks. But

it all fell on deaf ears: when the supreme commander said jump, you

jumped. With or without a chute.

"Hey, Sarge, I thought you wanted to keep fighting," Sean reminded

him.

Dante glared at him. "I just don't like being used like a pawn in

Leonard's game of 'name the alien.' We've gotta go out there and risk our

lives to save their reputations."

"How literary of you, Angelo," Dana said sharply. "What the heck does

reputation have to do with any of this?" She gestured out the window in the

direction of the downed fortress. "That ship is at least a potential threat.

What are we supposed to do-turn it into an amusement park ride?"

"How are we even going to get in?" Louie Nichols thought to ask.

The team turned to regard the whiz kid of the Southern Cross, waiting

for him to suggest something. With his gaunt, angular face, top-heavy

thatch of deep brown hair, and everpresent wraparound opaque goggles,

20

Louie came closer to resembling an alien than Dana herself. Some members

of Professor Cochran's group actually believed that Louie had patterned

himself after the infamous Exedore, the Zentraedi Minister of Affairs during

the Robotech War.

"It's difficult enough analyzing their technology. But getting inside

their ship...How are we supposed to pull that off?"

Angelo looked at Louie in disbelief. "Get in? How are we gonna get out,

Louie, how are we gonna get out?! I don't think you realize there's a chance

we may not return from this mission alive."

Sean made a wry face. "Pity...she's gonna miss me when I'm gone."

At the same time, Louie exclaimed, "Gone?!" Bowie asked, "Isn't that a

song?" and Dana said, "Knock it off."

Sean acknowledged the rebuke with a bemused smile. "You're right,"

he told Dana. "This mission is more important than my miss. What's it

matter, right? We're tough."

"That's the right stuff," Dana enthused. "And there's no other way to

pull this mission off but to, well, to just do it!"

The sergeant was nodding in agreement now, wondering where his

earlier comments had come from. If Dana the halfbreed could get behind it,

he could, too.

"All right," he said rallying to the cause. "We'll make them rue the day

they touched down on this planet."

The 15th had a little over twelve hours to kill, and sleep was out of the

question. Dana had her doubts about giving anybody permission to leave

the barracks, but realized that keeping them cooped up would only give

them time to ferment and perhaps explode. She issued "cinderella"

passes-good until midnight-along with dire threats about what Nova's MPs

would do to anybody who screwed up in town or came back late.

Sean left to visit a good friend who found prebattle good-byes

aphrodisiac. Louie Nichols sat down to tinker with his helmet video

transmitters. Angie nursed drinks and cigars in the dark privacy of his own

21

quarters. And Bowie Grant insisted on treating Dana to the finest beers to

be had in Monument City.

Twenty minutes later, Dana and Bowie were lifting frosted, conelike

pilsner glasses of pale, foamy beer and clinking them together in a toast to

better times.

Bowie contorted his face for a clownish look. "I figured it was the least I

could do after what you did for me yesterday."

As Dana lowered her glass her hand brushed something that he had

slid over to her.

"What's this?" It was a gorgeous little blossom of delicate red, hot pink,

and coral, and tones in between. "A flower?"

"An orchid, Dana. For good luck."

She pinned it ceremonially onto her torso harness, near her heart.

"You're sweet, Bowie. And maybe too sensitive for this line of work. What

d'ya think?"

Bowie drew a deep breath. "Well, I prefer music to space warfare, if

that's what you mean. You know this wasn't my idea."

Dana looked hard at her handsome friend, thinking back through years

of peaceful and playful memories, back to when their parents were still

on-world-when her memory of them was still alive...

She debated for a moment, then it occurred to her-as it did more

strongly with each action she fought in-that for her, Bowie, the 15th, the

Human race, tomorrow might be the last, for any or all of them.

Bowie had been making mistakes lately in a very uncharacteristic way.

Dana was no shrink and she couldn't take away all Bowie's resentment of

the military; but the way she saw it, it would be good for all concerned if he

let off a little steam on some piano keys.

"So go find some piano in an on-limits place and play for the people,"

Dana said- suddenly. "And quit gaping at me like that!"

Bowie's eyebrows beetled. "Don't put me on about this, Da-"

"I'm not putting you on. Just remember: I gave Nova my word; I'm

responsible for you. Don't mess up or we both take a fall. And sign back in

22

at the barracks before midnight, read me?"

"Roger that," Bowie said, and was gone.

Feeling a good two kilos heavier after knocking back several more

glasses, Dana (Bowie's gift orchid boutonniered to her uniform) returned to

the barracks compound, left her Hovercycle in the mecha pool, and

elevatored to the 15th's quarters. She looked in on Louie, but decided not to

take him from his gadgeteering, and made for the ready-room, where she

found Angelo nursing a drink in the dark, silently regarding the distant

fortress, a black shape all but indiscernible from the ridgeline's numerous

stone outcroppings and buttresses.

The sergeant sat with his arms folded, legs crossed, a sullen but

contemplative look on his face. He was unaware of Dana's presence until

she announced herself, asking to speak to him for a moment.

"About tomorrow's reconnaissance mission," they said simultaneously.

But only Angelo chuckled.

Dana had serious issues on her mind now, the success of the mission,

the safety of her team. With a bit of luck Bowie would land himself in the

brig and she would be able to scratch him from her worry list. Sean and

Louie presented no problems, and either of them could handle the squad's

grunts; but that left Angelo Dante.

"I know this doesn't have to be said but once," Dana went on. "But...I

know I can depend on you, Angie. Just wanted you to know."

"Same here, Lieutenant. Don't worry; we're gonna kick some alien

butt."

It was typical of Angelo to put it this way: at the same time he was

deferring to her and questioning her command abilities. Alien was directed

at her; the sergeant's unmasked attack on her mixed ancestry. But she had

lived with the "halfbreed" stigma for so long that it hardly fazed her

anymore. Who on Earth hadn't lost someone to the Zentraedi wars? And

with all of her mother's people aboard the SDF-3 or the Robotech Factory

Satellite now, she was in effect the unofficial scapegoat for the unspeakable

23

crimes of the past. If only Max and Miriya had foreseen this; she would have

preferred death to the purgatory of the present.

"I'm aware of my responsibilities," she told Angelo. "But I just wanted

to say that this mission will fail even before it gets under way unless you and

I can begin to trust each other."

She took the small orchid from her lapel, reached across Angelo, and

dropped it in his Scotch and soda.

"Hey-"

"Tropical ice," she smiled down at him. "A little good luck charm for

you, Angie-a peace offering. Do you like it?"

"I guess..." the sergeant started to reply, sitting up in his chair. But just

then someone threw on the overhead lights. Startled by the intrusion, he

and Dana swung around at the same moment to find Nova Satori and Bowie

centered in the wide doorway.

"I put you in charge of Bowie and this is what happens?" Nova said, as

the entry doors slid shut.

Dana met them halfway, sizing up the situation quickly and rehearsing

her lines. She had certainly anticipated the arrival of these two, but not

Bowie's disheveled appearance. His uniform was soiled and one of his

cheeks looked bruised.

"Are you all right?" she asked him. "What's going on here?"

Bowie wore a distressed look, more genuine than yesterday's.

"I guess I did it again," he answered contritely.

"I ought to throw you both in jail," Nova scolded Dana. "He was in a

barroom brawl." The lieutenant looked like her namesake, ready to

incinerate whatever was in close proximity.

This time Nova herself had caught him red-handed, following him from

the caf?and waiting until just the right moment to walk in on him. And now

she had Dana just where she wanted her: of course Nova would agree to

release Bowie to her custody once again, but this time there would be a price

to pay-a first look at the results of tomorrow's recon operation for starters.

With rivalry increasing daily between Leonard's army intelligence and the

24

Global Military Police, it was the only way Nova could count on getting the

real dope.

Dana looked cross. "What was the fight about?"

"Ah, some loudmouth said no piano player is man enough to serve in

the Hovertanks," Bowie admitted.

"That's a lot of rot!" Dana returned, back on Bowie's side all at once. "I

wonder if I'm man enough?! I hope you taught him a lesson. I'm proud of

you."

Nova expected as much, but played her part by growing angry.

"Go ahead, praise him, Lieutenant Sterling. You're digging his grave

deeper."

"A soldier stands for something," Dana answered defensively. "What if

somebody said no woman is good enough to be an MP-"

Nova wore a wry look. "Stuff the defense plea, Dana. Battles don't get

won in barrooms, and merit doesn't get proven there either! What Bowie

earned himself is a cell."

Unless we can cut a deal...Nova was saying to herself when Dana

surprised her.

"All right then, take him away."

Both Bowie and Nova stared at her. The lieutenant's meticulously

plucked eyebrows almost went up someplace into her hairline.

"Run him over to the guardhouse," Dana said evenly.

"B-but, Lieutenant, you can't be serious," Bowie burst out. Dana's

verbal slap hurt more than that punch to the face. Even Angelo was stepping

forward, coming to his aid, but Dana was unmoved.

"I have enough to handle without having to worry about an eight ball,"

Dana said, trying not to think about the orchid in the drink glass, so nearby.

Nova was watching these exchanges with her mouth open. She gulped

and found her voice, hoping she could salvage something from this. "Dana,

you'd better not be kidding-"

Dana shook her head. "I've failed somewhere along the line...It's your

turn to take care of him now." She caught the hurt look that surfaced in

25

Bowie's eyes and turned away from him, determined to finish this scene no

matter what.

"I've got to be on that mission tomorrow," Bowie was pleading with her.

"You said I was right to defend our honor, now you're taking away my

chance-"

She whirled on him suddenly. "I've heard it all before, Grant! You

should have thought of that before you went off to that bar!"

Bowie's eyes went wide. "But Dana...Lieutenant...you-"

"Enough!" Dana cut him off. "Private Grant, ten-hut! You will

accompany Lieutenant Satori to the stockade."

Nova's puzzlement increased. Where had this one gone wrong? "You

don't want to reconsider...?"

"My mind is made up."

Nova made a gesture of exasperation, then smiled in self-amusement

and led Bowie away.

"What made you do that?" the sergeant asked Dana after they left.

Having recently caught a glimpse of Bowie's sloppiness in the field, he

wasn't opposed to Dana's decision but wondered, nevertheless, what had

motivated this sudden attack.

"Because I'm CO here," Dana said evenly.

26

CHAPTER THREE

Thrilled at having received, word of the 15th's mission to recon the alien

ship-it never even occurred to me that she might not return!-I was suddenly

faced with a new obstacle: Bowie Grant was in the custody of the GMP.

Dana's reactions to the fortress were of paramount importance, but I was

equally interested in establishing the depth of her involvement with the young

Grant. I asked myself. Would proximity to the Masters reawaken her

Zentraedi nature to the point where she would abandon her loyalties to both

teammates and loved ones? It was therefore essential that Grant accompany

the 15th, and up to me to see to it that Rolf Emerson learned of Grant's

imprisonment.

Dr. Lazlo Zand,

Event Horizon:

Perspectives on Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

The penetration operation got under way early the next morning.

Coordinated air strikes would provide the necessary diversion, and, with a

bit of luck, the breach the 15th was going to require in order to infiltrate its

dozen Hovertanks. Tech crews had worked all night long, going over the

complex mecha systems and installing remote cameras.

General Emerson was monitoring the proceedings from the situation

room. Staff officers and enlisted-ratings were buzzing in and out supplying

him with updates and recon data. There were never less than six voices

talking at the same time; but Emerson himself had little to say. He had his

elbows on the table, fingers steepled, eyes fixed on the video transmissions

relayed in by various spotter planes over the target zone. Only moments ago

a combined team of Adventurer VTs and Falcon fighters had managed to

awaken the apparently slumbering giant, and an intense firefight was in

progress on the high ground surrounding the alien fortress. Armor-piercing

rounds had thus far proved ineffective against the ship's layered hull, in

spite of the fact that the XT's energy shield had yet to be deployed. But

27

Emerson had just received word that the air corps was bringing in a

QF-3000 E Ghost-an unmanned triple-cannon drone capable of delivering

Reflex firepower of the sort that had proved effective in earlier airborne

confrontations.

The wallscreen image of the besieged fortress derezzed momentarily,

only to be replaced by a bird's-eye view of the 15th's diamond-formation

advance. Emerson felt his pulse race as he watched the dozen mecha close

on the heavily fortified perimeter. It was ironic that his attempts to

deescalate the fledgling war had resulted in the 15th's assignment to this

mission to hell; but in some ways he realized the perverted rightness of it:

Emerson literally had to put what amounted to his family on the line in

order to convince the supreme commander to listen to him. And Dana and

Bowie were just that-family.

So often he would try to run his thoughts back in time, searching for

the patterns that had led all of them to this juncture. Had there been signs

along the way, omens he had missed, premonitions he had ignored? When

the Sterlings and Grants had opted to leave aboard the SDF-3 as members

of the Hunters' crew did it occur to them that they might not return from

that corner of space ruled by the Robotech Masters, or that the Masters

might come here instead? Emerson remembered the optimism that

characterized those days, some fifteen years ago, when the newly-built ship

had been launched, Rick and Lisa in command. Rolf and his wife had taken

both Dana and infant Bowie: After all, they had so often watched over the

kids while the Grants spent time on the Factory Satellite, and the Sterlings

combed the jungles of the Zentraedi Control Zone-what used to be called

Amazonia-for Malcontents; it seemed a perfect solution then that the kids

should remain here while their parents embarked on the Expeditionary

Mission that was meant to return peace to the galaxy...

That Emerson had chosen to enroll both of them in the military had

resulted in a divorce from his wife. Laura never understood his reasons;

childless herself, Dana and Bowie had become her children, and what

mother-what parent!-would choose to wish war on her offspring? But Rolf

28

was merely honoring the promises he had made to Vince and Jean, Max and

Miriya. Perhaps each of them did have a sense of what the future held, and

perhaps they reasoned that the kids would have a better chance on Earth

than they would, lost in space? Certainly they recognized why Rolf had

decided to remain behind, just as surely as Supreme Commander Leonard

recognized it...

Emerson pressed his hands to his face, fingers massaging tired eyes.

When he looked up again, Lieutenant Milton, an energetic young aide, was

standing over his right shoulder. Milton saluted and bent close by his

shoulder to report that Bowie was in the guardhouse. It seemed that the

GMP had caught him involved in a barroom brawl.

Rolf nodded absently, watching the displays, and thinking of a little

boy who had cried so inconsolably when his parents left him behind. He

wondered whether Bowie had purposely provoked a fight in order to absent

himself from the mission. He had to be made to understand that rules were

meant to be followed. The 15th had been chosen and as a member of that

team he owed it to the others. Of course, it was equally plausible that Dana

was behind this; she didn't seem to comprehend that her overprotectiveness

wasn't doing Bowie any good, either.

"Tell Lieutenant Satori that General Emerson would consider it a

personal favor if she could find a way to release Private Grant," Rolf told his

aide in low tones. "Ask her for me to see to it that Bowie rejoins his unit as

soon as possible."

The lieutenant saluted and left in a rush as Emerson returned his

attention to the wallscreen's bird's-eye view of the 15th's advance, realizing

all at once that Bowie's readdition to the team would raise their number to

thirteen.

The terrain between Monument City and the fortress was as rugged as

it came. What was formerly a series of wooded slopes rising from a narrow

river valley had been transformed by Dolza's annihilation bolts into a

tortuous landscape of eroded crags and precipitous outcroppings, denuded,

29

waterless, and completely unnatural. Stretches of ancient highways could be

seen here and there beneath deposits of pulverized granite, or volcanic

earthworks.

Before dawn the 15th was in position just below the fortress's crash site,

ringed as it was on three sides by pseudobuttes and tors. Dana had brought

the column to a halt, awaiting the arrival of the Ghost drone. Quiet reigned

on all fronts.

Cocooned in the mecha's cockpit, her body sheathed from head to foot

in armor, she sensed a strange assemblage of feelings vying for her attention.

By rights her mind should have been emptied, rendered fully accessible to

the mecha's reconfiguration demands; but with things at a temporary

impasse, she gave inner voice to some of these thoughts.

She knew, for example, that the thrill she felt was attributable to her

Zentraedi ancestry; the fear, her Human one. But this was hardly a clear-cut

case of ambivalence or dichotomy; rather she experienced an odd

commingling of the two, where each contained a measure of its opposite.

Her heart told her that inside the fortress she would encounter her own

reflection: the racial past she had been told about but never experienced.

How had her mother felt when going into combat against her own brothers

and sisters? Dana asked herself. Or when hunting down the giant

Malcontents who roamed the wastelands? No different, she supposed, than

when a Human went to war against his or her own kind. But would it ever

end? Even her fun-loving uncles-Rico, Konda, and Bron-were resigned to

warfare in the end, telling her before they died that peace, when it came,

would merely be an interlude in the War Without End...

Beside her now, a Hovertank unexpectedly joined the 15th's front ranks,

raising a cloud of yellow dust as it slid to a halt in the pebbly earth. Dana

thought the Battloid's head through a left turn and almost jumped free of

her seat straps when she recognized the mecha as Bowie's Diddy-Wa-Diddy.

"What in world are you doing here, Private?" she barked over the tac

net.

"You tell me. Somebody sprang me."

30

"Good ole Uncle Rolf." She let the bitterness be heard in her tone.

Emerson had undermined her command.

"That's the way I figured it," Bowie laughed. Then the laughter was

gone. "And Private Grant is completely at your service. I've learned my

lesson, Dana."

Rolf! Dana thought.

Infuriated, she began to hatch sinister plots against him, but the

scenarios all played themselves out rather quickly. Rolf was thinking of

Bowie's self-image, as always, and she couldn't help but understand. It was

just that self-image wouldn't count for much if you didn't live to cash in on

it. Or would it?...Senseless to debate it now, she told herself as the cockpit

displays lit up.

"Then fall in, trooper!" she told Bowie.

"No more a' this eight-ball crap," Dana heard Angelo second over the

net.

"I copy, Sarge," Bowie said.

Dana called in air strikes as the 15th got moving again, straight for the

colossal alloy rampart that was the flagship's hull.

Scoop-nosed Tac Air fighters, Adventurers and Falcons, came down in

prearranged sorties, dumping tons of smart and not-so-smart ordnance,

strafing, braving the fire of the glassy inverted-teardrop fortress cannon.

Warheads exploded violently against the ship's hull, summoning in return

thundering volleys of pulse-cannon fire and an outpouring of Bioroids,

some on foot, but many more atop ordnance-equipped hovercraft. Ground

teams peppered the existing alien troops with chaingunfire, and the tac net

erupted in a cacophony of commands, requests, praise, and blood-curdling

screams.

While the two sides exchanged death, the Ghost drone dropped in on

its release run. A nontransformable hybrid of the Falcon and the Veritech,

the Ghost was developed in the early stages of Robotechnology as an

adjunct to the transorbital weapons system utilized by the Armor series

orbital platforms. It had undergone several modifications since, and the one

31

in present use was closer to a smart bomb than a drone aircraft. Professor

Miles Cochran's team had plotted an impact point toward the bow of the

fortress, in the vertical portion of hull somewhat below the pyramidal

structure known to some as Louie's "Robotech Teat."

ATAC Battloids took up firing positions and concentrated their total

power on the predesignated section of the hull in an attempt to soften it up.

Main batteries and rifle/cannon, and the multiple barrels of the secondaries,

everything in the 15th cut loose, aimed at the one small section of offworld

alloy. The air shimmered and cooked away; heat waves rose all around, and

power levels in the ATACs dropped rapidly. Dana sweated and hoped that

no assault ship or Bioroid came at them now, when the 15th's mecha must

hold their positions until the breach had been made.

Sterling kept the 15th well back from the strike zone as the Ghost

zeroed in. The craft fell short of its projected goal, but the ensuing explosion

proved powerful enough to open a fiery hole large enough to accommodate

a Hovertank, and no one could ask for more than that.

The ATACs lowered their weapons in a kind of shocked surprise.

"When we get back, I'll buy the beers!" Bowie said, breaking the

silence.

Dana returned an invisible smile and thanked him, promising to hold

him to his word. "All right, Fifteenth," she commanded over the tac net,

"you know the drill!"

Protoculture worked its magic as Battloids mechamorphosed to

Hovertank mode, reconfiguring like some exotic, knightly origami.

Thrusters whined as the tanks floated into formation, forming up on Dana

for the recon, and riding separate blasting carpets toward the jagged

opening and the dark unknown.

Behind the visor of her Valkyrie's helmet, Dana Sterling's eyes

narrowed. "Now we take the war to them!" she said.

The Bioroids didn't exactly escort the 15th in, nor welcome them with

open arms once they arrived. Dana raised the canopy of her mecha and

32

gestured the team forward, ordering them over the net to maintain

formation. She led them on a beeline to the breach, disc gun and cannon fire

paving an explosive road for the Hovertanks, which continued to loose

pulsed bursts in return. Miraculously, though, no one was hit and shortly

the 15th found itself inside one of the fortress's cavernous chambers.

It was Professor Cochran's suggestion-based on a rather sketchy

analysis of the fortress's infrastructure (which had led him to believe that

much of the starboard holds were given over to defense and

astrogation)-that the team swing itself toward the port side of the ship if

possible. This quickly proved to be not only viable but necessary because the

starboard section was found partitioned off by a massive bulkhead it would

have taken another Ghost to breach. Consequently, the ATACs barely cut

their speed as they advanced.

Three Bioroids suddenly appeared, dropping from overhead circular

portals that simply weren't there a moment before-"They may as well have

dropped in from another dimension," Louie Nichols would say later.

As annihilation discs flew past Dana's head, she trained the Vlalkyrie's

muzzle on the first of these and took it out with a faceplate shot; the alien

seemed to absorb the cranial round silently, slumping down and shorting

out as Dana sped past it. The other two were laying down a steady stream of

crippling fire most of the team managed to avoid. But Dana then heard a

terror-filled scream pierce the net and saw one of the 15th's tanks

screeching along the vast corridor on its hind end. Dante was trying to raise

Private Simon when the mecha barreled into one of the Bioroids and

exploded. Dana and Louie poured plasma against the remaining one,

literally blowing it limb from limb.

"Status report!" the lieutenant demanded when they brought the tanks

to a halt.

The corridor, a good fifteen-meters wide, was filled with thick smoke

and littered with mecha debris. The severed arm. of a Bioroid lay twitching

on the floor, leaking a sickly green fluid and a worm's nest of wires. Dana

wondered what sort of reception HQ was receiving and tried without

33

success to raise them on the radio. Display sensors gave no indication that

the video units were incapacitated, so she swiveled the camera through a

360 for Emerson's benefit. Louie, meanwhile, launched a selfdeployed

monitoring unit.

It was Simon's mecha that had collided with the Bioroid. Fortunately,

the private had bailed out at the last minute, his armor protecting him from

the explosion and what would have been a full-body road rash. However,

without the mecha, Dana informed him, he was going to be useless to the

team.

"But why?" he was saying to her now. "It's not my fault my craft was

disabled."

Sean, Road, and Woodruff had positioned themselves as a rear guard;

Angelo, Bowie, and Louie were forward. Private Jordon and the rest of the

team had dismounted and were grouped around Dana and Simon, the

helmetless private looking small and defenseless in the vastness of the

corridor. Jordon, who rarely knew when to keep his mouth shut, suddenly

found it necessary to back up Dana's words to Simon.

"You just have to understand, Simon, we can't afford to jeopardize the

mission by dragging you along with us."

Meanwhile, Dana had been trying to figure out just what she could do

with Simon. They were a good half mile in, certainly not too far from the

breach to have him leg it back, but what could he do when he got there? The

skirmish was still in progress and he wouldn't stand a chance outside. He

could ride second in one of the tanks, but Dana thought it was best to post

Simon and one of the others here as backup. Jordon was as good a choice as

any.

Jordon didn't take the news any better than Simon had, but Dana put a

quick end to his protests. He and Simon were to wait for the team to return;

if no one returned by 0600 hours they were to try and raise HQ and make

their own way out of the fortress. In the meantime, Dana would see to it

that Louie maintained radio contact with them every thirty minutes. With

that, she regrouped the rest of the 15th and signaled them forward.

34

A substantial portion of their premission briefing had involved a

thorough study of the archive notes left by the men who had reconned the

first super dimensional fortress shortly after its fateful arrival on Earth.

That group had been led by Henry Gloval and Dr. Emil Lang, and had also

included the legendary Roy Fokker and the now notorious T. R. Edwards.

But the 15th found little similarity between what they had read and what

they were faced with now. For starters, the SDF-1 group had gone in on foot;

but more important, this ship was known to be armed and dangerous. All

Dana could do was keep proper procedure in mind and try to emulate

Gloval's methodical approach.

As a group they continued at moderate speed along the dimly lit

corridor, the height and width of which never varied. It was

hexagon-shaped, although somewhat elongated vertically, a constant

fifteen-yards wide across the floor-uniform blue outsized tiles-by some

twenty-five yards high. The walls (paneled on the downward slope and

strangely variegated and cell-like above) appeared to be constructed of a

laser-resistant ceramic. There was no ceiling as such, save for a continuum

of enormous tie beams, proportionally spaced, beyond which lay an

impenetrable thicket of pipes, conduits, and tubing-an unending knot of

capillaries and arterial junctures. But by far the most interesting objects in

the corridor were the adornments that lined the upper walls of the

hexagon-oval shaped, ruby-red opaque lenses spaced five meters apart

along the entire length of the hall. Every twelfth medallion was a more

ornate version, backed by a segmented cross with pointed arms. Twice, the

15th entered a stretch of corridor where these lenses found their match in

similar convexities that fined the lower walls, but along one side only.

The team was moving parallel to the long axis of the fortress, one mile

in when they reached the first fork, a symmetrical Y-shaped intersection at

the end of a long sweeping curve, with identical corridors branching off left

and right. The archway was lined with a kind of segmented trimwork that

looked soft and inviting, but was in fact ceramic like the walls. Here, the

servo-gallery above the openwork ceiling was bathed in infrared light.

35

Dana once again ordered them to a halt and split the team: the

sergeant would take the B team-Marino, Xavez, Kuri, and Road-into the left

fork; Dana, Corporal Nichols and the rest of the 15th would explore the

right.

"We'll rendezvous back here in exactly two hours," she said to Angelo

from the open cockpit. "Okay, move out."

Dante's group swung their vehicles out of formation and followed the

sergeant's slow lead into the corridor. Dana gave a wave and the A team fell

in behind her tank. Behind the 15th, unseen, three curious, Human-size

figures stealthily crossed the corridor. One of them depressed a ruby-red

button that seemed part of a medallion's design. From pockets concealed in

the archway slid five concentrically-etched panels of impervious metal,

sealing off the corridor.

Dana's group passed quickly through domed chambers, empty and

discomforting, with riblike support trusses and walls like stretched skin.

Beyond that was the selfsame hexagonal corridor and yet another Y

intersection.

"Which way now?" Bowie asked.

Dana was against breaking the team up into yet smaller groups, but

they had to make the most of their time. "Bowie, you and Louie come with

me down the right corridor," she said after a moment. "Sean, you and the

others take the left one-got it?"

While Dana was issuing the orders, Bowie happened to glance over his

shoulder in time to see what appeared to be the retreating shadow of a being

of some sort. But the light here was so unsettling that he resisted alarming

the others; his eyes had been playing tricks on him since they entered the

fortress and he didn't want the team to think him paranoid. Nevertheless,

Dana caught his sharp intake of breath and asked him what he had seen.

"Just my imagination, Lieutenant," he told her as Sean's group split off

and moved their Hovertanks into the left corridor.

Dana also had the feeling that they were being watched-how could it

not be so, given the technosystems of the ship? But that was all right: she

36

wanted to be seen.

The right corridor proved to be a new world: hexagonal still, but fully

enclosed, with an overhead "bolstered" ridge and numerous riblike trusses.

Gone were the medallions and ruby ovals; the walls, upper and lower, were

an unbroken series of rectangular light panels. A new world, but a

worrisome one.

Without success, Dana tried to raise Sergeant Dante on the net.

"I haven't been able to raise him, either," Louie said, a note of distress

in his voice. "Do you think we should go look for him?"

Dana was considering this when the silence that had thus far

accompanied them was suddenly broken by a distant sound of servo-motors

slamming and clanking into operation. The three teammates turned around

and watched as a solid panel began its steady descent from overhead.

The corridor was sealing itself off.

Ahead of them, a second door was descending; and beyond that a third,

and fourth. As far as they could see, massive curtains of armor-plate were

dropping from pockets built into the ceiling trusses, echos of descent and

closure filling the air.

"Hit it!" Dana exploded. "Full power!"

The Hovertanks shot forward at top speed, barely clearing the first gate.

They tore beneath a dozen more in the same fashion, seemingly gaining on

the progression-three urban joyriders beating the traffic lights downtown.

Then all at once the progression shifted: up ahead of them was a fully

closed gate. Dana, far out in front of Bowie and Louie, reached for her retro

levers and pulled them home, favoring the port throttle so that the hind end

of the tank gradually began to come around to starboard. There was no way

in the world she wanted to hit that gate head-on...

37

CHAPTER FOUR

Initial analysis of the fruit [found aboard the alien fortress] revealed

little more than its basic structure-its similarities to certain tropical fruits

seldom seen in northern markets these days. But subsequent tests proved

intriguing: one taste of the fruit and a laboratory chimp soared into what

Cochran described as "a one-way ticket to reverie." And yet it was not a true

hallucinogen; in fact, molecular scans showed it to be closer to animal than

vegetal in makeup!...Several years would go by before our questions would be

answered.

Mingtao,

Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

The huge wallscreen in the situation room was little more than static

bars and snow. A flicker of image enlivened it momentarily,

incomprehensibly, then there was nothing.

"We've lost contact with the Fifteenth," a tech reported to General

Emerson.

"Increase enhancement," Rolf said sternly, bent on denying the update.

"See if you can raise them."

Haltingly a second tech turned to the task, well aware of what the

results would be. "Negatory," he said to Emerson after a moment. "I'm

afraid the interference is overwhelming."

Colonel Anderson pivoted in his seat to face Rolf. "Should we consider

sending in a rescue team?"

Emerson shook his head but said nothing. The toss of one team would

be enough...the loss of two loved ones, more than he could bear. He pressed

his hands to his face, fearing the worst...

The left corrider had led Sergeant Dante's contingent to an enormous

hold filled with a bewildering array of Robotech machinery.

"Where is Louie when you need him," Angelo was saying to his men.

38

They had all dismounted from their Hovertanks and were grouped

together marveling at the chamber's wonders. The hold was simply too

spacious to fathom, its distant horizons lost in darkness. Here was a

massive cone-shaped generator, three hundred yards in circumference if it

was an inch; there, a second generator harnessing and shunting energy the

likes of which Dante had never seen-a raw subatomic fire that seemed to

have a life of its own. Liquids alive as fresh blood pulsed through

transparent pipes, coursing from generator to generator, machine to

machine, while unattended display screens strobed amber-lit schematics to

robot readers, communicating to one another through a cacophonous

language of shrill sounds and harsh rasps.

There was no telling how high the hold went: indeterminate levels of

conduits, tubes, and mains crisscrossed overhead, illuminated by flashes of

infrared light projected by spherical anti-grav Cyclopean remotes-ruby-eyed

monitors, ribbed and whiskered with segmented antennae.

"Look at the size of this place!" Private Road exclaimed. (Angelo

couldn't wait to promote the guy just to put an end to the running joke.)

"Hold it down," said the sergeant. "Stay alert and keep your eyes peeled

for anything that might be threatening."

"Threatening?" Marino asked in disbelief, his assault rifle welded to his

hands. "This whole place looks pretty threatening to me, Sarge."

"Gimme hell anyday," Xavez seconded.

Dante whirled on both of them, raising his voice. "I said can it, and I'm

not gonna tell you again! The next guy that speaks is gonna be in a sorrier

scene than this! Now, spread out! But keep in sight of each other! We've

gotta job to do."

High above them, one of the eyeball remotes blinked, fixing an aerial

image of men and mecha in its fish-eye lens. That much accomplished, the

device rotated slightly and emitted a patterned series of light.

On a gallery still higher up in the hold, the code was received by a

shadowy creature, which acknowledged the signal and moved off into the

darkness.

39

Private Road, meanwhile, had begun to edge away from the tight-knit

group. There was no sense waiting around for the sarge to wrap up his

lecture-they could recite it from memory by now, even the threats and

imprecations. The private smiled in the privacy of his face shield and took a

small step backwards. But suddenly something was taking him a step

further: a vice had been clamped around his throat, shutting down his

oxygen supply and crushing the nascent scream that was lodged in his

throat. He could feel his eyeballs begin to swell and protrude as whatever

had him increased the torque of its grip. He heard and felt the snap that

broke his neck, the rush of death in his ears...

"...and I want you to sound off the minute you see anything

suspicious," Angelo finished up. He had armed his weapon and was

lowering his face shield when Kuri made a puzzled sound over the tac net.

"Hey Sarge, Road's gone."

Dante leveled his weapon and swung toward where he had last seen the

private. Xavez and Marino exchanged wary looks, then followed the

sergeant's lead.

"Road!" Dante called softly. He dropped his mask and called him again

through the net. When there was no response, he gestured briefly to the

team. "All right, don't just stand there: find him!" To Kuri he said: "See if

you can raise the lieutenant."

Dante double-checked his weapon, thinking: If this is Road's idea of a

joke, they'll be calling him dead-end from now on!

Suddenly, without warning, the room was sectioned by laser fire.

"Stand clear!" Dana warned Bowie and Louie.

The two of them returned to their Hovertanks as Dana primed the laser

and aimed it at the armored gate.

Dana's mecha had managed to stop just short of the thing, hind end

almost fully around, two meters from collision. She had repositioned it in

the center of the corridor now, thirty meters from the gate. The barrier was

some sort of high-density metal, unlike the durceramic of the corridor walls,

40

and Louie had every confidence that the laser would do the trick.

"Any luck raising Sergeant Dante or Jordon?" Dana asked Louie once

more before targeting.

Louie shook his head and flashed her a thumbs-down.

"Even my optic sensor is out," he told her over the net.

That didn't surprise her, given the apparent thickness of the corridor

walls and the fact that they were at least one-and-a-half miles into the

fortress by now. Nor did the barriers come as any great shock; all along she

had sensed that their progress was being monitored.

"Do you think they caught the others?" Bowie said worriedly.

"Your guess is as good as mine," she responded casually, and turned

her attention to the laser. "All right then: here goes."

She depressed the laser's trigger; there was enough residual smoke in

the corridor to give her a glimpse of the light-ray itself, but by and large her

eyes were glued to the barrier. Louie had cautioned her that it would prove

to be a tedious operation-a slow burn they would probably need to help

along with an armor-piercing round but Louie was not infallible: instead of

that expected slow burn, the laser blew a massive hole in the gate on impact.

"Well that wasn't so bad," Dana said when the shrapnel-storm passed.

She reached for her rifle, dismounted the tank, and approached the

gate cautiously. Beyond it was a short stretch of corridor that opened into

what she guessed was the fortress's water-recycling and ventilation hold.

What with the numerous shafts and ducts here, she reasoned she couldn't

be far off the mark.

"What do you see, Lieutenant?" Louie asked from behind her.

Dana lifted her face shield. "Not much of anything, but at least we're

out of that trap." As Bowie and Louie caught up with her, she cautioned

them to stay together.

There were enough dripping sounds, sibilant rushes, and roars to make

them feel as though they had entered a giant's basement. But there was

something else as well: almost a wind-chime's voice, soft and atonal, all but

lost to their ears but registering nonetheless as if through some sixth sense.

41

It seemed to fill the air, and yet have no single source, ambient as full-moon

light. At times it reminded Dana of bells or gongs, but no sooner would she

fix on that, than the sound would reconfigure and appear harplike or string

percussive.

"It's like music," Bowie said to a transfixed Dana.

The sound was working on her, infiltrating her, playing her, as though

she were the instrument: her music was memory's song, but dreamlike,

preverbal and impossible to hold...

"Are you all right, Lieutenant?" Louie was asking her, breaking the

spell.

She encouraged the tone to leave her, and suggested they try to locate

the source of the sound. Louie, his face shield raised, ever-present goggles

in place, had his ear pressed to one of the hold's air ducts. He motioned

Dana and Bowie over, and the three of them crouched around the duct,

listening intently for a moment.

"Maybe it's just faulty plumbing," Bowie suggested.

Louie ignored the jest. "This is the first sign of life we've encountered.

We have to figure out where it's coming from and how to get to it."

Dana stood up, wondering just how they could accomplish that.

Excited by the discovery Louie was firing questions at her faster than she

could field them. She silenced him and returned her attention to the sound;

when she looked up again, Louie was falling through the wall.

Sean and company-Woodruff and Cranston-were in what appeared to

be some sort of "hot house," scarcely 200 yards from the water-recycling

chamber (though they had no way of knowing this), but in any case

separated from the lieutenant's contingent by three high-density ceramic

bulkheads. "Hot house" was Sean's conjecture, just as recycling chamber

had been Dana's, but it had taken the private several minutes to come up

with even this description.

There was no soil, no hydroponic cultivation bins or artificial sunlight,

no water vapor or elevated oxygen or carbon dioxide levels; only row after

42

row of alien plants that seemed to be growing upside down. Central to each

was an almost incandescent globe, some ten meters in circumference,

tendriled and supported by, or perhaps suspended from, groupings of rigid,

bristly lianalike vines. (Cranston was reminded of the macrame plant

hangers popular in the last century, although he didn't mention this to the

others.) The globes themselves were positioned anywhere from five to

fifteen meters from the floor of the chamber, and below them, both still

affixed to the stalks themselves or spread about the floor, were individual

fruits, the size of apples but the red of strawberries.

The three men had left their idling Hovertanks to have a closer look.

Sean had the face shield of his helmet raised, and was casually flipping one

of the fruits in his hand, using elbow snaps to propel the thing in the air.

Talk had switched from the plants themselves to the fact that the team had

yet to encounter any resistance. No one had taken the dare to taste the fruit,

but Sean had thought to stow a few ripe specimens in his tank for later

analysis.

"It's crazy," the one-hand juggler was saying now. "They were awful

anxious to keep us out of here in the first place, so why are they so quiet

now?"

"Maybe we frightened them?" Cranston suggested. "Up close, I mean,"

he hastened to add after catching the look Sean threw him.

"W-w-what d'ya guys got against peace and quiet anyway?" Woodruff

stammered.

Sean made a wry face. "Nothing, Jack. Except when it's too quiet, like it

is right now. We just can't let ourselves be lulled by it, is all. Or else they'll

be all over us." Sean held the fruit out in front of him and began to squeeze

it. "Like this!" he said, as the fruit ruptured, releasing a thick white juice

that touched all of them.

It was actually a hinged, polygonal section of wall that Louie Nichols

had fallen through. And behind it were even stranger surprises.

At sight of the first of these-a rectangular vat filled with assorted body

43

parts floating in a viscous lavender solution-Louie almost blew his breakfast,

his eyes going wide beneath the tinted goggles. Bowie and Dana stepped in

and followed his lead, registering their revulsion in stifled exclamations and

sounds.

A five-fingered grappling claw was attached to the side of the vat, its

purpose immediately obvious to Louie as he took in the rest of the room.

Behind them was a conveyor belt, also equipped with a grappling arm, and a

tableful of artificial heads.

"It's an assembly line!" Bowie said in disbelief. "And we thought these

aliens were humanoid!"

"Mustn't jump to conclusions," Louie cautioned him, leaning toward

the tank now and reaching forward to touch the arms and legs floating there.

He was fully composed again, curious and fascinated. "These are android

parts," he said after a moment of scrutiny, amazement in his voice.

Dana decided to risk another look and watched as the corporal pulled

and probed at the ligamentlike innards of a forearm and the artificial flesh

of a face.

"Incredible," Louie pronounced. "The texture is actually lifelike. It isn't

cold or metallic...They seem to have developed a perfect bio-mechanical

combinant..."

Bowie, feeling a little like a corpuscle in a lymph node, had wandered

away from the vat to investigate the membrane walls of the room-any

excuse to absent himself from Louie's continuing anatomy lesson. But even

so, words from his science courses kept creeping into his thoughts: cell-wall,

vacuole, nucleus...A minute later-during an elevator ascent through thin

air-he would recall that osmosis was the last thing he had said to himself

before being sucked through the wall...

He also told himself that it was useless to struggle against this new

situation: stepping off the radiant disk under his feet or propelling himself

clear of the globe of soft light encompassing him seemed like risky ventures

at the moment, and for all he knew this ride would land him outside the

fortress, topside, smack dab in the middle of all that fighting and strafing,

44

which was fine with him

But all at once those dreams of an easy out came to an abrupt end,

along with the disk itself. Bowie picked himself up off the floor-thankful

there was one-and brought his assault rifle up, shouting demands into

whitelight fog: "All right-what's going on here?!"

He was answered by the music they had heard in the water-recycling

hold, who knew how many levels below him now. Only it was much more

present here and, he realized, haunting and beautiful. He lowered the

helmet's face shield and took one cautious step forward into the radiant

haze, then a second and third. Several more and he began to discern the

boundaries of the light; there was a corridor beyond, similar to those

hexagonal ones they had already negotiated but on a smaller scale. The

walls were textured, bare except for the occasional ruby-colored oval

medallion, and the floor shone like polished marble. There was also a dead

end to this particular windsong-filled corridor, or, as it turned out, a

doorway.

Twin panels that formed the hexagonal portal slid apart as Bowie made

his approach, revealing a short hall adorned with two opposing rows of

Romanesque columns, medallioned like the walls. Overhead ran a

continuous, arched skylight, hung with identical fixtures along its

length-cluster representations of some red, apple-sized fruit. Shafts of

sunlight danced along the hall's seamless floor.

Following the sound, Bowie turned left into a perpendicular hall, with

curved sides and proportionately spaced rib trusses. The music was still

stronger here, emanating, it seemed, from a dark room off to Bowie's right.

Bowie hesitated at the entry, rechecked his weapon, and stepped through.

In the dark he saw a woman seated at a monitor-a curiously shaped

device like everything on this ship, Bowie told himself-an up-ended

clamshell, strung like a harp with filaments of colored light. The woman, on

the other hand, was heavenly shaped: somewhat shorter than Bowie, with

straight deep green hair that would have reached her knees if loosed from

the ringlet that held it full halfway down her back. She was dressed in some

45

sort of sky-blue, clinging chiffon bodysuit, with a coral-colored gauzelike

cape and bodice wrapping that left one shoulder bare. She had her small

hands positioned at the light-controls of the device when she turned and

took notice of Bowie's entry. And it was only then-as her hands froze and

the music began to waver-that Bowie realized she was playing the device:

She was the source of the music!

He recognized at once that he had frightened her and moved quickly to

soften his aspect, shouldering his weapon and keeping his voice calm as he

spoke to her.

"Don't be scared. Is that better?" he asked, gesturing to his now slung

rifle. "Believe me, you have nothing to fear from me." Bowie risked a small

step toward her. "I just wanted to compliment you on your playing. I'm a

musician myself."

She sat unmoving in the harp's equally unusual seat, her eyes wide and

fixed on him. Bowie kept up the patter, noticing details as he approached:

the thick band she wore on her right wrist, the fact that the hair bracketing

her innocent face was cut short...

"So you see we have something in common. They say that music is the

universal language-"

Suddenly she was on her feet, ready to run, and Bowie stopped short.

"Easy now," he repeated. "I'm not a monster. I'm just a person-like you." As

he heard himself, he imagined how he must appear to her in his helmet and

full-body armor. He rid himself of the "thinking cap" and saw her relax

some. Encouraged, he introduced himself and asked for her name, tried a

joke about being deaf, and finally dropped himself into the harp's cushioned,

highbacked chair.

"I'm forgetting that music is the universal language," he said, turning

to the instrument itself and wondering where to begin. "Maybe this'll work,"

he smiled up at the green-haired girl, who stood puzzled beside him, taking

in all his words but uttering nothing in return.

Bowie regarded the ascending strings of light, marveling at shifting

patterns of color. He positioned his hands in the harp, palms downward,

46

interrupting the flow. As the tones changed, he tried to discern some

correlation between the colors and sounds, thinking back to obscure

musical texts he had read, the occult schools' approach to Pythagorean

correspondences...Still he could make no musical sense of this harp. And it

was soon apparent that the harpist herself could make no sense of Bowie's

attempts.

"How long has it been since you had this thing tuned?" he said playfully,

as the woman leaned in to demonstrate.

Bowie watched her intently, more fascinated by her sudden closeness

than the richness of her music. But as her graceful hands continued to

stroke the light-strings, Bowie felt a soothing magic begin to work on him,

eliciting feelings he could not define, other than to say that the harpist and

her instrument were the source of them; that it felt as though he could

somehow be made to do the harp's bidding.

"That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard," Bowie said softly.

"And you're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen."

She had scarcely acknowledged his earlier attempts at verbal

communication, but this seemed to give her pause; she turned from the

harp to stare at him, as though his words were music she could understand.

Then all at once the room was flooded with light.

Startled back to reality, Bowie leapt up from the seat, his helmet

crashing to the floor, as a raspy synthesized voice said, "Don't make a move,

Earthling."

Bowie reached for his rifle, nevertheless, snarling "trap" to both the

harpist and the armored shock troopers who had burst into the room.

"Don't be a fool," cautioned the second trooper.

Bowie saw the wisdom of this and moved his hands clear of his weapon.

It was difficult to know whether there were humanoids inside the gleaming

armor worn by the aliens, but Bowie sensed that these troopers had been

assembled from the android parts he had seen only a short time ago. This

pair was human-size, armed with featureless laser rifles, and encased in

helmets and cumbersome body armor, including long carapacelike capes

47

that stood stiffly out behind them.

"Another move and it will be your last. You're coming with us-now. You,

too, Musica."

Bowie turned at the sound of her name, and repeated it for Musica's

benefit. He thought he detected the beginnings of a smile before one of the

android's said: "All right, Earthman, come along quietly now"-as though

lifting dialogue from an archaic motion picture.

Bowie sized up the two of them: they were side by side, perhaps three

yards from him, gesturing with their rifles, but more intent on capturing

him than blowing him away. Spying his helmet on the floor now, Bowie saw

an opportunity and went for it. He took a step forward, as though

surrendering to them, then quickly brought his right foot against the helmet,

launching it square into the face of one of the androids, while pile-driving

himself into the other one. The trooper took the full force of his blow and

staggered backward but remained on its feet. Bowie was clutching the thing

like a tackle when he saw that number one had come around and had the

rifle leveled on him. He sucked in his breath and slipped out of the clutches

of the second, just as number one fired, catching his companion through the

face with several rounds. Both Bowie and the android were motionless for a

brief moment while the weight of this reversal descended; then Bowie had

his own rifle out front and put several rounds in the suddenly speechless

alien. The trooper dropped to the floor with a thud.

Bowie turned to Musica and threw his shoulders back triumphantly.

But this was no green-haired Rapunzel he had just rescued, and it didn't

occur to him that he had just aced two of her people. Musica, her hands like

nervous birds, was staring at him distressfully, backing slowly away, as if

expecting the next round to come zinging her way.

Bowie finally realized what was going on and tried to persuade her that

he had done her some sort of favor. "Don't tell me you're still afraid of me?"

he said, putting his hands on her shoulders while she buried her face in her

hands. "I saved you from those two, didn't I? Doesn't that prove I'm your

friend?"

48

Musica was whimpering, shaking her head back and forth while he

spoke; but still he went on: "Now all we have to do is get out of here...Can

you show me the way?"

She finally succeeded in tearing herself away from him and began to

run. Bowie was starting after her when all at once a blast rang out from

behind both of them catching Musica unawares in the calf. Bowie caught up

and supported her, thinking that she had been trying to warn him. He

looked back toward the trooper who had loosed the shot: the android was

on its knees now, but there would be no need for Bowie to waste a charge

against it. In a second the thing was going to topple facedown of its own

accord.

But again the mistress of the harp broke free and ran, this time though

a blue and red triskelionlike doorway-some ultra modernist hexagonal

painting that slid apart into three sections as she approached, and closed

just as quickly behind her.

Bowie tore after her and found himself back in the columned hallway,

but Musica was nowhere in sight. Then he chanced to look to the right and

there she was: casually entering the hall from a perpendicular corridor.

"Well, that's better!" Bowie said smiling.

But off she went again and the chase was on.

"Take it easy," Bowie shouted after her, breathlessly. "You shouldn't be

running on that wounded leg." What he really meant to say was that it

wasn't fair of her to be outrunning him, but he was hoping that a

demonstration of concern for her well-being might prove more effective

than an admission of defeat. But then he noticed that her leg showed no

signs of the wound he had definitely seen there only a minute before. And

come to think of it, he found himself wondering: wasn't her hair more green

than the blue he was seeing now?

The intersections and branchings grew more and more numerous, a

veritable labyrinth of hexagonal corridors, polished replicas of the ones

belowdecks, with medallioned walls and stark blood-red ceiling panels

49

seemingly filled with axons and dendrites.

Bowie lost her in a maze of twists and turns. He stood still, breathing

hard and fast, listening for any sound of her. But what he heard instead was

the approach of something large and motorized. He brought his rifle off his

shoulder and moved to the center of the corridor, waiting to confront

whatever was about to show itself from around the bend.

50

CHAPTER FIVE

Did you ever see a dream walking?

Well, Bowie did.

Remark attributed to Angelo Dante

In an organically-fashioned chamber long ago given over to the

demands of the Protoculture, the Masters observed the Humans who had

been allowed access to their ship. The rubylike corridor adornments Louie

had called medallions were their eyes and ears, and when the humans had

strayed from these, the Masters had relied on intelligence gathered by their

android troopers, the Terminators-the same armored beings who had

almost gotten the drop on Bowie and were presently exchanging fire with

Sergeant Dante's contingent, still trapped in the generator hold, one of their

number already dead.

The trio of aged Masters was in its steadfast position at the shrub-sized

mushroom-shaped device that was their interface with the physical world.

In many ways slaves to this Protoculture cap, generations past the need for

food or sustenance, the Masters lived only for the cerebral rewards of that

interior realm, lived only for the Protoculture itself, and their fleeting

contact with worlds beyond imagining.

But though evolved to this high state, they were not permanent

residents in that alternate reality, and so had to compromise their objectives

to suit the needs of the crumbling empire they had forged when control

really was in their hands. This mission to Earth had proved to be as

troublesome as it was desperate, a last chance for the Masters of Tirol to

regain what they needed most-the Protoculture matrix Zor had hidden

aboard the now ruined super dimensional fortress. The Masters were not

interested in destroying the insignificant planet that had been the unwitting

recipient of their renegade scientist's dubious gift; but neither were they

about to allow this primitive race to stand between them and destiny;

51

between them and immortality.

At this stage of the Masters' game there was still some curiosity at work:

viewing the Earthlings was akin to having a look at their own past-before

the Protoculture had so reconfigured fate-which is why they had permitted

this small band of Terrans into the fortress to begin with. Earthlings had

thus far proved themselves an aggressive lot: firing on the Masters when

they had first appeared and goading them into further exchanges, as if

intent upon ushering in the doomsday the Zentraedi had been unable to

provide.

But perhaps this was but a measure of their stunted development? And

this small reconnaissance party was nothing more than an attempt to

determine exactly who it was they were up against. They were beginning to

reason for a change, instead of simply throwing away their lives and

resources, waging a war they were destined to lose in any case.

So, in an effort to glimpse the inner working of the Humans, the

Masters had subjected the intruders to several tests. After all, they were not

really to be trifled with, having in effect defeated the Zentraedi armada.

They had even foiled the Masters own attempts to gain information

about the Protoculture matrix by passive means, by accessing the

information in one of the Terran master-computers, one known as EVE.

The Masters had permitted the Terrans to enter through a lower level

corridor that led to the mechanical holds of the ship. It had been interesting

to note they had split up their team, showing that they did indeed function

independently and were not in need of a guiding intelligence. There were

also demonstrations of caring and self-sacrifice, things unheard of among

the Masters' race. One group was currently battling Terminators in the

generator hold-the troopers were ascertaining the strength of the Humans

in close-fighting techniques; another group had wandered into the Optera

tree room; while a third group had found the android assembly line.

One member of the latter group had actually conversed with Musica,

Mistress of the Cosmic Harp, whose songs were integral in controlling the

clones of the inner centers. But that Human was now reunited with his

52

teammates, who at the moment were returning to their predesignated

rendezvous point. The second group was also en route, and so the Masters

passed the thought along to the Terminators that the skirmish in the

generator room be called off, allowing the third group to follow suit. Once

the Humans were regrouped, the Masters would initiate a new series of

challenges.

General Rolf Emerson and Colonels Anderson and Green would have

given anything for a glimpse at what was going on in the fortress. But the

recon team was already an hour overdue and hopes for their safe return

were sliding fast. In an effort to do something, Emerson had ordered a

stepped-up assault on the fortress, in the hope of hitting it hard enough to

shake the team loose-lost ball bearings in an old fashioned pinball machine.

But instead of tilting, the fortress had merely upped the ante, filling the

skies with Bioroids on their hover platforms and sending out ground troops

to combat the teams stationed at the perimeter of the crash site. It had been

a calculated gamble, but one that had not paid off.

The situation room was as busy as a hive, but the three massive screens

opposite the command balcony told a woeful tale of defeat.

Emerson sat back into his chair to listen to the latest sitreps from the

field, none of which were encouraging. A rescue ship sent to ATAC area

thirty-four had been destroyed. Air teams were sustaining heavy casualties

from the fortress's cannon fire. Bravo Fourteen had been wiped out

completely. Sector Five had been overrun. A rescue squad was being

summoned to Bunker niner-three-zero, where nearly a hundred men were

trapped inside. Medics were sorely needed everywhere.

"Have you reestablished communications with Lieutenant Sterling

yet?" Colonel Green asked one of the techs.

"Negative," came the reply. "But we're still trying."

Emerson caught Green's groaning sigh.

"Let's not give up on Lieutenant Sterling yet, Colonel," he told him,

more harshly than was necessary. "She won't give up until she's succeeded

53

in her mission."

Bowie, bareheaded and precariously perched behind and slightly above

the pilot's seat of Dana's Hovertank, tried to fill the lieutenant in on his

experiences since that elevator ride to Musica's harp chamber. He had never

been too fond of Dana's reckless road tactics, and thought even less of them

now that he had a chance to observe things from his friend's perspective.

Dana was careening through the dark corridors at nearly top speed, not a

care in the world as she twisted the Valkyrie through turns its

gyrostabilizers were never meant to handle. The Diddy-Wa-Diddy had been

left abandoned, set on self-destruct in the recycling hold. In an effort to take

his mind off the very real possibility of a collision, Bowie continued his

rundown of the events, even though there seemed to be a lot of

discrepancies in his story.

"And you say she ran away after being shot in the leg?" Dana said

skeptically.

"I know it sounds incredible, but I saw it with my own eyes!" Bowie

replied defensively. "And she was one beautiful lady, too," he added

wistfully.

Dana threw a knowing smile over her shoulder, forcing Bowie into

paroxysms of fear as she took her eyes from the corridor.

"Maybe she was an android, Bowie."

"No way."

"Then my guess is she was a dream-after all, you claim that you felt

yourself being taken up into the fortress and yet we found you on the same

level we entered: We didn't take any elevator rides, Bowie, and we haven't

seen a stairway yet."

"But I'm telling you I went up, Dana! I do know up from down, you

know!"

Louie went on the external speaker: "Only when you're awake, Bowie,

and I don't think you were. Think back to our briefing sessions and the

notes from the Gloval Expedition into the SDF-1: when the captain's team

54

exited the dimensional fortress they were certain that hours had gone by,

and yet the guards who were stationed outside the fortress swore that only

fifteen minutes had elapsed!

"It could be that there is some sort of lingering effect to hyperspace

travel," Louie continued unchecked, "something we're not yet aware of.

Maybe time actually occurs differently inside the fortress than it does

outside. It's something I'm going to investigate someday."

The dark hallway was suddenly opening up and filling with light, and in

a moment Dana and company found themselves on a polished floor as blue

as the clearest of Earth's seas-an ice-lined canal of brilliant chroma, lined

with a continuous wall of turreted and arcaded buildings. Reminiscent of

ancient Rome, or Florence, before the destruction visited upon it during the

Global Civil War, each structure was more than two-hundred yards high,

with curved, scalloped facades, ornately columned arcades crowned by

friezes, and round-topped portals. Elsewhere, gracefully arched bridges

crossed the solid canal, overlit by circular lights set high in the hold.

Stranger still, the hold was inhabited-by Humans.

"At least they look Human," Dana commented.

The aliens had all taken shelter under the arcades and were staring at

the 15th's strange two-vehicled procession; but Dana didn't read actual fear

anywhere, only an intense puzzlement, almost as though these people had

no idea where they were, or what they were doing. Dress was uniformly

practical, sensible, not so much fit for the Rome Dana had read about, but a

Rome mock-up in the bowels of a spaceship. Shirt and trouser combinations

of the same cut, the same fabric, individualized only by color or neckline, all

with tight-fitting cuffs, blue, gray, gold.

Suddenly, Bowie yelled: "Lieutenant, stop the Hovertank-I just saw

that girl!"

Dana and Louie cut their thrusters and the mecha settled to what

seemed to be the street.

Dana wondered whether this was a show being put on for their benefit.

She scanned puzzled faces in the unmoving crowds, looking for a

55

green-haired girl.

"Are you certain it's her, Bowie?"

"I'm positive-she's one of a kind! I'd know her any-what?! It can't be!

I'm seeing double!"

"Everybody here is either twins or triplets," Louie said, completing

Bowie's thought. "They must be clones."

Dana followed Bowie's gaze and spied an attractive girl in chiffon,

shoulder-to-shoulder with her identical twin. Clones, Dana said to herself.

They had to be clones, like the Zentraedi. She thought back to what she

knew of her people: how they had been grown from cell samplings of the

Robotech Masters. How she herself had a part of this in her. And it

suddenly occurred to her that these clones might very well be her sisters

and brothers! Dana found herself looking around for someone who looked

like her.

"Headquarters will be happy to find out that their advance intelligence

reports were true," she heard Louie say.

Just then three armored shock troopers broke through the murmuring

crowds, leveling laser rifles as they took up positions around the

Hovertanks.

"Uh-oh-looks like we've got company!"

"Don't make a move!" one of the Terminators shouted.

"We've got you covered."

"See-there's that bad movie dialogue I told you about," Bowie said.

"Cowboys and Romans," Louie muttered. "What'll we do,

Lieutenant-shoot it out with them?"

"No," Dana said quickly. "If we fire into this crowd we'll end up

injuring a lot of innocent people. We'll just have to try to make a break for it!

Better tell your girlfriends good-bye!" she aimed at Bowie.

The Terminators opened fire as the Hovertanks lifted off, mindless of

the clones their stray shots cut down.

Valkyrie and Livewire sped off. In the rumble seat, Bowie clung to

Dana's waist, staring back at the two Musicans, heedless of the white bolts

56

of fire snapping at the Hovertank's heels.

"Boy, this mission's a washout," Cranston was saying to Sean. "I think

those jokers abandoned ship when they saw us coming."

"I'm beginning to believe you're right, Cranston," Sean admitted,

absently twirling his helmet in his hand, as he slowly guided the Bad News

away from the corridor rendezvous point. Nothing much had happened

since they left the hothouse, and when neither Dana nor Dante had showed

up at the designated hour, he had decided to take Cranston and Woodruff

into the corridor Dana's contingent was to investigate. "I've seen more

action on a Sunday School picnic," he started to say. But something was

approaching them fast from up ahead, coming in from the direction of the

point.

Almost before Sean could bring his weapon into ready or issue

instructions to his men, Dana and Louie came tearing by them without even

stopping. Sean yelled, realizing if they hadn't seen them, it wasn't likely that

they would hear him. But he called out anyway, worried all of a sudden

about what it was that was chasing them.

And Dana's team pulled up short.

"Wow!" Dana exclaimed. "I was beginning to think we'd never see you

guys again!"

Sean was puzzled by Dana's intensity. "Yeah, well I'm happy to see you,

too, Lieutenant, but I wanna tell you, this is the dullest mission I've ever

been on."

"Dull?!" Dana and her team all said at once, fixing Sean with a look he

couldn't quite grasp.

"Yeah. We think the aliens abandoned ship or something."

Suddenly Dana, Louie, and Bowie were all talking at him in a rush.

Grant was saying something about his having been transported by an

invisible elevator to the arms of a beautiful green-haired woman he had

jammed with, or something. But there'd been a chase a-and that was of

course why they didn't have his Hovertank with them because they didn't

57

chance going back to pick it up-not that they could find their way there

anyway. A-and then there was this population center they had just escaped

from that looked like ancient Rome and was filled with nothing but identical

clones and carapace-armored shock trooper androids...

When it was over all Sean could do was exchange puzzled looks with

his equally perplexed teammates.

"Well, we got to see the famous forest of light-bulb trees," he told Dana.

"Guess the shock troops were avoiding us for some reason."

Just as Sean was saying this, Sergeant Dante's contingent-minus

Road's Hovertank, and unfortunately, minus Road himself-hovered into

view and joined them in the corridor. Dante told them of the firefight, how

the aliens had crept up on them and pinned them down, only to back off

unexpectedly at the last moment...

He was in the middle of his explanation when the floor opened up

underneath them. Nine Hovertanks and ten Humans plunged into the

darkness.

"Is everybody okay? Bowie?" Dana called out into the blackness.

She knew she was wet and sticky, not from blood though, but from

what she had landed in. Touching the stuff in the dark only led to more

frightening images, so she groped in the opposite direction, wondering if

she would stumble upon one of the Hovertanks. It would be a miracle if no

one had been crushed under the falling mecha, and equally so if they all had

as soft a landing as she had. There seemed to be some sort of weightlessness

here-a dark and soggy lunar surface.

But one by one the teammates answered her.

"All present and accounted for. And apparently no injuries," Bowie

yelled.

"Speak for yourself," Dana heard Louie say. "I've got enough bruises for

the bunch of you."

"And I feel as light as a kitten in here."

"Where the heck are we, anyway?" Angelo asked. "And what's that

58

rotten smell?"

"I've pulled enough K.P. in my time to recognize this smell anywhere,"

said Woodruff. "I got no idea what these aliens eat, but this is their garbage,

I'll stake my wad on that."

Sean, Marino, and Xavez all made sounds of disgust.

But it was Kuri that voiced the first uh-oh...

Machinery had been activated overhead, servos were coming into play

and the sound was growing louder.

"Hey...wait a minute," Angelo said. "This must be a freakin' compactor!

And guess who's about to be compacted?!

"I seen this movie, Sarge!" Xavez was suddenly moaning. "What're they

tryin' to play with our heads, or what?"

"Flatten our heads is more like it!" Kuri yelled from across the

blackness.

"Echo readings indicate that there is in fact a massive plate descending

on us," Louie reported calmly. "I calculate forty-eight seconds until we

become tomorrow morning's breakfast crepes."

Dana heard two or three of her teammates pick up handfuls of the

sludge and heave it in Louie's general direction. At about the same time

Louie was hit and yelled, spitting words and whatever garbage had

connected with him, Dana, who had been edging forward in the darkness,

hands out front like a blind person, contacted one of the Hovertanks. From

the feel of it, it had landed upright, and she quickly climbed aboard and hit

the lights.

It was her first mistake.

Now everyone could see the sorry state they were in. They all looked

around the room, and then up at the descending plate of the compactor. Yes,

it was very much like a scene from a movie they had all seen.

"Lieutenant, you gotta get us outta here!" screamed Xavez.

"Stand back, everybody. I'm gonna blast us out of here."

"You can't, Lieutenant," Louie warned her. "These are high-density

ceramic walls. They're laser resistant. I don't think it would be a good idea.

59

If you remember that movie-"

"Then come up with a better idea, Louie. In the meantime, everybody

hit the deck and hope for the best."

Hitting the deck meant diving back into the muck, but suddenly even

that seemed preferable to feeling the heat of a richocheting plasma bolt.

"No-o-o!" yelled Louie once more before the end.

The bolt did just what everyone feared it would: it impacted against the

wall to no effect and headed straight back from whence it came, narrowly

missing Dana who ducked down into the cockpit at the last second, then

caroming around the room like a homicidal billiard ball of energy, giving

everyone an equal chance to dodge or be fried. Ultimately the crazed thing

hit the floor of the chamber and exploded, right at the foot of Dana's mecha.

There didn't seem to be a hope that she had survived the shot. Where

the Hovertank stood there was now only a huge garbage crater, smoking

like a cookpot in hell. Blessedly the damn compactor had ceased its

downward motion, and the hole was letting light into the room. They were

all thinking that Dana had died for nothing, when suddenly they heard her

voice rising from the hole. The garbage-spattered 15th grouped around the

crater, peering in.

Dana was still seated in the mecha, which was now on the floor of a

corridor that ran underneath the compactor. Several other Hovertanks had

fallen with her, along with Xavez and Marino who were covered with grime

and shaking like palsy victims.

"See-I knew it would work," Dana was saying unsteadily but knowingly.

"The floor wasn't laser resistant."

No one bothered to tell her that the compactor had stopped on its own.

One by one they lowered themselves through the hole, wiping off what

garbage they could.

A corridor monitor blinked once and brought the reversed situation to

the attention of the Masters. Things had not gone quite as planned, but the

aged trio was willing to concede that no matter what happened, they were

60

learning more about the Terrans and that was the purpose of the

exercise-even though the female soldier had gotten a lucky break by finding

her cannon round returned to the unprotected floor. And if anything, this

only suggested that luck itself should be figured into the equation when

dealing with this race.

The Masters next plan was to separate this most fortunate one, the

apparent commander, from her team, to see how the underlings would

function without her. Just how much independent thought was available to

them; how resourceful were they without adequate leadership?...

They had managed to retrieve seven of the nine remaining Hovertanks;

two were so hopelessly mired in the garbage sludge that even the mecha's

thrusters couldn't break the things free-not without a good deal more time

than they had to spare.

The 15th was mounted in its mecha now, Bowie still riding behind

Dana, Xavez behind Marino, Woodruff behind Cranston. The sergeant,

Louie, Sean, and Kuri were back in their original units.

"You sure beat the odds that time, Lieutenant," Louie commented.

Dana adjusted her helmet and made a face as she picked sticky bits of

refuse from the pauldrons of her uniform. "Let's not celebrate until we're

out of here," she warned all of them.

"But which way?" Louie threw to the team. "Without our helmet

monitors, we can't tell one direction from another. We've gotta be down at

least one level, maybe two, and unless we can find a way up I don't know

how we're gonna get outta this thing."

"Dead reckoning'll get us back to that hole; I'll bet I could find my way

blindfolded," the sarge announced.

"We'll just blow our way out," Dana said. "We got in: we can get out.

But stay alert...I've got that funny feeling that we're being watched again..."

No sooner had she said it than something leapt at her from the corridor

ceiling. She heard Sean's warning and the rapid report of his

rifle-adrenaline coursing through her like high octane-and caught the

61

movement of the thing peripherally.

Oddly, something said to her: snake. And when she raised her head to

look back on the thing Sean's blast had downed, she realized that that image

her mind's eye conjured wasn't far from wrong: it looked like an

oldfashioned wire-coiled vacuum cleaner hose, only a lot wider, and capped

with an evil-looking nipplelike device. In its final moments, before Sean's

second round severed the thing's tubular body, the hose loosed a massive

electrical charge that narrowly missed Dana's head and exploded against

the far wall of the corridor. The hose spasmed around on its ruptured neck

spewing a foul-smelling smoke, but no more fire.

"Good shooting, Sean!" Bowie shouted.

Louie watched the techno-assassin flail about for a moment, then

glanced down at his console, noticing instantly that the radio had begun to

function again. He told the team, and they realized that they must be close

to the exterior wall of the fortress. There was a good chance Headquarters

was monitoring them once again.

"Good," Dana said, bringing the face shield down. "Let's move out."

"Stay together this time," Sergeant Dante hastened to add.

The Masters were no longer entertained by the shenanigans of their

guests, and came about as close as they could to demonstrating real

emotion. And emotion made it necessary for them to break their telepathic

rapport and speak directly to the Terminator. It was imperative that the

Terrans not be allowed to leave the ship alive.

"See to it that all exits are sealed," said one of the Masters. "Move your

sentries into corridor M-seventynine and use maximum force if necessary to

prevent their escape.

"And see to it that Zor Prime is with your sentries," a second of the

Masters thought to add, his voice betraying some ulterior motive.

Full out, the Hovertanks moved through the labyrinthine corridors of

the fortress, their halogen lights piercing the darkness.

62

"Get ready," Dana told her teammates through the tacnet. "It looks like

we're going to have to fight our way out."

She hadn't actually seen anything up ahead, but as they ascended the

ramp which returned them to the proper level, the mecha lamps illuminated

a full line of Bioroids in the corridor ahead.

Zor Prime was leading them-the lavender-haired pilot of the red

Bioroid, who had been haunting Dana's thoughts since the encounter at the

Macross mounds. Diminutive against the fifty-foot high metal monsters

behind him, the elfin alien was standing calmly at their fore and holding his

hand up in a gesture that told the Humans to halt. When the Hovertanks

accelerated instead, Zor's hand dropped decisively, a signal to his troops to

open fire.

Dana tried to put the alien from her mind and called for evasive

maneuvers. "Concentrate on tactical driving!"

The Bioroids opened up on the approaching Hovertanks with their disc

guns, filling the corridor with white light and noise that could wake the dead.

The Earth mecha weaved between hyphens of searing heat, criss-crossing in

front of one another and returning fire to the wall of aliens standing

between them and freedom.

Dana had a fleeting image of Zor as she swerved her Hovertank around

him, unable to loose fire against him or run him over. But shortly there

would be another image that would replace this last. In the dancing

headlight beams the team saw two of their teammates sprawled lifeless on

the corridor floor in puddles of their own blood.

Dana yelled: "It's Simon and Jordon! We can't leave them like this!"

Angelo disagreed. "It's too late to do anything for them,

Lieutenant-we've got trouble up ahead."

A final Bioroid was standing guard at the exit. They certainly could

have run it down without problem, but it would be a lot more profitable to

take the thing alive.

Dana thought her tank through reconfiguration to Battloid. As she and

Bowie rode up into the giant techno-warriors head, Dana readied herself at

63

the controls.

"You can't take him alone," Bowie said. "He's too big!"

"He's not bigger than my Battloid," Dana reminded him. The Bioroid

leapt, and Dana urged her mecha to follow. She thought the Battloid's

metalshod hands into motion and grabbed the alien mecha by its pectoral

armor.

Then the Valkyrie and its prize flew through the unmended opening.

Dana didn't bother to look back.

64

CHAPTER SIX

I think l breezed through the rest of the recon in a kind of trance, my

thoughts so wrapped around the Eureka! Bowie's encounter with Musica had

booted up in my mind. The Masters' fortress had defolded from its hyperspace

journey with particles of the Fourth Dimensional Continuum still adhering to

it, iron filings to a magnet-like memory itself, alive in the Human brain

despite an elapse of chronological reckoning. Immediately I set to work on a

new theory based on the hypothesis that time, like light itself, was composed

of quantapackets of stuff I then called chronons. What I eventually arrived

at-years later-was nothing so much as a reworking of Macek's

turn-of-the-century theorem (then unknown to me): if you can take the time

and travel, you can surely travel and take the time!

Louie Nichols,

Tripping the Light Fantastic

Ten out of Lieutenant Sterling's original thirteen had returned from the

reconnaissance mission; based on the casualties sustained by the ground

forces and air support who had contributed to the penetration op, this

proved to be on the low side average, and Dana found some comfort there.

But it wasn't the numbers that remained with her, but the sight of Privates

Jordon and Simon lying on that cold floor, bathed in the harsh light from

her Hovertank, their lives flowing out of them. That, and the brief moments

she and Bowie and Louie had spent in the Romanesque heart of the fortress.

Were those twins and triplets Human clones, or had they been fashioned

from the body parts Corporal Nichols had stumbled across during the

mission? Her heart told her that they were clones, brothers and sisters to

the Zentraedi half of her, but Headquarters wasn't interested in her feelings;

rightly so, they needed concrete evidence, and the sad fact was that the

monitoring devices had ceased to function early on. There was, however, the

Bioroid Dana's mecha had spirited from the ship, and surely the pilot of that

alien craft would lay all these questions to rest; he or she wouldn't need to

65

say a thing: it only remained to be seen whether the Earth Forces were up

against androids or beings like themselves.

Dana had run these issues through her mind during the debriefing and

since. Unable to sleep, she had left her bunk in the middle of the night.

Sunrise found her and half the 15th in the barracks ready-room. They had

all argued back and forth, unable to come to any consensus, so varied were

their individual experiences inside the fortress. The squad was slated for

patrol in less than an hour, and she desperately wanted to convince them

that her instincts were correct.

"How can I be expected to shoot at people who might very well be my

own relatives?" Dana had put to them finally. She had drawn her sidearm,

and now had the distant, silent fortress bracketed in the pistol's sights.

Sergeant Dante entered the room just then, and finding her thus, put a hand

on her shoulder.

"I, uh, don't mean to interrupt," he said, out of real concern for the

room's permaplas window.

Dana turned to dislodge his hand, and frowned as she reholstered the

handgun.

"Target practice, eh? Too bad there's no aliens around to aim at."

Dana expected as much from Angelo. The mission had only served to

convince him of the truth of his earlier beliefs: the aliens were nothing but

bio-engineered creations that had been programmed for war. She knew that

he felt the same about the Zentraedi, despite the fact that their Humanness

had not only been proven, but was accepted by the very men and women

who had once fought against them. Sean, Louie, and Bowie were acting like

they weren't in the room.

"You're unbelievable, Sergeant," Dana said, disgust and disbelief in her

voice. She looked to the others for support, but found none. She knew that

Bowie agreed with her, especially now that he had had some sort of

encounter of his own inside the ship, but he was too timid to make a stand.

The vote was still out on Louie: like the staff at HQ, he was going to need

clearcut evidence before saying anything. Sean, as always, had no opinion

66

one way or another.

"I suppose you think we should shoot every alien on sight, huh? Would

that make you happy?"

Angelo smirked. It was so easy to get to her. But that wasn't really his

purpose; he merely wanted to get to the Human side of her. "Well, we'd be a

lot safer, Lieutenant. And I don't think anybody on their side's gonna

hesitate to fire at us."

Angelo had turned his back to her and was walking away, when a

messenger entered unannounced through the room's sliding doors.

"Sir," the aide said stiffly, offering his salute. "General Emerson

requests your presence. I'm to escort you and Corporal Nichols to Dr.

Beckett's lab immediately."

Dana told the messenger to wait outside. She turned temporary

command of the team over to Sergeant Dante, feeling as though she had lost

a minor battle.

The Robotech Masters felt the same.

The three had summoned their Scientist and Politician triumvirates to

the fortress command nexus after the Earthlings had made their daring

escape.

"I expect a full report on damage to our ship and an update on the

Micronian position," said the Master called Bowkaz. "Micronian" was a

term the Masters used when speaking to any of their numerous clones, a

holdover from Zentraedi times.

There was an unmistakable note of desperation in his voice, a fact that

at once distressed and pleased the three Scientist clones-androgynous

figures, with exotic features and long hair in brilliant colors.

"Most of the damage is isolated to the Reflex power modules," reported

the honey-haired Scientist. "The Micronians will probably attack again. We

should escalate our combat profile."

"How could the situation have come to this?" Dag asked rhetorically.

Like his companion Masters he was hawk-nosed and liquid-eyed, monkish

67

looking in the long gown whose triple collars mimicked the Flower of Life's

tripartite structure. "It was never our intention to destroy the Micronians or

their planet."

One of the young Politicians spoke to that. He resembled the Scientists

in form and figure, save for the fact that he was dressed in togalike

wrappings, and of course had been bio-engineered for political rather than

scientific functions.

"The Micronians feel threatened by our presence here," he reminded

the Masters now.

"But they must realize that our clones are not here to tamper with their

civilization," said Shaizan, who was in many ways the Masters' true

spokesman, most often called upon to communicate directly with the Elders

of Tirol. "The true threat to both our races is the parasitic Invid, who will

themselves come in search of the Protoculture."

Which was and was not true: but the Masters were compelled to make

their clones feel that the journey to Earth was more noble than it actually

was.

"We must complete our mission before the Invid arrive," Bowkaz

countered. "The Micronians are dangerous and must be destroyed if they

continue to obstruct us."

"I agree," Dag said after a moment of reflection. "The Micronian

ignorance of our purpose and their inexperience with the Protoculture

makes them a dangerous threat to our cause."

"And too many of our own Bioroid pilots have been severely injured to

mount an effective attack against them at this time," Bowkaz hastened to

add.

"Are our shields holding?" Shaizan asked of the Scientists.

Schematic representations of the fortress's energy system capabilities

came to life on the oval-shaped screen that filled the interstices of the

command center's neurallike structure.

"We estimate a functional capacity of only twenty percent," returned

one of the Scientists. "Not even powerful enough to seal breaches in the

68

fortress's hull."

"If we cannot leave and we cannot fight, then what option is left us?"

asked a second.

The three Politicians and the three Scientists waited for the Master's

pronouncements. Ultimately it was Shaizan who answered them.

"We must use the Micronians," he said somewhat haltingly. "First we

will take some of their kind and subject them to a xylonic cerebral probe to

determine whether or not we can turn them into Bioroid pilots. This will

serve a dual purpose: first, it will allow us to strengthen our forces. Second,

by allowing one of these reengineered pilots to be captured, we will be able

to convince the Micronians that they have been manipulated into fighting

their own kind. This will buy us the time we need to effect repairs or call in a

rescue ship. In the meantime, we must reformulate our thinking and come

up with a plan to secure the Protoculture matrix before it is too late."

The partially-dissected shell of the captured alien Bioroid lay on its

back on a massive platform in Dr. Beckett's Defense Center laboratory.

Colonels Anderson and Green, along with several forensic engineers and

computer techs, were already in attendance when General Emerson entered

with Dana and Louie in tow.

"I think you're going to find this very interesting," Beckett said by way

of introduction.

He was a nondescript-looking man in his late thirties, with thick,

amber-tinted glasses and a crisply starched white uniform he kept tightly

fastened at neck and cuffs. Known for the yard-long pointer he was said to

carry wherever he went, Beckett had little of Professor Cochran's savvy, and

nowhere near the intellectual power of someone like Zand; but he was

competent enough, and Louie Nichols let him ramble on for several minutes

before saying anything.

"Let me start by saying that this thing is a complicated network of

mechanical parts controlled by biological stimuli, the origin of which is

uncertain at this time." Beckett used his pointer to indicate a control panel

69

located below and to the left of the Bioroid's head. "However, we think that

this module here acts as a sensor device, or overload circuit mechanism."

He gave the panel several taps with the pointer.

"Then if you bypass that relay," Louie interjected, reaching for one of

the Bioroid's sensor cables and coiling it around his forearm, "...ah, these

should act like some sort of muscle."

Dana, who was standing next to the corporal, watched the arm of the

Bioroid begin to twitch as Louie flexed the muscles in his forearm. Startled,

she stepped back from the platform, worried that the thing was going to

attack.

"Don't worry, Lieutenant," Louie said, full of confidence. "It's not going

anywhere." He gestured to his forearm and once again flexed; the Bioroid's

arm gave another shudder. "It's only responding to the stimulus I'm giving

it."

"Like power-amplified body armor," Dana said, relaxing some.

"Bingo," said Louie, taking off his wrappings.

Emerson, Green, and Anderson looked to Beckett to elaborate. The

doctor cleared his throat and said: "Yes...In many ways it functions rather

like our own Veritechs, only in place of our sensor gloves and helmets, it

seems to be directly attuned to its pilot."

Beckett instructed one of his techs to project the data he had prepared

for the preliminary report. All eyes turned to the wallscreen above the

forensic platform. Various schematic representations and readouts of the

Bioroid's systems filled the screen as the Doctor spoke.

"It is indeed a type of armored suit that responds to the stimuli

provided by a pilot. Through a complex network of bio-mechanical diodes,

it actually interfaces with its pilot and carries out the pilot's commands in a

matter of nanoseconds." Beckett paused as a new schematic assembled itself.

"The difference here is that the pilot, too, seems to have been

bio-engineered to interface with the mecha."

"So that's why they're so maneuverable," Dana said.

"Then this Bioroid is an extension of its pilot?" asked the bearded

70

Green, still unsure what Beckett and this young corporal with the dark

goggles were getting at.

"Exactly," the doctor said. "The circuits of the one duplicate the circuits

of the other. We have yet to determine how such an imprint has been made

possible, but there is no mistaking the accomplishment."

"But this is incredible," Emerson said. "You're suggesting a

bio-mechanical lifeform."

Beckett shook his head. "A pilot is required," he started to say before

Colonel Green broke in.

"What's the most effective way to stop these things once and for all?"

the colonel demanded.

Dana, meanwhile, now had the cable wrapped around her own arm. If

the Bioroid required a living pilot, then her case for the Humanness of the

aliens was made. It would have been redundant to put androids in the

bioroids' cockpits...

She tuned in for Beckett's response to Green's query, holding her

tongue until the right moment. The doctor was once again tapping his

pointer on the Bioroid's neck module.

"Well, considering what we now know about the design, I'd say the

most effective shot would have to be placed in the area of this control

mechanism."

Rolf Emerson now stepped forward, as if to silence everyone. "I'd like

to have your input, Lieutenant Sterling. You and your team have engaged

these things hand-to-hand, as it were. Did either of you observe any weak

points in their individual defense systems?"

Dana shrugged. "I was too wrapped up in tactics to notice anything."

"Is the Bioroid equipped with any kind of microrecorder?" Louie asked

Dr. Beckett. "Because if it is," he went on without waiting for a reply, "there

must be some sort of internal damage-control monitoring system...Our

main computer could access the data and-"

"We've already seen to that, Corporal," Beckett interrupted, noticeably

peeved. "Display the pertinent data," he said to the tech at the console.

71

"I think I know why these things have been so hard to stop," Louie

muttered to Dana as new schematics scrolled across the wallscreen.

"Display the damaged sections individually," he instructed the computer

tech, stealing Beckett's thunder.

Louie stepped up to the screen and ran through an explanation of the

data for General Emerson and the other brass, but it was Beckett who said:

"The Bioroids are unaffected by direct hits unless you can destroy the

cockpit."

"That's the way I read it," Louie seconded, no trace of competition in

his voice.

"All right," said a pleased Colonel Anderson. "I'll make it a standing

order to aim only at the cockpit."

It was the moment Dana had been worried about, the order she feared.

"You can't do that, Colonel!" she blurted out, surprising all of them. "You'll

be destroying the pilots as well as the Bioroids!"

Anderson seemed slightly bemused by the outburst. "Well I think that

should be obvious, Lieutenant. The android pilot would be destroyed along

with his machine..."

"But they're not androids! It would make for a redundant system," she

said, looking to Louie for help. She made mention of their experiences in

the ship, the city of clones.

Green made a dismissive gesture. "But you have no proof that those, ah,

people weren't simply androids. What about this android assembly line you

claimed to have seen-"

"Exactly what do we know about the captured pilot?" Emerson asked

Beckett. The doctor made a wry face and looked over to Green, who fielded

the question, redfaced.

"I'm sorry to report that the pilot sustained some serious injuries as a

result of our rather hasty efforts to remove it from the Bioroid. However,

our medical teams are doing everything possible..."

Green let his words trail off as a messenger entered the lab.

"General Emerson, your presence is requested in the war room.

72

Commander Leonard is receiving a briefing on the captured alien pilot."

"How is the pilot?" Emerson asked.

Eyes-front, the messenger replied: "It stopped functioning over an

hour ago, Sir. But the autopsy is complete."

General Emerson asked Dana to accompany him to the war room; it

was the first time they had had a chance to talk in some weeks, but Rolf was

careful to steer the conversation away from the issue of the aliens. He knew

full well what must be going through Dana's mind, but there was as yet no

proof about the nature or identity of the invaders. Rolf hoped that the

briefing would put an end to this once and for all, and wondered what

Dana's mother would have done. But then, had Admiral Hunter, Max,

Miriya, and the others, not gone off on their Expeditionary Mission, none of

this might be happening now. Miriya had turned against her own kind once

before, and Rolf was certain that she would have remained on Earth's side

in the present conflict.

Dana had to be made to realize that the Zentraedi were in no way

connected with the Robotech Masters. Of course it was true that as clones of

that very group there was blood between them, but the Zentraedi had gone

off on their own; they had become their own people, and Dana was more

than any other Zentraedi representative of this great change. There was no

kinship between her and these clones the Robotech Masters had brought to

Earth; there was only enmity between them; she had no brothers or sisters

to that ship, any more than the people of Earth who had fought one another

through the course of history felt blood between themselves.

The chiefs-of-staff were seated around that grouping of tables Rolf still

wished triangular, with Leonard in his customary place at the curved apex,

and Dr. Byron from Defense Medical standing off to his right. Byron was a

tall man, whose head often appeared too small for his massive torso. He had

sharp, pointed features, and a dark brown mustache that was a perfect

inverted match for his arched and bushy eyebrows, giving his face a

somewhat comic turn, at odds with the no-nonsense forcefulness of his

73

personality.

Emerson and Sterling's entry had obviously interrupted the man. Rolf

introduced Dana to Leonard and the staff, seeing the analytical glint in the

supreme commander's eye now that he had a visual image of this person he

had not seen in years, save for a brief handshake at the Academy

ceremonies. But he was more than civil to Dana, complimenting her on the

recon mission and the capture of the Bioroid.

Leonard bade Dr. Byron continue with his findings.

"First of all, we found something remarkable inside the pilot's body,"

Byron said, reading from his notes. "There was some sort of bio-electrical

device implanted in its solar plexus. Subsequent analysis of this showed it to

be similar to the animating chips used early on by Dr. Emil Lang's teams of

Robotechnicians in the manufacture of Earth mecha."

Emerson's hand shot up. He gestured impatiently until Byron

acknowledged him.

"I'm sorry to interrupt, Doctor. But was the pilot human or not?"

"Oh, definitely not human," Byron said, shaking his head.

Rolf heard Dana's heavy sigh of disappointment as the doctor

continued.

"But I will say that it surpasses anything we ever attempted in the way

of bio-mechanical creations. In fact, this animating device we found in the

android's solar plexus is nothing if not akin to an artificial soul."

The supreme commander cleared his throat loudly. "Let's keep

theology out of this," he directed at Byron. "Just stick to the facts, Doctor."

Byron winced at the rebuke and nervously adjusted the collar of his

jacket.

"Our belief is that this race was forced to adapt to hostile environments

as it began its expansion across the galaxy, and that an android bio-system

was the natural outgrowth of this."

Leonard broke in again. "These aliens are not even the micronized

Zentraedi we first thought, but an army of programmed androids in control

of devastating bio-mechanical weapons. It's obvious to me that the

74

Robotech Masters found it much easier to use androids than clones." He

looked around the tables, then stood up, hands pressed to the table. "So

much the easier for us, then. We are waging a war against an artificial

lifeform, gentlemen, and we should have no qualms about destroying

it-utterly."

Suddenly Dana was on her feet. "Commander, you're mistaken," she

said. She raised her voice a notch to cut through the comments. "That

Bioroid pilot may have been an android, but I believe that we're dealing

with a race of living beings-not a soulless army of machines."

Byron narrowed his eyes and rocked forward on the balls of his feet.

"My observations are completely documented," he countered. "What proof

do you have to back up this absurd position?"

"I've had some first-hand experience in dealing with them," Dana shot

back. But she now felt Rolf's hand tighten on her arm.

"Sterling, sit down!" he told her.

Leonard looked furious. "Look here, I'm familiar with your report, but

it's possible you've misread your experiences, Lieutenant. The aliens could

have implanted certain things in your mind. If they're capable of creating

androids of this advanced form, who knows what else they're able to do?"

"No," Dana said back to him. "Why do you refuse to accept the

possibility I might be right?!"

Leonard slammed his fist on the table. "Don't provoke us, Lieutenant.

Quiet down at once or I'll be forced to have you removed from this session."

But Dana was on a roll, the persistent nature of her alien side well in

control of her now. "You're fools if you refuse to hear me out!" she told the

staff.

"Remove this insubordinate!" Leonard commanded. "I've heard

enough!"

Two sentries had stepped in and taken hold of her arms.

But Emerson, too, was on his feet now. "Perhaps we should listen to

her."

"I haven't got time for her disruptions," Leonard said stiffly.

75

Dana was pulled from the room, twisting and kicking, even breaking

free of their hold once to call everyone an idiot. Rolf only hoped that

Leonard was willing to overlook some of it. He sat down as a conciliatory

gesture, exchanging looks with the supreme commander.

"Go on with your report, Dr. Byron," Leonard said after a moment.

Byron wrapped things up, losing most of the staff when he turned to

technicalities.

Leonard cleared his throat.

"Gentlemen, it seems to me our course is clear: we must commit

ourselves to the total destruction of these androids."

All but Emerson voiced their concurrence.

Leonard threw the chief of staff a dirty look as he stood up. "Do you

have something to add, General?"

Emerson kept his voice controlled. "Only this: if these aliens possess

any human qualities, we should try to negotiate. Fighting can't be the only

alternative. Look what happened during the Robotech War-"

"Surely you don't believe that we could ever come to terms with a group

of barbarians, do you Emerson?"

"That's probably just what Russo and Hayes and the rest of the UEDC

said before Dolza's armada incinerated this planet," Rolf said with a sneer.

"I believe anything is better than a continued loss of lives."

"Perhaps, perhaps," the supreme commander allowed. "But their

advanced technology leaves us no other choice. Even if we could negotiate,

we'd be doing so from a position of weakness, not strength, and that could

prove fatal. It's out of the question! Now, will there be anything else from

you, General?"

Leonard hadn't even heard him, Rolf said to himself as he took his seat.

Worse, the commander was actually repeating the justification Russo and

his doomed council had used before firing the Grand Cannon at an alien

armada of over four million warships.

"No, Commander," Emerson said weakly. "Not now."

Someone will whisper the proper words over our graves.

76

CHAPTER SEVEN

Confronted with the issue of [Supreme Commander Leonard's]

militaristic megalomania, we are tempted to point to the past and remind one

another that history repeats itself. I know of no other statement that so

demeans us as a planetary race. Since Humankind looked the Monolith in the

face this authorless theory has been used to both excuse and justify our

shortsightedness and shortcomings; to explain away our foolish actions and

violent choices. But isn't it time that we asked ourselves why history has to

repeat itself? Short of positing a new theory of reincarnation-with the same

greedy men caught up in an eternal return to wage the same war over and

over again-we are left in the dark. Certainly Leonard was being pressured by

Chairman Moran, and certainly he had inherited the bloodstained mantle left

behind by T. R. Edwards; but where are the actual chains, biogenetic or

otherwise, that enslave him to history's dark flow? Perhaps we should look to

the Robotech Masters for answers. Or the Protoculture itself.

Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.),

Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War

"The officers on the general staff are nothing but a bunch of idiots,"

Dana reported to her teammates when she rejoined them in Monument

Sector Five, a usually crowded downtown district of shopping and office

malls that was all but deserted today.

With Angelo Dante in temporary command, the squad had just relieved

the 14th squad Tactical Armored and already positioned their Hovertanks.

Dana had roared up out of nowhere, executing a neat front leap from the

nose of the Valkyrie, and immediately begun to regale them with an account

of the briefing session with Commander Leonard. Both Sean and Angelo

wondered to themselves what might be the outcome of Dana's being forcibly

ejected from the war room; either one of them stood the chance of receiving

a promotion if the lieutenant was busted because of her actions.

77

Louie waited for Dana to finish before telling her what he had learned

at the forensic lab after she had left.

"We discovered that the relay we thought was a control device is

actually some kind of sonic frequency receiver."

"So?" Dana asked him.

Louie adjusted his goggles. "So the Bioroid is probably controlled by a

mixture of telepathic suggestion and signals from artificial sensors."

Dana's face fell. "You mean the Bioroids aren't controlled by the pilots?

After I just shot off my mouth back there-"

"I'm sure they can be," Louie said encouragingly, "but not like we

originally thought. It looks like some kind of higher intelligence may be

controlling them by remote control."

"I don't get it," said Angelo, trying to scratch his head through his

helmet.

"Someone or something is actually feeding instructions to the android

pilots," Louie explained.

"They're not clones then?"

Louie shook his head.

Dana still refused to believe any of this. "Well, anyway," she started to

say, "I told them..."

All at once alert sirens were blaring throughout the city. Dana ordered

everyone back to their Hovertanks (executing yet a second gymnastic leap

as she mounted her own), and switched on her radio. The net was alive with

a thousand voices, but she didn't need to try and make sense of the reports.

One look up explained everything: the skies above Monument City were

filled with the aliens' scarablike troop carriers.

"It's a full-scale enemy attack!" Sean said.

"If you have any alternative, don't shoot directly at their cockpits,"

Louie yelled before he threw himself into the Hovertank's seat. "We might

be able to capture one!"

Hundreds of alien ships were closing on the city, but now, even higher

overhead, appeared the telltale atmospheric streaks of Alpha fighters,

78

breaking formation and falling in to engage their Robotech enemies. A hail

of brilliant yellow fire, calculated to angle away from the city itself, was

launched against the invaders, Skylord and Swordfish missiles and Teflon

rounds impacting on the rust-colored crafts' armored hulls to little or no

effect. The sky was lit up with tracers, dazzling crescents of light, and fiery

explosions. But the troop carriers continued their attack, not only

weathering the storm, but returning their own brand of hell fire as the

Alphas completed their descent and dropped below them. The four-muzzled

guns of revolving undercarriage turrets spewed light and death across the

sky, taking down fighters faster than the eye could keep track. Trailing tails

of dense black smoke, Alphas plunged uncontrolled toward the city, while

others were simply disintegrated in midflight. Pilots drifting homeward on

synsilk chutes were cut down as well.

"It looks like there's more than we can handle, Lieutenant," Angelo

shouted over the net.

Dana said nothing. There had to be a way to disable those Bioroids

without harming the pilots, she thought. There had to be a way-but how?

Now hatches on the side of the troop carriers sprang open. Bioroids

mounted on their Hoverplatforms were disgorged from the ships in a

seemingly unending line. They fell upon the city, untouched by the Alpha

fighters, outmaneuvering them in almost every instance and bringing their

own disc guns to bear against them. The Bioroids fanned out over the city,

as though searching for something that had as yet eluded them. From every

sector came reports of their descent, but there was no clearcut sense of their

motive. They landed finally in unvarying groups of three and spread

through the city streets on foot.

Most of Monument City was packed away in the enormous

underground shelters that had become as much a part of city life since the

Global Civil War as a Sunday stroll in the park. But, as always, there were

those who had opted to return home first to salvage some precious

knickknack, or make certain that family or friends had already departed;

and then there were the diehards who simply refused, and the thrill-seekers

79

who lived for this sort of thing. And it was these last groups that the

Bioroids moved against, fulfilling the directives of the Masters to capture as

many Micronians as possible. Unseen by Dana and the rest of the 15th, and

as yet unreported by the Civil Defense networks, the Bioroids were engaged

in a novel form of looting: using their massive metalshod fists to smash

through the walls of dwellings and shops, and grab in those same hands

whatever Human stragglers they could find, often unknowingly crushing

them to death before returning them to the troop carriers.

Ultimately the Bioroids entered the canyons of downtown and found

the 15th waiting for them.

Sean said, "Heads up, folks, here they come!"

"Have any bright ideas, Louie?" the sarge asked.

"Yeah, I do," the corporal answered, ignoring Dante's sarcasm. "If you

aim to either side of the cockpit, you can temporarily paralyze the pilot."

"Now why the hell would I want to do that, Nichols?!" Dante bellowed.

Dana cut into the tac net. "Angelo, just do as he says-it's important,"

she announced cryptically. "We've got to try to avoid hitting the pilots

directly."

"Whose side are you on?" Dante got out just in time.

The Bioroids loosed plasma bolts from their Hoverplatforms

top-mounted guns as they approached, one of the first shots finding Dante's

mecha; the explosion threw the Hovertank fifty feet from its position in the

center of the street, but the sergeant rode it out, reconfiguring to Gladiator

mode during the resultant back flip and swinging the cannon around for a

counterstrike. Dana had also reconfigured her mecha. She hopped the

self-propelled gun over to Dante's new resting place, just as the sergeant

blew one of the Bioroids from the air.

"Angelo, listen to me-I want you to try to shoot down their Hovercraft

first."

"What are you up to, Lieutenant?" he fired back at her.

"Once you've got 'em off their Hovercraft,". Dana went on, "shoot at

their legs and put 'em out of commission." She was trying her best to make

80

this sound appealing to Dante, but she could just imagine his face, screwed

up in anger under the helmet.

The Bioroids were coming in low now, not more than ten yards off the

ground, Bowie, Sean, and Louie a barricade they'd never get past. The 15th

trio blew the Hoverplatforms out from under the attackers, even as

explosions rocked the street all around them. Bioroids fell with

ground-shaking crashes, while others decided to leap from their crafts and

take up positions in recessed doorways and storefronts. Downtown became

a war zone as both sides pumped pulsed fire through the streets. The sides

of highrise buildings collapsed and cornices and friezes crumbled to the

cratered street. Glass rained down in deadly slivers from windows blown

out high above the fighting.

Dana ordered her team to reconfigure from Gladiator to Battloid for

possible hand-to-hand encounters.

The street and surrounding area was pure devastation now, but the

enemy had been held at the 15th's line. No one bothered to ask what the

aliens were looking for, or where they hoped to get. Still in Battloid mode,

the squad headed for the cover and continued to trade salvos with the

entrenched group who had taken the far end of the avenue. Once again,

Dana reminded them to go for the legs and not the cockpits. But this time

Sean took issue with her.

"They can still blast us if we do that," he pointed out. "We've gotta take

a chance and aim at an area near those cockpits, Lieutenant."

"They're androids, damn it, androids!" Angelo yelled over the net.

"I'm convinced they're not, Sergeant!"

"Well what's the difference whether they're androids or clones?!" Dante

said as debris from a shattered store sign fell on him. He thought his

Battloid through a front leap that took him clear across the street. "They're

still shooting at us!"

"We've got to capture one!"

Without warning, a Bioroid appeared behind Dana's mecha and loosed

a blast at her. She spun but not in time. Fortunately Angelo saw the move

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and managed to take the thing out, slugs from his chaingun tearing open

the enemy's cockpit.

"So much for leg shots," Dante said.

"That's one I owe you," Dana responded tight-lipped.

Bioroids had taken to the rooftops and were pouring everything they

had into the street. Troop carriers were dropping in to assist, and things

quickly took a turn for the worse.

"We'll never be able to hold them!" Sean said, voicing what all of them

were thinking.

But just as suddenly, the battle began to reverse itself, through no

effort of the 15th. The Bioroids were returning to their Hoverplatforms and

making for the scarab ships, seemingly in retreat.

Dante said as much over the net and ranged in the Trojan Horse's

forward viewfinder. One of the Bioroids had a civilian clutched in its hand.

Dante turned and found another-the civilian limp, probably dead.

Everywhere he looked now, he saw the same scene.

"They're taking hostages!" he told Dana. Traversing his cannon, he

took aim on one of the Bioroids, muttering to himself, "You're a goner now,

buddy..."

But Dana positioned her Battloid in front of him, preventing a clear

shot at his target.

"Angelo, stop! You'll kill the hostage-"

Two Bioroids blew the words from her, with shots that would have

thrown her face-forward to the ground had Dante not been there to catch

her.

"That's two I owe you," she said with some effort.

They both dropped their Battloids into a crouch and returned fire.

Many of the Bioroids were left without Hovercraft and were obviously bent

on going down fighting. There would be no captives here, just a scrap pile of

mecha and android parts.

Dana did manage to blow the legs out from under one of their number,

but a second later the thing seemed to self-destruct. And when they did that,

82

there weren't even parts left, just memories.

Further down the street the troop carriers were lifting off. The 15th was

pinned down, unable to stop them. Still other carriers were landing close in

to the fighting, picking up troops who would have been abandoned. Could

they be getting short of firepower, Dana wondered?

The 15th pushed their line forward and took two more city blocks from

the dwindling number of enemy troops. Then ultimately they found

themselves firing on the carriers themselves as they were lifting off,

presumably returning to the fortress.

"There they go," Dante said, laying his weapon aside. "I wonder what

they're planning to do with all those hostages?"

"That's a good question, Sergeant," said Bowie.

"Yeah, a real good question," said Sean.

General Emerson and Commander Leonard watched the withdrawal

from the central tower of the command center. Below, much of the city was

in ruin; the sky above was smoke and orange flame.

"Negotiating couldn't have been worse than this!" Emerson said in

disgust, turning away from the window.

"Don't make assumptions," Leonard told him from his seat. "Who's to

say that if we had tried to sit down and reason with them the results would

have been any different? We may have prevented a worse disaster."

Emerson was too frustrated to counter the remark.

A staff officer entered the room just then and Leonard got to his feet

anxiously.

"Well, what's the figure?" he demanded.

"Over two hundred citizens have been kidnapped, sir. But the figure

may go higher once all sectors have reported in."

"I see..." Leonard said, visibly distressed. "In the official report, list

them as casualties of the battle."

Emerson threw Leonard a look, which the commander took in stride.

Did the fool really expect him to tell the civilian population that the aliens

83

were now taking people from their homes for some unknown purpose?

"Yessir," the staff sergeant snapped.

"I don't know what they're up to," Leonard said under his breath. "But

whatever it is, it won't work-not as long as I have a single man left to fight

them."

84

CHAPTER EIGHT

Come on, people, we've done this before and we can do it again. There

isn't one of us-except for the tots-who didn't see our homes and lives wiped

out by the rounds and missiles of one faction or another. So, think back to

those days, remember how we had to build and rebuild. And remember that

we never lost sight of tomorrow. We can lean on each other and pull through

this, or we can all retreat into our individual misery and lose everything. I'm

going to leave it up to each and every one of you. But I know what I'm going

to do: I'm going to roll up my shirtsleeves, grab hold of this shovel, and dig

myself out of this mess!

From Mayor Tommy Luan's speech to the residents of

SDF-1 Macross, as quoted in Luan's

High Office

The human booty that resulted from the Bioroid raid on Monument

City was being housed in a massive stasis sphere inside the Masters'

grounded flagship-a luminescent globe over fifty yards in diameter that had

once been used to store the specimen clones derived from the cell tissues of

the Tirolian scientist, Zor. Of the three-hundred-odd victims of the

kidnapping foray, only seventy-five had survived the ordeal. These men,

women, and children were drifting weightlessly in the gaseous chamber now,

as the three Masters looked on dispassionately. The time had come to

subject one of the captives to a xylonic cerebral probe to determine not only

the psychological make-up of the Humans, but to ascertain their

involvement with the Protoculture as well.

At the Masters' behest an antigrav beam retrieved one of the

deanimated Earthling males and conveyed him to the mind probe table, a

circular platform something like a light table, lit up by the internal circuitry

of its numerous scanning devices. The subject was a young tech, still in

uniform, his handsome face a mask of death. He was carefully positioned

supine on the transparent surface of the platform by the antigrav beam,

85

while the Masters took to the table's control console, a bowllike apparatus

slightly larger than the xylonic scanner, its rim a series of pressure-sensitive

activation pads.

"But can we extract the information we want from what is no doubt an

inferior example of the species?" Bowkaz put to his companions. Their

choice had been based on the fact that this one was clothed in an Earth

Forces uniform; there had been captives of higher rank, but they had

expired in transit.

"We will at least be able to determine the depth of their reliance on the

Protoculture," Dag returned.

Six wrinkled hands were laid on the sensor pads; the combined will of

three minds directed the scanning process. X-ray images and internal

schematics of the Human were displayed on the control console's central

screen.

"Their evolutionary development is more limited than we thought,"

Shaizan commented.

As the probes were focused on cerebral memory centers, video images

replaced the roller-coaster graphics; these so-called mnemonic schematics

actually translated the electroengrammic cerebral pulses into visual

wavelengths, permitting the Masters to view the subject's past. What played

on the circular monitor screen were scenes that were to some extent

archetypically human: preverbal memories of infancy, recollections of

school life, cadet training, moments of love and loss, beauty and pain.

The Masters had little trouble understanding the images of training

and hierarchical induction, but were less certain when the scenes contained

some measure of emotional content.

"Inefficient command structure and grotesquely primitive weapons

system," Bowkaz offered, as military memories surfaced.

Now a fleeting image of a run through Earth's tall green grass, a

companion alongside...

"Is this the specimen's female counterpart?"

"Most likely. Our previous studies have shown that the two sexes

86

intermix quite freely and that the Earthlings apparently select specific

mates. I believe that we are seeing an example of what might be referred to

as the courting ritual."

"A barbaric behavioral pattern."

"Yes...The species reproduces itself through a process of self-contained

childbirth. There is no evidence of biogenetic engineering whatsoever."

"Random...foolish," muttered Dag.

"But something about them is worrisome," said Shaizan. "It is no

wonder the Zentraedi were defeated." He lifted his aged hands from the

sensor pads, effectively deactivating the probe.

The young cadet on the table sat up, seemingly unaffected and

reawakened; but there was no life left in his eyes: whatever was once his

individual self had been taken from him by the Masters' probe, and what

remained was empty consciousness, like a hand wiped clean of prints and

lines, awaiting that first fold and flex...

"There is little chance of using these beings to pilot our Bioroids,"

Bowkaz pronounced. "The scanning process alone has destroyed much of

this one's neural circuitry. We would need to recondition each of them to

suit our purpose..."

But if this part of their plan was foiled, it was at least encouraging to

have learned that not all Humans had knowledge of the Protoculture, except

in terms of its application to the enhancement of technology. They had not

yet discovered its true value...

"...And this is to our advantage," said Dag. "Ignorant, they will not

oppose our removing the Protoculture matrix from the ruins of Zor's

dimensional fortress."

"But we must prevent them from carrying out these attacks against us.

Can they be reasoned with?"

Bowkaz scowled. "They can be threatened."

"And easily manipulated...I feel that the time has come to call down a

rescue ship."

"But we are so close to our goal," Dag objected.

87

Shaizan looked to his companion. There was an unmistakable element

of impatience in Dag's attitude, surely a contagion spread by the Earthlings

who had been allowed to scout the fortress. Or perhaps by the very

specimens the Bioroids had brought in. All the more reason to abandon the

surface of the planet as quickly as possible.

"The time has come for us to activate Zor Prime and insinuate him

among the Humans. The clone so resembles them that they will accept him

as one of their own."

Bowkaz concurred. "We will achieve a two-fold purpose: by implanting

a neuro-sensor in the clone's brain, we will be able to monitor and control

his activities."

"And second?" Dag asked anxiously.

"The realization of our original plan for the clone: as the contamination

takes hold of him, the neural imagery of Zor will be awakened. And once

that occurs, we will not only know precisely where the Protoculture device

has been hidden, but exactly how it operates."

Shaizan came close to smiling. "The Invid will be stopped and the

galaxy will be ours once again."

Bowkaz looked at the Human subject, then the stasis sphere itself.

"And what of these?" he asked his companions.

Shaizan turned his back. "Destroy them," he said.

"Specimen is in position and proton disposal is on standby," reported

the bio-lab tech.

Commander Leonard stepped to the permaplas observation window

and gave a last look at the alien android. It had been laid out on its back on

a flyout platform central to the huge sanitization tank. Curiously, someone

in forensic had thought to reclothe the dissected thing in its uniform.

Consequently, this routine disposal was beginning to feel more like a wake

than anything else, and Leonard didn't like that one bit.

The sanitization chamber resembled the sealed barrel of an enormous

gun, its curved inner surface an array of circular ports linked by conduits to

88

tanks of cleansing chemicals or particle-beam accelerators. No one had

expected the supreme commander to drop by, and it was only happenstance

that accounted for his presence-he and his retinue had been in the area and

Colonel Fredericks of the GMP had invited him over to witness the process.

Rolf Emerson was also present.

Leonard was just about ready to give the tech the gosign, when

Lieutenant Sterling came running in, urging him to wait, urging him not to

give the signal.

"Commander," she said out of breath. "You can't just destroy him. He

should be returned to his people. Perhaps we can bargain-"

Leonard was still burning from Dana's interruptions at the briefing, so

he turned on her harshly now, gesturing to the lifeless form in the tank. "It's

an unthinking piece of protoplasm even when alive, Lieutenant! Do you

seriously believe that the aliens would bargain for this?!"

Rolf Emerson was ready to drag Dana away before she could respond,

but she ignored his glare, even raised her voice some. "Why would

'unthinking pieces of protoplasm' bother to take Human hostages,

Commander? Answer that!"

Leonard winced and looked around, wondering if anyone without a

clearance had caught Sterling's comment. Fredericks understood, and

stepped behind Dana, gently taking hold of her arms.

"Let me go!" Dana threw over her shoulder.

Fredericks backed off, then said in low tones: "Calm down, Lieutenant.

There were no hostages taken yesterday, there were only casualties. And in

any event, this matter has nothing whatever to do with you."

"Activate!" Dana heard the commander say. He had turned away from

her, hands folded behind his back, silhouetted against the observation

window now as a flash of bright light disintegrated the alien corpse.

Follow-up chemicals poured from two ports removing any remaining traces

of tissue.

Dana stood motionless; unresponsive to Leonard as he shouldered by

her, dismissing her. Fredericks and Emerson closed in on her.

89

"Now then, Lieutenant," the GMP colonel began sinisterly.

"Will you take your hands off me?!" Dana yelled, twisting free of his

grip.

Rolf stepped in front of her. "Dana," he said, controlled but obviously

furious, "considering your past record, you risk a great deal by coming here

like this. You know the punishment for insubordination is severe-and don't

think for a moment that I'll intervene on your behalf."

"Yes, of course. Sir!"

Rolf softened some. "Believe me, I share your concern that

Commander Leonard has been too resolute in this matter, but I'm in no

position to debate his actions and neither are you. Do I make myself clear?"

Dana's lips were a thin line. "Clear, sir," she said stiffly. "Clear as day."

The 15th, like many of the other ATAC squads, had been assigned to

mop-up duty. There were sections of Monument City untouched by the

recent attack, but this was more than made up for by the devastation

elsewhere. Still, it was business as usual for the civilians: thanks to

Robotechnology, rebuilding wasn't the chore it would have been twenty

years ago, even though there were relatively few mecha units given over to

construction. Many wondered how Macross had been able to rebuild itself

so often without the advantage of modern techniques and materials, not to

mention modular design innovations. One would hear stories about

Macross constantly, comparisons and such, but what always surfaced was a

sense of nostalgia for the older, cruder ways, nostalgia for a certain spirit

that had been lost.

Dana's generation didn't quite see things that way, however. In fact,

they felt that Monument had more spirit than any of its prototypes.

Whereas Hunter's generation had been brought up during an era of war-the

Civil War, then the Robotech-Dana and her peers had enjoyed almost

twenty years of peace. But they had been raised to expect war, and now that

it was here, they simply did their part, then returned to the hedonistic

pursuits that had always ruled them and provided them with a necessary

90

balance to the dark predictions of their parents and elders.

In this way, mop-up operations were usually excuses for block parties.

Civilians left the shelters and started partying as soon as they could, and the

younger members of the Army of the Southern Cross were so easily

distracted and seduced...

"Get a move on, Bowie!" Dana yelled over her shoulder, as she leaned

her Hovercycle into a turn.

Bowie was half-a-dozen lengths behind her, with power enough to

catch up with her, but short on nerve. She had conned him into sneaking

away from patrol for a few quick drinks at the club he frequented on leave.

It was a crazy stunt to be pulling, but Dana was immune to his warnings.

What's the difference, she had told him. The High Command never listens

to a word I have to say anyway, so why should I listen to them?

Oh, he had argued with her, but as always she got the better of him.

"Hey, slow down!" he begged her from his cycle. "Are you crazy or

something?"

It was a foolish question to be asking someone who had just walked out

on patrol, so Bowie simply shook his head and gave the mecha more

throttle.

The club (called Little Luna, an affectionate term for the Robotech

Factory Satellite that had been in geosynchronous orbit until the arrival of

the alien ships) was SRO by the time Dana and Bowie arrived; it was

body-to-body on the dance floor and tighter than that everywhere else. But

Bowie enjoyed a certain cachet because he played there so often, and it

wasn't long before they had two seats at the bar.

"Let me have a bottle of your best Scotch," Dana told the bartender.

She asked Bowie to join her, but he refused.

"I don't know what's bugging you," he said, "but don't you think you

might be going about this the wrong way? I mean, getting thrown in the brig

isn't going to prove anything-"

Dana silenced him by putting her hand over his mouth. Her attention

was riveted on someone who had just appeared on-stage.

91

"Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, haves and have-nots," the

deejay announced. "George Sullivan!"

Bowie moved Dana's hand aside and leaned around her. Sullivan was

taking a quick bow for the crowd. He was a handsome man in his early

thirties, on the old side for the following he enjoyed, and fairly conservative

to boot. Clean shaven and wholesome looking, he wore his wavy brown hair

in a kind of archaic pompadour, and liked to affect tailcoats with velvet

lapels. Bowie could never understand his appeal, although he sang well

enough.

"What a fox!" Dana commented.

Bowie made a face. "We jam together sometimes."

"You jam with that hunk? Bowie, I should have been coming to this

club with you a long time ago."

Dana was too preoccupied to notice Bowie's shrug of indifference.

"He's a newcomer." Sullivan had spotted Bowie and was leaving the stage

and heading toward the bar, pawed at by some of the overeager. "He's

coming over here," he told Dana quietly. "Don't make a driveling fool of

yourself."

Dana's eyes lit up as Sullivan shook Bowie's hand. "I'm glad you

stopped by, Bowie," Dana heard him say. "How would you feel about

accompanying me on 'It's You'? I'm having some trouble with my romantic

image."

Dana thought him even better-looking up close. And he smelled terrific.

"That's hard to believe," she piped in.

Sullivan turned to her. "Have we met?" he said annoyed.

"This is Lieutenant Dana Sterling, George," said Bowie.

Sullivan stared at her: did his eyes narrow with interest just then, or

did she imagine it, Dana asked herself? He was reaching for her hand. "A

pleasure," she said, restraining herself from giving the masculine handshake

she was accustomed to.

"My pleasure," said Sullivan, a bit too forcefully. He held on to her

hand longer than he had to, communicating something with his eyes she

92

could not fathom.

The three Masters stood before a towering curved wall of strobing

lights and flashing schematics. Their hands reached out for the sensor pads

of a control console.

"Vectors are coordinated," said number three. "Ready to override the

Micronians' communications network."

"Let us begin immediately!" said Shaizan, aware too late of the haste

implied by his tone. Bowkaz called him on it.

"Is this impatience? Now you are beginning to show signs of

contamination!"

Shaizan growled slightly through clenched, vestigial teeth, yellow with

age and disuse.

"Enough," said Dag, putting a quick end to the argument. "Commence

override..."

From his chambers in the United Earth Headquarters, Commander

Leonard spoke with the Republic's prime minister via video-phone. A

white-haired mustachioed politico who had served like Leonard under T. R.

Edwards, Chairman Moran wore his badge of office on his right breast, and

his sidearm to bed. He had learned tactics from Edwards, and that made

him a dangerous man indeed.

"Your Excellency," Leonard said deferentially, "we must wait until we

know more about the aliens before launching a preemptive strike. Frankly,

my staff is split"

"The final judgment is of course yours," the chairman interrupted. "But

I hope you understand that it's becoming increasingly difficult for me to

defend your inaction. If you're not up to it..."

Leonard tried to keep his emotions in check as Moran left his threat

unfinished. "I understand my obligations to the council," he said evenly.

Moran's head nodded in the monitor's field. "Good. I expect you to

coordinate your attack plans as soon as possible."

93

The screen image de-rezzed and Leonard drew a hand down his face in

frustration. Curse Edwards for leaving me to this! he said to himself.

But suddenly the screen was alive again: Leonard opened his eyes to

wavering bars of static and multicolored contour lines. Then there was a

voice attached to the oscillations-high-pitched and synthesized, though its

message was clear.

"Consider this a final warning," it began. "Interfere with our attempts

to leave this planet and you face extinction."

A second threat in as many minutes.

The monitor screen went blindingly white.

94

CHAPTER NINE

Any assessment of T. R. Edwards's legacy must take into account the

feudal structures his social and political programs fostered. It is not enough

to say that the Council was organized along feudal lines; Human conventions

and mores just as often reflect the nature of the ruling body as influence it.

Feudalism ruled, both as political doctrine and spirit of the times, from the

government on down to the constituency.

"Overlords,"

History of the Second Robotech War, Vol. CXII

Dana and Bowie spent two hours in the club-two wonderful hours for

Dana, talking with George, listening to him sing. He performed a medley of

oldies, including several by Lynn-Minmei that were currently enjoying a

revival. She sat at the piano, chin resting on her folded hands, while Bowie

played and the audience applauded. And George sang for her. Afterwards he

wanted to know all about her-Bowie, that dear, had often spoken of her to

him-but he wanted to know more. All about her missions with the 15th,

especially the recent one, when they had been responsible for bringing

down the alien fortress. He let her go on and on-perhaps too far because of

the Scotch she had consumed. But it had felt so good to get it all out, to talk

to someone who was intensely interested in her life. In fact, he hardly talked

about himself at all, and that was certainly something that set him apart

from most of the men she met.

She was mounted on her Hovercycle now, waiting for Bowie to say his

good-byes and join her for the return trip to the barracks. Back to the real

world. However, it was a different world than the one she looked out on

only hours ago; fresh and revived, suddenly full of limitless possibilities.

Bowie appeared and swung one leg over his cycle.

"I can't get that last song out of my mind," Dana told him, stars in her

eyes. "I've heard you mention George before, but why didn't you tell me he

95

was so special?"

"Because I don't really know him that well," Bowie said. "He keeps to

himself." He activated his cycle and strapped in while it warmed. "We better

get a move on."

"Is he performing here again?" Dana wanted to know.

"Yeah, he's doing a set later tonight," Bowie returned absently. Then he

noticed that Dana had switched off her cycle.

"Dana..."

She was headed back into the club. "Don't worry about me. I just want

to say good night. Take off. I'll catch up with you later."

Bowie sighed, exasperated, though he had little doubt she would catch

up.

Dana went in through the stage entrance this time, noticing inside that

some comedian had tampered with the sign above the door-instead of

reading EXIT DOOR, it now read EXEDORE. The rear portion of the

building was shared by an adjacent store, and there were numerous packing

crates stacked here and there, and very little light. Dana called out to

George in the darkness, and headed toward that meager light she could

discern. Finally she heard the clacking of keyboard tabs and closed on that.

It was a small cubicle, brightly lit, with a cloth curtain for a doorway,

and apparently served as both dressing room and office. George was seated

at the desk, tapping data into a portable computer terminal. She called his

name, but he was obviously too wrapped up in his task to hear her. So she

waited silently by the door, wondering what he could be working on so

diligently. Song lyrics, maybe, or a detailed account of the two hours they

had just spent together...

Dana looked again at the portable unit. There was something familiar

about it...Then she noticed the small insignia: the fluted column above the

atomic circle...emblem of the Global Military Police!

Reflexively she drew in her breath and backed out of sight, hoping she

hadn't tipped her hand. George had stopped. But then she heard him say:

"Just as I thought...I suspected the enemy fortress had an outer hull

96

weakness."

Pretty weird lyrics, thought Dana.

Cautiously, she peered into the room once again. Had she missed

seeing someone, or was George talking to himself? Indeed, he was alone and

a moment later gave voice to-her worst fear:

"Now if I can just pry some more information out of the lovely

Lieutenant Sterling, maybe I'll be able to put my theories to the test."

A detailed account of their two hours, all right, Dana said to herself.

Sullivan was a GMP spy. And what those double-dealers couldn't pull from

HQ, they hoped to learn from her! And she had told them! All about the raid

on the fortress, the recon mission, the bio-gravitic network...

George muttered something, then surprised her further when she

heard him say: "Oh, Marlene, if you were only here!"

She might have charged in at that moment if the stage manager hadn't

appeared at the opposite door. "Five minutes," he told Sullivan.

Sullivan thanked the man and closed up the computer.

Dana backed away and ran to the exit door, her hand at her mouth.

The Masters were pleased with themselves, although each was now

careful to avoid any displays that might be interpreted as emotional.

"Will they heed our warning?" Dag asked aloud.

"I can't believe they would be so foolish as to ignore it," said Bowkaz.

He had been their voice to the Human commander.

Shaizan grunted. "All our questions will be answered soon enough."

"The time has come to signal the fleet."

Six hands reached forward to the console.

Dag removed his hands for an instant, breaking their fink with the

communicator. "Their behavior during the next few hours will indicate

whether we have anything more to fear from them," he said darkly.

"Where have you been?" Angelo Dante said as Dana stormed into the

15th's barracks. The team was assembled in the rec room, talking tactics and

97

stuffing their faces. Dana had heard warning Klaxons when she first entered

the compound, but had no idea what they signaled.

"We've been looking all over for you, Lieutenant," from Sean now.

"Where have you been?"

"Don't ask," Dana told them harshly. "Just tell me what's going on-are

we slotted for patrol again?"

"Tomorrow morning," the sergeant explained. "Seems another enemy

ship is on its way to Earth, probably to try and rendezvous with the

grounded fortress. High command wants us there on the ground to meet

'em."

"They've already sent Marie up with a welcoming committee of TASC

interceptors," Sean added. "Course they seem to forget we've got no way of

fighting them until the bright boys down in data analysis give us some

information."

Dana swallowed her initial surprise and smiled to herself.

"Sean, I've already taken care of that. I know where to get all the

information we need."

They all froze, midaction, waiting for her to finish.

"That's right. I've got a way to get it straight from the GMP."

"What do they know that we don't know?" Louie asked her. "We're the

ones who brought down that ship in the first place."

"But how do we know they didn't learn something from that Bioroid

pilot?" Dana pointed out. "I find it awfully strange that he expired, just like

that." She snapped her fingers. "They got something they're not telling us.

Maybe they're even holding out on HQ. Why else would Fredericks have

shown up at the zap tank? I'm telling you, the GMP is in on it."

"Even if you're right," Angelo said full of suspicion, "you and what

army's gonna access that data?"

"Those files are top secret, eyes-only," Louie hastened to add.

"Come on," Dana laughed, throwing up her hands. "Give me a little

credit, guys. One of their top agents is working for me-without his knowing

it, of course."

98

It was enough to silence Angelo and tip the goggles off Louie's nose.

Bowie and Sean just started at her.

The song came back to her as she took in their looks.

I always think of you

Dream of you late at night

What do you do

When I turn out the light?

You spy for the GMP, geek, Dana answered herself and the song. But

now it's you who's lost, George Sullivan...

The following morning (while Dana showered away romantic feelings

for George, decided that "Marlene" was probably some aging rock singer

who wore too much makeup, and devised a plan to reverse the tables on

suave Sullivan), Lieutenant Marie Crystal's TASC unit attacked the

Earthbound fortress that had separated itself from the alien fleet to

rendezvous with its grounded twin. Modified cargo shuttles had delivered

the Black Lions to the edge of space and the assault was mounted with an

absence of the usual preliminaries.

Leonard, Emerson, and the joint chiefs monitored the attack from the

war room at Defense Headquarters.

"We're hitting them with everything we've got, but it's like water off a

duck's back!" Leonard heard the lieutenant remark over the com net.

He would have been surprised to hear anything different; however, this

was one time the chairman wasn't going to get the chance to accuse him of

inaction. There was some hope early on that Crystal's squad could fell the

fortress as Sterling's had the first, but apparently the aliens were quick to

learn and not about to repeat mistakes: even if the Black Lions managed to

disarm the defensive shields of the descending fortress, they would find the

bio-gravitic reactor port sealed and unapproachable. And, as General

Emerson had been quick to point out, having a second fortress crashland on

Earth was not exactly optimum in any event. Better to let them pick up their

99

wreck, Leonard said to himself as he studied the schematics on the situation

board.

Leonard was trying hard not to think about the message that had been

flashed across his monitor earlier that day, and had half convinced himself

that it was an hallucination or the result of some plot hatched by Emerson's

wing of the general staff meant to put him at further odds with Chairman

Moran's Council.

"The assault group reports limited damage to the ship's

superstructure," a controller reported now, "but the enemy's force shields

remain intact and operational."

"The attack's having no effect whatsoever, Commander," Emerson said

angrily.

Leonard adopted the same tone. "Then we'll destroy the grounded ship

before this one can arrive to save it."

Emerson grinned wryly. Just who was the commander kidding?

Perhaps he was uttering these absurdities for posterity, Rolf thought.

Leonard had the right idea, they would say. Leonard did everything he could.

Save for the fact everyone knew that the destruction of either fortress wasn't

within their power. Nevertheless, the Tactical Armored units would be

deployed to realize Leonard's grandiose lies.

Or at least die trying.

Dana had asked Bowie to find out where George lived. Her friend

found it hard to believe that she could think about love at a time like this

(lust was the term he actually used), but he relented and came through. She

regretted having to keep him in the dark about her plan; however, she didn't

want him going into battle with any more on his mind than was absolutely

necessary.

Once again she put Dante in temporary command of the unit and set

out on her private mission, trailing Sullivan from his low-rent apartment

not far from the GMP ministry, to a grassy overlook in a restricted area on

the outskirts of the city. It was a tedious challenge, since George had opted

100

to hike to the spot. But once Dana was sure of his destination, she powered

her Hovertank along the back roads that led to the overlook and arrived

shortly after he did.

He was standing under perhaps the only shade tree on the entire

ridgeline, his computer briefcase clutched in his left hand. "What in the

world are you doing way out here?" he said, when she called to him from the

mecha's cockpit. "Shouldn't you be with your squadron or something?"

"I couldn't bear to be away from you any longer," she told him

dramatically. "And I was hoping I could get you to join my team...unless you

have to report back to the GMP?"

George stepped back from the mecha as though he had been hit. Dana

dismounted and told him not to worry about it-his secret was safe with her.

"But you used me," she said, unconcealed hurt in her voice. "And I

want to know why. What are you trying to prove?"

Sullivan's face registered anger. "I'm not trying to prove anything."

Then he closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. "All right," he

said after a moment. "But I've never told this to anyone."

Dana kept quiet while he explained. His sister had been a casualty of

the first alien raid on Monument City, and Sullivan, then an HQ war

department tech, blamed himself for her death-he had forgotten to pick her

up after school and she had been caught up in the attack while waiting for

him.

The sort of story Dana had heard all too frequently and become

somewhat inured to, despite the sympathy she felt for him. One might as

well blame chance or fate, she told herself as Sullivan continued.

He had deserted his post to visit her in the hospital and-though

severely burned and not expected to last the night-she had spoken his name

as if nothing had happened, assigning no blame and concerned that he

would soon be alone in the world. That was when the military police had

arrived on the scene; they had come to arrest him, but when they

understood the depth of his grief they realized that he was someone they

could use for their own purposes. He had been with them ever since, playing

101

both sides of the fence whenever he could.

"So you've been waging a one-man campaign against your sister's

murderers," Dana said when he finished.

"Whenever I can," he told her.

"Tell me one thing: does the GMP have new information about the

fortress-vulnerable spots or weaknesses, some place we could hit them and

incapacitate them?"

George nodded gravely, aware that he was breaking his security oath.

"Yes. We have reason to believe that we do."

"And it's in that computer of yours?"

Again he nodded.

Dana smiled and took hold of his hand. "Well then, let's put what

you've learned to good use." She led him back to the Hovertank and

gestured to the rumble seat. "With your data and my firepower, we can send

these alien invaders packing."

With annihilation discs raining down on them from all sides, the 15th

was throwing everything they had against the enemy, often successfully

when it came to downing trios of Hoversled Bioroids (especially in Dana's

absence), but ineffectually in terms of their primary target-the fortress itself.

Reports from Headquarters indicated that Crystal's Black Lion team had

fared no better with the incoming ship, now visible in the explosion-filled

sky above the angry ridgeline.

"These guys are slippery little devils!" Sean said over the net. "What

does it take to nail them?"

"Keep your eyes open and I'll show you," Dante radioed back.

They both had their mecha in Gladiator mode, their cannons

disgorging ear-splitting volleys without letup.

Dante ranged in his weapon and blew one of the airborne Bioroids to

debris, just after it loosed a shot that managed to topple Sean's tank.

"Everything okay?" Dante asked when Sean righted the thing.

"I'll live, if that's what you mean."

102

"I was talkin' about the tank," the sergeant told him.

This from a guy he had once out-ranked, Sean muttered to himself.

"Thanks for your concern, Sarge."

Then all at once Dana's Valkyrie was in their midst, oddly enough with

a civilian passenger in the rumble seat. Bowie identified the stranger for the

team and the tac net was nothing but nasty comments for a minute or so.

Sean got in the last word: "Hey Lieutenant, I didn't know you went for

thrill-freaks!"

"Just cut the chatter and give me some cover," Dana ordered.

Full-out, her tank was making directly for the fortress, unswerving in

the face of the ground fire it was receiving from Bioroid troops holding the

perimeter. Sean watched her go airborne as the tank crested a small rise less

than one-hundred yards from the ship, then lost her in the blinding flashes

of plasma light Alphas and Falcons were pouring against the fortress's

defensive shield.

A trio of Hovercrafts pursued Dana as she skimmed the tank across the

ship's armored surface, annihilation discs winging past George's

unprotected head as he studied the computer readouts. Had her helmet not

been essential for rapport with the mecha, Dana would have handed it back

to him.

"Have you coordinated the data yet?"

"It keeps shifting," he yelled into the wind.

"Keep trying," she urged him, piloting the tank through four lanes of

disc fire.

They had already made one pass over the fortress and she now veered

the tank around for a second, taking out a hovercraft as she completed the

break. There was no time to place her shots and she was sorry for that; but if

Sullivan's computer did its job, the end would more than justify the means.

Relying on the mecha's lateral guns, her hands locked on the handlebar-like

control and trigger mechanisms, she thumbed a second and third Bioroid to

destruction.

Meanwhile the second fortress was eclipsing the sky overhead,

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threatening to sandwich her small craft between it and the grounded ship.

Tactical units were loosing cannon rounds against its plated underbelly,

only adding to her predicament as the shells often ricocheted and detonated

along the Hovertank's course. Dana had also noticed Logans overhead

before the fortress blocked her view; possibly the remnants of Marie

Crystal's Black Lion squadron.

"The vulnerable area will be exposed when the fortresses attempt a

ship-to-ship link up," Sullivan said at last. "That'll be the time to hit them!"

Dana looked up, trying to calculate how much time they had left before

the fortress rendered her and her new sweetie a memory. The ventral

surface of the ship was an ugly sight, like the mouth of some techno-spider

about to devour them.

"I'm patching the information directly into your onboard computers,

Dana. The rest is up to you."

"Leave it to me," she started to say, accelerating the mecha through the

narrowing gap formed by the two ships. But suddenly a Hovercraft had

appeared out of nowhere, raining rear energy hyphens at her. Then a

Bioroid swooped in from her port side, forcing her dangerously close to

some sort of radar glove, a small mountain on the hull of the ship. As she

swerved to avoid it, she lost George.

She heard his scream as he flew out of the rumble seat, and craned her

head around just in time to see him caught in the metalshod fist of a

Hovercraft pilot.

Dana swung around hard, but lost sight of the alien craft. But Marie

Crystal was on the net telling her that she had seen the rear collision and

had the enemy right in front of her.

Dana couldn't figure out what Marie was doing in the gap, but she

didn't stop to think about it. She shot forward and attained the open skies

again, scanning for Marie's Logan-mode Veritech.

Below her, one of her teammates had just reconfigured from tank to

Guardian mode and loosed a bolt at one of the alien sky-sleds. Dana had a

sinking feeling as she traced the shot's trajectory: it caught the Bioroid that

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was holding George, sending it careening into a fiery spin, and on a collision

course with Marie's fighter.

Crystal broke too late, impacting against the out-of-control sled and

falling into a spin of her own. Dana didn't know who to watch: the Bioroid

holding Sullivan or Marie. Suddenly the tank that had fired off that fateful

round-Sean's tank was reconfiguring to Battloid, and leaping up to catch

Crystal's ship. Despite her fascination, Dana involuntarily averted her eyes;

but when she looked again, both Veritechs were reasonably intact.

Then all at once there was an explosion at nine o'clock. She turned, as

her mecha was rocked by the shockwaves.

The Bioroid was history.

And George Sullivan was dead.

She screamed his name and flew into the face of the angry fireball,

hoping, expecting to find who knew what. And as her scorched tank

emerged she recalled his last words to her: The rest is up to you.

Inside the grounded fortress, the Masters watched a schematic display

of their descending rescuer, a hundred yards overhead now and already

extending the grapplers and tendrils that would secure the link-up.

"We are ready," Dag reported.

Shaizan nodded eagerly. "Good. Deploy the Zor clone toward their

strongest defenses...We must make certain that he is conveniently captured

by the Micronians..."

One minute Angelo Dante was sitting in the cockpit of the Gladiator

doing his lethal best, and the next thing he knew he was airborne, turning

over and over...

He hit the ground with a thud that knocked the breath from his lungs

and left him unconscious for a moment. When the world refocused itself, he

recognized what was left of his mangled Hovertank, toppled on its side and

burning.

Dante got to his feet, promising to tear the aliens apart, even as a

105

sledded Bioroid dropped in for the kill. It was that gleaming red job, Angelo

noticed, already outside himself and braving it out, the hero he was born to

be. But just then a strange thing happened: a pinpoint blast from the

fortress bull's-eyed the Hovercraft, sending sled and pilot into a fiery crash

in the craggy outcroppings near the Earth Forces front lines.

Dante heard an atonal scream of agony issue from the craft as it fell.

"They shot down their own guy!" a puzzled Dante said out loud,

figuring he would live to see another day after all...

Dana tried to erase the fiery image of Sullivan's death as she piloted the

Hovertank back toward the fortress once again. Split-screen data

schematics were running parallel across the monitor screen of Valkyrie's

targeting computer, directing the mecha's weapons systems to the

coordinates that would spell doom for the fortress. And by the look of things,

there wasn't much time left.

With the rescue ship overhead now, the grounded fortress was actually

lifting off, still the target of countless warheads that were exploding

harmlessly against the alloyed hull-its complex network of close-in

weaponry silent-and apparently drawing on all the reserve power available

to it. The entire ridgeline appeared to be effected by its leave-taking; a

deafening roar filled the air, and the ground was rumbling, sending rock

and shale sliding down the steep slopes of those unnatural tors. Massive

whirlwinds of gravel and debris spun from the underside of the ascending

ship, as though loosed from traps set an eternity ago.

As Dana closed on the twin fortresses, she could see that four panels

had opened along the dorsal side of the first, revealing massive socketlike

connectors, sized to accept shafts-glowing like outsize radio tubes-that were

telescoping from circular portals in the bulbous, spiny anchor shown by the

second.

"Faster!" Dana urged her Hovertank, the cockpit screen flashing, the

parallel series of schematics aligned. Then the mecha was suddenly

reconfiguring to Gladiator mode, retroing to an abrupt halt, the cannon

106

already traversing and ranging in. Having surrendered to the dictates of the

computer, Dana could do nothing but sit back and pray that she had arrived

in time.

The fortresses were linked in an obscene technomating, one atop the

other, ascending and accelerating now, scarcely a three-meter wide gap

between them.

Dana's mecha fired once, its energy bolt finding that narrow interface

and detonating squarely against the linkup anchor. On all sides, explosive

light erupted from the empty space between the ships, and the upper

fortress seemed to shudder, list, and collapse over its mate.

But the ships continued to rise.

"It can't be!" Dana shouted over the net. "Why didn't it work?!" Even as

she said it, though, she knew the answer. The computer was flashing its

internal debriefing to her, but she didn't need to double-check the screen for

what she knew in her guts: she had been a split-second too late,

two-hundred yards out of the required lethal cone.

Dana had one last look at the fortresses before they disappeared into

battle clouds and smoke, a close encounter of the worst kind.

107

CHAPTER TEN

I think I sensed something about the alien pilot even before Cochran

turned to me with the results of his findings. Even now I can't say where that

feeling originated or where my present thoughts are directed. I only know

that the moment seemed full of import and grand purpose; something about

the alien triggered a change in me that is beginning to overshadow my entire

life.

From the personal journal of Major General Rolf Emerson

General Emerson's official car (a black Hoverlimo with large tail fins, a

purely decorative vintage front grill, and an antique, winged hood ornament)

tore from the Ministry's parking lot at a little after three o'clock on the

morning following the liftoff of the enemy fortresses. Rolf was in the

backseat, silent and contemplative, while his young aide, Lieutenant Milton,

felt compelled to issue cautions. Monument City felt like a ghost town.

Emerson had logged two hours of sleep when the call from Alan

Fredericks of the GMP had awakened him: something interesting had been

discovered near the liftoff site-an alien pilot, alive and apparently well.

Rolf asked himself what Fredericks was up to: he had brought the alien

to Miles Cochran's lab, and had yet to inform Commander Leonard of his

find. With rivalry running high between the GMP and the militaristic

faction of the general staff, Fredericks's position was suspect. Perhaps,

however, this was merely the GMPs way of making up for the hatchet job

they did on the first captured Bioroid pilot. Emerson knew when he

recradled the handset exactly what he could be setting himself up for but

felt the risk justified. He had asked Colonel Rochelle to rendezvous with

him at Cochran's lab, then called for his car.

"This is going to look suspicious, sir," Milton told him for the third time.

"The chief of staff racing out of the Ministry in the middle of the night

without telling anyone where he's going."

108

"I know what I'm doing, Captain," Rolf said brusquely, hoping to put

an end to the man's ceaseless badgering.

"Yes, sir," the lieutenant replied, sullenly.

Emerson had already turned away from him to stare out the window

once again. At least I hope I know what I'm doing, he thought...

Rochelle, Fredericks, and Nova Satori were already waiting at

Cochran's high-tech lab on the outskirts of Monument City. The good doctor

himself, a bit of a privateer who walked that no-man's land between the

GMP and the general staff, was busy keeping the Bioroid pilot alive.

Emerson stared down at the alien now from the observation balcony

above one of the lab's IC rooms. Cochran had the handsome elfin-featured

young android on its back, an IV drip running, a trach insert in its neck. The

pilot was apparently naked under the bedsheets, and surrounded by banks

of monitoring and scanning apparatus.

"Our last captive died through official mishandling," Rolf was telling

the others, his back turned to them. "I want to make certain that doesn't

happen again."

"Yes, sir," Fredericks spoke for the group.

Rolf swung around to face the three of them. "Who found him?"

Nova Satori, the GMPs attractive raven-haired lieutenant, stepped

forward and offered salute. "I did, sir. Out where the fortress was."

Emerson's eyebrows beetled. "What were you doing out there,

Lieutenant?"

Satori and Fredericks exchanged nervous looks. "Uh, she was looking

for one of our agents," Fredericks said.

Emerson looked hard at the hawk-faced colonel. "And just what was

one of your agents doing out there?"

Fredericks cleared his throat. "We're trying to determine that ourselves,

General."

Satori related her brief explanation, purposely keeping George

Sullivan's name out of it. But it was the singer/spy she had been looking for;

more important, the terminal he'd been carrying when last seen-something

109

Dana Sterling had better be able to account for. Nova had heard sounds

coming from one of the downed Hovercrafts and upon investigation had

discovered the alien pilot. He was ambulatory then, but collapsed soon after

being taken into custody, as though someone had suddenly shifted him to

standby mode.

"And he seems fluent in English," Nova concluded.

"All the more reason to let Cochran handle this personally," said

Emerson. "And as of this moment I want an absolute information blackout

regarding the prisoner."

Rochelle was saying little, waiting for Emerson to finish; but he now

felt compelled to address the issue that had been plaguing him since the

general's phonecall some hours before. It was a privilege of sorts to be

included in Emerson's clique, but not if it was going to mean a courtmartial.

"General," he said at last, "are you proposing that we keep this from

Commander Leonard?"

Satori and Fredericks were hanging on Emerson's reply.

"I am," he told them evenly.

"Exactly what do you want us to do with the specimen?" Fredericks

asked after a moment.

"I want you to run every test you can think of on him. I need to know

how these creatures breathe, think, eatdo you understand me? And I need

the information yesterday."

"Yessir," the three said in unison.

Just then Professor Cochran stepped into the observation room,

removing his surgical mask and gloves, while everyone questioned him. He

waited for the voices to die down and looked into each face before speaking,

a slightly bemused expression on his face.

"I have one important fact to report straightaway." He turned and

gestured down to the Bioroid pilot. "This alien...is Human."

The three Masters summoned their Scientist triumvirate to the

command center of the newly ascended fortress. The Zor clone had survived

110

and was presently in the hands of the Micronians. The functioning

neuro-sensor that had been implanted in the clone's brain told them this

much, although there were as yet no visuals. Schematics that filled the

chamber's oval screen showed that some damage had been sustained, but

all indications suggested it was nothing that need concern them. It was clear,

however, that the Scientists did not share their Masters' enthusiasm for the

plan.

"By capturing the Zor clone, the Micronians have played right into our

hands," Shaizan said by way of defense. It was certainly unnecessary that he

explain himself to the triumvirate, but it was clear that a certain

rebelliousness was in the air, pervasive throughout the ship, and Shaizan

hoped to lay some of that to rest. "They themselves will lead us to the

Protoculture Matrix."

"And suppose the Micronians should attack us again?" the

lavender-haired androgyne asked defiantly.

"One purpose of the neuro-sensor is to keep us appraised of all their

military activities," Bowkaz told him, indicating the screen schematics. "We

will have ample warning."

"Yes...and what happens if the Micronians should discover your

precious neuro-sensor? What then?"

"Discover it?" Shaizan raised his voice. "That's absurd! Recording of

the hyper-frequency of the device is far beyond the realm of their crude

scientific instruments. The idea is ludicrous!"

The scientist scowled. "Let us hope so," his synthesized voice seemingly

hissed.

Dana felt Sean's gentle tap on her shoulder and heard a forearm chord

of sharps and flats. She opened her eyes to sunrise, distant crags like

arthritic fingers reaching up into pink and grey layers of sky. She had fallen

asleep at the ready-room's piano, although it took her a moment to realize

this, head pillowed on forearms folded across the keyboard. Sean was

standing behind her, apologizing for disturbing her, making some joke

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about her guarding the eighty-eights all night and asking if she wanted

some breakfast. The rest of the 15th were scattered about the room, arguing

and moping about by the looks of it.

"...And who the hell was snoring all night?" she heard Angelo ask in his

loudest voice. "Somebody sounded like a turbo-belt earth-mover with a

faulty muffler."

Louie was off in a comer tinkering with some gadget that looked like a

miniature Bioroid. Bowie was sullen-faced in another, distanced from the

scene by earphones.

"I couldn't sleep a wink," Dana told Sean weakly. She remembered now

that she had been thinking of Sullivan and his senseless death, been trying

to peck out the melody of that old Lynn-Minmei tune...

"You need to cut loose of that responsibility once in a while," the

former lieutenant was telling her. "Let your hair down and have some fun,

take life a little less seriously."

Dana got up, reached for the glass of juice she had left on top of the

piano, and went to refill it at the dispenser. "There's a war going on, pal,"

she said, pushing past Sean. "Course you're not the first soldier I've run

across who's found the call of the wild more attractive than the call of duty."

"Look who's talking," Sean laughed.

"I mean, I wouldn't want to think that the war was interfering with

anything, Private."

"I don't let it cramp my style, Dana."

Style? she thought, sipping at the juice: Let me count the comebacks to

that one...But as she said this to herself, fragments of last night's dream

began to surface. There was George, of course, but then he became all mixed

up with the images of that long-haired Bioroid pilot she and Bowie had

crossed lasers with weeks ago-Zor! And then somehow her mother had

appeared in the dream, telling her things she couldn't summon up now...

"...and I'm definitely not into hopeless romances."

Dana whirled, not sure whether she should be angry, having missed his

intro; but she saw that Sean was gesturing to Bowie.

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"Now here's a guy who was operating just fine up until a few weeks ago.

Now he's out there where the shuttles don't run. And for a dream-girl at

that!"

Bowie didn't hear a word of this, which Dana figured was just as well.

Sean made a few more lame comments as he left the room. Dana went over

to her friend and positioned herself where she could be seen, if not heard.

"Sean says you're upset," Dana said when he removed the headphones.

Bowie made a face. "What does he know?"

"It's that alien dame," said Sergeant Dante from across the room, his

nose buried in the newspaper. "You better set your sights on something a

little more down to earth, my friend."

Dana threw Angelo a look he could feel clear through the morning

edition. "Just like that, huh Sergeant? He just snaps his fingers and forgets

her."

"For cryin' out loud, she's an alien!...Uh, no offense, of course," he

hastened to add.

"No offense taken," Dana told him. "I know your type can't help it. But

I don't care if this girl Musica is 'Spiderwoman,' Angelo. You can't tell

someone to just turn her heart on and off like a light switch."

"Her heart, Dana? Her heart?"

Dana had her mouth opened to say something, but she noticed that

Bowie was crying. When she put her hand on his shoulder, he shrugged it

off roughly, stood up, and ran from the room.

Dana started to chase him, but thought better of it halfway down the

corridor. Did her father have to put up with this from his squad? she

wondered. Did her mother? And where were they, she asked the

ceiling-where?!

Lieutenant Marie Crystal had slept well enough, thanks to the

anodynes she received at the base hospital after the crash of her ship. But

the pills' effects had worn off now, and she couldn't locate a joint or muscle

in her body that wasn't crying out for more of the same medication. She

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reached out for the bedside hand mirror and took a glance at her disheveled,

pale reflection. Fortunately her face didn't look as bad as the rest of her felt.

It was deathly hot and dry in the room, so she cautiously got out of bed,

shaking as she stood, and changed out of the hospital gown into a blue satin

robe someone had been thoughtful enough to drop by the room. She left it

open as she climbed back under the sheets; after all, it wasn't as if she were

expecting visitors or anything.

But no sooner had that thought crossed her mind when she heard

Sean's voice outside the door. Having literally landed in the arms of the

Southern Cross's ace womanizer was perhaps only a shade better than

having piled into a mountain, but it was something she was going to have to

live with for a while. She hadn't, however, anticipated that the trials were to

begin so soon.

Marie ran a hand through her short, unruly hair and pulled the robe

closed; Sean was running into some Nightingale flack at the door.

"Couldn't I just have five minutes with her?" Marie heard Sean say.

"Just to drop off these pretty flowers that I picked with my own teeth?"

The nurse was resolute: no one was permitted to enter.

"But I'm the guy who practically saved her life! Listen: I won't talk to

her or make her laugh or cry or anything-really-"

"No visitors means no visitors," the nurse told him.

Just whose side is she on? Marie began to wonder.

"Well isn't it just my luck to find the one nurse in this whole hospital

who's immune to my many charms."

Now that sounded like the Sean Marie knew.

"Here," she heard him say now. "You keep the flowers. Who knows,

maybe we'll just meet again, darlin'."

Marie's pale blue eyes went wide.

She was wrong: landing in the arms of his Battloid was worse than

having crashed!

General Emerson was in the war room when Leonard finally caught up

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with him. He had been dodging the commander's messages all day,

victimized by a dark premonition that Leonard had somehow learned about

the alien pilot. And as soon as Leonard opened his mouth, Emerson knew

that his instincts had been correct. But strangely enough, the commander

seemed to be taking the whole thing in stride.

"I've been told that you're keeping a secret from me, General

Emerson," Leonard began, with almost a lilt to his voice. "I thought I'd

come over here and ask you myself: is it true that another Bioroid specimen

had been captured?"

"Yes, Commander," Rolf returned after saluting. "As a matter of fact,

Professor Cochran is running a complete series of tests on him."

Leonard suddenly whirled on him red-faced with anger.

"Just when were you planning to tell me about him, General?!"

Techs throughout the room swiveled from their duty stations.

"Or perhaps you were considering keeping this information from me!"

Leonard was bellowing.

Rolf didn't even get the chance to stammer his half-formed

explanation.

"I'm taking the prisoner out of your hands, General. He'll be analyzed

by military scientists, not renegade professors, do you understand me?"

Rolf fought to keep down his own anger while Leonard stormed off, his

boot heels loud against the acrylic floor in the otherwise silent room. "We

mustn't let this prisoner be destroyed," he managed to get out without

yelling. "We learned nothing from the last one. This time we must proceed

impartially, and Miles Cochran's our best hope for that."

The commander had stopped in his tracks and swung around to face

Emerson, regarding him head to toe before responding. And when he spoke

his voice was loud but controlled.

"I'm sure our people could do just as well, General. But it seems to me

that you've taken a personal interest in this prisoner. Am I correct?"

"I have," said Emerson, and Leonard nodded knowingly.

"Is there something more I should know about this particular

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android?"

Rolf was tight-lipped. "Not at the moment, Commander."

"Well then, since you're so...determined...But keep in mind that this

one is your responsibility, General. There are too many variables in this

situation already."

Emerson saluted and Leonard was turning to leave, when all at once a

novel blip appeared on the threat board. The power play forgotten, all eyes

focused on the screen. Every terminal in the room was clacking out paper.

Techs were hunched over their consoles, trying to make sense of the thing

that had just appeared in sublunar orbit out of nowhere!

"What is it?" demanded Leonard, his hands pressed to the command

console. "Someone answer me!"

"A ship, sir," said a female enlisted-rating. "And it appears to be

moving in to engage the enemy!"

116

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Major Carpenter and crew left today. "Lang's shot in the dark," as some

are calling it. But I have already let it be known that the responsibility is mine,

and one part of me is even envious of their leavetaking. Simply to attempt a

return to Earth, to quit this malignant corner of space, this crazed and

maniacal warfare against our own brothers and sisters and the unstopable

creatures borne of the Tirolians' savagery and injustice...It is clear to me that

my destiny lies elsewhere, perhaps on Optera itself, Lisa my life and strength

beside me.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

The ship that had materialized prom hyperspace and created that blip

on the threat board was long overdue in arriving in Earthspace. Ten years

was hardly a measurable quantity by galactic standards; but to a planet

brought once to the brink of extinction and now enmeshed in a war that

threatened what little remained, ten years was an eternity-and the

appearance of the ship a godsend. Unfortunately such feelings were soon to

prove premature...

Lost in space for the past five Earth-years-lost in corridors of time, in

continuum shifts and as yet unmapped mobius loops-the cruiser had finally

found its way home. Before that, it had been part of the Pioneer

Expeditionary Mission-that ill-fated attempt to reach the homeworld of the

Robotech Masters before the Masters' sinister hands reached out for Earth.

The Mission, and that wondrous ship constructed in space and launched

from Little Luna, had had such noble beginnings. The Protoculture Matrix

thought to have been hidden inside the SDF-1 by its alien creator, Zor, had

never been located; the war between Earth and the Zentraedi terminated.

So what better step to take, but a diplomatic one: an effort to erase all

possibilities of a second war by coming to terms with peace beforehand.

But how could the members of the SDF-3 have known-the Hunters,

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Lang, Breetai, Exedore and the rest-how could they have foreseen what

awaited them on Tirol and what treacherous part T. R. Edwards would

come to play in the unfolding of events? Earth itself would have no

knowledge of these things for years to come: of the importance of a certain

element indigenous to the giant planet Fantoma, of a certain quasi-canine

creature native to Optera, of a budding young genius named Louie Nichols...

For the moment, therefore, the cruiser being tracked by Earth Defcon

seemed like the answer to a prayer.

The ship was a curious, one-of-a-kind hybrid, fabricated on the far side

of the galactic core by the Robotechnicians of the SDF-3 before the schism

between Hunter and Edwards, for the express purpose of hyperspace

experimentation: the SDF-3 hadn't the means to return to Earth, but it was

conceivable that a small ship could accomplish what its massive parent

could not. Those conversant with Robotech warship classifications could

point to the Zentraedi influences on this one, notably the cruiser's sleek

sharklike form, and the elevated bridge and astrogation centers that rose

like a dorsal fin just aft of its blunted bow. But if its hull was alien, its Reflex

power center was pure Terran, especially the quadripartite design of the

triple-thruster units that comprised the stern.

The cruiser's commander, Major John Carpenter, had distinguished

himself during the Tirolian campaign against the Invid, but five-years in

hyperspace (was it five minutes or five lifetimes, who could say which?) had

taken their toll. Not only on Carpenter, but on the entire crew, every one of

them a victim of a space sickness that had no name except madness,

perhaps.

When the ship had emerged from hyperspace and a vision of their

blue-and-white homeworld had filled the forward viewports, there wasn't a

crewman aboard who believed his eyes. They had all experienced the cruel

tricks that awaited the unwary techno-voyager, the horrors...Then they had

identified the massive spade fortresses of the alien fleet. And there was no

mistaking these, no mistaking the intent of the soulless Masters who guided

them.

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Carpenter had ordered an immediate attack, convinced that Admiral

Hunter himself would have done the same. And if it seemed insane, the

commander told himself as Veritech teams tore from the cruiser's ports-one

relatively undersized ship against so many-one had merely to recall what

the SDF-1 had done against four million!

Even the strategy was to be the same: all firepower would be

concentrated against the flagship of the alien fleet; that destroyed, the rest

would follow.

But Carpenter's crew put too much stock in history, which, despite

claims to the contrary, rarely repeats itself. More important, Carpenter

forgot exactly who he was dealing with: after all, these weren't the

Zentraedi...these were the beings who had created the Zentraedi!

In the command center of the alien flagship the three Masters

exchanged astonished looks over the rounded crown of the Protoculture cap.

Lifting their eyes to the bridge readout screens, the look the three registered

could almost have passed for amusement: a warship even more primitive in

design than those the Earth Forces had sent against them in the recent past

had just de-folded from hyperspace and was attempting to engage the fleet

single-handedly.

"Absurd," Bowkaz commented.

"Perhaps we should add insult to the list of strategies they have

attempted to use against us."

"Primitive and barbaric," said Dag, observing how the fortress's

segmented cannons were annihilating the Earth mecha, as though they were

a swarm of mites. "We do them a service by obliterating them. They insult

themselves with such gestures."

Behind the Masters the Scientist triumvirate was grouped at its duty

station.

"We have locked on their battle cruiser at mark six bearing

five-point-nine," one of them reported now.

Shaizan regarded the screen. "Prepare for a change in plans," he told

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the blue-haired clone. "Ignore the drones and deal directly with the cruiser.

All units will converge on your coordinates. Our ship will hold the lead...for

the glory of the kill."

The techs, staff, and officers in the war room were still yahooing and

celebrating the return of the Pioneer Mission. Supreme Commander

Leonard had left immediately to confer with Chairman Moran, leaving

General Emerson in charge of the surprise situation.

"Sir!" said one of the techs. "Pioneer Commander is requesting backup.

Shall we scramble our fighters and Ghosts?"

Emerson grunted his assent and nodded, curiously uneasy, almost

alarmed by the sudden turn of events. Was it possible, he asked as the techs

sounded the call-the return of his old friends, a new beginning?...

Bowie and Dana, each cocooned in private thoughts, sequels to earlier

interrupted musings, were in the 15th's rec room when they heard the

scramble alert.

"All pilots to battle stations, all pilots to battle stations... All ground

crews to staging areas six through sixteen... Prepare fighters for rendezvous

with SDF-3 attack wing!"

Dana was on her feet even before the final part of the call, disregarding

as always the particulars and details. Rushing past Bowie, she grabbed his

arm and practically hauled him into the barracks corridor, where everyone

was double-timing it toward the drop-racks and mecha ports. She hadn't

seen such frenzy, such enthusiasm, in months, and wondered about the

cause. Either the city was under full-scale attack or something miraculous

had happened.

She saw Louie racing by and called for him to stop. "Hey, what's all the

ruckus about?!" she asked him, Bowie breathless by her side.

Louie returned a wide grin, eyes bright even through the ever-present

goggles. "It seems the cavalry's arrived in the nick of time! We've got

reinforcements from hyperspace-the Pioneer's come home!"

Dana and Bowie almost fell over.

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Something miraculous had happened!

"We need a miracle, John," Commander Carpenter's navigator said

hopelessly. "We've thrown everything but the kitchen sink at them.

Nothing's penetrating those shields."

The two men were on the bridge of the cruiser, along with a dozen

other officers and techs who had wordlessly witnessed the utter destruction

of their strike force. That those men who had lived through so much terror

should perish at Earth's front gate, Carpenter thought, half out of his mind

from the horror of it. But he was determined that their deaths count for

something.

"Have the first wing make an adjustment to fifty-seven mark

four-nine," he started to say when the cruiser sustained its first blow.

Carpenter was sent reeling across the bridge by the force of the impact,

and several techs were knocked from their chairs. He didn't have to be told

how serious it was but asked for damage reports nevertheless.

"Our shields are down," the navigator updated. "Ruptured. Primary

starboard thrusters have all been neutralized."

"Enemy fortress right behind us, Commander!" said a second.

In shock, Carpenter glanced at the screens. "Divert all auxiliary power

to the port thrusters! All weapons astern fire at will!"

"What the devil's going on up there?!" Leonard shouted as he paced in

front of the war room's Big Board.

Rolf Emerson turned from one of the balcony consoles to answer him.

"We've lost all communication with them, Commander."

Leonard made a motion of disgust. "What about our support wing?"

"The same," Emerson said evenly.

Leonard whirled on the situation screen, raised and waved his fist, a

gesture as meaningful as it was pathetic.

A radiant rash broke out across the pointed bow of the Masters'

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flagship, pinpoints of blinding energy that burst a nanosecond later,

emitting devastating lines of hot current that ripped into the helpless

cruiser, destroying in a series of explosions the entire rear quarter of the

ship.

More than half the bridge crew lay dead or dying now; Carpenter and

his second were torn up and bloodied but alive. The cruiser, however, was

finished, and the major knew it.

"Ready all escape pods," he ordered, the heel of his hand to a severe

head wound. "Evacuate the crew."

The navigator carried out the command, initiating the ship's

self-destruct sequence as he did so.

"We're locked on a collision course with one of the fortresses," he told

his commander. "Seventeen seconds to impact." Throwing a final switch, he

added: "I'm sorry, sir."

"Don't apologize," Carpenter said, meeting his gaze. "We did what we

could."

On a lifeless plateau above Monument City, Dana and Sean,

side-by-side in the cramped forward seats of a Hovertransport, watched the

skies. The rest of the 15th were not far off. Escape pods from the defeated

Pioneer ship were drifting down almost lazily out of azure skies, gleaming

metallic spheres hung from brightly colored chutes. Taking in this tranquil

scene, one would have been hard pressed to imagine the one they had

inhabited only moments before, the heavenly inferno from which they had

been dropped.

Dana had learned the sad truth: it had not been the SDF-3 out there,

but a single ship long separated from its parent. Like herself. The crew's

last-ditch effort to hurtle the cruiser into one of the six alien fortresses had

proved futile. Still, she had hopes that one among the valiant survivors who

were now stepping burned and damaged from the escape pods would have

some words for her personally, some message, even one five or fifteen years

old.

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Sean maneuvered their Hovertruck toward one of the pods that had

landed in their area. Dana leapt out and approached the sphere, welcoming

home its two bloodied passengers, and doing what little she could to dress

their facial wounds. The men were roughly the same height, pale and

atrophied-looking after their many years in space and badly shaken from

their recent ordeal. The older of the two, who had brown hair, a wide-eyed

albeit handsome face, introduced himself as Major John Carpenter.

Dana told them her name and held her breath.

Carpenter and the other officer looked at one another.

"Max Sterling's daughter?" Carpenter said, and Dana felt her knees

grow weak.

"Do you know my parents?!" she asked eagerly. "Tell me...are they...?"

Carpenter put his hand on her shoulder. "They were when we last saw

them, Lieutenant. But that was five years ago."

Dana exhaled loudly. "You've got to tell me everything."

Carpenter smiled weakly and was about to say something more when

his companion grasped him by the upper arm meaningfully. Again the two

looked at each other, exchanging some unvoiced signal.

"Lieutenant," the major said after a moment. "I'm afraid that will have

to wait until I speak with Commander Leonard."

"But-"

"That means now, Lieutenant Sterling," Carpenter said more firmly.

Supreme Commander Leonard hadn't logged many hours in deep

space, but he was familiar enough with the ups and downs to recognize a

case of vacuum psychosis when he saw it; and that's exactly what he felt he

and General Emerson were up against while listening to the mad ravings of

Major Carpenter and his equally spacehappy navigator. In Leonard's office

at the Ministry, the two men rambled on about the Pioneer Expeditionary

Mission, repeatedly referring to a schism among the Earth Forces-T. R.

Edwards on the one side, Admiral Hunter and some group calling itself the

Sentinels on the other. But in spite of it all, High Command's principal

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question had been answered: these aliens were indeed the Robotech

Masters. They had abandoned their homeworld of Tirol and traveled across

the galaxy to Earthspace; and it was beginning to seem obvious to Leonard

that they had not come to reclaim anything, but to destroy the Human race

and lay claim to and colonize the planet itself.

The two injured officers had concerns of their own, as anyone would

after fifteen long years offworld, and the commander did his best to answer

these without breaching security. He described the initial appearance of the

Robotech ships; the fighting centered around the lunar base and space

station Liberty; the voluntary disappearance of the Robotech Factory

Satellite by the Zentraedi who operated it.

Leonard looked hard at the techno-voyagers after his brief summary of

the past several months, hoping to return the topic to present mode.

"Naturally, we're grateful for what you attempted to do out there," the

commander told them now. "But good god, man, what could you have been

thinking of? One ship against so many! Why not have waited until the rest

of the Pioneer Mission arrived?"

Leonard noticed Carpenter and the navigator exchange glances and

braced himself for the worst. Carpenter was looking at him gravely.

"I'm afraid you've misunderstood us, Commander," the major began.

"The Pioneer Mission will not be returning. Admiral Hunter and General

Reinhardt can only offer you their prayers, and their firm conviction that

the fate of Earth lies in good hands, with you and the valiant defense forces

under your command, sir. But expect no assistance from the SDF-3,

Commander, none whatsoever."

"And may God help them," the navigator muttered under his breath.

Leonard made a sound of disapproval.

"I wonder if there'll be anyone left on Earth to appreciate their prayers

by the time they return from space," Rolf said, his back to the room while he

watched a dark rain begin to fall on Monument City.

124

CHAPTER TWELVE

Of course, Cochran told me about the alien pilot. Emerson was a fool to

believe he could keep this from me. He has no inkling of the existence of the

Secret Fraternity, that one which binds great minds together, all petty

loyalties be damned...But I am thankful for his foolishness; it allows me a

freer hand in these matters. Unfortunately, though, the pilot was moved

before I could intervene. And now that I have learned his name, it is

imperative that I get to him as soon as possible. If he is who I believe him to

be...my mind reels from the possibility. In certain ways, I, Zand, am his child!

Dr. Lazio Zand,

Event Horizon: Perspectives on

Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

In the now heavily guarded laboratory of Miles Cochran, the Bioroid

pilot who would come to be known as Zor Prime, writhed in apparent agony,

his lean but well-muscled arms straining at the ties that kept him confined

to the bed. Masked and gowned, Rolf Emerson, Nova Satori, and Alan

Fredericks watched with concern, while the professor monitored the

captive's vital signs from the sterile room's staging area. The fine-featured

young alien had come out of his coma three hours before (prompting

Emerson's second predawn visit to the lab), but claimed to know nothing of

his past or present circumstances.

"A most convenient case of amnesia," Fredericks suggested, breaking

the uneasy silence that prevailed when Zor's cries had subsided some. "I

think it's all too obvious that the creature is a mole. These so-called

Robotech Masters hope to infiltrate an agent in our midst by the most

transparent of ploys. A Bioroid pilot who suddenly has no memory of his

past," the GMP man scoffed. "Absurd. Not only that, but after-mission

reports by the Fifteenth Tactical Armor suggest that this particular Bioroid

was deliberately shot down by the enemy forces."

Rolf Emerson nodded his head in agreement. "I'm tempted to agree

125

with your assessment, Colonel. Still, there are ways we can use him"

"How do we know he isn't one of our own hostages returned to us?"

Fredericks interrupted. "Perhaps the aliens have sent us a brainwashed

captive simply to convince us that we're waging a war against members of

our own species?"

"General," Cochran spoke up, walking into their midst with an armful

of diagnostic readouts. "Excuse me, Emerson, but please allow me to

present my findings before you succeed in convincing yourself this pilot is

an enemy plant."

"Go ahead, Doctor," Rolf said apologetically.

Cochran ran his forefinger down the data columns of the continuous

printout sheet. "Yes, here..." He cleared his throat. "Scans of the limbic

system, extending along the hippocampal formation of the medial temporal

lobes, fornix, and mammillary bodies, to the anterior nuclei of the thalamus,

cingulum, septal area, and the orbital surface of the frontal lobes, most

definitely point to diffuse cerebral impairment of the memory centers.

"It's quite unlike anything I've seen," he added, removing his glasses.

"Inappropriate to classify as retrograde or anterograde, and, as it appears,

only marginally posttraumatic. Closer to a fugue state than anything else,

but I'd like to consult with Professor Zand before committing myself to any

reductive explanation."

"Absolutely not," Emerson barked, stepping forward. "I don't want

anyone else involved in this case, least of all Zand. Is that understood?"

Cochran gave a reluctant nod.

"Now what are our options, Doctor?" Rolf wanted to know.

Cochran replaced his eyeglasses. "Well, treatment varies with the

subject, General. We might try hypnosis, of course."

"What about environmental manipulation?" Nova suggested. The GMP

lieutenant looked over at the pilot. "His brain patterns are obviously

abnormal, but they do appear to be stabilizing. Suppose we transferred him

to another environment."

"Somewhere more Human, you mean," said Rolf.

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"Yes."

"But who would supervise the treatment?" asked Fredericks.

"I would," Nova said confidently. "He doesn't seem to have a violent

nature, and if the amnesia is genuine, he'll need someone to trust and

confide in..."

"It has been known to work..." Cochran agreed.

"I think you're onto something, Lieutenant," Rolf said encouragingly.

"But where do you suggest we bring him?"

"The base hospital," Nova answered. "We can secure a floor and

gradually bring him into contact with the outside world." She gestured to

the room's equipment banks and ob windows. "This place is simply too

intimidating, too sterile."

"There's a reason for that," Cochran said defensively, but Emerson cut

him off.

"I'm putting you in charge, Lieutenant Satori. But remember: the

strictest security must be maintained."

Marie Crystal took a healthy bite out of a Red Delicious apple (from the

fruit basket her squad had sent over, along with the flowers presently vased

on the bedside table), and flipped through the pages of the glamour

magazine she had purchased. It seemed a little bizarre-reading about

projected fashion trends for the coming year when there was a war on-but

she assured herself that it had probably always been thus: no matter how

cruel the circumstance, the fundamental things applied...

She was sitting crosslegged on the bed, the mag spread in front of her,

an appealing portrait in dark-blue satin, when she heard a knock at the

door.

"All right, c'mon out," a mock-stern voice threatened. "This is hospital

security, and we know there's a perfectly healthy person in there."

There was no mistaking Sean's voice. She told him to wait a minute,

stashed the magazine under the bed, and got back under the covers,

clutching them tight to her neck and doing a reasonable impersonation of a

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patient.

Sean entered a moment later, flowers in hand. "Hi, Marie," he said, full

of good cheer. "I thought I'd drop by and apologize for not coming sooner,

but they've been keeping us pretty busy...Who the heck brought you these?"

he said of the squad's gift, pulling the yellow flowers from the vase and

trashing them. He replaced them with his own bouquet.

Marie made a face behind his back and faked a small but agonized

moan, subsiding to quiet whimpers as he turned to her.

"Hey, what's the matter?" he said, leaning over her now.

She came up hard and fast with a backhand as he was reaching out for

her, slapping his arm away.

"Get away from me!" she growled into his surprised look. "What's the

matter, you big jerk-you couldn't find any nurses to play with?"

Sean was open-armed, in a gesture of bewilderment. "Marie, you must

have taken one on the head. I came to see you"

"Just keep your hands to yourself!" she snarled, then groaned for real

as a stabbing abdominal pain snuck up on her.

"My, my...you poor little darlin'," Sean teased. "You really are a credit

to your uniform, the way you handle the excruciating agony. Or maybe I

should say lack of uniform," he added, leering at her fondly.

Marie ignored the comment, not bothering to conceal her cleavage as

she leaned up onto her elbows. "I'm faking it, is that it?" she said angrily.

Sean risked sitting on the edge of the bed, his hand stroking his jaw

contemplatively. "No...Well, actually, the thought had crossed my mind."

He folded his arms and sighed. "You know, looking back on it, I wonder

what I was thinking when I saved your life."

Marie's eyes narrowed. "Looking for gratitude, Sean?"

"Aw, come on," he smiled. "Maybe just a little friendliness, that's all."

Marie's head dropped back to the pillow, eyes on the ceiling. "This

whole mess should never have happened. It's all Sterling's fault I'm lying

here like a lump."

"Calm down," he told her sincerely. "You can't blame Dana."

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She turned on him. "Don't tell me what I can do ground-pounder! I

hate the Fifteenth-the whole bunch of you."

Sean held up his hands. "Wait a minute-"

"Get out of here!" she yelled at him, the pillow raised

like a weapon

now. "Out!"

He backed off and exited the room without another word, leaving her

to stare at the pink roses he brought and wonder if she had overplayed her

hand a bit.

In the corridor outside Marie's room, Sean bumped into Dana, a

bouquet in her hand and obviously on her way to pay a visit to the

Fifteenth's newest enemy. Sean stepped in front of her, blocking her

advance on Marie's room with small talk.

"And if you're here to see Marie, you can forget it," he finally got

around to saying. "The staff didn't give the okay for her to have visitors."

Dana looked suspicious. "She was admitted days ago. Besides, they let

you see her, didn't they?"

"Uh, they made an exception for me," Sean stammered as Dana pushed

her way past him. "After all, I'm the guy who-"

"Does she still hate me?" Dana asked, suddenly realizing the purpose of

Sean's double-talk.

Sean's forced smile collapsed. "Even worse. She's mad enough to say

that she hates me! It'll probably blow over," he hastened to add. "But right

now she kinda considers you responsible."

"Me?! Why?" Dana pointed to herself. "Jeez, I didn't shoot her down!"

"We know that," Sean said reassuringly. "She's just looking for

someone to blame. And if she hadn't been trying to save that Sullivan

dude..."

"Brother..." Dana sighed, shaking her head.

They were both silent for a moment; then turned together to the sound

of controlled commotion at the far end of the hospital corridor. A dozen

GMP soldiers, armed and armored, were supervizing the rapid transit of a

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stretcher to the elevator banks.

"What's all this about?" Dana wondered aloud.

"The place is crawling with Gimps," Sean told her. "I heard they

cordoned off the whole ninth floor."

Dana snorted. "Leonard's probably here for his annual physical."

But even as she said it, something didn't sit well. Nonetheless, she gave

a final look at the draped form on the stretcher and shrugged indifferently.

To avoid a scene like the one recently played in war room, Rolf

Emerson decided it was best to inform Leonard of the new arrangements he

had made for the alien pilot, who, shortly before being transferred to the

base hospital, had given his name as Zor.

Zor! the name Dana had mentioned in debriefing sessions following

the rescue of Bowie at the Macross mounds. It had seemed coincidental

then, but now...

Zor!

A name notorious these past fifteen years; a name whispered on the

lips of everyone connected with Robotechnology; a name at once despised

and held in the greatest reverence. Zor, whom the Zentraedi had credited

with the discovery of Protoculture; Zor, the Tirolian scientist who had sent

the SDF-1 to Earth, unwittingly ushering in the near destruction of the

planet, the eclipse of the Human race.

Of course it was possible that Zor was a common name among these

people called the Masters. But then again...

Emerson said as much to the commander when he reported to him.

Leonard, however, was not impressed.

"I don't care what he calls himself, or whether he's Human or android,"

the commander growled. "All I know is that your investigation has thus far

been fruitless. The man's name is no great prize, General. Not when we're

after military data."

"Professor Cochran is confident that the change in environment will

result in a breakthrough," Rolf countered.

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"I want facts!" Leonard emphasized. "This Bioroid pilot is a

soldier-perhaps an important one. I want him pumped for information and

I frankly don't give a damn how that's accomplished."

Emerson held his ground. "All the more reason for caution at this point,

Commander. His mind is fragile, which means he can either snap or become

useful to us. We've got to find out what the Masters are after."

Leonard's fist came down on the desk. "Are you blind, man? It's

obvious what they want-the complete obliteration of the Human race! A

fresh planet to use for colonization!"

"But there's the Protoculture Matrix"

"To hell with that mystical claptrap!" Leonard bellowed, up on his feet

now, hands flat on the desk. "And to hell with caution! Bring me results, or

I'll have that pilot's head, General-to do with as I see fit!"

The day's rain seemed to have scoured the Earth clean; there were even

traces of redolent aromas in the washed air, sweet smells wafting in on an

evening breeze that found Dana on the barrack's balcony. Strange to stare at

the sawtoothed ridgeline now, she said to herself, the fortress gone but the

harsh memories of its brief stay etched in her thoughts. The recon mission,

a city of clones; then Sullivan, Marie, countless others...And presiding over

all of it, robbing her of sleep these past few nights, the image of the red

Bioroid pilot: his handsome, elfin face, his long lavender-silver locks...

Dana closed her eyes tightly, as though in an effort to compress the

image to nothingless, atomize it somehow and free herself. It was worse

now that she had gleaned some information about the Expeditionary

Mission.

She might never see her parents again.

Silently, Bowie joined her at the balcony rail while her eyes were shut;

but she was aware of his presence and smiled even before turning to him.

They held each other's hands without exchanging a word, drinking in the

sweet night air and the sounds of summer insects. There was nothing that

needed to be said; since their youth they had talked about Max and Miriya,

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Vince and Jean, what they would do when the SDF-3 returned, what they

would do if it never returned. They were close enough to read each others

thoughts sometimes, so it didn't surprise Dana when Bowie mentioned the

alien girl, Musica.

"I know that the fortress represents the enemy," he said softly. "And

I'm aware that I don't have much to go on, Dana. But she's not one of

them-I'm sure of it. Something went off deep in my heart...and suddenly I

believed in her."

Dana gave his hand a reaffirming prolonged squeeze.

Was that what her heart was telling her about the red Bioroid

pilot?-that she believed in him?!

He had been moved; he knew that much. This room was warmer than

the first, empty of that corral of machines and devices that had surrounded

him. He also knew that there were fewer eyes on him, mechanical and

otherwise. His body was no longer host to that array of sensor pads and

transmitters; the vein in his wrist no longer receiving the slow nutrient flow;

his breathing passages unrestricted. His arms...free.

Gone, too, were the nightmares: those horrible images of the mindless

attack launched against him by protoplasmic creatures; the giant warriors

who somehow seemed to have been fighting on his behalf; the explosions of

light and a seering pain; the death and...resurrection!

Were they nightmares or was this something recalled to

life?-something one part of him used to keep buried!

There was a female seated in a chair at the foot of his bed. Her

handsome features and jet-black hair gave her an alluring look, and yet

there was something cool and distant about her that overrode the initial

impression. She sat with one leg crossed over the other, a primitive writing

board device in her lap. She wore a uniform and a communicatorlike

headband that seemed to serve no other purpose than ornamentation. Her

voice was rich and melodic, and as she spoke he recalled her from the short

list of memories logged in his virgin mind, recalled her as the one who had

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asked questions of him earlier on, before this sleep had intervened, gently

but probing. He remembered that he desired to trust her, to confide in her.

But there had been precious little to tell. Other than his name...his name...

Zor.

"Welcome back," Nova Satori said pleasantly when she noticed Zor's

eyes open. "You've been asleep."

"Yes," he said uncertainly. His mind seemed to speak it in several

tongues at once, but foremost came the one the female was versed in.

"Did you dream again?" she asked.

He shook his head and raised himself up in the bed. The female-Nova,

he remembered-motioned to a device that allowed him to raise the head

portion of the padded sleeping platform. He activated it, marveling at its

primitive design, and wondering why the bed wasn't reconfiguring of its

own accord. Or by a prompt from his thought or will...

"What's the last strong impression you remember from your past?"

Nova asked after a minute.

For some unknown reason, the question angered him. But with the

anger returned the dream, more clearly now, and it seemed to him suddenly

that at one time he had been a soldier of some sort. He told her as much,

and she wrote something on her notepad.

"And after that?"

Zor searched for something in his thoughts, and said: "You."

"Nothing in between?"

Zor shrugged. Once again the dream resurfaced. Only this time it was

more lucid still. His very body was participating in the memory, recalling

where it stood and how it felt. And with this came a remembrance of pain.

Nova watched him slide into it and was on her feet and by his side

instantly, trying to soothe him, recall him from whatever memories were

driving him into such unmitigated suffering and agony. She felt a concern

that ran much deeper than curiosity or nefarious purpose, and gave in to it,

her hand on his fevered brow, her heart beating almost as rapidly as his.

"Let go of it, Zor," she said, her mouth close to his ear. "Don't push

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yourself-it will all come back to you in time. Don't drive yourself to this!"

His back was arched, chest heaved up unnaturally. He groaned and put

his hands to his head, praying for it to end.

"Make it stop," he said through clenched teeth. Then,

curiously: "I

promise I won't try to remember any more!"

Nova stepped back some, aware that he wasn't talking to her.

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He's the leader of a race of clones,

Who'd come to Earth to smash some bones.

He's the Bioroid with lots of fight,

The Disturber of your sleep at night;

He screams "Victory, bab-ee, victory!

I'm invincible, I'm somebody!"

lust get into a duel with-

the Crimson Pilot

"Crimson Pilot,"

music by Bowie Grant, lyrics by Louie Nichols

Dana left the windows of her room open that night, hoping that

starlight and those redolent aromas would provide some soporific

enchantment and ease her into sleep. But instead the light cast menacing

shadows on the wall and the smells and sounds drove her to distraction. She

tossed and turned for most of the night and just before sunrise lapsed into a

fitful sleep plagued by nightmares that featured none other than the red

Bioroid pilot. As a result she slept late. Upon awakening, still half in the grip

of the night's fear and terror, she literally ran to the compound's battle

simulator, where she chose land-based Bioroid combat scenario

one-D-one-niner, and exorcised her demons by annihilating a holographic

image of the crimson pilot, setting a new high score on the mecha-sized

machine.

Entering her initials to the software package, however, was not prize

enough to stabilize the circular pattern of her thoughts, and she carried a

mixture of anger and bafflement with her for the rest of the day.

Sunset found her wandering into the 15th's ready-room, where Bowie

was at the piano, vamping on the atonal progression of half-notes he had

heard in Musica's harp chamber and finally been able to recall (and score).

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Angelo, Louie, Xavez, and Marino were lounging about.

"It's good to hear you playing again," Dana complimented him. She

tried to hum the curious melody. "What is that?"

"It's as close as I can get to Musica's harp," he told her, right hand

running through the modulating riff again. Bowie put both hands to it now,

improvizing an enhancement. "What kind of people can create music like

this and still find it in their hearts to kill?"

"Don't confuse the people with their leaders," Dana started to say as

Sean burst into the room. He made a beeline for her and was out-of-breath

when he spoke.

"Lieutenant, you're not gonna believe this, but do I have a piece of

news!"

"Out with it," she said, without a clue.

"I did some investigating and found out who the GMP have stashed

away on the ninth floor of the medical center. It's a captured Bioroid pilot-a

red Bioroid pilot."

Dana's mouth fell open. "Did you see him?"

Sean shook his head. "They've got him under pretty tight security."

"How did you find this out, Sean?" Bowie asked from the piano stool.

Sean touched his forefinger to his nose. "Well, my friend, let's just say

that it pays to make friends with a cute nurse now and again..."

Dana made an impatient gesture. "Do you think it's him, Sean-Zor, the

one we saw in the fortress?"

"Don't know," he confessed.

"I've got to see him," she said, beginning to pace.

"Those Gimps might have some different ideas about that," Sean said

to her back.

"I don't care about them," Dana spat. "I've got some questions to ask,

and that Bioroid pilot's the only one capable of answering them!"

"Yeah, but you'll never get to see him," Louie Nichols chimed in.

Angelo had also picked up on the conversation. "I don't know what

you've got in mind, Lieutenant, but I don't think it's a good idea to stick our

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noses where they don't belong."

"In any case," Louie pointed out, "he's probably beep programmed

against divulging information. It's not likely you'll get anything out of him."

"You're probably right," Dana agreed. "But I don't think I'm going to be

able to get a good night's sleep until I confront him face-to-face."

Sean put his hands on his hips and thought for a moment. "Well, if it

means that much to you, then let's do it. But how are we going to get in

there?"

Dana considered this, then smiled in sudden realization. "I've got an

idea," she laughed; then quickly added, "Fasten your seatbelts, boys-it's

going to be a bumpy night!"

An hour later, a bogus maintenance transport was rumbling through

the darkened streets of Monument City en route to the medical center.

Louie had the wheel. Stopped at the gate, Angelo, riding shotgun, flashed a

phonied-up requisition and repair order at the sleepy guard.

"Maintenance wants us to fix a ruptured ion gun in one of your X-ray

scanning sequencers," the sergeant said knowingly.

The guard scratched absently at his helmet and waved the vehicle

through. As it entered the underground garage, Louie said, "'By the way, ion

guns don't rupture."'

"Rupture, shmupture," Angelo rhymed. "It got us in, didn't it?"

Louie steered the transport to a secluded parking area. Angelo hopped

down from the front seat and threw open the rear doors: out stepped Bowie,

Sean, Marino, and Xavez-all in coveralls and visored caps-and Dana, in a

nurse's uniform that was at least three sizes too small for her and fit her like

a second skin. Louie and Bowie immediately began toying with the

hospital's phone and com line switches, while the rest of the men started to

strip down...

In Zor's ninth floor room, Nova put her clipboard aside to answer the

phone. A nasal voice at the other end said:

"This is the office of Chief-of-Staff Emerson, Lieutenant Satori, and the

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general requests that you meet with him at the Ministry as soon as

possible."

Nova frowned at the handset and recradled it. She apologized to Zor for

having to leave so suddenly, and a minute later was on her way...

Bowie, who had a reputation for vocal impressions, unpinched his nose

and informed the team that Satori had taken the bait. The coveralls gone

now, Angelo wore bedroom slippers and an unremarkable cotton terry robe.

Marino and Xavez were dressed like orderlies. Sean was in his usual

uniform.

"Okay," Dana told the sergeant, "make your move in ten minutes."

"I never missed a cue," Angelo promised.

Nova told the two GMP guards who were stationed either side of the

door to Zor's room to keep their eyes peeled.

"I'll be back shortly," she said.

At the same time, someone pushed the buzzer outside Marie Crystal's

seventh floor room. She was sitting in bed, reading a bodybuilding

magazine, which she quickly hid from sight, slipping beneath the sheets as

she did so and feigning sleep.

A moment later, the doors hissed open and in walked Sean.

Marie sat up, surprised. "What are you doing here at this time of

night?"

Meanwhile, on the ground floor, Dana, toting a large shoulderbag (her

nurse's cap in place), was escorting a stretcher to one of the elevators; the

stretcher was borne by Xavez and Marino, both wearing surgical masks-to

hide their smiles as much as anything else. They entered the car, pushing

seven on the floor display, just as the adjacent elevator opened, allowing

Nova Satori to step out.

Upstairs, Sean was down on one knee at Marie's bedside. "I got to

thinking...you lying here all by yourself. I was worried about you."

"Oh, no kidding," she returned sarcastically.

"Seriously," he persisted. "It's a beautiful night, Marie. And I thought

you might like to go up on the roof and enjoy it with me. A change of

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scenery, you know?"

Marie laughed. "Sounds great, but these doctors watch every move I

make."

Sean stood up and lowered his voice conspiratorially. "How 'bout if I

promised you you wouldn't get in any trouble?"

She threw him a puzzled look.

"I cleared it all with the administration," he said with elaborate

innocence.

Marie couldn't help but be a little suspicious. "Why me, Sean?"

"Because you're so sweet and gentle," he flattered her. "I can't help

myself!" Then all at once there was a light rap at the door and he seemed

suddenly impatient. "Come on, get ready. Your limousine's here."

No sooner had Marie run a hand through her hair and cinched her robe,

than the doors hissed open again. Two masked orderlies appeared bearing a

stretcher.

Marie leaned back, startled and having second thoughts. "Sean, I don't

know about this..."

"What's the matter?" he said, corning over to the bed. "Let's not look a

gift horse in the mouth." Without warning he pulled back the bed covers,

and a second later, Marie found herself in his arms, being carried over to

the waiting stretcher and those grinning orderlies...

As soon as the 15th's trio had conveyed the stretcher a safe distance

down the deserted corridor, Dana raced into Marie's room, doffed the

starched cap, and opened the window. She leaned out and looked up: Zor's

room was two stories directly above. From the shoulder bag, she retrieved a

stun gun, a short coil of rope, and four climber's suction cups. She put her

arm through the former, and strapped the cups to her knees and wrists. She

tucked the stun gun into the uniform's narrow belt. That much

accomplished, she climbed up on to the window stool and commenced her

fly-crawl up the marble side of the building.

Reaching the ninth floor, she peered cautiously into the window,

almost losing her grip when she saw Zor, the crimson pilot, sitting in the

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room's single bed, a uniform jacket over his shoulders. She lowered herself

down when he seemed to sense her presence and turned to the window. She

stayed that way for several seconds, then checked her watch. It read 9:29.

"Almost time," she said quietly, fixing a rope to the window's exterior

frame...

At exactly 9:30 a slippered and bathrobed Sergeant Dante stepped

from one of the ninth floor elevators. Three GMP sentries were on him

immediately.

"Get back in the elevator," one of them told him curtly. "This floor's

closed to the public."

Angelo waited for the doors to close and then said: "That's all right, I'm

allowed to be up here." He began to walk off nonchalantly. A second guard

restrained him.

"Check this guy out with security," the guard ordered one of his

companions. The man ran to the wall phone, but reported back with a shout

that the line was dead.

Thanks to Louie's basement tampering, Dante thought.

"Lemme go, you guys," the sergeant protested to the two who had

taken hold of his arms. "I tell ya, I'm here to see my wife!"

"Simmer down, pal," said the one on Dante's left. "We're going to go for

a little walk. You coming quietly or do we have to drag you?"

Dante smiled inwardly and prepared himself for battle...

In his room a short distance down the corridor, Zor heard the

commotion and got out of bed to investigate. It was all the diversion Dana

needed: she leapt in through the window, her stun gun in hand.

"Stop right there!" she told Zor, who was just short of the door.

Zor turned and began to walk toward her, wordless but determined.

"Stay back!" Dana warned him, arming the gun and bringing both

hands to the grip. "If you don't stop, I'll fire!"

But he was undeterred, one moment stalking her, and the next three

feet over her head in a superleap that brought him down precisely on the

gun. As it flew from her hands, Dana dropped back, adopting a defensive

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pose and waiting for him to come.

Zor leaned forward as if to step, but ducked adroitly as she came

around with a roundhouse right. He threw himself against her midsection,

taking her down easily and pinning her to the floor, his left hand clamped

on her left wrist, his right forearm pressed to her throat, firm enough to

strangle the breath from her.

"Why are you trying to kill me?" he demanded. "What have I done?!"

Dana gasped for air, managing to say: "You're responsible for killing

men under my command!" And more!

She saw his eyes go wide in surprise, felt the pressure against her

trachea lessen, and made the most of it, heaving up with her legs and

throwing him over her head. But the nimble alien landed on his feet after a

back flip, combat-crouched as Dana moved in on him.

He avoided her side kick and dropped to the floor, sweeping Dana's

legs out from under her with his right foot. She came down hard on the side

of her face and lost it for a moment. When she looked up, the alien had the

gun trained on her.

"You're the one," Dana said, struggling to her feet. "The red Bioroid,"

"What are you saying?!" He questioned her.

Dana had her fists clenched, her feet spread for another kata. "You're

the one we saw at the mounds-the one who captured Bowie! And the one in

the fortress!"

Zor relaxed his gun hand somewhat, his face betraying the

bewilderment he felt. "Nova told me the same thing," he said with troubled

brow. "What does it mean-Bioroid ?"

Dana straightened from her pose. "Your memory only works when

you're killing my men, is that it?!" she shouted. "I don't know why I'm even

bothering with you, alien!"

Zor winced as though kicked. "Alien?" he seemed to ask himself; then:

"I'm a Human being!"

Which he barely got out: Dana's powerful front kick caught him square

on the chin and slammed him back against the wall. He still had the gun,

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but it was now hanging absently by his side.

"I was there when you crawled out of that Bioroid!" Dana seethed.

"Don't deny it!" She stood waiting for him to get up, her hands ready; but

the alien remained on his knees, blood running from his mouth..

"I won't," he said contritely. "But I wasn't responsible for what I was

doing." Zor looked at her and said: "You've got to believe me!"

"Who made you do it?! Who are they?!" Dana demanded.

Resigned, Zor threw the gun at her feet. "Can't you see?" he said, full of

self-disgust. "I've lost my memory..."

Back at the elevators, Bowie Grant, in a white coat as large on him as

Dana's nurse's uniform was small, had come to Angie's assistance. Not that

the sergeant needed any: one guard was already unconscious, the one

gripped in Dante's left arm well on the way, and the third was more than

halfway there. Somehow, all of them had lost their helmets in the struggle.

"Ah, excuse me, Mr. Campbell," Bowie was saying in his best

professorial voice. "Your wife's room is on the eighth floor."

Dante tossed the two sentries aside dismissively and went on to finish

his scene with Bowie, playing to an all but unconscious house.

"So I made a mistake, Doc-is that any reason for these gorillas of yours

to jump down my throat?!"

Bowie, too, was willing to play along, especially now that the three were

coming around. "Calm down, Mr. Campbell. They were only doing their job.

And you can hardly blame them for that, right?"

Angelo laughed shortly and let a whistling Bowie lead him away...

The tune Bowie whistled was a strange one, with an unusual but

haunting melody. It was Dana's signal to make her escape. She said as much

to Zor who was now seated on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands.

"You can't remember anything at all?" Dana asked one final time.

"No, it's hopeless," Zor started to say but suddenly looked up at the

sound of the whistled tune. "That music," he said anxiously. "What is that

music?!"

Dana knelt beside him. "One of my troopers learned it from an alien

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girl on the fortress," she explained.

"Yes...I remember!" Zor exclaimed. "A girl named...Musica."

Dana gasped. "That's right!" So Bowie's vision was real after all, she

said to herself.

"I'm not even certain how I know that," Zor shrugged...

Elsewhere, Lieutenant Nova Satori was storming back to the med

center elevators. "No one makes a fool out of me like that!" she seethed out

loud when the car doors closed...

"But this is great!" Dana was telling the alien, no longer anxious to

leave the room. "It's starting to look like your memory's returning!"

Zor shook his head in despair.

And suddenly the doors hissed open.

Dana thought it might be Bowie and Angelo, but when she turned she

found Nova Satori glaring at her.

"I'll have your bars for this, Sterling!" she heard the GMP lieutenant

say. Dana took two quick steps and launched herself out the window,

rappeling down to Marie's room with Nova's threats ringing in her ears.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Ironically, the man who could have helped most was also the one who

could have done the most damage-Dr. Lazlo Zand, who emerges from his own

works and those of numerous commentators as a kind of voyeur to Earth's

ravaging by the Robotech Masters. His pathological manipulation of Dana

Sterling has only recently come to light [see Zand's own Event Horizon] and

one understands completely why Major General Rolf Emerson was loath to

involve the scientist in any of Earth's dealings with its new invaders. But it

must be pointed out that only Zand, Lang's chief disciple, could have provided

the answers to the questions Earth Command was asking. It is indeed

fascinating to speculate what might have come from a meeting between Zand

and Zor Prime.

Zeitgeist,

Insights: Alien Psychology and the Second Robotech War

Nova's first thought was to have Dana arrested by the GMP for

knowingly violating security, tampering, or whatever trumped-up charges

the boys at dirty tricks could dream up. But the fact remained that Dana's

encounter with Zor had resulted in a breakthrough of sorts. When Nova had

questioned him after Dana's swashbuckling escape from the ninth floor

hospital room, it was evident that something within the alien had been

stirred; he had at least partial recall of names and faces apparently linked to

his recent past, perhaps while onboard the alien fortress itself.

Professor Cochran was already revising his initial diagnosis based on

Nova's updated report; he was now rejecting the idea of fugue state and

thinking more in terms of the retrograde type, or possibly a novel form of

transient global amnesia. Brain scans done after the alien's fight with

Lieutenant Sterling indicated that the limbic abnormalities detected earlier

had lessened to some degree; but Cochran was still in the dark as to the

etiology. He pressed Nova to openly call in Professor Zand, but Nova

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refused; she promised him, however, that she would make mention of Zand

during her meeting with General Emerson.

The general was furious with Sterling for about five minutes. After that,

Nova could see that a new plan had come to him, one that would place Dana

Sterling at the very center of things. Nova would retain control over Zor's

debriefing, but Dana was to provide the stimulus.

Emerson explained all this to Dana scarcely a week after the med

center players had made chumps out of the GMP sentries.

Dana hadn't heard word one from Nova or High Command during that

time and had spent her idle moments preparing herself for the brig,

working her body to exhaustion in the barracks workout rooms, and trying

to make some sense out of the conflicting emotions she now felt toward the

alien pilot. Zor had been spirited away from the base hospital and even Sean

hadn't been able to pry any additional information from the nursing staff.

So Dana was hardly surprised when the call came for her to report to

General Emerson at the Ministry. But there were surprises in store for her

she couldn't have guessed at.

Rolf was seated rigidly at his desk when Dana announced herself and

walked into the spacious office. Colonel Rochelle was standing off to one

side, Zor to the other. Dana offered a salute and Rolf told her in a scolding

voice to step up to the desk.

"I suppose there's no need for me to introduce you to Zor, Lieutenant

Sterling. It is my understanding that you two have already met."

Dana gulped and said, "Yes, sir. You see-"

"I don't want to hear your explanations, Dana," Rolf interrupted,

waving his hand dismissively. "This issue's confused enough already." He

cleared his throat meaningfully. "What you may or may not know, is that

Zor is apparently amnesiac-either as a result of the crash or perhaps

through some neural safeguard the Masters saw fit to include in their

Human pilots. Nevertheless, it is our belief that he can be brought through

this. In fact, your previous...encounter with him seems to have provided a

start in that direction."

145

"Uh, thank you, sir," Dana muttered, instantly wishing she could take it

back. Rolf's eyes were flashing with anger.

"Don't thank me, Lieutenant! What you did was unconscionable, and at

some point you'll be expected to make amends for it!" Rolf snorted. "But for

the time being, I want to place Zor under your personal direction. I want

him to take part in the Fifteenth's activities."

Dana was aghast. "Sir?...Do you mean?..." She looked over at Zor,

struck by how terrific he looked in the uniform and boots someone had

supplied him: a tight-fitting navy blue and scarlet jumpsuit, cinched by a

wide, gold-colored belt, and turtle-necked, making his lavender locks

appear even longer. His faint smile brought a similar one to her face.

"I think I understand the logic here," she said, turning back to Rolf. "A

military assignment may jog his memory in some way."

"Precisely," said Rolf. "Do you think you can handle it, Dana?"

Again she looked over at Zor; then nodded. "I'm willing to try, sir."

"And what about your team?"

Dana thought her words out carefully before speaking. "The Fifteenth

is the finest unit in the Southern Cross, sir. Everyone will do their part."

"And Bowie?"

Dana's lips tightened. Bowie would be harder to handle. "I'll talk to

him," she told Rolf. "He'll come through, and I'm willing to stake my bars

on it."

Emerson looked hard at her and said, "You are, Lieutenant."

When Dana had left the room with Zor, Colonel Rochelle had some

things to say to Emerson, starting off by disavowing the entire project. "It's

insane," he told Rolf, gesticulating as he paced in front of the desk. "And I

want no further part of it. An alien pilot-an office, at that-wandering around

with one of our top units...Suppose he is a mole? Suppose he's wired or

rigged in some way we can't even fathom? We might just as well give the

Masters an open invitation to have a peek at our defenses."

Emerson let him speak; Rochelle wasn't saying anything that Rolf

hadn't already thought, feared, scrutinized, and analyzed to death.

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"And why Sterling? She's a discipline problem and a-"

Rochelle cut himself off short of the word, but Emerson finished the

thought for him.

"That's right, Colonel. She's half-alien herself. Part Human, part

Zentraedi, and therefore the perfect choice in this instance." Rolf exhaled

loudly, tiredly. "I know full well how risky this is. But this Zor is our only

hope. If we can show him who we are, then perhaps he can become our

voice to the Masters. If they're after what I think they're after, we've got to

use Zor to convince them that we don't have it."

"The legendary Protoculture factory," Rochelle said knowingly. "I just

hope you know what you're doing, sir."

Eyes closed, Emerson leaned back in his chair and said nothing.

"Our new recruit's a very skilled soldier," Dana told the assembled

members of the 15th. "I can tell you that he was assigned to us personally by

General Emerson himself, and that I have the utmost confidence in him."

The team, including a couple of greens fresh from the Academy, was

gathered at ease in the barracks ready-room. Dana had been building up the

new recruit for the past five minutes and Angelo for one was beginning to

get suspicious. Especially with all this talk about having faith enough in the

decision of High Command to accept a mission that seems somewhat

extraordinary on the face of it.

"All right, you can come in now," the lieutenant was saying, half-turned

to the ready-room sliders.

The doors hissed open and the lean, clean-shaven recruit entered. He

was handsome in an almost androgynous way, above-average height, and

affected a shade of light purple dye in his long hair. The yoke and flyout

shoulders of his uniform were green to Dana's red, the cadets' yellow, and

Louie's blue. Dana introduced him as Zor.

The name had no meaning to some of them, but Angelo gave loud voice

to the sudden concerns of the rest.

"Is this the alien?!"

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Dana said, "Zor is officially part of our unit."

Now everyone went bananas-all except Bowie, who Dana had spoken to

beforehand and who was now gritting his teeth. Murmurs of disbelief and

confusion swept through the ranks, until Dante angrily called them to a

halt.

"Lieutenant, is this the real dope?" Corporal Nichols asked

unconvinced.

"Blazing Battloids," Dana responded. "Do you think I'm making this

up?"

Again the comments began and again Dante silenced them, stepping

forward this time and fixing Zor with a gimlet stare.

"Lieutenant, I saw this alien shot down by his own troops! I saw it with

my own eyes! The guy's a spy! What is it-too obvious for High Command to

see that?! He's a damn spy!"

"No way I want him for my wingman," Sean called out.

"QUIET!" Dana shouted as things began to escalate.

"Now, I'm still in command here, and I'm telling you that Zor is

officially assigned to our unit! You let the general staff worry about whether

or not he's a spy. It's our job to make him feel welcome and that's the long

and short of it!" Dana stood, arms akimbo, with her chin thrust forward.

"Any questions?" When no one spoke, she said: "Dismissed!"

All but Louie Nichols began filing out of the room, throwing hostile

stares at the new recruit. The corporal, though, went over to Zor and

extended his hand.

"Welcome to the Fifteenth," Louie said sincerely.

Zor accepted the proffered hand haltingly. It was easy enough to see

where most of the team stood; but what was he supposed to feel toward

those who were suddenly befriending him?

"So, big fella," Louie smiled. "You and Dana-you two getting along all

right?"

The situation was, of course, fascinating to Nichols: the child of a

bio-genetically engineered XT and a Human, now made responsible for an

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XT who might very well have contributed his own cellular stuff to the

genetic slushpile... Dana and Zor could be father and daughter, sister and

brother, the possibilities were limitless. But what intrigued Louie even more

was the idea that this Zor was related in some way to his Tirolian

namesake-the genius who had discovered Protoculture itself!

The recruit Zor was puzzled by Louie's question; but Dana seemed to

have seen through the corporal's friendly gesture.

"Don't you have something better to do?" she said leadingly. "Perhaps

down in the mechanics bays or something?"

Louie took the hint and smiled. "Guess I could find something to

do...Later, Dana."

"And I'll thank you to address me in the proper manner from now on!"

she barked as he was backing off.

Louie reached the sliding doors just ahead of Eddie Jordon, the

younger brother of the private who had met such a cruel end during the

fortress recon mission. Dana noticed the cadet add his own hostile glare to

the pool before exiting, fixing Zor with a look that could kill.

They placed him in a small room, empty save for a single chair and

dark save for the meager red light of a solitary filament bulb. It was all so

alien to him: these encounters, events and challenges. And yet one part of

his mind was surely familiar with it all, directing him unthinkingly through

the motions, putting words in his mouth, summoning emotions and

reactions. But he was aware of the absence of connection, the absence of

memories that should have been tied to these same encounters and

emotions. A reservoir that had been drained, which they now hoped to refill.

Taken from the room he was left alone in the dark, although his senses

told him that this area was much larger than the last, and that he was under

observation. The slight one who had escorted him to this new darkness had

strapped a weapon on him, an unused laser pistol that somehow felt

primitive and archaic in his grip. Again, the thought assaulted him that

there was a kind of mindless redundancy at work here: the weapon ought to

149

be firing of its own accord, adapting itself to his will, reconfiguring...

But all at once a spotlight found him, and he was no longer alone but at

the center of a whirling ring of sequenced targets; and he understood that

the nature of the test was to destroy each of these within a predetermined

interval of time. Commands and countdowns were conveyed to him over an

amplified address system he could not see, loud enough for him to hear

through the padded silencers which someone had thought to place over his

ears.

The black and white targets had been whirling faster and faster, but

were now dispersing, abandoning the tight order of the circle for the safety

of random, chaotic movement. A digital chronometer flashed in the

background.

He spread his legs and clasped the weapon in both hands, empty of all

thought and centered on picking out the sequenced target. As number one

came in behind him, he crouched, turned, and squeezed off a charge,

disintegrating the substanceless thing in a fiery flash. Number two flew in

from his right and he holed it likewise, remaining in place for numbers

three and four.

He risked a gaze at the numerical countdown and realized that he

would have to press himself harder if he was to destroy all of them. His next

blast took out two at once.

Now they were coming at him on edge, but still his aim proved true, as

two, then three more targets were splintered and destroyed. He took out the

final one with an overhead shot just as the countdown reached

zero-zero-zero-zero.

As the room's overhead lights came on, Zor holstered the pistol and

removed the safety muffs. Dana came running out of the control booth,

complimenting Zor on his score. Behind her, were several members of the

15th, sullen looks on their faces.

"I can't believe it!" Dana was gushing. "Where did you learn to shoot

like that? You beat the simulator! No one's ever done that before! You're

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good, Zor; you're really good!"

Zor felt something akin to pride but said nothing. He heard one of the

cadets say, "Yeah, too good."

He was young, on the small side, with dark brown bangs and an

immature but not unpleasant face. He had his arms folded across his chest,

defiantly.

Eddie, Zor recalled.

"You can shoot all right, but what now, hot shot? You gonna destroy

the Bioroids or us?"

Zor remained silent, uncertain.

"Can't hear you, big man!" Eddie taunted him. "What's the matter-cat

got your tongue, tough guy?"

"Come on, Eddie," said Dana. "Lay off."

"You come on, Lieutenant!" the youth told her. "I don't buy this lost

memory crap!"

Without warning Eddie drew his sidearm and leveled it at Zor, who

stood motionless, almost indifferent. Dana had stepped in front of him,

warning Eddie to put the gun away.

Instead the cadet grinned, said, "Here!", and gave the gun a sideways

toss. Dana ducked, stumbling into Angelo's arms, and Zor caught the thing.

"And I don't think he's so tough, either!" Eddie said, walking away

from all of them.

Dana drew herself upright and stared after him, hands on her hips.

"Wise guy!" she muttered.

Zor looked down at the weapon, feeling a sudden revulsion.

The alien remained the outcast, but most of the 15th grudgingly grew to

accept him. It seemed unlikely that he would ever be accepted as one of the

team, but by and large the hostile looks had ceased. Except for Bowie and

Louie, they all simply ignored him. Dana was a special case; her interest in

Zor was certainly beyond the call of duty and especially worrisome to

Sergeant Dante. There wasn't much he could do about it, but he kept his

151

eyes on Zor whenever he could, still convinced that the Bioroid pilot was an

agent of the Robotech Masters, and that this amnesia thing was spurious at

best.

Only Sean was neutral on the issue of Dana's infatuation. It wasn't as if

he hadn't given it any thought; it was just that he was too wrapped up in his

own infatuation with Marie Crystal to pay it any mind. Ever since the night

on the med center roof, Sean had been preoccupied with the raven-haired

lieutenant, almost to the point of forgetting entirely about the other women

in his life.

On the day Marie was due to be released from the hospital, Sean

decked himself out in his fanciest suit and wiped the base florist clean of

bouquets. He was on his way to see her, when Dana almost bowled him

down in the barracks corridor. Sterling, too, was dressed to the nines: a

skirt and blouse of pink shades, a white silk scarf knotted around her neck.

"Now listen, trooper," she laughed, "Marie's not going to be as easy as

shooting down skylarks, do you get me?" She emphasized this by flicking

her forefinger against one of the half-dozen bouquets he was carrying,

shattering the petals from a rose blossom.

"Don't kid yourself," he joked back. "I shoot pretty well...And what's

with the civvies?" he said, giving her the once-over.

"Just a debriefing session with Zor," Dana told him, starry-eyed.

"Debriefing? In those clothes?"

"Yep," she nodded, checking her watch. "And I'm late! So tell Marie I

said hi, and that I'll come and see her as soon as I can!"

With that, Dana was gone, leaving Sean to mutter in her wake: "A true

space cadet."

Dana's idea of a debriefing session was to take Zor to Arcadia,

Monument City's one and only amusement park. There they ate the usual

junk food and fed credits to the usual games, but only Dana was interested

in going on the rides. Zor watched her from the sidelines, as she allowed

herself to be turned in circles in an endless variety of ways-upside-down

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here, centrifugally there, backwards, forwards, and sideways.

It amazed Zor that after all this she could still retain an appetite for the

gooey sweets she favored; but then again, there was so much that was

uncommon about her. At times he felt as though he knew her in some

forgotten past that predated life itself, and was not so much a part of his

amnesiac state, but had more to do with mystical links and occult

correspondences.

For Dana it was much the same, only more so (as all things were with

her). She recognized her infatuation and did nothing to repress or disguise

it. Zor was supposed to be treated openly and honestly, and Dana didn't see

why love couldn't jog his memory just as well as war might. On strict orders

from General Emerson, she had yet to tell him of her mixed ancestry; but

given his condition, the confession would have little impact in any case. So

she simply tried to keep things fun.

At one point he suggested that they return to the base, but she vetoed it,

pointing out to him that she was the one who was in charge.

"But I'm the one you're experimenting on!" he told her, making that

sad face that made her want to hold and love him. In return, he caught the

look on her face and asked if something was wrong with her.

"I think I'm in love," she sighed, only to hear him respond: "That word

has no meaning for me."

It was a line she had heard often enough in the past; so she lightened

up at once and convinced him to at least ride the Space Tunnel with her. He

wasn't wild about the idea, but ultimately relented.

The Space Tunnel was Arcadia's main attraction; prospective

dare-devils were not only required to measure up to a height line but

practically submit a note from their physicians as well. It was a high-speed,

grueling rollercoaster ride through tunnels that had been designed to play

dangerous tricks with the optic and auditory senses. Riders found

themselves harnessed side-by-side into two-person antigrav cars that were

hurled into a phantasmagoric session with motion sickness and pure fright.

After Zor was made to understand that Dana's screams were the result

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of exhilaration and not terror, he, too, began to surrender to the experience.

It was only when they entered the infamous swirling-disc tunnel that things

started to come apart.

There was something about the placement of those light discs along the

tunnel walls, something about their vaguely oval shape and curious

concavity that elicited a fearful memory...one he could not connect to

anything but horror and capture. It seemed to tug at the very fabric of his

mind, rending open places better left sealed and forgotten...

Dana saw his distress and desperately tried to reach for him; but she

was held fast by both gee-forces and the harness mechanism itself. She

could do nothing about the former but wait for a calmer point along the

course; so in the meantime she went to work on the harness, pulling the

couplers free of their sockets. Almost immediately she realized she had

miscalculated: the car was accelerating into a full rollover and in an instant

the shoulder harness was undone and she was thrown from the seat.

Zor saw her propelled to the rear of the speeding car, the shocking

sight strong enough to overcome memory's hold. Except that it wasn't only

Dana that he reached out for after he'd undone his own harness, but the

radiant image of a woman from his past, a gauzy pink image of love and loss,

not easily forgotten in this or any other lifetime.

Zor wrestled with the image of the woman for several days. He didn't

mention it to Dana or Nova Satori, but it accompanied him wherever he

went, his first clear-cut memory, seemingly a key to that Pandora's Box

stored in his mind.

He was with the GMP lieutenant now, viewing a series of video images

that were apparently supposed to have some meaning for him, but had thus

far proven less than evocative. Tall fruit-bearing trees of some kind, tendrils

wrapped around an eerily luminescent globe; protoplasmic vacuoles

free-floating amidst a neurallike plexus of cables and crossovers; a

round-topped armored cone rising from the equally armored surface of a

galactic fortress...

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"We've been over and over these tapes, Zor," Nova said, illuminating

the room with the tap of a switch. "What are you trying to do-drive us both

crazy?"

Zor made a disgruntled sound. "I'm getting closer each time I look at

these things. I can feel it, I can just feel it. I'm going to remember.

Something, at least. I'll break through." Zor stroked his forehead absently,

while Nova loaded a video cassette into a second machine. "Let's take a look

at that first program again."

"What happens if you do regain your memory?" Nova asked him coolly.

"Do you crack up or what?"

"Who would care, anyway?" Zor threw back.

Nova smiled wryly. "Maybe Dana, but she's about the only one."

The GMP lieutenant's attitude toward the alien had changed, although

Zor was at a loss to understand it. He sensed that it had something to do

with Dana, but didn't see how that might explain her sudden turnabout.

"Just play the tape," he told her harshly.

A red bipedal war machine Satori had called a Bioroid; other war

machines in combat with Hovercrafts; three identical mesas, round and

steep-sided, crowned with vegetation and rising abruptly from a forested

plain...

Zor stared at the scene, a sharp pain piercing his skull, words in an

ancient voice filling his inner ears.

"Earth is the final source of Protoculture, " the voice began. "The basis

of our power, the life's-blood of our existence. Our foremost goal is to

control this life-source by recapturing that which was stolen from us, that

which was hidden from us, that which we alone are deserving of and

entitled to... "

Zor was on his feet, unaware of Nova's voiced concern. He saw three

shadowy shapes arise from the mounds and disappear-creatures

deliberately revealing themselves for his benefit.

Nova heard trim groan, then scream in agony as he collapsed

unconscious across the tabletop.

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Professor Cochran was unavailable and Professor Zand was tabu; so

Nova had to call in a relatively low level GS physician on loan to the GMP

from the defense department.

Zor was unconscious, though not comatose, writhing on the bed Nova

and the doctor had carried him to in the military police barracks.

Dr. Katz and Lieutenant Satori were standing over him now; the doctor

professionally aloof and Nova encouraged by the breakthrough but at the

same time alarmed. Katz had undressed Zor and given him a sedative,

powerful enough to calm the alien some but not strong enough to control

the unseen horrors he was experiencing.

"Earth,"

Zor

was

groaning.

"Earth,

Earth

is

the

source...Earth!...Protoculture! We must have it!..."

"He's finally remembering," Nova said quietly.

Katz adjusted his eyeglasses and took a final glance at the bedside

charts. "There is no apparent sign of brain damage. The sedative should

take effect soon and last through the night."

Nova thanked him. "One more thing," she told him before he left the

room. "You are now under top-security restriction. You haven't been here at

all, you've never seen this patient. Is that understood?"

"Completely," said Katz.

Nova brushed wet bangs from Zor's feverish brow and followed the

doctor out.

A minute after the door closed behind her, an electrical charge seemed

to take charge of the sedated alien, starting in his head and radiating out

along afferent pathways, forcing his body into a kind of involuntary

stiffarmed salute. Zor screamed and clutched at the bed covers, his back

arched, chest heaved up, but Nova and Katz were too far away to hear him.

156

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Zor had sacrificed his life while attempting to redress some of the

injustices his discoveries had brought about. It must have occurred to the

Masters that his clone-properly nurtured, properly controlled to mimic the

behavior of his parent/ twin-would share the same selfless qualities. Just

what the Masters had planned for Zor Prime after he'd led them to the

Protoculture matrix is, and forever shall be, open to speculation.

Mingtao,

Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

In the Robotech flagship, still holding in geosynchronous orbit above

Earth's equator, the three Masters were seated for a change. A spherical

holo-field dominated the center of the triangle formed by their high-backed

chairs, and in the field itself flashed enhanced video images of the world

through the eyes of their agent, Zor Prime, electronic transcriptions of the

data returned to them via the neural sensor implanted in the clone's brain.

"The poor blind fools actually believe they've captured a brainwashed

Human," Bowkaz said acidly. "I expect the destruction of such a species will

be no great loss to the galaxy."

Shaizan agreed, as an Arcadia image of thrill-seeking Dana appeared in

the field. "They're like insects, but with emotions. Primitive, industrious,

and productive, but frivolous. This immature female, for example..."

"Hard to believe she's an officer," he continued, light from the

holo-field sphere white-washing his aged face. "A commander of men and

machines, leading them into war..."

Another view of Dana now, as she appeared when seated opposite Zor

at one of the park's picnic tables.

"And it seems that she is part Zentraedi," said Bowkaz, his chin resting

on his hand.

Shaizan grunted meaningfully. "It doesn't seem possible, and yet the

sensors have detected certain bio-genetic traits. But the mating of a

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Zentraedi and a Human...how very odd."

"The clone has sensed something in this halfbreed, and that

recognition has aroused him. Emotion is obviously the key to bringing back

the memories of the donor Zor."

Again the sphere image de-rezzed, only to be replaced with those

scenes Nova had recently shown Zor: the red Bioroid, battling mecha, and

the three mounds.

"It is no wonder the clone experienced such agony," Dag commented,

referring to this last holo-projection.

Under the man-made mounds were buried the remains of the SDF-1

and -2, along with Khyron's warship. The Masters felt certain that the

Protoculture matrix was intact under one of these, and had gone so far as to

investigate their hunch, but were stopped cold by the wraiths who guarded

the device. The clone, of course, had led that particular operation.

"The clone is regaining his donor's memory of Protoculture," Bowkaz

added knowingly. "Is it possible that he will tell them what he knows?

Remember how he deceived us so many years ago; we must proceed with

caution. "

The sphere was a sky-blue vacuum now, a portrait of empty

consciousness itself, interrupted at intervals by jagged eruptions of neural

activity.

"Are you suggesting that we assume control of the clone?" Shaizan

asked.

Bowkaz gave a slow nod, as one final image filled the sphere: the

hostile faces of the 15th when Zor had first been introduced to them. "To

avoid the risk of his being subjected to even more base emotions. I propose

we begin immediately, if only to focus his mind on the Protoculture."

"Agreed," the other Masters said after a moment.

Nova's updated reports to General Emerson concerning Zor's

identification with the Macross mounds and his ravings about Protoculture

convinced Rolf that it was time to open up the case to the general staff.

158

Commander Leonard agreed and an ad hoc interagency session was

convened in the Ministry's committee room.

Emerson briefed the officers, and Leonard took it from there.

"The alien's flashes of memory tell us one thing: Earth is the remaining

source of all Protoculture. If we can believe it, then this is the sole reason

the Robotech Masters have not destroyed the planet."

No one at the table needed to be reminded that Protoculture had

spared the SDF-1 from the Zentraedi in a similar fashion.

"But they will continue their attacks until they have accumulated every

supply of Protoculture we have," Leonard continued. "This means that once

they learn that the so-called factory was nothing but a legend, they will go

after our power plants, our mecha, every Robotech device that relies on

Protoculture.

"Therefore, our only hope for survival is very simple: we must attack

first and make it count."

Rolf couldn't believe his ears. The idiot was right back where they were

before Zor had even entered the picture.

"But Supreme Commander," he objected. "Why provoke an attack

when we have something they would barter to get? Let's tell them we know

why they're here and make a deal." Rolf raised his voice a notch to cut

through the protests his proposal had elicited. "Zor can speak for us! We

could get the word to them that we are open to negotiation!"

"Are you serious, General?" said Major Kinski, speaking for several of

the others. "What do you propose to do-sit down and have a luncheon with

the Robotech Masters?" He waved his fist at Emerson. "They won't deal;

they haven't even made an attempt to communicate!"

Leonard sat quietly, recalling the personal warning the Masters had

sent his way not long ago...

"I'm quite serious," Rolf was responding, his hands flat on the table.

"And don't raise a fist at me, young man! Now, sit down and keep quiet!"

"You heard him," Rochelle said to Kinski, backing Emerson up.

Now it was Leonard's turn to cut through the protests.

159

"We're not in the deal-making business, gentlemen," he said stonily.

"We're here to protect the sovereignty of our planet."

"How can you even think of negotiating with these murderous aliens?"

asked the officer on Kinski's left.

Kinski's own fist struck the table. "A military solution is the only

response. Our people expect nothing less of us."

Rolf laughed maniacally, in disbelief. "Yes, they expect us to bring the

planet to the brink once more"

"That's enough!" Leonard bellowed, putting an end to the arguments.

"We begin coordinating attack plans immediately. This session is

adjourned."

Emerson and Rochelle kept their seats as the others filed out.

Zor spent four days in the hands of the GMP and was then released to

rejoin the 15th. Louie Nichols greeted him warmly when he was returned to

the barracks compound, desperate to show him the scale replica of the red

Bioroid he had finally completed.

"I made it myself," Louie said proudly. "It's just like the one you wore

in battle."

Zor stared at the thing absently and pushed his way past Louie.

"I...don't quite remember," he said gruffly.

"Hey, what's up?" Louie insisted, catching up with him. "I'm only

trying to help you remember what happened out there, buddy."

"Sure," Zor mumbled back, moving on.

Louie would have said more, but Eddie Jordon had leapt off the couch

and was suddenly beside him, pulling the metal head off the replica.

"Not so fast, hot shot," Eddie yelled. "I want to talk to you. Turn

around!"

Zor stopped and faced him; Eddie was hefting the heavy object, tossing

it up with one hand, threateningly. Louie tried to intervene, but the cadet

shoved him aside.

"You're the cause of my brother's death!" Eddie declared angrily.

160

"You're a liar if you tell me you don't remember! Now admit it, clone!"

Angelo Dante was up on his feet now, warily approaching Eddie from

behind.

"Come on, Zor!" Eddie hissed into Zor's face, the robot head still in his

head. "Tell me-just how much did my brother suffer?!"

Zor said nothing, meeting Eddies gaze with eyes empty of feeling, ready

to accept whatever it was the cadet saw fit to deliver.

"You tell me about it!" Eddie was saying, angry but shaken; taken over

by the memory of loss and now powerless against it. "I know you

remember," he sobbed. "I just want to..."

Eddies head was bowed, his body convulsed as the pain defeated him.

Zor averted his eyes.

But suddenly the cadet's fury returned, cutting through the sorrow with

a right that started almost at the floor and came up with a loud crack!

against Zor's chin. Zor fell back against the rec room's bookshelves; he

slumped to the floor and looked up at his assailant.

"Feel better now?" Zor asked, wiping blood from his lip.

Eddies face contorted in rage. He raised his right fist high and stepped

in to deliver a follow-up blow, but Angelo Dante had positioned himself in

front of Zor.

Eddie's fist glanced off the sergeant's jaw without budging the larger

man an inch. Angelo frowned and said, "Don't you think that's enough?"

The cadet was both angry and frightened now. He looked past Angelo,

glowering at Zor, and threw the robot head to the floor with all his

remaining strength. Then he turned and fled the scene.

Angelo knuckled his bruised cheek. Behind him, Zor said, "Thanks."

"I won't stop him again, Zor," the sergeant said without turning

around.

"I don't blame you," Zor returned, full of selfreproach. "I suppose I

deserve a lot more than a few

punches for what happened to his brother."

Dante didn't bother to argue the fact.

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"You got that right, mister," he sneered, walking off.

Zor rode the elevator down to the compound's workout room; it was

deserted, as he'd hoped it would be. He took a seat against the room's

mirrored wall, regarding the many exercise machines and weight benches in

bewilderment, then turned to glance at his reflection.

He had no memory of Eddie Jordon's brother, or of any of the evil

deeds the team seemed to hold him responsible for. And without those

memories he felt victimized, as much by his own mind as by the teams'

often unvoiced accusations. Worse still, the more he did remember, the

more correct those accusations appeared. Without exception his dreams

and incomplete memory flashbacks were filled with violence and an

undefinable but pervasive evil. It must be true, he decided. I have killed

other Human beings...I'm a killer, he told himself-a killer!

Zor pressed his hands to his face, his heart filled with remorse for

wrongdoings as yet unrevealed. And how different this felt than the angry

mood he had found himself in earlier the same day!

While he was on the way to the barracks from Nova's post, on the

Hovercycle she had requisitioned for his use, Dana had ridden up alongside

him, full of her usual optimism and what seemed to be affection.

"Have you remembered anything else?" she had asked him.

He practically ignored her.

"Why am I getting the silent treatment all of a sudden?" she had

shouted from her cycle. "You've lost your recent memory, too? You've lost

all respect for me?"

It was as though something inside him was forcing anger against her,

irrational but impossible to redirect.

He had snarled at her. "I can't stand the constant interrogation,

Lieutenant..."

"So! There you are!" he suddenly heard from across the workout room.

Dana was standing by the door, impatient with him. "I thought you were

going to wait for me in the ready-room. I've been looking all over this place

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for you."

Zor squeezed his eyes shut, feeling the anger begin to rise in him again,

dispersing the sorrow of only moments ago.

"I'm tired of this," he told her, trying his best not to betray the rising

tide. "Please leave me alone, Dana."

Dana reacted as though slapped.

"I don't want you bothering me anymore." Something forced the words

from his tongue. "And I don't want my memory back either, understand?"

"I don't believe what I'm hearing," she said, standing over him now.

Zor stood up and whirled on her. "I can't take this whole situation! If

your people want what's locked up in my brain, tell them to operate!"

Dana's face clouded over. "You're really hurting me," she said softly.

"I'm only trying to help you. I want us to keep being friends. Please...let

me." When he didn't respond she risked a step toward him. "Listen to me,

Zor. The past is the past. I don't care what you did. I only know you as you

are now. And I think one part of you feels as close to me as I feel to you."

She placed her hands on his shoulders and tried to hold his gaze. "Don't run

away from this-we can win!"

"No!" he said, turning away from her. "It's over."

She took her hands off him and looked down at the floor. "Okay. If

that's the way you want it, then that's it." Then her chin came up. "But don't

come looking for me when you need help!"

Dana pivoted through a 180-degree turn and started off, her nose in

the air. The room felt unfocused, and it was almost as if she didn't notice the

large projection screen that had been positioned against the mirrored wall.

Her foot slammed hard into one of the metal frame's support legs and she

cursed loudly. But that wasn't enough for her. "You stupid thing!" she

barked, and toe-kicked the tubular leg, knocking it free of the frame's

weighted foot. The frame began to topple backwards, thick lucite screen and

all, and everything seemed to hit the mirrors at the same time.

Instinctively, Zor had rushed forward, aiming to tackle her to safety;

but two steps forward he caught sight of himself, reflected in each of the

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hundreds of mirror shards loosed from the fractured wall.

Past and present seemed to coalesce in that moment: Dana's frightened

face became a dark silhouette, then transmutated into the visage of

someone ancient and unmistakably evil.

Zzoorrr...a disembodied voice called to him. There is no place to run.

You cannot escape us, you cannot get away...

Now a hand as aged as that face pointed and closed on him

open-palmed, and suddenly he found himself running through the

curved-top tunnels of some twilight world, fleeing the grasp of armed

guardians, Gaped, helmeted, and curiously armored. A trio of threatening

voices pursued him through that labyrinth as well, but ultimately he outran

them, launching himself through a hexagonal portal and secreting himself

in a darkened room, filled with a heavenly music...

A green-haired woman sat at a harp, her slender fingers forming

chords of light that danced about the room. He knew but could not speak

her name. Likewise he knew that he had violated a tabu by visiting this

place...those ancient ones who sought to control him, to keep him locked

away and insulated; those ancient ones who sought to have him absorb a life

he had not lived!

Musica, the green-haired harpist told him...

But he had already moved behind her now, his arm across her neck.

The Terminators had caught up with him, and he meant to use her as a

shield, a shield...They will not kill her he told himself, as she quaked with

fear in his arms. She is one of them.

But the Terminators had armed their weapons and were taking aim;

and although he had pushed her aside and fled once more, they had

fired-fired at her...

The world was blood-red. Someone was calling his name...

Dana was struggling beneath him; he had collapsed over her, shielding

her from the glass but pinning her to the floor.

"Musica..." Zor heard himself tell her, as she helped him get up. "When

I first saw her, she was playing this beautiful music. Then I used her as a

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shield...I didn't think they'd kill her, but they did!"

Dana was staring at him, her eyes wide. "No, Zor, they didn't," she tried

to tell him. "Bowie saw her-alive! It must have been a dream-"

Zor was up and walking away from her, fixed on his angry reflection in

the shattered mirror.

"I have no memory" he declared, his azure eyes narrowed. "I'm an

android. I did kill Eddie's brother, I'm certain of it."

He rammed his right fist into the mirror; then his left, tossing off Dana

when she tried to restrain him. Again and again right and left, he punched

and whaled at the broken glass, ultimately exhausting himself and reducing

his hands to a bloody pulp.

"My god!" he howled. "The Robotech Masters! They must control me

completely!"

Dana was leaning against his back, her hands over his shoulders,

sobbing.

Zor's nostrils flared. "There's only one way to defeat them-I must

destroy myself!"

"No," Dana pleaded with him. "There's always hope..." She caught sight

of the fresh blood dripping down the mirror and reached out for his hands.

"Your hands!" she gasped. She pulled her kerchief out and wrapped it

around his right, which appeared far more lacerated then the left. "Androids

don't bleed," she said to him between sobs. "You're Human, Zor-"

"Without a memory? Without a will of my own?"

She wanted to say something, but no words came to her.

"I'm sorry, Dana," Zor told her after a moment. "I've said some terrible

things to you..."

"Let me help you," she said, looking into his eyes.

Zor pressed his forehead to hers.

Later, Zor marched determinedly down the halls of the Ministry,

closing fast on the office of Rolf Emerson. Dana's help would be invaluable,

but there were things he was going to have to do alone. To start with, he

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needed every scrap of information that was available on the Masters, on

their fortresses and science of bio-genetic engineering, and Emerson was

the only one who would have access to this.

At the office doors, he stopped and tried to compose himself; then

lifted his bandaged hand to knock. He could hear voices coming from the

other side of the door.

But something arrested his motion: answering the call of an unknown

force, he stood silent and motionless at the threshold, eyes and ears attuned

to a kind of recording frequency.

"But it's reckless for Leonard to press an attack now, General," Zor

heard Rochelle say. "We aren't prepared."

Rolf Emerson said: "I know, but what can I do? Leonard has most of

the staff on his side. I'd hoped this wouldn't happen. I'd hoped to use Zor as

a bargaining agent...But instead, it's come down to all-out war."

For several minutes Zor listened at the door, while Emerson and

Rochelle summarized the general staff's hastily coordinated attack plans.

Then he turned away and walked stiffly down the corridor, his original

motivations erased.

Unobserved at the far end of the corridor, Angelo Dante watched Zor

leave; tight-lipped, the sergeant nodded his head in knowing confirmation.

The neuro-sensor implanted in Zor's brain now transmitted a steady

supply of visual and auditory information, filling the flagship holo-sphere

with new images that both troubled and enlightened the three Masters.

"Notice how the clone's rage interferes with our attempts to manipulate

his behavior," Bowkaz pointed out, commenting on Zor's blood match with

his own reflection. "This is worrisome."

"But even so," Shaizan countered, "the use of the clone goes well-even

better than we had hoped." Emerson and Rochelle's exchange of attack plan

data under scored the solitary image of a chevroned doorway. "It is

interesting, though...the Micronians continue to delude themselves with

plans of attacking our Robotech fortresses."

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"I must say they have courage," said Dag.

Shaizan squinted at the holo-sphere's lingering transignal.

"One simple truth remains for the Micronians: we will annihilate every

one of them. Annihilate them."

"Annihilate them," Bowkaz repeated.

"Annihilate them!"

167

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

"AJACs, my butt! They're nothing but goddamned Protocopters!"

Remark attributed to an unknown TASC pilot

The United Earth Government flag flew high over the copper-domed

Neo-Post-Federalist Senate Building. Inside, Supreme Commander Leonard

addressed a combined audience of UEG personnel, Southern Cross officers

(Dana Sterling and Marie Crystal among them), representatives of the press,

and privileged civilians, from the podium of the structure's vast senatorial

hall. Behind him on the stage sat General Rolf Emerson, Colonels Rochelle

and Rudolf, and the Joint Chiefs-of-Staff.

"We fully realize there has been much debate over the advisability of a

preemptive strike against the alien fleet at this juncture. These concerns

have been taken into careful consideration by the High Command of the

Armed Forces. But the time has come to put an end to debate, and to unite

all our voices behind a common effort.

"Proto-engineering has completed the first consignment of the new

Armored Jet Attack Copters, henceforth designated as AJACs. These will

form the nucleus of the first assault wave. Your corps commanders will have

your individual battle assignments.

"I know there isn't a single soldier in this hall today who isn't painfully

aware of all the hazards that will certainly arise during the course of this

mission, and there are still some who would advise against its undertaking.

But the High Command has determined that we now have the capability of

dealing a devastating blow to the enemy, and to do nothing in the face of

this advantage is to admit defeat!"

Leonard's speech received less than enthusiastic support, except from

certain members of the general staff and the militaristic wing of Chairman

Moran's teetering legislature.

Emerson and Rochelle scarcely applauded. Leonard, the two had

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decided, was a megalomaniac; and the attack plan itself, utter madness.

Afterwards, in front of the building, where the press was all but

assaulting Leonard's silver chariot limo, Marie Crystal maneuvered through

the crowds to bring her Hovercycle alongside Dana's, just as the 15th's

lieutenant was engaging her own mecha's thruster's. Though it was the first

time the women had seen each other in several weeks, the reunion was

hardly a happy one.

"Guess who's been assigned to the first wave?" Marie taunted her

sometime rival. Recently given a clean bill-of-health by the med center staff,

she had been reassigned to active duty and reunited with her tactical air

squadron.

"Well aren't you the lucky little hotshot, Marie," Dana returned in her

sarcastic best. "You're through licking your wounds, huh?" Dana never had

paid her that visit-not after what Sean had reported of Marie's continuing

quest for a scapegoat.

Marie's cat's-eyes flashed. "Believe me, I'm completely recovered," she

told Dana, with a sly grin. "I never felt better in my entire life. But I think

it's just awful that the Hovertanks won't be seeing any action this time

around. Guess you'll be able to get some training done while we're

gone-heaven knows you need it."

Dana let the remark roll off her back. "To be perfectly honest, I'm really

not too unhappy about being grounded," she said in an off-hand manner.

"You pilots'll have your hands full."

Marie sniggered. "It won't be that bad. At least this time we'll have a

commander who knows what she's doing. Know what I mean?"

Dana frowned, in spite of her best efforts not to. "Oh, why don't you

lose that line?" she snapped at Marie. "When are you going to realize that it

wasn't my fault?"

Marie laughed, proud of herself. "Don't worry, I forgive you," she said,

twisting the throttle and joining the exiting throngs. "So long," she called

over her shoulder.

Dana was tempted to send some obscene gesture her way, but thought

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bettor of it and reached down to reactivate the thrusters. No sooner had she

armed the switch than Nova Satori wandered over.

"Make it brief, Nova," Dana began. "I have to meet Zor in fifteen

minutes and he always starts worrying if I'm late."

Nova never had a chance to confront her face-to-face on the medical

center stunt, and Dana was in no mood for an argument now. It had been

settled officially, and she was willing to let it rest. Although Nova probably

didn't see it that way.

"Zor's the very person I wanted to speak to you about."

"Well?" Dana said defensively.

"The GMP appreciates all you've done to help him regain his memory,

but we feel there are some areas that only trained professionals can-"

"No!" Dana cut her off. "He's mine and I've promised to help him.

These professionals you're so proud of will probably make a vegetable of

him, and I'm not about to let that happen!"

"Yes, I understand your feelings, Dana," Nova went on in her even

voice, "but this case requires some indepth probing of the subject's

unconscious mind." Nova glanced at her clipboard, as if reading from a

prepared statement. "We've called a certain Dr. Zeitgeist, an expert in alien

personality transference to-"

Dana put her hands over her ears. "Enough! You're giving me a

monster migraine with all this psychobabble!"

Nova shrugged. "I'm afraid it's out of your hands, Dana. I've been

assigned to supervise Zor's rehabilitation-"

"Over my dead body, Nova! All he needs is a little Human

understanding-something you're in short supply of. Leave him alone!" Dana

said, wristing the throttle, hovering off, and almost colliding with an

on-coming mega-truck.

"Dana!" the GMP lieutenant called after her. She's completely lost her

objectivity, Nova said to herself.

"I could just scream sometimes!" Dana said, bursting into the 15th's

ready-room.

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Cups of coffee and tea slipped from startled hands, chess pieces hit the

floor, and permaplas window panes rattled on the other side of the room.

"What seems to be the problem, Lieutenant?" Angelo said, leaping to

his feet.

"Nothing!" she roared. "Just tell me where Zor's hiding himself!"

Dana's angry strides delivered her over to Bowie. "I thought I told you to

keep an eye on him!"

Bowie flinched, stammering a puzzled reply and leaning back not a

moment too soon, as Dana's fist came crashing down on the table in front of

him. "I can't depend on you for anything at all!"

"Cool your thrusters, Lieutenant," Sean said calmly from the couch.

"The patient's fine and we're keeping tabs on him, so simmer down."

"Well, where is he, Sean?" Dana said quietly but with a nasty edge to

her voice.

Sean simply said: "He'll be back in a second," bringing Dana's back up

once again.

"I didn't ask you for a timetable of his comings and goings, Private,"

she barked, hands on her hips. "I want to see him!"

"I think he'd rather you waited..." Sean suggested, as she made to leave

the room.

The ready-room doors hissed open. "Just tell me where he is."

"Men's room: straight down the hall, first door on the right."

Dana made a sound of exasperation, while everyone else stifled laughs.

"Any word on assignments from the war council?" Corporal Louie said,

hoping to change the subject.

Angelo folded his arms across his chest. "Yeah, do we finally get

permission to take care of the enemy this time or do we get held back

again?"

Dana walked into their midst. "Well, if you really must know, the

Supreme Command in all its infinite wisdom has decided to..." she let them

hang on her words, "...keep us in reserve, of course."

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Dana kicked Sean's legs out from under him as she paced past him,

forcing him into an involuntary slouch before she exited the ready-room.

"This is getting kinda monotonous," Sean said with a grunt.

Angelo slammed his hands together. "Typical! Whoever makes these

stupid decisions oughta be shot!"

Sean extended his legs, crossing his ankles on the table. "It's a crazy

idea anyway. I'm telling you, the supreme commander's going nuts. He

knows it's hopeless to try a frontal assault."

"The application of brute force is strategically wrong," Louie added,

opposite Sean at the table. "We must fight with our intellect...By developing

Robotechnology we stand a chance."

Time would prove him right, but just now Angelo Dante wasn't buying

any of it.

"Forget all this machinery!" he counseled. "If they'd just give us a crack

at 'em, we'd knock 'em outta the sky!"

Dana went up to her private quarters in the loft above the ready-room,

the recent encounters with Marie and Nova replaying themselves in her

memory; but these were the reworked and edited versions, now scripted

with the things she should have said. She had convinced herself that Nova's

spiel was nothing more than a transparent attempt to keep Zor all to herself.

And that Marie would undoubtedly try to get her greedy little hands on him,

too, once they met-which Dana planned to keep from happening.

She crossed the room and opened the wings of the three-paneled

mirror above her vanity, regarding herself with as much objectivity as the

moment allowed, sucking in her waist, patting her tummy, and striking

fashion poses. She was pleased with her reflection, and decided that there

was really nothing to be worried about. Nova didn't stand a chance of

keeping Zor to herself. There was simply no comparison between Nova's

cool prettiness and Dana's warm-blooded allure.

Zor had returned to the ready-room. Angelo was lecturing the others

on what he planned to do once he got his hands on the enemy aliens,

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undisturbed by Zor's presence, actually playing to him at times. Zor took a

seat across the room and tried to busy himself with a magazine, but his eyes

refused to focus on the print; instead they seemed to demand that he

concentrate his attention on the sergeant...

But Dana's call broke the spell. "Zor, come up here!" she yelled from

her quarters. He left the ready-room with the team's laughter at his back

and climbed the stairs to the loft.

Dana was standing in front of her vanity when he entered, but what

captured his eyes were the three separate reflections in the mirror above.

Here was Dana in a red dress, Dana in a green pants suit, and Dana in an

elegant old-fashioned gown. And yet the real Dana was in uniform!

Zor gasped and stumbled, feeling himself drawn once more to the edge

of total recall-a dangerous precipice towering out of an absolute darkness.

"Dana...the mirror," he croaked, catching her by surprise.

"That...Triumvirate!" He didn't know where the word had come from and

was at a loss to explain it when she turned her puzzled face to him. "For a

moment there were three different images of you in that mirror," he told her

anxiously.

She made a wry face. "If you're going to start seeing things, maybe

Nova's right and you do need professional help-"

"The Triumvirate!" he interrupted her. "It's starting to come back to me

again..."

A chamber filled with a swirling nebulous mixture of liquids and gases,

a shape taking form amidst it all-gigantic, inhuman, devoid of all that life

was meant to be...And now a triad of such chambers, but smaller,

Human-sized, and within each, beings who shared a common face...

"The Triumvirate..." he groaned, almost losing his balance. "Something

to do with acting in groups of three."

Dana seemed almost disinterested in his distress; but in fact, she was

beside herself with excitement. Zor had to be making reference to the same

triplicate clones she, Bowie, and Louie had seen in the fortress. She was

determined to keep Zor unaware of this; and just as determined to prove to

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Nova that she could handle the subject's unconscious as well as any Dr.

Zeitgeist could. From now on it was going to be the kid glove treatment for

Zor.

"Well, I have no idea what all that means," she said with elaborate

innocence. "But it sounds just screwy enough to turn out to be important. I

guess I'll let High Command know about it-even though they're going to

think we're both crazy," she hastened to add.

At Fokker Field, Lieutenant Marie Crystal, already suited up in

gladiatorial, tactical air combat armor, directed her TASC team to one of the

score of massive battlecruisers that were positioned about the field in

launch mode. Marie checked off names on the list she carried in her mind,

as the flyboys rushed by her. Elevators carried them down to the field itself,

where Hovertransports were waiting to ferry them to their destinations. In

the distance, men and mecha were transferring themselves from transports

to cruisers.

Over the PA the voice of a controller issued last minute instructions:

"Final loading of AJACs in assembly bay nineteen. Transport commanders,

signal when AJACs are in place...T minus ten minutes to attack launch...All

pilots to standby alert... "

Marie checked her suit chronometer against the controller's mark anal

began to hurry her team along. "Come on," she told them, with a broad

sweep of her arm. "Keep it moving! They're not going to wait for us!"

She leaned over the balcony railing to glance at the transports and

happened to notice Captain Nordoff's Hoverjeep below. He looked up,

spying her and waving his hand.

"We expect to see those AJACs put through their paces up there!" he

yelled.

Marie threw him an okay-sign and told him not to worry about a thing.

"I only hope we don't get lost in the shuffle up there-I've never seen so many

ships!"

"Just pray we've got enough, Lieutenant!" he said, and hovered off.

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Marie straightened up from the rail and turned to find Sean alongside

her, displaying his well-known roguish grin.

"Hello, Private," Marie said disdainfully.

"Hey, don't get personal," Sean laughed.

She turned her back to him. "What are you doing here, Sean? No hot

date today? After all, the Fifteenth's not part of this action."

"Hey, don't say things like that, Marie," he said peevishly. "You're

tearing me apart, you know that? I came here because I wanted to see you

off. I care about you, in case you haven't guessed."

Marie looked at him over her shoulder. "Don't think that one night on

the roof makes us an item, Sean," she warned him. "I trust you just about as

far as I can throw you."

"T minus six minutes to launch," the controller told them from the

tower. "All commanders to their posts..."

Neither one of them said anything for a moment; then Sean broke the

silence with a quiet. "Be careful, okay?"

Marie's hard look softened. "I almost believe you really mean that..."

"I, I mean it," he stammered.

Marie blew him a kiss from the elevator.

Elsewhere on the base, Zor stood alone, his azure eyes scanning the

field, an unwitting transmitter of sight and sound...

In the Robotech flagship, the three Masters watched over the Earth

Forces base through the clone's eyes. The Protoculture cap was beneath

their aged hands now as they readied their fleet for battle.

"This new armada is the single largest fleet they have yet dared to send

against us," Bowkaz saw fit to point out, no suggestion of fear or

anticipation in his deep voice.

"The more ships they employ, the greater our triumph," said Dag.

"Their armada will be destroyed and their spirit broken," Shaizan

added. But suddenly there were signs of interrupted concentration in the

transignal holo-image. "What is happening?" he asked the others.

175

Bowkaz repositioned his hands on the Protoculture cap, but the image

of the prelaunch battlecruisers continued to waver and ultimately de-rezzed

entirely. "Someone is interfering with the clone," he explained. "Distracting

him..."

While Dana had excused herself to notify Rolf Emerson of Zor's latest

flashback, the alien himself had left the barracks. All at once compelled to

visit the Earth Forces launch site, he had ridden his Hovercycle up to the

plateau, and chosen a spot near the field that offered a vantage point for all

the myriad activities taking place. In a certain sense he was not cognizant of

where he was, nor what he was doing; and equally unaware that both

Angelo and Dana, on separate cycles, had followed him there.

The sergeant had watched Zor for some time, wondering what his next

move might be; but when he realized that the alien was simply staring

transfixed at the prelaunch activities, he decided to move in.

"Just what the hell do you think you're doing up here, Zor?" he

demanded, seemingly awakening Zor from a dream. "This sector's off-limits.

And besides, you're supposed to be back at the barracks."

"I was trying to get a better view of the liftoff," Zor offered as

explanation, although one part of him realized this wasn't true.

Angelo took a quick glance right and left; there was no one in sight, and

Angelo was tempted to fix it so the alien would no longer be capable of

moving around scot-free. Dante took a menacing step forward, only to hear

Dana's voice behind him.

"It's all right, Sergeant, I'll vouch for him."

Angelo glared at Zor and relaxed some. Dana was marching up the

small rise to join them, breathless when she arrived. She glanced briefly at

Zor, then threw the sergeant a suspicious look.

"What did you have in mind, Angelo?" she asked him, her chin up.

Dante met her gaze and said: "Not a thing, Lieutenant."

Dana nodded warily. "I gave Zor clearance to go wherever he wants. I

thought it might help him get his memory back."

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"Or something," said Angelo.

Zor looked at both of them, beginning to feel the anger return.

Supreme Commander Leonard and his staff viewed the armada liftoff

from command central's underground bunker. The darkly armored

leviathanlike battlecruisers were underway, rising from the plateau base like

a school of surfacing whales.

"Just look at them!" Leonard gushed, his eyes glued to the monitor

screen. "How can they possibly fail?"

"Very impressive, Commander," said Rolf Emerson, giving lip-service

to the moment. I wish to heaven I shared your confidence, he kept to

himself.

Schematics of the attack force and the relative position of the Masters'

fleet were carried to the oval screen in the flagship command center.

"Ah, here they come," said Bowkaz. "Like the proverbial moths to the

flame."

"Is there no one among them who sees the stupidity of this?" Dag asked

rhetorically.

"I will summon our defense force," said Shaizan.

But Bowkaz told him not to bother. "This won't require the rest of the

fleet. One ship will be sufficient."

177

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

With Dana Sterling's penetration of the SDF-1 burial mound,

Humankind (on Earth) had observed three separate stages of the Optera

lifeform and still didn't recognize what they were seeing: Lynn-Minmei had

watched Khyron ingesting the dried leaves, Sean Phillips had actually tossed

the fruit of the tree in his hand, and Dana Sterling had seen the plants in full

flower. All this intrigue centered on Protoculture, when the real treasure was

in front of them all the time-the Flower of Life itself!...Only one stage

remained, but Humankind would have to await the Invid's arrival to glimpse

it. In thinking about it, though, one might almost say that the Invid were the

final stage!

Maria Bartley-Rand,

Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

General Leonard's attack plan was a basic one ("simple-minded," as

Rolf Emerson would call it later): meet the enemy's six spade fortresses

head-on with the more than fifty battlecruisers of the Earth Forces armada;

use the new AJAC gunships to confuse them; then, simply overwhelm them

with superior firepower. Captain Nordoff would supervise the first-wave

assault; Admirals Clark and Salaam would take it from there. There were no

tactics built into the plan, no flanking or diversionary operations, no

contingencies for possible setbacks. The attack, which Leonard had

optimistically (and unrealistically) labeled preemptive, would render

needless Angelo Dante's concerns that Zor might be an enemy agent; the

Robotech Masters hardly needed the clone's eyes to see what was coming,

and consequently they were more than prepared.

At a distance of 100 miles from the alien fortresses (which were still

holding in geosynchronous orbit, some 47,000 miles above the Equator),

Nordoff gave the order to open fire. Annihilation discs streamed from the

cruiser's pulsed laser cannon like so many small golden suns-energy-

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Frisbees that to the last found their targets. But the enemy defense shields

absorbed it all and gave every indication of being hungry for more. The

great horned and spiked fortresses were not only left undamaged, but

untouched as well.

Knowing how much was riding on the success of the first wave, Nordoff

ordered his wing to maintain course and continue firing, even if that meant

at point-blank range. An armchair tactician, Nordoff, not unlike

Commander Leonard, refused to accept the fact that the fortresses were

effectively invincible-this despite the projections and cautions of the

Southern Cross's most brilliant minds. Even the 15th Squadron's downing

of the alien flagship was now being reevaluated in terms of the Masters's

own allowances and strategies.

At less than sixty-five miles the first-wave battlecruisers launched a

second fusillade; but this time the annihilation discs were not absorbed:

they were added to the fortresses' already immeasurably charged stockpiles

and spit back. Radiant blue-white tentacles reached out from the lead

fortress and grappled with one of the battlecruisers, probing indelicately for

weak spots in its armored hull. Troops were caught unawares by the force,

incinerated in a thousand flashstorms that swept through the ship, or sent

spinning to vacuum death through ruptures which instantaneously bled

precious atmosphere from the already scorched and scoured holds.

In the AJACs launch bay aboard Nordoff's ship, Marie Crystal heard

that what remained of the 007 was dead in space. She had been supervising

the launch preparations for the choppers, but now ran from her post to one

of the starboard cannon turrets, literally kicking the gunner from his seat to

have a crack at the enemy herself. She had good friends aboard the

demolished cruiser and wasn't about to allow their deaths go unpunished.

Once in the turret seat, Marie quickly removed her helmet and

strapped on the weapon's sensor-studded targeting cap. As

computer-generated graphic displays flashed across the helmet's virtual

cockpit, she immediately realized why the first-wave had failed to cripple

the enemy flagship: Nordoff and the other commanders were completely

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disregarding intel analysis reports concerning the fortresses' vulnerable

spots. Concentrated fire directed at any one of these would circumvent the

shields' absorption potential and allow pulses to penetrate to the hull itself.

Marie had been close enough to these things in the past to have

committed their surface details to memory; in fact, during her recent

hospitalization (when she wasn't glancing at muscle mags), she had done

little else except replay the fortresses' topography over and over to herself.

Ranging in the gun now, she felt as though she were directly over the

fortress in her Logan and could place the shot precisely where she wanted it.

"Ah-ha! There you are!" she said out loud as the spot was centered in

the cannon's reticle. Marie pulled home the twin hand-brake-like triggers

and loosed a full ten seconds of plasma fire at the flagship, knowing almost

before the fact that she had scored a direct hit.

In the flagship command center, the three Masters hardly reacted to

news that one of the fortress barriers had been breached. Absorbing the

energy discs delivered by the Terrans' cruisers had enabled them to leave

their own plasma reservoirs untouched and therefore shunt would-be

weapons system power to the fortresses' shields and self-restorative

systems.

No sooner had Marie's well-aimed barrage holed the hull than new

plating was already sliding into place to seal the breach.

Dag suggested that it might not even be necessary to fire on the

Terrans; better to let them fall back in complete confusion, demoralized by

their futile attempt.

But Bowkaz wanted to see concrete results.

The fortress fired back, taking out two more battlecruisers.

Dana and Zor had left their Hovercycles at the base and set out on foot

for the grassy overlook high above Monument City. Dana had sent Dante

back to command the 15th in her absence, ignoring his reminders that just

because the ground-based tactical armored units weren't directly involved

in the battle they were nevertheless still on standby alert. Not that he had

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expected her to abandon her pet project and return to the barracks; and the

only reason the sergeant didn't bother to press his point (or, for that matter,

inform Sterling's commanders) was that he felt a lot better off without the

alien around-and that went for both Zor and Dana.

Dana was encouraged by Zor's most recent mention of "the

Triumvirate" to resort to what she considered highrisk therapy now, and as

they walked and talked, she was sorely tempted to confess her past to him,

certain that he would then move even closer to recovering his own. It was of

course a double-edged sword and she was aware of the ambivalence within

her: on the one hand, Zor's memory could turn out to be the key that would

unlock the mystery of the Robotech Masters and give Earth the data it

needed to mount a proper defense, or, as Rolf hoped, engage in some sort of

deal-making. But on the other, Dana liked having this past-less Zor by her

side, this empty mind she could fill with the memories she wanted placed

there; in a way there was something nurturing and maternal about the

whole thing that went side-by-side with the more primitive feelings she had

for Zor.

They had reached the flat grassy area now, lifeless crags and shale

rivers ascending on three sides, with the last open to a spectacular view of

the city, several thousand yards below them. Dana tried not to think about

George Sullivan and the few moments the two of them had shared here.

The sky was not cloudless, but deeply sky-blue nonetheless, and the air

was unusually warm, especially for this altitude.

Zor must have been aware of it, too, because he commented that it was

hard to believe there was a war going on.

"It's so peaceful and quiet up here," she told him as they walked. "I

always start thinking about where I grew up when I come up here...the

people I left behind."

It would have been better to tell him about where her mother grew up,

she added silently. That would undoubtedly interest him a lot more than

stories about Rolf's farm and the almost idyllic childhood she and Bowie

had shared-until military school, that was, and Rolfs appointment to

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general and their move from New Denver to Monument City.

But Zor didn't ask for any specifics about that place; instead, he asked

with a laugh: "Was one of the people you left behind a boyfriend?"

It sounded so ridiculous coming from him that for a moment she was

certain he was joking with her. So she played cryptic to his question and

said, "No, not really..."

They were overlooking the city now, and Zor sat down in the tall grass

to take in the view. "I wish I could remember where I grew up," he said

wistfully. "I guess I'll never know what it's like to go home again."

"Well, the war will be over someday," she suggested. "You could think

about starting a new home..."

Zor had pulled up a long blade of grass and was chewing at one end of

it absently. "No," he told her. "It's not as simple as that. A man without a

past is a man without a home-now and always."

"But each day brings a little more of your past back to you," she

reminded him encouragingly.

"That's true," he admitted haltingly. "I do remember something about

the Triumvirate and Musica...but mainly it's these terrible visions about

death and destruction. I know I was doing something important when the

enemy attacked. And I get this feeling that there were giants there to protect

me...but after that, all I can think about is bloodshed, devastation." Zor

pressed the heels of his hands to his temples. "If only I could remember

where and why that attack took place. But there's nothing there. Just a

blank."

"Don't put yourself through it now, Zor."

"And those strange mounds that Nova showed me before I passed

out..."

"Mounds?" Dana said all of a sudden. "You didn't tell me about this!"

"That's when we weren't speaking. When I was staying at the GMP

headquarters."

"Of course! Why haven't I thought of this before?!"

Suddenly Dana had a flash of insight: the mounds, of course! Zor had

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been there. There was no reason to think that the mounds would do it for

him after Bowie hadn't, but it was worth a chance.

Dana stood up, took hold of Zor's hand, and led him off in a run.

Nearby, a curious animal poked its head from the tall grass. From a

distance it might have been mistaken for a small shaggy dog; but up close

several differences immediately presented themselves: the two knob-ended

horns that rose from behind its sheepdog forelock, the feet like soft muffins,

the eyes that were not of this Earth.

There was something about the creature's pose and expression that

suggested disbelief. It recognized its onetime female friend. But it was the

other human that captivated the creature's attention just now: it was the

being who had taken it from its homeworld.

The creature had almost run to this one, caught up in an instinctual

desire to be taken home. But instead, it followed the two Humans from a

discreet distance.

Nordoff had had a change of mind.

"A third of our battle fleet and nearly half our transports have already

been lost," he reported to the war room. "They're tearing us to shreds! Sir,

it's impossible for us to maintain battle formation. I suggest we withdraw

immediately."

"Nonsense," said Leonard into the remote mike. "Why haven't you

brought the AJACs to bear against the enemy, Captain?"

"We've been awfully busy just trying to survive up to this point,"

Nordoff returned. "Sir," he continued with greater emphasis, "the enemy

has been dispatching our largest battlecruisers with regularity; I hardly

think attack choppers have a-"

"Captain, this is a question for me to decide. Follow your instructions.

Dispatch the AJACs!"

Dana felt Bowie's presence essential; so she and the alien returned to

the 15th's barracks and snatched Bowie from the ready-room before setting

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off for the place where Zor and Dana had first set eyes on each other, and

where Bowie himself had been held captive-the burial site of the SDF-1.

Once again Angelo Dante didn't bother to protest, happy to be rid of

the three of them, liabilities all. Now the sergeant said to himself, if he could

only do something about Sean and a few of the others. But when he

completed his mental list of rejects he found that he had eliminated all but

one man from the 15th-himself!

Meanwhile, the therapist, her assistant, and their patient powered their

Hovercycles to the top of the ridge and over the pass that linked Monument

with what was once its sister city, Macross. There was no actual roadway left,

but there were remnants of the original one, and the cycles easily allowed

them to scramble around rough spots and landslide areas-both natural and

deliberate.

Macross was theoretically off-limits to civilians and Southern Cross

troops alike, although the site was in no way patrolled or otherwise kept

under surveillance. It was a well-known fact that the final battle between

the SDFs 1 and 2 and the Zentraedi warship manned by Khyron and his

consort, Azonia, had left the area intensely radioactive. Whether this was

still the case was top-secret and a question that could only be answered by

Professor Zand or one of those few scientists who had served on the

dimensional fortress and had not for one reason or another elected to

accompany Lang, Hunter, and Edwards on the Expeditionary Mission to

Tirol. In any case, the High Command didn't want anyone poking around:

most of the usable mecha and Robotechnological marvels had been salvaged

from the ship, but Lang had given strict orders that no one was to disturb

the area. Hence, the two-fold purpose of the bulldozed mounds themselves.

The lakebed had dried up and the resultant bowl was now teeming with

a wide assortment of vegetal and animal life, reminiscent of some of the

atypical habitats that formed in the bottom of craters or calderas, like that

of Ngorongoro in East Africa. And in the center of this were the three

flat-topped mounds, steep-sided, with larger bases than crowns, capped

with vegetation, and shrouded in mystery.

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Dana brought the trio to a halt some distance from the mounds. She

turned to glance at Zor, looking for any signs that might indicate familiarity

or recall. But instead, Zor seemed puzzled and possibly spooked, as she

herself felt.

"Well you know that 'military base' you keep dreaming about-the one

that was attacked?" Dana began. "It occurred to me that this might be it.

Bowie and I saw you here, Zor-we fought against you and your Bioroids

right on this spot!" Dana looked apologetic. "I didn't want to tell you before,

because Nova insists that I'm not to plant memories in your mind...but this

place is so important. You actually held Bowie prisoner here, Zor. Don't you

remember any of it?"

Zor was looking at Bowie for confirmation and receiving it; but even

that had no apparent effect. Zor tightened his mouth and shook his head.

"There was a terrible battle fought here," Bowie added. "Between the

Earth Forces and the last of the Zentraedi-a race sent here by your Masters

to retrieve something they thought we had-something they believe we still

have." Bowie gestured to the three mounds. "Underneath one of these are

the remains of a ship that was probably sent to Earth from your homeworld,

a planet called Tirol. By someone who you might even be related to-a being

called Zor."

Zor listened without a word, as an animal might listen to Human

speech: aware of the tone and even the words, but ignorant of the sense of

it.

"My father's sister, my aunt, died here," Bowie said softly, his voice

cracking. "Her name was Claudia Grant."

"I'm sorry for that," Zor returned. "And what was this thing you were

supposed to have that my Masters are still so desperate for?" he asked them.

Dana spoke to this, shrugging first, to indicate her limited knowledge

of these things. "Some kind of generator. Something that has to do with

Protoculture-the sort of fuel that drives our mecha and permits our

Veritechs to transform."

"To reconfigure," Zor said, at the edge of something. He absently

185

gnawed at his lower lip. "Protoculture..." he said thoughtfully. "I don't

know...It does seem familiar; but I don't recall anything."

"Well since we're here, let's poke around some," Dana proposed.

"Maybe we'll find something to jog your memory. I mean, if you feel up to

it..." she thought to add.

"Of course I am," Zor assured her, straightening himself in the cycle's

seat. "I'll investigate the mound on the left. "

"I'll take the right one," Bowie said eagerly.

Dana smiled and worked the mecha's throttle. "Okay. Then let's get

cracking!"

Zor and Bowie hovered off and she did the same, heading for the center

mound, which up close proved to be somewhat larger than the others. But

like them, it had the same atmosphere of enchantment and eerieness

lingering about it, the same profusion of shrubs, saplings, and underbrush

growing from crevices in its steep sides.

Out of sight the pollinator watched her, and began to head toward the

same mound.

She saw nothing that might indicate a way into the mound and

considered attempting to power her cycle up the sides for a look at the top;

but first decided to circle around the thing once or twice to see what she

could find. Just shy of completing the circle she found what she was looking

for: something like the mouth of a cave, large, dark and fanged by

stalactite-like deposits. She called out for Bowie and Zor to join her, and in

moments they were by her side.

They dismounted their cycles and made their way up to the mouth of

the opening, scrambling over rocks and through the barbed and tenacious

growth that covered the mound's inclined lower base. At the mouth, Bowie

bravely stepped in, and stood for a moment in the darkness waiting for his

eyes to dark-adapt.

"It looks like it goes all the way in," he told Zor and Dana.

They followed. Even Zor seemed to have misgivings. "Let's be careful,"

he told Dana. "We don't know what we might find in here."

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"Now, when have I not been careful?" She laughed, hopping over a rock

at the entrance and starting in, passing Bowie by.

It wasn't a natural opening in the side of the mound; it appeared to

have been excavated. Dana began to wonder whether looters had worked

over the sites during the past fifteen years.

They moved cautiously through the darkness, alert to distant sounds.

"It's like a tomb in here-all this place needs are a few mummies," said

Bowie.

"Stop that," Dana told him. "I'm scared enough already."

As they penetrated further, one thing was immediately obvious:

although there were indeed organic deposits growing from the ceiling of the

cave (some twenty-yards high) and vines and whatnot clinging to the walls,

the cave was in no way natural-they were actually inside an enormous

corridor. Exposed panels and circuitry, rusting structural members and

bulkheads confirmed this much.

But there were live things in the corridor as well, as Dana was soon to

find out.

Without warning, a group of bats flew straight at them out of the

darkness. Dana screamed, launched, and latched herself onto Zor's arm,

instantly regretting her show of weakness.

She reached up to find his mouth in the darkness, angrier when she felt

a smile there.

Zor laughed and insisted that they keep going.

They moved along the corridor for another fifteen minutes, following it

along a gentle arc; then there was light ahead of them-what appeared to be a

free-standing monolithic light bar, but was in fact a narrow opening in the

wall of the corridor, permitting light to issue forth from somewhere deeper

inside the mound.

Zor volunteered to take the point on this one, feeling as though he was

indeed approaching something that would lead him to clues of his real

origins and past. He seemed to know this place somehow, the feel of these

corridors. It was not quite the same as the picture his mind drew of it, but

187

familiar nevertheless. In a strange way, he felt that he knew this place as

one would a home.

The opening was just large enough to slip into, but it required that he

keep his shoulders pressed flat against the wall. It had to be a ventilation

shaft or accessway that was not meant to be walked.

Dana and Bowie stuck close. "Can you see?" Dana asked Zor. "Are we

almost at the end?"

"A little more..." he told her.

And all at once they were through the breach and inside an enormous

chamber. Below them was what seemed to be an excavated pit. Rough

staircases had been cut into the dirt and debris that settled into the place

when the roof caved in possibly a decade or more ago. Shafts of sunlight

poured in through openings in the crust above, along with vines and the

off-shoots of trees.

But the pit itself was what struck them: from a viscous-looking organic

soup all but bubbling in the bottom of the cauldron, grew an orderly pattern

of strange, unearthly green stalks, blossoming with fragrant buds and

tripetaled flowers even as they watched.

Overhead, light, mist, and bioenergy given off by the plants conspired

to form what looked to be an arrangement of power coils.

"This place is unbelievable," said Dana. "It's throbbing with

power...and those plants...What on Earth are they?"

"It's like some kind of greenhouse," Bowie suggested.

The trio made their way down the roughly-hewn staircase until they

were standing at the very edge of the cauldron. The plants swayed, as

though moved by some wind only they could detect. More, they seemed to

be communing with each other, issuing a song that circumvented normal

Human hearing. Dana felt compelled to reach out toward one of the flowers,

just to stroke the velvety surface of its petals...

"No, don't touch that!" Zor yelled.

But it was too late. The flower seemed to meet Dana's hand halfway

and attach itself to her. She felt no pain from this, but Zor's yell had startled

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her so, that she quickly snatched her hand away.

Bowie was aghast. "The plant sensed you, Dana! Did you see it move

toward you?"

Zor was now standing transfixed by the scene, mesmerized by the

shafts of dazzling light and something that played at the edge of his

memory.

"The Triumvirate!..." he said suddenly. "Look at these flowers-they

grow in threes!-the three who act as one! Once again, the same thing I saw

in my dream."

Dana tried to coax more from his tortured mind. "Could those things

be related somehow?"

"Do you think maybe these plants are what the Masters are trying to

get their hands on?" Bowie asked.

Zor shook his head, eyes shut tight. "I don't know...But I do know that

these flowers aren't what they seem. They're some kind of dreadful

mutation, feeding off a source of incredible power. They're definitely a new

form of life, unlike any that we've ever seen."

Dana turned to regard the cauldron, the writhing plants, their siren

song...

"I don't like this at all..." she said warily.

Zor concurred. "Neither do I," he told her. "I feel this cavern is full of

emanations of great strength. It's as if these plants were calling out...making

contact with something far away. My past is buried here somehow. But how

can I expect anyone to believe this?"

"We'll bring the Supreme Commander here and show it to him-he'll

have to believe you then!"

"Oh, terrific!" Bowie exclaimed. "Can you imagine what he'd say to

that-'You expect me to believe this balderdash about flowers and strange

emanations?'...That's what he'd say! He'd think we're crazy, Dana."

Dana took a deep breath and reached for Zor's hand.

General Emerson and Colonel Rochelle sat silently in the war room.

The assault had proved to be a total disaster, to men and mecha alike.

189

Dozens of battlecruisers had been lost, along with an untold number of the

AJACs the supreme command had put so much faith in.

Nova Satori was with the two men; she had volunteered to get some

coffee for all of them, and was returning with steaming mugs when

ground-base com acknowledged an incoming message from Lieutenant

Sterling. Emerson had the techs patch the transmission through to the

command balcony, and in a moment Dana's face filled the monitor screen.

"First of all, sir...I'm fully aware that I disobeyed orders."

"So, what else is new?" Nova muttered behind the general's back.

Dana caught the comment and replied to it. "I'm sorry, Nova, but I

have Zor with me and we've just paid a visit to the site of the SDF-1. General,

I hope you're not too angry with us."

Depleted of emotion, Emerson simply snorted. Besides, he had

interesting news of his own to report-perhaps the only good news that had

come from the battle.

"Lieutenant," he began. "We've just received a transmission from Marie

Crystal. She was in direct contact with the enemy and her visual evidence

seems to bear out that theory of yours regarding the trichotomous pattern

of the aliens' behavior."

"I can't take credit for it, sir. It was Zor's idea. Is Marie all right?"

"Our losses were disastrously heavy...But I've been informed that

Lieutenant Crystal is now safely back aboard. She and the entire first assault

wave have disengaged and are withdrawing toward the dark side of the

moon. However, I regret to say that the attack has been something of a

fiasco."

In another part of the UEG headquarters, Leonard was receiving the

most recent battle update.

"Supreme Commander," a tech reported from the monitor, "the first

assault wave has fallen back in disarray."

"Well then, we'll demonstrate that we have more where that came

from," Leonard growled.

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"Sir?..."

"Mobilize the second assault wave. Order them to rendezvous with the

remaining operational units of the first wave and prepare for a combined

attack against the enemy."

The tech went wide-eyed with disbelief. "Another frontal assault,

Supreme Commander?"

Leonard ran a thick hand across his bullet-shaped skull and nodded

gravely.

"And this time, we'll fight to the very last Human life!"

End

RTUCN.COM

191

Document Outline

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The Final Nightmare

By Jack McKinney

1987

2

For Kallan and Caitlin Lock, with love from Uncle Jack

3

4

CHAPTER ONE

Many women were often in the thick of the fighting during the First

Robotech War. They served splendidly and gallantly. But they were usually

restricted to what the military insisted on calling "non-combat roles," despite

the great numbers of them killed as a direct result of enemy action.

By the time of the Second Robotech War, with the Earth's resources

depleted and its population drastically reduced by the First, sheer necessity

and common sense had overcome the lingering sexism that had kept willing,

qualified women off the front lines.

Nevertheless, the Robotech Masters' onslaught quickly had Earth on the

ropes. It is instructive to consider what the outcome would have been if the

Army of the Southern Cross had faced the planet's second invasion without

half its fighting strength.

Fortunately for us all, that is not what happened.

Betty Greer,

Post-Feminism and the Robotech Wars

Lieutenant Marie Crystal made a willful effort to face the camera now

as she had faced enemy guns yesterday.

She drove back her bone-deep exhaustion, the pain of battle injuries,

and the despair of a desperate situation that even the light lunar gravity

couldn't alleviate. She intended to finish her report with the clarity and

precision expected of a Tactical Armored Space Corps fighter ace and the

leader of the TASC's vaunted Black Lions...

And maybe, after that, she could collapse and get a few minutes' sleep.

It seemed now that she never wanted anything but sleep.

In the wake of the disastrous all-out attempt to destroy the Robotech

Masters' invasion fleet, Marie had to shoulder even more responsibility. The

chain of command had been shot all to hell along with the Earth strikeforce

itself.

Admiral Burke was dead-diced into bloody stew by an exploding power

5

junction housing when the blue Bioroids cut the strikeforce flagship to

ribbons. General Lacey, next in line, lay with ninety percent of the skin

seared off his body, teetering between life and death.

The senior officer, a staff one-star, was still functional, but he had

virtually no combat command experience. The scuttlebutt was that he was

being pressured to let somebody else run the show. An implausibly

successful Bioroid sortie and the resultant hangar deck explosion on board

the now defunct flagship resulted in Marie being named the new flight

group commander.

She went on with her after-action report to Southern Cross military

headquarters on Earth.

"Our remaining spacecraft number: one battlecruiser, two destroyer

escorts, and one logistical support ship, all of which have suffered heavy

damage," she said, looking squarely into the optical pickup. "Along with

twenty-three Veritech fighters, twelve A-JACs combat mecha, and assorted

small scout and surveillance ships. At last report we have one thousand, one

hundred sixteen surviving personnel, eight hundred and fifty-seven of them

fit for duty."

Fewer than nine hundred effectives! Jesus! She pulled at the collar ring

seal of her combat armor, where it had chafed her neck. She couldn't recall

the last time she had been able to strip off the alloy plate and get some real

rest. Back on Earth, probably. But that was a lifetime ago.

"As I stated previously, deployment of the enemy mother ships, and

their assault craft and Bioroid combat mecha, made it impossible for the

strikeforce to return to Earth. Since we were also cut off from LS Space

Station Liberty, and were forced to take refuge here at Moon Base ALUCE,

we are making round-the-clock efforts to fortify our position against an

enemy counterattack. Major repairs and life-support replenishment are

being carried out as well, and civilian personnel have been placed under

emergency military authority."

It all sounded so crisp, so can-do, she thought, trying to focus her eyes

on her notecards. As if everything were under control, instead of at the thin

6

edge of utter catastrophe. As if the survivors were an effective fighting force

instead of a chewed up, burned-out bunch of men and women and

machinery. As if the attack hadn't been the most insane strategy, the worst

snafu, the most horrifying slaughter she had ever seen.

Recording her stiff-upper-lip report, she felt like a liar, but that was the

way Marie Crystal had been taught to do her duty. She wondered if the

brass hats at Southern Cross Army HQ back on Earth would read between

the lines-if that pompous, blustering idiot, Supreme Commander Leonard,

had any idea how much suffering and death he had caused.

She yanked her mind off that track; feeling murderous toward her

superiors would not help now.

"Our medical personnel and volunteers from other strikeforce elements

are tending to the wounded in the ALUCE medcenter. But facilities are

extremely limited here, and I am instructed to request that we be permitted

to attempt a special mission to ferry our worst cases back to Earth."

What could she add? There was the natural Human impulse to tell the

goddamn lardbutts in their swivel chairs how much hell she had seen. There

was the desire to see someone capable, someone like General Emerson, for

instance, march in before the United Earth Government council and charge

Leonard and his staff with incompetence. There was an inner compulsion to

tell how futile it felt, preparing the civilian ALUCE-Advanced Lunar

Chemical Engineering-station for a last stand, and getting the VTs and other

mecha ready to sortie out again if the need arose.

Forget it; shoot 'n' salute, that was a soldier's duty. Maybe a miracle

would happen, and the mysterious aliens who called themselves the

Robotech Masters would cut ALUCE and the strikeforce a little slack. If the

Humans could just have a few days to get themselves back into some kind of

fighting shape, that would change the mix a lot. But Marie had her doubts.

"This completes the situation report. Lieutenant Marie Crystal,

reporting for the Commander, out." She saluted smartly, her mouth tugging

in a faint, ironic smirk.

The camera tech wrapped it up. "We'll transcribe it and send it out in

7

burst right away, ma'am." She took the cassette of Marie's report.

The Robotech Masters had been having more and more success

interfering with the frequency-jumping communications tactics the

Humans had been forced to use. To avoid any interference, the report would

be sped up to a millisecond squeal of information. Hopefully it would get

through.

And when they get it, what then? Marie wondered. We might be able to

sneak one shipload of WIAs back, but for the rest of us there's no way home.

In the headquarters of the Army of the Southern Cross, Supreme

Commander Leonard studied the tape. The smudged and hollow-eyed

young female flight lieutenant reeled off facts and figures of bitter defeat

with no expression except that last upcurling of one corner of her mouth.

"Mmm" was all he said, as Colonel Rochelle turned off the tape. "We

received this transmission from ALUCE eight minutes ago, sir," Rochelle

told him. "Nothing else has gotten through the enemy's jamming so far.

Looks like they're onto our freq-jumping stunt. The people down in

signal/crypto are trying to come up with something new, but so far the

occasional odd message is all we can really hope for from Strikeforce

Victory."

Leonard nodded slowly, looking at the huge, gray screen. Then he

whirled around and threw himself into a seat across the conference table

from Major General Rolf Emerson.

"Well, Emerson! How about that!" Leonard pounded his pale, soft,

freckled fists the size of pot roasts on the gleaming oak. "It would appear

that our little assault operation wasn't a complete failure after all, eh?"

Everyone in the room held their breath. It was a well-known fact that

Emerson had opposed the mad strikeforce scheme from the outset, and that

there was no love lost between the Supreme Commander and his chief of

staff for Terrestrial Defense, Emerson. And everyone had watched Emerson

grow grimmer and grimmer as Marie Crystal delivered her casualty report.

Now Emerson looked across the table at Leonard, and more than one

8

staff officer wished they had had time to get a little money down on the fight.

Leonard was huge, but a lot of it was pointless bulk; there was some

question about how much real muscle was there. Emerson, on the other

hand, was a ramrod-straight middleweight with a boxer's physique, and few

of the men and women on his staff could keep up with him when it came

time for calisthenics or road drill.

Not a complete failure? Emerson was asking himself. God, what would

this man call "failure"?

But he was a man bound by his oath. A generation before, military

officers had violated their oaths. They had served grasping politicians-most

tellingly in the now-defunct USA-and that had led to a global civil war.

Every woman and man who had sworn to serve the Southern Cross Army

knew those stories, and knew that it was their obligation to obey that oath to

the letter.

Emerson stared down at his fingers, which were curled around an

ancient fountain pen that had been a gift from his ward, Private First Class

Bowie Grant. He worried about Bowie only slightly more than he worried

about each of the hundreds and thousands of other Southern Cross Army

personnel under his command. He worried about the survival of the Human

race and that of Earth more than he worried about any individual Human

life-even his own.

Emerson gathered up all of his patience, and the perseverance for

which he was so famous. "Commander Leonard, the ALUCE base is a mere

research outpost, with civilians present. Aside from the fact that by the

standards of the Robotech war we're fighting, ALUCE is tinfoil and

cardboard! I therefore presume you're not seriously thinking of fortifying it

as a military base."

It was as close to insubordination as Emerson had ever permitted

himself to go. The silence in the Command Briefing Room was so profound

that the roiling of various stomachs could be heard. Through it all, Emerson

was locked with Leonard's gaze.

The Supreme Commander spoke deliberately. "Yes, that is my plan.

9

And I see nothing wrong with it!" He seemed to be making it up as he went

along. "Mmm. As I see it, a military strikeforce at an outpost on the moon

will enable us to hit those alien bastards from two different directions at

once!"

A G3 staff light colonel named Rudolph readjusted his glasses and said

eagerly, "I see! In that way, we're outflanking those six big mother ships

they've got in orbit around Earth!"

Leonard looked pleased. "Yes. Precisely."

Emerson took a deep breath and pushed his chair away from the oak

table a little, as though he was about to face a firing squad. But when he

came to his feet, there was silence. All eyes turned to him. The general

feeling was that no one on Earth was more trusted, more committed to

standing by his word, than Rolf Emerson.

No one could be relied upon more to speak the truth into the teeth of

deceit.

And this was certainly that moment. "ALUCE is a peaceful,

unreinforced cluster of pressurized huts, Commander Leonard. I don't think

that anything the strikeforce survivors can do will make it a viable military

base. And it's my opinion that by provoking the enemy into attacking it

you'll be throwing away lives."

So many staffers inhaled at the same time that Rudolph wondered if

the air pressure would drop. Leonard's faced flushed with rage. "They've

already mauled our first assault wave; it's not a question of provocation

anymore. Damn it, man! This is war, not an exercise in interstellar

diplomacy!"

"But we haven't even tried negotiating," Emerson began, a little

hopelessly. An over-eager missile battery commander named Komodo had

fired on the Robotech Masters before any real attempt could be made to

contact them and learn what it was they wanted. From that moment on, it

had been war.

"I'll have no insubordination!" Leonard bellowed. To the rest of the

staff he added, "Mobilize the second strikeforce and prepare them to relieve

10

our troops at Moon Base ALUCE!"

Outside the classified-conference room, a figure clad in the uniform of

the Southern Cross's Alpha Tactical Armored Corps-the ATACs-moved

furtively.

Zor still didn't quite understand the half-perceived urges that had

brought him there. It was a familiar feeling, this utter mystification about

who he was, and what forces drove him. It was as though he moved in a fog,

but he knew that somewhere ahead was the room where all Earth's military

plans were being formulated. He must go there, he must listen and

watch-but he didn't understand why.

Suddenly there was a bigger figure blocking his way. "Okay, Zor.

Suppose you tell me just what the hell you think you're doing here?"

It was Sergeant Angelo Dante, senior NCO of the 15th, fists balled and

feet set at about shoulder width, ready for a fight. His size and strength

dwarfed Zor's, and Zor was not small. Dante was a career soldier, a man of

dark, curling hair and dark brows, not quick to trust anyone, incapable of

believing anything good of Zor.

The sergeant grabbed Zor's leather torso harness and gave it a yank,

nearly lifting him off his feet. "What about it?"

Zor shook his head slowly, as if coming out of a trance. "Angle!

Wh-how did I get here?" He blinked, looking around him.

"That's my line. You're sneakin' around a restricted area and you're

away from your duty station without permission. If you don't have a pretty

good explanation, I'm gonna see to it your butt goes into Barbwire City for a

long time!" He shook Zor again.

"Oh, Zor! There you are!" First Lieutenant Dana Sterling, commanding

officer of the 15th, practically squealed it as she rounded a corner and

hurried toward them. Angelo shook his head a little, watching how her

smile beamed and her eyes crinkled as she caught sight of Zor.

Like her two subordinates, she was dressed in the white Southern

Cross uniform, with the black piping and black boots that suggested a riding

11

outfit. She barely reached the middle of Angelo's chest, but she was, he had

to admit, a gutsy and capable officer. Except where this Zor guy was

concerned.

She rushed up to them and grabbed Zor's hand; Angelo found himself

automatically releasing his captive. Dana seemed completely unaware that

she had blundered into the middle of what would otherwise have been a

fight. "I've been looking for you everywhere, Zor!"

Zor, still dazed, seemed to be groping for words. "Just a second,

Lieutenant," Angelo interrupted.

But she was tugging Zor away. "Come along; I want to ask you

something!"

"Hold it, ma'am!" Angelo burst out. "Why don'tcha ask pretty boy here

what he's doing hanging around a restricted area?"

Dana's expression turned to anger. Like the sergeant, she had tracked

down Zor with difficulty, but she wouldn't let herself think badly of her

strange, alien trooper. She shot back, "What are you, Angie, a spy for the

Global Military Police?"

Angelo's black brows went up. "Huh? You know better than that! But

somebody has to keep an eye on this guy. Or don't you think what he's doing

is a little suspicious?"

Dana rasped, "Zor's suffering from severe memory loss. If he's a little

disoriented at times, that just means we should show him a bit of

compassion and understanding!"

She slipped an arm through Zor's, clasping his elbow. Angelo wondered

if he were going crazy; wasn't this the same alien who had led the enemy

forces in his red Bioroid? Didn't he try to kill Dana, as she had tried to kill

him, in a half dozen or so of the most vicious single combats of the war, her

Hovertank mecha against his Bioroid?

"I'll speak to you later, Sergeant," Dana said, dragging Zor off.

Angelo watched them go. He had gained a lot of respect for Dana

Sterling since she had taken command of the 15th, but she was only

eighteen and, in the sergeant's opinion, still too impulsive and too inclined

12

to make rash moves. He tried to suppress his sneaking suspicion as to why

she was so protective of Zor-so possessive, really.

But one indisputable fact remained. No matter how loyally Angelo tried

to discount it, Dana herself was half alien.

13

CHAPTER TWO

I could never figure out why Leonard, who hated anything alien, would

tolerate that wacky experiment where Zor was thrown in with the 15th

ATAC-especially since a female halfbreed was CO. One day, I remember,

Leonard had been grumbling about putting Zor back into lab isolation and

dissecting him.

Ten minutes later the phone rang. Leonard didn't say much in that

conversation-it was real brief. And whatever he heard through the earpiece

had him sweating. Right after that he dropped the topic for good.

I happened to see the phone logs for the afternoon over at the commo

desk a little later. The call had come from Dr. Lazio Zand, who ran Special

Protoculture Observations and Operations Kommandatura. I did my best to

forget I'd ever seen that log.

Captain Jed Streiber, as quoted in

"Conjuration,"

History of the Robotech Wars, Vol. CXXXIII

"

The Revenge of the Martian Mystery Women?

" Zor echoed Dana.

"Right!" she said excitedly. "Everybody says it's a dynamite movie.

You'll love it! And it won't cost you anything 'cause I've already got the

tickets!" She showed him the pair of ducats.

They were sitting in a little park outside the big, imperial-looking

building that housed Alpha Tactical Armored Corps HQ. Birds were singing,

and a fountain splashed nearby. "As a matter of fact, they're hard to come

by, and the scalper charged me plenty for these!" She frowned a bit,

wondering if she was making a fool of herself.

Zor gave a thin smile. "Well then, how can I refuse, Lieutenant?"

An officer in the 10th squad who had seen the movie last night had said

that it was romantic as well as exciting. Dana liked the idea of seeing a

movie about alluring, captivating alien women with Zor.

She rushed on, "I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't said

14

yes!" Then she stopped, looking perplexed. "Only-now I'm not sure what I

ought to wear..."

Zor watched her as she deliberated, certain that no matter what she

decided to wear she would look beautiful. He tried to sort out the conflicting

emotions and veiled impulses that kept him in a state of confusion much of

the time. Zor wondered if these feelings for his lieutenant were what the

Human beings called love.

In a geostationary orbit some 23,000 miles above the Earth hung six

stupendous mother ships-the invasion fleet of the Robotech Masters.

In the huge flagship, which still bore the scars of battles with the

Human race both in space and on the surface of the planet, stood the

Triumvirate of Masters. They looked down from the vantage point of their

floating Protoculture cap-the enormous, humplike instrument that gave

them total control of superhuman mind powers and abilities.

Like virtually all members of their race, the Triumvirate of Masters

functioned as a triad, each standing upon a small platform attached to the

hovering cap. They were males, with hawklike faces that wore perpetual

scowls. The severity of their faces was emphasized by scarlike V's of tissue

under each cheek. All of them were bald-or shave-pated; their long, fine hair

fell below their shoulders. They wore monkish robes, their wide, floppy

collars suggesting the tripartite blossom of the Invid Flower of Life.

The Masters usually mindspoke through direct tactile contact with

their Protoculture cap, but they chose now to say their words out loud.

Shaizan, who was often the spokesman for the Triumvirate, said, "So, you're

saying our Bioroid clones are limited in their effectiveness?"

Looking up at him was a triad of Clonemasters, two males and a female,

standing under their own, smaller Protoculture cap. All were tall, pale, and

slender. They wore tight-fitting clothes vaguely suggestive of the early

Renaissance.

Both males wore full blond-brown mustaches and mutton chops, and

one of them had a beard; the androgynouslooking female wore her long

15

blond hair in a simple style. The minor differences between them only

served to emphasize their sameness of body and features.

The leader of the Clonemaster triumvirate nodded. "Precisely. Their

current cerebral composition makes them undependable. They perform

adequately as shock troops, but in order to deal with an Invid attack, we'll

need clones much more tightly mindlinked to our triumvirate."

And they all knew that the need to deal with the savage, relentless

Invid might come soon. The Flower of Life had bloomed on Earth, and

where the Flower bloomed, the Robotech Masters' mortal enemies, the

Invid, were bound to appear in short order.

It was all so frustrating to the Masters, even though they didn't reveal

any emotion. They had traveled for nearly fifteen years-across the galaxy-in

search of the last Protoculture Matrix in existence. There were determined

to find that source of power that could return them to their rightful place as

lords of all creation. And yet, although they were near their prize, they were

unable to claim it because of the stubbornness of the primitive Humans

below. Unbeknownst to the inhabitants of Earth, the Matrix, sealed under

one of three mounds on the outskirts of Monument City, was going to seed.

The Masters' calculations showed that the Protoculture would soon

shift from a contained mass, kept in the prefertilized state in which it

exuded its incredible and unique forces, and convert into the Flowers of Life

that the Invid ingested to sustain themselves.

But the Humans weren't the Masters' only opposition; they weren't the

most formidable enemies. The mounds were guarded by invisible

Protoculture entities-three strange, mysterious, and sinister wraiths.

The wraiths had manifested themselves once-or rather, they had

permitted the Masters to perceive them. They were cloaked and cowled

fire-eyed specters-ghosts whose power stymied the Masters' efforts to find

out exactly where the Matrix lay. Without that information, it was

impossible for the Masters to use simple brute force to rip the Matrix from

the mounds; that would risk damaging the thing they had come so far to

retrieve. The Masters weren't sure yet what other powers or designs the

16

wraiths might have.

And now, to complicate matters further, local perturbations were

hampering the performance of the Masters' cloned slave populace. "Yes,

that might be our problem with Zor Prime," Shaizan was saying. "We've had

some trouble with him, almost from the first moment when he was set down

among the Humans. His neuro-sensor has been malfunctioning."

Not that Zor Prime, cloned from tissue samples of the slain original Zor,

greatest genius of his race and discoverer of Protoculture, hadn't been of

some use. Divested of his memories, the clone had been dispatched among

the Terrans as an unwitting spy, so that the Masters could see through his

eyes and hear through his ears.

The Masters were also hoping that the trauma of being among the local

primitives, and being on the planet to which the original Zor had dispatched

the Protoculture Matrix so long ago, would spur Zor's memory. Perhaps

they could get Zor Prime to tell them why the Matrix had been sent,

precisely where it was, and how to get it back from both the Humans and

the invisible wraithlike Protoculture entities who guarded the mounds that

hid it.

Dag, second among the Masters, had a slightly more prognathous jaw

than the others. He said, "It seems the Human behavioral dysfunction

known as emotions may be responsible for this malfunction."

Bowkaz, third of the Masters, nodded, his brows nearly meeting as his

frown deepened. "Yes. These emotions destabilize the proper functioning of

the healthy brain and the rational mind."

"What is your will then, Masters?" asked Jeddar, leader of the

Clonemaster triumvirate-their chief slaves-bowing humbly before them.

"Hmm," Shaizan said, gazing down on him. "You would like our

permission to carry out this plan of yours, no doubt."

The Clonemaster kowtowed. "Yes, my lord. We believe it will be our key

to a quick, decisive victory. We only need your approval."

The Masters touched hands to their Protoculture cap. Wherever one of

the nailless, spiderlike hands touched a mottled area of the

17

mushroom-shaped cap, the mottled area came alight with the power of

Protoculture. The Masters swiftly and silently came to a consensus.

The barracks housing the 15th squad, Alpha Tactical Armored

Corps-ATAC-was a truncated cone a dozen stories high, of smoky blue glass

and gleaming blue tile (the most modern of polymers) set on a framework of

blued alloy. It was a large complex even though it only served as housing

and operational facility to a few people; much of the aboveground area was

filled with parts and equipment storage and repair areas, armory, kitchen

and dining and lavatory space, and so on. In many ways it was a

self-contained world.

At the ground and basement levels were the mecha servicing and repair

stations, and the motor stables filled with parked Hovercycles and other

conventional vehicles, along with the giant Hovertanks-the 15th's primary

mecha.

Up in her quarters, Dana wasn't thinking about any kind of machinery

just then. Agonizing over what to wear for her date with Zor, she flung every

skirt, dress, and blouse in her closet in different directions, draping them

with lingerie.

There was, no doubt, something in the regs about officers dating

privates, but Zor was a different case. He had been placed with the 15th in

the hope that military service would help him recover his missing memory,

and that exposure to Earth-style social interaction and bonding would sway

him against his former Masters.

When it came to social interaction, Dana was more than ready. It

wasn't just that Zor was dreamy looking and a little disoriented. There was

also the fact that he was alien, as was Dana's mother. She sometimes

wondered if it was blood calling to blood.

Long before she had actually seen him, Dana had felt inexplicable

emotions and experienced strange Visions bearing on the red Bioroid Zor

piloted. Something within drew her to Zor.

Now, as she hurried into the unit ready-room, which doubled as a rec

18

room during off-duty hours, she tried to set all that aside and concentrate

on having a good time.

Decked out in a frilly skirt and silk blouse, she was all set to yell Hi Zor!

I'm here! Only-it wasn't Zor she found there.

Squad Sergeant Angelo Dante stepped away from the autobar (it was

after duty hours, and the cybernetic mixologist would dispense alcohol to

troopers who were certified offduty) and strolled over toward her. "Well,

well! Aren't we looking awfully chic tonight?"

She tried to act nonchalant; she wanted to enjoy herself with Zor and

not start off the evening with another row with Angelo. "Have you seen Zor

around?"

In the days before the First Robotech War (after which an almost

medieval cluster of city-states had banded in a loose hegemony to fill the

vacuum of world rule and form the United Earth Government-the UEG)

soldiers had had less autonomy and more discipline, so the old salts liked to

say. If so, she would have welcomed a reversion to those old days.

If she kicked Angelo's feet out from under him and mashed a coffee

table over his head, Southern Cross Command might not consider the act a

necessary disciplinary measure and it could cause sociodynamic strains.

Besides, Angelo was awfully tough.

Dana restrained herself, but resolved to command his loyalty-even if it

meant inviting the very big, very strong, and quick NCO to step downstairs

to the motor stables and have it out-before another day passed. There was

no way two people could run a Hovertank squad, or any other unit.

Angelo smiled spitefully. "Yeah. I bet if he had seen you in your prom

queen rig, he would have never asked Nova out tonight."

"Nova? Nova Satori?"

Angelo buffed his nails on his torso harness. Dana considered decking

him; he was large, but she was used to fighting for everything she had ever

gotten, and if she could get in the first shot...

"Uh-huh," he said. "Let's see now: something about dinner, and the

theater afterwards."

19

He backed away suddenly as she came at him with clenched fists, ready

to spit brimstone and, he could see from the way she held herself, do some

damage.

She was raving. "That no-good two-timer! That sneaking alien! He's

getting more Human every day!"

Angelo was fending her off. "Well now, ma'am, maybe all he needs is a

bit of compassion, remember?" That was what she had said to him, back

when Angelo was about to take Zor's face off.

"You're enjoying this, huh?" she seethed at him. Then she had an image

of suitable revenge. She held up the two movie tickets. "Well, I guess you'll

just have to escort me, big boy!"

Angelo's face fell and he made some odd sounds before he found the

words. "Uh, ah, thanks, Lieutenant, but I'll pass-"

"You ain't reading me, Sergeant! It's an order!"

The Clonemasters' update was even more bleak than had been

anticipated.

"My lord, our reservoirs of Protoculture power are running dry. The

effects of this are being felt throughout the fleet. Our new clonelings are

lethargic and unresponsive; the effectiveness of our weapons is limited; and

our defensive shields cannot be maintained full-time. If we do not secure a

large infusion of Protoculture, we are doomed."

As Jeddar spoke, the humpish Protoculture cap of the Masters showed

them, by mind-image, the deteriorating situation in all six of the enormous

mother ships. Where the Protoculture energies had once coursed through

them like highways of incandescence or arterial systems of pure, godlike

force, those flows were now reduced to unsteady rivulets. It was like looking

into one huge, dying organism.

Elsewhere in the colossal flagship, six clones-two triumvirates-faced off,

five against one.

On the one side was Musica, ethereal weaver of song, Mistress of the

20

Cosmic Harp, whose melodies gave shape and effect to the mental force

with which the Clonemasters controlled their subjects. She was pale and

delicate looking, slender, with long, deep green hair.

To one side were her two clone sisters, Octavia and Allegra, both of

them subdued and frightened by the very idea of discord. And across from

Musica was the triumvirate of Guard leaders: tall, fit, limber military males

who were now unified in their anger as much as in their plasm.

Lieutenant Karno spoke for them. His long hair was a fiery red; he

spoke with uncharacteristic anger, for a slave of the Masters. "Musica, it is

not your place to decide how things shall be!"

Another, Darsis, looking like Karno's duplicate, agreed, "It has been

decided for us and you have no say in the matter!"

Sookol, the third, added, "That is our way, as it has been since the

beginning of time!"

Musica, eyes lowered to the carpeted deck, trembled at the heresy she

was committing. And yet she said, "Yes, I know that. We've been chosen for

each other as mates, and we must resign ourselves to it. But-that doesn't

change the fact that we are strangers, we Muses and you Guards."

Karno's brows knit, as if she were speaking in some language he had

never heard before. "But...what does that matter?"

Musica gave him a pleading look, then averted her eyes again. "I want

so much to accept the Masters' decision and believe that it is right, but

something very strange within me keeps saying that the Masters cannot be

right if their decision makes me feel this way."

"'Feel'?" Karno repeated. Could she have contracted some awful plague

from the Humans when the primitives from Earth managed to board the

flagship for that brief foray?

Darsis and Sookol had gasped, as had Allegra and Octavia. "It's

madness!" Sookol burst out.

Musica nodded miserably. "Yes, feelings! Even though we've always

been told that we're immune to them, I'm guilty of emotions."

Madness, indeed.

21

She saw the repulsed looks on their faces as they realized, she was

polluted, debased. But somehow it didn't change her determination not to

surrender these new sensations-not to be cleansed of them, even if she

could.

"I know I should be punished for it," she declared. "I know I'm guilty!

But-I cannot deny my feelings!" She broke down into tears.

"What's-what's that you're doing?" Darsis asked, baffled.

"I think I know," Karno answered tonelessly. "It's a sickness of the

Earthlings called 'crying.'"

If it was a sickness, Musica knew, there was no question about who had

infected her with it. It was Bowie Grant, the handsome young ATAC trooper

who she had met when his unit staged a recon on board the flagship.

Instead of a mindless primitive in armor, he had turned out to be a

sensitive creature. Bowie was a musician and he sat down at her Cosmic

Harp and played tunes of his own devising-beautiful, heart-rending

compositions that bound her feelings to him. New songs-songs that

wouldn't be found in the approved songlore of the Masters. He had shown

an inexplicable warmth toward her from the very start, and he quickly drew

the same from her.

Now Musica found herself sitting at her Harp, playing those same airs,

as the other five looked on in shock.

Bowie, do you feel this way about me? How I wish we could be together

again!

22

CHAPTER THREE

There was never any other child born on Earth from a union of

Zentraedi and Human. I made sure of that, with the powers at my command.

Because, of course, I immediately knew that Dana was the One; Dana was all

that was needed. And the plan went forward.

Dr. Lazlo Zand, notes for

Event Horizon: Perspectives on

Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

Lieutenant Nova Satori took a precise sip of wine, then consulted the

heavy chronometer on her wrist. "Zero hour."

Across from her, Zor gave her a puzzled look. "Something important?"

Although he was good at fighting, there were still so many things he

simply didn't understand. Was he, in the terms of this "date," behind

schedule somehow? Was he late in initiating the curious physical

interchanges the barracks braggarts always talked about? Was there some

accepted procedure for abbreviating the preliminaries? Perhaps he should

begin removing garments-but whose?

Nova stared at him. "Well...don't tell Dana or anyone else, but the relief

force is just lifting off for the moon."

Nova couldn't for the life of her figure out why she was telling him,

except that she liked one-upping Dana. She couldn't really put a finger on

why she had come along with him to the restaurant either, except that she

felt drawn to him-almost against her will.

When Zor was first captured, Nova was responsible for his

interrogation. She had felt that he was an enemy then and was suspicious

that that still might be the case. But there was something singularly

attractive about him. He had an agelessness about him even though he

looked young, a serenity even though he was tormented by his missing

memory, as though he were a part of her. It was as if he, as the expression

went, had a very old soul.

23

Zor was thinking along quite different lines. Nova's mention of Dana

reminded him that he was supposed to have gone to the movie with her. It

had completely slipped his mind; he wondered if bit by bit he was losing all

memory functions.

Some curiosity-more of a compulsion, actually-had made him ask Nova

to dinner. He hoped that she could tell him more about himself; he might

even be able to recover a part of his lost self. But there was more to it than

that, motivations Zor Prime couldn't fathom.

He studied Nova, an attractive young woman with a mantle of

blue-black hair so long that she had to sweep it aside when she sat down.

Like Dana, she wore a techno-hairband that suggested a headphone. Her

face was heart-shaped, her eyes dark and intense, lips mobile, bright,

expressive.

"Earth calling Zor." She chuckled, breaking his reverie.

"Eh?"

"Promise not to mention it, I said. Dana's got an awful temper; she's

going to split a seam when her precious 15th squad gets left out of another

major operation!"

"Don't worry. I won't tell her."

Nova shrugged to indicate that it really wouldn't be so bad if Dana

found out from him and learned that he had found out from Nova.

She said, "No one's supposed to know the relief force is on its way until

tomorrow. I really shouldn't have told you about it."

The vague compulsions in Zor suddenly coalesced, and he found

himself asking, "How many ships are going? How are they planning to get

past the enemy?"

It would all be revealed tomorrow anyway, and Nova's tongue had been

loosened by the wine with which Zor had been plying her. "Well, I heard

that-"

"So! there you are!" Dana howled, rushing toward the table. The pianist

stopped playing and silverware was dropped by startled diners.

Angelo Dante followed, embarrassed. The Revenge of the Martian

24

Mystery Women had been a debacle, animated camp moron-fodder instead

of the sizzling interplanetary romance-comedy-adventure Dana was under

the impression they would be seeing. Apparently the officer who had told

Dana about it was jazzing her. Angelo had laughed so maniacally that she

had slugged his arm and dragged him out of the theater. Then she set out on

a mission of revenge.

Now she set her fists on her hips and glared daggers at Zor. "Just who

the hell d'you think you are, you double-dealing dirtbag, standing me up so

you can take out something like her?"

Zor looked very confused and almost queasy. Nova said, "I don't think I

like the sound of that last part."

"You're not supposed to, you tramp! It was an insult!"

Angelo managed to intervene just as Nova was about to vault across the

table for a go at Dana, who was waiting to clean Nova's plow before going on

to put Zor in traction.

"Now calm down, ladies!" He looked to Zor for assistance; the maitre d'

was already headed their way. "Hey, Zor, you just gonna sit there like a

vegetable or what?"

Zor tried to put his thoughts in order. He couldn't remember why it

had been so important to get Nova to tell him those secrets about the relief

expedition. Now that Dana had interrupted everything, he could barely

recall the impulse that had made him ignore his date with Dana.

"I-I'm so sorry." He got to his feet unsteadily. "I don't feel well.... " He

lurched from his place, and headed for the door.

"Damn chicken! Come back and die like a man!" Angelo fumed, for he

felt that he was about to meet his own fate.

Outside, Zor stopped to catch his breath, leaning on a railing

overlooking a garden near the restaurant's entrance. He heard Nova's voice

in his head again, "The relief force is just lifting off for the moon."

But then there was another voice, a cold one, speaking directly to his

mind. It filled him with terror and hate, and he saw an image of an ax-keen,

angry face set against a collar that looked like the Invid Flower of Life.

25

It said, Message received and understood.

At Fokker Aerospace Field, on the outskirts of Monument City, the last

units of the emergency relief force were lifting off. The larger warships were

being helped aloft by the brute power of a dozen flying tugs. The tugs

released their cables as the warcraft climbed above Earth's gravitational

grip.

They formed up, making their way out beyond the atmosphere, moving

at flank speed, maintaining communications silence. Their ascent was

masked by the bulk of the Earth for the time being. Since the Robotech

Masters couldn't maintain geostationary position over Monument City and

still guard access to Luna, the expedition would have an element of surprise.

To someone of an earlier day, the giant battlecruisers would have

resembled prenuclear submarines, complete with conning towers, and

bulky thruster packages attached to their sterns. Their estimated time of

rendezvous with the units from ALUCE, station, barring trouble, was in just

under six hours.

At Moon Base ALUCE, Marie Crystal began organizing things for the

evacuation, with brave words to the wounded about how they would be on

Earth by the next morning.

Home, she thought, and thought, too, of a certain deuce

private-formerly a First Lieutenant-in the 15th squad, ATAC. Sean, Sean! to

be with you again!

Jeddar, group leader of the Clonemasters, glared at Musica sternly.

"What exactly is the meaning of this behavior?"

"Do you realize that you're jeopardizing the very existence of our

people?" added bearded Ixtal, the other male in the Clonemaster

triumvirate.

Tinsta, the tall, androgynous female, commanded not unkindly, "Child,

explain yourself."

26

Allegra and Octavia watched the scene, not daring to say a word. They

had already concluded that they would never be able to comprehend

Musica's new, aberrant behavior. They were frightened to death of being

contaminated or punished for what their triad-sibling was doing. Off to one

side, Karno and the other Guard clones looked on.

Musica sounded as if she was ready to weep again, something with

which Allegra and Octavia were becoming uncomfortably familiar. "I'm

sorry! I wish I could explain! I don't mean to be disobedient, really I don't!"

"Your mate has been selected, Musica," Tinsta said. "And he is

Lieutenant Karno. You will submit to this decision."

"The survival of your own people requires it." Jeddar pressured her.

She shook her head, her long, deep-green hair swinging around her

face, moaning, "No...no..."

"Yes!" Jeddar shot back. "Disobedience cannot be tolerated!"

Musica, moaning, seemed to undergo some sort of seizure. Then she

slumped to the deck. Her sisters rushed to kneel by her. The Clonemaster

triumvirate gaped; finally, Jeddar found words. "This is far worse that I had

imagined."

"Has she ceased to live?" Lieutenant Karno asked numbly.

Jeddar replied, "She has fallen into what the Humans call a 'faint."' A

cold current rippled through him. Until this moment, he had been sure that

his Robotech Masters ultimately would be victorious. But as Musica now

knew emotions, so did Jeddar begin to know the meaning of doubt.

Everything was on schedule, and the relief force was expecting

rendezvous with Marie's contingent, when the chilling news came.

"Enemy ships spotted at mark seven niner, closing on us fast!"

General quarters sounded, armor-shod feet pounding the deck as men

and women rushed to battle stations. Cannon and missile tubes were run

forth from their turrets as the rust-red, whiskbroom-shaped assault ships of

the Robotech Masters plunged at the relief force.

Fast-moving and mounting formidable firepower, the assault ships

27

dodged the Terrans' shot patterns and began scoring hits almost

immediately. Hulls were penetrated by fusion-hot lances of energy; there

were explosions and explosive decompression in the breeched warcraft.

Southern Cross soldiers died in flames, in whirlwinds of shrapnel, and in

vacuum.

Battlecruiser number three, the Austerlitz, disappeared in a furious

fireball. Other vessels were taking heavy damage. The Terrans had been

taken by surprise, and no one could answer the question, How could this

have happened? How could they have been waiting for us, as if they knew

we were coming?

But the Humans struggled to throw up a screen of AA fire, bring

damage under control, and simultaneously launch mecha of their own. In

moments the A-JACs, rotors folded for space combat, howled forth from the

battlecruisers to engage in battle.

As soon as the A-JACs began their counterattack, the hatches opened

in the sides of the assault ships, and enormous Bioroids rode forth to give

battle on circular antigrav Hovercraft. The Bioroids deployed for the fight,

looking like vaguely human-shaped walking battleships. They swarmed

angrily, outnumbering the Human mecha.

"Air Cavalry One to Lieutenant Crystal," the call came over the

command net. "I'm breaking radio silence to request immediate assistance.

We are under heavy attack and request immediate assistance."

Marie, on the bridge of the destroyer escort Mohi Heath, saw the

worried look on the face of Lieutenant Lucas, the Aircav commander. She

opened her headset mike to transmit. "Roger, Aircav One; we're on our

way."

The ships of the patchwork evacuation force went to maximum speed.

Marie threw the headset aside and ran for her own A-JAC, and the rest of

her TASC outfit, the Black Lions, hot-scrambled.

The Bioroids were enjoying good hunting.

28

The relief expedition was short on mecha, since so many had been

committed to the first strikeforce and many more had to remain behind to

guard Earth. So, the enemy assault ships stayed back and let the

clone-operated Bioroids ride their Hovercraft, and slaughter the enemy.

The relief force A-JACs and others fought valiantly, but the sheer

unevenness in numbers became apparent at once. Bioroids blazed away

with the weapons mounted in the control stems and platform bows of their

Hovercraft, and with the disc-shaped handguns that were as big as

fieldpieces. A-JACs blazed into explosive death one after another.

Lieutenant Lucas, his unit half gone, was calling to ask permission for a

hasty withdrawal; there was no point in throwing away Earth's valuable

mecha. Then, suddenly, there was a blue Bioroid on his tail, the gun in its

control stem spewing annihilation discs. Lucas only had a split second to

wonder who would take over (his exec being dead already) and to hope that

the strikeforce somehow would survive.

But then the Bioroid disappeared in a flaming ball of gas, and a strange

A-JAC bearing a rampant black lion came zooming past. "Crystal, this is

Lucas! Crystal, is that you?"

"Looks like this time the settlers have come to rescue the cavalry," she

said. She added to her own outfit, "Okay, boys; let's wrassle 'em around

some."

But that was already happening. Marie Crystal's Black Lions had come

in on the enemy's rear flank, undetected, and hurled themselves into the

furious dogfight. They had already changed the odds; within seconds they

were turning the kill ratios around. Before fifteen seconds passed, eight

surprised Bioroids had been shot to fragments or utterly destroyed.

But the enemy seemed determined to stand its ground, as it were, and

fight. The Lions, having been mauled so badly on their first assault only

days before, were more than willing to oblige.

Dogfight? Rat race? Oh, yes! Marie thought. Now you pay! And if

somebody asks who your accountants are, you just say, "the Black Lions"!

The engagement got even hotter. Marie did a classic "Fokker Feint,"

29

flamed a blue, then raised Aircav One again. "Lieutenant Lucas! Now's your

chance! Head for ALUCE base!"

It was too sensible a suggestion for Lucas to argue with; the units still

on the moon would need the relief force, and Marie's pilots were keeping

the enemy busy. Lucas disengaged his A-JACs even as the relief warcraft

made their way past the distracted Bioroids to recover Aircav One and its

birds on the fly. He headed for ALUCE at top speed.

Some of the enemy tried to give chase, and Marie led several of her

A-JACs to stop them. She decided to change the mix a bit, and went to

Battloid mode. Other A-JACs followed suit, screaming after the enemy with

back and foot thrusters blaring.

The A-JACs launched missiles, and three more Bioroids got waxed. The

rest broke off their chase, to turn on their tormentors. Aircav One and the

rest of the relief force were already disappearing for their rendezvous with

Luna.

The Black Lions hit the Bioroids with everything they had, driving

them back, until Marie judged that the evacuation force had enough of a

head start. With the enemy ranks drastically thinned out and their attack

broken, the A-JACs got in a final barrage that blew one of the invader

assault ships to atoms. As before, destruction of their field-command nerve

center confused and demoralized the Bioroids; the A-JACs took advantage

of that to break contact and return to their convoy at max thrust.

Soon Earth loomed huge and blue-white before them.

30

CHAPTER FOUR

Very well; I can't stop you. Take the Protoculture from me! Seal my fate,

and seal your own as well!

The original Zor to the Lords of Tirol

The Robotech Masters' anger was not assuaged by their warriors'

excuse that Zor Prime had mentioned nothing of a second force coming

from Luna to catch the Bioroids in a pincer. If the Masters were not so short

of functioning servants, many clones, both in the command structure and in

the ranks, would have been deactivated and sent to reclamation.

The Clonemasters cut short the reports and turned to one another, as

they waited fearfully. "Well then," Dag said to the Clonemaster group leader,

Jeddar, "I presume that is all the evidence we need. We know we can no

longer depend on Zor Prime's transmissions."

Jeddar bowed. "That is correct, Master. He has been overexposed to

the emotional contagions of Humanity. But there is a matter of more

immediate concern."

"And that is?" Bowkaz demanded, looking down at him.

"Taking Musica as an example," Jeddar responded, "we are seeing an

upsurge in emotionality and counterproductive behavior similar to what we

now know happened to the Zentraedi giants when they tried to recover the

Protoculture Matrix."

Shaizan declared to the other Masters, "It seems to me that the time

has come to begin all-out production of our Invid Fighters."

The Masters' Invid Fighters were different from the mecha of the same

designation once used by the Zentraedi giants. But like the Zentraedi's, the

Masters'

Invid

Fighters-more

commonly

referred

to

as

the

Triumviroid-were the most powerful mecha in the Masters' inventory. The

clone/fighting machine system had been developed rather recently by their

stagnated standards-and incorporated certain characteristics of the savage

31

Invid with whom the Masters had fought a long and unrelenting war.

The reason there were not more Triumviroids in the Masters' forces

was because their production was so costly. But the Masters now faced the

choice of either losing the war or launching a crash program to create a

fighting force of Invid Fighters-even if it meant cannibalizing their

conventional blues, combat vessels, and their own instrumentality.

The Robotech Masters were also constantly aware that their own

masters, the Triumvirate of the Elders, waited far across the dark lightyears,

expecting results. Nearly all of Tirol's remaining resources had been thrown

into this expedition to obtain the last Matrix; the Elders, who were left in

the shambles of their empire with a mere handful of clones, expected

results-and were impatient.

The decision didn't take the Masters long; they lusted for the power of

the Protoculture Matrix more than any vampire ever thirsted for lifeblood.

They desired immortality and feared death with a terror greater than any

short-lived Human or clone could ever imagine.

The Robotech Masters turned to their slaves and nodded as one.

Supreme Commander Leonard let Marie make her brief report.

Leonard was more pleased with the battle as a propaganda victory and a

bolster to his influence with the UEG council than he was with it as a

military success. But he was pleased with that aspect of it, too-his loathing

of aliens bordered on the psychotic.

After she was dismissed, Marie stepped back into the corridor only to

discover Dana, Angelo Dante, and Sean Phillips coming toward her.

Marie was still dressed in smudged battle armor, dirty and weary, but

she didn't let that stop her from crying out his name and running toward

him, as he hurried to embrace her. "Oh, Sean, Sean, you came!"

He was the same as she had pictured him a thousand times since

leaving Earth, the smiling, roguish ladykiller of the 15th. Sean had been its

commanding officer not too long ago, with Dana his untried executive

officer fresh out of the Academy. But a certain scandal concerning a

32

colonel's daughter had gotten Sean busted to deuce private in the

Hovertank outfit he had formerly commanded.

The romance started when he saved her life during a firefight. Marie

had been very wary of his advances at first, refusing to be one more notch

on his bedpost. They had fought like alley cats. But in time she had come to

believe his declarations of love, and let herself admit that although she had

never been in love before, she was now.

"Darlin', I thought maybe we'd lost you," he grinned, to hide all the

worrying he had been doing. Sean was used to being the reckless

swashbuckler, going into danger while a woman kept the light in the

window, not vice versa.

Then he held her at arm's length again, and saw her eyes brimming.

"Marie, what's wrong?"

She didn't let herself surrender to tears. But after the long, exhausting

mission, the death and the killing, shouldering all burdens and enduring

sleeplessness while sustaining the morale of all around her, she laid her

head against his chest and let her breath go, running her fingers through his

hair. "Oh, Sean, I-I wasn't sure you really...really cared"

He hugged her and rubbed her alloy-clad back, while the others cleared

their throats and turned to look at something else, anything else. Then he

held her face in his hands to gaze into her eyes. "It's you and me, Marie

Crystal. From now on. Always."

In the conference room, Supreme Commander Leonard turned to his

subordinates.

"The relief force has the materials and know-how to turn ALUCE into a

strategic military base. With it, we will be able to attack the enemy on two

fronts."

But Leonard knew he couldn't afford to fight a two-front war, one

against those obscene alien invaders and one against the damned meddling

council. However, he had come up with what he considered a brilliant

strategy for solidifying his place as Supreme Commander: eliminate the one

33

man who could conceivably be tapped to replace him, and whose military

genius threatened to eclipse his.

He turned to Major General Emerson with a fulsome smile. "And Rolf,

I have a great little surprise for you."

Emerson, already three steps ahead of Leonard, resigned himself. He's

got my range and coordinates this time.

The 15th was on stand-down, relaxing in the ready-room, when Louie

Nichols charged in with his news.

Bowie Grant sat at the piano, playing sadly and brooding over Musica,

as he had since he first met her. He had thought of and discarded a hundred

plans for getting back to her somehow, for being with her, for finding some

kind of life together with the Mistress of the Cosmic Harp. She had

enthralled him-magicked an enchanted ring round his heart, so that he

could think of nothing and no one else. If he had taught her what love was,

she was also teaching him, even-especially-in their separation.

Louie Nichols burst in, babbling and running around in such a lather

that Dana, Angelo, and the rest thought they were going to have to kneel on

his chest to get him to spill out what he knew. It sounded as if he was about

to begin blubbering, but it was hard to tell with Louie because he always

wore big, square, tinted tech goggles, day and night.

"Well," he managed at last, "they've appointed a new commander to

take charge of ALUCE and open the second front."

Sean stared at him. "Yeah, so? Who is it?"

Louie worked himself up to answer. "Leonard's sending General

Emerson!"

Bowie had been playing softly. Now he brought his fingers down hard

in discord. The Robotech Masters seemed to have some kind of pipeline into

Southern Cross plans, and everyone knew how high the casualties would

probably run at ALUCE.

Emerson was supervising the organization of a new expedition to

34

ALUCE. With the original reinforcing group fortifying the lunar base, it was

time to get more personnel, combat units, and equipment up there, to

expand preparations for the second front.

He heard a scuffle behind him, and his name being called. He turned

from his contemplation of the intense activity all across Fokker Base, the

readying of the strikeforce he now commanded. His adjutant, Lieutenant

Colonel Rochelle, was struggling to hold back Lieutenant Dennis Brown, a

TASC Veritech pilot who had once served as aide to Emerson.

"Brown, we've heard enough out of you!" Rochelle was yelling.

Brown thrashed, trying to break loose. "But it's a suicide mission,

General Emerson! They're trying to get rid of you!"

"As you were!" Emerson hollered, and Brown and Rochelle subsided.

Emerson went on, "It's not for me to second-guess my orders, Lieutenant,

nor is it for you. We give orders and see that they're obeyed; we obey the

orders that are given us. We see to it that we don't violate the oath we've

sworn, not for any personal loyalty or preference. There's no other way an

army can function. Thank you for your concern, but if you don't return to

your post at once, I'll have no choice but to have you placed under arrest."

Rochelle and Brown had released one another. The lieutenant saluted.

"Yes, sir."

"One more thing," Emerson snapped. "No operation under my

command has ever been or will ever be a suicide mission. I'd have thought

you knew me better than that. Dismissed."

Dana found that Bowie simply refused to talk about his godfather being

posted to ALUCE. Bowie seemed determined to have the world think he

cared nothing about General Emerson.

It was Emerson who had insisted Bowie serve time in the Southern

Cross Army, as Bowie's parents had wished it, Emerson claiming that it had

nothing to do with personal feelings or his affection for Bowie. Now it was

Bowie's chance to hide behind a soldier's code, and the rest of it, to shield

his sorrow. Dana, with little choice, let it be so.

35

At the Global Military Police headquarters, a round-the-clock screening

program consumed everyone's time, especially Nova's. The high command

was determined to plug the leak in its system. Endless computer reviews

and field reports were the order of the day. Anyone who had access to

classified information and particularly those had access to long-range

communications gear were being scrutinized.

After all, how else could an espionage agent get the word across tens of

thousands of miles of empty space?

Zor got off the shuttle bus across the street from GMP headquarters

only to find Angelo Dante standing next to a jeep, waiting for him.

"I keep asking myself, 'Now, why's ole Zor-O so eager to see Nova?"'

Angelo said, blocking his way. "And what d'you think crossed my mind?

Why, Nova's with GMP! Maybe that's why you're bringing her a present,

hey?"

Angelo reached to grab the object Zor had tucked under one arm. It

turned out to be a classified looseleaf binder whose title sent Angelo's

eyebrows high. "An Intelligence Overview on the ALUCE Base?"

Angelo grabbed Zor's torso harness again, just as he heard a

Hovercycle flare to a stop at curbside behind him. He heard Dana yell,

"Sergeant Dante! Let him go!"

Angelo did, as she stalked over to him. "Now hold on a minute,

Lieutenant-"

She yanked the binder out of his hands. "You will stop harassing this

trooper, Sergeant! Grow up and quit playing GMP spy! Now, get lost!"

Angelo's face was a purple-red. He cared passionately about his world

and its people and their survival, of course, and his duty. But there was

more to it than that.

Why should I care if this guy uses Dana and wrecks her life? It's her

own fault and she's just a snotty, pushy teenage know-it-all anyway! Okay,

so she's proved she's got what it takes to lead the 15th, but why should I care

36

if she gets what she's got comin' for getting this weird crush on Zor-O?

He thought all that looking down into the pug-nosed, freckled face and

regretted making such a jackass of himself at the movie. Without warning,

he found himself wondering what it would feel like to hold her tenderly, the

way Sean had embraced Marie Crystal the other day. Then Angelo Dante

violently suppressed the thought.

"Yes, ma'am," he said through clenched teeth. He saluted, about-faced

and marched to the jeep. Tires chirped as he accelerated away from the

curb.

Dana handed the binder back to Zor without even looking at the cover.

"Here. Sorry about that, but Angie's such a-"

"Thank you." Zor took the classified book, turned and went up the

steps toward the main entrance, barely having registered her presence.

"Hey!" She started after him, but just then a hand closed around her

elbow.

If she had been only a little hotter under her high military collar, she

would have turned around swinging. But she reconnoitered first, and saw

who it was. "Captain Komodo!" she said in bewilderment. "What's the

matter, sir?"

Komodo was a man of about five-ten, with a powerful build, of Nisei

descent. Just now, he was sweating and a little wild-eyed. "Lieutenant, I

need a favor!"

Most people in the Southern Cross knew who Komodo was. After the

Robotech Masters' first attack on Moon Base One, Komodo had violated

Emerson's ironclad wait-and-see orders to launch missiles at them, ending

Emerson's hopes for negotiations.

Emerson had wanted him court-martialed for firing the goading shot in

a war nobody wanted, but Leonard, ever the alien-hater, had had Komodo

decorated for prompt and brave use of personal initiative, and transferred

to fire control on a battlecruiser. Still, the word on the scuttlebutt grid was

that Komodo regretted what he had done and he had made mention of his

wish to redeem himself.

37

Now Dana let herself be pulled off to one side by the captain, not sure

how anything fit together with anything else anymore.

In a small park near GMP headquarters, Komodo finished, "So I

thought you could help me, Lieutenant."

Dana looked him over carefully. "And Nova's the one for you, huh?"

According to the captain's story, he had only talked to her a few times, and

always in the line of duty. But when did love ever let reality stand in its way?

she sighed to herself.

Captain Komodo chuckled self-consciously. "I'm assigned to go with

General Emerson to ALUCE," he explained.

"And you figure you might not make it back, so you want her to at least

know you exist before you go?" Dana said with a blunt, uncharacteristic

need to hear his answer.

She paced a few steps up and back while Komodo gave a sighing laugh

and admitted, "I suppose she could never want me. "

"Let's have no defeatist talk, Captain!" Dana responded.

Maybe Komodo could serve as a distraction and pry Nova and Zor

apart-and maybe not. Still, it was the only card she had to play, short of

letting Angelo-who seemed to despise the alien for reasons she couldn't

understand-put Zor in Intensive Care.

She took Komodo's arm. "You can't give up the ship before you've fired

your first salvo, Captain." They both laughed, walking back toward the GMP

HQ.

They left the trees just in time to see Sean Phillips go racing by at the

wheel of a jeep, at breakneck speed. He was roaring with laughter, and

Marie Crystal, in the ninety-percent seat, was laughing, too, one arm around

his shoulders. He turned a corner on two wheels.

"There's living proof, Captain," Dana said, frowning. "If that sorry sack

can win a female heart, anybody can." Her words didn't seem to fortify

Komodo.

38

The appalling workload at GMP and the presence of Colonel Fredericks,

her CO, had kept Nova from seeing Zor when he showed up to return the

ALUCE documents. So, Zor had left the binder for her, wrapped in plain

paper, and she had claimed it when at last she knocked off for a few hours'

sleep.

Somehow, she couldn't see what she was doing as compromising

Southern Cross secrets. She did not even think of Zor as a security risk. She

could only think of those huge, oblique, elfin eyes, the face like a classical

sculpture's, the tumbling lavender locks of hair that fell past his shoulders,

the hypnotic fascination he held for her.

At the door of her billet in the Bachelor Officers' Quarters, she found a

lush bouquet of pink, black, and red roses, wrapped in silver-and-black

striped metallic paper. The sight of them took all her fatigue away.

Nova Satori pulled them close to her body, inhaled them, and carried

them into her billet. That scent-she drew it in deeply and wished she could

lose herself in it, could live in the Heart of the Rose forever. To be with Zor,

somehow, someday, seemed so hopeless.

I thought love was supposed to make you happy?

In the dimness of a bend in the hallway, Dana patted the sweating

Komodo's shoulder, as they watched Nova's door close from their

concealment.

"That completes the first part of the operation, Captain: the

softening-up process!"

Inside her rooms, Nova set down the ALUCE binder and the roses side

by side. There was a note in the flowers, printed in block letters: FROM AN

ADMIRER.

She held up the other note she had gotten that day, the one Zor had

tucked into the ALUCE book. I can't begin to thank you, Nova. Every bit of

information you give me restores more of my memory, more of me.

Then she realized all at once that she had violated the regulations she

39

was sworn to enforce. What have I done?

So the screwball contredanse continued. Dana tried to convince

Komodo that his flowers were the cause of the lovesickness he saw on

Nova's glum face. Meanwhile, Nova determinedly snubbed Zor and resisted

his every effort to get in touch-yet she felt dangerously drawn to him.

It had Nova so distracted that she screwed up, and flagged a VT pilot

named Dennis Brown-a former aide of Emerson's, yet!-who had been

scheduled to go to ALUCE and was now held back as a security risk.

She hunted the lieutenant down out on the flight line to apologize. He

merely shrugged it off. He looked her over for a few moments and decided

she could be trusted to hear the truth.

"Maybe it's all for the good. You have the computers and you aren't

blind, Nova. Leonard's weeding out all the officers who aren't loyal to him

personally, like some Roman emperor sending all his rivals off to distant

provinces. Thanks to you, though, at least one of us'll be here to keep an eye

on things: me."

He really was thanking her! Nova summoned up a grateful smile and

resolved to bury Brown's name and file where few in the GMP would ever

notice it.

At the far end of the flight line Dana, watching from behind a shuttle's

huge tire, whistled. "Man, that Nova knows how to play the field!" Captain

Komodo fought off an attack of terminal disheartenment.

40

CHAPTER FIVE

SPECIAL PROTOCULTURE OBSERVATIONS AND OPERATIONS

KOMMANDATURA

(DESIGNATION-"JAMES" PERSONNEL ONLY)

In view of the adverse relationship between Major General Emerson and

certain members of this unit, the transfer of the Singularity Effect-generating

equipment to his flagship will be effected in such a way as to preclude all

mention of or reference to the origins of the aforementioned equipment.

(signed) Zand, Commanding

The 15th's ready-room was dark. Most of the troopers were out on pass

or on ATAC guard duty or dozing. A few, like Robotechnofreak-another

term for it was "mechie"-Louie Nichols, were taking care of maintenance or

tinkering with their Hovertanks down on the motorstable levels.

Bowie Grant sat playing the piano softly. Sometimes he went into the

melodies he had played for Musica, and the ones she had played for him.

But tonight he kept coming back again and again to the ones Emerson had

taught him as a child, when the General introduced him to the piano and

fostered Bowie's love of music. Bowie played his own compositions, the

early ones that had made Emerson so proud. There was no one in the

dimness of the ready-room to hear the music, or to see his tears.

Below, though, in a long, black military limousine parked under the

open windows of the ready-room, there was an audience.

Major General Rolf Emerson sat in the back seat with the window

down, listening. He didn't recognize the alien tunes, though he suspected

what they meant; he knew each note that Bowie played from their shared

past, however, and understood those completely.

Emerson's efforts to contact his ward had been rebuffed, and the

general respected Bowie's right to be left alone.

Perhaps I never should have made him enlist; perhaps he shouldn't

41

have had to serve, Emerson reflected. But then, it would be a better

Universe if none of us had to. But it's just not that kind of Universe.

"That's enough. Take me back," he told his chauffeur, hitting the

button that raised the window.

Take me back...

This time it was a cascade of roses, tumbling down one Nova in a

fragrant red avalanche the moment she opener the closet in her billet to

hang up her cloak. Suddenly she wasn't bone-tired anymore, not even with

the liftoff of Emerson's strikeforce less than forty-eight hours away.

She let the roses shower around her, giggling and gasping, and tried

forlornly to understand alt the conflicting emotions and impulses that were

starting her own private war. She was knee-deep in flowers.

There was a-note taped to the shelf: Depot 7 at 2100.

At the elegant Pavilion du Lac, Marie Crystal pushed away her fourth

sidecar. If Prince Charming doesn't get here with the carriage soon,

Cinderella's gonna be too stinko to care!

Might even serve him right, she thought. She had blown half her

savings on a drop-dead white satin evening gown, and the most expensive

perfume she could find. Her walk was very different than it was when she

was in uniform; she had seen men panting, admiring. And rather than cut a

swath through the local male wildlife, here she sat, waiting for her Romeo.

She went out onto the balcony to get a little fresh air, sighing in the

moonlight, thinking of Sean, smelling the orchids there.

She had been shot out of the sky and he had mechamorphosed his

Hovertank, risen up in Battloid mode to catch her burning, falling Veritech.

He had sworn he would love her, and no one else, evermore. Had held her

to him as his Battloid had held her VT to it. Had made her love him.

You beast! You toad! I've never been in love before...

Below, hiding behind a column on the portico, Sean grinned and got

ready to go surprise her.

42

Marie had shown up early for their dinner date, and she had decided to

see how long it would take her to lose patience. It hadn't taken long; he was

barely late at all. But I've kept her waiting long enough, he thought guiltily,

and got ready to run up the steps to her.

A voice behind him called, "Seanie?"

It was Jill Norton, an old flame, all decked out like a green-sequined

sea goddess, throwing herself at him to hug him. "It is you!"

She locked her lips to his, and he had to wrestle her in order to crane

his head around and look up at the balcony. Marie was giving him the kind

of stare that preceded homicides.

Just like Cinderella, Marie lost a glass slipper on the winding stairs. In

fact, she lost both of them. She pushed her way in between Sean and his

latest trollop, about to leave, but spun around suddenly and grabbed him by

the front of his suit.

Before he could move, she kissed him as hard as she could-she put all

her love and all her wanting and all her hurt into it. Sean was starting to

think he might survive the encounter when she pushed him away and

rocked him with a slap that almost took his head off.

In the poorly lit corner of Depot 7, Dana practically had to put an

arm-bar on Komodo to get him to show himself and approach Nova. As he

walked over, he kept turning around to make sure Dana was still in the

shadows for moral support.

However, his worst fears came true when he turned to Nova and got a

backhanded fist, knuckles cocked, that sent him whirling onto the cold

duracrete facedown.

"Stay away from me, Zor!" she shrilled. "You hear me, Zor?" But inside,

she feared that she might really have hurt him.

Komodo pushed himself up partway. "Lieutenant Satori, I hear you."

He wiped blood from his mouth.

"Oh my god! Captain Komodo!"

He levered himself up. "Zor, eh? Now I get it!" He lurched off into the

43

blackness, sobbing, running nearly doubled over, as if she had given him

some eviscerating wound.

She looked around and saw Dana standing, a small pale figure, under a

nearby worklight. "I might've guessed, Sterling. Now do I have to part that

little blond puffball hairdo with a loading hook, or are you going to tell me-"

She was interrupted by her own wrist comset. The only way she had

been able to get some time to herself for the depot rendezvous had been to

sign out for a purported tour of the GMP patrols, to check up. So she was on

duty.

"Lieutenant Satori, we have a report of an individual, thought to be a

woman, driving very erratically and recklessly in a military jeep."

Nova was on her Hovercycle and away before Dana could get a word in

edgewise. Dana went and vaulted into the getaway jeep that was waiting,

Lieutenant Brown behind the wheel. Dana knew Brown from his brief

instructor days at the Academy, and Brown was an old close friend of

Kbmodo's.

Accosted by Komodo, Brown had explained why Nova had come to see

him: not a matter of passion, but rather of apology. Then, he joined in on

the plot to get Komodo and Nova together, and volunteered to act as

chauffeur.

"Go!" Dana howled, pointing at Nova's disappearing Hovercycle as it

vanished through the loading bay doors.

"Don't turn on the light, Zand. Just sit down."

Rolf Emerson's voice was soft in the darkness of the office in Southern

Cross HQ, but it still filled Zand with fear. How had he gotten in? Not only

were there guards and surveillance equipment, but Zand himself had

hidden powers that should have prevented any such unpleasant surprise.

And yet, there stood the Chief of Staff for Terrestrial Defense, in the

glow spilling into the darkened office from streetlights and moonlight. "I

won't stay long," Emerson added. "Just close the door, sit down, and listen."

Zand did, leaving his office dark. He thought about sounding an alarm;

44

Emerson certainly outranked him, but this kind of unauthorized visit was

nothing that even a general's stars would justify. However, there were old

animosities between the two, nothing Zand would like to have brought to

light. And so he sat, waiting.

"I'm leaving in the morning; you already know that, no doubt,"

Emerson said, sounding tired. "I just wanted to say this-"

Suddenly he was at Zand's side, his strong hand around Zand's throat.

Emerson shook him like a rag doll as the Robotech scientist made

strangling sounds.

"You will leave Dana alone while I'm gone, do you hear me? If I come

back to find that you've tried anything, anything, I'll kill you with this same

hand and let the Judge Advocate court-martial me."

For all his mild appearance, Zand could easily have shaken off the grip

of virtually anyone else; the Protoculture powers he had given himself

through dangerous experimentation made such physical tricks simple.

But for some reason, Zand's enhanced powers simply didn't work on

Emerson. It was as if the general was immune to Zand's abilities. Emerson

knew very little about Protoculture; he had no conscious access to its vast

gifts. Emerson had no idea that he was throttling a superman.

He shook Zand. "Do you hear?" Zand managed to nod, breath rattling.

Emerson let him go. There would be fearsome bruises on his throat by

daylight.

The last time Zand felt Emerson's grip on his throat was fourteen years

ago. That was at night, too, when Emerson burst into Zand's lab upon

discovering that Zand was running bizarre experiments on the baby

daughter left behind by Max and Miriya Sterling. He was exposing Dana to

Protoculture treatments and substances from some strange alien plant.

Emerson had heard it had something to do with activating the alien side of

her mind and genetic heritage. The general was Bowie's guardian, but had

been a good friend to Dana's parents.

Zand had believed he would die that night, that moment; Emerson's

strength seemed illimitable. Or perhaps it was simply that none of Zand's

45

acquired powers worked in Emerson's presence? Zand avoided him from

that time to this moment, and Emerson had made sure, no matter where he

was or what he was doing, that Dana was beyond Zand's reach.

Gasping and wheezing, rubbing his throat, Zand tried to make some

sense of it. How could a mortal like Emerson block the Shapings of the

Protoculture this way? And in such complete ignorance of what it was that

he was doing? It was as if the overwhelming frustration of it all was some

tithe Zand had to pay to win that ultimate triumph, that incredible prize,

that he saw promised to him by the Shaping.

It was even more humiliating that Emerson didn't even realize with

whom he was dealing. To Emerson, Zand was some half-demented

Protoculture mystic from R&D, who had deviated from the saner paths

followed by Dr. Lang, and ended up deranged.

"I know you've been keeping tabs on her through backchannels and

informants," Emerson said quietly. "Don't ever do it again. If I have to come

and see you a third time, Doctor, it will be to take you off the roll call for

good!"

Zand didn't even realize that Emerson had moved away from him until

he heard the door open and close. The heir to Emil Lang's Protoculture

secrets, and master of new, more perilous secrets of his own, massaged his

tortured windpipe One thing was clear: Emerson was an obstacle that would

have to be dealt with first.

Dana Sterling was vital, because she stood at the center of all Zand's

star-spanning schemes.

Marie wove her jeep through the streets and byways of Monument City.

What a little idiot I've been! I knew what Sean was like. I heard all the

stories. Yet I still believed he'd change just for me!

She ignored lights, ignored speed limits, ignored all peril to herself and

others, sideswiping whoever didn't stay out of her way. The night and

imminent death drew her on.

Her jeep bounced through an alley and onto an access road that would

46

take her to the cliff overlooking the city. She wasn't thinking clearly about

what she would find there, but something told her it would be better than

what she was feeling now, and she liked the feeling of the accelerator under

her stockinged foot. She only wished she were in her mecha.

It took her some time to realize that a GMP Hovercycle and a jeep were

behind her. Over a loudspeaker Nova Satori's voice was commanding her to

halt.

Marie stepped on the accelerator.

As the chase barreled out onto the cliff headland, Nova tried to

sideswipe her to a halt. Marie's jeep jounced off a rock, and slewed at the

cycle. Marie had an instant's view of Nova's terrified face as she fought her

handlebars. Marie hit the brakes and over-corrected, and her jeep went

sliding toward the cliff, tailgate foremost.

But Dennis Brown was there first, with Dana betted in the rear and

covering her eyes. The VT pilot brought Marie to a stop by letting Marie's

jeep slam taillights-first into his own, broadside. The two vehicles plowed

along in a spume of dust; Brown's left front wheel went over the edge, and

the undercarriage grated along.

The jeep tottered there, but held. Dana and Brown sighed

simultaneously. Marie hung against her steering wheel, crying like a lost

child.

Dana, Brown, and Nova were still trying to sort things out when the

distant sirens and flashing lights caught their attention.

Brown tched. "It'd sure be bad for morale if we let the Gimps find the

hero of the TASCs in this condition." He lifted Marie out of the jeep gently

and set her down on the ground.

"But-Lieutenant Brown!" Nova objected, as he slipped behind the

wheel of Marie's jeep.

"It's simple," he said, revving the engine. "Frustrated pilot bumped

from big mission gets hands on jeep and whiskey, understand?"

Nova did; she owed him one. It would be just as he said. "It means the

brig, you know."

47

Brown shrugged at Nova. "A couple days. They need me in my VT too

much to do more. Besides, I've got nothing better to do with my time."

He winked at her. "Come down 'n' see me once in a while, huh?"

Then he eased the jeep back and headed off in a spray of gravel.

Leaving a high plume of dust and grit, slewing and running flat-out, it

wasn't hard for him to catch the posse's attention; the strobing lights and

wailing sirens followed Dennis Brown away into the night.

Dana tried to decide what to do or say, with the perplexed Nova to one

side, the curled-up, weeping Marie on the other.

In the invasion flagship, the Robotech Masters watched their new

production line of Invid Fighters being put through its paces. The mecha

resembled oldtime naval mines, spined spheres that looked as much

biological as technological. They seemed to be grown of mismatched horn,

chitin, and sinew.

The Invid Fighters performed their maneuvers flawlessly. They evaded

the fire of multitudes of gun turrets, and when the command came, they

turned devastating fire on the turrets with pinpoint accuracy.

"And when they conjoin, they will be an undefeatable Triumviroid,"

Bowkaz said.

Jeddar of the Clonemasters made his abasing bow. "A Triumviroid, yes,

Master. Self-contained and capable of performing the three basic functions

of combat: data accumulation, analysis, and response, all within

milliseconds."

The very essence of Robotechnology. Logic dictates that these mecha

cannot be defeated!

A weapon as perfect as we ourselves, the Robotech Masters shared the

cold thought.

Dawn had brought a break in the clouds; final preparations for the

launch of Emerson's strikeforce were being made, last matters on the

checklists were ticked off.

48

Captain Komodo led his unit out at a run. He had indulged his grief

and put aside his humiliation; now it was time to discharge his duty, to live

up to his oath of service. But a voice calling his name made him stop short

as the rest ran on to the personnel elevator that waited to take the

battlecruisers' crewpeople to their assignments.

Dana caught up, breathless. "I just want to...say, I'm sorry, sorry

about-"

He gave her a smile. "Forget it, Dana. Thanks for everything."

The silence that followed was awkward, as they listened to

announcements and instructions for everyone who was going to hurry, and

for everyone else to get clear. Dana and Komodo groped for something to

say to each other.

Then a hand reached out to touch Komodo's armored shoulder.

"Captain..."

Komodo, pivoting to see Nova Satori standing at his side, looked like a

deer caught in headlights. She took his gauntleted hand in both of hers. "I

just wanted to say-be sure to come back safely."

It took him a few false starts to answer. "Nova, yes! I will!" He turned,

dashing to catch up with his command. "Don't worry about that!"

Dana figured Nova was still not in love with Komodo. But what did that

matter when a person might die-when a whole world might?

Dana was about to bury the hatchet with Nova, to tell her what a decent

thing that was to do, when both were distracted by another lift-off drama.

"Marie! Come back!"

But Marie Crystal already had a head start, and even weighted by her

combat armor she got to the elevator well ahead of Sean Phillips. And

anyway, Sean had been caught by Angelo Dante, who gathered him up

practically under one arm, and dragged him back.

Angelo hollered at his onetime CO, "Be a man, for god's sake! She's got

more important things on her mind, idiot!"

But Sean struggled free at the last moment, as the countdown went for

zero and ground crews and PAS bellowed at the ATACs to get to shelter.

49

Sean dashed for the elevator, but he was too late. The doors closed just

before he got there. Marie watched emotionlessly-or did she? Just as the

closing doors took her from him, her stone-face expression seemed to

change.

Sean curled up inconsolably on the hardtop, and let Angelo, Dana and

Nova lift him up and bear him away.

In the ready-room, Bowie was by himself again at the piano. He played

the songs Emerson had taught him, and the ones he himself had composed

early-on.

He heard the first rumbles of prelaunch ignition reverberate across the

countryside and the city, as his godfather and guardian readied for battle.

The battlecruisers, destroyer escorts, and other combat ships rumbled

and flamed and rose, shaking the ground. The thunderclaps of their drives

echoed across Monument City. Dana, Sean, Nova, and Angelo watched the

strikeforce draw lines of fire into the blue.

The tumult and the glare of it filled the ready-room windows; Bowie hit

a last, hateful note, then sat staring at the keys.

50

CHAPTER SIX

It is, perhaps, some ultimate universal justice on the behalf of

intelligence (as opposed to physical strength or predation skills) that the

secrets of the Universe are open only to those who have left certain outdated

belief systems behind.

Or, maybe it's one big-how do the Humans say?-one big gag.

Exedore, as quoted in Lapstein's

Interviews

The Robotech Masters, in their flagship, were aware of the impending

launch of Emerson's expeditionary force; this time there would be no

surprises, and the Earth would be dealt a final, crushing blow.

It was imperative that Earth be destroyed not only because the

constrained seeds of the Flower in the Matrix below were beginning to

sprout into actual blossoms, but also a new and more dangerous element

had entered their equations.

The Robotech Masters, nailless hands touching their Protoculture cap,

contemplated the cloud of interstellar gas that, in astronomical terms, was

so close. To an Earthly observer it would simply be a curiosity, a spindrift

that had wandered Earth's way from some impossibly distant H 11 region.

Its aberrant motion could be attributed to a close encounter with a far-off

mass of dark matter or to galactic streaming dynamics. The oddities in its

internal movements and constitution would be chalked up to some natural

phenomenon of density waves.

Just another collection of whorls and billows of dust and

phosphorescent gas; just another emission nebula.

But the Robotech Masters knew better and had good reason to be

afraid. It was an Invid Sensor Nebula, searching for Protoculture and/or the

Flower of Life. The Invid would be coming soon, and so the Masters' time

was short.

Long ago, the Invid had been a peaceful species, living out their lives

51

on idyllic Optera, ingesting the Flower and, with the powers it gave them,

rejoicing in their contemplation of the Universe. Then Zor, the original Zor,

had come to live among them, to learn. He saw in their almost

photosynthetic biological processes a by-product that, when isolated, gave

him the key to ultimate power: Protoculture.

The infinitely metamorphic Invid were the Apple of Temptation to him,

harboring ultimate secrets. Zor was the same to them-especially to the Invid

Queen, revealing to them the two-edged bane/blessing they had never

conceived of: passion, love.

He understood that the key to the power of Protoculture was the Invid

Queen. Zor, consumed with the hunger for knowledge, used her, barely

knowing what it was he was doing, and set, the course of a tragedy that

would stretch across eternity.

The Invid Queen, the Regis, became infatuated with Zor. This

infatuation would bring a universe crumbling down with no promise of

what would rise from the ashes. Love and Protoculture, Protoculture and

love; they were locked forever after in a pattern of exaltation and disaster.

Zor's superiors on Tirol, his homeworld, immediately understood the

more obvious implications of Protoculture-its power to penetrate spacetime,

to impart vast mental powers, its connection to the fundamental shaping

force of the Universe. Like all leaders, they lusted for power; naive Zor was

no match for them...at least at that point.

Using rudimentary powers derived from the more malign aspects of

Protoculture, the overlords of Tirol banded together to subdue Zor mentally,

to place an irresistible Compulsion on him. At their direction, Zor stole as

many of the Flower seeds as he could from his Optera hosts, and as much

Protoculture.

Under his Masters' enslavement, he betrayed the Invid hivequeen, who

had taken on a form like his own. Zor left the Regis loveless and full of

hate-she who had literally transfigured herself, loving Zor so. The rest of

Optera Zor laid waste, so that the Flower of Life would never grow there

again.

52

Love and Protoculture; Protoculture and love.

Conquest and dominance were the companion cravings of the Tirolean

tyrants' Protoculture addiction. Their giant, cloned Zentraedi

worker-menials were transformed into conquering legions; Zor became

their savant-slave. He shaped the Protoculture Matrices, and went forth to

seed the Flower of Life on other worlds, so their seeds could be harvested

for more Matrices.

The overlords of Tirol were transmogrified into the Robotech Masters.

Their own race became to them mere objects, plasm to be reshaped and put

to the use they chose.

Meanwhile, the Invid, changed by their hatred and suffering, burst

forth from Optera to seek the Flower of Life wherever the Masters seeded it,

and to slay the Robotech Masters and their servants wherever they found

them. The Invid began reproducing with monocellular speed, becoming a

teeming horde that daunted even the Masters. A stupendous war roiled

across galaxies, but the Masters were content that in time they would win.

The Masters, however, in their arrogance, had forgotten Zor's original

exposure to the secrets of Protoculture on Optera, and the expansion of his

mental gifts. Little by little, Zor was making patient, microscopic progress

against the Compulsion by which the Masters held him.

His breakthrough came in the form of a Vision of what was to be, given

to him by the Protoculture. He saw a small, blue-white, unimportant world.

A world where Humanity would ultimately obliterate itself, and all life on

the planet, in a Global Civil War. There was an alternative. It would involve

great hardship and suffering for the Human race, but at least it offered a

chance for racial survival.

The Vision showed Zor a possible future, wherein a great cyclone of

mindforce a hundred miles wide rose from Earth and, high above the planet,

transformed itself into a Phoenix of groupmind. The Phoenix spread wings

wider than Earth, and with a single cry so magnificent and sad that it

wrenched Zor's mind free of the Masters' domination, the bird soared away

to another plane of existence.

53

Zor was then free to work his act of defiance. He dispatched the SDF-1

to Earth, hiding it from the Masters, even as he gave up his life to an Invid

attack in a death he had foreseen in his Vision. The last Matrix by which

new Protoculture could be produced was gone; the others had all been used

up or destroyed in the course of the war, and only Zor had the secret of their

creation.

The Robotech Masters, regarding with arctic dread the roving Sensor

Nebula that was one of the Invid's coursing bloodhounds, knew little about

the original Zor's motives, and nothing of his Vision. They only knew that

their fanatic enemies would find them bereft of Protoculture's powers,

helpless, unless the Masters triumphed soon on Earth.

And that demanded as a first step the quick and utter destruction of

Emerson's expeditionary force.

Aside from some oddities noted in the peculiar nebula drifting so close

to Earth, there was nothing to report, the techs said. Emerson worried

nevertheless.

The enemy fleet still hung in distant orbit, permitting the expedition

room for passage. Emerson's force had already passed the enemy's optimal

point for launching assault ships to intercept and engage him. Soon the

Humans would be past their closest approach to the invaders, and would be

hightailing for Luna. He kept his escort forces deployed and ready for battle,

even as his command passed through the leading edge of the nebula.

Once out of the nebula, past the point of greatest proximity to the

enemy, the crewpeople began to breathe easier. But Emerson grew even

more vigilant.

The Robotech Masters gathered vast amounts of data through their

Protoculture cap. "The Humans must be relieved to have passed their zone

of likeliest combat without a confrontation," Shaizan conjectured.

"Prepare to destroy them," he sent out the command.

54

"What're you trying now, Louie?" Dana asked the lanky corporal as he

bent over the training simulator's guts.

"I'm gonna win back those two beers I owe you," Louie said smugly,

fooling with the systemry there, changing some connections, putting in a

special adaptor. "You're in for a surprise. "

Dana scoffed, "C'mon, Louie! You can't beat a born warrior like me,

even with a lot of mechie tricks."

At least he never had yet, even on the Kill Those Bioroids! program that

he himself had designed for the simulator. She was happy to let him keep

trying though; hand-eye training never hurt. She was just sorry the

simulator, in the canteen at the local Southern Cross service club, wasn't set

up more like a Hovertank's cockpit-turret, or that she hadn't been able to

beg, borrow, or steal a simulator for the 15th's ready-room.

The thinking caps did the bulk of the controlling for Robotech mecha,

but the tankers inside still had to know their instrumentation the way a

tongue knew the roof of its mouth. At the 15th, as in TASC and other units,

mock-ups of the cockpit layouts of the particular mecha used by the

individual outfit were pasted up in the interiors of lavatory stalls so that the

soldiers sitting there could refresh their memorization of their

instrumentation during what the brass euphemistically called "available

time."

Now Louie, making a final adjustment said, "That's what you say." He

climbed into the simulator and shocked- her by taking off the big, square,

dark tech goggles that he wore almost constantly-even in the shower and

often when sleeping. It gave his face an open, surprised look.

Dana wasn't sure what to think. Louie was undoubtedly a maverick

technical genius. Word was that he had passed up numerous offers for

advanced study or research assignments because he liked the action in

Hovertanks, but also because he preferred to tinker and modify without

somebody breathing down his neck.

Certainly, he had been responsible for one of the major victories of the

55

war when his analysis of the Masters' flagship's power and drive systems

permitted the 15th to disable it and bring it down. Even though the other

ships had retrieved it and guarded against any recurrence, nothing was

taken away from that spectacular success. And still, Louie had refused

transfer to Research and Development or some think tank.

Now he put aside his goggles and pulled on a wraparound visor, a black

and glittering V shape, like something a sidewalk cowboy might wear

downtown.

Two jumpsuited technical officers in a nearby booth, discussing

Emerson's mission in low tones, suddenly became aware of a furor near the

simulator, with TASC pilots and ATAC tankers and others crowding around,

exclaiming and cheering. They went over and saw a tall, skinny corporal in

black shades blowing away computer-modeled Bioroids with a speed and

accuracy unlike anything simulators-or even real mecha-had ever

approached.

As the two officers began shouldering their way through the crowd, the

kid was waving an adapter cartridge around and explaining that it was

computer-enhanced targeting linked into his glasses, a step up from even

the thinking caps.

"I call it my Visual Trace Firing System, or VTFS," Louie was telling

them all proudly. "Or if you prefer, my 'pupil pistol.' "

"Mind if I see it?" said one officer, holding out a hand for the cartridge.

Louie was instantly wary, and Dana looked the two over as well.

"Major Cromwell, Robotech R&D," the officer said. He indicated his

companion. "And this is Major Gervasi. I think we can use this system of

yours in our simulation training. We'll help you upgrade it and give you

advice, assistance, and technical resources. Is this the only copy?"

"N-no," Louie admitted, a little uncertain.

Cromwell slipped the cartridge into the shoulder pocket of his jumpsuit.

"Fine. If you don't mind, we'll have a look at this one, then. Can you be in

my office tomorrow at thirteen hundred hours?"

While stuttering that he could, Louie handed over the visor as well.

56

Dana decided that she couldn't pull rank on two majors, especially ones who

worked for the top-secret R&D division.

But more than that, she was experiencing strange sensations,

something to do with the mention of research, of Robotechnology, and thus

of Protoculture. Something about Protoculture and experimentation...It

gave her a queasy feeling, sent a jolt of fear zapping through her, brought

not-quite-perceived, evil memories...

But she shook it off as Cromwell walked away telling Louie, "We're

looking forward to working with you."

Dana smiled affectionately at the goofily grinning Louie. "My brainy

boy!" she said.

Outside the service club, Gervasi said to Cromwell, "Good work, Joe.

Just what we need, out of nowhere!"

Cromwell nodded. "Send word up the back channels to Leonard and

Zand right away. 'Rolling Thunder' is about to get the green light."

Emerson's force was very close to the moon when the Masters' fleet

appeared like ghosts all around them, not on the monitors one second,

hemming them in the next.

It was what the general had feared. The Masters had penetrated Earth's

detection systems before; measures to counter that capability just hadn't

worked, and the invaders had bided their time until they could use the tactic

to best advantage. That time was now, with the expedition out of combat

formation and deployed for lunar approach, with no way back and no way

forward.

Emerson was reordering the disposition of his units even as the alien

mother ships disgorged scores of the whisk broom-shaped assault craft.

With his battlecruiser Tristar at the center, Emerson prepared to fight his

way through to ALUCE.

Blue Bioroids came in at the Humans like maddened automaton

hornets. The call went out for the A-JACs to scramble, and the expedition's

ships began throwing out a huge volume of fire to clear the way for them

57

and hold the Bioroids off.

Once more, Marie Crystal led her Black Lions out in the A-JACs. She

was all combat leader, all Robotech warrior now, the regret and hurt from

Sean's betrayal savagely thrust aside. Leave love for fools, and let Marie

Crystal do what she did best!

The Bioroids and the A-JACs swirled and struck, lighting an unnamed

volume of space with thermonuclear lightning and sunfire. The killing

began at once, the casualties piled up.

Marie skeeted a Bioroid right off its Hovercraft, so that the circular

platform went on, unguided, heading for infinite space. She went to Battloid

mode, ordering others to do the same, changing tactics abruptly and taking

advantage of the foe's brief confusion.

Assault ships swept in, to hammer away at the larger expeditionary

vessels and be volleyed at in reply. Hulls were pierced through and through;

blasts claimed Human and clone alike. Space was a maelstrom of

plasma-hot beams and blowtorching drives and the ugly flare of dying

ships.

Professor Miles Cochran gathered up all of his nerve to ask, "Dr. Zand,

the Invid Nebula is so appallingly dangerous-it might even take hostile

action against Emerson's force. Are you certain we shouldn't give him some

inkling of that? Perhaps it's not too late..."

There had been a tremor in his voice; he couldn't help it. Cochran

began to tremble as Zand turned that eerie stare upon him there in the

grandiose, forbidden sanctuary of the Kommandatura in a Robotech-rococo

chamber deep in the Earth. Zand's eyes were all pupil, with no iris or white

at all; his was a gaze no one could meet for long.

Even more unnerving than his eyes was the power radiating from him,

which intimidated his handpicked disciples. The power of Protoculture. The

outside world might see him as a slightly odd-looking researcher, the UEG's

top scientific officer and adviser-a man of normal height and build with an

unruly forelock, who dressed in a somewhat rumpled uniform. An egghead.

58

But the seven men and one woman seated around the table knew

differently.

The group met in a vaulted room that mixed the technological with the

mystical. Side by side with the latest computer equipment and with Zand's

own systemry were musty copies of the Necronomicon and The Book of

James, along with talismans and gnostic paraphernalia. There was an

enlargement of a satellite photo of the mound in which the wreckage of

SDF-1 was buried. Zand sat at the head of the black obsidian table staring at

Cochran.

He said, almost delicately, "Do you think I expunged all mention of the

Invid, the Matrix, and the Flower of Life from every record but our own just

so that you could go blurting it to Leonard and his military imbeciles? Or

the fools at UEG? Have I wasted so much time on you?"

Cochran fought against a years-long habit of obedience to Zand, of

self-sacrifice to the transcendent plan the scientist had enacted. He and the

few others who sat there-Beckett, Russo, and the rest-were the only ones on

Earth aside from the man himself who knew just how much Zand had

altered the course of history.

"Confrontation is the whole point of the Shaping, don't you see?" Zand

went on. "War is the whole point. Do you think Dana Sterling's dormant

powers will be released by anything short of the Apocalypse?"

Data on the Invid and the Matrix and the rest of it, gathered from the

Zentraedi leaders Exedore and Breetai, and from Captain Gloval, Miriya

Sterling, and a few others, had been kept under tightest restrictions. Once

Lang, Hunter, and the rest left Earth on the SDF-3 mission, it hadn't taken

Zand long to see to it that everyone who knew about that information either

joined his cabal, or died.

"The Protoculture's Shaping of history is moving toward a single

Moment," Zand reminded them all. "And that Moment is near; I can feel it.

I shall take ultimate advantage of that Moment. Nothing will be allowed to

stop it."

Cochran, a thin-faced, intense redhead, swallowed. He had a brother in

59

Emerson's strikeforce-who probably would soon become a casualty of the

Shaping, but Cochran knew that would not matter to Zand.

To make him feel even more uncomfortable, Cochran was seated next

to Russo. Russo was the former senator and head of the United Earth

Defense Council. He was the man whose ambitions and prejudices had

made him, more than any other Human being, the source of the

misjudgments and errors that had cost Earth so terribly in the First

Robotech War.

Russo had no ambitions now; he was barely alive. He was a

vacant-eyed, doglike slave to Zand, very much a creature of the shadows,

like his master.

Cochran managed, "I just thought-"

"You just thought to interfere with the Shaping so that your brother

would be out of danger?" Zand cut in. "Don't look so surprised! Why do you

think your attempts to get him a transfer all failed? It was because I was

giving you a test, a test of loyalty. You wavered, and so you failed. Kill him."

The last words were soft, but they brought instant action. Russo was

out of his seat in an instant, pouncing on Cochran. Beckett, on the other

side-Cochran's colleague and friend since college-didn't hesitate either,

helping Russo bring Cochran to the floor.

Zand's other disciples threw themselves into the fray, terrified of failing

this newest test. Even matronly Millicent Edgewick was there, kicking the

doomed man. Zand sat and watched, nibbling dried petals of the Flower of

Life.

Cochran went down, his chair overturned. His screams didn't last long.

60

CHAPTER SEVEN

The generals who let us die

so they can shake a fist—

They'd none of 'em be missed,

they'd none of 'em be missed!

Bowie Grant,

"With Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan"

Bowie was tinkering with the keys again, trying not to think about the

strikeforce expedition. "Doesn't that get boring?" Sean asked, leaning on the

piano.

"Not really."

"I don't mean you, Bowie; I mean those two."

He pointed toward Dana and Louie, who were toiling over a simulator

that looked as if it had been stripped, components lying everywhere. Why

they had chosen the readyroom to work in instead of one of the repair bays

or maintenance workrooms was still unclear, except perhaps the fact that

Dana kept trying to entice people into volunteering to help.

Dana had commandeered the simulator from the canteen on authority

from R&D, and neither she nor Louie had slept that night. On the other

hand, as of yet no R&D support troops had shown up.

"I'm starting to wonder if that Cromwell really wants Louie's gizmo for

simulation training," Sean murmured.

"I just like machines," Louie was expounding to Dana, as he

reassembled things. "They expand Human potential and they never

disappoint you, if you build 'em right. Somebody with the right know-how

could create the ideal society. Unimpeded Intellect! Machine Logic!"

"I didn't know you were such a romantic," she said dryly. Ideal society?

Boy, what a mechie!

Louie wanted to run the final test, but Dana pulled rank and he yielded

amiably. She pulled on a visor, hopped into the simulator, and the

61

computer-modeled slaughter began. It was a quantum leap from the old

thinking cap; her score soared.

Elsewhere, the Tristar, Emerson's flagship, was fighting a desperate

diversionary action, luring the main body of the enemy's forces one way so

that the more badly damaged expedition ships could try to limp to ALUCE.

"We can't take much more of this pounding!" Green growled, as the

Tristar was jarred again by enemy fire.

"I know," Emerson said calmly. "Get me a precise position fix and tell

the power section we'll need emergency max power in two minutes."

"Sir," Rochelle said and bent to the task. Green turned a silent,

questioning look on the man he had served for so long.

"We're going to generate a singularity effect," Emerson said. They all

knew he meant use of the mysterious "special apparatus" given him by R&D

in a cryptic transfer that, rumor had it, could be traced to Zand himself.

The idea was to create a small black hole where the ship was, the ship

itself being yo-yoed momentarily into another dimension. The singularity

would then pull in and destroy everything in close proximity to it. The

untested theory and some of the apparatus came from Dr. Emil Lang's

research on the now-destroyed SDF-1.

"And then the enemy becomes a brief accretion disc, gets sucked into

the singularity, and vanishes forever," Green muttered. "Perhaps."

"We try it or die anyway," Emerson pointed out. To underscore that,

another enemy salvo shook the Tristar.

Power readings seemed insane, violating all safety factors and load

tolerances. Emerson had a microphone in his hand.

"Lieutenant Crystal, you and the other TASCs will lure all enemy forces

as close to the Tristar as possible, and be ready to get clear on a moment's

notice, in approximately six minutes, do you copy?"

"You heard the man," Marie told the Lions.

It was the weirdest mission she had ever been on: sting and run, get the

62

enemy assault ships and battleships and 'roids chasing you. Juke and dodge

to keep them from shooting your tail off; somehow keep them from

engaging and diverting or delaying you. Protect your teammates but keep

moving; do your best to ignore the heavy losses suffered by pilots who had

been forbidden, in effect, to turn and give battle. And watch the time

diminish down to zero.

As the timer wound down, the area around the Tristar was thick with

dogfighting mecha, the biggest rat race of the Second Robotech War. The

enemy forces were hitting Emerson's flagship almost at will, and it couldn't

last much longer.

Then Marie heard Emerson's order to get clear; the A-JACs cut in all

thrusters and headed away, leaving the field to the milling Bioroids and

combat vessels.

Emerson watched the indicators and, when it was time, he threw the

switch. Crackling energy wreathed the battlecruiser, seeming to crawl

around it like superfast serpents. The tremendous discharge expanded to

form a sphere just big enough to contain the ship. The Bioroids' emotionless

faceplates were lit up by the radiance of the blaze.

There were cosmic fireworks, then nothing to see as the lightshow was

engulfed by the Schwarzchild radius. The Bioroids and vessels closest to the

vanished flagship were destroyed by tidal forces. The invaders were sucked

into nullset-space.

Those slightly farther away were helpless to escape becoming accretion

material, whirling down to and over the event horizon after their fellows.

The Masters' mightiest assault force was gone except for a little quantum

leakage.

Marie was waiting for the Tristar, praying that the last and most critical

part of the operation wouldn't be a disaster, when cannonfire rocked her

A-JAC. "Damn!" she yelled, pushing her stickup into the corner for a

pushover, imaging the aerocombat move through her horned helmet even

though she was in airless space. There was one battleship left!

The other A-JACs scattered as the enemy drove in at them, putting out

63

a fearsome volume of fire with primary and secondary batteries. It was

obviously damaged-and so had moved too slowly to be drawn within the

deadly radius of the singularity effect.

Now it was practically on top of the Lions, still capable of doing fatal

damage to the Tristar, should Emerson's ship reappear and be taken by

surprise. Marie gave quick orders, and the Black Lions went at the enemy

dreadnought like wolves after a mammoth, biting, ripping, coming back for

more even though they suffered heavy losses-and luring the battlewagon

into position.

But the clones weren't blind to what had happened to the rest of their

battle group and fought to keep clear. The Masters' battleship put its

remaining power into a run for safety.

But it found another vessel blocking its way. Although the Salamis was

shaking with secondary explosions and seemed more holes than hull, it

closed in on the alien, firing with the few batteries still functioning.

The captain of the Salamis and most of its officers were dead. Captain

Komodo was now in command, and he knew he rode a death ship. His

engines were about to go, and there was nothing he and his crewpeople

could do but make it count for something.

Salamis rode its failing drive straight into the enemy's fire.

All engine readings were far into the red; the destroyer escort trembled.

"I love you, Nova," Komodo whispered.

Salamis vanished in brilliance.

"Okay! Everybody run for it!" Marie commanded. The A-JACs heeded

her, zooming away in all directions.

Marie was beginning to think she had miscalculated. Maybe she

misjudged the spot or perhaps Emerson simply wasn't coming back. Then

an enormous globe of ball-lightning leapt into existence near the enemy,

and cometlike sparks flew outwards from it.

Even though the explosion of Emerson's reentry was nothing like the

release of energy the decay of a natural black hole would have produced, it

64

was enough to vaporize the enemy battlewagon. In another moment Tristar

floated alone in space, as Marie laughed aloud and Emerson prepared to

rejoin the expedition's main force.

Supreme Commander Leonard put on a self-satisfied look as he passed

word of Emerson's victory along to the UEG council, taking as much of the

credit for himself as he possibly could. But inside, he seethed. He must have

victories of his own!

When he was back in his offices, though, a phone call brought welcome

news that turned his day around.

"That was Cromwell from R&D," said his aide, Colonel Seward.

"They've completed modifications on that targeting system they got from

the trooper in ATAC. Mass production and retrofitting have already begun;

they've got their special units on it now."

Then we can start preparation for my attack plan! Leonard exulted. He

said to his gathered staff, "Gentlemen, the time has come to strike the

telling blow, and capture or destroy the enemy flagship, using both

Earth-based forces and the ALUCE contingent.

"Inform General Emerson I want him back here on Earth A.S.A.P He'll

be my field commander on this one."

Run the gauntlet again, Rolf! Your luck has to give out sometime!

"Listen up, everybody!" Dana's tone was so upbeat that the 15th knew

this briefing wasn't just some joystick info-promulgation. They gathered

round her, there in the repair bay.

When she had them quieted down from the usual griping and groaning

about being interrupted, she motioned to Bowie and said, "Your friend

Rolf-that is, Chief of Staff Emerson-has arrived at Moon Base ALUCE with

his expeditionary force."

She saw Bowie's breath catch, but then, with deliberate effort, he put

on a bored expression. "Oh, yippee-pow. Now we can do some more

65

fighting."

"What's it all mean for us, Lieutenant?" Angelo broke in, seeing that

Dana was vexed by Bowie's reaction and wanting to keep things on track.

That somehow triggered the strac side of her personality, the hardnose

officer so unlike the wild rulebreaker. She put on her best CO expression

and said tightly, "Squad fifteen, Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, will stand-to

and make ready to participate in an all-out assault on the enemy flagship to

take place in approximately forty-eight hours, Major General Emerson

commanding."

She let the gasps and exclamations go on for a few seconds, then cut

through them. "As you were! Fall out and follow me."

Grumbling, they hopped onto the drop-rack, the conveyor-beltlike

endless ladder that carried them down to the motor pool levels to their

parked Hovertanks. As soon as they jumped clear of the drop-rack, they saw

that someone else had been at work there-at work on their own sacrosanct

mecha, in violation of every ATAC tradition.

Odds and ends of components and machinery and one or two forgotten

tools were lying around. They gave her betrayed looks, knowing now why

they had been given other work details to keep them all off the motor-pool

levels.

"They've all been retrofitted and augmented by R&D for extended

space combat capability," she recited the briefing that had been given her.

"Get used to them. You'll find instruction manuals and tutorial tapes in each

tank. We will all run individual in-place drills and dry-fire practice from

now until chowtime."

The 15th was only grumbling a little now, because they were fascinated

with what had been done to their vehicles. The mecha's lines had been

changed only a little, but the 15th could see that the detection and targeting

gear was newer and more compact, more long-range. Life-support and

energy systems were smaller and much more effective, too. The space

saving was mostly due to upgraded firepower and thicker armor.

They spread out, looking admiringly at the tanks but not trusting them

66

yet. Dana herself was uneasy about this sudden mucking around with the

15th's mecha, but she had her orders, and she thought that everything might

go all right.

"Good; you're here," someone said behind her. She turned, and found

herself facing Lieutenant Brown, decked out in his tailored TASC uniform.

"Looks like it's gonna be fun, doesn't it?" he added.

"You're coming along on this party," Dana said, not making it a

question.

Brown's handsome face twisted into a droll smile. "Gotta prove I'm not

a screwup, don't I?" He looked around and spotted the Livewire. "Hey,

Louie! Congratulations; I heard you're the one who dreamed up the new

targeting systems."

Dana turned, saw that Louie was hunkered over the control grips and

computer displays in his cockpit-turret. He didn't respond to Brown's hail.

She turned back to the TASC flyer. "Y-you mean the simulator gizmo?"

"They told me it was for simulation training," Dana heard Louie's

trembling voice. He was still bent over his controls, his back to them.

Sean was lounging in his tank, the Bad News, reveling in its

now-enhanced power, checking out the VETS "pupil pistol" target

acquisition and firing system. "First-round kill every time," he assessed;

Louie heard him, and groaned aloud.

"Shut up, Sean!" Dana screamed at him, her voice almost breaking.

Something snapped inside Bowie. What if the Robotech Masters had

run short of fighters in the wake of Emerson's apocalyptic victory? What if

Musica or someone like her was sealed into the ball-turret control module

of the next blue Bioroid to find itself in his gunsight reticle?

"I'm through with this!" Bowie howled, veins standing out in his neck

and forehead. "There're Humans like us in those Bioroids and they're not

our enemies! And we're not theirs, can't any of you understand that?"

Dana started to calm Bowie down, but before she could get out more

than a few vague, soothing words, she heard a rattle and felt waves of

superheated air behind her. Dana and the rest of the 15th turned around

67

and saw Louie Nichols with a thereto-rifle in his hands, its bulky power

pack lying on the permacrete at his feet.

His eyes were unreadable behind the dark, reflective goggles, but he

was trembling all over. "Those bastards from R&D never even asked me;

they just lied, picked my brain, and did what they were planning to do all

along. Like we're the clones; like they're the Robotech Masters!"

He shot a lance of brilliance at the motor-pool wall in a test-burn; alloy

melted and small secondary fires started. He figured he had enough power

in the rifle to burn the cockpit out of every tank and then go hunting for

Cromwell and Gervasi.

"Like we're a bunch of experimental animals," Louie cried at his

squadmates desperately, swinging the thermorifle's bell mouth this way and

that to keep them all back.

He had joined the Southern Cross because he believed in it, but the

mind and the products of the mind belonged to the individual, to do with as

the individual saw fit; that was the first order of his convictions. Or else,

what was the point of all this fighting? Why were the Human race and the

Robotech Masters not one and the same?

"We're not just slaves or puppets or lab animals!" Louie shrieked, and

put another spear of furnace-hot brightness into a partition, melting it,

setting it alight, to keep back an overeager PFC who had been edging toward

him.

Lab animals, the phrase registered in Dana and lodged there, because it

set off images and reflexes on the very limits of the perceivable. I know what

it feels like to be one!

Angelo started for the corporal one small step at a time.

"Louie, the balloon's already up. Emerson and the rest go, whether we

do or not. All you can do this way is give the goddamn aliens a better edge."

Dana winced at the aliens reference and leapt forward to shove Angelo

aside, the strange evocations of Louie's words still moving her. She leveled

her gaze at berserker Louie.

"Go ahead, Louie." She jerked a thumb at the tanks. "Flame 'em all."

68

Angelo was making confused, contrary sounds. She went on, "If you

can't do it, then I will!" She walked in Louie's direction, only slightly out of

the path of the thereto-rifle's tracer beam. The beam wavered on her, away,

and back.

Then she was before him, and he turned the nozzle aside. "They lied to

us," Louie said, lowering the barrel.

"I know," she answered gently, taking the weapon from him and

turning it once again on the tanks.

Angelo stepped into her line of fire. "You swore an oath!"

"So did they, Angie," she said evenly. Dana turned to burn her own

Hovertank, Valkyrie, first. But she found another figure in her way. Zor

gazed at her through the heat waves of the thereto-rifle's pilot.

"I understand this war from both sides; maybe I'm the only one who

ever will," he told her. "And humanity mustn't lose, it mustn't lose, do you

hear me? Listen, all of you: I know what the Bioroid clones feel when they

die. I've died before-and I'll die again, as we all will. The difference is in how

we'll live, don't you see? And for that, I'm willing to fight. And even to kill.

"Dying is a natural thing, sometimes it's even a mercy. But living as a

slave-that can make dying seem like a miracle."

He was before her now, almost whispering the words. Dana turned the

muzzle of the thereto-rifle up toward the ceiling. Zor pried it from her

fingers and deactivated it, just as Louie ran from the motor pool.

"The war must end, but the Robotech Masters must not win," Zor said

to them quietly, putting the rifle aside.

69

CHAPTER EIGHT

Hwup! Twup! Thrup! Fo'!

Alpha! Tact'l! Armored! Corps!

If yo' cain't git yo' mind tame,

Better play some other game!

Marching-cadence chant

popular among ATAC drill sergeants

In their flagship, the Robotech Masters showed no sign of their dismay

as the Clonemasters assessed the damage they had suffered in Emerson's

doomsday victory.

Many of their combat vessels and blue Bioroids were gone, along with

much of the materials that were to have gone to mecha construction. "We

have begun emergency production of the new, augmented Triumviroid

mecha, my lord," Jeddar was saying, "giving each the power of an Invid

Fighter. It lies within our ability to produce many of these and they are

superior to anything the Humans can field."

The Masters studied the Triumviroid, a red Bioroid similar to the one

Zor Prime had piloted. With one of the horned Triumviroid Invid Fighter

spheres in each ball-turret control module, they would have, in effect,

hundreds of Zors-hundreds of duplicates of their most capable fighter and

battle lord.

"This is our crowning achievement." Dag leered, studying the

enormous fists and weapons. "Utterly invincible."

Bowkaz pronounced his evaluation, "The Humans' Battloids will be

worthless against it."

And Shaizan contributed, "Finally, the Protoculture will be ours."

The gleaming red armored immensity of the straddlelegged Bioroid

loomed above them, so massive that it seemed it could tear worlds apart.

The Masters were sure that they were destined to succeed.

70

There was, however, a tacit silence among them on the matter of the

Humans' aspirations, which might be contradictory.

The ALUCE forces had repaired their mecha and licked their wounds.

At Emerson's order, they lifted off again, to rendezvous with him for what

the Human race hoped would be the knockout punch of the war.

Earth and the moon shook to the drives of Southern Cross battleships;

the Black Lions and some twenty-five thousand other soldiers looked to

their weapons and waited and wondered whether this would be the day they

died.

At Fokker Base, Marie Crystal, who had come with Emerson on his

harrowing broken-field run back from the moon, prayed for her own soul

and those of all the men in her unit. Then she rose, armored like Joan of Arc,

and got ready to lead them forth to slay and be slain.

In a mess hall near a launch pad at Fokker Base, there was little for the

15th to do except sit and wait. Their tanks were already loaded, nobody

seemed to feel much like talking, and the squeaking and scraping of body

armor was the only sound. Serenity seemed to be inversely proportionate to

rank. Dana felt the weight of the world on her shoulders, while the latest

transferees were trying to bag a few z's on the floor.

They had been listening to the Bitch Box-the PA speaker-drone on for

hours. Who was supposed to go where, cautionary notes about final

maintenance-and more ominously, chaplain's call and final offers from the

Judge Advocate General's office to make sure wills and deeds were in order.

Dana looked out the mess hall window, at the scarred, alloy-plowed

spot on a distant hillside where the Robotech Masters' flagship had crashed

a lifetime-a month?-before.

"C'mon," she murmured to the PA. I don't mind dying, but I hate to

wait! "Let's get this turkey in the oven!"

Sean, wandering past seemingly by accident, patted her glittering steel

71

rump. "Easy, skipper."

She spun on him and would have taken a swing at him if he had been

closer. Did he think she was so incapable that she needed his imprimatur to

run her squad? Dana didn't have time to think of anything more subtle or

telling, so she barked, "Squelch it, dipstick!"

They were both sweating, teeth locked, ready to punch each other for

no good reason-except that they were about to go into battle, to shoot or

perhaps be shot by total strangers.

Bowie bounded to his feet, despite the weight of his armor. "Stop it. We

only have one enemy, and that's the Robotech Masters. We should be

thinking about that." He said it with the uncomfortable knowledge that he

couldn't even take his own advice; he, too, was preoccupied, but in a very

different way.

Angelo was checking over the mechanism on his pistol. "Think,

schmink! Why don'tcha all quiet down and think mission?"

"Angelo is right," Zor said quietly.

Louie snorted, "That's easy for you to say, Zor. But us Humans get

emotional, especially when it comes to gettin' killed."

Zor didn't rise to the taunt. "You're right: I'm not Human. I wish I

could remember more than I do, but I recall one thing clearly. I was far less

than I am now, when my mind was ruled by the Robotech Masters."

"I want to destroy them to make sure that never happens to me or

anyone else. I'd gladly give my life to ensure that. If you knew what I was

talking about, you all would, too."

Nobody said anything for a few seconds. They had all been in combat

too many times to have much tolerance for gung-ho speeches, but

something quiet and sure in Zor's voice kept them from mocking him.

"I'm impressed," Angelo said, to break the silence. There were a few

grunts and nods of the head, about as close as the 15th could come to wild

applause at a time like this.

In their flagship, the Masters gazed down at the Scientist triumvirate.

72

"We observe the Humans' preparations," Shaizan said. "And their apparent

intention to use such crude tactics is difficult to rationalize. Do you detect

any indication that they are preparing to fight the Invid Sensor Nebula

should it attack them?"

The Scientists floated close on their satellite Protoculture cap.

Elsewhere in the cavernous compartment, the Clonemasters, Politicians,

and other triumvirates stood on their drifting caps and watched silently.

Dovak, leader of the Scientists, answered, "According to our

monitorings and intercepts, they plan nothing against the Nebula, but they

are mounting an all-out offensive against us."

The Masters pondered that. Perhaps the primitives below were

ignorant of the danger of the Invid. But that hardly seemed likely, especially

since the Zentraedi who had defected to the Human side in the First

Robotech War would have been well aware of it, and of the Nebulae.

Perhaps the Humans were hoping for aid from the Invid.

If so, they hoped in vain; the Invid had a mindless hatred of any species

but their own.

In any case, the Humans plainly would not constitute a buffer or third

force should the Invid arrive; their civilization and perhaps all life on their

planet-except the Matrix would in all likelihood simply be swept away.

And if they weren't ready for the Invid and in control of a replenished

Matrix by then, the Robotech Masters would be destroyed as well.

Finally the orders came. Dana grabbed up her winged helmet with its

long alloy vane like a Grecian crest.

"All right, Fifteenth! Saddle up! C'mon, move out!"

Out on the launch pad, Nova managed to steal a few moments from the

frantic activity of ensuring a trouble-free embarkation, to meet with

Lieutenant Brown.

"I was sorry to hear about poor Komodo," he told her. "I know it was

awkward for you but-you made him happy, Nova. Don't ever regret that, no

73

matter what."

She had almost decided not to meet Dennis, fearing that her farewell

might be a jinx. She struggled to say something.

"Just take care of yourself until I see you again," he smiled.

"Isn't that my line, Dennis?" She felt as if she might start shivering.

He shrugged his armored shoulders. "Nothing to worry about. 'Just

another day in the SCA.'" The stock Southern Cross Army crack didn't

sound so light, though.

She had a hard time understanding just how she had come to care so

much for him, especially in the midst of all the craziness about Zor and the

sadness over Captain Komodo. At first it had to do with her guilt over

messing up his clearance. Later she admired him for the way he took the fall

for Marie Crystal's stunt-driving exhibition, and for his role as getaway

driver in Dana's demented matchmaking scheme.

But there was something more to it than that, something that had to do

with the indestructible good humor with which he faced every misfortune.

She just felt that in some ways he was a kinder, a better person-more

compassionate-than she could ever pretend to be.

The warning hooters were nagging. "Gotta go," he said.

He turned to leave, but she caught his wrist. "Dennis, be careful. Do

that for me?"

He nodded with a handsome grin. "Count on it. See you soon."

She nodded, watching him as if he were some apparition. She couldn't

quite work up the nerve to tell him, Come back safe to me, because I seem to

have fallen in love with you.

He was trotting toward his transport, and she had to hurry to reach a

bunker. Drives boomed again, and the next phase of the Second Robotech

War began in earnest.

The forces from ALUCE came on, unopposed. The Masters refused to

react to Humanity's drawing gambit, and played a waiting game. Earth's

strikeforce positioned for attack.

74

Dana found Bowie down in the cargo hold where the 15th's Hovertanks

were secured for flight. It took some prompting to get him to open up, but

when he did the words came out in a flood

"Since I met Musica and Zor, I don't feel the same about fighting those

Bioroids! The people in them just aren't to blame! It's like one of those

ancient armies where they drove innocent captives in first, to be slaughtered,

to gain a tactical advantage!"

"Bowie, I understand. There's nothing wrong with what you're feeling-"

She had put a hand on his shoulder but he shook free, batting it aside.

"I'm right on the edge, Dana, and I haven't got my mind right, don't you

understand? I can't handle it anymore! I'll let you all down!"

That was serious talk, because everyone in the 15th knew-as all soldiers

know-that you don't take that hill for the UEG council, the Promise of a

Brighter World, or Mom's fruitcake. No; you do it for your buddies, and

they do it for you.

"Bowie, we've always been straight with each other, and I'm telling you:

I get those same feelings, too."

"But Dana, that doesn't tell me how to deal with it! Ahhh! So, there it is.

Nothing you can do about it, Lieutenant. I'm gonna have to sort this one out

for myself."

"I'm only part Human," she blurted. "I, I guess I'm related to Zor and

the rest, in a way. I don't like the idea of killing any of the clones, either. But

Bowie, think about the alternative. Remember what Zor said!"

She threw her arms around his shoulders, pressing her cheek to him.

"We can't let that happen to Earth, Bowie," she whispered, "and we can't let

that happen to the Fifteenth."

A few weeks before, the Masters' fleet would have disintegrated the

impudent Human attack. Now it fought for its life, its energy reservoir

failing to a point where the battle was horribly even and attrition seemed to

be the not-so-secret weapon.

Terran energy volleys and alien annihilation discs crosshatched, thick

75

as nettles, as the Human strikeforce closed in.

The 15th cranked up and sealed their armor, preparing to follow Dana's

Valkyrie into the launch lock. They got word that their tactical area of

responsibility-their TAOR-had been increased by 50%, because the 12th

squad had been blown to bits along with everyone else aboard the

battlecruiser Sharpsburg when enemy salvoes fund it.

The earth fleet threw everything it had at the enemy, but the news that

came to Emerson, watching stone-faced from his flagship, was bad.

"Missiles, solids, energy-nothing seems to be doing them much damage,

sir," Green told him.

There was no sign of the hexagonal "snowflake" defensive fields the

Masters had used before, but what Green said was undeniably true.

Ordnance and destructive force equivalent to a good-size World War was

being tossed at the lumbering invaders, to no avail.

"It might be some kind of shield we haven't seen before, or it might just

be their hulls," Emerson replied. But their I wasn't much room for fancy

changes of plan or pauses to consider now; the huge operation was, by its

own size and weight, all but unstoppable.

"Press the attack," Rolf Emerson forced himself to say, trying not to

think of the casualties but only of what would happen to Earth if he and his

fleet failed. He had seen excerpts from Zor's debriefing, and the monitoring

of Zor's comments about life under the Robotech Masters.

"Hit them harder," Emerson said, "and get ready to send in the fighters,

then the tanks."

Going in close, risking the furious-bright particle beams of the

teardrop-shaped invader batteries, the Earth ships poured down torrents of

fire at them. Tube after tube of the heavier missiles, Skylords and such,

gushed forth flame and death; racks of Swordfish and Jackhammers

emptied, only to be reloaded for another fusilade.

Marie Crystal, ready to lead the TASCs out, sent a silent thought to

Sean, to take care of himself.

76

A close, highly concentrated missile barrage that cost the Terran forces

a destroyer escort and the crippling of a frigate somehow opened a gap in

the alien flagship's hull. It happened just as the 15th was about to leave the

launch lock, and their mission changed in a moment.

There was little G3 operations could add to the standing orders. Get

inside there and disable them! Distract, neutralize!

The Hovertanks, compact as enormous crabs or turtles with all

appendages pulled close, dropped on the inverted blue candleflames of their

thrusters.

The rent in the enemy's upper hull was as big around as the 15th's

barracks; a gaping, irregular hole, sides fringed with twisted, blackened

armor seven yards thick, streaming black smoke and atmosphere like a

funnel. It was slightly forward and portside of one of those mountainous

spiraled ziggurats Louie insisted on calling "Robotech Teats."

It would still be a tight squeeze for a whole Hovertank squad, and Dana

didn't like the idea of being crowded together fish-in-a-barrel style. But

there was no telling when the gap would be closed by some repair

mechanism, no time to pause and reconsider. At her order, the ATACs

dropped slowly toward the hole, for a close pass before paying their

housecall.

No Bioroids anywhere, Dana registered.

I don't like it, Angelo told himself.

"A different tactic now. How strange," Shaizan said, sounding more

puzzled than perturbed.

Dag turned away from the crystalline pane, where he had been

observing the Hovertanks. "This is an unexpected opportunity," Dag said, as

the descending mecha swung slowly past the ruptured hull behind him.

"Yes; I believe it is time to test the new Invid Fighter," Shaizan

concurred.

Dag turned and barked, "Scientists! Quickly!"

77

That triumvirate, having been high among the looping arteries and

carryways of the ship's control systemry, descended now on their cap. "Yes,

Masters?"

"Deploy our Triumviroid Invid Fighters against those Human mecha

out there at once."

"At once!" The Scientists soared off to obey.

Bowkaz, watching the 15th come around for another close pass, closed

his thin, atrophied hand into a fist, the spidery fingers unaccustomed to

such a strong gesture. "Amazing! These missing links actually think they can

triumph against us!"

In a large compartment in the flagship, an infernal fantasy landscape

had been created. The translucent pink room consisted of high-arching

carryways and Protoculture arteries, with clusters of globes that resembled

grapes, of all things, at their intersections.

Far below the energizing and monitoring systemry, the Invid Fighters

reared, standing in threes, insects by comparison but cyclopean giants in

terms of the war raging on the outside.

The Bioroids' chest plastrons were open, shoulder pauldrarns raised,

helmet beavers lifted to expose the ball-turrets in which their pilots would

sit, in yogi fashion.

Dovak's voice came, "Vada Prime, triumvirates of the Invid Fighters, to

your mecha! Haste! The Human prey is near!"

Light poured in from the arch intersections where the grape clusters

hung; it illuminated triads of young male clones, the Vada Prime,

red-haired but bearing a strong resemblance to the original Zor. They stood,

back to back, where the extended chest plastrons of the mecha met like

lowered drawbridges.

"Prepare for utilization against the Humans and their blasphemous

concepts, their individuality! Obliterate them!"

"Three will always be as one!" one Vada leader chanted. That was the

essence of the Invid Fighter systems: the transference of power, awareness,

78

thought-Protoculture energy-back and forth among the members of each

triune unit and its mecha, on a millisecond basis, This occurred so that each

machine and pilot would be triply effective in the telling moments of

combat, which were themselves relatively few.

"One for three and three for one. In thought, action, firepower, and

reaction," Dovak intoned. "Remember this, Vada Prime!"

The Vada Prime clones retreated to their globular control sanctuaries,

and prepared to hunt down the Hovertanks.

Dana led the 15th in a low approach vector, ready to go down into the

hole in the enemy flagship's hull, hoping things went better than they had

the last time the 15th entered the Masters' metal homeworld.

But things became complicated even before the tanks could enter; giant

figures on Hovercraft rose up out of the smoking abyss of the hull breech.

Dana couldn't help but feel dismay when she saw what was ahead. Red

Bioroids!

Three, four-six that she could see, and perhaps more in the smoke. She

tried not to surrender to despair. Six red Bioroids! "New targets ahead," she

said, trying to sound confident.

The 15th bore in at the Triumviroids, the downsweep of their front

cowlings and the halogen lamps tucked beneath them giving the tanks the

look of angry crabs about to settle a grudge. The tanks broke right and left

and up and down; they needed maneuvering room.

The enemy split up and jumped them, firing from weapons in their

control stems, and from the disc handguns, lashing streams of annihilation

discs this way and that. Dana saw what she feared: they were all as fast and

deadly as Zor was, operating in perfect coordination. She fought her

recurring image of a complete rout.

Three of them went for a tank that had gone low, like cowboys chasing

a wandering heifer, bringing their discus sidearms to bear. Dana saw with a

start that the Hovertank was Zor's Three-In-One.

79

CHAPTER NINE

The politicians who kill troops

But leave no babe unkissed!

They'd none of them be missed,

They'd none of them be missed!

Bowie Grant,

"With Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan"

Dana yelled, "Zor, get out of there!"

Zor had the presence of mind to retro, rather than try some fancy

maneuver or an uneven firelight. The reds' shots stitched the flagship's hull,

passing through the airless spot where Zor would have been. He escaped

with only a spiderwebbing of his canopy, the effect of a grazing shot.

"That was close, but I'm all right," he said calmly.

An A-JACs unit had found a bowside cargo lock blasted open by

another Terran barrage; the mechachoppers zipped in at it like angry wasps,

under the same romp-and-ruin orders as the ATACs.

The command came to the Vada Primes from Dovak. "A new enemy

combat group is attempting to enter the flagship. Readjust battle plan and

destroy them at once."

It took the A-JACs a fatal few moments to realize that they were being

attacked by mecha far superior to their own.

One A-JAC was blasted as soon as it came in, going up like a Roman

candle. A second, already standing by the opened hull, was riddled and fell

apart in fragments. The reds came in, maneuvering and firing in perfect

cooperation. The A-JACs' counterfire had no effect on the Triumviroids'

battleshiplike armor.

"We're no match for them in these A-JACs!" Lieutenant Brown yelled

to the few survivors left in his team. "Everybody pull back! Evasive

maneuvers!"

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Dana had her own plan of action. She sent her Valkyrie leaping high,

imaging a change, her helmet sensors picking up the impulses and guiding

her tank through mechamorphosis.

Components slid, reconfigured, rearranged; the tank went to Battloid

mode. It stood in space, a Robotech Galahad, taking as its rifle the altered

cannon that had rested along the tank's prow moments before. She landed

on the hull to make her stand, feet spread, rifle/cannon strobing. Angelo

and Bowie landed next to her in the same humanoid mode.

Three reds swept in in echelon, their fire well coordinated, promising

to sweep the Battloids before them. Angelo remembered what he had

learned about the blue Bioroids. He stopped pouring out heavy fire and took

deliberate aim.

He hit the lead Triumviroid's faceplate; it shattered, spilling

atmosphere and ruin. The thing's Hovercraft began to waver gently, and the

red itself went immobile.

"I got one! Hey Lieutenant, go for their faceplates!"

But as Dana looked around to see what was going on, the red's ball

turret exploded, the body of its Vada Prime pilot tumbling out into vacuum,

breath and blood stolen away in a red mist.

They're humanoids, she saw. They look...just like Zor.

But she said, "You all heard Angie! Faceplates! And make every shot

count!"

Bowie prepared to fire, but a vision of Musica called him, and he froze.

Three more reds came in low over a hull projection, firing so as to scatter

the gathering Battloids, and one burst knocked Bowie's tank from its feet.

Dana and a trooper named Royce were almost shoulder to shoulder,

putting out a heavy volume of fire, to cover him. The red broke off and

banked away.

"You all right, Bowie?"

His Battloid began to lumber to its feet. "I think so."

"Then start shooting, god damn you! Bottom line: They're programmed

to destroy you."

81

Sean was isolated, his fireteam partner just a conflagration and a

memory, the enemy closing in. "Somebody get these 'roids offa me!"

The answer came in the form of an angel of death; the Triumviroid so

close to nailing him flew apart in a coruscating detonation. He picked

himself up off the hull to see an A-JAC hovering loose. "Huh? I'm dreaming!

I'm dead!"

Marie Crystal was on the 15th's freq. "Neither, hotshot."

"Marie?"

"That's right, Phillips, you lucky swine you. You're about four hundred

yards from your squad, at one hundred seventy degrees magnetic. Get back

to 'em and stay alert! I...I don't want to lose you, Sean."

"I won't forget you said that. And I won't let you. What d'you wanna

name our first kid?" She could hear the smugness in his voice but didn't

mind a bit. His Battloid dashed away at top speed as Dana rallied her

command.

Marie switched off her mike. "I won't forget," she whispered. Then she

broke left, to try to help suppress the murderous AA fire from the teardrop

cannon.

The interior of the flagship was a Hovertank job, and A-JACs,

Veritechs-no other mecha had any place in it.

Dana and the first of her 15th leapt right down into a cobra pit.

Her transmissions were patched directly through to Emerson; the

ATACs were Earth's best hope now. "General, we're pinned down in the

entrance gap by heavy fire from red Bioroids! We're about at a standstill

and request assistance-A. S. A. P!"

Emerson was out of his command chair. "We've got to force the enemy

mecha back and make that entrance bigger. Any suggestions?"

Green was giving him a dead-level look. "Ramming them is the only

way, Rolf."

It didn't even take Emerson a second to make up his mind; Earth could

never mount another assault like this, and it was make-or-break time.

82

"Then make ready to use this ship as a battering ram at once."

Emerson's crew acted instantly, and still it looked as though it wouldn't

be soon enough.

If the enemy mother ship's fire had been as intense as it was when the

Masters first arrived in the Solar System, the Human battlecruiser would

have been holed and immolated as soon as it came close to the invader. But

great hunks of armor and superstructure were blasted away from the enemy

ship, and Emerson's flagship was able to stay on course, bearing down on its

enemy.

And it provided a welcome diversion, permitting Dana's troops to

break contact with the devilishly fast and powerful Invid Fighters and

scatter. Even the Triumviroids' power wasn't enough to stop the

heavyweight Earth dreadnought.

The wedge-shaped bow drove into the long rift in the invader; the

impact sent Bioroid and Battloid alike sprawling and bouncing across the

hull. Dana had no idea what power it was that generated gravity on the

surface of the enemy ship, but she was grateful for it then-grateful not to be

sent spinning into infinite blackness.

With the outer armor breached, the battlecruiser experienced less

resistance from the mother ship's internal structure. Bulkheads and decks

and vast segments of systemry were crushed or bashed aside as secondary

explosions foamed around the cruiser like a fiery bow-wave.

Then Emerson's ship was through, having lengthened and deepened

the hull breach to three times its former size, all the way through to the

mother ship's port side. As the battlecruiser lifted clear, more explosions

from the alien lifted the armor even further, as if peeling back aluminum

foil.

Dana got word from the cruiser that the entryway was clear, and for the

moment the reds were nowhere to be seen. She hated the thought of leading

her command down there where so many explosions had already gone off,

but this was the only chance to go through the opening.

"Let's do it, Fifteenth! Follow me!" The 15th, all in Battloid mode,

83

dashed toward the opening, huge metal feet pounding against the hull,

rifle/cannon ready. Angelo was close behind Dana, and then Bowie. Sean

Phillips, Zor, Louie Nichols-those were all of the squad that got through.

Several others were annihilated right at the verge of the gap. Still more

raced for cover. The sum accomplishment of the biggest Human offensive of

the Second Robotech War was to get exactly one officer and one NCO and

four enlisted men of ATAC aboard the enemy command vessel.

Aboard his flagship, Emerson was hoping he had given the 15th the

margin it needed. No other mecha had succeeded in reaching a position that

would allow them to board, and, for the time being at least, none seemed

likely to.

Emerson was calling for more diversionary strikes, to keep the Masters

busy and eliminate as many red Bioroids as possible, when his flagship was

battered by another massive volley.

Colonel Green picked himself up off the deck, checked the incoming

reports and called to his commanding general, "It's another alien mother

ship, sir!" He checked damage readouts. "And we're in no shape to take 'em

on, Rolf!"

After the battle and the ramming, Emerson knew that was only

common sense. But he said, "The battle plan does not allow for withdrawal

at this time-"

A second barrage, even stronger than the first, rattled them all around

like dice in a cup. Emerson saw that it wasn't just one mother ship coming

to the rescue, but at least three. There was no choice; his forces would be

utterly obliterated if he didn't at least fall back to regroup.

And there was no time for an extraction mission to recover the 15th; it

was committed. Its few young troopers were very likely the last, best hope of

Earth.

Marie, back aboard her attack transport to rearm and refuel, heard the

announcements and commands over the PA and went cold, as the Earth

84

fleet began to break off contact and withdraw. Oh, Sean!

The 15th spotted the two Triumviroids in the corridor ahead of them

before the reds spied the 15th. The ATAC Battloids charged almost shoulder

to shoulder, unavoidably bunched up, putting out the heaviest volume of

fire they could.

A strange thing happened; the enemy mecha whirled and froze. ATAC

rifle shots spattered their torsos and faceplates, blowing them out, and the

Triumviroids dropped like puppets whose strings had been snipped. The

ATACs had had the advantage of numbers and surprise, but it was still a

remarkably easy win in comparison to the harrowing battle on the outer

hull.

The 15th never even broke stride, but charged on further into the ship,

weapons ready. But even as Dana leapt her Battloid over one red's body

something occurred to her. Two-there were only two this time. And the reds

had been working in threes up above. Presumably there was at least one

more around down here, perhaps damaged or crushed by Emerson's

ramming maneuver.

She had no time to pursue the thought, though, as she led her squad

along a curvy passageway built to mecha scale. The deck and bulkheads

seemed unremarkable here, but the overhead looked like a big, metallic

mural network. No time to stop and study, however.

"Must be kinda familiar, huh Zor-O?" Angelo taunted. "Which way

d'we go?"

"I wish I knew, but I don't remember, Sergeant." Zor answered,

unruffled.

"I'll just bet ya don't, alien!"

Dana snapped, "Knock it off, Dante! Stay sharp, all of you!"

The warning was well timed. A moment later, a diamond-shaped hatch

slid open before them and three Triumviroids leapt into the opening.

But the 15th was so juiced up on adrenaline and the heat of battle that

they opened fire instantly. For some reason these enemy mecha, too, were

85

slow in responding, and with their faceplates shot out, they went over like

bowling pins.

"Shoot for the faceplates, that's their weak spot!" Dana confirmed, as

the ATACs rushed the hatch, covering one another. "If y'get one or two away

from the third, it slows them down; if you get a trio, hit them at exactly the

same moment. Looks like that overloads 'em somehow."

"They have discovered an inherent weakness of our Invid Fighter,"

Shaizan said tonelessly. It seemed that the single-thinking Human animals

were a match for the Three-Who-Act-as-One.

Dag said, "Then, we must reactivate Zor Prime's programming, and

resume full command of his mind and actions."

A perfect solution. There could be no chancre of malfunction, since Zor

was so close to the Protoculture cap.

Bowkaz touched his long, nailless fingers and his palm to a mottled

patch of the cap, and the patch shone with radiance. "It is done."

"Lieutenant, somethin's wrong with Zor!"

It was odd to hear concern in Angelo's voice.

Dana and the others stopped and pounded back to where Angelo's

Battloid faced Zor's, which stood stiff as a manikin.

The power of Protoculture coursed through Zor's brain, taking control

of every corner of his mind in moments.

Dana shook the paralyzed Battloid a little. "Zor, what's wrong? Are you

hit? Answer me!"

Suddenly the Three-In-One lashed out, grabbing the enormous alloy

fist of Dana's Valkyrie in its own, bending it in a take-away hold,

threatening to rip it off.

Angelo yelled, "Zor, that's enough!" He had his rifle up, but Dana was

in his line of fire.

She worked a quick hand-to-hand trick, rotating her mecha's wrist out

of the grip and yanking herself free. "What's gotten into you?"

86

But Zor's Battloid was already running in the other direction, off

toward a side passageway.

Dana only had a second to decide, and no time to sort through her

various motives. A part of her simply could not bear to see Zor go off,

perhaps blanked out again or suffering some mental seizure, to be captured

or slain. Furthermore, he was an important resource to her mission and to

the Southern Cross, perhaps her best hope of doing her job in the mother

ship and getting her unit out alive.

But she couldn't risk her whole squad trying to tackle one berserk

trooper. "Angelo, come with me! The rest of you set up security here and

maintain radio contact!"

They had barely started to chase Zor when another threesome of the

reds tried to block their way. Dana felt sure the Triumviroids were covering

Zor's escape, that he had given them the order to do so.

Dana managed a broken-field run through them, but Angelo took one

out with a shoulder block, slamming it against the bulkhead, as the disc

guns opened up and the rifle/cannon replied. The passageway was an

inferno of close-range firing.

Sean yelled an obscenity as he, Louie, and Bowie set up the heaviest

fire they could, distracting the enemy from Dana and Angelo. The

Triurnviroids seemed to hear an unspoken order, and turned their attention

on the remaining troopers. The mecha blasted at each other, blowing holes

in deck and bulkheads, brilliant spears of novafire skewing across the small

distance separating them.

87

CHAPTER TEN

You look at us and ask why we are slaves. But we look at you and

wonder why you are not. What hideous mutation has given you the curse of

free thought, and taken away your peace of mind forever?

Remark of an anonymous clone to ATAC trooper

Corporal Louie Nichols

This place could be Roman! Dana thought, looking around the

compartment into which Zor had disappeared.

It was like same vast gathering hall or ballroom, There was invader

systemry around the bulkheads. But set all around the hall/compartment

were what seemed to be marble columns in the classic style, supporting

entablatures with carved friezes. The ceiling was a smooth dome of polished

stone. It made no sense to her, and she had no time to puzzle over it all.

"Zor! Zor, please come out!" The design of the bulkheads was so

strange, she couldn't tell what might be a hatch or place of concealment; the

columns were too small to offer a Battloid cover.

"We're your friends, Zor!"

Angelo's Trojan Horse came double-timing up, having hung back to

cover their rear. "Lost him, huh?"

"I saw him come in here."

Angelo raised his weapon. "He can't be trusted. He betrayed us." The

punishment for treason in wartime or desertion under fire was obvious.

"And I'm gonna give him what he's got coming."

It was also obvious that Zor wasn't going to willingly show himself, but

Angelo had his own straightforward solution for that. "Gladiator mode!"

The sergeant imaged the transformation through his spike-topped

thinking cap, and his Trojan Horse went through mechamorphosis.

Angelo opened fire, hitting one of the columns dead center. It broke

into a shower of stone splinters and dust, collapsing and breaking into a

88

thousand fragments. He traversed the barrel and let off another round,

blowing chunks from the ceiling.

"C'mon, Zor! Show yourself."

He was right, Dana saw. All her anger at the Robotech Masters welled

up; what right did they have to live in such beauty, slave keepers that they

were? She went to Gladiator as well, and together she and Angelo Dante

stomped about the hall, firing, demolishing the gorgeous entablatures and

columns.

Then at random she fired at another bulkhead of rectangular metal.

The rectangle crumpled and fell, revealing a space beyond. The hatch fell

and through the smoke and flame stepped one lone red Bioroid.

"Zor!" Dana knew it had to be him. All her anger was gone in a moment,

and the terrible thought that she had lost him again, perhaps forever, to the

Masters, brought out the other side of her personality. Forgetting

everything, she hiked herself up out of her seat, and leapt to lower herself

from her cockpit-canopy. "Zor!"

"Lieutenant!" Angelo's first impulse was to fire for effect, but before he

could do anything, she was in too close, nearly at the Bioroid's feet, arms

held up to it imploringly.

"Oh, Zor," she cried forlornly. "Don't you remember me? Have they

taken that from you, too?" But the great discus-shaped handgun in the red

fist swung to bear on her.

Angelo locked down his controls and rose, to drop from his tank. He

couldn't start a firefight and he wouldn't leave Dana to be captured or killed.

He chose not to question his own motives as he ran to stand at her side, but

he knew loyalty and duty were not his only ones.

Dana was so young and beautiful, so filled with a fighter's spirit...In his

whole life, he had met only a handful like her: good soldier, reliable

companion...someone you could trust, could count on. In Angelo's

vocabulary, those words meant everything.

Zor's voice came to them without benefit of their headphones. It

sounded, once more, as it had when Dana had first seen him revealed, near

89

the burial mound of SDF-1. His mindspeech was thin and reedy, higher than

it had been a few moments ago, and sounding like someone talking on the

inhalation rather than the exhalation.

"Do not move. Surrender or you will be instantly destroyed. "

"Zor," she murmured, distraught. "What have they done to you?"

Then light broke from the Bioroid as its head swung back. Its chest and

shoulders opened outwards, to reveal the ball turret within it. That, too,

opened-and Zor uncurled from a fetal position, seemingly given birth, in

blinding glory.

He stood to regard them with contempt, mindspeaking to them. "You

have fallen into this trap much more easily than I would have thought,

Lieutenant Sterling. You and your command are now captives of my lords,

the Robotech Masters."

"I cannot understand the extraordinary influence the female Micronian

exerts over Zor Prime's mental functions," Dag told his two counterparts.

"Exposure to her emotions is causing departures from several of the clone's

cognitive schemata, even here at the center of our power."

"But our control module is at maximum energization," Bowkaz pointed

out. "We have near-total manipulation of Zor Prime. Clearly, it will suffice.

What are emotions, after all, but primitive behavioral residue?"

Zor had retreated back into his control sphere, and the discus handgun

remained pointed at Dana and Angelo. The two ATACs had removed their

helmets and stood looking up.

"Zor, I have to talk to you!" Dana tried again. "You remember me, don't

you?"

There was no response, but Angelo noticed that, suddenly, the pistol

was wavering. From the shadowy figure of Zor, curled up again in his globe,

there was no movement. Dana started walking toward the Bioroid's foot.

"Look out, Dana! He's gonna shoot!" Angelo tackled her just as the

titanic handgun fired; the annihilation disc missed, as the two ATACs fell

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headlong together, but Angelo was quick to understand that it would have

missed anyway.

Another blast superheated the deck nearby, but at that range it should

have been dead center. Dana and Angelo looked up to see the red's armor

re-securing, closing protectively around the ball turret. The red moved

spasmodically; more rounds blasted into the deck at random.

Angelo made his decision and ran for his tank. The red continued its

disoriented firing, seemingly in conflict with itself, until it noticed his main

battery coming to bear on it. Dana was just far enough out of the way.

Angelo fired, but the Bioroid ducked, barely in time. Zor fell aside as the

deckplates beneath his feet leapt up in fire from the sergeant's second shot.

Within his Robotech womb, Zor sweated, moaning, in his trance. He

fought himself even more determinedly than his Bioroid fought Angelo, but

the internal combat wasn't going well.

Dana swung to Angelo. "You'll never stop him that way! Switch to

Battloid mode! And don't hurt him!"

Who's she think I am, Wyatt Earp? Angelo wondered. What'm I

supposed to do, wing that goddamn 'roid? But he went to Battloid and fired

his rifle/cannon from the hip. The red dodged, but more slowly.

"Zor's brainwaves indicate a deviance," Bowkaz observed.

Behind him, Myzex, group leader of the Politician triumvirate, spoke

from his triad's Protoculture cap. "His exposure to Human influence may

have produced an adverse effect on his anterior brain structure."

Dag half turned to the politicians. "You suggest an awakening of

dormant racial memory?"

"Possibly, my Master."

Perhaps this was the breakthrough the Masters had hoped for! It might

be that emotions were the missing key to the recovery of Zor's mental gifts

and, possibly, even to the Inheritance of Acquired Knowledge capacity they

had hoped to channel into him by use of their artificial psi abilities. The

I.A.K. and the recovery of the original Zor's secrets, a new Matrix-a

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universe-spanning realm belonging to them alone-it was suddenly all

possible.

"The Human disturbance and distraction must be eradicated at once,"

Shaizan decreed.

Suddenly Zor barreled past Angelo before the sergeant could get off a

shot, bashed through another hatch, and disappeared down a passageway.

"Angelo, stay down!" Dana yelled.

"What happened?" Angelo was shaken badly; he had thought his

number was up. "He had me dead to rights; why didn't he nail me?"

"I don't know," Dana said, heading back to the Valkyrie. "But we have

to find Bowie and the others before the aliens do."

Aliens.

The firefight in the passageway was successful for the 15th. The ATACs

used what they had learned about the Triumviroids' weaknesses. Without

Dana around to object, they had done some fast, straight faceplate-shooting,

and even Bowie, seeing that his squadmates' lives were on the line, had

made his choice and taken his stand.

But as they stood in the smoking aftermath of the firefight, they had

realized that it was time to lie low for a while. They had withdrawn to a

nearby recycling plant-a gigantic compartment full of moving conveyor

belts and organic looking reclamation equipment. Hopefully Dana would

follow their transceiver signals.

Sean picked up two signals that got stronger, until they had to be right

in the compartment. He looked up to see two Hovertanks shake loose of the

debris and scrap on a tenyard-wide belt high overhead, and descend on

gushing thrusters. Angelo and Dana landed amid a shower of junk and

garbage, Dana crying, "Look out below!"

"'Bout time, Lieutenant," Bowie commented dryly.

There were no guards or surveillance devices that they could see. Dana

and Angelo and the others hid their tanks in the dark reaches under a big

overhead, then the 15th gathered around to do some improvising.

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It was clear that they couldn't rely upon Emerson's return anytime

soon, and to simply run riot would be to make it just a matter of time before

the Triumviroids converged to wipe them out.

"So, what we gotta do is locate the flagship's command center or bridge

or whatever they call it around here, then come back with the tanks and take

it by force. Everybody, shuck your armor; this is a recon job."

"Secret agent time," Sean sighed. "And where d'we look, in a ship five

miles long?"

"The logical place, in view of their setup and systems, is the center of

the ship," Louie said. They began climbing out of their armor and checking

their small arms.

The ATACs wanted to pack all the weapons they could, but Dana nixed

the idea. A lot of throw-weight would only attract attention, and if they got

into a situation wherein a few pistols and a rifle wouldn't suffice, they

weren't likely to get out of it at all.

Another conveyor belt took them past an entrance decorated with a

marble arch. They hopped off there, went along a corridor lined with

meticulous, hand-done stonework. Angelo, walking point, found himself

looking out on a scene that resembled a cross between the Roman Senate

and the Borgias' waiting room. There was the same gorgeous artistry, and

gleaming floors underfoot. Clones were moving around in small groups,

their pastel clothing running toward togalike affairs, or tights with short

mantles.

"What's it look like out there?" Dana wanted to know, just behind

Angelo but unable to see around him. "Are any of those guards nosing

around, or can we keep moving?"

"All I can see are civilians, I guess," he whispered back. He held his

tanker's carbine high and moved a step further.

Dana came up and peered out, then told her men, "They don't look like

the type to ask questions, out there. We'll just mingle, and make our way

along."

"Nothing ventured-" Louie resigned himself.

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But the inhabitants of the ship did seem quiet, subdued-almost

lethargic. The ATACs moved out along an upper thoroughfare that

overlooked public gathering places and quiet quadrangles.

They had only gotten a few steps when Dana and Louie saw a small

surface-effect runabout headed their way.

Everybody else caught the signals and warnings except Sean, who had

been traipsing along more or less on the heels of three attractive females

who walked in a bunch. By the time he realized what was happening, the

others had taken cover. He was in no position to bolt and decided, in typical

fashion, to strike up a casual chat with the gals.

"Um, 'scuze me, Miss-" He tugged her elbow; all three turned as one

and went "Hmm?" in those eerie, indrawnbreath voices. The runabout of

guards was cruising closer.

Sean made idiotic stammerings about having met them before

someplace, and maybe they should all do lunch. He laughed unconvincingly,

slipped them a couple of winks, sweated.

They were actually quite fetching, triplets with hair dyed orange, blue,

and pink to differentiate themselves. They looked at him and listened for a

few moments. Sean tried to maintain eye contact and yet watch the guards'

slow cruising progress.

Orange Hair turned to her sisters. "This clone's condition is remarkably

degenerative, don't you agree?"

"Note the spasmodic facial expressions: neurological breakdown," Blue

Hair agreed gravely.

"Let us try to determine the nature of his malfunction before he

destabilizes completely," Pinkie put in.

Before Sean could get over his astonishment, they were gathered

around him, prying open his mouth, spreading his eye wide to study it,

thumping his chest-feeling him up.

He had left his torso harness back with his armor, and the three

Clonehealers somehow had his tunic open and down around his waist,

pinning his arms, and were tripping his feet out from under him in

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matter-of-fact fashion. He had been walking point, and so he wasn't even

carrying a gun.

Their deliberate proddings and pokings sent him into a ticklish

laughing fit. Please, whatever gods there be: Don't let Marie find out about

this!

Dana rushed to the rescue, pushing the women aside. "All tarts pile

off!"

"These clones are obviously all infected," said Orange Hair. She raised

her voice. "Guards! Seize these clones immediately!"

The runabout came end for end and the guards came roaring back.

"Split up!" Dana cried. "They can't follow us all!" She vaulted a railing

with Bowie and Louie bringing up the rear. "Meet back at the tanks!" She

ran off down glossy black steps that were mirror-bright and five yards wide.

Angelo dragged Sean to his feet, but realized he had left their tanker

carbines leaning against the wall. And there was no time to go for them;

shots were ranging around them. They dashed off along the upper

thoroughfare; the runabout was following them.

"Y'can't palm yourself off as an alien, ya ragweed!" Angelo panted.

"Aw, write it home to your mother, Sergeant!" Sean snarled back. They

ducked into the first alley they came to.

The guard craft stopped and a cop triumvirate piled out to continue the

chase on foot.

The cop/guards split up to search a loading dock at the far end of the

alley. Sean and Angelo popped out to jump the middle one, the sergeant

punching the lone clone hard, making sure he wouldn't get up again. Sean

grabbed the guard's short, two-handed weapon to cut down another guard.

He pivoted, he and the third guard drawing a bead on each other at the

same moment.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

I think the real change in Dana began the first time she had to write one

of those letters that starts, "As commanding officer of the 15th Squad, ATAC, it

is my sad duty to inform you..."

Louie Nichols,

Tripping the Light Fantastic

Musica caressed the rainbow-beam strings of her Cosmic Harp,

evoking from it sad tonalities. She had no heart for the tunes the Masters

would have her play. The acoustics of her darkened hall made it sound like a

cathedral.

Her sisters Allegra and Octavia approached, and she resigned herself to

yet another disagreement over her newfound defiance. But Allegra said, "A

band of alien soldiers has invaded the core district. We thought you would

want to know."

Musica caught her breath. "Have they been injured? Captured?"

Allegra spread her hands in a gesture to show that she didn't know.

"Karno and his men have started an all-out search for them. They will be

found."

Musica sprang to her feet and walked away. "Don't go!" Octavia called

after. "It's too dangerous!"

"I must be alone for a while," Musica said over her shoulder. She

thought, No harm must come to him! Oh, Bowie!

"You mean your units have permitted the enemy primitives to get

away?" Mega, androgynous female of the Politician triumvirate, demanded.

The guard group leader conceded, "Only temporarily, Excellency. But

they cannot evade us for long, or escape the ship."

She gave him a frigid glare. "Your incompetence will be punished. "

Louie, Bowie, and Dana were not the best mix of talents and traits.

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They found what looked like a dormitory, then had to dive under the

bedlike furnishings when they heard voices. Peeking out from under the

beds, they watched as the Clonehealers (who had been accosted by Sean and

had accosted him in return) entered, discussing the matter of the alien

-invaders.

"I cannot wait to sanitize myself," Spreella said, pulling off her robes,

"from the pollution of contact with them." All three undressed, to the

ATACs' vast interest, and lay down on beds. Projectors of some kind

automatically swung into place. Lights beamed down on the clones and put

them instantly to sleep. Little ring-auras danced over them.

A few seconds later, the troopers were wearing the togas, hoods pulled

up. They ventured out again, and moved across a rotunda in what looked to

Dana like Romeo and Juliet's old neighborhood, except that there were no

trellises, no flowers or plants of any kind.

More guard runabouts appeared. The three ducked into the first door

they came to and found themselves in a place that made them think of a

cocktail lounge. It had softly lit art-shapes of glassy blue panes, and gently

turning, unearthly mobiles. There was soft music from something that

reminded Bowie a little of a flute. They sat nervously at a table and a female

clone placed a strange drinking cup before each of them.

"Drink this, then step through that door to the bioscan chamber," she

said, and moved on. Everyone else was downing the same purplish stuff; it

smelled fragrant.

They were all thirsty, and hadn't been able to find anything like a

public fountain or even a tap. They downed the stuff; it was delicious, a real

pickup. Not beer, but not bad, and it cut their thirst.

Dana decided to have a look through that door. "Bioscan chamber"

sounded like something the brass hats would want to know about. They

went through the door, pistols ready in their belts.

A female nurse-technician clone was there, and the three were directed

to put their feet on lighted markers inside capsulelike structures. The nurse

manipulated a control component that resembled a small, halved

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Protoculture cap set on a pedestal, its flat face covered with alien

instrumentation that looked like the detailing of a mecha.

Rays played over them, and the nurse informed them that although

their dysfunction was far along, there was hope for them. Their mental

readouts gave the clone particular alarm.

Bowie and Louie looked like they wanted to bolt, but Dana had the

feeling that they were close to something vitally important about the

Masters' self-contained world. She followed as the nurse led them into the

next and far larger chamber.

The place seemed to be filled with a strange blue mist, a large

compartment with scores of glassy, coffinlike containers in rows. Long,

transparent cylinders descended from apertures in the ceiling to cast pale

light. There were more of the control modules set here and there among the

scores of shimmering coffins. The ATACs could see still forms in the glassy

caskets.

"Looks like we've found the morgue," Dana murmured.

"These conversion stabilizer units will remedy your malfunctions," the

nurse explained. She was used to clones being disoriented when they came

to her, but she wondered if these particular three were beyond help.

"Observe how this unit is now in complete harmony with his environment."

She referred to a male clone who was revealed as his sarcophagus lid

rose. He sat up, blinking, on his elbows.

"His structure was stabilized by this treatment and a simple bio-energy

supplement," the nurse went on. "You will now drink these."

She was talking about a sluggish looking stuff in three more drinking

vessels that had come down on a floating table. Something in Dana was

drawn to the idea of taking an alien elixir, of finding out what the strange

sleep brought. It triggered some deep memory. She yearned to comply, even

while the Southern Cross lieutenant in her knew it would be madness.

The nurse was doing something at a wall unit. Louie suddenly yelled,

"Look out, Lieutenant!"

Dana turned. The just-awakened clone was lurching toward her, arms

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outstretched. He didn't look very stabilized to Dana; he looked like

something out of a horror movie, pale and hollow-eyed, the living dead.

Their systems aren't functioning up to par, I guess, Louie thought.

Dana, filled with revulsion, screamed for the thing to stay back and

hurled her drinking vessel at it; the glass missed and smashed into a control

module. Liquid splashed, the module began sparking and sputtering, and

the lights started dimming and brightening.

"More trouble," Louie observed; the see-through caskets' indicators

and controls were going haywire. The lids were rising; the clones rose from

their resting places.

"Oh, great! The whole graveyard's coming to life!" Bowie yelled.

Dana showed her teeth to Louie with a hunting cat's ferocious mien.

"Here's your ideal society, Louie! Here's your machine dream, your Empire

of Unimpeded Intellect!" She seemed about to pounce on him. "Well? How

d'you like it?"

The nurse was shrilling something about third stage alerts and

out-of-control clones. The three ATACs didn't realize that she meant them,

not the late risers.

She must have put in a call already, though, because the troopers heard

running footsteps coming toward them. Three guards with the submachine

gun-looking weapons appeared in a doorway.

"Use the zombies for cover and head for that other doorway!" Dana

shouted. Bowie and Louie followed her, weaving among the sluggish,

confused clones. Dana was hoping the guards would be busy rounding up

the blitzed-out sleepwalkers, but the cop/clones gave chase instead.

The three ATACs ended up out on what appeared to be a public

transport platform, like a subway station. Dana, in the lead, took a turn and

kept sprinting. They wound through side ways and almost tripped over a

parked, unattended runabout.

Dana jumped in, determined to get it working; she hit controls at

random and it tore away into the air, leaving Bowie and Louie behind.

Everything she did seemed to make it worse, and in moments she had

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another guard runabout pursuing her. Dana rode over the rotundas and

through the passageways, coming close to crashing every two or three

seconds, somehow managing not to kill astonished clones, trying to get back

to her squadmates.

She heard the pursuing runabout careen out of control and crash into a

wall. As she zoomed out of an alley, Dana's own vehicle tried for a wingover,

and she went flying. Resigned to death, she had her fall broken by some

kind of awning, and slid through as it ripped. She fell on her rear end on

some kind of big disposal chute. It disposed of her, down into a steeply

pitched shaft, just as she heard her stolen runabout explode against a

distant ceiling.

Her funhouse ticket was good for another ride; she went screaming

down into darkness. She came sliding down across an arrival stage, losing

speed and uniform fabric and skin, and went shooting off, to bounce off

something soft and land in a heap.

"Where did you come from?" a calm male clone voice asked.

Dana, rubbing her butt and groaning, turned and said, "You wouldn't

believe it."

She found herself looking at a slender, graceful clone with long,

straight, steel-gray hair and a very young face. "I am Latell, of the

Stonecutters," he said, rising from the peculiar-looking pallet on which he

had been sitting and coming to kneel by her. "Are you badly hurt? Is there

anything I can do?"

She looked around her. The room suggested a Roman bath converted

to use as a clone hospital, but here the beds had no lids. Around the room,

the Masters' slaves were lying down or sitting, looking very torpid. "Well,

you could tell me what this place is."

"Why, this is the district interim center for purging and replacement."

So, she was at yet another clone spa. "Purging of what?"

He tilted his head, studying her. "The personal consciousness of those

who must be rehabilitated, naturally."

A male clone nurse appeared, a twin of the one who had tried to serve

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Dana the mickey. "You two! Your rest period is now terminated. Resume

training."

Latell snapped to attention, then drew the truculent Dana to her feet,

afraid that she was so destabilized as to risk punishment. Dana saw it wasn't

time to start a dust-up, and let Latell lead her away.

He took her to a chamber where dozens of people-that was how she

thought of them-were standing two or three apiece at glowing projection

tanks. The clones studied abstract shapes and symbols and hypnotic

patterns, which changed and shifted, the clones staring down at them with

intense concentration.

"Why are you here, Latell?"

"I was found guilty of individual thought," he confessed to her. "And

you?"

"Uh, the same."

He looked infinitely sad. "But they've allowed you to keep your

permanent body," he observed, too polite to point out what a nonstandard

body it was-so rounded and with such an odd voice. "Not the normal

procedure at all."

"It's, ah, part of an experiment, Latell."

They were at one of the pool tables. Latell was gazing down at the

shapes there, brow furrowed. The shapes began changing, multiplying,

going do-si-do. "I'm afraid I must confess: my reprogramming efforts

haven't been entirely successful-oh!"

He was staring disappointedly at the lightshapes. "The trainer is having

no effect. I still have individual thought patterns."

She looked him up and down. "What's so bad about that?"

"You know as well as I. Unstable minds cannot be tolerated-"

He was interrupted as a nearby female slumped against her pool

table-trainer and fell to the floor. Dana rushed to her, trying to revive her

without success.

She looked around. "Somebody give me a hand, here!"

A female who was twin to the one Dana cradled said frostily, "That is

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forbidden. Her body will have to be replaced."

So, when one member of the triumvirate got out of whack by the

Masters' standards, he or she was either fixed, or replaced. And the

triumvirate went on.

Dana showed her teeth in a snarl. "What are you, Human beings or

cattle?"

Human? She could hear the word ripple through them with a shiver of

disgust. The clones left their trainers and began to converge on her. Latell

dragged Dana to her feet, though she fought him.

"You've gone too far," he said. "You must leave."

"Idiots!" she was screaming. "Can't you see what they're doing to you?"

Was this how Zor would end his days? But he had been a freethinking

Human! To come to this...

The nurse had reappeared, with a twin. "This one requires a body

replacement. Yes. You, come with us."

The clone grabbed her and Dana let out her rage in the form of a quick

footsweep and a shoulder block. The nurses went flying in either direction.

She seized Latell's wrist. "C'mon. I'm getting you outta here." He didn't

resist. He was doomed, whatever he did, and in addition found her

fascinating.

Angelo and Sean had guard uniforms to wear over their Southern Cross

outfits (though Angelo's was strained to its limits, to say the least), and guns

and a runabout, but with the action over, they were at a loss as to what to do

next. Parked in a deserted upper-tier plaza, they worried and debated.

A plate on the runabout's dash came alight and a voice said, "Unit

thirteen, return to Main Control. Prepare for Override Guidance to return

you to Main Control."

Sean checked over his stolen weapon. "Get ready, Angie. We just got

our ticket to the target."

Stolen vehicles were the order of the day, only natural for a stranded

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Hovertank unit. Bowie and Louie had heisted themselves a vanlike craft,

and techmaster Louie had quickly figured out how to drive it.

They cruised slowly, hoping to spot one of the others and to get their

bearings on either the control center or the tanks. Bowie, riding shotgun,

abruptly yelped, "Louie, pull over! Stop!"

"Hah? Whatsamatter? Whatsamatter?" But he did as the other asked.

Bowie leapt out and went running after Musica, who had been wandering

along as if in a daze.

Louie shrugged. "Why not? We got nothin' better to do."

At Musica's direction, the three drove to the weirdest place they had yet

seen in the mother ship. It was like some underground grotto or an ant's

orchard.

Glowing spheres, some of them fifty feet across, were growing there-at

least that was what it looked like. The spheres were held by a network of

vinelike growths, alien lianas four and five feet thick, which sprouted dense

crops of translucent hairs the width of hawsers.

The vines traveled up to the roof and down to the floor in clusters,

where they were rooted in the soil. There, smaller spheres sprouted on

single vines, with spores of the mature forms growing in the middle.

Bowie sat and Musica knelt, each looking off in the opposite direction

at the tree-broad base of one of the rootvines. Louie waited in the van, some

distance off.

"Everyone is looking for you," she was saying. "I was so afraid you'd

been hurt or captured."

"It almost happened. It still could, but now I don't care."

She turned to him. "Why do you say that?"

Without looking at her, he reached out to close his hand around her

pale, slender forearm. "Now that I've found you again, nothing else matters

to me."

She said haltingly, "It's very strange to me, but I feel the same way. And

the odd yearning-that peculiar disquiet in me is no longer there when we

are together."

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"We belong together."

"I would be happy to remain this way for the rest of time, Bowie."

He was about to reply in kind when a harsh voice cut through the peace.

"Do not move, Micronian! Stand slowly!"

Bowie found himself gaping at Karno and two others more or less just

like him, and the big dark muzzles of their guns.

104

CHAPTER TWELVE

When the Robotech Masters first appeared, Earth sent its only mecha

factory off on a far, SDF-style orbit. It went to Code Red and manned battle

stations. It issued heartening war bulletins.

No wonder the situation got so crazy. Southern Cross had forgotten the

lessons of terrestrial wars, and nobody had warned us that we might see the

enemy as Human beings.

Louie Nichols,

Tripping the Light Fantastic

"Musica, move away from the alien at once," commanded Darsis. More

guards with their guns leveled appeared from among the massive vines.

"He is an enemy of our people," Karno stated. But Musica defied him,

moving to stand between Bowie and the Guards, arms spread.

"You mustn't hurt him, Karno! I forbid it! He's done you no harm!"

She forbids? The insanity of it boggled Karno's brain.

Darsis frowned. "Anyone shielding an enemy of the state will be

punished! Now, stand aside, Musica!"

The Guards were in a quandary, though; Musica was far too vital to the

Robotech Masters and their hold over the population of the ships to simply

shoot, and she knew it. It was a situation the Guards had never encountered

before.

They were saved from the inconvenience of thinking by the revving of a

van engine. Louie came hot-tailing at the Guards, yelling for Bowie to make

a break. Karno and his men got a few rounds into the van, but then had no

choice but to hit the dirt or scatter.

They were up again right away, firing into the vehicle's stern, and it

arced toward the ground leaking smoke into the distance. Louie managed to

get out of the van and saw the Guards racing after him. He turned to go, but

realized there was a beeping in his pocket.

He pulled forth one of his gadgets, studied it, smiled broadly, and raced

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off to make his escape.

Bowie, going for cover in the midst of a tangle of the colossal vine-roots,

skidded to a stop. More guards emerged from it, hemming him in against

those pursuing him.

Louie shook off his hunters and followed his gadget; it didn't take very

long to find what he had detected. Some sixth sense comprehension of

systemry and Robotechnology led him to a vaulted compartment in what

had to be the center of the flagship. To his amazement, it was unguarded.

What he found there left him speechless.

In the center of the vastness was a device the size of an upright

shuttlecraft. Top and bottom wire sawtoothed halves, as if a cylinder of taffy

had been sawn apart and stretched. What hung between them was-

Whaaa-at? Louie asked himself, dumbfounded. It looked like a single

braided mass of fibrous tissue, red, black, pink, and yellow like some

textbook illustration of a muscle. But pieces hung from it, curled and kinked

in the way of sprung wires peeling from a cable, or fibers of steel wool.

The whole circular chamber was lined with instruments stretching up

and up out of sight. The central device itself was orbited by slow-moving

amoeboid shapes of pure bluewhite light.

What an amazing creation! The flagship's control nexus.

Louie still had the alien energy-burpgun he and Bowie had managed to

steal. He worked it as if he had been using one all his life, preparing to

empty it in one blast, without regard to his own survival.

Destroy-this, and the Robotech Masters are finished. And there wasn't

even anybody around to put him in for a posthumous medal, oh well...

He decided to start high and blast a vertical cut in the thing. No sooner

had he opened fire than jagged lightning broke from one of the amoeboid

shapes. The weapon was sudden giving out heavy voltage. He managed to

let go before his heart was stopped, and it was levitated away high into the

air.

From the central tissue mass, a hundred ghostly ribbons of force, or

106

ectoplasmic lariats, were dropped. They wound around Louie and squeezed

his breath from him, sending an awful surge of energy through his body. He

was lit up like a Christmas tree ornament. One of the less fortunate

martyred saints.

Word went out that the Living Protoculture had captured its assailant.

The search for the other raiders intensified.

Dana didn't want to hear or see any more.

Latell had taken her past too many glassy spheres filled with bubbling

fluid. In them, naked, wired-up clones wearing helmets floated, dead to the

world. One of these clones was supposed to be the actual Latell the

Stonecutter, or perhaps the embodiment of the triumvirate of Stonecutters,

but then who was this talking to her?

This time, the guards who showed up didn't do much talking. The

doors parted and three charged in shooting. The first few rounds shattered

the container of Latell's "original body." The Latell she had been talking to

gave a grievous moan as she pulled him behind the other containers and

apparatus for cover.

The clone-fetus, slick with fluids, looked at Dana. Then its eyes rolled

up into its head and it expired there among the shards of its container.

Something in her snapped, and several objects on which she could vent

her rage were right close to hand. The guards weren't really much as

soldiers; apparently all they had ever had to do was keep docile slaves in

line and now and then round up some extraordinarily aberrant one.

Invaders were all but unknown, and the upshot was that the guards' combat

skills weren't nearly so well-honed as Dana's.

She came flying at them from behind a pillar of support equipment,

shrieking a ki-yi that froze them. She took out the first with the sword edge

of her right foot, and that only fed her hatred. The second, too close to get

clear, tried to swing the butt-plate of his weapon into her face. She ducked,

and then broke his neck.

She bent down to pick up the weapon he had dropped, but the third

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had fallen back against the hatch to spray energy bolts in her direction,

forcing her to throw herself back. Latell managed to find her among the

disintegrating containers and sputtering power lines, and together they

crawled off through a side hatch as still more guards appeared and

converged on them.

The guards cornered them in the next compartment, a sort of nursery

for infants. Why would the Masters need infants, it occurred to her, when

they can grow clones to adulthood in vitro?

Latell palmed a tiny device to her. "This is a maintenance sensor; it will

lead you to the control center. Destroy the center!"

Latell tried to push her to cover, tried to block the way. He was a

dysfunctioning slave of no importance; the guards shot him down.

There was no place to run away. Dana cradled his head in her lap. He

achieved a thin smile. "Please do not feel badly, Sister. You are Freedom,

and my life was not worth the living."

And so the clone Latell the Stonecutter died.

The firefight in the power-relay area was one of the more interesting

fights of Angelo Dante's life, although it did threaten to fix things so he

would never collect any of his retirement pay.

Still, he and Sean had good cover. They had taken out a lot of guards

already, and there was still some chance they could get free. Angelo stood

and sprayed shots at the enemy. If the ATACs were pinned down, so were

the guards, who had learned better than to try to rush the Human

marksmen across the yards of open space.

Then the sergeant realized that Sean wasn't firing. He was about to

holler something suitably crude and insulting when he felt a tug at the

sleeve of his stolen guard uniform.

Angelo whirled to see ten, eleven, perhaps a dozen of the runabouts in

an arc behind him, all crowded with guards and officers who had drawn a

bead on him and Sean.

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"Don't think I'll forget your face, slimeball, 'cause I won't!" Angelo

growled as the guard thrust him headlong onto the detention cell floor. Sean,

who had been more resigned and reasonable, disembarked from the

elevator with his hands behind his neck. The elevator doors closed.

Dana, sitting on a sleeping shelf with her knees drawn up, simply

looked at the two new arrivals. Louie didn't even look. Bowie knelt by

Angelo's side. "You okay, Sarge?"

Angelo nodded, springing up and shrugging Bowie off, stretching and

flexing his ample muscles. "Yeah. Gang's all here, huh?"

Dana grunted. They were all there, stripped of weapons and disguises,

dressed in their ATAC uniforms.

"And we failed our mission," Angelo went on, as bitter at himself as at

any of them or at fate. "We lost!"

Now Dana did look up, to fix him with her stare.

"Only round one," she said.

Gazing down on the captive specimens through their Protoculture cap,

the Robotech Masters were taken aback, in spite of the information and

insights they had gained through Zor Prime.

"Most interesting," Shaizan said. "They show no fear of their captivity,

only anger that they have failed, and an illogical unwillingness to face

reality."

There was an unspoken consensus among them: there were terrible,

unsuspected powers in the one-mindedness and emotions of the

Micronians.

Powers upon which a universe could turn.

It didn't take long, in a little bowl-shaped, inescapable confinement

some fifteen feet across at floor level, for the ATACs to get on each other's

nerves.

A crack from Angelo about Zor's spying. A hurt objection from Dana

that she had no way of knowing. A blithe comment from Sean that love was

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blind, followed by Dana kicking Sean's feet out from under him, then both

of them ready to twist each other's bones loose, and the others diving in to

break it up.

"Fascinating. The Earthlings have a pronounced tendency to turn upon

one another in confinement," Shaizan remarked.

Dag said, "They are too primitive to comprehend that what we are

doing will ensure their survival as well as our own." It did not need to be

added, of course, that that survival would be as a slave species. The Masters

considered their slaves greatly honored, Chosen.

"If the Invid obtain the Protoculture Matrix before we do," Bowkaz put

to words what they all knew, "it will in all likelihood mean the eradication of

the entire Human species."

"The last part of that statement is not an entirely unpleasant prospect,"

was Shaizan's rejoinder.

"As to the prisoners," Dag went on, "my suggestion is that the five of

them should be reprocessed as new biogenetic material for our cloning vats

straight away."

"No-all but the female," Dag corrected. "According to our

measurements, her intellect and biogenetic traits are extremely contrary to

Human norms. Dissection and analysis are in order."

"I say it might be more efficient and safe simply to destroy them all,"

Bowkaz said.

Jeddar, group leader of the Clonemasters-whose triumvirate floated

nearby on its cap-took the extraordinary step of interjecting a comment.

"Excuse me, my Masters, but we propose that you delay these actions until

we've reprogrammed Zor Prime's memory, restoring full awareness to him."

Tinsta, the female of their triad, continued, "His experience on Earth

has increased his bio-energy index above that of any other clone, even far

above precious Zor clones."

"We believe it has something to do with his prolonged exposure to

Human emotions. We think that these emotions maximize certain aspects

of clone performance. But we cannot be certain until further-eh?"

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A message was being broadcast over the ship's annunciator system.

"Attention, all sectors. This is Clone Control. Quadrant four reports that Zor

Prime is missing. Repeat, Zor Prime has left his assigned sector. All guard

units begin search pattern sigma. Security leaders contact Clone Control at

once."

Musica's attempts to drown her grief in her songs were unsuccessful.

Even the accompaniment of her sisters on spinet and lute couldn't lift her

spirits or erase the image of Bowie from her mind's eye.

At last she hit a dissonant note and turned to them. "I am sorry, sisters,

but there come upon me now times when I wish we weren't always

together-the Three-Who-Act-as-One. I find myself wondering what it was

like before the time of the triumvirates, when each individual was able to act

independently."

Allegra and Octavia showed their revulsion, crying out at her to be still,

but she went on. "A time when we were capable of feeling pleasure, pain,

happiness, even loneliness! I wonder what it is like to love."

She bent over her Cosmic Harp, face buried in her hands.

The words of three guards, making a sweep through the chamber,

brought her up sharply. In answer to Allegra's question, they explained

about the escape of Zor Prime and their search.

I know what I must do now, Musica realized.

Zor Prime wandered aimlessly through the various districts of the

flagship's residential sector. He hadn't evaded the search by any conscious

effort; he was too disoriented for that.

The ancient stone buildings seemed to fade in and out, to be replaced

by scenes of Monument City, so that part of the time he thought dazedly

that he was back on Earth. The sun seemed too bright and hot, too intense,

overhead. Often he saw Dana coming toward him, beckoning, laughing, so

desirable...

A patrolling guard runabout failed to spot him because a veiled figure

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pulled him back into the darkness of an alley. Zor shook off his trance and

saw Musica lower her veil and look up at him hopefully.

So many half images and confused memories assailed him that he lost

balance and fell to his hands and knees on the gleaming terrazzo flooring.

"Why is my mind so full of nightmares?"

"You are the clone of the original Zor," she said. "In a way, it might be

said that you are the only true Robotech Master."

With her help, he found the strength to rise again. But just then a

bright ray struck him from behind, and he fell once more. Standing behind

him were guards, and the Clonemasters, on an antigrav platform.

"It was only a low-gain destabilizer," Jeddar told Musica. "We need the

clone for a little while longer."

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CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Dear Mom & Dad,

Everything here remains quiet, as always, and I don't know why you

two keep insisting there's bad war news. Take it from me. As I wrote you

before, I'm in a rear-echelon unit that hardly ever sees any action at all. So I

hope you'll excuse me for asking you both to kindly quit worrying. Especially

with Pop in the condition he is in.

I'm sorry I missed Christmas. There's always next year, after all. I think

I might be able to pull a furlough soon, with things being so dull around here

and all.

Thanks for the fruitcake; it was great.

Love,

Your son,

Angelo Dante

The order of the day was execution, and the clones with the rifles

weren't listening to any ATAC objections about the Geneva Convention.

Dana and her squadmates had no room to try anything in the cell; they

marched out with hands behind their heads, as per instructions.

Surrounded by guards, the troopers were marched through the

detention center and into a side corridor. Without warning, the clones'

exacting schedule was interrupted.

A driverless runabout with its engine shrilling came zooming at the

lead guards. The triad was knocked high in the air with bone-breaking force,

Dana just barely managing to pull back out of the way. In a shower of sparks

and metal fragments, the runabout overturned and shrieked to a stop

upside down. The first guards were crunched to the floor as the troopers

jumped the other three, who seemed paralyzed by what had happened.

It was a short fight, Sean ramming an elbow back into one rear guard's

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throat, Angelo crashing the heads of the other two together like cymbals.

Even as the 15th was rearming itself from the selection of weapons lying

around, Musica came running toward them. "Bowie!"

Louie was delighted to find that one of the guards was carrying the

pulse-grenade that he himself had been carrying when he'd been captured.

Okay, Living Protoculture; let's just go another round, what d'ya say?

In the Memory Management complex, Zor rested, strapped to a padded

slab, at an acute angle, nearly standing upright. He was still unconscious,

his head encased in a helmet like a metal medusa.

Technician clones were moving precisely, ensuring that no mistake

would be made. Zor's original memories, as servant to the Masters, Bioroid

warrior, battle lord of the fleet, must be restored to him and integrated with

the memories of his time among the Humans. Then the totality of his

memory would be comprehensible, and would be shifted to storage banks

for further study. The lump of tissue that was the last Zor clone could be

disposed of.

Jeddar watched the preparations with satisfaction. He would have been

less happy had he seen what was transpiring on an upper tier of the

chamber.

On a glass-walled observation deck, a big forearm locked around a

guard clone's throat, and the guard was silently removed from active duty.

Angelo resisted the temptation to dust off his palms.

Dana and the 15th looked down on the demons' workshop below. She

saw what they were doing to Zor and almost gave out a yelp, but Louie

shushed her, as he studied the instruments and machinery. He adjusted his

tech goggles to detect energies on very subtle levels and looked the lab over

like a sniper studying the landscape through a nightvision device.

"Screwy operation," Sean said wryly.

"But convenient," Louie countered. "See those gauges over there?

When they hit the top, Zor's memories will all be back in his brain."

Louie indicated a bank of three stacked rectangles. The first was filled,

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all glowing blue; the second was filling, as if it were a resplendent blue

thermostat marking a sudden, incredible heat wave.

The techs had to pry Zor's jaws apart and wedge a mouthpiece between

them as the indicators rose. As the third stack filled, he began to convulse.

Louie had to hold Dana back from hurling herself through the glassy pane of

the observation deck to intervene.

At last a tech clone pronounced, "Full reinstatement of memory is now

complete. Reintegration of memory will begin at once-" He was cut off by an

intense barrage from above. The tier window and much of the complex's

apparatus was shot to bits. Before anybody there could react, the ATACs

had dropped to the main floor and had the clones covered.

"Don't anybody move," Dana warned. They could see from her eyes

what would happen if they did.

Jeddar and his Clonemasters were more astonished than afraid. This

was, after all, their first close encounter with Humans. Behind the raiders

came Musica, and Karno was visibly shaken to see her, breathing her name.

In another second, Louie and Angelo freed Zor from his restraints and

cranial wiring. The big sergeant got the unconscious clone over his shoulder

with ease. As much as Angelo might have berated Zor, Dana noticed that

now he glared around furiously at the creatures who had tortured him.

The troopers were so busy making sure that no one on the scene made

any hostile moves that they missed the slight motion it took Jeddar to press

a button on his wristband. A moment later, a door snapped open and three

more guards leapt into the opening.

Everyone opened fire simultaneously, and those guards who were

already in the lab took the opportunity to spring for cover, as did the

Clonemasters, the ATACs, and Musica. The energy bolts crashed and

flashed; the air began heating up at once. Shots set off eruptions of power

from the complex's systemry.

"I believe you've gone mad, Musica!" Karno called to her over the din of

the firefight. "What have these monsters done to you to make you a traitor

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to your own kind?"

Musica, flustered, didn't know how to explain except to say, "Zor is

their friend; they're saving him!"

Then Bowie was towing her along. "We're getting out of here!"

Intense fire from the 15th had cleared the doorway; three guards lay

dead or dying there. With practiced calm and precision, the five troopers

fired as they moved. The remaining enemy had no choice but to keep their

heads down, only able to risk the occasional shot.

There was another runabout outside the complex; in a moment, the

escapees were roaring away, with Dana and Sean keeping up a high volume

of fire to make sure no one followed or tried for a parting shot.

Released from the grip of the mind apparatus, Zor began to stir, then

came around. Dana was overjoyed and stopped shooting long enough to

gush about how happy she was, but Angelo, at the controls, growled,

"Secure that hearts-and-flowers crap! We've still gotta find ourselves a way

outta this joint, remember?"

At that moment three red Bioroids appeared, skimming along close to

the ceiling of the high central passageway in which the runabout was

traveling. Angelo managed to dodge their first bolts, nearly smearing the

vehicle along the nearby wall, then made a desperate turn into a side way,

losing the enemy mecha for the moment.

"We've got to get back to the Hovertanks!" Dana yelled over the wind of

their passage.

"I'm workin' on it, ma'am."

She consulted the tiny sensor Latell had given her. "Take that next

right!" Perhaps they could retrace their steps from the control center, which

Musica had pointed out along the way.

They slewed and hairpin-turned and blasted along, coming around a

corner only to run head-on into another triad of guards. Disinclined to stop,

Angelo gritted his teeth and slammed into them, hurling two to either side,

slamming the middle one to the floor.

But the impact made the runabout defy its controls. It hit a stanchion,

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bounced back the other way while Angelo fired retros desperately, then hit

the floor surface and slowly upended. Its occupants were spilled out and it

came to a final rest with a clang and crunch.

Dana shook her head, looking up. Directly before her was an open

hatchway, and beyond-"Look! It's the central control area!" The housing in

which the Living Protoculture was situated was closed, protecting it.

For the moment.

They heard Hovercraft approaching and scattered to find concealment

in the center. In another few seconds, the three reds settled in for a landing,

dismounting and scanning the area.

Seeing the Bioroids sparked something in Zor's still-disorganized

memory. He turned to Musica, who crouched with him under a huge

conduit. "Why did the Masters send me to Earth in the first place?" he

whispered. Somehow he knew that she, Mistress of the music that was part

of the Masters' power over their realm, could answer.

She looked at him with infinite sadness. "You were their eyes and ears.

You were sent to Earth as a spy," she mouthed the words more than

whispered them. "They planted a neuro-sensor in your brain. You weren't

even aware of what you were doing, Zor!"

The entire center, the entire ship, began thrumming with a peculiar

vibration, something that made their hair stand on end. The Bioroids

cocked their heads, registering it.

"It's a battle alert," Musica mouthed to the ATACs. "Your forces must

be attacking us!"

"Time to make our move," Dana said. "We take out this control center,

whatever it costs, understood? Otherwise Emerson won't have a chance."

With a little luck, Louie could figure out some way to put it out of

commission. But first the reds had to go.

The 15th troopers fanned out, firing at the Bioroids, dodging from

cover, heading for the Living Protoculture. They kept close to the systemry,

shooting from its protection. The enemy mecha seemed reluctant to fire,

enduring the minor consequences of the small arms fire rather than risk

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damaging the ship's core. One was angling for a clear shot at them; Louie

reluctantly used his pulse grenade on it, but only staggered it instead of

putting it out of the fight.

Only Zor and Musica remained behind, she stunned by what was

happening, he immobilized by surfacing memories. Then Zor found himself

remembering, remembering much. His gaze traveled to the 15th's

commanding officer.

Dana...

He knew what he had to do. He crept away to one side, getting clear of

the shooting.

At the same time, Musica was coming to a decision.

There isn't much time. The ship will be destroyed soon. I must get to

the barrier control!

She raced for the stairs that wound up around the housing that

protected the Protoculture. Bowie, seeing her go, yelled her name and

sprinted after.

Musica ran like a deer up the broad steps. But she was in the open, and

a Bioroid risked a shot as she neared the top. At the same moment, a bolt

from Angelo's weapon hit the red's discus gun; its discharge hit the housing

near Musica, missing her, but dazing her and damaging the housing.

In a moment, Bowie was at her side. "Bowie, the barrier! It must be

deactivated!"

He nodded, and sprang up the last few steps to the control panel she

had been trying to reach. The 15th was pitching at the reds with everything

they had, and the damage to the housing kept the reds from attempting

another shot at Musica or Bowie.

At her direction, he pushed a button, pulled down on the gleaming

lever that appeared in response to that. A worldshaking hooting rose above

the first alarms and even the firefight. "Hurry!" she called to him. "We must

go!"

The Bioroids were at a terrible disadvantage since it was forbidden by

the unseen Masters to fire any shot that might endanger the ship's systemry.

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The ATACs had been quick to exploit this fact; five rifles were a lot of

firepower if the users knew where to aim, and the troopers had had plenty

of practice at hitting faceplates.

As Bowie helped Musica down from the steps, the last Bioroid tottered

backward and came to rest leaning against the bulkhead. The fugitives raced

into the passageway, but another trio of reds dropped from nowhere,

blocking their way. The rifles were all but exhausted, and there was no

hiding behind systemry now. The leader took dead aim with its discus

handgun...

The gun and the arm blew apart in an eruption that almost knocked

them flat on their backs. Jetting down the passageway behind them came a

well-remembered red on its Hovercraft.

"Go get 'em, Zor!" Dana cheered.

Zor was still the greatest battle lord in the enemy fleet. He dodged the

other reds' blasts deftly, firing with great accuracy all the while. He leapt his

mecha from the Hovercraft, and let the saucer-platform crash into them,

destroying his opponents in a collision that half-deafened the fugitives.

Zor's Bioroid landed with a deck-shaking impact. "Dana, you and the

others go ahead; the Hovertanks are that way, through there. I'll stay here

and delay any further pursuit." His voice was the voice of the Zor they had

served with, not the eerie, indrawn-breath voice of the Masters' slave.

"Huh!" Angelo said, with something like approval.

"We'll be waiting for you," Dana said somberly.

There was no other option; the escapees dashed on. Zor turned to wait

patiently. It didn't take long; three groups of Triumviroids raced into view

on Hovercraft. Zor took aim and began firing.

Astoundingly, the tanks were just as the 15th had left them.

"But what good'll they do us?" Angelo asked, as the squad fired up their

mecha. "There's no way we can reach Emerson on just tank thrusters!"

"Don't you think I know that?" Dana snapped. With their mecha in

tank mode, the 15th followed her as she tried to retrace the route she had

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taken on her first evasive dash with Bowie and Louie.

At last she found what she was searching for, a sort of cul-de-sac

compartment piled high with salvaged components and disabled equipment.

It was obvious that a lot of repair work was done there as well.

The tanks stopped, cannon trained on the only hatchway. The troopers

rose to stand in their cockpit-turrets. Dana pointed to a rank of Hovercraft

that had seen better days.

"Louie, you've got to find us the five best out of those, and make sure

they'll get us to Emerson."

Easy for you to say! he thought. Was she crazy, or just ignorant?

"Lieutenant, I-"

"I don't want to hear it! I'm not talking about winning a Formula X race;

we'll only need them for a few minutes. If we're not back with the fleet by

that time, it won't make any difference."

Aboard his flagship, Emerson had long since reached the conclusion

his subordinates were warily expressing. The Earth forces were going at the

Masters with hammer and tongs once more, but couldn't take the beating

they were getting for much longer.

There was no sign of the 15th and no radio contact. Emerson ordered

that the fleet prepare to withdraw, that the A-JACs prepare to return to

their transports. When Lieutenant Crystal objected, he dressed her down

brusquely, and reiterated his orders.

But the whole time, he thought, Bowie. Dana. And he knew the other

names as well.

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CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Bowie, life in danger with you is so much more than Life without you

would be even if death strikes its chord.

Musica,

"End of the Old Songs"

While Louie did his wizard-of-Robotech number, Dana and the others,

with Musica's help, discovered the controls that opened the shaft overhead.

The ATACs redonned their armor, and Bowie made sure his canopy was

tight; Musica had no other protection.

In Battloid mode, the 15th boarded the Hovercraft. Dana's Valkyrie

reached out a huge finger to flick a Bioroidscale switch. The shaft hatch

opened, triggering the closing of emergency doors in the passageway

leading to the cul-de-sac. The 15th rose amid a storm of junk and debris

hurled upward by the escaping atmosphere.

It was the first and last time such an unlikely combination of

Robotechnology took place. Weaving through volleys from their own forces,

the ATACs started their survival run. There was still no sign of the red

Bioroid, and it was too late to turn back.

Unstoppable, unbeatable, Zor not only sent his opponents reeling back,

but actually fought his way forward towards the control center.

Knowing all the Triumviroids' weaknesses, he was also their superior in

experience and speed and adaptability, master of virtuoso tactics they had

never even had time to learn. He had left a trail of death and destruction

through the flagship's passageways.

Now Zor stood before the Living Protoculture, which still hid within its

armored cylinder. He knew, though, that it was too weak to defend itself,

depleted and wounded by the battle raging through the ship. He felt that it

sensed its impending destruction.

I betrayed my friends. Just as it happened so long ago, with the Invid!

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Am I damned, doomed to live this agony over and over? The red Bioroid

raised its discus weapon and aimed at the cylinder. Fire and smoke rose

around it.

And now my only way to redeem myself is by betraying my people.

Everything I touch turns to ashes. So be it.

Dana, good-bye!

He triggered the weapon just as the cylinder slid open, and the Living

Protoculture lashed out in a last desperate effort to save itself.

The explosion was bigger than anything ever seen from a mother ship

before; an entire section of the stupendous vessel was simply vaporized, its

edges pushed outward as the Main Control section detonated.

"You stupid alien," Dana said in a small voice, looking back at it. "You

said you'd catch up."

"I'm truly sorry, Dana," Angelo fumbled, not used to soft words. "I-I

know you were fond of him. And he liked you a lot, I could tell."

Sean was already in contact with Emerson's fleet. The 15th hadn't

beaten the clock by much; they just about had enough time and fuel to catch

the withdrawing strikeforce.

Louie also watched the explosion. He adjusted his tech goggles, trying

to see what information they might offer. He did a slight double take,

changed magnification and spectrum bands, and looked again. "Lieutenant?

I think you better check this out."

It was beginning to be visible to the naked eye against the glare of the

explosion so close behind it-a form resolving itself into a red Bioroid on a

Hovercraft.

"It's him!" Dana's heart had never been so full. At first it looked as if

Zor was helping along a wounded red, but then they saw that he had his

Battloid clasped to him.

"Whaddaya know," Angelo drawled. "He even brought along a change

of clothes."

Zor, racing to overtake them, wondered about the ways of fate, and the

122

Shapings of the Protoculture. The last effort of the living mass that served

the Masters had only contained the inevitable explosion for scant

seconds-enough time for him to retrieve his tank and find a Hovercraft and

flee.

But he was still an alien in a strange land. He wondered if what waited

ahead would be any better than what he left behind.

The Masters knew their flagship was doomed.

Invader assault ships, forward command ships, and the other smaller

craft that were berthed in the Masters' flagship took aboard as many clones

as they could in the little time they had left. But because the Masters were

impatient to get to safety and unwilling to risk themselves or their

possessions for the sake of unstable clones, many were left behind. And so

they abandoned their faithful slaves.

In one evacuation ship, Allegra and Octavia clung to each other, Karno

staring out the viewport furiously as explosion after explosion rocked the

flagship.

Musica! the two sisters sent out the silent, plaintive cry.

In the cockpit of the Re-Tread, Musica gasped. But when Bowie asked

what was wrong, she just shook her head and said it was nothing.

"The whole thing's gonna blow!" he yelled excitedly.

She turned in time to see blue, concentric rings leap out from the

flapship. Then a star grew from it, hurling forth a gaseous cloud.

Farewell, my sisters, she thought, as the 15th got ready to link up with

Emerson's fleet.

While Emerson elected to withdraw to the ALUCE base with the main

body of his command, damaged vessels and as many of the casualties as

possible made a run for Earth. One such vessel was the one that happened

to have picked up Dana and her companions.

In the tremendous confusion, it wasn't hard to smuggle Musica to a

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place of temporary safety, but that left the problem of Fokker Base, and

debarkation. Fortunately, the rest of the 15th, having been separated from

them, were on another ship, bound for ALUCE base with Emerson's main

force, leaving fewer to keep the secret. Surprisingly, Angelo was loudest

among those voices raised to protect the Mistress of the Cosmic Harp.

"We can't let the GMP get her! Remember what they did to Zor, all that

testing and probing and scanning, like he was some kinda animal?" It was

already a matter of barely spoken agreement that there would be no

mention to Southern Cross Command of Zor's temporary defection, at least

for the time being.

Dana was calmer. "Don't worry; anybody who messes with Musica is

going to have to mess with us first."

"Blast him!" Leonard bellowed in Southern Cross Army HQ. "I

question Emerson's commitment! I question his sanity!"

It was all for the benefit of UEG observers who were on the scene;

Leonard knew his words would reach Moran and the rest of the council

promptly. "The enemy fleet still has five fully operational mother ships, and

yet he withdraws!"

But Leonard was upset for another reason. Now he could no longer fall

back on Emerson's genius and leadership. There was no one to whom he

could delegate authority; the defense of Earth, the responsibility and the

culpability, fell squarely on him. He was unsure now; his attitude toward

Emerson's absence in the field was very different.

Zor had passed out just after being brought aboard the transport and

had suffered the injuries to justify it. Dana had no choice but to turn him

over to a med team and hope he would keep the secret of what had

happened in the flagship, as the 15th would keep it.

The ambulance with Zor in it had barely pulled away when Nova Satori

showed up. "Welcome back, Dana. What what did they say about Zor?"

They hadn't spoken to one another since Komodo's death. They felt

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uneasy in each other's company.

"He'll recover. Listen, Nova, I'm really busy right now, so if you don't

mind..."

That kind of evasiveness from the 15th's CO set off alarm bells in

Nova's head. Now what were these eight balls up to?

Musica held back panic, enclosed by armor that seemed ready to crush

her, fearful of what life among Humans might hold. Oddly enough, it wasn't

any of those, or the danger of exposure, that beset her the worst just then.

Instead, it was a comparatively little thing, the sickly-sweet, rubbery smell

of the ATAC helmet's breather mask; she was nauseous, not sure how long

she could control herself. The 15th, long since oblivious to the smell, had

forgotten how it sometimes affected boot trainees.

She did her best to be brave, but wasn't sure she was up to it.

"Looks like somebody else took a hit, too." Louie and Angelo, suit

helmets doffed, were carrying the stretcher themselves. As they passed

Nova, they both suddenly put on expressions more appropriate to a poker

game than a homecoming.

Nothing they could say could keep Nova from getting to the stretcher,

throwing back the blanket. Dana sighed, and took off the reclining trooper's

helmet when Nova threatened to do it herself.

Sean Phillips smiled up at her. "Shrapnel, right in the big toe, can ya

believe it? But I still qualify for a medal and recuperative leave, and it does

smart, and-"

Nova upended the stretcher and walked away. Dana was yelling at the

few 15th troopers around her-her core group to get busy and off-load the

Hovertanks, and she even gave Sean a swift kick. Then she barked at

another, "You, too! Hurry along there, Private Doppler! Double time!"

Then they had disappeared back into the transport. Nova stalked away

angrily, but stopped suddenly. "'Doppler'?"

Minutes later, GI personnel staff was confirming that the only Private

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Doppler was a 15th trooper who had died during the assault that had

temporarily brought down the mother ship, weeks before.

Who could Dana be hiding, if that's what she's doing? The only

possibility seemed too farfetched. Even Dana wouldn't be that crazy.

"Here: Lemme take a look at you." Dana felt only mild jealousy that

Musica looked better in one of her outfits than Dana herself.

Musica turned 180 degrees self-consciously. Her green hair would fit in

with current Earth fads; caught back as it was in a heavy clip, nearly

reaching her waist, it was gorgeous. "But-these garments expose my legs."

"With legs like yours, Musica, I wouldn't let it bother you. See for

yourself, in the mirror."

Musica did, pulling at the puffy sleeves of the pink blouse, the hem of

the full skirt. "Why is it whenever I wear something like that it makes me

look about ten years old?" Dana wondered aloud.

They decided to let Bowie enter at last and cast his vote. It took him a

while to find words, and when he did all he could say was, "I'll write a song

about it." Musica's face shone.

Angelo called from the hospital to tell them Zor was being released.

The rest of the 15th was in one of the ships that had gone to ALUCE with

Emerson, and had been seconded to the 10th ATAC squad, another

Hovertank unit.

Since the 15th was badly under strength, it wasn't on alert or standby;

Dana decided that a party was in order.

"Get Zor over to the Moon of Havana by eight, okay, Angie? We'll meet

you there."

It was good to be alive.

In the mother ship to which the Masters had withdrawn when their

own flagship was atomized, Allegra and Octavia were thrust into a detention

area.

They were still in shock. Muse clones simply weren't treated this way!

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But they saw that much had changed, and this wrath of the Masters

was only part of it.

Deprived of their instruments and, in Musica's absence, a vital part of

themselves, they trudged into the cheerless and impersonal holding area.

The clones confined there were dispirited and lethargic.

The two Muses huddled together in a corner, fearful of what might

come next. "It's all because of Musica," Allegra said bitterly. "She

abandoned us and betrayed her own people! They can't understand that her

sins aren't ours, so they've cast us away in here!"

"Allegra-"

But she cut Octavia off. "I feel-" Allegra made a vague, angry gesture, to

express the rage for which she had no word.

"Musica is our sister; we three are one," Octavia said soothingly. But

she was troubled. Didn't Allegra see that she was falling victim to the same

malady that had claimed Musica! Apparently, the sickness called "emotion"

had more than one symptom.

The party started with a toast to the ATACs who had been killed or

wounded in the battle. Then, one to the members of the 15th who had been

redeployed to ALUCE. After that, life, love, and happiness were the subjects.

The ATAC troopers had no urge to toast victory or rehash the battle-it was

time to forget the war for a while.

The manager gave the 15th a great table, a circular banquette. Soon

Bowie was at the Moon of Havana's piano. Musica sat, absorbed in his

playing. And the songs he played were new, like nothing she had ever heard

or thought of before! And he was making some of it up as he went along!

These Humans were truly astonishing.

Things were going fine until they realize Nova Satori was standing in

front of their table. Dana couldn't think of anything to do but invite her to

sit down.

Nova sat, and turned to Musica. "I don't believe we've met. I'm

Lieutenant Nova Satori of the GMP. You are...?"

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Musica looked nervously to Dana for rescue. "Friend of Bowie's," Dana

replied. "We haven't been able to get her to say 'boo' all night. Another

musician-plays the ukulele or something like that, I think he said."

Nova was about to press Musica some more, when Dana interjected,

"What d'you hear from Dennis, Nova?"

That shook Nova off the track. "I-he's part of the force that went to

ALUCE with General Emerson. He, he got in touch on a back-channel and

said he's all right."

Before Nova could go back to her interrogation, Bowie finished a

number and the crowd's uproar drowned her out. Bowie was forced to do an

encore. Musica floated on the sounds he made, but she couldn't help

thinking, If my sisters were here, we would play them music of great beauty,

too!

She was suddenly filled with emptiness. She hung her head, shaking it

so that the green hair swayed. "Oh, sisters, forgive me!" She said it low, so

the policewoman wouldn't hear.

"No, Musica," Zor, next to her, countered quietly. "Betrayal cannot be

forgiven. I am beyond forgiveness and so are you."

His memories were merging, surfacing, becoming available to his

conscious mind. He was becoming the original Zor, with all the regrets and

despair. He was thinking, too, of that awful final moment, when he

destroyed the flagship, and the deaths of uncounted defenseless clones-no,

people!

Angelo didn't interfere, for the moment. He saw how living among

Humans was both a joy and a torment to Musica, a lot like a kid's story he

remembered, The Little Mermaid. Funny how that just popped up; he

hadn't thought of it for decades.

Sean grabbed the shoulder of Zor's torso harness. "Hey, modulate,

there, trooper!" But Zor wrenched himself loose and strode from the

nightclub.

Musica, watching him go, began to slump into a faint. Sean and Louie

were quick to catch her. As tactical withdrawals went, dropping off Musica

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at her nonexistent apartment was a little thin, but it was all Dana could

come up with.

Nova watched the 15th leave, just barely having kept them from

sticking her with the check. Go ahead and play out your hand, Dana. You

haven't got much left.

129

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Hey Billy!

You said you owed me one, and if I needed a favor, just ask.

Okay.

Things are a little tight right now, and living on deuce private's pay is

tougher than I remembered. You and I know each other, so you'll forgive me

if I call the debt in.

Things've gotten strange here, but when was it otherwise? By the way:

that kid they gave my 15th squad to? She could've been worse.

Anyway, I'm gonna need some money and I'm gonna need some favors.

We've got the Plague of Love around here.

Your old pal,

Sean Phillips

Sneaking Musica back onto the base and the barracks compound

wasn't too hard. The ATACs were a little worried about Nova, but they

forgot about that when they saw Bowie and Musica embrace.

It's a good thing we've got some vacant quarters available,

Dana thought. She was thinking more and more these days of how well

Sean adjusted to losing his commission and hoped she could be as upbeat

once they busted her. Bowie and Musica's being together seemed, against all

expectation, like something that justified that risk.

Then a commotion off to one side had the rest realizing that Zor had

wandered off and Angelo had followed. "What d'ya mean, you shoulda

stayed on the mother ship?"

Zor was leaning against a tree, eyes to the grass, arms folded. He

answered in a low voice, "It was where I belonged."

"And you'd've been killed." Angelo's fists were on his hips. He didn't

look aside as the other ATACs and Musica came up.

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"That's exactly my point. Besides, then I'd merit a hero's funeral, isn't

that right? A golden opportunity for you to display those precious emotions

of yours-weeping for the fallen comrade, and all that."

Angelo felt betrayed. He had doubted Zor from the beginning, had seen

him turn traitor-then come back to his senses and fly right again. He had

carried Zor over his own shoulder, saved Zor as Zor had saved him.

Zor was one of the 15th, and it wasn't something Angelo granted lightly.

And now Zor was spurning that, making a fool of the sergeant.

But worse, infinitely worse, Zor was saying that Angelo liked grieving

for dead buddies, got some kind of sick charge out of the most wrenching

pain the sergeant knew. It insulted Angelo and, more, made a sham of the

deaths of brave men and women.

One minute a red tide was rising up Angelos neck and face; the next,

Zor was flat on the ground with a split lip.

Dana knew words weren't going to do much good, so she got in Angelos

way and threw a straight right to the sergeant's sternum. It was like

punching a bus tire, but it halted him-more through shock than pain.

"Get up. You ain't hurt. Yet," Angelo told Zor.

Zor rose, rubbing his jaw. "So I'm to be happy that I'm alive to go out

and kill or be killed again tomorrow?"

Dana pushed Angelo away when he would have gone at Zor again.

"Back off! That's an order!" She could hear Musica running off, sobbing,

and Bowie going after her, but Dana had no time for that lesser crisis at the

moment.

She turned to Zor. "You think it's going to make you feel better to get us

to hate you? It won't! Quit punishing yourself and quit trying to get Angie to

do it for you! Whatever's in your past is over with! And besides, you had no

control over what you did; we all know that. Zor, it's time to let all of that go,

and begin again."

He looked down at her as if seeing her for the first time: just an

uncivilized Micronian, scarcely more than a wild animal by the standards of

the Robotech Masters. Where was she finding these words? What were the

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sources of this wisdom?

But his inner torment gave him the strength to resist her. "Begin what?

Dana, it will always be the same! This incarnation, like all the others. That is

my punishment! I can't even trust my own mind and I'm tired. I'm so tired

of it all!"

He didn't even know why he had escaped the flagship's destruction at

the last moment; some survival reflex had taken over. He had begun

regretting it at once.

He brushed past them. When Angelo snarled some objection, he shot

back, "Just leave me alone! It's my problem, and I'll deal with it."

"Bowie, I'm so sorry. I feel that this is all my fault." Musica said, tears

rolling down her face.

"Sorry that we survived, Musica? Sorry that you and I are together?"

"Oh, no! But-why am I so unhappy? Why is there pain all around us?"

"Because our people are at war. But we can't let that keep us from

loving each other!"

He took her in his arms. She was slightly taller, laying her head on his

shoulder. "You and I will be different," he told her. "We'll be an island of

peace in the middle of all this hatred and misery. We'll have each other."

"Her name is Musica. You'll find her at the barracks of the Fifteenth

ATAC squad."

Nova couldn't believe what she was hearing; she looked at the phone

handset as if it were an alien artifact. Around her, the bustle and buzz of

Global Military Police HQ seemed to fade. "You mean the girl I saw at the

Moon of Havana?"

"I suggest you apprehend her as soon as possible," the firm male voice

said, "before she manages to-"

"Just hold on. Who is this?"

"Can't you guess, Nova?"

"Zor? Listen, what's this all ab-"

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But he had hung up.

Dana, deciding it was time to make more concrete contingency plans,

was about to knock at the door of her own quarters when she stopped,

transfixed.

It was a sound so ethereal that at first she didn't recognize it as a

Human voice. Then she knew Musica was singing, and that the Muse herself

was an instrument as hypnotic and magnificent as the Cosmic Harp. The

notes soared, evoking emotions both familiar and unknown.

"come, let me show you

our common bond

it's the reason that we live

Flower, let me hold you

we depend upon

Power that you give..."

She sang of the galaxies, of the depths, of the long story of the eons,

and Dana found herself seeing stars swarm before her eyes. Musica's voice

moved her with powerful tidal forces of feeling, giving her Visions.

She sensed a great epoch unfolding, something about Zor and a

frightening but tragic alien race and-things just beyond the realm of her

perception.

"we should protect the seed

or we could all fade away

Flower of Life

Flower of Life

Flower..."

Outside, Zor turned to hear the siren song. Then he continued on his

way to await Nova.

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Dana saw worlds from other star systems. She saw wonders and

horrors. It seemed that the voice coming from the other side of the door had

split into three, harmonious and almost identical, flawlessly matched and

perfect.

She saw something from her own dreams and visions: a triad of

three-petaled flowers of a delicate coral color, drifting through the air,

trailing long stamens. The flowers themselves grew in a Triumvirate. One

drifted past, brushing her cheek. She looked down at it in amazement,

where it rested on the corridor floor.

The song faded; the Flower disappeared. Even as Dana blinked herself

back to full awareness, many of the things she had envisioned faded from

her memory, and she was left with vague shadows of recollection.

She lunged into her quarters. Bowie was still on the bed, Musica by the

window.

"What was that?" Dana burst out. "Musica, you sang something about

the Flower of Life, was that it?"

"Yes, Dana. That is right."

Dana turned to Bowie. "I'm sure that's the flower we found in the ruins

of the SDF-1! The day we sneaked in there, remember? Those plants that

moved by themselves?"

How could he forget? It was like some malign greenhouse, something

that didn't belong on Earth, that belonged on no sane world. "And you think

there's a connection?" He didn't sound excited about it, just alarmed.

"Could that be it, Musica?" Dana asked. "Could that be what the war is

all about?"

"The Robotech Masters have not given it to me to know that, Dana, but

for your sake, I hope there are no Flowers of Life here. They are often

accompanied by great evil."

Louie Nichols burst into the room. "Read it and weep! Nova's

downstairs with a bunch of GMP gorillas and she wants to see you, Dana."

"It'll be all right," Dana told the frightened Musica and the grim Bowie.

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"C'mon, Louie; let's go see what the Gimps want."

"Unauthorized person in the barracks?" Dana gave Nova her best

wide-eyed look. "What makes you think there's one around here?"

"Zor told me."

The odds looked bad. The GMP apes were armed, and outnumbered

the unarmed ATACs. Maybe there'll just be time for Angie to finish what he

started on Zor.

Zor, for his part, stood studying the floor, ready to accept their

loathing-anticipating it. Dana wondered if Zor's treachery was committed to

make it easier for him to end his own life or perhaps, commit some even

worse betrayal.

Dana turned back to Nova. "She saved our lives. When it comes right

down to it, Musica saved the whole fleet."

"Tell it to the brass."

"Sure, Nova, while they're busy sticking electrodes in her ears and

trying to light her up like an arcade game. Would it help to tell you she and

Bowie love each other?"

Dana knew it wouldn't-not now, with all the GMP goons standing

around as witnesses. But she wanted Nova to know just how much harm she

was doing, every bit of it.

"I always thought, as Gimps went, you were the exception to the rule,

Nova, but I see now: you fit in just fine! C'mon; let's go."

Dana turned to lead Nova and her squad upstairs. She had hoped she

could hide Musica until Rolf Emerson could get back from ALUCE and

intercede. All that was hopeless now. Maybe Dana could go outside the

chain of command, appeal directly to the UEG council? Her career was over

either way.

Zor was standing near the stairs. Dana gave him one brief, chilly glance.

"You had the chance to do something good and kind for a change. It might

have made up for a lot of the stuff that's torturing you so, did you ever think

of that?"

135

Zor put on a sardonic look, but what she had said went through him

like a dagger of ice.

Nova got her troops ready, and they went through the door of Dana's

quarters in a SWAT-style rush, guns ready. The balcony door was open, the

curtain wafting gently on the night breeze.

The Gimps searched the place just to be sure, but it was easy to see

their hearts weren't in it; they hardly even busted anything up.

Dana stood looking out at the night and wondered where Bowie and

Musica could possibly find refuge in such a world.

Bowie got them over a compound wall and across a road, yanking her

into the bushes out of the sudden glare of a GMP patrol's headlights. They

plunged deeper into the forest.

They ran through the darkness hand in hand; her feet were cut and

bruised, branches and rocks seemed to lie in wait for her. But she didn't

complain; Bowie had enough to worry about as it was.

Musica had lived her entire life in the confined structures of the

Robotech Masters and she fought back the agoraphobia that beset her now.

The darkness made that a little easier, but she wondered how she would

cope when the sun came up again.

An abrupt glare turned the whole world black and harsh white. A

sound like the end of the Universe, coming with a concussion that shook the

ground, made her lose balance again. She was sure that the GMP had used

some sort of ultimate Robotech weapon, that the final battle with the

Masters had come, or that the Earthlings were willing to wipe out an entire

region of their planet to make sure she was dead.

Bowie helped her up. "Just thunder and lightning," he j said.

"Harmless electric discharge." Unless it hits us, or a tree near us, he

amended to himself, but there was no point in worrying her. They ran on.

A winged creature of some sort gave a hateful caw and took to the air

on the next lightning strike. And then, astoundingly, droplets of

freezing-cold water were falling on Musica from out of the sky. She knew

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about condensation in a cerebral way, but this was her first experience with

it.

It seemed a planet that was infinitely cruel; it seemed she had followed

Bowie Grant into hell. But her hand was in his, and she recalled how bleak

and pointless life without him had been. She steeled herself and went on.

"Don't expect us to do your dirty work for you," Dana told Zor in the

unit ready-room, as the torrential rain struck the windows. "If you want to

be punished, go do it yourself."

She didn't know what to feel about him anymore. There was still,

somewhere, the love she felt for him, the yearning to stand by him and to

take away the pain. But he had shown that he was just too good at keeping

anyone from doing that. Dana wasn't quite ready to let him have the victory

of making her hate him, but she despaired, feeling that soon he would win.

"At least he remembered his duty, Lieutenant," Nova said as she

entered, shaking rainwater off her cloak. Her Gimps were still beating the

bushes for the two fugitives, but she knew it was in vain; this called for more

extreme measures.

Zor took advantage of the distraction to wander out, as Dana and Nova

faced off. Dana was mounting some good arguments on Musica's behalf, but

Nova cut through it with the news that the ATAC commanding general had

granted Nova temporary operational control of the 15th.

"At first light, you and your unit will begin search operations,

apprehend Grant and the alien, and place them under house arrest, is that

clear enough for you, Sterling? In the meantime, I will consult with the

Judge Advocate General's office with regard to court-martial proceedings

against you and your men."

Just when Musica had resigned herself to dying at Bowie's side in the

endless forest, lights appeared ahead-an outlying army equipment storage

facility. Bowie left her for, a moment, disappeared into the rain, and came

back mounted on a Hovercycle.

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He pulled her on, and they jetted off through the driving rain,

headlights coming alight behind them as jeeps took up a pursuit. It was a

mad chase over benighted roads that even the cycle's headlights couldn't

seem to light. Bowie's major advantage was that mud and slick road

conditions didn't matter much to a surface-effect vehicle.

But Musica was unused to riding and couldn't help him by leaning

correctly on the turns. They got a lead on the posse, staying ahead by one or

two bends in the road, but just about the time he was assuring her that he

was a past master at Hovercycle racing, he snagged a branch and almost

rammed a tree.

As it was, they slewed through a screen of bushes, and he laid the

sky-scooter down in a not-quite-controlled fall that sent them both

tumbling.

It turned out to be a blessing in disguise, because the pursuing jeeps

roared on by. Bowie crept over to where Musica lay and couldn't breathe

until he saw that she was all right.

He got her under the shelter of a tree, the lightning having stopped.

The rain was letting up a bit; he drew her to him, opening his jacket, trying

to warm her.

"Bowie..." She sounded so exhausted. "Lying here like this, I can feel

your heart beating against mine. It's such beautiful music; I wish we could

stay like this forever."

He felt such fear for her, such apprehension about the future, the pain

of the fall, and the cold and damp of the night. It astounded him how much

of that suffering and unhappiness she took away with a kiss.

"Zand, I haven't the time for-"

"Yes you have, Mr. Chairman." Zand didn't move out of Moran's way.

"I'll be brief."

Even with the flock of squawking flacks and bureaucrats trailing him,

waiting for the chance to get the ear of the chairman of the UEG, Moran

didn't brush Zand aside.

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He saw by the look in Zand's strange, liquid-black eyes that the

Robotech genius wouldn't stand for it. Moran made a casual-seeming

gesture of the hand; in seconds, his security people had the followers fended

back, and Moran, Zand, and Zand's aide were ushered into an empty

conference room.

Zand saw no reason for preamble. "There's word that an alien woman

has been smuggled back to Earth and that your people are looking for her so

that you can use her as a peace envoy. Don't do that, Mr. Chairman."

Chairman Moran-white-haired, white-mustached, kind old Uncle Pat,

as some commentators called him-frowned. "That's not for you to say."

Zand's vacuous-faced, unobtrusive aide had taken a seat off to one side.

Now Zand shot him a look. Russo leapt to his feet. Suddenly, instead of a

vacant-eyed hound, he was once more the senator, the kingmaker and

wheeler-dealer he had been back in the days of the old UEDC, despite the

persona that fooled younger people.

"'Lo, Patrick," he said. "You know what the boss, here, wants." It was as

if he were still wearing pinky rings, and carrying a long Havana cigar.

"Listen: You've gotta start following that party line, fella."

Zand concealed his own fascination with Russo's transformation. In

the wake of the terrible attack of Dolza, at the end of the war with the

Zentraedi (but before the attack of Khyron), Russo had simply been listed as

missing and presumed dead.

It was Zand's good luck to discover him, babbling and insane, in a

refugee center: the man who knew most of the secrets of the Earth's

government, and had leverage against so many rulers and would-be rulers.

Zand's Protoculture powers put Russo under his control with a mere pulse

of thought.

Russo was still talking in that back-room-boys voice. "Paddy! Patto!

We're not asking you not to make the offer, fella! We're just asking you man

to man, to hold off a while."

"We don't have a while-" Moran began.

"There's time," Russo said, a little more sternly. "Time for Doc Zand,

139

here, to get a better deal! But if you wanna play hardball, we can play

hardball."

Moran was looking at him, but not saying anything. Russo went on,

"Those fingerprints are probably still on file in the vaults down in Rio, Pat; I

think they survived the war. And what about that prosecutor? D'you think

his skeleton is still there?"

Zand silently congratulated himself am having salvaged what was left

of Russo's brain and the body it came in. The kingpin of prewar politics was

a henchman devoutly to be grateful for.

"How wouldja like the opposition party to force a confidence vote?"

Russo hinted darkly. Zand was pleased with the look on Moran's face.

"Not now. We could have peace, I think-"

Russo almost pounced at Moran. "You still can, Pat! We're not saying

you can't! We're just saying: Give us until tomorrow. is that so much to ask?

The peace you make could be better than anything you ever imagined! My

friend, if you want your place in the hist'ry books, this is the time to be

brave!" Russo subsided just the right amount. "But you gotta play along."

Moran was lost in thought for a second; his opposition would certainly

be able to call for a vote of confidence if Russo's secrets were made known.

Now, of all times! How did I get involved in such terrible things, Moran

wondered a little dazedly, trying to do good? "Very well, but only

twenty-four hours."

He touched a timer function on his watch; the twenty-four hours

began.

"You'll never regret it, Paddy," Russo said. Moran made a

noncommittal sound and moved for the door.

With his hand on the knob, he swung around to Zand, indicating Russo.

"Keep that thing away- from me, is that understood?"

Zand snapped his fingers, but more importantly, sent out a mental

signal. The thing that had been Senator Russo went blank-faced again and

sat down in the nearest chair.

Moran gave a fatigued, grudging nod, and went off to stick his finger,

140

his head, his body into the hole in the dike.

141

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Little Protoculture Leaf,

Waiting for our palates,

Where will you take us?

Flower of Life!

Treat us well!

Ancient song of the autotones of Optera

Hovertanks were not the sort of transportation appropriate to stalking

fugitives in the wilds, so the 15th took out two jeeps and got ready to go

afield.

There was something like a picnic air to it; any break from combat and

combat alert was to be enjoyed, and nobody really thought Dana was going

to hand Bowie and Musica over to the GMP, although no one was sure what

she would do. So they loaded up the jeeps with weapons, field gear, rations,

detection equipment, commo apparatus, and the rest.

At Louie Nichols's tentative inquiry as to whether or not she had any

idea where Bowie might go, Dana hedged. But she declared, "We play this

one by the book. Isn't that what we've always done?"

Well, no, it wasn't-her words didn't reassure them, but her sly wink did.

The ATACs were a lot happier-except for Angelo-as they set off, just as the

sun came above the horizon.

Above them, Zor watched their departure from the ready-room. At the

command of the SCA brass, he was ordered not to accompany the hunters.

He thought about the wording of the order, as the jeeps disappeared.

From her vantage point nearby, Nova Satori studied the route the 15th

was taking, and revved her Hovercycle.

Protoculture was accessible to the Masters only through the Matrices

and the power-supplying masses the Matrices produced. The germinal stage

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of the Flower of Life was contained in a balance something like that between

fusion and gravity in the core of a star.

But eventually, the urge of the Flower of Life to bloom overcame any

means of prevention ever devised, and that was happening now. Making

matters far worse was the disaster of the loss of the flagship and its

Protoculture mass.

The Robotech Masters' options had all been used up; they would have

to strike, all-out, at once, or lose the means to strike at all.

"And that is my decision, approved by the council," Supreme

Commander Leonard was saying. "We'll launch a final, no-quarter offensive

against the alien fleet commencing at thirteen hundred hours today."

All preparations had been made in secret. No one pointed out any of

the hundred strategic inadequacies in the plan; at Moon Base ALUCE,

Emerson heard the news through a direct commo link to the command

center, but made no comment.

"We will drive them from our skies forever or die trying," Leonard

finished.

Long, slanting rays of sunlight wakened Musica. She shivered a bit,

lying on Bowie's jacket with her own dew-covered one over her, but the day

was already becoming warm.

She heard a melodious sound and opened her eyes. On a large open

area of water nearby-a smallish lake, but much bigger than anything she

had ever seen before-an egret swept in low for a landing. Smaller birds

trilled to one another in a natural symphony that delighted and amazed her.

Bowie wasn't next to her. Rubbing her eyes drowsily, she looked

around for him and saw the tree under which they had taken shelter the

night before. A thrill ran through her as she remembered what had

happened between them then, the most beautiful music of all.

The clouds were all gone, making way for a clear blue sky; moisture

dripped from the leaves and the air was filled with the scent of renewal.

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How could I have thought this planet so awful? It's beautiful, it's magic-oh, I

have so much to learn!

Then she spied him and heard him. Bowie was working on the

Hovercycle with tools from its small kit. "Just about ready to go," he said

when she called out to him, then he stopped, taking a longer look at her.

"You're even more wonderful to look at in the morning than you are at

night."

"So are you, Bowie."

In another few minutes they were on the cycle and racing down the

road. Musica had never felt so free, so deliriously happy.

Bowie got his bearings, and turned his course for his objective. Soon,

the mound that was the burial cairn of SDF-1 came into sight.

Veritechs were launched from Fokker Base while A-JACs were trundled

into the transports for the assault. Hatches were run back from missile silos

as ground armored and artillery units deployed to defensive positions

against enemy counterattack.

"General Emerson, you are aware that the enemy is on the move with

his entire fleet, preparing to attack Earth?"

Emerson looked at Leonard's sweating face on the screen. "Yes, sir."

Was aware of it, had expected it, and had marshaled all the moon's forces to

try to help cope with it.

"You will move at once with all units under your command and engage

the enemy, blunting his attack and otherwise bringing your total force to

bear against him," Leonard ordered. "You will under no circumstances

break off contact or withdraw; you and your contingent are totally

committed, do I make myself clear?"

A death warrant wasn't too hard to read. "Yes, sir."

When Leonard signed off, Emerson turned to Colonel Green. "Find

Rochelle, please-oh, and Lieutenants Crystal and Brown-and meet me in my

office. Pass the word to stand ready; we'll be launching in ten minutes."

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Sean was at the wheel, Dana in the 90% seat, lost in thought.

Louie pulled up even with them so that Angelo could yell, "You can

stop worrying about what you wanna do with them when you find 'em!"

He was holding a pair of compu-binoculars and he jerked a thumb

toward the road behind. "We got a little tail with GMP plates on it.

Hovercycle."

"Nova!"

Sean didn't seem disturbed. "Want to lose her? Fasten your seatbelt,

ma'am." He tromped the accelerator, and Louie did the same.

At the base of the mound, Musica said, "Are you sure this is the right

one? The one where you saw the Flowers of Life?"

There were two others. Under one rested the SDF-2, and under the

other the remains of the battlecruiser of Khyron the Backstabber.

"This is the one, I'm certain," Bowie said. Somewhere deep within were

the remains of Admiral Henry Gloval, enlisted-rating techs Kim Young,

Sammie Porter, and Vanessa Leeds, and Bowie's aunt, Commander Claudia

Grant-five names that rang in Earth and Southern Cross history.

"Bowie, this place frightens me." The mound was a high, Human-made

butte scraped together from the surrounding countryside to cover the

radioactive remains of Earth's one-time defender. The short half-life

radiation was safer than it had been fifteen years before, but it still wasn't a

place in which to linger long. Still, they had to do what must be done.

"Trust me," he said, taking her hand again. They entered the

cave-tunnel he and Dana had found some weeks before.

A few yards in, they made their way over a rock and into an

underground corridor. It was a prefab walkway that had been dropped in

along with so many tons of rubble and building materials in the frantic

effort to seal up the radiation.

It took several reassurances from Bowie to make her believe the bats,

spiders, and other creatures rustling around her or scuttling overhead

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wouldn't hurt her.

The burial material that had been piled here so long ago had been

originally slated for installation in a new government building. Ageless,

round Buddha-like faces gazed out at the explorers from each pour-formed

block. Mushrooms, moss, and fungus were in abundance. Water seeped

from the ceiling and walls, to form brackish, vile-smelling pools.

Bowie felt his way along one wall, fingertips brushing through the

slime, as Musica clung to his elbow. In time, they spied a light ahead and

quickly went toward it.

It was an exit to the space in the center of the mound. Just as they were

about to go through, a gust of golden dust, fine as fog, hit them.

"Wha?" Bowie's head reeled and he went to one knee.

"Bowie! What's wrong?" She knelt next to him.

He shook his head, clearing it. "Just dizzy for a second."

"The Flowers! It must be the Flowers of Life!" She looked out at the

open space in the center of the mound. "Bowie, we've come too late!"

Something was strobing and gleaming up ahead; she ran toward it,

leaving it for him to catch up. He tottered through the doorway and stood

reeling as if he had taken a punch.

Above them glowed something that reminded him of a kid's diagram of

an atom-a complex assemblage of ring orbits that glistened in rainbow

colors. It was two hundred feet across, hanging unsupported near the

ceiling of the place; it seemed to be playing notes like a delicate carillon.

But he only had a moment to gape; Musica gave a woeful cry. "It's just

as I feared! We're too late!"

They were looking down into a vast circular pit like a transplanted rain

forest, in a shallow soup of nutrient fluids. There the Flowers of Life

flourished in their triads, some open to show their triple structure. Most of

the buds were still closed in shape like a twisted, elongated teardrop, a

shape that made Bowie think at once of the shape of the mother ships'

cannon. Among them, too, blew the golden pollen.

As they watched, more of the buds burst open, spewing forth the

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golden smoke. But sporangial structures in the Flowers also cast forth seeds

like miniature parasols, which drifted toward the ceiling, defying gravity

and air currents. It was like a gentle rain of glowing dandelion seeds in

reverse.

Bowie tried to remember his botany classes and make some sense of it.

The Flowers looked like some kind of angiosperm, producing the golden

pollen, and yet they cast forth spores, like gametophytes. He couldn't guess

what their alien life cycle might be like, or how it fit in with this

Protoculture business.

She pointed to the tiny, drifting parasols, which looked like seeds to

Bowie, but which she insisted on calling spores. "The Invid will sense this,

no matter where they are. They're probably on their way here even now."

"The Invid? Who're they?"

"The enemies of your people and mine!" That was true enough, though

it didn't tell the truth, but it was all that she had been taught.

There was a rustling and a series of shallow little sounds, as if

something alive was moving around somewhere in the mass of Flowers.

Bowie strained to see what it was, or hear it again, but could detect nothing.

Musica went down closer to the vast growing place, sandal heels

slapping. He followed, calling for her to be careful.

He had never been sure of exactly which part of the SDF-1 this open

space corresponded to-hangar deck, or Macross City compartment?-but he

was beginning to suspect he knew.

The plants were growing so thickly that their stems were compressed

into a mass that seemed to move and twist of its own volition. He looked up

and saw that, while the quickened spores drifted up seeking release through

a chimneylike opening at the top of the mound, something seemed to be

confining them to the cavern. Perhaps there was still hope.

He looked again to the shining, chiming energy rings, listening to their

song. There was something, something he seemed to remember...

He tried to get his bearings again, having been told since the time he

was a kid just how the SDF-1s last battle had been fought, how it had

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crashed, and in what mechamorphosis configuration. And then it hit him.

"I, I know where we are, Musica. This is the power section, where the

sealed Robotech engines were, the engines that not even Doctor Lang dared

to open."

He gripped her excitedly, pointed to the shining orbits. "This is the

Protoculture Matrix! The one that the Zentraedi came and attacked Earth to

get in the first place!"

The one that Lang and Exedore and Gloval and the others thought had

disappeared along with the spacefold equipment, after the catastrophic

jump to Pluto's orbit; the last Protoculture Matrix created by Zor. The only

one in existence.

He knew the history of that war better than almost anyone, because he

had seen copies of excerpts from his aunt's diary that were still circulated in

the family, even though the originals were classified. He knew that once, a

truce had been declared between SDF-1 inhabitants and Zentraedi, the ship

had been scoured for any sign of the Matrix, and none was found.

But he had already learned from Musica that the Protoculture had its

own Shapings, its own destinies to weave. Surely, hiding in the enormous

sealed engines and turning aside sensor emissions or fooling passive sensor

equipment would be a small marvel compared to the other things it had

done. And there, hanging above Bowie, singing to itself, was the collection

of interlocked rings that was the manifestation, on this plane of existence, of

the Protoculture Matrix.

And though he didn't realize it, he and Musica were being watched. The

triumvirate of wraiths that guarded the mounds was attentive to what was

transpiring, though the trooper and the Muse had no idea they were there.

The hour of the wraiths' long-awaited liberation was close at hand.

Bowie gripped Musica's shoulders. "This is the Protoculture Matrix!

We've found what they've been looking for, what they've been fighting over

for twenty years!"

She moved to put her arms around him, to lay her head against his

shoulder. "Yes, but we found it too late."

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"It can't be! We've got to think of something!"

"Oh, Bowie...if you had any idea what the Invid are like, how horrid

they are-"

Pebbles knocked loose from a ledge higher up in the cavern. Bowie

looked up to find that the 15th had followed him and, after getting lost,

somehow ended up there. "Dana, I'm warning you. We're not going back."

"We're not here to bring you back, numb-nub!" she grinned.

When his squadmates made their way down to him and he explained

what he had found out, Bowie had the dubious fun of watching them all

fish-mouth in shock. He was more than passingly interested in Dana's

response, though; this wasn't just some new kink in the war, to her-it was a

part of her heritage, a part of herself.

She breathed the golden clouds, looking out on the coral triads of the

Flowers of Life. She felt a strangeness-not a dizziness or faintness, but

something closer to the opposite: as if she were being galvanized on some

subcellular level.

Nova stole forward through the gloom, on the path the ATACs had

taken. She had her sidearm out and was alert to every sound; something

behind her made her turn.

Zor pushed the pistol barrel aside gently but firmly, as if he were

dealing with a child and a child's toy. His eyes glowed in the darkness. "You

won't be needing that. Come."

He set off for the light of the cavern. "You, you followed me?" she said.

"Yes. Now it is you who must follow me."

Musica and the 15th heard a groan and looked up to see Zor, muscles

tensed in agony, hands clenched in the long lavender hair, gazing madly at

the drifting spores. Next to him stood Nova Satori.

Nova managed to pull herself together a bit. "I'm here to take Musica

back to headquarters," she managed shakily, then cast another frightened

look at Zor.

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"No, you're not," Dana answered.

Nova plunged down the steps that connected her level with the one

below. But when she was halfway there, Zor, remaining where he was, let

out a tormented howl.

"This plant is responsible for my becoming the monster I am!" He

gasped for breath, staggered for balance there at the brink of the ledge.

He was only dimly aware of them all staring up at him. The scent of the

spores and the presence of the Matrix forced his memories to merge and

open themselves to him with the same compulsion that made the Flower of

Life blossom. He stared out into the resplendent rings of the Matrix, his

creation.

"I stole the secret of Protoculture from the Invid, and betrayed them. I

was betrayed in turn, and my contemporaries became the Robotech

Masters." He went down on all fours at the very lip of the drop.

"But I broke free of their will at last! I thwarted them! And they've

brought me back as a clone, again and again, hoping I would gibe them my

great secret. But they won't have it!"

"I don't know about that," Bowie yelled back in the echoing chamber,

"but this is all something the Invid want"-sweeping his hand at the Flowers

of Life-"and they're on their way!"

That seemed to jolt Zor back to a measure of reality. Nova continued

her descent of the steps. She couldn't understand how she had ever felt

drawn to Zor, felt such attraction to him; some alien trick perhaps? The

thought made her all the angrier.

"We can sort all of that out later. Musica is still my prisoner, and I'm

taking her back with me." Nova came to the bottom step.

Dana stepped to block her way. "Sorry, Nova. No."

150

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

And the mountains in reply

Echoing their joyous strain

Prewar Earth hymn

The Robotech Masters had deployed their assault ships and command

ships and lesser warcraft. Blue and red Bioroids were set to fight, mindlessly,

in a

Götterdämerung

.

Emerson's fleet was coming at flank speed, to hurl itself on the

invaders' rear. In an order that had his staff gulping, Emerson directed that

his Tristar flagship lead the attack. The equipment that had let him work his

singularity ploy was fused and useless; this battle would be toe-to-toe.

As Emerson's battle-weary elements threw themselves into a last,

almost spasmodic attack, the Masters' advance faltered. Virtually everything

in the Southern Cross capable of getting off the ground rose from Fokker

and a dozen other bases, braced for the Twilight of the Robotech Gods.

Marie Crystal and Dennis Brown led their A-JACs forth, and the

Triumviroids thronged to meet them. The Earth mecha did their best to use

the tactics that were successful against the invaders for the 15th.

Dreadnoughts lit the eternal night with cannon salvoes. Missiles left their

ribbontrails.

Nova ignored Zor's attempted intercession. "I'll expect you all to

remember your oaths of service," she said, sweeping her eyes across the

15th. She gave Bowie Grant a particularly fixing stare; he was the key to it all.

If she could get him to see past his deluded attraction to the clone woman,

the whole affair would be resolved peacefully. If not...

"I'm not part of the military anymore," Bowie said stubbornly,

squeezing Musica's hand.

"General Emerson is," Nova invoked the name. "And he's fighting with

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everything he's got to save this planet."

"I don't care!" Bowie burst out. "Musica's my friend-not my prisoner or

my enemy, and not yours either, do you hear me? Why can't you leave us

alone?"

Nova saw that all the ATACs quietly agreed-even the normally

duty-bound Dante.

"Is love so difficult for you to understand, Nova?" Dana asked angrily.

"Why d'you always have to be so coldblooded?"

The question rocked Nova a little, almost as if Dana had struck her. She

had felt like an outsider all her life, the more so when she had joined GMP.

The bewildering attraction she had felt for Zor, and then the sudden

absence of it; the slow warming to Dennis Brown; the pity she held for

Captain Komodo, because she knew how it felt to be rebuffed-those were

things she didn't dare inspect too closely.

She drew her sidearm, holding it close to her hip and leveling it at

them.

"It's my duty, that's why," she told Dana. "And for me, Earth comes

first. And the Human race. I'm taking Musica back, whether some of you get

hurt or not."

It was all too melodramatic, Dana thought, even as she got set to play

out her role. Bowie had stepped into the line of fire, shielding Musica, and

Musica was already making timid but determined insistence that he move

aside, to avoid bloodshed.

The rest of the 15th reacted to the appearance of the pistol with

predators' reflexes, shifting weight, edging this way and that slightly, barely

seeming to move their feet. They turned their bodies side-on to Nova to

minimize their target silhouettes, bracing to take her.

"What happened to all that talk back at GMP headquarters, Nova?"

Bowie challenged, holding Musica back. "Honor. Freedom. Defending

Human ideals and our way of life. You said you could be a friend to anyone

who valued those things."

"Well, this is my life." He put his arm around Musica's waist. "D'you

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really have it in you to be a friend?"

"I-" Nova had forgotten those talks, an attempt to win over a friend in

the enemy camp of the 15th. It had started out as a turning operation, at

Colonel Fredericks's direction. But it ended up with her actually feeling

something for the maverick trooper private, if only an unspoken sympathy

for his confusion, his alienation. And then he was also Claudia Grant's

nephew.

Nova had the flash of memory again, not clear but strong.

It was Christmas in rebuilt Macross City, the Christmas that would see

Khyron's sneak attack. Little Nova Satori was out with her older sister and

her sister's friends, caroling, as the snow drifted down. They happened upon

a tall, regal black lady, beautiful as a Snow Queen, who looked very sad.

But when she spoke to them, Nova's sister recognized the lady's voice,

as all the older girls did. Back on the SDF-1, hers had been the PA voice that

so often restored hope in the midst of war; told the people where to go and

what to do; gave the world calm; transmitted courage.

She was Commander Claudia Grant. The chorus of little girls gathered

close in a ring around her and sang, the best they ever sang. There was no

question about what carol it would be.

"An-gels we have heard on high! Sweetly singing o'er the plain!"

They all wanted to be Commander Grant; Commander Grant wanted

them to be more. She'd hugged them all to her and wept.

"-I'm a friend...." Nova managed, not sure what she was saying. Her

training and the pistol gave her command of the situation. She knew what

moves to make and procedures to follow, even what tone of voice she ought

to be using at this point to ensure that Phillips and the others didn't try any

of their absurd heroics.

She had singlehandedly managed situations against even greater odds,

against truly ruthless and evil people, and that last part was the glaring

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incongruity. She was disarmed of her greatest weapon: the conviction that

she was totally in the right. And all her other resources, powerful though

they were, began to fail her.

When Zor's big hand closed over the weapon and took it from her,

Nova barely registered it through the sudden numbness she felt. "You won't

need this," he said in an almost conversational tone. She could have had the

pistol back at once, by using an infighting trick; she didn't.

Nova shook herself loose of the paralysis, the realization that she

couldn't fire at these people, that her oath conflicted with the ideals it was

supposed to uphold.

She looked to Zor. "But-isn't she one of the clones? Zor, they did such

terrible things to you-"

Zor was shaking his head, the lavender curls swaying. "She is a Muse,

the very soul of harmony. She is vital to the Robotech Masters, however.

Look!"

Nova and the others followed Zor's pointing finger. They were watching

the great mass of the Flowers of Life, hearing the tonalities from the Matrix

that were so like the Muse's songs. "From the Protoculture all life flows.

Once the clones have been quickened, it is the playing of Musica and her

sisters that keeps them docile and obedient. That tells them, in effect, who

they are."

"And now, she's learning to play the songs of Humankind," Louie

Nichols said quietly, the words forming a core of argument there at the very

center of Nova's decision. There was too much happening for her to

consider the fact that it was an amazingly profound thing for such a

mechie-as she had always thought of him and his ilk-to put forth.

And if Fredericks and Leonard and the UEG got their hands on Musica?

They would pull her every which way like a wishbone-cruelty was one of

their first resorts. Musica embodied the hope of peace, but Nova dreaded to

think what her songs would sound like once she had been put into the

United Earth Government's mill.

"We have to move quickly," Nova said. "I commo'ed for a flying squad

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of GMP officers; it'll be here any time now."

"We've gotta get out of here!" Dana snapped. Emerson was in battle,

and there were few others she could trust. But the world was wide, much of

it unpopulated, and a Hovertank squad mounted plenty of firepower. They

would have to lay low, try to get to someone sane. Perhaps they would have

to contact the Robotech Masters as well, and force some kind of ceasefire.

Then a truce; then peace.

She threw aside her oath in that moment; the other party-the UEG and,

by extension, the Army of the Southern Cross-hadn't kept its end of the

bargain. She sensed that her ATACs stood with her, as did Nova and

Musica.

Peace renegades! It sounds so weird, she thought.

"Your officers won't make any moves without instructions from you,"

Zor, who knew from experience, reminded Nova. "We must move

calculatedly, but very quickly now."

He showed no emotion as Dana clapped her hands and began

organizing the escape, somehow drawing Nova into her little band as if the

GMP lieutenant had always been an ally. That instinctive talent for

commanding loyalty and cooperation must be something Dana had

inherited from both her warrior-woman Zentraedi mother and her

ace-of-aces Human father, Zor reflected in passing.

Suddenly there was that sound again, the one Bowie had heard before,

as if something was moving among the mass of Flowers. They all heard it, as

they heard a sudden, high, playful sound, like a cross between a small dog's

yip and the tones that came from the Matrix.

"Polly!"

Dana was on one knee, beckoning to him, and Bowie groaned. "I

should've known." Nova and the others stood trying to fathom their latest

marvel.

The little creature looked a low-slung white dog or mophead, some

kind of crypto-Lhasa apso with a sheepdog forelock, until one noticed the

knob-ended horns and feet something like untoasted muffins. He showed a

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miniature red swatch of tongue and yipped again, running to her.

"You know this thing?" Angelo demanded, scratching his head.

Bowie answered for Dana. "All her life. Her godfathers introduced her

to him. Only I never believed in Polly till now, never saw him. I, uh, always

thought he was imaginary."

Dana was nuzzling and laughing, hugging the little beast. A Pollinator,

her three unlikely, self-appointed godfathers, the former Zentraedi spies

Konda, Bron, and Rico had called him. Three-year-old Dana had given him

his shortened name right then and there.

She had quickly learned that Polly was a magical beast who came and

went as he willed; no walls or locks could hold him. He showed up very

rarely and went his way when he wished, simply vanishing while she was

looking the other way. In her whole life, she had seen him perhaps seven or

eight times. He never changed, or seemed to grow older.

"A Pollinator, yes," Zor said, looking down. "And now you know what

he pollinates." She's been tied to all this since she was a child-perhaps

before her birth. Dana, Dana: who are you?

Dana couldn't picture Polly buzzing around like a bee there in the

Flower mass, but obviously something had been at work. She let the little

creature lick her cheek again, then stood up with him in her arms, petting

him.

"What're you all staring at? Let's go!"

Zor looked to the Flowers of Life that would no doubt be detected by

the Invid. He still couldn't recall everything, but one thing, he knew.

The Masters' power must be broken. The original Zor was not

altogether responsible for what had happened once he beguiled the Invid

Regis. Perhaps I am not either, though I am him and he is me.

But it lies within my power to do what must be done. Let this be the

lifetime when at last I accomplish it!

The fighting raged around the five great surviving mother ships of the

Masters' fleet. The Humans were proving to be enemies even more terrible

156

than the teeming Invid.

But that was not the worst news. Optical relays showed an invader in

the realm of their Protoculture masses, a thing to be feared more than any

Invid or Battloid.

It was small and white, yipping and chasing its own bedraggled tail

among the storage canisters. A Pollinator.

The Masters knew better than to waste time attacking it. Try to stab the

wind; shoot a bullet at the sun.

The Masters accepted the devastating news with the same emotionless

reserve they had always displayed. To say it was stoicism would have been

inaccurate. It would have implied they had some other mode of behavior.

The dissipation of Protoculture made itself felt not only in the declining

performance of the Masters' Robotechnology, but in the failure of judgment,

dispiritedness, and lack of coordination of the clones themselves. Never had

the Masters' own-the primary-Protoculture cap been so weakened.

Even now, whole masses of Protoculture were transforming, all

through the fleet, into the Flowers of Life, just as was happening below.

Their unspoken conference was short. Shaizan gave the order.

"Transfer all functioning clones and all Protoculture reserves to Our

flagship. Set automatic controls on an appropriate number of combat

vessels to land them on the Earth's surface, and fuel them for a one-way

voyage. Process as many clones as is feasible to serve as mindblank assault

troops."

The Scientist bowed his head, swallowing his objection. The clones

were mere plasm, subject to the dictates of the Masters. Who dared declare

things otherwise?

Even if it meant genocide...

Allegra and Octavia had not so much adjusted to their reduced status

as gone into a sort of lasting shock that insulated them from it. Even though

they were Muses, Musica and her Cosmic Harp were the key to their triad's

power and effect. Without her they were all but useless to the Masters. Since

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being interned, they had seen the horror of reduced Protoculture and the

dissonance of Musica's absence all around; they had become desensitized to

it.

But a new flurry of activity roused them a little. The most ambulatory

of the malfunctioning clones were being injected by guards, shunted along

in a torpid line, at the end of which was a door. None who were passed

through that door returned.

Antipain serum, the words came quietly among the despondent

prisoners near them; Allegra looked to Octavia. They both knew what that

meant: clones who would be all but immune to normal sensation once the

drug took effect-who would be aggressive, terrible antagonists. Their minds

would be blanked to anything but fighting, until they were blasted apart or

until the drug burned up their physiology completely.

"Mindblanked assault troops," a voice said. Octavia turned to see who

it was, and gasped.

In the advance stages of Protoculture deprivation, the clone had

become a crone, witchlike, nodding out the last moments of her life.

She gazed, glassy-eyed, at the other clones being injected. "Sacrifices

on the altar of war. That is the Robotech way."

Resistance from the mother ships seemed to be failing, but Marie

Crystal kept herself from any hope or distraction, dodging through enemy

fire and preparing for another run. At Emerson's order, she began to

consolidate elements of the various shattered TASC units.

But we better get some help soon, she thought, or that's all he wrote.

"General, you have to commit all your reserves now," Emerson's image

said to Leonard.

The supreme commander kept his face neutral. "Current tactical trends

preclude that at this time."

So much easier than saying "screw you, " Emerson thought, as his

flagship shook to a Bioroid assault and the guns pounded.

158

"There'll be no other chance!" he roared at Leonard. "Move now, you

fool!"

Leonard's wattles shook with his anger. "You dare give me orders?

Carry out your mission!"

He had barely broken the connection, and was picturing Emerson's

imprisonment for insubordination under fire, when an aide leaned close to

say, "Enemy assault ship descending for landing, sir, about five miles

outside the city limits."

Leonard turned back to raise Emerson again. There must be no more

penetration of Earth's defensive forces, whatever it took.

Predictably, Emerson claimed that the order was unworkable was

simply contradictory to reality. Leonard let him go on, and then hit him

with a blow he had been saving until the battle was over.

"Carry on! Oh, and it may interest you to know that your ward, Private

Grant, has deserted in the company of an enemy agent. The GMP is hunting

him even now."

Emerson wanted to cry out in grief, to insist that it had to be a mistake

or that Bowie had been brainwashed. But he saw Leonard was enjoying it

too much to be persuaded of anything Emerson might claim.

Emerson broke the commo connection and began redeploying his

remaining forces for a direct assault on the only remaining mother ship.

On Earth, Leonard exulted that he bad managed to give Emerson such

agonizing news when the man couldn't even spare a moment for regret or

memory or worry.

But he didn't have long to enjoy it. An appalling new enemy teemed

from the assault ships that were slipping through, to wreak havoc in

Monument City.

Assault ship hatches dropped open, even as Leonard watched from his

tower, and the mindblanked assault troop clones charged forth like insane

demons.

159

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It's ironic that the SDF-3 expedition was on its way to find the Robotech

Masters to strike a diplomatic accord, at exactly the time the Masters were on

their way to Earth. Ships passing in the night, in truth.

There are those who lament the fact because they believe the second war

could have been averted. I do not share this view. Do Humans, mining for

precious gems, make deals with the monkeys whose jungle they invade?

The Masters were arrogant in a way that, in Humans, would certainly

be diagnosed as psychotic. They were as single-minded as the mindblanked

clone troops they were forced to use in their final offensive.

Major Alice Harper Argus (Ret.),

Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War

"Doesn't even faze 'em," an infantryman gritted over his tac net. He put

another burst into the alien, and this time the raving, long-haired wildman

in offworld uniform went down.

But not for long. The thing got up again, hollow-eyed, skin stretched

tight across its face, leering like a skeleton. It raced at him with unnatural

speed and dexterity, firing some kind of hand weapon. The grunt flicked

over from tefloncoated slugs to energy and held the trigger down, until the

zombie was burning chunks of debris.

But all at once another zombie reared up, grinning, to bear him over

and grapple hand to hand, not skilled but as unrelenting as a mad dog. They

pressed rifles against one another. Only the infantryman's armor kept him

from having his throat bitten out.

Everywhere it was the same. Only a few Southern Cross units had been

deployed here to Newton, to guard against a landing at the outmost

perimeter of Monument City. The grunts were badly outnumbered by the

Living Dead. What had happened among the defenseless civilians, the

soldiers could not bring themselves to think about.

160

The zombies kept coming even after their weapons were exhausted,

trying to grapple hand to hand, wanting only to kill before they themselves

died from the supercharged overdoses they had been given. In time, the

Human survivors rallied near the town's central plaza. They formed a tiny

square of fifteen men and women, one rank standing and one kneeling.

Like something from a nineteenth-century imperialist's fantasy, the

square fired and fired on all fronts as the damned rushed in at them. Time

and again the tremendous firepower of modern infantry weapons cleared

the area, and each time more mindblanked assault clones stormed forth,

some still firing but most not, their weapons exhausted.

At times it was hand to hand; body armor gave the infantry a powerful

edge. But each time they drove back their foes, a new wave came to crash

against them.

The square shrank to a triangle, eight desperate men and women. And

then, high above, cross hairs fixed on them.

It was regrettable that two assault ships' cargoes of mindblanked

clones had been mistakenly disembarked in the target population center.

But such things were unavoidable, given the haste of the operation and the

unreliability of some of the crew clones.

Still, the demonstration of Robotech Master power had to be made as

ordered, even at the cost of a few expendable null sets.

From a third assault ship, a beam sprang down and the entire middle

of Newton disappeared in a thermonuclear inferno. Friend, foe, civilian-all

vanished instantly, as blast and shockwaves spread holocaust.

Leonard heard the news without showing any response, cold as a

Robotech Master. The technical officers clamoring at him with their

assorted explanations of how the alien ray worked, some claiming it was a

new development, others disputing it, were of no importance, and he waved

them aside.

Two towns had been utterly destroyed, but that was of no importance

161

to him; Leonard knew as well as anyone that Monument City might very

well be next, and it had no defense. There was no time to consolidate forces

in the UEG capitol, but he gave the command that it be done nevertheless.

An aide tapped his shoulder tentatively, "We're receiving a

communication from the Aliens!" The face of Shaizan appeared on the

primary display screen before him, Bowkaz and Dag standing behind and to

either side.

They knew his name. "Commander Leonard, we are now capable of

destroying your species with very little effort. You will therefore surrender

and evacuate your planet immediately."

Leonard looked at the screen blankly. Evacuate? He had once read a

war college projection that if spacecraft production were to continue at full

speed and the birth rate were suddenly to drop to zero, such a thing might

be possible in another ten years or so. As it was, the aggregate space forces

of Terra before the current battle wouldn't have had a hope in hell of

carrying out such a mission.

But where was the Human race supposed to go? A few frail Lunar and

Martian colonies, and several orbital constructs were the only alternatives,

unless the Masters meant to help, which they manifestly did not.

That left an instant for Leonard to marvel at how the Masters

overestimated the Human race in assuming homo sapiens could pull off

such a miracle. But again, it was more likely that the Masters simply didn't

care; maybe "evacuation" only meant, to them, the escape and preservation

of the power structure-the government.

Thoughts and evaluations boiled in Leonard's mind then: perhaps it

would be possible to take the very most essential personnel-himself chief

among them, of course-and thus avoid total annihilation.

As he was studying the Masters' sword-sharp faces he heard Shaizan

say, "Within thirty-eight of your hours. Else, we shall have no option but to

slay you one and all."

Leonard's fists shook the desk with a crash, as he stood. "Now you

listen: this world has been ours, from the time our species stood up straight

162

to use its hands and its brains! Through every disaster and our own wars

and the ones you and your kind waged on us! This world is ours!"

He was shaking his bunched fists in the air before him, speaking an

unprepared speech for once. Then he realized, with surprise, that a few of

the men and women around him were nodding their heads in agreement.

He had come to think of himself as a man who could never have the

heartfelt support of those around him.

He was thinking along new lines when Bowkaz, speaking up, dashed

his hopes. "Leonard, this is an ultimatum-a fact of life-not a suggestion or a

mere threat. The Invid, our bitter enemies, have already detected the

presence of Protoculture on your planet."

"They will be here soon," Dag said. "And, it seems, there will be more

war. You can leave or you can be crushed between; there is no third way. Go,

and leave this matter to us."

Leonard resisted the urge to duck offscreen to consult with his advisers

and image-makers, or break the connection. But pride made him stand

there, as the Masters knew by now that it would, protecting to the last his

Lone Warrior, his Gunfighter-Patton-Caesar persona.

But the self-preserving side of his mind was making very, very fast

calculations. If only a portion of the Human race were to survive, it was his

duty to rule them.

"Impossible" he told Shaizan, hoping the word didn't sound too

tremulous. "More time!" Leonard added. He grabbed a figure from the air,

"At least seven days!" There was something Biblical about it, but nothing

workable.

Shaizan raised his arm, but Leonard couldn't see that he, like his triad

mates, was touching the Protoculture cap.

"Forty-eight of your hours, and no more," Shaizan decreed. He cut off

Leonard's objections. "And after that, no life on Earth."

The screen de-rezzed, then went clear. Leonard turned to his nearest

subordinate, saved from an agonizing decision because the Masters had

insisted on the impossible. "Reconsolidate all units in the area of

163

Monument City and prepare for an all-out assault."

There were only a few tentative hesitations; all of them jumped-to

when he bellowed, "Do it now! On the double!"

They were compliant because no other attitude was tolerated in

Leonard's inner circle, and so there was no contradiction. They scurried.

Leonard reflected, We whipped the Zentraedi and we can whip these

Robotech Masters! And the Invid, whatever in hell they are!

Men and women prepared as best they could. Some children were

shielded or remanded to shelters by their elders, but many found a weapon

and got ready to be part of the final battle.

There was a brief calm in the wake of the beams, something to savor

even though it wasn't meant to be savored. Soon, the sky split apart again.

The holding action fought by the Tristar, Emerson's flagship, was the

sort of thing children's stories and patriotic poetry are made of. Emerson

himself would have given anything not to be there, or at least not to be the

last living crewmember among the dead.

But that was how it had happened. An enemy blast took out virtually all

the bridge systemry and killed the senior gunnery commander who had

been standing between him and the nearest explosion. But he had taken

shrapnel and the command chair under him was stained with his blood. His

head had been rocked against his headrest at an angle where the padding

was of little help, dazing him.

Emerson felt infinitely tired and regretful-regretful that he had never

spoken his heart to Bowie; that he had lost the battle; that he had made

such a mess of his marriage. More than anything, he was regretful that so

many lives had been or were about to be sped into the blackness.

Smoke roiled from the control panels in a bridge that would soon be a

crypt. Emerson's head lolled back and he had only an instant to recall

something he had read in Captain Lisa Hayes-Hunter's war-journal,

Recollections.

It was getting harder to think, but he pulled the quote together by an

164

act of will. Why are we here? Where do we come from? What happens to us

when we die? Questions so universal, they must be structured in the RNA

codons and anticodons themselves, it seemed to Emerson.

He had no answers, but expected to shortly. He was pretty sure those

answers would be as surprising to the Robotech Masters as they would be to

dead Terran generals.

Then he was blinking up at Lieutenant Crystal and Lieutenant Brown.

Emerson couldn't imagine how they could have landed their craft on the

critically damaged Tristar. He couldn't decide if they were real or not. But

the agony he felt as they dragged him over to an ejection module convinced

him it was all real, and even revived him a bit.

Dennis Brown didn't quite know what to say to Marie; the whole

Emerson rescue had been so improvised, and they had only gotten to know

one another as unit commanders. Sitting crowded into the little

alloy-armored ball with the injured general made things different, somehow

awkward. But there had been no time to get back to their mecha, and

anyway both craft were so badly damaged that the ejection capsule was the

better bet.

"Looks like we made it," he ventured, as the Tristar began to blow to

pieces behind them, jolting the metal sphere along on its shockwave.

She considered that. "Yep," Marie hedged.

But then they saw that they had been premature; the maw of an enemy

cruiser, one of the last still functioning, came at them like the open mouth

of a shark, like something out of a nightmare.

They were swallowed up.

At point, Dana looked down and the Pollinator was no longer frisking

along behind; she was used to those sudden disappearances, but wondered

if she would ever see him again.

The 15th and its friends and allies, having made it to the top of the

mound that buried the SDF-1 and every vital secret of Protoculture, looked

down at a circus of light and sound. The GMP appeared to have gotten there

165

first, with troop carriers, giant robots, and crew-served weapons. There was

an energy cordon farther out, and a lot of activity at the foot of the mound.

In the distance, cities burned and smoke went up in mile-wide clouds where

the enemy had struck. For some reason the GMP troops, following Colonel

Fredericks's orders to recapture the aliens at all costs, were forgotten or

couldn't be reached by Southern Cross brass desperate for reinforcements.

As Zor thought about the madness of it all, Dana thought about Zor

and how very badly she needed to understand him and understand herself.

As the eight who stood there dealt with their wildly varying thoughts and

memories and impulses, another shadow crossed the land.

They all looked up, as did the Gimps below, to see, hovering above, a

cinnamon-red, whiskbroom-shaved Robotech Master assault ship.

Karno and his triad mates were gazing into an enormous lens. "There

rests the last Protoculture Matrix," Karno said in his single-sideband voice.

"But who are those, atop the mound?"

Theirs was the ship and the mission for which all the rest were

providing a distraction. The last thing they had expected was to find the

mound surrounded by combat units.

It was all very confusing. There was no sign of the three frightful

Protoculture wraiths, no least indication of any counteraction, and that was

enough to make anyone knowledgeable in the ways of Protoculture

cautious.

But this? As the focus zoomed in, Karno saw his onetime fiancee,

Musica, the latest of the Zor clones, and six Earth primitives ranged about

at the brink of a cliff.

"Zor is with them," Darsis observed with a dispassion worthy of the

Elders themselves.

"Even Musica," pronounced Karno, forcing himself to match that

proper tone, willing to die before admitting the hot, hateful feelings

coursing through him.

166

Dana looked at Zor in surprise, as he stepped to the brink and

addressed the empty air. "If you attack, we will destroy all that is here.

Flowers. Protoculture. Muse. All."

"Go to your Robotech Masters! Tell them this war must end. You in the

depths of your ignorance, you and your Masters: it is time for you to learn

how to learn."

Zor was intent on the ship, but Nova looked at him wonderingly, and

had misgivings. What if, somehow, he wasn't bluffing?

The godlike voice from the assault ship gave the Humans a start, but

Musica and Zor were braced for it. "We will be back," it said, as flames rose

from alien strikes all around, all the way to the horizon and beyond. The

assault ship lifted away, for space and the flagship.

Nothing Nova had ever been taught quite served in analyzing what had

come to pass. She, too, set aside her oath of allegiance as Dana had, silently

but finally. "Zor, the Flowers-the Masters...you remember now!"

He made the barest of smiles. "Yes, but only in fragments." He turned

the smile on Dana. "It's all beginning to coalesce in my mind now, and

Musica is the key!"

Dana's bark event stiff. And that's all, huh? Musica? Ignoring

everything Dana had...Ah, hell!

Zor started giving orders, and Nova for one seemed to be

ready-willing-to take them. Zor outlined his plan to have Angelo, Sean, and

Louie infiltrate the GMP perimeter and come back with the 15th's

Hovertanks tandem-towed.

Dana walked over to the ventlike opening in the mound, watching the

minute parasol spores bump against some invisible barrier and float back

down, to rise and bounce again. She couldn't sort out for herself the reason

why there was such immense fascination in it for her. She resolved that, if

they lived, she would make Zor explain.

Zor looked up at Earth's sky, while Bowie hugged Musica to him. Some

people were fleeing Monument City, terrified of another onslaught of the

destructive rays or the arrival of the Bioroids.

167

Last of a long line of one selfsame entity, heir to brilliant mastery of the

Shaping forces of the Universe and to every misdeed of his predecessors,

Zor Prime sniffed the breeze.

And now the war ends, he promised himself, promised all Creation.

168

CHAPTER NINETEEN

This sudden shifting of focus, from Matrix to Muse-and Zor Prime-is

bewildering only to those who haven't familiarized themselves with the

subtler powers of Protoculture.

From a distance, we can see it, of course, and feel smug in our overview

if the players on stage that day were mystified and even illogical, who can

fairly blame them? The Shaping of the Protoculture had the world in its teeth

and was shaking it.

S. J. Fischer,

Legion of Light:

A History of the Army of the Southern Cross

The captives could see that it was a very high space. The multicolored

invader lightstructure, as faceted as a stained glass chandelier and as big as

a Hovertank, was hanging unsupported very high above them.

It looks like-radioactive diamond; a crystallized thought-I dunno,

Emerson thought woozily, as Brown and Marie tried surreptitiously to hold

him upright on the couch.

"Well?" Dag repeated. "Will you make your species see reason, and

surrender?"

Emerson took a breath and looked again at the three strange beings

who floated before him on their Protoculture cap's small standing platforms.

Would Leonard have gone insane right on the spot? It was intriguing to

consider, but not very helpful.

"'Surrender'?" Emerson repeated the word tiredly, feeling the wounds

on his face and neck, and in his side. "Haven't you arrogant ghouls learned

anything about the Human race yet? Your Zentraedi came after us, and now

you come after us-ss-"

Emerson hissed in pain, going a little faint but coming around almost

at once. Lieutenant Crystal wedged up against him, propping him up so that

Emerson hadn't teetered. Good soldier!

169

"-after us," Emerson resumed, stiffening his spine. "But you don't seem

to realize: It doesn't make us weaker; it makes us stronger!"

Dag looked down on him. "A great pity; our information led us to hope

that you are seeking the same peaceful settlement as we-that our goal was

the same."

Emerson shook off his fatigue and pain. How old were these

apparitions, these seeming Grim Reapers before him? How many

Protoculture-grown Dorian Gray portraits in the old closet? he speculated,

then pulled himself together. It was no time for whimsy.

"Nice try," Emerson shot back, "but you know as well as I do that you

opened fire on us first. You never tried to negotiate."

"Regrettable," Dag parried, "but we respect you as we do other

intelligent beings who have the same Human form as we, the same

biogenetic structure-even a kindred intellect."

"That so?" Marie glowered up at the Master from beneath her long

black brows. "Then why haven't you called off your Bioroids?"

"You're liars, the whole pack of you," Emerson told the Masters.

Shaizan's eyes opened wide with his surprise and displeasure. "Truly,

you are stupid creatures!"

Emerson smiled mirthlessly. "Map reference point Romeo Tango

466-292; that's where you intend to make your initial landing, right? That's

how stupid we are. And you're going to see more mecha and more

fighting-mad Human beings than you could've dreamed of in your worst

nightmares!"

It was only a wild guess on his part, based on repeated alien activity

there, and those last transmissions from Leonard's staff before commo was

knocked out on Tristar. The gambit was worth a try, Emerson had decided.

Earth's defenses were nearly finished, but perhaps the Masters didn't know

that, and Emerson's words would throw them off balance for a bit.

And, terrible as the aliens' new beam weapon was, they would not use

it on the mounds, that much was obvious; they didn't want to destroy the

mounds, didn't dare to, or they would have done so long ago. It was tragic

170

irony that, now that the Human race finally knew something about the

Masters' original, bewildering demand, the Masters had upped the ante.

Emerson saw, just as Leonard had, that there was no way to evacuate the

Earth, and no place to go even if such a thing were possible.

"And we know about the Protoculture," Marie was saying, even though

the intelligence report on the 15th's discoveries inside the flagship, and

analysis of the Masters' transmission to Leonard, had been very sketchy.

"We know that if you don't get it, you die," Brown added.

That gave the Masters pause again, and the captives had the

impression the invaders were in silent conference once more. After a

moment, Bowkaz said, "Tell us just how much you people of know of us, of

our history."

"We know about your weak points," Emerson answered. "The Earth is

ours, and nobody's taking it away from us or making us leave it! But if you'll

agree to a ceasefire, then perhaps we can help each other. We can stop this

war."

"The Invid are coming, do you not understand what that means?"

Shaizan demanded. "You will all be wiped out!"

"We cannot allow your stubbornness or the fate of one tiny world to

endanger the establishment of our Robotech Universe," Dag said.

"Your small-mindedness merely illustrates how primitive you are,"

Bowkaz added.

Emerson laughed madly, so that Marie and Brown feared for a moment

that he had snapped. Then the general met the Masters' glares with one of

his own. "Then, so be it."

An area of mottling on the mushroomlike cap grew bright, and Bowkaz

put his palm to it. The cap spoke so that the Humans could hear as well, "I

am receiving information on Zor Prime.

"Zor and the Human military unit in which he served are now at the

site of the buried Protoculture Matrix. Musica is with him, but she is no

longer connected to the Cosmic Harp; she has given her loyalty to Zor and

Humans."

171

"Bowie!" Emerson murmured. "I knew you were no deserter, son."

Shaizan turned back to Emerson. "Our reprieve is withdrawn! Your

Earth has just run out of time!"

Sean and the others had simply slipped back to their concealed jeeps,

put on combat gear, then made their way back through the GMP lines as if

they were a recon unit going to the rear to make a report. Passwords given

to them by Nova made it easy. No one thought to question them with the

Masters' attacks and the chaotic situation in Southern Cross HQ.

The return trip was in some ways even easier, the piloted mecha lifting

the unpiloted ones over the GMP perimeter. The Gimps were hesitant to

shoot at friendly forces without specific orders, until it was too late.

Now the 15th stood around their Hovertanks, watching smoke rise

from the blasted Monument City, which had taken scattered beam hits but

not the sort of all-out, fused-earth attack that had claimed Newton.

"Bowie, I'm so ashamed," Musica said, tears wetting her cheeks, as they

saw the ragged lines of survivors making their way from the city.

"It's not your fault," Bowie told her, holding her to comfort her.

She looked up at him, trying to smile. "The harmony is strong, between

you and me. I feel your joys and sorrows; they are my own." Being close to

him was so wonderful, a divine gift of happiness that shored her up in the

horror that was around them.

Off to one side, Dana asked Nova quietly, "Do you think Zor knows

what's going to happen next? That he sees the future?" It was no time to

voice a more personal question to herself, And, have I? All her dreams and

Visions crowded so close about her.

Nova considered that. "What are you saying?" The results of her

interrogations and observations were inconclusive but-if Zor did have some

sort of precog powers, perhaps the Human race could turn them to good

use.

Dana was looking at Zor, who stood alone, watching the pyre that was

Monument City. "He doesn't want to help Musica," Dana faced the truth.

172

"He wants revenge, and he wants to die more than he wants to live, I think."

Her voice caught a little; she still loved him.

Zor studied the destruction and suffering before him, standing near the

Three-In-One; Dana had supposed he named his tank that because of its

three configurations, but understood now that it was some deeper memory

that had moved him to do so. Zor was repeating the silent vow as if it were a

mantra, This time they'll pay! This time I'll stop them!

That was when he heard the crackle of Shaizan's voice over the cockpit

speaker of Sean's Hovertank, the Bad News. "Zor! Traitor! Are you there?"

Sean nearly jumped out of the tank like an ejecting pilot.

Zor was in the cockpit of his Three-In-One in an instant, hands on the

control yoke grips. "I hear you."

Somehow, the Masters had contrived to send their image over the

tank's display screen. "You are aware that the Protoculture Matrix is

undergoing degradation, as the Flowers bloom." It wasn't a question. "And

by now, the Sensor Nebula has surely alerted the Invid."

Zor looked at his onetime Masters. The words made bits of memory

and realization fall into place. "I-yes. But I also know that I control the key

to this planet's survival. I dictate the terms."

"We are of the opinion that you are mistaken," Shaizan replied. "Watch

closely, and you will see."

The other ATACs were watching on their own screens, with Musica

looking over Bowie's shoulder and Nova over Dana's. They saw Rolf

Emerson, teeth locked in pain, with Marie and Brown trying to comfort

him.

"Emerson," Bowie said numbly, while Sean whispered Marie's name

like a hopeless prayer, and Dana heard Nova breathe, "Dennis."

Then the Masters were onscreen again. "'These three men will be

released when you return Musica and remove your troops from this area."

Men? Sean Phillips found a second to think, wondering if they had

gotten a good look at Marie. I suppose everybody in armor looks the same to

them but-maybe these vampires aren't as smart as everybody keeps tellin'

173

me they are. Anyway, if that's what it's like to be immortal, they can keep it!

"Do you find this acceptable?" Shaizan continued. "We trust that we

need not mention the alternative."

Zor fought down his fury long enough to ask, "What are your

conditions?"

"You will be picked up, and we will exchange prisoners onboard our

mother ship." The Masters disappeared from the screen.

Zor lowered himself from his tank wearily and had barely begun, "I do

not wish for the rest of you to be invol-" Bowie hit him with a shoulder block,

driving the bigger Zor up against the armored side of Three-In-One, trying

to choke the life out of him.

"They're not getting Musica! I'll kill you!"

Zor grimaced, trying to twist free, but didn't strike out at him. "Then

stay here and do nothing, and watch your good friend be killed! The

techniques of the Masters can be more cruel than anything you can conceive

of!"

Dana was dashing to intervene, but somehow Musica got them first.

"Stop it, Bowie!" He had no choice but to risk harming her or back off. He

let go his grip on Zor.

"I will not permit you all to suffer because of me," she; told Nova and

the 15th. "I will go back."

Before Bowie could object, Dana said, "She's right. Saddle up, Fifteenth!

C'mon, what're you all gaping at?"

Nova was the one among them most distanced from Emerson's

predicament. The fate of a few Human beings, even a flag-rank officer and

two TASC fliers, was insignificant against the survival of the Human race

and its home world; everyone who took the Southern Cross oath understood

that. Shaping strategy and policy on the basis of hostages and emotional

responses led to disaster; it had been one of the major contributing factors

to the Global Civil War.

Marie thought about her pistol again, but realized that events had gone

174

too far for that, and that she must see things through along with Dana's

ATACs. Protoculture seemed to have some barely hinted-at power to shape

events, and she could only hope that the benign side of that mystical force

was working now, because Fate had the bit in its teeth.

"There's no telling what'll happen," Dana was telling her men. "We'll

have to play it by ear. But this thing isn't about Southern Cross or the UEG

anymore. I don't think even the mound, here, is as important now. This

thing is between us and the Robotech Masters."

In the wake of her experiences on the flagship and her exposure to the

spores, pollen, and Flowers below, and to Musica's song, something in her

was coming fully to life-was flexing its powers like a butterfly emerging

from its cocoon and pumping out its wings.

Dana didn't know exactly how, but she knew the words were true.

"Maybe this was always meant to be, right from the start."

The contact broken, the Masters easily reached an unspoken consensus:

Musica was critical to their plans, and there was no longer any need for the

others-not even Zor. Furthermore, there were disturbing things about the

halfbreed lieutenant, Sterling; some genetic throw of the dice had embued

her with insights and an affinity for the Protoculture that made her

dangerous. It was best that she and her unit be terminated as soon as

possible; the Masters could tolerate no rival in the matter of the

Protoculture.

The units encircling the mounds simply held their fire as a flotilla of a

dozen assault ships came low to pick up the Hovertanks. Hopelessly

outgunned, the GMP troops breathed a universal sigh of relief when the

invader craft lifted away.

In due course the 15th came forth to form a spearhead on the huge

hangar deck: Dana's Valkyrie, Angelo's Trojan Horse, Bowie's replacement

tank, the Re-Tread, which had taken the place of his Diddy-Wa-Diddy,

abandoned on an earlier sortie aboard a mother ship. Sean's Bad News and

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Louie Nichols's Livewire completed the roster.

There were ranks of clone guards with rifles aimed at them, rabbits

policing the wolves. But the ATACs only watched and waited, the tanks'

headlights and downswept hoods making them appear to be glowering.

When Dana had looked the place over, she switched her mike to an

external speaker and announced, "First of all, we want to see Chief of Staff

Emerson."

There was some conferring among the invaders. Finally they opened

ranks and the Hovertanks fell in to follow a guard runabout, moving into

the vaulted passageways of the residential district, so much like those of the

Masters' original flagship.

Guards stood on ledges all along the way. Dana wondered if they

realized they were scarcely more than so many popup targets before the

armor and firepower of the Hovertanks. They didn't seem worried, and that

worried her.

But while she didn't have words to explain it, something told her that

what she was doing was right, that against all logic, what she was doing was

what she should be doing. Again she felt connected to something much

greater than herself, and breathed a quick prayer that it wasn't some kind of

self-delusion. It was nothing but faith, really, but if she had understood her

Academy philosophy courses, what cognitive process wasn't?

The guard runabout stopped at a bulkhead hatchway as big as a hangar

door, and the tanks settled in behind it, idling.

"From this point, Musica and two others may continue, but no more.

The exchange will be made at once."

Dana stood in her cockpit-turret, taking up her tanker's carbine and

slinging it over her armored pauldron. Her winged helmet, with its crest of

bright metal, and her flashing armor seemed to daunt the guards a little.

"That's you and me, Bowie." She couldn't figure out why the Masters weren't

luring Zor in, too.

"Right." Behind Bowie, Musica rose to her feet, to show that she was

ready.

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Valkyrie and Re-Tread were escorted among more of those stone-faced

corridors

Dana

remembered

so

well,

and

through

more

technological-looking passageways as well. At last the runabout leading

them stopped, and the tanks settled to a halt. At Dana's signal, Bowie and

Musica dismounted to join her, both ATACs carrying their carbines. They

were led to a triskelion hatch that rotated open.

Emerson looked up with a resigned smile. "It's you." Dana knew some

of it was for her, but most of the general's warmth was for Bowie.

"Rolf," Bowie said simply.

"General Emerson!" Dana strode over to him, carbine still at

sling-arms, as Dennis Brown and Marie Crystal helped him to his feet.

"You're wounded."

She could see there wasn't much she could do with her combat med kit

that Brown and Crystal hadn't already done with theirs. "It's nothing

serious," the general told her, a lie and they both knew it. "I'm glad you're

here, Dana."

Then he turned to Bowie, who stood rooted. "Good to see you, soldier."

Bowie inclined his head to his guardian. "Pleasure to be here, General."

But his eyes danced behind his helmet visor, and Dana took an instant from

her scheming and calculating to be glad. Whatever had gone wrong between

the two had somehow been made right again.

Dana was figuring the best order of march, meaning to use Musica as

insurance-something Musica had already agreed to-when there was a

muffled cry. Dana whipped around, the carbine slung down off her shoulder

butt first and the muzzle coming up, to see Musica being borne back,

wrenched from Bowie's grasp, and carried through two firing ranks of clone

guards. The guards had appeared from nowhere, their backs to what she

had assumed was a solid wall-she had fallen for an old trick. The ranks

closed, and the guards assumed firing stances.

"Dana!"

Sean had never quite heard that tone in Angelo's voice before. but there

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wasn't much time to stop and reflect on it. Sean himself had been

preoccupied, worrying about Marie.

But Dana had left her mike open, and there was no mistaking the

sound of a firefight or the lieutenant's yell for reinforcements.

"I'll come with you!" Angelo roared, as the tanks' thrusters blared.

Nova, riding with him, was all for that, thinking of Dennis Brown.

Sean automatically reverted to a command voice, even though the big

sergeant now outranked him.

"You know your orders! Hold this position! And you, too, Louie; you've

got to secure the escape route!" Sean fired up Bad News and bashed through

the hatch before him while Angelo was still making strangled objections.

It wasn't too hard to find the way; Dana and Louie each had a

transponder in their armor's torso-instrumentation pack. Then, Dana's

vanished from the display screen.

But Bowie's still functioned, even though Sean couldn't raise him or the

lieutenant over the radio. Sean had clones lucking low every which way,

indifferent to their puny small arms fire, laying out an occasional burst just

to keep them discouraged.

The race to get there seemed to take forever. Dana's signal was dead

and she might be, too; and Marie was in there, along with the others...

He bashed through a final hatch like an iron fist through rice paper,

holding fire because he didn't know where friend or foe might be. Energy

bolts began coming his way at once.

Still he held fire, trying to get his bearings. It was a singular piece of

discipline; as someone in an earlier war had remarked, you would shoot

your own mother if she happened to charge across your field of fire in

battle.

Bad News settled in for a low hover, as a triad of guards concentrated

their fire on it. Sean would wonder later if the clones had any real idea of

warfare, would feel as though he had simply executed them. But in the heat

of the moment, seeing there were no friendlies near, he laid out a single bolt

from the cannon and was on the move even while the immolated bodies

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were turning to ash.

He was too zoned-up for combat to feel sorry for them; there was only

one thing he cared about, and the voice Sean heard then sent waves of relief

and joy pushing through him, remarkable in their intensity.

"You took your time getting here!" Marie scolded from behind a fluted

column, snapping off judicious shots with a fallen guard's rifle.

"But my heart was with you all the while. Believe me, my little pigeon!"

The romance had started, for him, as just one more conquest. When

did she come to mean everything to me? Sean couldn't help wondering,

even while trying to keep his mind on business.

Maybe it was because Marie Crystal wasn't dazzled by him, having

more than enough medals and decorations of her own; or maybe it was

bound up in that spooky destiny stuff Dana kept yammering about anal

Sean refused to accept. Most likely, if he and Marie lived to be together

again and spent their whole lives that way, they would still never figure it

out, he decided.

He thought all that in a tiny slice of time, pivoting the Bad News and

laying out heavy suppressive fire, blowing beautiful friezes to cinders and

fountaining tiles from the deck to keep the enemy's head down.

The clones didn't seem to care about their own lives. Some stood right

up into the fire and shrapnel; their small arms counterfire was radiant

dotted lines running at every angle across the compartment.

179

CHAPTER TWENTY

Emerson! Shoulderer of sorrow!

Champion of the light! Although -

It wasn't given him to know that

Until his work was done

Mingtao,

Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

Rolf Emerson looked up, clutching his wounded arm to him, to see

Bowie and Musica sheltering in the lee of a column not far away, and a

guard clone angling to get a clear shot at them from behind.

Dispassion and logic were no part of it; Emerson was sprinting

headlong through the gauntlet of weapon blasts before rationale had any

chance to come to bear. The space between his cover and Bowie's column

was fairly safe; the shots were well directed by then. Emerson launched

himself through the air just as the clone pressed his cheek against the stock

of his rifle for maximum accuracy, down on one knee.

There was a split-second image of Musica's face, frightened, worried

for him, Emerson could see.

So beautiful, it occurred to the general as the charge hit his back.

Perhaps she's the better part of us all; we must listen to her.

The bolt hit him squarely in the back, vaporizing flesh and singeing

bone, setting his tunic afire. The next thing he knew, he was in Bowie's arms

and the clone rifleman had been mowed down by Dana's fire.

Sean was walking his tank's secondary-battery fire back and forth in

the compartment; most of the enemy withdrew and the rest died. In

moments, the violent echoes gave way to silence.

Bowie threw his helmet aside, kneeling to gather Emerson into his

embrace, smelling the charred flesh. "Rolf. Father..."

Emerson found his hand, gripped the cold alloy. "I heard your music.

The night before they sent me to take over ALUCE base, I stood under the

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barracks window and listened to you play. It was beautiful, Bowie; you have

a gift."

"I wasn't-I haven't-" Bowie wanted to talk about love and found only

apologies on his lips, and knew there was no more time.

Emerson's hand squeezed the metal-sheathed fingers. "You and

Musica...it's such a good thing, Bowie. You must both teach it. Son."

Emerson was still alive for another few seconds, though he would never

speak again. He looked up over Bowie's shoulder to see Dana with her

helmet faceplate open. Her armor was seared where an enemy bolt had

burned out her transponder, but failed to wound her.

She might have even more to teach than Bowie or Musica, it occurred

to him. Dana gave him a nod, knowing words wouldn't serve. Then she

slipped away out of sight, rifle held at high port.

Emerson saw with some surprise that the world wasn't going dark, the

way traditional lore said it would. Instead, the range of his vision and

perception went out and out, encompassing things wonderful and terrible,

things defying all description-a terrible beauty beside which mortal life

seemed a lesser matter.

There was a celebration of light around him, and he threw himself forth

willingly. The Universe embraced him, opening all secrets, answering every

question.

In his protected sanctum, Dr. Zand, monitoring the battle through

technical relays and paths of information of his own, suddenly straightened

as if he were about to suffer a stroke. But he relaxed again in a moment,

breathing raggedly.

He grasped the front of Russo's tunic. "Emerson is dead! The Moment

comes! Gather my special equipment!" He sent the smaller man on his way

with a shove.

As Russo slunk away, Zand began unbuttoning his uniform jacket.

Nevermore would he wear false colors! It was time to garb himself in more

fitting vestments.

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Today a new Universe begins!

Nova was wearing a spare suit of ATAC armor, a thing with long horns

that had originally belonged to Cutter, who had died in that first assault on

the mother ship. She looked a little like a metallic steer, gazing back in the

direction from which the two tanks-formerly three-had come on their

rescue mission.

"I don't see Zor anywhere," she leaned down to tell Angelo Dante. "He's

sneaked off somewhere."

In another part of the mother ship, Zor stepped his red Bioroid forth,

stalking the passageways, willing to die so long as he could work his revenge.

For a moment the image of Dana's face was before him, for no reason he

could name, but he thrust it aside and went on again, the ultimate intellect,

bereft of any thought but revenge.

"Sarge, these passageways all look the same to me!" Louie called over

the tae net. "How'll we ever find them?" Some new interference was

jamming all long-range commo and even blotting out Bowie's transponder.

"We keep lookin'," Angelo said. Damn Phillips anyway, for not marking

his trail!

Just then figures came dashing and dodging from a side passageway up

ahead, fire ranging all around them from behind. "It's Lieutenant Crystal

and Lieutenant Brown!" Louie yelled.

Bowie and Musica came close after, ducking for cover at either side of

the passageway, as the two TASC pilots did. Intense fire from the guards

splashed from the bulkheads. The guards' counterattack was so sudden and

determined that the Humans had been forced to leave Emerson's body

behind.

Sean's holding action back in the "senate" chamber wasn't keeping all

the guards pinned down. More showed up, from the other direction, with a

clear line of fire. But before they could cut down their prey, a sustained

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burst from a Hovertank's secondary batteries felled them all in a squall of

blazing rapid-fire bolts.

Bowie and the others turned and, stunned, saw Dana drift her Valkyrie

to a stop, its quad-barrels sending up shimmering heat waves.

Bowie was momentarily confused. Hadn't Re-Tread and Dana's tank

been parked in the other direction? He hadn't seen her slip away while

Emerson lay dying, to make an almost suicidal dash for her mecha.

Now she jumped up in her cockpit and fired with her carbine, afraid

that the heavy guns might hit friend as well as foe. A last guard pitched from

a ledge just above her friends' heads. Then she whirled and fired into a

guard runabout that was bearing down on her from the opposite side; the

runabout's windshield melted and the little vehicle rolled, throwing guards

every which way, and plowed to a stop.

Sean fought his way free and caught up, as Angelo, Nova, and Louie

came to a stop with blaring retros. While Dennis Brown and Bowie

supported Sean in holding back the guards who had chased them from the

"senate," Marie Crystal jumped into the runabout and got it started up.

Musica, Bowie, and Brown piled in. Marie gunned away, convoyed by

the four Hovertanks. It was only then that Dana realized Zor was missing.

The decision had been made to strike, the Humans' determination to

fight notwithstanding.

"We must consolidate our strength," Dag declared. "Eliminate all

clones functioning beneath an efficiency factor of eighty percent." The other

four mother ships and most of the combat vessels were almost useless for

combat now, depleted as they were; the flagship was the only remaining

hope.

Jeddar started to object. He knew that the Master didn't mean simply

denying the clones Protoculture, but also to eject them from the flagship.

"They may not submit to elimination, m'lord," Jeddar pointed out.

"Then confine them for the moment!" Shaizan lashed out. "And get

ready to dispose of them. Begin the assault on the buried Matrix below!"

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Even the fanatic loyalty of the guard clones failed before the massed

firepower of the tanks; in time the running firefight became an

unchallenged withdrawal. Dana couldn't believe the Masters didn't have

more of their Triumviroids around-but why weren't they using them?

The ATACs had lost their bearings, and even Musica couldn't tell where

they were. They burned through hatches, and came at last to a hangar deck

where whiskbroom-shaped assault ships were ranked side by side.

There was only time for brief kissing and hugging-passionate between

Sean and Marie, more reserved but plainly heartfelt between Nova and

Dennis-before the question of how to get out alive took center stage.

Marie and Dennis weren't sure if they could fly an assault ship;

planetary approaches in an unfamiliar spacecraft were a lot different from

joyrides in a guard runabout.

"See what you can do," Dana said, revving Valkyrie. "I'm going back for

Zor."

Angelo felt like tearing out his hair. "Lieutenant, this just ain't fair! It

ain't army!"

"I'm not working for the army anymore, Angie," she threw back the

tank pivoting on its thrusters. "If I'm not back in twenty minutes, go on

without me."

She was scarcely gone When Bowie and Musica went to stand before

the sergeant hand in hand. "I'm going back, too," Bowie announced.

"Musica says her people are in terrible danger."

"I can sense it," she explained. "My sisters and I are linked-are one."

Bowie touched her shoulder gently. "It's all right; we'll find them."

Perhaps this was part of the teaching that Rolf Emerson had said he and

Musica must do; in any case, Bowie knew he couldn't abandon Musica's

people.

Suddenly, Nova stepped forward, letting go of Dennis's hand. "I'll go

with you. Dana's right: we're not working for the army anymore, and it's

time for the dying to stop."

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Then Brown joined her, and Marie; Angelo Dante surrendered to the

inevitable. The flying officers outranked him, but that meant nothing since

this was a Hovertank operation. "Sean, you 'n' Lieutenant Crystal stand pat

here with Bad News and hold this position! See if you can figure out how to

fly these things. Rest of ya, do me a favor and try not to screw up."

The Southern Cross had rallied everything it had, mobilizing reserves

and arming any willing civilian, no questions asked. Cops, students, robots,

convicts, bureaucrats, homemakers, kid gangs-the Human race readied its

remaining resources for a last-ditch stand.

What regular forces there were would go out and meet the approaching

flagship head-on; the rest would wait, to fight it out on home soil if that was

what it came to.

Supreme Commander Leonard heard details of the hasty preparations,

then dismissed his staff for a moment to see to a matter of personal

readiness. Opening his desk drawer, he checked to make sure that the

charge in his pistol was full.

He burned again with his loathing of the aliens. Leonard tucked the

gun into his tunic and closed the drawer. He had no intention of letting

those monsters take him alive.

It smashed its way through a stone partition and came face to face with

three red Bioroids. Perhaps they recognized Zor's mecha as that of their

onetime battle lord, or perhaps not; it made no difference.

Even if they had been operating at peak efficiency, the Triumviroids

would have found Zor a formidable opponent. But they were

depleted-scarcely any kind of match for him at all.

He dropped them with fast, accurate shots from the thick,

discus-shaped handgun his Bioroid carried, its muzzle bigger than a

howitzer's. But as he stepped into the compartment, three more reds

dropped from above, springing their ambush.

Zor proved how experience counted; his Bioroid held up a great slab of

185

stone to shield itself from the ambushers' fire, then blazed away in response,

leaping high. He dropped one, two, three, holed through at the point where

their operating clones sat curled in the control spheres.

Zor broke into yet another compartment only to see a high ledge lined

with Triumviroids, dozens of them, waiting for him. Here and there were

armed guardsmen, looking like insects among the mecha.

"Take me to the Masters!" he commanded. "I mean you no harm; my

business is only with them."

He saw Karno, standing to one side, drop his arm in signal. Zor's

Bioroid's external sound pickup caught the shouted order, "Fire!"

Zor's red ducked aside, as the blasts volleyed in all directions,

ricocheted from bulkheads or penetrated them, lanced through the deck and

overhead. A secondary explosion from a weakened power routing system

knocked the mecha sideways.

He was momentarily in the cover of the hatchway frame, rolling and

about to surge to his feet again, his red's armor striking rooster tails of

sparks from the deckplates.

Karno reached out to pull a long lever nearby. "We knew you would

come."

There were carefully planned explosions, and the overhead gave way;

tons of metal and conduits and organic-looking Protoculture systemry

landed on him like a cave-in, pinning him. At the same time, the bulkhead

collapsed, tearing aside, leaving him exposed to his enemies' fire.

Karno looked down on Zor, not with the dispassion of a cloned slave,

but rather with the cold hatred he had felt since losing Musica. Emotions

were seeping throughout the servants of the Masters, unstoppable and often

unrecognized.

"You're a fool, Zor," Karno snarled, "if you believe you have the power

to stand against us! Now that this lunatic quest of yours has failed, I am

instructed to offer you one final chance to repent, and rejoin us." The tone

of his voice made it clear that Karno offered reconciliation unwillingly. He

would much rather give the order to fire again.

186

Zor's red managed to lever itself up. But despite all its immense

strength, it still couldn't fight its way clear of the pinning wreckage.

Zor looked into the muzzles that had been brought to bear on him, his

red's gleaming black visor panning slowly, and said, putting weight behind

each word, "Never. I won't stop until I end the Masters' tyranny or they end

me."

Karno nodded, not unhappy with that pronouncement. "It shall be as

you wish it." He raised his hand again to give the signal to resume firing,

and the fetal clones curled in each Triumviroid's control sphere sent out

commands of readiness, preparing to shoot Zor's mecha to incandescent

bits.

"And so passes the very last of Zor." Karno hissed out the words,

looking like a handsome young demigod turned angel of death, signal arm

ready to fall.

But like a wash of pure light, an enormous bolt from a Gladiator's main

battery came through another gap in the bulkheads, sending one

Triumviroid leaping off the firing ledge in a volcanic blast. The Gladiator,

standing in the smoking breach, traversed its great gun to blast another

enemy, and then another, like clay pipes in a shooting gallery.

The lack of Musica's harmonics and the decline in Protoculture energy

had the clone operators at a level of functioning that was near failure.

Instead of firing back, they awaited orders, or turned and collided with each

other, or merely stood waiting to die-except for the one or two who shot,

inaccurately. Karno was enough of a realist to flee through a side hatchway,

seething with the need to slay, to avenge himself-reverting to a level as

primitive as that of any primate, without realizing it, because his intellect

fed him justifications.

187

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

When I was a little kid, after my parents left in SDF-3, I had three

godfathers for a while. Maybe you heard about them, the ex-Zentraedi

spies-Konda and Bron and Rico.

They knew I was half Zentraedi and that I had no close family after my

folks went, so-they appointed themselves.

What I'm getting at is, they were kinder to me than anyone ever was.

They had loved three female techs who were killed in the SDF-1, and I suppose

to some extent I was the Zentraedi-Human kid they never had.

And when I was-I don't know, six or so, I guess-they got very ill. I found

out later that the doctors said it was something that came from being reduced

to our size in the Protoculture chambers. What I didn't know was that there

was a possible cure, but it would only work on a full-size Zentraedi. But they

stayed Human-size, so they could look after me.

They died within weeks of each other. So what I'm saying is, don't ever

ask me if I'm ashamed of being half alien, or ask why I'm willing to grant Zor

the benefit of the doubt. A lot of people think courage is something you can

only prove on the battlefield, and love is something noisy and-what's the

word I'm looking for? Demonstrative.

But aliens taught me differently.

Dana Sterling, in a remark recorded by Nova Satori

Dana fired again, then saw that the Triumviroids were making no

meaningful resistance, and ceased fire; her war wasn't with mind-enthralled,

blameless clones anymore.

She operated controls and imaged with her winged, crested helmet.

Valkyrie pivoted end for end, changing, rearing up, and in an instant she

was an armored Goliath, holding a rifle the size of a field piece.

Something about the mechamorphosis made some of the reds react, it

seemed; they were in motion again. She laid not a few rounds to keep their

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heads down, but suddenly they moved with more purpose. Dana leapt to

crouch by Zor's red Bioroid, partly shielding it with her own Battloid,

pouring out covering fire.

"Zor, stay down!" She shot from the hip, and a red that had been about

to nail Zor went down in a subsidence of ripped armor and glowing

components. But others stirred, raising their discus pistols shakily.

More reds were being brought back under control, getting ready to take

up the attack once more. Valkyrie swung its weapon back and forth, Dana

was well aware that so many Triumviroids, even hindered as they were,

would shortly prevail unless she did something. She fired with one hand,

trying to drag Zor free with the other. A red tromped over to a point on the

ledge behind her, ready to shoot directly down.

Zor's red's arm pulled free and swung its weapon; fierce artificial

lightning crashed, and the red above toppled from the ledge, even while

others staggered to move into positions of advantage.

"Thank you for saving my life, Dana," Zor said, a little numbly. "But I

must go on alone."

Dana dismissed the matter of who had saved whom from what in the

time since she had first seen him. Each had spared the other in combat; did

that count as a higher form of rescue?

Anyway, there would be better times to sort all that out; the problem

was living to see them. "No way, trooper!' She was helping his mecha to its

feet, pulling wreckage off it, supporting it. "It's my fight, too."

It is, to some ways I can explain, and others that I just can't, yet.

Then he was up, and the red Bioroid and the blue-and-white Battloid

were pounding along the passageway shoulder to shoulder, so that the deck

alloy gonged "Be warned: I mean to confront the Robotech Masters and

destroy them," he said.

"Long as you don't destroy yourself at the same time. Or me," she

cautioned. He heard her concern for him in her tone; and in the midst of his

killing wrath, he felt a calm, clear sanity flowing from her to himself.

But a hatchway loomed up before them just then. "Look sharp, now,"

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she said.

They took it ATAC style, poised to either side with their backs against it,

like infantry in house-to-house fighting, or SWAT cops going in. Another

red's shots fireballed through the hatchway past them.

Zor waited for the right moment, went through the hatchway firing,

bent low, and rammed his foe shoulder-on. Dana followed, waiting for a

clear shot.

"There are my people! Oh no, no..."

Musica was nearly collapsed against a crystal concavity of a viewport

taller than herself, seemingly close to a faint. Bowie, Angelo, and the others

halted in some confusion, not sure what she meant and thoroughly spooked

by the abandoned residential district around them.

The Humans had been forced to leave their tanks behind, to pass

through the tight confines of the Human-scale areas. They were armed and

armored, though.

The other troopers set up security and fingered their rifles, as Bowie

caught Musica just before she slumped. She was again wearing the

ceremonial vestments of her office-the blue tights and torso-wrapping, the

cold alloy ring around her neck with its arrowheadlike emblem.

She had found the clothes in an empty guard command center and, for

some reason, insisted on changing into them while the ATACs searched

nearby. But there had been no sign of her sisters and her people.

Bowie couldn't help worrying about the ceremonial clothing. The

Masters had brought it with them from their other flagship and held it ready.

Zor had been compelled to turn traitor; must Bowie fear such a thing from

Musica?

Now, though, the riddle of the missing clones was answered, and the

answers made a horrifying sense. "They are outside the ship!" Musica added

in a small, forlorn voice. She had sensed it, but the enormity of such a thing,

the sheer incomprehensibility of it, had kept her from considering it

seriously.

190

The troopers gathered around Musica and saw what was going on.

There were many ships, drifting close by because the Masters' new flagship

hadn't finished its waste disposal yet; every viewport and dome in the inert

combat vessels out there was crammed with motionless, seemingly sleeping

clones.

Louie Nichols looked out at it all and thought, as his stomach turned, of

an animal gnawing its own leg off to escape a trap's iron teeth. What the

Masters had done was infinitely worse. God, it's all stripped away!

Compassion...mercy.

The pure intellect and the rational organization of society-this is where

they point. Dana was right. He teetered a little, then caught his balance, and

looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. But they were all

transfixed.

Nova Satori looked out at the sight, rocked with surprise at herself

because, until this awful moment, she had never really been able to bring

herself to think of the aliens as Human beings. She had never thought of

them as creatures with souls, all Zor's appeal and powers of persuasion

aside. But she gazed upon genocide and knew she had been blinding herself.

It hadn't taken so very much ordi-psych indoctrination or so very many pep

talks from Supreme Commander Leonard and Colonel Fredericks to set her

attitudes in concrete.

Now, though, those were wiped away. There were people out there who

needed rescue.

There were other castaways, set adrift in spacesuits and smaller craft.

Now why didn't those Masters just space 'em? a practical side of Angelo

wondered. Why leave 'em safe and sound, as it were? Maybe the Masters

meant to come back and reclaim their slaves, if the Masters won.

But the ATACs intended to see to it that the Masters didn't win. "Are

they alive?" Bowie asked, gripping Musica by the shoulders.

"Yes, but doomed. Cut off from the Protoculture and the Masters' will."

And from the music of the Cosmic Harp, she admitted to herself. The

Cosmic Harp was nowhere to be found; perhaps it had been destroyed in

191

the first flagship. She was cut off from it forever, a pain as sharp as any

physical wound.

"A rescue mission would be just about impossible," Louie said in his

best mechie, noncommittal voice. But within, he was plotting his own

personal vector along new grids, and changing parallax. There were more

spacecraft in the mother ship. Maybe, sometimes, trying the impossible is

the whole point. "Maybe we can"

Musica cut him off. "Allegra! Octavia! My sisters are nearby!" Her eyes

rolled up so that only the whites showed, and Bowie had to bear her up.

He held her close, so that he breathed her sweet breath, almost tasted it.

"Are they alive?"

Blue-haired Allegra, sundered from the harmonies upon which she and

her Muse sisters had lived as upon food, drink, and the air they breathed,

found a troubling and yet comforting new orchestration in ministering to

those around her who were suffering. She hadn't known she knew how to do

it, and yet the harmonies assured her, conducted her through every

movement.

Now she was cooling the brow of a feverish stonemason clone with a

damp cloth, feeling Octavia's gaze upon her.

Allegra, kneeling there by the stone bench that had been made a

sickbed, said, "His bio-index has fallen too low, and his own reserves are

gone. I'm afraid there is no hope for him." The clone was pale white, sweat

slick along his face and neck, long hair damp and clinging, and yet his skin

was cold.

But Octavia told Allegra, "There is always hope!" and wondered where

the certainty, the rightness of the words that made them a new harmony,

had come from. All the old certainties had been burnt away, but in the ashes

she was finding bright, warming determination that had yet to find its form.

Allegra looked at her dubiously. "I wish Musica would come." They

sensed that she was near, ever the centerpiece and the wellspring of their

power.

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"Without the eternal Song of Musica's Harp," the stonemason clone

who rested under Octavia's dove-gentle hand said, "I have no will left to

live."

How much harder do you think it is for me? she thought.

"You must not say that!" Octavia found that her voice had become

harsh, a commanding note a Clonemaster might use, or even a Robotech

Master. "We must learn to live on our own."

The words and the very wisdom of them had come unbidden. Suddenly

there was a current of awareness in the big holding chamber, which lifted

the clones' lassitude and fed power back to her. Some shackle she had never

felt, even though it had confined her life and her art, had been broken. But

the rightness of what she had said was a clarity that she couldn't deny or

stifle, a pureness of a profound inner music she had never heard before.

A tech clone stood up next to his pallet, nearby. Weaving as he stood,

he got out, "We know nothing of the Dead Life, the Life of the One. We only

know the triumvirates, and now the triumvirates are no more."

Octavia didn't realize she was moving, as she stood up and gathered

her half-shawl, the words flowing to her as notes from same new,

unsuspected song. "Then it's time for us all to learn a new way to live.

Musica is willing to stand on her own two feet and survive."

Whence come these thoughts? she belabored herself, brain roiling.

Perhaps some had been transferred to her by the link with Musica, and

there was the breakdown of the Masters' power, the depletion of the

Protoculture, and the silence of the Cosmic Harp. The suspect sources were

many.

But the central melody of it, Octavia somehow knew, came from within:

a music long subsumed by the; narrow, repetitive themes the Masters had

forced the Muses to play.

"We still may be rescued, or save ourselves," Allegra added. Octavia

was shocked at first, but then felt more sisterly to her than she ever had.

But Allegra's patient hiked himself up on his elbows, feverish, to say as

if in some fortune-telling trance, "Even if we are rescued, who among us

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could live a life so forlorn? A life where the triumvirates are broken apart?

We are parts, we are not whole!"

Octavia didn't know how to answer that, exactly; she hadn't the right

words in her vocabulary, or the right notes in her music.

And yet, bringing all her will to bear, she knew in a revelation as bright

as a mountain sunrise that he was wrong.

From Earth rose every remnant of its military striking power. Nothing

that could conceivably reach the approaching Masters was left behind; men

and women readied for battle and took strength from a source greater than

the Protoculture.

They were willing to die for their families and children and planet, if

that be the price, so long as the Masters died as well. And if the Masters

meant to end life on the planet, then all, invader and defender, would die

alike.

The beings who had ruled galaxies, and meant to rule all the Universe,

wouldn't have understood that sense of fatalism no matter how it was

phrased.

Again, that terrible Human advantage had come into play. The Masters

proceeded, as they always had, upon logical conclusions; the creatures

Earth had bred rose up, in a manner that swept those calculations away, to

stand and fight.

Just then a minor subentity, an artificial intelligence construct of the

Protoculture cap, reported to the Masters that there was no rational

explanation as to why these creatures had not either totally destroyed

themselves, or become a slave culture (a stagnant one, the subentity would

have pointed out, if the Masters had created it to be more candid) like the

Robotech Masters' clones. The concept of a third alternative had simply

never been considered before.

Zor, Zor...you sent your dimensional fortress to no random world!

Earth was a deliberate choice for the centerpiece of this great War, wasn't it?

Some least-constrained part of the Masters' unified consciousness

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whispered the insight, a death-dry croak that sent panic all through them

and made the cap pulse like an alarm beacon.

Then they had it back under control again, and themselves as well.

"The Micronian fleet is advancing, m'lords," Jeddar said, head bowed low,

frightened by his own boldness in interrupting them but frightened even

more by the long barracuda shapes of the Terran warships.

Then Shaizan, Dag, and Bowkaz were alert once more, eyes so bright

that it seemed rays of divine wrath might shoot forth. The Masters had

shaken off or put down every misgiving. If there was some small voice

within their communal mind that persisted in faint, tormented murmurs of

mortality, it was altogether drowned out in their drumming mental din of

conquest.

Or at least, almost altogether; none of the three would dare admit he

heard it.

Shaizan sent out the command, "Let half of our remaining attack forces

go forth to engage this enemy fleet. The remainder will descend to the

planet and retrieve the Protoculture Matrix."

The other mother ships were all but useless, as were the combat craft

arid clones aria mecha remaining to them. But the Protoculture cap told

them the resources still available to the Masters in their flagship would

more than suffice.

As long as the Matrix was recovered, any and all losses suffered would

be negligible. But if the mission failed, such sacrifices would be immaterial:

the Robotech Masters themselves would have no hope of survival.

Shaizan touched the Protoculture cap again, so that the Masters were

gazing down on a scene of the three mounds near Monument City. Sensors

indicated that the aura of protection generated by the guardian wraiths

below was weakening. As the energy of the last Matrix began to fail, the

powers of the wraiths diminished. There was yet a tiny, unique window of

opportunity. The Protoculture cap had already gotten a precise fix on the

Matrix's location, like seeking out like, across the negligible distance

between planet and space.

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Shaizan had activated another mechanism. Like magic, a circular gap

appeared in the deck behind them, and from it rose a glassy sphere a yard in

diameter. They turned to regard it.

Within it was the last major Protoculture mass left to them, not a

Matrix that could perpetuate itself and spawn other Matrices, but still a

power source of vast potency. It was a tangled collection of

vegetable-looking matter, glowing and flickering, sending out concentric

waves of faint blue light in a nimbus. It was far different from the huge mass

Louie Nichols had seen and by which he had been captured; this one was

uncontaminated and unbloated.

It was contained in a clear canister only a little larger than and the

same shape as an earthly hurricane lantern, with flat metal discs of

systemry at either end. The container and the globe around it rested on a

stem of metal that was grown around with leaved creepers of a Flower of

Life stem.

Ranged around the compartment were other such vessels, the Flowers

within them now blooming-the masses useless, their remaining power

shunted into the single remaining viable one.

Its power, too, would soon show signs of atrophy, but it would serve.

The three looked on if silently, thinking greedy thoughts of the vast energies

waiting for them on Earth, exulting in the contemplation of the absolute

tyranny they could establish.

"Our victory is within reach," Shaizan said aloud, and the words had a

death-knell echo in the chamber.

"I shall never allow that victory!" a new voice cried, a ringing challenge.

The Masters whirled, shocked.

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CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Lazlo, my dear friend,

Comes now a parting of the ways; you know our quandary. Max and

Miriya Sterling will not consent to bringing their child, Dana, along on the

SDF-3 expedition for fear that the Shaping endangers her, and for mistrust of

me, I suspect. It may even be that Jean and Vince Grant leave their little boy

behind for kindred reasons.

Of course, you will be monitoring Dana's progress and seeing to her

welfare and education; that is a given. But I warn you to do nothing, nothing,

to harm her. The scales of the Protoculture, we know, often take a long time to

come back into balance, but ill is always paid for ill, and good for good,

despite your ponderings.

Parents are a fearsome breed anyway; how much more so, Earth's

greatest Robotech ace and the battle queen of the Zentraedi?

While we may look to the Shaping for certain protection, do not make

the mistake of forgetting that there are Powers far and above anything we see

in the Protoculture.

Your colleague,

Emil Lang

"So, Zor Prime, you have finally come," Shaizan managed to say. "We

have been expecting you, and you have not disappointed us."

And they had expected him, but not quite like this. How had he

survived the Triumviroids? He was armored, though unhelmeted, and had a

Southern Cross assault rifle leveled at them. Dana was backing him up, the

stock of her tanker's carbine clamped against her hip, muzzle swinging a bit

to keep them all covered.

Still, the Masters were little dismayed. In the final analysis wasn't Zor

one of them? The Protoculture's intoxicating effect on them, the rush of its

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sheer power, made them sure that if they offered to share it with the clone,

he would be theirs. The halfbreed enemy female was of no real importance.

"So-you know why I'm here?" Zor asked, eyes narrowed.

Shaizan nodded serenely. "But of course. Your purpose has always

remained the same-through every incarnation."

"You are the embodiment of the original Zor," Bowkaz added, "creator

of the first Protoculture Matrix, the Master responsible for our race's

ascendancy."

The words had Dana reeling; she had good reason to know some of the

Masters' works. "You mean...Zor also developed the Zentraedi people?"

Dag studied her. "Zor was the prime force behind all the advancements

of our race." He sensed that Zor Prince hadn't yet recalled all the things the

Masters and their Elders had done to the original Zor. If he had, Dag

thought, the clone would have entered firing.

Dana studied Zor Prime, reincarnation of the man who had created her

mother's race-he who was therefore, at least in part, her own creator as well.

She looked back to the Protoculture mass, and wondered if it was the key to

everything: the war, peace, and her own origins and destiny.

"But his most important discovery-the one from which our lifeblood

flows-is the Protoculture that makes possible eternal life," Shaizan was

saying.

Zor, though, was shaking his head angrily, eyes squeezed to mere slits,

breathing hard. "No! I was never a Master, never one of you! And the

Protoculture hasn't brought life; it has brought only death!"

He brought the assault rifle level with his waist and fired, the weapon

burping brief meteoric bursts that blew open a half dozen of the canisters of

degraded Protoculture mass along the wall. It showered the deck with

nutrient fluids and the raveled, dripping Flowers of Life, their soaked petals

and spores, their intertangled roots and blossoms.

"I will end this here and now!" he screamed, turning the barrel on his

onetime Masters.

In spite of their calm greeting, the Masters hadn't thought to confront

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Zor at this moment, in this situation. It was suddenly clear that he was too

overwrought to listen to reason or blandishment. The accursed Human

emotions had thrown the Masters' calculations awry yet again.

Shaizan stepped from the Protoculture cap to stand protectively near

the resplendent globe that held the remaining mass. Zor must be kept at bay,

until the help that had already been silently summoned could arrive. "Surely

you are not prepared to destroy your most precious creation, the

embodiment of all your hopes and dreams. Without it, your own species and

the civilization you founded will die."

Shaizan himself felt a strange ripple coursing through him. He felt as if

he needed biostabilization and longed for contact with the Protoculture cap,

but there was no time for that in this crisis. He could see that both Dag and

Bowkaz were experiencing the weird perturbations, too.

"My civilization is already dead!" Zor hissed, and opened fire again,

bolts chopping at the spilled, saturated Flowers, sending up steam and

burning blossoms and bits of glowing deckplate.

Zor felt as if he were made of pure rage. Strange, that beings as

emotionless as the Masters should find it so easy to use emotions to their

own ends-to torment him and manipulate him so with guilt and sorrow-to

batter down his resolve. They made it so hard to think clearly, and unclear

thought could only work to their benefit.

Then, all at once, the scent of the Flowers came to him. The aroma

summoned up a memory as clear and substantial as diamond, though it was

a memory inherited from a Zor who had died long ago. He recalled how he

had plumbed the mysteries of Protoculture, and why, and the tragedies of

that great undertaking. He recalled, too, that he had never intended his

discoveries to be used for the ends to which the Masters had put them. He

saw that the civilization-if that was the word for it-around him was their

perversion, their responsibility, not his.

And he saw, in an almost preternatural calmness, that it didn't lie

within his power to change the Masters' civilization, only to stop it.

Zor brought his weapon around and blasted the base of the sphere. The

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glassy material shattered, in big fragments and infinitesimal ones, like the

end of some Cosmic Egg. Shaizan bent aside, shielding himself with his

hands.

A secondary explosion in the systemry under the Masters' last

protoculture mass shot the hurricane-lantern canister into the air, as if a

child had launched a tin can with a firecracker.

Trailing wires and dendrites, it turned slowly end for end. Unused to

physical action, Bowkaz still sprang from his standing place at the ca tog

catch it before it shattered against the deck.

But Zor was pivoting, livid with anger. Perhaps he would have fired at

anybody who came into his sights then-even Dana. Certainly, he shot

Bowkaz, the impact of the blasts sending the Master back, setting his

monkish robes on fire, his Flower of Life-shaped collar flopping, to fall to

the deck.

But while Zor was distracted, firing at the Master, Dana was in motion,

slinging her carbine over her shoulder and leaping high. It wasn't so

different from football or volleyball, but it was the best save she had ever

made. She had always been athletic, but a desperation to save what might

be her own personal salvation and the key to the war made her faster and

stronger than she had ever been before.

And yet, even while she hurled herself up for the catch, gauntleted

hands closing in, she could hear the one called Dag actually screeching, "Do

not touch the terminals!"

She had no choice; Dana caught it as best she could, and as her hands

closed over the discs of systemry at either end of the canister, there was a

bright discharge. She wailed, a long, sustained sound, as an absolute-zero

shock of energy pulsed through her, and time seemed to slow.

She could see every detail of the vegetable mass in the canister. It was

really very beautiful. Unhurriedly-though she could sense, somehow, that it

was happening very quickly-the little twisted buds that reminded her of the

mother ships' cannon began to open.

Sheets of crackling energy raged and swept through the compartment,

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throwing out harsh shadows one moment, then making her and Zor and the

Masters all transparent as X rays the next. Bowkaz had barely begun to fall,

but his fall was stopping, making him seem to her to hang in midair,

contorted with pain from Zor Prime's shot.

The canister and its Protoculture mass glowed like a star. Shaizan,

watching, registered Impossible! The Masters, in concert with their

Protoculture cap, might have been able to work something like that effect,

but no unaided entity-not Elder, Master, clone, Zentraedi, or Human-could

so evoke the power of the Universe's most potent force.

But Dana heard. Somehow, as if from far away, she heard Shaizan's

thought-speech, The Flowers have blossomed!

Far below, Flowers began opening faster and faster, as the three

enigmatic entities set to guard and watch over the matrix by Zor sensed

what had happened in the mother ship. The three wraiths began to gather

themselves, depleted as they were, for their final task.

Zor felt himself engulfed in a quicksand of time dilation; he began to

mouth a cry that echoed Dana's, a cry that seemed to stretch to Forever.

And still the canister poured its full energies into Dana Sterling, who hung

in a split-instant's graceful pose, high in the air with the Masters' last

Protoculture mass radiant between her hands...

With no sense of transition, she found herself awakening on a green

field lush with the pink Flowers of Life. She still wore her armor; she looked

around at hills and vales, not sure that they were of Earth, though she saw

wind-blasted crags and what seemed to be rusting Zentraedi wrecks in the

distance. She had barely begun to wonder how she had come to be there

when she realized she wasn't alone.

"Huh?"

There were dark, cloaked figures standing back at a slight

remove-female, she thought, feeling a bit drifty, though she couldn't quite

be certain. Each of the dark figures held one of the three-stemmed Flowers

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of Life, the three-that-were-one.

But there was someone else, kneeling right before her, a compact,

blond young woman in gauzy pink robes, clutching a bouquet of the Flowers,

wearing a necklace something like Musica's. The woman had a roundish

hairdo and an upturned, freckled nose; she was calm, and yet there was a

sense of life and gusto to her that made her very winsome.

Dana gave her head a slight shake and realized that she was looking at

herself. And she realized that she, like this image of her, held a Flower of

Life.

She levered herself up and saw that there were more of the dark figures,

standing silently-making no move as yet-clutching their Flowers, forming a

ring around Dana and her doppelg 鋘 ger. Dana realized that she wasn't

armed, but somehow the fact didn't bother her, and she felt only peace and

a yearning to have her questions answered.

Then the kneeling image of herself suddenly shifted, separating out to

either side so that there were three, smiling their mysterious smiles at her.

The triumvirate! She sat-bolt upright, recalling what had

happened-grasping the canister-and looking at the Flower in her hand.

The discharges released the Zentraedi side of my mind! I'm seeing

those other sides of me that would have come to life if I were part of a triad!

She suddenly felt terribly alone. She had never known hen family,

never known much about her mother's race, had grown up cut off from

most of the knowledge of serf that people around her so took for granted.

And here was not just one other Dana, but three. A chance for a

closeness and unity, a companionship, beyond anything Humans knew. No

surprise, it occurred to her, that it was the first thing her expanded powers

of mind had summoned up from the vast reservoir of the Protoculture.

But even as she was about to embrace her sibling-clones, something

held her back. The image came to mind of Musica, and of the sad scenes in

the mother ships of the Masters. She remembered the antiseptic cruelty of

triumvirate life and the obscene murder of the clone Latell.

She still couldn't understand or see clearly who those shrouded entities

202

were, gathered around her, but perceived that they were listening closely,

were attentive to her response. Dana felt that some crucial judgment was

hanging in the air.

But it didn't take a lot of soul-searching. She had seen all the sorrows of

the submerged personalities of the triumvirates. She looked to her potential

otherselves again. Their stares were somehow malign now, and hungry-as if

they wanted to devour her, to subsume her in themselves and bury forever

the personality that had grown up, for good or ill, as Dana Sterling.

Dana hurled the Flower to the ground; it shattered and disappeared

like a de-rezzing computer image. "I am not a part of your triumvirate! I am

an individual Human being!"

The triplicate visions moaned in concert-hollow sounds like the

faraway wails of tortured children. They seemed to turn to smoke, becoming

vacant-eyed ghosts that were rent in the wind like spindrift, their Flowers

dissolving as well.

The dark listeners evaporated, too, with thin, pipe-organ howls like

mourning specters, resigned to their eternal fate. They faded, now part of a

reality that would never come to be.

Dana was on her feet. The green had vanished, and she ground herself

in a bleak and blasted setting, lifeless as any lunar crater but still

recognizably an Earthscape.

She threw the words out angrily. "I reject the horrors of your

civilization!" She wasn't sure if she was talking to the Masters, or the

Protoculture, or her own Zentraedi heritage. "I reject your values and your

beliefs!"

Who is there to hear? she wondered, and yet she knew she wasn't going

unheard. "I'm an individual, a free Human being of the planet Earth!"

It came to her that she was standing in a place of scattered Human

bones, a skull nearly beneath her feet. There was no stirring of air, no hint

of life, anywhere across a limitless plain covered with ash and roofed over

by low clouds that might have come from some planetary cremation.

Is this it? Is this the future of both civilizations? Suddenly she was

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running, calling for help in a bleak landscape that even denied her echoes.

Her foot turned on a shattered skeleton, and she fell headlong. But as

she fell, the ash smothering her, clogging her throat and nostrils, she heard

somebody calling her name.

She shook her head to clear it, but when she looked up, she was in

some strange, kinder place. There was the blue and green of growing things,

but not any that she could identify. The smell of life and the clarity of the air

made her gasp, though.

"Dana, wait for me! I'm coming!"

There were low crystal domes of the Flowers of Life before her, and a

starlit sky with no constellation she could recognize. Somewhere there was

ethereal music that reminded her of the Cosmic Harp's, and a little girl was

dashing toward her.

"I-I'm not going anywhere," Dana said dazedly.

She was ten or so, Dana guessed, a black-haired, spritelike thing with

huge dark eyes, wearing a short, flowing garment of gold and white. Her

tiny waist was encircled by a broad belt, her wrists and throat banded by the

same redbrown leathery stuff. She wore a garland of woven Flowers of Life

in her hair, and carried another.

"Who are you?" Dana got out.

The child stopped before her. "Your sister, Dana! The other daughter of

Max and Miriya Sterling! I was born a long, long way from Earth, and I've

come to warn you. Oh, Mother and Father will be so glad to know I've

finally made contact with you!"

"I'm glad, too," Dana said haltingly, praying it wasn't just some

hallucination. "But what are you supposed to warn me about?"

"The spores, Dana."

This, even while the little girl pressed the Flower of Life into Dana's

armor-clad hands. "I've come to bring you these Flowers and to warn you

about the spores."

"Please" Dana couldn't bear it, was afraid the thought of the Flowers

and the Protoculture and the rest of it would shake her loose from this

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Vision or contact or whatever it was. "Let's not talk about that. Tell me

about you! What's your name?"

The little girl was giggling. But then she turned and raced away in the

direction from which she had come. Dana was left to yell, "Hey! Please come

back! I want to know more!"

Two more shadow-figures had appeared, a man and a woman, graceful

beings whose figures were indistinct in the way of this strange half world. A

cape billowed around the woman, and there was something familiar about

the way the man had his arm around her, two presences Dana had felt

before.

The child went running toward them, and they opened their arms to

her. As the three apparitions looked to her, Dana heard voices she knew,

speaking without speech.

The spores, Dana! Beware the spores, and the Invid!

"The-the what?" She felt dizzy. Her own memories and old tapes of

Max and Miriya Sterling told her that she was truly hearing her parents'

voices-or rather, their thoughts.

Beware the Invid! They will come in search of the spores!

She had a million things to ask them and to tell them, but the contact

seemed to be growing weaker, for when the mind-message came again, it

was faint.

Time grows short. So much has happened since our last contact with

Earth, so many astounding things! Your powers are awake now, and they

are growing! Use them cautiously; we of the Sentinels are only beginning to

understand the true nature of Protoculture.

The Sentinels? Dana wondered at the sound of the words.

And then she heard was her sister's voice. We love you, Dana! We love

you very much!

We love you very, very much, daughter, her parents added, as the

voices faded.

"Oh, I-I love you, too! And I miss you so!"

Them the shadow figures were gone, and she was left to hope they had

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heard her, as the pink petals of the Flower of Life drifted around her.

206

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I lie down at night with my children safely asleep and my dear wife

beside me and send up a-one hopes, modest-prayer to the One. And the

prayer is thanks.

But, oh! Those days! How I would love to have lived them, even if it were

only to be slain on the first!

Isaac Mandelbrot,

Movers and Shakers:

The Heritage of the Second Robotech War

Zor crouched near Dana's body, glaring up at the images of the two

surviving Robotech Masters.

He still held his weapon, but it would do him little good; Shaizan and

Bowkaz had struck in the moment Zor turned aside to shoot down the

android shock troopers they had summoned. That had been the work of

mere seconds, but in that time, as Zor stood straddling the unconscious

Dana, the Masters had recovered the last Protoculture mass and made their

escape, protected by the powers of the cap.

But they had sent back their mind-projected simulacra to deliver their

death warrant. Zor heard Dana begin to stir, but felt little relief; his hatred

of the Masters was too all-consuming for him to feel any gentler emotion.

Dana raised her head groggily, hearing the one called Shaizan saying,

"All those who stand against us shall perish! Soon we will have the Matrix,

and be all-powerful once more. Therefore, surrender to us and be spared,

Zor."

She saw the two Masters, but realized that she could see through them,

as though they were made of stained glass.

Zor threw his head back and spat, "Your perversion of the Protoculture

only proves how little you truly know about it. Do you think such things can

go unpunished? No! And I'll never rest until there has been vengeance."

Dana had hauled herself to her feet, mind still whirling with the things

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she had seen and heard in her trance. But she drew a deep breath and said,

"I'll be right behind you, Zor."

That seemed to bring him out of his seizure of blind rage. He turned

and put his hand on her shoulder. "Thank you. Thank you many times over,

Dana. For showing me kindness and...for caring for me. For helping me

become whole again, and free myself."

He smiled, but it was bittersweet, as he shouldered his weapon. "I only

wish you were safely out of here."

He indicated the compartment's hatch. "That's one barrier we could

never burn through with hand weapons, and the Masters have sealed us

in-given the ship's systemry an order through their Protoculture cap. We're

trapped."

"Are you sure? It's worth a try, anyhow." She crossed to it. "Maybe we

can short-circuit it, or something."

He was about to tell her that the Protoculture didn't work that way.

That there was no hope of countermanding the Masters' instruction to it,

when the hatch opened to their touch at the controls.

Zor Prime looked at her, open-mouthed. "By the Protoculture!" he

whispered. "Who are you?"

She shrugged. I'm only beginning to find out. In a lot of ways, we're the

same. Now, how do we find those two and stop them?"

He had the rifle off his shoulder again. "Rest assured: we will find

them."

"Musica's come!" Octavia rose from her ministrations to a dying clone,

and Allegra did the same. Already, in the Muses' minds, there were the

unheard harmonies of their triumvirate.

Musica appeared a moment later, leading the ATACs and Nova Satori

and Dennis Brown. The Muses were reunited in a three-cornered embrace.

"I'm so happy you both are still alive!" Musica said. "Many of our people

have been set adrift in space."

Bowie had come up behind her. "We've got to get out of here. The

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guards are headed this way!"

The Muses turned to their people, the three voices raised in urgent

singsong, beseeching them to get up, to follow and escape.

The phlegmatic clones didn't seem to hear, at first, but in moments the

15th troopers were tugging them upright. Dante's voice came in a roaring

counterpoint, getting more of the clones moving the way only an

experienced NCO could; he was perfectly happy frightening and

intimidating people, if it was for their own good.

Nova, too, helped roust the Masters' slaves. She no longer looked on

them as the enemy or soulless biological units; she had changed, just as the

others had changed in this last stage of the Second Robotech War. Coming

across the tiny infant clone that Dana had seen on the 15th's last foray

aboard a Master ship, she saw no one else was looking after it and so

gathered it up in her arms, calling on the adults to follow her lead.

In seconds, scores of clones who had been resigned to death were up

and active. Hope, and the example of Musica and her sisters, filled the

emptiness that had afflicted the clones when the Masters discarded them.

The patchwork Terran attack fleet moved in, deploying its combat

forces, and opened fire. A-JACs, VTs, and other combat craft raked the

mother ships with energy weapons and all the ordnance they could carry.

Triumviroids swept out to meet them, fighting with a furious disregard for

their own survival.

The Human battlecruisers let loose their volleys; missiles and cannon

blasts lit the scene. Warheads blossomed in hideous orange-red eruptions.

The Robotech Masters' Flower budshaped guns answered, filling that

volume of the void with their eerie green electric-arc effects and white-hot

volleys.

With power so low, though, the Masters couldn't afford to generate

their snowflakelike defensive fields, and so the battle was a slugging match.

The four remaining mother ships, drained of their Protoculture reserves,

were sitting ducks for the Human gunners. Pass after pass by the mecha and

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broadsides from the heavier craft inflicted heavy damage on the mightiest

machines of the Masters' Robotechnology. But what the Humans didn't

realize was that they were wasting valuable time and effort on targets of no

importance-on targets that contained only a few barely functioning

zombies.

The Masters' flagship was far more effective, taking a heavy toll on its

attackers and sustaining little damage. The Southern Cross forces, unaware

that they had been outflanked, decided to concentrate on eliminating the

other mother ships first. They would deal with the flagship once the rest of

the invasion fleet had been destroyed.

One mother ship flared, and minutes later, another, their power

systems rupturing and yielding up their remaining energy in explosions that

expanded them and rent them apart.

Another mother ship, drifting, began the long crashplunge into the

Earth's atmosphere. Mecha and heavy craft raced after, trying desperately

to shoot it to bits. The impact of an object that large could work more

damage than any other blow the Masters had yet struck; Humanity had

learned that with the SDF-1s crash, so long ago.

It was then that the first reports came through of the massive, renewed

attack on Earth itself.

The Triumviroids dropped in waves on Monument City, Fokker Base,

and a half-dozen other strategic objectives in the region of the mounds.

Southern Cross mecha and defense forces barely had time to brace

themselves before the countryside became a ghastly killing ground.

Reds whirled and swooped on their Hovercraft, strafing and spreading

death and destruction. Outnumbered, the Humans fought grimly to make

every death count, but still the uneven score mounted in the enemy's favor.

All the volunteers and final reserves went into action. The death toll

mounted and mounted.

Triumviroids met their end, too, in staggering numbers; it mattered

little to the Masters if their mecha-slaves were wiped out to the last one. The

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Matrix was the only important thing now. Neither side gave quarter or

asked it.

In his office high up in the Southern Cross headquarters, Supreme

Commander Leonard looked down on the Taming graveyard that was

Monument City.

Colonel Seward implored again, "Sir, the defense forces are simply

outgunned and outnumbered! Monument City's doomed! We have no

choice but to evacuate!"

Seward knew there was at that moment another flight of assault ships

coming in at the city from the north. It might already be too late. For some

reason, the enemy hadn't seemed to have understood that the slim white

towers were the nerve center of the Terran military. But with the enormous

volume of communications traffic now being channeled directly there, and

the obvious disposition of surviving forces to protect it, even the aliens

would realize it was a prize target.

Seward fidgeted, wanting to run. Good career moves might justify a

certain recklessness, but all the threat-evaluation computers agreed that

staying in the HQ was suicide. And Seward had no desire for a posthumous

medal, no matter how high.

But Leonard didn't seem to see things that way. He stood, bulky and

stolid as a stone, his back to the staff officer, watching as the city burned.

Even as Seward was begging for Leonard to see reason, alien sights

were ranging on the white towers. Slim, gleaming pillars suggesting

Crusaders' pennons and medieval ramparts, the HQ structures were an easy

target to spot. Targeting computer gunlock was established almost

instantly.

"Go if you want," Leonard said brusquely. "I'm staying here until this

battle is over."

It wasn't an act of bravery or loyalty. He knew he had made a terrible

211

blunder, answering the alien feint with the bulk of his forces. His hatred of

all things unearthly, the loathing burn in The terrible injuries he hall taken

in combat against the Zentraedi, had blinded him to everything but the

chance for revenge.

He seemed bigger than life to the people around him, but the damage

done him-to his body and thus to his spirit, his mind-that day of Dolza's

holocaust attack, almost eighteen years before, was beyond any healing.

From the moment when Leonard had overridden Emerson's

wait-and-see policy, when the Masters first showed up, things had gone

from bad to worse. Leonard had long since admitted to himself that Rolf

Emerson was the better strategist and tactician by far, the better general

even in terms of commanding his troops' loyalty. But-dammit! The man had

no true appreciation of the danger of these aliens, of all aliens!

Seward saw further argument was useless, and started for the door. His

rationalization was that he was carrying Leonard's last dispatch, but in fact

he was deserting his doomed post. The Southern Cross was finished.

Leonard let him go, waiting to die. Better that way, rather than to live,

being known as the man who had lost Earth to obscene monsters from

another star.

Leonard didn't have long to wait; the first salvoes hit while Seward was

still in the doorway, a massive strike that lit the sky and shook the ground.

The proud white towers of the Southern Cross were blackened, as concrete

went to powder and structural alloys melted at the peripheries. At the

centers of the hits, there was complete destruction. For Leonard, it was the

end of an inner agony that had lasted some seventeen years; for the Human

race, his death came too late.

The 15th had picked up more of the refugee clones, hundreds of them,

until Angelo Dante began wishing somebody a little more suited to the mass

escape was in charge-say, somebody who could part the Red Sea, for

instance.

But there wasn't; even Lieutenant Satori was less qualified than he to

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lead a combat operation like this. Just a big, dumb career sergeant waiting

around for his pension, he thought, who happened to get his turn in the

barrel at the wrong time. Just bad luck; drive on, ATACs!

Going back for the tanks was out of the question. The 15th had to move

onward, as fast as possible, and give their trust to luck.

"This hatch leads to an assault ship docking area," the clone who was

guiding him said, crouched on the ladderway under an oblong metal slab. "I

think it is the one you wanted."

Dante was hunkered own next to him, studying the hatch. Spread out

behind him on the ladderway and the drawbridgelike catwalks leading to it

were the murmuring, frightened clones marked by the Masters for mass

extermination. Nova and the rest of the 15th were spread out through the

crowd, trying desperately to keep the people from panicking.

People, Dante sighed to himself. Hell, no denying it: that was the way

the ATACs had come to think of them. And ATAC-15's line of work was not

letting innocent people be slaughtered.

Angelo gripped his idle and awkwardly changed places with the clone,

then eased the hatch up for a look. The place was empty, as far as he could

see; more to the point, there were three or four of the whiskbroom-shaped

assault ships waiting there, parked in a row. The hatchway was in a

passageway leading to the hangar deck, which was at a slightly lower level.

He couldn't believe the ships hadn't been committed to the battle, but

he didn't have time to question the gift from above. What he didn't realize

was that the combat craft ferried in from the other, abandoned mother

ships were so many that the Masters couldn't man them all with the

functioning clones and mecha left to them. Not much choice; this's the only

chance we're gonna get.

He couldn't see Sean Phillips around anywhere, though. Maybe this

wasn't the right hangar. Nevertheless, it would have to do.

Angelo knelt in firing position by the open hatch, waiting for the

snipers to smoke him. But when that didn't happen, he turned to face the

anxious clone looking up at him.

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"Get 'em all up here now, and start boarding 'em. Tell 'em to hurry, but

keep the noise down."

The word was passed. The first of the refugees began pouring up out of

the hatch and making their way, at Angelo's direction, down the passageway,

gathering in it and awaiting the run for the ships.

He looked this way and that constantly, swinging his rifle's muzzle,

even though he knew an ambush at this point would probably be the end of

it. And it would save the army at least one pension, goddammit all!

But as he tried to help people up through the hatch with one hand and

guard at all points at the same time, help arrived. Louie Nichols came up,

dark-goggled and very matter-of-fact, taking up a kneeling firing stance at

the other side of the hatch. Bowie, having sealed the lower hatches behind

them, was next, covering another field of fire, with Musica and her sister

Muses flocking after. Angelo began to feel better.

Still the clones poured in, filling the area between the deck-level hatch

and the much bigger one through which they would have to race for the

assault ships. Nova Satori emerged, still clutching the baby, but with her

pistol in the hand that held it, the other hand free to grip the ladder-well

railing. Dennis was right behind, with one of the short two-hand weapons.

Hundreds came up; Angelo was sweating not just for the time when he

could kick the hatch shut and seal it with a few shots, and get the hell out of

the mother ship, but for the moment when he could turn his problems over

to some brass hat. Anybody who wanted responsibility for this many lives

had to be some sorta egomaniacal helmet case.

He was just thinking that when he heard the mewing of alien small

arms, in the direction of the large hatch at the end of the passageway.

There wasn't much room for a stealthy approach in the bleating press

of the frightened mob, but Angelo went bulling through them, holding his

weapon high in the hope that it wouldn't be jostled and torn from his grip.

Forging his way to the front of the crowd, he noticed that Louie and the

others were doing their best to follow, but lacked his size and sheer

strength.

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The bodies of three clone refugees, two males and a female, lay dead on

the deck.

There were huge containers and crates at that end, and ledges near the

hatch. Now clone guard riflemen stood all along those, as the lights came up.

"Stay where you are!" a clone voice was saying, in that trembling

single-sideband quaver of the true Masters' slave.

Angelo heard somebody say, "Huh?" beside him, and realized that

Louie Nichols was there, somehow, swinging the sights of his rifle to cover

the left, leaving the right to Angelo, just like a drill.

"Make no move, or you will be shot." The lights brightened. A triad of

clones marched in lockstep from behind one pile of cottage-sized crates, and

Angelo couldn't even tell which one was talking-or maybe they all

were-when they right-faced and glared at the escapees. "Everyone in this

room, go back or be exterminated."

"Karno," Bowie heard Musica say. And Allegra added, "We're trapped

here."

The Muses looked at their selected mates: Karno, Darsis, and Sookol,

as alike as they could be without being one person. Musica said, "Karno,

how can you do this? We all have a right to live!"

Darsis spat, "How dare you speak of rights, you who have betrayed the

triumvirate? Traitors to our society and our way of life! All of you will return

to your appointed places immediately, or be shot down where you stand!"

The crowd let out a concerted moan at that, but they didn't withdraw.

They were creatures who knew logic-at least-thoroughly, and they saw that

there was no survival in that direction, either. The ATACs and Nova were

moved by something less subject to rational analysis, but they all stood

shoulder to shoulder.

215

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Alpha! Tact'l Armored! Corps!

Yo' ain't goin' home no more!

Yo' want comforts, yo' want millions?

Shoulda stayed wit' the civilians!

ATAC marching cadence

"No one will be leaving here," Nova pronounced the words slowly and

carefully. Bowie noticed how open the words were to several different

interpretations.

Nova patted the small bundle of the clone infant. She had tucked her

sidearm in its holster, turning her hip away from the clones' sight, but was

ready to grab it out if things came to that. Dennis was edging her way.

She was also drawing the guards' attention. She had noted that Louie

Nichols was holding a shock grenade behind his back, fiddling with it by feel

while he watched Karno and the rest, readying to toss it. Nova readied

herself to dive for cover, taking into account the fact that no harm must

come to the baby if she could help it.

"These are not your slaves!" Musica cried. "These are individuals,

whose freedom of choice has made them free of your society. Now, stand

away!"

"Then you will die, you who disrupt our lives!" With that, Karno

brought up his weapon, as did Sookol and Darsis, and opened fire. At that

moment, the young man who had acted as guide for Angelo threw himself in

front of Musica. He took the first five rounds of the firelight, all at once and

all in one tight group.

The ATACs were standing straddle-legged, firing back at almost

point-blank range, in the same second-all except for Louie, who slid the

shock grenade the guards' way and hollered, "Get back!"

Refugee clones in the first rank fell like scythed wheat, but the ATACs'

216

fire cut into the enemy guardsmens' ranks at once, and all the clones'

accuracy was lost. Enemy shots rebounded from the troopers' armor, and

the tankers laid down a suppressing fire that had the guardsmen ducking

for

The detonation of the shock grenade was like a freezeframe of the

guards' postures, lasting only a fraction of a second. Its blast sent them

somersaulting and flying, while the refugees and the Humans scuttled for

cover, and the ambushers struggled to regain the offensive.

Musica, crouched behind one structural frame, cradled to her the youth

who had guided Angelo and taken the rounds meant for her. "Why did

you...?"

"You are the soul of us all. You are the hope of us all." The eyes rolled

up in his head, showing only white, and the breath rattled from him.

She laid his head down gently, then rose and stepped back into the

passageway, into the fairway of the firelight, the various beams and bolts

and streams of discs bickering back and forth. "Karno! Stop this at once!"

Bowie, pinned down, couldn't reach her, but screamed at her to get to

cover. Karno, crouched to fire from cover, bawled, "Musica, the Micronians

have cast a spell over you!"

"That's not true! I've freely chosen a new way of life-ahh!"

There was no telling if the beam that seared her arm was from friend or

foe. She went on through locked teeth, "The truth is...we are all free beings.

With free will. And you know that!"

"You speak lies!" he shrieked. "You're bewitched!"

"Got any brilliant inspirations?" Louie asked Angelo, as they squatted

in the lee of a huge packing crate.

"We could send 'em candy and flowers an' say we won't never do it no

more," Angelo allowed, then snapped off another round. "Or, pray for a

miracle-"

Just as he was saying that, the bulkhead was punched inward, one of

the more curious coincidences of the war. It was as if one of those ancient

beer-car openers was broaching a cold one, only the opener was a

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stiff-fingered shot by a Battloid.

The Battloid, having following their transponders, peeled back the

bulkhead like wrapping paper and stood into the gap. Smoke curled around

it and the guard clones shrank back in hysteria, forgetting their attack. A

voice amplified to Olympian volume rang, "So for this you stood me up at

our rendezvous?"

"Meant to drop ya a note, Phillips," 'Dante admitted. "But I got real

distracted."

"No excuses!"

Where he might have used the towering mecha's weapons to wipe out

every enemy there, Sean instead chose to chastise them. He had seen

enough war, seen enough slaughter and, more to the point, sensed that a

few more incidental enemy KIAs wouldn't influence the outcome of things.

He had no heightened senses or Protoculture powers, just simple Human

intuition that the outcome of the war-the very core of it-had nothing to-do

with scoring a few more clone body counts.

The colossal Battloid brushed a flock of guards into a wall; most of the

others broke and ran, dropping their weapons. Among those downed was

the Guard Triumvirate.

Angelo led the refugees the other way, toward the assault ships. But

Karno reared up and spied Octavia, who had been promised to Sookol so

long ago by the Masters. She looked so like Musica.

Karno dragged himself up and dug out his sidearm, to shoot her as she

dashed by. She screamed and fell, Bowie and Musica turning back to help

her.

Sean turned his Battloid and brought up the Cyclopean foot. Even as

Bowie and Musica were carrying Octavia to cover, Karno screamed. The last

thing the clone ever saw was the bottom of the foot of the

Battloid-configuration Hovertank Bad News, 15th squad, Alpha Tactical

Armored Corps.

Bowie knelt in the lee of the alloy container while Musica sought to

comfort her sister.

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Octavia's hand caressed her cheek. "It's all right, Musica-I know my

spirit and my songs will live in you!"

"We're still...as one," Musica struggled.

"Yes, I know, though greater things are in you now, such greater things!

But to the end of space and time-we three are one...always...."

And she was dead. Bowie tugged at Musica's arm because a sudden

rush by counterattacking guards might put Musica in jeopardy before Sean's

Battloid could make them see reason and drive them back.

The counterattack was repulsed, not much of a job for a mecha that

had the firepower of an old-time armored troop. Sean's Bad News burrowed

through a bulkhead like a big, glittering badger, and opened the way for the

refugees, who went spilling into the assault ship hangar deck. "There; that

oughta do it; everybody into the troop carriers!"

As planned, the battle on and just over the planet's surface and the

decoys that were the surviving mother ships had led most of the Earth

forces away from the flagship. Those that were left were of no importance.

The Robotech Masters' last functioning mother ship closed in to execute the

final portion of its mission.

Three segmented metal appendages, like huge blind worms, extruded

themselves from the underside of the flagship and met, their completed

instrumentality throwing out a light as bright as a solar prominence. A

beam sprang down to penetrate one of the mounds below, and the second,

and the third, with zigzagging sensor bolts.

Inside the Masters' ship, engines of raw power were brought into play.

The distortions and occlusions of the Protoculture wraiths could not stand

before that raw power, and the Masters saw-at last where their target lays.

The three wraiths looked upward. Their hour was nearly sped; there

was no resisting the focused might of the mother ship.

At the touch of the Masters' might, the mound covering the SDF-1

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shuddered, then began to split open, as the Flowers of Life stirred, and the

spores bobbed upward. Rock ground against rock, and tremendous volumes

of soil were shifted with ease. The mound itself was split in half and pulled

apart by the invaders' awesome instrumentality. As the gap widened, trees,

boulders, and dirt from the mound's flat top rained down onto the wreckage

below. In the place of the relatively small opening that had been above the

Matrix garden, there appeared a rift that exposed the entire wreckage of the

SDF-1.

The guardian Protoculture wraiths released the hold they had

maintained on the spores for so long; the spores began drifting up toward

the sunlight and the winds of Earth.

The Masters, studying their operations with satisfaction, watched the

mound split open and willed their great ship to speed to it, for the

extraction of the Matrix. There was time to save enough of it to provide

them with sufficient new Protoculture to rebuild their galactic empire.

They were no longer on their floating cap, since its systemry had to be

merged with that of the ship itself for this crucial function. Instead they

stood on a circular antigrav platform, nearly at floor level. Without Bowkaz,

it was less crowded than they were used to. Shaizan held the canister with

the last mass once more, waiting for the moment when its total power must

be brought to bear.

"Soon even the Invid will not dare stand against us," Shaizan declared.

He turned to issue another order to the Scientist triumvirate, whose

members stood nearby, supervising the mission, gathered around a big

control module in the middle of the chamber.

But the opening of a hatch behind them made Shaizan and Dag whirl.

Zor Prime entered, with the clone guard they had posted held in an armlock,

his rifle aimed at them with his free hand. Dana followed, holding her

carbine.

"Masters, heed me: the moment of retribution has come. Now you pay

for all the evil you've done!" Zor Prime thundered.

220

Shaizan seemed almost sad. "Will you never understand, Zor? It is

much too late." He gestured to the screens, which showed the opened

mound, and Monument City in flames. "In moments, we will have the

Matrix back, at last. You cannot stop us."

Dana snarled, "We're not going to let you snakes have that Matrix. It's

too powerful!"

The Masters were mystified as to how Zor and the female had escaped;

it was, perhaps, some effect from the sundering of their Triumvirate, Dag

and Shaizan concluded.

Dana brought the carbine up and aimed it at the Scientist clones,

clicking off the safety. "Stop the machines."

Dovak, the triumvirate leader of the Scientists, protested, "Impossible!

They cannot be stopped now; they've been given final instructions!"

Dana decided to find out, with a few well-placed bursts into the

controls-perhaps even into the clones, if they didn't see reason. But just

then, Zor shoved her aside. Energy bolts blazed through the spot where she

had stood, splashing molten droplets and sparks from the bulkhead.

The Masters' antigrav platform was rising, and from an energy nozzle

on its underside, a stream of shots raged at the interlopers. Zor had dived

for cover, hurling the guard. against the bulkhead and the clone dropped,

stunned. Rolling, Zor fired back, and Dag clutched his midsection, slumping,

crying out in pain and hysterical fear of death.

Dana fired, too, but her shots at the weapon nozzle and the platform's

underside didn't appear to be doing much good. Then she hit a hornlike

projection, and the platform rocked, smoking and crackling with powerful

discharges, and fell back to the deck.

The platform came straight at them, and Dana and Zor threw

themselves to either side. Somehow, Shaizan, still cradling the canister to

him, gained control at the last moment and managed to leap free, before the

platform went on to plow into the Scientist clones and their control module.

They screamed, transfixed with horror, as the platform crashed down on

them and their control module ruptured, spilling out furious energy surges.

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By the time Zor and Dana got back to their feet, Shaizan was already at

another hatch, clinging to the Protoculture mass. Zor screamed, "Master,

you can't escape me!" but the tripartite hatch closed behind Shaizan.

As they were rushing to catch up, Dana heard some monitoring system

shrilling in alarm. A voice simulacrum wailed, "Warning! Warning!

Guidance systems off-line! Power systems failing! Crash alert! Impact in

three point five five units!"

Dana looked at the display maps, and saw the projected point of impact:

it looked to her like Monument City. She wasn't aware that the city had

already been shot to ruins by the Triumviroids.

"We've got to stop it, or it'll kill everyone in the city! Zor, there's got to

be a manual control system!"

He shook his head slowly. "We must get Dhaizan to release his hold

over the systemry first."

He started for the hatch with Dana sprinting along behind. "Then we

have to capture the last one alive!"

In fear of his life, Shaizan ran as he hadn't run in an age. Fright gave

him more strength that he had ever thought possible, and the pumping of

adrenaline in his system felt savage, bewilderingly primitive, after a long

sedentary life.

But he was the quarry of young people in top condition; they soon

caught up with him, in an ejection capsule access deck not far from the

bridge. Zor saw Shaizan ahead and stopped to take up a firing stance. "Stop,

I command you!"

"Zor, don't!" But before Dana could strike down the rifle barrel, Zor

fired. Shaizan dropped in a swirl of robes; somehow, the canister remained

intact.

Zor went to look down at the old man. Somehow, death had taken away

the constant anger of the Master's visage, and he was nothing but a frail,

infinitely tired-looking creature with a smoking hole in him, head pillowed

on a collar resembling the Flower of Life. How could these creatures have

lived so long and thrived on the Protoculture without understanding its

222

Shapings-without foreseeing this day?

"It's over now," Zor said, more to himself than to Dana.

"What d'you mean, 'all over'?" Dana barked. "This ship's gonna

demolish the city!"

"The Masters brought their own punishment down on themselves, by

their misuse of the Protoculture," he told her, putting a hand on each of her

armored shoulders. "And I was the instrument of that punishment,

ordained by the Shaping."

"But what about my people? It's not fair to punish them for something

they didn't do-mmmmm..."

He leaned forward to put his lips to hers. Their months locked, they

kissed for what might have been seconds or centuries. When they parted a

bit, he smiled at her tenderly, and she was astounded to see from his eyes

that

He-he loves me!

Zor had her back in his arms, was lifting her off the deck. "Do not

worry about your people, Dana. I will allow no harm to come to them."

She felt like relaxing, just letting him carry her where he would; like

going limp and simply trusting him. But some inner, independent part of

her made her start to object. Just then, she realized that he was setting her

down into the cocoon padding of an ejection capsule.

"Good-bye, Dana."

At first she had thought he was going to join her inside-that they would

cast aside the armor of war and never wear it again. And she had been

working up the self-discipline to make sure everything really was all right

before she took her own armor off, though the temptation was great.

But instead, he drew back, and she was so astounded that she sat

frozen while the hatch of the little superhard alloy sphere closed and

secured. All at once she was staring at him through a viewport. His smile

was wistful, as he made some adjustment to the locking mechanism, and it

gave a loud click. He smiled at her again, fondly but mournfully.

"Zor!" She was pounding at the viewport and trying to work the locking

223

controls, but it did no good. He disappeared from view. She was still

struggling to get free, crying, shouting his name, when the capsule gave a

lurch, moved by the transfer servos, preparing for ejection.

224

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They give you clothes, they're free with guns,

And trainin', food and lodgin',

But tell me: what career moves

Can come from bullet dodgin?

Bowie Grant,

"Nervous in the Service"

"Sarge, we're picking up some kinda we ejection capsule launch from

the mother ship," Louie Nichols reported, sitting beside Angelo at the

controls of the liberated assault ship.

Behind them, refugee clones were crowded in tightly, frightened, but

used to the discipline of the Masters and so obediently quiet. Angelo,

sweating over the controls, snapped, "So what? Maybe it's somebody makin'

their own getaway. It sure ain't a raidin' party or a Bioroid."

That was true, and it was unlikely that there were many combat forces

left in the mother ship, or that they would do the Masters much good even if

they could get to the Earth's surface. For some reason, the Bioroid-pilot

clones and other fighters of the Masters' invasion force had, according to

the transmissions the escapees were monitoring, suddenly become almost

totally ineffective. The attacking enemies' ability to fight, their very will to

fight, seemed to have simply vanished, and Earth's ragtag defenders were

counterattacking everywhere, a complete rout.

Something occurred to Angelo. "Get on the military freqs and find

somebody who's in charge," he told Louie. "Tell 'em we got an airlift of

refugees comin' down, and to hold their fire. Tell 'em...tell 'em these people

here ain't the enemy."

Louie threw him a strange smile. "Hear, hear, Angie."

He felt Bowie, who stood behind him, clap him on the back, and felt

Musica's light touch h at his shoulder. Then Angelo pronounced a few

choice army obscenities, the ship having wandered off course. He was no

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fly-boy and even the coaching of experienced clone pilots didn't make it

much easier to herd the alien craft along.

"Everybody keep still and lemme drive," Angelo Dante growled.

Within the mother ship, Zor's red Bioroid stomped back toward the

command center, its discus pistol clutched in its gargantuan metal fist.

Below the ship, the mounds hove into view.

I cannot undo the damage I've done. Across a hundred reincarnations;

across a hundred million light-years light-years. And yet: I'll make what

restitution I can...

The Invid would not have Earth.

Below, the Protoculture wraiths sensed Zor Prime's coming, all in

accordance with the Shaping that had given the original Zor his vision and

set the course of the Robotech Wars, so long ago and far away.

The wraiths summoned up the strength that was left to them, for their

final deed. The rainbow-rings of the Matrix were dimmer now, but still

dazzling, still playing their haunting song. As the wraiths tapped its power,

the Matrix flared brighter.

Dana's efforts to contact Zor with the capsule's little commo unit had

drawn no response. Now she blinked at the bright sunlight, as the hatch

opened and the fragrant air of Earth drifted in.

The capsule had landed at the cress of a low foothill across the plain,

just within view of the SDF-1's gravesite. She already knew from the

capsule's crude monitoring equipment that the mother ship had followed

her down through the atmosphere, headed for the mounds.

Dana drew herself out of the capsule and saw the five mile length of the

Masters' last starship come in to hover over the resting place of the SDF-1.

"Zor. Don't-please!"

There was no other way.

226

Zor's red raised its discus pistol. The destruction of the mother ship

directly over the mounds would ensure that the Flowers of Life and their

spores would be completely obliterated, and spare the Human race the

slaughter and ruin of an Invid invasion.

Some spores had already drifted free of the mound, though

instruments weren't clear as to why that hadn't happened before; there were

completely unique and unprecedented Protoculture aberrations down there,

and no time to analyze them. But that didn't matter now. The radius of the

blast would get all of them.

Now!

The red fired its pistol at carefully selected targets; it was easy for him

to find the vulnerable points in the systemry the original Zor had conceived.

In moments the entire ship was a daisy chain of ever increasing explosions,

ripping open its hull, gathering toward that final, utter detonation.

He thought he would be swallowed up by grief in those last moments,

to see only the ghosts of the victims, and the shadows of the suffering he

had caused. Unexpectedly, though, Zor Prime's last thoughts were of the

thing that had made this last incarnation so different from the rest, and let

him free himself.

Dana, I love you!

Dana shrieked at the exploding ship, knowing it would do no good,

until the explosions reached a crescendo. "Stop! Zor, there must be a better

way-"

Then she threw herself to shelter behind the grounded, armored

capsule and wept, face buried in her arms.

In the mounds, the wraiths gathered all their remaining energy, and

contained the explosive force of the mother ship.

Zor's calculations were entirely correct, insofar as they went. The

self-destruction should have vaporized the mounds and wiped out the curse

that was the blooming Flowers, the drifting spores.

227

But the Shaping of the Robotech Wars had been set long before. Earth

was to be saved from destroying itself in a Global Civil War and, at the same

time, serve as the focal point that would let a tremendous wrong be righted.

The time for the righting of that wrong had not yet come to pass, though the

stage was now set.

And so the wraiths dampened the blast of the exploding starship. The

Matrix flared like a nova, sang a single piercing note, and released all its

power upward. The wraiths used it to muffle the blast in an unimaginable

contest of warring forces, and won.

Still, the mother ship was blown to fragments and, even as Zor Prime

soared to a higher plane of existence, freed at last of the cycle of crime and

guilt in which he had been caught since his first terrible transgression, the

fragments began to fall.

Even a small piece of the mother ship was enormous, and not all of the

explosive force had been contained. Housings and armor and structural

members pelted the plain and the mounds, raising huge puffs of dust,

opening the mound even further; the explosive force caught the rising

spores and sent them high and wide, to ride the winds of the world. Ripping

down into the garden that had been the last Matrix, the blasts freed a

hundred thousand times as many more, and sent them wafting, lifting

petals and even whole plants, gusting them forth.

The winds that came from the Protoculture detonation behaved unlike

normal air currents. It was as if they had been given a purpose, dispersing

the spores, sowing them, taking many into upper airstreams that would

bear them far-would seed the face of the planet with them.

The wraiths looked upon their work and upon the Earth that the

Shaping had made their home for so long. They had been given life, of a sort,

by the Protoculture, taking power from the masses within the wreckage of

SDF-1, SDF-2, and Khyron's downed battlecruiser.

But now their part in the Shaping was over, and the Matrix's last

energy was used up; it was gone forever. They began their return to

228

nothingness, making sure that the residual Protoculture around them

underwent conversion to the Flowers of Life.

Dana watched the drifting pink petals, the swirling spores. The Invid

are coming! Her parents' warning was right, and nothing could stop this

species that even the Masters held in dread.

Three shadows loomed up out of the mounds, growing, but becoming

more and more tenuous as they did. Dana, her senses expanded by her

exposure to the Matrix and even more so by the jolt from the canister

containing the Masters' last mass, knew that the phantasms would do her

no harm.

She was so preoccupied, thinking about her family, about the Masters'

words and Zor's, that she didn't hear the stealthy footsteps behind her,

covered as they were by the moan of the winds. The projectile took her at

the base of the skull, where her armor offered no protection. She went

down.

"You saw them!" an eerie voice said. It sounded Human but had some

of the sepulchral emotionlessness of a Robotech Master's. "Without

instruments or sensors, you saw the Guardians of the Mounds!"

She lay on her side, dazed, unable to move though she was fully

conscious. She realized she had been shot with some kind of paralyzing

agent. A moment later, two peculiar men came into view.

One she recognized, and the sight of him almost stopped her heart.

Zand, heir to Dr. Lang's secrets. He was wearing gleaming angelic robes,

shiny metallic stuff, cut somewhat in the fashion of the Robotech Masters'

monkish ones, and his collar was shaped like the Flower of Life. That alone

told Dana what was happening, and the danger she was in.

Zand had gone completely insane and saw her as his passport to divine

powers.

Along with Zand was a stout, vacant-faced little man with a pencil

mustache, so different from the pictures in the history books that Dana

didn't recognize him until Zand turned to say, "Russo! Bring the

equipment." The scientist tossed aside the tranquilizer gun indifferently.

229

Russo scuttled away. Dana knew there was no aircraft or surface

vehicle around; she had seen none on landing. Had they simply been sitting

out here, waiting? She couldn't figure out how Zand had foreseen that she

would be where she was. Perhaps his powers were already greater than hers.

Russo returned with devices like nothing either Earth's

Robotechnology or the Masters' had ever produced. It seemed to be all

crystal nimbuses and rainbow whorls, humming faintly like the Matrix.

Zand smiled like a fiend. "Much more compact than anything you'll

have seen even in the mother ships, I'll bet. Those were crude toys

compared to this."

He was assembling it in some fashion she couldn't quite follow. "I've

had plenty of time to study the Matrix, you see. Years!" The apparatus

seemed to shift and fold, as if it were moving among dimensions. Its aura

had a fractal look to it.

Zand laughed a bit. "The Masters and the Human race, destroying each

other over a mere Matrix! When the real crux of the matter is you,

Dana-and your Destiny, which is to yield up your powers to me!"

He reached out to touch something like a node of pure light against her

forehead. It clung there, and she felt an utter cold, even through the

numbness. "Your powers will grow. They will see beyond the Protoculture!

They will be matchless! But," his mouth flattened grimly, "they'll do all that

as mine, once I've taken them from you."

He looked around. "Where is the Protoculture cell?"

When Russo gave him a blank look, Zand lashed out and sent him

sprawling. Russo crawled and flopped away, whimpering like a whipped

hound, to return with a prism perhaps a foot long, slender and glowing.

Dana fought against her paralysis, but couldn't shake it or defy it. Zand

had planned it well. He had foreseen this day with powers of his own. As he

took the Protoculture cell and prepared to shift Dana's gifts to himself, she

had a moment to wonder: what, then, of her Vision, the Phoenix?

Her own life, she knew, was over. Zand was about to take something

that was so much her essence that she would die like a withered husk

230

without it.

He had mated the prism with the rest of his strange device. "So much

Protoculture in one place," he smiled. "It took a long time to gather, even for

me, diverting military supplies. But it's the power I need to draw your

powers from you to me."

The device shone brighter, Russo was groveling, crouched with his face

in the sand. Zand's strange voice was exalted. "First the power of the

Protoculture fills me, then the powers of Dana Sterling!" The light was

unbearable.

Zand seemed to swell and grow. Dana feared what the Universe was in

for, with Zand striding across it like a god.

Just then she heard a bark.

Polly! In her paralysis, she couldn't even say it.

The Pollinator came traipsing up and sat down, head canted to one side,

tongue lolling, to consider Zand. He barely registered the XT creature,

though, because something was terribly wrong with him.

His enlarged form was vibrating. Soon he was contorting, convulsing,

his device flashing like a lighthouse in an earthquake. Russo had thrown

himself flat, covering his head with his hands, wailing.

Dana had a sense that the last of the wraiths was vanishing away. And

with them, the last of the Matrix, as well as the last of the Protoculture in

the area, was being transformed.

Zand voiced a howl of agony and fright so ghastly that she was to

remember it all her days. The light engulfed him. Still the Pollinator sat and

watched. The Protoculture in the Matrix had been changed to the Flowers of

Life...

Perhaps it was the discharge of so much Protoculture. In any case,

Dana felt the world slipping away, and saw the old Vision once again, the

Phoenix. Only, this time she saw Zor, too. It was given to her, in that trance,

to know why the Robotech Wars had come to be, and what the ultimate

outcome was-just what the Phoenix was.

Just as the blinding light faded, Dana found that she could move a little.

231

Either Zand had underestimated the dosage or her expanded powers were

helping. Dana, Polly, and the whining Russo gazed on what had appeared in

Zand's place.

In a way, he got his wish, was Dana's fist coherent thought.

There had never been, nor eves would be again, one to match it, the

biggest Flower of Life that ever was. It stood rooted in the sand, spreading

its petals, a coral-colored tripartite beauty. Of Zand there was no sign except,

perhaps, in the shape and detail of the central blossom; it might only be her

imagination, or it might be that she saw his face there.

Of his fantastic device, nothing remained.

She found she hall the strength to rise, but came only to her knees,

swaying. She heard a cry and looked up to see Russo, shrieking and

screaming, running off down the hill like a crazed ape. He was headed

directly out into the wastelands; she let him go.

Dana dragged one foot to her, until she was on one knee, the spores

drifting about her. The odd thought struck her that perhaps Zand's fate was

some lesson from the Protoculture, some chastening, to balance the power

she had been granted.

She found herself humming, then realized it was a seventeenth-century

hymn her father had loved and her Zentraedi mother had approved of as

holding much and proper wisdom; so Rolf Emerson had told her, when

Emerson taught it to Bowie and Dana. As a little girl she had taught it to

Konda, Bron, and Rico, and they had insisted that what was in the words

and the tune was nothing less than universal truth:

Lead kindly, Light,

Amid the encircling gloom

Lead Thou me on,

The night is dark and I am far from home

Lead Thou me on,

Keep Thou my feet

I do not ask to see the distant scene

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One step enough for me

233

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Now our slaves, the Robotech Masters, are passed away

Now all our Protoculture balefires burn low

Now the Shapings turn; we surrender the stage to Invid and Human

Our cold light leaves the Universe

We see at the last that

Those who remain behind know no fear of the darkness

And we ourselves learn

What it is to weep

Death song of the Robotech Elders

Dana gathered Polly under one arm and walked tiredly back to the

escape capsule. Russo, already a mile away, was barely visible as a mad

figure capering and lurching into the wastes. The Pollinator licked her face.

A thin whine of engines caught her attention, and she looked up to see

an assault ship coming in at her, flying unsteadily, seemingly about to go

into a nosedive.

She threw herself flat, expecting the worst, but somehow the vessel

righted itself enough for a jouncing set-down right near her. She

remembered that she was unarmed, but she had no place to run and was too

tired and battered to feel fear-thought that, perhaps, she would never know

it again.

But when the assault craft's hatches opened, instead of letting forth

attack teams of Triumviroids, it yielded her own 15th squad, along with

Nova, Musica, and a bunch of clones.

"Damn it, Phillips!" Angelo Dante was seething. "I'd like to see you

make a better landing with an XT ship! We walked away from it, didn't we?"

"All I said was," Sean replied in a blase voice, "that I could do better

with boxing gloves on. Hey, Dana! You made it!"

The refugees stayed back, but her squadmates and Musica and Nova

234

clustered around her, along with Marie Crystal and Dennis Brown. She

blinked at him. "How did you find me?"

"Picked up your voice transmissions from the escape capsule," Angelo

said. "But then, all of a sudden, the engines and all the systems quit. We had

to land on emergency power."

"Ya shoulda let Marie and Dennis take over," Sean snorted.

But Dana was shaking her head. "No, Angie couldn't help what

happened. It's the Protoculture-there was nothing he could do." Angelo

looked at her strangely, not used to having her defend him.

There were still Protoculture power supplies on Earth, she knew,

outside the radius of effect of the wraiths' transformation. Enough to

animate mecha for a transition period. But there would be no new Matrices,

no new sources.

"The war's over, Lieutenant," Bowie told her happily. "The enemy

mecha stopped fighting, and the clones just want peace."

"That's...that's great, Bowie." He didn't understand why she sounded

like she was about to start bawling. People noticed the Pollinator, but

hesitated to ask about it. They saw the huge Flower that had been Zand, but

they were used to seeing the triad plants by now, and even such a huge one

was far down on the list of topics of discussion.

"Where's Zor?" Musica inquired timidly, fearing to hear the answer.

Dana pointed to where the mushroom cloud of spores and petals still

rose up and up, funneled into the higher atmosphere, sent on their

appointed way by those strange winds. "He died trying to save Earth."

Musica was shaking her head slowly, looking at the pink petals and tiny

spores that filled the sky like a blizzard. "But in vain. Now the Invid come.

Oh poor, poor Zor!" Bowie slipped his armored arm around her.

Nova drew a deep breath and declared, "Well, then! We've got to get

back and report to whoever's in interim command! We have defenses to set

up, plans to make-" She looked a little funny acting military with the infant

still in her arms.

But Dana was shaking her head, too. "You do what you have to. I'm

235

through with war." She already saw where her new course lay.

She had beheld something greater than herself, greater than the

Human race or any other corporeal race. She understood at last the Vision

that had filled her dreams all her life. She knew that there was no way to

oppose or derail the Shaping, though there was much more suffering and

strife ahead. She recalled that magnificent, infinitely sad Phoenix of racial

transfiguration, and the recollection took away some of her sorrow.

"What d'you mean? You think you can hide from what's coming?" Nova

snapped. "There's nowhere to run, Dana." The 15th and the others were

looking at her worriedly, too, afraid that what she had been through had

pushed her over the edge.

"What's going to happen on Earth will go beyond armies, beyond

Protoculture," she told them calmly. "The next Robotech War will be the

last, but I've had enough. I'm going to find my parents, and my sister.

They're with a group that includes Admiral Hunter and Admiral Hayes,

who've parted ways with the original SDF-3 expedition. They're trying to

establish a new, positive force, the Sentinels. I'm joining them."

Everybody was babbling at once, but Angelo Dante held stage center by

dint of his overwhelming voice. "Even if you weren't crazy, Dana, there's no

way to get there! All the Robotech Masters' starships were blown to

smithereens, and Earth ain't got no more." He looked toward the flaming

remains of Monument City and Fokker Base. "And ain't likely to for a long,

long time."

The Pollinator let out a playful yip and he reached out unconsciously to

pet the thing, barely aware that Polly was there.

Dana puzzled for a microsecond, but her new powers offered up the

answer at once, like some unfailing databank. "Before too long, a senior

officer named Wolfe will arrive with another expedition, carrying word from

the SDF-3, like Major Carpenter's ships did.

"By then, I'll be ready with the fuel and charts and everything else I

need to take one of his ships and find my family and the others. Any of you

who want to come are welcome."

236

They didn't have to ask if she meant to get the starship by legal means;

the world was in ruins and all chains of command shattered. All the military

certainties were swept away.

And, somehow, nobody thought to scoff at her, not even the aloof,

skeptical Nova. The way back to what they had known was shut to them

forever; within seconds they were all telling her she could count them in. All

save one.

"Wish you the best of luck," he said, then shrugged a little. "You follow

your own instincts, Dana, but somehow I figure my place is here. I think

Earth's gonna need me."

She accepted that, knew that special knowledge was given where it was

needed, and that she was far from unique in that regard. "If it's what you

want, Louie."

Louie Nichols gave his patented clever-funny smirk. "There's still a lot

of things I want to know, and I can only find 'em out here. And besides,

well-don't laugh!-but maybe I've got my own part to play." He adjusted the

big, dark tech goggles self-consciously.

Nobody laughed. There would be months, perhaps years, of

preparation yet-in a world half in ruins-and only Dana had any coherent

idea of what was to come. But somehow there was, on the crest of the little

hill, a feeling very much like what the sundering of the Round Table must

have felt like.

ATAC squad 15 (Hovertanks) turned to get the refugees formed up for

the long hike back to Monument City; the assault ship would never rise

again. There were already the pairings of Bowie and Musica, Sean and

Marie. And now, Nova Satori stayed close to Dennis Brown; the looks they

exchanged spoke eloquently.

Dana, sitting on a rock, was stripping off the armor that she hoped

never to have to wear again. The spores still drifted everywhere. A sudden

loneliness had come over her; there was so very much to do yet, and no one

could possibly share her knowledge and her responsibilities-no one could

ever understand her longing. She let go a long breath.

237

Something blocked the low, orange rays of the sunset from her. Angelo

Dante stood there, stretching and scratching, having ditched his own armor,

wearing a pack made up of most of the usable things he had managed to

scare up in the assault ship. The weight of it didn't seem to bother him. He

was adjusting his rifle sling.

He didn't seem to have a care in the world. "Lieutenant-Dana-you're

still callin' the shots. I got 'em ready; you move 'em out."

Before she knew it, she was on her feet, arms thrown around him.

About her had spun the symmetries and vectors of the Second Robotech

War; she alone had the powers of mind that would let a leader perform the

job she had to do now. But her nineteenth birthday was still three weeks

and three days away.

Angelo patted her back and spoke more softly than she had ever heard

him. "There, there, now, ma'am: we can't all be sergeants. But as officers go,

I've seen worse than you. Dana, all we need is someone to show us the way."

She knew he didn't mean the way to Monument; the flames would do

that. She surprised herself as much as him by pulling his head down to her

and kissing Angelo Dante hard.

Then she let him go, took the sidearm from his belt and stalked off to

the front of the disorderly mob while he was still recovering and turning to

glower at the ATACs, who had seen what happened but kept discreet

silence.

Dana saw that the 15th had gotten all the emergency supplies and

lights, water and rations from the assault ship and even from her own little

escape capsule. She tucked Angelo's pistol into her belt and noted with

approval the order of march, weakened or older refugees surrounded by

stronger ones who could help at need.

Not that she thought there would be much call for it; the route was

pretty straightforward and unobstructed, and the clones who had been so

lethargic before now seemed somehow more vital.

She was about to call for a start when there was a little yipping sound

238

nearby. Dana had put Polly down while stripping off her armor; she had

assumed that he had disappeared. But he was practically sitting on her feet.

"Polly. In for the distance, are you, hmm?"

The Pollinator showed her a red postage stamp of tongue. She looked

back to see that the 15th had the refugees formed up for the march. Angelo

winked and gave her a look she hadn't seen from him before. She wondered

whether or not she would, at some point, return it; she had a feeling she

might.

Later.

First Lieutenant Dana Sterling, 15th squad, Alpha Tactical Armored

Corps, gave hand and voice signals, and all the rest began moving. The

Pollinator fell in to waddle along beside.

ATACs and TASCs, GMP and clone refugees followed her down the

slope and the Pollinator capered around her feet, as darkness came across

the sky. They looked for her to point the way.

End

RTUCN.COM

239

Document Outline

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Before the Invid Storm

By Jack McKinney 1996

To supporters and critics met on the Internet: Todd Hill, Captain Harlock, PeterWW, Ethan P2144, Mondo Mage, Mad Mike, Miriya, Skull Leader, Ceej, and Breetai 13, among numerous others.

AUTHOR'S NOTE

The definition of Protoculture that appears as the epigraph to Chapter Three paraphrases an anonymous posting that appeared on both alt.tv.robotech and AOL.sf.television.robotech. The choices of an Ikazuchi Command Carrier for Carpenter and a modified Garfish for Wolff were by consensus. The story itself grew from suggestions by Michael Riccardelli and Bill Spangler.

For historians, this book is meant to follow #9 of the original Robotech adaptations, and, as I see it, bridges the last gap in the series. That is not to say, however, that there aren't stories to tell about Zor, the Zentraedi, the Global Civil War, Macross Island, and the aftermath.

My work, in any case, is completed. So, a final thanks to "HAL"; Carl Macek; Tatsunoko Production Co., Ltd.; Harmony Gold; Comico, Eternity and Academy Comics; Palladium and Donning Books; Del Rey Books; Risa Kessler; Ellen Key Harris; Steve Saffel; and everyone who read, wrote, reviewed, and retaliated.

CHAPTER ONE

As a species enslaved to time, we are wont to package history in tidy bundles. And so we find ourselves at the mercy of commentators who speak of First, Second, and Third Robotech Wars. And we are forced to listen to those same voices obsess about the generation of Henry Gloval, the generation of Rick Hunter, and the generation of Dana Sterling . . . When, in my humble opinion, there was only the War that began with the arrival of the Zentraedi and ended with the departure of the Invid; and only one generation that lived through it: the generation of the lost.

Jacob Remy, Robotech

Misa Yoshida sipped green tea while the Robotech Masters' flagship fell to Earth, the whole of its starboard side aglow. A swarm of Logans and aged Veritechs trailed in seemingly slow-motion pursuit, like wrathful wasps spilled from some unseen orbital nest. Missiles of every conceivable type tore from the pylons and launchers of the reconfigurable fighters, fires blossoming against the instrument-studded backbone of the holed and deteriorating battlewagon. Silent explosions, both surface and internal, hurled building-size chunks of slagged alloy into Earth's already debris- littered atmospheric envelope. Some of the pieces struck and obliterated entire squadrons of Southern Cross mecha, but the chase continued unabated.

Veteran pilots of the First Robotech War could recall the devastation wreaked by the SDF-1 during its gradual dive to the surface, thirty-three years earlier. And the flagship—ravaged by fire and beckoned by gravity— was twice the size of that uninvited end-of-the-century visitor.

The digital feed from the robot news cameras was superb. Misa could almost believe that she was witnessing the scene through a viewport on one of the orbital weapons platforms, rather than watching it on wallscreen in the comfort of her spacious apartment in underground Tokyo. At twenty-

two, she had only been alive for the catastrophic conclusion of the war against the Zentraedi, but she had often screened archival video of their attack on Macross Island, various encounters between the SDF-1 and the ships of Breetai's fleet, and, of course, the battle against the alien armada. Granted, scant footage had survived the Rain of Death, but nothing she had seen rivaled what the War Channel had been presenting since the arrival of the Robotech Masters, a year earlier.

Sometimes Misa found herself concerned that she didn't know what to do about the emotional desensitizing wrought by her hours and hours of viewing. A year ago she had been crying herself to sleep every night, but lately it seemed as if the war was taking place on a different world. Change channels and you could still find movies, sitcoms, sumo-bot wrestling, and exercise infomercials. In large part, that was because much of the war had been fought in space, and there was little any Earthbound citizen could do but support the efforts of the Army of the Southern Cross and shed nightly tears for the dead. In fact, most of the world was eager to perpetuate the illusion that what was happening above would have no impact on life below. From the start, it had been assumed that the city targeted by the Masters would reap the whirlwind. While sovereign nation-states like Brasília, Mexico, and Rome had not been ignored by the Masters' weaponry, Monument City—in the Northlands—had taken the brunt of their ire. Headquarters of the United Earth Government, the Army of the Southern Cross, and the Global Military Police, Monument was without doubt the most important city in the world and arguably the most prosperous, though by no means the most populous. It also had the distinction of being the closest city to the war memorial that was thrice-born Macross, whose three Human-made buttes marked the resting places of the SDF-1 and -2, and the cruiser that had carried the Zentraedi warlord, Khyron Kravshera, to his death. And—as with the Zentraedi themselves—the SDF-1 had once been the property of the Masters, dispatched from their grasp by a renegade

scientist named Zor.

Still, no one could explain why Tokyo, of all places, had escaped attack.

Perhaps it was simply that the largely underground city hadn't offered much of a target for the Masters' laser cannons and lesser batteries. Or perhaps the Masters were under the impression that by sparing Tokyo they were sparing the life of Dr. Lazlo Zand, with whom they had been in brief contact three years earlier, and were unaware that Earth's chief Protoculturist had been relocated to Monument.

Whichever the case, Tokyo's exclusion from the war had only heightened Misa's sense of guilt; and so she kept the wallscreen on-line day and night, in the spirit of remote participation—to remain, if nothing else, informed about the war.

And just now the war was being brought down to Earth.

"We take you to the outskirts of Monument City," a news reporter was saying, "for an update on the latest in a series of ruinous developments . . ."

Misa set her tea aside and leaned toward the wallscreen.

Thousands of people were fleeing Monument—and with good cause, since a sizable portion of the city was in flames. Bioroids, the saucerlike mainstay of the Masters' fleet, were dropping in waves on Monument and on nearby Fokker Aerospace Base, clearing a path for the flagship, which was descending toward Macross's triad of mounds. Two towns at the outermost perimeter of the city had already vanished in a thermonuclear inferno.

The War Channel's use of the phrase "live from Monument City" struck Misa as ill-advised.

"And this just in . . . We have now confirmed earlier reports that Major General Rolf Emerson had been taken prisoner by the Masters. It now appears that the chief of staff of the Ministry of Terrestrial Defense has died inside the Masters' flagship, of wounds sustained aboard the Tristar, during yesterday's counter-offensive . . ."

She hugged herself and swung away from the screen, tears welling in her eyes as she stared out the window at subterranean Tokyo. She knew Emerson—indirectly, as it happened—through Southern Cross fly-boy Terry Weston. Terry had been Misa's roommate and constant though much older

lover, until his recent reenlistment in the Tactical Armored Space Corps and his upside transfer.

More than the War Channel, it was Terry who had kept Misa and her closest friends apprised of the ASC's small victories against the Masters. These were victories that owed much to the efforts of the 15th Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, an elite Hovertank unit, which had engaged the enemy in space and on the ground, and on at least two occasions had infiltrated the enemy flagship itself. In command of the 15th was none other than Dana Parino Sterling, who, as well as being famous as Rolf Emerson's ward and the only offspring ever to result from a Human and Zentraedi mating, had also been a previous—and much younger—lover of Terry's.

At times, even Terry hadn't been able to separate the misinformation from the disinformation, but he had relayed to Tokyo whatever scuttlebutt reached his ears. For example, that the Global Military Police had managed to insert an espionage operative among the clone population of the Masters' ships. And that the Masters—until recently—had been tiptoeing around Monument City because of some Protoculture-manufacturing device concealed inside the SDF-1. The latest rumor to come down the well was that the Masters had issued an ultimatum to Supreme Commander Leonard that humankind either abandon Earth, or find itself caught in a war between the Masters and their enemies, the Invid.

If anyone could have negotiated an accord with the aliens, it would have been Rolf Emerson, Dana Sterling's guardian. And now Emerson was dead.

Tears coursing down her cheeks, Misa gazed absently at the huge fiber- optic display screen on the wall of the neighboring residential tower. The telepresence known as EVE had once dominated that and other screens, but EVE was long gone, gone with Zand and his Protoculture research facility, from which Zand's conversations with the Masters had taken place. With nothing but advertisements running on the screens ever since, was it any wonder that Misa preferred to stay tuned to the War Channel?

Moth to a flame, she returned her attention to the news . . .

Dead, too, by all accounts, were Anatole Leonard and Chairman Wyatt Moran. Word had it that Leonard, the Supreme Commander of the Army of the Southern Cross, had blundered definitively at the end, and, by rejecting Emerson's plea to consolidate all ground-based forces, had allowed the Masters' flagship to slip through Monument's defenses.

Cameras positioned near the Macross memorial relayed a dazzling close-up of the spade-fortress, as three segmented appendages extruded themselves from the ship's underside. From each appendage came a zigzagging beam of light as bright as a solar prominence, which cleaved the tallest of the mounds, displacing avalanches of trees, boulders, and dirt from its flat top, ultimately exposing the headless corpse of the SDF-1 itself. The beams intensified and merged, and more of the dirt and debris that had been heaped on the Super Dimensional Fortress fell away or was incinerated.

But just when it was beginning to look as if the Masters were intent on levitating—if not resurrecting—the fortress, the flagship abruptly powered down, tipped to one side, and exploded.

Then something even more unexpected occurred: the explosion appeared to arrest itself. Misa thought that she had inadvertently activated the wallscreen's replay-and-pause function, but not a moment later a nova flared at the center of the cleaved mound and a shaft of refulgent energy shot upward from the SDF-1, engaging and somehow dampening the blast of the exploding starship.

Dampening, but not entirely containing the burst.

There was no way to stabilize the satellite-relayed image now. The ground was shaking with the force of an earthquake, and enormous fragments of housings, armor, and structural members were pelting the two standing mounds and the surrounding plain that had once been Lake Gloval. Atomized, the SDF-1 disappeared in what at first seemed to be a storm of swirling dust particles, but in close-up looked more like seeds or spores. Spores, and more: petals, leaves, flowers, entire plants—sucked upward and sent wafting in every direction, as if being sown by the explosion itself.

Misa gaped at the wallscreen, not knowing what to make of the sight. She reached a trembling hand for her cup of green tea and raised it to her lips. Had the Earth been saved—rescued one final time by the very ship that had started it all? Or had something more sinister than defeat been visited on the world?

Dana Sterling marched bravely at the head of the crowd, the side arm she had filched from Angelo Dante tucked into her broad leather belt, Polly the XT pollinator gamboling at her feet. She felt ravaged in every part of herself, burned raw, inside and out. Rolf Emerson, Leonard, and Moran— dead. The afternoon made colder by strange winds, born of the destruction of the Masters' flagship and the SDF-1 mound. The sky shrouded by black smoke from the funeral pyre that had been Monument City . . .

Behind her marched the rest of the 15th ATAC—Angelo, Bowie, Sean, and Louie—along with Cosmic Unit commanders Marie Crystal and Dennis Brown; Global Military Police lieutenant Nova Satori; Musica, Mistress of the Cosmic Harp; and the two hundred or so alien clones the 15th had rescued from the Masters' flagship.

In the east hung a great roiling cloud of spores and petals that had been funneled into the upper atmosphere by the destroyed flagship. Dana had come to think of the mushroom cloud as a transfer station for the seedlings of the Flower of Life, a place of penultimate appointment where they hung until the winds dispersed them worldwide. The physical and spiritual foodstuff of the Invid, the Flowers of Life were harbingers of Earth's next cataclysm.

To many it would appear that Zor Prime had died for nothing, having sacrificed his life to prevent the Masters from retrieving the Protoculture Matrix hidden by his namesake aboard the SDF-1. But Dana had been granted a glimpse of a deeper truth—or at least she thought she had. Mirroring the chaotic dance of the spores overhead, images swirled in her mind, though she couldn't say which were the by-products of real events and which were flashbacks of hallucination.

Her recollection of those final moments aboard the flagship were nothing less than dreamlike. The plummeting ship . . . Zor Prime's assassination of the Master named Shaizan . . . Zor Prime's final words to her. "They brought punishment down on themselves through their misuse of the Protoculture, and I am the instrument of that punishment, ordained by the Shaping."

The Shaping. Over the years she'd heard the term bandied about by the disciples of Dr. Emil Lang and Lazlo Zand, both of whom had turned Robotechnology into a kind of religion, with Protoculture as its demiurge. But to hear the word from Zor Prime's lips . . . Was he crazy at the end, she wondered, or merely a victim of the Protoculture?

Only moments earlier, on the flagship, as a consequence of touching a canister of the Protoculture, Dana had had her own fling with madness: a vision of sorts, fashioned of images lifted from events of the past year, commingled with others whose origins she couldn't explain.

She recalled a green field, lush with the Flowers of Life, surrounded by hills and vales—though only her Southern Cross body armor and the distant, windblasted crags gave any hint that she was on Earth. Dark, cloaked figures had shown her a youthful image of herself and had intimated that she belonged to a triumvirate of clones, like those the Masters had created on Tirol.

She had rejected the suggestion, even if it wasn't far off the mark. She was, after all, half Zentraedi, and that race of giant warrior clones bad also been created by the Masters. And, yes, there were many times when she had tried to deny her ancestry, in the interest of fitting in. But in the hallucination, rejecting the alien side of herself had landed her in a bleak landscape, among skulls and bones and the ash piles of ten thousand cremations. Only to be rescued from her exile by a black-eyed sprite of a girl, who was wearing a short, flowing garment of gold and white, cinched at the waist by a broad belt. A garland of woven Flowers of Life in her hair, the sprite had introduced herself as the other child of Max and Miriya.

Dana's sister.

"Oh, Mother and Father will be so glad to know that I've finally made contact with you," she had said.

And Dana could recall thinking, Finally?

Around them were low crystal domes, and arching overhead was a purple sky hung with unrecognizable constellations. Faint music filled the air, reminiscent of the ethereal strains that emanated from Musica's Cosmic Harp. The sprite pressed a bouquet of Flowers into Dana's hands and hurried away to join two shadowy figures that had appeared on the scene.

Time grows short, one, or perhaps both of them, had sent to Dana without speaking. So much has happened since our last contact with Earth, so many astounding things. Your powers are awakened now, and they are growing. Use them cautiously. We of the Sentinels are only beginning to understand the true nature of Protoculture.

Okay. She had known about the Sentinels since Major John Carpenter's bumbling return from Tirol, months earlier. But was she supposed to accept that the hallucination's two shadows were her parents, who had apparently thrown in with that ragtag band of alien freedom fighters? Sounded like more of that nonsense about the Shapings. Even so, the sprite had given voice to a warning that was still ringing in Dana's ears. "Beware the spores, Dana. Beware the spores and the Invid!"

Dana had still been in the throes of the Protoculture-induced vision when Zor Prime had kissed her, scooped her up in his arms, and sealed her inside an ejection capsule, like she was some Lisa Hayes Hunter surrogate. Astounded by his actions, she sat frozen while he had secured the latch of the little, superhard alloy sphere and tasked it for launch. "I will allow no harm to come to your people," he had assured her.

But Dana had wondered during her slow descent to Earth, had Zor Prime been referring to Humans or Zentraedi?

The capsule had landed on the crest of a low foothill, atop which sat the Macross Scenic Overlook. It had puzzled her that Zor Prime should send her there, of all places, but then it dawned on her that she was meant to bear witness to his self-sacrifice and to the death of the Robotech Masters. And

she had: curling herself into a ball when the flagship exploded; then railing at Zor Prime and the falling sky when the Protoculture Matrix had released the Flowers of Life from bio-stasis and seeded the world with their spores.

But she did so only for a moment. Because Lazlo Zand and Napoleon Russo had suddenly appeared on the scene, completely out of their skulls. Zand, who had had a fixation on Dana since her infancy, was vampirelike, displaying some sort of high-tech Dracula device, babbling about Dana's matchless powers, how they went beyond Protoculture, and how he would have them.

"First the power of Protoculture fills me," Zand had raved, "then the power of Dana Sterling. The Masters promised me that I would be wed to the Flower and I will not be disappointed!"

Polly, Dana's Cheshire cat of a pet, had shown up shortly after Zand had activated the device, but could do nothing as he trained it on Dana. The Protoculturist's own form enlarged, vibrating and contorting, while Dana stood paralyzed and rotund Russo cowered like the little creep he was.

Across the plain, the Masters' flagship was coming apart and the genetic messengers of the Flower were gushing into a hellish June afternoon. Dana felt the tap of Death's bony hand on her shoulder and was on the verge of turning into the Reaper's embrace, when Zand loosed a howl of such agony and fright that even the Reaper retreated.

Zand had perhaps underestimated the dosage the device was feeding him, or somehow underestimated Dana's contribution to the influx of power. But either way, the net result was his transformation into a short-lived burst of radiant energy. And regardless, Dana wanted to believe that the outsize Flower of Life that took root where he had stood was actually him—Zand, wed to the Flower . . .

Arriving in a hijacked alien assault craft, the members of the 15th had found her there, stripped of her armor, Polly under one arm. Dana doing her own babbling about Zor Prime, the spores, the Invid, and a starship that she would someday pilot to wherever her parents were. But everyone had been patient with her, figuring that the nonsense she was spewing was the

result of combat trauma. It was Dana's cry for Mommy, the orphaned generation's cry for all that had been denied them.

Nova Satori had brought her around. "Invid or no Invid, we have to report to whomever is in interim command," the intelligence officer had said. Plans had to be made, defenses set in place. No matter that Nova was cradling a clone infant in her arms.

Dana had composed herself and had ordered that the escape capsule and the bottle-shaped assault craft be emptied of all rations and emergency supplies; and then she had grabbed Angelo's side arm and assigned herself the point position.

Renewed hope had eased the burden of the first couple of miles, but as the sky darkened and Monument's fire glow suffused the horizon, Dana felt herself sliding into despair. The brooding silence of the march told her that her squadron mates and the Tirolean clones were experiencing the same sense of loss.

"The war is over," Bowie had announced when he had stepped from the assault craft. And at the time she had been prepared to believe him. But now she wanted to respond, "This war—only this war is over." And suddenly there seemed so much to do . . .

But it would get done, Dana decided. The way all things got done: one step at a time. So she gritted her teeth, straightened her shoulders, and concentrated on planting one foot in front of the other.

CHAPTER TWO

Considerable irony attends the notion that, had the Masters been granted access to the Macross mounds and retrieved the Protoculture Matrix, they would have taken Earth as their own, unaware that their homeworld [Tirol], ravaged by the Invid, had subsequently fallen into the hands of the Robotech Expeditionary Force. Ironic or not, the theory is moot, in that enough evidence exists to suggest that the Masters, during their communications with Tokyo (i.e., EVE and Zand), had in fact been apprised by their Elders of developments in Tirolspace. Planetless, they most certainly would have claimed Earth, sowed it with the Flowers of Life, and moved on to some other world, leaving Earth—and whatever remained of humankind—to the Invid. In short, Earth was destined to play host to the Regis and her swarm, one way or the other.

Dominique Duprey, Prelude to the Second Robotech War

In contrast to the fanfare that had attended the interment of Macross City in 2015, the funeral for Zentraedi-founded Monument proved to be little more than a nod good-bye. No rousing speeches, no flag waving, no overflights by squadrons of mecha.

Rick Hunter and Max Sterling had flown with the Skull that spring day in Macross; Emil Lang, Lisa Hayes, and Vince Grant had offered remembrances. But Miriya Parino hadn't even been invited to attend the ceremony. She and two-year-old Dana had remained in Monument City, watching the memorial on TV. Monument had been Dana's home ever since, though it was Rolf Emerson with whom she had lived and not Max and Miriya, both of whom had left Earth in 2020, aboard the SDF-3.

Today many of Monument's Qwikform towers were still standing, but the core of the city was slagged, and it was without power and running water. Could the place be rebuilt, as Macross so often had? Probably. Though, what with the deaths of Leonard and Moran and the destruction of

Fokker Base, ASC headquarters, the Senate Building, and the Presidential Palace, there seemed little point in doing so. Moreover, the slow exodus that had begun even before the Masters' arrival had resulted in a shortage of skilled workers.

The city would not be abandoned, however, because Denver, Portland, and many of the towns and villages that dotted the northwestern corner of the continent had closed their doors to immigrants. Many of Monument's residents would be forced to live in the ruins, guarding what little they possessed from roving bands of foragers, and praying that, if and when the Invid came, the aliens would select some other landscape to ravage.

As early as their march from the Macross mounds, Dana and the rest of the 15th had realized that there would be no saving the city, or, by the looks of things, the Army of the Southern Cross. Evidence of lawlessness and mass desertions could be found everywhere, in the form of looted stores and abandoned formfitting body armor and mecha. Too—though the war machines of the Masters lay silent in the streets, on rooftops, wherever they had crashed or gone to ground—the clones who had piloted the ships were found to have been executed by rogue civil defense units or butchered by mobs of vigilantes.

Greeted with such sights, Dana had ordered the rescued clones to discard their capes and tunics in exchange for ordinary Earthwear, and, at all costs, to keep their mouths shut. Plus, given that the barracks of the 15th ATAC hadn't survived the fires, she thought it best to avoid venturing too close to the city. Instead she led everyone to the mountainside log cabin she and Rolf Emerson had shared—along with Bowie Grant and Rolf's housekeeper, Sarah Willex—one structure which had survived the directed light of the Masters' weapons. There, they would make camp, at least until it could be determined who, if anyone, was in command of the city.

But when that determination was made, prospects for the future looked even darker than before. The mayor and the members of the City Council were dead. The half-dozen rear-echelon officers who had fled ASC headquarters short of the Masters' bull's-eye strike had, by default, been

promoted to positions of authority. But the officer of highest rank to have weathered the war was ALUCE-based Major General Nobutu, and he and hundreds of TASC pilots had their hands full tending to the massive pieces of alien technology that remained in decaying orbits above the Earth.

On the political front, less than half the Senate had survived; and since many of those senators had been nothing more than the lackeys of various political factions, the so-called United Earth Government was effectively a headless entity.

Scarcely anything remained of the buildings in which Anatole Leonard and UEG Chairman Moran had died, let alone bodies. Even so, as information about Leonard's endtime equivocation began to emerge, the search for his remains took on a pathological frenzy. Many wanted to do to him what had already been done to countless Bioroid pilots. The power behind Chairman Moran's political throne, Supreme Commander Leonard was condemned even by the members of his general staff, who reviled the fact that he had gone down with his ship, as it were, and had not had the courage to answer for the miscalculations he had made.

Rumors abounded that Leonard had been in contact with the Masters two years prior to their actual attack. People argued that, regardless of who had fired the first salvo—Masters or Humans—the war could have been averted if Leonard had simply given the Masters access to the Macross mounds. But others felt that, while there was certainly some truth to the argument, it was just as likely that the Masters would have enslaved or exterminated Humankind once the Protoculture Matrix had been retrieved. In the end, history alone would pass judgment on the actions of the xenophobic Anatole Leonard.

Rolf Emerson, on the other hand, was being lauded as the war's true superstar. A champion of Zentraedi rights even during the Malcontent Uprisings of 2015-18, Emerson had showed himself to be an accomplished politician as well as a capable field commander. And more importantly, he had died a hero.

In the short time allotted to such things, Dana and Bowie had arranged

a private observance for the man who had parented them through the long years of boarding schools and military academies to which they had been subjected. Rolf had cared so strongly about Earth's future that he had chosen not to ship with the Robotech Expeditionary Force on its diplomatic mission to Tirol, and had agreed to take Dana and Bowie as his wards, knowing full well that the SDF-3 might never be heard from again. These actions said more about his charitable nature than either of them could put into words, though they tried, nonetheless, speaking to the hundreds-strong crowd of senators, military officers, and plain folk who made the trek to the somewhat remote cabin.

Even Terry Weston, all but marooned at ALUCE, managed to send his condolences.

The first official meeting of the provisional Earth government took place two weeks after the destruction of the Masters' flagship, in Nueva Mesa, some two hundred miles south of Monument City. In attendance were those few senators who believed that something could be salvaged from the UEG—Barth Constanza, Alfred Nader, and Owen Harding, among others—and those few officers who nursed similar misconceptions about both the Army of the Southern Cross and the Global Military Police. Where such meetings had once convened in a vaulted hall of marble columns and adamantine floors, this one was held in a nondescript cinder-block building, which, in past incarnations, had housed a superman and a cineplex.

After requesting a moment of silence for the dead the always outspoken Constanza brought the meeting to order. "I think our first order of business should be to determine whether we indeed have any business to discuss." The sturdily built Constants spread his hands and regarded his confederates from his seat along the northern arc of the massive round table. "Ladies and gentlemen, I pose the question: Are we viable or not?"

"As a political body or a planetary species?" someone grumbled.

"Let's take them one at a time," Constanza said, maintaining his aplomb. "Is there a hope in hell that the nation-states of the world will

voluntarily assign representatives to a global agency, or has it come down to every nation-state for itself?"

"The latter," Alfred Nader answered. He was a slight man with ruddy cheeks and a shock of white hair. "Speaking as a Southlander—though not for the Southlands—I can assure you that the policies of any global agency will be ignored. Oh, perhaps if such an agency were to situate itself in the Southlands, it might enjoy some limited respect. But even that much is in doubt. With the fall of Brasília, the last hope for a nucleus has been dashed. I'm afraid, Senator Constanza, that medieval attitudes hold sway from Mexico to Tierra del Fuego."

Everyone glanced at the fiber-optic world map that dominated the east wall of the vast, grimy space. Outside of the preemptive attack on Brasília and the intermittent harassing of Cavern City and Buenos Aires, the Masters had ignored the Southlands, where hundreds of agrarian-based polities had flourished since the defeat of the Zentraedi malcontents. Many of those polities had sworn allegiance to HEARTH, the Heal Earth Hajj, but as many others considered themselves nations in their own right, and rejected all attempts at enlistment in a global community.

"We could, of course, compel them to support a united government," Constanza suggested. "After all, we have the mecha."

The newly promoted General Vincinz, a former ASC staff officer, shot Constanza a withering look. "The Southern Cross answered to Supreme Commander Leonard," he thought to point out, "not to the Senate."

Constanza returned the glower. "If you're implying that the presently leaderless Army of the Southern Cross is now autonomous, General, I suggest that you first poll the mechamorphs under your command. Those who haven't already deserted, that is."

Vincinz didn't proffer an immediate rebuttal. Some estimates put the desertion rate as high as 70 percent, and in at least half of those cases, the deserters had taken their mecha with them.

Across the table from Vincinz, General Nigel Aldershot, a seasoned veteran of the Robotech Defense Force, seemed to have anticipated the

attention that was suddenly focused on him. "Let me assure all of you the GMP will continue to act in the interests of global unity and will be quick to thwart the actions of any group that threatens that unity."

Made up of former Robotech Defense Force units and—much to the irritation of Supreme Commander Leonard—answering principally to the UEG, the Global Military Police had been formed after the attempt coup of 2029.

Aldershot glanced at the portly Vincinz. "Accept the fact that the Army of the Southern Cross has been dealt a serious blow, General. It might behoove you to abandon the separatist policies Leonard brought to the military."

"We're warriors first," Vincinz said, "politicians, never."

Constanza used his gavel to silence the arguments that broke out. "It's apparent that we've learned nothing from the divisiveness that split the Earth Defense Force after the launch of the SDF-3. Call yourselves what you will, Southern Cross or GMP. But bear in mind that you are the planet's only defenders. It rests in your hands, gentlemen, whether we engage the Invid— if they come—or roll over and show them our belly."

"They will come," GMP Major Alan Fredericks interjected. Second in command to Aldershot, Fredericks was lanky and pale, with prominent ears and long, flaxen hair. "That isn't tree pollen on the windowsills and on the cars. What you're seeing and sneezing at are spores of the Flower of Life— the Invid Flower of Life. Their Sensor Nebula has probably already registered the change in our atmosphere and relayed its findings to the swarm, wherever in the galaxy it is."

Originally dismissed as a spindrift cloud of interstellar dust that had somehow wandered into the Solar system from some impossibly distant region, the Sensor Nebula had made its appearance at the end of the war. Some of the assault ships of Rolf Emerson's strike force had actually passed through the leading edge of the cloud on their way to engaging the Masters' fleet. But it wasn't until the recordings of Leonard's conversations with the Masters had been decoded that the aberration had been correctly identified

as an Invid Flower of Life sensor.

"Can't we simply destroy the thing?" Senator Stephen Grass asked. A muscular six-footer with a cunning smile, he had been a staunch supporter of the Army of the Southern Cross since its inception in Brasília during the Malcontent years.

Both Aldershot and Vincinz shook their heads. "The blasted thing has retreated to Mars orbit, where we can't get at it," Aldershot said. "It's as if it anticipated a threat."

"It exhibits signs of sentience," Fredericks elaborated. "And assuming that it can be destroyed, we'd need more than Logans or Veritechs to do the job. Something equal in firepower to a Tristar-class command ship. But even the least damaged of our frigates and fleet destroyers are going to require months of repairs."

"What about the enemy war machines?" Owen Harding suggested. Again, Aldershot spoke for both the GMP and the Southern Cross.

"First of all, most of them are depleted of Protoculture. Second, there's no figuring the damn things out. They seem to have been guided, in part, from the Masters' mother ships." He forced a weary exhale. "They're the junk in our new postwar landscape. Scaled-down versions of the husks of the Zentraedi cruisers we've been living with for twenty years."

Constanza cut him off. "Since these Flowers of Life seem to have taken such a liking to Earth, can't we matrix them, or whatever it is you have to do to them to extract Protoculture?"

Fredericks showed him a tolerant look. "I'm afraid that it's more complicated than that, Senator. In fact, with Dr. Zand dead, I'd hazard to say that there isn't anyone on Earth who would even know where to begin."

Vincinz drew attention to himself with a cough. "Speaking of Protoculture, I strongly suggest that we act quickly to consolidate all existing reserves—by force, if necessary."

"I concur with the general," Aldershot said.

Nader glanced at the two men. "I've heard rumors to the effect that many of the deserters left with their mecha."

Constanza nodded. "I've heard as much myself." He cut his eyes to Aldershot. "Suppose we enact a policy of amnesty. Every pilot who returns his or her craft will, in return, receive an honorable discharge. I mean, I understand these people not wanting to fight another day. Sometimes . . ."

The senator let the word dangle, and into the vacuum created by his silence poured the unstated anguish of every person seated at the table. Aldershot broke that silence after a long moment.

"Amnesty is a noble idea, Senator, but in order for it to fly, we need to have a government mandated to grant amnesty—which we don't—or an intact military to be discharged from—which we don't. Hell, we'd be better off offering bribes of food or scrip."

"We'll have no immediate need for the missing mecha if the Invid can be reasoned with," Nader said. "After all, we have no argument with them. And now both our races have fought the Zentraedi and the Masters."

Vincinz snorted a laugh. "Yes, and only we've beaten them."

Fredericks looked at him. "We didn't defeat the Masters. Zor Prime did." A quick glance around the table revealed that few were familiar with the name. "An enemy pilot the GMP managed to recruit and turn," he explained. "The alien took a . . . liking to Lieutenant Dana Sterling, and it was through him that Sterling and the 15th ATAC succeeded in infiltrating the Masters' flagship."

"Oh, so it was actually the GMP that won the war for us," Vincinz muttered with transparent sarcasm.

Fredericks narrowed his eyes. "I didn't make that claim. I'm only saying that Zor Prime brought the flagship down. And I have that on the authority of lieutenants Satori and Sterling, who were onboard the flagship prior to its arrival at the mounds."

Constanza made a gesture of dismissal. "What's done is done. I'm interested in the Invid. Did this Zor Prime provide the GMP with any data about them?"

Aldershot grunted. "None that added appreciably to what we already know. Which is to say that they're mindless, sluglike things, nourished and

driven by the Flower of Life, and that they've been at war with the Masters for generations. Does it sound to you like they can be 'reasoned with,' Senator?"

Nader made his lips a thin line and shook his head. "But I'm still of the opinion that it's important to have a governmental agency in place to negotiate with them, should the opportunity present itself."

Nader's statement met with murmurs of agreement.

"But where?" Constanza asked. He gestured broadly to the room's painted cinder-block walls. "To quote an old line, 'We can't go on meeting like this.'"

"It's senseless to reheadquarter ourselves in Monument," Harding said. "Not only for the obvious reason, but because the Invid may follow the Masters' lead in homing in on what's left of the Macross mounds. I recommend that we look to Detroit, Portland, or Denver."

Once more, the wall map became the focus of attention. All three of Harding's proposed sites had been hard hit by the Masters' Bioroids. A former mayor, Harding had pull in Detroit, though probably not enough to overcome the city's reluctance to house a reborn United Earth Government. Portland and Denver were long shots. The Southlands region was problematic because of the strong presence of HEARTH. But to what other cities could they look, where both satellite and microwave communications and military support were readily available? Africa and much of the Middle East remained nuclear wastelands; Europe was ravaged by disease; Asia and the Indian subcontinent were without technology; and Indonesia, the South Pacific, and Australia—with the exception of Sydney—had been parceled into dozens of separate sheikhdoms. Eventually, everyone's gaze drifted to relatively unscathed Japan.

As if reading the minds of his colleagues, Grass said, "There's always Tokyo. Even though it would mean dealing with President Misui . . ."

Constanza was rubbing his chin when Grass looked at him. "It's not Misui that concerns me," Constanza said at last. "It's the people that run him."

"The Shimada Family," someone said.

Constanza nodded. "They kept their heads buried in the sand throughout the war, waiting for the day when we would come to them for help." He gave a brief look around. "I can't speak for the rest of you, but I for one am not ready to place the future of Earth in the hands of a family of gangsters."

CHAPTER THREE

Protoculture is the energy derived from the heat given off by the seeds of the Invid Flower of Life, when prevented by pressure from reproducing. The energy is produced by a process of cold fusion, when a lithium- and deuterium-rich solution permeates the seeds and their environs. A protein chain within the seeds themselves squeezes the lithium-6 and deuterium atoms into close proximity. Bosons, the resultant compressed atoms, are not affected by the effective repulsion of the Pauli principle. Only electrostatic barriers to fusion need be overcome. This solution, which also includes several seed-beneficent nutrients, is known as the Protoculture Matrix . . . Maintained in bio-stasis, the seeds gradually surrender their stores of energy; the richer the lithium-deuterium solution, the quicker the depletion. For sustained energy, a moderate solution and moderate pressure are needed. However, as the solution begins to accrue carbon as a result of the fusion, the seeds receive nutrition sufficient to germinate. Thus, the Flowers end up consuming the matrix. And without the Invid or the pollinators to help fertilize the new growths that sprout in the containment vessels, the plants are effectively useless for the generation of energy.

Peter Walker, The Truth Behind Protoculture

All of Tokyo was celebrating the end of the war, but nowhere were people rejoicing with as much zeal and abandon as on the rooftop of the Shimada Building. Once the sprawling though squat structure had accommodated Emil Lang's Robotech Research Center, and years later, Lazlo Zand's Special Protoculture Observations and Operations Kommandatura. The building now encompassed the whole of the Koishikawa Gardens and towered over everything in aboveground Tokyo. Had the Masters launched an attack on the city, the Shimada would certainly have been ground zero; but Kan Shimada had gambled and won, and so the physical embodiment of his power and wealth had become

symbolic of his complete mastery over Tokyo's surface and subterranean worlds.

The top of the building was a fanciful, five-story arrangement of unevenly yet artistically placed opensided levels, linked by glass-booth elevators and Escheresque stairways, and lighted by massive skylights and fiber-optic arrays. Each hosted bird-filled gardens and shimmering waterfalls and ponds stocked with live carp. The war's-end fête was taking place on every level, though the uppermost was reserved for the elite among Kan-san Shimada's hundreds of invited guests.

Loosed from the streets below, tens of thousands of helium balloons were rising into Tokyo's warm night air, while brilliant fireworks blossomed over the Dream Archipelago landfill dumps that rose from the bay. Joyous people lined the roof's parapets, raising crystal goblets of vintage champagne, fresh from bubbling fountains. Others saluted the display—or the night, or perhaps the heavens—with bits of food plucked from tables replete with mushi zushi, sticky-rice cakes, udon, seaweed, shiitakes, lotus roots, omelets, fern shoots, and other "down-home" dishes.

Standing at the east parapet, Misa Yosida sipped champagne and ooh- ed and aah-ed with the rest of the well-dressed crowd as orange and blue umbrellas erupted in the southeastern sky. And she tried not to think too hard about the fiery demise of Monument City, footage of which was being run to death on the "news channels. How she had come to be among the party's VIPs—rubbing elbows with the likes of President Misui and the members of the Diet—was a story that played like a fractured fairy tale, even when she recited it to herself on nights when the very reality of her circumstances made sleep impossible.

Misa was still the tall and voluptuous young woman she had been in her B.S. years—Before Shimada. But little else about her life was recognizable: not the balconied apartment underground, or the wardrobe and jewelry, or the number-crunching job with the Shimada organization. And the odd thing was that the transformation of her world owed less to the Robotech Masters than to a series of mishaps three years earlier that had

landed her in the wrong place at the right time.

Landed not only her, but her closest friends, Gibley, Shi Ling, and Strucker. All three were present tonight on the top floor, and any one of them was more important to Kan Shimada's grand scheme than Misa was.

Now, if only Terry were here, the night would be complete, she told herself, looking up, not at the fireworks, but at the moon, where ALUCE Base was located. In the end, just before his reenlistment, physical contact between Terry and her had come down to point fighting in Onuma-sensei's dojo in Old Tokyo. But she went on loving him, and suspected that she always would.

"Some show, huh, gorgeous?" Strucker said, sidling up to her out of the crowd and smelling of scotch and potato chips. Blond and blue-eyed, he looked as if he had been imported from a different party. "Almost makes me nostalgic for life aboveground."

Misa looked at him askance. "The fresh air would probably kill you." "You're right," Strucker hollered over the sound of distant reports.

"Besides, I hear they have day and night up there."

Misa nodded. "It's true. The sun rises out of a cave in the east, and everything gets bright."

Strucker shuddered in elaborate disapproval.

When Misa had first met him, years back, he had been just another pimple-faced otaku—computer wizard—from the communal homes, who then went by the name Discount. But only the previous year he had learned the actual family name of his birth parents and so had dropped the self- styled sobriquet. An unexpected growth spurt that same year had brought him even in height with Shi Ling, but he was still only eye-to-mouth with Misa, and a good eight inches shorter than gangly Gibley. The sim-leather pants and vest made him appear less important than he was, but Misa, in a baggy velour suit, was no one to be throwing stones.

Shi Ling and Gibley wandered over while she and Strucker were talking, the pockets of their white utility coveralls bulging with pilfered foodstuffs and glass bottles of beer.

"Ah, to be rid at last of those pesky Masters," Gibley said, affecting a nasal, Northlands accent. "I was beginning to think they'd never leave."

"Leave?" Shi Ling said, playing along. "Why, I do believe they were

destroyed."

Gibley's big-knuckled fingers wriggled dismissively. "Please, dahling, don't bore me with details."

Hooked on end-of-the-century films, they made each other laugh, if seldom anyone else. The handsome and wiry Shi Ling, who had once called himself Census, was Chinese, but his parents had been in Japan during the Rain of Death, and he'd wound up orphaned in Tokyo. Gibley, though, was a Northlander, like Strucker, and pushing thirty-four.

An otaku of the first order, it was Gibley more than anyone who was responsible for the upgrade they'd all experienced, the outcome of an illegal run against Zand's Protoculture research facility, for whom Gibley had once worked. So there was some irony to his working in the facility once more— the expanded facility, to be sure—where he spent most of his time talking to machines. Not the way pilots did to their mecha via virtual-environment helmets, but actually talking to machines.

Misa was back to gazing at the moon when a pair of strong arms encircled her waist from behind and the owner of those arms pressed his right cheek to her left ear. "And I'll wager that Terry is looking straight at you right now."

She turned into Miho Nagata's embrace and kissed him on both cheeks, then stepped back to regard the dashing cut of his tuxedo and the luster of his leather wing tips. Even at forty-three, he looked better than the fireworks.

Misa's direct boss in the Shimada organization—her kumi-cho—Miho answered directly to oyabun, Kan Shimada. He had been promoted to gang boss in reward for the part he had played in Zand's downfall. Two years before the Masters had arrived in Earthspace, Gibley had sussed out that Zand was in communication—perhaps in league—with them, and Miho had successfully secured that information for the Shimada Family. In the wake

of Zand's recall to Monument City, the Family purchased the phased Protoculture facility—lock, stock, and barrel—and had installed Gibley to head up research into what Gibley termed "machine mind." At the same time, Kan Shimada had parlayed knowledge of the Masters' imminent arrival into a vast enterprise, by discouraging the development of surface Tokyo—including the construction of a Southern Cross base—and encouraging the immigration to underground Tokyo of select individuals from all over the world.

Misa suspected that she had been taken under the Shimada wing primarily because she reminded Kan of Yoko Nitabi, his adopted daughter who had been an operative within Zand's operation, and whom Zand had had executed. Her talent for numbers notwithstanding, only Misa's resemblance to the late Yoko could explain why she, too, had people answering to her—even if they were only money-drinkers and errand boys. Thus she occupied a top position in the traditional yakuza ranking, with a curious twist, in that working at or near the top now meant living at the bottom—in the underground—while working at or near the bottom meant living at the top, in the realm of okage—expendable—surface Tokyo.

Similarly, the end-of-the-century portrayal of the yakuza as full-body- tattooed mobsters was as period an image as that of the sword-wielding samurai. While the organizational hierarchy had been maintained, the goals of the organization had been legitimized. Where once only the dumbest of street boys were employed to run errands, the Shimada Family now employed only the brightest—and not to busy themselves with motorcycle thefts, drug dealing, or pimping, but assist in the even more profitable business of political control. Softened, as well, was the policy of racial purity that had characterized the crime families of the twentieth century. The survival of Tokyo was given central prominence, for the city had come to represent the ark that would carry Humankind into the future.

Miho was exchanging back-clapping embraces with the guys and making fun of Gibley's and Shi Ling's outfits, though that didn't dissuade him from accepting the bottle of beer Gibley conjured from the front pocket

of his coveralls.

"Kanpai!" Miho said, lifting the bottle before chugging half of it. "Now if we can just get through the next war." He chugged what remained of the bottle and patted his full lips with a monogrammed handkerchief.

His comment strained the levity of the moment, but only briefly. "How many years do you figure we have before the Invid come calling?" Gibley asked. "We went twenty between the Zentraedi and the Masters."

"I'm guessing ten," Strucker said.

Shi Ling shook his head. "No way. Five, tops." Gibley held up three fingers, and glanced at Miho.

"Mr. Shimada has reason to believe that the Invid will be here within the year."

Misa's jaw dropped. "Do you think he's right?"

Miho draped a comforting arm around her shoulders. "We're in the process of investigating some data that has come to us from associates in what's left of Monument City. It seems that the Invid have moved some sort of Protoculture sensor into our planetary neighborhood. That suggests that they are on the way. But I say, the sooner they arrive, the sooner we get to clear the air—so to speak."

Gibley shook his head uncertainly. "I don't know that Tokyo will be as lucky next go-round."

"Our survival had nothing to do with luck," Miho said.

"Sure, by keeping the Southern Cross away, we managed to keep the Masters away," Shi Ling said. "But the Invid may not be as discriminating about which cities they target."

"True," Miho allowed. "But our prominently displayed offering may give them pause."

"Offering?" Misa said.

Miho trained his smile on her. "Flowers of Life. To be gathered from places throughout Asia and the Pacific Rim nations and brought here, to Tokyo. We might even gift wrap them."

It surprised no one on Nova Satori's recovery team that Lazlo Zand's research laboratory was filled with the Flowers of Life; after all, Zand was believed to have been ingesting them since the late teens, when isolated clusters had begun appearing in the Southlands. Rumors persisted that he had even managed to fabricate a miniature Protoculture Matrix. But, no, what Nova's team found surprising—remarkable—was that the laboratory was at all intact. Cached among the amorphous buildings of the military- industrial complex that adjoined Fokker Aerospace Base, outside Monument City, the small L-shaped cell had sustained a near-direct hit that had flattened everything around it. But it figured that Zand would have had the place secretly hardened—in all probability to the detriment of its close neighbors.

It figured, too, that Zand would have had the lab wired for self- destruction, which was why Nova had sent a bomb squad in advance of her team. Several devices had been disarmed, and yet, despite the caution exercised in opening a hole in the wall—no one dared use the single, reinforced-alloy door—undetected devices had flooded the interior with a gas that was not only lethal to living things but corrosive to the lab's library of conventional and optical data-storage tapes and diskettes.

Once again, though, Nova had second-guessed Zand. Outfitted in antihazard suits, everyone on the team had been ordered to rush into the lab and grab whatever they could lay their gloved hands on, without wasting time on assessments.

Much of what was recovered was irreparably corrupted long before it reached the GMP's transitional headquarters, south of Denver. Then came the daunting task of analyzing and deciphering Zand's encryption techniques. The codes used to encrypt some of the data proved unbreakable, but GMP specialists chanced on the discovery that Zand had frequently employed the code he had used in his Tokyo-Monument communications with Anatole Leonard. Among the latter data was what seemed to be a partial biography of the Tirolean scientist, Zor. The biography had perhaps been gleaned from dialogues with the mother computer Emil Lang had

removed from the SDF-1 before the Zentraedi had come looking for the ship, and which had provided the voice and image for Tokyo's youth-friendly telepresence, EVE. There were also hints of some compromised surveillance operation that had involved Zand, Leonard, and the Robotech Masters, along with several members of the Shimada Family.

Other tapes and disks contained transcriptions of Zand's initial meetings with Leonard, back in the teens, and subsequent meetings that were attended by Wyatt Moran and T.R. Edwards, then in the employ of a covert UEG agency.

However, the real prize among all that encrypted treasure was the data on the Invid and their precocious Flowers, which Lang either hadn't had access to or hadn't shared with the UEG prior to the launch of the SDF-3. It was conceivable that Zand had retrieved the information from the mother computer, but just as conceivable that the information had arisen a priori through Zand's intimate acquaintance with the Flowers of Life.

Last but not least was the directory—if not the files—devoted to Zand's blatantly obsessive fixation on Dana Sterling. Dana's childhood predilections, Dana's adolescent comings and goings, Dana's misadventures in the Academy, Dana's performance on the battlefield . . .

Nova cursed her bad luck in not having recovered those files. But if nothing else, Nova still had access to Dana. And if Dana was even half as important to Earth's future as Zand had seemed to think, then the time had come to put Dana to the test.

CHAPTER FOUR

Mars base had had its ups and downs over the decades. Founded just after the turn of the century, Sara Base—as it was then known—was already in ruins by 2010, when the RDF engaged the forces of Khyron's Botoru Battalion on the Martian surface. Rebuilt in 2016, during the readying of the SDF-3, the base was abandoned in 2022, only to be resurrected two years later, deriving most of its funding from a conglomerate of Asian concerns. It has been suggested that its closing, in 2030, was the direct result of the Shimada Family's advanced knowledge of the imminent arrival of the Masters; for, shortly thereafter, the upper management of each of those Asian concerns relocated to subterranean Tokyo.

From the introduction to Shi Ling's

Sometimes Even a Yakuza Needs a Place to Hide

The Emerson property had become an armed camp. Western larch and pine from the higher elevations had provided lumber for six watchtowers, all of which were linked by a tall palisade crowned with concertina wire. Behind the stake fence stood three Hovertanks, which had been found abandoned in Monument City. Named Livewire I, Bad News II, and Trojan Horse II after the mecha the 15th had had to leave aboard the Masters' flagship, the squat, reconfigurable tanks, with their thruster pods and down-sloping prows, had belonged to the 13th ATAC and were running on empty. Louie, Sean, and Angelo were in charge of the mecha, while the towers were manned by the more militant triumvirates of the clones from Tirol. Though in command of the camp, Dana and Bowie had refused to so much as don armor, much less arm themselves.

It had been when Dana had proposed the cabin as an alternative to Monument City that the original band had splintered. Marie Crystal and Dennis Brown had been eager to learn what had become of the Black Lions, and Nova, of course, had felt compelled to report to GMP headquarters—

whether it was standing or not. So when Nova later showed up at the cabin, seated at the controls of a GMP personnel carrier, the first thing Dana asked her was, "Are you out for a joyride, Lieutenant, or is that APC your new office?"

"Just release the gate and let us inside, Dana," Nova said from the opened driver's-side door. "We're here on official business."

Dana made no move to unbolt the reinforced gate. "Official? On whose authority?"

"On the authority of the provisional government."

Every Human within earshot on the secure side of the perimeter laughed.

Nova and Dana had a long history of such clashes, dating back to Nova's first visit to the cabin some three years earlier, as a mouthpiece for Nigel Aldershot and his coterie of RDF dissidents. She had come then to enlist Rolf's support for a planned coup against the Southern Cross. But something about Nova had roused Dana's competitive instincts then, and it had been that way between them ever since.

Throughout the war, they had had run-ins over procedures and protocols; but their rivalry hadn't peaked until Zor Prime entered the scene. After being debriefed by the GMP, the seemingly amnesiac alien defector had been attached to the 15th ATAC, where his actions could be monitored. And both Dana and Nova had fallen in love with him.

"Lieutenant Sterling, you are in violation of UEG decrees by harboring prisoners of war," Alan Fredericks announced as he climbed from the APC. "The clones you captured aboard the flagship have to be debriefed—either by the GMP or Southern Cross intelligence. You decide."

Dana directed a calming gesture to the nervous Tiroleans in the nearest tower, then swung to face Fredericks. "War's over, Major—or hadn't you heard? These people are asking for political asylum. Which means that they'll only deal with a recognized member of the 'provisional government.'" Nova stepped out of the vehicle and approached the gate. "General

Vincinz isn't going to be as patient with you as we are, Dana."

"General Vincinz? Last I remember, he was a colonel—and not a very competent one. And we're not about to kowtow to some default commander." Dana grimaced. "As if Leonard wasn't bad enough."

"Be reasonable, Sterling," Fredericks said. "We agree with you about Vincinz—and Leonard—but these clones—"

"These 'clones' saved our asses, Fredericks." Dana glanced at Nova. "Tell him, Nova. You were there."

Fredericks rolled his eyes. "That's like saying that the SDF-1 saved us."

Dana's expression hardened. "Tell him about Zor Prime, Nova. His last words were that no harm would come to Earth. And he kept his promise. He destroyed the flagship." She lowered her voice. "He couldn't have known that his actions would wind up spreading the spores."

Nova was quiet for a moment; then she walked to the gate. "Remember how some people were crediting Breetai with helping to end the war against Dolza? It's the same thing, Dana: Maybe the Tiroleans did help, but it was too little, too late. And now we need to talk to them about the Invid. Surely, as a commanding officer, you can see the importance of that."

Dana folded her arms across her chest. Behind her, Bowie, Angelo, Sean, and Louie were advancing. "I've resigned my command."

"You've deserted, you mean," Fredericks snapped.

"No, I've resigned—from the killing." She looked at her squadron mates. "That goes for all of us."

Nova's heart-shaped face reddened. "Then you should surrender your Hovertanks. The UEG is appropriating all mecha and supplies of Protoculture. Any attempt to seize or withhold Protoculture will be treated as treason."

Angelo Dante planted his hands on his hips. "You can't seriously believe that people are going to honor that edict. With the Southern Cross being held accountable for the war? Oh, sure, if the SDF-3 suddenly appears out of spacefold, then maybe you'll see ex-soldiers surrendering their mecha. But until then, you don't have a prayer. Not here, and definitely not in the Southlands. While you're standing here arguing with us, people are stashing

Protoculture wherever they can."

Nova considered it, then smiled ruefully. "Then why all this—the fence, the watchtowers, the Hovertanks—if you've resigned from killing?"

"Killing and defending are two different things," Sean Phillips answered. Tall, with the rugged good looks of a swashbuckler, he had once lived and breathed for Nova, but there was little evidence of that in the stare he showed her now.

Fredericks snorted disdainfully. "And what about the Invid?"

Dana thought about the hallucinatory vision she had had aboard the flagship. Beware the spores, the sprite had told her. Beware the Invid . . . but she wasn't about to start rambling as she had at the Macross mounds. "When the Invid come, a lot of people are going to fight and die for nothing," she said. "There's something inevitable about the outcome of the next war. I don't think we could win it, even if we had the SDF-3 at our backs."

Nova was shaking her head, her long mane of black hair flowing. "I can't believe what I'm hearing. You're giving up. You're ready to surrender the planet to the Invid."

As well as they thought they knew her, even the members of the 15th were stunned by Dana's response.

"Yeah. In a sense, I guess I am surrendering the planet. But only because my destiny requires that I take a different path." She cut her eyes to Louie. "My detiny. No one else's."

Fredericks gazed at her questioningly. "It almost sounds like you know some way out of this mess."

Dana started to speak, but bit back the worth. "I, I can't explain." "You're going to head for the hills, is that it?"

Dana compressed her lips and remained silent.

"Well, personally, I don't care where you end up," Nova said at last. "But before you go, there are two missions that only you can execute—and neither bears on the fate of the Tiroleans. So at least hear us out, Dana. You owe us that much."

Dana disagreed, but opted not to debate the point. "Start talking," she told Fredericks.

The GMP major stepped forward. "General Vincinz has dispatched lieutenants Marie Crystal and Dennis Brown to Space Station Liberty, with orders that the station should attempt to reestablish contact with the factory satellite."

The tankers of the 15th exchanged baffled looks. The moonlet-size facility had departed Earthspace three years earlier, under the stewardship of several hundred Micronized—downsized—Zentraedi. It had not been their aim to escape the Masters, but to serve as a decoy. The destruction of the factory was to have alerted Earth that the Masters had arrived in the Solar system. The Masters, however, had either overlooked the factory or chosen to ignore it.

"Liberty will advise the Zentraedi that the Masters have been defeated," Fredericks was saying, "and that we want them to return to Earth."

"But, why?" Dana asked in disbelief. "Not to defend us against the Invid—"

"Yes—in a way," Nova said. "We want their help in destroying the Sensor Nebula."

Fredericks glanced at Nova, then Dana. "The Flowers of Life are taking root faster than we can eradicate them. The damned things have a will of their own. It's as if the spores are deliberately seeking out the most arable areas of the world—the Northlands plains, Venezuela, northern Argentina, central Europe . . . Research and Development is trying to develop a sensor so that we can go after them with Logans and such, but so far no one's had much success."

Nova exhaled with purpose. "The Flowers seem to be some type of tripartite, pollen-producing angiosperm, but they disperse spores, which should classify them as gametophytes. And yet, even what we're calling spores turn out to be more like seeds, which resemble minuscule parasols."

Dana quirked her brows together. "But how's the factory supposed to destroy the Sensor Nebula, when it isn't even armed?"

"By transporting one of our crippled destroyers in its belly," Fredericks explained.

Dana gave it some thought. "It won't work."

Nova and Fredericks spoke at the same time. "Major Carpenter seems to think it will work."

Dana gave her head a mournful shake. Barely emerged from spacefold, the REF commander had erred tactically by engaging the Masters' fleet and losing his ship. "You're going to trust what he says? The man's space happy."

"You trusted him enough to believe what he had to say about the Expeditionary mission and the Sentinels," Nova pointed out.

"That has nothing to do with it."

Fredericks was eyeing Dana with suspicion. "Do you have specific data relating to the Sensor Nebula that we haven't seen?"

Dana shook her head. "I shouldn't have said that the plan won't work.

What I mean is, that it won't matter. The Invid will come." "Not if their beacon is destroyed."

Fredericks' tone of voice told Dana that the matter had already been decided. "All right, so you're recalling the factory satellite. How does that concern me?"

Nova and Fredericks traded brief glances. "We want you to serve as our emissary," Nova said. "We want you to persuade the Zentraedi to help us."

"You're practically one of them," Fredericks added. "So it stands to reason . . ."

Dana laughed—not because there was anything funny about the proposal, but because Nova had asked the same of Rolf on the day she and Dana had met—even though Rolf wasn't one of them. General Nigel Aldershot had hoped that Rolf could entice the remaining Zentraedi to side with the Robotech Defense Force in a coup against the Southern Cross.

"Assuming for the moment that you can convince the Zentraedi to return, I'll accept the assignment," she told Nova, "in the spirit of old times. Now, what's this other business I'm uniquely suited for?"

"It involves Lieutenant Terry Weston," Fredericks said, taking delight in Dana's surprised reaction. "It's come to our attention that Weston enjoys considerable cachet among the yakuza organization that purchased Lazlo Zand's research facility in Tokyo. We have information that Shimada's researchers have found a way to interface with machines, without the need for Protoculture."

"Your past relationship with Weston is no secret," Nova interjected. "We've recalled him from ALUCE to serve as your introduction to the Shimada Family and the researchers they employ." She turned to Louie Nichols, who immediately pushed his goggles up onto his forehead. "In the interest of opening a scientific dialogue with Tokyo, we want Corporal Nichols to accompany you."

Though battered and bruised by the Masters, Space Station Liberty still hung at its Trojan Lagrange point, close to the moon. For more than ten years Liberty had combined the functions of outpost fortress, communications nerve center, and way station along the routes to ALUCE and Mars Base—now closed. Its complex communication apparatus— apparatus that wouldn't function as well downside—was Earth's only method of maintaining even intermittent contact with the factory satellite.

Marie Crystal and Dennis Brown had been on board for close to a week now, awaiting orders from Southern Cross command to drop back down the well or to continue on to ALUCE, which was where they both wanted to be. But it was becoming obvious that Vincinz was no more capable of commanding the Army of the Southern Cross than Senator Barth Constanza was the "provisional" Earth government. Where Crystal and Brown initially had been given to believe that Liberty would constitute nothing more than a brief stopover, orders received since then made it appear that they were being permanently reassigned to the station, while at the same time they were being considered for the Sensor Nebula mission, should the Zentraedi agree to it.

Frustrated by the slew of contradictory transmissions from Southern

Cross temporary headquarters in Denver, the two lieutenants had whiled away the week effecting repairs on their Logans, jogging on the track retrofitted into Liberty's "handle"—for the station resembled a colossal version of a child's rattle—and trying hard to maintain objectivity in an atmosphere steeped in paranoia.

Sitting duck that it was, Liberty was your posting only if you'd scored brilliantly on no less than twenty psychological tests and you had been evaluated by a dozen psychologists, neurometric analysts, and behaviorists. Still, the recent war had taken a toll on everyone aboard, and, what with the Invid lurking in Earth's imminent future, there wasn't a watch officer or communications tech who hadn't been placed on a regimen of mood elevators or mild tranquilizers. All it took now was a hunk of war debris turning up as paint on some radar screen and the station went to full alert. The turrets that concealed the gleaming snouts of Liberty's twin- and quad- barreled batteries were never closed, and the threat-assessment boards and signal-warfare countermeasures computers were serviced twice a day, lest some glitch allow the Invid to arrive in the Solar system undetected.

Despite her best efforts, however, Marie was growing frazzled. When she regarded herself in the mirror, her normally pale skin looked positively ashen; her oblique blue eyes—which people liked to call exotic—were bloodshot; and her black hair appeared more intractable than unruly. ALUCE notwithstanding, she would have preferred ridding local space of the Masters' depleted hover platforms and assault ships over pacing Liberty's narrow, duct-lined corridors waiting for orders that might never come.

Dennis didn't have to say as much in order for Marie to recognize that he felt the same. Until three weeks earlier, they'd only known each other as fellow unit commanders in the Black Lions. But then came the hastily planned mission to rescue Rolf Emerson from the crippled Tristar, and their subsequent capture by the Robotech Masters. Marie could recall every detail of those events: the Tristar's ruined bridge; Emerson's blood, puddled on the command chair; the metallic smell of the cramped, alloy-

armored ejection module; the maw of the Masters' flagship; the eerie tonality of their voices . . .

Will you make your species see reason and surrender? one of the monkish-looking Masters had asked them. We cannot allow your stubbornness or the fate of one tiny world to endanger the establishment of our Robotech universe. Your small-mindedness merely illustrates how primitive you are . . .

She couldn't help but wonder whether the Invid would soon be posing the same questions and uttering the same condemnations; and whether some new Rolf Emerson would arise to inform them that Humankind would never surrender their world, and that what didn't kill us only made us stronger.

The Masters had communicated with the 15th ATAC in the hopes of orchestrating a hostage exchange: their two prize defectors—Zor Prime and Musica—for the lives of Emerson, Marie, and Dennis. But no honest accord had been reached. No sooner had the Hovertanks of the 15th been brought aboard the flagship than all hell had broken loose, and Emerson had been killed. It was his death, perhaps more than any other single event, that had forged the bond between Marie and Dennis, and as well between Marie and Dana Sterling, with whom she had been at odds nearly from the day Dana had graduated from the Academy and had been appointed acting CO of the 15th ATAC.

Dana came to mind now, as Marie was staring over the bony shoulder of a communications tech named Rawley, who had called to screen several real-time views of Earth's North- and Southlands. Following the destruction of Macross City, Dana's father, Max Sterling, had helped rid the Southlands of malcontent Zentraedi. But several hundred acculturated Zentraedi had allied themselves with the REF and shipped for Tirol aboard the SDF-3. Still others had exiled themselves on the factory satellite. Marie asked herself how she might feel if she were Dana, knowing that her people, so ill-treated under the reign of Chairman Moran and Supreme Commander Anatole Leonard, had now been asked to lend support in the fight against the Invid.

"I've seen turn-of-the-century recon-sat opticals," Rawley was saying, "and I swear you'd think you were looking at a different world." A sharp- featured man of about twenty-five, he had long, narrow hands and an enormous Adam's apple, which bobbed when he spoke. "Just here," he continued, indicating the bulbous northeast coast of the Southlands, "all this used to be dense forest, fronted by sandy beaches. Now it's wasteland— as devastated as anything in Africa or Asia."

"The Rain of Death," Marie said, referring to the assault by the Zentraedi Grand Fleet in 2012, the catastrophic conclusion to the Robotech War.

"The Zentraedi Rain of Death," Rawley amended nastily. "And now we're inviting them back." He shook his head disapprovingly and called new views to screen.

While newborn Marie had lost her family to the Rain, she had never really known them, and so had no feelings one way or another about the Zentraedi—an attitude not uncommon among the so-called orphaned generation. "We need their help," she told Rawley.

"But how do we know they haven't gotten that factory on-line again, spitting out Battlepods or other armed craft? How do we know they're not going to blow us out of orbit just for suggesting that they side with us against the Invid?"

For the first time, Marie noticed that Rawley's hands were trembling slightly and that his upper lip was beaded with sweat. "From what I've heard, the Zentraedi aren't especially conversant with technology."

Rawley stared at her, wide-eyed. "From what you've heard? Well, maybe you should research what they accomplished during the Malcontent Uprisings, Lieutenant. You might feel differently about the transmissions you forced us to send."

In the first place, Marie told herself, no one had been forced to do anything. But you didn't point that out to a guy who needed to have his medication dosage increased. And as for the flash message Liberty had transmitted, in addition to the recall code, it had contained nothing more

than a schedule of the Reflex burns the factory would be required to make in order for it to insert in Earth orbit. The trajectory corrections had been based on Dr. Emil Lang's original calculations.

"If the Zentraedi respond to our request," Marie said finally, "they'll do so as comrades, not—"

"Paint!" Rawley rasped, shooting to his feet and leaning over the console, practically nose to nose with the vertical threat-assessment board. "I've got major paint on long-range two!" he said into a pickup, spewing coordinates, even while his left hand was fumbling with the release key for the alert-status activation display.

Marie studied the assessment board as sirens began to blare throughout the station. Rawley pressed his headset against his ear and adjusted the gain on one of the transceivers. "I'm waiting for identification!" he yelled into the microphone. "I have high probability that it's an alien ship! Invid, it has to be Invid!"

A massive, radish-shaped object took shape on the friend-or-foe display. "It's the satellite!" Marie said, caught up in the emotion of the moment.

And the next words to issue over the speakers were Zentraedi.

CHAPTER FIVE

"We'd heard rumors about Louie Nichols, nothing more than that. For instance, we knew he'd been credited with detecting the bio-magnetic field deployed by the Masters' fortress, which led directly to the grounding of their flagship early on in the war. I mean, if it hadn't been for that, the Southern Cross might never have realized just who or what they were up against. Then, of course, there was Louie's 'pupil pistol'—his targeting glasses. We had no doubts that he'd fit in. In fact, we probably would have kidnapped him if he'd turned down Mr. Shimada's offer to join our team."

Wilfred Gibley, quoted in Bruce Mirrorshades'

Machine Mind and Arthurian Legend

"Gath Yar, dentalla!" Dana yelled as she bounded across the arrival gate at Tokyo's Haneda ("Big Bird") Airport and hurled herself at Terry Weston. The Zentraedi phrase—one her mother had shouted at her repeatedly during her childhood—translated as "Complete the mission, ally," but Dana used it the way Miriya Parino had, meaning, "Pick up after yourself!"

Terry fended off a flurry of Dana's kicks and punches before she managed to sneak one past him. Months of piloting a Veritech against the Masters' hover platforms had sharpened his mind but slowed his Earthbound reflexes.

Neither he nor Dana were in uniform. Terry wore black jeans, fly-boy boots, and a tight-fitting shirt; Dana, leggings, a baggy top, and vest. Blond and lanky, Terry was nearly twice her age, but could have passed for a slightly older sibling. Louie Nichols, in a tanker's mechasuit and his ever- present tinted goggles, was the only one who looked the part of a combat veteran.

Following the backhand that tagged him lightly on the chin, Terry pulled Dana into an affectionate embrace and held her until she had calmed

down. The point/counterpoint was a habit with them, still operational after all these years. Eventually he stepped back to regard her, though guardedly. "How much of what I've been hearing about you and the 15th is on the level?"

Dana made her arching brows bob. "Tell me what you've been hearing." "That you were aboard the flagship minutes before it exploded."

"Guilty as charged."

"And that it was you who turned the red Bioroid pilot against the Masters."

Dana's grin faltered. Terry was referring to Zor Prime. "Umm . . . No, I can't take credit for that. The red Bioroid pilot did what he needed to do. I just happened to be there when he did it."

Terry shook his head in amazement. "Next, they'll be erecting a monument to you."

"Not likely," Dana said, ready to change the subject. She turned to Louie. "Terry, Louie Nichols."

Weston extended his hand. "Good to meet you, Nichols." When his gaze returned to Dana, the mirth had left his eyes. "I was sorry to hear about Rolf."

Dana compressed her lips and nodded. "Rolf's the one who deserves a monument."

"How's Bowie taking it?"

"Not good. But he found someone who's helping him through it." She didn't bother to add that that someone was a green-haired alien clone named Musica.

The Shimada Family had provided a stretch limousine, which was waiting curbside. Dana had been told to expect as much, but the car took her by surprise nevertheless. The Terry Weston she knew was a rough-and- tumble guy who rode motorcycles and piloted Veritechs. And while he maintained that he still rode a vintage Marauder, he seemed awfully at home in the air-conditioned comfort of the backseat.

"Just why did you agree to play go-between for the Shimadas and the Southern Cross?" Dana asked him when they were under way and the privacy partition had been raised. "After what the Cosmic Units accomplished upside—in spite of Leonard—you sure don't owe command anything above and beyond the call."

"I probably would have said no to command. Especially if Leonard had survived." Terry worked his jaw in repressed anger. "But once Kan Shimada learned that Dana Sterling might be coming to Tokyo, he asked me to handle things." He grinned at her. "He's eager to meet you."

Dana snorted. "As celebrated war hero or notorious half-breed?" Terry shrugged. "You'll have to ask him."

The limo sped down a wide highway, populated large by enormous trucks and fleets of small vans. Though a frequent visitor to near space, Dana hadn't seen much of the planet up close and personal, and far she was disappointed. Tokyo, said to be Earth's twenty-first-century wonder, looked less like a city than a superhighway system run amok. The residential zones had the makeshift look of slums, and everything in between was a smoke- spewing industrial park. "No wonder the Masters left this place alone," she commented.

Louie and Weston regarded each other and laughed. Louie said, "You're only seeing the roof, Dana."

The city's single tall structure would have been lost among the former milk-carton towers of Monument, though in fact it turned out to be the Shimada Building. Dana thought about Lazlo Zand; it was from here that he had communicated with the Masters, almost two years before the War. Emerging from the limo, she shaded her eyes with her hand and gazed up at the Shimada's airy crown. "That's our destination, I suppose," she said as Terry was climbing from the backseat.

But he shook his head. "We're going the other way." He aimed his thumb at the ground. "Down."

The elevator car had walls of thick glass. After descending several levels through the building itself, the car emerged in Tokyo's vast underground as

an exterior elevator affixed to the Shimada's hidden self. Dana realized that they were dropping into an interconnected complex of vast domes—the so- called geo-grid—lit by sunlight and fiber-optic arrays. These housed all that was missing from the surface world: offices, shops, sports complexes, casinos, pedestrian malls, and video gardens. But for all the wonder of it, Dana's awe was corrupted by sadness; for Tokyo was emblematic of what had become of Humankind, driven by three generations of war—global and otherwise—to entomb itself in gloriously appointed bomb shelters.

The elevator stopped well above street level, and Terry led Dana and Louie back into the building. They moved down a carpeted hallway toward a room sealed off by traditional Japanese sliding doors. While they were removing their footwear, a male attendant spoke into his lapel mike and announced their arrival, then Terry escorted them inside, where ten men and one young woman were sitting on the floor around a long, low table. Varying in age from twenty or so to sixty, the men bowed from the waist and spoke to one another in Japanese while Louie and Dana folded themselves into cross-legged postures at the near end of the table. Exquisitely wrought faux wood, the table supported an arrangement of porcelain teapots and cups. Save for the overhead lights, there wasn't a piece of technology to be seen.

"Most revered guests," the silver-haired man at the head of the table said, "you honor us with your visit. Let us hope that this meeting will be the first of many, and that it will lay the groundwork for projects mutually beneficial to our individual and collective causes."

The silver-haired one was Kan Shimada himself. On his right sat his sons, Eiten, Yosuke, and Chosei, and on his left, his most trusted advisors, including Miho Nagata, whose name Dana knew. Closer to her and Louie's end of the table—and dressed way down for the occasion—were two of Shimada's top researchers, Wilfred Gibley and Shi Ling. The young woman's name was Misa Yoshida.

Dana found the first moments of eye contact telling. People who knew anything about her ancestry tended to regard her with a certain wary

curiosity; but the penetrating gaze of the Shimadas added respect to the mix, which was something new to her. In a year's time, she seemed to have graduated from half-breed upstart to half-breed war hero. And while she felt gratified, she wished she could have brought along a couple of the Tirolean clones, if only to siphon off the Shimadas' flagrant inquisitiveness. Gibley and Shi Ling, on the other hand, gave her only a moment's gaze before fixing their attention on Louie Nichols, whose whiz-kid reputation had obviously preceded him. As for Misa Yoshida, her dark eyes darted not between Dana and Louie, but between Dana and Terry, who wasn't even seated at the table, but behind Dana, near the sliding doors.

"Mr. Shimada, I, too, hope that something productive can come of our meeting," Dana said when she'd had about all she could take of the silent scrutiny. "But as an emissary of the provisional government and the allied defense forces, I'm obliged to mention that we were hoping President Misui would be included."

Kan Shimada nodded gravely. "Rest assured, Miss Sterling, that everything said here will reach the ears of the president. From our previous dealings—though they may not have been face-to-face—it should be obvious to you, at least, that I am a man of my word."

Shimada was referring to the intercepted communiqué between Lazlo Zand and the Masters. Where the yakuza family could have kept the intelligence to itself, Kan Shimada had instead tasked Terry Weston to bring it to the attention of Rolf Emerson, who Terry eventually reached through Dana. As a result, Emerson had been able to use the data to thwart Anatole Leonard's plan to usurp the power of the UEG and crush the Robotech Defense Force. The Shimadas hadn't exactly kept quiet about what they knew—that the Masters' fleet had already arrived in the Solar system—but they had gone about their work of empowering Tokyo without once resorting to blackmail.

"Mr. Shimada, I only needed to hear that President Misui would be apprised of our discussion," Dana said at last. "My adoptive father often said that you would be one of the people on whom Earth's future would rest,

and I never doubted that for a moment."

The Shimada daimyo inclined his head toward her. "I am deeply saddened by Rolf's death—though all of us should wish for such an honorable ending to our lives." He allowed a moment of silence before asking, "What assistance can Tokyo provide to the beleaguered leaders of the world government and the defense forces?"

Dana switched from a cross-legged position to a kneeling posture. "We know that you have been doing research into something called 'machine mind.' It's rumored that you've discovered a way to bypass the Protoculture interface in controlling mecha. Defense Force command is eager to know if there is any truth to this rumor, and if so, whether you would be willing to share aspects of your research with Robotech Research and Development."

"For the war effort, you mean."

Dana thought for a moment. "Let's say, for the next war effort." Shimada grinned, showing even, white teeth. "Ah, but here in Tokyo,

our sole interest lies in backing the peace effort."

Dana grinned faintly. "Tokyo was certainly within its rights as a sovereign city to exclude itself from the War. But may I respectfully submit that the Masters did not come in peace. If it wasn't for the Macross mounds, Tokyo might have suffered the same fate that Monument City has."

Shimada showed the palms of manicured hands. "Who can say for certain? Had the Masters been granted access to the mounds, a war might have been averted. Zand and Leonard must have known this. But each, for his own reasons, opted for contest over negotiation. I respectfully submit to you, that, even if it existed in the shadow of the mounds, Tokyo would have responded differently."

"Perhaps," Dana granted. "But it's pretty obvious now that we all exist in the shadow of the Invid. What will Tokyo do when they arrive?"

Shimada's eyes glinted. "Treat them as guests before we brand them as enemies." He paused for effect. "For all anyone knows, the Invid will seek out only those areas where the Flowers of Life are growing in greatest profusion. And should that prove the case, it may be possible to coexist with

them. For a time, we shared this planet with the Zentraedi. Why, then, shouldn't we be prepared to share it with the Invid?"

Dana recalled his introductory words to her. You honor us with your visit. Let us hope that this meeting will be the first of many, and that it will lay the groundwork for projects mutually beneficial to our individual and collective causes. Was that how Shimada planned to greet the Invid?

He spoke before she could reply. "It is only because the Defense Force will assume that the Invid are our enemies that we are reluctant to share our research with them. We are without ulterior motive in this. You can assure those to whom you answer that we are not like the Southlands' Starchildren cult, readying some dream ship that is meant to deliver us far from Earth and its troubles."

"I'm sure they'll take great comfort in that," Dana said disingenuously. "But make no mistake about it, Mr. Shimada, the Invid are going to disappoint you. True, they probably won't wage war on us like the Zentraedi and the Masters did. They aren't coming to reclaim a hijacked battle fortress or a Protoculture Matrix. They're coming for the Flowers of Life and for the planet on which they've taken root. And they will see us as nothing more than troublesome pests infesting their gardens. They will simply eradicate those of us who resist and enslave the rest. They will construct hives in every part of the world and create orchards and gardens around them. And we will be the ones tending those gardens and picking the Flowers, Mr. Shimada. Ask the inhabitants of Karbarra, Spheris, Praxis, Garuda, and countless other worlds. They'll confirm what I'm telling you, because they've lived with it."

Shimada traded baffled glances with his sons. "I know nothing of these places."

"Worlds that were once ruled by the Masters," Dana explained. "But when their empire began to crumble, the Invid rushed in to claim them. This comes direct from the Expeditionary mission, Mr. Shimada. From the commander of the one ship the REF has managed to return home."

"Why wasn't this made public?" Wilfred Gibley asked. "All we heard

was that Major Carpenter's ship had been destroyed by the Masters' fleet."

Dana smiled thinly in Gibley's direction. "Whatever my personal indebtedness to you for what you did to Zand, you were hardly considered a Southern Cross ally. Command released only that information that bore directly on the war. I guess it struck Leonard as counter-productive to whip everyone into a frenzy about the Invid while we were still trying to deal with the Masters. Probably the only right choice Leonard ever made."

Shimada steepled his fingers and touched them to his lower lip. "You made no mention of this when you asked if we would be willing to share our technology. Are you proposing some sort of trade—our research for what you know about the Expeditionary mission and the SDF-3?"

Dana glanced at Louie, who gave his head a barely perceptible shake. "I'm not going to lie to you," she said, when she looked back at Shimada. "Major Carpenter was shocked to find the Masters here—in Earthspace. Apparently, it took the SDF-3 several years to fold to Tirol, and it took Carpenter's ship almost as many to refold. He thought he'd be returning to the year 2023, not 2032. In other words, his information about the REF is already years out of date. Anything could have happened. The Invid might have been defeated in Tirolspace, or vice versa. We just don't know."

Shimada took a long moment to respond. "What is your personal hunch about the Expeditionary mission?"

Dana was nonplussed. Shimada continued.

"I'm not suggesting that you've had some sort of revelation. But, surely, you have a gut feeling about the SDF-3. What with your parents onboard . . ."

Dana was tempted to tell him about her vision, but rejected the idea. Not in this setting, she told herself. Not in her position as emissary. "I'll say this much, Mr. Shimada: I believe with all my heart that the Invid will come to Earth. I wouldn't be here, otherwise. Nor would I have agreed to play this same role with the Zentraedi."

Shimada's sons and advisors muttered and shook their heads. "More surprises from the not-so-guileless Ms. Sterling," Kan's eldest, Chosei, said.

Dana glanced at him. "The Zentraedi have agreed to return the factory satellite to Earth orbit. We're hoping we can use it to ferry some of our disabled warships to what we've determined to be a Sensor Nebula, dispatched by the Invid to search for Flower-rich worlds. Presently, the Nebula is some twenty million miles away. That's why we're interested in knowing what you've learned about media control. The reasoning is that the more firepower we can bring to bear on the Nebula, the greater the chances of destroying it. But most of our ships and craft are depleted of Protoculture. We have to find some other way to activate them."

"To resurrect them as agents of death and destruction," Shimada said sadly. "I'm sorry, Ms. Sterling, but I think I prefer them as lifeless rather than animate things."

Dana nodded. "I respect your decision, sir. But there's one more point I need to make: I said that most of our fighters are depleted. But even so, there are hundreds that remain operational. Meaning that the Defense Force is more than capable of taking what it wants, when it feels that all attempts at negotiation have failed."

Shimada kept his composure when all about him were losing theirs. "I suspect that you were ordered to say as much, and I appreciate the veil you draped over the Defense Force's threat. Please advise them, in return, that they should feel free to impose their will on us. Without weapons, we would be fools to resist. Therefore, they can come and possess whatever we have— except, of course, our attitude toward peace."

He looked around the table. "You see, Ms. Sterling, we are nondiscriminating toward all would-be invaders: Defense Force or Invid, we will treat them both the same."

CHAPTER SIX

The Southlands' penchant for tribalism was undoubtedly a legacy of the continent's indigenous peoples: the Inca, the Chibcha, the Moche, the Mapuche, and the countless peoples who inhabited the vast rain forests of the interior. Commentators are quick to assign tribal or cult status to the Church of Recurrent Tragedies, HEARTH, and the Starchildren, but neglect to include the bands of Zentraedi that flourished during the Malcontent Uprisings—the Shroud, the Burrowers, Khyron's Fist, and, of course, the Scavengers—or the scores of "indy" battalions that came into being in the wake of the mass desertions following the Second Robotech War: the Stonemen, the Altiplano Five Hundred, the Pantanal Brigade, and others. Under the heading of Southland factions, one could even, I suppose, include Anatole Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross.

Major Alice Harper Argus (ret.),

Fulcrum: Commentaries on the Second Robotech War

Cordiality returned with the end of the meeting. Dana and Louie were treated to a grand tour of the Shimada facility, which struck Dana as being closer to what she had read about the complex as it was under Emil Lang than under his chief disciple. Lazlo Zand. Around every corner and crowding every laboratory were robots, curious machines, and computer- created specimens of artificial life. Too, many of the facility's scores of researchers—Asian, for the most part—wore the wide-eyed gaze that had long been associated with Robotechnology, rather than the "furtive warlock" look that typified the members of the Zand cult, wherein Protoculture was deified.

Kan Shimada and his top jonin, Miho Nagata, remained at Dana's side the entire time, drinking in everything she had to say about the Masters and their weapons of destruction, the 15th's reconnaissance of their flagship, and the valiant battles that had been fought on Earth and in near space.

Shimada was astonished to learn that a group of Tiroleans had been rescued from the flagship and were currently in protective custody in Monument City.

After three hours of riding elevators, talking to machines, and shaking countless latex-gloved hands, Dana was spent, and was searching for ways to quit the tour. Louie, however—who had spent most of the time talking nonstop with Gibley, Shi Ling, and a cute blond named Strucker—was just getting started. Dana recalled something he'd told her when he was working on his targeting glasses, months before. I just like machines—period. They expand Human potential, and they never disappoint you if you build 'em right. Somebody with the right know-how—such as myself—could create the ideal society. Unimpeded intellect! Machine logic!

So Louie decided to remain at the facility while Dana excused herself under the pretense of being exhausted from the transPacific flight. In fact, she was looking forward to spending some personal time with Terry, whom she hadn't seen since long before the start of the War. But when she finally succeeded in locating him—in one of the building's subground-level bars— he was with Misa, who clearly knew Terry as well as, or perhaps better than Dana did.

The three of them retreated to Misa's apartment, in a subterranean luxury high rise only a dome away from the Shimada Building. The apartment was an eccentric combination of traditional Japanese and ultratech, and had a balcony that overlooked a park with a waterfall. Terry was as much at home in the place as he had been in the backseat of the limousine. Misa—who was long-haired, curvaceous, and taller than Dana— wasn't a researcher but some kind of glorified accountant, though how number crunching had earned her a place at the Shimada table was anyone's guess.

The opulence of the apartment discomfited Dana; for the first time since the end of the fighting, she felt uncertain of her place in the world. How could all this exist, she asked herself, in light of what had happened on the other side of the world? The recent past took on a kind of unreality, and

for a moment, she could almost convince herself that Rolf, Zor Prime, Jordan Sullivan, and so many others were still alive.

It took several cups of Misa's sake to take the edge off her mood. Pleasantly intoxicated, Dana scarcely batted an eye when Terry informed her that Misa was the person who had inadvertently come into possession of the encrypted data disk that he had turned over to Rolf, and it was the disk that had brought Terry and Misa together. The irony was obvious, in that Terry and Dana had met under similar circumstances during the Giles Academy incident—an intelligence operation mounted by Rolf Emerson, against a Leonard lieutenant named Joseph Petrie.

"We're like blond and brunette bookends for this guy," Dana told Misa between fits of laughter.

As an unsettling dusk descended on the subterranean city, their talk turned to the state of the world outside the shelter that was Tokyo. Neither Terry nor Misa put much stock in the warnings Dana had voiced about the Invid. To them, it—invasion—couldn't happen a third time. They envisioned a better tomorrow for everyone, and a gradual resurfacing from terror. The thirty-year curse of Macross was ended. The political and military disarray in the Northlands would stabilize, the Southlands would surrender some of its feudal attitudes, Europe and Africa would recover . . . And Tokyo—a kind of inverted Shangri-la—would be there to lead the way into the future.

"Dana, you should think about coming to live here," Misa suggested. "Mr. Shimada would probably appoint you mayor."

Somewhat disarmed by the sake, Dana said, "I'm leaving the planet." It was only when she realized that Misa and Terry were staring at her that she thought to add, "To go to the factory satellite, I mean."

"But when you return," Misa said, looking relieved.

Dana displayed a practiced smile. "When I return. Sure, why not."

On the muddy slopes below Brasília's ruined Esplanada dos Ministerios Brasília, twenty Southern Cross A-JACs deployed in Battloid mode, their quartets of gyro blades slung on their backs like the vanes of a

windmill. Above them, dispersed between the spires of debris that had been plasteel and concrete buildings, waited an equal number of Hovertanks and battered Veritechs, several of them also configured in that most Humanlike of fighting modes.

Lieutenant Dewey Tast in Green Tiger One glanced at his communications console to see the narrow face of Gavin Murdock resolve on-screen. Murdock was crafted in one of the Hovers on the Esplanada just now, though as recently as two months ago he and Tast had been wingmen during the Emerson-led assault on the Masters' fleet.

"Haven't you got more important things to do, Lieutenant, than to follow a couple of deserters all the way to the Southlands?"

Tast knew better than to be thrown by Gavin's smile, which he flashed even when dead serious. "No, Sergeant, it's my sad duty to inform you that you're the only game in town."

"So what game are we playing?"

"It's called 'coming clean,' and here's the way it goes: First off, you people get together and decide whether you want to be military or civilian. If you choose civilian, you surrender the mecha and walk away without any penalties. If you choose military, then you get to keep the mecha but you have to follow orders."

"And what's the penalty for choosing military?"

"That's the beauty of it: there isn't any. So, either way, you win." "Except for losing the mecha."

"As civilians, you have no right to them."

"Oh, yeah? Then what's the penalty for refusing to play the game, Lieutenant? A court-martial?"

It was a good question, and Tast had to take a moment to consider it.

Once the crown jewel of the Southlands, Brasília had endured its own brief Rain of Death during one of the frequent lulls in the pitched fighting in Monument and out near the moon. Those lulls had come to be feared by everyone downside, for it was then that the Masters' space fortresses would ravage whatever landmass happened to be below them at the time.

Occasionally they would target a specific place, but more often their energy bursts were unpredictable, scouring uninhabited tracts of forest, or leveling mountaintops, or boiling lakes dry.

Brasília's unlucky day had come four months back. The Masters' preemptive attack hadn't lasted more than five minutes, but in that time, the city—given new life by Anatole Leonard when he had led refugees there from the devastated coast following the original Rain of Death—had been laid to waste. Given that everyone had grown accustomed to living out the lulls in the city's poor excuse for an underground, casualties were comparatively light. But there wasn't a building that hadn't been touched by directed light and sent crumbling to the cobblestone streets. Many believed it was because of Leonard that Brasília had been targeted. But what, then, of Mexico City—also ruined beyond repair—where the Masters' nemesis had never even planted his jackboot?

Brasília, nevertheless, was still home to many of the Southern Cross regulars who had followed Field Marshal Leonard to Monument City after the launch of the SDF-3. And it was to their roots they had returned in the course of the mass desertions that had followed the destruction of Earth's primary fleet and the end of the war.

Gavin Murdock was of those who had returned home.

"I'm still waiting to hear about the penalty for refusing to play, Lieutenant?" he directed over the link to Tast's A-JAC.

Tast decided to try a more down-to-earth approach. "Murdock, what do you plan to do down here?"

"Defend ourselves, brother. 'Cause God knows you people aren't going to do it."

Tast shook his head for the cockpit camera. "Look around you, Gavin.

There's nothing left to defend."

Murdock acknowledged the comment with a nod. "Maybe not right here, Lieutenant. But not all of the Southlands looks as bad as this place. HEARTH has got things pretty much under control in the interior and up north."

"Is that what you're planning to do—throw in with those cultists?"

Murdock smiled. "Hey, Lieutenant, those cultists are Earth first, you know what I'm saying? They're not about to fight a war that can't be won. The Invid want a piece of planet? Fine, they can have it, so long as they leave us alone to do our thing. We protect our property, our land, and nobody else's. You can tell that to General Vincinz and the rest of command. Tell him we're not surrendering the mecha, and that he should think of us as an indy battalion. Civil defense, whatever. But we're not taking orders from anyone. Understood?"

Tast sighed wearily. "You've got, what—fourteen Hovertanks and six Veritechs that can hardly stand on their feet? Have you considered that you're outgunned?"

"Okay, then. Go ahead and shoot us. Eliminate more of Earth's remaining mecha—and mecha pilots. You know, we're not saying that we won't fight if push comes to shove. We're just saying we get to decide when and how."

Tast muted the communication display and opened up a frequency on the command net that connected him to the Green Tiger commander, Captain Vitti, who was waiting with ten more A-JACs, five miles to the south.

"Did you monitor that, Captain?"

Vitti's face appeared on-screen. "I got it."

"Do we show them what for, or do we starve them out?"

"Neither. Let them be." Vitti gave his head a mournful shake. "And let's just pray that the goddamned Zentraedi on the factory satellite will be more inclined to see reason."

Tast thought he could hear Anatole Leonard rolling over in his grave.

Surrounded on three sides by pianos and synthesizers, Bowie Grant noodled his way through a little-known Lynn-Minmei song entitled, "Screaming Across the Skies." It was late morning and the sun was creeping over the jagged ridge opposite the Emerson cabin, dappling the sloping land

with golden light. Bowie loved this hour of the day—and now more than ever. Shortly, the air would warm, and perhaps some of the stiffness would begin to leave his fingers.

He could recall a time when the outbuilding that was his studio behind the cabin had been a sanctuary. Home on leave from any number of military academies, he would retreat to the small wooden structure and play keyboards until his fingers were too cramped to move. But even in those days, when music was everything to him, he knew when he had reached a point of diminishing returns; when sheer exhaustion was undermining the effort he was putting into perfecting some dazzling chord progression or arpeggio. Just now, however, concerns about exhaustion and technique didn't enter the picture; he didn't dare allow himself the luxury of a break, for fear of fomenting mass hysteria among the Tirolean clones.

In fact, the relentlessness of his playing had as much to do with maintaining some semblance of order among the refugees as it did with drowning out the sounds of their anguished cries, baleful moans, and unnerving laughter. What with one of the Hovertanks supplying a couple hours of electricity per day, he had tried running a loop track of samples over the camp's improvised PA system, but the Tiroleans—accustomed to Musica's live compositions on the Cosmic Harp—didn't respond nearly as well to recorded music. Against both the emotional outpourings and the near-constant music, Sean and Angelo had simply taken to wearing earplugs round the clock.

Rescuing the Tiroleans from the Masters' disintegrating flagship hadn't exactly been Dana's idea, but the three campbound members of the 15th ATAC held her responsible just the same. Well before the end of the War, sickened by the fighting, the squadron had rebelled against killing the programmed Bioroid pilots. But it was Dana, to whom Bowie had always looked for support, who had set everything in motion; Dana, who had seen something of herself in the Tiroleans and insisted that they had to be cared for. And now she was off on a mission to the just-returned factory satellite, and Louie was still in Tokyo, and responsibility for the refugees had fallen

on Bowie, Sean, Angelo, and a handful of volunteers they had recruited into service.

Though no more accustomed to leadership than the Tiroleans were to individuality, Bowie—as both musician and Musica's mate—had inherited the real burden of their custody, regardless that he hadn't the slightest notion on how to proceed. In the same way that the Protoculture pods aboard the Masters' ships had become contaminated by the Flowers of Life, so, too, had the clones become contaminated by emotions.

Of the two hundred plus that had been rescued, sixty had already died; some from wounds sustained during the fighting aboard the flagship, others from disease, and others from heart failure brought on by sensory overload, panic, hypersensitivity—Bowie didn't know what to call it. Phlegmatic under the Masters—Dana had once referred to them as "zombies"—they were nothing less than manic without them, milling within the confines of the Emerson camp like dogs before a fox hunt.

With Monument City deserted, save for the diehards and foragers who had taken up residence in the city's crisped towers, Bowie had given thought to relocating everyone to the lower valley, where they would at least be closer to the crashed assault ships that were supplying food—of a sort—for the clones. But the pale and fragile Tiroleans were as ill suited to travel as their gauzy clothing had been to the Northwest's extremes in temperature. They had been made for life in the climate-controlled interior of the mother ships that had carried them from Tirol, and for nowhere else.

En masse, they seemed to be suffering from dislocation. They longed to return to their previous circumstances: to those inboard cities that resembled Old World Venice without the canals; to their lives of meaningless activity and arranged marriages; to their devices—the bioscanners and reprogrammers—that analyzed and modified their behavior as need be; and to the unquestioned authority of their armed and long-haired Clonemasters.

Perhaps most of all they yearned for the return of the three-in-one mentality the Masters had fashioned for their society, in which each clone

was part of a Triumvirate and was incapable of individual effort or action. Bowie often asked himself why the Masters had bothered to create such oblivious creatures; but then he supposed that all would-be-gods— beneficent or corrupt—required applause, and the beings equipped to deliver it . . .

Still chording with his right hand, Bowie was giving his left a rest when Musica edged into the studio and gave him a wan smile. She was dressed in mismatched items from Bowie's civilian wardrobe, and her long, dark-green hair was tied in a ponytail. A fresh dressing, courtesy of Sean, covered the scorch she had received on her upper arm during the final fight with Karno and some other clones, but the wound had festered and wasn't healing. In her arms, she cradled the infant they had rescued from oblivion. A boy, the infant was sleeping for a change.

"Are things any better with your people?" Bowie asked while continuing to play.

She shook her head. "Worse, Bowie. Most of them wish they had been included among the aged ones the Masters jettisoned from the flagship. We're . . . we're at a loss."

As if reading his thoughts, Musica said, "Octavia's dying words to me were that we would still be as one. But I don't feel her, Bowie. And if I can't feel her, how am I to give voice to her spirit and songs?" She wept into her hands. "I know that Allegra is going through the same ordeal, and yet she refuses to talk to me. My sister hates me for freeing you from capture, and for leading you to the flagship's control core."

"She doesn't hate you," Bowie said, rocking the infant, who had begun to stir. "You're all struggling with being separated from your brothers and sisters, with standing on your own two feet, as we say. That separation—that distance—must seem like hatred, but—"

"Everyone was so noble and compassionate in the final moments of the War," she said, cutting him off. "But now that the fighting is done, people are reverting to their old ways. The general you so loved—Rolf Emerson—he said that we should be careful not to make the mistakes the Southern Cross

and the Masters made; that it was imperative to the future of the planet that our two races learn to live together. But look what has happened already." She glanced at the infant. "The woman, Nova Satori, saved the life of this child, and now she is ready to turn us over to the authorities for 'debriefing.' She is back to being the hardened military officer she was when she tried to take me into the custody of the GMP. And she is but a symptom of an illness that will spread unchecked through your people."

Bowie knew that she was right. He and Musica had had to flee to the Macross mounds to escape Nova. Now the brief time they had spent among the blossoming Flowers of Life was almost a fond memory. He leaned forward and kissed away her tears, the infant pressed between their two bodies. "I promised you that we would be an island of peace in this ocean of misery, and, no matter what comes down, I will do everything I can to make that happen."

Musica sighed disconsolately. "Then return us to Tirol, Bowie," she said, collapsing against his knees. "Take us home."

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Masters not only were aware of the presence of the factory satellite, but they continued to monitor its whereabouts throughout the War. Of course, it would have been easy enough to target and destroy the facility—as they had a Botoru Battalion warship that was later discovered marooned on a moon of [Saturn]—but the Masters were at that point convinced that the Protoculture Matrix would soon be theirs once more, and they planned to repair, reenergize, and redeploy the factory—along with its contingent of Zentraedi— against the Invid. It's conceivable that the Masters also intended to utilize the factory as a kind of clone creche for thousands of new Zentraedi warriors, which—Imperatived—would then engage the swarm.

A footnote in Zeus Bellow's The Road to Reflex Point (apparently based on a remark attributed to Nova Satori, in her intel report on the debriefing of Zor Prime)

Approached from Space Station Liberty, the factory satellite, despite its enormity, looked shriveled and desiccated. The factory's secondary pods drooped at the ends of their stalks and, except for a few places, the rose hue of the central radish-shaped body had faded completely. The pallid face of a corpse, Dana thought, rouged by the stroke of a mortician's brush.

She had proceeded directly to Liberty aboard a shuttle launched from Japan's Tanegashima Aerospace Facility, which had seen little use since the start of the war. Then, after several days of briefings, Dana and Marie Crystal had piloted coupled Alpha and Beta Veritechs to the factory, recently returned from its cometary orbit, and in whose veritable shadow Liberty now turned. Newly developed sensors, deflectors, and "sanitiziers" allowed the Legios to avoid and/or destroy hits of debris that could have proved catastrophic to the mecha.

En route, Marie and Dana caught up on developments upside and downside, but spent the better part of the short trip talking about Dennis,

who was still on Liberty, awaiting transfer orders; and about Sean, who, along with Bowie and Dante, was safeguarding the Emerson camp's tragically diminishing population of Tiroleans.

As a newborn, Dana had been part of the RDF mission that had captured and returned the factory to Earthspace; but she hadn't been aboard since the death of her three Zentraedi godfathers—Rico, Konda, and Bron—years earlier. Rolf had paid it a visit three years ago in response to the Zentraedis' request for permission to quit Earth orbit. They had planned to act as an early-warning system for the arrival of the Masters, and the plan had called for them to inform the Masters that the grail of their twenty-year journey—the Protoculture Matrix—had left Earth aboard the SDF-3, to be returned to them. But, for reasons unknown, the Masters had remained incommunicado with the factory-satellite Zentraedi, the Solar system survivors of Dolza's Grand Fleet.

At the time of Rolf's visit, there had been some four hundred Zentraedi living in gender segregation in coffin-size chambers on level seven of the central body. The vast holds above and below level seven had apparently been sealed off, and the sole functioning gate was the iris access that had been retrofitted into the underbelly of the so-called three-o'clock pod. Rolf had told of meeting with the Zentraedi in compartments blotched with pools of lubricant and strewn with refuse, and of how the once-great race of cloned warriors had come to consider themselves "the doomed."

Fifteen at the time, Dana had experienced a troubling ambivalence over the satellite's departure. On the one hand—and notwithstanding the doomed Zentraedi themselves—she was glad to see the gloomy thing go. But should their suicidal plan succeed, Dana would be left the only Zentraedi— well, half Zentraedi—between Earth and Tirol. Either way, she had hoped never to see the factory again, and now here she was, traveling in Rolf's booster trailings, emissary of a military she abhorred and a government that represented scarcely one-fiftieth of Earth's tormented population.

But if some things never changed, others did. The Earth-tech-capable iris gate in the three-o'clock pod would not open, even after repeated

promptings from the coupled Veritechs.

"We could try blasting our way through," Dana said. "Or 'open sesame,'" Marie suggested.

But in the end, with the Legios anchored to the pod's blanched hull, Dana was forced to go extravehicular and squeeze herself through the gate's manually operated emergency membrane, which itself was barely serviceable.

The transfer tube that connected the pod to the factory's central body opened directly on level seven. But Dana didn't have to go that far. In the docking bay, she was met by a group of about seventy-five haggard Zentraedi, all of them female.

"Par dessu," Dana said in greeting, when she had removed her helmet. "I'm ex-lieutenant Dana Sterling, presently attached to the diplomatic service of the provisional government. I assume that you were informed of the purpose of my visit."

That they had been informed hardly prevented them from staring. But their scrutiny was of an entirely different order than what Dana had been subjected to in Tokyo. The gaunt gaze of the female aliens wasn't emboldened by either curiosity or respect, but by unadulterated incredulity. "Look closely at the eyes," one of the females said at last—a purple-

haired crone with a hooked nose. "You can see the Parino in her."

"It's true," commented another, tall and raven haired. "The Parino Template. No Human seed could smother it."

As a group they stepped closer, surrounding her. "I am called Tay Wav'vir," the first announced. "I knew your . . . your mother." It was as if she had to force the word from her throat. "Into many a battle I flew with her. Time and again, into the maw of kara-brek flew the Quadrono Battalion. Time and again, into the maw of honorable death." She gestured broadly to her comrades. "Now I am domillan here. Speaker, among us. Keeper of the Remaining Days."

"And the males?" Dana asked. "Where are they."

"Dead," the black-haired one supplied. "They refused to eat what little

sustenance the factory provides, and so they perished. Of starvation, of grief, of self-pity, of dissolute pride. We are the stronger willed of the self- banished. Waiting without surrender. Honoring our imperative, t'sen-mot through our stance. The original Imperative has died with the Masters."

"Triumphant T'sentrati!" someone shouted, and throughout the bay the call was echoed in defiant volume.

"Are they truly dead?" Tay Wav'vir asked when the cheer had attenuated. "The Masters?"

They had put the same question to the communications and astrogation techs who had overseen the facility's insertion into stationary orbit. So Dana had brought proof, in the form of news footage of the destruction of the flagship, which she played for them on a laptop-size display screen. When the footage had run, the earlier expressions of wonderment returned to their faces.

Dag, Shaizan, Bowkaz . . . dead. It was almost inconceivable.

"You, Daughter of Parino, you destroyed them," Tay said. "For all of

us."

They saluted, and Dana accepted their salutes, as her mother would

have wanted her to. Triumphant T'sentrati! The lingering images of her Protoculture-vision had aroused feelings of kinship with the Zentraedi, emotions that were even stronger than what she felt toward the clones. But then, as she began to detail the purpose of her mission, the mood in the docking bay grew somber.

"Yes, we monitored the arrival of the Sensor Nebula," Tay Wav'vir said when Dana was finished. "But this facility isn't capable of carrying your ships there, Daughter of Parino. It has made its last burn. Here it rests to be picked apart by time. A negrota souvenir of the war. Worthless."

"The Sensor Nebula is impervious to such an attack, in any case," the raven-haired one added. "The T'sentrati tried on many occasions to silence the things with the energy of our weapons, but to no avail. The Nebula has dispatched its message and the Invid will come. Reserve your firepower, Daughter of Parino—for the swarm."

Dana checked to be sure that her recording devices were functioning. She had thought as much about the Nebula, but her words alone wouldn't have carried much weight with Southern Cross command. Now command would get to hear the sad truth from the lips of the Invid's archenemies.

"My superiors will be informed," she said.

"Is Emerson among them still?" a yellow-haired one asked. "The Emerson who met with Ilan Tinari before we left Earthspace?"

Dana swung to face her in transparent confusion. Ilan Tinari had been Rolf's companion for a short time when Dana and Bowie were ten or so. "How do you people know Ilan Tinari?"

The Zentraedi female looked to her comrades. "Is it possible she doesn't know?"

Tay Wav'vir stepped in front of Dana. "Ilan Tinari was T'sentrati," she clarified. "It was because of you that she left him—Rolf Emerson. You, Daughter of Parino, were a constant reminder to Ilan of what might have been for the T'sentrati, had Humankind accepted us.

Dana was too stunned to respond. Rolf had never revealed Tinari's ancestry. But, why? Had he feared that Dana would never accept being raised by a Zentraedi other than her mother? Or had he been concerned about awakening too much of the Zentraedi in her?

"Emerson, too, is dead," she managed to say.

Tay Wav'vir nodded soberly. "A pity. He was your guardian, was he not?"

Dana swallowed and found her voice. "He was."

"We wanted to ask a favor of him," Tay's black-haired second said. "Having returned to Earthspace in good faith, we wanted to ask him to provide us with weapons and mecha, so that we might have the joy of soaring into battle against the Invid."

"Carry that message to your superiors, Daughter of Parino," Tay Wav'vir said. "Convince them to treat us as the free beings we are, after so long a time."

Before she and Sterling had set a course for the factory satellite, Marie had recommended that he should check out this communications tech named Rawley, who was stationed in Liberty's forward observation post. Best entertainment outside the game arcade was what Marie had said. So Dennis—having decided not to read too much into the miss-you message he had received from Nova Satori, and fed up with the snafus that were interfering with his transfer to ALUCE—had decided to give Rawley a try. But now he was sorry that he had.

"I'm not going to be able to get used to seeing that damn thing, hanging out there like some rotten vegetable," Rawley was saying, referring to the factory, whose ventral surface dominated the view from the post's observation blister. His hands were shaking and his armpits were underscored by large, crescent-shaped sweat stains. "First I thought it looked like some kind of sick Christmas-tree ornament, but now I think it's more like a moldy turnip you find at the back of your fridge.

"I mean, the Invid already have that Nebula to zero in on. And now we've gone and given them a Zentraedi facility, the likes of which they've probably targeted and destroyed in who knows how many other star systems in their search for the Flowers of Life."

Rawley shook his head and propelled two unidentifiable white pills into his mouth, washing them down with a gulp of cold coffee.

"Like my life wasn't miserable enough up here without them positioning that turnip right outside my front window. But do they care one iota about Paul Rawley? Not very likely, not very likely at all."

"Maybe it's time to put in for a transfer," Dennis gamely suggested.

Rawley laughed without merriment. "A transfer? You know where I want to be? In some remote corner of the Southlands where no one can find me. A patch of land with a couple of trees and potable water within walking distance. I'll live on rice and beans, or gather nuts and berries. Hell, I'll live on tree bark, if I have to. Bathe in streams, wear a loincloth, fashion tools out of wood and stone.

"I empathize with the deserters," he continued. "I'd follow suit if they'd let me off this baby's rattle. You'll feel exactly the same, Brown, once you've been here for two or three months and they want to put you on medication because they claim you've been raving, which would ordinarily excuse you from duty or get you a medical discharge but doesn't nowadays because there aren't enough people left aboard who know how to read these screens and interpret data. It's my curse that I can—that I can, even though I'm losing my damn mind! But you try sitting in this seat for a while and see what happens."

Rawley paused for air, and Dennis thought he saw an out, but didn't act quickly enough.

"The Church of Recurrent Tragedies, remember that movement? Reps from that cult used to come to my house in Brasília. What was their solution for keeping the Masters and the Invid from Earth's door? Burn incense, chant, meditate, send money to church headquarters. I think they lost most of their membership after the Malcontent Uprisings. But can you stand there and tell me they were wrong? Can you prove that their tactics wouldn't have worked if we'd all gotten behind them?"

Dennis had his mouth open to reply when Rawley continued. "I, for one, am sorry I didn't join them. I, for one—"

He stopped and stared at his vertical bank display screens, then slammed a hand down on a series of buttons. Howling sirens told Dennis that the station had just been put on full-alert status—for the fifth time in as many days.

"I've got a major bogey in sector six," Rawley shouted into his headset. "Not like anything I've ever seen. Earth vector confirmed!"

What the hell? Dennis thought. It couldn't be a Southern Cross ship out that far. So was it some straggler from the Masters' fleet?

"It's the Invid, Brown," Rawley was muttering. "I'm telling you, it's the Invid . . ."

A burst of static crackled from one of the post's speakers, and everyone in the hold turned to it, as if it were a display screen.

A tense silence held sway for a moment; then the speaker came to life once more.

"This is Colonel Jonathan Wolff of the REF," a calm, resonant voice announced. "I'm sure you people have us on your screens by now, and all I can say is that the view looks great from out here. We want very much to come home, folks, so please advise at your earliest opportunity. We have incredible news to share with you."

CHAPTER EIGHT

Rumors persisted throughout the '30s that groups of Zentraedi or Tiresians had survived the wars and were living on the moon or downside, atop remote mountains or deep within vast tracks of forest. Even now (2065), it is not uncommon to hear tales of travelers who have encountered, in Amazonia, Siberia, or elsewhere, itinerant bands of people purported to resemble [Tirolean] extraterrestrials in appearance or aspect. Yesteryear's Bigfoot and Yeti have given way to today's Zentraedi and Bioroid.

Issac Mendelbrot, Movers and Shakers: The Heritage of the Second Robotech War

From that distance out, Earth was still only a smudge of light through the bridge's observation bay; but no matter: it was their smudge of light.

Colonel Jonathan Wolff made the toast. "To Earth and to the ship that brought us here." A drink bulb raised in his right hand, he patted the armrest of the command chair with his left. "May each of us get to live the dreams we've been nursing about home."

Everyone on the bridge added voice to the toast; then, when they had all sipped from the bulbs, they tossed them toward a waste bucket someone had thought to bring forward from maintenance. Though there were bottles of Karbarran champagne and ale in the galley, the bulbs contained water. No real celebrating until they were safely docked in Earthspace and had assessed the situation there, Wolff had told them. Wouldn't do to have his crew of three hundred stumbling drunkenly from the ship, as if they had just returned from a party on Tirol. They were REF, after all—Robotech Expeditionary Force—and they planned on demonstrating to the Southern Cross just what a strack outfit they had become.

The ship was a substantially modified Garfish, constructed in Fantomaspace and powered by Reflex drives in combination with Protoculture-fueled spacefold generators. Unofficially designated The

Homeward Bound, it had launched from the Valivarre system one month earlier, and had forged its way through the Fourth Quadrant by executing a series of transluminal, continuum-bending jumps, or spacefolds.

The ship had performed admirably throughout, except in one area: communication with the SDF-3, in orbit around Tirol, had not been achieved. Burst transmissions had been dispatched through ordinary space nonetheless, in the hope that they would eventually be received. The selfsame glitch had plagued the Ikazuchi Carrier commanded by Major John Carpenter, which had yet to be heard from, though it had left Fantoma more than six months earlier.

The dissimilarity in their sizes, profiles, and signatures notwithstanding, the principal difference between the two ships—known only to Lang and Wolff—was that The Homeward Bound was capable of executing a refold for Tirol.

Not that Jonathan Wolff had any such designs. To the contrary, Wolff saw Earth as the final stop in a life odyssey that had taken him not only all over the planet, but to worlds he had never imagined existed. Tirol, Karbarra, Praxis, Garuda, Haydon IV . . . the lot of them inhabited by beings he had never imagined existed. But he was through with wandering and with wanderlust. His return would mark a new beginning for himself and for the wife and son he had left behind three years earlier. No more licking the wounds he'd suffered at the hands of Lynn-Minmei; no more disabling himself with drink—not so much as a celebratory goblet of Karbarran champagne for him; and an end to the consuming and ultimately self- destructive hatred he had for T. R. Edwards.

He understood that renewed interspecies warfare was likely to subsume the next year or two of his life. But he knew that he would be able to meet every challenge if he could succeed in reuniting with Catherine and Johnny. If he could succeed in winning their forgiveness for the years of selfishness and abandonment.

He sat straighter in the command chair while his crew busied themselves with duties. His crew, he thought. Not bad for a guy who had

been a Hovertank commander only four years earlier. Moreover, he stood to receive a healthy promotion for piloting the Garfish home. And how could Catherine fail to be impressed by the sight of a general's star glinting from the crown of his RDF command cap? Oh, there were bound to be heated discussions about his decision to remain in the military. But perhaps she would be inclined to see him in a different light once she realized that he was on the side of peace this time around.

In the breast pocket of his jacket, close to his heart, was a message from Emil Lang, which he had been ordered to hand deliver to Rolf Emerson, of the Earth Defense Force. And included among the contents of that message was Lang's disclosure that Zor had concealed the Protoculture Matrix in the Reflex furnaces of the now-interred SDF-1, a fact to which the Masters should be directed in the event that they threatened war. Even though the possibility of that occurring was still several years off.

"Colonel, I've got an enhancement of that gas cloud," Wolff's science officer reported. "It's approximately one-point-five million kilometers from perihelion of Mars. Coming up on screen five."

Wolff swiveled his chair to the monitor, then sunk down in it as the image resolved.

"Colonel?" the duty officer said in concern.

"An Invid Sensor Nebula," Wolff said when he could. "I had my first look at one in the vicinity of Haydon IV when I was with the Sentinels. It's a kind of Flower of Life detector devised by the Invid Regis. A haze of preorganic molecules imbued with what amounts to sentience."

"But what's one doing here?" a tech asked from her station.

Wolff shook his head. "I don't understand it. Unless—" He glanced at the science officer, Wilks. "—unless the Flowers I occasionally saw in the Southlands have begun to proliferate."

"It's as good an explanation as any," Wilks said. "Lang has always maintained that some of the Zentraedi ships that crashed on Earth may have carried specimens of the Flower. Khyron was said to be addicted to the things."

Wolff ran his fingers through his glossy hair. Good god, he asked himself, was Earth going to have to tangle with the Invid before the Masters even arrived? The very thought of the sluglike creatures made his skin crawl. He swung around to face the astrogation console.

"Enhance the opticals you shot of Earth, and run everything through our friend-or-foe library. Screen anything out of the ordinary—at full magnification."

The tech bent to her task, whistling in astonishment a moment later. "Colonel, I'm registering anomalous objects in almost every optical. I'll display them in the order taken."

No sooner had everyone given their attention to the heads-up monitor above the astrogation station than exclamations of shock and anger began to ring out from all sides. The computer enhancements revealed an extensive debris cloud containing fragments of Logans, Veritechs, Hovertanks, and weapons platforms—all interspersed among pieces of Tirolean Hovercraft, Bioroids, and assault ships. One optical showed an asteroid-size hunk that could only have come from a starship of awesome dimension.

And yet, there was the factory satellite, intact if somewhat dispirited looking . . . So just what had happened? Wolff racked his brain for answers. It was obvious that a portion of the Masters' fleet had arrived in Earthspace ahead of The Homeward Bound. But how was that possible, unless the Tirolean scientist, Cabell, had either been mistaken about the time of the Masters' departure from Tirol, or lying?

"Colonel, Space Station Liberty wouldn't have issued the go-to for our insertion unless things were under control," Wilks suggested.

Wolff glanced at him. "The assumption being that the Masters were defeated?"

Wilks inclined his head to one side. "Their first wave, at least."

Wolff compressed his lips. "Then explain how they managed to complete a twenty-year journey in under fifteen years, without the benefit of fold-capable star ships."

"They knew a shortcut?" someone said, breaking the tension.

Wolff let the laughter continue for a moment, before swiveling his chair to face the communications station. "Lieutenant Mouru, dispatch another burst to Liberty," he ordered, trying to ignore the roiling in his stomach. "And, this time, ask them what year it is."

Any tanker worth his or her horned helmet knew all about Jonathan Wolff: one of the first cadets graduated from the Robotech Academy on Macross Island, defender of Venezuela Sector's Cavern City during the Malcontent Uprisings, commander of the illustrious Wolff Pack. And—what with his slicked-back black hair, pencil-thin moustache, and signature wraparound sunglasses—straight out of central casting. Dana had heard personal anecdotes about Wolff from Rolf, who had known him in the Southlands. Of course, Wolff was legendary among the ATAC, too, all the more so for having ridden to distinction in an ancient Centaur rather than in a modern Hovertank. Said to be dashing, romantic, and quite the charmer, Wolff had been a pinup in Dana's locker throughout her years at the Southern Cross Military Academy.

She and Marie learned about Wolff's extraordinary transmission while they were returning the Legios to Liberty. At the same time, they received orders to reroute for ALUCE Base, which was to be Wolff's point of debarkation.

ALUCE was an acronym for Advanced Lunar Chemical Engineering, and hadn't become a military installation until the final stages of the War. Still undergoing conversion, it was little more than a slope-sided trench of landing-pad alloy fronting a large, circular building—a kind of exclamation point in the center of Hayes Crater, at the northern rim of the Sea of Tranquility.

But, like Tokyo, most of ALUCE was concealed from sight in a ten-level subsurface cylinder that had been inserted into a lava tube. The facility boasted separate areas devoted to power and life support, gravitronics, hydroponics, human services, training, recreation, and living quarters. The

base's present though somewhat nominal commander was Major General Desmond Nobutu, a charismatic, square-jawed black man, who had demonstrated his mettle in the near-space mop-up operations that succeeded the destruction of the Masters' fortresses. Regardless, what remained of ALUCE's scientists, engineers, and technicians steadfastly refused to acknowledge Nobutu as their commander, and continued to answer solely to their own chiefs of staff.

A blackout had been imposed on communication with The Homeward Bound upon receipt of Wolff's not entirely unexpected follow-up query about the current date. Clearly, he and his crew had been laboring under the same misconception John Carpenter had, in thinking that their spacefold from Tirol had been instantaneous. In Wolff's case, it was still unknown just when he had departed Tirol, but the very nature of the query left no doubt that Lang's latest generation of star ships were not without their problems.

In the week it took The Homeward Bound to attain lunar orbit, Dana ran herself through a gamut of emotions concerning its arrival. With news of her parents and the rest of the REF looming on the horizon, she was suddenly forted to consider that her hallucinatory experience aboard the flagship had been tinged with prescience. But did the foreseen arrival of Wolff's ship mean that she should give equal credence to the vision's other elements? Did she, in fact, have a younger sister, who had somehow been able to contact her across the reaches of space-time? The possibility was as unsettling as the vision itself; and, because of it, she had scarcely managed more than a few hours of sleep each night.

Driven by a sense that everything she said or did from that point forward would have wide-ranging consequences, she had decided not to reveal what the Zentraedi had told her about the Sensor Nebula. Defense Force command was going to press hard to enlist Wolff's aid in launching a strike against the intelligence-gathering cloud, but Dana planned to say nothing until she had heard Wolff out.

By the time the colonel and his chief crew members arrived at ALUCE, dozens of officers and officials were waiting for them. But despite the brave

smiles with which the crew of The Homeward Bound greeted their ovation, it was apparent from their awkward movements that they were unstuck in time; that the revelation about the chronological disparity had shaken them to their very cores.

Wolff most of all, by the look of him.

Everyone assembled in a small amphitheater on ALUCE level two, which was being forced on that occasion to accommodate twice the number of people it had been designed for. Wolff and some of his officers shared the amphitheater's focal point, along with generals Vincinz and Aldershot, representing the Southern Cross and the GMP, respectively; senators Constanza, Grass, and Harding; and several scientists from ALUCE and downside.

Vincinz's adjutant, a burly major named Stamp, furnished The Homeward Bound contingent with a summary of the salient events of the past twelve years, commencing with the rise to power of Anatole Leonard and the Army of the Southern Cross. The war itself was given relatively short shrift, though Stamp did touch on several key incidents, including the arrival of Carpenter's ship, the capture and defection of Zor Prime, and the attack on Monument City and the Macross mounds, in which Leonard, Moran, Zand, Emerson, and thousands of others had died, and in which the Protoculture Matrix had been destroyed.

Then, plainly disturbed by all that he had absorbed, Jonathan Wolff stepped to the podium and recounted the most incredible tale.

As early as 2012—thanks to Zentraedi commander Breetai and his dwarfish advisor, Exedore—Humankind had been apprised of the existence of a myriad of intelligent races inhabiting the Milky Way galaxy. More recently, John Carpenter had supplied information about the Sentinels and their campaign to liberate the Invid-held worlds of Tirol's local group; the resizing of the Zentraedi and the renewal of mining operations on Fantoma; and about the schism that had split the Expeditionary Force.

But unlike Carpenter, Wolff was able to supply firsthand accounts of the battle on Karbarra, the destruction of praxis, and the strange reversals

that had occurred on both Haydon IV and Tirol. He told of the assassination of an Invid simulagent, for which he himself had seen blamed; and of the events that had led to his hijacking a star ship. And he told of the Sentinels' struggle to reverse a curse that had gripped the planet Peryton; and of the trial in which T. R. Edwards had been unmasked as a traitor. Finally, almost as an afterthought, he mentioned the child born to Max and Miriya Sterling on Haydon IV . . .

But Wolff's was a maddeningly unfinished tale, for he had left Tirol shortly after Edwards and his Ghost Squadron had launched for Optera in order to join forces with the Invid Regis, and almost five years had passed since then. Consequently, there was no telling how the events in Tirolspace had played out, though the continued absence of the SDF-3 seemed to indicate that something untoward had occurred.

When everyone in the auditorium had had several minutes to grapple with the implications of Wolff's account, General Aldershot asked him straight-out if the ship was fold capable.

Dana was seated close enough to the podium to take note of Wolff's momentary hesitation.

"Our aim was simply to come home." Wolff finally said.

"But is it worthy for near-space travel?" General Vincinz asked. Wolff nodded. "Within limits. But for what purpose?"

"To destroy the Sensor Nebula—which you yourself have indicated is a harbinger of the Invid."

Wolff studied the Southern Cross commander in chief for a moment. "We could try, I suppose."

"Try?" Vincinz sneered. "It has been proposed, Colonel, that the detonation of several thermonuclear warheads should suffice to disperse the cloud."

"And if the cloud's already done its dirty work?" Wolff said.

One of ALUCE's astrophysicists cleared his throat in a meaningful way. "We're going on the assumption that the Nebula also serves as a biological beacon—a kind of homing device for the swarm. Unless, of course, you can

present us with evidence to the contrary."

"No, I can't. As far as I know, the Nebulas contain some biological components, invested with a kind of raw Protoculture of the Regis's devising. Dr. Lang once characterized them as 'entropic,' but I'm not sure why." Wolff's frown faded, and in its place surfaced a look of heroic readiness. "I'd like to volunteer the services of myself and my crew to carry out the mission."

Senator Constanza traded significant glances with his peers while separate conversations broke out throughout the hall.

"We are deeply indebted to Colonel Wolff for the information he has provided, and for his offer to effect the destruction of the Invid Sensor Nebula," Constanza said when the amphitheater had quieted. "However, I must caution General Vincinz that he is not in a position to assign the mission to Colonel Wolff or, indeed, to any other officer."

Vincinz came slowly to his feet to glare at Constanza. "Perhaps you should explain yourself, Senator."

Constanza leaned back in his chair, almost as casually as he might have done in full-standard gravity. "In 2019, the Robotech Expeditionary Force was placed at the disposal of the United Earth Government, as represented by the members of the Plenipotentiary Council. And since we"—he gestured to his fellow senators—"are the vestiges of the UEG, it follows that Colonel Wolff—if he will excuse the phrase—is ours to command, with or without his ship, which I hereby place in the custody of the Global Military Police, until such time as it is deemed appropriate to execute a strike against the Nebula."

Vincinz's face grew flushed. "You seem to be forgetting that the

Southern Cross bears responsibility for defending the planet, Constanza."

The senator was unmoved. "The leaders of the Southern Cross apparat are dead, or have been judged guilty of treason. T. R. Edwards—if he hasn't been executed—is probably imprisoned on some forlorn moon. And had they lived, Supreme Commander Leonard and Chairman Moran would surely be facing similar fates. What's more, 80 percent of the Southern

Cross's ground-based forces have deserted, whereas 70 percent of General Aldershot's GMP forces have remained devoted to duty. Add to this the fact that two REF contingents have now returned to Earth, and only one conclusion can be drawn: the barbarous reign of Anatole Leonard is finally ended, General Vincinz."

CHAPTER NINE

We desperately wanted to host [Wolff's] parade, but Constanza and his bunch wouldn't hear of it. Manhattan was just too far removed from all that Rocky Mountain action: Macross, Monument, Denver, and the rest. More importantly, as a city, we were still on the comeback trail, with too few residents and a dearth of mecha to give the parade the proper military touch. In retrospect, though, Constanza made the right choice. The parade would certainly have resulted in increased immigration, which would have only put more people in Manhattan when the Invid Regis arrived, and left more corpses in the streets after she doused us with death. You have to grant one thing, however: Despite the attacks by Dolza, the Masters, and the Regis, despite the staggering number of fatalities over the decades, the city itself never fell. The place was built to last.

Mayor Mario Peebles, as quoted in Xandu Reem's

A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard

"The mole we placed within the Global Military Police reports that another warship has returned from Tirol," Kan Shimada announced to the table, between forkfuls of buttery-smooth steak. "The ship is smaller than the one that appeared last year, but well armed, and is under the command of a Colonel Jonathan Wolff, who was apparently a member of the so-called Sentinels. Since news of Wolff's arrival is to be made public next week, we have only until then to exploit this unexpected, and potentially inauspicious, development."

The name of the restaurant was Tokonama. Situated six levels below Shinjuku Station and commanding a view of the entire Shinjuku dome, it was one of many Family-owned and operated establishments in the geo- grid. But the Tokonama was Kan Shimada's preference when he was in the mood for pre-Rain decadence; for the restaurant was renowned for its kobe beef, New Zealand wines, and exquisite desserts, which were often served in

fanciful, edible containers.

Misa knew from previous experience that Kan Shimada only indulged in pre-Rain fare when he had matters of a serious nature to discuss, and so she had come prepared to do more listening than eating. Terry Weston accompanied her, still downside on leave, though only that morning he had received orders to return to ALUCE on the next shuttle out of Tanegashima. They had spent a wonderful week together, and had even made love—once Misa had assured herself that Terry's feelings for Dana Sterling hadn't been rekindled by her brief visit to Tokyo.

The silk-and-linen corporate crowd that normally patronized the Tokonama had been told to keep away, and on arriving at the restaurant, Misa and Terry had noticed more than the usual number of Family enforcers and kumi-cho about, seeing to crowd control and security. That Kan Shimada was the city's undisputed oyabun didn't insure against people who wished him ill.

"A briefing was held at ALUCE, during which it was proposed that Wolff's ship be used against the Invid Sensor Nebula, of which Dana Sterling spoke," Kan Shimada continued. "The feasibility of disabling the cloud is still under discussion, but that dispute is irrelevant to my concerns about the ship itself."

Shimada took a sip of wine and patted his full lips with a cloth napkin. Seated at the opposite end of the table, Misa leaned slightly to one side, the better to see Shimada around an enamel vase full of freshly cut flowers.

"To come directly to the point, this ship poses a risk to our plans to open negotiations with the Invid. The waning power base of the Southern Cross aside, I am unclear as to the intentions of the surviving members of the provisional government. Were it not for the loyalty of the Global Military Police, the UEG could be toppled and we could be done once and for all with this pretense of a central bureaucracy. But as things stand, we are forced to deal with the likelihood of a refurbished government. And while Constanza and the others appear to be more levelheaded than their predecessors, we have no guarantee that they won't engage the Invid as

Leonard did the Masters—especially now that Wolff's ship has provided them with the capacity to do so."

Shimada's youngest son, Yosuke, refilled his father's glass with red wine. Kan took a sip and set the glass aside. "I see no harm in allowing Wolff—or whomever commands the ship—to carry out the Sensor Nebula mission. But I believe it will be in our best interests to make certain that the ship disappears soon afterward."

Miho Nagata's deep voice broke the silence that fell over the table. "Sabotage?" he said.

Shimada rocked his head from side to side. "I'm not sure we need to be thinking along those lines just yet. There are many groups that would leap at the chance of commandeering that ship—the chiefs of staff of the presently disaffected Southern Cross, to name but one."

"I would add the Zentraedi to the list," Miho said. "Our mole reports that the factory satellite is effectively dead in space."

"Yes, they should also be considered."

"What about the Starchildren?" Chosei offered.

Kan stroked his chin. For ten years, the Southlands cult had been seeking a means of moving its membership offworld. "Certainly."

"Do we know if the ship can fold?" Eiten asked.

"Wolff asserts that it can't," his father said. "But can Wolff be taken at his word? For all we know, he was dispatched by the REF to evaluate conditions in Earthspace and report back to Tirol. But let us assume for the moment that Wolff is telling the truth. Is there no way of reconditioning the ship's existing drives to render them foldworthy?"

Shimada directed the question to Gibley and his team, who were actually sporting suits—though of a late-twentieth-century cut.

"Louie Nichols, who was here with Dana Sterling, alerted us to several encouraging avenues of research," Gibley said. "But first we'd need to have a look at the ship's Reflex furnaces and spacefold generators."

Shi Ling glanced at Gibley and picked up where he left off. "Nichols is interested in investigating something he calls 'Syncron technology,' which

involves the generation of a singularity effect. The procedure was successfully employed during the war, and Nichols is of the opinion that, properly tamed, the effect can be employed to execute an instantaneous spacefold."

Shimada adopted a thoughtful pose. "Where is Nichols now?"

"In the Northlands," Gibley told him. "In a refugee camp just outside Monument City, staffed by the former members of the Sterling's 15th ATAC squadron."

Shimada looked at Miho Nagata. "Make contact with Nichols. Tell him that we are reconsidering the UEG's request for an assessment of our research into machine mind. Suggest to Nichols that we would like him to act as liaison between our technical teams and theirs, and gently hint that we have learned about the arrival of a star ship. Set the stage for eventual terms that would allow us to inspect Wolff's ship as a prerequisite to any bargain involving our findings."

"Hai," Miho said, bowing slightly.

Shimada's eyes roamed the table. "In the meantime, we must begin to rouse a craving for Wolff's ship, wherever possible." His eyes came to rest on Misa and Terry. "Have either of you ever had any dealings with the Starchildren?"

"Indirectly, sir," Weston said. "I met Kaaren Napperson—the cult's founder—about eight years ago, in Monument City."

Shimada nodded. "We have an operative among them. She will acquaint you with all you need to know about the Starchildren. Then I want you and Misa to undertake a trip to their colony in the Southlands." His determined gaze favored Terry. "I will see to it that your leave is extended."

Terry inclined his head.

"I suspect that the Starchildren will take a great interest in Wolff's ship. And even more in the fact that we could be convinced to fund an operation that would deliver the ship into their hands."

Shaved and showered in the hotel suite the UEG had prodded for him

in Denver, Jonathan Wolff gave half an ear to the TV news coverage of the parade in which he and his crew had been honored.

"Wolff performed heroically with the Sentinels," a male commentator was saying, "on one occasion rescuing Admirals Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes Hunter in a star ship he skyjacked from Tirol; and on another, agreeing to stand trial for crimes he didn't commit, just to see that General

T. R. Edwards was brought to justice."

An attractive, fair-haired female commentator came on-screen. "The devilishly handsome commander of The Homeward Bound reports that the Invid swarm have been routed from every planet on which they've set foot— or is that pseudopod?—and that the Earth will be no exception."

"Should the Invid come, the Sentinels will be hot on their trail; is that the idea, Leana?"

Leana smiled for the camera. "That seems to be the long and short of it, Roger. So a word for you Invid out there, if you're listening: Jonathan Wolff is home, and he's going to be out there gunning for you . . ."

Dismayed by the portrait being painted of him, Wolff silenced the TV with a voice command. He had anticipated being swallowed up by the UEG's propaganda machine, but he hadn't expected to be recast as a savior. He supposed, to some extent, that the hero bit came with the territory, but that was no excuse for portraying the Invid as a swarm of killer bees.

With the collapse of the Southern Cross, his promotion to general seemed all but assured. The recommendations would have to come from General Aldershot and his command staff, of course, but given that they had all been die-hard Robotechs even before Global Military Police, he felt certain that he could count on their support. However, though they scarcely mattered in the big picture, he had no such faith in the members of the UEG. Just who was Constanza trying to kid, anyway, acting as if he and a handful of senators had run of the planet, when Japan, China, the Southlands, and most of Europe wouldn't have anything to do with them?

Wolff wasn't entirely clear himself on his reasons for withholding information about the fold capability of the ship. When the question had

been put to him, his survival instincts had taken over. It had struck him at the time that someone was going to have to return to Tirol to apprise Reinhardt, Lang, and the Hunters about the war with the Masters, and about the space-time disparities that plagued the Tirol-made ships. He had lied as a means of retaining some control over when that mission would be launched. As to who would command it, he was undecided.

Wolff moved from the bathroom to the bedroom, where his uniform was laid out. As he began to dress, he thought about Catherine and Johnny, who were due to arrive at any moment. He wondered if the flight from Albuquerque had carried the televised parade, and whether they had caught any of it.

While buttoning his shirt, he realized that his hand was shaking, and he glanced at the suite's wet bar, with its tidy assortment of bottled brandies and liquors. Just one drink, he started to tell himself; then he came to his senses.

It was never one drink.

Regarding himself in the full-length mirror, he couldn't accept that twelve years had passed since he last saw them. Had The Homeward Bound, and the SDF-3 before that, entered some new space where time didn't exist? Otherwise, shouldn't his body betray the years? The crew and the members of the Wolff Pack felt as discombobulated as he did, though most of them hadn't left family behind on Earth. Hunter had chosen them for precisely that reason.

And yet, in spite of everything, it was wondrous to re-experience Earth after the dizzying artificiality of Haydon IV and the lunar sterility of Tirol. Too bad about Monument City—though he had never really warmed to the place. He did, however, want to visit Albuquerque and Cavern City, even if the latter had been overrun by some cult that called itself the Heal Earth Hajj.

But all that would have to wait until he got his land legs. Physicians at ALUCE had pronounced him to be in good health, but he didn't feel 100 percent. In fact, the closest he'd come to feeling shipshape was on the

shuttle trip down the well, during which he had gotten to know Max and Miriya Sterling's perky 18-year-old daughter, Dana, who had proved herself to be as able a warrior as her parents. Wolff remembered her as the girl who had carried the flowers at the Hunters' factory-satellite wedding, ages ago, but, oh my, how she had grown and filled out! Talking with her, he could almost forget that she was half Zentraedi—not that he held that against her, in any case. Why, even during the Malcontent Uprisings, some of his best friends had been aliens.

He was thinking of Dana when the door chime sounded, and his heart began to race. Giving a final downward tug to his tunic, he hurried to the door and threw it open, grinning like a kid, even through his initial shock. Catherine seemed as little changed by the years as he was, but Johnny . . . Where was the teenager Wolff had planned to pull into an embrace and clap on the back? Who was this sullen-looking man who had his father's black hair and his mother's sculpted features?

Catherine permitted herself to be hugged, but she returned none of the warmth he exuded. "You look wonderful," he said, stepping back awkwardly. And indeed she did: the mounds of red hair, the noble forehead and cleft chin . . . She was heavier by ten pounds, he guessed, and her eyes were encased in a network of fine lines that hadn't been there twelve years ago, but she was every bit as striking as she had been on the day they'd met.

Johnny stuck out his hand and said, "Hello, Colonel," in a tone that somehow blended hostility with sadness.

Wolff ushered them into the suite, took their bags, and offered them drinks from the wet bar, which they declined. Catherine sat on the couch, taking in the room. Johnny remained standing, with his hands thrust deeply into his trouser's pockets and his eyes lowered. The suite's air-conditioner hummed loudly.

"I thought long and hard about not coming," Catherine said after a moment. "But I decided it would be better this way. We were never good on the phone."

Wolff sat down opposite her, resisting an urge to reach for her hands.

"I'm glad you came. I would have gone to Albuquerque, but I'm scheduled for dozens of briefings."

"The price of glory," Johnny muttered.

Wolff glanced at him. "I didn't apply for the position as hero," he said, more strongly than he meant to.

"What do you want with us, Jonathan?" Catherine said quickly. She reached for her purse, lifted a cigarette from a flat case, and lighted it. "We watched the parade. We heard several news accounts of your exploits on Tirol and other places. We're very happy for you. You have exactly the life you dreamed of having."

Wolff watched her exhale a cloud of smoke; an athlete, she had despised cigarettes. "What I did on Tirol, I had to do. But I came home because I wanted to. Because I missed you—both of you—and I want to apologize for leaving."

Catherine's green eyes narrowed. "Why are you apologizing? You made a choice, Jonathan. You knew full well what you were doing."

He compressed his lips. "I made the wrong choice. I see that now."

She laughed her mouth empty of smoke. "You must be kidding. You think you can just come blasting back into our lives after twelve years? I'm sorry, Jonathan, but I don't see that there's anything left between us."

"There're my feelings. Or don't they matter?"

"Please," she said nastily. "Are you telling me that you're resigning from the REF?"

"Well, not right away," he said. "But after we resolve our differences with the Invid, then, yes, I'm prepared to resign, if that's what it'll take."

She shook her head in self-amusement. "You'll never be happy as a civilian. Look what happened when we moved to Monument City. You lasted four months before you applied for a transfer to the REF, because you couldn't stand the boredom of a desk job. And it's a good thing you did ship with the SDF-3, because the Masters took a long time getting here, Jonathan, and you would have been chomping at the bit."

"That's done with," he snapped. "If it wasn't for the Invid—"

"You'd follow me to Albuquerque and play the happy husband?" She stubbed out the cigarette. "Has it occurred to you that I might have a life of my own now? What do you think I've been doing all these years—watching the stars for your return? Oh, I did, for a time. But I had a son to raise, and to send through school, and to keep out of the hands of the Southern Cross, and to keep safe from the Masters . . ."

Her voice began to break up, and Johnny laid a comforting hand on her shoulder, scowling at Wolff the whole while.

"And what about our age difference?" she continued after a moment. "You don't think that's going to be a problem? Because, you see, I heard from the wife of one of John Carpenter's bridge officers that you'd taken a liking to younger women."

Wolff swallowed. "I'm telling you, all that's behind me."

She stared at him. "Lynn-Minmei is out of your system, huh? Just a mad infatuation?"

"I came home for you, goddamnit."

Her look was pitying. "Well, then, I'm afraid you made another wrong choice."

"We suffered our eighty-first fatality just last night," Bowie told Dana, pacing nervously as he spoke.

"From disease?" she asked.

He stopped to glance at her. "Sure, if you can call homesickness a disease."

They were in the wood-paneled den of the cabin, a mom they had grown up in and was layered in memories, Angelo was there as well, while Sean and Louie were in Monument, securing supplies. Dana had only returned to the compound that morning, after more than a week of debriefing in Denver regarding her visits to Tokyo and the factory satellite. She had been there for the parade, though she hadn't had a chance to speak with Wolff afterward. She had found herself thinking about him, though, ever since their long conversation aboard the shuttle from ALUCE.

Jonathan really was the stuff heroes were made of, much more comfortable with the role than she recalled her father being. Even so, it hadn't been the easiest conversation to sustain. She had talked to Wolff—her pinup—so often in her thoughts, that she could scarcely bring herself to meet his gaze.

"The upper-forty is getting to be a regular boot hill, Dana," Angelo said.

Bowie nodded solemnly. His dark-brown face looked drawn. "We have to do something. I've been playing for them ten hours a day and it isn't making a difference."

"What's Musica have to say about all this?" Dana asked him.

"They want to go home, Dana, and that's all there really is to say. It's like we rescued them from the flagship just so that they could die here."

Dana thought about the Zentraedi females in the factory satellite, about whom the same thing could be said. When she had brought up the idea of arming them in advance of an Invid invasion, Aldershot, Fredericks, and Nova Satori had practically laughed in her face—though they had tentatively agreed to have the iris gate repaired. In the wake of the unexpected arrival of The Homeward Bound, the depleted factory had lost any real significance. And unless Dana disclosed what the Zentraedi had said about the futility of attacking the Nebula, Aldershot and the members of Constanza's oversight committee would soon be turning their attention to the selection of a commander to head up that mission.

"We've got some serious decisions to make, Lieutenant," Angelo was saying.

She frowned at him. "Don't call me that."

Angelo snorted. "Well, for someone who claims to have resigned from the military, you sure seem to be taking on a lot of assignments. If you don't mind my saying so."

"I do mind your saying so, Angelo. I'm only trying to prevent us from making the same mistakes we made with the Masters."

"Is Colonel Wolff's ship going to be able to take out the Nebula?" Bowie

said.

Dana considered her response, then shook her head and recounted

what Tay Wav'vir had told her. Long before she was through, Angelo was bristling.

"Why are you keeping this from General Aldershot?" he demanded. "What, you'd rather see the Defense Force expend firepower than dash their hopes of throwing the Invid off track?"

Dana kept shaking her head. "I'm not sure I can answer that, Angelo. Aldershot probably isn't going to accept the word of a couple of atavistic Zentraedi, anyway. But if he does, and the mission is scrubbed . . ." She looked at Angelo. "I suppose it is a matter of not dashing their hopes."

Angelo smiled wryly. "Even though you don't believe the Nebula can be destroyed."

"Right. Even though I don't believe it."

Sean and Louie returned just then, each of them carrying crates of emergency rations. Dana hadn't seen Louie since the meeting with the Shimadas, and by the look of him—in coveralls, goggles, and jester cap— some of Tokyo had worn off on him.

"Guess who I was just talking to?" Louie said after giving her a stiff hug. "Miho Nagata."

"One of Kan Shimada's captains or bosses or whatever they call themselves," Dana told Bowie and Angelo. "What did he want?"

Louie grinned broadly. "Seems that the Shimadas might be willing to let us in on what his scientists have been up to these past couple of years, after all."

Dana's eyes widened in surprise. "Louie, that's great news!"

"It is. But there's an 'if' attached to the offer. Miho hinted that we'll get to evaluate their research if the powers that be can be persuaded to allow Gibley and his team access to the fold core of Wolff's ship."

"Why?"

"To determine whether the fold generators can be revitalized." "Is that possible?" Angelo asked.

"Gibley and I think so." "Gibley and you?"

Louie crossed his arms over his narrow chest. "That's the other part of it. The Shimadas want me to come to work for them."

"What kind of crap is this?" Angelo said angrily. "You can't leave us now. We need you here."

Dana stepped between them. "Yes, he can, Angelo. In fact, he has to." She looked over her shoulder at Louie. "I saw it that first day in Tokyo. You belong with them. You'll make a difference there."

Louie loosed a relieved exhale. "Thanks, Dana. But what about the terms of Shimada's deal? Do Gibley and I have a shot at examining that ship?"

Dana took her lower lip between her teeth. "All I can do is propose it to Aldershot and the members of the oversight committee. But I don't see how they could refuse if there's even an outside chance of revitalizing the fold generators. Establishing contact with the SDF-3 has to take precedence over everything else. We've got to find out what happened on Tirol, and the REF has to be told what's happened here."

"Dana, I just had a crazy thought," Bowie said a moment later. "Let's say Louie and this Gibley succeed, and the ship is programmed to return to Tirol. How about our making sure that the Tiroleans are part of the cargo?"

Dana beamed at him. "We'll do it—even if it means taking everyone upside ourselves."

CHAPTER TEN

Wolff and Carpenter were cut from different cloth. From the start, Wolff had been out to make a name for himself, in Cavern City during the Uprisings, and later as the flamboyant commander of the Wolff Pack. Carpenter, on the other hand, while a respected officer, had the kind of self-effacing, quiet strength that didn't draw attention to itself. Brought together at the start of the Third Robotech War, they would make a good team for a time, but suffer an eventual falling out, from which their relationship would never recover. A loner who never married, Carpenter—who would survive the Invid—claimed that he might have tempered his judgment of Wolff had he understood what Wolff was going through with his wife and son. But he never absolved Wolff for absenting himself from Nobutu's attack on Reflex Point, for the sake of a "harebrained" rescue attempt. If there was some measure of hero worship on Carpenter's part before the Invid Invasion, there was nothing but disillusionment afterward.

Mizner, Rakes and Rogues:

The True Story of the SDF-3 Expeditionary Mission

"Wolff!"

"Hello, Carpenter. Good to see you again." Wolff extended his hand, but Carpenter brushed it aside and pulled him into an embarrassingly lengthy embrace. Fortunately it was just the two of them in the subterranean briefing room of the GMP's new headquarters, a hundred miles south of Denver. Nova Satori, the ravenhaired deputy director of intelligence, had arranged for them to have a couple of minutes together before the briefing began.

"I can't believe you're here," Carpenter was saying, with a tight grip on Wolff's upper arms. "I was beginning to think I'd never see any of you again."

Wolff eased out of Carpenter's hold and grinned. "Lang thought the

same about you. But I had a sense you'd made it home. It was a courageous act, Major—agreeing to pilot that retrofitted Ikazuchi."

Carpenter's dark eyes shifted. "Some of what we did might have been courageous. But some of it was just plain stupid."

Wolff assumed that he was referring to his frontal attack on the Masters' flagship. "Not that it matters, I suppose, but I would have done the same thing."

Carpenter showed him an intent look. "It does matter, Wolff. It matters a great deal."

They hadn't known each other well, either before the launch of the SDF-3 or on Tirol. When the Hunters, the Grants, the Sterlings, Wolff, and so many others had agreed to throw in with the aliens who comprised the Sentinels, Carpenter—at Lang's behest—had volunteered to remain in Tirolspace, as a precaution against possible acts of sedition by T. R. Edwards and his Ghost Squadron.

Carpenter's elation notwithstanding, the real reunion was taking place elsewhere on the GMP's base, between members of Carpenter's crew and those of Wolff's who had once been attached to Carpenter's command. Those dozen or so would have been home all the sooner had they not assisted in the hijacking Lang and Wolff had staged. That heroic act had provided the Sentinels with a replacement ship for the Farrago, which had been lost to the Invid above Praxis.

Carpenter had suffered a nervous breakdown after his fiery return to Earth, and had spent the final months of the War with friends in Portland, corning to terms with the destruction of his ship and the displacement of ten years of his life. As a consequence of that breakdown and the loss of the data stored in the ship's computer, much of what he told Leonard's staff and the GMP had met with unvarnished skepticism. That Wolff and The Homeward Bound had provided corroboration for Carpenter's earlier claims about the Invid and the Sentinels figured strongly in Carpenter's delight in seeing him.

"Wolff, I've got a million questions," he started to say.

But Wolff held up his hands. "I don't have the answers, Major. I'm sure you've read the reports. In the scheme of things, we launched right behind you. And that was five years ago."

Carpenter fell silent and wearily lowered himself into a chair at the foot of the briefing room's plastic laminate table. "I still can't get used to this," he said after a moment. "When I saw my friends in Portland, it came home to me. Ten years . . . People see me and they say how terrific I look, and I want to grab them by their shirtfronts and tell them that it feels more like I lost ten years than gained them. Forget what the stress has done to me." He looked up at Wolff. "How are you and your people handling things? You left a wife and kid back home, didn't you?"

Wolff concealed his pain. By the time Catherine and Johnny had left the hotel suite, he had at least gotten her to consider giving him a second chance, but he was hardly encouraged. Johnny had remained brooding throughout, and Wolff suspected that Catherine's apparent thaw was nothing more than an attempt to bring their reunion to a quick conclusion. When he spoke of visiting them in Albuquerque, Catherine had told him not to rush, because she didn't want to feel pressured. You've made another wrong choice . . . He was tempted to admit to Carpenter how it had crushed him to hear her say that; how it had undermined the grandiose plan he had outlined for the future. But he held back.

"Some of us are taking it better than others" was what he finally said. Carpenter nodded knowingly.

"What about your people, Major? Are they still a unit?"

Carpenter took a breath. "Not so you'd notice. More than a third have resigned from service. I refuse to see it as desertion—not after what they've been through. I know where some of them are. Hell, there's a group of them living not too far from here in the husk of a depleted Garfish. Veterans of the war against the Zentraedi. So who am I to tell them they have to fight the Invid? All of us went a little crazy, I guess. Don't be too surprised if the same thing takes hold of your crew, Colonel."

"I'll keep that in mind."

Carpenter regarded Wolff for a moment, formulating his thoughts about something. "The ship, Colonel—it can't refold?"

Wolff shrugged. "Maybe someday."

"I only mention it because, well, I'd be honored to have a place on your crew—in the event you were thinking about taking her back to Tirol, I mean."

"For the moment, that ship isn't going any further than the Sensor Nebula," Wolff said firmly. "But I'd be glad to have you aboard on that mission, if it falls to me."

"Can the Nebula be destroyed? You've had more experience with those things than I've had—and with the Invid."

Wolff took a breath. "It can't hurt to try."

The center-pull doors opened just then, and Nova entered the room, trailed by Dana Sterling, Alan Fredericks—now a colonel—and several members of the UEG's oversight committee. Accompanying them was a lantern-jawed civilian, wearing outsize, tinted goggles.

"I don't trust that one," Carpenter whispered of Nova as Wolff was dropping himself into the adjacent seat. "She's the one who debriefed me after we tangled with the Masters." He appended a choice epithet.

"Something to report, Major?" Nova asked suddenly, regarding him from the far end of the table.

"Nothing of relevance, ma'am."

"Then I strongly suggest you save it for after the briefing." "I'll do that, ma'am."

Nova cleared her throat. "I'd like to reverse the usual order of things by asking Colonel Wolff if he has any questions for us, now that he's had an opportunity to familiarize himself with our strengths and weaknesses— strategically speaking, of course."

Wolff glanced around the table, trading covert smiles with Dana before beginning. "To put it bluntly, I think we're in for a world of trouble. Assuming that the figures I've been shown are accurate, we don't have

sufficient mecha to engage the Invid, let alone mount a meaningful counteroffensive should their first wave be repulsed. Our stores of Protoculture are minimal and dangerously dispersed. And while some modicum of firepower is concentrated at ALUCE, warships are outnumbered ten to one by Veritech transports, which are worthless in a fight. So, my question to you is simply this: What stance do you plan to adopt when the Invid arrive?"

The oversight committee chairman, Senator Pauli, took up the challenge. "Having learned something from Anatole Leonard, our initial position will be to adopt a policy of watchful waiting. With the Masters, we grasped, in due course, that they were coming for the Protoculture Matrix, but we didn't even realize that we had the damned thing until it was too late to sue for peace. But from what you and Major Carpenter, among others, have told us, the Invid are after these Flowers of Life that have been sprouting like weeds all over the world. So, it seems to me, straight off, that we have a bargaining chip at our disposal."

"A bargaining chip," Wolff said, as if trying to comprehend Pauli's meaning.

"Yes. In the interest of framing a peaceful accord, we'll allow the Invid free access to the Flowers, in return for their promise to respect our sovereignty over the planet itself. Some show of force may be necessary to convince them that we mean business, but that shouldn't be too difficult to stage, from ALUCE or some location downside."

Wolff was very aware of Dana Sterling's gaze. "Senator, excuse my saying so, but you're way off the mark. The Invid are nothing like the Zentraedi or the Masters. Get those notions out of your head. We're talking about a race whose homeworld was defoliated, and who have wreaked havoc on every world where their Flowers took root and were detected. They don't announce their arrival, and they don't engage in negotiations or accords. They sweep in and lay waste to everything and anything that hints at resistance. Then, very unceremoniously, they establish themselves as the sovereign power."

"Yes, Colonel, Major Carpenter has said as much," Alan Fredericks remarked in a patronizing tone. "But it seems to me that this scenario contradicts what you told us about the summit that took place aboard the SDF-3. Simulagent or not, that summit was doubtless an attempt at negotiation."

"But we were dealing with the Regent," Wolff argued. "And from everything the Sentinels learned, he's a different order of being than his spouse or feminine counterpart or whatever she is."

"This so-called Regis," Nova supplied.

Wolff nodded. "For all his savagery, the Regent has—or had—a Human streak. He patterned himself on the Masters. He's acquisitive and manipulative. He dreams of having what they had: an empire. That's why he could be drawn into negotiations."

"And this Regis?" one of the senators asked. "She's searching for a homeworld."

"Then she'll have to look elsewhere," Pauli warned. In the event she attacks first, we'll hit back with everything at our command. No holding back, as we did with the Masters. Retaliatory strikes by our squadrons of Logans and Veritechs will keep them outside lunar orbit. Why, you yourself said, Colonel, that they were defeated on every world in Tirol's local group."

"They were. But not by launching suicidal strikes."

"I caution the colonel to remember his place," Nova interjected.

Dana threw her a pointed glance. "With all due respect, ladies and gentlemen, Colonel Wolff and Major Carpenter are the only people in this room who have actually fought the Invid. They should at least be allowed to speak, without fear of censure."

"All right, Wolff," Pauli said a long moment later. "Suppose you tell us what you would do."

Wolff asked Nova to call up the data that had been downloaded from The Homeward Bound to the GMP's computers and to make it available to the keyboards and screens that were set into the table at every seat. Wolff typed in a flurry of commands, summoning high-resolution opticals of the

huge, dimpled hemispheres that were the Invid's "dome hives."

"To begin with," he said, "we don't show the Regis our hand. We permit her to come and set up shop—in hives like the ones on-screen. She and her brood aren't bloodthirsty killers by nature. Like ants or vespids, they attack when provoked."

Wolff placed his hands flat on the table. "That's not to say that there won't be heavy casualties during the first couple of weeks of their occupation, regardless of our response. After her encounters with the Zentraedi and the Masters' Bioroids, she's going to figure that she has to pound us into submission. But we can minimize our losses by evacuating the cities—particularly those within a thousand miles of Monument—by withholding fire, and by insisting that everyone remain in the shelters until we've issued an all clear. They'll fashion their farms and hives where they find the choicest Flowers. And it's likely that anyone who puts up a resistance is going to end up a worker on one of those farms. But that's inevitable, in any case."

Pauli was aghast. "Are you seriously proposing that we sit by and allow ourselves to be turned into slaves?"

"Only for a time, Senator," Wolff answered calmly. "Once the Invid have full access to the Rowers and the nutrient they derive from them, some of the anger and fight will go out of them, and we can begin to make our move."

"We counterattack," Fredericks said.

But Wolff shook his head. "We fight them guerrilla style, hive to hive, from a series of small bases, until we've so disrupted their communication network that an attack on the main hive is warranted."

He called up opticals and schematics of Invid Scout ships, Armored Scouts, Troopers, and Shock Troopers—hulking, bipedal, insectile things, ten to twenty feet high, with Cyclopean eyespots and pincerlike arms. "They're easy to kill once you get the hang of it. Drones, basically, with little initiative, typically fighting in small groups."

"And just where do you propose we hide our mecha while they are

'setting up shop?'" Fredericks asked nastily.

We keep most of our Alphas on the moon, which the Invid will ignore because it can't support the Flowers. Then, when the Regis has built her central hive, we begin to move mecha down the well to predetermined locations from which the hive can be attacked, but aren't close enough to present an overt threat."

"And these fortified locations would be ignored?" Pauli said in disbelief.

"Deals can be cut with the hive Enforcers. Each hive—whether a dome or a stilt—is responsible for delivering a quota of Flower nectar to the central hive. By helping the small hives meet those quotas, we'll be able to fortify our bases without too much interruption."

"By providing the hives with slaves, you mean," Nova said.

Wolff rocked his head. "I choose to call them volunteer field operatives."

Pauli snorted in derision. "Colonel Wolff, you could probably sell your idea of 'volunteer field operatives' in Tokyo, judging by what Lieutenant Sterling has told us of the climate there. Perhaps in some areas of the Southlands, as well. But I suspect we will be hard-pressed to convince the UEG, Defense Force command, and the people who support us to embrace such a . . . such a humiliating plan." He studied Wolff for a moment. "Do you have anything further to add before we move on?"

Wolff made his lips a thin line. Fools, he thought. Earth's only hope rested with the REF. The Homeward Bound would have to fold for Tirol as soon as possible. "How long before we attack the Sensor Nebula?" he asked.

Pauli glanced at Nova. "I believe that Miss Satori has something to say on that matter."

"Colonel, we want to take a close look at your ship before sending it against the Nebula," Nova began. She gestured to the goggle-wearing civilian. "Mr. Nichols, along with a group of researchers who have been working in Tokyo, have proposed that the drives of The Homeward Bound can be made foldworthy."

Despite his best efforts, Wolff shot to his feet. "You're going to allow a bunch of techs to tamper with the only warship we have?"

"Who said anything about tampering?" Louie asked. "We just want to have a look at the drives to see if anything can be done to reconfigure them."

Wolff started to reply, but faltered. Would Nichols be able to determine that the ship was, in fact, foldworthy? With Lang and Penn on Tirol, and Lazlo Zand and his people dead, was there anyone on Earth who possessed that depth of knowledge?

"The oversight committee has selected Lieutenant Sterling to head up the survey team," Fredericks said. "Naturally, Colonel, we expect you to accompany and familiarize them with the workings of the ship."

"But what about the Nebula mission?" Wolff managed to ask. Fredericks smiled without showing his teeth. "First things first,

Colonel."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ALUCE had its share of deserters following Leonard's decision to turn the facility into a Southern Cross base. Many of the decamping scientists, engineers, and technicians ended up in the Southlands, bringing with them not only their expertise but in many cases apparatus and supplies, including shuttles and construction robots liberated from ALUCE before the military arrived. And much of the state-of-the-art equipment would find its way to the Starchildren, who put it to immediate use.

Weverka T'su, Aftermath: Geopolitical and Religious Movements in the Southlands

In central Argentina, southwest of Buenos Aires, under the retractable wings of a massive dome that had somehow escaped the Masters' notice despite its outward similarity to an Invid hive, sat an almost-completed, lozenge-shaped ship its builders hoped would one day take them to the stars. Assembled over the course of ten years by cadres of engineers, designers, and specialists of every discipline—some of whom had participated in the reconstruction and retrofitting of the SDF-1 on Macross Island—the ship had been christened Napperson's Hope, after the woman who had originally conceived the project.

A Robotech systems analyst who had studied under Emil Lang, Kaaren Napperson had become convinced—long before the Zentraedi attack of 2009—that Earth was destined to find itself embroiled in a lengthy and ultimately Human-fatal war, brought about by the controlled-crash arrival of the Visitor—the SDF-1. Caught up in the SDF-1's inadvertent jump to Pluto, however, Napperson had spent two years on board the ship she had helped restore; the following three working on the ill-fated SDF-2; and the next four in the null-gee center of the factory satellite, overseeing the transformation of Breetai's flagship into the SDF-3. It was only in 2019 that she had literally come down to Earth and relocated to the Southlands; and it

was there she had gathered the personnel who would begin work on the ship of her dreams—a ship without weapons of any sort, whose purpose was to house and preserve at least a few specimens of the Human species before time ran out.

The so-called Starchildren had not begun as a cult; the news media were to blame for the name, which found common acceptance after Napperson's perhaps inevitable affiliation with the Church of Interstellar Retribution. Regardless, as word of the project spread, more and more people wanted to lend a hand in its realization, until there were more people living and working in the vicinity of the dome than the ship within could ever accommodate. And even when this became apparent, people weren't dissuaded from coming. Thanks to the lottery Napperson had devised, everyone stood an equal chance of making the final cut of twenty-five hundred passengers. Many believed, as well, that if one ship could be successfully launched, then that ship could be duplicated, and that eventually there would be space for any and all who wished to quit the planet before war reduced it to a barren, hopelessly irradiated ruin.

The Starchildren's motto—"Space for any and all"—referred as much to the lottery as to the fact that the cultists had no real destination other than the void between the stars. Napperson and her teams had utmost faith in the antigravity generators they had fashioned to levitate the ship; but lacking spacefold generators or Reflex furnaces, the ship couldn't even get nowhere fast.

Destination was beside the point, in any case. For the Starchildren viewed Napperson's Hope as an ark that would wander the galaxy for generations, breeding a new kind of Human. A new kind of Earth Human, that is, given the many diverse species known to inhabit the planets of distant star systems.

In itself, the galaxy's sheer abundance of intelligent life was enough to convince Napperson's followers that they would chance upon a species, which, like themselves, viewed war as an abomination . . .

Minutes into the VIP tour that had been arranged for her and Terry,

Misa experienced a sense of nostalgia for a place she was visiting for the first time. She could almost believe that she had been there before—in a past life or something. She was not only astounded by what the Starchildren had created, but profoundly moved by their selfless commitment. More so than the residents of Tokyo, the Starchildren seemed to embody the indomitable spirit of the Human race. And they hadn't had to burrow underground to express it.

Just then, she and Terry were meeting with Kaaren Napperson herself, along with her husband and several others, in a cluttered office that overlooked the ship and the bustle that surrounded it. The dogged activity brought to mind the early days of the geo-grid, when Tokyo seemed to be excavating the future.

"You'll excuse me for saying so, Terry," Kaaren Napperson was remarking, "but your visit comes as quite a surprise." She was a handsome woman of sixty or so, with shoulder-length gray hair and big, blue-gray eyes.

"Mr. Shimada knew it would," Terry told her, a container of coffee in hand. "And we're encouraged that you could set aside your wariness, at least for the time being."

Napperson traded looks with her much-younger husband, Eric Baudel, a slight, balding man with hairy, muscular forearms. "To be honest, Terry, I'm not sure we have set aside our wariness."

Eiten Shimada had paved the way for Terry and Misa's visit. That had been accomplished easily enough, since the Nappersons had been trying to solicit Shimada interest in their project for the past several years. Also, Kaaren knew Terry from the time she had spent in Monument City in '24, when she had been asked to investigate a glitch that was plaguing the Alpha Veritech. That glitch had ultimately been traced to cyber-control experiments being conducted by one of Anatole Leonard's minions, the brilliant though misguided Joseph Petrie.

"Are we to assume that the Shimada Family has finally taken an interest in what we're trying to accomplish here?" Eric Baudel asked.

"The Shimadas have always taken an interest."

"Now they're considering taking a more active interest." Misa added. Terry seemed pleased with the confusion their statements sowed.

"'Why now?' you're probably asking yourselves. Why, after all these years? Well, it all has to do with the ship that recently arrived from Tirol."

"Colonel Wolff's ship," Kaaren said. "But what does that have to do with us, or the Shimadas?"

"Before I tell you," Terry said, "you have to understand that the Shimadas think of Tokyo in much the same way you do your ship. As a kind of ark."

"We've said as much," Baudel thought to point out. "But where Tokyo's future is largely dependent on the very ground in which it's ensconced, Napperson's Hope will be a world unto itself."

Terry put his tongue in his cheek and nodded. "Assuming you can launch it before the Invid arrive."

"We're certainly working toward that end," Kaaren told him. "We could launch tomorrow—"

"But you have concerns about the ship's power core."

Kaaren smirked. "We've never tried to hide that fact, Terry. But given a choice, wouldn't you rather have the power of a sports car at your disposal than a Volkswagen? The fuel for sustained burns has always been our major problem."

"The Shimadas understand that. That's why we want to suggest that some of the parts you need have arrived—from Tirol."

Napperson, Baudel, and the others regarded one another in uncertain dismay. "That ship is REF property," Kaaren said at last. "And the Shimadas are very much mistaken if they think we'd stoop to piracy to realize our aims."

"These are desperate times for Humankind," Misa said on cue. "The Shimadas fear that the REF ship will be used to attack the Invid the moment they appear in Earthspace, and that it will be destroyed as a result."

"Your sports car, Kaaren," Terry interjected. "Reflex furnaces capable of propelling a ship to better than light speed The Starchildren's ticket out of here."

Kaaren shook her head in disbelief. "Yes, and all we have to do is steal it out from under the noses of the GMP and the Tactical Armored Space Corps."

"That's where we come in," Terry said, without missing a beat. "What if I told you that we'll soon be in a position to provide you with information about the ship's security, Reflex drives, and other features. All you'd have to do is launch Napperson's Hope and position it where it can receive and make best use of the data."

"Terry . . ." Kaaren started to say, but he spoke over her.

"We're not saying that you have to do anything with what we provide you. But bear in mind that once you people leave Earthspace, you're essentially home free. There's not a ship between here and Tirol that could catch you."

"Of course, the Shimadas can't afford to take a direct hand in the matter," Misa quickly added. "But they can provide funding for what you'll need to launch Napperson's Hope."

"In exchange for what?" Baudel demanded to know. "Our promise to make room for them aboard?"

"Nothing of the sort," Terry said. "They're thinking only of the survival of our species."

Baudel made a plosive sound and sat back in his chair, shaking his head back and forth. "You seem to forget that only twenty-five hundred of us will be leaving. The people left behind will have to live with the stigma of our actions."

Terry mirrored Baudel's posture and spread his hands in a gesture of wily Openness. "We're not twisting your arm, Eric. We're simply saying that we'd like to contribute to the success of your project."

Misa felt a shiver of longing pass through her. Gazing at the rapt expressions on the faces of Napperson and some of the others, she suddenly

wanted nothing more than to see the Starchildren get their wish.

"Maybe Senator Pauli and the rest were taken in by Wolff's performance, but I'm not," General Vincinz told the dozen members of the now-defunct Southern Cross command. Two weeks had passed since the briefing at GMP headquarters, and the group was meeting in secret conclave in the back room of a strip club in Denver. "From what I hear, Wolff leaped out of his chair when Pauli informed him that a bunch of Tokyo geeks had been granted permission to survey his cherished ship."

"Can you blame the man?" Senator Grass said. "Who knows what damage they could do?"

Vincinz gestured dismissively. "Damage, my ass. Wolff's worried that they're going to discover the truth."

"Which truth is that?" the general's adjutant, Major Stamp, asked.

Vincinz leaned forward in his chair, resting his elbows on his knees and interlocking his blunt fingers. The room smelled of body odor and stale beer, and was faintly illuminated by colored ceiling spots. The stage and the chrome poles the strippers wrapped themselves around sat in darkness.

"Emil Lang wouldn't have dispatched a second ship on a one-way trip to Earth," Vincinz said. "I'll stake my life on it that that ship is foldworthy, and that Wolff is just itching to get his crew back on board so they can fold out of the mess they've landed in."

Everyone took a moment to consider the possibility. Senator Grass was the first to speak. "Are Shimada's people clever enough to determine the capacity of the fold generators?"

Vincinz nodded, narrow eyed. "Maybe even too clever. Think about it: All at once the Shimadas change their minds about giving us a look at their research—providing that their people are allowed a look at Wolff's ship. Why? Because ole Kan Shimada-san has his own suspicions about Wolff. I mean, what's to stop the Shimadas from cutting a deal with Wolff to be included among his cargo in exchange for keeping their mouths shut about the fold generators?"

Grass snorted a laugh. "Kan Shimada would never abandon Tokyo— even for a shot at immortality. It doesn't get much better than what he's already created for himself."

Vincinz conceded the point. "All right, maybe he wouldn't leave. But he might expect Wolff to pay for Tokyo's silence in other ways—in Protoculture or weapons."

Captain Bortuk, Vincinz's ferret-faced chief of staff, shook his head. "The last thing the Shimadas want are weapons. And as for Wolff smuggling 'culture down to Tokyo, I don't see how we can prevent it. Unless, of course, we're willing to share our suspicions with the GMP."

"We don't need to go that far," Vincinz said bitterly. "The way I see, all we have to do is keep Wolff away from that ship."

"You're too late," Grass said. "He and that Tokyo bunch are already on their way."

"I'm talking about making sure that Wolff isn't assigned the Nebula mission."

Grass pulled down the corners of his mouth. "Unfortunately, we no longer have much say in that. Although, I suppose we could argue that Wolff and his crew—having fought the Invid on Tirol and elsewhere—are too vital to our defenses to place at risk."

Vincinz grinned wickedly. "That's the idea. We need Wolff and his people to advise us. Ideally, we would want to get some of our own people assigned to the Nebula mission."

"That mission isn't exactly going to be a cakewalk," Bortuk commented. "There's high probability that the Sensor Nebula isn't as innocuous as it appears to be. I've read Rolf Emerson's after-mission reports on the counterattack Leonard launched against the Masters' fleet. Some of the pilots under Emerson's command who passed closest to the cloud reported serious problems with their mecha. Spontaneous reconfiguration, scrambled communications, laser malfunctions . . . So why not let the GMP have run of the mission, rather than jeopardize any of our own people?"

"Because we would benefit from familiarizing ourselves with the ship."

Vincinz paused for a moment. "Particularly in advance of our commandeering it."

"Are you out of your mind?" Grass's voice was shrill with disbelief. "What do we want with that ship?"

Vincinz grinned faintly. "Power. The power Aldershot, Constanza, and the rest are afraid to hurl against the Invid. The power to reassert the authority of the Southern Cross. The power to determine our own fate in the coming war. And one final thing: a way out of it."

"The war?" Major Stamp said dubiously.

Vincinz nodded. "Pretend for a moment that I'm right about Wolff and the ship. Or, if you don't like that, consider that Shimada's geeks will be able to work some magic on the fold generators."

Stamp ran a hand over his mouth. "All right, but how's that provide us with an 'out'? Where are we going to go—to Pluto?"

"Tirol," Vincinz replied evenly.

Grass stared at him, then burst out laughing. "That's rich, Vincinz. With Edwards probably hanging from his boot heels in Tiresia? I'm sure Reinhardt and Hunter would love to have a couple of more Southern Cross renegades drop in on them."

"To hell with Edwards," Vincinz snapped. "And how would Hunter know we weren't sent to Tirol by the UEG? They won't have a clue. Besides, we'd be doing the REF a service by apprising them of what's been happening on Earth." He glanced pointedly at everyone. "Where would you rather be: here, condemned to some Flower of Life labor camp, or there, cozying up to Mr. and Mrs. Hunter with a couple of elaborate lies of omission?"

"Seems a risk either way," Grass said, relenting somewhat. "After all, we don't know what's been happening on Tirol. We could be jumping from the frying pan to the fire."

Vincinz shrugged nonchalantly. "I'll take the fire over the long sizzle. I didn't enjoy waiting for the Masters, and I know I'm not going to enjoy waiting for the Invid. And the way Wolff makes it sound, we're going to get

our asses kicked no matter what we do. So where's the harm in our leaving? My guess is that by the time we return to Earth, there won't be a person alive who could denounce us for what we did."

The Homeward Bound had neither the blockish, articular countenance of the SDF-1, nor the bulbous, organic mien of the SDF-3. In profile the modified Garfish approximated the fore-tapered sleekness of the deep-sea denizen after which it had been named, though it was cinched amidships by a beltlike housing, from which hung a fish-shaped spacefold module. Twice the length of the Garfish HSTC frigates the SDF-3 had carried in its belly to Tirol, the ship contained more than eighty mecha in its belly and had space for a crew of six hundred, though The Homeward Bound had arrived with a force only half that size.

Wolff had supplied opticals and schematics of some of the other prototypes the REF had manufactured in Tirolspace, including considerably modified versions of the bird-of-prey Horizont DTTS and the goliath Ikazuchi Command Carrier. But of all of them, the Garfish alone looked as though it would have been at home among the dreadnoughts of the Zentraedi Grand Fleet.

The shuttle that had lofted Dana, Wolff, Louie, and the Tokyo tech detachment docked alongside the Garfish, and everyone cycled through the air locks without incident—though Gibley and company remained nauseated until well after they were safely on board. As an accommodation to them, The Homeward Bound's artificial gravity had been enabled by the GMP and TASC guards who had been stationed aboard the ship since Wolff and crew had debarked for ALUCE a month earlier.

Once over their queasiness, Gibley, Shi Ling, Strucker, and the others began to behave like kids on a school trip to a hands-on museum. The only old hand among them—having flown combat missions upside and toured the interiors of many a warship—Louie was slightly more reserved, though Dana could see that even he was itching to disassemble some component to see how it functioned. Wolff had further supplied that the ship's spacefold

generators were not empowered by Karbarran Flower of Life peat, as Carpenter's had been, but by a more conventional dialogue between unadulterated Protoculture and the monopole ore the REF Zentraedi had mined on Fantoma. But while it seemed unlikely that the generators could be revitalized by Earth technology, no one appeared discouraged. Except for Wolff, of course, who was beside himself with concern. So, in a sincere effort to distract him, Dana suggested that he show her around the bridge while Shimada's team went to work.

Compared to the SDF-3, or indeed to the now-crippled destroyers of the Southern Cross fleet, The Homeward Bound felt cramped and disorderly. The passageways were narrow and in many cases unlighted, and only a few of the cabin spaces were finished. Conduits and fiber-optic lines were exposed, and most of the partitions had obviously been erected in haste. The bridge was a variation on the tried-and-true design incorporated into the SDFs, though almost intimate in its proportions. Centered among the various duty stations sat the signature, solitary command chair, with its vantage of the two forward viewports. And taking up most of the starboard bulkhead was the vertical stack of monitors that comprised the threat- assessment display.

Dana seated herself at one of the forward stations. The lunar surface seemed near enough to touch, and she calculated that the large bright spot at one o'clock was the factory satellite, where repairs to the iris gate had commenced. Wolff took the adjacent chair and stared at the moon for a long moment before speaking.

"My first day on the factory satellite, I remember thinking that there couldn't possibly be a planet as beautiful as Earth. And now when I look out there, I find myself comparing Earth to worlds like Karbarra and Garuda and what was Praxis. Even Haydon IV and Tirol have their fine points— though Tirol's only a moon, and a rather forlorn one at that."

"It's so incredible that you've seen those places," Dana said.

He turned to her and smiled. "Maybe you'll see them one day, after all this is over and done with. Your father was always saying how he wished

you could see this or that place. You were never out of his thoughts, you know."

His words brought a lump to her throat. "I wish I could remember Max more clearly. Miriya, too. But I just have these vague memories. And I can't even sort out the real ones from all the stories Rolf told me."

"If your folks had had even a hint of what was to come, they never would have left Earth. They would have resigned their commissions."

"But then I might not have a younger sister." "Or maybe you'd have more than one."

She laughed at that, and listened intently while Wolff began to elaborate on some of the incidents he had touched on during the shuttle flight from ALUCE. He talked about Max's exploits with the Sentinels and about Miriya's close friendship with the members of the Praxian Sisterhood, and how she had saved the life of a Spherisian named Teal. He spoke, too, of his belief that Miriya's pregnancy had been influenced by the exotic atmosphere of Garuda, and by something called the hin.

Dana loved listening to him, and she couldn't wait to repeat for Bowie what Wolff had to say about Bowie's parents, Jean and Vince. She mapped Wolff's face with her eyes, and she catalogued his seemingly unlimited repertoire of expressions, which shifted continuously and seemed to draw her in all the more.

At some point he went from talking about the Grants to talking about his wife and son, whom he had apparently met with in Denver, though things hadn't gone well. And almost confessionally he revealed that he had been unfaithful to Catherine on Tirol. He had fallen in love with Lynn- Minmei, of all people, only to crash and burn when she had taken up with T.

R. Edwards. More than taken up with: had married in a bizarre ceremony aboard Edwards' ship, during its desperate flight to Optera.

"I came this close to killing Edwards with my bare hands," Wolff said, regarding his fists, "just after the trial. Like all cowards, he ran, and I chased him, convinced that I was going to kill him if I caught him. But I collided with a young kid—Lang's nephew, I think it was, Scott something-or-other—

and Edwards got away. I'm sure that he kidnapped Minmei. I know she wouldn't have gone with him of her own free will."

Dana wrestled with the irritation his statements roused. Why was he taking responsibility for Minmei's actions? What compelled everyone to feel so overprotective toward her? Just because she was The Voice that had helped defeat the Zentraedi? The problem was that most people simply didn't know her as Dana did—that is, as well as Max and Miriya and Lisa Hayes knew her. They didn't know what a self-serving little priss she could be, and how she had jerked Rick Hunter around for years. Why, she wouldn't even be on Tirol if she hadn't arranged to be caught up in the SDF- 3's spacefold—and she'd only done that to remain close to Rick, surely in the hope that he and Lisa would fall on hard times. And while she was waiting for that to happen, she had snared Jonathan in her web—

"You shouldn't condemn yourself for being attracted to Minmei," Dana said suddenly. "You were far from home, and she's a seductive . . . woman."

"That she is," Wolff mused. "But I can't help wondering, if she hadn't gotten involved with Edwards . . ."

"Would you still have made the decision to return to Earth?"

He nodded. "How do I know I'm not just running back to Catherine on the rebound?"

His right hand was on the console between them, and Dana reached for it without thinking. "That's why you're here—to find out."

Wolff held her gaze for a long moment, then blew out his breath and swiveled his chair to face the bulkhead hatch. "We'd better go check on your friend, Louie, and the rest of them. I don't want them thinking they have run of this ship."

No sooner had he said it and stood up than Louie came through the hatch, with his goggles pushed up onto his high forehead and a defeated look on his face.

"Is there any hope?" Dana asked, hurrying to him.

Louie shrugged. "Gibley's never seen anything like it. The power-core module is effectively designed to clip onto the ship, which suggests that

Lang's design teams mean for the driver to be interchangeable. But it's alien technology. It'll be months before we analyze even a fraction of the data stored in the ship's computers.

"And the spacefold generators?"

Louie slipped the goggles down over his eyes. "Good for a one-way trip."

Dana and Wolff sighed at the same time. Though, later, it would occur to her that his sigh seemed informed more by relief than disappointment.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Much as the Internal Revenue Service had not only survived but prospered during the Global Civil War and the First Robotech War, the GMP emerged from the Masters' War [sic] as a more powerful entity than it had ever been. This reversal of fortune, however, was less a consequence of the deaths of Leonard and Moran than the deaths of sixty four Southern Cross- friendly delegates, who had been killed in the Masters' strike on the Senate Building in Monument City. As it happened, the building had two underground shelters, one of which was favored by members of the Southern Cross old-boy network, and the other by those politicos who had risen to power with the Robotech Defense Force; and the Masters' light fell on the Southern Cross side . . . Not three months after the end of the Masters' War, the GMP enjoyed what amounted to absolute authority to detain, arrest, search and seize, surveil, infiltrate, and subvert as the agency saw fit. And in this, the GMP couldn't have been served better than by deputy directors Colonel Alan Fredericks and Lieutenant Nova Satori.

"Upheaval", History of the Third Robotech War,

Volume III

The Shimadas had arranged a hero's welcome for Gibley's team— including Louie Nichols—just arrived from three days of intense debriefing at GMP headquarters. Held at Kan Shimada's palatial home in the geo-grid, the celebration featured singers and costumed dancers, bubble-blowing machines, storms of flower petals, and cases of ramune—old-fashioned ginger ale, served in bottles sealed with glass marbles. Attendance was mandatory for all upper-echelon members of the Family, a group that totaled some two hundred people. Terry Weston had returned from the Southlands just to attend; though Misa, captivated by the starchildren's flourishing base of Operations, had opted to remain in Argentina a while longer.

It was not, however, until the inner circle had retired to the estate's Edo-style garden teahouse that Kan Shimada broached the subject of The Homeward Bound, and then only after tea had been ceremoniously served and a measure of dusk had been imparted to the artificial sky. What with the diffuse sunset effects and the cherry trees lining the moat, you could almost believe you were on the surface.

"As all of you are aware," Kan Shimada told his sons and advisers, "I have never—much to my regret—ventured higher than one hundred thousand feet above our world. I have fond memories of the years before the Rain, when we talked of building a resort on the moon, and of raising pyramid and volcano-shaped cities on Earth. I regret, too, that the imminent arrival of the Masters compelled us to withdraw our financial support from Mars Base—though in light of what occurred we were certainly judicious to do so.

"Outer space has long fascinated me, but destiny has drawn me inward, as it were. And yet"—he glanced at Gibley's team, who occupied places of honor at the table—"with our having been allowed to survey the interior of Colonel Wolff's ship, I now feel that I have journeyed—in proxy—at least partway to the stars."

Shimada fell silent for a moment. "Let us go to the heart of the matter," he then said. "Can the ship be induced to fold?" He directed the question to Gibley; but—with a look—Gibley handed it off to Louie.

"The Homeward Bound is already fold capable," Louie announced to surprised murmurs from everyone but Kan Shimada. "Thanks to Gibley's way with intelligent machines, we were able to wring enough out of the on- board computer to learn that Protoculture levels are much higher than anyone would be led to believe. Lang's technicians fashioned some clever camouflage, but Protoculture has a way of revealing itself. That's how the Masters were able to zero in on the burial site of the SDF-1. They scanned for the Protoculture Matrix."

Kan Shimada's expression was unreadable. "Is Colonel Wolff merely being, shall we say, discreet, or is he himself in the dark as to the ship's

capacities?"

"He definitely knows what he has," Gibley answered, "since he's the only key that can unlock the fold generators."

Unable to contain his enthusiasm, Louie spoke up. "The spacefold system is keyed to a voice-recognition code Wolff alone can supply. Without that code, we can't even converse with the generators, much less enable the system itself."

Shimada pressed the tips of his fingers together. "Given time, could we supply the machine with a facsimile of the code?"

"We're already working on that, Mr. Shimada," Gibley said. "But we'd stand a better chance if we could revisit the ship."

Shimada nodded in understanding. "Then, in order to ensure our remaining on good terms with them, we must begin to provide the GMP and the Defense Force with something of value. The Southern Cross never took much interest in artificial intelligence and robotics, but perhaps if we showed them some of our results . . ."

Gibley was nodding his head. "One thing we could do is try to interest them in sending a robot-crewed ship against the Invid Sensor Nebula."

"Pursue that course," Shimada encouraged. "And in the meantime, continue to work on deciphering Wolff's code." He cut his eyes to Louie. "Is it your assumption that the fold generators have been pretasked to return the ship to Tirol?'

"I'm leaning in that direction. Lang seems to have relied heavily on the technology that the Masters incorporated into the Zentraedi ships. The Homeward Bound is designed to be user friendly by personnel with limited expertise, and, in effect, is capable of executing a wide range of programs on its own. Wolff doesn't have to submit to a retinal scan or a vein scan to enable the spacefold generators. All he has to do is give the code. And that's certainly deliberate on Lang's part, because he wanted the ship to remain operational even if something happened to Wolff. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the ship could execute a spacefold without any crew."

Shimada paused to consider the implications. "The ship could be sent

away on its own?"

Louie nodded. "Properly prompted."

Shimada looked at Terry Weston. "It seems that we may have been premature in sending you and Misa to Argentina."

Terry's mouth twitched uncertainly. "We don't need their help, that's for sure. But maybe we can help them."

Shimada raised an eyebrow.

Terry said, "Louie, can more than one ship be folded during a jump?"

It was obvious that the question piqued Louie's curiosity, but he kept his thoughts to himself. "There's some precedent for it. Macross Island was folded to Plutospace along with the SDF-l. And it appears that a small ship carrying Lynn-Minmei and Janis Em was folded to Fantoma along with the SDF-3. But I'm not sure I'd want to risk hitching a ride that way."

Shimada glanced at Terry. "Your concern for them is commendable, Terry, but Louie is correct: folding in tandem is too unreliable, and too dangerous. In attempting to help them, we could end up thwarting them. Therefore, we must undo our mistake immediately. Inform our agent in Argentina to apprise her supposed handlers of the launch plans. But make certain our name doesn't come up."

"Hai," Terry said softly, inclining his head.

Shimada was quiet for a moment, then he looked at Gibley. "Without the code, we can do nothing?"

"Without the code, and Wolff to vocalize it," Gibley amended.

"Then we must first determine if Wolff can be enticed or coerced into revealing the code. I want to hear your thoughts on the matter."

Gibley locked his hands behind his head and smirked. "Well, he and Dana Sterling seemed to be getting pretty chummy."

Slowly, everyone turned to Louie, who was still trying to make sense of Kan and Weston's veiled conversation about Argentina. "Would Dana Sterling be likely to assist in our efforts, or to undermine them?" Shimada asked.

Louie pondered the questioned, then smirked. "I think she'd be willing

to help us. She has her own reasons for wanting to see that ship return to Tirol. A hundred and thirty of them, to be exact."

"The Starchildren are planning to raid Wolff's ship?" Alan Fredericks said to Nova in a tone of amused incredulity. And just how are they planning to do that, with The Homeward Bound two hundred thousand miles away?"

"Our informant wasn't specific on that point. But apparently they're planning to use their own ship to get them there."

The skepticism in Fredericks's bemused smile deepened. "Weren't we given to understand—by this same informant—that Napperson's Hope was just that: more pipe dream than promise?"

"They've found some new financial backers." "Who?"

Nova shook her head. "Our girl didn't say." "Couldn't say or wouldn't?"

"She'll tell everything she knows for a single-payment bonus of three million dollars."

Fredericks made a tsking sound. "Greedy little thing, isn't she?"

They were in Fredericks's office in GMP headquarters, where serious renovation work was in progress. The whine of power tools infiltrated the room, which smelled strongly of joint compound and acrylic primer. Fredericks's desk was an oak antique, piled high with computer tapes and hard-copy reports. The fixed-pane window overlooked the parking lot and the foothills of the Rockies. Only two years earlier, the cubical building had been a hotel.

Fredericks drummed his fingers on the desktop, while Nova took a moment to inspect the active-length nails of her right hand. "Have you discussed this offer with Aldershot?' he asked after a moment.

"He wants us to handle it."

"Of course. Now that he's been bumped up to commander of Tactical Space Corps, he has no time for the mundane world of intelligence

gathering."

Nova shrugged. "Something like that. He isn't convinced about the Starchildren information, but he did suggest that we respond as if."

"Lest the GMP be caught with its pants down." Fredericks sniffed. "Well, I refuse to be pumped for additional funds. Not another dollar goes to our informant. The identity of Napperson's backers, in any account, isn't crucial to our response. Do you think Napperson realizes that Wolff's ship is incapable of executing a spacefold?"

That information had been supplied by Louie Nichols and the Shimada team on their return from The Homeward Bound. Debriefed, they had been released a week earlier. It remained to be seen just what research data Shimada would turn over to the Defense Force, now that the GMP had lived up to its side of the bargain.

"Napperson's obviously willing to settle for Reflex furnaces, in a pinch," Nova said. "What's more, she probably feels that she'll be doing Earth a favor by further reducing our arsenal."

Fredericks shook his head in transparent disapproval. "Sounds as though she and old man Shimada would make the perfect couple. Perhaps the Invid Regis will award them merit badges for their efforts in her behalf." He sighed. "Well, I don't see that we have any choice but to delay their launch schedule."

Nova brushed her hair away from her face. "Seems a shame, after all they've accomplished."

"They'll have themselves to blame. I'm disappointed, though, that the Starchildren would resort to sedition. Not to mention that they would fail to consider that we'd get wind of their plans. Still, as much as I dislike our informant, I think it's best to carry out our directive without compromising her. Who knows, she may decide to supply us with the name of Napperson's most recent convert free of charge."

Nova quirked a cunning smile. "Do you have a subcontractor in mind?" Fredericks nodded. "A competitor, you might say."

"I didn't know that the Starchildren had any competitors."

"For Wolff's ship, they do." Fredericks waited for Nova's surprise to show, then added, "We need simply to arrange for General Vincinz to hear of Napperson's plans. Given the Southern Cross interest in Wolff's ship, I suspect that everything will see to itself from that point on."

Nova nodded in comprehension. "Speaking of Wolff, there's growing concern about his taking part in the Nebula mission."

Fredericks's brow furrowed. "What's behind that, do you suppose?" "I can only tell you what I've been hearing."

Fredericks's thin fingers made a beckoning gesture.

"Now that the ship's been off-loaded of data and REF mecha, people are saying that Wolff and his crew are too valuable to risk on an operation that's not only dangerous but of questionable worth to begin with."

"Do you concur?" Fredericks asked her. She shrugged. "There's some wisdom in it." "Who, then?"

Nova smiled without showing her teeth. Two could play Fredericks's game. "I have a candidate in mind."

Fredericks leaned forward to watch her prize a thick intel report from her briefcase. The report's red cover told him that it had come from the lab of the late Lazlo Zand.

Skids stacked high with cargo crates crowded the greasy floor of the GMP armory building in Denver. All of it had been shuttled down the well from The Homeward Bound, which remained in lunar orbit. Wooden bleachers had been erected along the walls of the spacious, high-ceilinged room, and nearly every inch of bench seat was occupied by GMP, TASC, and Southern Cross personnel.

Jonathan Wolff, wearing a tight-fitting REF uniform, moved commandingly among the crates and a dozen REF officers, including Major John Carpenter. A wireless microphone clipped to the collar of Wolff's tunic carried his tenor voice throughout the room, and a trio of huge, overhead display screens supplied real-time close-ups of weapons and mecha, or

battle footage of Invid assault craft and Inorganics.

"It's possible that we won't be going up against the Hellcats, the Jack Knives, and the Blue Eyes," Wolff was saying, referring to the ghoulish, long-armed robots that were marching across the display screens. "The Regent employed them primarily as occupation forces, and rarely as frontline troops. But there's no evidence to suggest that the Regis will employ them. That's why we'll be stressing tactics more appropriate for combat against the Scout, Trooper, and Shock Trooper assault units, all of which are outfitted with a type of chitinous armor, and are equipped with plasma-disk delivery systems."

Dana was sitting in the upper-tier bleachers, close to the armory's principal doorway. Having arrived late, she had missed Wolff's introductory remarks about the weapons of the REF arsenal, which, by Earth standards, were almost fifteen years out of date—or out of fashion, at any rate.

At the insistence of Anatole Leonard—who loathe anything that smacked of the Robotech Defense Force—the Army of the Southern Cross had mothballed much of what had been developed for the Expeditionary mission. Hovertanks, A-JACs, and Logans had taken precedence over the Alpha and Beta Veritechs, the Destroids, and the Alpha-portable Light Combat Cyclones. Hermes helmets and flare-shouldered torso harnesses had replaced CVR-3 Body Armor. And the Southern Cross had generated its own line of weapons to substitute for the R Burke—designed Gallant H-90, FAL-2 pulse laser rifle, SAL-9 single shot laser pistol, and Wolverine assault rifle.

However, the remnants of Leonard's army, deprived of much of their mecha, grasped that they were going to have to refamiliarize themselves with the arms and armaments of their former rivals if they expected to integrate with returning waves of REF forces—should they arrive from Tirol. On returning from Wolff's ship, Dana had gone directly to the Emerson cabin. Fifteen more Tiroleans had died during her absence, and conditions at the compound had continued to deteriorate. Where she thought Bowie would take heart from what Wolff had told her, the five-year-old stories

about his parents, Jean and Vince, had only plunged Bowie deeper into desperation. She blamed herself for not having been able to predict as much from her own delayed reaction to Wolff's well-meaning words about Max and Miriya. And as for Sean and Angelo, they were about ready to re-up if something wasn't done about the Tiroleans.

There was no justification for her returning to Denver, or, indeed, for attending Wolff's discourse on battle tactics. After all, she was a diplomat now; even those she had fought alongside during the War had begun to treat her with a deference she wasn't accustomed to and didn't appreciate. But it didn't take much self-examination to realize that she had been missing Wolff—Jonathan. She wanted to convince herself that he was important to her as the sole link to her parents; but she knew it went deeper than that. She was enchanted with him, and not simply because his photo had graced the wall of her locker.

This wasn't a crush, it wasn't infatuation, and she refused to so much as consider the older-man-as-replacement-dad psychobabble she had heard from Rolf during her short-lived romance with Terry Weston. No, what she felt for Jonathan had welled up from her heart, and she couldn't dismiss it or explain it away, despite her best efforts. And tried she had, by reminding herself that Jonathan was not only fresh from a disastrous—though admittedly incomprehensible—affair with Lynn-Minmei, but that he had a wife and son with whom he was attempting to reconcile. Besides, who was she to think that he would have similar feelings for her, or that she had the right to step in and make matters worse for him?

Still, he had seen her enter the armory and he had made meaningful eye contact with her several times since . . .

Wolff's lecture lasted another three hours, only to conclude in heated debates between TASC and REF officers. What did a former Hovertank commander know about combat flying? the Cosmic Unit commanders argued. Just because he had ridden a star ship home from Tirol, Wolff was suddenly entitled to preferential treatment?

Also, many of the officers in the room resented Wolff for the parade the

provisional government had staged. Weren't they owed one for having defeated the Masters? At the end, Wolff was practically shouting to be heard above an audience of disgruntled veterans, many of whom were filing through the exits in patent distrust.

"This is hopeless," Wolff was telling Carpenter and a couple of members of the Wolff Pack by the time Dana had worked her way down to him. "They have no faith in guerrilla tactics. They're used to meeting the enemy head-on, and they're convinced that the same approach is going to work against the Invid."

Everyone who had remained agreed and commiserated. The way Dana saw it, their devotion alone spoke to Wolff's abilities as a leader. Seeing her coming, however, they started to disperse, intent on providing Wolff with some private space.

He managed a sardonic smile for Dana. "What the hell's the good of being portrayed a hero if no one's willing to listen to you?"

"You have to be patient, Colonel," Dana said in a low voice. "For better or worse, we were raised on a certain combat style, and the notion of hide- and-strike fighting is going to take some getting used to. But I do understand your frustration."

He gave her hand an affectionate squeeze. "Call me Jonathan, Dana."

She perched herself on the edge of one of the cargo crates and began to tell him of her own ambivalence about going back to war, and about the Tiroleans the 15th were sheltering from everything but dislocation and death, and about her yearning to be reunited with her parents.

"I know it sounds strange," she said. "I mean, I hardly remember Max and Miriya, but . . ."

"But what?" he encouraged, planting himself next to her.

She waited a long moment before saying, "Something happened to me on the Masters' flagship. I mistakenly grabbed hold of a canister of Protoculture and I experienced . . . well, a kind of hallucination. I know you'll think I'm crazy, but I saw my sister, Aurora, and Max and Miriya. They told me they were with the Sentinels, and they warned me that the

Flowers of Life were going to draw the Invid to Earth." She looked at Wolff. "I saw them, Jonathan, almost as clearly as I'm seeing you now."

Nonplussed, Wolff stood up and paced away from her. "The Awareness," he said, turning to face her. "The artificial intelligence at the heart of Haydon IV. Somehow . . ." He shook his head.

Dana stared at him. "Jonathan, I don't understand."

He approached her and took hold of her hands. "All I'm trying to say is that your experience aboard the flagship wasn't just some hallucination. It was something real, Dana."

She wanted desperately to rid herself of the rest of the vision: that a ship would arrive to deliver her to Tirol. But she thought he might misinterpret her meaning, so she said nothing. What would be the point, anyway, when that ship obviously wasn't The Homeward Bound.

Unexpectedly, when she lifted her face to him, he kissed her softly on the mouth.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The identity of the operative the GMP infiltrated among the Starchildren had been the subject of much speculation and, at times, heated debate, until the matter was laid to rest by Shi Ling, in his posthumously published tome, Sometimes Even a Yakuza Needs a Place to Hide. Her name was Martha Fox, and Shi Ling puts her age at fifty-five when she was killed in the Invid attack on the Starchildren's colony [January. 2033]. A first-rate mecha engineer, Fox was serving a twenty-year sentence in Monument's Bitteroot Correctional Facility for acts of [Zentraedi] terrorism committed during the Malcontent Uprising. Recruited by Nova Satori in 2031, Fox was sent to Argentina, where she rose effortlessly to a high-level position in the Starchildren cult, and became the mistress of [Kaaren Napperson's husband] Eric Baudel. Promised an even more lofty position in Tokyo, Fox was in turn recruited by Eiten Shimada, only to betray the Family the following year by selling information to the GMP about the Shimada's financial ties to the Starchildren.

Channing DeMont, The Secret History of the GMP

Misa and Izumi sauntered through Japantown, watching people going about their business. Shawls were being knitted, shoes mended, chickens plucked, bicycles repaired. Come sundown, the Argentine air could turn bitterly cold, but tonight there was no breeze sweeping in from the Andes and the temperature was almost balmy.

They held hands while they walked, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Pairs of girls hurried past them, arm in arm; pairs of boys, as well, with their arms around each other's shoulders. The dirt streets were lighted by lanterns or solitary incandescent bulbs. A brew of appetizing aromas swirled in the air.

"I love it here," Misa told her new friend.

Izumi nodded in agreement. "That's why I couldn't care less about

leaving."

"And when the ship launches?" "We'll begin work on another one." "And if the Invid come here?" "We'll ask for their help."

Two weeks at the Starchildren's pampas colony—variously referred to as Launch City (Ciudad Lanzar), Napperson Naval Station, or Noah's Follow-up Folly—had confirmed Misa's first hunch about the place. The saucer ship was almost incidental. It was the dream itself that had drawn and continued to unite everyone. Half the people she'd met expressed little or no interest in leaving aboard Napperson's Hope; they were content merely to be part of the effort. And it was that pioneer spirit that distinguished the colony from Tokyo. For where the Starchildren were constructing a future—though for a relative few—Tokyo seemed intent on waiting one out.

In good-natured dismissal of Misa's protests, Kaaren Napperson and Eric Baudel had insisted on treating her as a VIP, which meant that she had been permitted to wander as she would, even into areas of the ship and its encompassing dome that were off-limits to all but the engineering elite of the Starchildren. Kan Shimada's ambassador of a sort, Misa had a motorized cart and driver at her beck and call, was free to question whomever she might, and dined nightly with Kaaren and Eric themselves, who sometimes seemed intent on adopting her.

The results of Tokyo's sudden generosity were already having a powerful impact on the colony—a trial launch was scheduled and final selection of the twenty-five hundred passengers was under way—so Misa could understand why the project chiefs would want to keep her happy and well fed. But their innocence troubled her. They had no notion of the favor they were doing the Shimadas by assisting in the disabling of Jonathan Wolff's ship.

From Tokyo, Terry had told her what he could about the initial survey of The Homeward Bound, which had apparently gone well—well enough, at

any rate, for the Shimadas to have reciprocated by sharing technology with the Defense Force. Terry was being placed in charge of that; and Louie Nichols, the Shimada Building's newest fixture, was to serve as liaison with the GMP.

Given the number of deserters and "retirees" that had been turning up at the colony, it was a wonder to Misa that the Defense Force was still vital. Each day saw the arrival of soldiers and their families, from Monument, Mexico, Cavern, Brasília, Buenos Aires, and other cities strafed or ruined by the Masters. Misa listened to story after story detailing the horror of the attacks. And during each, she would find herself reflecting on how quiet Tokyo had been during the same period, the tranquility interrupted only by the occasional blare of the early-warning-system sirens, the economy bolstered through trade with other Asian and Pacific Rim centers.

The increase in immigration had led to tightened security throughout the colony, though primarily in the crowded residential zones that surrounded the dome. The interior of the dome was patrolled by a legion of fifteen-year-old Destroids, which were part of a larger arsenal of Veritechs, Logans, and Hovertanks. The Starchildren's militia, made up of some two thousand former soldiers, practiced regular drills, but had yet to be deployed against any threat, real or imagined. Argentina was far removed from what passed for the world's industrial centers, and those who came to the pampas usually had had their fill of war.

Without deliberately setting out to do so, Misa had found herself spending most of her time among the colony's sizable population of Nihon- jin. Many of them were the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of cattle ranchers and soybean farmers who had emigrated to the Amazon basin at the turn of the century, and the enclave they had fashioned for themselves was rich in traditions that had been abandoned by ethnically diverse, modern Tokyo. Ironically, the simple life Misa had sought since her youth in the communal orphanages was alive and well, there on the vast, rolling plains of the Southlands.

Izumi Sasaki had become her unofficial guide to the narrow streets that

comprised Japantown. He was thin and always smiling, and only an inch shorter than her. They had met at a noodle shop and formed an instant friendship that gave every indication of harboring at least the seeds of romance. Izumi was in fact one of the main reasons she hadn't returned to Tokyo with Terry Weston.

Yes, she still loved Terry, but whatever future they might once have forged had been undermined by his reenlistment in the military—a military that had once branded him unfit for duty, no less. She had come to realize that she couldn't be partnered with a soldier; a soldier in the Defense Force, or for that matter, a soldier in the Shimada Family.

"So, do you love this place enough to delay your return to Tokyo?" Izumi asked her now. He knew that much about her—that she was visiting the Argentine—but not much else.

"I've already delayed my return by two weeks." "And your family is missing you?"

She smiled inwardly. "Yes. I think so." "You have a large family there?" "Well, an extended one, anyway."

"Then you'll probably leave before the launch?" "I might."

He sighed dramatically. "You're going to miss a great party."

She was about to reply when the ground shook with earthquake force and a deafening explosive report assaulted them from the northeast. Shaken, they turned in time to see an enormous fireball rise into the night sky.

Izumi's face was a mask of anguish. "The dome!" he said, in a tremulous voice. "The ship!"

Dana was aware that the Shimadas had sent Louie to Denver to negotiate with the GMP, but she hadn't expected him to arrive unannounced at the cabin. She had returned to Monument only two days earlier, largely in flight from Jonathan and the confusion brought on by the sudden and upsetting change in their relationship. Sean had shown Louie

up the hill to where Dana and Angelo were utilizing one of the Hovertanks to excavate graves for the Tiroleans. Three more had succumbed since Dana's trip to Denver. At the same time, there was reason for cautious optimism, in that Bowie and Musica had succeeded in reprogramming one of Bowie's synthesizers to emulate the eerie harmonies and dissonances of the Cosmic Harp.

Louie's ever-present tinted goggles couldn't conceal his distress at seeing the grave sites, though it was equally apparent that his visit hadn't been prompted by concern for the health of the clones. Surely, his uneasiness had something to do with Shimada business. Even when he and Dana had put some distance between themselves and Sean and Angelo— much to their outrage—Louie remained agitated and wouldn't look her in the eye.

"Louie, will you quit pacing around and tell me what's on your mind!" she said at last. A cliff face along the ridge caught hold of her words and sent them echoing through the canyon.

He hemmed and hawed for a moment, then said, "Dana, it's The Homeward Bound. Wolff failed to mention that we wouldn't be able to penetrate the on-board computer because it's secured by a voice code. As it turns out, he's the only one with full access to the data."

Dana puzzled over the assertions. "Why would he conceal that from you?"

"We're not sure. Maybe the computer contains additional information about the Sentinels or the REF, or about the true purpose of his mission? We just don't know. But we can't get anywhere without a deeper look."

"But why didn't you say anything at the time, Louie—when we were all on board the ship?"

"We didn't want to confront Wolff openly. He obviously has a reason for keeping quiet about the code. If we mentioned that we'd encountered it, he might have done something rash."

Dana quelled a sense of mounting panic. Did the computer contain data about her parents or her sister? Was Jonathan lying about T. R.

Edwards or the Invid? "Why are you coming to me with this?" she asked. "You should be talking to Jon—to Wolff."

Louie caught the slip and touched his chin. "I will talk to him—if you agree that that's the best way to proceed. See, I haven't mentioned anything about the code to Nova or Fredericks."

Dana was flustered. "What other way is there to proceed? If Wolff is the only one who can help you."

Louie dug the tip of his boot into the soft earth. "We're certain that the computer can be made permeable by a code word or a phrase. Granted, it has to be presented in Wolff's voice, but we can get around that." He glanced at Dana. "What we need first is the code."

It took Dana a moment to grasp his meaning. "You want me to pry the word out of him? Is that why you're here?"

Louie shrugged. "Like I said, I'll ask him directly if that's what you think's best."

Now Dana began to pace. "Why would he purposely conceal data about the REF or the Sentinels? He's already sick of being labeled a hero. If there's anything of worth in the ship's computer, he'd share it."

"Then why hasn't he told us about the voice code?"

Dana recalled his startled reaction to learning that the ship was to be surveyed. She put her hands over her mouth and shook her head.

"We have a second theory," Louie said quietly. "It's possible he's concealing that the ship is foldworthy." He raised his hands before Dana could speak. "The REF may have commanded him to return to Tirol once he had a dear picture of the situation here. He knows that he won't be allowed anywhere near that ship if the truth is revealed."

The words flattened her. Was that why Jonathan had claimed to believe so strongly in her vision—even though she hadn't mentioned anything about the ship? When they made love in his quarters on Denver Base, she had promised herself that she would have no expectations. She wasn't going to add to his confusion or further complicate his life. The physical intimacy they shared was only a prerequisite to intimacy of a

different sort. If they were to be honest with one another about the future, that threshold would have to be crossed.

If there hadn't been an attraction, things might have gone differently. But neither of them could ignore what they felt, and they had acted on those feelings. Now, however, she had a clear and frightening understanding of the position she had put herself in, and she was hopelessly torn.

She screwed her eyes shut and continued to shake her head. "I don't know if I can do this for you, Louie. Things have gotten complicated . . ."

"Then do it for the Tiroleans," he said firmly. "If The Homeward Bound is foldworthy, it's their best shot at going home."

Dana balled up her hands. "That's low, Louie," she growled. "And cruel. If I refuse to pry the code out of him, I'm condemning everyone in camp to death, is that it?"

Louie showed her a sheepish look. "I'm sorry, Dana, I shouldn't have said that. Do whatever you think is right. Maybe if you tell him about the Tiroleans, he'll admit all he knows about the ship. Maybe the two of you can work out a deal. But if he says nothing about the code . . ." Louie shrugged.

Dana sat down on a stump and raised her face to the pine-scented breeze. Years earlier she had played the spy for Rolf by investigating the Giles Academy. But she had no stomach for espionage anymore. Couldn't she simply tell Jonathan that they knew all about the code? Then it would be up to him to decide whether or not to inform the GMP. Given the opportunity, would he return to Tirol? she wondered. To Lynn-Minmei and to all that he claimed to have run from? More to the point, if he chose to remain on Earth, would she be able to leave him—given the opportunity? Or would her concerns for the clones and for her parents overwhelm what she felt for him after only a few short weeks?

"Oh, Louie," she said, finally looking at him. "I wish you hadn't told

me."

General Vincinz and his chiefs of staff were en route to the moon, aboard a twenty-year-old shuttle launched from Denver. At ALUCE, they

were to meet with General Nobutu, to oversee the transfer of nuclear weapons to The Homeward Bound in advance of the Sensor Nebula mission. Weightlessness disagreed with Vincinz, though he enjoyed sending objects like pens and wristwatches wafting through the cabin space.

"Nova Satori's nobody's fool," he was telling the others just now. "When she came to me and casually dropped that little nugget about the Starchildren's plans to launch their ship, she knew from the start that I'd expect payment from the GMP if we were going to do their dirty work."

That dirty work had been carried out by a group of alleged Southern Cross deserters, who had gone to Argentina bearing gifts in the form of two fully armed A-JACs. The group was under orders to delay the launch, without inflicting damage on the ship itself, unless absolutely necessary. The mission couldn't be judged a complete success, inasmuch as two of the saboteurs had been captured and the ship had, in fact, sustained collateral damage in the fire that had spread from the targeted fuel dump. Nevertheless, not only was the ship grounded, but Vincinz could always claim to have done everything in his power to keep the Starchildren from suffering an irredeemable loss.

"I don't like the idea of Satori coming to us," Major Stamp said with candor. "Our willingness to execute the raid makes it appear that we have some special interest in protecting Wolff's ship."

Vincinz encouraged a piece of crumpled notepaper to drift from his open hand. "But that's the beauty of it. Of course we have a special interest in the ship. As the 'militant' faction of the retooled Defense Force, we are required to view The Homeward Bound as essential to Earth's survival in the face of an Invid onslaught. I practically said as much to Fredericks in the same casually meaningful tone Satori later used on me. That's how he got it in his head to use us in the first place."

"So what exactly do we get in exchange for grounding the Starchildren?" Captain Bortuk, the chief of staff, asked.

Vincinz held up two fingers. "First, unobstructed access to the data the Shimadas have promised to provide. And second, Wolff's name is removed

from the shortlist of candidates to command the Nebula mission."

"After the briefing he gave in Denver, there's a lot of people who would love to see him disappear," someone muttered.

"Wolff's a fool, thinking he can wage a guerrilla war against a bunch of XT slugs," Vincinz agreed. "Now more than ever, we need someone like Leonard at the helm. But it's imperative—especially now that Wolff's parade is being rained on—that he be kept away from the ship."

"Tokyo wants us to consider using their robots to man Wolff's ship for the run against the Sensor Nebula," Stamp supplied.

"Which isn't a half-bad idea," Vincinz replied, to everyone's surprise. "When the time comes to commandeer The Homeward Bound, it wouldn't hurt to have the help of a couple of smart machines that have already piloted her."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

She would deny it to the last, but Sterling retains vestiges of the Imperative the Robotech Masters coded into the behavior of their warrior clones, the Zentraedi. In Sterling, however, the commingling of Human and Zentraedi genetics has twisted the Imperative into a willfulness, which masqueraded as precociousness in her infancy and toddlerhood, and rebelliousness in pubescence. I predict that, as she approaches full maturity, the Imperative will present in a more overt and dramatic fashion, overwhelming whatever codes of behavior to which she has hitherto adhered. In this sense, she is likely to be exceptionally impetuous, corruptible, manipulative, and self-serving. Though I hasten to add, this does not mean she should be exempted from active duty; to the contrary, she should be considered for high-risk undertakings whenever feasible, so as to encourage the surfacing of her warrior nature.

Lazlo Zand, Event Horizon:

Perspectives on Dana Sterling and the Second Robotech War

"I'm well aware of the dangers posed by this mission," Senator Pauli told the members of the oversight committee. "But I consider it too important a mission to entrust to machines—no matter how allegedly intelligent they are." His gaze was focused on Louie Nichols. "You can tell the Shimadas, thanks, but no thanks. We've decided to go with a human crew on this one."

Louie adjusted the fit of his goggles. "I can appreciate that, Senator. But perhaps you'd be willing to allow one or two of the Shimada machines to participate as observers on the mission?"

Pauli looked to Aldershot, Grass, Fredericks, Satori, and the rest.

"I have no objections to allowing a robot to go along for the ride," Nova said. "Tokyo has been more than accommodating. There are potential military applications for some of the smart machines Shimada's people have

designed. We may even be able to circumvent some of our reliance on Protoculture, vis-à-vis mecha power supply and reconfiguration."

Aldershot's adjutant, Major Sosa, was nodding in agreement. "I find it laudable that some of Tokyo's techs volunteered for the Nebula mission, even though we were constrained to reject the offers."

General Aldershot explained. "As long as Tokyo maintains its isolatory—and in some sense collaborative—stance with regard to the Invid, the Shimadas can't expect to be included in what is essentially a military operation. I will, however, tender my okay to the inclusion of a robot among the Nebula team—but only to serve as a redundant system to The Homeward Bound's on-board computer."

"Exactly how much access to the on-board system will this machine have?" Senator Grass asked—as he had been instructed to by General Vincinz.

Louie answered for the Shimadas. "We're basically interested in evaluating the Nebula, Senator. In the event the nuclear devices fail to have the desired effect."

"So you're talking about having the robot serve as an additional sensor," Aldershot said.

Louie nodded. "I also think it couldn't hurt to have the machine evaluate the performance of the ship's Reflex furnaces. The more data we amass, the easier it's going to be to work toward revitalizing the Protoculture fold generators."

Aldershot considered it, then nodded in understanding. Louie was excused from the meeting. A vote was taken and the proposal was accepted.

"Have the fission bombs been transferred to the ship?" Pauli asked a moment later.

"General Vincinz confirms from ALUCE that we're a go," Nova told the table.

Pauli nodded approvingly. "Well, then, I suppose we need only arrive at a consensus as to our mission commander."

Grass cleared his throat. "I trust that by now we're all in agreement

that Colonel Wolff and his officers and crew should be excluded?"

Fredericks and Nova traded covert glances. Payback time for Vincinz's actions in Argentina, Nova told herself.

"It makes good sense to keep Wolff out of it," Aldershot was saying. "The ship is similar enough in design to our existing frigates and destroyers to be piloted by any Southern Cross commander. And what with Wolff's experience in fighting the Invid, he's critical to our strategic posture."

"How's Wolff taking this?" Pauli put to Alan Fredericks.

Fredericks cleared his throat. "He hasn't been told. But his reaction shouldn't be a factor in our decision. Lang and Reinhardt sent him to help us, not contend with us."

"Then I agree with Senator Grass and General Aldershot that he be excluded," Pauli said, to a chorus of assenting voices.

Fredericks got to his feet with purposeful slowness. "The GMP submits that Dana Sterling is the best choice to oversee the mission."

"Sterling?" Pauli exclaimed. "She isn't even military personnel."

Fredericks inclined his head to one side. "It's true that her recent duties have had more to do with diplomacy than defense, but may I remind the committee that she has handled each assignment with competence and dedication to our common cause. She facilitated our growing rapport with Tokyo, she met with the Zentraedi—when we thought we had need of them—and she has already sat on the bridge of Wolff's ship. More importantly, Lieutenant Satori and I are in agreement that Sterling would meet with near universal approval. As former Southern Cross, she'll satisfy generals Vincinz and Nobutu; the Shimadas seem to have taken a liking to her; and we have reason to believe that even Wolff will support her."

Fredericks didn't need to look at Nova to guess what she was thinking. GMP operatives assigned to Wolff had reported that while Wolff may have encountered rough seas with his estranged wife and son, it had been nothing but smooth sailing with Dana Sterling.

"You make Sterling seem unassailable as a candidate, Colonel," Grass opined when Fredericks had finished. "But her actions during the War were

often as reckless as they were heroic."

"That 'recklessness' has always paid off, Senator," Nova remarked. "Besides, there's one overriding reason for sending her."

Grass and the others waited.

"She's half Zentraedi," Nova said. "For all we know, the Sensor Nebula may respond differently to her than it would to any of us. Perhaps, in addition to seeking out Flower of Life worlds, the Nebula also scans for the presence of enemies of the Invid."

The committee members spent a moment considering it.

"Yes, but based on the very reasons Colonel Fredericks gave for excluding Wolff," Pauli said at last, "can the Defense Force afford to lose Sterling?"

"We can't afford to lose anyone, Senator," Fredericks said, almost offhandedly. "But suffice it to say that we can afford to risk her."

Dana allowed herself to be swept into his embrace, and she returned the kisses he scattered across her lips, cheeks, and neck. But she broke it off when she felt her own passion begin to build. She couldn't make love to him now and do what she had to do. She refused to betray their intimacy in that way. She needed to confront him as honestly as possible and see what course he took.

"I've missed you," he whispered, reluctant to release her.

"I've missed you," she said, and slipped skillfully out of his arms.

His eyes were on her as she entered his quarters on Denver Base. "Have conditions improved at the cabin?" he asked after a moment.

She told him that there hadn't been any deaths since Bowie's alterations to the synthesizer, though neither Dana nor Musica expected their luck to hold. Then, sensing that it was as good a time as any to begin, she added, "A trip home is the only thing that can save them—a return to Tirol."

She watched him out of the corner of her eye, alert to every nuance in his expression. And indeed she identified a subtle rearrangement of his

handsome features. It was as though a shadow had passed over his face. The light went out of his dark eyes. He exited the moment and went into himself. He was weighing something, gauging its import.

"I sympathize with what you're going through, Dana. I only wish there was something I could do." He followed her into the room, but walked past her, mumbling to himself. "Maybe, maybe there's a way . . ."

"What way, Jonathan? We both know the outcome. The clones will die, just as the Zentraedi did."

"If the ship could be retasked . . . I mean, if Louie or the Shimada team were to discover something about the fold generators."

Oh, but they have, she told herself, though she couldn't bring herself to give voice to the thought. So instead she said, "There's something I need to tell you, Jonathan. I wanted you to hear it from me first."

His fine brows beetled as he regarded her. "What, Dana?"

She straightened to her full height. "I've been asked to command the Nebula mission."

Wolff's eyes widened. "What?"

"That's why I'm back in Denver so soon," she said quickly. "Not that my heart has been anywhere but here. But command contacted me this morning, and ordered me to report."

Wolff couldn't control his consternation. When he turned to her, there was something new in his eye: a devilish ruefulness. "So they've taken my ship away from me."

She shook her head. "They haven't taken your ship. It's just that you're too valuable—"

"And you're not?" he snapped. "Earth's foremost celebrity? The half-XT soldier who practically ended the war single-handedly?"

"Jonathan—"

"I'm so valuable they don't even want me to waste my breath talking about the Invid." A sardonic laugh escaped him. "Don't you see what's behind this, Dana? They're worried I'm going to leave."

She swallowed hard. "But how could they think that? You've said all

along that the ship isn't fold capable."

"No, no, of course it isn't," he answered in a distracted voice. "And here's the funny thing: I would have rejected the mission anyway. And you know why, Dana? Because I am too valuable. Or maybe I should say that my work comes first—ahead of anything the GMP or the Southern Cross can concoct."

"Your work?" she asked.

"My personal work." He put his hands in his pockets. "Actually, it's good they don't want to listen to me. Maybe they'll grant me a discharge. That way I'll be able to concentrate on what's important—getting over Lynn- Minmei and reconciling with my wife and son."

She stared at him. What was going on? It wasn't as if he was saying anything new, but he was saying it in a tone she hadn't heard him use before. An emphatic, almost accusative tone. Was he angry with her? Through with her? Or was he trying to tell her something? . . .

"I haven't accepted the mission," she started to tell him.

He whirled on her with such fury that it startled her. "But you have to accept it! You have to, do you understand me?"

She looked hard at him. "I have something else to tell you—something I haven't told anyone. When I met with the Zentraedi on the factory satellite, they informed me that our mission was a waste of time. There's no way to destroy the Sensor Nebula, Jonathan. And even if we manage to disrupt or disperse the cloud, it'll be too late. The Nebula has communicated with the Invid. They'll come, no matter what we do."

"It's not too late," he countered. "You're going to take the word of a group of dying Zentraedi? You have to accept the mission."

She exhaled in weary confusion. "Why couldn't Lang have surprised us by making the ship foldworthy—despite what he told you." Deliberately, she locked eyes with him.

He held her gaze for a protracted moment: uncertain, then angry, then sad. Finally he breathed deeply and smiled wanly, at once disappointed and relieved. "Imagine what a fool I'd look like," he said elaborately, "after

insisting to everyone that The Homeward Bound was here to stay." Dana tried hard to decipher his look and his words.

"But you're right," he went on, turning his back to her. "Lang shouldn't have sent me home with an imperfect ship. It's crucial that we communicate with the SDF-3. All of our efforts should be directed to that end. Vincinz and Aldershot have their minds made up about how to deal with the Regis, and it'll be the death of all of us."

"They don't want to surrender their authority to someone they see as a newcomer," Dana said in a low voice.

A smile flared on Wolff's face and died away. "Take good care of that ship, Dana," he said soberly. "It's Earth's only hope. Do you understand what I'm telling you? Use it as it was meant to be used. It's Earth's only hope, as surely as Lynn-Minmei was our hope during the Robotech War."

Again: Lynn-Minmei. Was he trying to hurt her? "Jonathan, you know that I would never do anything—"

"You can't be tied to me," he interrupted. "There's no room for sentiment in our lives. We all have separate parts to play, Dana. You know that as well as I do."

She tightened her lips and stared at the floor.

"You'd better go," he said, softening his tone. "There are preparations to make. Go now, Dana. Before it's too late."

In an aboveground laboratory in the Shimada Building, Miho Nagata watched Gibley, Shi Ling, and Strucker tinker with the disturbingly Humanlike robot that had been selected to ride The Homeward Bound into space. Reminiscent of the machines Emil Lang's staff of Robotechnicians had been experimenting with twenty years earlier and left to gather dust when Zand's Protoculture fiends inherited the facility, the plastic-sheathed thing had two legs, two arms, and a head, along with dozens of other appendages designed to gather and collate information. Gibley had told Nagata that the robot could see and hear from practically anywhere on its body.

"We have a pretty good idea of what happened in Argentina," Kan Shimada's number-one man was telling the trio as they worked. "The GMP somehow convinced General Vincinz to scuttle the launch of Napperson's Hope. The two women who were captured were former Southern Cross intelligence officers in Mexico."

"I'm surprised Vincinz was willing to cooperate," Gibley said in an offhand way, "after what Aldershot and Constanza have done to the Southern Cross. Why didn't the GMP handle it themselves?"

"Obviously they didn't want to compromise their intelligence agent." He smiled. "Our agent, I should say. She told them just enough to get them nervous, without revealing where the funding for the launch originated, so there are no ties to us."

Shi Ling peered at Nagata from behind the robot "And the ship?" Gibley asked.

"Misa and our agent report that it was damaged, but apparently not irreparably so."

"Tough break," Strucker commented.

Miho nodded. "Mr. Shimada shares your concern. He feels that we are indirectly responsible for the damage, and has sent Terry back to Argentina to make amends."

Gibley secured a panel in the robot's thigh and stood up, stretching his arms over his head. "Is Kaaren Napperson planning to confront the Defense Force about the damage?"

"Her captives are denying any present affiliation with the Southern Cross," Nagata said. "They claim they were acting on behalf of the Heal Earth Hajj. Besides, Napperson knows better than to stir up further trouble."

A vid-phone chirped while everyone was mulling over Nagata's remarks, and Louie Nichols's face appeared onscreen a moment later.

"Lynn-Minmei," he said when Gibley had planted himself in front of the vid-phone camera.

"Uh, what's red and white, and irksome?" Gibley replied.

Louie forced a smile.

"Okay, I give up," Gibley said.

"Lynn-Minmei is The Homeward Bound's voice-recognition code." "You're kidding."

"No, and I doubt Dana is."

Shi Ling was suddenly at Gibley's side. "We'll have to scan the news- footage files to see if we've got audio of Wolff saying her name."

Louie shook his head. "Won't be necessary." He held up a minidisk. "Dana wired herself."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

A glance at the events that transpired between the [Second and Third Robotech] wars is likely to leave one with the impression that the actual function of the Invid Sensor Nebula was to so confound the inhabitants of Earth that they would be incapable of taking any action that might deflect or otherwise repel the swarm. Given the conduct of the revamped government, the dismantled Southern Cross, the impotent Defense Force, the orchestrating Shimada Family, the naïve Starchildren, and the foundering 15th ATAC, one is tempted to view Leonard, Moran, even Zand in a more benevolent light.

Selig Kahler, The Tirolean Campaign

This time when Satori and Fredericks arrived at the refugee camp, they found the barbwire-crowned gate wide open. Dana, Bowie, Angelo, and Sean were waiting for them, on the ground rather than inside the battered Hovertanks they had salvaged from the war-torn streets of Monument City. Groups of Tirolean refugees watched warily from the Emerson cabin, the watchtowers, and the deep shadows of fir trees. Musica stood off to one side of the gate, cradling the clone infant in her arms.

"You'd better have a damn good reason for making us come all the way from Denver," Fredericks said to Dana, in the affected tone that had endeared him to no one.

Dana stood akimbo. "I'll let you be the judge of that, Colonel."

The former members of the 15th led the climb up the grassy slope to a large field, strewn with graves, marked only by knee-high piles of river- smoothed stones. The desiccated, overturned earth was the color of cocoa.

"On the Masters' mother ships, clones that died or were determined to be defective were simply recycled," Bowie told the two GMP officers. "But since we lack the technology for that, and because cremation is for some reason anathema to the Tiroleans, it was either interment or cryogenic preservation. As you can see, we chose burial."

Nova's eyes were larger than usual as they roamed the field. "My God, how many have died?"

"One hundred and three," Angelo said gruffly.

"If you'd surrendered them to our custody . . ." Fredericks started to say, only to be cut off by Sean.

"They would have died anyway."

Nova had a hand over her mouth. "Surely we can get a medical team to come up here . . ."

But Dana was shaking her head. "It's too late for that, Nova. Anyway, we've already treated the ones who came down with diseases. What you see here is mainly the result of madness and malnutrition. The war was even tougher on them than it was on us, and now, everything about the place is killing them: the air, the openness, the food . . . They have to be moved to a secure environment where they can tend to their own healing. And they require special nutrients we can't supply, because we've run out of downed assault ships to plunder."

"Dana, I don't know what you expect us to do," Nova said.

"I'll tell you what I expect." Dana took a couple of steps toward them. "I need your help in transferring them to the factory satellite."

Fredericks snorted in disbelief. "While the Zentraedi are on board? Are you certain you've thought this through, Sterling?"

"The Zentraedi have more in common with these people than they do with us," Dana told him. "Their gripes were with the Masters, not the clones the Masters created. They'll accept the Tiroleans. More importantly, the factory's life-support system is still producing a synth food that contains the Protoculture chemicals that are indispensable to their health."

Nova blew out her breath. "We don't have the authority to facilitate an operation of this scope."

"I know that, Nova. But I need you to act as our intermediary with Aldershot and Constanza and whomever else. Tell them that we want three shuttles. They're to be delivered to what's left of Fokker Base, and launched from there, as well. I'll pilot one; Sean will pilot the second; and I want

Marie Crystal to pilot the third. We'll see to getting the Tiroleans aboard and lofting them to the factory satellite. We won't require any escorts, and we want full clearance to carry out the debarking of our passengers without interference. From the factory, we will proceed directly to The Homeward Bound."

Fredericks curled his lip at her. "This is beginning to sound like blackmail, Sterling."

Dana almost grinned. "My—or I should say, our—acceptance of the Nebula mission is contingent on it. Unless our terms are met, Aldershot and the lot of them can find another crew for Wolff's ship."

Nova gnawed her lower lip. "Dana, before you issue any further ultimatums, I should caution you: There are other qualified candidates."

Dana nodded. "But you people owe me this much. For my acting as your emissary to Tokyo and the factory-satellite Zentraedi . . . And every day you delay costs all of us. Tell that to Constanza and Aldershot, Nova. And advise them that we're ready to go at a moment's notice."

"I can't say I'm any more comfortable with this than I am with weightlessness," Vincinz announced, surveying his roomy subsurface quarters on ALUCE Base, "but it does feel good to be within fifty thousand miles of our prize."

The Homeward Bound, Vincinz meant, which he and some of the others had been briefly aboard during the transfer of the fission bombs. And a fine ship she was, he had told himself at the time. Somewhat cramped and unfinished, but suitable for spearheading an attack on the Invid. Or for spacefolding to Tirol—once Shimada's team had finished working their Protoculture magic.

With Vincinz were his adjutant, his chief of staff, and two Southern Cross captains who were loyal to Vincinz but had spent the past two months attached to General Nobutu's command. A lanky, long-haired TASC lieutenant named Lancer had shown everyone to Vincinz's quarters and had promised to have the kitchen deliver food and drink.

Major Stamp pounded his hand against the room's arc of alloy wall, as if testing its strength. "Tell you the truth, I think I'd rather be here than on Earth if and when the Invid come. Especially if Wolff turns out to be right about their ignoring the moon."

"Do you want to wait around and see if he's right?" Vincinz asked. "I only meant—"

"I know what you meant. But I anticipate we'll be on our way within a couple of weeks. As I see it, Sterling's mission to the Nebula will provide those Tokyo otaku with everything they need to run a full assessment of the fold generators. It'll just be a matter of time before they announce that the ship's already foldworthy or that they can make it so."

"Sterling," Captain Bortuk remarked with patent distaste. "Who would have figured a Zentraedi going mushy over a bunch of clones."

Vincinz snorted. "Anyone who fought with Sterling during the war. She was the first one to protest the wholesale slaughter of Bioroid pilots because they were Human."

"The younger generation," one of the captains said. "Too bad she wasn't around to see what Humans were doing to Humans during the Global Civil War."

"Still, going to the trouble to loft them to the factory satellite . . ."

"All we need now are some Invid, and we'll have ourselves a regular XT petting zoo," Stamp added, laughing at his own joke.

They were all laughing when Lancer, the fly-boy, reappeared at the door. "General Vincinz, high-priority commo from Senator Grass." He gestured to the room's communications terminal. "The encryption is unfamiliar to us, sir."

"I'll see to it, Lieutenant," Vincinz said, dismissing him. Then, prizing a hand-held computer from the breast pocket of his jacket, he went to the terminal and downloaded Grass's message. A moment later, he had the hand-held on-line with a stand-alone CRT monitor, and everyone was huddled around it.

Grass was seated at his desk in the Denver building the resurrected

UEG was leasing from a produce supplier.

"General Vincinz: Stop right now if you haven't taken the necessary precautions." Grass paused for several seconds, then began again. "Ever since it was learned that Starchildren had set a launch date for Napperson's Hope, the GMP has been following the money that financed the rapid readying of the ship. It appears now that the funds originated in Tokyo, and also that the Shimadas may have had their sights set on Wolff's ship.

"The conclusion being drawn down here is that they know more about that ship than they've let on. Which begs the question: Have they shared what they know with anyone else? Get back to me as soon as possible, Vincinz. I don't want to be left on Earth if the balloon goes up ahead of schedule."

Vincinz turned to Stamp. "When is Sterling slated to loft the clones to the factory satellite?"

"Today. Oh-six-hundred hours, Denver time."

Vincinz consulted his wrist watch. "That gives us just under twelve hours."

"To do what, sir?"

"To beat Sterling to The Homeward Bound. That ship isn't going anywhere without us."

Nova, Fredericks, and three other GMP officers had a room to themselves in Denver Base's mission-control complex. Dana's shuttle convoy was up and away—in spite of a few last-minute problems at Fokker Aerospace—and the three ships were being tracked and monitored. All of Dana's terms had been met: the UEG had okayed the demand that her crew be made up of the former members of the 15th ATAC, in addition to Lieutenant Marie Crystal of the Black Lions TASC squadron; the Tiroleans were cleared for transfer to the factory satellite; and the 15th was authorized to proceed directly to The Homeward Bound and commence countdown for the Nebula mission.

Although there were far fewer display screens, the room the GMP

officers had to themselves received the same data that was being relayed to the central control room. Just now, most of the monitors were displaying video feeds from the pilot cabins of the three shuttles. There were Sean and Bowie; Angelo and Marie; and, in the third and largest shuttle, Dana, partnered with the Shimadas' somewhat grotesque, Humaniform robot, and some silly-looking, poodlelike stuffed animal Dana had brought along. But while Fredericks and the other officers were regarding the screens, Nova was listening—via audio earbeads—to a recording of a conversation Wolff and Sterling had had, ten days earlier, in Wolff's quarters.

There's no way to destroy the Sensor Nebula, Jonathan, Dana had said to him at one point. And even if we manage to disrupt or disperse the cloud, it'll be too late. The Nebula has communicated with the Invid. They'll come, no matter what we do.

That Dana had heard as much from the factory-satellite Zentraedi and had failed to report it might have been grounds for bouncing her from the Nebula mission. But Nova had decided not to bring the recording to the attention of the oversight committee. Her personal beliefs notwithstanding, Dana could claim to have simply dismissed the information, on the assumption that the Zentraedi were frequently misinformed about tactical data—a claim that would be backed up by her acceptance of the mission.

It's not too late, Wolff had told her. You have to accept the mission.

Nova was unclear as to why she had become preoccupied with the recording. However, because the onset of that preoccupation had coincided with the arrival of new intelligence about the Starchildren, she sensed that she was searching for a clandestine link between the Shimadas and Wolff, or perhaps between the Shimadas and Dana.

The funds that were to have financed the launch of Napperson's Hope had been traced to Tokyo. Behind Fredericks's back, Nova had authorized a payment of $500,000 to their informant, and the woman had spilled what she knew about the Shimada connection.

As Sterling herself had helped to establish, the Shimadas claimed to have no interest in either abandoning the elegant underground empire they

had forged, or contributing to the refurbishment of Earth's decimated Defense Force. Rather, they had hopes of accommodating the Invid with the aliens' own Flowers of Life, like some antiwar hippie crusade from the previous century. It followed, then, that they might have viewed Wolff's ship as a threat to their plans, and had therefore attempted to arrange for its destruction or disappearance—at the hands of the Starchildren or who knew what other groups.

All of which would have been well and good, save for one piece of intelligence that had also come to light: the GMP operative had stated that the person who had supplied the information about the Starchildren's launch was Terry Weston—a Shimada subordinate.

That being the case, what had happened to compel the Shimadas to reverse the plan they had set in motion? Never mind that they had manipulated the GMP and the Southern Cross to achieve their ends; had they discovered a better way of disposing of the ship?

Nova paused the playback of the recordings to study the monitor screens. Sean and Bowie, Angelo and Marie, Dana and the robot . . .

The two-legged machine had been scanned and probed, and declared to be essentially harmless. It wasn't harboring a bomb or any program that could initialize a self-destruct sequence in Wolff's ship. As desperate as the Shimadas might be to rid the planet of The Homeward Bound, it was unlikely that they would knowingly sacrifice Dana and her crew in the process.

So what wasn't she seeing?

She studied the display screens some more, finding her attention drawn again to the wide-angle feed from the shuttle Dana piloted. The Shimada bot's tinted vision array suddenly brought Louie Nichols to mind, and Nova laughed at the comparison. But her amusement faltered almost immediately, and she hurriedly commanded the Sterling/Wolff conversation to recommence play.

Why couldn't Lang have surprised us by making the ship foldworthy,

Dana had mused, despite what he told you.

Nova fast-forwarded through the initial portion of Wolff's reply. ". . . Lang shouldn't have sent me home in an imperfect ship. It's crucial that we communicate with the SDF-3. All of our efforts should be directed to that end." Again, she fast-forwarded, "Take good care of that ship, Dana. It's Earth's only hope. Do you understand what I'm telling you? Use it as it was meant to be used. It's Earth's only hope . . ."

Nova didn't have to run the recording through a voice analyzer to know that Wolff's statements were informed by a subtext. Clearly, he had realized that the amp had him under surveillance.

Use the ship as it was meant to be used . . .

How was it "meant" to be used? Hadn't it, in fact, already discharged its importance by returning Wolff and his Pack to Earth? Or did it have a secondary objective to fulfill that had nothing to do with the Nebula mission?

Why couldn't Lang have made the ship foldworthy? Had he?

Did Wolff know, and had the Shimadas found out? Nova cut her eyes to the display screens.

The robot!

She reached for the phone and barked, "Patch me though to General Aldershot—highest priority!"

It was a moment before the operator got back to her. "I'm sorry, sir, but the general can't be disturbed."

"He can't be disturbed? Did you tell him that this was highest priority, Corporal?"

"Affirmative, sir. But a situation has developed at ALUCE—" "What situation?"

"Sir, General Vincinz and his chiefs of staff have departed unexpectedly from ALUCE in a commandeered frigate, and are apparently en route to The Homeward Bound."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sterling never explained how the "cha-cha," the pollinator she called Polly—a gift from her three Zentraedi godfathers—reached Tirol. All the principals in the pre-War drama surrounding The Homeward Bound reported that the pollinator was not aboard the shuttles, or the ship itself, and Sterling herself has denied Satori's claim that she observed it during her surveillance of Sterling's flight to the factory satellite—though apparently mistook it for a stuffed toy poodle. Several commentators have argued that, in fact, it wasn't Polly who followed Sterling out of the Tirol-arrived Homeward Bound, but one of the many cha-chas that were known to have resided in captivity in Tiresia when the REF captured the city from the Invid Regent. [See La Paz, Baker, Huxley, and others.] It's possible that Polly was overlooked during the boarding of the shuttles, the flight to Wolff's ship, and the relatively brief fold to Tirol. But, then, how is it the little, knob-horned, mop-headed creature was glimpsed by numerous foragers who descended on the Emerson cabin after the departure of Sterling, Grant, Dante, Phillips, and the Tirolean refugees?

Mari Peirce, Homeward Bound

Repairs to the iris gage of the factory satellite's three o'clock pod had been completed a week earlier, but two small work ships were still anchored to the rotating factory when the convoy of shuttles approached. While the repairs were being effected, there had been sporadic radio contact between the work vessels and the Zentraedi, but neither crew members nor technicians had ventured any deeper into the factory than the docking bay of the enormous pod itself.

Dana, too, had spoken briefly with Tay Wav'vir—the domillan—and Tay had promised to be on hand when Dana arrived. Dana hadn't apprised her of the purpose of the visit; though, what with the trio of shuttles, the Zentraedi were likely to surmise that their earlier request for mecha and

weapons had been granted.

The shuttles negotiated the iris gate in single file, entering the vast forlorn chamber Dana had last visited in an EVA rig. When the shuttles had powered down, she emerged from the shuttle's forward doorway accompanied by three nearly identical female Tiroleans, who together formed a Triumvirate. All were wearing flight suits.

Waiting in the bay were Tay Wav'vir and the seventy-five or so other females, looking even more haggard than they had scarcely two months earlier.

"Par dessu, Daughter of Parino," the purple-haired Tay announced. "We were beginning to wonder if we would ever set eyes on you again."

"There's been much to attend to," Dana said.

Tay smirked. "Have your superiors abandoned their plans to assault the Sensor Nebula, or will they use the Super Dimensional Fortress that recently arrived?"

"Is it truly an REF ship?" someone asked before Dana could reply.

Dana nodded to the Zentraedi who had spoken. "Colonel Wolff, the commander, is an REF officer."

"Colonel Jonathan Wolff?" someone else asked. "Jonathan Wolff, yes."

The Zentraedi turned to her closest comrades. "The malcontent exterminator," she said. "Leader of the Wolff Pack."

The statements elicited an excited murmuring among some of the Zentraedi. This briefly overpowered a wary muttering that had begun in another quarter, and was clearly directed at the Triumvirate. After a thickly built female from the latter group said something in confidence to Tay Wav'vir, the domillan cut her eyes to the triplets and uttered several phrases in Zentraedi.

Nonplussed, the Tiroleans looked to Dana, who had anticipated the Zentraedi's reaction. "They are not T'sentrati," she said when the separate conversations had quieted. "They are from Tirol. Aboard the shuttles are an additional hundred."

Tay held up her hands to silence everyone. "What is your purpose in bringing them here, Daughter of Parino?"

"I'm taking them home, Domillan Wav'vir. And I've come to ask you to join us."

Bafflement clouded Tay's eyes. "Home?"

"To Tirol," Dana said. "I can't provide you with the weapons you requested, but I can at least offer you a chance to return to your home space along with them."

Isolated sniggering punctuated the stunned silence.

"Tirol is not our home," Tay explained, in a somewhat amused voice. "Most of us on this station have never even seen Fantoma, let alone made planetfall on its inhabited moon. If Tirol meant anything to us, we would have shipped aboard the SDF-3 all those years ago." She glanced disdainfully at the Triumvirate. "Tirol may hold significance for these clones the Masters created to populate their empire, but the moon holds no significance for us."

Dana had not anticipated this. "Would you stay here, then, in this dead thing, with the Invid on the approach?"

"This dead thing is as much a home as we have ever known," someone replied. "That's why we sued for permission to defend it."

"But monumental changes have occurred in Tirolspace," Dana said. "Lord Breetai commands his own ship once more: the Valivarre, fueled by ore freshly mined from Fantoma. And the forces of the Regent have been driven off Karbarra, Praxis, Garuda, Spheris, and many other worlds. This is the dawn of a new era—an era in which the T'sentrati can participate, not as enslaved warriors, but as an autonomous people."

Tay Wav'vir heard her out, then turned to her confederates. "Step forward, without fear of dishonor, any who would leave this place."

But no one made a move.

"Hey, you can't go in there," Aldershot's aide shouted to Nova as she stormed past his desk.

"The hell I can't," Nova said under her breath.

After numerous attempts to reach Aldershot from mission control, she had finally left Fredericks to mind the store and sped over to Denver Base in a borrowed Jeep, barely avoiding accidents on three occasions.

"Satori! What in blazes—" Aldershot's adjutant said as she came through the office door with the aide hot on her heels.

The general himself, surrounded by several officers and technical specialists, was seated in front of an array of monitors, some of which were displaying views of the frigate Vincinz had apparently hijacked from ALUCE. Aldershot turned when he heard the commotion and waved his aide and Major Sosa off Nova as they were trying to hustle her from the room.

Nova gave a downward tug to her tunic, flipped her hair behind her shoulders, and saluted. "I'm sorry to break in like this, General, but no one would put me through to you."

Aldershot scowled. "Excuse us, Lieutenant, if we were too busy dealing with a mutiny to return your calls."

"But, sir, it may not be a mutiny. If you'll give me a minute to explain what I've learned about the Shimadas—"

"The Shimadas and their secret-agent robot," Aldershot interrupted. "I've taken your conjectures under advisement, and if there's anything to them, action will be taken at the appropriate time."

"But now is the appropriate time," Nova replied forcefully. "The Shimadas are planning to fold The Homeward Bound to Tirol."

Everyone in the room turned to her.

"It's fold capable, sir," she went on, "Wolff knew this from the start, and the Tokyo team found him out. I can't make a case for conspiracy—not at the moment, anyway—but I'm certain that the Shimadas have incorporated the spacefold codes into their robot." She paused, then added. "The Shimadas' machine is going to take control of the ship."

Aldershot showed her a look of angry disbelief.

"And just why would Tokyo want to do such a thing?" the chief of staff asked in a patronizing voice.

Nova steeled herself. "They want the ship to disappear. They don't care where it goes, or if it takes another five years to get there. They want it away from Earth, so we'll have nothing substantial to hurl against the Invid when they arrive."

After a long moment, Aldershot spoke. "Ms. Satori, that's the most preposterous assumption I've heard in some time. You and Colonel Fredericks have been so busy chasing phantoms that you overlooked the plot that was hatching right under your noses. General Vincinz and his staff are the ones we need to be concerned about—not a bunch of yakuza and their two-legged computer."

"But, sir—"

The general held up his hands. "No more buts." He gestured to one of the monitors. "See for yourself, Lieutenant: Vincinz is headed for The Homeward Bound. Fortunately, we learned of his treachery in time to divert the shuttle rendezvous squadron to intercept him."

Nova turned her attention to a monitor that showed several Logans closing on the frigate. "Have you asked yourself what Vincinz is planning to do once he gets aboard Wolff's ship?" she asked Aldershot. "If you recall, sir, he and the rest of the Southern Cross staff officers okayed the mission. Why would they take such drastic measures to thwart it, unless they had good reasons to be suspicious?"

Major Sosa snorted in derision. "Ask yourself why Vincinz failed to alert us to those 'good reasons,' Satori. For God's sake, he won't even respond to our hailings."

Nova met his look. "Perhaps he didn't think you'd listen to reason."

Sosa had his mouth open to reply when one of the techs reported that the Logans were within targeting range of the frigate.

"Tell the pilots to continue hailing the ship," Aldershot ordered. "They are not to go to guns unless they find themselves in laser lock." He looked over his shoulder at Nova. "General Vincinz knows that The Homeward Bound is the only effective weapon we have at our disposal, and he doesn't trust that we'll make proper use of it. He's indignant that we were given

custody of the ship, and he wants it back. It's as simple as that, Lieutenant." Nova worked her jaw. "May I speak candidly, sir?"

"Candidly, but briefly."

"Sir, I feel that you're allowing yourself to be blinded by old rivalries between the Southern Cross and the RDF. Vincinz means to commandeer The Homeward Bound because he has somehow learned what I have: that the Shimadas have only their own agenda. You've got to let him reach that ship, General. Even if he commandeers it, he won't be able to execute a spacefold without the necessary codes. And even if I'm completely wrong, we can always retake the ship if Vincinz refuses to surrender it. He's not about to fire on his own forces."

"General Aldershot," a tech said. "Black Lions Five and Six report that they are being targeted by the frigate. They are taking evasive action."

Everyone turned to the monitors, where, on one screen, two Logans were veering from their courses. An instant later, a burst of cyan light erupted from the starboard guns of the frigate, missing the mecha by a narrow mark.

Aldershot muttered a curse. "Still no response from Vincinz?" "None, sir."

"Then it's done," the general said wearily. "Order the squadron to cripple that ship."

In Black Lion Two, Dennis Brown rolled away from the frigate, then angled beneath her, out of harm's way for the moment. Five and Six had nearly been scorched by the starboard laser array, and the tactical net was noisy with chatter.

"Talk isn't going to stop that ship," Dennis suggested good-naturedly. "Sorry, Two," Five said, "but I was one of Vincinz's aides, so I'm a bit

freaked that he'd try to dust me."

"Maybe that's why he's trying to dust you," Three said.

Dennis thought about Nova, listening to the remarks over the command net, and decided to get serious. "I'm pretty well positioned to

stitch the aft power plant," he told his wingmate.

"Go for it, Two. Nothing fancy. And keep it clean." "Roger that, One. No Fokker feints."

Dennis cut his forward speed, falling back until the tail end of the frigate was directly overhead. If Vincinz was going to burn him, it would be now. But the escort's underbelly guns didn't traverse. No one laser locked him.

"Sitting duck," he said into his helmet mouthpiece, and loosed a gaggle of Mongooses.

"Our wings have been clipped," Captain Bortuk reported from his post on the bridge of the hijacked frigate. "Principal drives are down. We're dead in space."

"Traitors!" General Vincinz snarled through barred teeth, struggling against the grip of the two officers who had dragged him away from the weapons console before he could loose a second blast at the Logan pursuit team.

Major Stamp swung his chair through a half circle. "You're the traitor, Vincinz. Firing on our own people."

Vincinz glowered. "Did you have some other way of reaching the ship with them in our way?"

Stamp rose and approached Vincinz. "If we'd made it by stealth it would be one thing. But I'm not about to kill innocent people. And unless I'm sorely mistaken, General, your stunt may have cost us our only alibi."

"Sir, General Aldershot is hailing on the command frequency," their communications man said.

Stamp blew out his breath. "No one is to speak but me, is that understood? I'm going to play this as close to the vest as I can." He slipped into the command chair, composed himself for the camera, and nodded to the commo man. "Put him through."

Aldershot appeared on one of the heads-up screens, distorted by intermittent static. Seeing Stamp in the driver's seat, he said, "Where's

Vincinz?"

"General Vincinz has been temporarily relieved of duty. I don't expect you to believe this, Aldershot, but our burst was unintentional."

"As was your hijacking that frigate, I suppose." "Not entirely, no."

Aldershot snorted. "Do you want to explain your actions now, or save it for the inquest and court-martial?"

Stamp wet his lips. "The truth is that we've come into some information that may well endanger the Nebula mission."

Aldershot blinked and was silent for a moment. "What sort of information, Major?"

"That Tokyo didn't reveal all they discovered about the capacities of

The Homeward Bound."

"And why wasn't the GMP or the oversight committee apprised of this?"

"To be blunt, we didn't think we'd be listened to. A lot of what we have on the Shimadas is circumstantial, and we couldn't be sure of presenting sufficient hard evidence to delay the mission."

"That was damn foolish of you, Major."

"We were well aware of the risks. But we felt obliged to give it our best shot."

"You damn fools!" Vincinz shouted from behind the command chair. "That ship is going to jump, Aldershot, and you're going to have to live with the consequences!"

Aldershot narrowed his eyes. "Put Vincinz where I can see him."

Vincinz shrugged his captors off and planted himself directly in front of his adjutant. "Listen to me, Aldershot: There wasn't time to consult you or to request Nobutu's permission to borrow this ship. We had to act fast and trust that we were doing the prudent thing."

"I hardly consider targeting the pursuit team the prudent thing," Aldershot told him. "And I'm not convinced that your burst was accidental. This is the same battle we've been fighting for twelve years, Vincinz:

Southern Cross against Robotech. You're lucky I didn't order those Logans to pick you apart."

"We'll see who's 'lucky,' Aldershot—at the inquest, as you say."

Aldershot started to reply when one of his staff passed him a slip of paper. His face was ashen when he looked into the camera.

Vincinz and the others aboard the bridge strained to make out what was being said two hundred thousand miles away. Then Aldershot cleared his throat.

"I've just been informed by the pilot of one of the Logans still positioned at the shuttle rendezvous point that Commander Sterling appears to have taken the Tiroleans with her. The sentries have been overpowered, and Sterling is in the process of relocating the clones aboard The Homeward Bound."

Vincinz let out a rueful laugh. "She's folding to Tirol, you old fool! That damned half-breed is out of here!"

The view from the forward bays encompassed all that had been her life for eighteen years: Space Station Liberty, the factory satellite, cold Luna, and wounded Earth. While Sean, Marie, and Angelo were strapping into their seats and bringing The Homeward Bound's systems on-line, Dana peered into her past and tried to imagine her future.

Bowie and Musica were elsewhere in the ship, seeking out sheltered places for their hundred Tirolean passengers, and the TASC guards had been disarmed and transferred to the abandoned shuttles. The Shimadas' robot was at the rear of the bridge, mated to a wall of technology by means of a pencil-thin connector that projected from the front of its alloy thorax. A pale lavender light glowed behind its wraparound vision array.

At Fokker Base, during preflight—and in the moments before a visual feed had been established with mission control in Denver—Louie had spoken to Dana through the robot, which had been delivered to Monument by a Shimada security team.

"The machine will see to everything, Dana. Just show it to the

computer link on the bridge and task it to interface. When you're ready to execute the fold, tell the machine to initialize the Protoculture generators.

"Oh, and by the way, we figured out where Lang went wrong. Your fold to Tirol should be near instantaneous. The machine contains a download of our calculations, including all my notes relating to the Synchron drive. I hope Lang and Penn can make sense of them. But be sure to tell them of the part that Tokyo played in getting you there—I figure this is Kan Shimada's way of ingratiating himself with the REF in advance of the fleet's return to Earth. Now if we can just weather the Invid Storm . . .

"Don't feel that you're abandoning us in our hour of need, Dana. Just keep in mind what you felt after the Masters were defeated. You knew then that this would be your destiny, just as you knew that Tokyo would be mine. I speak for all of us in the underground in telling you to 'Hurry back.'"

Dana had been given a glimpse of her destiny aboard the Master's flagship, and she had been watching it unfold ever since, playing an active part in that unfolding and refusing to credit any of it to the "Shapings" of Protoculture or any other metaphysical agency. She felt more clearheaded and resolute than she had ever felt, despite the ruggedness of the moral terrain she was traversing. Louie and the Shimada Family didn't view her departure as abandonment, but many would. Her actions during the war would be forgotten. She would be seen as a coward of the worst sort. And yet, was there any other path open to her? One that would not only take into account the Tiroleans and the Shimadas, but would speak to Earth's still- questionable future?

Part of her wanted to steer a course for the Sensor Nebula and make it appear as if The Homeward Bound succumbed to destructive forces. But she couldn't bring herself to slip away like that, on a calculated lie.

And, of course, there was Jonathan.

She may have glimpsed his ship in her premonition, but she hadn't glimpsed him, or foreseen the cruel dance of circumstance that would engulf both of them. He had sanctioned her treason, just as Emil Lang must

have sanctioned Jonathan's when he had hijacked a ship to deliver to the derelict Sentinels. And he had sanctioned her abandoning him, by telling her that she couldn't be tied to him; that there was no room for sentiment in their lives; that they each had their parts to play—

"Dana," Sean said suddenly. "Highest priority commo from Denver Base."

She turned from the view. "Let's hear it."

Nova Satori's cool voice issued from the speakers. "Dana, this is Nova. I'm with General Aldershot. We are delaying the mission. Repeat: we are delaying the mission. Do you copy, Dana? Please respond."

Dana signaled Angelo to open an audio channel. "We copy, Denver. But we strongly urge that you reconsider. That Sensor Nebula is waiting, and we don't want to miss our launch window."

Nova didn't reply immediately, and when she did her voice was heavy with disappointment. "Dana, we know that you've brought the Tiroleans aboard, and we have reason to suspect that the Sensor Nebula isn't tops on your list of places to go."

Dana and Sean exchanged defeated glances. "Denver," Dana said, "the Zentraedi wouldn't accept the clones. I had no choice but to transfer them."

Aldershot answered her in a firm voice. "It won't work, Sterling. It seems that that ship is foldworthy, after all. And some of us feel that you mean to fold it to Tirol."

Dana took a moment to compose her thoughts, then forced a slow exhale. "You're correct, General—on both counts."

"Dana—"

"You're wasting your breath, Nova. Colonel Wolff didn't realize the ship was fold capable, but the Tokyo team learned the truth—"

"I don't believe that for a minute," Nova interjected.

Dana raised her voice. "Lang programmed the ship's on-board computers to time-release the fold codes three months from now. But Shimada's team persuaded the computer to divulge the codes ahead of time."

"You can't do this to us, Dana."

"Sterling, I am ordering you to surrender the ship." "I'm sorry, sir," Dana said. "I can't do that."

"For a hundred Tirolean clones?" Nova asked in distress. "You're a traitor to your people. Sterling."

Dana swallowed hard and found her voice. "I'll accept that, sir. But we all have our parts to play, our separate destinies to fulfill. To begin with, there's no destroying the Nebula. The Zentraedi assured me that it couldn't be done. The Invid are coming, and—despite what Vincinz thinks—the presence of this ship isn't going to make much of a difference, one way or the other. In fact, Earth's probably better off without it."

"You've been corrupted by those damned yakuza," Aldershot growled. "Think what you will. But someone has to communicate with the REF,

and it might as well be me. And all the better if a hundred displaced Tiroleans are returned to their home planet at the same time."

"Quit trying to justify your treachery, Sterling."

"Time will tell if I've taken the right course, sir. I hope we're able to sit down and discuss this episode a year or so from now, when I return with the SDF-3 and enough troops to send the Invid back where they came from. But until then, I suggest you listen to Colonel Wolff and give the Regis what she wants."

"Don't expect me ever to sit down with you, Sterling."

Dana shut her eyes and signaled Angelo to mute the audio feed. "Are we ready?" she asked Sean.

"Almost. Just want to put a bit more distance between us and the shuttles."

"No hitchhiking allowed," Marie said.

Dana settled into the command chair, enabled the restraints, and moved her gaze from Marie to Angelo to Sean. "Any last minute regrets?" she asked.

After the head shaking was done, Dana turned to the robot. "Machine: initialize the Protoculture generators."

In Jonathan Wolff's voice, the robot said, "Lynn-Minmei," and The Homeward Bound gave a protracted shudder, powered up, and disappeared from sight.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Despite everything we'd been through, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him, because I knew how driven he was. Or, a better way to put that is that I knew, I understood what drove him. I don't think that people set out to be heroes; heroes surface from circumstances that are often beyond their control. My husband had a need to be in that zone—where events teetered on disorder—because it was only then that he could tap his real strengths, as a man, as a Human being. Perhaps that's why he was his most loving when things between us were most chaotic. I can't account for his alleged betrayal at the end, his conspiring [sic] with the Invid [See Rand, Notes on the Run], except to say that he must have been biding his time, waiting for the right opportunity to strike. I don't feel that it had anything to do with my and Johnny's captivity. If he had been with us in Albuquerque instead of in Valhalla, he would simply have been taken prisoner along with the rest of us. So, no, I don't hold him responsible, and I pray that he didn't hold himself responsible. We were two people, Johnny and I, and poor Jonathan felt that he had an entire world to rescue.

Catherine Montand Wolff, as quoted in Zeus Bellow's

The Road to Reflex Point

It was Tirol all over again, Wolff told himself while Eiten Shimada read a prepared statement for the tribunal.

"Furthermore, Shimada Enterprises denies any foreknowledge regarding or related to the capacities and capabilities of the star ship known as The Homeward Bound. As previously stated, the smart machine that accompanied the flight crew was designed merely to evaluate the vessel's performance and to serve as a redundant system in analyzing the effect of the fission bombs on the Sensor Nebula cloud.

"Lieutenant Sterling's statement to the effect that technicians in the employ of Shimada Enterprises discovered a key to the operation of the

ship's spacefold system has no basis in fact. Moreover, it has yet to be demonstrated that Shimada Enterprises was anything but charitable in this entire matter. The robot and other examples of Shimada technology were provided to the Defense Force freely and without expectation of recompense. It is therefore the decision of President Misui and the other members of the Diet, along with those named by the court, that these proceedings shall be considered preliminary, until such time as the allegations can be substantiated to the mutual satisfaction of everyone involved."

Well, perhaps not quite like Tirol, Wolff amended in thought. There, blame had been assigned—even though the guilty parties had escaped sentencing . . .

A month had passed since The Homeward Bound had folded from Earthspace, and the inquest had been going on for more than a week. Thus far, however, in trying to mount a case against the Shimadas, the GMP had only succeeded in muddying the waters. To establish beyond a reasonable doubt that Tokyo had manipulated the events would have required testimony from Kaaren Napperson. But dragging Napperson into court would have eventually led to the revelation that the GMP had given its tacit approval to the raid Vincinz's operatives had carried out against the Starchildren's colony.

As a means of safeguarding that same revelation, the intelligence agency had likewise been constrained to dismiss the charges of sedition leveled against Vincinz and the core membership of the Southern Cross command. Without evidence to corroborate that Vincinz had sinister designs on The Homeward Bound, the charges had been reduced to "unauthorized use of a Defense Force vessel," for which the general had received an official reprimand. Thanks to intense lobbying by Senator Grass—whose complicity in the hijacking could not be confirmed—the laser burst that had nearly atomized two Logans was ruled "inadvertent."

That left only Wolff, who had already been thoroughly interrogated by a brood of attorneys, and was next up, now that Kan Shimada's son had finished speaking. The stand was simply a podium positioned among

tablefuls of lawyers, recording secretaries, and officers of the court. The inquest wasn't open to the public, though a few reporters had been granted permission to cover the proceedings for the media. Wolff often wondered how Catherine had reacted to seeing her estranged husband go from hero to accused.

Fredericks was handling the case for the GMP. Wolff's attorney, a small but ferocious young woman, had been appointed by the court.

"Colonel Wolff," Fredericks began when Wolff was in place, "to whom would you say you owe your allegiance as an officer in the Defense Force?"

Wolff frowned. "I'm not sure I understand the question."

Fredericks forced a thin smile. "What I mean is, you left Earth as a member of the Robotech Expeditionary Force, which answered to the Plenipotentiary Council, which itself was a judicial arm of the United Earth Government. But looking around this room, you'll find neither RDFers nor members of the Council. And our government, at this point, can scarcely be described as either united or global in scope. So, Colonel, to whom do you offer salute?"

Wolff touched his chin. "I suppose I'm still attached to the REF."

"And, in turn, to the Plenipotentiary Council, of which Dr. Emil Lang is a member in good standing."

"Lang and eleven others, yes."

"Very good, Colonel. And now that we've established that Lang is in effect your commander—one of twelve, at any rate—I want to return to something we discussed two days ago. You testified then that you had no knowledge of The Homeward Bound's capacity for fold. And, I must say that your officers and crew have done an admirable job of bolstering your statements. However, I'd like to hear your explanation of why Dr. Lang and General Reinhardt opted to leave you uninformed as to the ship's fold potential."

Wolff addressed his response to the five judges seated opposite him. "I was simply charged with informing whomever was in command that the Masters' were en route to Earth. Unfortunately, I was too late. As to why Dr.

Lang and General Reinhardt kept me in the dark," Wolff shrugged, "I guess they wanted me to remain on Earth at least until the computer time- released the fold codes."

"Then you have accepted Dana Sterling at her word regarding the hidden agenda of the ship's computer?"

"What reason would she have for lying?"

Fredericks snorted. "We'll come to that in a moment, Colonel. But before we do, could you elaborate on what you mean by the phrase 'whomever was in command.'"

Wolff took a breath. "Dr. Lang ventured that the Southern Cross apparat had ascended to a position of global authority, and that those in command would be reluctant to accept that General Edwards had joined forces with the enemy—the Invid Regent. He was further concerned that Edwards might pave the way for the invasion of Earth by the Invid Regent by making the most of his past affiliations."

Fredericks considered Wolff's words while he paced. "You're suggesting that General Edwards wouldn't be perceived as a threat by the people with whom he had been affiliated before the launch of the SDF-3."

"That's correct."

"Meaning who, Colonel? Which people, specifically?"

"Field Marshal Anatole Leonard, Chairman Wyatt Moran, and Dr.

Lazlo Zand, among others."

Fredericks moved to the GMP table and picked up a sheet of paper. "This letter, handwritten and signed by Emil Lang, was provided to the court by Colonel Wolff, and it confirms his statements. But I would like him now to name the person to whom this letter was addressed."

"Rolf Emerson," Wolff said.

Fredericks repeated the name. "In other words, Colonel, you weren't ordered to deliver the information about the Masters, General Edwards, and the Invid to 'whomever was in command,' but to the highest-ranking member of the former Robotech Defense Force."

Wolff's lawyer shot to her feet. "Sirs, Colonel Fredericks is twisting the

facts. Minister of Defense Emerson was a major general in the Army of the Southern Cross."

Fredericks whirled on her. "Of late, perhaps. But until the Military Accord of 2030, Rolf Emerson was a career officer in the RDF."

As were Fredericks, Satori, and Aldershot, Wolff said to himself. But they were GMP now—Gimps, as they were sometimes called—movers and shakers in Earth's secret army, and seemed to have forgotten their roots.

"Colonel Fredericks, you're splitting hairs," one of the judges advised. "Southern Cross, Robotech Defense Force . . . Come to the point."

"The point, sirs, is that Colonel Wolff's primary responsibility was to keep his ship and the information it contained from anyone considered a rival of the Robotech Expeditionary Force. Isn't that true, Colonel?"

Wolff glared at Fredericks. "If it was, why would I have submitted to a full debriefing about the events on Tirol?"

Fredericks was willing to concede the point, but asked, "And you told the full truth during those debriefings?"

"Yes."

"And you likewise told us everything you knew about your ship?" "Everything I knew."

Well, there it was, Wolff thought. He had just perjured himself. But as surely as he had encouraged Dana to take the ship, she had encouraged him to lie for the greater cause. We all have our parts to play, she had said to Aldershot before the fold, echoing Wolff's own words to her. And what a bittersweet event her departure had been for him, knowing he might never see her again.

The day she had come to his quarters, he had made a split-second decision to encourage her to take the ship. Once he had gotten over his initial anger and despondency, that was. But he had realized from her questions and tone of voice that the Shimada team had uncovered the truth about The Homeward Bound, and also that she had probably wired herself, in the hopes of conjuring the fold code out of him. So he had supplied it, though carefully, to avoid arousing the interests of the GMP personnel

tasked with monitoring their conversation. Nor did he regard Dana's actions as a violation of trust, because she had attempted to tell him—in a code of her own devising—what she knew, and how conflicted she felt . . .

Fredericks was pacing once more, clearly building toward some bombshell. "Colonel Wolff, how would you characterize your relationship with Dana Sterling?" he asked suddenly. "Did you consider it a professional relationship?"

Wolff swallowed and said, "Yes." Because the GMP's surveillance tapes had been ruled admissible as evidence, he knew he had to exercise care.

"Strictly professional?"

"There was a personal side to it, as well. Relatively speaking, I was with her parents only a few months ago, and she was naturally curious to learn all she could about them."

"You told her that a second daughter had been born to Miriya Parino Sterling?"

"I did."

"And how did she take that news?" "She was overjoyed."

"I imagine that she was anxious to meet her sibling." "Why wouldn't she be?"

"Indeed, why wouldn't she be? . . . But getting back to the personal aspect of your relationship, how do you imagine that Dana Sterling saw you: as a fellow officer, a friend, a kind of father figure, a potential lover—"

"Colonel Fredericks," one of the judges interrupted. "This is an inquest, not a trial. Colonel Wolff is a decorated officer and I won't allow his name to be besmirched by innuendo."

Fredericks spent a few seconds studying his bloodless hands. "Sirs, if you'll permit me to proceed, the relevance of my questions will become apparent."

The judges conferred briefly. "We're going to allow you some leeway, Colonel," one of them said. "But I'm warning you, tread carefully."

Fredericks nodded. "Suppose we approach this from a different angle,

Colonel Wolff. How would you characterize your feelings for Dana Sterling? She is, what—nineteen years old? And you're . . . Well, that's irrelevant, I'm sure. But just what did you feel toward her?"

"I thought of her as a valiant officer and a pleasant young woman." "That's all—'a pleasant young woman?' I only ask because she made

such a point of mentioning you in her final communication with General Aldershot. First, she absolves you of all complicity in the hijacking; then she suggests that we follow your advice concerning the Invid . . ."

"I can't help that," Wolff said brusquely.

"Then you don't feel she was going to great lengths to protect you?" "Protect me from what?"

"Why, from this, Colonel. From a trial, in which you have been implicated as a conspirator. But, of course, you had no idea she was planning to hijack your ship."

Wolff grinned slightly. "I wasn't aware that it could be hijacked."

"I see . . . So, during the moments the two of you spent together— aboard The Homeward Bound and . . . elsewhere—Sterling merely plied you with questions about her parents and her baby sister. And perhaps she even told you that she missed them, terribly." Fredericks turned to Wolff. "Did she ever tell you that she missed them, Colonel?"

"She may have said that."

"And did she on any occasion tell you about the clones she was sheltering in Monument City."

"She spoke of them."

"Did she describe to you their desperate plight?" "She said they were dying, if that's what you mean."

"And how did it affect you to hear about Sterling's longing to see her parents and the hopeless situation with the Tiroleans?"

"I felt bad for her."

Fredericks gazed at him. "Bad enough. Colonel, to supply the Shimadas with the fold codes for the ship, knowing full well that they would be passed on to Dana, who was herself desperate to reunite with her parents and save

the lives of the Tiroleans she had taken under her wing?"

Wolff's lawyer jumped up. "Sirs, Colonel Wolff has already stated that he had no knowledge of the codes. How many times are we going to cover the same ground?"

Fredericks made a placating gesture. "Colonel, didn't Sterling tell you that the Sensor Nebula couldn't be destroyed?"

"She did. But I didn't put any stock in what the Zentraedi said. For all I knew, they hated Dana for the role her mother played in the Malcontent Uprisings."

"Dana . . ." Fredericks smiled nastily. "So you encouraged her to accept the Nebula mission—even though you and your crew had been excluded."

"I did. Strategically, it made sense to keep the Wolff Pack on Earth." "Do you recall your words of encouragement to Sterling?"

"I think I said that she should do her best, and that she should take good care of the ship."

Fredericks approached Wolff and leaned on the podium, facing him. "Didn't you, in fact, tell her that she should use that ship as it was meant to be used?"

"I probably said something like that."

"Not 'probably,' Colonel. You said precisely that."

Fredericks turned an about-face. "And how was that ship meant to be used? As a two-way messenger. Colonel Wolff was sent to warn us about the Masters; that much is beyond dispute. But after discharging that responsibility, he was expected to return to Tirol. Separated from his ship, however, he had no choice but to send someone in his place. And that someone was Dana Sterling, with whom he had formed a . . . paternalistic relationship.

"No sooner did he supply the fold codes to Tokyo, than Sterling began to concoct her scheme to loft the Tiroleans to The Homeward Bound. She never had any intention of transferring them to the factory satellite, and I surmise that she only stopped there to take the surviving Zentraedi with her. Once aboard Wolff's ship, the Shimadas' machine assumed control. And the

rest, sirs, is, as they say, history."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

It is also interesting to note that that year [2033] saw one of the mildest winters on record. This has been credited to the cloud of mecha and warship debris that had encircled Earth since the previous spring. But there are those who hold that the Flowers [of Life] themselves had an impact on the climate. They thrived because they had somehow convinced earth and sky to collaborate in their irruption.

Bloom Nesterfig, Social Organization of the Invid

The court deliberated for a week before rendering its decision. Owing to a lack of evidence, Wolff was cleared of all charges. The Shimadas and Dana Sterling were found guilty of conspiracy and sedition, though the decision carried little weight, since there was nothing the court could do to either of them.

Confined to quarters, Wolff received the news on Denver Base, and immediately began packing his bags for a trip to Albuquerque. Catherine had invited him to visit her and Johnny, though Wolff hadn't been able to determine from the phone call whether she had had a change of heart or she simply felt sorry for him. Before he left Denver, however, Nova Satori requested that he meet with her—unofficially—to discuss matters of mutual concern. In her note, she had suggested a truck-stop restaurant on the Denver-Albuquerque highway, about twenty miles south of GMP headquarters, where she assured him they would both be safe from prying eyes and listening devices.

Wolff found her at the appointed time, in a tattered corner booth, ignoring the looks she was getting from a group of redneck drivers seated at the counter. The looks ceased when Wolff slipped into the booth, largely because Nova and Wolff seemed made for each other—an inseparable two of a kind.

"Thanks for coming," Nova said, leaning back in the booth to appraise

him.

Wolff signaled for a waitress. When the waitress arrived, he ordered a

coffee, then changed his mind. "Make that a beer—a tall one.

"What's on your mind, Satori?" He mirrored Nova's relaxed posture. "Want to tell me that you're not finished with me yet? That you won't rest until you see me in the brig?"

Nova scoffed at the idea. "Despite what you might think, Colonel, your freedom was never in jeopardy. Oh, we had to present that little mock inquest for the public's sake. But the outcome was never in question. You're a hero, and there aren't too many of you left. Especially now that Dana and her boys are on Tirol, or wherever your ship sent them."

Wolff inclined his head to one side. "Funny, I didn't feel much like a hero when Fredericks was grilling me."

Nova laughed shortly. "Come on, Colonel. We went easy on you." She narrowed her eyes. "We could have made a lot more of your 'paternalistic' relationship with Dana, for example."

"You should know, Satori. You were certainly watching me closely enough."

Nova shrugged. "Don't take it personally. It's simply part of what I do. Look at it this way: You probably wouldn't be off to see your wife right now if we'd revealed everything we knew."

Wolff shook his head in disgust. "You don't miss a trick. So, do we have matters of mutual concern to discuss, or did you get me here just to provoke me?"

"The former, Colonel. But first, answer one question: Would you have gone with the ship if you'd had the chance?"

"Back to Tirol?" Nova nodded.

"No, I wouldn't have gone. I left my share of problems there. Anyway, somebody has to give you the straight dope on what we're up against with the Invid."

Nova smiled in grudging admiration. "You actually do give a damn

about what happens here. You really are some kind of champion." "Sorry to disappoint you."

"You haven't. In fact, you've made things a lot easier for me." She paused and leaned forward. "I want you to work for us, Wolff."

He gaped at her. "For the GMP? Are you nuts?"

"Maybe I am, but try to be objective for a minute and listen to what I have to say. The Defense Force is in shambles. Seventy-five percent of the Southern Cross units have decamped with their mecha and have formed scattered bands all across the North- and Southlands. But, as we're hearing it, many of those bands are in total agreement with you as to how to combat the Invid."

"That's encouraging," Wolff said tentatively.

"I agree. And it can be more than encouraging if you'd agree to act as our liaison in communicating with them. We have the makings of a resistance, but we have no one to organize it."

Wolff's beer arrived, and he took advantage of the moment to think things through. "Seems to me that those units decamped because they had no faith in the leadership of the Southern Cross," he said at last. "So what makes you think they'll listen to me if I'm suddenly a GMP officer?"

Nova shook her head. "You wouldn't be. You'll be a singleton. Plus, a figure to rally round. And all we'd expect from you in return is to be kept apprised of what you're doing—just so we can have some sense of our troop and mecha strengths."

"What do I get for my efforts? Aside from the expense account., I mean."

Nova folded her arms across her chest. "Now you're beginning to sound like the Jonathan Wolff I've read about. The one who made deals with Zentraedi malcontents just to get replacement parts for his Centaur tanks."

"Don't believe everything you read," Wolff advised.

"I'll remember that." Nova allowed a smile. "In any case, here's what we're prepared to offer you: funding for a base of operations for the Wolff Pack."

Wolff raised an eyebrow. "We'll require more than a base. We'll need mecha and Protoculture and the authority to expand our forces, however we see fit. I'd also want to include Major Carpenter in this."

"I can arrange that."

"And another thing: I want some assurance from Aldershot and the UEG that they're not going to go off half-cocked when the Regis shows up. If they do, we're lost—no matter what I manage to put together in the way of a resistance force."

"I'll talk to Aldershot," Nova said.

Wolff grinned, roguishly. "Then we just might be able to work together after all."

Nova returned the look. "When you . . . finish in Albuquerque, we'd like you to go to the Southlands. There's a group of ex-Southern Cross in Brasília who are calling themselves the Stonemen. We've had our problems with them in the past. But their commander, a guy named Gavin Murdock, intimated that he might be willing to talk terms, if you'd serve as a negotiator."

"Sounds like a reasonable first request," Wolff said.

"We'll furnish you with an Alpha. And while you're in the Southlands, give some thought to where you and the Wolff Pack might want to establish themselves. I suggest you check out a town called Valhalla, in central Amazonas. The Southern Cross had a base there before the War, in a crater left by a crashed Zentraedi warship."

"Valhalla," Wolff mused. "I think I already like it."

He lifted the beer to his lips and drained half the bottle.

"Kaaren's feeling is that the Invid will concentrate their hives in the Northlands, where the Flowers of Life are plentiful," Misa was telling Terry Weston as they stood in the wooden building that served as a terminal for the colony's airport. On the runway, the Shimada jet was being prepped for takeoff. Towering above the acacia and eucalyptus trees that bordered the asphalt strip was the dome that harbored Napperson's Hope. "Besides,

there's no organized military presence in the Southlands. So the Invid might overlook us entirely."

"I hope you're right," Terry said, caressing Misa's right forearm. "But the Flowers have begun to blossom all around Buenos Aires, and that's not all that far from here."

"Kaaren's not saying that the Invid won't construct hives in the Southlands. But most of those will probably be far to the north, in the Venezuela Sector."

Terry snorted. "HEARTH country—which they're not going to surrender without a fight."

"So let them fight. So long as they leave us alone."

Terry had been in Argentina for over a month now, but with the inquest ended, it was time to return to Tokyo. From the start, the Shimadas had trusted that the GMP wouldn't subpoena testimony from Kaaren Napperson about the cult's ties to Tokyo—not if the GMP expected to conceal their hand in the raid that had damaged the saucer. But just to be on the safe side, Terry and several yakuza troubleshooters had been dispatched to the colony to make certain that Napperson didn't testify if summoned.

Misa had guessed the truth the moment Terry and the others had emerged from Kan Shimada's private jet, and she had spent the first two weeks vacillating between concern for Kaaren's safety and anger at the Family for once again resorting to intimidation. Terry supposed it was during that anxious period that she had made up her mind to remain with the colony and distance herself from the lush life she had known in the Tokyo geo-grid.

"I don't suppose I could get you to change your mind about staying here," Terry said, after a moment.

Misa shook her head. "I'm sick of Tokyo's ends-justifies-the-means mentality. We all want to survive, Terry. But the people here wouldn't sacrifice their ideals to ensure survival."

Terry grimaced. "They were ready to accept Wolff's ship when we

offered it."

"Kaaren would never have allowed it, Terry. Okay, she didn't turn down Mr. Shimada's funds. But that was only to get the ship launched. Commandeering The Homeward Bound would have gone against everything the Starchildren stand for."

"And everything you stand for, it seems."

"I don't know how to feel about what everyone did to make sure The Homeward Bound would disappear. For all I know, Dana will return with the SDF-3 and the ends will have justified the means. But until then . . ." She sighed, then gazed at Terry. "Do you miss her?"

Terry hooked his long, blond hair behind his ears. "It's weird. I do miss her, but not in a private way. I think I miss not having her on Earth, if that makes any sense."

"Like she was a kind of lucky charm?"

"I'm not sure. But being with Dana always reminded me that we're not alone in the universe. That Human beings don't have any special claim to the stars."

Misa reigned in an amused smile. "You could always buy a telescope and stare at the factory satellite."

Terry laughed. "Maybe I will." He was quiet for a moment, then said, "What am I going to do when you leave?"

"Me? I'm not going anywhere. I didn't make the final cut." "Is the new launch date set?"

"Three months from now."

"What are you going to do after it launches?"

She shrugged. "Help to build another one. Go on living the simple life. That's the real reason I'm not returning to Tokyo. I wasn't born to live in a tower. Fairy tales are all right to read, but not to live."

Terry took her hand once more. "You see? That's what I've always liked about you."

"Then you should stay here."

He rocked his head. "Who knows, I might come back. In the meantime,

it sounds like you're well taken care of."

Misa had told him a little about Izumi Sasaki, but she blushed anyway. "I've finally found a home here—among people who aren't afraid of the future."

"Whatever gets you through the War," Terry said.

She nodded her head slowly, in thought. "When will they come?" "Nobody seems to know—not even Wolff."

"At least we had the advantage of knowing that the Masters were on the way."

"This next one's going to be like the War against the Zentraedi: Lang and his Macross Island teams predicted that the owners of the SDF-1 would come looking for it, but they had no idea when that would happen. Substitute the Flowers of Life for the SDF-1 and we're back where we started."

"I keep thinking, if the Invid come, long-distance travel will probably be impossible." Misa bit her lower lip. "This could be the last time I see you, Terry."

He forced a laugh. "Tokyo will pull through. And so will this place. With the ship launched, how could the Invid regard you people as a threat?" Misa's grin was slow in forming. "Even so, maybe I'll recommend to Kaaren that we should do as Mr. Shimada suggests: Welcome the Invid with

bouquets of their Flowers."

"It doesn't look particularly sinister," Kan Shimada said of the triple- petaled flower Louie had handed him. They were standing under a tile- roofed pavilion of recent construction, which overlooked a broad valley, south of Tokyo, in the rain shadow of Mount Fuji.

Louie nodded uncertainly. "One person's beauty is another person's beast, sir."

"It is the nature of all things to possess a measure of good and a measure of evil," Kan replied. "But until I know differently, I shall elect to see only the good in this Flower, in the expectation that the Flower will

repay me in kind."

Notwithstanding his remark, the head of the Shimada Family was wearing leather gloves that reached his elbows and a beekeeper's helmet. Louie had told him about the time Dana, Bowie, and Zor had ventured deep into the SDF-1 mound of the Macross trio and a Flower of Life had wrapped itself around Dana's arm like a predatory vine. Just the same, Louie was sorry he hadn't gone along on that jaunt; by the time he had gotten his first good look at the Flowers, they had already gone to seed.

Kan Shimada was turning the Flower about in his hand. "From this innocent-looking plant comes Protoculture," he mused.

Louie's eyes narrowed behind the tinted lenses of his goggles. "Comes war," he mumbled.

Once the hunting grounds of the Imperial family, the rolling terrain was dotted with picturesque lakes, cypress groves, and the ruins of ancient temples and twentieth-century ski resorts. Many a Shimada Enterprises annual banquet had been held at a nearby inn, called the Gotenbu Onsen. But today the Family—sons, relatives, advisors, otaku, and researchers— were gathered to enact a ritual of a novel sort, one that was new to planet Earth, at any rate: a Flower of Life benediction.

A swath of fecund land in the valley had been cleared, leveled, and planted with triads of Flowers of Life seedlings, which in a few short weeks had grown to mature plants, pendulous with twisting buds that resembled elongated teardrops. And moving among them were a dozen Shinto priests, who, at Kan Shimada's request, had journeyed from Hakone Jinga, a sacred shrine on Fuji, that dated to the year A.D. 757. The priests were attired in saffron-colored robes, and they chanted as they wove among the clusters of Flowers. Some carried incense braziers or drums, and others Wore finger cymbals.

Kan Shimada turned slightly to face Wilfred Gibley. "You are certain that the Flowers will thrive here?"

"Climatically, it's similar to the banana-belt valleys south of Macross and Monument City," Gibley answered. "Warm, sunny days; cool nights.

Less rainfall, but the Flowers don't appear to be affected by underwatering. In fact, they seem to derive most of what they need from sunlight and from the ground—from the Earth itself."

Shimada lifted his face to the cirrus-streaked sky. "Winter is fast on the approach. We'll see how they fare when the weather changes."

A sudden, cool breeze ruffled Louie's hair. "Let's hope it's not too brutal a season."

Everyone fell silent for a long moment.

Below them, the buds and newly sprung petals of the Flowers bobbed and danced, as if in joyful anticipation of a long-overdue reunion . . .

EPILOGUE

Astronomers who monitored the Sensor Nebula during the Invid occupation have reported that the "cloud" began to diminish in size and volume coincidental with the Regis's invasion, and continued to do so throughout that year [2033], until October; when it expanded to half its original size and underwent a series of changes in hue and reflectivity. Whether the changes were inspired by the arrival of the ships of the REF Mars Division has never been established. However, the Nebula did return to the Earth-proximal position it had reached during the final stages of the Masters' War [sic], only to be dispersed or destroyed the following year, along with the numerous ships that comprised the REF Tirol fleet.

General Marc J. Alan, as quoted in Maria Bartley-Rand,

Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

Since the surprise departure of The Homeward Bound, five months earlier, commo tech Paul Rawley, of Space Station Liberty had made a habit of speaking with the Zentraedi at least once during each of his shifts. Curious to know if Dana Sterling had executed a spacefold, Tay Wav'vir had initiated contact only hours after Wolff's ship had jumped; and from that first communication, a kind of radio friendship had formed between Rawley and the Micronized aliens. This had made it easier for him to accept the presence of the factory satellite in Earthspace, despite his continuing to regard it as a beacon for the Invid swarm.

The cloud, too—the so-called Sensor Nebula—was still lurking out by Mars orbit, looking from Earth like a postage stamp-size blemish of golden light. But the enemy itself had yet to be heard from, and everyone had begun to wonder if Dana Sterling's controversial leave-taking hadn't resulted in some extraordinary occurrence in the far reaches of the Fourth Quadrant of known space.

Not that the wondering had had any effect on Earth's war footing. In

fact, the Defense Force had succeeded in reconditioning several Tristar- class battlewagons, and rearming a dozen frigates and scores of Logans, Alphas, Betas, Veritechs, Hovertanks, A-JACs, and other mecha. Most of those, however, were being kept in concealment on the moon or on secret bases downside. And even the fleet's spaceborne destroyers were separated by great distances, so as not to present a visible threat to the Invid.

Nevertheless, command's battle plan remained unclear. At times it appeared that a limited bombardment of Earth would be tolerated before the fleet would be directed to counterattack; but at other times—chiefly when Southern Crossers were asked—one got the impression that any act of aggression would meet with an immediate reply. The inconsistency troubled Rawley—whose chronic anxiety was responding only sporadically to medication—and it was frequently the subject of his conversations with Tay Wav'vir.

"You must cease your whining and honor your imperative," Tay was telling him during one seemingly interminable shift in January 2033. The feed was audio only, and Rawley often had to strain to hear her. "After all, Paul Rawley, you are our eyes and ears on the Solar System. We need you to alert us to the swarm's arrival, so that we may fly to the fore."

The Zentraedi females had been armed, after a fashion, with six Battlepods that had been found moldering in a warehouse north of Detroit City.

"What can you hope to accomplish with six Battlepods?" Rawley asked. "Distinction."

It was ground they had covered before, but no matter. Rawley was about to pursue the argument when the display screens at his station turned snow white. Tay picked up on his silence and asked the cause.

"Some kind of system glitch. The screens are white with interference." "Pure white like the snow that falls in your northern climes?"

"Exactly like that. I'm going to—"

"Place your station on full alert," Tay interrupted. "The Regis has come. Empowered by the Flower of Life, she folds her brood through space-time

by an effort of sheer will. Place your station on full alert, Rawley. The War has arrived."

Rawley's trembling hand opened a line to station control. "My screens are down," he started to say.

"We're working on it," the voice in his ear replied.

Rawley swallowed hard. "It's the Invid—they've defolded."

"Rawley, take it easy," the voice said after a moment. "A spacefold doesn't knock out every scanner on the station."

"I'm telling you, it's the Invid! Put the station on alert and notify ALUCE and Denver." His hand slammed down on the early warning keys. But no sirens answered him. "Put the station on alert!" he screamed.

The display screens had turned dazzling white and a circular, albescent glow was now visible through the observation bays, throwing the nearby factory satellite into stark silhouette.

Rawley's left hand fumbled for his vial of medication as a torchlike beam struck the factory satellite on its far side, instantly annihilating it. Then the beam sundered itself into more than a dozen curving combers that streaked downward to umbrella the Earth.

All but one, which was surging straight toward Liberty.

Within hours, Earth's major cities were lanced by the harnessed power of the Invid swarm. Contrary to what had been said, outlined, and sometimes promised, Defense Force command—in the moment it learned of the destruction of Space Station Liberty—ordered the fleet to counterattack. Teams of mecha launched from their places of concealment to engage the russet Pincer Units disgorged by the swarm's clam-shaped troop transports. The skies crackled with lightning and resounded with fulminations.

Incensed by the countless fiery deaths of her children, the Regis retaliated. Additional cities were targeted and reduced to rubble; then towns and villages; then anything that smacked of resistance: passenger jets and cargo ships, tractor trailers and heavy equipment, bullet trains and city buses . . . She descended on the Starchildren's colony like a wrathful demon,

killing thousands in one fell swoop and demolishing the ship that was to have launched the following week.

Earth was pounded and pulverized, rendered numb by the attack and the swiftness with which the swarm constructed their hives. Not only in the Northlands—whose tortured mid-Atlantic region was to house the Regis's sprawling, central-hive complex—but throughout the Southlands, and across the face of Europe and Asia, and southward into India, Indonesia, and Australia. Even Japan wasn't excluded. South of Tokyo, on the flanks of Mount Fuji, where they found fields of cultivated Flowers waiting for them, the Invid built several small stilt hives. Though they chose not to disturb the subterranean city nearby, treating it as if it were the nest of some innocuous indigenous species . . .

Jonathan Wolff was in Brasília when the first enemy wave struck, but he made it safely back to Valhalla, or "Soldiertown," as the place had come to be called, where John Carpenter, the Wolff Pack, and hundreds of recruits were dug in, in anticipation of an attack that never came.

Months later, Carpenter would make a daring flight to Tokyo, returning to Valhalla with Louie Nichols, who helped reestablish contact with ALUCE, which had not been heard from since the first hours of the invasion. Plans were eventually devised for a coordinated attack on the central-hive complex—termed Reflex Point—to be led by General Nobutu's ALUCE forces, with support from Valhalla and the demoralized remnants of Aldershot and Satori's battalions.

But the attack would fail miserably, and would constitute the last action by Earth's ground forces for the remainder of 2032. Worse, the defeat would result in an irreparable breach in Wolff's forces, owing to Wolff's absence during the attack.

For days earlier, Wolff had learned that his wife and son were thought to be prisoners in a hive that had been constructed near the raging oil fires outside Dallas. Terry Weston—one of the few survivors of the Starchildren's colony—would die in Wolff's raid on that hive. The assault, too, proved futile, in that Catherine and Johnny Wolff had already been moved to Reflex

Point.

Carpenter would never forgive Wolff for putting his personal needs first. He would decamp for Portland and amass his own band of guerrilla fighters, known as the Splinters. Satori, too, would break ties with Wolff, withdrawing her support for Valhalla, which would slowly come to mirror the increasingly dissipated state of its disheartened commander.*

And as for Louie Nichols, he would remain in Valhalla for close to three months, returning to Tokyo soon after he had monitored a burst transmission from a Commander Gardner of the Mars Division. A fleet of REF ships had defolded from Tirol and were decelerating toward Earth.

In his brief communiqué, Gardner would not only make mention of admirals Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes, General Gunther Reinhardt, and Dr. Emil Lang, but Dana Sterling and "the intrepid crew of The Homeward Bound."

The former 15th had succeeded.

And there was no stopping them now.

*Satori wouldn't surface again until after the war, as head of the so-called Homunculi Movement, although there would be evidence to suggest that the movement's leader was an imposter, and that the real Nova Satori was a secret though guiding force in Earth's Reconstruction.

End RTUCN.COM

Invid Invasion

By Jack McKinney 1987

For K. A. and the Kahlua Kid, who have heard little else this past year

PROLOGUE

Somewhere a queen was weeping...her children scattered; her regent a prisoner of the blood lust, at war with nature and enslaved to vengeance.

But dare we presume to read her thoughts even now, to walk a path not taken-one denied to us by gates and towers our senses cannot perceive and perhaps never will?

Still, it must have seemed like the answer to a prayer: A planet newly rich in the flower that was life itself, a profusion of such incredible nutrient wealth that her Sensor Nebulae had found it clear across the galaxy. A blue and white world as distant from her Optera as she was from the peaceful form her consciousness once inhabited.

And yet Optera was lost to her, to half her children. Left in the care of one who had betrayed his kind, who had become what he fought so desperately to destroy. As she herself had...

All but trapped now in the guise that he had worn, the one who lured the secrets of the Flower from her. And whose giant warriors had returned to possess the planet and dispossess its inhabitants. But oh, how she had loved him! Enough to summon from her very depths the ability to emulate him. And later to summon a hatred keen enough to birth a warring nature, an army of soldiers to rival his-to rival Zor's own!

But he, too, was lost to her, killed by the very soldiers her hatred had fashioned.

Oh, to be rid of these dark memories! her ancient heart must have screamed. To be rescued from these sorry realms! Garuda, Spheris, Tirol. And this Haydon IV with its sterile flowers long awaiting the caress of the Pollinators-this coq fused world even my Inorganics cannot subdue.

But she was aware that all these things would soon be behind her. She would gather the cosmic stuff of her race and make the jump to that world the Sensor Nebulae had located. And woe to the life form that inhabited that world! For nothing would prevent her from finding a home for her children,

a home for the completion of their grand evolutionary design!

News of the Invid exodus from Haydon IV spread through the Fourth Quadrant-to Spheris and Garuda and Praxis, worlds already abandoned by the insectlike horde, worlds singled out by fate to feel the backlash of Zor's attempt at recompense, nature's cruel joke.

The Tirolian scientist had attempted to foliate them with the same Flowers he had been ordered to steal from Optera, an action that had sentenced that warm world's sentient life-form to a desperate quest to relocate their nutrient grail. But Zor's experiments had failed, because the Flower of Life proved to be a discriminating plant-choosy about where it would and would not put down roots-and a malignantly loyal one as well.

Deriving as much from the Invid as the Invid derived from it, the Flower called out from Zor's seeded worlds to its former guardian/hosts. Warlike and driven-instincts born of the Robotech Masters' transgression-the Invid answered those calls. Their army of mecha and Inorganics arrived in swarms to overwhelm and rule; and instead of the Protoculture paradises the founder of Robotechnology had envisioned, were planets dominated by the beings his discoveries had all but doomed.

And now suddenly they were gone, off on a new quest that would take them clear across the galactic core.

To Earth...

Word of their departure reached Rick Hunter aboard the Sentinel's ships. He was in the command seat on the fortress bridge when the communique was received. Thin and pale, a war-weary veteran of countless battles, Rick was almost thirty-five years old by Earth reckoning, but the vagaries of hyperspace travel put him closer to fifty or two hundred and seventy, depending on how one figured it.

The giant planet Fantoma, once home to the Zentraedi, filled the forward viewports. In the foreground Rick could just discern the small inhabited moon called Tirol, an angry dot against Fantoma's barren face. How could such an insignificant world have unleashed so much evil on an

unsuspecting galaxy? Rick wondered.

He glanced over at Lisa, who was humming to herself while she tapped a flurry of commands into her console. His wife. They had stayed together through thick and thin these past eleven years, although they had had their share of disagreements, especially when Rick had opted to join the Sentinels-Baldon, Teal, Crysta, and the others-and pursue the Invid.

Who would have thought it would come to this? he asked himself. A mission whose purpose had been peace at war with itself. Edwards and his grand designs of empire...how like the Invid regent he was, how like the Masters, too! But he was history now, and that fleet he had raised to conquer Earth would be used to battle the Invid when the Expeditionary Force reached the planet.

Providing the fleet reached Earth, of course. There were still major problems with the spacefold system Lang and the Tirolian Cabell had designed. Some missing ingredient...Major Carpenter had never been heard from, nor Wolff; and now the Mars and Jupiter Group attack wings were preparing to fold, with almost two thousand Veritechs between them.

Rick exhaled slowly and deliberately, loud enough for Lisa to hear him and turn a thin smile his way. Somehow it was fitting that Earth should end up on the Invid's list, Rick decided. But what could have happened there to draw them in such unprecedented numbers? Rick shuddered at the thought.

Perhaps Earth was where the final battle was meant to be fought.

Ravaged by the Robotech Masters and their gargantuan agents, the Zentraedi, it was a miracle that Earth had managed to survive at all. Looking on the planet from deep space, it would have appeared unchanged: its beautiful oceans and swirling masses of cloud, its silver satellite, bright as any beacon in the quadrant. But a closer look revealed the scars and disfigurations those invasions had wrought. The northern hemisphere was all but a barren waste, forested by the rusting remains of Dolza's ill-fated four-million-ship armada. Great cities of gleaming concrete, steel, and glass towers lay ruined and abandoned. Wide highways and graceful bridges were

cratered and collapsed. Airports, schools, hospitals, sports complexes, industrial and residential zones...reduced to rubble, unmarked graveyards all.

A fifteen-year period of peace-that tranquil prologue to the Masters' arrival-saw the resurrection of some of those things the twentieth century had all but taken for granted. Cities had rebuilt themselves, new ones had grown up. But humankind was now a different species from that which had originally raised those towering sculptures of stone. Post-Cataclysmites, they were a feudal, warring breed, as distrustful of one another as they were of those stars their hopeful ancestors had once wished upon. Perhaps, as some have claimed, Earth actually called in its second period of catastrophe, as if bent on adhering to some self-fulfilling prophecy of doom. The Masters, too, for that matter: The two races met and engaged in an unspoken agreement for mutual annihilation-a paving of the way for what would follow.

Those who still wish to blame Protoculture trace the genesis of this back to Zor, Aquarian-age Prometheus, whose gift to the galaxy was a Pandora's box he willingly opened. Displaced and repressed, the Flower of Life had rebelled. And there were no chains, molecular or otherwise, capable of containing its power. That Zor, resurrected by the Elders of his race for their dark purposes, should have been the one to free the Flower from its Matrix is now seen as part of Protoculture's equation. Equally so, that that liberation should call forth the Invid to complete the circle.

They came without warning: a swarm of monsters and mecha folded across space and time by their leader/queen, the Regis, through an effort of pure psychic will. They did not choose to announce themselves the way their former enemies had, nor did they delay their invasion to puzzle out humankind's strengths and weaknesses, quirks and foibles. There was no need to determine whether Earth did or did not have what they sought; their Sensor Nebulae had already alerted them to the presence of the Flower. It had found compatible soil and climate on the blue and white world. All

that was required were the Pollinators, a missing element in the Robotech Masters' equations.

In any case, the Invid had already had dealings with Earthlings, having battled them on a dozen planets, including Tirol itself. But as resilient as the Humans might have been on Haydon IV, Spheris, and the rest, they were a pathetic lot on their homeworld.

In less than a week the Invid conquered the planet, destroying the orbiting factory satellite-an ironic end for the Zentraedi aboard-laying to waste city after city, and dismissing with very little effort the vestiges of the Army of the Southern Cross. Depleted of the Protoculture charges necessary to fuel their Robo-technological war machines, those warriors who had fought so valiantly against the Masters were forced to fall back on a small supply of nuclear weapons and conventional ordnance that was no match for the Invid's plasma and laser-array superiority.

Even if Protoculture had been available to the Southern Cross for their Hovertanks and Alpha Veritechs, there would have been gross problems to overcome: the two years since the mutual annihilation of the Robotech Masters and Anatole Leonard's command had seen civilization's unchecked slide into lawlessness and barbarism. Cities became city-states and warred with one another; men and women rose quickly to positions of power only to fall even more swiftly in the face of greater military might. Greed and butchery ruled, and what little remained of the northern hemisphere's dignity collapsed.

Though certain cities remained strong-Mannatan, for example (formerly New York City)-the centers of power shifted southward, into Brazilas especially (the former Zentraedi Control Zone), where growth had been sure and steady since the SDF-1's return to devastated Earth and the founding of New Macross and its sister city, Monument.

Unlike the Zentraedi or the Tirol Masters, the Invid were not inclined to destroy the planet or exterminate humankind. Quite the contrary: Not only had the Flower found favorable conditions for growth, the Invid had as

well. The Regis had learned enough in her campaign against the Tirolians and the so-called Sentinels to recognize the continuing need for technology. Gone was the blissful tranquillity of Optera, but the experiment had to be carried forth to its conclusion nonetheless, and Earth was well suited for the purpose.

After disarming and occupying the planet, the Regis believed she was more than halfway toward her goal. By utilizing a percentage of Humans to cultivate and harvest the Flowers, she was free to carry out her experiments uninterrupted. The central hive, which came to be called Reflex Point, was to be the site of the Great Work, but secondary hives were soon in place across the planet to maintain control of the Human sectors of her empire. The Regis was willing to let humankind survive until such time as the work neared completion. Then, she would rid herself of them.

There was, however, one thing she had not taken into account: the very warriors she had fought tooth and claw on those worlds once seeded by Zor. Enslave a world she might, but take it for her own?

Never!

CHAPTER ONE

The armada of Robotech ships T.R. Edwards had amassed for his planned invasion and conquest of Earth would be put to that very use years later when Admiral Hunter sent them against the Invid. Adding irony to irony, it should be mentioned that the warships had serious design flaws which went unnoticed during their use on Tirol. Assuming this would have been the case even if Edwards had managed to persevere, the invasion would have failed. Destiny failed to deliver Edwards the crown he felt justified to wear and likewise failed to deliver Hunter the quick victory he felt justified to claim.

Selig Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign

A fleet of Robotech warships moved into attack formation above the Moon, a mixed school of gleaming predators, radiant where the distant sun touched their armored hulls and alloy fins. Each carried in its belly a score or more of Veritech fighters, sleek, transformable mecha developed and perfected over the course of the past thirty years. And inside each of these was a pilot ready to die for a world unseen. War was at the top of the agenda, but in a narrow hold aboard one of the command vessels a young man was thinking about love.

He was a pleasant-looking, clean-shaven youth going on twenty, with his father's long legs and the wide eyes of his mother. He wore his blue-black hair combed straight back from his high forehead-save for that undisciplined strand that always seemed to fall forward-making his ears appear more prominent than they actually were. He wore the Expeditionary Force uniform-simple gray tight-fitting pants tucked into high boots and a short-sleeved ornately collared top worn over a crimson-colored synthcloth bodysuit. The Mars Group patch adorned the young man's shirt.

His name was Scott Bernard-Lieutenant Scott Bernard-and this was a homecoming of sorts. That fact, coupled with the anxieties he felt

concerning the imminent battle, had put him in an impassioned frame of mind. The fortunate recipient of this not-so-sudden desire was a pretty, dark-eyed teenager named Marlene, a good six inches shorter than Scott, with milk-chocolate-brown hair and shapely legs enhanced by the uniform's short skirt.

Scott had Marlene's small face cupped in his hands while he looked lovingly into her eyes. As his hands slid to her narrow shoulders, he pulled her to him, his mouth full against hers, stifling the protest her more cautious nature wished to give voice to and urging her to respond. Which she did, with a moan of pleasure, her hands flat against his chest.

"Marry me, Marlene," he said after she had broken off their embrace. He heard himself say it and almost applauded, simply for finally getting the nerve up to ask her; Marlene's response was a separate issue.

Her surprised gasp probably said the same: that she too couldn't believe he was finally getting around to it. She turned away from him, nervous hands at her chin it an attitude of prayer.

"Well, will you?" Scott pressed.

"It's a bit sudden," she said coyly. But Scott didn't pick up on her tone and reacted as though he had been slapped.

"You'll have to speak to my father first," Marlene continued in the same tone, her back to him still. "My mother, too." When she turned around, Scott was staring at her slack jawed.

"But they're back on Tirol!" he stammered. "They might not be here for-" Then he caught her smile and understood at once. He had literally known her for her entire life, and he still couldn't tell when she was putting him on.

Marlene was smiling up at him now, eyes beaming. But the sudden shrill of sirens collapsed her happiness.

"Defold operation complete," a voice said over the PA. "All wing commanders report to the bridge for final briefing and combat assignments."

Scott's lips were a thin line when he looked at her.

"Answer me, Marlene. I might not get another chance to ask you."

The command ship bridge was a tight, no-nonsense affair, with two duty stations squeezed between the wraparound viewports and four more back to back behind these. There was none of the spaciousness and calm that had characterized the SDF-1 bridge; here everyone had a seat, and everyone put duty first. It took something like the first sight of Earth to elicit any casual conversation, and even then the comments would have surprised some.

"I'm so excited," a woman tech was saying. "I can hardly wait to see what Earth looks like after all these years.'

Commander Gardner seated at the forward station of starboard pair, heard this and laughed bitterly to himself. He had served under Gloval during the First Robotech War and had been with Hunter since. His thick hair and mustache had gone to silver these past few years, but he still retained a youthful energy and the unwavering loyalty of his young crew.

The woman tech who had spoken was all of seventeen years old, born in deep space like most of her shipmates. Gardner wished for a moment he could have showed her the Earth of forty years ago, teeming with life, wild and wonderful and blissfully unaware of the coming tide...

"What does it matter?" the tech's male console mate answered her. "One planet's the same as another to me. Robotech ships are all I've known-all I want to know."

"Don't you have any interest in setting foot on your homeworld? Our parents were born here. And their parents, right on back to the first ancestors."

Gardner could almost hear the copilot's shrug of indifference clear across the bridge.

"Just another Invid colony, color it what you will. So this place is blue and Spheris was brown. It doesn't do anything for me."

"Spoken like a true romantic."

The copilot snorted. "You get romantic thinking about the Invid

grubbing around the old homestead looking for Protoculture?"

Commander Gardner was hanging on the answer when the door to the bridge hissed open suddenly and Lieutenant Bernard entered.

"Alpha Group is just about ready for launch," Bernard reported.

Gardner muttered, "Good," and rose from the contoured seat, signaling one of the techs to turn on the ship's PA system.

"Most of you know what I'm about to say," he began. "But for those who don't know what this mission is all about, it's simply this: Several months ago we became aware that the Invid Sensor Nebulae had located some new and apparently enormous supply of the Flowers of Life. The source of the transmissions turned out to be the Earth itself.

"The Regis moved quickly to secure the Flowers, with the same murderous intent she demonstrated on Spheris and Haydon IV and a dozen other worlds I don't have to remind you about. Nor should I have to remind you about what we're going to face on Earth. It seems probable that the Invid decimated Wolff's forces, but we number more than four times the units under his command."

Scott noticed that the bridge techs, eyes locked on Gardner and grim faces set, were giving silent support to the commander's words. Marlene entered the bridge in the midst of the briefing, whispering her apologies and seating herself at her duty station.

"Admiral Hunter has entrusted us to spearhead a vast military operation to invade and reclaim our homeworld," said Gardner. "And I know that I can count on every one of you to stand firm behind the admiral's conviction that we can lay the foundations for his second wave." He inclined his head. "May God have mercy on our souls."

A brief silence was broken by the navigator's update:

"Earth orbit in three minutes, Commander. Placing visual display on the monitor, sir."

Everyone turned to face the forward screen. Orbital schematics de-rezzed and were replaced by a full view of the Earth. They had all seen photos and video images galore, but the sight inspired awe nevertheless.

"It's beautiful," someone said. And compared to Fantoma or Tirol, it most certainly was: snow-white pole, blue oceans, and variegated land masses, the whole of it patterned by swirling clouds.

A computer-generated grid assembled itself over the image as the command ship continued to close. At her station, Marlene said, "So that's what Earth looks like...I'd almost forgotten."

The commander called for scanning to be initiated, and in a moment the grid was highlighting an area located in one of the northern continents. Data readouts scrolled across an adjacent display screen.

"Full magnification and color enhancement," Gardner barked.

Marlene leaned in to study her screen. The forward monitor was displaying an angry red image, not softened in the least by Earth's inviting cloud cover. She knew what this was but asked the computer to compare the present readings with those logged in its memory banks. She sensed that Scott was peering over the top of her high-backed chair.

"That's it, sir," she said all at once, her screen strobing encouragement. "The central hive. Designation...Reflex Point," Marlene read from the data scroll. "Picking up energy flux readings and multiple radar contacts...waiting for signature."

Gardner glanced over at her briefly, then turned his attention forward once again. "I want visuals as soon as possible," he instructed one of the techs.

"Shock Trooper transport," Marlene said at the same time. Gardner's nostrils flared. "Prepare to repel."

Techs were already bending over the consoles tapping in commands, the bridge a veritable light show of flashing screens.

"Two minutes to contact," the navigator informed Gardner. "All sections standing by..."

"Auto-astrogator is off...Ship's shields raised..." Marlene flipped a series of switches. "Net is open..."

"All right," Gardner said decisively. "Issue the go signal to all Veritechs."

"One minute and counting, sir." The commander turned to Scott.

"It's up to your squads now, Lieutenant. We've got to get through their lines and set these ships down." Scott saluted, and Gardner returned it. "Good luck," he added.

"You can count on us."

Marlene had turned from her station, waiting for him to walk past. As he leaned down to kiss her, she smiled and surprised him by placing a heart-shaped holo-locket into his hand.

"Take this with you," she said while he was regarding the thing. "It's my way of saying 'good luck.'"

Scott thanked her and leaned in to collect that kiss after all. Resurfaced, he found Gardner and the techs smiling at him; he gave another crisp salute and rushed from the bridge.

"'Good-bye, sweetheart,'" one of the techs stationed behind Marlene mimicked not a moment after Scott left. "'And here's a token of my undying love.'"

Marlene poked her head around the side of the chair. Marf and one who liked to be called Red were laughing. "Knock it off," she told them. She was used to the razzing-personal time was hard to come by aboard ship, and Scott's open displays of affection only added fuel to the fire-but in no mood for it right now.

"What's the matter, Marlene?" Red said over his shoulder. "Don't you know that absence makes the heart grow fonder?"

She swiveled about in the cushioned seat and hid her face in her hands. "I don't know how it could," she managed, suddenly on the verge of tears.

"Don't let them get to you, Marlene," one of her supporters at the forward stations called out while Red laughed.

Come back, Scott, she prayed. I'd give my life to keep you safe.

Gardner's command ship was actually one of the fleet's many transport vessels-delicate-looking ships that resembled swans in flight, with long,

tapering necks and thin swept-back wings under each of which was affixed a boxcarlike Veritech carrier.

Scott, his body sheathed in lime-green armor, was strapping himself into one of the Veritechs now. Fifteen years had seen only minor changes in armor and craft. Lang's Robotech design team had maintained the "thinking caps" and sensor-studded mitts and boots that were so characteristic of the first-generation VT pilots. Armor itself had become somewhat bulky due to the fact that these third-generation warriors were involved in ground-assault missions as often as they were in space strikes; but there was none of the gladiatorial styling favored by Lang's counterparts in the Army of the Southern Cross.

"The main engine and boosters are in top shape, sir," a launch tech perched on the rim of the Veritech bin told Scott before he lowered the canopy. "Good luck and good hunting."

Scott flashed him a thumbs-up as the canopy sealed itself. "Thanks, pal," he said over the externals. "I'll be seein' you Earthside."

Flashes of green and red light from the cockpit displays played across the tinted faceshield of Scott's helmet as he activated and engaged one after another of the Veritech's complex systems. "This is Commander Bernard of the Twenty-first Armored Tactical Assault Squadron, Mars Division," he announced over the com net. "Condition is green, and we are go for launch." "The flight bay is open," control radioed back to him. "You are cleared

for launch, Commander."

Scott gave a start as bay doors throughout the carrier retracted. The cloud-studded deep-blue oceans of Earth filled his entire field of vision. The sight elicited a sense of vertigo he had never experienced before; it was difficult for him to comprehend a planet with so much water, a liquid world that offered so little surface...but Scott was quick to catch himself.

"Mars Division attack wing," he said over the net, "let's do it!"

The Veritech lurched somewhat as the bin conveyers began to move the fighters toward the forward bay. Scott saw that the grappler pylons that would convey the mecha from belt to vacuum had already attached

themselves. He readied himself at the controls, urging his body to relax, his mind to meld with the VT systems. In a moment he felt the grapplers release, the fighter drifting weightlessly, before he engaged the thrusters that bore it away from the transport carrier.

"All right, look alive," Scott said as his wingmen came alongside to signal their readiness. "Once we join up with the main formation, I want eyes open and hands on the trigger." Earthspace was filled with mecha now, some two thousand Veritechs in a slow descent over a silent world. Scott heard Commander Gardner's voice over the com net.

"All wing commanders maintain loose battle formation...prepare to break off for individual combat at the first sign of enemy hostility. It shouldn't be long in coming..."

It is unlikely that many of the men and women who made up the Mars Division (so named by Dr. Lang to convey a sense of attachment to Earth and its brethren worlds) recognized the uniqueness of their position: Their invasion represented humankind's first deliberate offensive against an XT force. Up to that point Earth had always been on the defensive, counterstriking first the Zentraedi, then those giants' Tirolian Masters, and lastly (and unsuccessfully) the Invid themselves. In this sense the day was a red-letter event, if not the turning point Hunter and numerous others had all hoped it would be...

Scott was one of the first to see the enemy ship; it was below him at nine o'clock, surfacing through Earth's atmosphere at an alarming rate. An Invid troop carrier, one of the so-called Mollusk Carriers.

"Here they are," Scott said to his wingmen, gesturing with his hand at the same time. The clamshell-shaped fortress was yawning now, revealing an arena array of Invid Shock Trooper mecha. "Fall in on my signal."

When Scott looked again a split second later, an Invid column launched itself and was locked in on an ascent to engage, the ships' crablike hulls and pincer arms a gleaming golden-brown in Sol's intense light. "Yeah, I think we're gonna see signs of hostility," Scott muttered to himself as his squadron dropped in to meet the enemy at the edge of space.

At Scott's command the pilots of the Twenty-first thumbed off flocks of heat-seeker missiles, which streaked into the ascending column. Short-lived explosions of violent fight blossomed against Earth's blue and white backdrop. The VTs continued their silent descents, loosing second and third salvos of red-tipped demons against that horde which had overwhelmed their world. And countless Invid mecha flamed out and fried, but not enough to matter. For every one taken out there were three that survived, and those which broke through the line of fire began to strike back. Scott knew there were creatures inside each of those ships-huge bipedal mockeries of the Human form, with massive arms and heads that resembled elongated snouts.

Unlike the enemy forces of the First and Second Robotech Wars, the Invid relied on numbers rather than firepower. True, the Zentraedi had a seemingly endless supply of Battlepods and an armada of ships four million strong, but by and large the war was fought in conventional terms. Up against the Masters this was even more the case, with the number of mecha on both sides substantially reduced. With the Invid, however, humankind encountered a horde mentality to rival any that nature had produced. And true to form, whether army ants or swarms of killer bees, the Invid carried a sting.

As Scott and the others knew from their previous encounters, initial fusillades were what counted most. Once separated from its column, the individual Invid ship was blindingly maneuverable and often unstoppable. In close it favored two approaches: ripping open mecha with its alloy pincer claws and embracing a ship and literally shocking it to death with charges delivered by the ships' Protoculture systems. Scott saw both variations of this occurring while he did his best to keep his own fighter out of reach.

Veritech and crabship were going at it across the field, Mars Division troops and Invid mecha in deadly pursuits and dogfights, crisscrossing in the upper reaches of the stratosphere amidst tracer rounds, missile tracks, and laser-array fire from the command ships. Scott saw one of his team taken out by a claw swipe that opened the Veritech tail to nose, precious

atmosphere sucked from the fractured canopy, the pilot flailing for life inside. In another part of nearby space, several Veritechs floated derelict after loveless Invid embraces.

Scott realized the hopelessness of their situation and ordered his squadron to reconfigure to Battloid mode.

Mechamorphosis, or mode selection, was still controlled by a three-position cockpit lever, along with the pilot's mecha will, which interfaced with the fighter's Protoculture-governed systems. But where all parts of the first-generation Veritechs participated in reconfiguration, the augmentation packs and energy generators of the Armored Alphas (essential for the space and ground missions that typified the Expeditionary Force) remained intact during the process. The forward portion of the craft telescoped to accomplish this, arms unfolding from behind the canopy while radome and cockpit rotated up through a 180-degree arc, now allowing the underbelly laser turret to become the Battloid's head, and the underbelly rifle/cannon to become the weapon that was grasped in the mecha's right hand.

Thus transformed, Scott's squadron fell in to reengage the Invid, blue thrusters bright in Earth's dark side.

Meanwhile, a second wave of Veritechs was launched from the transports to respond to another column of Invid approaching swiftly from Delta sector.

Scott's displays flashed coordinates and signatures of the second Mollusk Carrier even before he had visual contact. He ordered his team to form up on his lead and throw themselves against the column. Once again heatseekers found their marks and took out scores of Invid ships; and once again orange hell-flowers blossomed. But reinforced, the Invid launched a frenzied counterstrike. Shock vessels broke through the front lines and went for the transports themselves in suicide runs and massed charges. Particle beams, disgorged from bow guns, swept like insecticide through their ranks, annihilating ship after ship.

Scott's team regrouped and gave chase to any that survived, blasts from

the VTs' chain-guns blowing pincers to debris and holing carapaces. Still, Scott could hear the death screams of the unlucky ones piercing the tac net's cacophony of commands and reactions. VTs and Invid ships drifted from the arena, locked in bizarre postures, obscene embraces. Here, an Invid pincer was apparently caught in the canopy of the ship it had ensnared; there, another held a VT to itself, exchanging lightning flashes of death.

Scott, sweat beading up across his forehead, was in pursuit of two Invid ships that were closing in on Commander Gardner's transport; he had heard Marlene's terror-stricken call for help only a moment before and had one of the enemy ships bracketed in the chain-gun's sights now. He fired once, shooting a hole through its groin, and smiled devilishly as it disintegrated in a brief burst of crimson light. The second Invid, its pincers raised for action, was moving toward the bridge viewports. But fire from Scott's cannon decommissioned it before it attained striking distance.

"Saw two, swatted same," Scott told Marlene over the com net, a confident tone returned to his voice. The Invid were falling back on all sides. "Good job, Commander," Gardner congratulated him before Marlene

had a chance to speak. "Signal your team to begin their atmospheric approach. Our thermal energy shields are already seriously drained."

"Roger," said Scott, at the same time waving the chain-gun to signal his wingmen. "We'll escort you through."

Scott saw the transport's thrusters fire a three-second burst, realigning the ship for its slow descent. He sat back and punched up orbital entry calculations inn the data screen, fed these over to the autopilot, and returned his attention to wide-range radar. Suddenly Marlene was on the net again, alerting him to a unit of bandits moving against him at four o'clock. He glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed them even as their signatures were registering on the mecha's radar screen.

"I see them," he answered her calmly.

Scott permitted the half dozen Invid to close in, enabling his onboard targeting computer to get a fix on all of them. It was a calculated risk but one that paid off a moment later when the Battloid's deltoid compartments

opened and each launched a missile that homed in on its target. Scott boostered himself away from the silent fireworks and rechecked the screen: There was no sign of enemy activity.

"We're all clear, Commander," he reported, easing up the thinking cap's faceshield.

Gardner's face now flashed into view on the cockpit's small commo screen. "Scott! We must try to slip through and hit Reflex Point before the Regis's drones have a chance to regroup. Understood?"

"Roger Commander," Scott returned. At a signal from the HUD; he dropped the faceshield, the inside surface of which was displaying approach vectors and numerical data. He opened the tac net. "Our entrance azimuth is one-two-one-one...Reconfiguring for orbital deviation."

Scott armed the Veritech's shield after it had shifted mode and brought the fighter alongside Gardner's descending transport. The hull temperature of his own ship was reaching critical levels, and he reasoned that the same thing had to be occurring on the larger ship. A glance told him he was correct and more. The underside of the command vessel was radiating an intense glow that suggested an improper angle of approach. Scott waited for the vessel to correct itself, and when it didn't, he went on the net.

"Recommend you recalculate entry horizon, Commander. The ship appears to be entering too quickly."

"It can't be helped, Scott. We've got to put down. Our shields will never see us through another attack."

"Sir, you'll never live to see another attack if you don't readjust your course heading," Scott said more firmly. "That ship wasn't built for this kind of gravitational pull. You're going to tear her apart!"

Scott tried to suppress a mounting feeling of panic. He heard Marlene tell Gardner that the reserve thermal energy shields were now completely exhausted. Gardner ordered her to engage the retros.

Scott craned his neck to see if the retros were having any effect, his guts like a knot pressing against his diaphragm. He saw something break free

from the tail section of the transport, glow, and burn out. He was trying to maintain proximity with the ship, but as a result his own displays were suddenly flashing warnings as well. I'd better slow down myself if I don't want to be decorating a big part of the landscape.

Scott pulled the mode selector to G position and stepped out of his fear temporarily to think the Veritech through to Guardian mode. As the legs of the mecha dropped, reverse-articulating, he engaged the foot thrusters, substantially cutting his speed. At the same time, Gardner's transport was roaring past him in an uncontrolled plunge.

"Commander, pull out!" he cried into the net. Marlene!

Caught between self-sacrifice and desperation, Scott could do little more than bear witness to the agonizingly slow deterioration of the command ship-the end of all he held dear in the world. The transport was a glowing ember now, slagging off fragments of itself into the void. The intense heat would have already boiled the blood of those inside...

Marlene!

His mind tried to save him from the horror by denying the events, cocooning him in much the same way the Veritech did. But averting his gaze only worsened matters. Everywhere he looked ships-of-the-fleet were breaking apart, flaming out as they plunged into Earth's betraying blue softness, wings and stabilizers folded by heat, delicate necks snapped, molten alloy falling like silver tears in the night.

The Veritechs were faring better, but columns of Invid were now on the ascent to deal out their own form of injustice.

They fell upon the helpless transports and command ships first, helping nature's cruel reversal along with deliberately placed rends and breaches, spreading further ruin throughout the fleet. Scott saw acts of bravery and futility: a Battloid already crippled and falling backward into the atmosphere pouring cannon fire against the enemy; two superheated Veritechs attempting to defend a transport against dozens of Invid claw fighters; another VT, boosters blazing, in a kamikaze run toward the head of the column.

Scott instructed his ship to jettison the rear augmentation pack and increased his speed, atmosphere be damned. There was still an outside chance that some of Gardner's crew had made it into the evacuation pods. If only the Invid could be kept away from the hapless transport.

"Please, pull out!" Scott was screaming through gritted teeth. "Please, please..."

Then, all at once, the transport's triple-thrusters died out, and an instant later the ship was engulfed in a soundless fireball that blew it to pieces.

Marlene! Scott railed at the heavens, his fists striking blows against the canopy and console as the Veritech commenced a swift unguided fall.

CHAPTER TWO

I don't think I'll ever forget the first time I laid eyes on Scott Bernard-beneath all that Robotech armor, I mean. He had the Look of the Lost in his eyes, and a stammer in his voice that was pure tremolo. The latter proved to be a case of offworld accent-some Tirolian holdover-but that Look...I just couldn't meet his eyes; I sat there tinkering with the Cyclone, trying to figure out whether I should run for the hills or off the guy then and there. Later on-much later on-he told me about that first night in the woods. I've got to laugh, even now: Ask Scott Bernard the one about the tree falling in the wilderness-and prepare to have your head bitten off?

Rand, Notes on the Run

Tirol, once the homeworld of the Robotech Masters, then an Invid colony when the Masters had uprooted the remnants of their dying race and journeyed to Earth in search of Protoculture, was a reconfigured planet, much of its surface given over to humankind's needs, its small seas and weather patterns tamed. Not like this Earth, Scott thought, with its solitary yellow sun and distant silver satellite. He yearned for Tirol. It had been his home as much as the SDF-3 had been; he missed the binary stars of Fantoma's system, the protective presence of the motherworld itself. How remote one felt from the heavens on this displaced world.

Scott recalled Admiral Hunter's rousing send-off speech, his talk of the "cool green hills of home"-his home, Earth. Scott laughed bitterly to himself, the planet's native splendor lost on him.

The Alpha had found a soft spot to cushion its fall in some sort of highland forest. Oak and fir trees, Scott guessed. The VT was history, but cockpit harnesses and collision air bags had kept him in one piece. However, the crash had been violent enough to plow up a large hunk of the landscape. He had lost his helmet and sustained a forehead bruise; then came a follow-up thigh wound of his own making when he had rather carelessly

climbed from the wreck.

He was sitting in the grass now, his back against the fighter's fuselage, his head and left leg bandaged with gauze from the ship's first-aid kit. He had gotten rid of his cumbersome armor just before nightfall but kept his blaster within reach.

The forest was dark and full of sounds he could not identify, although he was certain these were all natural calls and chirps and whistles-from what he had seen thus far, Earth was primitive and uncontrolled.

And there were just too many places for an enemy to hide. "Give me a scorched Martian desert any day," Scott muttered.

He heard a rustling sound in the brush nearby and reached out for the blaster-a discette-shaped weapon developed on Tirol that was a scaled-down version of the one carried by the Masters' Bioroids during the Second Robotech War.

"Is there somebody out there?" he asked of the dark.

When the movement suddenly increased, he fired off a charge; it impacted with a blinding orange flash against a tree, flushing two small long-eared creatures from the undergrowth. Scott mistook them for Optera cha-chas at first-the Flower of Life Pollinators-then realized that they were rabbits.

What's happening to me? he asked himself, shaken by the cold fear that coursed through him. Marlene and everything I loved destroyed, and now I'm losing my nerve. He set the blaster aside and put his gloved hands to his face. It was possible he had sustained a concussion during the crash. A delayed onset of shock...

Lifting his head, he found that Earth had another surprise in store for him. The sky was dumping droplets of water on him-it was raining! Scott got up and walked to a clearing in the woods. He had heard about this phenomenon from old-timers but hadn't expected to encounter it. Scott could see that rain might not be a bad thing under certain conditions, but right now it was only adding to his discomfort. Besides, there was something else in the air that had come in with the rain: periods of a

short-lived, rolling, explosive roar.

Clouds backlit by flashes of electrical charge were moving swiftly, obscuring the Moon and plunging the world into an impenetrable dark. Soon the angry bolts responsible for that stroboscopic light were overhead, launched like fiery spears toward the land itself, earsplitting claps of thunder in their wake.

Scott found himself overwhelmed by a novel form of terror, so unlike the fear he was accustomed to that he stood screaming into the face of it, his feet seemingly rooted to the ground. This had nothing to do with enemy laser fire or plasma annihilation discs; it had nothing to do with combat or close calls. This was a larger terror, a deeper one, springing from an archaic part of himself he had never met face to face.

Unnerved, he ran for the safety of the Veritech cockpit as lightning struck and ignited one of the trees, toppling it with a second bolt that split the forest giant along its length. He lowered the canopy and hunkered down in the VT seat, hugging himself for warmth and security. Eyes tightly shut, ears filled with crackling noise, he shouted to himself: What am I doing on this horrible planet?

As if answering him, his mind reran images of the command ship's fiery demise, that slow and silent fatality.

"Marlene," he said through tears.

His hand had found the holo-locket she had given him on the bridge. But his forefinger was frozen on the activation button, his mind fearful of confronting the ghosts the device was meant to summon up. Still, he knew that he had to force himself to see and hear her again...before he could let the past die.

The metallic green heart opened at his touch, unfolding like a triptych; from its blood-red holo-bead center wafted a phantom image of Marlene.

"Scott, my darling, I know it isn't much, but I thought you'd get a kick out of this trinket. I'm looking forward to living the rest of my life with you. I can't wait till this conflict is all behind us. Till we meet again, my love..."

The voice that had been Marlene's trailed off, and the shimmering message returned to its place of captivity. Scott closed the heart and clutched it tightly in his fist, wishing desperately that he could so easily de-rezz the images held fast in his own heart. Outside, the storm continued unabated, echoing the dark night of his soul. Lighting fractured the alien sky, and rainwater ran in a steady stream across the protective curve of the VT's canopy.

In the morning Earth's skies seemed as blue as the seas Scott had seen from space; the air smelled sweet, washed clean of last night's violence. But this was little consolation. Fear and sorrow had lulled him into a fitful sleep, and the stark images of Marlene's death were with him when he awoke.

At a clear stream near the crash site, he filled his canteens with water. Taking in morning's soft light, the spectacle of the forest itself, the profusion of bird life, he suspected that Earth could be a tolerable place, after all, but doubted that he would ever feel at home here. He promised himself that he would turn his thoughts to the mission and only the mission from this point on. Insanity was the only alternative.

He returned to the Veritech and stowed the canteens with the survival gear he had already retrieved from the mecha. He had enough emergency rations to last him the better part of an Earth week; if he didn't come across a settlement or city by then, he would be forced to forage for food. And given what little information he had about edible plants and such, the thought was hardly an appetizing one.

He turned his attention now to the one item that was likely to rescue him from edible plants or privation: the Cyclone vehicle stored away in the fighter's small cargo compartment. A well-concealed sensor panel in the fuselage gave him access to this, and in a moment he was lifting the self-contained Cyclone free of the cargo hold. In its present collapsed state the would-be two-wheeled transport was no larger than a foot locker, but reconfigured it was equivalent to a 1,000-cc twentieth-century motorcycle.

Which in fact it was, after a fashion.

Originally one of Robotechnology's first creations, it had undergone some radical modifications under Lang's SDF-3 teams. The Expeditionary Force had come to rely upon the vehicle as much as it had on the Veritech fighters, even though its design was still a basic one: a hybrid piston and Protoculture-powered transformable motorcycle that was a far cry from the Hovercycles developed on Earth during the same time period. Unlike that Southern Cross marvel, the Cyclone required the full interaction of its pilot, whose "thinking cap" and specially designed armor were essential to the functioning of the vehicle's Protoculture-based mechamorphic systems. In addition, it was light enough to carry, and wondrously fuel-efficient.

Scott carried the Cyclone several feet from the fighter and set about reconfiguring it, which entailed little more than flipping the appropriate switches. That much accomplished, he transferred his survival gear to the cycle's rear deck and began to struggle into the mecha's modular battle armor-not unlike the shoulder pads, hip harnesses, and leg and forearm protectors worn by turn-of-the-century athletes, except for the fact that the armor had been fashioned from lightweight alloys.

Scott was wearing Marlene's holo-heart around his neck now and gave a last look at it before snapping the armor's pectorals in place. It's time, my love, he said to the heart.

Again he told himself to concentrate on the mission. He recalled Commander Gardner's words: If only one of you survive the invasion, you must locate the Invid Reflex Point and destroy it along with their queen, the Regis. Scott had no idea how many people from Mars Division had survived atmospheric entry, but it was unlikely that any of them had touched down near his crash site. He had been so caught up in the destruction of the command ship that he had failed to lock the proper coordinates into the VT's autopilot. As a consequence, the mecha had surely delivered him far from any of the dozen preassigned rendezvous points and who knew how far from the Reflex Point itself. The stars told Scott that he had come down somewhere in the southern hemisphere, which put thousands of miles

between him and the Regis if he was lucky, oceans between them if not. In any case, north was the direction of choice.

Scott donned his helmet and mounted the Cyclone. A thumb switch brought the mecha to life; he found his confidence somewhat restored by the throaty, synchronous firing of the cycle's systems.

Now let's get on with evening the score with the Regis and her Invid horde, Scott said to himself as he set off.

The worst thing about being a lone survivor were the memories that survived with you, Scott decided. If only one could erase them, switch them off somehow. But Scott knew that he couldn't; the people one loved were more frightening ghosts than anything imagination could conjure up. And they couldn't be outrun...

Less than an hour from his crash site, Scott was surprised to find himself on what appeared to be a trail or an ancient roadway lined with trees. But an even greater shock awaited him over the rise: a veritable desert at the foot of the wooded foothills that witnessed his crash, stretching out toward distant barren mountains. Scott slid the Cyclone to a halt and stared homesick at the sight.

Who said there were no Fantoma landscapes on Earth?

Scott had never heard Wolff, Edwards, or any of the old-timers brag about this. It was almost as vast as Spheris!

Now reassured as well as renewed, Scott twisted the Cyclone's throttle and streaked down into the wastes.

Elsewhere in the wastes rode a survivor of a different campaign; but his cycle was of a different sort, (twenty years old if it was a day, and running desperately short of fuel pellets).

A clear-eyed, short, sinewy teenager with a shaggy mop of red hair and an unwashed look about him-both by necessity and by design-he called himself Rand, his inherited names long abandoned. He was born about the time the SDF-3 had been launched from Little Luna, and he had seen the rise and fall of Chairman Moran's government, the invasion of the Robotech

Masters, and humankind's subsequent regression to barbarism, a turn of events that had culminated with the arrival of the Invid and their easily won conquest.

Just now Rand was doing what he did best: keeping himself alive. His old bike was closing in on the object he had seen plummet from the night sky two days ago, something too slow and controlled to have been a meteor, too massive for an Alpha. He had made up his mind to track its fall, abandoning his earlier plans to try for Laako City in the hopes of beating other Spotters, Foragers, and assorted rogues to the find.

Rand relaxed his wrist and let the bike come to a slow stop a good kilometer from the impact point. He threw back the hood of his shirt and slid his goggles up onto his forehead. The ship was even larger than he had guessed, like some great bird with enormous hexagonally shaped cargo pods strapped to the undersides of its wings. It was still glowing in places but obviously had been cooled by the rains that had drenched the irradiated wastes during the night. Rand cautiously resumed his forward motion, completing a circle around the thing at the same safe distance. There were no tracks or footprints in the still-moist sands, which meant that no one had left or entered the wreck during the past twelve hours or so.

He cycled through a second, tighter circle and headed in, convinced that he was first to arrive on the scene. Approaching the ship now, he could discern numbers and letters stenciled on the fuselage-M_R_DIV_I -but could make no sense of the whole-where it had come from or why.

The wreck had the stench of recent death written all over it. He wasn't in the least looking forward to walking into cargo bays wallpapered with Human remains, but he was just going to have to shut his eyes to that part of it. There had to be something he could use, weapons or foodstuffs.

He began to circle the ship on foot now, searching for some way to get inside. The nose was throwing off so much heat there was no getting near it, but the rear hatch of one of the cargo carriers had sprung open on impact, and the place seemed cool enough to enter.

Rand threw himself atop the twisted wreck of the hatch and started in.

The interior was dark and uninviting, and it smelled like hell. He knew he wasn't going to get very far, but not fifty feet into the thing-after whacking his head on a low threshold and falling flat on his face in the dark-he found more than enough to satisfy him: a bin of ten Robotech cycles.

He lifted one up and out of its rack and bent down to look it over. It was Robotech, all right, probably one of the Cyclone type the military had used before the development of the Hovercrafts. Rand had heard about them but never thought he would live to see one-let alone ride one!

Straddling the mecha now, he depressed the ignition switch, fingers of his left hand crossed for luck. The Cyclone fired, purring like a kitten, after a goose or two of the throttle.

"Awwriight!" Rand shouted.

He flicked on the headlight, screeched the Cyclone through a 360, and tore back toward the doorway, launching himself into the desert air from the sprung hatchway. He hit the sand and twisted the cycle to a halt, exhilarated from his short flight.

Then he noticed something else in flight: a three-unit Invid scouting party coming fast over a ridge of low hills to the west. Rand cursed himself for not figuring them into the picture; they, too, must have been aware of the transport's crash. And as always, their timing was impeccable. Even so, Rand was thankful that they were only Scouts and not Shock Troopers. In fact there was a good chance that the Cyclone would be able to outrun them-at least as far as the forest.

The three Scouts put down next to the downed ship; positioning themselves to prevent Rand's escape, the cloven foot of one them flattening the old cycle that had seen him through so much.

"I sure hope your insurance is paid up, pal!" Rand yelled at the Scout.

They were twenty-foot-tall bipedal creatures with articulated armored legs and massive pincer arms; there was no actual head, but raised egg-shaped protrusions atop their inverted triangular torsos were suggestive of eyes, while what looked to be a red-rimmed lipless mouth concealed a single sensor lens. Rand had seen brown ones and purple

ones-these three were of the latter category-and more than anything they reminded him of two-legged land crabs. The Scouts were just that and were weaponless, except if one counted their innate repulsiveness. However, they could inflict serious damage with their claws, and just now one of the Scouts wanted to demonstrate that fact to Rand.

Rand shot the Cyclone forward at the Scout's first swipe, its claw striking the sand with a loud crunching sound. "Okay, but-Um going to be submitting a bill for damages!" he called over his shoulder as a second creature gave pursuit.

Rand's previous questions concerning the Cyclone's capabilities were soon to be answered. The three Invid were gaining on him, and ready or not he was going to have to put the cyc through its paces. He took a deep breath and kicked in the turbochargers. Instantaneously the Cyclone took off like a shot, living up to its namesake while Rand struggled to retain control. The Scouts meanwhile gave up their ground-shaking run and took to the air, thrusters carrying them overhead, pincer arms poised for the embrace that killed.

Their prey, however, had managed to overcome his initial ineptitude and was now leaning the Cyclone through a series of self-imposed twists and turns along the featureless sands, a tactic that more than once brought the Scouts close to midair collisions with one another.

"Just lemme know if you're gettin' tired!" Rand shouted above the roar of the mecha. He laughed over his shoulder and threw the Scouts a maniacal grin; but when he turned again to face forward he found trouble ahead. Something was approaching him fast, kicking up one heck of a dust storm. Two of the Invid were moving into flanking position, and it suddenly occurred to Rand that he would soon be surrounded.

Scott Bernard felt two emotions vying for his attention when he saw the Cyclone rider and the Invid Scouts: elation that he had found one of his Mars Division comrades and rage at the sight of the enemy. He couldn't figure out why the rider wasn't reconfiguring but knew that the situation

called for immediate action. Lowering the helmet visor, he engaged the mecha's turbos. For a moment the Cyclone was up on its rear wheel, then it went fully airborne. At the same time, Scott's mind instinctively found the vibe that allowed it to interface with the cycle's Protoculture systems.

Helped along by the imaging Scott's mind fed the Cyclone via the helmet "thinking cap," the mecha began to reconfigure. The windscreen and helmet assembly flattened out; the front wheel disengaged itself from the axle and swung back and off to one side. The rear wheel, along with most of the thruster pack, rode up, while other components, including the wheel-mounted missile tubes, attached themselves to Scott's hip, leg, and forearm armor. In the final stage of mechamorphosis, he resembled some kind of airborne armored backpacker whose gear just happened to include two solid rubber tires and a jet pack.

Scott let the thruster carry him in close to the Invid Scouts before bringing his forearm weapons into play-twin launch tubes that carried small but deadly Scorpion missiles. Right arm outstretched now, palm downward, he raised the tubes' targeting mechanism, centered one of the Scouts in the reticle, and loosed both missiles. They streaked toward their quarry with a deadly sibilance (Scott's armor protecting him from their backlash), narrowly missed Rand, and caught the Invid ship square in the belly, scattering pieces of it across the sands.

The unarmored Cyclone rider went down into a long slide while Scott took to the ground to dispatch his remaining pursuers. Once in their midst, he dodged two claw swipes before launching himself over the top of his would-be assailant. Another missed swipe and a second leap landed him atop one of the pair; he leapt up again and came down for the kill, firing off a single Scorpion from the left forearm launch tubes. While the Invid was engulfed by the ensuing explosion, Scott put down to deal with the last of them.

The thing tried to crush him with its foot, but Scott rolled away from it in time. Likewise, he dodged a right claw and jumped up onto the Invid's head. The Scout brought its left up now, almost in a gesture of puzzlement,

but Scott was already gone. He toyed with the Invid for a minute more, allowing it another shot at him before polishing it off with the remaining Scorpion, which the Scout took right through its red optic scanner.

The Cyclone rider was still on the ground beneath his overturned mecha when Scott approached. "They're not really as tough as they look, are they?" he said to the bewildered red-haired civilian.

"Hombre, you're really something else in a battle," the man returned, his bushy eyebrows arched.

Scott raised the faceshield of his helmet. "The Cyclone does the work," he said humbly.

"Yeah, it's quite a rig," said Rand. He got up, dusted himself off, and righted the cycle, marveling at it once again. "You are a Forager?" he asked Scott warily. "Some kinda one-man army?"

"You might say that," Scott began. "Now listen-"

"It's the first time I ever actually rode one of these things!" Rand interrupted.

"I need some information-"

"I'll bet I could modify this to go twice the speed!" Rand was on his knees now, fidgeting with this and that. "Look at this control setup! I can't wait to try to reconfigure it!"

"Just where the hell are we, outlaw?" Scott managed at last. But when even that failed to elicit a response, he reached over the Cyclone and grabbed Rand by the shirtfront. "I'm talking to you, pal. Where'd those Scouts come from? Is there an Invid hive around here?"

Rand began to struggle against the mecha's hold, and Scott let him go.

He was a scrappy kid but might make a decent partner.

Rand backed off, arms akimbo. "What do I look like, some kind of travel agent? I don't make a habit of asking them where they hail from-you just look up and there they are. I hate those things!"

"Take it easy," Scott told him harshly. He explained about the ill-fated invasion force and their abortive attempts at securing a groundside front.

"I didn't think you were from around here," Rand said, somewhat

relieved. "Admiral Hunter, huh?" It was as if Scott had mentioned George Washington.

"Ancient history, I suppose."

Rand shrugged. "I've never heard of Reflex Point either. 'Course, I don't mix much when I don't have to. As far as I know, the Invid HQ is north of here-way north." Fascinated, he watched as Scott, now on his knees, collapsed and stepped out of the two-wheeled backpack, returning the mecha to Cyclone configuration. "You really going to try and find Reflex?"

"That's what I'm here for," said Scott, doffing the helmet. As he pulled it over his head, the chin strap caught the holo-locket's chain and took it along. The heart fell and opened, replaying its brief message to Scott and his stunned companion.

"...I'm looking forward to living the rest of my life with you. I can't wait till this conflict is all behind us. Till we meet again, my love..."

Wordlessly, Scott stooped to retrieve the heart. "Hey, that's great!" said Rand. "Is that your girl?"

"Uh...my girl," Scott stammered. He straightened up, clutching the heart against his pectoral armor, and turned his back to Rand.

CHAPTER THREE

Dolza's annihilation bolts had devastated the South American coastal cities and turned much of the vast interior forest into wasteland. Ironically enough, however, repopulation of the area was largely the result of the hundreds of Zentraedi warships that crashed there after the firing of the Grand Cannon. Indeed, even after Khyron's efforts to stage a full-scale rebellion had failed, the region was still largely under Zentraedi domination (the T'sentrati Control Zone, as it was known to the indigenous peoples), up until the Malcontent uprisings of 2013-15 and the subsequent events headed up by Captain Maxmillian Sterling of the Robotech Defense Force. But contrary to popular belief, Brazilas did not become the lawless frontier Scott Bernard traversed until much later, specifically, the two-year period between the fall of Chairman Moran's Council and the Invid invasion. In fact the region had seen extensive changes during the Second Robotech War and surely would have risen to the fore had it not been for the disastrous end to that fifteen-year epoch.

"Southlands," History of the Third Robotech War, Vol. XXII

Countless people found themselves homeless after the Invid's preemptive strike against Earth; the waste was awash with wanderers, thieves, and madmen. And, of course, children: lost, uprooted, orphaned. They fared worse than the other groups, usually falling prey to illness, starvation, and marauding gangs. Occasionally, one would stumble upon groups of them in devastated cities or natural shelters-caves, patches of forest, oases-forty or fifty strong, banded together like some feral family; and God help the one who tried to disturb their new order!...But this was the exception rather than the rule. The great majority of them had to make their own way and fend for themselves, attach themselves-more often, enslave themselves-to whomever or whatever could provide them with

some semblance of protection, the chance for a better tomorrow.

Laako City, largest settlement in the southern wastes, saw its fair share of these nameless drifters, and Ken was usually the one who welcomed them with open arms. He was a tall, gangly streetwise eighteen-year-old with a reputation for dirty tricks, mean-spirited by nature but a charmer when he needed to be. His long hair was a pewter color, save for the crimson forelock that was his trademark.

His most recent conquest was a young girl named Annie, who claimed to be fifteen. But Ken had grown bored with her; besides, he had his eye fixed on a pretty little dark-haired urchin who had just arrived in Laako, and the time had come to kiss Annie off.

The trouble was that Annie didn't want to go.

"Don't leave me like this!" she was pleading with hum just now, alligator tears coursing down moon-face cheeks.

"Hey," he told her soothingly, disengaging himself from her hold on his arm. "You knew from the start you'd have to leave someday."

This was and was not true: Laako did maintain a policy of limiting the time outsiders were allowed to spend in the city, but well-connected Ken could easily have steered his way around the regs. If he had been so inclined.

The two of them were standing at the causeway entrance to the city in the lake, the tall albeit ruined towers of the Laako's twin islands visible in the background. Sundry trucks and tractors on their way to the causeway checkpoint were motoring by, kicking up dust and decibels alike.

"Please, Ken!" Annie tried, emphatically this time, launching herself at him, hoping to pinion his arms with her small hands. It was push and pull for a moment-Ken saying, "Annie!...Cut it out!...Stop it!" to Annie's "I can't!...I won't!...I can't!-" but ultimately he put a violent end to it, bringing his arms up with such force that Annie was thrown to the ground.

Which was easy enough for him to do. She was a good foot shorter than Ken, with a large mouth, long, straight, carrot-colored hair, and what some might have termed a cherublike cuteness about her. Her single outfit

consisted of an olive-drab double-breasted military jumpsuit she had picked up along the trail, set off by a pink frameless rucksack and a maroon visored cap emblazoned with the letters E.T, a piece of twentieth-century nostalgia that dated back to a popular science-fantasy film. It was difficult to tell-as it was with many of the lost-whether Annie was searching for a friend, a father, or a lover. And it was doubtful that she could have answered the question either.

"I told you to cut it out," Ken started to say, but the sight of her kneeling in the dirt crying her eyes out managed to touch what meager tenderness he still possessed. "Don't you see I have no choice?" he continued apologetically, walking over to her and placing his hand on her heaving shoulder. "This whole thing is just as hard for me as it is for you, Annie. Please try and understand."

She kept her face buried in her hands, sobbing while he spoke. "Nobody who comes from the outside can stay for more than a little

while, remember? And if I left here, I wouldn't be allowed to return..."

Suddenly the tears were gone and she was looking up at him with a devious grin on her face. "Then run away with me, Ken! We'll start our own family, our own town!" She was up on her feet now, tugging on his arm, but Ken didn't budge.

"Quit giving me a hard time," he told her harshly, angry at himself for being taken in by her saltwater act. "I'm not going anywhere-you are!"

Annie's face contorted through sorrow to rage. She cursed him, using everything her vocabulary had to offer. But in return he proffered a knowing smile that undermined her anger. "You're heartless," she seethed, collapsing to the ground once more. "Heartless."

Rand had led Scott to the site of the downed transport; the Mars Division commander held little hope that anyone had survived the crash but thought there might be an Armored Alpha Veritech still aboard. He was thankful for the Cyclone, but with perhaps thousands of miles separating him from the Invid Reflex Point, the journey would be a long one indeed.

Fearing a visit from Invid reinforcements-Shock Troopers this time-the two riders didn't remain long at the wreck. There were neither survivors nor Veritechs, but Scott was at least able to procure additional Scorpions for the battle armor launchers, several canisters of Protoculture fuel, and a sensor-studded helmet for Rand. Thus far the redheaded rebel had demonstrated no inclination to form even a temporary partnership, but Scott hoped that the helmet and battle armor would entice him somewhat. Scott would have been the first to admit his sense of helplessness; he was a stranger to this world and its ways. And if the unthinkable had occurred-if he alone had survived the atmospheric plunge-he was going to need all the help he could get.

Rand wasn't sure what to make of the offworlder. He was a good man to have on one's side in a fight and no doubt-a capable enough officer in his own element, but he was a fish out of water on Earth, and a relic besides-a throwback to a time when humankind functioned hopefully and collectively. In any case, Rand was a lone rider, and he meant to keep it that way. You joined up with someone, and suddenly there were compromises that had to be made, plans and decisions a single Forager wasn't caught up in.

Rand lived for the open road, and he was grateful that the offworlder hadn't lingered too long at the crash site, glad to have it behind him now. The two had ridden as far as the hills together, then Rand had waved Scott off and lit out on his own, the Cyclone throbbing beneath him. He was enchanted with the mecha, but there were a few other priorities that needed tending to: food, for starters. The tasteless stuff Scott had liberated from the wreck might be all right for spacemen, but it wasn't likely to catch on among down-to-earth Foragers.

Once again he had decided to pass on Laako City; it would be easy enough to get something to eat there, but the results probably wouldn't justify the paranoid garbage he would have to put up with. Rand had never visited Laako, but what he had heard from other Foragers was enough to give him second thoughts about the place.

Even so, he was headed in the general direction of the island city,

putting the Cyclone through the paces on the twisting mountain road that connected the wastes with the grasslands and lakes of the central plateaus. The only such road, it was usually heavily trafficked and dangerous in spots-little more than a narrow ledge with deep ruts and steep drop-offs. But most of that was still ahead of him, and he was cruising along, oblivious to the fact that Scott was not far behind. Then Rand heard the roar of the second Cyclone and looked over his right shoulder, surprised to find the offworlder scrambling along the embankment above the roadway. Scott gave a nod and piloted the cycle through a clean jump that brought him alongside Rand.

"What's the problem?" Rand shouted, raising his goggles. "You got nowhere to go, or what?" He saw Scott smile beneath the helmet's wraparound chin guard.

"I want to head up toward that city you mentioned," Scott called back, maintaining his speed. "We might be able to get some information."

"What's this we stuff, spaceman?" Rand barked. "I go my own way." Scott smiled again. "Come on, I'll show you how to convert to Battle

Armor mode. Or maybe you're too frightened of the Invid, huh?"

"Hey, pal, you go ahead and wage your one-man war. This Cyclone's fine as is," Rand snapped. "See you around," he added, giving a twist to the throttle and pulling out ahead of Scott.

In a moment Scott came up alongside again.

"Make up your mind-you headed to the city or not?"

Scott made a gesture of nonchalance. "I'm just headed where I'm headed, that's all."

"Well, get off my tail!" Rand shouted, lowering his goggles. He popped the front wheel and accelerated out front.

Scott did the same, and the two of them toyed with each other for several minutes, alternating the lead. By now they had entered the shoulderless downhill portion of the highway, and Rand was nursing some misgivings about playing chicken with a dude who was decked out in armor. Nevertheless, he stuck by the offworlder, racing him into a wide turn where

the roadway disappeared around the shoulder of the mountain. Neither of them saw the convoy of trucks headed for the pass until it was almost too late. The driver of the lead vehicle-an opencabbed eight-wheeler-leaned on his horn and locked up the brakes, throwing the transport into zigzags. The Cyclones, meanwhile, were also locked up, sliding sideways down the narrow road. Rand, on the inside, saw a collapsed portion of an earthen wall and went for it, ramping his bike up to the high ground. Scott, however, kept to the road, dangerously close to the drop-off now, and brought the Cyclone to a halt a meter from the truck's front grille.

The driver, a long-haired rube wearing a tall brimmed hat, waved his fist in the air. "Ya rogue-somebody coulda got killed!"

"Sorry about that," Scott told him offhandedly. "Look, we need some information-"

"Wait a minute!" the driver cut Scott off, eyeing him up and down. "You're a soldier! What are you doing out here?"

Scott revealed just enough to satisfy the driver's curiosity. "I'm looking for others who may have bailed out. Have you come across anyone?" Scott saw the man give a start, then avert his gaze.

"Nope. No one...But lemme give you a free piece of advice," the driver answered him, throwing the truck into forward gear. "You're gonna wish you never came back!"

Scott legged the Cyclone off to one side, calling out for an explanation as the truck roared off. The other drivers in the convoy regarded Scott warily from the cabs of their trucks as they lumbered by, but no one said a word until a young boy in the back of the final one yelled out: "Hey, mister, don't tell anyone who you are or you'll be in deep trouble!"

Scott thought he would hear more, but the truck's headbanded elder put a hand over the boy's mouth. "Don't talk to that man," he threatened the kid.

Rand watched the convoy disappear around the bend and saw Scott's gesture of puzzlement. "You coming or not?" the offworlder asked him suddenly. Rand thought about it for a moment while Scott took off down the

road. All his instincts told him to follow the trucks, but ultimately he coasted down the incline and set out to catch up with Scott; after all, somebody had to keep the guy from sticking his nose where it didn't belong. In the trees at the edge of the roadway, the red optic scanner of an

Invid Scout rotated slightly to track the rider's swift departure...

"Ken, please come with me!" Annie was shouting. "I'll be good for you, I promise! I love you! You promised you'd stay with me!"

He was dragging her down the road now, his hands underneath her arms. They were a good half mile from the causeway checkpoints already, and Annie was still causing a scene. Finally he dropped her on her butt.

"Whaddaya want from me-you want me to leave my family and friends?"

She looked up at him and said, "Yes."

Ken bent down eye to eye with her. "Look, I know it seems bad right now, but you'll find somebody to take care of you."

"Don't worry about me!" she yelled in his face as she got up. "I can find my own way around. Men are a dime a dozen for someone like me." Then suddenly she was all over him again: "Please, Ken!"

Ken shook her off, sending her down to the ground on her knees. Fed up, he began to walk back to the checkpoint. Ten steps away, however, he turned at the sound of approaching vehicles. Scott and Rand were just coming around a bend in the tree-lined road. They halted their Cyclones where Annie sat crying. Ken took one look at the cycles and saw a sweet deal in the making. He went over to them with a gleam in his eye.

Closest to Annie, Rand was asking, "What's the matter, kid, are you hurt?"

She looked up, surprised, and told him in no uncertain terms that she wasn't a kid. "So, beat it!"

Ken ambled up and gestured appreciatively at Scott's mecha. "Nice wheels, rogue." Ken smiled. "Where'd you forage 'em?"

"I'm Commander Bernard of Mars Division," Scott said when he had

raised the helmet faceshield. "I'm looking for other survivors of my unit." Ken glanced over at Rand and stepped back. "You're for real,

then-soldiers, I mean."

"Have you seen any of the others?"

"Come with me," Ken said after a moment, already setting off for the causeway.

Scott was suddenly full of hope. "They're here?"

"And you can come, too, Annie," Ken added without turning around.

Annie's eyes opened wide. "I take back what I said." She hurried to catch up with him and attached herself to his arm lovingly.

Rand and Scott exchanged looks and brought the Cyclones back to life. "What's the chance of landing some belly timber?" Rand wanted to know. "We've got trade goods."

"Follow me," Ken told him.

Annie beamed. "You've made me so happy, Ken." She went up on tiptoe to kiss him on the mouth.

Ken whisked them through the checkpoint and escorted them along the causeway that led to the main island. It was a picturesque spot for a city, Rand had to admit: a crystal-blue lake surrounded by forested hills. But there was ample evidence of the war's hold over the place-the scorched and rusted hulks of Zentraedi battlecruisers, downed Adventurers, Falcons, and Bioroids. He noticed that there was a second island, accessible only from the main one, and that it, too, was host to a densely packed cluster of tall, mostly ruined buildings, rubble, and debris heaped up in the streets. Up close the city was somewhat less than inspiring, literally a shell of its former self, but so far they hadn't been searched, hassled, or otherwise bad-vibed, and Rand was beginning to wonder where all those rumors had come from.

"These are Robotech soldiers!" Ken announced to the sullen-faced people huddled inside the buildings, postapocalypse cave dwellers in high-rise cliffs of slagged steel and fractured concrete. "They were with the forces who have returned to Earth to rid us of the Invid." No one moved, no one returned a word. There was only the slight howling of the wind and the

steady throb of the Cyclones' engines. "They're looking for lost members of the assault group. I'm going to take them over to the other island."

Ken turned a wan smile to Scott and Rand. "As you can see, folks around here aren't used to strangers," he said by way of apology. "They're always a bit suspicious at first, but don't worry about it. They'll soon get used to you."

Scott, Rand, and Annie followed Ken's lead to the causeway linking the main island with its twin.

"There it is." Ken pointed. "If any of your comrades have come through here, they'll have been taken over to the other island."

"Thanks a lot for your help, Ken," Scott said.

Ken disengaged his hand from Annie's two-fisted lock on it. "Why don't you show them over the causeway while I go talk to the Elders about your staying here?"

Annie called out to him as he was walking away.

"Yes?" he said impatiently, not bothering to turn around. "Bye-bye, sweet things"

"And don't forget that food!" Rand thought to add.

Annie made an elaborate gesture, then laughed. "Now, if you gentlemen will just follow me..."

Rand chuckled and patted the rear seat of the Cyclone. "Hop on," he told her. "It'll be fun."

CHAPTER FOUR

The Invid Regis ruled her empire from Reflex Point (located in what was once the United States of America, specifically the Indiana-Ohio frontier); but there was scarcely a region without one or two large hives (except the poles and vast uninhabited tracts in Asia and Africa). In this way her Scouts were always about, with Enforcers (a.k.a. Shock Troopers) not far behind. Brazilas was no different from other northern regions in that it was effectively an occupied zone. Like Vichy France of the Second World War, each town had its sympathizers and resistance fighters; but the former far outnumbered the latter, and it was not uncommon to encounter gruesome and ghastly acts of betrayal and butchery undertaken in the name of self-survival.

Bloom Nesterfig, Social Organization of the Invid

As Rand himself would later write:

"There was something about Ken's telling Annie to lead us across the causeway that hit me like a cold wind, but for some reason I just turned my back to it. Scott's innocent enthusiasm had something to do with this. Psyched about seeing some of his friends, he was off in a flash, the Cyclone's rear end chirping a quick good-bye to me and the kid. So I told her to climb on and followed Scott's carefree course, Annie laughing and hanging on for dear life while I goosed the mecha into a long goldcard wheelie.

"The bridge was a simple affair, a flat span no more than fifteen feet wide and a quarter mile long, its plastar surface every bit as holed and bellied as the rest of Laako's streets. The causeway seemed to bisect the island's stand of colorless truncated towers, which rose before us like some ruined vision of the future, an emerald without its shine. Beyond it, a ridge of green hills and a soft-looking autumn sky.

"Scott was a block or two ahead of me when we hit the island, and talk about your low-rent downtown...the place looked as though it had seen some intense fighting with conventional weapons as well as the usual Robo

upgrades. Scott had slowed his cycle to a crawl and was using the mecha's externals to broadcast our arrival.

"'This is Commander Bernard of the Twenty-first Armored Tactical Assault Squadron,' his voice rang out. 'I'm looking for any Mars Division survivors. If you can hear my voice, please respond...Is anybody there? I just want to talk!'"

"Annie and I looked around but didn't see anyone moving. I would have been happy to see some more of those sunken-eyed citizens we had seen on the other side, but suddenly even those shadowy cliff dwellers were in short supply. Up ahead, Scott was stopped near a pile of trashed mecha, a perverse war memorial complete with Veritechs, Battlepods, Hovertanks, and Bioroids, arms, legs, and cannon muzzles fused together in a kind of death-affirming sculpture. I came up behind him and toed the Cyclone into neutral. We were on a small rise above the causeway, Scott off to my left, staring at the junk heap with a kind of morbid fascination.

"Then we saw the Cyclones." "And the bodies."

"You couldn't ride the wastes in those days and be a stranger to death, and like everyone I had seen my fair share of Human remains, but there were fresh kills in the heap, and it was obvious what had happened."

"'This isn't any junk pile!' I heard Scott say. 'It's a goddamn graveyard!'"

"Annie gave a start and hugged herself to my back. 'What's it mean?' she cried, panic already in her voice."

"Scott glanced over at us, his face all twisted up. 'It means I smell a rat and it's got your boyfriend's face!'"

All at once we heard a deep whirring noise accompanied by sounds of mechanical disengagement. I looked back toward the causeway in time to see it give a shudder, then begin a slow retraction toward the main island. But I was more puzzled than alarmed. I'd already seen Scott leap that mecha of his twice the distance to the island, so our being able to get off this one alive only meant that I was going to be learning the secrets of Cyclone

reconfiguration in spite of myself. Moreover, I couldn't figure why Ken needed to resort to such elaborate plans to rid Laako of intruders.

"I think Scott must have been way ahead of me on this one, because he didn't seem at all surprised when two Invid suddenly surfaced in the lake. Annie's pounding me on the back, shouting, 'We gotta get outta here!' and Scott is just sitting silently on the Cyclone taking in the situation like he's got all the time in the world. I'll always remember the look on his face at that moment-and I would have reason to recall it often during the following months. I thought to myself: The eye of the storm."

"Two more Invid were now heading our way from up the street, looming over us, pincers gleaming like knives caught in the light, the ground shaking from their footfalls. These weren't Scouts but Shock Troopers, the larger, meaner version whose shoulder-mounted organiclooking cannons gave them a wide-eyed amphibious look. The lake creatures had submerged, only to reappear behind us, rising up through the plastar streets and putting a radical end to thoughts of escape. In a moment the four were joined by a fifth, who had also taken the subterranean route."

"I felt compelled to point out that we were surrounded, and Scott said, 'Take off!' Which I was all for. I spun the cycle around my left foot and was gone, Scott not two lengths behind me, his Cyclone launched from the street by an overhead pincer slam that nearly flattened him. Later, Annie apologized for the fingernail prints she left in my upper arms, but at that moment I was feeling no pain."

"I had what I thought was the presence of mind to head for the narrower streets, but the Troopers were determined to have us for lunch; their leader, airborne now, simply used its shoulders to power a wider upper-story path between the buildings."

"'How'd they find us!' Annie was yelling into my left ear."

"'Your boyfriend, Ken,' I told her. 'He delivered us right into their claws.' But she didn't want to hear it. Who-Ken?"

"'He'd never do anything like that-never!'"

"It wasn't really a good time for an argument, though. The Troopers

were sticking to us like magnets, firing off bursts of plasma fire. The fact that I had seen what those annihilation discs could do to a Human body was probably responsible for the chancy moves I made on the Cyclone. But the memory of those liquid remains paid off, because I got us through the first stretch unscathed. Then, after we had taken them around one block, down an alleyway, and through half a dozen more right angles, Scott told me to get the kid out of there; he was going Battle Armor to lure them away. Scott was nothing if not noble. But I couldn't resist getting another look at that reconfiguration act, and caught some flack for it."

"'What're you looking at?' Scott berated me over the externals. 'Get moving!'"

"Annie seconded this with a couple of cleanly placed kidney shots. So Scott and I parted company at a T intersection, and the next thing I heard was a massive exchange of cannonfire and a series of crippling explosions. But the Invid had done their part in sticking to Scott's tail, and Annie and I were in the clear for the moment."

"I pulled the bike over and told her to hop off. There was no way I was going to let Scott take all the heat; I just had to get my Cyclone to reconfigure, battle armor or not. Trouble was, the damn thing wouldn't respond. I thumbed the switch above the starter button, but nothing happened, so I started flipping switches left and right, cursing the thing for being so obstinate. Annie, the little darling, stood by me, hands behind her head, taunting me and telling me in no uncertain terms to hurry the hell up. Of course, I have since learned that that is precisely what you don't do with a piece of mecha, but what did this basically backwoods loner know about mecha then? I just kept jiggling this, pounding that, turning the other, and all of a sudden I found myself flat on my back in the seat, the Cyclone grotesquely reconfigured, with both wheels behind it now, its nose kissing the street."

"Annie was kind enough not to laugh in my face; she turned aside first. And I did something brilliant-like leap off the cycle and try to place kick it into the lake-which only resulted in an injury to my foot to match the one

already sustained by my pride."

"But now Annie was shouting and pointing up at something. Scott, in full battle armor, had taken to the buttressed top of a building a few blocks away. One minute he was standing there like some sort of rooftop Robostatue, and the next he was playing dodge-the-plasma-Frisbees. I saw him drop into that annihilation disc storm and execute one of those Bernard bounces that carried him out of sight, just short of the explosions that turned the building into a chimney, flames roaring up from its blasted roof, black parabolas of slagged stuff in the sky."

"Meanwhile, I had worked through my frustration and managed to get the mecha back into Cycle mode. Annie still wanted to know why the thing wouldn't change. I started to explain about the armor and 'thinking cap,' and the next thing I knew she was running off toward the causeway."

"'I'm gonna go and find Ken and get him to tell me once and for all why he went and sold us out to the Invid!' she yelled after I tried to get her to stop. 'If you don't like it-tough!'"

"I had to admit that I was thinking along those very same lines, but Annie's timing left a lot to be desired. And since I didn't relish the thought of finding that pink backpack of hers dangling from a bloody pincer, I threw the Cyclone into gear and went after her. I reached out, and she swatted my hand away, telling me to get lost. Angry now, I decided I would just scoop her up in my left arm and put an end to the foolishness, but I misjudged both my course and her weight. No sooner did my arm go around her waist than I was pulled from the mecha. Worse still, we were right alongside an open freight elevator; and down we went, eight feet or more, would-be opponents wrapped in each other's arms."

"I blacked out for a moment; perhaps we both did. But Annie came around first and laid into me as though I had just tried to maul her. I came to with her shouting: 'Get off of me, you monster! You dirty Forager sleaze! You're all alike!' She heaved me off her and scrambled up out of the shaft with a nimbleness and speed that surprised me. By the time I poked my head out, she was nowhere in sight. But I heard her rummaging around in a

nearby pile of mecha scrap, still cursing men in general, me in particular. When I saw her come up with an oldfashioned automatic rifle, I started having second thoughts about showing myself. Fortunately, she was only interested in emptying the thing's clip against the already devastated facade of a building across the street. Then she tossed the depleted thing aside and dove back down into the scrap heap. Meanwhile, I was wondering what had become of Scott and whether the Invid would home in on Annie's gunfire. When I looked over at her again, she was wrestling an antitank weapon up onto her shoulder."

"'Watch where you point that thing!' I started to warn her. 'It might

be-'"

"And it was."

"The small missile nearly put a center part in my hair, then changed

trajectory and detonated against the side of the building."

"A little to the right and she would have connected with the Invid who was just stepping around that same corner."

"I ran for the overturned Cyclone, hopped on, and darted over to pick up Annie, who now had control of the weapon. She located another missile and launched it against the approaching Shock Trooper. I backed her up with Scorpions from the front-end launch tubes of the Cyclone, but neither of us managed to connect with a soft spot in the thing's shell, and it kept up its menacing advance. Annie screamed and made a run for it, not a second before the creature's right claw came down at her; the tip of its bladelike pincer swept the pack from her back and ripped open the jumpsuit neck to waist but left her otherwise untouched. But the nearness of the blow paralyzed her; I saw her reach back, finger the tear, and collapse to her knees."

"Meanwhile, I had problems of my own. The Invid had turned its attention to me and fired off several discs, one of which blew the Cyclone out from under me and threw me a good fifteen feet from the blast. My back was to its advance now, but one look at Annie's shocked face told me everything I needed to know."

"'Heeelp!' she was screaming. 'Anyone!'"

"But there was something else in my line of sight as well: a glint across the lake, sunshine on gleaming metal. And even as my head was going down to the street in a gesture of surrender and ultimate indifference-some part of my warped mind wondering what that giant cloven foot or pincer was going to feel like-I knew Annie's call had been heard."

"A figure in red Cyclone battle armor launched itself across the lake and came down at the end of the street, hopping in for a rescue, dodging one, two, then three explosive blasts from the Invid Shock Trooper. I saw the soldier return fire from the rifle/cannon portion of the armor's right arm and heard the Invid take a direct hit and come apart."

"The soldier put down behind me as I rolled over, Annie oohing and ahhing nearby, just in time to see Scott appear at the other end of the street with three Invid on his tail. He dropped one for the crowd and took off out of sight, the other two closing on him. I got up, hand shielding my eyes, and tried to follow the fight. Overhead now, Scott blasted a second Invid, then swooped in low and ass-backward to finish off the last. I saw him sight in on the Trooper, then loose the shot. It tore into one of the Invid's hemispheric cranial protrusions, loosing fire and smoke from the hole."

"Scott was thrown backward by the missile's kick and landed on his butt not ten feet in front of us-Annie, me, and the mysterious red Cycloner. The Invid came in on residuals, mimicking Scott's undignified approach with one of its own, and immediately fell face forward to the street, a sickly green fluid spewing from its wound, its outstretched pincer trapping and nearly mincing poor Annie. Scott had explained that the fluid was a kind of nutrient derived from the Flowers of Life, but I had yet to see exactly what it was that the stuff was keeping alive! Scott, his faceshield raised, turned to thank the red who had come to our aid. But it was obvious he had seen something I hadn't, because he stopped in midsentence, as though questioning what he was seeing."

"And Red bounded off without a word."

"At the same time, Annie was crying for help, and Scott went over to

her, lifting the pincer enough to allow the pale and shaken kid to crawl free. What a picture she made, kneeling there in the dirt, tears cascading down her face, her torn jumpsuit hanging off her shoulders."

"'I'm so sorry,' she wailed. 'This is all my fault.'"

"Scott didn't say anything; he simply walked over to the fallen Invid and regarded it-analytically, I thought, as though he had seen those things bleed before."

"I was sitting on the engine cover of my overturned Cyclone feeling twenty years older and wondering what had happened to solo riding."

"'We did what we could,' I told Scott. 'But it just wasn't enough.'" "Annie said, 'Now what are we going to do, Rand?'"

"And Scott and I exchanged looks, remembering Ken and the other island..."

"We found Annie's knapsack, and I did what I could to sew up the tear in her jumpsuit. The causeway had been reextended to complete the span between the islands; Scott figured that Ken and the others had heard the explosions and realized they were going to have to deal with us one way or another. This was pretty much the case. Ken said, 'I'm glad you made it,' when he saw us cycle in. But Annie wasn't buying it; she leaped off the rear seat, even before I had brought the Cyclone to a halt, and whacked Ken across the face forcefully enough to spin him around. He gave us a brief over-the-shoulder look and decided he had better take it or he would have us coming down on him as well.

"He asked Annie to forgive him, and frankly, I was surprised by the sincerity he managed to dredge up. 'I only did it to save the others,' he explained. 'If we stood up to the Invid, all the people in Laako would suffer for it. The way things are, we get by all right.'"

"Fire in his eyes, Scott dismounted, took off his helmet, and walked over to Ken. 'So you feed potential troublemakers to the Invid to save your own skins,' he growled."

"I'm not sure what would have happened next if a crowd of Laako's

citizenry hadn't appeared."

"'You got that right, soldier!' their leader told Scott."

"They were only a dozen strong, men, women, and children, and they were unarmed; but there was an attitude of defiance about them that rattled us. The rest of the audience was glaring down at us from their cells in those shells of buildings."

"'You've got to leave here!' the man continued. 'I'm sorry, but we don't want any soldiers in this town. So get out-now!'"

"I had to hand it to the guy. He wasn't especially large or well built, and his glasses and workman's blues gave him a kind of paternal look; but here he was standing up to an offworlder in Cyclone battle armor. I thought Scott would take the poor man apart; instead, I heard him laugh."

"'Well, was it something we said?' Scott asked."

"'There is nothing funny about the situation, young man,' the man responded angrily. 'I am in deadly earnest. Nobody here even wanted your Robotech Expeditionary Mission to begin with, and if it wasn't for you soldiers, this planet would still be living in peace! Now, get out! Save your rescues for somewhere else!'"

"I winced at hearing this, knowing the man had gone too far. Scott stepped into the guy's face, shouting back: 'Why you...Don't you realize that without any kind of resistance, you've got no hope?!'"

"'We know,' Ken chimed in from behind Scott. 'But we still want you to leave.'"

"'Terrific,' Scott snarled. 'You're going to sit back and relax and let the Invid rule over you and the entire planet-'"

"'Fighting the Invid will aggravate the whole situation!' the crowd leader interrupted. 'All we want is a peaceful life. What difference does it make who's at the top-some corrupt Council or the Invid? There's no such thing as freedom!'"

"The man must have caught a whiff of his own words, because all of a sudden he was soft-spoken and rational. 'Look, anybody who hasn't seen it our way has already left. So will you please go?'"

"I had heard the same speech so often that I hardly paid any attention to it, but you just didn't go throwing the reality of the situation into the face of a guy who had come halfway across the galaxy to fight your battles for you. Before I could open my mouth, Scott had grabbed the guy by the shirtfront and was ready to split his head open."

"I told Scott to leave him alone. After all, in their own way they were right: They had peaceful lives, even without the so-called freedoms that were so important thirty years ago. Besides, nothing Scott or I could say or do was going to change the way they felt."

"'Look around you,' I told Scott."

"He did, and the truth of it seemed to sink in some. He shoved the man aside and spat in the street. 'I don't believe what I'm witnessing here,' he rebuked the crowd. 'You people make me sick! You think I'm the only one fighting the Invid? Well, there are plenty of others. People who aren't ready to roll over and play dead, understand?'"

"The crowd looked at him pityingly. He donned his helmet, mounted the Cyclone, and took off without a word to any of us."

"I felt that I had to back Scott up and made some kind of silly speech about selling out strangers, but it all fell on deaf ears. Except Annie's."

"'That goes for me, too,' she told the crowd. 'I wouldn't want to live in this rotten town anyway.' With that, she threw herself onto the cycle's rear seat and told me to 'let 'er rip.'"

"Annie hugged herself to me for all it was worth, and I could almost feel her tears through my shirt. But when I asked if she was okay, she said she would make it all right. I was certain she had known worse moments in her life..."

"When we caught up with Scott, I asked about his plans."

"'Somehow or other I've got to find Reflex Point,' he yelled without bothering to look over at me."

"He had mentioned this when we first met and once or twice since but had never explained its meaning. 'You keep talking about this place as if it's the most important thing in the world.'"

"'It is,' Scott threw back sternly, and accelerated out front."

"There was something about his attitude that put me off, or maybe I was just hoping for an argument that would split us up and return me to my solo riding. I said, 'You know what your problem is? You don't know how to communicate with people! Now that you've had a taste of the old homeworld, don't you think you'd be a lot happier back in space with your girlfriend?'"

"His silence told me I'd gotten to him."

"'Lay off,' he snapped back, accelerating again. 'Marlene's dead.'" "It literally stopped me cold in my tracks."

"'He never told you?' Annie said as we watched Scott disappear over a rise up ahead."

"'Not one word about it,' I mumbled. It explained a lot about Scott's behavior, his obsession with waging this one-man war of his..."

"'I know how he feels,' Annie was saying. 'Being the woman so many men dream of, and yet so unlucky in love, has made me very sensitive to this sort of thing.'"

"I didn't know whether she was trying to make me laugh or what, but her comment succeeded in lightening my spirits. Then she slammed me on the back: 'Hey, come on! We're gonna lose Scott if we don't get a move on!'"

"I asked her if she was sure about leaving Ken behind, and she made a face."

"'Uh-huh. I have a feeling my next lover's going to be my last. Now, let's get moving, Rand!'"

"She pounded her tiny fists against my back again, and we were gone."

CHAPTER FIVE

Mom was, as they used to say at the turn of the century, one tough broad. She was the most respected member of the Blue Angels, and even after her falling out with Romy and her flight from Cavern City, her name was adopted by only those riders who shot for the narrows, and scrawled on many a wall.

Maria Bartley-Rand,

Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

It wasn't much of a town-strictly Main-Street frontier, run-down and dirty-and it wasn't much of a bar, but at least the place offered cold beer (even if it was locally brewed and bitter-tasting), shade, and a singer backed by a decent pickup band.

After all of the battles are over After all of the fighting is done Will you be the one

To find yourself alone with your heart Looking for the answer?

Rook Bartley lifted her glass and toasted the singer. The song was soft and downbeat, just what she needed to ease herself into the blues, trip through memories she couldn't do anything about.

Rook took a look around the place over the rim of her mug. It was dimly lit and poorly ventilated but surprisingly clean and tidy for a joint in the wastes. There was the usual assortment of types, Foragers mostly, keeping to themselves in the corners, nursing drinks and private thoughts. A couple or two wrapped around each other on the cleared space that passed for a dance floor. And several bad boys on the upper tier, boots up on the table, midnight shades. Rook judged they were locals from the way they were scanning the room for action, your basic rough trade feeling safe

on the barren piece of turf they had secured for themselves. Rook returned to her drink, unimpressed.

She was a petite and shapely eighteen-year-old with a mane of strawberry-blond hair and a face that more than one man had fallen in love with. She was wearing a red and white short-sleeved bodysuit that hugged her in all the right places. It was set off by forearm sheaths, a blue utility belt, and boots, an outfit styled to match the mecha she rode, a red Cyclone she had liberated from an armory just after her split from the Blue Angels, the assault by the Snakes...

When it feels like tomorrow will never come When it seems like the night will not end Can you pretend

That you're really not alone?

You're out here on your own (Lonely soldier boy) You're out here on your own (Lonely soldier boy)

Rook settled back in her chair to study the group's lead singer, a rocker well known in the wastes who called herself Yellow Dancer. The song had taken an unanticipated leap to four-four, guitar and keyboards wailing, and Yellow was off to one side of the low stage, clapping in time and allowing the band their moment in the spots. She was tall and rather broad-shouldered, Rook thought, but attractive in a way that appealed to men and women both. Her hair was long but shagged, tinted slightly lavender and held by a green leather band that chevroned in the center of her forehead. Yellow's stage clothes were not at all elaborate-pumps, tight-fitting slacks, and a strapless top trimmed in purple-but were well suited to her tall frame and flattering to her figure.

Yellow stepped back to the mike to acknowledge the applause. She was modest and smiling until one of the bad boys decided to change the tempo somewhat.

"Hey, baby face!" he called out, getting up from the table and

approaching the stage. "Me and my friends don't like your music. It stinks, y' hear?"

Rook had expected as much. It was the one with the pointed chin and wraparound sunglasses, the apparent gang leader. He was wearing tight jeans tucked into suede shin boots and a short-sleeve shirt left unbuttoned.

"It's garbage, it ain't music," he insulted the singer.

Rook wondered how Yellow would handle it; the pickup band were locals, as was most of the room. No one was exactly rising to her defense, but neither was she showing signs of concern.

"Well, why don't you just give these people a sample of what you consider music?" she taunted back.

Some of the crowd found the comeback amusing, which only managed to put Yellow's critic on the spot. Rather than risk making a fool of himself, he decided to teach her a quick lesson and stepped forward swinging a lightning right.

"I'll give 'em a sample," he said at the same time.

But Yellow was even faster; still maintaining her place, she ducked to the left, leaving vacuum in her wake. The rogue's arm sailed clean through nothingness, wrapping itself around the mike stand, and threw him completely off balance. The crowd howled, and Yellow smiled. But in that instant, her assailant recollected himself, turned, and caught her across the face with an open-hand left.

Yellow's head snapped back, but not for long. She countered with a right, open-hand also but hooked a bit to bring her nails into play. The man took the blow full force to his temple and cheek; his glasses were knocked askew, and blood had been drawn.

"Now we're even," she said to the leader, whose back was still turned to her. But she now had the rest of the gang to answer to as well; they had left their tables and were approaching her threateningly. "How about calling it quits, fellahs?" she told them. "Tag-team wrestling isn't scheduled until Saturday night, and we wouldn't want to mess up the program, would we?"

Rook had to laugh; either she knew what she was doing or she was one

of those who got her kicks facedown. Rook had reason to believe it was the former, however. Yellow was set like an upsprung trap, her legs slightly bent, her fists clawed. At the same time, she was keeping an eye on the one she had already wounded and was more than ready for him when he pounced.

"You little witch!" the man snarled. "I'll kill you!"

He moved in and swung a roundhouse left with little of the lightning that had characterized his first swing and none of the ambivalence of the second. But once again, Yellow was left untouched, and the momentum carried the man off the stage, practically into the arms of his henchmen.

"I've enjoyed our little dancing lesson," Yellow joked, backing away somewhat. "But if it's all the same to you, this place is paying me to sing." Her eyes darted right and left, plotting an escape if needed. "Of course, we can pick up where we left off after the show-you could sure use some work on your fox-trot, you know-and if you're all nice boys, I'll teach you to rumba..."

The gang was closing in on her, and Rook was beginning to rethink her earlier evaluation of Yellow Dancer. Whatever happened now, she had some of it coming. Meanwhile the club owner had appeared on the stage to intercede. But Rook had to laugh again, grog making it up into her nose. Not only was the dude pushing seventy, but he began his little speech by referring to Yellow's opponents as gentlemen!

"If you can't control yourselves," he continued, his white mustache twitching, "I'm going to have to ask you all to leave!"

You and what army, Rook said to herself, quoting the punch line of an old T'sentrati joke.

One of the toughs, a mean-looking little guy in a muscle shirt, had whipped out a throwing knife during the old man's attempted reprimand. He gave the knife a backhand toss now, sending it whizzing past the owner's head and straight into the plywood wall behind the stage.

"Mind your manners, Gramps!" the youth cautioned.

Rook sighed tiredly, swallowed the last two drops of her drink, and stood up from the table.

"Boy, you guys sure have guts," she told the gathered gang members. They turned slowly toward her as she knew they would, looks of disbelief on their faces. "Think you can handle her all by yourselves?"

This brought immediate catcalls and challenges from the rest of the room. Rook smiled for the audience's benefit and winked at the gang leader. She had been through scenes like this too often to count, and she knew the leader's type as well as she knew herself. She was confident she could take him, and that would eliminate the need to go one on one with the others. All she had to do was go after the leader's pride, and she had already made a good start in that direction...

"Blondie, take my advice and stay out of this or you'll be next," he warned her.

Rook looked away nonchalantly. "Maybe if two of you held her down while the others ran for reinforcements...Then you might have a chance."

The catcalls increased in volume and originality. Even the leader cracked an appreciative smile. He steadied his shades and gave Rook the once-over. "A comedian." He sneered. "Too bad for you I've got such a poor sense of humor, 'cause I'm gonna make you sorry you ever walked in here."

The nasty little knife thrower produced a second shiv, but the leader motioned him back. "She's mine," he told his boys, and launched himself into a charge.

Rook had plenty of time to prepare and position herself; plus she had already sized up the guy's strengths and weaknesses. He was coming at her full force, yelling at the top of his lungs, his hands at shoulder height slightly out front. On the balls of her feet now, Rook dropped herself into a crouch and brought her right arm in front of her face, elbow pointed outward. When the leader was within range, she twisted back, then sprang up and took her shot, catching the man square in the larynx.

Instantly, he went down on his knees, hands clutching his throat. "You almost killed me," he managed to rasp.

"Well, come at me again and let's see if I can get it right this time," Rook answered him.

The room was full of applause and cheers by now; even some of the gang members were laughing.

Rook heard Yellow Dancer say, "I think the baboon's overmatched," just before the leader growled and shouted, "Stop laughing!"

Then the knife wielder started to move in...

Outside the bar, two Cyclones were added to the long row of cycles and various hybrid vehicles that lined the town's main street. Scott and Rand glanced at the cycles and at the bar and traded questioning looks.

"Shall we go in?" Rand asked.

Scott shrugged and removed his helmet. "What've we got to lose?" "That's not what I wanted to hear," Rand started to say, but Annie was

already off the Cyclone and heading for the door. "Come on, Rand. I'm dry enough to spit cotton."

Rand exhaled forcibly and dismounted wondering just how he had let things get so out of hand. Just one more town, he had told himself. A place where he could feel all right about leaving Annie and saying a final farewell to Scott. Then it was going to be back to solo riding and the open road. But that had been three days and several towns ago, not one of which suited his needs. Nor did he have especially good feelings about this one. Two rows of ruined high-tech prefabs split by the northern highway and squeezed between the stone walls of an arid canyon, the place had a filthy, forlorn look to it. It seemed as though the town had surrendered long before the Invid's arrival.

"They could at least clean the place up," Rand said to Scott now. "Bunch of lazy slobs..."

"You country boys do things differently, I suppose," Scott said in a patronizing way.

Rand scowled. "At least we have enough self-respect to keep our homes from becoming pigsties. You wonder why I'd rather five off the land, Scott? Well, look around."

"Oh, quit arguing, you two," Annie said, stepping through the

barroom's swinging doors. "This dump isn't so bad. What do you think they do for fun around here?"

Inside, the first thing that greeted their eyes was a knife fight.

An attractive young woman in a red bodysuit was squaring off against a mean-looking youth wielding what looked like a hunting knife. Onlookers were cheering and offering words of encouragement to both parties. On the room's stage, a tall, lean female and a white-haired old man yelled for the fight to stop.

Scott stopped short. "It's her!?" "Who?" said Annie.

"She's the one who helped us out the other day-the girl on the Cyclone!"

Rand's eyes went wide. "The girl on the Cyclone? Now you tell me!...Well what are we waiting for? Let's go-"

"No, hold up a minute." Scott put his arm out to restrain Rand. "I'm sure she can handle herself all right."

"But they'll kill her," said Annie.

Scott shook his head. "No, I don't think so."

Rand decided that Scott might be right. The woman moved like a dancer, dodging the youth's every thrust and overhand, her blond hair twirling about her face. One of the other men in the crowd was urging the knifer on with threats of his own.

"Stop your prancin' around! Stick her, man! Stick her!"

But the woman wasn't about to let that happen. She backed away with calculated deliberation, turning and folding at just the right moments. Rand could see that the rogue was losing patience and getting sloppy with his cover; he also noted that this was not lost on the woman in red. She set herself, legs wide, and waited for him to come in. Sure enough, the youth tried an over-the-top reverse and left himself wide open; the woman spun out from under it and completed her turn with a roundhouse kick that nailed him across the face, throwing him against one of the tables. The knifer went down as the table collapsed under him, but a second man, a

large, dark-skinned tough wearing an earflapped cap, caught the woman from behind in a full nelson. She tried to struggle free but found herself overpowered. At the same time a third member of the gang sauntered in and took the knife from his fallen comrade. He tapped the tip of the blade menacingly against the woman's cheek.

"You can say good-bye to that pretty face of yours, sister," Rand heard the man say.

Scott was already stepping in, as was the female singer, who had started to grab for the knife stuck in the wall behind the stage. But Rand moved quicker than both of them. He swept up a heavy half-empty goblet from a nearby table and hurled it, knocking the knife from the gang leader's hand. As the youth screamed and dropped, holding his struck hand, Rand yelled, "Duck!" and launched a second glass.

Rook saw this one headed her way and stretched herself thin in the larger man's hold, arms fully extended as she slithered down. The glass hit the man in the face, and his hold on her collapsed; he was holding his nose and moaning when Rook brought her boot down onto his instep and turned away out of reach.

"I'm gonna kill you for that!" the man yelled. But when he took his hands away from his face, he found himself staring at Scott's drawn blaster.

"Get moving-all of you!" Scott told them.

Weapons were a common enough sight in the waste, but a blaster was seldom seen. Taken by surprise, the gang members began to back toward the swinging doors. "You win this one, soldier," the leader threw over his shoulder. "But the war's not over yet."

In a moment the sounds of revving and departing cycles filled the bar.

Rook looked disdainfully at her rescuers; she recognized them as the three she had saved from an Invid setup in Laako three days before. The redheaded one named Rand was eyeing her appreciatively.

"Why'd you have to butt in?" Rook said harshly, and left the bar. "Guess there's no pleasing some people," Rand threw after her. "Swelled head!" said Annie, making a face and gesturing.

"Well, I'm grateful for your help," said a lilting voice.

Rand turned and nearly fell over. It was Yellow Dancer! He hadn't recognized her before and could hardly believe his eyes now. "It can't be," he stammered, unable to control his excitement. "I've seen you at least twenty times, but I never thought I'd get the chance..." He turned and made a desperate lunge for a napkin and shoved it toward Yellow. "I know it's silly, but...it's for my kid sister, you know?"

Yellow smiled knowingly. The bar owner took a pen from his jacket pocket and passed it to her. "To your kid sister," said Yellow, chuckling. "As always..."

Annie saw Scott's look of bewilderment and said, "It's Yellow Dancer.

Haven't you ever heard of her?"

Scott smiled thinly and shook his head. "Boy, you're really out of it, Scott."

Scott ignored the comment and turned to the owner. "That gang, who are they?"

The man shrugged. "The usual riffraff. Their kind seem to be just about everywhere nowadays."

"Yes, but what about the local authorities-have you thought of asking them to do something?"

Rand raised his eyes to the ceiling in a dramatic gesture and turned away embarrassed.

The manager stared at Scott a moment, then said, "Mister, those are the local authorities."

CHAPTER SIX

Tirolian society-that is, the generation of Terrans that grew to manhood and womanhood under T.R. Edwards, Dr. Emil Lang, and to some extent (by proxy, as it were), Admiral Rick and Commander Lisa Hunter-took a decidedly different course than its counterpart on Earth (under Chairman Moran, Supreme Commander Leonard, et al.). Thanks to Edwards's chauvinism, bigotry, and undisguised misogyny, one would certainly have been hard pressed to encounter the likes of a Dana Sterling or a Marie Crystal among the Tirolian contingent...Scott Bernard had been raised in such a milieu, and there were things, as well as attitudes, on Earth that he had never dreamed possible.

Xandu Reem,

A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard

Ringo and his boys roared away from the bar and regrouped at the edge of town. Their cycles, one outfitted with a sidecar, were well equipped with weapons, and it would have been simple to blast and torch the bar; but that wasn't really an option: Pops' had the coldest beer within three hundred miles. So they decided to turn their frustrations against any newcomers who might wander into town; a bit of the old ultraviolence, as it had once been called. Instead, however, they soon found an even more suitable target in the form of the ex-soldier named Lunk, who had been in town on and off for the past two months. More than once Ringo had attempted to goad the man into a fight with less than satisfying results. The attempts had increased in frequency once Ringo found out something about Lunk's recent military past, but still he was unable to push the man into a hand-to-hand confrontation.

But now, after his humiliating run-in with the strangers in the bar, Ringo was in no mood for subtlety or verbal provocation. No sooner had Lunk's battered six-wheel personnel carrier lumbered by the gang's

edge-of-town position than Ringo ordered his men into pursuit. There was nothing like a little manhunting to pick you up when you were feeling down. Lunk was twenty-five, a huge, barrel-chested man with almost brutish facial features: a wide, prominent chin, heavy-lidded, soulful eyes, and a broad, flat nose. He had let his hair grow long these past few months and kept it out of his face with a yellow elastic headband. His size alone would have given most men pause, but there was something soft and secretive about him that often allowed smaller aggressive types to feel they could

have a free hand with him.

One look at Ringo's impromptu roadside gathering and Lunk knew that he was in for it; he told his companion, Kevin, to hang on and began to push the ancient APC along the town's main street for all it was worth.

He could see four cycles in the carrier's circular outboard rearview mirrors now; Ringo's men were opening up with handlebar and faring-mounted weapons, toying with him as he swerved the heavy vehicle left and right.

"How many of them are there?!" Kevin asked in a panic from the shotgun seat.

"Too many!" Lunk yelled back as machine-gun rounds fractured the mirrors.

Two rockets exploded in the street in front of the APC, and Lunk braked hard, losing control. The vehicle slid off the roadway and crashed into an enormous pile of debris that had been 'dozed away from a fallen storefront. The impact left Lunk and Kevin momentarily stunned, but they quickly shook themselves out of it and scampered out of the carrier's open top, taking careless and crazed giant strides down the back side of the heap.

Ringo and his boys threw their bikes into the pile with equal abandon, launching themselves over the top only to careen down the rear face, laughing maniacally all the while. Lunk and Kevin had taken an alleyway that led to the main street, so Ringo ordered his gang to split up, sending the sidecar cyclist one way and instructing the others to form up on his lead. Lunk wasn't aware of the trap until he saw the sidecar skid around a

corner and head his way. Turning, he heard Ringo and the rest of the bikes behind him. He shoved Kevin toward the debris-strewn sidewalk, hoping they would be able to make it into one of the abandoned buildings, but at the same moment the sidecar driver gunned it and came down on them. One of Ringo's gang-a dark-skinned dude every inch as big as Lunk-leaned out from the sidecar seat and made a grab for Kevin. Lunk flattened himself against the street, but Kevin sidestepped too late. Ringo's man managed to get a handful of shirt and shoulder, and by the time Lunk looked up, Kevin was being dragged down the street by the cycle.

Lunk heard him scream for help but could do nothing; Ringo's men were accelerating toward him now, shouting and yahooing. Lunk spun around and ran toward Pops' bar. Halfway there, the sound of the cycles ringing in his ears, Lunk noticed that a group of men and women were gathered out front. And one of them was raising a weapon of some kind...

He dropped himself into a tuck-and-roll seconds before the weapon fired. The round impacted against an unbraced section of heaped-up vehicles and mecha parts and loosed some of it into a slide. Lunk heard shouts and the squeal of brakes behind him. One of the bikes went down, sliding uncontrolled along the street with a rasping, scraping sound. Lunk reached Pops' just as Ringo's cycle pulled up, but the gang leader found himself confronting the man with the weapon.

"You again," Lunk heard Ringo seethe. "You're really pressing your luck, robby."

Hearing Ringo use the derisive slang term for a Robotech soldier, Lunk turned to study his rescuer. The man was straddling a Cyclone and wearing a uniform with patches Lunk couldn't identify. Nor was the weapon familiar.

"Put your hands where I can see them," the soldier told Ringo. "Now turn your cycles around and get out of here. The party's over."

Ringo adjusted his dark glasses and flashed one of his infamous grins. "Have it your way..." He looked over at Lunk. "If you wanna see your friend alive, come on out to the ranch-if you have the guts, that is!"

The three cycles roared off, and the soldier asked about Lunk's friend. Lunk quickly scanned the crowd: mostly locals he had seen before, but there were three or four he didn't recognize. Two attractive women and some carrot-topped kid. Another Cyclone rider. They were staring at him expectantly.

"Stay out of it," Lunk said, starting to walk off.

Spider stepped out of the crowd; they had ridden together previously, Spider, Lunk, and Kevin...

"Hey, Lunk, you're not going to just walk away?" Spider said to him questioningly. "We've gotta go get 'im, man. We can't leave him with Ringo!"

Lunk stopped, hung his head, then resumed his heavy steps.

"With a friend like you, a guy doesn't need enemies," the soldier called out to the delight of the crowd.

Lunk spun around, ashamed but angry; Spider and the others were still waiting.

"All right," the soldier was saying, strapping on some sort of pectoral armor. "Where's this ranch? How far is it from here?"

"About five miles-" Pops started to say, but the soldier's younger companion interrupted.

"Hang on a minute, Scott," the redhead said. "You can't keep fighting everybody's battles for them. You think you're going to whip the whole planet back into shape single-handed, and I think you're nuts!"

"I wouldn't advise tangling with Ringo, stranger,"' Pops added. "Just take our thanks and ride on out of here."

But Scott didn't answer either of them. He put his helmet on, started the Cyclone, and wheelied off. A woman in similar armor riding a red mecha followed him. Lunk heard the soldier's companion mutter a curse and yell for Scott to slow down; then he angrily straddled his own Cyclone and joined the others.

"Lunk..." Spider said leadingly.

Lunk spun around, a determined look on his face now. "All right, let's

go."

"Really?"

"I won't let those bums make a chump outta me, Spider. Kevin's our

friend, and we can't leave him out there." Lunk turned to the crowd. "I need some wheels. I've got scrip enough to rent 'em."

"Take mine," said Pops, fishing keys out of his shirt pocket. "And don't worry about paying me, either."

Lunk caught the tossed chain, threw a thanks over his shoulder, and ran over to Pops' olive-drab tri-wheel. Spider straddled the rear seat. Lunk noticed that the tall woman singer he had seen once or twice in the bar was also headed toward her vehicle. Meanwhile, the little kid with the E.T. cap was beside him, introducing herself as Annie.

"Are you married by any chance?" she asked Lunk. Lunk's face twisted up in shock. "What, are you kiddin'?"

Annie threw open her arms and said, "You lucky boy!" as Lunk rode off, a look of bewilderment on his face. "The man of my dreams," she added a moment later, climbing into Yellow Dancer's pink roll-barred jeep.

Scott's improvised posse of seven followed the road out of town to a turnoff that wound up into the hills. They stopped once so that Scott and Rook could suit Rand up in Cyclone armor and run him quickly through the basics of mechamorphosis.

The ranch sat at the crest of a gentle rise near a wide stream that made it one of the choicest spots in the district. It was enclosed by a rustic post-and-rail fence, and there were patches of grass and a few beautiful old trees that had weathered more storms, natural and otherwise, than anyone cared to guess. Scott and company rode in without ceremony and found Ringo's gang waiting for them in the shade of an immense oak. There were five of them: the knife-wielding punk, the hulk, and two others who had been with Ringo in the bar earlier that day. They were all astride their bikes-the hulk in his usual sidecar seat-grouped close together in a shallow arc, cycle weapons pointed outward. Kevin was behind them, lashed by

thick rope to the tree trunk.

Scott ordered his group to a haft two hundred yards from the tree. Ringo's group wouldn't have stood a chance against the firepower of one Cyclone, let alone three, but it was obvious from the start that Ringo wanted to go one on one with Lunk. Kevin's precarious position guaranteed against any Cyclone fireworks, so in a certain sense (as was always the case when hostages were involved) Scott's position was the more vulnerable one.

Lunk was aware of what was going down and asked Spider to climb off the triple-wheeler. It was likely, given Ringo's flair for dramatics, that he would begin the festivities with a bike joust, and Lunk figured he could handle the thing better if he was alone.

"Okay, but be careful," Spider said, stepping away. Lunk snorted. "I'm sick to death of being careful."

Rand and Rook were side by side a few yards away, with Scott slightly off to one side behind them. "I can't figure out why you came," Rand was saying to the red Cyclone rider through the helmet. "You've got no stake in this."

"I've got just as much reason to be here as you," Rook said harshly without looking over at him.

"Everybody stay loose," Scott warned. "Keep your fingers away from the triggers. I don't want anyone getting hurt unless it can't be helped."

"No great loss, if you ask me," Rook muttered.

Rand glanced over at her. "Reminds me of a movie I saw once.

Gunfight at the...I can't remember the title. But what happens is that-" "People die in real life, pal. Keep that in mind."

Before Rand could say anything, Ringo called out: "Hey, Lunky-boy-I can hear your knees knockin' together! Is it gonna be just you and me, or do you need the army behind you?" Ringo's gang hooted and howled. "I mean, you didn't have much use for the army a while ago, did ya? In fact, you got a history of runnin' away from fights, the way I hear it. Ain't that right?"

Lunk gritted his teeth. Sweat was beading up across his face, and indeed, his knees were knocking against the valve covers of the cycle's

engine. "You don't know nothin' about it, ya little shit!" he managed to bite out.

Ringo laughed and slapped his knee. "Sorry if I blew your cover. I keep forgettin' you're too modest to brag about your military record!"

"What're you trying to prove?" Lunk yelled, muscles and veins standing out like cords in his beefy neck.

"Nothin'," Ringo returned. "Nothin' at all. 'Cept the Invid hate soldiers, and since we don't have much use for them ourselves, we decided to help them along this time."

Lunk began to rev his cycle, but Scott gestured to him to hold his ground. "Hand over your hostage!" Scott demanded of Ringo.

The gang leader turned to his men and laughed. "We might just make you part of today's quota, robby!"

"Yeah, we ain't picky!" the knifer threw in.

"And we're not afraid of your firepower, neither," the hulk yelled from the sidecar, raising a bazooka-type weapon into view.

"They're psyching themselves up," Rook cautioned the others. "Be ready!"

On Ringo's word the four cycles leapt forward in a charge, but all at once a round detonated in their midst, throwing some of them off their machines. Scott, Rand, and Rook exchanged looks, wondering who had fired. Then they heard Spider and Annie's simultaneous screams and looked up: Three Invid Shock Troopers had appeared over the canopy of the oak tree. Ringo and his boys were bolting for the shelter of the ranch house as continued flashes from the Troopers' shoulder cannons shook the ground and blew their cycles apart. Kevin was trying desperately to free himself from the tree trunk, and Annie was shouting, "Do something!"

Scott took the initiative and shot his Cyclone forward, engaging the thrusters and going to Battle Armor mode as the mecha left the ground. Two of the Invid went after him, while the third dropped in low toward Lunk and the others. Rand was working the system switches frantically, eager for the mecha to reconfigure.

"Come on! Come on!...What the heck's wrong with this thing!?" he said to Rook.

"Just calm down," she told him. "Remember what Scott told you-your thoughts have to help it along. Relax and stop bashing away at it." Rook lowered her head and threw the thumb switch. Rand watched amazed as the cycle restructured, wrapping itself around her and integrating with her armor. "Treat it gently-like it's alive," Rook added, standing now.

Scott meanwhile was off in another part of the grassy fields dancing between the annihilation discs sent his way by the Troopers who had put down on either side of him. Lunk saw him lift off after half a dozen agile leaps and bounces and return fire from the suit's forearm rocket launchers.

"I can't escape it!" Lunk yelled to no one in particular. "I thought I'd never be fighting again!"

Rook was engaging the third Invid, while Rand continued to struggle with reconfiguration. He was about to give up on it, when he felt the mecha's reciprocal vibe, and suddenly the damned thing was actually conforming itself to his armor. He stood up, showing a look of disbelief under the helmet's faceplate, and gently engaged the system's hoverthrusters, searching the skies for signs of Rook or Scott. At last he saw the red Cyclone rider. She was powering up through a backflip one minute and dropping like a stiff-legged bomb the next. But her Invid target leapt away in time, hooking itself overhead and dishing out a blast that nearly caught her. She avoided the explosion by launching straight up, but the Trooper was sticking close, discharging two more bolts, one of which nicked her armor and sent her into a spinning descent toward a stand of trees.

Scott was handling himself well against the other two Troopers but had yet to land a Scorpion on either of them. He was down on the ground now, getting off another shot before the Invid surrounded him, pincers swinging, discs cratering the soft earth. Rand joined him, and together they managed to chase the Troopers off momentarily.

Scott was congratulating Rand on his mechamorphosis when Lunk pulled up alongside on the triplewheeler.

"You weren't ever a member of the space battalion, were you?" Lunk asked Scott.

"Yeah?..." said Scott. "So what?" "Then you can fly a Veritech."

"Of course I can," Scott said excitedly. "Do you have one?" Lunk nodded. "Follow me."

Rand watched them zoom off, Scott running alongside Lunk's cycle. He dodged an Invid that attempted to flatten him into the ground and brought his forearm up to fire. But the Trooper was already flying off to link up with the other two, all three headed in the same general direction as Lunk and Scott.

If I hang around with this guy long enough, I'm gonna get myself killed for sure, Rand said to himself.

Then Rook was suddenly beside him, upright in Battle Armor mode and hovering two feet off the ground. "What's the matter," she asked him, "your joints rusting up on you or something?"

"No, I was just trying to-"

"You really aren't much use in combat, are you?"

"Hey, wait a minute!" Rand shouted as she began to hover off in the same configuration. "It's not like I'm supposed to be here, you know. I mean, technically I'm a noncombatant, did you know that? Did I ever tell you about the time I fought off three Invid patrols at the same time...?"

From the cover of the ranch house, Ringo watched Spider set Kevin free from the ropes that held him to the tree. Knifer was kneeling by the window, peering over the stool; the hulk was cowering in a corner under a shelf.

"Stop your whinin', you lily-livered rogue!" Ringo shouted from the window.

Knifer looked up. "Hey, Ringo, I think I can hear your knees knockin'."

Ringo made an exasperated face and brought his fist down on Knifer's skull. "It's because I'm mad, bonehead. Mad, mad, mad!" He punctuated each word with a follow-up blow.

Elsewhere, Annie was asking Yellow Dancer why she was hanging around. They were in the singer's pink armored vehicle, parked some distance from the scene of the initial fighting. "What do you want from them?" Annie wanted to know. "I'm warning you, I can get very jealous."

Yellow turned to her from the driver's seat with an enigmatic smile. "Believe me," she assured Annie, "there's absolutely nothing for you to be jealous of."

"Well, then, it's okay," Annie said, perking up. "You can hang around as much as you want."

The Veritech hangar was a dilapidated circular building, holed in numerous places, with a hemispherical red roof sectioned off and reinforced by curved trusses. A mostly ruined solar windmill rose alongside the structure, which Scott guessed was a barn of some sort. Up ahead, he saw Lunk give a wave, jump the triple-wheeler from the top of a small grassy embankment, and accelerate through the fallow fields that led to the makeshift hangar. The Invid Shock Troopers were in hot pursuit overhead, their gleaming crablike bodies filling the sky.

"Hurry!" Scott could hear Lunk shout.

Scott had been expecting to find the rusting shell of a first-generation Veritech, but once inside the building his hopes took a leap forward. Carefully positioned in the spacious loft was what looked to be a well-maintained Alpha Fighter, sans augmentation pack and boosters, and certainly a leftover from the latter stages of the Second Robotech War.

"Climb in," said Lunk. "She's ready to fly."

"Who's been maintaining it?" Scott asked as he struggled out of the reconfigured Cyclone.

"Listen, I'm not as stupid as you might think," Lunk said, raising his voice above explosive volleys from the Invid. Discs were striking the fields nearby, loosening dirt and debris from the exposed rafters. "I was a certified bio-maintenance engineer. Trust me, this baby will fly like a dream."

Scott climbed into the barn loft and gave the Veritech's radome an

affectionate pat. He threw himself up to the open canopy, got a good handhold, and slipped into the cockpit. He hadn't bothered to change out of the Cyclone armor, but now he exchanged his helmet for the Veritech's own "thinking cap" and began a run-through of the systems. It was so long since he had piloted a VT in atmosphere, he wondered if he could bring it off now. "Everything seems in order!" he called down to Lunk as an explosion

tore out a huge section of wall.

Lunk's hands went to his ears, and he threw himself to cover. Through the breach in the wall, Scott glimpsed the three Troopers land and begin their approach on the barn. I'll never be able to power up fast enough to get out of here! he thought.

But just then Rand and Rook arrived to check the aliens' advance. The red Cycloner launched herself like a projectile straight into one of the Trooper's optic sensors, while Rand fired two Scorpions against a second. It was all the time Scott needed to bring up the Protoculture levels of the Veritech, and a moment later, much to Rand's consternation, the radome of the VT was punching through the barn's roof.

Scott threw the VT into a steep climb, luring the Troopers away from their swipe attacks against Rook and Rand. Rand watched the fighter accelerate through a sweeping arc and head back into the faces of its pursuers, destroying one with a missile too swift for his eyes to track. But that was only the beginning. Now the fighter was reconfiguring to Battloid mode and leading the two remaining Invid on a high-speed chase over the countryside.

Scott thought the ship upright-a techno-knight standing in thin air-while salvos of annihilation discs beamed past him. He reached out, throwing levers that opened the missile compartments built into the Battloid's forearm, shoulder, and lower-leg armor, and thought the systems through to launch. It was all coming back to him now-it had to! For a moment, the techno-knight was encompassed in energy balloons; then dozens of missiles tore from their launch racks like so many red-tipped arrows of death. The Troopers took the full storm and were all but

disintegrated by the force of the blasts.

Down below, Kevin and Spider were running toward the barn, a few steps ahead of Annie, who had just leapt from Yellow's jeep and was calling out for Lunk. Rook and Rand had already reconfigured their Cyclones and were doffing the hot and cumbersome battle armor when Scott brought the VT down, cut the engines, and threw open the canopy.

Lunk stepped from the barn unharmed and caught Annie midair as she jumped up and threw her arms around his neck. "There you are!" she gushed. "I knew they wouldn't get you, I knew you'd come back to me!"

Lunk held her away, offering a miffed but understanding grin. "I've decided you're the only one for me!"

"Well, thanks," said Lunk. "I wish I could say the same." He smiled tolerantly and gently lowered Annie to the ground. "You're a little young for me...And besides, I've got other plans."

Annie stared up at him, despondent, and asked what those other plans might be.

Lunk threw his massive shoulders back. "Join the resistance," he said to all of them. "See if I can make up for past mistakes."

"I'd be glad to join forces with you, Lunk," said Scott. "If you mean what you say..."

Kevin looked from one to the other. "He's not serious, robby. Are you, Lunk?"

Lunk nodded. "I'm sick of sneakin' around like a frightened little weasel. Face it, Kevin, I'm a soldier, after all. And it's time I started acting like one."

"Use your head, Lunk," Kevin countered. "This war's a lost cause. What can two, ten, or even two hundred do against the Invid?"

"We can try," said Lunk.

Annie made a disappointed sound and turned her back to Lunk, hands behind her head. "And I thought you were special..."

Lunk bent down, perplexed, to ask: "But a minute ago I was the man of

your dreams, remember?"

Annie's lips tightened, and she shook her head. "A long time ago I decided I'd never marry a soldier. They don't last long enough nowadays."

Kevin and Spider laughed.

"The kid's no dummy, that's for sure," Rand offered.

Yellow stepped down from the jeep and approached the VT. "I'd like to sign up for the team, Scott."

Rook sent a knowing elbow into Rand's ribs at the same time Kevin sent one into Spider's. But Scott's answer disappointed all of them.

"Thanks," he said from the cockpit. "But we don't have enough troops yet to hire an entertainer."

"There's a lot more to me than meets the eye," said Yellow.

"As if that isn't enough," Rand commented under his breath but loudly enough for Rook to hear.

"All I see is an attractive woman in a rather slinky outfit," said Scott. "Wrong on both counts," Yellow answered him, walking back to the

jeep. "I've got something to show you. "

A buzz of general puzzlement swept through the would-be team as Yellow sauntered off, especially when she turned her back to them and began to undo the rear buttons of her strapless top.

"Hey, w-wait a minute," Scott stammered in protest. "I appreciate your wanting to, er-show me, but don't think for a moment that's going to change my mind..."

"Is she going to do what I think she's going to do?" said Annie, gulping. "Sure looks that way," Rook said in an interested way.

Yellow meanwhile had removed her top and tossed it into the open jeep. She still had her back to them, long lavender hair falling all the way to the narrow band of her brassiere.

"H-hey, now hold on!" Rand said with a desperate tone.

Lunk laughed. "Well, she's right about one thing-she's not wearin' no slinky outfit anymore."

Yellow turned to throw them a wink over her shoulder, then reached

back the way only a woman can and unfastened the bra, letting it slip from her breasts. She still had her back to them when she undid her trousers and let them fall. The pink jeep concealed whatever treasures these moments might have held for the red-faced team.

"Now what's she doing?" Lunk said as Dancer picked up a towel and began to scrub her face with it.

"I don't know," Scott responded sternly. "But I want an end to it right now, hear me, Yellow? You can stop this little game, because we're not taking you with us, and that's final!"

Then Yellow swung around to face them.

And something was wrong, very wrong, indeed.

"Oh, no!" Rook screamed, and began to laugh hysterically. "Y-yellow Dancer?" Rand said tentatively.

Lunk, Kevin, and Spider drew in stunned but disappointed intakes of breath. Annie was simply confused; Scott, wordless. It was plain enough to see that Yellow Dancer was a man-a tall, rather hairless, lean and attractive man.

"You can start by calling me Lancer," he told his stunned audience, his voice deeper now. "I think the name suits me a little better. So, I hope there are no further objections to my tagging along with you."

"Well, I don't know..." Scott started to say. Woman or cross-dresser, what was the difference? he asked himself. But looking down at Rook now, he began to have second thoughts about all of this. Earth was a fascinating but bizarre place where women seemed to want to mix it up as much as the men. So maybe there was a place for her, er, him.

Rand meanwhile was beside himself. There were all those dreams of Yellow Dancer he had lived with for months-all those fantasies! "It can't be!" he was saying. "How could you do this to me-your biggest fan?!"

"I wasn't exactly thinking about you, Rand," Lancer said. "Yeah," Rook chimed in. "Not like he was thinking about you!"

Everyone laughed, except Lancer. "So how about it, Captain? Do I make the team or not?"

Scott and Lunk exchanged looks and shrugs. "Yes," Scott said at last. "I guess you do."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Mom, who thrived on adversity, had met her perfect foil in Rand.

Fortunately for me, they eventually worked it through.

Maria Bartley-Rand,

Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

The team had been formed: Scott, Rand, Rook, Annie, Lunk, and Lancer (although Scott wondered if the singer shouldn't be counted twice). None of them promised to accompany Scott all the way to Reflex Point-if such a place actually existed; it was simply a loose agreement among six people headed in the same general direction, each with a separate purpose in mind. Scott wanted to see the Invid defeated; at the very least he hoped to link up with other downed fighters from the Mars Division and establish an organized resistance. Lunk was searching for a redemption of sorts; Annie, for a family. But the aims of the others were less clear-cut; their pasts remained unrevealed, their motives somewhat suspect. Nevertheless, Scott had himself a team.

All he needed now was an adequate plan.

The present one wasn't working well at all. Rather than risk calling attention to their latest acquisition-the Alpha Fighter Lunk had so reverently maintained after his rather hasty departure from the Army of the Southern Cross-Scott and Lancer had flown the mecha north under the cover of night and secluded it along the river that marked the border of the neighboring territory. Lancer was to remain with the Veritech while Scott rode back to town on his Cyclone to collect the others. In the meantime, Lunk and Annie would be in charge of gathering up what they could in the way of supplies and foodstuffs. Rand and Rook would secure a safe route out for the loaded APC.

Things went smoothly enough at first; Lunk had seen to his assignment, and Scott rendezvoused with the APC/Cyclone convoy on schedule. They

had begun their trek north and entered the highlands when the Invid appeared. It hadn't paid to leave enemies the likes of Ringo behind...

Scott held the lead up the rugged mountain road;. Rand and Annie were a few lengths behind, then came Lunk in the APC and Rook on her red Cyclone. There were at least five Troopers in pursuit, with annihilation discs striking the cliff faces above and below the roadway.

Scott waved for the others to pour it on and accelerated along the arid slope.

Rook pulled alongside him and shouted above the deafening explosions. "They're gaining on us!" To maintain their low profile, they had opted against suiting up in helmets or battle armor.

"We haven't got a prayer unless we can reach the Alpha." Scott turned to Rand, who had come up on the inside, and told him to take the lead. He and Rook would stay behind to armor up and reconfigure for combat.

Rand signaled his assent, cautioned Annie to hold tight, and moved out front. But no sooner had they reached the crest than two Invid rose into view. Rand engaged the brakes, pivoting the mecha through a clean 180, and headed back down the hill.

Scott hadn't even dismounted yet. "Why are you turning around?" he shouted.

"They've got us surrounded," Rand reported. "We'd better go cross-country." He indicated the steep grade above the roadway and lowered his goggles.

"No. No detours," Scott argued. "The Alpha's only a few miles down the road-we've got to break through!"

Rand snorted and shook his head. "You break through, Captain. I'm heading for the hills." He stomped the Cyclone into gear and took off, scrambling up the rutted incline, heedless of Scott's shouts to stop. But not a moment later, Invid Troopers were ascending into view at both ends of the road, and Scott saw the logic of Rand's choice. He gestured to Rook and Lunk and screeched off up the hill.

There was a barren stretch of plateau at the top of the slope, separated

from twin fingers of pine forest by steep crevices too wide to jump. The Invid Troopers realized their advantage and began to loose disc storms of energy from their cannons. As always, there seemed to be an effort made to incapacitate rather than kill the humans, but it could just as easily have been poor marksmanship on their part. In any case, the plateau-great swirls of weathered rock and shale-was being torn up and superheated by the Troopers' fusillades. Lunk's APC, slower and far less maneuverable than the Cyclones, provided the best target, and the Invid were soon concentrating their bursts against it. Inside the cab, the big man was bouncing around like a featherweight, barely in control of the thing anymore. When a blinding disc streaked by inches from the carrier, he lost it completely; the APC crashed into a boulder and overturned, hurling Lunk twenty feet to a hard landing facedown on the shale. At the last instant, however, he had grabbed two sacks of supplies and had managed to hold on to them during his brief airborne journey. The sacks cushioned his fall somewhat, but he blacked out momentarily nevertheless. Coming to, he heard Rook's voice behind him, warning him to keep his head down. He did as instructed and felt rather than saw the red Cyclone streak over him.

Scott and Rand had witnessed the collision and stopped their Cyclones to return fire against the Troopers, bringing rear weapons into play. Behind them, Lunk was attempting to gather together and rebag items spilled from the sacks.

"Lunk! Forget that stuff and come on!" Scott shouted.

"But we need these Protoculture energy cells for the mecha!" Lunk countered, ducking as a series of annihilation discs Frisbeed overhead. The Invid were close at hand now, upright and laying out salvo after salvo of white-hot fire. Explosions began to erupt all around him, orange blossoms in the shale, and he was forced to abandon the supplies. He made a beeline for Scott's idling Cyclone, straddling the rear seat not a moment too soon.

"My toothbrush!" Lunk moaned, looking back at the wrecked APC as Scott gunned the mecha into a wheelie.

"So your teeth will fall out," Scott said into the wind. "It's better than

having your head blown off."

They were headed downhill a moment later, across a smooth flow of solid rock with an inviting forest of tall firs and eucalyptus at its base. As they neared the trees, Scott spied an unpaved road and made for it, signaling the others to follow his lead.

Two of the Invid attempted to track them but eventually gave up; it was widely believed (but certainly unproven) that the Invid had a kind of fearsome respect for forests in general. The Troopers circled overhead for a long while, then began to fan out trying to cover all possible points of egress. Meanwhile, Scott directed his band north in an effort to strike the river. By his reckoning, they were now somewhat west of Lancer and the Veritech, but reaching the river would put them in good position for a direct eastward swing.

The forest thinned as they worked their way north, giving way to a series of tall grass terraces that dropped in measured steps to the river gorge itself. The grass was deep enough to offer places of concealment for themselves as well as the Cyclones, so they continued their cautious advance. There was no sign of the enemy.

"Do you think we lost 'em?" Lunk asked, poking his head above the grass. He could see tall buttes and stone tors in the distance.

Rand answered him from nearby. "We must have-there's no way those things can follow a trail through the woods. Believe me, I know."

"How 'bout some food, then?"

Rook showed herself. "You really take the cake, Lunk." "I wish I could-"

"First you nearly get us all killed, and now all you can think about is that selfish stomach of yours!"

"Drop it!" Scott said more harshly than was necessary. He switched on his Cyclone briefly to read the system indicator displays. "You were right about those Protoculture cells, Lunk," he admitted. "It's imperative that I get back to the Alpha. Someone's going to have to draw the Invid off in case I'm spotted. We can't let them find the ship."

Rand suddenly shushed him. "They're coming," he whispered.

The team dropped themselves into the grass, raising weapons as they did so. Minutes later, three Troopers could be seen patrolling the gorge, their scanners alert for movement on the cliffs above the river.

"Everybody hold your fire," said Scott.

"How did they find us?" Rand said to no one in particular.

Annie put her hands to her breast. "I betcha they heard the sound of my heart pounding."

Rand stared down at the Mars-galant Scott had given him earlier; it was a long-barreled version of the sidearm blaster the offworlder wore, shaped a bit like an elongated closed-topped Y Time to go on-line with this thing, he said to himself. But no sooner did he flip the switch than the Troopers stopped their bipedal patrol and turned on them.

"Open fire!" Scott yelled as globes of fulgent energy formed at the muzzles of the Troopers' cannons.

Lunk, Rook, and Rand stood up, bringing their H-90's to bear against the invaders. Phased-laser fire seared into the Troopers' armored bodies, while annihilation discs ripped into the cliff's grassy terrace, touching off violent fires and clouds of dense smoke. Two more Invid appeared above the cliffs behind the team, adding their own volleys to the arena.

"We've gotta get back to the trees!" Rand shouted above the angry buzz of disc fire and concussive detonations.

"Lead them away from the Alpha!" said Scott. "You worry about the Alpha. I'm gone!"

Abandoning their Cyclones, the team broke ranks and began to belly-crawl their way through the grass back toward the tree line. They scaled slope after slope, beating a circuitous retreat across each terrace. The closest call came when Rook miscalculated and nearly slipped into a narrow ravine; but Rand was there for her, hauling her up and supporting her while they ran. In the forest once more, they took to the trees and hid themselves high up in the branches. Invid Troopers were walking sweeping patrols along the perimeter; two were actually braving the cool and dark mystery to

probe deep into the woods. Rand flicked his gallant on-line again as one of the latter group was passing beneath him. Curiously, the Invid stopped short, its would-be head rotating upward.

Rand took a sudden, sharp intake of breath-not out of fear but from realization. Of course! he told himself. At the river they stopped when I activated the power cell on my blaster. And just now...

It made sense, but it was time to try an experiment to validate his findings. He disarmed the power cell, and sure enough, the Invid lost interest and stomped off. "Yeah, that's gotta be it," Rand said softly. He was exhaling pent-up fear when something orange and menacing suddenly dropped on him from the branch above. His throat refused to utter the scream his guts demanded, but he gave a start nonetheless, raising the weapon like a club, only to realize that it was Annie, upside down and dangling from her knees, carrot-colored hair like an unfurled flag.

"Were you talking to yourself?" she demanded. "Were you? Huh?" "Don't ever sneak up on me!" Rand seethed.

Scott, Rook, and Lunk were on the ground now, telling Rand that the coast was clear. Excitedly, Rand scrambled down out of the tree.

"I think I know why we've been having so much trouble getting these blasted walking lobsters off our trail," he announced. He gestured to the weapon's on-line switch. "We've been giving ourselves away every time we switch on our Cyclones or our blasters."

"How so?" said Lunk.

"They can detect the bio-energy given off by our Robotech mecha." Lunk helped Annie down from the tree. "You could be right," he said to

Rand. "Back at the river Scott left the panel gauges of his Cyclone on. They could've homed in on that."

"Right!" Rand agreed.

"It makes sense," said Scott. It had never been an issue on Tirol, but then, there were a lot of things about Earth that separated it from Tirol...

"Of course it makes sense," Rand was continuing. "They thrive on Protoculture, right? Well, it's like they can smell the stuff, the same way a

shark is able to smell blood in the water." "Charming thought," Rook said distastefully.

Annie laughed. "Mr. Wizard! You really thought that out by yourself, huh?"

Rand smiled with elaborate modesty.

"Sure doesn't happen very often, does it?" Rook scoffed.

Rand whirled on her. "Yeah? Besides your looks, what have you contributed lately?"

Rook's nostrils flared. "All right, that does it! Let's step aside and settle this once and for all!"

"You sure you don't just want to get me alone in the bushes?" Rand said, smiling and stroking his chin. "Admit it-"

"Stop it!" Scott broke in, silencing the two of them. "Arguing among ourselves isn't going to help matters any. We're supposed to be friends, in case you've forgotten."

"Oh, is that so?" Rook said, arms akimbo. "Well, I don't remember him ever becoming a friend of mine," she threw to Rand.

"Then what the hell are you doing here?" Rand barked. "I didn't ask you along! We don't need this kind of nonsense."

Rook and Rand faced off defensively.

"Cool off," Lunk told everyone. "There'll be plenty of time to scream at each other later. But right now we gotta get back to the Alpha."

"Kiss and make up," Annie said to Rand as Lunk walked off. "Or at least shake hands."

"Fine with me." Rand shrugged and glared at Rook. "But maybe you should ask the lady with the chip on her shoulder!"

Gradually, in single file, they began to work their way back to the river. Rook and Rand opened a second front in their war when Rook insisted that something was following them and Rand called her paranoid. Scott came down on them again and ordered Lunk to walk between them as a buffer. And it was in this way that the three men managed to avoid the leeches...

Scott and Rand heard Annie's scream and turned around in time to see

the descent of the mutant worm rain. They dropped from the forest canopy, instantly attaching themselves to the two girls.

Lunk made a sound of disgust and backed away. "There's millions of them!"

Annie was crying and stamping her feet. Rook's face was contorted, her body shaking all over. "Do something!" she screamed to Rand, but he only smiled. "You creep! Get these things off me!" She stood paralyzed, as if not knowing where to begin-on her arms, her neck, her face...Just then another leech dropped from the trees and landed on her forehead; Rook screamed and collapsed to the ground, wailing and kicking her feet in frustration.

"Hold still," Scott said, kneeling alongside her and pulling the leeches off Rook's arm. But Rand stopped him before he had detached more than two or three. He took Lunk's lit cigarette and touched the lighted end to one of the creatures.

"Make things hot for them and they'll pop out on their own," he explained as the leech dropped off, sizzling. "Pull them off and you end up leaving the sucker intact." Methodically, he moved the cigarette from leech to leech.

"I tell you, I get a real kick seeing city girls in the country" Rand told Scott while he labored. "They look so darn cute when they start screaming." He smiled at Rook. "You should've seen yourself..."

She made a face, averting her gaze from Rand's handiwork. "Can you blame me? It's disgusting." She shuddered. "I hate to break this to you, Daniel Boone, but there's something called civilization out there. Maybe you've heard of it."

Rand snorted. "That's where you have crime and filth, right?" "Better than slimy little blood-sucking tree leeches."

"Sourpuss," Rand said, standing up and moving over to Annie. "Any leech that gets a good taste of you is gonna swear off human beings forever." Rook stood up, angry at first, then flashing an enigmatic, almost seductive smile. "We'll see..." she said, walking off into the bushes to check

for leeches off limits to Rand's search.

They stuck to the forest this time rather than risk showing themselves in the open ground that bordered the river. Two hours along they stopped to rest below the small falls of a tributary that fed the gorge. Rand stripped a sapling of twigs and fashioned a fishing rod for himself. He waded out to a rock midstream and cast in his line. Scott and the others sat under the trees along the bank.

"Hey, Rand," Annie taunted him. "Do you really think you can catch anything with that funny-looking stick of yours?"

Rand frowned while everyone had a good laugh. "Just you wait," he told them. "I'm an expert, and if there's a trout anywhere in this river, it's mine."

It was a pleasant spot, full of water sounds, animal life, and cool shade stirred by a gentle breeze. "Almost makes you forget where you are," Scott mused.

Rook nodded absently. "I know. I'm starting to feel like we're at a Boy Scout picnic."

Rand meanwhile was addressing his would-be catch, when something small and mean hit him on the head. He looked around and found Lunk crouched on the limb of an overhanging tree. "Hey, what's the idea?" Rand started to ask.

"Invid..." Lunk said softly, cupping his hands to his mouth.

Scott, Annie, and Rook took to the cover of the brush. Rand was looking around for a place to hide when he noticed the line stretched taut. He grabbed hold of the anchored pole, ignoring Scott's orders to abandon the fish. It had to be a five-pounder at least, and he wasn't about to let it go. Even so, he could sense the ground-shaking approach of the Trooper. He pulled hard and saw the rainbow break water; it was bigger than he had thought. The Invid's cloven footfalls were increasing; Rand gave a mighty tug and brought the fish up. But just then the line snapped. At the same time the Trooper appeared through the trees.

Deciding it might behoove him to be the one that got away, Rand

dropped the pole and dived from the rock.

Lunk was still in the tree, standing now, his back flattened against the trunk, when the Trooper passed. A second Trooper lumbered into view an instant later. Peering from the bushes, his H-90 raised, Scott saw that the two were headed toward the falls. Rand was nowhere to be seen.

Unless one happened to be a fish.

Running short on breath when the first Invid hit the water, Rand had propelled himself downstream, hugging the rocky bottom, only to run into another pair of armored legs. His lungs were on fire, threatening to implode, but surfacing wouldn't necessarily improve the situation any. He swallowed hard, sensing a darkness creeping into the edges of his vision...

The two Troopers stopped in the middle of the river and swung their sensors through a 360-degree scan. Concerned for Rand's safety, Scott ran from cover when the Invid had crossed the stream and moved off into the woods on the opposite bank.

Lunk dived in, and found his companion unconscious on the river bottom, arms still locked around the boulder he had hugged to keep himself submerged. He brought him up and laid him facedown on the bank; then straddled him and carefully began to use his big hands to pump water from Rand's lungs.

"Is he going to be all right?" Annie asked. Scott nodded. "He just passed out."

Rand's color started to return, and he coughed up a few mouthfuls of water. Softly, Rook called his name.

Rand straightened up with an energy that surprised all of them, knocking an unsuspecting Lunk backward into the river. He looked around dazedly and dropped back to his knees exhausted.

"Uh, the Invid are all gone," Annie said.

"Yeah, you can calm down, Superman," Rook added. Rand smiled thinly.

"All right," Scott said, extending his hand to Lunk and helping him to the bank. "Now that they're gone, we can get back to Lancer. We can't be too

far-"

Rook saw Scott's eyes go wide. She spun around and saw the reason for

it: An enormous black bear, frightened and up on its hind legs, was breaking through the brush. Scott had his weapon raised but froze as a bizarre giant tiger-striped spider dropped from a tree onto the weapon's barrel. Scott winced and uttered a startled cry, reflexively loosing a bolt from the thing that whizzed past the bear's head. Rook lunged for Annie as the animal's huge claw came down, narrowly missing her. Lunk almost caught the backlash and rolled for cover.

Rand missed with two shots from his own weapon, and the bear's right paw connected with the blaster, sending him and the weapon flying in opposite directions. Rand looked up into bared teeth and sharp claws, the face of furry black death. He made his peace with the Creator and glimpsed a brilliant flash of white light...But when the smoke cleared, he found himself still alive and the bear gone-vaporized.

The only problem was that there was now an Invid ship overhead-and not one of the Troopers either, but one of the rust-brown Pincer units!

"Well, I never thought I'd be happy to see you guys!" Rand said as he got to his feet, the smell of roasted meat in the air. He joined the rest of the team in a jog for the woods.

The Invid rained fire down on them as they ran, steering them away from the safety of the trees and bringing one of the patrolling Troopers in on the action. The team soon found itself cornered, fenced in on open ground by high-energy beams and annihilation discs. But Scott heard a familiar sound cutting through the tumultuous roar of the Invid's death-rays.

It was Lancer, riding one of the abandoned Cyclones.

Lavender hair trailing in the wind, he leapt the mecha over a surprised Invid Trooper and landed it not more than fifteen feet from where the team stood huddled together.

"All I had to do was ride to the sound of the guns!" Lancer yelled when the Cyclone had skidded to a halt. "What're you waiting for, Scott? Climb

on!"

Scott offered a silent prayer to the gods who governed silver linings and

threw himself onto the rear seat. Lancer popped the mecha into a long wheelie that shot them through the legs of the bewildered Trooper. But the Pincer ship chased them, loosing continuous disc fire from its treetop course.

Lancer kept the Cyclone in the woods for cover. Scott saw that they were nearing the river gorge now and raised himself on the rear pegs in an effort to spot the Alpha. Lancer took one hand from the controls and pointed. "At the foot of the cliff on the right!" he shouted over his shoulder.

Scott realized that the land dropped away sharply up ahead, but he couldn't discern just how high they were above the lower terrace. Lancer was cutting their forward speed as they approached the ledge. Scott leaned in to ask him how he planned to negotiate the jump. But all at once Lancer threw his arms straight up and was gone.

Instinctively, Scott grabbed hold of the handlebar controls and saved the mecha from overturning. He looked over his shoulder and saw Lancer squatting on the overhanging branch he had swung himself to, smiling and waving Scott off. Scott was impressed. It had been one heck of a gymnastic feat. But neither of them was in the clear yet. An Invid Trooper broke through the woods and began to open up with disc fire. Lancer executed a Tarzan leap from the tree and disappeared into the undergrowth. Scott lowered his head to the rush of the wind and goosed the cycle. But the cliff face was close now, closer than he had realized, and an instant later he was sailing into blue skies above the treetops. He lost the Cyclone and plummeted on his own, no one to catch him or take note of his alarmed cry...

Elsewhere, Lancer had worked his way back toward the rest of the team. He literally ran into them not a mile from where he had put Scott in charge of the Cyclone. They had three Invid Troopers behind them, devastating the forests with sporadic sprays of fire. Lancer took the point and led them along the same path he and Scott had Cycloned not an hour before. Twilight

was giving way to darkness now, and Invid cannon sounds and annihilation discs lent a hellish atmosphere to the scene.

Once again the Troopers succeeded in boxing them in, and once again Rook, Lunk, Annie, and Rand yelled good-byes to one another while explosions rained leaves and forest carpet all over the place. But Scott turned the tide. He had survived his plunge into the trees and made his way to the concealed Veritech. The Invid Pincer ship, as he explained later, was history.

Now the Alpha came tearing into the woods and took out the Trooper whose cannons were ranging in on the team. Then Scott launched the VT straight up into the starry skies, reconfiguring to Battloid at the top of his booster climb and bringing out the mecha's rifle/cannon to deal with his pursuers. Two more Troopers fell to the Alpha's storm, but a third managed to work its way in close enough to inflict a pincer swipe that brought Scott tumbling back to the woods.

The Trooper roared into a long sweeping turn and headed back in on the downed Battloid. Inside, Scott shook himself to clear his head and ran through a rapid assessment of his options as he brought the techno-knight to its feet. The mecha's external pickups brought the team's cries of warning into the cockpit, especially Annie's high-pitched: "Behind you, Scott! Behind you!"

Scott thought the Battloid through a quick about-face in time to see the approaching Trooper. He reached for the launch-tube cover levers. The Invid fired first, blazing discs spinning and twisting out of the cannon muzzles. But Scott's aim was surer: Red-tipped heat-seeking missiles ripped from the Battloid's shoulder compartments and homed in on the Invid's dark form, detonating against pincers and torso alike, and giving brief life to a blinding fireball, a brilliant orange midnight sun.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Most commentators overlook the fact that Lancer was a singer long before he was a freedom fighter, and a crossdresser long before a Yellow Dancer. But he was first and foremost an actor-malleable, dramatic, and narcissistic. And while it's true that he can be linked to certain literary traditions wherein heroes carried out their crusades under the guise of fops and other fabulous fools, Lancer was no Scarlet Pimpernel or comic Zorro: He was a fox of an entirety different order.

Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

Prior to Zor's arrival on Optera, it was the Flower of Life that held the central place in the Invid's naturalistic pantheon. But that was no longer the case. They were aggressive species now every bit as warlike as the Tirolian Masters who defoliated Optera. And they worshipped Protoculture, the bio-energetic by-product Zor had coaxed from the Flowers themselves. They continued to subsist on the Flowers their captive Human population planted and harvested, but it was Protoculture that fueled the army of mecha which kept that enterprise running smoothly and without incident. Indeed, it could be said that the Invid themselves had become more dependent on Zor's discovery than the Robotech Masters ever were.

Enormous amounts of Protoculture were required to oversee and maintain Earth's diverse population centers and to put down uprisings and revolts in the farms and factories. (Exedore would have been chagrinned to learn that the Invid had found their own way to manufacture Protoculture without having to resort to the matrix device that had figured so prominently in the First and Second Robotech Wars.) These reserves, fashioned by Human hands into individual energy canisters suitable for Invid and Terran mecha alike, were stored in scores of warehouses across the globe and guarded by Humans "sympathetic" to the Invid's purpose. The privileges enjoyed by these sympathizers varied; sometimes hostages

were taken to assure allegiance, while on other occasions outlaws and petty powerbrokers were given charge. Towns and cities bartered with the Invid overlords for simple freedoms: the right to enjoy a semblance of normal life in exchange for snooping out resistance groups or seeing to it that Protoculture cells did not fall into the wrong hands. Often the Invid allowed those in charge before the invasion to keep their lofty positions, except that there was a new authority to answer to-the Regis and her legions of territorial supervisors who dealt directly with their underlings.

Lancer explained some of this to Scott while the team licked its wounds after their encounter with the Troopers. Even though the episode had consisted largely in their outrunning the Invid, it had nevertheless served to unite the members of the team and instill in each of them a confidence that hadn't been there two days before. They were now beginning to understand and accept each other's strengths and weaknesses, and they were learning to trust one another as well. Without any formal vote or voiced acknowledgment, Scott surfaced as the leader, which was only right given his training and resoluteness. Lunk was something of a sergeant to Scott's lieutenant; Annie, everything from den mother to mascot. Rook still held herself separate, but could always be counted on for her instinctive combat sense. And Rand was their backwoods provider, fishing and hunting when he wasn't sitting under a tree scribbling notes to himself. That left only Lancer.

Scott still had misgivings about the man, but as he listened to Lancer's detailed account of the Invid infrastructure and occupation techniques, he began to see him in a new light. The female-singer ploy had yet to be explained, but it was obvious from Lancer's report that the adopted persona of Yellow Dancer had opened many doors to him. He would discuss his former ties with the resistance only in a vague way, but Scott understood that his contacts were as numerous as his information was exhaustive.

The team had retrieved the two other Cyclones from where they had left them in the grass and spent three days in the river gorge dining on pit roasted fish, recuperating, and planning the next move in their northward

journey. They were careful about using the mecha now, convinced that Rand's theory was correct. Most of the time the Invid Scouts and Troopers were operating in a kind of background net of Protoculture emanations and couldn't home in on any one source. But when they were engaged in a particular search, their senses were more acute at screening out the random waves from the usually nearby active ones. In any case, it was a moot point at the moment; the Alpha was depleted of charge, and there was scarcely enough left in the Cyclones to power them, let alone reconfigure or fire them.

That's where Norristown entered the picture. Located somewhat east of their present route, it was one of the Southland's largest cities, transplanted like so many others from the devastated north during the reign of Chairman Moran and the formation of the Army of the Southern Cross. The city had prospered throughout and boasted one of the continent's few surviving sports arenas. But most important, it was the site of one of the Invid's Protoculture storage facilities, a heavily fortified castle (constructed years ago in the Hollywood style) that overlooked the city.

Lancer had a map of the place. And a rather ingenious plan.

Less than a week later, Rook and Annie were on one of the roads leading into Norristown. They made an interesting picture-the blonde in her red and white bodysuit leaning almost casually against the parked Cyclone and Annie in her military greens and ever-present cap perched on the seat like some diminutive ornament. Not five miles away was the city itself, a tight cluster of buildings surrounded by forest, with Drumstick Butte and the hulks of two Zentraedi ships casting their giant shadows from behind. The Protoculture storage facility could be discerned at the foot of the oddly shaped, topheavy butte, linked to the city below a well-maintained switchbacked roadway.

Rook straightened up at the sound of an approaching vehicle and glanced over at Annie; the youngster nodded and hopped down from the

Cyclone's seat to stand alongside her traffic-stopping teammate. Up the road a truck came into view, and Rook threw the driver a playful wink and raised her thumb in a hitchhiker's gesture. Innocently and with well-rehearsed bashfulness, Annie pressed her forefingers together and called for the driver to stop and lend a hand.

The driver halted the truck and climbed down from the cab, taking in a long eyeful of the two marooned girls and their red Cyclone. He bent down to inspect the mecha, complimenting them on the fine condition of the thing, but was sad to report that they were out of Protoculture fuel. This was so common an occurrence that the driver scarcely gave it a second thought; anyone might stumble upon some wonderful specimen of aged Robotechnology only to come to think of it as a worthless piece of junk when the all but irreplaceable Protoculture energy cells were depleted. True, there was a black market, but it was one that few people had access to. Between the needs of the Invid, the resistance, and your everyday 'Culture hounds, Protoculture had become a priceless commodity.

"We were hoping you could fix it," Annie said to the truck driver. "We're on our way to the Yellow Dancer concert in Norristown."

The driver smiled up at her. "Not without Protoculture. There's nothing I can do."

"Hey, mister," Rook said suddenly, as if noticing the driver's Invid-occupation double-C hard-hat emblem for the first time. "You're from the storage facility, aren't you ?"

"So?" the man answered, wary now.

"Couldn't you spare us some?" Annie asked, leaning over the Cyclone's

seat.

The man snorted. "What're you, nuts, kid? If anyone found out I'd

shared my rations, I'd be in deep trouble." He turned his head at the sound of a mechanical click and buzz and found himself staring into the laser muzzle of a strange-looking disc-shaped weapon.

Rook grinned and gestured with the blaster. "Know what? You're already in big trouble, buddy..."

Five minutes later the driver had been dragged to the side of the road. His arms and legs were bound with rope, and his mouth was sealed by a piece of wide tape. He continued to struggle while Lunk secured the final knots.

"Relax, buddy," Rook told him. "We're just going to borrow your truck for a while." She hastened off to the spot in the woods where they had moved the vehicle. Her teammates had the back doors opened. "Well, the first stage went pretty well," Scott was commenting as she walked up.

Rand was leaning against the trailer with his arms crossed. "I had no idea that soldiers also doubled as hijackers, Scott."

Rook looked at both of them impatiently. "Are you guys going to stand here and argue, or are we going to get a move on?"

Scott and Rand exchanged looks. "Let's do it," they said at the same moment.

A short while later the truck roared into town with Lunk at the wheel, the former driver's hard hat and permits now part of his disguise. Rook, Rand, Scott, and Annie were in the rear, but not yet in what would soon be their hiding place. Originally the plan had called for all of them to hide underneath the chassis while the truck was cleared through to the storage facility, but good fortune was on their side in the form of a loft compartment built into the truck's trailer. They could only speculate on what the compartment had been used for, but it was perfectly suited to their present needs. Lunk made one stop along the way to the facility gate-just brief enough to allow Annie to hop out and work her way into the crowds that were already gathering for Yellow Dancer's concert.

"Be sure to make lots of noise," Scott reminded her.

"Come on," she returned, as though insulted. "How do you suppose I got the reputation for being such a loudmouth?"

Scott grinned and began to pull the rear doors closed. He was surprised by the size of the crowds and recalled what Rand had told him earlier: When people find out Yellow's coming to town, they go completely berserk. When

Annie had jumped out, Scott had glimpsed a poster of the singer pasted to the side of a building: Yellow Dancer in a spaghetti-strapped sundress, some sort of matching turban, low heels, and a pearl collar.

Lancer had left for Norristown three days before the rest of the team. The plan called for him to put a pickup band together and cut a deal with a local promoter, who would secure the sports arena and take care of publicity and logistics. The promoter, a man named Woods, was an old friend of Lancer's and a member of the resistance.

Scott thought back to Lancer's departure-Lancer in his alter-ego guise. Scott couldn't help feeling that Yellow Dancer wasn't just Lancer in female attire but an entirely different personality. Lancer's demeanor changed as well as his voice and carriage. Yellow was a real entity living alongside Lancer in the same body. Scott found it incomprehensible and just a bit unsettling, but it didn't detract from the trust he had in Lancer. Scott was wondering how the second part of Lancer's plan was succeeding when he heard Lunk's fist pounding against the cab of the truck-the signal for Scott, Rand, and Rook to take to the overhead compartment. That meant the truck was nearing the twin-towered security gate on the road below the storage facility.

Farther along the road that wound up toward the base of Drumstick Butte was the barracks of the security force that staffed and guarded the storage facility. The chief of station, Colonel Briggs, was a large, beefy man with salt-and-pepper hair and a thick mustache. He was in his office in the barracks, feet up on the desk, daydreaming over a color photo of Yellow Dancer that had appeared in the morning edition of the city's newspaper when one of his staff arrived with good news.

"We've been asked to supply security at Yellow Dancer's concert this afternoon," the staffer reported. He wore a blue-gray uniform with a red upturned collar, similar in cut and design to that worn by the colonel. A single red star adorned the front of his brimmed cap. The Invid had made a point of allowing local customs and garb to remain unchanged in

Norristown and numerous other strongholds throughout the Southlands. "Shall I refuse the request, sir?" the staffer wanted to know.

Briggs didn't bother to lower the newspaper, which effectively concealed him from the staffer. He hummed to himself, finishing up his fanciful daydream scenario before replying. "Are you out of your mind?" he said at last. "If something should happen to Yellow Dancer, it's our reputation that will suffer. Send every available man down to the arena."

"But sir," the' staffer pointed out haltingly, "we can't risk leaving the facility unguarded..."

"Nonsense," the colonel said from behind his paper. "What time is the concert scheduled to end?"

"Around three-thirty, but-"

"And what time are the Intercessors arriving to pick up the shipment?" "Four o'clock, but-"

"Then there's no problem." Briggs set the paper aside, got up from behind the desk, and walked over to the office window. "What can happen?" he said, gesturing to the facility half a mile away at the top of the switchbacked access road. "The facility's impregnable...And besides, I'd like to oversee Yellow Dancer's security personally." He swung around to his lieutenant. "See to it that she expects me."

Rumor had it that the storage facility was originally a castle imported stone by stone from Europe during the mid-1800s by a renegade nobleman from Transylvania. It saw more than one hundred years of alteration and modernization before being substantially renovated (in the Hollywood style) by a sports event promoter who fell heir to the place in 2015. Much of Norristown, including the arena, owed its existence to the same man.

The building, with its mansard roof and numerous spires, still retained a Proven 鏰 l look, but this was overshadowed by the fantastical elements added on during the last twenty-five years, primarily the east wing's

crenellated tower. Three-quarters of a mile down the road was the twin-towered main gate, where Lunk and the others were presently stopped.

"I'm here to run a check on the cooling systems," Lunk said to the helmeted guard who approached the driver's side window.

"Your permit," the guard said nastily.

Lunk handed the papers down for the man to read, while a second guard moved to the back of the truck to have a look inside. "It's clean, Fred!" Lunk heard the man call out a minute later. The guard perused the permit a while longer, then returned it. "You'd better be clean on the way out, too," he warned Lunk. Lunk saw sentries at the other tower frisking a white-coveralled driver.

"You got it," he told the guard.

The guard waved him through and opened the fence that spanned the roadway. Lunk threw the truck into gear and drove off, removing his hat and wiping away the sweat that had collected on his forehead. Two trucks filled with security personnel passed him going in the opposite direction, a sign that Lancer's request might have been granted. At the top of the switchbacks, Lunk backed the truck toward the shipping entrance. There were only three or four guards on patrol, and not one of them even glanced at Lunk while he climbed down from the cab and threw open the rear doors.

"We're in, gang," he said loudly enough for his friends to hear.

Rook, Rand, and Scott lowered themselves from the loft compartment and entered the facility. Scott unfolded Lancer's map and checked it against their location. "This one," he told Rook and Rand, indicating an air duct grate along one wall. Lunk helped them move several crates over to the wall. Scott climbed up first, rechecked the map, and peered through the grate. Satisfied, he nodded, and Rook and Rand joined him. The two men went to work on the bolts that held the grating to its frame, and in a moment they were able to lift the panel free. Scott and Rand crawled in. Lunk handed rope, a tool pouch, and an aluminum carry case up to Rook. She waved him good luck and followed Scott's lead into the horizontal duct.

Less than fifteen feet into the duct, Scott stopped and whispered: "The control room is on the third floor. It should take us about ten minutes to get there."

Rook could barely discern him in the darkness. Ten minutes was going to feel like an eternity.

Down below, the arena was rapidly filling to capacity and Annie was circulating in front of the stage doing what she did best: inciting the crowd.

"...At her last concert a whole bunch of people got up on stage, and everybody started partying and having a good ole time," she told everyone within earshot. "Some of us even got to go backstage with Yellow Dancer after the concert and party some more! But this one's going to be the best! I hear that she might not perform like this again, so we better make this the one to remember. Right?!"

"All right!" several people shouted. "Party time!"

Meanwhile, Yellow Dancer was entertaining guests in her backstage dressing room. She had changed to a sleeveless pink and burgundy pants outfit with a matching bowed headband, which held her hair up and off her neck.

"At the last concert, some of my fans came up on stage and really made a mess of things," she was explaining, facing the mirror while she applied eye liner. "I'd rather that didn't happen again."

"We won't allow that here," Briggs, the facility security chief, said from behind her. Yellow smiled at him in the mirror. "We'll do our job and guarantee you complete security. As long as nothing happens to bring the Invid down on us."

"Those horrible creatures," Yellow said, twisting up her face.

"Aah, they're not so bad once you get to know them," the chief started to say.

Lancer's friend, Woods, threw him a conspiratorial wink from a corner of the room. He was a handsome young man with a pencil-thin mustache whose taste ran to calfskin jackets and black leather ties. Just now he was holding the large bouquet of flowers Briggs had brought along for Yellow Dancer. "We know you'll do your best, Colonel," Woods said encouragingly.

Lancer saw the chief's puffy face turn red with embarrassment. "You're

damn right we will."

"And I want to thank you so much for the flowers," Yellow gushed, turning away from the mirror now to flash Briggs a painted smile. "They're lovely."

Briggs leered at her. "Anything for you, Yellow, anything you want."

Scott, Rook, and Rand had reached the third floor of the facility. The duct opened out into a small area that served as the relay center for the facility's security systems. Scott and Rand moved in to try to make sense of the tangle of wires and switches that covered two full walls of the room. It took several minutes to locate the feeds from the security cameras, but the rest was child's play. Rook unsnapped the clasps on the carry case and began to hand over the devices Lunk assured them would scramble the a/v signals. Scott and Rand quickly attached these to the feeder cables and set off on the next leg of their cramped journey.

The map called for a brief return to the air duct system before they could enter the actual storage area. But once through this, they would be free to move about at will-assuming Lunk's devices did the trick. They dropped out of the duct into a maintenance corridor that encircled the supply room but had no access to it except for a single elbow conduit located clear around the back of the building. Rand volunteered to test the effectiveness of Lunk's scramblers by making faces at one of the surveillance cameras. When no sirens went off and no guards came running, the trio figured they were in the clear and decided to use one of the maintenance carts to convey them to the conduit-an open-topped electric affair with two seats and a single headlamp that brought them around back in a quarter the time it would have taken them to walk.

They stopped at the first elbow conduit and commenced a careful count. Rook looked over the map, while Scott took charge of noting their position relative to the first main.

"Under the main line, thirteenth from the right," Scott said, recalling the scrawled notation on the map. He gestured to an elbow up ahead. "That

must be it."

The conduit was made of light-gauge metal; it was a good four feet in circumference and stood at least six feet high from floor to right-angle bend. It was held in place by a circular flange, but promised to be flexible enough once the bolts securing the flange to the floor were undone. Rand and Scott took box wrenches from the tool pouch and immediately set to work. At the same time, Rook took a coil of rope from the cart and began to tie it fast to one of the adjacent elbows.

When the last of the bolts had been loosened and removed, Rook and Scott shoved the conduit to one side and bent down to peer into the shaft below.

Rand squinted and smiled to himself as his eyes fixed upon the objects of their search: crate after crate of Protoculture canisters, each the size and shape of a squat thermos.

"There's a mountain of it down here," he reported.

Scott gave a tug on the rope Rook had tied to the conduit. "Feels strong enough," he commented while Rook tied the other end around her waist. "The security system down there is still operative. You touch anything-the wall, the ceiling, the floor-and you'll trigger it."

Rook sat down and let her legs dangle through the opening. Rand and Scott took hold of the rope and signaled their readiness. "All right," she told them. "Let's get this over with before I change my mind."

Yellow Dancer's concert was under way. She streaked onto the stage like a comet, with the band already laying down the intro to "Look Up!" and the audience of several thousand roaring their appreciation. It was a heavy message number that had become something of an anthem in the Southlands, and Yellow loved singing it. She stood with her legs spread apart, one hand on her hip, holding the mike like an upturned glass, her body accenting the beat.

Another winter's day

Another gray reminder that what used to be Has gone away.

It's really hard to say,

How long we'll have to live with our insanity; We have to pay for all we use,

We never think before we light the fuse... Look up, look up, look up!

The sky is fall-ing! Look up,

There's something up you have to know. Before you try to go outside,

To take in the view, Look up, because the sky Could fall on you...

Yellow looked to the stage wings, where the colonel was eagerly trying to stomp his foot to the music, an ear-to-ear grin on his face, his men vigilant throughout the arena.

Loaded down with canisters of Protoculture fished from the storage room, the electric cart sped away from the maintenance corridor and entered a stone serviceway, damp, foul-smelling, and seemingly unused for centuries. Rook, still dizzy from her upside-down descent into the storage room, had the map spread open in her lap while Scott drove. In the dim ambient light, she tried to match juncture points in the serviceway with the vague scrawls indicated on the map. Finally she told Scott to stop the cart. He got out and began to inspect the stones at eye level along the right-hand wall of the corridor.

"Should be over here somewhere," Rook heard him say. She watched him lay his hand against one of the stones, and in a moment the wall was opening. Another corridor was revealed, perpendicular to the first and decidedly downhill.

"And this is supposed to lead to the concert hall?" Rook said uncertainly.

"Looks to me like it leads to the dungeon," Rand said behind her.

Back at the wheel, Scott edged the cart forward into the dark passageway. "Lancer said it was an escape route constructed by the man who originally had this place built."

"Well, let's hope so," Rook answered him as the stone wall reassembled itself behind them.

The ramp dropped at a steep angle that sorely tested the electric cart's brakes, but the important thing was that they were leaving the facility behind.

Rand was encouraged. According to his own calculations the passageway was indeed leading them in the direction of the arena. "Piece of cake," he said from his uncomfortable position atop the Protoculture canisters stacked in the bed of the cart. "We should have taken more while we had the chance."

"Don't be so smart," Scott said stiffly. "We're not out of here yet."

Rand leaned forward between the front seats. "What's there to worry about now? The concert's on, we've got the 'Culture, Lunk'll be waiting for us with open arms..."

"Mr. Confidence all of a sudden," Rook snorted from the shotgun seat. Scott was easing up on the brakes, and the cart was traveling along at a good clip now. Rook was holding her hair in place with one hand when the cart's headlamp revealed a solid wall blocking their exit.

"Hold on!" Scott yelled, pulling up on the hand brake.

The rear end of the cart bounced and swerved as the brakes locked, but Scott managed to remain in control and brought the vehicle to a halt with room to spare. The trio regarded the wall and began to wonder whether they might have missed a turnoff earlier on.

"I didn't see any side tunnels," said Scott. "And according to Lancer's map there's only supposed to be this one passageway."

"The map's been accurate up to now," Rook added, running her fingers

through her tangled hair. "Where'd we go wrong?"

"Maybe we have to give the wall a push or something, like up top," Rand suggested.

Scott was just about to step out and have a look, when he heard a deep rumbling sound behind him. The trio turned to watch helplessly as a massive stone partition dropped from the tunnel's ceiling.

"Now what?" Scott said after a moment.

"They must be on to us somehow!" Rook said. But Scott disagreed. "Those a/v scramblers still have fifteen minutes of life left in them. I think we must have-"

Scott cut himself off as a new sound began to infiltrate their silent tomb. It began with a grating sound of stone moving against stone, then softened to a sibilance before gushing loud and clear.

"Water!" Rand yelled. "We're being flooded!"

CHAPTER NINE

It was just a case of overcompensation again: We went from having no plan to too much plan!

Rand, Notes on the Run

Yellow Dancer pranced across the stage, pointing and gesturing to the crowd, swinging the microphone over her head as though it were a lariat. She was in the midst of a hard driving number now, a flat-out rocker that had the audience dancing in the aisles and pressing forward toward the stage.

Annie was helping this along.

"Let's get this party under way!" she shouted from her cramped space near the front. "Let's get up on stage!"

Yellow spied Annie in the crowd and smiled while she sang. She threw herself into an impromptu spin, shaking her hips and urging the band to kick up the volume somewhat. She turned again and launched herself across the stage in a kind of Jagger strut, inching her way to ward the edge with each pass and beckoning the fans to join her.

Woods and the colonel looked on from the wings.

"What an incredible performer," Briggs was saying. Woods noticed the glint in the colonel's eye as he watched Yellow twirl herself like some sort of singing acrobat. "She's amazing...And these kids look like they're ready to jump out of their socks."

The man is practically drooling. Woods laughed to himself. "They are beginning to get a bit out of hand," he told Briggs, a forced note of concern in his voice. He motioned to the front ranks of the audience, where the crowds were pushing hard against the security force's arm-link cordon. "Don't you think it would be wise to keep a van ready out back just in case we have to get Yellow Dancer out of here in a hurry?"

Woods saw Briggs blanch. He called out to one of the men guarding the

stage entrance and told him bring a van to the rear door, while Woods suppressed a smile and turned to watch Yellow strut her stuff.

On the cold stone floor of a small, seldom-used room beneath the stage, Lunk sat cross-legged, blowing up balloons. Several hundred of these helium-filled colored globes had already been inflated and secreted in a compartment behind the bandshell itself, but the ones Lunk was busy preparing had to serve a special purpose. To each grouping of four balloons, Lunk added a carefully concealed propellant device in addition to a sensor that would allow the four-color group to home in on a prearranged beacon signal transmitted from the outskirts of Norristown, close to the spot where the team had left the Cyclones and the Veritech.

When Lunk had filled the last of the balloons, he crawled over and shut down the helium tanks, only then realizing how spaced out he was from inhaling the gas. He glanced at the room's brick rear wall and moved over to it now, running his hands over the stones and searching for any signs of the doorway indicated on Lancer's map of the facility and linking passageway. But he could find no evidence of seams or fractures in the mortar. Perhaps it could be opened only from inside the tunnel, he thought, checking his watch. He would know soon enough, in any case...

The cart turned out to be watertight. Not that this would have been some wondrous piece of news under normal circumstances, but given the tunnel trio's present condition it was one of those small miracles to be thankful for. It meant that they were able to remain seated while the water rose around them rather than have to exhaust themselves trying to remain afloat in water that was well over their heads. Of course, this, too, seemed a minor consolation.

A few four-pack canisters of Protoculture were bobbing about in the cold water, and Rand was sitting on the front bumper of the cart looking like the world was about to end.

Which was certainly an appropriate enough response, seeing how the

water was still pouring into their tomb with no signs of letting up, and the cold ceiling was only four feet above them now. But Rook, who seldom had a good word to say about anything, was trying to cheer Rand up.

"C'mon, pal, try not to get so down in the dumps."

Rand stared at her in disbelief. "Down in the dumps?" he said, gesturing to the room, their situation. "What d'ya think, I should be happy about getting a chance to wash up before I die?"

"It's my fault," Scott told them. "I should have considered the possibility that some of the older defensive systems would still be operational."

Rook shook her head. "Don't blame yourself, Scott."

"Let 'im," Rand argued. "Why not? He got us into this, didn't he?" "We got us into this," Rook said, raising her voice.

Scott told them both to shut up. "Besides, we might get a lucky break

yet."

Rand and Rook waited for an explanation.

"If the a/v scramblers fade before the water gets much higher, we'll

probably get to face a firing squad instead of drowning."

In the stage wings, the colonel looked out at Yellow's screaming audience and swung harshly to Woods. "If this mob gets any more unruly, the Invid are to going to send a few Troopers in here and we'll have all hell to pay!"

Woods had to agree. Yellow was supposed to have finished up already, but instead she was going into yet another encore. The crowds were whipped up into such a frenzy that the arena seemed unable to contain it.

Yellow Dancer sensed Woods's concern and turned to him briefly as she gyrated around the stage. Where is Scott? she asked herself as the band revved up. She took several giant steps toward the wings and tried to flash her accomplice a signal, touching her earring and shaking her head as if to indicate that she hadn't heard from Lunk yet.

Woods acknowledged his understanding with a shrug and a slight

gesture toward the chief, who was pacing in the wings like a nervous animal.

Yellow brought the mike up and asked if everyone was all right, holding the mike out to them as they screamed replies. Again they strained at the security cordon, and several kids succeeded in making it onto the stage before being scooped up by guards and carried off. Something had to be done quickly!

Scott, Rook, and Rand had scarcely a foot of breathing space left, and the water level was still rising. Things had reached the desperate stage a few minutes before, and now the three of them were in the water pushing up against each and every ceiling stone, praying that one would give.

"That story about the hero escaping through a loose stone is just a fairy tale," Rand was saying, when his hands felt the stone budge. For a moment he was speechless, but finally he managed to gulp out the words: "It moved! The stone moved!"

"She's already gone a half hour overtime!" the chief shouted to Woods. "I want the concert wrapped up-and I mean now!"

"But look at the kids," Woods tried. "They're having the time of their lives. I mean, after all, when do they ever get a chance to let off a little-"

"Now!" the chief said firmly. "Or this will be the last chance they ever get. Do you understand me?"

Woods backed away and threw a signal to the control booth: They were to cut the power as soon as Yellow finished her song...

Lunk, meanwhile, was pacing back and forth in the small area beneath the stage. Scott was way overdue. There were no contingency plans other than to get out of Norristown as quickly as possible. Annie and Lancer would be all right, but Lunk could be identified by the guards at the facility tower. But just as he was resigning himself to this, he heard sounds of movement behind him. He swung around in time to see his waterlogged friends step through the parted wall. Each of them was toting Protoculture canister packs.

"Well, it's about time," Lunk said to them, eyeing their soaked clothing. "What happened to you guys-you come by way of the river, or what?"

"We'll explain later," Scott said hurriedly, already fastening the packs to the balloon clusters. "Signal Lancer, and let's get this show on the road."

Yellow was aware that the control room and sound personnel had been ordered to cut the power, so she was milking the final song for all it was worth, extending the chorus and encouraging the audience to join in, in the hopes that Scott would appear in time. But by now she had done all she could; the band was finishing up with an interminable one-chord wrap-up, and she was just about to make the grand leap that would cut it off. Then she heard a small but unmistakable flashing tone emitted by her left earring. It was Lunk's signal: Scott had made it!

"Thank you! Thank you, all of you!" Yellow yelled into the microphone over deafening applause. Yellow gestured to Annie and watched as she began to worm her way toward the cordon, readying the pass that would admit her backstage.

People in the crowd were pointing to something in the air now, and Annie got a glimpse of a skyful of balloons before she disappeared through the door to the stage wings.

"I love you!" Yellow added as she left the stage.

The plan called for Scott, Rook, and Rand to infiltrate themselves among Yellow Dancer's retinue of sidemen and bodyguards, all of whom had been handpicked by Woods. At the same time, Lunk's role was to see to it that the waiting police van was rendered safe and secure.

This was easily accomplished, thanks to the fact that the guard was napping when Lunk stole up to the driver's side door. Lunk pummeled the man into a more lasting sleep. Scott, Rook, and Rand took to the canvas-backed van, while Lunk dragged the guard off to one side and began to change into the man's police helmet, shirt, and trousers. Annie appeared a moment later, followed by Yellow, who was clutching two wardrobe suitcases under her arms. The colonel was inside the arena, waiting

patiently at Yellow's dressing-room door for the singer to arrive. Woods's team, meanwhile, had spirited her out a rear entry and was now doing its best to keep things backstage suitably chaotic.

"So, you're alive after all," Yellow said breathlessly, running to the truck and passing her valises up to Scott.

"Never underestimate the best," Rand said, full of importance.

Yellow gave Rand the once-over and smiled bemusedly. "Why are you so wet?"

"Come on, get in," Rook broke in. "It'll be your bedtime story."

Yellow climbed up into the back of the truck, already pulling off the clothes that separated her from Lancer. Rand threw himself in and unfurled the rear canvas drape. Annie ran around to the passenger seat and settled herself, while a smiling Lunk did the same behind the wheel. He knew how, ridiculous he looked in the smaller man's uniform and helmet and couldn't keep from laughing.

A moment later the truck was screeching away from the stage entrance, just short of a crowd of fans who had found their way back there. Woods stood pleased in the doorway, silently wishing Yellow and her friends a smooth getaway.

Back outside the dressing-room door, Colonel Briggs was glancing impatiently at his watch and complaining under his breath about how much time women required to change outfits. He contemplated walking in on Yellow, wondering if he would be able to catch her at a vulnerable moment. The thought was blossoming into a Technicolor fantasy when one of his guards ran up to him and saluted.

"There's been a break-in at the facility," the staffer reported in a rush. "Thirty-eight cases of Protoculture are missing."

The colonel's mouth fell open. "B-but...how?"

"They used some kind of scramblers to disrupt the surveillance cameras and apparently lowered themselves into the storage room from one of the overhead maintenance corridors."

Briggs grabbed the man by the lapels and pulled him close. "How could they get through the towers? Were all vehicles searched?"

"Yes, chief, everyone was searched," the man managed to get out. "They must have found another way out."

The colonel shook the man, took a few steps, then whirled on him again. "Search the city! Set up roadblocks! I want them found-alive!"

The staffer saluted. "We'll do what we can. But most of our units are still working crowd control outside."

"Forget the crowds!" Briggs barked. "Get every man on it."

The city's streets were soon filled with police vans-sirens hooting, tearing around corners in search of a team of sneak thieves. But by this time, Lunk was edging the van out of town, way ahead of the roadblocks the colonel's currently understaffed security force were attempting to set up at all possible points of egress.

The colonel's own van screeched to a halt in a cobblestone square, where it rendezvoused with three others that were returning from various checkpoints. Briggs leapt out and approached one of his lieutenants, demanding all pertinent information.

"And don't tell me they've disappeared," he warned the already shaking staffer.

"We have reason to believe that they made their getaway in a police van," the lieutenant updated. "So we're in the process of having our men check each van they come across to ascertain the identity of those inside."

"Good," the colonel said haltingly. Then: "You mean to tell me that your men are out there searching each other?!" He was about to say more, when he heard a small crash behind him, as if something had fallen from a rooftop. Turning, Briggs saw a cluster of red, yellow, and green balloons weighted down by something he couldn't make out until he had taken three steps toward it.

"Protoculture canisters!" he exclaimed, kneeling beside the helium balloons and their precious cargo. He looked up and saw scores more

drifting high over the city on a northeast wind. "Gather up all those balloons," he ordered the lieutenant. "Shoot them down if you have to!...And bring me that singer," he hastened to add, thinking back to the concert and its colorful finale...

Briggs was hurrying back to his van when a vehicle from the facility pulled alongside him.

"Have you found them?" he asked eagerly.

"No," the driver answered. "But the Invid Intercessors have arrived at the facility...And they wanna speak to you..."

The getaway truck and the rigged balloon clusters arrived at the transmitter site at the same time, a clearing in the woods that fringed the northeastern outskirts of Norristown. The team hopped out and began gathering up the canisters. Rook and Lancer were heading for the Cyclones when they heard Annie yell and saw her point to the sky.

"Invid."

There we a five Troopers, coming in fast from the southwest but still several miles off. Scott told everyone to grab whatever canister packs they could carry and run for the mecha. Lancer, already suited up in battle armor, headed directly for one of the Cyclones and inserted a fresh canister into the cylinderlike fuel cell below the mecha's engine. He straddled the cycle and activated the ignition, watching with delight as the power displays came to life, glowing with an unprecedented brightness. Nearby, Scott was in the cockpit of the Veritech, Lunk attending to the refueling.

Rook was preparing to power up her red Cyclone when she saw Lancer lift off and reconfigure to Battle Armor mode. Beside her, Rand was strapping on the last of his Cyclone armor.

"Rand, did you remember to put in a fresh canister?" she asked him, certain he had forgotten.

"Oh, right," he returned, and stooped ego insert the fresh pack. "Dimwit," Rook scolded him as she roared off, going to Battle Armor

mode a moment later. Rand followed her up and through to reconfiguration,

and the two of them streaked off to assist Lancer, who was going head to head with two Invid Troopers.

Lancer had coaxed the Troopers to the ground and was executing leaps to avoid pincer swipes. Frustrated now, one of the creatures was ready to bring its shoulder cannons into play.

Lancer stepped back when he saw the muzzles begin to glow; Rook and Rand had set down behind him, and the three of them felt the blast of the first charge.

"Let's not push our luck until the Alpha arrives," Lancer said over the Cyclone's tactical net.

The two Troopers took to the air, then swooped down for strafing runs. But Rand had tailed one of them and launched shoulder-tubed Scorpions before the Invid could fire. The Trooper took two missiles to the face and went down, leaking a thick green fluid.

Rook took out a second creature; Lancer dispatched a third that was giving Rand a hard time, bringing the odds more to everyone's liking by the time Scott got the Veritech up.

The two remaining Troopers kept to the ground, dishing out annihilation discs against the incoming Alpha, but Scott flew undaunted into the fire, loosing the VT's own brand of vengeful energy. With a last-minute leap, one of the Invid narrowly escaped the Alpha's angry red-tipped missiles, but the second stood its ground and suffered for it.

Scott continued his power dive against the fifth and final Invid now; it had put down again, emptying its upturned cannons against him. Scott dropped through the annihilation discs like some sort of slalom flyer, getting off one shot before pulling out of his dive. But that one connected, impacting the Trooper's midsection and splitting it in half.

Scott banked hard at the top of his climb and fell away toward Norristown and the enormous buttes which overshadowed the city. Down below he could discern a long line of police vehicles speeding from the city toward the team's somewhat ravaged forest clearing.

Hearing Scott's warning over the tac net, Rand, Rook, and Lancer

landed their mecha and reconfigured to Cyclone mode. Annie and Lunk were running around gathering up late-arrival balloonloads of Protoculture canisters. They took to the police van at Scott's amplified insistence and sped off following the Cyclones' lead, the setting sun huge and blood-red at their backs.

CHAPTER TEN

Rook's hometown [Trenchtown, formerly Cavern City] typified an offbeat trend in city planning that was popular between the [First and Second Robotech] Wars. This plan, called the Obscuro Movement, was formed as a reaction to threats of invasion, real and imaginary, by Zentraedi, Tirolian Masters, Invid , or any of a number of self-styled conquerors and terrestrial invaders. Cities were constructed in the most unlikely places-on the tops of mesas, the bottom of ravines, the heart of darkness-anywhere deemed unassailable by founders and would-be leaders.

"Southlands," History of the Third Robotech War, Vol. XXII

Rands journal picks up the story:

"We had a good enough jump on Norristown's police force to lose them without too much hassle. But just to make sure, Scott saw to it that our escape route was wiped out behind us with a few well-placed missiles from the Alpha. Chances are that most of the vans turned tail as soon as they caught sight of the Veritech anyway. We could only guess what the Invid decided to extract in the way of retribution; at the very least some heads were going to roll."

"We were all feeling great. The Cyclones practically had to be reigned in, thanks to the fresh infusion of 'Culture. Scott thought that the Invid-manufactured batch was more powerful than the 'Culture Earth mecha had been operating on during the last twenty years. The only thing that held us back was the police van we had commandeered. But it seemed a wiser idea to accept the thing's limitations rather than carry Lunk and Annie on the Cyclones or in the fighter. It continued to puzzle us why the Invid didn't simply overwhelm us with Troopers; with three Cycs running at high speed, it should have been easy enough to track us down. But Scott explained that they had demonstrated the same sort of tactical

shortcomings in previous encounters. I was always trying to press him to elaborate, but he was reticent to talk about Tirol and the other worlds he had seen."

"We traveled north for two days almost without letup, using the scrip Woods had given Lancer to barter supplies and bedrolls in some of the settlements we passed through. The terrain was arid and rugged, characterized by buttes and tors and mesas similar to those around Norristown but softened by small skyblue lakes and patches of hardwood forest. We made our first real camp alongside one of these cold water lakes. We had come across a dozen wild cattle earlier on and shot one for provisions, so we were eating well and getting good rest in the sleeping bags. Scott ran us through a kind of mutual-appreciation debriefing on the Norristown raid. More and more we were beginning to feel like an actual team and not just six individuals on the run."

"I tried to insist that we make camp in the woods, but everyone else was intent on enjoying the sunlight at the edge of the lake. I put Annie in charge of gathering firewood, and she kept coming in with nearly petrified pieces of hardwood. (Not that we really even needed the fire-I was doing most of the cooking over a propane stove anyway-but a fire was their idea of camping out, and I wasn't into spoiling anyone's fun.) Lunk whittled when he wasn't going over the Cyclone and VT systems. Scott cleaned and maintained the ordnance. Lancer was finding it easier and easier to relax around us, and he would often fall quite naturally into a kind of midway mode that was part Lancer the freedom fighter and part Yellow Dancer. He had fashioned a shower for himself by punching a series of holes in one of our old cook pots. He would bring in water heated on the fire and pour this into the holed pot he had fastened to an overhead branch. Lunk got a big charge out of this and once tried to interrupt Lancer while he was showering. It was a pretty comical exchange that ended with Lancer calling Lunk "a mindless brute," and Lunk amazed that Lancer of all people should be modest."

"Rook was the only one keeping to herself. I would see her standing

alone by the lake, absently skimming stones across the surface. It was obvious that she had something disturbing on her mind, but she didn't want to share it with the rest of us. Scott also sensed it. I have since learned what the brooding was all about, but back then all I could sense was Rook's uneasiness and an inexplicable feeling of helplessness. The only time the team discussed it was after she had turned on Annie, who was only trying to entice her to join us around the fire."

"'What d'ya thinks wrong with her?' Lunk asked the rest of us." "'Women's mood changes are unpredictable,' Lancer said

knowledgeably in Yellow's voice. He had just stepped from the shower and was wearing a long yellow terry robe and had his hair up under a towel wrapped turban-style around his head."

"'Just leave her alone,' I suggested. 'She'll come out of it.' But Scott took issue with me."

"'No. This is different.'"

"'Let it go,' I started to say, but Scott was already on his feet and off to seek her out. I felt compelled to tag along at a discreet distance, probably because I was afraid of Scott's scoring points where I couldn't."

"Rook was standing near the lake. She didn't even respond when Scott called her; I saw him give a small shrug and pull out that holo-locket he wore around his neck-the one Marlene gave him shortly before she went down with her ship. I wasn't sure just what he was thinking, but what bothered me most was the idea that Rook's moodiness was going to have a contagious effect on the team."

"In a moment, however, we all had bigger problems to deal with."

"I saw Scott and Rook turn at the same moment to stare at something off in the distance, so I stepped out from cover to see what was going on and heard the telltale approach of an Invid ship even before I saw the thing appear from behind one of the buttes. It was a large patrol ship, a rust-brown number boasting twice the firepower of a Trooper. I ran back to the fire and started stomping it out, while Scott and the others headed for the woods. The Invids hadn't spotted us, and it wasn't likely that a simple

campfire was going to bring it down, but for all we knew the patrol ships had now been ordered to incinerate anything that moved. Rook's Cyclone was my main concern; she had thoughtlessly left it by the lake in plain view."

"The patrol ship swept along the shore directly over our smoldering campfire and headed out toward the lake, but suddenly it swung about, its optic sensor scanning the woods. I voiced a silent prayer that the thing wouldn't spot us, and what seemed an eternity later, the Invid blasted up and away from our small piece of tranquillity."

"'Close one,' I said when the thing had disappeared. 'But it looks like we're safe for the moment.'"

"'Uh uh,' Scott said worriedly, shaking his head. 'We've got to assume they found us.' He saw the chagrined looked on my face and hastened to add: 'It might have gone for reinforcements-we'd be foolish to remain here any longer.'"

"Lunk was taking stock of our surroundings. 'Bad place to get caught if they mean business. I'm for splitting.'"

"'Then let's move it,' Scott said."

"I knelt down by the remains of our fire and poked at the coals. 'So much for dinner...'"

"Lancer sauntered by me, dangling an outstretched limp wrist from the robe's broad sleeve and feigning a bored yawn. 'Well, it didn't look very appetizing anyway,' he minced."

"Movement was likely to make matters worse, but there was high ground nearby that provided substantially more in the way of cover. We rode out most of the afternoon looking over our shoulders and waiting for Scott's warnings over the tac net, but no Invid appeared. It was beginning to look as though we hadn't been seen after all, but no one was making an issue of having abandoned our campsite. The air in the highlands was invigorating, and we found an expanse of conifer forest to call home for the night. Even Lancer had to admit that the steaks were tasty, and Rook, who had been sullen and lone-riding all day, seemed to be coming around

some."

"I woke up sometime during the night and noticed that Rook wasn't in her bag. I took a quick look around, counting heads and quickly realizing that Scott had the watch. (Actually, it turned out that he wasn't on watch at all, but I imagined him absent, once again falling victim to a kind of irrational jealousy.) I unzippered myself from the bag, egged on by thoughts of Rook and Scott cozying it up somewhere in the woods. Just lean on my shoulder and tell me all about it, Rook, I could almost hear Scott saying, when it was my shoulder she should have been leaning on!"

"The moon was full and low in the west, casting long shadows across ground cushioned with pine needles. To a sound track of insect songs, I stole silently through the trees and spied Rook, alone, in a clearing dominated by a tall oak. Her Cyclone was parked nearby; obviously she had wheeled it away from the pack while the rest of us slept. She seemed to be staring transfixed at something carved into the trunk, but I was too far back to make out what it was."

"I heard her say, 'Why-why did it happen?' and the next thing I knew she was hopping onto the Cyclone and moving off. I ran after her and thought about calling her. The word or name ROMY was carved into the tree trunk. It didn't mean anything to me, but it had obviously touched off something in Rook. I went back for my Cyclone and pushed it a good hundred yards from the woods before starting it up and going after her."

"It wasn't hard to follow her trail, and there was enough ambient moonlight for me to tail her without bringing up the Cyclone's headlamp. Straight off, it was apparent that she knew where she was going. She cut through the woods in the direction of the main road, headed north for several miles, then turned east along a rutted track that coursed over a barren, seemingly endless stretch of land. She was perhaps a half a mile ahead of me when I saw her suddenly veer off sharply to the right for no apparent reason. Fortunately, I thought to cut my speed some, because just short of the spot where she had made her turn I realized that the land dropped steeply away. I braked and threw the Cyclone into a sharp turn that

brought me close to the edge of a narrow chasm, scarcely the width of a city block. In the darkness below I could discern two rows of ruined buildings backed against the canyon's walls, almost as tall as the chasm was deep and facing each other across a single potholed street. Still a good distance ahead of me, Rook was disappearing into a kind of open-faced bunker that projected from the land as though it were a natural outcropping. Nearby were the tops of two massive circular shafts I guessed were exhaust ports for the city below."

"I twisted the Cyclone's throttle and accelerated into the unlit tunnel, not knowing what to expect."

"The city was dark and deserted-looking, claustrophobic due to the closeness of the canyon walls but threatening in a way that had nothing to do with the uniqueness of its location. Rook was still unaware of my presence. She had parked her Cyclone halfway along the street, dismounted, and was now peering into the permaplas window of alighted and apparently occupied ground-floor apartment. I think I came close to abandoning my little game just then; the sight of Rook eavesdropping on someone called into question my own position. But I decided to hang in, rationalizing that I was simply keeping an eye out in case anyone came wandering in on Rook's scene. Again, I was too far away to make out exactly what was going on: I heard Rook say, 'Romy,' as a man in a yellow shirt passed by the window. That at least explained the tree trunk carving and Rook's knowledge of the area. She had been here before; perhaps was native to the place. A moment later I heard Rook's sharp intake of breath. She had turned away from the window as if in disbelief."

"'My sister Lilly?' she asked softly."

"Rook took a few backward steps, straddled the Cyclone, and roared off. I stomped my mecha into gear and followed. I had all intentions of catching up to her now and having a heart-to-heart, but suddenly there were three more vehicles in the street, tearing out in front of Rook from an alleyway that ended at the canyon wall. They were solid-hubbed Harley choppers

with twin front headlights, dressed down for rough and ready street riding. The riders were of the same ilk-Mohawked, shaved-skulled, maniacal. They were chasing down two young women, taunting, gesturing, and otherwise cat-and-mousing them. I saw the Mohawked rider come alongside and douse them with beer from the bottle he was carrying. Then, when one of the women fell-a cute brunette in knee boots and a full skirt-the riders began to circle her, revving their bikes and promising a wide variety of injustices. The only helmeted rider had taken hold of the second woman and was grabbing what he could, heedless of the fury of her fists.

"Rook, meanwhile, had edged her bike up to the perimeter of the riders' circle; now, as they were making grabs for the downed girl, she switched on the Cyclone's headlight and brought it to bear on the group. Stunned, the riders brought hands up to shield their eyes.

"'You Snakes haven't changed a bit,' Rook growled. She turned the front wheel aside so the bikers could get a look at the hand blaster she had trained on them. 'Well, now don't tell me you've forgotten my face...'"

"The Mohawked rider, who I now noticed had a blue heart tattooed on his left arm, squinted and scowled. 'Why, it's Rook!'"

"The two women broke free of their pursuers and ran to stand by Rook's Cyclone, one of them crying hysterically."

"'I suppose you degenerates have overrun the whole place since I've been gone,' Rook continued."

"The outlaw riders looked at one another and said nothing. Finally, they laughed and took off, warning Rook that she had made a big mistake in coming back."

"'Skull's right,' I heard one of the women say to Rook. 'You better split. The wars aren't like before. The Red Snakes have five times as many members now.'"

"'Five times?...Is Romy doing anything about it? Are the Blue Angels still around?'"

"'Broken up,' the other woman said between sobs. 'They've fallen apart.

Romy spends all his time with...'"

"'Say it, Sue-I already know.'"

"'Your sister,' Sue said, lowering her head. 'He can't fight them alone.

No one can.'"

"The canyon widened some at its eastern end, where there was a surprisingly well kept park. Rook spent the rest of the night there-what little there was left of it-still unaware that I wasn't fifty feet away from her. In the morning a small van drove into the park; a nondescript-looking guy and a girl who couldn't have been more than fifteen stepped out, opened up the back, and, for an hour or so, sold and refilled canisters of propane gas for what appeared to be steady customers. Rook watched for some time without revealing herself, until the last customer had been served and the duo was getting ready to pack up and leave. Of course it occurred to me that these two might be Romy and Rook's sister, Lilly, but I had no way of being sure until Rook opened her mouth."

"On foot, she had moved her Cyclone to the top of a wide stone staircase that overlooked the couple's business area and signaled her presence by starting up the mecha. The man looked up at the sound and said, 'Who the heck...?' then, 'Rook!' full of excitement."

"But she returned a cold sneer. 'Romy, how the heck could you just let the Snakes take control of this place?' she demanded."

"'Welcome back,' Romy said, nonplussed."

"'Sue tells me there's five times as many of them as there used to be.'" "'I worried about you, Rook.'"

"'Liar!' she shot back. 'I'll bet you were real worried about me when Atilla and his Snakes were stomping the hell out of me in a rumble you and the rest of the Angels never attended!'"

"'Rook-'"

"'How could you have done that to me, Romy?' Rook said; sobbing now. 'If you only knew what they did to me...there was no way I could stay here after that.'"

"While all this was going on, I saw the girl walk out from behind the

van, her hand to her mouth in a startled gesture. Now she spoke to Rook through sobs of her own."

"'You don't understand-it wasn't like that at all!' she began."

"Rook's younger sister! I thought. She bore almost no resemblance to her blond sibling. Lilly was raven-haired and petite, dressed in a pleated white skirt and a simple burgundy-colored sweater."

"'Romy didn't run away-he tried to help you, but he was ambushed by the Red Snakes. They beat him up so bad, he couldn't walk for a month. It was the Snakes' plan all along to make it seem like Romy deserted you. They knew you would leave the Angels, and without you, the Angels were nothing. So when you left, everything fell apart.'"

"Rook wore a confused look now." "'That's enough,' Romy was telling Lilly."

"'Please don't blame him,' said Lilly. 'He searched all over for you.'" "Rook looked from one to the other, former lover to sister."

"'Why should I believe you?' she asked. 'Either of you!'"

"Lilly took a step closer. 'Besides, you can't expect Romy to take on the Snakes alone.' She motioned to the delivery van and to Romy, who was tight-lipped and, I think, embarrassed by the scene. 'We're trying to build a life for ourselves, Rook. Romy isn't going to do the stupid things he used to do. He's...he's grown up.'"

"I thought Rook was going to take offense at the remark, but she didn't.

In fact, I could see that she was no longer angry."

"'Sure the Snakes are an evil bunch,' Lilly continued. 'But if you don't give them a reason to fight, they mind their own turf. Romy's not holding back because he's a coward, but for the good of everyone.'"

"Rook smiled. 'So you're holding back, are you, Romy?'"

"I'm not sure just what was on Rook's mind-maybe the idea that Romy was also holding back the affection he still had for her. In any case, Lilly answered yes for him, and Rook said that she was beginning to understand. 'I guess it took a bookworm to make him see the light,' she directed at Lilly." "Lilly was about to say something, when one of the girls Rook had

rescued appeared at the top of the staircase. Sue, if I recall."

"'You've got to run for it, Rook!' she said, out of breath. 'The Red Snakes are all over Trenchtown looking for you!'"

"I saw Rook grin. 'Great!' she said, engaging the Cyclone. She asked Romy if the Snakes still hung out at something she named 'Highways.' Romy nodded warily. 'Rook, you're not thinking of-'"

"'It's what I've been waiting for,' she told him. 'Revenge!'"

"She stomped the Cyclone into gear and raced off, leaving all of us wondering if we would ever see her again."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"No one can dispute the accomplishment. The very fact that they undertook the journey !to Reflex Point] is in and of itself a measure of their courage and commitment; the very fact that they journeyed so far through such hostile territory a testament to their skills. But someone needs to point out the troubles the journey stirred up for those along the way. Can anyone name one Southlands settlement that survived their [the Bernard team's] wake?"

Breetai Tul, as quoted in Zeus Bellow,

The Road to Reflex Point

"I decided to show myself after Rook split. I brought the Cyclone to life and pulled out from my place of concealment in the bushes, surprising the hell out of Romy and Lilly. I popped a small wheelie for effect and screeched to a halt, allowing the tail end to slide around to where Romy stood with his mouth half-open.

"'Well, don't just stand there waiting for flies to land,' I said to him. 'Hop on and let's give her some backup support.'"

"Romy flashed Lilly a look that communicated several dozen things at once and climbed on. I could tell that Lilly wanted to hold him back, but she knew better than to try. Romy had to get this out of his system for his sake as well as Rook's. I mean, nobody likes to be thought of as a Khyron, even if it was all a misunderstanding."

"Cavalierly, I nodded to Lilly and powered the Cyclone up the staircase, getting a rise out of the fact that Romy was white-knuckling the seat grips all the while. I have to admit that I liked impressing would-be motorcycle toughs like Romy; they were an all too frequently encountered breed in the wastes, and I was bored to tears by them."

"Once up top, I asked Romy about this 'Highways' place Rook had mentioned; he shouted directions into my ear, and I wristed the Cyc's

throttle, letting it open up along the undamaged sections of roadway that led back to the narrow heart of the city."

"It must have been about this time that the three Invid paid a call on Scott and the others. I had been wondering what they had made of our disappearance from camp. Perhaps they figured we had run off together or just decided that individually we had had enough of Scott's search for Reflex Point. As it came out later, Annie was all for going out to look for us, but Scott felt differently. 'I prefer not to meddle in people's private affairs,' is how Annie told me he had put it. But I guessed correctly that they had opted to hang in for another day, thinking that we would find our way back to them. There was a good chance they would have literally passed right over Trenchtown on their way north, but strangely enough, Scott found his own way to the city in the canyon-with a little help from the Invid, that is."

"They came swooping down on the camp early in the morning, laying waste to that beautiful patch of forest. Whoever was in charge had elected to send in the big guns again: combat ships like the one we had seen after our run-in with the black bear. The team had no chance to hit back, only take cover and keep their heads down. The other thing I learned afterward was that neither the Alpha nor Lancer's Cyclone was activated or otherwise engaged before the attack, which suggested that the combat units had a means of zeroing in on Protoculture even when it wasn't being tapped for energy."

"Scott did manage to make it to the Alpha, though. He brought up the VT's power and launched before the Invid reduced the camp to a fiery ruin, but apparently that was only the first of his woes. The three aliens formed up on his tail and went after him with an unprecedented fury, layering the zone above the forest with unforgiving streams of annihilation discs: When Scott glimpsed Trenchtown's canyon, he saw his out; he led the Invid down into the seemingly deserted city, intent on battling them there."

"Closing on Highways, I heard what I then thought was thunder but later learned were the detonations of the eight heat-seekers Scott had dumped on one of the Invid ships."

"Highways turned out to be the headquarters of the Red Snakes. It was on the roof of a skeletal fifteen-story building, reached by a series of jerry-rigged ramps that connected it with an adjacent (and equally devastated) ten-story parking garage. Romy and I arrived a few moments after Rook, who was braving it out on her own against more than a dozen outlaw bikers. At the center of the group stood the Snakes' main man, a mean-looking hulk named Atilla. He must have stood six six and weighed in at two eighty, most of which was pure muscle. He had a pot, like most of these rogue leaders do, and affected a getup that was part street, part costume, including armless goggles no larger than bottlecaps he had had stitched to his eye sockets, black leather wristbands, shin guards and knee pads fashioned to resemble poised cobras, and a kind of pointed, twin-horned Vikinglike helmet and cowl combination. There was a large S emblazoned on the front of his sleeveless T-shirt, and he had a face not even a mother could love, with a nose that was wide and flattened from countless breaks."

"'I've gotta admit it, Rook,' he was saying as we pulled up. 'You got a lotta guts. It's just too bad you ain't got the brains that go along with it.'"

"At that, Atilla gestured to his assembled pack, and they responded with the appropriate litany of hoots and hollers. The implication was clear enough: Rook was about to receive a stomping that would make the first seem like a love fest."

"'I didn't think you had it in you, Rook,' Atilla added."

"But if Rook was at all worried at that moment, she had me fooled. Somewhere along the way she had suited herself up in Cyclone battle armor. But even so, she looked vulnerable, straddling her bike, glaring right back at them, her blond hair mussed by the wind."

"'I'd say you're the one who's the coward. Snake Eyes,' she fired back. 'You're nothing without this army of slugs you call a tribe.'"

"During this little exchange we were parked on the remains of a roof balcony, above and behind Rook. Romy was eager to go down to her, but I told him to hang back a moment more, at least until the rules were laid

down."

"'You're Mr. Mean,' Rook was saying, 'only because you've got the odds on your side, and not one of these rogues has the balls to challenge your position. But I think you're hollow to the core, and I came back here to tell you that.'"

"This was the same Rook I had fallen in love with that day in Pops's biker bar...And unless Atilla was a lot quicker than the scuz she had seen to there, he was soon to be one sorry rogue, and I knew it."

"To Rook's taunts, Atilla returned something befitting his intellect-something like: 'Oh yeah? Prove it!'-before she got down to the challenge."

"'Just you and me,' she told him. 'One on one, right here in front of all your boys. And I'll even make it easy for you. We won't even fight; we'll just have a chicken race.'"

"'A race?' Atilla roared laughingly. 'I thought we were gonna have some fun.'"

"Rook grinned and said, 'The beam,' pointing to something off to her left."

"This brought a real chorus of cheers from the spectators. I didn't understand what she was talking about until Romy showed me what the beam was. It was either the remains of a bridge that had once linked Highways with the building across the street or a collapsed structural member from one of the two buildings. In any case, it was no more than foot wide and now ran roof to roof more than one hundred and fifty feet above the city's main street. But that wasn't all: The beam was not entirely straight. Midway along was a bend and a slight dip-from who knew what-to test the mettle of any rider. Reaching the beam first was only part of the game; reaching the other roof was something else again. It was obvious from everyone's reactions that the beam was one of Trenchtown's rites of passage, an initiation that had certainly ended in more than one death."

"While I was taking all of this in, Romy was dismounting from the Cyclone. ' We can't let her go through with this,' he told me, showing an

intense anger that almost led me to reevaluate my initial impression of him."

"Atilla, meanwhile, was doing his best to back away from the challenge without losing face. He pointed out to his assembled buddies that what he had envisioned was a genuine physical mix-up with Rook-winner taking all, so to speak-and they were buying it."

"'Let's pluck this chicken now!' he shouted, leering at Rook."

"I could understand his misgivings, but if I were him I would have been pointing out the fact that Rook's Cyclone was not only faster than his old Kamikaze but capable of reconfiguring and actually flying across to the opposite roof should Rook misjudge the beam itself. Well, perhaps he had never seen a Cyclone before, I thought."

"Romy and I were standing side by side on the roof balcony now. Below, Atilla and his Huns were beginning to take a fancy to the idea of jumping Rook's bones, so I decided it was time for us to show our colors, pulled out the hand H-90, and fired off a quick vertical burst for the boys that stopped them dead in their tracks.

"'Stay where you are!' I warned them, feeling a little like Atilla with the blaster backing up my threats. 'The two of them fight it out alone, just like the lady says.' Rook was more surprised by my sudden appearance than any of them. I figured that by backing her I was doing a little better than Romy, who was now urging her to give up the idea. His presence elicited as many comments from the Snakes as Rook's idea of riding the beam had. It seemed that the former leader of the Blue Angels was not very well thought of in the Snakes' side of town."

"'Don't worry, Romy, I won't blow it,' Rook was saying, not entirely successful at hiding her concern. 'Let's just say my riding skills have improved a lot.' She looked hard at Romy and thanked him for standing by her. 'Coming back here was a good thing,' she said, smiling. 'I think it cleared my head of a, lot of bad memories. More than you'll ever know...'"

"'Rook,' Romy started to say."

"'I'm counting on you to take care of Lilly,' Rook added, activating the

Cyc."

"I walked down the stairs and casually aimed the blaster in Atilla's direction. 'You gonna run this race, or what?' I asked him, unsure about my next move should he refuse."

"The Snakes threw words of encouragement to their leader, and Atilla stepped forward to accept the challenge. Romy ceremoniously handed Rook her helmet, and some of the Snakes ran to the edge of the roof for a better view of the race."

"Things got under way without the preliminaries and fanfare that usually characterize such events; Rook and Atilla positioned their machines on either side of a flag bearer, maybe a hundred feet from the beam. The starter, a shaved-skull Snake in T-shirt and fatigues, jumped up and brought the flag down with a shout. The two machines patched out and headed for the beam. Again, I thought I heard distant thunder but made nothing of it."

"I had noticed Atilla give the red Cyc a dismissive once-over before the flag dropped and figured he would be in for a surprise. But I was the one surprised: The old Kami was a real sleeper and must have concealed a turbocharger somewhere within its works, because Atilla beat Rook off the line and stayed a half length ahead of her for the first fifty feet. In fact, I'm pretty sure Snake Eyes would have hit the beam neck and neck with Rook if fear hadn't revealed his own true colors."

"Just shy of the beam he glanced over at Rook, saw that she wasn't about to yield an inch, and bailed out, bouncing and sliding all the way, his cycle plummeting over the edge and exploding when it hit the street."

"Rook rode the beam like a pro. She told me later that at no time did she even consider using the mecha's capabilities to save herself from wiping out. I ran forward to the edge of the roof, along with everyone else who was applauding her feat, including more than a few Snakes. The loyal members of the gang were ministering to their bruised and road-cashed leader, who knew, I think, that many more challenges would soon be coming his way."

"Rook had raised the faceshield of the helmet and was waving back to

us when I realized that that distant thunder was no longer either distant or thunder. And an instant later, we saw Scott streak overhead in the Alpha, pursued by two Invid combat ships. The Snakes began to freak and scatter for cover. I turned and heard one of them shout: 'They found out about the Protoculture I stole! They're gonna blow us apart!'"

"I looked back at Rook in time to see her spin the Cyc through a 360, accelerate along the roof, and launch herself into Battle Armor mode. This was lost on most of the Snakes, but I noticed Atilla staring at the transformed Cyclone like he had just witnessed some kind of miracle."

"Rook put down on a roof a few blocks down the canyon, raised the mecha's cannon, and took out one of the ships. Scott, at the same time, had thrown the VT into a booster climb and was now falling back down upon the second, unleashing a rain of six missiles to deal with the thing. The Invid dropped itself to street level, dodging as best it could, but ultimately took one of the heat-seekers full force and spun out of control, impaling itself on a spiked piece of construction infrastructure. You would have thought Rook and Scott had planned it that way."

"After the action died down, I used the Cyc's tac net to notify Scott that his errant troops would be home soon; we made plans to rendezvous on the north road."

"I didn't have any doubts about Rook's bidding a swift good-bye to Trenchtown, even though some wrongs had now been redressed and some old worries laid to rest. But I knew also that there was still a scene that had to be played out with Romy, and I was anxious to see it."

"The four of us-me, Rook, Romy, and Lilly-got together for eats at his place. Small talk for the most part; Romy made no mention of Rook's staying on in Trenchtown, and we made no mention of Reflex Point, Lancer, or the others.

"'Rook, it's been so good seeing you again,' Lilly said as we were preparing to shove off. 'I just can't tell you...If it hadn't been for your courage, the Snakes would still be ruling this city...' She started getting

weepy about then, and it made Rook angry."

"'What on Earth are you crying about?' Rook said, putting her hands on the smaller woman's shoulders. When Lilly exchanged looks with Romy, Rook caught on and lightened up. 'Hey, don't worry about me,' she told Lilly. 'There's a person in my life now who means a lot to me...'"

"I was leaning against the building with my hands behind my head when she suddenly turned to me. 'Rand,' she said, leadingly and with a sweetness that didn't fit her. She came over and took hold of my arm, finding a pressure point in my wrist at the same time. 'Come on, give me a kiss like you always do.' Under her breath, she told me to pretend to be her honey or else. 'Kiss me on the cheek-and make it look good,' she added."

"Romy and Lilly were watching with a mixture of bemusement and anticipation, and Rook was standing there, offering me her left cheek like she was my aunt or something, so I did what I had to do to make it look good! I took hold of her upper arms and pulled her to me before she even had a chance to close her mouth. I didn't hold her long, and she kept her eyes wide for the duration, not returning the favor, but it was long enough to bring a scarlet blush to her cheeks."

"'Rook is my baby and always will be,' I told Romy over Rook's shoulder, putting some bass in my voice to keep from laughing. 'Come on, honey. Let's get back to the ranch,' I said as I mounted my Cyc."

"Rook climbed on her mecha without looking at me. Lilly started to say something, but Rook just said goodbye and motored off. I did the same, leaving Romy and Lilly in the street, his arm draped over her narrow shoulders."

"When I came alongside Rook, she flashed me the anger she didn't want to show in front of her sister, and I decided to have some fun with it. 'You kiss pretty well for such a tough gal,' I ribbed her."

"'That was supposed to be the cheek, dirtbag.'"

"'Jeez, I'm sorry...I must have misunderstood or something..." "'Pea brain! Degenerate!'"

"I laughed, then tried to switch tracks. 'What about your folks, Rook?' I

asked her. 'Are they still living in this hole?' I was sincere about it; Rook's past was my way into her present."

"But she just shook her head and made for the conduit, not bothering to look behind."

CHAPTER TWELVE

The book Lunk had promised to deliver was called Inherit the Stars, a piece of speculative fiction written by the noted twentieth-century British author and inventor James P. Hogan and first published in 1977. It was the first in a series of novels that dealt with humankind's contact with an alien race indigenous to Ganymede (the Ganymeans), who in many ways were the antithesis of the Opteran Invid.

footnote in Xandu Reem,

A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard

When they were reunited and on the road north once again, it was business as usual. Four hundred miles north of Trenchtown the team was attacked by five Invid Troopers, which they disposed of almost without breaking stride. Scott took out the first two from the Alpha and left the rest of the work to the three Cyclones, piloted by Rook, Rand, and Lancer, who had by now become a finely honed unit. There had been no signs of Pincer ships for several days, and though the Troopers were bothersome, they posed no real threat provided that each one glimpsed was accounted for on the battlefield.

The desert terrain helped them to easily spot the Troopers. They had left the highlands behind. Gone were the forests and misshapen buttes of those plateaus, as well as the cool air and sparkling rivers they had come to take for granted. But this was not true desert, waterless and unforgiving, but rather a broad expanse of arid lowland, with solitary flat-topped mesas to break the monotony of the horizon and enough spring-fed lakes to support a wide assortment of settlements.

Lunk, demanding equal-time benefits after Rook's "dalliance in the Trench"-Rand's words-was calling the shots on the latest detour along the way. The group was headed toward a town called Roca Negra, sixty miles west of the north road and said to be a community that had managed to

retain an old-world charm.

The team had an overview of the place now from the tableland a few miles east. Roca Negra looked neat and compact, enlivened by groupings of cottonwood and eucalyptus trees, and lent a certain drama by the mesa and rounded peaks that all but overshadowed it. Scott made a pass over the town in the Alpha, the VT's deltalike shadow paralleling the course of the main road, and reported his sightings. There was a large circular fountain and plaza central to the town, with an assortment of rustic-style buildings grouped around it and the few streets that radiated out from the hub like the spokes of a wheel. Scott could make out tile roofs and cobblestone streets, a church steeple, and a number of people, some of whom were staring up at the Veritech, while others ran off to inform the rest of the townsfolk.

Lunk smiled at the thought of the place and urged the van along with added throttle. Annie was next to him in the shotgun seat. It was the same police van they had commandeered in Norristown, but Lunk had removed the canvas top and given the thing an olive-drab onceover in memory of the beloved APC he had had blown out from under him in the highlands. Lancer, Rook, and Rand flanked the truck on their Cyclones.

"I sure hope we'll be able to get some food in this town," Annie said after Scott's message. "I'm starved!"

Lunk flashed her a bright-eyed smile and told her not to worry, then turned to Rand, who had come alongside on the driver's side of the van.

"What's so special 'bout this place?" Rand shouted into the wind. "You been here before?"

Lunk shook his head, maintaining the smile.

"Then why are we stopping here?" Annie demanded, joining in.

Lunk reached back and pulled a worn paperback book from the rear pocket of his fatigues, holding it out the window for Rand's inspection.

"To make good a promise I made to a friend a year ago," Lunk said to both of them. "To deliver this book."

Rand gazed at the thing but couldn't make out much, except that it was

aged, yellowed, dog-eared, and smudged. Someone had thought to wrap the book in protective plastic, but too late to preserve the cover illustration.

"What sort of book is it?" Rand asked.

Lunk pulled the book in and regarded it. "I really don't know-I haven't read it. But it was important enough to my buddy for him to ask me to bring it to his father if I ever got the chance."

"Well, why didn't your buddy deliver it himself, if it's so important?" "I wish he could..."

Rand saw Lunk's smile fade and asked him about it.

"It was during the Invid invasion," Lunk began. "My friend was on recon patrol, and I was detailed to rendezvous with him for the extraction. When I found him, he was trying to get away from a couple of Shock Troopers, and I could see he was wounded. They blasted him again while I...sat and watched. How he could get up and run after that I'll never know, but he did, and started for the APC. I thought there might still be a chance, but the Invid caught up with him before I could move in, and he didn't have a prayer."

Annie could see that Lunk was torturing himself with the memory but kept still and allowed him to finish. Was this what he had run from? Annie wondered, recalling comments uttered months ago when they had first met. "He called out to me," Lunk was saying. "Calling me to come get him,

but there was nothing I could do. The Invid had spotted the APC and started after me, and I had no choice but to make a run for it.

"I don't even remember how I got away from them...But I can still hear my buddy's voice coming over the net, as loud and clear today as I heard it then, calling me to help him. I can't forget..."

Lunk's face was beaded with sweat, and Annie fought down an urge to hold him. But he was through it now and sort of shaking himself back to the present, looking hard at the book again.

"This had some special meaning for him, I suppose. The one thing he wanted most was for his old man to have it. I promised on the day he went out..."

"Oh, Lunk," Annie broke in, touching his arm lightly. "You've been carrying more than that book around, haven't you? I feel so bad..."

Rand looked in through the driver's side and noticed Annie crying. "Lunk," he said all of a sudden. "We've got a book to deliver. So let's get on it!"

Lunk saw Rand wrist the Cyclone's throttle to wheelie the mecha into lead position. He smiled to himself, thankful for the company of his friends, and pressed his foot down on the van's accelerator pedal.

Roca Negra had a secret of its own, a dirty little secret compared to the one Lunk wore like a scarlet letter. But no one on the team was aware of this just yet; the only thing immediately obvious was that the town seemed deserted despite Scott's recent claims to the contrary.

"Where is everybody?" Lancer said to Rook and Rand as the three Cyclones entered the empty plaza.

"What'd you expect-the welcome wagon?" Rook asked sarcastically. "After all, we didn't tell them Yellow Dancer was coming to town. It's probably just siesta time."

Rand took a look around the circle, certain he saw people ducking away from the open windows and pulling shutters closed on others. Even the central fountain was deserted, but the damp earth around it suggested that people had been there a short time ago. "You don't find this a bit strange?" he asked Rook.

"You're both imagining things," she said. "It's not like this hasn't happened before. Besides, there are two kids right over there," she added, pointing to two young boys munching on apples nearby.

Rand relaxed somewhat at that and swung his mecha into a second lap around the well. He began to take stock of the buildings now and realized that his expectations had been way off base. Instead of the stucco and terra-cotta village he had envisioned, Roca Negra was like something lifted from what used to be called England. The architecture was of a style he had heard referred to as Tudor, with mullioned windows, tall gables, nogging

and timber facades, and steeply pitched tiled roofs. "How about giving me a bite?" he heard Annie shout to the kids as the van drove past them. Then he spotted the restaurant: José's Café, according to the sign above the curved entryway.

Rook, Lancer, and Lunk followed Rand's lead, but only Lunk moved in to investigate. There were tables and chairs set up out front but no one on the scene to serve them.

"Bring me some peppermint candies!" Annie shouted to Lunk.

Lunk turned briefly to acknowledge her, and when he swung around, there was a mustachioed man standing in the restaurant's barroom swinging doors.

"The restaurant is closed during the emergency," the man began. He spoke with a Spanish accent and wore an apron and work shirt more suited to the trades than to the food biz, but he was gesturing Lunk to halt in a way that suggested he owned the place. "Our communications have been cut, and we're short on supplies of all kinds. The indications right now are that we'll be closed for about a month."

"But we've traveled such a long way!" Annie shouted out the open top of the van, disappointment in her voice. "We haven't had a decent meal in weeks."

"I told you what the situation is," the man fired back, raising his fist. Lunk was taken aback by the gesture. The man was slight, but his dark eyes were flashing with an anger that seemed to add to his aspect. "There's nothing I can do about it. We have no food to feed you. I suggest that you try the next town."

The man had moved past Lunk and was now overturning the café chairs and placing them legs up on the table. Lunk followed him, deciding to steer clear of the food issue for a moment and inquire as to the whereabouts of Alfred Nader, his dead friend's father. But the simple question. seemed to unhinge the restaurant owner, who dropped one of the chairs at the mention of the man's name.

"What're you getting so upset about?" Lunk asked, concerned but not

yet suspicious. "I only want to know how I can find Alfred Nader's house. Is that too much to ask, or are you as short on information as you are on food?"

The owner averted Lunk's penetrating gaze and busied himself righting the chair. "You must have the wrong town," he said distractedly. "I know everyone in town, and there's nobody named Nader living here."

"But you must have heard of him," Lunk pressed. "Alfred Nader?..."

"I tell you I never heard of him," the man said, raising his voice and moving back toward the swinging doors. "Now go away and leave me alone!"

"This is weird," Lunk said, turning around to face Rand and the others. "This guy tells me Alfred Nader doesn't live here. But he's lying, I'm sure of it." Lunk took a look back at the doorway and walked to the van. "Why the heck would he lie like that?"

"Something stinks," said Lancer. "Nader's here. We're just going to have to find him on our own."

"We'll split up," Rook suggested.

"All right, I'll go with Lunk," said Rand, already climbing into the van's shotgun seat. "We'll meet in an hour by the bridge outside town."

Lunk thanked his friends for their support and got behind the wheel. He swung the van around and headed it out of the plaza, followed closely by Rook and Lancer, who both ignored Annie's attempts to team up with them. "Well, screw you guys!" she yelled as they roared off; then she spied

Rand's untended Cyclone and smiled broadly.

Lunk and Rand headed up one of the streets leading from the plaza. There were a few people about, but without exception they disappeared as the van approached. Shutters slammed overhead, women carried their children indoors, and men shouted threats from the darkness of interior spaces. Much to Rand's surprise, Lunk seemed to know his way.

"My friend used to tell me all about this place," Lunk explained, a bit

nostalgic. "He'd tell me all about his father, about how his old man was a big shot in town-a politician or something."

"And the restaurant owner never heard of him, huh?" Rand said knowingly. "What are they trying to cover up?"

"There's supposed to be a bakery somewhere along this street," Lunk said, leaving Rand's question unanswered and looking around. "There it is," he said a moment later. "A few more landmarks and I might be able to find my way to Nader's house without anybody's help."

Rand was silent while Lunk took one turn after another, the pattern of disappearances and threats unbroken. "You know, something just occurred to me," he said to Lunk when they had reached the outskirts of town. "Maybe they're trying to protect Nader."

"How do you mean?" Lunk asked, pulling the van over.

Rand turned to him. "These people don't know us. For all they know we could be sympathizers. If Nader was a politico, he could be in trouble."

"With who?"

Rand shrugged. "The Invid, for starters."

The rest of the team, having met with the same reception, had abandoned their search and were killing time at the edge of town, waiting for Lunk and Rand to show up. Rook was on her feet, leaning almost casually against the stone wall of the bridge. Lancer and Annie were sitting on the grassy embankment above the stream.

"Lunk and Rand have got to pass by here eventually," Lancer was telling the others.

Rook agreed. "We're better off just waiting for them. But one of us is going to have to find Scott. Where do you think he put the Alpha down?...Hey! A truck!" she said suddenly. "Maybe the driver can shed some light on this thing."

Annie turned to glance at the truck. "Looks like they're stopping."

No one moved as the truck came to a halt on the bridge. They had seen two men in the cab and were looking there, when without warning a third man jumped from the canvased rear. It took them a moment to realize that

he was wearing a gas mask and what looked like a twin-tanked oxyacetylene rig on his back. And by the time they had made sense of this it was too late: The man had brought the rig's torch out front and released a foul-smelling, eye-smarting gas into their midst.

Almost immediately Rook and Lancer began to cough uncontrollably. Beneath the cloud and consequently somewhat less affected by it, Annie tried to slide down the embankment and reach the stream. But the gas's effects caught up with her; she felt a searing pain work its way toward her lungs and doubled up into a fit of coughing. The cloud was as dense as smoke, but she could discern that several other men had followed the lead man from the back of the truck. They, too, had gas masks on, but they also earned bats and clubs. Just before Annie went under, she saw Rook and Lancer fall as roundhouse blows were directed against them.

There was an olive tree and a small circular well where there should have been a house. Otherwise the lot was empty, the buildings that surrounded it on three sides burned and abandoned. Puzzled, Lunk stood staring at the scene.

"Are you sure this is the place?" Rand asked him from the van. He had pulled out one of the former police vehicle's air-cooled autopistols and was resting it up against his collarbone now.

"Yep. He told me his dad had a well and an olive tree in his backyard.

And there they are. Now all we have to do is find the house."

Rand frowned and stepped away from the van to join his friend. "There's got to be twenty houses in this town with an olive tree and a well in the backyard, Lunk. And even if this was Nader's place, he's obviously not here now. I don't know," Rand added skeptically. "Maybe he's dead, and that's why everybody's acting so strange."

Lunk was starting to reply when Rand heard the sound of footsteps behind him. He looked over his shoulder and found himself facing half a dozen angry-looking men, one of whom was carrying a kind of backpacked welding torch.

Rand swung back around, putting all he had into knocking Lunk to one side while he threw himself in the opposite direction. Lunk took the full force of the gas cloud in the back, but before the men could move in, Rand was through his roll and taking aim at the torch. He pulled off one quick shot that effectively decapitated the twin-spouted rod and gave the men pause. They began to scatter as Rand squeezed off three more shots, one toward the feet of each of the men who were standing guard by the van. The three leapt through a kind of impromptu dance and fled along with their comrades.

Rand called to Lunk and made a beeline for the van, throwing himself into the shotgun seat through the passenger-side door, Lunk just steps behind him.

Off to one side, the men were rallying for another attack. "Make tracks!" Rand yelled, pounding a fist against the dash.

"You make good sense, buddy!" Lunk yelled back, putting the pedal to the metal.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

It has yet to be demonstrated that the Invid Regis was capable of direct dealings with each of her remote drones-Scouts, Troopers and Pincer Ships-prior to Scott Bernard's forcing her hand, so to speak. Commentators have pointed to the incident at Roca Negra as an example of changes in the previous hierarchical organization, in which each hive queen (sic) was made responsible for her own soldiers.

Bloom Nesterfig, Social Organization of the Invid

In José's Café, the churlish mayor of Roca Negra, a large, mustachioed man named Pedro, received word of the brutal attack on Rook, Annie, and Lancer.

"They beat them up!" he bellowed now, bringing his big fist down on one of the tables and rising to his full height of six foot four. His English, like José's, had a Spanish accent.

"Yes," José's wife, Maria, continued. She was a small, pretty woman who usually wore her auburn hair in a loose braid over one shoulder. "They put the three of them in the back of the truck, and then they sped off somewhere. But I think the two others got away."

José watched his wife from across the room but said nothing. It worried him to have her interfere in these matters, but she had been adamant about reporting the attack to the mayor, and when she was decided about something, there was nothing José could do to stop her. He only hoped that the rogues who captured the three strangers would not learn of her statements.

"Those no-good bums have done it this time," said Pedro, starting for the door.

Maria's thin hands were clutched at her breast. "You won't let them hurt the others, then?"

"When I get my hands on them, I'll show them who runs this town!"

the mayor said without looking back.

José watched the doors swing to and fro. Who would he show? he asked himself. The rogues or the strangers who had come in search of Alfred Nader? Roca Negra could so easily fall victim to violence from either side...

Meanwhile, Rand and bunk were speeding toward the bridge to rendezvous with Lancer and the others, unaware that the bad part of town had already come calling.

"But why would they attack us?" Rand asked. "Just to drive us out of town, or what? And where the heck is Scott, anyway?"

"It has something to do with the disappearance of old man Nader," Lunk said firmly. He had the book out again and was regarding it while he drove.

"If that's true, we oughta rethink your idea of trying to get that book to him," Rand suggested.

Lunk shook his big head. "Uh uh, buddy, no way. I said I'd deliver this thing no matter what the odds. And if Nader's alive, I'll find 'im."

"Bravo," Rand replied, crossing his arms. "I just hope you don't get us both killed in the process." The van was closing in on the bridge now, and Lancer was nowhere to be seen. "They're supposed to be here. Where are they?"

"No sign of the Cyclones either," Lunk added, bringing the van to a halt and climbing out. He looked over toward the embankment, then down at tire marks in the dirt road-marks that didn't belong to the van. "Check this out," he told Rand. "Something's been by here earlier on-a truck by the looks of it."

Rand and Lunk bent down to inspect the tracks and in so doing took no notice of the men who climbed up from under the bridge. But Rand had thought to bring the autopistol with him and raised it threateningly as the men advanced. However, a second group joined the first after a moment, and although underarmed with clubs, axes, and farm tools, they stood fourteen strong.

"Some of you are gonna go down with me," Rand warned.

He was standing back to back with Lunk at the center of the wide circle that was forming around them.

"Get a load of this big bruiser with the knife," Rand heard Lunk say. He had no intention of turning around for a look but had to wonder about the size of the man if Lunk was calling him big. "If ever there was an hombre with no sense of humor, he's it."

"Well, this character with the ax isn't exactly my idea of a comedian either," Rand answered to let Lunk know how things were on his side of the circle.

"Ugly bunch of gorillas..." Lunk growled, lowering himself into a crouch and beckoning one of the men to come in on him.

"What are they waiting for?" Rand started to say, when one of the circle said, "We have your friends."

Rand felt Lunk straighten up behind him. "Throw the weapon down," Lunk told him.

"We're just going to let them take us?"

Lunk already had his massive arms raised. "Take it easy," he said to Rand under his breath. "My guess is they'll take us to Lancer and the girls. Then we'll make our getaway, all right with you?"

"Well, if you say so..." Rand gulped and tossed the autopistol to the dirt, much to the amazement of the circle. "It's your party," he shrugged as the men moved in to bind his wrists.

A short while later, in the back of the same truck that had surprised Lancer, Rook, and Annie at the bridge, Lunk had a change of heart. The truck had entered the plaza and was moving slowly past José's Café, Lunk spotted the owner standing in the doorway and said: "There's that bird José, I bet he knows where our friends are!"

And the next thing Rand knew, Lunk was standing up and shouldering his way toward the street. Rand jumped out of the truck and was right

behind him. As the two of them rolled, got to their feet, and made a mad dash for the café entrance, propelled by blasts from the very weapon Rand had surrendered only moments before.

Lunk crashed through the swinging doors at full speed, knocking frail-looking José halfway across the room.

"I sometimes have my doubts about you, partner!" Rand said, out of breath and dodging blasts that were entering the bar from the street. The truck was backing up, disgorging men who were already closing in on the café. "Hope you have another plan ready," he added, noticing for the first time that there was a woman in the room.

Lunk was behind the bar, cutting the cords that bound his hands with a knife he had gripped between his teeth. José was cross-legged on the floor, shaking his head as if to restore himself to consciousness. The woman was kneeling beside him. Lunk freed himself and tossed the knife to Rand, who had to catch it in both hands and duplicate his friend's Houdini act.

"Okay, what's next?" Rand managed with his mouth full.

Lunk grinned and pulled a hand blaster from beneath his shirt. "Surprise," he said, shoving the weapon into José's ribs. "Now, my closed-mouthed friend, you're going to do a little talking."

Rand took a cautious look out the swinging doors and turned to Lunk. "I hate to bring up an unpleasant subject, but there's quite a crowd gathering out there, and since we've only got one blast-"

"In a minute," Lunk cut him off. "Start talking," he said to José, ignoring the pleas of the man's wife.

José swallowed hard. "What about? It isn't my problem." "You can begin with where our friends are-and no stalling!"

"Maria," he said, looking imploringly at his wife. "What should I do?" "Please believe us," she told Lunk from her husband's side. "We don't

know what became of your friends. Only Pedro knows what happened to them."

"Fine. So produce Pedro."

"He is the mayor," Maria continued. "He's giving all the orders."

"Maria!" José yelled, trying to stop her. "Then take us to him-now!"

"But how?" said José. "We can't get past that mob." He gestured toward the door.

"I've got an idea," Rand said from the door. "José, you've put on a pretty good act so far, and now you're going to do some acting on our behalf..."

José pulled Rand and Lunk through the café's swinging doors a few minutes later, leading them along on a leather leash. Their hands were now bound in front of them with white cloth napkins Maria had helped to knot, one of which dutifully concealed Lunk's blaster. The townsmen were suitably impressed (if somewhat bewildered) and moved in to retake custody of their prisoners, but José waved them off.

"Pedro has asked me to take them to him. He wants you men to stay here and capture their companion when he shows up."

"You're doing fine," Lunk complimented him under his breath. "Now just keep walking. Get us out of here and you'll save your skin. Tell the driver to take us to Pedro."

José motioned to the idling van one of the villagers had driven in from the bridge. "Is this their vehicle?"

The man behind the wheel nodded. José shoved his prisoners into the rear seats and joined them there. Maria rode shotgun.

"Be alert for their comrade," José reminded the men as he ordered the van off.

Away from the café, Lunk loosed the cloth knot and brought the blaster out for the driver to see. He ordered José and the driver out of the van when they reached the mayor's offices.

"Now don't get any funny ideas when we get inside," Lunk advised them, making his point with the weapon. "I don't want to hurt anybody, but I'll do what's necessary."

"You want me, too?" said the driver, Gomez.

"You, too," said Rand, giving him a light shove.

The building was a wooden two-story structure with tall, curved-top entry doors. Lunk and Rand stayed behind the two men as they climbed the staircase to the upper floor, but once at the office, José and Gomez burst through the doors shouting warnings to their friends inside. Lunk was only a step behind them, though, and fired a shot at the ceiling to quiet the room. There were a dozen or so townspeople in the office, not counting Lancer, Rook, and Annie, who were bound hand and foot on the floor in the

center of the spacious room. "Hands up!" Lunk bellowed.

"Well, hello, boys," said Rook as plaster rained down on her from Lunk's ceiling shot.

"Where's Scott?" Lancer asked.

Rand moved in to free his friends while Lunk threatened to air-condition the room unless someone directed him to the mayor.

"That's me," said a large man seated at a table. "Be careful, Pedro," José warned him.

Lunk leveled the blaster at him. "We've got a few questions for you." "Like where you hid the Cyclones," Rand said, moving to Lunk's side.

Lancer and Rook had some nasty bruises, and a new anger was evident in Rand's voice.

But the mayor wasn't impressed. "We have them, and we mean to keep them," he told Rand. "You people are free to go, but we keep the machines."

Rand showed his teeth. "Hear me, mister, and hear me good: We're giving the orders now, not you."

"Give all the orders you want, but we'll do what we have to do."

Rand made an impatient sound and grabbed the blaster from Lunk's hands. "Talk to him, Lunk, before I do something I might regret."

The big man nodded and stepped forward. "All right, Mr. Mayor, forget the Cyclones for a moment. What I want now is the truth about Alfred Nader."

"I don't know anyone named Nader," Pedro said, meeting Lunk's glare.

But the stifled gasps from others in the room told a different story.

Lunk slammed his fists down on the table. "I'm sick of listening to lies,

pal!"

Rand put a hand on his friend's arm. "Hold on a minute," he started to

say. But suddenly the building was shaking. Annie pointed at the window: Rand saw flashes of brilliant orange light in the skies above the mesa.

"Annihilation discs!" said Rand. "Invid patrol ships!"

"Now at least we know where Scott's been," Lancer chimed in. Rand turned to the mayor, furious now.

"Your time is up, Pedro! We need those Cyclones!"

The mayor remained tight-lipped. "We don't want any more fighting in our village."

"If we don't get out there and help our friend, there won't be any more village," Lancer pointed out.

Pedro scoffed at him. "Do you imagine you heroes are going to repel an Invid attack by yourselves?"

"You better let us try," Rand said as the sounds of distant explosions infiltrated the room.

"I mustn't endanger the town!"

"We're trying to help your town," Rook told him.

Lunk took the blaster back from Rand and raised it. "That tears it! I'm not standing by while my friend dies for this stinking excuse for a town. Pedro, you've got ten seconds!"

"Wait!" José said, stepping into the projected line of fire. He turned to Gomez. "Tell them where the Cyclones are hidden."

"You're responsible for this, José." the mayor shouted. "If anything should happen to our village-"

"I'll take the responsibility then," José answered, whirling on him. "They're in the warehouse," Gomez said softly.

The warehouse was a barn situated close to the bridge, an odds-and-ends storage facility for grain, farming tools, and rusting

examples of early Robotechnology. The Cyclones had been rolled into a corner and covered over with a couple of mildewed canvas tarps.

Lancer, Rook, and Rand headed straight for their machines, activated them, and rode off to the sound of the guns. Annie and Lunk wished them luck and watched as the Cyclones reconfigured to Battle Armor mode. Lunk was heading back to the van when he heard his name called. It was Pedro, looking somewhat sheepish and conciliatory.

"Lunk, you're determined to go through with this?"

Lunk gestured to the by-now-distant Cyclones and said harshly, "That oughta answer your question."

Pedro nodded sullenly. "Then there's something I want you to see," he said, leading Lunk back into the barn. Inside, he motioned to an object concealed under a nylon cloth and pulled the cover away.

"I want you to have this."

Lunk knew it by its slang term-a "Stinger"-a lightweight autocannon no larger than a turn-of-the-century M-70 machine gun that ran on Protoculture and delivered piercing bursts of Reflex firepower. Stingers were the weapon of choice for the resistance early on, but with the Invid's control of Protoculture, the weapon had passed quickly into disuse. This one looked as though it had never been fired, but it hadn't been well cared for either.

"This was given to our town by a group of freedom fighters," Pedro began to explain while Lunk inspected the gun. "Before I was mayor, when...Nader was alive." Lunk straightened up at the mention of the name.

Pedro's voice took on a harder edge. "But Nader didn't want it used. He actually believed we could make a separate peace with the Invid and hid the gun, afraid that fighting back would end in death for all of us. But many of the townspeople misinterpreted his concern; they accused him of cowardice and worse. When he still wouldn't reveal where he had hidden the thing...they beat him to death. They burned his home, they..."

Lunk saw that Pedro was sobbing. "So that's your dirty little secret...the reason why those men attacked us. You're all ashamed of what happened

here."

Pedro nodded. "May God have mercy on us. By the time we found the gun, it was too late to do anything. The Invid had overrun everything."

"And now you're the one who feels responsible for this place. You've inherited Nader's legacy."

"You could say that."

Lunk's hard look softened. "Pedro, maybe I've misjudged you."

"And I, you," returned the mayor. "A common enough mistake these days."

Out on the flats things were looking grim for Scott and the team. The arrival of the Cyclones had taken the pressure off him to some extent, but the Invid still outnumbered them three to one.

Shock Troopers again. Scott wasn't sure why they had showed up. It was possible that one of the Scouts they had tangled with earlier had gotten away. He had seen the first of the Troopers just as the team had been entering Roca Negra and had doubled back to deal with it. But on the tail of the first came a second, then a third and a fourth, and before Scott knew it, he was in the midst of a full contingent of Pincer units.

He dropped the Alpha in for a release run now, going after three grounded Invid who had pinned down Rook and Rand with cannon fire. The already cratered and fused terrain was being torn up by annihilation discs, the air above superheated and crosshatched by missile tracks launched from the Cyclones' forearm tubes. Scott loosed a flock of heat-seekers at the bottom of his dive and climbed sharply, looking back over his right shoulder to catch a glimpse of the results of his run. Two Invid ships were flaming wrecks, collapsed and bleeding green nutrient. Another was badly damaged but still on its feet, one of its pincers blown away.

Scott swung his head as he thought the Alpha through a roll and saw Lunk's van streaking across the sands, seemingly on a collision course with three more Invid ships. Alert to the van's approach, the Troopers lifted off, forming up in a triangular pattern to deal with it.

But in a moment it was obvious that they had misjudged Lunk.

Scott caught sight of a brilliant flash at the front of the van an instant before one of the ships exploded in midair. A second flash and another Invid was blown to pieces. Scott realized that Lunk had mounted some sort of cannon to the van. Apparently the Invid also recognized the weapon, because they were suddenly giving the van a wide berth. Rook, Rand, and Lancer took advantage of the opportunity to deal out death blows of their own, managing to fell two additional Troopers with precision shots to the ships' optic scanners.

Scott smiled broadly and uttered a short, triumphant cry to the skies outside the Alpha's canopy. Not only had they cut the odds, they had won the battle.

The remaining Invid were actually turning tail and fleeing the area! It was the first time Scott had ever seen them retreat.

Lunk returned to Roca Negra alone. He had a longer talk with Pedro and José about Alfred Nader. Both men had known Nader's son, Lunk's friend, and were sorry to hear that he had been killed.

The battle on the flats hadn't affected the rest of the town's attitude toward Lunk, but he understood this and pitied them the cross they had to bear. He had his own, and the emotional weight of it hadn't been lessened any by this brief stop at Roca Negra. In fact, he felt even more confused than before. Would Nader have turned out to be a sympathizer in the end? Would his town have been just another place where the people were too busy maintaining their separate peace to rally to the cause of a greater one?

Lunk spent some private time at what had once been Nader's ranch, picking up ripened olives from the tree and drinking cool water from the well. Lunk kept the book. More than the object of a promise now, it had become a symbol of confusion, of mistrust and treachery...markings engraved upon Earth's tortured and embattled landscape and upon the very fabric of Human life.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Psychohistorian Adler Ripple traces Jonathan Wolff's treachery to his illicit affair with Lynn-Minmei. He had met her on Little Luna (the Robotech factory satellite), during the Hunters' wedding and fallen in love with her while the two of them were, for all intents and purposes, stranded on Tirol. It's likely they would have married had the Sentinels not come between them. (Minmei had vowed to steer clear of soldiers after her brief and disastrous fling with Rick Hunter. Ironically, she caught the bridal bouquet at Hunter's wedding and in a sense felt destined to marry Wolff. The subsequent degradation she fell into can be attributed in part to her learning about the wife and child Wolff had left behind on Earth.) Ripple asserts that Wolff's decision to return to Earth was motivated by the broken engagement with Lynn-Minmei. Wolff was suddenly convinced that he could take up where he had left off with the family he had abandoned. When that didn't occur, he turned to drink and drugs and embarked on a campaign of self-destruction. (Information that has only recently come to light suggests that Wolff also had a brief affair with Dana Sterling-the daughter of Max and Miriya, who took Wolff's ship back into space with the hyperdrive perfected by her former Southern Cross comrade, Dr. Louie Nichols-and that Wolff had learned the Invid were holding hostage both his wife Catherine and his son Johnny.)

Selig Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign

A week of hard riding brought dramatic changes in both the terrain and the social climate of the settlements the team passed through. The land was thickly forested except where it had been cleared for farm cooperatives and villages. The road system was well maintained, and food and supplies were readily available. Lunk knew the reason for this: They were approaching one of the Invid's so-called Protoculture farms, where Human laborers were forced to toil endlessly in vast gardens, maintaining and harvesting the aliens' nutrient plant, the Flower of Life. But where the team had expected

to encounter armies of Scouts and Troopers, they found none; and in place of a downtrodden populace, they found people in a celebratory mood. The Invid were said to have stopped their patrols a little over a month ago, and there were rumors to the effect that this had something to do with the arrival of a platoon of Robotech soldiers who were currently engaged in an assault on the Protoculture farm itself.

Scott was certain this unit was composed of men and women from the Mars Division attack wing. One of the predesignated rendezvous points set up by the mission commander was located some five hundred miles north of the team's present coordinates, and it was likely that a splinter group from the main force had moved south to engage the Invid at the farm. Scott was tempted to take the Alpha north to see for himself, but his sense of loyalty wouldn't permit leaving his friends on their own. At least not until each of them had found a peace of sorts or, better still, a home. It was no secret to any of them that the team was more like a family than the invincible military machine each member sometimes imagined it to be. And it was something none of them took for granted, least of all Scott, the most recent victim of the war's dispassionate savagery.

So they stayed together and eventually found their way to the city where the Robotech soldiers were supposedly garrisoned. It was an immense place, far larger than any of the places they had passed through thus far, a former military base (whose buildings had been adapted for civilian use) that had grown up within the confines of an enormous depression in the Earth's denuded crust, enclosed by the severe walls of an unnatural escarpment. The city now had hotels, restaurants, and a thriving population of five thousand or more.

Scott left the Alpha concealed outside the city and rode down into the bowl with Lancer and the others. As newcomers, they were questioned and searched at the main gate-an immense security fence watched over by armed guards stationed in nearby ultratech towers-but ultimately permitted to enter.

Scott, already searching for familiar faces, was perhaps a bit more

hopeful than the others if no less puzzled. There were indeed soldiers all over the place, but they were hardly the strac troops Scott had convinced himself he would find. Nor were they Mars Division. Their high-collared, belted jumpsuits were the same iceblue color as Scott's own, but the unit patches were unlike any he had seen. Scott glanced around some more, certain he would find what he was after. Here were three soldiers stumbling out of a bar; there, three more drinking on a street corner. Other troops in jeeps and personnel carriers were joyriding through the narrow streets, trash and empty liquor bottles in their wake. Even Annie was stunned.

"What's with this place?" she asked from the van. She was standing on the seat in the open back, her arms draped over the vehicle's roll bar.

"There's no shortage of 'Culture, that's for sure," Rand observed, motioning to the cruising jeeps.

Scott tuned in to a nearby conversation-soldiers, new arrivals by the sound of them: "This town's a gas!" one of them said. "Unbelievable," said another. "I didn't think I could ever feel this way again."

Scott heard tires squeal behind him and turned around. A jeep was accelerating drunkenly from the main gate, slaloming its way up the street, four soldiers laughing it up inside. It pulled up shortly next to Scott, one of the soldiers offering a bottle out of the top.

When Scott refused, the man said: "What's your problem, pal?" His glazed eyes took in the rest of the group. "You guys look like a war's going on."

"What about the Invid, soldier?" Scott snarled. "A couple hits of that stuff and you forget, huh?"

The soldiers looked at one another, speechless for a moment, then laughed. "Where you been, Colonel?" asked the driver. "They're history. We've been kickin' ass and takin' names all over this sector."

"It's no lie," said another. "Long as ya stick 'round here, ya got nothin' to worry 'bout. So, enjoy. The man's got it covered."

"You can get anything you want here, get me?"

"What man? What are you talking about?" Scott yelled as the jeep

screeched off.

"At ease, Colonel!" one of them yelled, eliciting laughter from the others.

It was the same scene wherever they went: everyone talking up the town like it was paradise. Drunken soldiers, hookers, scammers, Foragers, rogues, and hustlers, all thrown together in the same pot, reveling and lifting their glasses in toasts to the mystery man who secured all this for them. The search for food and drink led the team into one of the many bars along the strip. Annie's attempt to flirt with the sideburned bartender ended with his walking off just as Lunk was about to order. Lunk was looking around for something to throw at the guy, when a soldier burst in through the bar's swinging doors.

"Wolff's back!" he yelled to the crowd at the top of his lungs.

Almost everyone got the message-out of sheer volume or at mention of the name itself-and many started for the door. Others, too drunk to move, got as far as lifting their heads from various tabletops. Scott took hold of a soldier within reach and spun him around.

"Who's Wolff?" he demanded of the man.

"The Wolff, bro," the man slurred. "The Wolff." "Jonathan Wolff?" said Scott.

The man snapped his fingers, pointed, and winked at Scott, then shuffled off toward the door.

Rand saw the look of disbelief surface on Scott's face, but before he could ask about it, Scott was shoving his way through the exiting crowd and making for the street.

Rand and the others followed Scott out and found him amid a mob that had gathered around a jeep. Scott was standing rigidly by the curb, mouth half-open in amazement, staring at the man who was climbing out from the driver's side of the vehicle. A celebrity, Rand thought. Either that or a Robo officer who fancied himself one. The man was of medium build but square-shouldered and muscular. He had brown hair, thick and combed straight back, well-defined eyebrows, and a mustache, clipped clear in the

center. He was wearing dark glasses and a gray uniform offset by a wide black belt and a red ascot. There was, however, something stern and humorless about him that made Rand wonder at the reception he was getting.

People in the crowd were firing questions left and right, some of which Wolff took the time to answer and others he ignored. At the same time, a wounded soldier in the rear of the jeep was singing Wolff's praises. "He saved my life," the man bit out. "Picked me up and carried me on his back through the Invid fines...then went back for the Protoculture canisters he knew we needed..."

"Celebration time!" yelled a black man behind Rand. "Drinks on the house!"

But Rand heard someone else mutter: "Wolff's a damn hero every time he comes back. How d' ya figure it?"

Scott swung around at the comment, his face dark and angry, but said nothing. Until he turned back to Jonathan Wolff. Then Rand heard him say: "I can't believe he's alive-alive!"

Colonel Jonathan Wolff...Graduated first in his class from the Robotech Academy on Macross Island but missed the SDF-1's inadvertent jump to Pluto and the two-year odyssey that followed. Nevertheless, he had distinguished himself during that period by openly criticizing the Council's decision to turn its back on the fortress's crew and unwitting civilian population and was resolute in his opposition to Russo, Hayes, and Edwards and their plan to use the Grand Cannon against the Zentraedi. He rose to the fore again during the planet's two-year period of reconstruction and was finally handpicked by Admiral Hunter to head up the ground-base division of the Robotech Expeditionary Force.

But it was on Tirol that Wolff's name became legend and his special forces-known by then as the Wolff Pack-rode to glory. Throughout the Tirolian campaign against the Invid, it was Wolff's forces who turned the tide of battle time and time again. And it was Wolff who came to play a

crucial part in the schism that all but destroyed the Pioneer Mission.

Even that wasn't enough for the man. Leaving Dr. Lang and his Saturn group in charge of things on Tirol, Wolff had gone off with Hunter and that group of galactic freedom fighters who called themselves the Sentinels. To Spheris, Garuda, Haydon IV, to every world that had fallen to the Invid, to every world reduced to slave colonies by the Regent and his limitless army of Inorganics.

Then, for reasons few understood, he had volunteered for a more hazardous assignment: to follow in the tracks of Major John Carpenter in attempting to return a warship to the Earth all of them had left behind. An Earth that had been ravaged by the very Tirolian Masters the Pioneer Mission had aimed to disempower and now faced an even greater threat from the race those same Masters had turned savage and indomitable.

Wolff left Tirol, but not before he had saved the life of a young man who idolized him from afar...an assistant to the celebrated Dr. Lang named Scott Bernard...

Silently, Scott ran over the facts and memories while waiting for a chance to speak with Wolff. It was incredible enough that the man had made it back from Tirol, given the then primitive state of the hyperdrive units, but for Scott to find him now, after all these years, was nothing less than miraculous.

From what he had managed to piece together since first seeing Wolff earlier in the day, Scott learned that Wolff had arrived on Earth shortly after the destruction of the Robotech Masters' fleet, approximately two years before the arrival of the Invid. His Wolff Pack had led the counteroffensive but had been decimated along with most of the Army of the Southern Cross. But Wolff himself had survived. Driven underground, he had spearheaded the resistance and ever since had been on the go continually, moving from place to place to recruit and reconnoiter, waiting for the moment when the rest of the Expeditionary Force returned to wage the final battle.

Still, the boisterous atmosphere of the town disturbed Scott. Where was the discipline that had made the Pack such a respected outfit? And why

weren't the troops being organized for a coordinated assault against Reflex Point? Why, in fact, was Wolff here, so far south of the central hive, and where were the survivors of Mars Division?

Scott had all these things on his mind when he stepped into Wolff's personal quarters that night and offered salute.

"Lieutenant Commander Scott Bernard, Robotech Expeditionary Force, Mars Division."

Wolff was on the bed, his shirt-sleeves rolled up. "Mars Division?" he said, reaching for his dark glasses; then he laughed shortly: "Well, one of you made it through after all."

Scott lowered his hand from his forehead, somewhat stunned. "Then you haven't rendezvoused with any of the survivors, sir?"

Wolff got off the bed and walked over to the bureau. "Lieutenant-Bernard, you said?-you're the first I've seen." When he saw Scott agape, he laughed again. "Welcome to Earth, Lieutenant. Care for a drink?"

Scott declined and watched Wolff pour a tall one for himself. The small room reeked of stale sweat and liquor and was littered with the remains of half-eaten meals and empty bottles. Scott noticed that Wolff's hand shook as he downed the drink.

"Well, let's not stand on ceremony, Bernard," Wolff said exuberantly. "Have a seat. You can tell me about your ill-fated offensive and I'll tell you about mine."

"Sir, I'm not really here to socialize..."

"Oh, I see," Wolff said from the couch, with mock seriousness. "What's this about, then?"

Scott stared at the man before replying, fighting an impulse to turn around and leave the room before matters got worse. "You don't remember me, do you, sir? I knew you on Tirol. I was part of the Saturn group, an assistant to Dr. Lang."

Wolff's grin straightened; he turned his face away from Scott. "That was a long time ago, Bernard. And a lot of miles from here." He put the

drink glass aside. "I'm sorry about this, Bernard. We lost quite a few good men today. And there's damn few left."

"Sir, about this town...The Wolff Pack-"

"This isn't the Wolff Pack, Lieutenant!" Wolff barked.

"The Wolff Pack is dead, every last one of them." He got up and returned to the bottle. "I know what you're thinking, Bernard. That the noble Jonathan Wolff is but a ghost of his former self and that he can't even control his troops. But you don't know the full story, Bernard. Not the half of it!"

Wolff scowled and set the drink aside without tasting it. "These men aren't soldiers-they're rogues and thieves and Foragers and every other kind of riffraff this planet has spawned during the past fifteen years. I do what I can with the few real soldiers I cross paths with. But this is Earth, not Tirol. And our enemy behaves differently here...As we all do."

Scott wasn't sure what to say, so he simply came to the point. "I'd like to be part of your team, sir."

Now it was Wolff's turn to stare. "You obviously know what you're in for, Bernard."

"I've fought my way through a thousand miles, if that's what you mean."

Wolff's eyebrows went up behind the dark glasses. "Impressive."

"In fact," Scott said excitedly, "if it's good troops you're looking for-" "No," Wolff cut him off firmly. "I don't care how good they are. If

they're not Robotech-trained, I don't want them." He turned his back to Scott to stare out the window.

"But, sir-"

"That will be all for now, Bernard."

Scott buttoned his lip and saluted. "Your orders?"

"Oh-five-hundred sharp at the main gate," Wolff said without turning around.

Four Cyclone riders suited up in battle armor left the basin base at

sunrise, ascended the escarpment, and headed into the lush forests an hour's ride east. Wolff, Todd, Wilson, and Bernard. Scott had made no mention of his meeting with Wolff to Rand or the others. He had gone as far as bunking with them in a room they had managed to secure in one of the base's barracks turned hotels and had crept out under the cover of darkness after leaving a scrawled note of explanation on his bedroll. He had to admit that it felt strange and discomforting to be without them, his surrogate family and personal "wolf pack." But he told himself it was time to begin distancing himself from them; his new loyalties would have to lie with Wolff and whatever missions lay ahead of them.

The four men left their Cyclones in the woods and followed Wolff's lead along a faint trail that coursed over low hills to an enormous clearing. Through the foliage, Scott caught glimpses of a massive red hemisphere of some sort. It troubled him that they had left the Cyclones behind and were closing on the Invid Protoculture farm armed only with hand weapons. Wolff's explanation made sense-that they wouldn't be able to get near the place on Protoculture-fueled mocha-but even so, it was hard to imagine that simple H-90's could effect much damage.

It was only when they reached the edge of the clearing that Wolff made the rest of the plan clear: It was imperative that they make off with enough Protoculture to fuel the massive rescue operation Wolff was planning. Each previous mission had brought him closer to this goal, and today's could complete the rescue team's requirements. Beyond that, the four of them simply had to keep themselves from being fried by annihilation discs. Scott had a clear view of the farm now and understood why Wolff hadn't attempted to describe the place earlier-it had to be seen to be believed. It was a hemisphere, all right, but one that stood more than three hundred feet high and was nearly a mile in circumference. It was a kind of blood-red, organic-looking geodesic dome, lit from within by a pulsing light. And from its techno-system base extended ten tentaclelike projections, each a good fifty feet around. Scott imagined that it must have resembled a jellyfish creature from above.

Wolff whispered a warning to his men. "Don't be fooled just because you don't see any Invid. They're around, you can be sure of it." Wolff had the faceshield of his Cyclone helmet raised; he had his dark glasses on.

Scott had to admit that the man was cool and alert, not the boozing, self-pitying Wolff he had seen the night before but the Wolff who had led the Pack up the glory road.

"There are two entry points above the foundation. The Protoculture is stored just inside these," Wolff said, gesturing to two arched portals in the membranous portion of the hemisphere wall. He told Todd and Wilson to take the south one. "Bernard and I will take the other one."

The three men nodded.

"Don't overburden yourselves," Wolff added. "Just take what you can carry without weighing yourselves down. Remember, you might need a free hand for those blasters." Wolff grinned. "But I hope it won't come to that."

Wilson and Todd moved off, using one of the tentacles for cover. Wolff waved Scott forward a moment later.

Halfway along one of the segmented tentacles, Wolff and Scott stopped, huddling down with their backs against the thing, waiting for Wilson and Todd to reach the south portal.

But something unexpected occurred just as Wilson was stepping through.

"Wolff!" Scott heard Todd shout over the suit's tac net. "There's a force field of some kind!" He and Wolff turned at the same moment: Wilson seemed to be suspended in the entrance, arms up over his head, his body shaking as energy coursed through his suit. The ground was rumbling all of a sudden, and before they could take a step toward their two comrades, an Invid Trooper erupted from the ground not twenty feet in front of them.

The shock of seeing the thing must have been enough to break the charge that held Wilson, Scott guessed, because now both he and Todd were heading back toward the woods at a run, dodging a pincer swipe along the way. Scott and Wolff adopted a similar tactic; only to find their route back to safety blocked by a second Invid. The Trooper emerged with enough force

to throw Scott off his feet.

A third Trooper had cut off Wilson and Todd's retreat as well, and the two men were depleting their blaster charges against it.

Wolff was shouting for Scott to get up, all the while pouring energy from his handgun into the face of the alien. Peripherally, Scott saw a flash of white light and experienced a wave of searing heat; he turned in time to see Wilson and Todd disintegrate beneath a storm of annihilation discs, their depth screams a piercing sound track through the net.

Wolff, meanwhile, had managed to chase off the Invid that had been looming over them only a minute before. Scott couldn't figure out how he had pulled it off but didn't stop to question it. He was on his feet now, Wolff's commands to run for it in his ears. The tree line was only fifty feet away, and he made a mad dash for it...

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The incident with Jonathan Wolff dealt a severe blow to the team. Not only because the episode touched them more deeply than they thought possible-they were not as inured as they liked to think-but primarily because it seemed to shift the burden of responsibility entirely onto their shoulders: There was no resistance, except for their own meager efforts. But they would get over Wolff's treachery. How could they not, once confronted with the disillusionments that lay ahead?

Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

The note Scott left for the team only made matters worse. It read: "Don't anyone worry. I can't tell you where I'm going or what I'll be doing, but I'll be back around sunset. Scott."

It was the secrecy that troubled Rand most. If Scott had simply disappeared for the day, Rand might not have given his absence a second thought, but when Scott failed to return with Colonel Wolff that afternoon, he and Rook decided to take matters into their own hands. They didn't bother with the formalities of the chain of command that kept Jonathan Wolff insulated from the city's rabble; they simply made their own way to his room and burst in on the man uninvited.

"Where's Scott, Colonel?" Rand said, out of breath from his run down the hall.

Wolff turned puffy eyes to them. He was seated at a table in the fetid room, a half-empty bottle of vodka in front of him. He had barely moved when Rand and Rook had thrown open the door and was now regarding them tiredly, with little concern.

"Scott who?" he said, refilling his glass.

"Bernard," said Rook. "We know he was with you this morning, and he hasn't returned since."

Wolff made a dejected sound and put down his glass. He reached for

his dark glasses and slid them on. "Bernard..." "Well?"

Tight-lipped, Wolff turned his gaze from them and shook his head. Rand gasped. "You mean..."

"I can't say for sure. The Invid surprised us, and in the confusion I didn't see if he made it out or not. They were waiting for us, and we were overmatched. What more can I tell you?"

Struggling with the possible truth of it, Rand said nothing. But a suspicious look had begun to surface on Rook's face. "A whole lot more," she told Wolff. "How did you escape, Colonel?"

Wolff shrugged. "I was luckier than the others. That's the way it is." Rook snorted. "From what I hear, that's the way it always is with you." "What are you insinuating?" Wolff seethed, flashing her a cold look.

Rand gestured Rook to back off. He took two steps toward the table and slammed his hand down. "Just tell us where you were attacked."

Wolff's hand went out to steady the bottle. "If you're thinking about trying to go out there and find him, forget it. You won't make it."

Rand showed his teeth, then relaxed. "Look, we've got an Alpha fighter hidden nearby. If there's even a chance that Scott's alive, you better believe I'm going out there to find him."

Mention of the VT seemed to bring Wolff around somewhat. He lifted the bottle but set it down without pouring. "Even a fighter might not be enough." Wolff gave Rand an appraising look. "Yes, Scott told me that you'd seen action together. But we're up against a hive, not a Scout patrol."

"It's still worth a try."

Wolff thought a moment, then said: "All right, I'll lead you out there." "Great!"

Wolff stood up and went for his jacket. "We'll leave immediately."

Rand swung around to Rook. "Let the others know what I'm up to.

We'll get Scott back!"

With that he rushed from the room, Wolff a few paces behind him. Rook stood dumbfounded for a moment, then followed him to the doorway.

"What am I-your personal messenger or something?" she yelled to his back. But he didn't turn around. "Rand!" she shouted again, fuming.

Rand showed Wolff where the Alpha was hidden, but the colonel insisted they recon the area on Cyclones before bringing the Veritech into play. The fighter, Wolff insisted, would stir up the entire hive; it was simply too precious a commodity to risk, even for the life of a valued friend.

Rand saw the logic of it, disturbing as it was, especially after Wolff had led him to the hive.

"The place is a fortress!" Rand exclaimed, keeping his voice low. "I've never seen anything like it."

Wolff regarded him from behind the dark glasses, obviously pleased by Rand's shocked reaction. They were at the edge of the clearing now, suited up in Cyclone armor and armed with hand blasters. "It's just one of many," Wolff said. "There's a chain of these things that runs clear to Reflex Point."

Rand swallowed hard, discouraged. "It was around here that you last saw Scott?"

Wolff nodded and lowered the helmet's faceshield. "We'll search the perimeter first." He motioned Rand off to the right. "Stick to the woods, and I'll meet you on the other side. I only hope there's something left of Bernard to find."

Rand refused to allow the thought to register. He turned and was about to move off when the ground began to tremble. Wolff drew his blaster and pivoted through a 360, searching for some sign of the Invid's egress point. Rand managed to get his blaster unholstered and aimed in the same general direction as Wolff 's.

In a moment the Invid Trooper showed itself, rising up through the earth and underbrush just outside the clearing. Wolff and Rand hit it full power, but neither of them was successful at directing a charge to any of the creature's vulnerable points. The Trooper seemed to sense their helplessness and opted to kill them with its claw rather than cannon fire. It had one of its pincers raised for a downward strike, when someone behind

the two men stunned it with a Scorpion delivered to the head.

Rand turned in time to see Rook's red Cyclone's rearwheel landing in the clearing. She slid the tail end of the mecha around and shouted through the externals for Rand to jump on.

"I told you you weren't leaving me behind," Rand heard as he raced to the Cyc. "And it's a lucky thing for you two that I decided to follow."

As Rand straddled the Cyclone's rear seat, he realized that Wolff wasn't behind him. Over his shoulder he glimpsed Wolff waving Rook off. "Get going!" Wolff told them. "I'll make it back to my mecha!"

Rook wasn't about to sit around and argue. She toed the Cyclone into gear and sped off almost before Rand had secured an adequate handhold behind her. Meanwhile, the stunned Invid had come to life and was spewing a horizontal hail of annihilation discs into the trees. The Trooper pursued them, its shoulder cannons blazing. Rook pushed the Cyclone through a series of twists and turns, dodging explosions, plumes of fire and dirt.

Rand was thinking they were in the clear when the carapaced head of a second Invid appeared in front of them, pushing itself up from the soft forest ground, an unearthly land crab. Rook tried to launch the Cyclone over the thing before it completed its rise, but the Invid got one of its pincers free just as the mecha was directly overhead. Rand felt the jolt as the alien's claw impacted the mecha, and the next thing he knew he was on his butt in the grass, dazed, Rook similarly postured nearby. The Cyclone was nowhere in sight.

Rand shook his head clear and raised the helmet faceshield. "We've gotta find the Cyc," he shouted to Rook. "Split up."

Rook got to her feet; Rand waved her the okay sign and disappeared into the brush.

Splitting up was a bad idea, Rand told himself fifteen minutes later. The woods were thick, impenetrable in places; he had started working circles to fix his location, but he soon lost track of his own center-along with Rook and the missing Cyclone.

He was close to the hive clearing again, removing his helmet, when he heard sounds of movement close by. Rand turned, glimpsed Colonel Wolff, and almost called out to him. But something made him pull himself into concealment at the last moment. Wolff had holstered his blaster and looked as though he were waiting for a delivery of some kind. A Human-size figure was walking toward Wolff, but it was still too far off for Rand to get a good look at it. And even when it finally approached Wolff, he didn't know what to make of it.

Rand had his H-90 aimed at the thing now: It was taller than it had first appeared, perhaps eight feet tall, bipedal and suited up in bulky dark-colored battle armor. The creature's head-if that was indeed its head and not some kind of helmet-reminded Rand of a snail's foot. He told himself that it had to be an Invid. It certainly matched Scott's description of them, but Rand had for so long come to think of the aliens' ships as the creatures themselves that his mind refused to accept the idea.

Then Rand saw the Invid soldier hand Wolff a carry pack of Protoculture canisters.

He was tempted to kill them both-alien and traitor-but knew as the rage spread through him that he wanted Wolff to know who was taking him out when the moment came.

Rand lowered the weapon and silently began to work his way toward the conspirators. There was an outcropping of rock behind Wolff; Rand made his way to the top of this while the Invid walked back to the hive. Wolff had the Protoculture and was about to return to his Cyclone when Rand surprised him.

"So the hero's a traitor," Rand said from the outcropping, his blaster aimed down at Wolff. Wolff had been quick to raise his own weapon, but Rand went on, undaunted. "No wonder the city's full of laughing soldiers-it's so safe and secure now that you've arrived."

Rand risked a leap and in a moment was standing face to face with Wolff, who had yet to say a word. "The Robotech hero's made a deal with the Invid! For a few measly canisters of Protoculture, the great Jonathan

Wolff leads his own soldiers to the Invid's doorstep. Isn't that it?" Wolff fired.

The low-charge blast caught Rand in the right forearm guard, knocking the weapon from his grip and sending a jolt of searing heat to the flesh beneath the battle armor. He went down on one knee, as much from surprise as pain, and stared up at Wolff in disbelief.

"Go ahead and finish me," Rand spat. "I was meant to be Invid bait anyway...Just like Scott and all the others...It's how you always manage to return in one piece and well stocked with 'Culture..."

Wolff put the short muzzle of the blaster to Rand's head. "Easy, boy," he warned him.

Rand was shaking uncontrollably in spite of his best efforts to contain his fear. "How could you do it?" he asked Wolff. "Scott idolized you...He told me you'd saved his life once."

"Now you know about the dark side of heroism," Wolff said flatly.

Rand could feel the blaster's priming charge grounding on his skull. He wished he could see the man's eyes, know just what he was thinking. "I've seen it before-everyone out to save their own necks, trading lives...But why you, Wolff? Why?"

Wolff retracted the blaster. "Because they can't be beaten." He sneered. "Because it's better to have a few safe towns than an entire planet of slaves...And because...because of things you wouldn't understand, kid."

Rand scowled. "You better kill me, Wolff, because I'm gonna see to it that you're stopped."

Wolff stepped back and holstered his sidearm. "Go ahead and tell the town. See if they believe you."

Wolff turned and hurried off.

Rand unfastened the scorched battle armor from his forearm while he watched Wolff leave. Relieved that his burns weren't as serious as he had feared, he began to search the tall grass and brush for his blaster, wondering if he might be able to catch up with Wolff before he reached the

Cyclones.

Go ahead and tell the town, Rand recalled Wolff telling him. See if they believe you.

Suddenly he heard Rook's voice and looked up. Scott was with her, one arm draped over Rook's shoulders for support. His battle armor was blackened in places, but he looked otherwise intact.

"I can't believe my eyes," Rand said, extending his hand to Scott. "Is it really you?"

"Barely," Scott returned.

"I found him in a hole in the ground." Rook laughed.

"And I miss it already." Scott disengaged himself from Rook and started to say something about a prehistoric-looking creature he had seen while in hiding, when he spied Wolff several hundred yards off. He tried a shaky step in that direction and said to Rand, "Is that Colonel Wolff? He came back to look for me?"

Rand put a hand out to restrain him. "Let him go, Scott." Scott looked over his shoulder, puzzled. "I've got something to tell you, and you're not going to like it...Wolff...Wolff's a traitor. He's got an arrangement with the Invid-he's been trading soldiers' lives for Protoculture."

"What are you talking about?" Scott's eyes were flashing.

"He's a traitor! I saw him with my own eyes. And an Invid, Scott, not a ship but-"

Rand didn't see the punch coming. Now, lying facedown in the grass, he couldn't even remember feeling it. "You're lying, you little coward!" Scott was yelling. Rand rolled over and sat up, feeling a slight numbness beginning to spread across his jaw. "When I confronted him, he didn't deny it. I'm telling you, we were both led out here to be killed."

Scott roared something and launched himself, but Rook stepped in his way. In his weakened state he was no match for Rook and was easily held back. But she could do nothing about the curses he was hurling Rand's way.

All at once a fiery explosion effectively erased all traces of the struggle, the concussive force of it flattening Rook and Scott to the grass on either

side of Rand. Through the smoke the three could see Trooper after Trooper issuing from the ground around them, blinding globes of incipient fire at the tips of shoulder cannons.

In a moment, annihilation discs were zipping into the area, pulverizing rocks and roots and whatever else lay in their path. Rand helped Scott make it to the safety of the stone outcropping, while Rook laid down cover fire with her hand blaster.

"The Cyclones-where are they?!" said Scott.

Rook indicated a direction. "I'll see if I can slow these things down some. Swing back around and pick me up."

Scott and Rand signaled their assent and rushed off, crouching as they

ran.

Jonathan Wolff watched them from another part of the forest. He was

surprised to see that Bernard had lived and was strangely relieved. Nevertheless, his escape had been but a minor stay of execution, for there were at least six Troopers going up against the three freedom fighters. Wolff could see that the woman was remaining behind to buy time for her comrades. But even if the other two were fortunate enough to make it to their Cyclones, it would just be a matter of time.

Unless someone came to their aid with the appropriate firepower. An Alpha fighter, for instance, Wolff said to himself.

Rand got to the Cyclone first and doubled back to pick up Rook and convey her to the waiting red. Afterward he launched and went to Battle Armor mode, neatly disposing of one of the Troopers with a single shot to the thing's sensor.

Rook and Scott were similarly reconfigured now and going after a second alien. Scott dazzled the Trooper with in-close fancy flying, then boostered up and away from its pincer swipes to loose a Scorpion, which the creature blocked with its claw armor. In return the Invid pilot loosed a volley of annihilation discs against Scott, but in so doing had overlooked Rook and the missile she launched straight to its vulnerable scanner. The

Trooper was blown to pieces, and the three teammates regrouped on the ground. The woods around them were crawling with Invid.

"We're surrounded," Rand thought to point out, his back to Rook and Scott. "Now what do we do?"

"What we always do," said Scott, almost laughing. "Fight our way out.

Now, look alive."

Rand launched first, but critically misjudged his trajectory and ended up snagged by a Trooper's claw. Scott heard his desperate cry through the net, but even before he could think about how to free his friend, a bolt out of the blue took the Invid's pincer off at the elbow. An instant later, Scott saw the Alpha streak overhead. He was confused until he heard Rand yell, "Wolff! It's gotta be him!"

Wolff had the VT in Guardian mode. Missiles tore from undercarriage launch tubes, detonating like geysers of fire around one of the Troopers. But the creature survived the storm and struck back. Wolff rolled and tumbled the fighter through a steady stream of discs and dropped in to knock the troublemaker off its feet. He then switched to Battloid mode and came back down at the rest of them, the rifle/cannon discharging white death from its high-port position.

There were two Pincer ships in the skies now, and Wolff propelled the Alpha up to deal with them. One of the Invid had barely arrived in the arena when it was disintegrated by a flock of heat-seekers Wolff launched from the Battloid's shoulder racks.

On the ground, Scott was saying, "A traitor wouldn't handle an Alpha like that." He and the others had followed the fight and were now in the arid heights west of the base escarpment.

Wolff came on the net a moment later. "Just thought I'd give you a few pointers, flyboy."

"Be my guest!" Scott enthused.

Wolff kept the VT in Battloid configuration to take out the second Pincer ship before moving against the remaining Troopers. He literally stomped one of these senseless by bringing the mecha down full force on

the alien's head. But the acrobatic act ended up costing him a precious few seconds: Wolff pivoted the Battloid in time to deal with the final Invid, but not before the Trooper succeeded in holing the techno-knight with an energy bolt that passed clear through it like a flaming spear.

Scott watched the crippled Battloid go down on one knee, then reconfigure to Guardian mode, seemingly of its own accord.

"Colonel Wolff!" he yelled, running over to the fighter. "Are you all right?"

The canopy went up, and Wolff managed to clamber out of the cockpit, one hand pressed to his side wound. He lowered himself to the ground, collapsing into Scott's arms. Gently, Scott laid Wolff on the ground, his own hands now awash in the colonel's blood. "You're bleeding, sir," he told Wolff hurriedly. "We've got to get you back to the base."

Wolff reached up and removed his dark glasses. "Too late, Bernard," he answered weakly, eyes closed. "Get yourselves out of here on the double."

"I won't let you die like this," Scott objected. "You're coming back with

us!"

Wolff forced his eyes open and looked hard into Scott's own. "I'm a

traitor, Commander-" "Colonel-"

"And a traitor should be left to die out in the open..." Wolff shivered from a cold that began deep down in his guts. "When I think of the lives I traded to save my own skin..." Wolff screamed as something seemed to come loose inside him. Scott watched him blanch and felt the dying man's grip tighten on his arm.

"Colonel, hang on-"

"Catherine...Johnny...Minmei!" Wolff gasped, and died.

Scott shut the dead man's eyes, stood up, and saluted. In the distance he could see Lunk and Annie bounding toward the Alpha in the van. Alongside them rode Lancer on a Cyclone he had probably picked up at the base.

Scott looked over his shoulder at Rook and Rand; they looked back at

him blankly, drained of emotion. Scott wondered whether they felt the same confusion he did. Gazing down at Wolff's body, gazing out at the smoldering remains of half a dozen Invid ships, he asked himself how this war could ever be won.

Or if indeed a war like this could ever have winners.

He thought about the long road ahead of them-his team, his family. Would it be as bloodstained a journey as these past few months? Marlene, he said to himself, reflexively reaching for the holo-locket around his neck.

To go through all this and yet never be able to win back your life!

End RTUCN.COM

Metamorphosis

By Jack McKinney 1987

To Tim and Sara Robson and Gary Stiffler—staunch Robotech Defenders

CHAPTER ONE

How could so many of the principals in this vast struggle be so blind to the reason that one planet was at the center of it all? That is a secret we shall never know.

On blighted Earth, arguably the most warlike planet in the Universe, the Flower of Life had taken root like nowhere else before-except for Optera (which may or may not have been its world of origin). And in so doing, it set the stage for Act Ill of the Robotech Wars.

And yet, inventively oblivious, Invid and Human alike attributed that to the vagaries of a plant.

Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

Never has the Flower of Life wrought more strangely! it occurred yet again to the Regis, empress/ mother of the Invid species. Earth, your fate is wedded to ours now!

How strange it was that Zor had chosen Earth, she thought, as she poised there in the center of the stupendous mega-hive know as Reflex Point. Or, more aptly, how well he had chosen by sending his dimensional fortress to the planet so long ago. Of all the worlds that circled stars, what had made him pick this one? The thought of Zor made her seethe with a passion that had long since turned to austere hatred.

Did he know that Earth would prove so fantastically fertile for the Flowers of Life, a garden second only to the Invid race's native Optera in its receptivity to the Flowers? It was true that Protoculture could bestow powers of the mind, but even so, what had drawn Zor's attention across the endless-light years to the insignificant blue-white globe?

But Zor's decision didn't matter now. All that was important was that the Invid had finally found a world where the all-important Flower thrived. At long last, they had conquered their New Optera.

Of course, there was an indigenous species-the Human race-but they

did not present any problem. The first onslaught of the Invid had left Human civilization in ruins; the aliens used many of the survivors to farm the Flower of Life.

A few Humans cowered in and around the shattered remains of their cities or prowled the wastelands, preying on one another and dreading the moment when the Invid would finish the job. The only use in letting the Homo sapiens survive a little while longer was to use them to further the Invid master plan.

Then the Humans would be sent into oblivion forever. There was no room for them on Earth anymore. And from what the Regis knew of the Human race's history, their absence would improve the universe as a whole. And it would be done. After all, the last of the Regis's real enemies were dead. There was no one to oppose the might of the undefeated and

remorseless Invid.

The Alpha Fighter bucked but cut a clean line through the air, its drives flaring blue. Wickedly fast, heavily armed, and hugging the ground, it arrowed toward the snowcapped mountains.

Lieutenant Scott Bernard eased back on his HOTAS-the Hands-on-Throttle-and-Stick controls. With so much power at his disposal, it was tempting to go for speed, to exercise the command of the sky that seemed like the Robotech fighter's birthright, and his own.

One reason not to speed on ahead was that there were others below, following along in surface vehicles-his team members. It would take them days, perhaps weeks, to cover mountain terrain he could cross in a few minutes. And he didn't dare leave them too far behind; his Alpha was the team's main edge against Invid hunter/killer patrols. The Alpha slowed until it was at near-stalling speed, its thrusters holding it aloft.

Another reason not to give in to the impulse to roar triumphantly across heaven was the fact that Humans didn't own the sky anymore.

He opened his helmet mike. "This is Alpha One to Scout Reconnaissance."

A young male voice came back over the tac net, wry and a bit impatient. "I hear you, Scott. What's on your mind?"

Scott controlled his temper. No point in another argument with Rand about proper commo procedure, at least not now.

"I'm about ten miles ahead of you," Scott answered. "We'll never be able to make those mountains before nightfall. I'm turning back; we'll rendezvous and set up camp. "

He looked wistfully toward the mountains. There was so far to go, such a long, perilous journey, between here and Reflex Point. And what would be waiting there? The battle for Earth itself, the showdown of the Robotech Wars. The destruction of the greatest stronghold of the Invid realm.

But this group of oddly met guerrillas and a stranded Mars Division fighter pilot were not the Earth's sole saviors. Scott hadn't let his new companions in on it, but Humanity had a much more formidable ace-in-the-hole than them. And soon, soon...the demonic Invid would be swept away before a purging storm of Robotechnology.

He increased speed and took the Alpha through a bank, watchful for any sign of Invid war mecha that might have detected the fighter's Protoculture emissions. The fighter complained a bit; he would have to give its systems a thorough going-over with Lunk, the band's tech straw boss.

Scott was less proficient at flying in atmosphere than he would have liked. He had grown up on the SDF-3 expedition, and most of his piloting had been done in vacuum. There was an ineffable beauty, a rightness, to flying in Earth's atmosphere, but there were also hidden dangers, especially for a combat flier.

Still, he didn't complain. Things were going better than he had expected. At least the supplies of ordnance and Protoculture Scott's team had lifted from the supply depot of the turncoat Colonel Wolff would last them for a while.

Now all they needed was some luck. Somewhere, Scott's Mars Division comrades were getting ready for the assault. Telemetry had told him that a good part of the Mars Division had survived the orbital combat action and

planetary approach in which his squadron had been shot to pieces, leaving him the only survivor. Scott still lived with the sights and sounds of those few horrible minutes, as he lived with memories even more difficult to endure.

Reflex Point waited. There the Invid would be repaid a millionfold-an eye for an eye.

From high overhead, Reflex Point resembled a monstrous spiderweb pattern. The joining lines, glowing yellow-red as though they were canals of lava, were formed by Protoculture conduits and systemry. The accessways were traveled by mecha and by the Regis's other servants.

At the center was the enormous Hive Nucleus that was Reflex Point proper. It was a glowing hemisphere with a biological look to it, and a strange foam of bubblelike objects around its base like a concentric wave coming in from all sides. The Nucleus was more than twelve miles in diameter. To Human eyes it might have resembled a super-high-speed photograph of the first instant of an exploding hydrogen bomb.

At the various junctures were the lesser domes and instrumentality nodes, though some of those were two miles across.

Deep within Reflex Point, at its center, was a globe of pure Protoculture instrumentality. This veined bronze sphere, with darker shadows moving and Shaping within it, responded to the will of the Regis. A bolt of blazing light broke from the dark vastness overhead, to create an enormous Protoculture bonfire.

The Regis spoke and her "children", half the Invid race, listened; there was so much to tell them. With the incredible profusion of Flowers of Life that the Earth had provided, the Regis's children had increased in number, and the newly quickened drone zygotes must be instructed in their destiny. From within the huge globe, her will reached forth to manipulate the leaping Protoculture flames. "The living creatures of this world have evolved into a truly amazing variety of types and subtypes."

Images formed in the flames: spider, platypus, swan, rat, Human

female. "Many of these are highly specialized, but extremely successful. Others are generalized and adaptable and many of those, too, are successful. "Earth is the place the Flower of Life has chosen, and that is a fact that brooks no argument. And so it is the place where the Invid, too, shall live forevermore. For this, we must find the ultimate life-form suitable to our

existence here and assume that form."

All across her planetary domain, the Invid stopped to listen. A few could remember the days long ago on Optera, before Zor, when the Invid lived contented and joyous lives. Other, younger Invid had access to those days, too, through the racial memory that was a part of the Regis's power.

On Optera, by ingesting the Flowers of Life, the Invid had experimented with self-transformation, and with explorations in auto-evolution that were part experiment, part religious rite. And, with the power of the Protoculture and its Shapings, they strove to peer beyond the present and the visible, into the secrets of the universe-into transcendent planes of existence.

Those days were gone, though they would come again when the Flowers covered the New Optera-Earth. For the moment though, evolution would be determined and enacted by the Regis.

"In order to select the ultimate form, the form we will assume for our life here, we are utilizing Genesis Pits for our experiments in bioengineering, as we did on Praxis."

More shadows formed in the otherworldly bonfire.

"We have cloned creatures from all significant eras of this planet's history and are studying them for useful traits at locations all across the globe. We will also study their interaction with the once-dominant species, Homo sapiens."

Her disembodied voice rose, ringing like an anthem, stirring Invid on every rung of her species' developmental ladder, from the crudest amoeboid drone gamete to her most evolved Enforcer.

"Long ago, the Invid made the great mistake of believing alien lies; of believing in trust, of taking part in-" Her voice faltered a little; this final sin

had been the Regis's alone. "In love."

And the love Zor had drawn from her had been mirrored by her male mate, the Regent, as psychotic hatred and loathing. This had caused the Regent to fling himself-purposely and perversely-down and down a de-evolutionary path to monstrousness and mindlessness, to utter amorphous primeval wrath. But the other half of the Invid species, his children, worshipped him nonetheless.

The Regis steeled herself. Her mind-voice rang out again.

"But we have paid for those failures for an age! For an age of wandering, warfare, death, and privation! And once we have discovered the Ultimate Form appropriate to this planet, we shall assume that form, and we will secure our endless new supply of the Flower of Life. Our race will become the supreme power it was meant to be!"

But she shielded from her universe of children the misgiving that was never far from her thoughts. Here on Earth-the planet the Flower itself had chosen-the once-dominant life form was cast in the image of Zor.

And again the Regis felt herself fractured in a thousand ways, yet drawn in one direction. What affliction is more accursed than love?

Rand bent over the handlebars of his Cylone combat cycle as Annie yelled, her face pressed close so he could hear her over the mecha's roar, the passage of the wind, and the dampening effect of his Robotech armor.

"Look, there's Scott, at ten o'clock!"

Rand had already seen the hovering blue-and-white Alpha settling for a VTOL setdown. There weren't many useful-size clearings in the thick forest in this region. Certainly, there was nothing like a suitable airstrip for a conventional fighter craft within a hundred miles or more.

The designers who had given the fighter Vertical Takeoff and Landing capability of course knew how important that would be in a tactical situation in a conventional war. But Rand sometimes wondered if they had foreseen how helpful the VTOL would be to a pack of exhausted guerrillas

who were Earth's last committed fighting unit.

"I see 'im," Rand yelled back to Annie, rather than pointing out that he had been tracking Scott both by eye and on the Cyc's display screen. Rand didn't like to admit it, but he had developed a soft spot in his heart for the winsome, infuriating bundle of adolescent energy who had insisted on being a part of the team.

Annie had insisted on coming along with him on point, too. She was determined to do her share, take her risks, be considered an adult part of the team. Rand saw that a lot of her self-esteem was riding on the outcome and grumblingly admitted that he wouldn't mind some company. Scott and the rest had given in, perhaps for the same reason that they never questioned the pint-size redhead's outrageous claim that she was all of sixteen.

You could either accept Annie for her feisty self or risk shattering the brave persona she had forged, with little help or support, to make her way in a dangerous, despair-making world.

Now she banged Rand's armor. "Turn there, turn there!"

"Pillion-seat driver," Rand growled, but he turned down the game path, the cycle rolling slowly, homing in on Scott's signal. "We're about ten minutes ahead of the others, Scott."

Scott's voice came back over the tactical net. "Good. Still no sign of the Invid, but we can run a sweep of the area before the others get here."

None of them saw it or registered it on their instruments, but in the dim forest darkness, massive ultratech shapes moved-two-legged, insectlike walking battleships.

Just like armored monsters from a madman's nightmare.

CHAPTER TWO

Oh, great! We been shanghaied aboard Charon's Ark!

Remark attributed to Annie LaBelle by Scott Bernard

Following the path their scout team had taken, Lancer, Rook, and Lunk rode down the long, dangerous road toward Reflex Point. Lancer was riding his Cyclone in the lead, wearing full techno-armor, the masculine, warlike side of his divided personality clearly present. He was sure and confident, Rook Bartley thought to herself, a practiced mecha rider and a deadly warrior.

Rook, also in full Robotech panoply, had just caught up on her red-and-white Cyc, having made sure that the team wasn't being followed and it was safe to leave the rear guard. She let Lancer hold the lead, glancing over to make sure all was well with Lunk.

Things always seemed to be well with the big, burly ex-soldier when he was on the road, riding in his beloved all-terrain truck. Taking one look at Lunk, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that there wasn't much going on upstairs. His low forehead and the thick sideburns that curled around and up under his eyes made him look like a comic-strip caveman.

But anyone who had talked to him, or looked closely into those soulful eyes, or seen him do the things Rook had seen him do, understood why conventional wisdom counsels against drawing quick conclusions.

As for Rook, she still found it strange to be riding with a gang again, even though Scott insisted on calling it a team, and everybody else kept insisting that they had their own agenda and that the alliance was temporary. She still wasn't sure how she had teamed up with them. It was too easy to say that she had shared danger, hardship, triumph, and defeat with them; she had done that with others before. She kept looking toward the time when she could ride as a loner once again.

Of course, there was Rand...

Screw Rand! she snarled to herself.

From their places in the shadows of the great trees, the Invid Shock Trooper mecha kept watch, making sure the Humans were moving the right way. So far, the Troopers noted, these life-forms hadn't needed any herding. The location of the nearest Genesis Pit was logical, situated along the easiest passageway through the mountains. The Entrapments were well deployed; the routine specimen collection was going well. The mecha floated along quietly and slowly, their thrusters muted as they awaited their

moment.

"Heads up, Annie!" Rand's voice sounded a bit tinny through his helmet's external speaker. "Scott's right on schedule, of course."

Of course; what else? Would Scott Bernard, the rules-and-regs sole survivor of the massacre of his squadron be even a few seconds off?

Annie leaned out from the Cyclone and saw Scott's Alpha settling in the clearing. She pulled the bill of her trademark baseball cap, with its huge emblem that read E.T., lower "Um-hmm."

She tried not to let her relief sound in her voice. Although she had insisted on taking a turn at riding point, she was much more at ease riding next to Lunk in the truck (or APC, as Lunk insisted on calling it, since it was Armored and was indisputably a Carrier of Personnel). Annie wasn't even armed. Weapons made her a little queasy.

But now she didn't have, to worry, because everything was going well.

The Alpha had switched to Guardian mode for the VTOL landing.

The cockpit canopy slid back. Scott, armored in Robotechnology, stepped out, walked out to the forward edge of the swing-wing's fixed glove, and hopped down.

Annie looked around at the trees and the darkness they shed in the waning light, as Rand pulled up next to Scott in a spray of sand and gravel, some of it rattling and hissing off Scott's armor. "I guess this means we're staying here, huh?" She was tough despite her age, but she had done most of

her surviving in settlements and cities. The wilds unnerved her.

Scott had gone around to the rear of the Guardian's portside leg to open a hidden compartment. "I'll get my Cyclone and we'll run a security sweep of the area before the others get here."

He pulled forth and activated the compact package that turned into his Cyclone, unfolding and reconfiguring. He thought about ordering Annie to wait in the cockpit of the fighter, but she had a special gift for getting into trouble, and so he discarded the notion. "Let's go."

Scott and Rand sped away, following the dry streambed, looking for an opportunity to leave it and move cross-country. Scouts seldom learn anything worth knowing on the main road, except when it's too late.

Acting as a scout for its unit just as Scott had done for his, an Invid Shock Trooper closed in on its target.

Normally the Invid were slow to detect Humans unless the prey had been specifically targeted, or there had been a sizable expenditure of Protoculture. This time, however, the Regis's fearsome war machines had been sent to guard a specific area and herd specimens into the Genesis Pit. The Humans had come into their territory. By some oversight, there were no specific orders of any kind concerning Humans, and so the Troopers simply evaluated, the interlopers as they would any other life-form, and decided they too would be worthwhile subjects of experimentation.

The Trooper kept its distance from the Humans, but some trick of the last filtering light of sunset piercing the dense trees betrayed it. Or perhaps Scott Bernard just had a feeling that they were being followed.

Scott slid to a side-on stop, ready to trigger and image the change that would meld his Cyclone and his armor into a Robotech killing machine. Rand stopped, too, Annie clinging close, white-faced. "What's wrong, Scott?" Rand's voice came over the tac net.

Scott shook his head slowly. "I'm sure I saw something moving. Back there."

But how could it be an Invid? Scout or Shock Trooper, their instant

reaction was to attack.

"Don't tell me we're being watched!" Annie snapped at Scott, her lower lip trembling. "The Invid can't be everywhere!" She tried to get her arms all the way around Rand's armored midsection.

Contrary to its genetic programming, the Shock Trooper drew back-in accordance with the special instructions given to the sentinels of the Genesis Pits. Here were more samples from present-day life-forms to interact with the Regis's replicated marvels.

And an Entrapment intake waited near.

"Calm down, Mint," Scott was saying in that strangely relaxed tone he took on when other people's neck hair was standing on end. He had used Annie's team nickname-"Mint," from her ongoing affair with peppermint candy-to calm her.

"We've got to make sure the area's safe before the others get here. Or d'you want to see them ride into an ambush? No? Good. Rand, stay close. And cover me on the left."

The Cycs moved out, Protoculture engines gunning.

The Trooper floated back, almost delicately, close to the ground but leaving no print. As it circled it left its prey a clear path. All through this area, the Entrapments, a living part of the Genesis Pits, were growing in profusion, waiting to gulp down specimens.

Scott suddenly wondered if they should pull back; if he should send Annie and Rand hurrying for safety and cover their retreat with a barrage of Cyclone firepower.

But he realized that he and his companions had been led off to one side. Time had passed and Rook, Lancer, and Lunk were already near. It would be better to warn them first and then carefully withdraw.

He couldn't raise the other three over the tactical communication net, though, and couldn't tell if it was his position among the terrain features or whether the Invid were jamming the system. He spied a spot of high ground ahead and headed towards it, hoping for a clear commo link.

Then a shadow seemed to move across the hilltop-a shadow much

larger than a bear or anything else that walked Earth's surface. It was going the other way, apparently oblivious to the scouts-heading for a point that would intersect Lancer and the others.

Ambush! Scott had no doubt. He revved his superbike, giving Rand a hand signal so that the Invid could not intercept a transmission. The sand felt a little treacherous, but that didn't matter under the circumstances, the two Cycs were fully armed, and for once, it seemed, the team had caught the Invid mecha with their iron trousers at half-mast.

He was about to order Rand to drop Annie off where she could take cover, then follow him on a stealthy approach-for-attack. But just then the ground opened up.

All Scott could see was that a flap of thick, brown-mauve stuff-like a flap of canvas twenty yards wide and seven yards thick-had been drawn back. It was thickly edged with long purple hairs, or perhaps they were feelers because in that horrible instant Scott could see that they were moving in different directions.

It seemed as though a monster's mouth had opened up in the Earth, ready to swallow them. But although Rand was extremely frightened and disgusted, he knew what this was. A pit! Oldest trap of 'em all!

The Entrapment's mouth was gruesome, bending inward at all four midspans rather than from the corners.

All thoughts of proper commo procedure faded like dew in the sunshine, and all Scott and Rand could hear over the tac net were one another's terrified howls; all they could hear over their external pickups was Annie's scream.

We're not fated to win after all, it occurred to Scott, as the Cyclones spun down into a deep, dark shaft that gleamed wetly like a gullet. The Cyc riders kept their seats by sheer instinct; Annie clutched Rand's waist. They, fell into blackness, and what little light they had was cut off as the quadripartite Entrapment flaps above them closed serenely.

"Switch to Battle Armor!" Scott hollered, too loudly, over the tac net. He operated the gross hand controls on the Cyc, but more importantly,

imaged the transition through the receptors in his helmet. He knew Rand would be doing the same. But just then Rand felt Annie lose her grip and drift free in the powerful air currents of the pit.

Mechamorphosis. That was the name Dr. Emil Lang had given these transitions so long ago, even before the start of the First War-that techno-origami shifting of shape.

One moment, there were two young men in armor tumbling through the moaning air currents of the Entrapment, and the next, there was something going on.

An onlooker might have thought that the Cycs were leukocytes destroying their riders, sliding up around them, Cyclone components meshing with armor components. The machines broke down into subunits to slide into their appointed places around the armor, as certain microorganisms might whip some critical hurt on certain other microorganisms.

The Cycs' tires were up high and out of the way on the Cycloners' backs, allowing them free play and unlimited fields of fire with their Robotech weapons. But even the thrusters in their suits didn't help them against the enormous vacuum that drew them down. There was no way back up.

Their armor flared anyway, to cushion the fall, and then somehow Rand heard a small, plaintive cry and realized that not everybody was protected.

"Hold still, Annie!"

It was a precision catch, possible only through Robotechnology. They were falling very fast, and simply rocketing armored arms under her would have only served to break the sweet, loudmouthed, red-haired soul of the team into three or-more likely-more pieces.

But as it was, Rand matched velocities and made the save.

He opened his helmet, careless of what might happen to him, holding Annie close-her pale face against his so that she could breathe the air his suit was pumping up in an effort to keep positive pressure.

Her small fingers moved, clasping the lip of his helmet's

chinguard...then she was still, though she kept breathing. Rand hugged her to him, shielding her as much as he could. Neither Rand's armor's thrusters nor Scott's could stop their fall; whatever was pulling them down, it was more than just gravity and air currents. Scott wasn't even sure they were being drawn straight downward.

Rand, who was falling head first, was first to see it. "Scott! Look down there at that red glow coming right at us! Maybe there's a bottom floor after all!"

A lighted area on the shaft's floor? A lava pool? The light down there seemed to shift and waver, but it had the glow of extreme heat.

"A lot of good that'll do us if we go splat! Hit your burners!"

Rand and Scott simultaneously hit their burners, while Annie moaned and cried. But the retrothrusters did no good, and in another moment they plunged into the hellish fire.

CHAPTER THREE

Kraneberg, an oldtime historian of (North) American technology, once said-in the form of a First Law-"Technology is neither positive, negative, nor neutral."

Indeed. It is all three. And omnipresent.

Scott Bernard's notes

"Huh?"

Scott was amazed that he wasn't being boiled alive. Instead, orange-yellow light played all around him, Annie, and Rand, reflecting off their armor and helmet facebowls.

The light seemed alive, moving like writhing eels. It seemed to knot together in places with its ends exposed, like twists in snarled barbed wire. Elsewhere it had settled into layers, like the colors in a sunset. The radiance brightened, enveloping them.

Their facebowls polarized to shield them, while poor little Annie squeezed her eyes shut and buried her head against Rand's armored chest. Scott checked his instruments, but the sensors were not working. "I, I think we're in some kind of energy field."

"Unbelievable," Rand breathed. Then all at once the light was above them, and they were plummeting through utter blackness-or so it seemed, their facebowls still darkened. "We went straight through it! Are we near the bottom?"

"Y'got me," Scott said, straining to see as his facebowl slowly depolarized. The place looked pitch black. The idea of a jagged rock floor racing up at them filled him with a cold despair.

"Emergency power to retros-" he was saying, just as the Cyclone warriors hit the water with a tremendous splash.

The first thing that Scott knew when he came to was that he had a monstrous headache. The next thing was that his eyes wouldn't focus properly, even taking into account the fact that he was trying to see through a helmet facebowl. He realized that he was sprawled out on his stomach. Before him, he saw his Cyclone armor's gauntlet-hand.

He groaned, trying to flex his fingers. They barely moved. He saw that he was lying on...on soil. Dirt.

He tried to see beyond the hand, his head trembling as he tried to lift it.

His eyes were responding a little better, but what he saw made no sense.

Those giant fern things we saw on Praxis? No; wait a second...'S not it...This's a diffr'nt planet...Earth...

It didn't look like any place he had ever seen or heard about on Earth.

It looked...primeval. Where are we, a swamp? What happened?

Scott saw Rand sprawled out a few feet away, along the little stretch of sandy bank where they had landed.

Scott crawled over to him, groaning and hoping the pain he felt in his side wasn't a cracked rib. "Rand! Rand, are you okay?" He shook the Forager's shoulder pauldron. "Come on, fella, speak to me!"

Rand began to stir a bit. Through the external pickups, Scott heard a tiny moan. He looked beyond Rand and saw Annie lying a few yards away along the bank. She was making feeble attempts to sit up. "Annie, are you all right?"

She sat up suddenly, wide-eyed but apparently unafraid, blinking at the dawnworld landscape. "What happened to me?"

"We must've hit the bottom of the pit," he told her. Just then, Rand started coming around. "Take it easy, pal."

But Rand rose to his feet. "What, d'we miss a turn somewhere?"

He shook his head to clear it a bit. What he was staring at appeared to be seedferns. Cycads; club mosses and horsetails. Big and huge; small and almost microscopic. Off in the distance he could see what appeared to be conifers, ginkgoes, and more.

What is this, a damn coal forest?

Annie heard something that sounded a bit like a heavy-duty dentist's drill and ducked instinctively as something flashed by her ear. In a moment there was a cloud of them going past, though they seemed uninterested in the Humans. Their double wingsets were making silver blurs in the strange light of the place.

"Dragonflies!" Rand burst out. But these were dragonflies the length of his forearm, with enormous wings-slower than their modern counterparts.

Annie, seeing that they wouldn't hurt her, laughed with delight and skipped after them a few steps, the water splashing around her ankles.

Scott and Ran had instinctively reconfigured their armor, the Cyclone combat bikes under them once again. "And this water's nice and warm!" Annie was saying. She was wrinkling her nose, though; the air of the place was thick and steamy-the heaviness of rotting vegetation, of primitive life.

Annie's mood had turned to wonder, and she kicked up bright plumes of water. "Why don't you guys come in and give it a try?"

She was still trying to get them to join her when the surface of the water broke behind her, and something huge began to rise. "Annie! Behind you!" Scott shouted, his voice sounding a bit strange and processed over his suit's external speaker.

Both men were off their cycles, groping for their sidearms. Annie stood rooted as a plated head the size of a small fishing coracle reared, shedding water in all directions. It opened its mouth and revealed rows of teeth like thick pegs. Rand's mind threw up a strange word, Eogyrinus?

Pieces of torn flesh still clung to the teeth, and it reeked of death and the marshes it hunted. Annie knew that through their helmets Scott and Rand couldn't even smell it.

Scott and Rand were jockeying for a clear line of fire. It was seemingly hopeless with Annie standing frozen right in front of the thing, hypnotized like a mouse before a rattlesnake. They were both armed with MARS-Gallant Type-H90s-the latest word in hip-howitzers, but that firepower was of little use with Annie in the crosshairs.

The thing had gotten very close. Rand saw that it was wide and flat, like

a big croc with a bobbed, broad snout-no doubt an experienced shore hunter, just like the books said.

Scott hollered at Annie to get out of the way. She backpedaled and fell on her rump in the wet sandy shore. She stared into hungry, merciless eyes that, she could see, saw her as nothing more than another morsel of food. She threw herself flat on the ground just as the creature reared up to lunge for her. Then the neon-blue blasterbolts flew, making a mewing sound.

As the H90s spat, the torrid air got even hotter. Rand fired with the modified two-hand stance that Scott had taught him. The thing heaved up as the dazzling hyphens of energy hit it. Pieces exploded from it as the furious heat of the shots turned the moisture in its cells into superheated steam, blowing it apart. There was no blood from those wounds; instead, the gaping holes in the thing had the look of broiled meat. The stench of it made the atmosphere that much more repugnant.

The monster thrashed and twisted. Roaring and bellowing, it swiped at the air with thick claws, snapping its jaws at the radiant bolts. Unable to understand what was happening, it nevertheless knew that it was dying. Its rage shook the air, the primeval plant-forest, and the sluggish lake waters. It fell back with a mighty splash, still quivering and contorting.

Annie kept screaming as Scott and Rand dragged her back to shore by her jacket. "Mint, he didn't bite you, did he?" Scott asked anxiously.

That seemed to bring her around a little. "N-no, but almost. And don't call me Mint, okay Scott?"

He held out his hand to her. "Sure thing. Come on; up you go." But even as she was scrambling to her feet, Rand yelled and pointed, sounding thoroughly rattled.

"Here comes more company!"

Three more of the things had surfaced and began ripping away at the first, while it spasmed. They tore out huge gobbets of flesh, snarling and whistling. Scott remembered hearing somewhere that real Earthly gators usually left their prey to rot, if it was too small to swallow in one gulp. That wasn't the case with this lunch crowd. In seconds, flesh, bones, blood, and

viscera surged and rolled in the oily waters.

Rand gulped. "They passed on the salad course, I guess." "Just look at them," Annie breathed.

Just then one of the three paused in its gorging to hiss a piercing whistle at them, giving them that same hungry, pitiless stare.

"They're looking at us!" she cried.

If we shoot, these three, do nine more show up? he wondered. Even Robotech weapons had their limits. He grabbed Annie's arm. "Let's get out of here! Move, move!"

In another moment the armor had mechamorphosed, and the two Cyclones leapt away, Annie clinging to Rand once more, the tires automatically adjusting to travel over the soft soil. The Eogyrinuses came swarming up at them moments too late.

"Guess we lost 'em," Annie reported, glancing back over her shoulder to be sure. "I don't think they're built for long-distance events."

"But where did they come from?" Scott murmured.

Rand gazed upward. The sky held no sign of the energy field; instead there was a low gray haze. They sped up another dry watercourse, past tall, odd-looking conifers and cycads and some bennettitaleans.

"The Lost World, " he said softly.

Lancer looked at Rook hopefully as he hopped down from the cockpit of Scott's abandoned Alpha fighter. Let it be good news! Let her have found something!

But as Rook slid her cycle to a stop, Lancer was already listening to negative results over the armored suits' tac net. "I followed the path north and cut a circle for a mile around. There wasn't a trace of them."

As she finished her report, Lunk showed up in his olive-drab APC truck. "If they circled back, they weren't leaving tracks," he reported.

That left another question. Scott's Cyclone was gone, and there were no tire marks anywhere. But why would they have gone straight to full armor and flown away, without leaving a message or trying to make commo

contact with their teammates?

Maybe the tire tracks had been obliterated by someone? That would be easy enough to do in this kind of soil.

Lancer yelled out, "They know better than to do this to us. " Rand might be a bit impetuous, and Annie was flighty to say the least, but Scott, a trained officer and team leader, would never simply ignore his responsibilities.

There was only one explanation that might make some sense of the situation, and that was the appearance of Invid.

"Shouldn't one of us scout ahead?" Rand asked as the two Cyclones sped through the eerie landscape of the subterranean world. "I've had enough surprises for one day."

"We'll stick together for now," Scott ordered.

"Well, do you have any idea where we're headed?" The instruments were all useless.

"No, Rand. But anywhere away from those reptiles will be fine with me-hey, power down! There's something up ahead-the end of the trail, maybe.

They stopped in an open part of the water course. What they saw ahead of them was a rampart of stone some hundreds of yards high, running away to the left and right with no breaks.

"A dead end!" Annie wailed. "And the cliffs and ceiling come together."

It was true. The overhead haze was broken by the downward sweep of the gigantic cavern's stone ceiling, which met the walls of the place in a tight seal. "No exit here," Scott observed.

"Maybe; maybe not," Rand corrected. "See up there?"

It was an opening of some kind, the mouth of a tunnel or cave, set high above the floor of the cavern. "That could be our rabbit-hole," Rand declared. "It's worth a look."

Scott couldn't argue with that. Their engines howled.

Elsewhere, the Regis noticed that something was amiss in one of her Genesis Pits. From Reflex Point, her consciousness reached out to join with the evolved mind of a Shock Trooper who was following the movements of the three Humans.

The Trooper's single, cyclopean optic sensor flashed red as she mindspoke. Contaminants in the pit! her angry thought reverberated through that trooper and the others assigned to the place. Unless these intruders are contained ant neutralized, the experiment will be ruined!

But she paused, seeing the reasoning of her guards. Certainly these were Earthly biota, and under the Regis's broad guidelines they were valid candidates for inclusion in the pits. But these were Human, and they were armed with weapons and mounted on vehicles. A counterproductive anachronism here in the cavern of monsters!

Still, the introduction of machines and weapons might provide some instructive insights about the capabilities of the creatures she had bred here beneath the Earth. Their worth as contributors to the Invid's final, Evolved Form would be tested.

Yes; let it continue for now, at least until more observations had been made. The creatures of the cavern would probably cleanse the place of outsiders by themselves, and that would be most informative, too. Or if not...

There were other ways.

CHAPTER FOUR

Fay Wray can have it!

Remark attributed to Annie LaBelle

There are important insights to the story in Rand's recounting of it in his voluminous Notes on the Run:

"I got even more worried when I saw that that tunnel through the bedrock was artificial. It had a low arc of roof, but the flat, level floor made it easy for us to go to cycle mode and race along."

"The obvious fact that someone had drilled the tunnel made me nervous, but let's face it: everything about that underground Lizard Lounge had me nervous by then. Scott had noticed it, too, I assumed, but we didn't mention it because we didn't want Annie hysterical."

"So we barreled down the tunnel. The Cycs' headlights cut the darkness, but only showed us the rock walls, the rock ceiling, and the rock floor. I would even have welcomed some motel art by that time. I had long since outgrown my graffiti stage, but I was tempted."

"I fibbed to Annie. 'Hang on tight! I've got a real strong feeling about this tunnel; in fact I'm sure it's gonna be our way out of this place!' If she knew I was bulling her, she was kind enough not to say so."

"But she did point to a bright light that was coming up before us. 'Hey, look at that!'"

"Scott's voice sounded real relieved over the tat net, 'We made it!' That sort of surprised me; I figured a guy raised in starships most of his life wouldn't feel the claustrophobia as badly as I was feeling it, but I guess the weight of all those strata above us had been working at him."

"So I said, tempting fate a little, 'I knew it! Our troubles are over now!'" "All of a sudden the floor of the tunnel seemed to slope down. The next thing we knew, the Cycs were out in the open air and falling toward the lush

vegetation down below."

"But we were pretty used to our mecha by then, although it had taken me some time to learn the ropes on a Cyc and Scott hadn't had much practice operating in an environment like Earth until he had crash-landed, a coupla weeks before. Mox nix; we hit our burners. I did my best to see that I didn't lose Mint, and somehow I made that landing on sky-blue, umbrella-shaped thruster flames."

"The terrain we landed on seemed okay at first, with boulders and some kind of fanlike growths coming from the ground. It was a little precarious but nothing those amazing Robotech scoots couldn't handle. If I had had my helmet open, maybe I would have noticed the smell; Annie was, I suppose, too strung out to."

"We were congratulating ourselves on making it When the ground beneath us began to move. We had landed in the middle of a bunch of big sail-backed things! Just before we thruster-jumped the hell out of there, I got a look down the maw of one of the things and saw it had two quite large front choppers. I guess it was a Dimetrodon, but I wasn't doing much note-taking and really couldn't tell you for sure if you asked me."

"Scott was howling something about 'more dinosaurs' but we were safe.

The herd had re-settled for the night."

"We were all watching them to make sure that they weren't thinking about a bedtime snack, but I just happened to be looking off to one side when I caught the flash of movement. 'Hey, Invid!' I blurted out. But whatever it was had already ducked."

"Scott thought I was crazy, and we got a little sore at each other. Being that far underground and in a situation so insane had him kind of frayed. But then he backed off a bit, looking around thoughtfully. 'Maybe they are involved in all this. I suppose-'"

"Scott interrupted his thought when he noticed that Annie was off an another caper, waving to us from a few yards away. She was balancing, with a lot of windmilling of her hat and shuffling of shoes, on a big, mottled, offwhite ovoid thing that rolled under her. She was giggling and yelling, 'Watch me!'"

"It was a typical Mint reaction to what we had just been through, driving it from her mind by clowning around. When I saw what she was doing, I could only think, Oh, my god! and I started to reach for my '90. Scott was yelling at her to get down off of there."

"Annie laughed right up until the second she realized that something big was coming up behind her-fast! I got my gun out. Maybe that Daspletosaurus actually wasn't the size of two Battloids one on top of the other, but that was how it looked to me at that moment."

"Certainly it was a little surprised to see Annie playing around with its eggs. I can only surmise that it had just laid them and hadn't had time to cover over its nest. It was fast and agile and brilliantly colored. It was just like the oldtime revisionist paleontologists said: a tower of bone and muscle in metallic blues and reds and pinks. Its teeth looked like sharpened baseball bats."

"I opened fire at it, and then Scott did, too. I have to give the lieutenant credit: he stood his ground and just kept shooting H90 rounds at it, even though it didn't look like he was doing any damage to the thing."

"If you're sitting someplace safe and reading this, I'll tell you something: It feels a lot different when you're there, and an animal bigger than any mecha is bearing down on you and you can smell it, and the best shots you can lay out don't seem to be making any difference. It takes a lot not to bolt, but I didn't have to make the choice because Scott Bernard was slightly in front of me, straddle-legged, whamming away. So I stood my ground, too."

"Then you live from microsecond to microsecond, and events all fuse together, because when you're about to die your life is suddenly an infinitely precious thing, no matter how lousy it's been to you."

"It was our good luck that the thing had a lot of ground to cover. I was aiming for the skull, hoping I might put its eyes out of commission or even get its brain somehow. It roared and staggered at us. But H90s were developed for use against Invid mecha, and no living organism, even one the size of that tyrannosaurid, could survive the kind of punishment we were giving it."

"We chopped away at its feet, legs, chest cavity, head-all while it was shrieking and snapping. Then Annie had the presence of mind to leap clear, as the Daspletosaurus fell across its own eggs, crushing some, dying and charred, never understanding what had killed it."

"I was yelling at Annie, who was white faced and contrite and promising not to go running off ever again, when I spotted familiar shapes: 'Hey, Scott! I told you I saw Invid!'"

"But they had drawn back out of sight before Scott turned from Annie or she could spin around. And right away Scott and I were arguing again. How could he have seen them up above and yet not believe I had done the same down below? Either you trust your teammates or you don't."

"Of course, Mint put in her two-cents worth, as the ancients say. She was scared enough as it was and wished I wouldn't see Invids behind every tree."

"For maybe the fourth time that day I bit back what I had been about to say. I knew Scott's military training revolved around reports and evaluations and source-dependability ratings and all that garbage, but either I was a teammate or I wasn't. I dropped the subject, though."

"'I can't help it if you're scared, kid,' I told Annie, turning away from Scott to kind of defuse things. 'I'm scared, too. But they were there, they're still there, and they're waiting for us.'"

"I just couldn't get a handle on any of it. Prehistoric biota, and Invid who didn't attack. It just didn't make sense."

"But I could see that at least I had given Scott something to ponder."

"The fire we built on the beach of a tepid lake made Annie feel a lot safer. But I was still looking in every direction, waiting for Godzilla and the gang to show up expecting hot hors d'oeuvres. Scott coughed at the smoke but agreed with Annie that the fire was cheery."

"I stripped off my armor and put together a survival-type circle trident, to try to catch some supper. Up on the surface we could have just thrown some explosives in the water and waited for the catch of the day to come

floating to us belly-up. But around here those tactics might just make something mad."

"So I crouched nervously on a rock on the beach, waiting, checking the deeper water every half second or so, I guess. Still, I'm a country kid, a Forager, and I had done that kind of thing a hundred times before. Pretty soon I had a hit."

"What I pulled up was all needle snout and kinked tail, some sort of freshwater, pygmy Ichthyosaurus whose grandmother had too many X-rays, I guess. I threw it down on the sand. Scott and Annie came over to find out what was wrong."

"Everything just got to me, because I started waving my arms around and babbling. The whole time scale had me going nuts."

"'This fish should've been dead, I dunno, sixty-five million years ago.

Those pterosaurs and all the rest of these critters, same thing!'"

"Annie was looking at me with eyes as round as full moons. 'S-so how can they still be alive?'"

"Scott was shaking his head slowly. 'This is-it's beyond me.'"

"I told them, 'Well I'm just wondering what else might be floating around out there.' Somewhere far off, we heard something very heavy break the water in a dive. It reminded me of the sound whales made in those prewar nature shows. Only, we knew it wasn't a whale, because it honked like a horny tractor-trailer."

"'At least Annie can sleep,' Scott said tiredly awhile later, as we sat in the firelight. We planned to take turns standing guard all night, and it was time for him to turn in."

"We had managed to talk Annie out of taking a watch with some excuse about needing her to help with the scouting the next day. Actually we didn't want her up alone and didn't really trust her with a gun. Even Scott saw the sense in letting her sleep. She snored softly, cap bill pulled down, hands clasped across her middle as she lay on her back. I shrugged. 'Kids: nothing bothers 'em.'"

"We were finishing up the last of my impossible fish, and Scott grinned, 'Your appetite hasn't been bothered much, either.' I kept on chewing, looking into the fire, trying to think. 'Hey, Rand! Anybody home?'"

"'I hear ya perfectly well, Scott. I'm just trying to piece a few things together, all right?'"

"He took an unspoken offense and went to curl up by the other side of the fire. He probably thought that I was still upset that he didn't believe me about the Invid."

"I thought back to what had happened since we fell into that pit or whatever it was. The fire made it easier to visualize the energy screen we had fallen through."

"Scott had grown up out there in space somewhere, and lacked a lot of knowledge about Earth. And Annie-she was simply Annie. But one of the main things that originally drew me into the Forager life was that it was a way to find books. Books, films-the history of Earth, the Human race; the history that led to my being what I am, if that doesn't sound uppity."

"No, Scott knew next to nothing about Earth's prehistory, but I had read a small library's worth. What kid doesn't become interested in dinosaurs? And I had seen enough to know that what we had been thrown into was a huge potpourri: Paleozoic plants, Mesozoic reptiles. Everything was thrown in and mixed around, as if somebody was waiting to see what floated to the top."

"While there were a few swamp areas like the one in which we had found ourselves at the outset, most of the hundreds or thousands of square miles of the Lizard Lounge appeared to be flood plain, with seasonal bodies of water. We had no idea how the builders managed that. But it was no wonder the place was so enormous; the land creatures' lives revolved around the herbivores' need for a slow, constant feeding migration, and the carnivores' constant need to follow and hunt."

"We had seen dinos no bigger than chipmunks, and the real heavyweights as well; most or all of the biological niches were filled, including the ones for small, furtive mammals."

We had seen things that verified the work of Ostrom, Horner, Bakker, and the rest of the last great paleontologists. Stegosaurus actually did have a single row of bony plates on its back. Do they know, I hope?"

"What we had stumbled into were warm-blooded dinosaurs-endotherms! The Brontosauruses protected their young while on the move, like a herd of elephants. I watched huge duckbill females exhibiting maternal behavior, feeding and protecting their hatchlings. Of course, we didn't have any time to witness live births among the brontos: we were sorta busy keeping away from hungry meat-eaters."

"The predators were warm-blooded, and therefore had to eat a lot. They were fast-moving, very aggressive, and always ready for a meal. I watched a pack of swift Deinonychuses, running on bird-hipped hind legs, drag down a much bigger Tenontosaurus. The Deinoychuses tore the helpless giant to pieces and devoured it."

"Annie hid her eyes against my back, and while I was fascinated even though I was sickened, I made up my mind to try to spare her any similar sight, if possible."

"We had already had a few close encounters, though. Scott may go down in history as the only human being to ever kill a T. Rex; he did it with a rocket barrage of Scorpions from his Cyc's forward racks. We were safe for the time being, but how long could we last once we ran out of power and ordnance?"

"I'm probably the last member of the legendary King Kong Klub, having passed the rigorous written and oral exams and proven my love for that movie. But in spite of my avowed devotion to stop-motion critters, I wished in those next hours that the Cycs were teleportation machines. I suspect we all did. You would have, too."

"I had forgotten that smell of blood. If you have ever had a serious laceration or been around major trauma, you know what I'm talking about. Fresh blood, spilled, lost. That smell was so thick down there that I swear it would have snuffed a candle."

"Still, that wasn't what I was trying to sort out while I sat watching the

fire that night, to the sound of Pachycephalosauruses batting heads like bighorn sheep and oinking and spitting at each other. I was considering the awesome size of the artificial world around me."

"The Human race, even at its prewar height, didn't have the power or the knowledge to create this Lost World. It was pretty obvious who was behind it."

"But the Invid certainly had little motivation to build an Earth museum. Then I stopped thinking of the Invid I had been catching glimpses of in terms of soldiers and started trying to think. of them as some other kind of force-say, park rangers? Guarding a sanctuary, perhaps?"

"'Clear enough!' I was mumbling, and Scott sat up, rubbing his eyes, to look at me. 'This place is one big lab!' I cried. 'Now I'm beginning to understand! It's incredible!'"

"'Well, I'm not beginning to understand,' he was grousing. 'Back up and try again.'"

"He was right. I forced myself to slow down. 'I'm sure this is an Invid test facility. They're playing around with the history of life on Earth-evolution, from the start right down to today!'"

"Were there other arenas where Tertiary organisms fought and strove, or basic Earth life-forms had been mutated with coldly clinical intent, against some possible future? There wasn't any time to think about that now; I was about to trip over my own tongue as it was. I tried again. 'They're doing evolution experiments-cloning, genetic engineering! Darwinism in the passing lane!'"

"'Are you drunk?'"

"'I wish! Listen, Scott: the Invid intend to make Earth their home, because that's where the Flower of Life grows best, right? Well, before they choose the final physical form-or forms-they'll take on, they're testing, studying!'"

"Scott was standing up with a lot of well-now-hold-on-a-second-there talk and flat-handed calming gestures."

"'And now we're part of the experiment,' I yelled over him, sorry that

Annie was going to have to wake up to bad news, because I was shouting it. 'They're using us as guinea pigs somehow; that's why the Invid keep hidden instead of showing themselves and attacking-'"

"Scott was trying to shush me, but I backed away; I couldn't let him think I had had a hysterical episode, or he would never believe me. 'Scott, we've got to get out of here. Or at least get word to the others! This is more important than your damned Reflex Point! Once the Invid find a form that they figure will let them dominate the Earth, there'll be no more need for-uh!'"

"At least, I think that was the sound I made. We had both stopped in midsyllable, mouths open, because the voice we heard then seemed to come from everywhere. It was female, and there was something slightly familiar about it. It was mostly alien and cold, yet with an arrogant undertone to it."

"I also got the feeling, somehow, that its words were being transmitted to and echoed by some multitude that spoke with a single voice, subordinate to the main one. And I know this is strange, but-it sounded like a stage voice to me, like somebody doing Lady Macbeth through a lot of voice-processing equipment."

"It said, 'Humans, your time on this planet is almost spent!'"

"We were both looking around for the source of the voice. And then I felt cold night air on my neck, because the hair there was standing up, because Annie came to a sitting position, arms folded across her chest.

"She was still facing away from us, the firelight playing over the hair that looked so straggly after a day of roughing it in that sweaty theme park."

"Scott began, 'Um, Annie, are you feeling all-'"

"That voice came again. 'The age of Humans is coming to an end!' What sat on the ground turned toward us, but the features we saw weren't Annie's anymore. It was something old and malign, using her face and form."

"'Now,' it gloated, 'a new era begins on Earth!'"

"'What's she babbling about?' I said, but I didn't mean Annie."

"'Rand, she-sounds possessed,' Scott swallowed. And I had been

hoping he would have some idea what we should do."

"The thing using Annie's body rose to its feet, standing across the camp fire from us. 'Humans, you do not know the extent of our power!'"

"With that, the fire expanded, the flames leapt high above our heads.

Scott and I backed off a step or two, shielding our faces."

"We saw Annie across the flames from us as she let them die down a bit, her hair floating as if windblown, her hands making passes as if she were a sorceress."

"'Humans are merely a dead end in the great scheme of evolution!' Annie gestured, and all of a sudden, so help me, we were seeing a moving form silhouetted in the blaze, a female form that didn't look quite Human. It threw its arms high in triumph, while that chilling voice went on exultantly."

"'The Earth is entering an era of domination by a different form of life, which has traveled a different evolutionary path.' The thing laughed evilly. 'Be warned...'"

"But then the voice trailed away, until it was Annie's, moaning, and the expression on the face was one we recognized. Annie slumped, and we rushed to her."

CHAPTER FIVE

Those which we call monsters are not so with God

Montaigne, Essays, Vol. II, XXX

The team's search patterns turned up nothing. Exhausted, they stopped for a few hours' rest before they would continue with a night-sweep.

Lunk couldn't seem to stop himself from repeating the same thing over and over: "What coulda happened to em?"

"I don't know where else to look," Lancer admitted tiredly. "Our best hope is that they just-show up." He ran his fingers through his long purple hair.

Lunk sat down next to him, leaning against the same boulder in the firelight. He gnawed noisily on a drumstick that they had scavenged from Wolff's supply depot. "I suppose that's all we can do."

He looked to where Rook was curled up, a lithe form in a blanket. There was only a single stray curl of strawberry-blond hair showing, brilliant in the firelight. "Isn't she even worried about them? How can she sleep at a time like this?"

Without turning over, she said, "I can't sleep, if you sit there blabbing and gorging yourself all night. How can you eat at a time like this?"

Lunk wore a hurt look. Lancer told him in a whisper, "The real reason she's awake is because she's worried, too, Lunk."

Rook lay watching the moon, listening to Lunk complain about how spooky it all was. After riding as a loner for so long, she was feeling again that special torment that she had promised herself she would always avoid-fear that harm had come to a loved one; an all-consuming concern for people who had become, though she had never meant to let it happen, family.

Annie came around again in a second or two, but when Rand and Scott

told her what had happened, she claimed that they were both imagining things. As far as she was concerned, she had been having some crazy dream in which she married an Invid who looked like her old boyfriend.

That was Annie, mind never too far from the marriage that would, she was sure, let her live happily ever after. What the two men were telling her was upsetting her, and she gave them a wounded look, asking if they couldn't just drop the whole issue. Scott and Rand backed off.

But they would have had to stop talking about it anyway; just about then, a battle of the bipeds started up. In the dim nightlight glow from the haze overhead, they could just make out some big meat-eaters tangling with each other, probably over a kill or some carrion. Rand thought it was between two Ceratosauruses and a larger Allosaurus, but couldn't see for sure and wasn't interested enough to stick around and find out.

Dangerous as it was traveling at night, the men snapped on their armor, started the Cyclones, and the moved out. They found the dry water course they had been traveling on, but they had no sooner increased their speed than the air was full of pterosaurs of all sizes and shapes, swooping and diving, beaks napping. Scott couldn't figure out if they had been stirred up by the blood and noise of the fight, or if the Invid were somehow sending them at the Humans.

Luckily the flying things were getting in each other's way, so that evasive maneuvers saved the Cyclone riders for the moment. And lucky was the word; Rand saw one that had a fifty-foot wingspan. Scott's voice came over Rand's helmet phones, "You and Mint find cover! I'll fight them off and catch up!"

Rand couldn't argue; the armor gave the men a lot of protection, but Annie was completely vulnerable. Rand rogered and increased his speed, peeling away and heading for some tree cover. The soaring hunters concentrated on Scott.

Scott switched to full Battle Armor mode, rising on thrusters, Cyclone components becoming part of his powered suit. One blast from the H90 sent a small Pteranodon tumbling to the ground. With the flock hesitating,

surprised at the blast, Scott landed in a blaring of backpack thrusters, to fight from the ground.

He blasted the wing off another as it stooped, but then had to duck and roll aside as a third came at him from the left. Its beak and wicked teeth would have taken off an unprotected arm, but the Robotech alloy saved him. He rolled onto his back, holding his H90 in both hands, firing at any pterosaur that came near.

The things shrieked as the blue bolts quartered the air, seeking them

out.

"Scott's doing okay," Rand said, from the shelter of the trees, dividing

his time between watching Annie and keeping an eye out for strays. "I don't think he needs our help."

"I...I kind of feel sorry for those creatures," Annie confessed. "Aw, Mint, gimme a break!"

Scott was back on his feet again, shooting this way and that with a high degree of accuracy. Dead and dying soarers, whole or in pieces, lay all around him. As Rand and Annie watched, he nailed one that was coming straight down at him with folded wings; he got it dead center and its head exploded.

Then Rand noticed, from the corner of his eye, a glow coming from the foot of the nearby cliff-wall. It pulsed brightly, waned a bit, and brightened again.

"Hang on, Annie; we have to check something out."

High on a cliff ledge overlooking the savage battle, an Invid Shock Trooper mindspoke to itself and its companion. It was the Regis's voice, the same voice that was heard through Annie.

"The Human life-forms are most determined! Their will to survive is strong!"

Like the Zentraedi and the Robotech Masters, the dinosaurs were discovering that Humans weren't as easy prey as they looked. Yes, it seemed all this experimentation with life-forms from Earth's past and mutations of

various ones from its present was pointless.

There would have to be further study of the Humans, to find out if their form would suit the Invid despite its aberrant behavioral patterns. But as for the ones below, they had done enough damage in the Genesis Pit. It was time to rid the place of contaminants.

Rand stopped some distance from the tunnel, which was at ground level. From the mouth of the tunnel, the light and heat pulsed so strongly that Annie hid in the lee of his armor except for an occasional peek.

"I knew something like this had to be here!" Rand cried. Heat, light, the energy field-perhaps even the force that kept the stupendous stone ceiling up-they had to be powered by some source. Some Invid source. Rand armed his forward Scorpions.

"Rand, what are you doing?" Annie asked sharply. "It's time for 'Last Call at the Lizard Lounge,"' he said.

Eventually the pterosaurs broke off their attack, the slaughter having been too much even for them. Scott stood on the battlefield, the smoking remains all around him, fitting a fresh charge into his H90.

He rolled a body over with his foot, inspecting his work. "Must've been something he tried to eat."

Rand appeared, Annie still clinging to his waist, the Cyc skidding to a stop. "Are you all right?"

"All right so far."

"Listen, Scott, I've gotta tell you-"

But before Rand could get out his story about the Invid power source, or control center, or whatever it was, a new chorus of sounds came to them. They looked up to see that the sky was filled with every possible flying creature: dragonflies and other insects as well as pterosaurs.

"Something's stirring them up," Scott said. "Something's got 'em all on the run!" Annie shouted.

They peered into the haze-light and, sure enough, the whole population

of the strange sanctuary seemed to be headed their way.

"Looks like we're going to be right in the middle of rush hour," Scott was saying. Suddenly the ground began to tremble and dance beneath them. There was nothing they could do except lurch and teeter, trying to keep their balance.

"Earthquake!" Rand yelled. This wasn't the time to tell Scott about the two rockets he put into the Invid cave installation, or of the terrific secondary blast they had set off-or of the dark silence in the cave afterward. They could hear the grinding and cracking of uncountable tons of bedrock all around them.

A tree swayed like a giant flyswatter, and came down smack atop a Triceratops that just ignored it and kept bulldozing along. A big conifer broke the back of a smallish Stegosaurus; passing meat-eaters ignored it, continuing their flight. A boulder the size of a bus, falling from the ceiling, squashed an Iguanodon.

As the herd passed by, Rand and Scott changed modes and soared overhead on thrusters. Then they fell in behind the beasts, letting them lead the way.

"Scott, doesn't it occur to you that being in the middle of a dinosaur stampede could be bad for our health?"

"We don't know where we're going, Rand; maybe they do. Any better ideas?"

Rand muttered, "Oh, brother..."

Clouds of dust rose from the ground and fell from the ceiling. The haze began to grow dim. Rand figured that the energy field was losing the last of its power. It took every ounce of their skill to keep the Cycs going, but Scott insisted that they stay on the ground. The air was a storm of flying things that would have blinded them and perhaps even knocked them out of the sky.

Two big Tyrannosauruses some distance in front of them simply disappeared, tails flailing, and Scott barely had time to give a warning. There was no time to brake, and the two Cyclones went off the edge, into the

abyss that had opened in the ground before them. All three howled, Annie loudest of all.

As the armored men mechamorphosed, rising on their backpack thrusters again-the Cyc wheels repositioning up on their backs, out of the way-and Rand held Annie in his arms, something rose out of the chasm with them, flashing past.

"Invid Shock Troopers!" Scott shouted. Rand couldn't quite find the time to say, Toldja. In the distance, a thin, incandescent pillar of light suddenly stretched from the floor of the Genesis Pit up to its ceiling and beyond.

The Invid mecha swept out and around for an attack. "We'll have to take 'em on," Scott said grimly. Rand zoomed off to one side, to drop Annie off to safety on some rocks.

As Scott landed, one of the big, purple alien mecha came his way, firing annihilation discs from the bulky cannon mounted on either shoulder. Scott leapt clear with an assist from his thrusters, rolled, and came up with his H90 in his hand, firing. The Invid dodged his shots and came in at him.

Rand was standing shoulder to shoulder with Scott by then, the two trying to aim their shots while the ground heaved and jostled under them. Scott jumped off to the right and Rand launched himself high, barely eluding a swipe by a colossal metal pincer on a forearm the shape of a ladybug. Rand put more rounds into it, but the trooper crouched in a defensive posture beneath him, shielding itself with the thickest parts of its panoply.

Annie was screaming, pointing to the pillar of light. "Look, look!

There's the exit, but it's disappearing!"

The energy field that had blocked the way out was gone. But the opening was shrinking, and the pillar of light was getting narrower.

"It's our only chance!" Scott called to Rand.

Rand was so distracted that he was nearly mashed into the ground by a blow from an Invid. As it was, the mighty forearm got a piece of him, sending him sprawling. Rand managed to drive it back with wild shots from

his sidearm, but the second Shock Trooper was angling for a shot of its own. Rand back-flipped as Scott rushed in, the trooper getting off near misses, sending both men reeling back. Scott's targeting module deployed from its external shoulder mount and swung into place before his eye; he was staring at the Invid through a sighting reticle. He released a pair of

Scorpions that missed, but drove the Invid back.

Suddenly, the invaders broke off the fight, turning and zooming off into the air, ignoring the Humans. "They're heading for the opening!" Rand saw. "We've gotta stop them, before they close it behind them!"

"Take care of Mint," Scott called back, already aloft. "I'll go after them." As he rocketed after them, he saw that the exit was closing quickly.

The Shock Troopers apparently realized they couldn't outrun their pursuer and turned to fight. Scott dodged another pincer swipe, just as Rand caught up, having dropped Annie off again. Scott evaded the swipe and vaulted to land atop the second Invid's crablike head. The first Trooper was so caught up in the battle that it swung again, missing Scott, who hurtled clear, but struck its comrade instead.

Scott dispatched another missile just as the first Trooper prepared to unleash its annihilation discs. He blasted it right through the optical sensor that was its cyclops-eye. The warhead was a dud, but the missile penetrated the glassy circle, shattering it.

Green, thick nutrient fluid poured from the Shock Trooper, and it went flailing back like a falling scarecrow and hit the ground. The second Trooper charged at Scott, but Rand, in a close pass on raving thrusters, lashed out with his feet and smashed that one's eye, too.

"Hurry up!" Annie shrilled. "The exit's almost closed!" The entire place was shaking, raining boulders and dust, cracking apart, as monsters roared and bleated.

Rand lifted her up, and the three blasted through the air toward the shrinking ray of light. As they entered it, they were seized by the force that had drawn them into the Genesis Pit earlier, only this time it pulled them upward.

Within the Genesis Pit, the roof began to give way. The shallow waters churned, throwing up waves and living things that would soon be dead. The great beasts of land and sea threw their heads back and bellowed their agony to the world that had obliterated them once and was now doing it again.

The cliffs and ceiling gave way; the floor of the Genesis Pit fissured open, letting forth the magma the Invid had diverted to heat the place. A surge of molten fury gushed up the exit shaft behind the three Humans, threatening to overtake them.

Then the two armored figures and the little girl in her oversized battle jacket were flying upward under the moonlight. The magma stopped its upward motion and spread, igniting fires, and then it began draining down into the Pit once more.

All three Humans were laughing and cheering. Scott and Rand flew far away from the site to a distant hillside. The moon was full, but it looked to Rand as if rainclouds were moving in. Good; those fires wouldn't last long. "Isn't that a beautiful moon?" Rand said wonderingly.

But Annie's attention was elsewhere. "Look at the mountains!"

"The whole mountain range is sinking into that Pit," Scott said quietly.

The ground rumbled and moved again, clouds of dust obscuring the mountains, as a huge area went into subsidence, filling in the Genesis Pit. "That one was close" was all Scott could find to say.

Annie said mournfully, "But what about the poor dinosaurs?" She looked at Rand. "The Invid created them," he told her. "And I think it's just as well that they left the dinosaurs down there to be destroyed. Conditions up here aren't right for them; there's just no place for them to survive anymore. Time simply passed them by."

Annie intertwined her fingers behind her back and scuffed the ground with one toe. "Y'mean, it's the same as when the Invid talk about the Human race being all finished?"

Rand was starting to nod when Scott interrupted. "No! Earth belongs to us; it's the Invid who are going to be extinct!"

He sounded ferocious. Rand knew all about Scott's fierce hatred of the species that had killed his fianc 閑 and wiped out his unit, but this was no time for propaganda speeches. "All right, Scott; all right-"

"Hey!" Annie blurted. "Y'hear that?"

It was the sound of large engines. In a few moments mecha came into sight, seeking the source of the vast disturbances their instruments had detected. In another moment, the survivors spotted an aircraft.

"It's the Alpha Fighter!" Scott said. "And there's the rest of the team!

It's about time."

Annie was dancing from foot to foot. "Wait'll I tell Rook what happened to me! Oboyoboy!'

"Y'better make sure she's sitting down," Rand said dryly. He wondered if Rook would care to hear his story. There was just no telling how the young lady would react sometimes. Still, maybe it would be worth the risk.

CHAPTER SIX

The grand themes of the Robotech Wars are so dominant that the lesser ones are sometimes ignored. But those lesser themes, I insist, are more instructive.

The matter of Marlene Foley's ultimate destiny is a primary case in point. Surely Protoculture is a force to be reckoned with in our every thought.

Jan Morris, Solar Seeds, Galactic Guardians

The five Invid mecha cruised slowly across the night sky, navigating with care, surveying the terrain below. They brought with them a sixth Robotech construct. Within it was a cargo of critical importance.

Two Shock Troopers brought up the rear, and a partially evolved Invid in personal battle armor-the so-called "Pincer Ship"-led the way. In the center of the flying convoy were two more Pincer Ships. Between them they carried a hexagonal canister. The canister was like a Robotech setting for a cosmic gemstone; inside its crystal cocoon there throbbed and shone a fantastic, translucent egg. The thing was luminous in deep corals, gentle reds, and flesh tones.

"We must know more about these new enemies," the Regis had decreed, in the wake of the Genesis Pit catastrophe. Her servants had been quick to act. Soon, a Simulagent, a triumph of Invid biogenetic engineering, would be in the enemy's midst. And before obliterating them, the Regis would know whether the Humans posed any possible danger to her grand scheme for her race.

The Simulagent was code-named "Ariel." Ariel had been replicated, with certain alterations, from a Human tissue sample that had been recovered while the Invid were examining the debris of the Human strikeforce they had destroyed weeks before. It was inconceivable that anyone on Earth would recognize Ariel as a clone, since the source of most of her genetic design was a dead woman from the long-gone SDF-3

expedition...

The Invid flight leader's optical sensor scanned the area for any sign of Human presence, but there was none. The timing of the drop was important. The Simulagent's placement must be unseen, so that its origin would remain secret, and yet Ariel must not be left unprotected for long.

But the Invid had a recent fix on the Humans' route, which made things easier.

As the Invid formation neared its dropoff point, the crystal cocoon began to crack like an eggshell being pushed open from within. The strobing light from its center shone brighter.

Just as the formation flew low over a deserted, devastated village, the crystal shattered. The egg fell, lighting the night and the landscape below. It bounced from a tree branch to a half-demolished roof to the ground. Light and resilient and yet astonishingly strong, it suffered no injury. The flight of alien mecha turned around and started back toward Reflex Point.

The egg rested under a tree, casting its flesh-tone light all around. Soon it sensed the approach of its targets. Its glare grew, and it pulsed with the rhythm and sound of a quickened heartbeat. Darker colors swirled among the lighter ones now, and the egg stretched against the confines of its own skin with each beat.

This time Scott was flying directly over the rest of his team, keeping close in case of trouble, easing along in Guardian mode. The Veritech fighter looked like a cross between an armored knight and a robotic eagle.

The subsidence of the mountains into the Genesis Pit and the aftershocks had made the terrain dangerous and their maps useless. It had taken days to blaze a new trail through. They traveled at night, both to make up for lost time and because, at last, they had found a major highway.

Rand, Rook, and Lancer were all riding close to Lunk's APC. Like Scott, the Cyc riders had shed their armor; they all needed a chance to get out of its confinement after days of travel, and the scans and scouts indicated no Invid presence anywhere nearby. Scott flew his Alpha without his control

helmet-the "thinking cap," in Robotech jargon-controlling it with the manuals alone.

Furthermore, it took Protoculture to power the armor, and they had used up a lot of their reserves in traveling the difficult mountain terrain. Several times, Scott had been forced to ferry the APC across unavoidable gaps, which was something he hated to do. By acting as a transport, the fighter was left highly vulnerable to sudden Invid attack. Also, since this task demanded very slow, deliberate, painstaking maneuvering, it ate up a lot of Protoculture. It was a workhorse role the fighter wasn't built for, and one that strained its autosystems.

At times like those Scott cursed the truck; but when he had to land and replenish his Protoculture and ordnance and service the Alpha, he blessed Lunk and the battered old APC.

Rand keyed his headset by chinning a button on the mike mouthpiece, both hands being occupied steering his Cyc. "Hey, Scott! Don'tcha think it's time for a rest? It's almost dawn, y'know."

Scott was well aware of it. The first rays of the sun were already lighting the surrounding mountain peaks, gleaming off granite and snow. They would shine through his cockpit well before they warmed his teammates below. "Quit griping! Point K is just a few more miles ahead."

"Say again?" Rook broke in sharply.

"Point K-as-in-king, Rook," Scott came back. "That's where all units from the invasion force I was in are supposed to rendezvous. They've probably already prepared an offensive aimed at wiping out Reflex Point."

Rook's voice sounded unsure. "You mean this Admiral Hunter of yours knew the Invid were here?"

"Negative. He didn't know who the enemy was, exactly, but he was aware that something was wrong back on Earth. Don't ask me how; it was all hush-hush stuff."

Even Annie, standing up in the truck's shotgun seat and resting her chin on her forearms, on the windshield frame, didn't have to ask Scott why he hadn't told them all that before. With the risk of capture or even

desertion-'going my own way," as Rand or Rook would have called it-ever present, Scott simply couldn't take the chance.

Still, she kicked the glove compartment a little and pulled her E.T. hat down lower on her head, sticking out her lower lip. Lunk gave her a quick look, then went back to his driving.

Scott continued, "The way I figure it, there ought to be hundreds of Veritechs there, maybe a thousand or more. And ground units, assault mecha, supplies, and ammo-the works!"

Annie whooped into the dawn air. "Awright! Now that's the way to show 'em how it's done!"

"Wait, Scott." Rand sounded edgy. "How can you hide an army that size?"

Scott was all confidence and can-do. "No more hiding. There's a secure base of operations there by now. From there we go island-hopping, cutting the links between Invid bases, until Reflex Point's isolated, and we can smash it."

Just then, Scott's displays began flashing and beeping for his attention. Computers sorted through the sensor information and flashed order-of-battle information, indicating that there was a large, friendly force just over the next ridge.

He caught a flash of bright metal off fighter tailerons, and in the valley below he saw ranked mecha in the predawn mist. "All right, boys and girls! There it is, just ahead!"

He increased power to the Guardian's foot-thrusters. "I'm going to go on ahead and report in." The Guardian flashed away, over the rise.

"Can't wait to see his playmates, huh?" Rand grumbled. This business about reporting in had reminded him that he wasn't on any army roster. Like Rook and Annie, he was just an irregular who had joined up with Scott to try to do his bit for the Human race. But he obviously had no place in a regulation strikeforce.

So, what happens to the rest of us now? "Thanks, and don't let the door hit you in the butt as you leave?"

The mists still swirled around the many hectares of grounded mecha. Scott figured the base was operating under blackout conditions, because he could see no lights or movement. He didn't receive any warn-offs or challenges, and he didn't get any indications that radar or sensors were checking him out, but he decided to land on the hillside and go in on foot anyway. The base might be using new commo procedures, and he had no desire to be shot down as a bogie.

The Guardian bowed its radome, and Scott hopped down. He stood breathing Earth's air for a few deep breaths, feeling the moment. From this beachhead, we take our homeworld back!

Rand and Rook had raced ahead of the others; their Cycs came leaping over the hill with a winding of Robotech engines. The sun was about to top a ridge to the east; Scott decided he might as well wait and ride down with his companions. He was painfully aware that, except for Lancer and Lunk, they had no place in this regular-army campaign.

Rand and Rook came to side-on stops, pushing up their goggles, and Lancer showed up moments later, with Lunk not far behind. Scott checked himself to make sure the mauve-and-purple flightsuit with its unit patches of his division, the Mars Division, and his knee-length, rust-red boots were all in order. Insignia, buttons, sidearm-he wasn't quite strac, but he wasn't looking too bad for somebody who had been stranded for so long.

Scott and his teammates were exchanging a few mild, almost self-conscious congratulations-when Annie gave a dismayed yelp.

"The base! Look!"

They turned to look at the base just as the sun crested the ridge and its light shone off the snowy hills, brightening the little valley that was the home of Earth's liberation army.

But what they saw wasn't a home but rather a graveyard. Attack-transport spacecraft lay gutted like crushed eggs. Broken and burned-out mecha were everywhere. Ranks of parked Veritech Alphas had been holed and eliminated before ground crews and pilots could even reach them. Battloids and Hovertanks and MACs and logistical vehicles lay on the

ground like shattered toys. And the stench of death wafted on the warming breeze.

The valley was filled with jutting, broken, blackened fuselages and skeletal, burned-off airframes and hulls. Barely keeping his balance, Scott stumbled to the edge of the rise, looking down, both hands buried in his dark hair.

The clearing of the mist only made it worse by the second. "I don't believe it; this, this can't be-" He howled across the valley, hoping the survivors would answer. He fired his H90 aimlessly into the air. The others sat in their vehicles and looked at one another in despair. At last Scott Bernard dropped the pistol, sank to his knees, and wept.

Earth's liberating army! The mist for its shroud; the vultures to caw taps over it.

One by one his friends dismounted and gathered around him.

They went down among the monolithic wrecks; there was no place else to go. Lunk opened up the last of their rations and Annie built a fire. Scott had wandered off.

He was sitting in the shade of a three-tube pumpedlaser turret, looking off at nothing, eyes unfocused. Eventually, Rand came over with a plate of food and a cup of ersatz ration coffee, nudging them up against Scott. "Enough is enough. Time to eat, before you keel over."

He turned to go, then turned back for a moment. "You've got the team to think about, y'know." Rand walked away, the soles of his desert boots gritting in the sand. Scott stared blankly at the field of carnage.

Back at the campfire, Rook tried to sound positive, although cheerleading wasn't usually in her line of work; but everybody else seemed to be falling apart. "Look, here's a good idea: Why don't we get outta this dump right now?"

Lancer studied his ration can's contents, stirring them. "Not until we collect everything of use. Ordnance, supplies, weapons, perhaps Protoculture."

They all shivered a little, realizing how grisly that search would be. Lunk blew out smoke from a ration-pak cigarette, unsteadily. Rand returned.

"How is he?" Lancer asked, looking at the distant figure sitting with arms around knees.

Rand pulled up the hood of his sweatshirtlike windbreaker. "Catatonic.

I dunno."

Lancer set down his ration can. "Come on, Scott! We're wasting time!"

Rand caught Lancer's arm. "Uh, I think I'm gonna go forage over that way. Maybe Scott can establish a commo base."

Like the others, Lancer caught what was in Rand's eyes. In another moment they were on the move, eager to replenish their supplies, eager to get away. As Rand sped off in a plume of soil, Rook raced after him.

The Robotech graveyard was a strange place for a two-ride, but Rand welcomed it. It came, really, just as he had decided it was pointless to try to get close to the onetime biker queen. By her city lights, he was just a hick, a wilderness Forager. She had made it clear to him that he wasn't one of the Bad Boys. Rand tried not to show his astonishment as she fell in with him, their tires stenciling parallel tread patterns among the looming derelicts.

They were moving slowly, searching; he had his hood down and his goggles up on his forehead. He glanced over at Rook, admiring the lissome grace her red-and-blue racer's bodysuit showed off. "Why'd you come along?" He had to yell, not wanting to key his headset. "Not that it bothers me or anything."

Her fair brows knit; the strawberry-blond hair blew around her freckled face. "Too depressing back there."

They came in a tight turn round a smashed tanker. Rand was saying, "I know what you-heyyyyy!"

They dug to a stop at the lip of a drop-off, looking down into a kind of arroyo ledge protected by drainage ditches. There stood a village-or at least, the remains of a village; its caved-in tile roofs and beaten-down walls and the general lifelessness of it somehow let them know it had suffered the

same fate as the strikeforce.

"Two transgressors approach," the voice of the Regis said to her mecha warriors. "Remain in concealment!"

The war machines hunkered down, Scouts and Shock Troopers in personal battle armor, watching through optic sensors. Rand and Rook wound their way down the narrow lane.

Rand rode through the streets calling for any survivors, even though it might attract dangerous attention. But there was little time to search, and he hated the idea of leaving anyone, especially a child or someone who had been injured, behind. Rook was impressed with Rand's nerve, but she kept that to herself. She joined in the yelling.

They dismounted near the only building that was still in one piece, a large hacienda. Obviously the place had been too close to the strikeforce's rendezvous point, and it had been included in the slaughter. More carnage. But the two had grown callous to such scenes.

They were looking around the hacienda, not talking or meeting each other's gaze, when Rook smelled something strange and went to a spot where most of an adobe wall had been blown away. She stepped through into a garden, and knelt next to something jellylike and translucent, like a dying man-o'-war, draped across the swordleafed plants there. It was three or four inches thick, and had perhaps the surface area of a table cloth.

Rook knelt by it. "Careful," Rand grated, holding his gun uncertainly.

But she touched it, then snatched her hand back with a hiss of pain. "Damn thing burned my hand! And it's nothing to smirk about!" "Well I said watch out."

She was suddenly as alert as a doe. Her voice came more softly, so intimate that it made him a little lightheaded. She practically mouthed it, "Do you think the Invid are still around?"

He shrugged. She was up and moving; he had been staring, fascinated, at the blob of protoplasmic stuff, but now he couldn't take his eyes off the fit of her bodysuit, the shape of those slender legs, the swirl of the seemingly

weightless cascade of hair...

"I'll look outside; you check in back of the house." She pulled out her gun, and that brought him back to reality. His own gun was in his hand, fitted with its attachable stock and barrel extension, in submachine gun configuration now. He stepped back through the rift in the wall and thought about the blob of clear jelly.

A brief sensation of expanded awareness, as if his mind had been touched by another, swept through him. Why do I feel like I've been through all this before? The thought came unbidden and bemused him.

He heard a sound from back somewhere in the vaulted darkness of the hacienda. It might have been some debris falling as easily as it might have been some living thing blundering into a pile of rubble.

Rand warily followed the noise, his weapon raised. In a courtyard at the center of the place, he saw another sheet of the glistening, decomposing man-o'-war stuff, shrinking in the sun as he watched it. Its highlights twinkled like stars. He strained to remember what it reminded him of, as he moved on, footsteps echoing in the darkened hallways.

It looked almost...almost...But the image eluded him.

He heard a sound. He whipped around a corner with his weapon ready, braced to do battle. "FREEZE! Just fr-just, that is..."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Not even Zand, for all his PSI Sinsemilla, his Flower ingestion, had foreseen anything like it. And on and on, the Protoculture Shaped events.

Xandu Reem,

A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard

She sat in a shaft of sunlight that poured down on her like a benediction from above. Her arms were crossed on her bare bosom, long, slim fingers clutching opposite shoulders. She stared aimlessly at the light.

Her hair was a deep red, like his own but waist-length, and luxuriant as some rare pelt. Her skin was so pale, her body so frail-looking-and yet it was a woman's. Highlights glistened from her

Like the twinkling of stars.

Rand realized how close he had come to shooting by blind instinct. He also realized that she was naked, and he saw how beautiful she was there under the soft, almost loving sunlight.

"Ooo! That is...excuse me!" He brought the gun up and stared at it for a moment. He whirled, with a country Forager's sense of propriety. "That is, I'm sorry!"

She looked up at the strange figure, her long distraction broken. "Uh-mm-ahh?"

The distraught Rand was trying to collect his wits. In the outlands where he came from, being found with a naked woman could have all sorts of horrible repercussions, especially if one were found with her by her male kin.

He jittered, staring at the pockmarked stucco wall. "Didn't mean to surprise you! But-won't you catch cold just sitting there like that? You know-Heh, umm, don't you have any-" He tried not to look at her. "-any clothes you could put on?"

She didn't know who or what she was. She looked up at the creature or

object that had moved and made noises toward her. Following an ingrained program, she emulated: "Clothes...put...on?"

"Yeah, you know: anything to w-woo-" He was having trouble spitting it out, and he was having even more trouble keeping himself from ogling her.

"Have any thing w-wwoo-" she mimicked, completely baffled. Just then, Rook dashed in. "Rand! I thought I heard voices!"

As she skidded to a stop, he was already waving his hands, trying to keep her from seeing the situation. "Um, don't come any closer! I don't think you want to see, er-maybe we should get back to the Cycl-"

But she had already seen the naked woman, and her open-mouthed surprise changed to anger. "Stop being an idiot!" She elbowed him aside and looked down at the young woman, who was trembling and looking up at them both, apparently in a state of shock.

Rook spun around and grabbed the front of Rand's pullover. "You animal! How could you do something like this?"

"Hey, honest! I found her like that! She wasn't wearing a single piece of anything!" He was astounded by the anger in her eyes, astounded that she could think he would assault someone. He was even more astonished by something else he thought he saw there. It was partially a look of despair, as if Rand had betrayed her, betrayed some emotional investment she had made in him.

She released him and began taking off her faded yellow hunting jacket, moving toward the young woman. "I'll just bet she wasn't, you scuzzwad!" She knelt to drape her jacket gently around the woman's shoulders.

"Tell me," Rook said kindly, "why are you here all by yourself?" "Here all by yourself," Ariel repeated.

Rand told Rook, "That's all she does, repeat what you say!"

Rook rose and went back to him. "Now slow down and tell me what you're babbling about."

He shrugged. "Maybe she lost her memory."

Rook considered that. "You mean like through some sort of trauma?"

The young woman was staring down blankly at the straw on which she sat. The scintillating lights playing off her were fewer now.

Rand rode point, while Rook followed along with the frightened young woman huddled in her jacket.

They were observed by the optical sensors of a half dozen Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships.

"The Simulagent has been accepted," the Regis's voice rang among them. "Follow and observe! Make no attempt to contact-as yet!"

Annie, worried about Scott, stayed behind when the others went out foraging. Her few attempts to get him to talk met with utter failure. As the sun climbed higher, she idly inspected the nearby hulk, and kept one eye on Scott. He didn't move but sat beneath the gun turret, staring off into space.

Something bright in the sand caught her eye. "Hey, Scott, look what I found!" She swung it from its chain. "A pendant! Isn't it beautiful?"

But he never even turned her way. Annie's feelings were so hurt that she threw the glittering thing back toward where she had found it, then squatted miserably in the dust, eyes brimming with tears.

But a moment later she was distracted by the approach of Scott's Alpha, still in Guardian mode. Annie jumped to her feet, waving and smiling up at the Veritech. "Hey, Lancer!"

A few seconds later, Lancer leapt down from the cockpit. Annie trotted over to greet him. "Did everything go all right? Didja find any Protoculture?"

He beamed, throwing back the long purple tresses. "I found something even better! Come on, while I tell Scott."

She dashed after, thrilled without even knowing what the news was. "Scott! Wait'll you hear this!"

Lancer stopped in front of the young lieutenant. "Scott, listen-" He stopped because Scott hadn't even bothered to look up at him.

Scott sighed listlessly. At last, still looking down, he said, "Yeah, what is

it?"

But before Lancer could speak, they heard Lunk returning, laughing

and beeping the horn of his truck. "Hey, everybody! Wait'll you see this! It's terrific!"

He was still carrying on as he stopped in a shower of gravel and sand and hopped out of the cab. Scott wasn't any more curious about Lunk's find than about Lancer's, but Lancer and Annie were eager to hear.

"You won't believe it!" Lunk chortled. "It's a new type of Veritech fighter I've never seen before!" He was waving a manual. "See? It attaches to the back of the Alpha, and it'll double or triple the range and firepower! It's called, uhh-"

He paused to thumb through the manual. Scott surprised everyone by saying quietly, "It's a Beta Fighter."

The other three went "Huh?" in concert, then Lunk continued. There was barely a mark on the Beta, and he had already repaired the slight damage there was. He unfolded one of the manual's diagrams and showed it to Lancer and Annie.

The Beta was bigger and more burly looking than the Alpha. It was a mecha of raw power that could also assume Battloid form and a kind of modified Guardian.

Then it was Lancer's turn. He had located two more Alphas that looked like they could be made combat ready, especially given the surplus of spare parts lying around.

Lunk was still giddy. "With four fighters and four Cyclones, we'll just plain knock the Invid clear off this old world!"

Annie was picturing herself in a victory parade. "Scott, this is so exciting! We're going to have enough firepower to make us a miniature army!"

He looked at her angrily. "Four lousy fighters? What difference will that make against the Invid? The people who died here were an army, don't you understand that, any of you? This was part of Admiral Hunter's handpicked force! And all we can do is end up just like them!" He slammed

his fist against the torn hull furiously.

He hated himself for saying it. He had spent the morning hating himself for a variety of reasons: for the death of his fianc 閑 Marlene in the initial attack, when Scott was the only survivor from his entire squadron. For leading the others along on this quixotic quest across a ruined Earth, with a lunatic vision of defeating the beings who had conquered an entire world. For the despair that had enveloped and disabled him completely, now that all his hopes were shattered. For the sad necessity of telling them, now, that it had all been a mistake, and they had to make their own way

from here on, as best they could...

Annie was in tears and Lunk's big fists were balled. He looked a little like an angry gorilla. "That does it. Bernard! All right, you feel bad about your buddies; we understand, and we do, too. But is that any reason to take it out on Annie?"

Lunk took a step closer. "Get up." His ham-size, scarred fists were raised.

But Lancer intervened, almost frail and insubstantial next to Lunk, though they had all seen Lancer fight and knew differently. "Lunk, stop. Take care of Annie, will you? I'll talk to Scott."

Lunk hesitated, then obeyed. Lancer went to squat next to Scott, who seemed to be asleep.

"Don't say anything, please, just listen. We're all with you, and we're still ready to follow you in the fight against the Invid, because you-and we-are the last chance the Human race has. But if you give up now, the team falls apart, because you're the only one with the know-how to tackle Reflex Point.

"Now I want you to remember what you told us: we're all soldiers, and we have to do our duty, whatever the cost, whatever happens."

Scott's eyes had slowly opened, but he still stared out at the aftermath of the slaughter. Lunk, disgusted, led Annie off to begin work on the Alphas Lancer had found. After a moment Lancer followed them, leaving Scott alone and silent once more.

There's no way to defeat the Invid. You're insane, and now you've passed the insanity on to others.

He lost track of time until a sudden glint of light caught his eye. It was the sun shining off the pendant Annie had tossed aside. It was a cheap piece of jewelry; a lot of people in Mars Division and the other units had carried it or something like it. That made him remember something suddenly, and he dug out the locket Marlene had given him when they had parted-unknowingly-for the final time. It was a flat, heart-shaped metallic green locket with a blood-red holo-bead in the center, not very expensive but unutterably dear to him.

He activated it and it opened like a triptych. The air above the holo-bead was shot through with distortions, then the image of Marlene hung there, a Marlene perhaps six inches tall. Her uniform with its short skirt and boots showed off coltish legs. She was gamine and graceful; pale, wide-eyed, with long brown hair. Not beautiful, but very attractive.

The brief loop began playing in mid-message. "My love, I accept your marriage proposal with all my heart. I can't tell you what this means to me, or how long I've dreamt you would ask. Yes, Scott: I'd be proud to spend the rest of my life with you."

He had looked at it once, in the cockpit, just after she had given it to him, with nova-bright joy. But in the countless other times he had opened it, Marlene was superimposed on a scene of a flaming, plunging warcraft.

He clamped the locket shut once more, cutting off the loop. Marlene! Suddenly he heard the sound of powerful engines and looked up. The APC was returning with Rook at the wheel and Annie crouched nervously in the back seat. Rand was playing outrider on his Cyclone. The Alpha was playing mother hen to the bulky Beta Fighter. Scott figured Lunk was babying the Beta along; the big ex-soldier had some flight time, although he preferred the ground. But who was that in the APC's shotgun seat?

He got a better look and leapt to his feet without realizing it. Marlene!

The hair was a different color, but the face, the skin, the eyes-the very posture of her-these things were those of his dead fianc 閑.

It's finally happened. I've driven myself mad.

"It's like she's just learning to talk," Rook finished her story, "but she learns very quickly."

"How terrible the thing that happened to her must have been," Lancer said somberly.

Annie was sniffling. She wiped her eyes on the floppy sleeve of her battle jacket. "Well, I think it's awful!"

Rand looked grim. "The Invid did this to her, you can bet on that."

Lancer had assured himself that there was nothing obviously wrong with the young woman. There were no signs of bruises, wounds, or sexual assault. "We'd better get her to a town, somewhere where she can be helped."

The Simulagent had been staring at Scott, unnerving him, so that he stole only intermittent glances at her. Now though, still watching him, she shivered and groaned, then went down on one knee. Scott couldn't escape the feeling that it had something to do with him. Or maybe I just want to believe that?

It seemed impossible that anyone could be such a close match of another Human being. He had no faith in miracles, but he was beginning to think he would have to change his mind, because there was no other logical explanation.

But there was no time for insights; seconds later a deep thrumming vibrated the air, and the freedom fighters whirled to see a flight of Invid mecha heave into sight from behind a crashed battlecruiser.

The war machines spread out into a skirmishing line and began their slow approach, gliding some thirty feet above the ground. Rand and Rook sprinted off toward their Cyclones. After a moment's confusion, Lunk and Annie knelt to gather up the young woman, as Lancer prepared to get to his Robotech bike as well.

Rand halted to look back at Scott, who still stood rooted. "Come on, Scott! Hurry!"

Lancer seized Rand's arm. "Forget about him and get to your Cyclone!"

Rand gave Scott a brief, bitter look. "Big talker." Then he rushed to battle.

Lunk and Annie got Ariel to take cover behind an exploded cruiser's hull. The three Cyclones raced out to meet the enemy. We're lucky they didn't simply open fire, Lancer thought. With all of us caught in the open like that, it could have been a turkey shoot.

The Pincer Ships and Shock Troopers laid down an advancing barrage of fire, patterning toward the oncoming riders. The annihilation discs from their shoulder cannons streamed down, fountaining sand and fire and debris wherever they hit.

Scott watched numbly. Part of him wanted to fight and part of him simply wanted to end it all. He wanted to give in to the seemingly endless weariness and bloodshed and pain, and accept his fate then and there. Then he realized that the woman was on her feet.

She seemed to be about to break down into tears. She stepped out of the cover into which Lunk had carried her and strode like a sleepwalker out onto the hot sand. She stared up at the oncoming Invid sortie, and whimpered. Lunk started to go after her and drag her back, but the nearby impact of two discs sent him falling backward.

Scott screamed, "Hey, what are you trying to do, get killed?" It occurred to him that someone else might as well ask the same question of him, standing out there in the open.

Lunk and Annie braved the alien volleys to reach her and try to carry her back to safety. But she was frozen there, and the Invid closed in, their fire sending up columns of flame to all sides. She put both hands to her ears and screamed, screamed.

As Scott watched her face, it was as though Marlene were screaming. The sound of it struck through every cell of him. It was the sound he had imagined a thousand times-her last scream as she died in the enemy onslaught.

Marlene!

Before he knew what was going on, he was vaulting for the Alpha's cockpit. He howled away into the air, pulled on his thinking cap, and buckled his harness. Scott changed to Alpha to Veritech mode, wings swept back for high-speed atmospheric dogfighting.

He had remembered what he was fighting for.

CHAPTER EIGHT

People are mostly stupid and hateful and cruel to one another but-hell; let's save the world's ass anyway. It's better than being bored.

Rook

The three pincer ships came at scott in a tight V formation. He tagged the starboard wingmate with an air-to-air missile and banked past the falling, burning bits of it as the surviving two broke to either side to avoid him.

He read the displays; the target acquisition computers were working overtime. He launched another flight of missiles; a Pincer dodged one only to be skeeted head-on by another.

"All right; who's next?"

The third personal-armor Pincer was the next one to come in at him, Frisbeeing the white-hot discs. Its claws were bent close to it to decrease wind resistance and increase airspeed. Scott missed with a burst from his wing cannon.

How the blazes do they manage to maneuver so fast?

But he knew he had been lucky; his whole team had. It was miraculous that the Invid, catching them unprepared and out in the open like that, hadn't incinerated them.

He looped, trying to get into the Invid's six o'clock position for the kill.

Rand brought his Cyc through a skidding 180?turn, throwing up a shower of grit, as annihilation discs registered hits to all sides. The Shock Trooper stumped toward him, raising its immense claws, its two shoulder cannons pointing in his direction. Rand got off one round from the front-hub-mounted gun, cursing the fact that he hadn't had time to don his armor. Then he was flung back as a near miss from the Trooper's heavy guns blew him and his Cyclone backward through the air.

He landed in a shallow pit, stunned, waiting for an alloy claw to close around him and snip him in two or for a disc to burn him to ash. Instead he regained full consciousness in moments, spitting out sand and swearing. A thunder in the sky made him look up; the Shock Trooper roared by overhead, with Scott rocking it with cannon salvos.

Scott lost track of the Trooper, though, as the last Pincer Ship got on his tail and raked him with near-miss fire.

Rand, standing up in the pit, wiped the dirt off his face and invoked an all-embracing line from one of his favorite prewar motion pictures, shaking his fist at the sky. "I'm mad as hell and I'm not gonna take it anymore!"

Then he spotted the grounded Beta.

Lunk and Annie had the young amnesiac back under cover. "Don't worry," Annie told her. "The Invid won't hurt you, I promise! We won't let them!"

The Simulagent's face was warm and slick with tears.

Rand was studying the manual while he pulled on his thinking cap and warmed up the ship. He was trying to forget the fact that, except for a few hours in the Alpha under Scott's tutelage, he had never flown at all.

But the engines came up, deeper and more powerful than any Alpha's engine. Although the Beta was light on sensor gear and countermeasures equipment and certainly less maneuverable than an Alpha, it was fearsomely armed.

He was debating the best way to lift off when the heavy fighter rocked and nearly overturned. He saw through a stern monitor that a Shock Trooper had landed to take a swipe at it. Only the Beta's reinforced Robotech alloy armor had saved it-and him.

Rand grabbed the control grips, wrenched the stem back, and imaged the move to the receptors in the flight helmet. The Beta's engines erupted; the Shock Trooper was knocked backward tumbling, cracking open, becoming a pinwheel of flame. The Beta arrowed away from the standing

start, riding a column of smoke, fire, and ground-shaking thunder.

Rand laughed to himself nervously. "Now! That's what I call-huh?"

The last Pincer Ship dove in at him, skimming annihilation discs from both shoulder mounts. He juked his ship inexpertly, trying to evade the Pincer, wondering if this was to be the briefest solo on record.

Then he heard Scott's voice, "Hold on, Rand!" These were the most welcome words he had ever heard in his life. Above and behind the Invid and closing in fast, Rand saw the Alpha launching a spread of missiles.

The Pincer Ship dodged and juked like a demon, but one air-to-air got a piece of it. The knee juncture of one of the monstrous, crablike legs exploded. The Pincer cut in all thrusters and went off, tumbling and blasting across the sky like some erratic comet.

Scott let it go, and fell in with Rand to try to talk him down. But there wasn't time. The Beta was flying upside down. Rand held his breath, fought off the impulse to close his eyes, and went in for a landing.

He managed to get rightside up at the last moment, but that was about all. The massive armor of the Beta got him through a landing that would have demolished on Alpha, or almost any other mecha. The ship skidded, punched completely through an empty troop carrier, skidded some more (while Rand recalled prayers he hadn't thought about in years) and ended up penetrating the hull of a tanker. She finally came to rest in the shadowy main hold, lit by the few rays of sunlight that found their way in through hull punctures. She was nose-down but intact.

Rand lay with his chin on the instrument panel, the rest of his body piled up behind, the operating manual on his head like an A-frame roof.

A perfect landing. In the sense that I'm gonna be able to walk away from it. Or at least be carried.

Extraction of the Beta and reactivation of the other Alphas took most of the rest of that long day. The team wanted to stay longer to get everything they could from the battlefield, but they didn't dare; there was no telling when the Invid would be back. They gathered what supplies, ordnance,

Protoculture, and equipment they could and prepared to move out.

"Good fight," Scott told them, meeting everyone's gaze. But something showed in his eyes that hadn't been there before: an awareness that people had their limits, and that those limits were not so confining as he had thought.

Around them the Alphas were poised, noses almost touching the ground. The lower half of the Beta's nose was swung open like a trapdoor, its pilot's seat lowered for boarding. Lunk's truck was loaded. The team watched Scott.

"But as a result, we're short on Protoculture," he continued, "and we can't risk another tangle with the Invid, at least not now, if we can possibly help it. Remember that. Rand, do you think you can fly that thing without killing yourself?"

Scott pointed toward the white-and-olive-drab Alpha. Rand scratched his cheek near one of his numerous bandages. "As long as we don't have to turn right or left," he allowed.

"Improvise. Lancer, the Beta Fighter's yours. Rook, the other Alpha, okay?"

It was a VT with red-and-white markings. Rook wore a hungry, feline smile. "Just leave it to me."

They split up to get going. Annie and Lunk put Ariel into the truck.

As the Veritechs took off and Lunk gunned his engine, a lone figure stood watching them from a distant ridge. The Pincer Ship, its right leg blown away at the knee, relayed what it was seeing to Reflex Point, and to the Regis.

The wind whipped the Simulagent's scarlet hair, as she rode next to Annie. "Reception is perfect," the Regis's voice came to the mutilated Pincer Ship. "Maintain surveillance."

The subsidence of the mountains around the Genesis Pit and the danger of increased Invid patrol activity in the wake of events at rendezvous point K made Scott wary; progress was slow in the next few days. Roads and

bridges had been shattered, and mountain passes were filled by quake and avalanche.

Time and again the Veritechs were forced to airlift the truck and its stores, until the Protoculture supply became critically low. Long-range aerial scouting missions were impossible; Invid patrol activity was too intense. At last the freedom fighters reached a mountain tunnel that a shifting of the Earth had permanently sealed.

With the Veritechs' remaining operating time drastically restricted, there was nothing to do but try to find a detour. A small town lay nearby, and the team members agreed to check it out as a first step.

But first they had to be sure the aircraft were safe. They parked the fighters in a part of the tunnel that was undamaged, near the entrance, then donned Cyclone armor. The team used the power-assisted metal suits to move boulders and wall in the VTs for safekeeping.

It was a strange sight-seven-plus-feet-tall gleaming giants lifting huge stones, in teams when the weight was extreme, but often alone, tossing them like medicine balls. After the task was completed, the team shed their armor so they wouldn't attract any attention from possible Invid patrols or from informers. They set off toward the town.

The one thing the team hadn't brought was extreme cold-climate clothing; they hadn't counted on being forced to go so high into the mountains. As the Cyclones sped along, with Lunk's APC bringing up the rear, Rand shivered, "I can't s-stand it. I'm so cold!"

"All the more reason for us to get out of here before the real winter weather hits," Scott shot back.

The town lay in a valley at the confluence of a number of different mountain tracks and streams that might promise a path through. Two other roads from the lowlands ended there, reinforcing Lancer's contention that it was probably a jumping-off point.

Once they were down out of the heights they were more comfortable. The town itself, named Deguello according to a hand-lettered sign on weather-silvered wood at its outskirts, was more prosperous than Rand

would have expected. Apparently there was some hidden resource. A hidden prewar supply depot, perhaps? His Forager instincts came to the fore.

The town was like a lot of others Rand and the rest had seen, a type Scott was getting to know. Stucco, tiled roofs, wrought-iron window bars, whitewash that had long since faded. Cracked plaster, drainage ditches that were mostly clogged. Still, somehow, there were some crops and meat and wares under the tattered awnings of the market stalls. Deguello was better off than many other places the team had seen.

It was evident that medical attention was available, but none too sophisticated. Most clothing was patched and frayed. This was a typical post-Invid settlement where virtually nothing was discarded; it was repaired, reused, recycled, cannibalized, or traded for something else. The day of the use-and-discard consumer society was nothing but a galling memory.

There were normal, struggling people trying to keep their lives together and trying to function in a normal way, side by side with seedy types. The townspeople eyed the newcomers and their Cycs with cold interest. Rook automatically noted the weapons she saw: knives and chains and conventional firearms; prewar military and hunting arms; some police and homemade-type stuff. She didn't notice any energy guns, which meant the team would have a tremendous edge if they ran into trouble.

Let's hope there's no trouble, though, she thought. They look like they've been through enough.

Just like everybody else on Earth.

As the group pulled into the town's main plaza, a man stirred and lowered his smeared plastic cocktail glass, looking them over, adjusting his much-worn wraparound shades. The grungy kerchief tied around his head and his thick black beard made him look like a pirate. He was wearing ratty brown shoes with no socks, threadbare khaki pants, and a grimy camouflage shirt, of the same fabric as his headband.

Scott dismounted first. Everyone knew that the plan was to look the town over and get some kind of handle on the local situation. They parked

their cyclones and the APC without concern; in this postwar world, anyone with a vehicle had the sense to boobytrap it, and their nonchalance would be the most eloquent kind of proof that it would be wise not to meddle with the gleaming mecha.

Annie was pressing the idea that they all go shopping at the market. Scott was about to approve her expedition-it was as good a way to misdirect any watchers' attention as anything else he could come up with-when the man who had seen their arrival approached.

"Well, howdy there, folks." He kept his distance, as it was wise to do in greeting new people. Still, Scott could smell the odor from his body and from his mouth of broken yellow-and-black teeth.

The days of cosmetic dentistry and TV-hyped, brandname personal hygiene were all over, and the beaten-down Human race was showing it. But people could be divided between those who still made the effort, with homemade soaps and pig-bristle toothbrushes, and those who had simply reverted to a medieval way of life and thought.

"Thinkin' about takin' a trip?" the man said. Lunk, looking on, wondered if Scott intended to try to convince people that the team just happened to be up here on a pleasure jaunt. Or perhaps gathering daisies.

"Them mountains is crawlin' with Invid, y'know." Scott and Rand looked at him and said nothing. "Yeah, there's an Invid fortress smack-dab in the middle of that range; not even a rat could get through. But there is a map that'll show you a secret route. And it'll only cost you-"

He pulled an ancient pocket calculator. It was a solarpowered model that had been more of a novelty than a work tool before the wars, but was very dear in these days when batteries were scarce.

He squinted at their Cyclones, keying buttons. The calculator beeped with a final sum which he showed them. "-this much!"

Scott recoiled from the figure, payable in gold. "But we haven't got that kind of money!"

The man looked the Cycs over. "Well, there're those in this town who've been known to do some barterin' and tradin'. Them fancy machines might

do-"

"Forget it," Rand said flatly.

The man was about to argue, but stopped when he saw the look in the

Forager's eye. "Have it your way, m'friend. But all the high-tone highway hardware in the world ain't gonna do you no good if you're stuck here. And I'll tell you one thing: Paradise is waitin' fer you, right on the other side of them mountains."

He turned to go, "Look around; see if I'm not telling you the straight gospel. If'n you change your minds, you can find me right over there, most any time."

"Without that map, we'll never get through the mountains! We're stranded here!" Annie said, close to tears.

"Within arm's reach of the Invid," Scott added. "Rand, you shouldn't have been so quick to refuse to bargain."

Rand made a sour face. "It's lucky for you you've got a Forager along, Lieutenant Bernard. You think somebody with a map that valuable would be lounging around in the street, looking like that?"

"Rand's right," Rook added. "Maybe there's a map, but it's not very likely that that pig has it. Why d'you think he was so anxious to cut a deal right away, before some other con artist could get to us?"

"It's a pretty good bet that this friendly little community is crawling with every kind of sharpie there is," Rand said. "The way I see it, our best bet is to split up, take a look around, and try to get the feel of the place."

Scott nodded in agreement. "All of you be careful. Is everyone armed? Lunk will stay here and guard the vehicles. Annie, you stick close to him, got that?"

Lancer said, "I've heard one or two things about this place." He was removing a pack from his Cyclone. "I want to check them out, but it's something I'll have to do alone."

Soon the team was setting off in various directions, hoping Deguello held some hope for their survival.

CHAPTER NINE

Mom wasn't surprised at the way things were. I think she found grim irony in the fact that the one-percenters were in the majority at last.

Maria Bartley-Rand,

Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

Lunk was deeply engrossed in his gearhead window shopping. It was a great chance to examine some leftover war machinery. Annie put up with it for as long as she could and then, while he was on a mechanic's creeper under an APC like his own, she slipped away to check out Deguello for herself.

She was surprised at how much lowland food and other goods were available in this mountain outpost. Maybe somebody had discovered an emerald mine or something?

The fact that most of the people living in Deguello were from somewhere else wasn't so unusual; the first two Robotech wars and the Invid conquest had set most of the world adrift. And the fact that the team was in what had once been South America didn't really mean that much anymore, either. All nations were long since extinct; all cultures had been thrown together. Everyone was engaged in the struggle for survival.

But what struck Annie was strange was that so many folks seemed to be waiting for something. She saw people holding furtive negotiations in taverns and alleys, and others marking time in the square, looking this way and that as if expecting someone. Annie also noticed that people were selling or trading their personal possessions in return for gold or gems-apparently the only currency that counted here.

In some ways, it reminded her of a romantic oldtime motion picture that was one of her favorites, but there was no Rick's Cafe in Deguello, although she prided herself on looking just a little like a young Ingrid Bergman, when the light hit her just right, though Lunk and the others

scoffed.

Still, it was nice to dream; her dreams were the only things she really owned...

She scuffed her sneaker at a bit of garbage that lay on the pitted cobblestone sidestreet, aware that many eyes were following her. Brother! I've been in some creepy places in my time, but this one takes the booby prize. What a slimebucket zoo!

She was thinking that while watching a coughing, apparently tubercular man shuffling along and gagging in to a disgusting-looking rag. She was so distracted that she bumped right into somebody.

"Hey, ya little geek, why'n'cha watch where yer goin'?"

He was definitely one of the Bad Boys, a snake-lean, rat-faced guy in a dark, greasy jumpsuit open to his shrunken waist. There was a scorpion tattoo on his cheek. He wore a chain belt of massive links, and a blue Chicom Army-style cap, with a red bandanna tied around his thin left bicep. He had werewolf sideburns, a sawed-off 12gauge side-by-side (a popular weapon in Deguello) in a shoulder rig, and there were fishhooks stitched to the knuckles of his fingerless black leather gloves.

Her street instincts resurfaced, and she realized that she had been traveling in the charmed company of Robotech heroes for so long that she had forgotten how vulnerable she herself was.

Uh-oh, Annie thought. It was her considerable luck that he merely clapped a hand down on her cap and shoved, to send her stumbling, arms thrashing. But quick hands caught her, saving her from landing on her derriere in the gutter.

"You should be more careful, little boy." She found herself looking up at a clean-cut, handsome face-a young man who couldn't be more than eighteen or so. He had big blue eyes, wavy black hair, and a blinding smile.

She squirmed to break free of his grip. "I am not a little boy! What're you, blind? I'm a woman!"

He let her go, surprised, plainly upset that he had hurt her feelings. "I'm terribly sorry! Forgive me. Um, my name is Eddie."

She took a closer look at him and noticed that he resembled-let's see...James Dean! Only nicer! He was a dreamboat in a white T-shirt and a leather jacket!

She swayed toward him, almost melting. "Oboy! I, I mean, I'm Annie!

Eddie's my favorite name! You can call me Mint!"

She vaguely recalled that she was supposed to be on a mission of espionage and derring-do. "Um, d'you live up in those mountains, by any chance?"

He chuckled; she sighed. "No, Annie. Only the Invid live up there. But beyond them is Paradise."

Her eyes were the size of poker chips. "You mean all that stuff is true?"

He nodded, pointing at the distant mountains. She thought he was as beautiful as a hood ornament; "Paradise is a city that was set up by the old United Earth Government and the Southern Cross Army, so that if there was an invasion or a catastrophe, the Human race would be able to go on. A kind of New Macross, I guess you could say."

"Paradise is like Earth used to be before the Invid, or the Robotech Masters, or the Zentraedi! People are free there, and safe."

Annie felt faint. A place where people were safe and free and happy!

But what was Eddie saying?

"-the place for me. It's taken us a long time, but that's where my family's going. I-I wish the whole world could be like Paradise."

Annie launched herself straight. up, throwing her arms around his neck, clinging there, swinging her feet. "Oh, Eddie! That's so beautiful! I love you! Please take me with you? Pleasepleaseplease?"

The mayor of Deguello's mansion was as grand as a small palace. The place had fallen into extreme disrepair in the latter twentieth century, especially with the privations of the Global Civil War, and the First and Second Robotech Wars. But now there were signs of a revivification. The reflecting pool and formal gardens had regained much of their glory; the mansion shone with light and elegance.

The mayor, son of the previous mayor and descendent of many, sat in the ballroom, holding the hand of a beautiful woman who in turn owned his heart. Donald Maxwell, so used to commanding the obedience of others, of navigating his way through the treacherous political waters of Deguello and the post-invasion world, thought there was a cosmic symmetry to it: everyone had their Achilles' heel, and his was love.

Under the ballroom's chandeliers, brilliant even in daytime, and the paintings as big as barn doors, portraits of a score of ancestors, he sat in his Louis XIV chair and she in hers. In its time the ballroom had been the most splendid and celebrated in a hundred mile radius. Now, though, its decor was stranger than anything its original builders could ever have envisioned.

"But we must talk about our wedding, Carla," he was saying. "It's long past time.

"Have you tired of my lovetalk? Then think about what you have to gain if you marry me! I've always given you everything, anything you wanted. But this I need from you! And when you're my wife, my only thought will be to make you happy!"

Maxwell's Northern European and North American bloodlines were evident in his blond hair, pale skin, and Anglo features. His meticulously tailored three-piece pinstripe suit-a traditional costume, as he regarded it-only served to set them off.

Carla, too, was fair-skinned. She was slim and willowy, a brown-haired, angel-faced young woman with a permanent air of sadness and a far-away look in her green eyes. She seemed about to speak, but then hesitant.

A servant entered and spoke softly. "Your pardon, sir, but your visitor has arrived."

Maxwell's hold on Carla's hand loosened a bit. Without turning he commanded, "Show her in." The servant bowed and left. To Carla he whispered, "Please! I need you so!"

She steeled herself. "Why? Donald, why do you insist on possessing me?

Why can't you just accept what I'm willing to give?"

He rose, hearing the door open again, releasing her hand. "Because you

can be much more than that," he whispered again, more harshly.

Then he turned away, and his fine, handmade shoes clicked on the polished dance floor. "Ah! The famous Miss Yellow Dancer! You honor us! Please do come in; I'm Donald Maxwell, Mayor of Deguello, very pleased to make your acquaintance!"

"You are so very kind," said Yellow Dancer with a shy lowering of her chin, her voice melodious and soft. She looked out at the ballroom in some wonder, through thick lashes.

Parked there were three fighter planes of Global Civil War vintage: a red Vampire jumpjet; a needle-nose Vandal all-weather fighter-bomber; and a Peregrine interceptor wearing the famous skull-and-crossbones insignia of the American VF-84 Squadron-the Jolly Rogers.

Maxwell had caught the look, was expecting it. "You find my old relics interesting? Maintaining them is something of an extravagance, of course, but-it's something of a matter of family pride, you see."

No visitor had failed to be astounded at the sight. Maxwell drew a certain sensual pleasure from seeing the sculpted brows of the renowned Yellow Dancer raised high. "Mr. Mayor-these planes still fly, then?"

He basked in the impact his collection had made. "They haven't in many, many years, but-of course, or what would be the point of having them?"

He indicated the way with a slight bow; Yellow fell in, walking between the gleaming, sleek-lined sky hunters while he went on. "I'm no aviator, you see; they were refitted to fly by auto-pilot, the very last word in Human guidance systemry, before Robotechnology changed all that forever."

They had walked beneath the open landing gear bays, the poised wings. Yellow could see that the external hardpoints and pylons were loaded with what seemed to be real, functioning ordnance, and that the jets looked fully operational.

"The planes basically flew themselves," Maxwell was saying. "These were my father's prized possessions; they're dear to me as he was dear to me. They're all I really have left of him, really."

They had come to two easy chairs over by the high windows, some distance from where Carla sat. Maxwell pointedly made no introductions. "Please sit down. Your note said that you're seeking employment?"

Yellow Dancer nodded, a purple wisp of hair falling across her cheek. "Yes, and I hear you are the owner of a fabulous nightspot here in town, correct?"

Maxwell nodded, his eyes searching Yellow's, drinking her in. Lancer had heard through resistance sources that Maxwell was a collector of Yellow Dancer's performance tapes and sound recordings. In fact, the mayor had made tentative inquiries with an eye to getting the legendary Yellow Dancer to perform in his mountain domain.

"I am indeed. And if the magnificent Yellow Dancer were to perform there, it would help my people by boosting the town's economy-and my own, of course."

Yellow Dancer chuckled slyly. Unnoticed, Carla suddenly broke her sad reverie, her head snapping up, eyes going toward where the two sat. "I'd be thrilled to, Mayor Maxwell," beamed Yellow Dancer. Carla's breath caught in her throat, and she put one hand on the arm of her chair, feeling faint.

It can't be! But-I've got to be sure! She forced herself to her feet.

The mayor was saying, "A bravura performance by Yellow Dancer will lift people's spirits. Certainly it will help in my reelection campaign." It didn't look or sound like Maxwell was very worried about being unseated, though.

Yellow Dancer looked up amiably, ready to greet the mayor's fianc 閑. A

sudden astonishment came across the fine-boned, androgynous face.

Carla could only stare down at Yellow. It is Lancer!

Maxwell hadn't noticed Yellow's expression, because he was reaching up to take Carla's hand. He made the introductions and added, "I have a splendid idea! We'll have ourselves a deal, Yellow, if you promise to sing a ballad for our wedding! And I'll move the date up to tomorrow afternoon. Now how's that?"

Yellow barely heard what the mayor was saying. Like Carla, Yellow had

the feeling that the gold of the sunset had engulfed the whole room, whisking them to some other time and place.

Maxwell's Club Inca was the finest spot in the region, but it was still a sad place, more of an echo of a bygone era than an evocation of it.

Carla sat watching Yellow Dancer move across the stage, dedicating the first number to the bride and groom. The groom was off somewhere attending to more of his seemingly endless business, and the bride was trying to hold back her tears.

The noontime wedding, at Maxwell's mansion, had been a joyless affair attended mostly by his attendants and a few local notables. Carla had refused an elaborate wedding gown, insisting on wearing a simple blue frock. She had gone through the motions like a zombie, barely aware of what she was doing, knowing only that Lancer hadn't come to her.

She had thought he would seek her out, and save her from the wedding. And then in time she realized that, for some reason, that wasn't going to happen.

But now, alone at her table at the Club Inca, she watched Yellow Dancer's every move. She couldn't be wrong! Lancer must have come back for her at last!

Yellow wore one of her most stylish outfits, a feminized version of the Cabaret MC's costume, complete with vest, bowtie, derby hat, and spats. Very Marlene Dietrich.

As promised, the song was an old Minmei number, sung for the mayor and the new Mrs. Maxwell. The alluring chanteuse broke into song, accompanied by recorded music because the house band just wasn't up to her level of performance.

How could it all have turned out this way? Carla wondered, staring into her champagne glass as though the answer were there.

Her memory strayed again, back to a time just after the Invid destroyed the planet Earth.

The brunt of the conquest was over in hours. Striking with beam

weapons and energy effects that humanity still could not comprehend, the Invid exterminated over eighty percent of the Human race. Many more died as the Invid mecha descended to ravage and slay.

The remnants of the Army of the Southern Cross rose to fight, were thrown back in defeat, regrouped, tried again against any sane hope, and were shattered beyond repair.

Still there were those who refused to surrender, as the aliens established themselves and began their pacification of the planet. One of these was a young aviator reservist named Lancer who had just begun to explore his love with a woman named Carla when the hordes from the stars struck.

Even as the Invid established their network of quislings, informers, and assassination squads, Lancer and a few others were plotting for a final attempt to strike at the heart of the Invid beachhead.

But the raid was a final disaster. Wounded, attempting to get back to her, Lancer had crash-landed his Veritech less than a mile from her door. Somehow, Carla had gotten him to what was left of her home.

By then, most of the people still alive were those willing to submit to the Invid. Some even served them-hunted down their enemies and offered them up to the triumphant invaders.

Lancer had barely come to in Carla's bed when the sounds of the hue and cry drifted up from the streets. Rifle butts were bashing at doors; hounds bayed.

In time, the manhunt came to Carla's house.

CHAPTER TEN

If you hold it against me that I was a little theatrical in what I did, and you don't care to consider The Scarlet Pimpernel or Zorro, be kind enough to keep in mind what I accomplished, and let the record speak for itself.

Of if not, either walk on by or step out back.

Remark attributed to Lancer

That time seemed so remote, Carla thought, and yet it remained so crystal-clear in her mind.

Lancer had a fine record as a military officer, but he had left the Southern Cross sometime before the Invid attack because he had been unable to fight the urge he felt to be a performer. His soft, intimate way with some songs, his brassy, crowd-pleasing style with others, made him a natural; but there was another side to his art.

An interest in theater had led him to investigate the Japanese traditions of No, Bunraku, Bugaku, and especially Kabuki. He found that he loved to perform clownish Saruwaka antics more than he liked any Aragoto swaggering heroic lead, and in somewhat the same way, the martial juggling/acrobatics of the Hoka possessed him.

And he came, in time, almost against his will, to a fascination with the revered craft of the Onna-gata-the tradition of female roles portrayed by specializing male actors-and the gentle Wagoto style of acting.

Lancer found a strange understanding of himself through the Musume, the ingenue role, and dramatic masters encouraged him to study the art. In the West there was still, in many quarters, a horror at the blurring of gender lines. But in the Kabuki his talent was applauded, by men and women both, for its triumph of art over stereotype, and for its submersion of self in role.

Lancer returned to the Americas with new thoughts in his head. He began to revive the type of gender-blending pop music figure that had disappeared with the outbreak of the Global Civil War.

When he met Carla, she seemed immediately to understand everything. Carla became his co-conspirator, his lover, his confidant, his fianc 閑. She

became a mainstay of his life, showing her affection for his Musume persona, joining him in a world where conventions and Western narrowness had no hold.

Everything was fine until the Invid came. While Earth passed into the flames, a young reserve aviator named Lancer lay listening to the tread of Shock Trooper mecha and the sound of rifle butts and hobnailed boots breaking down doors in the alley outside.

Carla was already nearly as adept at some parts of his craft as he. "There's only one way you can survive, and that's as Yellow Dancer," she said, even as she was setting out makeup.

When the Invid manhunters came in they found only two frightened women. Their insistent search turned up nothing-Lancer's VT armor having been left behind-and they went away grumbling, the Shock Trooper's optical sensor indicating nothing as the hulking war machine turned to go.

Carla leaned to kiss her lover longingly. "You're Yellow Dancer now.

You must be, every moment, or we're dead."

In retrospect, it seemed a happy time but sitting at the table in the Club Inca, Carla knew that it had been filled with fear and travail. By foot and ox cart and stolen bike and a half-dozen other means that they took as the occasion arose, she and Yellow Dancer moved toward some hoped-for safety. Yellow even began singing for their supper, when the opportunity came up. Not only did Yellow Dancer's persona submerge Lancer's; Yellow and Carla came to meld, in a way.

Then there came a day in a huge rail terminal, both of them clutching forged documents from the Resistance that would get them to a possible place of safety. The region they were in was somewhat neutral, and Carla's lover was Lancer once more. Dark thoughts seemed to have overtaken him once his male persona reasserted itself; the halcyon days of the escape were over, and aliens strode the Earth, exterminating Human beings at will.

And as the bullet train began moving, Lancer leapt from it. The doors shut and secured automatically behind him. He crouched, staring at the surface of the train platform so that he wouldn't have to meet her gaze. Lancer had to let the train take Carla to safety so that he could join the Resistance in the fight against the Invid.

Carla was gone from the sad little bridal party table by the time Yellow Dancer finished her encore set. Yellow went downstairs to her makeshift dressing room. What point would there have been in seeing Carla alone? The Invid kept the two apart, no less today than on that day in the rail station.

When Yellow Dancer opened the door, Carla sat waiting.

Yellow Dancer and Lancer surged and vied in a single mind. Carla seemed small and frail, sitting with her hands in her lap, facing the door, waiting only for Yellow's return. "After three years," she whispered. "You've come back for me at last!"

Tears ran down her cheeks as she watched Yellow sit down. "Time stopped having any meaning for me, do you know what that feels like? What happened to you? I've felt-my life has been so empty!"

What Yellow might have said will never be known; at that moment the door slammed open and Annie rushed in. "Lancer! Oops, didn't mean to interrupt, but-I'm in love!"

"That's all right, Annie," Lancer replied, but his eyes were on Carla.

In love, Carla thought. Lancer was looking at her now, not Yellow Dancer. "I-I was in love with someone once," Carla told Annie haltingly, wondering if she sounded deranged.

Annie appeared not to notice Carla's despair. "Fall in love again, okay?

Then you'll be just as happy as l am!"

Annie gripped Lancer's hand. "Eddie and his folks are getting a map, an honest one, that'll tell them how to get through the mountains to Paradise. And they're taking me along! They're gonna be my family!"

It dawned on her that neither Yellow Dancer nor Carla seemed very

happy for her. She jumped off the couch and resettled her E.T. cap. "I just couldn't leave without saying good-bye. Um, well, my dreamboat's waiting-g'bye!" She skipped out the door, tra-la-la-ing.

"Good-bye, Annie," Yellow Dancer said softly.

"Love," Carla mused, realizing what it was that she had seen in Lancer's eyes. "And ours is gone forever, isn't that what you were going to say?"

Annie caught up with Eddie where he was waiting for his father at the Central Deguello Bank. Mr. Truman came down the steps of the bank with a briefcase under one arm, looking up as he heard his son call out to him.

Eddie's father had been away for a few days, so Eddie said, "I'd like you to meet a very special friend of mine."

"Hi, Mr. Truman! My name's Annie LaBelle!"

Truman, a lean, stoop-shouldered man with salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, had a careworn face and wore much-repaired wire-rim glasses. He looked weary but friendly. "Well, Annie LaBelle, I'm very pleased to make your acquaintance."

He thought he knew why Eddie had taken a liking to Annie; she was so much like Eddie's little sister, Aly-Aly, dead these eighteen months since the White Virus cut its swath through the region.

To his son, Truman said, "Eddie, we'll be leaving soon-just as soon as I wrap up a few things. I found a buyer who wants the shop, and Mrs. Perio upped her offer for the house. Make sure everything's packed, and as soon as I get home, we'll be on our way."

Eddie shifted from foot to foot, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket. "Um, Dad, I told Annie she could come with us. "

Truman let show a faint smile. "Why, of course you did, Son. Don't leave anything behind, Annie; we're getting out of here for good."

As Mr. Truman walked off, Eddie whooped and did a little war dance; Annie pirouetted, giggling deliriously. "Paradise, we're on our way!"

The ten-ounce gold bars, flat and wide as candy bars but much smaller,

looked so insignificant there on the desk, Mr. Truman thought. And yet they had taken so much time and sacrifice and work to accumulate. The sunlight streaming through the tall windows made them so bright that they made him squint.

Across the wide desk, Mayor Maxwell said, "You should be proud, Mr. Truman. I know what you had to go through to get this, but not one man in a hundred succeeds like this."

Truman nodded tiredly. It had been explained to him, long since, why Maxwell's map cost so much. Certain parts of the route had to be changed constantly, to reflect new Invid activities and patrolling patterns. And there was the need for Maxwell's Lurp teams to set up safe resting places and resupply caches along the route. The cost of maintaining the teams was high, not to mention the fact that a cut of all proceeds went to the Resistance effort against the Invid.

Or so Maxwell insisted. There were rumors to the contrary, but there were rumors about everything in Deguello. Reliable people swore they had heard from friends and relatives who had made it to Paradise, and that Maxwell was a trustworthy man. Truman was too tired to hesitate anymore, too ground down by the loss of a daughter and the dead-end of life in Deguello. He just wanted to be on his way, to get his family to the safety of Paradise.

Maxwell handed over a folded, waterproofed bundle. "And here's a current map showing the safe route through the mountains. It was updated by my Lurps just this week; you'll be safe with this."

Truman accepted it with a trembling hand. "Thank you, sir."

"In Paradise, you'll live a better life," Maxwell said. "I'm glad you're the one getting this, Truman. I know what some people think of me, asking all the market will bear for these maps, but-the traffic along the secret route has to be kept to a minimum, and there's still the Resistance to finance. Still, I sleep better when the people I help deserve it."

Carla, on the other side of the ballroom, stared through the big tropical fishtank there, watching the scene played out as she had watched it played

out dozens of times before. She looked at the map Truman held, wishing-struggling with herself.

Truman was quickly on his way, eager to get a start in what was left of the day. Carla sat in a wing chair near a window, looking up at the nearby mountains.

The team, minus Annie, was making a poor afternoon snack of a few canned party tidbits-salted nuts and the like-of prewar vintage, at an outdoor table. Buying local food, even at high prices, seemed wiser than eating current-dated Mars Division rations out where people might take notice.

All their inquiries had gotten them nowhere. There were other people with mysterious maps-in fact, it seemed to be one of the town's major industries. But what little reliable advice they had been able to get said that none were to be trusted-except, perhaps, the mayor's. And the price of the mayor's help, payable in gold, was beyond the team's reach.

Lancer had told the team about his contact with Maxwell. But he told them nothing of his old ties with Carla, and so there seemed to be no avenue of map-acquisition there; Maxwell was all business.

Scott was seriously considering letting Maxwell know who and what the team members were, but held off. More than one purported Resistance sympathizer had turned out to be an Invid stoolie.

Meanwhile, the team was concerned about Annie and her new adopted family. They couldn't blame her for wanting to restore some kind of stability to her life, even though her trip to Paradise did sound like a pipe dream. But Scott worried that she would inadvertently tell more than she should. However much she was sworn to silence, there was always the chance that she would betray the team's secrets.

Rand, chasing one of the few surviving pistachios around the dish, said, "They'll be serving free buffets in Deguello before we can ever scrape together the money for Maxwell's map! So what're we gonna do now?"

Scott stared down at his coffee. He had a plan to fall back on, and as

much as he regretted using it, it seemed like the team's only hope now. Scott's plan was to pay a call on Maxwell, in full armor, with VTs in Battloid mode, and force the man to hand over the map. Then they would make a break for the mountains, leaving the mayor incommunicado. Hopefully they would get through before anybody could alert the Invid.

Scott was about to bring it up, but Rook spoke first. "Hell, it seems like this one never worries about anything." By that, she meant Ariel, who still wore Rook's jacket, and who still looked at the world with the lost expression of a total stranger.

And yet, Scott thought, it wasn't really irritation Rook was showing. Instead it was concern. Most traumatic-amnesia cases recovered in a few days, but this woman had been a blank for a week now.

Scott sighed. "I'm glad you brought that up. Isn't it about time we gave her a name of some kind?"

The Simulagent made a little questioning sound, aware that they were talking about her. Rand smirked, "Hey Lunk! How 'bout you giving us a few suggestions?"

Lunk looked upset; as he always did when anyone asked him to take a lead. "I, ah, I bet Scott could come up with a nice name."

Scott had intended to say something else, but found himself asking, "Why don't we call her Marlene?"

Rook's brows knit; she knew the story of Scott's fianc 閑's death. Lancer

broke in, "Why don't we just let her tell us when she's good and ready?" Rook shrugged. "Until then, Marlene's as good a name as any."

But none of that solved the map problem. They discussed the situation again, until Lancer rose from the table. "I want to look into a few more things. I'll catch up with you later."

They watched him go. Rook thought, Why do I get the impression he just made a decision? She heard a murmuring and saw that the young woman was repeating the name Marlene to herself.

Maxwell was away on more of his unnamed business; and Carla invited

Lancer in, bringing him to the balcony overlooking the ballroom. She poured some of the green tea she knew he loved, a true rarity in that part of the world nowadays, and made him sit by the grand piano Maxwell had bought her.

Carla played a soft Minmei melody, her touch much more deft than it had been two years before.

Lancer went to the open French doors, to stare at the snowcapped mountains. "Carla, tell me: how does Donald Maxwell make his money?"

Her smile slipped, then was back in place. "You know the lyrics to this one; would you like to-"

"What is Donald doing that you can't talk about?" "I, I can't tell you."

He went and held her hands down so that the music stopped on a discordant note. "Now listen to me: there's something terribly wrong about this map business. Won't you tell me what it is, before somebody gets hurt? And then we can leave this place together, Carla. Carla, tell me!"

She hesitated, but swayed toward him for a moment, her eyes on his, as if some greater gravity had hold of her.

"I'll find us a place that will be much better for both of us," he promised.

She stood to look across at the balcony's opposite windows, to look west. "Lancer, let's go that way! To the warm sea breezes and the sunlight! I'll make you happy there, I swear it!"

"I've been down there, Carla. I'm being hunted, and so are the people with me. And we have a job to do. The only way out for us is over the mountains."

Her eyes dropped. In a very small voice, she confessed, "There's no way across those mountains, Lancer. The Invid control everything. Everyone who tries it dies, I'm sure of that now."

"Here's a copy of the map," Annie said in secret-agent tones, looking around, slapping it into Scott's gloved palm. "The real map, the mayor's!"

She was hitching up the pink brushed-suede rucksack she had been wearing when Scott first met her, the one that contained everything she had in the world. Scott gaped at her.

"I, um, borrowed it from Eddie's father and photocopied it!" she gushed. "I'm off now to Paradise with my new family. Eddie's mother and father are so-ooo nice! You guys make sure you follow quick, okay? The route'll probably change again in a coupla days, because the Invid are always changing their surveillance. Bye, Scott! Bye, Marlene! Bye, everyone!"

She frolicked away, laughing giddily.

Scott, watching her go, unfolded the map slowly. Rand and Rook and Lunk were ecstatic. The other team members went off to see to their vehicles.

Reflex Point was suddenly much nearer.

Scott looked at the map, matching it up with a hand held display that showed aerial survey records from the memory banks of his Alpha. It didn't take long for his face to go from elation to scowling anger. A fake...

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Who will ride? Who will fall? Cyclone Psychos!

Deguello ballad

"That's his business, selling fake maps," Carla was telling Lancer.

"And nobody knows because nobody comes back. Did he start the rumors about Paradise, too?"

She gulped and nodded. Lancer looked around him. "And that's what pays for all of this. Sheer dumb, stubborn Human hope and longing. Maxwell's going to pay-"

He stopped as he heard an engine roar at the edge of town. From his vantage point high up, Lancer could see over the mansion wall to the street where Annie and Eddie sat in the back of the Truman family's all-terrain truck.

Most of the cargo bed was taken up by the Trumans' good and baggage, lashed under tarps. As the ATT pulled away, Maxwell and a half-dozen of his Lurp scouts waved. Near them were two all-terrain jeeps.

"Annie!"

Lancer dashed for the door.

Armored and mounted, the team made final checks, ready to begin the pursuit. Cycs were tested for battle-readiness; Lunk made sure that the ammo well for the Stinger autocannon mounted in his APC's prow was filled to the brim with linked ammunition. Marlene sat next to Lunk, looking more bewildered than ever.

Scott was ripping up the map, though he already entered its directions in the displays, in order to trail the Trumans. "When I get my hands on Maxwell-"

Lancer snapped, "There's no time to think about Maxwell now! We've got to catch Annie before it's too late!"

All four Cycs went into wheelies, a way of releasing energy and yet not getting too far ahead while the APC accelerated. They streaked away toward the mountains.

Carla had watched from her vantage point in the mansion. Now she raced down the stairs and past the three silent fighter planes, flinging herself at the door; determined to steal a car or do whatever it took to catch Lancer and go on with him or die with him. She was determined not to be left behind ever again.

But Maxwell came through the door. "Hey! What're you doing, Carla?

What've you been up to?"

"I told them, Donald! I told them everything!"

The team roared up the mountain roads, the Cyclones taking curves as only Robotech mecha could, Lunk doing his best to keep from falling behind. "We're comin', Mint!"

Marlene suddenly cried out, holding her head as if she had been hit by a migraine. "I, I heard them. Something...there's trouble!"

Truman slowed down his all-terrain truck, adjusting his glasses, squinting at the map. "I can't understand it. I can't orient this map; it doesn't make any sense."

His wife, a kindly woman with an open, fleshy face and hair pulled back in a black bun, looked on disheartenedly, doing her best not to distract him.

Suddenly she looked up in terror, as shadows crossed the windshield.

At the back of the cargo bed, Eddie was joking with Annie. She understood that he regarded her as a kid sister and had decided to wait until she got to Paradise to make her move. If a little makeup could work wonders for Yellow Dancer, she could imagine what it could do for Annie LaBelle!

Then she heard a roaring of thrusters, and bulky mecha heliographed the sun in a close pass.

"Invid!" She could see four Pincer Ships, claws folded close to them while they made their attack dives. Mr. Truman had seen them, too, and began swerving as the first annihilation discs hit. The all-terrain truck wove back and forth on the road, the Invid seeming to drive it almost playfully, until at last Mr. Truman swerved sidelong into a boulder, and Annie and Eddie were thrown from the cargo bed.

A strafing Pincer chopped a line of explosions along the road, and Eddie rolled into the ditch with Annie in his arms. Mr. Truman and his wife fell along after, clutching one another. The Pincer's wingmates held back while the leader came in for the kill.

Then there was an additional explosion and they saw that the leader was wobbling and tumbling through the air, like an unstrung, burning puppet. It erupted into a balloon of energy, smoke, and shrapnel just before it struck a nearby cliff.

Annie looked up, dazed. Suddenly there were Cyclone knights everywhere in the sky. All at once, the Invid were getting a costly lesson in dogfight tactics and learning that the sky was still a hotly contested killing ground.

Lancer pulled up nearby, still on his Cyc, and Lunk in his truck. "Get them out of here while we cover!" Scott's voice came over the tac net.

Rook's red-and-silver armor was sleeker, more maneuverable than the others', and had that wide-bore long-gun that was unique to it. Scott's blue-and-silver was more heavily armed than before, with an assault-rifle module acquired in the wreckage of his strikeforce's graveyard; he stood straddle-legged, letting the Invid come at him, and held the trigger down.

Rand's armor, light-blue-and-silver, seemed more specialized for handgun-firing, and that suited him just fine, the armor wielding a bigger, more powerful version of the H90.

Then Lancer scooped up Marlene, who had dismounted in a numbed astonishment, set her behind him on his Cyclone, and started off. Annie and

Eddie helped his parents into Lunk's truck, and it accelerated to catch up. The Cycs fell back in good order, firing, as the Invid came down at them, but then split up as the firing became too intense.

Scott jetted backward on thrusters that set the brush among the trees afire, awaiting his chance. He could see Rand and Rook doing the same. Trees and mounds of soil and rock exploded, the Invid lashing out at everything in their frustration.

At last the defenders were driven down to a lowermost verge. From that spot they could either go to the open sky, where they would be shot like clay pigeons, or to the forest that lay a few hundred yards below. Invid fire turned nearby trees into Roman candles.

Scott said, "We have to make them think they've won." I hope Lunk and Annie and the rest have gotten far enough away! He dismounted two missiles from a forearm pod, twisted their warheads to adjust, and waited, as the Invid rushed down. "On three! One..."

The armored Cycriders set up a network of fire, crisscrossing the sky with brilliant bursts, jostling the Invid as the Pincer Ships came within range.

Scott gave the warheads a final twist, then tossed the missiles down, and took up firing again. "Two..."

He and Rand and Rook were throwing up a furious barrage, heels hanging over the edge of the cliff, the dirt and gravel they had scuffed loose falling. The Invid's attack-pass cut the air.

"Three!"

The Cycs jumped back, dropped. Invid annihilation discs hit the ledge where they had been standing, raising huge gouts of flame and debris and smoke.

Although the Regis's awareness was not in the Invid there, they spoke to one another with her voice. They did not know that Marlene was among the prey, and that she was part of a greater plan.

Instead they heard the Regis's standing orders in their minds,

Eliminate all resistance! Neutralize rebel forces. They must not be allowed to escape! Kill them all!

Clinging to Lancer's armored middle, Marlene suddenly cringed. "The, the voices again!" She seemed about to faint. "Rand and the others-they ran!"

Lancer had his hands full with the pitched descent of the mountain road. But he wondered, Does she mean Scott and the rest? And how does she know?

Then Lancer, followed by Lunk, rounded a corner and had to stop. The way was blocked by Maxwell and a score of armed men.

They were equipped to tackle even Cyc armor, with old LAW rockets, RPGs, a few Manville X-18s, and a truck mounted with a heavy machine gun. Lancer fought off the urge to break away and come back later. But Maxwell might not let the others live long enough to be rescued, and above all, Carla was with the mayor, standing in the back of his staff car, her hand caught up in his.

Truman was standing up in the bed of Lunk's truck, gripping the cab frame. "Maxwell, you lied."

"I'm a good businessman and you're not; don't come crying to me. There is no way through the mountains. Congratulations on being the first to ever come back. However-"

Maxwell showed a thin smile. "Now that you know my secret, you can't be allowed to return. You understand, I'm sure. Will you please step down and line up over there?"

Maxwell's men had the angle on them from all sides with high-powered rifles, pump shotguns, and some Galil heavy assault pieces loaded, no doubt, with armor-piercing rounds. The Trumans, Annie, Lunk, Lancer, and Marlene dismounted and did as they were told. Lancer read his displays and braced himself.

Carla caught Maxwell's hand. "What are you doing?" "They must be eliminated."

"No!" she wrestled against him for a moment. He threw her back against the bed of the converted truck, knocking the wind from her, ignoring her when she husked, "No, Donald..."

The blue-and-silver Cyclone rider had gathered the captives back some distance from the trucks, Maxwell noticed, most of them sheltering behind him. But Maxwell smiled. "This is the end of the road, folks." He raised his arm for the signal.

"If you move it, I'll burn it off," an amplified voice promised. Maxwell spun around just as Robotech weapons opened fire. Many of his men dropped their guns and all of them cringed, as the dazzling rays opened the ground around them and sent novaflame curling into the air.

Annie threw her arms wide and sang, "Good work, Rand!"

Maxwell ordered the rest of his men to throw down their guns, and he dismounted from the car, gaping at Lancer's H90, as Lancer advanced on him. "I-if you fire that thing, the Invid will be down on us immediately!"

"They're a little busy right now. We killed all the ones that came after us. Now, you've been feeding innocent people to the Invid for years, isn't that right?"

Lancer raised his gun. "Time for you to get a taste of your own medicine."

Maxwell drew a breath and said, "If you pull that trigger, you'll never find out how to get through these mountains alive. And the Invid are swarming after you."

The mayor met Lancer's gaze. "My precise map isn't just some children's story. It shows the way through underground warrens dating back to the Global Civil War. It leads into a camouflaged road through the mountains. You see-" He gave a slight smile. "I serve the Resistance, too; they pay me well. You can ask any underground contacts you want if you don't believe me."

Scott and Rand and the others were frisking Maxwell's henchmen. They rearmed their friends and armed the others with captured weapons: Eddie with a Manville, Mr. Truman with an ancient shotgun, Carla with an

Ingram MAC 9. They tossed the other weapons into Lunk's truck.

"You spare my life and we all leave here alive," Maxwell was saying.

Lancer raised his H-90 and fired. The adjusted threadfine beam burned away a piece of Maxwell's left ear, cauterizing what was left. His hair was singed but it did not catch fire. Maxwell fell to the ground, holding his wound and swearing in a monotone.

Lancer looked down at Donald Maxwell, "All right; we'll take you up on your offer. And if anything goes wrong, you'll be the first to die."

Carla ran after Lancer as he turned to go. "Wait! Lancer, wait for me!" Maxwell lurched to his feet. "Carla, where are you going?"

She looked at him and her lip curled. "I've had enough of you!"

His protests-that he had done it all for her, that his wealth meant nothing without her-couldn't bring her back.

With Veritechs looming around him, Eddie shook his head to Annie's cries. "Why won't you come on with us, huh? Why?" she whined.

Eddie heaved a long breath. "Because you're going where there's more fighting, and that's not what I want, Mint. Paradise was just a lie. My dad's brother has a ranch down south; that's where we'll go. You can come with us if you want, but I'm not getting involved in any war! Besides, I have to look after my family."

Then he had dropped her hand and run to jump into the passenger seat next to his mother and father. "So long, Annie. Good luck."

"Eddie! Good-bye!" Annie called, but didn't move. The truck pulled away into the dusk. "l love you!"

She whirled and threw herself into Lunk's arms and wept. Lunk held her and wept for her, too.

Rand was sitting on and patting the crates of ordnance and the few precious Protoculture cells Maxwell had been forced to give up. "At least we got supplies and ammunition."

Rook still had her chin on her fist. "The chance to kill him against a few supplies? I still don't like the trade." Rand knew better than to try to reason with her in a mood like this.

Scott turned and saw the APC throwing up a trail of dust, speeding up out of Deguello. "We move out as soon as Lancer comes back."

Lunk's borrowed APC bounced up the road from the town, Carla's suitcase loaded in the back. Lancer somehow felt stiff and absurd sitting next to Carla. He tried again. "I simply don't want you mixed up in all this; same reason as before."

She looked across at him for an instant, then ahead through the windshield. "I'm not afraid to fight."

"I know that."

But Lancer wasn't so sure Maxwell would let her go, despite all the mayor's assurances. Then the subject changed from the abstract to the immediate; dashboard displays bleeped, showing three flights of Pincer Ships cresting a ridge nearby.

Lancer stepped hard on the accelerator, ignoring the danger of the curves. He felt a coldness right down at his center.

Good try, but-they've got us this time.

CHAPTER TWELVE

How did the Regis lose contact with Ariel, such an important agent? The technically minded hindsighters will point out several reasons. The rest of us have learned better by now.

Nichols, Zeitgeist Reconsidered: Alien Psychology and the Third Robotech War

The pincer ships swept in, but there were abruptly three new blips on the dashboard's scanners.

Maxwell's trio of prized autofighters swooped in hard at the Invid armor-piercing cannon rounds, loosing missiles and, breaking left, right, and upward, following the aero-maneuvering programs in their memories-maneuvers the Invid hadn't had the time or necessity to learn...until now.

Lancer stopped for only a moment, looking back to see the warplanes fighting their last battle. He saw the bright fireglobes of exploding Pincer mecha in the sky, and the whirling, flaring wreckage of enemy war machines.

Go get 'em! Lancer tromped his foot down hard on the accelerator.

Maxwell, in a secret tech-pit, watched his fighters roll up a score and then, one by one, be overwhelmed and sent down in flames. He liked to think that his father would have been happy at this last stand, even though it came late in the game.

At least Carla will be safe. So much for the jets. What does it matter?

Not much, without Carla.

He leaned back in the control center chair and closed his eyes, wishing that he would never have to open them.

Snow had begun drifting down.

Lancer had his arm around Carla's waist. "Donald sacrificed all three of his father's fighters to save us-no, to save you."

He could see that she knew that; she was looking back at Deguello rather than at the smoking remains of the warplanes and mecha. Lancer wanted to wrap her in her coat and take her along with him.

"Why?" She was trembling.

A core of honesty made him answer. "You're everything to him. He wanted to save your life."

He was beginning to shiver, the flakes melting on his skin and the thin bodysuit. "What now, Carla?" He gripped her shoulders in strong hands. "I won't let him use you again!"

"Oh, Lancer! I have to-I'm going back." She reached for the satchel she had left in the APC. "This time I guess I'm the one who's jumping the train." She reached up, held him close, kissed him with hopeless passion.

"Good-bye Lancer; good-bye, Yellow."

Then she was going back down the road, walking to the lights of the mayor's mansion. Lancer walked slowly to the truck.

He automatically checked for the weapons the team had taken from Maxwell's goons and saw the pile was one gun light. The little palm-size shooter was gone.

Love or death; what will it be?

Lancer took a last look down the road at Deguello. As Yellow Dancer, he blew a last kiss to Carla. Then, as Lancer once more, he pulled on the parka Lunk had left on the seat, hardened his heart to all that had gone on before, and floored the accelerator, to go meet the Invid, to take them on on their own ground.

Maxwell had told the truth in at least one matter: the Invid fortress blocked the only usable pass.

The team had hoped to avoid it; the hidden road was perilous but had served for much of the way. A recent quake had brought the entire side of a mountain down, though, making further progress impossible. There was no

choice but to tackle the fortress.

Watching the morning patrol of Pincer Ships and Shock Troopers return, Scott did his best not the hear Annie's teeth chattering and not to think about the silent shivering of Marlene and the others.

"It's a pattern," Lancer said, still grave after days journeying from Deguello. His skin was paler than ever from the high-country snow and chill. "The bulk of their mecha goes out at sunrise. That's the best time to make our move, Scott, whatever our move is going to be."

They were still bickering about the best way to deal with the alien stronghold when they heard a cracking and splintering of wood, and Rand's cry, "Tim-ber-rrrr!"

By nightfall, they were sitting around Rand's fire, wearing every stitch of clothing they had, and huddling under cargo pads from Lunk's truck as well. Under the draperied shelter of a rock overhang, Rand used the molecule-thin edge of a Southern Cross survival knife to carve skis, bringing them up every so often to sight down their lengths critically, while he explained.

"Okay; we can't get our mecha anywhere near that fortress without being detected, right? So one of us has to get cross-country to the fortress and knock out their Protoculture detection gear."

"And so you'll just ski on in there?" Lancer asked with a tug of a grin. But Scott admitted, "It might work. What other chance do we have?

When Rand signals us that, he's knocked out their sensors, we'll run the gauntlet and hope nobody notices."

"There's only one hangup, isn't there, Rand?" Rook asked, giving him a look he couldn't quite read. "You don't have any idea what an Invid sensor looks like."

"I'll know it when I see it," he grumbled.

Annie grabbed one of the skis and began sighting along it as if she knew what she was doing. "Hey, Rand! You're gonna let me come along, aren't'cha?"

He shaved another paper-fine layer off the ski he was working on.

"Actually, Mint, I'm afraid I cut these for somebody a little older and taller than you. With blue eyes and long, strawberry-blond hair and a shape that-"

A snowball hit him in the back of the head.

"I mean, a team spirit that we all admire," Rand amended.

"Well, you can count me out," Rook told him. "This dame isn't wandering around in the wilderness with you, country boy-"

It was just then that Marlene went into another seizure. Nobody but Rook saw how hurt Rand looked; nobody but Rand saw how confused Rook seemed by what she herself had said.

Lunk, Scott, and the others kneeling near Marlene didn't seem to be of much help and she appeared to come out of the fit by herself. Rook, standing and looking down at her, said, "It's almost as if she's got some horrible memory locked up deep inside, that's trying to push her over the edge."

Rand looked at Rook's profile in the firelight, and wondered how much of that was something Rook was projecting.

The Invid fortress was cut into a mountain face that resembled a miniature Matterhorn pockmarked with hemispherical openings.

"Look: I cut those skis down for you, Mint," Rand told Annie, "but don't get cocky. Practice runs are a lot different from what we're gonna have to do today."

"Don't call me 'Mint'!" was all she had to say, as she adjusted her improvised bindings.

The others looked on from the treeline. Watches had been synchronized, explosives packed, weapons charged-all of it checked a dozen times over and then checked again. Rand had managed to snatch a little sleep, but he doubted that Scott had slept at all.

The fact that Annie should accompany Rand was less and less of a surprise to them. Aside from the Forager, she was the only one with cross-country experience (she insisted that some undyingly devoted boyfriend had taught her). And aside from Rand, she was the only one who

could hope to cross the open country to the fortress in a reasonable amount of time. The snow was so chancy that even snowshoeing was out of the question.

At five A.M., when the sun was beginning to light the sky, Rand and Annie moved out.

As Rand turned to go, snatching his makeshift ski poles out of the ground, Rook seemed to be about to say something or even grab his arm. But when she saw he was looking at her, she abruptly turned away.

Annie turned out to be a better skier than Rand himself, though neither of them was very good. Then Annie got fancy, Rand tried to chastise her-a bad move while skiing-and they both ended up in a snowbank.

It proved to be a heaven-sent spill; shadows crossed the snow and Invid Pincer Ships landed to examine things that had fallen from Annie's pink rucksack. Somehow, the skiers' tracks had been obliterated by the drift of snow on the slope.

"That's my bikini!" Annie yelped, struggling to get to her feet and take on the entire Invid horde by herself. Rand pushed her face down further in the snow, stifling her.

The Invid hooked the bikini bottom in question (Why was she carrying it on a ski run? Rand wondered) in its claw, and raised it close to its optic sensor for examination. The mini-panty had in turn hooked one of the metallic submarine-sandwich-like charges the team had prepared for the fortress job.

Seeing it tottering there in the seat of the bikini, Rand pushed the struggling Annie even further into the snow. The sapper charge tottered and fell. Rand exhaled in relief when the charge proved inert. The Invid personal armor mecha dropped the bikini bottom and rocketed away on a wash of thruster-fire.

Skiing to the base of the fortress mountain held no other terrors; they kicked off their improvised bindings. A modified grenade launcher got a grapnel up to an opening. There was terror in the climb, as they watched a patrol of Shock Troopers cruise by below them. But the Invid didn't notice

the climbing rope, and the Humans pulled themselves up near the topmost access tunnel.

Annie nearly fainted back into Rand's arms; a Shock Trooper mecha was standing there.

Rand shoved the edge of his hand in Annie's mouth and she bit down so hard that she drew blood. But the Trooper appeared to be looking at the surrounding peaks with no more interest than an Alpine sightseer. It turned to go, each step sounding like a boiler being thrown down on a concrete floor, back down the dark, arched tunnel from which it had come. Rand rubbed his hand and wondered if Annie had had her shots lately.

The two pushed their goggles back and went in after the Trooper. The tunnel was a place of heat gradients, the chamber at the end being almost womblike in its warmth and moisture. It was a bizarre landscape of structures that looked like neurons and axons (or were they stalactites and stalagmites?). Dendrites bent and arched, and the undulating ceiling resembled Liver Surprise. Cable-thick creepers ran from the squishy-looking support members. A knee-high mist obscured everything. "All this place needs is bats," Rand whispered.

Bela Lugosi, where are you?

They sprinted through the echoing, gutlike halls of the Invid, trying not to breath. Annie had banished all rational thought from her brain, and so she was surprised when Rand hauled her behind one of the sticky-looking dendrite pillars.

There was a strange echo as the three smaller mecha stumped by, these ones only eight or nine feet tall, their optical sensors set in long snouts. They had the faces of metallic archer-fish. Even the two Humans heard the resonating message in the Regis's voice, the very armor of the enemy reverberating with it, "All my outlying units, report to transmutation chamber at once!"

Rand watched them lumber off. "This could be a lot harder than we figured."

He had pushed Annie into the shadows of a doorway of some kind, and

she began experimenting with the wet-looking, illuminated membranes that looked like buttons.

A door-size sphincter opened next to her; she gasped, seeing what lay beyond, then giggled. "Open Sesame!" Words she had always dreamed of using, so appropriate now. There were certainly more than forty bad guys in this cave.

The two stepped into the next chamber, awestruck, gazing around them. Their stage whispers were lost in the size of the place.

"Wouldja look at-" "Holy-"

It was the size of the biggest indoor arena Rand had ever seen, the one in the radiation-glazed deathtown they used to call Houston. He and Annie walked out on a gantrylike thing, which looked like a suspended arm with dangling Robotech fingers. They looked down.

Ringing the center of the huge dome were concentric ranks of egg-shaped objects: motionless protoplasmic things, with untenanted mecha sleeping inside like hunkered fetuses. And at the center of that vast place was a brilliant, shining dome. To Rand, it resembled those twentieth-century pictures of the first nanoseconds of a thermonuclear explosion. Around it grew a low, irregular palisade of things like budding mushrooms, but they stood ten yards high.

Annie looked down at the embryonic mecha. "Y'think they're all asleep, or something?"

Rand shrugged. "Y'got me, but if they are, maybe we can wake 'em up." His patented grin showed itself. "A riot in the Invid Incubator Room! That's gotta be some diversion."

Still, the ranks of huge eggs reminded him uncomfortably of an old-time space flick he had seen as a kid, and he had no intention of having something leap up and give him some interspecies mouth-to-mouth. He held Annie back and kept his gun level as he pulled a coin out of a slit pocket over his midsection and tossed it.

The coin glittered in the red-orange-yellow light and bounced off the

top of one egg. Rand was expecting a gelatinous quiver, but instead the coin bounced with a metallic bonk! and skipped, to land on the floor with a faint chiming. Nothing moved, nothing happened.

"My last quarter," Rand said ruefully. A 1/4-Cid piece from the city-state of Espana Nueva back down south. True, it wouldn't be much good on the road to Reflex Point, but still...

"Maybe they're in suspended animation," he considered, rubbing his jaw. "And maybe they won't wake up until they're supposed to."

He disregarded the idea of using his gun to experiment further; most likely, it would set off alarms and draw the enemy straight to him. Then Annie was crooning, "Uhohh-hh."

A saucer-shaped air-vehicle whose underside was all glowing honeycomb-hexagons had come floating silently from among distant dendrites. Its curved, mirrorlike upper surface showed four equidistant projections like knobbed horns. It came directly at Rand and Annie.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

So? I thought you country boys could rub your psoriasis together and start a fire? Where's that pioneer spirit?

Rook, to Rand

The flying saucer was fifty feet wide. When it had covered most of the distance separating it from the intruders, it halted. It remained motionless, lying dead still without sound or motion.

Suddenly the honeycomb-cells began shedding harsh light, the saucer's underside solid convex of brilliance. One of the embryo-mecha began to glow. Its egg expanded and rose into the air toward the saucer. Rand and Annie stopped their withdrawal and watched what was happening.

Again there was the regal female voice, reverberating from the saucer, the cross-echoes making it difficult to understand. But Rand thought he heard, "Nine-X-Nineteen has been selected for transmutation. The quickening will begin. Retrieve a Scout pod and transfer it to Hive Center. "

The egg had disappeared and the unborn Scout was enclosed in a larger globe of light, some sort of lifting field. It looked similar to the ones Rand and the team had fought. It was slowly unlimbering, its contours still curved to its confinement, the way a baby bird's are to its shell for the first few moments after it breaks free.

Rand and Annie watched the mecha borne away by the saucer. He's being promoted? Rand tried to puzzle out. He didn't know much about how Invid society really functioned; nobody did, or at least nobody who was talking.

Annie shook him and he realized that time was wasting away.

In the Hive Center lay one of the bio-constructs that was the Regis's direct contact with each installation and every individual of her far-flung realm. It was the center of the hive's reverence, obedience...adoration. It

spoke to the hive members, and with them, and for them.

It was situated in a shallow nutrient pool about five or six yards wide, filling two-thirds of it. A half-dozen mature light-stalks blossomed around it, beaming down nourishing rays-radiating flowers like the Flower of Life and yet unlike it.

The darker chocolate-orange of the Hive Center's floor was broken across its entire span by large and small dark pink circles. It looked as if a hundred spotlights of various sizes shone there. But the only visible path of light was the incandescent beam that shone down on the Sensor, the coordinating intellect-clearinghouse of the hive.

Mecha stood by as the Regis spoke. Listening to her were a single looming Scout unit and a half dozen and more of the smaller, more highly evolved, trumpet-snouted Controllers.

"The proliferation of the Flower of Life on Earth has reached a critical phase, a triggerpoint," it said. "Soon the mass thriving of the Flower will be assured, and we will need the Human race no more, and Earth will be the homeworld that will replace our beloved Optera. But we must pass that triggerpoint, we must have more Human slaves to spread the Flower of Life to every corner of the Earth.

"And to increase our supply of slaves, we must have more mecha, as rapidly as the Evolving makes that possible. Prepare now for the arrival of the retrieval droid, and the quickening of a new Scout ship!"

One of the Controllers began making stiff-armed gestures to the others, like some ancient Roman military salute sequence. The other Controllers moved to their places, and in moments the hulking Scout ship, standing immobile on one of the lighted circles, began descending into the floor. In a moment it was gone and the aperture closed.

"I guess that thing there is the brains of the outfit," Rand whispered, where he and Annie poised in concealment behind two fibrous columns.

"Yeah, well, it may have it in the brains department, but-" She made a face. "Ugh! It gives a whole new meaning to 'ugly'!"

The thing that Rand thought was a Sensor was a huge mass of wetly

glistening, sickly pink coils. It looked like someone had knotted a length of enormous small intestine beyond any unsnarling. Its stench clogged the warm, humid air of the hive center.

A retrieval pod entered, bearing aloft the hatchling it had fetched. "Scout Trooper ready for quickening," the Regis announced. The saucer set its burden down exactly where the previous one had stood, the hatchling booming as it landed. The lifting field disappeared as the saucer's underside dimmed. The retrieval pod whisked away.

The hatchling's optical sensor opened, exposing the vertical row of three lenses. "Activate canopy," the Regis commanded. Long segmented metal tentacles extended from somewhere above, their articulated fingers working quickly. The Scout's cranial area was opened and a broad plate or hatch swung up.

Rand could see a softly lighted area within the cranial compartment, but he couldn't tell much more about what was going on. "Insert drone Nine-X-Nineteen," the Regis's eldritch voice said.

From a conduit high in the wall, there came another egg, this one far smaller than the mecha's. Clusters of gracefully-waving tendrils, like undersea plants, floated at the top and bottom of the embryo.

Within the embryo was something curled up that looked shrunken and wizened even though its skin had the moist, hairless look of the unborn. It appeared to be mostly head, its arms and legs degenerated and vestigial. Its dark eyes were bottomless, liquid black slits; Annie couldn't decide whether they were as unseeing as a seconds-old kitten's, or windows to some all-observing intellect. Drone Nine-X-Nineteen's nose was a bony button.

A crest of hard plate made a ridge from its massive, convoluted brow back across its skull. Its skin seemed to be a lusterless gray-green, its brow and skull mapped by a craniological nightmare of bulges and eminences. It was all but chinless, its mouth seemingly a tiny bud.

Rand and Annie looked at the face of the enemy.

Drone Nine-X-Nineteen, still in its egg, was wafted by unseen forces, to nestle in the dimly lit womb of the Scout's head.

"Drone in place," the Sensor reported to itself. "Bad place," Annie muttered. Rand nodded.

The tentacles closed the canopy of the quickened Scout; the optical scanner came alight, glowing red. "Transmutation completed," the Regis declared. "Prepare next Scout Trooper for quickening." The Scout that carried-or had become-Nine-X-Nineteen sank out of sight like its predecessor.

"Rand," Annie said plaintively, "I'm scared."

"So'm I, Mint. Let's get this thing over with and get out of here." A retrieval pod was bringing in another Scout. "Dammit! We must've gotten here right in the middle of Motherhood Week!"

Annie swallowed. "Then let's blow that Sensor thing and get out of here!"

"Fine with me, but we have to find it first, remember? And it could be anywhere in this maggot factory."

She looked at her watch. "That means it's time for Contingency Plan B, huh?"

Rand nodded, checking his own watch. "I hope Scott and the others aren't napping." He looked around him. "I'd hate to be stuck in this neighborhood at night."

Scott was wide awake and swearing, looking at his military chronometer. He and the others were gathered under snow-covered firs behind a line of drifts, watching the pass from the shadows.

"They're late with their signal!" And he had no idea whether Annie and Rand were in trouble or had simply, in their sloppy civilian way, forgotten the timetable.

If they're goofing around up there...

But Lancer grabbed his armored shoulder. "There they are." He pointed.

Three quarters of the way up one of the peaks that flanked the fortress, light was flashing from one of the many niches or tunnel openings or launch

bays or whatever they were.

Scott and Lancer trained their computer-coupled binocular on the spot. The binocular showed Annie, sitting on the edge of one of the niches, angling a mirror from her pack, using it as a crude heliograph. It would be impossible to answer by the same code, since the Invid might have picked up the flashes. He turned to Rook, who stood with Marlene and Lunk.

"Just as I figured: they need a decoy. Okay, Rook, get moving."

She nodded, snowflakes glistening in her long, strawberry-blond waves. "Wish me luck."

Annie continued her signaling, hoping the team had noticed it. It only made sense not to use a radio inside the fortress, but she would have felt better hearing Scott say, "Affirmative."

She heard the heavy tread of mecha round a corner, coming her way unexpectedly. Annie fumbled with the mirror and lost it as she dove for cover. She had no choice but to hang from the brink by her fingers, as two towering Controllers marched by.

"Unidentified intrusions registered along Perimeter Sixteen," the Regis's voice warned. "Investigate!"

After they had passed, Annie hauled herself back up again. But she felt a sinking unease. Suppose her signal hadn't been seen? She looked around for some other reflective surface that would serve, but could find none.

Maybe Rand and I are on our own? Maybe we'd better start improvising?

Rook activated a control, and her Cyc's tires extruded heavy snow studs. She left her thinking cap off, letting her hair blow in the wind on the chance that the aliens might think her less of a military threat if they didn't see that she was a Cyclone warrior.

She jumped from ridges and traveled under the tree canopy as much as she could, hoping that the enemy couldn't follow her back-trail through the snow and find signs of her teammates' presence. Then she howled out into

the open, making the treacherous approach uphill toward the fortress. It wasn't long before a flight of Pincer Ships dove at her, their shadows flickering across the snow.

Rook gave a wild, scornful laugh, elated by the thrill and risk of it all. "Come on!" she called up. "I'll race you to the mountain top!"

The Pincers swooped close but held fire for the moment, trying to determine just what kind of threat they faced. Their scanners studied the racing cyclist.

In the Hive Center, sheets of light and electrical discharges raced across the heaving, visceral mass of the Sensor. "Patrol reports bio-energetic activity in the approaching vehicle. Protoculture emanations registered! All available units converge and intercept!"

Rand, watching from concealment, held Annie well back. "Keep your head down!"

"But-what's happening?"

Rand checked his watch again. "It all hit the fan just at the time Rook was supposed to start her diversionary run!"

As the Invid closed the distance, Rook hit a switch on her right handlebar and tensed herself like a coiled spring.

A change in the din and the Saint Elmo's fire along the Sensor made Annie point and tug Rand's arm. "Look, it's stopping! Is that bad?"

Rook! he thought. He felt a stab of despair and loss so powerful that it nearly staggered him.

"Intercept and neutralize!" the Regis commanded, as the Pincers raced to obey.

Rook concentrated everything on her timing. Calculations meant less now than instincts and years of experience in evading the Invid. At a certain moment she slewed around a stand of pine and laid down the bike in a

spume of snow, throwing herself clear of the on-purpose grounding, diving into a snow bank.

The Cyc lay dead, its Protoculture engine off. Rook lay doggo as the Pincers rounded the trees and went on past, following their Protoculture detectors, suddenly confused. They raced on, splitting up, casting about like bloodhounds for a scent.

Rook pulled herself up a little and smiled at the receding Invid personal-armor mecha. "Ciao!"

An instant later the smile disappeared. Rand, get busy! Get out of there! She was frowning at the fact that she was worrying so much over him-and Annie, of course...

She hadn't let anybody mean anything to her since she had quit her old biker gang. This caring for someone-especially a dumb country boy-was making her angry with herself and with him, too.

"It can't be a coincidence," Rand said tightly. "That heap o' guts out there-that thing is the Sensor we're looking for!"

Annie gripped his shirt. "D-d'you think it knows we're here?" "If it does, we're in a lot bigger trouble than I thought."

The obscene loops of the Sensor were dark and quiet. Still, the quickening of Scouts went on. Rand watched as more Controllers went to take up positions near the stinking mass of the Regis's local embodiment.

Something occurred to him, and he gazed at Annie apprehensively. She had been possessed by an alien intelligence once before, in the Genesis Pit. What if it should happen again? But no, she seemed to be behaving normally-quaking with fear.

Rand tried to calm himself and take in the situation. "The place is crawling with guards."

"M-my skin's crawling, too!"

He picked a route and led the way from cover to cover. The Controllers were all concentrating on the quickening, gathered to one side of the Sensor. Then the two reached the opposite side of the monstrous mound of alien

bowels. Annie skittered after Rand, quiet as a mouse, but she lost her footing and was about to go sprawling.

But Rand had turned, and he caught her. The descent of yet another Scout ship into the floor had covered the noise. "Watch what you're doing!" he whispered fiercely, turning her around and rooting through the pink rucksack.

She was puffing, wiping the sweat from her brow, fanning herself with the E.T. cap. Rand mumbled, "Where is it-ah!"

He drew out an instrumented cylinder the size of a pint beercan. A shaped-charge cobalt limpet mine, something the team had been saving ever since the raid on Colonel Wolff's goodies warehouse. "This should do the trick." And we'd better not be hanging around when it does!

Annie whispered, "Hey! I carried it; I think I ought to be the one to plant it-"

She dropped her cap and stifled a squeal as she reached frantically to catch the bomb, Rand having casually tossed it to her while the Controllers inserted another drone.

It was supposed to be totally inert until it was armed, but-"Talk about dumb," she said, giving him a venomous look. Then she turned to attach the limpet to the side of the Sensor's pool. She set the timer's blinking numerals. "One minute enough?"

He was setting a second sapper charge for sixty seconds. "Let's hope so." They couldn't take a chance on a longer setting; one of those enemy mecha might decide to take a stroll at any second.

They nodded to each other. No going back now! They stole off the way they had come. They were halfway across the floor when Annie realized her head felt cold. Even though she knew it was crazy, she looked back instinctively for her treasured cap. It still lay where she had dropped it.

Then, somehow, her feet had tangled up and she was falling, almost cracking her chin on the floor. From her loosened pack jounced an adjustable ordnance tool, ringing like an alarm bell.

"Disturbance in Hive Center!" thundered the Sensor, in the voice of the

Regis.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Plutarch said courage stands halfway between cowardice and rashness. Shakespeare said it mounteth with occasion. What we've got here is living proof.

Scott Bernard's mission notes

Rand skidded to a halt, spun, and saw what had happened. "Typical!"

But he went dashing back, as Controllers turned to converge on the spot where Annie lay. Their bulging arms were raised and pointed, and their built-in weapons were ready to fire. "Intruders. Two in number. Neutralize them," the Regis exhorted her troops.

Annie levered herself up miserably. "No, please don't! We didn't mean anything!"

Rand calculated time and angles. "Just hang tough, Mint. These jerks won't know what hit them in a coupla' seconds."

"Surrender, Humans, or be destroyed," the Regis demanded. Rand watched the Controllers close in, his hand on his H90. Then he holstered it and put both hands over his ears and opened his mouth wide, to lessen the impact of the blast. Annie, terrified, did the same. "Humans, this is your final warn-"

Most of the blast from the limpets' shaped charges was directed inward, into the grotesque coils of the Sensor, but the backwash was more than enough to knock the leading three Controllers sideways.

The Sensor bore the brunt of a stupendous blast.

Marlene gasped.

Scott, too busy to notice, was watching through his binocular as smoke roiled from one of the snowpeak's upper openings. "They did it! Isn't that a beautiful-"

He lowered the binocular and turned, hearing Marlene cry out and

then collapse into racking sobs. Rook and the others rushed to her side. "Is it the same thing as last time?" Lancer asked, gently trying to quiet her.

"She's screaming at me!" Marlene managed, through convulsing shudders.

Lunk's low brows met. "Who is?"

Rook tore her gaze away from the smoking fortress and tried not to fear that Rand had been hurt or killed. "Is there any way we can help, Marlene? Tell us what to do!"

Marlene was on her knees, holding her head in her hands. But she shook it no, her hair swinging.

"Let's get moving," Scott barked, to snap his team out of it. "Rand and Annie might need help even more."

"I...don't...believe it," Annie stammered, gazing upward.

Rand stood tranfixed near where she lay, looking up as well. "That-that thing..."

The Controllers were all down, smoking, either from the initial blast or from secondary explosions. And the Sensor had vanished from its nutrient bath, all right. But now sickly pinkish blobs of it, in various sizes, bobbed and drifted around the Hive Center. They tumbled like slow-moving meteors, drifting, caroming off each other, spreading like floating amoebas to fill the place.

My god! We hit it with enough wallop to knock off a half-dozen Shock Troopers, and yet-"It's dissolved into some kind of, of protoplasmic flesh!" He wasn't even sure what the phrase meant himself. Perhaps, he babbled to himself, "Protoculture ectoplasm" would be more the term?

Annie was struggling to get to her feet. "It's coming straight for us!" The deploying blobs had somehow located them, and were homing in from all over the chamber like evil clouds of murderous jelly.

Annie threw her arms around Rand's waist. "It's g-gonna eat me!"

Rand had his H90 out, gripping it in both hands. "Eat this," he told the remains of the Sensor, and began firing. But the bolts just split the flying

lumps into smaller ones, and the firing somehow made them charge at high speed.

The Regis's voice came from every doughy lump, down to the least globule, as if from a vast chorus, "Attack!"

Rand fired hopelessly as Annie screamed.

One pilot short, the team still got all VTs into the air. The Beta was linked to Scott's Alpha, which increased its firepower and speed. The fighters moved forward on thrusters that shook the earth and started minor avalanches in the valley behind them. Down below, Lunk's APC, rigged for cold-weather work, moved cross-country almost as nimbly as a snow-mobile, bound straight for the fortress's main portal.

As they jumped off a snowbank and roared on again, Lunk said out of the side of his mouth, "I hope your stomach's stronger than your head, Marlene." But she sat hugging herself, eyes unfocused, shivering in spite of the outpouring of the heaters.

Rand tried not to retch, as wad after wad of the stuff that had been the Sensor splattered into him, coating him. The stuff had the consistency of runny putty but was warm to the touch. The most horrible thing about it, though, was that it moved by itself, snaillike, spreading wherever it hit. And it wouldn't come off.

The Sensor knew, even in its dispersed state, that it was dying. But it knew, too, who its enemies-its slayers-were, and it would have its revenge.

Annie's mind was about to snap. She closed her eyes as she rubbed and brushed at the stuff, uselessly tore it with her nails, batted it and shrilled, "No, no, no, no, no!"

She flung herself back at Rand, who was trying to clear the plugged muzzle of the H90. He was already wearing a pink mantle that was surging to cover his head. There was a waist-high pile all around them, making it impossible to run.

Rand beat, trying to shield Annie "Annie, listen to me!"

"Auff. It's getting in my mouth!"

The amorphous clots of residue streamed down at them from every quarter. He heaved at her. "Hang onto me and try to keep your head above it!"

Her voice was muffled by a mask of the stuff. "I can't breathe!"

His arms were all but paralyzed. "Annie, listen! Check the emergency tracking beam! Is it still flashing?" The crud was surging up around his face. She gathered all her courage and forced down her panic. With a supreme effort, she got her head around and managed to get a glance down at the thing like a silvery fountain pen with a flashing tip that was clipped to

one of her pockets.

She forced herself to get out the words, "I think so-yes!"

The Pincer Ships still casting about for Rook's trail weren't prepared for the sudden appearance of a vengeful trio of Veritechs. The dogfight had barely begun when four of the Invid personal-armor mecha were falling in whirling, flaming fragments. The team spent its missiles prodigally; their kill score climbed.

Lunk's truck, bounding and slewing across the open snowfield, attracted other attention. He saw cannons in a half-dozen niches in the cliff face open fire, and he began dodging and juking. Invid annihilation discs began Frisbeeing all around him. Snow was melted and earth blown high in fountains of flame and smoke. As was his habit, Lunk froze from his thoughts the image of what even one hit would do to him, Marlene, and the truck, in view of the ordnance and Protoculture they were hauling.

But Scott had seen what was happening, and dove in, loosing more missiles. The gun emplacements were knocked out in cascades of snow and broken rock, leaving only smoking holes like horizontal chimneys.

Rook and Lancer had vanquished the last of the opposition; the VTs made an attack run and blew open the main gate of the Invid fortress. The fighters slowed, moving on hoverthrusters, sailing into the colossal main corridor. Lunk's APC brought up the rear, his finger on the autocannon's

steering wheel trigger.

They had little time to observe the fortress, with its bizarre and unnerving combination of alien technology and XT organics. Following Annie's tracer beam, they came to the Hive Center at last. The aircraft had been forced to slow down in the maze, so that Lunk pulled to a stop just as they grounded VTOL style.

The VTs knelt in a Hive Center of twisting, still-burning Controller mecha. The place was filled with thick smoke, the stench of incinerated organic material, and the reek of the disintegrating matter that had been the Sensor. The pilots jumped down, as Lunk and Marlene both coughed from the foulness around them.

At last they spotted the mound of pinkish stuff that had been the Sensor. Then they saw the dim flashing coming from its summit. Scott dashed toward it. "Gimme a hand here!"

The Sensor-stuff was beginning to melt; in another moment, Scott and Lunk had pulled two bodies free. Rand was barely breathing when they got him out, but he had shielded Annie in a little air pocket he had formed with his own body.

Rook stood to one side, staring down, not moving. She seemed about to speak, then was silent. But she never took her eyes off of Rand.

At last Rand's eyes opened. "W-what took you so long, pal?"

Rook let out a breath and pulled her features back into their normal unconcerned, uncaring expression. And so when Rand eagerly looked at her, she gave him a casual look. He still managed a smile, grateful that she was alive, though he would have crawled back in under the Sensor offal before admitting it.

Lunk called over, "Annie sez she'll be all right once she brushes her teeth!"

Rand was already pushing Scott away from him, coming to his feet, clearing the last of the goo out of the H90, weaving a little. "I've had it! I'm gonna slaughter those walking tin latrines!" He steadied himself and lurched away. By the time Scott caught up with him, Rand was standing at a

lower entrance to the huge dome where empty mecha waited in fetal repose.

Scott whistled low. "What is it, an incubator?"

Rand brought up his pistol. "Whatever it is, it's history!"

Something inside him knew he should be off somewhere ferreting out the place where the drones themselves were created-that he should be wiring that place up with all the explosives in Lunk's truck.

But he just wasn't made that way. The drones, for all their grotesqueness, were living things. And without their mecha, they were nothing.

Rand fired into the hemisphere in the middle of the dome-the thing that looked so much like the first instant of a nuclear explosion. He didn't know quite what would happen, but it turned out that the thing was fragile as stained glass. Sections of it geysered, then caved in, and black smoke roiled forth.

Rand was watching it in stonefaced satisfaction when, suddenly, Marlene's screech echoed to them down the alien halls.

They raced back to find the others trying to help, without any effect, as Marlene knelt, clutching her head. She wept that she couldn't stand it-though she didn't say what it was.

When Lunk wondered aloud what could be the cause of Marlene's seizures, no one answered until Scott said softly, "I wish I knew."

"Bad news, guys," Rook cut through their unease. She was standing by Lunk's truck, examining its beeping displays. "That Invid patrol that left the hive this morning is on its way home!"

Scott didn't take the time to wonder if it was because the raid had taken too long or because the destruction of the Sensor had alerted the mecha. "Okay, people: let's get out of here on the double. Rand, take the Beta Fighter."

Rand was already off and running. When the VTs hovered in the Hive Center and Lunk was racing his engine, Scott said over the tac net, "Listen up: you either break out of this rat's nest now, or you spend the rest of your lives as sharecroppers on an Invid Protoculture farm."

"What d'you mean 'you'?" Rand challenged. "What's Bernard gonna be doing while we're busting out?"

Scott tried to sound matter-of-fact. "I'm the one who got us into this." "Nobody's arguing," Rand shot back.

"As you were! So, it's my place to take some of the heat off you. I'm going to block the front door for a while; don't lollygag getting out the back." His thrusters lit like blue novas, and his Alpha sprang away into one of the huge elevated conduit-passageways.

"Lancer, we should back him up," Rand said slowly, pulling on his thinking cap.

"Let him go, country boy; he'll be fine!" Rook snapped. "We've got enough problems of our own!"

Scott mechamorphosed to Battloid mode as he zoomed toward the shattered main gate. He met the first of the returning Pincer Ships with blasts from the mecha's massive rifle/cannon, a weapon with a muzzle as wide as a storm drain. The enemy flight was coming head-on, and Scott had little chance to dodge them. He blasted the first ship out of the air and scattered the ones near it.

But they came at him anyway, Frisbeeing their annihilation discs. He ducked into a side passageway, an upright Battloid, back and foot thrusters gushing blue. The Invid dove after him.

Then it was a game of evade and hide, ambush and run. The Invid were unrelenting, attacking him even though he had the advantage of standing or fleeing as he chose.

At last he darted like a huge wasp into a corridor that led to an intense light. At its mouth stood two Scout guards, so surprised at his appearance that they were slow to react. Scott knocked them off their feet, and they plunged backward, unable to attain a useful flying attitude. They tumbled and thrashed to their doom.

Scott found himself in a place that was miles wide. In its center was a tremendous globe that reminded him of the ancient ones in dance halls, the

ones that reflected light. Only, this one was wired up with Invid Robotech hardware and organic wetware.

This must be the central power core for the fortress!

Pincer Ships entered the spherical vastness from three different conduits, and he felt the sweat run down his face. He eyeballed the power core quickly, spotting a glowing circular opening or access port a hundred yards across. Through it, he could see the scintillating mysteries of Invid Protoculture technology. His computers told him it was the alien equivalent of a main control matrix.

Scott made his decision, and the Battloid roared toward it. Invid noted his presence, drove toward him at full acceleration, claws outstretched to grip and rend, since they didn't dare fire there. Scott fooled them by hitting the core's outer hull, absorbing the impact with the Battloid's mighty legs, and springing away again.

The personal-armor mecha couldn't fire, but Scott felt no such compunctions. He whirled in midair and dispatched six air-to-ground Bludgeon missiles from his right and left shoulder pods. The Pincers dodged, thinking the missiles were meant for them.

One of the Bludgeons detonated on the rim of the access opening, but the rest lanced through into the power core's innards. Scott had already turned his Battloid on its heel to run like all hell.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Homer posited two kinds of dreams, the "honest" one of Horn, and the "glimmering illusion" of Ivory. So Dad shot for Ivory, what else?

Maria Bartley-Rand,

Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

The core's vitals suddenly turned white-hot, and the whole miles-wide spherical chamber lit up like the interior of an arc furnace.

Although her Sensor was gone, the Regis spoke to her remaining children. "Control Matrix breeched! Reflex furnace overload!" All she could do was tell them that they were all going to die, but at least they would hear her voice in their final moments. Gargantuan sheets of electrical discharge played all through the place.

The core came apart at its seams, like a soccer ball full of Tango-9 explosive. The Pincers were vaporized; the explosion raced outward.

Scott had turned and turned again, hurtling along at max thrust, praying the walls and turns would muffle some of the blast.

Then it caught up with him.

The Beta and the other two Alphas, shepherding Lunk's truck, arrowed toward the titanic triangle of the alien stronghold's rear gate. Beyond it, a snowy Earth shone.

"Nice of 'em to leave the back door open," Rook smiled. Then she felt her flesh goosebump as she saw that the light was dwindling; the two halves of the giant triangle's door were sliding in from either side.

"But not for long!" cried Lancer. "Lunk, hurry!"

Lunk gritted his teeth, floored the accelerator, and hit a few buttons. "Can't make it," he muttered, but the APC leapt ahead in a way that disputed that.

The VTs had to come through standing on one wingtip; the APC almost got its tailpipe caught. But they all made it, as the massive door halves

ground shut.

"I think that one took some paint off my baby, here," Rook said cheerily, patting her instrument panel.

Lunk just tried to control his trembling; Annie was either meditating, praying, or passed out. Marlene looked comatose.

Rand glanced back over his shoulder at the fortress. C'mon, Scott!

Somehow, being slammed against walls and dribbled along the deck for a bit hadn't destroyed the superstrong Battloid. Even though the blast from the reflex furnace had shaken the whole mountain and had fissured walls, floors, and ceilings, it had somehow been relatively contained. But he was registering secondary explosions, and there was every chance that the core was going to explode again with an even more spectacular Big Bang.

Then it was on his tail, a fireball even bigger than the first. His sensors picked it up even while he was jetting for a secondary reargate, unable to find the main. Fast as it was, the Battloid had no chance of outrunning the flashflood of utter destruction for long.

And the bad news was that the gate he was headed for was closed.

He let the gate have everything he had left, his only hope being to break through. No room for explosives; he fired pumped-lasers.

Well, Scott: make-it-or-break-it time! he thought, all in an instant, as the valve before him disappeared in a wash of demonfire.

Then he was through, the Battloid thrown into the clear like a marionette fired out of a mortar. But somehow the Robotech colossus held together, straightened itself, and regained flying posture, as the core explosion reached the open air on the mountain behind it. It was as if somebody had opened a floodgate into the heart of a star.

Scott dazedly shook his head, trying to image his mecha along, looking around him wonderingly, and tasting the special sweetness of being alive. Well, what...do...you...know! He went down to join the others.

Down below, Annie, Lunk, and Rook cheered as the mountain shook to its roots. Lancer was silent, but even he nodded approval.

But Marlene only watched dully, hearing the distant wailing of the Regis, and Rand was thinking to himself that somewhere thousands upon thousands of drones had been consumed. When he thought about the horrible things their quickening would have meant for Humans, he couldn't feel pity.

The stronghold itself began to sink, subsiding into the ground the way the mountains above the Genesis Pit had subsided. Passes everywhere were blocked with the snow shaken down by the fortress's passing, but at least now the way was open for any who might want to come after; for anyone who had had enough of the south and wanted to try a new life.

Who knows? Annie thought. Maybe there is a Paradise!

Far below the snow line they found a lake that, though cold, was a welcome place of respite. In no time, Annie was in the water, her much-touted bikini covered by a T-shirt. Rook was in, too, in bra and panties, eager to wash off the trail and the deaths and the killing. In no time, Annie had her engaged in a splash-fight. Both of them loved it, even though their lips were turning purple.

Marlene sat on the grassy shore, watching in bewilderment. Maybe if she could figure out this incomprehensible behavior it would help her figure out all the other enigmas that were her life. Thus far, she had simply gone along with the people who had found her, like a spore borne on the wind. But was that what she should be doing, even if it did feel appropriate? Nothing made any sense.

A few yards away, the men sat at ease after setting up camp. Annie had pointedly informed them that it was ladies first in the bath, and they would have to wait their turn.

Rand was shaking his head, saying, "Poor Marlene. All those attacks or whatever they are. And she still hasn't pulled out of that amnesia. I wish there was something we could do for her." He was looking in her direction, but it was also easy to shift focus just a little, and watch Rook splashing

around in that skimpy outfit, which, drenched in water, was just about transparent. His breathing became a little ragged.

"Don't push it," Scott said. "She's been through some pretty rough times. She's got problems she's got to work through; who doesn't? She'll open up when she's ready."

Lancer was eyeing Scott, thinking about the matter of Marlene's naming, wondering what things the team leader was working through.

Annie was hollering for Marlene to come in and join the fun. Rook added, "Yeah, c'mon girl. It'll do you good."

Cold water immersion therapy? Rand wondered. I could use some right about now.

Then his predicament got even worse. Marlene said, "All right," to Annie's invitation, in a hesitant, unsure voice-as if complying came more easily than deciding.

She rose and began shedding clothes as innocently as a child. All four men stared, bug-eyed, but it was Rand who choked out, "Marlene, stop that! Are you trying to give me a cardiac?"

But she was already naked and seemed not to hear, feeling the sun and the wind on her skin, her fine, waistlength red hair stirred by the breeze. It was the slim-but full, flawless female body Rand remembered so well trying not to stare at.

Framed there against the mountains with the sun gleaming from her, Scott thought Marlene was somehow a higher being. She seemed finer than other Humans-a creature possessed by an unconscious beauty and a natural grace so overwhelming that it caused an ache in your heart just to see it, and left you changed.

Lancer had calmly, almost gently, grabbed Rand by the earlobe to stop his raving. "Don't you know it's not polite to stare at a lady? You might make her feel self-conscious."

And who'd know better than you? Lunk thought, but not unkindly. "Ow! Okay!" Rand was yelping, trying to squirm out of Lancer's hold. "I

didn't mean to! I won't do it again! Uh, but maybe what I need's a swim-"

Lancer shoved him over in mock disgust. Rook, having watched from the lake, was suddenly scowling.

Gawdamn hick!

They were all to remember the interlude by the lake wistfully, though. Their route soon descended to a sandblown desert region that didn't appear on twentieth-century maps. It was a desert more resembling those of North America than anything that had existed in the South before the devastations of the Zentraedi, Robotech Master, and Invid.

The terrain and climate hampered their rate of travel, but the enemy activity was much more of a problem. In the wake of the fortress raid, the Regis had saturation patrols scouring the countryside for them-consisting mainly of immense Shock Troopers now, with Pincers and Scouts in support roles.

They knew the aliens were concentrating a great deal of their resources on the freedom fighters, and Scott began to fear the team had attracted a fatal amount of attention to itself. What none of them could know was that the Regis was also enraged and frustrated that she had lost contact with her Simulagent-Marlene.

There came a time when the team was held up in a cave as a sandstorm raged outside and Shock Troopers paced the desert outside, searching for their trail. Though it should have been broad daylight, the world was a sand-red dusk, and even in the cave that tinted the air and layered everything, making their world monochrome.

Marlene, who had become ill once they had come down onto the desert, was nearly in a coma, shivering in her sleeping bag. In reality, she was suffering a delayed reaction to the impact of the Sensor's destruction and the PSI emanations' impact on her.

And their water supply was virtually gone; their main supply, in jerry cans rigged to Lunk's truck, had been shot up in a brief skirmish when they made their dash from the high country. Morale was so bad that Scott blamed Lunk for it, and Rand in turn jumped all over Scott; the argument

almost had them at each other's throat. It didn't blow over so much as spread to the others. They were sick of seeing and hearing each other and being crowded into the cave with their mecha, the sand in everything, and the endless howl of the wind.

At last Marlene cried out in her fever-dream and startled everyone. There were some shamefaced apologies, as Rand knelt to squeeze some moisture into her mouth from a rag-twisted bit of cactus flesh. She opened her eyes at the taste of the juice and, despite its sour flavor, smiled up at him gratefully, almost adoringly. Outside, the rumble of Shock Trooper thrusters came over the wind, as the aliens went to search elsewhere.

Rand couldn't help smiling back, losing himself in those mysterious eyes, even chuckling to himself. But the others weren't laughing; they accused him-absurdly-of keeping the information about cactus moisture to himself.

He jumped to his feet, fists cocked. "A guy just can't win around you people, can he? Any Forager knows that trick; I guess I just assumed you weren't so dumb you'd just die of dehydration when there're cactus all around out there!"

He started for the cave entrance. "Did you see me holding out? No! I gave what I had to Marlene, or are you all blind?"

"Rand, wait!" Rook spoke to him sharply, and yet there was a note of alarm in it.

"You want cactus? You'll get it!" She would have gone with him, but his hate-mask expression made it plain that he was in no mood for company. Rook watched him go, then turned to study Marlene, who had fallen back into a fitful sleep.

Even with his goggles on, Rand found himself all but blinded by the storm. He counted his steps and tried to remember the layout of the area. He had barely gotten thirty yards before he fell off the lip of a deep sandpit. He rolled and tumbled down its side, scraping skin and having the wind knocked from him.

Back in the cave, Marlene's eyes suddenly opened wide, though the others were busy making plans and didn't notice. The howl of the wind blotted out her one soft cry, "Rand!"

Rand was doing fine until an outcropping of sandstone grazed his head. Then he was seeing stars, and there was no desert, no earth, no nothing around him.

There were in fact cactus and other plants near where his body lay. The Invid Flower of Life took root where it willed, with no predictable pattern or limitation. Rand lay, out cold, in a miniature garden of them, with several of the tripartite Flowers crushed under him.

The sandstorm had stopped, and the beat of great, leathery wings, and the sound of a very special voice crying his name, roused him. He opened his eyes to a night sky, and saw that a dragon was passing overhead. And in its right forepaw, amid gleaming claws like sabers, it held.

"Marlene!" He was on his feet in an instant. What the flamin', flyin'-"Stop!"

Then his Cyc materialized next to him and he was off to the rescue. The mechabike took to the air, and suddenly he was in armor, riding across a rectilinear landscape. He went to Cyclone Guardian mode, only to discover that the dragon had turned to fight.

Rand couldn't shoot without risking hitting Marlene. The dragon faked him out with a snap of its jaws, making him dart back. He managed to recover as Marlene yelled for him to save her.

His back burners ignited as he climbed back at the dragon for Round Two. "I don't know what's going on, but I'm coming, Marlene!" He bulldogged the dragon, assisted by the powered suit. The monster's saliva ate at his armor like acid. "Let 'er go, ya oversized iguana!"

Then it did, and she was falling, wailing. Rand went after her like a meteor and caught her, but the dragon was hot on their trail.

But all of a sudden, somehow, it was Rand and Marlene on the Cyc

again, no armor, dodging and evading, while the beast blew flamethrower shots at them. Marlene, arms around his waist, cheek pressed to his back, called out, "Rand, listen: maybe this isn't happening."

"Huh?"

"Maybe you're dreaming all this."

"I like that idea better than being crazy as a restroom rodent!" Still, it was nice to feel her arms around his middle.

The firedrake stayed in their six o'clock position over a Frazetta-scape of crags, peaks, and dire moors. It birddogged them through a long cave with a bright light at the other end. Rand wondered if he was supposed to be reliving his birth trauma or something, even though all he felt was scared. It chased them under an impossibly big, bright moon, and Rand wondered if the Cyc's silhouette resembled a certain oldtime movie production company logo.

Then it was daytime, the desert, and the pursuit was still on. Rand realized that Marlene was giving him the adoring look that said it all, and revised his opinion of the dream.

Next thing, somehow, they were back in the Hive Center, and Marlene had another one of her strange attacks, and Rand, staring at the Sensor, made the connection. "It's like a telepathic link with all the other Invid," Rand said slowly, eyeing the Sensor, "but why would you be so strongly affected by it, Marlene?"

No time to wonder; the dragon was back. Rand was on the Cyc and turned around to tell Marlene to get on, and then realized she was naked and unspeakably beautiful, as he had seen her by the lake.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A trillion light-years high, Expanding primordial fireball, Your Universe is still

Your body

Mingtao, Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

This isn't gonna be one of those numbers where I find myself in school with no pants on, is it? Rand wondered.

Suddenly Marlene, clothed, was behind him on the Cyc. But he saw that he was back in the Lizard Lounge. Appropriately enough, the dragon showed up. At least the Cyc wasn't mired in mud; he accelerated away past dueling dinosaurs.

Then he had to dodge some Shock. Troopers. I told Scott there were Invid here! "I get the feeling this is some kind of laboratory," he told Marlene, whose hands pressed him tighter to her. "That the Invid are experimenting with the evolutionary processes of Earth. But why?"

A ridge of rock rose up to send Rand and Marlene head over heels. When he had crawled to her, to cradle her head, she groaned, "You mustn't fight with Scott."

Scott? What's she telling me, here? "The two of us just don't see eye to eye. I honestly don't think our lives-any of us-mean a thing to him."

"Rand...water, please..."

But when he fetched it from a pool, she couldn't sip. He brought some in his mouth, pressed it to her lips. Then he was kissing her, and her eyes opened.

He laughed and tried to joke. "Um, in some places, that would mean we were engaged."

But the roar of the dragon filled the cave as it came at them like a bomber, and they were off again on the Cyc. Off to one side was Annie,

leering over the flames once more in the Genesis Pit, speaking in the voice of the Regis.

"Look, Human, into the flames of truth and tremble, for it is your doom that you will see there. Even now the final chapter of your people is being written in the great Book of Time."

Annie wasn't finished. "Once the Invid were a simple race, content with our own existence. But with our world destroyed, our Flowers stolen, we were changed forever. And once we have conquered the Universe we shall rise, rise-we shall ascend beyond the physical. We shall rule the higher planes of existence, as a race of pure intellect, pure spirit!"

Rand saw again those mindshapes in the flames called up by the possessed Annie. Somehow he saw Reflex Point, and the very dwelling place of the Regis herself, though he could not see her.

She said, "So we have come here, to regenerate, to take Earth from the dying hands of Humanity. From the ashes of your people we shall arise, reborn, like the Phoenix!"

There was a lot more to the dream, and it got even weirder. The dragon snatched Marlene again, and Rand found himself riding to the rescue with his teammates, all of them dressed in combination Wagnerian-R.E. Howard getups, but using mecha. And even Lunk's truck could fly. Rand noticed that Rook seemed very displeased with him.

Couldn't I just click my Ruby Slippers three times and call it a night? Still, it was great to have a team to back him up, great to have friends.

He realized that it was still a new thing to him, but he also realized that he had felt a little lonely back there, facing the Leaping Lizard all alone.

Somewhere along the line even the VTs got swords, gleaming silvery ones as big as telephone poles. When that dragon came at bay, the team pureed him.

But when demigoddess Marlene had thanked the warriors for saving her, and they were following the Eagles of Light homeward, after having been assured that a new day was dawning for the Human race, Rand could still hear the voice of the Regis. From the ashes of the Humans, the Invid

would rise like a Phoenix.

What happened subsequently seemed dreamlike, but it hurt so much that he decided it wasn't. The sandstorm had passed and he was being helped back to the cave by Rook, who had come looking for him, and his scalp was matted with blood.

But when he saw the look of concern on her face, Rand reconsidered the possibility that he was still unconscious.

When the team-except for Lancer and Marlene-ran out from the cave demanding answers, Rand found himself slurring, "Listen, a new day is dawning, for the Dragon is slain at last. Shut up and listen! The, the day of oblivion's come f'r us all. Who th' hell were we, t'believe we could rule the Earth forever?"

There was a lot of crosstalk and some friction, some of them mad at Rand, others-especially Rook-telling them to lay off. But Rand plowed on, "The Invid have come here from across the Cosmos to regenerate themselves into a new form. They want to rule the physical Universe, and the higher planes of existence, too!"

"Wow! His brain's been fried!" Annie whispered.

"Naw, Annie," Rook countered. "The boy just hasn't woken up." She gave him a therapeutic slap on the cheek that she tried not to enjoy too much. Rand found himself back in the real world.

He took a few deep breaths and started again. "I know now why the Invid are here. They're trying to survive by plugging themselves into the Earth's evolutionary system. Don't look at me like that; you can't hardly blame 'em! We'd do it, too, if we faced racial extinction!"

Which we do, he realized.

Scott was close to taking a swing at Rand. "I couldn't care less whether the Invid survive or go the way of the Zentraedi and the Robotech Masters, just as long as they leave Earth. This is our planet!"

"Well, I wasn't saying that we-"

"I don't know what happened to you out there, Rand," Scott seethed,

"but it seems to have knocked your loyalties out of whack."

"He was lying on a bunch of Flowers of Life," Rook blurted. "A whole little field of them. And the sandstorm hadn't bothered them, not even a bit."

While the others were thinking about that, Rand said, "What about Marlene? Is she all right?"

Rook looked at him for long seconds before she said, "She's still pretty weak, I'm afraid."

Rand went down on one knee next to her. Under his gaze, she stirred, wakened, smiled up at him as she had hours and an eternity ago. It had taken a look and a thought, not a kiss, to wake the sleeping damsel.

Well, Fair Milady, I don't know if you'll ever realize it, but you and I have just been on quite a spin. And I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

Rook, leaning against the cave wall with her arms crossed, glowered at the two. Maybe Marlene was brain-damaged, but that was no excuse to gaze up at a bumpkin like Rand with liquid, lambent eyes. He was nothing but a wasteland Forager!

"Hi," Rand smiled down gently. And now Scott, too, was scowling. In true military style, he didn't bother to consider his reasons for being irked at Rand. It was easier than examining his feelings for Marlene.

Rand touched Marlene's cheek. Her gaze gave him the eerie feeling that she had truly been along on the all-time championship motocross run. Marlene smiled up at him.

A thought crossed Rand's mind. What was it Rook said he had been lying on?

Eventually, as Scott had fatalistically expected, a patrol of Shock Troopers spotted them. The freedom fighters jumped the Invid right away.

They knew little about the Regis, but they were beginning to suspect something. The simple fact was that the Regis's attention was often diverted to matters elsewhere in her world-embracing scheme, and offworld as well. Although the whereabouts of her Simulagent and this persistently

bothersome group of enemies were high on her priorities list, the Regis had a staggering number of projects and operations to control and guide.

All the freedom fighters knew was that there was still a chance to avoid disaster if the team could act quickly enough. Once more the VTs dodged and fired, barrelrolled and spat missiles.

This battle took place over a strange landscape. The place looked like a jungle, except it appeared to have been roofed over. A translucent, shell-like pink covering stretched over hundreds of square miles of river valley. The roof, or whatever it was, had numerous irregular openings in it, openings so big that the VTs could fly in and out virtually at will. But so could the Invid.

The Humans were hampered by low Protoculture levels and ordnance supplies; Scott wondered if they would even have enough to get them through this latest mass dogfight. But Lancer was a tough, precise fighter jock, frugal with fuel and ammo when it was necessary, and he and Scott had taught Rand and Rook well. Trooper after Trooper went tumbling, burning, from the air under the weird shell-roof.

Down below, Lunk, Annie, and Marlene were having it a little tougher, as a Trooper noticed them and came swooping down at them. "Hey, you fancy fly-boys up there!" Annie squawked over the tac net, "you forgetting your friends here on terra firma?"

Rand broke away from the "ratrace" and, nearly at deck level, went after the Shock Trooper that was on the APC. But suddenly a bunch of trees came at him out of nowhere. I think I zigged when I shoulda zagged, he thought, as retros proved insufficient and the Beta hung up in a treetop.

A disc's explosion overturned the truck and the Trooper closed in for the kill, as the shocked Lunk, Annie, and Marlene watched. All in an instant, a bolt from a heavy VT cannon holed the enemy through and through, and it toppled.

The three looked up to where Rand's Beta hung like a fly in web. "Some shot, huh?" he beamed, although he was draped over his instrument panel at an undignified angle.

"Jeepers, what a dopey landing," marveled Annie.

Above, Scott and the others switched from Protoculture to reserve impulse power, and used their jamming gear and spread clouds of aerosol smokescreen behind them. Then they dived through one of the holes in the river valley's "roof," breaking contact. As they had hoped, the Invid went off in all directions, apparently mystified as to where the prey had gone.

The group made its camp and held council. With power and ammo levels so low, Scott unveiled what he considered to be the only workable plan for continuing the trip to Reflex Point.

"A raft?" Rand exclaimed.

Scott sipped from his mug. "There are two things to recommend the idea: We'll save what little Protoculture we have left, and we won't attract the Invid by activating our mecha."

Lancer blew on his coffee. "I think it's a brilliant idea. We'll just let the river do all the work."

Rand looked at the mecha. "You're talking about one helluva raft, there.

D'you know anything about rafts, spaceman?"

Annie started demanding that she be allowed to supervise and that the raft be named in her honor. Rook scolded her and said that this wasn't some dumb jungle movie where all you need is a couple of vines and a coconut.

Things began to turn into one of the team's signature free-for-alls. Lancer rose, stretched, and paced away toward the river. "Since I don't know the first thing about marine engineering, I volunteer for lookout duty."

"Probably afraid he'll break a fingernail," Lunk grunted.

Rand was agreeing, "The guy's just a lazy bum," when something heavy tapped his shoulder.

Scott was handing him the ax. "Country boy, it's time you showed us your stuff. I know this thing's a little primitive, but at least it works without Protoculture. Just think of a raft as a very large ski."

Lancer drank in the quiet beauty of the place. He found himself in a

very quiet, serene world.

Coming to the shore of a fast-moving stream, he decided the current was too swift for predators and elected to bathe. In a moment, he had stripped, taken soap and personal articles from his belt pouch, and plunged in.

Several miles downstream from the team's landing spot, another Invid stronghold straddled the river on five asymmetrical legs. It looked like a bulbous insect with a glowing, low-hanging belly.

Inside was a Hive Center like and yet unlike that of the fortress. The Sensor there was identical to the other in its physical shape, but its color was a putrid, lit-from-within green. But in one particular way, this was a very different scene: The Regis had manifested herself.

An oval energy flux surrounded by a blue nimbus, its long axis vertical, hung over the Sensor. The mauve flux gave off solar prominences of light. Within it were swirling lights and within the swirl, barely discernible in the brilliance, was the female form of the Regis.

"Our Matrix is now approaching the bio-energy level needed for transmutation."

Regis and Sensor were attended by several Shock Troopers. One of these the Regis instructed, "Trooper, step forward!"

The Shock Trooper obeyed, somehow seeming subdued despite its immense size and armaments. The incandescence played across its armor as it stared at its ruler-deity, the Regis.

"You have proved yourself time and again," she told it, "as both a soldier and a shape-changer. In both these capacities you have helped ensure the survival of our race. Your outstanding achievements won you the honor of engaging the enemy in the Shock Trooper armor that now enfolds your being."

Her face was little more than a blank mask with shadowed eye sockets and the ridge of a nose. "Now the time has come for you to continue your evolution, to take the next step upward in the spiral of Protogenetic

progress! Are you ready?"

The Trooper, watching her with its single optical sensor, made a biotechnic gurgling and a kind of hunching bow of obeisance.

"Very well! As I have spoken, so it shall be done! Prepare yourself for disembodiment and transmutation!" The Regis flung her arms wide, and the green Sensor was aglow. Energy crackled and sizzled through the Hive Center.

Vines of living Protoculture power snaked out from the Sensor to envelope the Trooper. In another moment it seemed to be in a rictus of agony, its superhard armor crumbling from it like plaster, as it stood in the center of a globe of transplendence.

Abruptly the armor was gone, and a pulsating egg hung in the center of the solar fury. "The disembodiment is complete," the Regis decreed. "You are yourself, unadorned, without identity, awaiting transmutation into the shell that will make you invincible!"

The egg beat like a heart. What it held was like the drone Rand and Annie had seen, and yet unlike it, the product of a long evolutionary progression.

The Regis gathered her indistinct hands to her blank breasts, palm to palm. "Behold the final stage in your evolution! Behold the Enforcer!"

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

They had moved so fast they had forgotten something. They were racing to save a world, and particularly the Human species, but nobody had ever said anybody was going to be grateful. It was just as well that they started getting used to that fact then.

Xandu Reem,

A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard

The Invid anome hung before the Regis, a minor sun throwing off streamers of starflare. She threw her hands out wide, and the sunlet was swallowed up in a roaring pillar of ravening power. It burned upward like a huge searchlight beam, as something took shape within.

The light died and it was revealed. Twice the size of the Shock Troopers, it mounted a shoulder cannon like theirs but had a suggestion of the Controller's long muzzle. Its claws were proportionately smaller, adapted for finer work, but much more powerful than those of the mecha standing around it paying homage. It held all the power of the Matrix outpouring that had created it.

Its optical sensor fixed on the Regis, the Enforcer awaited her command.

The cool, clean water felt so good that Lancer could almost believe he was back at the o-faro, the bath. When he had lathered and rinsed himself, he began a little Musume exercise, like the ones his masters used to give him.

Using a theatrical depilatory, he removed the hair from his chest, legs, armpits, and so on. Then Yellow Dancer performed a maiden's bathing ritual, abandoning self for role. Each stylized gesture and movement would make an audience believe in the demure young girl; each pose and motion, handed down for centuries, contained a hundred subtleties.

But Yellow had become so clumsy, so out-of-practice! Surely Master Yoshida would have broken three sticks upon Lancer by now! Still, the exercise brought a feeling of calm serenity, a reminder of gentility and the frailty of beauty-a renewed faith in the high value and evasive exquisiteness of life itself.

Yellow emerged from the bath, still moving with the grace of the art. She held a towel close for modesty, even in that solitary place. She combed her long purple hair out carefully with her free hand. Then Yellow Dancer stretched out, stomach down, towel wound around middle, to nap in the warm sunlight that found its way down through gaps in the jungle roof and the forest canopy.

Gradually, Lancer reemerged, working on the problem of how to carry on the mission to Reflex Point. Had Scott's single-mindedness blinded him to the drawbacks in his rafting scheme?

A sudden sound made him look up, all freedom fighter now. He couldn't believe someone had managed to steal up on him; it had never happened to Lancer before. But it was too late; a knobby branch, padded by windings of creeper, thumped across the back of his skull.

"Tim-ber-rrr!"

Rand stepped back as the tree went down, dragging vines and creepers, branches from other trees with it. It sent up leaves and dust and all sorts of sounds as the creatures living in the tree fled in panic or anger.

"I'm gettin' pretty good at this Paul Bunyan stuff, huh?" he asked his teammates proudly.

But nobody seemed very impressed. Annie, looking up from where she and Rook and Marlene were making cross-members for the raft, snarled, "Whaddaya want, a standing ovation?"

Marlene giggled, and everyone stared at her. "Looks like our patient's finally starting to loosen up a bit," Scott smiled.

But inside, he was trying to sort out his feelings. If Marlene was improving-if she began regaining her memory-that might mean she would

go her own way soon. He had tried not to think of that other life that she had obviously left behind. He tried not to think about the lover or even the husband who might be waiting for her, but now that was less and less possible.

In the midst of Scott's thoughts about Marlene, a long spear with a gleaming, machined-metal head suddenly arced out of the treeline and buried itself in a forest giant right next to him. The long shaft of stripped, dried wood bobbed slowly.

More spears followed, as Scott roared, "Follow me!" and led the way back toward the mecha. The rest of the group pounded after him. Miraculously, no one had been hit. They had to veer from a direct course, as a virtual hedgehog of spearpoints was thrust through a wall of undergrowth. Scott detoured, hoping he wouldn't lose his bearings, gun in hand. He yelled for Lancer, but got no answer, and feared the worst. Scott had no idea who was attacking, but it clearly wasn't the Invid, and he had no wish to hurt any Human if he could help it. As the team members sprinted across a clearing, leaves and dirt flew as ropes of braided grass creaked, and all six

travelers were hoisted aloft in an enormous net.

They were squashed in together against each other every which way, Scott losing his pistol, the others too tightly pinned to get to theirs. The world spun and swayed below them, but after a moment Scott saw people come out of concealment and into the open.

The spears had Rand expecting some lost tribe, a bunch of Yanamamo, perhaps, who had somehow survived the Wars and left their traditional territory. But instead, the team was looking down at men in factory-produced shoes and boots, albeit tattered and decaying ones, and trousers made from machine-woven fabric.

But the men were a bearded and mustached and headbanded bunch, carrying homemade bows, arrows, and spears, although the weapon heads were of metal. They wore beads and feathers and shell jewelry. Nothing made sense.

"W-whoever they are, they look like they're honked off about

something," Annie observed.

An older fellow with snow-white hair and beard gestured up at them with a warclub whose head had been set with flakes of sharpened steel. "Bring them to the temple!"

The way he said "temple" had Rook expecting something from one of the venerated oldtime movies, but she was wrong. The natives marched them at spearpoint downriver to an aging, massive, hydroelectric power dam that looked to be in disrepair.

They were soon disarmed and standing out on a platform of lashed timbers on one of the dam crest piers. The green river valley seemed to stretch out forever, and the waters of the spillway basin fought and swirled far below them. All gates appeared to be open, and water fell in huge, white cascades, filling the area with mist.

Their hands had been tied, and each captive had been fitting with an ankle shackle rivetted to a heavy weight. Scott was looking around for some sign of Lancer, hoping that he had gotten clear and could come to their rescue.

"Now you will pay for your sacrilege!" the white-haired leader said. "You are outlanders and your presence in this place has offended the river god."

He gestured to where the open taint-or gates and lowlevel outlets were letting the level of the reservoir fall. "It is because of you that the river god has turned his back on us and is leaving the valley!"

"Oh, come on!" Rand shouted, and some of the spearheads wavered close to his chest. "You're not telling me you're going to kill us just because this friggin' dam's had a malfunction?"

Scott already saw that that was exactly what the locals had in mind, but could make little sense of the matter. How could such a tribal society, such a primitive belief system, spring up in a single generation?

The only answer he could think of was the fact that the team was now in the region that had become a Zentraedi control zone, back when Khyron took refuge after the apocalyptic battle in which Dolza's force was wiped out.

The Zentraedi would certainly have found good use for the hydroelectric power, but their giant size would've made it difficult for them to operate and maintain the dam. The answer would have been to spare a picked group of Micronian techs.

Most of the men in the group were in their mid-twenties or so, Scott judged. If a lot of the techs had been killed, inadvertently or otherwise, upon Khyron's departure, that would have left kids and a few oldsters-like the white-haired man with the slightly unhinged look in his eye-to put together a new society of their own. Perhaps they had borrowed elements of their crude culture from local Indians.

As to why the whole area had been roofed over, apparently by the Invid-Scott could only conclude that this was another of their experimental labs, a kind of grandiose ant farm.

"Silence!" the old man was howling. "The only way to bring back the river god's den is to sacrifice you!" He gestured to the shrinking reservoir.

He must be old enough to recall the days before the Wars, Scott saw-and certainly the days before the Invid and the Robotech Masters. But something had wrenched his mind away from the days of sanity and rational thought, and locked him into superstition.

"My lord, I think I have an idea," Scott interjected. "If we've sinned against your god, we plead ignorance. But we will set things right by bringing the river god's den back to your valley."

The old man looked at Scott; perhaps he recalled the techs in their worksuits-not so different from Scott's uniform-who had once made the dam do their bidding. "You can do this?"

"If, in return, you let us go."

The old man stroked his beard with gnarled, black nailed fingers. "Very well, outlander. But if you fail, your companions die!"

Scott angled a thumb at Lunk. "I'll need his help." And I hope it's enough.

Scott surprised himself by recalling as much about dam construction as

he did from a years-ago Officer Candidate engineering class.

Lunk followed him at a dead run, and they soon reached the outlet control structure, further along the dam. But when they got to the control room, they found a musty room of half-corroded machinery and a bewildering collection of long-outmoded technology. Switches were frozen in place; CRTs were dark and silent.

Scott had concluded that some malfunctioning autosystem had opened the gates to release the reservoir waters. "We'll shut off everything until we find the right one," he told Lunk. Reopening them at a later time would be the locals' problem.

"The outlanders have been gone a long time, Silverhair," a warrior said to the white-haired chief.

"Yes." Silverhair considered that. "Perhaps they abandoned their companions to save themselves."

"Hold on a second!" Rand protested. "If Scott says he'll do something, then he'll do it! Just give him time!"

The old chief nodded slowly. "It is hard for you to face the fact that they have deserted you. Ulu!"

The warrior addressed as Ulu brought up his spear blade and leveled it at them.

After some time, Lunk stopped pulling levers and spinning manual valve wheels at random and began reading designation plates on the various consoles. By miraculous good fortune, he found a mildewed manual. The covers were rotted to soggy filth, but the schematics themselves had been laminated.

Lunk might have his problems with social interaction, but he had never been outwitted by an inanimate object yet. He puzzled over the highpoints of the operating procedures for long minutes, then moved decisively. "Hey, Scott! I found it!"

It was a massive, two-bladed lever, an emergency manual control that

would in cases of power failure close the gates by means of a fluidic backup system. But it, too, had suffered from the decades of neglect.

Lunk strained at it, the muscles of his shoulders and arms bunching and swelling. Scott threw his strength into the fight, too, their hands clamped around the switch.

Ulu's spear blade was close. "Trust us, will you?" Rook said, not able to take her eyes off it. "They'll do it and be back." The spearpoint edged closer, and a half dozen other warriors came after Ulu, to see that the job was done thoroughly.

The lever moved, an unbelievable quarter-inch, down its grooves. Scott and Lunk braced their feet against the console, teeth gritted, heaving for all they were worth. The lever moved another half inch.

"I warned your companions that all of you-would pay the price of their failure," the chief said. The spear blades hemmed in the team members.

Suddenly there was a change in the sound of the water gushing through the gates and outlet. The flow was lessening.

"They did it," Rand exulted. "They shut off the valve!" Annie managed a cheer. As the team and the tribe watched, the flow was shut off, at both the top of the dam and the bottom.

"The valley is saved," the old chief said. "The river god is appeased at last!" His men were a little frightened by what they had seen, but joyous anyhow.

Scott and Lunk got back to the dam crest as fast as could, only to find that their teammates had been unshackled and were receiving the tribesmen's clamorous thanks.

"We invite you to become members of our tribe," the old man said when Scott and Lunk got there.

"Thank you, but first there's a missing brother of our tribe we have to

find," Scott deflected the invitation.

"Hey! Silverhair!" came a shout. "I did it! I got myself a wife!"

There was a barefoot kid in ragged cutoffs and T-shirt, maybe an undersized thirteen years old or so, coming their way. "I'm a man now!" he puffed, dragging a big, heavy old duffel bag after him.

"It's Magruder," said Silverhair the chieftain. "Did he say 'wife'?" Rand murmured.

Magruder staggered to a stop before Silverhair and dropped the rope, as the warriors gathered round. "I captured myself a wife," he panted again, "so according to tribal law, you have to make me a warrior!" He pushed his narrow chest out proudly.

Rook got the distinct impression that Magruder was more excited about the prospect of being a warrior than about having a wife. Typical for his age, she decided.

Just then the duffel bag heaved and fell open. Everyone there gasped.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Protoculture Garden: Eden or Gethsemane?

Samizdat Reader's Digest article, November 2020

Rand found himself looking down at a familiar mass of purple hair. "Lancer!"

Lancer, gagged, glared up at Rand and at the rest of the world. Scott

turned to Magruder with a rare smile. "I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you, kid. Y'see, your fianc 閑 is a man. And not one that I'd like to have mad at me, if you catch my drift."

Magruder looked stricken. "It can't be! That's my wife!"

The tribesman were beginning to guffaw, and Annie was giggling a bit hysterically. "Is this the missing brother you were talking about?" Silverhair asked.

Rand nodded, "Yeah; his name's Lancer." Magruder had knelt to undo the gag. "Uh-oh."

Lancer looked at him mildly. "It was an honest mistake, little man.

Now-" He drew a deep breath. "Get me out of this thing!"

Scott and some of the others stooped to help, Magruder being too paralyzed. Everyone was united in laughter now, at the expense of woebegone Magruder. Rand was having trouble catching his breath. "I-I guess you haven't had much experience, huh, little guy?"

Annie was among the loudest, until she saw how hurt and mortified Magruder was. She stopped in mid-laugh, realizing that here was a mind of kindred spirit, another runt of the litter trying to make a place for himself and be accepted on equal terms.

The chief was ruffling the kid's hair; plainly, he was a sort of pest/mascot. "I hope you will forgive him, my friends. Magruder, these are our guests."

But Magruder broke free, grabbed up a spear, and ran fleetly for the jungle.

Annie made a stop at the truck, then followed Magruder's trail. She caught up with him in a little clearing at the edge of the stream where he had ambushed Lancer. She could hear him crying, so she backed up some distance, then made a lot more noise. "Yoo-hoo!"

He brought his spear around, swiping quickly at his eyes with the back of his hand. "Who is it?"

She struggled through the undergrowth into the clearing, trailing the long skirt she had scavenged back in New Denver. She was wearing a diaphanous top, and in her hair was a flower garland she had made that afternoon.

Annie struck a glamour pose, one hand behind her head, and batted her eyelashes at him. She sang, "Hi-ya. Magruder!" He gasped and dropped his spear; she sauntered over and sort of nudged her shoulder up against him.

He struggled to say, "Wh...what are you supposed to be?"

She smiled coyly. "You poor thing! You've got such a lot to learn about the opposite sex! Y'need a real woman to show you what makes the world go round, hmmm?"

He pulled away so fast that she almost toppled over, letting out a squawk. "And I suppose you're a real woman?"

Annie's lower lip thrust out and she made fists. "Hey, listen, buster: don't forget your last girlfriend! I'm a damn sight closer than he was!"

He crossed his arms on his chest. "That's none of your business! Why don't you go away and leave me alone?"

"You'll never get a wife, you lamebrain!" she bawled at him. "A woman'd have to be nuts to hook up with a dippy squirt like you!"

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah! You're hopeless!"

They were snarling at each other, when Annie reminded herself why

she had come out there. Hold your horses, Annie! If you play your cards right, this guy could make you a jungle princess. Or a queen. Who knows? They might even make you a goddess!

She turned from him, hands clasped to where her bosom was due to appear any day now. "I'm really sorry for shouting at you, Magruder," she sniffed. "It's just that-it's so difficult when a woman becomes emotionally involved."

Magruder looked like he'd been sandbagged. "Uhh! You're not crying, are you? Hey, don't do that!"

Everything was going just swell, Annie figured. In a week or two she would be running the valley. But then her schedule was thrown out the window: with a low rumbling, a trio of Shock Troopers flew by overhead. "Yikes! Invid!"

Magruder looked up at them stonily, as the flight of Troopers disappeared in the distance. "The Overlords have come back to their nest here in the valley."

Annie turned to him. "'Overlords'?"

He nodded. "My people hate them. Ever since they first came here, and made the great roof over this valley, hunting has been bad; they frighten the game."

He pointed downriver. "The strange three-in-one flowers grow thick down there, and so the Overlords built the great roof over the valley, to make this place their garden. The legends say that someday the river god will rise up to smite them, but"-a shrug-"so far that day hasn't come."

He turned and reached for his spear. Annie frowned, "Um, Macky, you're not gonna try something stupid, are you?"

He hefted the weapon. "It's time I became a man!" he said. "I'll prove myself in battle!"

Hollering at him to use his head didn't help. He sprang away into the trees, nimble as a squirrel. Annie stumbled after him, tugging to free the hem of her skirt from some thorns. When she saw Magruder next, he was poised on a branch near a wide trail-a trail that had been beaten down by

something a lot bigger than any wild game in the valley.

She hit the dirt as she heard the tread of mecha. When she lifted her head again, Magruder was swinging at the lead Shock Trooper on a vine, clutching his spear, yowling a fierce battle cry.

He landed with remarkable skill, on top of the lead alien's head canopy. "Now they'll stop laughing at me! I'll show all of them that Magruder is a man!"

Annie was prepared to see the spearpoint bounce off and Magruder either fall to his death or be plucked to bloody shreds. But instead, just as he struck, the Invid, apparently oblivious to him, fired its thrusters. Magruder lost his balance, caught his spear with both hands and fell. The spear lodged sideways in the grooves at the back of the cranial canopy; Magruder clung to it.

The next thing Annie knew, her new flame was being dragged away through the air, feet kicking, atop a Shock Trooper.

It took her a while to get the tribesmen and her own teammates to believe it. The LaBelle lower lip was thrust out again. "That's right! This place is some kind of Invid hothouse! Magruder took them on all by himself! He's convinced the only way he'll get you to stop laughing at him is become a macho sexist Tarzan!"

Silverhair shook his head. "That boy will be the death of me." "The Invid are probably looking for us," Scott said.

"The tribesmen are going after Magruder!" Rand shouted. "Scott, we've got to help these guys; the Invid'll wipe out every last one of 'em."

"We've barely enough Protoculture left to light a match," Lancer pointed out, "let alone fight a battle."

Scott was lost in thought, staring off at the dam. "Then, we'll have to improvise and maybe get a little hand from the good old river god."

Rand and Lancer began to get the idea, looking at their leader skeptically. It was funny how Scott wasn't very flexible until it came to fighting off the Invid.

"The trick will be in getting the Invid close enough to the dam. We may have to risk the last of our Protoculture reserves to lure them there."

Rand added, "Leave it to me. Those big boys just love to follow my Cyclone."

"Good. The rest of you, I want enough explosives planted on that dam to blow the whole business through those holes in the roof. Cobalt grenades, Tango-9-the works. And we're going to need Protoculture flares."

Lunk and Rook were smiling, though Marlene looked apprehensive and uncomprehending. Annie was off to one side, thinking. I don't like this! Macky and me're being left, out in the cold! My jungle darlin's just got to prove himself, or-ahh! Eureka!

The Shock Troopers had been flying a slow spiral pattern, like searching wasps. They weren't flying very fast, but they were more than high enough for the young would-be warrior to make an unfavorable impression on the ground when he hit.

He held on, hoping they would pass over the reservoir or some other body of deep water soon. That was his only hope, and his hands were going numb. His fingers were slipping.

Then the alien mecha flew into the middle of a hail of boulders. The rocks bounced or broke harmlessly on the mecha. The Shock Troopers shielded themselves with the ladybug-shaped targones mounted on their forearms. They landed, looking around more in curiosity than in anger or alarm.

The Invid themselves didn't understand all the secrets of the Flower of Life. For some reason, the Flowers had chosen to thrive in this valley, and it was critically important to the Invid to understand why. Therefore, they had roofed the place, in order to control study conditions. They left the population of atavistic Humans unbothered.

At least, so far. The Troopers were hit by a rain of spears and arrows that shattered on or rebounded from them. Their optical sensors swept the jungle for enemies. Magruder managed to drag himself up. "Hey! Hold your

fire!"

Silverhair shouted from the shelter of a leafy screen. "Quick, get down!" But Magruder sprang to his feet, standing on the Trooper as if it were a mountain he had just scaled. "Look at me, Silverhair! I'm a man, and I'll

prove it to you!"

Magruder felt that this was his moment. He grasped his spear and got ready to thrust it into the monster's brain.

But a figure swung out of nowhere, scooping him off the Shock Trooper's head just as the thing reached up to find out what was irritating it. Alloy claws clashed together on empty air.

Lancer, swinging across to safety with Magruder under one arm, laughed. "Keep trying to kill yourself and you won't live to be a very old man."

Annie saw where they would land and ran to meet Magruder. There wasn't much time left to get her plan in gear.

The Shock Troopers turned on the tribesmen, who were pelting them with arrows and spears again. The Invid advanced slowly, hoping to learn what had caused the change in these docile primitives.

"They've taken the bait!" bellowed Silverhair. "Hurry; back to the temple!"

Rand, leaning on a log next to his Cyclone, tossed pebbles at a leaf aimlessly and yawned. I hate waiting! Let's get this turkey in the oven!

He never heard the bare feet sneaking up behind him, and he only began to turn when he heard the swish of the creeper-wrapped wooden club. Then he was stretched out cold.

The Shock Troopers lumbered under the immense trunks of the deserted tree-city with the Regis's voice ringing within them. "The Robotech Rebels are somewhere in the vicinity! Scan for traces of Protoculture activity!"

It didn't take them long to find it and hear it. A Cyclone revved nearby

and the optical sensors swung to fix on it at once.

Straddling Rand's Cyc with Magruder behind her holding the handlebars, Annie settled her goggles and shrilled her war cry. "Hit it!"

Magruder, it turned out, wasn't as primitive as he looked. He had some experience with the two-wheeled, battery-powered putt-putts that the dam engineers had once used to get around on. He gave the accelerator a twist, and the Cyc shot off along the wooden overhead walkway.

The Invid looked up, following the noise. Rand, lying trussed up back where he had fallen, shrieked through his gag, Those brats stole my Cyclone!

Magruder did a daring jump from one level to the next, right above the Invids' heads, and Annie didn't seem to realize just what danger she was in. "Yeah, there they are! Yoo-hoo! Come and get us!"

The Shock Troopers rocketed after them, slowed a bit by the need to watch out for the giant trees. Magruder zoomed down to the jungle floor and away; the aliens began making up the distance quickly. "Okay, remember to hold on tight now!" Annie yelled.

"I will!" Annihilation discs began crashing nearby.

Annie seemed undisturbed as the Cyc hurtled along, finding paths through the dense foliage that only the tribes-people knew. "Magruder, my little Ape-Guy, we're gonna make a man of you yet!"

Rook set her last cobalt grenade in place. There was only one limpet mine, and Lancer was placing that to the best advantage. The grenades and Tango-9 would have to do the rest of the job. She didn't want to think about what would happen if it wasn't enough.

Ironically, Silverhair and his people raised no objection to the whole plan. Deliverance in the form of the river god was what they had always looked for. It was the reason they had defended their god's den. It was obvious to the tribe that the freedom fighters were just messengers of the god, sent to assist him. Rook was beginning to think the religion wasn't as crazy as it seemed.

She listened, for the two-dozenth time, for the approach of Rand's Cyc. Don't you dare screw up this one! she thought to him silently. Then she wondered why she should even care about him.

Then she thought again, C'mon, Rand. C'mon!

Lancer set the last of his charges and delicately threaded a lilylike flower in one of its adhesion legs, for an artistic touch. He patted it, then turned and dashed for high ground.

The trooper caught up faster than Annie had calculated, jostling the Cyc with near misses in the long feeder tunnel that led to the dam. Magruder lost control just as they shot out of the tunnel and mecha and riders all ended up plunging through a screen of fronds and leaves and spilling in separate directions over lush grass.

The Invid appeared a moment later to land and stalk closer, spreading to either side. This Protoculture motorcycle was similar to the freedom fighters', but its riders seemed to have no armor, no weapons. There would have to be a little more examination before irrevocable disposition of the Humans was made.

That was the moment when Lunk blew the flares; all Invid heads turned automatically. A dozen Protoculture mini-suns burned on the dam's concrete face.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

They were such disparate personalities-it's amazing that anyone could have believed they would come together as a result of random forces.

Crowell, Remember Our Names! (The Road to Reflex Point)

"Protoculture activity on the dam!" The Regis's voice came to her children. "Investigate!"

The gleaming purple Shock Troopers boosted away, forgetting Annie and Magruder for the moment. Lunk came dashing off the dam crest roadway, getting clear of Ground Zero.

Scott watched with satisfaction as the Troopers, joined by the others who had been combing the valley, plummeted down to the blinding-bright Protoculture flares set along the dam face. He pushed the button.

Concrete blew out in a storm of conventional and Protoculture shaped charges, as the dam fractured and broke. The Invid mecha were stunned by what was happening and then they were thrown backward and down by the falling concrete cliff and the freshwater sea behind it. In a moment, a squadron of Invid were wiped away, smashed and flattened by forces that not even Robotech armor could withstand.

"And so the river god legend comes true," Scott mused, looking down on the devastation from the heights. Just lying on top of some Flowers of Life had given Rand weird visions; perhaps living in the midst of a preserve of them had given the tribe some kind of altered perception, or prescience

The water quickly pushed up dirt and trees, hunks of mecha and vegetation. It was less a tidal wave than a moving wall of mud and solid debris that would plow down anything before it. A lot of Flowers were doomed. Maybe the Invid would even lose interest in the valley.

Lunk, Rook, and Lancer had come up behind him. Lancer spoke softly. "Did the tribe's Visions serve us, or..."

Annie pushed herself up, realizing that she had been lying on top of Magruder. Nearby, the Cyc rested on its side, smoking, but still intact. "Macky! My little Greystoke! Are you hurt?"

Magruder moved, then sat up, rubbing a bump on his head and knowing that by all rights he and Annie should have been torn limb from bough. Then he heard the din of the flood. They had barely made it high enough; a few yards away and several down, the broached reservoir had left its high-water mark.

Annie was offering him a handful of white silk, her gage for her jungle knight. "Need a hankie?"

His hands closed around hers. "Hey, we did it, Annie! Thank you, oh, thank you!" His face was alight; not even Silverhair could say no to him now!

Annie sat listening to the world-shaking noise of the flood recede. Sunlight came directly down on them through one of the holes in the Invid-built roof. It seemed a perfect moment, the kind she had always wanted to live, the kind she had always wanted to trap in amber.

"Believe me, Macky, it was my pleasure."

Rand was beginning to get a grip on the knots that held him. "If they've damaged my Cyclone I'll twist the skin off their heads and strangle 'em with it!"

He was blinded by salt sweat, but he was working mostly by feel. He had an enormous headache from the shot he had taken. "What is it with kids these days, anyway?"

It was a holy night in the treetop town, both because the Invid had been driven out by the river god's righteous wrath, and because Magruder had at last proved himself a man of the tribe. (The team noticed that a number of people were breathing a sigh of relief about that, since they wouldn't have put up with any more of Magruder's pecadillos.)

Magruder and Annie, in the best raiment of the village, got to sit side by side in the high-backed chairs of honor in the tribe's council hall. Annie looked a little punchy but very happy. In addition to greeting Magruder as a man and a brother, Silverhair offered him his choice of any woman as his wife.

"All hail, Magruder!"

The river receded quickly, and for some reason the tribe didn't seem bothered by the loss of the dam, or the likelihood that the Invid would come again. Prophesies had been served, had been borne out, and thus other prophesies and Visions-which the tribemembers wouldn't discuss-would be, too. Therefore, all was well.

With the tribe's help, the building of a string of rafts went with surprising ease and speed. There were hidden warehouses, with empty oil drums, cordage, and tools. Several nights later, the team floated off downstream, on a string of rafts that supported them and their mecha.

Lunk had gotten a few powerful heat-turbine outboard engines going, and these were used for steering and minimal propulsion-enough to give the rafts headway. Even Marlene had to man a sweep, since the team was now one member short.

The shoreline still reeked of the stuff that had been washed up onto it during the flood. Watching the luminous fairy-grove of the tribe, each team member thought about what Annie had meant to him or her. All, that is, except for Rand, who stood by his outboard and looked downstream only, refusing to acknowledge that anything had happened.

The others silently manned steering engines or sweeps. At last he whirled on them. "Why the long faces? You all look like your gerbil just died. Try pulling yourselves together, okay? We're better off! You didn't have to look after her as much as I did, so trust me on this one. Now us big kids are free to get on with some down 'n' dirty freedom fighting!"

Rook, sitting with her back to a crate, hiked herself up a little, studying him. "Y'know, you're as transparent as glass."

Rand made a blustering objection, then turned away, his cheeks hot.

Then he said in a low voice, "Hey, I think we've arrived."

It was just coming into view around a bend. The Invid Hive looked a little like a spider straddling the river. Its nodules were all alight now, like blister windows. Its curved underside glowed like a belly-furnace. As they watched, a flight of mecha left it, ungainly bats making their way out into the night.

"There are no Hives like that," Scott breathed. "That's the weirdest looking-" He drew breath. "All right, everybody; you know what to do."

They had tarped the mecha and Lunk's truck with camouflage covers, but that didn't hold much promise for the time when the string of rafts came in under the bright undergut of the Hive. It was like being a bug under a lamp beam, Rand reflected, as he huddled under a tarp, staring up at the fiery glare of the thing.

But somehow they weren't noticed. They couldn't decide whether it was because the Invid were in a turmoil after suffering losses, or simply that the aliens were looking for Protoculture spoor and ignoring everything else.

The stilted Hive made a bizarre sight, set against the delicate pink-lighted inner surface of the tremendous roof shell. At some point, the team realized that the light had grown less harsh, that they had passed out of the fortress's immediate area. They emerged from cover as the rafts drifted into darkness.

Something crossed the night sky. It was the patrol they had seen leave the fortress, exiting the valley through one of the giant holes. There were five Shock Troopers flying as the rear two echelons of a triangle, two followed by three. But what was at the apex made the team gasp.

"Hey, look at-" Rand began.

"I don't think I've ever heard of a Trooper like that before," Lancer said, the last of the Hive's light catching his pale skin.

Scott was shaking his head slowly. He had memorized every mecha-identification profile there was, arid he had never seen this one. It was twice the size of the others. "What could it be?"

But there were no answers.

Once again, Rand's Notes on the Run offers an enlightening commentary on the subtler forces affecting the team:

"Another two days' rafting brought us to a deserted city where, wonder of wonders, we found a pinch of Protoculture in an old Southern Cross underground shelter-just enough to keep us going. It should have made us rubber-kneed with relief, really; it was a lucky find. But we were all still a little depressed about Annie. I kept expecting her to start yapping and pestering me."

"Unloading the mecha from the rafts was a lot easier once they were under power, and the Beta lifted Lunk's APC off like it was a toy. We decided to hole up in the downtown hub of that empty burg for a few days, to see what else there might be that we could use. The Forager in me didn't trust the place-those windy streets, echoing concrete canyons-but I knew there would be few other places to resupply between there and the coast."

"Figuring a few rest stops, Scott told us he estimated another eleven days' travel to the Pacific coast of Panama, where we would get ready for that hop to what all the old maps call Baja California. Most of Central America was an Invid bailiwick, and the Gulf of Mexico was their bathtub; we didn't have much choice but to go around. Scott said we might manage to be in the region of Reflex Point in as little as a month or so."

"Yippee..."

"While Scott and Lancer went over the maps, and Marlene sort of huddled in Rook's old jacket, watching Scott. Rook and Lunk and I rode off to see what else we could forage. Our headlights only made the city seem spookier and more ominous. Rook was grousing, something about the foolishness of scavenging in the dark."

"I told her, 'We'd be sitting ducks during the day-not that I feel a whole lot safer now. I'm beginning to think the Invid see equally well, day or night.'"

"It wasn't much of a comment, I suppose. To tell the truth, I was still

thinking about Marlene, and the looks she was giving Scott. If we had been living some oldtime musical, I would have said the two of them were about to burst into a somber duet. As for me, that intimate connectedness I had felt with Marlene seemed to be fading. And my feelings toward Rook changed from second to second."

"Anyway, there we were riding among leaning and teetering buildings, toppled wreckage, cracked streets with weeds growing up through them-and the Invid jumped us. A flight of Pincer Ships were following either that giant one we had seen back in the valley or its twin."

"They took a novel approach, blasting the top floors of buildings to pieces, raining cinderblocks and cement and pieces of girder and glass down on us. We did some stunt driving you won't find in any books, with dust coating our goggles and sticking in our teeth. A granite splinter opened a groove in Lunk's cheek."

"It seemed like we fled forever. Then we zazzed around this turn and Scott and Lancer were there, running neck and neck, Marlene riding pillion behind Lancer. We had gotten lax, maybe, because Scott was the only one in armor. Wearing that tin can never seemed to bother him; I had seen him sleep in it often."

"At any rate, he told us to find cover while he ran interference. It made sense; without our armor, the rest of us were just bikers in a bull's-eye. Then we heard his fireworks, and we poured on everything we had because as good as Scott was-and he was the best among us-he couldn't hold 'em for long."

"I was in the lead, and I spotted a major subway entrance. We went down, giving our kidneys a nice little massage on the steps. Scott was right behind Lunk's truck, and the Invid rounds were already melting the entrance canopy. We ran to the end of the platform and then hit the rails."

"Ladies and gentlemen, it was dark down there! Our headlights scared up rats as big as small dogs, and other things that didn't fit in any Audubon book I ever saw-mutations, of course."

"I figured we could put up a pretty good fight down there, because the

Invid would have to bunch up and move slowly. But I made a note to slip on my helmet the second there was a chance; weapons make noise, and in the confinement of the tunnel a few shots would be plenty for a little short-term hearing loss."

"What I hadn't foreseen, though, was that the Invid would just shoot at us from the street above. They had tracked us by Protoculture emissions, I concluded. I bet that big bozo we had seen was the one doing the shooting; Pincer Ships simply didn't have that kind of raw power. Even Shock Troopers didn't pack such a wallop."

"Sure enough, the first one made me partially deaf and gave me the beginnings of a week-long headache. At every junction we looked for a way to go deeper."

"The Invid shots blew straight down through ceiling and floor behind us. The ceiling suddenly collapsed and Lunk's APC was nearly stuck, but somehow he churned free. I do believe that glorious old wreck listened when he talked to it."

"We shut down our Cycs so the Invid couldn't sense our Protoculture, but they must have gotten a final fix on Lunk's truck, because the last volley damn near nailed him. As it was, the whole tunnel began to break up."

"We all wriggled to shelter under some subway cars, except for Marlene, who had taken a spill, and Scott, who crouched over her, protecting her with his armor. I looked at the two of them and the way they looked at each other and I knew, in that bizarre instant flash you sometimes get, that they were what Vonnegut called a "Duprass"-a bonded pair. Something to do with fate, no doubt."

"It sounded like they were knocking whole buildings over up above; the tunnel was blocked by fallen debris and concrete back the way we had come. Lunk's beloved old jalopy was crumpled, too."

"Then it got quiet. We guessed that they had decided they had destroyed us. But there was no going back; our only chance, the way I saw it, was to look for another route out of the place-find a junction further down. And we had to do it fast, Lancer pointed out, because there might be Invid

looking for a way in."

"Scott was mechamorphosing back to cycle mode while he was reminding us how persistent the Invid were-as if we hadn't seen that for ourselves. If Scott had one weakness as a leader, it was stating the obvious. But as he stripped out of his armor and went to look for an exit, his light showed that the tunnel had been sort of squooshed together like a toothpaste tube in that direction."

"We were sealed in."

CHAPTER TWENTY

What is to become of men and women-males and females-and the way they cope with one another and the differences between them?

Doesn't this go to the heart of the reason the Robotech Wars started in the first place? The Regis and Zor? The soullessness of the Masters? The Shaping of the Protoculture itself?

Isn't it the question that must be answered before there's a love that's worthy of the name?

Altaira Heimel, Butterflies in Winter: Human Relations and the Robotech Wars

Rand continues:

"Scott hardly batted an eyelash. He just fell back to Plan W, or whatever letter he was up to by then. Can-do, that's the attitude they had drummed into him."

"But without any warning at all, Lunk suddenly lost it. The next thing we knew he was kneeling on Scott's chest, choking him, screaming about how Scott had gotten us into this, how it was his fault we were going to die. I think the first would be undeniable, but we had all had the chance to opt out, just like Annie, and so the second part just didn't stick. Maybe Lunk was regretting that he hadn't stayed behind to give Annie away at the wedding and settle down in a hammock someplace."

"When Lancer and I tried to peel him off, Lunk just flung us away with one sweep of his arm, growling and roaring like some berserk Neanderthal. Rook had no intention of letting it go on, but she was smarter than we were; I saw her edging her H90 out."

"Lancer saw, too, and so we made one more effort. Lunk was foaming at the mouth, but I guess by then he had said everything he was thinking-basically, that he was afraid he was going to die. Lancer and I got armlocks on both sides, and this time we dragged him loose. Marlene

cradled Scott's head to her and tried to stop the bleeding of his split lip." "Lancer and I had our hands full, and Lunk was howling for us to leave

him alone. Lancer stepped back and wound up for a punch. He got a lot of power into the uppercut-I made a mental note not to poke fun at Yellow Dancer ever again-but it barely rocked Lunk. Still, the big guy sort of came out of his fit."

"Lancer was apologizing, although I noticed he was poised to give Lunk a second dosage if the diagnosis called for it. But Lunk's madness seemed to have left him as quickly as it had come. Lancer reminded him that Scott hadn't led us down there; I had."

"And there I was, nodding, kind of smug, in a sneaky way, about how honest and forthcoming I was being. It served me right for letting my ego take over; when I wasn't looking, Lunk hooked me. It was a little like being struck by lightning. Next thing I knew, I was lying on the ground with loosened teeth."

"All I could think of to do was lie on the ground. I settled for giving Lunk my best mean look. 'Feel better?' I drooled."

"And it worked. Next thing I know, Lunk's down on his hands and knees begging my forgiveness and blubbering that he didn't know what got into him-he was scared, he didn't belong on the team, didn't have what it took and so on."

"I opted for the high road. Rubbing my jaw, I told him that it seemed to me that he had had what it took just a second before. I sorta sneaked a look at Rook, hoping she had noticed now mature and big-hearted I was being, but she just sniffed at me and turned her nose in the air, and said, 'I guess he proved that, didn't he?'"

"Sometimes I wish there was a third gender that would do nothing but referee."

"Marlene was looking around at us like we were crazy. And I suppose we were; Christ, we were all crazy, the Robotech Irregulars off on a lark to blow up Reflex Point! No wonder it had brought us to a dead end."

"We gradually pulled ourselves back together. Scott said his head felt

like somebody had been using it to crack walnuts."

"Lunk was worried about that same old thing, what else? Back in the war he had had to make tracks from a bad situation, and he saw himself as a coward. He was afraid he had cracked and let us down, too."

"Lunk had never asked me about this, but from what he admitted about that firelight, I don't think he could be blamed for what he did."

"I'm sure that it's a special kind of hell hearing your closest buddy scream for a pickup and having to stand pat. But when the transmission's coming from the middle of a walking-barrage of Invid cannonfire, and the rest of your unit's wiped out, and the man or woman shrieking at you is mortally wounded and beyond any possible rescue, I don't call it cowardice. It's part of the evil of war."

"Lancer had established himself as a sort of authority figure with that punch, I suppose you could say. But he tried to point out that Lunk was just Human. Lunk still didn't seem to know what to do and looked like he was about to burst into tears again. I gave Rook a little eye signal and said somebody should start hunting for a back door-that maybe there was something we had missed."

"She gave me a funny look, but didn't object. She and I got flashlights and started off. There was the very beginning of another platform at the far cave-in, and we got down to a lower level, but there was no exit. We walked amid handbills that had faded and gone to tatters, newsstands where the candy had been taken by the rats and the stacks of newspapers turned into cockroach settlements."

"The steady drip of water was everywhere and you could smell the stagnant pools of it, and the things rotting in them. There were constant skitters in the dark, distant squeaks and squeals. It wasn't terribly cold, but it was dank enough to make me shiver."

"I looked at the face of the woman on the last edition of Mademoiselle ever to be published and couldn't help wondering what I always wonder when I come across things like that."

"Did she survive the Invid holocaust? Had she lived through the

turf-wars and the plagues and famines and slave-roundups? Had she been disfigured; or lived long enough to discover that her beauty could be a terrible curse in this post-apocalyptic world, and simply ended it all one day?

"Rook was strangely quiet, and I didn't feel like talking much because my jaw ached. Finally we were sitting on a platform, swinging our legs, gazing down at the third rail that would never know its surge of current again. Out of nowhere, I was admitting that I wasn't so sure there was any way out this time.

"I expected the worst, but for once she wasn't busting my chops. 'Don't give up hope. I'm sure we'll come up with a way out of here eventually.' Her voice sounded so different all of a sudden; the world seemed to change."

"I was flummoxed, as the ancients would say. To cover up, I said that even if we did get out, the team would never be the same. Rook just lay back with her head pillowed on her hands, looking up at the ceiling. I wanted to stretch out next to her the same way-nothing funny, you understand, just lie there together like we were out on a hill someplace looking at clouds. But I thought she might take it the wrong way, so I didn't."

"'I should tell you something,' she said. 'I've been thinking of quitting the team.'"

"It was the last thing I expected her to say. But she insisted, 'It's been on my mind a long time, Rand.'"

"'But we're counting on you more than ever now that-'"

"'I'm tired of people counting on me! Or maybe I'm just tired of running for my life all the time.'"

"I didn't know how to respond to that, so my mouth said, 'C'mon, you're just like me. You thrive on danger!'"

"She was looking at me out of the corner of one eye, in a very strange way. 'Up to a point.' From her, it was a major concession, agreeing with anything I said like that."

"So I gave in a little, too. 'You're right. I'm not being straight with you when I say fighting is fun. Maybe I just keep repeating it to keep from facing

the fact that I'm scared sick a lot of the time.'"

"Now she was watching me with both eyes. 'What d'you know? I never thought I'd hear you admit a thing like that.'"

"I shrugged. 'It's all been working at me, Lunk and the Invid and all. Matter of fact, I wonder if this whole mission isn't just a hopeless effort. A half-dozen people just can't do it.'"

"Now she was up on one elbow, and I couldn't help noticing how she moved in that shiny, skintight biker's racing suit. 'Rand, I just had a bright idea. Let's quit the team together. Hear me out! We'd be saving everybody's life. Scott would have to postpone the mission while we all go looking for more recruits. There are Resistance units. We might be able to assemble a real strikeforce.'"

"I thought about that for a few seconds. An hour would not have been enough, but I didn't want her to think I was slow or indecisive now that she was just starting to be civil to me. 'I've got an even better idea: Why don't you and me just pull out and not come back?'"

"Those fair, fine brows of hers came together. 'What are you saying?'" "'We could hop on our bikes and hit the highway again! You and I

could get married, have us a coupla spare wheels-'"

"It will, by now, be obvious to the knowledgeable reader that in spite of all the boasting I had done, I really didn't know much about women. Rook was giving me a glare that made me wonder if I should go get myself fumigated."

"But all at once she turned and started twirling a wisp of her forelock around one finger looking at it kind of cross-eyed. 'You've completely missed my point, Rand. The point was to pull out together so we could find more people and bring them back. Get me?'"

"'I thought the point was to hit the road together because you feel the same way about me that I feel about you,' I opened up. 'We'd be perfect together. I'd follow you anywhere in the world. You know that.'"

"'Have you completely lost your mind?'"

"'Huh-uh. I've completely lost my heart.' God, what else did she want

me to say? And so, of course, because (I'm pretty sure) I had made my point, she just-jumped to her feet! She just broke off the conversation! With that one move, she was calling the tune again."

"So I got up, too, and put my arm around her shoulders, not at all certain that she wouldn't flip me down over the third rail. But she stamped one foot and pushed my arm away and scolded me instead. 'The point of this deal is to save our friends' lives, not to establish a relationship. If, if you're willing to accept that, then I'm still game.'"

"'Since you put it that way, I can hardly refuse, can I?'"

"She chuckled softly, that throaty laugh that made me wish so muck that we could be together. 'Boy, will Scott be mad,' she added."

"She laughed some more and it made me laugh, but really I was thinking the whole time what it would be like to hold her in my arms and have her embrace me instead of pushing me away. It made my head swim and I kind of forgot what we were supposed to be laughing about."

"Scott didn't think our dropping out was so funny, of course. We kept citing burnout and the need for more troops, without touching on the Lunk matter, and poor Lunk just stood there looking hangdog and miserable. Scott was hampered by the fact that, after all, none of us had ever signed an enlistment paper or sworn an oath of loyalty."

"Marlene was just puzzled, but I think Lancer wasn't fooled for a moment. Still, he kept his peace, for the most part, especially when I told them I had thought of a way that we might get out of that sepulcher. They heard me out, disliked my brainstorm, but gave in to it anyway."

"It didn't take long and it wasn't too sophisticated. We fastened our last spare Protoculture cells behind a kind of wedge we put on a length of rail that we cut loose with H90's. Scott mounted the wedge on a derelict subway car using his Cyc armor's strength. The rest was pretty obvious."

"Scott had yanked Lunk's truck loose and even straightened out most of the damage, with his powered armor. Everybody understood that there was a chance that we would bring the whole place down on our heads, but the air was starting to get thin, or so it felt, and we had all had enough of

being buried alive; there were no objections."

"Lunk was calm again. He got the cells, primed them, and lashed them in place, steady, proficient-almost cheerful. The rest of us got into our armor, while Marlene and Lunk got to cover. Scott and Lancer stood ready to fire in case Invid came swarming through the hole we were hoping we would make."

"The car's motor was long dead, of course. But Rook and I started heaving and pushing against the back. The powered armor got that crate moving in no time, rusted parts freeing up with banshee shrieks. Then we hit our jets and the car was rocketing forward, faster than it ever traveled on the Urban Transmit System, I bet."

"We couldn't see, of course, because we had our shoulders to the wheel, but Scott told me later that the rail and the canisters of Protoculture just seemed to go into the rubble like an icepick. Lunk had mounted the cells just, right, so that when they were several yards in, they went off like shaped charges."

"I never found out how Lunk rigged those cells, but suddenly there was a gap in the cave-in and the car was in it."

"The explosion rocked the car back and knocked Rook and me right on our butts, powered armor or no. We pushed the car off again with our feet, to keep the way clear.

"It turned out that Lunk had had the presence of mind to rig earplugs for himself and Marlene; none of us armored types had thought of it."

"Even before we could get up, Scott was scrambling into the car, running to the forward end with armor-heavy steps that shook it. Lancer was about a half a high hurdle behind him. I thought they were being alarmist. But as I was getting a hand up from Rook I heard Scott yell over the tac net, 'Invid!'"

"Apparently, a few personal-armor mecha had been hovering out there, trying to figure out what to do. Maybe they had been afraid to start digging because it might bring down the roof on themselves; maybe they had some sort of time frame, so that if we didn't dig ourselves out by its elapse we

would be written off as dead. We'll never know.

"Scott and Lancer got in the first eight or ten shots and some missile hits, and that set the stage for a rub-out. Rook and I followed as fast as we could, but there really wasn't much to do but mop up."

"The next part's a little anticlimactic; we had to wait a bit for the tunnel to cool off from the heat of the firefight and the Pincer Ships' thrusters, but clearing a way with the powered armor was a cinch. In less than an hour, we were back on the surface, with no sign of any patrols and no hint of that big-bruiser enemy mecha."

"We took off our armor. I kept starting to put my arm around Rook's shoulders when she was looking the other way, and then deciding that she would take offense, then starting to edge my arm up again-then pulling it back, hoping nobody had noticed. I probably looked fairly spastic."

"Here's where it gets surprising again: When we finally trudged back to where we had left the VTs, Annie was standing there."

"She was wearing her olive-drab army surplus, that pink rucksack, and an E.T. cap just like the one she had lost in the fortress-a spare, it wouldn't surprise me. She was sort of moping around, but when she saw us her face lit up like a Christmas tree."

"After some reunion time, we got the story out of her-or at least, her version. 'Can you picture me as a jungle princess? They expected me to gather fruit and nuts and stand in the background while the men held council! So I said so-long! Dumb, hmm?'"

"I suspected that there was probably also the problem that the tribe wouldn't rename itself in her honor. And that Magruder expected certain matrimonial accommodations. Annie was a lot like me: talked a better fight, in certain arenas, than she could deliver."

"It was pouring down rain by then and we were all standing under the Beta, which had been hidden in a parking garage. I had to interrupt Annie. I told her-and everyone else-that Rook and I were pulling out because we couldn't hack it anymore. Rook watched me and didn't say a word. Annie was shattered, poor kid, but then Rook spoke to back me up."

"Marlene said she would stay with Scott, and that seemed only as it should be. Lunk was in for the whole nine yards, as the ancients put it, to Reflex Point. To prove himself, he said. (Though I thought that was the wrong reason to go on a mission like that, I kept my mouth shut. I guess all motives and ideals were at least a little tainted, by then.)"

"The way it turned out was just Rook and me riding away into a curtain of icy rain, while the others prepared to go on without us. Annie was crying her heart out on Lunk's shoulder. The farewells had hurt a lot more than they had helped."

"Some brilliant plan, Rand!"

"Rook was tearing along way too fast for weather and road conditions, and almost slammed me with her Cyc when I mentioned it. So we rode on, with all of it eating at us and no possibility of talking it out."

"And we were thinking the same thing: The team was going to carry on the mission. Dropouts, losses, setbacks-none of that mattered. Something greater than themselves had taken hold of them."

"The last straw was when Scott and Lancer cruised slowly overhead in VTOL mode, a slow flyby and solemn salute. Suddenly my adored Rook wasn't there anymore; she had made a bandit turn on the slick street, risking her neck, and was charging back the way she had come. Back to greet Lunk and Annie; back to board the Alpha she had left behind."

"I turned more slowly; I just didn't feel like talking to anybody for a while. I was going to have to get Scott to land, because he had my Beta mated to his Alpha."

"I watched Rook speed through the rain like a Valkyrie on two wheels, a War Stormqueen. I didn't want to talk over the tac net or hear the brave words. I was staying because Rook had stayed; I would have left if she had left."

"Something greater than myself had taken hold of me."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I suppose it's net a secret by now, though it was a long time till Pop knew it. When the team members complained about what bothered them the most, Rand agonized over how the books and films and tapes were dying-how Human history was passing away. And I guess sometimes he admitted he was trying to be a one-man databank/preservation society.

A lot of things happened after that, but if you want my opinion, that's when Mom fell in love for the first and the last time.

Naturally she didn't tell him right away.

Maria Bartley-Rand,

Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

The evolution wasn't finished. It was just beginning.

The time had come for a form beyond that of the Enforcer. It was time for a new category of mecha-a new evolutionary step.

In the Hive Center at Reflex Point, the Regis looked down on two Enforcers. One was the one that had failed to eliminate the freedom fighters; the other had been quickened less than a week earlier. These two were the most intelligent, capable and adaptable of the Regis's children.

"You have been summoned here to assume your rightful place in the new order of our society," she told them. "First you must undergo transformation to the life form most suitable to this planet. Prepare for bio-reconstruction!"

Jagged nets of energy whirled out from the huge globe. in the center of the dome, to ensnare the two Enforcers and etch them in light. They writhed as if in torment, then froze like statues. In moments, the mecha had been stripped away, dissolved to particles. In the midst of the Protoculture fires two figures, in fetal tuck, floated-the forms of two fully developed Humans-a male and a female.

"My children, you now share a part of my own genetic code. You are a

prince and princess of our race, and shall be known hereafter as Corg and Sera."

The Regis appeared again in her almost-physical manifestation, the swirling barber-pole stripes of energy spiraling up and down around her. The Regis poured forth a purity of Protoculture power on a scale that only an Invid monarch was capable of ordaining or controlling. In moments, new mecha formed around the floating twins, Corg and Sera.

"We must soon begin the mass transformation of our people to the Human life form," the Regis went on, "the form in which I have conceived you. The most advanced and flexible configuration for survival on this planet-this world to which the Flower of Life has led us."

Two mecha stood side by side now, bigger than Enforcers. They were more humanlike in form than any of the other alien war machines. They looked like the powered armor the Zentraedi had used long ago, but they were larger. The upper torsos were heavy with weapon pods and power nacelles, so that the things gave a strange appearance of buxomness. The head area was quite small, sunk between massively armed and powered shoulders and immensely strong arms.

The mecha of Corg, who had so recently harried the freedom fighters in their underground escape, was drab gray-green, with highlights in an orange-tan color. Sera's mecha was purple, with trim of dark pink. The great Robotech digits worked and tested themselves; the Prince and Princess of the Invid had risen above the claw, the pincer.

"However," the Regis told them, "there may be hidden dangers in this physical form. An earlier experiment with Human reconstruction appears to be malfunctioning. Our spy, Ariel, whom the Humans call Marlene, has failed to establish communications with me. You must seek out Ariel and determine the cause of her dysfunction, before we commit our race to a complete metamorphosis. You must prepare the way for the final phase of our domination of this planet! Go now, and prove yourselves worthy of your heritage!"

As the morning sun rose, the team stood on a cliff looking out at the Pacific. Scott was calculating the variables and the absolutes involved in a run for Baja California, but the others were just enjoying themselves. They were watching the crashing waves and the plaintive gulls, and enjoying the sight of the blue water and the broad beach.

From here on, according to fragmentary reports, the Invid watchposts and strongholds grew thicker and thicker. In order to avoid them, a sea-cruise seemed the only hope. The mecha were low on Protoculture again, and the ordnance was practically gone. But they had made it to the sea.

From here, anything was possible. Scott was thinking along the lines of a low, slow swing out over the ocean by night, leaving Lunk's truck and most of their other baggage behind-perhaps even abandoning one of the VTs.

That was when Annie pointed to her discovery. The team just stood there staring, while Annie asked them what in the world it was. Lancer answered.

"Abandoned Southern Cross base, Annie. Combination Navy Division/Jungle Forces installation, I'd say."

The place was a cluster of piers, radio towers, hangars, domes and quonset huts, barracks and operations center structures. Everything was decayed and overgrown with jungle plant life, and several of the roofs had collapsed. It was nothing new to the team; a gleaming town in good repair would have surprised them, but this was just one more pocket of earthly decline.

They were instantly thinking about food, weapons, maps, and charts, perhaps even equipment or a boat. in another second they were racing back to their mecha, eager to explore.

What pieces of mecha there were in the base were useless, but all other news was good. There was a fair amount of Protoculture, ordnance that was compatible with their VTs, sealed ration containers that had withstood the test of time, and a desalination plant that was still up to supplying a trickle of fresh water. But best of all, there were three boats.

Two of the boats were missile PTs, heavily armed for their size and extremely quick and maneuverable. The third was a cutter mounting missiles and a large pumpedlaser battery. Finding the boats confirmed Scott's decision: The best way to make the run to Baja was by sea. It would save Protoculture and they would be able to stay below the Invid sky sensors. The VTs could take turns hitching a ride on the cutter, and the boats could carry a wealth of supplies and materiel.

Whatever had made the Southern Cross troops abandon their base, it had left them time to put their boats and other equipment in mothballs before they went. In no time, the team was getting everything in working order again. Aerosol cans' spray peeled off the sealant layers over the boats' engines and a lot of the other gear; special treatments had kept the hulls free of barnacles and such growth. They were immune to rot, and as ready to go as when they had been laid down.

Lancer, standing his turn at watch in the tower, a binocular raised to his eyes, couldn't help but feel that chill he got whenever things were going a little too well. It wasn't very many minutes later that he found himself staring through his binocular at a Shock Trooper whose optical sensor was looking right back at him.

"What I figure is," he was telling the others a minute later, "it's not sure yet that there's anything going on here. But I'd be shocked if the Invid don't come looking around very soon. If we want the element of surprise, we'd better get hopping."

Scott would have liked another two days to reconnoiter, double-check the boats from stem to stern, rest up, and perhaps even do a short sea-trial. But he didn't even have two minutes.

Lunk had some experience with a Resistance quickboat outfit, and he was the logical one to take command of the missile cutter. He put out to sea with Annie and Marlene joining him on the bridge. The two PTs were towed by hawsers.

The VTs lifted off to rendezvous with the tiny flotilla, but the minute they activated their Protoculture engines, Shock Troopers came shooting up

out of the trees. Annihilation discs hatched infernos all around them.

"This always happens, very time I go up!" Rand complained. "Don't those guys have anything better to do?"

The VTs went darting off on evasive maneuvers, the pilots punching up weapons and targeting displays. The Troopers folded their ladybug-shaped forearms close to them and blasted after the VTs, firing from their shoulder-mounted cannon. The fighters led the Invid on a long swing out to sea, to keep them away from the boats. The humans were breathing heavily from the g-forces, legs locked, stomach muscles tightened to keep the blood up in their heads where it was needed the most. The tac net sounded like a wrestling tournament.

One Shock Trooper got a glancing hit at Rook's ship. Rand heard her groan of pain over the tac net, and his heart went cold. He turned around, thumbed the trigger on his stick, and flamed a Shock Trooper that never even knew what hit it. A second Trooper broke off its pursuit, diving and sliding to avoid meeting a similar fate.

"Serves ya right for fooling around with the big kids!" Rand cut in full military power and caught up with his teammates.

Two more Troopers showed up but fell in with the surviving one, and turned back toward the coast. Invid patrol patterns were a little inflexible, Scott saw.

Rand slid in until his wingtip was under Rook's and nearly touching her fuselage. "Hey, Rook? Are you hurt?"

Her answer had a clenched-teeth sound to it. "Nothing I can't live with, farmer." He didn't press her about it; it would only have brought on another spitting match over the tac net.

"But I owe you one," she grated, taking him completely by surprise.

In her cockpit, Rook looked down at the fizzling avionics, so badly shot up, and at the left thigh and bicep sections of her armor, which had been split open by flying shrapnel and Invid force ricochet. Blood seeped from her wounds.

Lancer scouted ahead, and in less than ten minutes the VTs had located

a place to rest. They stopped in the midst of a tiny chain of islands not too far off shore. While Rand coached Rook in for a landing, Lancer went back to help Scott provide air cover and guidance, and convoy the boats in.

Their rest stop had been a resort only a generation before. A place where people came to worship the sun to the point of melanoma; pay for drinks with plastic beads; coo and woo under the coconut trees; surf; scuba.

To make love, Scott thought, looking around at the place. The bay was translucent blue and the sand powder-white. Eat, drink, gamble. The team was doing all those things now, he assumed, although he might be projecting a little on the trysting part. And the freedom fighters were gambling with and for things a lot more precious than plastic beads or casino plaques.

Annie had been reading manuals and instruction pamphlets, and decided to play nurse on Rook. The onetime biker queen gritted her teeth but sat still for it. Annie wound her upper arm and thigh in enough bandage to restrain a small moose. Rand watched interestedly without seeming to; Rook had certain soft spots, like the one for Annie, and he was determined to learn them. Then Rook scowled at him, and he turned his attention elsewhere.

Stripping to his shorts, Rand took the swim he had been thinking about since he had listened to the chorus of the gulls that morning. Lunk had promised Scott that he could patch up Rook's Alpha and the other damage the VTs had suffered, with minimum delay. But meanwhile, all they could do was wait. Rook rested her chin on her fist and squinted balefully at Annie and Rand, who were frolicking in the surf.

Marlene, in a white mini bikini made of knotted lengths of parachute silk, went running and yelling into the water. The wet silk made Rand gape, and then he looked away, swallowing with a loud noise.

Scott appeared to say that everything would be ready when Lunk was done. Rand came out of the water sniffling and laughing and dripping-and happy. Rook's jaw muscles jumped a bit, but she held back her temper.

Then Rand was holding his hand out to her, more serious than she was

used to seeing him. "I'm sorry you were injured, but-c'mon down to the water and enjoy yourself. Otherwise I can't be happy."

It shocked her so much that she didn't quite know what to say, but she saw that Rand suddenly wasn't smiling; he was just watching her.

She practically stuck the back of her hand in his eye. "I guess it can't hurt. Well? Aren't you gonna help me up?"

Marlene and Annie stopped splashing each other and shouted happily for Rook's recovery as Rand gallantly helped her up and led her down to where the waves were foaming. Rand called triumphantly, "Hey, look who finally gave in and decided to have some fun!"

Scott saw Rook's fingers, the ones on her free hand, curl into a fist and then open again, away from Rand's sight. It was like some quick debate.

Scott watched Marlene's lithe grace in the spray and surf. Maybe they're right about this place. We should enjoy it while we can.

Corg and Sera and the mecha they led split up to search the chain of islands for the rebels and for the Simulagent, Ariel. Sensor triangulations indicated that there was a strong possibility she was near.

They understood their orders. If possible, they were to contact Ariel. If not, they were to observe her interaction with the Humans in order to determine the cause of her malfunction. Failing any of the above, they were to destroy her utterly, and the outcasts who had swayed her.

Lancer grew despondent looking at the pointless destruction the Invid had inflicted on the island. He followed a stream he had spotted from the air and found a small waterfall in a grotto a few hundred yards up an overgrown trail into the jungle. He tried not to reflect upon all the people who had come that way before him, and what their eventual fate had been.

This time he put aside the Musume persona. He waded in and began washing the sweat of fear and battle and the rankness of too many hours in the cockpit from him. He sang loudly in Lancer's voice. He sang as if he were trying to drown out some other tune, perhaps a funeral dirge...

It might have been memory of the Magruder ambush that kept him alert. Even though the little waterfall was splattering, he heard foliage parting and swinging back, and caught the movement of a shadow out of the corner of one eye.

Sera had picked up those strange auditory impulses through the superattuned senses of her mecha. The Regis had given her crowned offspring the means to know what it was to be a demigod, to soar over oceans and continents-to see each movement of the blades of grass, hear each bend of a leaf.

But the Regis never guessed what a trap that could be. The strange sonic input kept Sera from firing on its source. It kept her from contacting her brother Corg, or the Pincer Ships. The only thing she could do was stalk closer. She had heard the music of the spheres, but she had never heard Human singing before.

Before she realized what she was doing, she was out of the all-embracing armored safety of her mecha, padding through the strange smells and sights and sounds of the island, the terrifying intimacy of it. She was drawn by the siren song.

She couldn't put a name to what she felt. She knew that not all of her genetic coding came from the Regis, of course. Some of it was Human. Was that what was forcing her to this aberrant activity? She repressed any doubt; she must see what was making these compelling, beautiful sounds. Information wetware input told her that it was what the Humans called "singing" but that word was a mere cipher...

The Human had long purple hair and was a male. He was standing under a precipitation runoff as some sort of an ablutionary function or perhaps a superstitious rite. The Human sang, and Sera hunkered down to listen. But her hand pressed frond to frond, which made slight noise and changed the silhouette of vegetation against the westering sun.

She saw him tense and look around, and she drew back. When she edged one eye up for another look, he was pressing into the heavier part of

the waterfall, off to the right, where the view was screened from her by the thickness of the foliage and the weight of the water.

This was madness. She should kill him, summon her brother Corg, and eradicate all the rest of them. But there was something about the sounds he made. His "song" was so haunting, so soft and knowing, as if he had been given instruction in the things most intimate to her.

The feelings that stirred in her had no name. Sera pushed forward a little in the undergrowth to hear more before she would be obliged to still that voice forever.

She could hear nothing. She waited, standing on the rim of the waterfall's pool, looking this way and that. With the song ended, a measure of sanity returned. Better to kill the Human now and forget the aberration of his singing.

Two hands closed on her ankles, pulled, and Sera screamed. Then she was swallowing water.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

There were all these escapist books (as Rand called them) at the resort-I couldn't make out the name of the joint too well from the sign, but I think that for some reason or other it was called "Club Mud."

These books were all about what fun. everybody was gonna have living action-packed lives after some global disaster. They didn't mention radiation sickness and self-aborting children and plagues and famine and pillagers and-oh, you jaded oldtimers! I'm sick of you!

Escapist? From hot showers and hot meals and dentists and intercontinental airline flights and inoculations and a planet that belonged to the Human race? Escape me there!

Annie LaBelle, Talking History

Sera opened her eyes and saw a pale face and purple hair riding the water lazily, before her.

Lancer saw an indistinct figure in some sort of body suit. This certainly wasn't an Invid. That didn't mean it couldn't be another turncoat. The person squirmed, blowing breath in silver bubbles of alarm, thrashing to the surface.

Lancer held his captive by one wrist, shaking the water out of his own hair. "All right, pal! You're not going anywhere until...until...Um. You're a woman."

She seemed transfixed, a slim Human female, medium-tall, with short-trimmed blonde hair and the strangest red eyes-the kind of thing you see in a bad flashphoto. Her hairstyle was, even wet, some short, green-blonde upswept thing: Peter Pan Meets the Razor and Car Vacuum People. She was dressed in a bodysuit of colored panels of black, purple, and pink.

Lancer's nerveless fingers had gone limp on her wrist. "Ah wo-mahn?" she repeated back at him, breathing quickly, as nervous as-as someone he

remembered. They were knee-deep in the pool now, and she just stared at him.

She lurched to get away from him, but Lancer cuffed his hand around her wrist again, more astounded than alarmed. "Sorry, but we'll have to know where you're from."

He looked over her dermasuit, a second skin. "At least you're not armed. Or is beauty your weapon?" His lips were close to hers.

She pursed her own, parted them, then suddenly struck at him, and struggled frantically to break free, sobbing.

Rand shook the water out of his thick red hair. Marlene, listening to a shell, flinched a bit as the water hit her but never lost her smile. She laughed at the water that was being sprayed at her; there was light everywhere she looked.

Rand was panting, leaning on the boogyboard he had found in the ruins of the resort. "Scott, you're missing a once-in-a-lifetime chance. Quit pretending to be a sand crab."

"Rand, I am not pretending to be a sand crab. Uh, what is a sand crab?" "What're you talking about? At least take off that dumb flight suit!" Scott had no way of refusing Rand's demands short of physical violence.

Flight suit and all, Rand dragged him into the water. Rook watched them, easing her aching leg and arm. Rand seemed so young and limber and in the water, especially, he seemed slick and carefree as a pink sea otter. What hope could she have for a life with someone like that? He hadn't accumulated the chronicle of sins that she had. Rook sighed.

Scott confessed that he didn't know how to swim; virtually none of the spaceborne generation did. Rand only took that as a challenge to teach him. About thirty seconds of Rand's instruction had Scott spitting water, and heaving, and vowing to stick to solid ground from then on.

Out where the mecha were parked, Lunk was running repairs and listening to Annie's apparently endless heartbreak stories. "I'm beginning to

think I'll die an old maid! I might even wind up as a librarian!"

That comment brought Lunk's head up out of the cockpit of Rook's Alpha, where he had been working. The only meaningful relationship he had had was a romance with a librarian. She was a fiery young woman who knew how to handle a gun and was determined that the books would live and that they would be there when Homo Sapiens eventually started picking up the pieces.

Lunk had had to run, but he had often thought back to the dark-haired, dark-eyed librarian-so impassioned...

He drew a great breath and told Annie, "You're such a heartbreaker, you'll probably get married five or six times. Do me a favor and invite me to every wedding."

She shrieked with laughter, grabbed the thick hair of his sideburns and showered his face with kisses.

Lancer thought he had spied his prey. He dodged into a clearing, but he saw that he had been fooled by a trick of the light. He stopped, froze, then called out, "Wait! I only want to talk to you! There may be Invid nearby! You may be in great danger!"

He heard a thrashing behind him, turned to see the pink along one flank as she ran, and yelled after her even as he sprinted to pursue. "Please stop-"

Sera could have gotten away if she had really wanted to. Why had she lingered? Why had she watched him?

"I just want to know who you are and where you're from! It's very important to me! Hey!"

Lancer could hear her ahead, sobbing and stumbling. He ran with an even breath, hopping some obstacles and ducking others. At last he bounded into a clearing where hot, blinding light shone down on him. He shielded his eyes with the flat of his hand and gazed up.

It was an alien mecha like nothing there had ever been before, anywhere. The late morning sun glinted all around it, and reflected off

enormously strong purple components and pink trim, making the machine-mountain difficult to see.

Lancer blocked the light with his hand, moving a little.

It must have landed while I was swimming, but-it didn't attack me! It seems abandoned. But how could that be? According to all reports the drones are helpless eggs outside their mecha.

He heard a sound and sensed some movement. The young woman stepped out from behind one of the machine's colossal legs. He saw now that the color pattern of her bodysuit reiterated the colors of the alien Trooper.

He stared at her as she watched him silently. "Y-you can't be the pilot!

You're Human, not an Invid drone; where's the pilot, the alien?"

Something galvanized her; she leapt, incredibly high, as the mecha bent toward her, the turret in its muzzle blossoming open to receive her. Rather than the egg-nest described by Rand and Annie, the new Trooper's control nacelle was a padded cockpit completely encased in armor.

Lancer was still yelling to her as the cockpit closed and the Trooper's back and foot thrusters fired up. He was nearly blown from his feet and singed by the backwash; the invader lifted off, leaving the grass burned and smoldering where it had stood.

He blinked, coughing from the smoke and the sand she had kicked up. By the time he opened his eyes again, the Trooper was a diminishing meteor racing to the east.

This is unbelievable! She was the pilot of that mecha! Does this mean Humans are fighting for the Invid?

Shaken by her encounter with Lancer, and unable to unravel the complex series of feelings and impulses that had assailed her, Sera rejoined Corg and the contingent of Shock Troopers. But she made no mention of what had happened and that, too, confused her.

But Corg and the Troopers' sensors had detected Lunk's test activations, as he checked his repair job. Sera had barely rejoined them when they

assumed attack formation and rocketed toward the island where Humans had been sensed.

Rand eased himself into a frayed chaise longue next to Rook. Scott threw himself down on all fours in the sand, resolving never to go swimming in a flight suit again. As he hunched around to sit down, his hand happened to touch Marlene's shoulder.

She gasped as if she had been touched with a live wire, and seemed to go into shock. "Must've pinched some kinda nerve," Rand diagnosed.

"I tell you, I barely touched the woman!" Scott shot back angrily, face reddening at the thought of how he longed to caress her.

"Su-uure, Scott," Rook teased. "Probably just your sexual magnetism." She looked to Marlene, who was gazing into empty air. "This might be a good sign, though, if she's having flashbacks or something; maybe it means her memory's returning."

"I hope so," Scott said, but he wondered if he really did, or if he would be sorry on the day that happened.

Marlene abruptly clutched at her hair. "I feel them coming closer!

They're here!"

But the thunder of the attack had already made the Humans look up. Down through the clouds plunged Corg and Sera, leading their Pincer Ships and Shock Troopers. "Invid squadron heading this way!" Rand hollered, bounding out of his beach chair.

"Invid," Marlene was moaning. "Reflex Point...Regis..."

"We're out of time, but I think we can still make a break for it," Scott said, tight-lipped. "I'll run the boats. Rand, Rook: suit up and make sure you're ready for my signal."

They snapped to it, fast as any Mars Division elite troops, sprinting away, feet throwing up sand. Scott grabbed for Marlene's arm, but this time she showed no reaction to his touch.

The Invid completed several sweeps of the island, preparing to go in

closer. Then they noticed the pair of PT boats moving out to sea at maximum speed.

Corg felt delighted at the chance to slay Humans. With voice and arm signals, he ordered the attack. Pincer Ships followed him for the first pass. Scott, on shore, watched and did his best to evade the enemy's strafing runs, but the jury-rigged remote controls were slow in responding.

Rand and Rook rushed to get into their armor, dragging the camouflage nets off their VTs even while Lunk was working, with infuriating deliberateness, to finish the last of his repairs on Rook's Alpha.

Two passes had both PTs leaking smoke and had blown open the weather bridge on one. Receiving no counterfire, the Invid dropped lower to recon. They saw the boat's wheel moving with no living hand upon it, and noted the remote transmissions it was receiving.

The Regis's voice spoke from their computer/commo net. "Scanners reveal no Human units in target vessels. Warning! Possible strategic entrapment maneuver!"

Scott figured he had played the possum hand for just about all it was worth. Here we go; firing all missiles.

The team had loaded the PT boats' racks with surface-to-air missiles, since surface-to-surface combat was unlikely. Now the launchers rose and traversed and targeted. Guided by their radars, the racks emptied, and sixteen Tarpon heat-seekers came boiling and corkscrewing up at the Invid. Caught by surprise, three of the Pincer Ships were blown to bits. The rest went into evasive maneuvers.

Corg studied the situation. The computer delivered its analysis in the Regis's voice. "Tracking sensors place origin of remote control transmissions at coordinates delta 6-5. Presence of Human life-form at that location is also confirmed. "

Corg's optical sensor showed him another ocean craft, a bigger one,

docked at a quay under a sheltering boatyard roof. Corg dove toward it, with the Pincer Ships and, eventually, Sera failing in behind.

Scott watched as they neared the island.

Lancer charged into the clearing where the VTs were being readied for flight. "I just found out-something horrible," he panted.

Rand was armored, helmet in hands. "What is it? We just sprang the trap!"

"The repairs are all finished and it's time to scramble," Rook added. "What's the problem now?"

Lancer gave them a devastated look. "I just found out that the Invid are using Human pilots!"

Scott sat behind the controls of the cutter's main gun battery, in the forward turret. The pumped-laser cannon was outmoded by Mars Division standards, but it still delivered a terrific shot.

Corg and Sera, dodging the cannon blasts, homed in on the cutter like angry dragonflies. Scott had already shot down one Pincer Ship, but these new mecha were frustratingly fast and maneuverable. Their annihilation disc shots chopped up the water and the quay around the cutter, and Scott clenched his teeth. C'mon Rand! Rook, Lancer! Don't let me down!

Then the VTs were on the scene, closing in on the oncoming Invid, both sides pitching with all the firepower they had. The new-style mecha dodged, but two more Pincer Ships went down. The aliens broke and evaded, scattering to re-form and change their tactics.

Scott knew they would be back shortly though. He pulled himself from the turret as Annie, Marlene, and Lunk hurried over. Lunk tossed his tool cases in the direction of the little stern chopper pad, where his trusty truck was hidden-covered with a tarp in preparation for the voyage.

Scott assured Annie that he was all right and Lunk apologized for the repairs' having taken longer than he expected. Scott gave the big ex-soldier's shoulder a squeeze. "Save your breath; you worked miracles for us, Lunk."

As per plan, Lunk assumed command of the cutter while Scott ran off to get his VT into the air. Just as Annie and Marlene were preparing to help free up the berthing lines, a growling in the air made Lunk look out to sea.

The Pincer Ship Scott had winged, its portside claw missing, trailing smoke and fire, had come around for a suicide run. It was aimed straight for the cutter.

Lunk sent Marlene and Annie to seek shelter, then dove into the forward gun turret and began pounding away at the alien with the pumped-laser cannon. Because the Pincer Ship's aerodynamics had been changed by the damage it had suffered, it bucked and was buffeted by the air, evading Lunk's fire more effectively than it could have if it had been whole.

The alien filled his targeting scope. A moment later the world went dark.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

By this time, the Mars and Venus Divisions should be well engaged in their battle with the Invid, and building toward the final blow at Reflex Point.

Air and ground forces of the Human race, we salute you and send you our best wishes! We know that, in your overwhelming numbers, and with the undeniable power of Human Robotechnology behind you, you will triumph!

Morale twix from Colonel Ackerman (GI staff-SDF-3) to Earth relief strikeforce (never received)

So far the three VTs were winning the air battle. Pincer Ships were no match for VTs in one-on-one dogfights. But the new enemy mecha had been hanging back, studying their opponents; Rand wasn't sure what would happen if they decided to jump in with both feet and a roundhouse swing.

Lancer had taken the Beta up. The purple-and-pink monster machine he had seen on the island came up fast and its back pods gushed forth a torrent of missiles. Lancer went into a ballistic climb, cutting in all his jamming gear, side-slipping, and weaving. Warheads detonated behind him and missiles fizzled past in near misses.

Then Annie's voice came up over the tac net. "Lancer! Come in!" "I'm right here, Annie. What's up?"

"I can't raise Scott. We're on the ship and we're in trouble. Lunk's been

hit!"

"Annie, this is Scott. I just got to my Alpha; I heard your last

transmission."

"Scott, this is Lancer. Hook up our fighters and take the Beta. I'm taking over for Lunk."

It only made sense; aside from Lunk, Lancer was the only one with any real experience at the helm of a large vessel. "I copy, Lancer. Meet you at the cutter."

Seconds later, the Beta settled in on its blasts and lowered the bottom

half of its cockpit like a dinosaur opening its mouth. As the pilot's seat was lowered, Lancer yelled over the tac net to Scott, "It's all yours, pal! Go get 'em!" Then he jumped to the ground and got clear.

The Beta shifted components slightly, preparing for interlock. Scott's Alpha backed in at its nose, tailerons folding, and a complex joining took place in seconds, with a clanging of superhard alloy. The latched fighters formed a single ship that sprang away into the sky at incredible boost.

Lancer ran for the cutter.

Scott scattered the remaining Pincer Ships and the new enemy mecha, intimidating them with the combined fighters' speed and the volume of fire they could spew. Corg and Sera broke in different directions, cautious, deciding to feel out their enemy's strengths and weaknesses-if any.

"Follow me, you guys," Scott radioed to his wingmates. "We'll try to lead them in front of the gunboat-in range for a knockout." He cut in full thrust, rushing to catch up with Rand and Rook. Corg and the two surviving Pincer Ships climbed after, but Sera's mecha poised in midair, as she listened to her computer and the Regis's voice.

"Scanner confirms Human life-forms now aboard third flotation target mecha." Far below, the cutter was underway, racing for the open sea.

Lunk eased his arm in its sling and grated his teeth against the agony of the burns and what he figured was probably a hairline fracture. There were painkiller ampules in the med supplies, but he wanted a clear head for battle.

"Sorry about getting you into this, Lancer." He was crowded into the bridge with Marlene and Annie, all of them doing their best to give Lancer room to man the wheel.

Lancer, helmet cast aside, spared one gauntleted hand from the wheel for a moment, to give a blithe wave. "You did great, Lunk. The cutter's still in one piece, isn't she? I got no complaints."

Indeed. The kamikaze Invid had taken a hit at the last instant and broken up in the water just in front of the cutter's bow, showering it with

flaming wreckage. A chunk of it had hit the optical pickup for the pumpedlaser's scope, blowing it up in Lunk's face. A major piece had hit the turret, throwing the unbelted Lunk out of the gunner's saddle and giving him some considerable lumps and burns-and damaging the main battery beyond repair.

Scott's voice came over the net. "Lancer, Lunk! Heads up! We're going to try to draw the enemy down to you!"

Lancer had barely gotten finished acknowledging and begun preparing for a make-or-break shootout, when something enormous blocked out the sky. Everyone on the bridge cringed, seeing the immense tower of Robotechnology that was Sera's mecha. Lancer tried to reverse-all, hoping he wouldn't blow every bearing in the power train or tear apart a propeller shaft.

It did no good; the alien advanced at what was for it a slow approach-speed, with something like a deliberate vindictiveness. Rather than fire, it drew back one titanic fist, bracing to put it right through the bridge. The freedom fighters could only steel themselves, and dread the impact.

In her cockpit, Sera made an animal snarling, her teeth locked, eyes like red coals of anger fixed on the cutter. So many Pincer drones had died! So many conflicting emotions had interfered with her devotion to her Queen/Mother, the Regis! Now it was time to thrust aside confusion and prosecute the war these Humans seemed determined to fight.

And breaking this toylike water-vessel to bits with her mecha's hands, sending it and its crew to the bottom, was the ideal place to start.

She drew back her mecha's hand, wrapped in a fist the size of an oldtime tank. She could see, through her mecha's eyes, the terrified looks on the faces of the Humans. Three of them dropped to the deck, the fourth clung to the wheel despite the swells set up by her machine's back thrusters. Sera drew a quick, almost whistling breath. The one at the wheel was him, the one with the purple hair who had made those strange, seductive,

achingly beautiful sounds.

Her mecha answered her thought-images; it drew back, hanging there on thrusterfire. Although her mecha was nearly as big as the cutter itself and well able to break it to matchwood, it held back.

Lancer thought about the woman he had confronted in the quiet jungle clearing. Why doesn't she shoot? Who is she, and what's going through her mind? He was frozen at the wheel, waiting for the missile, the annihilation disc, the single blow of a mecha fist that would make four Human Beings into scraps of fishfood.

He wanted more than anything to run from the bridge and scream, Wait! I don't want to be your enemy! I don't want you to be mine!

Sera shrank back from the visual displays before her, eyes still fixed on the male with the purple hair, pressing the back of her hand harshly against her lips, whimpering, sobbing.

Rook's voice came over the tac net. "Lancer, hang on! I'm almost in range!" Lunk's eyes flickered to the target-acquisition displays and saw that there was no alternative; the cutter was helpless before this Invid.

Sera's indecision gave way to conviction. She couldn't harm the man.

All the rest was murky: whys and wherefores and what might happen next. She had failed her Regis; and yet something had been born in her that was herself, that was Sera, and not something that had been put there. It was frightening, and it was at the same time wonderful.

Her mecha was jolted by an Alpha energy volley. She looked and saw Rook diving at her like an angry hawk, going to Battloid. Sera whirled her mecha away, leaking fire and smoke, dodging further damage.

Rook hovered close, confronting her, whamming away with the Battloid's fearsome rifle/cannon. Sera gathered herself and sprang away into the air faster than any rocket, unable to tell if she had won some personal victory or suffered a disastrous defeat-or both.

Lancer watched her go, his heart beating hard, pulse throbbing against

the collar ring of his Robotech armor.

Scott's voice crackled. "Lancer, we're almost to you! Coming into range now! Get set!" Lancer glanced aside; target-acquisition displays had them.

"Ready Scott." He could see the VTs and their Invid pursuers. "Breaking on three! One, two" Lancer clutched the remote firing grip,

his finger curled just off the trigger. "Three!" Scott finished. "Fire!"

But Lancer had seen his three friends break away, and was already triggering. The cutter's fore and aft launchers belched; racks of Tarpons emptied, and thick flights of Copperheads went up as well. "Firing!"

Two Copperheads broke in burning wrack across Corg's mecha but were otherwise insignificant. But other missiles savaged the Pincers that had made it that far, and not a single personal-armor machine survived. Corg's mecha closed its bulky, armored forearms around its cranium, protecting its pilot, while an inferno washed past it. Sera, soaring in to join her brother-unsure of what she would do-pulled clear, as the missiles drew instant lines of contrail across the sky.

Rand, Rook, and Scott stayed out of the demon's brew of detonating warheads until there was quiet again. There was no sign of the enemy anywhere. They banked and headed for the cutter, which sailed along on an impossibly placid ocean, a Pacific unaware of the carnage that had ended seconds before.

Sera landed on a beach from which she could watch the cutter and its accompanying VTs dwindle from sight toward the horizon. Soon Corg landed, and the two skyscraper mecha stood shoulder to shoulder.

"Patrol escorts destroyed," their computers told them in the Queen-Mother's voice. "Abandon further pursuit. Do not risk loss of royal mecha at this time."

Corg emerged from his upholstered nacelle. He was a sharp-featured, handsome young man with lean good looks and mysterious, oblique blue eyes. His shoulderlength hair was blue as well, lying flat and fine against his skull and lending itself to his cruel, ascetic look. He snarled at the escaping

enemy, then looked to his twin's mecha.

Sister, what possessed you? Brother, I-I do not know...

Lancer stood looking out over the fantail, as he had for so much of the voyage. Annie showed up in her usual ebullient mood, rejoicing that land had come into view. He said he would be along to the bridge in a moment. Annie gave him a dubious look, but then frolicked off, ecstatic with the idea of getting away from shipboard confinement.

He brushed the long lavender stands from his face, but the wind only fluttered them back there again.

Who is she? How did I lose a piece of myself so quickly?

"Hard to believe we've come such a long way in such a short time," Rand said, breaking the long silence of the net. He looked over to where Rook cruised close, but she didn't even glance aside at him or otherwise show that she had caught the implication.

Rand trimmed his Alpha. Where Rook was concerned, silence was a kind of a start.

Baja California gleamed ahead. The imperatives of history and the Vision that had moved Zor across the years and light-years were pulling together; their warp and woof were almost complete. What was to be, would be.

But that wasn't how it felt to anyone on the team. If Corg and Sera were confused by Human emotions, the freedom fighters were at least dazed by them, each in his or her own way-arguably, they were disabled in some measure. But if emotions had been taken from them they would have fallen like scythed wheat, and the Third Robotech War would have ended right there and then.

As it had been ordained from the beginning, the deciding force in the

Robotech Wars was something neither side would ever see or understand, but everyone involved had felt it.

And just over the horizon, a Phoenix waited to spread its wings.

End RTUCN.COM

Symphony of Light

By Jack McKinney 1987

For the West Coast contingent: Julia, Jesse, and Daniel

CHAPTER ONE

I am intrigued by these beings and their strange rituals, which center around this plant their language calls "the Flower of Life." This world, Optera, is a veritable garden for the plant in its myriad forms, and the Invid seem to utilize all these for physical as well as spiritual nutrition-they ingest the flower's petals and the fruits of the mature crop, in addition to drinking the plant's psychoactive sap. The Regis, the Queen-Mother of this race, is the key to unlocking Optera's mysteries; and I have set myself the goal of possessing this key-if I have to seduce this queen to make that happen!

Zor's log: The Optera Chronicles

(translated by Dr. Emil Lang)

It was never Scott's intention to make camp at the high pass; he had simply given his okay for a quick food stop-if only to put an end to all the grousing that was going on. Lunk's stomach needed tending to; Annie was restless from too many hours in the APC; and even Lancer was complaining about the wind chill.

Oh, to be back in the tropics, Scott thought wistfully.

He had always been one for wastes and deserts-weathered landscapes, rugged, ravaged by time and the stuff of stars-but only because he knew of little else. Here he had been to the other side of the galaxy and remained the most parochial member of the team in spite of it. But since their brief stopover in the tropics, he had begun to understand why Earth was so revered by the crew of the Expeditionary Mission, those same men and women who had raised him aboard the SDF-3 and watched him grow to manhood on Tirol. In the tropics he had had a glimpse of the Earth they must have been remembering: the life-affirming warmth of its yellow sun, the splendor of its verdant forests, the sweetness of its air, and the miracle that was its wondrous ocean.

Even if Rand had insisted that they try that swimming!

Scott would have almost been willing to trade victory itself for another view of sunset from that Pacific isle...

Instead, he was surrounded by water in the forms more familiar to him: ice and snow. The thrill the team had experienced on reaching the Northlands and realizing that Reflex Point was actually within reach had been somewhat dampened by the formidable range of mountains they soon faced. But Scott was determined to make this as rapid a crossing as was humanly possible. Unfortunately, the humanly possible part of it called for unscheduled stops. It was Lunk's APC that was slowing them down, but there was that old one about a chain being only as strong as its weakest link. The land vehicles were approaching the summit of the mountain highway now. Rook and Lancer, riding Cyclones, were escorting the truck along the mostly ruined switchback road that led to the pass. The ridgeline above was buried under several feet of fresh snow, but the vehicles were

making good progress on the long grade nonetheless.

Scott was overhead in the Beta, with Rand just off the fighter's wingtip. Short on fuel canisters, they had been forced to leave Rook's red Alpha behind, concealed in the remains of a school gymnasium building in the valley. Scott planned to retrieve it just as soon as they located a Protoculture supply ripe for pilfering. Down below, Annie and Marlene were waving up at the VTs from the back seat of the APC; Scott went on the mecha's tac net to inform Lunk that a rest stop was probably in order.

The two Robotech fighters banked away from the mountain face to search out a suitable spot, and within minutes they were reconfiguring to Guardian mode and using their foot thrusters to warm a reasonably flat area of cirque above the road and just shy of the saddle. By the time they put down, the sun had already dropped below one of the peaks, but the temperature was still almost preternaturally warm. The weather was balmy enough for the two pilots to romp around in their duotherm suits, especially with the added luxury of residual heat from the snow-cleared moraine. There was a strong breeze rippling over the top of the col, but it carried with it the scent of the desert beyond.

The rest of the team joined them in a short time. Lunk, Rook, and Lancer began to unload the firewood they had hauled up from the tree line, while Rand went to work on the deer he had shot and butchered. Moonrise fringed the eastern peaks in a kind of silvery glow and found the seven freedom fighters grouped around a sizzling fire. The northern sky's constellations were on display. Scott had developed a special fondness for the brilliant stars of the southern hemisphere, but Gemini and Orion were reassuring for a different reason: They reinforced the fact that Reflex Point was close at hand. He had to admit, however, that it was foolish to be thinking of the Invid central hive as some sort of end in itself, when really their arrival there would represent more in the way of a beginning. He wondered whether the rest of the team understood this-that the mission, as loose as it was, was focused on destroying the hive, or at the very least accumulating as much recon data as possible to be turned over to Admiral Hunter when the Expeditionary Force returned to Earth for what would surely be the final showdown.

Glancing at his teammates, Scott shook his head in wonder that they had made it as far as they had, a group of strangers all but thrown together on a journey that had so far covered thousands of miles.

Scott regarded Lunk while the big, brutish man was laughing heartily, a shank of meat gripped in his big hand. He had done so much for the team, yet he still seemed to carry the weight of past defeats on his huge shoulders. Then there was Annie, their daughter, mascot, mother, in the green jumpsuit that had seen so much abuse and the ever-present E.T. cap that crowned her long red hair. She had almost left them a while back, convinced she had found the man of her dreams in the person of a young primitive named Magruder. It wasn't the first time she had wandered away, but she always managed to return to the fold, and her bond with Lunk was perhaps stronger than either of them knew.

Rand and Rook, who could almost have passed for siblings, had had their moments of doubt about the mission as well. They had formed a fiery partnership, one that seemed to rely on strikes and counterstrikes; but it

was just that unspoken pact that kept them loyal to the team, if only to prove something to each other.

More than anyone, Lancer had remained true to the cause. Scott had grown so accustomed to the man's lean good looks, his lavender-tinted shoulder-length hair and trademark headband, that he had almost forgotten about Yellow Dancer, Lancer's alter ego. That feminine part of the Robotech rebel was all but submerged now, especially so since the tropics, when something had occurred that had left Lancer changed and Scott wondering.

But the most enigmatic among them was the woman they had named Marlene. She was not really a member of the team at all but the still shell-shocked victim of an Invid assault, the nature of which Scott could only guess. It had robbed her of her past but left her with an uncanny ability to sense the enemy's presence. Her fragile beauty reminded Scott of the Marlene in his own past, killed when the Mars Division strike force had first entered Earth's atmosphere almost a year ago...

"You know, just once I'd like to sit down and eat steak until I pass out," Lunk was saying, tearing into the venison like some ravenous beast.

"Just keep eating like you're eating and you might get your wish," Rand told him, to everyone's amusement.

"I've never met anyone who had such a thing for food," Rook added, theatrically amazed, strawberryblond locks caught in the firelight.

Scott poured himself a cup of coffee and waited for the laughter to subside. "You know, Lunk, we've still got a full day left in these mountains, so I'd save some of that for tomorrow if I were you." Always the team leader, he told himself. But it never seemed to matter all that much.

"Well, you're not me, Scott," Lunk said, licking his fingertips clean. "Sorry to report that I've eaten it all."

"You can always catch a rabbit, right, Lunk?" Lancer told him playfully.

Annie frowned, thinking daunt just how many rabbits they had dined on these past months. "I'm starting to feel sorry for rabbits."

Rand made a lace. "They like it when one of them gets caught, Annie. It gives them a chance to go back to the hutch and-"

Rook elbowed him before he could get the word out, but the team had already discerned his meaning and was laughing again.

Even Marlene laughed, eyes all wrinkled up, luxuriant hair tossed back. Scott was watching her and complimenting Rand at the same time, when he saw the woman's joyous look begin to collapse. Marlene went wide-eyed for a moment, then folded her arms across her chest as though chilled, hands clutching her trembling shoulders.

"Marlene," Annie said, full of concern.

"Are you feeling sick or something?" Lunk asked.

But Lancer and Scott had a different interpretation. They exchanged wary looks and were already reaching for their holstered hip howitzers when Scott asked: "Are the Invid coming back, Marlene? Do you feel them returning?"

"Form up!" Rand said all at once, pulling back from the circle. "Weapons ready!"

Annie went to Marlene's side while the others drew their weapons and got to their feet, eyes sweeping the snow and darkness at the borders of the firelight. "Anyone hear anything?" Rand whispered. No one did; there was just the crackling of the fire and the howl of the wind. Rand had the H90 stiff-armed in front of him and only then, a few feet away from the fire, began to sense how cold it was getting. There was moisture in the wind now and light snow in the air. Behind him, he heard Rook breathe a sigh of relief and reholster her wide-bore. When he turned back to the fire, she was down on one knee alongside Marlene, stroking the frightened woman's long hair soothingly.

"It's all right, Marlene. Believe me, you don't have a thing to worry about. We're safe now, really."

Marlene whimpered, shaking uncontrollably. "What's wrong with me, Rook? Why do I feel like this?"

"There's nothing wrong with you. You just have to understand that you had a terrible shock, and it's going to take a while to get over it."

Lancer put away his weapon and joined Rook. "Maybe I can help," he

told her. Then, gently: "Marlene, it's Lancer. Listen, I know what you're going through. It's painful and it frightens you, but you have to be strong. You have to survive, despite the pain and fear."

"I know," she answered him weakly, her head resting on her arms. "Just have faith that it'll get better. Soon it'll get better for all of us." Still vigilant, Rand and Scott watched the scene from across the fire.

The young Forager made a cynical sound. "That sounds a little too rich for my blood."

"Optimistic or not, Rand, he's right," Scott returned.

Rand's eyes flashed as he turned. "I only wish I felt that confident."

Not far from the warmth and light of the fire, something monstrous. was pushing itself up from beneath the snow-covered surface. It was an unearthly ship of gleaming metals and alloys, constructed to resemble a life-form long abandoned by the race that had fashioned it. To Human eyes it suggested a kind of bipedal crab with massive triple-clawed pincer arms and armored legs ending in cloven feet. There was no specific head, but there were aspects of the ship's design that suggested one, central to which was a single scanner that glowed red like some devilish mouth when the craft was inhabited. And flanking that head were two organic-looking cannons, each capable of delivering packets of plasma fire in the form of annihilation discs.

Originally a race of shapeless, protoplasmic creatures, the creators of the ship, the Invid, had since evolved to forms more compatible with the beings they were battling for possession of Earth. This creative transformation of the race had its beginnings on a world as distant from Earth as this new form was distant from the peaceful existence the Invid had once known. But all this went back to the time before Zor arrived on Optera; before the Invid Queen-Mother, the Regis, had been seduced by him; and before Protoculture had been conjured from the Flower of Life...

The Regis had failed in countless attempts at fashioning herself in Zor's image but had at last succeeded in doing so with one of her children-the

Simulagent Ariel, whom the Humans called Marlene. Then, upon losing her through a trick of fate, the Queen-Mother had created Corg and Sera, the warrior prince and princess who were destined to rule while the Regis carried on with the experiment that would one day free her race from all material constraints.

It was Sera's ship that surfaced next, the heat of its sleek hull turning the glacial ice around its feet to slush. Purple and trimmed in pink, the craft was more heavily armed than its companion ship, with a smaller head area sunk between massive shoulders and immensely strong arms. Momentarily, four additional ships of the more conventional design surfaced around the Humans and their windblown fire.

Sera heard the Queen-Mother's command emanate through the bio-construct ship that had led the squad to the high pass.

"All Scouts and Shock Troopers: you may move into your attack positions at this time! Sera, you will now take command. You are personally responsible for the elimination of these troublesome insurgents."

Sera signaled her understanding with a nod of her head toward the cockpit's commo screen. She had dim memories of a time not long ago when she had fought against these Humans in a different climate, and accompanying this was a dim recollection of failure: of Shock Trooper ships in her charge blown to pieces, of an inability on her part to perform as she had been instructed by the Regis...But all this was unclear and mixed with a hundred new thoughts and reactions that were vying for attention in her virgin mind.

"As you command, Regis," she responded as confidently as she was able, her scanners focused on the seven Humans huddled around the fire. "We now have them completely surrounded. And with our superior abilities, we will succeed in carrying out your...your orders." Somewhat more mechanically, she added, "Nothing will stop us."

Had the Regis heard her falter? Sera asked herself. She waited for some suggestion of displeasure, but none was forthcoming. It was only then that she allowed herself to increase the magnification of her scanner and zero in

on the Human whose face had caused her lapse of purpose.

It's him! she thought, once again taking in the fine features of the one whose strange, seductive, and achingly beautiful sounds had drawn her to that jungle pool; the one who had surprised her there, stood naked before her, holding her in the grip of his strong hands and assaulting her with questions she could not answer. And it was this same Human she had glimpsed later during the heat of battle when her own hand had betrayed her...

"Sera! You're waiting too long!" the Regis shouted through the bio-construct's comlink.

Sera felt the strength of the Queen-Mother begin to creep into her own will and force her hand toward the weapon's trigger stud, but one part of her struggled against it, and at the last moment, even as the weapon was firing, she managed to swing the ship's cannon aside, so that the shot went astray...

Lancer was just commenting on the beauty of the snowfall when the first enemy blast struck, flaring overhead and erupting like a midnight sun in the snowfields near the grounded VTs-a single short burst of annihilation discs that had somehow missed their mark. Scott was the first to react, propelling himself out of the circle into a tuck-and-roll, which landed him on his knees in the perimeter snow, his MARS-Gallant handgun raised. But before he could squeeze off a quantum of return fire, a second Invid volley skimmed into the team's midst, sending him head over heels and flat on his face. He inhaled a faceful of snow and rolled over in time to see a series of explosions rip through the camp, brilliant white geysers leaping from plasma pools of hellfire. On the ridgeline he caught a brief glimpse of an Invid Trooper before it was eclipsed by clouds of swirling snow.

The rest of the team had already scattered for cover. Scott spied Lancer hunkering down behind an arc of moraine slide and yelled for him to stay put as Invid fusillades swooshed down into a gully below the ridge, throwing up a storm of ice and shale. Rand, meanwhile, was closing on the

Alpha Fighter, discs nipping at his boot heels from two Invid Troopers who had positioned themselves just short of the saddle. Running a broken course through the snow, he clambered up onto the nose of the Veritech and managed to fling open its canopy. But the next instant he was flat on his back beneath the radome of the fighter, a Shock Trooper towering above him. Frantically, Rand brought his hands to his face, certain the Trooper's backhand pincer swipe had opened him up. But the thing had missed.

Now, he thought, all I've gotta do is keep from being roasted alive!

Radiant priming globes had formed at the tip of the cannon muzzles; as these winked out, platters of blinding orange light flew toward him like some demon's idea of Frisbee. Rand cursed and rolled, thinking vaguely back to that deer he had killed down below...

Two hundred yards away Scott was on his feet, blasting away at the Invid command ship positioned on the ridge. Unless his eyes betrayed him, it was the same ship that had been sent against them during their ocean crossing to the Northlands. And that was a bad sign indeed, because it meant that the Regis had finally gotten around to singling the team out as a quarry worthy of pursuit. He squinted into the storm and fired, uncertain if the ship was still there. The wind had picked up now, and icy flakes of biting snow were adding to the chaos. From somewhere nearby he heard Lancer shout: "Behind you, Scott!" and swung around to face off with a Trooper that was using the Veritechs for cover. Scott traded half a dozen shots with it before a deafening explosion threw him violently out of the fray; he felt an intense flashburn against his back and was eating snow a moment later. Coming to, he had a clear view of the ridge, of the pastel-hued command ship standing side by side with a somewhat smaller Trooper. The Trooper had lifted off by the time Scott scrambled to his feet; it put down in front of him, sinking up to its articulated knee joints in the snow. Scott stumbled backward, searching for cover, while the Invid calmly raised its clawed pincer for a downward strike.

A short distance away, Rook sucked in her breath as she witnessed Scott narrowly escape decapitation. Fortunately, the snow beneath his feet

had given way and he had fallen backward into a shallow ravine at the same moment the Trooper's claw had descended. But now the thing was poised on the edge of the hollow, preparing to bring its cannons into play. Rook turned her profile to the ship, the H90 long gun gripped in her extended right hand, and fired two blasts. Given the near-blizzard conditions, it was too much to ask that her shots find any vulnerable spots-although her second burst almost made a hole through the ship's eyelike scanner. The Trooper swung toward her, almost the impatient turn one would direct toward a mischievous child, and loosed two discs in response, one of which tore into the earth twenty yards in front of her with enough charge to blow her off her feet.

By now, five Invid Troopers had put down in the cirque; their colorful commander was still on the ridge monitoring the scene. The team, meanwhile, had been herded toward the steep glacial slope at the basin's edge. Scott leapt up out of his hollow after Rook took the heat off him and waved everyone toward his position. "Everyone over the side!" he yelled into the wind. "Slide, down the slope back to the tree line!"

"But the mecha!" Rand returned, gesturing back to the basin. "Forget it! We've gotta make for the woods!"

Scott saw Annie go over the side and ride down the chute on her butt, trailing a scream that was half fear, half thrill. Lancer and Marlene took to the slope next, then Lunk and Rand. Scott waved them on, yelling all the while and triggering the handgun for all it was worth against the Invid who had nearly taken his head off a few moments before. He managed a lucky shot that blew the thing's leg off, and it settled down into the basin snow and exploded.

Only Scott and Rook remained in the cirque now, along with the four undamaged Troopers that were moving toward them with evil intent.

"Rook! Are you all right?!" Scott yelled.

She gave him the okay sign and started to make her way toward his position, pivoting once or twice to get a shot off at her pursuers. The Invid were pouring a storm of discs at them, so they had to flatten themselves

every so often as they attempted to close on the chute. Scott continued to send out what his blaster could deliver and wasn't surprised to see the enemy split ranks and head off for a flanking maneuver. Rook was a few yards in front of him when the two of them went over the side. Scott tried to dig his heels in, then realized why the rest of the team had disappeared so quickly. Under a thin layer of snow the chute was a solid sheet of glacial ice.

Sera saw the apparent leader of the group whipping down the slope and lifted off to pursue him. She paused briefly on the edge of the slide to issue instructions to her troops, then engaged the thrusters that would send her down toward the tree line along the Humans' course.

Although Lancer might have given Sera pause, she had no bonds with the rest of the team. She came alongside Scott, realizing that he could see her through the command ship's transparent bubble, and trained her cannons on him. But at the last minute, Scott's heels found a bit of purchase and he suddenly ended up somersaulting out of harm's way, each of Sera's shots missing him as he rolled down the slope.

The Invid princess came to a halt at the bottom of the chute where the others had taken up positions behind groupings of terminal moraine boulders. Lunk was loosing bursts against the cockpit canopy that made it impossible for Sera to tell in which direction the leader had headed.

Sera allowed the brutish Human to have his way for an instant, then turned on him, aware of the blood lust she felt in her heart. But all at once one of the Human's teammates ran from cover and pushed the big one off his feet and out of the path of her shots. Angered, Sera traversed the command ship's cannons to find him, realizing only then that it was the lavender-haired Human.

Her hand remained poised above the weapon's ovalshaped trigger, paralyzed.

Elsewhere, the rebels and Shock Troopers continued to trade fire. Marlene cowered behind a boulder as lethal packets of energy

crisscrossed overhead, her hands pressed to her head, as if she were fearful of some internal explosion.

"Fight or die!" she screamed, her words lost to the storm. "There must be another way...another life!"

Then, a moment later, the fighting itself surrendered. Scott heard an intense rumbling above him and looked up in time to see enormous chunks of ice fall from the buttresses surrounding the cirque, avalanching down into the basin, scattering the Invid Troopers and burying the Cyclones and Veritechs under tons of crystalline snow.

CHAPTER TWO

Scott had assumed that the "waning" [sic] of Yellow Dancer had something to do with Lancer's infatuation with Marlene; but while Scott was certainly on the right track, he had the wrong cause-a fact that contributed to the rivalries that arose later on. Had the two men sat down and talked things out, perhaps they would have realized that Marlene was not the amnesiac Scott wanted to believe she was, nor Sera the Human pilot Lancer assumed her to be. Time and time again this failure to communicate would undermine the team's movement toward unity, right to the end.

Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

It was Scott's idea that they separate into three groups. The avalanche had indeed buried the VTs and Cyclones, but at the same time it had forced the Invid out of the basin area and bought some breathing space for the team. Reunited, they had picked their way farther down the mountainside, splitting up when they reached the tree line. There they left obvious evidence of their separate paths in the snow, hoping the Invid commander would similarly redeploy her Troopers. This way, Scott hoped, his irregulars would stand a better chance of circling back to the chute and retrieving the mecha.

Somehow.

The squall had moved through, but the temperature had actually risen a couple of degrees. Nevertheless, the freedom fighters were soaked to the skin and feeling the chill. Annie felt it more than the others-her jumpsuit had little of the thermal protection afforded Rook by the Cyclone bodysuit, and she simply wasn't as inured to the cold as Rand. As a result, she had ridden piggyback into the woods, her shaking arms draped around Rand's neck.

"It'll get better when we get into the trees," Rand had assured her. "I can't promise you a fire right away, but at least you'll be out of this wind."

At this point Rand had no real plan beyond finding temporary shelter where they could regain some of their strength. All of them had taken a beating, and Rook had some severe facial burns. Rand didn't imagine that Scott and Lunk were in much better shape, and even though Lancer had been spared real harm, he had Marlene to look out for, which was in some ways worse than being out there alone. Rand had berated himself for having left his survival pack in the Alpha. For the past few weeks he had been complaining to Scott that everyone was becoming too reliant on the mecha systems for survival, and now here he was out in the woods with nothing more than a handgun and his fenceman's tool. But a few steps down the, forest's wide trail his attitude began to improve considerably, especially after he spied the snare.

Evidently at one time the place had been occupied by others who were less than sympathetic to the Invid. There were three small, almost igloolike shelters containing foodstuffs, tools, and lengths of cord and cable, but more important, the trees along the trail had been rigged to repel intruders.

Rand left Annie in Rook's care in one of the shelters and went off into the moonlight to investigate. That the designers of the traps had been after big game was immediately obvious, but each of the tree and cable mechanisms was in need of attention, and Rand realized that he was going to have to work fast if the snares were to serve their purpose. So while Rook and Annie warmed themselves, he went to work replacing worn cables, resecuring counterbalances, and sharpening stakes. He had to fell several medium-size trees, but he had been careful to select only those that would topple with the least amount of noise. And thus far there had been no sign of the Invid.

He was busy on a final piece of handiwork now, down on his knees in the snow using cutters on the cable that guyed the central snare.

"Aren't you finished yet?" he heard Rook ask behind him.

He turned from his task to give her a wry look. She was ten feet away, arms folded and a smirk on her face. "Hope you and Mint have been comfortable," he answered with elaborate concern.

Rook made an affected gesture. "Oh, we'll manage until the servants arrive. Have you been having fun with your cat's cradle?"

Rand twisted a final piece of cable around itself and stood up, regarding the contraption in a self-satisfied way.

"Sometimes I amaze myself."

Rook walked over and gave the wire a perplexed tug. "This is the better mousetrap you promised us?"

"You two just stay put in the shelter and leave the metal nightmares to me, okay?"

She scowled. "Your confidence is underwhelming." "Pretend to believe in me," he quipped.

Just then Annie ran into the clearing, breathless and pointing back toward the foot of the chute.

"They're coming!"

Rand told Rook to see if she could do something about the tracks they had left in the snow, so she and Annie went to work with conifer switches while he smoothed the snow around the snare. He briefed his teammates on its workings and ran rapidly through the contingency plan he hoped they wouldn't have to resort to. Fifteen minutes later, he was climbing up into one of the trees and Annie and Rook were back in the shelter.

Rand squirreled around a bit until he found a good place for himself in the upper branches, then cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, "Help! Help me, I'm hurt!" directing his false alarm along the trail that led to the base of the snowslide. Rook and Annie heard his call and hunkered down in the shelter, peering out at the clearing through a narrow slot in the wall. Soon they heard the sound of heavy footfalls, and a Trooper lumbered into the clearing, its blood-red scanner searching the trees.

Rand drew his H90 and reminded himself to remain calm. He could see that the Trooper was following the footprints they had purposely left intact on the trail.

"A little farther..." Rand encouraged, whispering to himself through gritted teeth.

The Invid took two more perfectly placed steps, which brought each of its cloven feet down into the trap's ring mechanisms. Cables cinched and tightened, while others grew taut, straining at turnbuckles and activating pulleys that had been concealed high in the surrounding branches. Elsewhere, poles and trees began to spring loose, groaning as they straightened up, released at last from their bowed bondage. The Trooper's feet were pulled out from under it, and suddenly it was being hauled into the air, captive and inverted.

Grinning in delight, Rand moved out onto the branch to view the hapless thing's ascent. But a moment later his smile was collapsing: the snare had been well engineered but underbuilt. Either that or the lashed trees had seen too many seasons. One after another they were beginning to splinter under the Trooper's weight; cables stretched and snapped, and pulleys were ripped from their moorings. As the ship plummeted headfirst toward the snow, Rand armed his weapon and squeezed off four quick shots, only one of which connected. But all that served to do was alert the Invid to his presence. Before he could react, the Trooper's cannons came to life and discharged a blast that connected squarely with the trunk a few feet below his shaky perch. The tree came apart, and Rand and the upper section were blown backward by the explosion.

He and the Trooper hit the ground at almost the same instant, both of them knocked senseless by their falls. But the Invid was the first to stir. As the Trooper rose slowly to its feet, Rook and Annie saw the ship's scanner wink into awareness. Rand was still unconscious, facedown in the snow, one outstretched arm hooked around the base of the tree he had slammed into on his way down. Annie began to scream.

Horrified, Rook watched the Invid take three forward steps and position itself over her fallen teammate. She barreled out of the shelter, yelling for Rand to wake up, raising her blaster even as the Trooper was raising its claw. She had to put five shots into the alien's back before it swung around, and when it did, it was clever enough to use its pincer as a shield. Undaunted, Rook continued to fire until she saw those telltale globes

of priming light form at the ship's cannons; then she spun around and hastily tried to retreat. The Invid dropped her with a disc that threw her into a headlong crash. She rolled over, struggling to regain her breath as the Trooper approached, uncertain if she should be thankful that the thing had let her live. Suddenly she heard Annie's taunting voice close by and watched amazed as her diminutive friend began to pelt the towering ship with snowballs.

Rook raised herself and resumed fire, hoping to draw the Invid's attention before Annie succeeded in enraging it. Rand had meanwhile come around and was contributing his own bursts, and together they somehow managed to send the Trooper to its knees.

"Go, go!" Rand yelled, motioning Rook and Annie past him.

They both knew what he was up to and broke for the trail where Rand had rigged the second trap. Rook turned around to see if he was following.

"I'm right behind you!" she heard him yell.

And so was the Trooper, looming up over them and the trees, monstrous-looking in the moonlight, like the nightmare it was.

But it performed just as Rand had expected, stepping boldly along the path, unaware that one area held a special surprise. And in a moment the Trooper was sinking to its waist through the snow, down into a pit that had been dug underneath the trail.

"Cut your lines!" Rand shouted to the women.

Rook ran to the area he had indicated and drew her knife. She severed the cables as he called out the numbers. Instantly, sharpened logs swung down toward the trapped Trooper from the surrounding treetops. Thrusters blazing against the pit's hold, the Invid dodged the first two and parried the third with its pincer targone, but the fourth punched through the ship's scanner and immobilized it. The Trooper was lifted up out of the pit and sent flat on its back in the trail. The sharpened log protruded out of its blood-red eye like a stake thrust into a vampire's heart.

"God...we did it," Annie said in disbelief.

Rook wiped sweat from her brow. "Too close this time, just too close."

"Not bad." Rand smiled, striding over to the bleeding ship. "A bit primitive perhaps, but I had confidence in it.

Rook scoffed at him. "Sure thing, Rand. And I suppose almost getting yourself killed was part of the plan?"

"That's always part of my plan," he told her. "Just to impress you a bit." "You're never scared?" Annie said, taken in.

Rook looked over at Rand, then down at Annie. "Only when no one's looking at him," she told her.

Somewhat closer to the chute, Scott and Lunk were attempting to bring their own primitive plan into play. They had skirted the edge of the woods, keeping themselves just above the tree line, then worked back toward the western buttress of the cirque. As hoped, the Invid commander had split its forces-her forces, Scott was now telling himself-but two of the four Troopers had picked up their trail and were narrowing the gap.

The avalanche had touched off secondary slides in several of the tributary crevasses below the basin, and in one of these, an exposed grouping of moraine boulders perched precariously above the gully's narrow floor. Scott thought that if they could lure the Troopers into the ravine, then somehow manage to loosen those boulders...

Lunk was skeptical, but he didn't see that there were any alternatives. The VTs and Cyclones hadn't been completely buried by the snow, but they couldn't even think about reaching them until they had cut the enemy down to size. So he volunteered to go up top and see if he could pry some of the rocks free, while Scott set out to bait the two enemy ships.

Lunk had found what he considered to be a persuasive boulder that would force the entire group into a slide, and he had his shoulder to it when Scott entered the ravine at a run, the Troopers right behind him. The lieutenant reached the end of the ravine and turned to fire a few shots at his pursuers, meant more to antagonize than to inflict any damage. But more than that, Scott's short burst was aimed at keeping the Troopers at bay for just the few seconds Lunk needed to send the boulder crashing down

toward them.

"Hurry!" Lunk heard between H90 reports. "They're in position!"

Lunk shoved his bare shoulder to the stone, boots trying to find purchase in the snow. Down below, one of the Troopers opened fire on Scott. The anni discs threw up a fountain of snow that momentarily buried him, but Lunk saw Scott shake himself out of it. And perhaps it was the sight of his friend's peril that gave him the extra push he needed, because all at once the boulder was toppling over and commencing its slide and tumble toward the pack.

Scott heard the rock impact the mass and decided to help things along by training his weapon on the ledge itself. The charges from his MARS-Gallant did what sheer momentum alone couldn't, and in a moment the whole mass was avalanching toward the bottom of the ravine with a ground-shaking, deafening roar. Scott threw himself up the opposing slope, figuring the Invid would blast free of the ravine, giving him and Lunk a chance to reach the VTs. He never hoped they would actually catch the Troopers unaware, but that was exactly what happened. They had both tried to lift off, but the bounding rocks had shattered the ships' sensors, and in the confusion the things got caught up in the slide and were overturned and buried.

When the snow settled, Lunk appeared at the top of the ravine, a triumphant look on his face.

"Not bad, eh, Commander?!" he yelled down.

Scott surveyed the damage they had wrought and could only regard it in wonder. "Yeah, great, pal," he called back. "Just like we planned."

Lancer and Marlene had run clear through a finger of woods. They were not far from Rand and the others, but their trail had led them to the edge of a deep gully, with a river of snow several hundred feet below them. They had no way of knowing that the one Trooper on their tail was the last of the four.

Marlene seemed unaware of where she was or what it was they were

running from. Lancer had simply pulled her along like a helpless child, often shielding her with his body from debris flung up by the Trooper's discs. But now all he could do was gaze hopelessly across the ten feet of empty space that separated them from the gully's opposite face.

"Maybe if we hurry we can double back around," Lancer told her, trying to make it sound feasible.

But as he took hold of her thin wrist again and prepared to set off, he saw the Trooper emerging from the woods, closing in on them fast. Marlene understood that they would have to jump across the abyss. She nodded to Lancer, her forehead wrinkled up in apprehension.

They gave themselves several yards of runway and made a mad dash toward the ledge, hand in hand as they soared across the chasm. And they almost made it. But they fell short by a foot, catching hold of the edge-which was really little more than snow-and falling backward to what they thought would be the chasm bottom. Instead, however, they landed on a narrow ledge approximately ten feet below the lip.

Lancer was thinking that things couldn't get much worse, but of course they could. Above them, the Invid command ship came into view. But to his surprise, he watched as the control nacelle sprang open and a Human pilot jumped down from the padded cockpit. It was the same brainwashed captive he had seen on the island: a slim female of medium height with punked out greenblond hair and eyes as red as a Trooper's scanner. She wore a bodysuit of colored panels that emphasized the body's major muscle groups in swaths of black, purple, and pink-like the colors of the command ship itself.

"I know you," Lancer called to her as she peered down at them. "Why are you fighting for the Invid?"

The woman's only response was to mock him with a short laugh.

Lancer pointed at her accusingly. "You're a traitor! Answer me: Why are you fighting for them?"

Sera continued to stare at the Human, angered and confused at the same time. I should destroy this thing called man, she thought. But for

some reason I cannot.

The Trooper who had pursued Lancer and Marlene through the woods appeared on the opposite ledge now, but it, too, held its fire.

Lancer regarded the ship warily, then swung back around to confront the woman, who was obviously in command of the situation. "Can't you understand me?!" he demanded. When he failed to get a response, he altered his tone to one of cynical surrender. "Then get it over with. But spare this woman. She's done no wrong."

Marlene and Sera met each other's gaze. And during the exchange, which Lancer thought brief, a wealth of racial memories was transmitted.

That face...thought Marlene. It's as though time has stopped and I can look into my past and my future simultaneously...

Sera's face had dissolved, but Marlene seemed to follow those flashphoto eyes on a journey through space and time. Cosmic vistas opened up before her, stains and weblike filigrees of brilliantly hued clouds, swirls and spirals of galactic stuff strewn like diamonds on velvet. She beheld a vision of Optera through Sera's eyes, of the Invid as they were before the coming of Zor, of the Flowers before the Fall. Then Sera's unconscious unlocked for her the horrors of days since. Marlene saw the quest for their stolen grail; the transmutation of the race to an army of relentless warriors, burdened with a need for mecha and Protoculture that rivaled the Masters' own; the trip across the galaxy to this planet they now called their own; and the dispossession of its indigenous beings, just as they themselves had once been dispossessed...

And there was a voice in Marlene's mind-one that she could not identify but that at the same time seemed to be her own:

"Reach into the cosmic consciousness of your race, Ariel," the voice told her. "And although you feel you are dreaming, watch send observe the beauty of your home. For we are a race of powerful beings destined to control the universe with our intellect and power, and you, Ariel, are a part of that power. Come back to us, my child; come back, Ariel, and rejoin the hive..."

Marlene stared at Sera as her face took form once again, the journey through space-time concluded, and thought: I know her: we're like sisters somehow...

Then without warning, explosions were rocking the ledge and erupting around the base of Sera's command ship. Scott and the rest of the team had positioned themselves on the ridgeline above the gully and were firing bursts against the command ship and its sole minion.

Momentarily confused by the renewed fighting, Sera broke off her contact with Marlene and returned to the cockpit of her ship, lifting off at once and joining her charge on the opposite side of the chasm. But no sooner did she touch down than the ledge gave way and the two dropped together, impacting rocks and outcroppings as they fell.

Lunk and Rand pulled Lancer and Marlene to safety. It seemed unbelievable that they had all survived and that all their crazed plans had worked. But even more unsettling was the Human pilot who had once again demonstrated a bewildering ambivalence. Scott refused to believe that the woman had purposely stayed her hand; he pointed out how she had fired on him earlier without compunction. Lancer, however, knew better than to accept Scott's explanation that the woman had been distracted by their sudden fire. And he also saw that something inexplicable had transpired between the woman and Marlene. Both Rand and Annie had been touched by the Invid consciousness in the past, but their psychic encounters had been brief and transient. Marlene, on the other hand, had been profoundly affected.

"I don't belong with you," Marlene told Lancer later, when the others had moved off in the direction of the buried mecha. "Please, Lancer, I'll just bring trouble for all of you..."

He tried to comfort her as best he could by offering himself as her protector. And that did seem to calm her a bit. But it brought him little succor.

Who would be next to feel the enemy's mind probe? he wondered, shivering as he led Marlene away from the abyss.

CHAPTER THREE

In quieter moments I find myself wondering about the men and women I have served with during these long campaigns. I think about the ones left behind, like Max and Miriya, and the ones sent away, like John Carpenter, Frank Tandler, Owen, and the rest. The list goes on and on. Would I have joined that crew had it not been for the Sentinels; abandoned these dark domains for even a chance at seeing Earth's blue skies once again? I think: Absolutely. But what can my homeworld offer me now? Certainly not peace, that endangered species. Retirement, perhaps. How Lisa would laugh!

Admiral Hunter, as quoted in

Selig Kahler, The Tirolian Campaign

Freeing the Veritechs and Cyclones from the snowslide proved to be a greater challenge than anyone had expected. The team brought the collective heat of their MARS-Gallant H90 hand blusters to bear against the massive chunks of ice that had been loosed during the avalanche, by sunrise they had succeeded in defrosting the Alpha Fighter. Tango-9 explosive and the VT's thrusters did the rest of the work in a tenth the time, but Annie and Marlene sustained mild cases of frostbite nonetheless. And despite Scott's optimistic projection, it took the team several false starts and another two days to cross the Sierra range. But waiting for them was the desert with those warm highland winds, and with it came a renewed sense of purpose and determination.

This was the same arid expanse crossed by pioneers and adventurers during North America's push toward its western horizon, but few would have recognized it as such. Over the course of the last two decades the region had seen periods of devastation to rival those of its geoformative years. Dolza's fleet of four million had not overlooked the cities that had grown up here, and neither had Khyron after New Macross had risen to the fore. Vast stretches of the territory were cratered from the thousands of

annihilation bolts rained upon it, host still to equal numbers of rusting Zentraedi dreadnoughts, thrust like war lances into the ravaged land. Just north of the team's present route were the remains of Monument City, which had played such a pivotal role in the Second Robotech War.

Population centers had grown up in some of the craters, but most of these were abandoned now, their onetime residents returned to life-styles more befitting the territory's original nomadic tribespeople than the Robotechnologists who had once tried to breathe new life into the wastes.

Scott had listened intently to Lancer and Lunk's information; he of course had read and heard accounts of Macross and Monument, and the team's propinquity to those legendary cities filled him with an awe usually reserved for sacred places and archeological power spots. It made him think about the long road that had taken him back to this land of his parents' birth and the treacherous one that lay ahead. The team was close to Reflex Point now-the presence of an Invid tower assured him of this much-but he had to wonder how many more twists and turns they would have to negotiate before they stood at the portal of the Regis's central hive, how many Invid stood in their way, and how many more deaths their journey would entail.

There were many such communication towers placed around the hive complex, and Scott knew from past experience that the team's further progress toward Reflex Point would depend on how many of these they could circumvent, or better still, destroy. Options were discussed while the team made temporary camp near a meandering river where cottonwoods and conifers provided a narrow green ribbon of safety and shade. In the end it was decided that Scott and Rand would recon the outlying area; nearby were the ruins of a deserted city and what appeared to be an inhabited town. Annie insisted on tagging along, hoping they would run across a cowboy or two.

The three freedom fighters set out on Cyclones, Annie in her customary place on the pillion seat behind Rand. Only Scott was suited up in battle armor. Rand had tried to talk him out of it but soon recognized that Scott

fancied himself the only law and order between here and Reflex Point.

A short ride brought them into the town they had glimpsed from the Veritechs, a curious combination of high-tech modular buildings and wooden structures fashioned after centuries-old designs, complete with elaborate facades, shaded boardwalks, and hitching posts for horses and pack animals. The dirt streets were empty, but this no longer came as any surprise. Scott was certain the townsfolk were well aware of their arrival and were merely concealing themselves until the proper moment. As they powered the Cyclones down the town's main street, he could almost feel the weapons being trained on them from upper-story windows.

The one thing he hadn't figured on was getting arrested.

But that's just what the residents of Bushwhack had in mind when they finally did show themselves, twenty or so strong, dressed in Twentieth-century garb and armed with antique rifles, shotguns, and revolvers. They formed a broad circle around the rebels and ordered Scott and Rand away from their mecha. Scott was willing to comply-even to go as far as removing his battle armor-until he saw the ropes come out. But by then it was too late to do much about it. He and Rand were stripped of their weapons, tied up, and led by the jeering mob to the sheriff's office.

He was a short, stocky man with curly black hair and a handlebar mustache. He was wearing a beat-up felt fedora and a sheepskin coat. Scott didn't see any badge displayed, but when the sheriff pointed a six-gun at him, he stopped looking.

"Anybody who goes around dressed like that is just lookin' for trouble," the sheriff told him, gesturing to the heap of Cyclone armor Scott had piled in the street. "I reckon you're under arrest, strangers."

"But we haven't done anything!" Rand protested, struggling against the rope coiled around his arms. Silently he cursed himself for having listened to Scott's harebrained logic about uniforms and earning respect.

"Well, you look like you might do something," the sheriff answered him, putting the muzzle of the revolver close to Scott's head.

"It's illegal!" Scott argued, trying to step away.

"Yeah, you can't arrest us without charges," Annie added.

The sheriff's dark eyes narrowed. "That so? Well, I reckon I'll be the one to decide that, young 'un. You renegade soldiers and your catch try to take over everything. But we're not lettin' you take over this town."

"Who'd want to, anyway?" said Annie.

"But we're not renegades," Scott argued. "I'm from Mars-"

"From Mars?!" The sheriff laughed and turned to the crowd. "Here that, folks? He's from Mars!" The crowd started whooping it up. "Reckon you better tell it to the judge, robby."

"Fine," Scott said through gritted teeth. "Lead us to him."

The sheriff flashed a smile and pushed his hat back on his head. "You're lookin' at 'im."

Again the crowd got into the spirit, laughing and jeering. One dangled a noose in front of Rand's face, while a second began to inspect Rand's boots with an evil glint in his eye. There was what amounted to a festive atmosphere brewing, so much so that no one took notice of the two strange figures who were watching the scene from nearby. One was perhaps two feet shorter than his companion, but both were clothed alike, in bottletop goggles, helmets, cowls, and full-length cloaks.

"Looks as though these strangers are going to be occupied for a spell," said the taller of the two.

"Then I guess they won't be needin' their Cyclones, huh, Roy?"

"I feel it only right that we see to it that no harm comes to them." "The Cyclones, you mean."

"Now what else would I mean?"

"Well, you coulda meant the strangers."

Roy made a face. "Now, have you ever heard me express any concern for strangers before?"

"No...but-"

"And is it likely that I would be concerned about the strangers?" "Well, no. But-"

"Then I think it would be prudent for you to adhere to our original

plan."

"Adhere, Roy?"

"As in 'stick to.'"

"I should get the truck?"

Roy let out an exasperated sound. "Yes, Shorty, you should get the truck."

Back at the camp on the outskirts of town, Lancer, Lunk, Rook, and Marlene were doing what they could to camouflage the VTs with strategically placed branches and bunches of sagebrush and tumbleweed. They had moved the fighters to a kind of natural shelter Lancer discovered, a rock outcropping with plenty of surrounding scrub. It seemed a senseless task, but at least it was keeping everyone busy.

Lancer hadn't been in favor of Scott's heading off into town; whenever Scott disappeared, it usually spelled trouble for the rest of them. It was some comfort to know that Rand and Annie were with him, but not enough to keep Lancer from worrying. The major source of his concern, however, was Marlene. She had said little these past two days, and it was obvious to Lancer that her confrontation with the Human pilot of the Invid command ship had had a devastating effect. Was it possible, he asked himself, that Marlene herself had once been used in a similar fashion? Perhaps she had escaped after her own command ship had been destroyed. There was a certain logic to it, since, like the blond pilot, Marlene seemed to have no recall of her past life.

I don't belong with you, Lancer could hear her say. I'll just bring trouble.

Marlene was aware of Lancer's concerns and smiled weakly at him as she continued to tug handfuls of tall grass from the sandy earth. Then suddenly she was down on her knees, moaning and clutching her pale hands at her temples. Lancer jumped down from the radome of the Alpha, but Rook beat him to Marlene's side and was already stroking the tortured woman's long hair and speaking soothing words into her ear by the time

Lancer got to her.

"She must be sensing the Invid again," Rook told Lancer and Lunk. "I told Scott this would happen if we camped too close to that communications tower."

Lunk shook his head. "We're not that close to the thing. But maybe there's a Protoculture farm around here."

Lancer knelt down to take Marlene's hand. "Marlene, can you tell us what you're feeling? Can you tell from the pain whether it's a patrol or a hive?"

Marlene pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead and made an agonized sound.

"You're asking a lot of her, Lancer," said Lunk.

"Look," Lancer said, turning around. "I know what I'm asking. But it could be that Scott and Rand are in danger, and Marlene might be able to lead us to the source of it."

Rook looked at him as though he had just sentenced Marlene to the rack. "The closer she gets, the more unbearable the pain becomes. I don't have to tell you that."

"No, you don't. But all of us are at risk here-not just Marlene." He touched Marlene's cheek with his fingertips, and she opened her eyes. "The decision's yours. Do you think you can lead us to the source of your pain?"

"I can...try," she responded weakly.

Lancer tightened his mouth and nodded. "Then we're going out together," he said, getting up.

Rook and Lunk were dead set against it, but Lancer convinced them that there was really no other choice. Marlene was part of the team, with strengths and weaknesses just like the rest of them. And it only made sense to exploit her strengths, especially when that early warning system of hers was kicking in. So an hour later Lancer and Marlene were cruising out over the wastes, side by side in the APC that Lunk had reluctantly given up.

"Are you all right?" Lancer asked her after they had been driving for some time.

She nodded without saying anything. "Is the pain still there?"

"Not now. It's like someone just switched it off inside me."

"It would help if you could remember something. about your past."

"I feel like I was born on the day you people found me, Lancer. There's nothing beyond that-I'm empty."

He looked over at her. "Still, you had a life. We just need to find out who you were."

Marlene shrugged. "How much do you remember about the day you were born?"

"Not very much," he started to say. Then all at once there were two men on horseback positioned in front of the vehicle. Lancer brought the APC up short, instinctively extending his right arm across Marlene; the horses reared, their riders leveling rifles.

"One false move and I'll make a lead mine outta yer innards!" warned one of the men. "How's that fer threats?" he asked his partner.

The second rider repeated the warning to himself and shook his head. "I don't like it. Too...cryptic." He brought his rifle to bear on Lancer. "Supposin' you tell us what yer doin' in these here parts, Lavender Locks."

Lancer suppressed a grin. The man had on a bandanna and a tiny pair of tinted goggles. His voice sounded like sandpaper on cement. "We were just out driving around, and we got lost," he told them sheepishly.

"Yeah?" said the first rider. "'Pears to me you had sumthin' on yer mind 'sides yer drivin'." He began to laugh knowingly, leering at Marlene.

Lancer smiled and put his arm around Marlene, pulling her close. "Well, shucks," he mimicked the rider. "Iffen you have to know, we're newlywed honeymooners."

"Well, no wonder yer all distracted," the rider exclaimed, lowering his weapon. "I would be, too!"

"Stop cackling and tend to business, Jesse," his cohort told him. "You folks might not know it, but there's an outlaw gang operatin' out here, an' yer lucky ya didn't go and git yer car 'n' everythin' stole out from under ya. "

He disarmed his weapon.

"Worse'n that, yer headed right smack dab straight into Invid territory."

"Garldarn," said Lancer, playing it up. "Me and my little bride 'preciate yer bein' so neighborly as to warn us like that."

The gruff-voiced man seemed to offer a grin beneath the bandanna. "Seems we speak the same language, stranger, so I tell ya what we're gonna do: We're gonna show ya where you can buy some mighty fine weapons to defend yerselves." He tugged at the reins to bring his mount about. "Ya jus' follow us."

The two riders began to gallop off. Lancer kept the APC close behind.

Their trail angled east along the remains of a once-broad highway. "Why are you trusting them?" Marlene asked.

"I'm not. But I'm curious about these weapons. Maybe there's a resistance group operating around here."

The highwaymen led them down into one of the devastated crater cities Scott and Rand had flown over earlier that day. Its once-tall towers were nothing but empty shells now, burned and collapsed like fallen layer cakes. Some time ago a river had altered course and turned most of the crater into a polluted lake. But adjacent to the resultant waterfall, practically beneath its thunderous flow, was a massive tunnel that led to an arena of some sort, and it was into this that the riders disappeared. "Hole in the wall," they called it. Inside, however, was an even greater surprise: the rusting remains of a Robotech battle fortress. It had put down on its belly and somehow seemed to be fused to its ruined surroundings.

Lancer couldn't help but register his astonishment. The ship was nothing like the cruisers developed during the Second Robotech War; it had more in common with the organically fashioned Zentraedi battlewagons of the First. And yet it was not quite Zentraedi, either. The sleek sharklike bow and massive triple-thrustered stern were closer to the hybrids he had heard about-ships constructed on Tirol and sent home under the command of a certain Major John Carpenter. Lancer said as much to the two riders. They

had dismounted and doffed their helmets and cowls; in place of the techno-outlaws who had stopped the APC stood two silver-haired old-timers with thick mustaches and faces aged from a myriad of suns.

"Yep, and she's old and rusty, just like her crew," said the one called Jesse, who affected a headband and had a crazed way of laughing.

"Then you were part of Admiral Hunter's command," said Lancer. "That's something we don't talk about around here, sonny," returned

Frank, who may have had a few years on his saddlemate. His hair was shorter than Jesse's, and his mustache lacked the same outlaw droop.

Just then a third member of the gang stepped through an open hatchway in the grounded ship. He had a cooking pot in one hand and a ladle in the other. With his clean-shaven face and trimmed black hair he appeared to be much younger than either of his companions; moreover, he wore a sky-blue uniform that bore some resemblance to Scott's. Lancer saw, however, that there was no sign of life in the soldier's dark eyes. He tried to question the man as he passed by the driver's seat of the APC but got no response.

"Don't pay no attention to him," Jesse told Lancer. "Gabby hasn't spoken a work to anybody since he came here."

Frank motioned them toward the ramp that led to the hold of the battlecruiser. "Come on in hare, stranger, so's we can show you what we got."

Lancer and Marlene followed them in. Piled high inside were high-tech crates Lancer knew to contain laser-array ordnance of all description.

Jesse made a broad sweep with his arm. "Welcome to the best-stocked tradin' post in the whole West!"

Back in town, the sheriff was trying to follow the rapid, angry flow of Scott's words. He and his men had tossed the three renegade soldiers into a cell, but it hadn't put an end to the leader's ranting and raving.

"Just in case you're interested, Sheriff," Scott was saying now, his hands gripped on the bars of the cell, "I happen to be an officer with Mars

Division. We were sent here from Tirol by Admiral Hunter to liberate Earth from the Invid's hold. As far as I know I'm the only survivor of the assault group, but regardless, my orders are to locate and destroy the Invid Regis and the central hive at Reflex Point. Short of that I-"

"Enough!" the sheriff shouted, holding up his hands. The man had been going on like this for more than an hour, and he couldn't take much more of it-all this talk about assault groups and an attack fleet on its way to Earth from the other side of the galaxy...Every so often one would hear this sort of thing from people who had come wandering in off the wastes looking

like they had just received communiqu 閟 from the Lord Almighty, but that

didn't mean that he had to sit still and listen to every last one of them. "You're just wastin' your breath if you expect me to believe such a cock-and-bull story. Besides, I heard tell of a better one than that by the last group of waste wackos who showed up here."

Scott was about to take up the argument-from a different front when he heard a shot ring out from outside the sheriff's office. A moment later one of the sheriff's men burst through the front door.

"Rustlers, Sheriff! They got the motorsickles!" Scott shook the bars and cursed.

Rand shouted: "Don't let them get away, Sheriff!"

The sheriff made it to the door in time to see two of his men emptying their revolvers at a truck that was tearing down the main street. He could just discern a figure in the open back, a cloaked and helmeted figure yelling above the noise of gunfire: "Much obliged, Sheriff! We never woulda gotten away with 'em iffen you hadn't, locked away the strangers!"

The sheriff glanced in at the jail cell, the open office door, then once more at the truck.

"You're responsible for this, Sheriff!" Scott called out, furious. "You've endangered our entire mission,'" said Rand.

"You dumb hick!" Annie added.

The sheriff contemplated his position: the rustlers were well known to him, and he certainly didn't fancy tangling with them. At the same time, he

was responsible for the strangers' property. So it only made sense to let the strangers go after their own machines. He turned to one of his deputies and said: "Saddle up a coupla fast horses."

"These, must date clear back to the war against the Robotech Masters," said Lancer, hefting one of the samples from the opened crate. It was really not much different from the laser rifles the team was used to, except that the muzzle was somewhat thicker and the trigger mechanism more complex.

"Gen-yoo-wine army issue," Jesse said proudly.

Lancer brought the rifle up to high port position. "Guess it wouldn't be considered good taste to ask where you got them, huh?"

"Why should you care?" Jesse wanted to know.

"Good customers don't ask too many questions," cautioned Frank, swigging from a bottle of whiskey.

Jesse laughed. "Frank's right, Lavender. But I reckon there's no harm in tellin' ya."

He came across the hold to explain himself, close enough for Lancer to see the space madness in his eyes.

"Way back when, we was soldiers. The army issued these weapons to

us."

"So you're part of this ship's rusty old crew." Lancer grinned. "Then

why aren't you out fighting the Invid with all this firepower instead of playing rustler?"

Jesse scowled and looked away for a moment. "We had our fill of fightin'. We were with Admiral Gloval on the SDF-1; after, we signed up fer duty with the Expeditionary mission. Traveled clear across the galaxy, sonny, a godfersakin' place called Tirol. Then we made one heck of a mistake and tied in with Major Carpenter. 'Course, we finally made it back all right, but by then General Leonard and his boys had their hands full with the Robotech Masters. So we jus' kinda retired, if you know what I mean. Now we sell supplies to resistance fighters, so I reckon we're doin' our part."

Marlene saw Lancer's face begin to flush and did what she could to calm him down by sliding under his arm and laying her head against his shoulder. But Lancer's anger was not so easily assuaged.

"Making a nice profit for yourselves, aren't you?" Jesse laughed. "Reckon we are at that."

"You're nothing but a pack of deserters," he started to say. But suddenly there were new sounds wafting in from outside the hold. A truck had pulled up in the arena. Lancer heard someone shout: "Look what we got!" followed by a wild "yaahoo!"

Jesse and Frank were standing by the hatch. "Wonder where they stole those?" Jesse said before the two men stepped outside.

Lancer heard the Cyclone engines.

"Why don't you see if you can make a little more noise?" yelled Frank. "I don't think them thangs can be heard more'n twenty miles away!"

"Aw, the sheriff didn't even bother to send a posse after us," the new arrival yelled back, laughing as wildly as Jesse had a moment before.

"Keep that talk down, Shorty," Frank ordered. "We got company."

As Lancer and Marlene were stepping down the hold ramp, Jesse swung around to ask them if they were interested in buying a couple of Cyclones. Lancer saw two men in cloaks and helmets astride mecha they had ridden out of the back of the truck. It took him a moment to recognize the Cycs, and he had to quiet Marlene before she said anything.

"Young folks, meet Roy and Shorty," said Frank, gesturing to the men. Roy was tall, with a blockish, bald head. Shorty had crossed eyes and a pinched-up face. He bristled at Frank's introduction.

"I told you not to call me Shorty, Frank!"

"Well, we gotta call you something," Frank answered him.

Jesse leaned across the Cyclone's handlebars to thrust his chin at Shorty. "We'd call ya by your real name if ya could remember what it was, Shorty!"

Shorty raised himself on the footrests. "That ain't funny!"

It looked as though he might have taken a swing at Jesse just then, but

Gabby appeared out of nowhere with his pot and put a quick end to it by ladling some hot stew onto Shorty's bare hand.

Shorty screamed and clutched himself, while the rest of the band had a good laugh.

"Gabby ain't too fonda Shorty," Jesse told Lancer and Marlene. "Ain't that right, Gabby?"

Gabby stood still, almost catatonic, oblivious to it all.

"Fact is, Gabby ain't too fond of nobody," Frank chimed in. "He's a little funny in the head."

Lancer looked over at the uniformed man and experienced a rush of compassion. Gabby seemed to pick up on it and walked toward the hatchway, proffering the pot of stew to Marlene.

"Look out, folks!" Shorty warned them. "He might throw it at ya!"

But instead, he simply held the pot out until Marlene took it from his hand.

Frank felt his chin. "Well, I'll be hornswaggled. He's offerin' it to you." Marlene thanked him.

"Well, isn't this a day for surprises?" said Roy.

Shorty nursed his burned hand. "First time I ever seen him do anything nice for anyone."

"He tried to rejoin Hunter's outfit when those kids from the 15th ATACs got hold of Jonathan Wolff's ship," Frank explained. "But his Veritech got shot down before he could make it."

Jesse snorted. "Darn fool wuz tryin' to git back into the war agin. He's gotta be crazier'n a bedbug."

The four old veterans collapsed in laughter.

CHAPTER FOUR

Dr. Lang considered him an army brat and tried on more than one occasion to instill him with some sense of objectivity, but Scott was a lost cause. If he couldn't persuade, his inclination was to force. And this kind of behavior was simply nor tolerated in the lab. Lang would tell him: "You can't force experiments or people to conform to your world view! The universe just doesn't work that way!" Scott heard him but was not so easily convinced. He had little patience in those days and was often accused of being arrogant and judgmental. Type A, all the way.

Xandu Reem,

A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard

Lancer asked himself how Shorty and Roy could have come across Scott and Rand's Cyclones. There was some talk about a local sheriff and how he had been foolish enough to leave the Cycs unattended. It was beginning to sound like Scott had gotten himself into another fix, but Lancer had yet to find out why or where his teammates were being held. He had barely enough scrip to purchase one of the laser rifles, let alone buy back the Cyclones, but he wondered if he couldn't persuade the Robotech veterans to rescue Scott for old time's sake. After all, they had all been on the SDF-3 together, and chances were that Frank or one of them had at least heard of Scott Bernard, the Pioneer Mission's youngest member.

They had all moved back into the hold of the cruiser, which functioned as the group's living quarters as well as their high-tech trading post. Marlene and Lancer had gorged themselves on Gabby's delicious stew. The shell-shocked soldier had taken to them and, in his eerily silent fashion, was treating them more like honored guests than potential customers. Frank, Jesse, Roy, and Shorty were engaged in a wild game of cards that required two full decks and seemed to be a hybrid of gin rummy and draw poker.

"Come on, Lady Luck," Shorty was saying now, "give me the card I

want." He took one from the facedown stack just as Jesse was throwing one faceup beside it.

"You can have this one, Shorty."

But Shorty was too busy kissing the card he had picked to respond to Jesse's offer. "Jus' the one I wanted," he crowed. "How 'bout that!"

Frank looked at his hand and made a disappointed sound. The cards were an inverted fan in his left hand; his right gripped a whiskey flask.

"Don't need this 'un either," said Jesse, discarding another. "Gentlemen, I fold," Roy announced stiffly, although he kept the cards

in his hand.

Shorty started bouncing up and down in his seat. "Frank, y' ole coot, ya gonna play or not?"

"Hang on, I'm jus' tryin' to decide how much to raise you." "Yer bluffin'!"

Gabby served a cup of steaming tea to Marlene, who smiled and thanked him. Lancer watched the man shuffle off into an adjoining compartment separated from the hold by cinched curtains. Gabby sat down at a communications console and began to throw switches.

"Is that transceiver in working condition?" Lancer asked loudly enough to cut through the card-table conversations.

Frank answered him. "Like everything else around here, it's wore out." Dismissively, he threw his cards to the table. "We still receive transmissions from the Expeditionary Force, but we can't respond to 'em."

Jesse grunted and laughed. "Gabby keeps turnin' it on like maybe he's expectin' a message from somebody."

Gabby seemed to hear the men ridiculing him; forlornly, he got up from the console and left the hold.

"What do the transmissions say?" Lancer asked after Gabby had gone. "Who knows?" Shorty cackled. "We don't pay no attention to 'em."

Lancer leaned back in his chair. What a sad bunch, he thought. Soldiers who have lost the will to fight...He was about to launch into the speech he hoped would rekindle their spirits, when Marlene suddenly shot to her feet

and let out a low groan of pain. Lancer stood up and took hold of her quaking shoulders; she had her eyes closed, her fingertips pressed to her temples.

"What is it, Marlene? Are you hearing the Invid broadcasting towers again?"

The four veterans voiced a shocked "Whaaatt?!"

"The tower must be broadcasting again," Lancer explained without thinking.

Alarmed all at once, Frank stood up. "You mean she can hear 'em?" He gestured to the others. "Git 'em, boys! I reckon these two to be Invid spies!"

"You're wrong," Lancer told them, shielding Marlene. "Well, I think Frank's right," Jesse said menacingly.

"I knew there was sumthin' funny 'bout 'em," snarled Shorty.

Frank leveled a hand blaster that resembled an antique short-barreled staple gun. "Don't make a move," he warned Lancer. "If she ain't an Invid, how come she hears their signals?"

Lancer took Marlene into his arms while she sobbed. "She's been traumatized by them. It affected her hearing somehow-it's more sensitive than ours."

Jesse scoffed. "That's 'cause we're Human and she's an Invid!"

"That's not true," Lancer shouted, leading Marlene slowly away from the couch and closer to the external hatch. "She's suffered more from the Invid attacks than any of you! You can see for yourselves the agonizing pain their broadcast signals put her through."

Shorty took a step forward. "You're whistlin' in the wind, pretty boy.

We ain't buyin' it!"

Roy uttered a kind of growl and began to move in bearlike, his huge mitts raised. Lancer backed Marlene against the bulkhead and turned her in his arms. "Think she's an Invid, huh?" He pulled her to him and kissed her full on the mouth. Startled at first, Marlene began to relax and return his tenderness. The veterans went wide-eyed.

"Whoa!" said Jesse. "Don't reckon he'd kiss an Invid like that, do you,

Frank?"

"They might be aliens, but they sure ain't strangers," laughed Shorty. "Hol' up, kids, 'fore ya short out our pacemakers."

Lancer broke off his embrace. "That was the most pleasant way to prove a point I could ever imagine," he whispered, looking into Marlene's eyes.

Frank tucked away his blaster and sat down on the edge of the table. "No hard feelings, kids. Consider yourselves among friends."

Lancer saw his chance to enlist their aid. "Does that mean you'd be willing to help us?"

Frank looked at him questioningly. "What possible help could we be?

We're just a bunch of old-huh?!" An explosion rocked the ship.

"The telltale sound of trouble," said Roy, reaching for a weapon.

From the hatchway they saw two Troopers complete a pass over the arena. Gabby, some sort of tote bag clutched in his right hand, was running a jagged course toward the ship. A single charge from one of the Invid ships tore into the already ruined street, throwing him off his feet. Roy had a rocket launcher on his shoulder; he fired and caught the Invid with a glancing shot to its underbelly.

"Lay down some more cover fire!" Frank yelled. "I'll go try to fetch 'im!" "No, wait," Lancer said, pulling the launcher from Roy's grip. "I can

move faster. I'll get him."

Lancer raised the weapon and darted out into the arena. The second Trooper was swinging around and preparing for another pass. "Make a run for it!" he told Gabby, helping him to his feet. "I'll keep you covered."

Wordlessly, Gabby struggled to his knees, but instead of heading for the escort, he doubled back to retrieve the tote bag he had dropped. The Trooper, meanwhile, was coming in low overhead. Lancer seated the launcher on his right shoulder, centered the ship in the weapon's laser sight, and triggered the missile. His shot was sure, straight to the Invid's optic core; a brief fireball and the enemy disintegrated.

Gabby was still on his hands and knees but now had the bag tight in his arms.

"Leave it!" Lancer barked, hearing the sound of the first Trooper's thrusters. "Whatever it is, it isn't worth risking your life!" But he had begun to wonder. Gabby looked up at him, words of explanation in his eyes, and fumbled with the bag's latch. Puzzled, Lancer went down on one knee to gaze at the contents: it was Gabby's battle armor.

All at once the ground rumbled. Lancer reshouldered the launcher and twisted. The first Trooper had put down behind them, its right pincer raised for a crushing blow. Lancer squeezed off a second projectile, which tore into the Invid's scanner, dropping it instantly. He was on his feet watching the thing bleed green when he heard Rand's voice in the distance.

"We've been looking all over for you!"

Rand was waving at him from atop a heap of slacked steel that had once been part of the arena's superstructure. Scott and Annie were with him, along with the horses they had ridden in on.

Not exactly the cavalry arriving in the nick of time, Lancer said to himself while returning the wave, but it was good to see them just the same.

Lancer led his teammates to the Robotech ship; Scott filled him in on their brief incarceration and the theft of the Cyclones, and Lancer primed Scott for the surprises in store. Everyone remembered the incident with Jonathan Wolff, and Rand especially was concerned about Scott's reaction to all this. It was certainly good news that the Cycs were safe, but Rand knew that Scott wouldn't let it go at that-not when the rustlers were soldiers who had once served with the illustrious Expeditionary Force.

The veterans claimed never to have heard of Scott Bernard. This didn't surprise Rand, given the fact that some of them apparently couldn't even recall their own names. Besides, from what Scott had told him, the Pioneer Mission had had an enormous crew, and Major Carpenter's contingent had separated from the main body of the force early on in the mission. They had been lost in space for approximately ten years, but Scott wasn't about to cut

them any slack.

Frank was the first to catch Scott's wrath-square on the side of his jaw. "You cowardly scum!" Scott raved, sending the old man backward into

the arms of his companions. "I hate to even dirty my fists on you."

Rand kept his mouth shut, but he wished for once that Scott could control his temper.

"We ain't soldiers any longer," Jesse was telling Scott, wagging a bony finger in the lieutenant's face. "And we don't take orders from the likes of you or anyone else! So if ya wanna attack the Invids, you'll jus' have to do it on yer own!"

"You're all traitors!" Scott bellowed back, grabbing Jesse by the shirtfront and glaring at him.

Lancer put his hand on Scott's shoulder. "Back off, Scott, you're wasting your time. They fought bravely against the Zentraedi, but the fight's gone out of them. Obviously they're no match for the Invid now."

Scott growled and propelled Jesse backward into Roy's arms. It looked for a moment like he was ashamed of himself, but just then he caught the telltale sounds of the transceiver. He rushed into the adjoining cabin, where Gabby was seated at the console.

"A working transceiver?" Rand heard Scott say before roughly snatching the headphones from Gabby's grip and shoving him aside. "Calling Admiral Hunter," Scott began. "Come in, Admiral Hunter..."

Frank, Jesse, and the others burst out laughing until Scott turned on them.

"What's so damned funny?"

"The transmitter doesn't work," Lancer explained while the old men tried to stifle their chuckling. "Just the receiver. "

Scott looked at the console in disbelief. "It what-"

Suddenly the monitor screen flashed, and the external speakers crackled to life. "This is the Expeditionary Force calling all Earth stations. Do you read us? Come in Earth stations..."

"We receive you, com base," Scott spoke into the headset, desperation

evident in his voice. "This is Earth station receiving Expeditionary Force command..."

The face of a young man began to resolve on the screen. It was a clean-shaven face with blue eyes, finefeatured and framed by shaggy brown hair.

"If anyone is reading this message, your orders are to rendezvous with the Expeditionary Force at Reflex Point. Ships of the main fleet will be entering Earthspace within two weeks Earthtime this transmission..."

"Admiral Hunter jus' won't give up," Jesse commented. "He's sure a spunky one, ya gotta give 'im that," said Shorty.

The image had de-rezzed by now. Through it all Gabby had been staring at the screen as though he had seen a ghost. While Scott continued to fiddle with the console controls, Gabby shuffled mindlessly toward the hatch.

"We've got to take out the broadcast towers," Scott was saying to no one in particular. "If we can cripple even some of them...Hey! Where's he going?"

Rand stepped back to permit Gabby access to the hatch; he noticed that the man was clutching something in the palm of his hand, but he couldn't make it out. "Let him go," he told Scott. "He can't help, anyway."

Lancer volunteered to take the APC out to the camp and bring in Rook and Lunk. It was dark by the time he returned, and in addition to Rook and Lunk, the APC carried what remained of Gabby's body. Lancer explained that they had seen flashes of annihilation disc fire in the vicinity of the broadcast tower; they had gone in when the fighting stopped and discovered the flaming wreck that was Gabby's jeep. Close by, they had found Gabby, clad in the battle armor he had retrieved only a short while before.

They had the man laid out in the escort hold now; Gabby's fractured helmet sat on the floor next to him, and the holo-locket taken from his burned hand lay atop the sheet Lunk had thrown over the body.

"He was a brave and loyal soldier, all the way and then some," Frank

said soberly.

Shorty tugged in a sob. "We're gonna miss ya, Gabby."

Marlene stooped to place a flower on the sheet; she gathered up the holo-locket, accidentally activating it as she stood up. A handsome, uniformed youth appeared in an egg-shaped aura of purple and gold light. "Hi, Dad," the bolo-image saluted. "Like father, like son; so here I am in the army now, and I just hope you'll be as proud of me as I am of you." Marlene thought she recognized the youth but said nothing.

"Poor Gabby," Jesse said, kneeling down to lift a corner of the sheet. All at once Frank grabbed Jesse by his lapels and pulled him to his feet.

"Are we gonna jus' sit around and let the Invid kill us off one by one, or are we gonna do somethin' about it?!" He shoved his friend aside and drew his blaster. "I'm gonna finish the job Gabby started!"

Lancer came up behind Frank and caught him up in a full nelson, trying to reason with him. "You can't do it alone, Frank."

The old man told Lancer to butt out but ceased his struggling as a second transmission began to flash from the communications console. On the screen was the face they had seen earlier, and the young man's message was much the same: The Expeditionary Force was preparing for an offensive, and all resistance groups were urged to move against the central Invid hive, designated Reflex Point.

Marlene reactivated the holo-locket and compared the two images. "It's him!" exclaimed Jesse. "That's Gabby's boy on that screen!"

Lancer let go of Frank. "No wonder he spent so much time trying to make that transceiver work," he said, turning to the body. "With it he could stay in touch with the one person he loved the most."

Frank hung his head. "It's a goldurn pity. Gabby could see his son, but the boy couldn't see him. An' he never told us nuthin' 'bout it."

"Listen to me, everybody," Scott said in his best takecharge voice. "I'm going to get that broadcast tower if it's the last thing I do. How about it-are you with me or not?"

The team, of course, rallied, but the veterans remained unmoved.

"What's your plan?" Rand thought to ask Scott as the freedom fighters raced toward the hatch.

"We'll decide on the way!" Terrific, Rand said to himself.

"But what about the old cowboys?" Annie wanted to know, gesturing to Frank and his men.

"You heard them, Annie," Scott told her. "Their fighting days are over!"

Frank knew what he had to do; he just couldn't seem to bring his body to understand. It was as if the young lieutenant's words were true after all: The fight had gone out of him. He had, however, gotten as far as suiting himself up in his rusting armor and struggling his way to the bridge of the ship. He was sitting in one of the command chairs now, trying to bolster his courage with long pulls from his flask, but even the whiskey was failing him. "This ain't no help," he muttered, giving the flask a toss toward the rear

of the bridge.

"Thank ya, Frank, but we don't need it either."

Frank swiveled in the chair to find Jesse grinning at him, the flask gripped in his right hand. Roy and Shorty were with him, all three of them squeezed into armor that barely fit them anymore.

Jesse laughed, shutting his eyes. "You ain't goin' nowhere without us, Cap'n."

"Reportin' fer duty," saluted cross-eyed Shorty, hand to the helmet he was rarely without.

"He's correct," said Roy, a smile playing across that sagging face of his, his bald pate gleaming in the console lights.

Frank rose out of the chair, suppressing the smile he wanted to return. "Well, what're ya waitin' for, then? Git to yer battle stations."

Jesse tossed the flask back to him and straightened his headband. "Aye, aye, sir!" he said smartly.

A moment later the aged cruiser's lift-off thrusters came to flaming life. Like some predatory fish, the ship began to rise, disentangling itself from

the techno-debris that had ensnared it for so long. And in response the devastated city rumbled its applause, buildings and ruined roadways vibrating in sympathy. At an altitude of five hundred feet, the ship's Reflex engines kicked in, triplethrusters blazing like newborn suns, to direct it along its final course, straight into the heart of the Invid domain.

The blunt top of the broadcast tower resembled the glowing hemispherical hives Scott and the others had already gone up against, except for the fact that it was set atop an organic-looking stalk some eight hundred feet high. As the three Veritechs closed on it-Scott's Alpha and the uncoupled Betas-scores of rust-brown Pincer Ships poured out to engage them. And the odds had never been worse.

"God, there are too many of them!" Scott yelled into his helmet mike, suddenly questioning the impulsive nature of their attack. Two of his three heat-seekers found their targets, but the skies were literally dotted with alien ships. "We'll never get through them!" As a storm of annihilation discs was directed against him, he loosed a cluster of four more missiles. Three mote Invid ships exploded, sending teeth-jarring shock waves and flashes of blinding light clear into the VT's cockpit. Scott zigzagged through a second salvo of enemy fire and was triggering off another missile flock when he heard Rand's voice cut through the tac net.

"Scott, look! Those crazy old men have actually gotten that junk heap off the ground!"

Scott edged himself up in the seat; he saw the cruiser off to the right below him, barely above treetop level.

"Watch your mouth, sonny," Frank was telling Rand. "This ain't no junk heap, and we're gonna prove it by showin' you whippersnappers what a real combat crew looks like!"

Scott wanted to take back all the things he had said to them. He had heard those words of newfound courage before, and the ending was always the same.

"Get that ship out of here!" he roared.

"Jus' like the good ole days!" Jesse yelled over his shoulder to Roy. He had the base of the broadcast tower centered in the console's targeting screen, but it was not the tower he was after-not yet. First there were all those ships to take out. So he flipped the weapon selector switch to maximum burst and depressed the trigger button.

A fan of laser-array energy spewed into the field, annihilating countless ships. But the combat troops were quick to even up the score. Ignoring the Veritechs for the moment, they massed against the cruiser and refocused the might of their collective firepower. Without shields, the Robotech ship had little immunity to the discs. Fiery explosions erupted across the cruiser's bow as blast after blast flayed armor and superstructure and blew away gun turrets.

On the bridge Shorty was thrown screaming from his station as an angry white flash holed the ship.

"Dadburn it!" Jesse cursed, seeing his friend go down. "I'll show 'em!"

He slammed his hands against the trigger button again and again, but for every Invid ship that flamed out there were two more returning fire. They were buzzing around the cruiser now, slashing at its damaged areas with their pincers and opening irreparable wounds in its hull. Discs found their way into these, and soon the warship was a flaming, smoking wreck locked in a new struggle with gravity itself.

Scott watched helplessly as the cruiser began to fall. "Use your escape pods!" he pleaded with them. "Abandon ship while you've got time!" But Frank spoke the words Scott knew he would hear:

"No way, sonny. This crew don't give up."

"Don't be foolish, old man! There's nothing more you can do!" "There's still a job to be done," Frank told him weakly.

Scott was alongside the ship now, trying to get a look in through the bridge viewports. "You're not going to prove anything by this!"

"We can prove we ain't cowards, Lieutenant."

Scott realized that they were trying to pilot the cruiser into the very base of the broadcast tower. He would have given anything to have been able to prevent them, and yet the tower had to be taken out, and it was doubtful that the Veritechs could do it alone. So Scott pulled up and away from the ship's suicidal plunge, ordering Rand and Rook back at the same time.

The cruiser pierced the stalk like a lance, some two hundred feet below the hemispherical cap.

On the bridge, Roy turned a knowing look to Frank at the adjacent station. "I've removed the safety locks from all the missiles, Commander."

Frank nodded. "Are we all in agreement about what must be done?" he asked his crew. "Shorty, what d' ya say?"

Mortally wounded, Shorty had managed to struggle back into his seat. His head was resting on the console. "Commander, how many times do I have to tell you? Don't call me Shorty."

Scott's voice boomed through the speakers. "There's still time. Set the charges and get yourselves to the pods. We'll come in and pick you up."

"Sorry, sir," said Frank. "Our radio's been damaged, an' we can't hear a word you're saying." Rand tried to make them understand, but Frank just shook his head. "No, it's better this way... Shorty, you ready?"

Shorty coughed once. "It's a funny thing, Commander, but I just remembered what it really is-my name, that is. It's-"

Frank brought the heel of his fist down on the self-destruct button. The tower exploded, a stalk in a firestorm.

The three Veritechs swooped in for a flyby.

"We mustn't let the world forget them...loyal, courageous...soldiers." "They'll be awarded medals of honor," Scott said softly.

Down below, Lunk, Annie; Lancer, and Marlene watched the fireball climb and mushroom overhead.

"Who were they, anyway?" Annie asked.

Perplexed by the conflicting emotions she felt, Marlene thought back to Gabby's kindness, Jesse's laugh, Frank's gruffness, the brief holo-locket

image of Gabby's son...

"They were heroes," she sobbed.

CHAPTER FIVE

They thought they had stumbled into Denver, but in fact they had lucked into Delta-Six, a top-secret subterranean installation attached to the Cheyenne Mountain complex, constructed to ensure that America's heads of state would survive any form of attack leveled against the continent. But they weren't thinking of the Zentraedi then, and certainly not of Dolza's four million.

"Northlands" History of The Third Robotech War, Vol. LXXXVI

The team swung north, then east, leaving the desert behind and entering the foothills of the Northlands central range. The Rockies, they were told. They chose to avoid southern routes across the continental divide in favor of the less traveled northern passes, even though this made for more difficult ascents. But there were numerous satellite hives in the warmer valleys to the south, and since the team's reserves of Protoculture were low, they couldn't afford to risk all-out engagement. They had managed to procure a few canisters of fuel, but Scott had insisted they be used for the red Alpha, which Rand and Rook had retrieved.

The weather was against the team, however, and although a week went by without an enemy encounter, their progress was slow. When at last they crossed the spine, they began to sense the nearness of the prairielands beyond. But tectonic upheavals brought about by the Zentraedi Rain of Death had so altered the terrain here that they often felt off the map; and given their precataclysm charts, indeed they were.

It was snowing now in this final pass that had no right being there. Fearful of calling attention to themselves and careful to conserve what little fuel remained, they had decided to keep the Veritechs grounded. Lunk had secured chains for the APC and fashioned skids and tow bars for the fighters using plate and barstock he had scavenged from what had been a recreational ski area. They had the APC rigged as a kind of tow vehicle, but

most of the real propulsion was derived from battery-driven thrusters in the VTs' raptorlike legs. Annie and Marlene were riding up front with Lunk; the rest of the team was currently on foot.

"It's so cold," Annie whimpered to Marlene, shivering and clutching the hooded poncho to her neck. "It feels like my nose is going to fall off or something."

Marlene pressed herself closer to Annie and brought some of her own poncho around Annie's shoulders.

Scott, Lancer, and Rook, similarly attired in coldweather ponchos, were alongside the red Alpha at the middle of the caravan. "Soup," said Rook, daydreaming. "Nice, hot soup. A cup of thick soup, a bathtubful of piping hot, steaming soup..." She felt Lancer's hand on her shoulder.

"Don't. It only makes it worse."

Then she heard Rand: "Hold up a minute, guys!"

He was behind them at the Beta's wingtip, preoccupied with his latest acquisition-the thermograph Jesse had given him shortly before the assault on the broadcast tower. It was about the size of a small chain saw, with a muzzlelike sensor and top-mounted carrying handle. Rook saw that he was kneeling down, sweeping the instrument across the snow.

"Lunk! Stop the sleds!" Scott called out over the wind.

"It's amazing...There's something underneath us!" Rand was saying as Scott, Lancer, and Rook approached.

"Yeah, we know. It's called ice," Rook told him.

Scott motioned her to lighten up. "What are you picking up?"

Rand double-checked the indicator readings. "A large heat source.

Massive, way off the meter." "Volcanic?"

Rand shook his head, loosing wet snow from the poncho. "Definitely not."

"Then the thermograph is on the fritz," Rook said through chattering teeth. "Either that or it's your brain."

Rand ignored the comment and began pushing snow aside, as if to get

a glimpse of something beneath the ice. "It's gotta be a generator of some kind...just below this layer of snow..."

Rook made an impatient sound. "Come on, man, you're wasting our time."

He looked up knowingly and got to his feet. "Wasting our time, huh?" All at once he was beside her, pushing her toward the window he had excavated.

"Quit your shoving!" she protested.

"Well, Miss Know-it-all, why don't you take a look for yourself?"

She glared at him for a moment, then went down on her knees, wiping away flakes of new snow and peering in. The ice was virtually transparent, as clear as Caribbean water. But her mind refused to accept what her eyes were telling her: she seemed to be looking down on a turn-of-the-century building bathed in artificial light-one of those twenty-story milk cartons she had seen pictures of. There was steam or something issuing from exhaust elbows on the roof, and below that she could discern other buildings and lit streets.

Overwhelmed by a sudden sense of vertigo, she had to turn away. "It's a city!"

"Told you," said Rand.

Scott looked at both of them and frowned. "Sorry, guys, but it's no time to play archaeologist."

"We just need a pickax and some ropes!" Rand said excitedly. He was already up and running toward the APC. "Think of the food and supplies that are down there!" He threw off his poncho and made a mad leap for the vehicle's shotgun seat, mindless of Lunk's bewildered cries. He was rummaging around in the storage compartment beneath the seat when the ground started to give way.

It was too late for the warnings Scott and the others were shouting out; the APC fell through, almost dragging the VT caravan with it. Instinctively, Scott grabbed hold of the Beta's skids, but momentarily the fighter train came to a halt of its own accord, with the blue Alpha perched precariously at

the edge of the hole, its radome dropped, like the beak of a bird searching for worms in a hole.

Down below, Annie felt herself for broken bones. She looked around and saw that Rand, Marlene, and Lunk were performing similar self-examinations. She had no idea what they had fallen into or onto, but it seemed to be some sort of roof. The APC was upright nearby, the chains that had connected it to the lead Veritech snapped. Overhead, Scott and the others were leaning in to inquire if everyone was all right. Annie got to her feet and felt a strong uprush of heated air.

"Hey, I think we can get down to street level!" Rand was shouting. He had thrown open the door to a boxlike structure that housed the building's stairway. Atop it were the jetting exhausts Rook had seen from above.

Rand disappeared through the door, and Annie followed him without a thought.

The rest of the team had lowered themselves to the roof by now and had discarded their ponchos. Above the jagged rend in the ice the snowstorm was still howling. Scott moved to the edge of the roof and looked around in amazement: It was indeed an underground city, intact and apparently deserted. He turned to gaze up at the hole and realized that the city was not only subterranean but fully enclosed by a protective dome of what appeared to be fabriplex. Somehow the place had been spared destruction by both the Zentraedi fleet and subsequent geological shifts. Over the years it had become buried by earth and snow. He wanted to run this by Lunk and Lancer, but Lunk had other concerns on his mind.

"The landing gear's been damaged," he told Scott, indicating the undercarriage of the still suspended blue Alpha.

"I guess that means we're stuck here for a while," said Rook, not exactly unhappy about it.

Scott scowled. "Another delay," he muttered under his breath.

Rand and Annie, meanwhile, had hit the streets. They had taken the

forty flights warily, and Rand had his blaster out even now, but there was no sign of activity. The ground-floor levels of many of the buildings were illuminated, as were numerous signs and street lights. Still, there were indications that the place had been abandoned in haste, and it was an eerie feeling to walk through it all. There were no vehicles, and the only sound was that of the city's self-contained atmosphere being sucked toward the breach they had opened in its protective umbrella.

Annie wasn't quite as put off by the emptiness as Rand. "It's magical," she enthused. "I've never seen a city this big in my whole life."

Rand holstered his weapon.

"I wonder what keeps it running. It looks like it dates back to the prewars period." He caught a glimpse of Annie's look of enchantment and laughed. "And to think, it's been buried here just waiting for you and me to come along."

"Like out of a fairy tale!"

Rand took hold of her hand, and they ran off to explore.

Scott sent Marlene and Rook off to locate Rand while he, Lunk, and Lancer carefully disengaged the caravan and piloted each of the Veritechs to the roof of the building. A search for tools brought them down into the lowermost of the building's subbasements, where Lunk discovered the source of the city's power: a generator that tapped thermal power deep within the Earth itself. Lancer also came up with something that explained where they were: it was a teletype evacuation notice addressed to the residents of "Denver," issued on the eve of Dolza's devastating barrage of death.

"They were in such a big hurry, they forgot to turn out the lights," Lunk smirked. "They're gonna get stuck with some utility bill."

Rook had managed to find Rand. It wasn't difficult: she simply started with the toy stores, then worked her way through the supermarkets and delis.

She was off gathering supplies now, while Rand, Annie, and Marlene were sampling foodstuffs from the plastic wrapped; bottled, and canned goods smorgasbord they had spread out on the floor around them. They had found bags of marshmallows and jars of peanut butter, cookies, dried fruits and frozen pies, cans of soda and bars of chocolate, cereals, beans, soups, and assorted sweets.

"Mmmm, mint chocolate," Annie said with her mouth full. She tore open a second package and broke off a piece for Marlene. "Try it, you'll love it. I could live off this stuff."

Marlene nibbled at it and raised her eyebrows. "It is good." "Peppermint!" Annie exclaimed, picking another item from the floor.

"This is my most favorite thing in the whole world!" She pillowed her head against the bag and closed her eyes lovingly.

Nearby, Rand popped open a Coke. "You got mints on the brain, kid." He gulped some down and took a bite from the hero he had defrosted.

"I don't care what the Invid do as long as they don't take away our peppermint."

"Nice attitude, Annie. But I gotta agree with you: this is the life.

Somebody pinch me so I know I haven't died and gone to heaven."

Rook, pushing a cartful of supplies, came by just then to remind him. "How about a kick in the teeth instead?" She gave the three of them her best disapproving look. "What a mess. We're supposed to be foraging supplies, not packing them away in our stomachs. Ever think that Scott and Lancer might be hungry, too?" She shook her head at Rand. "Sometimes you make me wonder."

He showed a roguish grin in response and tossed a can over to her. "Ever seen these before?"

Rook read the label. "Vienna sausages? What's a 'vienna'?"

Rand saw Annie and Marlene's puzzled looks. "You mean none of you have tried these?"

"Are they peppermints?" Annie said, getting to her feet.

Rook made a face and tossed the can over her shoulder to Rand. "What

a disgusting thought."

Rand shared a wink with Annie and said, "Let's find out."

She kneeled down and pulled on the can's ring-seal. "Oh, they're cute!" she laughed, fishing out sausages for Rand and Marlene. She popped one into her mouth. "Ter-ri-fic...Not peppermints, but pretty good anyway."

Rook was watching them all munching away, her forefinger to her lower lip. "Lemme try one," she said, kneeling down, hands between her knees.

Rand dangled a sausage between his fingers. "I don't know... You think you should?"

"Just gimme it," she barked, snatching it from his grip. She chewed the thing up and swallowed: salty and too soft, but it tasted better than anything she had had in weeks.

Annie saw the look of delight on her face, laughed, and pointed her finger accusingly. "Now our food supply's really gonna be in trouble!"

Scott had left the VT repairs to Lancer and Lunk and had gone off to look for Rand and Rook. He couldn't blame them for wanting to explore the city; it was like some museum of prewar life, the life some of the oldest members of the Pioneer Mission had spoken of.

He was standing in front of a bridal shop now, staring at a lovely white dress in the display window. The dress reminded him of a picture he had once seen that was taken on his mother's wedding day. There was even something about the mannequin that reminded him of her, the short upswept brown hair adorned with a red flower...He was so caught up in the memory that he wasn't aware of his teammates' presence until Annie spoke.

"Jeepers, look at that dress! What I'd give to be married in that!"

Embarrassed, Scott swung around, certain they had read his thoughts somehow. Marlene and Rook were nodding in agreement. They had three shopping carts loaded with supplies.

"Hey, Scott, who's the lucky girl gonna be?" Rand joked.

But Scott saw his friend's smile quickly collapse after Rook nudged him

on the arm. Now it was Rand who was embarrassed for having forgotten about Marlene-Scott's Marlene, who had died during the Mars Division assault.

The foursome began to move off. Scott returned to his musings for a moment more, then called out for them to stop.

"Where do you think you're going? I want to get these supplies to the ships. Maybe you've forgotten, but we have an appointment to keep at Reflex Point."

Rand made a dismissive gesture. "Ah, give it a rest, Scott. What's an hour or two gonna matter?" Then he softened his tone somewhat. "Look, I know this place might not be very important to you..."

"But we were born right here on Earth," Annie filled in. "And leaving this place now would be like turning our backs on our heritage."

Even Rook chimed in. "We deserve a little R&R, don't we?"

The three of them didn't wait for his answer and started off down the street. But he didn't try to stop them; there was no denying the truth of their arguments.

"You're such an old stick-in-the-mud sometimes," Annie said over her shoulder.

Scott regarded the mannequin once again, only now it was Marlene, his fianc 閑's face, that he saw there. Oh, come on, Scott, he fantasized her saying. Loosen up a little. It's a beautiful dress. And who knows, maybe

they'll give us a break on the price...It is our wedding, after all... "Marlene," he said softly.

"I'm right here, Scott," the other Marlene said behind him. "What are you thinking about?"

He turned to her and stammered: "Uh...about another dress a long time ago that was similar to this one." She had a sympathetic look on her face. "Do you think they're right about me being a stick-in-the-mud?"

She was about to reply that she had no idea what that meant, when Scott's face brightened suddenly and he put his hand on her shoulder.

"Marlene, how about an unguided tour of the city-just you and me?"

She smiled and let him take her hand but an instant later was down in the street on her butt.

"Whoa, are you all right?" Scott was asking her. He was kneeling beside her on the pavement, regarding her ankle boots and frowning. "We're going to have to find you some better shoes and some warmer clothes."

She took Scott's hand between hers and pressed it to her cheek. "Mmmm...You're not cold?"

Scott nuzzled her hair. "No. All of a sudden, I feel very warm."

They walked the deserted streets arm in arm, content to say little and enjoying their closeness. Marlene spied a display of lingerie in a shop window and ran to it, fingertips to the plate glass. Here was a pair of yellow bikini briefs with a matching spaghetti-strapped bra, a lavender, camisole, a rose-colored teddy.

"Aren't they beautiful, Scott?"

"Uh, that's not quite what I had in mind," he said from a safe distance, blushing all the while. He put his arm around her shoulders to move her away. "Believe me, you'd freeze in those things," he told her.

In a shoe store, he feigned a foreign accent and tried to interest her in a pair of low-impact approach boots, but she playfully demanded to be shown something more feminine.

"But these things will keep you from churning in the snow." "Feminine, I said."

He round a pair of white pumps in her size and squatted down to place them on her feet. "They're not very practical," he started to say, but she was already up and twirling around on one foot, laughing.

"There," she told him. "Much better for dancing."

Scott smiled up at her. Dancing, he thought. But the more he watched her, the more her face began to blend with memories of his lost love, and ultimately he had to look away. She saw the sadness in his eyes and asked him to talk about it.

"I was just dreaming of a better time, Marlene. Of dancing..."

Then all at once he was on his feet, the excitement back in his eyes, putting his hands atop her shoulders.

"And now to complete the picture..."

He led her off at a run to a dress shop and rummaged through the racks until he had found what he was after: a strapless gown cut like a mermaid's tail, pale lavender above a kind of pleated base of white skirt.

"It was made for you."

She held it up to herself, flattered by his choice. "Go ahead, try it on," he urged her.

And she was about to, but there was something vague in her memory that prevented her. Scott picked up on it immediately, even though she hadn't a clue as to why she had stopped.

"Stupid of me," he said, smacking the heel of his hand against his head. He scanned the shop for a dressing room and when he had located it, rushed over to station himself like a guard by its curtained entrance.

"If you'll just step this way, mademoiselle..." he suggested with a theatrical bow.

She disappeared inside and cautioned him about peeking, recalling the way Rand had looked at her when she had innocently stripped off her clothes to swim...

Scott jumped back as though scalded. She's reading my thoughts, he told himself. He swallowed hard as he watched her discarded clothes pile up on the floor below the curtains. And when the curtains parted, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

She stood still, her hands crossed at her neck, allowing him to take her in; then she gathered her hair in one hand and turned her back to him.

"Would you zip me up, Scott?"

He regarded the open zipper and took halting steps toward the dressing room, his eyes fixed on the graceful curve of her back, the pale perfection of her skin.

CHAPTER SIX

Why the sudden shift from Lancer to Scott? many have asked. But the answer is immediately evident once we are reminded of Ariel/Marlene's original programming as Simulagent. Then it seems entirely natural for her to seek out the leader, and, as it were, the team's weakest line of defense.

Bloom Nesterfig, Social Organization of the Invid

Rand sang to himself while his index fingers worked the machine's flippers. Sure plays a mean pinball...The left paddle caught the ball just right and sent it careening around the cushioned arena, up the forward ramp, and smack into the belly dancer's navel for a bonus score of one thousand points. But propelled free, the steel sphere fell like one of Galileo's own and shot directly through the Flipper Straits, lost to the game's mechanical bowels.

"You Khyron!" Rand cursed, whacking the machine with his hands.

Beside him, Rook made a bored sound at her own machine and moved off to one of the arcade's plastiform seats.

"Don't tell me you're giving up already?" he asked over his shoulder. "Too boring." She yawned.

"Well, how do you ever expect to improve at anything if you just keep giving up?"

He was still angry with her for the elbow she had given him earlier while they were washing their clothes in the Laundromat. Annie had wandered off, and Rand had spotted Scott and Marlene strolling by arm in arm. He was leaping up to give Fearless Leader a round of applause when the gut shot had been delivered without forewarning.

Of course, it wasn't really the case-that Rook had a habit of giving up-but that was beside the point. In any event, she ignored his comment, so he turned back to the machine, angering it just short of tilt after another ball plunged home.

"No good piece of-"

"This place just makes me feel...lonely," Rook interrupted him.

Nice, Rand said to himself. We finally get to spend a few peaceful moments together and she feels lonely. "So what does that make me-part of the furniture?" he said without turning around.

He heard her laugh. "C'mon, you don't want me to answer that, do you?"

Rand compressed his lips to a thin line. He was going to place the next shot right between her eyes...

Up on the roof, Lancer and Lunk were making final repairs to the damaged Alpha. Lancer was down on one knee operating the torque wrench. It was a rare occasion when the two men worked side by side; Lunk was continually worried that Yellow Dancer would make some unannounced appearance, and the last thing he wanted to do was to be caught alone with her, er, him! But today had been different; they had talked shop, and they had talked about the Invid.

"We've really got our work cut out for us now," Lunk was saying. "These new ships they keep throwing at us are a lot more maneuverable than the Troopers."

"You're right about that," Lancer said absently.

"I mean, we were just plain lucky the last time they surprised us in the mountains. If that ledge hadn't given way..."

Lancer recalled the fall of the pink and purple ship. And its female pilot. He found himself wondering if he would see her again-wondering with a mixture of fear and anticipation. But Annie's voice brought him from his musings before he had to grapple with the emotions behind them. She came running onto the roof from the stairway cubicle dressed like a June bride.

"Look what I found!"

The dress was a soft pink, with a white ruffled collar and matching bonnet. But it was at least four sizes too large for her, so she had most of the train gathered up in her arms.

"Just what are you supposed to be?" Lunk asked her.

Lancer laughed and stood up, wiping his hands on his trousers. "She's a bride-and a pretty one at that." He formed his hands into an imaginary camera and brought them to his eye. "What I'd give to have my old Pentax."

Annie put up her hands to stop him. "Wait! I want my bridegroom in this photo!" And with that she jumped up, threw her arms around Lunk's neck, and hung there, the hem of the gown touching the floor now.

Lunk went rigid for a moment, then scooped her up and cradled her in his arms, his dismayed expression unchanged.

Lancer threw his head back and laughed. "Perfect!" he enthused.

Scott couldn't get that zipper out of his mind, except now he was wondering what it would be like to undo it. Since Marlene's death he had been convincing himself that celibacy had been written into his destiny, but suddenly this nameless goddess, this new Marlene, was bringing all the old allegiances into question. Was it wrong for him to be having these thoughts? he asked himself. Would his Marlene have wanted him to remain faithful to her no matter what? He sensed that the phrasing was wrong, perhaps even the questions themselves, because he knew that his love for Marlene could never be extinguished. But these new feelings had more to do with happiness and companionship.

The two of them were exploring a department store. Scott had located the sound system and an original Lynn-Minmei disc-probably the first one she had ever recorded. He knew her well from Tirol, but how different that Minmei seemed from the innocent girl whose bright eyes shone from the CD jacket. It seemed ages ago, Scott realized, before all the troubles with Edwards, before Minmei's devastating encounter with Wolff...

"Stagefright," one of the singer's most popular numbers, was blasting through the PA speakers. Marlene, still in that strapless gown that fit her like a glove, was trying on jewelry. Scott watched her in wonderment. They picked out a silver and brass collar and a bracelet of gold. He found her a

leather shoulder bag and a floppy blue hat.

They exchanged meaningful looks. And Scott asked her about love. "Was there anyone, Marlene? Were you ever in love?"

"Love?" she asked him.

He could see that she had no understanding of the emotion. How traumatized she must have been to have had even that erased from her past!

He began to envy her.

In the next store they separated, as two people might drift apart in a museum, lost in private thoughts and personal moments. It was the toys that fascinated Marlene: wind-up clowns and talking bears, music boxes and transformable gadgets, drummer boys and lively ballerinas. She switched all of them on, filling her world with a symphony of transistorized sounds and songs. She was handling a fragile glass giraffe when the gorilla showed up.

Marlene uttered a frightened scream and fell back, dropping the small figurine to the floor. Of course it was only Scott in a mask, but how was she to know that?

She ran to him after he had taken it off, seeking shelter in his arms. "Hold me, Scott," she whispered. But he held back and gently pushed her to arm's length, his hands on her shoulders.

"Marlene, I...I want to know all about you."

She gave him a helpless look. "I wish I could tell you," she apologized. "I wish I knew the words..."

But what he saw in her eyes was enough. "We don't need words," he told her, drawing her in. They kissed lightly, tentatively, exploring each other.

Then suddenly she pulled back, overcome first by dread, then pain. "They're coming!" she managed. "It's hopeless, hopeless!" Her mane of red hair was shaking back and forth. "There's no escape from them!"

Scott did what he could to comfort her and began to look left and right in desperation. "We're trapped down here!" he berated himself. "Trapped!"

There was no escape!

Far above them in those displaced mountains that towered over the buried city, Corg, the crown prince of the Invid horde, had zeroed in on the rend the freedom fighters had inadvertently opened in the dome. He was a sharp-featured young man with lean good looks and mysterious oblique blue eyes. His hair, which was also blue, lay flat and fine against his skull, lending itself to his somewhat cruel and ascetic look. Corg had been created from the lifestuff of his race by the Regis herself, to rule at Sera's side in the new order.

His command ship was like hers: somewhat acephalic, top-heavy, and buxom-looking with its heavily weaponed torso pods and power nacelles.

Accompanying him were two Enforcer ships that represented the most recent examples of technological innovation from the Regis's weapons factories. They were not unlike their crablike prototypes but somehow appeared almost naked beside them. They were bipedal and seemingly four-armed, their optic scanners were more Cyclopean in placement, and there was a phallic, muscular flexibility to the top-mounted cannons that was absent in the more cumbersome-looking Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships.

Corg chose to make his own opening in the city's dome and did so with a massive charge from his ship's shoulder cannon. Then he began his hellish descent, his two underlings following him down into the breach.

The freedom fighters were waiting for them, though. Scott had alerted the rest of the team to Marlene's premonition, and they had elected to draw the Invid down into the city and utilize the more maneuverable Cyclones to battle them in the streets.

In Battle Armor mode, Scott, Lancer, Rand, and Rook were assembled at street level when the first two Invid blasts shook the city, impacting against the upper storys of one of the tall towers and showering them with chunks of concrete and shards of plate glass.

"We won't stand a chance head to head against these guys," Scott said over the tac net. "We've got to take advantage of their clumsiness!"

"Gotcha!" Rook returned as everyone took to the air.

Rand lingered behind and was almost slagged because of it. "We'll make mincemeat out of them," he was saying when an energy bolt exploded in the street. He caught up with Rook a moment later in an alleyway, but the newfangled Enforcer had pursued him and loosed a shot that nearly fried both of them where they stood. They launched and took up ground-level positions on either side of the alley's exit and poured return fire into the Invid ship as it rounded the corner.

The Enforcer found Rand first and swung toward him, the triple nodes of its cannon primed for fire. Rand leapt away just in time, amazed to see two steady streams of crimson fire where he had expected annihilation discs.

Elsewhere, Scott and Lancer were facing off with the second Enforcer. They had their backs to the wall as the Invid came at them, its rear thrusters keeping it airborne, a flying insect nightmare in the city's twilight.

"I'll draw its fire," Scott told Lancer. "Get above and do some damage!" The Enforcer's cannon muzzles came to life, spewing two deadly beams,

which converged and struck the base of the building, sending shock waves through the streets. Glass was now raining down from everywhere, along with snow that was avalanching through the dome's ruptured skin. Both freedom fighters jumped aside, but Lancer stayed in the air while Scott attempted to lure the enemy onto a wider boulevard. He dug in at the end of the street and waited for the Enforcer's approach; then, with the thing scarcely two hundred yards away, he launched two time-charged Bludgeons from the right forearms tubes of his battle armor. The missiles detonated in the air over the Invid's back, with a collective force great enough to throw the thing face-first to the street. Lancer was in position now, and on Scott's command he activated nearly all his suit's launch tubes; missiles arced from the open compartments and racks and fell like a fiery hail on the immobilized alien ship, destroying it even while its own cannons were

blazing away. To add insult to injury, Scott launched another missile into the dome overhead, loosing a fall of massive ice chunks, which sealed the Enforcer's fate.

Rand and Rook were still being pursued by the first ship, whose pilot was obviously the more experienced of the two.

"Boy, this high altitude's beginning to affect me," Rand told his teammate, fighting for breath.

They had stopped to go face-to-face with the ship after realizing that Scott and Lancer were coming in to outflank it. Now all four of them opened up at once, throwing everything they had against the Enforcer and what was left of the devastated dome, burning and burying it much as they had its companion ship.

But suddenly there was another ship in the arena: a drab gray-green command ship with orange-tan highlights. They had seen this one before and had hoped they wouldn't see it again.

"Scott, behind you!" Rook warned.

The team scattered, but the command ship stuck with Scott, pursuing him through several blocks-literally through the buildings, although Scott was using the doorways and the alien was simply making his own. Ultimately they squared off, the giant insectlike ship and the diminutive Cyclone, and Scott flicked on his externals to say: "I had a sick feeling you would show up again."

The Invid raised its cannon arm and would have slagged him then and there had it not been for Lancer and the others, who distracted it with rooftop fire. Scott seized the moment to leap away, but the command ship continued to stalk him-probably angered by the earlier comment, Scott had the temerity to say to himself. Even Lunk, Annie, and Marlene had joined the fray by this time; they were packed into the APC, riding circles around the Invid's feet while spraying it ineffectually with machine-gun fire. Down on his butt with the alien looming over him, Scott wondered how they had gotten the vehicle down to street level, but he didn't dwell on it for long, because the Invid was ignoring the trio and raising that handgun again.

Just then Annie somehow succeeded in angering the thing with some silly comment; the Invid switched targets, reangled its handgun, and fired off a rapid burst that nipped at the carrier's tail. The APC was unscathed, but something had been thrown from the rear seat-something pink and soft-looking...

Scott realized it was a dress of some sort but couldn't believe his scanners when he saw that Marlene was running back to retrieve it! Lunk had brought the APC to a halt and was yelling at her to forget about it.

The Invid ship swung around and took one giant step, aiming menacingly at its defenseless prey. In the cockpit, Corg stared down at the sister his race had lost to the Humans and could not bring himself to fire.

Scott, meanwhile, had launched himself straight up, crying out Marlene's name and launching half a dozen Scorpions straight into the Invid's back. Leaking fire from its seams, the alien whirled on him and raised its cannon, but Scott was again quicker to the draw with two more missiles that managed to sever the ship's right arm.

The cannon hit the floor with a thunderous crash, but Corg wasn't about to retreat just yet. He turned and stomped after Scott, shouldering the ship through the walls of the building and out into the street.

There, the reunited rebel team ganged up on the command ship, paralyzing it with missile fire and opening up the rest of the dome. It was as though a dam had collapsed: hundreds of tons of snow and ice were pouring into the city. The Invid struggled against the slides but eventually succumbed to the sheer weight of the fall. It went down on one knee, systems sputtering and shorting out, then tipped to its side.

"To the Alphas, everybody!" Scott commanded.

"Well, there goes the world's shortest vacation," Rand said in response. Lunk, Annie, and Marlene were waiting for them on the roof. Once more, Scott couldn't figure out how the APC had managed it, but he didn't stop to ask. He reconfigured his mecha to its two-wheeled mode and told Lunk to stow the four Cycs in their Veritech compartments. Marlene was frightened but unhurt. Scott wanted nothing more than to hug her, his

battle armor notwithstanding, but he contented himself with simply touching her shoulder.

Shortly they had the Veritechs in the air, the APC slung from the undercarriage of the Beta.

"Sorry about the accommodations," Scott apologized to Lunk, Annie, and Marlene, "but the fresh air will do you good."

Lunk swung himself around in the driver's seat of the APC to look back at the massive holes in the ice dome that had kept the city a secret from its surroundings for the past twenty years. In his hand he held an electronic detonator he had rigged to the computer control system of the city's thermal furnaces.

"Now or never," he said out loud, and thumbed the trigger button.

Five minutes later the city exploded with near-volcanic force; a swirling pillar of fire shot up into the winter skies, vaporizing snow and ice and capturing the resultant thaw and clouds of steam. The sound of follow-up explosions echoed in the mountains, catching the Veritechs in their roar. They fought to stabilize themselves in the shock waves and newborn thermals, the jeep rocking to and fro like a pendulum beneath Scott's fighter.

"What the hell happened?!" Rand's panicked voice boomed over the

net.

Lunk flipped on the APC mike. "I rigged the main generator to feed

back on itself," he explained. "Bu-but why?!"

"Because that city had no place in this world." There was a kind of anger in Lunk's voice.

"Well, it sure doesn't anymore," Rand said. "Some fireworks, though," Rook commented.

"Well, golly gee, Miss Rook, sure glad we were able to bring some excitement to your day. Least you won't have to be bored anymore."

"Who asked you?!" Rook returned.

Scott listened to them go at it, then reached out to lower the volume in

his cockpit. He craned his neck to see if he could get a glimpse of Marlene, below him in the personnel carrier. She knew they were coming, he told himself. But what was the strange link they shared? What channel had the Invid opened in her shocked mind that allowed her to sense their coming? And could the team somehow tap that frightening frequency?

He thought back to the command ship's momentary paralysis when Marlene had appeared to pick up Annie's lost dress. Why didn't the alien pilot fire? he wondered, thinking back to the blond pilot's similar reluctance. The Invid had her right in its sights, and yet it was almost as if the thing had recognized her.

Almost as if Marlene was...one of them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Opinions vary: there are those who give Annie LaBelle's age as thirteen and others who give it as seventeen; and there's enough contradictory background data to give strength to either argument. Subsequent research has yet to reveal enough to persuade or dissuade either camp. Rand, in his voluminous Notes on the Run, states that "Annie was thirteen going on seventeen," while elsewhere he opines that "she may be seventeen, but she acts like she's thirteen." It is a minor controversy, to be sure, but one that is still argued over. Ms. LaBelle has not been helpful in laying this matter to rest.

Footnote in Below, The Road to Reflex Point

The presence of Invid scouts patrolling the outer perimeters of the central hive forced the team to keep to the mountains and turn south once again. There was still no sign of Hunter's invasion force, and the Protoculture reserves in the VTs were simply too low to permit any worthwhile reconnaissance behind the enemy lines. No one was really put off by the delay; even Scott breathed easier knowing that Reflex Point was temporarily out of the question. Besides, the snow was behind them, even though the land itself was no less rugged. Travel since "Denver" had been almost due south-into what Scott's maps indicated had once been called western Texas.

Scott, Rook, and Lancer had done most of the flying; Lunk's APC was back on the ground where it belonged, with Rand's Cyclone to keep him company. Annie was in the mecha's buddy seat, urging Rand through the old highway's twists and turns. It was a warm, blue-sky day, and she felt gloriously alive and uncommonly optimistic. Indeed, she had good reason to feel this way.

"It's my birthday!" she shouted into Rand's ear when they had exited one of the road's many tunnels.

"If you don't stop screaming in my ear, it'll be the last birthday you

celebrate," Rand warned over his shoulder.

They had lost sight of the VTs on the other side of the tunnel, so he took the turn fast, hoping to spot them before entering the figure-eight switchbacks that led down into the valley. All at once, Rook's red Alpha came whipping around the shoulder, scarcely ten feet above the roadbed. Rand told Annie to hold on and locked the Cyclone's brakes, stabilizing the mecha through a long slide as Rook was setting the fighter down. Lunk had a clearer view of things and managed to bring the APC to a more controlled stop behind the cyc.

"Why don't you look where you're going?!" Rand shouted even before Rook had opened the canopy.

"Are you trying to kill us?!" Annie threw in.

"Just the opposite," Rook said peevishly over the Alpha's externals. "There's an Invid hive on the other side of the ridge, and at the rate you two were going, you'd have been on it in no time."

Rand's eyes went wide, but instead of thanking her or apologizing, he simply said: "Way down here? Choicest spot around."

Rook was correct about the hive; what she didn't realize was that the Invid were already aware of the team's presence and were heading toward them. About the same time she was warning Rand away, the Invid Regis was issuing new instructions to her troops through one of the hive's bio-constructs.

"Shock Trooper squadron, prepare to relieve incoming patrol drones," she announced. "Projected course of Robotech rebels from last point of encounter should bring them into our control zone during the next eight hours. Evidence of Protoculture activity on the outlying limits of scanning perimeter indicates possible presence of Robotech mecha within control zone even now. All scanning systems on full alert."

On foot, Rook, Rand, and the others joined Scott and Lancer at the top of the ridge, where the two had concealed themselves among some rocks.

The VTs had been shut down and left on the roadbed.

"I don't like the looks of all this activity," Lancer was telling Scott when the rest of the team approached. He had a pair of high-powered scanning binoculars trained on the hive dome. Shock Troopers and Scouts were buzzing in and out of the hemisphere, and several Pincer units were in assembly on the ground, as though receiving orders from some unseen commander. "I think they're expecting us."

"But they weren't expecting us to spot them first," Scott said gruffly. "How does it look?" Rand called out behind them.

Lancer lowered the binoculars and stepped away from the outcropping. "In a word-bad."

"We've got to double back," Scott told them. "There's a high road that keeps to the ridgeline above this valley. We might be able to get through before their sensors pick us up. It's going to be slow going, but I don't see that we have any choice."

The refrain, Rand said to himself as he trudged back to his mecha.

Scott, Rook, and Lancer led the slow, silent uphill procession, relying once more on the battery-operated thrusters that had seen the Guardian-configured Veritechs over many a northern pass. But once over the ridge, they risked increasing the pace somewhat and brought the Protoculture systems back into play. They kept to the road nevertheless but were now hovering fifteen or so feet above its rough surface. But this still wasn't fast enough for Annie.

"Some birthday," she griped to Rand. "No party, no presents, and no fun."

He had been hearing this for the better part of three hours now and was beginning to tire of it. "Count your blessings," he told her. "We're lucky to be alive. Isn't that right, Marlene?" he added, hoping to gain some support.

But Marlene didn't have much to say beyond a soft "Uh-huh" from the front seat of the APC. Her head felt as though it was splitting open, but she

was determined not to let the others see how much pain she was in.

The three pilots became more brazen on the downhill stretches and were soon winging the fighters along at a good clip. Encouraged (and seeing an opportunity to raise the noise level of the mecha above that of Annie's nonstop complaining), Rand began to feed the Cyclone more throttle.

"Mint, what d' ya say we goose this thing a little. That sound good to you?"

Annie hammered her fist against his shoulder. "Don't call me Mint-Whoa!"

With a turn of his wrist, Rand saw to it that her words were left behind. The three Veritechs had disappeared around the bend, but with a bit of fancy weaving under the foot thrusters, Rand thought he could not only catch up but pull out into the lead. As soon as he made his first move, however, the first Invid ship appeared on the scene. It elevated into view from the trees at the base of the slope and skimmed two streams of annihilation discs straight into Rand's path. Consequently, he had to bring that fancy maneuvering into play sooner than planned, but he did succeed in dodging the energy Frisbees of the enemy's first volley.

Of course, it meant leaving the road entirely to do so.

But at least we're alive! he screamed to himself as the Cyclone was bounding down the steep slope toward the trees, Annie hanging on for dear life, in and out of the pillion seat half a dozen times before they hit the flat ground at the base of the cliff. Rand risked a look over his shoulder and saw that the APC had also left the ledge roadbed.

What he, didn't see, however, was that Lunk's landing was far from smooth. A second discharge of disc fire had forced Lunk to swerve at the last moment; the nose of the vehicle connected with some large rocks and overturned, sending Marlene sprawling while Lunk rode out the roll. The same Invid ship swooped down for a close pass over the fleeing Cycloners, loosing a barrage as it fell, but Lancer's Alpha was on the thing now and holed it before it could manage a follow-up burst. Rand, meanwhile, was closing on the trees at top speed, heartened when he heard the Pincer unit

explode behind him, but panicked when he saw two more rise unexpectedly out of the forest.

"They're everywhere!" he shouted.

"Rand! Get into your battle armor!" he heard Scott say over the mecha's tac net. "I'll keep you covered."

Rand halted the Cyclone and began to snatch sections of armor from one of the storage compartments. Off to his right he saw Lunk leading a dazed Marlene to shelter among the rocks at the base of the slope and told Annie to join them there. She ran off, holding her cap on her head with one hand.

Rand struggled into the "thinking cap" and launched for reconfiguration. A moment later he was back on the ground in Battle Armor mode, squaring off with one of the ships. The thing tried an overhand pincer swipe that missed, then a, quick spray of disc fire after Rand had aggravated it with two Scorpions from the Cyclone's forearm launchers. The discs tore into the earth at Rand's feet and threw him flat on his back, but he countered with three missiles that found their way into seams in the ship's alloy. The Invid had enough life left in it to attempt a second pincer crush, but Rand rolled out from under it and watched as the ship collapsed onto its face and exploded.

Elsewhere, Rook was in pursuit of the second new arrival; Scott was several lengths behind her as she chased the ship across wooded valleys and dry fingers of foothills. The lieutenant's face came up on the red VT's cockpit commo screen.

"That's enough, Rook-let it go."

"But we can't let this one report that it found us," she pointed out. "We've gotta finish it."

"Forget it," Scott told her more strongly. "They're on to us already, or we wouldn't have had that little skirmish back there. Swing around."

Rook glared at Scott's screen image, then began to ease the VT off its pursuit heading. She couldn't help but notice how beautiful the land was below her-green hills and meadows, in startling contrast to the barrenness

of the high ground. She saw a town and alerted Scott to her find.

"It doesn't look like anybody's home," she commented as the two fighters completed a quick flyby.

Scott was silent for a moment, then said: "That'll be perfect." "Perfect for what?" she asked him. But he had nothing further to say.

They all agreed that the village must have been a delightful place when it was alive. Now it was just a motley collection of buildings and houses (spanning several hundred years of architectural styles), but nothing could diminish the tranquillity of the valley itself or the beauty of the surrounding mountains.

Scott ordered the Veritechs in and instructed Rand to assist Lunk with whatever repairs the APC required; afterward the two men were to join the others in town, but Marlene and Annie were to wait until they received an all clear before coming down from the hills.

A building-to-building search of the place revealed little in the way of supplies, but Lancer stumbled across one item that prompted a scheme to turn the tables on the Invid Troopers in the nearby hive-as well as carry out the more prosaic surprise Scott had in mind for Annie. What he had found-hidden in a barn on the outskirts of town-was a device known as a bio-emulator, a Protoculture-powered instrument that was capable of mimicking the energy emanations of a supply-sized cache of the pure stuff. It had been developed not by the resistance but by the black market racketeers at the close of the Second Robotech War, for luring Southern Cross personnel to their deaths.

Given top billing in Scott's reworked plan was an unusual building that dominated the town, a circular structure with a columned cupola adorning its domed roof that had once served as an armory. Installation of the bio-emulator setup required a certain amount of group effort to conceal wiring and such, but the original plan, the prosaic one, called for little more than setting up several strategically placed rocket launchers and breaking out some of the supplies the team had brought with it from the Rocky

Mountains underground complex. The freedom fighters split up into two teams, with Rook and Rand handling the indoor chores while Lunk and Lancer worked together rigging the armory building with charges. Scott did what he did best: he supervised.

Then Rand was sent to fetch the two women.

The sun was setting, huge and golden, and. Annie and Marlene were still waiting in the mountains, sitting side by side on the rock with a western view.

"I guess birthdays are very special days," Marlene was saying consolingly. "I wish I could remember if I ever had one."

"Oh, you've had one," said Annie. "I don't think there's any way around that."

"Do they always make you unhappy?"

Annie brought her knees to her chest and put her head in her hands. "Let's just say that it's hard to be happy when every single one of your birthdays is a disaster."

"But Annie, were they all bad?"

The young girl was sniffling now, her eyes closed.

There was a time, she recalled, when things could have been pleasant but weren't. A time before the Invid invasion, when her parents and Mr. Widget were still alive, when the Northlands were embroiled in war with the Robotech Masters, and the Southlands prospered. Before the bombs...when she still had a home.

She could see herself in that simple shingled house, dressed in her yellow pants and blouse, reading the card they had given her and gazing at the cake her mom had bought at the market, left alone to puzzle out why they couldn't stay to enjoy it with her, why they always seemed to have more important things to do. She could hear her mother's voice still: Your father and I won't be back till late, Annie, so when you've finished your little party, be sure to clean up all the dishes and put yourself to bed at a decent hour, all right? Well, good-bye, honey, and, oh yes, happy birthday...

"I don't know how many times I prayed that just once I could have a real birthday party with friends and family like everybody else in the world." "I don't think there's anything worse than being alone on your birthday.

Well, I guess I wasn't completely alone...at least my friend Mr. Widget was there to help me eat my birthday cake."

"Who?"

"He was my cat...He's gone now..."

"Oh," Marlene said softly, trying to understand.

Annie looked up into a pale yellow sky, wisps of lavender clouds. "Jeez, when did it get so dark? I wonder where the others are." The sun was already down now. "Thank goodness it won't be my birthday for much longer," she sighed.

All at once the two women heard growling noises coming from the trees behind them. They wrapped their arms around each other and waited for the worst. The growling grew louder, and Annie began to scream, clutching at her friend; then Rand appeared out of the darkness with a big hi and a smile on his face.

"Rand, you jerk!" Annie yelled.

He snorted and walked over to them. "All right, all right, calm down. I should've known you'd be a nervous wreck by now. But let's get going; we have to go meet the others."

"But where's the Cyclone?" Marlene wanted to know, her arm still around Annie's shoulders.

Rand shook his head. "I'm afraid I can't offer you a ride. It's too risky to use any of our mecha. This whole area is crawling with Invid."

Marlene gasped. Strange that she didn't feel their presence.

"Scott and the others are holed up in the village," Rand added after a moment. "There's no way we can get through."

"That tears it..." said Annie.

Marlene gave her a reassuring hug. "I'm afraid it's going to be another birthday without a party, Annie. We're sorry."

Rand made a scoffing sound. "I hate to tell you this, but we've got a lot

more important things to worry about than Annie's birthday. Now, come on."

He led them off through the woods to the edge of the hill overlooking town, trying to maintain that same hard look that wouldn't give away the surprise. But he knew that the act must be killing her and began to wonder about the more sinister side of surprises.

"That big house down there on the left," he gestured. "We've gotta try and make a run for it."

"It's so spooky-looking," Annie said, burying her face in Marlene's breast. "I'm scared."

"Are you sure Scott's down there?"

"Everybody's down there," Rand told her. "At least, they were when I left I hope nothing's happened." He started off down the hill. "Follow me."

It was a simple brick affair with a large chimney, curved-top windows and doors, and two small dormers. They hid together behind a tree at the edge of the walk. Rand ran to the door and motioned for them to join him quietly but quickly. Annie was making frightened sounds.

"It's dark in here, so watch out," he cautioned them as he opened the door. "Scott, I'm back," he whispered into the darkness. "Where are you?"

Annie was the last through the door, and by that time Marlene and Rand were gone. She called out to them, quietly at first but with increasing panic in her voice. "What happened to everybody?" she asked pleadingly as she moved across the floor, unable to see her hand in front of her face.

"Why does everybody always abandon me?"

"Annie, over here," someone called out from somewhere. "Rook, is that you?" she answered, her voice a tremolo.

Suddenly there were flashes of light in the blackness, then a brightness she had to hide her eyes from. But again someone called out to her: "Open your eyes, Annie."

And when she looked, she saw all her friends, gathered around a round table that had been set for seven, with plates and wine goblets and platters of food and a large birthday cake decorated with seventeen candles. And

everyone was wishing her happy birthday.

Lunk was standing over her with the cake in his hands. "Are you putting me on?" she asked them.

"It's your favorite," he told her. "Mint chocolate."

"And look what I made for you," Rook said, showing her a knitted scarf. "Happy birthday, Annie," said Marlene. "At last."

Annie stared at everyone for a moment, found that she couldn't take it, and ran outdoors to weep; there she said thank you to the stars.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Dad didn't plan a career as a voyeur-at least, not consciously. He just kept finding himself looking here when he should have been looking there, stumbling onto this when he should have been busying himself with that:.. Until the incident at the baths. But I sometimes wonder how mach Mom encouraged Dad's behavior. I asked her about it once, and the only thing she would tell me was that Dad got what he had coming. Then she grinned.

Maria Bartley-Rand,

Flower of Life: Journey Beyond Protoculture

The cake, the sweets, and the gifts were only the start of the surprises Scott and the team had in store for Annie, but after a few sips of wine it turned out that Annie had some surprises of her own.

She was playing the celebrity host to their toasts and compliments now, using her wineglass as a prop microphone and modeling the pink chiffon dress Rook had given her. Her hair was brushed and parted in the center, for once free of the funky E.T. cap she was seldom seen without.

"To the cutest little freedom fighter around," Scott said from the table, lifting his glass.

"Thank you, thank you, ladies and gentlemen," Annie directed to her audience. "I would also like to thank my designer, Miss Rook Bartley, for this elegant gown."

Rook took in the cheers with a noticeable blush. She hadn't done more than tailor the dress down to Annie's size. And unfortunately, she had gone a little high on the hem; the dress made Annie look about six years old, but no one was pointing this out. The yellow knee socks and brown pumps didn't, help any, but they had taken what they could from the sub city, with little thought given to coordinating an outfit.

"Rook, I didn't know you were so...so domestic," Scott said from across the room.

Rook saw the bemused look on his face but ignored it. "It looks great on you," she told Annie, throwing the lieutenant a look out of the corner of her eye.

"Thanks! I feel like a beauty queen!" Annie tried a pirouette, giggling all the while, and almost lost her balance.

Cross-legged on the floor, Rand stifled a laugh. "One thing's for sure-you're no ballerina!"

Annie looked at him and shook her head as though to clear it. "And now the moment you've all been waiting for," she said like an emcee. "Approaching the judges' runway is our next contestant for the title of Miss Birthday Girl!"

Lunk and the others caught on to the act and applauded.

Annie switched to a squeaky parody of her own voice. "Thank you," she said into the wineglass. "My name's Annie. I'm four-foot-seven with blue eyes, and I'm often complimented on my personality." As she sauntered by Rand, she flashed some thigh and slipped him a wink. "And my legs aren't bad, either, big boy."

"I'll say," Rand enthused, knocking back another goblet of wine.

Annie cozied up to Lunk next. "Oh, I can't tell you how happy I am to be here! It's just too thrilling for words!" She gave him a light peck on the cheek and moved away from the table, snatching up his glass of wine.

"Hey, wait a second, that's not fair!" Rand protested while everyone else laughed. "If a contestant kisses one of the judges, she's gotta kiss all of them."

Annie had backed away tipsily to clink glasses with Lancer. "Gee, do I have to?"

"Yep. Them's the rules."

"Well, pucker up then," she said on her way over to Rand. But as he stood up and offered his lips, she stuck one of the wineglasses in his mouth. Annie dismissed the laughter and sidled up to Scott, who was leaning against the wall. "Now, don't anybody move, because my very favorite part is coming up next-the swimsuit competition!" As Scott's eyebrows went up,

she reached up and shut his eyes with her fingertips. "But you don't get to watch, you dirty old man!"

"That's telling him, Annie!" Rook encouraged her. Rand said, "Well, she's got my vote."

"Yeah," from Lunk, getting to his feet.

Rook seconded the vote, and everyone else said, "Agreed!"

"It's unanimous, Annie," Rook announced. "You are the new Miss Birthday Girl!"

Annie skipped over to the curtained window while they toasted her easy victory. "Jeepers, I don't know what to say!" Then suddenly it was her natural voice once again, full of emotion and sincerity:

"Except that this is the happiest night of my life."

But far above the spirited celebration, some uninvited guests were converging on the deserted village: an Invid patrol from the nearby hive, now under the leadership of Corg himself. He had narrowly escaped being blown to bits by the explosions that had destroyed the underground city, and the Regis had granted him a new command ship of the same design as the original.

"Are we approaching the site of the disturbance?" Corg inquired into his cockpit communicator.

The source of active Protoculture readings recently received by the hive monitors had been traced to the village, and the Regis was certain that the Robotech rebels had made their way here. She was just as certain there would be no escape for them stow.

"Estimated arrival time: five point two minutes," she told Corg through the command net that linked her with her troops.

Corg glanced out over the landscape from the cockpit of his ship and thought: The thrill of approaching victory makes me feel almost...Human!

The women were cleaning up-by choice, not design. Normally they wouldn't have even bothered to tidy up, but there was something about the

house and the town itself that brought out sentiments most of them thought they had left behind. Marlene was a little puzzled by it all, but she volunteered to help Rook clear the table and clean the glasses and plates. The luxury of running water was more than enough for Rook, and she really had her mind on the hot bath she planned to take once the supplies were repacked.

"I've never seen Annie so excited," she was telling Marlene now. "This is one birthday she'll never forget." Annie was peacefully asleep in a chair nearby. "I never thought I'd live to see her wearing a dress like a regular little girl."

Scott was outside the window, eavesdropping, his handgun raised.

Lancer found him there and wondered what it was all about. "You're concerned about Marlene, aren't you?"

"Well, what about you, Lancer? Don't you get the feeling there's something mysterious about her? And I don't just mean the amnesia. It goes beyond that...like she's never had a past to remember. Like..."

"Like what, Scott? Go on, say it."

But Scott simply tightened his mouth and shook his head.

Lancer sighed knowingly but wasn't about to open up his own thoughts if Scott couldn't bring himself to do the same. "I don't think that she's going to murder us all in our sleep, Scott. But I agree that she's an unusual woman. Maybe we just have to give her some time to come out of it."

Scott gave him a dubious look and was about to press the point, but just then Rand broke into the conversation.

"Hey, guys, do you really think the Invid might show up tonight?"

There was something about Rand's tone that suggested more than his usual concern, almost as if he had other plans. But Lancer chose to reply to his remark, not to the unsaid things. "There's no sign of them yet," Lancer told him. "And believe me, that's just the way I want it. I think I've had more than enough entertainment for one day."

Rand tittered, delighted. "Well, maybe you've had enough. But as far as I'm concerned the party's just beginning."

Lancer beetled his brows. "Rand, what exactly do you have in mind?"

When Rook and Marlene finished the dishes, they woke Annie up and surprised her with a bag of peppermints they hadn't brought out at the party.

"Peppermints!"

Rook patted her on the shoulder. "I knew those bags you took wouldn't last."

Annie was handling the bag lovingly one moment, and the next she was crying. "When I think that I'm having a real birthday after wanting one so badly...with peppermints and everything..." She buried her face against Marlene.

"We're just glad you enjoyed it," Rook said, smiling. "The only problem is we only get to do it once a year." She yawned and stretched. "And now, something for the three of us to enjoy together..."

The bathroom was in the rear of the house; it was a completely tiled room with a shower stall and a sunken tub large enough for four. Rand had been there when Rook made the discovery, and he knew it was only a matter of time before she would go back to avail herself of the pleasures of an honest-to-goodness hot bath. So he had already stationed himself below the room's only window well before the time Rook, Marlene, and Annie entered. He couldn't believe his luck when he realized that all three were about to take the plunge.

He had actually convinced himself that he had no idea just what the room contained. As far as he or anyone else was concerned, he was merely standing guard out here while the rest of the guys dillydallied out front, cleaning their weapons and waiting for the Invid to home in on that device Lancer had rigged in the armory. Therefore, it was entirely understandable that he poke his head up to that window at the first sign of any unusual noises, because who knew what was lurking around in these supposedly deserted villages?

What he hadn't figured on was the damn window being quite so high; he was forced to stand on the rather shaky woodpile underneath it in order to peer in. And it was only then that he realized the window glass itself was frosted-not opaque but certainly a lot less clear than he would have liked. And the steam from all that hot water wasn't helping any, either.

Nevertheless, he was able to discern a good deal of what was going on. He knew, for example, that that was Marlene stepping out of her pants, and Annie discarding her dress, and Rook slipping off her jumpsuit and bra and panties...It was just the details that were left to his imagination. And the need to know those details soon had him on tiptoe atop the woodpile, eyes and cupped hands pressed to the glass.

Annie was already in the sunken tub when the first logs began to slip under his feet.

"It sure is warm enough," she was saying. "I feel like a lobster." Naked, Rook and Marlene were laughing playfully but not loud enough to cover up the sounds from outside the window.

Rand gripped the windowsill, held his breath, and tried to will the logs silent, but they just kept rolling off the top of the pile and crashing against the side of the house. At first he wasn't sure if the women had heard anything, nor could he be sure they were looking his way. But the bathroom was awfully quiet all of a sudden...

I'm just investigating these strange sounds, Rand said to himself over and over. I'm just investigating these strange sounds

"Hey, is there somebody out there?!" Annie asked.

Rand heard her and started to back off, but the pile gave way again and sent him down on his butt to the ground. By the time he turned around, the window had been thrown open, and in addition to clouds of steam came a bucketful of ice-cold water that caught him squarely on the back and seemed to lift him right off the ground.

"That oughta cool you down, Rand," he heard Rook saying.

"That's what I get for trying to be helpful?!" he shouted in return, running off toward the front of the house.

Overhead, the Invid squadron closed in on the village, a constellation of evil moving across the heavens.

"Estimated three point seven three minutes to objective," Corg told his troops. "Focus scanning systems on Protoculture activity. And remember: These are Robotech rebels. They are not to be neutralized for the farms; they are to be destroyed."

Scott and the others had moved indoors by the time Rand entered, towel-drying his hair and trying to work some warmth into his scalp. Lunk was spreading out the sleeping bags, and Scott seemed to be spit-polishing the muzzle of one of the assault rifles.

"I'm starting to think maybe the Invid aren't as stupid as we thought they were," Lancer was saying from the window.

"Don't worry, they won't let us down," Scott told him. "Just keep your eyes peeled."

Shivering, Rand draped the towel around his neck. "Whew!" he said loudly enough to capture everyone's attention. "I've never been able to figure women out. They go on and on about how men don't appreciate them, and when we do go out of our way to appreciate them, they start screaming bloody murder like it was all news to them."

Lancer threw him a disapproving look. "There's a big difference between appreciating them and leering at them, Rand."

"Ah, what do you know about it?" Rand countered angrily.

Scott ignored the two of them and asked Lunk about the so-called Roman candles he had set up outside.

"It's just my part of the surprise for Annie's birthday," Lunk explained.

Meanwhile, the birthday girl was back in the tub having her hair washed by Rook. She asked Marlene if she had ever been in love.

"Scott asked me the same question," Marlene said, soaping herself up,

"and I have to give you the same answer I gave him: I know it must sound strange, but I honestly don't remember."

"How can you not remember if you were in love?" Annie said in amazement.

Marlene shrugged. "I've forgotten everything. I'm a living, breathing, walking blank-I can't even remember what my purpose in life is."

"Your purpose in life is to find a man," Annie told her with certainty. "Everyone knows that. Rook has found herself a man."

Rook stopped massaging Annie's hair and gently twisted her head around. "If you're talking about Rand," she said into Annie's face, "let me enlighten you about a thing or two. First of all, about this business of needing a man-huh?!"

Marlene was staring at them in stark terror. "They've come!" she screamed. "The Invid are here!"

Inside the armory the bio-emulator continued its false siren song.

The men were also aware that the Invid had arrived, and the ships were doing just what the plan called for: forming a circle around the building.

"Remind me to congratulate the wise guy who invented that bio-emulator," Lancer said, arming his blaster. "It's working like a charm."

Scott was the first through the open window. "Lunk, stay with the women. And Rand, grab those detonators on your way out. Time for this evening's next surprise."

While Scott, Lancer, and Rand were stealing away from the house, Corg was issuing orders to his troops. They had put down in formation fifty yards from the circular structure and were spreading out to take up positions. The voice of the Regis came across the communications net.

"You have reached the focus of the disturbance."

"Deploy for complete encirclement of the Robotech rebels," Corg ordered. "None of them must be allowed to slip through our grasp."

"Scanners indicate the Protoculture emanations are definitely

Robotech in origin..." the Regis updated as the combat units fanned out. "We will not fail you this time, my queen," Corg started to say, but the

Regis had something to add.

"However, the nature of your readings is disturbing. The Protoculture activity is unusually steady in its dispersal pattern. We detect no modulations or fluctuations of any kind-almost as if the matrix waverings were being synthetically produced."

"Nonsense! Humans are incapable of such deception!" He already had the cannon arm of his ship raised.

The cockpit displays in Corg's ship began to flash as new data was received and transmitted. "Our bio-detectors register no sign of Human movement within the structure," the Regis continued. "Probability cortex indicates likelihood of a trap, increasing by a factor of one hundred for every five seconds you remain in present situation..."

Corg reached out and shut down the audio signals. "Open fire!" he commanded.

Streams of annihilation discs began to tear into the circular walls of the armory, and explosions erupted across the face of the dome, filling the cool air with the sound of thunder and throwing pyrotechnic light into the night sky. Corg continued to scream "Fire! Fire!" urging his troops on to greater heights of destructive catharsis, pouring out all the misunderstood feelings and frustrations that were part of the life the Regis had given him.

But outside the circle of pincer-clawed ships, the Humans had some feelings of their own to express. And suddenly there were explosions coming from the trees that surrounded the building, explosions Corg could not understand. He watched as his Troopers were hurled violently against one another and sent smashing into the building's stone walls. Others were lifted off the ground by the force of the blasts. Claws, scanners, and pieces of hardware became fiery-hot projectiles blown from his decimated squadron. The hull of his own ship was holed with shrapnel and pieces of airborne debris, and all at once he felt himself overturned, felled by a storm of enemy fire. Shock Troopers were taken out while they attempted to lift off, erupting

like brilliant balls of flame, raining pieces of themselves throughout the field.

"Easy as shooting fish in a barrel," Rand said from the perimeter.

Lunk, too, was yahooing from the window of the house. The women had joined him in the front room, clad only in bath towels. Annie was so excited, she leapt clear out of her towel, breasts bobbing up and down, but Lunk was too preoccupied with the explosions to notice.

"Ka-boom! Yeah! I love this stuff!"

"Wow! This is the best birthday present of all!"

Meanwhile the few remaining Invid ships, including the command ship, were taking to the skies in retreat.

"Okay, we're free to use the Alphas," Scott told Lancer and Rand. "Let's move it!"

The three men ran past the house to the concealed fighters, waving back to Lunk and their towel-clad teammates. Lancer stopped to say: "Don't anyone go to bed yet, because we fly-boys have one more surprise in store!"

"Another surprise?" Annie asked him, adjusting her towel. "Just what are you guys up to now?"

"Just you wait and see," Lancer said, running off to catch up with Scott.

Lunk had jumped out of the window and was showing Annie an enigmatic grin. "I've got one of my own," he added, rushing away.

The women exchanged puzzled looks and then some as the sky began to fill with starburst explosions.

Rook laughed. "He wasn't kidding: they really are Roman candle launchers."

Annie looked at her. "You mean you knew all along?" "Only some of it."

Scott was glad to see that the fireworks had only added to the enemy's confusion. The Invid ships were streaking away, trying desperately to evade the fireworks, fooled into thinking they were some sort of lethal missile.

In fact, Corg was reporting as much to the Regis while he led his ragtag troops back toward the hive.

But Scott didn't call for pursuit. Instead, the Alphas formed up on his lead and went through the unrehearsed moves they had discussed earlier that day.

"It's wonderful, isn't it, Annie?" Marlene said from the window of the house.

"I've never had a birthday like this," the teenager was saying.

"I don't think any of us have had a birthday like this," said Rook. And it's really happening...it's not a dream!

The women could see the skywriting now, and Rook read the words: "Happy...Birthday..."

Up above, Rand said: "I'll bet Admiral Hunter never had you guys doing this with your Alpha Fighters, huh, Scott?"

Scott smiled, then realized that Rand was off course somehow. "What are you doing down there?" he asked.

Rand made no response and completed his part of the skywriting moves. From the window, the three women watched as his Alpha spelled out "Mint" under the birthday greeting.

Rook snorted. "So that's why Rand wanted to write your name."

"Oh, well," Annie sighed, turning away from the window for a moment. "I guess it's a lot better nickname than 'Peewee.'"

CHAPTER NINE

The planet [Earth] secured, the Regis then had to decide what to do about the surviving Human population. She knew from past experience that Humans could be a dangerous lot, even these Terrans, who seemed somehow inferior to the Tirolian species. Eventually it would occur to her to use a percentage of the survivors as laborers in the Protoculture farms, but that was only after what can best be described as a trial-and-error period, during which an unlucky assortment were subjected to experiments too gruesome to dwell on. Fortunately, most of the laboratory cases died outright or soon thereafter, though a scant few remained to wander their ravaged homeworld less than Human.

Bloom Nesterfig, Social Organization of the Invid

As Rand told it:

"The soldiers had been dead a week, but the town was just getting around to burying them when we rode in...I have to admit that I had put no stock in the rumors we had been hearing on the road, but sure enough, the town had its own contingent of Robotech soldiers, Mars Division, like Scott, survivors from that same ill-fated assault on Earth. It was remarkable enough to come across a populated village so near the Invid control zone, but to find fellow soldiers as well was almost more than Scott could bear. I still have an image of him parked in the middle of that town's dust bowl of a main street, straddling the Cyc with a big grin on his face and broadcasting our arrival to one and all over the mecha's externals. When only a handful of folks wandered out to greet us, I remember thinking: Here we go again; just another ghost town run by a bunch of rubes and rogues. But then we learned that everyone that counted was at the graveyard."

"That's where Scott ran into the robbies. Not straight away, though; there was a funeral service in progress, so we all just hung around on the outskirts of the action until the crowds thinned. There were church bells

ringing in the distance. After that, Scott went in to introduce himself to the one soldier who seemed to be in charge-a tall officer, wearing shades and a high-collared gray uniform like Scott's. I never did catch the dude's name; come to think of it, I don't think the two of us exchanged more than a brief handshake the whole time we were in town."

"It turned out that they had been there for some months; they had put down as a unit somewhere south of Reflex Point and worked their way into the Northlands, hoping to come across other Mars Division survivors. They saw a lot of action early on, but now they were just hanging on, waiting for the big one to go down. They had all heard of Scott and were excited to learn that the Expeditionary Force was indeed on its way. They had a good deal of intelligence dope on Reflex Point, but there was something they needed to talk about before getting down to basics."

"There were three fresh graves in the cemetery, marked by simple wooden crosses, one of which was crowned with a 'thinking cap,' its faceguard shattered. I naturally assumed that the Invid had paid the town a visit and left their usual calling cards, but that wasn't the case. It seems that the three had been gunned down by some lone biker who went by the name of Dusty Ayres. These latest murders brought the total to eleven."

"Scott was flipped out to learn that someone other than the Invid were killing soldiers; he asked the officer about Ayres."

"'We don't know much about him,' the man replied. 'Except that he seems to have it in for soldiers.' The officer threw his men a dirty look. 'Some people claim he can't be killed.'"

"I didn't like hearing this, but for Scott it explained how three soldiers could be brought down by one loner. I didn't bother to point out that a man needn't be invulnerable to get the better of a group, because it was obvious that Scott was already thinking Invid. No Human could do such a thing. As if he had to be reminded about the sympathizers we had met along the way. Wolff, to name just one..."

"'Sounds like a real mystery man,' Lancer offered. 'And nobody knows why he's here, huh?'"

"Scott said more firmly, 'You must know more about this guy.'"

"I was glad to see that I wasn't the only suspicious one among us. But the officer wasn't swayed to say any more about Ayres. 'I wish I had more.' The man shrugged. 'Everything's just rumors right now.'"

"'Dusty Ayres, you say,' Scott repeated."

"'That's the only name I've ever heard him called.'" "Lancer brought up the sympathizer idea."

"Lunk punched his open hand. 'I just wish he'd try to start something with us. I'd break his face.'"

"Terrific, I thought. I looked at the three graves and wondered how our helmets would look on those crosses."

"'He's got to be hunted down,' the officer told Scott. 'Will you join us, Lieutenant?'"

"Scott was wary. 'I'm not going to involve any of my people until I know more about this matter.'"

"'Sure thing, Lieutenant. You take your time. While the rest of us die...'" "I sucked in my breath; you just didn't go around saying things like this

to Scott unless you were already holding an H90 to his head. Fortunately, Lancer stepped in to intervene. Only thing was, he actually took it upon himself to volunteer our services. Lunk, the big lug, seconded it, and I guess that was enough for Scott."

"'You won't regret it, Lieutenant,' the officer thanked us."

"I, of course, already regretted it; but everyone else was talking tough and anxious to get started."

"We left Annie and Marlene behind-much to our birthday girl's dismay. After all, she had been 'seventeen' for a full week now, and didn't that entitle her to share in the 'fun stuff'? Those were her words: 'It simply isn't fair!'"

"Rook got a big charge out of this but didn't bring it up until later, after we had split up into several groups."

"'Fair? Did she really say "fair"?'"

"I repeated Annie's exact words into my helmet mike and laughed. We

were both in battle armor now and cruising side by side across the barren stretch where Ayres had last been seen, close to where the bodies of the three soldiers had been found. The area had once been called 'the Panhandle,' for reasons unknown, but it was just plain desert to us, no different from the wastes we had been traveling through since leaving the mountains behind. Scott and Lancer were off somewhere south of us, and Lunk was riding with a few of the other soldiers."

"I confessed to Rook how pissed off I was by the whole deal. 'I mean, what happened to Reflex Point? Suddenly we're a posse for hire, or what?'"

"For once, Rook actually agreed with me. Strange, because she had been ignoring me since the stunt I pulled at the bathroom window. I had been taking a kind of apologetic, conciliatory tone with her ever since and now suggested that we split up to cover more ground. But she didn't want to hear it."

"'If it's all the same to you, I'd feel better about this if we stayed together.'"

"I certainly didn't need to be told twice, and I'm sure I was smiling inside my helmet when the Invid ships appeared over the hills."

"'Guess we're just not meant to be together!' Rook shouted over the net just before we separated."

"There were five ships bearing down on us: four rustbrown pincer-armed combat units led by one of the new blue and white monsters we had been up against in the underground city. It was bound to happen-our Cycs were probably putting off the only 'Culture vibes for miles around-and I had said as much before we split up, but nobody wanted to hear it."

"The leader dropped some fire at our tails, but we were flat out now and just out of range. The big guy stuck with me after we separated, but Rook had her hands full with the Pincer craft. I saw her slalom through a field of explosions, then launch and reconfigure to Battle Armor mode. She put down almost immediately and took out one of her pursuers with a single Scorpion loosed in the nick of time. I wanted to applaud her, but I was too

busy dodging blasts from that leader ship. There was a low mesa directly in my path, and I used it to my advantage by snaking around its base and going over to Battle Armor before the Invid ship completed its own turn. I hovered near the eroded wall of the butte, trading shots with the ship, but I couldn't zero in on any vulnerable spots. The Invid was up on its armored legs, towering over me, loosing anni discs from two small weapons ports tucked under its chin-guns I didn't know existed until just then. But after a minute of this I took off to find Rook. As the two of us landed side by side, she said, 'We've gotta stop meeting like this.'"

"I would have laughed if another blast from the leader hadn't forced us into a rapid launch. And when we put down again, there was panic in Rook's voice. 'It's bad, Rand! There's just too many of them!'"

"'It's always bad!' I shouted back. 'Just range in on the big one and give it your best shot!'"

"The four remaining ships had regrouped and were closing in on us. We both raised our forearm launch tubes, and it was then that Rook spied something atop one of the nearby hills. I turned in time to catch a metallic glint."

"'What is that?' Rook asked."

"I told her I had no idea. 'But if it's not friendly, we're in real trouble.'" "The Invid had also caught sight of the thing, and it was apparent an

instant later that they found it to be a more appealing target. The ships zoomed past us without a shot, making straight for the hilltop. I thought it might be Scott or maybe Lunk in the APC, but I had to guess again, because instead of attacking, the ships simply moved off, as though recalled unexpectedly."

"'I guess it's friendly,' Rook was saying, stepping out for a better view of the thing. But that didn't make sense, I told her, following her lead. If it was friendly to us, it would have been fired upon. My guess was that it was an Invid command ship-perhaps that orange and green one we had been seeing lately."

"But as the thing came into view, we saw that it was some kind of

side-carred cycle, piloted by a man wearing a poncho and Western-style hat. We were trading looks with him when he suddenly fell off the bike, obviously shot!"

"The rogue was hurt, but well enough to ride. Rook insisted on seeing what she could do for the wound in his arm, and he led us to a patch of forest that bordered the river we had crossed on our way into town. He was tall and good-looking in a derelict sort of way. His hair was parted in the center and fell below his shoulders, and he was in need of a shave and a good scrubbing, but none of that seemed to bother Rook. She was playing nurse to his silent cowboy and enjoying herself. I pretended to interest myself in the guy's mecha, which was unusual-it had twin scrambler-type exhaust stacks and a multimissile launch rack (the thing I had taken for a sidecar)-but I didn't miss a word of their conversation. I had already convinced myself that the guy was an Invid plant. He claimed to be as surprised as we were that the Invid had flown off without frying all of us, but I wasn't buying any of it."

"Rook and I had taken off our battle armor. The stranger was sitting down with his back against a tree, the poncho draped over one shoulder, letting Rook probe around inside his wound with a pair of tweezers from one of the Cyc's first-aid kits. What she fished from his arm turned out to be an old-fashioned bullet! But even this didn't seem to faze Rook."

"'This should help some,' she said, dropping the small projectile on the ground and treating the wound with antiseptic solution."

"The man thanked her in the same flat, clipped tone I was already beginning to dislike. A breeze rustled through the woods just then, and I gazed up and saw something that reinforced my suspicions about the guy. The wind revealed what the poncho had intended to hide: that his arm and a good portion of his chest were covered with some sort of gleaming alloy. Rook must have seen it, too, because I heard her gasp while asking the rogue's name."

"'Excuse me, mister. I didn't mean to embarrass you,' she hastened to

add. 'What happened to you?'"

"'Well, I'm glad you didn't run away when you saw it,' the stranger drawled. 'That's how most react...Let's just say it's a little present from our friends the Invid. You could say I'm just lucky that they left me alive at all.'"

"Rook made a face. 'I guess it could've been worse... ' She asked the man to remove his poncho and dabbed at the wound with gauze before beginning to dress it. 'At least you got away from them.' Rook winked at him flirtatiously. 'Now, I'm no doctor, so you better not let this rest until you see one.'"

"The rogue almost smiled-or maybe that tight-lipped grin was his idea of a smile. But in any case, he said: 'What'd you say your name was, missy-Rook? Well, Rook, I just can't thank you enough for helping a stranger out.'"

"Rook had a blushing response all ready for him. I saw her gesture to the bullet. 'But this isn't from any Invid,' she started to say. 'They don't have anything this primitive in their arsenal.'"

"The stranger was about to reply, but I stepped in with my Gallant drawn and aimed at his midsection. 'You're right, Rook. And those Invid ships didn't just forget about us, either. This rogue's a spy.'"

"'What are you doing?!' Rook shouted at me. 'Put that thing away!'" "'Not till I find out what it is about his guy that makes the Invid run

away, or how he ended up with a bullet in his arm.'"

"The rogue just stared, like he was sorry for me or something. 'If you have to know, the bullet came from my own gun. It discharged by accident. Check near the seat of the cycle if you don't believe me, kid. You'll find an antique six-gun under-'"

"'You're an Invid agent,' I snarled, ignoring the bit about the gun because it sounded too much like the truth."

"'If that was true, you'd be dead, kid.'"

"This also sounded right, but I ignored it and motioned with the blaster for him to get up. Rook was already on her feet, cursing me."

"'He's not our enemy, Rand. Besides-he's hurt!'"

"I told her to stand out of the way and ordered the guy to his feet. He got up slowly, almost tiredly, and said we had helped him and he was grateful. 'I don't want anybody to get hurt.'"

"I had the weapon straight out in front of me, and I guess I really didn't expect him to go for his gun. I even fired a warning shot into the tree behind him as his hand inched toward the holster, but he went for it anyway, confident that I wasn't about to kill him in cold blood, and caught me in the right hand with a stun blast, knocking the Gallant from my two-handed grip."

"That made twice when I should have fired first and asked questions later-first with Wolff and now with Mr. Clint McGlint. But so help me, if I'm ever drawing a bead on someone again..."

"Anyhow, Rook ran over to me to take a look at my hand, dismissing it roughly when she saw that I was only mildly burned."

"'I hope you're satisfied!' she seethed. "You could have been killed!'" "The stranger threw me a look. 'Like I said, kid, if I was one of them,

you woulda never left the sands alive.'"

"I looked over at Rook, trying to sort through my feelings, and decided that it was all her fault for being so...friendly."

"Back then I was still struggling with jealousy."

"I let Rook and the stranger have a few moments of privacy by the river while I nursed my hand and wounded pride. But I didn't let it go on for long. The sun was going down, and I was certain that Scott and the others would be worrying about us. I had all but forgotten about Dusty Ayres and the search that had brought us out here to begin with."

"Rook and her new hero were too far off for me to, hear, but I could tell by her posturing that things were getting a little too chummy, so I finally banged the Cyc into gear and rode in to break it up."

"'Sorry to interrupt, but it's time we headed back to town,' I told her. 'Thank your friend for his hospitality and let's get moving.'"

"The stranger regarded me, then turned back to Rook. 'I have to leave

anyway.'"

"'Sorry to hear it,' I said."

"He ignored the comment. I tried to hurry Rook along and roared off, wanting no part of whatever good-byes the two planned to exchange."

"Rook caught up with me a few minutes later, and we rode a long way before either of us spoke. She repeated that I had been wrong about the man from the start-the man with no name. As he told it, he had been used as a guinea pig in some gruesome experiments the Invid had carried out shortly after they had defeated the Earth forces; apparently, the whole right side of his body had been vivisected and replaced with prostheses and alloy plating. Worse than that, his friends had stood by and made no attempt to rescue him. He was an unusually sensitive man, Rook insisted, and I had acted like a complete moron."

"I don't know why I didn't put two and two together then and figure out who the stranger was; I guess I was just too wrapped up in Rook's attachment to him to see the obvious. 'I have some unfinished business to take care of,' he had told her in response to her invitation to join us."

"Well, by the time we got back to town, I was convinced that I had been wrong and full of forgive and forget toward Rook. The open invitation didn't exactly thrill me, but I somehow managed to swallow my protests and keep still about it."

"'Rand, level with me,' Rook said when we were getting off the Cycs. 'Was I wrong to befriend that stranger?'"

"'No,' I told her. 'You've gotta follow your feelings sometimes, no matter what.' Naturally I thought she was trying to get to the heart of the possessive feelings I had displayed. It was only later that I realized what was really on her mind: she had known all along just who it was she was helping and befriending. The question had nothing to do with us; it had to do with loyalties of an entirely different sort..."

"We had tracked down Scott and the gang to a saloon/restaurant straight out of an old Western movie. But if the place took me by surprise, the sight of Yellow Dancer nearly floored me. I suppose I had started to

think of her as gone-a missing person-someone who had traveled the road with us for a short while and vanished, a casualty of this bizarre war. So to see Lancer now, in his turquoise tunic and helmet/bonnet, his pink belt and skin-tight pants, filled me with contrasting feelings. Scott and Lunk were at the bar knocking back a few while Yellow sang a very subdued 'Lonely Soldier Boy.'"

"A couple of the town's soldiers came in just then, announcing that they had finally dug up a photo of this Dusty Ayres character, and they wanted to pass it around to us. Rook and I stood at the bar with the rest of them as the photo circulated. It was of course the face of our mysterious stranger. The cigarette in his mouth made him look even more sinister than he had appeared in the flesh."

"I was waiting for Rook to say something or at least throw me a look, but she didn't do either. I turned to her, my face all twisted up, and said:

"'You see?-I was right all along!'"

CHAPTER TEN

If the Ayres incident proved one thing, it was that Humans and Protoculture were basically immiscible. Invid and Protoculture? That was something else, as we shall see.

Mingtao, Protoculture: Journey Beyond Mecha

Rook edged away from the bar and left the saloon. The sight of Dusty's photo in the hands of all those soldiers who were eager to see him killed, all those soldiers who had allegedly lost friends at his hands, had brought into question her earlier efforts on his behalf. Her flirtations. She sat in the dark on the saloon steps, while inside the soldiers drank and swore vengeance, and wondered why she always seemed to fall for the bad boys, the loners and rogues. It went back to Cavern City, she supposed, to Romy and the Angels and the days when she had been something of an outlaw herself. She couldn't deny, however, that she had seen something noble in Dusty's character. She thought back to that brief glimpse she had had of his chest plates and prosthetic arm. "My friends did nothing to stop them," she recalled him telling her. "They made no attempt to rescue me, or at least put me out of my misery... " Not that that justified his going on a murder spree.

Rook heard Rand's voice and glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the saloon. He was telling the men that he knew where Dusty could be found. But he made no mention of the time he and Rook had spent with him. He was being his usual protective self, and yet Rook found that she was angry instead of grateful; she didn't want to thank him as much as throttle him. Because Rand, underneath all the arrogance and sarcasm, was actually a pretty sensitive man-in a hick sort of way.

Rook shut her eyes and pressed her hands to her forehead, as though in an attitude of prayer. I knew he was the one they were searching for, but it just doesn't seem possible that he could be so cold-blooded. And maybe Rand is right-maybe he is an Invid agent. When she looked up, she found

Marlene standing in front of her.

"Are you all right?" Marlene asked her. "I saw how upset you got in the saloon."

"I'm touched," Rook said nastily as Marlene sat down beside her.

Marlene made a puzzled expression. "I guess I must deserve that for some reason...You see, I don't mean to pry, but you just looked like you could use a friend."

Rook sighed and took Marlene's hand. "I'm sorry, Marlene. In fact I was just thinking about friendship."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Rook made Marlene promise that what she was about to say would remain between them; then she told her about the brief skirmish with the Invid ships and the wounded rider she had helped. "It was Dusty Ayres," Rook confessed. "I think I knew right from the beginning, but I just didn't want to believe it. And after he told me what he had been through, I started to feel sorry for him. I probably wouldn't have said anything if that photo hadn't turned up. Now I'm going to have to lie about it."

"But Rand won't say anything. He doesn't know what you were feeling." Rook showed a thin smile. "Oh, he knows, Marlene, he knows..."

A light rain had begun, but a moment passed before Rook took any notice of it. She could hear the soldiers in the saloon discussing their plans to hunt Dusty down. Suddenly, she shot to her feet, startling Marlene. "I won't be able to rest until I see him again. Maybe I can convince him to surrender before he gets himself killed!"

Rook raced off, leaving Marlene alone in the rain.

An hour later, Scott was leading a Robotech posse across the sands. Rand was overhead in one of the Alphas (the Beta was close to depleted), directing the five Cyclone riders to where he and Rook had last seen the outlaw Ayres. The APC was trying to keep up with the group; Lunk had two of the town's soldiers with him. No one knew where Rook had gone; Rand

had an idea, but he wasn't saying.

A heavy rain was falling, and the barren land had all the charm of a landscape in hell. But Scott was inured to the idiosyncrasies of the Earth's weather. Besides, he was obsessed with Ayres's capture, even though he had wanted no part of it initially. Perhaps it was because he was convinced that there was more to the story than anyone was telling him. A supposedly invulnerable outlaw who was systematically killing off Robotech soldiers...And yet the man wasn't thought to be an Invid agent, and no one had the slightest idea what was motivating him to murder. It just didn't add up. Scott was even beginning to suspect Rand of holding something back. It was obvious from the things he had said back in the saloon that he and Rook had had more than a passing encounter with Ayres. But why would Rand lie about it? Scott wondered. With Reflex Point almost close enough to touch (and with the new information the town's soldiers had supplied him), it was imperative that the mystery be solved so everyone could get back on track.

As if to reinforce Scott's concerns, a squadron of some fifteen Invid ships appeared suddenly out of the clouds.

"Invid at twelve o'clock!" Lancer reported over the net. "A bunch of 'em, too!"

Scott made a motion for the Cycloners to fan out. "Here we go, Rand," he sent up to the Alpha. "Standard battle plan!"

In the Veritech cockpit, Rand had to laugh. Standard battle plan. That was their little joke, meaning: Do your best and we'll all try to keep from killing one another in the process.

Rand wished them luck and threw his fighter into the thick of things. The squadron was composed of Pincer units and one blue leader that he could see; he managed to destroy one of the ships straight away but spent the next few minutes juking and dodging discs and laser fire from the rest. The blue especially was riding his tail with a vengeance.

"Too many of them!" he shouted over the net, upside down now and enmeshed by angry red bolts and streams of annihilation discs. "Where the

hell is Rook when we need her?"

Elsewhere on the sands, Rook was confronting the outlaw. Ayres had almost fired on the red Veritech when it appeared but had stayed his hand at the last minute when he recognized Rook inside the cockpit. She was standing by the fighter's kowtowed nose now, mindless of the rain. Dusty was dressed in the same poncho and hat he had worn earlier; his all-terrain war machine was idling softly behind him. "You took a chance coming out here, Rook," he was telling her.

"I know that. But it was a chance I had to take, Dusty."

He grinned at her knowingly. "So you know my name, huh? And you just had to find out more about the mysterious killer. Is that it?"

"I suppose so," she started to say, wondering if she could bring herself to admit more.

"Well, there's nothing more to find out," he answered before she could go on. "So get back in your fighter and forget about trying to involve yourself in this."

"But I'm already involved," Rook shouted. "I knew who you were this afternoon. I didn't need to learn that in town. And all I'm asking you for is an explanation."

Dusty started back to his cycle. "I've got things to do, Rook. I don't have time for this."

Rook pushed wet hair back from her face. "I guess I was naive to think I could keep you from killing again, so you leave me no choice..." She drew her blaster and leveled it at him. "I'm a soldier, Dusty, just like the rest of them. I have friends to protect."

She could see that she had surprised him, but he made no move for his weapon. "I don't want to hurt you, Rook-"

"Don't move or I'll fire," she warned him.

"You're making a mistake," he said after a moment. "Just put the blaster away and listen to me. Don't make me do something I'm going to regret."

Rook's nostrils flared, but she couldn't keep Dusty's words from undermining her will. She recalled how he had shot Rand, and she recalled the stories of his invulnerability...At last she lowered her weapon, and Dusty thanked her.

"You remember what I told you at the river, Rook? About the Invid's experiments with me?" He tossed the poncho over one shoulder and opened his shirt to give her a good look at the alloy plates that covered half his chest. "My friends let this happen to me, Rook. They stood by and let those monsters use me like a laboratory animal. They replaced my entire right side piece by piece with Protoculture-generated organs and these metallic prostheses." Ayres glared at her. "Do you really blame me for hunting them down?"

Rook lifted her head to answer him. "It must have been unbearable," she began on a sympathetic note. "But think about it, Dusty: you were a soldier once. Maybe your friends couldn't get to you. Maybe they tried and failed. And look what you're doing now: you're killing the only people who can avenge you. Your enemies are the Invid. How can you be sure they didn't implant something in your brain when they were carrying out those experiments-something that would compel you to attack your own friends."

Rook waited for him to respond. The latter possibility made a lot more sense to her than the former, because if Dusty's friends really had made an attempt to rescue him, why were they now acting like the whole deal was one big mystery to them? It was a moot point, though: Dusty was shaking his head, rejecting what she had said.

He raised his prosthesis into the cycle's headlamp and indicated eleven crosshatched marks engraved into the forearm alloy. "Each mark is a name I'd just as soon forget," he told her. "But I won't forget until I've killed every one of them!"

More than the marks, Rook could see the madness in Dusty's eyes. "I understand," she said softly.

He uttered a short maniacal laugh. "I was hoping you would, Rook." He goosed the cycle's throttle and pulled the hat down on his forehead. "I've got

no gripe with your friends, but don't try to stop me-any of you. "

Rook allowed him to ride off. We'll meet again, she told herself. And I'll do what I have to do...

Rand took out another Pincer unit with heat-seekers from the undercarriage launch rakes and reconfigured to Battloid mode, bringing the rifle/cannon out in the mecha's metalshod right fist.

"It looks like we've gotten ourselves into a hole this time," Lunk said from the ground, where the soldiers were pouring fire into the sky.

Employing the foot thrusters to stabilize the ship, he raised the weapon to high port position and bracketed yet another Invid in his sights. He triggered off a burst, catching the ship midsection. "Just keep firing," Rand told Lunk, while the enemy fell like a meteor.

Scott screeched his mecha to a halt and stood up, straddling the seat to bring his assault rifle into play. In the distance at ground level, he saw a bright light moving toward him. "Something's coming!" he alerted the others.

"Let's hope it's on our side," said Lancer.

Lunk lowered his weapon to have a look at it. "It's sure moving fast!"

Suddenly the Invid ships ceased their attack and began forming up on the blue leader, as though to observe the arrival of the newcomer. Then Rand's voice cut through the net: "That's Dusty Ayres's machine!"

With a dozen Invid ships still overhead, Rand expected Scott would have had sense enough to pull back and regroup, but instead, he heard Scott say, "Let's get him!" and launch himself in pursuit of the outlaw. Two of the other Robotech soldiers followed his lead.

Dusty Ayres saw the Cyclones speeding toward him and flashed a satisfied grin. Well, well, Steve and Kent driving out with their greetings, he thought. How considerate of them. The launcher's panel slid to, and Ayres let his thumb hover over the trigger button. "Now die!" he screamed, and fired.

Missiles streaked from the rack and found their targets; the two riders

were blown to bits. Scott squinted as flames geysered up out of the sands, instantly superheating the air and filling it up with the stench of death. "Outflank him!" Scott commanded Lancer and the fifth Cycloner. "We'll try a cross fire!"

The three Cyclones and the APC converged on the lone rider, announcing themselves with a horizontal storm of lethal rounds. But Ayres appeared to be weathering it all; his clothes were torn to shreds and aflame, but the man himself was unscathed.

"They were right, Scott! The guy's indestructible!" Lancer exclaimed.

Ayres answered the challenge with shots of deadly accuracy, first taking out the Cycloner, then picking off the soldiers in the APC one by one before loosing missiles against the vehicle itself. Lunk was thrown a good twenty feet from the fiery wreck; when he looked up, he saw Scott hovering over Ayres in Battle Armor mode, dumping everything the mecha had against him. Lancer pulled up a moment later, and Scott put down beside the two of them.

"Nice shooting," said Lancer as the three of them regarded the ruin that was Dusty's cycle.

But it wasn't over yet: Ayres-at least something that resembled Ayres-was stepping from the flames.

"I must be seeing things!" Lunk cried.

Scott's eyes went wide beneath the helmet faceshield. "I wish I could say you needed glasses, but I'm seeing it, too!"

In the meantime, everyone had forgotten about Rand-all except the Invid Enforcer, that is. The rest of the ships were still in formation overhead, but the commander had pursued Rand to the ground. Still in Battloid mode, he was trying to go one on one with the thing, but his reconfigured fighter was an infant to the enemy's giant.

Fortunately, Rook came roaring to his aid not a moment too soon, somehow managing to pilot her red VT right through the Pincer combat units without a fight. Together, the two Veritechs turned on the Enforcer and brought it down with enough explosive heat to turn the rain to clouds of

steam. When the Pincer Ship pilots saw this, they broke formation and fell on the Humans; but by now Rand and Rook were back to back, with the VTs' weapons systems synchronized. On Rand's command they launched all their remaining cluster rockets, and in the fireworks display that followed, every Invid ship was destroyed.

At the same time, Lancer was seeing fireworks of his own. The first to attack Ayres, he was the first down, toppled by a blow from the outlaw's bionic arm. Lunk was already out-he had fainted from shock-but Scott stepped forward now, raising his weapon and cautioning Ayres not to move. Confident inside the reconfigured mecha, Scott reasoned that Lancer's battle armor hadn't been enough to withstand the Human monster's strength, but surely Ayres couldn't bring a Cycloner down...

Scott tried to reason through it again a moment later, when he found himself flat on his back with Ayres standing over him aiming a blaster at his heart. He couldn't even recall the punch Ayres had thrown.

"Stay there," said Ayres. "Don't get up."

Who is to say what he might have done had the two Veritechs not put down on either side of him just then? Rook and Rand had the fighters in Guardian mode now; Rand leveled the rifle/cannon on Ayres while Rook leaped from her cockpit to face off with the gleaming half-Human outlaw.

"You told me it was just revenge, Dusty. That you weren't after the rest of us, remember?"

"They tried to kill me," Ayres threw back, training his hand weapon on her. The implication was clear: if Rand fired, Rook was going to die as well. No one was even certain at this point that the VT could really take Ayres out.

"Well, what did you expect them to do?" Rook screamed. "You're a murderer." She took two steps toward the muzzle of the weapon. "So you might as well start with me, because these people mean more to me than life itself. And if I thought that my helping you had contributed to their deaths, I couldn't live with myself." She gestured to her breast. "Go ahead, Dusty: right here, right here..."

Scott, Lancer, and Lunk were urging Rook to get back, but she stood her ground.

Ayres glowered at her and extended his weapon, but a moment later, much to Rand's amazement and everyone else's relief, he lowered it.

"I couldn't do that," he said, unable to meet her eyes. "I just couldn't...Maybe if I'd had friends like you, none of this would have happened. I told you: I've got no argument with any of you people."

In the midst of all this, the Invid Enforcer had struggled to its feet and was now taking halting steps toward the Humans. Scott and the rest of the team swung their guns off Dusty to train them on the approaching ship. But Ayres told them not to worry about it. "I can tell by the way it's moving that it's no threat to us anymore."

Scott, who figured he knew the Invid just about as well as anyone, disagreed and told his team as much. So it seemed that only Dusty was surprised when the ship's cannons flared to life. He pushed Rook aside, raised his handgun, and fired, bull's-eyeing the ship's scanner.

Rook hid her face from the ensuing blinding flash and follow-up explosion. She thought she heard a bloodcurdling scream pierce through it all, one of agony and release, and when she looked up Ayres was gone, disintegrated along with a great portion of the Invid ship itself.

The team spent the rest of the night picking up the pieces. Rook filled everyone in, grateful for Rand's efforts to support her but in the end overriding his objections. No one blamed her, really; they had all seen so much in the way of revenge, betrayal, and deceit this past year that Ayres's story was nothing new.

"I told him his real enemies were the Invid," Rook explained. "I'm sure they put something in his head; they had more control over him than he realized."

"More than he wanted to admit, that's for sure," said Lancer. "Those ships pulled back to see what we'd do up against their toy. He was probably an early experiment to see if they could use us against one another."

"And it's obvious they can," Scott added. He exchanged a brief look with Lancer. They were both thinking about the blond pilot they had seen in the tropics and then again in the snow-covered Sierra pass.

And they were thinking about Marlene.

"Well, at least he had a friend in his last moments," Lunk said to Rook. She gave him a wan smile. "He died for us..."

"Stop it, Rook," Scott said harshly before she could continue. "Don't make him out to be some kind of hero."

Rand saw the hurt look surface on his friend's face and moved quickly to Rook's side to take her hand. "Scott's right," he said softly. "Dusty wasn't a hero, Rook." "Then what was he, Rand?" she wanted to know. Rand's lips compressed to a thin line. "He was a victim."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Oh, what a place this was! A city? The city. These nine foot techno-horse

-headed gestapos with their black armor and fancy blasters...They wouldn't drawn second looks in this town.

Remark reported by Rand in his Notes on the Run

Another week went by and there was still no sign of advance units from the Expeditionary Force. Nevertheless, Scott and his team put the time to good use reconning the southern and eastern perimeters of the central hive complex. Thanks to information supplied to him by the Robotech officer (whose remains were now housed in the same graveyard Dusty Ayres helped to fill), Scott was beginning to form an overview of Reflex Point; it was not, as initially believed, a single hive but rather a group of hives, at the hub of which was the Regis's stronghold. The complex covered a vast territory that stretched from the Ohio River Valley to the Great Lakes and from what had once been Pennsylvania west to Illinois. The week's recon had established that the perimeter was most penetrable from the northeast; this constituted something of a lucky break for the team, as it placed Mannatan (formerly New York City) close enough to their route to justify a short detour. Burdette, the late Robotech officer, had furnished Scott with the location of a relatively unpoliced Invid storage facility within the island city, where there was more than enough canister Protoculture to restock the team's dwindling supplies.

Mannatan was the largest surviving city in the Americas, Northlands and Southlands. It had been shaken and scorched by Dolza's annihilation bolts, but many of its enormous structures had survived intact. So much death had been rained around it, however, that the city had had to be evacuated. Few of the millions of evacuees who had fled into the irradiated surroundings had survived, but by the end of the Second Robotech War, people and mutant birds with condorlike wingspans were finding their way

back to the cracked and fissured towers, and the abandoned city slowly began to repopulate. Before the Invid arrived, hopes ran high that the city would rise once again to become the great center it had been in the previous century, but those plans were dashed with the aliens' first wave. Still, the Regis saw no reason to destroy the place; she merely constructed one of her hives atop the tallest structure-the 1,675-foot Trump Building, which the hive encased like a wasps' nest just short of its summit-and moved all potential troublemakers to nearby Protoculture farms. With Reflex Point at close proximity, the city's residents (who numbered less than one-tenth of one percent of the city's prewars population) posed no threat to the Regis's domain, and Mannatan was one of the few places where her Controllers and bio-constructs actually patrolled the streets on foot.

Everyone was naturally eager to visit the city, but Scott was wary about all of them entering at once. He wasn't sure just how closely the Regis had been monitoring their recent movements, but given the reappearance of the green-haired Human woman and the orange and green command ship, it seemed reasonable to assume that the team was still a high-priority concern at Reflex Point. And with access to the city limited to a single two-tiered bridge near the northern tip of the island, Scott was against taking any unnecessary risks. Lancer was the obvious choice for advance man because he had already seen the city-years ago, before the Invid invasion, when Mannatan was on the ascendant. Rand would serve as backup, and Annie would accompany them, if only to keep up appearances. The two men would carry hand blasters.

Scott's intuitions proved correct, inasmuch as the Regis had indeed made elimination of the team one of her top priorities, especially since she had lost Ariel to them, and was noticing a certain reluctance on Sera's part. But in some ways this was as intriguing to her as it was baffling-allowing her to recall her own attractions to Zor so long ago. So she elected to place Sera and Corg in temporary command of the city's central hive to observe the results. She did this mostly because she had pressing concerns of her

own at this point. The long-awaited trigger point of the Flower of Life was drawing near, but at the same time there was evidence of the imminent arrival of the Human forces who had battled her husband, the Regent, on Tirol and other worlds. And if they arrived before the Flowers came to full fruition, the entire scheme of the Great Work would be jeopardized.

Nine Urban Enforcers marching in a diamond-shaped formation were patrolling a quadrant in the lower part of the island city just now, an area where the towers were especially tall, making the sunless streets feel all the more narrow. Security had been breached earlier that same day; sensors had detected the presence of an unauthorized entry into the city and the energy signatures of Robotech mecha. Shock Troopers and Pincer Ships were hovering overhead, while Scouts covered the miles of waterfront.

"Urban Enforcer squadron," boomed the Regis's voice over the foot soldiers' command net. "Proceed in formation to the East River, divide into units, and search all abandoned buildings for any sign of the rebels. They must not be allowed to slip through our grasp this time."

The nine were huge cloven-foot, bipedal creatures outfitted in black-and-white battle armor, with rifle/cannons affixed to both forearm sheaths. Their smooth eyeless heads were almost comically small, almost dolphinlike beneath the helmets, with a single round scanner for a mouth-a red jewel in the elongated jaws of the helmet. Over what could have been the bridge of the leaders' snout was an inverted triangular marking of rank.

Most of the residents had scattered from the streets and returned to their homes. Street stalls had shut down, and mongrel dogs were having a field day. There were two Humans, however, who made no move as the soldiers approached. They were hunkered down on the sidewalk, their backs to the wall of a ruined building, tattered clothing pulled tight around them, hats pulled low on their heads. Their temerity would have been suspicious had the pair not been representative of that class of Humans who had a penchant for street life and were often addicted to any number of intoxicating concoctions. Nevertheless, in light of the present emergency,

one of the soldiers saw fit to stop and investigate the duo.

"Investigating Human life-forms..." the Invid told his superior, aiming a scanner. "Sensors indicate no active Protoculture, yet their lack of reaction warrants further observation."

The squad stopped to have a look, but after a moment the leader made a dismissive gesture with its right arm. "Do not waste time with these derelicts."

"But they do not fit the standard Human profile," the soldier began to object.

"Do as I command," the leader said more harshly. "These could hardly be the rebels we seek."

As the soldiers moved off, a whispered and muffled voice rose through the clothing of one of the men. "Can we get up now? I can't breathe-the kid's smothering me in here!"

"Not yet," said his companion, taking care to keep still. "Let them get a little farther down the street."

Shortly, Lancer straightened up, removed the brown cap, and flashed a self-satisfied grin at the now deserted street. "Okay," he said.

Beside him, Rand was in a panic. "Come on, Annie, open up the blanket! I've got about thirty seconds worth of air left!"

Lancer stood up in his tatterdemalion threads, while Annie tossed aside the blanket she had wrapped around her shoulders. She had been sitting on Rand's shoulders beneath the makeshift cape for the past ten minutes or so. Adroitly now, she leapt off him and removed her dark shades and gray fedora.

Behind her Rand was massaging circulation back into his score neck. "My head! Jeez, Annie, why couldn't you have-"

"Lancer, I thought you said they called this place Fun City," she complained, ignoring Rand. "Well, it's been a pretty big disappointment so far! All we've done is dress up like bums and hide from the Invid. When do we get to have some real fun, huh?!"

"When are you gonna learn?" Rand said angrily, waving a fist over her

head. "What d' ya think, we're in an amusement park or something? Remember what we're here for."

She made a face and stuck her tongue out at Rand.

Lancer had stripped off his costume and was back to his usual black trousers, tank top, and leather knee boots. "Knock it off," he told Annie. "We have about fifty blocks to cover, so let's move it."

Burdette was right about the place being unguarded. There were a few Urban Enforcer troops stationed out front, but the trio had no problems getting around them and were soon in the basement of the building, closing on the duct system the Robotech officer's map indicated would lead them to the main storage room. It was at this point that they were supposed to head back downtown to rendezvous with Scott, but Lancer insisted that they make certain the information was correct and follow through with the break-in without waiting for the diversions Rook and Lunk had planned.

Rand went along with the idea (Annie didn't have to be convinced), and in a short while they were pushing out the grate of the duct that emptied into the Protoculture storage area itself. It was a dimly lit theater with an elaborate stage, but all it housed now were stacks and stacks of crated Protoculture canisters. Rand went over to one of the crates and pried open the lid.

"There's enough here to take a whole army to Reflex Point!" he whispered excitedly, hefting one of the sodacan-sized fuel canisters.

"Provided we can get it out without being spotted," Lancer said absently.

"Ha! Don't worry about a thing, sir," Rand began to joke. "Protoculture Express at your service! We deliver overnight or you get your money back."

"Guaranteed!" Annie joined in. "In fact, if we don't make good, we pay you!"

"Now all we've got to do is get back downtown and tell Scott about this," Rand said. "Right, Lancer?...Lancer, are you okay?"

Lancer was glancing around the theater, amazed. "Sorry," he said, turning to his teammates. "I was just thinking what a beautiful place this used to be."

"What do you mean?"

"This is Carnegie Hall," he explained with a sweep of his arm. "I guess it doesn't mean much to you, but before the Robotech Wars this was one of the finest concert halls in the world. I remember reading about it. The people who used to sing here..." He smiled at the thought. "I used to dream of playing here. Now there isn't much chance of that, I suppose."

"Culture of a different sort," Rand mused. "Maybe the Invid will start holding auditions, huh?"

Lancer ignored the ribbing and allowed himself a momentary fantasy that featured Yellow Dancer on stage, singing "Lonely Soldier Boy" to a packed house...

I won't let the Invid destroy my dreams! he promised himself.

It was that promise that enabled Lancer to justify going along with Rand's spur of the moment plan to take what they could get their hands on straightaway rather than risk a second entry into the place. It also made sense from a practical point of view, because they would have enough fresh Protoculture to recharge the Beta and utilize it in a follow-up raid if it came down to that.

They were in the midst of packing away a few sixpacks of the stuff when they heard loud footsteps echoing in the hall and headed in their direction. They had already secreted themselves among the maze of stacked crates when one of the Invid foot soldiers entered, seemingly on patrol.

"Keep under cover," Lancer warned as they made themselves small. "We don't want to fight it out if we don't have to." He and Rand had their handguns drawn. Annie was wide-eyed, trying to hold on to the armful of canisters she hadn't had time to set down.

Lancer cautiously peered over the top of one of the crates. He could see

the soldier moving systematically through the aisles formed by the stacks. "It may just be on an inspection tour," he said softly. "It'll probably go away if it doesn't find anything wrong, but be ready, just in case." Silently, he stole across the aisle and repositioned himself for cross fire.

Rand looked over at Annie and her precariously balanced load. "Try not to move. Don't even breathe if you can help it!"

She shut her mouth tightly and rearranged the canisters as judiciously as she could, but there was one that insisted on sliding. She made a nervous sound.

The Enforcer stomped past their aisle and stopped, as though alerted to something. Rand drew a bead on the things back. Here we go again, he told himself. Sitting ducks...!

The Invid began to move off, but Annie was suddenly desperate. "Rand, help me! They're slipping-they're gonna fall!"

And a moment later they did, hitting the floor with a sound of toppling bowling pins. Rand managed to stifle Annie's scream with his hand, but the Enforcer had heard enough to warrant a second pass along the aisle.

"They slipped," Annie explained in a panic after Rand took his hand away. "I'm sorry, I couldn't help it-"

"Here comes trouble," he interrupted her, arming the Gallant. "Just keep quiet."

The Invid raised its rifle as it began to retrace its steps, but its pace remained unchanged. Lancer threw a quick nod to Rand and leveled his own weapon, wondering just where you had to hit these creatures to have it count. He chose the scanner as a likely target and bracketed it in his sights.

"Just a few steps closer," Rand was whispering to himself when he heard the cat.

At least it sounded like a cat-a rather large cat at that. It growled twice more and then launched itself from wherever it had been perched. Rand went up on tiptoe and just caught a glimpse of the animal's shadow as it leapt from stack to stack. It was even bigger than its growl had indicated! He could see that the Invid soldier had swung its snout to the sound and

was also tracking the shadow now. The cat took a few more leaps, making one hell of a racket in the process.

Rand breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the Enforcer's rifle begin to lower. Obviously it was satisfied that the animal had been responsible for the noise. It's going to fall for it! he thought.

He let himself collapse in sheer nervous exhaustion when the Enforcer exited the room, and Annie came over to him thinking he had been hit or something. Then suddenly the cat was back, snarling a long meow and executing an incredible tumble from the box seats near the hall's stage. Only now Rand was sure the thing wasn't some ordinary cat.

And in fact it wasn't: it was a young, curly-haired Hispanic boy wearing elbow pads, sky-blue dancer's tights, pale yellow leg warmers, and a tank top emblazoned with a large J.

"Well that was easy!" the boy laughed, one leg crossed over the other and hands behind his head after his upright landing.

"Have you been here the whole time?" Lancer said once he had gotten over his amazement.

The youth nodded. "That was my Persian. Wanna hear my Siamese now?"

Annie still didn't get it. "You mean that was you? There wasn't any cat?"

"Okay, so you do a good feline impression," lancer said warily, gesturing with his weapon. "What are you doing in here?"

The boy's eyebrows went up. "What are you doing here is more like it, mano. As for me, I hang out here sometimes-but I know a lot of easier ins and outs than using the air ducts."

"So you saw us," said Rand. "Hope you're not nursing any ideas about turning us in..."

The youth laughed again. "Wha'-for, foraging a little 'Culture? Be real, Red. 'Sides, I'm no symp, if that's what you're thinking." He motioned to Lancer's blaster. "Look, I'm not complaining or anything, but how 'bout lowering the hard-tag?"

Lancer glanced down at the weapon and deactivated it.

"That cop's gonna be making another pass pronto," the youth warned. "We better make tracks, unless you're dying to use your juice."

Rand got up, his H90 casually aimed in the boy's direction. "Lead on, Lightfoot," he told him. "We're right behind you."

There were indeed quicker ways out of the place than the route they had taken in, and in a short time the youth was leading the trio down an east-west street a few blocks from the Carnegie Hall storage facility. The Protoculture canisters had been safely stashed away for the time being.

"I guess we owe you an apology and our thanks," Lancer was saying. "What are you called?"

"Jorge," the youth answered him. "I've got a nest in the balcony back there."

"You can enter that place at will?" Rand asked, impressed.

Jorge turned a gleaming smile up at him. "Shit, man, there's no place in this whole city we can't go if we want to."

"But the Invid-they're crawling all over this place." "Yeah, but they don't bother us if we don't bother them."

"That was some display you put on," Lancer said, changing the subject. "You're quite an acrobat."

"A performer," Jorge emphasized proudly. "Fact is I was on my way to rehearsal before I had to stop and save your necks." He laughed at their chagrin. "Why don'cha come with me and check us out."

Lancer looked over to Rand, who returned a shrug of consent.

"Well, I'm all for it," said Annie, quick to take Jorge's arm. "I'm gonna have some fun in this place if it kills me!"

"It should be a great show," Jorge was telling them a few minutes later.

He and the rebel trio were on a staircase landing overlooking a small stage, where a dozen male and female dancers were executing syncopated martial kicks under colored lights. It was a kind of historical piece,

harkening back to the frenzied, kata routines of the turn of the century, with some break dancing and pelvic thrusts thrown in for variety.

"They're good," Lancer commented. I wonder if their dreams will survive this alien nightmare?

But on stage some of the performers were wondering whether they would survive the director. He was nothing if not the consummate perfectionist. "Hold it! Stop! Stop!" he was shouting now, an effeminate curl to his voice. He was twice the age of the oldest on stage but well built nonetheless. He had a pencil-thin mustache and brown hair, save for a section of bleached forelock. "This is awful, just aw-ful. Harvey," he continued, pointing, "I swear you dance like a moose in heat. And Arabella: You look like you're waltzing, for heaven's sake. Remember, everyone, this is supposed to be 1990, not 1770! So could we please try not to embarrass ourselves?"

The dancers had all adopted hangdog expressions by now, and Jorge took advantage of the lapse in the music to call out: "Simon! Hey! Up here!" When the director looked up, Jorge gestured to Lancer and the others. "I brought some friends to watch the rehearsal, okay?"

Simon scowled at him. "Absolutely not! You know my rules about people-" He broke off his scolding and was staring at Lancer. "Am I seeing things? Is that the face that launched a thousand slips?! Lancer, is that you?! Or should I say Yellow Dancer?"

Lancer smiled and went downstairs to take Simon's hand. Jorge, Rand, and Annie tagged behind.

"Lancer, I still can't believe it," Simon exclaimed. "I've thought about you a lot...What's it been, something like two years? In Rio, wasn't it? What are you doing here? I want to hear everything."

Lancer looked over his shoulder at Rand. "Well, we're just passing through."

"Passing through?" Simon said, surprised. "Since when does anyone enjoy the privilege of 'passing through' anymore? You can't be serious."

"We've got transportation," Lancer said, holding back.

Simon stepped back to regard the trio quizzically. "Perhaps it's not in good taste to ask too many questions," he said after noticing Rand and Lancer's sidearms.

"Probably not." Lancer smiled.

"Well, you've just got to come to the show tonight, that's all there is to it," Simon enthused.

"The Invid are permitting performances?" Lancer asked.

"They haven't tried to stop us yet. I guess they figure it keeps the slaves happy and out of their way."

Meanwhile, in the hive atop the Trump Building, Sera was engaged in an argument with her brother/prince, Corg. The Robotech rebels had not been located, and Corg was in favor of taking matters into his own hands by simply exterminating every Human in the city.

"I will not permit it," Sera told him. "Observation of these life-forms has not yet been completed. They require more study, even if that means the rebels live for a time more."

"Your lenience is a sign of weakness," Corg answered her. "I say destroy them now."

She glared down at him from the massive throne-a monolithic two-horned affair set atop what appeared to be a thick-stalked, flat-topped mushroom, adorned along its outer edge with a band of glossy red discs. Beneath the cap stood two Urban Enforcers, as silent and motionless as statues. The domed room itself resembled the inside of a living neural cell.

"You seem to forget our instructions, my brother. We are to study the Humans' behavior patterns and learn from them."

Corg made a disgruntled sound. "The experiment is as good as complete. It is time to exterminate these lifeforms. I'll proceed with my program, regardless of instructions."

She knew that he had been defeated on every occasion and wondered whether this was influencing his behavior, but she didn't want to point this out to him. "I'm warning you, Corg, do not challenge my authority in this

matter. The Regis has placed me in charge." "For the moment," he snarled.

"What makes you so sure of that?"

"It's perfectly obvious. You have no stomach for destruction. But you've known all along that our plan calls for the eradication of these creatures. And I intend to begin that process immediately."

Corg disappeared through the floor of the hive even as Sera was ordering him to call off his attack. She reseated herself to digest his words.

Maybe he is right, she began to tell herself. Perhaps I don't have the determination to carry out this task. She had to admit to herself that she had no grasp of the emotions that were keeping her from destroying the rebels-especially that one who had touched her with his voice. Surely she should have killed him when they had faced each other at the chasm. But she had let him live, and now Corg was beginning to suspect her. All at once it seemed imperative that she speak with Ariel, because in that brief confrontation with her lost sister she had come close to understanding some of the changes that were going on inside her.

Sera shot to her feet.

I must try to find her...

Corg wasted no time assembling his Shock Troopers and commencing his murderous assault on the city's Human population.

Across the Hudson River, where Scott and the rest of the team were awaiting word from Lancer, Marlene sensed the warlord's destructive swing and screamed as those hellish emotions assailed her consciousness once again.

Scott was by her side in an instant. "Where?" he asked as he tried to comfort her. "Where are they attacking?"

"The city," she managed to bite out, hands pressed to her head, body rocking back and forth in Scott's arms. "They're going to wipe out the entire city!"

"But you've got to be mistaken," Scott started to say when the sound of

the first explosions reached him. He grabbed a binocular scanner and ran to the edge of the roof that was their temporary camp. Training it on the city, he saw countless flashes of intense light, and within minutes it seemed that the entire northern portion of the island was ablaze.

CHAPTER TWELVE

There is some truth to the claim that Corg contributed to the Invid's defeat, such as it was; but only in the sense that his premature blood lust succeeded in alienating Sera that much sooner. On the other hand, the so-called parallels with the Zentraedi Khyron are rather forced and remain unconvincing. To be honest, who can we point to that did not contribute to the defeat? One might as well blame Marlene, Sera, Zor, for that matter. Lay the blame on love, if you will, on Protoculture.

Dr. Emil Lang, The New Testament

Corg assembled his Urban Enforcer squadrons at the northern tip of the island and commanded them to begin a southward march, sanitizing the city top to bottom. Shock Trooper ships would back them up, creating apocalyptical fires to flush the Humans from their dwellings.

The residents thought they were witnessing some sort of drill until the first streams of annihilation discs hit the streets; then there was sheer panic. People fled from burning buildings only to be caught up in volleys of fire from the Invid ground troops. Block after block burned, filling the evening sky with infernal light. The brick and concrete facades of buildings collapsed into the avenues, sending up storms of glowing embers and acrid ash. Hundreds were trapped in the rubble, and hundreds more perished in the alleyways and streets, in shafts and courtyards. No one could comprehend what was occurring. Had they brought this on themselves somehow? Had they transgressed or violated some Invid regulation no one had been aware of? Or was this simply the way it would always end from now on? No more old age or disease, no more heart attacks or accidents; just random bursts of blinding light, spurts of systematic extermination...

Corg smiled down on the ensuing destruction from the cockpit of his command ship. There, Princess, he laughed to himself. Observe your life forms now!

Downtown, in Simon's dance theater, Jorge held a note that had just been delivered by one of the underground's black eagle courier birds. The sounds of distant explosions had already reached into the building, and an atmosphere of dread prevailed. "Listen up, everybody!" he announced. "The Invid are on a rampage. They're offing everyone! Sweeping through the whole city, north to south!"

"Oh, my God!" muttered Simon. "They're through with us! I knew it would come to this someday!"

Lancer looked over at Rand, his face all twisted up. "It's because of us, Rand," he seethed, just loud enough for his friend to hear. "We brought this on. Just our being here..."

Rand accepted it with a kind of shrug and took another bite from the sandwich Jorge had fixed him before all hell broke loose.

"We've got to get out of here," one of the dancers was telling the rest of the troupe. "They're getting closer!"

The man was right, Lancer realized; the explosions were louder now, near enough to shake the theater itself. The first blast to strike the building threw everyone to the floor. The lights flickered once and went out; a few people screamed.

"We have to help these people get to shelter," Lancer told Rand when intermittent power returned. Dust and particles of debris filled the air. Lancer had his weapon drawn...

Rand, who had almost swallowed the sandwich whole, pulled it from his mouth and gasped for his breath. "Get them to shelters? What about them getting us to shelters?"

Jorge was standing beside them, helping a petrified Annie to her feet. "We can reach the subway from the basement," he said rapidly. "We'll be safe there."

"Depends on how serious they are," Rand started to say. But Jorge was already herding his fellow performers toward the exits.

Two more crippling explosions erupted in their midst just then, and all

of a sudden the interior of the theater was in flames. Most of Simon's-troupe had already made it through the exit doors, but the director himself was standing stock still, as though in shock. Lancer ran over to him and spun him around, catching the look of devastation in his eyes.

"Simon, you've got to leave!" "My theater..."

Lancer put his hands on Simon's shoulders, steering him away from the blaze that had already scorched both their faces. "Listen to me...The theater's gone. And it won't help anybody if you go up with the rest of it."

"It's over," Simon said flatly, overcome.

"Come on, man. There'll be other shows; we'll get through this." Simon offered a wan smile. "Maybe..."

A column collapsed behind them, bringing down a portion of the balcony and fueling the fire.

"Of course there will!" Lancer yelled. "Unless we don't get you out of here right now!" Rand was by the door, one hand shielding his face from the heat, yelling for them to get a move on. Lancer grabbed hold of Simon's hand and led him off at a run.

"Unbelievable," Scott was saying on the rooftop across the river. "It looks like they're trying to destroy the whole city and everybody in it." He scanned the infrared binoculars north to south, then lowered them.

Rook and Lunk stood silently by the retaining wall, mesmerized by the fiery spectacle. Marlene was off to one side, hugging her arms to herself. Scott swung around to Lunk.

"How much Protoculture will we have if we cannibalize the Cyclone power systems?"

"Maybe a dozen canisters."

"We have to act quick," Rook told Scott. "Annie and the boys are somewhere in the middle of that firestorm."

Scott tightened his mouth. Why haven't they contacted me as planned? he asked himself, already dressing them down. With a dozen canisters of

fuel, they would have just enough to power the three Veritechs for a short time. But unless they were able to resupply afterward, that would effectively finish the mecha, fighters and Cyclones both. And even the instrumentality nodes of Reflex Point were a good three hundred miles west of the city.

"Come on, Scott," Rook was saying, her mind made up. "Let's switch the canisters and get out there."

Scott issued a silent nod of consent and went down on one knee by Marlene's side while Rook and Lunk moved off. "You better stay behind," he told her. "I don't want to risk bringing you any closer to that place. I can see what you're already going through."

"I-I'll be all right here," she stammered, as though chilled to the bone. "But promise me you'll be careful, Scott."

They touched briefly, and he was gone.

In the central hive, Sera had been alerted to the wave of death her brother was unleashing against the populace. She sat rigidly at the top of the mushroomlike dais now, hands clasped tight to the arms of the throne, as views of the destruction reached her via a circular projecbeam.

"This is intolerable!" she screamed to her Enforcer guards, who stood unflinching below the dais cap. "Corg is deliberately sabotaging the experiment! The defeats he has suffered at the hands of the Humans have affected his conditioning!"

Everywhere the projecbeam took her, the scene was the same: buildings ablaze, Human life-forms in postures of agony, and more. But all at once Sera gasped as an image of Lancer filled the holo-field. He was out in the madness, his Gallant stiff-armed in front of him, returning insignificant blasts of vengeance against the overwhelming power of Corg's war machine.

The Earth rebel who has caused so much disturbance within me! she kept saying to herself. But Lancer's presence meant that Ariel must be nearby. Sera leapt from the dais and headed straight for her command ship.

If Sera had continued watching the projecbeam a moment longer, she would have realized that Lancer's shots were not to be so easily dismissed. True, an H90 seemed insignificant when compared to Corg's mobile arsenal, but Lancer and Rand had nevertheless managed to clear the streets of more than a dozen Urban Enforcers.

"That's that," Lancer was saying now as number fifteen fell, its chest plates laid open and oozing green nutrient fluids.

Annie, Jorge, and Simon stepped out from cover to join them in the street. Most of the ground troops had moved further south, but in their wake the city crumbled and burned, turning night to day.

"At least no one in the company got hurt," said Jorge. "Everyone made it into the subway tunnels in time."

"I wish the rest of the city was that lucky," Annie added, stifling a sob.

Lancer checked the blaster's remaining charge and frowned. "We better get underground ourselves."

Suddenly Annie raised her arm and let out a bloodcurdling scream. Two Trooper ships had dropped to the street out of a slice of orange sky, their cloven hooves ripping into the pavement.

Lancer and Rand raised their weapons at the same moment and fired, instinctively finding the same target. The Trooper caught both blasts just above its scanner and ruptured like a lanced cyst, spewing thick smoke and sickly fluids. The second turned to watch its companion go down, then swung back around, its cannon tips aglow with priming charge. But out of the blue something holed the thing with a perfectly placed shot to the midsection, and it too dropped, almost crushing Rand and Annie on the way down.

Simon, Jorge, and the freedom fighters looked up in time to see three Veritechs swoop through the canyon formed by the buildings and fade into the glow.

"It's Scott!" Rand shouted, amazed. "How the hell did they find us?!"

"I don't think they did," Lancer said, watching the VTs bank out of sight. "Just be glad that they chose to zero in on that particular Trooper." He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned.

"Lancer, I've got an idea," said Simon. "I want you to help us go ahead with the show." He paid no attention to Lancer's look of disbelief. "I know it's a lot to ask, but we're going to need help if this city is to survive:"

Lancer thought it over; over Simon's shoulder he could see Annie and Rand nodding their heads in encouragement. "Sure," he said at last.

Jorge fucked his fingers together with an audible snap. Ejole! "This'll be the show of a lifetime!"

The three Veritechs flew north to the edge of the worst conflagrations and split up to double back. The thruster fires of Invid Trooper ships were just visible in the southern skies. "Let's make sure the streets are clear of any ground units," Scott told the others over the net. "Then we'll go after the ships."

"Nothing on my scanners," Rook reported a moment later. "Mine either," added Lunk.

Scott looked out over the city and shook his head in despair. The Invid had cut a north-to-south swath of death four blocks wide along the west side of the island. Searching for any signs of Enforcer activity, he dropped down into the canyons again and was almost at street level when his radar displays suddenly came to life.

"Hold on, I've got something!"

By the time he realized what it was a blast had seared the upper sections of his fighter, nearly destabilizing it, but he managed to pull the Beta up and out of its plunge and soon had a visual on the enemy ship even as the displays were flashing its signature.

"Command ship," said Scott, staring down at the orange and green crablike thing that was hovering below him at rooftop level. "It's that damn command ship! Let's take it!"

Corg, as though reading Scott's designs, chose that moment to loose his

first stream of annihilation discs. Scott banked sharply and fell; the Invid ship shot up at the same time, and Human and alien ended up exchanging places, discs, and laser-array fire in an aerial duel. Rook streaked in from behind and landed two heatseekers, but Corg's ship shook them off and stung back, igniting a row of rooftops with its misplaced shots.

Scott and Rook went wingtip to wingtip to launch a salvo of missiles, but again the Invid outmaneuvered them, diving down into the city's hollows, where Lunk almost fell victim to the command ship's wrath.

"That thing is dangerous!" he shouted over the net as explosive light lit up the inside of his cockpit.

"All right, let him go for now," said Scott. He turned to make certain the Invid was willing to give it a rest and exhaled with relief when he saw the ship arrow off. "We've got to find Lancer."

"Yeah, but where do we start looking?" asked Rook, disheartened by the inferno below, to say nothing of the complexity of the city's intact landscape and terrain.

"Just keep your external receivers open," Scott told her.

Hopeless, she thought. Just what kind of sign does he expect us to see from up here?

Two hours later, the three Veritechs were still circling. They were all running dangerously low on fuel, and there had been no sign of Lancer, Annie, or Rand. Or the Invid, which was a lucky break. Then Rook picked up something on the receiver and reported her coordinates to Scott and Lunk. She supplied them with the frequencies as they came into view on her display screen.

"Tune in and tell me who that sounds like."

Lunk fiddled with his controls, listened for a moment, and heard the strains of "Look Up" coming across the cockpit speakers.

"Hey, that sounds suspiciously like an old buddy of mine."

Rook laughed shortly. "Scott, you wanted a sign, huh? Well, how's that one down there at three o'clock?" She tipped the VT's wings once or twice over the source of the transmissions: a tall, squeezed pentagon of a building

whose rooftop was currently the scene of some kind of concert or show.

Scott completed a flyby and signaled Rook in a similar manner. He could discern the words PAN AM at the top of the building, above a huge lightboard sign that was flashing the word HERE.

"That's Lancer all right," Scott started to say. Then he noticed that his radar display was active once again: The command ship had returned with reinforcements. "Follow my lead to the street," he told his teammates. "And activate cluster bombs on my mark."

The Invid ships pursued them just as he had hoped they would, and when the three VTs were properly positioned, he called for a multiple missile launch. Warheads streaked from the fighters, arcing backward and detonating in advance of the Invid ships; several of the Troopers were destroyed, and even the command ship was brought up short by the force of the explosions.

"I'm going back for Marlene," Scott reported as the Veritechs climbed. "I'll rendezvous with you at the source."

Rook and Lunk kept their fighters airborne until the concert ended; then they hovered down in Guardian mode, just as Scott was returning from the Jersey side of the river. Yellow Dancer, who had borrowed makeup and a flashy pink outfit for his part of the show, was already out of character by the time everyone regrouped.

"I got a bone to pick with you three," Scott yelled as soon as the VT canopy went up.

"Save it, Scott," Rand answered him from the roof. He tossed a canister of Protoculture fuel up to Rook. "Figured you might be a quart low by now."

Scott lost most of his stored anger while he listened to a quick rundown of the events of the day. He couldn't really find fault with their actions, especially in light of what had followed. There was certainly no going back to the storage facility now, but what they had managed to carry out was more than enough to take the team the rest of the way to Reflex Point. Once they finished here, of course.

Scott pulled Marlene, aside while Lunk set about refueling the mecha energy systems. "We're going to have to go back up," he explained, his hands on her shoulders.

"Yes, I know."

He wanted to say more, but Lancer was now standing alongside them, urging Scott to hurry it up. "I don't mean to break you kids up, but we've got lots of work to do."

Embarrassed, Scott withdrew his hands. "See you," he said, blushing, and ran for the Beta.

Lunk and Annie remained with Marlene as the two Alphas and the now separate components of the Beta lifted off. Hurry back, Marlene was saying to herself when Lunk stepped up behind her.

"You miss him alread-"

An explosion erased the rest of his words and threw both Lunk and Marlene ten feet or more in opposite directions.

Marlene was first to come around. Unsure how long she had been out, she stood up and coughed smoke from her lungs. One section of the roof was holed and in flames, and she could hear screams of panic in the darkness. Lunk was on his back nearby, apparently unconscious; Annie was nowhere in sight. Someone yelled, "Ariel," and for some reason she found herself turning around.

It was the green-haired woman they hadn't seen since the mountain attack. She was stepping from the flames that were licking at the armored legs of her towering command ship.

"Ariel," the woman repeated, and again Marlene felt something stir within her. "I am Sera, princess of the Invid, and I have come for you."

Trembling, Marlene stared at her. "But my name is...Marlene. I don't understand why you've come for-"

"Because you have turned against your people and I must know why, before we begin transmutation of our race. Why have you disobeyed the Regis?"

Marlene gasped. What is this woman talking about? "I don't believe what I'm hearing," she said, as if Sera were some hallucination she could banish through an effort of will. "I'm not an Invid."

Sera was taking steps toward her now, her crimson eyes flashing a kind of anger that burned deep into Marlene's soul. "You were placed among the people of Earth to learn their ways, so that we might profit from your discoveries. The Regis has been awaiting your reports, and yet you choose to ignore our commands. Do you expect me to believe that you have forgotten who you are and why you are here?"

Marlene shook her head back and forth; she tried to deny the words her heart seemed eager to affirm. "No...it can't be."

The woman regarded her quizzically. "What can't be, Ariel? Search your thoughts, search them for the truth."

"You're lying! You must be!" Marlene screamed as an explosion tore up another section of the roof.

Sera leaned away to shield herself. "I must stop Corg, before the battle comes any closer," she said. Then her eyes found Marlene. "I will deal with you later."

Marlene watched Sera race off to her ship. Behind her, Lunk was coming around, wondering aloud what had happened. But she hardly heard him.

It can't be true, she thought. It can't be true!

Down below, the battle was raging in the streets. Reconfigured to Battloid mode, Scott's section of the Beta was backed against a building, the rifle/cannon in both hands laying down a thunderous sweep of fire into the face of an advancing Trooper. Elsewhere, two Pincer Ships pursued Lunk through the city's right-angle canyons. Two more had ganged up on Rook's red Battloid, forced it into a corner, and were now attempting to open it with their claws.

She called for help over the net. "These cursed things are trying to rape my ship!"

Rand came to her aid a moment later, his Battloid hovering overhead and taking out each ship with a single shot. But the next moment he was facedown in the street, felled by a blast to the back by none other than Corg himself.

The Invid put down behind the crippled Battloid and moved in to finish it off, but Lancer blew it back into the air with a massive Bludgeon release from the reconfigured burly hindquarters of the Beta. At rooftop level, Corg countered with a wave of annihilation discs that pinned Lancer to the wall, but the Invid prince recognized that he was outnumbered and darted off to muster support.

Scott moved in to check on Rand's status, the rifle/ cannon upraised and ready for action. Rook joined him shortly.

"Looks like they're pulling back," said Lancer, while his ship launched and reconfigured. "What do you say we call it a day, Scott?"

"We're not done yet; there's still the hive."

Rand whistled over the net. "The hive! Don't you think you're asking a lot out of four little fighters?"

"Yeah, Scott," Rook chimed in. "Have you got a secret army or something?"

"No, but I've got a plan," he told them. "Obviously the Regis never figured on a direct attack, or she wouldn't have had her workers build the hive in such an accessible spot. My bet is we can bring the whole thing down with a few well-placed cobalt grenades."

There wasn't much time to discuss the pros and cons because Corg had returned with three Pincer Ships to back him up. So the three Battloids launched to join their leader and boostered off toward the hive, the four Invid ships in close pursuit.

In the hive, the Regis's voice reached into the very thoughts of her unsuspecting children.

"Attention, perimeter guard: Four Earth fighters are preparing to launch an attack against the hive."

But Sera was nowhere to be found, and without her the Invid drones and Enforcers could do little more than scurry about in a kind of blind panic. And by the time Corg understood the Humans' intent, it was already too late to stop them.

The VTs had climbed to an altitude of several thousand feet and were now falling on the hive like metallic birds of prey: They directed their warheads into the conical summit of the tall structure that housed the hive, and the energy of the ensuing explosions funneled down through the building like a bomb dropped through the top of a chimney. The hive took the full force of the contained blast and blew apart, raining great clumps of organic mass to the streets.

Corg felt the collective deaths pierce him like a lance. In the face of the hive's collapse he broke off his pursuit and cursed the Humans for their barbaric act.

I will have my revenge for this day, he promised the stars.

Lancer insisted on saying good-bye to Simon.

"There's no way we can ever thank you for what you and your friends have done," Simon told him. "Why don't you stay here and leave the rest of it to them, Lancer? Surely you've done your part by now."

The city's survivors were leaving the subway shelters, taking stock of what had been leveled against them. Simon, Jorge, and the freedom fighters were near Carnegie Hall, having just finished loading the VTs with as much Protoculture as they could safely carry.

Lancer knew that Rand had heard Simon's remark and was waiting for his response. Lancer flashed him a brief look and said: "I've been with these people for a long time, Simon, and I plan to be with them right to the end."

Simon offered an understanding nod.

"This was just a skirmish in a much bigger war," said Rand.

"Well, I hope all of you will return someday. And when you do, we'll have the celebration you deserve." Simon embraced Lancer and wished him luck.

On their way out of the city (Lancer, Annie, and Marlene squeezed into the Beta's cramped storage space), the team flew over the remains of a metal statue that had once stood proudly in the harbor. It had once symbolized liberty, Lancer explained.

Scott regarded it and said: "I only hope we can return that to the world someday."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Reflex Point consists of a central hemispherical hive close to what was once the city of Columbus, Ohio and several attendant structures linked to it by numerous Protoculture conduits and instrumentality lines. There appear to be seven secondary nodes-one at twelve o'clock, a second at two, a third at four, a fourth and fifth at seven, and a sixth and seventh at eleven-along with an unattached and somewhat larger dome, south at six o'clock. And that's about the best we can offer you right now, fellows. We hope you'll be able to tell us more once you get down there.

An excerpt from the Mars Devision premission brief

—as quoted by Xandu Reem in his biography of Scott Bernard

She was most definitely humanoid but of indeterminate, often variable height. The form was as close an approximation of Zor's as was possible for the Invid Queen-Mother; with her children she could work wonders, but to become like them she would need to divest herself completely, a thought beyond contemplation. Her cranium was well shaped but hairless, her large, exotic eyes a deep royal-blue, elongated to near slits, with sparse lashes and pencil-thin brows. She was attired in gloves and a full-length red robe whose curious collar encased her ears like a kind of neck brace. Two oval-shaped sensors were set into the robe's collar; they matched a third that was affixed to her breast.

She was deep inside the hemispherical hive that was the living heart of Reflex Point, positioned beneath an enormous globe of Protoculture instrumentality, her link with the outside world in which her children lived and died. The trigger point for the Flower of Life grew near, but the recent events had made her more fearful than encouraged by its timely approach. The experiment in racial transmutation had become hurried and desperate now, in the face of an imminent Human onslaught from the far reaches of space, from that very world that had once doomed her own Optera to

death-the Tirol that haunted her memories and dreams.

How like those war-hungry creatures I have become in my drive to possess this world! she told herself. But wasn't this a condition of the body she inhabited?

It was strange that this very Human form should be deemed the one best suited to her designs for racial transmutation, that these very beings she and her children had labored to enslave should prove the form most suitable to the planet itself. And yet didn't she know somewhere in her heart that this would have to be the true form, the form that she had grown to love, the form that Zor had inhabited when he first seduced the secrets of the Flower from her innocent and trusting nature?

The Regis was well aware of the recent destruction of her outpost in the Human city of tall towers and artificial environments, and that the Robotech rebels who had so far eluded her were quickly closing in on the central hive complex. But she couldn't hold Corg or Sera accountable for their failures, or even Ariel, now that she understood. It was this physical form itself that was to blame; once instilled with consciousness, a subtle sabotage began to occur, an undermining of all spiritual vigor. It was like the Protoculture itself, that artificiality the Robotech Masters had conjured from her precious flowers. These bodies took over the stuff of soul and subverted its true purpose, enslaved it to emotions and whims and unfathomable interior currents.

But if these things were not far from her mind, they were at least somewhat removed from her priorities-the continuation of the Great Work. And the Human form, however gross, would have to serve them in this purpose; it would merely represent a stage on the way to the final realization, the transcendence itself.

The sky above the western horizon was drained of color and angry with flashes of intense light, brighter than the midday sun. It was all the world's lightning in concert, a blinding stroboscopic show that could be seen and felt for a radius of one hundred miles.

Scott looked into the face of it, hands shielding his eyes from random bursts of unearthly whiteness. The assault has begun, he told himself with a mixture of excitement and terror. Hunter's forces have arrived and are attacking the hive complex itself.

The team was at the eastern perimeter of Reflex Point, Veritechs and Cyclones grounded after Scott's advance sightings and subsequent commands to regroup. They were in an area that had seen relatively recent tectonic upheavals, jagged outcroppings that looked as though they had been thrust up from the bowels of hell and had no place in this otherwise stable terrain of soft grasslands and rolling hills.

Annie stared at the sky in wonder. "Is it some kind of storm? A tornado, maybe?"

Rand and Rook, exchanged grim glances. "I wish it were," Rand told his young friend. Bass sounds were rumbling across the sky, seconds late of the explosions that birthed them.

"It has to be Admiral Hunter," Scott said behind them. Squinting, he could discern dark shapes streaking through that celestial chaos. Hundreds of shapes-fighters, mecha, and surely the Invid ships launched to engage them. "Let's move in," he said firmly. "We can't just stand here and watch."

They kept to the high ground and began a slow forward advance. Oddly enough, the light show seemed to wane as they approached, and when at last they reached the arena itself-a wooded valley, host to a wide, meandering riser-they understood why.

"We're too late," Scott informed everyone over the net.

They could see for themselves what he meant from their vantage on a cliff overlooking the battleground. The landscape was littered with the smoldering remains of Veritechs and Invid Pincer Ships and Trooper craft. Patches of forest across the valley were burning, and layers of smoke and gas hovered above the valley floor like some nefarious fog; it was as though the land itself had belched up fire and gas from its seething nether regions. In the distance, the uppermost portion of a hemispherical hive was visible, squadrons of Invid closing on it like wasps returning to their nest. A huge

gunship crashed and burned while the team watched helplessly.

"It's too horrible," Annie sobbed, putting her face in her hands, and remembering Point-K and similar horrors. Marlene put her arm around Annie's shoulder and pulled her close. Lunk turned around in the front seat of the APC to stroke Annie's back.

"I've never seen ships like these," Lancer said from the seat of the Cyclone. Rand and Rook were nearby on their mecha. Of the three VTs, only the Beta had been moved in, and Scott was overhead now, hovering at the edge of the cliff.

"They must be the latest upgrades," said Lunk. "But I guess there's still some flaws in the design, huh?"

Scott heard the comment. "Can that talk, Lunk," he barked over the net. "This was only an advance group. The admiral is probably trying to ascertain the defensive strength of the hive complex. But he'll be back-you can count on that now."

Lunk grunted an apology.

"I'm going in to check things out down there," Scott continued, bringing up the Beta's rear thrusters. "Stay put until you receive my all clear."

"Somebody wake me up," Annie pleaded, rubbing her eyes. "This has to be just some terrible nightmare."

Scott's signal came an hour later, and the seven team members gathered by the river to honor the dead. Scott had looked everywhere but hadn't found a single survivor. The smoky aftermath of the battle was beginning to disperse, but the stench of death lingered in the cool air.

"What now, Scott?" asked Lancer.

Annie grabbed hold of Rook's elbow. "Can't we just leave? I hate this place."

Rook had turned to answer her, but the ground beneath their feet was suddenly quaking and rending open. Everyone fell back as an Invid Pincer Ship pushed itself up out of the earth. No blasters were drawn, however,

because it was obvious that the thing was finished; it had been lethally shot and was leaking nutrient.

"Back!" Rand cautioned the others. The ship pitched forward on its face, spewing the viscous green fluid from its wounds. "You don't want to get any of that stuff on you!"

They all remembered when he had been slimed and couldn't get the smell off him for a week. Nevertheless, they were intent on watching the puddle spread and turned away only when they heard the sound of a muffled command ring out behind them.

"Hold it right where you are! Don't move!"

Scott swung around anyway, hand at his weapon, but stopped short of raising it. The source of command was a soldier who was aiming some sort of shoulder-mounted device at them, but underneath that shiny black helmet and gleaming body armor the soldier was Human, Scott was certain of that much.

"Who are you?" the soldier demanded in a curious voice, panning the device across the faces of the team. There was no hostility in the voice but a certain intensity Scott couldn't immediately identify.

"Are you with the Expeditionary Force?" he asked.

The soldier shushed him and fiddled with the controls of the device.

Scott realized that it was a video camera.

"Let's try it again-and no questions this time. Now: who are you?" The soldier swung the camera on Scott.

"I'm Lieutenant Scott Bernard, Twenty-first Squadron, Mars Division, but-"

"Teeming Tirol!" The soldier exclaimed, pausing the shot. "Mars Division? And the rest of you?"

"These are my personnel," Scott began. "We've been together-" "Freedom fighters! I got it, I got it!" the soldier said, recommencing to

shoot the team. "Lieutenant-Bernard, did you say?...Lieutenant Bernard and his ragtag band of freedom fighters, weary after their long journey to Reflex Point and disheartened by the devastating defeat suffered by the first

wave of Admiral Hunter's assault group, contemplate their next-"

"That's about enough of that, mister!" Scott interrupted, taking a threatening step forward. "Just who are you and what the hell do you think you're doing?!"

The soldier shut off the camera and doffed the helmet.

Scott's mouth fell open. Not because she was that beautiful-although her long black hair and piercing green eyes had been known to stop men in their tracks-but simply because he hadn't figured on confronting a woman.

"My name is Sue Graham," the photographer was saying. "I'm a photojournalist attached to the Thirty-sixth Squadron, Jupiter Division."

"Then you're with the Expeditionary Force," Scott said excitedly. "When is the rest of the fleet due?"

"Soon," Graham answered him absently, training her camera on the fallen Invid's leaking wounds. "Maybe I can get a shot of you and the admiral shaking hands. That's something that should be included in the archives: Hunter congratulates one of his officers on a job well done." Graham looked at Scott. "You have been doing a fine job, haven't you, Lieutenant? Where are the rest of the Twenty-first?"

"Dead," Scott said nastily.

Graham glanced at the nearby wrecks of Veritechs and troop carriers. "Guess that gives us something in common."

Scott glowered at her. "I don't think so, Graham. I didn't just stand around shooting footage while my comrades died."

"Oh, really? Just what exactly were you doing while your comrades were dying, Bernard?"

Rand snarled, "Listen, you," and started to move in, but Scott gestured for him to stay put.

Graham regarded Scott and his team. "Look, don't you think we should get out of here before the Invid show up? Or would you rather stand around and argue?"

"You heartless bitch," Scott seethed, bringing up his fists.

Lancer stepped between Scott and Graham. "Take it easy, Scott. If she

can watch her friends die without so much as flinching, there's nothing we can say to put a dent in her."

Graham snorted. "Bunch of soft sisters."

Lancer had to get Scott in a full nelson to restrain him. But he might have broken free anyway had it not been for another of Marlene's early-warning-system headaches.

"Scott," she said, pained. "They're coming!"

Rook armed her blaster and looked around for cover. "Let's go, boys, let's go..."

"Push over your Cyclones," Graham shouted, scooping up her helmet and gesturing to the mecha. "Deactivate the systems so the Invid will think the pilots have been killed."

Rand made a face at her. "Jeez, space cadet, you think we need to hear that from you? We've been fighting these-"

"Here they come!" Lunk warned. Everyone turned their eyes west: The sky was dotted with hundreds of alien ships, black spots on the face of the setting sun.

Scott tore himself away from the scene and glanced nervously right and left; ultimately he fixed his sights on the mecha. "We better do as she says. Then make for the trees, everybody!"

More than a dozen Invid ships put down where Scott and the team had stood no more than an hour before-Pincer craft mostly, seemingly under the command of a blue leader. Curiously enough, they didn't fan out to search the woods but wandered around the battle wreckage instead, as though searching for something. On several occasions they came close to crushing the overturned Cyclones, and a mindless pincer swipe almost sent the APC off the slope (where it was supposed to appear crashed) and down into the river below.

From the edge of the woods, Scott's team of irregulars watched the aliens' movements with growing alarm. The search party represented more collective firepower than any of them had yet witnessed, and Scott couldn't

help but wonder about it. He was saying as much to Rand, when Sue Graham suddenly stood up and began filming the Invid.

"Graham, what are you doing?!" Scott whispered from behind the fallen tree that concealed them. "You're going to give away our position!" It was getting dark now, but that was no reason to take chances.

"Every piece of footage adds to our knowledge, Lieutenant," she answered him calmly. "Besides, I don't have any decent shots of these things on two feet. Most of it's aerial sequences, and I'm not about to lose the opportunity now."

Scott reached over and grabbed her ankle, twisting it and forcing her to sit down. "You do that on your own time, Graham," he grated. "Not when there are other lives at stake."

A short time later, the Invid patrol left the area and the team began to relax somewhat. Lunk, Rand, and Lancer stole their way to the APC and returned with the sleeping gear and provisions. They made camp in a small cabin fifty feet into the woods.

Meanwhile, Sue Graham filled Scott in on what she knew about the Earth forces' imminent invasion. She had spent the past year aboard the SDF-3 as Admiral Hunter's personal photographer, and she couldn't say enough good things about the man. She didn't say what had made her join the ranks of Jupiter Division, but it was obvious to Scott that there was some intrigue connected to the move. They spoke of Tirol and Fantoma, of Rem and Cabell, and of other notable people they both knew. Scott felt himself growing strangely homesick for deep space if not for Tirol itself, and even his attitude toward the journalist was softening somewhat. The red bodysuit she was wearing in place of the armor helped.

"The third attack unit is in preliminary maneuvers at a base on the far side of the moon," Graham was saying now. She had set her camera up to project some of the holographic footage she had shot, and everyone was gathered around. "Here's a shot of the site," she narrated as views of deep space and the warships of the Expeditionary fleet lit up the darkness.

"The admiral's fleet is due to rendezvous with the advance units any

day now. Squadrons of new-generation Veritechs will arrive with the fleet. They've been codenamed Shadow Fighters."

Scott, Lunk, and Lancer leaned toward the holo-image for a better view. The craft looked something like the standard VTs but were colored a nonreflective gray-black and had a more pronounced delta-wing design.

"Why 'Shadow Fighter'?" Lunk wanted to know.

Graham changed discs; technical readouts now filled the bolo-field, replacing the space footage. "The Protoculture generators of the new-generation VTs have been redesigned to include a fourth-dimensional configuration that renders the Shadow Fighter invisible. The Nichols drive, it's called."

Scott had a hundred more questions in mind, but once again it was Marlene who threw him off track. She uttered a low moan and began to sink into that posture of agony they had all witnessed so often. Sue Graham looked at the red-haired woman skeptically and asked: "What's with this one, anyway?"

Scott ignored her and crept to the edge of the woods to search the skies. Sure enough, the Invid squadron was returning, their thrusters blazing in the night. Scott ordered everyone forward, and silently they made for the valley floor to investigate the enemy's reappearance. Marlene, even though breathless with pain, was the first to notice that the cockpit of the blue leader was opening.

And out of the innards of the ship stepped what looked like a Human being: a young man with long blond hair in a tight-fitting broadly striped uniform of black and green. He issued a command the team strained to hear, and two of the Pincer Ships appeared to acknowledge him with raised claw salutes.

"Human pilots!" Graham said in amazement.

"Another turncoat," said Rand. "Just like that woman we saw...The Invid must have a thing for blondes."

"Quiet!" Scott told him. "I'm certain they know we're here. "

"Maybe not, Lieutenant," said Graham almost casually, the camera

perched on her shoulder.

Rook turned around to look up at her. "Then what? Some piece of Robotech mecha?"

"Exactly. A syncro-cannon."

Scott was the only one who knew what she was talking about; the rest of them were scratching their heads while he cursed Graham for not telling him earlier that the assault group had been equipped with such a weapon.

"It's a particle-beam weapon," he explained. "The cannon was developed by Dr. Lang for use against the Invid. "

"It must pack one helluva wallop if the Invid are bothering to look for it," Rand commented.

"It does," Sue told him, still filming the aliens' movements. "That's why I hid it from them."

Scott shot to his feet and yanked the camera out of Graham's grasp. "Where, Graham? And no games."

"In a cave." She gestured without looking. "About a click or so upriver." Roughly, Scott shoved the camera back into her hands.

"We've got to get that weapon before they find it." "Count me out, Lieutenant," said Graham.

"Ever hear of loyalty, or self-sacrifice?"

She smirked. "We've all got our jobs to do. For me, it's this." She patted the camera.

"Please, Scott," Marlene said, cutting them off, reaching up for his hand. "Don't try to go out there. You'll be killed."

Scott squeezed her hand and smiled thinly. "I'll see that weapon destroyed before I see it fall into their claws." He turned to glare at Sue Graham: "That's my job...but I can't expect you to understand."

Graham laughed shortly, patting the camera again. "Just give me some good footage, hero. I'll make you a star."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

God knows Rick and I have had our share of difficulties, Max, especially during the weeks following his decision to join the Sentinels, as you probably recall. But this is worse than that, and it's beginning to prey on me. Sue's with him day and night lately, and Rick doesn't seem to mind it one bit-the lecher. He claims Sue sees him as some kind of father figure, but just who does he think he's kidding? She's infatuated with him, and I'm worried that he is going to fall for it one night-the loneliness of command and all that rot. Max, can't we just see about getting her transferred? Who'd be the wiser?

Lisa Hayes-Hunter in a letter to Max Sterling

Oddly enough, some of them managed to get a little sleep. Marlene had made Scott promise to wait at least until morning before making an attempt to go after the syncro-cannon. He had given his word, proverbial fingers crossed behind his back, if only to calm her down. She had appeared especially stressed out for the past week, and Scott was worried about her, so he wasn't surprised to hear her call out in the middle of the night. He slipped out of his sleeping bag and went to her side; she seemed to sense his presence and come around, smiling weakly up at him in the moonlight.

"I feel so strange, so alone, Scott... "

He reached out to stroke her luxuriant hair. "It's because we're so close to Reflex Point, Marlene. I was afraid this would happen; that's why I wanted you to stay with Simon... " He was suddenly aware that she wasn't listening to him but staring instead at the holo-locket that had slipped from his shirt.

"You'll never forget her, the woman in your pendant...She was very special, wasn't she?"

Scott held the heart-shaped memento in the palm of his hand and regarded it for a moment. "She was special, but so are you, Marlene." He placed his hand against her cheek. "I wear this to remind me...Sometimes

it's the only thing that gives me the strength to go on."

"I'm sorry I brought it up," she said sleepily, and rolled over in her bag. Scott heard the roar of thrusters and went to the door and looked up. Through the trees he could see three Invid patrol ships streak across the night sky. Lancer was beside him now; he had the watch and had returned to the cabin at the sound of Marlene's cries. "Everything all right?" he asked.

Scott led him away from the doorway. "Nobody has enough strength left to hold on to, Lancer. If we don't finish this thing soon..." Scott let it go and uttered a soft curse aimed at the stars. "What's keeping Hunter? Doesn't he realize-"

"Don't, Scott," Lancer said, cutting him off. "We just have to keep taking things one step at a time."

"I suppose you're right." Scott turned to look back at his sleeping friends and teammates. "We've just got to-Lancer, where's Rand?!"

Lancer swung around and saw the empty bedroll-then another. "Annie's missing, too."

Scott stepped deeper into the woods to whisper their names in the dark. "They're with Graham, I'm sure of it," Scott told Lancer angrily. "Wake everyone up. We've got trouble."

Ten minutes later, what remained of the team was ready for action; Lunk and Marlene were helping Scott, Lancer, and Rook into their battle armor. "My guess is that Graham is leading them to the syncro-cannon," Scott was saying now. They were gathered at the edge of the woods and could see that the Invid were still patrolling the area. "We have no choice-we have to get the Veritechs up."

"I can't believe Rand would be foolish enough to listen to that woman," said Lancer. "And to take Annie with him..."

Rook snorted. "Doesn't surprise me any. I think he's hot for that photographer." She disregarded the fact that Rand had tried to take Graham's head off earlier in the day.

"I know why he did it," Marlene offered, looking away from them.

"Because I made such a scene about Scott going."

Lancer flashed her an understanding look. "Still, why would he take Annie?"

"That was probably Graham's idea," Scott answered him. "Can't you understand what she's up to?" he continued, seeing their puzzled looks. "The whole idea is to try to get some terrific action footage for herself. Think about it: Annie and Rand, two freedom fighters far from home."

Scott was correct on every count, including his hunch that Sue Graham had set the whole thing in motion. She and Rand and Annie were picking their way across a steep, rock-strewn incline now, nearing the place where Graham claimed to have hidden the Robotech weapon. Neither Rand nor Annie minded in the least that Graham was getting it all down on disc; after all, this was a heroic undertaking, and who along the long road they had traveled had taken such an interest in their actions? And while it was true that Rand had been affected by Marlene's concern for Scott's safety, his motivations were more selfish than considerate.

What Graham had termed a cave was actually a kind of pocket in the hillside, well concealed and protected by a broad earthen overhang. Several Invid patrol ships had overflown the area, but the cannon had thus far escaped detection. Rand wasn't all that impressed by his first sight of the thing. But the weapon was massive, he had to admit, with a boxcar-sized barrel that had a kind of mitered muzzle. There was an adjacent drive unit, its front cockpit portion enclosed by a bubble shield. The whole arrangement was mounted on a three-legged circular base that housed the weapon's thrusters and hoverports. It reminded Rand of some of the artillery used by the Army of the Southern Cross in the Second Robotech War.

Rand and Graham scrambled down the slope while Annie waved good luck from the overhead ledge. The photographer trained her camera on the young girl, then swung around to catch Rand as he was seating himself at

the cannon's controls.

"On second thought, this thing looks awesome;" he said, grinning for the lens. "But I'm sure I'll be able to handle it. Why, when I think back to some of the spots we've-"

"Get started!" Graham yelled from the ground. "I want to get a shot of you coming out of the cave."

Rand's face reflected his disappointment, but a moment later he was pushing buttons and flipping switches, the cannon's thruster fires roaring to life beneath him. He had had limited experience with Hovercraft of any sort, but what he knew was enough to send the weapon free of its rocky enclosure and place it to strategic advantage on a high ledge overlooking the valley floor, the river a dark, sinuous ribbon below him. Infrared scanners told him where the Invid patrol ships were thickest, and without much thought as to the consequences, Rand slipped on a pair of targeting goggles and began to arm the gun.

Back at Annie's side now, Sue Graham aimed her camera and readied herself for the shot.

The syncro-cannon erupted, spewing a flash of blue fire into the night. The first blast tore right through four Invid Enforcer ships, a streaking projectile through paper targets. No more looking for vulnerable spots now, Rand said to himself. He grinned and triggered three follow-up one to take out the survivors that were making for the skies.

Suddenly patrol craft and Troopers were lifting off all across the valley. It was as though someone had tossed a smoke bomb into a into a bee's nest. And Rand kept firing, scorching earth and air alike with the cannon's devastating salvos. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he saw Graham, in her armor now and astride a black Cyclone.

"Hey, what are you up to?" he asked her over the tactical net. He saw Graham gesture to her camera.

"I've got work to do."

"But we're going to need you now that we've stirred everything up!" Rand yelled, but she was already gone.

Scott and the others took to the Veritechs at the cannon's first discharge. Rook hadn't witnessed such an incredible display of power since the early battles between the last of the Southern Cross and the first Invid wave. But even so, this was Reflex Point, not some low-echelon outpost hive staffed with Scouts and a couple of Trooper, ships. For every ten Invid the cannon destroyed, there were ten more in the air, and Rook began to curse Rand for taking it on himself to confront them.

The three Veritechs had a bad time of it; that they survived at all was in no small way a result of the pandemonium Rand's shots were causing. Numerous though they were, the Pincer Ships and Troopers seemed to be buzzing around in a blind rage, desperate to counterattack but at a loss as to direction; in some cases they were even annihilating one other. Consequently, Scott, Rook, and Lancer were able to inflict a good deal of secondary damage as the syncro-cannon continued to send swaths of blue death into the field.

But the Invid ultimately located the cannon, and their forces proved to be more than Rand could handle. Recalling what Scott had said earlier-that he would rather see the cannon destroyed than fall to the enemy-Rand saw to it that that was the case, arming the syncro's self-destruct mechanism even as Pincer Ships were moving in to overwhelm him. He had rejoined Annie and was shielding her with his own body when the thing finally blew, taking twenty or more Invid ships with it.

"I didn't want to blow the damn thing up," Rand explained to Annie as dirt and rocks rained down on them. "But it was better than letting them get their steely paws on it!"

Shortly, the Beta was hovering over them, a rescue rope dangling blessedly from its undercarriage. Rand was shocked to find Marlene in the rear compartment, but Scott told him that they couldn't risk leaving anyone behind. Lunk was off somewhere in the APC. Rand sent Annie back to sit with Marlene and climbed into the Beta's rear cockpit seat.

"Prepare for mecha separation," Scott told him over the net. He said

nothing about Graham and nothing about Rand's action, hoping to make Rand feel all the worse about it.

"I'm ready, Commander," Rand said by way of apology.

He then turned to the women and told them to brace themselves.

Sue Graham was overjoyed at the shots she had been getting: entire squadrons of Invid Pincer Ships Ships reduced to slag heaps by blasts from the syncro-cannon; Veritechs and alien Troopers going at it tooth and claw in Earth's night skies; the ground-shaking self-destruction of the cannon itself-Invid craft clasped onto it like so many frenzied land crabs; the frightened look on the face of the young female freedom fighter as she climbed toward the safety of the hovering Beta Fighter. It was splendid stuff, fantastic-the kind of footage that would earn her awards.

She knew that Lieutenant Bernard had caught sight of her once or twice during the chaos and was well aware of what he thought of her. But she found it easy to dismiss him from her concerns. It might be a bit uncomfortable later on, Sue told herself, but with the main fleet already overdue, she wouldn't have to put up with the lieutenant's flak for very long. She had to admit, though, that he had certainly provided her with some of the day's best action sequences-especially now that his Beta had undergone mecha separation and his motley band had all reconfigured their fighters to Battloid mode. It had been a long time since she had seen techno-knights dishing it out. She kept her camera trained on the skies for a time, singling out the red Alpha and its attractive pilot.

But suddenly her lens found an even more interesting subject: the blond Human who had stepped from the Invid command ship the day before. She had seen his craft off and on during the battle, but now she had him fully in her sights. And so, apparently, did the pilot of the Beta's rear component-that daredevil Rand. The two ships, Battloid and Invid commander, exchanged hyphens of laser fire and flocks of heat-seeking missiles; they darted across the valley like two insects in a kind of death ritual. But in the end it was the Earthling who prevailed; his missiles tore

into the hovering, perhaps depleted ship and holed it top to bottom, blowing away one of its cannon arms and sending it into a lethal dive.

Sue reconfigured her Cyclone to Battle Armor mode and zoomed in to meet it, a gleaming figure in black hopping across the battle-scarred terrain. Most of the drone ships had also taken note of their commander's demise and were fleeing the arena in the direction of the central hive.

Sue raised her camera and took a few steps toward the fallen ship, its pilot on the ground motionless beside it. He had scampered out of the ruined cockpit and collapsed, but Sue was certain he wasn't dead. As she stepped closer, the blond man got up, gasping. She centered him in the lens brackets and asked: "Who are you? How long have you been fighting for them? What's the Regis really like?"

The pilot dropped to his knees, lianas tight against his abdomen and stared at her uncomprehendingly. Then he was on his feet again, taking shuffling steps.

Sue heard the angry rasp of thrusters behind her and turned to look up at the source of the sound. It was one of the few remaining Pincer Ships, evil on its mind. She broke into a wild run, but the first discs were already on their way. For a brief instant her eyes met those of the blond pilot, before white light erased the world...

Scott got off a few rifle/cannon shots at the retreating Pincer Ship, but the thing got away. He ordered a sweep of the area, then put down where he had seen the command ship crash and Sue Graham shoot her last footage. Lunk, Lancer, and the rest joined him after a moment.

"Hey, is this guy really an Invid or what?" Lunk said, standing over the body of the blond man as though afraid to touch it.

Scott went over to the photographer and gently removed her helmet. Alive but mortally wounded, Sue let out a long, deep moan. Scott tried to cradle her head in his lap, but the bulky armor of the Cyclone prevented it. He pushed her hair away from her face.

"It seems I've got pictures of an Invid with the body of a Human," she

managed to say, looking up at Scott through glazed eyes. "Were they worth dying for, Graham?"

Behind him, Annie was making disgusted sounds. She and Lunk and Marlene watched as green blood pulsed from the pilot's wounds. "Anybody that bleeds green blood must be an Invid," she announced. "But how come they look like us all of a sudden? I mean, he looks almost Human, doesn't he, Marlene?"

"Like that other blond pilot," said Lancer. "That woman."

Annie turned around to find out why Marlene wasn't answering her; she saw that Marlene was staring wide-eyed at a wound she had received to her left shoulder. Alarmed, Annie reached out. Then she noticed the blood.

It was green.

Annie collapsed to her knees in disbelief. Was it possible that through all their months together she had never seen Marlene bleed? It had to be some kind of mistake-a hallucination!

Annie's actions had drawn everyone's attention, and all eyes were now fixed on Marlene. No one knew how to react: someone might as well have told them that Marlene was suffering from a fatal disease. The pale woman looked from face to face, then put her hands to her head in a gesture of complete shock. "No! No!" she screamed, tossing her head back and forth.

Scott left Sue's side to calm Marlene, uncertain himself and denying the evidence with each step. He put his hand out to touch the wound, to see for himself if this wasn't just some trick of the night...

The two of them exchanged looks of dismay as they regarded the blood on his fingertips. "Marlene..." he stammered. "I..."

She stared at him, tears streaming down her face, turned, and ran off.

Only Rand made a move to stop her, but Scott restrained him. "But we can't just let her leave!"

Scott's lips were a thin line when he turned to his friend. "She'll be back," he promised. "I don't know what's going on here...this pilot, now Marlene...but I know she'll never be able to live among the Invid again. We're her family, Rand. We're her family!"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Captain, there's something wrong with the engines! They're just not responding!

Remark attributed to someone in the SDF-3 engineering section

On the far side of the moon, the warships of the main fleet dematerialized from hyperspace-sleek, swanlike destroyers with long tapering necks and sweptback wings. They were enormous battlecruisers shaped like stone-age war clubs with crimson underbellies; dorsal-finned tri-thrusters and Veritech transports that resembled clusters of old-fashioned boilers; and of course the squadrons of new-generation assault mecha, the so-called Shadow Fighters.

On the bridge of the flagship, General Reinhardt waited for word of Admiral Hunter's arrival, while the rest of the fleet formed up on his lead. Filling the front viewports was the Earth they had come so far to reclaim. Reinhardt regarded the world as one would a precious stone set on black velvet. Almost sixteen years, he thought to himself. Is this a dream?

He shook his head, as if to clear thoughts of the past from his mind, and turned his attention to the monitors above the command chair. Here were displayed views of local space, Earth's silver satellite, and the gleam of a thousand hulls touched by sunlight. But there was still no sign of the admiral. Reinhardt slammed his thin hand against the chair's communicator button. "Anything yet?"

"No sign," the astrogation officer responded.

"That damn ship's jinxed," Reinhardt muttered to himself. "I told Hunter something like this would happen..."

The bridge controller flashed him a look across the bridge. "Recommend we initiate attack sequence, sir. We can't afford to wait much longer for the SDF-3. All approach vectors have been plotted and locked in,

and conditions now read optimum status."

Reinhardt drew his hand across his face. "All right," he said after a moment. "Issue the codes."

The controller swung around to his console and tapped in series of commands, speaking into the mikes while his fingers flew across the keyboard.

"All units are to proceed to rendezvous coordinates Thomas-Victor-Delta. Attack group three will remain and await instructions from SDF-3 command. Attack group two will continue to objective Reflex Point, activating cloaking device at T minus five minutes and counting...Good luck, everyone, and may God be with us for a change..."

Ground force units and their companion VT strike groups had already landed. Scott and the team had been on hand to greet them, and in the ensuing excitement everyone forgot about Marlene for a few moments. She hadn't been seen since dawn, when the painful realization of her identity had led to her flight.

Sue Graham was dead.

The Invid hadn't shown themselves either, which in itself was a positive sign. Scott still didn't know what to make of the Human or humanoid pilots they were apparently using. He wanted desperately to believe that Marlene was in fact the amnesiac captive he had come to love-that that green blood was something the Invid had done to her-and that they would reunite when all this was finished once and for all. But there were just too many reasons to think otherwise, and for the first time in over a year he found himself recalling Dr. Lang's theories concerning the Invid Regis and her ability to transmute the genetic stuff of her children into any form she chose. These were fleeting thoughts, however, glossed over while preparations got under way for a full-scale invasion of the central hive.

The irregulars had been attached to the ground forces under the command of Captain Harrington, a darkhaired, clean-shaven young man who thanked Scott for the recon information he had gathered and promptly

dismissed it. They were all in a group now, atop a thickly wooded rise that overlooked Reflex Point's centermost and largest hive, a massive hemisphere of what looked like glowing lava surrounded by five towering sensor poles and a veritable forest of Optera trees-those curious thirty-foot-high stalk and globes that were the final stage of the Flower of Life. There was no Invid activity, visible activity, except for random flashes of angry lightning, which in their brief displays suggested a domelike barrier shield that encompassed the hive itself.

"At last...we finally made it," Scott was saying. He was in Cyclone battle armor, as were Lancer, Rook, Rand, Lunk, and most of Harrington's troops. Veritechs had taken up positions in the woods all around the hive, and the grassy slopes to the rear were covered with squads of Cyclone riders.

"I don't want to burst your bubble," said Harrington, "but we've still got a Protoplex energy barrier and a couple of thousand Invid Shock Troopers to get through."

Scott had a defensive reply in store for the captain but let it go. How could the man be made to understand what Reflex Point meant to Scott's team? True, the Expeditionary Force had come a long way for this showdown, but Scott reckoned that the distance of the overland journey to this moment as incalculable.

"I want to make certain that the main Alpha force stays out of this until we punch a hole in the barrier," Harrington was advising his subordinates. "We don't want to repeat yesterday's mistake and get them too stirred up. We'll let them think we're of no consequence." Harrington turned to Scott. "Lieutenant, I'm counting on you to be ready with your fly-boys as soon as you receive my word, understood?"

"Sir!" said Scott. Lancer and Lunk joined him in a salute.

"I'm so excited I could just scream!" Annie enthused from the sidelines. "It's going to be awesome," Rand said beside her.

Scott threw Rand, Rook, and Annie a stern look. "Forget it, you're not coming. This is strictly a military operation."

"You're lucky to be out of it," Lancer added at once and almost

cheerfully, hoping to mitigate Scott's pronouncement somewhat.

Rook went from sadness to anger in an instant. "Well, we sure don't want to interfere now that the big boys have arrived, do we? I mean, all that action we've seen together-that was just play fighting, right?"

Rand, too, was seething but was determined not to show it. "Personally, I'm in no hurry to get myself killed, Lieutenant, so it's fine with me."

Annie looked up at her two friends, then over at Scott, Lancer, and Lunk. "But it's not fair to break us up like this just 'cause you guys were soldiers. We're still a team-a family! You can't just tell us to split up!"

Rook tried to soothe Annie while she cried. "I suppose this is good-bye, then." She had packed away all her snide comments. "Good luck, Scott."

Harrington gave orders for the attack to begin before Scott could answer her. Veritechs configured in Guardian mode lifted out of the woods to direct preliminary fire against the hive, filling the air with thunder and felling scores of Optera trees. And as fiery explosions fountained around the hive, awakened Invid Shock Troopers emerged from the ground to engage the Earth forces one on one. Scott rushed to his fighter, but Lancer stopped to say a farewell to his friends, even as Veritechs roared by overhead.

"I can't say it's always been fun, but it's certainly been terrific," Lancer yelled over the tumult. "You three take care of yourselves, okay?"

"You take care," said Rand. "Remember, I expect to see Yellow Dancer perform again."

Lancer smiled coyly. "Don't worry, you will." "You promise?" Rook asked.

Lancer leaned over to kiss her lightly on the cheek. "Till we meet again."

It was a little too sweet and fatherly for her liking, but Rook said nothing. Lancer behaved the same toward Annie.

"Now, don't go and get married behind my back." "I won't," Annie said tearfully.

Lunk pulled up in the APC to wave good-bye as Lancer headed for his Alpha. "I'm a soldier again," he shouted, gesturing to his spotless battle

armor. "I'll be seeing you guys!"

Rand watched his friend drive off. "A soldier again? What the heck does everyone think we've been doing this past year?" He frowned at Rook. "They're all riding off into battle, right? So how come I feel like we're the only ones without invitations to a party?"

A short distance away, Scott waved good luck to Lunk and threw a salute back to his former teammates.

"That tears it!" Rand cursed. "I should've figured he'd say good-bye like that. A robby, through and through."

"Would you want it any other way?" Rook asked him, returning Scott's salute and smiling.

Rand thought it over for a moment, then brought the edge of his hand to his forehead smartly.

Scott turned to his console and displays, lowering the canopy and activating the VT's rear thrusters.

Good-bye, my friends, he said to himself. Whatever happens now, at least I'll know the three of you will get out of this alive.

Veritechs and Invid Shock Troopers were clashing throughout the field now. Hundreds of Pincer Ships had joined the fray and were buzzing around the hive in clusters four and five strong. Only a few Cyclone riders had reconfigured their mecha to Battle Armor mode; most of them were riding against the hemisphere in a kind of cavalry charge, pouring all their fire against the hive's flashing barrier shield.

Bursts of blinding light strobed across a sky littered with ships and crosshatched by tracer rounds and hyphens of laser fire. Rand watched from the edge of the woods as Veritechs swooped in on release runs and booster-climbed into the sunlight. The sounds of battle rumbled through the surrounding hills and shook the ground beneath his feet. He could see that the battalion was meeting with heavy resistance, despite what Captain Harrington had said about underplaying their hand. The Invid knew exactly what was at stake, and they weren't about to be tricked.

I can't do it, he thought. I can't just stand here and watch them go!

Without a word to Rook or Annie, he donned his helmet and made for his Cyclone. They called out after him.

"I'm not going to sit it out after coming this far," he told them. "I figure the time has come for a little well-meaning insubordination."

Rook tried again to stop him, to talk some sense into him, but her words lacked conviction-even she didn't believe what she was saying. "That idiot's going to get himself killed without somebody to look after him!"

Annie saw what was coming but didn't bother to try to stop her other than to shout a halfhearted, "Wait!"-and that was only because she didn't want to be left behind. She began to chase after them, leaving the woods and risking a mad unprotected dash across the battlefield, but it was Lunk she ultimately caught up with.

He had been riding escort to various Cyclone squads, adding his own missiles to the riders' laser-array fire, when an Invid command ship he had finished off with heat-seekers almost toppled on him, sending the APC out of control. Suddenly he was flung into the shotgun seat, and the vehicle was skidding to a halt in the thick of the fighting. And the next thing he knew Annie was in the driver's seat, practically standing up to reach the pedals and shouting: "I'll show you how to handle this thing!"

"What the heck are you doing here?" he demanded, grateful and concerned at the same time.

Annie accelerated, pinning him to the seat. "What's it look like I'm doing?!"

"Come on, Mint, gimme the wheel"

"Forget it!" she yelled into his face as he made a reach for it. "I'm not gonna be left behind anymore, Lunk!"

Lunk backed off and regarded her. She was a trooper, he had to admit, a regular workout.

Deep within the hive, the instrumentality sphere glowed with images of the battle-a Cyclone charge, an aerial encounter, death and devastation. A

living flame of white energy now, the Regis beheld the spectacle and understood.

"The Earth people have risen in great numbers against us," she addressed her troops, in position elsewhere in the hive. "And now they dare to attack our very center, to threaten all that we have labored to achieve. But this time we will put an end to it. Corg, I call upon you to defend the hive. Destroy them, as they would us, for the greater glory of our race!"

"It will be my pleasure and my privilege," Corg answered her from the cockpit of his command ship. Behind him, his elite squad of warriors readied themselves as the hive began to open, the subatomic stuff of the barrier shield pouring in to fill the drone chambers with white radiance.

But Corg was suddenly aware of a Human-sized figure silhouetted against that blinding light. "No, wait! You mustn't!" it shouted.

Ariel, in her Human guise and garb, was below him, searching for sight of him in the cockpit. "So, you've returned...What do you want?"

"I want to speak to the Regis. Let me through-this madness must be stopped!"

"Madness?!" he shouted, stepping his ship forward menacingly. "What are you saying?

Ariel gestured to the outside world. "They're only fighting to regain the land that is rightfully theirs...the land we've taken!"

"You've lived among them too long, Ariel," Corg told her. "Or should I call you Marlene?...Now stand aside!"

Corg leapt his ship over her head, nearly decapitating her, but she had ducked at the last instant and was on all fours now, weeping, Sera's pink and purple ship towering over her.

"Sera, you must listen to me," Marlene pleaded, getting to her feet. "Have we forgotten our past? You yourself opened my mind to these things. Have we forgotten that our own planet was stolen from us? What gives us the right to inflict the same evil on these people?"

Sardonic laughter issued through the ship's externals. "So suddenly our Ariel remembers," sneered Sera. "And you would have us surrender...Well,

we have traveled too far to concern ourselves with this barbaric life-form's needs. Soon this will be our world, and our world alone."

"We've traveled far, and yet we have learned nothing."

Sera engaged her ship's power systems and leapt into the light, the roar of the thrusters drowning out Marlene's anguished pleas.

Outside, the barrier had been breached by antimatter torpedoes delivered against it by two Veritechs and subsequent blasts from the battalion's destabilizer cannons. Cyclone riders and Battloids were now punching through the rend and battling Pincer Ships on the ground nearest the hive wall.

The outpouring of Protoculture energy released from the shield was working a kind of seasonal magic across the landscape, reconfiguring not only local weather patterns but the life processes of the flora itself. Rand and Rook, riding at the head of a contingent of Cycloners, moved from winter to spring in a matter of seconds. Spores and pollen clusters the size of giant snowflakes were wafting through the newly warmed air; young grass was spreading like some green tide across the valley, and trees and flowers were blossoming in vibrant colors.

"This sure wasn't in the forecast!" Rand commented over the net. "Look at all these wildflowers! Poppies, marigolds-"

"Yeah, but I don't like the look of that big cornflower up ahead."

Rook saw a blue Enforcer ship surfacing in front of them, its cannon tips already aglow with priming charges. "Fan out," Rand ordered the rest of the Cyclone group as energy bolts were thrown at them. The two freedom fighters launched their Cycs and changed over to Battle Armor mode.

"Draw its fire!" said Rook, boostering up and off to the left.

Rand remained at ground level, taunting the blue devil with trick shots, while Rook came in from behind to drop the thing. But a second Invid suddenly appeared out of nowhere and swatted her from the air with a cannon twist that smashed one side of the armor's backpack rig, shearing away one of the mecha's tires. She went into an uncontrolled fall with her

back to the larger ship, but Rand swooped in to position himself between the two of them.

"It's okay, I've got you covered."

"Leave it to me!" she told him, voice full of anger, as Rand triggered off a series of futile shots.

"If I'd left it to you, you'd be a pile of smoking rubble by now, and I'm just too fond of you to let that happen!"

"You're what?!"

Rand risked a look over his shoulder at her. "You heard me-I'm fond of you, dammit!"

It was a hell of a time to be confessing his feelings, she thought, but it was turning out to be one of those days. "I-I don't know what to say... "

Rand swung back to his opponent and saw that the Invid ship's cannons were about to fire. "Don't say anything," he yelled in a rush, "just moooove!"

The cannons traversed and followed the Cycloners up, but the pilot's aim was off, and Rand managed to sweep in and bull's-eye the ship from behind.

"Nice shooting there, cowboy," Rook said, coming alongside him later. "I bet you try to impress all the girls that way."

There was a sweetness in her voice he had never heard before and a smile behind the faceshield of her helmet that lit up his heart. "No, only the ones who can outshoot me," he laughed.

They were both some fifty feet off the ground, almost leisurely in flight, as though the battle had ended. Then, without warning, there was something up there with them: a kind of towering diamond-shaped flame of white energy inside of which, naked and transcendent, was a Human female with long, flowing red hair...

The vision, if that indeed was what it was, also appeared to Lunk and Annie, who were down below in another part of the arena.

"What the devil is that thing?!" Lunk said, back behind the wheel of the APC now.

At that the flame seemed to tinkerbell across the sky, as though calling to them. Annie swore to herself that she was seeing Marlene up there but dismissed the thought as wishful thinking. The flame, however, did seem to be beckoning to them.

"Do you get the feeling it wants us to follow it?"

"That seems to be the idea," said Lunk, putting the vehicle into gear. "And I've learned that you never say no to a hallucination."

At the same time, almost directly over the hive, where the fighting had been fast and furious, Scott and Lancer were reconfiguring their fighters to Battloid mode in the hope that some of the Expeditionary Force fly-boys would follow their lead. The air combat units had been sustaining heavy losses, and Scott reasoned that the boys had been flying far too long in zero-gee theaters. He recalled the fear he had felt when Lunk first surprised him with the Alpha-and back then he was only going up against two or three Troopers ships, nothing like the swarms of Invid aircraft that were in the skies today.

Reconfigured, the two teammates demonstrated what a year of guerrilla fighting had taught them, they dropped down close to the hive, rifle/cannons blazing, and took out one after another Invid ship-even the most recent entries to the aliens' supply: the Battloid-like Retaliator ships, upscale versions of the Invid Urban Urban Enforcer street machines. Lancer went so far as to bat a couple of them with the rifle/cannon, showing just how to make gravity work to one's advantage.

Then suddenly there was a kind of flame whisking along beside them, tipped on its side and incandescent.

Lancer said: "It's some sort of vapor cloud, I think. But I can't get a decent fix on it. See if you can get close to it."

Scott banked his fighter toward the apparition and trained his scanners on it. But it was his eyes that gave him the answer: Inside the flame cloud a naked figure swam, larger than life and recognizable.

No, it can't be! Scott thought.

All at once Lancer's voice pierced the cacophony of sounds coming over the tac net.

"I'm hit, Scott! The gyro-stabilizers are shot! I can't get myself turned around! Can't get the canopy up, either. I'm down and out-,buddy!...A memory!"

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

One of the intriguing (and unanswered) questions of [the Third Robotech War] is how Ariel/Marlene accomplished her minor miracle in the skies above Reflex Point. Nesterfig (in her controversial study of the social organization of the Invid) advances the theory that Ariel somehow "borrowed" Protoculture energy leaking from the hive barrier shield-the same that so affected the surrounding countryside. But this does not really answer the question. Neither Corg nor Sera was endowed with similar abilities, and most experts agree that they were the most highly evolved of the Regis's creations. The Lady Ariel herself was never able to shed light on this curious incident.

Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

In the cockpit of her command ship, Sera flashed a self-satisfied smile at her display screen. The Human pilots had hoped to get the better of her troops by reconfiguring their craft, but, vastly outnumbered, they were sustaining the same losses in Battloid mode as they had in Guardian. But suddenly her scanners revealed that Lancer's fighter had been one of those to feel the Invid wrath, and although his ship had not been destroyed, it was plummeting toward Earth, hopelessly out of control. As she watched him fall, memories of his face played across the screen, and when she could bear no more of it, she engaged the thrusters of her ship and fell in to rescue him. Ariel's words came back to her now: We have learned nothing Sera, nothing! And she answered back: "You're wrong, Ariel. I have learned to

love at least one of our enemies, enough to betray my own people."

Lancer caught sight of the rapidly approaching Invid command ship and guessed that it was corning in to finish him off. He had been struggling with the canopy release switches but had since abandoned any idea of freeing up the jammed mechanisms. His teeth were gritted now, and he was resigned to death. But all at once the Invid was actually scooping up his

wounded ship in its armored arms, and far from annihilating him, the enemy was pulling him out of his fall. He glanced up and saw through his canopy and the enemy ship's bubble cover that it was the blond woman pilot. Whether she was XT or Human had yet to be learned; but whoever, she was saving his life.

"Why?" he shouted. "Why?!"

And somehow her voice found its way through the VT's command net to answer him: "Don't ask me to explain," she told him. "But in saving your life I have forfeited my own!"

At the same time her ship let go of his, but the Alpha's systems were revived now, and the foot thrusters were able to maintain it at treetop level. Lancer had the Battloid's rifle/cannon raised, and it would have been a simple matter to destroy the command ship, but instead he let it escape unharmed, confused by this latest turn of events.

Closer to the hive, Scott was still staring at the flame cloud Marlene inhabited. Several other Battloids were similarly suspended, awed by the sight.

"Marlene...is it you?" Scott asked the thing hesitantly. "Is it really you?" In response, the flame leapt toward the hive. Cocooned within its radiance, Marlene, tike some living filament, stretched out her arms, and

sinuous waves of lightning leaked into the sky.

Scott engaged the VT's boosters and shot after her. Lancer was right behind him.

Corg's ship was not far off; while he watched the two Earth mecha streak off in pursuit of Ariel's projected image, the voice of the Regis entered his ship, informing him of Sera's betrayal.

"She did what?" Corg said in disbelief.

"It is true, Corg," the Regis repeated. "She has saved the life of one of the Robotech rebels."

"Then she is as tainted as Ariel." How was it that this Human species could make his sisters abandon their duty? he asked himself.

He vented his rage against two Battloids and three Alphas, destroying all of them with blasts from the forearm cannons of his ship; then he soared after Ariel and her rebel friends.

But if the flame had begun to alter itself, so had the weather. The land had suddenly passed from spring to summer, and now autumn leaves were falling. Rand and Rook were still following Marlene's form, a flickering sun trailing tendrils of light.

"Marlene," Rand shouted over the net, hoping she could hear him. "What does all of this mean?! What's going on?"

If they had any doubts that what they were seeing was truly Marlene, the voice they heard put an end to all of them.

"Can't you understand?" the flame seemed to ask, oscillating as it moved, its naked filament regarding them over her shoulder, long red hair streaming out behind as though it were a part of the light itself. "We are only trying to find a place where we can live in peace and security."

"Yeah, but you forgot something," Rand reminded her angrily. "This planet is our home, not some Invid retirement community."

"You must believe me, it was never our plan to destroy Humanity."

Marlene's flame shot ahead of them, a free-floating electrical disturbance against the crimson and yellow surface of the hive.

"Then what was your plan?"

"I am neither Human nor completely Invid. I am a new form of life that is a blending of the two. I see that now, although my Regis does not. I can see that it was never our destiny to remain in this Human form. But I must somehow make her understand."

Even though they were scattered, the rest of the team-Scott and Lancer, Lunk and Annie-were monitoring the conversation.

"And this new form of life is planning to replace the old one, I suppose," said Lancer, still thinking about the humanoid pilot who had saved his life.

"My friends, follow me into the central core, the heart of the Invid

civilization. There all your questions will be answered."

With that the flame dove into the hive, opening a radiant portal in the side of the dome.

"She went in," Annie said in an amazed voice from the shotgun seat of the APC. "You're not going to follow her, are you?" she added, tugging on Lunk's arm.

"You better believe I am," he told her firmly. "Listen, Mint, if you're scared, you can hop out. I'll be back for you."

"I'm not scared," she harumphed, turning her back to him. "I don't think... "

They were approaching a blinding white hole in the side of the hive now, driving entirely out of their own world, destined perhaps never to return.

It was a little like being underwater or within a living bloodstream, replete with cells and corpuscles. In the distance they could discern a blinding white sphere, bisected by a horizontal ray that spanned the field from one side to the other.

And Marlene's form was still leading them in.

"I can't believe it," Rand said to Rook over the net. "We're inside Reflex Point. I thought we were supposed to be destroying this place, not taking the grand tour."

"I think I prefer the view from the outside. Where do you suppose she's taking us?"

"Over the rainbow," said Rand.

Almost everyone emerged at the same moment: Rook and Rand, still in Battle Armor mode, Lunk and Annie in the APC, and Lancer and Scott in their fighter mode Alphas. The place was a huge cavernous chamber, filled with light and supported by what seemed to be webwork strands of living neural tissue. Suspended overhead was an enormous globe of pure Protoculture instrumentality, a kind of veined bronze sphere with dark

shadows moving and shaping within it, responding to a will that was fearful to contemplate.

They were all shocked to see each other, but where Annie was excited, Scott was angry; he threw off his "thinking cap," raised the canopy of the alpha, and hopped out, storming over to the two Cycloners.

"I thought I told you two to stay put," he began. "You're not soldiers!"

Rand marveled that the man could even be entertaining such thoughts given the circumstances.

"Well, since we're not soldiers, we don't have to follow your orders, do we?" Rook threw back at him, raising the faceshield of her helmet.

"Marlene led us to this place," Annie explained, climbing down from the APC.

Scott looked around uncomfortably. "She led all of us here, I guess."

Suddenly Rand was pointing up to the sphere; its interior was growing brighter by the second. The glow culminated in a flash of threatening light.

"Foolish Humans," an omnipresent deep but female voice began, "you have come here seeking to look upon the face of the Invid Regis...So be it. You shall see her."

Over the rainbow, indeed! Rand said to himself.

The next thing anyone knew, someone had pulled the plug, plunging the Regis's inner sanctum into darkness, except for the inner glow of that sphere, directed down on them now like stage light. Then a towering flame formed beneath the base of the sphere. It was similar to the one that had encompassed Marlene earlier, only this one was larger and more menacing. And within it they could discern a hairless humanoid figure, thirty feet high and dressed in a long red robe and strange gloves that dangled a kind of tail. "Behold, I am the Invid. I am the soul and the spirit. I have guided my people across the measureless cosmos, from a world that was lost to a world that was found. I have led my people in flight from the dark tide of the shadow that engulfed our world, one that threatens to engulf us even now. I am the power and the light. I am the embodiment of the life force, the

creator-protector. In the primitive terminology of your species, I am...the Mother!"

While she spoke they had views of nebulae and star systems, the journey the Invid had taken from Optera to Tirol and on to all the worlds that had led them eventually to Earth.

Light returned to the chamber, and they had a full view of the blue-eyed creature, the Invid mother.

"You are surprised...So were we, when we discovered that the planet to which we were led by the Flower of Life was inhabited by the very species who had destroyed our homeworld."

"I'd say 'inhabited,'" Rand started to say.

"That is of little consequence...Your species is nothing when weighed against the survival of my people...The Invid life force will not be denied... "

"No, that's not right!" a small voice rang out to argue with her. Everyone turned and saw Marlene enter the domed chamber from somewhere, just as they remembered her in her yellow jacket and blue denims.

Scott called to her.

"So, Ariel, it is true: you are a traitor. Was it you who led these children of the shadow into the hive?"

"They are not children of the shadow," Marlene contradicted her. "They have a life force almost as strong as our own."

"They are the enemies of our race."

"If they oppose us, it's because we are trying to do the same thing to them that was done to us so many years ago!" She turned to her friends now. "Scott, listen to me: Perhaps if we could begin again, we might be able to find a way for our two races to share this planet together, in peace."

Scott closed his eyes to her and shook his head. "I'm sorry," he told her. "But you must realize that's impossible."

"So you'd rather have the death and destruction continue?"

"That's right, Marlene," Lunk cut in. "To the bitter end if we have to!" Marlene made a stunned sound; she had not expected this.

"Lemme tell you something," Lunk continued. "Maybe you've forgotten that your species invaded our world-remember?!"

"I do remember," she said softly.

At the edge of Earthspace the third attack group was moving into position above Reflex Point, the Shadow Fighters that rode its wake dematerializing as the command was received for activation of the Protoculture cloaking device.

"There are still no signs of the SDF-3," the controller updated. "All other ships are present and accounted for."

"Jinxed!" Reinhardt muttered.

"Ground forces report successful penetration of the hive barrier shield, with heaviest losses sustained by the Veritech squadrons. Invid command is either unaware of our presence or unconcerned. My guess is that the cloaking device has been successful."

"All right," the commander said, turning to the forward viewports. "Signal the fleet to form up for final attack formation and prepare to engage." Reinhardt exhaled slowly, exhausted by the weight of his responsibility. His confidence had been bolstered by the controller's report, but he couldn't help but dwell on the possible consequences of failure. Hunter had called for the use of neutron bombs, which while sure to annihilate the Invid would also spell doom for much of the Earth's population.

Over the battlefield Corg was taking out ship after ship in an effort to offset Sera's betrayal. And now his sensors were indicating the presence of Robotech mecha inside the hive itself. He dealt out death to two more Veritechs and headed through the remnants of the shield into the heart of the hive.

In the inner sanctum, the alien the Humans knew as Marlene was still trying to get over Lunk's remarks. "But you've traveled with me," she was

telling him, the hurt evident in her voice. "I even thought that you liked me, or at least accepted me. I'm no different now than I was then, Lunk. So why have your feelings changed?"

"What d' ya mean, you haven't changed?" Lunk's face was red with rage beneath the lifted faceshield of his helmet. "You're an alien! You think we woulda taken you along if we knew that? You're a spy!"

"But the fact that I could travel among you as a friend should tell you something, Lunk. Isn't it possible that we're not so different, after all...your people and mine?"

The Regis had been following these exchanges with interest, and she learned more about the Humans in the past few minutes than she had in the past three years. But Ariel still had a lot to learn. "Look at these friends of yours," she said to Ariel and directly into the minds of the Humans. "Notice how they stare at you in fear and confusion-emotional states that in their species inevitably lead to hatred...and violence!"

"Yes, they're confused because they feel I betrayed them," she argued, "but they're not full of hatred."

"Your contact with them has blinded you to their true nature, my child. It is their genetic disposition to destroy whatever they cannot understand."

"Now just wait one damn minute, Dragon Lady!" Rand interrupted her, willing to risk a step forward. "I've had about enough of this! How do you know what we're thinking? I'm willing to take Marlene as she is-and I think Lunk feels the same underneath all that armor of his. I don't hate her. Especially now, knowing what she stands to lose by coming to our defense like this. But you are another matter. As far-"

No one saw the crimson paralyzing rays until it was too late; they seemed to bubble up out of her blue eyes like dye, and they knocked Rand off his feet-the proverbial look that could kill-but his battle armor saved him.

"It is natural to them," she explained to Marlene/Ariel, barely missing a beat. "As natural as breathing itself. Their entire history is a catalog of murder, conquest, and enslavement, all directed against others of their own

species."

"That's not true!" Sera now threw back, suddenly materializing in the chamber. "Ariel's right, Regis. Forgive me, please, but I too have begun to doubt whether we are any better than they are." She looked briefly at Lancer before continuing. "You say this species is guilty of murder and enslavement, but how is that any different from what we're doing to this planet?"

"So, Sera, you and your sister have been turned against us." Sera, Lancer thought to himself, watching her.

Ariel was now gesturing toward the Humans. "Look at them, Regis. They're not...animals or barbarians. They are a brave and noble people trying to protect what is rightfully theirs, just as we tried to do." She offered Scott an imploring look, hoping he would understand and forgive her. Something in his eye told her he would.

Corg had by now joined them also, not in the flesh like Sera but via the instrumentality sphere, where his image appeared five times life size.

"Have all of you gone mad?" he shouted. "How did these Humans gain entrance to the hive?! Sera, remove them at once!"

Sera thrust out her chin. "I was not aware that I had to obey your orders, Corg."

He scowled at her. "Your contact with the rebels has made you weak and spineless."

"And it has made a monster out of you," she returned. "Consumed by vengeance and evil passions. You are a child of shadow, Corg, not the Humans."

"What are you saying?" he bellowed. "This pathetic species you've become so fond of cannot be allowed to stand in the way of our future. Have you forgotten what we have been called to do?"

"If you keep fighting, there won't be a future for any of us," Lancer said from the floor of the chamber.

Corg dismissed the threat without a word. "Enough. I am called to battle-where my duty lies!"

"I've got to stop that lunatic!" Scott yelled, ignoring Marlene's pleas for

him to wait and racing for the cockpit of his fighter.

The Alpha gave chase to the alien ship through that same netherworld of moving cells Rand and Rook had navigated earlier. I've got you now! Scott thought, training his weapons on Corg even before the two of them had left the hive. But the XT swung his craft around and loosed a stream of discs before Scott could get off his shot, and an instant later they were outside, dogfighting in the skies over those recently altered autumnal forests. Red-tipped heat-seekers and anni discs cut through the air as the two aces put their ships through their paces, dodging and juking, climbing and dropping against each other.

Views of the battle were displayed inside the chamber, where the rest of the freedom fighters were still gathered, along with Ariel and Sera.

"I don't like just standing around and watching this," Rand told Rook. "What do you say, do we stay here or go out there and help him?"

"I don't know anymore, Rand. I'm all confused... "

All at once the sphere's images de-rezzed, only to be replaced by space views of the approaching Expeditionary fleet.

The Regis's lapis eyes narrowed. "No! They have come! The dark tides of the shadow have come to engulf us again!"

"It's the rest of Hunter's fleet!"

"Wow! I didn't expect so many ships!"

"Well, that does it," Lancer said softly, filled up with a sudden despair. "Any hope of a peaceful settlement has just gone down the drain."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Throw water on her! Throw water on her!

Remark attributed to Rand (unconfirmed) on seeing the Invid Regis for the first time

Most of Earth's population was unaware of the Expeditionary Fleet's arrival, let alone of the Olympian battle that was taking place in the skies above Reflex Point. But even as far off as the remote areas of the Southlands, people knew something was up. The Invid were suddenly taking their leave-from cities, towns, communications outposts, and Protoculture farms, a steady stream of Troopers and Pincer units, all headed north for some unknown purpose.

Meanwhile, in one small section of those embattled northern skies, a green and orange Invid command ship was going one on one with a Veritech, each oblivious to the ferocious fighting going on around them, as though these two had been chosen representative combatants. And in some ways they had...

For Corg, the alien prince, there was no thought of defeat, only the glory of victory. Showing a malicious grin, he raised the right cannon arm of his ship and loosed a bolt of red death at the approaching fighter.

But Scott was well prepared for it and already thinking the Beta through an avoidance roll; he returned two bursts to Corg's one, reconfiguring to Battloid mode as the VT came full circle.

Corg darted left and right, almost playfully, then threw his ship into a frontal assault, even as the Battloid's rifle/cannon continued to pour energy his way. The two crafts collided and grappled in midair, thrusters keeping them aloft while they flailed at each other with armored fists. Scott tried to bring the cannon down on the ship's crown, but Corg parried the blow and punished the VT with body blows. Scott twisted and hurled his opponent way; once again he brought the cannon into play, and once again Corg

seemed to laugh off the attempts.

The alien's voice seethed over the tac net: "Your pitiful attempts make your defeat at my hands all the more pleasurable!"

Scott snorted. "I'll be satisfied with boring you to death, then!"

The Battloid had the cannon in both hands now; the first volley missed, and the second impacted harmlessly against the command ship's crown. In response Corg loosed a flock of missiles from his ship's shoulder-mounted racks, and Scott met the stakes with an equal number of his own. The projectiles destroyed themselves in midair between the two ships, but Corg had followed his missiles in, emerging from the smoke and bringing the metalshod foot of his ship against the VT's control modules before Scott had an opportunity to take evasive action. Electrical discharges snapped around the inside of the Beta's cockpit like summer lightning as circuits fried and systems shorted out. Scott sat defenseless in the seat as shock poured through his armor and the displays cried out last warnings. Corg's ship was behind him now, cannon raised. Scott thought he would feel the final blow against the Battloid's back, but Corg played his hand for insult instead. He targeted and zapped the Beta's thrusters, incapacitating the ship.

The Battloid commenced a slow facedown descent, trailing thick smoke from its leg and neck...

Corg watched it for a moment, laughing out loud in his cockpit, then turned to deal with the half dozen fighters that had suddenly appeared to avenge their commander.

"How quaint," he sniggered to himself.

He positioned himself central to their assault and let them take their best shots, which he avoided with ease. Then, as they came in at him, he showed his teeth and counterattacked, taking out the first as it swooped past him, then a second, third, and fourth as they strived to ensnare him.

At the same time, Corg's Troopers were taking the battle to the edge of space. The so-called Mollusk Carriers and squadrons of Pincer units a thousand strong had moved in to engage the main fleet. Laser fire

crisscrossed and lined local space, spherical explosions blossoming like so many small novas.

Hundreds of Invid ships were annihilated by mecha they could not even see, let alone fight. Squadrons of Enforcers and Pincer ships were wiped out; Mollusk Carriers exploded before they could even release their brood. And yet they continued to come, more and more of them.

On the bridge of the fleet flagship, Reinhardt received the latest updates. "Estimate of Invid troop capability is coming in now, sir," Sparks reported.

"I want a full status report on the assault force entry into Reflex Point," he demanded.

"They're continuing to meet heavy resistance, sir."

Reinhardt studied the monitors and displays. "If push comes to shove we're going to be forced to use the neutron S missiles."

"But our troops..." said Sparks, alarmed.

"I'm aware of the consequences," Reinhardt answered him grimly. "But is there a choice? Either we eliminate them and reclaim the planet or give it all away. We can deal with the ethics later on."

"I understand," Sparks said softly.

"Shadow Fighter launch is complete," a female tech said over the comlink.

"This is it, then," said Reinhardt. "Wish them Godspeed for me, Lieutenant."

In the hive chamber, Lancer, Lunk, Annie, and Sera had their eyes fixed on the Protoculture globe as glimpses of the battle in space were relayed to the Regis's sanctum sanctorum. It was obvious to the Humans that the Regis was growing concerned now; she was no longer the omniscient being they had first met.

"All units regroup," she was telling her troops. "Repel the invaders at all costs!" As she swung around to face her small audience, her eyes found

Sera. "Your defection has cost us much, my child."

No one really understood what she meant by it, least of all Sera. It was true that she had stayed her hand when it had come to killing Lancer, but it was beyond her how her presence in the current battle could have affected things or altered the outcome any. "It can't be," she answered her Queen-Mother, knowing guilt for the first time.

Lancer was about to add something, when he saw one of the cells of the communication sphere black out. It was the third time he had seen it happen now, and it suddenly occurred to him that the sphere was tied in not only to the Regis in some direct way but to her offspring as well. He turned his attention to the battle images again: A squadron of Enforcers was being decimated by laser-array fire erupting from what seemed to be empty space; and as the last of the ships were destroyed, another cell faded and was gone. Annie noticed it, too.

"Hey, look at that!" she said, pointing to the dark patch on the underside of the globe.

"It loses power with each Invid loss," Lancer explained. "Isn't that right, Regis?"

The alien looked down at him imperiously. "You are perceptive, Human...And as you have observed, our entire race feels the loss when even one of our children ceases to exist."

The pain she must have known, Lancer found himself thinking. Even over the course of the past year, to mention nothing of what had happened before, with the Tirolian Masters, then Hunter and the so-called Sentinels... "Those Shadow Fighters are chewing them up!" Lunk enthused as more

and more Invid ships disappeared in fiery explosions and seemingly sourceless cross fires.

Lancer took a step toward the pillar of flame that was the Invid Queen-Mother. "Your forces can't detect those fighters," he told her. "Your children are defenseless, don't you understand? Now you're the only one who can end this destruction."

Unmoved, the queen regarded him. "Twice in our recorded history we were forced to relinquish our home and journey across the galaxy... But this time we shall not leave!"

"Don't you know when to take no for an answer?!" Lunk shouted at her. "Your children are dying!"

Sera glanced at Lunk, then looked up to the Regis. "Mother, perhaps we should listen to him... "

"You have the power to transform any world you choose," Lancer argued. "Some planet you won't have to fight for!"

"You cannot understand," the Regis said, almost sadly. "The Flowers of Life exist on this world and this world only. They are our strength; they are our life. Without them, we would perish."

Scott opened his eyes to Marlene's face and a world of pain. He was in his battle armor and propped up against a tree not far from the smoldering remains of a crashed fighter. He had no recollection of the events that had landed him there.

"Scott," Marlene was saying, dabbing at his head with a moistened rag. "Is your head any better?"

Scott saw blood on the rag and raised his fingers to the wound. Even this slight movement brought a wave of pain along his left side; at the very least his ribs were cracked under the armor's chest plate. "Agh...what happened?" he groaned.

Marlene gestured to the VT, "You were shot down. I saw you fall and-" "Where's the Beta's component?" He tried to raise himself and

collapsed; Marlene laid her hand and cheek against his chest. "You shouldn't be moving, Scott. Stay here with me!"

"I've got to get back... " He saw that she was staring at him in a peculiar way and couldn't understand it. The revelations of the previous day and the sequence inside the chamber of the hive were lost to him. "Marlene, what's wrong?" he asked her, almost warily.

"I...I don't know how to explain it," she stammered. "I feel so strange,

so concerned about you...Do you think you could love me, Scott? Even if only for a little while?"

Some of it was coming back to him now, scenes of battle, memories of Corg! He looked at her like she was crazy to be saying these things. "Marlene, I'm capable of only one thing, and that's fighting the Invid!" Refusing her offered lips, he managed to struggle through the pain and get to his feet.

Marlene chased after him as he ran off. "But, Scott," she screamed, "I love you!"

Elsewhere, two Battloids were moving through the chaos like lovers taking a Sunday stroll in the park. Rand's had just suffered a near miss, and Rook was teasing him about it over the tac net.

"I think you need some lessons in how to maneuver, kiddo. My grandmother could do better than that."

"All right," he told her in the same teasing voice. "But the next time you're in trouble, don't come to me for help. "

"Who'll come to who for help?"

Rand smiled for the screen. "Love you, too."

"Same goes for me," Rook started to say, but Corg's approach put a quick end to the flirtation.

He split them up with fire from his hand cannon. They had arrived on the scene too late to see what the alien had done to Scott, so it took Rand by surprise when Corg moved against him hand to hand-something seldom done in midair-effortlessly knocking the rifle/cannon from the Alpha's grip. Rook stared out of her cockpit amazed, watching the two ships begin to duke it out, moving in to exchange rapid flurries of blows, then separating only to thruster in against each other all over again, trying to punch each other's lights out. But Rand was nothing if not resourceful, and somehow he managed to get the Invid ship in a kind of full nelson, which left Corg vulnerable to all frontal shots.

"Okay, I've got him!" Rook heard Rand yell over the net. "Blast him!"

Rook tried to depress the HOTAS trigger button, but her fingers simply refused to obey the command. If she didn't catch the alien just right, Rand would be destroyed along with him. Her face was beading up with sweat and the HOTAS was shaking in her grip as though palsied, but she couldn't bring herself to fire with Rand's safety at stake. He was screaming at her, telling her not to concern herself...

Corg was just as confused as Rand: the red Battloid had a clear shot at him, but instead of firing the pilot was throwing herself against him, trying to batter him with the mecha's cannon. It was a tactical blunder and one that gave him all the time he needed to reverse the Battloid's hold. Corg grinned to himself and fired off a charge into his opponent's right arm, taking it off at the elbow; then he threw open the command ship's arms to propel the Human mecha backward. Engaging his thrusters now, he fell against the red ship, striking it with enough force to stun the mecha's female pilot.

Rook came around as Corg's ship was surfacing in her forward viewport, the hand cannon primed and aimed at her. But just then Rand rammed the thing from behind, and although he had managed to interrupt Corg's shot, he received the blast that had been meant for her.

Rook could hear his scream pierce the net as his crippled Battloid began a slow backward fall, bleeding smoke and fire and sustaining shot after shot from Corg's weapons. Rook came up from behind to try to slow his descent, but Rand protested loudly:

"Rook, it's useless...He's coming in for another run. You've gotta save yourself!"

"You're out of your gourd, mister," she told him, "I'm not letting you go now!"

Corg had the two Battloids centered in his sights and was preparing to fire the one that would annihilate them both, when an energy bolt out of the blue impacted against the back of his ship.

Scott's voice came over the tac net as Rook saw the component section of the Beta come into view.

"Get Rand out of here. I'll take care of things up top."

"Roger," she exclaimed, wrapping the arms of her mecha more tightly around that of her crippled friend.

The Beta and the alien mecha went at it again, only this time both of them knew it would be for keeps. Enough of Scott's memory had returned to make him aware of what Corg had done to him.

The two ships spun through a series of fakes and twists, drops and booster climbs, slamming each other with missiles and volleys from their cannons. Again, flocks of projectiles tore into the skies and met in thunderous explosions, throwing angry light across the field. But then Scott saw a way to prey on the alien pilot's technique: He made a move as though to engage Corg hand to hand, then surreptitiously loosed a full rackful of heatseekers as Corg hovered open-armed and defenseless.

Even Corg wasn't aware of how much damage the Bludgeons had done to his ship and sat for a moment, complimenting the Human pilot on what had been a clever if underhanded maneuver. But all at once his ship's autosystems were flashing the truth, even as the first explosions were enveloping him, searing flesh and bone from the humanoid form that had been created for his young soul...

Scott shielded his eyes. Fire and green nutrient seemed to gush from the ship at the same instant as the explosion quartered it, arms and legs blown in different directions. But as important as it had been for him personally, Scott knew it for what it was: a minor battle in a war that was still raging all around them.

Scott put down a few minutes later to see about his friends. His mecha's missile supply was virtually depleted, and it was time to let the fleet VT squadrons take charge of things for a while. He asked Rand if he was all right, but instead of the thanks he thought he was due, Rand said: "What the heck did you say to Marlene?"

"Yeah," added Rook, "we can't get a word out of her."

"I'd rather not talk about her," Scott started to say. But without

warning Rand was all over him, head bandage or no, his hands ripping at the armor at Scott's neck.

"You're gonna tell me whether you like it or not! You think you can just walk out on this thing? She's got some crazy idea that she loves you-as if she had some idea of what that means. But you're gonna see to it that she understands, pal! I think you would have loved her, too, if you hadn't found out she was an Invid."

Rook separated the two of them. Then she had a few things of her own to say to Scott. "Stop torturing yourself over your dead girlfriend and come back to life, will you?"

"How can I ever forget that she was killed by the Invid-by Marlene's race?"

"So you're going to hold that against Marlene?" Rand seethed. "It wasn't like she pulled the trigger, you know. Besides, what about all the Invid you and the rest of Hunter's troops killed? This war has made victims out of all of us. When are you going to realize that the Invid are just our latest excuse for warfare?"

"Rand, you've lost it-you've gone battle-happy. They started it; they attacked our planet-"

"Listen, there were wars before we even heard of the Invid or the Robotech Masters or the Zentraedi. You might've lost your Marlene fighting other Humans."

Scott shook his head in disbelief, but even so he sensed some rightness in Rand's words. Not the way he was phrasing it; more in the sentiments he was trying to express, the sensibilities...

After a moment, he said: "If only we could have avoided this... " Scott Bernard might as well have asked to negate his own birth.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The so-called trigger point was that point at which Flower production would have provided the Regis with adequate supplies of liquid nutrient for the

conversion of her hibernating hive drones to quasi-Human form. Once this had been accomplished, her soldiers with their Protoculture-fueled ships-the Troopers, Pincers, and Enforcers, would have been turned loose to eradicate the remaining Human population, including those who had comprised the labor force in the Protoculture farms, which (with more than enough Protoculture on hand to maintain a standing army) would have been shut down. Presumably...But would this then-reformed race have taken up where they had left off on Optera? Would they continue to employ the Flower that had been central to their society there? Would they have become somewhat Humanized by the Reshaping?...We are open to suggestions.

Zeus Bellow, The Road to Reflex Point

With the arrival of the Invid legions from the Southlands the tide began to turn on the Expeditionary Force. It was a matter of sheer numbers.

Even though the Shadow Fighters had been initially successful in decimating the enemy ranks, the odds had now changed. The alien hordes were now punching through Reinhardt's forward lines and launching strikes against the fleet warships themselves. Consequently, contingents of Shadow Fighters had fallen back to protect their mother craft, leaving vast regions of space unprotected and vulnerable to infiltration. And though the hive barrier shield had been breached, the Terran ground troops had yet to gain entry to Reflex Point itself. Reinhardt, of course, had no way of knowing that six Humans not only had been inside the hive but had met the Invid Regis face to face.

"Three cruisers wiped out!" Sparks reported from his duty station as the flagship was rocked by another volley of enemy fire. "They're all over us, Commander. Even the Shadow Fighters can't stop them!"

Reinhardt swiveled in the command chair to study one of the threat board displays. "Blast it! What in heaven's name is preventing Harrington's men from getting into that hive?!"

"Sir, the Second, Third, and Fifth Divisions are reporting extremely

heavy casualties. I can't raise the Fourteenth at all."

Reinhardt cursed. If the fourteenth was wiped out, it meant that responsibility for the entire assault had fallen to the Cyclone squadrons. And they would have to accomplish that without air support.

"At this rate we won't be able to hold out for more than a few hours," Reinhardt muttered. "Order one of the Shadow squadrons to prepare for a direct assault against the hive. I don't care how they accomplish it-even if we have to pull everyone back for a diversionary move. Tell the air wing commander that I'm instructing cruisers in the fleet to concentrate their firepower in sector six. We'll guarantee a hole, but the rest is up to them."

Sparks swung to his tasks.

Reinhardt sucked in his breath and waited.

In the hive chamber the Regis regarded the Protoculture globe with growing alarm. Though her children were meeting with success, the battle was far from won. And could it ever be? she began to ask herself.

"This planet retains the malignant spirit of the Robotech Masters," she said out loud to Sera and the three Humans. "Whether one race or the other emerges victorious is of little consequence now, because such lingering hatred will only breed greater hatred into the race that survives. This world is contaminated, and I am only just beginning to understand..."

"The conflict will rage from generation to generation unless every last Human is wiped out, and that still won't be enough. Because we have inherited that evil bent. Our gene pool is polluted by it."

Cocooned within her column of cold white fire, the Regis turned slowly to gaze down upon Sera. "My child, this is not what we seek. This is not what we have traveled so long to achieve. But I begin to see a way clear of the treachery that has ensnared us...the truth I refused to grasp on Haydon IV It is almost as if he were speaking to me across the very reaches of space and time...as though he had some inkling of the injustices he unleashed even then, when his Masters first directed their greed against us... "

She could see Zor's image in her mind's eye, and it came to her now

that the Flower. that had been the cause of it all was about to bring their long journey full circle. That the Protoculture he had conjured from its seeds was to provide her with the energy she needed to complete the Great Work and ascend with her children to a higher plane, the noncorporeal one at last, that timeless dimension. No earthly chains to bind them...no emotions, no lust, only the continuous joys and raptures to be found in that realm of pure thought.

But could he really have seen this all along, been so omniscient? she asked herself. Such a precise vision, such an incredible realtering and reshaping of events...Sending his ship away to this world, then drawing the Masters and their gargantuan armies here, only so that the Flower could take root and flourish, so that the Invid might follow.

And now these returning ships with their untapped reservoirs of Protoculture-destined from the start to be her mate in the new order.

She had been so misguided in assuming his form; in so doing she had been captured by the rage and fears and emotions that blinded her to Protoculture's true purpose. It was not simply to supply mecha with the ability to transform and interact with its sentient pilots; it was meant to merge with the race that had passed eons cultivating its source. They had used the Flowers for nourishment and sustenance and spiritual succor, and for all these millennia the Flower had been trying to offer them something more.

And Zor had played the catalyst.

"My child," the Regis continued, "I see now the new world that calls to us. And we shall consume and bond with that blessed life that provides our passage."

"Do you understand what she's saying?" Lancer asked Sera as the Regis seemed to reincorporate with the chamber globe.

Sera nodded, her attention still fixed on the battle scenes displayed there. Lunk and Annie gasped as the latest view was flashed into the inner chamber: Shadow Fighters, visible now, piercing through the hive's protective envelope.

And Reflex Point was beginning to react to their entry. Colored lights began to strobe into the chamber from unseen sources, dissolving the weblike neural arrangements supporting it and eliciting a threatening tide of organic waste and refuse from those collapsing cells.

"Well, the takeoff may be decided, but she just ran outta time," said Lunk.

Sera started off in one direction of her command ship, but Lancer put his arm out to stop her. "Let me go," she pleaded with him. "I must protect the Regis and the hive until she has assured our departure."

"I want to help you," Lancer told her.

She stopped struggling and turned to him. "You will be fighting against your own people."

Tight-lipped, he nodded. "If they knew what I know now...they'd understand."

"We understand," Annie encouraged him. She grabbed hold of Lunk's arm and led him toward the APC. "Now let's get out of here before this whole place comes apart."

Word of the Shadow Fighters' successful penetration of the hive was relayed to the flagship, but Reinhardt was still not encouraged. Six cruisers had been taken out in the past hour, and it had required over fifty fighters to get a mere four through the hive's defenses. And if those few survivors didn't make it into the central chamber, Reinhardt asked himself, what then?

"Sir?" Sparks said from his station.

Reinhardt looked at him wearily. "I have no choice...I want all neutron missiles armed and ready for an immediate launch against Reflex Point."

Sparks swung around to his console. Reinhardt listened while his orders were radioed to the rest of the fleet. He wondered what the other commanders must be thinking of him. But there was no alternative; they had to realize that...

"T minus fifty and counting," he heard Sparks say.

At the edge of Earthspace, the thrusters of two dozen mushroom-shaped droneships flared briefly, propelling their armed warheads toward the target area.

The hive corridor was oval-shaped and surgeon's-gown green. Lancer had no idea as to its purpose or its direction. But Sera appeared to know where she was going, and that was all that mattered. She was at the controls of her pink and purple command ship; he was alongside her in a Cyclone he had taken from the VT, reconfigured in Battle Armor mode.

"I consider it an honor to be fighting side by side with you," Sera told him over the comlink.

Yes, we're both fighting on the same side now, he thought. And in a sense they were a nonallied counterforce, separated from the Human as well as the Invid cause.

"You know, I've been thinking about how we met... " he said leadingly. "Lancer, would it be possible for you to love one of my race?"

He thought back to Marlene. And Scott. "I think I could. And what about you?"

She sighed over the net. "I only hope we have time to find out."

Two Shadow Battloids were fast approaching them from the corridor terminus.

"T minus ten seconds and counting," the tech reported.

Reinhardt was standing at the control center now, Earth's beautiful oceans and clouds filling the bridge viewpoints. Short-lived explosions flashed across the field, and off to port a holed cruiser floated derelict in space. He had already inserted the override key into the console lock; he gave it a quarter turn and commenced arming the main switches as the countdown continued.

"Seven, six, five, four..."

Reinhardt hit the secondaries and slammed home the final crossover; now the S missiles were beyond anyone's control, no matter what followed.

"Three, two, one, zero!"

Reinhardt could discern bursts of white light below him against the seemingly tranquil face of the planet.

"God forgive me," he said under his breath.

The Regis's voice boomed out, omnipresent. It was as if she had become the entire hive now, and each part of it her.

"The final attack has begun. And a terrible error has been made. But in seeking to reach our own goal we shall see to it that these creatures have a chance to reach theirs as well. The shadow of the Robotech Masters has been allowed to rule this world for too long...Now it will be dispersed!"

Sera's ship took a hit to the shoulder from one of the Battloids in the corridor, but she rallied and returned fire, taking out not only the one who had shot her but two more. Lancer hovered clear off to one side, unable to assist. But he had already done his part by destroying the first two, and it pained him even now to think about those Human lives he had taken.

Suddenly two more Shadow Fighters streaked into view. "We'll never be able to stop all of them!" he shouted to Sera.

She was about to reply when unexpected fire from behind them devastated the intruders. Lancer twisted around to find Scott's VT behind them in the corridor.

"Figured you could use some help," the lieutenant said flatly. "You're a welcome sight, Human" Sera told him.

"Yeah, well I'd love to stay and chat about that," Scott said after a moment, "but I suggest we get ourselves out of here on the double."

Lunk and Annie made it out of the hive before the three pilots. Rook and Rand and Marlene were also in the clear, a few miles off when the hive began to undergo the first changes.

In the shotgun seat of the APC, Annie gulped and found her voice. "Lunk," she said, pointing, "tell me what's happening!"

As if he could explain it.

The hive had gone from a crimson, almost blood-red color to steely blue. It was also more transparent now, and some sort of huge spherical nodes had been made visible in the deep recesses of the dome-perhaps those same round commo devices Lunk and Annie had stood beneath only minutes before. With the barrier envelope disappeared, the Shadow Fighters had direct access to the Regis's lair, but they couldn't get near it because of the intense electrical discharges that were surging up throughout the area.

And somehow the voice of the Invid queen was reaching all of them where they fought, died, or waited.

"Hear me, my children," she intoned. "When we sensed the first faint indications of the Flower of Life resources on this world, we thought we had at last found the home for which we searched."

The hive was barely visible now. It was engulfed in a kind of swirling storm of blinding yellow light from which rays of raw energy poured into the sky, while a crazed network of lightning and electrical groundings danced overhead. It was more like a contained explosion than anything else, as though the hive had become an epicenter for all the world's random energy, as though the very processes of universal creation were gathering together and being run through at an extraordinary pace. The hive had become the vessel for the Great Work, the merging of opposites-the pleroma. Here was the meeting place of the red and white alchemical dragons: the point of transcendence. The air was crackling, local storms unleashed and billowing clouds tearing through darkened skies as though in a time-frame sequence. And the land was changing and reconfiguring. The trees surrendered their leaves as an intense chill swept in from all sides, minitornadoes swirling around the sunlike fires that glowed within the hive. Invid ships-Scouts, Troopers, and Pincers-were streaming into it like insects drawn to the flame that annihilates them.

"We had called together all of our children scattered throughout the galaxy to begin life anew on this planet. We began rebuilding a world that

had nearly been destroyed by evil. And we constructed the Genesis Pits in order to pursue the path of enlightened evolution. But it was not enough."

Suddenly light and shadow seemed to reverse themselves, and the world drained of color. Where the hive had stood there was now only an impossible tower of radiant amber light, launching itself through hurricane clouds with blinding determination, a pillar of raw but directed energy.

It was a mile-wide circular shaft of horrific power that erupted from the hive, mushrooming up with a rounded, almost penile head into that feminine void above, a million blast furnaces in concert.

Overhead, at the edge of the envelope that was Earth's protective shield, the neutron missiles were falling toward their target, but now that target was now coming up to meet them, with a face as different as any could be, a face only the once-dead would recognize...

Reinhardt and his bridge staff saw it coming and would not have been able to move away from it had they had the power to do so; they were transfixed, in awe, in some sort of splendiferous, almost holy, reverie. Before their eyes the light was changing shape even as it pierced through Earth's atmosphere and entered the vacuum out of which it had been born. It was anthropomorphic here, contorted into a dragon's face there, with its fanged mouth opened wide, its tongue a lick of solar fire, ready to engulf all that dared stand in its way. It struck like a serpent, twisting and flailing about as though charmed by its own-existence; charmed by its own imminent swan song.

Reinhardt saw the creature-for that's what he termed it to be, a living light: energy and life combined on some new and unimaginable scale-encounter the warheads he had launched against it, and he saw those alloyed death machines slag and melt away in the creature's wake. And he realized that this was to be his own fate as well...

There was nothing but brilliant yellow light in the viewports now; throughout the fleet men and women stood naked before it, unable to

comprehend what was happening but aware that it was something that had never occurred before. They were unable to understand That they had come all this way to meet death face to face, like the Zentraedi and Robotech Masters before them. It was as though they had been chosen to reap the whirlwind that had blown in from the other side of the galaxy. And they were unable to understand that they had been chosen to unite with the Invid in some inexplicable way, in the same manner that the Invid were uniting with the wraiths of the Protoculture. They were the homunculi, the Micronians who had been used by the conjurer Zor in the carrying out of the Great Work.

Some people, in ships at the perimeter of the fleet, saw that tower shoot up from Earth's surface like a lance of pure light, only to be joined as it pierced the night by coils of unequaled brilliance delivered up from the planet itself, encircling it for a brief moment like the shells encompassing an atomic nucleus. For this really was a kind of cosmic orgasmic fusion.

"Come with me!" the Regis's voice rang out, like the music of the spheres. "Discard this world and follow the spirit of light as it beckons us onward. And let our leavetaking heal this crippled world and reshape its destiny."

Then that light contacted the warships of the main fleet and digested and assimilated their strengths and weaknesses as it had the bombs sent against it, incorporating into itself all the contradictions and ironies and, most of all, Humankind's ability to wage war.

The dragon seemed to yawn and bellow its triumph as the light streaked on into the void.

"Our evolutionary development is complete," the racial voice continued.

"To all of my children scattered throughout the cosmos...Follow me to a new world, a new plane. Abandon this tortured life and follow the spirit of light as it spreads its wings and carries us to a new dimension..."

And those few who survived told of the ray's complete and total transmutation. To a feline face with bright blue eyes, through one that was

surely Human in form. And then it had collected itself into one mass...like a phoenix on the wing, a radiant bird with outstretched wings wider than the world it was leaving behind, soaring away quicker than thought to another plane of existence.

EPILOGUE

Which came first: the Flower or the Protoculture?

Louie Nichols, BeeZee: The Galaxy Before Zor

Life is only what we choose to make it; Let's just take it,

Let us be free.

Lynn-Minmei, "We Can Win"

There were few salvageable Veritechs left after the Transformation, but Scott Bernard had managed to secure one of them. Most of the crew and ships of the main fleet had perished with the Invid's departure-gone with them, as some were saying.

A month had passed, and Earth was indeed beginning to heal itself, as the Regis's voice had promised it would. Grass and nascent forest covered what had been wasteland before, and regions that had been hot since Doha's rain of death were showing markedly lower levels of radioactivity. Even the devastated area around the central hive had been sanitized by the light's leave-taking.

But two of the Regis's children remained...

Scott was saying good-bye to one of them now on a rise overlooking the scene of what was to be Yellow Dancer's last concert, an outdoor amphitheater not far from the city that had once been called New York. People had been drawn to the concert from all over the Northlands and Southlands, seeking some explanation for what had occurred, almost as though the Invid's departure had been something of a Second Coming. There was a sense that the Earth had come to play a pivotal role in events that were beyond anyone's ability to comprehend, that the world had been used somehow to further one species' progress toward an end that awaited all of them. And in the process Humankind had been saved from

self-annihilation, so that Earth, too, might someday follow along the same path.

A feeling of peace prevailed, of lasting calm few had ever known. War had been placed out of reach. And if one were to be fought, it would have to rage without Protoculture, for almost all that precious substance, along with all the Invid Flowers, had vanished from the face of the Earth. It would have to be a war fought with sticks and stones by a species that had been returned to a kind of primitive innocence; to childhood, perhaps.

But these issues were far from Scott's teammates' thoughts that day; rather, they were dwelling on endings and beginnings of a different sort. For now that they had done their part in allaying everyone's initial fears and confusion, the time had come for them to think about their own individual paths and the inevitable farewells those steps toward the future would entail. And amid all that returning splendor, there was an awkwardness they had never experienced with one another.

As for Scott Bernard, his mind was made up. The SDF-3 had never appeared out of spacefold, and Scott was going out to look for it aboard the only fleet cruiser that had survived the Transformation.

"But why?" Marlene wanted to know, raising her voice above the music booming out from the concert shell below them, where Yellow Dancer held center stage.

"Really, Scott, what's the point?" Rand said, backing Marlene up even though he knew it was futile. "You can start a new life here."

"I've got to go back," Scott insisted, turning the "thinking cap" over and over in his hands.

"But how will you figure out where to begin looking?" Annie asked him. "I mean, couldn't you be happy staying down here on Earth with your friends and everything? Gee," she added, tears welling up in her eyes, "I miss you already."

How could he explain it to them? That although their friendship had meant so much to him this past year, he had other friends as well. Dr. Lang, Cabell, and so many others. He had to find out what had become of the

SDF-3. And more to the point, space was his home, more than the Earth ever was and perhaps more than the planet would ever be.

He looked down at Annie and forced a smile. "Admiral Hunter's lost out there, and someone's got to find him and his crew. We've got to try while there's still one ship left with enough reflex power to make the fold." He glanced over at Rand and Rook, Marlene and Lunk. "Fate brought us together for a journey none of us will ever forget. But we've reached the end of that road, and there're only individual ones left for us now." Scott shook his head. "I don't know, maybe to spread some of what we learned while we were together. Does that make any sense to you?"

Rand caught Scott's eye and smiled broadly. So it's not meant to be a winding down, after all, he told himself, but a gearing up for new quests...

"Well, good luck," Lunk said dubiously, walking over to shake Scott's hand. "I think I'm through with the road for a while." He gazed appreciatively at the green hills above the festival grounds. "I'm going to do a bit of farming, try and pay back the debt I owe to good ole Earth for shooting it up the past coupla years. Especially now that I've got some real fine volunteer help," he added, looking over at Marlene and Annie and grinning.

"What about you, Rand? Any ideas?" Rook asked leadingly. The two of them were sitting side by side in the grass, their backs against a tree.

Rand leered at her fondly. "Well, yeah, I do have a notion or two. I'm thinking of going back to the Southlands to write my memoirs."

Rook grimaced. "You've got to be kidding. Who the heck cares, anyway?

Besides, you're just at the beginning of your life, not the end of it."

Rand thrust out his chin. "Hey, I think people would be interested to read about some of the adventures we've been through."

"We?" she said excitedly. "Well, that's different! But I think those books are going to need a feminine point of view, just to keep things balanced, of course."

"And you're applying for the position."

"I am uniquely qualified to edit you, rogue."

Rand was about to agree, when a tremendous cheer rose from the crowds down below.

But the cause of the commotion wasn't Yellow Dancer, who had just finished her rendition of "We Will Win"-the anthem of the First Robotech War-but Lancer himself. He had thrown off his wig and female attire and was now attempting to explain himself to the audience.

"Thank you, everyone, thank you. You've made Yellow Dancer's final concert the greatest ever. Thank you all, you're wonderful!"

Those in the front rows saw that he was directing a lot of his delivery to one person in particular: an unusual looking woman with short spiky green-blond hair and eyes that glowed like embers...For who else but an out-of-this-world woman was so well suited for Lancer?

Only he wasn't getting the response he had expected; the audience seemed almost indifferent to his visual confession. In fact, they were prepared to follow him in any guise he chose; after all, it was just the stage, wasn't it?

Up above, Scott had kissed Marlene good-bye and was headed for the cockpit of the Alpha. What would become of her and Sera? he wondered, and found himself thinking about Max and Miriya Sterling's daughter, Dana.

He waved to his friends as the VT lifted off, tuning his receiver to the broadcast frequency of Lancer's concert. He really did it, Scott chuckled to himself. It was certainly a month for revelations.

"I want to dedicate my last number to a very special group of friends," Lancer was saying from the stage. "And to one friend in particular...He's leaving Earth behind, and with it the most precious of possessions: his friends-the people who love him most. But I want him to know that when he returns, we'll be here to welcome him home with open arms."

As Scott listened to Lancer's latest composition, he found himself recalling the names and faces of the people who had emerged as heroes during Earth's quarter of a century of devastating warfare. Rick and Lisa Hunter; Max, Miriya, and Dana Sterling; Lynn-Minmei and Bowie Grant

and Louie Nichols...And all those who hadn't lived to see this day: Admiral Gloval, Roy Fokker, Claudia Grant, Rolf Emerson, and countless others. Scott felt a bittersweet wave pass through him as Lancer's words crept into his mind, Earth dwindling now in the Alpha's cockpit display screen.

She finds him strong and brave

And how she wants him so, so much

So much she knows she needs that touch To lead the way to love.

He spies a gentle soul

Waiting for her to find someone so So very sweet and kind

To lead the way, the way to love.

"The Way to Love," Scott repeated, meditating on the words. And it suddenly occurred to him that it was love after all that had tipped the scales in each of those terrible wars. Love had won out over the greed, the hatred, and the betrayals, redressing the evil the Robotech Masters had first unleashed, and perhaps even atoning for some unknown sin that was Zor's alone.

And now they have their space They've run the final race Love's given them a place Where love can live

Heaven is where they are

With love, they have no need to roam Just look at them to see how she,

She led them to love

They are in love They are in love...

Marlene! he thought, leaning out as though to catch a glimpse of her. But there were only Earth's oceans and clouds now, and stars winking into view above him. And he made a promise on one of them: a promise to return after he had found that jinxed ship and its long-lost crew.

Scott listened a moment more, choking back his sadness, and hit the Alpha's thrusters, boostering up and away from the world he had helped to liberate, one he hoped he would see again...

Far below, Lunk, Marlene, and Annie had climbed into the battered APC and were headed down to the festival grounds to pick up Lancer and Sera. There were wisps of sunset clouds in a warm-looking sky, clear all the way to tomorrow. The Moon was rising, brilliant and seemingly closer than it had ever been. Lunk glanced up at it and said:

"You know, sometimes I think that's the most beautiful sight in the whole world. And I don't know why anyone would want to leave it behind."

Annie saw the VT's contrails caught in the western sky's final moment of color and sighed.

"And it might be a long time before anyone leaves it again." She smiled. Marlene put her arm around Annie and hugged her close.

"Good-bye, Scott," she said softly. "May you find what you're after. May all of us."

End RTUCN.COM

Robotech: The End of the Circle

Book Eighteen of the Robotech Series

Copyright 1989 by Jack McKinney

FOREWORD

The publication of The End of the Circle, the eighteenth book of the series, concludes the Robotech saga. The story now spans five decades, from 1990 to 2040 or thereabouts, save for a period of "lost years," covering the rise of Monument City and the Army of the Southern Cross, an account of which may yet see the light of day. Some of this material is in fact already being covered by other sources.

With nearly one million words of print in the Ballantine/Del Rey series alone, eighty-five episodes of powerful animation, an equal number of comic book adaptations, numerous art and role-playing books, and supplemental source material including several college theses it should be clear that Robotech has traveled a great distance since "HAL," Haruhiko Mikimoto, sat down at his desk one day and inked the first sketch of raven-haired songbird, Lynn-Minmei.

As most readers of Robotech are aware, the eighty-five "continuous" animated episodes (which still show up in U.S. television markets) were actually a complete reworking in terms of music, dialogue, and storylines if three separate anime series that appeared in Japan over the course of several years: Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeda. Credit for this unique accomplishment goes to Carl Macek, as well as Harmony Gold U.S.A. Inc. Together with a talented team of writers, voice-over artists, and production personnel, Robotech Master Macek found an overall grand visual theme in the Japanese series and redefined both Robotechnology and Protoculture.

It is a source of continuing disappointment that the project, as envisioned by Mr. Macek, was never brought to completion. The result would have been an additional sixty-five episodes of animation detailing the exploits of the Sentinels, and who knows how many more devoted to the material covered in this final book, presented here for the first time.

But perhaps Robotech's most important contributors have been the fans themselves, who have kept this project vital for five years running. More than seventy thousand strong have been aided and abetted in their efforts by the following, to whom the author wishes to express his heartfelt gratitude: Comico Comics, especially Markalan Joplin, who died shortly before completion of the illustrated series; Eternity-Comics, which has inherited the mantle and is currently publishing twice-monthly issues of the Sentinels; Kevin Siem-bieda and the staff at Palladium Books for their role-playing games; Kay Reynolds and Ardith Carlton, creators of the Starblaze Robotech Art Books; Kevin Seymour of Books Nippan; and a special thanks to Claude Pelletier, Michel Gareau, Alain Dubreuil, and the staff at Protoculture Addicts, the official Robotech fanzine.

We should all do it again sometime.

PART I

WHEEL IN SPACE

CHAPTER ONE

"Beware the skies, for the cerulean raiments of that sweetscented realm mask a darkness and evil that know no bounds. And do not look to heaven for peace, for there resides hell. And beware all who descend from those skies, for they are the harbingers of death and destruction."

Dogma of the Church of Recurrent Tragedy as quoted in Weverka T'su's Aftermath: Geopolitical and Religious Movements in the Southlands

The starship Ark Angel hung in geosynch, 36,000 kilometers above Brazilas in the Southlands. Recently returned from a distant campaign, it alone had been spared the wrath of the Invid's transubstantiating departure, one ship among scores in that moment of victorious defeat.

Scott Bernard had yet to decide whether its survival constituted a curse or a blessing.

He could just make out the warship's underbelly through a small oblong viewport set high' up in the curved hull of the chemical shuttle's passenger cabin. A soft-soled boot, freefloating, drew his attention forward, and he watched it for a moment, thinking: Weightless. Hugged to the padded contours of an acceleration couch by web belts and Velcro straps, as if on some nostalgia-steeped theme park ride.

Although restrained might have been a better word to describe his present circumstance, as in temporarily prevented from doing harm to himself or others. Not that he would. But there were half a dozen G2 analysts planetside who thought differently.

Scott sniggered aloud, unperturbed by the curious glances his self-amusement had elicited. He returned the looks with interest until one by one each of his fellow passengers in the cramped cabinspace turned away.

Oh, he had it, all right: what Rand had once called the look of the lost.

Scott inclined his head to one side to get a better angle on the ship, her dark symmetry obscuring a narrow sweep of stars. Built and christened on the other side of the Quadrant, she was the very ship Colonel Wolff had pirated from Tirol orbit years before. The ship that had become the Sentinels' own.

Running lights illuminated an array of weapons and sensor ports dimpling her underside-retrofitted sometime during the three years since Scott had last seen her-along with a swath of heavily blistered alloy, where angry tendrils loosed from the Invid's mindstuff phoenix had brushed her just three months before. She rested alone in gravity anchor, save for the countless metal fragments that drifted above and below her: the lingering debris clouds of Dolza's fleet; of Little Luna, the Zentraedi factory satellite; of the hapless, goosenecked ships of Mars, Venus, and Jupiter Divisions; of the Robotech Expeditionary Force's tri-thrusters and Karbarran manufactured boilerlike monstrosities.

Earth was in fact haloed by death and destruction. But liberated-or so it seemed.

A Tiresian-accented voice cautiously interrupted Scott's painful reverie.

"Colonel Bernard," the woman repeated as Scott turned from the view. She stood wavering in the narrow aisle, Velcroed in place, strands of auburn hair wafting out from under a pearl-gray shuttle bonnet. The smile, too, seemed fastened there, detachable with the slightest tug.

"What is it?" Scott asked, masking his thoughts.

"Sir, General Grant wishes you to be informed that he'll be on hand to meet the shuttle. Mrs. Grant and Senators Huxley and Penn are with him, sir."

Scott nodded and put on a pleasant face, certain it read as a twisted malicious grin. But the woman only broadened her smile in response and asked if there was anything he needed before docking. He told her he was fine and leaned over to watch her space-step down the aisle, a child learning to walk. So much to relearn, he told himself. So much to forget.

The chemical shuttle itself was symbolic of the change. Launched from a twenty-five-year-old reconstructed base in Venezuela Nueva, the ferry and a handful of others like it were humankind's only existing links with near space. There was the Angel, of course, but she had remained in geosynch ever since the disastrous finale to the assault on Reflex Point, the Invid queen's hivelike stronghold on the North American continent. Word had it that a small portion of the REF's mecha-Alphas and Shadow fighters, principally-was still functioning, but most of the older generation Cyclones and Veritechs had simply given up the ghost.

No one knew what to make of the events that had occurred at Reflex Point. In the wake of the Invid departure all sorts of reports had reached Scott and his team of freedom fighters. The REF fleet had been destroyed; it had survived. The Invid had exited the solar system; the Regis had relocated her horde in the Southlands. The SDF-3 had been destroyed; it had manifested from fold and been swallowed up by the Invid phoenix; it had failed to

appear at all . . . Eventually, Scott learned that the fleet had indeed been vaporized and that the flagship had failed to emerge from hyperspace. He had not bothered to wait around for verification. With an assist from Lunk and Rand, he had managed to commandeer and make serviceable an anni-disc-ravaged Beta, only to find that the VT was not much good outside the envelope and that the Ark Angel had removed herself to stationary orbit over the Southlands.

It had begun to make sense after the initial anger and disappointment had washed through him. Much of the northern hemisphere was devastated, and where else would reconstruction commence but in the south, where several cities had actually flourished during the occupation. Norristown, once the site of a Protoculture storage facility, was fast emerging as the leader of the pack, and it was there that Scott had ultimately set down. Like a fly on lacquered paper. Mired in red tape for close to two months before Provisional Command had okayed his request to be among those shuttled up to the starship.

The question he had heard most often those two months had been: "Scott who?"

It seemed that Mars and Jupiter Divisions were filed away in Command's mainframe as having gone down with all hands, and so the person claiming to be Lieutenant Scott Bernard of the 21st Squadron, Mars Division, had to be a ghost, a zone loonie, or an ambulatory case of what the neurometrics were calling Post-Engagement Synaptic Trauma PEST, for short.

Ask Dr. Lang about Scott Bernard, he had pressed. I'm his godson, for chrissake!

Only to hear: "We're sorry, er, Lieutenant Bernard, but Doctor Lang is not available at this time."

Later, Scott would learn that his godfather and mentor had been aboard the ill-fated SDF-3 when it had jumped from Tirol. But in the meantime he suggested that Captain Harrington might be able to vouch for him. Harrington had commanded the first wave of Cyclone ground teams the REF had directed against Reflex Point.

After all, it wasn't like he was asking for medals, Scott had assured the analysts. But the least Command could do was acknowledge what he had achieved on the yearlong road to Reflex Point or applaud his one-on-one with the Invid Corg in the seasonally shifting skies above the hive cluster. Why, some of Harrington's team had even seen the Invid simulagent's flame cloud, had even seen Scott go into the central dome!

He was sorry he said it even before the words had left his lips.

"Now, uh, what was that you were saying about talking to the Regis, Lieutenant?" the boys from G2 had asked. "You did say something about her being, let me see here, 'a baldheaded column of light twenty feet high.'"

And so he had played the PEST for them, steering clear of any mention of Marlene or Sera or any of the mind-boggling time-space displacements he'd experienced inside the hive chambers.

In retrospect, he had to ask himself whether pulling out all the stops would have brought the med teams' debriefing reports to Jean Grant's attention any sooner, but they had reached her on their own momentum in any case, and Scott had finally been granted permission to come aboard.

And issued a battlefield commission to full bird, to boot.

For Scott it was something else to snigger at: a promotion, in an armed force without ships or soldiers, defenders and liberators of a world that wanted little part of them even now.

The shuttle docked in one of Ark Angel's starboard bays just as Sol was flooding the eastern coast of the Southlands with morning light. Scott drank in the view that had been denied him when Mars Division had approached a year earlier: Earth's characteristic clouds and swirling weather fronts, its deep-blue water oceans and healing landscape. And for the first time in years he found himself thinking about Base Gloval, his father's forefinger thrust upward into the Martian night, pinpointing a homeworld. Huddled afterward in the prewarmed comfort of his sleep compartment, he would grapple with the notion-that faint light, a home. But even after his family had been transferred to the factory satellite to work on the SDF-3, Scott could not regard Earth as such. And he had so few memories of those years that he called Tirol home now and perhaps always would.

Only a week ago he had learned that his parents were still there.

The memories surrendered to more recent recollections as Scott and the rest of the shuttle's privileged boarded a transfer vehicle that ferried them into the ship proper, Ark Angel's artificial gravity settling on him like oppression itself. Nearly every component of the ship was different from what he remembered, from the illumination grids that checkered the holds to the persistent foot-tingling basso of the dreadnought's internal systemry.

He soon caught sight of Vince Grant, towering walnuthrown and square-shouldered over a small gathering of civilians and military personnel bottlenecked at the arrival hold's security gate. There were hands in the air, salutes, a welter of voices that brought to mind vid-scenes of turn-of-the-entury airport arrivals, and it was obvious to Scott all at once that the REF was as altered as the Angel herself. He sensed something cool but determined in the ship's slightly sour air, a single-mindedness at work he had not experienced since Tiresia.

A male aide appeared out of the crowd to escort him through security, and a moment later he stood facing the Grants and the two Plenipotentiary Council senators. "Colonel Bernard, reporting as ordered," Scott said with a crisp salute. "Permission to come aboard, sir?"

"Granted," Vince returned, working the muscles of his massive jaw into a tight-kipped smile. "Welcome home, Scott. "

"Oh, Scott," Jean said, rushing forward to embrace him. "God, let me look at you."

He took a step back to allow for just that, extending a hand at the same time to Justine Huxley, then Dr. Penn. Vince and Jean were outfitted in modified REF uniforms, collarless now but with flared shoulders and simleather torso harnesses retained. The senators wore loose-fitting jumpsuits of a design that had originated on Garuda.

"Good to see you, my boy," Penn said with paternal sincerity. "I only wish Emil and Karen could be here with us." There was no mention of Karen's lover, Jack Baker; certainly there was no love lost between Dr. Penn and Baker, in any case. Karen, like Bowie Grant, had elected to ship out aboard the SDF-3. Let them all have better luck than Marlene and I had, Scott thought. Even if that means dying together. The scientist's words had thrown a curtain of silence around the five of them, a spot of stasis amid the bustling activity in the hold. "Is there any word?" Scott asked, hoping to break the spell.

Jean shook her head, her dark honey complexion paled by the exchange. Her hair was pulled back into a tight chignon, imparting a touch of severity to what was normally the warmest of faces. "We've received some garbled subtrans from Tirol. The ship folded soon after Rheinhardt and the others were away. There's been no word from the SDF-3 since. "

"I think we should have this discussion elsewhere," Vince said with a hint of suggestion in his voice. "We all have a lot of catching up to do. "

"Colonel," Huxley said before everyone set off, "I do want to apologize for this somewhat subdued welcome." She gestured around the hold with a quivering, aged-hand. "As you can well imagine, we've all been trying to adjust to the loss of our friends and compatriots."

Scott could see that she was referring to the destruction of the fleet rather than the presumed loss of the SDF-3. "I understand, Senator," he told her. "No need for apologies."

"Besides, Colonel," Huxley continued after a deep breath, "what with the Council trying to set up summits with our planetside counterparts and Jean's medical teams doing what they can . . . Well, I'm certain you do understand, Colonel Bernard."

Scott did not envy either group but thought it might be particularly rough going for the

Council itself. To the last they had been respected members of the United Earth Government. But that was before the ascendancy of the Army of the Southern Cross, the arrival of the Robotech Masters and the Invid, and the factionalism and isolationalism that had thrived during the occupation. Those would-be leaders below barely trusted their neighbors, let alone a council of lawmakers and theoreticians absent for fifteen years. Scott was not sure whether Huxley, Penn, and the rest had grasped the fact that Earth was a changed world.

Scott found Vince Grant studying him when he looked up. "I know the promotion might not seem like much, Scott, but we haven't gotten around to honoring individual effort just yet."

Scott was taken aback. "Excuse me, sir, but if you're talking about medals or citations-"

"You've certainly earned them, Scott," Jean said hurriedly, glancing up at Vince before showing Scott an uncomfortable look. "We just want you to know-"

Scott held up his hands to stop her from saying anything further. It was a sham, and everyone knew it-or at least they should have. There were no heroes this go-round, Scott said to himself, as he had so often the past three months. No matter who had done what at Reflex Point or anywhere on either side of the envelope.

There were only survivors.

CHAPTER TWO

There isn't a man or woman aboard the [Ark Angel] that wasn't thinking about the SDF-1 when Dr. Penn announced our intention to make a trial jump to the moon. But do we have a choice? Doesn't it make more sense to strand the ship a safe distance from Earth rather than strand her in Martian orbit as some have suggested out of sheer superstitious fear of repeated misfortune? All this, of course, presupposes that the fold generators will fail, which I am inclined to believe will not be the case. As for our inadvertently ending up near Pluto or some such celestial locale, I can only pray that doesn't occur. Should it, however, I might as well state now that I have always regretted missing the jump that landed Claudia and the rest at the frozen edge of our home system. Perhaps I'm bound by destiny to follow her now.

General Vincent Grant, ship's log of the Ark Angel

See you on the dark side of the moon.

Late twentieth-century song lyric

Jean Grant purposely fell out of step with Vince and the two senators so that she might observe Scott without setting him off as she had almost done in the arrival hold. Her sentiments had been sincere if awkwardly expressed. She was not unaware of the

meaninglessness of promotions and medals at this stage of things-she had always held that battles were better forgotten than immortalized by ribbons, in any case-but gestures were important for morale, even of the salute and handshake variety favored by armies the Quadrant over. And God knew morale was in short supply just now.

She took note of the slight limp in Scott's long-legged stride as Vince led everyone to his personal quarters aft of the Ark Angel's bridge. Up close, when she had felt Scott stiffen in her short-lived embrace, she had seen the scars on his still youthful face and graceful hands. Nineteen now-or twenty-ix in Earth-relative years (a system she readily dismissed because of the havoc it wreaked on her own age)-he was growing to resemble his father more and more. But from beneath the broad forehead and slick black hair peered the dreamy eyes of his mother. He had her prominent ears as well, but the limp and the stoop in his formerly erect carriage were gifts of a war that refused to go away.

REF staffers and administrative officers stared openly as they hurried through the ship's corridors, trying no doubt to puzzle out the identity of the stranger who had been admitted into their midst, the undernourished apparition in rust-red knee boots and tattered mauve and purple flightsuit adorned with Mars Division unit patches. The scarred warrior wearing an archaic Badger on his hip.

Jean listened closely to Scott's words as everyone settled themselves behind drinks in Vince's quarters. And she heard the strange accent he had acquired during his time on Earth, the bitterness in his breaking voice when he recounted the Mars Division's assault against Invid-occupied Earthflow the ships had literally come apart in space, defeated long before the Regis's Shock Troopers and Pincers had moved in to loose their hyphenstorms, their fiery coup de grace.

Scott told them about the long road to Reflex Point, a journey that seemed to have become something of a personal odyssey to despair and disillusionment. Of the rogues, traitors, and cowards who populated that war-torn landscape. Of his encounters with Jonathan Wolff (Scott's template for cynicism, Jean thought), with the geriatric star-struck mechamorphs who had returned with Major Carpenter; and with Sue Graham of the Jupiter Division's 36th. Jean remembered the photojournalist well and the agony, real or imagined, she had put Lisa Hayes Hunter through.

Her ears pricked up when Scott mentioned Reflex Point itself and spoke of some of the things he had described to neurometric analysts planetside. She saw no reason to doubt the veracity of Scott's claims-that he had actually conversed with the Invid hivequeen-but she also sensed that Scott was leaving something unsaid. G2 had tried to put a trace on the freedom fighters Scott claimed had accompanied him inside the complex, but a search had proved impossible among the population displacements and shifting conditions below.

In turn, Vince caught Scott up on the incredible events that had transpired on Optera shortly after Mars Division had folded for home space. Scott was attentive, but it was

apparent that he had already-heard most of it from REF mecha pilots. Nevertheless, he had questions about Dana Sterling's nearly miraculous appearance and the so-called Nichols drive that powered the Shadow fighters and retrofitted Ark Angel.

Jean waited for a lull in the shop talk before attempting to return the conversation to personal concerns. She had risen from her chair to gaze out the viewport, mesmerized by the scintillating dance of Earth's orbiting debris. Of late, every viewport in the ship seemed to be a window into her private torment. She could not regard Earth or stars without recalling the phoenix vision she had beheld when the Tokugawa had met its terrible end above Optera or the real-time manifestation of that phoenix as it had scorched its way through the expeditionary fleet.

Nor could she help thinking of Gardner and Ackerman and Gunther Rheinhardt, all dead. And Rolf Emerson-dear Rolf, who had died in Bowie's arms. The news of his death had seemed unreal on Tirol, but now, so close ...

"We were so sorry to hear about Marlene, Scott," she said at last.

By sheer reflex, Scott's hand went to his breast to feel for the heart-shaped holo-locket he wore under his flightsuit. "Her parents are onboard," Jean added.

Scott nodded grimly. "And I'm sorry to hear about Bowie," he said, meeting her eyes.

Jean saw concern and hatred in those eyes-hatred for Musica, the Tiresian clone Bowie was in love with. Jean saw little purpose in going into it now that Scott was exhibiting signs of outright xenophobia. She wondered whether Dana, too, would fall prey to his distrust. Dana, who had remained with her parents on Haydon IV.

"We'll find them," Scott said suddenly, watching as meaningful glances were exchanged. Then: "All right, what aren't you people telling me? You said you received transmissions from Tirol."

"From Cabell," Vince answered, setting aside his drink. "But it's only what we've told you, Scott. The SDF-3 executed its fold shortly after Rheinhardt's Neptune and Saturn groups were away. Rheinhardt's final communique with Admiral Hunter-"

"Rick," Jean thought to point out.

"-involved decisions on deployment of the Cyclones and Shadow fighters." Vince paused. "And the use of the neutron `S' missiles if all else failed."

Scott's eyes widened. Then the rumors were true: Rheinhardt had been prepared to render the planet uninhabitable rather than surrender it to the Invid. "Madness, " he said through clenched teeth.

Vince looked to his wife and let out a long breath.

"It wasn't an easy decision to arrive at, Colonel," Senator Huxley said. "There was a high probability that most of the Southern hemisphere would survive the saturation."

Scott stared at her, then ran his hands down his face. "So where the hell's the ship if they completed their fold? It's been three months now!"

"Easy, Scott," Vince said, straightening in his chair. "We're doing all we can."

Scott glared at him. "By sitting here? No, I don't think so. Hasn't anybody thought of returning to Tirol? There has to be some trace of them."

Dr. Penn cleared his throat. "The truth is, son, we're not sure we can return. We are, however, planning to execute a trial jump to lay all doubts to rest."

Scott nodded in comprehension. "The Protoculture. The one thing that's plaguing most of the mecha downside. The reason I had to ride a damn chemical shuttle up here. Nothing's working, is that it?"

"Yes and no," Penn said quickly. "Some of the Veritechs are functional and fully capable of mechamorphosis. Others have limited capacity for flight or combat maneuvering. Now it this last is something I find disturbing."

Scott glanced at Vince before responding; if the general was willing to let Penn's comment slide; so would he. "I heard some talk: there's something different about the Flowers you harvested from Optera-"

"New Praxis," Justine Huxley amended.

"New Praxis, then. But why would the older models suddenly shut down now?"

At the viewport, Jean folded her arms. "We were hoping you might be able to tell us, Scott."

Scott touched his fingertips to his chest. "Me? What could I-" Then it occurred to him. "The Regis," he snorted. "We've read your debriefing reports, Colonel," Huxley said. "You claim you were inside the central hive just before the end, that you actually spoke with the Regis."

Scott swallowed and found his voice. "Yeah, it's true, but come on, it's not like she explained herself to me."

"Then what did she say?" Jean asked.

Scott smoothed back an undisciplined comma of hair. "What did she say?" He laughed nervously. "I'm still not sure what I heard and what I imagined. But I think we were, well, arguing."

"Arguing?" Huxley said dubiously.

"Yeah. About ... ethics. About whether the Invid had a right to Earth after what the Masters had done to Optera." Scott searched the faces appraising him. "It sounds crazy, I know, but she was just raving about what warlike beings we are, about how the universe would be better off without us." No one said anything for a moment.

"Anyway, I still don't see what all this has to do with the SDF-3. The Invid are history, aren't they?"

Jean turned to the viewport and thought of the phoenix once more, the transubstantiation of an entire race. "Maybe the ship went where she went," she suggested softly. Vince sent her a questioning look as she swung around. "The Regis, I mean."

Penn made a knowing sound. "It's a pity there are no Invid left to quiz as to just where she might have gone."

Scott put a hand over his mouth as though to bite back his words. Somewhere below, in one of the burgeoning cities of the Southlands or wandering the waste of the Northlands, were two of the three children the Regis had conjugated in human form. Sera and Marlene-clone-close in appearance to the Marlene lost to him over a year ago.

Could he face them again? he asked himself. Could he enlist the enemy's help in finding his friends?

"What is it, Scott?" Jean said, watching him.

Scott clamped his jaws shut, then relented. "Not all the Invid have left," he told them at last.

Above them rose crystal palaces and translucent spires, mansions of white-frost gingerbread and platforms of smoky blue glass, elfin halls and minarets, stately columns, onion domes, and ethereal towers.

Above them were alloy plains three hundred miles wide and burnished smooth as a looking glass, idyllic landscapes dotted with sea-green lakes, and skies of gold filled with conediers, hovercraft, and outsize magical carpets. A dreamy world of perfect days and

tranquil nights, of exotic biota and Eliding beings in high-collared robes whose silent speech was a gentle thought carried on the wind.

And below them . ._ . below them was that which had given shape to the illusion above: the ultratech complexities of a planet-sized artifact, birthed in the mind of an alien genius who had left his mark on half the far-flung worlds of the Fourth Quadrant. A genius met in lore and legend or encountered in towering shrines that masked the being himself.

He had perhaps imparted his name to the artifact or left that for others to do, but that his very essence was there erected-in those spires and domes and artificial lakes-was not to be denied.

And suspended between-in the boundless chamber that confined them-was this place of instrumentality nodes and info-networks, the material interface with the Awareness-Haydon had set in place to mind his clever works. So this place was neither one nor the other but a middle ground from which to know creator and created, sacrosanct, then, truly suspended. For from, where else could one take the proper measure of things?

Exedore ceased his mystical musings even before he sensed the soft intrusion of Veidt's sendings. This was what mingling with humans and Garudans had wrought, he told himself, a penchant for the metaphysical. Questions commencing with why.

How far he had come from the directed, purposeful nature of the Imperative! he would catch himself thinking. Feeling as remote from that now as his recontoured physical self was from the genetic vats that had conceived him. Normalized in both size and aspect and drained of the conquering urge, the compulsion to obey without question. Given to metaphysical ponderings. How un-Zentraedi, indeed! And how Great Breetai would have mocked him!

"A moment more and the requested correlations will be available," Veidt sent from the data column.

Exedore swiveled in his chair to regard the limbless Haydonite-his partner these past years. A response formed on the tip of his tongue, though there was little need of it. An old habit, difficult to break. "I, um . . ."

Veidt hovered through a quarter turn to face him with what nearly approximated a smile.

"I am well aware that my workings please you, Lord Exedore. Your words are an echo, you understand-an unnecessary redundancy."

Exedore favored him with a genuine grin, as difficult to suppress as the habit itself. This was as close as they came to jesting or arguing, he still was not sure which. Veidt's face had already resumed its normal configuration, which was to say, blank. As featureless as

an unfinished mannequin's, a tech aboard the SDF-3 had once commented in Exedore's presence.

"Featureless, yes," Veidt sent, "but hardly unfinished, Exedore:"

Early on Exedore had found it somewhat unnerving to have his thoughts scanned on a moment-to-moment basis, but he was long past concern or misgiving. It was logical, in fact, that he open his mind to Veidt, if only to expedite the unraveling of the cosmic puzzles someone had seen fit to send their way.

And "baffling" only began to describe them.

The SDF-3 was missing, not merely disappeared into hyperspace but vanished from the Quadrant. The ship had not emerged from fold anywhere in known space, nor was it trapped in the netherscape of the hyperdomain. Haydon IV's Awareness had told them that much already. But what the artificial sentience could not tell them was where the ship was or whether it existed at all. The SDF-3 had simply ceased to be, and yet there were no indications that it had met with any of the thousand ills matter was heir to.

That the dematerialization had coincided with a reawakening of a myriad slumbering computer components, Exedore initially read as a sign that the artifact planet had been in some sense, responsible for the event. Subsequent investigation, however, had led him to the conclusion that the Awareness had not been responding to the SDF-3's plight, after all, but to a concurrent phenomenon that had taken place clear across the Quadrant:

Along a spacetime curve that led to Earth.

Something originating there had sent an energy pulse through the fabric of the continuum, whose destination seemed to be the distant collapsed giant the Tiresians knew as Ranaath's Star.

Haydon-he has returned to our world! Veidt had sent at the time, and-novice astrophysicist that he was-Exedore had taken him literally. But literalness was not something the Haydonites practiced with regularity, and the expression-for that was what it was-was best translated by the Terran self condemning phrase Well, I'll be damned!

The very one Exedore had used sometime later when he bad learned of the Invid's departure-months ago, Earthrelative, after a series of mostly interrupted exchanges between Earth and Tirol and between Tirol and Haydon IV. Since then, the Awareness had been spewing out a steady stream of mathematical calculations and puzzling data readers, conversing with itself on an information level the likes of which Exedore had never encountered. Veidt had been successful in eavesdropping on the Awareness's inner dialog and enticing it to display some of its findings-in holographics, projecbeam, and the occasional verbalization, remarkably enough, issued forth in fluent Tiresian (linga franca).

But little of it made any sense to Exedore, on whose shoulders the search for the missing flagship had fallen. The Zentraedi could almost smile, recalling Zor's original fortress, the SDF-1. He had been successful in tracing that one, but that hardly qualified him as an expert in the field.

Cabell had promised to tear himself away from Tiresia to join in plying the Awareness with questions, but Exedore thought the coded outpourings might outdistance even the master himself.

They needed Emil Lang or the Zor-clone, Rem, who had contributed so much to the facsimile matrix fashioned by the REF to empower its fleet. They needed the combined intellect of the SDF-3's Robotechnicians.

Better still, they needed Haydon. "My thought exactly, Lord Exedore."

Exedore chuckled to himself. "Yes, Veidt. The Earthers have a saying, I believe. `Great minds think-'"

The chamber had begun to vibrate. That in itself was nothing unusual. In fact, during the five years Exedore had been on-world he had known instances where the vibrations were strong enough to rattle the alloy walls and rumble data discs out of their holders. But the sudden tremor was more intense than any he had experienced.

"Another atmospheric cleansing?" the Zentraedi asked in a quavering voice. "A seasonal change? An internal overhaul, the upwelling of a new lake or the damming of a stream-send something, will you!"

Veidt had glided back to his station by the central data pillar, his high-collared cape a screen for projecbeam schematics, a dizzying light show of flashing alphanumeric analogues and equational abstracts.

"An intruder, perhaps," Exedore continued, his stubby hands spread atop leaping sheets of hard copy like some Ouija board reader. "An unannounced ship-"

"I heard you," Veidt sent with a sting. "It is none of those things. Something novel, unprecedented."

Exedore ceased his futile efforts to steady his work and with some difficulty swiveled to regard the strobing databanks of the Awareness, data scrolls and cards tattooing to the floor at his feet. The information traffic displayed was enough to render the Invid leave-taking a minor itch.

"What is it, Veidt?" Exedore pressed, a note of alarm in his voice. A deep-space view of Haydon IV advanced through the 3-D field of a projecbeam, a variegated ball in time-lapse

motion. "Veidt," he repeated.

"Primary activation sequences have commenced," the Haydonite sent with curious detachment. "Atmospheric integrity is constant for the moment. Surface damage is projected to be well within accepted parameters. Casualties among offworlders are not expected to exceed a thousand."

"Casualties?" Exedore said; up on shaky legs, bulging eyes darting between Veidt and the projecbeam field.

Veidt rotated to face him, a lavender brightness pulsating from the center of his smooth forehead. "The crossing is achieved. The Event is occurred. Praise Haydon."

Careful not to be too literal, Exedore reminded himself. Praise Haydon could mean almost anything. "The Event?" he asked cautiously.

Veidt nodded. "Haydon IV is leaving orbit. Shortly, we will depart the Briz'dziki system entirely."

Exedore's mouth fell open. "Haydon," he muttered. "He has returned to our world."

CHAPTER THREE

The motion to leave Earth irradiated rather than leave it to the Invid Regis was carried by a narrow margin. Balloting was kept secret, and there has yet to be discovered a person-by-person breakdown of the vote. Of the ten members of the [Plenipotentiary] Council, there are believed to have been two abstentions from Stinson and Longchamps. Obstat, Huxley, and others have elsewhere indicated the basis of their individual decisions. Of the participating members of the REF command staff, seven voted in favor of using the Neutron-S missiles, five against. It is altogether ironic that the decision to irradiate Earth was arrived at in Tiresia, where, centuries before, the Robotech Masters had sentenced Optera to suffer a similar fate.

Ahmed Rashona, That Pass in the Night: The SDF-3 and the Mission to Tirol

Lisa dreamed a tunnel in the sky, a radiant corridor stretching timeless across the heavens. Warm to her hands and bare feet, secure and enfolding, redolent with aromas of spring and summer. At one end her father waved good-bye, a smashing figure in his United Earth Government tunic with its breast salad of ribbons and braid; at the other end was a patch of scudded sky that could have belonged only to once-upon-a-time Earth.

It occurred to her that she could not have been more than seventeen, returning to Macross Island after her first real leave. Was this carpeting below her, then? The warm glow the lights of some airport concourse or jetway?

But where were the flight attendants, then; where were her guides? And how could she hope to find her seat without a boarding pass?

She slapped the pockets of her long coat as she walked, panic gaining on her. The light ahead was almost too intense to behold, like the sun itself on a cloudless south Pacific afternoon when there was not a breeze in the world.

The hot sand was making her hurry along, but it was the voice she was responding to now. The panic evaporated, trailing behind her ghostly and diffuse, and the warmth returned. Her mother's voice, her arthritic hand waving in the light at the end of the corridor. Her guide, to be sure, a smile broadening as Lisa outran the years; the deaths and disappearances that ruined her garden. A child as she approached the light, Earth too remote to touch ...

I'm dead! she thought?

-as noise filled her up and air swelled her lungs, bringing renewed life to her pounding heart. A dream, she told herself, the recurrent one her mind reserved for hyperspace folds.

Everyone had them, those nightmares and visions, brief excursions to private heavens or hells. Space lace, some of the crew called it. With an ever-present out-of-body component, an after-life accompaniment.

Only this time she had died, and that had never happened before. Grief coursed through her, a profound sense of loss, a kind of terminal nostalgia. Had it been stirred by the dream? Or did it emanate from the nurturing other she had discovered within herself?

Roy was suddenly on her mind, her bright center in the universe, her barely five-year-old hero. The thought of having to open her eyes filled her with fear. But open them she would.

And the grief propagated.

The SDF-3 bridge was as dark and silent as a tomb. Sweat burst from her palms like splinters of ice.

"Lieutenant Toler," she said. "Mister Hakawa?"

"Here, sir," someone answered from a duty station behind the command chair. She called to the rest-Williamson, Price, Martino-and one by one they responded, reborn from dreams. Lisa flathanded the com-line stud built into the arm of the chair and called for Dr. Lang in engineering.

"All systems are down, Sir," said a voice in the darkness-Price, Lisa ventured correctly. "No response from any of the backups: It's like we're unplugged."

"Nonsense," Lisa returned. "We're obviously not weightless, Mister Price. And unless we've somehow defolded on Earth's surface, I'd hazard a guess some systems are operational."

"Yes, sir."

"Doesn't anyone keep a damn flashlight up here?" she said, cautiously feeling her way out of the chair. Off to her right she heard a pneumatic hiss, a tear of Velcro. "Everyone stay put," she called toward the sound. "We're still on full alert, gentlemen. Besides, I don't want anyone walking into a bulkhead. "She directed her voice starboard, toward Toler's station beneath the threat board. "Mister Toler, you're the youngest among us. How's your vision?"

"Better than perfect, sir," Toler told her, a crack in his voice on the last word.

"Do you think you can make your way to the hatch and engage the override?"

"With my eyes closed, sir."

Everyone laughed, and the tension eased somewhat. "Yes, well, you can keep your eyes open, Lieutenant. This isn't a test of your agility. I just want to know if the whole ship's in this fix."

"I understand, sir."

Lisa heard Toler's chair swivel. A few moments later came the low thud of retracting bolts. The air stirred as the hatch slid open and the sound of half a dozen voices drifted in from the operations room. Toler and someone else made startled sounds. "What happened?" Lisa asked.

A man's voice growled: "Who is that?"

"Lieutenant Toler. Who's that?"

"Commander Forsythe, Lieutenant. Stand aside."

"Sir!" Toler snapped.

Lisa heard a hollow meeting of flesh and bone and a follow up wince of pain. "Damn, boy," her bald-headed exec said, "you don't have to salute me!"

Just then the emergency lights came up, banks at a time, red and somber throughout the bridge. A slight shudder swept through the ship, and Klaxons wailed midnote, signaling battle stations.

"That's more like it," Lisa enthused. "Showing up crippled would send one hell of a message to the Regis."

Forsythe stepped through the hatch, throwing Toler a hard look before joining Price at one of the forward heads-up display screens.

"We're still dead in space, sir," Hakawa updated. "Auxiliary power forward and to all priority stations, but all scanning, ECM, and defense systems are non-op."

"Can we determine our position?" Forsythe asked. "Negative, sir Guidance, telemetry, and astrogation are still down."

Lisa traded frowns with Forsythe and glanced over her shoulder at the watch officer. "Well, we can at least take a look outside, can't we?"

"Yes, sir."

"Raise the forward cowl, Mister Hakawa," Forsythe said impatiently.

Lisa could barely contain herself. It was almost as though she could dismiss this latest snafu the way a cyclist might shrug off a punctured tire after a thousand-mile journey. Earth, after close to fifteen years. With nothing unforeseen in store for them this time: no accidental jumps to Pluto, no fold hitchhikers to rescue, no surprise attacks by alien cruisers. The REF knew who and what they had come for: the Regis and the world they had lost to her. They knew, too, the Shock Troopers and Pincers they would be facing, and they knew how to engage them.

And best of all, they knew they would succeed.

Six years of effort had gone into this one day, and the fleet that was the result of that labor would be spread out before them, weapons arrays and combat mecha targeted for Reflex Point. Earth, Lisa said to herself again as the forward view port shields retracted. Earth!

Light of a sort began to filter onto the bridge, only it was neither the welcome warmth of Sol nor the reflected brilliance of their blue-white homeworld.

It was the alien light at the end of Lisa's tunnel in the sky. It was death light.

On the command balcony of the fortress's cavernous Tactical Information Center, Rick

Hunter stared uncomprehendingly at the monitors affixed to the portside bulkhead.

"I'm sorry, sir," an enlisted-rating tech stationed at a nearby console repeated, "but the opticals are on-line. This is the external view. Sir."

In the phasing, satanic illumination of the emergency lights the room could have been a corner of hell. Rick would have taken odds that it was just that: the hell of his space lace given shape during the fold. But unlike Lisa's recurrent tunnel, Rick's nightmare vision did not require a jump to ignite it. The set, the setting, the thousand separate elements that composed it could all be traced back to the Genesis Pits on Optera. Walk away from it you might, but turn around and the fear would be there, waiting for you, beckoning you back into its sinister embrace.

An intercom buzzed insistently at Rick's back. "Command One," he heard his adjutant say at last. "Doctor Lang, Admiral," the colonel continued, conveying the mobile over to him.

"What the hell's going on?" Rick shouted into the mouth piece. "Where are we?" He glanced at the monitors once more before proceeding. "It looks like fog out there, Lang. Is that possible?"

"I would like to humor you, Admiral," Lang said, "but, unfortunately, there is little humor in the situation. And if it is indeed a fog, as you suggest, it is of the quantum sort. We have life support, but little else, as I'm sure you're aware. "

Rick's boot continued to tap the floor long after Lang had finished. The two men had grown distant from each other on Tirol, Lang like some Prometheus with his facsimile Protoculture matrix, and Rick busy with Roy more often than not. The wizard of Robotechnology kept getting stranger while Rick just kept getting grayer.

"How long before you can return power to the drives?" Rick demanded.

It was to be the REF's final battle, he thought, the one that was to decide their fate, return to them their homeworld or send them back to Tirol, an irradiated Earth in their wake.

Lang launched his patented maniacal laugh through the earpiece. "Perhaps you should abandon your post for a moment and come below, Admiral. There's something I'd like you to see."

"I don't have time for this, Lang," Rick told him. "Just tell me where we are." He heard the urgency in his voice and noted that his adjutant was fixing him with a concerned look.

Lang's laugh trailed off as he cleared his throat. "You may not like the answer, Admiral. "

Rick's hold on the phone became viselike. "You let me lie the judge of that."

Lang was quiet a moment, then said: "Nowhere."

In whispered voices behind cupped hands it was often suggested that Dr. Emil Lang ran the ship. Not that he had much to do with command decisions or actual hands-on astrogation, but that he ran the ship in the sense of driving the ship, fueling it. Word was passed in those same engineering huddles that the Reflex furnaces and Protoculture drives were nothing but pretense-mock-ups constructed to put the uninitiated at ease-when in fact Lang himself was the drives. Lang folded space; Lang jumped the fortress from realm to realm.

Lang was aware of all the rumors but did little to discourage them. Myths concerning his powers and prowess had been in the making since the first day he had set foot inside the grounded SDF-1. No one had seen him take the Protoculture mindboost that had altered the direction of his life, but they had read the change in his reshaped eyes. And had his eyes not betrayed him, even had he not taken the boost, they would have invented it for the myth, witnessed that he alone among Earthers was destined to see deeper and clearer than the rest, that the Protoculture had a natural affinity for him.

But that was just the sort of thinking that pointed out how great a distance he had yet to travel. The ship's drive, he sniggered to himself. Hardly. The ship's driven, perhaps; the SDF-3's preconscious libidinal urge ...

Lang lifted his eyes to regard the displays once more. On screen were remote views into the heart of the fortress's power plant; safely rendered for a mortal's eyes, for one did not look long into the naked eye of God and live to describe it. But there was a burning bush now, no ten thousand stars or golden heavens, simply the absence of those things. What Lang saw instead was a reflection of his own pride, the hubris that had dominated him for the past five years. He and Cabell and the Zor-clone, Rem, harvesting the Flower of Life from Optera's regrown fields, coaxing the secret of the Shapings from its trifoliate core, creating a matrix of their own design. And now this.

Lang saw his face in the display screen and laughed out loud. The Shapings were teaching him a lesson.

He was still laughing when Rick Hunter rushed in, threading his way through the chaos, techs and their bewildered assistants moving frantically from station to station.

"What'd you get me down here for, Lang?" Rick barked, pacing behind Lang's chair and glaring down at him.

Lang's upturned look was unreadable as he indicated the displays. His humanity as well as his age seemed to have been arrested by continual contact with the Protoculture.

"See for yourself, Admiral."

Rick spread his hands atop the console and leaned toward an on-screen computer-enhanced translation of the engines' subatomic fire. He held the pose for a moment, then glanced at Lang in annoyance. "I don't see anything wrong, Doctor."

Lang snorted. "No, of course you wouldn't, Admiral." Rick was used to the condescending tone.

"Explain." The Roboscientist sighed and blanked the monitor with a tap of a crooked forefinger. "It has vanished, Admiral-the Protoculture. Disappeared. "

Rick's dark brows beetled. He reached out to reactivate the screen, but Lang's powerful hand restrained him.

"Take my word for it, Admiral, the Protoculture has vanished." It would have been senseless to talk about the shadowy presence of the black-robed wraiths Rem had taught him to recognize. "Yes, exactly as it disappeared from the SDF-1," he added, discerning Rick's thoughts.

"But how?" Rick began. "Why?"

"To teach us a lesson, I think."

Rick shook his head. "A lesson?" He swept his arm through an all-encompassing gesture. "Listen to me, Lang. Rheinhardt and the rest of the fleet are out there waiting for us. Do you understand what that means?"

The scientist gave him a pitying look. "I assure you, Admiral, the fleet is not out there."

"Then where the hell are we?" Rick said, at the end of his rope. "And don't tell me nowhere."

Lang folded his arms and met the intensity of Rick's gaze. "All right. It's possible that we're still in hyperspace, although there is no evidence to support the hypothesis. It's also possible that we have died, as some of the ship's personnel are suggesting. Or that we have somehow jumped to a void in intergalactic space, perhaps jumped beyond the expansion wave of the big bang itself."

Rick went wide-eyed. "You mean we've jumped outside the galaxy?"

Lang shrugged. "It's simply one theory among many. A jump beyond time could perhaps explain how and why the Protoculture vanished, although our own continued existence

would seem to contraindicate it."

Rick staggered backward into a chair adjacent to Lang's. "But-but there has to be something out there."

Lang shook his head. "Not according to our instruments. We are nowhere, Admiral. Not even a when that I can determine. I'm sorry, but there's no other way to put it."

Rick turned to face him. "Then get us somewhere, Doctor."

Lang rubbed his chin. "What would you have me do fashion a world for you out of nothingness?"

Rick forced out his breath. "Yes, damn it. Fashion us a world if you have to."

CHAPTER FOUR

"It's absolutely true. Mom really did have a took, a different grimace for every occasion. But I'll tell you something I've never told anyone before: The strangest of all Mom's looks was the one she reserved for any mention of Scott Bernard. Seriously. For the longest time I was convinced that they'd had an affair or something. But then one day Mom told me about the time he stopped by looking for Marlene. There was that look again, the whole time she told the story. And I suddenly realized that I wasn't seeing one of those what-might-have-been looks but one that was saying what-never-should-have-been.

Maria Bartley-Rand, quoted in Xandu Reem's A Stranger at Home: A Biography of Scott Bernard

Scott breathed a sigh of relief as he felt the craft settle down, rubber tires chirping against the tarmac on a smooth but long disused stretch of Southlands highway. Mission priorities and the usual red tape had made it impossible for him to procure an old VTOL, much less an Alpha, so Scott was stuck with a forty-year-old air breather, a civilian five-passenger jet some group in G4 must have liberated from a pre-Wars museum. They'd blown the dust off the thing and fitted it with new rubber, but the cockpit had seen far better days, and the instruments were ancient. Scott's biggest problem was refraining from trying to think the aircraft through mechamorph maneuvers. A lot of good that would have done, anyway; the thing wasn't even equipped with a neural interface thinking cap!

Priorities aside, though, there were good reasons for flying civilian and denying any military affiliation just then. Earth's surface, the Southlands especially, had become a sorry place for soldiers. With the so-called fall of Reflex Point and the Invid abandonment of their hives, Flower of Life orchards, and POW camps, humankind was once more on the move. People were quite literally crawling out of the holes they had buried themselves in when the Invid had landed. Tens of thousands, many of whom had spent the past year or

more in internment centers in what had once been called Canada, were migrating south from the ruined Northlands, lured to Brazilas by rumors of massive reconstruction efforts and the promise of a United Earth Government rising from the ashes of the Southern Cross apparat. At the same time thousands more had taken to the cracked and rutted roadways of the thrice-invaded world in search of lost friends and loved ones, while others busied themselves by exacting vengeance on spies, sympathizers, and any who had profited during the occupation.

Soldiers of any army, private or otherwise, were often at the receiving end of the general wrath and blood lust, espe ially those unfortunates who had fancied themselves insurgents or freedom fighters. It was an accepted fact that insurgency had done more damage than good-Invid reprisals having far outweighed the dubious worth of destroying a handful of Shock Troopers or Pincer ships-and that the Regis had not really been defeated but had willingly abandoned the planet in search of richer hunting grounds. The returning REF consequently was not looked upon as some beneficent force of liberators but as yet another conquering army, a gang of thugs looking to resume control after a fifteen-year absence.

Under the circumstances, Scott's small jet was less a product of choice than of sheer necessity. And the same held true for his civilian attire.

Mention of the Invid sister simulagents had dropped him right back into the lap of the REF's intel people for two more weeks of memory probes and debriefings. Ultimately, however, Scott's inquisitors had come to accept that Marlene's present whereabouts were unknown and that Scott himself stood the best chance of finding her. That he had agreed to do, under the condition that he be given an opportunity to undertake the search alone and in his own fashion.

G2 had acquiesced, figuring that it would prove a simple matter to assign a team of agents to the colonel, but Vince Grant had received word of the operation and vetoed it before a single operative had been assigned. Back on the surface, meanwhile, Scott had been quizzing migrants, bribing local officials, and bartering with foragers for a line on any one of his six former teammates-counting one for Lancer, and Marlene among them. He had concentrated on Rand, who months ago at Yellow Dancer's final concert had said something about heading for the outskirts of Norristown, where he planned to write his memoirs.

A downside week had gone by before Scott locked onto what seemed a worthy lead, and that lead had now brought him and the toy jet to Xochil, a pueblo not far off the route the team had taken through Trenchtown, in the heart of the Southlands.

A tatterdemalion crowd of vacant-eyed townspeople and rough-trade foragers was gathered around the craft by the time Scott raised the canopy and climbed out. He answered a few questions about the state of things on the north coast in exchange for

information on Rand and, for five hundred New Scrip (with a promise of that much again when he returned from town), enlisted the services of a couple of locals sporting turn-of-the-century military-issue projectile rifles to keep an eye on the jet.

Twenty minutes later he was negotiating a narrow alley off Xochil's earthen main street, zeroing in on the throaty revvings of what he took to be a fossil-fueled motorcycle engine.

Rook Bartley was standing alongside the chopped machine, twisting the handlebar throttle with her right hand while her left ponytailed her long strawberry-blond hair. Seeing her, Scott smiled genuinely for the first time in weeks.

She was dressed in mechanic's coveralls, back and rolled up sleeves emblazoned with motorcycle brand-name patches. She was also quite a few pounds heavier than when they had exchanged good-byes, her hands and one cheek smeared with grease and grime. Scott waited for the bike's growling sounds to die down before he called her name.

Someone's metal-rock rendition of "Look Up" was blasting from stereo speakers. The song had become something of an anthem in the Southlands, much as Lynn-Minmei's "We Will Win" had captured the spirit of the First Robotech War.

Rook turned, startled, and regarded him quizzically for a good ten seconds before a smile split her freckled face. "Well, now maybe all this exhaust is getting to me, but I'd swear that's Scott Bernard standing in the doorway."

"Hello, Rook," he told her over the music and the rumbling sound of the idling machine.

She shook her head in disbelief, wiped her hands on a scrap of towel, and sauntered over to embrace him, kissing him lightly on the mouth and then jabbing a fist into his upper arm.

"I thought you were off looking for your friends, soldier boy. Figured you'd be halfway to Tirol by now." Rook's blue eyes gave him a quick once-over. "And look at you-what'd the REF boot you back into real life or something?"

"You look great," he said, beaming.

Rook took a step back and pinched out the coveralls' pants legs as though she were wearing a skirt. "You think so, huh?"

Scott nodded. "Guess you're eating better now."

Rook laughed. "Figures you'd notice, Scott. Fact is, I'm pregnant. "

"Pregnant? Jeez, I thought there was something different, but-"

"Six months," she said. "She's going to be a Virgo if I've computed it right. But then I figure it's about time they changed the signs of the zodiac, don't you?"

"She?" Scott said.

Rook smiled broadly. "Call it woman's intuition. Rand's skeptical, but I've even got her name picked out-Maria. Maria Bartley. What d' you think?"

Scott ran it through and nodded. "I like the sound of it. So this place is yours?" he asked after a pause. In the naked glare of generator fed incandescents sat a score of partly restored bikes. There were perhaps a dozen engines resting on blocks, spoked wheels hanging from the rafters, rusted frames and spare parts piled in corners or littering the top of thick wooden worktables. The air reeked of solvents and exhaust fumes.

"Will be someday," Rook said, looking around. "Right now I'm only helping out." She caressed her stomach. "Gotta keep the family fed."

"Why here, of all places?"

Rook tugged at her lower lip. "Trenchtown, mostly." Scott recalled something about rival motorcycle gangs in Rook's past, the Blue Angels and the Red Snakes. "You've got family there, don't you?"

"Mom and a sister. Guess I'm thinking about mending fences one of these days."

Scott grinned. "What about Rand?"

Rook screwed up her face. "The Great Commentator, you mean?" She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "We found a place a couple clicks west of town. All he does is write morning, noon, and night. Like there's going to be an audience for his book or something."

"Have you read any of it?"

"Yeah, I have," she said, moving back to the cycle she had been working on. "And it's actually not bad. 'Course I have to straighten him out on a lot of the facts. To hear him tell it, you'd think he won the war single-handed." Rook was quiet for a moment. "So what brings you around, Scott? I don't figure you just happened to be in the neighborhood."

"I'm not," Scott confessed. "I'm looking for Marlene, Rook."

Rook appraised him silently. "Talk about mending fences ... That oughta be some reunion, partner. You plan on selling tickets, or what?"

Scott worked his jaw. "Have you heard from her, Rook?" Rook goosed the throttle, and the

bike sent up a cloud of white smoke. "Think you better talk to Rand, soldier boy. I don't want to get in the middle of this one."

Scott recognized examples of Rand's handiwork in the dilapidated wooden cabin he and Rook called home. It was not much to look at on the outside, but the two main rooms were comfortable if Spartan and reflected Rand's utilitarian nature. Scott also recognized the small notebooks stacked atop the writing desk, the ones Rand had guarded with his life during the journey to Reflex Point.

"Here you go," Rand said, handing over a tall mug of home-brewed beer and pulling a stool opposite Scott's chair. "I bottled it when we first moved in."

Rand had already explained how Rook had enticed an REF Alpha pilot to fly them down to Norristown after Scott had taken off for the skies.

"What's weird is that I was just thinking about you," Rand resumed. "I was reading in my notes about the day you and I met. The time I saved your ass from three blues."

Scott almost spewed his beer across the room. "You saved my-" He wiped his mouth on his sleeve, deciding it didn't merit an argument. "Right, I remember now."

"Yeah, those were the days," Rand mused, shaking his shaggy mop of red hair. "Foraging; surviving on the road . . ." He looked up at Scott. "I'm going to call the book Notes on the Run."

"Your baby, is that it?"

Rand's thick eyebrows bobbed. "So Rook told you. She also give you that intuition crap about her being sure it's a girl?"

"Maria, I think she said."

"Yeah, well, don't put scrip on it." Rand sipped his grog. "Either way it goes, though, I'm going to make sure the kid is raised to appreciate books and movies and learning in general." He gestured to the writing desk. "Maybe she'll even end up a writer like her old man."

"You said `she,' Rand," Scott pointed out.

They both laughed, but it was not long before an uncomfortable pause crept into their conversation. When Scott mentioned Marlene, Rand's smile collapsed entirely.

"What do want from her, Scott?" Rand asked.

"I just need to talk to her. That's all I can tell you right now. "

"And I don't suppose you can tell me anything about why most of the Cyclones have stopped working either. Lot of unemployed 'Culture hounds wandering around out there all of a sudden, amigo."

"Sorry, Rand," Scott told him. "We're all in the same dark."

Rand smirked. "Same ol' soldier. What is it-your REF people want to debrief her?"

Scott shot to his feet. "Hey, you think this is easy for me? You think I want it? I look at her and I see the Marlene I loved. I look at her and I think about what the Invid did to us."

Rand rolled his eyes. "Oh, for chrissakes."

"The Regis planned to exterminate us, Rand," Scott snarled. "You don't remember that? The Flowers had hit their goddamned trigger point. If the fleet hadn't returned, we'd all be dead."

Rand stood up. "Yeah, and if the Regis hadn't decided to leave when she did, your precious fleet-" He pointed toward the ceiling. "-your precious fleet would have irradiated the lot of us!"

"You'd rather let the Invid have this planet?"

"I'd rather none of this happened, Scott. But I don't see how dragging Marlene back into it's going to serve any purpose now. She's living a normal life, Scott. Let her be."

"Where is she; Rand?" Scott pressed. "It's possible she knows where my friends are."

Rand regarded him. "The SDF-3? How do you figure?"

Scott forced out his breath. "The ship didn't emerge from hyperspace. Relatively speaking, it vanished at the same moment the Invid left Earth."

"So you figure what?"

"That they may have ended up in the same place." Scott held Rand's gaze. "It's possible Marlene is still in rapport with the Regis. That's why I need to talk to her, Rand."

The smaller man shook his head. "You're putting me between the proverbial rock and the hard place, mano."

"Just tell me where she is, Rand."

Rand took a long pull from his mug. "She's with Lunk and Annie. They're in Roca Negra."

Scott tried to place it.

"Remember the book Lunk tried to deliver to Alfred Nader?"

"Of course," Scott said in sudden realization. "That's where you'll find them."

"Thanks, Rand. "

Reluctantly, Rand accepted the proffered hand. "One thing, Scott," he said when they were seated again. "Lunk's not going to be as easy on you as I was."

CHAPTER FIVE

TO: NILES OBSTAT EYES ONLY

FROM: SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY DIRECTORATE RE: PROJECT STARCHILD

DNA      ANALYSIS      OF      BLOOD      AND      TISSUE      SAMPLES      TAKEN      FROM      INVID

SIMULAGENT (A.K.A "MARLENE," "ARIEL") PROVE UNEQUIVOCAL MATCH TO

ON-FILE DNA PROFILES OF MARS DIVISION E.R. TECH MARLENE RUSH (SEE

APPENDED NOTES). SUGGEST THAT REGIS EXTRACTED RUSH TISSUE FROM

WRECKAGE OF MARS GROUP AND USED FIND AS TEMPLATE FOR HER

HUMANOID CREATIONS. IT IS YET TO BE LEARNED WHETHER USE OF RUSH

TEMPLATE WAS DELIBERATE OR COINCIDENTAL. QUERY: IS COLONEL BERNARD

TO BE INFORMED? SUGGESTION: WITHHOLD ALL KNOWLEDGE OF CLONING

UNTIL FULL DISCLOSURE IS WARRANTED OR DEEMED ADVISABLE.

G2 dispatch, quoted in, Sara Lemole's Improper Council: An Analysis of the Plenipotentiary Council

"She's got the right dynamic for the New Frontier." Twentieth-century song lyric

Under Reflex power, the Ark Angel left geosynch and inserted itself into orbit where the Robotech factory satellite had once played the role of Earth's inner moon. The departure point for the trial jump to Luna's far side was the very same spatial coordinates the SDF-3 had used in its fold to Fantomaspace.

Vince had been elsewhere when the SDF-1 had jumped from Macross, but he was well acquainted with the accounts of that fateful day logged by Henry Gloval, Emil Lang, and countless others. The far side had been targeted for the position jump, but the fortress had missed the mark by what amounted to the radius of the solar system. Gloval had given the

command, but Lang had borne the burden of the blame. Inexperience, pilot error ... An official inquiry was never performed. Years later, though, while Breetai's ship was undergoing its face-lift in the factory satellite's null-g core, the then-micronized Zentraedi commander had shown Lang where he had gone wrong. Yet in spite of that, the feeling remained that Lang was innocent of any technical oversight or wrongdoing. Human control was considered a moot point where Protoculture was involved.

So, cinched into the Ark Angel's command chair-a well added motorized affair similar to the one he had had designed for the GMU a lifetime ago-Vince Grant had to ask himself just what Protoculture might have in mind for the day's fold.

Seated at duty stations to the left and right of him, techs and bridge officers were running through a final series of system checks as the ship counted down from double digits. Jean, steadfast in her refusal to remain planetside for the test, was with her med group elsewhere in the ship. Vince was on file as insisting on a skeleton crew for the test, but he was secretly thankful that the Plenipotentiary Council members had overruled him. When it came right down to it, no one wanted to be left behind.

Even if the Protoculture had a surprise destination already picked out.

In truth, the Ark Angel's drives were Sekiton-fueled-a peat derived from Karbarra's abundant Ur-Flower crop. Vince supposed the distinction was a minor one, but that belief was not shared by the half dozen Karbarrans who headed up the ship's engineering section. Protoculture, the ursinoids were fond of pointing out, could be handled by almost anyone, but Sekiton responded to Karbarrans only, a condition Haydon the Enigmatic had been responsible for, or so Vince had been given to understand.

"Ten seconds and counting, General Grant," a young female tech reported.

Vince's hand elongated the noble features of his broad brown face. He considered the recent transmission the ship had received from Cabell.

"Seven ... six . . ."

Exedore, still on Haydon IV, was of the opinion that the Awareness held some key to the SDF-3's disappearance. "Five ... four . . ."

Dr. Penn, Jean, and several others were of the same mind. "Three ... two . . . "

Now if the Ark Angel could only get there. "One. Fold generators engaged."

Vince sent a silent prayer to the ship's drives and their Karbarran overseers.

A lunar crescent suddenly filled the forward viewport. The bridge crew applauded wildly.

Exuberant cheers filtered in from distant quarters of the ship.

"Yirrbisst has blessed on us this day, Commander, " one of the ursinoids gutturally announced over the com-line, invoking the name of his homeworld's primary. "Praise Haydon."

Vince thanked everyone for a job well done. Two or three Council members had suggested a second trial jump, to Mars perhaps, if the first succeeded, but Vince had renewed confidence in the ship and saw no need for further tests.

Earth ascended into view as the Ark Angel's attitude thrusters repositioned the ship for the return jump.

Vince turned to his communications officer. "Inform Cabell that we'll soon be folding for Haydon IV."

Lunk was standing in the center of a small patch of cleared ground a kilometer east of Roca Negra proper, attacking a stump of hardwood with a heavy ax. He was shirtless in the morning heat, long black hair tied back, brutish features determined, barrel-chested torso glistening with sweat. He checked his swing momentarily to monitor Scott's approach-ax handle resting on his shoulder and a hand to his brow-then resumed his work, putting increased effort into each blow.

"Good to see you, Lunk," Scott said, keeping what he determined to be a safe distance.

The former Southern Cross soldier stopped only to mop his face with a Paisley bandanna. "I guessed it was you when I saw the jet come down," Lunk grunted after the blade bit wood. "The way I read it, you must be on leave or undercover. You land on the old highway?"

"Just."

Lunk took another swing. "A Lear, isn't it?"

Scott's boot tip drew a shallow trench in the tilled ground. "I suppose so. Pre-Wars. But I almost lost it this time."

"Yeah, well you'll be lucky if the thing's still there when you get back."

"It's being looked after, Lunk," Scott assured him.

The big man went back to chopping. "So how'd you find us, Lieutenant?"

Scott squatted, waving insects away from his face. "I found Rand. But I think I'm supposed to mention that he wasn't exactly eager to tell me."

"Sure," Lunk said.

"So you're homesteading, huh?"

Lunk turned to face him. "The townspeople gave us a place to live and a bit of land to work. The Invid came down hard on everyone after we passed through last year, but the town's rebuilding. They're good folk, Lieutenant. What's past is past. We're all making new lives for ourselves."

Scott caught the warning in Lunk's baritone voice and decided not to mention the promotion. "I can see that," he said, glancing about. Well-tended fields of grain stretched emerald to distant hills. On nearby terraces, men and women were harvesting and threshing golden stalks of rice. "Annie around?" he asked after a moment.

Lunk threw the ax into the wood and gave a twist to the blade. "She left right after we got here. The idea of settling down didn't suit her too well. Went off to find that guy Magruder. The kid's still got stars in her eyes."

Scott smiled to himself, picturing Annie in her "E.T." cap and faded green jumpsuit.

"What d' ya say we skip the small talk and come to the point, Lieutenant," Lunk said suddenly.

Scott contemplated the line his boot had drawn, then raised his eyes. "All right, Lunk. The fact is, I'm looking for Marlene."

Lunk spit. "I thought so. What happened, Lieutenant got lonely for you up there?" He motioned with his chin to the cloudless sky. "Figured maybe you'd passed on a good thing down here, a girl that was only trying to love you the best she knew how?"

That from the guy who had called Marlene a traitor that day in Reflex Point, Scott thought, getting to his feet. "It's nothing like that, Lunk."

"Think you can just fly in here with your little jet and pick up where you left off, huh?" Lunk held the ax like a hatchet and shook it in Scott's face. "Lemme tell you, you're way off the mark, Lieutenant. Marlene's had a rough time of it, but I've been helping her. She's kinda come to rely on me, and I think your showing up is just gonna gum up the works, understand me?"

"Look, Lunk, I just want to talk to her."

"I'm tellin' ya how it is, Lieutenant."

Scott left a brief empty space in the exchange, waiting for Lunk to cool down. "Back at Command everyone's still scratching their heads about what happened at Reflex Point," he commenced on a casual note. "There's a possibility the SDF-3 got itself caught up in the Regis's exit." He looked at Lunk. "I think Marlene can help out."

Lunk glared at him, then threw the ax down into the stump and left it there. "Come on," he said, storming off across the field in the direction of Roca Negra.

Scott fell in behind him for a silent walk that delivered them fifteen minutes later to two spacious freestanding tents erected side by side on a small parcel of land dotted with olive trees. Lunk's battered APC was parked off to one side.

"Marlene," Lunk bellowed, rustling the mosquito-netting front flap of the larger tent.

"Lunk?" Marlene responded from somewhere inside. "You're back early."

Scott's heart broke at the sound of her voice; save for a hint of Southlands Forager accent, it might as well have been that of Marlene Rush.

As the Invid simulagent stepped into the sunlight, luxurious red hair shorn to her shoulders and skin as pale as a Tiresian's, Scott thought: She is Marlene!

The Regis's daughter took a moment to absorb the scene before she collapsed into Scott's slapdash embrace, sighing. "I knew you'd return for me, Scott, I knew you'd return."

Lunk quickly turned his back to the two of them, afraid they would see his tears.

Scott immediately realized that Marlene had undergone a profound change since they had last embraced. Marlene then had been alive and vital to his confused thoughts and anxious hands, a woman of human lusts and needs, nothing like the insubstantial being he cradled in his arms now. It was something he could not articulate, but it was obvious to all who dared to look deep enough into her eyes.

Scott led her into the shade, to a canvas-backed chair at the head of a split-log longtable. Lunk positioned himself behind the chair, his large callused hands resting on Marlene's frail shoulders. "I told ya she was having a rough time of it, Lieutenant. Ya never shoulda come back."

Marlene patted Lunk's hand and gazed up at him fondly. "I'm all right, Lunk. Really."

Scott felt her eyes return to him and swallowed hard as he perched himself on the edge of the table: "Marlene," he began, "how much do you remember about those last few days at Reflex Point?"

"Only some of it, Scott. I remember when we were all inside the central chamber together. With Sera and Corg and the Queen-Mother."

"What made the horde-er, the Queen-Mother leave, Marlene? I mean, I'm sure she realized the fleet had plans to irradiate the area, but it seemed like she'd decided to leave before the neutron missiles were launched."

Marlene nodded and reached across the table for a water bottle. "It's true, Scott. And something vital left me when she departed." She took a long pull from the bottle. "I know you sensed it when you held me. I feel as though I'm only half-here, as though if I breathe too deeply I'll fade from sight. But I have a knowledge of things, Scott, a knowledge: that seems undreamed of by any race."

"Don't worry," Lunk said, "I'm not about to let you fade. Marlene squeezed his hand. "You see, Scott, the Queen Mother finally understood, the reasons for all that had happened on Optera, Tirol, and Earth, and that knowledge liberated her."

"But what was it she understood?" Scott asked.

Marlene quivered. "I can't tell you, Scott."

"Please, Marlene," Scott snapped.

Lunk stepped out from behind the chair. "I'm warning you, Lieutenant."

Marlene put a hand on his balled-up fist. "No, Lunk, Scott doesn't understand. It's not that I'm keeping something from you, Scott. I only mean that you're asking the wrong person."

"Sera," Scott said after a moment's reflection.

"Yes. She was more closely bound to the Regis than I was. But I fear that bond has affected her more than it has me."

"Do you know where she is?"

Marlene closed her eyes and took a shuddering breath. "I can sense where she is. Sometimes I can almost see through her eyes and feel her suffering."

Scott edged closer to her. "Where, Marlene?"

"The city of tall towers in the Northlands. The one Sera and Corg were to rule."

Scott and Lunk exchanged looks and simultaneously said: "Mannatan."

"Yes. She is with Lancer."

Scott was already on his feet. "Will you come with me, Marlene? You, too, Lunk," he was quick to add. "Just until we locate her."

"Forget it, Lieutenant," Lunk said. "Marlene's not going anywhere. "

Marlene stood up and gently swung Lunk around to face her. "But I am, Lunk. Don't you see that I have to go?" Lunk's face fell. "No, Marlene, no. You can just stay here and let me take care of you. You said yourself you were all right. I could just-"

"No, Lunk, it's no good this way," she cut him off. "Remember who and what I am."

Lunk stiffened. "You're Marlene, that's it."

Marlene shook her head. "I am Invid, Lunk." She reached up to stroke his face. "But that doesn't mean I haven't loved you."

Lunk steeled himself, holding back his anger and grief. "You'll come back to me?" he asked softly.

"Nothing can take away these past few months, Lunk."

It was Scott's turn to avert his gaze.

He swore to himself he would never love again.

With Marlene in the copilot's seat, Scott returned the jet to the REF's provisional planetside base on the Venezuelan coast and apprised Vince Grant of his plans to continue on to the Northlands. The general informed him of the successful position jump undertaken by the Ark Angel and the rapidly approaching launch window for the fold to Haydon IV. To speed Scott and Marlene on their way, Grant ordered that they be escorted to and from the Northlands city in one of the ship's few remaining reconfigurable Veritechs.

From what Scott could gather, Mannatan-recently returned to its original name of New York-was fast becoming a population center once again. The narrow island city had miraculously escaped saturation by Dolza's deathbolts, only to suffer disastrously some twenty years later at the hands of the Regis's power-mad "son," Corg. But by then the city

had already fallen into the hands of street crazies `who had' somehow survived a radiation pall that had hung over the city for more than fifteen years' and roving gangs of Foragers and rough-trade Southern Cross deserters. A scarcity of food and arable land had kept the population numbers low, but now that New York had become a kind of raw-materials depot for developing towns to the south and west, a barter system for foodstuffs had been implemented.

The Veritech put down west of the Hudson River, leaving Scott and Marlene to negotiate the rest of the journey on foot, along with hundreds of other migrants who were talking or buying passage through checkpoints on the single bridge that linked city and mainland. Scott saw the end result of Corg's fiery campaign to bring the city to its knees: huge leveled tracts where tall brick and stone buildings had once stood, gridded by the scorched remains of asphalt and concrete roadways.

Marlene acted as guide, drawing on her recently enhanced psychic talents-to close on her sister simulagent's where bouts. In a certain sense she seemed more the Terran than Scott. But Scott refused to be fooled by the human guise the Invid Queen-Mother had fashioned for her, and so their conversations were strictly of the pragmatic sort. Scott, after all, was on a military mission.

Marlene led them ultimately to a refurbished theater in the city's midtown district, where a young Hispanic named Jorge greeted them at the door and affirmed that Lancer was in fact part of a troupe of actors, singers, and musicians.

After the less than warm reunions with Rand and Lunk, Scott was expecting more of the same from Lancer, but-the former stage gender-bender surprised him by running up the broad aisle after Jorge's announcement and embracing the two of them like family.

"Scott, I can't believe it!" Lancer said, gripping him by the arms. "God, it's great to see you again." He had equal enthusiasm for Marlene, along with a bear hug that went on for well over a minute.

Lancer looked lean and limber in tight-fitting trousers and a sleeveless shirt, but Scott noted dark circles under the singer's dyes and a somberness beneath the cheeriness of the moment. The natural color of Lancer's hair was growing in. Scott thought briefly of Yellow Dancer and wondered whether she was gone for good.

"You don't know how I need you guys right now," Lancer continued, taking hold of their hands.

"What is it, Lancer?" Marlene asked.

"Your sister," he said, favoring Marlene's hand. "I'm afraid she's dying."

Sera was bedridden in Lancer's backstage room, a tight, cluttered space that apparently served as living quarters and dressing room. A man named Simon was ministering to her, but he exited as Lancer entered, stopping only to introduce himself to Scott and Marlene in an affected, slightly effeminate manner.

Fetally curled beneath the bed's threadbare blankets, Sera seemed hardly more than a specter. "I've been waiting for you to come, Ariel," she said as Marlene kneeled beside the bed and laid a comforting hand on her heaving breast. "Sister-"

Sera pressed a finger against Marlene's lips to quiet her. "Do not weep for me, Ariel. I am to rejoin the Queen Mother. "

"Then I'll return with you, sister."

Sera shook her head. "No, Ariel, your destiny lies along a different path. And what a wonderful one it is."

Marlene leaned closer to her sister, her eyes brimming with tears. "Tell me, Sera."

"You need know only this, Ariel: that the world can be remade. The Queen-Mother learned this when she mated with the Protoculture-the goal of the Great Work, the transmutation of our race."

"The Protoculture!"

"Yes, Scott," Sera said, looking at him. "Your people will understand what to make of this."

"Stay, sister," Marlene pleaded with her. "Love has the power to keep you here."

Sera smiled. "No, Ariel. Love has the power to release me..."

With that, the Invid simulagent shut her eyes and surrendered her all too brief life.

Scott watched horrified but transfixed as Sera grew subtle and translucent, then slowly faded from sight. An eerie breeze caressed his cheek as the blankets dropped empty and silent to the foam mattress.

Lancer clutched desperately for what was no longer there. "This is my fate also," Marlene said, turning to Scott with tears coursing down her cheeks. "You were right to promise you would never love again!"

CHAPTER SIX

Of course I understand how you feel, you big jerk. You think I want to break up the team? But look at things from my side, will you, Bowie? First, I've got Max and Miriya riding my tail about shipping back on the fortress, and now I find out that Rem's going along for the ride. I can't handle it just yet, that's the long and short. I look at him, and I see Zor Prime. Ask yourself what it would have been like if Musica had died instead of Octavia-god forbid. I mean, how could you look at her without thinking about Musica? So maybe Haydon IV's going to work out for me. Maybe I'll even get to know Aurora a little bettor. Anyway, from what I hear, at least it'll be a change for the quiet.

Dana Sterling in a letter to Bowie Grant, quoted in Altaira Heimel, Butterflies in Winter. Human Relations and the Robotech Wars

Dana Sterling tightened her grip on the balcony railing and launched phrases of gratitude into Haydon IV's amber skies. In the plaza twenty, stories below her, pedestrians were scurrying for cover as Glike rumbled and shook. Like bare trees caught in the hurricaning mass of a storm front, the city's tapering glasslike spires swayed and snapped, falling in a prismatic rain of deadly gems. Skyways danced loose their walls and roofs of transparent sheathing and sent them crashing to heaving, buckling streets and garden-lined thoroughfares. Onion domes and entablatures fissured; ornate facades and friezes peeled away from buildings and archways; water surged from canals and drained from lakes into the planetoid's ruptured seams.

"'Bout time there was action around the place!" Dana yelled to no one in particular.

She leapt back from the railing to flatten herself against the building's exterior wall as a plummeting guillotine blade of permaplas struck the balcony edge and splintered into hundreds of angry fragments. At the same time the entire city seemed to tilt radically to one side, the normally clear skies tainted with smoglike roilings of clouds. Where she could see the horizon, Glike's backdrop of photo-perfect mountains wavered, as though dazzled by atmospheric heat.

We're finally seeing Haydon IV's other face, Dana thought. She had heard all about the battle that had been fought there years before between the Sentinels and the Invid Regent, but that might as well have been a campfire tale. Glike had been fully rebuilt by the time she had arrived, and it had been nothing less than paradise since.

Hopelessly boring.

But something had finally happened to shake things up. It did not seem possible that Haydon IV could be subject to tectonic shifts, but who could tell? Well, Exedore maybe, or his free-floating good buddy Veidt. Some internal malfunction, then, some glitch in the unfathomable technology that kept the world turning. An actual invasion was too much to hope for-a chance to see for herself those well-concealed planetary defenses everyone talked about. The ones said to react to the mere suggestion of aggression, the ones that

forced everyone on-world to hang up their hip howitzers when they rode into town.

But even if it turned out to be nothing more than a quake, it was certainly more excitement than she had seen since Exedore had burst into the Sterling's high-rise quarters three months ago, raving that the planetoid's so-called Awareness had gotten itself all fired up about something or other.

The collapse of a structure down below sent a swirling cloud of debris up the face of the building. Dana heard panicked cries in several offworld tongues.

"Dana!" her parents shouted from inside their living quarters.

She turned and passed through the balcony's field portal in a long-legged rush, blond hair in wild disarray. Her father was by the lift-tube door, a few obviously irreplaceable items clutched to his chest. Her mother had Aurora, Dana's eight-year-old sister, by the wrist. Dark-eyed and otherworldly, she was nearly five feet tall already and a regular pain in the ass. It was hard for Dana to believe they had had the same father, but that was a thought she kept to herself. Veidt claimed that Aurora's rapid development and psychic gifts had come about as the result of Miriya's experiences on Garuda, but Dana ventured that it had more to do with something the Haydonites were putting in the food.

Aurora was not calling Dana's name. The child spoke so infrequently that when she did, everyone stopped to listen. But even though she was mouse-quiet, one always knew when she was around.

"Hurry, Dana!" Miriya said, joining her husband at the lift. She, too, had a few things in hand. Dana glanced around the room and quickly decided that there was nothing she needed to keep.

Let it all come down, she thought.

Llan and Anad, their two Haydonite advocates, were already in the tube. It was the only place planetside where everyone got to hover together, except on the city's Arabianlike flying carpets. Dana often wondered just whose bright idea those things had been. Some planet-hopping culture hero named Haydon was credited with building the world; Dana had him figured for some kind of kidder.

The tube field was as calm as the eye of a storm.

"What do you think, Max," she said excitedly, "an attack?" She rarely called him "Dad." Somehow it didn't feel right to her after their thirteen-year separation. Not that she didn't love him and Miriya both; it was simply that they had changed so much.

"I hope not, Dana," Max told her, adjusting his glasses so that they sat where they were

supposed to. "For the sake of whoever'd be foolish enough to try."

So gentle-voiced, Dana thought. It was a continual source of amazement, especially when she tried to picture her parents mixing it up inside the SDF-1 with knives or battle mecha. And Max-cripes! Max had been gobbling Malcontents for breakfast when Dana was a toddler!

"Upon exiting the lift tube, you must proceed across the plaza and descend the elevators to level four," Llan sent, as if he were giving orders all of a sudden. But only Dana seemed disturbed by the tone.

"Level four, my ass, Llan. I think we better shuttle up to one of the trade ships. I'd rather ride this out up there hatever this is. Wouldn't you, Max? Miriya?" Dana noticed that Aurora was giving her one of those funny looks.

"No, Dana," Miriya answered. "I think it's best that we follow Llan's advice for the time being."

"Your mother is correct," Llan sent with emphasis. Dana folded her arms across the sequined bib of her jumpsuit and faced off with the taller of the two Haydonites. "Yeah? Then tell us what's going on."

"A slight readjustment," Anad answered. "Slight?"

"We are arrived," Llan interrupted as the tube field opened onto the plaza.

Things were even worse close up, Dana realized. On the far side of the plaza, the entire colonnade of a Tiresian-style commercial hall had crumbled, burying dozens of Karbarran traders and visitors under tons of debris. The ursinoid beings, who had been enjoying great prosperity among the Local Group worlds since the fall of the Regent, constituted the majority of Haydon IV's alien population, but Dana could see quite a few injured Praxians emerging from the ruined building. Elsewhere, a couple of dazed Spherisians were wandering aimlessly through the pandemonium. The Haydonites themselves, however, were unhurt; it was as though they had known beforehand which areas to avoid.

"Move quickly and orderly if you wish to avoid injury," Llan sent to the Sterlings, attempting to hurry them along by hovering at their backs a yard off the plaza's adamantine smooth surface.

"They need help," Dana said, indicating a small group of Karbarrans who, heedless of the dangers overhead, were attempting to dig out their trapped companions.

"Move!" Anad sent sharply in response.

Max could not fail to notice the change in Anad and Llan and was about to protest, when a series of blindingly blue energy bolts tore up into the sky from the outlying sectors of the city. From somewhere deep outside Glike's obscuring haze came scattered reports of explosive light that reached the surface like heated thunder.

"It is an invasion!" Dana exclaimed.

But even as she said it, she noted something inexplicable going on around her: Individual Haydonites had begun to employ some sort of energy weapon to herd the plaza's off worlders toward the subwaylike entrances to the city's subsurface maze of transport corridors and multilevel shelters. On closer inspection, Dana saw that the light-prods were emanating from the Haydonites' foreheads, from the cabochonlike organs centered there, which Veidt had once called dzentile. The English term that came closest was governor, but Dana suddenly understood that those regulators could be made to serve a double-edged function.

She took a quick head count, calculating just how many Haydonites she would have to take down to clear a path out of the plaza. Beginning with Llan, who was still hovering at her back, although he had yet to demonstrate any light-prod capability. Answering to Anad's telepathic insistence, Max, Miriya, and Aurora were already halfway across the square.

"Move!" Llan sent with sufficient force to make Dana's eyes cross.

Oh, you're gonna get yours, she promised herself, mentally forging her spin kick. But no sooner had she commenced her turn than Max grabbed her around the shoulders and swung her off her feet. "Dana, we don't have a chance," he told her.

Dana watched a nascent glow center itself above Llan's expressionless visage. "Well, we certainly don't now," she said, shrugging out of Max's restraining hold.

Llan and Anad were more vigilant after that, making certain to keep the entire family between them for the rest of the dash across the plaza, relaxing their guard only after the Sterlings were well inside the accessway, dwarfed by several dozen Karbarrans who had been funneled in from the collapsed commercial center.

"That was a foolish thing to do," Max said in a lecturing tone, loud enough to be heard above the ursinoids' unnerving growls and grumblings.

"Maybe it was," Dana conceded, "but I don't like it when somebody says they're concerned for my safety and then aims a weapon at me."

The incident only pointed up the differences between them. Dana had had reservations about returning to Haydon IV with her parents as early as those first few weeks in Tiresia,

but it had meant so much to them that she get to know Aurora and give peace a chance. And then, when she had learned that Rem had assigned himself to the SDF-3, she saw no alternative but to give Haydon IV a try. Oh, she supposed she could have signed aboard the Ark Angel or any one of the ships of the fleet, but she saw little purpose to it.

It had come as quite a shock to find yet another Zor-clone waiting on Tirol after she had just finished her brief go-round with one on Earth. Rem and Zor Prime were more like twins separated at birth than clones, but there were enough underlying similarities to make her feel as though she were dealing with the same person. She thought the original Zor must have been one mixed-up character, another trickster in a galaxy full of them.

She still couldn't explain just what it was about the slender, elfin-featured clones that drew her to them. But it seemed obvious that the attraction arose from the Zentraedi, biogenetically engineered side of her personality.

Those thoughts were with her for the duration of the short descent to Llan's "level four," where, she imagined, luxuriously appointed shelters awaited them. She had even begun to feel guilty about her perhaps misguided outburst in the plaza and was about to apologize to Max, when from up ahead in the corridor-the recycled air thick with the musky smell of Karbarran fur and fear-came cries of protest in trader's tongue.

"You limbless mechanoids!" one Karbarran yelled. "May Haydon curse the lot of you!"

Dana went up on tiptoe in an attempt to discern what all the commotion was about, but all she could see was the backs of massive shoulders and knob-horned heads. It was not until the group reached the terminus of the corridor, where it opened into a vast, domed chamber lit by an unseen source, that she glimpsed the reason for the Karbarrans' distress: A police force of black-cloaked Haydonites a meter taller than the norm were using their enabled light-prods to segregate the confused crowd into planetary types, shepherding each into separate rooms similar to ones Dana knew had been used by the Invid Regis to contain the Sisters of the Praxian diaspora.

"Comport yourselves in a manner befitting the intelligence of your race and no harm will come to you," the police line sent to everyone in frightening telepathic discord. "Your nutritional and medical needs will be attended to. Haydon IV will strive to make you as comfortable as possible in your containment."

"Imprisonment, I'd say," said an all-too-familiar voice off to the left of the Sterling family. Dana caught sight of Exedore peeking out from behind the high-collared cloak of one of the hovering jailers.

"Yes," he added, folding his arms and glancing around. "I suggest that we consider ourselves under arrest."

As expected, their individual cells were splendidly designed affairs with all the necessary conveniences and furnishings, all the more sinister in their homeyness. Exedore and the Sterlings found themselves lodged with the four Praxians whose very size dictated that they be given the largest of the four rooms. Their section of the jail was flanked by Karbarran and Spherisian quarters but was effectively sealed off from them, with access to the central portion of the domed chamber barred by laser fence. Thoughts of escape were not only difficult to entertain but periodically discouraged by squads of the now obsequious jailers who glided through sweeps of the area.

Dana, however, had not yet given up on the idea and sat timing the patrols while Exedore filled everyone in on the details of his own arrest.

"One moment Veidt and I were interpreting the results of our latest calculations, and the next I was being hurried out of the data room by two of these black-cloaked fellows, with Veidt warning me to obey their every command."

"Our advocates acted the same way," Max said. "Turned on us without warning."

"Oh, I don't think it safe to assume they were acting at all," Exedore cautioned. "It's my belief that the Awareness sent a command to each and every Haydonite-a telepathic stirring, if you will, analogous to that which prompted the planet to reorient itself in space."

"Then we are . . . moving?" Miriya asked.

Exedore nodded. "Most definitely moving."

"But we saw a salvo of energy bolts, Exedore," Dana interjected. "The planet's probably moving because it's under attack."

Exedore shook his head. "There's been no attack, although what you witnessed was certainly defensive fire. It seems that the commander of one of the Karbarran cargo ships armed his weapons array when planetary realignment commenced. The Awareness registered this and responded as programmed. I'm afraid several ships were destroyed in the process. This much I was able to learn from Veidt."

"Then our lives are in danger," Miriya said, hugging Aurora to her.

"No, child. Haydon IV is not only abandoning its orbit around this system's primary but shedding its atmosphere as it accelerates. That's precisely why we've all been brought down here.

"For all this sudden militant posturing, they do seem to have our safety in mind. Haydon knows they require no true atmosphere for themselves, nor any need of Glike, for that

matter." The Zentraedi snorted. "A surface paradise, indeed, for that's all that it was-a veneer, to borrow a Terran word.

"It only confirms what I've been saying all along: that Haydon IV is not a planet transformed by ultratech wonders but a ship. Its very name suggests as much. Haydon IV, and yet it occupies the third place in the Briz'dziki system. " Exedore adopted a puzzled frown. "No. It has come to be known as Haydon IV because it was Haydon's fourth."

"Haydon's- fourth what?" Max wanted to know.

Exedore threw up his hands. "Any answer I give you would be pure speculation. Much as my guess as to exactly where it is that we're headed."

"We'll know when we get there, is that it?" Dana said. "Well put."

Max looked from Exedore to Dana and back again. "But what about these calculations of yours? You still think this has something to do with the SDF-3?"

"I'm certain of it," Exedore affirmed. "And with the Invid departure as well. A pulse of novel energy has been sent into the known universe. Our calculations prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that the focus of this outpouring is the dead star we Zentraedi know as Ranaath's."

Miriya sucked in her breath. "Exedore!"

"Yes, Miriya, I'm afraid so. But there's more: This pulse has also caused subtle but potentially dangerous quantum and gravitational shifts throughout the continuum. All standard measurements seem to have been infinitesimally affected." "Meaning what?" Max said.

"Meaning that something unprecedented has occurred, Max. It's as though everything is suddenly drawing closer and closer together."

CHAPTER SEVEN

Eventually, Rem saw the logic of the REF's arguments [that a Protoculture matrix was essential to ensure certain victory against the Invid Regis]-or at least he gave Lang every impression of being convinced. Just as Zor had once given sway to the Robotech Masters' conviction that knowledge went hand in hand with power and that all real power sprang from the conquest of life itself . . . This tendency to submit, this plasticity, was a character flaw inherited by both clones-Rem and Zor Prime and taken advantage of by yet new generations of masters. "Zor, the reshaped," as Lang himself once thought to describe Rem in his notes. Who else could have enticed Protoculture from the secret places of the Flower but one of equal lability?

Adrian Mizner, Rakes and Rogues: The True Story of the SDF-3 Mission

Even with the knowledge they had been able to amass during the voyages of the SDFs-1 and -3 and with what little they had been able to beg, borrow, and steal from the Sentinels, the fortress's chief astrogators still considered themselves among the Quadrant's least experienced travelers. So while the void they had been folded into presented a novel challenge, there was no sure way of ascertaining whether this "newspace"-as it had been termed-was not just some commonplace occurrence among the more well traveled. To this end, interviews with those Sentinels aboard-Kami, Learna, Lron, Crysta, Baldan, Gnea, and others-had thus far proved unenlightening, a not entirely unexpected development given that the original crew of the starship Farrago had never been top-notch spacefarers to begin with.

Lang nevertheless had gone about his investigation of the ship's environment with unflagging confidence and textbook determination. The results of Jack Baker's brief extravehicular recon were in. Exterior background temperatures and the velocity of light had been measured and found to be constant; the fortress chronometers were still functioning. Physical laws inside the ship-and within a radius of a half million kilometers from it-were in fact operating much as they should have. It was simply that the stars-indeed, space itself-had disappeared.

The SDF-3's reflex engines were functioning, but there was still nowhere for the fortress to go.

"I'm inclined to favor the hyperspace hypothesis," Lang was saying, eyes glued to an immense tabletop display screen in his office. Rem stood behind him, just off to one side, the handsome features of his pale face highlighted by the screen's intermittent flashings. "We've somehow become trapped in the fold corridor itself."

Rem grunted noncommittally. "You're dismissing the popular notion, then-the one circulating through the ship?"

"What, that we're all actually dead? I certainly am." No one knew just how the rumor got started, but it seemed that the results of a survey taken of some two hundred crew persons had revealed remarkable similarities in their fold, space lace experiences. These included feelings of tranquillity, out-of-body experience, the encountering of a presence or a deceased relative in a dark tunnel, a sudden urge to review one's life, a warm and accepting light at the end of the tunnel, and a brief merging with that light prior to an immediate return to physicality.

"If we were all dead," Lang continued, "we probably wouldn't have returned at all."

"And how to prove it in any case?" Rem said, smiling. "Against what can we measure nonexistence?"

Lang turned to regard the Tiresian, pleased that he had finally succeeded in spiriting him away from Minmei, if only for a short while. One would have thought the strangeness of the ship's predicament alone would have been enough to pique Rem's interest, but the Zor-clone had agreed to a conference only after Lang had made mention of the vanished Protoculture.

Lang had reminded himself later that he should have known better; Protoculture was the only thing that ever brought Rem around. But Rem did not share Lang's enthusiasm for Protoculture's application to mechamorphosis or astrogation. In fact, the REF had had to coerce him into lending his brilliant talents to the creation of the facsimile matrix by painting lurid scenarios of what was bound to occur throughout the Quadrant should the Invid Regis have her way with Earth. How long, they asked him to consider, before the Queen-Mother would decide to spread her vengeful horde across the stars as her husband had done? How long before her armies would return to the Local Group for what they had been forced to surrender-Optera itself? And what of the Praxians, then, who had made that tortured world their own? And what of Tirol and Spheris and the rest, so recently liberated from the claw hold of that very race?

Rem could be infuriating at times, but how Lang enjoyed the few discourses they had shared! How thrilling it was to converse with an intellect as powerful as his own. What they might be able to achieve together, he often thought, were it not for Rem's preoccupation with the biotransmutational aspects of Protoculture or his inexplicable attachment to Lynn Minmei.

Lang swung back to the tablescreen. "Oh, I'll admit there's something to this afterlife speculation that's worth pursuing," he said abruptly, "but for the present there are more tangible enigmas to grapple with." He motioned to the displays. "These are the latest readouts."

Rem leaned over the table.

"Either this void has yet to decide which set of physical laws it plans to subscribe to, or our scanners are in over their, artificial heads." The Terran scientist's voice was a mixture of apprehension and excitement. "I haven't seen anything like it since my supercollider days thirty years ago. But at least I knew then that our accelerators were manufacturing all those weakly interacting massive particles. Here, there's no rhyme or reason to it. One could almost believe we've entered a kind of dark-matter universe."

"I doubt we could exist in such a place, Lang."

"Precisely my point. The findings are more consistent with fold anomalies than anything else."

Rem nodded. "Then the real question we should be asking ourselves is whether the ship is still on its way to somewhere or whether it has in fact arrived."

Lang threw him a skeptical look. "I don't see how we can possibly be on our way to something without the fold drives." Rem made a dismissive motion with his hand. "The Protoculture is only essential for initiating a fold, Lang; it has little to do with destination."

"But how are we to emerge, then?"

Rem's gaze grew unfocused. "You fail to see the potential, Doctor."

"Perhaps I do, Rem, but-"

"When all you need do is think back to your experiences inside the ship you called SDF-1-when it crash-landed on Earth."

Lang's face went blank.

"Your own notes state that you were at a loss to explain the time displacement you and your team experienced inside the ship."

"Yes..."

"And so you postulated that some 'quantum'-your word, Doctor-some quantum of hyperspace had adhered to the ship."

"And the team was actually walking through a kind of hyperspace dimension," Lang finished in a rush. "Yes, of course, I remember now."

Rem laughed. "Ah, what tricks the overmind plays with us!" He offered Lang a tight-lipped smile. "Listen to your words, Doctor: `I remember now.' That's what the SDF-3 is doing. Zor's ship captured a quantum of hyperspace and conveyed it into the world of time. Our ship has captured a quantum of time and carried it into hyperspace. "

Lang glanced at the mathematical constructs assembling themselves on the tablescreen as if to confirm something.

"I don't know why the Protoculture chose this particular moment to abandon us," Rem resumed, "or just what Shapings are to be inferred from it. But I do know that the SDF-3 is remembering now-now, Lang." He gestured toward the exterior bulkheads. "And what I think we're seeing out there is a universe in the making."

"Remember when he was just learning to walk?" Rick asked, regarding his five-year-old

raven-haired son from the transparent side of the nursery's one-way mirror. "It was like he wanted to start off running. Always in a hurry to get somewhere."

Lisa's eyes narrowed somewhat. "No thanks to you. Walking must have seemed awfully tame after all the aerial acrobatics you put him through."

Rick laughed. "Guilty as charged. But I didn't have anything to do with turning him into a whiz kid. That's gotta be your doing."

Lisa patted the bun of gray-streaked hair at the back of her head and laughed with him.

In meeting at the nursery, the two proud parents had agreed to call a moratorium on discussing the fortress's present circumstance, at least until Lang and Rem could sort out whether they had punched themselves into some misty uncharted corner of hyperspace or were simply on line in limbo, waiting for judgment. Morale was low in all sections, and so Lisa had ordered most of the ship to secure from battle stations.

She returned her eyes to Roy and to the transformable puzzle block one of the ship's child-care specialists had handed him. Silently, as she watched Roy rotate the alloy block in his tiny hand, she applauded his analytical powers: the way, he seemed to size it up before making a move, the way the expression on his sweet face mirrored his intense concentration. At the same time she marveled at the dexterity he demonstrated as he began to expose one after another of the block's hidden forms, nimble fingers prying open doors, separating sections, twisting others, extending telescoping parts. And just as silently she worried.

Up until a few months ago Roy had seemed just an ordinary child to her, perhaps too ordinary, if anything. For all her efforts at keeping him as far from the SDF-3 as she could manage, at seeking to raise him as someone other than the son of two career officers, Roy had been going through the same action/adventure stages as his peers aboard the fortress. One could take the child away from Earth, but one apparently could not take Earth away from the child. Airplanes, action figures, toy guns ... even an invisible friend who still showed up every so often.

But things had changed once she and Rick had completed their transfer to the SDF-3. Suddenly it was puzzles that fascinated him, both manual and computer-generated. And then there was the look he would give her sometimes, as if to say: I know exactly what you're thinking. To hear Kazianna tell it, her son Drannin and some of the other Zentraedi children were behaving likewise, and there had been occasions when Lisa had had to drag Roy screaming from his oversize "play mates." She still didn't know whether to feel comforted by all the youthful bonding or even more worried than she already was. More than anything she wished Miriya were there to tell her what it was like to nurture a genius, what the Praxians sometimes called a Wyrdling.

And how much of it, Lisa wondered, could be traced to the ship itself?

She felt Rick's arm go around her shoulder, and she rested her head against his.

"We've had some good days, haven't we?" Rick said softly. "Especially these past few years."

She knew what he meant: how good it had been to absent themselves from the endless tasks they had overseen during Reconstruction and again after the destruction of New Macross.

Rick turned to face her. "I've been missing them lately. Really feeling at a loss."

Lisa recalled her postfold malaise and shot him a look. "You, too, Rick? Like you've lost something important?"

He nodded. "First I thought it was just leaving Tirol, but it's more than that. Lately I've been thinking about Pop's air circus, Macross Island, even the Mockingbird."

"But it's pervasive, isn't it?" Lisa said. "Like you can't pin it down."

Rick bit his lower lip. "I think I know what it is now," he began with a nervous laugh. "I'm willing to lay odds it's the Proto-"

"Begging your pardon, sirs," Rick's adjutant interrupted, stepping through the observation room hatch. "Tactical Center requests the admiral's immediate presence."

"What is it?" Lisa asked, hurrying to the room's intercom.

"We've got a screenful of bogies, sir." "Signatures?" Rick said.

"Not yet, sir. Radar's silent. The ship's bio-sensors made the call."

Rick and Lisa traded looks. "Bio-sensors?"

"TIC patched the system into IFF, sir, but couldn't raise a signature or profile."

"Invid?" Lisa said, cocking her head to one side. "Some self-mutated form?"

Rick met his adjutant at the hatch. "Maybe someone's shown up to lead us home," he suggested, and was gone.

Belowdecks in one of the fortress's mecha bays, Captain Jack Baker gave a downward

tug to his flight jacket as he paced back and forth in front of his small audience of veteran pilots and mechamorph aces.

And not one of them had soared where he had now. "You may think the background stuff's unimportant, Captain Phillips," Jack was continuing after a bothersome interruption, "but what I'm trying to do is give you a sense of the experience."

Sean Phillips threw an imploring look to the high ceiling. "No offense, Baker, but I think we've all heard about what happened when you piloted the VT down to Haydon IV. I just don't see the relevance."

Jack's innocent face reddened. With so many heavy hitters to choose from, he still could not figure out why the admiral had singled him out for the void recon. He hoped, of course, that Hunter's finger had simply gone right to the top of the list, but then, he supposed that list could have been alphabetical. Jack nevertheless was determined to make the most of the distinction while it lasted.

"I'm talking about the unknown, Captain," he told Sean. "The importance of state of mind."

"Like going against the Robotech Masters was a given?" Sean asked.

Jack grew flustered. "I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that what Haydon IV threw at us was totally unlike anything we'd faced."

"Did we ever tell you about the spade fortress that put down just outside of Monument City?" Sergeant Angelo Dante asked in a conversational tone, the only one of the group who had refused to accept a commission. He swung around to face everyone, elbows flared, large hands on wide spread knees. "The Fifteenth ATAC was ordered to recon the ship, see. So we tank out there and-"

"Now who's being irrelevant?" Jack cut in. "I mean, why don't we just invite some of the Karbarrans in here to entertain us with their war stories? Or how 'bout getting Gnea in here to talk about hand-to-hand."

"Yeah, I'll bet you'd-enjoy that, Jack," Marie Crystal laughed, affectionately nudging Karen Penn with an elbow. Black Lion leader during the Second Robotech War, she was just another officer here. Sean, who had been her fiance three times over the past year, was being his usual arrogant self, and while she rarely approved of his teasing sarcasm, Baker was so easy to put off balance. "What d' you think, Karen? Shall we call the Praxians in?" she contributed.

Karen smiled and regarded Jack from her seat. Lithesome and honey-blond, she appeared to be every bit Marie's opposite, but in fact the two had grown to be close friends. "That's up to Captain Baker," she said. "It's his show."

"Jeez," Jack muttered, brushing back a recently styled silver-tinted pompadour, "et too?" He spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. "All right, for cryin' out loud, I'll get on with it."

The pilots applauded wildly as Jack called up memories of his brief EVA.

"It's like flying through a cloud," he began on a serious note. "Only there's no vapor around you, no droplets streaking your canopy. Other times it's like moving toward a cloud you can't seem to reach. I had a hard time looking forward, because everything started to go solid on me. But watching your displays doesn't help, because there's absolutely nothing happening on-screen. I kept feeling like I was close to punching through it, but it just went on and on. And it never changed, no matter which heading I took. The SDF-3 is your whole world, the only game in town."

He blew out his breath and shook his head. "I don't know what more to tell you, really. The VT performed well, no glitches in any of the systems. I thought it through a couple of reconfigurations, and there were no problems. Weapons systems seemed to be fully operational, but I was under orders not to enable. Dr. Lang's thinking is that missile propulsion isn't affected."

"When do we get a crack at it?" Sean said, rising to his feet for added effect.

As soon as Admiral Hunter figures you're ready, Jack was about to tell him, when hooters drowned out the thought. The ship was returning to full-alert status. A female voice, boomed from the flight bay's overhead speakers:

"We have uncorrelated targets closing on the fortress in all sectors. Captains Baker, Phillips, Penn, and Crystal report with your teams to assigned launch bays immediately. Substations November, Romeo, Tango, Zebra, prepare for. . . "

Jack let the rest of it pass right through him. Phillips and his 15th cohorts were already up and hurrying toward their VTs, pale-faced but eager wingmen-combat virgins the lot of them-falling in behind.

Jack-stepped down from the missile pallet that had been his temporary stage, Karen was waiting for him, a grin forming.

"Cheer up, flyboy," she said, linking arms with him as he approached. "For what it's worth, you'll still go on file as being the first out."

Jack snorted sullenly. "Fame's a damned fleeting thing these days."

CHAPTER EIGHT

The elderly spokesperson for what remained of the planetside contingent of the Army of the Southern Cross introduced herself tome as 'Regina Newhope.' The woman's associate-as facially scarred and ghoulish-locking a creature as I have ever encountered-went simply by the name `Farnham.' I recall thinking at the time that there was something strangely familiar about the pair of them, something I wanted to connect to the deceased Lazlo Zand. Then, when I subsequently learned that Newhope's real name-her pre-Invid name-was Millicent Edgewick, I realized that the Zand connection was a sound one. And even now I'm certain that `Farnham' was none other than the First Robotech War's most wanted political criminal, Senator Alfonse Napoleon Russo.

Dr. Harold Penn, quoted in Justine Huxley's I've Been to a Marvellous Party

The REF pilots who had escorted Scott Bernard to New York were ordered to return the colonel and his alien charge directly to Norristown rather than to the launch pad in Venezuela. The Southlands city-where tech crews ferried down from the orbiting Ark Angel had been working overtime to clear a landing zone for the soon-to-be-arriving dignitaries-had been selected as the temporary site of the reunited Earth governments.

No sooner had the VT set down than Marlene was whisked away to the REF's planetside HQ by three sinister-looking men from G2 dressed in dark suits and opaque glasses. Scott, too, was hurried off to yet another debriefing, but this time at the hands of the intel directorate chief himself, former Plenipotentiary Councilman Niles Obstat, the balding and stoop-shouldered old-guard ally of Emil Lang. Unlike the neurometric specialists whose job it had been to evaluate Scott's psychological state, Obstat was interested in learning all he could about the political climate of the Southlands. Which towns had impressed Scott most? Who seemed to be in charge? Who controlled the wealth, the distribution of goods, the private armies and fringe groups? Who had been partisans, and who had been sympathizers? And who headed up the quasi-religious movements like the Church of Recurrent Tragedy or the so-called Interstellar Retributionists?

Scott answered as best as he could, covering much of the same ground he had covered months earlier. Obstat pursued oblique lines of questioning, ever on the alert for nuance, personal impressions, the recollection of some seemingly trivial episode.

The sessions continued for two days. Scott was asked to thumb-print oaths and papers and was instructed not to discuss anything about the SDF-3 or the returning REF with "downsiders," which he understood to mean planet-bound Terrans of all varieties.

Afterward he was left pretty much to himself, and more than a week slipped by. Marlene was kept incommunicado; as far as anyone in G2 was concerned, the Invid simulagent was military property. Besides, as someone had suggested to Scott, she was a lot better off than she would have been on the streets, where if word of her background got out she wouldn't have lasted a day.

He didn't fully understand the reasons for all the secrecy about the missing flagship and the sudden inactivation of much of Earth's Protoculture-driven mecha until Vince Grant invited him to attend an introductory summit held in Norristown's city hall, a castlelike affair that had served as an Invid Protoculture storage facility during the occupation.

The REF was represented by the Plenipotentiary senators Penn, Huxley, Stinson, and Longchamps. The latter two, still in some sense allied with the old Southern Cross apparat, were a faction in their own right, hoping to reconnect with whoever was currently representing the interests of the demolished government of Wyatt "Patty" Moran, General Anatole Leonard, and Dr. Lazlo Zand. And while all three men had died during the final days of the Second Robotech War, a small group recently released from an Invid internment camp did step forward to speak on their behalf.

Planetside Earth had numerous secondary spokespersons as well, several of whom Scott recognized by sight and a few of whom he knew by reputation. Donald and Carla Maxwell, for example, from Deguello; and Terri Woods, one of Lancer's contacts in the resistance, who now headed up a diverse but vocal contingent of REF supporters. Then there were the two women Obstat had told Scott to keep an eye out for: exGMP lieutenant Nova Satori, the charismatic leader of the Homunculi Movement, and Jan Morris, Corporeal Fundamentalist, whose large following advocated a return to agrarian and religious primitivism.

Loyalists, separatists, cultists ... each group took its turn at the podium, and each stirred argument, debate, in some cases violence among the gathered crowds. Scott could see that Huxley was bent on reaching accommodations with one and all, even though her patience was wearing thin. The Council's principal aim was the restabilization of humankind's understandably paranoid mind-set in the hope that Earth could avoid a return to the feudal mentality that had prevailed during the Masters War and the occupation. It was obvious that the REF figured to achieve that with the promise of advanced technologies in exchange for a large piece of the planet's geopolitical pie.

No mention was made of the missing SDF-3, nor was any attempt made to explain mecha failure or Earth's sudden energy crisis. The Council not only acted as though the situation were easily reversible but suggested that they had even had a hand in bringing it about!

No decisions had been reached by the time Scott was shuttled up to the Ark Angel to attend a prelaunch briefing. Justine Huxley, Longchamps, and the rest, backed by several squadrons of functioning mecha, remained on-world to press the REF's case. A select few were apprised of the fact that the Ark Angel would soon be leaving Earthspace.

The briefing was held in a dungeonlike cabinspace located on the starship's engineering level that had come to be called the Sentinels Bay, for it was there that campaign strategies had been hammered out. Scott arrived in the company of the Grants' adjutants

and aides; Vince and Jean were already positioned at the compartment's horseshoe-shaped table, along with Dr. Penn, Niles Obstat, and a dozen or so of the ship's command and intel officers. But the briefing did not get under way until the table's remaining seats were occupied by five of the most bizarre-looking civilians Scott had encountered in quite some time. Dressed alike in tight-fitting black jumpsuits studded with what looked like chrome stars, the five sported round mirror-leaned goggles and hairstyles that made the outlandish razor cuts and permtints of the century's first decade seem tame by comparison.

"Professor, I believe you're acquainted with everyone here," Harry Penn said by way of welcome. "With the possible exception of Colonel Bernard." Turning to Scott, he added: "Colonel Bernard, Professor Nichols, and his team from Cyber-Research, Doctors Stirson, Gibley, Strucker, and Shi-Ling. "

The five Penn had addressed as doctors nodded in unison; they might have been clones or biogenetically engineered quadruplets. Of their apparent leader, a short, lantern jawed man with an enormous pompadour of henna-colored hair, Scott asked, "Nichols, as in Louie Nichols, creator of the Syncron drive?"

"Adapter of the Syncron device, Colonel," the professor said, adjusting his glasses as if to sharpen their focus. "But yes, one and the same."

"I'm honored, sir," Scott said in obvious awe. The Nichols drive, as it was sometimes called, had been responsible for assuring the nearly instantaneous return of the REF fleet from Tirol. "Your reputation has reached clear across the Quadrant."

Nichols smiled tolerantly. "And we've heard about you, too, Colonel."

Scott's face flushed; Nichols's tone of voice left it unclear whether he had been complimented or insulted. His assistants, meanwhile, had begun to set up some sort of computer station off to one side of the table. Scott had never seen decks or consoles quite like the ones they were unpacking.

"Dr. Penn informs me you have some news for us, Professor," Vince was saying.

"Yes," Nichols said after a moment, "thanks to the colonel's capture of the simulagent."

Vince appraised Scott with a quick, look. "`Capture' might be too strong a word, Professor. As I understand it, the Invid, er, operative voluntarily turned herself over to REF custody."

Nichols made` a dismissive gesture. "File it where you want, General. The important thing is that the simulagent gave us the go-to we needed on the Protoculture. Based on what we managed to access from it-"

"It has a name, Professor," Scott cut in angrily. "We called her ... Marlene."

Nichols stared at him from behind the mirrored goggles. "Sorry about that, Colonel. I screened it but misfiled it somehow. Well, this Marlene, then, gave us a solid return on our investments. The Regis did in fact wed her race to all existing Protoculture at the moment of transubstantiation the incident that gave rise to the `phoenix vision' some of your own ship's crew have confessed to experiencing, Doctor."

Penn leaned back in his chair, stroking his chin as muttered questions and exclamations were exchanged around the table. "But Professor," he queried at last, "you said all existing Protoculture. And yet dozens of mecha remain fully functional, to say nothing of the Ark Angel herself."

Nichols traded amused looks with his associates. Scott noticed that the four had linked their terminals together, employing cables of peculiar design. From each console dangled equally strange-looking umbilical jacks.

"A valid prompt, Doctor, but you don't need a simul.. .er, a Marlene to run it. What I should have said was all the first-generation Protoculture-the pure strain that came from Zor's original matrix, along with the home brew the Regis was concocting from the orchards here."

"As distinct from what?" Penn asked.

Nichols let out an exasperated sigh. "As distinct, Doctor, from the Flower stuff the REF cooked down in this facsimile matrix Lang and the Tiresian-what's his name?"

"Rem," Gibley said.

"Rem. What Lang and Rem cobbled together on Tirol."

Penn and the REF staffers mulled it over for a noisy moment.

"That would account for the fact that certain mecha are still functioning," Vince offered. "But of course we'd have to do a complete craft-by-craft accounting. As far as the Ark Angel is concerned-"

"It is Sekiton-fueled," Nichols completed.

Penn's ruddy face registered astonishment. "My God. You're saying that the SDF-3 ..."

Nichols nodded encouragement. "The fold generators of the SDF-3 were taken from Breetai's flagship and the Robotech factory satellite, both of which were fueled with first generation Protoculture."

"And that Protoculture," Penn said, "was caught up in the Invid transformation that occurred here, on Earth."

"You've got it," Nichols told him. "If we can learn where the Invid went, we'll find the SDF-3."

"But how can we do that?" Jean Grant asked.

"Folding for Haydon IV is a good way to start," Nichols said. "The more I hear about Haydon and this `Awareness,' the more I'm convinced there's a lead there. Second, we can take the Invid ... woman along. Some part of her is still on-line with the Invid group-mind, wherever it is, in this dimension or some other."

Some other dimension? Scott wanted to ask him. Wrinkled foreheads and bobbing Adam's apples suggested that he was not alone in his concern. Nichols's group, however, seemed to be taking the revelations in stride. Scott watched the one named Gibley. He had one of the umbilicals in hand and seemed to be applying some sort of spray lubricant to the jack.

"`We,' Professor," Vince said. "Can I take that to mean that you and your associates have agreed to accompany us?" Nichols nodded. "But not for the reasons you probably imagine, General," he was quick to add. "Like most of you, we have friends on that ship who are important to us. But as for viewing Protoculture as a necessity in shaping Earth's future, we couldn't disagree with you more."

Scott's mouth dropped open as he saw Gibley part his long tail of bleached hair and insert the multipronged jack directly into the base of his skull.

Nichols caught Scott's expression. "They're called cyberports," he told Scott, fingering aside the hair on the right side of his cranium to reveal a similar alloy receptacle.

Jean Grant blanched as the rest of Nichols's team began to follow Gibley's lead.

"And we call this-headlocking," Nichols explained, regarding the table for a moment. "You see, despite what you may think, Protoculture's reign is finished. Robotechnology is dead.

"It worked its final shapings in the Quadrant when it merged with the Invid. I suspect, in fact, that that was its raison d'etre all along-to be both mate and propellant for the Invid transformation.

I

"But I repeat: It has no place in the world it reshaped in the process." Nichols shook his head, his eyes a mystery behind mirrors. "No. From this point on it will be up to us to

shape our destiny as a race, and we will have to look to superintelligences to help us define and design our course."

He motioned to his headlocked associates, their activated consoles and rapt expressions. "`Machine mind' holds the answers. Through it we will accomplish all that we have failed to accomplish in the past. Through it we will achieve where we have failed. Through it we will journey where we have never been."

The table waited in silence.

"Not out among the stars, either," Louie said with a grin. "But in a reality we will create. Using the power of our own enhanced intellects and the immortal machine bodies we will someday soon fashion for ourselves."

CHAPTER NINE

During the cruel reign of the Robotech Masters, Karbarra had exported its revolution (along with tens of thousands of its pneumatic projectile rifles) to several Local Group worlds, including Garuda, Praxis, and Spheris. During the Invid occupation, Karbarra had seen its very future (i.e., the Karbarran childcubs) held hostage. The origin of the planet's subsequent turn to dreams of empire is most often traced to its solid defeat over the (T. R.) Edwards-controlled Invid on Optera (see La Paz, Mizner, London, et al.). But who if not Haydon himself [sic] was Karbarra rising up against-Haydon and the curse of his [sic] Ur-Flower.

Noki Rammas, Karbarra

Dana was ready to jump the first Haydonite that glided across the laser-barred threshold to the Sterlings' plush level-four lockup. But when that visitor turned out to be Veidt, all she could do was quietly lay aside the Praxian hardwood war club she had fashioned from a table leg, try to ease unnoticed from her place of concealment behind the couch, and join her parents and Exedore in questioning the being who had been like family to all of them in their time on-world.

She was encouraged to hear Veidt address everyone as "my friends."

Exedore made his relief known with a slow exhalation of breath. "What is going on, Veidt?" he asked, staring up into the hovering figure's bilaterally symmetrical suggestion of facial features. "I certainly can't tell anything from your expression."

"Would that you had learned to discern our nuances," Veidt sent to everyone. "You would have undoubtedly noticed alterations in my countenance since the initial stirrings of the Awareness some months ago. Our inner states are as much on display as your own, you know."

"Tell us what's happening to you," Exedore said.

A dull, pulsating glow lit Veidt's dzentile. "Thoughts come not without great difficulty now, Lord Exedore."

"Try, Veidt," Miriya said, "please."

Veidt's hairless head rolled briefly within the high collar of the robe. "One might compare it to the Compulsion the Robotech Masters used to extract unfailing allegiance from the Zentraedi." The Haydonite regarded Max. "I have found nothing in Terran history that invites comparison, although my intuition tells me otherwise."

"We Haydonites nevertheless have as a world been forced to respond to a type of behavioral programming that up until recently has lain dormant within us. But it appears that those of us who have had continued contact with offworlders can exercise intermittent control over the programming."

Exedore and the Sterlings could sense Veidt's musings. Alone among his planetary companions, Veidt had shed tears on the occasion of the death of Sarna, his mate in captivity, whose body had been delivered into the cupped hands of Haydon IV's towering shrine to its creator.

"The process is somewhat analogous to the defenses your bodies utilize in the resisting of biological contamination or infection," Veidt continued.

"I guess Anad and Llan haven't got the hang of it yet," Dana said.

Veidt rotated to face her. "They were probably more helpful than you realize, child."

Exedore spoke up before Dana could respond. "But what brought this about, Veidt? Surely it has something to do with the Invid's departure. Only a believer in coincidence would fail to see the connection."

Veidt's sendings ceased for a moment. "The Event has occurred, Lord Exedore. I can offer little more data than that. From the deepest center of my being arises an understanding that this world itself has been waiting and preparing for the Event for countless millennia, and yet I cannot speak of it. I know only that the waiting is complete."

"You're telling-us you've no idea what you've been waiting for?" Dana said.

"I am. Nor do I know what to expect."

"Why have we been arrested, Veidt?" Max demanded. The Haydonite glided to the center

of the room and back. "Arrest is not the appropriate term. You've done nothing illegal, nothing to warrant imprisonment."

Dana pointed to the laser-barred threshold. "In case you haven't noticed, Veidt, we're not exactly free to come and go as we choose."

"Protective custody is the term I would use," Veidt offered, as though he had been scrolling through a phrase file. "As I'm certain Lord Exedore has already informed you, Haydon IV has left orbit and is accelerating even now. Surely you accept the fact that you never would have, been able to survive on the surface."

"Granted, Veidt," Miriya said. "We were brought down here for our own good; we've accepted that much. But does that mean we'll be released when we reach wherever it is we're going?"

Veidt's forehead pulsed with subdued light. "Not exactly. You see, it is important that you not be permitted to interfere with the successful completion of the secondary and tertiary stages. Therefore, you are to remain in protective custody until all post-Event phases have been carried out."

"But how long are we talking about?" Dana managed.

"As long as the operation requires," Veidt sent.

Max and Miriya stared at each other aghast. Exedore and Aurora assimilated the disclosure silently. Dana considered lunging for the hardwood war club she had stashed behind the couch.

"Violence should not be considered an option," the Haydonite said without facing anyone directly. "I should add that I have sought audience with Vowad."

Father of a sort to Sarna, Vowad was a high-ranking member of Haydon IV's Elite.

"And?" Exedore asked.

"He can do nothing. Offworlder contact has mitigated the impact of the Compulsion on Vowad as an entity, but he is still obliged to answer to the Elite, who have thus far remained fully responsive to the programming."

Dana felt her anger rising again.

"Perhaps I should remind you that one incident of violence has already been answered in kind," Veidt sent in her direction.

"The Karbarran vessel," Exedore said.

"Vessels, unfortunately. One Spherisian ship did, however, escape the acceleration unscathed."

"Has Karbarra been informed of the incident?" Max asked out of genuine concern.

"Yes, by the Spherisians themselves," Veidt sent. "In fact, there is some reason to believe that a Karbarran battle group is en route to Haydon IV at this very moment."

Max shot to his feet. "But you just said that interference couldn't be permitted! You've got to see that they're warned away.

Veidt grew quiet, as though accessing some remote mainframe. "I'm sorry, all of you. But it is apparently too late for that now."

At Admiral-Elect Lron's urgings, the Karbarran dreadnought had been named N'trpriz in honor of some Terran ship of primitive design. And while Commander K'rrk had not been against the idea at the time, he would have preferred a different vessel to call his own, a Sekiton-powered ship-of the-line with a proper Karbarran name. The Tracialle, if he bad had a choice or, failing that, the battlewagon Yirrbisst.

K'rrk sat in the command chair of the N'trpriz, shaking out the lingering effects of spacefold as his bridge crew fed him updates on the ship's position and readiness.

"Haydon IV coming into view, Commander," Mav reported from one of the forward duty stations. "All cruisers accounted for. Establishing matching velocity with the planet three point seven units, sir."

"Thank you, Mav," K'rrk said from the helm chair. "Let's have a look at it."

The artificial planet resolved on the bridge's forward screen, variegated, rotating, but atmosphereless. A celestial wanderer no longer, but more the starship it was. Parsecs distant from that which it had called its home star for a time, and still accelerating.

K'rrk cupped a paw around his muzzle in a contemplative gesture. Off to one side of the helm chair stood an enormous wooden wheel, a vestigial adornment overruled by Tiresian made astrogational computers buried deep in the ship's heart but left in place out of respect for the Sentinels' "steam ship," Farrago.

K'rrk turned to regard his science officer. "Could they be preparing to fold, Lorek?"

"A distinct possibility, Commander." "What do scanners show?"

"Areas of extensive surface damage," Lorek responded after a moment. By Karbarran standards, he was tall and lean, with mottled fur and a curious cant to the diminutive, mushroom-shaped horns set between his ears. "Glike appears to be completely deserted, sir, although bio-indicators are registering life signs in several subsurface chambers."

"Do we have a fix on whatever's powering the thing?" Kirk asked.

"Affirmative. All drive systems are controlled from a central AI nexus concealed under what used to be a system of reservoirs and interlinked canals. It has apparently been given the name Awareness, Commander."

"Defenses, Lorek. Shields? Antiparticle fields?"

"None that scanners can discern, Commander."

K'rrk growled with pleasure as he turned to the ship's communications officer. "Reeza, inform all battle group commanders to hold their positions."

"Done, Commander," she responded almost immediately.

K'rrk made an approving sound. "Open up a hailing frequency, Lieutenant. "

"Frequency opened to all traffic," Reeza told him.

K'rrk cleared his throat and slapped a paw down on the chair's translator stud. "This is the Karbarran starship N'trpriz. We wish to make contact with whomever is presently in control of Haydon IV." He repeated the request twice more.

"Incoming, sir," Reeza said as a synthesized voice speaking formal Karbarran began to issue from the bridge's communication ports.

"Attention, N'trpriz," the voice began. "Your vessel is being scanned. Do not, repeat, do not attempt to arm or deploy any weapons. "

K'rrk flashed his weapons officer a paw signal for restraint and patience. "Understood, Haydon IV," he directed toward overhead audio pickups. "With whom are we speaking?"

"You are in communication with Haydon IV's Awareness. State your purpose, N'trpriz."

K'rrk glanced at his crew, then said, "We must be permitted to establish a docking orbit around Haydon IV for the purpose of extracting our citizens,"

Ursine eyes fixed on the forward screen and speakers. "That cannot be permitted," the

Awareness replied at last. "Your citizens are in no danger. Do not, repeat, do not attempt an approach or your vessel will have to be destroyed." K'rrk bared his fangs in a twisted smile. If the normally dour Karbarrans had learned anything from the Sentinels' victorious campaigns, it was that fate, destiny, could be grasped as one would a prize piece of fruit. And just now Haydon IV was that prize, a conquest that would consolidate Karbarra's power among the worlds of the Local Group and reward a certain commander with the dreadnought of his choosing for all subsequent sorties.

"Nonsense," K'rrk told the Awareness with a gurgling snarl. "Release your prisoners at once or suffer the consequences." He hit the com-interrupt stud and swung to Lorek. "Do we still have a fix on the nerve center?"

"Affirmative, Commander."

K'rrk struck the arm of the command chair with a huge fist, nonretractable claws finding their usual grooves. "Activate all electronic countermeasures and prepare for evasive action. Mav, prepare to secure us a counterrotational orbit at my command. Cano: target primary torpedoes ground zero on nerve center coordinates."

"We're being warned away, sir," Reeza said.

"Engineering," K'rrk growled across the com-line as the N'trpriz began to close on the accelerating sphere that was Haydon IV.

"Engineering here, Commander," a thickly accented Highlander's voice returned.

"We're going to try a hit-and-run, Rash. Will your engines back us up?"

"By Firrbisst, you know they will, Commander." K'rrk grinned. "All right, Cano, on my-"

A blare of two-note warning horns overpowered his words. "Commander," Lorek reported in an astonished voice. "Ship's auto-destruct has been armed and is counting down!"

K'rrk rose halfway out of the helm chair. "What?"

"Auto-destruct set for thirty units, sir."

K'rrk spit a curse at Haydon IV's on-screen image. "Toy with us, you will not! Mav, plot a course directly for the surface. I want us in this ship sitting right over the Awareness!"

"Twenty units, sir. "

K'rrk slammed a paw down on the chair's control panel. "Ship's computer," he said, catching a whiff of his own muskiness. "Abort auto-destruct sequence. Priority override,

K'rrk-two-K'rrk-one, cancel."

Lorek entered a similar verbal code, and the warning horns were silenced. "Auto-destruct sequence aborted," Lorek up dated.

K'rrk grinned knowingly. "All engines full reverse, Mav." The navigator tapped a flurry of commands into his console, then threw a wide-eyed look over his shoulder. "Sir, the ship isn't responding!"

"Rash!" K'rrk barked over the com-line. "Get your engines on-line!"

The chief engineer's reply was panicked. "By the UrFlower, we're trying, sir!"

K'rrk heard Lorek's sharp intake of breath under the blare of reactivated warning horns. "Auto-destruct reinitiated, Commander. Counting down from thirty units."

"Haydon!" K'rrk bellowed. "Mav: Return to previous course heading, all ahead full!"

"Twenty units, Commander."

"We've got full reverse, sir," Rash said proudly from engineering.

K'rrk's muzzle fell open at the sight of Haydon IV dwindling on-screen. "Full ahead! Full ahead!"

"No response, sir!" Mav said. "Ten units, Commander."

"Ship's computer," K'rrk sputtered. "Abort auto-destruct sequence. K'rrk-two-K'rrk-one. "

"You forget to say `priority override'!" every officer on the bridge cried at the same time.

"Five units, Commander."

"Ship's computer," K'rrk started again. "Priority override-No! I mean Abort K'rrk-two- No, I-"

"Four units, Commander!"

"Ship's K'rrk Computer sequence-"

Mav and Cano had abandoned their duty stations and were approaching him with murder in their eyes.

"Abort, K'rrk! Abort?

"Three units."

"Cancel priority-"

"Two units."

Even Reeza had joined the mutiny, the claws of her hands poised over the helm chair.

"Arrrggggg!"

"One unit."

K'rrk was still butchering commands when the N'trpriz added its brief fireball to the heavenly sweep.

CHAPTER TEN

One of the things I liked about having [Sean] Phillips around was that his relationship with Marie Crystal was even more confused than mine was with Karen [Penn]. But we were competitors from almost the first moment he set foot on Tirol. I had it figured then that the 15th thought they'd done the job the REF had been sent to do-cut the Robotech Masters down to size. After all, none of us [in the REF] had dealings with the Masters. As far as the Invid were concerned, the 15th had left Earth before their arrival and docked on Tirol after the Invid had already left. So of course I made a thing about talking up the Sentinels and what we'd been through on Praxis and the rest. But who could blame me when the 15th had gotten a bigger reception in Tiresia than the Sentinels had gotten when we'd returned victorious from Optera.

Jack Baker, Upwardly Mobile

Jack was first out of the launch bay, nine Veritechs formed up on his tail. Newspace veteran Jack in his scarlet Alpha, out into the fog that was not.

That was the real kicker, he told himself. That newspace, as Lang's Robotechs were calling it, felt more like a state of mind than a state of matter. Extravehicular, immersed in vaporless white light, you got the feeling you were not so much "out there" as you were, well, inside something.

Against the black star-strewn backdrop everyone was used to, you were occasionally overcome by the magnitude of it all. You could sense just how insignificant you were in the grand scheme, and it made for easy combat when one figured your single ship didn't amount to squat. (But jeez, how it could bring on the night, terrors afterward! That amoebalike sense of immersion, the loss of self . . .)

That was where newspace was something else. Because in there-he might not say it, but he could not help but think it-one started to feel just too significant, as though every action one took set into motion a chain of immutable reactions.

The "fireflies" found by the fortress's bio-sensors were on-screen and closing on all sides. They winked light just like the real things, here one moment, gone the next, vaguely blue against the colorless, ambient glow of newspace.

"Command to Red Team leader. Do you copy, Red leader? Repeat, do you copy?"

The SDF-3 was a black slash at nine o'clock, the mecha constituting Red and Blue Teams circumferentially deployed like widely scattered paint flecks chipped from the ship's hull.

Jack chinned into the command frequency, opening a line to the Tactical Information Center. "Red One receiving you loud and clear, Command. What have you got for us?"

A video image of Colonel Vallenskiy's head and shoulders appeared on one of the Alpha heads-up display screens, strobing harsh light into the cockpit. "Nothing yet, Captain. Bio-scanners are still showing hot signatures but no profiles."

"Copy and confirm, Command," Baker said. "Sorry to disappoint, Colonel, but our view doesn't seem to be any better than yours."

"Roger that, Red leader. TIC requests you maintain present position. Let's see if they're willing to come into the playground."

Terrific, Jack thought. Just hang us out here like fresh meat. "This is Baker," he directed into the tactical net helmet pickup. "Maintain position. Lights alive at two thousand meters, all points and closing."

He could see them overhead, given false color and solidity by the cockpit canopy's polarized tint. Only now he saw that the bogies were not spherical at all but the rounded, light emitting tips of tendrillike forms. He flashed on the Sentinels' encounter with Haydon IV's antibody defenses, thinking: But so. . . No one at the briefing had been interested in hearing about that episode.

"They're onto me," one of Marie Crystal's wingmen blurted. "It's like I'm looking at tentacles. B-but they're not attached to anything!"

"Hold your position, " Jack heard Marie tell the pilot. "Christ, Captain, they're practically all over me!"

"Blue Six, you are not to engage unless provoked, " Vallenskiy ordered over the com net. "Maintain position. " Jack felt something graze the Alpha's radome and cockpit and

realized that the VT was being probed and explored. Reflexively, he crouched down in his seat, suddenly feeling as though he were about to enter an old-fashioned car wash. But what would have been brush tips were flickering lights. Blue Six gave a panicked cry. "Holy shit, they passed right through me, Captain! The things just shot right through me!" Jack shuddered, chilled to his center, as one of the light tips pierced the hull and thudded wormlike against his "thinking cap." It was incredible: The tendrils were not puncturing the hull but simply penetrating it! Some tore right through it, while others were whizzing lightning-quick recons around the cockpit. A few seemed to enter his body and course up and down his arms and legs; one even took a fast tour of his mind, leaving him dizzy and momentarily nauseated.

The tac net was filled with the sound of gasps and near exultation as the lights penetrated one Veritech after another. No one was capable of responding to Command's urgent requests for updates.

Jack braced himself for the lights' return the way one tightened up at the crest of a roller coaster drop. But at the last instant the tendrils that were headed for the Alpha divided and joined separate groups closing on Jack's two wingmen. This time, however, they did not pierce the VTs but danced around them, forming dazzling nimbi of light. Then, almost simultaneously, the two fighters winked out of existence.

Jack could not get his voice to work. When he did, he had difficulty reporting what he had just witnessed. Command, however, had apparently seen the two Veritechs disappear from the threat board.

"Red and Blue leaders, we show two, make that four, missing spacecraft," Vallenskiy said. "Can you confirm? Repeat, can you confirm?"

"They're gone!" Jack managed. "Atomized, dematerialized, disintegrated. . . I don't know what. The lights, surrounded them, then took them out."

"That's affirmative, " Marie said, answering for the Blue Team.

"Did you engage? Any of you?"

"Negative," Jack said, counting follow-up denials on the net: Dante, Crystal, Penn,

Phillips ...

"Can you verify present UCT positions, Red leader?" Jack glanced at his displays and screens, tipping the Alpha starboard with a brief firing of the VT's attitude jets. The lights had lost interest in the squadron. Beneath him, the tendrils were like spears gone ballistic, the SDF-3 soon to be pincushioned or worse.

Jack said, "You're the center of attention, Command."

"Then you are to engage, full teams," Vallenskiy returned. "Stop those things from reaching the ship!"

Rick stood on the TIC'S command balcony, listening to Vallenskiy relay commands to the mecha recon teams. Unless his eyes or the fortress's exterior cams were lying, he had just seen four VTs dematerialized by an enemy light. And now he had ordered the squadron to counterattack. With the hope of accomplishing what? he asked himself. Punishing the light for its omnipotence? According to the available data, it was not even light they were facing but some animated form of electrical energy.

Something like the synaptic firing of a neuron, Lang had explained.

"Fortress defensive shields raised," a tech announced from the command console. "Red and Blue Teams falling in to engage, sir."

Rick swung around to the monitors in time to see the Blue Team pilots imaging their VTs over to Battloid mode. Captains Baker and Penn and what remained of the Red Team were configured as Fighters or Guardians.

Rick briefly considered what he would do if he was out there. He pictured himself strapped into the cockpit seat, one hand clasped on the Hotas, face bathed in display light, scalp tingling from contact with the helmet's neural sensors, the smell of fuel and heated circuitry. No good to use heat seekers, he thought. Go right to lasers.

"Lasers fired, sir," the same tech reported. Rick squinted at the monitor screens.

And what he saw blinded him for the next ten seconds and left him with a dull ache in the back of his head he knew he would feel for a week.

His eyes opened to the sight of men and women throughout the TIC bent over their consoles in postures of anguish. The lasers had only fed strength to the light.

Succeeded in angering it.

Sirens wailed: Brace for impact!

Kami deliberately placed himself in the path of the first light tendril to penetrate the hold. It shook him with all the force of a baleful premonition, a minatory sending from the hin.

And how like the hin it seemed-the source of this light! Garudan, Kami had an intimate knowledge of such non ordinary states of mind-that which Terrans considered non

ordinary was the norm on Garuda. Credit Haydon or blame him, but his tamperings had resulted in a planet that was hell for those offworlders who chanced to breathe its rarefied atmosphere, a heaven for those fortunate enough to have been born into it. No, hell for the lupine Garudans was to be deprived of their homeworld's atmosphere. And it was thanks only to treatments received on Haydon IV that Kami could function aboard the SDF-3 without the transpirator he had worn through the Sentinels' perilous campaign.

Credit Haydon again. Or blame him.

Kami saw that Learna, his mate and partner those long years of war and tenuous peace, had discerned his intent and was also about to position herself under the full force of the teeming rain of crazed light. Her sendings were strong as she ventured forth from useless cover, the hin both guide and umbrella.

From across the hold came shouts of concern from their Terran shipmates and Local Group brothers and sisters in arms. Gnea said something in Praxian neither Kami nor Learns could comprehend. Baldan, Lron, Crysta, and several other Karbarrans were nearby. There was barely a corner the light had overlooked by then, save for what some called "the Pit," where Kazianna Hesh and a dozen or so Zentraedi were suiting up in power armor.

And it was not until the tendrils found the warrior giants that the Garudans' allies in the hin opened a portal to the truth.

Kami realized at once that the SDF-3 was not dealing with some blindly malicious Luciferian strike force but the scouts and emissaries of a powerful but childlike superintelligence. His encounter was brief by necessity, for he could barely maintain his individual self in the suffocating intoxication of the experience. The portal had been opened into a realm unlike any he had ever visited in the hin, opened into a soul unlike anything met there. The call of life's beyond, a siren song of such warmth and transcendence that Kami was tempted to surrender himself and be absorbed.

It was only Learna's presence that saved him, Learna, anchored firmly in the non-ordinary and beckoning him back with her love.

The light in the fortress's belly was retreating, dazzling eye and mind with its speed and brilliance. It had discovered something in the Zentraedi that filled it with fear, a fear that sent it screaming through the rest of the ship, as though desperate to find a route to its own safety.

"Please, Rem, hurry," Minmei said; tugging at the flared sleeve of the Tiresian's tunic. "I don't like this; I'm frightened of it!"

Rem was standing in the center of the cabin, arms akimbo and face uplifted to the ceiling. He looked like a dreamy eyed teen in love with the idea of being caught out in a spring shower.

"You're a child sometimes," he told her with a laugh. "Something wondrous seeks us out, and you'd have me hide under the bed. What frightens you?"

Minmei opened her mouth to speak but realized she had so response in mind. The truth was that she could not articulate what it was about the lights that frightened her, but all her instincts told her that Rem was in danger.

That he was not listening to her came as no surprise, really, for who was she to tell Lord Protoculture anything? Oh, once he would have listened, when she was still the voice that had won the Robotech War, but it had been years since that voice had sung, and it was Rem's star that had been on the ascendant since. Playing Johnny Appleseed on New Praxis with the Flowers of Life, conjuring Protoculture from them, fabricating the matrix Lang and the REF command worshiped like some sacrosanct icon.

Rem suddenly took hold of her narrow wrist and pulled her close, encircling her shoulders with his right arm. "Let it find us together," he said, still eyeing the ceiling expectantly. "Open your mind to it."

She tried not to quiver so in his embrace, but dread was sluicing through her veins like ice water. She wanted nothing more than to dig a deep dark hole for the two of them to hide in.

The first lights passed through the cabinspace with scarcely a moment's hesitation, piercing the room obliquely from ceiling to floor. A second group followed from the opposite direction. But the third and fourth entered through the starboard bulkhead and instead of exiting along their line of flight began to dart around the perimeter of the cabin, as if to fence the couple in.

Rem took a bold step forward and immersed a hand into the flow. The light raced up the length of his arm and outline of his body, as it was doing to other objects in the room. Minmei instantly became part of the tableau, her thoughts sent reeling by the tendrils' inquisitive caress. And suddenly then was more longing in her heart than her mind could process more light in the cabin than her eyes could absorb.

Rem bellowed the most mournful sound she had ever heard and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

With the confusion of the Great Transition behind them; the Zentraedi Imperative in place, and the Compulsion implemented, the Robotech Masters went about systematically expunging Zor's name from all records of the technovoyages of the starship Amtraph. They sought nothing less than to rewrite history in such a way that credit for the discovery of the Protoculture would go to the Elders themselves. However, Zors own accounts of those voyages survived in secret for some time, until destroyed by the young scientist himself as he began what has been termed his quiet rebellion-save for a precious few jottings preserved by Cabell. All details of Zor's early investigations and experiments vanished with the destruction of these notebooks and journals. And it is likely that we will never know more than we do now about the Amtraph's first sighting of Optera.

From Emil Lang's introduction to Cabell's - Zor and the Great Transition

Rem's cells remembered.

So many worlds to explore, countless even within the limited zone defined by the ship's reflex superluminals. So many landscapes to wander across with devices in hand, hillsides to climb, forests to penetrate, skies to soar. So many life orms to contact, cultures to experience-more than a mortal should be allowed to glimpse, let alone contemplate, more than an understanding god would have created ... They were there but to tempt, those climes of eruptive heat or frost waste, those worlds of nascent sentience or eons-old evolutionary struggle. But was there any greater rapture than to journey from one to the next? To watch worlds turn through cycles of their lives? To gaze from a ship's deck upon the sweep of time itself? ... If there was, it was surely beyond the scope of his intellect to imagine, and even had that gift of imagining been his, would he choose to deprive himself of this joy? He supposed not ...

Always those thoughts upon awakening from the essential sleep, Zor told himself. The artificial extension of life, while the Amtraph thrust itself from star to star. Man's little game played with time. A bit of existential trickery ...

He regarded the sleep chamber now-the nutrient drips that sustained the body, the contact studs that stimulated muscle and bone, the headband that helped to nourish dreams-and laughed away his musings, chest aching from disuse, unaccustomed to the sudden return of those chaotic, nay, inspired, rhythms.

Vard was watching him from afar-able servant and faithful friend-the rest of them already hobbling away from their opened cocoons like aged ministers hurrying off to meeting, and conferences. A spectacle ill befitting the courageous crew they were-scientists to the last, sworn to exploration and the search for truth. Zor breathed deep, congratulating himself on the choices he had made, the paths that had turned him away from government service and carried him offworld a last, clear of Tirol's crowded skies. If only Vard could feel the same content with the quest itself-instead of continually focusing on the goal.

But Zor was too astute, too used to their calculated designs, not to feel in Vard's

promptings the hand of his Elder: in the Academy. The hungry members of the Grand Chair; perhaps even Cabell himself, mentor and father in his own curious fashion. No, the data he transmitted were never enough for them: the trade arrangements and scientific exchanges too profitless to sate their appetites for progress.

We must have worlds to use as way stations for our glorious expansion, they would tell him, as though it were conquest they had in mind. We must have discoveries that will further the glory of our race, as though it were immortality they were striving for.

Oh, Vard, he thought, filling his lungs with the ship's sweetened air, perhaps this next world will be the one your real masters would have me find. One with wondrous things to offer, the miraculous things they feel certain are out here for the taking.

He stood up and stretched, as though reaching for the very stars beyond the reflective sheen of the viewport overhead. "Out among you somewhere," he said to the fixed lights. "Out among you is the world I'm destined to discover. By Valivarre's will, may the cause of peace profit above all."

Karen Penn tried one final time to inflict some damage on the lights, to extract a toll for whatever it was they had done to her Red teammates. With disciplined hand and quieted mind she reconfigured the Alpha to Fighter mode and burned for the fortress's stern, where the lights had clustered on and around the reflex drive exhaust ports. Jack was in plain view at three o'clock, his burn through the eerie glow of newspace complete, a Veritech pas de deux as they fell toward the ship.

The Blue team mecha, Battloid-configured, were hitting hard at the SDF-3's bow from just below the midline, head lasers emitting a deadly light of their own.

Karen planned on depleting her undercarriage lasers this time, taking no quarter, routing the light or luring it away, making it cry uncle or roll over and die.

She was shifting her weight in the padded seat, composing herself for the kill, willing the VT in, when all at once the fog of newspace lifted.

Her eyes were so fixed on the reticle of the Alpha's targeting screen that it took a moment for the change to register. Then, suddenly, there was darkness where there had been glow, and the lights were gone.

"Sonuvabitch," she heard Jack exclaim. "We're home, gang-we're home!"

But Karen was not buying it. Though they seemed to be drifting through the inky blackness of home space, something was missing.

"If we're home, Jack," she asked over the net, "where the hell are the stars?"

On the fortress bridge, Lisa mimicked Lang's on-screen head-scratching pose. She did not understand it, either: One minute the lights were digesting critical portions of the ship, and the next they were gone. Had the SDF-3 punched or been punched out of the hyperdomain? she wondered. And was that actually the real world outside the viewports or yet another black tunnel in the sky?

"Stations shipwide report all clear, Admiral," Forsythe said from across the bridge. "The lights are gone."

Lisa ran a palsied hand through her undone hair. "Damage assessment, Mister Price. Immediate. All decks."

"Aye, aye, sir."

Lisa returned her attention to the com-line monitor. "Well, what about it, Lang? Are we home?"

Lang looked at something off screen and shook his head. "No, Lisa, nothing has changed."

"Maybe you'd better have a look outside, Doctor." Lang's puzzled expression remained in place. "I have looked, Admiral, I assure you. But present readings are identical to those previously assembled." He snorted. "We're still a long way from home."

Lisa felt her heart race.

"We've lost a good deal of our reflex drive systemry," Lang continued as though to himself, pupilless eyes glazed over. "I'm beginning to believe that the reason the Veritechs were assimilated had nothing to do with defense against intrusion. No, whatever was directing the lights had need of specimens. Perhaps it has yet to make up its mind about us."

Lisa swallowed hard. "You make it sound like our pilots were appetizers, Doctor."

"In effect, they were just that," he told her, more animated suddenly. "By the time the lights reached the ship, they knew exactly what they were after."

"We're crippled, then. Is that what you're telling me?" The scientist shook his head. "Oh, no, we have some drive capacity left to us, although nowhere near what we'd require to go superluminal. In fact, as things stand we would be as stranded in our own space as we are here."

Lisa let out her breath. "You're full of good news, aren't you?"

Lang shrugged. "I'm sorry if I can't tell you what you'd undoubtedly like to hear."

Lisa waved a hand at the screen. "I'm the one who's sorry, Doctor. But you've got to give me something to go on. I mean, do we sit here and wait for those . . . things to come back and nibble away at more of our systemry?"

"As opposed to what, Admiral?" Lang wanted to know. "Christ, I don't know. Move. Somewhere."

Lang smiled, recalling Rem's real-time bubble theory. "Your husband suggested that I fashion us a world."

Lisa regarded him tight-lipped. "Then do it," she said after a moment.

Minmei cradled Rem's head in her arms. She pushed his hair back from his face and leaned an ear close to his parted lips. She was certain he had ceased breathing for a time, but that heart-stopping moment was past, his exhalation ruffling the strands of hair she had hooked behind her ear. Her breath was coming in shallow gasps as she pressed his head to her bosom, praying that he would regain consciousness soon.

Holding him like that, staring down at his beautiful face, she found herself walking through an ancient memory. Tiresia, on the night of the SDF-3's New Year's celebration. The Sentinels' ship, Farrago, had yet to arrive in Fantomaspace, and there she was with eyes only for Jonathan Wolff: But she remembered watching Rem that night while Wolff told her all the things he must have assumed she wanted to hear. And she remembered gazing at him the way she had often observed others gazing at her, with a look people reserved for screen idols and heroes. What might have happened if Rem had remained in Tiresia instead of joining the Sentinels? she wondered. Would his presence have altered events, given her the strength to steer clear of Edwards and grandiose plans?

It was Rem who had rushed to her side after she had killed Fdwards's horrible minion on Optera. Her voice had awarded a personal victory, a fitting end, she had decided. But on that same day Janice had walked out of her life forever. And Lynn-Kyle so soon before that ... It had been difficult for to go on when the memories of the sacrifices made in her behalf were so vivid. When she had been so undeserving. So evil.

But Rem had continued to stick by her in Tiresia, during the months she had languished under doctors' care, the Booths and years when she had so little will to survive. And looking at him now, imagining the two of them walking Tiresia's Romelike streets together, she was not sure she was envisioning a past that almost was or a future that could be. A

kind of alternative present, she told herself. One they could fashion together to erase the mistakes both Zor and Minmei had made.

She ran a hand across her belly arid sighed. At the same time a soft groan escaped Rem's lips, and he moved his head against her.

"Rem," she said. "Oh, please, darling . . ." And his eyelids fluttered and opened.

Jack knuckled his eyes with gloved hands, wondering what could have given him such a shot to the head that he was seeing stars. It was not exactly unheard of for the "thinking caps" to malfunction and send a jolt of current through one's system-to bite the head that fed them, as the saying went but that usually left one with twitching limbs or feeling like someone had unzipped one's backbone and poured hot lead down one's spine. Not seeing stars. And he didn't think he had sustained a hit from one of those lights, either, because he had seen them retreat into the black curtain newspace had unexpectedly lowered.

Hadn't he?

Jack forced his eyes wide open. And kept seeing stars.

It was as though the retreating light tendrils had simply decided to hang themselves out there for his benefit.

"Uh, this is Red One," he said slowly. "Is anybody seeing what I'm seeing? I mean, is anybody, uh . . . "

Karen's face resolved on the tactical screen, but she didn't speak. She seemed to be staring off into space, and Jack had to call her several times before she responded.

"Jack, did you see it?" she said.

He exhaled in a relieved way. "I'm seeing stars if that's what you're talking about."

"But the way they got there, Jack ... It was like they just assembled themselves into constellations."

"Yeah, well, it's like Lang said. We were trapped in hyperspace, and now we're not." Jack gestured to the blackness outside the Alpha's cockpit. "That's real space out there, and those are stars. We're home, kid. Get used to the idea."

She looked directly at him. "You don't seriously believe that, do you?"

Jack fell silent for a moment. "No, I suppose I don't," he conceded, contemplating the view. "But I guess I'll take it over the alternative any day."

PART II

COHERENT LIGHT

CHAPTER TWELVE

The question of Professor Nichols's whereabouts during the years following the end of the Second Robotech War, including that period now referred to as the Occupation, remains a source of controversy. While it has been elsewhere demonstrated that he remained with Jonathan Wolff through March of 2033 (see Tasners Sheep in Wolves' Clothing), his subsequent alliances are more the product of conjecture than hard-earned investigative proof. However, based on evidence that links Nichols's associates (Gibley, Shi-Ling, Stirson, et al.) to the Yakuza organization that inherited the remains of Lang's Tokyo complex (see Makita and others), the author is of the opinion that Nichols somehow prevailed upon Wolff to furnish him with safe passage to Japan, where he, we know, was eventually located by intelligence operatives assigned to his case by the REF G2 chief, Niles Obstat.

From Ronstaad Irk's preface to the fourth edition of Nichols's Tripping the Light Fantastic

"I'm sorry I ever had to drag you into this . . .Ariel," Scott said, finally working up the courage to meet her gaze.

"Please don't make things worse," Marlene told him weakly. "And don't refer to me by that name, Scott. I'm Marlene. I have been since the day you found me."

Scott's nostrils flared. "You're not Marlene, damn it!" he cried, turning away from her. He stormed three steps toward her cabin's security door before swinging around. "You're Ariel, and the sooner you understand that, the better." He gestured offhandedly about the shipboard cell G2 had fashioned for her. "Why do you think you're locked up in here? This isn't some free ride. Intel's convinced you know where the Regis is. So put yourself in touch with your real self, Ariel. Tell them what they want, for your own sake." Marlene hung her head, waves of red hair falling forward to conceal hollow cheeks and colorless lips. "Don't you think I'm trying, Scott?" She lifted her face to him. "Look at me. Can't you see what this is doing to me?"

He didn't want to look, but when he did, he could not stop himself from hurrying to her and encircling her frail form with his arms. She was so pale, so thin. And he kept recalling Sera, wasting away in Lancer's bed. "Marlene," he whispered, rocking her gently back and forth. "Marlene . . . "

He had already been through the same argument just hour, earlier, shortly before the Ark Angel had folded from Earth space. Some numbnuts from G2 had given permission for Kurt and Lana Rush-the real Marlene's parents-to observe by remote, one of Obstat's brain probe sessions with Ariel. The Rushes had sought Scott out immediately afterward, understandably upset, visibly distressed and angered.

"How could you do this to us, Scott?" Lana had sobbed from the safety and comfort of her husband's thick arms "Even if Marlene was captured and conditioned by the Regis. Why couldn't you have left her alone? How could you let her be put through this hell?"

Scott had been dumbstruck. "But that's not your daughter," he had managed to reply. "That ... creature in there has green blood in its veins!"

He remembered Marlene's father taking a menacing step for ward, fists balled up. "Damn you for that, Bernard! " Rush had seethed. "I don't care what color they turned her blood and hair. I know my own daughter. That's Marlene your intel freaks are torturing with their devices. And you put her there!"

There had been no convincing them and, in the end, no way of convincing himself, either. Each day saw more and more of Marlene emerge in the simulagent, more and more of what had been Ariel submerge. And each day seemed to bring both personalities closer and closer to death.

Scott huddled with her on the cool floor of the cell, railing silently at the thought of losing her a second time.

"I'm going to try harder, Scott," Marlene said, full of false hope. "I know how much your friends mean to you and I desperately want to help you find them. You know I'd give up my life-"

"Don't," Scott said, stopping her. "I don't want to find them only to lose you in return. I'll help you. Maybe together. . ." She showed him a wan smile.

"We'll be on Haydon IV soon," he went on. "Exedore will have some answers for us, I'm sure of it. We've made a start, Marlene, that's what's important. We'll find the Regis. Even if we have to go back in time to do it."

In a spacious cabin aft of the Ark Angel's astrogation section, Louie Nichols locked his hands behind his head and leaned away from a screenful of hyperspace position grids and spacetime calculations. "Well, I think it's a righteous intro to interstellar travel," he told Harry Penn and Vince Grant. "I mean, I've heard of missing the hoverbus, but missing an entire planet. . . This is one for the record files."

Gibley and Strucker, two of the mohawked members of Nichols's team, laughed from their seats at the far end of the table, where they were headlocked into an interactive video comic book pulled up from the ship's entertainment mainframe. Gleaming interface plugs studded their cranial cyber-ports.

Penn, a curl to his upper lip, eyed the two with disdain, their tattoos, tight clothes, bad skin, and bad hair. Now that he had gotten to know Louie's team a little, he had decided they were as unappealing a lot as he had ever encountered. Video fiends and substance abusers, they related only to things they could plug themselves into. Despite all their ravings about artificial intellect and "machine mind," it was almost a pre-Protoculture, electronic age fascination that animated them.

The portly scientist cleared a low growl from his throat. "And I'm telling you we're exactly where we're supposed to be, Professor Nichols. If anything's missing, it's Haydon IV."

Nichols, grinning, put a hand to his round-leaned goggles as he peered over his shoulder at Penn. "Some wrinkle in the Newtonian universe, Doctor? A planet gets it in mind to leave orbit, and off it goes?"

Penn scratched at his beard." Need I remind you of some of the wonders we've experienced these past thirty years, Professor? Besides, with that world anything's possible."

Nichols smirked. "Relax, Harry. I'm sure your aim was true." His forefinger called up data on the touchscreen. "What we have here are indications of gravitational perturbations throughout this star system. So I believe it's safe to assume the planet has in fact vanished."

"But Cabell had been in communication with Exedore," Vince thought to point out. "There was nothing in his transmissions about . . . this."

"Then it's likely the event occurred recently," Nichols said: "Obviously within the past Earth-standard month."

"I concur," Penn said.

The bridge com-line tone sounded, and Vince leaned forward to respond.

"Receiving an urgent distress call, " his exec began. "Survivors from the Karbarran ship N'trpriz."

"Survivors? What happened?"

The line was quiet for a moment. "Sir, the N'trpriz was ordered to Haydon IV on an

extraction op. Seems that several hundred Karbarran traders were taken prisoner during the rebellion. "

Vince and Penn traded astonished looks. "What rebellion?" Penn demanded.

"It's unclear, Doctor. Apparently the Haydonites have risen up against the Awareness. Offworlders caught up in the rebellion have been transferred to subsurface confinement areas below what remains of Glike.

"This is madness," Vince said. "Ask them if the N'trpriz attempted to engage the planet."

"Affirmative, sir. N'trpriz was in communication with the surface when the planetary Awareness succeeded in arming the ship's auto-destruct systems." Grant's first officer paused momentarily. "The survivors claim to have jumped ship in an escape vehicle prior to detonation. They claim that the ships of their own battle group deserted them. "

Vince tightened his lips. "Tell them we're on our way to their position. But ask if they can give the approximate present location of Haydon IV."

"Negative, sir. They say no can do. "

"Why in heaven's name not?" Penn said.

"Response, sir: `Because Haydon IV executed a fold.'"

After rescuing the Karbarran survivors, the Ark Angel executed a jump of its own not, however, for the ursinoids' homeworld but for Fantoma's third moon, Tirol.

Scott had to call in most of the favors owed him to get himself included among the small landing party that was shuttled down to Tiresia. But the hassle was well worth it, if only for the quick ride through the city's streets to the Royal Hall, which still towered argent and pyramidal over the city scape like a holy mountain.

Otherwise, the place had changed dramatically in the three years since the Mars Group's departure. Scott had not been here for the return of Jonathan Wolff's starship, and with it the arrival of the 15th ATAC and the Tiresian clones they were conveying home. Nor had he been around for the first Flower of Life harvest on New Praxis or the development of Lang's facsimile Protoculture matrix, which had been left in Tiresia for safekeeping. That alone had returned enormous wealth and prosperity to Tirol, what with liberated worlds throughout the Local Group hungry anew for interstellar transports and, inexpensive but efficient sources of energy to assist in the mammoth task of reconstruction. Most of the actual manufacturing of ships and machines had been farmed out to Karbarra, but it was Tirol that had reaped the rewards. The moon had become a kind of cultural crossroads,

almost on a par with Haydon IV in the trafficking of information and construction techniques.

Thus, Tiresia's public buildings and housing structures sparkled like gems in an emerald setting. Under REF supervision, the clones and indigs had irrigated and terraformed the city's once-denuded outskirts, and while a Rome-analogue look had been preserved in places, reconfigurable stadiums and ultratech high rises dominated the skyline.

Scott's parents, both of whom were engineers largely responsible for the rebuilding of Mars Sara Base, were among a group of Terran settlers and exiled Ghost Squadron pilots who had elected to remain on Tirol. He was eager to see them again, plans for a meet having already been firmed up during a short ship-to-surface conversation earlier on.

Cabell-the bald and bearded wizard who had seemed such a sinister figure to an eleven-year-old Scott Bernard-was on hand to welcome the landing party and escort them, in a caravan of surface-effect vehicles, to that part of the Royal Hall given over to Local Group affairs. There, Vince and Jean Grant, Harry Penn, and the rest were greeted by planetary envoys from Karbarra, New Praxis, Spheris, Garuda, Peryton, and several emerging worlds once dominated by the Robotech Masters and Invid that had never been visited by the Sentinels.

The Haydonite foreign minister and the whole of the ambassadorial legation had been placed in custody.

"They haven't revealed so much as a thought since their arrest," Scott heard Cabell inform Vince while a Karbarran representative had the chamber's floor. "And of course we know of no way to force them to send. I'm certain they've fallen victim to the same programming that has set their homeworld in motion."

"First the Invid, then the SDF-3, now Haydon IV," Jean whispered back.

Cabell nodded, flaring white eyebrows bobbing. "And these disappearances are only the beginning."

"How so?" Vince asked.

The Tiresian voiced a note of frustration. "The very fabric of the continuum has been affected in some way. It would require a complex array of instruments and measuring devices to demonstrate my findings. But I will say this much: Our universe appears to be shrinking."

Penn blanched. "But-"

"Wait." Cabell cut him off, holding up a graceful hand. "Hear this one out."

There was commotion on the floor. Scott saw that the Karbarran who had been growling demands at everyone had been issued a message of some sort and was pacing before the amphitheater seats, waving the crumpled thing overhead in a clenched paw-hand.

"Let it be known to all members of the Local Group that Karbarra is fully prepared to go to war unless reparations are made for the capture of our citizens and the destruction of three of our vessels."

The audience of diplomats and staffers muttered among themselves.

"And how many more ships will you have to lose before you see the error of interference?" a Spherisian shouted from the hall's upper tier.

"The next time it won't be a single ship but a fleet we commit," the Karbarran snapped.

"Fleets have been destroyed in the past, Nal," a Praxian said.

"Legends," Nal scoffed. "Karbarra has outgrown such things."

"And Karbarra would like nothing better than to see Haydon IV added to its growing list of indentured worlds," sneered someone from the Perytonian contingent. "You try the patience of the committee, Nal."

Nal gestured with a paw-hand. "Such accusations from the chief debtor world in the Local Group. Peryton tries our patience, Minister Marak."

"Silence! All of you," Cabell said loudly enough to quiet a score of separate arguments that had broken out. He looked to Nal. "Talk of reprisals and reparations is not only premature but pointless, given the fact that Haydon IV has managed to elude us. I strongly suggest-"

"No longer, Tiresian!" Nal waved the message sheet in Cabell's direction. "Our recon forces report that Haydon IV has emerged from fold and inserted itself in orbit around Ranaath's Star. "

"Ranaath?! " Cabell said, struggling to his feet. "Are you certain of this?"

"Our reconnaissance forces pride themselves on their accuracy," Nal told him.

"But Ranaath is a ... black hole system," Cabell said for the benefit of the Terran contingent. He had yet to tell Penn or Grant about Exedore's determination that Ranaath had been at the receiving end of the energy pulse that had accompanied the Invid departure. "Why would the Haydonites willingly place themselves in such a godforsaken place?"

Nal folded powerful-looking arms across his massive chest. "We'll be sure to ask them," he said, hurling the message b the floor and storming from the room.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

At 66:18:740, Commander in Chief Dolza committed the last of the Golthano Fleet ships to the dark maw of Ranaath's Star, and once more the ships were torn asunder by (translator's insert: tidal forces encountered at the event horizon). Losses to this date number 670 ships, 42,000 Zentraedi lives. It would appear that the Zentraedi ships are of insufficient durability to negotiate penetration of the (horizon) or the (realm jump) that is a suggested probability should such a penetration be effected. Be aware that Commander Khyron of the Botoru Battalion is fully prepared to undertake the next attempt. He would have it made known to you that he in fact requests to be afforded the honor.

Exedore, in a communique to the Robotech Masters, as quoted by Rawlins in his Zentraedi Triumvirate: Dolza, Breetai, Khyron

Max Sterling watched Exedore play the console Veidt had delivered to their cell, stubby fingers pecking away at command keys. To offset any suspicion that the furtive delivery might have aroused among level four's cadre of humorless, hovering overseers, the terminal had been designed to include an archaic touchpad. The armless Haydonites had no call for such a tedious approach, and in truth neither did Exedore, who had grown accustomed to the Awareness data lab's neural headbands. The console consequently resembled nothing so much as a child's learning aid, which was exactly what the jailers were meant to make of it. To buoy the ploy, Aurora was seated alongside Exedore, ostensibly under the Zentraedi's tutelage, issuing appropriate sounds of excitement and discovery as the screen displayed responses to Exedore's prompts.

Miriya and Dana were in the Praxians' quarters, trying to reassure the four Amazons that Veidt's sudden turnaround was genuine.

Well, Miriya was, Max thought. Dana was probably encouraging everyone to tunnel beneath the walls.

The former Skull Squadron ace found himself thinking about twentieth-century prison escapes as he cast a wary eye at the cell's laser-barred threshold. It had been pastry surprises back then, files and hacksaw blades concealed in cakes and long loaves of bread. But breakouts now required break-ins of a sort, direct data links to the security system's keymaster-in this instance, Haydon IV's artificial sentience, the Awareness.

Exedore voiced a plosive sound of frustration. "Another mistake. My fingers have forgotten just who it is that does the thinking for them. They seem convinced they have a mind of their own."

"Take your time," Max advised under his breath. "Remember, you're supposed to be a teacher, not some interloper. "

"Teachers have been known to lose patience," Exedore retorted. "In any event, keeping watch on the front door such as it is-does little more than draw attention to us. I suggest to you that the Haydonites would have filled these rooms with monitoring devices if they for one moment suspected wed be foolish enough to attempt an escape."

Max glanced at the alloy partitions and ceilings. Veidt had been responsible, too, for the holo-views that adorned the long, rear walls-vistas of rolling hills crisscrossed with hedgerows and low stone walls. A sun shone in the false sky, rising and setting in breathtaking colors; if nothing else, it had at least returned the captives to a semblance of circadian normalcy. Max sometimes felt as though he were back in the SDF-1, carousing after a mission with Rick and Ben in downtown Macross under EVE'S projected cloudscape.

And there he was, the only full-blooded Terran in the room. "I'm certain of one thing," Exedore resumed. "Haydon IV has defolded."

"I guessed as much," Max told him, gratified that he could still rely on his own senses to differentiate between real time and hyperspace. "Can you find out where we are?"

"I have already established that. Although I'll confess I should have suspected it all along."

Max laid a protective hand on Aurora's shoulder; the doe eyed child looked up at him and smiled as Exedore took a deep breath.

"We are inserted in orbit around a small, carbonaceous moon that circles this system's sixth planet-an equally desolate place, I might add. The Zentraedi knew the system's dying primary as Qalliph, a word approximated by the Panglish term dread."

Max raised an eyebrow. "Go on."

"Actually, it isn't so much the star itself that inspired the name but the phenomenon to which it in turn pays gravitational obeisance. The Masters named it Raanath's Star, after an especially barbaric warlord from Tirol's pre-Transition past. Your own astrophysicists have labeled such phenomena black holes."

Max whistled lightly. "I've always wanted to get a look at one of those things."

Exedore frowned at him. "Yes, I recall from my delvings into Terran literature that your race has endowed these black holes with near-mystical importance. This was especially true among your so-called science fiction writers, I believe. A blend of romantic fascination

and morbid curiosity. But I can assure you, as one who has seen an entire battle group swallowed by these sinister portals, that even the most ghoulish of your imaginings doesn't come close to detailing the horrors of the experience."

"So what are we doing here?" Max asked after a moment of nightmare reflection.

Exedore did input at the console, then studied the displayed results in silence. "The reason is twofold. First, I believe that we-Haydon IV, that is-are in pursuit of the energy pulse that originated in Earthspace with the Invid defeat. Based on the results of my previous investigations, I posited that Ranaath's Star was the terminus of that pulse.

"Second, Haydon IV is apparently making use of radiation bleeding from the collapsed star, but to what purpose I cannot fathom. The Awareness has also issued a series of commands to the planetary drives, which will soon bring us dangerously close to the cratered satellite we have been orbiting." Exedore regarded Aurora but continued to address Max. "An external view would be most helpful, but I have yet to determine whether visual data are available. The Awareness had been operating in a purely abstract mode."

Max was just beginning to reply when Dana burst upon the scene.

"You can put away the toy," she directed to Exedore. "Unless you can use it to find out whether the Awareness believes in an afterlife." Exedore cocked an eyebrow.

Miriya was only a few steps behind, wearing the worried look she reserved for her eldest child.

"The Praxians have worked out a wall-tapping commo code with the Karbarrans next door," Dana explained. "Seems one of the jailers let it slip that a Karbarran recon vessel homed in on our new address and radioed a burst transmission to Karbarra. Since then, a fleet of Local Group battleships has folded from Tirol. They're due any hour now." Max searched his wife's face.

"It's true, Max," Miriya said. "At least that's what they told us. The Karbarran prisoners claim to have discovered some way to override the threshold confinement lasers as well. They're prepared to ready a full-scale revolt as soon as the battle group arrives and the attack commences."

"But they've already lost three ships," Exedore reminded everyone. Beside him, Aurora had reached a hand over to enter a command into the console.

"They'll never learn," Max said absently, monitoring Aurora's movements peripherally.

"Yeah, well, a fleet can do a lot more damage than a single ship," Dana argued, hands on

her hips. "I say we throw in with the Karbarrans. Anything's better than being cooped up in here."

"An uprising would prove a terrible mistake," Aurora interjected quietly.

It was as though an oracle had spoken. Exedore swiveled in his seat, but something on the display screen caught his attention and brought him up short.

"Figures you'd say that," Dana replied uncertainly.

"You must tell them to be patient, sister," Aurora added in the same assured tone. "The Karbarrans must wait until the Awareness is preoccupied."

"Preoccupied how?" Dana wanted to know.

"Here!" Exedore said, an unsteady index finger aimed at the monitor.

Max narrowed his eyes as a series of complex schematics flashed on-screen.

Dana got a grip on the Zentraedi's shoulder. "Don't go mute on us now, Exedore, or I'll-"

"It's changing," he said before she could complete the threat. "The entire planet. Haydon IV is reconfiguring!"

"The second star to the right?" Rick asked, wondering when he had heard the phrase before. "Why that one?" Lang's broad shoulders heaved. "It's the closest. It appears to be, I should say. Light seems to enjoy playing games with itself in this place. One moment the star lies directly along our course, the next it doesn't. One moment it's effectively beyond reach, the next at our bow." The scientist gestured to the engineering room's tablescreen. "You see! There it changes again. As if it were compensating for the deficiency of our drive system or trying to decide just where to locate itself." He shook his head. "What's the sense of trying to discover the essential mechanics of this realm where there is nothing immutable to measure against?"

Several theories had been advanced when the fog of newspace had lifted and distant stars had appeared, all of which had since been quickly overruled by updated findings: The SDF-3 had not been returned to hyperspace, nor had it manifested from fold somewhere in the intergalactic void.

According to some, however, the present darkness was but the afterlife tunnel itself, and next would come encounters with deceased relatives and shadowy presences.

Many, in fact, had already begun to review their lives. Screen-weary, Rick was massaging

his eyes with his fingertips. Here was a universe to behold from the viewports, but to hear Lang tell it, the stars might as well have been insubstantial. Rem was standing behind the two of them, silently brooding.

Lang said, "We train our scopes on the farthest reaches, millions of parsecs distant, and what do we find?"

Rick waited, then realized that he was supposed to answer. "Uh, I don't know. What do we get?"

"Stars literally winking into existence." Lang punched a scancorder's playback bar. Eyes on the monitor again, Rick felt as though he were soaring over the crest of an invisible hill to watch stars appear on the horizon.

"Maybe we're inside some sort of torus," he ventured. "Our motion's a continuous curve instead of the straight line we perceive."

Lang's upper teeth were bared when he turned Rick an over-the-shoulder look.

Rick felt skewered. "It was only a suggestion."

"Of course," Lang said with unconcealed condescension. All at once Rick was aware of Rem's breath on the back of his neck. "Are you just going to stand there?" he asked, adopting Lang's curdled expression as he swung around.

"I have nothing to add," Rem told him.

Rick inclined his head to one side. "Rumor has it you blacked out when the lights hit us."

Lang twisted around in his chair. "I heard nothing of this." The Tiresian regarded them coolly. "Minmei exaggerates. We unfortunately found ourselves at a nexus point. The experience was somewhat overwhelming. I may have lost consciousness, but only for a moment."

Lang traded looks with Rick. "Why didn't you report this?" Rick pressed.

Rem shrugged. "There was nothing to report. A slight feeling of dissociation, not altogether unpleasant."

Rick regarded him for a long moment. "The next time you lend yourself at the center of something, Rem, you come to tell us about it. That's an order."

Jack gave the Alpha's thinking cap an angry toss as he combed from the cockpit. The

sensitive helmet struck the forward seat with an audible thud and drew the attention of a burly flight mechanic who was standing nearby.

"You wanna watch that, sir," the man said as Jack dropped to the deck. "Next time your bird's not answerin', you know why, right?"

Jack considered making an issue of it but in the end apologized. "I'll watch it."

"That'd be smart, Cap'ain."

Everybody's a goddamn expert, Jack thought, striding away. Command when they order you not to engage, mechies when they're telling you how to care for your gear. And Sean and the rest of the 15th jockeys when they're telling you how to pilot your craft.

Captain Phillips was approaching from across the hangar bay, Dante and Marie Crystal on either side. Jack looked around for Karen, but she was nowhere in sight. So I'll go it alone.

"That was some soarin' there, hotshot," Sean began. "Where'd you think you were, in an air circus?"

"And I suppose you had the whole thing sussed, is that it, Phillips?"

"At least we knew enough to go to Battloid, Jack," Marie interjected.

Jack glared at her. "Enough to go to Battloid? That was the most asinine thing I've ever seen. Even a VT cadet knows better than to go upright when going to lasers. It's not only a waste of fuel but a wasted thought. I don't know if that kind of stunt flying cut it against the Masters-personally, I doubt it-but this is null-g, folks. I mean, you Troopers better get your exo shit together if you're gonna stay with the program."

The three ex-tankers exchanged wide-eyed looks.

"Can you believe this guy?" Sean said. "He goes in teats up, belly lasers engaged-full retro, mind you-and he's got the nerve to rag us about stunt flying?"

Jack fumed. It was the same argument they had been having for two years. Of course there had been no missions to fly all that time, so the competition had to be saved for practice runs with green cadets outside Tirol's envelope or the occasional deep-space prototype of off the Ark Angel. Then there were the nights on leave when things got roughneck and rowdy downside in some Tiresian canteen. But what else could you expect from mechamorphs who had suddenly been plucked from combat and practically returned to school when they were not drawing watch assignments in ordnance factories or on some Karbarran-manufactured peat-cruisers?

"I'm gonna have to trim your course some, Phillips," Jack said. menacingly.

Sean motioned his teammates back and set himself in a bent-knee stance. He curled his fingers at Jack. "Come on, then, Jack. Make your move."

Jack really had not expected things to go that far but clearly realized there was no backing down. "Suit yourself, Sean," he said, about to raise his fists.

"That'll be quite enough of that," a voice said loudly enough to bring everyone around. Jack thought for a moment that Karen was coming to his six, but one look at her face told him he was flying blind.

"This is positively the most pathetic excuse for a debriefing I've ever witnessed."

"We weren't exactly debriefing, sir," Dante started to say.

"That's right," Sean said with a glowering glance at Jack. "It was more in the way of comparing styles."

Marie said, "Look, Karen, we were just-"

"Maybe you've forgotten that we lost several good pilots out there, is that it?" She shook her head in disapproval. Real heroes, all of you."

"Jeez, Karen," Jack said with a hangdog look.

"Save it," she told him.

"How are they being listed, sir?" Angelo Dante asked softly as Karen was about to walk away.

She turned to face him. "A new classification to suit our situation, Sergeant Dante. Neither killed in action nor missing and presumed dead."

"How then, sir?"

"Presumed missing, " she told him.

Elsewhere in the superdimensional fortress, retired 15th Corporal Bowie Grant was making music.

The return of the stars, the lightstuff of real space, had proved something of an inspiration for Bowie and his female lead singer. Musica and Allegra-two of the clone population

Jonathan Wolff's starship had returned to Tirol-and they were trying out their gifts on a new composition when Minmei's quiet entrance into the music room startled them into silence.

"I-I didn't mean to disturb you," she said. Bowie was speechless.

"I just wanted to listen for a moment."

"C-come in, please," Bowie stammered. The two clones, poised like museum statuary on either side of his rack of Boards, regarded him with bemused expressions.

Their sister in the triumvirate, had died on Earth, Musica's mystical rapport with the Cosmic Harp-an instrument whose melodies had once given shape and effect to the telepathic power of the Robotech Masters-had died too. But Musica's voice was more alive than ever, as was Allegra's, and together their harmonies came close to recalling for Bowie the magic of his first taste of that ethereal sound.

He had been a keyboard artist then, masquerading as a tanker, just another artist caught up in the war. But he had been lucky enough to emerge from it with his creative impulses intact, and love to boot. Love for Musica: his pale and slender green-haired muse, his vocal accompaniment, his very life. Even limboed in newspace, they had each other, the separate world created and sustained by their music.

For years Bowie had tried with synthesizers and samplers to play the part of their missing third. But a rendering, an interpretation was the best that had been achieved. Oh, the harmonies might sound pleasing to an audience of untrained ears, but for those lucky enough to have experienced the triumvirate songs, the reconstructions were as far from the pure as Lang's facsimile matrix was from Zor's original creation.

Missing in both cases was some immeasurable emotional component, the true conjurer's magical touch. Lang lacked it, and Rem as well. And Bowie, for all the love that went into his work, simply could not push the compositions over the top. In the end what the trio had had to settle for was virtuosity, when the goal had been transcendence.

What they lacked was a voice: powerful, heartfelt, sublime. Minmei was possessed of the gift, and countless times the past two years Bowie had wished that she might sing again. Now, suddenly, there she was standing in the music room's curved hatchway.

"You really want to listen?" Bowie asked as the hatch hissed closed.

Minmei approached the keyboards tentatively, as though afraid of them somehow. "Well, more than listen, really." She pressed a finger down on a black key. "Is it true you've learned to play some of Octavia's vocal parts?"

Bowie looked up at her. "Yeah, I have. Sort of. I mean, I sampled her voice before she ...

died." He gestured to one of the keyboards. "Electronics do most of the real work. But we can't get the harmonics Octavia's voice used to create." Minmei paused to consider that, then smiled lightly at the sister clones. "Do the three of you ever ... well, do you ever sing any of the ancient Tiresian psalms?"

"The Clonemasters' songs?" Musica asked.

Minmei bit her lower lip and shook her head. "No. I was thinking of the psalms from the early days, before the Great Transition."

Allegra looked surprised. "You know something of our ancient culture, Minmei?"

"Some," she confessed. "I read quite a bit when I was in Tiresia." In the hospital, she left unsaid. "And of course Rem talks about those times."

The sister clones eyed one another.

"So, you'd like us to sing one of the old psalms?" Bowie said uncertainly into the silence.

Minmei fingered a minor chord. "Actually, Bowie, I was wondering if you could teach me some of Octavia's parts."

Lisa hurried through the ship's corridors, returning salutes when she was forced to but primarily attempting to avoid everyone's gaze. Not that she heard so much as a giggle from the crew, but she knew what they were all thinking.

She huffed to herself as she exited the lift on the med deck. One did not have to be a telepath to read the expressions of concealed amusement, to take note of the near smiles.

She came through the hatch to the nursery's observation room with fire in her eyes, the anger palpable enough to be seen clear across the room by the on-duty pediatric nurse and child-care staff.

"Sir?" the nurse asked cautiously after springing to attention.

Lisa threw everyone a cold, appraising look. "Which one of you made the PA announcement?"

A small hand went up, and a corporal stepped sideways into view from the rear of the group. "I did, sir?" the young staffer said in a tone that modulated to falsetto.

Lisa coughed into her hand, suppressing a smile. "Now hear this, mister. When my

presence is required or requested, can send a courier or you can key into my command channel. But I don't ever-repeat: ever-want to hear a call that over the PA again. Is that understood?"

Yes, sir," the corporal returned crisply.

"`Admiral wanted in the nursery'" Lisa muttered to herself. "Remember, all of you, we have to at least pretend that I'm running this ship. That I'm not just some working mom fitting a job around child rearing."

"Sir!" said several voices in unison.

Lisa adopted a theatrically firm expression. "Good. NOW what's all this about?"

"The children, Admiral," the nurse said, indicating the nursery's one-way observation window.

Lisa stepped over to have a look, a puzzled frown contorting her features. Roy and a couple of human toddlers, along with Drannin and the rest of the Zentraedi children, were assembled in what was called the 'creative crafts area,' where a sphere a good fifteen feet around had been fashioned out of extruded plastifoam. Lisa could see that some sort of hinges were inset along the equator of the sphere.

"They didn't do all that by themselves, did they?" she asked in alarm.

The corporal shook his head. "No, sir. They asked for our help with the ... globe or whatever it is. But they told us exactly what they wanted."

"I take it it opens somehow."

The head nurse chuckled. "It does indeed, Admiral." Lisa regarded the two of them.

"What's inside?"

"The most amazing thing," the nurse said, enunciating each word. "They've been working on it all day long, every one pitching in. The Zentraedi doing the heavy work, Roy directing the other kids in the fine work. But with barely word exchanged among them. It's like they knew from the start what they were after."

Lisa felt a chill run through her. "And what is it?"

The nurse looked to the corporal, who drew a breath "Their own version of a puzzle block or a transformable toy. Made entirely out of what they could salvage from other toys except for a few items they asked us to procure: springs cams, lubricants, that sort of

thing."

"Lubricants?! You should be in there supervising them."

"We tried that, Admiral," the nurse said. "But they stop playing whenever anyone enters the nursery. Frankly, sir, find it a little, well, unnerving. That's why I asked you down."

Lisa folded her arms, considering. "I think it's time we found out just what they're up to." She spun on her heel and stepped to the nursery door. "I'm going inside," she told the staff, one hand already on the knob.

In a silent and deserted corridor on the recreation deck, Rem pressed an ear against the hatch to Bowie's music room. He had promised Minmei he would wait until conditions were right before attempting to reachieve the altered state of mind that had gripped him when the lights had penetrated the fortress, but walking past the music room had proved too great a temptation.

Rem understood that the nucleic memories awakened by those probing lights were not his own but Zor's-Zor's to a degree he had never experienced. Not at the insistence of the Regent and Haydon IV's mind-bending devices, not with Cabell's guidance, not under the influence of dried Flowers from Optera's regrown gardens. The lights-and whatever intellect animated them-had accomplished something perilously wonderful by unveiling the sensate content of his progenitor's experiences. And though the lights had vanished, perhaps never to reappear, they had left an open frequency to his other self.

He ventured that he needed only attune himself to that unacommon freq and the flood of psychoid stuff would recommence. And with it, answers to just where the fortress was and for what purpose it had been brought there.

Reluctantly, Minmei had agreed to assist him. The clones' songs will provide the prompt I require, he had told her. But how much greater the effect if the triumvirate's harmonies could be reinstated! For Minmei it would mean coming out of voluntary retirement, facing fear, relocating the voice that had worked miracles.

And Rem could hear that voice now, muted by distance and inch-thick alloy. Bowie's synthesizer was teaching her a vocal line, a measured, seemingly impossible leap of octaves. Minmei sang and Rem grinned: Yes, yes!

"All right," Bowie said. "Let's see what happens." The three singers joined voices.

And a spike of pure light pierced Rem's mind.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I must admit that even I am somewhat stunned by the sudden reappearance of this comforting darkness and these distant stars, because I cannot help but recall what I said to Hunter that day in engineering: What would you have me do-fashion you a galaxy? Words to that effect, at any rate. Hunter, as usual, didn't know how to take the remark. But could it be that I have actually succeeded in doing just that? Has the Protoculture finally endowed me with the ability to Shape, as Zand always maintained it would? And what, then, becomes my next move? Do I impost my will on the laws of this domain or simply think into being a world for us to orbit?

Dr. Emil Lang, The New Testament

Scanners indicate a profusion of life-forms, m'lord, Vard had told him. Perhaps this one will prove out treasure trove, eh?

Zor could not recall his reply now-a glance, a glower, some noncommittal sound. It was true that treasures were sometimes found or discovered, but most often they were the end result of greed, plunder, willful extraction . . . "Which is it that you hold in store for us?" he asked an arc of reflected light outside the viewport. "A discovery that will reward us with wealth and fame, the accolades of our distant fathers? Or a world that will bring out the worst in us, a world for the taking?"

The planet was the fifth of this star the charts called Tzuptum, a lush wanderer with a single oblate moon to light its night skies. Zor had a preference for such celestial partnerships and shivered thinking of Tirol's long night, Fantoma's oppressive proximity. It was not fitting for sentient creatures to be so overruled, rotated in the shadow of something monstrously huge. Thought and contemplation required a more subtle interplay of forces: of winds and tides and natural rhythms. In the absence of that grew an urge to dominate, to absorb the power of that larger other, to extend influence in the basest of manners, to conquer all that would threaten to overshadow . . .

He brought his face close to the hull's transparency, as though his eyes could tell him something the scanners could not. But what was there to discern from up here? he asked himself. Hailings had gone unanswered, and yet there was, as Vard had indicated, abundant life of a complex sort. So the planet's life forms were either pretechnological or atechnological. Primitive was the operative classification used by the ship's cyber-networks, but Zor knew better than to accept that as in any way descriptive.

Maybe they are right not to respond to us, he thought. Their way of saying they want no part of whatever it is we are offering ... But something told him there was more to it than that. From somewhere within him arose a belief that the dominant life forms on this world were simply too self-involved to answer. That deep in the dense forests below, an experiment of grand design was taking shape. And perhaps even now those beings were cursing their misfortune, decrying the fact that in this vast universe someone had found

them-had found them out!

The dropships were standing by, Vard was telling him from the hatchway. With hailings still unacknowledged, ship's General Command was recommending accompaniment by surface-effect drones and a full complement of armed Troopers. What General Command called standard operating procedures.

The method had been utilized on dozens of worlds to no lasting ill effect, but Zor could not suppress a feeling that such techniques might prove calamitous here. He could argue the point, of course, but Command would ultimately have its way.

He turned to give the planet one final look before following Vard out into the corridor. In place of the anticipation he normally felt prior to a drop came apprehension.

"You are from this day forward changed," he said aloud, uncertain whether his words were

directed to the planet or to himself...

Rem had been found lying unconscious in a rec-level corridor.

And Dr. Wenslow, astrogation's wide-scope expert, had detected a planet orbiting Lang's indecisive second star from the right.

The two messages had arrived simultaneously in Lang's lower deck study, where Rick and the scientist were still poring over star charts and indices. While Rick attended to the former, Lang linked systems with Wenslow to see for himself just what was out there.

"We've got him down in med lab, sir," a female lieutenant named Clay reported over the intercom.

"Any idea what caused it?" Rick asked.

"Not yet, sir. He was found outside the music room." Rick checked a half-formed expletive. Music room, he thought. This was the "emergency" he had excused himself for a little over an hour ago?

"He was alone? No one else around?"

The lieutenant cleared her throat. "Mister Grant and Miss Minmei were inside the room, sir. But they apparently had no knowledge of Rem's presence."

"Minmei?" Rick said. "She was there?"

"Yes, sir. Singing, sir."

Rick's mouth fell open. "You must have gotten that part of it wrong, Lieutenant."

"I don't think so, sir. She was singing with Mister Grant and the two Tiresian women. "

Rick pushed a hand through his long hair. What the hell was happening to his ship? he wondered. What had this place-those lights-done to everyone? He exhaled slowly and brought out his command voice. "Lieutenant, I want you to find some excuse for keeping Rem under close medical observation for the next, let's say, two hours." Rick glanced at his watch. "He is not to be released until 1900 hours."

"Yes, sir.

Rick patched himself through to security next and instructed the chief of station there that Rem's whereabouts were to be discreetly monitored at all times until further notice.

"And have someone keep an eye on Minmei as well," he added as an afterthought.

That much accomplished, he turned to Lang, who favored him with an enigmatic smile.

"We've actually got ourselves a planet?" Rick said.

Lang shrugged. "It would appear so." He activated a screen on his desk and beckoned Rick over. "Polar caps, mountain ranges, a verdant equatorial belt, Earthlike atmospheric conditions . . . Custom-made for us, wouldn't you agree?"

Rick raised an eyebrow, one hand flat on the intercom control panel again. "Yeah, a little too custom-made," he started to say as the bridge responded.

"Bridge, Commander Forsythe."

"Raul, Hunter. Put me through to Lisa, would you?"

"Sorry, Rick. She's not here. You might check the nursery." Rick felt his face flush. Another "emergency," no doubt,

like Rem's need for a stroll around the ship and Minmei's sudden urge to sing. "Raul, what the hell is going on around here? Is everybody going space-happy? Who's running this ship, anyway?"

Forsythe was quiet for a moment. "Which question do you want me to respond to first, Rick?"

Rick let out an exasperated sigh. "Skip it, Raul. Just stand by for new course headings.

And when the admiral returns, tell her I want to see her in the briefing room, ASAP."

Forsythe signed off, and Rick swung back to Lang. "Suggestions, Doctor?"

"I suppose it could be a trap of some sort, an attempt to lure us in," Lang began. "But I don't see that we have much choice. If the planet is inhabited in addition to being hospitable, we stand a chance of learning a bit about this place, perhaps even a way out of it. Certainly more than we'll learn from these stars something has seen fit to provide."

Rick studied Lang's expression. "You're serious about that, aren't you?"

Lang nodded.

"All right. Instruct astrogation to plot us a course in."

While reflex drives were carrying the SDF-3 toward a planet that had seemingly leapt into existence only moments before, the Ark Angel, recently reemerged in normal space, was bearing down on a world that had traveled hundreds of thousands of parsecs to settle itself on the dark edge of annihilation.

The Terran legation had tried to convince Karbarra to stay its warlike hand, if only until Haydon IV had a chance to respond to the charges brought against it. In this, the Ark Angel promised to act as intermediary and arbiter. But it had been plain that Karbarra was out for more than blood vengeance. The ursinoids had agreed not to obstruct Earth's representatives from communicating with the Haydonites but had assured everyone that a flotilla of Karbarran ships would be folding at the Ark Angel's stern and that any hostility Haydon IV directed against them would be met in kind.

Vince, Jean, Harry Penn, Scott, Cabell, and Nichols and his interface addict associates had passed most of the journey from Tirol gathered in the starship's situation room, discussing strategic options and speculating on the SDF-3's present whereabouts.

Scott, his body hot-wired on an assortment of liquid stimulants, thought he might simply spontaneously combust before the session ended. The brief reunion with his parents had only aggravated the concern he felt for his missing friends, and to top that off he had finally taken his tortuous relationship with Marlene to its predictable conclusion.

Back on the Angel after the nearly disastrous summit in Tiresia, he had gone to her cell-against his better judgment-where one thing had led to another, and had ultimately found the two of them pressed against a spot of bulkhead inaccessible to the prying eyes of the security cams, making love with animal intensity. Green blood or no, Marlene was a woman of human needs and passions. And while Scott was still deliciously dazed from their sensual intertwining, the encounter had left him more confused than ever.

"I'm sorry to make it sound like this, Cabell," Vince was saying, "but we didn't make the jump from Earth to get ourselves entangled in Local Group affairs. We came back for the SDF-3, not to assist Karbarra in its push for control of the spaceways."

Cabell's clear eyes narrowed. "Perhaps not, Commander, but I suggest the time has arrived for Earth to consider itself part of the Local Group. After all, it was at the insistence of your Plenipotentiary Council that this war machine was built to begin with."

The Terrans waited.

"I would point out to you that the SDF-3 had the capacity to fold to Earth shortly after the end of the Sentinels' campaign. You could have returned then, with the Local Group's blessings and thanks, instead of anchoring yourself in Tirol pace for an additional three years."

Vince snorted. "Embark on a five-year voyage to find our homeworld occupied by the Invid Regis?"

"So you chose to defeat her in a war," Cabell said in a casual way. "The result is the same. You perhaps succeeded in chasing her off, but at what cost? The fleet you labored to construct is gone, atomized. Your planet is devastated. And your philosophy of answering might with might has had a telling effect on the Local Group worlds." The Tiresian raised an accusatory finger. "You knew full well when you left Tirol what you had set in motion on Karbarra."

Scott was grateful for the momentary silence that followed Cabell's remarks. On the voyage out from Earth, Vince had brought him up to date on Local Group grudges, but Scott had not expected the once morose Karbarrans to be so radically affected by their recent economic windfalls. And aside from problems of a localized sort, there were, to hear Cabell and Nichols tell it, problems in the grand scheme of things as well. Scott could not follow half the mathematical proofs the scientists had offered up as evidence, but something had apparently worked a bit of underhanded universal micro/macro magic, tugging matter in both realms just that much closer together. Cabell had even said something about pulsar stars disappearing entirely a "Big Crunch" in the working.

"I don't see what Karbarra or Haydon IV's got to do with us," Scott interjected. "General Grant's already said it, Cabell: It's the Regis we're after."

Scott noticed Nichols and Cabell trade looks.

"We were hoping you could update us on that score, Colonel," Nichols said at last.

"Me? How so?"

"Well, you've been having intimate ... discussions with her agent, haven't you?" Nichols asked. "We thought maybe Marlene had told you something in confidence."

Scott's face went crimson. He might have known it was not that easy to get around the security cams in Marlene's cell. "She hasn't told me anything," Scott muttered, eyes averted from the table.

Nichols made a dismissive motion. "All the more reason for communicating with Haydon IV, then."

"If we only knew more about the descendants of Haydon," Jean said.

Cabell looked at her. "Descendants of Haydon? Surely you don't mean Veidt's brethren?"

The expression on Jean's brown face flattened. "Well, yes, I did. "

"The beings we call Haydonites," Cabell said, "bear no more relation to Haydon than do Karbarrans, Praxians, or any other Local Group race." He caught sight of Jean's puzzled look and added, "Perhaps I should explain."

Vince said, "Perhaps you should."

Cabell rubbed the side of his nose. "The one we call Haydon is thought to have been a member of an ancient, highly evolved spacefaring group, whose collective name-if indeed they possessed one-has not been passed down to us. Nor, for that matter, can we be certain that `Haydon' was the name applied to a single entity or the group itself.

"Jean, Vince, Scott, you have all seen some of the shrines erected to Haydon, and certainly you recall how dissimilar they are to one another, save for their age and gargantuan size. But not one is believed to represent Haydon as a living being."

"But there has to be some record of him, or them," Jean said. "Instruments, tools, artifacts, that sort of thing." Cabell chuckled to himself. "You're familiar with Garudans, Praxians, Karbarrans, and such, are you not?"

Jean nodded.

"Well, Haydon's handiwork is these very races." Cabell adjusted the high collar of his cloak. "You see, each planetary race was in a sense `altered' by Haydon. And each perpetuated Haydon in a form appropriate to their own world view. So one hears Spherisians speak of `the Great Shaper' or Karbarrans mention `the Great Augury," when in effect they are all talking about the same entity or group."

Cabell shook his head in a self-amused way. "Where that group came from we cannot begin to guess. But from myths, legends, and fanciful historical accounts that have been handed down to us emerge 'through a glass darkly,' if I may borrow a Terran phrase-two versions of the final days of Haydon's race. In one we are told that they were on the threshold of an incredible turning point in self-generated evolution when they were destroyed in some catastrophe their own tamperings may inadvertently have brought about."

"And the second?" Nichols asked.

Cabell let out his breath. "In the light of recent developments, this version is by far the more interesting. For it suggests that the race did not vanish-though we are so led to believe-but placed itself in a state of what I once heard Dr. Lang refer to as suspended animation."

"We're all familiar with the term, Cabell," Vince assured him. "But what are these . . .

geniuses supposed to be waiting for?"

"An event," Cabell said with a faraway look. "A cosmic event that would alter the fabric of spacetime."

Nichols gaped at the Tiresian from across the table. "The Invid," he said, gazing at everyone. "Don't you get it? Their mating with the Protoculture, their transubstantiation. That's what Haydon's race was waiting for."

He threw his head back and laughed. "They're getting ready to wake up. They're figuring on hooking onto the Invid phoenix and following it right off the map!"

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Of course, we had a sizing chamber aboard [the SDF-3], but Cabell's suggestion that micronization of Drannin or the other Zentraedi children could result in developmental problems had naturally filled Kazianna with a newfound fear of the device. I still believe the suggestion was totally unfounded, but because it was taken as gospel at the time, it meant that those Zentraedi who had elected to ship with us had done so full-size-not to mention what it meant for the work crews who now had to construct the nursery to accommodate children of vastly different sizes. Anyway, the experience of that day I walked into the nursery to check on the children's creation left me convinced that I'd placed too much importance on all this child bonding and that maybe it hadn't been such a good idea, after all. In retrospect I think I should have insisted that [the Zentraedi ship] Valivarre fold with the rest of the fleet instead of remaining: in Tirolspace with its skeleton crew.

Lisa Hayes, in Resh N'tar's Interviews with Admirals

"Seven worlds," Exedore said to himself, hands clasped behind his back as he paced the alloy floor of his confinement area quarters. Max, Miriya, Dana, and the Praxians were off somewhere exchanging wall tappings with the Karbarrans. Aurora was in the front room, glued to the display screen of their monitor unit as though it were one of Earth's old-fashioned television sets.

Seven worlds, Exedore repeated in thought, head down, eyes on the floor.

The past dozen hours had been punctuated by deep rumblings from Haydon IV's artificial core, the sound of powerful machines being reactivated after who knew how long a slumber. On-screen schematics flashed by Veidt's device told him little, but it was easy enough to imagine modules being hoisted and repositioned by robotic arms, gigantic plates retracting, a change in the very sphericity of the world. Exedore awaited some word from Veidt. Haydon IV was surely reconfiguring, but reconfiguring into what? An unassailable battle station, as the more nervous of the Karbarran captives were suggesting? A world turned inside out? A factory of some sort? The Awareness still had not made any external visuals available; positional data, however, indicated that the artifact was well within three hundred thousand kilometers of the small carbonaceous moon that remained the focal point of its eccentric orbit. Almost close enough to touch.

A deafening movement from seemingly underfoot rocked level four and nearly sent Exedore sprawling. There had been several jarring moments already, but no one had been hurt. No power failures, split seams, broken seals. Buried in the Awareness's neural programming were command codes that apparently ensured the safety of Haydon IV's passengers and guests.

As there were command codes that safeguarded Haydon IV from the threat of attack.

But just what had the historical Haydon-as individual or race-gone to such lengths to protect: the world's passengers or the world itself?

The Zentraedi perched himself on the edge of the bed, unconsciously adopting a thinker's pose. Seven worlds, he thought.

He had surmised from investigations undertaken during the Sentinels' campaign that the Awareness had had dealings with Zor in the early stages of his self-styled rebellion against the Robotech Masters. Later, the Tiresian-Protoculture's midwife had for some unknown reason duplicatedthe route Haydon had taken through the Quadrant millennia before, using Haydon's chosen worlds as the objects of his seeding attempts.

Had Zor been attempting to pick up where Haydon had left he had already visited Optera, where, assuredly, Haydon had brought Invid and Flower together.

But then he had gone to seed Peryton, for which Haydon had devised a thought-propelled instrument capable of altering the rotational axis of that dying world.

And gone on to seed Karbarra, which Haydon had gifted with the ursine-responsive Ur-Flower.

And Garuda, where Haydon had restructured the biosphere to facilitate a true planetary consciousness.

And Spheris, where Haydon had experimented with the evolution of crystalline lifeforms.

And Praxis, where biological parenting had become a single-gender affair.

And-by way of the deliberately crash-landed SDF-1-Zor had seeded Earth, where according to Dana's accounts the Flower had taken root with perplexing tenacity.

Which suggested that Haydon had used Earth for some purpose.

But a larger question remained: What had Haydon hoped to accomplish on his namesake world? What was Haydon IV that it should at all costs be spared the injustices visited upon the rest?

"Exedore," Aurora called from the front room.

That she had said it just loud enough to be heard did not keep Exedore from jumping out of his skin. Miriya's youngest had that effect.

He entered the room a shaky step or so ahead of Max and Miriya, who had also come running. Aurora was seated in front of the monitor screen, one finger raised to it.

"It's the reconfiguration pattern," Exedore said excitedly after a moment's study of the displays. "We'll be able to see-" Miriya gasped.

Haydon IV's northern and southern hemispheres were separating. The artifact world was about to open up like a hinged ball!

In newspace, Lisa edged quietly through the doorway to the nursery. She told herself that in addition to being a naturally inquisitive mom, she was being considerate just now, mindful not to disturb the children's play. At the same time she realized that her inner voice was not urging caution but demanding it; the feeling was similar to the fight-or-flight hormonal responses that were triggered every time she had to give the order to deploy the fortress's defensive shields.

The kids, human and Zentraedi, were still grouped around the enormous sphere they had constructed, completely absorbed in their work. The toe of Lisa's heelless boot touched down on a squeaky toy, and a dozen pair of eyes were suddenly trained on her.

"Hi, kids," she said, pinning a smile on it.

Roy glanced at his peers, rose out of his cross-legged pose on the deck, and walked over to meet her halfway. Lisa squatted down to his eye level and mussed his black hair. "Hey, that's some globe you guys made," she began. "What is it, some kind of space base?"

Roy took a quick look over his shoulder at Drannin. "It's secret, Mommie. You have to leave."

Lisa adopted a wide-eyed expression. "It's so secret you can't even let your mom have one quick peek?"

"No."

"Oh, sweetie, please."

Roy shook his head, adamant. Behind him, the human children had formed a guarded line in front of the sphere. Lisa straightened up to her full height. "Just one peek, Roy, and I'll leave you guys alone," she said more firmly.

Roy's eyes and faltering tone of voice betrayed his ambivalence. "You can't, Mom. We're doing something secret." Stern-faced, Lisa folded her arms across her chest. "Now listen to me, young man, I'm still the commander of this ship. Just show me what you've built and I'll-"

Abruptly, Roy turned on his heel and rejoined the group, leaving Lisa standing in the center of the room. She shook her head in disbelief at the mirrored side of the observation window and was about take a forward step when Drannin and the other Zentraedi children suddenly positioned themselves between her and the sphere. It was like facing a fifteen foot-high wall of muscle and bone.

Lisa tried to contain her unease. She had not had to face off with a Zentraedi in almost longer than she could recall, but some part of her remembered and pumped fear into her blood.

"Drannin," she said in a scolding voice, "I don't approve of this behavior. And Kazianna won't, either." She could see Roy peering from behind Drannin's knee. "Do you want me to go get her, or are you going to show me what you've built? I promise I'll keep the secret," she thought to add.

"It's almost finished," Drannin answered in English. "We can show you after, not before."

Lisa softened her expression somewhat. "So it's not really a secret, then."

Drannin spent a moment considering that, almost as though monitoring something just out of earshot. "No, it isn't really a secret," he said at last. "It's more like a surprise."

Angelo Dante was the one who had discovered Rem slumped unconscious in the rec-deck corridor and had carried him over his shoulder, like a fireman, down to the med lab. The experience had been more troubling than the recent EVA and had cost the sergeant the few hours of after-mission rest he had coming to him.

"The guy's bad news," he was telling Sean, Marie, and Jack. They were picking at meals in the ship's commissary/mess, Karen's harsh reprimands having worked a temporary truce among them. "I've been through this before, so help me. Once I caught him hanging around outside of Major Emerson's office. Then I found him snooping around Fokker Base."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Jack cut in, gesturing with both hands. "You caught Rem where?"

Dante showed him an impatient, look. "Not Rem-Zor Prime. "

Jack scratched his head. "You mean the Masters' clone, the one Southern Cross command stuck with the Fifteenth?" Dante nodded.

"So what's Zor-Prime got to do with Rem?" Jack persisted.

Dante growled. "That's what I'm trying to tell you, Captain. They're the same guy!"

Jack looked to Sean, then to Marie for support.

"What the sergeant's saying is that both Rem and Zor Prime were cut from the same cloth," Sean explained. "They're both clones of the same donor. It's like they're identical. "

"On the nose," Dante said.

Jack tried to dredge up what little he knew about theories of nature and. nurture. "Biologically, maybe," he argued. "But Rem was raised on Tirol, for cryin' out loud. Zor Prime grew up on one of those space fortresses, didn't he?"

Dante waved a muscular hand. "Splitting hairs. You find Rem lurking around, you know something's going on."

"Like what?" Jack started to say, when the sergeant suddenly shot to his feet and began beckoning someone over to the table. Jack turned and saw the keyboard man, Bowie Grant, headed their way, meal tray in hand.

"Just the person I was looking for," Dante said as Bowie was sliding into one of the molded chairs. "You heard what happened outside the music room, right?"

Bowie nodded uncertainly. "Rem passed out or something."

Dante returned to his eat and fixed Bowie with a gimlet stare. "I want to know what was going on inside, Bowie."

Puzzled but wary, Bowie tucked in his chin. "We were running down some old songs."

"Who was?" the sergeant demanded.

"Me, Musica, Allegra, Minmei. Why? What's this have to do with anything, Angelo?"

"Minmei?" Jack asked, surprised.

"Some of those old Masters' songs, I'll bet," Dante said. "Some of that clone music."

"Easy does it, Sergeant," Marie cautioned.

Bowie pushed his tray aside angrily. "Let's not start this again, Angelo."

"Minmei singing with you, Rem outside listening ... Doesn't that mean anything to you, Bowie?"

Bowie glanced around the table. "Zor Prime," he said in sudden realization, then laughed. "Look, Angelo, Rem is not Zor Prime."

"We just had this discussion," Marie offered in a weary voice.

"Yeah, well, I'm not convinced," Dante said, rising again. "And besides, even if he isn't Zor Prime, he's a clone of the original. And look what that guy dumped in our laps."

In the SDF-3's briefing room, Rick checked, his watch and muttered to himself. "Damn it, what's keeping her?" Lang regarded him from the hull viewport. "Why don't you just have a seat, Admiral. I'm sure she'll be here any moment now."

Rick stiffened, then resigned himself to it, forcing out his breath as he joined Lang at the

permaplas window. "Beautiful, isn't it?" the scientist said.

Rick had to agree. Any planet at all would have been a welcome sight just then, but the one they had found-or the one that had found them-was nothing less than extraordinary. Crystalline skies like those on Spheris, verdant forests like those on old Praxis, seas to rival Garuda's own . . . And yet unlike any of those worlds.

"It makes me think of Earth," Rick said after a moment. "Earth before the first war," Lang amended. "But yes, looking at it summons up the same feelings in me. After Tirol, Karbarra, Optera, how easy it is to forget how affecting the sight of rampant life can be." He cleared his throat. "Now, Admiral, as to a scouting party."

A hatch hissed open behind them, and Lisa stepped into the room, an unreadable look in her eyes. Rick thought it was anger but could have believed it was fear.

"Rick," she began, "you better get down to the nursery and have a talk with your son. When I tell you what he did-"

"We can save that for later," Rick interrupted. He jerked a thumb at the viewport. "Maybe you haven't noticed." Lisa glanced at the planet.

"Of course I've noticed. Raul's kept me apprised of everything. But we can't save this matter until later, Rick. Roy and Drannin-"

"Lisa," Rick snapped. "I said I didn't want to hear it. We can discipline the kids later on. Right now we've got more pressing matters to address."

Lisa's mouth tightened. "If you'd kindly let me finish," she grated.

Rick was about to interrupt again when the intercom sounded. He punched the talk-stud and barked, "Admiral Hunter!"

"This is security, Admiral," a deep base voice answered. "Colonel Xien."

"Go ahead, Colonel."

"It concerns, Rem, sir. He's been released from med lab and is now on his way back to rec deck."

"And Minmei?"

"The same, sir. She's with the two Tiresian women.

Rick rubbed the stubble on his jaw. "All right, Colonel. Maintain surveillance and notify me

immediately if there are any new developments."

Lisa was staring at him when he signed off. "What's this about Minmei and Rem? Did you order surveillance on them? "

Rick snorted. "I thought you were being kept apprised of things, Lisa. Maybe if you hadn't been spending your time in the nursery?

"Rick!" Lisa said. "What right do you have to question my actions?"

"Every right, when you disappear from the bridge to attend to some ... child-care problem!

"

"Child care? If that's what you think-"

"Please, please," Lang said, stepping between them with hands raised. "We're wasting valuable time. "

Rick and Lisa glared at each other over Lang's shoulder. "Carry on, Doctor," Lisa said through clenched teeth. Lang bowed his head. "About the scouting party, Admiral. You were about to say-"

"Pass the order to ready a party, at once," Rick replied before Lang could finish. "And inform them that I will be accompanying them."

He was holding Lisa's gaze as he said it.

Minmei recalled how she had sung for her parents as a child, leaned Yokohama and trips to Kyle's house, where she would invariably be asked to perform, to entertain. It had been years later on Macross Island that singing had grown to mean something else to her. She still lived then for the chance to perform, lived for the response, the adulation, but singing had come to represent a kind of power game. More than the power to inch closer to wealth and popularity, though; singing was power over people: a means to move, stir, control.

To conquer.

The problem was, there were people who sought to make in power their own. To twist it this way and that to suit their own purposes. Gloval and the SDF-1 command had iced her; Kyle had tried to remake her; T. R. Edwards had tried to possess her.

And now Rem needed the voice-not Minmei but the voice. He was not out to conquer audience or enemy or to build an empire founded on his own lust and greed. He needed the voice to position himself on a road to self discovery. A road to redemption for a

father/self he was just beginning to understand.

So she had been willing to help him, even willing to let him go on believing that by so doing he was helping her. To confront her fear, he had told her. To give full reign to her vocal prowess.

How she had been tempted to confront him on that one! To embrace him, really, and confess that she would sing simply because he needed her to sing, nothing more. But that could wait until Rem's inner quest was concluded. And then she would confess, and thank him, too. Oh, yes, thank him for allowing her to re-experience how wonderful it felt to liberate that voice within. For what had she been but self contained the past five years, imprisoned, like matrixed Flowers of Life? Her voice: the Protoculture denied . . .

Musica and Allegra had played no small part in that sense of rebirth. For with them she harmonized with equals. She had come closest to such transcendent purity with Janice Em, human-made, but at the time neither she nor Janice was possessed of the songs themselves.

Ancient psalms that predated Tirol's Grand Transition and the coming to power of the Robotech Masters.

Minmei was in the company of the sister clones now, preparing her voice for the difficult parts Bowie's keyboards had taught her. Musica and Allegra had seemed pleased with her contributions thus far, to say nothing of Bowie, who was beside himself. A dream come true, he kept telling her, a dream come true.

She kept to herself that she was wearing a transmitting device, that Rem had wired her for sound, to use an old Earth phrase. In some sense it made her feel as though Rem were present in the music room, pressed close to her warm breast like the device itself.

Her hand brushed it through the soft weave of her tunic, then went to her belly, where it lingered a moment longer. And she began to sing.

Not far away, Rem would be listening.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Certain parallels are suggested by the fact that both the Masters' clone (Zor Prime) and the Invid Regis's simulagent (Ariel, aka "Marlene') were corrupted by their contact with Terran humankind. Those commentators who advance the view usually offer the Zentraedi as further proof to bolster their claim. Corruption, then, is equated with emotion, for it was human passion above all else that turned the tide time and time again during the Robotech Wars. Terran humankind has been singled out and in some sense denigrated.

But were the pre-Robotech Tiresians any more in control of their passions? One need only look to Zor and the corruption his actions worked on the Invid Queen Mother. Was this not in fact the original corruption?

Gitta Hopkins, Queen Bee: A Biography of the Invid Regis

Outside the Ark Angel's viewport spun a dark maelstrom of stolen matter, a grave whirlpool of cosmic stuff, black as evil in its singular heart.

"My God," Vince said in utter astonishment.

"Let us hope not," Cabell offered, turning his back to the view and helping himself to food recently delivered to the situation room.

"Stellar Transylvania," one of Louie Nichols's data junkies said without bothering to explain. "Give me two pints of protons," he added, affecting some sort of middle-European accent.

In the foreground between starship and black hole floated what Vince had first taken for a dumbbell-like structure captured by the system's nearly lightless sun, the host upon which the hole had fed for countless eons. It was only after the ship's onboard AI had served up a graphic breakdown of the object that he had begun to comprehend it. One end of the dumbbell was in fact a small rouge moon, yanked from orbit by what constituted the dumbbell's twin-cupped opposite end: a radically reconfigured Haydon IV.

The cylindrically shaped bridge that joined moon and artifact world were made up of two massive conduits, which had apparently telescoped out of each of Haydon IV's now separated northern and southern hemispheres.

Vince ran a hand down his face and left it covering his mouth, as though fearful of what sounds might emerge. Just in view far off the Ark Angel's port side were the ships of the Karbarran battle group, a school of predatory fish awaiting the scent of blood.

"Evaluation," Vince said, turning to find Louie Nichols headlocked to the room's comp console. Data-expedient or not, the sight of the wizard's cranial ports still left him distressed.

With an audible pop, Louis jacked the umbilicus out of the skull. "No doubt about it, they're mining the moon for metals. Haydon IV's turned itself into a working factory."

Vince gestured to the viewport. "You mean those, those tubes are mine shafts?"

"In a manner of speaking," Louie told him. "See, instead of parking yourself in orbit and shuttling payloads of raw materials up the gravity well, you construct transfer corridors ship-to-surface and suck up what you need. A variation on the old space elevator or orbital tower concept."

"But what the hell are they manufacturing?"

Dr. Penn and Cabell approached the console to hear Louie's response.

"Ships would be my guess," Nichols said, only to receive skeptical looks from the three of them.

"Assume for a moment our theories about Haydon are on the money, then put yourself in his boots." Louie stood up to make his point. "Here are Haydon and his crew wandering the spaceways for tens of thousands of years, jumping system to system, world to world. And frankly, the whole thing's becoming a yawn. They've conquered war, hunger, pestilence, disease, death ... I mean, what's left to do?

"So all at once they begin asking themselves some serious questions. Like maybe if there isn't more to life than gallivanting around the galaxy playing deity to groups of awed primitives. They start focusing on ontological and teleological questions about purpose and god and what's supposed to come after you punch exit and wave good-bye to your biological parts. Of course they've been asking themselves these questions since they crawled up out of the gene pool, but all of a sudden there's an urgency attached to it. It's a kind of what'd they used to call it?-a midlife crisis thing."

Louie took a breath and adjusted his opaque goggles. "Thing is, for all their investigations into existential metaphysics and such, for all their experiments with religion, sensory dep, mind-altering substances, and cyber-interface, they just can't seem to break through to any of the ethereal dimensions they figure must be out there or in there or somewhere. After all, the math works, so where's the experiential side to the equation?

"So Haydon gets the notion that maybe his or her or their race just isn't meant for transcendence-I mean, they're just not built for it. They're psychically deficient or constitutionally deprived or something. But that doesn't necessarily rule out the existence of these other realms or the possibility that some other race is capable of getting there." Louie looked at Vince. "You following me so far, General?"

Vince deliberated, then nodded.

Louis rubbed his hands together. "Okay. So what they decide to do is see if they can't speed things along by scouting the galaxy for likely candidates and lending a helping hand wherever they can." Louis motioned to Cabell. "They hit Karbarra, Praxis, Peryton-all the worlds you mentioned-adding something here, deleting something there. Then they sit back to see what happens.

"But-" Louie raised an index finger. "-we're talking millennia again. So rather than risk a second yawn they decide to build themselves a world-that world," Louie said, gesturing

out the viewport, "to do the monitoring work for them. And they equip the AI they've set up to run the place with instructions to call them when one of their experiments racial transmutation bears fruit."

Cabell saw where Nichols was headed and smiled knowingly.

Louie returned the grin. "Yeah, you see it. The Karbarrans aren't cutting it, and neither are the Garudans or the Spherisians, but hey, what's going on over here in Optera's corner of the Fourth Quadrant? Why, we got some kind of war going on here between the Invid and the Robotech Masters over those Flowers Haydon left behind."

Louie snorted a laugh. "Well, one thing leads to another, and the Invid arrive on Earth, mate with the Protoculture Zor conjured from their blessed Flowers, and bing, bang boom! transcendence. They soar clear off this mortal coil, and an alarm clock goes off on Haydon IV. The Awareness says, `All right, all you slumbering spacefarers, it's rise and shine. A trail's been blazed, and it's time to start settin' out for the new frontier.'"

Vince and Harry Penn were hanging on his every word. Gibley and the rest of Louie's teammates had gone back to playing video games. Louie glanced at them and aimed a laugh at the ceiling. "So, I forget, where was I headed?"

"Ships," Penn reminded him breathlessly.

"Oh, right, ships. Well, that's the obvious part, isn't it? The Protoculture sure isn't going to get Haydon into the other domain. Besides, there's none of the pure stuff left. So what they need now is ships."

Cabell's forehead and bald pate wrinkled. "But if what you're saying is correct-if Haydon actually plans to follow in ships-the Invid's departure would have to have resulted in a detectable physical rend in the continuum."

"That's true," Louie said. "And I'm betting the Awareness will be programming the location of that rend into the ships Haydon IV's going to start spitting out."

Vince slapped a hand down on the table. "So all we need to do is hang around until Haydon shows up to claim the ships and tag along behind."

Louie nodded. "I don't think they'd mind a coupla hitchhikers, do you?"

"But we don't have any idea how long this process will take," Penn protested. "Ships, slumbering spacefarers ... The idea is absurd. But even if all this is true, suppose Haydon does mind. Suppose they don't want to share the discovery with outsiders. What then?"

Louie pondered that for a moment. "We've still got one other lead-the Invid simulagent.

We continue to put the squeeze on her until she talks. Once we have the location, we can get a jump on Haydon's ships, beat 'em to the pass."

"My God," Vince repeated. "What have we gotten ourselves into?"

"That's unimportant," Penn said. "The question should be phrased, What are we getting ourselves into?"

Cabell tapped a finger against his lips and turned to the viewport... "There's one point Doctor Nichols still hasn't addressed. Here is Haydon IV, joined to the mineral-rich moon of a dying system orbiting a gravitationally collapsed star." He swung around to the room. "Inside which are Haydon and his race hiding?"

Scott was not surprised when Obstat so willingly acceded a his request that Marlene be released in his custody. Intel had made it clear what they were after, and Scott had in some sense become their field agent.

They were in his quarters, side by side on the narrow bed, exhausted from stress and the fleeting sense of relief lovemaking had provided. Try as he might, Scott could not push the image of Sera from his thoughts. Marlene was so frail in his arms as to be intangible, and once more he had begun to fear for her life. And he kept thinking about what Cabell had said about stars disappearing, the very fabric of the universe strained. Was it that cosmic tightening that had finally brought him to his senses? Had it required nothing less than gravitational collapse to bring Marlene to his arms? She was almost asleep, but he felt the need to talk, as though spoken words forestall the inevitable.

"These last few days have made me wish things had been went on Earth," he told her in a whisper. "I wish I hadn't been so stupid and blind. I wish we hadn't waited for this...'

Marlene raised her eyes to his, her long lashes fluttering against his bare chest. "Do you mean that, Scott?"

He nodded and kissed her forehead.

"And how would things have worked out, Scott? Your love for me would have kept you from leaving? You would have launched in your fighter only to return immediately to my arms?"

"Yes."

"And we would have traveled together to the Southlands and pitched in to farm and restore the planet while you left it up to your friends to search for the SDF-3."

Scott's throat seemed to dry up. To hear his wishes presented like that only undermined

the sentiment and filled him with misgiving. But he answered yes to all of it.

Marlene raised herself on one elbow to study his face. "Remember Sera, Scott. You would have ended up alone."

He worked his jaw. "It wouldn't have mattered. We would have had each other."

"Like you had the Marlene Rush you can't forget?"

"Change it, then, goddammit!" he seethed. "Find the Regis and make it right for both of us! Maybe your queen can have it end differently for you. Then maybe we can have the dream you just laid out."

Marlene curled against him and took a deep, shuddering breath. "You're not making it easy for me to remember who and what I am," she said softly.

His chest where the holo-locket used to rest was damp with her tears. He squeezed her to him. "Tell me what I have to do, Marlene."

"You have to stop loving me, Scott. You have to stop treating me so human."

Elsewhere in the Ark Angel Minmei and the sister clones sang:

Little Protoculture leaf,

Waiting for our palates,

Where will you take us?

Flower of Life!

Treat us well!

What had happened on this world? Zor recalled having asked himself only a few days before. What enchanted hand or conspiracy of sky and soil had shaped that grand experiment in life?

For as far as the eye could see there had been nothing but this: a living landscape under skies tinged with aquamarine. Life pure and unadulterated, which here had chosen but two forms of expression. The one, vegetal but without question sentient; the other, more the animal stuff of his own being but seemingly free of the gross entanglements so often given rise to by bone and sinew. The one, a flower, fruit, and tree, pulsating with occult power, the other, feeding from that power but returning everything to it, tranquil and self sufficient, with no need to look outside itself to answer the questions that burned in Zor's soul. It was symbiosis of the most perfect sort, true synthesis, two life forms nourishing each other in every possible way and altering in the process of that joining the physical

structure of their environment. Nothing there seemed fixed or constant, neither natural law, nor dictated shape, nor evolutionary design. All was potential . . .

He recalled Vard calling out to him. Vard and several of are ship's crew on the trail below, the one that switchbacked down from that bit of high ground the creature had guided them to. An eagerness in Vard's voice Zor had rarely heard before, excitement prompted by the thrill of discovery. Zor, come! Hurry! He had ignored the young man's direction?drill too mesmerized by sky and landscape to tear himself away ...

Weeks before, the dropship had put down in a boundless field of the tri petaled flowers. Triumvirate in their groupings, they were of a coral color, with elongated teardrop-shaped buds and long trailing stamens. And oddly enough they cast forth both pollen and seeds.

The landing party had made its way into a forest of sphersically canopied fruit-bearing trees-impossibly tall, some of them with rainbow-colored fluids coursing through translucent trunks. Zor remembered: Tzuptum's rays warming limbs stiff from space sleep: the spongy ground cover wondrously welcome to feet too long accustomed to deckplates of cool and unyielding alloy. The air thick and redolent, almost too perfumed to inhale unfiltered. And in fact two members of the party had succumbed to a kind of delusional psychosis and had had to be returned to the ship. But for Zor those bet weeks had been magical. He and his science team had run scans and collected botanical samples while other teams charted distances and topography and probed the surface for useful metals.

It was shortly after he had determined the inherent sameness of flower, shrub, and tree that the landing party had had its initial encounter with the planet's indigenous beings.

Limbless, amorphous, asexual creatures-vaguely mushroom-shaped when Zor first saw them-they lived communally in conical, hivelike structures from which they made daily forays into the surrounding countryside for the purpose of hover-gathering fruits and flowers of the planet's singular plant life. After several days of observing the creatures in their routines and rituals-all of which centered on the flowers and trees-Zor came to understand that the beings made use of the plant for physical as well as spiritual nutrition. Seemingly oblivious to the presence of off-worlders, they ingested the flower petals and fruits of the mature crop and often sipped the sap of the seedlings, which Zor had discovered possessed strong psychoactive ingredients.

Ultimately he had approached what he took to be the hive leader and had learned that the creatures were capable of telepathic communication. He realized, too, that they had the capacity to alter their physical being to suit their circumstances. While Zor and the hive leader had conversed, the creature had actually assumed a semblance of sexually differentiated humanoid form. It was that one who had identified the race by the name Invid and first used the term "Flower of Life." This one who led the landing party to the overlook and told Zor about the Queen-Mother they called Regis.

Zor! Are you coming, Zor? Vard had shouted once more, and, reluctantly, Zor had begun to follow him down the steep slope, along a path strewn with velvety Flower of Life petals.

And so had commenced a marvelous journey of two Tzuptum days through Flower-crowned hills and bustling hive settlements that welcomed them with silent chant and delivered them finally to the lair of the Queen-Mother. . .

Zor stood gazing at her now, eyes next to closing from the soporific warmth of the hive's central chamber. She had conjugated herself in an approximation of humanoid female form in his honor.

In his honor. The phrase she had sent to him.

"We have anticipated your return to Optera for so long, Bringer of Life. Forgive me if I am not yet adept at fully mimicking your present form."

You anticipated our coming? Zor had asked her, confused.

"The memory is ancient but deep within me. The Flowers were your gift to us."

Zor realized that he was being mistaken for someone who had visited Optera in the dim past and was about to correct the Regis when a sudden paralysis gripped his thoughts. The Flowers of this world contained a form of novel bio-energy. They endowed life-indeed, nature and matter itself-with the power to shift and reshape, to wrestle from the gods themselves the ability to control the course of evolution.

Then consider, Zor found himself thinking, what the result might be if the plant's bio-energy could be harnessed and directed.

Would the power to light a thousand worlds seem too much to ask? The power to drive a thousand ships across the sweep of stars? The power to shape and reconfigure the very continuum itself? The extension of life ...

And yet the secret of communicating with the Flower and harnessing that energy lay with the unknown being that had brought it to Optera. And with this Invid shape changer who had fallen heir to the Flower's fortunes.

Zor was intrigued. He realized that the Regis was the key unlocking Optera's mysteries, and in an instant of mad inspiration he decided to set himself the goal of possessing that key-if he had to seduce this queen to make that happen! "Yes, your highness," Zor said to her at last. "I have finally returned."

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I knew Lisa was serious the moment she stepped out of the vanity, dressed-barely!-in that revealing black camisole Karen Penn gave her for her thirty-ninth birthday. I was surprised, even though I shouldn't have been. I mean, I remembered the look in Lisa's eye when she saw Kaziana with Drannin that first time, and, after all, we had talked over the idea some...Well, Lisa must have caught the look on my face (that night on the Ark Angel), because she laughed and started to accuse me of backing out. But I told her no way. And, well, let's just say I put my whole heart into what naturally followed.

The Collected Journals of Admiral Rick Hunter

There was a girl in Rick's past, a gamine, honey blond California free spirit named Jessica Fisher, the eldest daughter of Alice Fisher, an old friend of Pop's. Rick had met her shortly after Pop had taken the flying circus to Sacramento in search of spectators with a bit of extra wartime scrip in their pockets.

Rick had just turned nine, and he and Jessica were introduced to one another as cousins. It had not taken long, however, to understand that there was no actual blood bond between them, especially after Pop and Alice had decided to bring their own romance out from behind closed doors. Rick, in fact, had been there when things had gotten started between his aging dad and the independent Alice, the night the four of them had gone into San Francisco and "the Visitor-the SDF-1-had made its grand appearance. Of course, very few people realized they had seen a ship in the skies that night, and Russo's government had managed to keep the Macross project under wraps for the next five years. But Pop and Alice seemed to have been touched by something in the air, because their relationship had changed from that night on. Rick, too, had been transfigured by the event. Youthful flying ace that he was fast becoming, he had liked to think the sky as his property-even though Neasian and other military pilots might have argued the claim-and suddenly in that same sky he had glimpsed a power that surpassed all. The impact on his young mind was as devastating as it was exhilarating, for while Pop had done his best to keep his only child sheltered from the disputes that had plagued Earth at the time, "the Visitor" had made it clear there would be no hiding from war's long reach.

Jessica, ironically, had guessed the truth about what they had witnessed. I'll bet it was an alien spaceship, she had told Rick. And it's come down to show everybody on Earth that war isn't the only way that things get changed, that there're all kinds of powers in the universe we'll never understand if we keep thinking war's the answer.

She was almost three years older than Rick and a lot more concerned about such things. And after Pop decided to remain in California instead of taking the circus elsewhere, Rick would often sit at Jessica's feet for hours, listening carefully to what she had to say about hatred and injustice and greed, and he would pay close attention to the things she read aloud from novels and texts and some of Alice's books on philosophy and religion. Outside the year of high school he had attended in Sonoma, the time with Jessica came as close to a standard education as Rick had received; by the time he had turned fourteen, he was

completely infatuated with her.

That she was still almost three years older than he made things extremely complicated, because by then older boys had begun to show up at the Sacramento farmhouse, guys who would stop by to visit with Jessica and fill her head with a lot of talk about what they were going to do when they joined the war.

Rick had already tried on countless occasions to express his feelings-he had even gone as far as writing her a poem-but the words just couldn't make it past his lips. At the same time he had tried unsuccessfully to corner her into confessing her undying love for him. There had been a bit of hand holding and quick kisses but nothing that approximated the passion Rick had decided the two of them were meant share. So, invariably, when any of Jessie's prospective boyfriends were on hand, Rick could be found retreating to his room, where he would sulk for an hour or two or stare at all the trophies and medals his flying skills had earned him and wonder why they were not doing the trick. But he certain was not about to sit out there on the porch and spew a lot of nonsense about how many enemy planes he planned to down when his turn came. And what was Jessie doing listening all the lies those characters were feeding her, anyway?

The truth, as it would unfold, was that she had not been listening. One night she had followed Rick back to his room to tell him just that, and damned if she hadn't been aware of Rick's feelings all along! But how could you even think for minute I'd be impressed by all that war talk? she had asked him. I don't want that kind of hero in my life, Rick. I want to fall in love with someone who isn't afraid to look for different answers. Someone like you.

Over the next six months Jessica had led him slowly in the joys of love and sexual discovery, but by the time winter had rolled around it was plain they were not meant to be lovers, that it was more important that their friendship survive than anything else. So Jessie had moved on to the sensitive hero of her dreams, and Rick had thrown himself in stunt flying with renewed fervor. But lord, how his hormones had raged for those six too-brief months! Not even Minmei or Lisa would inflame him the way Jessie had.

And oddly enough, it was Jessie he was thinking about now, laser-cutting a path through the verdant foliage of a new world, staring at Marie Crystal's shapely, jumpsuited deriere.

What the hell's coming over me? Rick asked himself, tearing his eyes away. He had not felt quite so lustful since Sue Graham had tried to seduce him one afternoon in the Ark Angel's situation room.

Rick stopped short on the narrow trail, only to have Karen Penn bump up against his back.

"Excuse me, sir," she said. "I didn't see you give a sign to halt."

"I, er, that is," Rick began. "Listen, Captain, why don't you go on ahead for a while."

"Certainly, sir," she said, brushing past him, face to face. Cripes! he thought. Two women to leer at now.

Angelo Dante had the point, the rest of the human and XT scouting party spread out behind in a trailing wedge. The Alpha-Beta VTs were Battloid-reconfigured on a flat spot of ground where they had left them only moments before. The land was an undulating temperate zone forest of analogue firs, raucous with the calls of black birds that confined themselves to the upper reaches of the canopy. The sun was intense where it shone through; the air was aromatic, rich with the smell of life. Scans initiated from the SDF-3 had indicated the presence of an intense bio-energy nexus in the region, but several low-level passes had revealed little to add to what had already been gleaned from the ship's data readouts, and so Rick had ordered the Veritechs down.

He was not sure just what had made him think of Jessie after all those years. It was true that the argument with Lisa had touched off a cascade of angry thoughts, but no sooner had he lowered the VT's canopy in the launch bay than they had been cleared from his mind. And Marie Crystal's butt not been responsible, either, no matter how pleasing it was. Because for all the lust, Rick was experiencing waves of nostalgia as well. A yearning for simpler-alternative presents.

He felt certain that something in the air had brought it on, or perhaps it was the trees themselves and the memories of northern California redwoods and home fires that their piney aroma elicited.

Memories of Earth before the wars.

Jack Baker appeared from the underbrush a few steps behind Rick-waved, and came up alongside. Rick not only saw a bit of himself in the younger man but noticed the same wistful in Baker's green eyes. He tracked Baker's gaze to Karen's backside.

"What's on your mind, Captain?"

Baker was red-faced when he turned around. "Begging the Admiral's pardon, sir. I guess I was just daydreaming."

"Daydreaminng, Baker?"

"Fantasizing, actually, sir." He made a circular motion with his hand. "It's this place, Admiral. It reminds me so much of where I was brought up. North Carolina, sir? before Dolza, I mean."

"You're wondering what it would have been like if things had gone differently for Earth."

Jack looked at him searchingly. "That's it, sir. I keep thinking this planet's trying to remind us of what we lost."

In a dark corner of the galaxy lost to the SDF-3, silhouetted against the swirling, malevolent backdrop of Ranaath's Star, floated the first nearly completed products of Haydon's IV's mining and manufacturing efforts: ships assively proportioned-with featureless spherical hulls attended and ministered to by hundreds of labor drones.

Inside the Ark Angel, Vince, Cabell, Penn, and the Nichols team were fortifying themselves with strong caffie when an unexpected transmission was received from Haydon IV.

"Veldt, is that you?" Vince asked in a rush, eyes riveted to the situation room's commo screen. They had spent part of the Sentinels campaign together, but Vince had not seen the Haydonite in years. Even so, save for the color of his forehead sensor, a certain warmth to his sendings, and definite swagger to his glide, Veidt was nearly identical to countless other "male" beings on Haydon IV.

A synthesized voice answered for Veidt. "Yes, Commander. It's good to see you again."

"And you, too," Vince said. "I only wish it could be under different circumstances."

Beneath the static of the signal, Veidt's expression conveyed a wry smile. "You discern my very thoughts."

For hours the Ark Angel had been hailing the Awareness without response. The flagship of the Karbarran flotilla had been attempting the same and had finally issued the reconfigured artifact world with an ultimatum: Release all Karbarran prisoners by 1200 standard hours or suffer the consequences of a full assault. Cabell had appealed to the Karbarran legation to rethink their position, but the threat stood as delivered.

"You know about the ultimatum?" Vince asked.

"I have only just learned about it, yes. But you must convince the Karbarrans to rescind."

Cabell leaned toward the camera. "You leave them no alternative, Veidt. "

"I will endeavor to explain," the Haydonite said after a moment. "Be advised, however, that Vowad and I have undertaken communication with you at great personal risk. Should my visage abruptly vanish from the screen, you will understand why."

"Then save your thoughts," Vince said. "We think we've got a fair idea of what's been going on." Quickly, he summarized the scenario Louie and Cabell had arrived at. Veidt

listened in silence. "We just need to learn where these ships you're manufacturing are headed," Vince concluded. "You have our word we won't interfere with the Awareness in any way. We only want permission to tag along, if that's possible. Veidt shook his head. "That is quite impossible, Commander. Your ship is inadequate for such a journey."

Vince glowered at the screen. "Try to understand our side of it, Veidt. This may be our only shot at locating the SDF-3. Think about Rick and Lisa and the crew. They're our friends, Veidt, and they're in trouble."

Veidt's features betrayed little. "I might also ask that you appraise things from our vantage, Commander. To comprehend after thousands of years that your sole purpose had been to function as caretakers for a race who, if they did not create you, then surely redirected you from your evolutionary process." The Haydonite paused. "And now, even in the face of this realization, to be helpless."

Vince turned away from the camera to glance at Cabell and Penn. "Were sorry, Veidt. But all this doesn't mean we can stand by and do nothing."

The Haydonite's shoulders seemed to shrug under his robe. "The Awareness must be persuaded to release all offworlders-immediately."

Awareness is no longer responding to us, Commander," Veidt sent with a touch of impatience. "We are responding to it. In any case, all offworlders will be released in due course. In the meantime, everyone is being well cared for. Exadore and the Sterlings are in good health: I have even seen to it that they have been equipped with a monitoring device linked to the Awareness itself."

Louie put a hand down on the communication console's interrupt stud and turned his back to the optical pickup. "Ask him if he can put us on-line with Exedore."

Vince studied Louie's face for a moment, then reactivated the system's audio feed. "Listen, Veidt, can't you at least allow us to get in touch with Exedore and Max, just so we know they're all right?"

Veidt computed the feasibility. "I can so arrange," he said, at last.

His back still turned to the screen, Louie smiled. "That may be all we need," he whispered.

Exedore, Max, Miriya, and the Sterling daughters listener attentively while Cabell brought them up to date on current events and the speculative history of Haydon IV. The five of them were huddled around the monitor, hands gripping on another's arms in contained excitement.

"Yes, yes, it all fits precisely with the facts," Exedore was telling the old sage. "The experiment shaped by Haydon has finally succeeded. The Invid have exited the continuum and opened a breach to a new realm. And the SDF-3 is trapped there." He shook his head in astonishment. "This could account for all the irregularities, Cabell-this tightening of the cosmic fabric."

"We think so," Cabell said. "The creation of that breach as you call it, has possibly doomed the world we know to ultimate collapse. It is as though Haydon's `success' has rendered all evolving life in this Quadrant obsolete. Only one was needed to achieve that passage." The Tiresian shook his head. "For the rest of us, a pat on the back and an accelerated heat death."

"Jeez, you guys," Dana cut in, "try not to sound so cheerful about it, huh."

"Tough break, but they're right about it, Lieutenant," Louie said, his goggled, smiling face on-screen all at once. "Louie!" Dana yelled.

"Hey, Dana. Told you you'd see me again before long." Dana recalled the send-off party Louie's gang had thrown for the 15th aboard Wolff's ship. The memory stirred thought of Jonathan and their last night together. "So where'd you spend the occupation, mechie?" she asked.

Louie grinned. "No time to go into that now, Dana." He looked to Exedore. "We need to know whether the device Veidt gave you can access the Awareness."

The Zentraedi scratched at his thatch of barn-red hair. "Only in the most limited of capacities."

"But you can get in?" Louie pressed.

"Yes, but I don't see-"

"We're going to find out where Haydon's headed by hook or by crook, Exedore. The Karbarrans, God help them, are finalizing their plans. But their attack is going to provide us with the diversion we need."

"Well, we're all set down here," Dana enthused. Catching sight of Max and Miriya's concern, Vince said, "Now look, Dana, don't try anything rash. Veidt's already told us you'll be released."

"Sorry, Commander," Dana countered with a dismissive wave at the screen, "but we're all out of trust down here. Besides, there's no harm in creating a second diversionary front while you're running your op, is there? Who knows, we might even be able to place a coupla monkey wrenches of our own. "

"Dana," Max and Louie said at the same time. Max motioned for Nichols to continue.

"There's one more thing we're gonna try first, Dana," Louie told her. "We've got someone on board who might be able to tell us where the Regis went."

Dana flashed him a dubious look. "Yeah? What'd you do, Louie, bring an Invid along for the ride?"

Louie stroked his cleft chin. "Never was any fooling you, Lieutenant."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Come let me show you our common bond, it's the reason that we live.

Flower, let me hold you.

We depend upon the Power that you give.

We should protect the seed, or we could all fade away; Flower of Life, Flower of Life, Flower . . .

Tiresian chant of the Cult of the Three-in-One

For once even Vard was concerned. are you certain of what you're accomplishing here? he would ask at least once a day. And Zor could answer only with that maniacal grin that had become his ever-present look on Optera: Of course he was certain. And wasn't this exactly what their elders in Tiresia expected of them: to return from these technovoyages with something extraordinary? And if that wasn't enough, who were these Invid that they should have these incredible flowers to themselves? That they alone should possess the ability to reshape the world about them? No, this was for all worlds, Zor had suggested to Vard for the galaxy in all its wondrous variety!

Mad, in those times; possessed, though he would not recognize it in himself...

But to achieve it, thus, Vard would point out. To achieve it by deceiving the hive queen of the race-this Regis. To lay claim to royalty by pretending to be the long-expected one returned, the Bringer of the Flower. And to resort to seducing the secrets from this naive being . . .

This was central to Vard's concern-the fact that Zor had done nothing less than make love to this creature. In her approximation of human guise and human-made raiments. In her very chambers and in her very bed ... For such was the only way that the secrets could be revealed. The process, dear Vard, required a complete joining-mind-to-mind, body-to-body-and passion to accompany it. Or, in Zor's case, an approximation of passion, a semblance of love.

Oh, in a sense he did love her, he supposed. He certainly envied her, lusted after the knowledge the Flower of Life had imparted to her. But as to all this mindspeech about remaining on Optera, about actually relinquishing some of his physicalform so that they might remain mates here ... Well, that was arrant nonsense. He could no more live here-even with the secret shared and revealed-than he could abandon the quest for enlightenment that had already taken him to scores of star systems and hundreds of planets.

Furthermore, there was a husband to consider.

Nothing like the Regis, this creature that called himself the Regent. And Zor had barely given him a second thought when it had come down to formulating his plan for seduction and conquest. But there was something about the Regent that rendered him more human than the Regis could ever be, for all her recently evolved anatomic curves, erogenous zones, and self-shaping talents. And it was just this mysterious humanness that Zor made use of to ensure that the Regent was absent from the hive for long periods at a stretch.

The Regent, it seemed, had a curiosity for Zor and his kind that rivaled Zor's curiosity for the Regis. Only the Regent was less interested in the physical and psychological differences that separated them than he was in the very artifacts the technovoyagers used in their everyday lives and travels. It was as though the creature wished only to fill his world with such things-instruments and devices and ships. So it had been easy enough to arrange for the Regent to be taken on a tour through this or that part of the ship or flown to distant places on his own Optera when the need arose.

And that need had arisen often these past months . . . Zor smiled to himself, lying with the Regis now, his arms wrapped around her. He recognized that the transference was almost complete, the language of the Flower almost his. But he recognized, too, that there were rules governing the use of this language and, quite possibly, that he had been made aware of something misunderstood by the Queen-Mother herself. The Flower of Life apparently held a secret of its own, one that had yet to be seduced from it.

A secret Zor would one day call Protoculture.

Scott Bernard sat stiffly in his chair as the two majors led Marlene into the Ark Angel's briefing room. Cabell, the Grants, Louie Nichols, and several intelligence officers from G2 were seated at the long table. Bulkhead displays flashed color-enhanced visual close-ups of Haydon IV, an updated count of production vessels, an alphanumeric Karbarran attack countdown. The ship had turned slightly to port to keep the reconfigured artifact centered in the exterior viewports. The accretion disc of Ranaath's Star pinwheeled in the background, a sinister wheel of fortune.

Marlene, red hair pulled back behind her ears, looked ill. "Take a seat," Vince began, sounding like a physician about to deliver bad news.

With a nervous glance, at Scott, Marlene lowered herself into one of the plastic chairs. He held her gaze for a moment and looked away, tight-lipped.

Niles Obstat cleared his throat. "I think you know why we've asked you here."

"I'm-I'm not sure," Marlene told the intel chief.

Vince grimaced and blew out his breath. "We've tried to give you time to think through your position, er, Marlene. But I'm afraid time has run out for all of us. We have reason to believe you can tell us where the Regis is, and we need that answer now."

Marlene swallowed and found her voice. "I've been trying-"

"Don't give us any of that," Obstat said, cutting her off. "You're Invid, and what one of you knows, you all know. Just tell us where we can find the Regis, and we'll put an end to this. It's for your own good, too," he added. "How else are you planning to get home if we don't take you there?"

Scott was tempted to tell Obstat how Sera had gone home but held his tongue. Marlene was staring at the director, lower lip trembling.

"But don't you see, I'm not all Invid," she replied. "I have-"

"You're all Invid as far as we're concerned," a woman officer sneered.

Marlene closed her eyes and shook her head. "If that's true, then how is it that one of your own kind loves me?" Her eyes found Scott, as did everyone else's in the room. "Tell them, Scott, please. Make them understand."

"Well, Colonel?" Vince said, averting his eyes. "Suppose you tell us."

Scott's hands clenched beneath the tabletop. He looked at Marlene as he slowly rose to his feet.

"I'm sorry, Commander," he began, "but I guess our trick didn't work." Again he locked eyes with Marlene. "It was a good idea to make it seem like you were releasing her in my custody, but I guess she just didn't buy it. I certainly did my part to convince her that I ...

loved her, sir. But she wouldn't tell me anything."

Scott swallowed hard and continued. "Hell, I would have told her anything she wanted to hear to get that information. I sure don't mind admitting now that this was the toughest

charade I've ever had to play out. Pretending love for this ... Invid. And all the while thinking about what they did to Earth, what they've probably done to our friends and comrades on the SDF-3." Scott snorted, averting his eyes from the table. "I think all I managed to do was help convince her she really is human, Commander. Imagine that, will you-this Invid, human."

Wide-eyed through Scott's confession, Marlene suddenly put her hands to her head and screamed.

The scream was a nonhuman one.

She aimed a finger across the table at Scott. "You betrayed me! You told me you loved me!"

Scott held his breath.

Marlene was about to continue, when her body was seized by a violent paroxysm. The two majors flanking her leapt from their seats as she began to fade from view.

"Don't touch her!" someone warned. As if anyone was about to.

Scott thought he might pass out, but just then Marlene rematerialized, skin tinged green and expression vacant. Her right hand was still raised but pointed out the viewport. She regarded the table for a long moment, as though challenging anyone to speak. But it was Marlene herself who broke the spell her brief disappearance had cast.

"There," she said finally with utter contempt.

Scott joined the others at the table in following her finger. "Ranaath's Star?" Obstat stammered. "Your queen is inside the black hole?"

"You asked to know," Marlene said flatly.

"Christ," Louis Nichols muttered. "Veldt wasn't kidding when he said the Ark Angel isn't built for the trip."

"I know how difficult that was for you, Scott," Vince said after Marlene had been taken from the room. "But we had to know. You understand, don't you?"

Scott looked up at him, face drained of blood. "And is she going to understand that I was lying just now?" He sighed heavily. "I've sentenced her to death, Commander. I've killed her."

Dr. Penn almost laid a hand on Scott's shoulder but withdrew it. "She had to remember who she was, son. The shock was necessary. You couldn't have prevented it, anyway. She belongs to her own kind, not here, divided, trapped in two separate worlds."

Scott uttered a sardonic laugh. "A lot of good it did us, Doctor." He motioned with his chin toward the viewport. "The SDF-3 is out of reach."

"Haydon doesn't seem to think so," Louie said into the silence. "Look," he explained as heads turned, "I realize that any directional coordinates we could coax from the Awareness would be useless now. But Haydon's obviously convinced that it's possible to follow the lead, no matter where it ends up."

Vince shook his head. "If you're thinking that I'll risk taking this ship into that . . . " he said, indicating Ranaath's Star. Louie held up his hands. "I'm not. I was only going to suggest that instead of pilfering coordinates, we steal one of those ships."

Minmei was crying when she left the music room. But what she had first assumed to be a rapturous outpouring brought upon by the harmonies of the clones' psalms she now understood to be tears of sadness. The ancient songs had awakened an aged hurt inside her one she could not be certain was even hers, but it touched her as though it was and was connected somehow with Rem.

The tears were flowing patently by the time she rushed blindly onto the lift, where she ran straight into Lisa Hayes Hunter.

"Minmei," Lisa said, surprised. "What's wrong?"

The odd thing was that the sight of Minmei's tears actually helped to dam the flow of Lisa's own. Relieved by her exec only moments before, Lisa had nearly fled the bridge like a lovesick adolescent, crushed by the discovery that a romance meant to last an eternity was not even going to survive the football season! She was at a loss to explain just what had brought the nosedive on-some aftereffect of the argument with Rick, perhaps, or just plain concern for his well-being planetside-and she was headed for the nursery to press Roy to her breast with a vengeance.

"Do you want to talk about it, Minmei?" Lisa asked, feeling that the situation was awkward all of a sudden. Their friendship had been on a steady decline since Lisa and Rick's wedding day. The Sentinels campaign hadn't helped, nor had Minmei's fling with T. R. Edwards and her subsequent retirement from public life. But Lisa had heard that Minmei had been on the mend, thanks to Rem. And hadn't Rick mentioned something about her singing again?

Well, maybe it was one of those artistic mood swings, Lisa started to tell herself, when

Minmei said, "It's Rem."

Lisa eyed the young woman who had slipped onto the lift behind Minmei and was off to one side now, pretending disinterest in the conversation. The woman had security written all over her.

"Come on," Lisa said, leading Minmei off the lift at the Hoed deck. "Now tell me what happened," she added, a few steps down the quiet corridor.

Minmei sniffled and ran the back of her hand under each eye. "That's just it, Lisa, I don't know what happened. I just, it's just . . . I'm feeling like he used me. Just the way everyone else has done for my whole stupid life." She took a deep breath. "The singing hasn't helped me. It's made me feel worse about everything. He just wanted me to sing so he could take his little trip down memory lane."

Lisa waited for her to continue.

Minmei sniffled again. "It's for Zor," she said dismissively. "He thinks the old Tiresian songs will jar memories of Zor's early experiences on Tirol and Optera."

"Optera?" Lisa said, thinking suddenly of the planet below. A planet that had appeared out of nowhere.

"I just keep feeling he's betrayed me somehow," Minmei explained, sobbing. "He doesn't love me. He probably never loved me."

Lisa was not listening. Some half-formed realization had begun to vie for her attention, a thought she could not quite assemble. But before she knew it, she had taken Minmei by the upper arms and was shaking her. "Did Rem tell you why it's so important he recall Zor's memories?"

Minmei looked up, startled.

Lisa dropped her arms at her sides and exhaled. "Minmei, listen to me. I'm on my way to the nursery right now because I feel like Rick's been lying to me about something. That he's really in love with that little idiot Sue Graham or someone. But I know that isn't true, even if he has been acting like a complete jerk." She looked into Minmei's eyes. "And I'm sure Rem hasn't betrayed you. It has something to do with this place, Minmei. Something we haven't considered yet." She gnawed at a finger, remembering Roy. "It's even begun to affect the children."

Minmei looked ashen. "Oh, please, don't tell me that," she said, turning to face the corridor wall. "You can't tell anyone, Lisa," she added, "but I'm carrying Rem's child."

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Although Wilfred Gibley is most often credited with the discovery of machine mind and the development of cyber-interface technology (See Shi-Ling's "Sometimes Even a Yakuza Needs a Place to Hide"), Nichols was to become the movement's principal advocate and spokesperson. Evidence suggests that Nichols himself may have been working along similar lines as early as May of 2031, when he wrote: "It was Bowie [Grant] that started me thinking. He used to say that he thought of music, like mathematics, as this place somewhere out there that adepts could tune into. And that the key signatures and notes and scales were actually solid things you could approach in that realm. So I thought: Why couldn't it be the same for data? After all, what's mind but a union of music and math?"

Bruce Mirrorshades, Machine Mind and Arthurian Legend

Hodel, Commander of the Karbarran flotilla, counted down the seconds. He thought about Cano, the brother he had lost when the N'trpriz had been destroyed, and wondered how many others he would grieve for before the battle was through.

Haydon IV had yet to respond to the ultimatum, although the Tiresian, Cabell, claimed to have been in touch with a high-ranking official planetside who had affirmed that no offworlders would be released. The Haydonite had also warned against the use of force to achieve that end. In his capacity as amateur historian, Hodel was inclined to believe him. He was conversant as any with the facts regarding the Mo'fiint Incident, in which 870 dreadnoughts at the command of a would-be empire builder had attempted to add Haydon IV to her long list of conquests. Eight hundred and seventy ships annihilated in a matter of minutes . . . But history was just that, or so the Karbarran High Authority had admonished Hodel when he had brought the Mo'fiint Incident to their attention. So, in his capacity as battle group commander, he was expected to disregard any Haydonite counterthreats communicated to the Ark Angel and accept on faith that history mattered only to the victors.

Moreover, it was obvious from the recordings made during the N'trpriz's final moments that K'rrk had committed a series of tactical blunders. He had failed to break off communication with Haydon IV's artificial sentience and had thereby allowed the Awareness access to the ship's onboard Tiresian-manufactured AI-which in turn had been based on Haydonite designs!

This time in there would be no such contact. The Awareness had been given ample opportunity to respond; the deadline had not been met, and it was time therefore to actualize the threat. Haydon IV would be given no second chance.

And neither would the ships of the flotilla.

Hodel buried the thought behind a confident scowl and rose from his command chair as

the zero-line display triggered battle-station sirens throughout the ship.

"Order all ships into attack formation," he growled to his communications officer. "Full ahead, on my command, Ntor. "

"Aye, sir," Ntor responded from her station. "Sekiton drives at maximum power, all systems enabled. "

The battle plan was a straightforward one now that the safety of the hostages was no longer considered a mission priority. Haydon IV was simply to be beaten into submission. The loss of the five hundred or so merchants and traders planetside would be regrettable but acceptable.

Colonel Mo'fiint had felt no need to justify her actions when she had given the order to attack Haydon IV. The goal, after all, had been conquest.

Much as today, Hodel thought.

"Planetary reconfiguration in process, Captain," the science officer advised. "Haydon IV is disengaging from the moon. Weapons nacelles retracting. We are being scanned and targeted."

Hodel swiveled to study displays. The giant artifact was rotating to face the flotilla, its materiel transfer tubes traversing local space like twin cannons. "Standard evasion, Ntor," he directed forward. "Close all communication frequencies."

"Repositioning of the labor droneships, Captain," the science officer updated. "They are being deployed to repel strikes directed against the surface."

Hodel growled to himself. "Order fighter teams away as soon as we're within range."

"Aye sir."

Hodel watched the forward screens. "All right, Ntor, let's clear a path for them. On my mark . . ."

Aboard the Ark Angel, Louie Nichols and his crew of comic-crazed compjockeys were headlocked into that part of the ship's AI mainframe linked to the commo device Veidt had left in Exedore's care.

The data room was a yard sale of consoles, monitors, slave decks, sensory boosts, psi-amps, and enhancers; a tangled nest of F/O lines, power leads, and interface cables, with the team members positioned about like switches and relays some sprawled on the

floor beneath tables, cranial cyber ports studded with titanium plugs and alloy adapters, others cross-legged atop tables and racks, fiddling with tuning knobs, keying input, fingering touchscreens, but loving every minute of it, thrilled to be back where they belonged, ghosts in the mind of the machine.

Vince Grant had just sent word that the Karbarrans were making their move and that Haydon IV was readying what promised to be a crippling response. It had been Louie's signal to commence an attack of his own devising, not directed _ against the planet, however, but against the psychodynamics of its ruling artificial intelligence. With luck, the Awareness will be too busy attending to matters of defense to notice Louie and his cowboys' subtle approach, too preoccupied carrying out the timeless dictates of its enigmatic program to realize that someone was toying with its emotions.

Louie, Gibley, Strucker, and the rest were not going in so much on-line as they were on-wave, in an attempt to grapple with the Awareness where it lived, loved, and loathed. Unified, the discorporate raiders aimed to plant the seeds of self oubt, to stir a bit of regret, to suggest a path to redemption. To inject a virus if all else failed.

Louie could feel the cyber surge as he punched into machine mind, the hands to which his thoughts were now only remotely connected hovering over the console's directional cross and touchpad, his hands-on-trigger-and-stick. The cyber-surge was the rush of a crimson-tipped stimulant, a kick clear out of the world. He could feel Stirson and Shi Ling headlocked into the same vibe, telepathic twins flanking him like recklessness and daring, an upside Scylla and Charybdis.

Machine mind was dimly lit, boundless but crowded with the color-coded spires and sentry towers that guarded Ark Angel's mainframe cores. Below was the network's familiar grid of pulsating lights, data highways for the grounded and uninspired. Louie laughed as he soared above bridges and constructs, executing flyboy rollovers between mainframe pillars and pyramids as he closed on the access link to Veidt's device.

Exedore's computer construct was over the horizon, stuck in the real stuff, blazing a trail for the team. Louie thought he could almost detect the Zentraedi's fingers hammering overhead like thunder in that weatherless domain.

Down the link into the device, a jump fueled by thought from ship to reconfigured world, into a much smaller space a foyer of a kind, an antechamber defined by the dark maws of derezz gates, the looming shadows of security fences. Gibley's construct slid to a halt nearby, freaked by the sight, wavering like the filament in a shaken bulb. Exedore was giving it his all, hacking away with commands, but there were defensive, commands beginning to line up behind the walls: retaliatory icons ordered in by executive decision.

Louie steeled himself, hands set for play in the Ark Angel's dreamscape. Gibley, Strucker, Stirson, and Shi-Ling were eager trotters, panting at the start of the course.

An access window suddenly flashed transparent. Exedore had punched through.

Gibley's construct took the point as the Awareness deployed its net.

Time to fry, Louie thought.

"I've found a way in!" Exedore announced, hands raised above the keyboard in surprise.

"Yeah, and I've found a way out," Dana told him from the front threshold as repeated blasts shook the room. The laser fence disabled, the Praxians had already gone through to lend support to the Karbarran revolt.

The ursinoids had streamed out of their cells only moments before at the sound of the first surface explosions, stacking bodies in the thresholds until the lasers were overworked, then flooding into the central confinement area armed with everything from furniture parts to sheets of alloy torn from the walls.

Most of level four was pure chaos. The Haydonite jailers had trained their forehead weapons on the mob and successfully decimated the Karbarran front line. But like the lasers, the hovering guards were soon overwhelmed and felled by body blocks and staggering paw-hand swipes.

Dana ventured that the Awareness itself was being overwhelmed by coordinated strikes launched by the ships of the Karbarran battle group. Haydon IV's big brain could not effectively oversee confinement zone security when it was busy feeding off plasma bolts and safeguarding the spherical ships its factory had been spitting out. The laser fences had been the first to go, control of the jailers had been relinquished, and Exedore was telling everyone that he had secured a route to the heart of the central computer. It was a sure thing, then, that Louie's team would be able to follow Exedore in and loose their poisons.

In the meantime, Dana thought she might be able to assist both Louie and the Karbarran flotilla by opening up yet another front. At her insistence, Exedore had ferreted out the whereabouts of the power management terminals that controlled production of the sphere ships' stardrives. Readouts indicated that a few of those drives had already been installed, but most were still under construction. The way Dana saw it, Haydon and his hibernating brethren were not going thrilled to learn that someone had crept up the beanstalk and made off with the golden goose, or in this case, one of ships built to whisk them off to their planned retirement community. But if she could arrange it so that the drives never reached the ships, the Ark Angel crew would be long gone before Haydon figured out what had happened.

Of course it would have been better still to incapacitate Haydon's alarm clock, or at least set the wake-up time forward a couple or three centuries, but Exedore had not had any success in zeroing in on that part of the Awareness, much less in divining just where Haydon was sleeping it off.

"So who's joining me?" Dana asked, wielding a table leg in one hand. "We got some labor droids to decommission."

"It's important that I remain here," Exedore said without taking his eyes from the monitor screen."

"You keep doing what you're good at, Exedore." She glanced at her parents, standing side by side behind the Zentraedi. "What about it? Mom? Dad?"

Aurora stepped forward while the Sterlings were casting uncertain looks at one another. "I'll go with you," she told Dana.

Dana adopted a dubious look. "That's good of you, kid, but I don't know."

"Remember the spores, Dana," Aurora said, reminding her of the mindlink they had once shared across a near arm's length of galaxy.

Dana nodded. "Glad to have you aboard, sis."

Max and Miriya adopted determined expressions. "All right, Dana, you win," Max said.

She quirked a smile at them. "Yeah," she said, "now I remember you guys."

"Fools," Vince said under his breath, "crazy fools. It's a suicide run."

Spherical bursts erupted in the darkness outside the bridge viewports. The Ark Angel had removed herself a safe distance from the battle, but even so it was apparent that the Karbarrans were sustaining heavy losses. Their strafing runs across Haydon IV's split hemispheres had succeeded only in riling the planet's defensive arrays, which were responding mercilessly. Fortunately, the Karbarran commander had had sense enough to keep the factory-produced sphere ships between his own flotilla and the artifact's in-close plasma cannons. That at least had assured that the Awareness would fall into a push-pull dispute with its own programmed imperatives?to protect the planet from attack while at the same time safe uarding the ships it had assembled from the metallic stuff of its host/captive moon. As a result, Haydon IV had been forced to be uncharacteristically circumspect with its initial retaliatory salvos, and many of the Karbarran dreadnoughts had survived.

Close-up cameras revealed planet and flotilla in a savage dance around the production ships, each searching for openings. But the Karbarrans were having a difficult time maintaining formation in the face of such maneuverings. As an added irritant, the Awareness had directed most of its labor droneships against the flotilla's defensive fighter groups and was scoring heavily in all sectors.

"They should break off the attack while there's still time," Vince said to no one in particular. He felt Jean's warm hand on his shoulder.

"We've pinpointed the ship," she told him as he swung around from the view.

Vince glanced over her head at intel officers and techs grouped around the tactical board. In tight close-up on-screen was one of the interdimensional sphere ships, with few labor drones about.

"Is that the one?" Vince asked.

"Yes, sir," a lieutenant colonel replied. "We're certain it's the prototype. First off the line, first to be equipped with drive units." The young man swiveled to face Vince. "It's our best bet, General."

Vince answered him with a grim nod. "Any word from Nichols?"

"Just up, sir," a tech said, displaying a message on one of the sit board's peripherals. "Looks like they're inside the Awareness. We've also received reports of a full-scale hostage uprising planetside."

Vince studied the big board, then turned to the viewport, narrowing his eyes against an angry strobing of battle light." All right, gentlemen," he said after a moment. "Inform Colonel Bernard that his Veritech group has a green light. But make sure he understands they're to wait for Dr. Nichols's all-clear before attempting to board the prototype."

The tech activated the com-line. "Anything else, sir?"

Vince snorted. "Wish him Godspeed, Sergeant."

The Awareness was an argent temple that brought to mind Tiresia's pyramidal Royal Hall. Louie and his infiltration team approached it cautiously, evading program sentries when necessary, although most of those had been successfully lured away to implement Exedore's requests for system updates.

Once they were inside, the place turned out to be a labyrinth of command corridors and data reservoirs, as difficult to enter as it probably was to exit. But there was no time to be

selective. Gibley surrendered the point, and Louie joysticked himself through a columned portal. Angling through a maze of lower function hallways, he began arming the virus charges the raiders had carried in. The idea was to home in on the source of the disruption signals that would result once they were detonated.

And in that, the charges did not disappoint.

The Awareness rallied, filling its instinctual level corridors with a veritable horde of antibiotic programs. But the teams' decision to engage early on had been predicated on the expectation of just such a primitive reaction, and by so doing, the Awareness not only lost momentary control of its logic circuits but allowed Louie's team to ascend rapidly through its command and control hierarchy.

Louie followed the path of most resistance, deploying ghosts to confuse trackers, and eventually entered a vaguely defined triangular chamber close to the pyramid's summit. Normally there would have been access codes to decrypt there, but the Awareness had apparently been engaged in entering them when the Karbarran attack had begun.

When Louie had brought the raiders to a halt, he sent three recon drones through the elaborate window at the chamber's apex.

The data they returned stilled his thoughts.

In the space above the temple's golden triangle were perhaps tens of thousands of discorporate intelligences. Louie had discovered where Haydon and his race were hiding.

By the time he found the presence of mind to order the team out, the first of Haydon's antipersonnel security-force programs was-already engulfing them.

CHAPTER TWENTY

"Now, children," I heard one of the child-care staffers, say into the mike, "stop being so damned destructive!" He turned to me red-faced and apologetic, but I was already thinking: Damned children, damned children ... When and where had I heard that before? Lisa Hayes, Recollections: The Lost Journey

Rem did not need the clonesongs to open his mind to what had happened once Zor had left Optera with the Flower of Life specimens the Regis had given him. He knew from both the historical record and the cellular memories he had summoned while at work on Lang's facsimile matrix that the Regent had learned of his wife's infidelity, exposed the hoax Zor had perpetrated, and ordered the landing party to leave the planet.

Though the use of deception was still in vogue among the arts of that period, the direction

of physical force against other life-forms was not, and the landing party had assented to the outraged husband's demands and exited the Tzuptum system the following day. But instead of continuing with their grand tour of the Quadrant, they had returned almost immediately to Tirol, where Zor had described for the Elders the wonders to be found on Optera and had given them their first look at the mysterious Flower he had accepted on their behalf.

What had followed for Zor were years and years of tedious, most often solitary experimentation with the Flower. The Elders had been pleased to accept his gift, but their disappointment was apparent. True, the Invid-Flower symbiosis seemed to be a process worthy of further investigation, but that was the end of it. The Elders lacked the necessary vision to see how the Flower might have any lasting import to human life. So Zor had endeavored to demonstrate just what could be accomplished by harnessing the Flower's bio-energy and by employing the language the Regis had taught him, he introduced Protoculture to the Quadrant.

So began the brief but catastrophic era known as the Great Transition: the years of barbaric infighting that led to the formation of the Robotech Masters, the rapid redevelopment of terror weapons and spacefold drives, the bloody program that anticipated the early clone experiments, and finally, the neural re-programming of the miner-giant Zentraedi.

Zor had long since lost control of his discovery and fallen victim to the compulsion the Masters had placed upon him. And those same Masters would oversee his eventual return to Optera, no longer as trickster or would-be king but conqueror, thief, and destroyer of worlds . . .

Rem wept in his quarters aboard the SDF-3, recalling the hell Optera had been sentenced to by his clone-father and the millions-strong Zentraedi. The theft of the Flowers, the ravaging of that garden planet, the overnight devolvement of the Invid, the war that had raged across the face of countless worlds ...

As little as two Earth-standard years ago, Rem had convinced himself that by reseeding Optera-New Praxis-he had actually redressed some of Zor's injustices. But he understood now that he had balanced only half the equation The Flowers prospered, but only to serve the demand of the beings that sowed them-to yield up the Protoculture.

The Compulsion lived on. For in fabricating the matrix Rem had helped deal yet another blow against the Flowers true guardians.

He began to ask himself what Zor had hoped to accomplish by sending the original matrix to Earth. Zor's hand had been guided by something he had learned on Haydon IV, Rem knew that much. But what was it he had discovered there?

Some way to rescue the Invid, perhaps, to make amends to the Queen-Mother he had seduced.

Some way to balance the other side; of the equation.

Rem realized that he would need Minmei's help one final time to dredge up nucleic memories of Zor's quiet rebellion against the Masters and of his critical encounter with Haydon IV's artificial sentience, the Awareness.

"I suppose we should be grateful they disassembled the thing," Emilio Segundo, the ship's pediatrician, suggested. Lisa looked at him askance, "`Disassembled,' Doctor? I'd say they destroyed it."

Kazianna Hesh issued a low, grunting sound that sent the nursery's Micronian balcony vibrating. "What can we expect," she said, "with world killers as their role models?"

Lisa could have almost believed she was conversing with one of the women in the childbirth class she and Rick had taken before Roy was born. Although Lisa, Dr. Segundo, and Kazianna Hesh were standing eye to eye, the balcony was me forty feet above the nursery floor.

But killed was certainly an apt description of what the human and Zentraedi young ones had done to the alloy and foam sphere they had expended such energy fashioning. The wing was literally in pieces, hemispheres cleaved, the complex transformable modules of their interiors scattered about. The nursery looked like a war zone, which was how the pediatrician had related it to Lisa over the intercom several minutes before.

"Did they give any explanation?" she asked him.

Dr Segundo shook his head, one hand tugging at his salt-and epper goatee. "None whatsoever. One minute they had the sphere opened and transformed into something that looked to be an oversize pair of binoculars, and the next they attack it with every toy in the place."

"Complete with sound effects," Kazianna said. "Mecha flight sounds, explosions, death rattles, that sort of thing," ahe added, sensing Lisa's bafflement.

"So it was all an elaborate game-building this thing, then wrecking it?"

Segundo shrugged. "It would hardly explain the secrecy they attached to it." He looked at Lisa. "And all this guarded behavior the staff claim they demonstrated."

"Oh, they did," Lisa affirmed, recalling her confrontation with Roy and Drannin. "Trust me

on that one, Doctor." Lisa stepped closer to the one-way glass to peer down into the playroom. The children, cross-legged-human and Zentraedi alike-had formed an inward-facing circle on the floor. "Let's have the audio again," she said after a moment. Segundo activated a wall switch; and low-voiced chanting filled the balcony space. The chant sounded like some sort of monotone, three-syllable canine call: Ur-rur-ra, ur-rur-ra, ur-rur-ra . . .

"They've been at it for close to fifteen minutes now," Kazianna said.

Lisa was about to respond when the intercom sounded. Segundo made a volume adjustment on the nursery mikes and hit the com-line ready stud. Raul Forsythe's face appeared on-screen. "Go ahead, Raul," Lisa said, positioning herself in front of the camera.

"Message from below, Admiral," Forsythe began. "Two members of the scouting party have disappeared."

Lisa's hand went to her mouth. "Oh, no . . ."

"Seems scanners detected the presence of a life-form just prior to the disappearances-enormous by the sound of it. But the thing vanished before the team could fix its location."

"Any confirmation from our onboards?" Lisa asked.

"Not yet. But Admiral Hunter is requesting backup. They've got a lot of ground to cover, and it's slow going."

"Was he specific?"

"He wants two teams-one Sentinels, one Zentraedi." Lisa turned to Kazianna to see if she was listening. The Zentraedi nodded, but Lisa noticed misgiving in her sad eyes. "What is it, Kazianna?" Lisa said after she and Raul had signed off. "If you have any concerns about going planetside, now's the time to make them known."

Kazianna shook her head. "It's not that, Commander, it's the chant."

Lisa listened for a moment. The children seemed to have upped the tempo, if not the volume.

"`Ur-rur-ra,'" Kazianna mimicked. "I think they're saying Aurora."

Toggled out of machine mind, Louie Nichols sat palsied at his console in the Ark Angel's

data room, his own internal systems scrambled by Haydon's security programs. That he emerged with his personality intact was nothing less than miraculous, given what the Awareness had launched against the team. Gibley, however, had not been as fortunate. He was laid out like a rag doll on a table across the room, eyes open but expression blank. Two med techs were working on him but while they might succeed in keeping the body alive, Gibley was fried inside, a complete brainwipe.

"You okay?" Louie heard Strucker ask behind him. He owned and nodded.

"Command says Bernard's VTs are closing on the ship." Louie took a deep breath. "Then we've gotta go back in. But this time we steer clear of that central shaft," he told his team. "Everybody got it? I think we bypassed command and control in the way up to Haydon's cyber-sleep chamber."

"On the left as we cleared that tall logic column," Stirson aid.

"Right, I saw it," Shi-Ling agreed. "Green haze portal, like the one we developed back in Tokyo for Matushima." Stirson grinned. "That's the one."

"First one in goes straight to drive programming," Louie instructed. "What we're looking for is an override command allow Bernard's team to get aboard the prototype and steer it clear of the artifact." He thought briefly about Dana, moving against the factory's drive production center now. "If we can deactivate the drives of the rest of those prototypes, so much the better," he thought to add.

"Haydon's not going to like this one bit," Stirson said.

Louie had his fingers on the jump toggle. "Yeah, let's just we never have to answer to them face to face.

He toggled back into machine mind.

With crude shields and weapons raised, the four Sterlings emerged from the transport tube on level two, but all that greeted them was what remained of Glike's debris-strewn main boulevard.

"We must be on the surface," suggested one of the Praxians who followed them out.

The sky was a backlit haze, seemingly draped from the summits of Glike's ruined onion domes and spires. Though tinged with odors of dust and smoke, the air smelled like Haydon IV's saccharine-smelling own, but Max felt certain they were still subsurface. He thought it likely that the city had been lowered and moved inside during reconfiguration, that the overcast "sky" they were staring into concealed the ceiling of some cavernous

hold.

It was irrelevant in either case, and in short order the hastily formed team had reconned the immediate area and set off for the drive production area Exedore had located, distant explosions and plasma cannon reports shaking the streets at random intervals. The farther they got from the transport tube egress, the more Max's hypothesis began to make sense. Glike's borrowed and indigenous architecture which had always seemed purely aesthetic in both function and design-had been transformed and incorporated into the workings of a massive assembly line.

The robot masters in charge of production work barely acknowledged the humans as they followed Dana's lead across once-green parks that had become staging areas, along avenues converted to parts conveyers, past monuments and obelisks truncated and metamorphosed into stanchions and pylons, and through buildings that housed the busy machines themselves athes, presses, extruders, and such. Ultimately, Dana brought them to a building Max thought he recognized as the former headquarters of the Haydonite Elite. The adamantine arches and gilded roots of its almost pre-Global Civil War Arabic look were still in evidence among the ultratech computer devices that crowded the entryway.

"This is it," Dana announced loudly enough to be heard over the roar of the production line, "the brains of the operation." She was standing, arms akimbo, in that defiant superhero pose that had become something of a trademark.

Max, too, recognized it from the schematics Exedore had called up on the monitor. Dana, scanning the power junction catwalks for Haydonites, snorted derisively. "Haydon wasn't expecting anybody to get this far." She aimed an index finger at a towering bank of apparently undefended data-control terminals. "We knock those out and production grinds to a halt in this entire section. Haydon'll have his ships, but they won't be able to take him anywhere."

One of the Praxians stepped forward, a broad-shouldered white-maned Amazon a foot and a half taller than Max. "We've come to silence this machine servant," she said in thickly accented Tiresian. "Let's get on with it."

Dana grinned and rubbed her hands together. She stooped to retrieve the table leg she had carried up from level four and said to Aurora, "Watch closely, kid. We'll show you how it's done."

Max received a gentle shove from Miriya and was about to join his daughter and the four Praxians when someone poured a bucketful of nitric acid into his head. That, at least, was how he decided it felt as he was dropping to his knees, hands pressed tightly to his ears. Dana and the rest were similarly felled, knees buckling, faces twisted up in pain.

Only Aurora appeared unaffected.

With effort, Max managed to lift his head and search the control room. Hovering fifteen feet above him was a group of four Haydonites, similar in aspect to the jailers who had patrolled level four's confinement areas, their dzentile glowing with charge.

Dana screamed and cursed, pounding the floor with a fist in an attempt to shake off the psychic force the Haydonites were directing against them. Through the mottled cloud her field of vision had become she spied Aurora and called to her in a pleading voice.

Aurora made no response. She stood stiffly above her fallen companions arms at her sides, eyes unfocused as the Haydonites began a slow descent.

But just when the four were reaching what would have been the Praxians' headtop level, Max heard a loud swwooossh at the building's entrance and turned to see one of Glike's fabulous flying carpets come streaking into the room on edge. It was an exquisitely textured specimen, vaguely rectangular in shape, as large as a ball court, and it was headed directly for the hovering Haydonites.

They, too, swung around at the sound or presence of the thing and tried frantically to counterdirect it with last-moment sendings, but the carpet was already upon them, trapping them in a brilliantly executed broadside cigarette roll and propelling them clear across the control room.

Max struggled to his feet and ran to check on Miriya and Dana. The pain was gone, but trouble was still on the scene in the form of two additional Haydonites who had followed the carpet into the building, one with a coppery skin tong and bulging cranium.

Max was surprised to hear his name sent and shortly recognized the two as Veidt and Vowad.

"The Awareness has mitigated the strength of its directives," Veidt explained. "Several of us are now free to assist in your escape."

"We've got more than escape on our minds," Dana muttered, wiping her hands on her pants. The Praxians voiced agreement.

"Then it was you who sent the carpet," Miriya said. The two Haydonites traded looks. "No," one of then started to send, when Aurora said, "I called the carpet." Veidt, nodded perceptibly. "I believe she did," he announced, nonplussed.

Dana looked at her younger sister and laughed. "Damn kids nowadays. Can't teach 'em a thing."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It has been claimed that all laws of science, our very ability to predict future events, will break down upon reaching the singularity. That the black hole's event horizon trapped light's desperate spacetime path-is but a one-way membrane, we are about to find out. If only Dr. Hawking were here to join us.

Dr. Harold Penn, The Brief but Timeless Voyage of the Peter Pan

Like laser light in a smoke-filled room Louie's cyber-self punched through the green haze security threshold leading to the Awareness's higher function core and arrowed straight into a cluster of telemetry commands in charge of programming dimensional data into the sphere ships' drives. The team was spread out in a V formation behind him, targeting ghosts against approaching strings of defense bytes.

Stucker had found that some of them could actually be absorbed and turned against their own kind.

Louie was a quarterback in that moment of stasis before the inevitable inrush of linemen and backs, searching through banks of data in a reckless effort to locate the prototype ship intel and indentified as nearly complete. The team was doing an incredible job of blocking the Awareness's poisoned advances, but the line was beginning to weaken.

Back aboard the Ark Angel, Louie's fingers tattooed hunches and possibilities to his discorporate mind; his fingers danced on the directional cross, maneuvering him clear of cicuit frying, brainwipe booby traps.

Then, suddenly, he had it: an on-line ship designated by a perplexing series of emblematic icons and alphanumeric analogues. As expected, the ship had been safeguarded against entry, but no longer. Louie tapped the override program and keyed a new sequence of commands into the console.

Neuron probes, meanwhile, were nipping at the perimeter of the envelope in which-he had secreted himself. There was no time left to search out the space drive production commands; Dana would have to see to it on her own.

"Toggle out!" Louie ordered as the first of the probes penetrated his defense net. "Toggle out!"

Scott Bernard maneuvered the Alpha through a storm of annihilation discs launched from Haydon IV's in-close plasma arrays. The planetoid's big guns were still trained on the few ships that remained of the Karbarran battle group. The ursinoids' fighter squadrons had been literally blown to pieces during counteroffensive impact runs by cloud after cloud of labor drones. Stray bits of those fighters drifted around the Alpha, touched by explosive

glints, cyan and crimson.

But Haydon IV had been taking a pounding as well. It was a twin-eyed monstrosity below him now, hemispheric surfaces scorched and molten, factory tubes holed and venting gouts of alloy debris.

In the midground of the Alpha's curved canopy view floated a hundred or more of Haydon's sphere ships, temporarily abandoned in varying stages of readiness.

Scott had not flown a space combat op in well over a year and felt rusty. As rusty as the first day he had piloted a Veritech through Earth's atmosphere, a green VT Lunk had stashed away in an old barn. But no matter. The searing discs, the blue-green bolts, those swaths of agitated light were mild compared to his inner torment.

Marlene was dying. Again!

And this time he had killed her.

"Able leader," announced a female voice over the command net. "Target ship's shields down and deactivated. You are go for boarding. You can take your team in, Colonel."

Scott acknowledged Ark Angel Command and went on the tac net to communicate with his wingmen. The squadron had lost only one mecha, a red Beta piloted by a Mars Base lieutenant Scott had known since childhood, who had gotten himself caught between Haydon IV's main guns and the Karbarrans' recently crippled flagship.

Atomized, Scott thought. Released.

"Colonel," the command net voice squawked, "why are you delaying? Target's shields are down, repeat, down." Scott shook his head clear of thought and addressed himself to the Alpha, thinking the mecha through to Battloid mode.

So reconfigured, the squadron began to follow him in.

The sphere ship enlarged before him until it obscured all else. The surface was ball-bearing smooth save for the faint outline of a hexagonal hatch low down on the curve of its starboard side.

There were no viewports, no visible weapons or scanner arrays. No way to see where they would be going and no way tp protect themselves once they got there. But God willing, the hapless crew of the SDF-3 would be waiting for them. And with them the Invid Queen-Mother. Scott's hope and salvation.

"Just stay put," Vince Grant advised after he had expressed how good it was to hear Max's voice. "We'll get sense Alphas down there to pick you up as soon as we can."

"I don't see that we have much choice, Vince," Sterling said to him.

Outside the bridge viewports Haydon IV's primary batteries were inactive; they of course had been silent throughout the duration of the Karbarran attack, but now they were shut down as well. Early on the assumption was that the Awareness had quieted the planetoid's fire once the Karbarran flotilla had no longer been deemed a threat. But then Exedore had gotten word through to the Ark Angel that the entire superintelligence was temporarily shut down, probably as a response to the virus programs Nichols had infiltrated during the raid that had claimed the life of one of his team members.

The Ark Angel was closing on the battered planetoid after a brief reflex burn, most of its mecha squadrons deployed on search and rescue operations among the remnants of the Karbarran battle group. The pirated sphere ship-under remote control by the Angel's AI-would be meeting them halfway with Scott Bernard's team safely inside.

"What are your survivor estimates, Max?" Vince asked.

"Probably two hundred or so Karbarrans, " Max responded after a moment. "A lot of them in bad shape. About two dozen Praxians and three or four Spherisians. Then there's the seven of us."

"Seven?" Vince said.

"Veidt and Vowad, " Max explained. "They helped us take out the production center, Vince. I've got no qualms about taking them along.

Vince mulled it over. "Guess they don't want to be around when Haydon wakes up, huh?"

"Neither do I, " Max affirmed. "Honeymoon's over on this place."

A smile tugged the corners of Vince's wide mouth. "See you soon, Commander," he signed off.

In newspace, fifteen Zentraedi Battlepods launched from the SDF-3's forward mecha bay formed up on Kazianna's Officer's Pod and fell toward the vernal surface of an unknown world.

An unseen, unforeseen something had been detected there and had since disappeared with two members of Hunter's scouting party. The admiral-perhaps still unconvinced that the fortress had been flung far from familiar shores-had requested reinforcement from two

XT teams, probably in the hope that someone-Karbarran, Garudan, or what have you would be able to communicate with the unseen thing.

This unforeseen thing.

Kazianna found herself thinking of Drannin and the sphere the children had assembled and destroyed. Were they really chanting Aurora? she wondered. Sending a telepathic call to the youngest Sterling the way she had once sent one to her older sister across a sea of stars?

An SOS, Lisa had called it.

And what of this strange planet that had brought the fortress here? For that was how she considered it, despite what Lang and the others were saying about intergalactic voids and patterning.

No, this was more than a world; she was certain of that much. It was perhaps even an intelligence unto itself, with something to teach them all.

The control consoles and acceleration couches, the general interior makeup of the sphere ship, had not been designed for human hands or eyes or posteriors, Scott had decided. Not, for that matter, with crystalline fingers, paw-mitts, or outsize limbs in mind.

The ship was merely a spherical chamber of light-emitting metal divided into several levels by featureless decking, unconnected by ladders, stairways, or lift tubes. On what had to be the command level was a continuous circumferential bench four feet from the floor without so much as a screen or a function key to mar its smooth surface.

It was only through Louie Nichols's remote manipulation of the external hatch that Scott's team had been permitted access to the ship at all, and only because of his deactivation the ship's artificial gravity that they had been able to explore.

Then, just when Scott was thinking that no one outside-of Haydon himself was ever going to be able to make use of the ship, the bench console came suddenly to life, banded in color like the planetary rings of some gaseous giant, and a huge projecbeam display of the Ark Angel's bridge took shape in the center of the sphere.

"Doctor Nichols assures me that you can see me, Colonel," Vince Grant said, as though he were in the same ship. Is that true?"

Wondering for a moment where to direct his words, Scott shrugged and said to the projecbeam image, "Not just you, General, but the entire Angel bridge. Doctor Nichols, Mrs. Grant, Doctor Penn, Cabell, Exedore, the Sterlings, all of you, sir." He thought about

asking what the hell Veidt and Vowad were doing there but decided against it.

Louie Nichols nodded in the background. "We're going to begin ferrying some things over to you, Colonel," he began as uncharacteristically subdued manner. "Components of the Angel's onboard AI, which will ultimately become our interface hardware with that ship's power plant."

"Then we can make use of it?" Scott asked. "You can get us through the breach?"

Louie's face collapsed somewhat, and Scott recalled hearing about the teammate Nichols had lost.

"I'm certain we can do that much, Colonel. I'm just not as certain about getting us back out again."

No one spoke to it.

Vince cleared his throat. "We'll commence transporting life support essentials, mecha, and personnel as soon as Doctor Nichols has his team in place."

"Well, there's not much in the way of a welcome we can arrange," Scott told him. "We haven't found the liquor cabinet yet."

Polite laughter greeted the remark, principally from Scott's own team members.

Vince gestured behind him. "Cabell and Exedore won't be joining us, Colonel. The Ark Angel will make for Tirol after disembarking her Karbarran passengers. And hopefully act as our beacon in this realm once we've, well, crossed over."

Scott gulped, thinking of Ranaath's Star. "Who'll be crewing this ship, then, sir?"

"I've put it on a voluntary basis, Scott. Jean and I and Doctor Penn are coming over. And so far we've got three squadrons of mecha pilots and a sufficient number of technical assist crews."

"I hope you've already counted me in, Commander," Scott said, sensing that Vince had left something dangling in the air.

Vince nodded. "I have."

Scott folded his arms and stared at the floor. "There's just one more thing, sir . . . The, ah, Invid simulagent. I was, you know, thinking it would help having her along."

"Marlene will accompany us, Scott." Vince traded brief looks with Louie. "There doesn't

seem to be anything left for her in this realm."

Or much left of her, Scott kept to himself.

The transfer of supplies and personnel took less than twelve hours, during which time Haydon IV did not so, much as stir. But finally the moment arrived for the Ark Angel and the pirated ship to part company.

Louie canceled the override and punched up the original commands the Awareness had programmed into the sphere's drives, and the ship's systems instantly came on-line.

While Cabell and the rest watched from the Ark Angel bridge, the sphere's massive drives flared once and hurled the ship toward the dark eye of Ranaath's Star. The sphere seemed so hang suspended at the edge of the whirlpool for the briefest of moments before it vanished from space and time.

Thousands of miles distant, the fey, aged crew of a second ship monitored the sphere ship's protracted plunge into the black hole and the subsequent departure of the Ark Angel. They then turned their attention to the reconfigured Haydon IV and waited.

PART III

AWAKENINGS

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Survival recognizes and rewards anything that sustains life, and here was undeniable proof of that. No matter how noxious its central characteristic, it proved itself to have a stark value in what the Earthers call Darwinian terms-even a functional formidability.

The Scribe Triumvirate of Aholt, Ulla, and Tussas, Nothing but Animus: A History of the Robotech Elders

Death, their tireless enemy, had them cornered at last.

It had pursued them for an age, ever since they'd cast off the bonds of a mortal life span and received unholy communion with the Protoculture a naive Zor had fetched home to them from the stars. Death was the inevitable dark side of nthe bid they made, immediately, for eternal life. Not just longevity but immortality; anything less-prolonged years in dread of the end-was nothing but a unique torment.

For the Robotech Elders, death had become the greatest of fears, in some ways a

Singularity of fear.

Watching the sphere ship plunge into Ranaath's Star, somehow surving the deadly swirl of the accretion disc, the utter anihilation of the event horizon, the Robotech Elders had shuddered at the risk its passengers and crew were running. Foolish little subcreatures, so reckless with their brief lives!

The Elders sat despondent, even their mindspeech silent, in their habitual circle. They arranged themselves in their triumvirate from habit-from reflex, by now. Between them was their darkened Protoculture cap, a mushroomlike console of instrumentality ten feet across, a hateful mockery of its former glorious self.

Once it had bent worlds to their will. In the years since the Elders had fled Tirol-upon the arrival of the SDF-3-it had kept them alive, barely, through its residue of power. With the disappearance of all Protoculture in the Elevation of the Invid race, the cap had died, become nothing more than a burnt-out artifact.

Their ship was a small prototype a Scientist triumvirate had been working on when the Invid onslaught had finally reached Tirol. The vessel was considerably smaller than the assault ships that had once carried the Robotech Masters' colossal Bioroids into combat, smaller than the tri-thrusters their Zentraedi giants had flown in battle in an age now vanished forever.

They had languished in it for years with little to behold but one another, each coming to hate the others and yet incapable of surviving without them.

Some of the craft's systems had been altered over the intervening years to run on more conventional power sources. Thus, it could still provide life support and had marginal maneuvering capability. But nothing could power the cap except Protoculture itself; after all this time the Elders were looking death in the face as they never had since that first, transmogrifying taste of the Essence of the Flower of Life, so long ago.

The SDF-3 had first shown up near Tirol to establish contact with them, to seek a peace, but the Elders had never really considered that idea seriously; they had presumed it was their onetime Zentraedi slave-warriors come home for final vengeance. Besides, when SDF-3 unfolded, the moon of Fantoma was already under genocidal attack by the forces of the Invid Regent.

Terrified as they were of abandoning their seat of power, lust as they might for the Protoculture the warring armies carried, the Elders had fled. There was too great a risk of death on Tirol, and their fear of oblivion outweighed any other impulse.

Learning the REF's true intentions, the Elders still shrank from any contact. Masters of deceit and treachery, they were incapable of trusting anyone else.

Their little prototype ship, with its superluminal drive, had made a few planetfalls over the years (since the Elders dared not show their faces near any of the advanced Local Group worlds they had once ground under their heel, of course). There were species sufficiently organized and domitable to be of some minor help-retrofitting the craft under the Elders' supervision, installing conventional power systems to minimize the drain on their Protoculture supply.

But the very act of dominating a population used up Protoculture at an agonizing rate, and the Elders feared detection by their former subjects, who were sallying out among the stars on their own. More than anything, however, the last Robotech Masters lusted for a return to their former power.

For that, they needed clones, warriors, the irresistible power of Robotechnology, but above all, they needed the secrets that had died with Zor. So they took to space again, feeding on bitterness and resentment of the universe. They were the unseen watchers of the Sentinels' struggles against the Invid, the hidden monitors of the conflict that had nearly consumed the Local Group like a black hole.

They looked for their advantage at every turn, but events defied them. Then the Invid transubstantiation swept away their last hoarded reserve of Protoculture like a whirlwind. Growing weaker, sickened like addicts gone cold turkey, they seemed wraithlike themselves. The Elders clung to life single mindedly, feeding on their own rapacity-the stark craving to rule. They became their own worst tormentors.

Finally, as they spied on the drama played out around Haydon IV and Ranaath's Star, they felt the last of their life forces ebbing.

They had no idea how the planet had assumed its shape, or kept it, without the forces of gravity deforming and distorting. The very idea of two half spheres the size of the opened Haydon IV was untenable by any physics the Elders knew.

But that was something for the lower orders-Scientist triumvirates and the like-to wonder about. The task of Masters was to rule.

Nimuul, the First among them, could barely lift his chin from his breast as he sat sprawled in his thronelike chair. Still, when he managed-to bring his head up a bit, his face wore the furious, blazing glare that was the Elders' only expression. It was an ax-keen, hawk-nosed face with sharp, angular cheekbones under which were scarlike creases of skin suggestive of tribal scars. His pate was bare, but fine, straight blue hair growing from the sides and back of his head fell to his shoulders.

Nimuul's fight to shape words was even harder than his effort to raise his head, but he chose the spoken word over thought-speech because only a trickle of their mental power

remained. "We . . . must . . . reveal ourselves. To the . . . Awareness."

Hepsis, of the silver hair, stirred on his high-backed chair. His nailless, gracile fingers trembled feebly on its arm. But after a grunt he, too, brought forth sound. "No! The . . .

risk . . ."

The third, Fallagar, was the most weakened by the prolonged ordeal. It seemed he could feel death before him, ready to blow his mind and personality away to nonexistence like a puff of dust. His terror gave him the strength to shape words aloud. "Our last chance."

He radiated waves of impotent rage and fear that even a nonsensitive could have felt. There was no telling what the Awareness of the planet would do in its battered, virus-altered state once they dropped their mental shields and revealed their presence-supposing that they could rouse it from its slumber. But there were no other options.

They were agreed. They dropped their shields warily, each making sure neither of the others betrayed him, left him exposed while ducking back behind psi-cover. With a heightened sense, they perceived the Awareness, hanging not far off in space, as a cold moonlet of mental energy.

Even at the zenith of their power the Elders had forborne to probe or seek to alter the Awareness of Haydon IV. They were averse to risk to themselves; the Awareness was tractable and presented no apparent threat. But always, in the recesses of their inner thought, Nimuul, Hepsis, and Fallagar had harbored misgivings about the titanic mindforce residing in the core of the artificial planet. Certainly it had no reason to take pity on them; quite the reverse.

But Nimuul managed, "Let me . . . speak for us." Where once it had shone forth like a nova, the triumvirate mental force of the Elders was a wan beam, like a ray from a dim nebula. But it carried Nimuul's message: We are the last of the Robotech Masters. We can lead you to new Protoculture!

With that, all three slumped, spent, in their chairs. Their breathing slowed, began rattling.

But within Haydon IV, something quickened.

The message activated a deeply nested subroutine, which enabled a function that had been totally inert, and so was missed, during Louie Nichols's epic cyber-burn. Mechamorphosis had always been a cardinal trait of Robotechnology, a reflection of Protoculture.

Cyber-systems could mechamorphose, too.

Deep in Haydon IV, new data highways shifted into existence, circumventing the blockages on the old. What pure information had done, physical change undid, at least in part. New topographic features-mountainous ones-grew out of reshuffled components.

The Awareness roused itself, took stock of the situation, acted. Control and other systems on the Elders' ship came to full available power. Its attitude thrusters fired, and it began a full-boost approach to Haydon IV even while its three oc upants felt life slipping away.

The planet shifted massively as the Awareness ignored all the frightened queries from its inhabitants. The surviving Haydonites drew back, afraid to interfere.

Even as the ship closed on Haydon IV, a Brobdingnagian alloy tentacle took shape out of shifting machinery to emerge from one of the shot-up factory tubes. The Awareness guided the ship into the grasp of a specially fashioned claw. It was enfolded, and the enclosure was pressurized.

The lock cycled open in response to the Awareness's unspoken command. Remote units swarmed in around the Elders, propping them up on their thrones, inserting tubes, sensors, actuators. In seconds the Elders were encased in life support systems, their vital signs increasing.

The Awareness saw at once that the triumvirate could not be kept alive that way for very long. It stepped up its efforts to revive them.

From a hidden storage nook deep, deep in its internal reaches, the planet fetched forth a half dozen or so eggplant purple cylinders, round-bottomed and quiveringly gelid. They were the last of the particular manifestation of the fruit of the Flower of Life that the Invid Regent had grown in his hive on Haydon IV. That had been back during his occupation of the planet-before the Sentinels had unseated him in a cataclysmic battle-and now these few specimens were all that remained.

There was no Protoculture in them as such, true, but there was some vestige of the Flower's essence and substances akin to the ones on which the Elders fed. In moments, fluids drawn from the fruit were flowing into the bodies of the three.

They began to regain consciousness. The Awareness knew that this emergency measure would not sustain them for long; it introduced stimulants, heedless of the shock to their systems, and waited-anxiously-for some sign of life.

Nimuul's eyes blinked open. He did not feel well-indeed, he felt a bizarre disorientation-but he knew death had retreated, at least for the moment. He saw at once what had happened.

I will not deal with you, Nimuul mind-spoke to the Awareness. I will bargain with your

master only.

By then Hepsis and Fallagar were awake, too, and the triumvirate integrated itself once more, still weak but less so than it had been in a long time.

We will speak only with Haydon.

There was a moment of utter silence all around them, through the ship and the life support systemry, in the air, and seemingly through the artificial planet itself. Then the Elders felt vibrations-physical, psychic, extradimensional-and Haydon IV began to move again.

The Haydonites saw, heard, and sensed the changes all around them. They began to assemble in designated places and make ready in answer to the instructions of the Awareness. The planet shifted and reconformed in its most important mechamorphosis.

The Elders, encased on their thrones, found themselves no longer in their ship; it had been dismantled around them. The Protoculture cap was whisked away, straight up into the air, by some outsize waldo apparatus they glimpsed only for an instant.

The thrones were set in a line, facing the same way, on a circular platform containing the equipment that ran and controlled their life support. That disc sat in turn, now, in the middle of one of the Haydonite transport devices hat the humans had dubbed "flying carpets."

The claw must have drawn them back to the surface of Haydon IV itself. At least they found themselves atop a high tower, seemingly a mile and more in the air. How the planet retained its atmosphere and kept from freezing, they did not know. Below them the landscape heaved and crept, glittered and digested itself.

The carpet lifted off the tower and flew out over mecha-morphosing terrain. The Elders, hair whipping in the wind, were held immobile by the life supports grappled in place. They could see other carpets, huge ones laden with thousands of Haydonites, converging.

Beams of light began to break from cracks in Haydon IV's surface, as if the Robotech landscape were a cracking coat of paint on a light bulb. There were deep reverberations from the planet's core. For the first time since their transmogrification to Elders, the three knew another emotion besides anger, fear, and the lust to conquer and rule. Even in them, spirits hollowed by centuries of slavery to the Protoculture, mere was awe at the magnitude of what was taking place below.

Something climbed into prominence on the horizon immense even at that distance and altitude. It had a curve to it, suggesting a cyclopean dome even bigger than the hives of the Invid. But the curve swept in, too, as if it were a sphere.

There were more flying carpets, the whole of the remaining Haydonite race coming together to watch their world carry out the purpose for which it had been given form so long ago. The Elders' carpet went into a descent, angling down toward the curve in the planet's surface.

It was not a dome but rather the open end of a curved, circular tube, as if an unimaginable horn of plenty had wound its way up from the heart of the world. There was an impenetrable darkness within it.

The Elders' carpet continued to descend while the carpets of the Haydonites ranked themselves in rows all around the gargantuan aperture below like angels assembling for a heavenly choir. The Elders strained against their confinement uselessly, then gave it up.

Their carpet was the only one to descend to the surface of the planet. It came to a stop before the yawning opening, but there was no telling how far; the scale of things threw off any normal sense of perspective.

A long silent moment went by, except for the wind fluttering the Robotech Masters' hair. Then, at the same instant, a light appeared far down the conduit from some source beyond its curve, and the Haydonites took up a single piercing, tentative note, a mental moan of ecstasy and holy dread.

The light grew brighter, and the note louder. Then all at once brilliance leapt forth from the maw of the great conduit, and the Haydonites' note became a full-throated telepathic cry. It was well that the Elders were connected and cathetered; they lost control of their bodily functions.

The light and sound grew until the planet shook. The winds tore across the Robotech plain, yet the Haydonites' carpets somehow held position.

And, deep in the soul of the light, something moved.

It came toward them slowly, unhurriedly-regally. Nimuul, Hepsis, and Fallagar, held fast, eyes threatening to start from their heads, watched spellbound.

The Haydonites' chorus swelled as if it would fill the universe as Haydon emerged from a sleep of eons.

"You can't be serious," Exedore said, though he had known Cabell long enough to be aware that no other possibility existed.

"See for yourself," the sage challenged, presenting the data caps with a flourish. "I've included the mathematics." Ever since the two had returned to Tiresia, they had been

busy around the clock, analyzing and collating their observations from events at Ranaath's Star. Now Exedore fed the caps into a projector; it took only a cursory scan to show that Cabell was right, at least in terms of the implications. The sphere ship's plunge into the black hole had revealed a new mathematical world, and one particular subfunction stood out glaringly.

I don't know why we didn't see this before, Exedore thought, a sure sign that the function he was looking at was valid.

Exedore looked back to Cabell but pointed to the equation in question. "This implies ...

Anti-Protoculture!"

Cabell was nodding almost tiredly. "You're correct, dear fellow; we should have realized it long ago. It's almost as if wed been blinded to this side of the mathematics."

Of course it was old hat, scientifically, that each particle had its mirror image-an antiparticle carrying an opposite electrical charge-and that pairs would annihilate each other in a supreme release of energy whenever they encountered each other. But no one had ever supposed the yin/yang symmetry extended to this: a shadowy counterpart force to Protoculture itself, one whose first glimmerings implied apocalyptic mutual destruction should the two ever be brought together.

Exedore drew a breath and grabbed a calculator. "I suppose we had better get to it, my friend. There is much to learn ago not very long to do it."

Cabell was still nodding. "We must penetrate this frightening new secret before anyone else does."

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I figured maybe the SDFs needed some new kind of unit patch say, a spacefold drive with a red diagonal through it.

Jack Baker, Upwardly Mobile

Once, darting down into a danger zone in her powered armor like a giant Robotech hornet, Kazianna Hesh would have felt the urge to howl a Zentraedi battle cry. Foeman, prepare to die! The Quadronos come!

But not here, not today-if "today" meant anything in what the humans were calling newspace. She wasn't free to throw her life away in splendid battle anymore, had obligations and priorities above even military glory-a child to protect.

Thus, she was a hundred times more dangerous than the Kazianna of old.

With the fifteen Zentraedi mecha behind her, there was an even division of eight powered armor suits and eight Battlepods. Eight males, eight females; even Exedore could not say why the suit-configuration mecha responded so much better to women, the pods to men. It was simply so. They descended in frontal-assault formation to the planet that had appeared from nowhere.

The humans and some of the others might rhapsodize over the place and its forests and seas, but it was just another alien world to her, with none of the perilous grandeur of Fantoma or the austere dignity of Tirol. Perhaps there was something in newspace that liked the giants less than it did the rest.

If so, let that something beware; its foe was Kazianna Hesh, mate of mighty Breetai and mother of his son.

The Zentraedi squadron homed in on Rick Hunter's beacon, and Kazianna established contact over his tactical freq. At his direction, the giants dropped in for a landing on and around the high ground where the first party's Battloids had posted a guard.

Groundside, Kazianna and her spitfires remained sealed in their suits, but the pods opened to permit debarkation of the Sentinels' personnel: Baldan, Kami and Learna, Lron and Crysta, and several of the Praxian Amazons. None of them seemed any the worse for the ride.

Kazianna had taken a shine to the warrior women, had hound a spiritual kinship with them, as soon as she met them. Indeed, the former Quadronos and the Praxians had done a trtde comradely drinking in SDF-3's split-level rec club.

Now, though, the Praxians were distraught, almost unsoldierly. Kazianna supposed it was understandable what with Gnea, their leader and one of the great heroines of the war, missing. When one was spoiling for a fight, it always made discipline secondary. No doubt they would settle down as soon as blood began to flow.

Now the only problem was to find someone to fight. Down below, at the level of Kazianna's lower shins, Rick Hunter was finding out just how determined the Praxian furies could get.

"As you were!" He bellowed it with veins standing out in his temple and neck; it finally shut them up. "I didn't bring you down here so you could go charging off in all directions and end up missing, too! You're here to observe and advise, so anybody who can't follow orders is going back upstairs in a pod!"

That quieted them. Brudda, their section leader, drew a deep breath and saluted. "Understood, sir. We place ourselves at your command."

Rick forced himself to calm down, too. "Thank you. Lron, Baldin; over here, please." There was no point going over the whole business twice. "Kazianna, let me know if you can't hear me."

Zentraedi and Sentinels gathered before him; Jack, Karen, and the rest of the remaining recon party formed a semicircle behind. The mecha, weapons ready, took up a circle around the group, keeping watch in all directions.

"You know the main facts." Rick pointed out the route his recon party had followed. "We were advancing through a densely wooded area about a mile and one-half along that valley, with Sergeant Dante on point. Gnea moved up to walk the slack position, some six yards or so behind him.

"As we entered an open grassy area, both the sergeant and Gnea were enveloped by what appeared to be a somewhat different version of the luminous phenomena that-"

Jeez. Been talking bureaucratese in the TIC too long, Rick! He started in again. "From what we could see, this hail torm of light swirled down on them, and we lost them from sight. At the same time, sensors picked up an enormous life reading, but there were no large organisms in sight.

"The light was gone in a couple of seconds, and so were Angie and Gnea. We searched the area-no trapdoors, camouflaged openings, or other clues. We even blew open the ground and lasered down nearby trees; they were solid.

"I'm splitting you into search units. Battlepods and Quadronos will deploy on the ground; Battloids will fly recon and cover. I'm hoping the Garudans' extended senses, the Karbarrans' hunting and tracking skills, or the Praxians' scouting procedures turn up something we missed."

He looked to Baldan. "And I was thinking-maybe if there's some equivalent of the Crystal Highways here . . ." Baldan nodded his gleaming head. "I'll do what I can do, Admiral."

Rick began calling off assignments. The mixed contingents sorted themselves out to move back into the target zone.

"Aw, sca-rew!"

Angelo Dante knelt with the stock of his rifle pressed to his cheek, swinging the muzzle this way and that in the milkwhite mist. Not that there were any targets around; it was just something to do while he tried to sort things out. "Not again," he grated.

Like most of the younger Amazons, Gnea had developed a preference for modern,

high-firepower weapons over the traditional arms of her Sisterhood. Now, though, for reasons she could not quite pin down, she reslung her submachine gun and took her halberd in hand, giving it a preparatory spin, the long curved blade leaving a silver trail in the air. "You mean you've encountered this phenomenon before, Sergeant?" Like his, her voice brought no echoes. She wondered if they were outdoors.

"Naw. It's just-weird stuff like this, ma'am. It simply ain't military."

And it always sounded so goddamn lame in an after-action report. Like when Angie and the other ATACs went through all that crap in the Masters' spade-shaped mother ship. Living energy nexuses and mindmusic and alien horticulture. Try writing those up without having some G-staff chairborne commando laughing at you!

It was all too involved to explain to some dame from another planet.

Gnea pivoted, spinning her polearm to hold it at high port, and kept watch in the opposite direction. "What's the last thing you remember?"

"Uh ... We were moving through that open area, and I felt something kinda strange, like the way electricity makes your hair stand up, only it was inside my head. So, that-"

He hated to hurt a woman's feelings, but- "So I gave you the signal to pull back, only you didn't do it." He was making a circular motion with one hand.

She took a quick glance at it over her shoulder. "Oh, yes; your UEG field signal. It took me a moment to remember what it meant; in our army that's the gesture for close intervals."

It's what you get mixing different services together, he thought sourly, but kept it to himself. "So whatever that tinsael blizzard was, it got you, too." He began trying to raise somebody on the tactical freq.

Gnea sensed nothing nearby; visibility looked like it might be several dozen yards, but it was impossible to make an accurate estimate, lacking any point of reference. She set the spiked butt of her halberd on the, floor by her feet (at least, she assumed it was a floor; it was glossy and smooth, like a single white tile).

"Sergeant, I think it would've gotten us no matter what. And I don't think something's gone to all this trouble just to harm us."

Well, she was a cool one, he had to give her that. All frequencies were silent, and so Angelo came to his feet, rifle leveled at waist height, covering his field of fire. "Maybe not. Even though some aliens I've known like to collect specimens."

He slipped a pencil flare out of his belt pouch, struck it alight, and dropped it to the ground.

"What we'll do is work out as far as we can, keepin' the flare in sight, and run a circular search pattern."

She frowned. "You mean split up?"

"Hell no! What d' ya think this is, a slasher movie?"

"Excellent." She whipped the halberd around again, bringing it en garde. Angie thought, If this is a movie, at least the slasher's on my side.

"Only," Gnea went on, wetting a forefinger and holding it up, "I seem to feel an air current coming from that direction. Shall we start there?"

"Good as any other."

They both moved to take the point at the same moment, then looked at each other. There was no telling who out ranked whom. Gnea topped Angelo by half a head and more; from her looks and reputation and what he had seen of the Praxians already, he was prepared to believe she could handle herself. But still, she was carrying that frog dissector while he had a rifle with its selector switch flicked over to continuous fire. "Look, if y' don't mind?"

Gnea nodded with reserved grace. "By all means." She knew that some human males still harbored strange attitudes about females. But at least this one was quick to react, willing to shoulder a dangerous job. Perhaps he was even as competent as he seemed to think.

Angelo found himself staring into those inhuman eyes of hers, eyes that belonged in a bird of prey. He forced himself to look away from them. The two moved out with Gnea watching behind, going in a sort of sideways crab step. Their footfalls sounded lonely and small. In thirty paces (fewer for Gnea) the flare was getting dim behind them, but the current of air was stronger. "How long will it burn?" she asked.

"Fifteen minutes, anyway. Let's keep goin'."

"Yes, but drop another flare."

He did, not that there was much to go back to. Another thirty paces and the air had a distinct cold tinge to it.

"An exit, maybe," Angelo muttered, striking a third flare. Before he had to reach for a fourth, something loomed up in the mist before them. With scale so tough to judge, he thought at first that it was a city or at least a building.

They drew close enough to make out details. When they finally had a clear look at it, they stopped in their tracks. Angie's jaw was hanging open. "Well, tug my gearshift and call me

Five-Speed."

Gnea shouldered her halberd: "I think you might as well got your weapon up, Sergeant. Whatever did this, I doubt a leer means much to it, and we definitely don't want to offend it."

Angelo had never been very enthusiastic about taking orders from women except when they made overwhelming sense. Like now. He slung his piece, and they continued on, walking side by side.

"Y' know, this qualifies as theft of gov'ment property," it occurred to him to observe.

Gnea smiled unexpectedly. "And have you brought proof of ownership?"

That one gave him pause. "I don't think they put serial numbers on spacefold drives."

The Protoculture drives-or rather, the casing that held them, what the engineers called the housing-bulked before them, big as a building. Somehow, out in the open likethat, they were less overpowering than in the SDF-3's drive section. Nevertheless, the two could not see the far end from where they stood.

Of course, the trillion-dollar question was how the hell the drives had gotten there-wherever "there" was-and who or what had done it. Angelo figured the answer to that one would go a long way toward explaining what had happened to the SDF-3 and what the newspace stuff was all about.

"They're ours, all right," Gnea said. "You see that multiphaser? Doctor Lang's work."

Hot for the first time since they had gone on-line, the fold drives were completely dark, inert. Like so many other Robotech devices, the housing had had all Protoculture drained from it. Only unlike the rest, the physical structure had been stolen, too.

"Maybe there's another around here someplace," Angelo mused as he and Gnea began a slow tour around the huge drives housing. To him it resembled a great sealed city of domes, megablocks, and manifold roadways.

"Another fold drive array?"

He clicked his tongue. "Yeah. The one the old SDF-1 lost back in 'oh-nine, near Pluto. Maybe something around here collects 'em."

They completed a cautious circuit of the fold drives housing without finding anything else. Gnea pointed to a stairway leading to the service catwalks. "We might be able to see something from up there."

"Worth a try."

They made their way to the little mesa that was the top of the primary containment casing. But there was nothing to see; they could not even spot the flares. Angelo yelled into the wintry mist through cupped hands, and Gnea fired three spaced shots, but there was no response of any kind.

"I suppose we could reconnoiter further," Gnea ventured. "Huh uh," Angie said firmly, seating himself tailor fashion with his rifle across his thighs. He dug for his canteen. "Now that we found 'em, I'm sittin' my butt right here on top of 'em till they take us home."

"Yes, I thought you might feel that way."

Oh, yes, la-de-da. Like she's got everything doped out. He stopped himself before taking the swig of water, though, automatically offering her the first drink. "Thirsty?"

Gnea canted her head at him. "I have water of my own, thank you." She swiveled her hip around to show him the canteen on her belt. It was an exquisite hip, in keeping with the rest of her. "Did you think a Praxian would be unequipped? "

"No. Who cares? Suit yourself." He slugged at the canteen in an evil temper.

She hunkered down, holding her halberd upright. Males were so difficult to understand, especially human males. She recalled the infatuation between Jack Baker and herself. Of course, that had had a lot to do with the Compulsion Tesla had worked on them both. But it had taught her something of the confusing, unsettling, and not always controllable, nature of relationships between the sexes.

"If I've offended you somehow, Sergeant, I ask your forgiveness."

Sweet Baby Jesus cookies on Christmas! Now he really felt like dirt! "Naw, y' didn't do anything wrong ma'am-uh, Gnea. "

She nodded sagely. "I'd heard you were heartsick over the officer Dana Sterling. Such things can be troublesome." Angelo's face turned purple. "What'd they do, announce it over the PA?"

Actually, he had made some inroads with his former CO on the trip out from Earth. They had always had a sort of feuding friendship, and when Zor Prime died in the final explosion that released the Flower of Life across the planet, Dana and her senior NCO seemed to come together as natural as magnets.

Then, of course, they had arrived at Tirol, and Dana had met Rem. Seeing what was

between the clone and Minmei, Dana had forced herself to stay away from them. Things between her and Angie were never the same again, though. He figured that part of the reason she had stayed behind with her folks was because he-and Rem and Minmei, for that matter-were going on the SDF-3.

So, now that was general gossip, huh? Angelo considered Gnea, squatting there in that getup of hers-part armor, part uniform, mostly skin-and realized morosely what truly had him bristling at her.

"Hai!" she said, making it sound like a swear word. "Now I've done it again! I didn't mean to get you upset."

But he shook his head. "Drop it, okay? It's not important." He stood up just for something to do.

Gnea stood, too, and they were face to face. Almost touching-he could see the pulse beat in her throat and feel his own. She smelled exotic and exciting.

Looking into the avian eyes, he heard himself say, "I don't want to think about . . .

about . . ."

She made a raptor's hissing sound and clutched the harness at his shoulder. Angelo reached his hand behind her neck and pulled her lips to his. He figured they probably looked funny, running their free hands all over each other, kissing and panting while holding on to their weapons and trying to keep lookout with one eye-in case the godless XT hordes came charging over the hill.

"Hey, before somebody gets killed," he got out of the side of his mouth, and carefully tossed his rifle aside. Her halberd landed on top of it.

They threw their arms around each other with a passion neither of them had ever felt before. It was all moans and fumblings, neither one familiar with the other's outfit.

They sank to the surface of the containment casing, still kissing and caressing. It was cold and, once they were out of their clothes, slippery. That made it more fun.

Angie had heard of transcendent experiences, but nothing like this. It seemed as though the whole world were getting brighter, going nova.

Waitaminute, waitaminute; it is!

"Angelo! " Gnea's nails dug into his shoulder; he rolled over and found himself staring up into the face of a deity. Out of uniform in the presence of God. He wondered if it was a court-martial offense.

It was a visage formed from the white brume, a hairless, humanoid head, vaguely and yet unmistakably feminine. It seemed to take up the whole sky.

They heard its thought: LIFE IS WASTED ON THE LIVING!

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Not odd to note, perhaps, in view of the upheavals in that particular period of Aeon Lanack. But the truth is that in spite of the laborious, even stern, inquiries made by the Elders and their servants, no one ever seemed quite certain as to exactly where Zor came from. We know that, like so many others born during that era (for that matter, like many born before and after it and many born into other races on other planets), he was raised in a succession of government care facilities and the like from the time he was very young.

But no record of his birth or precise origin could be found. This frustrated the Elders, who wished to analyze and duplicate the secrets of his genius and extraordinary affinities, beyond words.

Cabell, Zor and the Great Transition

She had often crashed through enemy fortifications or target cities, brushing aside buildings or shouldering her way between defensive works.

But now Kazianna Hesh moved easily and carefully through the venerable old trees on the planet that had appeared from nowhere. Her enemy had not chosen to reveal itself yet, and caution was warranted.

Rick Hunter had assigned the Zentraedi to sweep paths accesible to their mechaed bulk; the humans and Sentinels were working their way through the denser growth, and a few Cyclone outriders advanced along the wider footpaths and streambeds. Periodically, she heard Jack Baker and Rick Hunter trying to contact Sergeant Dante or Gnea on their tactical freq, but there was no answer.

Like Angelo, she tried to keep her mind on her job but found herself distracted. It seemed that her team was too; she snapped at them to stay sharp.

What was it about the place? She had expected to have Drannin and the problems with the children on her mind, had recognized that she would have to make sure she kept full concentration. But she had not expected what she was feeling, what kept running through her mind.

Breetai, oh, my Breetai . . .

His face was there before her, his phantom arms around her; his kiss pressed on her lips.

Stop! You're a war leader of the Quadronos! But it did no good castigating herself. A moment later the memories were there before her again, as though she had not grieved and struggled to reclaim her life.

Breetai, my lord and my love . . . What was it about the place?

Kazianna saw the sky reflected in her helmet -facebowl and realized as if from afar that she had stopped advancing, was standing, swaying, in a grove of trees whose tips came even with the top of her powered suit. A leaf the shape of a kite came loose from a branch, fluttering down.

But it was only her body there. Kazianna Hesh was years and light-years away.

It was her first major action, an assault landing on a strategic Invid stronghold on icy Tawkhan, and everything had gone wrong: more Invid than anybody had projected, fleet deployment from fold jump hopelessly snarled, Lord Dolza s flagship missing and perhaps lost.

Kazianna was pinned down with what was left of her battalion-her battalion, because all senior officers had fallen before waves of Invid. Scout Shock, Trooper, and Pincer Ship, they seemed to spring from the ground, a horde for every individual the massed Zentraedi firepower burned down.

The resources of an entire sector had been marshaled. Out beyond the atmosphere a total of nearly a quarter million ships of all classes hammered away at one another. They were at virtual point-blank range for a space engagement; Kazianna and the other ground troops could look for little help from that quarter. Even on the daylight side of the planet, the incandescent bursts flashed bright, far overhead.

The giants had never had music of their own; the Robotech Masters had reserved the arts of the Muses and the Cosmic Harp to themselves and their clone triumvirates, yet how the blood sang in the veins of the Zentraedi that day! Fired by the eons-old traditions and honor that Exedore had taught them, they hurled themselves at the Invid with a will.

This was what the Zentraedi had been born for. They followed their Imperative.

Oyster-shaped Invid troopships blotted out the sky. The entire planet was a theater of war. Whole armies were thrown against each other as if they were mere companies. Nearly eight million Zentraedi eagerly locked in mortal combat with over twenty million Invid.

Battlepod went muzzle to muzzle with Shock Trooper, weapons vomiting forth death. Powered armor suits darted in aerial combat, fought as infantry, and even rolled and tore with the enemy hand to hand. There were massed charges of entire corps, met by equal or greater numbers of teeming Invid.

Combat heated the atmosphere of Tawkhan itself. Explosions and energy volleys opened crevasses and shattered glaciers; undersea onslaughts made the oceans boil; beams of raw power melted ice fields and shook loose immense avallanches. All across the planet the warfare raged in thickening smoke and rain.

The stupendous barrages awoke the resentment of Tawkhan itself, jarring its tectonics. Volcanoes blasted to life, and fissures poured lava up through ice cap and seabed. Quakes crushed or swallowed Invid and Zentraedi alike. Mud and superheated water rained down. Floods swept mecha away like bits of straw.

Through it all, Kazianna's unit made its way toward the very heart of the foe's central hive, a daring thrust to end the campaign with one telling blow. But it met with failure, and what was left of her unit was about to be totally annihilated.

Kazianna braced herself to grapple unarmed with a Shock Trooper; her weapons were exhausted. Then the Trooper was gone, burned in half, the halves falling away in opposite directions. Dazed, Kazianna Hesh looked beyond where it had been. There stood the great Breetai, a metal war god in his personal battle panoply, a rifle as big as an Earthly artillery piece smoking in his gauntleted fists.

Behind him came a crack task force, ten divisions of elite troops, to strike at the very brain of the foe. Kazianna learned later that her own assault force had been a feint, drawing Invid attention away from Breetai's sword-stroke raid. In moments the special coalition of living computers that directed the Invid on Tawkhan-the piles of brain tissue lurking in their vats-would be destroyed in an apocalyptic contest with the invading foot soldiers and mecha.

In that second, though, all Kazianna Hesh saw was Breetai, striding his personal domain-the domain of battle-like an icon come to life. The most illustrious and successful of Dolza's field commanders and, after the Old One himself, the biggest and strongest of the entire Zentraedi race.

It was heresy to think this, but Kazianna did not care: He was like some higher being, some creature superior to other Zentraedi and even to the Robotech Masters.

But the worship was not mutual; Breetai was still directing his raid and barely gave her a glance. "You! Consolidate your unit and stand by!"

Then he was gone, and she was rushing to obey. Genders were usually strictly separated among the Zentraedi, where neither physical love nor natural birth were known; only the scope of the Tawkhan campaign had thrown them together so.

Thus, Kazianna Hesh could not understand what was happening to her-why did his voice and his look obsess her so? Was it madness?

She studied and admired him from afar, through an age of conflict and conquest. The closest she came to him was when he presided at an awards ceremony for Miriya Parino. Kazianna was only a few paces away, a company commander by then. Breetai did not even spare her a glance.

By that time he wore the alloy half cowl as a result of his terrible wounds, suffered when Zor was slain. But to her he was only that much more imperial looking. In those days the Protoculture supply was dwindling, the galaxywide war running down like clockwork as both sides' resources and infra structures declined. The central mission of the Robotech Masters, and thus the Zentraedi, was to find Zor's vanished super dimensional fortress and the last existing Protoculture matrix.

At long last came the end of an epoch, when the terrible beauty of Minmei's voice, along with human emotions, worked Armageddon upon the Zentraedi. The glories of their history turned out to be a tissue of lies concocted by the Robotech Masters. Kazianna and the rest were a pitiful handful of survivors.

But for her, something in the human emotions had stirred dormant feelings. For Kazianna, the example of Miriya Parino and her love for Max Sterling pointed the way to an even amore audacious thought. If Zentraedi could love human, why could not Zentraedi love Zentraedi?

In the humble home on Fantoma where Breetai had dwelt at a simple miner an epoch ago, she went to him. And this time she did not permit him to ignore her.

When death took him from her in combat, she was nearby and saw him sacrifice his life to slay the Regent, end the war. There were fools who looked at the relative size of the combatants-Breetai nearly three times the Regent's height-and marveled that Breetai had not won outright. They understood nothing of the astounding power the Invid monarch had by then, the strength beyond mere size-or of the debilitating effects of Minmei's voice, transmitting her torment, forced on Breetai by the malevolent Edwards.

Kazianna dismissed all fools. What Breetai had done with his dying breath, no one else who ever lived could have done. He died in victorious combat, the highest Zentraedi fulfillment.

Watching him perish in an explosion like the birth of a star, she had wept for the single time in her life.

"Is anything wrong, Commander?"

Kazianna's executive officer's voice shook her out of the reverie, and she realized that barely an instant had gone by. The falling kite-shaped leaf whirled down past her facebowl.

"Negative. Resume sweep."

But something on the planet must have been probing her thoughts, scrutinizing her memories. If it was malign, she meant to destroy it, but for the moment she almost felt grateful to have had Breetai back again even for a few seconds.

Then the reverie was wiped away by a burst of static. "All units, all units! Hold position! It's back!"

"I specifically told the bridge officer not to inform you unless you inquired about the children," Segundo said. "I am aware that you're dealing with other crises."

"Understood, Doctor," Lisa acknowledged curtly. Even over the intercom screen he could see the strain on her face. "What is your assessment?"

The pediatrician stepped aside and let the pickups focus in on Roy, Drannin, and the other children. Once again they sat in their uneven circle, the Zentraedi children towering over the human.

But there was no doubt about their chant now. ` Au-ro-ra, Au-ro-ra, Au-ro-ra . . . '

Aurora the psi-child, the accelerated-growth sprite, the one who reached across interstellar distances. Lisa had always been sure she would be able to keep jittery mommy stuff separate from ship's officer worries, but now she was less certain.

"I don't think this is a mental dysfunction or a behavioral aberration in the traditional sense," Segundo was saying. "I believe that they are rational but that they are responding in a way that we don't understand to a difficulty or necessity that we can't perceive."

On the bridge, Lisa heard people conferring behind her; the search operation-something was up. "Inform me of any changes, Doctor."

She turned to Raul Forsythe. "They've found Gnea and Dante," he said.

Somewhere far away, Minmei was singing, his head on her lap, her hand stroking his brow. Rem knew it, as he knew that her warm tears were splashing on his cheek, but that was in some other universe . . .

On Haydon IV, Zor saw no contradiction to what he had already learned, though Vard had not yet reached the same level of enlightenment. Living matter, inorganic matter, machine, Protoculture they were all united by certain basics. The fundamental building blocks of Creation had nothing to do with quantum foam any more than they did with plant sap.

The key understanding was that the universe was a result of the interaction of pure information. Information organized in a way that was so subtle, all-pervading, and elegant that in the end all the wise men, mystics, and scientists had missed it.

It was not a jarring note, then, to Zor, to see that fact manifested in the from of an artificial planet.

The expedition to Haydon IV had to be postponed twice while Zor gave his seeming obedience to the Masters and made secret preparations. By that time he was well along in his quiet rebellion.

The Masters, drunk on the power of Protoculture, were so arrogant, so sure of their hold over him. What better way to fight them than to feed those monstrous egos? They understood no more about Protoculture than a child knew of an energy gun it might find and brandish about.

But now at last he had come to Haydon IV in his super dimensional fortress, seeing that the preliminary surveys had not exaggerated its beauty, its magnificence. On his own urgings and from their hidden misgivings, the Robotech Masters spared the artifact world any visit from their Zentraedi giants; there was something about its storied Awareness that made the Elders cautious. Haydon IV rendered tribute to them from its apparently endless wealth and went about its enigmatic affairs.

The Invid, for their own reasons, never made the planet a military target. Maybe they saw it as too desirable a prize to damage. Or perhaps they had heard the daunting stories of how the planet dealt with invaders.

Zor was welcomed down by the inhabitants of Haydon IV with the kind of remote courtesy for which they were famous. And yet he felt their intense scrutiny. The confusions and mental fogs that plagued the survey team were no obstruction to Zor; where others had missed the looming presence and central importance of the Awareness, he had been attuned to it from the first.

As for actually gaining access to the Awareness, it was like some absurd parable. Where the Haydonites had turned back all inquiries and all travelers before, they simply watched him. Facing a stupendous hatch that blocked his route to the lower reaches of the planet, he reached by habit for a handful of dried Flower petals from the pouch he carried at his belt,

He chewed the petals and leaves frequently now-supposes his body was addicted to them, though the true craving stemmed from no physical need. As he tasted the little quid; he felt himself probed by sensor beams. A moment later the titanic door rolled aside.

The Haydonites who had flocked around him and kept him under surveillance since his arrival came no farther than the entrance, nor would he let even the faithful Vard accompany him. Zor passed into the lower depths alone.

He made his way down through the labyrinthine under world, sustained by it and accepting the paths it opened for him. At last he walked calmly and unhurriedly out into the yawning techno-cavern where the Awareness waited.

It was a confusion of neon lines in strange patterns, a thing the size of a cruiser. By the time he came into its physical presence, he was quite well acquainted with it.

When he bespoke it now, though, the Awareness refused to answer. He had the feeling that it was waiting for some final proof, some bona fide, before it lowered its last defenses with him.

Zor reached into a pocket and drew forth an object he has prepared after long, hard pondering. It was an artificial jewel, charged with Protoculture power, formulated from his studies of both the Haydonites' dzentile and-even more important the organic gemstones manifested by the Regis when she has assumed humanoid form.

Zor lifted the jewel to his forehead in self-coronation. A bio-adhesive charge made it fast there. He willed a command, and a ray sprang forth to strike the resplendent cat's cradle of the Awareness.

There was a moment's gravid silence. Then a billion scintillating notes leapt from the Awareness, the material work seemed to fall away, and it opened its fateful dialogue with Zor.

CHAPTER TWENTY?FIVE

The will to power is disguised in a hundred thousand ways, on many worlds-as service to the public good, or defending the faith, or protecting the nest from outsiders. But at the core it is always the same; exposed to the light, its features are unchanging: a naked lust to dominate and control.

Not surprising, then, that on that fateful night in a hidden place, the Three who had sworn obedience to the will of the people piled hands in an unholy ritual. Sotted on Protoculture, they put all shame aside and anointed themselves as Masters.

The Scribe Triumvirate of Aholt, Ulla, and Tussas, Nothing Save Animus: A History of the Robotech Elders

The Robotech Elders stopped straining at the med machines that held them fast. Behind their respirator masks, their furious howls ceased. Haydon was coming, and they understood that there was no escaping.

Like a mountain on the move, the figure in the gargantuan conduit approached them through the blinding light. With slitted eyes, the Elders watched it come. High above and all around, the Haydonites had ceased their mental hymn singing and fallen quiet.

With coronas of crackling energy radiating from him and lightning bolts crashing all around the heights of his head and shoulders, Haydon emerged.

Some of the intermittent transignal messages from their vassals-the Robotech Masters sent to ravage Earth-had told the Elders of the primitive religions of that blighted planet. Now a minor phrase came back to haunt Nimuul: created in God's image.

Small wonder the Haydonites were ready to swoon with adoration and ecstasy; before them was He in whose image they had been cast. The Elders used their resentment and irascibility to keep from yielding to the mesmeric spell the sight of Him cast.

Haydon wore-or had perhaps simply donned the illusion of-a billowing, high-collared cloak like the Haydonites'. From beneath it, feet extended, and yet they floated free of the planet's surface.

The stupendous head was smooth and hairless, reminding the Elders of their onetime warlord, Dolza, but Haydon's skull was higher-crowned and more finely shaped than that. His face was more defined than the Haydonites'; it was some countenance the Elders somehow half recognized but could not place. Where the Haydonites had been born without eyes, mouth, ears, nostrils, the face of Haydon gave the impression that it had once borne those features and they had atrophied from disuse.

Haydon bore no dzentile, though. In the middle of His forehead pulsed a gland or organ unlike anything the Elders knew of, ridged and scalloped like some shell thing's back, puckered closed like a sleeping blossom.

Haydon's blind cliff of a face panned His domain, drinking in the physical universe after His long hibernation. He became aware of the Elders-or perhaps He had been all along and the cyclopean head tilted down. The mystic organ in His forehead bloomed open, and for an instant the Elders saw within-a shape and texture they could not discern that nevertheless paralyzed them with dread.

A beam of searing brilliance burst from the organ to play over the captives. VERMIN,

SPEAK!

Nimuul answered with mindspeech: Look to your proud fleet, Ancient One! Your grand design is in jeopardy!

There was a concerted moan from the Haydonites, like a low wind. Haydon turned His blank face to the sky, and the beam from His forehead played out across the spherical ships drifting powerless in space over the world He had made.

The Haydonites and the Elders sensed swift communication between Haydon and His Awareness, like some deep stratum perturbation. Plainly, Haydon understood then the enormity of what the Karbarrans, Ark Angel, and Louie Nichols's cybernauts had done.

From the organ on Haydon's forehead a black beacon shone forth, swallowing up all the light in its path. The Haydonites wailed wordlessly, and the planet shook.

Nimmul, Hepsis, and Fallagar united with even more desperation than they had in contacting the Awareness. No, stay your wrath! We've come to offer you a bargain, and Protoculture!

That gave Haydon pause. He stood erect once more, gazing out over His handiwork. A nimbus grew up around him, so effulgent that the Elders had to close their eyes. When they opened them again, Haydon had worked another miracle.

Where one had stood there was now a trio-a triumvirate, the Robotech Elders registered-shoulder to shoulder, facing outward in a circle. It was impossible to tell which, if any, was the original, but it was clear that while enormous, they were smaller than He who had levitated forth from the bowels of Haydon IV.

Without any talk, one went back down the conduit from which Haydon had emerged, another floated off across the machine landscape, the Haydonite carpets making way for him, and the third turned back to the Elders. SAY ON.

Nimuul responded: We know where there is Protoculture, new Protoculture that the Regis did not steal! Enough to power all your ships. We will lead you to it gladly.

Gladly. It was pivotal that Haydon be given the means to leave spacetime.

AND IN RETURN?

In return you will provide us with the means to exert our will over the Local Group star systems and their inhabitants. You will grant us your authority to rule the planets you touched so long ago.

DONE! The Awareness had already spoken to Haydon of the ships it had built and the single energy that must power them.

Agreement came so readily that the Elders were tempted to ask for more concessions, but they dared not. It was manifest that Haydon-or the Haydons-wanted nothing more from the physical universe except the means to pass beyond it.

Haydon raised one hand in a divine gesture. There was a psychic shuddering through the planet as the Awareness prepared to turn itself to new tasks; the Haydonites on their carpets came about in vast flocks to regroup and race away to all points of the compass, bent on missions Haydon had given them. First among those was completion of the unfinished sphere ships.

Haydon turned back to the Elders. NAME OUR DESTINATION.

Treacherous as they were, the Robotech Elders were loath to trust anyone. But before the might of Haydon they had no other choice, fearing that if they were uncooperative, he would snuff out their lives and go seeking Protoculture on his own.

The Elders joined their minds to speak, practically fondling the words with their thoughts. Optera first-"New Praxis," it is called now. Then ... Tirol!

SO BE IT.

The planet shifted under them, already on the move. FIRST, WE MUST GATHER UP

OUR SPHERE SHIPS. THEN IT WILL BE NECESSARY TO DIVERT TO LASKAR.

The Elders were puzzled even as they felt a certain lassitude stealing over them. Your planet's primary? Why? FUEL IS NEEDED FOR SUCH A JOURNEY.

As they grasped the enormity of that, they felt themselves losing consciousness. A trick! Stop! We demand?

The Elders' thoughts faded as the med machines' sedation took hold. Haydon turned away from them disinterestedly as the carpet on which their thrones sat whisked them out of His presence.

Haydon had already given His command to the Awareness. Like a worshiping slave, it strained itself to carry out His directions to the fullest.

Haydon IV gathered in the sphere ships, finished and unfinished alike, holding them in readiness, then reabsorbed what it could of the factory tubes. Haydon saw that His discorporate hibernation had lasted longer than He had foreseen. That and the appearance of the Sentinels, plus the demands of producing the sphere ship fleet, had nearly exhausted the power reserves of the artificial planet.

Eventually, of course, power could be brought back to full by other means, but there was not time for that. While the Haydonites raced to carry out the labors He had assigned them, the planet left orbit and began its descent toward Laskar, dying lesser sun of the Ranaath system.

The star's place in the arc of the sky grew and grew as Haydon IV rushed toward it. The artifact world hurtled past the orbit of the system's innermost planet. At the same time a strange energy field polarized into existence, surrounding Haydon's handiwork to protect it and more.

It was well within the reach of stellar prominences before it stopped. A preliminary beam licked out from Haydon IV, probing into the monstrous furnace of the star itself. Back poured a mammoth gush of naked power.

For several long minutes Haydon IV hung there, tethered to its star, drawing in energy as it had drawn in raw materials from the asteroid. Within, its reserves were restored, then rilled to repletion, with all the power the planet would need.

The fiery stream of starfire stopped, dissipating, as Haydon IV moved away from Laskar again. As it went, Haydon had word from the Awareness of troubling findings.

At the edge of perceptible space there were aberrations and anomalies. The fabric of the continuum was losing integrity, and whole regions seemed to be disappearing.

Time was growing short, very short. Haydon IV's drive activated, its course charted for Optera. It went superluminal and vanished.

Still Rem drifted; still the nucleic dreams showed him the past.

Not even Haydon could predict how things would develop, while he slept, on the worlds he had touched personally.

Therefore, he left instructions with the Awareness that if any arrived with enlightenment, or even some portion of it, the Awareness would recognize that by certain signs.

And Zor had manifested such a sign; much (though not all) of the Awareness's data revealed itself. Zor mentioned the Texts of Haydon, of which he had learned, and they were opened to him. But not translated for him. He had to demonstrate certain aptitudes or begone.

The Texts of Haydon resembled no book or archive before them. They were a cyclorama of thought images and psimemes. But Zor, with his Flower-altered mind, found them intelligible-barely. Had he not, the Awareness would have known and slain him on the

spot.

He forgot about food and sleep, laboring to receive the disembodied knowledge until it seemed his brain would burst like a lightning-struck tree. But stopping was unthinkable, and he persisted, pausing only to ingest another petal or two of his shrinking Flower supply or, when he remembered to, drinking water from a font the Awareness had set by him.

In that manner Zor came to know the story of Haydon, first and greatest of the intellects spawned by the galaxy (the Texts had a bewildering way of referring to Haydon in the plural one minute and in the singular the next). In exploring and mastering the universe around Him, Haydon had gained immortality and probed the essential secrets of Creation.

But when His exploration of the universe seemed to hold no further mysteries, no further challenges, Haydon still had not found the answers that He longed for, the destiny for which, He was sure, He had been called into being.

Some of His investigations indicated to Him the existence of a level of being beyond those that could be seen or touched. Of a place outside His continuum where Haydon could at last find fulfillment, achieve a level of being that had become an undeniable need.

And Haydon found that He could not reach that other side. Every approach failed, every assay fell short, until at last Haydon faced the fact that He could not attain transcendence.

But that did not mean some other life form could not. And so began an age of grand experimentation, epic journeys, profound contemplation, and unprecedented megaprojects. The Garudans were endowed with their expanded senses and their psychotropic biosphere. On Spheris, crystal lifeforms were given an evolutionary helping hand. An investigation into thought control went awry on Peryton, leading to the holocaust Moebius in which the planet became trapped.

Not least importantly, Haydon IV was given form, and its Awareness was brought to life.

Zor read on, feverish with the need to know. At last he came to the mention of Optera and the Invid. A curious race, Haydon found, with some promising characteristics, but apparently at an evolutionary dead end unless something new were added. And Haydon had that something in mind, an intriguing plant He had encountered.

The organisms on the plant's planet of origin did not seem to be exploiting the plant's potential, and so Haydon transplanted the entire species to Optera leaving none behind. Zor stared long and hard at the image of the Flower's original home, such an unremarkable little place ...

The introduction of Flower of Life to the Invid was like the recombining of long-sundered

halves. Almost overnight the Invid's entire existence came to revolve around the Flower and something they seemed to perceive in it.

(A lab mutation of the plant, the ur-form called Sekiton, was introduced to Karbarra. But while the ursinoids there found many uses and demonstrated a peculiar affinity for it, the experiment was essentially a failure.)

The star-spanning experiments Haydon had begun were set in place, and Haydon began to prepare for His long sleep, weary of the tedium of immortality. The event of transubstantiation would cause His artificial world to awaken Him more accurately, to return him from mere stored information to physical form.

The ticking off of the centuries began.

Zor lashed out, stopping the parade of thought records as a seething rage took hold of him. It had been bad enough to know that the Robotech Masters had perverted his discoveries and the Protoculture to evil ends that the Zentraedi had laid waste to Optera.

Now, in addition, Zor understood that his meddling and the Masters' fiendishness had derailed a bold and unique attempt to push living intelligence through into an entirely new realm.

Zor threw back his head and roared up into the echoing spaces of Haydon IV's inner reaches, fists raised high, for the sheer iniquity of it all. The waste and suffering and loss, the death and devastation.

His fury combined with his contact with the Awareness gave Zor a moment of lucidity unlike any other he was ever to have. He suddenly had a vision, a Grand Design, of his own. He would atone for what had happened.

It was all there before him: a reseeding program; a mighty new starship incorporating everything he had learned about Protoculture with which to execute his plan; a renewal, especially of Optera and its idyllic way of life; and eventually, a return of the galaxy to the way it had been before the rise of the Robotech Masters.

And lastly, he thought, he would return the Flower to the world on which it had originated, for who could tell what role it had yet to play there? Yes, even Haydon had been shortsighted in that instance; the Flower deserved to grow once more in its appointed place, the unremarkable little bluewhite world called Earth.

His exhaustion, his hyperstimulation through mental contact with the Awareness, his ingestion of the petals perhaps it was just a combination of these. But the fact was, it was the image of Earth, the invocation of it, that brought on his seizure.

Zor cried out, thinking himself blinded, hands clamped to a skull that threatened to fly

apart.

He saw a column of pure mind energy rising from the Earth, a pillar of dazzling force a hundred miles in diameter, crackling and swaying, swirling like a whirlwind, throwing out sheets of shimmering brilliance. It climbed higher and higher into space, all in a matter of moments.

Zor knew what the mind cyclone was, recognized it as the racial transmutation of the Invid. The pinnacle of the cyclone abruptly gave shape to a monumental bird, a phoenix of mental essence. The firebird of transfiguration spread wings wider than the planet and soared away, bound for another plane of existence, with a cry so magnificent and sad that his heart was wrenched by it and he was changed forever.

Zor shuddered, sobbed, and fell to the floor weeping, then lost consciousness.

In the sphere ship, Louie Nichols gathered the survivors of his team. Other personnel were distracted by the strange, swirling limbo through which the craft was passing on its way between continua; it was the cybernauts' chance to regroup.

They set up a prefab secure cubicle high up on an unoccupied platform. Louie was helped onto a robot med diagnostic table that deployed itself from a compact shipping case.

There were some gasps when he removed his tunic and they saw the marks the cyber-burn had left on his body.

He gritted his teeth. "All right, quit gawking. You know what we have to do."

They did. The headlockers began unpacking machines and remotes, fitting them together, and patching into power sources with protech proficiency.

Louie's mouth felt very dry, and when he tried to lick his tips, he could not work up any saliva.

Several remotes floated in at him. Behind them were the surgical waldos loaded with the implants and bionics he needed and wanted to receive.

Louie drew a deep breath and lay back down on the table.

Rem awoke. His head was still in Minmei's lap, but her tears had long since dried. His face was slick with moisture, however; he was crying as Zor had.

Minmei sang softly, sadly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

When Nichols emerged from that lockbox cubicle his disciples had set up, he was the same studiously irreverent young pain in the neck who'd gone in with some noticeable increase in vigor and agility. But there was also an undertone of indefinable strain to him. I resolved to keep an eye on him; he played his part well except for one occasion during transit, the one slip that hinted at the change in him: He leaned to a scope that was controlled by a sensor and of course accepted it matter-of-factly when the scope swiveled to him and adjusted height, focus, etc.

What he didn't know was that the auto-adjust mechanism wasn't working-had developed a glitch and been switched off. But the scope's servos had obeyed his silent will, anyway. It was no time to confront Nichols and his familiars, but thereafter I kept an even closer watch on them.

Dr. Harold Penn, The Brief but Timeless Voyage of the Peter Pan

For her, the tribulations of the passage were a multiple torment, because she was not One but Two.

Marlene had heard the humans refer to the ghosts and visions, memories, and chimeras as space lace. She had heard them talk of out-of-body episodes and afterlife experiences. They were all but unintelligible concepts to her; being in her present body was phantasmagoria enough, her life a nightmare almost beyond coping.

By the time the hijacked sphere ship plunged into the gravitational abyss of Ranaath's Star, she seemed a ghost, a semitransparent thing of ectoplasm fading fast. In a kind of terminal sleep, she was unaware that Scott Bernard kept a bedside vigil, though it made him nearly insane with guilt and heartache.

Marlene/Ariel's fold jump dreams were a kind of mental multiscreen image deluge. She, too, experienced the birth/death trauma, understanding it in a way she never otherwise would have because in that moment the nucleic memories and perspectives of the original Marlene Rush resurfaced.

But, as well, she felt the cellular tide of the Invid like a moon-drawn ocean within her, swelling and falling. Ariel knew the all-encompassing sadness of the great Invid downfall and the loss of their paradise, recalled the unity of plasm that the Invid shared and what it was to be a race literally sprung from one flesh.

Marlene saw once again her youth, her coming of age on the REF expedition.

Ariel went through her strange birth, a shivering, naked simulagent delivered by a Protoculture-spawned egg. Marlene: falling in love with the taciturn but idealistic Scott

Bernard.

Ariel: the bewildering travels across a blasted Earth with the last Robotech fighters.

Marlene relived the moment, on the deck of a starship racing to do battle with the Invid conquerors, when Scott asked her to marry him and she said yes. Ariel witnessed the defeat of her race and the transfiguration of the Invid into a phoenix of psi-essence-and saw, too, where the phoenix flew.

Both were also silent watchers of each other's memories, like visitors to alien screening rooms. Their/her consciousness was wrenched this way and that by the unimaginable forces grappling at the sphere ship; between torment and joy they attenuated her . . .

Until there came a moment of profound trauma, the cessation of external influences-the ship's emergence into new-space. With an almost physical jolt, the two halves of her were snapped together, fully integrated for the first time.

She opened her eyes and saw Scott gaping at her. She looked down and saw that her body was completely material once more. She felt a tranquillity and quiet triumph. She was healed and whole.

He breathed, "Marlene."

Marlene. Yes, that was the name that fit her best, even though Marlene's memories and identity were only a component of what she was now. Ariel was a name the Regis had given her capriciously, and she was not Invid anymore.

She lay on a pallet spread directly on the ship's deck. Scott came to her side on one knee, hesitating to take her hand but wanting to. "You're alive. Thank God."

He was haggard and drawn, not from the passage to new space, she knew, but from self-torture over what he'd done to her. With the disparate parts of her mind and psyche integrated, she understood what he had done and what external pressures it must have taken for him to do it.

His sense of duty, his fealty to his oath of service, his feelings of obligation to those on the SDF-3: those were human things, and Marlene understood them now.

"Yes, Scott. Alive." Her hand covered the last bit of distance to grasp his. His expression swung from astonishment and doubt to relief and the beginnings of rapture.

Before he could answer, though, a face appeared over his shoulder, long and pale with insect goggles, wearing an irrepressible smirk. "Back in action, huh, Marlene? Aces! Scott, didn't I tell ya this little jaunt would give her a new lease on life?"

There stood one of the main pressures that had forced Scott to treat Marlene as he had back on Ark Angel. Scott didn't know if Louie Nichols realized how lucky he was that all this had worked; had Marlene been put through all her anguish for nothing and perished, somebody would've paid.

Scott only grunted in answer to Louie's promptings and put his other hand on Marlene's. "Lie back, now; you've been through a rough time."

"Scott, I know what I'm saying. I've made a full recovery. Besides, I presume Doctor Nichols has some more questions for me."

She looked at Louie slyly. She still had that otherworldly strangeness to her, but there was a certain human knowledge behind it now. Louie found himself realizing what a dish she was. "You said it, gorgeous!"

Scott shot him a jealous glance, and Louie reined in a bit. Marlene rose to her feet without any difficulty, shaking back the waves of crimson hair.

"Um." Scott smiled awkwardly. "Welcome aboard the REF prize-of-war vessel Peter Pan." He shrugged.

Marlene stepped forward to look out over the inner globe of the ship. There was no shortage of space; a fairly healthy piece of legendary Macross could have been rebuilt inside the yawning sphere.

Improvised bridges, ladders, and catwalks connected the various levels and platforms, and human furnishings had been fastened to its decks with adhesives and strapping; the techs and engineers could find no way to drill or bend the stuff of the ship. "`Peter Pan?'"

"Yeah. `Second star from the right, then straight on till morning', and all that," Louie supplied with one of his quirky shrugs. Marlene watched people laboring over the interface equipment required to run the ship or setting up living facilities on unused platforms. It was odd to see portable sanitary booths side by side with modules of Haydonite technology and to smell heated rations there where Protoculture had been intended as the only sustenance.

There were parked mecha, too, and piles of weapons, ammunition, and ordnance; but no weapons had been mounted as the ship itself, since it was impossible to penetrate its hull for firing ports and anything mounted externally would have been annihilated in the passage.

"We're sure bombin' along now." Louie scratched his hen ed hedgehog of hair: "Thing is, we're not all that sure where we are. I hoped you could give us a clue, Marlene."

As she stood there gazing out, she wore the expression Scott had seen that day when she had first cast eyes on a mountain lake, not long after his team of irregulars had found her. Her beauty and her delight in nature's beauty had simply taken hold of him and never let go.

She smiled faintly, "What's the matter, Doctor? Afraid the others will think you're crazy if you tell them yourself?" She turned to Louie, who was for once speechless. Scott had the feeling that behind the goggles, byte buckaroo's eyes were starting from his head.

"You're in what some call new-space," she told them.

"Is the SDF-3 here?" Louie's levity had left him. "Is the Regis?"

Marlene turned to see what effect it would have on them both. "New-space is the Regis-is the entire Invid race, in a way. We're outside the province of spacetime. You might say we've entered the mind of the transubstantiated Regis herself."

Louie was quick to get in the next remark while Scott was still making choking noises and trying to shift mental gears. "Marl! Babe! Hey! Work with me, here! How do we talk to her?"

The corners of her mouth turned up ever so slightly. "1 think you're about to learn."

The two men followed her gaze and saw what others were becoming aware of. On a platform near the center of the ship's interior, Aurora stood, a blue glimmer growing up around her. Max Sterling, standing near, had started toward his daughter, but Miriya was holding him back. As they watched, Jean Grant, too, put a restraining hand on him.

All through the ship people stopped working and turned to watch Aurora as they became aware of a chant impinging on the very fringes of their perception.

Au-ro-ra, Au-ro-ra, Au-ro-ra ...

The rest of the ship's complement seemed to freeze, as if they were playing statues, listening to the cadence. Vince Grant, listening to some report; Shi-Ling, at the interface helm; Dana, poised on a maintenance job on her hovertank all eyes went to Aurora.

All at once Aurora was not alone. Seated in a ring around her were what looked like transparent holograms of children large and small. They sat repeating their mantra, eyes lambent with eldritch fire.

Jean Grant breathed, "Roy!"

"Drannin!" Miriya added.

But neither they nor the others in their circle gave any sign of having heard. They were focused on Aurora, and she on them. Louie, hypnotized by it, too, almost jumped in the air when Marlene spoke at his shoulder. "`Straight on till morning,' Doctor."

Kazianna landed on streamers of fire, her weapons ready, as mecha and running ground troops closed in on the open field from every side.

It's back, the message had been, yet there was no sign of the sparkling rain that had spirited away Gnea and Dante. But there were two figures in the middle of the field, scrambling around animatedly.

There were confused transmissions overlapping each other on the nets, but at last Rick got some order on the tactical freq. "Hold your fire, I say again, hold your fire! The swirling lights came back just as our point elements were entering the field, then disappeared. We have a visual on what appear to be Gnea and Angie. All elements stand fast and hold fire unless otherwise ordered."

With the field covered from all sides and other elements watching for a trap or sneak attack, Rick selected a recon team and elected to walk point. Jack Baker, Karen Penn, Lron, and Crysta checked their weapons, then spread out in a skirmish line, moving forward. Baldan came, too, carrying communications gear patched to the SDF-3's TIC and bridge.

No doubt about it, the sergeant and the Amazon were there once more. Rick was not sure what the flurry of activity had been when they had first reappeared, but it sure looked like some hasty clothes donning.

He and his team went carefully, testing the ground and watching the air around them, but there was no sign of a threat. Angelo and Gnea, squared away, were wandering around the spot where they had appeared, apparently searching for something. As Rick came up to them and Angelo came to attention, Gnea was carving a big X in the ground with her halberd, on the spot where they had popped back into sight, so that it could be found later if necessary.

Angelo pumped off a nervously crisp salute. "Um, Sergeant Dante reporting, sir. We, ah, that is?

"Just take it slow, Angie. One thing at a time. Is there still a threat here?"

The big tanker swallowed. "There is, everywhere in these parts, sir. But no more here than anyplace else."

Gnea had joined them. Rick could not help noticing that she stood rather close to Dante,

leaning on her halberd. "Give me the high points first," Rick told them.

Angelo's chest expanded as he drew a deep, resolute breath. But Gnea got the story in motion first. "We met the Invid Regis. This whole newspace is her realm. She's got the SDF-3's fold drives and won't give them back. She doesn't want us to leave."

Angelo still had his chest full of air. He let it out in one long sigh. "She says the real universe is ending, Admiral." Rick looked at the X in the ground. "Does she know we're not finished with it yet?"

He said it to cover the fact that he was dumbfounded. What the hell was going on? The SDF-3 had been on its way home to fight the Regis. Was the war already lost?

Rick glanced from Gnea to Dante. "Looks like we're in for one helluva debriefing."

The communicator toned. The tiny screen showed not a TIC officer but Lisa's face. "Rick, we've had a new development here. Suggest you return to SDF-3 ASAP."

He ran a hand through his hair, wondering why it had not all gone white. "What's happened?"

He could tell it took some effort for her to stay calm. "The children-Roy and the others. They've made contact with Aurora Sterling. It seems there's a rescue ship on the way, but the kids're in some kind of trance, and Segundo can't rouse them out of it."

There was a sudden ground-shaking eruption of flame and blast. Where Kazianna's powered armor had stood, there was only burning grass. High above, her armor darted for the SDF-3.

"No closer!"

Segundo looked ridiculously small blocking Kazianna's path to the circle of children, but he did not budge an inch when she seemed about to trample him flat.

Instead, she stopped. The humans knew more about young ones than she, and there was an undeniable ring of moral force in the Micronian's voice.

Still, it took a lot to keep her distance when Drannin sat bewitched with the others, droning Aurora's name. What made it all insane was that Aurora's image, or specter, floated in the center of their circle. Her eyes held the same macabre glow theirs did.

Lisa stood nearby, barely restraining herself from going to Roy. "Emilio, if this is a case of waking the sleepwalker, I'm willing to risk it rather than have their minds stolen."

She felt Rick's hand grip hers and give it a sustaining squeeze.

But Dr. Segundo was shaking his head. "It's not that. They are still in their bodies, as it were, and I believe Aurora is, too. But this is not the sort of thing you can end simply by dashing water in someone's face.

"Some exchange of information is taking place; we can all feel that. Let it, for I suspect the children will not desist until it does."

Kazianna wavered like a tree swaying in a monsoon, then held her place. "For how long?"

Before the pediatrician could answer, someone shouted, "Look!"

Aurora was looking beyond the circle of children to where Lisa and the rest stood. She raised her hand to them in greeting or farewell-Lisa could not tell which-as the chanting grew louder.

Au-ro-RA!

Then the chanting stopped, and Aurora faded away. Roy and the others rose and faced their parents, their eyes still alight. Segundo had the sense to move aside this time; nothing was going to keep Kazianna from Drannin's side. Lisa and Rick ran to Roy, and other parents were right behind.

Lisa threw her arms around her son, possessed or not. She half expected him to feel clammy or wooden in her embrace, but he was just a little boy who might well do with a bath sometime soon.

As she knelt by him, though, he put one hand on Lisa's boulder. "Mommy, 'Rora's gonna be here soon."

Rick hunched down by his son. "When? How, Roy?"

"Comin' in a big round ship. We told her how to find us. Mommy, we have to go."

"Yes, hon. We'll take you home right now."

Roy shook his head, eyes still flashing eerily. "Uh uh, I mean go from here. 'Rora said. Before it's too late."

"What did she mean?" Rick gripped Roy's shoulders and forced himself to look into the beacon eyes. "Too late how?"

"I can tell you," he heard somebody say.

Rick and Lisa rose, Lisa holding Roy. Before them stood Rem and Minmei, hand in hand.

"And the boy is right," Rem added. "There isn't much time."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Why are Terrestrials so surprised there was no fossil evidence or other indication of the Flower's origin left behind on Earth or the Pollinators' either? Hasn't it penetrated yet that we are talking about Haydon?

Cabell, Zor and the Great Transition

Even set in a row as they were, locked on their thrones on the flying carpet like so many trophies on a mantelpiece, the Robotech Elders made their acid resentment known-by their eyes, their mental timbre, their very aura. Why are you not mustering your war machines? You must crush the Amazons!

Haydon was One again, standing afoot, as he rarely did, far across the machine plain, tall as a peak. Nevertheless, he caught their sour, almost pouting thought.

Haydon turned to them, rising from the alloy flatland and drifting toward the fantastic tower on whose pinnacle they rested. He was so huge that winds moaned and swirled in turbulence at his passing. Even at that thin-aired height, his head loomed above them.

YOU ARE SUCH PETTY AND UNTHINKING ORGANISMS. NO WONDER YOU CAME

TO THE PITIFUL STATE IN WHICH I FOUND YOU.

The Elders shot back, You need the Flowers!

I HAVE ALREADY MADE THAT KNOWN TO THE PRAXIANS, the great head sent forth its words.

What? No! You must take them by surprise, smash all resistance with your first blow! The artificial world must al eady be depleted by construction of the sphere ships; surely it could not sustain a prolonged war.

Haydon drew back, light as a feather though he stirred immense air currents with his movement. YOU KNOW NOTHING. THERE ARE OTHER WAYS TO ACCOMPLISH

GOALS BESIDES MURDER AND DESTRUCTION.

As he hung in the air, Haydon worked yet another change upon himself. This time the Elders were so shocked that even their crotchety sourness of spirit failed them.

Power systems had long since been installed on New Praxis, but tonight's ceremony decreed the light of torches.

The city had the look of traditional Amazonian architecture, which often reminded humans of a blend of classical Japanese and Dark Ages Nordic. Here, though, it was worked in local materials, the rough-cut stone being little different but the lumber taken from Flowers permitted to grow to massive fruition. Though the feud wars of the Praxians had ended generations ago, their buildings still had the look of fortifications.

The importance of the Second Generation Flowers went far beyond building supplies. As the only complex plant that would thrive in Opteran soil, it sustained much of the CO2-oxygen cycle that made the planet inhabitable. Thus, much of the Praxians' effort at recolonization had been directed at a third seeding of the place.

Down the center way of their rebuilt city the Sisterhood came in a throng, marching somberly, torches held high. They were turned out in their best armor and accoutrements, weapons sharpened and polished, their fantastic war helms burnished.

At the end of the main avenue of their old cities was usually the Whaashi, a birthing center or creche. Though the women warriors knew nothing of courtship, sexuality, or pregnancy, at least until the Sentinels War, the monolithic Whaashi saw to it that their race endured. It had always been so, since the legend times of Haydon's appearance.

That was no Whaashi, though, at the end of the main thoroughfare of the new Sisterhood capital of Zanshar. It was a big block of a place, reminiscent of the birthing places, but had been built with Tirolian and human help-because all the Whaashi had been lost when Praxis had been rent by planetary apocalypse.

Among the Sisters trooping along in silence with their fluttering firebrands, a few smaller figures could be seen-a child sheltered under the flow of a mother's embroidered cape or walking alongside, trotting to keep up.

They were children-all female. Some were from the Praxians' contact with humans or, in a handful of cases, clones of Tirol. But they were few, and while they were loved, they were not the offspring of the Whaashi, and the rites and gifts of the Whaashi were ingrained in the Amazon psyche.

The building at the end of the avenue was another kind of lifeplace, where the sciences of Tirol could bring forth clones of Sisters who longed for progeny. These children, too, were cherished and made welcome, but they were not the blessing of the Whaashi, either, and most Sisters yearned for the mental communion with the Whaashi that brought forth a new and destined infant.

Waiting at the top of the steps at the cloning center was Bela, a rank of guardswomen below her, also bearing torches. As the crowd entered the plaza before her and spread out to fill it, Bela threw back her campaign greatcloak to expose her sword hilt, its grip wound in golden wire, its pommel a flashing blue gem held in a claw of black iron. From the other side of her belt hung a big, use-worn Badger pistol.

She rested her gauntleted hand on the sword hilt. Out of the sky darted a bright shape of silver-blurring double wing sets. Hagane; Bela's malthi, perched on her shoulder and gave a piercing warning cry. When the Sisters had poured into the plaza and there was silence, Bela spoke.

"I have had the dreams, even as all of you have. I have seen the reports of how the stars are disappearing from the sky. What these things mean, I do not know. Yet, as we were called to this place and time by voices within us, so we have come.

"Has Haydon truly spoken to us? I cannot say, and all the reports and messages from other worlds are in conflict and confusion. But the dream I dreamed showed me a rebuilt Whaashi, even as it did you, and-"

She stopped, feeling a presence behind her. Hagane uttered a jarring whistle but then fell uncharacteristically silent. The throng gasped, and Bela turned to see Haydon. It took her a moment to find her tongue.

"Greetings, O Mother," Bela cried, and kowtowed. The rest of the Praxians genuflected.

Over them hung the image of the changed Haydon, a Haydon of the Yin aspect. The conformations of the blank skull, the contours of the vast body under its cloak, the very emanations the figure gave off-these left nothing in doubt. Haydon was as Haydon had been in a bygone age.

The final proof lay in the tone of the mindvoice, unmistakably feminine. AS I SAID I

WOULD SO LONG AGO, I HAVE COME BACK TO THE SISTERHOOD OF PRAXIS.

The figure had come from nowhere and might as easily have been some transignal image or holograph. But the Praxians' inner senses knew differently.

"We thank you," the thousands of voices murmured together.

It was the great secret the Praxians had hidden from all others, even their Sentinel allies: the distaff side of Haydon's Godhead that had made itself manifest nowhere else in the universe.

I WILL RESTORE THE WHAASHI. AND IN RETURN YOU WILL DO THAT WHICH I

REQUIRE OF YOU.

Bela had always considered herself devout, and the very thought of a new Whaashi was enough to make her heart leap. But something had happened to her in her service with the Sentinels, experiences that had taught her that a leader could not afford the simple, open faith that others clung to.

Thus, when the glad shouts of the Amazons died away, Bela raised her formidable voice. "We thank you and praise yon for this benevolence, Haydon, First Mother! Yet what is do nature of the task you require of us?"

There were some angry mutterings from her subjects over her impertinence.

GO FORTH NOW AND GATHER IN ALL OF THE FLOWERS OF LIFE THAT HAVE NOT

REACHED FRUITION. THOSE THAT HAVE BORNE FRUIT OR WILL BEAR IT, LET BE. ALL OTHERS ARE NOW CONSECRATED TO ME. Immature Flowers? "Protoculture," Bela breathed to herself, not daring to say it aloud. Then, as loudly as she could, she demanded, "Why does the First Mother want Protoculture? We, who have fought in wars caused by it, must know for what purpose it is intended!"

The objections and chastisements of the crowd were louder. "What does it matter?" "You blaspheme!" "Anything! Anything for the Whaashi!"

The former Sentinel allies had engaged in open combat, and the political brew of the Local Group was turning toxic. The concerns and dangers of other planets were no longer the Praxians' affair, especially since defying Haydon would jeopardize the granting of the Whaashi. Such was the popular sentiment in the plaza.

The singular organ in the center of Haydon's forehead burgeoned open and lit like a star. Her wrathful voice filled their minds. THAT IS NOT FOR YOU TO QUESTION! DO AS I

BID YOU OR FEEL MY DISPLEASURE!

Even more terrifyingly, Optera/New Praxis ground like ill itting bones under their feet. The Amazons, who had already lost one homeworld to upheaval, moaned their dismay.

There were hundreds of voices crying out to surrender the Flowers. Bela drew her weighty, two-handed shortsword from its scabbard so that the blade flashed with light from the torches and from glimmering Haydon.

"I forbid it! Not until we know the purpose behind this commandment."

She had received word of the SDF-3's disappearance, of course, and the events at Haydon IV-conflicting reports that only added to her misgivings about setting free more Protoculture. The apparition Haydon might even somehow be the trick of an unknown

enemy.

But the crowd was not with her. Their fear of Haydon's anger and planetary catastrophe and their need for the Whaashi were too great. With a unified roar, they swept up the steps.

Bela's personal bodyguard wavered, some of them more attuned to the crowd's position than to the queen's. But it hardly mattered; hesitating to hack or open fire on their own Sisters, they went down under the wave of tall fighting women.

Bela herself stood straddle-legged on the steps, sword in one fist, assault pistol in the other, to meet them. But when she saw faces she loved, comrades she'd served with, mothers of children she'd held coming for her, she knew she could not do them harm.

The crowd had stopped short before her, daunted by her even in the extremity of their passion.

Bela holstered her pistol, sheathed her sword, and stood with arms hanging limply at her sides. The crowd turned back the way it had come. Already Amazons were organizing harvesting operations. Haydon, looking down, found Her handiwork good.

"And so the final phase of my-Zor's-plan was set in motion," Rem said.

He lifted his hand to Rick and Lisa Hunter. "And the cycle of the story comes around to Earth once more. The last planet Zor seeded, or rather, in Earth's case, reseeded with the Flower. With the SDF-l."

"And Zentraedi help," Kazianna murmured while she was mulling over all the things he had told them.

"Yes, the first to fall prey to the lure of song," Rem told her soberly. He reached out his arm to encircle Minmei's shoulders. "I suppose every child of Tirol is susceptible to it, really.

"The Protoculture gave me insights into the power of the Cosmic Harp and how music could throw down even the Robotech Masters' mental domination."

Dolza found that out, Lisa thought, but kept it to herself so as not to switch the conversational track.

They were assembled in the big bilevel conference area?most of the leaders and certain others whose testimony was pertinent. Caffie and other refreshments had been brought. Screens kept a constant vigil on the children and their chanting, but nothing seemed to have changed except that Aurora's term phased in and out from time to time. She would

not or could not respond to any of the grown-ups, but everyone got de feeling there was a lot of information being exchanged between her and the SDF-3's children.

"With music, Zor-reprogrammed, I guess you could say, a few of the Zentraedi most loyal to him," Rem said. "Although I prefer to think of it as liberating them. It never occurred to the Masters that the Zentraedi could find a cause higher than obedience."

"Lucky for Earth they didn't learn their lesson," Rick whispered to Lisa.

The thought troubled her for a moment. What if the Robotech Masters had somehow eliminated their Achilles' heel? Surely Earth would have been devastated far worse than ever Optera was.

But it had not happened; it was not meant to. She dismissed the thought; it was not time to be morbid.

And yet she felt sure the thoughts and feelings of all aboard were being probed and in some cases manipulated.

Lisa hurried to get a word in before Lang could; the scientist looked half-ecstatic, half-deranged with all that new insight. "Rem, we must stick to the point. What is the nature of new-space, is there really a relief ship on the way, and are all personnel safe at the moment?"

She meant the children, and no one begrudged her the preoccupation. Rem replied, "Just so. I believe the story told by Gnea and Sergeant Dante is entirely true. I believe that all that has happened is tied in with the master plan of Haydon.

"The Regis told you both that she, which is the same as to say her entire race, now desires a return to the Invid's pre or state on Optera, isn't that right?"

Angelo responded, "Yes, sir," and Gnea inclined her head, making her malthi-winged helmet glitter.

"Very well. Ladies and gentlemen, Zor's dream has come to pass," Rem said. "The fleet you sent to Earth must have driven her from it in a supreme mating with the Protoculture itself. But for whatever reason-I suspect because the Regis was forced into it by violence-this transcendence has not worked out as intended."

"We find ourselves in a situation of danger not only to ourselves but to the entire universe. I believe that unless some solution is found, by the nature of Protoculture, all of the Creation that we know will vanish as if it never existed."

At his end of the table Lang watched and listened to Rem with a fascination and a sense of dismay that had been growing for months.

The clone had been scarcely more than a boy when the REF had first encountered him. Now, grown and filled out, he was very much the image of Zor, albeit with some slight genetic alteration. But even more tellingly, in the wake of his clonesong dreams, he spoke with the voice of Zor-with an utter certainty about the nature of Protoculture and the fate of spacetime.

Lang studied Rem's face. It was the same countenance Lang had first viewed decades ago on the other side of the galaxy, ageless and graceful. Then it had stared out of a screen and had spoken incomprehensible words. Now it lived before him.

Lang listened carefully to what Rem was saying, but within the scientist there was a pall, a feeling of total defeat. Despite all his assumptions and all his efforts, it was not Lang that new-space was trying to contact, to use and deal with. The mantle of ultimate Protoculture destiny had fallen on Rem.

All Lang's hopes were dashed. It had been his creed that the Protoculture had sought him out, that he was at the center of the Shapings. Now he saw the cruelty of it, that he was so more a luminary of the Shapings than one of the children or Sentinel fighters, perhaps no more than that overmuscled tank sergeant, Dante.

It couldn't be! He'd come too far. He refused to be done out of his place in the Shapings. But how to avoid it?

Lang was a past master at concealing his feelings. Nothing domed on his face, but inside he felt an icy thrill of hope and dread.

The Shapings had come full circle, and in some ways the pattern was ripe for repeating. Or if not, at least Lang's place in the great cycle would be secure.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Those critics contending that the personnel of SDF-3 were unforgivably blind-in not seeing the implications of their own behavior in terms of the "birth, trauma" nature of their transit into new-space-are nothing but (God forgive me) lard-bottomed armchair generals.

Given the stresses of what they were going through, the emotional wringer pressing out every one of them, and the demands of constant strife and danger, the SDFers' confusion was almost inevitable.

Only children, fools, and those who have never known hardship could argue otherwise. Pastor Basil Yanamamo, Pipeline: Experiences in Birth and Death

"Karen, wait!"

He had finished postflighting his Alpha and had rushed so that he wouldn't miss her, but somehow she had completed her task even quicker and left the flight deck.

As he caught up with her in the passageway, Karen spun on her boot heel, tapping her toe, arms crossed, features composed in heavy weather warnings. "Make it brief, Jack."

He trotted to a stop, feeling something that would have been akin to deja vu if he had not known exactly where he'd felt it before: every time they had squabbled, disagreed, clashed, or vied for the upper hand.

"Aah, it's no big thing. Just thought we could hit the mess if you want some company for dinner."

She was not looking any kindlier. "Don't you want to find out what's going on at the meeting?"

"You mean what went on; I heard it's just breaking up. But by the time we grab a bite, there'll probably be an intel summary we can get a peek at."

Her eyes narrowed. "Then maybe stop for one or two at the officers' club? Possibly a dance?"

Actually, that was just what he had in mind. He answered warily, "Why, is there something wrong with that?"

"Hah! Honestly, Baker, there're cockpit canopies harder to see through than you are!"

"Who aho wha was all he got in.

"This is so typical," Karea said through clenched teeth. "We're stuck in newspace or wherever it is, possibly forever, and suddenly it hits you that we should be seeing more of each other."

"Well, yeah, that just happens to be the case," he said lamely. Then he heard laughter and realized that there were some enlisted ratings standing back by the hatch, ordnance men and women taking a break before going back to rearming the mecha.

"Haven't you goddamn BB stackers got anything better to do?" he railed at them. When he looked back, Karen was gone.

This time he had to grab her sleeve to stop her, and he thought for a moment she was

going to sock him. At least they were out of anyone else's earshot.

"Have it your way, Karen! Let's go back to the cats-and-dogs routine."

"My way? I want you to think about that, Jack. Remember back when we were stranded on Praxis and you got so domestic? Even though you put on a front when there was anyone else around. You were the one who was all set to plow the north forty, lasso goats, and raise us'ns up a crop of rug runners. Right?

"Then we get off the planet and back into the war, and your priorities revert. That's your pattern. When you were laid up after Burak gored you, you were actually acting human for a while, but once you were up and around, ugh!"

Jack had his mouth open to object, but Karen had been saving this one up for a long time, and he didn't stand a chance. "And now we're beached here in new-space and you're making an approach run. Well, spare us both the thrill, Baker!"

"You knew I was insecure and thoughtless when you got me to fall in love with you!" he hollered.

Karen uttered a wordless ki-yi and tried to take his nose off with a snap kick. Jack just managed to fall back but tripped over a stanchion and whapped the back of his head on a viewport rim, going down.

He sat there seeing stars. "King's X! What're you, working for the Invid?"

She was torn between concern and the urge to do mayhem. "Oh, Baker, damn your eyes!" She knelt by him. "Here, let's see."

"No! Ouch! You're just trying to finish the job."

"Stuff it, you big baby. You didn't even break the skin." She released him and let him get up by himself.

"You made your point, Karen. You don't want me to talk to you unless I've already talked to you several times earlier that same day."

"Stop trying to twist things, Jack."

"Yeah, all right. I bet you think that effing Sean Phillips is more considerate, right?"

He rubbed his head gingerly, gazing out the viewport. There were more stars than there had been a while ago. "D' you suppose she's bringing in biota?"

"What?"

"You heard what Dante said about the Regis. All these stars she's making appear here in new-space-Are there lifeforms on them? Maybe even intelligent ones? Is she ripping them off from someplace else or just thinking them up?"

"You're asking the wrong woman."

"Mmm. Okay, look, how about dinner a week from Friday?"

"I don't think they have Fridays in new-space, Jack." She turned toward the officers' mess, more slowly this time. He fell in beside her. "How about breakfast tomorrow? In my bunk?"

Bowie, the Muses, Sean, and Marie had stayed well back during the meeting. There were plenty of astonishing revelations but not really much anybody could say or do about anything ertainly not the ex-UEG fighters or the siren Muses.

As the meeting began to break up, Sean yanked Bowie's sleeve and pointed with a sneaky smile and half-lidded eyes. Angelo Dante had wandered over to the hatch just about the time Gnea, her attention seemingly elsewhere, had eased back out of the crowd.

A look passed between the two. Gnea left, and Dante hung back, scanning the compartment to see if anyone had noticed them.

"Don't let him see you watching!" Sean hissed. The ATACs and Marie quickly glanced elsewhere. Musica and Allegra gazed at them uncomprehendingly, then at each other, so the effect was the same. A moment later Angie was gone.

"Angelo Dante?" Bowie boggled. "No, must've been something that wants us to think it's Angelo Dante."

Musica had caught on, and she was smiling, too, slipping her arm through Bowie's. But Allegra said slowly, "You mean you think he's not human?"

Marie Crystal laughed. "Oh, no; he's human, all right, no matter how he tries to hide it. I bet he and Gnea are gonna Indian wrestle to see who carries whom across the threshold."

Sean sighed and made lewd, fishy kissing noises at her until he realized that two senior staff officers were glaring at him. Marie added, "Now that I think about it, though, there's been a lot of slap and tickle going on since we entered newspace."

"If I understood it right, that's what Lang was driving at," Bowie put in thoughtfully. "Maybe

creating a newspace macroverse is like writing a song. You can't just haul off and do it cold; you haveta draw on inspiration."

That had them all silent and thinking. The loves and attractions of the SDF-3's complement were only part of the mental and emotional baggage they carried.

"It occurs to me that maybe we all want to be real careful about what we think and say and do around here," Marie pondered aloud.

Perhaps I saw this day coming all along, Lang mused, keying the armored vault module with his spoken password, DNA code, and brain scan. Why else would I have made this shrine to it?

The vault module had been aboard the SDF-3 all along, transferred there from storage on Earth. The Robotech equipment it held had been removed from the just-crashed SDF-1 within days of Lang's first encounter with it in '99. The equipment sat before him now, silent and patient, looking little different from the way it had in the instant when Lang had first seen Zor's face on its screen.

He ran his hand along it, the console that had been the nucleus of the SDF-l's living Robotechnology. It had been replaced by human interface equipment, which had then been set up in a conventional bridge arrangement where Henry Gloval set his strong hand on the tiller of galactic history.

But the original systemry was here, preserved, inert. Touching it, Lang felt his skin tingle, recalling the unspeakable shock when pure Protoculture, amassed and controlled by Zor's least comprehensible devices, had flooded through him. It was an event that belonged if not on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, then perhaps on a matrix containment casing, Lang thought ruefully.

He had kept to himself as much as possible the profound changes the Protoculture had worked in him and his new affinity for it. He was absolutely indispensable to the new Robotech Age, and so his strangeness was overlooked. People hailed him as genius, as savior, yet he'd been confronted every day, from the first crash exploration in '99 to this moment, with his own shortcomings and fear.

By long habit he glanced back to make sure the vault module was totally secure. He reached out and tapped a code into a touchpad.

Zor's master console came to life.

Not to full power, of course; there was little Protoculture now, and it all had the unavoidable Second Generation impurities and unsuitability. But the infusion let the alien

indicators and displays show that they still waited. He could flood the devices with Second Gen power whenever he chose.

Up until a short while before, he could have taken a second boost-could have done that at almost any moment over the decades. His powers would quite probably be increased geometrically; the math and research data were promising on that point, just as they led to the inescapable fact that he would die very shortly thereafter.

Zand had been willing to risk it after that first voluntary exposure to the Protoculture he had taken against Lang's orders and behind his back. Though neither of them mentioned it later, Lang had been quite prepared to shoot his colleague down in cold blood rather than see him take that next step toward the godhead.

Most of that stemmed from fear of what the second boost might make of Zand, who was none too stable as it was, of course. But wasn't there more to it? Jealousy and a refusal to let Zand have something that he, Lang, feared to claim as his?

No matter. Zand had had his transcendence, all right. And to hear Dana Sterling tell it, it was all in line with the fear of the Shapings that was almost a religious fervor within Lang sow.

Here in newspace, though, the Shapings had gone awry or petered out or ... Lang was not sure what.

His polestar faith, the Shapings, led him no more. The politicians and the military would go on pretending there was something they could do, but he knew differently. There was only one possible way to save the lives onboard the SDF-3 and, more important, the universe threatened by newspace.

That route lay in a direct encounter with the Shapings. And the only way anyone would do that would be to raise oneself beyond the limits of mortal power, at least for a single moment.

Only no one was going to do that with Zor's equipment, not with Second Gen Protoculture at any rate.

At least ... not as the console was configured now. Lang drew his stool closer and sat absorbed in the console. After long minutes he reached for a sensor and hooked it into one of the system's peripherals. He took up a touchpad and began keying equations into his mainframe, scarcely aware he was doing it.

He paused to run his hand along the console in thought, recalling its Protoculture thunderbolt, and almost threw down the touchpad. It was madness!

There was a sudden flux in the equipment-not unusual; he'd had to jury-rig a lot of the modifications that let it use Second Gen Protoculture. He forgot his frustration and fear, watching rainbow waves of distortion chasing each other across the ten-foot screen.

Lang did not even need to wonder what he'd see next; he had viewed the recording so many times that he knew the pattern of the static that preceded it.

He was staring at the ageless, elfin face again, with its wide, almond eyes, framed by a mane of bright, starlight hair. He'd long since memorized the sounds of Zor's speech of greeting and warning.

Zor's recording. Kicked up at random by a meaningless Protoculture hiccup, some might say.

But Lang took his touchpad back in hand and sat down, staring unblinkingly at Zor. When the recording had run its course, he went back to his calculations.

All across New Praxis the surface-effect and aerospace vehicles were on the move.

The Amazons had come there with little agrarian experience; they'd hunted, herded, and gathered the untended bounty their homeworld offered up naturally. But they had met their new planet's demands with their innate adaptability and their hard-nosed refusal to give up.

They raised some of their food in vats, greenhouses, and aeroponic domes, but the key to their survival had been rendering parts of the stalk and roots of the Flower of Life edible (the fruit being deadly to them). They had learned to farm.

And now they were learning to reap in a way they had never conceived of.

From every point of the compass the ground wagons, air lorries, and skyboats converged. Military, private, common carrier-every vehicle on the planet had been mobilized by women working to exhaustion and beyond. None had slept since Haydon's appearance.

In the main plaza of Zanshar, before the cloning center, the pile of Flowers grew. Every specimen had been carefully scanned to make sure it was unpollinated. All had been bagged in clearseal to ensure that they stayed that way.

And that raised a troubling point. For some reason the mysterious little Pollinators, whose nature it was to tend the Flowers and who had ranged freely across New Praxis, had disappeared. Some thought that an evil portent, but no one dared voice the opinion.

The pile of bagged Flowers grew and grew, higher and higher, until it had attained the top

step and spilled against the high front doors of the cloning center.

Bela watched from the opposite end of the main thoroughfare, from the uppermost parapet of her castle. The Amazons' big orbital freight shuttle was nearly ready to receive the bounty of New Praxis. Cargo pods were already being wheeled into place to transport the Flowers.

Bela had sent her guards and advisers from her. Silently she watched through the night as Flowers were trundled off toward the shuttle pad. The shuttle lifted off like a morning star for its flight into high-orbit and a rendezvous with Haydon IV (how the artificial world had drawn so close without colliding with New Praxis or, at the very least, causing catastrophic damage, no one knew). It would return with the sealed, prefabricated modules that would be activated to form a new Whaashi.

But in the meantime, what dark harvest have we reaped? The thought came like a sword cut, over and over.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

"Peter Pan, huh?" I said to him. "Hope we packed plenty of pixie dust, Tink."

Louie Nichols, remark to General Vincent Grant, quoted in Nichols's Tripping the Light Fantastic (fourth edition)

In spite of himself, he was nearly nodding off when he felt his wife's fingers dig into his arm. "Max! Look!"

The fingers sank in with enough strength to make him wince; becoming a mother had not robbed Miriya of any of her Zentraedi sinew and vigor. Max was instantly wide awake, sitting up straight on the sleeping pad he and Miriya had thrown down on the bare deck to keep a vigil by their daughter.

He saw what she meant at once: Aurora was blinking as if coming out of a dream, and the apparitions that were the SDF-3 children had vanished.

Miriya was first to her daughter's side, feeling her forehead with one hand, checking her pulse with the other. On the other deck levels, people were taking note of the change.

Aurora put up with the fussing but insisted, "I'm all right, Mother. Father." She put an arm around each of them and hugged.

Max offered up a prayer of thanks. Aurora was so ethereal, so seemingly unsuited for hardship and strife-it broke his heart whenever he thought of her coming to harm.

Jean Grant had arrived to gently nudge Miriya aside and run a diagnostic scanner over Aurora. Louie Nichols was there, too, practically jumping up and down, dying to ply Aurora with questions. Max laid a restraining arm on him. "Give her a minute, Doctor."

"Jean, I'm perfectly fine," Aurora insisted gently, pushing the scanner away. "And we really haven't any more time to waste."

"What happened to the children?" Louie burst out, unable to contain himself anymore. "Why'd they break contact?"

"I'm still in fourth-level contact with them," Aurora corrected. "But second-level, which you saw earlier, is somewhat draining. And it's no longer necessary; I know our course now."

She stepped through the circle of people around her to a makeshift ramp that led toward the control area. Jean protested, "Wait, sugar; you need to rest a bit."

"There's no time, Jean." But before Aurora could set foot on the ramp, Max blocked her way. "Hold on a second, hon. You have to tell us what's going on."

She smiled at him sweetly. A smile like a springtime sunrise, he thought; her shoulders felt so frail in his hands.

"Well, I have to take control of the interfaces, to direct the Peter Pan on the last leg of the trip," she told him. "Basically, we're navigating through as mind continuum, you might say. As Marlene told you, it's what the SDFers call newspace. Different from the physical universe and even from Doctor Nichols's cyber-dimensions. So I have to take the helm to guide us."

Her face changed then, becoming sober, and Max felt her delicate hands close on his. "And there's something else. Newspace reacts to what's in us, our thoughts and emotions and experiences. It has no true form of its own, and so it draws from what it finds. The children say be very careful what we say and do and think."

"Yes," someone agreed, and Max saw Marlene standing nearby. A somber, intent Scott Bernard hung back a step behind her. "We must all be careful now," Marlene went on.

"Mm-hm," Aurora said, hair bobbing as she nodded her head. Then she drew his head down so that she could whisper in Max's ear. "But especially you, Father."

"And the Praxians don't respond?" Exedore frowned. Cabell, raised his hands hopelessly, then dropped them again. Before them, the big transignal communicator was silent. "The installation we left on New Praxis was working," Cabell insisted. "The last message from Bela talked about disturbing dream aberrations, and our remote instruments indicated that

Haydon IV was approaching the planet. As you can see, our link with the Amazons is now silent. The obvious conclusion is that Haydon is awake. I fear the worst."

"The Flowers," Exedore rasped, running a hand through the bright disarray of his hair.

Cabell inclined his head slowly. "The Flowers, of course. And after that, inevitably, the matrix."

They turned as one to look out the window of the lab at the immense rebuilt pyramid that was the Royal Hall, where the only Second Gen matrix-the "facsimile," as Lang called it-had been stirred to fitful, difficult-to-control life.

"What if we simply surrender it to Haydon?" Exedore mulled.

Cabell answered, "It may come to that in the end, but I would see our subsequent chances of survival as very slim." And by "our" he meant every single living thing in the universe and possibly, knowing Cabell, its inanimate material as well.

"We could create another matrix," Exedore said.

Cabell put into words what they both knew. "Yes, but that would take time, perhaps months, and Haydon will not endure such a wait. No, He means to supercharge the matrix with the Flowers from New Praxis and start at long last on His final journey."

There was a rapping at the open door: Lantas, Cabell's new student and research assistant since her return aboard the ship comandeered by Dana Sterling and the 15th ATACs. She was the last surviving member of a Scientist triumvirate, a bright and energetic young woman, her hair a mass of pink ringlets. She had adopted a protective, almost proprietary attitude toward Cabell and Exedore, making them the missing members of a new triumvirate.

Now, though, Lantas looked young and frightened. She said, "The captains of the Local Group are here."

They trooped into the room Karbarran and Spherisian, Garudan and Perytonian. Strange to see them striding along together, when in the near past there had been so much friction among them.

The captains drew to a halt before the three. Hodel, the burly Karbarran, spoke for them; the flotilla was mostly Karbarran, after all. "We have had word of Haydon's approach. Tirol has given us reason to hate it over the centuries, but in the Sentinels War, you here became our allies. More to the point, we think your researches into using the matrix to halt the shrinkage of the cosmos are our only hope of survival. We therefore cannot surrender the matrix to Haydon, no matter what.

"Tracialle will lead the fleet into battle. Your Tiresian techs have agreed to man the Valivarre." His main regret was that the powerful Ark Angel had, after delivering the scientists to Tirol, departed for return to Earth; it would have added tremendously to the flotilla's firepower.

Exedore had heard something about the Tiresians' crewing-Valivarre for battle. With all the Zentraedi gone save only himself, the ship had to be refitted for use by Micronians, of course. But how surprising that the clones, after centuries of docility, should leap to defend their planet and the matrix with all the stoic determination of Zentraedi in a suicide charge. It was a time of horrors but, truly, a time of wonders as well.

"I tell you again that I doubt you have any chance of victory," Cabell was saying. "But I know that won't dissuade you. What, then, do you wish of us?"

A Perytonian, Purg, spoke up, tossing his needle-sharp horns as he did. "Tell us of the Awareness, the seat of its consciousness, where its vulnerabilities lie. It is weak now; if we destroy it, Haydon will be unable to wage war."

Cabell was shaking his head measuredly. "Firstly, the planet has gone through such radical mechamorphosis that there is no telling where the Awareness is now. Nor is there any reliable way of detecting it.

"But more importantly, destroying the Awareness will not guarantee that Haydon is powerless; far from it. I implore you all to hold back. Exedore and I are trying to develop some kind of defense to keep the artificial planet at bay."

What he did not tell them was that if worse came to worst, he and the micronized Zentraedi meant to destroy the matrix utterly. The residents of the Local Group looked to it as their only hope of salvation.

Captain Prah, the Spherisian, answered. Her ship, the Quartzstar, was the newest, smallest, and most beautiful of all the Local Group vessels. Spheris was perhaps the least warlike of the allies, and so Cabell hoped for some word of moderation from her.

But she said in a voice that had a high crystal ring to it, "We cannot risk Haydon's gaining the ultimate power of the matrix, nor can we gamble the lives of Tirol's people. Therefore, unless this weapon of yours is forthcoming, the flotilla will advance and engage Haydon IV as soon as it appears in this system."

"I am Zentraedi," Exedore said, hands clasped behind his back. "I understand your feelings. Nonetheless, I beg you to reconsider. "

The captains' silence was as emphatic as any spoken refusal.

"Go, then," Cabell told the captains. "Exedore and I will see if Protoculture has any secrets left to teach us."

Over and over, during the headlong days of the Flower harvest, her hand went to her sidearm and she drew a breath to summon those guardswomen who were still faithful to her, to go out and stop the collection, prevent the delivery to orbit, or die trying.

But each time, Bela's hand unwillingly released the gun's grip. To do that would mean fighting and killing her Sisters and make her worse than Haydon, worse than an Invid. What was to happen now was beyond her power to control.

In time the cargo ship lifted off, climbing to orbit on its antiproton-power trail. It was gone for more than ten hours, off-loading its Flower cargo and taking aboard the promised modules. When it made planetfall again, it seemed as though every childless woman on the planet was waiting to greet it, to help in assembling the modules.

Haydon and Her works remained an enigma; the modules, once activated, shifted position and assembled themselves, the Amazons not daring to interfere or try to probe the secrets of Her devices.

Still Bela sat in her aerie, glaring down the central boulevard of Zanshar. Dawn rose on a plaza from which the cloning facility had vanished, replaced by a Whaashi. A lottery was being held in the open square for a fair and orderly allocation of access to the place of miracles.

When the first woman entered the Whaashi, Bela rose from her place and went to her palace's command center. There she watched on a projecbeam screen as Haydon IV got under way again.

She expected to see a planet restored to high-sheen, flawless max-function, but it was not so. It looked as if there had been some repairs, and certainly the artificial world was maneuvering powerfully and quickly, but signs of damage were still to be seen.

Then Haydon IV was gone, superluminal. Bela.com manded her techs to make yet another attempt to establish contact with Tirol despite the interference that had been frustrating them thus far.

Curse the Shapings!

With Aurora's hand on the tiller or rather, her mind guiding the Peter Pan through a modified "thinking cap" (she refused to have anything to do with Louie's cyber-sockets,

and Max and Miriya would not have permitted it, anyway) the sphere ship emerged into newspace.

It was as if an encasing bubble had popped; all around them were stars and nebulas, and nearby the Super Dimensional Fortress swung in orbit over a world swathed in the white clouds indicative of a living planet.

"We took longer to get here than the SDF-3," she explained, "because our drive is so different, and so was our route through Ranaath's Star." Dr. Penn, Louie, and the rest did not get to find out why, because Lisa Hunter's face appeared on the main projecbeam imager and her voice rang from the speakers.

"Attention, unknown vessel. Attention Aurora! Vince! Max, Miriya ord, it's good to see you all!"

A lot of people on the Peter Pan were trying to talk at the same time, Aurora being a notable exception. Vince silenced them with one stern command. "At ease!"

Lisa went on. "The children said you were coming. Vince, I have to warn you: There's no guarantee you won't be stranded here, too, unless you get out of newspace now, this moment."

Louie Nichols had crowded up next to Vince, recognizing Lisa from old newscasts, tapes, and having seen her once in person during the SDF-3 launch ceremonies. "I think we've got a handle on that, Admiral."

Vince frowned at Louie but tolerated the intrusion. "Lisa, d' you have maneuvering power?"

"Barely, Vince."

"No problem. If you'll hold your present orbit, I'll match up with you." Harry Penn was studying his instruments and giving Vince a can-do nod.

"Very good. I'll convene an emergency conference. We can begin transferring personnel to your ship right away." Vince drew a deep breath but decided not to contradict her quite so publicly. It might cause serious morale problems maybe even a breakdown in discipline-to announce that nobody was going anywhere for a while.

The main delay in docking ships was necessitated by Peter Pan's techs having to fit external securing gear on the outer hull. But two hours later the mated air locks opened, and despite the strain of the crisis, there was a reunion that made the bulkheads rattle.

Lisa had left Forsythe in command of the bridge. She waited on the SDF-3's side of the

lock, since it was roomier. Vince stepped through from Peter Pan, they saluted each other, and then he swept her up in a laughing hug. Rick did not bother with salutes, throwing his arms around Jean and bussing her soundly.

Restraint and order broke down, with more hugging, joy, and laughter than any of them could recall in a long time. Vince was in no position to object, since he no sooner released Lisa than he was-confronted by his son. Bowie held out a hand shyly. "Hello, Dad."

Vince took it and shook it, but Jean threw her arms around Bowie and kissed him over and over, laughing even though there were tears streaming from her eyes. Musica and Allegra watched from one side, fascinated. Then Jean embraced them.

The two groups met and mingled in individual encounters that varied greatly. Dana managed to clutch both Sean and Marie to her and at the same time kiss a strangely blushing Angelo Dante, while Gnea looked on dubiously. Harry Penn embraced his daughter and spared a handclasp, albeit a cool one, for Jack Baker. Scott Bernard led Marlene over by the hand to meet Lang, who seemed subdued, even shy, out in public like that. Kazianna sat to one side, not wanting to trample anybody, but knelt to exchange kisses, like humans, with her old comrade-in-arms Miriya. Angie saw Dana's face go blank and distant as she caught sight of Rem.

Minutes went by before Miriya realized that Aurora was not anywhere to be seen. She mouthed the name to Max, and he shrugged helplessly while Rick Hunter pumped his hand and pounded him on the back. Then Miriya realized that there was a spreading pool of silence over by Peter Pan's lock and another on the opposite side of the compartment. The crowd went silent by degrees, becoming aware that Aurora waited on one side, Roy and Drannin and the SDF-3 children on the other.

Some had not seen the children's glowing, otherworldly eyes before; there were murmurings and uneasy shiftings in the crowd. People instinctively made way until the children and Aurora were staring at each other over a gap of empty deck. Aurora and Roy moved at the same time, drawing close like kids in a pretend wedding.

When they came together, they took each other's hands, and a crackle of blue radiance startled the grown-ups. Aurora informed her parents, "The others and I must talk."

Roy led her over into the circle of lamp-eyed youngsters, and the group headed for the lock. Lisa wanted to haul them back, but Jean put a restraining hand on her arm. "We need to talk, too, Lisa."

With some difficulty, Lisa cut the core leadership people out of the herd and got them across the passageway to the conference compartment. Vince and his essential people came, too, while the rest of the celebrants repaired to a nearby rec hall to carry on with the reunion.

"We've run some calculations," Lisa began before everyone was seated. "I want to get all personnel evacuated-in one hop if you have sufficient deck space. Even if that means we'll be sitting on each other and take only the clothes on our backs. "

Rick had been watching the troubled look on Vince's face and braced himself as the general spoke. "Lisa, I'm not sure we have any place to go back to. Whatever it is that happened when you were drawn here, it's affecting the universe. Louie, maybe you'd better take over."

Louie rose, adjusting his black goggles, his grin coming and going in tics. He launched into a recap of what had happened, the SDFers interrupting with intermittent questions but for the most part listening.

The transcendence of the Regis and her race, the appearance of Ark Angel in Earthspace, the search expedition for the SDF-3 and the battle at Ranaath's Star-Louie recounted it all succinctly, although Lisa noticed that he described the strange psi-contact between the SDF-3's children and Aurora in oddly neutral terms, apparently not wanting to offer much theory about that just yet.

Lang watched Nichols, that Robotech up-and-comer. The scientist, having studied some of Louie's brilliantly insightful work, became convinced nonetheless that Louie saw the solving of the mysteries of Protoculture not as a holy pursuit and the search for the Grail but rather as some immense and rather elite game.

So: there was Rem the reborn template, and Nichols the secular adept, along with all the others-half-breeds, Wyrdlings, mind-savants, and the rest-gathered in one place at last. But none of them could occupy the place in the Shapings that Lang could.

If only he had the strength to seize it.

CHAPTER THIRTY

In that happy-yet-sad reunion with the people from Peter Pan, I felt one special pang but kept it to myself.

It was clear how much Scott Bernard's mixed feelings about Marlene had put him through, but in some ways I couldn't help envying him. As much as I loved Rick and Roy, I couldn't help thinking about other human DNA remains, in other wreckage at Sara Base, on Mars. How would I feel if Karl Riber reappeared?

At one point I discovered I'd been sitting there for five minutes, staring out the bridge viewpane, lost in that thought. And realizing newspace's apparent affinity for our memories and emotions, I knew we really had to get out of there.

Lisa Hayes-Hunter, Recollections: The Lost Journey

The Robotech Elders' tempers flared, even though the rage was impotent. You fancy yourself a god? Then act like one!

Haydon ignored them as usual. That was far more infuriating than if he had caused them pain or silenced their mental rantings.

The Second Gen Flowers from New Praxis had been taken below the surface of the artifact planet, and faraway sounds and tremors indicated that they were being processed; or perhaps digested, in some fashion. And yet, aside from Haydon IV's superluminal passage to the Valivarre system, nothing seemed to have been accomplished.

If the Awareness and your facilities cannot produce any warcraft or combat mecha, then arm the sphere ships and send forth your Haydonites to do battle! You cannot venture into combat this way; OUR lives are at risk as well as yours!

Haydon was as imperturbable as he was vast. He watched as the planet went subluminal and, swung toward majestic, green Fantoma. His planet's sensors told him that His arrival had been noticed and that a flotilla of ships was deploying even now to intercept.

He ignored their hails. Once He would have swept them aside like so many gnats or drowned them under an ocean of His own war simulacra. But the damage done to Haydon IV by space attack and cyber-burn had limited His options.

That only meant that His victory would be somewhat uneconomical, a bit inelegant. In another way, though, it would show those absurd little creatures what an intelligent mind could do with Robotechnology.

The Elders felt the world shifting and quaking around them again. What are you doing? We demand to know!

Haydon made no response as long moments slid by and the artificial planet seemed on the verge of tearing itself apart. The Elders raged and vituperated, but at last, their fury spent and their apprehensions waxing, they spoke the words they had not used since the days of their mortality.

We ... beg you to tell us what is happening.

Haydon's blank face gazed down at them indifferently. YOU PRESUMED TO CALL

YOURSELVES ROBOTECH MASTERS? I WILL SHOW YOU WHAT MASTERY IS.

With that, light burst from the organ in His forehead, and Haydon levitated into the air. At the same time, the carpet carrying the Elders' imprisoning thrones rose, joining Him as an immense bubble appeared from somewhere to enclose Haydon.

The planet below was going through profound mechamorphosis. It was only as the bubble climbed high above the atmosphere that the Elders began to understand the mind numbing scale of it.

Having had little time to train together, the pickup flotilla of the Local Group was fortunate that it had experienced no collisions, much less that it had somehow gotten into a passable formation.

Tracialle led the way, with Valivarre prominent on the right wing of the formation. The armed merchantmen of the Karbarran fleet were the flotilla's backbone, with the other planets' vessels interspersed all through the three-dimensional deployment scheme.

Hodel watched as long-range sensors fed him information about the intruder world's approach, noting the appearance of the bubble high over it but more concerned with the throes of the gargantuan artifact itself. It seemed that Haydon IV was trying to self-destruct, fly apart in uncountable pieces or grind itself to dust.

"We're detecting anomalies," a clone from the Valivarre reported.

"Indeed?" Hodel scoffed in a moist rumble. "Don't you think they're apparent?"

"I am referring to new topographical features on the target world," the answer came back. "Their existence defies gravitational influence. Immense amounts of power are being expended. We have analyzed our findings and believe that an unprecedented kind of mechamorphosis is taking place, and its speed is accelerating."

Hodel's barrel-chested laughter stopped suddenly as his own techs snarled at their positions. "The clone is right," someone growled.

"See! See!" another cried.

A visual magnification was flashed on the main screen. In it, Haydon IV could be seen quickening its transformation. Apparently the modular alterations had been accomplished earlier-perhaps in flight-and this was the final rearrangement.

Hodel was a captain, not a scientist, but he had more than enough technical background to know that no physical materials, no conventional power source, could possibly achieve what he was witnessing. Haydon IV should have been annihilating itself with those upheavals.

It was not, however. It was taking on a new shape. Its astonishing division at Ranaath's Star was nothing compared what it was doing now.

"Mechamorphosis, in truth," Hodel heard Prah say from the Qrartzstar.

Hodel roared and slashed at the air with his claws. "How long before we can close with them?" Perhaps Haydon IV was as yet defenseless.

"Thirty-two minutes until they're in maximum range," a bridge crewwoman called out. "But the speed of the mechamorphosis is increasing. Estimated time to completion, twenty-eight minutes."

"We will attack and obliterate them before they can catch their breath and prepare for battle," Hodel howled. "Full speed ahead! All ships, watch your deployment and intervals and prepare to attack!"

Before them, Haydon IV grew. It contorted and reformed, land features sliding, rising, falling-extending and reconfiguring in ways Local Group science would have pronounced impossible.

The substance of the planet was redistributed, prominences growing and lengthening, the center shrinking. Even the Karbarrans knew a cold fear, their snarls and rumblings more muted as they watched the artificial planet take on the form of a megacosm Robotech warrior.

Max was glad Lisa forcibly broke up the meeting when she did; in another few minutes, Nichols and Lang might have attempted some kind of voodoo dance to summon up the Regis, while Rem and Marlene performed a little lounge-act mind reading and Dana told a fortune or two.

Emotions had run high as theories and assertions clashed. It seemed that all the mystics knew pieces of what was happening but that nobody had the big picture. A lot-of people at the meeting were still at the trying-to-believe-it stage.

Perhaps the major distraction, however, was the conviction many of the adults had that the real action was going on down in the child-care center. Aurora and the SDF-3 kids were being exactingly recorded, but Obstat and the others were not likely to learn much from the motionless, silently communing seance the rug rats were holding.

The real question, of course, was where the Regis was and how to get in touch with her. Lots of people had ideas, but none of them sounded very convincing to Max.

Vince, Lisa, and Rick were off to cope with whatever tangible problems they could find and handle-integrating working teams, transferring supplies to the Peter Pan just in case there was no choice but to run for it, resuming patrols of the planet.

Max, like Miriya, had left his seat after the adjournment and gone to comfort Dana. Encountering Rem seemed to have knocked her feet out from under her; they were not used to seeing their gutsy older daughter so despondent.

Miriya had one arm around Dana, who was nearly her height, before Max got there and led her off into an empty adjoining compartment. Dana's head leaned on Miriya's shoulder. The look his wife shot him told Max that he ought to hang back for the time being.

Lisa and Rick had made some vague reference to Max's going to work coordinating the combined fighting elements of the joined ships, but Max did not feel much like talking war right at the moment.

He turned instead to find his way aft and see if Aurora's kiddie coven had broken up yet. He wandered along, thinking of her whispered message to him. Why was he, especially, to be on guard there in newspace to be careful of his thoughts? Aurora either could not or would not clarify.

Distracted, he realized he was lost. It had been a long time since he had wandered the passageways of the SDF-3. There was no one around, but he got his bearings and began moving aft again. He went slowly, meditating.

Peace had seemed at hand when the Sentinels War ended. He and Miriya had played less and less of a role in the fighting, and he would have been perfectly happy to go on the inactive rolls for good.

Once, he'd been the terror of the Robotech battlefield, a dogfight wizard with a mother lode of the right stuff, an unparalleled feel for his mecha, and unrivaled combat instincts. Slight, pale, and bespectacled, he seldom attracted a second glance from a stranger, but he had no equal among humans, Zentraedi, Invid, or any other species.

Max passed into a big, empty observation area, its sweep of viewport showing a broad expanse of newspace and the appearing stars.

Funny how that Robotech gift of his had just gradually slipped into the background as being a husband and father became more and more central in his life. As if whatever had given him his matchless skills had been rechanneled.

He stopped, instincts telling him that he was being watched. With absolute certainty, he pivoted suddenly toward the viewport.

Something hung there in the night of the SDF-3's shadow, looking back at him. It was a shape blocking out the stars, the unreflective black of soot or that jersey dress Miriya had. He could not make out its shape, but it moved slowly like a marionette drifting in water. It

was difficult to estimate, but he got the impression it was only about a hundred yards or so from the hull . . . and it was big.

Without taking his eyes from it, Max edged over to an intercom on the bulkhead and signaled the bridge. "This is Sterling-Max Sterling on Foxtrot Deck, compartment, uh, H-2108 starboard. I have a visual on possible bogey." Something about the indistinct shape made his stomach twist, and sweat had started at his forehead.

A brisk voice-Mr. Toler, Max thought it was-answered. "Our sensors show nothing, Commander."

"Then they're malfunctioning! Gimme some hull lights down here, now!"

High-candlepower external lights sprang to life out on the hull. The harsh illumination they threw forth splashed against a shape that made Max's mouth fall open.

It was not like any mecha he'd ever heard of, though he'd been pretty sure he knew them all. It incorporated features of Invid Inorganic, RDF Beta Battloid, and Robotech Master Bioroid. But the bulbous torso with its plastron cannon and the reverse-articulated legs immediately made him think of Zentraedi pods. And its single-lensed turret of a head sported long, gleaming saber-tooth fangs like those of a Hellcat.

It floated out there, looking straight at him with its yellow and red lens, while Max whispered a soft, almost admiring obscenity. Seconds ticked by while the two stared at each other.

He heard running feet and glanced over automatically to see Colonel Xien dash into the compartment with some staffers bringing up the rear-a mere flicker of the eyes. And yet, when Max looked back, the black mecha was gone.

"Commander Sterling, we have nothing on scopes or visual," the voice from the bridge said a bit primly, perhaps peeved at Max for implying that those on watch would let something sneak up on the ship. "Whatever it is, we don't see it."

Max stared at empty space for a few moments before keying the intercom to reply. "That figures. It wasn't here to see you, either."

It was a race against time that had the Elders frothing behind their respirator masks. The mechamorphosis of Haydon IV into a Robotech warrior was an astonishing achievement, violating laws of engineering and strengths of materials by means of higher powers Haydon reserved unto Himself.

But still the transformation was too slow to suit the Elders. The rabble are too close!

Nimuul protested, following developments via the planet's mental data dissemination nets. Where are your weapons? Why do you not fire?

Haydon was smaller than they had yet seen Him, appearing from the west like a moving crag. I WEARY OF YOUR STUPIDITY.

There was a multiplicity to the voice, as if more than one were speaking. The Elders became aware of other moving shapes. BEHOLD AND LEARN.

From east, north, and south came other embodiments of Haydon returning from unguessable missions. As the four merged, there were outpourings of radiance too intense to bear, when the Elders could look again, Haydon was a single figure, back to his original size.

Once more he flew off over the terrain of His synthetic world, which had in effect become a mecha, and the Elders' carpet lifted off to follow.

They were not far from the right arm's juncture to the body, but from their viewpoint it was more like a curve in the world, vanishing away, with another even greater bulge rising out of sight far beyond. They were too small to have any sense of the planet's new shape.

A yawning opening appeared in the surface of the planet, and Haydon entered in serene, floating fashion. The carpet trailed obediently after. Haydon IV reverberated to the shocks of the final reconfigurations. As it did, the first maximum range salvos began to blossom around it.

The war machine waited in space as the flotilla of Local Group ships rushed to the attack.

PART IV

FINALE AND OVERTURE

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

It's been said that we're all three people: the one we see ourselves as being, the one others see us as being, and the one we really are.

The Regis seemed determined to explore all of those, and I don't know which frightened me most.

Dr. Harold Penn, The Brief but Timeless Voyage of the Peter Pan

Because Dante and Gnea had been accosted there by the Regis's strange luminous effects, it was decided that the attempt to establish contact with her should be initiated on the planet, which some scholar in the SDF-3 crew had dubbed Omphalos.

Most of the command people were all for it, since it was seemingly the only course of action open to them. Rick and Lisa were more hesitant, since the experts felt the only plausible method of communicating with the vanished racial entity/queen lay in Roy and the other children; everything that had happened regarding newspace thus far indicated that it was a domain with a special affinity for psi-phenomena. Certainly the Regis had not responded to any conventional attempts at communication.

Calculations showed that the breach draining the substance of the universe into newspace was widening, though. There was a growing faction among the theorists, lining up behind Lang, who believed that real spacetime would be altogether sucked into the adjunct province of newspace and find itself under the dominion of the Regis. Thus, the children's lives were already horribly at risk, and the perils of contact with the Regis must be borne.

A lot of people in G2 and G3 wanted to make a landing in force to secure the area against any possible hostile action by the Regis-post Battlepods, hovertanks, Veritechs, and the rest in a layered defense. But cooler heads prevailed; mecha firepower probably would not amount to much against the entity that controlled newspace.

So, two shuttles flanked by one Alpha and one Beta descended as if on a diplomatic mission, slow and steady, followed by two pods and two suits of powered armor. Once down on Omphalos, the party formed up on the ground and moved out for the field where Angelo and Gnea had disappeared.

They could have dropped in for a landing directly in the field, of course, but it was felt that going in on foot would help re-create the circumstances of the first encounter and look much less belligerent. The Alpha was sent back aloft to patrol, and the ground party started walking.

Rick and Lisa led the way. Roy was farther back, with the children and most of the other parents. Scott Bernard was following close behind the Hunters. Marlene came after him, a part of the group at her own insistence and over his objections. The Hunters and the rest welcomed her presence; she was the closest thing the expedition had to an expert on the Regis.

The landing party was armed, but it did little to assuage Rick's nervousness. He did not really think guns would do much good against the dangers that menaced his ship, friends, and family.

Lisa cast a glance back to make sure the kids were all right and to see if the other parents were coping emotionally. All of them were under stress, but she was particularly worried about Max. If the Veritechs' top gun was starting to see things that weren't there, anybody could lose his grip.

In the last few hours others had begun falling prey to the insidious effects of the new continuum. Word had it that the Karbarrans' morose augury chants had brought them Wagnerian visions of doom. The Garudans' hin sendings had the lupine XTs fatalistic and despairing. Baldan had had ghostly encounters on the Crystal Highways of Omphalos and at length had been ejected by them.

Even the music of the Muses and the Cosmic Harp had taken on a doleful sound they seemed helpless to rise above.

The libidinous climate of the past few days had changed, and the only possible explanation was that something about the Regis had changed.

And what if Her Highness doesn't feel like granting us an audience? Rick was asking himself at the same moment. Do we sacrifice a few oxen, blow on a ram's horn, or what?

But as he pushed through the last screen of bush, he saw that there was reason to hope for an audience with the Regis, after all: The field had changed, even though nobody from the SDF-3 or the recon flights had seen it.

Where the swaying grasses had grown to midcalf height, there was a structure that brought a sinister grunt from Scott. "Invid hive. Huh. Looks like a miniature Reflex Point."

It did indeed, but it was far smaller than the sprawling stronghold/nerve center that had been the Regis's seat of power on Terra. It was a dome with the same organic look, the same glowings in orange and red and yellow, like a super-high-speed photograph of a thermonuclear explosion. Around it was the strange foam of bubblelike objects suggesting concentric waves coming in at the dome, as at Reflex Point; there were the same smaller peripheral nodes, much like the central structure, all of them interlinked by a network of conduits or accessways as brilliant as tubes of flowing lava.

"Maybe we should send in a recon team," Lisa said.

"I don't even see a way in. Scott?"

But before the Invid invasion veteran could answer, there was a commotion from farther back in the line. It was Drannin and the other Zentraedi children, followed by Roy and the humans, pushing to get through and head for the miniature hive.

"Roy, wait!" Lisa dodged around Payton, another Zentraedi giant-youngster, to try to stop her son. Just then, knocking small trees aside, Kazianna and a Zentraedi male caught up to head off their kids.

Roy did not push Lisa away, but he writhed "in her grasp. "Mommy, please! She's waiting

to talk to us. But we haveta hurry!"

Lang had left his place in line, too, with Louie Nichols and his cyber-whiz disciples in his wake. "I understand your reticence, Admiral, but the lad is right. Right now our chief jeopardy lies in delay."

"But how do we get-" Rick swallowed the question when he turned back to the mini-hive. There was a dark semicircular opening directly in front of them.

His lips became two thin lines, and he turned back to his little command. "Listen up! We're going in. Remember your orders, and I want all weapons on safety and either holstered or slung."

The door was high enough even for Zentraedi. The party filed into the uncomfortably warm darkness under the dome, smelling again the strange aromas and alien odors-some pleasant, others not-of an Invid hive.

It was like being inside a cathedral of dark stained glass. Most of the space enclosed under the dome was occupied by a veined bronze sphere that shone dimly. There was room for even the tallest Zentraedi to stand erect. The contingent from the SDF-3 ranged themselves along the wall, waiting to see what would come next.

Rick felt sweat trickling down his uniform collar and soaking his shirt. He had faced Zentraedi and the Regent, but he had never felt the misgiving he felt there in the shrine of an entity that was close enough to a deity as to make no difference.

The children looked at one another with their lambent eyes, then stepped closer to the sphere, joining hands-the Zentraedi sitting in lotus position so that the humans could reach them, Aurora stood in the middle of their line, a nimbus of whirling scintillas welling up from her.

Without warning, a zigzag bolt of incandescence broke from somewhere overhead to smite the bronze globe, turning it into a ball of deep amber light. Shadows moved within it, and then they saw the face of the Regis, exalted and endowed with a terrible beauty, gazing back at them.

They heard her voice in their minds: AT LAST, THROUGH YOUR EVOLVED CHILDREN,

YOU HAVE TOUCHED THE PLANE UPON WHICH WE CAN COMMUNICATE. KNOW

THEN THAT THE CUSP IS NEARING IN WHICH ALL THAT EXISTS WILL COME

TOGETHER IN THIS, MY CREATION, MY NEWSPACE.

Rick realized that he had been waiting for Aurora to speak; after all, the children were the ones in contact with the higher mental realms where the Regis moved. He saw his mistake: The children might have powers of communication and perception, but they lacked their elders' experience and training, their grasp of the situation and ability to deal

with it. Despite the kids' astounding powers, the outcome of the crisis would still hinge on the adults' actions.

He was the leader of the ground unit, and it was his place to speak up, but before he could, Lang's voice broke the silence.

"Mother of the Invid race! Why have you brought us here? Why is the universe we know being drawn into this one? Haven't the Shapings been fulfilled?"

Rick saw that Lang was not addressing what was to him a critical point: getting the fold drives back and getting the SDF-3 and Peter Pan out of newspace. But before he could interject that matter, the Regis answered.

KNOW THEN THAT I WHO AM THE REGIS AND ALL OF THE INVID RACE IN ONE

ENTITY BROUGHT YOUR VESSEL HERE IN MY TRANSUBSTANTIATION BY MY

DOMINION OVER THE PROTOCULTURE. YOUR SDF-3 WAS SELECTED BECAUSE

ITS ENGINES WERE BEST SUITED TO SUCH A CONTINUUM FOLD. YOU MADE THE

FIRST TINY PUNCTURE THAT HAS BECOME A MIGHTY RIFT IN THE BARRIERS

BETWEEN THE REAL UNIVERSE AND NEWSPACE BUT MORE IMPORTANTLY YOU

ARE HERE BECAUSE YOU NUMBER AMONG YOU SO MANY WHO LED THE WAR

ON THE INVID AND WHO HAVE STRONG TIES TO THE PROTOCULTURE AND THE

SHAPINGS-THE GREAT, INELUCTABLE CYCLE OF COSMIC EVENTS.

Looking about her, Lisa thought how true that was. Oh, a few like Exedore and Cabell were absent, but of the survivors of the Robotech Wars, most of the principals had been snatched is the dimensional fortress or drawn hither in Peter Pan.

And if the Regis could assert her will so thoroughly over events, what hope could mortals have of prevailing against her?

AS ONCE UPON EARTH I SOUGHT TO FIND, THROUGH EXPERIMENTS IN MY

GENESIS PITS, THE IDEAL FORM THAT MY RACE WOULD ASSUME FOR ITS

EXISTENCE ON THAT PLANET, SO I HAVE BROUGHT YOU HERE FOR MY STUDY.

BY SIFTING THROUGH YOUR PSYCHES AND WHAT SOME OF YOU CALL YOUR

SOULS, I WILL DECIDE THE NEW MENTAL AND EMOTIONAL CLIMATE OF THIS

CREATION OF MINE, THIS MALLEABLE DOMAIN, THIS NEWSPACE.

Lang seemed to have assumed the role of speaker, and he showed a pronounced vexation when Louie Nichols butted in.

"Hey, retro back a second! You mated with the Protoculture, you went through your transcendence. What more d' you want?"

TRANSUBSTANTIATION IS A MOCKERY, A PRISON! I WAS DRIVEN TO SEEK IT BY

YOU HUMANS! THE SHAPINGS ARE A HOLLOW JOKE, A CELL WITH NO EXIT.

The Karbarrans were growling as if they might utter some defiant roar, and so Rick hastened to say, "But what do you want?"

A harsh beam of light sprang from some unseen source to pin Rem squarely. It was not a weapon, and yet he cried out, throwing an arm across his face.

I WISH ONLY A RETURN TO THAT STATE MY INVID AND I ENJOYED WHEN ZOR

CAME LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT. I WISH OPTERA TO BE AS IT WAS AGAIN AND

FOR THE INVID TO REVERT TO THE FORM WE KNEW THEN.

"Then why don't you do it?" Louie shouted. "You have total control over newspace."

BUT NOT CONTROL OF THE SHAPINGS! AND BECAUSE THE INVID LEFT THEIR

FORMER STATE BEHIND TO WAGE WAR AND STRIVE AGAINST THE SHAPINGS,

CLOSING CERTAIN CONFIGURATIONS BEHIND THEM, A REVERSION TO OUR

ORIGINAL STATE IS THE ONE THING I CANNOT DO, EVEN HERE.

NEITHER DO I WISH TO LIVE IN THE CHAOTIC NOT AWS THAT ARE THE

NATURAL STATE      OF      NEWSPACE.      THEREFORE,      I WILL PERMIT THE      REAL

UNIVERSE TO BLEED INTO THIS SPACETIME, AND WHEN ALL MY RAW MATERIALS

ARE AT HAND, I SHALL REFASHION ALL THE COSMOS IN THE IMAGE I DEEM FIT.

"No!" With help from Minmei, Rem was struggling to rise. "It's not their fault! You can't banish away their entire existence!"

AND WAS IT MY FAULT WHEN THE FIRST OF YOUR BLOOD, ZOR, CAME LIKE A

POISONOUS VIPER TO OPTERA? WAS IT MY FAULT THAT YOUR ROBOTECH

MASTERS DECREED THE RAZING OF OPTERA? THE UNIVERSE CARES NOTHING

FOR JUSTICE ... NOR DO THE SHAPINGS.

It was Learna, mate to Kami and at one with the hin, who spoke then. She stood erect, and even though she was of smaller stature than anyone else there but the children, her foxlike appearance gave her a certain nobility that struck the others with an undeniable poignancy.

"Then why spare us? Why not obliterate us and make a clean beginning?"

No one else had been brave enough to call out the question. The Regis hesitated long seconds before replying. BECAUSE I NEED TO STUDY YOU. I MUST DECIDE

WHETHER THERE SHALL BE IN THIS NEWSPACE THE ONLY THING YOU MORTAL

RACES HAVE DEVELOPED THAT IS OF ANY SIGNIFICANCE: LOVE.

"In spite of what it did to her," Lisa heard Rick murmur; she had been thinking the same thing.

Louie Nichols's voice cracked. "`Only'?" he cried. "What about intelligence?"

A MERE COPING MECHANISM. AN INEVITABLE OUT ROWTH OF EVOLUTION.

"Art, literature," Rick heard Dr. Penn say.

CONCEITS, DEVISED TO FILL THE WAIT BETWEEN SUCCESSIVE FEEDINGS AND

SLEEPS.

"Music-" Bowie started to protest, but the word was drowned out.

ENOUGH! YOU ARE NOT HERE TO IMPORTUNE ME!

"Yeah, here it comes," Dana heard Louie Nichols mutter. Louder, he added, "Why'd you have the kids bring us here?"

MY EXPANDED SENSES INFORM ME THAT THE RE WAKENED HAYDON, IN

COLLABORATION WITH THE ROBOTECH ELDERS, EVEN NOW LAUNCHES AN

ATTACK ON TIROL IN AN EFFORT TO RECOVER THE FACSIMILE PROTOCULTURE

MATRIX. SHOULD HAYDON WIN HE WILL ENTER NEWSPACE BY MEANS OF THE

SHIPS BUILT BY HIS ARTIFICIAL PLANET AND HIS ARTIFICIAL RACE. WITH THE

POWER OF THE MATRIX AT HIS DISPOSAL, HE MAY BE IMPOSSIBLE TO STOP. HE

WOULD      CONTROL      THIS      PLACE      THEN,      AND      HAYDON      WILL      HAVE      LITTLE

TOLERANCE FOR THE CONVENTIONAL SPACETIME BODIES, LAWS, AND ENTITIES

THAT HE HAS BEEN TRYING SO LONG TO PUT BEHIND HIM.

"Why are you telling us this?" Lisa demanded.

TO PREPARE YOU FOR WHAT IS TO COME. IF AND WHEN I MUST COME TO GRIPS

WITH HAYDON, IT WILL BE A BATTLE OF MENTAL FORCE AND PSI-ENERGIES F

IMAGES AND POSSIBILITIES, SINCE I HAVE BEEN MONITORING YOUR PSYCHES,

THE THINGS I HAVE SEEN WITHIN YOU WILL BE IMPORTANT WEAPONS. YOU ARE

ABOUT TO BE CAUGHT UP IN AN APOCALYPSE.

"No!" That was Minmei, tears in her voice, she and Rem supporting each other and looking as if they were at the end of their strength.

"You can't! We-we have innocent children with us. At least spare them!"

WAR SPARES NO ONE; YOU KNOW THAT AS WELL AS I.

There were roars from the Karbarrans, baying from the Garudans, Gnea's angry Valkyrie war cry, and more, all mixed in a general howl of outrage. The Regis took no notice, however.

Her voice thundered in their heads. PREPARE YOURSELVES.

Within the blazing sphere, her countenance faded out, replaced by brighter and brighter glory. Once more they had to shield their eyes.

... RESIGN YOURSELVES.

When they opened their eyes again, the hive was gone and they were standing in a field of waving grass under the calm sky of Omphalos.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

You humans should cavil less about our tempers. I have observed your own behavior. With better fangs and claws, you might go far.

Lron, as quoted in Noki Rammas's Karbarra

The Local Group captains, following Hodel's example, had spoken boldly and resolutely in exhorting their crews. When they initiated their attack on the hulking worldlet-size Robotech warrior, though, it was with considerable caution.

The first strike brought improvised strategic missiles to bear: subluminal spacecraft packed with thermonuclear explosives set to run by remote control. Drones and robot probes went in ahead of them, firing with hastily installed weapons, to draw fire and test the megacosm-mecha's defenses.

The remotes' visual pickups gave their controllers a strange view of a reconfigured Haydon IV, which looked less and less like a humanoid figure as the kamikaze sortie closed on it. Model found himself expecting the action to start once the remotes flew in between the extended arms; physically impossible as it was for structures that size to move with any speed, he could not help feeling that one of them would lash out at any moment to swipe the jury-rigged ships out of existence.

That did not happen, though, and Hodel dismissed the notion as the natural expectation of the Karbarrans, whose bearish fighting style relied so much on their awesomely powerful arms. He bent closer to peer over a remote operator's shoulder and follow the attack.

That particular ship was a Tirolian courier craft, small but very fast and agile. It dove in at Haydon IV as the planet's plasma guns started firing at extreme range. As the intel staffs

had projected, there was no repeat of the Awareness's taking over of automated systemry. Because of damage suffered in Louie Nichols's cyberburn or the battle near Ranaath's Star, or perhaps even as a result of this final mechamorphosis, Haydon IV's guiding AI seemed no longer capable of that sort of hostile action.

The courier was preceded by probes that had been mounted with additional booster thrusters for the suicide mission. The long-range flaring of the plasma batteries hosed annihilation discs across the night of space, their accuracy not very impressive at that range.

The probes and drones bore in, their onboard computers and sensors augmenting the guidance from their shipboard operators.

"Clumsy," Hodel said in a low guttural voice, meaning Haydon IV's defensive fire. "Slow."

He looked over to Ntor. "It's been weakened. We've got them now."

She growled loyally. "Aye, sir. But? Her sense of duty made her add, "I still detect subsurface activity. There appear to be immense servos, energized and functional."

"Do they have mechamorphosis capability?"

Ntor wuffed to herself, studying her instruments. "Negative, from what I can see."

Hodel flipped a fearsome paw. "Then servos will do them no good. I'm more concerned about those sphere ships; keep a careful watch."

But the remotes plunged down toward the immense torso of Haydon IV without meeting opposing vessels. "They couldn't get 'em powered up," Hodel concluded.

Prah, Spherisian captain of the Quartzstar, came up on the command net. "Captain, may I suggest that we preserve some of our lead element drones for recon."

"Agreed," Hodel said. He had not really expected the decoys to survive the approach, but things were going better than he had hoped.

A half score of the decoys, most of them bulkier mining probes, had been lost to the close-in plasma guns. As many more swooped in to take up strafing attacks on the defensive batteries in twisting, dodging flak-supression runs.

The artifact planet's guns now divided between the attacking drones and the oncoming remote-controlled vessels, along with the additional drones escorting them. The courier ship began its dive into the guns' close range. The target zone was crisscrossed by geysers of annihilation discs, one right on top of the next, at such a high rate of fire that

they were practically touching.

The probes' firepower was not sufficient to penetrate the armor of the massive gun turrets, but their attacks helped spoil the plasma cannons' aim and did do at least some damage to the targeting sensors. Nevertheless, one by one the drones and probes were potted out of the air by the sheer volume of firepower down near the planet's surface.

But by then the courier was juking its way down through the AA fire, homing in on a large fire-control complex in the general vicinity of the megacosm-mecha's solar plexus.

On the bridge, Ntor reported, "Sir, we're detecting a power influx to those servos again."

Hodel tore himself away from the main action long enough to snap, "Any movement?"

"Not yet, sir."

"Keep me informed."

Then he was back watching the main screen as the courier swooped like a hawk at Haydon IV. There was a moment of utter disappointment as a glancing hit by a disc damaged one of the steering thrusters, but the operator had sufficient auxiliaries to compensate.

Spread out back in the courier's wake, more kamikazes took up their approaches.

Ntor spoke up again. "Sir? Servos activated. The arm booms are moving."

Hodel checked the readouts. The arms were moving so slowly that they presented no credible threat. Still, moving like that hey reminded him of something, some Robotech legend ...

"Missile one: thirty seconds to impact," someone remarked, and Hodel broke off his musings.

"Make sure surviving drones are clear of ground zero," Hodel ordered. "Get-uurrrr!-numbers five, seven, eight, and ten on recon sweeps of the far side."

"Fifteen seconds."

The courier craft had slipped down under the AA guns' lowermost angle of fire, too low for most defenses to target. Streaming smoke and flame, it wobbled and rattled across the last miles, the fire-control complex looming up like a Robotech scarp.

"What was that?" Difficult to make out either on visuals or, thanks to the alchemist's mix of energies down below, by sensor, something seemed to go flashing across the corpus

terrain of Haydon IV. Like a skimming blue shadow, it flickered straight for the target area.

The courier's visual pickup cut out at impact, of course, but other instruments showed the abrupt outwelling of the explosion: the nearly magical appearance of a superfireball that put many watching it in mind of the big bang.

"Damage report!" Hodel was grunting excitedly even while the fireball expanded. If there was anything left of the complex, he would target a second mop-up missile ship at it; if not, he would accelerate the other kamikazes to their assigned targets. The proof that the attack weapons could strike home on Haydon IV had him exulting.

But then came Prah's voice from Quartzstar. "Attention, Tracialle! Our instruments show failure to impact. Something shielded the target area from the blast."

"Impossible!" Hodel bellowed so loudly that even his fellow Karbarrans winced.

Ntor spoke up. "Negative, sir. Look." She had split the main screen. Next to the real-time image of the expanding nuke strike, she was projecting the flicker that had raced across the surface of the megacosm-mecha.

It was a large blue circle, like the image of a spotlight on the surface of Haydon IV. It streaked straight for the impact point, a dot of light some hundred miles across and yet small in comparison to the gargantuan torso.

The Tracialle's techs were confirming what Quartzstar's had found: The nuke hit had been deflected. "And see, two more of those strange energy loci," Ntor added. Hodel yowled angrily at the three blue circles, drifting here and there across the modules of the reconfigured planet like buzzing insects.

Without warning, Exedore appeared on the main screen. "Captain Hodel, I have seen this phenomenon before. It's a pinpoint barrier system, though how Haydon learned of it, I don't know. There's no time to explain; you must withdraw your fleet. "

Hodel's paw smashed his command chair's arm. "There are only three of those miserable little dots. We'll hit them with everything we have, all at once-and wipe them out!"

Waysee, commanding the two-ship Garudan contingent, came up on the net. "There's no guarantee we'll be able to concentrate our strike precisely enough."

Hodel shot back, "There is if you all listen to orders! Now, link your operators to my controllers, who will coordinate all strikes. We'll soften them up with the suicide ships, then blow them away!"

"More readings from the forearm booms," Ntor said to him.

Hodel whirled. "Any sign of offensive capability?"

"No, Captain, just power buildup."

Hodel barked a laugh. "Much good it will do them when ten ships punch in at once. Controllers! Prepare for a unified strike operation-simultaneous hits all across that empty suit of tin out there."

As the fleet re-formed and moved in again, all decoys and kamikaze ships leaping ahead for the coordinated attack, Exedore checked and collated data back in the Royal Hall.

"I don't know how they did it, Cabell. Perhaps the Haydonites learned something when they were holding us captive, or perhaps it's something uncovered back when the Regent had the Sentinels captive on Haydon IV."

"It may be much simpler, something implicit in Robotechnology that Haydon discovered just as the Micronians did. "

Exedore shrugged helplessly. "Just so. In any case it proves do we don't know what we're up against. We must get Hodel and the others to break off the attack."

"Retreat: something Karbarrans have never been good at," Cabell observed.

At least Hodel had the caution to stay well back while launching his attack wave.

Fire from the plasma batteries was less effective now that the drones were down and strafing the planet's surface; those that had been dispatched to scout the far side were brought back and hurled into the assault. As Hodel had observed, the racing pinpoint barrier shield circles could not be everywhere at once.

But just as it had served SDF-1 so well decades before, the defense cut into the attackers' advantage dramatically. Nevertheless, the decoy craft wreaked havoc all over the near side of Haydon IV.

Of the ten nuke-primed ships sent ahead to smash resistance, two were destroyed by fire while still far above the artificial world, and another two on approach, even though by then the decoys had put many gun emplacements out of action.

Hodel, howling in battle lust, ignored Exedore's attempts to reach him by commo. Ntor watched the buildup of the energy in the booms but dared not bring them up again.

The surviving ships streaked down to strike as planned, dispersed across Haydon IV.

Three were met by pinpoint barriers, but the other three struck in the chest, neck, and lower abdomen of the Robotech figure that was the artifact world. This time the planet shook from superbombs so massive that even a continent of armor was not proof against them.

Haydon IV was ripped open in three places, energy and vaporized systemry fountaining from it. Secondary explosions rattled the megacosm-figure and vented themselves in the vicinity of the right shoulder, blasting it open. The streams of annihilation discs died away.

The Karbarrans on the Tracialle's bridge, growling their war chants, led the way in to the attack. The rest of the Local Group ships raced after, some of the other races even taking up the Karbarrans' chant.

Haydon IV loomed near, and the fleet primed its weapons for a last decisive assault. At last Exedore managed to override the fleet's communications and put his image on their screens.

"Reverse course, you fools! Retreat! The booms the booms are weapons too!"

The precise nature of the threat had worked at his mind even as it eluded him, until he chanced to glance over at a schematic in the communications center there in the Royal Hall. On it, the figure of Haydon IV was represented as a sort of crude outline, and he saw things for what they were.

Instead of the articulated Robotech waldos and forearms, the planet's limbs might have

been clubs, or the arms of a horseshoe magnet, or a tuning fork ...

Or the bows of the SDF-1.

"Get out, get out before it's too late!" Exedore screamed, but few were listening.

One was Prah in the Quartzstar. "Attention, Hodel! Urgently advise you break off attack until considering Exedore's advice. Energy buildup along forearm booms has intensified."

Hodel wasn't having any, and neither was anybody else aboard the Tracialle. Around the booms, bubbles of snapping, coruscating energy were forming and bursting in brilliant effervescence, but that did not deter the rest of the fleet for a moment. Prah, however, began to deviate from course, shearing away from the attack run and demanding that Hodel and the rest do the same, heeding Exedore, before it was too late. The Valivarre emulated her, largely because of the Tirolian clones' respect for Exedore and Cabell. The bulky mining vessel fell in behind the glittering, glassy bauble that was Quartzstar even as Hobel growled his contempt for them and returned to his assault.

Haydon IV was being shaken by massive internal quakes and eruptions. The pinpoint loci

were gone. The fleet's sensors marked a hundred great exposed, defenseless targets and too many smaller ones to count. In its eagerness, the Tracialle outran the rest of the Local Group ships, hot to draw blood.

Tongues of orange starflame were slithering and looping around the booms and writhing up and down them, seemingly eager to be set free. Hodel thought the booms not worth bothering about but fired a bow sweep of missiles at them as he neared, just to be sure.

Flashing along at attack speed, the Karbarran was nearly past the booms when his missiles struck, and doomsday fell. All at once the energies in the booms surged, unleashed, just as the SDF-1's bows had configured into a main gun and fired on her launch day so many years ago. Hodel's missiles were vaporized.

A cloud of swirling energy appeared between the booms, and a raving torrent of utter destruction shot out from it. The superbolt, miles in diameter, lanced out and washed across the oncoming Local Group ships; where it had played, nothing was left behind but elementary particles.

Valivarre and Quartzstar, both damaged by the mere peripheral wash of the volley, braced for another. But none came. Indeed, the booms were blackened and leaking power fluxes. The volley had damaged Haydon IV as well as wiping out most of the flotilla.

"We-we'll pull back and wait," Prah said in a subdued voice; the clones on the converted Zentraedi ore ship concurred.

The Tracialle, damaged by the abrupt appearance of the power storm between the booms behind it, somehow escaped annihilation by a split second. Shuddering and breached, its commo systems fried and others threatening to fail, it dived for the planet.

"I don't think any of the others made it, sir," Ntor reported. "At least, I have no visuals on them. Most other sensors were knocked out."

"Then it's up to us," Hodel said calmly. "Aim for the heart."

They all saw what he meant, an exposed control nexus as big as a floodplain on the mecha figure's upper right chest. What little data they had indicated that it was a vulnerable point.

They also knew that there was no going back, even if the booms were inoperative. The Tracialle's engines were going fast-they would overload in moments. Like most of the others, Hodel and Ntor felt that they had already witnessed this death once, in their augury chants.

The few cannonades of discs the plasma guns could manage were a pale imitation of their

former selves, hopelessly low-power and inaccurate. The far greater danger was that the Sekiton-fueled ship would shake apart, but somehow it held together. By some fluke of technology or caprice of the Shapings, the Karbarrans' commo began functioning again just at the end, and the survivors heard their roars as the Tracialle's crew went to sink their fangs into their enemy's heart. Down and down their ship plummeted, into the breast of Haydon IV like an avenging comet. The detonations it set off sent the artifact worldlet into lethal convulsions.

Quartzstar and Valivarre, carrying out repairs to restore life support and some measure of maneuvering power, were lit by the distant nova of Haydon IV's death blow. Prah watched sadly and was about to turn away, when someone said, "I'm scanning spacecraft-many of them!"

Prah rapped, "Origin?"

"They are sphere ships; I believe they emerged from the far side, just before the end."

For a moment Prah thought that it was to be the end of her vessel, after all. But the swarm of sphere ships, a hundred and more, formed up and set off without paying Quartzstar or Valivarre any heed.

Their course pointed straight for Tirol.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

This cadet-graduate will make either a passable officer or a very troublesome convict. Final evaluation from the file of Southern Cross Lieutenant Dana Sterling

There was nothing for the ground party to do but return to the landing zone; the Regis ignored their demands that she come back, listen to reason, answer their questions, show some mercy.

The quietest among them were the children, who seemed distracted and uncommunicative. Scott noticed that Marlene was very much like them. He realized he had been holding his breath, dreading the moment when arcane forces would suck her soul and body into the oneness of the Invid race that was the Regis.

But apparently the trauma she had undergone had insulated her from that for good. She really was herself. He was grateful for that but furious at the trick of fate that had put them back together at last only to schedule Armageddon a few days or hours away.

Still, when he reached tentatively for her hand and she smiled bittersweetly, taking his hand fondly, there was a lightness to his soul that had not been there since the death of

Marlene Rush on a day long gone.

There wasn't much vigilance to their withdrawal in spite of Rick and Lisa's disspirited promptings. What good to keep your guard up when all of newspace might well attack at any moment?

Rick thought twice before approaching Louie Nichols; the Regis might be listening in. But then, the same could be said about the deepest security vault on the SDF-3.

"Louie? What about the Peter Pan? Can we make a run for it if we have to?"

Louie worked his shoulders, adjusted his goggles, and went through some more of his repertoire as they walked along. "I doubt it. It turns out that the sphere ships aren't exactly like I thought they were. Not really built with a return trip in mind.

"Think of 'em as bobsleds, created for a single voyage along a particular flow of force-down a snowy hill, if you see what I mean. The Peter P. might be forced up the hill, but I wouldn't bet on it."

He looked so downcast that Rick figured Louie was regretting that he had ever gotten involved in the rescue attempt. He patted one skinny shoulder. "I don't know if I ever said thanks, Louie. I'm grateful for your being here to help, grateful as an officer and grateful as a man with a family in danger."

That seemed to take Louie by surprise, but he mumbled some acknowledgment. Then he picked up his pace, head bent in thought.

Max Sterling had to restrain himself from grabbing Aurora and clasping her to him, shielding her with his body. That way, the Black Knight mecha-or whatever it was that his combat skills had brought into existence in newspace-would have to come through him to get her. But she was so fragile, so ethereal that he didn't want to frighten her. And so he hung near her like a shadow, peering and glaring in all directions, sweat running down his face.

He was a fighter jock, a mecha warrior; his talents lay elsewhere, and he always, felt insufficient to cope with the expanded powers and perceptions of his youngest. And now he had sensed some terrible peril, become its focus, and there was little, perhaps nothing, he could do to help. Nothing but protect my daughter with my life.

At least one person in the group had kept her training in mind and was maintaining a high level of alertness as she went, though. Dana was carrying a Wolverine rifle at the ready, more than willing to open up if a target presented itself, wishing for one, if the truth be known.

She had fallen far back to walk rear guard, relieving Lron. The sight of Minmei and Rem leaning on each other had abraded her nerve endings and left her in an empty, murderous mood. Even in the worst of those days after her parents had left on the SDF-3-times when she had found herself in some agency-sponsored home or care institution-she hadn't felt quite so resentful and drained.

That was because she hadn't met Zor Prime yet, no doubt. And once in a while she got a visit from a friend who loved her unconditionally.

She heard the chirping yip faintly. The person ahead of her-Dr. Penn, his mind apparently a million parsecs away did not seem to notice it. But Dana recognized it at once.

"Polly! " She said it softly, not wanting the others to come barging back to her. The Pollinator was her pet, her lifelong friend.

Only, how had Polly gotten there? He had disappeared let's see-back on Tirol, just before she'd lifted for Haydon IV. Well, if walls and doors were no barrier to him or his kin, why should space be?

Manifestly, it wasn't, because there he sat, like an animated mophead, thirty feet back the way she had just come. His head was tilted to one side, and he gazed at her bemusedly, as if she were the one who'd disappeared without warning and he was the aggrieved party.

SOP said that she should signal for a halt and request permission and backup before fetching him, but by that time Polly might take it into that cute knob-horned head of his to vanish again. Dana glanced to make sure Harry Penn hadn't noticed-he was still going his way deep in thought-and turned back to make the pickup on the Pollinator.

"Don't give me that innocent look, you little deserter!" She knelt by him, shifting her rifle so that she had a free hand to scoop him up. "Maybe I oughta tie a bell to your collar. Or better yet, get a spacefold leash-he-eeyy!"

Wait a minute! Polly had somehow gotten himself not just across space but into newspace. That must mean there was some way back out!

"Oh, baby! Wait'll Louie and Lang hear this-umph! You been puttin' on weight, or what?"

The Pollinator dragged at her arm, nearly pulling her to her knees, the sheer mass of him unbelievable. "What's wrong-holy f-fff-"

Polly, back on his little muffin feet, was no longer the adorable teleporting pet she loved. His feet sprouted black claws, and his sheepdog face took on an evil leer. What really sent shivers down her spine, though, was that he was growing like an inflating life raft, only

faster.

Dana gave a yell and stumbled back, bringing her rifle up, wondering if the Pollinator had fallen prey to some weird newspace rabies. Her finger was on the trigger, but she hesitated; this was one of her few true friends, after all, and friends meant everything to her.

Polly's hide showed through the molting white pelt as the creature grew: black, smooth, and hard-looking. Polly heightened and broadened, bigger than Dana already, rearing back on two lengthening hind legs.

Dana had hesitated to give the alarm, fearing that someone would shoot her dog, but that ceased to matter. The Pollinator let out an eerie inorganic sound, like a processed challenge roar.

"Polly, stop! Stay back!" She had the Wolverine up, centered, backing away herself. The thing in front of her took a step toward her, though, and when its massive black foot pouched down, there was a distinct metallic sound.

It leaned toward her, and from its sheepdog face there appeared a single red-yellow lens.

Dana howled fiercely for a universe that would turn a dear pet and friend into a deadly foe. She brought the Wolverine up and fired a sustained burst at the thing that had been the Pollinator.

Farther up the line, everybody froze. Harry Penn blinked, caning out of his distraction, getting his bearings. "It's Dana!" he yelled to those ahead of him, and turned back, drawing his Badger.

Max, farther toward the front of the column, caught the news as it was passed along. People were yelling conflicting questions, answers, and orders.

Max moaned aloud. "Dana!" He pressed Aurora into Miriya's arms. "Hang on to her!" Rick and Lisa had come hurrying back down the column, berating people to set up security and guard against a surprise attack from another quarter. Lisa was calling in air cover; Rick was trying to find out what was going on at the rear.

People formed up to defend the children, Kazianna towering among them and unlimbering her oversized weapons. Max shoved his wife and daughter toward them. "Vince! Don't let anything happen to them!"

Then he was off to the rear, leaving Louie and his cyberteam where they had set up rifle positions, dodging Scott Bernard, who had Marlene clasped to him protectively.

Max broke through the final screen of foliage to see something immense and black standing with its back to him, the sun of Omphalos doing little to relieve its intense darkness.

Those who had already gotten to the scene Harry Penn, Bowie, Lron, and a few others wavered, holding their fire, not sure what was going on. The black mecha had bent to pick something up. It turned toward them, straightening to its full height, with Dana in its armored fist.

Lron raised the squad laser weapon that he carried like a rifle and would have fired into the black mecha's leg in hopes of bringing it down; Max knocked the laser's thick barrel down. "Hold your fire, all of you!"

The thing clutching Dana raised its free hand, pointing at Max. She was struggling determinedly but weakly to break out of its grip; the effort was hopeless, and she did not seem to have the breath to yell to those below. Huge, humped, and misshapen as a giant troll, the black mecha leaned toward Max as if about to speak.

But before it could, thrusters shook the ground and one of the escort Veritechs arrived, a Beta in Guardian mode. It landed like an eagle ready to do battle, its balled armor fists cocked.

Its pilot couldn't open up, though, since Dana was in the line of fire. The pilot began to shift his VT through mechamorphosis, going to Battloid, but before he could, the black mecha leapt at him and with one swing of its fearsome fist smashed the VT down.

The Guardian/Battloid crashed to the ground, broken and smoking. Even as people raced toward it to rescue the pilot, the black mecha hit its foot thrusters and shot away into the sky, still clasping Dana.

In the middle of the confusion another escort VT, an Alpha, appeared, called back from its CAP flight, requesting instructions. As boss of the SDF-3's fighter command, Max got on the net.

"Get down here right now."

"But Commander Sterling, shouldn't t?

"I said land!"

With a dozen different matters vying for his attention guarding against further attack, counting heads to see if anyone else had been taken, checking whether the Beta pilot was still alive, raising the dimensional fortress for reinforcements and to arrange a safe

pullback Rick didn't realize what Max was doing until it was too late.

Max was gone, the second-generation Alpha shrieking away in Fighter mode, going supersonic in its ballistic climb, its sonic booms shaking the ground of Omphalos. The VT's pilot was standing there bareheaded Max having appropriated his thinking cap helmet staring after his departing craft.

He saw Rick. "Sir, he didn't even stop to call for reinforcements."

"I know; it's being done."

Of course, it would be precious minutes before more VTs could get there from the low-orbiting SDF-3. The fighter jock nodded. "No way was he gonna wait, sir."

Rick, watching the spot where Max had disappeared in the distance, agreed. "No, the gauntlet's been thrown, Lieutenant."

The Alpha was one of the best in the SDF-3 inventory, a souped-up new armored Alpha version of a second-generation VT that was why Max had assigned it to fly security for the ground party but it was all he could do to keep the Black Knight in view.

"Black Knight" was the way he had come to think of his antagonist. Supposedly, that made him the White Knight, but he felt a poor excuse for one.

And a despicable failure as a father.

He had worried about Miriya from the first, always apprehensive because she had gone through the sizing chamber, had been subjected to so many dangers, had nearly died in battle and childbirth alike-he himself had nearly killed her! And for Aurora, otherworldly entity from the very start, with her mind powers and unnatural maturation rate, Max had had constant concern.

But Dana, Dana ... what malign brilliance for the being that ruled newspace to test him this way! He had left Dana behind on Earth against his own better judgment when the SDF-3 set forth. No one but Miriya-except perhaps Aurora-knew how bitterly he'd condemned himself when he'd heard about the suffering and hardship she had had to bear.

Never knowing a true home, growing up in war, her heart wounded terribly by Zor Prime and her very essence nearly raped by the madman Zand-Max could barely bring himself to think of those things, for when he did, he wished he had never been born.

His love of his family and the sense of calm Miriya and Aurora gave him were the things that had made Earth's greatest Robotech fighter gradually put aside combat over the

years. So of course, what better way to draw him back into war in all earnest than this? And again it was Dana, poor Dana, suffering because of Max.

What pitiless genius! The Regis would have her fight.

Max realized he'd been rasping an endless string of soft, monotonic obscenities and stopped. He monitored the fighter ops and tac nets only to discover that none of the other VTs could get a fix on the Black Knight. Nor could the SDF-3, even though the bandit was making a paint as big as a house on his scopes.

He was not surprised.

With his burners wide open, he gained slowly on the grotesque mecha. It was not going at multimach-which it certainly seemed capable of doing-and it was staying at low altitude. He prayed that that meant Dana was still unharmed.

The Black Knight went all the way down to the deck, and Max lost it in terrain obstructions and ground scatter. He brought up a detailed topo display from the SDF-3's orbital mapping memory but couldn't guess what the kidnapper's next move would be.

He was so intent on it that he almost died; the night-dark mecha came howling out of a mountain rift, firing a spread of missiles at him from the bulbous pods under its strangely articulated arms.

Max reacted instantly, plying the Hotas but, more important, imaging through his thinking cap. The uncanny instincts and nearly instantaneous reflexes that had made him a living legend were as sharp, as apt, as ever. The Alpha rolled vertical, two missiles boiling by just beneath his overturned canopy, then rolled again into a power dive, narrowly avoiding another spike-snouted killer.

Max banked, nearly tearing the VT's wings off, as the enemy came charging straight for him. The fist that had held Dana was enclosed now, a smooth armored globe; there was no way to tell whether she was alive or dead in there.

The Veritech dodged the Black Knight, then Max went ballistic and poured on full emergency military power as his antagonist launched another spread at him. He twisted and jinked, cutting in his jamming and countermeasures gear as missiles seared by and left their fiery corkscrews all around him.

Swathed in their trails, he mechamorphosed on the fly, went to Battloid, turning and coming to bay with his rifle/cannon in his mecha's alloy fist as the enemy came howling up after him.

Max was about to open up with the heavy pulsed laser buttery but stopped himself at the

sight of the globed fist. The famed top ace reflexes failed him, and he froze, unable to use his weapons.

The Black Knight opened up with a mecha hand weapon of its own, an affair shaped like a dory, from which purple lightning broke. Max feinted, jetted the other way, and nearly eluded the shot. But a snapping tongue of discharge caught the Battloid's left leg, blasting a rent in the armor there.

But in the interim, the distance between the two had closed. Max gathered himself and kicked in all thrusters, pouncing on the enemy rather than avoiding it. The Black Knight caught him with terrifying strength.

The two mecha fell through the sky, locked together in mortal combat.

CHAPTER THIRTY?FOUR

And so these equations expose a long-hidden truth: We now know the nature of the heretofore unimaginable energies that existed in the first, irreducible instant after the creation of the universe. That the last vestige of them is to be found in the distilled essence of a Flower is something to ponder, were there time.

But there is none.

From Exedore's notes, written in the Royal Hall during the approach of Haydon IV

By the time Cabell returned to the observation/command post high atop the Royal Hall pyramid, the drives of the departing evac ships were mere sparks-there were a dozen or so of them, containing a few thousand clones, human holdouts, a handful of XTs, and a pet or two.

Exedore noted the smudges and stains on the old savant's robes. "There was violence."

Cabell nodded wearily. "I did what I could, but yes. Less, though, than I'd feared, given the fact that there was only room for a relative few to escape. All dread the sphere ships' coming."

Exedore grunted: Valivarre lay dead in space undergoing repairs; the ore ship might have lifted the entire populace of Tiresia to safety. But then, there had been no time to organize a large-scale evacuation; those who had escaped on the few ships at the spaceport were essentially those who had been there or nearby when the disastrous battle demolished the Local Group fleet.

"At least the wait will not be long," he added. The flock of a hundred-odd ominous metallic bubbles was even then entering the upper atmosphere. "The rest will go underground to shelters, I suppose, or perhaps break into the bistros for a final toast to life."

"That's more than the Haydonites got, or the Local Group fleet crews, either," Cabell observed. There was no sign of Haydonite life aboard the sphere ships, and it was presumed that the artificial race had perished when Haydon IV had been destroyed. Neither was there any sign of the Awareness's survival, and that was of some comfort to the two savants; the Awareness had been perhaps Haydon's greatest weapon. "Come," Cabell bade. "We've not much time."

Not having caught his breath, he was huffing again within a few steps. Exedore caught up and lent a supporting arm; he was physically younger, though he was the older of the two.

They went to the pinnacle of the Royal Hall, which they'd polarized to transparency, so that it seemed open to the sky. In it was the facsimile Protoculture matrix.

They had both seen the original and now considered this Second Generation manifestation. Lang had once observed how it resembled an old-time representation of an atom: a complex interlinking of ring orbits some two hundred feet across, suspended in midair by its own internal forces.

However, where the original matrix glistened in rainbow colors, this fabrication was harsh white and gold, and the musical sound coming from its gleaming nucleus seemed more strident, more ominous, than that produced by Zor's original creation.

Now, though, the two observed in the matrix certain anomalies and instabilities that hadn't been there a short time before. Their research told them that, indeed, the Shapings were reaching some climactic point, a cusp or crux in events even mote important than the conversion of the original matrix years ago in the mound where the SDF-1 lay buried.

"Come," Cabell bade Exedore. "We haven't much time." They went to where a new piece of apparatus had been set up. It suggested a kind of elaborate laser drill or boring unit, heavy with magnetic bottling fields and insulator rings.

"The buildup of Anti-Protoculture energy is still below what the job may require," Cabell said, "but it will have to suffice."

Exedore drew a deep breath, running both hands through his unruly red thatch. "Are you sure we're doing the right thing?" Once it was done, there would be no backing out, not to mention the danger to Tiresia and perhaps to all of Tirol.

"The matrix mustn't fall into Haydon's hands!" Cabell insisted. "Otherwise, he'll reduce all that remains of the universe to mere fuel and raw materials for his mad ambitions."

Exedore sighed. Cabell was right; it was just that the first matrix had been the Holy Grail for so long, and the second had required such extraordinary striving and genius. To

destroy this last vestige of the power of Protoculture seemed to run counter to everything the long wars and researches had been about.

"You're correct, of course." Exedore clapped Cabell on the back tiredly. Strange and sad that things should end this way.

And an end it would be, since neither of them could survive this last-ditch effort to thwart Haydon's scheme. Exedore thought of the Micronian stories: Sampson in the temple, Horatio at the bridge. Exedore and Cabell at the Second Gen matrix would outdo all of those.

Cabell had brought forth two protective faceplates, handing one to Exedore. "Here you are, my dear fellow."

Exedore accepted his, slipping it on. "You know, Cabell, I still maintain that one of us can in all likelihood carry out this, er, procedure. There is thus no reason for you to make this sacrifice."

"Now, now. We've been all over this, old friend. There's no guarantee that one operator could balance the induction field and simultaneously calibrate the integration mixture. And it's far too late to automate the process. No, that just won't do therwise I'd have insisted you leave."

Exedore shook his head, settling the faceplate into place. Strange how, so late in his long years, he had become friends with such an odd assortment of beings: Micronians, Sentinels, even a Clone of Zor himself. And Cabell, who was a companion and kindred soul, rather than the master his position would once have required him to be.

Both of them were working as fast as they could even while they were musing. Surveillance satellites gave word that the sphere ships were making planetary approach at much higher speed than had been foreseen.

Still, Exedore saw calmly, he and Cabell would have time to carry out their last act. The special magnetic bottling fields began to come into existence, and in another few minutes Protoculture and Anti-Protoculture would mix in mutual annihilation.

There was another warning tone-from the surveillance satellites. "An energy plexus of unknown type has been detected, originating from the sphere fleet, moving in the direction of Tiresia."

The two companions stopped their work and looked at the speaker. "Describe its nature."

"It is nonmaterial," came the reply, "a webwork of mental energy in some ways resembling the Awareness and yet unlike it."

Cabell was horrified. "That is because it is no longer linked to the instrumentality of Haydon IV. We've been caught unawares!"

He leapt to his controls, Exedore doing the same, and they prepared to fire the Anti-Protoculture infusion device, ready or not. But even as they did, the computer voice from the satellite net announced, "Calculations show that there is no time to complete your current endeavor. The Awareness has raced ahead of the sphere ships and now encompasses the Royal Hall."

But by then Cabell and Exedore didn't need the computer to tell them something was wrong. A sparkling network, like a highway system of strobing luminescence in the sky, had sprung into being all around the hall-not the Awareness itself but a side effect of the Awareness's presence, an exertion of its artificial mind powers.

The inside of the grand pyramidal chamber holding the matrix became like an aquarium filled with strange, insubstantial waters, shimmering air showing colors to which neither Exedore nor Cabell could put a name. It made the facsimile matrix's music turn ominous and caused it to glimmer in a new and sinister fashion.

Cabell, suffused with light, felt his consciousness slipping away. "Fire! Do not wait!" He held his grip on his senses for an extra moment, contriving to fall against the control panel and hook one arm over the ignition release, dragging the lever down with him.

Exedore, seeing what he had done, stabbed with the last of his strength for the firing button, even though he thought the charge was too low to accomplish the full destruction of the matrix. As his finger descended, he saw that the firing unit was aglow with the Awareness's light.

It all made such chilling sense; the Awareness had been removed from its instrumentality-Haydon IV itself-and yet maintained in a coherent state. So Haydon has disembodied his AI construct and sent it here to fuse with the matrix-its new instrumentality.

The firing unit failed to function, of course. The device built by Exedore and Cabell to destroy the matrix began to die, its fields falling silent, its Anti-Protoculture beginning to decompose at once, returning to the quantum foam from which it had been extracted with such enormous effort.

The light effects of the Awareness's merging with the matrix showed some of the cat's-cradle patterning that had been observed within Haydon IV. Exedore slumped in his place at the controls.

All across Tiresia, those who were brave, curious, or fatalistic enough to want to bear

witness to the end peeked forth from their concealment. Out of the Royal Hall's peak rose a swirling nebula, showing some characteristics of the Awareness, some of the facsimile matrix, and some that were totally unfamiliar.

The nebula lit the city as it ascended higher into the night toward the waiting sphere ships. Tiresia was spared a last and utter destruction. Exedore and Cabell roused themselves from the paralysis of the Awareness's visit and watched the nebula of force rise up into the blackness to rejoin Haydon.

Max had hoped to score a quick victory in hand-to-hand combat with the black mecha, but the enemy machine was tremendously strong and agile, at least a match for his Alpha and maybe more.

He held his own against it, though, his own lightning reflexes being relayed through the "thinking cap" and a lifetime's training in unarmed combat coming to his aid.

Above all, he clung to the thing's globular right fist, terrified that if he released it for even an instant, the black mecha would harm or kill Dana, perhaps even by smashing it against Max's own Battloid.

The two war machines wrestled and struck at each other as they fell from the sky, neither one's thrusters able to stop it or give it the upper hand. Max tried to force the foe's right arm around to gain leverage with his Battloid's legs and rip loose the all-important right arm. But the enemy was fiendishly clever and nearly managed to kick his Battloid's head off.

In all the confusion, though, the two managed to get their foot thrusters under them and cushion their fall somewhat. They crashed into the top tier of a three-layer forest canopy, breaking off limbs and sending wildlife flapping and skittering.

They hung up in the second tier layer, entangled in more branches and networks of heavy vines. Max thought he saw a chance to pin his antagonist where one of the great trunks divided, immobilizing the black mecha and giving him the chance he needed to rescue Dana.

But the foe seemed to read his mind and struck at the Battloid's head with the globe at the end of its right arm. Max dodged desperately to avoid harming his daughter and lost his balance. The Black Knight brought its huge left fist down on the Alpha where a human's collarbone would be. The Battloid reeled, falling ...

Rick dashed to catch up with Louie, who in turn was hotfooting it so as not to fall behind Lang. "Halt, goddammit!" If anybody could shed some light on what was happening, it was

the two Protoculture hotshots, but neither seemed inclined to stop. Finally Louie, younger and fleeter, of foot, caught up with Lang and hauled him around by one shoulder. "Doctor! Listen to me!"

"Let go!" Lang shoved Louie with that strange strength Rick had seen him exhibit on one or two rare occasions. But cough Louie was hurled back with extreme force, taking an impact against a tree that made Rick wince, he bounced back for more, taking up the chase again.

"Rick!" It was Lisa; perhaps no other voice could have made him stop and turn around just then. She was coming along at a run, too, with Scott Bernard and Marlene. The children and most of the others were following more slowly in good order, but Rick noticed that Kazianna was nowhere to be seen.

He got on the tac net to the guards posted back at the landing zone. "Hold Doctors Lang and Nichols under close arrest until I get there-and keep 'em away from each other!"

He had time to repeat the message for clarity's sake, with the guard detail commander acknowledging, before Lisa caught up.

"Rick, Marlene says everything's starting to unglue or melt down. Something's trying to change even the Regis's plans." Marlene was nodding. "I can feel it, even though my connection with the Protoculture isn't as strong anymore. I believe that the Regis and something else are about to lock in some tremendous struggle."

"Haydon? "

Lisa nodded, "It sounds like a good bet. I wanted to hear what Aurora had to say, but she's gone, too-she and Miriya and Kazianna."

She pointed to a disappearing Quadrono armored suit, vanishing in the direction Max and the Black Knight had taken. "Something about that black mecha, and none of them would take the time to explain."

Rick wanted to wait until they were all back aboard the SDF-3 to clear things up, but he understood that there might not even be that much time. "What do Roy and the other kids say?"

"They're too upset to make a lot of sense, but they obviously think something very dangerous is about to happen."

"That's it, then; we get everybody back to the ship before we do anything else." As he said it, they heard the sound of heavy engines, and one of the two shuttles lifted off. Rick got the group moving as fast as he thought they could stand. Luckily, Kazianna had left her

Zentraedi behind to help maintain security.

Just before the party reached the landing zone there was another roar, and an Alpha went leaping away after the shuttle.

When the group got to the remaining shuttle, they found dazed security people dealing with their own wounded. "I-I'm not sure how it happened, sir;" a rattled commander told Rick. "We had Doctor Lang and Doctor Nichols in custody-and then suddenly Lang had knocked out three of my best people, and the shuttle hatch opened all by itself to let him in. "Everybody piled on Nichols to make sure he didn't get away. We had 'im held down pretty good until one of the Battloids just knelt down, without anybody even at the controls, to get him loose. Then he boarded and flew off after Lang."

"The new age of miracles," Vince muttered.

Rick didn't answer. Lisa had already sent someone to see if the remaining shuttle was working; it was, as were the mecha.

"Various people have had their mental powers expanded in one fashion or another," Jean Grant observed. "It seems that, at least in some cases, those expanded powers are now growing. "

Rick heard a thoughtful note in her voice and turned to her to see her looking at the SDF-3 children. Lisa blurted, "Jean, what are you saying?"

For a moment Rick feared the same thing his wife did: that Jean's point was that the children were now to be considered a threat, that it had at last come down to war within families.

But instead, Jean Grant showed the first hint of a smile they had seen from her in a long time. "What I'm saying is, the children think it'd be a good idea to get out of newspace?and the Regis is somewhat occupied all of a sudden-and somewhere not too far away, our spacefold drives are sitting there waiting for us."

In the moment's silence that followed Rick heard the strange cries and stridulations of Omphalos's wildlife. Vince threw an arm around his wife and kissed her. "You're one of a kind, kid."

Rick was already giving hand signals. "Okay, get ready to board. We'll all have to squeeze onto one shuttle."

"Are we going home, Daddy?"

He reached down and gathered up his son. "Yes, we are."

CHAPTER THIRTY?FIVE

How hot a pilot was Max Sterling? Perhaps this simple observation makes the point best: Among the VT fighter jocks, his modest, upbeat middle-American manner of speech replaced the Chuck Yeager drawl that had dominated among pilots for decades and sifted down among other fliers as well.

If you don't understand how very much that meant, go ask any old stick-and-rudder hand. Theresa Duvall, Wingmates: The Story of Max and Miriya Sterling

All his training, experience, and remarkable skills came to nothing in that critical moment after Max was struck by the Black Knight.

But blind chance stepped in to fill the gap, if only for a half instant. A springy hawser of vine had become looped around his Battloid's foot, and it served the dual purpose of swinging him around to where he could get a grip on the immense tree trunk from which he was suspended and allowing him to lash out with his foot.

But most importantly, it bobbed him out of the line of fire of his foe's dory-shaped hand weapon. The purple lightning snapped and discharged, blowing a distant limb to vapor; before the enemy could correct its aim, the massive metal battering ram that was the Battloid's foot connected. The Battloid-scale hand weapon went flying.

At the same time, Max was firing thrusters, righting himself. He rose on full back and leg blasts to grapple with his enemy, pounding the weapon out of its fist. Locked together, they fell to bend down a stout branch that, even though it cracked somewhat, sprang back like a diving board to flip them into empty air. They left behind a trail of smoldering foliage and a few fires, but the vegetation was too wet to burn easily.

Again they fell, but this time Max had both hands fast at the Black Knight's right wrist. Both fired thrusters, heaving this way and that, kicking and flailing. Max saw the ground coming at him and twisted to cushion his landing with blaring power bursts. The black mecha wasn't as alert, and he managed to land on top of it.

They had come down in a large clearing, branches and leaves and lengths of vine raining down after them, along with burning bits of debris.

The enemy lay there stunned and partially staved in, shorted power leads crackling and throwing off sparks. Max seized a hold, planted his feet, twisted, and pulled with all the might he could focus through the thinking cap. With a shower of sparks and the tearing loose of strangely designed linkages, the right arm came off.

While the foe thrashed and bounced about the clearing in spasms, Max jumped clear to

lay the globe aside carefully. He wanted more than anything to make sure Dana was all right, but there was no time. The living demon that was the black mecha might come at him again at any moment.

There wasn't even time to answer as, amazingly, he heard Kazianna Hesh's voice come over the net, though he thought his corn equipment had been knocked out. "Max! Where are you?"

Even more strangely, he thought he heard Miriya's voice, too, and strangest of all, Aurora's-for Aurora seemed to be speaking directly into his mind.

Father, no! No!

It was no time to give in to hallucinatory voices, though; the Black Knight was back on its feet, coming his way in a tittering run that covered a dozen yards at a time. Max imaged and his rifle/cannon slid into his grip; the thought that his laughter might even now be lying there dead made it that much easier to draw a bead.

"Max! Freeze!"

He had no idea why Kazianna would be yelling that in his ear, and so in the end it was confusion rather than discipline that made him hesitate for the telling split second. In that moment the Quadrono powered armor suit came barreling through a curtain of thick-leaved branches and interwoven vegetation, throwing itself on the Black Knight from the left.

Max held his fire and watched, astounded, as Kazianna sought not to terminate the enemy but to subdue it without harming the occupant and to shield it from Max's fire.

The Black Knight fought wildly, but Miriya had come into battle fresh and uninjured, armor operating at peak levels, with the advantage of surprise. Moreover, the viragos of the elite powered armor units in effect fought exclusively in what the REF would term Battloid mode; the contest was on Kazianna's chosen turf.

Kazianna called into play all the tricks of close-in mecha brawling that she had picked up in a long Quadrono career. Though the interloper was clever and savage, in the end Kazianna held it immobilized and forced it to one knee, standing behind and maintaining a complicated arm-bar hold on it.

Max expected her to deliver the coup de grace or at least disable the thing utterly. But to his shock, Kazianna freed one hand for a moment, made a quick move, and dropped a hand weapon of her own onto the forest floor, almost within reach.

Max made a decision and raised the rifle/cannon again, hoping he could avoid hitting

Kazianna but determined to blow away the black mecha. His Battloid's finger was squeezing the trigger when Miriya's voice came to him again. "Max, don't shoot!"

And Aurora's voice spoke in his mind: We have to break the spell, Father! Don't you see what's happened? She sent a vivid image into his mind, the clearest mental link he was ever to have with his confounding younger daughter.

"Oh, my God," he whispered.

His Battloid's hand lowered, the rifle/cannon falling from its lax grip. He waited as Kazianna slowly released her hold on the Black Knight. The thing reached out slowly, almost unwillingly, taking up the gun Kazianna had thrown down, and began to come to its feet.

The war queen of the Quadronos waited, tensed, to pounce on the strange mecha again-if it seemed about to fire on Max, but such a contest might come out either way. The thing was moving uncertainly, as if in a trance.

Max could feel Aurora's thoughts pouring toward it, Miriya's voice came over the com net to it. "This isn't what you want. Come back to us."

Max stood looking into the weapon's muzzle, arms hung at his sides, in the profoundest torment he had ever known. "Whatever happens, please lways, always know that . . .

that I love you. We've always loved you with our whole hearts." Then he stood up straight, the gun barrel centered on him, waiting.

The Black Knight's aim wavered, and after what seemed like a lifetime it dropped the weapon with a cry of utter misery in a voice they all knew. The mecha staggered, and Kazianna caught it, already working at the unfamiliar lock-downs to crack it open.

Max dashed to them, reconfiguring as he went so that he sprang down from a kneeling Guardian whose huge metallic hands helped keep the supine Black Knight steady. As he got down, Aurora and Miriya were emerging from Kazianna's open helmet, Miriya helping Aurora lower herself to the ground. They had ridden in the powered suit, which had been retrofitted back during the monopole mining operations on Fantoma to carry Micronian observers.

Kazianna had gotten the soot-black, alien-contoured chest plate open. Max, Miriya, and Aurora scrambled up and raced to gather around the pilot's seat, Max fumbling to remove from her a thinking cap that looked more like an instrument of torture.

Dana, coming out of whatever spell it was the Regis had used to throw open her dark side, blinked up at them. "Dad, I uhhh. Don't hate me; I didn't want to?

"Shh! We know; everything's all right."

"Dana, we love you; oh, sister ..."

Then all four Sterlings were weeping, trying to talk at once, hugging and kissing each other. At the same time they struggled to get Dana out of the pilot's seat/iron maiden into which she had been transferred somehow from the globular prison out at the end of the Black Knight's arm. Aurora's emanations of grief and joy bathed them all, Kazianna included. Kazianna eased back a bit once Dana was down on solid ground again to give the four some room and privacy. She thought of the strange interludes that had come upon the newspace castaways, and some abrupt instinct made her look straight up into the sky.

Framed by the hole the descending mecha had made in the forest canopy, a single gargantuan eye that Kazianna knew now for the Regis's gazed back.

The giantess murmured, "You never learned this from Zor, did you? No, nor from the Great Work, or your Genesis Pits, or even the transcendence itself."

But the Regis made no answer, and there was no sign what the new data would mean to her race/self.

Then that last, separated part of her attention was gone, reunited with the rest of her, as the Regis addressed herself to the threat she sensed from Haydon.

People were used to deferring to Lang, to obeying without question the driving force of the SDFs, RDF, and REF. Even when he landed in a shuttle whose jamming gear was fouling up communications with the planet below, even when he emerged alone and gave orders to seal all flight decks and air locks, even when he walked away without a word of explanation or authorization, they automatically moved to obey. Even Xien knew his authority lay, in reality, somewhere far below Lang's.

Perhaps every human's did.

Niles Obstat attempted to get into the shuttle, to shut down the countermeasures and jamming gear so that the SDF-3 could contact the ground party, but the shuttle refused to open no matter what he tried.

Lang was already racing to his sanctum sanctorum back near Engineering when he heard the PA chatter about an unauthorized air lock opening and the arrival of an Alpha. He was too busy thinking about other things to curse, but his lips curved a bit in a cold smile. Nichols the cyber-master; what an unexpectedly worthy opponent!

Louie emerged from the VT to find the people waiting for him looking like the victims of

some psychic plague: dazed and unfocussed, not sure who or what to trust, least of all their own senses. At least Xien and Niles Obstat summoned up the resolve to confront Louie and try to intervene.

Louie swept them with his black, bug-goggled gaze. "I can't explain; follow me if you like. Lang has to be stopped."

Xien stepped in his way. "Admiral Hunter hasn't given any orders."

"The Hunters and the rest are all right, I think. Ask them yourself."

Louie had glanced to where Lang's abandoned shuttle was carelessly parked. Crew members were swinging a heavy-duty cutting unit into place for forced entry. At Louie's glance, various nearby sensors registered a change, and somebody from the TIC reported that the jamming had stopped.

Xien's mouth became a thin, resolute line, and he pulled his sidearm, training it on Louie. "You stand fast until the admiral says differently."

He had just turned to muster a security detail to bring Lang to ground, when they all heard the grinding of mecha.

All over the hangar deck war machines were moving, mechamorphosing, rousing up like wakened fairy-tale monsters. Xien was brushed back by a Guardian's careful hand, unhurt but helpless to interfere. The would-be security detail found themselves boxed in by a Battloid and the single functioning second-generation Destroid aboard. Similarly, other personnel moved out of Louie's way or were moved from it.

Louie showed a bit of harried delight as three figures stood forth from the shadows to regard him. Strucker, Shi-Ling, and Stirson had to maintain their concentration with so many mecha to remote-control.

"Keep them all here," Louie ordered his men. "Same goes for the Hunters and the rest."

"Listen, you need us with you," Shi-Ling began.

"Uh uh; I've got Lang's number, but he'd just burn you out."

The unplugged people present heard the toccatas and rondos of data only as dim sounds from control panels and computer units. To Louie and his disciples it was a symphony and light show that surrounded them and validated Louie's assertion with hard proof: Only he, with his augmentations, could hope to survive a clash with Lang. Stirson conceded, "We understand. Wipe 'im, man."

Louie ran on his way. He never knew if he found the passages empty by some doing of Lang or as a result of the Regis or sheer coincidence. He got to Lang's sanctum sanctorum to find the heavy hatch of the armored vault module hanging open.

Emil Lang was poised on a stool within, contemplating the apparatus taken so long ago from Zor's quarters. Now it was radiant with Protoculture.

Lang spoke casually, without looking at him. "I think you'll find this interesting, Doctor. Do come in."

Louie shrugged out of his jacket. Where his black turtleneck was torn, the bionics and chip technology that had become parts of his body could be seen, along with the cyberport at the back of his neck.

Lang glanced at him. "Don't be frightened; it's too late for you to do me any harm, so I've no need to harm you." Louie was not ready to put money on that yet, but it was certain that Lang was on his own playing field. Oh, maybe there was something Louie could do about the door servos or the conventional light fixtures, but everything of any significance was Protoculture, and Lang had already proved who was top dog in that particular arena.

Louie gulped but entered. What else was there to do? "Doctor, look: I know what you're thinking, but you can't control the Shapings. Remember what happened to Zand?"

Lang's voice cut like razor wire. "You impertinent little cyborg Pinocchio! Do you think you've risen so high that you can look down on me in that fashion?"

"That wasn't what I meant."

Lang eyed him and grudgingly believed him. "Doctor Nichols, if what we are observing were allowed to come to pass-if real, spacetime were drawn into newspace and the whole reformed along lines chosen by the Regis-I believe that your somewhat unorthodox intellect and talents would make you the new template for the nature of Protoculture. "And I do not find that an easy thing to concede."

Louie swallowed. "I just-"

"Please. Allow me to finish. As glorious a thing as that new universe would be-that fresh start, that shining correction, perhaps, of all that's gone wrong with our old one there is much that would inevitably pass away. Maybe most, or virtually all, of everything we have known."

"I don't celebrate evil or pain, oh, no! But all that's happened means something, perhaps gives some irreducible validity to existence itself. Or maybe the struggle of evolution against entropy, of ferment against mere sameness."

"And I find that I cannot let the past die, for all its short omings. There are too many precious things in our space time, preserved in amber, as it were. I won't let them perish."

Louie wondered if he had the strength to wrench that long control around on its hinge, swing it against Lang's head, get in the first shot. "You can't do any of that by trying to control the Shapings, Doctor. Zand proved that."

Lang shifted to turn a dial. The console shone brighter and sang more gloriously. "I know that. What I'll do is merge with them. For they, too, are reaching the end of a vast cycle.

"Not that I'm of any significance, but perhaps I can be like an insignificant snowflake that determines which way the avalanche shall fall. In any case, I won't know, for Emil Lang won't exist anymore."

Louie had taken Lang's shift of position into account and now gathered himself. But Lang threw him off by rising, and Louie noticed for the first time that something truly new had been added to Zor's apparatus: a pair of brass handgrips set perhaps a yard apart on the console.

Lang smiled suddenly, his black, all-pupil eyes gleaming limpidly. "There's no one else eligible for the job, so I have to try, at the very least. Won't you wish me well ... Louie?"

Louie froze and found himself answering, "I do, Emil. I wish you well."

He moved with all the speed he could muster but stopped just before he got within reach. The control bar was forgotten, the fight forgotten. Louie Nichols found himself guided by a simple intuition-nothing to do with Shapings or psi but only a feeling that the man had spoken the truth.

"I wish you well."

"Thank you, Louie. Good-bye."

Lang rose unhurriedly and seized both handgrips. A light like the beginning of the universe filled the vault module, and Louie felt as if all the winds of time were blowing through his brain, something so symphonic and grand and terrible that he shrank from perceiving them.

He was hurled back through the air, through the door of the vault, as the light expanded.

CHAPTER THIRTY?SIX

What with all the new psi powers-and other faculties-we saw manifested along the way, maybe this whole kick-out's just been the universe's way to give evolution a leg up. Bruce Mirrorshades, Machine Mind and Arthurian Legend

Down near Ranaath's star the sphere ships spiraled along the accretion disc, orienting themselves for the final transit.

The mingled energies of Second Gen Protoculture and the Awareness cloaked them, so that they were like a string of mirror-perfect pearls, to shield them against the tidal forces and the more menacing phenomena beyond.

Within the ships, all platforms but one were occupied by simulacra of the One Haydon, giants but still minute now that they were parts: tens of thousands of them watching silently over the ships' systemry as the moment approached.

On that other single platform stood the Robotech Elders, watching gleefully. The infusion of Protoculture had freed them of the need for their life-support thrones; they were swelled and vibrant with the vitality the Second Gen essence had given them.

They waited near a sphere of their own, a small vessel fashioned and put there by Haydon. In it they would journey back from the moment of intersection with all the power of Protoculture at their command. That power would bring the Local Group under their dominion, just the springboard they needed to put the universe at their feet.

The Elders, looking like scavenger birds on a storm wind, gazed into the scanner hungrily.

The Event Horizon loomed up before them.

"I just get the feeling that the people in this whole long historical contest are starting to fall together like pieces of a puzzle," Jean Grant pondered. "I mean, from Zor to Roy II-"

"It's as likely as any other explanation," Lisa admitted. Just then Rick turned to them in the crowded shuttle, lowering the com unit he had been using to follow what was going on between the SDF-3 and the shuttle's com officer. He was still holding Roy II in his lap, but it didn't look out of place with humans and XTs and Zentraedi children and so forth all crammed into one ship.

"Somebody shut down the commo jamming, but I don't think we're gonna be able to make any sense of anything until we get back to the SDF-3. Louie and Lang are having some kind of showdown or something. But at least Vince has Engineering alerted and getting set for the big push."

Lisa reached out to smooth Roy's raven hair. Even with the proof that the children had

preternatural powers, even accepting the fact that they were the newspace strandees' only hope of survival, she had trouble from moment to moment keeping herself from denouncing the plan Rick had formulated.

She reminded herself of the Sterlings' encounter with the Black Knight, though. What hope was there for Roy if he became part of the Regis's lab experiments? Or if Haydon took over?

The shuttle and accompanying VT and Zentraedi arrived on the hangar deck to find Louie's cybernaught team under close arrest-having surrendered, apparently, because outside interference in the confrontation between Louie and Lang was impossible now-and most other people trying to sort themselves out.

"We've got a team by the main hatch to the compartment where Lang and Nichols are," Men reported a bit shakily, "but as yet they can't get it open. Some kind of cyber-stunt." He glared at Louie's fellow grid-gallopers, who did not ap ear to notice.

"Never mind that for now," Vince said. "WeVe got to detour around that compartment and get back to the drive section. Are the new patch-ins rigged?"

An engineering officer who looked like she was not old enough to vote reported, "The teams are almost ready, sir. I've had my people leave a lot of leeway in the leads and cables, because nobody seems sure just where the drives'll be situated when they, um, appear."

IF they appear, Vince amended, but kept it to himself. There was also the possibility that the SDF-3's spacefold drives would show up upside down or something, but there was not much point worrying about that. "Very good."

The Sterlings were still clinging to one another, but Aurora tugged to free herself. "I have to go aft with the others. But I wish you'd come."

Rick and Lisa knelt by Roy. Lisa ran her fingertips through the boy's fine hair. Rick told his son, "Don't be afraid; we're gonna be right there with you."

He was already tugging at their hands. "We haveta hurry!"

Rick had already directed Colonel Vallenskiy to remain in command in the TIC; Lisa had left Raul Forsythe conning the bridge. They both stood, each taking one of the boy's hands, and hugged each other quickly and very urgently.

Just then there was a message over the PA. Karen Penn, who with Jack Baker was leading the security team that was covering the compartment containing Lang and Louie Nichols, reported, "Admiral, something's happening in there. I'm not sure what."

The rest of it was lost in the sudden soaring of sound, the rising vibrations-that-were-not-vibrations, that shook the ship. Light seemed to come from everywhere, and someone screamed. Wind squalls swept the vessel. All at once there were radiant vortices everywhere, shooting back and forth at high speed like living things, going through solid bulkheads without any perceptible resistance.

Vince bellowed, "All right, stations everybody! Stand to! Let's do it, people!"

The flux-storm, or whatever it was, abated a bit, and people rushed off to their stations. Scott and Marlene went with the party headed for the drive section, as did a lot of the XT Sentinels and Zentraedi. Even Veidt and Vowad went along. Rem, Minmei's hand in his, was following step by slow step when another light-storm struck.

This one was different, a cloud of lumens that closed in around them alone, and none of the others seemed to notice. Minmei screamed, cringing to her knees, arms closed protectively around her middle. Rem knelt next to her, eyes slitted against the onslaught.

The cloud became a face that Rem recognized. The Regis looked down emotionlessly at the two.

NO, YOU WON'T BE SAVED. ALL YOUR PLANS WILL COME TO NOTHING. THIS IS

THE MOMENT OF MY TRIUMPH AND YOUR EXTINCTION.

"No!" Rem howled. He hauled Minmei to her feet to seek shelter, but when he started off, she pulled in another direction. "That way! That way!"

They left the cloud behind, though there were still swirls of fury around them. Minmei led the way down one passageway and then another until they came to a quarters hatch. Rem hit the release and on the other side found a pistol leveled at him.

Bowie stared down the barrel. Rem felt his pulse pound, waiting for the blast. After a long hesitation, though, Bowie bit out, "Close it. Seal it behind you."

Rem saw then that Musica was trying to comfort Allegra, both Muses huddled together in the lower bunk. Bowie reholstered the sidearm, saying, "I don't know what's happening, but I know I want the Singers and me together when it does. No more soldiering for me."

His eyes flicked to Minmei. "What brought you back?" She was sobbing, shaking her head, chest racked, unable to tell him. Maybe she could not have even if she hadn't been crying. Rem took her into his arms.

Bowie went to where his compact synthesizer keyboards were set up next to the glowing Cosmic Harp. "Well, maybe you just wanted to be played out with some song. Good a way to go as any."

His fingers touched keys, evoking full, uplifting chords. "It's what I was planning on."

Minmei swiped back the limp hair from her eyes, lifting her head. "Yes. Music."

Rem helped her over to where she could slump into a seat near Bowie and sat stroking her shoulder, back, and face. Bowie played a melody she knew, and she lifted her voice. At least she could give her unborn baby that much.

Minmei lost herself in the words for a few bars, shutting out the rest of the world, until she realized that Musica had sat to stroke notes from the fine lines of resplendence that were the strings of the Cosmic Harp.

Musica sang, too, and in a few more moments Allegra joined in. The SDF-3 shook and jolted, distant shrieks and wails rang from far-off bulkheads, doomsday light anomalies impinged again and again at the edges of their song. But within it, for the moment, the music somehow kept them safe from the terminal spasming of the Shapings; from the probings of the Regis or, perhaps, only from her malice; from the rift-energies as newspace drew in realtime's structure; and from the desperation and despair claiming so many others aboard the SDF-3.

In the drive section, techs were being ordered back to stand along the bulkheads and everybody was donning headgear. There was no time for much else in the way of safety precautions like getting all hands into spacesuits and no telling what sort would be needed.

Pinwheels of ghostly pastel flame swooped and buzzed through the cavernous compartment like startled birds; the mental sounds and the jarring of the SDF-3 were increasing.

The children had formed their circle of power once again, this time with Aurora as a link between Roy and Drannin. They were situated off in one corner of the compartment in the hope that they would be out of the way of danger. The parents moved back, Lisa releasing Roy's shoulder only after Rick put his arm around her.

Rick tried to get Jack or Karen on the intercom to find out what was happening at Lang's sanctum, but all communications seemed to be down.

The children had taken up a new chant, the eerie glow of their eyes brightening. Rick could not hear it over the astral storm that blew and crashed around them, then, leaning closer, did hear.

Ro-bo-tech, Ro-bo-tech, Ro-bo-tech ...

The children had picked their mantra, their source of power and unity, their psychic spell word and focus; something about it made the parents, the techs, and the rest stand a bit straighter, hold their chins a little higher. Lisa felt Rick squeeze her hand and saw that his eyes were glistening with tears.

The chant became louder than the astral storm not in sheer decibels but in the minds of those gathered. Their physical surroundings-the drive ancillaries, the bulkheads-fell away in a panorama of boiling psi-stuff, and the children forced back the curtain with their unity, searching.

Ro-bo-tech! Ro-bo-tech! Ro-bo-tech!

The perceptual mist fell away and they saw the SDF-3's drive housing, like a phantom, translucent and insubstantial, there where it had once been.

Angelo Dante sent up a cheer, feeling a personal stake in the matter of the drives, and was the first one to grab a connector cable as thick as his own upper arm, ready to hook up.

But Gnea held him back, just as Vince Grant and some of the others called out for everybody to keep their distance. The drives were still insubstantial; the children had not fully materialized them yet.

The chant became more intense, and the drives took on solidity. They became opaque, then substantial.

And then the sky opened up.

The Regis looked down, anger somehow showing forth from her blank mask of a face.

I HAVE BROUGHT YOU HERE, AND HERE YOU WILL REMAIN, RAW MATERIALS

FOR MY TRANSFORMED NEWSPACE!

Long cyclonic whips of otherworldly force lashed in at the drives from everywhere, striking at their housing. The children's chant wavered, became unsure. The drives lost substance once more and faded; the ectoplasmic storm closed in.

But the Regis's face remained above those gathered below. I WILL BROOK NO MORE

INTERFERENCE!

Around each child a dark corona grew as the Regis sought to waft them away into her own zone of existence. The chant faltered, the children fighting her will, but the coronas became darker and darker still.

Like dozens of others, Rick and Lisa leapt forward to save the children but rebounded from a barrier of force that encompassed the circle. Lisa watched, helplessly sprawled on the deck, as Roy and the rest faded from view into night.

In the compartment holding Lang's vault module, Louie Nichols zeroized his goggles' transparency and threw his forearm across them for good measure.

The brightness was too intense for sight to have any coherence, anyway. At the ground zero of Lang's ultimate Protoculture act, Louie found himself perceiving things with new and different senses.

He beheld the end of Lang by immersion in the Protoculture. In the end, the man's expanded intellect, colossal as it was, was overshadowed by his boundless delight in the elegance, subtlety, and mystery of the universe and of life itself.

As Jovian as those things were, though, Lang had been right; somehow, Louie sensed that Lang's essence was no more than a single snowflake against the endless winter vista of the Shapings. The single particle that had been Lang floated away to become part of the Shapings, the man himself lost and gone forever.

Because the nature of Haydon had not been intended for the transition to newspace, the sphere ships exerted unique adaptive energies to the transit.

Negotiating perilous intercontinua commissures, they endured and wended toward their destination but accumulated more and more excess psi-quanta in their force envelopes. It was not unlike a skier building up more momentum than was desired and finding himself unable to shed it.

The sphere ships would either reach the bottom of their hill with incalculable mental energy potential or perish in a failure that would destroy everything, everywhere, everywhen.

Lisa watched her son pulled from sight without even the hope that she could sacrifice herself to save him, without even the hope that she would have his body to mourn over.

Then something changed the world of ectostorm and mind blast there in the violence of the drive compartment, something that called the unleashed fury to heel for an instant and calmed the cataclysm for a beat. Lisa knew what it was, but it took her a moment, in her stunned state to fix words to it.

Life is only what we choose to make it

Let us take it

Let us be free!

Lisa heard Rick croak, "Minmei!"

By the time Lisa had levered herself up and looked around, there were indescribably sweet notes backing Minmei's silvery voice and other voices chiming in.

Minmei stood near the hatch, looking scared and weary and haggard, but she clung to Rem, who bore her up, and she became a pure instrument for her song.

We can find the glory we all dream of,

And with our love,

We can win!

Musica and Allegra wove their spell behind hers. The Cosmic Harp danced like a starry spiderweb under Musica's fingers. Giving it all a kind of human interface was Bowie, eyes closed, drawing lofty chords from the synth-keyboard slung over his shoulders.

Scarcely aware of it, Lisa also took in Jack and Karen and Harry Penn, all of them apparently out of breath and hunkered down near the harp. Of course; it hadn't just levitated itself there.

But her thoughts were all for Roy and the kids; Lisa looked back to see the dark coronas fade a bit, the children still sitting in their places.

As Minmei let her song take flight, the chant came up beneath it, somehow merged with it?

Ro-bo-tech! Ro-bo-tech! Ro-bo-tech!

CHAPTER THIRTY?SEVEN

The quick and the dead-we're both!

Remark attributed to Rick Hunter at the Intersection

Rick threw himself at his son, dreading the barrier that would hurl him back again.

But this time he made it, passing through a sort of resistance area, a membrane. He went down on one knee next to his son. "Roy, try again. Try for the spacefold drives again!"

Roy left off the chant, though the others kept it up, to look at his father with glowing eyes.

"We're trying, Daddy. But that lady, the Regis-she put them someplace that we can't find them."

"Keep looking; they have to be somewhere."

God, what was he doing, giving psi-search pointers to his superkid? But he couldn't help it; he had to do something, bed to keep them in the fight.

"The drives might be anyplace, Roy, anyplace in, um, space or time! Look everyplace."

Then he quailed a bit as tentacles of astral malignance and and quested overhead, the Regis trying to reach the children again. But Minmei's song kept them at bay.

Rick realized that his son was tugging at his arm. "Daddy, we found them. We looked across time, 'n' we looked across space."

"What? Buddy, you're beautiful!" Rick didn't know if he was laughing or crying. "Can you bring 'em back?"

As an answer, Roy pointed. Outlines were appearing, an enormous containment casing coming into existence. Cheers began around the compartment.

Rick came to his feet, ready to start lending a hand hooking up the fold drives. He was going to give a cheer himself until he realized that something was not right.

Others were beginning to see it, too, especially engineering types. The casing took on more and more substance, and one by one people in the drive section understood what they were looking at. Rick had never actually seen the object he now beheld, but he had certainly seen enough holographs, schematics, tapes, and such.

"Christ," he whispered.

"We got them, Daddy!" Roy squealed delightedly.

"Y-you sure did, old-timer." And solved-and created one of the great mysteries of the Robotech Age.

We will win! Minmei's song hit a crescendo and stopped.

The original fold drives from SDF-1 sat there, big as ten diesel locomotives and just as solid. Lisa was staring at them, speechless, as techs approached them tentatively. Then she blurted, "Careful! They may still be hot."

She meant thermal energy, not hard radiation; but the heat was quite minimal. Not bad,

she decided, seeing that as far as the drives themselves were concerned, they had just finished taking the SDF-1 on a jump from Earthspace to the orbit of Pluto.

They'd been snatched from that instant directly to this one, though decades had passed in the interim.

"Oke-" Vince Grant finished gulping, and tried again. "Okay! A fold drive's a fold drive. Let's get 'em hot-wired." People hopped to it.

Pursued by the Zentraedi, the SDF-1 had attempted a fold jump to hide in the lee of Earth's moon. A miscalculation or so it was said-had sent the ship to the edge of the Sol system, where the drives immediately vanished, leaving behind only a few winking luminous particles. Then SDF-1 had begun her years-long odyssey homeward.

Lisa wondered what Henry Gloval would think of all this. Maybe he already knew.

The design of the SDF-3's drives was based on that of the original Super Dimensional Fortress. There was no time for niceties, and there was every possibility the ship would be blown to nothingness, but the drives were connected. There was a residue of First Generation Protoculture left in them in the wake of the Pluto jump, but the instruments showed that trace vanishing-melding with the Regis and newspace, apparently-even as techs were charging into action.

The psi-fog the Regis had manifested, along with its squall effects, had retreated, though the children had broken their circle and Minmei was no longer singing. "But that don't mean the dame is gonna leave us alone for long," Angie said, frowning.

"Has she gone?" Miriya asked Aurora.

Aurora's brows met. "Something else is placing demands on her attention."

"Haydon," someone said, and they realized that Louie Nichols was standing there, looking like he had been through hell.

There wasn't even time to comment on his exposed bionics. "Are you sure?" Vince demanded.

His team, who had stayed in the background through the Regis's appearance, closed ranks behind Louie. "Ask Marlene."

She nodded her head unwillingly. "My instincts tell me the same thing."

"And what's going to happen here in newspace has nothing to do with us anymore," Louie added.

"All the more reason to haul anchor," Angie snorted. Indeed, there was nothing the contingent from realtime could do in a collision between such entities. But while the preparations for the jump were rushed to completion-with Louie and his team quickly becoming key players-Lisa turned to something else she had to do.

Minmei still stood with Rem's arm around her. Lisa went over and took both Minmei's hands in hers. "Thank you for what you did. Thank you for saving my son, Minmei."

Minmei stood away from Rem. She and Lisa held each other, Lisa patting Minmei's shoulder. "I heard the children's voices, and I knew my place was here." Rick and others, mostly parents, closed in to thank Musica and Allegra; the Muses smiled timidly. Bowie was already in a clinch with his parents.

"Ahem. Isn't anybody gonna thank the furniture movers?" Jack Baker hinted.

The idea to get the siren music to the drive section had been Minmei's, of course, but if he and the Penns had not happened upon her and the Muses and Bowie-drawn by Minmei's a capella singing-as they struggled along with the harp, things would have gone very differently.

Karen gave Jack an elbow in the ribs. "You're not really going to be happy until you're an eighth-dan schmuck, are you?"

But Harry Penn, having gotten his breath back, gave Jack a clap on the back. "I'll say this much for you, Baker: You hold up your end." That made Karen's eyes go large; she had assumed that her father's loathing of Jack was set in permacrete. Jack looked dumbstruck.

"This is no time for a whoopee," Vince Grant reminded everybody loudly. He turned to Lisa. "Replacement fold drives on-line, Admiral."

Pull pin and throw, Rick thought.

Lisa keyed an intercom. There was still static, as there were still muted sound and light phenomena loose in the ship. Raul Forsythe responded from the bridge. "Navigation has worked out algorithms that should be what we need to find our way out," he reported, "but there's no way to check 'em."

"There's one," Lisa replied. "Exec-"

All of newspace seemed to go through a paroxysm, an expand-and-contact feeling that made everyone cry out, as if the warp and weft of it were caught in some unthinkable contest of forces.

"-ute fold jump, Captain!" Lisa finished.

Everything around them seemed to be dissolving into distortion. Rick heard screams and orders, reports and moans. He whirled and yelled his son's name, but all sane perception seemed to have fallen away to nothingness.

Then the fold drives hummed, building power, and coherent reality rezzed up again. Rick took no chances but snatched Roy up into his arms again, other parents following suit-including the Zentraedi, which was quite a sight. Lisa faced the fact that she could not command her ship by intercom and let Raul concentrate on running the bridge.

Vince had been holding his breath, not knowing how the SDF-l's drives would take to Second Gen Protoculture hell, he hadn't even known how the SDF-3's would. Now he found out, as the smooth fold sequence stuttered, the sound of the drives falling off.

"Run start-up sequence again," he'd just said, when everything around him dissipated into perceptual chaos again, making him feel he was going mad.

In a place with no real existence in space or time, the onrushing Haydon, with all the accumulated energies of his crossing, rushed headlong at the Regis, who was determined to defend this, her last domain.

The rift between the domain of newspace and realspace widened, all things flowing together at the cusp. The very end of the Shapings had come.

With the residue of the expanded senses he had been given by exposure to Lang's discorporation, Louie Nichols perceived the settling of that single snowflake on the endless winter landscape of the Shapings. It took its place, losing itself in the whole.

But its very arrival generated the movement of those beneath it, and they imparted infinitesimal shifting to those farther down. There was mass movement.

Aboard the SDF-3, the start-up sequence ran again and the fold drives raved to life. This time the process caught, and everyone aboard could feel the generation of the fold jump field as it sprang out from the ship. Once more they were passing into the unknowable.

For Haydon there could be no going back; for the Regis there was no retreat. Collision was inevitable, and only one entity could survive.

Both beings registered the jump of SDF-3, though the Regis could spare no attention for it and Haydon saw no reason to; the cosmos for which it was bound would soon be destroyed, anyway. They charged upon each other to do ultimate combat.

Then both near deities let out silent emanations of shock, wonder, fear, and awe.

The Shapings were shifting in a way unique in all their long history.

In that intersection, Haydon suddenly had access to a wider mental vista, a fuller historical perspective, than he had ever had. The Regis, meanwhile, was opened to a total vision of all that had taken place and all that would. Both knew humbling and unprecedented sensations of acceptance, resignation-and peace.

It was as if all continua and all probabilities were rotating on infinite axes beneath them. Once again the Regis was transformed into a phoenix of racial essence, about to take flight for a final destination. But Haydon turned, in the eternal instant when the rift in spacetime still yawned wide, and reached into the SDF-3, searching.

At the moment of Intersection, as a side effect miracle, the perceptual blindfolds fell away from the eyes of the SDFers, and they gazed across time.

Kazianna Hesh clutched Drannin while the Super Dimensional Fortress plunged into the eye of the continua hurricane. If death rose up to claim her at last, she knew how to greet it; she was Zentraedi.

But instead, what she thought at first to be a hallucination manifested itself before her. She saw mighty Breetai as she had first seen him, unscarred and unbeatable, leading the legions of the Zentraedi to victory.

As she saw and heard her love again, watched him leave his mark, huge and unique, on galactic history, Kazianna came to realize that it was no dream or specter. Somehow she was seeing across the conventional boundaries to points on the timestream where he still existed.

She witnessed again the terrible battle in which Zor died, the great slaughter of Dolza's fleet, Breetai's triumphs in the Malcontent Uprisings and the Sentinels War.

She saw herself again, too, as she went to him on Fantoma and awakened love in him as he already unknowingly had in her. She saw how he had become truly happy for the first time then.

There was no hard and fast linearity to the scenes. She was seeing many times and

places where Breetai was in effect alive still and would always be so-as Lang had intended, though Kazianna knew nothing of that at the moment.

She saw him presiding like some war god at the post-battle revels of the Zentraedi, proud of his conquests and yet weighted, always, by the burden of his leadership. Nevertheless, Kazianna knew a fierce joy that some part of him would preside forever in the halls of victory.

And she saw him brooding, about to enter his final contest against the Invid Regent, and knowing that this time the Shapings had a different outcome in store for him.

She felt Drannin stir in her arms. "Is that man my father?" Is. That was the right word. She understood now that he was no more lost to her than if he were on some far shore. She was still with him in many times and places and knew a certainty that she would be again.

"Yes. That is Great Breetai. "

The child was silent for a long moment, then his voice rang out across the barrier between them. "Hail, Breetai!" At that moment Breetai's head rose from his preoccupations, and one of his very rare smiles touched his lips. He had known, going to his death, that his wife carried his son. Now Kazianna had no doubt that somehow he had heard the boy's voice across time.

She held herself very erect. "Yes, hail, Breetai." But she said it with a lover's softness.

For Lisa, it was Karl Riber: the love of an older man-all of nineteen!-for an introverted sixteen-year-old. She was the daughter of a military family, he a gentle thinker and dreamer.

She saw that his lonely life at Sara Base on Mars was not as horrible as serving in the RDF would have been. When he met death in the Sara Base raid, she did not turn her eyes from it, and she saw a vast calm in him then. Karl had never feared dying; he understood life too well. He had only shrunk from killing, and in the end the life he'd left behind was the kind of monument to peace that would have pleased him. For Lisa, other faces and scenes rose up from the time stream too: the mother she'd remembered dimly but now saw afresh and more fully; her father, in his good moments and bad, making her even more grateful that she and he had become friends once more, at the end.

She had lost many friends and now saw glimpses of those who'd been closest to her.

Sammie, Kim, and Vanessa made her smile with their bewildering mixture of high spirits and dead-calm combat savvy. She let the tears come as she saw Claudia Grant once more, in all her best friend's moods and moments, and blessed whatever agency it was

that gave her this interlude of insight and remembrance.

And of course Lisa beheld Captain Henry J. Gloval across the gulf of years-in his assorted tempers and aspects, the emphatic humanity he hid under a gruff exterior. She had long ago recognized that he was her father in the truest sense; she considered herself fortunate that that had been so.

Lisa saw the bridge crew formed up on the day when she had been promoted to captain, rendering their-salute. She saluted them back, happy that that day was still alive and eternal somewhere.

All through the ship, the SDFers cast their gazes across space and time. Human and XT alike, Vowad and Veidt no less than the rest, growing even closer in their contemplation of Sarna. The Muses glimpsed their sister Octavia and heard for the last time their original, perfect harmony.

Bowie's soul played a haunting martial blues for General Rolf Emerson. Scott Bernard saw outtakes of Marlene Rush meld with those of the simulagent Ariel/Marlene, the two now being one; he blinked mentally in surprise, compelled to think through the implications of that.

As for Marlene, she saw the timescenes of Marlene Rush as well as those of Ariel, and that completed her long self healing.

Dana was overjoyed to see the three Zentraedi spies onda, Bron, and Rico-once more, though she had kept them so alive in her heart all along that she never doubted for a moment that they existed somewhere. She, too, looked upon Rolf Emerson with fond acknowledgment. But then the image of Zor Prime came to her.

She tried to drive it out at first, thought of the images of Intersection as a kind of torture. She found that she had to watch, though, and the more she saw of Zor Prime's tormented life, the more she understood.

Dana cried out as she saw the things to which the Robotech Masters had subjected him, the ways in which his personality, his will, his very soul were mauled and marred-the way in which he fought a ceaseless struggle against the memories of his past incarnations.

At a certain moment, overcoming her own resistance, she felt herself send out an unspoken forgiveness. That deliberate act somehow shook her loose from the worst of the bitterness that had racked and entrapped her since the explosion of the Masters' ship that day high over the Mounds. In the end it was a cleansing, not easy to endure but one that saved her.

Rick was glad he had Roy in his arms. For some reason, like Kazianna, he and his child communed in the glimpses across time. "That's my father, your granddad, and our flying circus." Roy giggled and oohed at the aerobatics but took in the old man's crusty, smiling face and barnstorming joie de vivre silently, with great attention.

Rick, too, knew enormous gratitude that this experience, whatever it was, had come his way.

Ben Dixon came into the timescenes later; not the first time Rick had seen his image since the big VT flier had tuned out, but it was always good to see him. Claudia Grant and the Bridge Bunnies, Gloval, and the rest made him feel he had led a very charmed life indeed.

And a long time later, so it seemed, he told his son, "That man there is Roy Fokker, and your mother and I named you after him."

Roy II put his head on his father's shoulder and took it all in wordlessly, saw his father as a much younger man, too. At length he said, "Was he really your big brother, Daddy?"

"No. He was a lot more than a brother."

"Will you teach me to fly?"

"Yes. I will."

For Minmei, as for many others, there was a certain relief in the faces she did not see in the timestream. Her parents and cousin were absent, and so she felt she could hope they were still well back on Earth. She feared at first that she would be forced to review the terrible things she'd seen, people and creatures shed encountered, but this side effect of Lang's final act was not connected to that sort of thing. Of Edwards there was no sign. Surely the evil moments endured in time, too, but the point seemed to her to be that, abandoned to themselves, they lost much or all of their power.

Mad Khyron and Azonia, the Regent, and all of that stamp-let them stay encysted, shunned, and unvisited in their various pigeonholes of time. She turned her eyes elsewhere.

It hurt to look at the painful parts of Lynn-Kyle's life, but she also saw the fine parts, the heroic and idealistic side. She saw again that he had died trying to save her and end the war; the love for him that she had suppressed was free to find its rightful place in her now, with no power to do her harm.

She renewed her affection for Janice Em. Android or no, Lang-agent or no, Jan had perhaps been her truest friend and best song-soulmate.

Looking in on the SDF-3, Haydon found what he had been searching for.

Minmei had no idea how long she had been watching the flow of scenes when another voice reached her, and somehow she knew it was not a part of her Intersection-generated views of time. It was Rem.

She turned, somehow breaking the trance, to see that he was being swallowed up in white translucent banners of force. She tried to move, rooted to the spot. "No!" He began to fade from her sight.

She cried the word like a plaintive song-"No-ooo!-and somehow its power, the power her voice had always had, overcame whatever was immobilizing her.

Minmei threw herself at Rem, feeling the energy discharges around her, clinging to him, and together they vanished from the starship.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

The music plays, and everyone must dance.

Twentieth-century song lyric

At the intersection the Robotech Elders, in their smaller-model sphere ship, shrieked their outrage and despair.

We had an agreement!

Haydon answered, THAT MEANS NOTHING TO ME

Free us with the Protoculture as you abandon your sphere ships!

What they said was true; the individual simulacra of Haydon were vanishing from sight. Somewhere beyond, they sensed, the One Haydon was coming into being again. He had no further use for the ships or the Protoculture-indeed, He released them to meet their own discorporation.

But the Elders' sphere He kept under his mental control. YOU, I WILL BRING WITH ME

INTO MY NEW DOMAIN, AS I SHALL BRING ONE OTHER CONTAINER FROM

SPACETIME.

You struck a bargain with us!

DID      YOU      THINK      I      COULDN'T      SEE      BEYOND      YOUR      WORDS?      INTO      YOUR

THOUGHTS?

Then the Robotech Elders wailed in truest fear; they'd planned to betray Haydon at the earliest juncture if the opportunity arose. Instead, they saw, He had brought them along until he could exact a satisfactory revenge.

He was immortal but mortal enough to feel that urge. The venue known as newspace was empty, the stuff of conventional spacetime banished back to the place from which it had come. Haydon wanted no part of it; that was the entire point of His great effort.

Instead, He discharged into newspace all the accumulated energies of His crossing, giving Himself unending raw material with which to work. Haydon willed new and utterly alien physical laws into being and set out to explore and shape His new domain.

Except, that is, for two bubbles of normality. The first among those was the prison of the Robotech Elders. He imprisoned them once more in the hated thrones, in the bondage of systems that would ensure their survival. They perceived that some of the substance forming their bubble was the stuff of their Protoculture cap itself-depleted, reshaped, used in irony by Haydon.

Then Haydon accelerated the flow of time within the sphere-to ensure its passage there.

Tens of thousands of years might pass while Haydon's attention was elsewhere for an instant, but every so often Haydon would look in on them and see how His little experiment was going.

The Robotech Elders; imprisoned in the hated circle in which they had started, had their Immortality at last.

Perhaps the best summation of subsequent events is found in Recollections: Peacetime by Admiral Lisa Hayes-Hunter.

So those glorious old drives brought us home at last in grand style. Some people griped that it was a near thing, pointing out that the drives were about to blow when we came crashing out into Earthspace, but take it from me, they'd have done whatever they needed to, to get the job done.

Of course by "home," I mean conventional spacetime; the Sol system wasn't exactly the old neighborhood for the XT Sentinels, the Zentraedi, and so forth.

That didn't matter much at the time.

The pure joy of getting back to Earthspace was dampened, of course, when we realized

that Minmei and Rem had disappeared. This, even though the pilots originally "kidnapped" from Red and Blue teams were miraculously put back aboard SDF-3, Veritechs and all, at the Intersection. As of this writing, there is no indication whatsoever of what happened to them, and all efforts to locate them or establish their fate have been fruitless.

The second great shock of our arrival was the calculation (by astronomical Ads, from the positions of planets in the Sol system) of the elapsed time since the departure of Peter Pan. Foldspace had played another joke on us.

More than ten years had passed.

But that wasn't enough to dampen our morale, not after what we'd been through. I think that those on board SDF-3 during that moment of Intersection will always be different. We were given a new perspective on life and death and our place in the scheme of things; that left its mark on us.

And so SDF-3 started for Earth one last time, driven by auxiliary power. Somehow the transit from newspace had drained away all our Second Gen Protoculture, even what was left in the various mecha. We shall not see its like again, as the saying goes.

There's no denying the sheer joy of homecoming, though. The Earth below us was the first and best surprise: pristine and beautiful, her surface restored, her ecosystems flourishing with a vitality they hadn't known in a century and a half and more.

Maybe it was some kind of payback.

We arrived to find that Earth had muddled through the multiple crises that had beset her, largely with the help of exotic new technology developed from information brought home by the Angel.

But largely, it was a matter of humanity's being sick of war. I've heard of old soldiers retiring from the carnage to create and retreat into a beautiful garden somewhere. I guess that's more or less what happened to the entire species Homo sapiens.

Water ice had been brought in from offworld, pollution damage cleaned up through bio-remedialism and other newly devised techniques. The drifting space junk from the Robotech wars had all been removed, or burned itself up in atmospheric entry. The planet started getting better simply because people stopped placing impossible demands on it and began giving something back. Too, the population had been drastically, catastrophically reduced.

Besides, there was aid from the Local Group worlds that had, by that time, reached Earth via the new, non Protoculture Pseudojaunt drive. (What beautiful starships the new technologies make possible! Earth looked like she had magical treasures in orbit around

her when we arrived.) The old government had been swept away; what had replaced it was benign, democratic, and very participatory.

We weren't surprised that Louie Nichols and his byte punchers, in particular, saddled up and threw themselves right into that new ferment.

I got a sense of how much things had changed when we (the Hunters) went with Scott Bernard and Marlene to catch up with old friends down in one of the Restoration Bureau's South American reserves. Young Stone Face had by then broken down and faced the fact that he loved Marlene (later, Scott even. asked and got a reconciliation with Marlene Rush's parents, who'd survived on Tirol) and proposed to her.

But he still felt he needed a little moral support for this mission, I guess.

His old comrade Lunk had buried his bitterness, however, even though he turned his face away and was shaken by sobs when he saw Marlene. But Lunk gave Scott a sincere handshake and Marlene a heartbreakingly chaste kiss on the cheek. I'd seen old pictures of him, and Lunk had changed a lot, stomach expanded, hair thinned to a gray fringe around his bald head. He looked like a sad old simian.

Rand and Rook Bartley showed up with little Maria; there was a lot of ribbing about the success of Rand's Notes on the Run, Rook doubting he could cut it as a Forager anymore. He did seem a little chagrined, especially since his wife still looked like she'd kept her biker edge.

Still, it was plain that they loved each other, even if Rook wasn't happy about little Maria's preoccupation with her word processor.

Just as things became less formal, we were almost run over by a dinosaur. From what I'd heard of Annie LaBelle, I shouldn't have been surprised that she was a reckless behemoth driver.

Rick and I were looking around for guns that we weren't carrying-since nobody has any on Earth anymore-but Roy II thought that thunder lizard was just the greatest thing since crayons.

And sitting on a saddle up behind its head was Annie. It was a seismosaurus, she told us later, biggest of the herbivorous heavyweights; it sure impressed me.

With Annie was her husband, Magruder, the two of them looking-and dressed-like a new-tech Tarzan and Jane. Scott made some comment about how nicely she'd sprouted up and filled out, and Magruder seemed to accept that with great pride.

At the local Bureau HQ, Annie and Lunk filled us in on all the strides genetic engineering had made since contact with the Local Group-and especially, of course, with the Tirolians.

Even fossilized genetic models could be revived, and existing ones cloned and varied, differentiation being so important to species survival. Not only were pandas, snow leopards, and whales thriving, so were passenger pigeons, giant sloths, and woolly mammoths.

And of course, the biggest debate at that time was whether it would be immoral to bring Neanderthals back from extinction (or, to put it another way, leave them extinct). Annie and Magruder-both of whom had advanced degrees in neogenetics were passionate about opposite sides of the argument, as ready to punch it out as they were to kiss and make up.

At any rate, Scott and Marlene's strike force reunion turned gut well, but I had my first real exposure to the fact that an aging SDF skipper wasn't exactly in demand anymore in this brave new world. I was out of phase, bereft of background data. There were more shocks waiting for all of us.

What hit Scott and Marlene hardest, I think, was news of he death of the freedom fighter named Lancer, also known as Yellow Dancer. But something bore them up when they beard how he died flying a disaster relief mission. I think it was the insights of the Intersection, where we all saw the big picture a little more clearly.

That, plus the fact that his music lives on after him, as popular now as Minmei's. People started to talk about slipping in fingers of the two-recreation artists for "The Concert That Never Was." The idea was almost universally ignored. Perhaps the slimy-souled people who came up with it would feel differently if they'd gone through the Intersection.

The effects of that passage and its insights were pointed up electrifyingly when a few of us were flown out for a tour of a big reforestation program in Alaska. It was an especially affecting trip for Rick and me, since we weren't so far from where the Grand Cannon installation once was.

We were shown to where people worked, patiently reseeding the restored and prepared slopes with tiny firs. I didn't notice anything in particular, walking past a bent figure that seemed to be giving all its attention lovingly to what was being done. It was Dana, a few paces behind, who let out a yell.

Rick and I turned to see the Sterlings and our guide looking on in horror as Dana, hauling at the worker's faded coverall, prepared to deal him a blow to the side of the temple with the heel of her cocked-back hand. No question about it, she was out to kill.

Part of our astonishment, too, was the appearance of the worker. I have never seen such

a gnarled, pitifully scarred, frightened creature in my life. He dropped his little tray of seedlings, and all he could do was cringe and whimper. Yet Dana, eyes bugging from her head, wasn't deterred a bit.

Rick and I were revving up, trying to get to her to stop, like cartoon characters having trouble getting into motion. Max and Miriya, who'd been looking the other way, were kind of tangled up with each other.

But there was someone else to intervene. Not that Dana was overpowered-a tough proposition at any time. Still, when Aurora's gentle hand came to rest on Dana's tensed, heelshot one, the action froze.

"You don't want to do that. Sister-"

And with that, Aurora went up on tiptoes to whisper something into Dana's ear. The rest of us had stood rooted, and we saw Dana's hand relax as she released the man cowering in her grip. Dana looked around the reseeded slopes, the life that was coming back to a devastated wasteland, and turned away.

As Dana walked back toward our shuttle, one of the program supervisors gently got the man back to work, saying reassuring things, calling him "Alf."

I ran a check and found out about the assassination of Milicent Edgewick and the disappearance of her familiar. Dana's instincts were correct, and the brainwiped, hollow wretch she'd been about to kill was Farnham, once known as Senator Alfonse Napoleon Russo, though now he only answered to the name Alf. How he found his way into a custodial rehab program for marginally functional war casualty types, no one was able to say.

Heaven knows, Dana had good cause to execute him; all of us did. But seeing what he'd come to in the end, we dropped the matter. I've never presumed to ask Aurora what it was she whispered into her sister's ear, but I imagine it was to the effect that there had been enough death; part of the revivifying process we and the planet are undergoing has to do with putting certain things behind us.

SDF-3's returnees scattered to all corners of the world in those weeks. Louie Nichols and his team were quick to start snooping into the Post-Protoculture technologies, and they were welcomed with open arms by the Earth's top researchers, then castigated for their heretical approach to things. Nothing new there.

Nevertheless, Louie & Co. became the driving force toward this new grail called Instru-Mentality. Implants that will give every intelligent being powers of teleportation, psychokinesis, telepathy, and the rest would be the next logical step-a new dawn, to be

sure-but I can't help wondering if we're ready for it.

But as Cabell pointed out, no one was ready for Robotech, either, when you come right down to it.

Anyway, the Robotech Age, with its mechamorphosis and Protoculture, has passed away forever, and something else must now come onstage.

The experiences of various others have been set down elsewhere, by themselves and third parties. Of the rollicking group (Dana, Sean, Marie, Jack, Karen, and several more) who became the Crazy Eights Exploration and Development Co., Unlimited, much has already been written-a good deal of it on indictments. And why they took on Lunk as their head wrench wrangler and mojo hand, I cannot guess-but it's probably one of their few sources of good karma.

Still, they're young and carefree, and they keep claiming they've got the galaxy by the bustle.

If you've been lucky enough to get a seat at Bowie Grant's Blue Harp Lounge to hear Musica and Allegra sing and play along with him or have caught them on tour, you know how well they're doing and why.

One of the tenser moments occurred as Angelo Dante set off to introduce Gnea to his parents. He was so nervous that she offered to change into more conservative Earth garb (and a lot of us were all set to pitch in), but Angie said no; quite an independent move for him. We all heaved a sigh of relief when they fell in love with her.

The visit was rather hasty, though, since Gnea was being rushed back to New Praxis (Optera) by special courier ship ncluding the penalty weight of the fruitcake from Angie's folks-to brief Bela on all that had happened-

-and, of course, to help take care of all those little Invid they've got running around once more.

Jean Grant once spoke of pieces of the puzzle fitting together, and there's probably no more prominent example of that than New Praxis.

For some reason the Regis didn't suffer the delay in time that we did, and when the altered Shapings permitted her/his Race to return to spacetime, I suppose it's no surprise, they came full circle-and, from what we can tell, took on the original state in which Zor found them.

The Second Gen Flowers of Life bloom there now, with hordes of little Pollinators to make sure they bloom. (Dana keeps insisting that one in particular is hers and hers alone, and the critter seems to feel the same way.) Anyhow, everybody's happy the Pollinators are sacred beasts on New Praxis these days, protected by the brawny arms of warrior women, because the galaxy has had enough of Protoculture.

Riding herd on all this is a graying Bela, with Gnea taking up the reins bit by bit. And their fighters, women who've lost a world, now posting guard over creatures whose only desire is to be left alone: there's a higher symmetry to that.

Because, surely, this is the fate we all felt the Regis cry out for back there at the Intersection. We don't probe into the Invid hive life, but I suspect She lives there someplace inside Optera, more happily now than at any time since Zor came.

I do not ask, though, for anyone to pursue these questions. And yet there come reports, fourth-and fifth-hand, that a new entity is being brought to life down there in the hive. From what little the Intel officers-kept conscientiously at bay on the surface-can tell, it is a male who will have the capacity to erase or perhaps refurbish certain chemical/energy memory systems.

A new and better Regent?

On another front, Gnea promised to build quarters in Zanshar just for Angie's parents so that they can visit whenever they please. And feel guilty about not being there. I suspect Gnea's figuring on a few daughters to keep Angie busy and perhaps give him a new perspective on women.

The Sentinels see each other infrequently now, not because we're sedentary but rather because so much more is happening everywhere. The Zentraedi, of course; are based on Fantoma but can be found anywhere heavy-g operations are going on, especially in monopole ore mining. Their numbers increase at a far, far slower rate than in the days of cloning, but from what I hear, they still favor their new-timeless ethod of reproducing.

The survivors are just starting to live-all of us.

Drannin is looking more and more like Breetai every day. He still shows those glowing eyes, though, as do all the SDF-3 children. Their psi-abilities and other exceptional attributes of strength, speed, and dexterity continue to increase. They can still giggle, but at other times they seem to have their glowing eyes fixed on some far horizon the rest of us can't see.

Does the name "Darwin" strike a bell?

The human race-and others-are ready for a new and different kind of leap across the stars, a peaceful one this time, and these glow-eyed children of ours are proof.

That was part of the reason we went forth, wasn't it? To find out what we could ultimately become? In any case, Roy II forgets to brush his teeth if Rick or I don't remind him, even if he can argue spacetime algorithms with Louie Nichols. And bedtime is still bedtime; the kid gets a swat on the landing gear if he's being too muley.

Keeps us all humble.

I suppose I was looking the other way, but it seemed like I was the only one surprised when Aurora ran for Interworld Council and became the youngest representative-elect ever. She's not maturing at her accelerated rate anymore, but no one appears to care.

Max and Miriya are Earth's ambassadors to Tirol/Fantoma, of course, so they get to see Aurora all the time.

Which sounds good to an old lady whose son and husband seem to spend most of their hours in that damned old Fokker. Somehow, the little Dr. 1 triplane made it through the whole newspace dustup, stowed away down there in a hold in SDF-3. Roy-my-darling-boy handed Rick the wrenches and whatnot, and Rick put some kind of power plant into that kite that makes it do things Manfred von Richthofen could only dream about.

They're up in it most of their waking hours, as Roy feasts on the wonders of Earth. I'm invited along whenever I want to go (and intrude upon the male bonding? Thanks, Rick!), but my editor keeps yelling about this deadline.

We didn't come home to paradise; there are still crises and suffering and conflict, but it's a very different world, a different galaxy, from the one we left when we entered newspace.

Louie Nichols once confided to me that he thought the Shapings had come to an end, that a certain cycle of downfall, redemption, and renewal had played out to its finish, leaving us to make our own Shapings from now on.

I like the sound of it.

Looking back over this manuscript, I see there's no way I can fit in every detail.

Such as: that boisterous exploratory tour Exedore and Cabell took, the pink-haired Lantas mother-henning them, here on Earth, and Cabell's newfound dotty passion for classic rock music (who can explain the Presley fixation?).

Or the story of how the Haydonites-those saved from the wreckage of their world-have become a sort of wandering interstellar Peace Corps. Much of their effort went into helping Earth and New Praxis rebuild.

The people at New Random House are just going to have to understand that I can't write CLOSE-FILE to this one; among other things, work on SDF-4 is nearing completion.

Vince Grant, Crysta, and Baldan will be here any minute to take me upstairs for another inspection tour. Soon we'll know whether the saga of Protoculture made itself felt in the Andromeda Galaxy or if things there are a new story entirely.

When I joined the service, no woman had ever commanded a spacecraft-of-the-line. Through luck and the turn of events and a bit of merit, I've commanded the greatest vessels Earth ever put into space. Having achieved that, I'm not ready to hand it over yet.

Check back with me in another ten years or so.

Rick made me watch Roy Fokker's favorite old-time movie, Things to Come, and that "Which shall it be?", speech at the end never fails to make the two of us tear up a bit. But at least now we know the answer to the question posed by Raymond Massey, and it is one worthy of the human race.

Still, I can't get it out of my mind that one part of this story hasn't been finished and, it seems, never will be. As least not in my lifetime.

. . . but her songs play on after her. And the universe listens ...

The Flowers grew best up on the hill near where the SDF-3 fold drive casing sat.

Minmei liked going up there to sit and think and to sing into the dark spaces cast by the casing's mighty shadow, especially now that her time was drawing near.

The second bubble in newspace, shielded from the in Human forces of Haydon's new natural laws, was very different from that in which the Elders passed their eons. Perhaps some of the materials came from the sphere ships; in any event, Minmei and Rem reigned now over a worldlet encompassing a small island and a tiny sea.

They wandered it at their pleasure. Even though the lifeforms there were alien, there was nothing to hamper them on the land or menace them in the sea; the new dominion was benign.

Why Haydon had chosen to leave the drives there on the hilltop, they were not sure; some godly whim, perhaps. They had no reason to complain, though, as they had no reason to complain of the gentle climate or the passage of the warm sun across the seemingly infinite sky. At night the stars, nebulas, comets, and frequent meteors entertained them, though they suspected that the show was all illusion.

Rem examined the Flowers of Life that grew around the silent drives and pronounced them harmless, pollinated; soon they would bear fruit.

Every now and then, at night, they could hear the yips of Pollinators playing around on the hillsides, but the little beasts took fright and fled when they heard Rem and Minmei coming. She took no offense and knew no despair; she had all the time in the world to win their confidence.

Rem was sitting in thought, off at the end of the point, watching waves break on the reef. He often did that, and she let him.

He had built a simple, complete-comfortable life for them both, using their world's resources and the tools and materials that the invisible Haydon had provided-had left waiting against their first moment of reawakening. She loved Rem's company but did not begrudge him his solitude.

And she valued her own. Minmei sang to the little life in her womb, sang all the songs she knew. The songs would become a part of the being within.

The songs would become a part of everything he did or fashioned.

And in the end Minmei's songs and voice would become a part of the Protoculture itself-the key to it.

Her glimpse of the Intersection and the inevitable nature of the Shapings' cycle had imbued in Minmei a sense of acceptance.

Even heredity conspired. Rem's genetic structure had been altered from that of the original Zor, but now, in joining with hers, it would produce the man who would change the universe. Not a duplicate or clone but Zor himself.

Minmei did not understand by what process her baby would become that man, but Rem seemed certain of it and the inevitability of it. Raydon, he would say, and then he would go down to the sea to be by himself for a while.

Minmei turned to the long shadow cast by the drives and sang a note. Something moved

iridescently in the shadows far out beyond her worldlet's atmosphere. It was enormous, something felt rather than seen.

Minmei knew what Rem was thinking: of the suffering and strife that would begin when Zor grew to manhood. But she herself was not so sure. The Shapings had fallen away, and perhaps that meant that Reshapings could bring things to a better resolution.

As she sat plucking idly at the petals of a Flower of Life, a sudden thought struck her. A woman can have more than one child.

She heard a distant hail; Rem was trotting along far below, coming up the beach to help her down the steep hillside trail. Minmei uttered another note into the darkness; there seemed to sit, for an instant, an Optera undefiled by Masters' wars or Sentinels' counterattacks. And beyond it was a galaxy at peace with itself.

Waiting for her child. Bit by bit, she was getting them perfect. Out in the vastness, working as an artisan to shape her vision, the Awareness of Haydon, left behind by Him to carry out this specific function, waited patiently to form a new and more perfect Creation, in harmony with her song.

She did not know yet whether this cosmos she was shaping would replace the one she had known or stand as an alternative. She did not know if it would be the one into which her son would enter.

But a woman can have more than one child.

Minmei let the note die away, and the darkness came forward again, to conceal her work.

She went to sit on a rock, cooled by the sea breeze, and wait. As she sat, she sang.

THE END

Published by New Random House 2156 (Earth actual)

ROBOTECH CHRONOLOGICAL SUMMARY 1171 Aeon Lanack

Zor is born on Tirol.

1256-1490 A. L.

Quadrant exploration by the Tiresian technovoyager ship Azstraph-the "Venture."

1520 A. L.

The Azstraph enters the Tzuptum system and inserts itself into orbit around Optera. Zor encounters the Flower of Life, makes contact with the Invid, and seduces the secrets of

the Flower from the Queen Mother, the Regis.

1697 A. L.

The Azstraph returns to Tirol. Zor begins to experiment with the Flower specimens he has brought with him from Optera.

1755-1836 A.L.

Zor conjures Protoculture from the Flower and eventually falls victim to the Compulsion placed upon him by the Tiresian Council of Elders. Origin of the Cult of the Three-in-One and ascendancy of the Robotech Masters. Fall of the Royal Hall, as the period known as the Great Transition commences.

1920 A. L.

Development of the spacefold drive.

6 Aeon "Robotech"

Creation of Tirol's clone population and neural reprogramming of the Zentraedi miner giants.

88 A.R.

The razing of Optera by the Zentraedi.

157-500 A.R.

Consolidation of the empire of the Robotech Masters. The Invid, after a burst of monocellular reproduction, declare war on the Robotech Masters.

566 A.R.

Zor's voyages deliver him to Haydon IV, where he has a profound encounter with the planetoid's artificial sentience, the Awareness.

Zor designs and builds the starship that will come to be called SDF-1, and backed by a group of loyal Zentraedi begins his "quiet rebellion" against the Masters.

Zentraedi commander in chief Dolza forms an uneasy alliance with Zor, who has by now become hopelessly addicted to the dried leaves of the Flower.

580-640 A.R.

Zor's clandestine seeding attempts take him to Peryton, Karbarra, Praxis, Garuda, and Spheris.

671 A.R.

Zor steals the single extant Protoculture matrix from Tiresia and conceals it within the spacefold drives of the SDF-1. The fortress, with its skeleton crew of loyal Zentraedi, is folded from Tirol's corner of the galaxy.

1999 (Earth actual)

An alien spaceship crash-lands on Earth, effectively ending almost a decade of Global Civil War. Originally called "The Visitor," the ship is dubbed Super Dimensional Fortress I-the SDF-1.

Dr. Emil Lang, after an initial recon of the ship (in the company of Roy Fokker, Henry Global, T. R. Edwards, and others), begins to unravel the secrets of the extraterrestrial science known as Robotech.

Macross Island becomes the focal point of Robotechnology, and restoration commences on the SDF-1.

In another part of the galaxy, Zor is killed by Invid soldiers during a Flower of Life seeding attempt. The Zentraedi Breetai is wounded during the same raid. Commander in chief Dolza orders Commander Reno to return Zor's body to the Robotech Masters on Tirol.

Instellar war with the Invid, whose homeworld, Optera, has been defoliated by the Zentraedi, continues to chip away at the fringes of the Masters' galactic empire.

2002

Destruction of Mars Base Sara. Lisa Hayes's fiance, Karl Riber, is killed. Lisa turns 17.

Development of the reconfigurable Veritech Fighter.

On Tirol, Cabell "creates" Rem by cloning tissue from Zor. The Masters, too, have their way with Zor's body, cloning tissue for their own purposes and extracting from the scientist's residual cellular memories a vision of Earth-destination of the fortress and Protoculture matrix he has stolen and spirited from their grasp.

2003-08

Rise of the United Earth Defense Council under the leadership of Senator Russo, Admiral Hayes, T. R. Edwards, and others.

Roy Fokker and Claudia Grant become fast friends.

Lisa Hayes is assigned to the SDF-1 project on Macross, under the command of Captain Henry Gloval.

Tommy Luan is elected mayor of Macross City.

2009

On the SDF-1's launch day, the Zentraedi (after a ten-year search for Zor's fortress and the missing Protoculture matrix) appear and lay siege to Macross Island. The fortress

makes an accidental hyperspace jump to Pluto, carrying the island and its population of 75,000 along with it. 15-year-old Lynn-Minmei and 19-year-old Rick Hunter are caught up in the spacefold.

Lisa Hayes turns 24.

2009-11

The SDF-1 battles its way back to Earth with Macross City rebuilt inside its massive holds.

Rick Hunter joins the RDF and earns the rank of lieutenant, with Ben Dixon and Max Sterling assigned to his VT squadron.

The Battle at Saturn's Rings. Lynn-Minmei is voted "Miss Macross." Breetai calls up the Botoru Battalion, led by the notorious Khyron the Backstabber. The Battle at Mars Base Sara.

Rick, Lisa, Max, and Ben are captured by Breetai and interrogated by the Zentraedi commander in chief, Dolza.

The Earth forces learn of the term "Protoculture" for the first time.

Three "micronized" Zentraedi spies Rico, Konda, and Bron-are successfully inserted into the SDF-l.

The SDF-1 lands on Earth.

2012

Lynn-Minmei is reunited with her cousin, Lynn-Kyle.

Rick Hunter is seriously wounded during a Zentraedi attack on the fortress.

Roy Fokker is killed during a raid led by Khyron.

After almost six months on Earth, the SDF-1 is ordered to leave by the leaders of the UEDC.

Ben Dixon is killed.

Little White Dragon is aired.

The Minmei Cult has its beginnings aboard the flagship of the Zentraedi fleet. Lynn-Kyle founds a peace movement aboard the SDF-1.

Asylum is granted to the three Zentraedi spies.

Max Sterling weds former Zentraedi Quadrono ace Miriya Parino.

Exedore arrives aboard the SDF-1 for peace talks.

The Zentraedi armada appears in Earthspace and lays waste to much of the planet. At Alaska Base, the Grand Cannon is destroyed and Admiral Hayes is killed. T. R. Edwards survives and vows to avenge himself on Rick and Lisa.

The SDF-1, with an assist from Lynn Minmei's voice, defeats Dolza's armada of five million ships and returns to a ravaged Earth.

A period of reconstruction begins, with humans and Zentraedi working side by side. The Robotech Masters lose confidence in their race of warrior clones and begin a mass pilgrimage through interstellar space to Earth to recapture Zor's Protoculture matrix. Zor Prime comes of age.

2013

Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant (son of Claudia Grant's brother, Vince) are born. The factory satellite is captured from Commander Reno and folded to Earthspace.

Dr. Lang and Professor Lazlo Zand begin work on a secret project involving artificial intelligence. Zand takes particular interest in the infant Dana after undergoing a Protoculture mindboost.

2014

Khyron makes a surprise appearance and takes Minmei and Lynn-Kyle hostage. The destruction of New Macross, the SDFs 1 and 2, along with Khyron's forces. Henry Gloval, Claudia Grant, Sammie Porter, Vanessa Leeds, and Kim Young are among the many casualties. The remains of the three ships are buried under tons of earthen debris dredged up from Lake Gloval.

2015-17

Zentraedi Malcontent Uprisings in the Southlands Control Zone (South America). Jonathan Wolff comes to the attention of Commander Max Sterling.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force is formed for the express purpose of journeying to Tirol to sue for peace with the Robotech Masters. Aboard the factory satellite, work commences on the SDF-3.

Rise of Monument City and Anatole Leonard's Army of the Southern Cross. Lynn-Minmei takes on a singing partner, the android Janice Em, at Emil Lang's urging.

The Invid complete their conquest of Garuda, Praxis, Karbarra, and Spheris.

2020

Rick Hunter and Lisa Hayes wed aboard the factory satellite. Dana and Bowie are given over to the care of Rolf and Laura Emerson.

The SDF-3 is launched. Minmei and Janice Em are caught up in the spacefold. Rick turns 29; Lisa, 34; Dana and Bowie, 7. Scott Bernard, Lang's godson from the recently completed Mars Base, turns 11.

2025 (Earth actual)

The Invid Regent takes Tirol. Sickened by his blood lust, the Regis leaves Optera for Praxis to carry on her Genesis Pit experiments.

The Robotech Expeditionary Force arrives in Fantomaspace and engages the Invid; the fortress's spacefold generators are damaged. (The REF is unaware that the fold has taken five Earth-years and believes the date to be 2020.) T. R. Edwards and his Ghost Squadron capture the living computer the Regent has left behind in Tiresia's Royal Hall. Tiresians Cabell and Rem inform the Plenipotentiary Council that the Robotech Masters are on their way to Earth.

The Zentraedi contingent of the REF agree to be returned to full size so that they can mine Fantoma for monopole ore to fuel a new fleet of warships.

The Sentinels-composed of Praxians, Garudans, Karbarrans, Haydonites, Spherisians, and Perytonians-are formed to liberate planets recently conquered and occupied by the Invid horde. The Hunters, Grants, Sterlings, and others leave Fantomaspace aboard the Farrago.

On Earth, Senator Wyatt "Patty" Moran and the apparat of the Army of the Southern Cross consolidate their power and take control of the Supreme Council. Dana and Bowie grow up under the care of the Emersons.

2026 (Earth actual)

Karbarra is liberated. Tesla and Burak form a curious partnership. The Sentinels' ship is destroyed, and the Ground Military Unit is stranded on Praxis shortly after the Regis's leavetaking for Haydon IV.

Praxis explodes. Death of Baldan I.

T.R. Edwards holds secret talks with the Regent and begins a personal campaign to capture Lynn-Minmei.

Wolff and Janice Em return to Tirol. The Invid Tesla murders a simulagent sent to Tirol by the Regent.

T. R. Edwards begins to hold sway over the REF'S Plenipotentiary Council. Wolff is accused of murder and piracy. Control of the Fantoma mining operations passes to Edwards.

Garuda is liberated. Rick, Lisa, Rem, and Karen Penn suffer the nearly fatal effects of the planet's atmosphere.

Baldan II is "shaped" by Teal.

The Zentraedi leave Tirolspace with the monopole ore needed for the fleet's warships.

2027 (Earth actual)

The Sentinels arrive on Haydon IV shortly after the Regis's departure and "surrender" themselves to the occupying Invid troops. Rem learns that he is actually a clone of Zor. Janice Em reveals herself to be an android. Sarna is killed.

The enigmatic Haydon becomes a source of interest to Lang and others.

A prototype ship under the command of Major Carpenter leaves Tirol for Earth. Edwards loses his grip on the Council after troops sent out to hunt down the Zentraedi side with them instead. Wolff, Breetai, and Grant return to Tirol and clear the Sentinels of all charges.

Haydon IV and Spheris are liberated. Tesla leaves the Ark Angel for Optera to have it out with the Regent.

Aurora is born to Miriya Sterling on Haydon IV.

Edwards and his Ghost Riders flee Tirol for Optera, taking Lynn-Minmei and the reawakened Invid living computer from Tiresia with them.

2028 (Earth actual)

Jonathan Wolff leaves for Earth.

Edwards arrives on Optera. Tesla is chased off; Breetai and the Regent die together. Exedore arrives on Haydon IV with the Council's peace proposal for the Regent. The Sentinels move against Peryton. Tesla and Burak sacrifice themselves to end the planet's curse.

2029 (Earth actual)

The battle for Optera. Edwards, Arla-non, Teal, and Janice Em die.

Dr. Lang makes a series of shattering discoveries about the spacefold generators his

teams have used in Carpenter and Wolff's ships.

Exedore makes a startling discovery involving Zor and the historical Haydon.

Ark Angel begins a slow return to Tirol. Breetai's son, Drannin, is born to the Zentraedi Kazianna Hesh.

2030 (Earth actual)

Roy Hunter is born in Tiresia. The REF and Karbarrans begin work on the main fleet ships. Lang's Robotech teams perfect an integrated system of body armor and reconfigurable cycles known as Cyclones.

2031 (Earth actual)

Dana Sterling and Bowie Grant turn 18, graduate from the Academy, and are assigned to the 15th Alpha Tactical Armored Corps, which includes Sean Phillips, Angelo Dante, and Louie Nichols.

The Robotech Masters arrive in Earthspace, and the Second Robotech War begins.

Major Carpenter's ship returns from Tirol. Zor Prime is introduced to the 15th ATAC.

2032 (Earth actual)

End of the Second Robotech War. Zor Prime's attempt at destroying the Masters' flagship' results in the loosing of the Flowers of Life from the Protoculture matrix concealed within the spacefold drives of the buried SDF-1; spores cover the planet, and the Flower takes root, alerting the Regis's sensor nebula.

The Invid "disappear" from Tirol's corner of the galaxy. It is assumed that the Regis has begun her move against Earth. The Mars Group leaves Tirol with 18-year-old Scott Bernard aboard.

Lazlo Zand dies.

Jonathan Wolff's ship returns to Earth. An anti-Invid underground is established before the Regis arrives. Dana commandeers Wolff's ship after the drives are retrofitted with a device perfected by former 15th ATAC whiz kid Louie Nichols.

The Robotech factory satellite returns to Earthspace.

Optera is fully seeded with the Flowers of Life and given over to the homeless Praxians, who rename the planet New Praxis. The Flowers become the crop for a new Protoculture matrix created by Rem, who has managed to tap some of his progenitor's-Zor's-memories.

Max, Miriya, and Aurora Sterling arrive on Tirol from Haydon IV.

2033 (Earth actual)

The Invid Regis arrives on Earth. Her newly hatched army of soldiers and mecha destroys the factory satellite and easily defeats Earth's depleted defenses. Hives and farms are set up worldwide, and some Terran captives are forced to work in labor camps, harvesting Flowers and processing nutrient for use in the Regis's terror weapons and battlecraft.

Arrival of Dana Sterling on Tirol. With her are Bowie Grant, Sean Phillips, Angelo Dante, Musica and Allegra, and many of the Masters' clones.

Shadow Fighters and neutron "S" missiles are developed by the REF for use in the assault against Earth. Nearly instantaneous spacefold becomes a reality for the main-fleet ships.

2034 (Earth actual)

Arrival and defeat of the Mars Attack

Group sent by the REF.

Scott Bernard and his ragtag band of freedom fighters-Rook, Rand, Lancer, Lunk, and Annie-begin a journey toward the Regis's central hive complex, known as Reflex Point.

Marlene, Sera, and Corg are birthed by the Regis.

2035 (Earth actual)

The Jupiter attack wing arrives in Earthspace. Photojournalist Sue Graham dies on Earth.

The REF main-fleet ships are folded from Tirol to Earth. The Regis and her children take leave of the planet in the form of a phoenix of mindstuff, annihilating the returning ships in the process and ending the Third Robotech War.

On Haydon IV, Veidt and Exedore are present at the reawakening of the planet's artificial sentience, the Awareness. (Max and his family are also on-planet. Cabell is on Tirol.)

The SDF-3 fails to remanifest in Earthspace. Rick turns 40 (or 45 by chronological reckoning); Lisa turns 45 (or 50). Aboard the Ark Angel, which has been spared the fate of the rest of the main-fleet ships, Scott Bernard and Vince and Jean Grant commence a search for the missing fortress.